24
JOHNSON’S STRATEGY OF BIPARTISANSHIP was vindicated in the November, 1954, elections. The Democrats regained control of the House. In the Senate, rather than lose additional seats—the fate that had been widely predicted two years previously—they gained one, giving them forty-eight to forty-seven for the Republicans.
The key to control of the Senate was therefore the ninety-sixth senator, Wayne Morse.
Morse had been feuding with Johnson—it had been only a few months since he had said derisively, “Lyndon Johnson represents Lyndon Johnson”—but if the former Republican would vote with the Democrats in organizing the new Senate, they would have a majority. The time for feuding was over; it was time for a deal. Telephoning Morse, Johnson said that Morse could have any committee assignment that a Majority Leader had to offer.
Morse understood the proposal, but said he would have to think it over. Johnson facilitated his thinking. While he was still in Texas, he said that “Morse never should have been kicked off his committees”; upon his return to Washington, he told a group of reporters, “I don’t know what Senator Morse may want, but whatever he wants, he’s going to get it—if I’ve got it to give.” What Morse wanted was Foreign Relations. Johnson checked with the committee’s ranking Democrat, Walter George—and, as always, with Richard Russell. With a chance to regain their lost chairmanships, what did their dislike—contempt, in fact—for the Oregonian matter? Morse announced he would vote with the Democrats; Johnson announced Morse’s assignment not only to Foreign Relations but to Banking and Currency as well, and added that he would also keep his seat on the District Committee. “He would serve with distinction in any post, and we decided to give him three,” Johnson said. On January 4, 1955, Lyndon Johnson was re-elected—by acclamation—to the leadership of the Senate Democrats. As he had become, at the age of forty-four, the youngest Minority Leader in the history of the United States, so he was now, at forty-six, the youngest Majority Leader in the history of the United States.
• • •
AND NOW THAT LYNDON JOHNSON was Majority Leader, the Majority Leader was powerful.
For two years, Johnson had had the power of a Minority Leader—but only of a Minority Leader—over scheduling: over determining the order of business on the floor, over deciding when a bill vital to a senator’s career would be allowed to come to the floor, over deciding if the bill would come to the floor. He had been able to make suggestions or requests—but only suggestions or requests—to the Majority Leader about holding back one bill or speeding up another, about coordinating, and making rational, the arrival of legislation on the Calendar and on the floor. His party’s minority status had restricted him to monitoring bills’ progress; he couldn’t direct it. Now he had the power of a Majority Leader, who had the privilege of first recognition, who could use that privilege to schedule, who alone could say, and have his words assented to: “I move that the Senate proceed to the consideration of…”
The scheduling power of previous Majority Leaders had been diluted by the degree to which they exercised that power merely as agents—rubber stamps, in effect—of their party’s Policy Committee. But Johnson had made the committee his “private rubber stamp.”
For previous Majority Leaders, the scheduling power had been further diluted by the power of the Standing Committees, whose chairmen had moved bills forward and finally brought them to a vote within their committees at their own pace, so that the bills’ arrival on the Senate Calendar was at the chairmen’s discretion. Furthermore, since they arrived in the form the chairmen wanted, all too often troublesome amendments would not be thrashed out until the bills were on the floor, which made realistic advance scheduling impossible. But Johnson’s intervention, as Minority Leader, in the internal workings of the Standing Committees had created an unprecedented intra-party mechanism for monitoring bills’ progress within committees and for bringing them to the floor with disputes already ironed out. And now, with his party in the majority, the committee Democrats with whom he was dealing were no longer merely ranking members; they were chairmen. He would be able to play a role greater than any previous Majority Leader in determining the schedule on which bills emerged from committee, the schedule on which they were placed on the Calendar, the schedule on which they were called off the Calendar and brought to the floor. Awareness of this new reality came quickly, as is shown by the new tone in the letters he began receiving from his colleagues almost from the moment that he became Majority Leader:
Dear Lyndon:
I respectfully request your assistance in scheduling S. 2345, a bill that I consider of grave importance to me and to my constituents.
Dear Lyndon:
I would consider it a great favor if you could help me to achieve postponement of the textile bill. As it is now written, it poses enormous problems for the textile industry in my state and I have promised them that I will obtain a delay until at least next month so they can study it further.
Dear Lyndon:
Four measures of primary importance … are ready for action, and inasmuch as I have charge of them, I would deeply appreciate an indication of when they might be taken up.
I will deeply appreciate your cooperation to make certain that none of these measures is lost in the closing congestion of the session.
He would be able to play a role greater than any previous Majority Leader not merely over the scheduling of legislation but over its content.
During his two years as Minority Leader, Johnson had been intervening more and more in the internal give-and-take among the Democrats on the Standing Committees, using Siegel and Reedy and Bibolet to ascertain the points of disputes between senators, and then mediating the disputes so that Democratic positions within the committees were unified. His three aides would ask a committee’s staff about Democratic bills—who was objecting? why were they objecting? Then Johnson’s aides would go to the senators involved: ask what would satisfy them, work out possible compromises. Then Johnson himself would telephone or visit, or summon, the senators: reason with them, cajole or threaten them in private—persuade them to accept the compromise. The content of legislation still before the Standing Committees was therefore being altered—altered sometimes in extremely subtle ways—not only by those committees but by the Leader. More and more, during those two years, proposed Democratic legislation had become the product of bargains, trade-offs, rewordings, of additions, excisions, that had been made not by a committee or subcommittee chairman but by him. More and more, it had become the product of temporary alliances—often very complex alliances—that he had woven together. And, more and more, since the bargaining process was not only so complex and detailed but so private only the Leader knew the trade-offs between senators which had been made, or rejected—and the reasons why they had been made or rejected. Sometimes, the persuasion used involved some other, unrelated issue; in exchange for a senator’s agreement on one bill, Johnson might have promised the senator something he wanted on a different measure—perhaps one that was being considered not by his committee but by some other committee. Previously, the committees had been separate, proudly independent baronies; there were threads—slender but strong—between them now. And only the Leader knew all of those threads, and how they had been tied together. Only he knew the promises that had been made, the threats that had been withdrawn. The myriad legislative matters of a single Senate session made up a vast tapestry in which a thousand threads were interwoven in a complex, intricate pattern; only Lyndon Johnson knew that pattern. When a senator demanded a change in a bill, only Johnson could tell him why such a change was possible or not possible. And often, since the reasons might be very private to the other senators involved, the senator demanding the change could not even learn if what Lyndon Johnson was telling him was true.
And, of course, after a compromise had been worked out in a Standing Committee, it was submitted to that “private rubber stamp.” During the Democrats’ two years in the minority, Johnson’s control of the Policy Committee had had only limited significance: although never before had a party Policy Committee intervened so extensively with respect to bills still within the Standing Committees, those bills had been minority bills, generally not the bills finally reported out of the committees to the floor. Now Democratic bills—the bills whose final form he was playing such a decisive role in determining—would be the actual legislation on which the Senate acted.
