Master of the Senate (179 page)

And that was how Lyndon Johnson reacted now.

What crystallized his feelings is not known, but it occurred on the ranch. Not long after he had returned to Washington from that three-week Easter vacation
on the Pedernales—even while he was still making public statements that “let everybody know that he was against” a civil rights bill—a difference in his attitude was becoming apparent to those who saw him behind closed doors. Richard Boiling, who had come to hate Johnson, in part because he had felt he was “really quite negative on civil rights,” and who had watched Johnson “grow very quiet” during the early months of 1957 as he had grown very quiet during 1956 “whenever civil rights came up” behind the closed doors of Sam Rayburn’s late-afternoon Board of Education, now began to see “a change in Lyndon Johnson,” a change that began almost imperceptibly, but that, afternoon by afternoon, became more marked.

That was on the House side of the Capitol. On the Senate side there were indications, too. “Something changed,” Gerald Siegel would say. And after it did, “he never had any hesitation at all.”

F
OR
L
YNDON
J
OHNSON
, determination had to include belief.

He understood that all his life—as is shown by the fact that as a boy “he was always repeating” the salesman’s remark that “You’ve got to believe in what you’re selling,” and that decades later, in his retirement, he would say: “What convinces is conviction. You simply
have
to believe in the argument you are advancing: if you don’t, you’re as good as dead. The other person will sense that something isn’t there …” And Lyndon Johnson could
make
himself believe in an argument even if he had never believed in it before, even if he had believed in an opposite argument—and even if the argument did not accord with the facts. A devotee like Joseph Califano would write that Johnson “would quickly come to believe what he was saying even if it was clearly not true.”

When Lyndon Johnson came to believe in something, moreover, he came to believe in it totally, with absolute conviction, regardless of previous beliefs, or of the facts in the matter, came to believe in it so absolutely that, George Reedy says, “I believe that he acted out of pure motives regardless of their origins. He had a remarkable capacity to convince himself that he held the principles he should hold at any given time, and there was something charming about the air of injured innocence with which he would treat anyone who brought forth evidence that he had held other views in the past. It was not an act…. He had a fantastic capacity to persuade himself that the ‘truth’ which was convenient for the present was
the truth
and anything that conflicted with it was the prevarication of enemies. He literally willed what was in his mind to become reality.” Califano, listening to Johnson tell a story which Califano knew was not true, and which Califano knew that Johnson himself knew, or at least had known at one time, was not true, writes of “the authentic increase in the President’s conviction each time he recited it.” The phrase used to describe the process by longtime Texas associates like Ed Clark—the “revving up” or the “working up”—was homier, but it was the same process: “He could start talking about something and convince himself it was right, and get all worked up,
all worked up and emotional, and work all day and all night, and sacrifice, and say, ‘Follow me for the cause!’—‘Let’s do this because it’s
right!
’” And, Clark says, Johnson would believe it
was
right—no matter what he had believed before.

To pass civil rights legislation, to convince senators of the need for such legislation, Lyndon Johnson therefore had to believe—to believe totally, with absolute conviction—that there was an urgent need for that legislation. He had to know that it was
right
to fight for it. And knowing it coldly, intellectually, was not enough. He had to feel it—to feel it wholeheartedly, to feel what the color of their skin meant to those Americans whose skin was darker than his. To fight wholeheartedly for justice for those people, he had to
feel
the injustice that had been visited upon them, and that was still being visited upon them. He had to make himself feel their fears and their doubts, had to make himself feel all the injustices and indignities that America had inflicted on them, from the lash and the leg irons all the way down through the decades, the generations, to the word “Colored” above the drinking fountains.

So now began the “working up.”

Sometimes, the working up was couched in terms of pragmatism. In the homes of longtime conservative, somewhat racist, friends, the phone would ring now, often long after midnight, and on the phone would be Lyndon Johnson. “I can’t sleep,” he would say, and he would begin talking—to convince himself as well as them. One of the friends was his protégé Joe M. Kilgore. When Johnson told the young Texas congressman one night in 1957 that a civil rights bill should be passed, Kilgore resisted the suggestion. “The problem with you is that you don’t understand that the world is trying to turn to the left,” Lyndon Johnson said vehemently. “You can either get out in front and try to give some guidance, or you can continue to fight upstream, and be overwhelmed or be miserable.” The congressman had known Lyndon Johnson for a long time, had “traveled the Valley with him” in 1941 and 1948, and, he says, he understood the purpose of the phone call, and of Johnson’s words: “He was talking like he was giving me advice, but it was really himself he was giving the advice to. He wasn’t talking to convince me; he was talking to convince himself.”

