Master of the Senate (107 page)

“An incredible momentum built up behind the amendment,” Reedy would recall. “In all the years that I’ve been around the Congress … I don’t know of any other single legislative issue that has aroused such emotion. It… became apparent from the start that it could not be defeated on a straight-out vote. No one could vote against the Bricker Amendment with impunity, and very few could vote against it and survive at all—at least, so they thought.” Only the most liberal senators—no more than fifteen or twenty of them, not nearly the necessary one-third plus one—would vote against it. “There was no hope of stopping it through direct opposition.”

To Lyndon Johnson, S.J. Res.
I
was, as he said to Bobby Baker, “the worst bill I can think of,” for reasons that included not only the political (it was, after all, a slap at
Democratic
presidents, and its passage would be a major Republican victory) but the philosophical (if there was a single tenet he held consistently throughout his political career it was the necessity for broad latitude in the exercise of executive power) as well as the personal: the strongest of personal reasons for this man who wanted the world to think of him as “LBJ” and was certain that one day it would—at which time his connection with executive power would no longer be merely theoretical. S.J. Res.
I
“ties the President’s hands, and I’m not just talking about Ike. It will be the bane of every President we elect,” he told Baker.

Trying to stop the Bricker Amendment would, however, be extremely risky for Johnson. Among its most fervent supporters were not only a large majority of his Texas constituents but his key Texas financial backers, as Eisenhower suspected; once, when his aide W. Bedell Smith asked who was financing the avalanche of pro-Bricker “propaganda,” the President replied, “Probably those two millionaires from Texas”—by whom he appears to have been referring to the two oilmen who had contributed so lavishly to both his campaign and Johnson’s, Sid Richardson and Clint Murchison (although the President could also have been referring to H. R. Cullen and H. L. Hunt, who had also contributed heavily to both campaigns). And also among its supporters were Johnson’s key senatorial allies: Russell and virtually the entire Southern Caucus. It could be dangerous for him to oppose the Bricker Amendment if oilmen, press, and public became aware of what he was doing.

The best insurance against such awareness was to have someone else, preferably someone prominent, out in front in opposition—and who better than the President?

Having tried and failed to persuade Bricker to drop the whole thing, or at least to modify it, Eisenhower had realized that the Senator would not be budged, and had then tried to make the proposal look silly, telling his Cabinet that “Bricker seems determined to save the United States from Eleanor Roosevelt.” The “people
for
it,” he told Attorney General Herbert Brownell, “are
our deadly enemies.” But the President, trying to avoid emphasizing the split within his party, had made most of his comments privately. To Dulles’ suggestion that he speak out more directly, he replied, “There was nothing fuzzy in what I told Bricker. I said we’d go just so far and no further.” “I know, sir,” Dulles replied, “but you haven’t told anybody else.”

Eisenhower’s stance sufficed for a time. Growing ambivalent about the resolution, Taft had his allies on Judiciary hold it in committee (to the growing annoyance of the committee’s chairman, Jenner, who said that “a secret revolutionary corps” was working against it). But on June 10, Taft, dying, turned the majority leadership over to Knowland, one of S.J. Res.
I
’s true believers, and just five days later Judiciary reported it out, with a favorable 9–5 vote. Afraid that it would be brought to the floor and passed before Congress adjourned, Johnson got into his big limousine, which pulled away from the Senate steps and headed for the State Department. The purpose of the trip was to keep the President standing firm against the amendment, and Johnson therefore wanted to relay, through Dulles, his ally on the issue, Taft’s judgment on the situation, in which he knew the President had come to trust. That afternoon Dulles sent Eisenhower a memo:

Eisenhower thereupon not only announced publicly his “unalterable opposition” to Bricker’s text, but also had Brownell draw up a substitute resolution, and asked Knowland to introduce it—and the preliminary skirmishing over the new proposal insured that no action on the floor of the Senate had been taken when Congress adjourned for the year on August 4.

