Master of the Senate (90 page)

Even while visiting journalists were writing about how relaxed Lyndon Johnson was on the ranch, members of his staff knew that when journalists weren’t around, Lyndon Johnson’s behavior was in some areas as frenetic in Texas as in Washington. George Reedy was to write that he would sometimes embark on “a wild drinking bout. He was not an alcoholic or a heavy drinker in the commonly accepted sense of those words. But there were occasions when he would pour down Scotch and soda in a virtually mechanical motion in rhythm with the terrible tension building visibly within him and communicating itself to his listeners. The warning signs were unmistakable and those with past experience tried to get away before the inevitable flood of invective. As they found out, it was rarely possible.” Reedy wrote that “there did not appear to be any relationship between the locale and the episode. It could happen in his Capitol office; in the living room of his ranch”; other members of his staff say that it actually happened more often on the ranch, both because in Washington he felt more need to keep his guard up and not “lose control,” and because in Texas he didn’t have Bobby Baker measuring the drinks.

His behavior in Texas was similar to his Washington behavior in other ways. The journalist Hugh Sidey would write about Lady Bird: “Her constant pacification of the beast in her husband was her greatest achievement…. He caressed other women in front of her.” In Washington, there was in these public “caresses” at least some restraint. In Texas, there was less. Horace Busby was to recall sitting in the back seat of Johnson’s car while Johnson was showing the ranch to a friend of Lady Bird’s who had come to visit. Johnson was driving, with Lady Bird in the front seat at the window and the friend sitting
between them. Leaning over the front seat to ask a question, Busby saw that Johnson had his hand “under the woman’s skirt and was having a big time, right there in front of Lady Bird.” (Busby says that “Lady Bird didn’t say a word,” but “after a while” the woman “slapped his hand.”) The journalist Eliot Janeway was to speak of Johnson’s “harem,” saying that “one way you could visualize Lady Bird is as the queen in
Anna and the King of Siam.
It worked that way; you know the scene where she sits at the table and all the babes—Lady Bird was head wife.”

B
ACK IN
W
ASHINGTON
, Lyndon Johnson, as the Democrats’ Assistant Leader, was having ample opportunity to “read” his party’s senators—to learn what it was they wanted,
really
wanted—and to make use of what he learned, and into one senator he was reading very deeply indeed. It was during 1951 and 1952, William White was to say, that “Lyndon Johnson fixed his restless, reckoning eyes on Hubert Humphrey.”

If Johnson were to become Democratic Leader, he would find himself faced with the problem that previous Democratic senatorial Leaders had been unable to solve, and that had been a major cause of their failure and humiliation: the hostility-filled chasm between the party’s ardent liberals and defiant conservatives that kept a Leader from presenting a unified front. For him to avoid his predecessors’ fate, he would have to find a bridge over that seemingly unbridgeable gulf, some means of compromise between two factions so bitterly divided that no compromise seemed possible. And since he was regarded as a conservative and would be a Leader placed in power by the conservative bloc, the instrument of compromise would have to be found on the liberal side of the chasm.

As Nathaniel Hawthorne said of Andrew Jackson, “His native strength … compelled every man to be his tool that came within his reach; and the more cunning the individual might be, it served only to make him the sharper tool.” No man, in 1951, would have seemed less likely to be an instrument of compromise than the senator Johnson chose; no senator, indeed, would have seemed less likely to be anyone’s tool. But the more cunning the man, the sharper the tool—the more uncompromising the man, the better tool he would be for the making of compromises.

Hubert Horatio Humphrey had burst on the national stage as the very symbol—courageous, passionate—of unwillingness to compromise, as the defiantly unyielding champion of a noble cause.

The stage was the 1948 Democratic National Convention, the last non-air-conditioned
convention ever held by either major party, and the temperature on the podium in Philadelphia’s Convention Hall was ninety-three degrees. It was the convention’s third day, the day scheduled for President Truman’s renomination and acceptance speech, but the delegates’ mood, dispirited and downcast because Truman was considered to have no chance to win (in the hall, Alben Barkley was to recall, “the very air smelled of defeat”), had turned angry, over civil rights.

