Master of the Senate (72 page)

Even the
Saturday Evening Post
, which, as one newspaper put it that year, “never says anything kind about a Democrat if it can avoid it,” couldn’t avoid it. While Paul Healy’s
Post
article mentioned Johnson’s treatment of his “underlings” (who “jump like marionettes”) and of motorists on Connecticut Avenue (whom he “continually addressed in unparliamentary language”) and, after quoting his statement that Roosevelt “was like a Daddy to me,” mentioned that “He says much the same thing” of Rayburn, Fred Vinson, Carl Vinson, and Alvin Wirtz, Healy also admitted that “In Washington, Johnson is given the major share of the credit for keeping this investigation nonpartisan and devoid of a circus atmosphere…. He succeeded in getting a unanimous vote from his committee every time.” Healy called him “dynamic,” with an “extraordinary quick and incisive mind” and “a willingness to work like a dray horse.” Johnson “is a student of human nature,” the article said. “He reads other senators like a psychologist.” And, it concluded, he was

These articles created a particular image of the young senator. When, Carpenter wrote, a visitor to Johnson’s office commented, “Why, you have one of the most beautiful views in Washington from your window,” Johnson “turned his head,” looked out, and said, “I’d never noticed before.” John Connally told reporters that when he suggested they go to see a Lana Turner movie, Johnson replied, “Who is Lana Turner?” When a reporter mentioned Johnson’s golfing afternoons at Burning Tree, Johnson emphasized that he played golf only as a means of advancing some purpose with Symington or some other influential partner. “He confesses privately that he does not enjoy the game and can’t waste the time it would take to really learn it.” He had no interest in life other than his work, these interviews suggested. “Leave Lyndon Johnson alone in a room with a telephone and he will make a long-distance call,” his staff member Arthur Perry told Carpenter. And Busby, as always, had a vivid anecdote ready. Meeting his boss at an airport, he recalled, he found him pacing back and forth near a row of three telephone booths. “Watch those phones!” he yelled, as he started toward the newsstand. “I’ve got a long-distance call working in each one.”

The image was summarized in Healy’s lead paragraph, which said that “the junior United States Senator from Texas maintains the most rigidly one-track mind in Washington. Johnson is entirely preoccupied with the science of politics, which for him is an exact science and one which he has mastered superlatively. Politics is, naturally, Topic A for most social circles in the national capital. But for Johnson it is Topic A-to-Z…. He refuses to be trapped into thinking about or discussing sports, literature, the stage, the movies, or anything else in the world of recreation.”

I
N
N
OVEMBER
, the yearlong flood of publicity reached its crest. This time, when a photographer—Ed Wergeles of
Newsweek
magazine—arrived at Lyndon Johnson’s office to take his photograph, he wasn’t satisfied to pose him just behind his desk or against a wall. He had to have a better background, Wergeles said, for unless some breaking major news story erupted during the next two or three days, this photograph was for the cover.

Johnson had bid for the cover—the cover of a national magazine with a circulation of more than two million—with the tried and true technique of which he had, during this year, so repeatedly demonstrated his mastery: a leak of a still-secret subcommittee report. He had privately assured a
Newsweek
correspondent that this report, the thirty-fifth the subcommittee had issued, was its most significant; it revealed, he said, that America’s overall defense production program—deliveries of planes, tanks, ships and guns—was lagging “dangerously behind schedule.” He had given the magazine not merely a draft of the report but the final version, signed by all seven subcommittee members and already in the final printed form in which it would be released to the rest of the press on November 29. And he had given it to
Newsweek
well enough in
advance so that the magazine could use it in its issue that would appear on newsstands on Wednesday, November 28.

Even George Reedy, author of the report’s Introduction and Conclusions, and of the accompanying press release, was to admit later that “That report was not very substantive.” But Reedy’s written words at the time—particularly a phrase designed to catch the journalistic eye—certainly made it seem substantive. The reason for the lag, he wrote, was that “We didn’t have the courage to put guns ahead of butter.” In the press release, Johnson said: “This report spells out for the American people the payoff for the wasted months that have been spent in a fruitless search for a formula that will give us both butter and guns in ample quantities. The results have been excellent in terms of butter. But unfortunately butter—even fortified butter—is not enough to stop Communist armies. That takes guns and when it comes to the production of guns, our formula has not worked out well.”

During the week before the cover story was scheduled to appear, Johnson received a letter that might have raised concerns among
Newsweek’s
editors had they learned about it. One of Johnson’s key contentions for some weeks had been that America’s “dangerous lag” in defense production included production not only for American troops but for those of NATO nations. To document his point, he had cited what he said was a shortfall behind various schedules. But on Wednesday, November 21, Acting Secretary of Defense William C. Foster wrote Johnson that he was confusing two schedules: that for NATO arms deliveries scheduled for 1951, and that for 1951 fiscal appropriations for NATO arms which required substantial “lead time” to design and had never been intended to be delivered that year. Furthermore, Foster said, there was no need for these arms to be delivered in 1951, since they were intended for use by NATO units which had not yet even been formed. Johnson did not release that letter, nor show it to any other member of the subcommittee. And, although Johnson was in frequent communication with
Newsweek
reporters during this week, he never let them know about it, either.

