Master of the Senate (165 page)

Lyndon Johnson’s failure to acknowledge these realities ran counter to the previous pattern of his political life. A political convention is at bottom an exercise in counting, and if he had been counting delegates as he counted senators—coldly, unemotionally, looking unflinchingly at reality, no matter how unpleasant that reality might be—he would have seen that he had no chance for the nomination. But in Chicago, he was hearing what he wanted to hear, believing what he wanted to believe. At one point late Monday afternoon, Harry Byrd Jr., hastily dispatched to Chicago by his father, gave Johnson an overly optimistic report on the Virginia delegation. Instead of checking it, Johnson simply believed it. Inviting reporters into his suite that evening, Johnson was brimming over with self-confidence. He had had “a very fruitful day,” he said—the same type of day that he was accustomed to having in Washington: a day of talks with “many members of the Senate, leaders of the party, for whom I have respect and to whom I have obligations,” talks “about the problems which confront us,” “the same kind of talks which happen on the third floor of the Capitol when I’m there.” And, he said, he expected the results in Chicago to be just as satisfactory as they were in Washington. He had had many pledges of support, he said. Texas would not be the only state in his column; “There will be other states that will vote for me.” In particular, he said, one big northern state had been won over. “The biggest bloc of votes that I expect I’ll have was a complete surprise to me.”

Standing at the back of the room listening to the press conference, Corcoran and Rowe could not even imagine what big state Johnson might be referring to; they knew that nothing that had happened that day offered any hope that Johnson would receive the votes of
any
big state other than Texas. John Connally recalls that “for one day”—that Monday—“there was the feeling that there was hope.” But in truth there was no hope, and that day should have made Johnson understand that. The man who had always looked facts in the face wasn’t doing so this time. Years later, at their Washington law firm, Corcoran and Rowe would be talking to the author of this book about the 1956 convention. Rowe, thoughtful and analytical, was using terms like “ambivalence” to analyze Johnson’s behavior when the blunt Corcoran interrupted with a blunter
explanation. “Listen,” he said. “He just wanted it [the nomination] so much. He wanted it so much he wasn’t thinking straight.” There was a pause, and then Rowe nodded agreement. Trying to run for President from behind the closed door of his Hilton suite, Johnson was insulated from reality by his hopes and dreams.

O
UTSIDE THE SUITE
, however, there was reality just the same.

Truman himself was finding out on Monday, to his chagrin, that his announcement had had little effect on Stevenson’s firmly committed delegates. Invitations to his Blackstone suite were accepted far more eagerly—delegates were thrilled to meet a former President—than was his advice. By evening, Murray Kempton wrote, “the old man was down to haggling for the votes of single delegates from Montana and one such came, and came out saying it was an honor to meet one of the great men of American history, but, no, he guessed he hadn’t quite made up his mind.” And, Kempton wrote, “all afternoon the word rolled in from the Kennedys, the ADAers and the Monroneys—all the names of the future in the Democratic Party—and every one said that he was still for Stevenson.” In fact, Truman’s statement had boomeranged against Johnson. Worried that Truman’s move might improve the chances of the hated Harriman, many southerners felt they could not wait any longer for a Johnson commitment to stay in the race and climbed back off the fence—into Stevenson’s camp. Byrd was still making telephone calls, but the growing sentiment in the Virginia delegation was expressed by Thomas Broyhill, who told a reporter that it was time for Virginia to stop “fooling around with dark horses. It’s Stevenson or Harriman, and we had better get Stevenson in there as quick as possible.” Almost every poll of delegates taken Monday evening, the evening of Johnson’s “very fruitful day,” showed that in fact Stevenson’s delegate count was either close to or over six hundred.

And, unlike Johnson, Stevenson and his canny campaign manager, James Aloysius Finnegan, a tough Irish politician from Philadelphia, were talking to the right people: all that Monday, while Johnson, in his room at the end of one wing of the Hilton, was conferring with senators, Stevenson and Finnegan, in their room at the end of the next wing (when Johnson looked out the window, he could have seen into Stevenson’s suite across a fifty-foot courtyard had the blinds in Stevenson’s suite not been kept closed), were conferring with the men who really ran the delegations.

