Master of the Senate (119 page)

The long arcs would be filling up now—senators coming in and walking along them to their desks, and then standing talking quietly with a colleague or sitting listening to the debate on the proposed bill—as if a painter, having finished the background, was putting in the figures. Other senators would have congregated in the well, bantering with each other in the relaxed senatorial way. The Chamber floor would be the familiar, still Senate tableau.

Except that, on that floor, there would be one figure who, now, with the vote coming closer, seemed never to be still.

He was prowling the big Chamber now, ranging restlessly up and down,
side to side. He rarely listened to the debate, except occasionally for a moment or two to see if the speaker was saying anything he hadn’t anticipated. Rather his eyes would be constantly roaming the Chamber, “seeing how things were going—seeing
if
they were going,” as one aide put it.

What was going on in the Republican cloakroom? How could he find out? What could he read in the faces of the senators coming out of that cloakroom? Where were
his
senators: why weren’t they all here? Raising his hand over his head, he would beckon Bobby Baker or one of Baker’s aides, or, if they didn’t see him, snap his fingers loudly to get their attention, and order them to see that the senators were on their way. Were two or three on whom he had counted likely to be absent? He’d hurry across the floor to arrange live pairs. Was something going wrong? Was the chairman of Public Works drunk again, confused and rambling as he tried to manage one of his committee’s bills? Striding across the floor to another senator, he would whisper, “You ready to do five or ten minutes on Defense? I want to get Denny off the floor.” Then, forcing himself to move slowly so as not to attract attention, he’d walk down the aisle to where Chavez was standing, take his arm—if that wasn’t enough, take his lapel and put his other arm around his shoulder—whisper, “Denny, I’d like to talk to you outside for a minute,” raise a hand for recognition, tell the presiding officer, “Mr. President, I’d like to suspend discussion, and if it be the will of the Senate, take up the Defense Appropriations bill, and we will bring Public Works back in a few minutes,” and then lead Chavez up the aisle and out the door. Did he catch a glimpse, as the doors to the Republican cloakroom swung open, of a GOP senator on whose vote he was counting, talking inside the cloakroom, in a suspiciously cordial manner, to a White House liaison man? Waiting until the senator came out on the floor, he would check to see if the vote was still firm, and if it wasn’t he’d be moving quickly to some other senator, to try to replace it.

With the vote all but upon him now, he seemed always to be in motion, and the motion would be faster, almost frenzied. As he talked to senators, his hands never stopped moving, gesturing expressively, chopping the air with that snake-killing gesture, opening a palm to illustrate a point, punching the air with a fist, jabbing a lapel with a finger, patting a senator’s shoulder, straightening his tie, grabbing his lapel, hugging him if he agreed to the proposition being made.

If he dropped down into his own front-row center chair, he might sprawl down in it, stretch out both long legs across the aisle, or lean far back, crossing them. But he wouldn’t stay in any pose long. “Jiggling, scratching, crossing and uncrossing his legs,” leaning back in his chair with a hand up to his face as he whispered to Russell close behind him or to a senator who had approached with information or an inquiry, pulling out a tally sheet, writing something on it, tucking it back in his pocket, “he seemed,” in the words of one reporter, “simply unable to sit still for a moment.” Abruptly, galvanized by a sudden thought, he would leap out of his seat, “going from slouched to almost frenetic
in an instant,” as another reporter put it, to rush over to a senator. “You’d see him with the finger right in the face. He’d be over on the Republican side as much as the Democratic. Then he’d be back across the floor, pulling someone else off to the side,” a slash of vivid movement through the senatorial still-life.

And if something was going wrong, Lyndon Johnson would be moving even faster, moving so fast that, Neil MacNeil reported, “his baggy-cut, almost zoot suit flies open.” Once, when Johnson was away from the floor, a number of senators unexpectedly began proposing one controversial, contradictory, and often confusing amendment after another to a routine Post Office appropriation bill being managed by Olin Johnston. The mere discussion of those amendments would plunge the Senate into the kind of angry debate that, in past years, would have brought it to a halt for endless days, Steele wrote; passage of any of the amendments would result in a certain Eisenhower veto. “The Senate was in a turmoil. The babble on the floor prevented senators from hearing and being heard. There were amendments to amendments; amendments offered and withdrawn; senators arose to protest they couldn’t hear the debate, didn’t understand what was transpiring.”

