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NOW THAT LYNDON JOHNSON had become the Leader of the Democratic senators, his personal ambitions were bound up with that divided and disorganized band. The bond was unbreakable: for him to use the leadership as a stepping-stone to his real goal, he would have to be an effective Leader—and he could be an effective Leader only to the extent that his Senate Democrats were an effective party.
Johnson’s personal fortunes had been interwoven with institutions before, when he had been leader of the White Stars, or of the Little Congress, or of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Each of these entities had also in its own way been so disorganized and ineffective that in order for him to use them as vehicles for his personal, political advancement, it had been necessary for him not merely to make them more efficient but to change them completely, to transform them into institutions capable of accomplishing a political purpose. Each time, so creative was his political genius that he had transformed them. Now, however, the institution to which he was linked was not a college or staff members’ social club or a political fund-raising committee but the Democratic Party in the Senate of the United States; now Lyndon Johnson’s personal fortunes were bound up inextricably with the fortunes of something far larger than anything he had ever led before. This link carried with it, moreover, a threat, one that was terrible to a man who feared humiliation as much as Lyndon Johnson feared it, for every recent Democratic Leader had been humiliated, made a figure of public ridicule. And this institution had been insulated against change. Not only did a Senate Leader have little power—“nothing to promise them, nothing to threaten them with”—to cajole or force his party’s senators into line behind him, the Senate’s rules and customs had been designed to prevent him from acquiring any.
The link carried with it another threat to Lyndon Johnson’s greater ambitions. Difficult though the acquisition of power would be for any Senate Leader, it would be especially difficult for him—because of the place from which he had come, and the place to which he wanted to go, because his true objective lay not in the Senate but beyond it. Power in the Senate was held by the southern senators who were his allies, and who had made him Leader. The natural human reluctance to surrender power would be reinforced in the southerners’ case by their devotion to the institution and the region that were both sacred to them. Since their power was derived from the Senate’s rules and precedents and constitutional prerogatives, bound up in the body’s very fabric, any reduction in their power would entail drastic change in an institution they were determined to keep unchanged. And reinforcing that determination also was the fact that it was their power that made the Senate the South’s stronghold, so that any reduction would also weaken the South. They would never give up their power voluntarily. Nor could they be forced to give it up—it was fortified far too strongly for any Leader to take it away. Lyndon Johnson’s only hope of obtaining the power that the southerners now held was to persuade them to give it to him, and he would be able to do that only if they didn’t realize that they were giving it to him—if he was able to conceal from them the implications of what he was doing.
Difficult though this would be, however, what would be even harder than getting the power would be what he would have to do with it once he got it. Power in the Senate might be in southern hands, but it was northern hands that held the prize at which he was really aiming. He could reach it only with northern support, and to get that support, he would have to make the Democratic Party in the Senate more responsive to northern wishes, would have to advance liberal causes. He would have to use the power that he took from the South on behalf of causes that the South hated.
But if senatorial power was the South’s to give, the South also had the power to take it back. Even if he succeeded in enlarging a Leader’s powers, the South not only would still hold its committee chairmanships but would still command a majority in the Democratic caucus. The South had made a Leader; the South would be able to unmake a Leader. If in furthering the causes of the North, he antagonized the South, the South could, in a very few minutes—in the time it took to take a vote in a caucus—make sure that he had no power to further anybody’s causes, including his own. So he couldn’t antagonize the South. Not only would he have to take power from the southern senators without them realizing what he was taking, he would have to use that power without them realizing how he was using it.
This would be very difficult, for deceiving the southern senators meant deceiving men who were expert parliamentarians, expert legislators, masters of their craft.
Masters. But not geniuses.
IN FRONT OF THE CAPITOL, during the first two weeks of 1953, scores of carpenters were hammering into place the stands for the presidential inaugural.Pennsylvania Avenue was draped with red, white, and blue bunting, the full panoply that accompanies the transfer of executive power in America.
The hammering couldn’t be heard down Delaware Avenue, where, on the second floor of the Senate Office Building, in Suite 231, the door to Lyndon Johnson’s private office stayed closed, hour after hour, during those two weeks, while, on the four-button telephone on Walter Jenkins’ desk, the left-hand button, the one that was lit when Johnson was using his phone, stayed lit hour after hour. Behind that door, Lyndon Johnson was attempting a transfer in legislative power, a transfer without precedent in American history; he was taking a gamble that would, if successful, change the nature of power in the Senate, a gamble in which the odds against him were very long—and in which the stakes were so high that, describing the maneuver later, he was to say, “I shoved in my whole stack.”
Of all the barriers between a Senate Leader and genuine power the highest was the seniority system. The committee seats so vital to senators’ careers were assigned according to that fixed rule, so a Leader had no discretion over the assigning, no power to use committee seats as instruments of threat or reward. And because the system enabled the southern senators, with their greater seniority, to monopolize seats on the better committees, it exacerbated the resentment of excluded northerners and thus sharpened the hostility between the party’s two wings and made it all but impossible for a Democratic Leader to unite the party behind him. In addition, not only did the seniority system keep the Democratic Leader from being as strong as he might be, it kept the Democratic Party in the Senate from being as strong as it might be: filling vacant seats on the basis of longevity rather than expertise or ability meant that the party didn’t make full use of that expertise or ability. But no Senate custom was more sacred than the seniority system, the system that “the Senate would no more abandon than it would abandon its name.” Behind that door, over that telephone, Lyndon Johnson, in his first act as Leader, was trying to change the seniority system.
IN A WAY, he was working with a giant chessboard. It had 203 squares, the 203 seats on the Senate’s fifteen Standing Committees.* In theory, ninety-four of them were his to play on, for the Democrats, in the minority in the Eighty-third Congress, would be allowed to fill that many seats. Actually, however, eighty-seven of the squares were already occupied by Democratic senators, so he had only seven to play on, and only four of these were on major committees.
By tradition, moves on the chessboard would be governed almost entirely by seniority. Into the four major committee seats would move the most senior of the senators desiring them. Their moves would vacate four places. Into them would move the most senior senators wanting them. There would be other moves. Occasionally—not often, for a senator who moved from one committee to another had to start accumulating seniority with that committee from scratch—a senator would move from one committee to another of approximately equal importance. And of course there were always vacancies in the least desirable spaces: seats on the least important committees. They would generally be filled with newly elected senators who had no seniority at all. Seniority had never been the only factor in the filling of committee seats. Liberals, for example, would almost never be appointed to Finance, the committee which wrote tax laws like the oil depletion allowance which meant money in the pockets of oilmen and other business interests who backed conservatives. A disproportionate number of them found themselves relegated to the Post Office and Civil Service Committee or to the equally impotent Labor and Public Welfare. And sometimes, defeat or death would empty an unusual number of seats, and freshmen found themselves on important committees, as had been the case in Richard Russell’s appointment to Appropriations in 1933. But for generation after generation, seniority had almost invariably been the governing factor. If more than one senator wanted to move into a vacant space, the one with the most seniority was the one who was allowed to move.
PLAYING THAT CHESS GAME in his private office, behind the closed door, sometimes he would be sitting in his big black leather chair behind the desk at the far end of the office, phone in hand, hunched forward in concentration. Sometimes he would be standing behind the desk. One mottled hand—the left hand if things were going well, the right hand if they weren’t—would be wrapped around the black receiver he was holding to his ear, the receiver looking unexpectedly small in that huge fist. The other hand would usually be holding a cigarette. He lit one cigarette from the end of another, often not bothering to stub out the first, and the ashtray on his desk and the standing ashtray next to it were overflowing with butts, some still burning.
Often, for long minutes, the only words Lyndon Johnson spoke were words to encourage the man on the other end of the wire to keep talking—so that he could better determine what might bend the man to his purpose, what arguments might work. For long minutes, the only movements Lyndon Johnson made were to raise the cigarette to his mouth and take a long, deep drag. The hand gripping the telephone would not move, the lines of the normally mobile face would not move, the eyes next to the phone, narrowed to unblinking slits, gleamed black with concentration through a slender column of smoke while another column or two rose from the ashtrays, their lazy upward spiral accentuating the intensity of the big figure behind them. Lyndon Johnson would stand or sit that way for a long time, motionless, intent, listening—pouring himself into that listening, all his being focused on what the other man was saying, and what the man wasn’t saying; on what he knew about the other man, and on what he didn’t know and was trying to find out.
