Master of the Senate (169 page)

(A glowing profile of Johnson that appeared in the
Washington Post
shortly after the Grahams’ return to Washington showed how well Phil had grasped the point:

The article was written by Robert Albright, but Johnson knew whom to thank for it. “I know how much I owe to you,” he wrote Phil, “and any time I can donate an arm, a leg or anything else to the Graham cause, you can count on it.”)

On his home ground, Lyndon Johnson was, in Mrs. Graham’s words, “sort of overwhelming—he sort of smothered you with hospitality and with charm.” There was the invariable insistence that the guest shoot a deer—whether the guest wanted to or not. “Phil—who loved hunting birds, in part because they are hard to shoot, which meant he mostly missed them, couldn’t stand the idea of killing a deer,” Mrs. Graham recalls. When they came upon a small group of deer standing on a hill and Johnson told Phil to shoot, “he couldn’t bear the thought,” and, with the gun on his shoulder, hesitated until the deer turned away from them and started to leave the scene. Then, when Johnson shouted, “Shoot, Phil!” Graham said, “I can’t shoot him in the ass, Lyndon,” as the deer bounded away. Spotting another group of deer a few minutes later, Johnson stopped the car again, and again ordered Graham to shoot. “I can’t, Lyndon,” Graham said this time, “He looks like Little Beagle Johnson.” But, Mrs. Graham says, “instead of laughing” and accepting Graham’s reluctance, Johnson grew angry. “Phil realized he had no choice but to comply, and he shot his deer”; later, Phil and Lyndon laughed over the episode.

And there was the time spent cementing his bonds with the visitor. After dinner, “he and Phil would sit for hours and drink” and talk in the big living room with the frontier-size fireplace. As she and Lady Bird sat mostly silent, Mrs. Graham says, “Lyndon slouched down, Phil bending his elbow—political talk, political gossip, people talk.” (One after-dinner session didn’t add much cement to the bonds between Lyndon and Mrs. Graham. “Lyndon started complaining” about journalists, she says. This was par for the course for any politician, of course, but “in the middle of his diatribe,” Johnson made a remark that she felt went beyond the usual limits, saying: “You can buy any one of them with a bottle of whiskey.” “I was much too reticent to enter into the conversation or to object,” Mrs. Graham says, “but when Phil and I went upstairs I denounced Lyndon for saying what he said, and Phil for letting it go unchallenged.” “How could you sit there and listen to that?” she demanded. “How could you?”)

Johnson’s parting gifts did not improve the situation. Phil’s present was a ten-gallon Stetson, hers a charm bracelet with charms attached, including one in the shape of Texas, and another of a microphone. “When it hit my hand, it was so heavy I realized it was gold,” she recalls, and, in the context of Johnson’s remark about the press being purchasable, “it rankled.” She asked her husband, “Should I give it back—it’s just what he was talking about,” but he said not to—that they would return a gift of equal value, which they did, sending Johnson a water purifier that he had mentioned needing.

In addition to the customary rituals, during the Grahams’ visit there was an added note, a concentration not only on the publisher but on the publisher’s wife—to make another point that Johnson wanted liberals to understand: that it was not through idealism and speeches that civil rights would be attained. Philip Graham had for some years been trying to persuade Johnson to “take the lead” on civil rights. “Phil always wanted Johnson to be President,” Joe Rauh was to say. “Maybe that [was] because of … his [Graham’s] feeling for the South. [Graham had grown up in Florida.] That he wanted a southerner [to be President]…. He wants to make Johnson President. Well, you got to clean him up on civil rights.” Graham had been “pushing Lyndon on its importance from the beginning of their relationship,” Mrs. Graham was to say. Since the publisher was himself pragmatic and realistic, “Phil and Lyndon were completely comfortable with each other” on the issue, but, as she puts it, “Lyndon regarded me quite differently [from Phil]”—as one of the flag-waving “red-hots” who couldn’t understand that their methods were not improving the chances for social justice. And during this visit, “looking straight at me, separating me from him and Phil,” he kept making that argument, prefacing each supporting point by saying, “You northern liberals …” hammering “points home, as though trying to explain to me how the world really worked.”

Illustrating the message was an anecdote, which Mrs. Graham would always think of as “The Story of How Civil Rights Came to Johnson City.”
“You liberals,” Lyndon Johnson said. “You think that you fight for civil rights in the North. Well, I want to tell you how civil rights came to Johnson City.” And he launched into a story about an incident he said had occurred during his boyhood, when a road was being built through the town, and the road gang included “some Negras” (which, according to Mrs. Graham’s oral history, was how Johnson pronounced the word).

“At that time,” Lyndon Johnson said, “niggers weren’t allowed to stay in Johnson City” after sundown, but the road was coming “nearer and nearer,” and obviously the foreman of the road gang was planning to have the gang sleep in town.

