Master of the Senate (30 page)

“I was just as green as a gourd,” Woody would recall. The official he saw first at Inaugural headquarters was unable to satisfy his request, and sent him to see a woman whose name Woody caught as “Miss Masters.”

“I went in and poured out my story” to the lady, Woody said, and when she agreed to help, decided to do her a great favor in return: with the air of someone giving a thrill to a functionary who would be honored to dance with a senator,
he said, “I know Senator Johnson will be very grateful, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he wants to have a dance with you.”

When he related the story to Johnson, Johnson was puzzled as to the identity of “Miss Masters”—until the light dawned. “Her name wouldn’t be Mesta, would it?” he said. “You were talking to Perle Mesta!” His assistant had told Washington’s most famous hostess that he would, as a favor, have his boss give her a dance. “Well, that was how green we all were, without John there with his sophistication,” Woody says. Not long after this (and after Harlow and Rowe—and several others—had refused to fill Connally’s place), Johnson began telephoning Connally at Wirtz’s law firm, cajoling and pleading with him to return. “You got to come, John. You got to hire my staff. You got to help me. I’m going to be new. I need help, John.” And when the pleading and cajoling failed, the big hand tightened on the telephone and the voice became low and threatening—“Now, you listen to
me!
By God, you either come back and reorganize my staff, or find me someone who can!”—and then he slammed the receiver down so hard that the base shook. And a moment later, he picked the up receiver again—to telephone Connally’s new boss. And a few minutes later, Connally would recall, “Senator Wirtz called me in. He said, ‘John, I know you don’t want to go to Washington. I don’t blame you. But, you know, I just don’t really think we have any choice.’” Connally told Johnson, however, that, choice or not, he would stay for only a single Senate session, and his unhappiness in the job was so evident that, at the end of the session, Johnson allowed him to leave for fear he would infect the rest of the staff.

H
IS FIRST STEPS
along the Senate path showed how rocky it might be for him.

All Lyndon Johnson’s life he had been grabbing—for more than his share of boardinghouse food, for more than his share of radio advertising, for House committee seats to which he was not entitled. And now he tried to grab for the first two things he wanted in the Senate: committee seats and office space.

He made his moves fast. The three most desirable committees were Appropriations, Finance, and Foreign Relations, and luckily, or so Johnson thought, the senior senator from his own state, Tom Connally, was not only a power on two of them—chairman of Foreign Relations and ranking member of Finance—but was also, thanks to the Senate’s long Christmas recess, ready to hand. And hardly had Connally arrived back in his hometown of Marlin in early November when Johnson flew up to see him, accompanied by John Connally (no relation to the Senator). They were met at Waco, the nearest airport, by Frank C. (Posh) Oltorf, then a second-term member of the Texas Legislature, who drove them to Marlin and went up with them to Connally’s suite in the Falls Hotel, where the two younger men sat on a sofa as the old senator and the new one chatted.

“After a while,” Oltorf recalls, “Lyndon said he’d like to discuss committee assignments, and he’d like to be on Foreign Relations and of course he’d like to be on Finance.”

Senator Connally, Oltorf recalls, took out of his breast pocket a little book with the list of Senate committees, and pulled his glasses down on his nose to leaf through it. He took a long, leisurely puff on his big cigar. Then, looking at Johnson over his glasses, he said, “Well, now, Lyndon, let’s see. Oh, now, here’s the Agriculture Committee. You could get on that, and you could help the farmers. You’re for the farmers, ain’t you, Lyndon?”

Johnson said he was. “I thought I heard you say something about it during the campaign,” Senator Connally said. Connally’s “eyes were just twinkling,” Oltorf recalls, and he paused to savor the moment. “And you can get on the
Armed Services Committee,” Connally said, “and then you could help A&M [the Agricultural & Mechanical College of Texas, which depended on federal grants for military research and Officers Training Corps programs]. You’re for A&M, ain’t you, Lyndon?” Oltorf does not recall whether or not Johnson made any reply to this question. “By this time he was sitting there with his arms crossed; he never cracked a smile. Johnson didn’t like to get worked over.”

