Master of the Senate (96 page)

Impressed though they were by the personality, however, the northern Democrats did not forget the principles for which Russell stood. When he met with “the New Jersey leaders,” George Reedy was to recall, “he got the same reaction from all of them: ‘My God, Senator, we’d like to support you. You’re the best man around, but we can’t support a southerner.’” There was to be no support for Russell in Maine, none in New Jersey, and none in the other northern or western states—New York, Pennsylvania, Wyoming, California, Colorado—to which he traveled. He had thought Big Ed Johnson’s support would give him Colorado, he had counted on Colorado. But when he arrived in Denver, Big Ed had to give him bad news: there was no hope that the delegation would support him; the only possibility of keeping Colorado’s votes out of the Harriman column would be to persuade the delegation to vote for a favorite son on the early ballots. Then the two senators walked out on a stage together before the delegation; despite Ed Johnson’s immense popularity in his home state, there was little applause, and even some scattered boos. From Colorado, Russell flew to California, where he had hoped for a bloc of votes in California’s big delegation. The response in California was very cold.

A
RRIVING AT THE CONVENTION
that was being held in the International Amphitheatre, near the Chicago stockyards, a week after Eisenhower had ended forever Robert Taft’s dream of following his father into the White House (and had chosen as his running mate thirty-nine-year-old freshman Senator Richard M. Nixon), Russell and his Georgia supporters still believed he had a chance to win. Walter George himself was going to deliver the nominating speech, the great Walter George whose speeches could change votes in the Senate. “They thought Walter George could work a miracle,” John Connally recalls. More dispassionate observers were startled at their optimism. Visiting Russell’s campaign headquarters, two Georgians with experience in national politics and an awareness that by this time Russell had no realistic “expectations of getting the nomination,” Chip Robert, the knowledgeable Georgia national committeeman, and Roy V. Harris, publisher of the
Augusta Courier
, got what Harris calls a “surprise.” Harris recalls convention manager Cocke saying, “‘Now, we’re going to get so many votes on the first ballot, and … on the seventh ballot Dick will be nominated. This state will come, and this state will come.’ And I scratched my head, and I’d look at Chip and he’d look back at me… We found out they were serious. We found out Dick was serious….”

The jammed Amphitheatre was not the Senate Chamber; Walter George tried in vain to make himself heard as the hundreds of delegates would not stop talking among themselves. With only a handful of exceptions, the only marchers in the parade for Russell (in which, one article stated, “Senator Lyndon Johnson was among the most enthusiastic paraders”) were southern delegates. The convention’s decision had in fact become a foregone conclusion on
the day before George spoke, for on that day the Governor of the host state had spoken, welcoming the delegates—and had demonstrated vividly why
he
was known as a great orator. “In one day,” the
New York Times
reported, “all the confused and unchannelled currents seemed to converge upon the shrinking figure of Governor Adlai Stevenson as the one and only, the almost automatic, choice of the Convention,” and Stevenson had finally agreed that if he was chosen, he would run.

Even so, Russell refused to give up hope. After the second ballot, on which he had received 268 votes, only five more than he had received in 1948 when he hadn’t campaigned and almost all of them again from the South, “things began to fall apart,” says Ernest Vandiver Jr., a Georgia politician working on Russell’s staff, and the Arizona delegation (which in loyalty to Carl Hayden had added twelve votes to the southern total) “came to me asking me if I could release them from their pledge so that they could vote for the winning candidate, so … I called the Senator and told him the situation and he said, ‘No, I won’t release. No, I want them to stick in there. You can’t ever tell what might happen.’” On the second ballot, the move to Stevenson began, and he won easily on the third, with Russell receiving 261 votes.

F
OR A MAN WHO LOVED
and idealized his “Southland” as deeply as did Richard Russell to be told to his face that no southerner could be President was, in Goldsmith’s phrase, a “visceral blow.” He “had indeed known, rationally, that he could not be nominated. Before campaigning in the North, however, he had not heard political leaders … tell him to his face that he was obviously the best-qualified candidate, but that they could not support a Southerner.” As George Reedy says, “It’s one thing to know something academically; it’s another to have it hit you in the face.”