And then, when he had decided what arguments might work, Lyndon Johnson would begin to talk, and as he did so, he would begin to circle the desk, prowling restlessly around it in front of the fireplace that was so delicate alongside his tall, burly frame. His voice would be soft, calm, rational, reasonable, warm, intimate, friendly, telling the stories, explaining the strategy, shoving in his whole stack. And whether he was listening or talking, the room was filled with Lyndon Johnson’s determination, with the passion and purpose radiating from him. Then the call would be over. He might immediately make another one, the index finger so big in the dial. Or instead he might drop back down into the big chair and sit for long minutes motionless, slouched down on his spine, the relaxed pose of the body belied by the fierceness of the concentration on the face, the hand holding the cigarette rising again and again to his lips. Or, turning his back on the room, he would stand behind the desk, staring at the window whether the blinds in front of it were open or closed, stand there unmoving except for the hand in his trouser pocket. There would be no sound in that office at all except for the jingling of coins. Sometimes, then, he would take out a white handkerchief from his other pants pocket and mop it hard over his brow. And sometimes, lighting yet another cigarette, he would bend over in his chair, head low as he took his first drag, “really sucking it in,” in Jenkins’ phrase, and sit like that, head bowed, cigarette still in his mouth, for a while, as if to allow the soothing smoke to penetrate as deeply as possible into his body, as if trying desperately to relax for a moment. And then he would reach for the phone again.
HE SOLD WITH LOGIC—some very unpleasant logic.
It was based on two new facts of political life that had been revealed by that November 2 election, and that Lyndon Johnson, down on his ranch, had grasped very quickly. One was the previously unappreciated depth of America’s affection for Dwight David Eisenhower. The other, demonstrated in some hard numbers in the election returns, was that, even beyond Eisenhower’s personal victory, the national balance of power might be tipping against the Democrats. The foundation of Eisenhower’s victory had been his overwhelming margins in the suburbs, and it was suburbia, traditionally GOP suburbia, that was the fastest-growing part of America. As for the cities, the longtime Democratic strongholds, the Democrats had, almost incredibly, lost Chicago and almost lost New York—an indication of what analysts called “the total decay of the old Democratic city machines.” The significance of these facts, as well as their all-too-likely implications for the Senate Democrats, was spelled out in a three-page memorandum Johnson had had George Reedy write on November 12. Eisenhower’s victory, the memo said, “was a personal triumph and not a Republican victory,” as was proven by the fact that despite “one of the most astounding votes in history,” he had been able to pull into office with him only slim majorities in Congress. But, as Reedy added, it would not be difficult for Eisenhower to “turn his personal victory into a party victory…. He has a mandate almost unmatched in American history. If he has the ability, he can use that mandate to do anything he wants.” And “should he have a truly successful administration,” he could “bring in large Congressional majorities in 1954…. The balance of power will certainly shift from Democratic to Republican.” The current tenuous Republican edge in the Senate would be made firm—and it would stay firm for a long time.
Johnson had had the memo written—ostensibly to himself—to lend an air of objectivity and authority to a key argument he wanted to make. After making the argument to a senator over the telephone, he would say that it was Reedy’s memo that had persuaded him of its validity, and that he would have George drop off a copy so that the senator could read it, and then he would phone back to draw the senator’s attention to specific points. Before January 2, he had had to be discreet in explaining the implications for the seniority system because he wasn’t yet Leader, but now he could do so, and he did, not that much explaining was needed with the master politicians who were reading it. The men to whom he was speaking had been committee chairmen for a long time, but now, suddenly, they were no longer chairmen, and a successful Eisenhower Administration would mean that they would not be chairmen again anytime soon. Their best hope of regaining their lost power—their gavels and their patronage—was to create in the Senate a Democratic record strong enough so that Republican gains in the next election would be kept to a minimum—so that perhaps the Democrats might even become the majority in the Senate again.
And that, Lyndon Johnson said, would require the Senate Democrats to change the system by which they assigned committee seats.
The Foreign Relations Committee, on which there were two of the seven Democratic vacancies, was a key illustration he used to explain what he meant. Foreign Relations was going to be a focal point of the Republican attack, he said. Anyone could see that: the rumors that Taft himself was moving from Labor to Foreign Relations had just been confirmed, and Taft always went where he was going to attack, as he had moved to Labor in 1947 so that he could push through Taft-Hartley. And Taft was bringing with him Ferguson, Knowland, and Langer, Old Guard haters of the Marshall Plan and the China policy. This move presaged an all-out attack on the Roosevelt-Truman foreign policies that the Old Guard felt had not only drained America’s coffers to provide foreign aid for untrustworthy Europe, that had not only handcuffed the noble MacArthur when he had tried to wage the Korean War the way it should have been waged, but that had also given the world the Yalta Conference; the Old Guard had always felt that even the Yalta agreements that had been announced publicly, those agreements that had allowed the Russians to enslave Poland and the other Eastern European countries, were unconstitutional because they were actually treaties and had never been presented to the Senate for ratification. And the Old Guard believed as an article of faith that other, secret agreements had been made at Yalta. Now Taft would try to use the power of the Foreign Relations Committee to obtain those secret texts at last, and thereby document once and for all the Democratic Party’s “softness” on Communism, an attack that could be devastating both to the party’s future, and to the Roosevelt-Truman hopes for the containment and ultimate collapse of Communism, and for peace. And the Old Guard would want a formal vote in Foreign Relations, and then in the Senate as a whole, to repudiate all the Yalta agreements, secret and public alike, and to amend the Constitution to ensure against any future circumvention of the treaty process. Moreover, the Old Guard had always felt that Truman had acted unconstitutionally in sending those four divisions to Europe to be part of NATO; now was the chance to end that commitment, too.
If Foreign Relations was going to be the main point of the Republican attack, Lyndon Johnson said, Democratic defenses on that committee should be especially strong, but they were, in fact, weak. They should be shored up by senators with the expertise in foreign affairs, and the force, to stand up to Taft. He had two senators in mind who fit that description perfectly, Johnson said, but one, Hubert Humphrey, was in his first term in the Senate, and the other, Mike Mansfield, was in his first week. And both were liberals besides. Under the old system, there was no chance that they would be given the coveted Foreign Relations seats, but, Johnson said, the Democrats couldn’t afford not to give those seats to Humphrey and Mansfield. Hubert could hold his own against any senator, even the dreaded Taft, in debate, or, equally important, in the cut and thrust of committee deliberations, and he had already demonstrated considerable interest in foreign affairs. Mansfield had been not only a professor of Latin American and Far Eastern history but a leading, and very respected, member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “Mansfield out-knows Taft, and Humphrey can out-talk him,” Lyndon explained, over and over, on the phone.
And, he explained, Foreign Relations was only one example of what he was talking about. Another newly elected senator was Missouri’s Stuart Symington. The Democratic Party might once have had the luxury of relegating a former Secretary of the Air Force, one of the nation’s foremost authorities on the armed services, to the District of Columbia Committee; the party couldn’t afford that luxury now. The Democratic minority in the Senate had to be made as strong as possible all across the board, Lyndon Johnson told the men on the other end of the telephone. A host of talent was already going to waste; men of real ability like Clements, Hennings, Monroney, Smathers and Pastore were wasting that ability on minor committees. And among the newly elected senators were other men besides Symington and Mansfield who could step right in and make strong records, make the Senate Democrats a real fighting force, if they were just put on major committees.
He sold with humor—some very pleasant humor.
What he was proposing was only fair, he said; it was unfair to allow a few senators to monopolize the more desirable committee seats while other senators had no desirable seat at all; that was why no senator should be given a second major seat until every senator had at least one. And he made this point with one of his wonderful Texas anecdotes.
“When I was a young fella,” Lyndon Johnson would say, “the Crider boys were just about my best friends. Ben was the older one. He was kind of strong and self-reliant—always goin’ off somewhere. Otto—well, he was more shy and retiring. One day I was over there at the Crider house. Ben was away somewhere, and I was playing with Otto, and it was the weekend and no school the next day, and we asked Miz Crider if Otto could come sleep over at my house for a couple of nights. And Miz Crider, when we asked her, she said, ‘No.’ No reason. Just ‘No.’
