Master of the Senate (207 page)

Despite such statements, in 1958 as in 1950 the actual results of a much-publicized Lyndon Johnson “preparedness” investigation were virtually nonexistent. Johnson “made it clear that he was going through the motions” of introducing and supporting the bill “only to quiet the insistent demands of his staff,” Reedy says. The creation of a space agency was significant in its institutionalization of the drive to explore space, but its form in practice was little different from the form it would have taken had Johnson not held his preparedness investigation. It would not be until 1961, when President Kennedy put Vice President Johnson in charge of the space program, that Johnson became genuinely active in a field with which he would become prominently identified. (“In later years, when he was reaping the public-image benefits of NASA achievements, he persuaded himself that they had taken place because of
his
prodding of
his
colleagues and
his
staff,” Reedy would comment.)

T
HE SPACE INVESTIGATION’S
lack of accomplishment, and its other similarities to episodes in Lyndon Johnson’s early Senate career, was typical of the overall pattern of Lyndon Johnson’s last three years in the Senate. “The last two years of the congressional decade”—1959 and 1960—“can only be described as dreary,” Reedy was to write, and, with the exception of the space investigation, that adjective can be applied to the 1958 session as well.

There was, again, as in the Bricker Amendment battle of 1954, a fight against right-wing attempts to cripple another branch of the federal government, this time not the presidency but the Supreme Court. The South, of course, had been eager to punish the Court and limit its power ever since the
Brown
decision that year. In 1956 and ’57, in a series of civil liberties rulings, the Court overturned or narrowed anti-Communist or anti-subversive legislation passed by individual states and reaffirmed the supremacy of federal over
state law. The southern ranks were therefore swelled by the Jenners and Butlers and Curtises—by northern right-wingers of both parties. In August, 1958, shortly before adjournment, the conservatives had enough votes in both House and Senate to pass three anti-Court bills.

Having rolled through the House, the bills were reported favorably to the Senate by Jim Eastland’s Judiciary Committee. As ill-drafted as they were ill-considered—they would be called a “legal monstrosity”—they were the kind of bills that gave the Senate a bad name (they would, for example, force interstate business to comply with forty-eight different, and not infrequently conflicting, state laws). It was too much even for Russell, who also realized that passage of such legislation would be a severe blow to Lyndon Johnson’s efforts to woo liberal support for his presidential bid; Georgia’s senior senator had spoken for the bills publicly, of course, but behind the closed doors of the Policy Committee had not disagreed with Johnson’s decision to delay bringing them to the floor until August, when they could be buried in end-of-the-session confusion. Johnson had put Humphrey and Hennings in charge of counting votes, and when they assured him the bills would be defeated, he told the Policy Committee, “Well, I’m going to have to let them [conservatives] have their day on this stuff.”

When he called the Court-ripper bills up on Tuesday, August 19, and the first two were defeated, Humphrey’s count appeared correct. But when the third bill was brought up late Wednesday evening, with the Senate tired and querulous, the Court’s civil rights record suddenly was brought into a dialogue on the Senate floor, and in a moment all the old passions were aroused, angry exchanges broke out, positions hardened, and when the roll was called on a motion to table and thus kill the third bill, the motion lost, 39 to 46. A second vote lost, 40 to 47. Richard Russell saw what was coming. As the Senate floor erupted in shouting matches, he leaned forward and whispered to the man at the desk in front of him, “Lyndon, you’d better adjourn this place. They’re going to pass this goddam bill.” Jumping to his feet, Johnson said, “Mr. President, I move that the Senate adjourn,” but so infuriated were the conservatives by his action that, although adjournment was the Majority Leader’s prerogative, several senators insisted on a roll call on his motion. As it began, Lyndon Johnson stood up at his desk. There was a clipboard in his hand, and on it a long sheet of paper. When a vote was cast against him, the Majority Leader wrote down the name of the senator who had done so, making sure that what he was doing was obvious. This act of less than subtle intimidation had its desired effect: at the end of the vote, there were only eighteen names on the paper.

