17

The “Nothing Job”

THE PRESIDENCY, OF COURSE, was never far from Lyndon Johnson’s mind. Just after his election as Assistant Democratic Leader in January, 1951, Leslie Carpenter had written that “To Johnson and his admirers his selection as majority whip was just one more step on the road to the Vice-Presidency—and perhaps one day to the White House itself. The Texan makes no particular secret of his ambitions in that direction.” But the path ahead was still a very long one, and if Johnson had few illusions about the position of Democratic Leader, he had even fewer about the position of Assistant Leader. “The whip’s job is a nothing job,” he told journalist Alfred Steinberg. If he was to advance along that path, however, his progress during the next two years at least was going to have to be through that “nothing” job. So he had set about making, out of nothing, something.

While, during these two years, 1951 and 1952, the Senate had, in the MacArthur Hearings, a moment of glory, over the rest of those years hung a miasma of gloom. The century-long decline in its power and prestige accelerated. Hardly had the Eighty-second Congress convened in January, 1951, when President Truman announced that he was sending, “without reference to Congress”—and without any emergency to justify the decision—“four more divisions to reinforce the American army in Europe.” This was not sending a few Marines to some Latin American banana republic; this wasn’t a murky question of whether the dispatch of troops was interposition or intervention; “never before,” as Arthur Schlesinger was to write, “had a President claimed constitutional authority to commit so many troops to a theater of potential war against a major foe.”

Truman didn’t merely claim the authority, moreover; he flaunted it. Even while Senate business was being dominated by a “Great Debate” over whether or not to give him permission to do what he had already done, the President said of Congress, “I don’t ask their permission; I just consult them.” Not, he added, that he was required even to consult “unless I want to. But of course I am polite, and I usually always consult them.”

Opening the debate, Robert Taft said the “President simply usurped authority, in violation of the law and the Constitution, when he sent troops to Korea,” and “without authority he apparently is now attempting to adopt a similar policy in Europe,” but Tom Connally replied that the President had “authority … as Commander-in-Chief to send the Armed Forces to any place required by the security interests of the United States.” For eighty-six days the debate rolled back and forth, but when Dwight Eisenhower, who had been the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during World War II and was considered an unchallengeable authority on military questions, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that there was “no acceptable alternative” to the “defense of Western Europe” but to send the four divisions, the debate was effectively over. Attempting to save some face, the Senate resolved that it was its “sense” that Congress should be “consulted” before future presidential decisions to send troops abroad (“What this foggy final paragraph meant no one seemed to know,” one observer commented), but it approved Truman’s decision, and, as Fortune put it, “The effect was to loosen still more Congress’ none-too-firm grip on the sword, thus bringing about a definite relinquishment of some of its constitutional authority.”

These two years were years of investigation; Johnson’s Preparedness Subcommittee and Estes Kefauver’s Organized Crime Subcommittee were only the most famous of a score of congressional investigating groups actively looking into Truman’s Administration, into atomic spying, into a host of other areas, and hardly had Russell’s hearings, which burnished the Senate’s reputation, concluded when Joe McCarthy removed the luster and lacquered on tarnish by speaking, on the Senate floor, of a “conspiracy so immense”—and thereafter, throughout these two years, McCarthy’s influence on the Senate grew. With the Korean War still dragging on, Congress at least passed some foreign affairs legislation, authorizing increased military expenditures and nonmilitary aid. On the domestic front, as one observer noted, “Mr. Truman’s Fair Deal program scarcely got discussed.” When the national legislature finally ground to a halt in October, 1952, it had, the Washington Star said, “completed less work than the 80th Congress, the Congress called ‘the worst’ by Truman.” The Washington Post reported that “almost as many major bills have been sent back to committee as have been reported to Congress in the first place.” In the House, there was at least some leadership, thanks to the commanding figure of Ray burn; the Senate was in almost total disarray. “Congress is being overcome by its own inertia,” said Fortune; “the legislative machinery, which is the heart of democracy, is breaking down.” The era’s most authoritative work on Capitol Hill, the 689-page The Legislative Process in Congress, was being written even as the Eighty-second session was going forward. Its author, the political scientist George B. Galloway, concluded that “Many people are losing faith in American democracy because of its repeated and prolonged failures to perform its implicit promises.”

Although both houses of Congress were indicted for failure, the focus of criticism was shifting gradually to the Senate. In part, this was because of its larger role in foreign affairs. “Now that the United States has become the leading democratic world power, the future of the Senate is a subject of general concern,” Galloway wrote. “The quality of its performance and the nature of its output have worldwide repercussions.” And in part, it was because of its role in domestic affairs. The absenteeism that had plagued Majority Leaders Barkley and Lucas was even worse under McFarland, so the body couldn’t even pass urgently needed domestic legislation on which both parties agreed. When, for example, increased federal financing of medical facilities—a measure supported by both parties and favorably reported by the Senate Labor Committee—was brought to the floor, so few of its supporters were present that it was defeated. The passage of time had had its inevitable effect on the seniority problem. The Senate Appropriations Committee had become a particularly notorious bottleneck because, as Drew Pearson reported, “Tennessee’s never-say-die Kenneth McKellar, grandpa of the Senate, is now so feeble that he can no longer run the Committee, which passes on all the funds for the entire government. Yet he is so jealous of his powers as chairman that he won’t let another senator run it.” And then there was the Senate’s peculiar institution. The responsibility for Congress’ failures, Galloway wrote, “lies in large part at the door of Senate filibusters…. Filibusters have delayed for decades the enactment of social legislation passed by the House of Representatives and desired by a majority of the American people.”

Neither Galloway nor any other realistic observer saw any substantial hope of even modifying, much less abolishing, the sacred senatorial tradition of unlimited debate—or of passing other needed procedural reforms. Despite almost universal disapproval of the seniority system, Senator Mike Monroney was only expressing another universal sentiment when he said that any Senate Majority Leader who suggested a substitute for that system “would be cutting his political throat.”

Mounting concern was expressed on the Senate floor. “The Senate of the United States has in recent years been losing its hold on the confidence and respect of the American people,” Senator Morse said. “The complaint is universal.” Condemning the “blind rush” to pass legislation in the session’s closing days, the Acting Minority Leader, Republican Guy Cordon, said, “We are mighty close today to acting not as a parliamentary body but like members of a group in a riot…. I feel that I am part of a vast failure of public duty.” There was even being heard, still faintly but with increasing insistence, the suggestion that perhaps America no longer needed a Senate, that in a modern world a Senate might be an anachronism, as Galloway put it, a “relic of the days when checks and balances were needed to prevent tyranny,” that perhaps the Senate’s powers should be reduced—or that perhaps the Senate should be abolished entirely. That, Galloway pointed out, would only be in keeping with a world-wide trend: “the decay of second chambers and the trend toward unicameralism in the democratic constitutions of the post-war world are widespread phenomena”; twenty-nine democratic countries now had unicameral legislatures. And perhaps that would be the fate of America’s Senate, too. “The obsolescence of the Senate, so the argument runs, together with its tolerance of unlimited and irrelevant debate and its frequent absenteeism, may lead the American people in time to recognize that their second chamber is not indispensable,” Galloway wrote.

THE PREDICTIONS THAT INOFFENSIVENESS and amiability would prove insufficient qualifications for the job of Senate Majority Leader had been borne out—embarrassingly—at Ernest McFarland’s very first encounter with the press following his election to the post. When the reporters crowding around the four Democratic congressional leaders—House Majority Leader John McCormack and whip Percy Priest, McFarland and Johnson from the Senate—as they emerged from their first Monday conference at the White House asked likable old “Mac” for a statement, he stammered for a moment, and then said, “Uh, John is more experienced at this than I am.” McCormack and the reporters reminded him that the statement traditionally came from the Senate Leader. Well, McFarland finally said, “The President expressed confidence in Congress and what we can get done in the next two years.” Only when reporters pressed him did he think to add that of course “I share his confidence. I think we will be able to work out a unity that will be good for the country.” McFarland seemed to have forgotten a piece of news that the conference participants had agreed should be told to the press. When Lyndon Johnson whispered a reminder, McFarland told him to make the announcement himself, and Johnson thereupon stated that his “Preparedness Committee” would start hearings on the Selective Service Bill that week, and that “General [George] Marshall will make the first statement.” Only then did McFarland remember what he had been supposed to say to demonstrate Democratic unity on the draft issue: “The President emphasized that General Marshall’s proposal will be an Administration proposal, and Marshall will speak for all departments and agencies of the government. If you hear any rumors to the contrary they are not true.” And he delivered that message with the air of an actor trying to remember difficult lines. McFarland was not to improve with practice; it was soon an open secret on Capitol Hill that Old Mac just couldn’t think very fast on his feet. Nor was this man who said, “I just try to get along with people,” adept at the exercise of power. When a senator—even one whose vote was crucial—told him that he was going to vote against an Administration proposal, McFarland’s standard response was: “That’s all right. I’ll never ask you to vote against your convictions.” As William White was to say: “There are not many times when a Senate leader can afford to ‘get tough.’ To McFarland there was no time at all.”

And, of course, had Old Mac wanted to exercise power, he didn’t have much to exercise. Though he was called the Democratic Leader, more than half the Democrats took orders not from him but from Richard Russell, and should it come to a showdown involving the entire Senate, a majority would take orders from Russell and Taft; the conservative coalition, not the Administration, had the votes in a crunch. Liberal senators and the President might insist that he get a bill out of a committee that was letting it die by inaction, but what was he to do when the committee chairman flatly refused even to put the measure on the committee’s agenda? Obtaining a majority vote for a motion to discharge a bill from a committee would be all but impossible. And if a liberal measuredidsomehow reach the floor, what was the “Majority Leader” to do then? Once, with Truman demanding that a bill giving home rule to the District of Columbia be brought to a vote, McFarland gingerly raised the subject with the southerners—who informed him that should the bill reach the floor, they would discuss it “at length,” because, as one southerner put it, home rule would open the door for “a ‘Nigra’ mayor of Washington.” And where was McFarland to find the votes to shut off the filibuster? He let the home rule bill die—he had no choice but to let it die—in committee. Day after day, the genial, inoffensive Arizonan had to listen to the Douglases and Lehmans pillory him to his face for inaction, had to read, day after day, that “McFarland was simply ineffectual” or that “Majority Leader McFarland was no leader at all”; there was nothing he could do about it.

The number of senators on the floor—for years so disgracefully small—grew smaller; endless quorum calls were required to round up enough senators to conduct even routine business. In August, McFarland convened a caucus of his Democratic senators. At the Senate’s present pace, he said mournfully, “we’ll be here until Christmas.” The “useless quorum calls,” he said, “were wasting the equivalent of “one day a week. It’s got to stop.” Not an hour after the caucus adjourned, he went to the Chamber; the first voice he heard when he opened the doors at the rear was that of one of his Democrats—calling for a quorum. When he did manage to get a measure to the floor, even a non-controversial measure on which no one wanted to filibuster, he could not put a halt to speeches, often on some unrelated topic, designed for home consumption. In September, with the Washington Post saying that “Congress is taking longer to pass fewer bills than it ever did in recent history,” he took the floor, and as the Post reported, “pleaded with senators to stop talking and start voting ‘so that we can get out of here.’” He is, the Post said, “getting positively plaintive about it.” By the end of his first year as Leader, McFarland was a figure of ridicule in the Senate, and in national publications as well.

ALTHOUGH THE FAILURE of the congressional “leadership”—in particular, of the Senate leadership—was a theme much emphasized as the Eighty-second Congress drew to a close, the leadership referred to was that of McFarland and the committee barons. None of the criticism included Lyndon Johnson, for he was not considered part of it. His title, “Assistant Leader,” had always been little more than honorary; journalists had the impression that the whip’s job was still the “nothing job” he himself had called it.