And sometimes the working up was couched in very different terms.

At dinner parties in the homes of liberal friends, Lyndon Johnson began to tell again the stories with which, during his early years in Washington, he had won Alice Glass’ heart and the hearts of the young New Dealers close to FDR, but which he had been telling less frequently in the years since he had come to the Senate. In the summer of 1957, there was a small dinner party in the Georgetown house of Daz and Richard Harkness, and one of the eight people at the table was Frank Church’s wife, Bethine. “I remember at this dinner party, Johnson talking about teaching the Mexican-American kids in Cotulla, and his frustration that they had no books,” Bethine Church recalls. “I remember it as one of the most passionate evenings I’ve ever spent.”

He had a new story, too—about a talk he had had some years before, probably about 1951, with Gene Williams, the husband of the Johnsons’ maid, Helen Williams.

At the end of each congressional session, the Johnsons’ car was driven back to Austin from Washington by Gene and Helen and the Johnsons’ third African-American employee, their cook, Zephyr Wright, while the Johnsons flew back in the Brown & Root plane. Then, when Congress reconvened in January, Ms. Wright and the Williamses drove the car back to Washington. During Johnson’s talk with Gene Williams, Johnson asked him to take along the Johnsons’ dog, Little Beagle Johnson.

Williams hesitated, and then asked, “Senator, do we have to take Beagle?” Johnson asked, “Tell me what’s the matter. Why don’t you want to take Beagle? What aren’t you telling me?” When Williams still hesitated, Johnson said, “Gene, I want an answer.”

“Well, Senator,” Gene finally replied, “it’s tough enough to get all the way from Washington to Texas. We drive for hours and hours. We get hungry. But there’s no place on the road we can stop and go in and eat. We drive some more. It gets pretty hot. We want to wash up. But the only bathroom we’re allowed in is usually miles off the main highway. We keep goin’ ‘til night comes—’ til we get so tired we can’t stay awake anymore. We’re ready to pull in. But it takes another hour or so to find a place to sleep. You see, what I’m saying is that a colored man’s got enough trouble getting across the South on his own, without having a dog along.”

In the memoirs he published during his retirement, Lyndon Johnson was to write that that discussion had been an awakening for him, because he realized “there was absolutely nothing I could say to Gene Williams, or to any black man, or to myself”; that while “of course” he had known “that such discrimination existed throughout the South … somehow we had deluded ourselves into believing that black people around us were happy and satisfied; into thinking that the bad and ugly things were going on somewhere else, happening to other people,” that the day of the discussion had been “the day I first realized the sad truth: that to the extent Negroes were imprisoned, so was I.” If Johnson actually experienced such an epiphany on that day, however, it was an experience he kept to himself, for quite some time. His three employees were excused from taking the dog—Little Beagle continued to fly back and forth to Texas with the Johnsons—but not from taking the car, year after year, twice a year, on that three-day drive across thirteen hundred miles of the South. In 1953, Zephyr simply refused to keep making the trip (“I just wouldn’t go,” she recalls), but Gene and Helen Williams went on making it every year. And while many associates and acquaintances of Lyndon Johnson interviewed by the author recall Johnson recounting the story of his talk with Gene Williams, if he told the story for some years after the conversation occurred, he didn’t tell it often. When the author asked these people when Johnson began telling it,
none of them could give a precise answer. But, asked to make an estimate, every one of them who was willing to do so replied with some version of the phrase: “About the time he began fighting for civil rights.”

Now, however, in 1957, the story became a staple of his conversation at Georgetown dinner tables—and in other venues as well. He told it over and over—with his customary vividness. Harry McPherson, who overheard the story in 1963, when Johnson was telling it to John Stennis, describes the occasion, in doing so showing Johnson’s storytelling gift at work.

