Master of the Senate (204 page)

Of the new Democratic senators elected, none were conservatives and five were liberals, “eager,” as Evans and Novak wrote, “to make common cause with the tiny, beleaguered faction of liberals” who had been challenging Johnson’s leadership. “You know there has been this undercurrent of emotion against your leadership in the last six years,” Jim Rowe wrote Johnson shortly after the election. “It is much stronger today than it has ever been in the past.”

Within weeks of the election, this undercurrent had risen to the surface: a letter to Johnson from Joe Clark of Pennsylvania, demanding increased representation for liberals on the Democratic Policy and Steering Committees, found its way into the press. Pat McNamara demanded more frequent caucuses. And several of the newly elected liberals, notably Edmund Muskie, who had broken the Republican hold in Maine by twice winning election as governor and then had defeated Republican incumbent Payne to win a Senate seat, and, surprisingly, William Proxmire, were unwilling to be relegated to the spear-carrier roles that Johnson’s method of operation required. Offering Muskie advice on his Senate career, Johnson told him not to make up his mind on issues too early—to wait, in fact, “until they get to the Ms in the roll call.” But when, a few weeks later, Johnson said he assumed Muskie would be supporting
him in the first big Senate fight of January, 1959—the attempt, once again, to amend Rule 22—Muskie responded by saying, “Well, Senator, I think I’ll follow your advice, and just wait until they get to the Ms.” And when he voted with the liberals, Johnson, while not throwing down his pencil, responded otherwise as angrily as he had with Frank Church; Bobby Baker was dispatched to tell other senators that Johnson considered Muskie a “chickenshit.” As for Proxmire, who had once called himself Johnson’s “biggest birthday present,” he turned out to be a somewhat unwelcome gift. During his early days in the Senate, in 1958, Proxmire had seemed willing to pay, in both silence and obsequiousness, the price for admission to the Senate “club,” entering debates only upon an invitation from a senior senator, scheduling his first major speech for the day before Easter recess, when most senators would already have left Washington and wouldn’t have to listen to him, and tendering a strikingly full measure of deference to the Majority Leader at every opportunity. But he soon decided that the price was too high. Talking one day to an acquaintance about a freshman colleague who also spoke seldom, he exclaimed, “He might as well not be a senator!”

Proxmire decided, he was to say, to “be a senator like Wayne and Paul,” and became outspoken on the floor. In 1959, after Johnson refused his request for appointment to the Finance Committee—Proxmire felt the refusal was due to his opposition to the oil depletion allowance—Proxmire went further, in a full-dress Senate speech attacking Johnson’s leadership. “There has never been a time when power has been as sharply concentrated as it is today in the Senate,” he said. At the first caucus he had attended, in January, 1958, he said, “senators assembled and listened to the Majority Leader read a speech which he had previously released to the press in full. There was not a single matter of party business discussed. There wasn’t even a mention of a party program, not a whisper concerning any legislation.” And the next meeting of the Democratic caucus wasn’t until “a full year later…. Senators had to surrender for another year their right and duty to determine the Democratic Party’s policies and programs.” Proxmire then gave a series of talks attacking “one-man rule” in Congress, in the Senate by Johnson, in the House by Rayburn (“When you get these two men together with the power of making committee assignments, you see the obsequious bowing, scraping senators and congressmen around them”), and demanding more frequent caucuses and larger, more democratic party committees.

All during 1958, 1959, and 1960, the liberal attacks on Johnson continued; in January, 1960, the liberals embodied in a formal resolution demands for more frequent caucuses, for selection of the Policy Committee membership by a vote of all Democratic senators instead of by the Leader alone, and for the drawing up by the Policy Committee of a Democratic legislative agenda. And these attacks were treated by the Washington press corps as significant revolts against Johnson’s leadership, with headlines and cutting cartoons; one, by
Herblock, showed “King Johnson” on a throne with a spear knocking off his crown as he said, “Methinks, milord, that the peasantry is getting restless.”

Johnson’s grip on the reins of senatorial power, however, was far too firm for the attacks to have any real significance. He was stung by Proxmire’s attacks into answering him on the floor, saying the Wisconsin freshman needed a “fairy godmother” or a “wet nurse.” “This one-man rule is a myth,” he said. “I do not know how anyone can force a senator to do anything. I have never tried to do so. I have read in the newspapers that I have been unusually persuasive with senators. I have never thought these were accurate reports. Usually when a senator wants something done and does not get his way, he puts the blame on the leadership. It does not take much courage, I must say, to make the leadership a punching bag.” As for Clark, Johnson didn’t deign to reply to him himself; he delegated that task to Majority Whip Mike Mansfield, who said that instead of restructuring the Senate, the Democratic senators should rely on “the leadership and parliamentary skill of Lyndon Johnson.”

