Master of the Senate (94 page)

Humphrey could see with his own eyes that Richard Russell also regarded Lyndon Johnson as his protégé, that the senators with whom Johnson was on the most intimate terms were the southerners, but Humphrey felt, after those talks with Johnson, that he understood that. “Johnson never was a captive of the southern bloc,” he says. “He was trying to be a captain of them, rather than a
captive…. He was, I think, biding his time, so to speak, and building his contacts.” He was not yet fully convinced of Johnson’s liberalism, but he was convinced that there was much more liberalism in his new friend than he had previously believed.

Was Johnson also reading in Humphrey his loneliness, the loneliness of a gregarious man, shunned in the Senate, who badly needed a friend? Of all the things that Lyndon Johnson made Hubert Humphrey believe, in those years when one was not yet President of the United States and the other was not yet his Vice President, one of the most important in binding Humphrey to him was to convince Humphrey that Lyndon Johnson was his friend.

Johnson liked him, Humphrey would say, he was sure of it. “We were hitting it off.” Looking back at those Senate years in 1972, from a very different vantage point, he would say, “I really believe that Lyndon Johnson looked upon me—I’ve tried to think about this even after the Vice Presidency and all—I think it’s fair to say he liked me as an individual, as a human being.” He thought he understood why. “Johnson had a sense of humor, and he could kid with me,” he would say. “Johnson didn’t enjoy talking with most liberals. He didn’t think they had a sense of humor.” And there was in Johnson’s attitude an implicit assumption that they were comrades-in-arms, friends fighting for the same cause. He not only showed Humphrey a mountaintop—that both of them would rise (although because he, Johnson, was unlucky enough to be from Texas, Humphrey would rise higher)—but that they would be on the mountain-top
together.
Once, on the Senate floor the day after one of the huge Democratic Jefferson-Jackson dinners, he told Humphrey in a low, confidential voice that he was tired of “the same old phonograph records of yesterday” that had been played at the dinner. “We’ve many fine governors and members of Congress, fresh faces, who weren’t heard from,” he said. “We need new voices. Someday we’ll give our own party.”

In letters he wrote to Humphrey from Texas during the long Senate recesses, he used over and over again the word Humphrey wanted to hear. “I have been sorely missing your wise advice and friendly counsel,” he wrote in 1953. “I am looking forward to many more years of service with a good friend,” he wrote in 1954. In a letter at a crucial point in their relationship, in 1956, he wrote assuring him, “You will be on the scene as a national leader long after the others are forgotten.

“And you are my friend.”

“You are a wonderful friend, and I will never forget it,” he wrote in 1957, and, also in 1957, “My deep thanks go to you for … being my everlasting friend.”

And Humphrey responded with the same word. “The privilege of your friendship is a priceless gift,” he wrote. “Thanks so much for your warm words of friendship,” he wrote.

And there was one further key element in the Humphrey text, one element
that to Lyndon Johnson, to whom personality was all-important, may have been the most important of all. It was a quality that could have been discerned, at this stage of Hubert Humphrey’s career, only by an unusually gifted reader of men, for at this stage Humphrey was regarded as a very strong man, strong and tough enough to have stood up to the South. But Lyndon Johnson was just such a reader. Hubert Humphrey may have been strong and tough, Johnson saw, but he wasn’t strong
enough
or tough
enough.
Most importantly, he wasn’t as strong, as tough, as he himself was.

At the bottom of Humphrey’s character, as Johnson saw, was a fundamental sweetness, a gentleness, a reluctance to cause pain; a desire, if he fought with someone, to later seek a reconciliation, to let bygones be bygones, to shake hands and be friends again. And to Lyndon Johnson that meant that at the bottom of Humphrey’s character, beneath the strength and the ambition and the energy, there was weakness. Years later, he would define this crucial difference between them with Johnsonian vividness of phrase. At the time, they were both in a dispute with labor leader Walter Reuther, whose right arm had long been permanently crippled by a would-be assassin’s gunshot. Reuther had come to Washington to meet with them individually, and Johnson told an assistant: “You know the difference between Hubert and me? When Hubert sits across from Reuther and Reuther’s got that limp hand stuck in his pocket and starts talking … Hubert will sit there smiling away and thinking all the time, ‘How can I get his hand out of his pocket so I can shake it?’ When Reuther sits across from
me
,” Lyndon Johnson said, “I’m smiling and thinking all the time, ‘How can I get that hand out of his pocket—so I can cut his balls off!’”