That fact made his control of the Policy Committee very significant in the history of the Senate. For decades, the Majority Leader had been, even at his strongest, no more than a first among equals—the equals being the mighty chairmen, impregnable in their committee strongholds, with their absolute power over the bills their committees were considering, the bills that “in reality the Senate does little more than approve or disapprove … practically as they are reported.” In the nearly century and a half since the committee system had been solidified in 1816, no Leader had been able to curb the chairmen’s power.
Now, in 1955, that was no longer true. Two years earlier, Lyndon Johnson had gently slipped a bit between the teeth of the Democratic senators who had once been committee chairmen, and who would be chairmen again, so gently that the chairmen had hardly noticed it was there, and the reins attached to it had been kept loose. But it was there. And now the reins were being tightened.
THEY WERE being tightened in other ways as well. Was Lyndon Johnson already arranging with the chairmen the schedule of when their bills would reach the floor? Now he began suggesting to some chairmen that he manage the bills on the floor.
In the past, chairmen had managed major pieces of legislation on the floor except when they assigned one to a committee member with a particular interest in it. Says Floyd Riddick, who in 1955 was the Senate’s assistant parliamentarian, and had been observing the Senate, in one capacity or another, for almost twenty years: “In the past the chairmen would never have let the Majority Leader do that. They managed their bills on the floor.” But some of the chairmen—not only Finance’s seventy-seven-year-old Walter George but Interior’s seventy-eight-year-old Jim Murray and Rules’ eighty-seven-year-old Theodore Francis Green (whose eyesight, hearing, and mental faculties had all declined to a point at which he sometimes required an aide’s assistance even to find his way around the Capitol hallways)—were elderly now, and it was no longer easy for them to manage controversial or complicated measures. They had grown accustomed to Johnson’s assistance in so many matters; George and Green were now quite appreciative of the way in which, when they were confronted with a crowd of question-shouting reporters as they emerged from a White House foreign affairs briefing, Johnson, standing between them, would field the questions. Fielding questions on the Senate floor seemed only a logical extension. Furthermore, their paternal fondness for Johnson made his offers of assistance seem the offers of a loyal young friend, eager only to help. Johnson was not exaggerating when he told Doris Kearns Goodwin that these elderly senators were as grateful for the offers “as for a spring in the desert.”
With younger chairmen—William Fulbright of the Banking and Currency Committee, for example—Johnson would use a different tactic. He would point out that unwanted amendments would be offered on the floor. The chairmen would realize that while they had been able to squelch those amendments within their committees, the Leader would be in a better position to squelch them on the floor and keep the bills in the form they wanted. And Johnson would use his power to keep the bills as intact as possible.
Once, for example, after a long battle in committee, a bank regulatory bill emerged in a form favored by Chairman Fulbright and by the bill’s proposer, the committee’s ranking Democratic member, A. Willis Robertson. Robertson told Johnson that while Fulbright had been able to force the bill through the committee, some of its members were determined to introduce major amendments on the floor, and that some of them would pass. Fulbright couldn’t do anything about this, but Johnson could. He told Robertson to tell the would-be amenders that in that case the bill wasn’t going to come to the floor, that he would not make a motion to have the Senate consider it unless Robertson gave him “assurance that … no amendments will be offered.” Robertson relayed this message to the dissidents, and some of them, eager for the bill to pass, agreed to drop their amendments. Three would not. “The nearest I can come to your request” would be to reduce the number of amendments to three, Robertson wrote Johnson, but he also reported that all three could be voted down quickly on a voice vote. That was good enough for Johnson—and for Fulbright. Johnson had, by negotiating on his behalf, obtained most of what the chairman wanted.
Noting such developments from his seat on the dais, Riddick saw their significance. “Now, for the first time, you had a Leader who’s going to keep it [a bill] intact…. They [the chairmen] went along [with letting Johnson manage their bills] because by letting him take over the management of the bills, they knew they would get what they wanted,” Riddick says. “Out of loose consideration of legislation was emerging leadership control [of legislation]—control by Lyndon Johnson. Johnson just gradually pulled the management [of bills] out of the hands of the chairmen. They were surrendering their powers—not intentionally, but it was a growth process. There was gradually growing an attitude, ‘Let Lyndon do it.’ You don’t realize you’re losing power, you don’t realize that things are changing. You think the Leader is only helping you. But the first thing you know, he’s integrating everything. He knows everything about every bill, he can change one thing for another with different senators. Things were changing.”
HE WAS ALSO USING other powers he had acquired, or created, as Minority Leader, and he was using them with less restraint.
Majority Leader or not, he still needed the support of the old Democratic Bulls—of Russell, George, Hayden, Byrd, Ellender, Eastland, McClellan, three or four others; while Walter George, elected President pro tempore at the Senate’s 1955 opening session, was laboriously ascending the dais to accept the gavel, a reporter in the Press Gallery above muttered, “Save your Confederate money, boys. The South is rising again.” With southerners as chairmen of six of the nine most powerful Senate committees (and its ally Hayden ascending, thanks to McKellar’s death, to the chairmanship of a seventh, Appropriations), “its hold seems even stronger than previously,” Thomas Stokes wrote. Were the Big Bulls to turn against Johnson, they could wreck his leadership as easily as they had wrecked McFarland’s and Lucas’ before him—and to the Big Bulls Johnson was as deferential as ever. He praised them publicly at every opportunity, telling one reporter, “We have the master craftsmen in the legislative field in the Democratic Party,” noting to another that these chairmen “have been twenty-five years in Congress, on the average. Hell, every one of ’em’s an old pro.” In private, he was as obsequious, as fawning, as ever. “He didn’t rant and rave at the Harry Byrds of the world,” Senator George Smathers of Florida would say. “Oh no, he was passive, and so submissive, and so condescending, you couldn’t believe it! I’ve seen him kiss Harry Byrd’s ass until it was disgusting: ‘Senator, how about so-and-so? wouldn’t you like to do this? can’t we do this for you?’”
But with the Big Bulls solidly behind him, the addition of his new powers made the support of the rest of the Democrats less important to him; they needed him much more than he needed any one of them. For the first time since college and the NYA, Lyndon Johnson had direct power over other men. And as soon as he got it, he showed how he was going to use it. Power, Lord Acton said, corrupts. Not always. What power always does is reveal. And now there began to be revealed a Lyndon Johnson who would have been familiar to those who had known him in college.
It began quickly—in his first action as Majority Leader: the making of committee assignments. In the appointment calendar on Johnson’s desk the pages headed January 6, January 7, and January 8 were blank except for a numeral he had scrawled large across each one: “231.” His office in the Capitol was too accessible: once again, in the first days of a new Congress, Lyndon Johnson was operating from behind a closed door in his old suite in the SOB; once again, the left-hand button on Walter Jenkins’ telephone console glowed yellow-white; once again, by the date of the Democratic Steering Committee’s first meeting—this year on Monday, January 10—the Standing Committee checkerboard was already filled, and Steering Committee ratification had been arranged. There was, however, a difference between the telephone calls Lyndon Johnson was making now and the calls he had made two years earlier. Throughout his two years as Minority Leader, despite the power over committee assignments that had been ceded to him by the Steering Committee, he had, in making and explaining controversial assignments, hidden behind that committee, telling disappointed or angry colleagues that it was the committee that decided, that he was only one of its members. Though that veil had become increasingly transparent, he had nonetheless kept it in place, and to some extent it had softened the harsh reality of his wielding of power. Now the veil was allowed to fall.
