Master of the Senate (164 page)

Russell had been keeping himself inaccessible at his place “with no telephones,” but his attendance at the White House briefing (at which Johnson told Eisenhower that the proper response was “to tell [the British and French] they have our moral support and go on in; Eisenhower demurred) put him within Johnson’s reach, and Johnson had more success “working” him than he had with Rayburn. Determined not to go to Chicago, Russell tried to explain that he could not help Johnson get the nomination, that it was too late, that even the Georgia delegation, under Governor Marvin Griffin’s direction, was now so firmly committed to Stevenson that its vote could not be changed. As Evans and Novak were to recount: “Johnson persisted. All right, he said, Griffin is hopeless. But please,
please
, come out with me anyway. Come with me and sit with me in my headquarters and talk to me and eat with me and be with me. The tone was beseeching, pleading.” And Russell finally agreed, leaving for the airport with Johnson without even packing a suitcase. “Robert E. Lee could not have dragged Dick Russell to the Democratic National Convention in … 1956,” Evans and Novak wrote. “But Lyndon Johnson did.”

When the plane arrived back at Chicago’s Midway Airport at four o’clock Sunday afternoon, Rayburn and Johnson began walking toward their waiting limousines, accompanied by Booth Mooney. When newspaper and television reporters and cameramen ran toward them, the Speaker pushed through them, scowling, but Johnson stayed to talk.

“I don’t see why Lyndon lets those buzzards trap him like that,” Rayburn said to Mooney. Looking around to make sure that no reporter could hear him, he muttered, “I hate to see Lyndon get bit so hard by the presidential bug at this stage of the game. Stevenson’s got it sewed up.” When the reporters caught up to him, he “stayed hitched,” repeating that “I haven’t said I was for anybody but Lyndon, dammit.” Asked if Johnson’s candidacy was truly a “serious” one, he said, “It’s a serious one.” He even said that Johnson would get “a good many votes” besides the ones from Texas. But, as Mooney was to say, “he had no illusions.”
And as soon as Russell started telephoning the leaders of southern delegations, he lost any
he
may have had. Rayburn and Russell were realists; both saw there was no hope. Rayburn told Johnson privately that he felt he was making a big mistake in actively pushing a hopeless candidacy. “I told Lyndon I thought he had lost his head,” he was to tell a friend later. “I told him that it was a mistake to become a sectional candidate. He should be thinking of 1960. Look what happened to Dick Russell.” Johnson was getting the same warning from the only member of his staff besides Connally who dared to give him warnings. When Johnson had awakened Sunday morning, he had found a memo slipped under his door. It was from Jim Rowe, who had written it during the night. In it, Rowe recalls, “I said you must be careful [that] you don’t get yourself where Dick Russell got himself in 1952…. Don’t get yourself in that position, don’t get out front, you can’t make it….” After he returned from Washington, Johnson came into Rowe’s room and said, “I agree with everything you said.” Perhaps he did agree—intellectually. But he didn’t take the advice. He couldn’t. He was beyond listening to warnings, as was demonstrated the next day, when the convention opened.

O
N THAT DAY
, Monday, August 13, “one man who thought Lyndon Johnson’s chances were excellent was Lyndon Johnson,” Richard Rovere wrote in his
New Yorker
analysis. “For somewhere between twelve and eighteen hours on Monday, he waged a perfectly serious and purposeful campaign for the nomination, and he … thought it more likely than not that he and Senator Russell, of Georgia, could gain control of the Democratic Party and make it a medium for the expression of their views.”

In the International Amphitheatre, party orators were droning away to a nearly empty auditorium; the real negotiations were going on in the big Loop hotels, not in the lobbies jammed with boisterous badge-wearing, placard-waving delegates, but upstairs in the traditional “smoke-filled rooms” of party leaders, and in the hotel conference rooms where state delegations were caucusing. At the Texas caucus early Monday morning, Johnson sat listening as one speaker after another predicted he would win the nomination; “Let us tell the nation and the world that we have here the next President of the United States,” John Lyle proclaimed in that ringing voice that would have been familiar to anyone who had attended the Leland Olds hearings. Emerging from the caucus, Johnson told reporters that he had no plans to release his delegates; “My name will stay as long as the American people are interested.”