Walking over to Humphrey, who was shaking his head in bewilderment, Johnson let him know that he had failed—again—at vote-counting. “You boys screwed up,” he said. “I don’t know what you did, but you screwed up. You told me wrong.” Then he said, “If you want to beat this thing, there’s still a way.” Starting to explain the strategy that would have to be used, he suddenly realized
that there were reporters listening. “I don’t know these people,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.” He started to lead Humphrey to his office. As he was crossing the Senate Reception Room, he saw Anthony Lewis, the
New York Times
Supreme Court reporter, coming down the stairs. Grabbing Lewis’ arm, Johnson brought him along, and Reedy as well, and the four men settled down for a talk, the Majority Leader behind the big desk, the three men facing him. Every twenty minutes or so, a secretary would come in and hand Johnson a fresh Cutty Sark and soda, which he would gulp down.

They settled down, to be more precise, for a monologue. “In the course of two hours, Humphrey may have gotten out about three sentences,” recalls Lewis, who, familiar with Humphrey’s customary garrulousness, was astonished. As for himself and Reedy, “I don’t think we said a word.”

Lewis would never forget that monologue. An acute political observer, he understood its purpose. It was, he would say, “a display of his being on the right side of issues.” (McPherson would explain Johnson’s thinking: “What an opportunity: to defeat a bad bill, save the Court, and win the embarrassed thanks of Senate liberals! It was worth doing.”) But nonetheless the monologue was awesome: not only a step-by-step exegesis of the complicated parliamentary maneuvers that alone could stop the bill from passing, but an exposition of why it should be stopped, an exposition so passionate that from that day forward, Anthony Lewis would believe in Lyndon Johnson’s commitment to liberal causes. “Johnson always wanted to be seen by people like me as a defender of civil liberties,” he would say decades later. “On the other hand, I think he actually believed in it—at least that’s my opinion. It’s my opinion because of things like the passionate lecture I saw him give Hubert Humphrey that night.”

Lewis would remember with particular vividness one incident that occurred during the monologue while Johnson was explaining that he would need time to carry out his maneuvers, and that therefore Humphrey would have to filibuster to give him that time. And if the maneuvers failed, Johnson said, Humphrey would still have to filibuster—because if the maneuvers failed, a filibuster would be the only way to defeat the bill. Humphrey, who, of course, as Lewis knew, “had been fighting filibusters all his life,” was reluctant to agree to do that, and Johnson said he understood Humphrey’s feelings. But then Lyndon Johnson said, “Hubert, they’re really gonna lambaste you for filibustering because you’ve always been against the filibuster. But if they hit you on one cheek, Hubert, you gotta turn the other cheek.” And as Lyndon Johnson said that, he took one of his huge hands and slapped one of his own cheeks with the flat of that hand—slapped it hard. And then he took his other hand and slapped his other cheek—hard. “So hard!” Anthony Lewis would recall decades later. “He took his hand, which was a very large hand, and hit himself on the cheek—so
hard!
I thought, That must have
hurt!
And then he took the other hand…. I felt he believed in what he was saying. Definitely.”

As it turned out, a filibuster would not be necessary. When the Senate convened
the next day, Johnson put into motion the tactics he had outlined during the monologue: first, he had a motion introduced to return the bill to the Judiciary Committee, so that the vote would not be on the bill but only on the procedural motion, and therefore senators Johnson wanted to switch their vote “could,” as Mann says, “truthfully claim that they had voted not to kill the bill but only to return it to committee.” Then, using pressure and persuasion, he got enough senators to switch so that the vote on the motion was a tie, 40 to 40. And finally he got the forty-first vote, by persuading the GOP conservative Wallace Bennett of Utah to switch. An ardent supporter of Richard Nixon, Bennett very much wanted Nixon to be President. Johnson pointed out to him that a tie vote would have to be broken by Nixon, and no matter how Nixon voted, Johnson told Bennett, the vote would hurt Nixon’s chances to become President: he would have to antagonize either liberals or conservatives. The way to save Nixon from this dilemma, Johnson said, was to make sure the vote wasn’t a tie. So, as startled exclamations came from the gallery, Bennett voted aye—to send the anti-Court bill back to Judiciary, and death there.