A number of younger senators had accumulated sufficient seniority to expect seats on major committees, seats for which they were well qualified—in some cases, extremely well qualified. But their committee assignments were not going to be made on the basis of seniority or of qualifications. Their assignments were going to be made on the basis of their personal allegiance to Lyndon Johnson. And Johnson let them know it.
Estes Kefauver, for example, had been trying for four years to get on the Foreign Relations Committee or the Policy Committee (making, in regard to the Policy Committee, the argument, strong in traditional Senate terms, that Tennessee had historically had, in McKellar, a Policy seat), and Johnson had always told him in the past that these selections were determined by the Steering Committee. On Tuesday, January 11, 1955, Kefauver learned that he had again been passed over for Foreign Relations. The makeup of the Policy Committee had not yet been announced, and he telephoned Lyndon Johnson and, with Walter Jenkins listening, mouthpiece unscrewed, taking notes, said, “Lyndon, I want to be a member of the Policy Committee.”
“Well, Estes,” Lyndon Johnson replied, “I appreciate your wanting to be there.” But, Johnson said, you’re not going to be there. And in explaining why, Johnson didn’t bother to cite the Steering Committee. The pronoun he used was the first person singular. “The man I selected hasn’t been you,” he said.
When Kefauver began to argue—“Lyndon, you remember I started trying to be a candidate for [the Policy Committee] when Tom Hennings got it…”—Johnson reverted to traditional terms, mentioning the need for geographical diversity on the committee, and the requirements of seniority, and Kefauver attempted to swallow his chagrin. “Of course, if it is already settled …” he said. “I was of course kind of disappointed about Foreign Affairs…. How about keeping me in mind?” And when Johnson replied this time, he made things clearer. There were no more traditional terms; instead the new reality was spelled out—in the “new tone” that Hubert Humphrey had heard. “I will sure keep you in mind,” Lyndon Johnson said. But, he said, “I have never had the particular feeling that when I called up my first team and the chips were down that Kefauver felt he … ought to be on that team.” The price of his favor was stated. “If you feel you ought to be and want to be [on my team], it is the best news I have ever had,” Lyndon Johnson said. “I will meet you more than fifty percent of the way. I will push you into every position of influence and power that you can have…. If you and I can ever get on that basis …”
Kefauver began to plead a little. “As far as I am concerned, I have always wanted to be on that basis,” he said. “I will let my hair down on this point, Lyndon: honestly, you have never given me a break since you have been the Leader.” But Johnson was having none of that. “Maybe I just felt like I wasn’t positive you wanted me to be the captain—that’s letting your hair down,” he said. Proof, clear proof, of Kefauver’s willingness to be on the Johnson team—and to let Johnson be the captain—would be required, Johnson made clear. “You have got to have a lot more than desire on these committee appointments,” he said. Kefauver had not provided such proof in the past, he said. “You just look through your documents and see when you have said to Johnson that you were on my team…. There’s no use in our kidding each other.”
Johnson apparently felt there was at least a chance that Kefauver could be brought to heel. With liberals like Lehman and Douglas, uncompromising in their principles, there was no such chance, and Johnson knew it. So with them he was more brutal. Long determined to end the injustice and prejudice codified in existing immigration laws, Lehman badly wanted a seat on Judiciary, the committee with jurisdiction over those laws. His seniority for that seat was sufficient, his expertise unique: not only did he represent the state which, as Drew Pearson put it, “was more concerned with immigration than any other,” possessing as it did, New York City, lodestar of immigrants, he had been that state’s governor for ten years. But he didn’t get the seat, and when he asked Johnson why, Johnson gave as his reason, as he later told reporters, that Lehman was not a lawyer, an excuse so transparent (no Senate rule made a law degree a requirement for membership on the committee; degreeless Earle Clements had only recently been serving on it) that he obviously did not care whether or not it was believed.
Lehman’s qualifications for Judiciary were equaled by those of Douglas for Finance, and since Johnson had proclaimed expertise a criterion for committee appointments, it was assumed that he would not dare to continue keeping the Senate’s most respected expert on taxation off its tax-writing committee, particularly since it had not one but two vacancies to be filled (and since, as Evans and Novak were to write, although Douglas was opposed to the oil-depletion allowance, “the Finance Committee was already so stacked in favor of the oil and gas industry” that one vote on it could not affect its decisions). “It had been assumed that he [Douglas] would get it up to the time the lists were made public,” Thomas Stokes was to write.
But Johnson had another plan for the economist, one with a particular sting in it. There was a committee with the word “Economic” in the title: the Joint Economic Committee. But whereas Finance had vast power, this committee had no power at all; it was authorized only to issue reports. “I’m gonna name him chairman of the Joint Economic Committee,” Johnson told Bobby Baker. “It can’t do a damn thing. It’s as useless as tits on a bull. But it’ll give Professor Douglas some paper to shuffle.” And for Douglas’ exclusion, Johnson vouchsafed no explanation at all.
In 1955 as in 1953, every newly elected senator received an assignment to a major committee, and columnists were once again full of praise for the “Johnson Rule.” “Johnson at his best again,” Doris Fleeson wrote. “Senator Johnson has once again quietly worked a revolution in the ancient system.” All but unremarked by journalists, however, was the fact that the nature of the revolution had changed. No longer was it only the assigning of freshmen, or the use of expertise as a criterion. Added to the Johnson Rule now was another factor—one which did indeed prove that Johnson ruled.
HE WAS ACQUIRING NEW POWERS, too—and using them with little restraint.
The Democrats’ recapture of majority status gave the party more patronage slots to distribute, and that meant more work for its Patronage Committee. And the committee’s chairman, the seventy-seven-year-old Hay den, was also becoming chairman of Appropriations. He was, in the words of one aide, “just not as interested in patronage as he had been.” And he had become very fond of Lyndon Johnson. He was increasingly willing to listen to Johnson—the party’s Leader, after all—on party matters; patronage, the aide says, “just sort of wandered into the hands of the leadership.” Realization of that development came quickly, too—as was shown by a letter from Burnet Maybank to Skeeter Johnston a few days after the November, 1954, election: “I know you feel better about Tuesday’s results—I certainly do. Hope you get the opportunity to talk to Lyndon Johnson about the patronage situation in the Capitol. It appears to me with us having a majority we are certainly entitled to more positions. Of course as you know, my appointees were laid off…. Do let me know what Lyndon thinks about the patronage.”
