Master of the Senate (67 page)

Busby’s determination to preserve what was left of his psychological independence had not abated, however, and he was planning to leave Johnson’s staff early in 1951, whether or not a replacement had been found. Then, at a party given by Dave Botter of the
Dallas Morning News
, he noticed that the United Press reporter who had been covering the subcommittee, George Reedy, was roaring at Johnson’s jokes. “He responded to Johnson very well,” Busby was to recall. Some days later, when Reedy telephoned Johnson’s office to get information for an article he was writing, he was told that the Senator was in Walter Reed Naval Hospital in Bethesda with one of his chronic bronchial infections, but that he had left his phone number and was hoping Reedy would call him there. When Reedy did, and had finished asking his questions, Johnson said, in what Reedy recalls as “a joking way, ‘I want you to get over on my side and work for me where you belong.’” Thinking Johnson was joking, Reedy said, “Make me an offer,” and when Johnson did—$9,688 per year, almost double what he was earning at the United Press—Reedy accepted and succeeded Busby in April, 1951.

Although Reedy was as liberal as Busby was conservative, for Johnson’s purposes they were interchangeable tools, and the catchy phrases continued without abatement. One of the first reports Reedy wrote assailed the Army for assigning tens of thousands of able-bodied men to desk jobs. This was also not new; the high proportion of administrative to combat personnel in modern armies was, as one military expert commented, “inevitable,” given the complexity of modern war and the public’s insistence that America’s soldiers be given the best support possible. “A good many others have made similar discoveries before,” he said. But the subcommittee’s discovery made headlines, because never before had desk-assigned soldiers been categorized in a phrase as vivid as the one in the Johnson Subcommittee’s report: “the Chair Corps.”

“It’s all right with me that Lyndon Johnson is junior Senator from Texas instead of being a rival Washington columnist,” syndicated columnist Holmes Alexander was to say. “The guy can write. What you notice right away about these Johnson reports is that they’re low in federal gobbleygook and high on the peppy turns of phrase which make for public understanding…. This stuff Johnson puts out is written to be read.”

And it wasn’t just the writing that was getting Lyndon Johnson headlines—for he was playing the press like a master. Understanding that the most effective means of burnishing the subcommittee’s image (and that of its chairman) would be identification with the renowned Truman Committee, Johnson
wanted the ultimate identification: for journalists to call his group “the new Truman Committee.” But in that desire lay a pitfall: one word of public disapproval from the man whose name was in that title would end any possibility of that identification—and Johnson almost fell into that pit with his first step, when, drawing up his subcommittee’s agenda, he made it so broad in scope that Truman felt it might impinge on his Administration’s conduct of the war. The President reacted—luckily for Johnson only in a private memo of which Johnson was made aware—with anger.

Hastily pulling back from the edge, Johnson soothed the President—in what was, even for him, a masterstroke of flattery. A “Statement of [Subcommittee] Policies and Procedures” was drafted, and it reassured the President—not surprisingly, since the key points were virtually his own words, words Truman had written ten years before to guide
his
committee. Truman, for example, had written, “The function of generals and admirals is to fight battles and to tell us what they need to fight battles with.” Johnson’s statement said, “We were not created to tell generals and admirals how to fight battles, but rather to make sure that they and the men fighting under them have what they need to win those battles.” Had Truman decreed that his committee would not investigate “military and naval strategy”? Johnson’s statement said that his committee would not investigate “battlefront strategy.”

Other passages were designed to allay any fears Truman might have had that the subcommittee would criticize his Administration. Pledging that “We will not hunt headlines,” the subcommittee stated, in phrases that also echoed those of the Truman Committee, that it was not concerned with past mistakes. “What’s done is done. Most important, I think this subcommittee must be extremely diligent not to establish—or attempt to establish—itself as a Monday morning quarterback club.” Having marked the passages that echoed Truman’s words, so that the President couldn’t miss them, Johnson sent him the statement and delivered further reassurances in person—Johnson’s appointment with the President on August 8 was the first time he had been in the White House since January—and the desired effect was evidently achieved. Returning to his office, Johnson recounted details of the meeting to one of his staff, who wrote that the President had read the statements “and approved them heartily as some of the finest ever to be made by a Senate committee…. He said go right ahead, on the charted course; if anything is wrong, come and tell him about it and it will be remedied. Senator said it was the ‘finest meeting’ that could possibly be had.”

