Master of the Senate (115 page)

T
HE VERY RUTHLESSNESS
with which Lyndon Johnson used his power helped him to amass more of it. The story of how Bernard Baruch’s contribution had never reached Paul Douglas had gotten around, and everyone knew how Douglas’ office had been taken away from him without warning or excuse. The ostracism of Herbert Lehman had been noted. And aides gossiped. It was an open secret now that some senators couldn’t even get their phone calls returned. The United States Senate contained men adept at reading power and they had no difficulty in drawing from these ongoing actions a unifying lesson.

And new lessons were constantly being provided for their edification.

A single attempt at independence could end an alliance with Lyndon Johnson forever—even if the alliance had been as long in duration, and as intimate, as that between Johnson and Stuart Symington.

Symington had no jealousy of the Texan with whom he had spent so much time and exchanged so many favors. “I thought he was a man of destiny,” he was to recall years later. And he had thought they were friends. “I was awfully fond of Lyndon B. Johnson,” he was to say. But after Johnson put Symington on the Armed Services Committee, the experience and expertise—
true expertise—in military matters of the tall, handsome Missourian became apparent at Armed Services Committee hearings, and Johnson’s aides became aware that he resented it. Johnson began to say, when Symington’s name came up during private conversations, “He’s not a team player.” For a while Johnson remained amiable when talking to Symington in person, but Symington, detecting a subtle change in Johnson’s attitude, decided it was simply that “I was getting too much prominence.” He decided to play a less prominent role in future hearings, he was to recall; he didn’t want anything to break up the friendship. But 1954 was the year of the Army-McCarthy hearings, and of Symington’s courageous challenge to McCarthy, after Johnson had told him not to challenge McCarthy, “and,” Symington says, “Johnson didn’t like that at all. I’ve never quite known why. But it [standing up to McCarthy] was something that just had to be done, and I did it.” And then, Symington recalls, “I found out that if you crossed him—well, the one word that was foremost in his mind was power, and if anyone stood in his way—well, no one stood in Lyndon Johnson’s way.” Then Symington realized something about Johnson that he had not understood before: that “there was a sort of cruelty there.”

He found out the hard way—in public. Because of the role he had played in building up Texas defense contractors, it had become a tradition for Symington to be invited to luncheons given by Texas’ congressional delegation for prominent visitors from the state. Walking into a luncheon shortly after his confrontation with McCarthy, Symington strode over to his friend Lyndon as he always did, and Lyndon turned his back on him. “I did not realize he was breaking with me before that,” Symington recalls. “My goodness, only a few years before he had introduced me [at a Texas delegation luncheon] as ‘the Greatest Texan of Them AIL’ And he did it so that everyone saw it. Cruelty.”

Then Johnson did it so that everyone in the Democratic cloakroom saw it. In the past, whenever Bobby Baker circulated through the Democratic cloakroom at the end of the day inviting senators to drop by the Leader’s office, Symington would be one of the senators invited. Now, one day, he was standing with two senators when Baker approached. Taking the arms of the other two senators, Baker said to them, “The Leader wants you in his office.” He walked away. Symington realized he hadn’t been invited. And for some years after that, he never was invited. “He [Johnson] was deliberately leaving me out—and he was doing it in such a way that everyone would know. No one crossed Lyndon Johnson.”

“Senators mutually recognize the primary natural law of political survival,” Neil MacNeil, a very perceptive observer, was to write. When a senator was asked for a vote, an excuse invariably accepted by most Leaders was that it would be politically harmful in his home state. “Hell, I know what it takes to get elected,” one of Johnson’s predecessors as Leader would explain. Even very pragmatic men recognized this law, and accepted it. That was why, Scoop Jackson would later say, that if, despite President Kennedy’s persuasiveness
with a senator he had invited to the Oval Office, “the senator said his people [constituents] wouldn’t go along, Kennedy would finally say he was sorry they couldn’t agree but he understood.”

Johnson wouldn’t understand. He would refuse to understand. Considerations important to the Senator—even the consideration of political survival—did not divert him from his purpose. “He could charm you or knock your block off, or bribe you, or threaten you, anything to get your vote,” Jackson would explain. “And he’d get it. That was the difference.”