“Well, Otto, he was real upset. And you know what he said? He said, ‘Mama, why can’t I go? Ben, he’s already been twowheres, and I ain’t never been nowheres!’”
The new senators had to be given at least one place, Lyndon Johnson said, before more senior senators, who already had one good committee seat, got to go “twowheres.” To do otherwise, Lyndon Johnson said, wouldn’t be good for the party, wouldn’t be good for the Senate, wouldn’t be good for the country.
He sold with whatever he thought might work. The self-interest of the southerners who had been committee chairmen dovetailed with the larger interests of the South, and he made sure they understood that: the South’s last stronghold, the last and best defense of its peculiar, and sacred, institution, was those chairmanships; the South had to get them back. The best way to accomplish that was to make a strong Democratic record, which required unifying and strengthening the Senate Democrats. And, he pointed out, since no senator was being required to give up a committee seat he already held, the major committees would still be stocked, three or four deep, with southerners.
Another argument he never mentioned to the southern senators—but he didn’t have to. Some of them had become aware of Russell’s grand design, to make Lyndon Johnson President, a plan that required that Johnson be made acceptable to the North. “While he didn’t say it in so many words, LBJ very early, in private conversations, started taking advantage of a growing belief that he might be a presidential candidate,” Reedy says. “I think it started right there. And what he was saying is that he had some northern senators who were Democrats and he just had to get them on something besides the Capitol committee on roofs, domes and skylights…. I think the primary thrust was their [southern senators’] recognition that LBJ had to have some leeway in order to get national recognition….” When Lyndon Johnson told Harry Byrd or Walter George or Jim Eastland, “I’ve just got to give those damned red-hots something to get them off my back,” they understood what he was really saying.
And, of course, over and over again Johnson emphasized that since no one was being forced to give up anything, nothing fundamental was really being changed. Everyone would be able to stay right where they were if they wanted to, he said. Southerners could still control every major committee, he said. Years later, during his retirement, Lyndon Johnson would explain his maneuvers to Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Ms. Goodwin, summarizing his explanation, would write that although the seniority system “was the foundation of power and the principal determinant of the conduct of Senate business,” in seeking to change that system, “Johnson dissembled his aim in such a way that his request for change seemed more like a trivial departure which did not threaten the governing mores of the Senate.”
THE FIRST SENATOR he had to persuade, of course, was Russell; if he didn’t persuade Russell, there was no sense in going on. Johnson appealed to the qualities in Russell that were as noble as his racial feelings were ignoble, to his loyalties not only to his beloved country (“You’re a patriot, Dick”), which couldn’t afford to have America’s international commitments voided, but also to his beloved party, to his beloved Southland—and to his beloved Senate. Giving freshmen who already had expertise in particular fields seats on the important committees that had jurisdiction in those fields would make the Senate a stronger, more effective institution, and would start them early on the road to being, in the highest sense of the title, Senators of the United States. “We’ll be making real senators out of them,” he told Russell. And Russell proved much easier to persuade than might have been anticipated, in part perhaps because of his plans for Lyndon Johnson, in part perhaps, as John Steele was to speculate, because his own early experience as a brand-new senator (that fortuitous, immediate assignment to Appropriations) had taught him “that a leg up in committee could help a new senator’s career tremendously.” In fact, Evans and Novak relate, “when Johnson broached his revolutionary idea, Russell surprised him by replying that he, too, had always favored giving new senators one good committee assignment.” While warning Johnson of the risks in what he was planning (“You’re dealing with the most sensitive thing in the Senate,” he told him. “[You’re] playing with dynamite”), Russell did not forbid him to make the attempt. While he would not actively support Johnson’s plan, Russell said, he would not oppose it, either. If Lyndon could persuade the other senators to go along, he would go along.
GETTING THEM TO GO ALONG was a problem of such difficulty that it seemed all but insoluble.
If the problem before him resembled a chessboard—with the spaces representing committee seats, the chessmen the senators who moved among those spaces—the seven vacant spaces available to him, only four of them on major committees, were not nearly enough to allow him to make the moves necessary to accomplish his purposes. The senators who now occupied the other desirable spaces would not want to move off them. And senior senators had already filed with Walter Jenkins their claims to the four desirable seats. Their appointment to those committees did not fit into Lyndon Johnson’s plan, but they were entitled to those seats by seniority—and would not be at all inclined to surrender their claims.
Foreign Relations was a particular sticking point. Getting Humphrey and Mansfield onto it required first of all the approval of the Committee’s former chairman (now its ranking Democrat member) Walter George, who never wanted liberals on his committees, and of other elders of the conservative coalition. Johnson gave his explanations of the strategic importance Foreign Relations would have in the months ahead, how Mansfield could “out-think” Taft and Humphrey could “out-talk” him. He received, from these elders, as he had from Russell, at least tacit permission to go ahead with his plans for the two empty seats on Foreign Relations—if, of course, and only if, the senior senators who had prior, higher, claims to those spaces agreed to surrender their claims.
One of these senior senators was Harry Byrd, whose surrender was easy to obtain, for his interest in a Foreign Relations seat was not passionate. It was made easier by his fondness for Johnson—a fondness that had begun when he had looked up at his daughter’s funeral and seen the Texan there. When Johnson explained why he needed the Foreign Relations seat, Byrd said he could have it. That, however, was not the case with the three senators with the greatest seniority who had formally applied for those seats, whose names Lyndon Johnson had written in the “Requests for Assignments” column on the papers on the desk in front of him. Warren Magnuson, Spessard Holland, and Matt Neely wanted those prestigious seats, wanted them badly, and expected that, in the order of seniority, they would be given them.
Magnuson, first in seniority for one of the two seats, not only Johnson’s Senate ally but a power in the Senate, had been unmoved by the “out-talk, out-think” arguments, in part because he felt that he himself possessed those qualifications, in part because he felt that under the seniority system he was entitled to a seat on the most desirable committee available whether he possessed them or not. He had entered his name for two committees, Foreign Relations and Appropriations (the only committee more desirable than Foreign Relations), but since there were no vacancies on Appropriations, he was demanding Foreign Relations. Warren Magnuson was not a man ever to give up something he was entitled to. He wanted Foreign Relations, and he intended to have it. No matter how many times Johnson had approached him, he had been very firm, so firm that on his lists Johnson, surrendering, had scrawled the name Magnuson on one of the blank lines under “Foreign Relations.” And on the other line he was going to have to writeHolland orNeely. There seemed no way to get Humphrey or Mansfield where they were needed.
Then he got a break. The GOP’s new leader, Taft, had a problem: Wayne Morse, disillusioned with Eisenhower, had bolted the Republicans during the campaign, and was listing his party affiliation as “Independent.” He had agreed to vote with the Republicans on organizing the Senate, so the Republicans would still hold a 49–47 edge on those votes. But thereafter Morse would be voting as an Independent. With the party ratio so close, the Republicans would only have a one-vote majority on the committees on which Morse sat, so if Morse didn’t vote with them, they wouldn’t have a majority. And they would have this problem no matter which of the fifteen committees they put Morse on.
To solve their problem, the Republicans had proposed a simple solution: that a Republican be added to each committee to which Morse might be assigned. But Johnson didn’t want a simple solution. For other men, nights were for sleeping…. It was at four o’clock one morning, Lyndon Johnson was to recall, that he had suddenly seen that the Republican problem could solve his, that if he handled things right, he might even come out of the situation with the only thing that could persuade Warren Magnuson to give up his claim to a seat on Foreign Relations—a seat on Appropriations. He told Taft that if these new extra seats the Republicans wanted were added, the Democrats should get some seats they wanted. And he had the leverage to make the argument stick: the old Senate leverage. The number of seats on a committee could be changed only by changing the official Senate rules, and such a change could easily be blocked. A series of very complicated negotiations ensued. At one point, on January 7, Taft asked unanimous consent for a new rule. Johnson did not consent. Reserving the right to object, he said he wanted to sit down with the distinguished Majority Leader for further discussions, and when the discussions were over, there was a new, even more complicated fomula, under which the membership of nine committees had been enlarged, and four had been reduced, by either two or four members. (The size of two committees remained the same.) Johnson kept the negotiations friendly. Taft felt he had gotten what he wanted. So impressed was he with Johnson’s cooperation that on Inauguration Day, he would write a friend, “So far everything has gone well in the Senate, with an amount of harmony which is almost unprecedented.” But under the new formula, the number of spaces on the chessboard had been increased from 203 to 209, and the Democrats had gotten three of the six new seats, and among the new seats was one on Appropriations. Johnson offered the seat to Magnuson, and Magnuson accepted. What Johnson said to Holland and Neely we do not know—he appears to have promised Holland that if he would surrender his claim to Foreign Relations, he would be given the next empty seat on Appropriations; he may have placated Neely by allowing him to continue to be one of only three Democrats who would be allowed to sit on three committees, although his ranking membership on one of them would normally have disqualified him from three assignments—but both senators agreed to step aside, and he could recommend to the Steering Committee that Humphrey and Mansfield be moved into the empty spaces on Foreign Relations.