Then, into this “mixed-up mess” roared Lyndon Johnson. “Quickly sizing up the situation, he began to act. He paced from one side of the Senate Chamber to the other, moving at a loping gait, the coat tails of his gray flannel suit winging out behind. He whispered with Bill Knowland, with Frank Carlson, the Administration’s spokesman on postal matters; he conferred with Olin Johnston and Johnston’s aide; he talked with Russell Long, Ev Dirksen, Parliamentarian Charlie Watkins, with Dick Russell; he slipped to a phone, one equipped with a baffled mouthpiece, in an alcove just off the Senate rostrum. He snapped his thumb and second finger with the retort of a firecracker to summon a page for water…. The Senate Majority Leader was ready to straighten things out.

“It would take some straightening out—seven different maneuvers…. Johnson was running the whole show. From his Majority Leader’s desk, he hand-signalled the various players in the drama. He peremptorily cut senators off to seize the floor. He barked harsh orders to Jack Kennedy in the presiding officer’s chair to put this question, make that ruling. He pleaded with senators to defer speeches, he whispered to aides to summon this or that senator, he snapped his fingers like a whip to fetch more water. He sped to the cloakroom for a conference and back to his desk. He ranged the aisles…. A legislative catastrophe [was] averted.”

And that was on a non-controversial, relatively minor bill. On a bill on which the vote was going to be close, and the result of genuine political significance, the frenzy of Lyndon Johnson’s actions escalated another notch. As the moment approached for the roll call—the call that would determine the actual, irrevocable winning or losing for this man who had to win—Lyndon Johnson’s orders grew sharper, more punctuated with fury.

Some of his votes, votes he had counted on, were missing. There was no
more “Sure, I understand, I hope he feels better”—
“By God, I got to have his vote!”
he rasped to Hennings’ assistant Bernard Fensterwald.
“Get him IN HERE!”
To other senators’ aides there was a single sentence, delivered in a low, threatening snarl: “Get your fucking senator
over
here.” Once, in the well, he dispatched Baker to the cloakroom to make a call; Bobby, walking away from him, didn’t move fast enough. With one long step, Lyndon Johnson caught up to him, grabbed each of Baker’s narrow shoulders in a huge hand and shoved him violently up the aisle. Once, Humphrey told a reporter, Johnson, after ordering him to do something and to “get going,” was so impatient that he actually kicked him—hard—in the shins to speed him on his way. (The reporter, Robert S. Allen, thought Humphrey must be exaggerating until “he [Humphrey] added, ‘Look,’ and he pulled up his trouser leg and, sure enough, he had some scars there. He had a couple of scars on his shins where Lyndon had kicked him and said, ‘Get going now.’”)

Some of the senators he needed on his side were still planning to vote the other way. On one vote, the recalcitrants included John Pastore. Talking to the little Rhode Islander, Johnson led him into the cloakroom, where they could not be seen from the galleries. Then he took each of Pastore’s lapels in a hand, pulled the hands together, and lifted them up so that Pastore was held motionless on tiptoe while Johnson brought his face down to stare into his eyes and deliver the argument that way.

The Leader was hurrying back and forth across the Chamber, prowling the aisles, charging up the stairs to the cloakroom—and then, suddenly, the moment was at hand, the moment for which he had been waiting: the number of votes on the tally sheet in his hand was—at last—the number he needed. He would win—if nothing changed. If the senator in the chair was not a thoroughly loyal Johnson man, he quickly put someone in the chair who was. And, prompting him across the well, he hurried the new presiding officer through his paces. Standing next to his Leader’s desk, he would mutter along: “No further amendments…. Third reading of the bill…. The clerk will call the roll….” There might be interruptions from the floor from opponents. The muttering would become a growl—sometimes audible in the gallery. “Out of order!” Lyndon Johnson would prompt.
“Out of order!”
“Out of order,” the senator in the chair would say. “Call the question,” Lyndon Johnson would prompt.
“CALL THE QUESTION!”
The question would be called. “Yeas and nays have been ordered. The clerk will call the roll.”

