Master of the Senate (175 page)

Was Johnson, as Reedy puts it, “in private conversations, taking advantage
of a growing belief that he might be a presidential candidate”? When he told Eastland or Olin Johnston or Harry Byrd, “I’ve just got to give those bomb-throwers something to get them off my back,” did they understand him to be
really
saying that, as Reedy puts it, he “had to have some leeway to get national recognition”?—that if there was a no-holds-barred fight in the Senate, and he lined up on the side of the South, he would never get to be President?

When this argument was employed on a southern senator, implicit in it, of course, was the assumption that a Johnson presidency would be a desirable thing for the South.

Johnson—and Russell—were, in 1957, reassuring southern senators that this would indeed be the case. With the more senior southerners, those who had been working with Johnson and Russell for years and who understood the implications of the argument, it wasn’t necessary to spell them out or in some cases even to mention them. In 1957, however, there were three new southern senators, and to them things were made more explicit. Having won a special election in March, 1957, to replace Price Daniel, Texas liberal Ralph Yarborough would, on his arrival on Capitol Hill that month, pay the obligatory visit to Richard Russell about his committee assignments, and would be asked by Russell to sign the Southern Manifesto, which had been passed the year before. Yarborough declined, and tried to excuse himself by saying that his fellow Texan Johnson hadn’t signed. Russell, Yarborough recalls, replied that “he [Johnson] was running for President, and this [signing] would ruin him”—and that it was important that Johnson not be “ruined.” Thereafter, listening in the Democratic cloakroom and on the Senate floor to Johnson talk to the other southern senators, Yarborough understood the reason for Russell’s feelings. “He [Johnson] made them think he was with them, and that he’d be with them forever,” Yarborough says. The two other new members of the Southern Caucus, Herman Talmadge and Strom Thurmond, had both been sworn in on January 3, 1957—As soon as Talmadge arrived in Washington, the facts of Senate life were explained to him: thereafter he would support Johnson for the presidency, explaining his stand by saying, as a story in the
Atlanta Constitution
put it, that as President, “Johnson would be more favorable to the South’s position on States’ Rights, and therefore his choice … would be Johnson.” Thurmond, the former presidential candidate of Dixieland’s States Right Party and an ardent racist (after listening one day in 1957 to the South Carolinian deliver, in a dispassionate tone, a long, dogmatic discourse on the irremediable inferiority of the Negro race, Olin Johnston, ardent racist himself, was moved to comment: “Strom really
believes
that stuff!”), was astonished to find that Russell was not adamantly opposed to any civil rights bill at all. He felt he understood Russell’s reasoning. “I think Russell didn’t fight it [the bill] as hard as he ordinarily would have” if he hadn’t wanted Johnson to be President, Thurmond was to tell an interviewer. “He was trying to help Lyndon get elected President…”

What did this argument mean to the southern senators? What was Johnson saying to make them feel “he would be with them forever”? Did it mean
merely, as George Reedy says, that he would use the presidency as a means to heal century-old scars and make the South truly a part of the Union again, that he would “end the Civil War,” that he would be “a bridge” for the reconciliation between North and South? Certainly, some of Johnson’s aides believe this is the basic meaning. Harry McPherson was to write that “Johnson felt about the race question much as I did, namely that it obsessed the South and diverted it from attending to its economic and educational problems; that it produced among white southerners angry defensiveness and parochialism.” And most, if not all, Johnson biographers have believed it, too. “Johnson argued, and he probably believed, that the South was on the verge of new possibilities for rapid expansion,” but that those possibilities would not be exploited if the racial issue was not defused by civil rights legislation, Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote. And with some of the more tolerant, less racist southern senators such as Lister Hill or John Sparkman, that was probably what the argument meant. But did Johnson’s persuasion of other southern senators rest also on other grounds? Probably there is not one answer; almost certainly there were different emphases, depending on which senator he was talking to—arguments tailored to specific individuals by someone supremely gifted at telling each man what he wanted to hear. “We’re talking about twenty different individuals, you know,” Harry Dent says. But persuasion is in part a matter of tone, and the tone of the words and phrases that Lyndon Johnson was heard using to the southern senators—“the nigger bill,” “Negras,” “uppity”—was not that of a man interested primarily in healing wounds or building bridges or facilitating economic progress. What’s more, the Southern Caucus included not only southern moderates like Hill and Sparkman but southern racists like Byrd and Talmadge and Eastland and Olin Johnston to whom economic progress was not the predominant concern. And these racists were without exception among Johnson’s most enthusiastic supporters for the presidency. Johnson was to joke about the depth of Eastland’s racial beliefs, and about the Mississippian’s other obsession—Communist subversion—and Johnson’s aides and biographers repeat these jokes as if they are evidence of Johnson’s true feelings. Writing that “Johnson deplored East-land’s militant racism” as well as his Communist obsession, Booth Mooney quotes him as saying, “Jim Eastland could be standing right in the middle of the worst Mississippi flood ever known, and he’d say the niggers caused it, helped out by the Communists.” But until Johnson became President, Eastland did not deplore what he felt were Johnson’s beliefs on the issue. There was nothing about Johnson that Eastland deplored. Indeed, this archetypal racist constantly praised Lyndon Johnson in the most laudatory terms. “You have certainly made the best Majority Leader we have ever had,” he wrote him in 1956, adding, “I am leaving tomorrow for the Convention and will vote for you for President.” And he actively promoted him for the 1960 presidential nomination as well.

