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THERE WAS ANOTHER motif as pervasive in Richard Russell’s life as power, and it was loneliness.
Within the Senate world, there would for years be speculation about the reason that this man, who possessed “that persuasive charm that no woman can resist” had never married. Some said the explanation was Dick Russell’s never-fading adoration for “the greatest woman I’ve ever known.” At least one remark he made lent plausibility to another theory: that the explanation lay partly in his intense ambition, personal and political, both for himself and for his family, which had made him raise up early and never let drop the fallen banner of the Russells. Asked, when he was old, why he had never married, Russell replied to a reporter friend: “That’s a question I’ve been asked many times, and I’ve asked myself many times. I think it was because I was too ambitious to start with. I wanted to be Governor of Georgia younger than any man had ever been in history … so I didn’t marry until after I was elected, and somehow after that I didn’t get around to it, didn’t have time.”
The denouement of the single episode in which Russell broke his lifelong pattern of “shying away from serious relationships” was viewed as support for this theory. During the 1930s, Russell and Patricia Collins, an Atlanta-born attorney for the Department of Justice in Washington, dated for three years, and were, acquaintances recall, obviously deeply in love. They set a wedding date. And then on the very eve of the wedding, it was canceled; Russell telephoned the editor of the Atlanta Constitution, which had already set the wedding announcement in type to run the next day, to ask him not to print it. Ms. Collins was a Catholic. In the highest circles of Georgia politics there were whispers that, at the very last moment, Richard Russell had finally bowed to the reality that, no matter how popular he might be, in a state with a Baptist-dominated, Catholic-hating Bible Belt, marrying a Catholic might end his political career. Russell and Ms. Collins continued to date frequently in Washington for several more years, and then less frequently, although they were still seeing each other when, in 1947, she told Russell she was going to marry someone else.
Nobody really knows the reason Dick Russell never married—perhaps not even he knew. But he knew the cost. When he was old, that reporter friend asked him whether perhaps it was fortunate that he had never married, and so had been able to concentrate fully on his work, and Russell answered, “Well, no—well, it certainly has permitted me to have more hours to work … but I would not recommend it to anyone. If I had my life to do over again, I would certainly get married.”
In Winder, where his mother kept his room furnished as it had been furnished when he was a boy, and where, during the months he lived there every year, he often wandered around the house and the yard barefoot, as he had liked to wander barefoot as a boy, he had his family. His father, still Georgia’s Chief Justice, had died in 1938, at the age of seventy-six—of a heart attack following a long day studying cases in his judicial office—and on a gentle hill behind the house, in a clearing surrounded by pines and red oak trees, Russell erected a gray granite obelisk, monumental in sleepy, small-town Barrow County, and wrote the inscription himself: “Richard Brevard Russell—Son of the Old South, Defender and Builder of the New.” And he took his father’s place at the head of the family table. At the sprawling Russell family gatherings, to which the other twelve children, each of them without exception a success in his or her chosen field, would bring their own children, “Uncle Dick,” surrounded by scores of nephews and nieces, would preside—patriarch of the Russells, once again one of the first families of Georgia. He remained very close to his brothers and sisters; of his brother Robert E. Lee Russell, manager of his early political campaigns, he was to say, “We were about as close as two brothers could be.” As for his mother, the flow of tender letters that had begun between them during his youth didn’t stop when he was a senator. In 1952, the town of Winder held a parade in Ina Dillard Russell’s honor; it was then, as her son rode beside her in an open car, that the newsreel camera for once caught, as pride and joy conquered reserve, a broad smile on Richard Russell’s face. When she died, in 1953, to be buried with her husband under the same tall tombstone, he would draft her inscription: “There has never been a married relationship more tender than existed between this noble woman and her eminent husband.” Thereafter, on his visits to Winder he lived alone in the big white frame house, tended by the family’s elderly black housekeeper, and frequently walked up the hill in back, through pines and holly bushes, to the graveyard, and puttered around it for hours, plucking out weeds and neatening the plots, or just sitting there and thinking. He could think best there, he told a friend, close to his family. When years later, the Senator lay dying in Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, and his brother Henry visited him, Dick told him of a thought that was comforting him—that perhaps dying meant that “we could run jump up in God’s lap like we used to run jump up in Mother and Dad’s lap when we were little boys.”
And in Winder he had friends. So at ease was he in his hometown that, clad in a sweatshirt and stained dungarees, he would sit on a curb with old friends and chat with them for hours. “He just likes to talk,” the editor of the Winder News explained. “If he has an enemy in Barrow County, I’ve never heard of it.”
But Richard Russell seemed at home and at ease nowhere except in that little town. “He had warm feelings for individuals, but, outside of his family, he did not express them,” says his biographer, Gilbert Fite. “He was not a man” who could talk about “his personal feelings.” In Georgia—where he had been Speaker and Governor, and now, as senator, was known as “the Georgia Giant,” where he was so respected that no politician dared to run against him—“he had a host of acquaintances and casual friends, and friends who would do almost anything for him,” but “very few close or intimate friends.”
And in Georgia, Dick Russell had been young. In Washington, he was growing older, and traits sometimes deepen, harden, as a man grows older, no matter how much he may wish them not to. “He became,” as his biographer says, “somewhat more aloof.”
“I had always been taught that if decent people asked you to come to their house you had to go,” he was to recall, and for a few years after arriving in Washington in 1933, he accepted at least some of the invitations to parties and dinners that poured in on a bachelor senator. And, his hostesses said, when he wanted to be, there was no one who could be more urbane and charming. But gradually he accepted fewer and fewer invitations, and by the early 1940s he had all but stopped going to parties except for ones given by or for Georgians. Once, during the 1950s, a Washington reporter asked him exactly how often he did go to a party—cocktail or dinner. Leafing through his desk calendar, Russell discovered that he hadn’t been to one for six months.
