Master of the Senate (162 page)

“This was the dirtiest trick Johnson ever played,” Joe Rauh would say forty years later. “It was just Johnson putting his foot on Douglas’ face.” “It was an effort to humiliate,” Frank McCulloch says. “That was its only purpose. A quick voice vote would have defeated it [the motion]. Douglas had made it knowing he was going to lose.”

The effort succeeded in its purpose. For a while, Douglas stood at his desk, and then he sat down, as, one by one, his colleagues, the men he had to work with every day, voted against him—almost every one of them. Even men he had thought he could count on did not stand by him in the face of Lyndon Johnson’s power. Wayne Morse did not stand by him, or Estes Kefauver, or Richard Neuberger, or Clifford Case, or Pat McNamara or Thomas Kuchel. “Even my friend and ally Humphrey voted ‘No,’” Douglas was to say. In the end, only five senators voted for his motion: two members of his own party, Herbert Lehman and Tom Hennings, and three Republicans: Langer, George Bender and Irving Ives. Seventy-six senators voted against him.

Years later, Paul Douglas would remember that after that 76–6 vote, “I tried to walk out of the Chamber with my head high.” Muriel Humphrey, who knew she had just seen a man crushed before her eyes, was standing outside the door; Douglas would never forget the “concerned look in her eyes.” He paused for a moment to kiss her cheek. Walking on, he came to the elevators, and stood there for a moment—the hero who had charged up a beach when he was too old to charge up a beach, the brilliant economist who had dared to rally economists behind the New Deal—stood there in a kind of daze. By this time, his young assistant Howard Shuman had come running after him, and after a moment, Douglas spoke to him, bitterness in his voice. “Push the button three times,” he said. “Let’s pretend I’m a senator.” When he reached his suite, he went into his inner office, shut the door behind him, and cried, cried “for the first time in years,” he was to recall—cried less for himself than for his cause, the great cause, and for the strategic mistakes he felt he had made in fighting for it. “How many senators really care about civil rights? I asked myself. How could we ever reverse the tide? And what an imperfect and erring instrument I was to fail in so crucial a moment.”

T
HE
S
ENATE HAD WON AGAIN.
The citadel of the South, the dam against which so many liberal tides had broken in vain, was still standing, as impenetrable as ever. And it was standing thanks in substantial part to its Majority Leader. For years, the South had had a formidable general in Richard Russell. In 1956, as in 1955 and 1954 and 1953, it had had another formidable general
in Lyndon Johnson. Lyndon “organized the Southern Democrats against civil rights this year so successfully that it was crushed,” Willis Robertson of Virginia wrote a friend.

Johnson’s maneuver had paid off not only for the South but for himself. As the
New York Times
reported: “With a series of parliamentary delaying tactics he blocked attempts by Northern liberal Democrats such as Paul H. Douglas of Illinois and Herbert H. Lehman of New York to bring up the bill. He thus retained the friendship of the Southern group, which is expected to give him the … convention influence that he desires.” As for the northern liberals, those who had followed the fight closely were infuriated with Johnson’s tactics. In a formal statement, ADA National Chairman Joseph Rauh said: “He has brought the Democratic Party to its lowest point in twenty-five years.” But thanks to Johnson’s legislative skills, there hadn’t been enough of a fight to capture public attention on a larger scale, so his relationship with the party’s liberals in general was no worse than it had been before. Despite the dangers inherent in the Southern Manifesto and H.R. 627, he had kept civil rights from damaging his chances for reaching the presidency.

A
NOTHER KEY PART
of his strategy for winning the Democratic presidential nomination was also in place: he was not only the chairman of the Texas delegation to the party’s national convention, but the state’s favorite-son candidate; its fifty-six votes at the convention would be his until he released them.

The ultimatum to Stevenson with which he had hoped to trap him—that Adlai prove his vote-getting ability by entering primaries—had backfired, however. Adlai had indeed entered the primaries—and had won almost all of them. As Democrats headed for Chicago on the weekend before the convention’s opening on Monday, August 13, various estimates gave him between 400 and 600 of the 6871/2 votes needed for nomination. Estes Kefauver had 202, and the third announced candidate, Governor Averell Harriman of New York, trailed far behind. Seven states besides Texas were supporting “favorite son” candidates—a switch of only one or two of the big delegations would give Stevenson victory, and two (Michigan and Ohio) were poised to switch; the
New York Times
reported that “The professional prognosis was that the last ballot might come early”; Stevenson himself was so confident that he was writing his acceptance speech.

