Master of the Senate (138 page)

G
EORGE
S
MATHERS
, Johnson’s “assistant whip” during the Natural Gas Battle, was with him from early in the morning “until ten-thirty at night,” and saw that this man who had suffered a heart attack “didn’t slow up during the entire workday”—“I don’t know how his body stood it.” But Johnson not only stood
it but thrived on it. At the conclusion of the natural gas fight, Dr. Cain of the Mayo Clinic wrote Tommy Corcoran, “I have had my fingers crossed during this whole trying period, for I know Lyndon must have been under a terrific strain.” But when, on February 20, Lyndon underwent a complete physical examination at Bethesda, his heart showed no enlargement, and his blood pressure and other vital signs were actually better than they had been in December.

To the uninitiated, the first close-up look at Lyndon Johnson was astonishing. A new member of his staff, Nadine Brammer, couldn’t believe the abuse he rained on the men and women in his office. “He could be totally charming, a lot of fun—he was always trying to put the make on me—but there was a rotten side to him. There was a lot of personal exhibitionism, a lot of hitting on women. It was like a family atmosphere, and he was the Big Daddy. He controlled everything. He ruled with fear—like a heavy-duty parent. Fear permeated the whole staff. Lyndon would jump on someone. Just make mincemeat of him. Tongue-lashing people. Walter was just always on pins and needles. I’ve seen Walter shake, just literally shake, when Lyndon was asking him questions. Walter was just stripped of any human dignity.” Mrs. Brammer was to leave the staff the next year. “I just couldn’t understand how they [the staff members] put up with it.” Another new member of the staff wouldn’t put up with it. Within a month after Jim Rowe, whom Johnson had recruited so ardently, came on board, he told Johnson he was leaving. He finally agreed to remain until the end of the 1956 session, and left then. But no aspect of Johnson was more striking to new staffers than his energy. “He worked us, he
worked
us,” Mrs. Brammer says. “And he worked himself,
worked
himself. He had made up his mind to be President, and he was demonic in his drive.”

L
YNDON
J
OHNSON’S
“Program with a Heart” had contained only one proposal anathema to liberals. Despite scandal and widespread outrage, he had rammed that proposal to passage in the Senate, in a vivid illumination of his power over that body. The fate of the program’s other twelve proposals—all liberal proposals—was instructive because it illuminated the purpose for which he was using that power.

Five of those twelve proposals—poll tax elimination, immigration reform, disaster insurance, aid to depressed areas, and tax reduction for the poor—died quiet deaths during the Senate’s 1956 session. Five more—for a federal water conservation program and for federal aid for medical research, and for hospital, school, and housing construction—passed in amounts so small or forms so diluted as to make them insignificant. Since President Eisenhower was supporting most of the same programs, the failure of these proposals in a Senate controlled by Johnson was an indication of the extent to which his heart was—or wasn’t—truly in the program, of the extent to which the program had been proposed merely to blunt liberal criticism, and of the extent to which his first priority was not to appease liberals but to avoid antagonizing conservatives.

The fate of an eleventh proposal was particularly infuriating to liberals. It was a proposal that was actually more part of Eisenhower’s program than Johnson’s: the bill that became the basis for the Interstate Highway System. Organized labor had assumed that construction workers on the highway program would be covered by the existing Davis-Bacon Act, which required workers on all federal projects to be paid the prevailing local wage. But Herman Brown, who had started as a road builder and had never lost that image of himself, could not bear to have this most sacred area of free enterprise polluted by the hated unions and their endless “gimmes.” “He laid down the law to Lyndon on that one,” Ed Clark would recall.
*
When the Administration-backed highway program reached the Senate floor on May 28, labor unions were ready for a fight, and a union-backed measure was introduced to have wage rates set by the Secretary of Labor. UAW lobbyist Robert Oliver, who had been on what Evans and Novak call a “quiet campaign to soften Johnson’s antipathy toward organized labor,” warned the Majority Leader that opposition to the bill when it came to a vote the next day would be disastrous to his future relations with labor, and Johnson found a way to avoid the vote. He had been scheduled to leave for a checkup at the Mayo Clinic at 3 p.m. on the 29th; he moved up his flight to 10 a.m. so he wouldn’t be present during the vote (which labor won). As the two journalists put it, “Johnson’s absence saved him from another attack from the unions, but it scarcely won him their praise.”