With the President’s support assured, there was seemingly no interview Lyndon Johnson gave in which the magic title was not invoked, and the press took the point, “
A NEW ‘TRUMAN COMMITTEE’ EMERGES
” was the headline in the
Washington Post.
After talking with Johnson, Robert Walsh of the
Washington Star
wrote that the two committees are “like father, like son.” The Johnson subcommittee, the article said, is the Truman Committee’s “natural heir.” It has
Truman’s “paternal blessing.” Truman “has made it abundantly clear to all around him that he is ‘cooperating’ with the committee,” Walsh wrote.

F
REQUENT AS WERE
the comparisons between the Johnson and Truman bodies, however, there were significant contrasts between their respective chairmen’s methods of operation—contrasts which reflected the differences in their personalities, and which foreshadowed the differences between their presidencies. But these methods also helped Johnson in his playing of the press.

One was a difference in control. The genesis of the Truman Committee was very much the work of one man. Disturbed by reports of profiteering and waste in the vast military buildup begun in 1940 and by the possibility that his home state of Missouri was not receiving its fair share of defense contracts, Senator Harry Truman decided to try to find out the truth for himself—by leaving Washington, alone in his old Dodge automobile, and driving to military installations and defense plants from Florida to Michigan, covering perhaps ten thousand miles. It was his speech to the Senate on what he had found on this personal inspection that led to the creation of his committee, and even after it was formed in April, 1941—until his nomination for the vice presidency in July, 1944—Truman would make other trips, sometimes by plane, sometimes in that old car, usually not saying who he was unless he was asked, lying awake at night in hotel rooms in strange cities and little towns worrying over the course of the war. But Truman also went to great lengths to involve the committee’s six other senators in its work, encouraging their active participation, generously sharing the limelight with them. Throughout the war, committee members—sometimes all six—would accompany him and committee investigators on cross-country tours. “They would put down at a city or military base, go through their routine for a day or so, and then be off again, like a roadshow, everybody by now knowing just what to do,” David McCullough has written. “War plants were inspected, hearings held in local hotels.”

Participation was not encouraged on the Johnson subcommittee; steps were, in fact, taken to discourage it.

Cook and Busby had long since learned the inadvisability of conducting long conversations with their boss’s colleagues. Busby was very adept at turning aside senators who dropped by his cubbyhole to discuss a subcommittee report. The group’s three Democratic members were not especially eager to participate. Fellow freshmen Estes Kefauver and Lester Hunt, both ambitious, were preoccupied with their own subcommittees; without encouragement they wouldn’t give more than cursory attention to Johnson’s; Kefauver, in fact, signaled his lack of interest by giving Johnson a blanket proxy to use “whenever I am not present.” And Virgil Chapman, a big, bald Kentuckian who considered Johnson his friend because they had served in the House (and had been “Sam’s boys”) together, was sliding rapidly down a very steep alcoholic slope. One of
the three Republican members, Leverett Saltonstall, so amenable that he was known as “Old Oil on Troubled Waters,” certainly wasn’t going to make trouble by poaching on another senator’s preserve. The second Republican, Styles Bridges, was known for his receptivity to the
quid pro quo.
A freshman senator with an infant subcommittee with a tiny budget might seem to have little to offer the ranking GOP member of Appropriations, but Johnson had recognized that Bridges was building his own empire: what one observer calls “an apparatus all over Washington; he had guys stashed away in every agency.” Johnson told Bridges that he would value his “guidance” in filling two positions on the subcommittee staff. And, he made clear, while these men would be paid by the subcommittee, they would not be required to work for it; they would take their assignments not from him but from Bridges. In return for the
quo
, Johnson got his
quid:
Bridges’ support on subcommittee actions, and a free hand in running it. The real problem was the third Republican, Wayne Morse of Oregon, independent, intelligent, opinionated, and hungry for publicity—and to solve this problem Johnson went to considerable lengths. Morse was facing a re-election fight in Oregon, where there was considerable apprehension about Russian designs on Alaska, separated from the USSR only by the fifty miles of the Bering Strait. Telling Morse that “Alaskan defense,” and indeed the defense of the entire Pacific Northwest, should be one of the subcommittee’s central concerns, Johnson asked him to head a special one-member task force on the subject. Morse was dispatched on this mission with pomp—his “work will take priority over all our other work,” Johnson told reporters; “Senator Morse has been insistent that adequate defense be given the Northwest”—far enough away from Washington (he was soon holding publicity-rich hearings in Oregon) so that, at least until November, his interference with other subcommittee work was kept to a minimum.

