Master of the Senate (79 page)

And the Senate, as Samuel Shaffer said, had been at its best largely because of Richard Russell. It was his “power and prestige … employed at a moment of great crisis in America” that had calmed a country that was “as close to a state of national hysteria as it had ever been in its history.” He had displayed,
Life
magazine said, “firmness, fairness and dignity almost unmatched in recent Congressional history.”

L
YNDON
J
OHNSON PLAYED
a minor role in the MacArthur episode, a role that had no relationship to his new post as Assistant Leader. He had assigned his two Preparedness attorneys, Donald Cook and Gerald Siegel, to analyze each evening that day’s testimony and prepare a list of questions for Russell to ask the next day. Before the hearings, Russell had not understood about “staff” in the modern sense. But for weeks now, when he arrived at his office in the morning, there on his desk had been the analysis and the list, tools prepared not by old-style Senate staffers, not by tired old military officers put to pasture on Capitol Hill, but by keen legal minds. Before the hearings, Russell had not understood about public relations in the modern sense. But Johnson had suggested that George Reedy each evening write a statement that Russell could deliver at the opening of the next day’s hearings. For weeks now, Reedy’s opening statements had been there on his desk.

Russell now understood, moreover, that staff could mean more than questions
and press releases. Richard Russell had never had an assistant like George Reedy. Sometimes they would be alone together in Russell’s office in the evenings, and Russell found himself discussing the strategy for the hearings—not specific questions or press releases, not matters of tactics, but the overall
strategy
—and he found that Reedy was worth discussing strategy with, that it helped to bounce ideas off him, to get other sides of the issue. Reedy, the flaming Wisconsin liberal who had always despised Russell because of the Georgian’s views on civil rights, had come to realize that Russell was not only “the preeminent senatorial tactician” but that he possessed “a grasp of history that was equaled by very few politicians in my memory.” And Russell realized that Reedy, too, possessed quite a grasp of history. He came, almost despite himself, this senator who had never relied on staff, to rely on Cook and Siegel and Reedy. One day, noticing that Russell never delivered the opening statements he was preparing, Reedy didn’t bother to write one. “George, please do it,” Russell said. “You don’t realize something. I may change it. I may not use it at all, but it gives me a sense of reassurance to know that when I come down that that statement is going to be there.” Reedy did so, of course, and he began to see that while Russell might not deliver the statement as written, he managed, in making his own statement, to incorporate most of Reedy’s points—just as, in asking questions of MacArthur and Marshall and Bradley and Acheson and the Joint Chiefs, he either used or incorporated the questions prepared by Cook and Siegel. By the conclusion of the MacArthur hearings, Russell understood the importance—the
necessity
—of staff, of the way in which it could enable a senator, could enable the
Senate
, to deal with new complexities, the complexities that had been overwhelming senators and Senate. He understood the importance of this tool in modern politics.

He understood because of Lyndon Johnson—and he had seen that Johnson was a master in the use of this new tool, as he was a master in so many other new tools. He saw that Johnson was capable of adapting the Senate to the new age.

And, of course, during those weeks in which Russell had been using the questions and statements provided by Lyndon Johnson’s staff members, it had only been natural for him to discuss them with Johnson. The two men had worked over them together at breakfast in the Senate Dining Room, and, often, in the evenings, so that they often had not only breakfast but dinner together. Their relationship, already close, had become even closer. “By the end of 1951,” George Reedy says, “the Russell-Johnson relationship was a very, very close relationship.” And it was about this time that Richard Russell paid Lyndon Johnson quite a compliment. In an undated memorandum that appears to have been written in November or December, 1951, a
Time
reporter informed his editors in New York that “Russell has soberly predicted that Lyndon Johnson could be President and would make a good one.”

T
HE PRESIDENCY, OF COURSE
, was never far from Lyndon Johnson’s mind. Just after his election as Assistant Democratic Leader in January, 1951, Leslie Carpenter had written that “To Johnson and his admirers his selection as majority whip was just one more step on the road to the Vice-Presidency—and perhaps one day to the White House itself. The Texan makes no particular secret of his ambitions in that direction.” But the path ahead was still a very long one, and if Johnson had few illusions about the position of Democratic Leader, he had even fewer about the position of Assistant Leader. “The whip’s job is a nothing job,” he told journalist Alfred Steinberg. If he was to advance along that path, however, his progress during the next two years at least was going to have to be through that “nothing” job. So he had set about making, out of nothing, something.