Johnson was careful not to disturb that impression. While he was still photographed emerging from the White House, after that first Monday morning he seldom if ever again made the mistake of injecting himself into the exchanges between the Leaders and journalists; he stood silently in the background with his House counterpart, Priest, as McFarland and McCormack answered—or tried to answer—reporters’ questions. When reporters called him off the Senate floor, or interviewed him in his office, he took stands on no subjects other than those that dealt with preparedness. Sometimes he would be asked, by the White House or by McFarland, to persuade a senator to vote for an Administration measure, but he almost invariably demurred. Resurrecting a sobriquet from Johnson’s past, Drew Pearson wrote that he “has adopted a policy of antagonizing no one—a policy which has won for Lyndon the nickname of ‘Lying Down Johnson.’” But that barb was drowned in the wave of publicity for the Preparedness Subcommittee and for the Watchdog-in-Chief; 1951 was the year of the long profiles that climaxed in the Newsweek cover. Most of those articles concentrated on the subcommittee chairmanship; almost no attention was paid by the press to Johnson’s other job, as party whip; that job was not, in fact, so much as mentioned in the Newsweek article.

But within the private world of the Senate—in the cloakroom and the Marble Room and behind the tall closed doors of the offices in the SOB—attention was beginning to be paid. For, without the press noticing it, the job was changing.

Part of the change was simply a matter of information.

Senators wanted to know—needed to know—at what time a roll call vote would occur, so that they could be present, and have their vote recorded. They needed to know what day a bill in which they were interested would come to the floor, so that they could arrange to be present to argue for or against it; to offer, or oppose, amendments. Not infrequently, they needed to know at least the approximate hour it would come up, which meant knowing if amendments would be introduced to bills on the schedule ahead of it, and how much time might be consumed discussing those amendments. They needed to know if a Monday or Friday session would be, as was so often the case, only a brief pro forma session without roll-call votes, in which case their weekend fence-building trips back home could be extended.

McFarland often didn’t know. Overwhelmed by the responsibilities he had accepted, he seemed increasingly helpless as the pace of the session picked up and the backlog of bills mounted. And during the second year of his term, worried about his re-election campaign, he spent more and more time back in Arizona.

Lyndon Johnson began checking with the chairmen on the status of bills before their committees, and when senators asked about a particular bill, he knew the answer, or said he would find out. And in talking with senators, he acquired as well as provided information. His colleagues found him an attentive listener as they told him about amendments they were planning to introduce, in committee or on the floor. And Johnson was therefore able to provide information to the Democratic Policy Committee, of which, as party whip, he was an ex officio member. When that committee discussed issues, he was silent, and followed Russell’s lead in voting. But when the committee turned to schedules, all of a sudden the discussions were no longer as haphazard as they had been in the past. Johnson could report what amendments were going to be introduced, and who was planning to speak for or against them, and how heated, and how long, the discussion on each amendment was likely to be. And when the schedule had been decided on, he could bring more precise information back to individual senators. There began to be, in the Democratic cloakroom, a realization that now, when a senator needed to know when a certain bill would come to the floor, there was, suddenly, someone he could ask.

THE INFORMATION wasn’t only about schedules. It was also about votes.

The White House needed to know if it had the votes for a bill it wanted brought to the floor. A senator needed to know if there would be sufficient support to pass a measure he had introduced. “Vote-counting”—predicting legislators’ votes in advance—is one of the most vital of the political arts, but it is an art that few can master, for it is peculiarly subject to the distortions of sentiment and romantic preconceptions. A person psychologically or intellectually convinced of the arguments on one side of a controversial issue feels that arguments so convincing to him must be equally convincing to others. And therefore, as Harry McPherson puts it, “Most people tend to be much more optimistic in their counts than the situation deserves…. True believers were always inclined to attribute more votes to their side than actually existed.”

Lyndon Johnson had seen firsthand the cost of wishful thinking, of hearing what one wants to hear, of failing to look squarely at reality, when his father, that “man of great optimism” sentimentally attached to the old Johnson Ranch, purchased it for a price higher than was justified by the hard financial facts. Lyndon Johnson had felt firsthand the consequences of romance and sentiment every time the reins of the fresno bit into his back. And Lyndon Johnson had been a master of the vote-counting art for a long time. Of all the aspects of his political talent that had impressed the group of fast-rising young liberal pragmatists of which, as a young congressman, he had been a member, none had impressed them more than this ability. These men, to whom politics was life, were uninterested in party games; at Georgetown parties, while others played charades, they would go off and amuse themselves by trying to predict the exact vote on some bill that would be coming up in Congress that week. And they learned that, as Jim Rowe recalls, “He was a great counter. Someone would say, we’ve got so many votes, and Johnson would say, ‘Hell, you’re three off. You’re counting these three guys, and they’re going to vote against you.’” Says Abe Fortas: “He would figure it out—how so-and-so would vote. Who were the swing votes. What, in each case—what, exactly—would swing them.”

Now Lyndon Johnson’s counting was not a social pastime but an exercise in hard political reality—and he was still “a great counter.” He kept his counts on the long, narrow Senate tally sheets on which the ninety-six names were printed in alphabetical order in a column down the center with a blank line on either side of each name, on the left side for the “yea” votes, on the right for the “nays.” When he knew which way a senator would vote, he would write a number—the number that the new vote raised the tally to—on the appropriate side of the senator’s name. And no number was written until he knew, knew for sure. To a staff member who, after talking with a senator, said he “thought” he knew which way the senator was going to vote, he snarled, “What the fuck good isthinking to me? Thinking isn’t good enough. Thinking is never good enough. I need to know!” Often, he didn’t know. He had no power to make a senator tell him which way he was going to vote, and some senators didn’t want to be asked. Pat McCarran, asked once by Walter Jenkins, warned Jenkins never—ever—to do it again. And he never tried to persuade a senator to vote one way or the other; it was information, not votes, that he was collecting. But if he didn’t know, he didn’t guess: the lines flanking the senator’s name stayed blank.

In this collecting of information, there had been an important development, what Evans and Novak call the “ripening of the relationship between Lyndon Johnson and Bobby Baker.” Owing a favor to a political operative from the South Carolina hamlet of Pickens, Senator Burnet Maybank paid it in 1942 with the offer of an appointment to the Senate’s corps of teenage pages, and the man recommended Bobby Gene Baker, the fourteen-year-old son of a Pickens mailman. Bobby was working in a drugstore; he had been hired six years before to sweep out the place, but, as he was to say about himself, he was “an eight-year-old boy who had it in him to hustle,” and the store’s owner was to say that it wasn’t long before Bobby was “doing everything but filling prescriptions.” One of his teachers said he was “so vivacious, just a little trigger. If you wanted something done, you gave it to Bobby and you knew it would be done.”

For the first ten nights the boy was in Washington, he wrote in his diary each night, “I’m so homesick,” but when one of his Pickens teachers, hearing of his loneliness, wrote him an encouraging letter, Bobby’s reply, scrawled on a lined piece of paper from a notebook, was “Miss Hallum, Bobby Baker don’t quit,” and he got ahead in the Senate as he had gotten ahead in the drugstore: in his words, by “hard work and hustle.” The twenty-two pages, all boys, wore dark blue knickers, went to school each day in a special school in the Capitol, and, on the floor, filled the inkwells and snuffboxes in the Chamber, “brought the senators public documents, newspapers, telephone messages, or anything they desired. To call us, they’d snap their fingers and we’d scurry to them.” He carried out such errands eagerly, and sought more: “I [learned] to anticipate what each senator might require…. When I learned that a given senator would be making a speech on a given day, I stationed myself nearby to quickly fetch some documents or materials or fresh water as he might need.” (His favorite senator was Truman: “Not once did I see him act imperiously toward lowly page boys. ‘Young man,’ he would say—not ‘Sonny’ as so many called us— ‘Young man, when it’s convenient, could you please get me a glass of water?’”) Before long, senators were asking for him by name, and giving him another type of assignment. “‘Bobby, I’m having a rubdown in the gym. Can you hold the vote for half an hour?’ I then would go to another senator, explain the situation, and ask him to request a time-consuming quorum call….”

He loved the institution; wandering around the floor, he would open the drawers of the desks so that he could read the names burned or carved into the wood, “running my fingers over the names—Daniel Webster, Stephen Douglas, Andrew Johnson—and marveling that I stood where they had stood.” He was “very early” intrigued by “the give and take of Senate debate.” When a parliamentary maneuver was underway, and he didn’t understand it, he would later approach Parliamentarian Charles Watkins in his office; “He was a kindly, gracious man from Arkansas and he patiently educated me.” So earnestly did he ingratiate himself with senators that at the age of sixteen he was named chief page, and at eighteen he was given a title on the Senate staff so that he, unlike the other pages, “might remain on the Senate payroll even after Congress had adjourned for the year.” When he married, it was to a woman from the Senate world: Dorothy Comstock, one of Scott Lucas’ secretaries.

Bobby “made the Senate his home,” an article stated. “[He] experienced the major episodes of a young man’s life under the great dome of the Capitol itself. There he grew into long pants, had his first shave, went to high school, received his diploma … met his wife and courted her. His wedding reception in 1948 was held in the Capitol…. Other boys have aunts and uncles beaming at their receptions. Bobby had five United States senators.” He was truly, reporters said, the “child of the United States Senate.” When a senator, Walter George, told him to upgrade his name, he did so. “A gentleman of the old school who enjoyed being thought of as an elder statesman, he responded to elaborate courtesies. ‘Bobby,’ he said, shortly after I had turned twenty-one, ‘you’ve got a boy’s name and now you’re a man. It doesn’t have enough decorum or dignity. I’d strongly advise you to change it.’” His father was offended when he changed Bobby to Robert, Baker was to relate, but “Senator George … was delighted and thereafter treated me in the warmest possible fashion.” By 1951, everyone around the Senate knew him, everybody talked to him freely; he knew a lot of Senate secrets. And Baker worked at knowing secrets; as the writer Evan Thomas was to put it, he “made it his business to know things: who owed whom a favor, who was drunk, who was on the take, who was sleeping with his secretary.” If an instrument was needed for obtaining information in the Senate world, it would be hard to find a better one than this twenty-two-year-old page.

And for Lyndon Johnson, Bobby Baker made clear, he would be a willing, eager instrument. The waiter who brought them sandwiches at their first meeting had felt that Baker seemed “drawn to LBJ by some invisible magnet,” and thereafter the attraction had only increased. “I found him fascinating from that first talk in 1948,” Baker was to recall. “I was, indeed, beguiled by him.” He flattered Johnson unmercifully, implored him to give him chores to carry out. Says one of Johnson’s staff: “He was an unabashed lackey, a bootlicker. He’d think of all manner of excuses to come in the office and see Johnson, and he’d tell him about all the things he was doing for him, all the little ways he was helping him.” “A bootlicker, but an agile one,” Evan Thomas was to call him. He carried out Johnson’s errands efficiently, and as quickly as he could—often at a trot. “He would scurry around the Capitol corridors, often scribbling notes as he walked,” his biographer would write. “He hunched a bit as he moved, and as a result some people began to call him ‘the mole,’” a description made more exact by his face, which was narrow, with a very large nose (which he later had altered) and a forehead and chin which both receded sharply, giving him a pointed-face look. He tried, somewhat unsuccessfully because he was much shorter and stooped, to stand in Johnson’s commanding attitude, and to walk as he walked; he had better luck talking like Johnson: “His voice seemed to take on a bit of the Johnson twang,” his biographer wrote. He was to name not one but two of his children—Lynda and Lyndon John—after him. Johnson’s response was all that Baker could have wished: “You’re like a son to me, because I don’t have a son of my own,” he told him.