What Lyndon thought was that Maybank’s appointees should be restored to their former places, and they were. And that was not the case—at least in several instances—with appointees of senators who were not on his “team.” Neither Kefauver nor Albert Gore was on its roster. Now both Tennessee senators sought to intervene on behalf of an elderly Tennesseean, Walker Toddy, who had been dismissed after twenty-nine years on Skeeter Johnston’s staff. “Mr. Toddy has given 29 years of loyal and faithful service to the Democratic Party and to the Senate of the United States,” Kefauver wrote Johnson. Toddy was not well off financially, and Kefauver noted that one more year would make him eligible for a higher pension. “I am very hopeful that Walker can secure some worthwhile place in the new senatorial setup”—even if only in a position as lowly as that of Bill Clerk. “I know that a lot of senators feel as I do,” Kefauver wrote, but one of those senators was not Lyndon Johnson, and Toddy was not given any place. Watching which senators received patronage slots—and which senators didn’t—Democrats were again reminded that it was better to be on Lyndon’s team.
For a senator who was not on the team, the cost of such independence might have to be reckoned not only in seats and slots, but in space—for Hayden’s move to Appropriations had left the chairmanship of the Rules Committee, allocator of office suites, in the hands of the “ailing” Theodore Francis Green, and Johnson assured Green that he would remove this “burden” from his shoulders.
Paul Douglas learned this new fact of Senate life during that same week in January. Johnson wanted more, and better, office space, and now that he was Majority Leader, he set out to get it. One January afternoon, he told Walter Jenkins to go down to the Senate custodian’s office and come back with the master keys that would open every door on the Senate side of the Capitol. That evening, Johnson waited until most senators and their staff had gone home, and then he began to walk through the empty Capitol, opening every door. On the top floor, near the head of a flight of stairs leading up from the gallery, he found what he wanted behind a door marked G-14, “Joint Economic Committee.” Inside, in the outer room of the two-room suite, sat its staff director, Grover Ensley, working late. Suddenly, without a knock or any other warning, the door swung open, and the startled Ensley found himself facing the tall figure of the Majority Leader.
Without a word, Johnson walked in and began looking around. The two rooms were rather small but elegant; from their high ceilings hung two chandeliers impressive even by senatorial standards; they had hung in the White House in Theodore Roosevelt’s time. In the inner office was a working fireplace, which, in Ensley’s memory, was probably lit that evening; he made a point of lighting it every afternoon. “It was very comfortable and cozy,” he recalls. The inner office was a corner room, and Johnson pulled aside the heavy draperies in front of its windows, and there was a view “right down the Mall to the Lincoln Memorial and across to Arlington Cemetery.” And what made the office perfect was that it was the office of the Joint Economic Committee. “The next day I got a letter from the Rules Committee,” Ensley recalls. It said that G-14 was going to be the new office of the Majority Leader. Having relegated Douglas to a committee whose only amenity was its office, Evans and Novak were to write, Johnson had now taken away the office, and “the Senate took notice. It was a dramatic sign of the consequences of a lack of rapport with the Majority Leader.” For other rapport-lacking senators, the signs were less dramatic, but decipherable nonetheless. Every time a senator had to walk a long way to reach the Capitol subway—and knew that other senators, with more conveniently located offices, had a shorter distance to walk—he was reminded of what Lyndon Johnson could do for him, or to him. “After a while,” as Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote, “insiders could recognize Johnson’s allies by one look at the roster of office suites—the larger suites … were reserved for friends, the smaller … were allotted to ‘the troublesome ones.’”
THERE HAD BEEN a façade of courtesy in his dealings with other senators, even those senators who were not part of the team. Now that facade dropped away. In the pile of message slips on his desk, there would be notations that “Senator Lehman called—please call him back,” “Senator Douglas called—please call him,” “Senator Kefauver called—would like to speak to you.” When he saw such slips, a thin smile would cross Lyndon Johnson’s face. Crumpling them up, he would throw them in his wastepaper basket. Or Walter Jenkins would be reading off the messages from his yellow legal pad, writing beside each one Johnson’s instructions for dealing with it. When he got to one from a senator who wasn’t on the team, there would be a silence. Jenkins would read the next message. “He wouldn’t return Lehman’s phone calls for days on end,” recalls Lehman’s administrative assistant, Julius Gaius Caesar Edelstein.
He might not return them at all. And his men—Clements, Skeeter, Bobby Baker—wouldn’t return them, either. When, in 1955, this first began happening, Lehman, himself the soul of courtesy, a man who, as Governor, would never have dreamt of snubbing even an avowed enemy, could hardly believe it was intentional. But after one incident in 1955, he had no choice but to believe. He first had difficulty reaching Johnson, who was at the ranch, being “told he was out hunting,” as he was to recall. When he finally spoke to him, Johnson promised that he would deal with the matter “immediately” and that either he or Earle Clements would call him back. “I even gave him the number of my [hotel] room and told him that if I should be out, he or Earle should leave word that they had called, and I would call back as promptly as possible,” Lehman was to tell Edelstein. Neither Johnson nor Clements ever called.
The facade dropped away in the cloakroom, too. Johnson would be standing in the middle of it, talking, laughing with a group of senators. A Lehman or a Douglas or a Kefauver or another senator not on the team would walk in. Johnson would turn away so that he wouldn’t be facing them, so that they couldn’t become part of the group. And some of the other senators, men attuned to nuances of power, would take their cue from the Majority Leader. Edelstein was to recall what it was like to be walking with Herbert Lehman after it became clear that he was in the Leader’s disfavor. “You’d walk into the cloakroom. People would fall silent. You’d walk down the hall, and there would be an averting of eyes so that they wouldn’t have to say hello.” The facade dropped away on the Senate floor as well. “Lehman would begin making a speech, and if Johnson was on the floor he would walk out to the cloakroom, just ostentatiously enough so you knew it was deliberate. And other people would drift—leave—the floor.” Or they would not come out onto the floor, as they otherwise might have done. While Lehman or Douglas or Kefauver was speaking, a senator would wander into the cloakroom, intending to go out on the floor. Bobby Baker would be standing by the swinging doors leading from the cloakroom to the floor. He would say to the senator, “Why don’t you stay in the cloakroom for a while?”
There were methods of humiliating a senator on the floor as well. Johnson would go over to Douglas’ desk, while the Illinois senator was sitting with one of his assistants. He would lean over and chat with the assistant, ignoring Douglas.
And there were methods less public than these, but, with certain senators, equally effective. “Skeeter would routinely have the boys back to his office at five or six o’clock,” Douglas’ administrative assistant, Howard Shuman, recalls. The invited senators would walk through the tall, dark door into those cheery rooms beyond, their arms around each other’s shoulders, chuckling or laughing. Other senators would see them going in. It was hard not to see; Skeeter’s office was just outside the cloakroom. “Paul was almost never invited,” Shuman says. “In fact, once, when he was, he told me about it.” In the telling, Douglas tried to make a joke of the situation, “but,” Shuman says, “it didn’t come off too well.”
