Master of the Senate (64 page)

“I have to hang up. I’m crying now,” she said.

Writing years later about the hearings, Senator Paul Douglas was to say that “Olds was crushed by the experience, and I do not think that he and his family ever recovered from the blow.” The experience, Joseph Rauh says, “killed Olds. I don’t know how many years he lived after that, but he never really recovered himself.”

O
NE OTHER INCIDENT
connected with the hearings perhaps deserves mention. It occurred during a brief recess. Leland Olds was standing in the corridor outside the hearing room, talking to his wife and Melwood Van Scoyoc, when Lyndon Johnson emerged and started to walk by. Then he stopped, came up behind Olds, and put his hand on his shoulder.

“Lee,” he said, “I hope you understand there’s nothing personal in this. We’re still friends, aren’t we? It’s only politics, you know.”

L
ELAND
O
LDS DIED
, after suffering a heart attack, on Sunday, August 5, 1960. There were tributes in the Senate—a few tributes: by 1960, few senators remembered Leland Olds. Senator James Murray of Montana said, “A great American passed away last week. He had his enemies, but I wish to state on the floor of the Senate that I believe we owe to Leland Olds a debt of gratitude which was not paid, and may never be paid, but which I wish to acknowledge at this time.” One of the tributes was from the Democratic presidential nominee, John F. Kennedy, who said, “In a sense … developments such as the St. Lawrence Waterway and power projects are a permanent memorial to him,” and added that Olds established “the foundation for the giant power systems that will soon be serving America.”

There was no comment from the Democratic vice presidential nominee.

W
HEN
R
ICHARD
R
USSELL
congratulated him on his victory over Leland Olds, Johnson replied: “I’m young and impressionable, so I just tried to do what the Old Master, the junior senator from Georgia, taught me to do.” And his note to the master included the most potent of code words: “Cloture is where you find it, sir, and this man Olds was an advocate of simple majority cloture on the gas producers.” Of all the spoils that Johnson reaped from his victory over Olds, perhaps the most valuable was the fact that it reinforced, and indeed heightened, Richard Russell’s favorable opinion of him, and not just of his philosophy—Communism was, of course, second only to civil rights on Russell’s list of the plagues that beset mankind—but of his potential.

In a previous engagement—the Civil Rights Battle of March 1949—and in the many small skirmishes of a Senate year, Johnson had shown Russell that he would be a loyal soldier for the Cause. Now, in the Olds engagement, Johnson had not only organized the forces against Olds, but had planned their strategy and tactics, led them on the field of battle. And the engagement had ended in victory—in the utter rout of the liberal forces. Was the South’s great general now beginning to feel that perhaps he had found not merely a soldier for the Cause, but something more: a leader for the Cause, a new general—someone who might one day be able to pick up its banner when he himself finally had to let it fall? It would not be for another year or so that Richard Russell began to hint at such a feeling, but there was, almost immediately after the 53–15 vote, impressive testimony to at least the warmth of his feelings for Johnson. The Senate adjourned for the year on October 19, six days after the Olds vote. Before he left for Texas, Johnson extended an invitation to Russell to join him there on a hunting trip in November. And Russell, who had turned down so many invitations to hunting trips, accepted this one.

Their destination was “St. Joe,” as it was known to the select few who were invited there—St. Joseph Island, the twenty-one-mile-long island in the Gulf of Mexico that had once been a fishing resort but had been purchased by
Sid Richardson and turned into his own private island, on which he built a hunting lodge so luxurious that its cost embarrassed even him and he never revealed it.