When Lyndon Johnson asked Bobby Baker what was going on around the Senate, the young man always had a lot to tell him. And Johnson took steps to make sure Baker would have even more to tell. He took the unusual step of inviting a Senate staffer to the small dinner parties at Thirtieth Place at which the other guests were senators and journalists. “In the intimacy of the dinner table,” as Evans and Novak were to write, “the men spoke frankly and unguardedly.” Sometimes at such parties, there would be three or four tables. Johnson could hear only what was said at the table at which he was sitting; with Baker present, and at another table, Johnson had a pair of sharp ears there, too.

There was another venue in which senators let their guard down, and Johnson installed Baker there, as well. Sometime in 1951, Johnson casually mentioned to McFarland and to Maybank, that Bobby had been doing such a good job, didn’t they think it would be nice to give him some sort of meaningless title? Johnson even suggested one: Bobby could be an assistant to Skeeter Johnston; he could be called “Assistant, Democratic Cloakroom.” The duties of Baker’s new job were nebulous, but the title freed him from the status, and duties, of page. And whatever the duties might be, they certainly had something to do with the cloakroom—which meant that Bobby now had a reason to spend a lot of time there.

For Bobby Baker, the cloakroom was a fertile field, because, as he himself was to put it, senators felt safe there. “No prying newsmen,” no constituents, apart from a few exceptions no staff members “need apply for admittance behind those sacrosanct doors,” he was to recall. “Safe in the cloakroom senators opened up their heads and their hearts….” And now, when heads and hearts were opened, a very sharp pair of ears was listening.

It was here I first heard direct from the horse’s mouth what senators were considered to be for hire, and to what extent, and to whom; I learned one could not presume that just because two senators shared a common ideology or a common state that they were soul mates. Jealousies played a part, and all the other human factors entered in: competing wives, distaste for another’s lifestyle, class differences, clashing personal goals.

Two years earlier, Lyndon Johnson had summoned Bobby Baker to his office because he had heard that Baker knew “where the bodies are buried.” During the intervening two years, Johnson had learned that Baker was willing to tell him where the bodies were buried. Now he had placed Baker in ideal vantage points to observe the burials. And of course the information Baker thus obtained gave him insight into how senators were likely to vote on a particular bill. The counting of votes on the Democratic side had been the province of Skeeter Johnston, the punctilious, dignified Secretary for the Majority. Skeeter still counted votes, still gave the counts to Lyndon, still thought it was his counts on which the leadership was basing its decisions. But it wasn’t. Bobby Baker had quietly begun making his own counts. He was a very good counter, and not only because of the information he had collected. Bobby, McPherson says, was no “true believer”; he was not one of those who “just can’t help but feel that the issue is so clear on their side that the people must vote that way…. Bobby didn’t let that kind of consideration affect him, maybe because he didn’t have terribly strong convictions himself.”

It was important to Lyndon Johnson that the information—Bobby’s information and the information he himself had collected—on those long tally sheets be accurate. Eyeglasses perched on his nose, he would hold a sheet in one hand, and the thumb of the other hand would move down the list of names, name by name, pausing on each line, making sure that no numbers were skipped or repeated, and that he knew—knew—that each senator would vote as the sheet showed he would vote. The thumb moved very slowly. Sometimes it would pause by a name for quite some time while Lyndon Johnson reflected, and it would not move down to the next name until those reflections had been completed. The tall young senator standing with a tally sheet in hand, head bowed over it, sometimes seemingly lost in the numbers on the sheet, oblivious to the world around him, was a picture of concentration. He was a picture of determination—of a man resolved not to make a mistake.

If these predictions of upcoming Senate votes were never complete, if the sheets usually contained more than a few blanks, they were nonetheless the best predictions available—by far. The White House learned that if it wanted to know what would happen if it pressed for a vote on some major Administration measure, the best person to ask would be the Assistant Leader. Senators learned that if they wanted to know what would happen on a vote on some minor issue, some intra-state issue important only to them, the best person to ask would be the Assistant Leader. In the world of the Senate, in which, for years now, nobody had known what was going on, an awareness was gradually growing that now, at last, somebody did.

Baker was also a source of other information, more routine but nonetheless vital. Votes needed not only to be counted but to be produced. If an Administration measure was coming up, it was the Leader’s responsibility to know where the bill’s supporters could be reached—in their offices, at their homes, in a mistress’s apartment, on the golf course, in a bar—so that they could be summoned to the floor in time to vote. More often than not, McFarland didn’t know. But when he was back in Arizona, the responsibility fell to the Assistant Leader. Lyndon Johnson told Bobby Baker he wanted him to know the whereabouts of every Democratic senator at all times. Soon, recalls McFarland’s administrative assistant, Roland Bibolet, “whenever some senator went someplace, Bobby would always have a phone number where he could be reached. Or where he couldn’t be reached, and why he didn’t want to be reached.” During his two years as Democratic whip, Johnson forged a tool for his use—a tool perfectly fitted to his hand.

THE CHANGE IN THE WHIP’S JOB was a matter of more than information.

One of the Majority Leader’s routine responsibilities was scheduling activities in the Senate’s “morning hour,” the period—actually two hours long—at the beginning of each day’s session during which routine resolutions and petitions and certain “unobjected to” bills could be introduced. With McFarland often in Arizona—and, when he was in Washington, uninterested in so mundane a chore—resolutions, petitions, and bills were piling up.

Johnson was very politic about moving into the realm of actually scheduling Senate business, however unimportant. Not wanting to do so when McFarland was in Washington, he would, when the Leader was in Arizona, check on his schedule with Roland Bibolet. “He wanted to know precisely the moment Ernest would be back on the Hill,” Bibolet recalls. If he was unable to get an answer from Bibolet during the day, he might call during the night. The phone would ring in the darkness of Bibolet’s bedroom, and a voice would say, without preamble, “Roland, I’ve tried and tried, and tried, and I can’t find McFarland.” Bibolet would try to protect his boss: “I know he got the message, and I’ll bet anything he’ll call you first thing in the morning.” Realizing from evasiveness that McFarland’s return was not imminent, Johnson would draw up the morning-hour schedule for the next few days. Democratic senators began to realize that the easiest way to get on that schedule was to ask Lyndon. And at the end of April, 1952, with the Calendar in chaos and the Leader away, the Assistant Leader took a firmer hand.

Calendar Calls were being invariably delayed, or interrupted, by senators’ speeches on unrelated matters. Johnson persuaded Bridges, who was serving his year as GOP leader, to agree that when the Senate convened on May 1, the Calendar would be brought up first, and that only “unobjected to” bills would be considered, so that a large number of them could be disposed of. Then he told a number of Democratic senators who wanted to make pro forma speeches, less than five minutes in length, about these bills that if they came to the Chamber at noon on May 1, they would be able to give the speeches and leave fairly quickly. And when, as was all too usual, a senator, in this case Republican James Kem of Missouri, who had not been advised of the agreement, wandered onto the floor and said, “Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to make a short statement on an unrelated topic,” Johnson, standing not at his own desk but at the Majority Leader’s front-row center seat, was firm. He told Kem that under his agreement with Bridges, speeches on unrelated topics were out of order. Since Kem had not known about the agreement, he said, he would allow him to speak nonetheless—but only if he agreed to limit his speech to five minutes; if Kem didn’t agree, Johnson said, he would regretfully be forced to object to him speaking at all. Kem started to bridle at that, but Johnson addressed him with a disarming smile: “I know the Senator does not desire to place himself ahead of other senators. I have told the Senator of the agreement made by the leaders of both sides. In view of that agreement, certain Senators were asked to come to the chamber…. I hope the Senator will confine his request to five minutes. If he does, there certainly will be no objection.” Kem acquiesced—and for once a substantial number of bills were called off the Calendar and enacted.

Democratic senators began asking Johnson if the party’s Policy Committee could schedule a certain bill to be called off the Calendar and brought to the floor, or if another bill could be held on the Calendar and kept off the floor. Johnson would say that he would be glad to see what could be done. He very delicately started asking McFarland—or at least as often, Russell—whether it would be possible to report out, or to delay reporting, various bills. The bills he asked about in 1951 and 1952 were never controversial bills, never major bills, but their enactment (or delay) was important to individual senators, and when he told a senator he had intervened on his behalf, the senator was grateful. In addition, McFarland or Russell would almost invariably accept Johnson’s suggestions, and word got around: if you had a bill you wanted moved, Lyndon was the guy to see. The Assistant Leader was no longer only providing information about schedules; to a small, but growing, extent, he was making schedules—and he was reaping benefits from that seemingly routine role: gratitude and debts, small but debts nonetheless, from his colleagues.

Then there was “pairing”—one of the more indefensible of the devices by which senators were allowed to veil their attendance and voting records from constituents. A senator who was absent on the day of a vote but didn’t want to be recorded as absent, or a senator who was present but didn’t want to have his vote recorded on a controversial bill yet didn’t want a future opponent to be able to accuse him of not voting on that issue, would arrange to be “paired” with an absent senator on the opposite side of that issue. The Leader, or the Assistant Leader, or the bill’s floor manager would then announce before the vote that the senator, “who is necessarily absent,” was “paired on this vote” with the other senator. “If present and voting,” the Leader would say, “the senator … would vote ‘nay,’” and the other senator “would vote ‘yea.’” In a variation of this device—a variation known as a “live pair”—an absent senator would request a senator who would be present, as a personal favor, to refrain from voting and instead to be announced as a “pair.”

Pairing is strictly “a voluntary arrangement between individual senators,” Senate Procedure states. Pairs are not included in the official tabulation of roll-call votes. Neither the clerk calling the roll nor the presiding officer so much as mentions them during or after the roll call. The two senators are listed in neither the “yeas” nor “nays” column, but as “not voting.” But the Leader’s announcement of pairs is recorded in the Congressional Record, and a paired senator can therefore later excuse his absence by saying that he had balanced the loss of his vote by removing one from the other side. As Bobby Baker puts it:

When accused of nonaction on the bill by some future opponent, they could bluster of how they’d “been recorded” on the bill—either for it or against—no matter that they’d had absolutely no influence on it. It would take the opponent six days to explain the parliamentary deceptions involved, by which time he’d be speaking to empty chairs or dark television sets. Such tricks are important in the political game, and politicians do not forget those able to arrange them.

Senate legend had it that some past Senate leaders had taken on themselves the responsibility for pairing, but for at least a decade, and probably for several decades, it had not been, as McFarland’s assistant Bibolet says, “a strategic thing.” Either “two fellows would arrange their pairs between themselves, or one could call Skeeter [Johnston], and say, ‘I’m going to be out of town. Get a pair for me.’ Skeeter would call around and arrange the pair.” Or, although Bibolet does not say this, during McFarland’s careless regime, Skeeter might forget to arrange it, or find it too much trouble. On the long voting tabulation sheets that the Leader carried, the spaces beside some senators’ names—sometimes many senators’ names—would remain blank. No one would care, until, as his next re-election campaign drew closer, a senator would suddenly realize that his failure to vote on some bill might be used against him—in which case the Congressional Record would be “corrected” to show him not absent but paired. The awareness among senators that they could do this added to the laxness and confusion with which the Senate operated.

But now, whenever McFarland was back in Arizona, that practice was changing. Lyndon Johnson didn’t want blank spaces on the voting sheets; he wanted every vote accounted for. So, more and more, the job was turned over to Bobby Baker, Bobby who would “always have a phone number” even when a senator had left for someplace where he “didn’t want to be reached.”

