20

Gettysburg

NINETEEN FIFTY-TWO, of course, was a presidential election year. Lyndon Johnson would not be forty-four years old until August of that year, and he was still a first-term senator, but neither of those facts precluded a try for the great goal which never left his mind. An interview published in January demonstrated that, and demonstrated also that he viewed the Senate as only a way station on the road to that goal.

The interview was conducted—symbolically—in the Capitol’s glittering President’s Room, with Johnson and Alfred Steinberg, who was writing an article on the House and Senate whips for Nation’s Business magazine, sitting, under the immense gold-plated chandelier and the richly colored Brumidi frescoes, in two low, deep-burgundy leather armchairs on wheels.

Johnson, Steinberg recalls, “was outraged when he learned he would be only one of four men featured in the article.” Wheeling his chair so close to Steinberg’s that their knees touched, and leaning forward so that their noses were only inches apart, he pressed the reporter back at an uncomfortable angle, seized one of his lapels to hold him steady, and asked loudly, “Why don’t you do a whole big article on me alone?” When Steinberg asked (“from my strange sitting position”), “What would the pitch be?—that you might be a Vice-Presidential candidate in 1952?” Johnson said, this time in a whisper and after a glance around to make sure that no one else was present, “Vice President, hell! Who wants that?” His voice boomed out again. “President! That’s the angle you want to write about me.”

Steinberg recalls that when “I smiled at the obvious impossibility of Johnson’s ever becoming President,” Johnson said, “You can build up to it by saying how I run both houses of Congress right now.” And when Steinberg asked for an explanation of “this extraordinary remark,” Johnson said, “Well, right here in the Senate I have to do all of Boob McFarland’s work because he can’t do any of it. And then every afternoon I go over to Sam Rayburn’s place.” One of Johnson’s hands was still firmly gripping the reporter’s lapel, but Johnson’s other hand had been unoccupied. Now, for emphasis it took a firm grip on one of the reporter’s thighs. “He tells me all about the problems he’s facing in the House, and I tell him how to handle them. So that’s how come I’m running everything here in the Capitol.”

Other journalists were aware of the same ambition. After an off-the-record conversation with Johnson, a member of Time magazine’s Washington bureau informed his editors in New York that “despite his Southern origins,” Johnson “is interested in the Number 1 spot.”

But 1952 was to be the year Richard Russell ran for President himself.

Although Russell’s “sense of the sweep of history” made him feel, as George Reedy realized during their long conversations together, “that the only way to ever really put an end to the Civil War, to heal the breach, would be to elect a Southerner President,” the Georgian also appears when he first entered the race to have been aware that, as Time said on March 19, “Russell has as much chance of being nominated as a boll weevil has of winning a popularity contest at a cotton planter’s picnic.” “The chances of any Southern Democrat residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue during our lifetime are very remote,” the Senator had written a friend a few months earlier; when, in December, 1951, John Stennis urged him to run, Russell replied, “I’m under no illusions about any Southerner being elected President of the United States.”

He appears to have begun running more for the South than for himself. The South’s great stronghold was Capitol Hill, the keys to the stronghold were the House and Senate committee chairmanships, the southerners would hold those chairmanships so long as the Democrats held the majority in Congress—but holding the majority wasn’t going to be easy. Foreseeing who the Republican candidate would be, Russell was uneasily aware of the genial Eisenhower’s popularity. A large Eisenhower plurality might sweep the GOP into the majority in Congress; Democratic unity in the face of this threat was crucial. The party could simply not afford to be split again, as it had in 1948, over the civil rights issue. And beyond the political considerations were the historical: his desire to make the South part of the United States again. Should the Democrats renominate Truman, or nominate another candidate with similarly unacceptable views on race, the South would break away from the party again, thereby reemphasizing the gulf between it and the rest of the country. The candidate might, in fact, be Estes Kefauver, who, detested though he was in the Deep South, was viewed by the rest of the country as the “southern” candidate. A Kefauver victory at the Democratic Convention—an event which in the Spring of 1952 seemed more likely with every passing week as he won a string of primaries—would trigger another walkout by southern delegates, and Russell believed that this would weaken the South by revealing the split within its own ranks. The way to avoid these scenarios would be for the South, a unified South, to have a candidate who would arrive at the convention with a bloc of votes large enough so that even though the candidate himself might not be able to win the nomination, he would have sufficient influence to force the selection of a candidate, and the writing of a platform, acceptable to the South. Russell knew that the old Confederacy would unite behind him, and that he would be its strongest candidate; it seems that he began running more to keep the South and the party together than because he felt he could win the nomination.

Nonetheless, illusions came, particularly after Truman, buffeted by seemingly endless revelations of corruption in his Administration (nine of whose members, including his appointments secretary, would go to prison), by his inability to end the war in Korea, and by “soft on Communism” allegations, was defeated by Kefauver in the New Hampshire primary in March and then announced that he would not run for re-election. Entering the May 6 Florida primary against Kefauver to prove that he, not the Tennessean, was the true candidate of the South, Russell won an easy victory. The announced candidates—Kefauver, Vice President Alben Barkley, and Averell Harriman—were hardly formidable. The big-city bosses whose machines had been embarrassed by the Kefauver investigations were determined that he would not get the nomination, no matter how many primaries he won. Barkley, at seventy-four, was considered too old, Harriman had never run for national office. Truman had in mind another candidate, Adlai Stevenson, landslide victor in the 1948 race for the Illinois governorship and a noted orator, but Stevenson had declined the President’s offer of support in language so firm that the New York Times said in April that he “has to all intents and purposes taken himself out of the race.” When Russell, fresh from his Florida victory and “exuding optimism,” spoke to the National Press Club on May 8, the assembled journalists realized to their shock that he had come to believe that he could win the nomination, and the general election as well. “That,” Russell told the Press Club, “would destroy a fable of long standing that no citizen from the southern part of our nation can be elected President.”

His optimism, at least about the nomination, was, in some ways, understandable. With 1,230 votes to be cast at the Democratic Convention, 616 were needed for nomination, and Russell could count on the votes of every Confederate state but Tennessee: 262 votes, a solid base. And he was counting on a substantial number of nonsouthern votes because of the support of senatorial colleagues. Big Ed Johnson of Colorado had agreed to be his national campaign manager, Pat McCarran of Nevada had enthusiastically endorsed him, and not a few senators from the Midwest and West, while not actually endorsing him, had spoken warmly of his candidacy: having lived for almost twenty years in a world in which these men possessed genuine power, Richard Russell could be excused for assuming that they possessed it in their states as well. And senators from farm states had been appearing for years before Appropriations’ agricultural subcommittee asking for his support for their projects; pointing out that “Those in the Midwest who are concerned about agriculture would be wise to support Russell,” Senator Milton Young of North Dakota now said that “if the Democrats have sense enough” to nominate the Georgia Giant, he, although a Republican, would support him.

Calculations relating to the general election, and to Dwight Eisenhower’s immense popularity in the South, were also feeding Russell’s belief that his party would turn to him. There were 146 electoral votes, vital to Democratic chances, in the thirteen “contiguous” states—the eleven Confederate states plus border states Kentucky and West Virginia—and polls were showing that, as Russell put it, “I am the only Democratic candidate who can defeat a certain military personage” in those states. And if he did so, he said, “it will only be necessary to obtain an additional 118 votes from the other 35 states to win in … November.”

