Master of the Senate (103 page)

W
HEN
, shortly after the Steering Committee had adjourned, George Reedy dropped on the long wooden table in the Senate Press Gallery copies of a press release announcing the new committee assignments, veteran journalists quickly grasped the significance of Johnson’s achievement. “I still remember how all of us in the Press Gallery that day felt it was a real change,” John Goldsmith of the UPI was to recall forty years later. “We said, ‘Gosh, a lot of good people are going to go on good committees right away.’ If that had ever happened before, none of us remembered it.”

Their articles, and the columns that followed during the next few days,
reflected a sense almost of wonder over the fact that the brand-new Democratic Leader had, as
Time
put it, “dared to violate the traditions of seniority.” “A remarkable feat,” Doris Fleeson wrote. The
Washington Post
gave the feat a headline—“
FRESHMAN DEMOCRATS RECEIVE MAJOR COMMITTEE ASSIGNMENTS
”—and several journalists gave it a name, saying that the “seniority rule” had been replaced by the “Johnson Rule.” Johnson has “rather miraculously persuaded fellow Southerners with seniority to step aside in favor of liberals and newcomers,” the Alsops declared. Writing about the new appointments to Foreign Relations, journalists could barely contain themselves. “Extraordinary action … a break with tradition,” William White wrote in the
New York Times
about the assignment of “an out-and-out ‘freshman,’ Mr. Mansfield,” explaining that now when Taft began to make his charges about Yalta and the sellout of Eastern Europe, facing him across the committee table, serious and intent, ready to respond, knowledgeably and eloquently, would be Humphrey and Mansfield, “two of the most advanced internationalists in Congress. To make” such moves “possible, it was necessary in some cases for Southern members with greater priority” to give up their claims, White wrote. “One of the principal citadels stormed in this movement was the Finance Committee,” to whose aging Democrats had been added youthful, energetic Russell Long.

Journalists explained to their readers how Johnson had dramatically strengthened his party as a whole by giving “to the liberal wing a degree of representation that it had not known in many years.” Barely two weeks before, Marquis Childs pointed out, congressional Democrats had been in disarray, the gap between northerners and southerners seemingly more unbridgeable than ever, not least because of the selection of the southerner Lyndon Johnson as Leader, a selection which, as Childs put it, “was greeted with solemn foreboding … by Northern Democrats,” who felt that they would be left more than ever “to shift for themselves.” Now, he wrote, “almost the exact opposite has happened,” because of Johnson’s “shrewd and skillful leadership.” For the first time in years, Senate Democrats showed signs of becoming a unified party.

And liberals had particular reason to rejoice over that fact, Childs said.

Time’s
McConaughy told his editors in New York that “In barely two weeks Lyndon Johnson has emerged as a crack minority leader…. In fact, he may turn out to be the best Democratic leader in recent Senate history.”

Lyndon Johnson’s ascension to the leadership had suddenly brought his narrow personal interests into conjunction with the larger—the largest—interests
of the Democrats. His first major moves as Leader had done a lot for his party.

A
ND HE
had done a lot for himself.

By giving the liberals desirable committee seats, he had not only made them feel more a part of the party, he had also made them less likely to attack its Leader. And the newcomers like Mansfield and Symington and Jackson who had been expecting to waste years on minor committees had instead been put at once on major committees—and they knew who had put them there. “Dear Lyndon,” wrote Jim Rowe, Mansfield’s longtime intimate. “Re: Foreign Relations Committee—I don’t know
how
you did it, but I know
who
did it. And so does Mike.” They would, within the limits of politics, be grateful. And if the coin of political gratitude is a currency subject to rapid devaluation, the political fear that is the coin’s obverse has more stability. Its value might even increase as the implications of what had been done sank in: men who knew who had given, would know also who could refuse to give. Barkley and Lucas and McFarland, like the Leaders before them, had had little to give, and therefore little to refuse. That was not the case with the new Leader. Lyndon Johnson had something to promise them now, and something to threaten them with. “We’ve got a real leader,” Bobby Baker told his friends. “He knows what makes the mule plow.”