He had planned to go on a fishing vacation off the Florida coast arranged by George Smathers—Lyndon Johnson and two or three other senators would be along—following the convention, but now he said he wouldn’t be going. He returned to Winder for a while. For the first time, he began to complain about his health, talking about a pain in his left shoulder, a cough, headaches.

Johnson arranged for Russell to go to the Mayo Clinic, where a week-long physical examination found his health “excellent.” Although he was still only fifty-five years old, however, aides would notice, from this time on, a loss of what they called “energy,” and when, that fall, he visited the Johnson Ranch, Lady Bird noticed the same thing. “Energy; it’s my feeling that after 1952 he did not exhibit as much of that,” she says. And her sharp eyes noticed other changes, which she felt she understood. “I have a distinct feeling” that the 1952 campaign “was sort of a benchmark in his life,” she was to say. “It was the time when he really put his chips in and tried, and not receiving the nomination probably caused him to retreat into the ivory tower … sort of withdrew him
from the field of battle to some extent.” Upon his return to Capitol Hill, some journalists noticed the change, although none of them would do more than hint at it in print until after his death in 1971. Samuel Shaffer of
Newsweek
would write at that time that “Something happened internally to Richard Russell after the 1952 campaign.” He “lost some of his zest for legislative battles.” And George Reedy, who often heard Russell refer to that campaign “with some bitterness,” began to notice creeping into Russell’s conversation “a little querulous tone” that had not been there before. “He had just been hurt so deeply.”

This bitterness was to have a significant effect on Lyndon Johnson’s career. It made Russell more determined than ever that one day the North would accept the South back into the nation in the most dramatic manner possible, by electing a southerner to be its President. He wouldn’t be that southerner, he knew that now; he would never try for the presidency again, he told people around him. But by the end of 1952, it was becoming clear to a number of these people that Richard Russell had settled on the southerner it was to be.

Russell’s growing affection for Lyndon Johnson had now been cemented by gratitude—gratitude for Johnson’s help in his campaign. “He [Johnson] worked very earnestly in my behalf,” Russell would say. “He did everything in the world—everything he could…. He really meant it when he supported me in ’52.” And beyond these personal considerations—and far more important to Russell in matters vital to the South—during the campaign Lyndon Johnson had demonstrated a political qualification that the Georgian, from his own experience, now understood was essential for any southerner who wanted to become President.

Watching Johnson talking familiarly at the convention to delegates and political leaders from New York, from Chicago, from Montana—from all across the North—Russell had seen that these men knew the Texan and liked him, these men whose feeling toward most southerners was contempt. What other southern senator was a friend of Dubinsky? What other southern senator
knew
Dubinsky? He was already, of course, aware that in Washington Johnson was a member not only of southern but of New Deal circles, a pal not only of John Stennis and Lister Hill but of Tommy Corcoran and Abe Fortas—one of the relatively few men in Washington to have a foot firmly in both camps. Before he had taken his campaign north, Richard Russell might not have realized fully the importance of such a national acquaintance, an acquaintance on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, but he realized it now. If his goal—to make a southerner President—was to be realized, that southerner, while absolutely committed to “constitutional principles,” would have to be someone with whom northerners, even northern liberals, were nonetheless comfortable. With at least one southern senator committed, Russell believed, to “constitutional principles,” northerners were comfortable already.

Johnson possessed other qualifications that Russell now understood to be essential. A national campaign, he had learned, was indeed “a new league,”
requiring financing on a scale of which he had previously been unaware. Johnson, he had seen, had access to such financing—easy access. Watching Johnson discuss politics with northern delegates, Russell had seen that he understood their states’ internal politics. Russell’s knowledge of, and ability to relate to, intra-state politics across the country had been unequaled by that of any other senator. There was, he now saw, another senator who knew, and could relate to, these politics perhaps as well as he.