Beyond such rational calculations there was the euphoria produced by a national campaign: the enthusiastic applause from audiences in Florida, and the rolling cheers from the huge throng that lined the streets of Atlanta as he paraded through it, seated high atop the back seat of an open convertible as the bands marching before it played “Rambling Wreck from Georgia Tech,” a song to which new words had been written: “The Senator from Georgia / Dick Russell is his name—/ Will Take His Place among the Great / of U.S. History’s Fame. / His Years of Public Service Devoted to our Nation / Will Lift him from his Senate seat / the Presidential station!” (Flying down from Washington that morning for the parade, Russell had landed first in Winder, so that he could visit his mother [who so long ago had written him that she had not brought “my R. B. Russell, Jr.” into the world “to ever fail in anything he might undertake”].) For so many years now, his colleagues had been telling him that he was the man in Washington best qualified to be President, and that they hoped that one day he would be. He still kept close to hand the cherished note Harry Truman had written him in 1945: “Dick: I hope you [will] be recognized next. And you will be.” Was Truman’s prediction to come true at last?

In addition, once Russell had entered the race, Johnson had put his own ambitions on hold, and thanks to him the Georgian’s campaign organization was of impressively high caliber. Although John Connally was now working for one of Eisenhower’s most generous financial backers—Sid Richardson had, in 1951, hired him away from Alvin Wirtz’s law firm—he was a key part of it; Johnson had persuaded Richardson to lend Connally to the Russell campaign, because, Connally explains bluntly, “We felt that he [Russell] was going to be a power in the Senate, win, lose or draw.” Furthermore, “Richardson regarded Russell as one of the greatest public servants this country ever developed”; had he won the Democratic nomination, Richardson “would have supportedboth[him and Eisenhower].” Although Atlanta banker Erie Cocke Sr. had the title of Russell’s “convention manager,” most of the contacts with individual delegates were handled by the young Texan whose political competence was already well known in Washington. And, thanks also to Johnson, working in offices near Connally’s at Russell campaign headquarters in the Mayflower Hotel were two speechwriters whose competence Russell admired: Reedy and the conservative Booth Mooney. Johnson had arranged for ample supplies of money as well as talent. Russell’s Georgia campaigns hadn’t required much money, and he was astonished and at first daunted by the amount required for a presidential campaign. This, he wrote to a supporter, was “a new league.” It was, in fact, Johnson’s league, and he made playing in it easy for Russell, arranging for lavish financing by ex-Texas regulars H. R. Cullen and E. B. Germany, and by the three conservatives whose wallets were always open to Johnson: Richardson, Murchison, and of course, Herman Brown. The dignified Georgian didn’t even have to soil his hands. When at one point the campaign ran short of ready cash, Connally simply flew down to St. Joe Island and returned with an envelope, and, Connally says, Russell may not even have known about the trip.

Johnson was, in fact, working very hard for Russell in every area of the campaign. The Texas Democrats were split, with liberals supporting Kefauver, but Johnson, in alliance with the state’s Dixiecrats, including reactionary Governor Allan Shivers, arranged for the announcement, the day Russell won the Florida primary, that Texas’ fifty-two votes would be cast for him as a block. All through the campaign, Johnson would use his contacts across the nation on Russell’s behalf, always making sure that Russell knew he was doing so, and in Chicago, his tall figure was conspicuous as he roamed hotel corridors and convention floor, draping an arm around delegates’ shoulders and urging them to vote for Russell. Johnson even provided Russell with a campaign slogan, which he said had been coined by a Texas constituent: “Let’s Hussle for Russell.” (“A number of others have suggested the same slogan, though they spelled it differently,” Russell wrote back.) The staff, the money, the national contacts—all these added to Russell’s optimism.

A MEETING WITH TRUMAN on June 10, a meeting Russell requested in an attempt to translate the President’s 1945 sentiment into a 1952 endorsement, might have made the Georgian recognize the folly of his hopes. Russell came as close as he could to pleading. “I told him [Truman] that I would like to have his support and that with a little more help than I now had there was no question about my nomination and election. He then said, substantially: ‘I would give my right eye to see you President, but you know that the Left-Wing groups in Chicago, New York, St. Louis and Kansas City must be kept in the Democratic Party if we are to win and they will not vote for you. We must keep these groups in the party.’” According to Russell, Truman also said: “Dick, I do wish that you lived in Indiana or Missouri. You would be elected President hands down. We have differed on a great many issues but we have always understood each other. You are a great Democrat and I respect you….”

But Russell was by this time beyond the reach of logic. His aide William Darden says that “When he started [his campaign], he was realistic. But as he progressed, and had a little bit of success here and there, and nobody else pulled out of the pack, I think he got a little bit of hope in a way that was very uncharacteristic of him.” John Connally says that “He had convinced himself he had a chance. Any man who [runs for President] has convinced himself there is a way he can be successful. And he had convinced himself.” Deriding the idea that a southerner could not be elected President “as more a fixation of timid politicians than it is any widespread feeling on the part of the American people,” Russell told reporters that he expected to arrive at the convention with between 300 and 400 votes, that neither Kefauver, Barkley nor Harriman would be able to amass the necessary 616, and that by the seventh or eighth ballot, he would win. The depth of his hopes can perhaps be measured by the fact that, in an effort to remake his image with liberals, he even attempted for a time to portray himself as a “moderate” on racial issues, stating that he was for “constitutional” government and that the Constitution “enumerated the basic and fundamental rights which are the heritage of every citizen without regard to race or creed.” His long opposition to the FEPC, he added, was not based on racial considerations but on his opposition to government interference in private business. (“He could not,” however, as his biographer Fite notes, “muster enough moderation to criticize segregation,” and the attempted makeover didn’t last long. Pressed by reporters to comment on segregated food counters at Washington drugstores, Russell said that he was “American enough to believe that, if a drug store owner wants to serve only red-headed people with brown eyes, he can do it.” Even his desire to be President couldn’t overcome his prejudices. After Kefauver said he would feel “morally bound” to accept a strong FEPC plank, reporters pressed Russell on what he would do if the convention adopted such a plank; he would, Russell said, ignore it.)

Then, in the latter part of June, Russell made the same mistake that Lee had made—the mistake that led to Gettysburg. He took his campaign into the North.

The Democratic Party officials and convention delegates whom Richard Russell met on this trip responded to his personality as people always responded to his personality. One of the men who met him in Maine, Edmund Muskie, who would later be that state’s Governor and a United States Senator, was then a young county committeeman meeting all the potential candidates for the first time. “Of all of them, Russell made the biggest impression on me,” Muskie would recall years later. “He had the look of an eagle. There was strength there. He knew he was coming to a Northern state. He made no apologies. He was coming so we could see what he was. When he walked into a room, instantly you knew here was a man you could trust. You knew from his demeanor, the way he moved: that quiet projection of authority, authority in the sense of knowing what they’re about, who they are. And when he spoke—Russell’s intellect was very impressive.”

Impressed though they were by the personality, however, the northern Democrats did not forget the principles for which Russell stood. When he met with “the New Jersey leaders,” George Reedy was to recall, “he got the same reaction from all of them: ‘My God, Senator, we’d like to support you. You’re the best man around, but we can’t support a southerner.’” There was to be no support for Russell in Maine, none in New Jersey, and none in the other northern or western states—New York, Pennsylvania, Wyoming, California, Colorado—to which he traveled. He had thought Big Ed Johnson’s support would give him Colorado, he had counted on Colorado. But when he arrived in Denver, Big Ed had to give him bad news: there was no hope that the delegation would support him; the only possibility of keeping Colorado’s votes out of the Harriman column would be to persuade the delegation to vote for a favorite son on the early ballots. Then the two senators walked out on a stage together before the delegation; despite Ed Johnson’s immense popularity in his home state, there was little applause, and even some scattered boos. From Colorado, Russell flew to California, where he had hoped for a bloc of votes in California’s big delegation. The response in California was very cold.

