Master of the Senate (85 page)

Hunt declined to give that help, Mooney says, but Johnson had more success with another appeal, this one recounted by Bobby Baker. “LBJ,” Baker was to say in
Wheeling and Dealing
, “wore a sad hound dog’s look as he said, ‘Bobby, we’re broke and we owe $39,000 for a hotel bill out here. See what you can do.’ … I went to Bart Lytton, president of Lytton Savings and Loan, with the sad tale. He required persuading. ‘I don’t have that much available,’ he said. ‘Even if I did I wouldn’t want it on record that I’d given it.’ I assured Lytton that he’d be protected and stressed the benefits of incurring LBJ’s goodwill. ‘On the other hand,’ I said, ‘he can be a miserable prick if he feels someone has let him down.’ Bart groaned, but motioned me into a public men’s room nearby.” In one of the stalls, Baker was to write, Lytton “gave me two $10,000 personal checks made out to cash. I delivered them to LBJ, who took one look and said, ‘Hell, Bobby, this is just a little over half of it.’” Nonetheless, “Senator Johnson pocketed the checks, though grumbling under his breath….”

Johnson sometimes also took a personal hand in distributing money to other senators.

“On one occasion,” Baker was to write, “I was asked to transmit $5,000 from Lyndon B. Johnson” to Styles Bridges. “As was the Washington practice, Johnson handed me the boodle in cash. ‘Bobby,’ he said, ‘Styles Bridges is throwing an “appreciation dinner” for himself up in New Hampshire sometime next week. Fly up there and drop this in the kitty and be damn sure that Styles knows it comes from me.’” On another occasion, in 1957, Joe Kilgore relates, Johnson gave a contribution to William Blakely, who had been appointed to Texas’ other senatorial seat to replace the retiring Price Daniel, and was running for the permanent seat in a special election.

“He [Johnson] called me to come over to his office,” Kilgore says. “When I got there, he said, ‘Come on, I’m meeting Bill Blakely down on the sidewalk.’ We left his office and went down in an elevator. While we were in the elevator, he said, ‘Here, hold this,’ and stuck something in my hand. I looked down and
it was a big wad of money. When we got out of the elevator, we went into a closet—I think it was a janitorial closet. He told me to count the money. It was twenty thousand dollars. In one-hundred-dollar bills. I knew why he wanted me to count it. He wanted a witness. So that he could prove that he had given this money. He gave the money to Blakely, saying, ‘I just want you to know I’m on your side.’”

Johnson’s use of money to help finance the campaigns of his colleagues had begun even before he became whip. In 1950, he had funneled Texas cash into the campaign of an old House acquaintance who was trying to move to the Senate, Earle Clements of Kentucky. Now, in 1952, there were senatorial elections again, and Johnson used financing on a broader scale. And Johnson’s financing of colleagues’ campaigns was not limited to money he distributed himself. Stuart Symington, making his first try for the Senate in 1952, had wealthy financial backers in Missouri, but as one of them was to write, “We can’t raise money in the quantities you Texans can.” In September and October, 1952, Johnson raised it—largely from Herman Brown. “I gave him some money and I sent a man down to help him at Lyndon’s instigation,” Brown would recall years later, after he had become enraged by Symington’s refusal to vote for further natural gas deregulation. “But Symington has very little ability, the least of any of them. I’ve got a nigger chauffeur who’s got more ability than Symington—although maybe I shouldn’t express myself so frankly.”

How much did Brown, and other Texans, contribute at Johnson’s instigation to Symington’s 1952 Missouri senatorial campaign? In a painful interview with the author in 1982, Symington at first attempted to minimize the amount and to contend that it had been given only in the form of checks, checks that, as legally required, had been reported. The author then showed him contradictory information. “Well, I remember Johnson sent my campaign manager somewhere to get money for me. It wasn’t much—five thousand or ten thousand dollars—but it was a nice gesture.” The author asked if the amount might have been higher. “I’m pretty certain it wasn’t fifteen thousand,” Symington said. “Maybe it was ten thousand. Nobody could buy me for ten thousand dollars.” Asked if the money had been cash, Symington said, “I don’t know. My worst characteristic as a politician was my inability to raise money.” The money—at least much of it—
was
in cash: in hundred-dollar bills. And the amount may have been far higher than Symington’s estimate. Ten thousand dollars—in cash—was the amount contributed to Symington in 1952 by oilman Wesley West alone. Arthur Stehling, one of Johnson’s lawyers, was to recall sitting in Johnson’s ranch house during the fall of 1952, listening to Johnson discuss over the telephone the financial needs of various senators: “He would say, ‘Well, I’ve got twenty for him, and twenty for him and thirty for him.’ Symington was always the highest.” Twenty or thirty thousand dollars were paltry amounts by the fund-raising standards that would be in place at the end of the twentieth century; they were quite substantial amounts by mid-century standards. And Johnson’s use of money, like his use of Rayburn, was getting him
what he wanted, as Ed Clark saw. “Roosevelt would pay people off in conversation or speeches,” Clark says. “Johnson went right to the heart of it. The nitty-gritty. ‘How much do you have to have to make this campaign go?’” When senators returned to Washington after the 1952 elections, there was a new awareness on the north side of the Capitol. There was a vast source of campaign funds down in Texas, and the conduit to it—the only conduit to it for most non-Texas senators, their only access to this money they might need badly one day—was Lyndon Johnson.

