Master of the Senate (114 page)

H
E WAS ACQUIRING NEW POWERS
, too—and using them with little restraint.

The Democrats’ recapture of majority status gave the party more patronage slots to distribute, and that meant more work for its Patronage Committee. And the committee’s chairman, the seventy-seven-year-old Hay den, was also becoming chairman of Appropriations. He was, in the words of one aide, “just not as interested in patronage as he had been.” And he had become very fond of Lyndon Johnson. He was increasingly willing to listen to Johnson—the party’s Leader, after all—on party matters; patronage, the aide says, “just sort of wandered into the hands of the leadership.” Realization of that development came quickly, too—as was shown by a letter from Burnet Maybank to Skeeter Johnston a few days after the November, 1954, election: “I know you feel better about Tuesday’s results—I certainly do. Hope you get the opportunity to talk to Lyndon Johnson about the patronage situation in the Capitol. It appears to me with us having a majority we are certainly entitled to more positions. Of course as you know, my appointees were laid off…. Do let me know what Lyndon thinks about the patronage.”

What Lyndon thought was that Maybank’s appointees should be restored to their former places, and they were. And that was not the case—at least in several instances—with appointees of senators who were not on his “team.”
Neither Kefauver nor Albert Gore was on its roster. Now both Tennessee senators sought to intervene on behalf of an elderly Tennesseean, Walker Toddy, who had been dismissed after twenty-nine years on Skeeter Johnston’s staff. “Mr. Toddy has given 29 years of loyal and faithful service to the Democratic Party and to the Senate of the United States,” Kefauver wrote Johnson. Toddy was not well off financially, and Kefauver noted that one more year would make him eligible for a higher pension. “I am very hopeful that Walker can secure some worthwhile place in the new senatorial setup”—even if only in a position as lowly as that of Bill Clerk. “I know that a lot of senators feel as I do,” Kefauver wrote, but one of those senators was not Lyndon Johnson, and Toddy was not given any place. Watching which senators received patronage slots—and which senators didn’t—Democrats were again reminded that it was better to be on Lyndon’s team.

For a senator who was not on the team, the cost of such independence might have to be reckoned not only in seats and slots, but in space—for Hayden’s move to Appropriations had left the chairmanship of the Rules Committee, allocator of office suites, in the hands of the “ailing” Theodore Francis Green, and Johnson assured Green that he would remove this “burden” from his shoulders.

Paul Douglas learned this new fact of Senate life during that same week in January. Johnson wanted more, and better, office space, and now that he was Majority Leader, he set out to get it. One January afternoon, he told Walter Jenkins to go down to the Senate custodian’s office and come back with the master keys that would open every door on the Senate side of the Capitol. That evening, Johnson waited until most senators and their staff had gone home, and then he began to walk through the empty Capitol, opening every door. On the top floor, near the head of a flight of stairs leading up from the gallery, he found what he wanted behind a door marked G-14, “Joint Economic Committee.” Inside, in the outer room of the two-room suite, sat its staff director, Grover Ensley, working late. Suddenly, without a knock or any other warning, the door swung open, and the startled Ensley found himself facing the tall figure of the Majority Leader.

Without a word, Johnson walked in and began looking around. The two rooms were rather small but elegant; from their high ceilings hung two chandeliers impressive even by senatorial standards; they had hung in the White House in Theodore Roosevelt’s time. In the inner office was a working fireplace, which, in Ensley’s memory, was probably lit that evening; he made a point of lighting it every afternoon. “It was very comfortable and cozy,” he recalls. The inner office was a corner room, and Johnson pulled aside the heavy draperies in front of its windows, and there was a view “right down the Mall to the Lincoln Memorial and across to Arlington Cemetery.” And what made the office perfect was that it was the office of the Joint Economic Committee. “The next day I got a letter from the Rules Committee,” Ensley recalls. It said that G-14 was going to be the new office of the Majority Leader. Having relegated
Douglas to a committee whose only amenity was its office, Evans and Novak were to write, Johnson had now taken away the office, and “the Senate took notice. It was a dramatic sign of the consequences of a lack of rapport with the Majority Leader.” For other rapport-lacking senators, the signs were less dramatic, but decipherable nonetheless. Every time a senator had to walk a long way to reach the Capitol subway—and knew that other senators, with more conveniently located offices, had a shorter distance to walk—he was reminded of what Lyndon Johnson could do for him, or to him. “After a while,” as Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote, “insiders could recognize Johnson’s allies by one look at the roster of office suites—the larger suites … were reserved for friends, the smaller … were allotted to ‘the troublesome ones.’”