T
HE LESSON KEEN-EYED SENATORS
drew from what happened to Kefauver and Douglas and Lehman was spelled out by one of the keenest, Russell Long. Lyndon Johnson, Long said, “could not bear to have anyone operating outside his camp. When he saw this developing, he would either reconcile or isolate them.” And this made senators all the more anxious to be in his camp, anxious to be on his team. Men learned from watching what happened to Symington what Symington had learned the hard way. “As for Senate loners,” Russell Long said, “he could make their lives miserable.” Seeing what had happened to Symington, men made sure they didn’t make Symington’s mistake and cross Lyndon Johnson. As Frank Van der Linden of the
Richmond Times-Dispatch
put it, “When somebody is ruthless like that, and has the power, and is willing to use it, weaker men get out of his way.”

A
ND
L
YNDON
J
OHNSON
, looking for power over the Senate, had found another instrument with which power could be created. It wasn’t a new instrument. First employed in 1845, it had been formally embodied in the Senate Rules (Rule 12, Paragraph 3) since 1914, and previous Senate Leaders had used it in a number of different ways. Never, however, had it been used as this Leader used it. His use of it was, in fact, perhaps the most striking example of the creativity that Lyndon Johnson brought to the legislative process.

The instrument was a “unanimous consent agreement,” a procedural device under which the Senate, by unanimous consent, agrees to limit the amount of time that a particular bill can be debated; to divide that time between the bill’s proponents and opponents according to a prearranged formula incorporated in the agreement, and to place the allocation of that time under the control of one or two specific proponents and opponents of the measure; to limit the number of amendments to the bill that can be introduced, and the amount of time each amendment can be debated, and to place that time, too, under the control of specific senators.

Prior to World War II, most unanimous consent agreements had come near the end of a session, when the bill in question had already been debated for days, if not weeks; the Senate would then agree that after a certain number of
additional days of debate, a vote would be taken. The mounting impatience after the war with the Senate’s inefficiency had led to increased use of these agreements, but they still had generally been employed only after substantial debate on a measure had already occurred, and they still generally allowed additional time for debate. The 119 bills that had become the subject of agreements between the end of the war and the end of the 1954 Senate session had been debated for an average of six days before the agreements were instituted—and the agreements had allowed an average of three additional days of debate, so that a total of nine days of discussion had been allowed before the vote.

Lyndon Johnson wasn’t allowing nine days; sometimes, in fact, he wasn’t allowing even one.

Traditionally, says assistant parliamentarian Riddick, who had begun drafting more of the agreements as parliamentarian Charlie Watkins grew older, “It was sort of a practice to allow them to consider [debate] the bill a while to see if they anticipated a long debate”; it was only if they saw that one could be expected that they would try to restrict debate. “After Mr. Johnson came to the forefront,” however, the agreements began coming earlier and earlier in the legislative process; “you would get an agreement on some [bills] before you even started debate.” Johnson would decline to call some bills—including some quite major bills—off the Calendar onto the floor until a unanimous consent agreement had been worked out setting a strict time limit; the total debate on a bill might be only six, or four, or, in some cases, two hours. Nor was that the only difference. Until Johnson became Majority Leader, Riddick explains, most agreements were “loose—just general agreements,” many dealing only with time limits. “Often they just set the number of hours, or a set time at which they would vote—that was all many of them contained. You didn’t work out all the details.” Now the agreements became much stricter, and much more detailed. “What Mr. Johnson did was introduce the use of … a detailed agreement as to…how long each amendment would be debated; how long the general debate of the bill would last; whether all amendments had to be germane to the bill, and details of that nature. This was all reduced to unanimous consent agreements, even specifying the hour that you’d proceed to the consideration of said bill; and the hour that you’d vote on it.”