While, during these two years, 1951 and 1952, the Senate had, in the MacArthur Hearings, a moment of glory, over the rest of those years hung a miasma of gloom. The century-long decline in its power and prestige accelerated. Hardly had the Eighty-second Congress convened in January, 1951, when President Truman announced that he was sending, “without reference to Congress”—and without any emergency to justify the decision—“four more divisions to reinforce the American army in Europe.” This was not sending a few Marines to some Latin American banana republic; this wasn’t a murky question of whether the dispatch of troops was interposition or intervention; “never before,” as Arthur Schlesinger was to write, “had a President claimed constitutional authority to commit so many troops to a theater of potential war against a major foe.”

Truman didn’t merely claim the authority, moreover; he flaunted it. Even while Senate business was being dominated by a “Great Debate” over whether or not to give him permission to do what he had already done, the President said of Congress, “I don’t ask their permission; I just consult them.” Not, he added, that he was required even to consult “unless I want to. But of course I am polite, and I usually always consult them.”

Opening the debate, Robert Taft said the “President simply usurped authority, in violation of the law and the Constitution, when he sent troops to Korea,” and “without authority he apparently is now attempting to adopt a similar policy in Europe,” but Tom Connally replied that the President had “authority … as Commander-in-Chief to send the Armed Forces to any place required by the security interests of the United States.” For eighty-six days the debate rolled back and forth, but when Dwight Eisenhower, who had been the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during World War II and was considered an unchallengeable authority on military questions, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that there was “no acceptable alternative” to the “defense of Western Europe” but to send the four divisions, the debate was effectively over. Attempting to save some face, the Senate resolved that it was its “sense” that Congress should be “consulted” before future presidential decisions to send troops abroad (“What this foggy final paragraph meant no one seemed to know,” one observer commented), but it approved Truman’s decision, and, as
Fortune
put it, “The effect was to loosen still more Congress’ none-too-firm grip on the sword, thus bringing about a definite relinquishment of some of its constitutional authority.”

These two years were years of investigation; Johnson’s Preparedness Subcommittee and Estes Kefauver’s Organized Crime Subcommittee were only the most famous of a score of congressional investigating groups actively looking into Truman’s Administration, into atomic spying, into a host of other areas, and hardly had Russell’s hearings, which burnished the Senate’s reputation, concluded when Joe McCarthy removed the luster and lacquered on tarnish by speaking, on the Senate floor, of a “conspiracy so immense”—and thereafter, throughout these two years, McCarthy’s influence on the Senate grew. With the Korean War still dragging on, Congress at least passed some foreign affairs legislation, authorizing increased military expenditures and nonmilitary aid. On the domestic front, as one observer noted, “Mr. Truman’s Fair Deal program scarcely got discussed.” When the national legislature finally ground to a halt in October, 1952, it had, the
Washington Star
said, “completed less work than the 80th Congress, the Congress called ‘the worst’ by Truman.” The
Washington Post
reported that “almost as many major bills have been sent back to committee as have been reported to Congress in the first place.” In the House, there was at least some leadership, thanks to the commanding figure of Ray burn; the Senate was in almost total disarray. “Congress is being overcome by its own inertia,” said
Fortune;
“the legislative machinery, which is the heart of democracy, is breaking down.” The era’s most authoritative work on Capitol Hill, the 689-page
The Legislative Process in Congress
, was being written even as the Eighty-second session was going forward. Its author, the political scientist George B. Galloway, concluded that “Many people are losing faith in American democracy because of its repeated and prolonged failures to perform its implicit promises.”

