Master of the Senate (46 page)

If the hour wasn’t too late, Lynda Bird and Lucy Baines would be awake. “He was always very nice to them and apparently at ease with them,” Mrs. Johnson says. “And they remember him with affection.” They called him “Uncle Dick” (their parents encouraged them to do so). But there are different types of uncles. “It was with just respect and affection, not intimacy,” Mrs. Johnson says. “He did not wish to have too strong a tie to [people], in my opinion. Ties of family, dear Lord, he had them strongly and lovingly, but he just didn’t go around becoming intimate with men, women or children.” (Speaking of the entire twenty-year relationship between Richard Russell and the Johnsons, during which Russell made scores of visits to the Johnson home, the interviewer from the Johnson Library asked, “Did he ever bring little token-type gifts? I was just wondering, over the years did he bring any kind of little remembrance to you or the children?” “No, not that I remember,” Mrs. Johnson replied.)

And after Spring arrived, occasionally, in the late afternoons, Lyndon Johnson would make another suggestion, one to which Russell always responded with uncharacteristic enthusiasm. Asked years later what drew the two men together, Russell mentioned first the sport he loved. “We both like baseball,” he explained. “Right after he came to the Senate, for some reason we started going to the night baseball games together.” Sometimes Lady Bird was invited to accompany them. “They would buy hot dogs … and sit and watch and talk about the prowess of this player or that player.” And, she noticed, at baseball games Russell was less “aloof…. He really liked that.” If no box seats were available, they would sit in the grandstand above the boxes—two tall men in double-breasted suits and fedoras, hot dogs in hands, sitting close together, talking companionably and laughing together.

Johnson’s sudden interest in baseball surprised people aware of his previous total lack of interest in any type of sport. “I doubt that Lyndon Johnson had been to a baseball game in his life until he heard that Dick Russell enjoyed the sport,” John Connally says. Connally, the only one of Johnson’s aides who dared to joke with him, would say, “‘Well, I see you’ve become a baseball fan. Do you know the pitcher from the catcher?’ He [Johnson] would smile and laugh, and say, ‘You know I’ve always loved baseball.’ I said, ‘No, I’ve never been aware of that.’” But Connally understood: “He knew Dick Russell liked baseball games, so he went to games with Russell.”

He began spending time with Russell not only after the Senate recessed for the day but before it convened. Although Johnson had generally eaten breakfast in bed ever since, with his wedding ceremony, he had acquired someone to bring it to him, he now began rising early and breakfasting in the senators’ private dining room—as it happened, at the same hour that Russell ate breakfast there. More and more frequently, the two senators had breakfast together, discussing Armed Services Committee business.

And, more and more, he was spending time with Russell on weekends. Not many senators worked on Saturdays, but Russell did, of course, and Johnson did, too. Years later, he would say:

This necessitated some juggling because once Sam Rayburn had been the older man having brunch and reading papers with Lyndon, but the juggling was made easier by the fact that there was more than one meal on Sundays. During his last years in the House, Johnson had begun inviting a number of New Dealers—most of them Rayburn’s friends, like Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas and Tommy Corcoran and Jim Rowe—to Thirtieth Place for Sunday dinner. At seven o’clock he would switch on the radio so that they could all snarl at Drew Pearson’s revelations about congressional activities. Rayburn enjoyed being one of that group, and had begun coming for dinner instead of brunch, so now Russell was invited for brunch, Rayburn for dinner. Frequent guests at Thirtieth Place noticed that, as Oltorf says, “You never, ever, saw them at Lyndon’s house together.” “Lyndon didn’t want his two daddies to see how he acted with the other one,” explains Jim Rowe.

Not all the time Johnson and Russell spent together on weekends was spent working, or reading the papers. For Russell found that this new senator from Texas shared—enthusiastically—some of his own interests. Those new enthusiasms that Johnson now revealed were as surprising to his assistants as his love for baseball. One, for example, was the War Between the States. All his life, Johnson had displayed a distaste for discussing history as intense as his antipathy for any subject that required reading: a feeling that went beyond lack of interest, and was disdain. That feeling had included the Civil War. Attempting
to convince Lady Bird to marry him, he had assured her that “I shall take you … when you are mine” to the Civil War battlefields “and all of those most interesting places”; during the fifteen years since their wedding, she had been trying—in vain—to persuade him to take her at least once. Now Johnson told Russell that he had heard that Russell had a great familiarity with the battlefields. He himself was fascinated with the tactics and the heroism that had been demonstrated on them, he said; the next time Russell visited one of them, he would certainly consider it an honor to be allowed to accompany him. And, on more than one occasion, he was.

Discussing in later years his early relationship with Russell, Johnson gave it a patina of generosity. “He was my mentor and I wanted to take care of him,” he said. But contemporary witnesses to that relationship “snickered behind their hands,” in the words of Bobby Baker, who says that Johnson was “pressing an ardent courtship on” Russell. “He flattered him outrageously.” Had Senator Russell been a woman, “He would have married him.” But Johnson’s courtship of older men had been the subject of snickers at San Marcos and in the House of Representatives, and those courtships had achieved their ends.

And, with Russell, too, as Baker also says, “there’s absolutely no doubt that his campaign worked.” When, years later, it was suggested to Russell that he and Johnson were dissimilar personalities, the Georgian replied, “Well, I suppose that’s the public impression. Johnson and I had a good many things in common…. We just hit it off personally together.” (The things they didn’t have in common, and that might have repelled Russell, Johnson’s iron self-control kept to a minimum when they were together; the inhaler, for example, was never in use in Russell’s presence.) Within a remarkably short time after he was sworn in, this freshman senator was spending far more time than any other senator with the Senate’s most powerful member.

