Master of the Senate (205 page)

B
UT ALTHOUGH DURING THE FINAL THREE YEARS
of his Senate career, Lyndon Johnson’s power over the Senate was as great as ever, the legislative achievements of this last stage of his Senate career were in many ways no more than a reprise of his early years in the Senate.

This late period opened with a repeat of the theme—“preparedness”—that had been so prominent during the early period, more full-throated but in most aspects remarkably similar to its earlier form. On October 4, 1957, during the
Senate recess before the opening of the Senate’s 1958 session, Russia launched
Sputnik
(“traveling companion”), the first man-made satellite to orbit the earth. Americans were shocked, having been confident of their nation’s technological and scientific superiority over the Soviet Union. A new age—the Space Age—had been launched, and it wasn’t America that had launched it but America’s most feared enemy. Despite the Eisenhower Administration’s attempts to minimize the Soviet Union’s achievement (Sherman Adams said that America was not about to play the Russians in “an outer-space basketball game”), in the first excitement its implications seemed ominous. The Russians had beaten America in the race to develop a missile capable of placing a satellite in orbit; might they not also win in the race to develop a missile capable of delivering nuclear warheads? Lyndon Johnson was down on his ranch when the news came over the television late that afternoon. He was to recall that when, after dinner, he, Lady Bird, and their guests, Dale and Scooter Miller, took the evening walk on the dirt road next to the Pedernales, they peered up at the dark Hill Country sky, unsuccessfully “straining to catch a glimpse of that alien object” among the skyful of stars. He felt, he was to recall, “uneasy and apprehensive”—as did much of America that night and in the weeks to come. The country’s first reaction was an alarm that approached panic; in the excitement it seemed that the Administration had squandered America’s lead in missilery, and that the nation had been caught unprepared, as unprepared as it had been seven years earlier, when Communist troops in Korea had attacked without warning across the 38th parallel.

With the nation possibly in danger, Richard Russell was again not the bigot but the patriot—a patriot who, in love of his country, was pure of heart. On October 4, Russell was back in the big white frame house in Winder, and all that evening, telegrams and telephone calls arrived there from his colleagues, for, apprehensive over the news, they knew, as they had known during the MacArthur crisis, who was the best senator to handle the necessary investigation, the senator who was, moreover, chairman of the Senate committee—Armed Services—into whose jurisdiction the investigation fell. “This is so vital a matter that nothing short of your own guidance will give it the necessary prestige and force,” John Stennis said. Stuart Symington was particularly insistent, urging “complete hearings” before the full committee so that “the American people can learn the truth”; in such hearings, he, as former Secretary of the Air Force and a longtime critic of Eisenhower’s defense policies (and as a Democratic presidential candidate planning to base his campaign on the defense issue), envisioned himself playing a substantial role. But Russell, more and more aware of his loss of “energy,” felt there was someone better suited for the work than himself: the senator who had done such yeoman work during that earlier time of unpreparedness. Having returned from his walk to the Pedernales, Johnson was about to put in a call to Winder when the phone rang in his living room. It was a call
from
Winder, and Russell told Johnson that the investigation
should be carried out not by the full Armed Services Committee but by its Preparedness Subcommittee. Symington, he was to tell Johnson, “has a lot of information and would raise a lot of hell, but it would not be in the national interest.” Soon, in a time of possible peril to the Republic, the telephone calls were again going back and forth between the big frame house in sleepy Winder and the ranch in the isolated Hill Country. Russell’s tone was again avuncular. “You’re so thorough you’ve got to have the answers before you ask the questions,” he told Johnson. “Maybe this time you should ask the questions first.” To Stennis and Symington and any other senator who asked him to conduct the investigation, Russell said, as he was to put it, that he “had more or less turned this whole matter over to Senator Johnson.”

P
REPAREDNESS HAD BEEN THE ISSUE THAT HAD
, in 1950, catapulted Lyndon Johnson to Senate prominence, of course, and what he did now with that issue—and with that subcommittee (which, George Reedy was to say, “he had kept alive” during the intervening years “through the same instinct that causes people to store obsolete furniture in an attic rather than throw it in the trash”)—duplicated in many ways what he had done with the issue and the subcommittee in 1950.