Arranging pairs, arranging schedules, getting minor bills called off the Calendar—mundane chores that no one wanted to do, mundane chores that, left undone, clogged the schedule and slowed the Senate down, little chores that, for many years, no one had done with any diligence. They were being done with diligence now.

If you do everything… The days were long days, and the nights were not just for sleeping. The counting didn’t stop then, the planning didn’t stop. On the night table beside Walter Jenkins’ bed, there lay, every night now, a yellow legal pad, so often did the telephone jangle in the bedroom’s darkness. And it was not only in the homes of Lyndon Johnson’s own assistants that the phone would ring in the night. More and more frequently, “sometimes at three a.m.” Bibolet would be jolted awake. “Roland, I can’t find McFarland!” No one could remember a whip ever really working at that “nothing job” before, but Lyndon Johnson was working at it now. And he was making it into something it had never been before.

AND THOUGH MOST of Lyndon Johnson’s activities as his party’s Assistant Leader were matters merely of scheduling and vote-counting, there were, at times, signs that he was capable of doing more: flashes of something that was beyond just hard work or flattery—and beyond just talent, too.

One came in 1952, during the annual end-of-session struggle over foreign aid. The Administration was losing the struggle that year—losing in a year when losing would be particularly disastrous, since Western Europe, attempting to unite to meet the threat of Communist aggression, badly needed to feel that the United States was solidly behind NATO. President Truman had requested seven billion dollars for aid to NATO’s members. The House had reduced the amount to six billion. Dwight Eisenhower, now NATO commander, had warned that the alliance might be able—barely able—to live with that lower figure, but that any further reductions would cripple it. Yet Senate isolationists and conservatives, led by Taft and Herman Welker, were determined to make further reductions—big ones. “We’ve already poured seventy-five billion dollars down a rathole and still are losing people by the millions to Communism,” Welker said. “Unless we call a halt to this crazy spending and these give-away programs … we will revert to the Dark Ages.” And the conservatives had the votes to make those reductions—partly because of what the Herald Tribune called “heavy absenteeism among northern Democrats and liberal Republicans” who, with the Senate on the verge of adjourning for the long summer vacation, had left Washington and were not willing to return; among the fifteen absent senators were eleven who might have supported the Administration. Welker, “sensing the weakness of his opponents,” in Newsweek’s words, offered an amendment to cut an additional half billion dollars from the House figure, Russell Long offered one to cut $400 million, and both amendments seemed certain to pass.

In the Senate Chamber, before galleries as full (of summer tourists) as the floor was empty, the famous internationalist orators raised their voices in support of the Western alliance, Walter George telling his colleagues in majestic, organ-like tones that “Nothing less is involved than the will of free men, especially in Western Europe, to stand up and integrate themselves in a federation which is the hope of the free world…. If we overcut here, it would discourage the very people in Europe we hope to encourage at the time of their greatest need.” Tom Connally, managing the bill in his swan song in the Senate, was making his final performance memorable. Thumping his chest, his voice quavering in imitation of old-fashioned stump speakers, he advised his opponents sarcastically to cut the entire appropriation—“Then you can go home and strut your stuff before your constituents and make Fourth of July speeches and tell them ‘I saved seven billion dollars and let the free world go to hell.’ Then go out and beat your breasts while war is breaking out in Europe,” and as he spoke his fellow senators laughed out loud in appreciation, and the galleries roared. Richard Russell, customarily in favor of cutting foreign aid, understood that this time the cutting had gone too far; he was talking privately, gravely judicious yet passionate in his conviction, to individual senators in the rear of the Chamber. But Welker, Taft, and William Jenner were pressing for a vote—and the Administration knew it didn’t have the votes. Of the eighty-one senators still in Washington, forty-one were committed to cutting foreign aid, and available to cast votes. Even if every one of the other forty senators was persuaded to be present, the Long and Welker amendments would still be passed. Standing at the Leader’s desk, McFarland was running his hands through his hair in frustration. Internationalists felt, as Newsweek reported, that “without a minor miracle, they could never muster enough votes to hold the line.”

Then the double doors to the Democratic cloakroom swung open and the party’s tall young whip came through them. He said something to Russell, and Russell nodded, and Lyndon Johnson strode down the center aisle and spoke to McFarland, and McFarland walked over to old Matt Neely and asked him to hold the floor for the rest of the day’s session, and Neely did so for the full hour and a half—which gave Johnson eighteen hours to work with before the Senate convened the next day. And when the Senate adjourned, Lyndon Johnson went with McFarland to McFarland’s office, and told him what he thought they should do with those hours.

If there were too many votes against them, Johnson said, the only thing to do was to get rid of those votes. And that could be accomplished, he said, by using live pairs. If they could persuade isolationist senators who were still in Washington and who were planning to vote for the aid-cutting amendments to agree to pair with absent senators who would have voted against the amendments, each senator who agreed to do so would be depriving the amendments of one vote. And pro-amendment senators would agree, Johnson said, for the usual reason—to do a colleague a favor by saving him the embarrassment of being recorded as absent on an important vote. The only reason they wouldn’t agree, as Johnson was later to explain, was if they realized that the ordinarily routine pairing device was being used for a very unroutine reason. And, as he was to explain, they wouldn’t realize unless someone on the other side checked around and found that an awful lot of live pairs were being arranged. And this checking would have to be done in advance: once a senator had assured a colleague that he would pair with him, that assurance was considered an unbreakable promise.

The pair that Johnson focused on first was the absent internationalist Warren Magnuson, back home in the distant state of Washington and unwilling to return, and Joe McCarthy, an adamant opponent of foreign aid. The two bachelor senators were dating buddies. “If Magnuson wasn’t going to be present, you’ve lost his vote anyway,” McFarland’s assistant Bibolet explains. “So if you can get a live pair with Magnuson, you’ve cut out an opposite vote.” Johnson asked McCarthy to save his friend “Maggie” from embarrassment with a live pair, and McCarthy agreed. And then Johnson focused on Guy Gillette of Iowa and Kerr of Oklahoma, two other senators who didn’t want to return, and on McMahon of Connecticut, who couldn’t, because of illness.

The next day, the unsuspecting Russell Long called for the yeas and nays on his amendment, and the yeas and nays were ordered. But just before the clerk called the roll, a number of his amendment’s supporters asked to be recognized for brief statements.

“On this vote, I am paired with the senator from Washington,” Joe McCarthy said. “If he were present and voting, he would vote ‘nay.’ If I were permitted to vote, I would vote ‘yea.’ I withhold my vote.” Olin Johnston said: “I am paired on this vote with the senator from Iowa. If he were present and voting, he would vote ‘nay.’ If I were permitted to vote, I would vote ‘yea.’ I withhold my vote.” John Stennis said: “On this vote I have a pair with the senior senator from Oklahoma, who if present would vote ‘nay.’ If I were permitted to vote I would vote ‘yea.’ I withhold my vote.” A. Willis Robertson said: “On this vote I have a pair with the senior senator from Connecticut. If he were present and voting he would vote ‘nay.’ If I were permitted to vote I would vote ‘yea.’ I withhold my vote.” The Long Amendment therefore received not the expected forty-one yeas, but only thirty-seven. There were forty nays, so it was defeated. It fell four votes short of passage—the four votes Lyndon Johnson had stripped from it by using live pairs.

All that day, other amendments to reduce foreign aid would be offered—and all that day Administration supporters fought them off, armed with live pairs. In the evening, Administration opponents finally passed an amendment, but only for a $200 million cut. And that was their only victory. At first, Welker had been puzzled. “I am concerned by the number of pairs,” he said at one point. “What is this—legislation by absenteeism?” Then, realizing that he had been outsmarted, he strode over to McCarthy, whom he had been defending against attempts to discipline him for breaches of Senate rules. “From now on, let Magnuson defend you,” he said, in a snarl that could be heard in the Press Gallery above. “McCarthy turned white,” Newsweek reported. But McCarthy’s reaction was the only satisfaction Welker could obtain from a day he had been confident would bring major victories. When he asked other pro-amendment senators to stop pairing, they told him they couldn’t do so—that they had given their promise. As Robert Albright was to report in the Washington Post, “By adroit ‘pairing’ of missing votes with a few ‘live’ (supporters of the amendment), the Democrats managed to stave off a serious cut.” Absenteeism had been crippling the Senate, and no one had seen a solution to the problem. And then suddenly someone had seen a solution—had seen a way, in fact, not only to solve the problem but to turn it to his party’s advantage. Within the clouds of legislative gloom that had shrouded the Senate for so many years, there had suddenly flickered, very brief but very bright, a bolt of legislative lightning.

AND OTHER CHANGES WERE also taking place during Lyndon Johnson’s two years as his party’s Assistant Leader in the Senate.

These changes had no relationship to the Senate’s internal workings. They were, however, to have a very significant relationship to the Senate’s future. For their relationship was to power.

Leader after Leader, Democratic and Republican alike, had complained about their lack of anything to “threaten them with,” of anything to “promise them”; about the paucity of sources of intimidation or reward that would give a Leader enough power so that he could truly lead. Their frustration was understandable. Generations of gifted parliamentarians, determined that the Senate not be led, had done their best to ensure that it couldn’t be, designing an institution in which there existed few levers with which a Leader could move it.

But of all Lyndon Johnson’s political instincts, the strongest and most primal was his instinct for power. The man who was to say “I do understand power…. I know where to look for it” was looking for it now. There were few places within the Senate where a Leader could find it—so he looked for it outside the Senate.

One place he looked was not on the Senate side of the Capitol at all but on the House side, in the little hideaway room on the ground floor with an unmarked, unnumbered door—the room that journalists called Sam Rayburn’s “Board of Education” but that Rayburn himself called simply “downstairs.”

Lyndon Johnson had become a “regular” in that room when he first came to Congress, a twenty-eight-year-old freshman hoisting a glass with the great House barons every afternoon after the House recessed for the day. His betrayal of Rayburn in 1939 had resulted in his exclusion from the hideaway for almost three years—“I can get into the White House; why can’t I get into that room?” he had shouted in frustration to House Parliamentarian Lewis Deschler in 1941—but on his first day back in Congress after his return from the Pacific in 1942, Rayburn not only had invited him to “come downstairs” but had even handed him the most prized of status symbols on the south side of the Capitol: his own key to the hideaway door.

Lyndon Johnson was a senator now, but he still had that key—the only senator who had one, the only senator who was a regular at Rayburn’s “Board Meetings”—and that key meant power if it was used correctly. Senate passage of a bill vital to a senator was only half the action required on Capitol Hill; the bill also had to be passed by the House, and in the House, Rayburn ruled. It was during this era that, angry over the defeat of a bill he favored, he simply announced that there would be a second vote, and, calling twenty freshmen representatives to his office, flatly ordered them to vote for it—which they did, so that the measure was passed. It was during this era that, the night before the vote on a controversial resolution, he said, “I don’t want one word said against this resolution on the floor”—and not one word was said. Sometimes, when he was up on the triple dais, his stocky body, massive, totally bald head and grim, unsmiling face dominating the Chamber, a member would attempt to raise a perfectly legitimate point of order. “The Chair does not desire to hear the gentleman on the point of order,” Rayburn would say—and would stand there, impassive, unmoving until the gentleman sat down.