Wergeles’ prediction had made Johnson hopeful that he might attain the cover, but the prediction was conditional, and Johnson, who had left Washington for the ranch shortly after the photograph was taken, spent several days filled with anxiety over the possibility of some major news development. Finally, on Tuesday, unable to bear the waiting, he telephoned Walter Jenkins and told Jenkins to get an advance copy that very night, he didn’t care how; Jenkins apparently flew to New York to get one.

Jenkins still had not telephoned, however, when Johnson and Lady Bird had to leave to go out to dinner with some neighbors. While they were gone, the call came—to Mary Rather in Austin. Mary typed a note to Johnson, and a car sped out of the city on the lonely road through the dark hills to the Johnson Ranch, and when the Johnsons returned, the news was waiting for them. “Walter says the cover is a beautiful picture in color,” Miss Rather wrote. “Very
vivid. The background is that Scotch plaid blanket…. You are leaning forward with your hands up to your face—head resting on right arm and cigarette in left hand. Underneath the picture: ‘Watchdog in Chief.’” The next morning copies of
Newsweek
arrived in Johnson City, and there he was, on the newsstand in Fawcett’s Drugstore, where Sam Ealy Johnson’s credit had been cut off so that his son had had to stand by watching while his friends charged purchases to their fathers’ accounts.

The articles that accompanied the cover (under the headline “too much butter, not enough guns”) were equally satisfying.
Newsweek’s
editors, who, an editor’s note said, had given the “Johnson Report” a “searching examination,” accepted it without reservation, saying “When the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee calls the armament lag ‘dangerous,’ it is not just indulging a taste for rhetoric.” Noting that the subcommittee had found American air strength to be “below what the American public expects,”
Newsweek
said that “If the Korean War continues and the Chinese decide to challenge American air supremacy, the result could be a military disaster for America.”

And there was a separate article on the subcommittee, and on him. The subcommittee, the editors said, “has been likened to the Truman Committee.” Actually, the editors said, it was better than the Truman Committee.

As for its chairman, “Johnson has made a great and growing reputation,”
Newsweek
said. “His manner is quiet and gentle, and everything he does, he does with great deliberation and care. Yet, when he believes the facts warrant it, he can be two-fisted and tough.”

N
O SOONER HAD HIS WORK
on the report been completed than George Reedy, who had never before participated in the subcommittee’s in-the-field investigations, abruptly found himself dispatched on one—to one of the most isolated military installations in the United States: Goodfellow Air Force Base southeast of San Angelo in the remote prairies of West Texas.

Arriving there, Reedy quickly saw that the trip was a waste of time. “There had been some complaints about the quality of the training,” he was to recall, but “even I could see that most of the complaints were absolutely nothing except the standard sort of thing that bobs up at any military post.” He
couldn’t understand why he had been sent until he saw the
Newsweek
cover. “He got me out of town deliberately on that one because he sensed that I would be opposed to what he did,” Reedy was to recall. “He literally got me out of town…. When I came back I discovered they had wrapped up this
Newsweek
deal.”

Johnson was correct in thinking that he would have been opposed, Reedy says. “You really can’t do anything much worse than that. If you’re going to give a newspaperman or a magazine … an exclusive, for the love of God don’t make it a formal committee report. It’s too obvious, among other things.” It would infuriate other journalists, he knew. While they had not subjected any of the previous thirty-four subcommittee reports to intensive scrutiny, they would scrutinize this one, he felt. And, he felt, this “not very substantive” report would not hold up under scrutiny.

Reedy’s premonitions were well founded. Even a master of an art can sometimes overreach himself, and by thus stretching the leaking technique to its limit—leaking an entire formal report for a cover story while describing the report in exaggerated terms—Lyndon Johnson had overreached. Analyzing a Preparedness report in depth for the first time, the press now found what some subcommittee staff members felt it would have found about many of the subcommittee’s previous reports had it analyzed
them
in depth: that the promise of the catchphrases was not fulfilled by the content.

“He got this cover of
Newsweek
… and in return for that he had the enmity of every economics writer in Washington,” Reedy was to explain. “And they all set out to prove the report was a phony, and they did.

As outcry over the report mounted, so did embarrassment. After an official of the Office of Defense Mobilization demanded to know “one instance where materials or equipment… needed for the Korean fighting was not available,” reporters asked the subcommittee to name such an instance, and the subcommittee proved unable to do so. Releasing Acting Secretary Foster’s letter to Johnson, the Department of Defense charged that Johnson “sat on it”—delayed
releasing the letter—until after the
Newsweek
article had appeared. Confronted by reporters holding copies of the letter, a flustered Jenkins disappeared into Johnson’s private office to telephone the Senator in Texas. Emerging, he said that the charge was “unfair,” and that Johnson would respond to it the next day. The response was as aggressive and headline-catching as always—characterizing Foster’s statements as “doubletalk,” Johnson made a new charge, in a new colorful phrase, saying, “It certainly does the public confidence no good to find that the Department of Defense, behind a cloak of security, keeps for all practical purposes a double set of books”—but the Defense Department refused to retreat, saying, as the
Herald Tribune
put it, that “the Texas legislator just didn’t know what he was talking about,” and in effect defying Johnson to provide one example of double bookkeeping—an example Johnson did not provide. For a year and a half Johnson had been claiming, as proof of his subcommittee’s fairness, that it always afforded departmental officials the opportunity in executive session to rebut any negative findings in a draft report so that the report could, if necessary, be modified in its final version. It was now clear that in preparing this report, at least, Preparedness had never spoken to a single departmental official—either to give him a chance to put the department’s side of the story on the record, or for any other reason.