ARRIVING AT THE CONVENTION that was being held in the International Amphitheatre, near the Chicago stockyards, a week after Eisenhower had ended forever Robert Taft’s dream of following his father into the White House (and had chosen as his running mate thirty-nine-year-old freshman Senator Richard M. Nixon), Russell and his Georgia supporters still believed he had a chance to win. Walter George himself was going to deliver the nominating speech, the great Walter George whose speeches could change votes in the Senate. “They thought Walter George could work a miracle,” John Connally recalls. More dispassionate observers were startled at their optimism. Visiting Russell’s campaign headquarters, two Georgians with experience in national politics and an awareness that by this time Russell had no realistic “expectations of getting the nomination,” Chip Robert, the knowledgeable Georgia national committeeman, and Roy V. Harris, publisher of the Augusta Courier, got what Harris calls a “surprise.” Harris recalls convention manager Cocke saying, “‘Now, we’re going to get so many votes on the first ballot, and … on the seventh ballot Dick will be nominated. This state will come, and this state will come.’ And I scratched my head, and I’d look at Chip and he’d look back at me… We found out they were serious. We found out Dick was serious….”

The jammed Amphitheatre was not the Senate Chamber; Walter George tried in vain to make himself heard as the hundreds of delegates would not stop talking among themselves. With only a handful of exceptions, the only marchers in the parade for Russell (in which, one article stated, “Senator Lyndon Johnson was among the most enthusiastic paraders”) were southern delegates. The convention’s decision had in fact become a foregone conclusion on the day before George spoke, for on that day the Governor of the host state had spoken, welcoming the delegates—and had demonstrated vividly why he was known as a great orator. “In one day,” the New York Times reported, “all the confused and unchannelled currents seemed to converge upon the shrinking figure of Governor Adlai Stevenson as the one and only, the almost automatic, choice of the Convention,” and Stevenson had finally agreed that if he was chosen, he would run.

Even so, Russell refused to give up hope. After the second ballot, on which he had received 268 votes, only five more than he had received in 1948 when he hadn’t campaigned and almost all of them again from the South, “things began to fall apart,” says Ernest Vandiver Jr., a Georgia politician working on Russell’s staff, and the Arizona delegation (which in loyalty to Carl Hayden had added twelve votes to the southern total) “came to me asking me if I could release them from their pledge so that they could vote for the winning candidate, so … I called the Senator and told him the situation and he said, ‘No, I won’t release. No, I want them to stick in there. You can’t ever tell what might happen.’” On the second ballot, the move to Stevenson began, and he won easily on the third, with Russell receiving 261 votes.

FOR A MAN WHO LOVED and idealized his “Southland” as deeply as did Richard Russell to be told to his face that no southerner could be President was, in Goldsmith’s phrase, a “visceral blow.” He “had indeed known, rationally, that he could not be nominated. Before campaigning in the North, however, he had not heard political leaders … tell him to his face that he was obviously the best-qualified candidate, but that they could not support a Southerner.” As George Reedy says, “It’s one thing to know something academically; it’s another to have it hit you in the face.”

He had planned to go on a fishing vacation off the Florida coast arranged by George Smathers—Lyndon Johnson and two or three other senators would be along—following the convention, but now he said he wouldn’t be going. He returned to Winder for a while. For the first time, he began to complain about his health, talking about a pain in his left shoulder, a cough, headaches.

Johnson arranged for Russell to go to the Mayo Clinic, where a week-long physical examination found his health “excellent.” Although he was still only fifty-five years old, however, aides would notice, from this time on, a loss of what they called “energy,” and when, that fall, he visited the Johnson Ranch, Lady Bird noticed the same thing. “Energy; it’s my feeling that after 1952 he did not exhibit as much of that,” she says. And her sharp eyes noticed other changes, which she felt she understood. “I have a distinct feeling” that the 1952 campaign “was sort of a benchmark in his life,” she was to say. “It was the time when he really put his chips in and tried, and not receiving the nomination probably caused him to retreat into the ivory tower … sort of withdrew him from the field of battle to some extent.” Upon his return to Capitol Hill, some journalists noticed the change, although none of them would do more than hint at it in print until after his death in 1971. Samuel Shaffer of Newsweek would write at that time that “Something happened internally to Richard Russell after the 1952 campaign.” He “lost some of his zest for legislative battles.” And George Reedy, who often heard Russell refer to that campaign “with some bitterness,” began to notice creeping into Russell’s conversation “a little querulous tone” that had not been there before. “He had just been hurt so deeply.”

This bitterness was to have a significant effect on Lyndon Johnson’s career. It made Russell more determined than ever that one day the North would accept the South back into the nation in the most dramatic manner possible, by electing a southerner to be its President. He wouldn’t be that southerner, he knew that now; he would never try for the presidency again, he told people around him. But by the end of 1952, it was becoming clear to a number of these people that Richard Russell had settled on the southerner it was to be.

Russell’s growing affection for Lyndon Johnson had now been cemented by gratitude—gratitude for Johnson’s help in his campaign. “He [Johnson] worked very earnestly in my behalf,” Russell would say. “He did everything in the world—everything he could…. He really meant it when he supported me in ’52.” And beyond these personal considerations—and far more important to Russell in matters vital to the South—during the campaign Lyndon Johnson had demonstrated a political qualification that the Georgian, from his own experience, now understood was essential for any southerner who wanted to become President.

Watching Johnson talking familiarly at the convention to delegates and political leaders from New York, from Chicago, from Montana—from all across the North—Russell had seen that these men knew the Texan and liked him, these men whose feeling toward most southerners was contempt. What other southern senator was a friend of Dubinsky? What other southern senator knew Dubinsky? He was already, of course, aware that in Washington Johnson was a member not only of southern but of New Deal circles, a pal not only of John Stennis and Lister Hill but of Tommy Corcoran and Abe Fortas—one of the relatively few men in Washington to have a foot firmly in both camps. Before he had taken his campaign north, Richard Russell might not have realized fully the importance of such a national acquaintance, an acquaintance on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, but he realized it now. If his goal—to make a southerner President—was to be realized, that southerner, while absolutely committed to “constitutional principles,” would have to be someone with whom northerners, even northern liberals, were nonetheless comfortable. With at least one southern senator committed, Russell believed, to “constitutional principles,” northerners were comfortable already.

Johnson possessed other qualifications that Russell now understood to be essential. A national campaign, he had learned, was indeed “a new league,” requiring financing on a scale of which he had previously been unaware. Johnson, he had seen, had access to such financing—easy access. Watching Johnson discuss politics with northern delegates, Russell had seen that he understood their states’ internal politics. Russell’s knowledge of, and ability to relate to, intra-state politics across the country had been unequaled by that of any other senator. There was, he now saw, another senator who knew, and could relate to, these politics perhaps as well as he.

