Part IV
22
AND NOW THE LIFE of Lyndon Johnson was to become linked with something larger than a party or the Senate. The chorus of approval that greeted Hubert Humphrey’s motion in the Democratic Caucus of January 2, 1953, to make Johnson’s election unanimous had installed him as his party’s leader in one of the two houses of the national legislature, and his party was the opposition party; there was no Democratic President to whom he had to defer; that vote in the caucus made Lyndon Johnson one of the two or three most prominent and influential Democrats in America. His life was now to be indissolubly entwined with his country’s. And, within a very short time after that link was soldered fast, it became apparent that Lyndon Johnson’s political gifts were not limited to the institutional or to the tactical—that they could operate on levels far above those.
THE ENTWINING HAD BEGUN, of course, before January 2, had begun with the maneuvering to win the leadership, and with the planning of his strategy for using the leadership, which had taken place on the ranch, and on his trips to Washington in November and December, 1952, when he had grasped so quickly the fact and the implications of Eisenhower’s popularity.
Eisenhower’s first moves after the election had demonstrated that he might become more popular still: fulfilling his campaign pledge to “go to Korea,” he went there even before his inauguration, and his actions on the trip reminded Americans of his calm decisiveness before D-Day. General Mark Clark, commander-in-chief of the UN forces in Korea, and South Korean President Syngman Rhee had developed plans for an all-out new offensive; Eisenhower gave them no chance to present them. Instead, as his biographer Stephen Ambrose writes,
for three days, Eisenhower did what he had done so often during World War II; he visited frontline units and talked with the senior commanders and their men. Despite the bitter cold and snow-covered ground, Eisenhower bundled up in a heavy pile jacket, fur-lined hat, and thermo boots to see for himself. He flew a reconnaissance mission over the front. He studied the artillery duel with his binoculars, chatted with troops, ate outdoor meals from a mess kit….
Plans for an all-out offensive, he concluded, were irrational. The situation was intolerable, he said; the only solution was to end the war on honorable terms as soon as possible, and get the troops home. America nodded in agreement.
And as the new President’s personality impressed itself on America, America was coming, day by day, to love it more and more. While some columnists had expressed disappointment over the failure of Eisenhower’s Inaugural Address to speak to domestic issues—it dealt almost entirely with foreign policy—and while the speech had not been nearly partisan enough for the more rabid Republicans, even the liberal columnist Richard Rovere had to call it “statesmanlike” and admit that it “was appreciated by most people and fervently admired by some.” And the most significant moment of the Inauguration had occurred not during the Address but in the moment before it. Repeating the oath of office after Chief Justice Fred Vinson, Eisenhower wore a serious, determined expression, but as he said “I do,” he turned toward the huge crowd below and suddenly shot his arms up high over his head in a wide V-for-victory sign, and he grinned, and as his great wide smile beamed over the crowd, the cheering began, and the warmth of it was enough to make even hardened politicians and observers understand, some of them for the first time, just how much America liked Ike.
As the implications of the size of Eisenhower’s margin had sunk in on Democrats, along with the figures from the suburbs and even from the cities that had once been Democratic strongholds, many Democratic leaders had come to “privately fear that the November vote may represent a more or less permanent shift in the party balance of power,” the Alsops wrote. While Johnson had still been down on the Pedernales, and making his quick trips back and forth to Washington to sew up the leadership, a feeling almost of panic set in among Democrats, a feeling that centered on the Senate. As the Alsops wrote, “The great movers and shakers of the recent past, the chairmen of powerful committees—Southerners almost to a man—are movers and shakers no longer. Accustomed to page one in the newspapers, they now find themselves among the want ads—if they are lucky.” Senatorial barons who had for decades dispensed patronage with a lavish hand suddenly found many of the elevator operators, doorkeepers, file clerks, secretaries, and committee staffers who had depended on them out of work. And even the most cursory look ahead at 1954 showed that the situation was likely to remain unchanged. “A whole series of shaky Democrats are up for re-election, while only two or three Republicansneed worry…. [T]he Senate will remain Republican.” The southerners bitterly blamed northern liberals for their plight, and the liberals, with equal bitterness, blamed the South. The Democrats were a party in disarray, a party, as Timewould put it, “looking for an excuse to fly to pieces,” a party reeling and bloody amid the wreckage of a battlefield on which they had suffered a great defeat.
But that was not how Lyndon Johnson saw the defeat, not even in its first, worst, moments. He had grasped the unpleasant facts of the election very quickly, of course, as was shown by the analysis he made in the “Reedy” memorandum of November 12. And while he had had to delay using these facts to support his plan to change the seniority system, waiting until after his election as Leader was a. fait accompli to reveal his potentially controversial plans for the system, no such discretion had been necessary in using those facts to propose an overall strategy for the Senate Democrats. And he had also seen, almost immediately after the election, that those facts had a deep significance for such a strategy, a strategy that went far beyond the seniority system—because while Eisenhower was popular with voters, in the Senate it was not the Eisenhower wing of the GOP but the Taft wing that ruled, and with those Old Guard senators Eisenhower was not popular at all.
It was still in November, 1952, that Dallas-based public relations man and political speechwriter Booth Mooney received a telephone call from Walter Jenkins asking him to come down to Austin for a job interview with his boss, who, Jenkins said, was going to be elected Democratic Leader when the new Congress convened. The “interview” lasted for three and a half hours, and, Mooney was to recall, “He talked nearly non-stop. We left his office only once, to go to the men’s room, and he continued to talk as we stood side by side” at the urinals. And the gist of Johnson’s monologue, Mooney was to recall, was that if he was elected Democratic Leader, he would have a great opportunity, “an opportunity to lead his colleagues in support of the Republican President.”
Mooney was not the only person to whom Lyndon Johnson tried to explain that Dwight Eisenhower’s popularity could be not a disaster but an opportunity. It could be an opportunity for himself. “The way he [Johnson] looked at it, about half the voters of Texas were against him,” Mooney recalls. “He had to make a dent in that large body of citizens before 1954, when he would be up for re-election…. He wanted to—he must—project a more conservative image,” and what better way to do that than by supporting a Republican President? And it could be an opportunity for his party as well.
Since Eisenhower was so popular, Lyndon Johnson explained, whoever was supporting him would be on the popular side. The Democrats, he said, could be on the popular side—particularly if they were supporting Eisenhower and the Republicans weren’t.
And, Lyndon Johnson said, if they handled things right, the Democrats could be supporting the President against his own party. At a time, between the election and the Inauguration, when the prevailing opinion not only of Democrats but of commentators of all shades of political opinion was that mounting a comeback in any near future would be difficult if not impossible for the Democrats, Johnson said that that opinion was wrong—that, in fact, mounting a comeback in the near future would be easy.