He stopped attending other social occasions, too. He had enjoyed hunting, for turkey, quail or deer—bird hunting was his favorite sport, and he owned five or six shotguns—and had regularly gone on hunting parties with old friends from Georgia. And he had enjoyed golf. But gradually he began finding excuses to decline invitations to hunting trips. “Frankly, I have no desire to kill more deer as I have killed more than twenty in my time,” he said in response to one invitation. Gradually, he stopped playing golf. It took too much time, he said. As a young man, he had been a ladies’ man; now he was an older bachelor. He still had dates, but less and less frequently.
With members of his staff, the reserve of this man so conscious of the dignity of a senator of the United States was especially marked. During his early years in the Senate, he had made attempts at camaraderie with his assistants and secretaries, but they were forced and didn’t work out very well, and, year by year, they became fewer and fewer. Finally, he almost never joked with them, or even came out of his private office to wander around their work area; he was very formal in dealing with them. Women employees, his biographer says, “were ‘Miss Margaret’ or ‘Miss Rachel’ in the best traditional southern manner.” Some of the members of his staff idolized him; they didn’t want to leave him alone in the empty office, and although he never asked them to, when he stayed until six-thirty or seven, as he did most weekday nights, at least one of them would stay in case “the Senator wanted something.” But when he would finish for the day, and take a bottle of Jack Daniel’s out of his drawer and pour himself a drink, he almost never invited one of them in to have a drink with him. Occasionally, one of them would muster the courage to invite the Senator home for dinner; the acceptances were rare and the invitations grew rare, too.
With his fellow senators, he was invariably courteous, friendly, even cordial. But, more and more, as year followed year, that friendship also had a limit: the point at which intimacies, personal confidences, might have been exchanged but were not, because of the barrier around Richard Russell which was never lowered. He seemed unable to express affection, unable to talk about personal matters, to bridge the distance between himself and even a colleague he liked. The grave demeanor, the judiciousness and reserve, might bring him the respect of his colleagues; it did not make any of them his intimates.
He loved baseball, had in his head the day-to-day batting averages, not only of the Washington Senators but of an impressive number of players around the American League. A longtime tradition of the Senate was that on the season’s opening day, senators who liked baseball (and a few selected functionaries such as Secretary of the Majority Felton [Skeeter] Johnston) would attend the game as a group. Russell, his aides say, had a wonderful time going to Opening Day with other senators, but, of course, that was a formal occasion, with the invitations made without any participation on his part being necessary. As for the rest of the season, members of his staff could have gone to games with him, just as they could have invited him to their homes, but one social occasion was as rare as the other. Sometimes the Senator went to a baseball game alone. It was embarrassing for such a man to be alone. If he was the renowned Richard Brevard Russell, the most powerful man in the Senate, why didn’t he have anyone to go with? Would some colleague or staff member or acquaintance see him—and feel sorry for him, or tell people that Dick Russell went to baseball games alone? So Russell went to few baseball games.
WHEN THE SENATE was in session, of course, Russell’s life was crowded with committee hearings and discussions about legislation and floor tactics, with professional give-and-take with his colleagues. But the Senate wasn’t generally in session in the evenings, or on weekends.
The respect—almost awe—in which he was held made it difficult for his colleagues to invite him to their homes. He himself lived, during most of his years in Washington, in a small, two-room hotel suite, first in the Woodner Hotel, then in the Mayflower; finally, in 1962, he moved into a small apartment, furnished as impersonally as a hotel room, in a cooperative apartment house on the Potomac.
In his hotel room or apartment, he would spend long hours reading, often with a cigarette and a glass of Jack Daniel’s at hand, sometimes with the radio on. He still read the Congressional Record every day, and after he became a member of the Armed Services Committee he read not only the transcripts of the endless hours of testimony that the committee had taken, but the exhibits—the analyses and studies and charts—that witnesses had entered into the record to supplement their testimony, as well as classified Army, Navy and Air Force internal reports and memoranda. His apartment was filled with books, including a steady stream of books he requested from the Library of Congress; on many Fridays, a stack delivered from the Library for his weekend reading would be on the corner of his desk in the Senate, ready for him to take home. In the apartment, books, some opened, some with slips of paper sticking out of them to mark passages to which he wanted to refer, would be piled on the desk, on chairs, on the floor—mostly history and biography; during his early years in Washington, he read—again—Gibbon’s complete The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and in his later years, he read it through a third time.
His life fell into a pattern. He would arrive at the Senate early—at eight or eight-thirty in the morning—and eat breakfast alone in the Senate Dining Room. He would stay at the Senate late. After a day filled with Senate business, and punctuated by lunch at the round table in the dining room, the center of respectful attention whenever he spoke, he would return to his office at four or five o’clock to go through his mail, draft or dictate letters, and return telephone calls. By six-thirty or seven, he would be finished, and would take out the Jack Daniel’s and water, and sip a drink or two while listening to the evening news on the radio, or, in later years, watching it on television. When the news was over, he would get up and leave, often through the door from his private office which opened directly onto the corridor, so that he would not have to make conversation with his staff. He generally ate at O’Donnell’s Seafood Grill, on E Street, sitting alone at the counter. Then he would go back to his small apartment—that apartment where books were stacked on chairs on which no one ever sat; that apartment in which, unless he turned on the radio, there was no human voice—to spend the evening alone, reading.
“The Senate is my life and work,” he told a reporter once. “I don’t have any family or home life. If I don’t get home till late, that’s all right.”
AFTER LYNDON JOHNSON’S DISCUSSION with Bobby Baker (“Dick Russell is the power”), in late December 1948, Johnson abruptly dropped his requests for a seat on Appropriations. There was, he would explain, only one way to get close to a man whose life was his work: “I knew there was only one way to see Russell every day, and that was to get a seat on his committee. Without that we’d most likely be passing acquaintances and nothing more. So I put in a request for the Armed Services Committee.” There was less demand for that committee than for Appropriations (or for Foreign Relations or Finance) and four vacant Democratic seats on it, and when, on January 3, the Senate was organized, and the list of Democratic Steering Committee assignments was read, he was given one of those seats. (His other committee was Interstate and Foreign Commerce, which under the chairmanship of Ed Johnson—“Mr. Wisdom”—supervised the oil and natural gas industries vital to Texas, and on which Johnson had an assignment to carry out for those industries in 1949.) Johnson threw himself into the Armed Services Committee’s work, and he began dropping by Russell’s office to discuss it.