And there were yet other qualities, vaguer to define but even more important. During the campaign, Richard Russell and Lyndon Johnson had spent many hours in conversation not about senatorial or Armed Services Committee strategy but about political strategy on a national scale. Who can recognize a master of politics better than another master? As succeeding years were to make clear, Richard Russell was indeed beginning, if very gradually and hardly perceptibly at first, to withdraw from “the field of battle.” But he was not abandoning the field to his enemies, to the enemies of the South. He believed that he had found a new champion, younger, with more “zest,” who would, relying always on his advice and counsel, take the field in his place. Not long after the campaign, Richard Russell, who so much wanted a southerner to become President, began to make his feelings clear in confidential conversations. A year before, he had “soberly predicted” that “Lyndon Johnson could be President and would make a good one.” Now, shortly after the 1952 election, George Reedy “became aware that Russell wanted to make Johnson President.”

“Russell made no bones whatsoever” about that, Reedy recalls. “He was quite open with me. He was determined to elect a southerner president. And he could not see any other southerners that could be elected president except LBJ. He talked about that to me as early as 1953.” As to his reasons, it is impossible today to know with certainty what they were, or what weight to give to each. Reedy says that Russell saw Johnson “as an instrument of this purpose—to heal the breach so the South would no longer be a separate part of the nation.” But did he also mean something more—something darker? By far the best book on the Russell-Johnson relationship is a little-known work, Colleagues, by John A. Goldsmith, who began covering the Senate for the United Press in 1946 and was head of its Senate bureau for almost twenty years. In his book, Goldsmith speaks of Russell’s “hope that Johnson might … become a President attuned to southern culture.” What does that last phrase mean? Did it mean attuned to southern culture in the best sense, in the sense of civility and graciousness and tradition and the political creativity that made southerners principal architects of America’s system of government? Or did it also mean attuned to that worst aspect of southern culture—that blacks had to be kept in their place? Had Johnson convinced Russell that in his heart he believed that? When one reads words spoken at the time by members of Russell’s Southern Caucus, the senators to whom the Georgian explained his reasoning to secure their support of Johnson, it is difficult to escape that suspicion. In 1957, Herman Talmadge would arrive in the Senate as a new senator from Georgia, and receive Richard Russell’s explanation of why he was supporting Johnson for the presidency: because “Johnson would be more favorable to the South’s position on States’ Rights and local self-government.” In Talmadge’s view, that statement was not about breach-healing, as became apparent when the author interviewed Russell’s fellow Georgia senator in January, 2000. Johnson, Talmadge said, “gave me the impression” that his views on the appropriate relationship between white and black Americans were the views of the southern senators. And what were Johnson’s views, Talmadge was asked. “Master and servant,” Talmadge replied. Didn’t Johnson have any sympathy for the plight of blacks? “None indicated,” Talmadge said. “He was with us in his heart,” he said—and, he said, that was what Russell believed. It was when he was asked if Russell was boosting Johnson for President out of friendship that John Stennis replied that Russell “wasn’t a bosom friend of anyone when it came to … constitutional principles.” The concept of segregation—continued segregation—was of course deeply embedded in “States’ Rights,” “local self-government,” and “constitutional principles.” A Georgia friend once told Russell, “You’re just fighting a delaying action.” Russell replied: “I know, but I am trying to delay it—ten years if I’m not lucky, two hundred years if I am.” A delay of some decades would be a considerable victory. And, during those decades, a lot could happen. The mood of the country could change, could become more conservative, more supportive of the southern way of life, or at least less overwhelmingly determined that that way be changed. A long enough delay might almost be the equivalent of victory for the South. Did Russell feel that one way of ensuring a long enough delay would be to make Lyndon Johnson President? Whatever the reason, Richard Russell, Reedy says, “was very determined to elect Lyndon Johnson President of the United States.”

THE LESSON OF RICHARD RUSSELL’S DOOMED, quixotic campaign of 1952 was not lost on Lyndon Johnson, for whom it had the deepest implications. After all the acknowledgments that Russell was the best qualified candidate for the presidency—acknowledgments that had come from the North as well as the South—he had received virtually no northern votes at the Democratic Convention; the fact that he had never had a realistic chance of winning his party’s nomination, much less the presidency, had been made dramatically clear. And if the strongest possible southern candidate had never had a chance, no southern candidate had a chance. If Lyndon Johnson had ever entertained a hope of winning the nomination as a candidate identified largely with the South, Russell’s fate demonstrated conclusively the futility of such a hope. In order to attain his great goal, Johnson would have to make the party and the nation stop thinking of him as a southerner.

And this hard fact created for Johnson the most difficult of dilemmas. Being linked with the South would keep him from rising beyond the Senate. Yet being linked with the South was the only way in which he could rise within the Senate.

DURING THE 1952 CAMPAIGN, the Red Scare and the inability to win in Korea stirred up the class and ethnic resentments that were never far below the surface of the American electorate. Republican charges that the Democrats were “soft on Communism” and that in fact the Roosevelt-Truman years had been “twenty years of treason,” and Joe McCarthy’s references to “Alger—I mean Adlai” and his statement that if he got onto the Democrat’s campaign train with a baseball bat, he would “teach patriotism to little Ad-lie,” resonated with the electorate. And so did the personality of the Republican candidate, about whom British Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, no fan, had once remarked: “He merely has to smile at you, and you trust him at once.” Journalists, attracted by Stevenson’s wit and dignified, issue-oriented campaign, were slow to understand this, and polling was not as exact a science as it would later become (and pollsters, burned in 1948, may have been hedging a bit), so that the predictions were summed up in theNew York Timesheadline the morning before the balloting: “ELECTION OUTCOME HIGHLY UNCERTAIN.” But Dwight Eisenhower, America’s greatest military hero, who had smiled at the American people—and promised them “I shall go to Korea”—was swept into office with 55 percent of the vote, and 442 electoral votes to Stevenson’s 89. Stevenson retained his sense of humor (after the election, he asked a friend, “Who did I think I was, running against George Washington?” and said of the results, “I’m too old to cry, but it hurts too much to laugh”), but Eisenhower’s overwhelming victory pulled so many Republican candidates into office with him that the GOP won control of both houses of Congress, the Senate by a single vote; over the Christmas holidays, Capitol maintenance men unscrewed Senate desks from the floor of the Chamber and rearranged them, so that there were only forty-seven on the Democratic side of the center aisle.

Among the missing Democrats would be Ernest McFarland. Once, McFarland had been a fixture in the Senate, a sure bet for re-election. Then he became Leader—and identified in Arizona with the unpopular Truman Administration. Scant his leadership responsibilities though he would, moreover, they had nonetheless cut into the time he could spend back home campaigning. He had been defeated by a forty-three-year-old Phoenix city councilman, Barry Goldwater.

