Master of the Senate (112 page)

“The size of the majority,” as Oshinsky notes, “was impressive indeed.” Lyndon Johnson had lined the Democrats up in a solid front—from Lehman to Eastland. He had achieved Democratic unity on still another issue, and thereby helped end McCarthy’s reign of terror. “Whatever you say about his delaying and delaying, well past the point when it was necessary, and allowing this inquisition, with all its human suffering to go on,” nonetheless Johnson “in rounding up those votes” accomplished something “that was really difficult,” Paul Douglas’ administrative aide, Frank McCulloch, was to say. Douglas himself was to call Johnson “splendid on McCarthy.” Yet the censure, as Oshinsky notes, was voted “on rather narrow grounds.” “We have condemned the individual, but we have not yet repudiated the ‘ism,’” Herbert Lehman said.

Moreover, the condemnation vote was taken on December 2, 1954; the vote to bring McCarthy’s career to a conclusion was taken only after that conclusion was foregone. Oshinsky says that McCarthy “could have been stopped rather quickly”—and almost certainly he could have been stopped far more quickly than he was. By the time the censure vote was finally taken, McCarthy’s support from the American people was very low—and, except for the Taft wing, so was his support in the Senate.

His Senate support had, indeed, been low for some time. The attitude of the three Democratic subcommittee members at the Army-McCarthy hearings had demonstrated that in April. Scoop Jackson had confronted McCarthy’s staff on the doctored photograph, and Symington had confronted McCarthy himself on so many occasions, and so directly and uncompromisingly, that an enraged McCarthy had called him “Sanctimonious Stu” to his face. And if these two Democratic moderate liberals had clearly shown their hostility to McCarthy, so had the subcommittee’s Democratic conservative member, the ironbound McClellan, who more than once turned down the table and lectured McCarthy in terms quite harsh by Senate standards, going so far as to tell him bluntly, on one occasion when he had reversed the names of two witnesses, “Get your names straight,” and on other occasions telling him flatly that he was
breaking the law in revealing classified information, and that he, McClellan, would not allow him to do so. Between Jackson, Symington, and McClellan, all segments of the Senate Democrats had been represented at those hearings except for the most “ardent” liberals—who were, of course, McCarthy’s bitter enemies. Had Lyndon Johnson not been so efficient and persuasive in lining the Democrats up behind a censure resolution, there might conceivably have been a few Democratic votes against the resolution, but only a very few: Democratic liberal and moderate support for curbing McCarthy had been evident well before April. Given Republican moderate support for curbing McCarthy—support also evident well before April, 1954—Senate opposition to a resolution was effectively limited to the GOP’s Taft wing. Despite the mounting toll of McCarthy victims month after month, Johnson had waited to move against him until it suited his purposes to do so. He had acted not as a mobilizer or enunciator of opinion against the unprincipled demagogue who was using the Senate as his platform, but only as a coordinator by which that opinion, already formed, could be expressed.

He had had his reasons. If he had moved against McCarthy too early, he might have lost—and increased McCarthy’s strength. If he had moved before a substantial number of Republicans had become disillusioned with the Wisconsin demagogue, the issue might have become a partisan one, with the Democrats on the less popular side of the issue. Feeling, moreover, that “Joe will go that extra mile to destroy you,” and that McCarthy might have been made aware, through the Texas oilmen who were his allies, of damaging information about his finances, he was very wary about taking him on until he had been sufficiently discredited that an attack from him would not cause as much damage as it had previously. If he had played too prominent a role in the opposition to McCarthy he might have alienated the oil barons who were McCarthy’s principal financial supporters, and thus jeopardized the future financial support he himself would need. For all these reasons, Lyndon Johnson didn’t move against Joe McCarthy until the time had come when moving wouldn’t hurt him, and when he did move, he stayed sufficiently behind the scenes so that his own alliance with the Texas reactionaries would not be weakened. Johnson biographer Robert Dallek acknowledges that “Johnson’s role in ending McCarthy’s influence should not be exaggerated.” In the McCarthy affair, Lyndon Johnson had demonstrated his legislative skill—and had demonstrated how this skill was subordinated to pragmatism.

J
OHNSON’S STRATEGY OF BIPARTISANSHIP
was vindicated in the November, 1954, elections. The Democrats regained control of the House. In the Senate, rather than lose additional seats—the fate that had been widely predicted two years previously—they gained one, giving them forty-eight to forty-seven for the Republicans.

The key to control of the Senate was therefore the ninety-sixth senator, Wayne Morse.

Morse had been feuding with Johnson—it had been only a few months since he had said derisively, “Lyndon Johnson represents Lyndon Johnson”—but if the former Republican would vote with the Democrats in organizing the new Senate, they would have a majority. The time for feuding was over; it was time for a deal. Telephoning Morse, Johnson said that Morse could have any committee assignment that a
Majority Leader
had to offer.

Morse understood the proposal, but said he would have to think it over. Johnson facilitated his thinking. While he was still in Texas, he said that “Morse never should have been kicked off his committees”; upon his return to Washington, he told a group of reporters, “I don’t know what Senator Morse may want, but whatever he wants, he’s going to get it—if I’ve got it to give.” What Morse wanted was Foreign Relations. Johnson checked with the committee’s ranking Democrat, Walter George—and, as always, with Richard Russell. With a chance to regain their lost chairmanships, what did their dislike—contempt, in fact—for the Oregonian matter? Morse announced he would vote with the Democrats; Johnson announced Morse’s assignment not only to Foreign Relations but to Banking and Currency as well, and added that he would also keep his seat on the District Committee. “He would serve with distinction in any post, and we decided to give him three,” Johnson said. On January 4, 1955, Lyndon Johnson was re-elected—by acclamation—to the leadership of the Senate Democrats. As he had become, at the age of forty-four, the youngest Minority Leader in the history of the United States, so he was now, at forty-six, the youngest Majority Leader in the history of the United States.