Lyndon was the guy to see if you wanted to get a bill off the Calendar, Lyndon was the guy to see if you were having trouble getting it passed in the House, Lyndon was the guy to see for campaign funds. There wasn’t anything Lyndon was using these facts for as yet. But in ways not yet visible, power was starting to accumulate around him—ready to be used.

W
ITH HIS COLLEAGUES
, still, no favor was too small for Johnson to perform, no favor too big. Nothing was too much trouble. In March, 1952, Harry Byrd’s thirty-five-year-old daughter, Westwood, died after falling from her horse during a fox hunt. Her funeral was to be held in Winchester, Virginia, near the Byrd family home, Rosemont. Byrd had always treated Johnson with notable reserve, a reserve that sometimes seemed to border on dislike, and Winchester was seventy-two miles from Washington, but Johnson decided to attend.

Not wanting to go alone, he persuaded Warren Magnuson to accompany him, telling Maggie he would pick him up at the Shoreham and drive him down. When the morning of the funeral dawned with heavy rain, Magnuson tried to demur, but Johnson told him he had no choice but to go, that “everyone in the Senate is going to be there—including the Republicans.”

But, as Lyndon Johnson was to report to Horace Busby when he telephoned him later that day, “You know how many United States senators were there? Two! Maggie and me!” When he saw that, he told Busby, he had “almost got cold feet” and decided it might be better to simply turn around and go home. But he stayed, and he and Magnuson stood in the cemetery, holding their hats in their hands in the rain, on the other side of the grave from the Byrd family, directly across from the Senator, whose head was bowed in grief. And suddenly, while the minister was reading the service, Harry Byrd looked up and saw them. “He looked at us, and then he looked back at me,” Johnson told Busby. “I don’t know what that look meant, but I’ll bet a dollar to a dime that was a very important look.”

B
ECAUSE
J
OHNSON WAS WHIP
, he had a reason for doing what before he had needed excuses for doing: for meeting and talking with other senators, for making friends with them, for selling himself, man to man, one on one.

He sold on the Senate floor. No longer did he have to sit at his desk in the
Chamber with only Horace Busby for company, hoping that some senator would “come by and say something to him.” Senators wanting information, senators wanting favors—he had plenty of senators coming by to say something to him now. And he made the most of the opportunity.