One aspect of Lyndon Johnson’s strategy had been sound. The wisdom of his decision to pose as merely a favorite-son candidate to avoid mobilizing Democratic liberals against him had been vividly demonstrated by liberal alarm at every journalistic suggestion that he might become a serious contender. Despite the last-minute passage of the Social Security bill, liberal antipathy to Johnson was as strong as ever—stronger, in fact: 1956 had, after all, been the year of the natural gas fight and the exemption of highway workers from the David-Bacon Act, and new revelations about Johnson’s relationship with Brown & Root. Under a headline that was an echo from the turn of the century—“THE IRRESPONSIBILITY OF THE SENATE”—the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
ran a long article by the liberal journalist William V. Shannon filled
with phrases that recalled that gilded and corrupt age: under Johnson’s leadership, Shannon wrote, the Senate “has had a rising curve of power and a declining arc of moral prestige…. Several forces conspire to intensify the rigidity and unrepresentative character of the Senate. One is the increasingly important role of big money…. Political power must be purified.” Most of all, of course, 1956 had been the year of the civil rights bill, whose denouement had also been directed by Johnson. Civil rights, ADA National Chairman Joseph Rauh said, would be the “great issue” of the 1956 campaign. On the eve of the convention, the ADA issued a report on Johnson’s leadership. His constant cloakroom dealing, it said, had turned the Senate into “a legislative brokerage house.” Asked in a subsequent press conference if the liberal organization might consider supporting Johnson, Rauh replied by saying that it would consider supporting any of three candidates—the three other candidates. Even the admiring Stewart Alsop had to conclude that “Johnson is no ardent advocate of Negro equality, and as a Southerner he would probably alienate a big slice of the Negro vote, increasingly vital in the Northern industrial states. For such reasons, the Northern liberals could be expected to combine to veto a Johnson nomination…. Most political realists doubt that Johnson could ever get a convention majority.” Johnson’s strategy and persuasiveness had had an unintended drawback. So convincingly had he told southern leaders he was not a candidate that some of them had believed him, and had consequently turned to Stevenson as the least liberal of the three announced candidates—and now had become rather comfortable with Adlai, not only because they liked him personally but because, despite occasional lapses into support of the
Brown
decision, he had in general moved, as his biographer John Bartlow Martin puts it, “toward gradualism in desegregation.”

Rayburn, loyal as ever despite his desire not to split the party with a divisive convention fight, said firmly that he was supporting Johnson, but he tried to let the younger man of whom he was so fond know that, while he would certainly get the nomination in 1960, there was no realistic possibility of his getting it this year. At a luncheon in the Capitol for business leaders, attended by several senators and representatives, including Johnson, the old man sat dourly silent as the others speculated on the possibility of a convention deadlock that might enable a dark-horse candidate to win. But when one Pennsylvania industrialist opined that “if the convention deadlocks,” there might be a “stampede” to a dark horse like Stuart Symington, Rayburn finally spoke. “I’ll agree with you on a stampede,” he said. “But it won’t be to Symington.” The room fell silent. Finally the businessman asked, “Why not?” “Because there will be no deadlock,” Rayburn said. “Stevenson will be nominated on the first ballot, or by the second ballot at the most.” The favorite sons will start to jump on the Stevenson bandwagon, Rayburn said. “He won’t need many shifts … to put him over very quickly. Once that rush starts, no one can stop him.” Lyndon Johnson was sitting beside Rayburn. All during lunch, he had been voluble,
telling one anecdote after another, but after Rayburn spoke, Johnson said not a word. Later, when the “dramatic incident,” as Robert Allen put it, was “reverberating through inner party circles,” reporters asked the Speaker if he was saying that he had swung to Stevenson. “I’ve never said I’m for anybody but Lyndon Johnson, dammit,” he replied, and he never wavered in that stand. But Johnson knew he had heard Rayburn’s assessment of the convention—that Stevenson had already won.

