29

The Program with a Heart

ON THE OPENING DAY of the 1956 session of Congress, ninety-one senators were at their desks when, after the chaplain’s prayer, the Majority Leader rose to ask for recognition so that he could request a quorum call. Before Vice President Nixon gave him the floor, however, he said, “The Chair knows that he expresses the heartfelt sentiments of all the members of this body when he says that we are most happy to see the senator from Texas back in his accustomed seat.” All along the four arcs of desks, senators stood and applauded. “You don’t know how glad I am to stand at this desk again,” Lyndon Johnson said quietly. After the quorum call had begun, he walked out to the lobby to pose for photographers. Nixon came out and put his arm around him. Walter George and Harry Byrd crowded up to him, not to get into the picture but to say hello, and Theodore Francis Green was not far behind. As they talked to Lyndon, the old men’s faces lit up and their eyes were warm behind their thick glasses. Hubert Humphrey bustled over to shake his hand, with a broad, warm smile on his face, and it was no broader than Bill Knowland’s. When, later that week, the Democratic Policy Committee held its first meeting, Johnson began by expressing his “everlasting gratitude” to Earle Clements and all the committee members for “carrying on so admirably” during his illness. “It was a labor of love for all of us,” Clements replied, and the heads around the table—Jim Murray’s and Lister Hill’s and Bob Kerr’s and Carl Hayden’s as well as Dick Russell’s—nodded vigorously in agreement. Lyndon Johnson, who had spent his life searching for affection and a sense of security, was back in a place where he had found as much of those commodities as he was ever likely to find anywhere. He had just spent five months in the valley in which he had been born and raised, but he was back in a place, on a hill, that was much more a home to him than the Pedernales had ever been.

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SPEAKING AT THE WOMEN’S NATIONAL PRESS CLUB “Welcome to Congress” dinner in the Hotel Statler that evening, tall and rangy, his deeply bronzed face dramatic above the black and white of his evening clothes, Johnson said that his heart attack had been “a wonderful way to gain a little perspective. I think I learned lessons of humility and of proportions—when to put forth the maximum effort and when to let troubles go by.” Assuring reporter John D. Morris of the New York Times that he was going to follow his doctors’ orders, he said, “I’m going to be sensible. I’m not going to try to do everything.”

James H. Rowe, the highly respected lawyer and political insider, who had known Lyndon Johnson for almost twenty years, was aware that, as he was to say, Johnson would always use “whatever he could” to “make people feel sorry for him” because “that helped him get what he wanted from them.” But that awareness didn’t help Rowe when the person from whom Johnson wanted something was him. Johnson had been trying for years to acquire Rowe’s full-time services. He was aware of something known to very few people in Washington. Capital legend had bestowed much of the credit for Harry Truman’s 1948 victory on a memorandum written to the President before the campaign, at a time when his chances appeared hopeless. The memo proposed a campaign strategy, and it did so with great specificity and pragmatism; every one of its recommendations was based not on ideology but on what the memo called “the politically advantageous thing to do.” Truman had reputedly kept the document—thirty-two single-spaced typewritten pages—in the bottom drawer of his desk all during the campaign, using it as a blueprint for his come-from-behind victory. The memo, which had acquired an almost talismanic significance in the capital’s political circles, had been presented to the President by Clark Clifford, his legal counsel, and its authorship was publicly attributed to him, but Johnson knew that except for some editing changes the author was actually Rowe. Having read the memo—and having observed how closely Truman adhered to its strategy—Johnson believed that the President had relied on it heavily, and that its brilliance had been proven by Truman’s victory. He felt that Rowe could do the same for him: could give him, too, a blueprint for reaching the goal that flickered always before him. He had, George Reedy was to say with more than a touch of envy, “an almost mystical belief in Jim’s powers. He thought Jim might make him Pope or God knows what.” But while Rowe had always been available to help Johnson with advice, having observed how Johnson treated people on his payroll, he had always rejected Johnson’s offers to join his staff. During that first week in January, however, Johnson renewed his overtures—with a new argument—and when Rowe refused this time, he wouldn’t let it drop. “I wish you would come down to the Senate and help me,” he said in a low, earnest voice. And when Rowe continued to refuse, using his law practice as an excuse (“I said, ‘I can’t afford it, I’ll lose clients’”), he found that Johnson was telling other members of their circle how cruel it was of Jim to refuse to help to take a little of the load off a man at death’s door. “People I knew were coming up to me on the street—on the street—and saying, ‘Why aren’t you helping Lyndon? Don’t you know how sick he is? How can you let him down when he needs you?’”

Johnson had spoken to Rowe’s law partner, Rowe found. “To my amazement, Corcoran was saying, ‘You just can’t do this to Lyndon Johnson!’ I said, ‘What do you mean I can’t do it?’ He said, ‘Never mind the clients. We’ll hold down the law firm.’” Johnson had spoken to Rowe’s wife. “One night, Elizabeth turned on me: ‘Why are you doing this to poor Lyndon?’”

Then Lyndon Johnson came to Jim Rowe’s office again, to plead with him, crying real tears as he sat doubled over, his face in his hands. “He wept. ‘I’m going to die. You’re an old friend. I thought you were my friend and you don’t care that I’m going to die. It’s just selfish of you, typically selfish.’”

Finally Rowe said, “‘Oh, goddamn it, all right’”—and then “as soon as Lyndon got what he wanted,” Rowe was forcibly reminded why he had been determined not to join his staff. The moment the words were out of Rowe’s mouth, Johnson straightened up, and his tone changed instantly from one of pleading to one of cold command.

“Just remember,” he said. “I make the decisions. You don’t.”

THROUGHOUT THE 1956 SESSION, Johnson used his heart attack to get what he wanted from senators, too. Bobby Baker would remind senators recalcitrant on one issue or another that they shouldn’t upset the Leader, that he was a sick man, that they should try to make things easier for him—arguments that had particular resonance in 1956 for a group in which, that year, the shadow of death was particularly dark. In February, Harley Kilgore died of a stroke, and in April, Alben Barkley, giving a speech at a college in Virginia, had just proclaimed, in one of his trademark religious references, “I would rather be a servant in the House of the Lord than sit in the seats of the mighty,” when he clutched his chest, collapsed, and died of a heart attack. And all through that year, Eugene Millikin, once tall and vigorous but now pale and gaunt, was forced to attend Senate sessions in a wheelchair because of an illness that he called arthritis but that his colleagues suspected was something worse; in July, Millikin announced that he would not seek reelection that November.

Johnson did, indeed, act like a heart patient for a while, following his doctors’ orders. He took a nap in the midafternoon, on the couch either in G-14 or in Skeeter Johnston’s inner office, or, occasionally, in the Marble Room, with an aide stationed outside the door to make sure he wasn’t disturbed. Because the ordinary sofa was too short for him to stretch out, he had Senate cabinetmaker Renzo Vanni make a number of new couches, seven feet long, extra wide, so big that Vanni called them “battleship couches”; one, called by others the “Johnson Couch,” remains in the Marble Room to this day. And for a while these naps were not to be interrupted. He would tell Skeeter’s assistant, Dorothye Scott, “how soon to call him,” and tell her he wasn’t to be disturbed until then.

But only for a short while. After a week or two, when he came through Skeeter’s outer office, Ms. Scott recalls, “he would walk in his great, big strides, like an antelope, and by the time he would get from my outer office into the inner office he would have said about seven things he wanted me to do.” And long before the time he had told Ms. Scott to wake him, the door to the inner office would burst open, and he would stride out, asking her if the things had been done. More and more days were uninterrupted by any nap at all. Clements was in trouble in Kentucky, where he would have to stand for reelection in November against a very popular Republican, tall, handsome Assistant Secretary of State Thruston Morton. By February, the Assistant Leader was spending a lot of time back home, and Johnson asked George Smathers to be “acting whip.” The suave Floridian knew Johnson the senator, but he didn’t know Johnson the boss, and he quickly found out that, as he was to put it, Johnson “was very, very difficult to work for.” Senator though he might be, Smathers found himself treated as if he were a member of Johnson’s staff, and he learned that when Johnson gave an assignment, no excuses were accepted. “He used to say, ‘I want only can do people.’ That was one of his favorite expressions. ‘I only want can do people around. I don’t want anybody who tells me that they can’t do something.’” If the assignment was to obtain a senator’s vote, “Johnson was very unsympathetic” if that vote was not forthcoming. Once “Quentin Burdick…didn’t vote like Johnson wanted. ‘Why didn’t you get on that, goddamn you, so-and-so and so-and-so two weeks ago!’” And the assignments never stopped coming. “He demanded not just one hundred percent of your time, but more than that,” Smathers recalls. Every morning, early, “Lyndon came by my house on Garfield Street,” and I was with him until ten-thirty at night. As soon as we walked into the Capitol, he started his sixty-cylinder engine, and he didn’t slow up during the entire workday.” He wanted Smathers to be available until he left for home, and “Then it seemed like only a few hours later [that] Lyndon and his limousine were back at my front door to start a new day.” There was no time to nap, or to slow down, because the first major business Lyndon Johnson put before the Senate, within three weeks after the session began, was the part of his “Program with a Heart” that he considered the most significant for his political future: that proposal he had tried to conceal in the middle of the program so that no one would notice it.