Hubert Humphrey was trying to use him, just as he was trying to use Hubert Humphrey. Lyndon Johnson knew that. But he knew something else, too. If two men were each trying to use the other, the tougher one would win—and he, Lyndon Johnson, was the tougher.

L
YNDON
J
OHNSON BEGAN
, although he was still only Assistant Leader, to prepare the way for the time when, as Leader, he would be able to make use of what he had learned about Hubert Humphrey. Of all the political science lessons taught in SOB 231, the most important, for the teacher’s purpose, was about the need for compromise.

To convince Humphrey of the efficacy—indeed, the necessity—of compromise, Johnson played on one of the Minnesotan’s deepest desires: his wish not only to fight for social justice, but to win; to help, instead of merely talking about helping, the poor and underprivileged, the “people! Human beings!” that he saw as the main issue of the twentieth century; on Humphrey’s desire for genuine accomplishment.

As Humphrey would later relate, Johnson would often telephone him in his office at about seven-thirty in the evening. “Hubert, come over. There’s
something I want to talk to you about,” he would say. If Humphrey protested that his family was waiting, Johnson would say, “Damn it, Hubert, you’ve got to make up your mind whether you’re going to be a good father or a good senator.” And when Humphrey arrived, Johnson would, evening after evening, play variations on the same theme: “Your speeches are accomplishing nothing,” he would say. Humphrey should learn to compromise. “Otherwise, you’ll suffer the fate of those crazies, those bomb-thrower types like Paul Douglas, Wayne Morse, Herbert Lehman. You’ll be ignored, and get nothing accomplished you want.” Humphrey, the man who had refused to compromise, not only came to believe this—“Compromise is not a dirty word,” he would say. “The Constitution itself represents the first great national compromise”—but to believe it with all the fervor of the convert, the convert who is the most enthusiastic of believers. Not only, he was to say, was compromise not a dirty word; those who refuse to compromise are a threat; “the purveyors of perfection,” as he came to call them, “are dangerous when they … move self-righteously to dominate. There are those who live by the strict rule that whatever they think right is necessarily right. They will compromise on nothing…. These rigid minds, which arise on both the left and the right, leave no room for other points of view, for differing human needs…. Pragmatism is the better method.” The fact that some of his fellow liberal senators were to come to look upon him as, in his own words, one of the “unprincipled compromisers” bothered him for a while, he was to say; “it doesn’t bother me any more at all. I felt it was important that we inch along even if we couldn’t gallop along, at least that we trot a little bit.”

T
HE CONVERSATIONS IN 231
were in a way a testing—a test (of which Humphrey was evidently unaware) of whether Humphrey could and would be the means to Johnson’s ends—and Humphrey evidently passed. Slowly but steadily Johnson began to move Humphrey into a position where he could one day be a bridge between liberals and conservatives, and an instrument of compromise.

During that 1951 session, Johnson began telling Walter George, “Senator, Hubert isn’t such a bad fellow, you know.” He told George how interested Humphrey was in foreign affairs. When Humphrey walked into the cloakroom, Johnson would bring him over to George’s armchair and begin discussing foreign affairs; Humphrey by this time had realized the necessity of listening when George was pontificating, and he listened. And when he himself occasionally interjected a thought, George listened, too; it was difficult to be in a conversation with Hubert Humphrey and not be aware of his intelligence. And of his warmth; the more Walter George saw of Humphrey, the more he began, despite himself, to like him. Simultaneously, Johnson was working on Russell, telling him that Humphrey’s views on agriculture were remarkably like his
own—which was, in fact, the case; “the South and the Midwest have always been together on farm legislation,” Humphrey would say. “We needed each other.” Once or twice, when Johnson invited Humphrey over for a drink and a talk, Russell would be there, too. Then Johnson told Russell that Hubert would appreciate having his opinion on an agricultural bill he wanted to introduce. “Humphrey utilized this opportunity to show deference by his repeated ‘sir’ to Russell when they discussed the measure,” Steinberg relates. Russell, too, as John Goldsmith puts it, “came to appreciate Humphrey’s intelligence.” And he came to appreciate his sincerity; Russell had a passion to help the poor farmers of the South, Humphrey had a passion to help the poor farmers of the Midwest, and this shared passion brought them a little closer together. And always Johnson was putting in a good word for Hubert with Russell.