At first, he would drop by only in the late afternoon, after the Senate had adjourned for the day. He was very deferential and formal in his approach. He would not ask the receptionist to tell Senator Russell he was there; instead, he would write a note asking if it would be convenient for Senator Russell to see Senator Johnson, and ask her to take it in. And he would keep the conversation focused on the committee’s work, asking Russell questions about it, asking advice on how best to carry out some committee assignment he had been given. And he would listen to the answers, and listen hard. “If you saw them together, you would not see Johnson walking back and forth, and talking, like he usually did,” John Connally says. “Russell would be doing the talking. He [Johnson] would be sitting quietly, listening, absorbing wisdom, very much the younger man sitting at the knees of the older man.” Had the chairman of Johnson’s other committee been given a nickname? The chairman of this committee wasn’t neglected. Richard Russell, Johnson began saying, was “the Old Master.” The phrase was used frequently—often to the Old Master himself. When Russell offered him a piece of advice, Lyndon Johnson would say, “Well, that’s a lesson from the Old Master. I’ll remember that.”
After a while, the conversations no longer took place only in Russell’s office. Russell would be drafting a committee report, or reading over one that he had assigned Johnson to work on, and there might be more work to do on it. Or there might be a line of questioning to be worked out for witnesses in the next day’s hearings. Johnson would be helping. Why didn’t they finish over dinner? he would suggest. Lady Bird had dinner waiting for him. It would be no trouble at all for her to put on another plate. It would make things easier all around. “You’re gonna have to eat somewhere anyway,” he would say. And after a few such invitations, Russell accepted one.
When the dinner guest at Thirtieth Place was Richard Russell, Lyndon Johnson’s table manners would have pleased even his mother. Says Posh Oltorf, who was occasionally a fellow guest, “He was an entirely different person with Russell than he was ordinarily. There was no reaching, no slurping. Johnson was on his very best behavior.”
At Thirtieth Place, moreover, Johnson had his great helpmate, and she was as valuable with Russell as she had been with Rayburn. The help was of a different kind, of course. The bond between Lady Bird Johnson and Sam Rayburn—lovingly daughterly on the one hand, lovingly paternal on the other—was the bond between a fierce, stern man whose fierceness and sternness concealed a terrible shyness and a young woman whose unwavering smile concealed a shyness and timidity just as terrible. And she saw Rayburn, whose portrait was the only one she would place in the living room of the Johnson Ranch, as the exemplar of all that was great in the common American people from which she, her husband, and the Speaker all sprang. Talking of “the Speaker,” she says, with a passion very unusual for her: “He was the best of us—the best of simple American stock.”
Richard Brevard Russell wasn’t one of us, and had no desire to be, and Lady Bird’s keen eyes saw it all in an instant. “I early knew that his father was, I think the chief judge in Georgia, and I remember a very patrician picture of him swearing in his young son, Dick Russell—and I would hear stories [from Georgians] of seeing the Russell family drive into town on a Saturday afternoon with Mrs. Russell sitting very erect and very starched, and extremely well groomed…. They were quality.” When an interviewer from the Lyndon Johnson Library tries to suggest that her husband and Russell were intimates, Mrs. Johnson quietly sets him straight. “Senator Russell was always—there was a certain aloofness in him, it’s my feeling,” she says. “Although he had humor and he could have warmth, he was something of a loner. There was an aloofness, and you would be presumptuous to say, ‘He’s my best friend.’… He was a great friend, a dear friend, but he was not the sort of person with whom you could broach intimate things….”
But the love Lady Bird Johnson had for Rayburn was no deeper than the respect she had for Russell. “He was a patriot right through and through,” she says. “In appraising him I think you would have to get in the words, ‘enormous sense of integrity.’… If he told you something, that was so.” He was, she says, “a towering person…. I never looked at him without admiration.” And of course Mrs. Johnson was a very southern woman, very devoted to the ideals and philosophy of the South, and, as she puts it, “Dick Russell was the archetype and bellwether of the South.” And, in a way, the help Lady Bird gave her husband with his third R was the same she gave him with his second. No one, no matter how reserved, could remain untouched by the warmth with which Lady Bird Johnson would say, as she bid a guest good-bye, “Now you all come back again real soon, you hear.” In both cases, her warm graciousness made a man who seldom visited other people’s homes feel at home in hers, sufficiently at home so that he would come again and again.
The wisdom of Johnson’s choice of committees—his insight that the only way to get to know Russell was to work with him—was documented, for, as Mrs. Johnson says, “As far as trying to sign him up for a dinner party three months in advance, I doubt if I’d have had much luck, or if I would have had the nerve to try…. He was always much sought after for parties, you know, and very unlikely to go…. He was our visitor so many times, but it was much more likely to be on the spur of the moment. They’d be working together on something and they would not be finished with it, and Lyndon would say something about, come on and go home with him, and Lady Bird will give us some—whatever we had. That was the way it usually happened.” And when he got to the Johnsons, there would be, no matter what the hour, that wonderful welcoming smile.
If the hour wasn’t too late, Lynda Bird and Lucy Baines would be awake. “He was always very nice to them and apparently at ease with them,” Mrs. Johnson says. “And they remember him with affection.” They called him “Uncle Dick” (their parents encouraged them to do so). But there are different types of uncles. “It was with just respect and affection, not intimacy,” Mrs. Johnson says. “He did not wish to have too strong a tie to [people], in my opinion. Ties of family, dear Lord, he had them strongly and lovingly, but he just didn’t go around becoming intimate with men, women or children.” (Speaking of the entire twenty-year relationship between Richard Russell and the Johnsons, during which Russell made scores of visits to the Johnson home, the interviewer from the Johnson Library asked, “Did he ever bring little token-type gifts? I was just wondering, over the years did he bring any kind of little remembrance to you or the children?” “No, not that I remember,” Mrs. Johnson replied.)