There was the same instant creation of an extremely able staff from outside the Senate world. Johnson’s first choice for general counsel, in fact, was the subcommittee’s earlier general counsel, Donald Cook. But Cook, now president of American Electric Power and determined never to work for Lyndon Johnson again, declined, and Johnson persuaded the man who had engineered Cook’s move to American Electric, the New York attorney Edwin Weisl Sr., to accept the job in his place, and Weisl brought with him the brightest of the young lawyers at his big New York law firm, Cyrus R. Vance (who quickly caught Johnson’s eye, would be boosted by him up through government ranks, and, during Johnson’s presidency, would become Secretary of the Army), as well as Edwin Weisl Jr., a young attorney. Scientific expertise of the same quality came with the recruitment for the subcommittee’s staff of scientists from Harvard and Rice Institute. These lawyers and scientists were added to the nucleus of the subcommittee’s staff, headed by Daniel McGillicuddy, that was already in place, since Johnson had kept that nucleus intact over the years. Reedy was informally seconded to the subcommittee to be, again, its publicity director. There were the same assurances to a President—now not Harry Truman but Dwight Eisenhower—that the subcommittee would not attempt to lay blame on the Administration; after one Johnson visit to the Oval Office, Eisenhower would tell Ann Whitman that Johnson had “said all the right things. I think today he is being honest”—the same eloquent assurances of nonpartisan-ship to Senate Republicans, particularly to Styles Bridges, who was still the subcommittee’s ranking Republican member; there would be “no ‘guilty party’ in this inquiry except Joe Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev,” Johnson said; the
material being assembled by the committee’s staff was so “deeply disturbing” that even “the most hardened ward-heeler would forget politics if he knew the facts.” He therefore pledged not to embarrass the “one man who can give the orders that will produce the missiles. That man is the President of the United States.” “We very much appreciate the way you are approaching this,” Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy replied. “… If through your efforts it is kept out of partisan politics, it will be for the good of the public and we want to work with you.” To Republicans, he held up Symington as a spectre, the way he had held up Joe McCarthy to Democrats in 1950. “If he did not initiate it [an inquiry], it would be done by Symington, and that would be much worse,” he told John Foster Dulles. There was the same journalistic praise over the non-partisanship. The investigation “will serve a useful purpose,”
Time’s
editors were told in a memo from the magazine’s Washington bureau. “… It is not, repeat not, being conceived as a witch hunt. Johnson knows that a good investigation is the only kind that will satisfy anyone, and in the end bring credit to everyone…. Here, as downtown, there is a sense of urgency, of consideration of the national interest.” There was the same understanding that nonpartisan-ship was, in this instance, the best politics, for the facts that would undoubtedly be brought out could hardly reflect other than unfavorably on the Administration. As a memo to Johnson from Reedy put it: “This may be one of those moments in history when good politics and statesmanship are as close to each other as a hand in a glove.”

There was the same emphasis on publicity, the same squeezing out of every possible drop of that mother’s milk of politics. “Johnson’s running things … hit the extreme this week,” John Steele was to report to his editors. “He was running the photographers and they were, for once, not objecting. He’d usher them [to closed committee sessions] for pictures, then usher them out and turn his attention to newsmen. Speaking so fast that no one could take a word-by-word account, he would rip through a briefing on a committee session, pant that he was ten minutes late for a luncheon speech he had to make. ‘The statements will be up in a minute anyway,’ burst out of the room to give the television interviewers time for ‘just three’ questions, then flaring up when a fourth was asked—‘I told you, just three.’”

There was the same cultivation of the press, the same leaking of news to the most influential newsmen, the same long background sessions with columnists, a cultivation that extended into evenings, when he would invite them home to dinner, or weekends, when especially favored newsmen would be invited down to Huntlands, or even to Texas, with the most favored newsmen of all, Bill White and Stewart Alsop and Rowland Evans, coming to the ranch. (White, the most favored newsman of them all, secured the prize invitation: a visit to the ranch for Christmas.)