And there were yet other qualities, vaguer to define but even more important. During the campaign, Richard Russell and Lyndon Johnson had spent many hours in conversation not about senatorial or Armed Services Committee strategy but about political strategy on a national scale. Who can recognize a master of politics better than another master? As succeeding years were to make clear, Richard Russell was indeed beginning, if very gradually and hardly perceptibly at first, to withdraw from “the field of battle.” But he was not abandoning the field to his enemies, to the enemies of the South. He believed that he had found a new champion, younger, with more “zest,” who would, relying always on his advice and counsel, take the field in his place. Not long after the campaign, Richard Russell, who so much wanted a southerner to become President, began to make his feelings clear in confidential conversations. A year before, he had “soberly predicted” that “Lyndon Johnson could be President and would make a good one.” Now, shortly after the 1952 election, George Reedy “became aware that Russell wanted to make Johnson President.”

“Russell made no bones whatsoever” about that, Reedy recalls. “He was quite open with me. He was determined to elect a southerner president. And he could not see any other southerners that could be elected president except LBJ. He talked about that to me as early as 1953.” As to his reasons, it is impossible today to know with certainty what they were, or what weight to give to each. Reedy says that Russell saw Johnson “as an instrument of this purpose—to heal the breach so the South would no longer be a separate part of the nation.” But did he also mean something more—something darker? By far the best book on the Russell-Johnson relationship is a little-known work,
Colleagues
, by John A. Goldsmith, who began covering the Senate for the United Press in 1946 and was head of its Senate bureau for almost twenty years. In his book, Goldsmith speaks of Russell’s “hope that Johnson might … become a President attuned to southern culture.” What does that last phrase mean? Did it mean attuned to southern culture in the best sense, in the sense of civility and graciousness and tradition and the political creativity that made southerners principal architects of America’s system of government? Or did it also mean attuned to that worst aspect of southern culture—that blacks had to be kept in their place? Had Johnson convinced Russell that in his heart he believed that? When one reads words spoken at the time by members of Russell’s Southern Caucus, the senators to whom the Georgian explained his reasoning to secure their support of Johnson, it is difficult to escape that suspicion. In 1957, Herman
Talmadge would arrive in the Senate as a new senator from Georgia, and receive Richard Russell’s explanation of why he was supporting Johnson for the presidency: because “Johnson would be more favorable to the South’s position on States’ Rights and local self-government.” In Talmadge’s view, that statement was not about breach-healing, as became apparent when the author interviewed Russell’s fellow Georgia senator in January, 2000. Johnson, Talmadge said, “gave me the impression” that his views on the appropriate relationship between white and black Americans were the views of the southern senators. And what were Johnson’s views, Talmadge was asked. “Master and servant,” Talmadge replied. Didn’t Johnson have any sympathy for the plight of blacks? “None indicated,” Talmadge said. “He was with us in his heart,” he said—and, he said, that was what Russell believed. It was when he was asked if Russell was boosting Johnson for President out of friendship that John Stennis replied that Russell “wasn’t a bosom friend of anyone when it came to … constitutional principles.” The concept of segregation—continued segregation—was of course deeply embedded in “States’ Rights,” “local self-government,” and “constitutional principles.” A Georgia friend once told Russell, “You’re just fighting a delaying action.” Russell replied: “I know, but I
am
trying to delay it—ten years if I’m not lucky, two hundred years if I am.” A delay of some decades would be a considerable victory. And, during those decades, a lot could happen. The mood of the country could change, could become more conservative, more supportive of the southern way of life, or at least less overwhelmingly determined that that way be changed. A long enough delay might almost be the equivalent of victory for the South. Did Russell feel that one way of ensuring a long enough delay would be to make Lyndon Johnson President? Whatever the reason, Richard Russell, Reedy says, “was very determined to elect Lyndon Johnson President of the United States.”

T
HE LESSON OF
R
ICHARD
R
USSELL’S DOOMED
, quixotic campaign of 1952 was not lost on Lyndon Johnson, for whom it had the deepest implications. After all the acknowledgments that Russell was the best qualified candidate for the presidency—acknowledgments that had come from the North as well as the South—he had received virtually no northern votes at the Democratic Convention; the fact that he had never had a realistic chance of winning his party’s nomination, much less the presidency, had been made dramatically clear. And if the strongest possible southern candidate had never had a chance,
no
southern candidate had a chance. If Lyndon Johnson had ever entertained a hope of winning the nomination as a candidate identified largely with the South, Russell’s fate demonstrated conclusively the futility of such a hope. In order to attain his great goal, Johnson would have to make the party and the nation stop thinking of him as a southerner.