Party leaders, up to the President himself, had concluded that if any slim chance of victory existed, that chance rested on the only section of the country that, in good times and bad, remained solidly Democratic, and they felt that that chance would disappear completely if the party antagonized the South. They had, therefore, agreed that the platform’s civil rights plank would be bland and unspecific enough to satisfy the South; it even contained a sentence—“We call upon the Congress to exert its full authority to the limit of its constitutional powers to protect these rights”—particularly agreeable to segregationists, who could, as journalist Irwin Ross was to put it, “interpret [it] as meaning that little federal action was possible, for in their view Congress’ constitutional powers were severely limited by the doctrine of states’ rights.” And the convention’s organizers had tried to muffle dissent over the civil rights plank by including only about twenty liberals (and only four from the militant Americans for Democratic Action) on the 108-member Platform Committee.

Refusing to bow to the committee’s majority, however, these liberals had held out during the first two days of the convention for a much stronger, uncompromising, civil rights plank, one that endorsed the proposals Truman himself had made two years earlier. They had even rallied some support in the committee, largely because of Humphrey, the thirty-seven-year-old Mayor of Minneapolis, Minnesota, who seemed to have a devotion to civil rights, and who, as Mayor, had not only secured in his city the passage of the nation’s first effective Fair Employment Practices ordinance, but had also worked doggedly to erase the city’s previous reputation as “the anti-Semitism capital of America.”

When, fifteen months earlier, sophisticated eastern liberal leaders had gotten their first look at Humphrey during an ADA Midwest organizational conference in Chicago, he had seemed very unimpressive, with his overly somber black suit, a Phi Beta Kappa key dangling ostentatiously from a gold chain across his vest, and a penchant for farmyard anecdotes so corny they made the Ivy Leaguers wince—until he rose to speak. Decades later, Harvard-educated Joseph Rauh could still recall how “dazzled” he had been by the young Mayor’s passion and sincerity, how he had brought the audience to its feet, applauding and cheering, and how, during the long evening of talk that followed, Humphrey had won their hearts. As uncompromising on the page as on the platform, he had demanded in an article he wrote for the
Progressive
that the Democratic Party and the Administration “lead the fight for every principle” in the “To Secure
These Rights” report. “It is,” he wrote, “all or nothing.” And now, in a steaming meeting room in Philadelphia’s Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, he still wouldn’t compromise, fighting so unflinchingly against party leaders for a stronger civil rights plank that, after one heated exchange, Senator Scott Lucas of Illinois muttered angrily, “Who does this pip-squeak think he is?”—the first of a dozen times Lucas was to use that word, sputtering with anger, in the angry hours that followed. At first, only four or five other committee members supported Humphrey, but as the hours passed and he kept fighting, sweat dripping down his thin, pale face, others began to be swayed by arguments that were not only moral but political; didn’t they understand, he demanded of the stony-faced party elders on the committee, that the black vote was becoming pivotal in the North’s big cities, and that, if the Democratic Party didn’t stand up for a strong plank, they might lose that vote? The battle went on for two days and nights; Humphrey’s friends, knowing that when he got involved in a fight, he forgot about eating, sent him in food (he was, despite their efforts, to lose eighteen pounds from an already thin frame during the convention). At the end, the liberals’ proposals lost by a big majority, and the “moderate” plank was adopted; calling it “a sellout to states’ rights,” “a bunch of generalities,” Humphrey said that when, the following day, the platform was brought to the convention floor for ratification, the liberals would offer a minority plank, and ask the convention as a whole to adopt it instead of the moderate proposal.