“Johnson was actually becoming a bridge for me with some of the more conservative members of the Senate,” Humphrey was to say. Their feelings about him had eased to a point at which Russell Long of Louisiana, his neighbor in Chevy Chase, felt able to bring him one day to the round table in the senators’ private dining room. “Since there was seldom talk of issues or legislation, lunch was usually a relaxed social hour of storytelling, chatter about the sports page, whatever was not political or controversial.” The southern senators started to get to know Hubert Humphrey not as a fighter for civil rights but as a human being. And, like most people who got to know Hubert Humphrey as a human being, they liked him. And Humphrey knew who had gotten them to like him. “My apprenticeship of isolation drew to a close as I got to know Lyndon Johnson,” he was to say; it was Johnson who brought even “Dick Russell around to look with some favor on me.” He knew that his relationship with the southerners—his key to acceptance in the Senate, to the end of his time as a “pariah”—was due to Lyndon Johnson. He knew that Johnson had given him a great gift. And, being an intelligent man, he knew that what had been given could be taken away.

I
F IN 1951 AND 1952
, Hubert Humphrey was charmed and impressed by Lyndon Johnson, friends with him and eager to stay friends, he was nevertheless still the dominant figure in the Senate’s liberal bloc and not at all disposed to relinquish that role. His loyalty to that bloc was as undivided as ever. On controversial issues, his views and those of Johnson and the conservatives were not similar, and Johnson didn’t try to modify his views. Nor did Johnson make any attempts during those two years, the years when he was only Assistant Leader, to make use of Humphrey’s new understanding of the virtues of compromise, nor of Humphrey’s new, easier relationship with the southerners, a relationship that would have made it easier for Humphrey to deal with them on the liberals’ behalf. And if Johnson had made such attempts, they would not have succeeded. Humphrey was aware that whatever Johnson’s true philosophy might
be, the Texan was very much part of the southern bloc and represented its interests. While during those years, Johnson, as Doris Kearns Goodwin puts it, “seemed to foresee that someday Humphrey might be useful to him,” that day had not yet come. For it to come, an additional, final ingredient would have to be added to the relationship between the two senators: power, more power than an Assistant Leader possessed.

N
INETEEN FIFTY-TWO
, of course, was a presidential election year. Lyndon Johnson would not be forty-four years old until August of that year, and he was still a first-term senator, but neither of those facts precluded a try for the great goal which never left his mind. An interview published in January demonstrated that, and demonstrated also that he viewed the Senate as only a way station on the road to that goal.

The interview was conducted—symbolically—in the Capitol’s glittering President’s Room, with Johnson and Alfred Steinberg, who was writing an article on the House and Senate whips for
Nation’s Business
magazine, sitting, under the immense gold-plated chandelier and the richly colored Brumidi frescoes, in two low, deep-burgundy leather armchairs on wheels.

Johnson, Steinberg recalls, “was outraged when he learned he would be only one of four men featured in the article.” Wheeling his chair so close to Steinberg’s that their knees touched, and leaning forward so that their noses were only inches apart, he pressed the reporter back at an uncomfortable angle, seized one of his lapels to hold him steady, and asked loudly, “Why don’t you do a whole big article on me alone?” When Steinberg asked (“from my strange sitting position”), “What would the pitch be?—that you might be a Vice-Presidential candidate in 1952?” Johnson said, this time in a whisper and after a glance around to make sure that no one else was present, “Vice President, hell! Who wants that?” His voice boomed out again. “President! That’s the angle you want to write about me.”

Steinberg recalls that when “I smiled at the obvious impossibility of Johnson’s ever becoming President,” Johnson said, “You can build up to it by saying how I run both houses of Congress right now.” And when Steinberg asked for an explanation of “this extraordinary remark,” Johnson said, “Well, right here in the Senate I have to do all of Boob McFarland’s work because he can’t do any of it. And then every afternoon I go over to Sam Rayburn’s place.” One of Johnson’s hands was still firmly gripping the reporter’s lapel, but Johnson’s
other hand had been unoccupied. Now, for emphasis it took a firm grip on one of the reporter’s thighs. “He tells me all about the problems he’s facing in the House, and I tell him how to handle them. So that’s how come I’m running everything here in the Capitol.”