26

“Zip, Zip”

AND WITH THIS POWER, Lyndon Johnson made the Senate work. Thanks to his intervention in the Standing Committees, his coordination of their schedules and his prodding of their chairmen, bills were emerging from committees faster than in the past. And since they were emerging with most points of contention already resolved, on the floor they were being passed faster than in the past.

The reciprocal trade bill was one example. For decades—after the Second World War as before it—the bill’s arrival on the floor had caused the Senate to grind to a halt, sometimes for weeks, as free-trade senators fought protectionists and the protectionists fought among themselves, no fewer than twenty states having products they insisted be protected by tariff, and with the rates of each tariff the subject of separate bargaining.

In 1955, the bargaining had—thanks to Johnson—taken place within the Finance Committee, where the logrolling went far more smoothly than it would have done in public. And with the necessary compromises agreed, he had been able to secure a unanimous consent agreement to limit debate. There was still another hurdle, a high one for previous reciprocal trade bills: there was traditionally a roll call on the measure, since there always seemed to be some senators who demanded one, and protectionist senators privately in favor of a bill often voted against it to avoid having to explain an affirmative vote to their constituents. The hurdle was removed for the 1955 bill. Putting a supporter of the bill in the chair, Johnson armed him with a surprise parliamentary tactic. Instead of calling for the yeas and nays whenever there was a show of a few hands requesting one, the presiding officer responded to the request by invoking Article I, Section 5 of the United States Constitution, which said that yeas and nays should be ordered only “at the desire of one-fifth of those present.” And Johnson made sure that there were always enough senators present with instructions not to vote for the roll-call request so that the necessary one-fifth was never achieved. The Reciprocal Trade Act of 1955 passed in three days.

Reciprocal trade was only one example. The Upper Colorado River Reclamation Bill—one of the most vital but controversial measures among westerners—had been brought up in session after session, hotly (and often lengthily) debated, but never passed. In 1955, it, too, passed in three days. The Paris accords, which, as Stewart Alsop wrote, “could have been expected at the very least to have elicited a lot of oratory for the folks at home,” were passed in less than two hours of floor debate. Then there were the dozen departmental appropriation bills, those measures that had been stalling Senate machinery for years—decades, in fact. “Traditionally,” as Alsop wrote, “the agriculture appropriation bill, touching as it does many sensitive farm pocketbooks, is the subject of loud, long and angry argument.” In 1955, “it passed, all but unnoticed, after exactly an hour of debate.”

The other appropriation measures were handled with comparable dispatch—even one, the bill covering the Departments of State and Justice, that was being handled by an Appropriations subcommittee whose chairman, Harley Kilgore, was one of the few chairmen who had refused to coordinate, or even discuss, his subcommittee’s deliberations with Johnson because he viewed such discussions as an infringement on his independence. Despite Kilgore’s secretiveness, Johnson knew exactly what was going on in his subcommittee, and when, near the close of Senate business at the end of one May week, Kilgore suddenly appeared on the floor to announce that his subcommittee had completed its work and had a bill prepared, Johnson was ready. He asked a question to which he already knew the answer: “Was the subcommittee report a unanimous report?” “It was a unanimous report,” Kilgore replied. In that case, Johnson said, the bill would be brought up at the earliest possible moment the next week. He had already discussed that schedule with “the distinguished Minority Leader,” he said; the distinguished Minority Leader had agreed. As for routine business, in a single day, as Newsweek reported, “the Senate passed 90 bills, confirmed an ambassador and a Federal Trade commissioner and then knocked off because it had temporarily run out of business. The elapsed time: four hours and 43 minutes. Washington was jolted to attention.” The first session of the Eighty-fourth Congress, Alsop wrote, “is certainly the most efficiently run session in recent memory.” In less than six months as Majority Leader, the youngest Majority Leader in its history, Lyndon Johnson had tamed the untamable Senate.

ALTHOUGH THE SENATE was running more efficiently, however, it sometimes seemed to be running in opposite directions. But underlying most of its significant actions was a single principle that determined which legislation would be passed—and which wouldn’t. The principle was the ambition of its Leader. As Leader of the majority instead of the minority, Lyndon Johnson’s personal interests affected America’s interests more directly than ever before, and when they conflicted, his interests came first.

Richard Russell had by now made most of the Southern Caucus understand that the way to make the South part of the United States again, “to really put an end to the Civil War,” would be to elect a southerner President, and they understood that their beloved Dick, giving up his own dream, had anointed Lyndon as that southerner. With the unbeatable Eisenhower expected to run again in 1956, victory that year would probably not be possible, but the Democratic nomination might be, and the nominee in 1956 would be a front-runner for the 1960 nomination. And they understood—to those of them slow in grasping the fact, Russell had made them understand—that in order for Johnson to attain the nomination he would first have to be perceived as a strong and successful Senate Leader, and that therefore he would have to have a unified party behind him, and they must bend their views to support him and not simply oppose the Leader’s every attempt to pass even moderately liberal legislation; that they must, in fact, even allow him at times to, in George Reedy’s words, “engage in maneuvers” that would facilitate the passage of legislation with at least a tinge of liberalism, legislation they would never have permitted another Leader to pass.