All that Fall and Winter, the Bricker Amendment stayed on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers, but statements on the issue came strictly from Republicans. The only word from the Senate’s Democratic Leader—made in a radio broadcast over an intra-state Texas network—was the innocuous hope that the Republicans would resolve their differences over “technicalities” and agree on a compromise text. Otherwise, from down on the Pedernales there was only silence.

But all through that Fall and Winter, Lyndon Johnson was sitting for hours every day in the big reclining chair in the study of his ranch, slouched and silent, in his hand a cigarette, on his face the expression that meant he didn’t want to be disturbed. Sometimes he would lunge up out of the chair, and, pushing open the study’s screen door, would walk outside along Marcus Burg’s concrete
walk to the front gate, and as he passed the living room window, Reedy and Rather and Lady Bird could see the same expression on his face. Beyond the gate was the dirt path down to the little river, and the family cemetery and the site of the house in which he had been born, and he would walk along the path, one hand holding a cigarette, the other deep in a pants pocket. Sometimes he would stop and stand, motionless except for the hand jingling the coins in his pocket, a tall figure in rancher’s khaki staring unseeing toward the river or toward the hills. All that Fall and Winter, Lyndon Johnson was trying to deal with the knot of tangled political implications that the Bricker Amendment posed for him.

It was a knot of almost incredible complexity.

Defeating the amendment and thereby preserving the power of the presidency—his first objective—could not be accomplished even if he united his party’s liberal and moderate senators against it; there simply were not enough of them. He would have to turn conservative senators against it too, conservatives who were at the moment wholeheartedly for it—and not just Democratic conservatives but at least a few members of the Republican Old Guard.

Even if he somehow managed to turn enough conservatives against it, however, that feat—difficult though it would be—would not accomplish his other purposes, for the public would then be presented with a picture of the President and at least some of his party’s Old Guard as allies, and Johnson didn’t want them allied; he wanted the public to see a clear, vivid picture: the President, the trusted, idolized President—the beloved Ike—being fought by the Old Guard tooth and nail. And Johnson also wanted the picture to contain another dramatic element: the rescue of Ike from the Old Guard by his true friends, the Democrats in the Senate. He wanted the Senate Democrats to get the credit for defeating the Bricker Amendment and preserving the powers of the presidency.

Nor did the complications end there. He wanted credit not merely for his party, but for himself—a substantial share of the credit from liberal press and public for the amendment’s defeat. He wanted to be seen, and portrayed, as the general who had led the senatorial cavalry to the President’s rescue. But getting such credit would be especially difficult because of the situation in his own state. He could not appear, in the eyes of the conservative Texas constituency and of key supporters like Richardson and Murchison, and, most of all, in the eyes of Herman Brown, to be opposing limitations on the hated executive power. He would have to emerge from the coming battle in a position to convince these men—one of whom, Brown, was extremely hard to fool—that he had not opposed limitations but had supported limitations. He would have to be able to claim (and to allow southern conservatives in his own party to claim) that he and they had supported a constitutional amendment that would prevent future Yaltas.

So tangled and twisted together were all these strands that they composed a knot that might have been thought to be as beyond untying as the one Gordius wove together in Phrygia. But Alexander had solved the Gordian knot by simply slashing through it. Johnson solved his the same way—with a single slash. By the time Congress reconvened, he had conceived of the political masterstroke that would do the job. Turning conservatives against the Bricker Amendment seemed all but impossible, but Johnson thought of a way—perhaps the only way—to do so: by turning against it the senator most influential in foreign affairs with conservatives of both parties.