“Oh, they did a lot of things to diminish Paul, Paul and the others,” Shuman says. “They went out of their way to diminish them. William S. White wrote that the way to get into the [Senate] Club was to be courteous and courtly. Well, that’s nonsense. Lehman was the most courtly man in the world, and he wasn’t part of the club. It didn’t have anything to do with courtly. It had to do with how you voted—with whether or not you voted as Lyndon Johnson wanted you to vote.” Says Neil MacNeil, a longtime congressional correspondent for Time magazine: “The Senate was run by courtesy, all right—like the longshoremen’s union.”
Assistants to non-team members were constantly being reminded of their bosses’ lack of status. “He [Johnson] was cutting [to me],” Edelstein recalls. “With other staff people he was very verbose. But when I said hello, he’d be very curt and turn his back on me.” Sometimes Johnson would be chatting, outwardly relaxed, in the cloakroom when he would notice, standing nearby, an assistant to one of the senators who was not on the team. “What the fuck do you want?” Lyndon Johnson would say. “Nothing, Senator,” the aide would answer. “Then get your fucking ass out of here,” Johnson would say. Or he would give these aides instructions for their senator in a tone that left no doubt as to where the senator stood in his estimation. Says Harry Schnibbe, administrative assistant to John A. Carroll of Colorado, elected to the Senate in 1956 and never a member of Johnson’s team: “Most of the time he ignored you. But he might say, ‘I want you to tell Carroll to get over here. Get on the phone and tell him! I need senators over here on this debate! You’re over here listening to this. Where the hell is he?’” Or he might simply tell Schnibbe, in a low, threatening tone: “Get your fucking senator over here right away!”
“I’d say, ‘Yes, sir!’ like I was a page,” Schnibbe recalls. “I’d almost salute. He terrified me. To tell you the truth, if I went in the cloakroom and Johnson was in the cloakroom, I left. I’d say, ‘Oh, shit, I’m not staying here.’ We all operated in total terror of Johnson.”
IN OTHER WAYS, too, the humility of Lyndon Johnson’s first term fell away, to be replaced by characteristics that would have been familiar to students at San Marcos—to students, that is, who hadn’t been on his team there.
G-14 had been refurnished—almost instantly, it seemed, thanks to the efficiency of the Senate Cabinet Shop—in the traditional Senate mode: turn-of-the-century desks and a visitors’ bench, refinished and polished until it glowed, from the Old Supreme Court Chamber; a nineteenth-century painting of “Rebecka, daughter of the mighty Powhattan, Emperor of Attaboughkomouck.” Johnson had admired portraits of John Nance Garner and a former Texas senator, Morris Sheppard, that had been hanging in Skeeter’s back office; now they were hanging in Johnson’s office. At the end of the day, Johnson would, after (or, increasingly, instead of) a session in Skeeter’s office, invite a few chosen senators or journalists to G-14 for a drink and a chat. Unbuttoning his double-breasted suit, he would put his feet, clad in either gleaming black shoes or gleaming, elaborately hand-tooled “LBJ” cowboy boots, up on the desk, and buzz a secretary to bring drinks. A You ain’t learning nothin’ when you’re talking plaque had been installed on the mantelpiece, but now, in sharp contrast to his first six years in the Senate, Lyndon Johnson paid markedly little attention to his father’s advice—as little attention as he had paid before those six years.
The most notable characteristic of these gatherings was the extent to which the conversation at them was dominated by one man. The talk was fascinating, but its dominant theme was the smartness, or, to be more precise, the shrewdness, of the host. Once, for example, on January 13, 1955, the day the committee assignments were announced, he was in the middle of a monologue when he abruptly interrupted himself. “My God,” he said, “I forgot to call Senator Stennis and congratulate him.” Snatching the phone out of its cradle, he tucked it between his shoulder and his chin, and dialed Stennis’ home. And when Mrs. Stennis, answering, said that her husband was not home, Johnson said, “Well, I must tell you, ma’am, how proud I am of your husband and how proud the Senate is, and you tell him that when he gets home. The Senate paid him a great honor today. The Senate elected your husband to the Appropriations Committee. That’s one of the most powerful committees in the whole Senate and a great honor for your husband. I’m so proud of John. He’s a great American. And I know you’re proud of him, too. He’s one of my finest senators….”
A number of aspects of the monologue Johnson was conducting with Mrs. Stennis—a monologue that went on for quite some time—were worth noting. The first was the attention to detail—to doing everything. Giving Stennis the Appropriations seat had put the Senator in his debt; a telephone call like this would add a little to the debt—so, late though it was, long though Johnson’s day had been, the call was made, and the call was not cursory; Johnson’s conversation was not hurried, but slow and as drawlingly gracious as any Mississippian could have desired. Another was the use of the “I” and the “my”—as Rowland Evans, one of the reporters listening, was to put it, “implicitly he was belaboring the obvious—that it wasn’t the Steering Committee or the full Senate that was really responsible. It was LBJ.” But the most significant aspect of all was that as Johnson talked to Mrs. Stennis, buttering her up, he would, as he poured it on, wink and nod to his listeners, grinning at them over what he was doing. Although his words seemed sincere, he seemed to want his listeners to understand that they really weren’t. It seemed to be important to him that they know that.
THE VERY RUTHLESSNESS with which Lyndon Johnson used his power helped him to amass more of it. The story of how Bernard Baruch’s contribution had never reached Paul Douglas had gotten around, and everyone knew how Douglas’ office had been taken away from him without warning or excuse. The ostracism of Herbert Lehman had been noted. And aides gossiped. It was an open secret now that some senators couldn’t even get their phone calls returned. The United States Senate contained men adept at reading power and they had no difficulty in drawing from these ongoing actions a unifying lesson.
And new lessons were constantly being provided for their edification.
A single attempt at independence could end an alliance with Lyndon Johnson forever—even if the alliance had been as long in duration, and as intimate, as that between Johnson and Stuart Symington.
Symington had no jealousy of the Texan with whom he had spent so much time and exchanged so many favors. “I thought he was a man of destiny,” he was to recall years later. And he had thought they were friends. “I was awfully fond of Lyndon B. Johnson,” he was to say. But after Johnson put Symington on the Armed Services Committee, the experience and expertise—true expertise—in military matters of the tall, handsome Missourian became apparent at Armed Services Committee hearings, and Johnson’s aides became aware that he resented it. Johnson began to say, when Symington’s name came up during private conversations, “He’s not a team player.” For a while Johnson remained amiable when talking to Symington in person, but Symington, detecting a subtle change in Johnson’s attitude, decided it was simply that “I was getting too much prominence.” He decided to play a less prominent role in future hearings, he was to recall; he didn’t want anything to break up the friendship. But 1954 was the year of the Army-McCarthy hearings, and of Symington’s courageous challenge to McCarthy, after Johnson had told him not to challenge McCarthy, “and,” Symington says, “Johnson didn’t like that at all. I’ve never quite known why. But it [standing up to McCarthy] was something that just had to be done, and I did it.” And then, Symington recalls, “I found out that if you crossed him—well, the one word that was foremost in his mind was power, and if anyone stood in his way—well, no one stood in Lyndon Johnson’s way.” Then Symington realized something about Johnson that he had not understood before: that “there was a sort of cruelty there.”