His method of making the race was somewhat unconventional. All that Monday, Stevenson and Harriman (and Kefauver, who was trying to persuade his two hundred delegates to switch to Stevenson) rushed from caucus to caucus behind police motorcycle escorts with wailing sirens. The Texas caucus was the only one Johnson attended. He spent the rest of the day—the entire
day—on the Hilton’s twenty-third floor, in his suite, behind closed doors. He had received four formal invitations from delegations to address them that day; he declined all four. Party leaders who wanted to talk to him were told he would be glad to meet with them—in his suite. “He wouldn’t go out to seek delegations or to meet with them,” Jim Rowe recalls. “It was a very odd performance”—odd unless one takes into account what Rowe calls Johnson’s “ambivalence”: the conflict between a desire to run and a dread of being
seen
to be running, lest he lose, since losing would then be “humiliation” (that word was on his lips constantly during the convention, particularly when he was asked why he wasn’t out appealing for votes; “I didn’t come here to be humiliated,” he told Marshall McNeil when McNeil asked him that question); the conflict between his emotions and his intellect, which told him how long the odds were against his winning. His emotions veered constantly between extremes: between the despair and depression when he thought he wasn’t winning and the overconfidence or euphoria that made him so overbearing when he thought he was winning (when, at a press conference, reporters pointed out that “serious” candidates usually address delegations, he replied, “Different people have different methods. Sometimes they come to you”). His performance is difficult to understand, furthermore, unless one also takes into account two other considerations. One was the self-knowledge that had made him say, when he first got to the Senate, that it was “the right size”—the awareness that he was most effective when he dealt with men in private, behind closed doors, and least effective when he had to speak to them in large groups. The other was not a personal but a political calculation. If he tried openly to rally support for himself, the first states that would announce their support would be southern states. Not wanting to be labeled a southern, regional candidate, he wanted at least one or two states from other regions to announce first.

And, indeed, on that Monday, the leaders
did
come to him. “While the other candidates rushed through the city in cavalcades heralded by sirens, to swoop down on wavering and uncommitted delegates, Lyndon Johnson sat in his white-walled suite overlooking Lake Michigan and received the mighty of his party,” Mary McGrory wrote. The Hilton’s twenty-third floor, on which Rayburn, Daley, and Stevenson also had suites, was the most crowded spot in Chicago, its long hallways crammed with the heavy, clumsy television cameras and cables of that era, with TV cameramen and newspaper and magazine photographers and reporters and delegates, and most of the delegates in the halls were wearing the “Love That Lyndon” buttons, and most of the visitors turned left after getting off the elevators, toward the wing that he had commandeered, not toward the suites of the other big names.

In the hallway that had in effect become his private corridor, the crush intensified, television cameramen and newspaper photographers shoving each other for vantage points, the TV cameras and cables so thick that when a waiter tried to push through them with a table containing Johnson’s lunch, the scene,
one reporter wrote, was “not unlike the ship cabin scene” of the Marx Brothers farce
A Night at the Opera.
And down the corridor that day, pushing past the photographers and reporters to the door at the end numbered 2306-A, Stevenson, Harriman, and Kefauver made their way, as did the favorite-son candidates Symington and Magnuson, vice presidential possibilities Humphrey and Kennedy, as well as Ernest McFarland, “flown in,” as one reporter wrote, “to deliver his state,” Richard Russell, in town to deliver several states, and twenty-one other men. They would knock on the door and sometimes be admitted at once, and sometimes have to wait outside in the corridor, either because someone else was inside or because, alone in the suite or with only Rowe or John Connally present, Johnson was working the phones; so many telephones had been installed in 2306-A and the adjoining small sitting room that wires seemed to stretch everywhere, and Johnson spent hours that day pacing back and forth with a big hand wrapped around a receiver, talking, persuading, selling. Lyndon Johnson’s suite, Bill White wrote, “was the most crowded in Chicago”—the epicenter that day of convention maneuvering. Reporters clocked the visits, and attached significance to the length of time Lyndon Johnson deigned to spend with each man—Stevenson, it was noted, was allowed thirty minutes, Kefauver a mere five—before they emerged, to be backed against a corridor wall by the press while they gave carefully noncommittal comments about what had taken place inside. Johnson would emerge and pose for a minute for photographers with a favored few—Stevenson and Harriman, for example—joking and smiling, a bronzed, confident figure towering over shorter men, obviously enjoying himself. Occasionally he would drop a tidbit for the reporters. Harriman had invited Johnson to his suite in the Blackstone Hotel, but Johnson had had one of his secretaries say he would rather have Harriman do the visiting, and Harriman had done so—Johnson made sure the reporters knew that he had made Harriman come to him. All that day, he was the center of attention, and he was reveling in it.