DURING THE SIX YEARS that had passed since 1949, the Senate’s refusal to advise and consent to the reappointment of Leland Olds had had the desired effect on the Federal Power Commission. Olds’ replacement by the malleable Mon Wallgren meant that three of the FPC’s five members were consistently reluctant to stand between the wealthy natural gas producers and the still greater wealth they coveted—understandably reluctant, in Paul Douglas’ view. “All know the great pressure which has been exerted by the big producers on the Commission…and the punishment which has been meted out to those who took an opposite stand,” Douglas wrote in 1956. “Since this is a real world, it is not to be wondered at that the majority of the Commission have chosen to play it safe.” Not only had the FPC reversed, one by one, the policies and regulations that Olds had promulgated to moderate the producers’ greed, it had even taken the stance that its jurisdiction did not extend to the independent producers who sold gas to the pipeline companies—a stance which allowed the producers to claim steadily higher costs and to charge steadily higher rates—and when House liberals moved to formally give it that jurisdiction, the commission declined to accept it. During those six years, therefore, the price of natural gas had risen and risen again, from six cents per one thousand cubic feet of gas in 1949 to ten cents in 1955, and so had the profits of the natural gas companies, and the price of their stock: a share of Superior Oil Company stock sold for $150 in 1949; in 1956, it was selling for exactly $1,000 per share; since the Keck family owned 21,977 shares of Superior stock, it was easy to calculate the value of their holdings: $21,977,000. As for Herman and George Brown’s Texas Eastern Transmission, a share of its stock, priced at $12 in 1949, was selling for $28 in 1955, which meant that the holdings of the two brothers—only a small share, of course, of their overall assets—was worth $8,379,000.

In 1954, however, the states of Michigan and Wisconsin, whose residents and factories constituted the captive market of gigantic Phillips Petroleum, were paying almost 40 percent more for natural gas than in 1949, took the FPC to court to force it to give consumers the protection that Franklin Roosevelt had created it to give them, and the Supreme Court, holding for the states, specifically ordered the agency to accept jurisdiction over the independent producers, and regulate their rates.

Responding to this verdict as slowly as it dared, the FPC issued its decisions on rate applications so slowly that they caused what Fortune called “the biggest logjam in the history” of any federal regulatory agency. Delayed though regulation might be, however, it was coming, unless something was done about the court ruling. Legislation was needed to supersede it. In October, 1954, therefore, the country’s largest oil companies formed two committees. The activities of one, the “Natural Gas and Oil Resources Committee,” would be public: an advertising and public relations campaign to create support for the legislation; the committee would spend $1,753,000 during 1955 “to educate the public.” The activities of the other committee—budget and expenditures kept tightly concealed—were more private. Its educational efforts were directed not at the public but at members of Congress; it was formed, as a memorandum by the committee’s attorneys was to explain, “for this express purpose.” The funds for the lobbying carried out by this “General Gas Committee” were collected under the direction of another figure from the Olds hearings, Lyndon Johnson’s old ally Maston Nixon of Corpus Christi, president of the Southern Minerals Corporation, and were distributed by two principal lobbyists: Johnson’s former administrative assistant John Connally, and Elmer Patman, a loud, arrogant attorney from Austin, Texas, who was on Superior Oil’s payroll. Early in 1955, a bill was introduced by Arkansas Representative Oren Harris to in effect nullify the Supreme Court decision by exempting independent producers from FPC regulation, and on July 28, 1955, after extensive lobbying by both public and private committees, it was passed, 209 to 203, by the House of Representatives. A companion bill, introduced by Arkansas Senator Fulbright, was reported out of the Senate Commerce Committee that same day.

BRINGING THE HARRIS-FULBRIGHT NATURAL GAS BILL to the Senate floor would angrily divide Democratic senators. The resulting split would run along geographic rather than the usual ideological lines: senators from the gas-producing southwestern and western states were adamantly in favor of deregulation; senators from the gas-consuming northern and eastern states adamantly opposed. The intra-party floor fight would be bitter, for not only were Democratic liberals against the measure, so were some of the party’s many conservative senators—because the injustice was too raw for them. More than 70 percent of America’s natural gas was owned by only forty-two companies, many of which were controlled by a small, often overlapping, group of individuals like Richardson, Murchison, Abercrombie, the Kecks, and the brothers Brown. It was this small group that was reaping, at the expense of more than 21 million familes, most of them middle or lower class, enormous, almost unimaginable profits. If there could be said to exist a “national interest” in natural gas regulation, it most certainly lay on the side of the consumers, not the producers. The producers, in addition, possessed a virtual monopoly over a natural resource which should, in the last analysis, belong to the people as a whole, and in the absence of federal regulation, the monopoly would only grow stronger, and the consumers would be only more and more defenseless against it. Millions of urban families owned gas-powered stoves, hot-water heaters and furnaces; purchasing new appliances run on other fuels would be expensive—too expensive for most of them. “Once the lines are laid, the homes hooked into the utility systems and the cooking and heating appliances bought, the chance for the users of gas to get any real protection against unfair producers’ prices by competition is nil,” Walter Goodman said. Speaking for the mayors of fifty American cities, Philadelphia’s Mayor Joseph Clark told a Senate committee: “To eliminate controls … is to leave the consumer at the mercy of [a] small group of oil companies.” The southerners on whose support Lyndon Johnson could usually rely were split. Brown & Root’s Posh Oltorf would never forget his surprise when he learned that “Lyndon was having as much trouble with the conservatives as with the liberals—with Russell as much as Humphrey. They [leading conservative senators] were opposed to it [the natural gas bill]. They were for free enterprise, but this was just too much. They thought it was terrible. They thought it was a damned bonanza for the oil companies. We had a terrible time with Russell and Byrd. I remember my shock that they would be opposed to something for businessmen.”

The stakes involved in passage of the bill were huge, however. Estimates of the short-term increases in gas prices that could be expected following its passage ranged between $200 million and $400 million per year, an increase that would boost the values of the producers’ gas reserves by between $12 billion and $30 billion. In expectation of passage, immense quantities of gas were being held off the market so that it could be sold at higher prices. Divisive though the bill would be, Lyndon Johnson’s cherished “unity” had to be sacrificed to higher considerations. To win the Democratic presidential nomination, he would have to become friendlier with northern liberals, and his principal financiers, rabid reactionaries almost to a man, would not ordinarily tolerate that. But the natural gas bill could be the key to greater tolerance, for these Texas tycoons held huge natural gas reserves. As the astute Oltorf was to explain, “This [the natural gas bill] transcended ideology. This would put something in their pocket. That’s how they viewed politics. Any son of a bitch who makes me a million dollars can’t be all bad. As long as you put dollars in their pockets, they’d forgive your ideology.”

Divisive though the Harris-Fulbright Bill might be, therefore, in 1955 Lyndon Johnson had only been waiting for it to be passed by the House before bringing it to the Senate floor and passing it. With a majority of Democratic senators against the bill, he would have to pass it, over the wishes of his own party, with Republican votes—and he had been intending to do just that, with the support of Eisenhower, who firmly believed that the measure would liberate businessmen from unwarranted governmental restrictions.

Johnson didn’t want these arrangements upset by his heart attack. When Acting Majority Leader Clements visited him at the Bethesda Medical Center in July, 1955, Johnson expressed himself, as Clements reported to the Democratic Policy Committee upon his return from the hospital, “very frankly”; “he [Johnson] would like the bill taken up yesterday and passed the day before yesterday.”

Clements was not the man for so difficult a job, as he himself appears to have recognized. Telling the Policy Committee that “opponents were ready for extended discussion,” he betrayed a lack of confidence that the bill could be passed without Johnson’s personal participation in the fight, saying, “In January, we will have back with us our distinguished friend from Texas. He will be back with us strong…. I will be happy to have it come up as early as possible in January.” The committee agreed that that would probably be best.

