Master of the Senate (108 page)

The substitute contained only two clauses. The first provided that no provision of a treaty could supersede the Constitution; the second that no “international agreement other than a treaty”—such as an executive agreement or the United Nations Charter—could become effective “as internal law in the United States … except by an act of Congress.”

Innocuous though the George Amendment may have been, however, it accomplished Johnson’s purposes. Since it contained none of the provisions to which internationalists had objected most strongly, it instantly attracted liberal and moderate support. And by reasserting the primacy of the Constitution over any treaty, it still contained a sufficient check on executive power so that the Old Guard—or at least all of it except its most rabidly isolationist members—could support it. Moreover, its wording, as Reedy was to say, “sounded very much like the language of the Bricker Amendment,” so it provided “a safe harbor to which Senators could flee who felt uneasy about the Bricker Amendment but who also felt compelled to vote for it under constituent pressure.” And its very introduction, on Wednesday, January 27, accomplished two of Johnson’s purposes: to move the Democrats to center stage on the issue, and to do so in the sympathetic role of presidential rescuer. “Within five minutes of the formal opening of the Senate’s long-awaited debate on the issue,” Walter George “momentarily seized the initiative for the Democrats,” White wrote in the
Times.
“Some Democrats privately said that Mr. George not only had moved ahead of the Republicans for the moment on the issue, but also that the effect of his effort would be greatly to reduce Republican embarrassment. Until today, the fight, in public at least, had been almost exclusively between the pro-Bricker and the pro-Eisenhower Republicans.”

Eisenhower was at first elated. “DDE not only has no objection to the George Amendment but actually believes it could work out to our advantage,” one of the President’s secretaries noted. “DDE believes this will get what we want on bipartisan basis.” Republican legislative leaders, feeling themselves rescued from an intra-party fight, breathed a sigh of relief. After calling on Ike the next morning, Ferguson, Millikin, and Majority Leader Knowland emerged from the White House full of optimism that “a broadly backed agreement was at hand.”

But the man who got what he wanted was not Eisenhower or Knowland but Lyndon Johnson. The Republican leaders arrived back at the Senate to find an enraged Bricker on the floor assailing the President for even considering replacing his amendment with George’s—and Bricker’s speech was so bitter that, White wrote, it “burned the last stick of any conceivable bridge remaining between his forces and the Eisenhower Administration.” And as the likely impact of newspaper coverage such as White’s sunk in, general Republican enthusiasm for the George proposal faded rapidly. At 4:57 p.m. on Thursday, Bedell Smith reported to Eisenhower that Senate “Republicans now feel they cannot accept the George Amendment and have it said that the Democrats had to save the GOP from fight on Bricker Amendment.” Republican senators, the
author Duane Tananbaum wrote, “were reluctant to let Democrats claim that they had saved President Eisenhower and the nation from extremists in the Republican Party.”

By Friday, Eisenhower himself was concerned over the same point. In a telephone call that afternoon, the President complained to Brownell that “pretty soon, Republicans will have nothing of their own to put in.” After Brownell raised an additional concern with the President—the possibility that the George Amendment, broad though its language might be, might one day be construed to limit a President’s powers to make war, or to prosecute a war as Commander-in-Chief—Eisenhower told his Attorney General to tell Know-land, “We couldn’t possibly accept the George Amendment without some qualifying language to protect power of the Pres. to carry out his duties as prescribed in the Constitution.” Knowland and Ferguson were trying to placate their fellow Old Guarders by working out a compromise text that retained some of Bricker’s language, but Eisenhower angrily rejected each attempt; he was, he told Press Secretary Jim Hagerty, “getting so tired of the name [of Bricker]. If it’s true that when you die the things that bothered you most are engraved on your skull, I am sure I’ll have there the mud and dirt of France during [the] invasion and the name of Senator Bricker.” And each angry outbreak on the Senate floor re-emphasized the fact that, as White put it, “The fight was fundamentally … between the Eisenhower wing of the Republican party and the Old Guard”—an Old Guard which would not compromise; Bricker said his supporters’ differences with the Administration reflected “fundamentally different philosophies of government.”

