Master of the Senate (135 page)

Now Johnson was back—strong. Opposition within his party had filtered
into even his rubber-stamp Policy Committee. Trying to show, as he put it in a committee meeting on January 5, 1956, that “I wanted to lean over backwards so I could not be accused of ramming the bill down the throats of the Senate,” he had invited the leading proponents and opponents of the natural gas bill to make their case before the committee, and Paul Douglas made the opposition case with his usual eloquence. The bill, Douglas said, shouldn’t be passed, or even introduced, “under Democratic sponsorship.” In 1954, Douglas said, one of the most effective Democratic issues against the Republicans had been the “giveaway to big business.” If the bill “comes out under Democratic sponsorship,” he said, “it is going to deprive our presidential, senatorial and congressional candidates of our strongest arguments…. If any Democratic speaker talked about giveaway favors to big business, it would be thrown back in his face…. This might well be a factor in our losing control of committees in both houses.” Johnson tried to counter that argument, but as usual when he confronted Douglas in argument, he did not get the better of the exchange. “Senator Johnson said he had heard that [Douglas’] viewpoint expressed strongly in the Tidelands argument, but it didn’t seem to have that effect on the 1954 elections,” the Policy Committee minutes report. “Senator Douglas replied that the Tidelands Bill was brought up under Republican leadership.” Conceding that “the majority of the Policy Committee” was probably against the natural gas bill, Johnson said, “the only question was whether it should be brought up.” Was there any objection to bringing it to the floor? he asked. “I won’t object, but I want to say that it will be very unfortunate in my state,” Hennings of Missouri replied. Five of the nine committee members hadn’t said a word during the discussion, and the committee finally looked where it always looked for direction. When “Senator Russell said his memory was” that in July the committee had agreed that it would be bought up “as early as possible in January,” the committee agreed that it could be brought up.

I
T WAS TIME
for the first team. “They [the oilmen] sent their best men up,” Posh Oltorf was to recall, in the tone of a Texas Homer relating the story of an historic battle. Across the crowded lobby of the Mayflower Hotel a big hand with two missing fingers waved to a friend, and, seeing that hand, Lobbyist Dale Miller whispered in awe to a friend, “Ed Clark’s here.” To get the legendary Secret Boss of Texas to Washington, the Humble Oil Company was paying him—in addition, of course, to the rent for his suite and all expenses—a fee of one thousand dollars per day, but, so that he wouldn’t have to suffer the indignity of registering as a lobbyist, “it was arranged,” as he would recall, “that although the ’Umble was paying me, it would be paid through Brown & Root,” a construction firm ostensibly unconnected with any legislation then before Congress. And Clark, of course, had his private incentive for winning the natural gas fight: those forty thousand shares of Texas Eastern in his lock-box
back in Austin. The broad-shouldered, big-bellied, squeaky-voiced, rumpled, coarse Clark was one of the two men the natural gas industry considered its most effective champions; the other—tall, slim, handsome, smoother than smooth, custom-tailored in pinstriped banker’s blue—was also at the Mayflower. “John Connally had the entrees
[sic]
,” Oltorf would recall. “He knew everybody from being on Johnson’s staff. And everybody liked Connally. And he could really get his side across. He knew how to talk to senators. He would say, ‘We’ll
never forget
you. You will be doing a wonderful thing for your country, and I’ll
never forget it.’
And, of course, that implies future support.” The arrogant Patman had been supervising the General Gas Committee’s lobbying efforts; he was informed that from now on, he would be reporting to Connally.