This understanding had allowed Johnson, again in Reedy’s words, to obtain “elbow room from the Southern Democrats” in his attempts to establish at least a modicum of rapport with Senate liberals. “The Southern dons of the Senate, the conservative men with seniority and power…regarded him with pride as their boy,” Booth Mooney says. “The southerners did not always agree with their Leader, but they wanted him to do well, and when it was necessary, were usually willing to stretch their own convictions to support him.” As Johnson advanced toward a more liberal position, his rear and his flank had therefore been protected against the southern attacks that would normally have made that advance impossible. There was even a symbol of that protection; the fact that as Lyndon Johnson sat in the Senate, the desks directly to his rear and at his side were manned by Russell and Walter George, the two most important southerners. Some of the less senior southerners had even made sacrifices (short-term sacrifices for which they had been assured they would be recompensed in the long term): to help him do well, to help him achieve the unity with liberals he needed, they had agreed that young liberal senators be appointed to committee seats into which they themselves would otherwise have moved through seniority; they had allowed the entrance of Humphrey into high party councils (some southerners still couldn’t understand how they had been talked into that: Harry Byrd said to Johnson one day, “Lyndon, I’ll never understand how in the world you got me to liking Hubert Humphrey so much”). And there were more subtle means of assistance: Johnson was no longer placed in the embarrassing position of attending, or declining to attend, meetings of the Southern Caucus; he simply was no longer invited.

On a number of issues, however, “Dick Russell and His Dixieland Band” would alter their position not an inch—and on those issues, Lyndon Johnson marched to their tune.

On the issue that mattered above all others, the southerners were, as Strom Thurmond’s aide Harry Dent puts it, “just as sure as ever that in his heart he was on their side”—a confidence that was understandable, since added to his eighteen years of votes on their side and his other actions of support for them in the past were the actions he was taking now, in 1955, as Majority Leader.

Almost the first major policy issue that confronted Johnson upon his assumption of the leadership was the issue that would make possible progress in civil rights: the long-dreamed-of change in Rule 22. The Senate liberals who had fought for the change in the past hoped that the liberal Democrats elected in November, 1954, would provide the reinforcements needed to vote it through at last. “We had [a] chance for a significant step forward,” Paul Douglas was to recall. But Johnson crushed the hope, in part, in the opinion of some observers, by making it clear to the newly elected senators that his offer of choice committee seats was contingent upon their support of “the leadership” in the Rule 22 fight (Walter White of the NAACP was to blame the defeat on “shrewd horse-trading over committee memberships”); in part by using Hubert Humphrey to sabotage the liberal caucus from within. After listening to Humphrey argue, with his customary eloquence, that the liberals should “abandon the devil theory of history,” stop thinking of Johnson as the devil and give him, now that he was equipped with the new powers of the majority leadership, “a chance to see what he could do with the South,” and to fight for civil rights not through “a frontal assault” on the rules but through the regular Senate committees,” Douglas went along with Humphrey’s pleas to shelve the rules-change motion. He knew almost at once that “we had made a bad mistake,” Douglas was to say. “There was no change in Johnson’s opposition to civil rights and not the slightest softening in the attitude of the South,” which, in fact—emboldened by Johnson’s success—“sharply stiffened its opposition.” Humphrey’s persuasiveness, Douglas was to say with bitterness, may not have resulted in any gains for blacks but it resulted in gains for Humphrey; his “role in this matter sealed his alliance with Johnson.” (Douglas was not alone in this opinion. John Steele informed his editors that in the Rule 22 fight, “behind Humphrey stood the off-stage figure of Lyndon Johnson.”)

Thwarting a new liberal attempt in 1955 to attain another long-sought objective—statehood for Hawaii—was easy for Johnson, but in May came an assault more threatening to those who believed in separation of the races. The black congressman from New York, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., attached to one of the South’s—to one of Richard Russell’s—most cherished proposals, the military reserve bill, an amendment to ban racial segregation in reserve units, and the House of Representatives passed it. The bill was before Russell’s Armed Services Committee, and there it stayed, for as much as Russell wanted a reserve system adopted, the threat to separation of the races was too grave; the Senate might pass the bill without the amendment, but the bill would then eventually be returned to the House, which might reinstate the amendment. Elated by the success of the maneuver, liberals were planning to attach a similar amendment to the school construction bill; House conservatives had responded by holding that measure in committee.

Attacking Powell’s military reserve amendment publicly, Lyndon Johnson said: “The issue that is now holding up passage of this crucial measure is one that has been settled in a number of different forms by the courts and by the executive agencies. Congress is no longer a meaningful forum for such debate. I sincerely hope that this issue can now be worked out and that we will not imperil the existence of our Nation by raising issues which can have no meaning in terms of results.” And Johnson maneuvered privately as well, getting Eisenhower out front on the issue as he had gotten the President out front on the Bricker Amendment. After Johnson urged him to do so, Eisenhower spoke against the practice of attaching anti-segregation amendments to major bills, saying, “If you get an idea of real importance, a substantive subject, and you want to get it enacted, then I believe the Congress and I believe our people should have a right to decide upon that issue by itself, and not be clouding it with amendments that are extraneous.” As for the reserve bill amendment, Eisenhower said, “It is entirely erroneous to try to get legislation of this character through by tacking it onto something that is so vital to the security of the United States.” Neither of the Powell amendments was enacted into law.

Another aspect of Johnson’s strategy—and its coordination with the strategy of the South—had been dramatized in January, at the conclusion of Eisenhower’s State of the Union address. As the President stepped down from the dais, Knowland had hurried over to congratulate him, but Johnson had moved faster, and had been the first to reach Eisenhower’s side, thereby, as Frank Cormier of the Associated Press put it, winning “the informal Capitol Hill footrace” to congratulate him. During the months since January, the considerations that had motivated Johnson to thus demonstrate his solidarity with the President had only been strengthened. In late spring of 1955, with the economy booming, the Formosa Strait crisis ended. With the world generally at peace, “millions of Americans” had, in Stephen Ambrose’s words, “a feeling of near-euphoria,” and Eisenhower’s promise of peace, progress, and prosperity seemed fulfilled. Johnson was more convinced than ever that opposing Ike would be politically unwise. Proposals were made repeatedly by Democratic senators for investigations of questionable Administration activities such as the Dixon-Yates “giveaway” of hydroelectric power to southern power companies. The proposals were shunted by the Democratic Leader into the Democratic Policy Committee, from which none of them ever emerged.