Johnson had arranged a week-long stag party on St. Joe, and the stags were some of the biggest in the Texas business herd: not only Richardson but Clint Murchison, Amon Carter, Myron Blalock and, of course, Herman Brown. It was a group that held views quite similar to Russell’s on Communism and labor unions and Negroes and the importance of ending government interference with free enterprise, a group that had long considered Russell the leader of the good fight on these issues and had been looking forward to meeting him. Although none of them was noted for an interest in books, Russell found he had a lot to talk about with them, that conversation was, in fact, relaxed and easy, for they shared an interest, these hard, tough men who wanted so much from government, in politics. And with Herman Brown in particular—Herman who loved to talk not only about politics but about issues (and who didn’t want to talk about them with “some damned radical professor”), Herman who loathed Negroes and unions because Negroes were lazy and unions encouraged laziness in white men, Herman who called New Deal programs “gimmes” because they gave government handouts to lazy men who were always saying “gimme”—with Herman in particular Russell got along famously. And, of course, not only the perfectly arranged duck hunting and the strolls, in total privacy, along the beautiful beaches in the sun, but also the luxury of the accommodations, the deferential black retainers everywhere, the lavish dinners prepared by a chef flown in from New Orleans for the week, the long evenings after dinner in which a lot of Old Weller was consumed, added to the pleasantness of those days in the Gulf. For Dick Russell, who had just spent ten months in Washington with very little warmth in his life, it was a week basking in warmth, and in admiration—and the thank-you note he sent to Johnson from Winder showed how pleasant the week had been. “Dear Lyndon,” he wrote. “Ever since I reached home I have been wondering if I would wake up and find that I had just been dreaming that I had made a trip to Texas. Everything was so perfect that it is difficult to realize that it could happen in real life.”

And when, the next year, a great opportunity suddenly appeared, and Lyndon Johnson grabbed for it, Russell saw to it that Johnson got it.

T
HE FIRST HALF OF 1950 WAS SLOW.
The desultory, now-familiar, Senate routine resumed—as did the extra-senatorial routine: the lunches and dinners at Bill White’s and Dave Botter’s to cultivate the press; the lunches and dinners to cultivate Rayburn (most notably a birthday lunch for the Speaker that Johnson, along with Representative Wright Patman, persuaded President Truman to attend as a surprise guest, and a boisterous dinner the Texas delegation threw for the Speaker at the Mayflower); the lunches and dinners to cultivate Rayburn’s
nephew, FCC Chairman Robert Bartley: when the Congressional Club had a ladies’ tea, it was Ruth Bartley who was Lady Bird’s guest. (And there was the evening that Lyndon and Lady Bird, just the two of them, spent at the Speaker’s apartment, eating a dinner he had had sent in from Martin’s—a very happy evening for Mr. Sam.) Sunday brunches were still devoted to Russell, but during the first half of 1950 there was little Russell could do for him. Johnson’s main effort in the Senate, apart from routine Armed Services Committee work, ended in frustration when, in April, Truman vetoed a natural gas deregulation bill.

Making the first half of the year more difficult was the tension at the Georgetown dinner parties of his old circle caused by the Leland Olds hearing, and now aggravated by the stands he continued to take on civil rights issues—his vote, for example, against cloture when Truman tried again to make employment practices more fair. His relationship with the President, never warm, had been further chilled by the Olds fight. The White House, during the reign of Roosevelt so open to him, was now a place he visited only when the Speaker brought him along, which during the first six months of 1950 was exactly once. Otherwise, apart from a few group occasions like the Rayburn lunch, Lyndon Johnson saw Harry Truman mainly up on daises—on Capitol Hill as the President delivered his State of the Union address, at the National Guard Armory at the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner. He had come a long way, but he had a long, long way to go—and, it seemed, in that slow, slow Senate, as if it was going to take a very long time to get there; if there was a shortcut, he hadn’t found it. The buzzer summoning aides to his private office was sounding less often; he was starting to brood in there again; when he telephoned Tommy Corcoran or Jim Rowe, his voice was beginning again to be flat, a little listless.

F
OR A FEW MEN IN
W
ASHINGTON
, the news came late Saturday night, June 24, in telephone calls like the one Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk received during a dinner party in Joseph Alsop’s home in Georgetown. Watching as Rusk listened to the message, Alsop saw “his face turn the color of an old-fashioned white bed sheet,” although all Rusk said, as he asked his host to make his apologies, was that there had been a rather serious “border incident” in South Korea. For the rest of Washington, including freshman Senator Lyndon Johnson, the news came, as the news of Pearl Harbor had come, on a quiet Sunday morning, in headlines and radio bulletins.