It would be easy, he said, because the first issues that were going to come up in the Eighty-third Congress would be foreign policy issues, and in foreign policy the dominant Republicans in Congress (and in particular in the Senate, which would, because of its treaty-approving power, be the focus of foreign policy debate) were not Eisenhower’s natural allies but his natural enemies. It was the support of the eastern, internationalist wing of the party that had given Ike the presidential nomination over Taft, but the Taft wing consisted mostly of Republicans from the Midwest, bedrock of isolationism. The Ohioan’s midwestern allies—Jenner, Bourke Hickenlooper, Welker, Ferguson, Molly Malone—had yearned for years to dismantle the Roosevelt and Truman policies that the liberals thought were so wonderful. Now, they felt, their time had come at last. They would, Johnson was certain, move at once to repudiate Yalta, slash away at the Marshall Plan, and loosen or sever America’s ties with the United Nations and with NATO. But Eisenhower was not merely a supporter of NATO; he had been commander of NATO. Says George Reedy, who was down on the ranch with Johnson and was familiar with his thinking, Eisenhower “had actually spent most of… the preceding twenty or thirty years in virtual support of the foreign policies of Roosevelt and of Truman. The Republicans … under Taft were opposed to that policy, [so] he and the congressional Republicans were just bound to be at loggerheads.” All the Democrats had to do was “take advantage” of the situation.
JOHNSON SAID THIS FIRST, of course, to Rayburn and Russell in long telephone calls from his paneled, comfortable study in the white house near the Pedernales, and both Rs agreed, wholeheartedly.
With one, the reasons for agreement included the personal. Sam Rayburn knew Dwight Eisenhower, and he liked him. Eisenhower had been born in Denison, a town in Rayburn’s district, and although his family had moved to Kansas when Ike was still a baby, that meant something to Rayburn. “He was a wonderful baby,” he would say with a grin. And Eisenhower’s parents had been poor, and that meant more. And Rayburn admired the General, not only for his wartime leadership but for the candor of his testimony during his frequent appearances before congressional committees; Sam Rayburn, who put such a high premium on truthfulness, regarded Dwight Eisenhower as a truthful man. Besides, he trusted Ike’s judgment on international affairs and defense. He would soon be writing a friend that “I told President Eisenhower … that he should know more about what it took to defend this country than practically anyone and that if he would send up a budget for the amount he thought was necessary to put the country in a position to defend ourselves against attack, I would promise to deliver 95 percent of the Democratic votes in the House….” As for domestic programs, Rayburn said, he would oppose Eisenhower if the President tried to undo “the good things we Democrats did” in the New and Fair Deals, but would provide the votes if the President tried to expand them. Beyond this, the adage that the opposition’s duty was to oppose was not Ray-burn’s adage. He didn’t want to oppose simply for the sake of opposing. “Any jackass can kick a barn down,” he said. “But it takes a good carpenter to build one.”
With Richard Russell, the personal paled before the patriotic. Russell, who had studied the generals of Rome, considered Eisenhower a great military leader, and was happy to rely on his judgment in defense matters. And, as Evans and Novak were to write, this “old-fashioned patriot” was “genuinely worried about the impact on the rest of the world if the Democratic Congress should be openly hostile to the Republican President.”
Convincing the rest of the senatorial Democrats was more difficult. Hour after hour, with senator after senator, repeating the arguments over and over again ten times, twenty times, in a single day, Lyndon Johnson tried to make them understand how popular Eisenhower was, and that, as Reedy puts it, “to announce right at the start that, by God, we’re going to give Eisenhower a battle down the line would have been just suicide,” whereas if they supported the hero, they would be on the popular side, and if they supported him more firmly than the Republicans, the Republicans would, as Reedy puts it, “look cheap and partisan, whereas the Democrats would resemble statesmen willing to put petty issues of partisanship aside to battle for the public good.” “He spent hour after hour in personal conferences” trying to make them understand that the popularity of the man who had vanquished the Democrats could mean not doom but hope for the Democrats, that it could in fact be the very key to a Democratic resurgence. When the Democrats gathered in a group—at the January 2 caucus, at which they elected him Leader—the acceptance statement he read to them repeated these arguments. “I have never agreed … merely to obstruct,” he said. Instead, he said, the Democrats should support “a program geared not just to opposing the majority but to serving America.” When, in his State of the Union address on February 1, Eisenhower said that foreign policy “must be developed and directed in the spirit of true bipartisanship,” Johnson had Reedy draft a response which he read to the Policy Committee at its February 3 luncheon. “Americans everywhere have been gratified by the President’s call for ‘true bipartisanship,’” it said. “The issues of war and peace are far too serious to be settled in the arena of narrow, partisan debate. They can be solved only by the united wisdom and efforts of all Americans regardless of political affiliations.” The Policy Committee approved the statement unanimously. It wouldn’t be merely in the Foreign Relations Committee that the Democrats were going to line up on Ike’s side. All-out defense of the international agreements, of NATO, was going to be the stance of the Senate Democrats on the floor as well.
Foreign policy was indeed the area on which the Republican Old Guard focused first—and the very first target in their sights was Yalta.
Isolationism was back on Capitol Hill, and it was back strong. Journalists who remembered the America First Committee filling the Senate galleries in 1940 and 1941 saw what Richard Rovere called a “resurgent isolationism” in the way the galleries were filled in 1953 when Joe McCarthy was scheduled to speak. The thunderclap of Pearl Harbor may have demolished in an instant the arguments of the Borahs and Nyes, the thunderclap of Hiroshima may have made it even clearer that in an age of nuclear weapons and modern air forces, the oceans were no longer moats; but those thunderclaps seem to have been heard only faintly in Senate Republican councils, in which the views of quite a sizable bloc (including, of course, the Republican leaders, the defiantly isolationist Taft and the suavely isolationist Bridges) sometimes seemed to resemble the views of the Republican senators who had helped Henry Cabot Lodge Sr. defeat the Treaty of Versailles.
Yalta gave these throwbacks a focus for their rage, for it symbolized so much of what they detested and feared: the usurpation of the sacred constitutional powers of Congress by the hated Roosevelt; the “softness” on Communism that had left Eastern European nations under Stalin’s heel; not to mention the treachery implicit in those “secret” agreements that they were certain existed. The isolationists had dreamed for years of having the Senate repudiate the public agreements, unearth the secret ones, and initiate the constitutional amendment process that would prohibit any future President from ever entering into such agreements. And they wanted action (“the form of which,” as Ambrose comments dryly, “was unspecified”) to liberate the enslaved satellites. As Sam Shaffer,Newsweek’s chief congressional correspondent, was to recall years later, “It should have been so easy for Republicans … to translate the dream into reality…. All that was needed to make the dream come true was a sweep in which a Republican Congress and a Republican President could join hands in repudiating the Yalta Agreements as soon as possible after taking the oath of office on inaugural day. It is difficult to comprehend today how intensely the Republican politicians clung to this article of faith.” Now their faith had been rewarded; the sweep had occurred; it seemed in the weeks following the November elections that nothing could stop them from realizing the dream—and thereby, they felt sure, becoming, once again, America’s majority party.