Among the details now included, moreover, was the identity of the senators who would control the allocation of time to other senators who wanted to speak for or against the bill. In the past, the time given to a bill’s supporters had usually been controlled by the senator who had introduced the measure (the “mover”), or by the senator who was managing it on the floor, or by the chairman of the committee from which it had emerged. Now, in more and more unanimous consent agreements, a new figure was named.
Ordered by unanimous consent, that…debate shall be limited to four hours, to be equally
divided by and controlled by the mover of the bill and the majority leader
, an agreement might say.
Ordered that on the question of the final passage of such bill debate shall be limited to six hours, to be equally divided and controlled, respectively, by the majority and minority leaders
, said another. Sometimes, in fact, the time allotted to a bill’s supporters was divided and controlled by the Majority Leader alone.

Because of Lyndon Johnson’s unprecedented intervention in committee work, the wording of the bills was often to an unprecedented extent a creation of the Majority Leader. He would previously have acted as a mediator between individual senators, or between blocs of senators, who were in conflict over an issue. Once the conflict would have been thrashed out on the Senate floor, but now Johnson would meet alone with each of the senators, or get them together privately, explore their differences to find areas of agreement, and finally would ask, and if asking did not work, would urge, and if urging did not work, would demand, and, finally, if all else failed, would use his raw power to threaten the senators to force them to consent (and to produce the consent of their allies) to the compromise he proposed—would, one way or another, arrange some wording on which they could agree, and for which he felt he could line up a majority of the Senate for passage. He would have been able to do this because of the power—the power of Ray burn, the power of campaign funds, the power of scheduling, the power of office space—with which he had previously surrounded himself. The
quid pro quo
was seldom stated, seldom precise, seldom the offer, of, say, a dam in return for a compromise on a specific bill. But the senator who needed the dam, or the campaign funds, or a private bill called off the Calendar would know that the man asking for this favor had the power to grant the other favor. Now the bills that were already the creations of the Majority Leader, creations made possible by his new powers, would under this additional new power be managed on the floor by the Majority Leader.

And Lyndon Johnson made sure, in each instance, that he had that power, beyond any question. When he resolved a point with a senator, he—or Reedy or Siegel—took notes on what the agreement entailed. Then the notes would be formally typed up. Recalls Riddick: “Johnson would come up to me: ‘Now look, I want you to type an agreement.’ And he would tell me what he wanted in it. For example: ‘And I want to make sure there are no non-germane [amendments].’ … I would go down to Skeeter’s office [and have the agreement typed up]. Then I would find him, and give it to him. He would read it, and he might say, ‘Well, now, change this so it will do so-and-so.’” In words that would equally apply to Johnson’s maneuvers on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution ten years later, Riddick says:

And, Riddick says, Johnson would take the formal document “around and show it to senators. He would say, ‘I hope you won’t object….’” He would make it very difficult for a senator to object; everyone else had agreed, he would say; we can’t waste days debating this bill; we’ve got to make the Senate function. After he had secured everyone’s consent, he would go to his front-row center seat and stand by it—never for very long—until the presiding senator said, “The chair recognizes the distinguished Majority Leader.”

“Mr. President,” Johnson would say, “I ask unanimous consent that a proposed unanimous consent agreement, which is offered on behalf of myself and the distinguished Minority Leader, be read.” He would hold out the order that Riddick had typed, and a page would hurry over, take it, and give it to one of the clerks on the lower dais, who would read it into the record. “Is there any objection?” the presiding officer would ask. “The chair hears none. Without objection, so ordered.”

L
YNDON
J
OHNSON’S USE
of the unanimous consent agreement to drastically limit debate ran contrary to the principles on which the Senate had been founded, and to the customs which had, during the previous century and a half of its existence, been most fundamental in its functioning. Unlimited debate had been sacred Senate custom, the device by which, more than any other, it fulfilled the Founding Fathers’ vision of it as the bulwark against the “fickleness” and “transient impressions” of the majority, as the guarantor of the sovereignty of the individual states. And it was debate—in its highest sense: unhurried, thoughtful discussion to educate first the Senate and then the people, to raise issues and examine them in depth and at length—that had made the Senate a great deliberative body. Johnson’s agreements limited debate so drastically that with their increased use the very nature of the Senate was altered. From the moment a motion for one of his agreements was made on the Senate floor, the body’s normally loose functioning was transformed into something very strict indeed.