Johnson refused to meet any of the liberal demands. They had asked for more frequent caucuses. That first Democratic Caucus of 1958—the one at which, in Proxmire’s phrase, “not a single matter of party business” was discussed—was the only caucus held in 1958. In 1959, there was also only one caucus. Then, during the first days of January, 1960, the Senate liberals “determined to speak out” and to make an all-out attempt at reform. At the Democrats’ January 7 caucus, Clark introduced a resolution stating that if at least fifteen senators requested a meeting of the Democratic Party Caucus, one would be held every two weeks. A debate ensued, “the more senior members generally speaking in opposition,” as Clark recalls, until Johnson ended it by saying he would be happy to call a caucus anytime at the request of even a single senator. Johnson was as good as his word—but he added some other words. During that January, he scheduled no fewer than four additional caucuses—but also let it be known that he would not be displeased if senators found they had better things to do. Attendance steadily declined. Sixty of the sixty-four Democratic senators had come to that first, January 7, caucus. By the January 20 caucus, attendance was down to twenty-four.
*
And, Clark was to say, “that was the end.” The liberals did not even request another caucus “largely because those of us who wanted regular meetings became convinced that without leadership support, which was not forthcoming, we could not turn out enough members to make the conferences worthwhile.” The liberals had proposed another resolution: that the Policy Committee be selected not by the Leader but by an election. The vote on that resolution was 51 to 12—against it. Proxmire had to concede that despite two years of attacks, he had failed to make “any real dent” in Johnson’s power. The
Star’s
“Washington Window” column
summed up the denouement of Proxmire’s revolt against Lyndon Johnson: it had been a “David and Goliath drama,” but with a non-traditional ending: “Instead of Goliath being slain, it was David who was slain.” Talking with Proxmire, Richard Russell told him that his “position reminded him of a bull who had charged a locomotive train…. That was the bravest bull I ever saw, but I can’t say a lot for his judgment.”

T
HROUGHOUT
L
YNDON
J
OHNSON’S LIFE
, in every institution of which he had been a part, a similar pattern had emerged: as he rose to power within the institution, and then, as he consolidated that power, he was humble—deferential, obsequious, in fact. And then, when the power was consolidated, solid, when he was in power and confident of staying there, he became, with dramatic speed and contrast, autocratic, overbearing, domineering.

Now, during his final three years in the Senate, this pattern was repeated. “The success of his leadership affected the Lyndon Johnson lifestyle visibly,” George Reedy was to say. “During his early years as leader, he put on a humble-pie act that would have done credit to Ella Cinders. This faded overnight and a major task of his staff was to keep the hubris from showing—too much.” This task was difficult. He already had an unprecedented amount of office space. Now he took over more—a lot more—not in the Senate Office Building but in the Capitol itself. He already occupied most of the western end of the Capitol’s Gallery Floor in the Senate wing, with his two-room Majority Leader’s suite in G-14 and his three-room Policy Committee suite in G-17, 18, and 19. But between these two suites was a third, the only space on that end of the floor that he didn’t occupy—a two-room suite, G-15 and G-16, filled with the staff of the Commerce Committee. Now he commandeered that as well, so that, as one reporter wrote, “He will have a seven-room spread of offices replete with crystal chandeliers and rich furniture, occupying the entire northwest Senate wing on the third floor of the Capitol.” Sometimes, for a new visitor, he would sweep aside the heavy drapery behind his desk there, and suddenly the window would be filled, as one reporter wrote, with the “marbled city below with its great avenues running toward the White House.” Grand as this suite was, it was still too far from the Chamber floor for his liking, but on the same level as the Chamber floor, and conveniently near it, was a suite of two huge rooms that had been the staff and meeting rooms of the Senate’s District of Columbia Committee. He commandeered that, too. On its high ceilings, above its big crystal chandelier, were frescoes (as soon as he chose the office, painters began touching them up) of boys carrying baskets of flowers and young maidens reclining on couches: a Roman emperor’s banquet. Reporters began referring to it as “the Emperor’s Room” before coining another name, which stuck: “the Taj Mahal.” Lady Bird imported an interior decorator from New York to redo the suite in green and gold. “On entering the office,” Sam
Shaffer wrote, “one was immediately confronted” by an extremely well-lit, fully life-size portrait of its occupant, hung above its marble fireplace. The artist had portrayed Johnson leaning against a bookcase, but he had captured at least some of the piercing quality in Johnson’s eyes; “That huge picture of Lyndon looking squarely in the visitor’s eye first thing on entering Lyndon’s office is a sure irritant,” John Steele reported in a memo to his editors at
Time.
And it was not only Lyndon Johnson’s portrait that was well lit. High above the desk, concealed in the chandelier, two spotlights had been placed, focused so that as the man himself sat at the desk, they cast on him what one reporter called “an impressive nimbus of golden light.” In a corner of the immense room he had ordered high walls of polished mahogany built, and behind them was a bathroom—a Johnsonian bathroom (a “monument of a toilet,” James Reston called it) used as Johnson used bathrooms: soon secretaries, assistants, and senators were having to take dictation from him or discuss issues with him as he sat before them on the toilet.