T
HERE HAD BEEN
a façade of courtesy in his dealings with other senators, even those senators who were not part of the team. Now that facade dropped away. In the pile of message slips on his desk, there would be notations that “Senator Lehman called—please call him back,” “Senator Douglas called—please call him,” “Senator Kefauver called—would like to speak to you.” When he saw such slips, a thin smile would cross Lyndon Johnson’s face. Crumpling them up, he would throw them in his wastepaper basket. Or Walter Jenkins would be reading off the messages from his yellow legal pad, writing beside each one Johnson’s instructions for dealing with it. When he got to one from a senator who wasn’t on the team, there would be a silence. Jenkins would read the next message. “He wouldn’t return Lehman’s phone calls for days on end,” recalls Lehman’s administrative assistant, Julius Gaius Caesar Edelstein.

He might not return them at all. And his men—Clements, Skeeter, Bobby Baker—wouldn’t return them, either. When, in 1955, this first began happening, Lehman, himself the soul of courtesy, a man who, as Governor, would never have dreamt of snubbing even an avowed enemy, could hardly believe it was intentional. But after one incident in 1955, he had no choice but to believe. He first had difficulty reaching Johnson, who was at the ranch, being “told he was out hunting,” as he was to recall. When he finally spoke to him, Johnson promised that he would deal with the matter “immediately” and that either he or Earle Clements would call him back. “I even gave him the number of my [hotel] room and told him that if I should be out, he or Earle should leave word that they had called, and I would call back as promptly as possible,” Lehman was to tell Edelstein. Neither Johnson nor Clements ever called.

The facade dropped away in the cloakroom, too. Johnson would be standing in the middle of it, talking, laughing with a group of senators. A Lehman or a Douglas or a Kefauver or another senator not on the team would walk in. Johnson would turn away so that he wouldn’t be facing them, so that they couldn’t become part of the group. And some of the other senators, men attuned to nuances of power, would take their cue from the Majority Leader.
Edelstein was to recall what it was like to be walking with Herbert Lehman after it became clear that he was in the Leader’s disfavor. “You’d walk into the cloakroom. People would fall silent. You’d walk down the hall, and there would be an averting of eyes so that they wouldn’t have to say hello.” The facade dropped away on the Senate floor as well. “Lehman would begin making a speech, and if Johnson was on the floor he would walk out to the cloakroom, just ostentatiously enough so you knew it was deliberate. And other people would drift—leave—the floor.” Or they would not come out onto the floor, as they otherwise might have done. While Lehman or Douglas or Kefauver was speaking, a senator would wander into the cloakroom, intending to go out on the floor. Bobby Baker would be standing by the swinging doors leading from the cloakroom to the floor. He would say to the senator, “Why don’t you stay in the cloakroom for a while?”

There were methods of humiliating a senator on the floor as well. Johnson would go over to Douglas’ desk, while the Illinois senator was sitting with one of his assistants. He would lean over and chat with the assistant, ignoring Douglas.

And there were methods less public than these, but, with certain senators, equally effective. “Skeeter would routinely have the boys back to his office at five or six o’clock,” Douglas’ administrative assistant, Howard Shuman, recalls. The invited senators would walk through the tall, dark door into those cheery rooms beyond, their arms around each other’s shoulders, chuckling or laughing. Other senators would see them going in. It was hard not to see; Skeeter’s office was just outside the cloakroom. “Paul was almost never invited,” Shuman says. “In fact, once, when he was, he told me about it.” In the telling, Douglas tried to make a joke of the situation, “but,” Shuman says, “it didn’t come off too well.”

“Oh, they did a lot of things to diminish Paul, Paul and the others,” Shuman says. “They went out of their way to diminish them. William S. White wrote that the way to get into the [Senate] Club was to be courteous and courtly. Well, that’s nonsense. Lehman was the most courtly man in the world, and he wasn’t part of the club. It didn’t have anything to do with courtly. It had to do with how you voted—with whether or not you voted as Lyndon Johnson wanted you to vote.” Says Neil MacNeil, a longtime congressional correspondent for
Time
magazine: “The Senate was run by courtesy, all right—like the longshoremen’s union.”