Finnegan was using some very strong arguments. To southern leaders still supporting favorite sons, he was saying that Adlai had the nomination all but sewn up and needed only a few votes to win. If southern states supplied those votes, those states would have Stevenson’s gratitude, and sympathetic treatment from a Stevenson Administration. On the other hand, if they didn’t supply those votes, the North might do so—several northern states were about to
throw their votes to Stevenson, he said. If they didn’t get aboard the train quickly, he told the southerners, they might find that it had left without them, and that there was no longer a seat for them on it.

To northern leaders, Finnegan was using the same argument in reverse; several southern states were about to throw the decisive votes to Adlai, he said; if northern states didn’t board the train quickly, they might find that it had left without
them.
And to northern liberals, Finnegan added another argument: If Stevenson didn’t get his majority, and the convention therefore was thrown into deadlock, who would benefit? he asked. Lyndon Johnson. Johnson would be in a position to demand concessions from Stevenson in exchange for the South’s support, he said. Do you really want to take a chance on that happening? A prolonged deadlock might even result in Lyndon Johnson eventually winning the nomination, Finnegan warned. Do you really want to take a chance that Lyndon Johnson will be the nominee?

These were chances that northern liberals indeed didn’t want to take. As W. H. Lawrence reported that night in the
New York Times:
“Some of the northern liberals [are] restive about the possibilities that the pressure on Mr. Stevenson might force him to make an accommodation with Senator Johnson.” Even liberals from Harriman’s own state were restive. The
New York Post
reported “uncertainty as to how long Harriman could hold New York’s delegation back from Stevenson if it looked like a coup by Johnson was in the making.”

One northern leader who didn’t want to take such chances was Walter Reuther. Lyndon Johnson had been confident that the big Michigan delegation would hold fast behind favorite-son Williams or would go for Harriman; he kept mentioning that Reuther was his friend, that he used to sleep on the spare bed in Johnson’s home when he came to Washington in the 1940s, that Reuther had helped swing labor support to him in his 1948 Senate race. He appears not to have grasped that for Walter Reuther, friendship was not as significant as Emmett Till, and that, in addition, since 1948 there had been Leland Olds and the natural gas bill and the destruction of Paul Douglas. And the Michigan delegation, as Murray Kempton wrote, “is the great fruit of the social revolution of the thirties; there are people in it who were arrested on sitdown strikes twenty years ago. The old CIO is stronger there than anywhere else at this convention.”

Monday evening, Michigan held a closed-door meeting, and Stevenson came to it, with a smile, a few jokes—and Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt.

Entering the room, she saw a photographer, Sammy Schulman of International News Service, who had been her husband’s favorite photographer. “Hello, Sammy,” she laughed. “Still going around?” Yes, he was, Sammy replied. And you, Mrs. Roosevelt, he asked, are you still going around? Yes, she was, Eleanor Roosevelt replied—and then she told Michigan why she was going around: that there are some things more important than winning—that principles are more important—and that therefore Michigan should be for
Adlai Stevenson. The delegation stood up and cheered, and then Walter Reuther spoke, and said he was for Stevenson. And Soapy Williams had understood Finnegan’s warning. The convention was drifting dangerously, the Governor told a reporter; if the liberal forces didn’t unite, he said, there was a danger that “a minority power bloc” might name the nominee. By the time the meeting broke up well after midnight, it was clear that when Michigan caucused the next day, Adlai would receive the delegation’s vote.

Jim Rowe got the bad news at five o’clock Tuesday morning from one of his “spies” in the Michigan delegation, and he put on a bathrobe and hurried down the hall to relay it to Lyndon Johnson.

Rowe would never forget how Johnson looked when he opened the door. All of him looked asleep—he was in pajamas and his rumpled hair was standing on end—all of him except his eyes. Piercing and intent, they were very wide awake, and when Rowe gave him the news, they narrowed in that calculating look that Rowe had seen so often. But then Johnson responded, and his response was not the usual Johnson response to bad news. “I don’t believe it,” he said.

Rowe tried to convince him it was true. He knew it was important that Johnson understand what was happening, that Stevenson was about to win, and that if Johnson did not support him, give him Texas’ fifty-six votes and bring in other southern states as well, he would lose all his power in the convention. He recalls saying, “It is absolutely true. It is going to happen. Reuther has given his pledge.” Michigan was going to caucus at 11 a.m., he said, and once it did, it would be too late for Johnson to do anything. He said, “You have approximately six hours to deliver Texas and to control the convention.” But Lyndon refused to believe it.