During the campaign, despite his role as implementer of Roosevelt’s agreements, Eisenhower had let the Old Guard believe that he acquiesced in their hard line, but as President he was not disposed to continue doing so, particularly after the State Department reminded him that it was at Yalta that the Allies had been given their occupation rights in Berlin and Vienna, and that if America could repudiate the agreements, so could Russia. His attempts to explain this to the Old Guard met with a response so stony that, on February 7, the new President noted in his diary, “Republican senators are having a hard time getting through their heads that they now belong to a team that includes rather than opposes the White House.” Nonetheless, he would not give them what they wanted. Instead of disavowing the Yalta accords, the resolution he proposed to Congress on February 20 merely rejected “interpretations” of the accords that “have been perverted to bring about the subjugation of free peoples.” On the subject of freeing the satellites, the President only “hoped” that they would “again enjoy the right of self-determination.” The Republicans’ new President did not even mention the “secret” agreements that they had for so long been certain existed; Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had investigated, and had found that they simply didn’t exist.
As congressional Republicans realized that Eisenhower was not repudiating the accords but only accusing the Russians of subverting them, their fury boiled over. Taft proposed an amendment that said, “The adoption of this resolution does not constitute any determination by Congress as to the validity or invalidity of any of the provisions of the said agreements,” and Taft’s allies on the Old Guard-controlled Foreign Relations Committee—Hickenlooper, Langer, Ferguson, and Knowland—were planning to offer other amendments, far harsher than Taft’s, in a closed-door committee hearing that had been scheduled for February 24.
On the eve of that meeting, however, a new voice was suddenly heard—a Democratic voice, the voice of the Senate’s Democratic Leader. Late that evening, Lyndon Johnson telephoned William White of the Times to say that the resolution the Democrats wanted was the resolution Eisenhower had proposed—without any changes. Senate Republicans, he said, would face a fight from the Democrats if they tried to amend it. He read White a statement: “President Eisenhower’s proposal to serve notice on the world that the United States will not acquiesce in the Soviet enslavement drive is one that all Americans can embrace. There is in the President’s resolution no trace of the partisanship that could lead to discord and disunity. Congress should be able to respond in the same high spirit. It is to be hoped that the resolution—as written by the President and his advisers—will receive the unanimous approval of the Senate and thereby serve to notify mankind that Americans are united against Soviet tyranny.”
Pointing out at the Foreign Relations hearing that “it would not be in the national interest to repudiate agreements such as those establishing American rights to be in Berlin or providing free elections in Poland,” Dulles pleaded for a unanimity behind the Eisenhower resolution that would present a united front to the Russians. “If the resolution is going to be controversial, if it were to pass the Senate by a narrow margin, it would be an absolute detriment to what we are trying to do,” he said. The committee adopted the Taft Amendment nonetheless. Telephoning Johnson in an effort to head off harsher amendments that would dramatize to the public the deep rift between the White House and the Republican Old Guard, Dulles attempted to persuade him and the Democrats to support the Taft Amendment—which was, after all, relatively mild—but got a flat refusal. It was Eisenhower, not Taft, whom Johnson wanted to be supporting. “How can we criticize the Russians for perverting understandings if we refuse to admit their validity?” he asked Dulles.
Stalin’s death on March 4 was providential for the Republicans, since it allowed them to declare that in such unsettled times it served no useful end to pass a resolution that would make it harder to establish a relationship with the new Soviet leadership. When Eisenhower told a news conference that all “I really want to do is put ourselves on record … that we never agreed to the enslavement of peoples that has occurred,” Taft admitted that it was probably better “to forget the whole thing.” But the Republican rift had been revealed; it could no longer be papered over. And neither could the fact that the Democrats were on the President’s side of the rift. Johnson had positioned his party precisely as he—he alone—had wanted it positioned, and the wisdom of his strategy was dramatically apparent. Grand in scale, this overarching political plan that he had conceived down on the ranch in a flash of inspiration had proved to be a political masterstroke. As George Reedy was to say: “The picture before the public was that of a great war hero and a very popular President under attack by a disruptive Republican Party while a constructive Democratic Party was rushing to his defense.” In addition, by creating an issue on which most Senate Democrats were on the same side, Johnson had also increased his party’s unity and strength, particularly since the issue was one especially close to the hearts of the liberals who had been most suspicious of his leadership. And he had increased his strength. The forty-seven Democrats he led had—for a moment, at least—been a unified group.
The strategy had another, larger, result—one that, just a few weeks before, might have seemed all but impossible. Johnson had held back a rising isolationist tide that, had it washed away the Yalta agreements, might next have swept unchecked toward the Marshall Plan, NATO, the United Nations. In his first battle as Democratic Leader, Lyndon Johnson had scored a major triumph not only for himself and his party, but for his country as well.
AND THAT MAJOR VICTORY was almost immediately followed by a minor one that nonetheless was significant in its own right.
If they couldn’t win on the broad Yalta front, the Old Guard seemed to feel, at least they could take revenge on someone associated with it—even though his association had been in one of the most innocuous roles possible. Charles (Chip) Bohlen, a career foreign service officer, had been only an interpreter at the Crimea conference. He had since become widely recognized as one of America’s most knowledgeable experts on the Soviet Union, but when Eisenhower nominated him as Ambassador to Russia, his expertise was not what the Old Guard focused on. “Chip Bohlen was at Yalta,” Everett Dirksen said, shouting. “If he were my brother, I would take the same attitude I am expressing in the Senate this afternoon. He was associated with the failure. Mr. President, in the language of Missouri, the tail must go with the hide. I reject Yalta. So I reject Yalta men.” Despite a Foreign Relations Committee recommendation that the Senate advise and consent to the nomination, Bohlen’s name remained on the Executive Calendar for the next two months under the heading “Nominations Passed Over,” while on the floor Pat McCarran accused Secretary of State Dulles of concealing FBI files that would be damaging to the nominee, and Joe McCarthy, elaborating on that point, said that he had seen the files—and that they contained damaging information about Bohlen’s “family life,” a euphemism for homosexuality. He demanded that Dulles make the files available to the Senate.