The Senate’s southern barons likewise had strong reasons for not opposing the President, not only because of the similarities in their philosophies but because of something that Lyndon Johnson and the barons never discussed in public. As The New Republic was to state:

It is difficult to document, yet the deans of the Senate, men like Walter George and Harry Byrd and Richard Russell and John McClellan, show a profound disinterest in whether or not a Democrat moves into the White House in 1957. These Southern veterans…already have their chairmanships and their committee patronage. The Administration is forced to clear important bills and appointments with them. No Democratic successor to Mr. Eisenhower could be more deferential to their prerogatives. In fact, a Democratic President might even cause a great deal of discomfort by prodding for more progressive and less moderate domestic legislation.

Though these barons were called Democrats, they were unenthusiastic about the leading Democratic presidential contenders—Stevenson, Harriman, and Kefauver, all liberals—and may have preferred another four years with the safely moderate Eisenhower in the White House. By cooperating with the President on such issues as the tariff and foreign aid and by hamstringing investigations that might have embarrassed the Administration, Johnson was acting not only in his own interest but in their interest as well.

The “cooperation” issue was raised publicly in April, in a very dramatic setting. Washington’s great annual Democratic gathering, the black-tie Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner, was usually held in a hotel ballroom, but the guest of honor in 1955 was the man whom the Associated Press called “the beloved ‘Mr. Sam’ of legions of Democrats.” No ballroom in Washington could accommodate the more than thirty-seven hundred Democrats from across the United States, the largest such crowd in history, who were coming to pay tribute to Sam Rayburn, and the dinner had to be moved to Washington’s National Guard Armory. Facing the audience above the dais was a gigantic cartoon of Jefferson and Jackson welcoming Rayburn to the Democratic pantheon, and the cartoon was flanked by huge portraits of FDR and of the most famous living Democrat, Harry S Truman.

Following tributes to Rayburn by Eleanor Roosevelt (“My husband counted on him and never found him wanting”) and Adlai Stevenson (“He was there when the record was made”), and Rayburn’s characteristically humble response (“I accept this honor feeling my inadequacy”), Lyndon Johnson, in his speech, repeated the statement he had made so frequently: that Democrats wanted a “party of moderation” in 1956. But when the seventy-one-year-old Truman spoke, assailing the GOP’s “cynicism”—the “most cynical political behavior” since the Harding era—in the familiar Truman rhythms, suddenly the audience, chanting “Give ’em hell, Harry,” louder and louder, seemed to remember that the Democratic Party, in leading America out of the Great Depression, and in fighting for social justice, had not been the “party of moderation” at all. And the next morning, in his suite at the Mayflower, the ex-President gave William White an interview in which he made clear that it was not only Republicans who he felt had recently been guilty of “cynical political behavior.”

He did not want to criticize the Eisenhower Administration’s Formosa policy, Truman said, because “I haven’t got a great deal of information on the subject.” But, he said, he did want to criticize one aspect of the situation: “that,” as White put it, “the Senate had not adequately debated the subject. Had there been such a debate, the former President observed, he would have felt no anxiety at all over the ultimate decision, whatever it might have been.” And Truman made clear, with Trumanesque vividness of phrase, whom he blamed for the lack of debate—and for other aspects of recent Democratic policy as well. “I have got tired a long time ago of some mealy-mouthed senators who kiss Ike on both cheeks,” he said. “Mr. Truman did not name these senators,” White wrote. “The implication seemed inescapable, however, that he was far from satisfied with the restrained partisan activity of the present Democratic leadership of the Senate headed by Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas.”

Arrangements had been made earlier for Truman to pay a nostalgic visit to his old Senate desk (“My heart has always been at this desk,” he said, adding that his ten years in the Senate had been “the happiest years of my political life”), and to be honored by Senate leaders at a luncheon in the Capitol on Monday. Johnson had no choice but to deliver the Senate’s formal welcome, written by Reedy: “This is a better Senate because he was part of it. Welcome back, Harry. The latch string is always out when you pass this way.” Then he had to stand next to Truman as reporters asked the former President to confirm the quotes White had used, and he did so, quite firmly. He had to pose beside Truman at the luncheon (from which several southern senators were noticeably absent), and ride beside him on the Senate subway as photographers took pictures. Truman seemed in high spirits; Johnson’s smile was noticeably wan.

Truman had told White that he had only one remaining political purpose in life: “to keep” the Democratic Party “over on the liberal side.” And his trip to Washington had at least succeeded in reminding some liberals that that was the side the party was supposed to be on. Reporting that “many Democrats were stirred by his [Truman’s] fighting speech—partly because they got so little of the same from the party’s actual presidential hopefuls,” John Steele commented specifically on Johnson’s call for a “party of moderation.” “Some thought this was a strange Democratic doctrine,” he said. And following that April weekend, the attitude of liberal journalists underwent an abrupt and dramatic alteration. “Some Democrats feel the party is compromising with principle,” Doris Fleeson wrote in May. Her column of June 3 said: “Southern senators are sensitive to the charge that they are perfectly satisfied to let Eisenhower continue in the White House. The record they make in support of the President proves, however, that they certainly aren’t unhappy. And it is under Southern leadership that all investigations of the Administration have faltered and no majority program has been approved.” The New Republic had come to realize that despite the Senate’s new efficiency, there was little political gain in the bills it had passed, and because of the dearth of senatorial investigations of the Administration, “there will be … no heavy ammunition for the Democrats’ candidate for the White House” in 1956. Columnist Roscoe Drummond began referring to Lyndon Johnson as “malleable.” In Drew Pearson’s columns he was again being called “Lyin’ Down Lyndon.”