His loss had re-emphasized the perils posed to a Democratic Leader, particularly one who would be up for re-election in less than two years: Scott Lucas had accepted the leadership in 1949 and been defeated in 1950; McFarland had accepted it in 1951, and been defeated in 1952. The job had cost both men their careers. With a Republican in the White House, the Democratic Leader would no longer be forced to support unpopular presidential programs, and, as the party’s highest elected official, he and the Speaker would assume a larger importance in national affairs, so that the leadership became in some respects more desirable. But during the campaign, liberals had been so infuriated by the refusal of southern Democratic senators (including, notably, Lyndon Johnson) to campaign enthusiastically for Adlai Stevenson that the old hostility between the liberal and conservative wings in the Senate had been dramatically inflamed, and on balance the problems that would confront the next Democratic Leader loomed more menacingly than ever. But although Johnson’s senatorial term would be up in two years, he wanted the job. One Democratic senatorial aide recalls that when McFarland lost, “the liberals began musing on what they would do when they got back to Washington, whom they were going to support.” But long before they got back, Johnson had begun to move. The dawn had just broken in Boston, and after a long, tense night, young John Fitzgerald Kennedy had just learned that he had defeated Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., when he got a call and Kennedy aide Lawrence F. O’Brien heard him say, “Well, thank you, Senator, thank you very much.” Putting down the phone, he told O’Brien, with what O’Brien described as “a puzzled expression”: “That was Lyndon Johnson in Texas. He said he just wanted to congratulate me.” It was an hour earlier in Texas. “The guy must never sleep,” Kennedy said. Kennedy’s puzzlement over the call disappeared when, a few hours later, the final Arizona results were reported. With the Democratic leadership suddenly vacant, “Johnson wasn’t wasting any time in courting Kennedy’s support,” O’Brien was to explain.

Richard Russell could either become Leader himself, or decide who would. According to some sources, the Arizona results had hardly been tallied when the Brown & Root DC-3 was in the air, carrying Johnson to Winder. According to others, the two senators met in Washington, on November 9. Evans and Novak, who interviewed the two men that month, reported that Johnson, in his first telephone call that morning after Election Day, suggested that Russell be Leader, and volunteered his support, saying, “I’ll do the work and you’ll be the boss.” Russell declined; since the Georgian had been turning down the job for years, “Johnson,” they wrote, “must have had a strong suspicion that this was precisely what Russell would do.” Russell then suggested that Johnson himself should take the job. Quickly agreeing, Johnson set one “condition”: since he would be constantly needing the Old Master’s advice, he said, Russell would have to change his desk in the Senate Chamber so that he would be sitting directly behind the Leader’s desk.

Matters were settled quickly. Bobby Baker was called out of class at the American University law school to take a telephone call from Texas, and when he told Johnson, “All you’ve got to do is convince one man and you’re home free,” Johnson told him that that man had already been convinced, and that Bobby should let his sponsor, Burnet Maybank, know it. When the South Carolina Senator told Baker, “I’m a Dick Russell man first, last, and always, if he wants it,” Baker assured him that Russell didn’t want it, and was supporting Johnson, and Maybank agreed to send a telegram to Johnson pledging to support him unless Russell became a candidate. When Johnson telephoned John Stennis in Mississippi to ask for his support, the conversation was a reprise of the one that had occurred between the two senators two years earlier, when the topic had been the assistant leadership. “I very frankly told him that if Senator Russell was interested at all, that I would support him, Senator Russell,” but Johnson said “he had already checked it out with Senator Russell,” so “I told him I’d support him gladly.” North Carolina’s Clyde Hoey, who had already publicly suggested Russell for the job, now wrote the Georgian that while “I was strong for you, as I would be for you for anything,” in deference to his wishes “I shall do all I can for Lyndon Johnson.” To every senator who telephoned Russell to ask him to take the leadership, Russell replied that he didn’t want it, and that he wanted Johnson to have it. And these calls did not come only from southern senators, for Russell’s influence was not confined to them. The eighty-five-year-old Theodore Francis Green of Rhode Island was one caller, and when he said, “A southerner should be the Leader,” Russell told him who he would like the southerner to be. Some senators who didn’t telephone Russell were telephoned by him instead, and on November 10, he wrote on his desk calendar in the Senate Office Building: “Saw L. Johnson—buttoned up leadership for him.” That afternoon, in a very rare gesture, he invited reporters into his office so that he could make the stamp of approval public. “A number of senators have highly honored me by suggesting me for the post,” he said, but “Senator Johnson is my choice for the place and I shall support him…. In my opinion, he will be chosen.” Johnson’s selection “is practically certain,” the astute James L. McConaughy wired his editors at Time. “Dick Russell’s endorsement means that it is as good as in the bag already.” In fact, by November 10, just eight days after the election, Johnson was assured of the support of a majority of the forty-seven Democrats.

A MERE MAJORITY was not what Lyndon Johnson had in mind, however. Becoming Leader with purely conservative support and the liberals solidly opposed to him would exacerbate the hostility between the two factions which had hamstrung past Democratic Leaders. Only by creating a new unity among the party’s senators could he avoid the fate of McFarland and Lucas and Barkley. Besides, were he to win the leadership almost entirely with southern votes, the press would identify him as the candidate of the South. Lyndon Johnson needed not a simple majority, but a big majority—one that included enough liberals so that he would not be tagged with that label so destructive to his future hopes.

Such a majority was going to be very difficult to achieve, Johnson saw. Russell couldn’t help him get it—couldn’t help him with Douglas or Lehman or Hennings or Kefauver or Murray or Monroney, or with newly elected liberals such as Kennedy, or Jackson or Mike Mansfield or Albert Gore. In fact, although Green had at first told Russell he would be guided by his wishes, the elderly Rhode Islander was now under pressure from his fellow liberals—and was declining to make a public statement of his preference. As many as twenty senators might line up behind a liberal candidate for Leader. So Lyndon Johnson began campaigning himself, telephoning other senators, listening, trading, selling.

Some of the selling was on philosophical grounds—to Hayden, for example, who wanted assurances that a new Leader would support the cherished right of unlimited debate. And some was done on grounds more pragmatic. The question of committee assignments for the newly elected senator from Massachusetts was being handled at what was, for the Kennedys, the highest level. Jim Rowe had been contacted by Joe Kennedy himself about “a good assignment for Jack.” Rowe contacted Johnson. What was said—or promised—is not known, but on November 13 Jack Kennedy wrote Johnson that “I want you to know that you will have my full support.”

In the case of Pat McCarran the grounds may have been more pragmatic still, for Nevada’s Silver Fox had a problem that went beyond the political. His long-rumored ties to Las Vegas and Reno underworld gambling syndicates had recently been noted in legal papers, in which the Senator was named, along with several prominent mafiosi, in a suit brought by Hank M. Greenspun, the crusading editor of the Las Vegas Sun, who charged them with attempting to drive him out of business because of his criticism of the “McCarran Machine.” If the suit escalated into criminal proceedings against the underworld figures, not only would McCarran’s re-election prospects be threatened but a whole new group of legal and public relations problems would be opened up, and the pre-trial hearings were not going well for him.

The solution to many of the senator’s problems might lie in the appointment of his protégé, James W. Johnson Jr., whom McCarran had previously installed as Nevada’s Democratic state chairman, as the state’s United States Attorney. In the lawsuit, Greenspun’s attorney had implied that McCarran had urged James Johnson’s nomination “to get a more friendly United States Attorney in Nevada.”

President Truman hated McCarran, but through an oversight had sent James Johnson’s appointment to the Senate in a large group of nominations. While McCarran was rushing it through the Judiciary Committee, the White House was made aware of the situation, and when the commission, approved by the Senate, had been sent back to Truman in July, 1952, for the normally pro forma signature, Truman had refused to sign, and had made it clear he never would. McCarran was one Senate elder who had never been particularly charmed by Lyndon Johnson, but now he apparently asked Johnson if he would intervene with the President if he was elected Leader; Johnson said he would, and McCarran agreed to support him.

As he was making the calls, Johnson was counting votes and making lists. The first lists were drawn up, as it happened, on a notepad from the Carlton Hotel, where Brown & Root maintained a suite, with Johnson making a large, firm checkmark next to a senator’s name when he was sure of his vote. The later lists—of the names of all forty-seven Democratic senators, from “Anderson” to “Symington,” typed in two double-spaced columns in alphabetical order—were on plain white paper.