Fearing it would set a damaging precedent, Eisenhower refused to open the files and also refused to retreat from his support of the nominee, dealing with the rumors in his own oblique fashion. Telling a press conference that Bohlen was “the best-qualified man for the post,” he added: “I have known Mr. Bohlen for some years. I was once, at least, a guest in his home, and with his very charming family….” And he refused to let Dulles retreat, informing him that he had checked, and was “confident that Bohlen had a normal family life.” When McCarthy responded to Dulles’ assurance that the FBI files contained no damaging material on Bohlen by demanding that the Secretary of State submit to a lie-detector test, Taft—in a rare event—chastised the Wisconsin senator and announced his support of the nominee. A compromise was worked out: one senator from each party, Taft and the Democrats’ John Sparkman, would be allowed to examine the files, and would then report back to the full Senate. Taft’s report gave the lie to Tail-Gunner Joe. “There was no suggestion anywhere by anyone reflecting on the loyalty of Mr. Bohlen in any way or any association by him with Communism or support of Communism or even tolerance of Communism,” he said. Nonetheless, when Bohlen’s nomination came to a vote, eleven members of Taft’s party continued to oppose him. Johnson had marshaled his troops into almost unbroken ranks, 45 to 2. The Republican vote was 37 to 11—which meant, as the press pointed out, that Democrats had lined up more solidly than Republicans in favor of the nomination made by the Republican President.
“THE HIGH-WATER MARK of the isolationist surge in the 1950s came upon what was known as the Bricker Amendment,” George Reedy was to recall. John W. Bricker of Ohio, stately and handsome, possessed of a full head of meticulously waved senatorial white hair and a consciousness of his senatorial dignity so profound that it was said that he always walked “as if someone was carrying a full-length mirror in front of him,” was a fervent admirer of Taft, whom he had three times backed for the Republican presidential nomination, and of McCarthy, whom he would support to the last, and a fervent hater of foreign aid, the United Nations, and all those he lumped with Eleanor Roosevelt under the contemptuous designation of “One Worlders.” He was the embodiment of the GOP’s reactionary Old Guard, and his amendment, introduced as a joint resolution—“S.J. Res. I”—at the opening of the Eighty-third Congress was the embodiment of the Old Guard’s rage at what it viewed as twenty years of presidential usurpation of Congress’s constitutional powers. And fueling the conservatives’ anger now was their fear that treaties and international agreements such as the United Nations Charter and Human Rights Covenant might not only provide a legal basis for the extension of federal control over matters previously regulated by the states, but might nullify specific state laws, such as the southern segregation laws. S.J. Res. I struck at the heart of executive activism by calling for a constitutional amendment to restrict the President’s power in foreign affairs.* Although the amendment would, in Ambrose’s words, go through “a complex and incomprehensible series of changes,” its continuing substance was that no international compact could be binding on the United States without the passage of positive legislation not only by Congress but in many cases by the legislatures of the individual states as well. Declaring that it would cripple an Administration’s ability to conduct negotiations with other nations by “making it represent forty-eight [state] governments in its dealings with foreign powers,” Eisenhower said privately that it was “stupid, a blind violation of the Constitution by stupid, blind isolationists.” In the American heartland, however, it touched a deep chord. The American Legion, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Chicago Tribune, the Committee for Constitutional Government, all leapt to support it. A newly formed organization, Vigilant Women for the Bricker Amendment, quickly obtained more than half a million signatures on petitions, mail running nine to one in its favor was pouring into Congress, and sixty-three senators joined Bricker in sponsoring it, enough to give S.J. Res. I the two-thirds of the Senate needed for passage even if all ninety-six senators voted. Among the co-sponsors were not only forty-five of the Senate’s forty-eight Republicans but nineteen Democrats, including many of the party’s southern hierarchy. And although the names did not include Walter George, the Senate’s bellwether on foreign affairs felt that “Many of our people are fearful and suspicious of the way the treaty-making power and the President’s power to make executive agreements have recently been used,” and let it be known that while some refinements in S J. Res. 1 might be necessary, he was in agreement with the philosophy behind it; without some new constitutionalcheck, George was to say, the country might “one day know one-man rule.”
“An incredible momentum built up behind the amendment,” Reedy would recall. “In all the years that I’ve been around the Congress … I don’t know of any other single legislative issue that has aroused such emotion. It… became apparent from the start that it could not be defeated on a straight-out vote. No one could vote against the Bricker Amendment with impunity, and very few could vote against it and survive at all—at least, so they thought.” Only the most liberal senators—no more than fifteen or twenty of them, not nearly the necessary one-third plus one—would vote against it. “There was no hope of stopping it through direct opposition.”
To Lyndon Johnson, S.J. Res. I was, as he said to Bobby Baker, “the worst bill I can think of,” for reasons that included not only the political (it was, after all, a slap at Democratic presidents, and its passage would be a major Republican victory) but the philosophical (if there was a single tenet he held consistently throughout his political career it was the necessity for broad latitude in the exercise of executive power) as well as the personal: the strongest of personal reasons for this man who wanted the world to think of him as “LBJ” and was certain that one day it would—at which time his connection with executive power would no longer be merely theoretical. S.J. Res. I “ties the President’s hands, and I’m not just talking about Ike. It will be the bane of every President we elect,” he told Baker.
Trying to stop the Bricker Amendment would, however, be extremely risky for Johnson. Among its most fervent supporters were not only a large majority of his Texas constituents but his key Texas financial backers, as Eisenhower suspected; once, when his aide W. Bedell Smith asked who was financing the avalanche of pro-Bricker “propaganda,” the President replied, “Probably those two millionaires from Texas”—by whom he appears to have been referring to the two oilmen who had contributed so lavishly to both his campaign and Johnson’s, Sid Richardson and Clint Murchison (although the President could also have been referring to H. R. Cullen and H. L. Hunt, who had also contributed heavily to both campaigns). And also among its supporters were Johnson’s key senatorial allies: Russell and virtually the entire Southern Caucus. It could be dangerous for him to oppose the Bricker Amendment if oilmen, press, and public became aware of what he was doing.
The best insurance against such awareness was to have someone else, preferably someone prominent, out in front in opposition—and who better than the President?
Having tried and failed to persuade Bricker to drop the whole thing, or at least to modify it, Eisenhower had realized that the Senator would not be budged, and had then tried to make the proposal look silly, telling his Cabinet that “Bricker seems determined to save the United States from Eleanor Roosevelt.” The “people for it,” he told Attorney General Herbert Brownell, “are our deadly enemies.” But the President, trying to avoid emphasizing the split within his party, had made most of his comments privately. To Dulles’ suggestion that he speak out more directly, he replied, “There was nothing fuzzy in what I told Bricker. I said we’d go just so far and no further.” “I know, sir,” Dulles replied, “but you haven’t told anybody else.”
Eisenhower’s stance sufficed for a time. Growing ambivalent about the resolution, Taft had his allies on Judiciary hold it in committee (to the growing annoyance of the committee’s chairman, Jenner, who said that “a secret revolutionary corps” was working against it). But on June 10, Taft, dying, turned the majority leadership over to Knowland, one of S.J. Res. I’s true believers, and just five days later Judiciary reported it out, with a favorable 9–5 vote. Afraid that it would be brought to the floor and passed before Congress adjourned, Johnson got into his big limousine, which pulled away from the Senate steps and headed for the State Department. The purpose of the trip was to keep the President standing firm against the amendment, and Johnson therefore wanted to relay, through Dulles, his ally on the issue, Taft’s judgment on the situation, in which he knew the President had come to trust. That afternoon Dulles sent Eisenhower a memo:
Lyndon Johnson was in to see me today. In the course of the conversation he mentioned the Bricker Amendment. He said he expected you would stand firm against it. He was confident it would be defeated unless you gave in. He added that Senator Taft had told him he did not think it would be brought up at this session unless you did give in on the matter.