LYNDON JOHNSON WAS VIEWING the chessboard as a whole now, and since the pieces on the board were men, he knew all the moves. He didn’t want to make any move merely for the sake of that move alone: he wanted one of those Foreign Relations moves to make possible other moves—to give him more of those strategic vacancies that he had to have. And the reader of men, having read Hubert Humphrey, knew how to do it. Johnson didn’t tell Humphrey he could have a seat on Foreign Relations, he told Humphrey he could have a seat on Foreign Relations if he gave up his seats on Agriculture and Labor. (He could retain his seat on the Government Operations Committee, Johnson said.)
While Humphrey wanted Foreign Relations, he didn’t want to make the sacrifice that Johnson was demanding. The price, he said, was too high. After all, he said, he had to run for re-election in Minnesota in two years. In his oral history recollections—recollections confirmed in essence by Johnson aides—Humphrey was to write that he told Johnson: “Mr. Leader, you know at home my constituency is Democratic Farmer-Labor Party. You’re asking me to give up Labor.” That, Humphrey said, he might be able to do because “I’ve got strong support in the labor movement.” But “Our farmers, they need me on that Committee on Agriculture. There isn’t anybody from my part of the country on the Democratic side on … Agriculture…. For me to back off now, the Farmers Union and the people out there that are the liberals in the agriculture area would never understand it.”
But Lyndon Johnson knew what Hubert Humphrey really wanted. The Foreign Relations seat would, Bobby Baker was to say, give Humphrey “a forum from which to bolster his national ambitions.” Johnson couched his appeal in terms of duty, telling Humphrey, “You can fight for the farmers down here on this floor and you can fight for the laboring man, but we’ve got some serious foreign policy issues coming up, and they’re going to be major.” Ticking the issues off on his fingers, he added, “This is one time where you’re going to serve your country and your party. You’re going to have to drop those two other committees.” And when Humphrey agreed—he exacted one condition: that should, in future years, another seat open up on Agriculture, he would get it—Johnson had not only shored up the Democratic position on Foreign Relations, he had also created two new vacancies, two new open squares, one on Agriculture and one on Labor. Suddenly, the chessboard was beginning to open up. Earle Clements of Kentucky wanted Agriculture badly. There hadn’t been a vacancy on Agriculture, but there was now; Johnson told Clements he could have it—if he gave up two committees, Public Works and Rules. That opened up two more squares.
• • •
THERE WERE DOZENS of other moves to be made in order for his purposes to be accomplished. The moves were no longer governed by the objective, inflexible seniority rule, and he had promised that everyone could stay right where they were if they wanted to, that no one would be forced to give up a seat. So each move had to be sold individually to the senators concerned.
Some of the arguments with which Lyndon Johnson sold were pragmatic. The vacancy he was most anxious to create was on the Armed Services Committee. Each of the seven seats on the Democratic side of the committee table was already filled; he had to empty one of those seats, so that he could put Symington in it.
Russell Long had one of those seats, and he liked Armed Services, but Johnson knew that for a senator from Louisiana, rich in oilmen anxious for government tax breaks, Finance was a better committee. And there was an open Democratic spot there. Long had not bothered to apply for it, since he had so little seniority, but Johnson told him he could have it—if he gave up Armed Services. And Johnson may have pointed out to Long—at least Johnson aides believe he did—an extremely pragmatic consideration. Although Long was only thirty-four years old, on Armed Services there were three other young senators ahead of him, and even Chairman Russell was only fifty-five. On Finance, whose chairman, Byrd, was sixty-six, there was no other Democratic senator younger than forty-nine; Long would be the committee’s youngest member by a full fifteen years; given the reality of the human life span, he could expect to be chairman one day of the crucial tax-law-writing body. Long moved to Finance; the open seat thus created on Armed Services was filled by the senator best qualified to fill it.
Some of the arguments with which Johnson sold were very pragmatic. If Foreign Relations would be one focal point of the Republican attack, the other was just as easy to predict—and was also vulnerable. Government Operations had always been regarded as a minor committee, but now its chairman was going to be Joe McCarthy. With a chairman’s authority—and staff—McCarthy was going to make life very difficult for the Democrats. Only one Democratic seat on Government Operations—John McClellan’s—was filled by a senator tough enough to stand up to the Wisconsin demagogue. Two seats were empty, but on a list of requested committee assignments on his desk in 231’s inner office Johnson had scrawled: “McCarran requests Govt. Operations.” Pat McCarran wanted one of the seats not to oppose McCarthy, but because, a rabid Communist witch-hunter himself, he wanted to be part of McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade. McCarran had a full twenty years of Senate seniority to back up his claim, and, as Alben Barkley had learned to his sorrow, it was unwise for a Democratic Leader to cross Judiciary’s coldly ruthless chairman.
Back in Nevada, however, McCarran’s problems—political and legal, both—were growing more serious. After years of dominating the state’s Democratic politics, the Silver Fox had in 1952 backed one of his law partners for the party’s nomination for the other Senate seat—only to see him lose the primary, in a stunning upset, to a crusading young lawyer. Although the lawyer had himself been defeated in November by the Republican incumbent, George (Molly) Malone, the young upstart was hinting that in 1956 he was going to run against McCarran himself. And in that troubling lawsuit alleging ties between McCarran and shady Las Vegas casino interests, pre-trial depositions were not going well; the Senator had already been forced to admit that he had interceded with the Internal Revenue Service in a tax case involving a casino. The appointment of a “friendly” United States Attorney was more urgent than ever.
But Truman’s resistance to signing the necessary appointment form was as strong as ever; in November, Johnson, keeping his promise to McCarran, had raised the issue with the President, but on January 1, 1953, the Washington Post reported that the Senator’s nominee “is not going to get” the appointment as long as Truman was in office. His replacement by the Republican Eisenhower on January 20 would, of course, make the appointment even less likely. In November, Johnson’s request to Truman had been on behalf of a single vote for Leader; when, going to the White House on January 13, Johnson again asked Truman to sign the appointment form, the stakes were high not just for him but for the Democratic Party. “All right,” the President finally said. “I’ll give this to you, Lyndon. But if that old so-and-so doesn’t produce, you bring it back to me.” Signing the form later that day, Truman had a White House courier deliver it not to McCarran as was customary, but directly to 231, and on it the President attached a note to Johnson marked “Personal and Confidential”: “As you know, I am doing this under protest. It is your ‘baby’ from now on.” Johnson carried the appointment form up to McCarran’s big office on the fourth floor, and when he returned to his own office, Johnson drew a line through “McCarran requests Govt. Operations.” A seat that under the seniority system would have gone to McCarran stayed vacant; two were still empty on Government Operations. Johnson managed to empty a third, which had been held by the mild-mannered Mike Monroney. What good was a Monroney against Joe McCarthy? Johnson moved Monroney into a vacancy on the more prestigious Commerce Committee. He wanted the three seats filled by senators who possessed certain qualifications: as Evans and Novak were to put it, “None of them wrapped in the orthodox liberal mantle, and none of whom would have to run for re-election for six years” (a qualification that would presumably encourage them to stand up to McCarthy). When he filled the seats with Symington, Scoop Jackson, and John F. Kennedy, he felt he had the kind of freshmen on the committee that he wanted, although Kennedy’s position on McCarthy would prove to be equivocal.