Walter Jenkins had one assignment that took precedence over all others: to notify Johnson—immediately—when the House adjourned for the day. Johnson would usually set out on the long walk to the south side of the Capitol as soon as Jenkins’ call came; on the rare afternoons on which he was delayed, Rayburn would telephone 231, without identifying himself would bark, “Tell Lyndon I’m waiting for him,” and slam down the phone, as if embarrassed at this admission of need. When Johnson was told that the Speaker had called, he would abruptly cut short whatever he was doing, and hurry out of the Senate Chamber or the cloakroom. As he walked along an arcaded passage and then around a small, colonnaded rotunda, a tall figure, alone and intent, he would be leaning forward in his haste, his ungainly but very long stride eating up the bright blue and gold tiles, his arms swinging stiffly and out of rhythm with his steps. He had to walk almost the whole length of the long Capitol, and as he reached the immense central Rotunda beneath the dome, and then, beyond the Rotunda, Statuary Hall, he would sometimes break into an awkward, gangling trot, his suit jacket flaring out, as he crossed their wide spaces, past the statues of Benton and Houston and La Follette. Reaching the House side, tiles now red and white, he would check his stride, though still walking very fast, pass the Speaker’s Lobby, crowded in the late afternoon with members who could not go where he was going, run down a flight of stairs two at a time, and enter the unmarked door.

Sometimes he seemed to resent these trips as if they were journeys to Canossa. One afternoon he was talking to Jim Rowe when Jenkins’ call came. “I’ve got to go over there to the Board of Education and kiss his ass again, and I don’t want to do it,” Lyndon Johnson said. But this feeling was never in evidence in the “Boardroom.” He came through its door every afternoon with a smile on his face so broad that, as one of the other regulars says, “Every time Johnson saw Rayburn he would light up like I do when I see my grandson.” House members in Rayburn’s hideaway for the first time—intimidated, as most men were intimidated, by the stern, unsmiling Speaker—were astonished at what Johnson did next. Walking over to the huge mahogany desk at which Ray-burn sat, he would bend over and kiss the Speaker on the top of his bald head. Sometimes he would say, in a loving, deeply solicitous tone, “How are you, Mr. Sam?” And sometimes he would say, “How are you, my beloved?” (“Mr. Ray-burn would play gruff.”) Other men watched how Johnson “handled” Rayburn. “In that room, he [Rayburn] was boss, and Johnson acknowledged that,” one says. Says another: “It was never ‘Sam.’ It was always ‘Mr. Sam,’ or ‘Mr. Speaker,’ and ‘Lyndon.’ There was never a feeling that they were equals. Never.” Says another: “Johnson was quite deferential to him. He would argue with him, but always in such a way that you knew who was the boss.” Another sums up Johnson’s tone and demeanor simply as “Sirring.” Occasionally Rayburn would grow irritated with Johnson. “Lyndon couldn’t sit still,” one regular says. “He was always jumping up and walking around. And the Speaker would say, ‘Sit down, Lyndon. You’re making me nervous.’” Johnson might ask him for an opinion, or a decision, on some matter, and Rayburn would give it. And if Johnson tried to argue, Rayburn would simply repeat what he had said—repeat it in exactly the same words. “That was the conclusive remark. That was the end of that conversation.”

The regulars also saw that Rayburn acted very differently toward Lyndon Johnson than he acted toward any of them. After the betrayal, his affection for Johnson was never again uncritical. Talking about the younger man, he at least once used the phrase “vaulting ambition.” Ramsey Clark says, “He understood Johnson. I’ve heard him talk about Johnson and his ambition. I don’t think it was blind love at all.” Says Richard Boiling: “A constant refrain was about [Johnson’s] arrogance and egotism. He [Rayburn] said to me several times the same words: ‘I don’t know anyone who is as vain or more selfish than Lyndon Johnson.’” But these men agree that although the “love” was no longer “blind,” love it certainly was. Says Rayburn’s assistant D. B. Hardeman: “It was a father-son relationship, with all that implies…. Johnson would just infuriate him, but he would defend Johnson against all comers. He loved him in the way: I’d like to wear the bottom of his britches out.” He loved him—and wanted to help him in any way he could. So when Lyndon asked for a favor—such as House passage of a bill vital to some individual senator—Rayburn would usually grant it.

Other senators soon came to realize this crucial fact of Capitol Hill life, and to ask for Johnson’s intercession with the mighty Speaker. A bill vital to Clinton Anderson was passed in the Senate, but, Anderson wrote Johnson, “Our … problem is to get action in the House,” where it would go before a committee whose chairman was sponsoring his own, competing, proposal on the subject. “I have written Speaker Rayburn,” Anderson wrote, but he knew that his letter wouldn’t be enough, so he also wrote Johnson: “I hope to enlist your continued interest in piloting this legislation to enactment.” Even the most powerful Senate committee chairmen—Allen Ellender of Agriculture, for example—would ask. “You put a little note on Lyndon’s desk and ask him kindly to get in touch with our friend the Speaker on the Sugar Bill,” Ellender told Dorothy Nichols over the phone one day. “It has been pending there for quite some time. We want to clear up the decks. Put a little note on his desk and let him talk to Sam Rayburn.”

When Johnson used his influence with Rayburn on a senator’s behalf, he made sure the senator knew it. After writing Anderson that “I appreciate the difficulties which may arise in moving the measure through the House [and] I shall be glad to do what I can to be helpful in this regard,” he let Anderson know the minute the bill had been passed. “I want you to know I have spoken to Speaker Rayburn,” he wrote Ellender, whose bill also passed. Few emotions are more ephemeral in the political world than gratitude: appreciation for past favors. Far less ephemeral, however, is hope: the hope of future favors. Far less ephemeral is fear, the fear that in the future, favors may be denied. Thanks to Sam Rayburn, Lyndon Johnson now had, at least to a limited extent, those emotions on his side in dealing with senators; he had something to promise them, something to threaten them with.

ANOTHER SOURCE of power was money.

Lyndon Johnson had been using money as a lever to move the political world for a long time—ever since, as a young worker in a congressional campaign, he had sat in a San Antonio hotel room behind a table covered with five-dollar bills, handing them to Mexican-American men at the rate of five dollars a vote for each vote in their family.*

For years, men had been handing him (or handing to his aides, for his use) checks or sometimes envelopes stuffed with cash—generally plain white letter-size envelopes containing hundred-dollar bills—for use in his own campaigns, or in the campaigns of others. His first campaign for Congress, in 1937, was perhaps the most expensive campaign for a congressional seat in the history of Texas.† During his first campaign for the Senate, in 1941, envelopes stuffed with cash cascaded into Texas from Washington attorneys and the New York City garment district unions. Some of these campaign contributions were carried in a more casual fashion. Recalling one trip on which he brought between $10,000 and $15,000, Walter Jenkins says, “I went down to Texas carrying this money in bills stuffed into every pocket.” The amounts of cash heading south were so large that Johnson sometimes lost the personal control over its use that was important to him. Corcoran “went up to the garment district and raised money for Johnson, and we … sent it to Texas,” Jim Rowe was to say. “Johnson called and said: ‘Where’s that money? I need it!’” When Rowe told him who was carrying it, Johnson exploded, apparently because the courier had authority to distribute funds on his own. Rowe recalls Johnson saying: “Goddamn it—it’ll never get to me. I’ll have to meet him at the plane and get it from him.” And money was being raised in Texas, too. Because campaign contributions were not a deductible business expense, Brown & Root distributed to company executives and lawyers hundreds of thousands of dollars in deductible “bonuses” and “attorneys’ fees,” which Internal Revenue Service agents came to believe were then funneled, in both checks and cash, to the Johnson campaign—contributions on a scale unprecedented at the time even in the freewheeling world of Texas politics. A tax-fraud investigation of Brown & Root launched by the IRS was cut off only after Johnson had solicited the personal intervention of President Roosevelt.‡ During Johnson’s second—1948—Senate campaign, hundred-dollar bills had been given to his aides in stacks so large that sometimes letter-size envelopes couldn’t hold them. Picking up $50,000 in “currency” in Houston, John Connally had to bring it back to Austin in what he calls a “brown paper sack like you buy groceries in” (which he left in a booth in an all-night diner, the Longhorn Cafe, where he had stopped for a bite to eat with fellow Johnson assistant Charles Herring, so that the two attorneys rushed back to the diner in a panic that was assuaged only when they saw the bag still lying in the booth). A paper bag Connally brought back from Houston on another occasion contained $40,000.* “They were spending money like Texas had never seen,” Ralph Yarborough, later a United States Senator from Texas but in 1948 an activist Democratic politician in Texas, was to recall. “And they did it not only so big but so openly.”

Lyndon Johnson’s use of money in other politicians’ campaigns had also been instrumental in his rise. It was money given to other candidates that, in 1940, had furnished him his first toehold on national political power. Obtaining an informal post with the moribund Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, he had arranged for newly rich Texas contractors and independent oilmen, anxious to enlarge their political influence in Washington, to make contributions to the committee, with the stipulation that they be distributed at his discretion.

That was when the checks and the envelopes stuffed with cash began to pour into his office in Washington—not into his office in the House Office Building because of federal strictures against receiving contributions on federal property, but into a five-room suite he rented in an office building on E Street, the Munsey Building, to circumvent those regulations: to circumvent not their spirit, which was to discourage the sale of political influence, but their technical letter. Tommy Corcoran handed him several cash-filled envelopes, filled with bills from the New York garment-center unions, and trusted couriers from Texas, including William Kittrell, the veteran Texas lobbyist, handed him others. To circumvent another federal law, the Federal Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibited any political contributions from corporations and set a limit of $5,000 on contributions from individuals, Herman and George Brown arranged to have business associates—subcontractors, attorneys, an insurance broker—send $5,000 each, in their own names, to the Congressional Campaign Committee.† On the scale of political contributions of the time, these contributions had a substantial heft. When six of these checks arrived at once, Lyndon Johnson had provided, through Brown & Root, more money than the committee received from any other source. And more and more checks came in, from Brown & Root, and from other Texas oilmen and contractors.

Lyndon Johnson was quite frank about why businessmen should be happy to make these contributions. When, the following year, removed in a power struggle from a formal job at the Congressional Campaign Committee, he became exasperated by the stinginess of some contributors, and by Sam Ray-burn’s failure to understand why they should be more generous, he wrote the Speaker that “These $200 droplets will not get the job done.” What was needed, he said, was to “select a ‘minute man’ group of thirty men, each of whom should raise $5,000, for a total of $150,000.” And, he added, “There isn’t any reason why, with the wealth and consideration that has been extended, we should fall down on this.” Wealth and consideration—the favors, the political influence that had provided FCC licensing favors that had let radio station owners grow rich, and federal oil depletion allowances that had let oil field operators grow richer; that had procured federal contracts to build and provision military installations in the Tenth Congressional District for favored Austin businessmen, and much larger contracts—such as the contract (it eventually grew to $357,000,000, then one of the largest in Navy history) that the Navy gave to Brown & Root early in 1941 to build sub-chasers and destroyers, despite the fact that, at the time, Brown & Root had never built a single ship of any type (and, as George Brown was to say, “We didn’t know the stern from the aft—I mean the bow—of the boat”).* Johnson was asking for contributions, in other words, on grounds of naked self-interest: political contributions should be given in return for past government help in acquiring wealth and upon the hope of future government protection of that wealth, and of government assistance in adding to it.

That argument was evidently persuasive. The droplets again became a gusher, and the needed money was again raised—although because Johnson felt himself unwelcome in Campaign Committee headquarters, some of the envelopes came into his House office, and the money they contained was distributed from there. Lyndon Johnson’s first national political power was simply the power of money, used as campaign contributions; it had given him whatever small taste of power he had for a year or two enjoyed in the House.