He found out the hard way—in public. Because of the role he had played in building up Texas defense contractors, it had become a tradition for Symington to be invited to luncheons given by Texas’ congressional delegation for prominent visitors from the state. Walking into a luncheon shortly after his confrontation with McCarthy, Symington strode over to his friend Lyndon as he always did, and Lyndon turned his back on him. “I did not realize he was breaking with me before that,” Symington recalls. “My goodness, only a few years before he had introduced me [at a Texas delegation luncheon] as ‘the Greatest Texan of Them AIL’ And he did it so that everyone saw it. Cruelty.”
Then Johnson did it so that everyone in the Democratic cloakroom saw it. In the past, whenever Bobby Baker circulated through the Democratic cloakroom at the end of the day inviting senators to drop by the Leader’s office, Symington would be one of the senators invited. Now, one day, he was standing with two senators when Baker approached. Taking the arms of the other two senators, Baker said to them, “The Leader wants you in his office.” He walked away. Symington realized he hadn’t been invited. And for some years after that, he never was invited. “He [Johnson] was deliberately leaving me out—and he was doing it in such a way that everyone would know. No one crossed Lyndon Johnson.”
“Senators mutually recognize the primary natural law of political survival,” Neil MacNeil, a very perceptive observer, was to write. When a senator was asked for a vote, an excuse invariably accepted by most Leaders was that it would be politically harmful in his home state. “Hell, I know what it takes to get elected,” one of Johnson’s predecessors as Leader would explain. Even very pragmatic men recognized this law, and accepted it. That was why, Scoop Jackson would later say, that if, despite President Kennedy’s persuasiveness with a senator he had invited to the Oval Office, “the senator said his people [constituents] wouldn’t go along, Kennedy would finally say he was sorry they couldn’t agree but he understood.”
Johnson wouldn’t understand. He would refuse to understand. Considerations important to the Senator—even the consideration of political survival—did not divert him from his purpose. “He could charm you or knock your block off, or bribe you, or threaten you, anything to get your vote,” Jackson would explain. “And he’d get it. That was the difference.”
THE LESSON KEEN-EYED SENATORS drew from what happened to Kefauver and Douglas and Lehman was spelled out by one of the keenest, Russell Long. Lyndon Johnson, Long said, “could not bear to have anyone operating outside his camp. When he saw this developing, he would either reconcile or isolate them.” And this made senators all the more anxious to be in his camp, anxious to be on his team. Men learned from watching what happened to Symington what Symington had learned the hard way. “As for Senate loners,” Russell Long said, “he could make their lives miserable.” Seeing what had happened to Symington, men made sure they didn’t make Symington’s mistake and cross Lyndon Johnson. As Frank Van der Linden of the Richmond Times-Dispatch put it, “When somebody is ruthless like that, and has the power, and is willing to use it, weaker men get out of his way.”
AND LYNDON JOHNSON, looking for power over the Senate, had found another instrument with which power could be created. It wasn’t a new instrument. First employed in 1845, it had been formally embodied in the Senate Rules (Rule 12, Paragraph 3) since 1914, and previous Senate Leaders had used it in a number of different ways. Never, however, had it been used as this Leader used it. His use of it was, in fact, perhaps the most striking example of the creativity that Lyndon Johnson brought to the legislative process.
The instrument was a “unanimous consent agreement,” a procedural device under which the Senate, by unanimous consent, agrees to limit the amount of time that a particular bill can be debated; to divide that time between the bill’s proponents and opponents according to a prearranged formula incorporated in the agreement, and to place the allocation of that time under the control of one or two specific proponents and opponents of the measure; to limit the number of amendments to the bill that can be introduced, and the amount of time each amendment can be debated, and to place that time, too, under the control of specific senators.
Prior to World War II, most unanimous consent agreements had come near the end of a session, when the bill in question had already been debated for days, if not weeks; the Senate would then agree that after a certain number of additional days of debate, a vote would be taken. The mounting impatience after the war with the Senate’s inefficiency had led to increased use of these agreements, but they still had generally been employed only after substantial debate on a measure had already occurred, and they still generally allowed additional time for debate. The 119 bills that had become the subject of agreements between the end of the war and the end of the 1954 Senate session had been debated for an average of six days before the agreements were instituted—and the agreements had allowed an average of three additional days of debate, so that a total of nine days of discussion had been allowed before the vote.
Lyndon Johnson wasn’t allowing nine days; sometimes, in fact, he wasn’t allowing even one.
Traditionally, says assistant parliamentarian Riddick, who had begun drafting more of the agreements as parliamentarian Charlie Watkins grew older, “It was sort of a practice to allow them to consider [debate] the bill a while to see if they anticipated a long debate”; it was only if they saw that one could be expected that they would try to restrict debate. “After Mr. Johnson came to the forefront,” however, the agreements began coming earlier and earlier in the legislative process; “you would get an agreement on some [bills] before you even started debate.” Johnson would decline to call some bills—including some quite major bills—off the Calendar onto the floor until a unanimous consent agreement had been worked out setting a strict time limit; the total debate on a bill might be only six, or four, or, in some cases, two hours. Nor was that the only difference. Until Johnson became Majority Leader, Riddick explains, most agreements were “loose—just general agreements,” many dealing only with time limits. “Often they just set the number of hours, or a set time at which they would vote—that was all many of them contained. You didn’t work out all the details.” Now the agreements became much stricter, and much more detailed. “What Mr. Johnson did was introduce the use of … a detailed agreement as to…how long each amendment would be debated; how long the general debate of the bill would last; whether all amendments had to be germane to the bill, and details of that nature. This was all reduced to unanimous consent agreements, even specifying the hour that you’d proceed to the consideration of said bill; and the hour that you’d vote on it.”
Among the details now included, moreover, was the identity of the senators who would control the allocation of time to other senators who wanted to speak for or against the bill. In the past, the time given to a bill’s supporters had usually been controlled by the senator who had introduced the measure (the “mover”), or by the senator who was managing it on the floor, or by the chairman of the committee from which it had emerged. Now, in more and more unanimous consent agreements, a new figure was named.Ordered by unanimous consent, that…debate shall be limited to four hours, to be equally divided by and controlled by the mover of the bill and the majority leader, an agreement might say. Ordered that on the question of the final passage of such bill debate shall be limited to six hours, to be equally divided and controlled, respectively, by the majority and minority leaders, said another. Sometimes, in fact, the time allotted to a bill’s supporters was divided and controlled by the Majority Leader alone.