Now Johnson was back—strong. Opposition within his party had filtered into even his rubber-stamp Policy Committee. Trying to show, as he put it in a committee meeting on January 5, 1956, that “I wanted to lean over backwards so I could not be accused of ramming the bill down the throats of the Senate,” he had invited the leading proponents and opponents of the natural gas bill to make their case before the committee, and Paul Douglas made the opposition case with his usual eloquence. The bill, Douglas said, shouldn’t be passed, or even introduced, “under Democratic sponsorship.” In 1954, Douglas said, one of the most effective Democratic issues against the Republicans had been the “giveaway to big business.” If the bill “comes out under Democratic sponsorship,” he said, “it is going to deprive our presidential, senatorial and congressional candidates of our strongest arguments…. If any Democratic speaker talked about giveaway favors to big business, it would be thrown back in his face…. This might well be a factor in our losing control of committees in both houses.” Johnson tried to counter that argument, but as usual when he confronted Douglas in argument, he did not get the better of the exchange. “Senator Johnson said he had heard that [Douglas’] viewpoint expressed strongly in the Tidelands argument, but it didn’t seem to have that effect on the 1954 elections,” the Policy Committee minutes report. “Senator Douglas replied that the Tidelands Bill was brought up under Republican leadership.” Conceding that “the majority of the Policy Committee” was probably against the natural gas bill, Johnson said, “the only question was whether it should be brought up.” Was there any objection to bringing it to the floor? he asked. “I won’t object, but I want to say that it will be very unfortunate in my state,” Hennings of Missouri replied. Five of the nine committee members hadn’t said a word during the discussion, and the committee finally looked where it always looked for direction. When “Senator Russell said his memory was” that in July the committee had agreed that it would be bought up “as early as possible in January,” the committee agreed that it could be brought up.

IT WAS TIME for the first team. “They [the oilmen] sent their best men up,” Posh Oltorf was to recall, in the tone of a Texas Homer relating the story of an historic battle. Across the crowded lobby of the Mayflower Hotel a big hand with two missing fingers waved to a friend, and, seeing that hand, Lobbyist Dale Miller whispered in awe to a friend, “Ed Clark’s here.” To get the legendary Secret Boss of Texas to Washington, the Humble Oil Company was paying him—in addition, of course, to the rent for his suite and all expenses—a fee of one thousand dollars per day, but, so that he wouldn’t have to suffer the indignity of registering as a lobbyist, “it was arranged,” as he would recall, “that although the ’Umble was paying me, it would be paid through Brown & Root,” a construction firm ostensibly unconnected with any legislation then before Congress. And Clark, of course, had his private incentive for winning the natural gas fight: those forty thousand shares of Texas Eastern in his lock-box back in Austin. The broad-shouldered, big-bellied, squeaky-voiced, rumpled, coarse Clark was one of the two men the natural gas industry considered its most effective champions; the other—tall, slim, handsome, smoother than smooth, custom-tailored in pinstriped banker’s blue—was also at the Mayflower. “John Connally had the entrees [sic],” Oltorf would recall. “He knew everybody from being on Johnson’s staff. And everybody liked Connally. And he could really get his side across. He knew how to talk to senators. He would say, ‘We’llnever forget you. You will be doing a wonderful thing for your country, and I’ll never forget it.’ And, of course, that implies future support.” The arrogant Patman had been supervising the General Gas Committee’s lobbying efforts; he was informed that from now on, he would be reporting to Connally.

Other lobbyists, not of the stature of a Clark or Connally but heroic figures in the Texas oil industry nonetheless, took the field in the Natural Gas Battle of 1956: Charlie Francis, Colonel Ernest O. Thompson of the Texas Railroad Commission (“I remember seeing Colonel Thompson when I was a boy, in a tent in an oil field in East Texas,” Dale Miller would say. “And he was up there in Washington in 1956—old and bent, but he was there”), Robert Windfohr of Dallas. Some wore into that battle the mantle of their fathers. Dale Miller’s huge suite at the Mayflower—377—had been the suite of his late father, Roy Miller of Texas Gulf Sulphur, an almost mythical lobbyist possessed of so much power in Washington that, the Saturday Evening Post said, “For twenty years he has had the status of a quasi-public figure.” The executive director of the Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, Claude Wild Jr., a very canny young political string-puller, was the son of Claude Wild Sr., the canny old pol who had pulled strings for Lyndon Johnson’s early campaigns in Texas. And all these men knew that this battle would be remembered in years to come. Talking with the author decades later, some of them tried to ensure that their participation in it would be recorded for history. Claude Wild Jr. was discussing another matter when he interrupted himself to say, “You know, I was in charge of counting the votes for the natural gas bill.” After a pause, he added, “You’re not writing that down.” And he waited until the author had made the desired note before continuing. During that battle, some of the oilmen even came up to Washington themselves, staying at the Mayflower. “I saw Hunt there today,” Texans told each other excitedly. “Sid’s here, too. I saw him. And Old Man Keck in his wheelchair.” George Brown, suave and discreet, was seldom seen: his suite was not at the Mayflower but at the Hay-Adams.

And it was time for the captain of the team. Not only did Lyndon Johnson install Clark and Connally in the Democratic Policy Committee office—“at whoever’s desk was vacant,” secretary Nadine Brammer recalls—so that they could make their telephone calls right out of the Capitol Rotunda, not only did he allow them to use his private office when face-to-face lobbying was needed, he also threw his weight behind them. “He [Johnson] would call senators up and ask them to come in and see me,” Clark says. And Johnson made sure that senators knew that when Clark and Connally spoke, they spoke for him.

Johnson, of course, was lobbying himself—“harder than anyone,” Oltorf says—as well as mapping strategy and directing the overall campaign. Every evening, after the Majority Leader had finished his work on the Senate floor, Connally would be waiting for him in 231 to give him what Oltorf calls “daily reports.” Then Connally would have dinner with Oltorf—who would relay the reports to Herman Brown in Houston.

And Johnson was not lobbying only in his office. In obtaining the necessary votes from the other side of the aisle, he needed more than Eisenhower’s support, so he was deepening his alliance with the Republican senator who, as chairman of the GOP Policy Committee and ranking GOP member of the Appropriations Committee, held power over bills vital to GOP senators. The glue for part of that alliance was social: “He had Styles [Bridges] down [to Huntlands] during the natural gas fight,” Oltorf recalls. Part was philosophical—to Bridges, of course, any assault on business had to be Communist-inspired—and part, as always in the Johnson-Bridges relationship, was pragmatic. The five thousand dollars in cash from Johnson that Bobby Baker carried to New Hampshire for Bridges was only one episode—in either October or November of 1955, Elmer Patman had made a “lobbying” trip to that state. And in the overall pattern of the Johnson-Bridges relationship, these were minor episodes. The key figures in the major episodes were Connally and Clark. Asked why Bridges would not only support the natural gas bill himself but would also bring the support of other Republican senators, Connally replied, “The reason was money.” He said he did not recall the amount involved, but that it was large. “I told you, I carried inordinate amounts of cash,” he said. Asked the reason for Bridges’ support, Clark smiled and rubbed together his thumb and index finger in the gesture that means money. Asked how much money, Clark said he could no longer recall, but, asked if it might have been about five thousand dollars, he laughed. “It would have been many times five thousand,” he said. “Styles Bridges was no piker.” Nor was such “lobbying” confined to New Hampshire. Patman sent an emissary, John Neff, to pay visits to several Republican senators in the Midwest.

Whatever terrain he picked for his battle, Lyndon Johnson fought well. “I was worried,” Claude Wild recalls. “It [natural gas deregulation] was not a popular issue. If you don’t have a good champion there—well, it’s awful easy for a senator to vote against it.” But, Wild says, natural gas had “a real champion”: not Rayburn (“I doubt he had any impression [of the stakes]. He had no idea what money was”) but Johnson. “In Lyndon, we really had one.” Says Oltorf: “He [Johnson] got Bridges. Johnson really wanted him involved—and he got him involved.” Hardly had the Senate convened on January 3 when Johnson knew he had enough Republican votes to win.

The captain had devised a devastatingly effective strategy. Northern newspapers and magazines were already seething with outrage. The New York Times called the bill wrong “socially, economically and politically.” The Nation called it a “gouge,” saying that “the producers are convinced they will get away with it because of their power over Congress” (and reminding its readers that “oil interests helped to finance McCarthy’s four-year anti-Democratic crusade”). The New Republic said that “the contention that natural gas ought to sell in a free market, like coal or wheat, loses some force when one notes that buyers of natural gas can never buy in a free market.” Johnson kept debate on the Senate floor from turning the temperature up any higher. Proclaiming repeatedly that he would not “ram” the bill through, that of course there must be “full debate” on so important a measure, Johnson gave the northerners all the time they wanted—a full month, with the vote scheduled for February 6. His only request, he said, was that the debate be “gentlemanly.” What he didn’t give them was arguments, or opposition, or even an audience—anything that would furnish grist for the journalistic mill. When liberal opponents of the bill were speaking, there were few comments, or even questions, from the bill’s supporters. There were, in fact, few supporters. Johnson had told them to stay away from the Chamber.