This was vote-counting by the son of a man who had fooled himself with wishful thinking. On the typed list Johnson would write a number to the left of the name of each senator who was for him, to the right of the name of each senator who was against him, and no number was put on the left until Lyndon Johnson was absolutely sure he could count on that senator’s vote. Senators about whom he had any doubts—even senators who had promised him their vote but about whom he still had some trace of uneasiness—were put in the “against” column. Optimistic though he may have been that Harry Byrd would support him, a number “i” was written against Byrd—to the right, to the right along with Douglas and Lehman and Humphrey. Russell may have assured him that Theodore Francis Green would be for him, but he himself had not heard from Green, and against Green the number “7” was written, on the right. He had been told that Willis Robertson of Virginia was certain, but after listening very carefully to Robertson on the phone, he felt that Robertson was not certain enough. He marked an “L” for “leaning” on the right of Robertson’s name, not on the left.

The first of the lists—they are undated, but this first one was apparently made on November 11—had twenty numbers or marks to the right; the numbers on the left (including, by this time, McCarran’s) ran only up to twenty-seven. About noon on that day, Johnson talked again to Robertson, and afterwards wrote a “28” to the left of the Virginian’s name, but there were still nineteen names with numbers on the right—too many—and among them were names whose opposition would not look good in the newspapers: Matt Neely, for example, and, still, Green. The oldest senator was staying at the Vanderbilt Hotel in New York. On November 12, Johnson took the train to New York, returning the same day, and went to 231 to clean up some work. A few minutes after he had disappeared into his inner office, Green’s administrative assistant, Eddie Higgins, came through the door of the outer office carrying a press release. Walter Jenkins snatched it from his hand, and read its first sentence even as he buzzed in to Johnson, “I am happy to join … in endorsing Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas for Minority Leader.” Attached was a note to Johnson that Higgins had written: “At the direction of Senator Green, I am releasing the attached statement to the papers immediately.” Johnson dictated a wire to the Vanderbilt: “THANKS FROM THE BOTTOM OF MY HEART.” Scratching out the negative number to the right of Green’s name, he wrote instead a “29.” He not only had another vote, but a vote which was, as the New York Times noted the next day, from a senator “identified with the Fair Deal wing of the party in the North.” And another piece of good news had been waiting for him when he got back to Washington, a memo from Jenkins telling him that “Senator Clements tried to page you on the train to tell you that he had talked to Albert Gore and that Albert Gore is going to be for you.” And John Pastore and Neely were, at last, firm in their support. “30,” Johnson wrote. “31.” “32.”

THIS LEFT A POSSIBLE FIFTEEN VOTES against him—fifteen liberal votes, still too many. And the opposition was hardening. Analyzing the upcoming selections of Rayburn and Johnson, William White wrote in the New York Times that both were southerners and their selection therefore “suggests … the almost indestructible power of the Southerners” in the Democratic Party; Ray-burn’s selection, however, “will be hailed with fervor by the ‘regular’ [liberal] Democrats because in the recent presidential election Mr. Rayburn risked forty years of political prestige in a vain effort to hold Texas for the Democrats.” Johnson’s selection, White wrote, “will not [be hailed] for the reason that he is [too] close to the intransigent southerners…. The Democrats of the Senate are about to choose as their Leader … not only a Southerner but a Southerner whose state went to General Dwight D. Eisenhower….” Liberal senators, as Hubert Humphrey was to recall, were “upset” by that prospect. They were also, as a memo from Time’s Washington bureau put it, “worried about their own problems back home, if they were being led in Washington by such a person.” On November 13, Jim Rowe telephoned Johnson’s office to warn him that “some of the liberals are getting ready to try to knife you” by nominating their own candidate when the Democratic caucus met on January 2 to formally select a Leader.

“Humphrey wanted it, but he couldn’t get the votes,” Bobby Baker was to recall. Fond though some of the southern senators had become of him personally, that fondness would obviously not extend to supporting a civil rights champion for Leader, so, as he himself realized, his candidacy was unfeasible. Humphrey was therefore asked to organize the liberals and find a candidate to block Johnson.

The liberal effort was a study in ineptitude. When, in mid-November, eighteen or nineteen senators finally got around to meeting—at Drew Pearson’s home in Georgetown—they decided that since no militant liberal could win southern votes in the caucus, “their only hope of success was to support Lister Hill, the most moderate southerner,” as Doris Kearns Goodwin put it. They telephoned Hill at his home in Alabama, only to be told that he was already committed to Johnson. They finally settled on seventy-six-year-old James Murray.

The Montanan’s frailness, which had just begun making itself apparent at the time of Johnson’s arrival in the Senate in 1949, was more marked now. His step was increasingly uncertain; at moments he seemed almost to totter. Murray had long been a courageous fighter for the New Deal, but his mind was no longer as strong as his heart, and more and more it dwelt in the past. “He had perfect memory of everything that took place under Franklin Roosevelt, but not as much more recent,” an aide says. But he was still capable, at least on most occasions, of holding his own on the Senate floor. And he was still a great favorite with the press, a noted New Deal “name.” While his candidacy was not a genuine threat—twenty-four votes were needed for election as Leader, and Johnson had thirty-two commitments—it could receive publicity, publicity that would work against Johnson’s objective.

The possibility of the press focusing on the leadership fight would of course be increased if speculation arose about the attitude of the Democratic standard-bearer in the recent election, and in mid-November, Adlai Stevenson, speaking to several Democratic senators—not Johnson—from Chicago said he was planning a trip to Washington to discuss party policy in a meeting with Democratic congressional leaders.

Johnson did not want that. Who knew where a Stevenson visit to Washington might lead? It might revitalize the Senate liberals. It had to be headed off. Although Lady Bird Johnson was in the Scott and White Clinic in Temple, Texas, for a gynecological procedure, her husband did not leave Washington until the Stevenson visit was headed off—which was accomplished in a telephone conversation with Stevenson at 4:10 p.m. on November 20, with Mary Rather on an extension, without Stevenson’s knowledge, taking down every word.

“I was hoping to get a chance to see you some time and talk to you a little bit,” Stevenson said, and when Johnson said he would shortly be leaving for Texas, Stevenson asked if “you couldn’t stop off here on your way.” Or, he said, he would be in New Jersey on December 3 and in Washington on December 4. Perhaps they could meet there.

Johnson was very diplomatic. He gently let Stevenson know that the leaders had already met. He, Russell, Clements, and Kerr “all had a very fine discussion the other night,” he said. They were all “very much in agreement.” And, he said, one thing they had agreed on was that there should not be any public meeting “until after we get this Senate organization behind us, because some of the speculators might attempt to inject you into it and we know that would be an embarrassing thing…. They would be saying that you were injecting yourself into it.” “We kinda concluded that probably we would get that behind us on January 2.” After it was behind them, he said, we “would try to work out a meeting….”

When Stevenson responded that he had thought the matter of the leadership had been settled (“I was under the impression … that there wasn’t any question but what the Democrats would elect you”), a warning, still diplomatic but slightly firmer, was delivered. “There is not any [question],” Johnson said. But, he said, “there are some pretty strong feelings on the other side.” And “up until the time they actually make the decision, you know, you are taking a little chance in having conferences. The first thing the press says is that the Governor is telling the Senate what to do. Or that I was asking the Governor to get these boys in line.”