And Lyndon Johnson had obtained more subtle means of threat and reward as well. Every senator was aware of his long-standing friendship with the new member of Appropriations. With “Maggie’s” appointment, as Bobby Baker was to say, Johnson all at once had “more control over the purse strings. Dissidents might not so easily attack Johnson if they knew a word from him might determine whether their pet projects would be funded.” All at once senators no longer had merely to consider “What will they do to me in Appropriations?” They had to consider “What will
he
do to me in Appropriations?”

It wasn’t merely praise that Lyndon Johnson had obtained in just two weeks. He had obtained power, too.

T
HESE DEVELOPMENTS HAD
implications for the Southern Caucus that might become quite profound indeed. In the past, it had been the southerners—through the Democratic Steering Committee they controlled and through their leader Russell—who decided on committee assignments. Freshmen had been told that if they wanted a certain committee, they had to “see Russell.” Now, in those first two weeks of 1953, freshmen had been told that it was Lyndon Johnson they should see.

The southerners, in particular Russell, had been consulted at every step, of course. Lyndon Johnson had, day after day, run back and forth to their offices to
clear with them what he proposed to do. No step had been taken without their approval—without, in particular, Russell’s approval. Lyndon Johnson had done this so diligently, and with so much deference, that neither Russell nor any other southerner appears to have realized that a great change had occurred. But it had.

A
ND, DURING HIS FIRST WEEKS AS
L
EADER
, it was not only the seniority system that Lyndon Johnson was changing.

The two party “policy committees” created in 1946 in the hope—political scientists’ hope—of narrowing the rifts within both parties that contributed so greatly to the Senate’s paralysis, and of creating more clear-cut party ideologies and positions, thereby defining issues and giving voters a “definite choice” between parties, had not fulfilled that purpose—or, indeed, any significant purpose. Since the Republicans were somewhat more cohesive in their views, their Policy Committee, which had a staff of twelve, at least met fairly frequently, after which Taft or Knowland “would,” as one writer puts it, “emerge to announce Republican opposition to the latest Democratic spending program” or to some other New Dealish proposal. The main function of the three-person staff of the Democratic Policy Committee, housed in Capitol Office G-18, a small two-room suite next to the Press Gallery, was to record senators’ voting records on index cards. “All we got out of the Policy Committee in those days were the little white cards,” George Reedy would recall. “No one quite knew what to do with it.”

But no one had known what to do with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, either.

Assembling a new staff for the Policy Committee wasn’t easy. Johnson wanted Donald Cook to head its legal activities, but Cook, having worked for Johnson before, wouldn’t work for him again. (Cook would
never
work for Johnson again; he kept finding excuses to turn down Johnson’s repeated job offers; in 1964, Johnson, now President, would offer the brilliant attorney, by then president of a major utility company, the post of Secretary of the Treasury, but Cook declined.) Now, in 1953, leaving the Securities and Exchange Commission to make room for Eisenhower’s choice, he excused himself by saying, disingenuously, that he had made a commitment, impossible to break, to join a private company. Johnson wanted Bryce Harlow to head the committee’s non-legal side, but Harlow was still unwilling to accept the “blacksnake.” (He would remain unwilling; he, too, would turn down repeated job offers from Johnson.) Johnson then offered the post to Jim Rowe, only to be turned down again. Nonetheless a staff was assembled—a competent staff, if not an outstanding one. George Reedy and Cook’s self-effacing, mild but diligent deputy, Gerald Siegel, were brought over from the Preparedness Committee, and Johnson also hired Roland Bibolet, who had been McFarland’s aide. Suddenly there
were six desks crammed into G-18’s outer room, and the Senate’s Democratic Party had a staff capable of performing the new functions that the Democratic Leader had in mind for it.

These functions were not at all what the political scientists had envisioned, for Lyndon Johnson didn’t want clear-cut positions or issues, or a “definite choice.”

His reasons were partly personal—that deep aversion to issues that had manifested itself throughout his entire political life; and that desire for unanimity which Gerry Siegel had observed on the Preparedness Subcommittee and which he was now to see again. His reasons were partly strategic. Raising issues could only divide the party, Johnson felt. How could a Douglas and an Eastland, a Lehman and a Stennis, ever be reconciled?—the gap was simply too wide to be bridged. The mere raising of many issues would spotlight the Democratic schism, would foster dissension and the disunity that would undermine a Leader’s authority, and ultimately make him an object of derision. He wanted unity, and he made clear to his newly formed Policy Committee staff that it was their job to take the preliminary steps necessary to produce it.