By thus arranging for the liberals to be ignored rather than answered, he had ensured that their speeches received less attention than would have been the case had there been controversy—newsmaking controversy—on the floor. And since many liberals had a natural reluctance to sit at their desks listening to someone else give a long speech, and they had no leader strong enough to ensure that they stayed on the floor anyway, liberals often found themselves speaking to a very small audience indeed. On January 25, for example, Paul Douglas took the floor for a long, carefully researched speech against the Harris-Fulbright Bill. There were only two other senators present, the presiding officer and Frank Carlson of Kansas. The presiding officer signaled to Carlson to take the chair, and, stepping down from the dais, left the Chamber himself. “That left Senator Douglas talking to four rows of desks” in which there was not a single senator present, Frederick Othman wrote. “In the press gallery, reporters were busy interviewing each other on the question of whether anybody remembered seeing a senator speaking to nobody at all. Even the oldest correspondent couldn’t remember a time when at least two or three senators weren’t on the floor.”

Unwilling to blame themselves for the situation (which of course could have been at least partially improved had they simply been willing to sacrifice a little time to listen to one another speak), the liberals blamed Johnson. “For the sake of appearances it would seem that Senator Lyndon Johnson, who cleverly stage-managed this puppet show, would have arranged for more senators to…attend to make it look good from the galleries,” Thomas Stokes said. As it was, Stokes said, the “farce gives itself away. Too slick was his careful arrangement of ‘full debate.’… The scene in the Senate reflecting the apathy and cynicism of the elected servants…carries me back to the 1920s when big money was moving the pawns about here in Washington.” But the strategy worked. While some of the arguments against the bill were eloquent—“the concentrated power of the great oil companies, wielded today to influence the decision of national Government by contributions to both parties in many parts of the United States, is a menace to the proper functioning of free government within this country,” Hennings said—the arguments were delivered before galleries that were almost as empty as the floor. Writing angrily that “perhaps the most cynical aspect of Johnson’s management of the issue was his pious decree that the debate must be ‘gentlemanly,’” Doris Fleeson had to admit that the decree, “of course, had the effect of dampening tension and excitement, emotions that do sometimes communicate themselves to the Senate and the public and affect the outcome of debate.” TheWashington Post could only observe helplessly that because “senators have stayed away from the Senate in droves,” the “arguments on the floor have attracted far less attention than they deserved.” “Never in the many years I have covered Washington have I seen such a skillful job of backstage manipulation,” Drew Pearson had to confess. So completely did Johnson feel he had the situation under control that in the middle of the debate, he left for a brief vacation in Florida—on a Brown & Root plane.

AND THEN, WITHOUT WARNING, the Natural Gas Bill of 1956 became a moral issue. On Friday, February 3, as the Senate was droning toward the weekend recess before the scheduled Monday vote on the measure, Senator Francis Case of South Dakota suddenly rose at his desk and announced that a lobbyist for a natural gas company had come to his campaign headquarters in Sioux Falls and left an envelope to be given to him—an envelope containing hundred-dollar bills, “twenty-five of them, in fact.”

He had been planning to vote for the bill, Case said—“The principle of maintaining free enterprise appeals to me”—but the payment (which “would be the largest single contribution I could remember for any campaign of mine”) reminded him of Hennings’ warning that the oil companies’ “money power” is “a menace to the proper functioning of free government.”

“I object,” Case said, to “doing something so valuable to those interested in natural gas that they advance huge sums of money as a down payment, so to speak, on the profits they expect to harvest.” Since the bill evidently “has prospects of unusual monetary profit to some, and with that profit would go the means for a continuing effort to influence the course of government for private gain, I must vote” against it.

Suddenly the press had all the grist it needed, “SENATOR TELLS OF BRIBE ATTEMPT,” headlines blared. Summoning Gulf Oil’s chief lobbyist, David Searls, to his Mayflower suite, Ed Clark gave him some very serious advice. “You are in the wrong place today. I wouldn’t want to be in Washington today.” There would almost certainly be an investigation of Case’s charge, Clark said, and that investigation might easily expand to include other contributions. If Searls was in Washington, it would be easy to serve a subpoena on him. “And if you ever get called to testify, you’re going to be in a position where you have to tell the truth or lie. And if you lie, you’re going to be in danger of perjury. If it were me, I would leave today!” Whether or not Searls himself followed Clark’s advice is not known, but it was followed by so many others that the Mayflower found itself with an unexpectedly high number of vacant rooms that Friday evening: all that afternoon, the private planes had been taking off from National Airport, heading southwest.

John Connally was not nearly as tough as Clark. And he was far more immediately threatened by Case’s bombshell. Although the Senator had not yet named the lobbyist who had offered him the cash, saying he wanted to do so not on the Senate floor but to some “properly constituted authority” such as the FBI or a Senate Committee, Connally knew that it was John Neff, a lobbyist for Keck’s Superior Oil Company, and that the cash had come from Elmer Patman and the General Gas Committee, whose lobbying operations Connally was directing. And Connally didn’t move as fast as Clark, either. When Tommy Corcoran rushed into Connally’s suite at the Mayflower, he found him “white-faced,” all the self-assurance gone in an instant. For an entire day, he “sat paralyzed,” one of his biographers, James Reston Jr., was to write. Then he, too, left town. As Reston says, “The widely held rumor was that Lyndon Johnson had spirited his friend out of Washington for fear that Connally would be questioned and then implicated and indicted in the scandal.” (In his own memoir, Connally says, in an attempt at exculpation that is unintentionally revealing: “No attempt had been made to bribe anyone. A contribution that would have been given routinely was handled clumsily, with atrocious timing. But this was unfortunately one of the quirks of character of people who lived and died in an industry where fortunes were made and lost almost overnight. Many oilmen of that period carried with them staggering amounts of cash, and they treated it as though they were tossing around chips in a Las Vegas casino.”)

Lyndon Johnson wasn’t paralyzed. His instant reaction was to rage at Case—“I think we ought to investigate the morals of some people in South Dakota for bringing this up,” he said—and to try to make him seem like a guilty party in the matter. First, he tried to impugn Case’s veracity by casting doubt on the truth of the story, saying (in a statement with no basis in fact) that it was based upon “a vague recollection of a lady clerk.” The next day he said: “Thus far, Senator Case has declined to reveal the name of the man who left the money. Unless the senator from South Dakota voluntarily divulges the name of the fellow, and the impropriety, if any, the Senate is going to investigate.” Then, when Case gave Neff’s name—together with the envelope and the twenty-five hundred-dollar bills—to the FBI, Johnson switched to impugning Case’s motives. Ignoring the fact that Case had been a supporter of the natural gas bill, and the fact that he had reported the contribution as soon as he realized it was connected with the bill, Johnson told reporters that he considered the timing of Case’s revelation—so close to the date of the vote—a deliberate attempt to sabotage the measure, an attempt he said would not succeed; when several senators urged that the vote be delayed until, as Mike Mansfield put it, “a complete and thorough investigation” could ascertain “whether other senators had received similar offers,” Johnson said there would be no delay. The vote, he said, would be held on Monday as scheduled.

ON MONDAY, on a packed Senate floor, several senators on both sides of the aisle called for a delay until, as Republican Potter of Michigan put it, it could be determined whether Neff’s approach to Case had been an isolated instance or “just a small part of the big overall effort of certain people to influence the passage of this bill.” But the Majority Leader was having none of it. “The Senate of the United States can ill afford to prostrate itself before phantoms,” he said. “That is what we would be doing if we delayed the vote now at hand.” When the clerk called the roll, the only senator who changed his vote because of the uproar over the Case contribution was Case, who voted against it. Every other senator voted as Johnson’s tally sheet showed he was going to vote. And while Democrats voted against the bill, 24 to 22, Republicans supported it by a 31–14 margin. “The Senate, casting aside suggestions that it was voting under a cloud of suspicion, passed the natural gas bill tonight, 53 to 38,” John Morris reported in the New York Times.“All signs indicate that President Eisenhower will sign it into law.”

The calls for an investigation did not die away, however. In a coincidence that Johnson viewed as unfortunate, the Rules Committee had the previous year appointed a three-member subcommittee to look into the broad question of campaign financing. Not only was it the obvious body to conduct the investigation, but its chairman was Missouri’s Hennings, who, facing a re-election campaign in November, had vowed to stop drinking, had in fact kept that vow for some months, and was therefore once again a dynamic and effective senator—and who, as a former District Attorney, knew how to investigate. Moreover, the other Democratic member was the lamentably independent Albert Gore. Surrounded by reporters, in the lobby outside the Senate Chamber, Hennings said his subcommittee would begin the very next morning a “thorough and complete look into the Case matter and every other damn matter in connection with it and get at the big boys if we can.”

Lyndon Johnson could not allow such an investigation. The “big boys” in question were his big boys—Herman and George, and Sid and Clint and the other oilmen with whose lobbying efforts he had been so closely connected. They were Ed Clark and John Connally, who had worked right out of his office. Any “thorough and complete” investigation could hardly help turning up his name. It had to be stopped.