When Johnson telephoned Horace Busby’s house in suburban Chevy Chase that morning, Busby heard the difference in the Chief’s tone immediately. “He called me at ten, and we were still talking at noon,” Buzz would recall. “All of a sudden, he was energized. He came to life. Because he knew the territory. He was a creature of war. His whole life had been shaped in the buildup to World War II. He felt he knew what was necessary. He talked about
China—would China come in? Would Russia come in? He knew the territory. He was back in command.”

Johnson’s involvement was not immediately requested, however. When, on Tuesday, with North Korean tanks rumbling down through South Korea, the President invited some forty congressional leaders to the White House, to inform them that he was dispatching United States air and naval forces to support the South Koreans, Johnson was not among them. He was just one of the crowd of senators and representatives who cheered the President’s statement when it was read on Capitol Hill, and he did not participate in the Senate debate on the “police action,” which took place on Wednesday.

But if you do everything, you’ll win.
Johnson had already done something. The White House was concerned about adverse congressional reaction to Truman’s failure to ask congressional authorization to send in troops. In the event, despite tense moments—Robert Taft declared that the President had “usurped the power of Congress”—substantial reaction did not materialize; several senators were to write letters to the President expressing their support. Johnson did everything he could to make sure
his
letter would have the strongest possible impact on the President.

On Tuesday night, Busby recalls, “He called me at home and said I want you to draft a letter from me supporting him.” The tone of the letter had to be
perfect
, he said. And it had to get there first, before a letter from any other senator. He would get to the office early Wednesday morning, he told Busby, “and I want that letter on my desk when I get in. I want it on Truman’s desk when he gets there in the morning.” And, Busby says, “he called someone in Truman’s office to make sure the President would see it the minute he got in.”

Beginning “My dear Mr. President, I want to express to you my deep gratitude for and admiration of your courageous response yesterday to the challenge of this grave hour,” the letter spared no adjectives. Your leadership, Johnson told him, had been “inspired”; it would, he said, “be remembered as the finest moment of American maturity.” It “gives a new and noble meaning to freedom…. For the decisions you must face alone, you have my most sincere prayers and my total confidence. Under your leadership, I am sure peace will be restored and justice will assume new meaning for the oppressed and frightened peoples of the world.” And Truman replied in a “Dear Lyndon” letter with a tone more cordial than that in which he had responded to previous Johnson overtures. Some months later, talking with Johnson, the President would say, “I remember: you were the first Senator to support me.” “The
first
was very important,” Busby says. Although the relationship between Johnson and Truman would never be particularly warm (Margaret Truman says that her father “never quite trusted him”), a moderate thaw, with occasional reverses, can be dated from this exchange.

But getting closer to the President, important though that was, was not nearly as potentially significant as another opportunity Johnson saw in this
moment—and for which he reached just as quickly. Still an obscure senator, he saw within hours, perhaps even more quickly, that America’s entry into the Korean War was a chance for him to assume the same role that had propelled Harry Truman into national prominence when
he
had been just an obscure senator.

Of course, Johnson knew the story: how Truman, just beginning his second term, still known only by the derisive title “the Senator from Prendergast,” had in January, 1941, become concerned about waste and mismanagement in America’s defense mobilization program and had persuaded the Senate to create a special committee to investigate the program, and, after Pearl Harbor, the war effort; how the “Truman Committee” had, with remarkable rapidity, become a national byword for its fairness and lack of partisan bias, as well as for the revelations it produced; so that when in 1944 Franklin Roosevelt was looking for a running mate, the chairman of “the most successful congressional investigating effort in American history” had sufficient stature to be chosen for the vice presidency that became the presidency. Everyone in Washington knew the story.
Truman of the Truman Committee
was the title of an inspiring political Horatio Alger saga. And, in a city in which so many men viewed great events at least partly through the lens of personal opportunity, many men—including many senators—saw very quickly how a new war, or even a “police action,” could provide the backdrop for a repeat version of the same scenario. But no one saw the opportunity as quickly as Lyndon Johnson. And no one moved as quickly—or as deftly—to take advantage of it.