Master of the Senate (31 page)

Jenkins felt he understood what Johnson meant by that, as did Horace Busby, to whom Jenkins repeated the words not long thereafter.

While Lyndon Johnson was not, as his two assistants knew, a reader of books, he was, they knew, a reader of men—a great reader of men. He had a genius for studying a man and learning his strengths and weaknesses and hopes and fears, his deepest strengths and weaknesses: what it was that the man wanted—not what he said he wanted but what he
really
wanted—and what it was that the man feared,
really
feared.

He tried to teach his young assistants to read men—“Watch their hands, watch their eyes,” he told them. “Read eyes. No matter what a man is saying to you, it’s not as important as what you can read in his eyes”—and to read between the lines: more interested in men’s weaknesses than in their strengths because it was weakness that could be exploited, he tried to teach his assistants how to learn a man’s weakness. “The most important thing a man has to tell you is what he’s not telling you,” he said. “The most important thing he has to say is what he’s trying not to say.” For that reason, he told them, it was important to keep the man talking; the longer he talked, the more likely he was to let slip a hint of that vulnerability he was so anxious to conceal. “That’s why he wouldn’t let a conversation end,” Busby explains. “If he saw the other fellow was trying not to say something, he wouldn’t let it [the conversation] end until he got it out of him.” And Lyndon Johnson himself read with a genius that couldn’t be taught, with a gift that was so instinctive that a close observer of his reading habits, Robert G. (Bobby) Baker, calls it a “sense”; “He seemed to
sense
each man’s individual price and the commodity he preferred as coin.” He read with a novelist’s sensitivity, with an insight that was unerring, with an ability, shocking in the depth of its penetration and perception, to look into a man’s heart and know his innermost worries and desires.

Such reading is a pursuit best carried out in private—Lyndon Johnson alone with a man, getting to know him one on one. And Johnson’s gift was not only for reading men but also for using what he read—for using what a man wanted, to get from him what
he
wanted, to sell the man on his point of view, or on himself. And this, too, as Jenkins and Busby knew—as indeed everyone who had spent much time with Lyndon Johnson knew—was a talent that operated
best in private. “Lyndon was the greatest salesman one on one who ever lived,” George R. Brown said of him, and in that sentence “one on one” was the operative phrase. The essence of his persuasiveness was his ability, once he had found out a man’s hopes and fears, his political philosophy and his personal prejudices, to persuade the man that he shared that philosophy and those prejudices—no matter what they happened to be. In words that are echoed by Busby and Jenkins, and by many others who had an opportunity to observe Lyndon Johnson at length, Brown was to say that “Johnson had the knack of always appealing to someone about someone [that person] didn’t like. If he was talking to Joe, and Joe didn’t like Jim, he’d say he didn’t like Jim, too—that was his leadership, that was his knack.” But such a technique worked, of course, only if Jim wasn’t around—and only if there was also no one around who might one day happen to mention to Jim what Johnson had said about him. It worked best if
no one
was around, if the conversation was strictly “one on one.” Moreover, since Johnson used the technique not only about personalities but also about philosophies—liberals thought he was a liberal, conservatives that he was a conservative—it worked best if there was no one present from the other side. He “operated best in small groups, the smaller the better,” Jenkins said.

For eleven years, however, Lyndon Johnson had been trapped in a body so large that he couldn’t work in small groups, much less one on one. Everything in the House of Representatives was done en masse, from the swearing-in by the Speaker at the opening of each Congress—where all 435 members, crowded together on the long benches in the House Chamber, stood up together, raised their hands and repeated the words of the oath in unison, as if they were a group of draftees being inducted into the Army—to committee meetings: each House committee was a substantial body in itself; on the House Armed Services Committee Johnson had been one of thirty-six members, so many that at meetings they had to sit on a long dais in two tiers. With its hundreds of members, its crowded, noisy corridors and cloakrooms, with its strict formal rules and leadership structure made necessary by its size, the House was an environment in which, as one observer put it, members “could be dealt with only in bodies and droves.”