Over and over again, that evening and all through the night, the liberals were warned about the fate of the Democratic Party if they persisted, that the southerners might even walk out of the convention and form their own party, that at the very least the party would be split wide open and the last hopes of victory would vanish. And warnings were issued also about the fate of Humphrey, who the liberals all assumed would lead the floor fight, for, as one of his biographers was to put it, only his oratory could “give them a chance … on the convention floor.” Pulling Rauh aside in a hotel corridor, Truman’s assistant for minority affairs, David K. Niles, laid it on the line: “Joe, you won’t get fifty votes on your minority plank, and all you’ll do is ruin the chances of the Number One prospect for liberalism in the country.” Another member of the Administration was angrier: “You ADA bastards aren’t going to tell us what to do,” he said.

Humphrey was told to his face that speaking for the minority plank would ruin—permanently—his own career; that, as Ross reported, “he was sacrificing a brilliant future for a crackpot crusade. ‘You’ll split the party wide open if you do this. You’ll kill any chances we have of winning in November.’” And for many hours of that night, Rauh recalls, Humphrey “was not at all sure what to do…. He was reluctant to make a big fight and speech on the floor.” He was well aware that, “personally,” as Ross put it, “he had much at stake”—starting with his own upcoming bid for the Senate. “If he won, he was likely to be one of the national leaders of the party….” And, as Ross puts it: “Humphrey’s personal
sympathies were firmly engaged in the cause, of that his colleagues never had any doubt; on the other hand, he was a professional politician who was being asked to challenge the entire national leadership of the party.”

Humphrey himself was to recall that “It was sobering … we were opposed by all of the party hierarchy.” He was well aware, he was to say, that the customary course in such a situation was to compromise. “I knew that the traditional thing to do was to make a gesture toward what was right in terms of civil rights, but not so tough a gesture that the South would leave the Democratic coalition.”

But, Humphrey was also to say, some issues were beyond compromise. “For me personally and for the party, the time had come to suffer whatever the consequences.” At about five o’clock in the morning, after he and a small group of liberal friends had been talking for hours in a hotel room, he said abruptly, “I’ll do it.” His friend Orville Freeman recalls him saying, “If there is one thing I believe in in this crazy business, it’s civil rights. Regardless of what happens, we are going to do it. Now get the hell out of here and let me write a speech and get some sleep.” And the next afternoon, after the majority plank had been proposed, Hubert Humphrey, in a stifling hall (the Secret Service had closed all the doors in anticipation of Truman’s arrival to accept the nomination) packed to the rafters with hot, bored delegates impatient to hear the President—many of them hardly knew who Humphrey was—stepped to the microphone.

For once he paused for a long moment before beginning to speak, as if he was gathering himself, a very thin figure perspiring so heavily under the glare of the lights that sweat made his black hair glisten and ran down his high forehead; and his face, as David McCullough puts it, was “shining,” with sweat and sincerity. “No braver David ever faced a more powerful Goliath,” Paul Douglas, who was sitting in the throng below him, was to say twenty years later. “I can see Hubert still, his face shining with an incandescent inner light.” And as he began to speak, his words slashing across the murmur of the restless throng, “the audience,” as one writer put it, “grew quiet, suddenly aware that someone they wanted to listen to was talking.”

For once his speech was short—only eight minutes long, in fact, only thirty-seven sentences.

And by the time Hubert Humphrey was halfway through those sentences, his head tilted back, his jaw thrust out, his upraised right hand clenched into a fist, the audience was cheering every one—even before he reached the climax, and said, his voice ringing across the hall, “To those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights—I say to them, we are one hundred and seventy-two years late.

“To those who say this bill is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this—the time has arrived in America. The time has arrived for the Democratic party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”

“People,” Hubert Humphrey cried, in a phrase that just burst out of him; it was not in the written text. “People! Human beings!—this is the issue of the twentieth century.” “In these times of world economic, political and spiritual—above all, spiritual—crisis, we cannot and we must not turn back from the path so plainly before us. That path has already led us through many valleys of the shadows of death. Now is the time to recall those who were left on the path of American freedom. Our land is now, more than ever before, the last best hope on earth. I know that we can—know that we shall—begin here the fuller and richer realization of that hope—that promise—of a land where all men are truly free and equal.”