And after Spring arrived, occasionally, in the late afternoons, Lyndon Johnson would make another suggestion, one to which Russell always responded with uncharacteristic enthusiasm. Asked years later what drew the two men together, Russell mentioned first the sport he loved. “We both like baseball,” he explained. “Right after he came to the Senate, for some reason we started going to the night baseball games together.” Sometimes Lady Bird was invited to accompany them. “They would buy hot dogs … and sit and watch and talk about the prowess of this player or that player.” And, she noticed, at baseball games Russell was less “aloof…. He really liked that.” If no box seats were available, they would sit in the grandstand above the boxes—two tall men in double-breasted suits and fedoras, hot dogs in hands, sitting close together, talking companionably and laughing together.
Johnson’s sudden interest in baseball surprised people aware of his previous total lack of interest in any type of sport. “I doubt that Lyndon Johnson had been to a baseball game in his life until he heard that Dick Russell enjoyed the sport,” John Connally says. Connally, the only one of Johnson’s aides who dared to joke with him, would say, “‘Well, I see you’ve become a baseball fan. Do you know the pitcher from the catcher?’ He [Johnson] would smile and laugh, and say, ‘You know I’ve always loved baseball.’ I said, ‘No, I’ve never been aware of that.’” But Connally understood: “He knew Dick Russell liked baseball games, so he went to games with Russell.”
He began spending time with Russell not only after the Senate recessed for the day but before it convened. Although Johnson had generally eaten breakfast in bed ever since, with his wedding ceremony, he had acquired someone to bring it to him, he now began rising early and breakfasting in the senators’ private dining room—as it happened, at the same hour that Russell ate breakfast there. More and more frequently, the two senators had breakfast together, discussing Armed Services Committee business.
And, more and more, he was spending time with Russell on weekends. Not many senators worked on Saturdays, but Russell did, of course, and Johnson did, too. Years later, he would say:
With no one to cook for him [Russell] at home, he would arrive early enough in the morning to eat breakfast at the Capitol and stay late enough at night to eat dinner [at O’Donnell’s]. And in these early mornings and late evenings I made sure that there was always one companion, one Senator, who worked as hard and as long as he, and that was me, Lyndon Johnson. On Sundays the House and Senate were empty, quiet and still, the streets outside were bare. It’s a tough day for a politician, especially if, like Russell, he’s all alone. I knew how he felt for I, too, counted the hours till Monday would come again and knowing that, I made sure to invite Russell over for breakfast, lunch, brunch or just to read the Sunday papers.
This necessitated some juggling because once Sam Rayburn had been the older man having brunch and reading papers with Lyndon, but the juggling was made easier by the fact that there was more than one meal on Sundays. During his last years in the House, Johnson had begun inviting a number of New Dealers—most of them Rayburn’s friends, like Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas and Tommy Corcoran and Jim Rowe—to Thirtieth Place for Sunday dinner. At seven o’clock he would switch on the radio so that they could all snarl at Drew Pearson’s revelations about congressional activities. Rayburn enjoyed being one of that group, and had begun coming for dinner instead of brunch, so now Russell was invited for brunch, Rayburn for dinner. Frequent guests at Thirtieth Place noticed that, as Oltorf says, “You never, ever, saw them at Lyndon’s house together.” “Lyndon didn’t want his two daddies to see how he acted with the other one,” explains Jim Rowe.
Not all the time Johnson and Russell spent together on weekends was spent working, or reading the papers. For Russell found that this new senator from Texas shared—enthusiastically—some of his own interests. Those new enthusiasms that Johnson now revealed were as surprising to his assistants as his love for baseball. One, for example, was the War Between the States. All his life, Johnson had displayed a distaste for discussing history as intense as his antipathy for any subject that required reading: a feeling that went beyond lack of interest, and was disdain. That feeling had included the Civil War. Attempting to convince Lady Bird to marry him, he had assured her that “I shall take you … when you are mine” to the Civil War battlefields “and all of those most interesting places”; during the fifteen years since their wedding, she had been trying—in vain—to persuade him to take her at least once. Now Johnson told Russell that he had heard that Russell had a great familiarity with the battlefields. He himself was fascinated with the tactics and the heroism that had been demonstrated on them, he said; the next time Russell visited one of them, he would certainly consider it an honor to be allowed to accompany him. And, on more than one occasion, he was.
Discussing in later years his early relationship with Russell, Johnson gave it a patina of generosity. “He was my mentor and I wanted to take care of him,” he said. But contemporary witnesses to that relationship “snickered behind their hands,” in the words of Bobby Baker, who says that Johnson was “pressing an ardent courtship on” Russell. “He flattered him outrageously.” Had Senator Russell been a woman, “He would have married him.” But Johnson’s courtship of older men had been the subject of snickers at San Marcos and in the House of Representatives, and those courtships had achieved their ends.
And, with Russell, too, as Baker also says, “there’s absolutely no doubt that his campaign worked.” When, years later, it was suggested to Russell that he and Johnson were dissimilar personalities, the Georgian replied, “Well, I suppose that’s the public impression. Johnson and I had a good many things in common…. We just hit it off personally together.” (The things they didn’t have in common, and that might have repelled Russell, Johnson’s iron self-control kept to a minimum when they were together; the inhaler, for example, was never in use in Russell’s presence.) Within a remarkably short time after he was sworn in, this freshman senator was spending far more time than any other senator with the Senate’s most powerful member.
BUT RUSSELL WASN’T RAYBURN. Rayburn hungered, yearned, for love—for a wife, for children, in particular for a son. It wasn’t a son that Richard Russell wanted, it was a soldier—a soldier for the Cause. Johnson may have made Russell fond of him, but fondness alone would never have gotten Johnson what he wanted from Russell. As another southern senator, John Stennis of Mississippi, was to put it, Russell “wasn’t a bosom friend with anyone when it came to … serious matters of government and constitutional principles.” For Johnson to get what he wanted from Russell, he would have to prove to him that they had the same feelings on the issue that dominated Russell’s life.