And he stopped it—on the next day, Tuesday, February 8, 1956, a day of fast-paced, and often brutal, maneuvering in the Capitol and the Senate Office Building. He was not the only senator who wanted it stopped, of course. Some of his colleagues had personal reasons. “What [Mr. Case] did was to raise in the Senate the whisper: ‘Oil money,’” William White wrote. Campaign financing was a sensitive issue with many senators, and no aspect of such financing was more sensitive than “oil money.” In “recent years,” the issues “in which there were truly vast sums of money involved have concerned the oil and gas lobby.” Who knew how many senators’ names might be blackened in a probe of “oil money”? Others feared a blackening not only of themselves but of what Russell Baker described as the entire “political structure supporting them.” There was “a growing uneasiness in the Senate about having itself subjected to a ‘tough’ investigation on this most delicate of issues,” Baker said, a growing “doubt as to whether the voting public could stomach the facts of political life.” And the mere fact of such an investigation might tarnish the Senate’s image. “Nothing” disturbs “the Senate type” more than “evidence that the Senate may be losing the respect of the country,” White wrote. For all these reasons, James Reston Sr. said, “If there is anything that exceeds the need for a fundamental investigation and revision of the present system of financing campaigns it is the unwillingness of many senators to encourage such an investigation.” But Johnson was the senator most involved, and he was the senator who played the leading role in stopping the investigation.

Pleading with Hennings to restrict his subcommittee’s investigation to the single contribution, Johnson pulled out all the stops. The agitation over the natural gas fight was causing his heart to act up again, he said; the doctor was even threatening to put him back on digitalis. “I felt as though I were being cast in the role of his murderer,” a shaken Hennings would tell a friend the next morning. And when Hennings nonetheless tried to stand his ground, he abruptly found it opening beneath his feet.

As soon as the Senate convened on Tuesday, Johnson and Knowland, in a move which Johnson devised and to which Knowland acquiesced, jointly introduced a resolution, which passed unanimously, without discussion, establishing a “Select Committee for Contribution Investigation.” Its four members were Democrats Walter George and Carl Hayden, and Republicans Edward Thye of Minnesota and Styles Bridges.

The Select Committee’s mandate was as narrow as was implied by the lack of any plural in its title: the resolution empowered it to “investigate the circumstances surrounding” the “alleged improper” contribution to Case—and no other contribution. Included in the resolution was a budget—$10,000—adequate only for so narrow an inquiry. And in the committee’s first meeting, held in Vice President Nixon’s office, steps were taken to make sure that its investigation of that contribution would be the only investigation of that contribution.

Hennings had telephoned Senator Case that Tuesday morning to invite him to testify at two o’clock that afternoon before his Campaign Finance Subcommittee, and Case had agreed to do so. Johnson, learning of this, moved fast—with Nixon’s help. In a formal ruling which the New York Times said was “without known example in the Senate,” Nixon awarded the Select Committee exclusive jurisdiction over the Case investigation. A letter, hastily typed for Walter George’s signature, and delivered to Case at 1:40, just twenty minutes before he was to appear before the Hennings Subcommittee, summoned him to testify before the Select Committee on Friday. The letter notified him of Nixon’s ruling, and said that therefore “they [the Select Committee] respectfully request that you appear before no other committee” prior to that time. The written request was reinforced by an oral communication, described by Arthur Krock: “Mr. George just sent word to Mr. Case that at two o’clock he was to come to the Vice President’s room, where Mr. George’s Select Committee was to assemble, and Mr. Case was to go nowhere else.” And when Case arrived, he was told by George that his first public testimony “had better be to the Select Committee.” He was not requesting Case to testify before the committee first, Walter George said; he was directing him to do so.

While Senator George was thus taking steps to keep the subcommittee from holding its hearing, Senator Johnson was taking his own steps, asking Senator Hennings to come to see him in his office, and then trying to persuade him, at length, to leave the investigation to the George Committee.

Johnson had wanted to see Hennings alone, but the Missourian had brought Gore along, and the three men were arguing heatedly when Gore told Hennings, “Let’s go. It’s after two o’clock and Case was scheduled to meet with us at two.”

“Go ahead,” Johnson said angrily. “I didn’t invite you here.”

The two senators went to the subcommittee room, but Case was not there. When the South Dakota senator finally did appear, he was carrying George’s letter, which he read to the subcommittee to explain why he couldn’t testify before it. And then Hennings and Gore were summoned to a hastily called closed meeting of their subcommittee’s parent Rules Committee, and although they angrily protested the “unprecedented” Johnson-Knowland attempt to gag a senator, the rest of the committee said that, in view of Nixon’s ruling, the George Committee had exclusive jurisdiction over the Case affair. Once again, all other arguments had faded before what Arthur Krock called “Mr. George’s unique prestige.” In a column bearing the accurate headline “IT DOESN’T PAY TO CHALLENGE MR. GEORGE,” Krock wrote that “The old man doesn’t hold with argument if he says a thing is so, or is to be done thus and thus. He doesn’t hold with it even if he is acting in his individual capacity, which is pretty powerful. And that goes double when Mr. George has been deputized by the Senate leaders of both parties, and another Senator tries to put on the same show in another tent.”

•    •    •

THE SELECT COMMITTEE TRIED to keep the focus on the Case contribution, and on Case’s motives for disclosing it and on the timing of the disclosure. Questioning the Senator for four hours, committee counsel Charles W. Stead-man “bored in like a prosecuting attorney,” the New York Times reported, so that Case “was cast somewhat in the role of a defendant.” Nonetheless, it was impossible to avoid calling the man who had made the contribution, and asking where he had gotten the money, and as soon as Neff began to testify, the names of more senators began to surface.

Neff testified that he had gotten the $2,500 from Elmer Patman, and then Patman had to be called, and he testified that he had gotten it from Howard Keck. Asked the nature of his connection with Patman and Keck, Neff testified that he had been employed by Keck’s Superior Oil Company to represent it not only in South Dakota but in Nebraska as well. The name of an “old friend” in Nebraska, Donald R. Ross, the U.S. Attorney, came up, and Ross was questioned by the Justice Department. He was shortly to resign, but before he did he stated that Neff had offered him $5,000 after receiving assurance that both of Nebraska’s senators, Republicans Carl Curtis and Roman Hruska, would vote for the natural gas bill (as, in fact, both of them had). And, Ross added, Neff had offered to make additional contributions to Nebraska’s Republican State Finance Committee. Then the chairman of that committee, Joseph Wishart, revealed that Neff had pulled out “this handful of money,” had peeled off $2,500 and given it to him for the committee, and had said he wanted to make additional donations. And Ross also added that Neff had said his employers wanted to make contributions in other states where the people were not unfriendly to the natural gas industry. He had mentioned trying “to get in contact with somebody” in Montana, and had mentioned that he had also made trips to Wyoming and Iowa, and in Iowa had spoken to GOP national committeeman Robert K. Goodwin. It was impossible to avoid calling Goodwin, and he testified that Neff had indeed visited him, had told him that he “had $2,500 … to contribute to Senator Hickenlooper’s campaign,” and had “offered to leave one thousand dollars” with him “pending the time when he could see Senator Hickenlooper.” Goodwin said he had turned both offers down because they “seemed like a down payment on a purchase.” And then there was a development which made it seem likely that the names of other senators might surface. Goodwin said that when Neff had visited him, he had “apparently inadvertently” left behind a list of the ninety-six senators. Next to each name was written “For,” “Doubtful,” or “Against,” and against the names of ten of the fifteen “Doubtful” senators a checkmark had been made.

It became obvious that more money might be involved than the amounts that had been mentioned. Testifying before the committee, Keck said that he did not consider $2,500 a “substantial” contribution. He said he could not say what other senators had received contributions—substantial or not—because he did not keep records. It became obvious that contributions were mostly in cash. Just as there had been an envelope with twenty-five hundred-dollar bills intended for Case, the money offered to Wishart had been in hundreds, and in an envelope.

Booth Mooney sat in on every hearing of the George Committee “on Johnson’s orders, and gave him a detailed report at the end of each day’s session,” he was to recall. “He was worried, more deeply than I had ever seen him, that his name or John Connally’s would come up in the course of the investigation.” But somehow, Mooney wrote, “that did not happen,” despite the fact that Connally had worked closely with Patman.