IF, HOWEVER, Lyndon Johnson’s interests always came first with Lyndon Johnson, there were times when those interests coincided with America’s interests—with the highest of America’s interests, the great liberal cause, the cause of social justice. And when they did, the cause advanced.

In some areas, conservatives and southerners would not give Johnson “elbow room,” but in other areas they would. And when Johnson had it, he used it. In June, 1955, in a single week, as the attacks on him by Fleeson and other liberal commentators were continuing to escalate, there arrived a moment in domestic legislation comparable to that which had occurred two years before with foreign legislation: a moment in which Johnson’s ultimate ambition did not conflict with, but instead coincided with, the aspirations of the liberals who had been attacking him. And, in that week, he accomplished—suddenly and without warning—gains the liberals had not believed possible.

He did it on two days of that week: Tuesday, June 7, and Wednesday, June 8, 1955.

On that Tuesday, the Senate voted on housing.

The conditions in which America’s poor and lower-middle-class families were housed had been a national disgrace for decades, and the situation was growing not better but worse, in part because in 1954 the Republican majorities in Congress had brought to a near standstill even the meagre low-rent public housing programs then in existence. Witnesses before the Senate Banking and Currency Committee, which had jurisdiction over housing, had testified earlier in 1955 that more than ten million American families were living in substandard dwellings, that the number was growing by hundreds of thousands of families each year, and that at the current rate of construction by the private real estate industry, the number was going to grow even faster.

The Eisenhower Administration’s 1955 public housing proposal was to fund 70,000 units over two years—a mere 35,000 per year—but Banking and Currency was one of the few Senate committees with a strong liberal bloc, and after hearing Philadelphia’s Mayor, Joseph Clark, testify that his city alone had 70,000 substandard units, the committee reported out a bill authorizing the construction of 540,000 units over four years, or 135,000 per year.

The very concept of public housing was anathema to Senate conservatives, who regarded it as pure “socialism.” And it provoked particular opposition from southern conservatives, because so many of the families that would be helped by this particular form of socialism would be black. Liberal housing bills had been reported to the floor before and had been killed or drastically scaled back there, and conservatives were confident that this one would be scaled back, too. The Indiana Neanderthal, Homer Capehart, had introduced an amendment reducing the number of units to the Administration’s original 35,000-per-year figure, and the amendment’s passage, George Reedy recalls, “was taken for granted.” An extremely careful head count by the real estate lobby, which, as Sam Shaffer put it, “exercises genuine power in virtually every congressional district,” had concluded that it would pass by a margin of 51 to 37. Capehart’s and Knowland’s counts were approximately the same, although, trying to be cautious, they were predicting victory by only eight votes.

Johnson reinforced the prevailing feeling. When reporters asked him about the eight-vote prediction, he said, with an air of dejection, that that was about right; his own count, he said, showed that the margin would be seven. Liberals, as Evans and Novak would recall, “had no hope at all”; Lehman and Douglas “were resigned to fighting” yet another “lonely, futile battle for public housing.” And the liberals knew who was to blame. That very weekend, the ADA had again assailed Johnson for “affably acquiescing to the Republican assault upon liberalism” and thereby “betraying the Democratic party’s traditional claim to be the party of the people.” The Majority Leader, the ADA said, “has consistently used the pretext of ‘party unity’ to avoid action on liberal legislation.”

But Johnson’s pessimism was only a mask—behind which he was preparing a surprise. His opponents’ head counts had as a matter of course included all the Senate’s twenty-two southerners with the exception of public housing advocates Sparkman, Hill, and Ellender (Sparkman was, in fact, the author of the 540,000-unit bill), and by traditional Senate standards that count would have been accurate. But in 1955 there was a new, non-traditional element: the southerners’ desire to help Johnson look liberal if they could do so without damage to their basic principles or to their popularity with their conservative political constituency. And at the last moment—over the long Memorial Day weekend before the Tuesday vote—Johnson had thought of a way in which they could vote against the Capehart Amendment without such damage.

It was true, he told the southerners, that the amendment cut back on public housing. But, he said, it nonetheless still authorized those 35,000 units per year. A vote for the amendment might be hard to explain to their constituents; it could make them vulnerable to some rabble-rouser back home who would charge them with voting for public housing; trying to explain that it was a reduced bill, he said, would be like saying, “My daughter is only a little bit pregnant.” Why vote for public housing at all? Johnson asked them. It wasn’t necessary to do so. All they had to do was vote against the Capehart Amendment, and then vote against the overall bill—that way, he pointed out to the southerners, they could assure their constituents that they had voted against all provisions for public housing.

“ONE OF THE ADVANTAGES of dealing with the Southern Bloc in those days was that its members knew how to reach complete and binding agreement without any word of their intentions leaking to the outside,” George Reedy was to recall. No one—including Homer Capehart or William Knowland—had the slightest inkling of what was in store. That very Tuesday morning, Time’s John Steele had bumped into the Indianan in a corridor outside the Senate Chamber, and had asked if the eight-vote margin was still firm. It sure was, Capehart said. At that moment, Lyndon Johnson walked by. “Lyndon,” Capehart said loudly, with his customary gift for the elegant phrase, “Lyndon, this time I’m going to rub your nose in shit.” Johnson’s reply, delivered in a rueful tone, was, “Okay, I guess you’ve got me.”

