Master of the Senate (109 page)

The Minority Leader’s desk was vacant. Lyndon Johnson was in the cloakroom, calling in his commitments. Hill, Magnuson, and Jackson lived up to them, switching to vote against the bill. There was also an unexpected Republican switch—by Ralph Flanders—against it. But two Republicans, Millikin and Robert Hendrickson, did indeed follow Knowland and switched to vote for it, so that there were still only thirty votes against it—and sixty for it. The margin was precisely the two-thirds necessary for passage. Johnson was standing just inside the cloakroom doors with Sparkman, who had voted for the bill, ready to throw him against it; he was gripping Sparkman’s arm, on the verge of pushing him through the doors to vote; Sparkman would remember for a long time how hard Johnson’s big fingers grasped his biceps. But Johnson had another card to play before it would be necessary to play that one, reluctant as it was. Harley Kilgore of West Virginia, a Democratic opponent of restrictions on the President who had voted against the George Amendment on the previous ballot, had not voted on this one because he wasn’t present. Because of the effects of either alcohol or influenza, he had fallen into a very deep sleep on a couch in his office. Men had run to get him, and had finally, with difficulty, brought him to the Chamber, and the oak and bronze doors in the rear swung open, and there he was. Nixon looked at him expectantly, but all Kilgore did was stare groggily back. He said nothing, Nixon said nothing. For a long moment, the Chamber was still, staring at Kilgore. Johnson was in the Chamber now, moving fast. Grabbing Magnuson, he whispered: “Stall.” “Mr. President,” Magnuson shouted, “how am I recorded voting?” A clerk studied the voting list, and of course said what everyone already knew, that Magnuson had been recorded against the resolution. While that charade was being enacted, Kilgore was pulling himself together and finally he nodded at Nixon. “The Senator from West Virginia,” Nixon said.

“Mr. Kilgore,” the clerk said.

“No,” Kilgore said. He walked slowly and deliberately down the center aisle and sank into a seat in the front row, as the clerk turned and handed the tally sheet up to Nixon. “On this roll call,” the Vice President said, “the yeas are sixty, the nays are thirty-one. Two-thirds of the Senators present not having voted in the affirmative, the joint resolution is rejected.”

T
HE CASTING OF THE DECISIVE VOTE
by a Democrat emphasized the crucial role the Democrats had played in defeating the amendment that would have curbed Dwight Eisenhower’s power. They had supplied more of the “nay” votes that had kept the George Amendment from passing than the Republicans:
sixteen Democratic nays, only fourteen Republican (Independent Morse had also voted nay). Republicans had, in fact, voted for the amendment—and against their own President—by a margin of 32 to 14. Eisenhower had won a big victory in the battle that had begun with Bricker’s introduction of S.J. Res.
I
, for he had defeated the Old Guard isolationists. But Lyndon Johnson had won a bigger victory.

Johnson had hit, in fact, every target at which he had aimed in the battle. Wanting to show the public a hero President, unparalleled in his knowledge of foreign affairs, being opposed in foreign affairs by his own party, and being rescued from that party by the Democrats, he had succeeded in doing exactly that. Wanting to demonstrate that despite GOP control of both White House and Senate, the Democrats had taken the initiative on the issue, he had, by arranging for the final vote to be not on a Republican but on a Democratic bill, done exactly that. He had wanted the Bricker Amendment defeated, and it had been defeated. He had wanted the George Amendment substituted, at first, and it had been substituted. He had wanted the George Amendment blocked at last, and at last it had been blocked.

Moreover, it had been blocked by a single vote. That was a feat dramatic in itself. But even more dramatic was the fact (which the public never learned) that had that single-vote margin not materialized—had, for example, Harley Kilgore not been able to make it to the Chamber—Lyndon Johnson would still have won. His hand had been on John Sparkman’s arm; he could have sent Sparkman out to switch. And if Sparkman’s vote had not been sufficient, Lyndon Johnson had had other votes ready. He had had almost no margin for error—and he hadn’t made any errors. The man who a long time before, when he had still been young, had won the reputation of being “the very best at counting” had shown that the reputation was deserved.