It wasn’t only senators from his own party who came by. During his early days in the Senate, Republican leaders had ignored him; he had not been important enough. Now, however, he was Assistant Democratic Leader, and often in charge of the Democratic side of the floor. Most Democrats ridiculed the Republican Leader, Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska, one of Dean Acheson’s “primitives,” for his malapropisms on the Senate floor (“Indigo China”; the “Chief Joints of Staff”; India’s fierce soldiers were “gherkins”; not infrequently he would refer to a colleague as “the senator from junior”), and were careful to keep out of his way, not only because in private life Wherry was an undertaker who loved his work, and if one were not careful, one found oneself listening to unpleasantly intimate details of the embalming process, but because so intense was Wherry’s “hatred” for Democrats that he was likely to take offense at some innocuous remark a Democratic senator made in conversation, and, when he was thus offended, he would delight in objecting to, and thereby blocking, the offender’s most precious private bills. Several older senators advised Johnson to avoid Wherry. But avoidance would not suit Johnson’s purposes; instead, he threw himself in Wherry’s path as often as possible, employing on him his customary techniques—as Alfred Steinberg was to write: “Johnson made it a point to be diffident in Wherry’s presence”—and demonstrating that their effectiveness was bipartisan. Wherry began to wander across the center aisle to talk to Johnson with evident fondness. And when during an evening session convened to pass a Truman Administration bill, Wherry announced that he was going to block it by objecting to every private bill on the Calendar to stall the Senate and block consideration of the President’s measure, Johnson, who had one of the private bills, approached the Nebraskan and said, in a tone that a listener described as “a plea to a superior”: “You know how I never do anything except Senate work.” Tonight, he said, he had made an exception and had promised to go to one of Gwen Cafritz’s dinner parties. “So couldn’t you just let my one little bill go through?” Acquiescing with a smile, Wherry added, “I’d rather do business with you than anybody else on your side, Lyndon.” Sometimes, in fact, Lyndon Johnson would even have a conversation with Bob Taft. In McFarland’s absence, Johnson would be sitting in the Leader’s front-row seat on the center aisle. Taft, managing some piece of legislation on the floor, would sit at the Republican first desk directly across the aisle—temptingly near. At first, the proximity did Johnson no good; the dour Taft resisted every Johnson device to draw him into conversation. So Johnson came up with a ploy irresistible unless Taft wanted to be blatantly discourteous. Leaning across the center aisle, holding a copy of the bill that was under discussion, Johnson would whisper that he had forgotten his eyeglasses, and, with an apology for his constant forget-fulness,
would ask Taft to read a particular paragraph to him. Taft would do so, Johnson would be very grateful, and brief exchanges sometimes ensued. Although Johnson wasn’t close to the key Republican yet, he was getting closer.

He sold in the Democratic cloakroom, where the now-familiar tableau was still being repeated almost every day—Walter George pontificating from an easy chair, Lyndon Johnson, in the adjoining easy chair, listening reverently. Chatting with other Big Bulls in the cloakroom, often in similar, one-on-one conversations in adjoining armchairs or on a sofa, Johnson’s tone was as soft and calm as ever, his attitude as humble. Advice was still being sought: “I need your counsel on something,” or “I want to draw on your wisdom on something,” or “I need the counsel of a wise old head here.” Assistance was still being offered—with Senator Byrd, for example, assistance in counting. The Virginia squire was the most fervent of believers in a conservative economic policy, and when he was pushing a tax or budget proposal, he was anxious to know what the vote would be, but, patrician to the core, he had never been able to bring himself to ask a colleague how he planned to vote. After Johnson became whip, Byrd got this information without asking; Johnson had Bobby Baker ask, and then would relay the finding to Byrd—always offhandedly, subtly, as if he didn’t know how anxious Byrd was.

And in the cloakroom now, there was also, sometimes, a new tableau. Lyndon Johnson would be standing in the center of the long, narrow space between the couches. Senators wanting favors or information would be coming up to him, Bobby Baker would be darting to his side, whispering something in his ear, darting away again, working the telephones. Often, the Assistant Leader would be holding one of the long Senate tally sheets, and he would be writing numbers on it; sometimes, a telephone page would run up to him excitedly, saying that the White House was on the phone; Johnson would go over to one of the booths, take the call, and report what the numbers were. And, more and more frequently—when he was talking not with George or Byrd, but with one of the less powerful senators—as he talked, one of Lyndon Johnson’s long arms would come up and drape itself over his colleague’s shoulders, in warm camaraderie.

If the other arm wasn’t gesturing, it stayed by his side. In 1951 and 1952, Lyndon Johnson wasn’t grabbing lapels.

Not yet.

A
ND AS
, more and more frequently, senators needing something dropped by his office, he sold there, too. There the subject was politics and only politics, for to many senators, including the host, politics was the most important thing in life, and even senators who regarded themselves as experts on politics came to realize that Lyndon Johnson was worth listening to. When senators returned
to Washington after a recess to report, in relation to the President’s constantly fluctuating popularity, “Harry’s up” or “Harry’s down,” Johnson’s explanation of the trend was so cogent that senators would repeat it to others as if it had been their own. When Truman offered to back Eisenhower for the Democratic nomination, and when Eisenhower refused and then resigned from NATO, and speculation arose that he would seek the GOP nomination against Taft, Johnson always seemed to know the inside story. When speculation arose as to when Congress would adjourn for the year, it was Johnson who had the best overview of the business that still needed to be transacted—and how long it would take. When discussions of strategy arose, “Johnson would say, If you do
x
, then so-and-so will do
y
, and then such and such is likely to happen.” To Lyndon Johnson, some of his colleagues were beginning to realize, politics was a chess game, and he had the ability to see quite a few moves ahead. “Sometimes it was just amazing to listen to him,” Stuart Symington says.