“The town bully found” the foreman in the barbershop, and said, “Get them niggers out of town,” Johnson said. And then he said, the foreman “got off the chair, took the towel off his neck, put it aside, and they wrestled up and down Main Street.” And finally, Johnson said, the foreman “got on top” and took the bully’s head in both hands and started banging it against the pavement, asking, with each bang, “Can I keep my niggers? Can I keep my niggers? Can I keep my niggers”—until finally the bully agreed that he could.

“And that’s how civil rights came to Johnson City,” Lyndon Johnson concluded.

The story was of course told with the customary Johnson vividness. “It was rather a marvelous example—I think he’s the best storyteller in the world,” Mrs. Graham would recall years later, and, showing Johnson pounding an imaginary head down with both hands and shouting, “Can I keep my niggers? Can I keep my niggers?” she would break into a fond smile of reminiscence. And it had a very clear theme: that, in Mrs. Graham’s words, “that was how civil rights could be accomplished, not by idealism but by rough stuff”; that he, not the speechmaking northern red-hots, knew how to get things accomplished for civil rights. He was, Mrs. Graham recalls, saying that “I was an idealist, this theoretical northern liberal,” and he, Lyndon Johnson, “was a practical fellow,” and that it was through “practical” means—“rough stuff”—that “things got accomplished.”

With Schlesinger and the Grahams, this cultivation bore fruit. Shortly after their return from Washington, the Grahams told Jim Rowe about their visit to the ranch, and Rowe informed Johnson, “You certainly did a remarkable selling job there. They wasted at least an hour of my time telling me what a remarkable man you are.” Schlesinger’s impression of Johnson was recorded in his memoir to himself: “I found him both more attractive, more subtle and more formidable than I expected.” And, the historian said, “One got the sense of a man … with a nostalgic identification of himself as a liberal and a desire, other things being equal, to be on the liberal side.”

In other liberal fields, however, the seeds Johnson tried to plant after the 1956 elections fell on stonier ground. When Schlesinger told Joe Rauh of Johnson’s contention “that he was not running for the presidency or for the Senate
in 1960,” Rauh just laughed heartily. He “said anybody who will believe that will believe anything.” Among most liberals, in fact, no planting was even possible; their antipathy toward the Majority Leader was far too strong to permit informal or social attempts at conversion to the Johnson cause. And overtures he had others make on his behalf to liberal journalists like Doris Fleeson or Thomas Stokes, to liberal labor leaders like Walter Reuther or Alex Rose, or to members of the New Deal-Fair Deal pantheon like Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Truman were notably unsuccessful. He could not, during these months just before the opening of the 1957 Congress, effect any significant change at all in prevailing liberal opinion about him, in part because to so many liberals the memory of earlier battles was still fresh (“What did he think—that we would forget what he did to Leland Olds?” says Alexander Radin of the American Public Power Association. “Well, I never would, I can tell you that”), but largely because of his more recent record on civil rights. Stokes described the “anguish and guilt” of Democratic northern leaders who “are scouring themselves for compromising with the southern wing of the party and permitting the southern leaders to shove civil rights legislation under the rug at the last session of Congress and, at the national convention, to put over a mealy-mouthed civil rights plank without even making a real fight against it.” To other northern leaders, it was the recent cruelty to Paul Douglas that left the bad taste in their mouths when they thought of Lyndon Johnson.

The first weeks after the election brought, as well, fresh signs that in 1957 the liberals were going to take the field again for social justice, and that in their view Lyndon Johnson was still very much the enemy. Declaring that “the Democrats are digging their own grave by inaction in the field of civil rights,” Hubert Humphrey announced that on the first day of the new session, he and five other liberal senators would jointly introduce a sixteen-point “Democratic Declaration,” a liberal legislative program highlighted by strong civil rights laws—and would also attempt to remove the main barrier to the program’s enactment by introducing a motion to repeal Rule 22. Fleeson predicted that Johnson would, as usual, oppose the motion because “Johnson is a southerner, deeply obligated for support and counsel to southerners.” Charles Diggs, the African-American congressman, said that if Johnson was unable to support the motion, he should resign as the party’s Senate Leader.