L
YNDON
J
OHNSON WAS HAILED
for the results of the fight on the Bricker Amendment, and for the other victories he had masterminded—on Yalta and on Bohlen—over the future shape of American foreign policy. The praise was justified. His initial overall decision not to oppose but to support a President of the rival party was political strategy of the highest order. It helped his party, and it helped himself.

But it was a masterstroke on levels higher than the political. As Stephen Ambrose has written, the Republican Old Guard “wanted major policy and structural changes … a flat repudiation of the Yalta agreements,” a constitutional amendment banning future executive agreements, action “to free the East European satellites…. For the nation and the world, these were matters of transcendent importance.” In these matters, the defeat of the Old Guard was accomplished at least in part—and not in small part—through Johnson’s maneuvers. Through them, he increased his party’s popularity and his personal
power. But through them also, he helped defend and make possible a continuation of a foreign policy that had produced the United Nations, the Greek and Turkish alliances, the Marshall Plan, NATO, the strategy of containment—the policy that had shaped the postwar world. Anyone who believes that the history of that world would have been the same had the senatorial Old Guard triumphed in the aftermath of the Republicans’ 1952 election victory has only to look back to the time, after the first Great War, when the Senate was run not by Lyndon Johnson but by Henry Cabot Lodge. The isolationist Old Guard had felt sure that the 1950s would be their time, and liberals had felt uneasily that the Old Guard was right. Whatever the motives behind Lyndon Johnson’s strategy, that strategy had helped ensure that the 1950s would not be such a time.

The icing on this triumphal cake was Johnson’s success in achieving his objectives without awareness of what he had done from supporters who disapproved of those objectives. He himself, of course, had voted for the George Amendment, and he told his reactionary bankrollers that he intended to keep on doing so. On March 3, he wrote Ed Clark, the attorney and lobbyist for many of them: “We had a mighty close one last week on the George Amendment, losing by one vote. It will be taken up again, and we hope the final result will be different.” And over dinner on St. Joe or at Falfurrias, or over drinks in 8-F, he assured Herman Brown, and Richardson and Murchison and Cullen and Hunt, that he had been fighting all along for some measure that would prevent further usurpation of power, and they believed him.

W
HILE
L
YNDON
J
OHNSON’S STRATEGY
on foreign policy dovetailed with his country’s interests from his first days as Democratic Leader, on domestic issues, and in particular on the dominant domestic issue, his arrival on the side of the angels was delayed, and came only after there was little risk involved.

It had been in February, 1950, that Wisconsin’s junior senator told a women’s club in Wheeling, West Virginia, “I have here in my hand a list of 205” State Department employees “who have been named as members of the Communist Party … and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department,” words that touched off the decade’s Red Scare.

The national bonfire thus ignited by Republican Joseph R. McCarthy—a bonfire that was to consume or sear, leaving scars that sometimes never healed, the reputations of thousands of innocent Americans—was to blaze for four years and ten months, and during virtually all that time, a period longer than America’s participation in the Second World War, not only liberals and concerned journalists but more than a few Democratic senators argued that the Senate should take a stand against him. It was in the Senate that a stand should be taken, they said, for McCarthy was using the Senate floor as his platform (it was the fact that many of his charges were made in the Senate that gave them a veneer of respectability), and his Senate chairmanships—of the Government Operations Committee and its Permanent Investigations Subcommittee (Roy Cohn, chief counsel)—as his base of operations. And in his abusive language about targets and colleagues on the Senate floor, and his misuse of senatorial powers of investigation and privilege, it was not merely basic human tenets of fairness and justice that were being violated, again and again, by the man who was, in Robert Sherrill’s words, “the most influential demagogue the United States has ever produced,” but specific Senate rules of decorum and civility. It was therefore under Senate rules that he could most fittingly be brought to book, and the tarring, month by month, of innocent Americans halted. From the
time of that first speech in February, 1950, there were attempts to move in the Senate against this consummate liar (among his inventions was a war record for himself: he claimed to have been known in the Pacific as “Tail-Gunner Joe,” and in 1951 asked for, and received, a Distinguished Flying Cross for flying twenty-five combat missions, although he had never been a tail-gunner but rather an intelligence officer whose primary duty was to sit at a desk and debrief pilots upon their returns from missions). When, several weeks after his Wheeling speech, he repeated on the Senate floor his charge that “there are presently in the State Department a very sizable group of active Communists” (although not, apparently, as sizable as had been the case before: the number was reduced from 205 to 57; it would thereafter fluctuate from speech to speech), the Senate established a special subcommittee, headed by Millard Tydings, to investigate his allegations, and after extensive hearings concluded that they were “a fraud and a hoax” not only on the American people but on the Senate itself. And, as Robert Byrd has written in his history of the Senate, “from the day he gave his address in 1950 … McCarthy was constantly under fire” from liberal senators—from liberals on both sides of the aisle. When, on June 1, 1950, Margaret Chase Smith delivered on the Senate floor her “Declaration of Conscience” (“Recently [the Senate’s] deliberative character has too often been debased to the level of a forum of hate and character assassination, sheltered by the shield of congressional immunity”), six fellow Republicans supported her. And repeatedly Johnson, as whip first and then as leader of the party opposed to McCarthy’s, was asked by liberals both in and out of the Senate to take steps to at least put the party on record against not only McCarthy but McCarthyism, the technique of guilt by association and innuendo that was poisoning the nation’s political dialogue. “Something, somebody, has got to stop this man McCarthy,” Bill White said to him in 1951. “You simply must put the Democratic party on the attack against him.” But no help from Lyndon Johnson was forthcoming.