Now, in the Senate, the cascade of cash continued. Some insight into these contributions would be furnished years later, and almost by accident, because of a 1975 Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit against the Gulf Oil Corporation that grew out of an investigation not into Lyndon Johnson but into the Watergate scandal. Testifying in this lawsuit, Claude Wild Jr. said he had become Gulf’s chief Washington lobbyist, reporting to the company’s general counsel, David Searls, on November 1, 1959. “Do you recall your first assignment?” he was asked. “One of the first assignments I had resulted from a commitment that” Searls “had made to then Senator Lyndon Johnson,” Wild replied. “The commitment was that Gulf Oil would furnish $50,000 to Senator Johnson for his use, and … I was furnished $10,000 on five separate occasions which I delivered to Walter Jenkins, who was Senator Johnson’s primary aide.” The money, Wild testified, was in “cash.” No one asked him at the time the denominations of the bills, or how they were carried, but in 1987 he told the author of this book that “probably it was hundreds,” carried in “plain white envelopes.” He said that the money could have been given either to help finance Johnson’s 1960 presidential campaign, or to help Johnson finance other senators’ campaigns—“it was for whatever he wanted.” He also testified that he had later made another payment, twenty-five thousand dollars, to Johnson “staff members” for “his or his delegate’s use in assisting members of Congress whom he hoped to see elected or re-elected.”

And Wild’s contributions were not the largest being delivered to Johnson. Men familiar with this aspect of Texas politics agree that his most important fund-raisers were Tommy Corcoran; John Connally, who carried cash given by, among others, Sid Richardson; Ed Clark, courier for, among others, Clint Murchison, Brown & Root, and the Humble Oil Company; and, on occasion, George R. Brown himself. By the time the author learned about the cash-filled envelopes, Brown had died, so the author could not ask him about them. But he did discuss them with both Connally and Clark, and both men spoke freely—indeed, somewhat boastfully—about flying up to Washington with envelopes tucked into the inside breast pockets of their suit jackets. And both Connally and Clark, as well as intimates familiar with the fund-raising efforts of these two men during the 1950s, agree that they brought to Washington amounts far larger than those about which Wild testified. Asked if the largest amounts he carried were of the same scale as the forty- or fifty-thousand-dollar contributions he had transported in a sack in 1948, Connally shook his head no, grinned, and said that the amounts he carried increased, particularly after he became Richardson’s personal attorney in 1951. “I handled inordinate amounts of cash,” he said. Clark, moreover, points out that Wild didn’t go to work for Gulf until 1959. Before that, contributions to Johnson were made by Chief Counsel Searls. Searls had died before the SEC began its investigation of Gulf, and therefore did not himself testify, but he worked closely with Clark for years; it was, for example, primarily Searls to whom Clark was referring when he explained how he had persuaded Gulf to purchase Lyndon Johnson’s political influence by purchasing advertising time on Johnson’s radio station, KTBC: “I had friends there. I spoke to them about it, and they understood. This wasn’t a Sunday school proposition. This was business.”* Clark didn’t put anything in writing about his association with Searls; the “Secret Boss of Texas” never put anything about money in writing, but in every instance in which one of Clark’s statements could be checked against something in writing, the statement proved to be accurate, and when he was asked about Wild’s testimony, he said, “I knew about that fifty thousand. I knew about two hundred thousand.” And Gulf was only one oil company—and there were non-oil businesses in Texas, too.

Some idea of the free-and-easy atmosphere that surrounded Lyndon Johnson’s fund-raising relationship with Texans would be documented in transcripts of telephone calls made in early 1960. “I have some money that I want to know what to do with,” George Brown said in a call to Johnson’s office on January 5. “I was wondering … just who should be getting it, and I will be collecting more from time to time.” (The answer to Brown’s question is not transcribed.) Ed Clark was raising so much that some of it had to stay in Texas to await the next trip down before Jenkins or some other Johnson aide could pick it up. “Woody,” Jenkins wrote Warren Woodward on January 11, “Ed Clark tells me that he has received some assistance from H. E. Butt. I wonder if you could go by and pick it up and put it with the other [we] put away before I left Texas.” Clark says that Brown’s money was for the presidential run for which Johnson was gearing up that January, and that Butt’s was for Johnson to contribute to the campaigns of other senators, but that often he and the other men providing Johnson with funds weren’t even sure which of these two purposes the funds were for. “How could you know?” Ed Clark was to say. “If Johnson wanted to give some senator money for some campaign, Johnson would pass the word to give money to me or Jesse Kellam or Cliff Carter, and it would find its way into Johnson’s hands. And it would be the same if he wanted money for his own campaign. And a lot of the money that was given to Johnson both for other candidates and for himself was in cash.” “All we knew was that Lyndon asked for it, and we gave it,” Tommy Corcoran was to say.

This atmosphere would pervade Lyndon Johnson’s fund-raising all during his years in the Senate. He would “pass the word”—often by telephoning, sometimes by having Jenkins telephone—to Brown or Clark or Connally, and the cash would be collected down in Texas and flown to Washington, or, if Johnson was in Austin, would be delivered to him there. When word was received that some was available, John Connally recalls, he would board a plane in Fort Worth or Dallas, and “I’d go get it. Or Walter would get it. Woody would go get it. We had a lot of people who would go get it, and deliver it. The idea that Walter or Woody or Wilton Woods would skim some is ridiculous. We had couriers.” Or, Clark says, “If George or me were going up anyway, we’d take it ourselves.” And Tommy Corcoran was often bringing Johnson cash from New York unions, mostly as contributions to liberal senators whom the unions wanted to support. Asked how he knew that the money “found its way” into Johnson’s hands, Clark laughed and said, “Because sometimes I gave it to him. It would be in an envelope.” Both Clark and Wild said that Johnson wanted the contributions given, outside the office, to either Jenkins or Bobby Baker, or to another Johnson aide, Cliff Carter, but neither Wild nor Clark trusted either Baker or Carter. In Baker’s own memoir, Wheeling and Dealing, a book he wrote with Larry L. King, Baker was to call himself the “official bagman” for Senate Democrats, but Clark was to say he “was the only person in Washington I ever recoiled from,” and Wild was to call him “a crook.” (As would a Federal District Court jury: in 1967, Baker would be found guilty of seven counts of theft, fraud and income tax evasion, in a case that did not involve Johnson. The jury found that in 1962 he had accepted one hundred thousand dollars in “campaign donations” intended to buy influence with various senators, and instead had pocketed the money himself. Jurors told reporters that they felt Baker had lied under oath. Sentenced to one to three years in federal prison, he served sixteen months.) So the two Texas fund-raisers almost always gave their contributions to Jenkins, “but sometimes,” in Clark’s words, “Walter were [sic] not available, or it were not convenient to do that,” and on such occasions they would be given directly to Johnson. Asked if the envelopes were always handed over outside the office, Clark replied, “Usually. Not always.” He said that Johnson was less cautious with him and with Brown and Connally and Wild than with other contributors because “We had had wheelings and dealings for a long time.” Wild responded by noting that before going to work for Gulf in 1959, he had been the Washington representative for the Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, “and they had a much more casual way of doing things” than Gulf. During this period, he said, he had given Johnson “quite a bit” of money—he said he had no idea how much—for the campaigns of other senators, sometimes giving it to Johnson “personally,” in his office. Money also found its way into Johnson’s hands by other means. In 1956, for example, Richard Reynolds of Reynolds Tobacco telephoned Juanita Roberts, one of Johnson’s secretaries, and said, according to a memo Roberts wrote, “He has $500.00 he’d like to contribute toward the Senator’s expenses.” After Gene Chambers, one of Johnson’s assistants, picked up the money, it evidently passed through Johnson’s hands. “Sen. J handed it to A.W. [Moursund] to take care of,” Roberts noted.

If Johnson was in Texas, he might collect the money himself. Shortly after Joe M. Kilgore had been elected to Congress in 1954, Kilgore says, Johnson came up to him after a meeting in San Antonio and “asked me if I was going to Washington.”

“When I said I was,” Kilgore recalls, “he said, ‘Here, take this.’ It was an envelope. Inside was ten thousand dollars. ‘Give it to Arthur Perry.’ I had never had ten thousand dollars before. Jane and I didn’t have ten thousand dollars [to our name].”

Kilgore patted his breast pocket with a nervous gesture. “All the way up I kept [patting] to make sure it was still there. I was sure everyone knew I had it. When I got to Washington, I called Arthur Perry. I was going to make sure he counted it in my presence to make sure I hadn’t taken out one of those hundred-dollar bills.” As it turned out, however, “he [Johnson] had called Earle Clements, and Clements was in the office when I arrived. I made them count it in my presence.”

So many envelopes were being filled with cash in the Lone Star State that Kilgore was not the only man who transported them to Washington despite a lack of familiarity with such chores. “Twice I personally carried packets of a hundred hundred-dollar bills, the common currency of politics, to Jenkins,” Booth Mooney, whose customary duties were in the speechwriting field, wrote in his book LBJ: An Irreverent Chronicle. “This money came from [oilman H. L.] Hunt, who said substantial contributions were also being sent to Washington by other oilmen and business people in Dallas and Houston.”

•    •    •

NO MATTER HOW MUCH MONEY WAS RAISED, “it was never enough for Johnson—never,” Ed Clark says. “How much did he want?—he wanted,” Claude Wild says. “He wanted all you could give and more.” And to get as much as possible, Lyndon Johnson took a very direct role in raising money. Clark would for years—decades—be regarded in Texas as the state’s most skilled political fund-raiser, but, Clark says, there was someone better at that art than he. “No one was better at raising money than Lyndon Johnson,” he says. “He would get on the phone and call people, and he knew just what to say.”

What he said sometimes dealt bluntly with “the wealth and consideration that had been extended.” Texas was home to businessmen much smaller than Sid Richardson or Herman Brown, and if some of them were reluctant to contribute, or to contribute as much as Johnson thought they should contribute, he would get on the phone with them personally. One of Clark’s clients, Theo Davis of Austin, owned a wholesale grocery company which had been given contracts to supply central Texas military installations, and he wanted to keep those contracts, and, Clark says, Johnson would “get on the phone with him” and “remind” him what he had to do to keep them, and, Clark says, “He gave Johnson five thousand dollars at a time.” Johnson had John Connally make him lists, Connally recalls—“We called them ‘John’s Special Lists’”—of how much certain businessmen and lawyers could give, and why they should give it. With some of these targets, the reasons were philosophical. “Good Democrat” Connally would write by a name. “Old Roosevelt man.” But with others, the reasons related more to “wealth and consideration.” One Leonard Hyatt would be good for $1,000 partly because he was a “Good Democrat” but also because “You have helped him on Bracero matter,” Connally wrote on one such list. An attorney, Floyd McGown Sr., who “can give and raise” $1,500, had been helped by Johnson years before—“represents Frederick Refrigeration & some other employers since War Labor Board days.” Next to another name, that of Johnson’s Fredericksburg ally Arthur Stehling (“500 to 1500”), Connally wrote, “Had a good year—Two pretty good capital gains transactions”—which, Connally explains, meant two transactions Lyndon had helped Arthur with.

If a more general type of coaxing was required, Johnson was adept at that, too, as is shown by the transcript of a telephone call he made to wealthy oilman Dudley Dougherty, who would be Johnson’s opponent in the 1954 election but, at other times, his ally. He complained about organizational difficulties to Dougherty until Dougherty said, “Let me see if I can dig up five thousand dollars for you.”

“If you can—don’t you get in any hurry,” Johnson said soothingly. But, in fact, he wanted to firm up the arrangement. “You let my boy Warren Woodward in Austin, he is a mighty good boy, or John Connally—they will fly down to your place. If you can help us, I’ll sure appreciate it.” And when it didn’t firm—when Dougherty was apparently going to hang up without any further word about the money—Johnson said, “You tell me when you want Warren Woodward to come down there.”

And sometimes, in the raising, Johnson took a very personal hand indeed, as is shown by two incidents that occurred at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles in 1960.