Although both houses of Congress were indicted for failure, the focus of criticism was shifting gradually to the Senate. In part, this was because of its larger role in foreign affairs. “Now that the United States has become the leading democratic world power, the future of the Senate is a subject of general concern,” Galloway wrote. “The quality of its performance and the nature of its output have worldwide repercussions.” And in part, it was because of its role in domestic affairs. The absenteeism that had plagued Majority Leaders Barkley and Lucas was even worse under McFarland, so the body couldn’t even pass urgently needed domestic legislation on which both parties agreed. When, for example, increased federal financing of medical facilities—a measure supported by both parties and favorably reported by the Senate Labor Committee—was brought to the floor, so few of its supporters were present that it was defeated. The passage of time had had its inevitable effect on the seniority problem. The Senate Appropriations Committee had become a particularly notorious bottleneck because, as Drew Pearson reported, “Tennessee’s never-say-die Kenneth McKellar, grandpa of the Senate, is now so feeble that he can no longer run the Committee, which passes on all the funds for the entire government. Yet he is so jealous of his powers as chairman that he won’t let another senator run it.” And then there was the Senate’s peculiar institution. The responsibility for Congress’ failures, Galloway wrote, “lies in large part at the door of Senate filibusters…. Filibusters have delayed for decades the enactment of social legislation passed by the House of Representatives and desired by a majority of the American people.”

Neither Galloway nor any other realistic observer saw any substantial hope of even modifying, much less abolishing, the sacred senatorial tradition of unlimited debate—or of passing other needed procedural reforms. Despite almost universal disapproval of the seniority system, Senator Mike Monroney was only expressing another universal sentiment when he said that any Senate Majority Leader who suggested a substitute for that system “would be cutting his political throat.”

Mounting concern was expressed on the Senate floor. “The Senate of the United States has in recent years been losing its hold on the confidence and respect of the American people,” Senator Morse said. “The complaint is universal.” Condemning the “blind rush” to pass legislation in the session’s closing days, the Acting Minority Leader, Republican Guy Cordon, said, “We are mighty close today to acting not as a parliamentary body but like members of a group in a riot…. I feel that I am part of a vast failure of public duty.” There was even being heard, still faintly but with increasing insistence, the suggestion that perhaps America no longer needed a Senate, that in a modern world a Senate might be an anachronism, as Galloway put it, a “relic of the days when checks and balances were needed to prevent tyranny,” that perhaps the Senate’s powers should be reduced—or that perhaps the Senate should be abolished entirely. That, Galloway pointed out, would only be in keeping with a world-wide
trend: “the decay of second chambers and the trend toward unicameralism in the democratic constitutions of the post-war world are widespread phenomena”; twenty-nine democratic countries now had unicameral legislatures. And perhaps that would be the fate of America’s Senate, too. “The obsolescence of the Senate, so the argument runs, together with its tolerance of unlimited and irrelevant debate and its frequent absenteeism, may lead the American people in time to recognize that their second chamber is not indispensable,” Galloway wrote.

T
HE PREDICTIONS THAT INOFFENSIVENESS
and amiability would prove insufficient qualifications for the job of Senate Majority Leader had been borne out—embarrassingly—at Ernest McFarland’s very first encounter with the press following his election to the post. When the reporters crowding around the four Democratic congressional leaders—House Majority Leader John McCormack and whip Percy Priest, McFarland and Johnson from the Senate—as they emerged from their first Monday conference at the White House asked likable old “Mac” for a statement, he stammered for a moment, and then said, “Uh, John is more experienced at this than I am.” McCormack and the reporters reminded him that the statement traditionally came from the Senate Leader. Well, McFarland finally said, “The President expressed confidence in Congress and what we can get done in the next two years.” Only when reporters pressed him did he think to add that of course “I share his confidence. I think we will be able to work out a unity that will be good for the country.” McFarland seemed to have forgotten a piece of news that the conference participants had agreed should be told to the press. When Lyndon Johnson whispered a reminder, McFarland told him to make the announcement himself, and Johnson thereupon stated that his “Preparedness Committee” would start hearings on the Selective Service Bill that week, and that “General [George] Marshall will make the first statement.” Only then did McFarland remember what he had been supposed to say to demonstrate Democratic unity on the draft issue: “The President emphasized that General Marshall’s proposal will be an Administration proposal, and Marshall will speak for all departments and agencies of the government. If you hear any rumors to the contrary they are not true.” And he delivered that message with the air of an actor trying to remember difficult lines. McFarland was not to improve with practice; it was soon an open secret on Capitol Hill that Old Mac just couldn’t think very fast on his feet. Nor was this man who said, “I just try to get along with people,” adept at the exercise of power. When a senator—even one whose vote was crucial—told him that he was going to vote against an Administration proposal, McFarland’s standard response was: “That’s all right. I’ll never ask you to vote against your convictions.” As William White was to say: “There are not many times when a Senate leader can afford to ‘get tough.’ To McFarland there was no time at all.”