So Johnson’s early efforts with Russell also included a speech. Delivered on Wednesday, March 9, 1949, it was his first speech on the Senate floor, and it was a major one: it took him an hour and twenty-five minutes, speaking in deliberate, grave tones, to read the thirty-five double-spaced typewritten pages that had been placed on the portable lectern that had been put on his desk. And it was delivered as a centerpiece of a southern filibuster against Truman’s proposed civil rights legislation that would have given black Americans protection against lynching and against discrimination in employment, and that also would have made it easier for them to vote.
First, he defended the use of the filibuster. The strategy of civil rights advocates, he said, “calls for depriving one minority of its rights in order to extend rights to other minorities.” The minority that would be deprived, he explained, was the South.
“We of the South who speak here are accused of prejudice,” Lyndon Johnson said. “We are labeled in the folklore of American tradition as a prejudiced minority.” But, he said, “prejudice is not a minority affliction: prejudice is most wicked and most harmful as a majority ailment, directed against minority groups.” The present debate proved that, he said. “Prejudice, I think, has inflamed a majority outside the Senate against those of us who speak now, exaggerating the evil and intent of the filibuster. Until we are free of prejudice there will be a place in our system for the filibuster—for the filibuster is the last defense of reason, the sole defense of minorities who might be victimized by prejudice.” “Unlimited debate is a check on rash action,” he said, “an essential safeguard against executive authority”—“the keystone of all other freedoms.” And therefore cloture—this cloture which “we of the South” were fighting—is “the deadliest weapon in the arsenal of parliamentary procedures.” By using it, a majority can do as it wishes—“against this, a minority has no defense.”
Then he turned to the substance of the legislation. Racial prejudice was not the issue, Lyndon Johnson said. Prejudice, he said, is “evil,” and “perhaps no prejudice is so contagious or so dangerous as the unreasoning prejudice against men because of their birth, the color of their skin, or their ancestral background.” And, he said, he himself was not prejudiced. “For those who would keep any group in our Nation in bondage, I have no sympathy or tolerance.” But, he said, prejudice was not the reason that the South was fighting the civil rights bills.
When we of the South rise here to speak against… civil rights proposals, we are not speaking against the Negro race. We are not attempting to keep alive the old flames of hate and bigotry. We are, instead, trying to prevent those flames from being rekindled. We are trying to tell the rest of the Nation that this is not the way to accomplish what so many want to do for the Negro. We are trying to tell the Senate that with all the sincerity we can command, but it seems that ears and minds were long ago closed.
He himself was opposed to the poll tax, Lyndon Johnson said, but the Constitution gave the states, not the federal government, the right to regulate elections, and Truman’s anti-poll tax proposals were therefore “wholly unconstitutional and violate the rights of the States.” He himself, “like all other citizens, detest[ed] the shameful crime of lynching,” he said, “but we”—the southern senators—are trying to tell the other senators “that the method proposed in the civil rights legislation will not accomplish what they intend”; lynching is dying out; “I want to remind senators of the changing character of the South: an enlightened public already has rendered such a law virtually unnecessary even if it were not unwise in its scope.”
At times, Johnson’s rhetoric grew so impassioned that he went even further than the other southerners. He denounced the proposed FEPC, for example, in terms that seemed to suggest that it might lead to a return of something not far from slavery.
It is this simple: if the Federal Government can by law tell me whom I shall employ, it can likewise tell my prospective employees for whom they must work. If the law can compel me to employ a Negro, it can compel that Negro to work for me. It might even tell him how long and how hard he would have to work. As I see it, such a law would do nothing more than enslave a minority.
So harmful would the proposed FEPC legislation be (it “would necessitate a system of Federal police officers such as we have never before seen…. It would do everything but what its sponsors intend…. It would do nothing more than resurrect ghosts of another day to haunt us again. It would incite and inflame the passions and prejudices of a people to the extent that the chasm of our differences would be irreparably widened and deepened”) that, Johnson said, “I can only hope sincerely that the Senate will never be called upon to entertain seriously any such proposal again.” And he presented one ingenious new rationale—a “novel argument,” the Washington Post called it—to support the right to filibuster. In the recent presidential election, he said, Harry Truman had been far behind. “But there was no cloture rule on the man in the White House. There was no rule limiting him to an hour’s debate because two-thirds of the Nation thought they had heard from him all they could hear, or all they wanted to hear.” So Truman had kept talking. Because “Mr. Truman … dared to keep speaking, because Mr. Truman [did] not bow before the opinion of the majority … the people were listening and were changing their minds.”
In general, however, his arguments were calm, reasonable, moderate. They were based on the constitutional rights of states and senators—in particular, in the case of senators, on the right to unlimited debate—and on the contention that civil rights legislation was not needed because the South was solving its racial problems on its own, and that such legislation would only inflame passions.
In later years, some journalists and historians would make much of his statements in his maiden Senate speech that his opposition to civil rights legislation was based not on racial prejudice but on constitutional grounds, that, as Time magazine put it, “He had no quarrel with the aims of civil rights advocates, only their methods.” He had indeed said this—but so had Richard Russell. Johnson’s arguments in his maiden speech closely mirrored the arguments Richard Russell had made familiar, the arguments Russell had persuaded southern senators to adopt, the arguments, reasonable-sounding but unyielding, that if accepted would leave southern black Americans as unprotected as they had always been against mob violence and intimidation, against discrimination in the workplace and in the general conditions of life, as unable as they had always been to vote as freely as white Americans.