T
HE ANGRY SHOUTING MATCHES
on a relatively crowded Senate floor were, for the next month, to be succeeded by day after day of the more familiar Senate tableau, with only a handful of senators present while negotiations went on behind the scenes. The political reality, however, was not what was happening on the floor but what the press said about it, and as James Reston noted, “The headlines make it appear that an exciting debate is in process here. The papers are full of well-argued charge and countercharge, and it is easy for the reader to imagine 96 Senators all in their places and crowded galleries listening to an eloquent debate….” For an entire month, the “Bricker Debate” was on the front pages day after day—in the light Lyndon Johnson wanted it portrayed, as an exciting story of a no-holds-barred battle between a beleaguered President and his party, a battle in which the Democrats were coming to the President’s aid.

And when, on February 26, the day of voting finally arrived, the rest of Lyndon Johnson’s objectives were attained.

T
HE FLOOR OF THE
S
ENATE
C
HAMBER
wasn’t empty that day, and neither were the cloakrooms, for this was the showdown.

In the Republican cloakroom were more than a normal complement of representatives from the White House, for so great was the importance the Administration attached to the preservation of executive power that seven or eight of its congressional liaison men had divided the forty-eight Republican senators among them, and each was keeping an eye on his charges until the moment they pushed through the swinging cloakroom doors and went out on the floor to vote. Every few minutes, it seemed, the liaison men huddled and counted votes together.

In the Democratic cloakroom only one man was counting. Few counts that he had made in his life were more crucial.

Three proposals for a constitutional amendment were scheduled to be brought to the floor: the first was Bricker’s; the second was a brand-new proposal cobbled together at the last minute by Knowland and Ferguson with limits on the presidential power so minor that Eisenhower had privately agreed he could accept it; and the third was Walter George’s.

The first two were Republican, and Johnson didn’t want either of them to receive the necessary two-thirds vote. He wanted the final vote to be on a Democratic bill, the George Amendment, so that it would remain clear to press and public which party had taken the initiative. He had arranged therefore that when the Knowland-Ferguson Amendment was called, a Democratic senator would make a motion to substitute the George Amendment for it. That substitution motion required only a majority vote, and Johnson wanted the motion passed, to give Walter George the necessary pride-saving victory. Johnson didn’t want the George Amendment itself to pass, however, since it would reduce presidential powers that he wanted to keep unreduced. He wanted the amendment to win on that first vote, but lose on the last vote: the vote on passage of the amendment itself. Passage required not merely a majority but a two-thirds majority. Johnson didn’t want it to get the two-thirds.

Counting the Bricker Amendment vote was relatively simple, for many conservatives who had once supported it now preferred Walter George’s bill. When S.J. Res. 1 had initially been introduced a year before, nineteen of its sixty-four co-sponsors had been Democrats; Johnson and George between them had persuaded thirteen of those Democrats to defect, and there were enough additional Republican defections so that when, after the year’s delay that Johnson had arranged, the clerk finally called the roll on the measure, it failed of passage, 42 votes to 50; not only did the Bricker Amendment, once seemingly so certain of passage, not receive the necessary two-thirds of those voting, it did not receive even a simple majority.

The rest of the counting was much harder.

The vote to substitute the George Amendment for the Knowland-Ferguson Amendment had to be favorable, and it had to be favorable by a big margin—that was necessary for the party, to cement the Democratic initiative, and it was necessary for Walter George’s pride. But if the George Amendment had to be
substituted, it then had to be defeated, by failing to get the necessary two-thirds vote.