Nor was that the only subject unexplored. Neff had testified that “he had contributed to the ‘personal campaign fund’ of no Senator except Senator Case since last October.” But, as the New York Times put it, “He was not asked to explain the qualification ‘personal campaign fund,’ and no attempt was made to determine whether he had made any contributions before last October.” Editorials demanded that the Select Committee broaden its probe; ADA Chairman Rauh accused it of merely “scratching the surface of this scandalous incident.” “Only the most naive would think that this is all the money involved,” the New York Times said. Why was Case singled out, “or was the ‘benevolence’ one of many?” Arthur Krock asked. “The questions call for answers.” But Senator George said, “Personally, I see no need for any further inquiry.” The committee’s hearings were adjourned on March 5. Noting that it “was limited in its scope and confined in its authority by the express direction of the Senate” to the Case contribution, its report, issued on April 7, kept within these limited confines. Commenting that it “left much unsaid,” the Washington Post stated that its “strangest deficiency … lies in its failure to commend Senator Francis Case for his courageous exposure of what the gas bill lobbyists were up to. At the committee’s hearings it sometimes appeared that Senator Case was the culprit rather than the people who tried to influence his vote by contributing $2,500….” As for the other senators whose names had come up in the hearings, the committee’s report mentioned them only in passing. It assailed Neff, Patman, and Keck, and said it was turning the transcript of the hearings over to the Justice Department to determine if any statutes had been violated. (Neff and Patman were later indicted for failure to register under the Lobbying Act and both men pled guilty, thereby avoiding a trial in which other names might have been mentioned; they were each given a one-year suspended jail sentence and fined a token—a rather whimsical token—$2,500.) And, saying that the Federal Lobbying Act and the Federal Corrupt Practices Act were “too vague and loosely defined,” it contained the usual recommendations that Congress make a “thorough and complete” study of campaign financing laws.

THE NEXT EPISODE in the natural gas fight took place, on February 17, not on Capitol Hill but in the White House. President Eisenhower numbered many titans of the oil industry among his friends. He was as indebted to the industry for past campaign contributions as was Johnson—and, as he prepared for his re-election campaign, he was as hopeful of future contributions. He was philosophically committed to reducing, not increasing, government regulation of industry in general, and he was particularly committed to reduction in the case of this industry, for he had become persuaded of the validity of the argument that oil and natural gas exploration entailed great risk, and high profits were therefore necessary to encourage exploration. But to Eisenhower all those considerations were invalidated by the circumstances surrounding the passage of the Natural Gas Act. “There is a great stench around the passing of the bill,” he wrote in his diary. It is “the kind of thing that makes American politics a dreary and frustrating experience for anyone who has any regard for moral and ethical standards.” Announcing that he approved the bill’s basic objectives but that because of the “arrogant” lobbying efforts on its behalf, he could not sign it without creating “doubt among the American people concerning the integrity of governmental processes,” he vetoed it. Taking into account his approval of the bill’s objectives, as well as the fact that the Republican Party was counting on millions in contributions from the oil industry for the coming campaign, “the veto was an act of some courage,” Eisenhower’s biographer, Stephen Ambrose, has written.

Lyndon Johnson issued a statement which said, “Since the President himself has regarded this bill as meritorious, his veto is difficult to understand.”

NARROW THOUGH JOHNSON had kept the Select Committee investigation, he hadn’t kept it narrow enough to accomplish his purposes. Despite his efforts, enough hints of the vastness of the oil industry’s lobbying efforts had emerged to fuel indignation over the Senate’s failure to police itself, and, in editorials in major newspapers in every section of the country except the Southwest, the indignation was laid at the door of the senator at which it belonged. The Denver Post, for example, told its readers that it was “Lyndon Johnson’s slippery leadership of the oil bloc” that “has blunted one of his party’s sharpest campaign weapons. He’s helped turn what had the makings of a crusade against ‘giveaways’ into a Hollywood production interspersed with drawling commercials for Col. Johnson’s banana oil…. The plunderbund was Mr. Johnson’s victory.”

Demands for a full investigation escalated. “The honor and dignity of the Senate require that it expose every aspect of the efforts of the gas lobby to influence the vote through political contributions—both those made recently and those made before the bill was under active consideration,” the Washington Post said. Calling Senator George’s inquiry “unsatisfactory,” the New York Times said, “There is every reason for a much fuller investigation…. Even seasoned veterans of legislative battles have been astounded at the pressures brought to bear.” And the indignation was summarized, eloquently, by a journalist who was rising to rare respect and influence in the capital.

Ever since Francis Case made his statement, James Reston Sr. wrote on February 20, “this city has been full of the most disturbing rumors, not only that this kind of money is passed around by wealthy organizations that stand to gain by the enactment of certain legislation but that the leadership of the Senate is in cahoots to conceal the facts. The immediate question is whether the majority and minority leaders are going to use their power and influence to correct the evils they know to exist or whether they are going to try to conceal them and allow the rumors of widespread misconduct to stain the reputation of what they are fond of referring to as ‘the world’s greatest legislative body.’”

Given Johnson’s plans for an imminent entrance onto the national stage, there was little alternative to authorizing a more complete investigation, and one was authorized—with appropriate fanfare. The day after the Reston column appeared, the Majority Leader took the floor. Declaring that he had been “unfairly, unjustly and almost unmercifully” portrayed as blocking a Senate inquiry, he said his whole purpose from the start of the controversy had been to have a full inquiry and not one confined to the Case contribution. “You senators and reporters—you better saddle your horse and put on your spurs if you’re going to keep up with Johnson on the flag, mother and corruption,” he said. Then he introduced a resolution, endorsed by Knowland and quickly passed, to create a new Special Committee that would conduct, he promised, a “far-reaching and thorough” investigation dedicated “to uncovering any wrong-doing of any kind and accomplishing something constructive.” Instead of having the customary Democratic majority, half of its eight members would be Republican, which, he said, would “give no unfair advantage to either party”; it would have a full-size—$350,000—budget; it was assumed that its chairman would be Albert Gore, who, as the Times put it, lauding his appointment, “has been insisting on an intensive investigation” which he had intended to carry out through the Elections Subcommittee but which Johnson had now persuaded him could be better conducted by the Special Committee. The resolution was greeted enthusiastically by the press. “The lobbying investigation” promises “to become the year’s liveliest,” Time said.

Because of what a complete investigation might reveal, however, there was no alternative to making sure that the Special Committee did not actually conduct one. That insurance was put in place by naming to the committee, as the senior Republican member, the ubiquitous Bridges, who was totally unabashed by the revelation that he had been one of the senators visited in his home state by Elmer Patman and hence might himself be a target of the investigation. Gore had assumed that the chairmanship would carry with it a chairman’s customary prerogatives, such as the right to appoint the committee’s chief counsel and the rest of its staff, and to issue the subpoenas indispensable to any financial investigation. That assumption, however, now proved to be incorrect. At the committee’s organizational meeting, at which Gore had expected the first order of business to be his election as chairman, Bridges said that since the committee was not a Standing but a Special Committee, the Senate’s normal rules for a committee did not apply, and that new rules would have to be made. “Speaking for the Republicans,” he said, an agreement on the rules would have to come “before we proceed to election of any personnel such as chairman.” Among the rules the Republicans wanted, Styles Bridges said, was the right, should a Democrat become chairman, to name the vice chairman—him, Styles Bridges. And, he said, the vice chairman must have the right to co-sign all subpoenas. Furthermore, if the Democrats selected the chairman, the Republicans must have the right to select the chief counsel—who, he made clear, would be a Republican with whom he was personally comfortable. Since the Democrats did not have a majority in the committee, Gore was helpless. No chairman was elected, no counsel appointed, no subpoenas issued; after one meeting, Newsweek reported, Gore, “boiling with rage, ran out of the building and leaped into a cab before newsmen could catch up.” Journalists’ initial enthusiasm faded before reality. “Bipartisanship can play Jekyll-Hyde” and the Senate leadership “has found a way to frustrate the lobby investigation…and still remain on the side of the angels,” The New Republic said on March 12. “The new 8-man Senate Committee on Lobbying … is headed by the Tennessee crusader Albert Gore. But there will be no Great Crusade here.” (Bridges told reporters that his conditions were simply “reasonable proposals drawn up to prevent abuses by a “runaway committee.”) The Republicans supported as chairman McClellan, whose Little Rock law firm represented several oil and natural gas companies, and who, as the Times put it, has “evinced little sympathy for Senator Gore’s objectives.” (Bridges was elected vice chairman.)

McClellan moved with deliberation. His first task, he said, on March 10, was the selection of a staff, “which might take some time.” That prediction proved accurate. An entire meeting of the committee in mid-April was devoted, the Washington News reported, “to discussion of the qualifications of a lady applicant for the job of file clerk.” That pace was maintained in all other aspects of the inquiry, which hardly touched on the specific revelations that had been made. Bridges, of course, was never asked about Elmer Patman’s visit—or about whether the lobbyist had arrived bearing gifts. Hruska and Curtis were never asked whether they had received the $5,000 contributions, Hickenlooper was never asked about the thousand-dollar offer that “seemed like a down payment on a purchase.” John Neff was never asked if any of the fifteen senators listed as “Doubtful” on his list had received funds—or about the significance of the checkmarks by ten of the names. No attempt was made to learn the full extent of the cash distributed by Keck and the Superior Oil Company—or by any other individual or oil company. Key figure though John Connally was in the natural gas lobby, closely though he had worked with Patman, he was never called as a witness. The interest of the press slowly but surely waned, and faded entirely when the national conventions came to dominate the news that summer. The investigation finally petered out in 1957.