Eisenhower thereupon not only announced publicly his “unalterable opposition” to Bricker’s text, but also had Brownell draw up a substitute resolution, and asked Knowland to introduce it—and the preliminary skirmishing over the new proposal insured that no action on the floor of the Senate had been taken when Congress adjourned for the year on August 4.
All that Fall and Winter, the Bricker Amendment stayed on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers, but statements on the issue came strictly from Republicans. The only word from the Senate’s Democratic Leader—made in a radio broadcast over an intra-state Texas network—was the innocuous hope that the Republicans would resolve their differences over “technicalities” and agree on a compromise text. Otherwise, from down on the Pedernales there was only silence.
But all through that Fall and Winter, Lyndon Johnson was sitting for hours every day in the big reclining chair in the study of his ranch, slouched and silent, in his hand a cigarette, on his face the expression that meant he didn’t want to be disturbed. Sometimes he would lunge up out of the chair, and, pushing open the study’s screen door, would walk outside along Marcus Burg’s concrete walk to the front gate, and as he passed the living room window, Reedy and Rather and Lady Bird could see the same expression on his face. Beyond the gate was the dirt path down to the little river, and the family cemetery and the site of the house in which he had been born, and he would walk along the path, one hand holding a cigarette, the other deep in a pants pocket. Sometimes he would stop and stand, motionless except for the hand jingling the coins in his pocket, a tall figure in rancher’s khaki staring unseeing toward the river or toward the hills. All that Fall and Winter, Lyndon Johnson was trying to deal with the knot of tangled political implications that the Bricker Amendment posed for him.
It was a knot of almost incredible complexity.
Defeating the amendment and thereby preserving the power of the presidency—his first objective—could not be accomplished even if he united his party’s liberal and moderate senators against it; there simply were not enough of them. He would have to turn conservative senators against it too, conservatives who were at the moment wholeheartedly for it—and not just Democratic conservatives but at least a few members of the Republican Old Guard.
Even if he somehow managed to turn enough conservatives against it, however, that feat—difficult though it would be—would not accomplish his other purposes, for the public would then be presented with a picture of the President and at least some of his party’s Old Guard as allies, and Johnson didn’t want them allied; he wanted the public to see a clear, vivid picture: the President, the trusted, idolized President—the beloved Ike—being fought by the Old Guard tooth and nail. And Johnson also wanted the picture to contain another dramatic element: the rescue of Ike from the Old Guard by his true friends, the Democrats in the Senate. He wanted the Senate Democrats to get the credit for defeating the Bricker Amendment and preserving the powers of the presidency.
Nor did the complications end there. He wanted credit not merely for his party, but for himself—a substantial share of the credit from liberal press and public for the amendment’s defeat. He wanted to be seen, and portrayed, as the general who had led the senatorial cavalry to the President’s rescue. But getting such credit would be especially difficult because of the situation in his own state. He could not appear, in the eyes of the conservative Texas constituency and of key supporters like Richardson and Murchison, and, most of all, in the eyes of Herman Brown, to be opposing limitations on the hated executive power. He would have to emerge from the coming battle in a position to convince these men—one of whom, Brown, was extremely hard to fool—that he had not opposed limitations but had supported limitations. He would have to be able to claim (and to allow southern conservatives in his own party to claim) that he and they had supported a constitutional amendment that would prevent future Yaltas.
So tangled and twisted together were all these strands that they composed a knot that might have been thought to be as beyond untying as the one Gordius wove together in Phrygia. But Alexander had solved the Gordian knot by simply slashing through it. Johnson solved his the same way—with a single slash. By the time Congress reconvened, he had conceived of the political masterstroke that would do the job. Turning conservatives against the Bricker Amendment seemed all but impossible, but Johnson thought of a way—perhaps the only way—to do so: by turning against it the senator most influential in foreign affairs with conservatives of both parties.
Not that persuading Walter George simply to oppose the Bricker Amendment would accomplish all of Johnson’s objectives. George’s opposition might move some of the Old Guard to oppose Bricker, but then the picture the public saw would be the somewhat blurred picture—of Ike and some Old Guarders on the same side—that Johnson didn’t want. He would therefore have to persuade George not only to oppose the Bricker Amendment but to offer an amendment of his own. The new amendment would have to split the GOP. It would have to still be strong enough—still contain sufficient curbs on presidential authority—so that the Old Guard would support it and Ike would oppose it, so that Ike would still be on one side of the issue and the isolationists on the other, but it would have to be less stringent, more moderate than the Bricker Amendment—moderate enough so that moderate Republicans who had been united with Ike in opposing Bricker would break away from him and support this new amendment. The GOP would therefore be split—and if the GOP was split, the balance of power in Senate voting would shift to the Democrats. If moderate Democrats supported the George Amendment, Senate Democrats would be in the position Johnson wanted: Democrats would be saving Ike from the Bricker Amendment—saving him from the isolationists in his own party. Moreover, the George Amendment would be a Democratic amendment. A Democratic proposal would become the focus of activity and interest. Although they might be in the minority, the Senate Democrats—the Democrats and their Leader—would have seized the initiative on the most prominent political issue of the day.
There would still be complications. The Democratic amendment—the George Amendment—would have to be popular with the public, and the popular side of the issue, as demonstrated by the overwhelming public support for Bricker, was the strong side, so the George Amendment would have to be a stringent curb on presidential power. But Johnson himself didn’t want a stringent curb. He would have to make certain, therefore, that the George Amendment, the amendment he had persuaded George to introduce, did not receive the necessary two-thirds vote. He had to persuade George to introduce an amendment—and then he had to make sure the amendment was not passed.
Which created another complication. He would need George’s support in Senate councils of the future as he had needed it in the past. He would never have it again if the old man felt humiliated by the reception of the proposal Johnson had persuaded him to introduce, and a defeat might well make George, who wasn’t used to defeats, feel humiliated. Johnson had to make sure that the defeat was not decisive, that the final vote was close. He decided that the George Amendment should pass by a majority—no one, not even Walter George, would feel humiliated by a majority vote—but not by the necessary two-thirds.
There was a final complication. At the end of the ensuing fight, Johnson’s reactionary Texas backers would have to be convinced that he himself had supported restrictions on presidential power. He would have to make sure that although he was arranging for the George Amendment to fail, he would be able to tell his constituents that he had worked earnestly for it to succeed. But, Johnson saw, that complication would be solved only if the George Amendment contained strong restrictions. If it did, and if he, along with Democratic conservatives, supported it, at least in public, he would be able to tell Richardson and Murchison that although the amendment had been defeated, he had personally supported it.