Schlesinger’s growing admiration for the Texan was most decidedly not shared by most of the historian’s fellow members of the ADA’s executive committee, who, while not going as far as Diggs in demanding Johnson’s outright resignation, passed a resolution asking him to recuse himself during the Rule 22 fight, and not “use his post to betray the Democratic platform.” ADA Chairman Rauh “regards the pivotal position of Lyndon Johnson as a major block to effective liberal legislation,” Irwin Ross reported in the
New York Post.
Before the sixteen-point Declaration had even been announced, Rauh said, its six senatorial sponsors, afraid of Johnson’s power, had watered it down so that it would
“be harder for Lyndon to complain.” Another coalition of liberal leaders, the National Committee for an Effective Congress, accused Johnson of wanting “to be the Democratic spokesman nationally—in a position tandem to that of the President,” and said that because of his views on civil rights he must not be allowed to have that role. One after another, leading liberals made the same point, none more eloquently than the New Yorker who in the Senate may have been almost an object of ridicule but who outside it, among liberals everywhere, was an object of reverence. In a valedictory interview he gave over the Christmas holidays of 1956, just before his retirement, Herbert Lehman told Irwin Ross that while he might be leaving the Senate, he was not leaving the fight—and that no matter how hopeless the fight seemed, it should be continued. “A fight is worthwhile even if you know you’re going to lose it,” he told Ross. “It’s the only way to crystallize attitudes, educate people. And in the end I’ve seen many hopeless causes win out.” Looking back at the 1920s, when it had seemed impossible to win social advances that were now an accepted part of American life, he said: “We were called radicals and dreamers, but we were willing to wage seemingly hopeless fights. In the same way, we will get complete school desegregation, and Negroes will get the right to vote in the South. These things are coming—quicker than people realize.”

Liberal dislike and distrust of Lyndon Johnson was not confined to idealists and intellectuals. At one Democratic conference, a speaker referred to the “great victory” the party had achieved in retaining control of Congress despite Eisenhower’s huge plurality. The next speaker was that most practical of politicians, Colonel Jacob M. Arvey of Illinois, who commented caustically: “All this talk about a great victory is fine. I think we scored a great victory. I also think we got hit by a truck.” And, the Colonel said, “if 1958 is to be a Democratic year, it may be necessary to get a few new pass catchers on the Democratic team.” An attempt was made to institutionalize the opposition. In a secret meeting near the end of November, Arvey and other seasoned professionals—liberal professionals—on the Democratic executive committee instructed National Chairman Paul Butler to formalize the challenge to the southern leadership in Congress by establishing a high-level “Democratic Advisory Council” to shape a party legislative program that would not coincide with, but challenge Eisenhower’s policies. Galbraith, one of its members, said that the purpose of the twenty-member council was to take “some of the Texas image off the party.” In the
New York Times
, Russell Baker said bluntly that “It is a challenge to Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas.”

Butler publicly invited Johnson and Rayburn to join the council—a tactical mistake on two counts. First, by including Rayburn, he infuriated scores of Democratic congressmen who took the formation of an “Advisory Council” as a personal insult to their beloved “Mr. Sam,” particularly because of his accomplishments in liberal causes. “I don’t think any outside committee can undertake to advise Rayburn,” said veteran Ohio congressman Michael Kirwan. “As
Interstate Commerce Committee Chairman, as Majority Leader, and as Speaker, he pushed through the House all the important laws of the New Deal and Fair Deal. Certainly I can’t advise him. Who are they to advise him?” Second, by issuing a public invitation—without ascertaining beforehand whether it would be accepted—Butler allowed Johnson and Rayburn to decline publicly (and to make sure that other congressional invitees followed suit) in a statement that emphasized the council’s powerlessness by saying that a legislative program could only be promulgated by legislative leaders. “The first blood has gone to the congressional leadership of the party,” Gould Lincoln wrote. But with liberal icons like Lehman, Stevenson, Harry Truman and Eleanor Roosevelt as members, the Democratic Advisory Council could hardly be ignored. “Our fight has just started,” Butler said, and his efforts were supported by liberal editorial writers, columnists, and cartoonists. They made it clear that the civil rights issue was not going to go away. Supporting the move to repeal Rule 22, the
New York Times
said that “Though similar efforts have failed before this … the interests of Democratic government require that it be made again, and again, and again, until at least it succeeds as it eventually will…. It is a travesty to wrap the mantle of ‘free speech’ around the filibuster. That is exactly what the filibuster is not.” And in words and pictures they also made clear what side of the issue they felt Lyndon Johnson was on. In the months since the Democratic convention the label he had worn there had been pasted on him more firmly than ever. Even his supporter Arthur Krock had to note that the criticism of his tactics at the convention had now been revived: “that he used his influence, with calamitous consequences, to induce the convention to ‘appease’ the South in the party platform plank on civil rights.” Conceding that the senatorial signers of the “Democratic Declaration” had little power within the Senate,
The Nation
told its readers that that was not the point. “The Declaration,” it said, “is an important document” because it is “the first major move in a campaign to reconstruct and rehabilitate the Democratic Party,” and because it was also “a vote of ‘no confidence’ in the leadership of Senator Johnson.” A Herblock cartoon on November 28 showed a “Senate Liberal” handing Johnson a paper labeled “Proposals for Cloture and Civil Rights Legislation.” In one hand, Johnson is holding a wastepaper basket in which he is going to deposit the paper; his other hand, hidden behind his back, is holding an outsize gavel with which he is preparing to knock the liberal on the head.