Johnson made other changes, too, in that Capitol wing that was his world. When he came to the deserted Capitol on a Sunday, he sometimes had to wait a minute or two for an elevator since only one elevator operator was on duty. Now the waiting time was eliminated: three operators were on duty all Sunday. And the operators of the subway between the Capitol and the Senate Office Building no longer stopped working at six o’clock; they remained on duty until Johnson had left the Capitol.

The pattern was discernible not only in the office but in the way visitors to it were treated—not the committee chairmen, of course, but almost all his other colleagues. Often, they were kept waiting; sometimes there would be three or four senators of the United States cooling their heels in the Majority Leader’s antechamber. Even the placid Mansfield once lost his temper over the length of time he was kept waiting for an audience and left, saying to Ashton Gonella, “Well, I’m not going to wait this long for anybody.” (Mansfield’s attitude displeased Ms. Gonella; in recounting this incident, she told the author, “I did not like people who did not respect Mr. Johnson.”) While the time senators spent in the suite’s outer office was sometimes uncomfortably long, the time they spent in the inner office was sometimes uncomfortably short; a request might be made of the Leader, and it might be denied, quickly and curtly, after which, it was clear, the applicant was expected to get up and leave.

Lyndon Johnson’s attitude toward his colleagues was increasingly proprietary and paternalistic. “They were his children; it was his Senate,” Ms. Gonella explains. Some of them were wayward children; that was all right, that was why he was there—the firm, fair father, to see that they didn’t get into trouble. In November, 1958, he would tell John Steele, in an off-the-record interview, “You know, I feel sort of like a father to these boys. A father loves his sons, though one son may drink a little too much, another may neck with the girls a little too much. A good father uses a gentle but firm rein, checks his
sons, guides them, and above all understands them.” He knew what each of them needed. In 1958, he selected his new favorite, Frank Church, for the honor of reading George Washington’s Farewell Address in the Senate on Washington’s Birthday; telling a reporter why he had selected Church, he explained that he “needed a bit of bringing forward—just like my daughter does at school.” More and more, he was unguarded in his estimates of his colleagues’ abilities, and in his description of their relationship with him—after all, why should he watch his words; what could they do about it if they didn’t like them? “Now, Alan,” he said about Bible—said to a journalist—“Alan is a good, mediocre senator. He’ll do what I tell him.”

He let reporters know how cleverly he manipulated them.

His attitude was also apparent in the terms in which he described his own activities. In January, 1958, two days before the President’s State of the Union address to Congress, Johnson delivered a speech to the Senate Democratic Caucus, instructing George Reedy to tell reporters it was Johnson’s “State of the Union address.” Did a President have a Cabinet? During the course of his speech, Johnson, as
Time
put it in a March, 1958, cover story on him, “hoisted himself to political heights without precedent by referring to himself, in effect, as President of the U.S. (South Pennsylvania Avenue Division). ‘As majority leader of the Senate,’ said he, ‘I am aided by a cabinet made up of committee chairmen.’” Doris Fleeson might poke fun at his pronouncements, asking if he had worked out a disability agreement with his second-in-command, Mansfield, but most of the Washington press corps, which had overplayed each attack on Johnson’s leadership (and then, after each one had failed, had conceded that his power was greater than ever), agreed with
Time’s
assessment that Johnson is “without rival the dominant face of the Democratic 85th Congress…. As such … he does indeed stand second in power only to the President of the U.S.” Asking, “Who is the most powerful man in the United States today?” Stewart Alsop, in January, 1959, answered his own question: “The President.” But, he added, “Sen. Lyndon Baines Johnson … certainly runs the President a close second, especially now that voters have given him a huge majority to lead. There are those who argue that Johnson is, in fact, if not in theory, the country’s most powerful man, because he loves … to exercise power, and President Eisenhower does not.”