Stevenson seemed to take the point. “That is that,” he said. “The last thing I want to do is to get in any way entangled with the selection …” and Johnson then assured him, “You are the head of the Democratic Party. You must remain so. You are our leader. You are the most popular one we have had. You made a great campaign….” But, it turned out, Stevenson had not yet grasped Johnson’s feeling that there should be no meeting at all, not even on general party policy, before the leadership election. “I would like to talk to you off the record in Springfield rather than Washington,” he said. “They always know in Washington.” Johnson replied that “I’m afraid that if I go to Springfield they will [know] too. I am afraid the construction will be placed on it that I am seeking Governor Stevenson’s intervention. I think that would be bad. The denial would never catch up with the original stories. I think if we do it early in the year that would be better.” And when Stevenson persisted—“I don’t want to cause any commotion, but if I could talk to you a bit. And I think I would like to talk to Dick Russell”—the warning became firmer still. “I know he [Russell] feels very much that we should talk and he would be very glad to participate, I feel sure. I feel sure, too, that we oughtn’t to endanger a possible division in the Senate and get you involved.” Finally, after several other exchanges, Stevenson acceded. “Maybe it would be better if we didn’t try to have any further talks for the present,” he said.

THE NEUTRALIZATION OF STEVENSON quashed the liberals’ last hope of blocking Johnson. Even some of the senators who had met at Pearson’s home had not agreed to vote for Murray. The liberals were not giving up, however, as was revealed by their spokesman, Humphrey, when, on December 15, 1952, he appeared on a radio show, Reporters’ Roundup, and was asked if he was supporting Johnson for Leader. Humphrey said he was not, “although I do have a great respect for Lyndon Johnson as a person.” “For the good of the Democratic Party,” he said, “it would be better to have someone that wasn’t so clearly identified with a sectional group.” Pressed on the point, he said he believed that “if the Democratic Party … intends to be the great national liberal party … it must emphasize the broad national program on a liberal basis.”

But Johnson did not want any vote at the caucus at all. A vote was a fight, and a fight not only meant newspaper stories, in which he would be labeled the southern candidate, but also an increase in tensions that would later make unity harder to achieve. And of course it meant there would not be unanimity, the unanimity that was psychologically so important to him that “anything less than one hundred percent was a great blow.”

So he made more calls. What Lyndon Johnson said during these calls we don’t know. Was he appealing to these men on personal grounds—playing on their affection for him or on their admiration for his abilities? Was his approach more pragmatic: was he delicately or forthrightly reminding them—with the help of Jenkins’ files—of favors he had done them in the past, hinting—or speaking bluntly—about favors he could do for them in the future? We don’t know. We only know that some of the calls were to senators and senators-elect—men like Tom Hennings and Stu Symington and Scoop Jackson—who in the past would have been firmly in the liberal column, on Lyndon Johnson’s lists with the numbers on the right side of their name, but who had been recipients, during their election campaigns, of financial assistance from Lyndon Johnson. And we know that on Lyndon Johnson’s lists, there were fewer and fewer numbers on the right side.

BUT JOHNSON didn’t want any numbers there at all.

The key to the unanimous vote he wanted was the liberal who was organizing the liberal forces, and who was giving no indication of quitting just because the fight was hopeless. “Hubert can’t win,” Johnson told Bobby Baker, “but I don’t want him gumming up the works for me. If he fights to the bitter end, then I won’t have a cut dog’s chance to be an effective Leader. The Republicans will eat our lunch and the sack it came in.”

Johnson sent Baker to “promise” Humphrey what Baker was to call “candy”—the candy that, from his reading of Humphrey, Johnson knew would be sweetest to his taste. “I know that Senator Johnson will be looking to you as the spokesman for the Senate liberals, and for the national constituency you’re building,” Baker told him. And, knowing also Humphrey’s desire to be a member of the Senate “club,” he offered him that candy, too. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he brought you into the leadership circle,” Baker said. And when that somewhat vague offer didn’t produce the desired effect, Johnson made a more direct one himself. Telephoning Humphrey at home, he asked for his support and, Humphrey relates, “When I said I had already made a commitment and couldn’t support him, he said he was sorry, in part because he was considering me for the minority whip job.”

Charmed and awed though he may have been by Johnson, eager though he was for his friendship, Humphrey would not abandon his fellow liberals. Despite this “exhilarating” offer, he tried to bargain with Johnson, telling him that the only way for him to obtain liberal support was to offer liberals additional seats on the Democratic Policy and Steering Committees. And the next day, he and fellow liberals Hunt of Wyoming, Lehman of New York, and Paul Douglas came to Johnson’s office “prepared to trade our support.”

But Humphrey was trying to bargain with a Lyndon Johnson who now, for the first time in their relationship, held all the cards. He had little patience with them. After letting them talk—“briefly,” to use Humphrey’s word—he told them he wasn’t going to bargain with them. “He wasn’t in the mood to make concessions.” In fact, he said, the talking was over. “I’ve got the votes in the caucus, and I’m not going to talk to you.” And then, “politely but curtly,” he “dismissed us.” And then, as soon as Humphrey had returned to his own office from “that awful meeting,” Johnson telephoned him and told him to come back alone—and when he returned, Humphrey found himself in the presence of a different Lyndon Johnson from any he had seen before, not “quiet and gentle” but, in Humphrey’s euphemistic phrase, “in a take-charge, no-nonsense mood,” a Johnson whose tone was “stern” as he showed Humphrey that he had not yet fully absorbed the political lessons he had given him, and that he had still more lessons to learn.

“How many votes [for Murray] do you think you have?” Johnson asked, and when Humphrey replied, “Well, I think we have anywhere from thirteen to seventeen,” Johnson “stared at me for a quiet moment and said, ‘First of all, you ought to be sure of your count. That’s too much of a spread. But you don’t have them anyway. Who do you think you have?’”

Humphrey handed him a list of names, and Lyndon Johnson looked at it. “He isn’t going to vote for him,” he said. “He isn’t, and he isn’t. These fellows are going to vote for me.”

“I can’t believe that,” Humphrey said, saying that the senators Johnson named had already promised him or Douglas that they would vote for Murray.

“Well, you’ll find out,” Lyndon Johnson said. And then he said, “As a matter of fact, Senator Hunt, who was just in here with you, is going to vote for me.”

AT ABOUT TEN O’CLOCK in the morning on Friday, January 2, 1953, the forty-seven Democrats in the Senate of the United States began filing into Room 201 of the Senate Office Building, on whose door a painter had, the previous day, changed the gold lettering from “Majority Conference” to “Minority Conference.” Ernest McFarland called the caucus to order and said that the first order of business would be to elect his replacement as Leader, and Richard Russell rose to nominate Lyndon Johnson of Texas.

Russell’s notes indicate the points he wished to make about Johnson. “Courage,” the notes say. “Character. Ability. Experience. Tolerance. LJ is Democrat. Record of party loyalty in Congress. In elections tried by fire. FDR. Supported party programs not slavishly but because believed. High degree of courage. Tempered with judgment. Against rash decisions. Patience and tolerance. No secret differences. No peer as conciliator. Complete confidence in his ability both to serve the party to which we adhere and the country and people we seek to serve.” Mary Rather, who heard about the speech from Johnson, was later to call it “very wonderful.” The seconding speeches were given by Chavez of New Mexico, speaking for the West, and Green of Rhode Island, speaking for the East.