TANGLED AS WERE THESE COMPLICATIONS, the mind working down on the Pedernales was equal to them. By the time Lyndon Johnson returned to Washington on December 28, 1953, and Bobby Baker mentioned the Bricker Amendment to him, he was able to tell Baker: “We’ve got to stop the damn thing, and I think we can.”
The single necessity, of course, was Walter George’s agreement to stop supporting Bricker’s amendment and introduce his own. That was the masterstroke, the only way to cut through the Gordian knot. None of Johnson’s plans would work without George’s agreement. Johnson set out to get it—to persuade the senator who never changed his mind to change it this time.
“To get George to take on Bricker, that was quite an undertaking,” Hubert Humphrey would recall. Johnson did it in part with a memorandum, written by Gerald Siegel and analyzing, in Siegel’s dry style, the flaws in S.J. Res. I. And he did it in part—after what Siegel calls “just a quick reading of the memo”—with a demonstration of his persuasive powers.
“He called me into a meeting that was going on between himself, Bill White, and Walter George,” Siegel recalls. “I sat there and watched one of those really stellar performances of persuasion that he was so capable of with the dean of the Senate…. Walter George was still a formidable guy. He was getting a little old but…
“I sat there and witnessed Johnson … persuade Walter George that he should not… favor the Bricker Amendment. It was a rapid-fire, almost uninterrupted monologue. It wasn’t a give-and-take discussion. It was the Senator expressing just about every point of view that he thought would be effective…. Finally, after long discussion, Senator George … agreed to introduce a substitute for the Bricker Amendment.”
The substitute contained only two clauses. The first provided that no provision of a treaty could supersede the Constitution; the second that no “international agreement other than a treaty”—such as an executive agreement or the United Nations Charter—could become effective “as internal law in the United States … except by an act of Congress.”
Innocuous though the George Amendment may have been, however, it accomplished Johnson’s purposes. Since it contained none of the provisions to which internationalists had objected most strongly, it instantly attracted liberal and moderate support. And by reasserting the primacy of the Constitution over any treaty, it still contained a sufficient check on executive power so that the Old Guard—or at least all of it except its most rabidly isolationist members—could support it. Moreover, its wording, as Reedy was to say, “sounded very much like the language of the Bricker Amendment,” so it provided “a safe harbor to which Senators could flee who felt uneasy about the Bricker Amendment but who also felt compelled to vote for it under constituent pressure.” And its very introduction, on Wednesday, January 27, accomplished two of Johnson’s purposes: to move the Democrats to center stage on the issue, and to do so in the sympathetic role of presidential rescuer. “Within five minutes of the formal opening of the Senate’s long-awaited debate on the issue,” Walter George “momentarily seized the initiative for the Democrats,” White wrote in the Times. “Some Democrats privately said that Mr. George not only had moved ahead of the Republicans for the moment on the issue, but also that the effect of his effort would be greatly to reduce Republican embarrassment. Until today, the fight, in public at least, had been almost exclusively between the pro-Bricker and the pro-Eisenhower Republicans.”
Eisenhower was at first elated. “DDE not only has no objection to the George Amendment but actually believes it could work out to our advantage,” one of the President’s secretaries noted. “DDE believes this will get what we want on bipartisan basis.” Republican legislative leaders, feeling themselves rescued from an intra-party fight, breathed a sigh of relief. After calling on Ike the next morning, Ferguson, Millikin, and Majority Leader Knowland emerged from the White House full of optimism that “a broadly backed agreement was at hand.”
But the man who got what he wanted was not Eisenhower or Knowland but Lyndon Johnson. The Republican leaders arrived back at the Senate to find an enraged Bricker on the floor assailing the President for even considering replacing his amendment with George’s—and Bricker’s speech was so bitter that, White wrote, it “burned the last stick of any conceivable bridge remaining between his forces and the Eisenhower Administration.” And as the likely impact of newspaper coverage such as White’s sunk in, general Republican enthusiasm for the George proposal faded rapidly. At 4:57 p.m. on Thursday, Bedell Smith reported to Eisenhower that Senate “Republicans now feel they cannot accept the George Amendment and have it said that the Democrats had to save the GOP from fight on Bricker Amendment.” Republican senators, the author Duane Tananbaum wrote, “were reluctant to let Democrats claim that they had saved President Eisenhower and the nation from extremists in the Republican Party.”
By Friday, Eisenhower himself was concerned over the same point. In a telephone call that afternoon, the President complained to Brownell that “pretty soon, Republicans will have nothing of their own to put in.” After Brownell raised an additional concern with the President—the possibility that the George Amendment, broad though its language might be, might one day be construed to limit a President’s powers to make war, or to prosecute a war as Commander-in-Chief—Eisenhower told his Attorney General to tell Know-land, “We couldn’t possibly accept the George Amendment without some qualifying language to protect power of the Pres. to carry out his duties as prescribed in the Constitution.” Knowland and Ferguson were trying to placate their fellow Old Guarders by working out a compromise text that retained some of Bricker’s language, but Eisenhower angrily rejected each attempt; he was, he told Press Secretary Jim Hagerty, “getting so tired of the name [of Bricker]. If it’s true that when you die the things that bothered you most are engraved on your skull, I am sure I’ll have there the mud and dirt of France during [the] invasion and the name of Senator Bricker.” And each angry outbreak on the Senate floor re-emphasized the fact that, as White put it, “The fight was fundamentally … between the Eisenhower wing of the Republican party and the Old Guard”—an Old Guard which would not compromise; Bricker said his supporters’ differences with the Administration reflected “fundamentally different philosophies of government.”
THE ANGRY SHOUTING MATCHES on a relatively crowded Senate floor were, for the next month, to be succeeded by day after day of the more familiar Senate tableau, with only a handful of senators present while negotiations went on behind the scenes. The political reality, however, was not what was happening on the floor but what the press said about it, and as James Reston noted, “The headlines make it appear that an exciting debate is in process here. The papers are full of well-argued charge and countercharge, and it is easy for the reader to imagine 96 Senators all in their places and crowded galleries listening to an eloquent debate….” For an entire month, the “Bricker Debate” was on the front pages day after day—in the light Lyndon Johnson wanted it portrayed, as an exciting story of a no-holds-barred battle between a beleaguered President and his party, a battle in which the Democrats were coming to the President’s aid.
And when, on February 26, the day of voting finally arrived, the rest of Lyndon Johnson’s objectives were attained.
THE FLOOR OF THE SENATE CHAMBER wasn’t empty that day, and neither were the cloakrooms, for this was the showdown.