Russell was very pleased with Johnson’s speech. He had been given a copy of it on the previous day, and after reading it, he had contacted the other southern senators—telephoning many of them personally—to tell them he would appreciate their presence on the Senate floor when Johnson spoke. He had insured a high attendance in the Press Gallery by telling reporters that Johnson’s maiden speech would be, as reporter Leslie Carpenter put it, “worth a story.” When Johnson had finished speaking, and was standing for a moment taking sips of water from a glass a page had placed on his desk, the southern senators hurried over to congratulate him. A “long line” of southerners “formed to shake [Johnson’s] hand,” a reporter wrote. Russell was the first man on it. Johnson’s speech, Russell was to say, was “one of the ablest I have ever heard on the subject.”
LYNDON JOHNSON’S MAIDEN SPEECH was delivered during one of the century’s most bitter civil rights battles, for Truman’s dramatic 1948 election victory—after a campaign during which his commitment to civil rights never wavered, a campaign, furthermore, in which black voters played a newly important role in key northern cities—had combined with the Democratic recapture of Congress and the arrival on Capitol Hill of aggressive civil rights advocates like Hubert Humphrey and Paul Douglas, plus a rising public outcry against Jim Crow, to give liberals confidence that the long-awaited day of social justice was at last at hand, that Congress’s Southern Bloc could no longer stand in its way. “The President can get most of his program, and without so much compromise, if he constantly calls upon the great public support manifest for him in this election,” the liberal columnist Thomas L. Stokes wrote. Even Arthur Krock agreed that this time “it seems improbable that” the southern citadel could stand.
But as the southern senators realized when they caucused on January 13, their general was ready. He saw the cause in which he was fighting as holy, and he was ready to battle for it. Yes, Richard Russell told a reporter, the odds against the South were indeed long. “It is clear that the only thing we can do now is to gird our loins and shout the cry of centuries: ‘The enemy comes: to our tents, O Israel!’” And he was armed with more than battle cries. No sooner had Truman won than Russell had begun throwing up his breastworks; even before the Senate convened, his aides were drawing up a list of all federal laws that would expire during the first six months of 1949 so that, as he would later explain, he would “know if there are any of them of any importance that will build up a logjam of discussion behind … the civil rights bills”—in other words, any whose passage the Administration could not afford to have delayed, so that threat of delay in general Senate activity by a civil rights filibuster would be more effective. And this scouting expedition found pay dirt: federal rent control laws—the only protection against exorbitant rents for millions of families in northern cities—were scheduled to expire on March 31. If the southerners could hold the floor into March, pressure would mount on northern senators to surrender on civil rights so that a bill extending rent control could be brought to the floor and passed. And there were other Administration proposals—to repeal Taft-Hartley, to continue the European Recovery Program, to strengthen NATO—that could not move along the legislative path so long as southerners held the floor, and that could therefore be held hostage to civil rights; Russell “made it clear that if Truman and his legislative leaders pushed any plan to [impose] cloture, the President’s entire legislative program might be in jeopardy.” The great general renewed his old alliances, including the one that consisted of a “wink and a nod.” The fervently isolationist Robert Taft wanted something: the defeat or reduction of Truman’s proposals for international cooperation and mutual aid. Although Russell was, of course, no isolationist, The Nation now reported that “a number of former influential internationalists and interventionists are modifying their position” to conform to Taft’s; these internationalist senators were southerners. When an amendment was introduced to reduce Truman’s proposed budget for the European Recovery Program, Senate observers understood at once that the vote on this amendment would be crucial, for, as one wrote, “it will forecast the Senate’s position on other questions of foreign policy.” And the amendment’s sponsors were Taft—and Russell. The price for Russell’s support, The Nation was to explain, was “Taft’s help in scuttling the civil rights program.”
Taft was the bellwether for about half the Republican senators; the bellwether for the other half was Vandenberg. As the Senate’s president pro tempore in 1948, Vandenberg, citing those loopholes in Rule 22, had said that “the integrity of congressional procedures” gave him “no alternative” to ruling against liberal attempts to impose cloture. He said that while cloture could be applied on a debate on a bill that was already on the floor, it could not be applied on a debate on a motion to bring a bill to the floor (a ruling which of course made the threat of cloture almost totally ineffective).
The way to keep Vandenberg as an ally, Russell told his southerners, was to make the 1949 cloture vote a vote on the validity of Vandenberg’s 1948 ruling, which the Republicans who respected the old senator would be reluctant to repudiate. Moreover, so long as Vandenberg held to his position on cloture, his towering reputation would give other Republicans the screen of parliamentary complexity when they voted against cloture, and their support would allow the southerners to hold the floor. Therefore, Russell told his troops, the emphasis in the 1949 battle must be kept on the point that Vandenberg had emphasized: the right of unlimited debate. Their self-discipline must be tighter than ever; in their speeches they must limit the irrelevancies. As soon as the Administration brought up any motion to make the civil rights bill the pending business of the Senate, or to strengthen Rule 22, the southerners must take to the floor—and keep the debate on that one point. Russell’s strategy worked. As the Administration’s plan to reverse the cloture ruling became apparent, The New Republic would report that Vandenberg was “working busily behind the scenes to vindicate his original decision.”
In addition, like the incomparable legislative strategist he was, Russell made his first stand not on the civil rights bill, and not on the motion to take up the bill. Majority Leader Lucas, with the full weight of the White House behind him, had made a motion to change the Senate rules to allow cloture to be applied on a motion to take up a bill. The southerners launched a filibuster on that motion. This gave the South one additional line of defense. Should it be lost, there would still be two other positions to fall back to.
And the South didn’t lose. Public pressure for cloture—for civil rights—mounted steadily. There were black faces in the Senate corridors. The NAACP announced that its secretary, Walter F. White, “has virtually moved to Washington to talk with the necessary people.” Editorialists raged. But somehow the votes to invoke cloture were never there, and after weeks of skirmishing, the focus was shifting to the implications of the filibuster for rent control and other bills, and Lucas was confessing that the “logjam” on Senate business was intolerable. “The filibuster could go on for weeks,” the Majority Leader said, and while it was going on, “rent control would go out the window”—and other major bills might not come to a vote, either.