•    •    •

LYNDON JOHNSON WAS NOT BLAMED by the Texas oilmen because the Natural Gas Act of 1956 did not become law. That, of course, was President Eisenhower’s fault; Johnson, they felt, had done his job, and done it well. The man who was in charge of counting the votes for the natural gas lobby, Claude Wild Jr., had expected that after “the big to-do” over the Case contribution, “we would lose some votes,” perhaps even enough votes so that the bill wouldn’t pass. “But it passed,” Wild says. “Only one vote was changed.” And he knew who was responsible for such steadfastness. “I’ve got to give Lyndon Johnson a lot of credit,” he says. “I think that was the finest piece of lobbying work I’ve ever seen.” The money that had been promised to Johnson to finance other senators’ campaigns in 1956 and in subsequent years would be delivered; Connally and Jenkins still brought envelopes stuffed with cash to Washington; Searls continued to carry cash himself. And it was after Wild succeeded Searls in 1959 that “as his first assignment, to meet a commitment Searls had made earlier to Senator Lyndon B. Johnson,” he made the delivery, “over a period of months,” of $50,000 in cash “to Mr. Walter Jenkins.”

And indeed, despite the presidential veto, the oilmen had no reason to be dissatisfied with the attitude of the federal government. Even pro-business Fortune magazine found in 1959 that the Federal Power Commission still “shirks its statutory responsibility of regulating the price of gas in the interests of the consumer,” and in that same year the Supreme Court, in a unanimous opinion, assailed the commission for having authorized a new high price for gas producers on “insufficient evidence.” The price of the product which before 1956 had already risen from its 1946 level of four cents per million cubic feet to ten cents, had in the three years since 1956 doubled, to more than twenty-one cents—had risen, in fact, to as much as the market could bear; Fortune said that “in some areas, like New England, natural gas is close to pricing itself out of the market.” The industry’s revenues were not the $5.3 billion of 1956 but $10.7 billion. The value of the Kecks’ stock was now $40,108,000. And as for Herman and George Brown, they were finding the business so profitable that when, in 1958, an immense new field, the Rayne Field, containing more than a trillion cubic feet of natural gas, was brought in in Texas, they had Texas Eastern Transmission buy up the entire field. By 1959, the annual profits of Texas Eastern would be $24,527,583, so that the Brown stock was worth $7,113,072. The company which had been formed twelve years earlier for an initial investment of $143,000,000 had assets worth more than a billion dollars.

GEORGE SMATHERS, Johnson’s “assistant whip” during the Natural Gas Battle, was with him from early in the morning “until ten-thirty at night,” and saw that this man who had suffered a heart attack “didn’t slow up during the entire workday”—“I don’t know how his body stood it.” But Johnson not only stood it but thrived on it. At the conclusion of the natural gas fight, Dr. Cain of the Mayo Clinic wrote Tommy Corcoran, “I have had my fingers crossed during this whole trying period, for I know Lyndon must have been under a terrific strain.” But when, on February 20, Lyndon underwent a complete physical examination at Bethesda, his heart showed no enlargement, and his blood pressure and other vital signs were actually better than they had been in December.

To the uninitiated, the first close-up look at Lyndon Johnson was astonishing. A new member of his staff, Nadine Brammer, couldn’t believe the abuse he rained on the men and women in his office. “He could be totally charming, a lot of fun—he was always trying to put the make on me—but there was a rotten side to him. There was a lot of personal exhibitionism, a lot of hitting on women. It was like a family atmosphere, and he was the Big Daddy. He controlled everything. He ruled with fear—like a heavy-duty parent. Fear permeated the whole staff. Lyndon would jump on someone. Just make mincemeat of him. Tongue-lashing people. Walter was just always on pins and needles. I’ve seen Walter shake, just literally shake, when Lyndon was asking him questions. Walter was just stripped of any human dignity.” Mrs. Brammer was to leave the staff the next year. “I just couldn’t understand how they [the staff members] put up with it.” Another new member of the staff wouldn’t put up with it. Within a month after Jim Rowe, whom Johnson had recruited so ardently, came on board, he told Johnson he was leaving. He finally agreed to remain until the end of the 1956 session, and left then. But no aspect of Johnson was more striking to new staffers than his energy. “He worked us, he worked us,” Mrs. Brammer says. “And he worked himself, worked himself. He had made up his mind to be President, and he was demonic in his drive.”

LYNDON JOHNSON’S “Program with a Heart” had contained only one proposal anathema to liberals. Despite scandal and widespread outrage, he had rammed that proposal to passage in the Senate, in a vivid illumination of his power over that body. The fate of the program’s other twelve proposals—all liberal proposals—was instructive because it illuminated the purpose for which he was using that power.

Five of those twelve proposals—poll tax elimination, immigration reform, disaster insurance, aid to depressed areas, and tax reduction for the poor—died quiet deaths during the Senate’s 1956 session. Five more—for a federal water conservation program and for federal aid for medical research, and for hospital, school, and housing construction—passed in amounts so small or forms so diluted as to make them insignificant. Since President Eisenhower was supporting most of the same programs, the failure of these proposals in a Senate controlled by Johnson was an indication of the extent to which his heart was—or wasn’t—truly in the program, of the extent to which the program had been proposed merely to blunt liberal criticism, and of the extent to which his first priority was not to appease liberals but to avoid antagonizing conservatives.

The fate of an eleventh proposal was particularly infuriating to liberals. It was a proposal that was actually more part of Eisenhower’s program than Johnson’s: the bill that became the basis for the Interstate Highway System. Organized labor had assumed that construction workers on the highway program would be covered by the existing Davis-Bacon Act, which required workers on all federal projects to be paid the prevailing local wage. But Herman Brown, who had started as a road builder and had never lost that image of himself, could not bear to have this most sacred area of free enterprise polluted by the hated unions and their endless “gimmes.” “He laid down the law to Lyndon on that one,” Ed Clark would recall.* When the Administration-backed highway program reached the Senate floor on May 28, labor unions were ready for a fight, and a union-backed measure was introduced to have wage rates set by the Secretary of Labor. UAW lobbyist Robert Oliver, who had been on what Evans and Novak call a “quiet campaign to soften Johnson’s antipathy toward organized labor,” warned the Majority Leader that opposition to the bill when it came to a vote the next day would be disastrous to his future relations with labor, and Johnson found a way to avoid the vote. He had been scheduled to leave for a checkup at the Mayo Clinic at 3 p.m. on the 29th; he moved up his flight to 10 a.m. so he wouldn’t be present during the vote (which labor won). As the two journalists put it, “Johnson’s absence saved him from another attack from the unions, but it scarcely won him their praise.”

As for the twelfth proposal, that, too, seemed dead as late as July. But when, that month, Johnson began to feel that he had a real chance for the Democratic nomination for President, a softening of liberal antipathy became desirable. And since passage of the last remaining item in the “Program with a Heart” would advance both liberal objectives and his own, that item passed—in a form far more liberal than he had at first proposed.

In 1955, the House had passed a bill that would have changed the nature of the Social Security system, the first broad change since 1939 in that major New Deal achievement. Previously, Social Security had meant retirement benefits at age sixty-five and payments to widows and orphans. The House bill would have lowered the age at which women could begin collecting benefits to sixty-two, but, more significantly, it provided for the payment of benefits to totally disabled persons of both sexes at the age of fifty, a provision that would transform Social Security from a retirement and survivors’ benefit plan into a vehicle for much broader social welfare programs, including the program that was the longtime dream of liberals and labor and the longtime nightmare of many doctors: Social Security-financed federal health insurance. Seeing the House bill as the thin end of the wedge for socialized medicine, the doctors’ lobby, the immensely powerful American Medical Association (AMA), mobilized against it—confident of success: annoying though the House action may have been, there was still that firmer body that had been created to stand against radical innovations. And, thanks in part to its Majority Leader, the Senate had indeed stood firm in 1955. With Johnson declining to fight for the House bill, it had never even reached the Senate floor that year. By the time it came up in 1956, therefore, the AMA would have had “over a year to pressure fence-sitting senators—particularly those facing re-election” that year, one account noted. Johnson’s “Program with a Heart” had mentioned Social Security, but mainly only to support the lower age requirement for women. It did not even mention disability benefits.

Now, however, it was 1956, a presidential election year. Johnson decided to support the House bill because, as he told Democratic senators, “it clearly differentiated them from Republicans.” It was time to mend fences with labor, and this was the quickest way. “I happen to believe passionately in Social Security,” he wrote AFL-CIO president George Meany. “I went through the Depression and saw what it did to our older people. A country that is as great as ours does little enough for them.”

The floor debate on the measure went on for four days in July, and for four days the count on Johnson’s tally sheet seesawed back and forth. “The Administration really put on the heat to defeat that bill,” George Reedy says. “We’d wake up in the morning with about a ten-vote margin… and by two or three in the afternoon it would have dropped to about three, and then it would shrink to one.” For four days, Johnson held the Senate in session; he had, he wrote Meany on July 19, spent “about twelve hours a day on the Senate floor for the last four or five days.”