And Talmadge’s statement that the reason he was supporting Johnson was that “Johnson would be more favorable to the South’s position on States’
Rights” was not a statement about wound-healing or bridge-building, as became clear when the author, after ten years of trying to obtain an interview with Talmadge, was finally granted one, which took place on January 10, 2000, at Talmadge’s home on Lake Talmadge in Georgia’s Henry County (reached by driving south from Atlanta on Herman Talmadge Highway and turning off at the exit marked “Herman Talmadge Road”).

Asked about his relationship with Lyndon Johnson in the Senate, Talmadge said, “At first, for years, I liked him. He spent a lot of time cultivating me—hours and hours.” They would talk about “everything,” Talmadge said. “Girls, hunting.” And, Talmadge said, they would talk about civil rights, and the relationships between whites and Negroes. How did Lyndon Johnson view the relationship between whites and Negroes? “Master and servant,” Talmadge replied. Well, didn’t he have any sympathy for their situation? “None indicated,” Talmadge replied.

Talmadge said that during the 1950s, Johnson would assure the southerners that they could count on him to weaken a civil rights bill as much as possible, that he was on their side on civil rights, that he had to pretend that he wasn’t, to meet the Southern Caucus as infrequently as possible, but that he really was their ally. “He would tell us, I’m one of you, but I can help you more if I don’t meet with you.” And, Talmadge said, the southerners believed him, believed that while changes in the civil rights laws were inevitable, Johnson would keep them as minor as possible, that “he was with us in his heart.”

“I believed him,” Talmadge said, but “I changed my opinion.” When? “When he was President,” Talmadge said. How did you feel then? “Disappointed,” Talmadge said. “Angry.” There was a long pause, and then he added, “Sick.” When asked, How did you feel when he said,
“We
shall overcome?,” Talmadge repeated, “Sick.”

The author then asked, “Did you feel that Lyndon Johnson betrayed you?” There was a longer pause. It could not have been easy for a politician as wily as Herman Talmadge to admit he had been fooled so completely. “Yes,” he finally said.

Of all the top aides to the southerners, the one with the best view of Johnson’s arguments was probably Dent, because of the time he spent “keeping an eye on Johnson” in the Democratic cloakroom. Dent says, “LBJ’s whole gambit was, ‘You guys can put me in the White House,’ and that will give you more authority and power…. And that would keep the South where the South wanted to be, which was a certain amount of segregation, at least. He was telling them, If LBJ was in the White House, the South would not get everything it wanted, but it would be far better off than if a Hubert Humphrey was President.”