Some of the arguments with which Johnson sold were idealistic, personal. To McClellan, who was already in fact not only twowheres but threewheres, since he was not only ranking minority member of Government Operations but a member of both Appropriations and Public Works, to McClellan who was so intimidating to most senators but whose farmer father had named John’s brothers after Democrats who had fought for farmers, Johnson said that McClellan had to help protect the New Deal programs that had helped the farmer, that McClellan had to keep the Democrats in the Senate strong—and that he, Johnson, had to find a good seat for Albert Gore, the newly elected senator from Tennessee, and that he wanted to put Gore on Public Works, since that appointment would strengthen his position in his state because of what a member of that committee could do to protect TVA. And Johnson said that McClellan’s Government Operations seat might well be the key Democratic post in the whole Senate, because the ranking member would be the Democratic point man against McCarthy—that job would be a full-time job in itself, Johnson said. Johnson didn’t actually suggest that McClellan resign from Public Works so that Gore could take his place; McClellan, after listening to Johnson, made the suggestion himself. There would be six Democratic freshmen senators in the new Congress; McClellan’s resignation had allowed Johnson to find desirable committee assignments for five of them. When he put the sixth, Price Daniel, on Interior, every freshman had a place on a major committee.
It was not only freshmen he was helping, it was liberals—at least some liberals: neither Paul Douglas nor Estes Kefauver, both of whom had voted for Murray for Leader, received a committee assignment he requested. As he moved senators around the chessboard, more and more spaces opened—and he made the most of them. In previous years, the southerners had consigned Lehman to Interior as a punishment for his liberalism; now Johnson found a space for the New Yorker on the committee he wanted: Banking. Onto Interior moved a senator for whom Interior was not a punishment but a reward: Clements—Clements who had of course surrendered Public Works for Agriculture.
And it was not only liberals. Somehow, as Lyndon Johnson shifted senators around, desirable spaces were found for southerners Olin Johnston and George Smathers; little bulls who were now, suddenly, well along the road to becoming Big Bulls.
ANY MOVE HE WANTED to make would have to be approved by the party elders who dominated the Democratic Steering Committee, of course, so every move had to be sold to men to whom seniority had always been sacred. Any move, furthermore, had to be approved by the former—and, it was hoped, future—chairmen of the Standing Committees involved, and sometimes dealing with the chairmen was harder than dealing with the senators he was moving around. Hour after hour, behind the closed door of 231, Lyndon Johnson was on the telephone with Harry Byrd and Carl Hayden and Ed Johnson, as well as with the senator who, in the past, “you had to see” about committee assignments.
Sometimes, through the office wall, Walter Jenkins or Mary Rather would hear Lyndon Johnson’s voice in a different tone, a tone he used when he was talking not to someone else but to himself. They knew what the “Chief” was doing then. They had heard him doing it in the automobiles in which he had been driven around Texas during his campaigns. As his chauffeur on some of those trips puts it, “It was like he was having discussions with himself about what strategy had worked or hadn’t worked,” when he had tried to persuade someone, “and what strategy he should use the next time.” And not just discussions. Behind that closed office door, Lyndon Johnson would be playing out a conversation: what he would say; what the other senator would say in response; whathe should then say—“He would be in there rehearsing, doing it over and over, trying to get it right,” Walter Jenkins recalls. And then, after a while, the left-hand button on Jenkins’ telephone would light up—the Chief would be making the call he had rehearsed. And sometimes the rehearsing wasn’t for a call, for a call wouldn’t be enough. Sometimes, when the rehearsing stopped, Jenkins and Rather would hear the door to Lyndon Johnson’s private office open and close. Bursting out of his room, he would run up the nearby stairs, or lope down the corridor with those long, fast strides until he got near the office for which he was heading. Then, abruptly, he would slow, perhaps even stop for a moment, gather himself together, get himself into a relaxed posture, and, easygoing, respectful, deferential, calm, polite, ask a Bill Darden or a Colonel Carlton if the Senator was in, and could he possibly spare a minute?
With some of the older senators—particularly Walter George and McClellan—Johnson played on their paternal feelings toward him, telling them that he wanted to be a good Leader, but it was sure a big job, he was worried about whether he would be able to handle it, he needed help, and part of the help he needed was to have Stu Symington on Armed Services. Most of all, he said, he needed to be able to give desirable seats to those damned northern crazies, so that they wouldn’t always be tearing at his flanks as they had torn at, and destroyed, ol’ Scott and ol’ Bob McFarland.
Over the telephone and in the offices, he used his memo and his “twowheres” story. He appealed to his Democrats on grounds of party. Taft was moving, he would say; he had ascertained that that rumor was true. Taft was going to Foreign Relations. You know what that means, he would say. He’s going to bring up Yalta. “Bob Taft is loading up the committee. They’re going to try to tear down everything that Roosevelt and Truman did, everything the Democratic Party has stood for for twenty years.” We’ve got to put our best young fellows on there, he said. We’ve got to put Humphrey and Mansfield on. And Government Operations, he said. “McCarthy’s going to go wild there if we let him. All we’re gonna be hearing for the next two years is ‘The Party of Treason, The Party of Treason.’” McClellan and Humphrey and Clyde Hoey had been talking about leaving Government Operations; who wanted to be a minority member on a McCarthy committee? Well, he told McClellan and Humphrey and Hoey, you can’t leave Government Operations. We need you on there. We need real fighters on there; we need guys that McCarthy can’t intimidate. And, he said to those senators—and to the Big Bulls—wouldn’t you feel better with Stu and Scoop on that committee? McCarthy won’t be able to make Stu or Scoop back down.
He appealed to them on grounds of policy. The Republicans had been aching for years to dismantle rural electrification, he told senators who had spent their lives fighting for the farmer. They all knew that. Now, with a Republican President and a Republican Congress, would be the Republicans’ chance to do it, to turn TVA over to private interests, to give the goddamned private utilities more of the power generated by the great dams of the West. Those proposals would have to move through either Public Works or Interior. Those committees must be shored up; vacancies on them should be filled with Democrats who not only believe in public power but who know how to fight for public power. We can’t think only of seniority now, he said; we can’t afford to. He appealed to them on pragmatic grounds. The major committees would still be solid, three or four deep, with southerners, he reminded them repeatedly. He appealed to them on whatever grounds would work—watching their eyes, watching their hands, listening to what they said, listening to what they didn’t say, “the greatest salesman one on one who ever lived”—trying to make a very big sale.
And then, on January 12, the new Democratic Leader convened a meeting of the Democratic Steering Committee, and almost the first assignment he suggested was of Symington to Armed Services, and some of the committee members looked out of the corners of their eyes at Russell, and Russell gravely nodded in approval. “Now I’m going to hit you with cold water,” Lyndon Johnson said. “Mike Mansfield for Foreign Relations.” The pause then was long, for Walter George loved to hold the center of the stage, but when George finally spoke he said only one word, “Excellent.” Everyone nodded, and then Lyndon Johnson reeled off the rest of his lists, and everything went very fast. Of all the archaic rules and customs and precedents that had made the Senate of the United States an obstacle to progress, the seniority system had been the strongest. For decades men had been saying that no one would ever be able to change the seniority system. Lyndon Johnson had changed it in two weeks.
WHEN, shortly after the Steering Committee had adjourned, George Reedy dropped on the long wooden table in the Senate Press Gallery copies of a press release announcing the new committee assignments, veteran journalists quickly grasped the significance of Johnson’s achievement. “I still remember how all of us in the Press Gallery that day felt it was a real change,” John Goldsmith of the UPI was to recall forty years later. “We said, ‘Gosh, a lot of good people are going to go on good committees right away.’ If that had ever happened before, none of us remembered it.”
Their articles, and the columns that followed during the next few days, reflected a sense almost of wonder over the fact that the brand-new Democratic Leader had, as Time put it, “dared to violate the traditions of seniority.” “A remarkable feat,” Doris Fleeson wrote. The Washington Post gave the feat a headline—“FRESHMAN DEMOCRATS RECEIVE MAJOR COMMITTEE ASSIGNMENTS”—and several journalists gave it a name, saying that the “seniority rule” had been replaced by the “Johnson Rule.” Johnson has “rather miraculously persuaded fellow Southerners with seniority to step aside in favor of liberals and newcomers,” the Alsops declared. Writing about the new appointments to Foreign Relations, journalists could barely contain themselves. “Extraordinary action … a break with tradition,” William White wrote in the New York Times about the assignment of “an out-and-out ‘freshman,’ Mr. Mansfield,” explaining that now when Taft began to make his charges about Yalta and the sellout of Eastern Europe, facing him across the committee table, serious and intent, ready to respond, knowledgeably and eloquently, would be Humphrey and Mansfield, “two of the most advanced internationalists in Congress. To make” such moves “possible, it was necessary in some cases for Southern members with greater priority” to give up their claims, White wrote. “One of the principal citadels stormed in this movement was the Finance Committee,” to whose aging Democrats had been added youthful, energetic Russell Long.