The debate, which began at about one o’clock that afternoon, was enlivened by a touch of drama. There was no more ardent supporter of public housing, of course, than the onetime pioneering mayor of Minneapolis, but months earlier Hubert Humphrey had scheduled an important speech in Minnesota for Monday evening, and the earliest he could return to Washington was via a seven-thirty Tuesday morning plane scheduled to arrive in the capital at about two o’clock. Johnson had promised him to delay the vote until that time, and had obtained Knowland and Capehart’s agreement on the grounds of collegial courtesy. But now Johnson’s staff, checking with National Airport, was told that the flight, delayed by inclement weather in the Midwest, was running more than an hour behind schedule.

Otherwise, the debate proceeded along the expected lines. After Spark-man had introduced and explained the Banking Committee’s bill, Paul Douglas, who had been fighting for public housing for so many years, stated his position forcefully. “Anyone who walks into any city of any size in this country, away from the central business district, will find in nearly every case a slum—streets without trees, houses that are many years old and in disrepair, and children growing up in circumstances that are very difficult.” Some of those children, Douglas said, grow up into fine men. “All credit to men like that and all credit to families like that.” But, he said, “Most children growing up under those conditions swim against the tide.” Over and over again, since almost “my maiden speech in the Senate,” “I showed that the death rate in the slums was very much above the average of the community; that the sickness rate, particularly from tuberculosis and other diseases, was very much greater than the average for the whole community. I showed that the fire rate was high, that the crime rate was high, and that the juvenile delinquency rate was high.

“After all,” Paul Douglas said, looking around at the few senators who were on the floor, “juvenile delinquency is just a fancy name for kids getting into trouble.”

And, he said, “the slums are expanding…. The cities need help…. The people for whom we are speaking on the floor of the Senate this afternoon are the low-income people. They are inarticulate. It is difficult for them to voice their needs. We provide aid and assistance to virtually every other group…. We provide assistance to private builders, real-estate groups…subsidies galore to those who do not need them, but none, or little to those who most need assistance.

“Mr. President, this is the noblest country on earth, but we have two great blots upon us: One is our treatment of the Negro and the other is the slums in our cities…. Mr. President, we all want a nobler country, a better country. One of the things we must do is cut out the cancer of the slums…. So I hope, Mr. President, that the Senate will reject the amendment of the Senator from Indiana.”

By about four o’clock, all the scheduled speeches had been delivered, Humphrey had still not appeared, and Capehart and Knowland were insisting on an immediate vote. Afraid to leave the floor lest a vote be called, Johnson prowled restlessly around the Chamber, glancing at his watch, throwing his troops into the breach—Sparkman rose to provide a lengthy overview of the whole history of public housing—embarking on a series of maneuvers: quorum calls accompanied by the palms-down motion to direct clerks to read the names slowly; a reversal of his previous refusal to allow Prescott Bush to introduce a last-minute amendment that would assist a local Connecticut housing authority (since discussing the amendment would take time). But Capehart couldn’t be stalled much longer. Walking back to the cloakroom door, Johnson shouted to a telephone clerk to get National Airport—not some airline clerk at National Airport but an air traffic controller in the airport’s control tower—on the phone. When the telephone clerk had done so, Johnson, saying, “Mr. President, I must leave the Chamber for a few minutes,” rushed into the cloakroom and grabbed the phone. “Damn it, I’ve got a senator up there,” Johnson shouted to the controller. “He’s two hours overdue and I want him down quick. He’s got to vote. You better be awful sure he’s not stacked up there.” The controller said that Humphrey’s plane was indeed stacked up, in a holding pattern over Pittsburgh; a lot of planes were stacked up in the pattern, the controller said. Johnson stopped shouting. His voice grew quiet and threatening. “Well, you better be goddamned sure none of those planes comes in before his comes in,” he said. After checking to make sure that a Capitol police car was waiting at the airport to rush Humphrey to the Chamber, he returned to the floor, where the debate was droning languidly on. At 5:13 p.m., Humphrey appeared on the floor. A quorum call was in progress; Johnson twirled his index finger, and the names came out faster and faster, and after the call was completed, the vote on the Capehart Amendment began.

Capehart was sitting complacently at a front-row desk, without a clue to what was about to happen, until the clerk reached the name of Senator Price Daniel of Texas, a staunch opponent of public housing whose vote, Capehart was sure, would be in favor of his amendment.

“Senator Daniel,” the clerk called.

“No,” Senator Daniel replied.

“Capehart’s head jerked around so rapidly I was afraid his neck was going to snap,” George Reedy recalls, and what he saw was another shock. The last time Capehart had looked around, most of the Democratic desks had been empty. They weren’t empty now. Sitting at them were the southerners who he had been certain would support his amendment. And the shock was intensified by their votes, as Capehart’s face showed. “For once it was the literal truth to say that a man’s jaw dropped as southerner after southerner voted against him,” Reedy recalls. Not only Daniel but Ellender, Ervin, Fulbright, George, Gore, Johnston, Kefauver, Kerr Scott, Sparkman, and Stennis (and, of course, Lyndon Johnson himself) voted “No.” Russell and Eastland, of whose votes Capehart had also been confident, abstained. (Had Johnson needed their votes to defeat the amendment, they would have voted “No.”) Smathers, Long, and McClellan had already been lost to Capehart through pairs. Capehart had expected to get eighteen or nineteen votes from the Southern Bloc. He got five. His amendment was defeated, 44 votes to 38.