Many of the reporters were from Washington, and they assumed that the closed-door conferences meant what they meant in the Senate: that, as Mary McGrory wrote, “what Lyndon wants Lyndon gets,” “that Senator Johnson, whose success in persuading senators to go along with him is nothing less than spectacular, suddenly saw in the delegates some 2,000 twin-brothers of his colleagues, that in this crowded arena he saw a reasonable facsimile of the Senate floor which he so indisputably dominates.” That assumption was incorrect, however. The famous political figures beating a path to his door were not offering support for his candidacy but asking for his support for
their
candidacies, and for the support of the southern delegates they thought he controlled. Not one of his visitors from the North was even considering supporting him. And there was another resemblance between suite and Senate, and it was not one that boded well for Johnson’s chances. Both locales were filled with senators—almost exclusively with senators. Among the visitors to 2306-A that Monday
were no fewer than fifteen senators—and exactly two governors (Harriman and Luther Hodges of North Carolina) and one labor leader. The men with whom Lyndon Johnson was meeting did not have the power to give him what he wanted.

Furthermore, with the exception of Richard Russell, who came by twice that day, few of the visitors were from the South. Since he didn’t want journalists’ attention on the southerners, he dealt with them that day mostly over the telephone. Once, Lyndon Johnson
could
have had the southern states, could have had them easily. But he had declined their offers—and the South, determined to exercise enough power at the convention to block an unacceptable platform plank or candidate, couldn’t wait for him to make a firm commitment to run. The only way for the South to be powerful was for the South to be solid, which meant lining up behind a single candidate. So the South had gone looking for a candidate, and, in Stevenson, had found one. In addition, the senators had stepped out of the picture, leaving the selection of convention delegates to the governors, most of whom were only casually acquainted with Johnson and some of whom were more than a little offended by his rejection of their offers. Most of the eleven southern states had arrived at the convention with the intention either of supporting Stevenson from the opening ballot or of casting that first-ballot vote for a favorite son, so as to keep their leverage over Stevenson and the platform, with the expectation that they would switch to Stevenson later. Nonetheless, that Monday, with Johnson at last—suddenly—a declared candidate, and with pleas from Richard Russell, offers of support for him had been renewed by several of the Old Confederate states in telephone calls to Johnson’s suite.

Most of these offers, however, came with a request: that he promise to stay in the race until the end, or close to the end; that he not drop out on an early ballot. For many of the southern states, this pledge was the
sine qua non
for their support; they couldn’t take the chance of lining up behind a candidate who might drop out too early in the convention, leaving them without a rallying point in the fight over the civil rights platform plank. The
Dallas Morning News
, well attuned to the southern viewpoint, reported that as soon as Johnson said he was “serious,” “Southern states … asked him what they could do to help along a fellow southerner,” but they also asked, “Would he ride hard to the finish, as Sen. Dick Russell had done in 1952? … Southern states wanted that ironclad guarantee.” But Johnson still believed he could pick up the southern states whenever he wanted, and was still afraid of the “humiliation” a losing fight to the finish would entail, and, the
Morning News
reported, “That firm assurance never came.”

In some cases, Johnson’s declaration came too late. The illness of Harry Byrd’s wife had prevented him from coming to Chicago, but early Monday morning Johnson telephoned Byrd at his Winchester estate, and for more than two hours, Byrd was on the telephone to Chicago, trying to swing the Virginia
delegation to Johnson. But, with Byrd having bowed out of the picture months before, the delegation had been selected by former Governor John Battle, and Battle and the delegation wouldn’t switch. Monday evening, there was a meeting of leaders from the eleven southern states. Texas was for Johnson, of course. Two states decided to stay with the candidate who would stay in until the end, who appeared likely to win—and who was so much more acceptable to them than Harriman: Adlai Stevenson. The other eight decided to support favorite sons “until an agreement was reached on a civil rights plank.” Some of these delegations were planning at that point to announce for Johnson, but their failure to announce immediately meant that no southern barricade had been thrown up in front of the Stevenson bandwagon.