And there was the same skill in the obtaining of publicity, the same sure touch for public relations: for the right witnesses, the nation’s most renowned nuclear and rocket scientists, like Edward Teller, Vannevar Bush, and Wernher
von Braun, and the nation’s most bemedaled generals and admirals of the nuclear age—Curtis LeMay, Hyman Rickover, James Gavin—called in the right order: the scientists first—“To elevate the hearings into the realm of space and away from interservice battles in the Pentagon,” Reedy explains—and, first of all the scientists, the one whose reputation as “the father of the hydrogen bomb” assured maximum press interest. Teller didn’t disappoint: in Reedy’s words, he “painted a verbal picture of a universe in which mastery of outer space meant mastery of the world. The message he sent was clear. The Soviet Union had taken the first step into the heavens and unless we hurried to catch up, the later steps would find us under Communist domination.” Then came the generals, to paint a disturbing picture of how an overly economy-conscious Administration had allowed its emphasis on a balanced budget to interfere with the nation’s security.

During the Korean War, the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee had been a source of vivid, apt, headline-making phrases. One phrase that Reedy now tried to suggest to Johnson, in fact, would have repeated a key word from the subcommittee’s earlier heyday: Reedy suggested that Johnson say that
Sputnik
presented the American people with a challenge, a challenge that would require “a call to action instead of a summons to a siesta.” Johnson rejected the suggestion out of hand: why would a great phrasemaker need to repeat himself? New phrases evolved in his press relations, press conferences, and letters to constituents. Some linked this moment of unpreparedness to another—one worse even than Korea.
Sputnik
was “a disaster … comparable to Pearl Harbor,” Lyndon Johnson said. The Space Age is “an even greater challenge than Pearl Harbor,” he said on another. Pledging nonpartisanship, he said, “There were no Republicans or Democrats in this country the day after Pearl Harbor.” Some evoked—not all that subtly—the speeches of a man whose speeches he wanted to imitate. By pulling together, Americans could make the Space Age “our finest hour,” he said. (To Texans he likened
Sputnik
not to Pearl Harbor but to the Alamo. Texans had lost that battle, he said, but had won the war against Mexico: “History does not reward the people who win the battles, but the people who win the war.”)

His very demeanor made newsmen feel, as they had felt in 1950, that the nation was in trouble, that there was not a moment to lose, that news of the subcommittee was
big
news. A memo from Rowe reminded Johnson of the necessity of creating “a sense of urgency to counteract the complacency of the administration,” and it would be hard to imagine a more superfluous piece of advice. Yet Johnson did not, in fact, seem to feel all that much urgency himself. News of
Sputnik
had come on October 4, and Russell had in the next day or so turned over the investigation to Johnson, but Johnson did not come to Washington until October 16, and he returned to Texas two days later—and, except for a day he spent sightseeing in Monterrey, Mexico, he stayed in Texas until, on November 2, the Russians launched a second, much larger, satellite that carried a live dog (and was therefore named
“Muttnik”);
only then, on November 3,
did he return to Washington for the subcommittee’s organizational meetings and a seven-and-a-half-hour briefing for himself, Russell, and Bridges at the Pentagon. He stayed in Washington for four days, and then went back to Texas for twelve days, returning to the capital on November 20 to prepare for the subcommittee’s hearings, so that during the more than six weeks following the launching of
Sputnik
, he was in Washington for six days. But during those six days—and when, in January, he returned to the capital full time—he put on quite a show. (A memo from Steele told his editors: “This was the pace Johnson was traveling at as he breakfasted one day at the Pentagon with McElroy, another day at the Pentagon with [Wilber] Brucker, as he whisked the Senate through its opening session…. Johnson was moving through days of seven hours of committee sessions, hours of planning future sessions with his staff, the long party conferences, innumerable confabs with fellow senators and other party officials, speeches … television films for a Texas network, innumerable telephone conversations with government officials, a mountain of mail—all with a lopping
[sic]
speed but with a deadly purpose. Johnson was working this week as though the orbiting of an American
Sputnik
was his own responsibility and that it should have been done yesterday. His speed, intensity, and energy was contagious. An Army Brigadier General grabbed a sheaf of news releases to hurry the distribution to reporters at a Johnson committee session….”) Leaving Capitol Hill in the evening after filing their stories for the next day’s papers, reporters would glance back at the darkened Capitol and see lights still blazing in that corner office on the third floor. “There seems to be a terrible sense of urgency about all this, doesn’t there?” one reporter said to another, as he snatched up his notepad and ran down the hall to cover still another Johnson press conference. Watching Lyndon Johnson hurry through the corridors, coat-tails flapping, journalists coined jokes about his intensity. “Light a match behind Lyndon and he’d orbit,” was one.