As for the twelfth proposal, that, too, seemed dead as late as July. But when, that month, Johnson began to feel that he had a real chance for the Democratic nomination for President, a softening of liberal antipathy became desirable. And since passage of the last remaining item in the “Program with a Heart” would advance both liberal objectives and his own, that item passed—in a form far more liberal than he had at first proposed.

In 1955, the House had passed a bill that would have changed the nature of the Social Security system, the first broad change since 1939 in that major New Deal achievement. Previously, Social Security had meant retirement benefits at age sixty-five and payments to widows and orphans. The House bill would have lowered the age at which women could begin collecting benefits to sixty-two, but, more significantly, it provided for the payment of benefits to totally disabled persons of both sexes at the age of fifty, a provision that would
transform Social Security from a retirement and survivors’ benefit plan into a vehicle for much broader social welfare programs, including the program that was the longtime dream of liberals and labor and the longtime nightmare of many doctors: Social Security-financed federal health insurance. Seeing the House bill as the thin end of the wedge for socialized medicine, the doctors’ lobby, the immensely powerful American Medical Association (AMA), mobilized against it—confident of success: annoying though the House action may have been, there was still that firmer body that had been created to stand against radical innovations. And, thanks in part to its Majority Leader, the Senate had indeed stood firm in 1955. With Johnson declining to fight for the House bill, it had never even reached the Senate floor that year. By the time it came up in 1956, therefore, the AMA would have had “over a year to pressure fence-sitting senators—particularly those facing re-election” that year, one account noted. Johnson’s “Program with a Heart” had mentioned Social Security, but mainly only to support the lower age requirement for women. It did not even mention disability benefits.

Now, however, it was 1956, a presidential election year. Johnson decided to support the House bill because, as he told Democratic senators, “it clearly differentiated them from Republicans.” It was time to mend fences with labor, and this was the quickest way. “I happen to believe passionately in Social Security,” he wrote AFL-CIO president George Meany. “I went through the Depression and saw what it did to our older people. A country that is as great as ours does little enough for them.”

The floor debate on the measure went on for four days in July, and for four days the count on Johnson’s tally sheet seesawed back and forth. “The Administration really put on the heat to defeat that bill,” George Reedy says. “We’d wake up in the morning with about a ten-vote margin… and by two or three in the afternoon it would have dropped to about three, and then it would shrink to one.” For four days, Johnson held the Senate in session; he had, he wrote Meany on July 19, spent “about twelve hours a day on the Senate floor for the last four or five days.”

The vote was going to be very close, but Johnson had quietly obtained leverage over two senators on whom Eisenhower was counting. Conservative Republicans were of course opposed to enlarging the scope of Social Security, and the further to the right they were, the more adamant their opposition. Among the furthest right, however, was Molly Malone, and the Nevada senator also had a bill up for consideration in 1956: a guarantee of at least $69 million in federal purchases from Nevada’s tungsten mines which was a blatantly unjustified giveaway of the public’s money to an already wealthy special interest.

Little attention was being paid to the proposed guarantee, which was, after all, a rather minor item in the overall federal budget. Both the Eisenhower Administration and the Republican senatorial leadership opposed it, and most
of those senators aware of it, even conservatives, were planning to vote against it. Liberals, of course, opposed it on principle. Since the tungsten interests were a major force in Nevada politics, without passage of the bill Malone had little hope of re-election, but there seemed no way for him to get the necessary votes.

Lyndon Johnson told Malone he would get him the votes, as many votes as were needed—in return for just one vote: Malone’s vote in favor of the Social Security disability amendment. Malone agreed to the bargain. When the tungsten bill came up for a vote on June 18, only four Republicans voted for it—but so did twenty-eight Democrats, including liberals like Humphrey, Lehman, Kennedy, and Green who would normally have voted against it. Johnson had offered them no explanation for his request that they vote for Malone’s bill, simply asking them to “support the leadership” on the matter. “Few if any Democrats connected tungsten with the Social Security bill,” Evans and Novak were to report. “They were frankly puzzled,” but the amount involved was small, and “if the Leader needed help, they were willing to give it to him.” With little more than half the Senate voting, the bill passed by a 32–22 margin.