Other lobbyists, not of the stature of a Clark or Connally but heroic figures in the Texas oil industry nonetheless, took the field in the Natural Gas Battle of 1956: Charlie Francis, Colonel Ernest O. Thompson of the Texas Railroad Commission (“I remember seeing Colonel Thompson when I was a boy, in a tent in an oil field in East Texas,” Dale Miller would say. “And he was up there in Washington in 1956—old and bent, but he was there”), Robert Windfohr of Dallas. Some wore into that battle the mantle of their fathers. Dale Miller’s huge suite at the Mayflower—377—had been the suite of his late father, Roy Miller of Texas Gulf Sulphur, an almost mythical lobbyist possessed of so much power in Washington that, the
Saturday Evening Post
said, “For twenty years he has had the status of a quasi-public figure.” The executive director of the Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, Claude Wild Jr., a very canny young political string-puller, was the son of Claude Wild Sr., the canny old pol who had pulled strings for Lyndon Johnson’s early campaigns in Texas. And all these men knew that this battle would be remembered in years to come. Talking with the author decades later, some of them tried to ensure that their participation in it would be recorded for history. Claude Wild Jr. was discussing another matter when he interrupted himself to say, “You know, I was in charge of counting the votes for the natural gas bill.” After a pause, he added, “You’re not writing that down.” And he waited until the author had made the desired note before continuing. During that battle, some of the oilmen even came up to Washington themselves, staying at the Mayflower. “I saw Hunt there today,” Texans told each other excitedly. “Sid’s here, too. I saw him. And Old Man Keck in his wheelchair.” George Brown, suave and discreet, was seldom seen: his suite was not at the Mayflower but at the Hay-Adams.

And it was time for the captain of the team. Not only did Lyndon Johnson install Clark and Connally in the Democratic Policy Committee office—“at whoever’s desk was vacant,” secretary Nadine Brammer recalls—so that they could make their telephone calls right out of the Capitol Rotunda, not only did he allow them to use his private office when face-to-face lobbying was needed, he also threw his weight behind them. “He [Johnson] would call senators up
and ask them to come in and see me,” Clark says. And Johnson made sure that senators knew that when Clark and Connally spoke, they spoke for him.

Johnson, of course, was lobbying himself—“harder than anyone,” Oltorf says—as well as mapping strategy and directing the overall campaign. Every evening, after the Majority Leader had finished his work on the Senate floor, Connally would be waiting for him in 231 to give him what Oltorf calls “daily reports.” Then Connally would have dinner with Oltorf—who would relay the reports to Herman Brown in Houston.

And Johnson was not lobbying only in his office. In obtaining the necessary votes from the other side of the aisle, he needed more than Eisenhower’s support, so he was deepening his alliance with the Republican senator who, as chairman of the GOP Policy Committee and ranking GOP member of the Appropriations Committee, held power over bills vital to GOP senators. The glue for part of that alliance was social: “He had Styles [Bridges] down [to Huntlands] during the natural gas fight,” Oltorf recalls. Part was philosophical—to Bridges, of course, any assault on business had to be Communist-inspired—and part, as always in the Johnson-Bridges relationship, was pragmatic. The five thousand dollars in cash from Johnson that Bobby Baker carried to New Hampshire for Bridges was only one episode—in either October or November of 1955, Elmer Patman had made a “lobbying” trip to that state. And in the overall pattern of the Johnson-Bridges relationship, these were minor episodes. The key figures in the major episodes were Connally and Clark. Asked why Bridges would not only support the natural gas bill himself but would also bring the support of other Republican senators, Connally replied, “The reason was money.” He said he did not recall the amount involved, but that it was large. “I told you, I carried inordinate amounts of cash,” he said. Asked the reason for Bridges’ support, Clark smiled and rubbed together his thumb and index finger in the gesture that means money. Asked how much money, Clark said he could no longer recall, but, asked if it might have been about five thousand dollars, he laughed. “It would have been many
times
five thousand,” he said. “Styles Bridges was no piker.” Nor was such “lobbying” confined to New Hampshire. Patman sent an emissary, John Neff, to pay visits to several Republican senators in the Midwest.

Whatever terrain he picked for his battle, Lyndon Johnson fought well. “I was worried,” Claude Wild recalls. “It [natural gas deregulation] was not a popular issue. If you don’t have a good champion there—well, it’s awful easy for a senator to vote against it.” But, Wild says, natural gas had “a real champion”: not Rayburn (“I doubt he had any impression [of the stakes]. He had no idea what money was”) but Johnson. “In Lyndon, we really had one.” Says Oltorf: “He [Johnson] got Bridges. Johnson really wanted him involved—and he
got
him involved.” Hardly had the Senate convened on January 3 when Johnson knew he had enough Republican votes to win.