The first, recounted in Booth Mooney’s book, occurred in an empty clothes closet in Johnson’s hotel suite. The suite “was filled with people,” Mooney was to write, so Johnson led him into the closet “and shut the door. ‘This won’t take long, Booth,’ he said urgently. ‘I just want to tell you we’ve got a lot of bills to pay here and other places. I have to raise a pile of money. Will you talk to Hunt and tell him he’ll never regret it if he’ll contribute ten or twenty to help us get square?’”

Hunt declined to give that help, Mooney says, but Johnson had more success with another appeal, this one recounted by Bobby Baker. “LBJ,” Baker was to say in Wheeling and Dealing, “wore a sad hound dog’s look as he said, ‘Bobby, we’re broke and we owe $39,000 for a hotel bill out here. See what you can do.’ … I went to Bart Lytton, president of Lytton Savings and Loan, with the sad tale. He required persuading. ‘I don’t have that much available,’ he said. ‘Even if I did I wouldn’t want it on record that I’d given it.’ I assured Lytton that he’d be protected and stressed the benefits of incurring LBJ’s goodwill. ‘On the other hand,’ I said, ‘he can be a miserable prick if he feels someone has let him down.’ Bart groaned, but motioned me into a public men’s room nearby.” In one of the stalls, Baker was to write, Lytton “gave me two $10,000 personal checks made out to cash. I delivered them to LBJ, who took one look and said, ‘Hell, Bobby, this is just a little over half of it.’” Nonetheless, “Senator Johnson pocketed the checks, though grumbling under his breath….”

Johnson sometimes also took a personal hand in distributing money to other senators.

“On one occasion,” Baker was to write, “I was asked to transmit $5,000 from Lyndon B. Johnson” to Styles Bridges. “As was the Washington practice, Johnson handed me the boodle in cash. ‘Bobby,’ he said, ‘Styles Bridges is throwing an “appreciation dinner” for himself up in New Hampshire sometime next week. Fly up there and drop this in the kitty and be damn sure that Styles knows it comes from me.’” On another occasion, in 1957, Joe Kilgore relates, Johnson gave a contribution to William Blakely, who had been appointed to Texas’ other senatorial seat to replace the retiring Price Daniel, and was running for the permanent seat in a special election.

“He [Johnson] called me to come over to his office,” Kilgore says. “When I got there, he said, ‘Come on, I’m meeting Bill Blakely down on the sidewalk.’ We left his office and went down in an elevator. While we were in the elevator, he said, ‘Here, hold this,’ and stuck something in my hand. I looked down and it was a big wad of money. When we got out of the elevator, we went into a closet—I think it was a janitorial closet. He told me to count the money. It was twenty thousand dollars. In one-hundred-dollar bills. I knew why he wanted me to count it. He wanted a witness. So that he could prove that he had given this money. He gave the money to Blakely, saying, ‘I just want you to know I’m on your side.’”

Johnson’s use of money to help finance the campaigns of his colleagues had begun even before he became whip. In 1950, he had funneled Texas cash into the campaign of an old House acquaintance who was trying to move to the Senate, Earle Clements of Kentucky. Now, in 1952, there were senatorial elections again, and Johnson used financing on a broader scale. And Johnson’s financing of colleagues’ campaigns was not limited to money he distributed himself. Stuart Symington, making his first try for the Senate in 1952, had wealthy financial backers in Missouri, but as one of them was to write, “We can’t raise money in the quantities you Texans can.” In September and October, 1952, Johnson raised it—largely from Herman Brown. “I gave him some money and I sent a man down to help him at Lyndon’s instigation,” Brown would recall years later, after he had become enraged by Symington’s refusal to vote for further natural gas deregulation. “But Symington has very little ability, the least of any of them. I’ve got a nigger chauffeur who’s got more ability than Symington—although maybe I shouldn’t express myself so frankly.”

How much did Brown, and other Texans, contribute at Johnson’s instigation to Symington’s 1952 Missouri senatorial campaign? In a painful interview with the author in 1982, Symington at first attempted to minimize the amount and to contend that it had been given only in the form of checks, checks that, as legally required, had been reported. The author then showed him contradictory information. “Well, I remember Johnson sent my campaign manager somewhere to get money for me. It wasn’t much—five thousand or ten thousand dollars—but it was a nice gesture.” The author asked if the amount might have been higher. “I’m pretty certain it wasn’t fifteen thousand,” Symington said. “Maybe it was ten thousand. Nobody could buy me for ten thousand dollars.” Asked if the money had been cash, Symington said, “I don’t know. My worst characteristic as a politician was my inability to raise money.” The money—at least much of it—was in cash: in hundred-dollar bills. And the amount may have been far higher than Symington’s estimate. Ten thousand dollars—in cash—was the amount contributed to Symington in 1952 by oilman Wesley West alone. Arthur Stehling, one of Johnson’s lawyers, was to recall sitting in Johnson’s ranch house during the fall of 1952, listening to Johnson discuss over the telephone the financial needs of various senators: “He would say, ‘Well, I’ve got twenty for him, and twenty for him and thirty for him.’ Symington was always the highest.” Twenty or thirty thousand dollars were paltry amounts by the fund-raising standards that would be in place at the end of the twentieth century; they were quite substantial amounts by mid-century standards. And Johnson’s use of money, like his use of Rayburn, was getting him what he wanted, as Ed Clark saw. “Roosevelt would pay people off in conversation or speeches,” Clark says. “Johnson went right to the heart of it. The nitty-gritty. ‘How much do you have to have to make this campaign go?’” When senators returned to Washington after the 1952 elections, there was a new awareness on the north side of the Capitol. There was a vast source of campaign funds down in Texas, and the conduit to it—the only conduit to it for most non-Texas senators, their only access to this money they might need badly one day—was Lyndon Johnson.

Lyndon was the guy to see if you wanted to get a bill off the Calendar, Lyndon was the guy to see if you were having trouble getting it passed in the House, Lyndon was the guy to see for campaign funds. There wasn’t anything Lyndon was using these facts for as yet. But in ways not yet visible, power was starting to accumulate around him—ready to be used.

WITH HIS COLLEAGUES, still, no favor was too small for Johnson to perform, no favor too big. Nothing was too much trouble. In March, 1952, Harry Byrd’s thirty-five-year-old daughter, Westwood, died after falling from her horse during a fox hunt. Her funeral was to be held in Winchester, Virginia, near the Byrd family home, Rosemont. Byrd had always treated Johnson with notable reserve, a reserve that sometimes seemed to border on dislike, and Winchester was seventy-two miles from Washington, but Johnson decided to attend.

Not wanting to go alone, he persuaded Warren Magnuson to accompany him, telling Maggie he would pick him up at the Shoreham and drive him down. When the morning of the funeral dawned with heavy rain, Magnuson tried to demur, but Johnson told him he had no choice but to go, that “everyone in the Senate is going to be there—including the Republicans.”

But, as Lyndon Johnson was to report to Horace Busby when he telephoned him later that day, “You know how many United States senators were there? Two! Maggie and me!” When he saw that, he told Busby, he had “almost got cold feet” and decided it might be better to simply turn around and go home. But he stayed, and he and Magnuson stood in the cemetery, holding their hats in their hands in the rain, on the other side of the grave from the Byrd family, directly across from the Senator, whose head was bowed in grief. And suddenly, while the minister was reading the service, Harry Byrd looked up and saw them. “He looked at us, and then he looked back at me,” Johnson told Busby. “I don’t know what that look meant, but I’ll bet a dollar to a dime that was a very important look.”

BECAUSE JOHNSON WAS WHIP, he had a reason for doing what before he had needed excuses for doing: for meeting and talking with other senators, for making friends with them, for selling himself, man to man, one on one.

He sold on the Senate floor. No longer did he have to sit at his desk in the Chamber with only Horace Busby for company, hoping that some senator would “come by and say something to him.” Senators wanting information, senators wanting favors—he had plenty of senators coming by to say something to him now. And he made the most of the opportunity.

It wasn’t only senators from his own party who came by. During his early days in the Senate, Republican leaders had ignored him; he had not been important enough. Now, however, he was Assistant Democratic Leader, and often in charge of the Democratic side of the floor. Most Democrats ridiculed the Republican Leader, Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska, one of Dean Acheson’s “primitives,” for his malapropisms on the Senate floor (“Indigo China”; the “Chief Joints of Staff”; India’s fierce soldiers were “gherkins”; not infrequently he would refer to a colleague as “the senator from junior”), and were careful to keep out of his way, not only because in private life Wherry was an undertaker who loved his work, and if one were not careful, one found oneself listening to unpleasantly intimate details of the embalming process, but because so intense was Wherry’s “hatred” for Democrats that he was likely to take offense at some innocuous remark a Democratic senator made in conversation, and, when he was thus offended, he would delight in objecting to, and thereby blocking, the offender’s most precious private bills. Several older senators advised Johnson to avoid Wherry. But avoidance would not suit Johnson’s purposes; instead, he threw himself in Wherry’s path as often as possible, employing on him his customary techniques—as Alfred Steinberg was to write: “Johnson made it a point to be diffident in Wherry’s presence”—and demonstrating that their effectiveness was bipartisan. Wherry began to wander across the center aisle to talk to Johnson with evident fondness. And when during an evening session convened to pass a Truman Administration bill, Wherry announced that he was going to block it by objecting to every private bill on the Calendar to stall the Senate and block consideration of the President’s measure, Johnson, who had one of the private bills, approached the Nebraskan and said, in a tone that a listener described as “a plea to a superior”: “You know how I never do anything except Senate work.” Tonight, he said, he had made an exception and had promised to go to one of Gwen Cafritz’s dinner parties. “So couldn’t you just let my one little bill go through?” Acquiescing with a smile, Wherry added, “I’d rather do business with you than anybody else on your side, Lyndon.” Sometimes, in fact, Lyndon Johnson would even have a conversation with Bob Taft. In McFarland’s absence, Johnson would be sitting in the Leader’s front-row seat on the center aisle. Taft, managing some piece of legislation on the floor, would sit at the Republican first desk directly across the aisle—temptingly near. At first, the proximity did Johnson no good; the dour Taft resisted every Johnson device to draw him into conversation. So Johnson came up with a ploy irresistible unless Taft wanted to be blatantly discourteous. Leaning across the center aisle, holding a copy of the bill that was under discussion, Johnson would whisper that he had forgotten his eyeglasses, and, with an apology for his constant forget-fulness, would ask Taft to read a particular paragraph to him. Taft would do so, Johnson would be very grateful, and brief exchanges sometimes ensued. Although Johnson wasn’t close to the key Republican yet, he was getting closer.

He sold in the Democratic cloakroom, where the now-familiar tableau was still being repeated almost every day—Walter George pontificating from an easy chair, Lyndon Johnson, in the adjoining easy chair, listening reverently. Chatting with other Big Bulls in the cloakroom, often in similar, one-on-one conversations in adjoining armchairs or on a sofa, Johnson’s tone was as soft and calm as ever, his attitude as humble. Advice was still being sought: “I need your counsel on something,” or “I want to draw on your wisdom on something,” or “I need the counsel of a wise old head here.” Assistance was still being offered—with Senator Byrd, for example, assistance in counting. The Virginia squire was the most fervent of believers in a conservative economic policy, and when he was pushing a tax or budget proposal, he was anxious to know what the vote would be, but, patrician to the core, he had never been able to bring himself to ask a colleague how he planned to vote. After Johnson became whip, Byrd got this information without asking; Johnson had Bobby Baker ask, and then would relay the finding to Byrd—always offhandedly, subtly, as if he didn’t know how anxious Byrd was.