A
NOTHER CONTRAST
between the two bodies was in the openness with which their work was conducted.

The Truman Committee had been characterized by a notable openness. Its work had centered around its hearings, meetings of the subcommittee at which witnesses testified. These hearings were remarkable not only for their number—during the just over three years that Truman was chairman the committee held 329 hearings, or about 104 per year, hearing approximately eight hundred witnesses but for the fact that even in a wartime atmosphere, Truman leaned over backward to make as few of them as possible “executive” or closed sessions, closing them only for genuine security concerns or to afford officials criticized in a draft committee report an opportunity to refute the criticism before it was made public. More than half the hearings—194 of the 329—were open to the press and public. Held in hotels, in the committee’s hearing room and, as interest grew and crowds mounted, in the great Senate Caucus
Room itself, these hearings produced what McCullough calls “memorable days of testimony”: when a great steel company official was forced to admit under oath that the company had falsified test results on steel used in Navy ships, when an inspector for Curtis-Wright, who had two nephews in the Air Force, broke down at the witness table and sobbed as he confessed that the company was selling the Air Force airplane engines it knew were faulty.

A characteristic of the Johnson Subcommittee was its secrecy. On-the-spot inspection trips were not a luxury in which Johnson indulged himself; during the two and a half years in which he was chairman before the Republicans gained control of the Senate in November, 1952, he ventured no farther afield on such a trip than New York. And it was not a luxury in which other members of the subcommittee, with the exception of Morse, were encouraged to indulge, so there were few hearings in other cities.

And there were few in Washington (except on a single project for which Russell, to further a pet proposal of his own, used the subcommittee as an arm of his full committee so that it was acting more under his direction than Johnson’s
*
). Aside from that project, during the two and a half years of Johnson’s chairmanship, Preparedness held forty-one hearings, in contrast to the more than one hundred per year of the Truman Committee, about sixteen per year. And in even sharper contrast only nineteen of Johnson’s hearings were open, or about eight per year. (Truman had held about sixty-five open hearings per year.) The rest of the Johnson Subcommittee’s hearings were executive, or closed,
sessions, held in its meeting room, SOB 212, with a uniformed Capitol policeman stationed in front of its closed doors to keep out the public.

Public hearings, with witnesses’ upraised hands as they took the oath, the rap of the gavel, the popping glare of flashbulbs, the senators and counsel hunching forward for cross-examination, the dramatic moments of testimony, the murmur and hush of the audience, the reporters’ scribbling pencils, the wire service men jumping up and hurrying toward the door to send bulletins—public hearings with their constant potential for the controversy and confrontation that makes news—were one of the surest devices for bringing recognition to a senator, the device used by most senators seeking publicity. But the public hearing is always a risky device, with ample possibilities for mishaps; it is, after all, not only the chairman to whom the committee horseshoe offers a forum: senators can disagree with each other. The witness table, too, can be a forum—a national sounding board for a witness who disagrees with the chairman. Controversy and confrontation do not always play out according to a chairman’s script.