Journalists explained to their readers how Johnson had dramatically strengthened his party as a whole by giving “to the liberal wing a degree of representation that it had not known in many years.” Barely two weeks before, Marquis Childs pointed out, congressional Democrats had been in disarray, the gap between northerners and southerners seemingly more unbridgeable than ever, not least because of the selection of the southerner Lyndon Johnson as Leader, a selection which, as Childs put it, “was greeted with solemn foreboding … by Northern Democrats,” who felt that they would be left more than ever “to shift for themselves.” Now, he wrote, “almost the exact opposite has happened,” because of Johnson’s “shrewd and skillful leadership.” For the first time in years, Senate Democrats showed signs of becoming a unified party.
And liberals had particular reason to rejoice over that fact, Childs said.
Realists for the Democrats knew they must build an alternative [to Eisenhower Republicanism]. They know … how hard is the job ahead with a party suffering from attrition and decay at the end of a long tenure of office…. But the Democrats in the Senate feel that at least they have taken the first step.
Time’s McConaughy told his editors in New York that “In barely two weeks Lyndon Johnson has emerged as a crack minority leader…. In fact, he may turn out to be the best Democratic leader in recent Senate history.”
Lyndon Johnson’s ascension to the leadership had suddenly brought his narrow personal interests into conjunction with the larger—the largest—interests of the Democrats. His first major moves as Leader had done a lot for his party.
AND HE had done a lot for himself.
By giving the liberals desirable committee seats, he had not only made them feel more a part of the party, he had also made them less likely to attack its Leader. And the newcomers like Mansfield and Symington and Jackson who had been expecting to waste years on minor committees had instead been put at once on major committees—and they knew who had put them there. “Dear Lyndon,” wrote Jim Rowe, Mansfield’s longtime intimate. “Re: Foreign Relations Committee—I don’t know how you did it, but I knowwho did it. And so does Mike.” They would, within the limits of politics, be grateful. And if the coin of political gratitude is a currency subject to rapid devaluation, the political fear that is the coin’s obverse has more stability. Its value might even increase as the implications of what had been done sank in: men who knew who had given, would know also who could refuse to give. Barkley and Lucas and McFarland, like the Leaders before them, had had little to give, and therefore little to refuse. That was not the case with the new Leader. Lyndon Johnson had something to promise them now, and something to threaten them with. “We’ve got a real leader,” Bobby Baker told his friends. “He knows what makes the mule plow.”
And Lyndon Johnson had obtained more subtle means of threat and reward as well. Every senator was aware of his long-standing friendship with the new member of Appropriations. With “Maggie’s” appointment, as Bobby Baker was to say, Johnson all at once had “more control over the purse strings. Dissidents might not so easily attack Johnson if they knew a word from him might determine whether their pet projects would be funded.” All at once senators no longer had merely to consider “What will they do to me in Appropriations?” They had to consider “What will he do to me in Appropriations?”
It wasn’t merely praise that Lyndon Johnson had obtained in just two weeks. He had obtained power, too.
THESE DEVELOPMENTS HAD implications for the Southern Caucus that might become quite profound indeed. In the past, it had been the southerners—through the Democratic Steering Committee they controlled and through their leader Russell—who decided on committee assignments. Freshmen had been told that if they wanted a certain committee, they had to “see Russell.” Now, in those first two weeks of 1953, freshmen had been told that it was Lyndon Johnson they should see.
The southerners, in particular Russell, had been consulted at every step, of course. Lyndon Johnson had, day after day, run back and forth to their offices to clear with them what he proposed to do. No step had been taken without their approval—without, in particular, Russell’s approval. Lyndon Johnson had done this so diligently, and with so much deference, that neither Russell nor any other southerner appears to have realized that a great change had occurred. But it had.
AND, DURING HIS FIRST WEEKS AS LEADER, it was not only the seniority system that Lyndon Johnson was changing.
The two party “policy committees” created in 1946 in the hope—political scientists’ hope—of narrowing the rifts within both parties that contributed so greatly to the Senate’s paralysis, and of creating more clear-cut party ideologies and positions, thereby defining issues and giving voters a “definite choice” between parties, had not fulfilled that purpose—or, indeed, any significant purpose. Since the Republicans were somewhat more cohesive in their views, their Policy Committee, which had a staff of twelve, at least met fairly frequently, after which Taft or Knowland “would,” as one writer puts it, “emerge to announce Republican opposition to the latest Democratic spending program” or to some other New Dealish proposal. The main function of the three-person staff of the Democratic Policy Committee, housed in Capitol Office G-18, a small two-room suite next to the Press Gallery, was to record senators’ voting records on index cards. “All we got out of the Policy Committee in those days were the little white cards,” George Reedy would recall. “No one quite knew what to do with it.”
But no one had known what to do with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, either.
Assembling a new staff for the Policy Committee wasn’t easy. Johnson wanted Donald Cook to head its legal activities, but Cook, having worked for Johnson before, wouldn’t work for him again. (Cook would never work for Johnson again; he kept finding excuses to turn down Johnson’s repeated job offers; in 1964, Johnson, now President, would offer the brilliant attorney, by then president of a major utility company, the post of Secretary of the Treasury, but Cook declined.) Now, in 1953, leaving the Securities and Exchange Commission to make room for Eisenhower’s choice, he excused himself by saying, disingenuously, that he had made a commitment, impossible to break, to join a private company. Johnson wanted Bryce Harlow to head the committee’s non-legal side, but Harlow was still unwilling to accept the “blacksnake.” (He would remain unwilling; he, too, would turn down repeated job offers from Johnson.) Johnson then offered the post to Jim Rowe, only to be turned down again. Nonetheless a staff was assembled—a competent staff, if not an outstanding one. George Reedy and Cook’s self-effacing, mild but diligent deputy, Gerald Siegel, were brought over from the Preparedness Committee, and Johnson also hired Roland Bibolet, who had been McFarland’s aide. Suddenly there were six desks crammed into G-18’s outer room, and the Senate’s Democratic Party had a staff capable of performing the new functions that the Democratic Leader had in mind for it.
These functions were not at all what the political scientists had envisioned, for Lyndon Johnson didn’t want clear-cut positions or issues, or a “definite choice.”
His reasons were partly personal—that deep aversion to issues that had manifested itself throughout his entire political life; and that desire for unanimity which Gerry Siegel had observed on the Preparedness Subcommittee and which he was now to see again. His reasons were partly strategic. Raising issues could only divide the party, Johnson felt. How could a Douglas and an Eastland, a Lehman and a Stennis, ever be reconciled?—the gap was simply too wide to be bridged. The mere raising of many issues would spotlight the Democratic schism, would foster dissension and the disunity that would undermine a Leader’s authority, and ultimately make him an object of derision. He wanted unity, and he made clear to his newly formed Policy Committee staff that it was their job to take the preliminary steps necessary to produce it.
The lawyerly Siegel would analyze the drafts of legislation that senators were planning to introduce, and he or Reedy would solicit comments from the other senators interested in the same subject. “We’d call individual senators who were objecting to something in a bill, and we’d explore their thinking and determine what would meet their objections.” Then Siegel would set to work, to, as he puts it, “make the changes … necessary to adjust to the reality….” The staff’s job, in other words, was to devise compromises within the party, to see that dissent was muffled before it became open. Then Lyndon Johnson would confer—in person or over the phone—with the senators involved, and try to win their agreement to the compromise.
This procedure, of course, had profound significance for the Senate. The Senate had always been the citadel of individualists, of independents, of ambassadors from sovereign states negotiating with each other—from positions of sovereignty. Although there had always been exceptions, senators had to a considerable extent negotiated, either in person or through their assistants, directly with each other—had negotiated among themselves. Now, gradually—very gradually at first, almost imperceptibly—a change was taking place. Senators were still negotiating with each other, of course, but now they were also negotiating through Lyndon Johnson. He—or his Policy Committee staffers—were representing senators’ opinions to other senators. He was telling one senator what an opposing senator was asking for—and what he would really settle for. He was telling Gerry Siegel what wording to put in the next draft of a senator’s bill. The beginning of this change can be dated precisely: the first meeting of the transformed and revitalized Democratic Policy Committee—the Lyndon Johnson Policy Committee—on February 3, 1953. Its evolution and growth would for some time be unnoticed by those—the Democratic senators—whom it was most directly affecting. But it had begun.