And in the cloakroom now, there was also, sometimes, a new tableau. Lyndon Johnson would be standing in the center of the long, narrow space between the couches. Senators wanting favors or information would be coming up to him, Bobby Baker would be darting to his side, whispering something in his ear, darting away again, working the telephones. Often, the Assistant Leader would be holding one of the long Senate tally sheets, and he would be writing numbers on it; sometimes, a telephone page would run up to him excitedly, saying that the White House was on the phone; Johnson would go over to one of the booths, take the call, and report what the numbers were. And, more and more frequently—when he was talking not with George or Byrd, but with one of the less powerful senators—as he talked, one of Lyndon Johnson’s long arms would come up and drape itself over his colleague’s shoulders, in warm camaraderie.

If the other arm wasn’t gesturing, it stayed by his side. In 1951 and 1952, Lyndon Johnson wasn’t grabbing lapels.

Not yet.

AND AS, more and more frequently, senators needing something dropped by his office, he sold there, too. There the subject was politics and only politics, for to many senators, including the host, politics was the most important thing in life, and even senators who regarded themselves as experts on politics came to realize that Lyndon Johnson was worth listening to. When senators returned to Washington after a recess to report, in relation to the President’s constantly fluctuating popularity, “Harry’s up” or “Harry’s down,” Johnson’s explanation of the trend was so cogent that senators would repeat it to others as if it had been their own. When Truman offered to back Eisenhower for the Democratic nomination, and when Eisenhower refused and then resigned from NATO, and speculation arose that he would seek the GOP nomination against Taft, Johnson always seemed to know the inside story. When speculation arose as to when Congress would adjourn for the year, it was Johnson who had the best overview of the business that still needed to be transacted—and how long it would take. When discussions of strategy arose, “Johnson would say, If you do x, then so-and-so will do y, and then such and such is likely to happen.” To Lyndon Johnson, some of his colleagues were beginning to realize, politics was a chess game, and he had the ability to see quite a few moves ahead. “Sometimes it was just amazing to listen to him,” Stuart Symington says.

Amazing, and, in Elizabeth Rowe’s word, fun.

Lyndon Johnson’s sentences were the sentences of a man with a remarkable gift for words, not long words but evocative, of a man with a remarkable gift for images, homey images of a vividness that infused the sentences with drama. A special interest group—organized labor in Texas, say—was never merely weak, it was “not much stronger than a popcorn fart.” In the Johnsonian lexicon, a House-Senate joint committee was not merely a meaningless legislative exercise; “Hell,” he would say, “a joint committee’s as useless as tits on a bull.” About a Republican senator expounding on NATO, he said, “He doesn’t know any more about NATO than an old maid does about fucking.” He would say that one man was “as wise as a tree full of owls,” that another was “as busy as a man with one hoe and two rattlesnakes.” Glancing out the window of 231, he would say, “It’s raining as hard as a cat pissing on a flat rock.” Ridiculing a Republican senator who thought he was making a national reputation with his expertise on economics, he said, “Making a speech on economics is a lot like pissing down your leg. It may seem hot to you, but it never does to anyone else.”

And, of course, the sentences would often be strung together in stories, many of them set in the Hill Country. They were about drunks, and about preachers—there was one about the preacher who at a rural revival meeting was baptizing converts in a creek near Johnson City and became overenthusiastic. One teenage boy was immersed for quite a long time, and when his head was lifted out of the water, one of the congregation called out from the creek bank, “Do you believe?” The boy said, “I believe,” and the preacher promptly put his head under again. Again, when he emerged, someone shouted out, “Do you believe?” and again the boy said, gasping this time, “I believe.” Down he went again, and this time, when the preacher lifted his head up, someone shouted, “What do you believe?”

“I believe this son of a bitch is trying to drown me,” the boy said.

Then there was the preacher who became irritated because every time he came to Johnson City, one farmer would sit in the front row, promptly go to sleep, and snore very loudly through the preacher’s sermon. “He finally got tired of it,” Johnson would say, “and decided to play a little joke on this farmer, and while he was sleeping, he said in a rather low voice, ‘All of you people who want to go to heaven, please stand,’ and everybody stood except the fellow in the front who was sleeping. And when they sat down, the preacher said in a very loud voice, ‘Now all of you folks that want to go to hell, please stand,’ and that stirred the fellow, and he waked up, and he heard the preacher say, ‘Please stand,’ so he jumped up, and he looked around and saw that no one else was standing with him, and he said, ‘Preacher, I don’t know what you’re voting on, but you and I seem to be the only two people for it.’”

And the stories were about himself. An unhappy childhood can be a novelist’s capital, and it was Lyndon Johnson’s capital, too. If he was as sensitive as a novelist in reading other men, he was as vivid as a novelist in depicting the hardships of his youth, in describing the blisters he got from chopping cotton (“The skin would come off your fingers like a glove,” he would say, seeming to peel off the skin from his fingers as he did so), or the Hill Country farm wives (“Those ol’ women—their faces jes’ like prunes from the sun”), or in talking about his family’s poverty. And he embellished his stories with a license so broad it might have been literary. “He frequently talked about the things that they didn’t have when he was a young boy,” George Smathers recalls. “They didn’t have firewood on certain occasions when they would get cold. I remember one time when we were in Florida and it suddenly turned cold. We were out on a boat and we couldn’t get warm, and I remember Johnson saying something to the effect that ‘I haven’t been this cold since I was a kid living back on the Pedernales.’ I said, ‘My God, did it get this cold?’ ‘Oh, sure it got this cold,’ but, he said, ‘the thing about it was we didn’t even have heat of any kind. We just had to huddle up around whatever firewood we could gather.’ He said, ‘That was pretty tough getting warm when six of you were trying to back up to one fire.’ He would talk about things like that.” No such scene had ever occurred in the Johnson home, poor though it was, but the description of it, and of other exaggerated scenes of his boyhood poverty, had the desired effect. It was, Smathers says, because of “things like that” that “I think he was very much inspired to lift himself and his family out of those conditions.”

And few novelists could have been more perceptive in their insights into human nature.

One afternoon in Johnson’s office he told a story about “the judge down in Texas during the Depression.”

“They called him up one night—this [state] senator did, and said, ‘Judge, we just abolished your court.’

“He said, ‘Well, why’d you abolish my court?’

“The senator said, ‘Well, we got to consolidate the courts for economy reasons, and yours was the last one created.’

“‘Well,’ he said, ‘you didn’t do it without a hearing, did you?’

“The senator said, ‘Yes, we had a hearing.’

“‘Well, who the devil would testify my court ought to be abolished?’

“‘Well,’ he said, ‘the head of the State Bar Association.’

“The judge said, ‘Let me tell you about the head of the State Bar Association. He’s a shyster lawyer, and his daddy ahead of him was.’”

At this point, the men listening to Lyndon Johnson started to smile, but he had only begun.

“‘Well, the mayor of the city came down and testified against you.’

“‘Well,’ the judge said, ‘let me tell you about that mayor. He stole his way into office. He padded the ballot boxes. He counted ’em twice. Who else testified?’

“‘Well,’ the senator said, ‘the banker.’

“‘Well, he’s been charging usurous rates jest like his daddy and his grand-daddy ahead of him did.’”

The men in Lyndon Johnson’s office would be laughing now, as he paused. Then he resumed. The state senator, he said, now told the judge, “‘Well, Judge, I don’t think we ought to talk any longer. You’re gettin’ your blood pressure up, and you’re all excited, and it’s late tonight. I just thought I’d tell you that the Legislature has adjourned. Somebody did offer an amendment to abolish your court, but we didn’t have a hearing—I was just kidding you—and nobody came down and testified against you at all. But I fought the amendment and killed it, and the bill’s gone to the Governor, and he’s signed it, and you’re safe, and I just thought I’d call you up and make you feel better.’ The judge said, ‘Thank you, Senator, but why did you make me say those ugly things about three of the best friends any man ever had?’” As Johnson leaned back in his chair, his feet up, his arm holding the glass out for a refill, his listeners would be roaring with laughter.

MOST OF THE STORIES WERE, of course, about politics. They were about political history, about scenes he had witnessed, or, to be more precise, that he said he had witnessed: about the scene in Sam Rayburn’s office when the call came that FDR was dead; about Huey Long, angered by the dirty campaign that the Arkansas political machine was waging in 1932 against elderly Hattie Caraway, the only woman senator at the time, shouting on the floor of the Senate (Johnson said he had seen this scene from the gallery), “I’m going down to Arkansas and pull those big bullies off that poor old woman’s neck.” Or they were about current political situations—he seemed to have a story apropos every one. Once a group of senators were talking about a colleague who might have had trouble winning re-election except that his opponent was as inept a campaigner as he was, and Johnson said, “That reminds me of the fellow down in Texas who says to his friend, ‘Earl, I am thinking about running for sheriff against Uncle Jim Wilson. What do you think?’ His friend says, ‘Well, it depends on which of you sees the most people. If you see the most, Uncle Jim will win. If he sees the most, you will win.’”

Johnson’s gift for mimicry made his listeners see the characters he was describing, Huey Long or Harry Truman or FDR; his big, ungainly frame brought to life his preachers and drunks and good-ol’-boy Hill Country ranchers. There was a natural rhythm in his words that drew his listeners into the story, caught them up in it, a rough rhetoric that nonetheless relied on devices such as parallel construction that might have been used by a highly educated orator, as well as the timing—unhurried, perfect—of a master narrator. And as Lyndon Johnson spoke, his face spoke, too, expressions chasing themselves across it with astonishing rapidity; his huge, mottled hands spoke, too, palms turned up in entreaty or down in dismissal, forefinger or fist punching the air for emphasis, hands and fingers not only punctuating the words but reinforcing them. He had what Busby called “the schoolteacher habit of laying his fingers down to make his points—one, two, three.” And, of course, his piercing dark eyes, those Bunton eyes, the eyes that the Hill Country said “talked”—they were speaking, too. His whole body spoke, with expressive posture and gestures; once, he was telling a few senators about a horrible embarrassment that had occurred to Bob Kerr, who maintained that he was a teetotaler, and whose political support in Oklahoma was indeed heavily dependent on the temperance vote in a largely dry state. Kerr, giving a barbecue in Washington, had had several steers butchered on his ranch and flown up to provide the meat, but a typographical error in the Associated Press dispatch on the event had informed Oklahomans that Kerr had had several “beers” flown up. And, as Johnson got to that point in the story, his face breaking into a wide grin, he threw up both arms and ducked behind them in a boxer’s defensive gesture against a big punch. Afternoon after afternoon, the staff in the outer office of Suite 231 would hear warm, delighted laughter from behind the closed door of Johnson’s private office. “People like to laugh, and he made the senators laugh,” Warren Woodward says. “So it was just natural that they liked Mr. Johnson.”

And Lyndon Johnson’s stories did more than merely charm his listeners. “I like to make points with jokes,” he would say, and he was very effective doing so, so effective that Evans and Novak were to speak of his “genius for analogy.” To emphasize the importance of the Democrats presenting their image as a compassionate party, he would tell a story that showed that the OOP’s image was quite different, saying that a Texan who needed a heart transplant was given his choice of three hearts: one from a healthy twenty-three-old skiing champion who had just been killed in an avalanche; one from a healthy twenty-year-old football player who had just died of a football injury. “Of course,” the surgeon added, “there’s also this seventy-nine-year-old Republican banker who’s just passed away.” The man thought a moment, and said he would take the banker’s heart. When the surgeon asked why, the man said, “I just wanted to make sure I was getting a heart that had never been used.”

*See The Path to Power, p. 277.

†See The Path to Power, pp. 408–9.

‡See The Path to Power, pp. 684–85, and pp. 716–18, 742–53.

*See Means of Ascent, pp. 274–75.

†See The Path to Power, pp. 633, 635.

*See Means of Ascent, p. 75; The Path to Power, p. 664.

*See Means of Ascent, p. 103.