In the Republican cloakroom were more than a normal complement of representatives from the White House, for so great was the importance the Administration attached to the preservation of executive power that seven or eight of its congressional liaison men had divided the forty-eight Republican senators among them, and each was keeping an eye on his charges until the moment they pushed through the swinging cloakroom doors and went out on the floor to vote. Every few minutes, it seemed, the liaison men huddled and counted votes together.
In the Democratic cloakroom only one man was counting. Few counts that he had made in his life were more crucial.
Three proposals for a constitutional amendment were scheduled to be brought to the floor: the first was Bricker’s; the second was a brand-new proposal cobbled together at the last minute by Knowland and Ferguson with limits on the presidential power so minor that Eisenhower had privately agreed he could accept it; and the third was Walter George’s.
The first two were Republican, and Johnson didn’t want either of them to receive the necessary two-thirds vote. He wanted the final vote to be on a Democratic bill, the George Amendment, so that it would remain clear to press and public which party had taken the initiative. He had arranged therefore that when the Knowland-Ferguson Amendment was called, a Democratic senator would make a motion to substitute the George Amendment for it. That substitution motion required only a majority vote, and Johnson wanted the motion passed, to give Walter George the necessary pride-saving victory. Johnson didn’t want the George Amendment itself to pass, however, since it would reduce presidential powers that he wanted to keep unreduced. He wanted the amendment to win on that first vote, but lose on the last vote: the vote on passage of the amendment itself. Passage required not merely a majority but a two-thirds majority. Johnson didn’t want it to get the two-thirds.
Counting the Bricker Amendment vote was relatively simple, for many conservatives who had once supported it now preferred Walter George’s bill. When S.J. Res. 1 had initially been introduced a year before, nineteen of its sixty-four co-sponsors had been Democrats; Johnson and George between them had persuaded thirteen of those Democrats to defect, and there were enough additional Republican defections so that when, after the year’s delay that Johnson had arranged, the clerk finally called the roll on the measure, it failed of passage, 42 votes to 50; not only did the Bricker Amendment, once seemingly so certain of passage, not receive the necessary two-thirds of those voting, it did not receive even a simple majority.
The rest of the counting was much harder.
The vote to substitute the George Amendment for the Knowland-Ferguson Amendment had to be favorable, and it had to be favorable by a big margin—that was necessary for the party, to cement the Democratic initiative, and it was necessary for Walter George’s pride. But if the George Amendment had to be substituted, it then had to be defeated, by failing to get the necessary two-thirds vote.
Johnson had, as Newsweek later put it, “passed the word to all party members: Vote for the George Amendment as a substitute, whether you are for or against the idea of changing the Constitution. Then after this gambit has succeeded in shunting aside … the Knowland substitute, do what you wish….” This, Lyndon Johnson felt, would ensure enough defections from Democratic liberals and moderates on the final vote—the vote on passage of the George Amendment itself—so that the measure would not receive the necessary two-thirds. But that final count was going to be uncomfortably close to two-thirds, and he couldn’t be certain which way some Republicans would vote—he tried to prepare for every eventuality, to guard against any unforeseen development. Although they personally disapproved of the George Amendment, a number of liberals from states in which opinion strongly favored a curb on presidential power were reluctant to vote against it. Johnson had obtained commitments from three such senators, Lister Hill of Alabama and Washington’s two senators, Magnuson and Jackson—all of whose seats were safe enough, and whose next election was far enough off—that although they would vote in favor of the George measure as a substitute, should their votes be needed to defeat it on the final vote, they would then switch and vote against it. A number of southerners personally opposed to the George Bill did not believe they could survive the next election if they were ever recorded voting against it. Johnson had persuaded Alabama’s John Sparkman and one or two other southerners that if necessary, they would absent themselves from the floor on the final vote so that, while not actually voting against George, their votes could not be part of the necessary two-thirds. But he was still worried. Standing in the center of the crowded Democratic cloakroom, senators milling around him, Bobby Baker darting to his side and away again, he kept nervously pulling the long tally sheet from his pocket and studying it through his glasses, counting and recounting. There were so many switches back and forth that he wasn’t putting numbers next to the senators’ names, since each switch would mean renumbering; he was using checkmarks instead. And sometimes, as a senator spoke to him, or Baker whispered something in his ear, or a piece of intelligence came to him from the Republican side, he would take a pen from his pocket and scratch out a checkmark on one side of the list, and make one on the other side, and then count again.
And, as it turned out, his caution was not unwarranted. Although Eisenhower’s aides, as one historian of the event has written, “continued, right up to the final vote” to lobby against the substitution of the George Amendment for the Knowland-Ferguson Amendment because the Administration wanted the final vote to be on a Republican bill, the substitution was approved, 61 to 30, and the only constitutional amendment left before the Senate was then the Democratic amendment. But the substitution vote showed the threat to Johnson’s ultimate objective to be quite grave. The sixty-one votes George had received was, with ninety-one senators voting, the necessary two-thirds. As the vote was announced, wire service reporters ran up the steps of the Press Gallery and teletype machines began clattering out the prediction that on the next roll call the Senate would almost certainly approve the George Amendment as a constitutional amendment.
A switch of a single vote would block the George Amendment, and Johnson, in his caution, had those three liberal votes available to switch. That had seemed like enough, but as senators were milling around the well of the Chamber waiting for the final vote, there was a development that no one had predicted or even considered. Red-faced and waving his arms, William Knowland was suddenly standing at his desk—the front-row, center-aisle Majority Leader’s desk—shouting for recognition from Vice President Nixon, above him in the presiding officer’s chair. And when Knowland got it, he strode to a desk in the third row, and said, “Mr. President, I have left the desk of Majority Leader because I wish to make it very clear that what I say is not said as Majority Leader, but is said in my capacity as an individual Senator”—and what he said was that he had just decided, “because of the very real need for some steps to be taken to curb … the gradual encroachment by the Executive on the legislative power of the Congress,” and because the only amendment left on the floor was George’s, that he would not vote against the George Amendment, as he had done on the first vote, but instead would switch sides and vote for it. Tumult erupted on the floor—not only would Knowland’s vote, added to the sixty-one votes that the George Amendment had received on the previous roll call, raise its total to sixty-two, but other Republican conservatives would probably follow their leader into the pro-George camp.
Herbert Lehman, who earnestly believed that “if we are not to accept a position of isolation,” the President must have the same freedom to conduct foreign affairs as he had had in the past, and who believed that the amendment to end that freedom was on the verge of passage, said, “Mr. President, what we are doing is one of the most dangerous and inexcusable things that any great legislative body can do.” Infuriated southerners and members of the Republican Old Guard started shouting, “Vote! Vote! Vote!” to drown him out, but Lehman said, “This is an important matter, and I will have my say on it.” Wringing his hands in his distress, the stocky little New Yorker began to speak again, wandering up and down the center aisle. A furious Burnet Maybank demanded a point of order. “The Senator who is speaking must stand at his desk,” he shouted. Lehman returned to his desk, but a moment later, carried away by his emotions as he spoke, he forgot himself and stepped away again—to be admonished again. As he continued speaking, flushed and angry, he was interrupted repeatedly by the shouts of “Vote! Vote!” but he refused to yield until he had finished his statement. Walter George, rising to make a final plea—“Mark my words, now, gentlemen: you are going to [pass] a constitutionalamendment…. You will do it now, or you will do it later. This is the best amendment which can be worked out”—was saluted by Bricker, and saluted Bricker in return, weeping, so emotional had he become, and Nixon finally called for the yeas and nays.