• • •
DISSENT ON THE POLICY COMMITTEE was muffled also by his selection of its nine members. On this committee, seniority was followed, for its four holdovers—Russell (of course), Green, Hill and Kerr—were allies on whose support he could count. He and his compliant Assistant Leader Earle Clements of Kentucky were ex officio members, and he filled the seventh seat with “Mr. Wisdom.” That left only two seats. To fulfill his pledge to Humphrey, Johnson had to fill them with liberals, but the infirmities of the liberal Humphrey had named, Jim Murray, were worsening so badly that Bobby Baker would describe him as “an echo who would do Johnson’s slightest bidding”; his vote could be counted on “to solidify Johnson’s control in party matters.” And if Murray was dependent on Johnson because of age, the other liberal he selected, Tom Hennings, was in a similar position because of alcohol.
Johnson wanted, in fact, unanimity on the Policy Committee. He didn’t want it to recommend a Democratic policy, throw its weight behind any Democratic bill or resolution, or issue any statement unless the stand was endorsed by, in Bobby Baker’s words, “one hundred percent—or at least ninety percent—of the Committee.” Exercising such caution “makes sense,” he explained to Baker. “If we can get our team solidly behind a bill and pick up scattered Republicans, we’ll win. Otherwise, we’ll lose. We’re a minorityparty, remember.” One hundred percent was the figure on which Johnson insisted in practice. “Unless there were no real serious objections, he wouldn’t come out of the Policy Committee with any decision,” Siegel says. But often, thanks to his selection of the committee’s members, there were no serious objections; the nine senators voted as one. Asked to describe the committee, George Smathers of Florida, who joined it in 1955, replied, “Lyndon Johnson … was really it. He ran it.”
Johnson’s use of the committee also muffled dissent. Practically the first piece of substantive legislation that it discussed—at its second meeting, on Tuesday, February 17, 1953—was the Hawaiian Statehood Bill, which Johnson reported would soon be brought to the floor by the GOP. Liberals were anxious to make the bill a party issue, believing that it was clear-cut. But the South saw the bill differently, feeling that admission to the Union of racially mixed Hawaii would mean another two votes in the Senate for cloture, and Russell raised objections in the Policy Committee, which, as the minutes tersely reported, finally took a position that blurred the issue: “The Committee discussed the Hawaiian Statehood Bill, and generally agreed that an effort should be made to amend that bill by granting statehood to Alaska as well.”
Other issues—virtually every issue, in fact, that came before the Democratic Policy Committee during Lyndon Johnson’s time as the Democratic Leader—were handled the same way.
The committee’s meetings, held every other Tuesday over lunch in the inner room of the G-18 suite, were the epitome of the traditional senatorial bonhomie and clubbiness. Its nine members were all members of the Senate “club,” and they were easy with each other. They would stroll into the staff room, “usually late, with the air of a man dropping into another’s office to have a drink and, having nothing better to do at the moment, to pass the time of day,” William White was to say, and head toward the tall open door in the rear where the courtly Skeeter stood to welcome them. Nothing could have been more pleasant than to see the youngest member of the committee, the youngest by half a dozen years, who happened to be its chairman, walk through the room with a gently guiding hand on the elbow of Murray, whose gait seemed more unsteady at each meeting, or stand listening deferentially and appreciatively to Green or Russell. Just inside the door there would be the hand-shaking, the backslapping, the “Glad to see ya’s,” the “Those were great remarks you made down there,” the rough, masculine joking before, with Skeeter firmly closing the door against any eavesdropping, the senators sat down, beneath the glittering senatorial chandelier, to the fruit cocktails embedded in ice and the thick sirloins served on the starched white tablecloth that had been spread over the long table flanked by the tall senatorial bookcase and the elegant senatorial fireplace and gilt mirror. Unless Russell brought up some matter he felt required lengthy discussion, the talk wouldn’t touch on serious matters until dessert (usually ice cream), when the chairman would turn to the agenda. Since the Democrats were in the minority, they had no responsibility for the scheduling of bills to be brought to the floor; Johnson might say that Taft or Knowland was planning to place a particular piece of legislation on the Calendar, and ask, “Does anybody have any objection?” and if one of the committee members did, the matter would be discussed.
The Republicans were, in 1953, issuing statements of purpose for their Policy Committee, rules for its operation. Johnson wanted no statements and no rules—nothing in writing. Political scientists who attempted to analyze its activities found themselves baffled. “Nowhere have the Democrats set down the functions for their Policy Committee,” Professor Hugh Bone of the University of Washington was to note in 1958. Journalists were baffled, too. “From that committee there were no leaks, none at all,” one recalls. Reporters would be reduced to waiting in the corridor outside G-18 in the hope that Johnson would emerge at the end of the meeting to tell them what Democratic “policy” had evolved. And often there was no policy to report at all. Nothing could have been more informal, more relaxed—more in the traditional Senate way—than the operation of the Democratic Policy Committee.
Under the bonhomie and the backslapping, however, behind those tall doors where nine men met seemingly as friends, developments were taking place that would have deep significance for the party, for the Senate, and, it would turn out, for the United States. Lyndon Johnson’s Democratic Policy Committee was not reconciling but ignoring conflicts among Democrats, not clarifying party policy but blurring it. The committee was being turned into a device to discourage the discussion of issues. Liberals were angered by that turn, as Bobby Baker was to say. They “saw the Democratic Policy Committee as Johnson’s private rubber stamp—which it was—and they accused LBJ of using the [committee] as a ploy to place on the back burner those bills he did not want called up. They were not entirely wrong. ‘I don’t see any profit,’ LBJ told me, ‘in calling up bills so that Jim Eastland and Herbert Lehman can insult each other, or so that Paul Douglas and Albert Gore can exercise their lungs. Why should we cut ourselves up and then lose …?’”
And it was a very effective device. Democratic Party councils—notably, the caucus—and the Democratic side of the Senate floor had always been platforms for the liberals’ demand for social justice, for social change, for the calls for equality from Douglas and Humphrey and Lehman. There were no liberal orators on the Democratic Policy Committee. Of the many impressive liberal senatorial voices in the party, not one was on the committee that enunciated the party’s policy. Room G-18 was an ideal place in which to kill an issue quietly; behind its closed doors there was no voice to keep the issue alive. As a result, the Democratic Party now appeared far more unified than it had in the recent past, but the unity was a unity that was, for the first time, imposed by the Democratic Leader. The transformation of the Policy Committee therefore had the same side effect as did the transformation of the seniority system: an increase in Lyndon Johnson’s power. Moreover, since the committee was supposedly setting party policy, he could say there was less need for party caucuses. During the first four years that he had been in the Senate—before he was Democratic Leader—the Democratic Caucus had met twenty-one times, or about five times a year. Under his leadership, that changed. For six of the first seven years that he was Leader, the caucus met only once a year. During the other year—1956—it did not meet at all. In only one year that he was Leader—1960—did the caucus meet more frequently—four times—and then only because of political considerations relating to Johnson’s run for the 1960 presidential nomination. After Johnson left the leadership, Democratic Caucuses were again held more frequently: five times each in 1961 and 1962, four in 1963, eight in both 1964 and 1965.
AND LYNDON JOHNSON was making other changes that involved the Policy Committee, changes more subtle—and more far-reaching.
The first two topics raised by the committee’s new chairman at the committee’s initial, February 3, luncheon meeting were the schedule of future meetings (twelve-thirty every Tuesday) and the method of paying for them (“A fund was established, to be financed by a $25 contribution from each member,” the minutes reported. “You know Dick,” Lyndon Johnson joked. “Dick wants to know who’s paying for these steaks.”) The third topic was presented just as casually—although a great deal of not-at-all-casual thought had gone into it.