The lawyerly Siegel would analyze the drafts of legislation that senators were planning to introduce, and he or Reedy would solicit comments from the other senators interested in the same subject. “We’d call individual senators who were objecting to something in a bill, and we’d explore their thinking and determine what would meet their objections.” Then Siegel would set to work, to, as he puts it, “make the changes … necessary to adjust to the reality….” The staff’s job, in other words, was to devise compromises within the party, to see that dissent was muffled before it became open. Then Lyndon Johnson would confer—in person or over the phone—with the senators involved, and try to win their agreement to the compromise.

This procedure, of course, had profound significance for the Senate. The Senate had always been the citadel of individualists, of independents, of ambassadors from sovereign states negotiating with each other—from positions of sovereignty. Although there had always been exceptions, senators had to a considerable extent negotiated, either in person or through their assistants, directly with each other—had negotiated among themselves. Now, gradually—very gradually at first, almost imperceptibly—a change was taking place. Senators were still negotiating with each other, of course, but now they were also negotiating through Lyndon Johnson. He—or his Policy Committee staffers—were representing senators’ opinions to other senators. He was telling one senator what an opposing senator was asking for—and what he would really settle for. He was telling Gerry Siegel what wording to put in the next draft of a senator’s bill. The beginning of this change can be dated precisely: the first meeting of the transformed and revitalized Democratic Policy Committee—the Lyndon Johnson Policy Committee—on February 3, 1953. Its evolution and growth would for some time be unnoticed by those—the Democratic senators—whom it was most directly affecting. But it had begun.

•    •    •

D
ISSENT ON THE
P
OLICY
C
OMMITTEE
was muffled also by his selection of its nine members. On
this
committee, seniority was followed, for its four holdovers—Russell (of course), Green, Hill and Kerr—were allies on whose support he could count. He and his compliant Assistant Leader Earle Clements of Kentucky were
ex officio
members, and he filled the seventh seat with “Mr. Wisdom.” That left only two seats. To fulfill his pledge to Humphrey, Johnson had to fill them with liberals, but the infirmities of the liberal Humphrey had named, Jim Murray, were worsening so badly that Bobby Baker would describe him as “an echo who would do Johnson’s slightest bidding”; his vote could be counted on “to solidify Johnson’s control in party matters.” And if Murray was dependent on Johnson because of age, the other liberal he selected, Tom Hennings, was in a similar position because of alcohol.

Johnson wanted, in fact, unanimity on the Policy Committee. He didn’t want it to recommend a Democratic policy, throw its weight behind any Democratic bill or resolution, or issue any statement unless the stand was endorsed by, in Bobby Baker’s words, “one hundred percent—or at least ninety percent—of the Committee.” Exercising such caution “makes sense,” he explained to Baker. “If we can get our team solidly behind a bill and pick up scattered Republicans, we’ll win. Otherwise, we’ll lose. We’re a
minority
party, remember.” One hundred percent was the figure on which Johnson insisted in practice. “Unless there were
no
real serious objections, he wouldn’t come out of the Policy Committee with any decision,” Siegel says. But often, thanks to his selection of the committee’s members, there
were
no serious objections; the nine senators voted as one. Asked to describe the committee, George Smathers of Florida, who joined it in 1955, replied, “Lyndon Johnson … was really it. He ran it.”

Johnson’s use of the committee also muffled dissent. Practically the first piece of substantive legislation that it discussed—at its second meeting, on Tuesday, February 17, 1953—was the Hawaiian Statehood Bill, which Johnson reported would soon be brought to the floor by the GOP. Liberals were anxious to make the bill a party issue, believing that it was clear-cut. But the South saw the bill differently, feeling that admission to the Union of racially mixed Hawaii would mean another two votes in the Senate for cloture, and Russell raised objections in the Policy Committee, which, as the minutes tersely reported, finally took a position that blurred the issue: “The Committee discussed the Hawaiian Statehood Bill, and generally agreed that an effort should be made to amend that bill by granting statehood to Alaska as well.”