And for a while Lyndon Johnson appeared to recognize this reality, and to accept it. The rooms at the Chicago Hilton had been paid for, the special phone lines—and phone booth—installed, the banners ordered; the trappings of a candidacy went forward, and his staff began, in twos and threes, to head for Chicago. Behind the brave front, however, Johnson had all but stopped running. For him to line up the South solidly behind him despite its growing acceptance of Stevenson, he would need Russell, but Russell was reluctant to attend the convention. “Nineteen fifty-two had left a deep scar with him; in 1956—well, he didn’t want to participate,” John Connally recalls. And when Russell told Johnson that he would not attend—“I’m going somewhere [a fishing camp near Winder] where there are no telephones”—Johnson made no attempt to dissuade him. Seeing the spectre of the “humiliation” he always dreaded if he were to be portrayed as an active candidate and then didn’t win—“He didn’t want to run and suffer a defeat for personal ego reasons,” Connally says—it was important to him that his denials be believed. Over and over again, he told reporters he wasn’t a “serious” candidate but only a favorite son; that he had never sought, and would not seek, any delegates outside Texas. To convince skeptical journalists, he even reminded them of his heart attack—which he never would have done had he still thought there was an opportunity for victory—and did so, this man who could teach it either way, as convincingly as he had, for months, been saying that he felt no effects from the attack at all; at one press conference, reporters kept asking if there was any possibility that he would accept the nomination, and he ended the discussion by saying, “Eisenhower may have forgotten he had a heart attack. I have not. Mine still hurts.” Another reporter who began a long one-on-one interview with Johnson skeptical of his denials was convinced by the end of the conversation that “he is sincere and would not accept the nomination if it were offered to him…. He talked freely and without any of those guarded utterances which betray a man talking for effect rather than in truth.” With southern politicians he was just as convincing; it was particularly important to him that he not be portrayed as a “sectional”—southern—candidate, since such a candidacy would look as quixotic as Richard Russell’s had in 1952. More than one key southern politician urged him to run, and offered him his state’s votes. Harry Byrd had pleaded with him to declare his candidacy; all he had to do was say yes, the Virginian had said, and he would never have to think about Virginia again: its delegates would be solid for him until the end. Johnson thanked them but declined
the offers. His actions were those of a man who understood that he had no chance to win.

A
ND THEN
, suddenly, he thought he did.

It had been taken for granted that former President Truman would support Adlai Stevenson for the Democratic nomination in 1956. It was Truman, after all, who in 1952 had suggested to a “flabbergasted” first-term Governor largely unknown outside Illinois that he run for President and that he, Truman, “could get him nominated”—and who had, indeed, sent word to Democratic kingpins shortly after his arrival in Chicago in 1952 to release their delegates to Stevenson.

But things had changed in the intervening four years. For one thing, as Richard Rovere was to write, there was the wholly understandable human reaction. “It has happened time after time in American politics that former Presidents … have resented and fought against their rightful heirs.” But in addition, Stevenson, his friend George Ball would say, “was affronted by the indifferent morality and untidiness of the Truman Administration,” and after the 1952 campaign, showed, in Rovere’s words, “his eagerness to have it thoroughly understood that he had never been part of it.” He particularly did not want to be associated with Truman’s characterization of the Eisenhower Administration as “this bunch of racketeers,” and, as Rovere puts it, he simply “does not share Truman’s view of Truman as the greatest living expert on everything.” Stevenson gave vent to these views only in private, “never in public,” but of course “they got back to Mr. Truman, who took it hard.” Several months before the 1956 convention, the ex-President growled to a friend, “Why, if Stevenson is ever elected, he won’t let us inside the White House.”

When Truman’s train pulled into Chicago’s grimy old Dearborn Street Station at 8 a.m., Friday, August 10, the former President, as jaunty as ever, found a mob of delegates, reporters, and cameramen pushing and shoving to get a glimpse of him, and then grabbed the headlines when he pointedly did not endorse Stevenson but instead said he would announce his choice the next day. All day Friday, Truman held meetings with party leaders in his suite at the Blackstone Hotel, giving them broad hints (“I am not a bandwagon fellow”; “I’m going to stir up a little trouble tomorrow”), and by that evening, while journalists were still writing that the ex-President was keeping the candidates in a state of suspense, party insiders knew—and Lyndon Johnson still down on his ranch was told—that the next day the former President would endorse Harriman.