Assistants to non-team members were constantly being reminded of their bosses’ lack of status. “He [Johnson] was cutting [to me],” Edelstein recalls. “With other staff people he was very verbose. But when I said hello, he’d be very curt and turn his back on me.” Sometimes Johnson would be chatting, outwardly relaxed, in the cloakroom when he would notice, standing nearby, an assistant to one of the senators who was not on the team. “What the fuck do you want?” Lyndon Johnson would say. “Nothing, Senator,” the aide would answer.
“Then get your fucking ass out of here,” Johnson would say. Or he would give these aides instructions for their senator in a tone that left no doubt as to where the senator stood in his estimation. Says Harry Schnibbe, administrative assistant to John A. Carroll of Colorado, elected to the Senate in 1956 and never a member of Johnson’s team: “Most of the time he ignored you. But he might say, ‘I want you to tell Carroll to get over here. Get on the phone and tell him! I need senators over here on this debate! You’re over here listening to this. Where the hell is
he?’
” Or he might simply tell Schnibbe, in a low, threatening tone: “Get your fucking senator over here right away!”

“I’d say, ‘Yes, sir!’ like I was a page,” Schnibbe recalls. “I’d almost salute. He terrified me. To tell you the truth, if I went in the cloakroom and Johnson was in the cloakroom, I left. I’d say, ‘Oh, shit, I’m not staying here.’ We all operated in total terror of Johnson.”

I
N OTHER WAYS
, too, the humility of Lyndon Johnson’s first term fell away, to be replaced by characteristics that would have been familiar to students at San Marcos—to students, that is, who hadn’t been on his team there.

G-14 had been refurnished—almost instantly, it seemed, thanks to the efficiency of the Senate Cabinet Shop—in the traditional Senate mode: turn-of-the-century desks and a visitors’ bench, refinished and polished until it glowed, from the Old Supreme Court Chamber; a nineteenth-century painting of “Rebecka, daughter of the mighty Powhattan, Emperor of Attaboughkomouck.” Johnson had admired portraits of John Nance Garner and a former Texas senator, Morris Sheppard, that had been hanging in Skeeter’s back office; now they were hanging in Johnson’s office. At the end of the day, Johnson would, after (or, increasingly, instead of) a session in Skeeter’s office, invite a few chosen senators or journalists to G-14 for a drink and a chat. Unbuttoning his double-breasted suit, he would put his feet, clad in either gleaming black shoes or gleaming, elaborately hand-tooled “LBJ” cowboy boots, up on the desk, and buzz a secretary to bring drinks. A
You ain’t learning nothin’ when you’re talking
plaque had been installed on the mantelpiece, but now, in sharp contrast to his first six years in the Senate, Lyndon Johnson paid markedly little attention to his father’s advice—as little attention as he had paid before those six years.

The most notable characteristic of these gatherings was the extent to which the conversation at them was dominated by one man. The talk was fascinating, but its dominant theme was the smartness, or, to be more precise, the shrewdness, of the host. Once, for example, on January 13, 1955, the day the committee assignments were announced, he was in the middle of a monologue when he abruptly interrupted himself. “My God,” he said, “I forgot to call Senator Stennis and congratulate him.” Snatching the phone out of its cradle, he tucked it between his shoulder and his chin, and dialed Stennis’ home. And
when Mrs. Stennis, answering, said that her husband was not home, Johnson said, “Well, I must tell you, ma’am, how proud I am of your husband and how proud the Senate is, and you tell him that when he gets home. The Senate paid him a great honor today. The Senate elected your husband to the Appropriations Committee. That’s one of the most powerful committees in the whole Senate and a great honor for your husband. I’m so proud of John. He’s a great American. And I know you’re proud of him, too. He’s one of my finest senators….”

A number of aspects of the monologue Johnson was conducting with Mrs. Stennis—a monologue that went on for quite some time—were worth noting. The first was the attention to detail—to doing
everything.
Giving Stennis the Appropriations seat had put the Senator in his debt; a telephone call like this would add a little to the debt—so, late though it was, long though Johnson’s day had been, the call was made, and the call was not cursory; Johnson’s conversation was not hurried, but slow and as drawlingly gracious as any Mississippian could have desired. Another was the use of the “I” and the “my”—as Rowland Evans, one of the reporters listening, was to put it, “implicitly he was belaboring the obvious—that it wasn’t the Steering Committee or the full Senate that was really responsible. It was LBJ.” But the most significant aspect of all was that as Johnson talked to Mrs. Stennis, buttering her up, he would, as he poured it on, wink and nod to his listeners, grinning at them over what he was doing. Although his words seemed sincere, he seemed to want his listeners to understand that they really weren’t. It seemed to be important to him that they know that.