B
ELIEVE IT OR NOT
, however, it was true, and with the Michigan decision, the bandwagon was rolling. On Tuesday morning, the Arizona delegation also caucused, and, ignoring a last-minute plea by Bob McFarland, voted to cast its sixteen votes for Stevenson. Lyndon Johnson had been pinning a lot of his hopes not only on Michigan but on New Jersey, which had come to the convention with its thirty-six votes ostensibly behind its favorite son, Governor Robert B. Meyner, but Meyner had come to the same conclusion as Soapy Williams: that Harriman couldn’t win, and that the South could not be allowed to dominate the convention. On Tuesday morning, he flatly refused to allow his name to be placed in nomination, and New Jersey voted unanimously for Stevenson. Hearing the news, a Harriman aide silently drew his finger across his throat.

Finnegan’s gambit was working with southerners as well, as they saw the northern states clambering aboard the Stevenson bandwagon and realized that it was, indeed, leaving without them. Moreover, some of them were by this time quite annoyed at Lyndon Johnson. If they had declined to back Stevenson,
it was on Johnson’s behalf that they had done so—had remained committed to their favorite sons—and yet he was still refusing to give them a firm commitment to stay in the race to the end. By Tuesday evening, it was apparent that Virginia would go for Stevenson. And since it was also becoming apparent Tuesday that “moderates” would control the Platform Committee, even Russell’s Georgia had less reason to hold out. Predicting a civil rights plank that “may not be all that we want but [that] we hope … will be one that we could live with,” Governor Griffin added—in a jibe at Johnson’s indecision—“Of all the candidates here that we know about, I would say that the Georgia delegation holds Mr. Stevenson in the highest esteem.”

Truman launched a second, more intemperate, attack on the man he had once persuaded to run for the presidency, calling him “too defeatist to win,” but while for the former President’s first press conference, the Blackstone’s Crystal Ballroom had hardly been big enough to hold all the reporters and cameramen, this time it was half empty—and his attack, as Lawrence wrote, served only “to confirm reports that his backing of Governor Harriman had not shaken” Stevenson’s support. Indeed, by Tuesday night, the former President’s actions had so “greatly minimized his own stature,” James Reston wrote, “that he was in danger of becoming” an ex-President “who no longer has the consolation of being powerful within his own party.”

All that Tuesday, Lyndon Johnson stayed in his suite, but in the corridor outside there were signs of the change in his status. During the morning, the cables and cameras were as thickly clustered as they had been on Monday, the callers were still lined up in the hall waiting for an audience, but, as one reporter wrote, “All through the day the Stevenson bandwagon kept on rolling. State after state, delegation after delegation, decided that instead of being on the fence, the place to be was on the side of the winner,” and by that afternoon, the television cameras had disappeared, and the number of visitors to Johnson’s suite was noticeably fewer. And two of the visitors were Stevenson and Finnegan, keeping an appointment that had been scheduled the previous day. Johnson tried to bargain with them, saying that in order for him to support Stevenson, he needed assurance that the civil rights plank would be acceptable to the South. Jim Rowe, the only Johnson aide present during the meeting, recalls Johnson saying, “I have got to have something that will not hurt my people too much.” Stevenson, ever courteous, said, “Well, I would like to think about it,” but Finnegan simply said: “No.”

“What did you say?” Johnson asked him. “I said no,” Finnegan replied. “We are not going to give you anything.”

When Johnson asked, “Why not?” Finnegan vouchsafed a further explanation, saying, “Look, all we are asking for [in the platform] is a shotgun. If we don’t give this crowd in the North that, they are going to use machine guns, [so] you’d better take it [the proposed plank]. But the answer to you is no.” If Lyndon Johnson needed proof that he no longer possessed meaningful power at the
Democratic National Convention of 1956, that one-word reply gave it to him. Finnegan and Stevenson no longer had to bargain with him; he no longer had anything substantial to bargain with. Johnson said simply, “All right.” And then, Rowe says, “they left.”