Connally looked at him again over his glasses. “And then, Lyndon, after you’ve been in the Senate for a while, then you can get on the Foreign Relations Committee or the Finance Committee, and render a
real
public service.”

Speed was of no more assistance on office space. Within days of his election, Johnson was telephoning Carl Hayden, whose Rules Committee assigned offices. Of course, he said, he understood that offices were generally allocated according to seniority, but he hoped that an exception could be made in his case, since under seniority he would be entitled only to a three-room office, not one of the more desirable four-room suites, and his circumstances were exceptional, since Texas was the largest state in area and sixth-largest in population, and he would need a large staff to serve his constituency. Hayden gave him a noncommittal reply on the phone, and then sent a letter, saying simply that as a result of retirement or defeat, six four-room suites were to be vacated, and they would be “tendered to the six senior senators now occupying three-room suites.”

These rebuffs only made Johnson intensify his efforts, using the lever which could move so much in Washington. Aware that both Hayden and former Majority Leader Alben Barkley, who was leaving the Senate to become Vice President but was still immensely popular on Capitol Hill, were old friends of Rayburn, he asked the Speaker to intercede with them, and Rayburn did. And Johnson had his own coterie of friends within the Truman Administration, most notably his fellow Texan, Attorney General Tom Clark, who assured him that he could persuade the President to “put in a good word with” Barkley, and he asked these friends to make some calls, and they did. He wrote more letters. Giving up on Foreign Relations and Finance (since without Connally’s support, appointment to either one would be highly unlikely), he switched his attention, writing to Appropriations Chairman Kenneth McKellar that “I want very much to … have you as my chairman,” and to Barkley and the influential Walter George that “Since Texas joined the Union in 1845, only
one
Texas Senator has served” on Appropriations, “and this was more than twenty-five years ago,” and that this inequity was all the more glaring because Texas was currently receiving more federal appropriations than all but three other states. And in mid-December, Johnson went up to Washington to make his mark on the Senate in person.

His first encounter was with a young Capitol policeman who was stationed outside the Senate Office Building entrance to ensure that no one but senators parked near that door—he was one of the young men who had been
told, about senators, “Whatever they want you to do, you do it.” There were no assigned parking spaces, but as could be expected the more junior senators left the three or four spaces nearest the entrance for their seniors.

Pulling around the corner from Massachusetts Avenue, Johnson drove his Cadillac onto Delaware and pulled into the parking space nearest the door. Since Johnson had not yet been given a District of Columbia license plate with a senatorially low number, the young policeman did not know he was a senator, and came up to the car to protest. Johnson simply ignored him, and went inside; the young man, having ascertained his identity, didn’t say anything when he returned. Arriving earlier than any other senator for the next few mornings, Johnson parked in the same space, but one day he found another car already in it. Although there were other empty spots along the curb immediately behind it, Johnson’s fury led the policeman to secure a “Reserved” stanchion and put it in that spot the next day to ensure that it would be available for Johnson. Nonetheless, not long thereafter there was again another car in that spot when Johnson pulled up. Telephoning the Capitol Police Chief, Olin Cavness, Johnson told him to “Get that goddamned car out of there!” Calling Johnson back a few minutes later, Cavness said that he had checked with the policeman, and the car belonged to a senior senator. Cavness evidently felt that that explanation would end the matter, but it didn’t. “Well,” Johnson said, “while I’m getting some more seniority, you put a cop there every morning to guard my space until I get there!” Cavness told the policeman to put not one but two “Reserved” signs in that space. That device worked because no one cared to inquire about the signs, and they would remain until Johnson’s car would turn onto Delaware, and the officer, who had been watching for him, would hastily roll them up out of the space so Johnson could park there.

But that was his only victory on the mid-December trip; he may have been able to win in a conflict with a young “policeman”; he had less luck with senators.