The Minority Leader’s desk was vacant. Lyndon Johnson was in the cloakroom, calling in his commitments. Hill, Magnuson, and Jackson lived up to them, switching to vote against the bill. There was also an unexpected Republican switch—by Ralph Flanders—against it. But two Republicans, Millikin and Robert Hendrickson, did indeed follow Knowland and switched to vote for it, so that there were still only thirty votes against it—and sixty for it. The margin was precisely the two-thirds necessary for passage. Johnson was standing just inside the cloakroom doors with Sparkman, who had voted for the bill, ready to throw him against it; he was gripping Sparkman’s arm, on the verge of pushing him through the doors to vote; Sparkman would remember for a long time how hard Johnson’s big fingers grasped his biceps. But Johnson had another card to play before it would be necessary to play that one, reluctant as it was. Harley Kilgore of West Virginia, a Democratic opponent of restrictions on the President who had voted against the George Amendment on the previous ballot, had not voted on this one because he wasn’t present. Because of the effects of either alcohol or influenza, he had fallen into a very deep sleep on a couch in his office. Men had run to get him, and had finally, with difficulty, brought him to the Chamber, and the oak and bronze doors in the rear swung open, and there he was. Nixon looked at him expectantly, but all Kilgore did was stare groggily back. He said nothing, Nixon said nothing. For a long moment, the Chamber was still, staring at Kilgore. Johnson was in the Chamber now, moving fast. Grabbing Magnuson, he whispered: “Stall.” “Mr. President,” Magnuson shouted, “how am I recorded voting?” A clerk studied the voting list, and of course said what everyone already knew, that Magnuson had been recorded against the resolution. While that charade was being enacted, Kilgore was pulling himself together and finally he nodded at Nixon. “The Senator from West Virginia,” Nixon said.
“Mr. Kilgore,” the clerk said.
“No,” Kilgore said. He walked slowly and deliberately down the center aisle and sank into a seat in the front row, as the clerk turned and handed the tally sheet up to Nixon. “On this roll call,” the Vice President said, “the yeas are sixty, the nays are thirty-one. Two-thirds of the Senators present not having voted in the affirmative, the joint resolution is rejected.”
THE CASTING OF THE DECISIVE VOTE by a Democrat emphasized the crucial role the Democrats had played in defeating the amendment that would have curbed Dwight Eisenhower’s power. They had supplied more of the “nay” votes that had kept the George Amendment from passing than the Republicans: sixteen Democratic nays, only fourteen Republican (Independent Morse had also voted nay). Republicans had, in fact, voted for the amendment—and against their own President—by a margin of 32 to 14. Eisenhower had won a big victory in the battle that had begun with Bricker’s introduction of S.J. Res. I, for he had defeated the Old Guard isolationists. But Lyndon Johnson had won a bigger victory.
Johnson had hit, in fact, every target at which he had aimed in the battle. Wanting to show the public a hero President, unparalleled in his knowledge of foreign affairs, being opposed in foreign affairs by his own party, and being rescued from that party by the Democrats, he had succeeded in doing exactly that. Wanting to demonstrate that despite GOP control of both White House and Senate, the Democrats had taken the initiative on the issue, he had, by arranging for the final vote to be not on a Republican but on a Democratic bill, done exactly that. He had wanted the Bricker Amendment defeated, and it had been defeated. He had wanted the George Amendment substituted, at first, and it had been substituted. He had wanted the George Amendment blocked at last, and at last it had been blocked.
Moreover, it had been blocked by a single vote. That was a feat dramatic in itself. But even more dramatic was the fact (which the public never learned) that had that single-vote margin not materialized—had, for example, Harley Kilgore not been able to make it to the Chamber—Lyndon Johnson would still have won. His hand had been on John Sparkman’s arm; he could have sent Sparkman out to switch. And if Sparkman’s vote had not been sufficient, Lyndon Johnson had had other votes ready. He had had almost no margin for error—and he hadn’t made any errors. The man who a long time before, when he had still been young, had won the reputation of being “the very best at counting” had shown that the reputation was deserved.
LYNDON JOHNSON WAS HAILED for the results of the fight on the Bricker Amendment, and for the other victories he had masterminded—on Yalta and on Bohlen—over the future shape of American foreign policy. The praise was justified. His initial overall decision not to oppose but to support a President of the rival party was political strategy of the highest order. It helped his party, and it helped himself.
But it was a masterstroke on levels higher than the political. As Stephen Ambrose has written, the Republican Old Guard “wanted major policy and structural changes … a flat repudiation of the Yalta agreements,” a constitutional amendment banning future executive agreements, action “to free the East European satellites…. For the nation and the world, these were matters of transcendent importance.” In these matters, the defeat of the Old Guard was accomplished at least in part—and not in small part—through Johnson’s maneuvers. Through them, he increased his party’s popularity and his personal power. But through them also, he helped defend and make possible a continuation of a foreign policy that had produced the United Nations, the Greek and Turkish alliances, the Marshall Plan, NATO, the strategy of containment—the policy that had shaped the postwar world. Anyone who believes that the history of that world would have been the same had the senatorial Old Guard triumphed in the aftermath of the Republicans’ 1952 election victory has only to look back to the time, after the first Great War, when the Senate was run not by Lyndon Johnson but by Henry Cabot Lodge. The isolationist Old Guard had felt sure that the 1950s would be their time, and liberals had felt uneasily that the Old Guard was right. Whatever the motives behind Lyndon Johnson’s strategy, that strategy had helped ensure that the 1950s would not be such a time.
The icing on this triumphal cake was Johnson’s success in achieving his objectives without awareness of what he had done from supporters who disapproved of those objectives. He himself, of course, had voted for the George Amendment, and he told his reactionary bankrollers that he intended to keep on doing so. On March 3, he wrote Ed Clark, the attorney and lobbyist for many of them: “We had a mighty close one last week on the George Amendment, losing by one vote. It will be taken up again, and we hope the final result will be different.” And over dinner on St. Joe or at Falfurrias, or over drinks in 8-F, he assured Herman Brown, and Richardson and Murchison and Cullen and Hunt, that he had been fighting all along for some measure that would prevent further usurpation of power, and they believed him.
* A constitutional amendment requires passage by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress, and ratification by three-quarters of the states.