The vote was going to be very close, but Johnson had quietly obtained leverage over two senators on whom Eisenhower was counting. Conservative Republicans were of course opposed to enlarging the scope of Social Security, and the further to the right they were, the more adamant their opposition. Among the furthest right, however, was Molly Malone, and the Nevada senator also had a bill up for consideration in 1956: a guarantee of at least $69 million in federal purchases from Nevada’s tungsten mines which was a blatantly unjustified giveaway of the public’s money to an already wealthy special interest.

Little attention was being paid to the proposed guarantee, which was, after all, a rather minor item in the overall federal budget. Both the Eisenhower Administration and the Republican senatorial leadership opposed it, and most of those senators aware of it, even conservatives, were planning to vote against it. Liberals, of course, opposed it on principle. Since the tungsten interests were a major force in Nevada politics, without passage of the bill Malone had little hope of re-election, but there seemed no way for him to get the necessary votes.

Lyndon Johnson told Malone he would get him the votes, as many votes as were needed—in return for just one vote: Malone’s vote in favor of the Social Security disability amendment. Malone agreed to the bargain. When the tungsten bill came up for a vote on June 18, only four Republicans voted for it—but so did twenty-eight Democrats, including liberals like Humphrey, Lehman, Kennedy, and Green who would normally have voted against it. Johnson had offered them no explanation for his request that they vote for Malone’s bill, simply asking them to “support the leadership” on the matter. “Few if any Democrats connected tungsten with the Social Security bill,” Evans and Novak were to report. “They were frankly puzzled,” but the amount involved was small, and “if the Leader needed help, they were willing to give it to him.” With little more than half the Senate voting, the bill passed by a 32–22 margin.

Then, on July 17, the Social Security bill came up for a vote. Malone, who had given no hint of his intentions to anyone but Johnson, was anxious not to “be importuned face to face with earnest arguments” by his own Leader, Know-land, who of course assumed his vote would be no. As Evans and Novak reported, “He stayed in the cloakroom, appearing only momentarily to call his ‘aye’ vote for the disability amendment, then fairly ran out of the Chamber—disappearing…before Knowland could get a crack at him.”

Malone’s vote made the count on Social Security 46 to 46. The proposal would fail on a tie; Johnson needed one more vote.

That vote belonged to Earle Clements. Of all the senators “loyal” to Lyndon Johnson in the way Lyndon Johnson wanted men “loyal,” none was more loyal—“dog loyal”—than the Kentucky Senator, who was willing to “do anything” for the Leader. Clements was well aware by now that his re-election campaign against Thruston Morton, Assistant Secretary of State, was, in George Smathers’ words, in “serious trouble.” He had not dared to oppose the doctors, whose opinions carried great weight with the unsophisticated voters in the rural Kentucky counties that were his stronghold, and had flatly promised the AMA that he would vote against the disability amendment. “Bob, I’m not with you on this bill,” he had told the UAW’s Oliver, labor’s chief representative on the issue. “I gave a commitment back home that I would vote against this bill.” When Oliver started to protest, Clements cut him off. “I can’t do it. I made a commitment.”

But the doctors’ support was not all Clements needed against the well-financed Morton. He needed cash—campaign financing on a scale far beyond what Kentucky would provide. Johnson had already provided some from Texas, and had promised Clements there would be more. Now, some weeks before the vote on the disability amendment, he told Clements he could have as much as he needed—but he said he might need something, too: Clements’ vote in favor of the disability amendment. He didn’t think he would need his vote, Lyndon Johnson said; the amendment was probably going to be defeated overwhelmingly, he said. But if it turned out that he did need Clements’ vote, Johnson said, he wanted to know that he had it. Clements could vote against the amendment at first, Johnson said, but if the decision came down to one vote, Clements would have to change his vote on the amendment from “nay” to “aye.” Clements told Johnson that breaking his word to the doctors might cost him the election, and Johnson was aware of that; “Johnson fully recognized that this would subject Clements to the full wrath of the doctors’ lobby,” Evans and Novak were to write. But Johnson refused to be influenced by this consideration, and Clements had no choice; he had to have the cash. Reluctantly he agreed that if Johnson needed his vote, he would have it. And now, as the roll call proceeded on the Senate floor, Johnson ordered Clements to stay close to hand. The bald old pro “was seated right next to Johnson and sweat was coming off his head,” Bobby Baker recalls. “He was down there, just hoping and praying that” his vote would not be needed. But it was. Johnson told him to change it, and he changed it, and, as Baker says, “We won by Clements’ vote.”

Johnson provided what he had promised. He sent Booth Mooney to Clements’ campaign headquarters in Louisville to provide speechwriting and public relations expertise—and more pragmatic assistance, as well. “He arranged, through me on a small scale and through Bobby Baker, on a much larger scale, for financial assistance to be pumped into Kentucky,” Mooney was to write. “I remember Bobby Baker came down there one weekend with a suitcase just stuffed with currency for [the] Clements campaign. I think it was about sixty thousand bucks, which was a good deal then.” But the money couldn’t offset that “aye.” Clements lost to Morton. The margin was less than five thousand votes; “no doubt about it, his vote on the disability provision defeated him,” Evans and Novak wrote; the vote he cast in the Senate, to accommodate Johnson, “infuriated the doctors and resulted in their organized opposition to his reelection,” Mooney says.

Even to someone as imbued with the pragmatism of politics as was Bobby Baker, this episode was something special. “Senator Clements had made a commitment to Senator Johnson that although it would destroy him politically, which it did, if he broke his word, which he did, that he would vote with us,” Baker says. “Of all the votes that I’ve ever seen that was mean and cruel and defeated a man, it was that vote by Senator Clements to liberalize Social Security, contrary to his commitment to the doctors’ lobby in Kentucky.” Senators mutually recognize the primary natural law of political survival. Not this senator, not Lyndon Johnson. Kennedy would finally say he was sorry they couldn’t agree, but he understood. If understanding stood in the way of Lyndon Johnson’s aims, he wouldn’t understand, would refuse to understand. He got the vote he needed from a senator, even though that vote cost the other senator, a senator “dog loyal” to him, his career.

(Baker, as always, was to try to excuse Johnson. “Johnson tried … to make up for Clements’ defeat,” he says. “He made him [campaign director] of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee…. Johnson felt bad about that one vote the rest of his life, because he destroyed a man’s political career.” Johnson did indeed appoint Clements to the Campaign Committee post in 1957. In 1959, Clements resigned to become Kentucky’s State Highway Commissioner, and to work in Johnson’s presidential campaign. He resigned the highway job within a few months, at the age of sixty-three, and never again held a position in government. After a brief stint with the Democratic National Committee in 1960, he became a consultant to the American Merchant Marine Institute, and then a lobbyist for tobacco companies. Baker’s view that Johnson “felt bad” does not jibe with the view of other Johnson aides and allies, including Booth Mooney, who over the years had sat in on many meetings between the two senators and who had been sure that “Johnson truly loved Clements.” When a saddened Mooney returned to Washington after Clements’ defeat, he had expected Johnson to be sad, too—at least a little sad. But Johnson simply congratulated Mooney on his work in Clements’ campaign. And when “I…pointed out that obviously I had fallen short of attaining the hoped-for goal,” Johnson said airily, “You shouldn’t feel that way. Look at it this way. Your man ran way ahead of the national ticket. You did everything anybody could’ve done.”

“Sometimes,” Mooney wrote, “Lyndon Johnson could be downright surprising.”)

THE SENATORS’ APPROVAL, by a 47–45 vote, of the disability amendment to the Social Security Act showed Lyndon Johnson’s power at (in the case of Molly Malone) its most subtle, and at (in the case of Earle Clements) its most raw. And that approval showed also the extent of his power, documented again that the Senate, a body designed so that it would never have a master, had a master now.

But the Senate was not what Lyndon Johnson wanted. It was only a step on the ladder to the goal, the only goal, of which he dreamed. So he had at last to come to grips with his great dilemma—which was also America’s great dilemma: the plight of the sixteen million Americans whose skins were black.

*When, in 1955, Johnson, responding to Brown’s edict, had pushed through the Senate an amendment exempting the highway program from Davis-Bacon (allowing senators to vote aye in anonymity by blocking Paul Douglas’ attempt to get a roll-call vote), as telling to liberals as Johnson’s maneuver had been his rationale for it—what Evans and Novak called his “quite sincere apprehensions about organized labor.” In discussing the bill, they wrote, “He [Johnson] recalled his own experience” on the road gang. “Paradoxically, he remembered not his own low pay but the small profit margin of the contractor, his difficulty in financing new equipment and his trouble in meeting his tax liabilities”—and Johnson’s resultant “sympathy for the small county contractor…colored his attitude” toward Davis-Bacon.