The Senate was very different. With fewer than a hundred members, it was less than a quarter of the size of the House, a much more personal, more intimate, body, one in which, as a commentator puts it, “most interactions were face to face.” The great reader of men would have to read only a relatively small number of texts. Furthermore, because of the longer senatorial terms, those texts would not be constantly changing as they were in the House. They could be perused at length, pored over; studied and restudied. What text could, under such favorable circumstances, remain impenetrable to Lyndon Johnson’s eyes? He would have ample opportunity not only to read his men, but to make use of what he read—in ideal conditions. In subdivisions of the Senate, the
contrast with the House became even more dramatic. Most Senate committees had only thirteen members, so that a committee meeting was a small group of men sitting relaxed around a table. Each Senate committee had subcommittees to handle specific areas of the committee’s business, and most Senate subcommittees had only five, or perhaps seven, members; not a few had only three. A member of a three-man subcommittee needed to sell only one other senator to carry his point. And Lyndon Johnson was “the greatest salesman one on one who ever lived.”

And, Jenkins would say, Johnson appears to have felt all this—to have felt the implications of the Senate’s smallness for his particular talents—in that moment in the doorway of the Senate Chamber, in that moment when he stood staring out at those ninety-six individual desks. “From the first day on,” Jenkins says, and Jenkins explains that he means from that day when Johnson stood in the doorway, “from the first day on, he knew he could be effective there, make his influence felt. It
was
the right size—just the right size. It was
his
place. He was at his best with small groups, and he was one of only ninety-six senators. With only ninety-five others—he
knew
he could manage that.”

T
HE DIFFERENCE
—and the implications—must have been dramatized to Johnson even more vividly by the swearing-in ritual for the thirty-two newly elected or re-elected senators at the opening ceremonies of the Eighty-first Congress. He was in the fifth group of four senators to be sworn in, and it was a distinguished group. Behind Johnson as he walked down the aisle, escorted by old Tom Connally, Chairman of the mighty Foreign Relations Committee, was the young Tennessean, Estes Kefauver, his arm held by the old Tennessean McKellar, Chairman of Appropriations, and then Robert S. Kerr of Oklahoma, escorted by old Elmer Thomas of Oklahoma, Chairman of Agriculture, and South Carolinian Olin Johnston, escorted by the Charleston aristocrat Burnet Rhett Maybank, Chairman of Banking and Currency. They walked down the aisle slowly—McKellar hobbling on his cane, Thomas, his eyesight almost gone, shuffling, feeling for each of the four steps with his feet—but with dignity, and the face of Vandenberg above them as they approached was the face of “the Lion of the Senate” familiar from a score of magazine covers. All four of the just-elected senators were over six feet tall; they stood very straight as, their right hands raised, they took the oath with the older men beside them. And after they had answered, “I do,” a clerk pushed the Senate Register (“a well-bound book kept for that purpose”) toward them, and Lyndon Johnson signed, at nine minutes past noon, and went not to a crowded bench but to a desk, his own desk.

L
ATER
, he took the little subway beneath the Senate to the office he hadn’t wanted. And though Suite SOB 231 may have had only three rooms instead of
four, they were senatorial rooms—high-ceilinged, spacious. On one wall of his private office, adjacent to his private bathroom, was a delicate marble fireplace, the hearth flanked by two slender marble columns. Above the fireplace was a tall gilt-framed mirror. And behind his desk was a high, wide, arched window, recessed and framed in mahogany. It looked out over the green parks of the Capitol Plaza, and beyond the plaza was the long Mall, and the great pillar of the Washington Monument. Margaret Mayer of the
Austin American-Statesman
, who had known him for many years in Texas and who had covered the 1948 campaign, went to interview him there. Referring to the hard campaign—and perhaps, since Ms. Mayer was a perceptive reporter, to his hard life—she asked him if it had all been worth it to be seated at last in that office. Lyndon Johnson winked at her, and nodded—and grinned.

H
IS PATH IN THE
S
ENATE
was also made smoother by other gifts that he possessed—talents that he had been demonstrating all his life, and that he now demonstrated again, vividly, during his first year in the Senate.

One was an ability to transform his outward personality, his demeanor and mannerisms—not to change his nature, but to conceal it—an ability that had always been one of Lyndon Johnson’s most striking characteristics, as had a strength of will that enabled him to make a transformation remarkably thorough.