When Dent’s assessment was repeated to John A. Goldsmith, head of the United Press Senate staff in the 1950s, Goldsmith said, “I think it’s much more ambivalent [than what Dent said]. Whether he [Johnson] or Russell would have said it in words that blunt I doubt.” And, Goldsmith said, that argument was just
one of “a whole flock of the considerations” that southern senators were taking into account. “I think it was one of the things that the southerners would understand. I have no doubt that Russell conveyed something along these lines to the Southern Caucus.” And when Goldsmith was asked, “Was Lyndon Johnson, in 1957, making them believe that if he became President he would do as much as possible to protect segregation?” Goldsmith replied, “These guys would have taken that as a given.” What Lyndon Johnson was saying, or hinting, about racial segregation during his private conversations with the members of the Southern Caucus we don’t know; we only know the final outcome. Strom Thurmond was suspicious of, and unconvinced by, Johnson, but the other members of the Southern Caucus were not.

Most important, Richard Russell was not. As John Goldsmith has written, Russell’s motives “have been debated over the years…. Russell himself may not have known” in 1957 “how much his long-standing, reasoned opposition to all civil rights initiatives was being tempered by his hope that Johnson might succeed in national politics and even become a President attuned to the southern culture.” And, Goldsmith adds, “Those considerations were not at odds with one another….” Russell validated Johnson’s arguments by assuring the Southern Caucus that they were true, and he reminded its members of his grand design; it wasn’t necessary for Lyndon Johnson to hint to the southern senators that the South’s first priority should be to put him in the White House, because Russell did the hinting. These senators had been following where Russell led for many years now, and they would follow him still. At the end of one Southern Caucus in 1957, Harry Byrd summed up the feeling around the huge mahogany table by saying simply, “Dick, it’s up to you.” Inconceivable as it might seem that these men would allow a civil rights bill—even a very weak bill—to pass, they would allow one to pass if Russell told them to. That same January of 1957, a strange rumor began circulating on Capitol Hill. Clint Anderson was telling friends that Lyndon Johnson had told him that a civil rights bill was going to be passed in 1957—and that he, Lyndon Johnson, was going to support it. Anderson didn’t believe either part of that prediction, but it was being heard elsewhere, “
REPORT BEING CIRCULATED IN WASHINGTON THAT MAJORITY LEADER LYNDON JOHNSON HAS PROMISED THAT A CIVIL RIGHTS BILL WILL BE PASSED
,” Roy Wilkins wired to NAACP headquarters in New York. Then the rumor was put in print; the
Herald Tribune
reported that “The Senate’s Democratic leadership had reached an understanding to bring the civil rights issue to a head early in the present session…. The leadership is hopeful … that if it gets the matter to the Senate floor within the next two months any southern attempt to thwart the decision by ‘extended debate’ can be beaten down….” And there was an even stranger rumor: that among the senators to whom Johnson had told this were the southern senators. In mid-January, reports began to circulate that Russell had convened a secret meeting of the Southern Caucus, and that at that meeting Johnson had laid down a timetable for action on a civil rights bill. And then that timetable was in print: Johnson,
Newsweek
reported, had told southerners that “Floor debate will open in early Spring…. By the end of April, the bill will be passed.” Lyndon Johnson, who as President just a few years later would do so much to end the racial discrimination that was a keystone of the South’s way of life, who would do more to end racial discrimination than any other President of the twentieth century, was being given a crucial boost toward the presidency by the South’s own senators, fervent believers, most of them, in racial discrimination. And at least some of them were helping Johnson at least partly because they believed that while, if he were to become President, he might have no choice but to do something about racial discrimination, they could count on him to do as little as possible.

Whether or not Lyndon Johnson was already planning in 1957 to take giant steps toward racial justice if he ever became President, we do not know, and perhaps no one will ever know. But whether or not in 1957 he was misleading the southern senators deliberately, misled they certainly were. Did he intend to mislead them?—we don’t know. But if we take him at his word—his word that at Cotulla, “I swore then and there that if I ever had a chance to help those underprivileged kids I was going to do it”—then Lyndon Johnson was misleading the southern senators deliberately. To whatever extent Johnson in 1957 was already planning, at least in outline, the things he would do if he ever became President, he was planning to betray, and to betray on a very large scale, the men, some of them very clever men, who were, for years, not only his most loyal but his most important supporters. “Civil rights didn’t get accomplished by idealism but by rough stuff”—that was the lesson that Katharine Graham had taken away from her visit to Lyndon Johnson’s ranch. What Johnson was doing now with the Southern Caucus, in the service of both his great ambition and his great purpose, was “rough stuff” indeed.