Because of Lyndon Johnson’s unprecedented intervention in committee work, the wording of the bills was often to an unprecedented extent a creation of the Majority Leader. He would previously have acted as a mediator between individual senators, or between blocs of senators, who were in conflict over an issue. Once the conflict would have been thrashed out on the Senate floor, but now Johnson would meet alone with each of the senators, or get them together privately, explore their differences to find areas of agreement, and finally would ask, and if asking did not work, would urge, and if urging did not work, would demand, and, finally, if all else failed, would use his raw power to threaten the senators to force them to consent (and to produce the consent of their allies) to the compromise he proposed—would, one way or another, arrange some wording on which they could agree, and for which he felt he could line up a majority of the Senate for passage. He would have been able to do this because of the power—the power of Ray burn, the power of campaign funds, the power of scheduling, the power of office space—with which he had previously surrounded himself. The quid pro quo was seldom stated, seldom precise, seldom the offer, of, say, a dam in return for a compromise on a specific bill. But the senator who needed the dam, or the campaign funds, or a private bill called off the Calendar would know that the man asking for this favor had the power to grant the other favor. Now the bills that were already the creations of the Majority Leader, creations made possible by his new powers, would under this additional new power be managed on the floor by the Majority Leader.
And Lyndon Johnson made sure, in each instance, that he had that power, beyond any question. When he resolved a point with a senator, he—or Reedy or Siegel—took notes on what the agreement entailed. Then the notes would be formally typed up. Recalls Riddick: “Johnson would come up to me: ‘Now look, I want you to type an agreement.’ And he would tell me what he wanted in it. For example: ‘And I want to make sure there are no non-germane [amendments].’ … I would go down to Skeeter’s office [and have the agreement typed up]. Then I would find him, and give it to him. He would read it, and he might say, ‘Well, now, change this so it will do so-and-so.’” In words that would equally apply to Johnson’s maneuvers on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution ten years later, Riddick says:
Johnson wanted everything written to back him up as a record. He would get us [the parliamentarians] to sign the damned thing. He wanted it written down so he would be able to say [if anyone objected], “Well, you gave me this power.”
And, Riddick says, Johnson would take the formal document “around and show it to senators. He would say, ‘I hope you won’t object….’” He would make it very difficult for a senator to object; everyone else had agreed, he would say; we can’t waste days debating this bill; we’ve got to make the Senate function. After he had secured everyone’s consent, he would go to his front-row center seat and stand by it—never for very long—until the presiding senator said, “The chair recognizes the distinguished Majority Leader.”
“Mr. President,” Johnson would say, “I ask unanimous consent that a proposed unanimous consent agreement, which is offered on behalf of myself and the distinguished Minority Leader, be read.” He would hold out the order that Riddick had typed, and a page would hurry over, take it, and give it to one of the clerks on the lower dais, who would read it into the record. “Is there any objection?” the presiding officer would ask. “The chair hears none. Without objection, so ordered.”
LYNDON JOHNSON’S USE of the unanimous consent agreement to drastically limit debate ran contrary to the principles on which the Senate had been founded, and to the customs which had, during the previous century and a half of its existence, been most fundamental in its functioning. Unlimited debate had been sacred Senate custom, the device by which, more than any other, it fulfilled the Founding Fathers’ vision of it as the bulwark against the “fickleness” and “transient impressions” of the majority, as the guarantor of the sovereignty of the individual states. And it was debate—in its highest sense: unhurried, thoughtful discussion to educate first the Senate and then the people, to raise issues and examine them in depth and at length—that had made the Senate a great deliberative body. Johnson’s agreements limited debate so drastically that with their increased use the very nature of the Senate was altered. From the moment a motion for one of his agreements was made on the Senate floor, the body’s normally loose functioning was transformed into something very strict indeed.
Amendments to a Unanimous Consent Agreement—Out of Order is the laconic title of the section of Senate precedents relating to the matter. That means all amendments. “There is,” the precedents state flatly, “no rule providing for amendment of unanimous consent requests.” And not only can the agreement therefore not be modified, once the agreement has been approved (“Without objection, so ordered”), there is no appeal from it except by unanimous vote (“A unanimous consent agreement can be set aside” only “by another unanimous consent agreement”)—by a vote that would be unobtainable should even one of the proponents of the original agreement want it to stand intact.
As for the measure—the bill itself—covered by a unanimous consent agreement, its consideration is hedged about by rules very different from the normal Senate procedure which allows virtually unlimited amendments and virtually unlimited debate. What if the senator who had introduced the bill now, listening to even the limited debate allowed, had a new thought—and, contrary to his earlier belief, realized that the bill should be amended? Under many agreements, no new amendment whatsoever could be introduced. Even in the rare cases in which new amendments were in order, they could only be introduced, not debated—which meant that their purpose could not be explained or discussed on the floor. Most Senate precedents dealing with unanimous consent agreements say that amendments “must be presented and voted on without debate.” What if a senator who has introduced an amendment on the floor before the agreement was ordered thinks that this proposed new amendment, modifying his, is a good idea? That does not change anything: even “Where an amendment proposed by a Senator to an amendment is accepted by the mover of the first amendment as a modification, further debate on such latter amendment is not in order.” And in the even rarer cases in which discussion is in order, it could only be cursory; the time for debate on the “modification” of an amendment had to be subtracted from the already meagre time—often a single hour—already allotted to the amendment.
As employed by Lyndon Johnson, the unanimous consent agreement was even eliminating the tradition that a senator could introduce an amendment on any subject he wished, at any time he wished. Under Rule 14, one of the Senate’s supposedly immutable rules, “germaneness of amendments to bills is not required.”* Nothing was more important to the guardians of the Senate traditions than that tradition. “Russell held that the sacredness of Senate procedure was that you could amend anything,” Riddick says. “You could tack anything onto a farm subsidy bill, for example…. There were no restrictions.” But among the few exceptions to Rule 14 was the unanimous consent agreement. “If a unanimous consent agreement…contains a provision for germaneness of amendments, an amendment not germane is out of order.” Most of Lyndon Johnson’s unanimous consent agreements contained that provision. No amendment that is not germane to the provisions of the bill shall be received, Riddick would type.
And the provisions of an agreement which gave control to a single senator—and, more and more, that senator was Lyndon Johnson—were, more and more, designed to ensure that that control was firm. Once the agreement was voted, the presiding officer no longer had authority to recognize a senator. “A Senator cannot be recognized unless time is yielded to him by one of the Senators having control,” the Senate Rules state. So firm were such provisions that, as Riddick’s chief assistant, Secretary to the Parliamentarian Murray Zweben, puts it,
Because of the unanimous consent agreements he devised, he [Lyndon Johnson] could keep major legislation from coming up. A senator could not introduce himself a major bill with provisions Johnson didn’t like, because Johnson wouldn’t let it come to the floor. And he [the senator] couldn’t offer it as an amendment to a different major bill because of the unanimous consent agreement [on that bill].
As for minor legislation, a senator had little hope of the amendment making its way into law by that route either—thanks to Johnson’s power over scheduling. Johnson would simply not allow that bill to come to the floor; “If a senator offered it [the amendment] to some piddling minor bill, that bill was dead,” Zweben says.