The most recent of these changes had occurred during the very election that had won him this Senate seat. The campaign’s first months, when he had been confident of success, had been filled with the familiar explosions at his subordinates: vicious tirades, laced with obscenities and with insults designed to find his target’s most vulnerable point, that made both women and men weep. He had refused to control himself—had seemingly found it impossible, so sudden and violent were the rages, to control himself—even in public, even in places where the tirades would be witnessed by the voters he was trying to court. Arriving at one Rotary Club meeting where he had expected to give only brief remarks, he was told that a longer talk would be desirable; wheeling on his hapless advance man, he screamed, as the club members gaped, “I thought it was just gonna be coffee, doughnuts and bullshit!” Armored against critical newspaper articles by his friendships, crucially important in Texas journalism, with publishers, he refused to control himself even in front of reporters, not only shocking them with his treatment of secretaries (unable to bear watching him shout “unbelievable” obscenities at the sweet-faced, soft-voiced Mary Rather, who was standing head bowed and crying in front of him, Felix Mc-Knight of the
Dallas News
suddenly found himself jumping in front of her, yelling “You can’t talk to her like that! Apologize to her!”), but giving them a taste of the treatment themselves (“C’mon,” he shouted to stubby Dave Cheavens of the Associated Press, who was sensitive about his weight, “Won’t those fat little legs of yours carry you any faster than that?”).

His treatment of people not connected with the campaign who were similarly unable to defend themselves—waiters and bellhops, desk clerks and cooks—was the same. Storming into a hotel kitchen, a towering figure holding a large steak in one hand and waving it in a cook’s face, he raged: “Who ever told you you were a cook? Didn’t you ever hear of cutting the fat off? I’ve never seen so much fat on a steak in my life.” And he seemed to feel he didn’t have to control himself; “Lyndon just seemed to think he was entitled to talk to people that way,” one reporter says.

But in the latter stages of the campaign—when he had suddenly realized, with only a month to go, that he was almost hopelessly behind and could not afford to antagonize voters—the tantrums ended, instantly and completely. Busby, who had been assigned to accompany him on the next trip, was dreading the experience (“I had learned one thing—when he got angry,
hide!”).
Now he watched in astonishment as Johnson greeted the first desk clerk he encountered with a gracious smile, and gracious words, saying, “You have a very fine hotel here. I stayed in it before and I’m looking forward to this visit.” He told the bellhop who carried his baggage to his room, “I’d like to shake hands with you if your hands weren’t so busy.” After the bellhop had put down the bags and had had the handshake, Busby started to give him a tip. “Son, he’s a cheap tipper; I don’t want him tipping you,” Johnson told the bellhop, giving him a five-dollar bill. And the next morning, Busby awoke to find Lyndon Johnson sitting beside his bed. He wasn’t there to give Buzz orders. He was holding something in his hands. “Here, Buzz,” he said, “I went down and got a coffee and doughnut for you.” And he didn’t simply hand the two items to Busby. He would hand the sleepy-eyed young man the coffee, wait until he had taken a sip, and take the coffee back—and only then would hand him the doughnut. After Buzz had taken a bite, Johnson would take the doughnut back, and then hand him the coffee again—sitting beside the bed holding one of the two items himself, so that his assistant wouldn’t have to hold two things at once. During that entire month, that “all or nothing” month, no matter how high the tension rose, Lyndon Johnson was, in Busby’s phrase, “a changed man.” He never lost control of himself—not once.

Now, after the campaign, safely in the Senate, he changed back—but only in some areas of his life.

He was the old Lyndon Johnson driving to work in the morning from his home, a two-story, white-painted brick colonial at 4921 Thirtieth Place in a quiet residential area in northwest Washington—driving down Connecticut Avenue with one hand on the wheel, the other frenziedly twisting the dial on the car’s radio back and forth from one station to another searching for news broadcasts, shouting obscenities at broadcasters who said something with which he didn’t agree. He was constantly sounding his horn to get other drivers out of his way—if they didn’t move aside quickly enough, he would lean out the window and curse them; passing them on their right, he would bang his big left hand down on the outside of his car door to startle them.