“You know, John,” Lyndon Johnson said, “the other day
[sic]
a sad thing happened. My cook, Zephyr Wright, who has been working for me for many years—she’s a college graduate—and her husband drove my official car from Washington down to Texas, the Cadillac limousine of the Vice President of the United States. They drove through your state and when they got hungry, they stopped at grocery stores on the edge of town in colored areas and bought Vienna sausages and beans and ate them with a plastic spoon. And when they had to go to the bathroom, they would stop, pull off on a side road, and Zephyr Wright, the cook of the Vice President of the United States, would squat in the road to pee. And you know, John, that’s just bad. That’s wrong.”

And as Lyndon Johnson told it, he felt it.

He may not have been moved by the story—at least not moved enough to tell it, and not moved enough to excuse his three employees from the car-transport assignment—during the intervening years since he had first heard it, but he was certainly moved by it in 1957. He not only had the gift of “reading” men and women, of seeing into their hearts, he also had the gift of putting himself in their place, of not just seeing what they felt but of feeling what they felt, almost as if what had happened to them had happened to him, too. He may not have understood the feelings of Ms. Wright and the Williamses before, but he understood—had made himself understand, had
willed
himself to understand—those feelings now. The hurt Gene Williams felt when a hotel clerk turned him away wasn’t only Gene Williams’ hurt now; it was Lyndon Johnson’s, too. He felt the hurt, and he felt for the people who had been hurt—felt the injustice and humiliation that had been visited upon them—grew angry for them, with an anger that was passionate and real.
John, that’s just bad. That’s wrong.
And when Stennis tried to say, “Well, Lyndon, I’m sure there are nice places where your cook and …,” Johnson, according to McPherson, “just said, ‘Uh-huh, Uh-huh,’ and just sort of looked away vacantly and said, ‘Well, thank you, John,’” and after the Mississippi senator walked away, “Johnson turned around to me and winked,” as if to say, “What can you expect?” and McPherson felt that “That was straight from real feelings. That made him angry … the simple indignity of discrimination was deep in Johnson.” “The indignities” that Ms. Wright and the Williamses had suffered “made him angry, sometimes just about to tears,” Califano says. Lyndon Johnson had, at last, put himself in their place as much
as any white person could do so—which meant he had, as much as any white person could do so, put himself in the place of all the people of America on whom indignities and injustice were visited because their skins were not white. The empathy and compassion for black Americans had always been there inside Lyndon Johnson, but it had always been held in check. Now it was unleashed. Lyndon Johnson believed in the need for a civil rights bill now, believed with that intensity which, in other crises in his career, had led him to take the “all or nothing” gamble, to “shove in his whole stack,” to determine, no matter how long the odds, to
win.
When Lyndon Johnson was this “worked up,” when he was as determined as he was upon returning to Washington from the ranch after Easter—beside that determination all other considerations paled. A civil rights bill had to be passed. And a civil rights bill was
going
to be passed.

And shortly after his return to Washington, he said so—to the surprise of a friendly journalist, Tris Coffin, with whom he was having an off-the-record breakfast in the Senate Dining Room. “A civil rights bill is going to be passed by this Congress,” Lyndon Johnson said. His tone was thoughtful, but suddenly he raised his big hand and smacked it down on his thigh to punctuate the words. “I’d like to see a bill the country can live with and not get torn apart,” he said. “I don’t know the answer, but I’m going to do a lot of listening.”

“D
URING THE LATE SPRING
and early summer months of 1957,” Booth Mooney would write, Lyndon Johnson began to go “tirelessly from faction to faction,” working “quietly, almost in secret,” refraining “from making any public statement of his intentions.” He was asking, probing, buttonholing senators and staff, lobbyists and lawyers, in the corridors of the Capitol and the SOB, sitting down beside a senator on one of the cloakroom couches and chatting in a relaxed manner, and then, suddenly, his eyes narrowing at some words that had caught his attention (words that had been spoken or words that hadn’t been spoken), taking the senator’s arm and asking him to step outside into the corridor for a moment for a more private conversation, dropping in on senators in their inner offices, closing the door behind him—listening, listening to what they were saying, and listening to what they
weren’t
saying. And out of the buttonholing, and the asking, and the listening, Lyndon Johnson was beginning to form a strategy. For as he listened, he heard something.