After Murray was nominated, McFarland called for the vote. Humphrey was to recall that “Senator Murray had his own vote and mine, plus three or four others,” and those, despite the list in Humphrey’s pocket and the promises he had received, were all he had. (He did not have Hunt’s.) “You’ll find out,” Johnson had warned Humphrey—and now Humphrey had found out. “I’ll never forget it,” he was to say. “He was just as right as day. They voted for Johnson.” He quickly moved that Johnson’s election be made unanimous without a formal vote, and it was.

Humphrey was to explain later that he had made that motion because “Number One, I didn’t want to have Murray embarrassed … by getting only a handful of votes from his colleagues…. For an old gentleman who had been there all those years, that didn’t look good at all.” But that was only Number One. Humphrey had learned a lot about Lyndon Johnson (although, as would in later years become apparent, not nearly enough). He had seen that Johnson was not a man to forgive and forget, to let bygones be bygones, to tolerate opposition. He had seen in Johnson a determination to make opponents pay for their opposition, and pay dearly. And that last, “stern,” interview—in that new, “take-charge,” tone—had reinforced that insight; he had seen a side of Lyndon Johnson he had not seen previously, and an element of fear, of intimidation, had been added to their relationship, as is revealed by the rest of Humphrey’s explanation for wanting to dispense with a formal vote: “Number Two, I knew that Johnson would keep book. I mean, when that roll call came he’d watch to see who each one of them was.” Whatever the explanation for Humphrey’s motion, however, it gave Johnson not merely unity but unanimity.

After the caucus, Johnson summoned Humphrey to 231, and told him to come alone: “Don’t come down here with any committees.”

When Humphrey came—alone—Johnson asked him: “Now, what do you liberals really want?” Humphrey was to recall that “The dialogue was brief and to the point. ‘The first thing we want is some representation on the Policy Committee.’

“‘All right, you’ll have it. Who did you want?’

“‘Well, I think it ought to be Jim Murray.’

“‘I don’t think he’s the right man, because he’s older and he won’t be effective, but if that’s who you want, that’ll be done. What else do you want?’

“I listed our other requests [formerly demands]” for liberal representation on a number of committees, Humphrey was to recall, and Johnson agreed to them. And then Johnson said, “Since you had enough sense not to drive it to a vote down there and made it unanimous, I am perfectly willing to deal with you.” But, the new Leader said, “I don’t want you bringing in a lot of these other fellows. When you’ve got something that your people want, you come see me. I’ll talk to you. I don’t want to talk to these other fellows. Now you go back and tell your liberal friends that you’re the one to talk to me and that if they’ll talk through you as their leader we can get some things done.”

What Johnson was offering Humphrey now was power—the first power Humphrey had had in the Senate. Those “other fellows” would be told that if they wanted something from their party’s Leader (and of course they would all, at one time or another, want something from the Leader), they would have to ask Humphrey to approach him on their behalf.

Humphrey understood the offer, and its significance for him. “I would be the bridge from Johnson to my liberal colleagues.” He would hold the power only at Johnson’s pleasure. “I had become his conduit and their spokesman not by their election, but by his appointment.” As long as he and Johnson got along—but only as long as he and Johnson got along—he would keep that power.

And he accepted the offer. He was to say in his autobiography that he accepted it in the interests of getting things done. “I knew clearly by then that I had no chance of influencing legislation in any major way without the help of the … Leader. With his influence, I might get the necessary votes for legislation I was interested in.” But, as time would make clear, he had accepted it also in his own interest. For whatever reason, the offer was accepted, and in accepting it, Humphrey was in effect pledging his allegiance to Lyndon Johnson.

The significance of this pledge for Johnson’s prospects as Leader can hardly be exaggerated. He had needed to unify his party, which meant bringing the liberals to his side. Now he had succeeded in bringing the liberals’ leader to his side, in binding him there quite firmly.

IN JANUARY, 1953, Lyndon Johnson was forty-four years old, and he was therefore not only the youngest senator in history to be elected either Majority or Minority Leader, but the youngest by quite a margin. Neither party had ever before elected a Leader who was in his forties; the average age of the seven previous Democratic Leaders at the time of their election was fifty-eight; the average age of the six Republicans who had been elected before 1953 was sixty-two.* In addition, Johnson had been elected Leader while still in his first term; in an institution in which seniority was considered so vital, only once previously had a first-term senator been elected Leader, and that was the first Leader, John Worth Kern (who had been elected at the age of sixty-three). When he had been young, Lyndon Johnson had come along his path so fast, and then, for seven years, he had stopped. Now he was coming fast again.

On the day they had been sworn in, several members of the Class of ’48 had seemed far more likely than he to advance within the Senate. But Douglas and Humphrey had chosen the public route, becoming spokesmen for liberal causes, using the Senate floor as a national forum, as a pulpit for ringing speeches. Kefauver had chosen as his arena not the Senate floor but the television screen.

Lyndon Johnson had, in his defense preparedness work, sought national recognition as avidly as they, as avidly as any senator, but by a very different route: a route to publicity that was, up to the final moment of the press release or the leak about the press release, remarkably unpublic—the preparation, behind tightly closed doors, of subcommittee reports. And publicity had not in fact been a major factor in his advancement within the Senate. If the Douglases and Humphreys had chosen the outside route, he had chosen the inside route: the Senate route. And the key to his advancement had fit the pattern of his entire life: as he had done at San Marcos and in the House of Representatives, he had identified the one man who had the power that could best help him, had courted that man, had won his support, and through that support, had been given the opportunity to attain the position he sought. But if that was how he had been given the opportunity in the Senate, he had made the most of the opportunity, by following not the pattern of his previous life—the pushing, the grabbing—but rather the pattern of the Senate. The work that had been most significant in his Senate advancement had been quiet chats behind closed office doors; he had concentrated not on the podium but on the cloakroom and the Marble Room. It was in these private precincts of the Senate that he spent most of his time and energy.

These places suited him. In a way, Lyndon Johnson had never before been at home anywhere in his life—certainly not in the Hill Country, the trap he had longed to escape; not in the NYA, from which he had wanted to escape back to Washington; not in the House of Representatives, where he had been just one of a crowd. He was at home now. The Senate was his home. He had fit into it. His tone, his mannerisms, had been transformed utterly—transformed into the Senate tone, the Senate mannerisms. He had become the true Senate man.

Now that he had the leadership, there were, also with remarkable speed, hints of new mannerisms. Hubert Humphrey had noticed a new tone: “take-charge, no-nonsense, stern.” Late in the afternoon of the day of the Democratic caucus, Drew Pearson encountered Johnson in a corridor. “He had just been made Democratic floor leader by the Southern reactionaries, and he felt supremely in the saddle,” Pearson wrote in his diary. As Johnson brusquely dismissed a Pearson request, the columnist wrote, he could not help remembering “the days when Lyndon used to call me from Texas saying he had a tight primary fight and asking me” for help. The next day, the Senate convened before the usual packed galleries of opening day, and reporters in the Press Gallery, looking down at the new Democratic Leader at the front-row center-aisle desk, saw a new Lyndon Johnson. He wasn’t so much sitting in his chair as sprawling in it, sprawling, as Evans and Novak were to write, “almost full length … legs crossed, laughing and joking … the picture of self-satisfaction.”

*The Leader the Republicans elected on the day that Johnson was elected, Robert Taft, was sixty-three. Before Johnson, the youngest Leader of either party had been fifty-three-year-old Joe Robinson.