“Senator Johnson (Tex.) … explained that there was a need for liaison between the Policy Committee and the Democratic members of [Standing] Committees,” the minutes reported. He “presented a draft of a letter to be sent by him to each of the ranking Democratic members on standing committees, requesting that they work out an arrangement whereby either some senator on the committee or some minority staff member keep the Policy Committee staff advised as to what is going on in the various committees.”
Johnson had, of course, “counseled” with his Policy colleagues beforehand, and as soon as he made the suggestion, Senator Hill said at once “that he thought it an excellent idea.” Senator Russell agreed, but suggested, possibly by prearrangement, that the liaison be kept on the staff level. “There being no objection, Senator Johnson (Tex.) stated that the letter would be redrafted, in accordance with the suggestions,” and the next day the ranking Democrat on each of the fifteen Standing Committees received the letter:
The Senate Democratic Policy Committee is in need of regular information upon the activities of the various Legislative Committees of the Senate. I have been requested by the Policy Committee to ask your help in meeting this problem.
If you could designate a staff member of [your] Committee … who could contact Roland Bibolet… on a weekly basis, it would be greatly appreciated. Bill analyses are not requested, but a report upon the status of legislation pending in your Committee that affects the Senate Democrats as a whole and the probable timetable for action on this legislation would be of great value.
With assurances of high esteem and respect, I am,
Sincerely yours,
Lyndon B. Johnson
No suggestion could on its face have been more logical, simply more conducive to the efficient operation of the Senate and to the unity of the Democrats in the Senate. If a single senator glimpsed the possibility of further implications behind the seemingly innocuous request, there was no indication of it. By Policy’s next meeting, Johnson could report that “replies furnishing the names of committee staff members” were coming in at a rapid rate.
But there were further implications. In the past, each of the Senate’s Standing Committees had operated as a totally independent barony, generally advancing its bills without more than cursory reference to other committees’ bills—not infrequently, in fact, advancing bills whose contents conflicted with other committees’ bills. Some of the more irascible chairmen were, in fact, prone to give notably short shrift to inquiries about schedules, or bill content, from the party leadership. This lack of coordination contributed to the Senate’s inefficiency: it was one of the primary reasons for the traditional end-of-session logjam in which major bills from many different committees arrived on the floor at the same time. It also contributed to the committees’ independence, to their almost absolute freedom from any outside control—and therefore to the power of their chairmen. Now, with that February 4 letter, the situation was changed. An outside entity, the Democratic Policy Committee, would henceforth be advised weekly on the status of bills within the Standing Committees. The Policy Committee could notify the committees’ ranking members (the same senators who would be the chairmen again when the Democrats took back the majority) of potential scheduling conflicts, could suggest that a bill be moved forward or held back, could by doing so intervene in the all-important strategic timing of action on legislation. The Policy Committee would, after that letter, also be regularly apprised of the content of proposed legislation, including legislation that was still under discussion by a Standing Committee or one of its subcommittees—legislation that was still in the early stages of being formulated or reshaped. Policy staffers Reedy and Siegel and Bibolet—and their boss—would be much better able to analyze the legislation, to “call individual senators, explore their thinking,” mediate between opposing points of view; to perform, in short, a role hitherto performed only by the mighty chairmen, and their staffers.
The chairmen had, in fact, been to some degree removed from this new arrangement. It was not they with whom the Policy Committee—and that Leader who controlled the Policy Committee so absolutely—was communicating, but rather a member of their committee’s staff.
And while the degree was small, it was to become larger. Lyndon Johnson made it larger. By the mid-1950s, after Bobby Baker had been promoted to being Skeeter Johnston’s assistant, Baker had begun meeting, on behalf of the Policy Committee, with the fifteen committee staff directors as a group, ostensibly to encourage them, urge them forward, but in those meetings he of course not only inevitably learned more about the inner workings of their committees but also made them feel more comfortable about answering his specific, more detailed, more pointed questions when he would call them later on the phone. By the mid-1950s, in fact, Lyndon Johnson would be taking the unprecedented step of meeting himself with the staff directors as a group. The fifteen men were invited from their rooms in the Senate Office Building to the Capitol, where, over coffee, in the words of one staff director, “he came in and massaged us, about how important we were and how we should get back and get our chairmen cracking and get those bills out of committee.” “Of course it helped him to deal directly with the staff,” Bibolet says. “Sure it did. He couldn’t control chairmen. He could control staff. And he dealt with staff, or Baker and Reedy did, more and more.”
The change was gradual—very gradual during 1953 and 1954, because the Democrats had only a minority party’s input into legislative scheduling and content. But even in 1953 and 1954 the change was taking place. One of the constants in the Senate of the United States had always been the total independence of the chairmen barons. In 1953 and 1954, these senators still thought they were totally independent, but in reality a bit had been gently slipped into their mouths, a bit attached to a checkrein. Committee schedules—the chairmen’s schedules—had never been coordinated before. Their schedules were being coordinated now. In the past, discussions with the Policy Committee about the content of “their” bills, the bills before their committees, had been held, when a chairman deigned to allow the holding of them at all, only by them. Now the content of their bills was being discussed with the Policy Committee by members of their staffs. These staffs were consulting not just with them but with George Reedy, and with Reedy’s boss. In 1953 and ’54 the bit was hardly noticeable. The reins were still loose.
But they would be tightened.
LYNDON JOHNSON’S TRANSFORMATION of the seniority rule and the Policy Committee combined to give him so much new power that the entire old order of affairs on the Democratic side of the Senate was substantially altered, both for liberals and for conservatives.
This alteration had greater implications for the conservatives, of course, for in the old power structure the power had been theirs. During the days in which the alteration was occurring—during the earliest weeks of Lyndon Johnson’s leadership, in January and February, 1953—had there arisen an understanding among any of the party’s “Big Bulls” of its implications, it could have been easily stopped. Had even one of the mighty chairmen realized the long-term effect of what Lyndon Johnson was doing, and explained it to others, Lyndon Johnson would not have been able to do it.
If, however, even a glimmer of any such understanding arose, there is no evidence of it. On the contrary, the reaction of the Senate’s barons to the changes that would eventually drastically reduce their cherished power and independence was only praise: “Excellent,” said Walter George, “Excellent,” said Lister Hill. The southern conservatives were loudest in their praise. They saw the changes Johnson had made in the Policy Committee as a means of muffling the liberal firebrands. They appear not to have realized the implications of those changes for them.
Did even the wisest of them—the shrewdest, the most astute parliamentarian of all these astute parliamentarians—realize the implications? Richard Russell could of course have stopped the changes with a word, with a shake of his head, with a wink, but he supported the changes, and if Russell was for them, who would be against them? If Russell was for them, who, indeed, would even bother to analyze them, to think about them in the detail required to understand their long-term consequences?
We can never know definitively the extent to which Russell and the other southern barons supported these changes because they wanted Lyndon Johnson to be President, believing that if he became President, he would help prevent radical change in the nation’s racial laws; or because they wanted Johnson to have power in the Senate; or because they thought the changes would improve the Senate; or because they thought the changes would strengthen the Democratic Party. The extent to which Johnson kept the senatorial barons from understanding the true implications of the changes—the extent to which he may have tricked them—will also never be known definitively. But after long discussions about these very changes with Johnson, Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote that
He accomplished this almost without conflict or opposition precisely because authority and influence of this kind had been of no significance to the exercise of Senate power and were not perceived as a potential threat to those who ruled. It did not occur to his powerful associates—respectfully consulted in every move—that from such insubstantial resources Lyndon Johnson was shaping the instruments that would make him arbiter and, eventually, the master of the United States Senate.
THE CHANGES LYNDON JOHNSON had effected in the seniority system and in the Policy Committee had increased his power—but at the same time they had increased the power, and the effectiveness, of his party. That was why these first weeks after he was elected Democratic Leader were a watershed in his life. With only a single major exception—the bringing of rural electrification to his congressional district—his previous use of power had created power mainly for himself. Now, in 1953, for the first time, with his election as Leader, his fate had been linked indissolubly with something far larger than himself, something that transcended the boundaries of a single congressional district. Attaining power for himself without attaining power for his party had been impossible. His political genius had always been used only for himself; now it had been used for the Democratic Party in the Senate—and it had transformed both the Senate Democrats and, to a lesser extent, the Senate itself.
*In all the previous postwar Congresses, fourteen committees had had thirteen members, Appropriations twenty-one members, for a total of 203.