Not that persuading Walter George simply to oppose the Bricker Amendment would accomplish all of Johnson’s objectives. George’s opposition might move some of the Old Guard to oppose Bricker, but then the picture the public saw would be the somewhat blurred picture—of Ike and some Old Guarders on the same side—that Johnson didn’t want. He would therefore have to persuade George not only to oppose the Bricker Amendment but to offer an amendment of his own. The new amendment would have to split the GOP. It would have to still be strong enough—still contain sufficient curbs on presidential authority—so that the Old Guard would support it and Ike would oppose it, so that Ike would still be on one side of the issue and the isolationists on the other, but it would have to be less stringent, more moderate than the Bricker Amendment—moderate enough so that moderate Republicans who had been united with Ike in opposing Bricker would break away from him and support this new amendment. The GOP would therefore be split—and if the GOP was split, the balance of power in Senate voting would shift to the Democrats. If moderate Democrats supported the George Amendment, Senate Democrats would be in the position Johnson wanted: Democrats would be saving Ike from the Bricker Amendment—saving him from the isolationists in his own party. Moreover, the George Amendment would be a Democratic amendment. A Democratic proposal would become the focus of activity and interest. Although they might be in the minority, the Senate Democrats—the Democrats and their Leader—would have seized the initiative on the most prominent political issue of the day.

There would still be complications. The Democratic amendment—the George Amendment—would have to be popular with the public, and the popular side of the issue, as demonstrated by the overwhelming public support for Bricker, was the strong side, so the George Amendment would have to be a stringent curb on presidential power. But Johnson himself didn’t want a stringent curb. He would have to make certain, therefore, that the George Amendment, the amendment he had persuaded George to introduce, did not receive the necessary two-thirds vote. He had to persuade George to introduce an amendment—and then he had to make sure the amendment was not passed.

Which created
another
complication. He would need George’s support in Senate councils of the future as he had needed it in the past. He would never have it again if the old man felt humiliated by the reception of the proposal
Johnson had persuaded him to introduce, and a defeat might well make George, who wasn’t used to defeats, feel humiliated. Johnson had to make sure that the defeat was not decisive, that the final vote was close. He decided that the George Amendment should pass by a majority—no one, not even Walter George, would feel humiliated by a majority vote—but not by the necessary two-thirds.

There was a final complication. At the end of the ensuing fight, Johnson’s reactionary Texas backers would have to be convinced that he himself had supported restrictions on presidential power. He would have to make sure that although he was arranging for the George Amendment to fail, he would be able to tell his constituents that he had worked earnestly for it to succeed. But, Johnson saw, that complication would be solved only if the George Amendment contained strong restrictions. If it did, and if he, along with Democratic conservatives, supported it, at least in public, he would be able to tell Richardson and Murchison that although the amendment had been defeated, he had personally supported it.

T
ANGLED AS WERE THESE COMPLICATIONS
, the mind working down on the Pedernales was equal to them. By the time Lyndon Johnson returned to Washington on December 28, 1953, and Bobby Baker mentioned the Bricker Amendment to him, he was able to tell Baker: “We’ve got to stop the damn thing, and I think we can.”

The single necessity, of course, was Walter George’s agreement to stop supporting Bricker’s amendment and introduce his own. That was the masterstroke, the only way to cut through the Gordian knot. None of Johnson’s plans would work without George’s agreement. Johnson set out to get it—to persuade the senator who never changed his mind to change it this time.

“To get George to take on Bricker, that was quite an undertaking,” Hubert Humphrey would recall. Johnson did it in part with a memorandum, written by Gerald Siegel and analyzing, in Siegel’s dry style, the flaws in S.J. Res. I. And he did it in part—after what Siegel calls “just a quick reading of the memo”—with a demonstration of his persuasive powers.

“He called me into a meeting that was going on between himself, Bill White, and Walter George,” Siegel recalls. “I sat there and watched one of those really stellar performances of persuasion that he was so capable of with the dean of the Senate…. Walter George was still a formidable guy. He was getting a little old but…

“I sat there and witnessed Johnson … persuade Walter George that he should not… favor the Bricker Amendment. It was a rapid-fire, almost uninterrupted monologue. It wasn’t a give-and-take discussion. It was the Senator expressing just about every point of view that he thought would be effective…. Finally, after long discussion, Senator George … agreed to introduce a substitute for the Bricker Amendment.”