“As the vote was announced, ponderous Homer Capehart, who had spent the day predicting his own victory by eight votes, was a slumped-down hulk, a pale-faced man in a rumpled suit at his Senate desk,” John Steele was to report. “Bill Knowland, his face a fiery red, stared stunned at the telltale tally sheet in front of him.”

Then came the vote on the overall housing bill. Many of the southerners voted against that measure, also, but while their votes on the amendment had been decisive, on the bill itself their opposition had no significance, so overwhelmingly was the rest of the Senate in favor of the measure. It passed 60 to 25. “As soon as the vote was announced,” Reedy recalls, “the Southern Democrats … hastened to the Senate recording facilities where they had themselves plugged in to radio stations all over their home states. There they explained to their constituents that they voted against the Capehart Amendment because it still represented socialism—35,000 units [per year] of it.”

Liberal senators remained on the Senate floor, because they had something they wanted to say there. Hubert Humphrey thanked “both sides of the aisle” for “making it possible for me to vote in favor of a progressive and decent housing bill,” but said that “most particularly I desire to express profound thanks to the distinguished Majority Leader, my friend, the senior Senator from Texas.”

“The Senator from Texas,” Humphrey said, “is a genius in the art of the legislative process.” And, Humphrey said, his genius was being used “in behalf of an effective Democratic Party liberal program.” “I know,” he said, “that the purpose of the Senator from Texas is to direct Congress so that its legislative behavior is a humanitarian one, consistent with the basic tenets of the New Deal and the Fair Deal.”

Fulsome praise of Johnson from Humphrey had become routine in the Senate, so that the words of the next speaker were more meaningful. For the next speaker was Paul Douglas, Douglas who so distrusted Johnson, Douglas who believed that Johnson’s motives were not at all liberal, Douglas who had been denied his rightful committee assignments by Johnson. “I am frank to say I did not think it would be possible to defeat the Capehart Amendment,” Paul Douglas said. “I do not know the precise methods by which the Capehart Amendment was defeated, but it was due to the extraordinary political virtuosity of the leader of the Democratic party in the Senate, and I wish to thank and congratulate him.”

And more meaningful still was the scene in G-14 an hour or so later, where Johnson was holding court. Among those present were the regulars at such celebrations: Humphrey, Bobby Baker, several members of the Southern Bloc, two or three chosen journalists. But also present was a senator who had not been invited to G-14 since Johnson had evicted him from it.

Paul Douglas had not wanted to accept Johnson’s invitation, but he felt he had to accept it. He had been fighting for so long for decent apartments to help “the low-income people, the inarticulate people”—to help them “swim against the tide”—fighting without success. Now at one stroke more than half a million apartments had been provided, and, being Paul Douglas, he had to give to the man responsible what he knew the man wanted.

While Johnson was holding forth, with Baker and Humphrey and the others laughing, loudly, at his jokes, Paul Douglas kept his distance, standing just inside the door. But when Johnson, gloating over the details of his triumph, looked over at Douglas and said, “Well, Paul, you got what you wanted, didn’t you?” Douglas walked over to Johnson’s desk so that he was standing directly in front of him, “grave and dignified,” as Evans and Novak wrote, and said, “I didn’t think you could do it, and I will never know howyou did it, but you did it, and I’m grateful.”

THE NEXT DAY, Wednesday, June 8, the issue was the minimum wage, which hadn’t been increased in six years—it was still the same seventy-five cents per hour it had been in 1949—and neither had the coverage, which liberals had been trying to extend to low-paid employees in the retail and service industries.

The Eisenhower Administration had proposed a 20 percent increase to ninety cents per hour, but had declined to broaden coverage. Conservative senators like Spessard Holland opposed even that modest increase. Since the Labor Committee subcommittee handling the matter was chaired by Paul Douglas, it was expected that the bill that would be reported out would both broaden coverage and raise the minimum to $1.25. If it did, the bill would therefore contain two provisions that conservatives would not accept, and the bill would therefore not pass and there would be no improvement in the financial situation of low-paid Americans.

Lyndon Johnson didn’t wait until the bill reached the floor, or even until it reached the full Labor Committee. He began working instead on the subcommittee, where he had only seven senators to persuade, and he convinced them to report out a moderate bill calling for a one-dollar minimum wage and no broadening of coverage.

With liberals determined to hold out for $1.25 and broader coverage and many conservatives opposed even to the one-dollar figure (one conservative, Republican H. Alexander Smith of New Jersey, was preparing an amendment that would raise it only to the ninety cents the Administration wanted) there were enough liberals and conservatives opposed to the bill so that it appeared that the 1955 minimum wage scenario would follow the scenario of previous years, and that at the end of the day, no bill would be passed.

The scenario was to be rewritten in 1955, however, thanks to those eyes that “missed nothing” on the floor.

That Wednesday, trying to avoid a floor fight that would not only split the Democrats but dramatize the split to the world, Lyndon Johnson had been working for a compromise—passage of Smith’s proposed ninety-cent amendment and of the rest of the Labor Committee bill, with its status quo coverage—and had been trying to get enough votes for this strategy by playing on the worst fears of both sides, telling liberals that he had counted votes and if they didn’t settle for ninety cents, there would be no increase at all, telling conservatives that he had counted votes and if they didn’t settle for ninety cents, they might find the minimum wage increased to $1.25. “The cloakroom was just jammed…. We knew what he was telling both sides, but there was just enough credibility in it—he was a master,” says one Senate aide. And he had apparently succeeded. The Smith Amendment, and the rest of the Labor Committee bill, was going to pass.