Johnson had, as
Newsweek
later put it, “passed the word to all party members: Vote for the George Amendment as a substitute, whether you are for or against the idea of changing the Constitution. Then after this gambit has succeeded in shunting aside … the Knowland substitute, do what you wish….” This, Lyndon Johnson felt, would ensure enough defections from Democratic liberals and moderates on the final vote—the vote on passage of the George Amendment itself—so that the measure would not receive the necessary two-thirds. But that final count was going to be uncomfortably close to two-thirds, and he couldn’t be certain which way some Republicans would vote—he tried to prepare for every eventuality, to guard against any unforeseen development. Although they personally disapproved of the George Amendment, a number of liberals from states in which opinion strongly favored a curb on presidential power were reluctant to vote against it. Johnson had obtained commitments from three such senators, Lister Hill of Alabama and Washington’s two senators, Magnuson and Jackson—all of whose seats were safe enough, and whose next election was far enough off—that although they would vote in favor of the George measure as a substitute, should their votes be needed to defeat it on the final vote, they would then switch and vote against it. A number of southerners personally opposed to the George Bill did not believe they could survive the next election if they were
ever
recorded voting against it. Johnson had persuaded Alabama’s John Sparkman and one or two other southerners that if necessary, they would absent themselves from the floor on the final vote so that, while not actually voting against George, their votes could not be part of the necessary two-thirds. But he was still worried. Standing in the center of the crowded Democratic cloakroom, senators milling around him, Bobby Baker darting to his side and away again, he kept nervously pulling the long tally sheet from his pocket and studying it through his glasses, counting and recounting. There were so many switches back and forth that he wasn’t putting numbers next to the senators’ names, since each switch would mean renumbering; he was using checkmarks instead. And sometimes, as a senator spoke to him, or Baker whispered something in his ear, or a piece of intelligence came to him from the Republican side, he would take a pen from his pocket and scratch out a checkmark on one side of the list, and make one on the other side, and then count again.

And, as it turned out, his caution was not unwarranted. Although Eisenhower’s aides, as one historian of the event has written, “continued, right up to the final vote” to lobby against the substitution of the George Amendment for the Knowland-Ferguson Amendment because the Administration wanted the final vote to be on a Republican bill, the substitution was approved, 61 to 30, and the only constitutional amendment left before the Senate was then the Democratic amendment. But the substitution vote showed the threat to Johnson’s
ultimate objective to be quite grave. The sixty-one votes George had received
was
, with ninety-one senators voting, the necessary two-thirds. As the vote was announced, wire service reporters ran up the steps of the Press Gallery and teletype machines began clattering out the prediction that on the next roll call the Senate would almost certainly approve the George Amendment as a constitutional amendment.

A switch of a single vote would block the George Amendment, and Johnson, in his caution, had those three liberal votes available to switch. That had seemed like enough, but as senators were milling around the well of the Chamber waiting for the final vote, there was a development that no one had predicted or even considered. Red-faced and waving his arms, William Knowland was suddenly standing at his desk—the front-row, center-aisle Majority Leader’s desk—shouting for recognition from Vice President Nixon, above him in the presiding officer’s chair. And when Knowland got it, he strode to a desk in the third row, and said, “Mr. President, I have left the desk of Majority Leader because I wish to make it very clear that what I say is not said as Majority Leader, but is said in my capacity as an individual Senator”—and what he said was that he had just decided, “because of the very real need for some steps to be taken to curb … the gradual encroachment by the Executive on the legislative power of the Congress,” and because the only amendment left on the floor was George’s, that he would not vote against the George Amendment, as he had done on the first vote, but instead would switch sides and vote for it. Tumult erupted on the floor—not only would Knowland’s vote, added to the sixty-one votes that the George Amendment had received on the previous roll call, raise its total to sixty-two, but other Republican conservatives would probably follow their leader into the pro-George camp.

Herbert Lehman, who earnestly believed that “if we are not to accept a position of isolation,” the President must have the same freedom to conduct foreign affairs as he had had in the past, and who believed that the amendment to end that freedom was on the verge of passage, said, “Mr. President, what we are doing is one of the most dangerous and inexcusable things that any great legislative body can do.” Infuriated southerners and members of the Republican Old Guard started shouting, “Vote! Vote! Vote!” to drown him out, but Lehman said, “This is an important matter, and I will have my say on it.” Wringing his hands in his distress, the stocky little New Yorker began to speak again, wandering up and down the center aisle. A furious Burnet Maybank demanded a point of order. “The Senator who is speaking must stand at his desk,” he shouted. Lehman returned to his desk, but a moment later, carried away by his emotions as he spoke, he forgot himself and stepped away again—to be admonished again. As he continued speaking, flushed and angry, he was interrupted repeatedly by the shouts of “Vote! Vote!” but he refused to yield until he had finished his statement. Walter George, rising to make a final plea—“Mark my words, now, gentlemen: you are going to [pass] a constitutional
amendment…. You will do it now, or you will do it later. This is the best amendment which can be worked out”—was saluted by Bricker, and saluted Bricker in return, weeping, so emotional had he become, and Nixon finally called for the yeas and nays.