And with those last words, the words that signaled the actual vote, the power of Lyndon Johnson as Majority Leader was fully revealed, for during the six years of his leadership, the Senate of the United States presented, during close and crucial votes, a spectacle such as had never been seen before during the century and a half of its existence.

If all his senators were present when the roll call began, and he could see that there were absentees on the other side, he wanted the roll to be called at a
fast pace. If he didn’t have all his men there—if some stragglers hadn’t been found yet—then he wanted the roll call to be slow. And during the years when he was Leader, the roll was called at precisely the pace he desired.

Standing at his front-row center desk, facing the presiding officer and clerk calling the roll, Lyndon Johnson would raise his big right hand, and with a pen or pencil, or simply with a long forefinger, would make those “revving-up circles in the air” that meant, as was said in the Introduction, “hurry up—he had the votes and wanted them recorded” before something changed. When, however, “he didn’t have the votes but would get them if only he had a little more time,” he would make the downward pushing motion with his open hands that meant “slow down.” As senators hurried into the Chamber, many walked down to the well to talk with their colleagues. Standing at the edge of the well, towering over men in it, Lyndon Johnson would raise his long arm over them, making those big circles, like “an orchestra conductor,” leading the United States Senate—the Senate that, for so long, had refused to be led.

Sometimes he would indulge in an even more blatant manifestation of his power. Somehow the vote hadn’t worked out as he had thought it would; he was a vote or two short of victory. So a vote or two would be changed—right out in the open. Johnson would walk across the floor to a senator who had been in opposition, and whisper to him, and the senator would rise and signal the clerk that he had been incorrectly recorded. “You would see votes changed right in front of your eyes,” the Senate aide says. Neil MacNeil, who knew the Senate so well, could hardly believe what he was seeing. “He did it in front of God,” MacNeil was to recall. “It didn’t happen much, but it happened. He was absolutely brazen about it. He put the arm on guys right on the floor.”

Sometimes Johnson would not even bother to walk across the floor. Once he yelled across the well to Frear, who was sitting at his desk: “Change your vote, Allen!” The Senator from Delaware did not immediately respond, so Johnson yelled again, in a shout heard, in the words of one writer, by “more than eighty senators and the galleries”:
“Change your vote, Allen!”
Allen changed his vote. Small wonder that Hugh Sidey, remembering years later the “tall man” with “his mind attuned to every sight and sound and parliamentary nuance,” who “signaled the roll calls faster or slower,” who gave another “signal, and the door would open, and two more guys would run in,” would say, “My God—running the world! Power enveloped him.”

S
OME OF THE TOUCHES
that Johnson brought to the role of Leader were merely for dramatic effect. “Often these shows were carefully orchestrated and perhaps even a shade melodramatic,” Bobby Baker was to recall. “He [Johnson] was not only a fine actor but a fine director and producer as well. He delighted in striding about the Senate floor, conferring and frowning and giving the impression of great anxiety, while the packed press gallery and the visitors’
galleries buzzed and hummed with tensions, even though he knew—and I was one of the few people who knew—that he had three decisive votes hidden in some Capitol nook and would produce them at the most effective moment. The Republicans would snort at losing another cliff-hanger, the newspapers would trumpet a new Johnson miracle, and Lyndon Johnson would go off to a fresh Cutty Sark and soda to laugh and laugh.” But, Baker was also to say, “I see nothing wrong” in such “trickeries…. Lyndon Johnson knew that the illusion of power was almost as important as real power itself, that, simply, the more powerful you appeared to be, the more powerful you became. It was one of the reasons for his great success.”

Some of the more perceptive journalists realized that some of the drama they were reporting was staged drama. “Lyndon Johnson
played
Leader,” Sidey says. But he played the part well—played it better, far better, than anyone had ever played it before, played it as if he was made for it, as if he had been born for the role. And however he got the power, he got it. Doris Kearns Goodwin was not the only writer who was to call Lyndon Johnson “the Master of the Senate,” because that was what he was.

A
ND WITH THIS POWER
, Lyndon Johnson made the Senate work. Thanks to his intervention in the Standing Committees, his coordination of their schedules and his prodding of their chairmen, bills were emerging from committees faster than in the past. And since they were emerging with most points of contention already resolved, on the floor they were being passed faster than in the past.