B
UT
R
USSELL WASN’T
R
AYBURN.
Rayburn hungered, yearned, for love—for a wife, for children, in particular for a son. It wasn’t a son that Richard Russell wanted, it was a soldier—a soldier for the Cause. Johnson may have made Russell fond of him, but fondness alone would never have gotten Johnson what he wanted from Russell. As another southern senator, John Stennis of Mississippi, was to put it, Russell “wasn’t a bosom friend with anyone when it came to … serious matters of government and constitutional principles.” For Johnson to get what he wanted from Russell, he would have to prove to him that they had the same feelings on the issue that dominated Russell’s life.

So Johnson’s early efforts with Russell also included a speech. Delivered on Wednesday, March 9, 1949, it was his first speech on the Senate floor, and it was a major one: it took him an hour and twenty-five minutes, speaking in deliberate, grave tones, to read the thirty-five double-spaced typewritten pages that had been placed on the portable lectern that had been put on his desk. And
it was delivered as a centerpiece of a southern filibuster against Truman’s proposed civil rights legislation that would have given black Americans protection against lynching and against discrimination in employment, and that also would have made it easier for them to vote.

First, he defended the use of the filibuster. The strategy of civil rights advocates, he said, “calls for depriving one minority of its rights in order to extend rights to other minorities.” The minority that would be deprived, he explained, was the South.

“We of the South who speak here are accused of prejudice,” Lyndon Johnson said. “We are labeled in the folklore of American tradition as a prejudiced minority.” But, he said, “prejudice is not a minority affliction: prejudice is most wicked and most harmful as a majority ailment, directed against minority groups.” The present debate proved that, he said. “Prejudice, I think, has inflamed a majority outside the Senate against those of us who speak now, exaggerating the evil and intent of the filibuster. Until we are free of prejudice there will be a place in our system for the filibuster—for the filibuster is the last defense of reason, the sole defense of minorities who might be victimized by prejudice.” “Unlimited debate is a check on rash action,” he said, “an essential safeguard against executive authority”—“the keystone of all other freedoms.” And therefore cloture—this cloture which “we of the South” were fighting—is “the deadliest weapon in the arsenal of parliamentary procedures.” By using it, a majority can do as it wishes—“against this, a minority has no defense.”

Then he turned to the substance of the legislation. Racial prejudice was not the issue, Lyndon Johnson said. Prejudice, he said, is “evil,” and “perhaps no prejudice is so contagious or so dangerous as the unreasoning prejudice against men because of their birth, the color of their skin, or their ancestral background.” And, he said, he himself was not prejudiced. “For those who would keep any group in our Nation in bondage, I have no sympathy or tolerance.” But, he said, prejudice was not the reason that the South was fighting the civil rights bills.

He himself was opposed to the poll tax, Lyndon Johnson said, but the Constitution gave the states, not the federal government, the right to regulate elections, and Truman’s anti-poll tax proposals were therefore “wholly unconstitutional
and violate the rights of the States.” He himself, “like all other citizens, detest[ed] the shameful crime of lynching,” he said, “but we”—the southern senators—are trying to tell the other senators “that the method proposed in the civil rights legislation will not accomplish what they intend”; lynching is dying out; “I want to remind senators of the changing character of the South: an enlightened public already has rendered such a law virtually unnecessary even if it were not unwise in its scope.”

At times, Johnson’s rhetoric grew so impassioned that he went even further than the other southerners. He denounced the proposed FEPC, for example, in terms that seemed to suggest that it might lead to a return of something not far from slavery.

So harmful would the proposed FEPC legislation be (it “would necessitate a system of Federal police officers such as we have never before seen…. It would do everything but what its sponsors intend…. It would do nothing more than resurrect ghosts of another day to haunt us again. It would incite and inflame the passions and prejudices of a people to the extent that the chasm of our differences would be irreparably widened and deepened”) that, Johnson said, “I can only hope sincerely that the Senate will never be called upon to entertain seriously any such proposal again.” And he presented one ingenious new rationale—a “novel argument,” the
Washington Post
called it—to support the right to filibuster. In the recent presidential election, he said, Harry Truman had been far behind. “But there was no cloture rule on the man in the White House. There was no rule limiting him to an hour’s debate because two-thirds of the Nation thought they had heard from him all they could hear, or all they wanted to hear.” So Truman had kept talking. Because “Mr. Truman … dared to keep speaking, because Mr. Truman [did] not bow before the opinion of the majority … the people were listening and were changing their minds.”

In general, however, his arguments were calm, reasonable, moderate. They were based on the constitutional rights of states and senators—in particular, in the case of senators, on the right to unlimited debate—and on the contention that civil rights legislation was not needed because the South was solving its racial problems on its own, and that such legislation would only inflame passions.

In later years, some journalists and historians would make much of his statements in his maiden Senate speech that his opposition to civil rights legislation
was based not on racial prejudice but on constitutional grounds, that, as
Time
magazine put it, “He had no quarrel with the aims of civil rights advocates, only their methods.” He had indeed said this—but so had Richard Russell. Johnson’s arguments in his maiden speech closely mirrored the arguments Richard Russell had made familiar, the arguments Russell had persuaded southern senators to adopt, the arguments, reasonable-sounding but unyielding, that if accepted would leave southern black Americans as unprotected as they had always been against mob violence and intimidation, against discrimination in the workplace and in the general conditions of life, as unable as they had always been to vote as freely as white Americans.