For two or three days he did what he had done during his days in the House, striding around the Senate Office Building corridors to various offices, bounding in the door with a big smile, saying, “Hi! I’m Lyndon Johnson from Texas, How’s everyone from Pennsylvania today?” saying it so winningly that he would draw smiles even from the traditionally dour Senate receptionists, asking, “Is the Senator in?” “Is he alone?” and, if the answers were affirmative, walking over to the door to the private office, knocking on it, opening it, and asking if he could come in and chat for a few minutes.

He got the chats—the invariably courteous Hayden, for example, “never refused to see anyone,” and of course he would never be too busy to see a friend of Mr. Sam’s—but the chats (and
pro forma
promises to “do everything I can to help”) were all he got. The levers Johnson had tried to use were levers outside the Senate, and the Senate reacted to their use as the Senate always reacted to outside pressures. Barkley brushed him off with a letter so cold that Rayburn,
to whom Johnson showed it, tried to console him by saying that “of course” it must have been “written and signed by one of his secretaries.” Walter George was courtesy itself at first as he let Johnson know that it was “inappropriate” for a new senator to try to bypass the seniority system, but when Johnson persisted in his arguments, he all but showed him out of his office. He tried writing Barkley again; this time the former Majority Leader
did
in fact let his secretary reply to “your letter with further reference to your desire to be assigned to Appropriations,” in a missive even colder than the first. After all the letters he had written and the phone calls he had made to try to force his way onto Foreign Relations or Finance or Appropriations, he was no closer to a place on these committees than if he had written no letters or made no phone calls at all. As for office space, Hayden told Johnson that while he had more seniority than four of the House members who had “come over” with him, and, of course, more than the eight newly elected senators who had no House service, he had less seniority than the eighty-three other senators, and he wouldn’t be assigned an office suite until all eighty-three had chosen theirs. It appeared to him, Hayden said, that the most desirable three-room suite available for Senator Johnson might be Number 231, which would be appropriate since it was the suite that had been occupied by his two predecessors from Texas, Senators Morris Sheppard and Pappy O’Daniel. Perturbed not only by 231’s size but by its location—next to a snack bar and, in the northwest corner of the building, inconveniently distant from the “subway” to the Capitol—and possibly misled by the softness of Hayden’s tone, Johnson may have pressed him too hard to alter this line of reasoning; Hayden finally ended the discussion with a remark which, for Hayden, was unusually sharp: “The trouble with you, Senator, is that you don’t have the seniority of a jackrabbit.” And not long thereafter another letter from Hayden arrived: “I am pleased to inform you that the three-room suite 231, Senate Office Building, now occupied by Senator O’Daniel, has been assigned to you for your office.” And when Johnson said he assumed that, in that case, he would also be assigned the extra little room in the basement—102-B—that O’Daniel had had the use of, Hayden replied that unfortunately Senator Forrest Donnell of Missouri had requested that extra room. Senator Donnell had more seniority than Senator Johnson. That room would be assigned to Senator Donnell. Lyndon Johnson’s trip got him nothing that he had gone to Washington to obtain.

U
NPRODUCTIVE THOUGH THAT TRIP
to Washington may have been, however, Lyndon Johnson did not return from it unhappy. For the Senate Office Building had not been the only place he had visited on that trip. He had also gone over to the Capitol—and had looked, for the first time as a senator, at the Senate Chamber.

Walter Jenkins, who was with him at the time—they had entered the Chamber by the side door near the Senate Reception Room, he would recall
years later—would never forget that moment. With the Senate not in session, only a single row of lights was turned on in the ceiling high above, and the Chamber was shadowy and dim, but those lights reflected off the polished tops of the ninety-six senators’ desks as the long arcs stretched away in the gloom.

Lyndon Johnson stood just inside the doorway, silently staring out over the Chamber, for what Jenkins would remember as “quite a long time.” And then he muttered something, speaking in such a low voice that Jenkins felt he was “speaking to himself.” And if Jenkins would not recall Lyndon Johnson’s exact words, he did recall the gist of what he said—that the Senate was “the right size.”