Then, on July 17, the Social Security bill came up for a vote. Malone, who had given no hint of his intentions to anyone but Johnson, was anxious not to “be importuned face to face with earnest arguments” by his own Leader, Know-land, who of course assumed his vote would be no. As Evans and Novak reported, “He stayed in the cloakroom, appearing only momentarily to call his ‘aye’ vote for the disability amendment, then fairly ran out of the Chamber—disappearing…before Knowland could get a crack at him.”

Malone’s vote made the count on Social Security 46 to 46. The proposal would fail on a tie; Johnson needed one more vote.

That vote belonged to Earle Clements. Of all the senators “loyal” to Lyndon Johnson in the way Lyndon Johnson wanted men “loyal,” none was more loyal—“dog loyal”—than the Kentucky Senator, who was willing to “do anything” for the Leader. Clements was well aware by now that his re-election campaign against Thruston Morton, Assistant Secretary of State, was, in George Smathers’ words, in “serious trouble.” He had not dared to oppose the doctors, whose opinions carried great weight with the unsophisticated voters in the rural Kentucky counties that were his stronghold, and had flatly promised the AMA that he would vote against the disability amendment. “Bob, I’m not with you on this bill,” he had told the UAW’s Oliver, labor’s chief representative on the issue. “I gave a commitment back home that I would vote against this bill.” When Oliver started to protest, Clements cut him off. “I can’t do it. I made a commitment.”

But the doctors’ support was not all Clements needed against the well-financed Morton. He needed cash—campaign financing on a scale far beyond what Kentucky would provide. Johnson had already provided some from Texas, and had promised Clements there would be more. Now, some weeks
before the vote on the disability amendment, he told Clements he could have as much as he needed—but he said he might need something, too: Clements’ vote in favor of the disability amendment. He didn’t think he would need his vote, Lyndon Johnson said; the amendment was probably going to be defeated overwhelmingly, he said. But if it turned out that he
did
need Clements’ vote, Johnson said, he wanted to know that he had it. Clements could vote against the amendment at first, Johnson said, but if the decision came down to one vote, Clements would have to change his vote on the amendment from “nay” to “aye.” Clements told Johnson that breaking his word to the doctors might cost him the election, and Johnson was aware of that; “Johnson fully recognized that this would subject Clements to the full wrath of the doctors’ lobby,” Evans and Novak were to write. But Johnson refused to be influenced by this consideration, and Clements had no choice; he had to have the cash. Reluctantly he agreed that if Johnson needed his vote, he would have it. And now, as the roll call proceeded on the Senate floor, Johnson ordered Clements to stay close to hand. The bald old pro “was seated right next to Johnson and sweat was coming off his head,” Bobby Baker recalls. “He was down there, just hoping and praying that” his vote would not be needed. But it was. Johnson told him to change it, and he changed it, and, as Baker says, “We won by Clements’ vote.”

Johnson provided what he had promised. He sent Booth Mooney to Clements’ campaign headquarters in Louisville to provide speechwriting and public relations expertise—and more pragmatic assistance, as well. “He arranged, through me on a small scale and through Bobby Baker, on a much larger scale, for financial assistance to be pumped into Kentucky,” Mooney was to write. “I remember Bobby Baker came down there one weekend with a suitcase just stuffed with currency for [the] Clements campaign. I think it was about sixty thousand bucks, which was a good deal then.” But the money couldn’t offset that “aye.” Clements lost to Morton. The margin was less than five thousand votes; “no doubt about it, his vote on the disability provision defeated him,” Evans and Novak wrote; the vote he cast in the Senate, to accommodate Johnson, “infuriated the doctors and resulted in their organized opposition to his reelection,” Mooney says.

Even to someone as imbued with the pragmatism of politics as was Bobby Baker, this episode was something special. “Senator Clements had made a commitment to Senator Johnson that although it would destroy him politically, which it did, if he broke his word, which he did, that he would vote with us,” Baker says. “Of all the votes that I’ve ever seen that was mean and cruel and defeated a man, it was that vote by Senator Clements to liberalize Social Security, contrary to his commitment to the doctors’ lobby in Kentucky.”
Senators mutually recognize the primary natural law of political survival.
Not this senator, not Lyndon Johnson.
Kennedy would finally say he was sorry they couldn’t agree, but he understood.
If understanding stood in the way of Lyndon Johnson’s aims, he wouldn’t understand, would refuse to understand. He got the
vote he needed from a senator, even though that vote cost the other senator, a senator “dog loyal” to him, his career.