And then, all at once, Lyndon Johnson, standing next to his desk as he managed the bill under the unanimous consent agreement he had negotiated, noticed something. Under that agreement, two hours had been allocated to discussion of the Smith Amendment. The Republican arguments in favor of it had been completed, but the Democratic hour was just beginning. Not expecting a vote for an hour, senators had begun wandering on and off the floor. All at once, although there were still a substantial number of senators on the floor, that number did not include most of the liberals who opposed the Labor subcommittee bill—or most of the conservatives who opposed the bill. By coincidence, at that moment the bill’s strongest opponents all happened to be gone at the same time, leaving on the floor mostly moderates who were willing to settle for an unamended bill—no broadening of coverage but an increase to one dollar in the wage—in the form the Labor Committee had reported.

“I think we’ll pass that minimum wage bill now,” he told Hubert Humphrey, with whom he had been talking.

It happened very quickly.

“Mr. President,” Johnson said. The presiding officer recognized him. “I yield myself such time as I may require,” Johnson said, speaking fast. “The committee considered this question long and thoroughly. I am hopeful that we shall not start amending the bill. I yield back the remainder of my time, and ask for a vote.”

“All time on the amendment has been used or yielded back,” the presiding officer said, and called for a vote. It was a voice vote, and the amendment was defeated. Suddenly, the pending matter was the unamended bill itself. “The bill having been read the third time, the question is, Shall it pass?” the presiding officer said. No Republicans were waiting to speak, and Knowland yielded back his remaining time. “Mr. President,” Johnson said, “I yield back the remainder of my time.” A voice vote was taken, and the chair announced that the bill was passed.

“Zip, zip,” Humphrey was to recall. “He called it up, and it passed just like that—voice vote—zip.” Lister Hill, the Labor Committee Chairman, was in the cloakroom at the time, and did not even know what was happening. Herbert Lehman happened to wander onto the floor as the clerk was announcing that the bill had passed. “What’s the vote on?” he asked. Told that it had been on the minimum wage bill, Lehman was “speechless.” Spessard Holland wasn’t. “Boy, oh, boy, Spessard Holland came charging out of the Senate dining room, and he wanted to know what had happened here,” Humphrey would recall. “Oh, he was just jumping, screaming, hollering and pounding the desk. Johnson said, ‘Well, Spessard, I had a little vote. If you fellows aren’t on the job around here, I’ve got legislation to pass.’ He just slipped it right on through there. Zip! Oh boy, they were furious with him.”

While both sides were furious, however, the fury of the liberal side was tempered by the realization that not only had an increase in the minimum wage finally been achieved, the increase to a dollar was higher than the ninety-cent increase that the Administration had proposed. As Reedy was to say, “Obviously we were proceeding on the ‘half a loaf’ theory. But it seems to me that the scoffers must be men and women who have never been hungry.”

Among those who agreed was old Matthew Neely, whose state of West Virginia was home to tens of thousands of coal miners who had just had their wages increased by a third. Rising stiffly at his desk, Neely said, “This has been a senatorial red-letter day for labor. With a minimum of debate, a maximum of efficiency and a majestic measure of humanity, we have [increased] the minimum wage from 75 cents to a dollar an hour. This action will cause rejoicing in thousands of American homes.”

“Some of us had hoped the amount would be somewhat larger,” Hubert Humphrey said. “But surely, by this very decisive action in the Senate, we have raised the economic levels of vast numbers of persons.” And among those who agreed was Paul Douglas. Passage of the minimum wage bill had confirmed the feelings about Lyndon Johnson that Douglas had expressed the previous day after the passage of the housing bill. “I was against him for Leader, but I think I was wrong,” he told his administrative assistant, Frank McCulloch. “I think now he’s the best man for the job.”

The last time a minimum wage bill had been before the Senate, Lyndon Johnson had voted against increasing it. Now he had fought for an increase in the wage—and the wage had been increased. Whatever the reason for his change on that issue, he had changed—and had made the Senate change with him. Whether or not Lyndon Johnson talked about “principled things,” or believed in “principled things”—and in both the public housing and minimum wage fights he had all but ignored the issues and concentrated on maneuvers—he had won principled things, for hundreds of thousands of Americans who needed those things. The slickness of Johnson’s maneuver had senators laughing among themselves as they walked out of the Chamber, but the liberals had much more reason to laugh. Lyndon Johnson had not only made the Senate work, he had, in at least two areas of social welfare legislation, made it work on behalf of that legislation. For so many decades—generations—the Senate had stood against such legislation like a dam. The dam was being breached now.

“THE TALK OF POLITICAL WASHINGTON today is the way Lyndon Johnson runs the Senate,” Leslie Carpenter wrote in his column on June 12, and the talk, and the print, now ranged all across the political spectrum. Conservative Gould Lincoln’s “The Political Mill” ground for him in the Washington Star. Under the headline “LYNDON MOVES MOUNTAINS,” Lincoln wrote that “The Senate, which so often has been the stumbling block over which legislation has fallen by the wayside, has set a pace rarely equaled—All this hasn’t just happened. There’s a tall Texan in the saddle….” The Wall Street Journal ordered up a long article on “the Texas-sized Texan” who “RUNS THE SMOOTHEST DEMOCRATIC SHOW IN YEARS.” Johnson had been enjoying praise from conservatives all year, but now, following the passage of the housing and minimum wage bills, liberals joined them on the Johnson bandwagon. “On several occasions in the past this newspaper has been critical of Senator Johnson’s leadership,” the Washington Post editorialized. “We are happy to say that in this session of Congress, he has exhibited a remarkable amount of finesse, understanding and restraint [and] has served the national interest.” Declaring that Johnson had “snatched victory from defeat” with “brilliant political technique,” Doris Fleeson added: “Admiring spectators suggested that all that remains is for him to do his next triumphs to music.” Drew Pearson praised “the deftness of [his] leadership.” A long Newsweek article on June 27 called him “THE TEXAN WHO IS JOLTING WASHINGTON.”