Considerations against going on the attack were understandable. Not a few senators agreed with McCarthy. His fears of Communist infiltration of the government were no more paranoid than those of Republican reactionaries like William Jenner or Homer Capehart, or of Molly Malone, who walked into a Washington cocktail party one evening, and loudly announced: “I’m for the son of a bitch and I’m for his methods. And I don’t want to talk about him any more tonight.” In addition, as long as the Wisconsin demagogue confined his attacks to Democratic targets, his party regarded him as a considerable asset in congressional elections in the Midwest. It was for a combination of these reasons that in 1950 Robert Taft told reporters that McCarthy should “keep talking and if one case doesn’t work out, he should proceed with another one.” And among the senators who agreed were more than a few of the conservative, ardently anti-Communist southerners who were the base of Johnson’s support.

Many senators feared McCarthy—with reason. Instead of retreating in the
face of the Tydings’ subcommittee report, he attacked, going into Maryland to campaign against the patrician Senator, using a fake photograph that “showed” Tydings listening intently to Communist Party leader Earl Browder. In 1938, Tydings had turned back Franklin Roosevelt’s attempt to purge him; he couldn’t turn back McCarthy’s. In November, 1950, he lost to the obscure John Marshall Butler by a startling forty thousand votes. The lesson, underlined by the unexpected victories that November of two Republican candidates for whom McCarthy had campaigned, Herman Welker of Idaho and Wallace F. Bennett of Utah, was not lost on the Senate. After observing the early days of its 1951 session, William White wrote: “There was a time, only a few months ago,” when many Republican senators “snubbed” McCarthy—when they “quietly arranged matters in their daily routine so as never to pass close to the desk of their colleague, Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. With a seeming casualness they avoided any public friendliness…. The desk of Senator McCarthy of Wisconsin is not, these days, avoided very often by his Republican associates. Senator McCarthy is, by any standards, the most politically powerful first-term senator in this Congress.” Nor, White reported, was the fear confined to the Republican side of the aisle. At the first Democratic conference that January, 1951, “there ran through the caucus” a “general expression of fear that what had happened to Mr. Tydings could happen to any other man in the Senate. ‘For whom does the bell toll?’ one Democrat asked. ‘It tolls for thee.’” The extent to which McCarthy had intimidated the Senate was definitively demonstrated during a speech in which he was presenting his “evidence” of Communist infiltration of the State Department, standing behind a lectern piled high with documents on the various “cases” that proved his point, and saying that any senator who wanted to examine the evidence was free to do so. One senator tried to take him up on the offer. With his funny waddling walk and his heart full of courage, Herbert Lehman came over to McCarthy’s desk and stood in front of it, his hand held out for the documents. Then, as Stewart Alsop wrote,