The unanimous consent agreements were a culmination of all the powers that Lyndon Johnson had created over scheduling, over the content of bills, over the managing of bills, over committee assignments. The agreements were made possible—senators had no choice but to accept them—because of the combining of these internal powers with the powers he brought to bear from outside the Senate: the power of Rayburn, the power of money. And the agreements cemented his power, made it formal, as formal as the wordings of the Senate orders in which the agreements were embodied. “Of course any senator could block unanimous consent and keep the debate going,” Evans and Novak were to say. “In fact, however, few did. Debates grew shorter—and ever less important…. Thus did Lyndon Johnson revolutionize the Senate, severely modifying its proud heritage of unlimited debate without changing a single rule.”
MAJORITY LEADER LYNDON JOHNSON may have been limiting debate on the Senate floor; he was not eliminating speeches. He wanted speeches, and he wanted plenty of them, the longer the better. Speeches—which he, and his aides, and most journalists persisted in calling “debate”—had their uses for him. The Lyndon Johnson version of “debate,” however, was not at all what the Founding Fathers had intended.
The Founders had envisioned debate—thoughtful discussion—as an indispensable part of the Senate’s main work. For Johnson, “debate” was a device to divert attention from the main work, and to buy time for him to do it. As George Reedy explains, “As long as somebody on the Senate floor is talking, the Senate cannot vote.” From the time he became Majority Leader, therefore, Johnson began using talk on the floor as what Reedy calls “a diversionary device, which enabled him to stay out of the spotlight while horse-trading,” as a smoke screen for the maneuvering that was taking place in the cloakrooms, or, more and more, in his top-floor Capitol office, as a method of stalling the Senate to give him time to work out his deals.
There were of course senators who liked—loved—to talk, and he used them. “Hubert prepares for a major address by taking a deep breath,” Johnson was to say, and “whenever Johnson needed extra time for horse-trading and a vote was inconveniently near, he invariably sent out Hubert H. Humphrey, who could stand up and deliver a discourse” of two hours or more “without previous preparation,” Reedy recalls. Another was Molly Malone, that “relic of Smoot-Hawley days,” who could still rise at his desk to deliver a passionate—and lengthy—explanation of the need for high tariffs. Although Johnson held the opposite view of tariffs, when he needed to buy time because he didn’t yet have the necessary votes for an upcoming vote on some non-tariff measure, he would often encourage Malone to give his views; “it was the interlude he wanted, not the message,” Harry McPherson says.
While the quorum calls and speeches were droning on meaninglessly on the Senate floor, therefore, the action that mattered was taking place off the floor. When it was completed—the compromises made, the deal closed, the unanimous consent agreement in place—the time for talking was over, and Johnson had little patience with any senator who failed to understand that. A senator heading onto the floor to discuss the upcoming bill would be intercepted by Bobby Baker. “Keep it short, keep it short or the Leader will be mad,” Baker would say. If the senator failed to take the hint, the Leader, seeing him raising his hand for recognition, would hurry over to his desk. “We’ve got the votes, don’t talk, don’t talk,” he would whisper. “Under Johnson, the Senate functions like a Greek tragedy,” Paul Douglas was to say. “All the action takes place offstage, before the play begins. Nothing is left to open and spontaneous debate, nothing is left for the participants but the enactment of their prescribed roles.”
THIS CHANGE IN THE NATURE of the Senate had a further implication. It was offstage, of course—in secret—that Lyndon Johnson himself liked to work. Debate was about goals, issues, about “principled things.” “It is the politician’s task to pass legislation, not to sit around saying principled things,” he said, repeating that credo over and over. George Reedy was to write that “He [Johnson] regarded public discussion as dangerous to the conduct of government…. He was absolutely convinced that achievement was possible only through careful negotiations in quiet backrooms where public passions did not intrude.” And, as Reedy notes, “This attitude left no room in the LBJ philosophy for the Senate as a deliberative body in which speeches could change the outcome of legislation or as an educational body in which speeches were intended to inform the public on the issues of the day…. The role of public debate in securing popular assent to policies and, ultimately, national unity was a concept he could not grasp.”
Under this cloaking of Johnson’s methods in governmental philosophy, however, lay something personal—and deeper. The unanimous consent agreement, the key device by which Lyndon Johnson was changing the fundamental character of the Senate, was, in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s words, “a natural extension of his personality. Because he himself felt uncomfortable in larger groups and formal debate, he gradually shifted senatorial and public attention away from the floor to the places where he felt most at home—the cloakroom, the office, the hallways.”
Some of his assistants understood this fact. “Discussions of goals and ethics were merely exercises in posturing, and he had no patience with such goings-on,” Reedy was to write. “He abhorred dissent to a point where he sought to quell it long before protagonists had talked themselves out.” Disagreement, to this man to whom everything was personal, was disagreement not with his point of view but with him—and, Colonel BeLieu says, “he had zero tolerance for disagreement.” He abhorred dissent. He hadno patience with discussions of goals and ethics. Even the loyal McPherson was to acknowledge that “His constant pressure for unanimous consent agreements…often came close to harassment.”*
Other thoughtful men were as concerned as Paul Douglas about the consequences of this pressure. “Lyndon Johnson did not believe it was a function of the Senate to inform and instruct the public,” Julius Edelstein says. “He believed it was the function of the Senate to pass legislation. But of course the Senate had always been the forum of the nation. The great tradition of the Senate was the tradition of Norris, and Borah and La Follette….” Such concern no longer had much significance, however. Lyndon Johnson had looked for power in the Senate, and had found it—and now that he was Majority Leader, he was using it. During his first six years in the Senate, he had concealed certain aspects of his character, adapting his personality to the institutional personality of the Senate, but now, in the seventh year, he was forcing the Senate to adapt its personality to his.
The adapting was, furthermore, taking place with remarkable rapidity. By June, 1955, within six months of his election as Majority Leader, the unanimous consent agreements that were the legislative embodiment of Lyndon Johnson’s personality had become, as Howard Shuman observes, “the standard operating procedure … on all big Senate bills.” Debate “beyond a sparse allotment of time became a favor which a Senator had to request from the Majority Leader,” Goodwin writes. The right to offer amendments? “If Lyndon Johnson didn’t want your amendment, you couldn’t even offer it,” Shuman says. He hated debate, and now in the Senate, once the very home of debate, debate was no longer important. In what had once been called the greatest deliberative body in the world there was now very little real deliberation. So creative was Lyndon Johnson’s political genius that it had transformed every political institution of which he had been the Leader. Now it had transformed the United States Senate—remade that body, seemingly so immutable, in his own image. He could run it now, run it as he wanted to run it.
*Except in the case of general appropriation bills, or of bills being considered under the cloture rule.
*Although McPherson adds, “But I could not fault him. Senators who raised objections had frequently benefited from his power. Complaints about limiting debate…often turned out to be based on a plaintiff’s annoyance that he must either miss a vote or forgo a speaking engagement back home. And besides, who knew better than liberals the enervating consequences of unlimited debate?”