Then, the day after Lyndon Johnson gave his maiden speech, Vice President Barkley, presiding over the Senate, ruled that cloture could be applied to a motion. Russell instantly appealed, called for a vote, and, reading previous cloture precedents, said that Barkley was wrong and Vandenberg right—that Vandenberg’s ruling had in fact been a model of statesmanship and wisdom. Vandenberg then rose to reply to Barkley, and said that while he was in favor of civil rights legislation and wanted to change Rule 22, the way to change the rule was “not simply to disregard what it clearly meant,” as Barkley had done. “Under such circumstances there [would be] no rules, except the transient, unregulated wishes of a majority,” he said. The only way to change the rules, he said, was through the method authorized by the rules—Rule 22, actually—through a two-thirds cloture vote.
With that speech, the fight was over. Walter White heard it “with sinking heart.” “Mr. Vandenberg has … given an aura of respectability to those who wanted an excuse,” he said. When the vote was taken on Barkley’s ruling, Russell had twenty-three Republican votes to go with twenty-three Democratic votes, for a total of forty-six. The pro-civil rights vote was forty-one.
The embattled group of southern senators had won—and they knew whom they owed their victory to. “With less than 25 percent of the membership of the Senate, the Southerners have won one of the most notable victories in our history,” Harry Byrd wrote Virgil Chapman. “The credit goes mainly, of course, to our great leader, Dick Russell…. I do not think that even Robert E. Lee …”
A great general does not allow a vanquished enemy to escape from the battlefield, and with the votes in his pocket, Richard Russell was in a position to exact vengeance on those who had dared to try liberalizing the cloture rule. Suggesting “to his cohorts that the opposition be taught a lesson,” as one writer put it, he pushed through the Senate a “compromise” on cloture. Under it, cloture could in the future be applied to motions as well as to bills. But under it, also, cloture would no longer require only the votes of two-thirds of senators present, which had been the requirement in the past—a requirement that would, if only a bare quorum of forty-nine senators were present, have allowed cloture to be imposed by as few as thirty-three votes. Under Russell’s “compromise,” cloture would now require, no matter how many senators were present, the votes of two-thirds of the entire Senate—sixty-four votes. After Truman’s victory, after all the rising hopes for civil rights, not only did the Senate citadel against civil rights still stand, its walls were actually higher than before.
IN LATER YEARS, it would become an accepted part of the Lyndon Johnson legend that, apart from his maiden speech, he distanced himself from the southern fight in 1949. He gave the impression—an impression accepted by historians—that he refused to become part of the Southern Caucus that met under Russell’s leadership. After her extensive conversations with Johnson, Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote that “he decline[d] Russell’s invitation to join the Southern Caucus.” In their biography of Johnson, Evans and Novak wrote that “In his first weeks as a Senator … Johnson made clear that he would not attend the Southern Caucus.” And this belief is understandable, not only because of the convincingness with which Johnson made his statements, but because of statements by William H. Darden, who was one of Russell’s secretaries from 1948 to 1951 and later became an ally of Johnson’s. (As President, Johnson appointed Darden a judge.) Darden said flatly in an oral history interview with the Lyndon Johnson Library that “Senator Johnson did not participate in that Southern Caucus.” And when the author interviewed him in 1986, he said flatly, “I was the one who would notify the southern senators of the meetings. Russell always told me to say there will be a meeting of the ‘constitutional Democrats.’ I would not call Lyndon Johnson. Russell would tell me who to call.”
Because of his determination to become President, Johnson was certainly desperate to avoid being identified with the Caucus. Once, returning to his office at about the time a Caucus meeting ended, he was unexpectedly confronted in the corridor outside the main door to 231 by an Associated Press reporter. When the reporter began asking him about the Caucus, Johnson moved past him and opened the door. When the reporter began to follow him through it, Johnson pushed it shut and held it closed against the reporter’s efforts to open it. An astonished Connally and Busby saw the Senator bracing himself against the door while saying loudly, “No, no. No, no.” “After he got the door shut,” Busby says, “he turned and went into his [private] office.” Summoning Busby, he explained, “That little shit from the AP wanted me to comment.”
But Johnson’s later contention that he had refused to join the Southern Caucus would have come as a shock to Richard Russell, had he been alive to read it. While Russell was alive—in 1971, shortly before his death—an interviewer said to him, “I read where he [Johnson] would not attend your southern conference.” Russell interrupted to correct him. “Yes, he did,” he said. “Yes, he did. He did attend it. He attended all of them until he was elected Leader.”
Russell furnished the interviewer with details of his typically unpressuring invitation to Johnson to attend. “I called him and said, ‘Now we’re having this meeting on this and I don’t want to embarrass you—I don’t know what your views are on this, but I want to tell you about the meeting and invite you if you want to come, but if you don’t want to come, nobody but you will ever know that I ever called you.’ Well, that made a tremendous impression on Johnson—he hadn’t been accustomed to that kind of policy … well, he came to the meeting….”
In fact, it appears that Russell was mistaken in saying that Johnson attended all the Southern Caucuses. After one, on January 12, 1949, Russell told New York Times reporter Clayton Knowles that Johnson had not attended because he was “at another committee meeting.” There is, however, reason to believe that Johnson attended at least some meetings of the Southern Caucus. The Russell Library in Athens, Georgia, says that Russell’s papers contain no lists of the names of the senators who attended the various Southern Caucuses, and the author has not been able to find a list in any newspaper. And the total number of senators who attended each meeting not infrequently varies from newspaper to newspaper. But after one caucus in February, 1949, the New York Timesreported that “twenty-one [Southern Democrats] met in Russell’s office.” The Times did not name the twenty-second southerner, but all news accounts agree that the liberal Florida Senator Claude Pepper was never invited to Southern Caucus meetings. During the 1949 fight, a second southerner—Estes Kefauver of Tennessee—announced that he would not support the southern stand on cloture. The New York Times article on the next Southern Caucus did not specifically give the number of senators who attended, but said, “The caucus counted two of the twenty-two southern senators—Pepper and Kefauver—as lost and gone over to the … opposition.” The Washington Post article said, “Southern senators caucused,” and “some twenty Southern senators are” united against cloture. And while it may (or may not) have been true that Judge Darden didn’t call Johnson’s office, someone called. Mary Rather would make an entry on Johnson’s Desk Diary when she was notified that a Caucus was scheduled. In the early days of 1949 alone, she made such entries for February 11, February 24, March 1, March 5, March 11, March 14 and March 15, sometimes entering them as “Meeting of Southern Senators,” sometimes referring to them by the phrase Russell preferred: for example, “Saturday, March 5–10:30 AM, Constitutional Democrats Meeting.” And she told the author that while Johnson didn’t attend all the southern meetings, “I’m sure he attended some of them.”