•    •    •

A
ND NOW THAT
L
YNDON
J
OHNSON
was Majority Leader, the Majority Leader was powerful.

For two years, Johnson had had the power of a Minority Leader—but only of a Minority Leader—over scheduling: over determining the order of business on the floor, over deciding when a bill vital to a senator’s career would be allowed to come to the floor, over deciding
if
the bill would come to the floor. He had been able to make suggestions or requests—but only suggestions or requests—to the Majority Leader about holding back one bill or speeding up another, about coordinating, and making rational, the arrival of legislation on the Calendar and on the floor. His party’s minority status had restricted him to monitoring bills’ progress; he couldn’t direct it. Now he had the power of a Majority Leader, who had the privilege of first recognition, who could use that privilege to schedule, who alone could say, and have his words assented to: “I move that the Senate proceed to the consideration of…”

The scheduling power of previous Majority Leaders had been diluted by the degree to which they exercised that power merely as agents—rubber stamps, in effect—of their party’s Policy Committee. But Johnson had made the committee his “private rubber stamp.”

For previous Majority Leaders, the scheduling power had been further diluted by the power of the Standing Committees, whose chairmen had moved bills forward and finally brought them to a vote within their committees at their own pace, so that the bills’ arrival on the Senate Calendar was at the chairmen’s discretion. Furthermore, since they arrived in the form the chairmen wanted, all too often troublesome amendments would not be thrashed out until the bills were on the floor, which made realistic advance scheduling impossible. But Johnson’s intervention, as Minority Leader, in the internal workings of the Standing Committees had created an unprecedented intra-party mechanism for monitoring bills’ progress within committees and for bringing them to the floor with disputes already ironed out. And now, with his party in the majority, the committee Democrats with whom he was dealing were no longer merely ranking members; they were
chairmen.
He would be able to play a role greater than any previous Majority Leader in determining the schedule on which bills emerged from committee, the schedule on which they were placed on the Calendar, the schedule on which they were called off the Calendar and brought to the floor. Awareness of this new reality came quickly, as is shown by the new tone in the letters he began receiving from his colleagues almost from the moment that he became Majority Leader:

He would be able to play a role greater than any previous Majority Leader not merely over the scheduling of legislation but over its content.

During his two years as Minority Leader, Johnson had been intervening more and more in the internal give-and-take among the Democrats on the Standing Committees, using Siegel and Reedy and Bibolet to ascertain the points of disputes between senators, and then mediating the disputes so that Democratic positions within the committees were unified. His three aides would ask a committee’s staff about Democratic bills—who was objecting? why were they objecting? Then Johnson’s aides would go to the senators involved: ask what would satisfy them, work out possible compromises. Then Johnson himself would telephone or visit, or summon, the senators: reason with them, cajole or threaten them in private—persuade them to accept the compromise. The content of legislation still before the Standing Committees was therefore being altered—altered sometimes in extremely subtle ways—not only by those committees but by the Leader. More and more, during those two years, proposed Democratic legislation had become the product of bargains, trade-offs, rewordings, of additions, excisions, that had been made not by a committee or subcommittee chairman but by him. More and more, it had become the product of temporary alliances—often very complex alliances—that he had woven together. And, more and more, since the bargaining process was not only so complex and detailed but so private only the Leader knew the trade-offs between senators which had been made, or rejected—and the reasons why they had been made or rejected. Sometimes, the persuasion used involved some other, unrelated issue; in exchange for a senator’s agreement on one bill, Johnson might have promised the senator something he wanted on a different measure—perhaps one that was being considered not by his committee but by some other committee. Previously, the committees had been separate, proudly independent baronies; there were threads—slender but
strong—between them now. And only the Leader knew all of those threads, and how they had been tied together. Only he knew the promises that had been made, the threats that had been withdrawn. The myriad legislative matters of a single Senate session made up a vast tapestry in which a thousand threads were interwoven in a complex, intricate pattern; only Lyndon Johnson knew that pattern. When a senator demanded a change in a bill, only Johnson could tell him why such a change was possible or not possible. And often, since the reasons might be very private to the other senators involved, the senator demanding the change could not even learn if what Lyndon Johnson was telling him was true.

And, of course, after a compromise had been worked out in a Standing Committee, it was submitted to that “private rubber stamp.” During the Democrats’ two years in the minority, Johnson’s control of the Policy Committee had had only limited significance: although never before had a party Policy Committee intervened so extensively with respect to bills still within the Standing Committees, those bills had been minority bills, generally not the bills finally reported out of the committees to the floor. Now Democratic bills—the bills whose final form he was playing such a decisive role in determining—would be the actual legislation on which the Senate acted.

That fact made his control of the Policy Committee very significant in the history of the Senate. For decades, the Majority Leader had been, even at his strongest, no more than a first among equals—the equals being the mighty chairmen, impregnable in their committee strongholds, with their absolute power over the bills their committees were considering, the bills that “in reality the Senate does little more than approve or disapprove … practically as they are reported.” In the nearly century and a half since the committee system had been solidified in 1816, no Leader had been able to curb the chairmen’s power.

Now, in 1955, that was no longer true. Two years earlier, Lyndon Johnson had gently slipped a bit between the teeth of the Democratic senators who had once been committee chairmen, and who would be chairmen again, so gently that the chairmen had hardly noticed it was there, and the reins attached to it had been kept loose. But it was there. And now the reins were being tightened.