“The Frantic Gentleman from Texas,” Saturday Evening Post, May 19, 1951

The Monday Meeting: President Harry Truman poses at the White House with his congressional leaders. Seated: Senate Majority Leader Ernest McFarland, Truman, and House Majority Leader John W. McCormack. Standing: Senate Whip Lyndon Johnson and House Whip Percy Priest, January, 1951.

The cover Johnson wanted

Leland Olds, September, 1949

With the Republican leaders. Above: Robert Taft of Ohio. Below: William Knowland of California

President Dwight D. Eisenhower with Johnson and Senate and House leaders, on the White House steps, 1955

In the middle: Johnson with Hubert H. Humphrey and Richard B. Russell

WORKING THE PHONES

Bobby Baker

Theodore Francis Green

Allen Ellender

Leverett Saltonstall

Scott Lucas

THE JOHNSON TREATMENT
Sam Ervin (seated, Alan Bible and Herman Talmadge)

Johnson campaigning in 1954 with George Reedy and Dorothy Nichols

Democratic National Convention, August, 1956: Estes Kefauver, Truman, Adlai Stevenson, and Johnson

Strolling the halls after the 1958 State of the Union Address, with William Knowland; ahead of them are Vice President Richard Nixon and Senator Carl Hayden.

Lunching with the Democratic Policy Committee

Questioning a witness at a subcommittee hearing

Conferring with Bobby Baker

The Southern Caucus meets in Richard Russell’s office to discuss strategy for the civil rights bill, July 26, 1957. From left foreground: James Eastland, Strom Thurmond, John Sparkman, Sam Ervin, Kerr Scott, Allen Ellender, Russell, Herman Talmadge, John Stennis, Olin Johnston, Spessard Holland, Russell Long, Lister Hill, Harry Byrd, and Willis Robertson (back to camera).

Frank Church, Joseph O’Mahoney, Johnson, Estes Kefauver, and Richard Russell, after the passage of the jury trial amendment, August I, 1957

Happiness: on August 27, 1957, Johnson’s forty-ninth birthday and the day the House passed the Senate’s civil rights bill, Johnson hugs Angel Macias, whose Monterrey, Mexico, team had won the Little League Baseball world championship.

On August 29, 1957, still Majority Leader because of William Proxmire’s election, Johnson emphasizes a point after Proxmire was sworn in. Left to right: John Kennedy, George Smathers, Hubert Humphrey, Proxmire, and Johnson.

Dedication of Henry Clay’s portrait in the Senate Reception Room: Senators Hayden, Kennedy, and Johnson, March, 1959

President-elect John Kennedy bids good-bye to his dinner guests, Vice President-elect Johnson and family, November 27, 1960.

As the Senate prepared to recess for the long Fourth of July weekend, moreover, the lionization by the press was about to take a new turn—the turn Lyndon Johnson had been waiting for.

The South had begun to throw out its skirmishers for a Johnson presidential candidacy in 1956. The lack of enthusiasm south of the Mason-Dixon Line for a second campaign by Adlai Stevenson was more than equaled by the South’s distaste for the men northern liberals were mentioning if Stevenson were not to be the candidate: the New Yorker Harriman or the apostate Kefauver. The man the South wanted was the man the South always wanted, of course, but now Richard Russell withdrew from consideration in terms so unequivocal that they would have been called “Shermanesque” had not that adjective been particularly inappropriate, and the conservative columnist Bas-com Timmons wrote that “Johnson will inherit much of the support which was given Senator Russell last time.” Immediately after Russell’s withdrawal, a chorus of such support began to issue from the southern citadel on Capitol Hill. Taking the Senate floor on June 30 with the Newsweek article in his hand, Harry Byrd himself read into the record the magazine’s prediction that Lyndon Johnson would be President one day.

And over the Fourth of July weekend, the press was going to join in the chorus, as Johnson knew. George Smathers had given him an advance copy of a front-page editorial scheduled to appear in Florida’s Orlando Sentinel on Saturday, July 2, an editorial that would say that “only the nomination of Lyndon Johnson” could “put solidarity back in the once solid South” and save the Democratic Party from another defeat, that only his nomination “can extirpate and expiate the shameful and disgraceful insults heaped upon the South at the last convention…. He is the one man who…can win back such states as Florida, Tennessee and Texas…. The Stevenson-Kefauver-Harriman liberals are through. They bear the stamp and stigma of the leftwingers and big city political machines.” Johnson had also seen the advance text of a Liz Carpenter article that was going to appear on July 3. “This super-sensitive political town began speculating this week” about “the first rumblings of a Johnson presidential bandwagon,” the article said.The New Republic’s July 4 issue would carry what would be described as an “exuberant panegyric” of Johnson by Senator Richard Neuberger. And, most significantly, Robert Albright’s “Gallery Glimpses” column, scheduled to appear in Sunday’s Washington Post (which would, as Evans and Novak put it, “be on every Sunday breakfast table in the capital”), contained the words that Johnson so much wanted to read: “Lyndon Johnson last week emerged as something more than a highly skilled legislative technician. Unless bystanders missed their guess, he was riding a presidential boom.” Having obtained an advance look at the Albright column, Johnson was telling colleagues to be sure to read it Sunday.

•    •    •

BUT LYNDON JOHNSON HIMSELF was not to read those articles on Sunday. On Sunday, July 3, 1955, he lay, as his father had once lain, under an oxygen tent in a hospital, having heard a doctor say to him what a doctor had said to his father: the words he had always dreaded hearing.