And Johnson’s contention would have come as a shock to journalists who, over the years, interviewed southern senators about him, for these senators told them that Johnson had attended some of the Caucuses. In 1958, members of Time magazine’s Washington bureau interviewed a number of southern senators for a cover story on Johnson, and the story dealt with the matter this way: “During his first Senate days he was invited to a Southern caucus by … Russell. There was an argument over Southern strategy in fighting a proposed change in the Senate’s cloture rule, and Johnson sided with Russell, who was both pleased and impressed.” Time correspondent James L. McConaughy had been told about the same incident in 1953, apparently by Russell himself. He reported that “Russell knew little about Johnson until he invited him one day to attend a caucus of Southern senators … There was a fight over strategy; Johnson sided with Russell.” In 1963, journalist Margaret Shannon was to write in the Atlanta Constitution that “authoritative sources say”—she does not identify the sources, but from the story they appear to be sources close to both Johnson and Russell—that Johnson had, at one early meeting of the Caucus, seen with his own eyes (and been deeply impressed by) the accuracy of Bobby Baker’s statement that “Dick Russell was the power.” Shannon wrote that “At the first Southern Caucus that Johnson attended, Senator Russell had occasion to chew out Texas’ then senior senator, Tom Connally, as no other Texan would have dared to do and as perhaps no other senator would have dared to, either.”
The contention that Johnson was distancing himself from the southern fight would also have come as a shock to the southern senators; on March 7, 1949, John Stennis, for example, replied to a correspondent who inquired about Johnson’s role: “Senator Lyndon Johnson is cooperating fully with us in this fight to prevent the adoption of the cloture rule.”
ALL THROUGH 1949, the fight went on. Victory did not lessen Russell’s vigilance; look what had happened at Antietam! And in June, the need for vigilance was demonstrated. Another anti-lynching bill, Russell noticed, had been quietly slipped onto the Senate Calendar. The general decided to post sentries.
“In view of our experience in the past when one of these bills was almost passed by unanimous consent due to the absence from the floor of all Senators opposing it… one Senator from the South” must be “responsible for watching the floor each day to see that no legislative trickery is employed to secure the passage of any of these bills,” Russell wrote to the members of the Southern Caucus. The schedule for this “guard duty,” Russell said, would be drawn up by his aide William Darden. Johnson was one of those sentries. “Relative to my ‘guard duty,’ I will do my best when Mr. Darden notifies me,” Johnson replied. And even on the most controversial measures, Johnson’s vote was a vote of which Russell could be confident. In May, for example, he voted for the passage of an amendment, proposed by Bilbo’s successor, James Eastland of Mississippi, to the District of Columbia Home Rule Bill. The amendment would have made segregation by race mandatory in public accommodations in the nation’s capital.
And, of course, during all these months, not only while the Senate was in session but in the evenings and on weekends, Richard Russell was spending a lot of time alone with Lyndon Johnson. We do not know what these two men talked about, but we do know that Russell, a notably sharp-eyed observer of his colleagues—and a man who on racial matters was the most suspicious of men—had no suspicions at all about Lyndon Johnson. He had not the slightest doubt about Johnson’s feelings about civil rights, about his loyalty to the Cause. “This great movement to [restrict] cloture—Johnson stood right with us on that,” Russell was to say. “Our political philosophy was very closely parallel.”
All that year, moreover, there were the baseball games, the dinners and Sunday brunches at the Johnson home, the outings to the Civil War battlefields. All that year, the two men were working together on Armed Services Committee matters. And when Johnson had a problem in some other area of Senate business, he would ask Russell’s advice. “In a way without boasting because he was a new senator then and I had been there for years, he kind of put himself under my tutelage, or he associated himself with me you might say—that sounds better, I hope you can use that,” Russell would tell an interviewer.
Johnson’s attentions to him, his courtship, flattered and pleased Russell not only emotionally, of course, but, more importantly, in an intellectual, dispassionate way. Russell, after all, had himself zeroed in on power in the Senate from the moment of his arrival there, and was, in his coolly rational way, very aware of his own position in the Senate. He understood Johnson’s tactics and appreciated them. “Senator Russell was extremely favorably impressed by how he just got started on the right foot and seemed to know where the sources of power were, and how to proceed,” Darden would say.
Russell was also impressed by other qualities that Johnson possessed: his diligence, for one. Russell had little patience with colleagues not familiar with all the facts regarding a piece of legislation. Men had said of Richard Russell that he read the Congressional Record every day; now men were saying that about Lyndon Johnson. No one could fool a senator who worked as hard as did Russell about how hard another senator was working, and he saw that now, at last, there was another senator who worked as hard as he. He was impressed—this general who worried that he was letting down his Cause by not being sufficiently in tune with the modern age—by “how well-organized his [Johnson’s] office was”; he was impressed by Johnson’s energy and drive, by how he got things done.
Lyndon Johnson, Richard Russell was to say, “was a can-do young man.” He had played tutor or patron to other young senators, he was to say; Johnson “made more out of my efforts to help him than anyone else ever had.” The master legislator, the matchless parliamentarian, knew that there was another master in the Senate now.