D
URING THESE LAST THREE YEARS
, Lyndon Johnson would again, as in his early years, have to placate Herman Brown and the Texas right-wingers (which he did by steering to passage, in behind-the-scenes maneuvers, the harshly anti-labor Landrum-Griffin Act) and the great Senate bulls (he paid off a lot of debts to Clinton Anderson by cooperating in Anderson’s efforts to defeat President Eisenhower’s nomination of Lewis Strauss to be Secretary of Commerce, the first defeat of a presidential nominee for a Cabinet office since 1925). To try to placate liberals, he produced in each of the three years—1958, 1959, and 1960—a legislative package of progressive proposals that he said should be passed. The 1958 package had one fewer proposal than the thirteen-point Program with a Heart of 1956, but was otherwise quite similar—and the fate of all three packages was similar to that of the 1956 program, too: the few proposals that were passed had been watered down to inconsequentiality.

His interest in the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination made it impossible for him to avoid the civil rights issue, but his civil rights enthusiasm of 1957 had noticeably faded, possibly because, much as he needed liberal support to obtain the nomination, southern support was still the
sine qua non
, and in 1957 he had pushed southern senators, and Richard Russell, as far as they would go.

The net result of the 1959 and 1960 Senate civil rights battles was, at best, the smallest of steps forward—and it may even have been a step back. In 1959 (as in 1953, 1955, and 1957), Johnson first cut the ground out from under a liberal attempt to revise Rule 22 by engineering a compromise which, although technically a very modest weakening of that rule, might very well have proved in practice to strengthen it—John Stennis praised Johnson’s “matchless leadership”
in obtaining the compromise. Forced into introducing a civil rights bill of his own when both the liberals and the White House introduced their bills, he devised a measure so tame that Roy Wilkins called it a “sugar-coated pacifier.” And then he allowed even that bill to die within the Judiciary Committee.

In 1960, the southerners staged a filibuster—the filibuster they had forsworn in 1957—against another liberal attempt to pass a civil rights bill. Lining up on the side of the South, Johnson opposed a liberal attempt to impose cloture. The vote on cloture, after two months of southern speeches, was 42 for, 53 against, figures that may be the clearest indication as to whether cloture could have been imposed in 1957; liberals had taken the 38 votes they obtained in the 1957 Rule 22 fight as a hopeful sign that they were in sight of the two-thirds vote needed to change the rule and make cloture possible; now, two years later, a vote had been taken on the cloture issue itself, and not only had they not obtained the necessary two-thirds, they had not even obtained a majority. As Robert Mann was to write: “Gone was their argument that an outmoded cloture rule was preventing the Senate from voting.” The civil rights bill that eventually passed in 1960, with the tacit acquiescence of Russell and the South, was a bill that Johnson, working with Eisenhower’s new Attorney General, William P. Rogers, had weakened to the point of meaninglessness. Liberals could only be thankful that, as Joe Clark put it, Russell, “the southern generalissimo,” was a gracious victor who threw the liberals “a few crumbs.” When the bill passed, Clark approached Russell and said, “Dick, here is my sword. I hope you will give it back to me so that I can beat it into a plowshare for spring planting.”

T
HE STORY OF
L
YNDON
J
OHNSON’S CAMPAIGN
for his party’s 1960 presidential nomination, of his failure to win the nomination, and of his decision to accept second place on the ticket instead, will be told in the next volume of
The Years of Lyndon Johnson.
One aspect of the aftermath of the 1960 election, however, belongs in this volume, because it is part of the story of Lyndon Johnson and the Senate.

On November 8, 1960, Lyndon Johnson won election for both the vice presidency of the United States, on the Kennedy-Johnson ticket, and for a third term as Senator (he had had Texas law changed to allow him to run for both offices). When he won the vice presidency, he made arrangements to resign from the Senate, as he was required to do under federal law, as soon as it convened on January 3, 1961.

Johnson was sure he would still be a figure of power in Washington, no matter how powerless a job the vice presidency had been in the past. He would break the mold. “Power is where power goes,” he told journalists. Furthermore, although he was giving up his seat in the Senate, he did not plan to give up his power there. During the weeks between November 8 and January 3, he devised an unprecedented plan: to continue, although he would no longer be a senator, to exercise power over the Senate’s Democratic majority. Under his plan, he would do this not as Majority Leader but as Chairman of the Senate’s Democratic caucus.