The captain had devised a devastatingly effective strategy. Northern newspapers
and magazines were already seething with outrage. The
New York Times
called the bill wrong “socially, economically and politically.”
The Nation
called it a “gouge,” saying that “the producers are convinced they will get away with it because of their power over Congress” (and reminding its readers that “oil interests helped to finance McCarthy’s four-year anti-Democratic crusade”).
The New Republic
said that “the contention that natural gas ought to sell in a free market, like coal or wheat, loses some force when one notes that buyers of natural gas can never buy in a free market.” Johnson kept debate on the Senate floor from turning the temperature up any higher. Proclaiming repeatedly that he would not “ram” the bill through, that of course there must be “full debate” on so important a measure, Johnson gave the northerners all the time they wanted—a full month, with the vote scheduled for February 6. His only request, he said, was that the debate be “gentlemanly.” What he didn’t give them was arguments, or opposition, or even an audience—anything that would furnish grist for the journalistic mill. When liberal opponents of the bill were speaking, there were few comments, or even questions, from the bill’s supporters. There were, in fact, few supporters. Johnson had told them to stay away from the Chamber.

By thus arranging for the liberals to be ignored rather than answered, he had ensured that their speeches received less attention than would have been the case had there been controversy—newsmaking controversy—on the floor. And since many liberals had a natural reluctance to sit at their desks listening to someone else give a long speech, and they had no leader strong enough to ensure that they stayed on the floor anyway, liberals often found themselves speaking to a very small audience indeed. On January 25, for example, Paul Douglas took the floor for a long, carefully researched speech against the Harris-Fulbright Bill. There were only two other senators present, the presiding officer and Frank Carlson of Kansas. The presiding officer signaled to Carlson to take the chair, and, stepping down from the dais, left the Chamber himself. “That left Senator Douglas talking to four rows of desks” in which there was not a single senator present, Frederick Othman wrote. “In the press gallery, reporters were busy interviewing each other on the question of whether anybody remembered seeing a senator speaking to nobody at all. Even the oldest correspondent couldn’t remember a time when at least two or three senators weren’t on the floor.”

Unwilling to blame themselves for the situation (which of course could have been at least partially improved had they simply been willing to sacrifice a little time to listen to one another speak), the liberals blamed Johnson. “For the sake of appearances it would seem that Senator Lyndon Johnson, who cleverly stage-managed this puppet show, would have arranged for more senators to…attend to make it look good from the galleries,” Thomas Stokes said. As it was, Stokes said, the “farce gives itself away. Too slick was his careful arrangement of ‘full debate.’… The scene in the Senate reflecting the apathy and cynicism
of the elected servants…carries me back to the 1920s when big money was moving the pawns about here in Washington.” But the strategy worked. While some of the arguments against the bill were eloquent—“the concentrated power of the great oil companies, wielded today to influence the decision of national Government by contributions to both parties in many parts of the United States, is a menace to the proper functioning of free government within this country,” Hennings said—the arguments were delivered before galleries that were almost as empty as the floor. Writing angrily that “perhaps the most cynical aspect of Johnson’s management of the issue was his pious decree that the debate must be ‘gentlemanly,’” Doris Fleeson had to admit that the decree, “of course, had the effect of dampening tension and excitement, emotions that do sometimes communicate themselves to the Senate and the public and affect the outcome of debate.” The
Washington Post
could only observe helplessly that because “senators have stayed away from the Senate in droves,” the “arguments on the floor have attracted far less attention than they deserved.” “Never in the many years I have covered Washington have I seen such a skillful job of backstage manipulation,” Drew Pearson had to confess. So completely did Johnson feel he had the situation under control that in the middle of the debate, he left for a brief vacation in Florida—on a Brown & Root plane.

A
ND THEN, WITHOUT WARNING
, the Natural Gas Bill of 1956 became a moral issue. On Friday, February 3, as the Senate was droning toward the weekend recess before the scheduled Monday vote on the measure, Senator Francis Case of South Dakota suddenly rose at his desk and announced that a lobbyist for a natural gas company had come to his campaign headquarters in Sioux Falls and left an envelope to be given to him—an envelope containing hundred-dollar bills, “twenty-five of them, in fact.”