Master of the Senate (209 page)

I
N LATER YEARS
, when Lady Bird Johnson would talk about the time that her husband had been a senator, she would sometimes say, “Those were the happiest twelve years of our lives.”

Those years
had
been happy—and now they were over. The Senate had been Lyndon Johnson’s home. Now he had left it.

D
URING THE TWELVE YEARS
since the previous volume of
The Years of Lyndon Johnson
was published, the research team that works with me on the project has published its own book, and is well under way on a second, yet it has found time—
made
time, really—to continue doing research on the current volume.

The team—Ina Caro, that’s the whole team, the only person besides myself who has done research on the three volumes, or on the biography of Robert Moses that preceded them, the only person I would ever trust to do so—has, during these twelve years, ranged all across the United States in search of information about Lyndon Johnson and the years he spent in the Senate. She has traversed mountains of files in presidential libraries: the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York; the Harry S Truman Library in Independence, Missouri; the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas—archivists in each of these libraries have taken occasion to tell me how deeply, watching her at work, they came to admire her tirelessness and diligence. And of course she has searched painstakingly and perceptively through the red and gray document boxes at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Austin, Texas. That’s just presidential libraries. Archival collections from Athens, Georgia (the Richard B. Russell Library) to Williamsburg, Virginia (the A. Willis Robertson Papers at the College of William and Mary), to Norman, Oklahoma (the Robert Kerr and Elmer Thomas Papers at the University of Oklahoma) have been subject to her incisive historian’s eye, as have collections at a place to which she didn’t have to take a plane but only a subway: Columbia University, where she has gone through, among many archives, the papers of Herbert H. Lehman.

Among the more memorable pieces of original research she accomplished is her work at the Russell Library, and she may also have read through more letters, memoranda, drafts of legislation and other documents from the members of the Senate’s Southern Caucus of the 1950s than any human being on the face of the earth. For the previous volumes, the libraries in which Ina worked included the tiny libraries of isolated towns all across the Texas Hill Country, where she
found early histories of the towns, and copies of ancient weekly newspapers that the librarians had thought no longer existed, and for those books, also, she accomplished other notable feats of research—transforming herself into an expert on rural electrification and soil conservation, for example—that I tried to acknowledge at the time. But I don’t think that even for those books, Ina Caro achieved more in the way of pioneering archival research than she did for this one.

Ina was meant for libraries. She doesn’t like to do interviews, but is always happy when she knows that the next week—or month—will be spent among books and papers, and there is still the same lilting joyfulness in her voice when she telephones me about some new discovery as I remember in her voice thirty years ago. This book, like the others before it, is improved in a hundred—or a thousand, who can count?—ways by the discoveries she has made in the files of vanished statesmen and bigots. The more I learn about history and historians, the more I realize what an exceptional historian she is: a researcher of remarkable tenacity and unshakable integrity—my beloved idealist, always.

T
HIRTY YEARS AGO
, Bob Gottlieb and I began working together, over the 3,300-page manuscript of the Robert Moses book,
The Power Broker
. We are still working together, so all four of my books have benefited from the unique literary gifts of this talented and energetic editor. I am very grateful for that, as the dedication of this book attests.

Thirty years ago, another person was often in the room with her “two Bobs.” Katherine Hourigan, Knopf’s managing editor, has also been an integral part of both the editorial and production process on all four of my books. After the last one, I wrote that “Her editorial judgments are characterized not only by perceptivity but by an unflinching integrity that has only grown stronger over the years.” Now more years have passed. The statement is still true. I also wrote, after that book, that it “presented daunting production problems. I have seen the ingenuity and tireless effort she put into solving them—and I have appreciated it.” I
would
have to amend that. The production problems for
Master of the Senate
, a book by an author who can’t seem to stop rewriting at every stage, were even more daunting. And I have appreciated even more deeply her efforts to solve them.

In a literary world of which so many aspects seem increasingly transitory, it seems marvelous to me that I have somehow managed to have been working with the same people for such a long time. And I don’t mean just Bob and Kathy. As I walk around the halls of my publishing house, Alfred A. Knopf, they seem filled with friends of three decades. The ads for every one of my four books have been designed by the same person: Nina Bourne. When I came to Knopf in 1970, while I was still writing
The Power Broker
, Nina was Knopf’s advertising manager, and when the book was published in 1974, she designed the ads for it, and I can still remember how thrilled I was by them. She designed the ads for the first two volumes of the Johnson project, and she is still Knopf’s advertising manager.
Nina offers editorial criticism of my books, too. She never presses it on me, but I have learned that when this uniquely gifted woman says something, I’d better listen. When I came to Knopf, Bill Loverd and his enthusiastic love of books were part of the house, and they are a part still. Every one of my Johnson books has been designed by the same person: Virginia Tan.

Other people at Knopf have not been there quite as long, but they have been there long enough for me to appreciate them. The president and editor-in-chief, Sonny Mehta, published my last book as perfectly as a book could be published, in my opinion, and in the years since, he has always been there when I needed him. The guidance that Paul Bogaards, now Knopf’s executive director of promotion and publicity, gave me on my last book made me understand and appreciate his energy and intelligence.

I have, luckily for me, had the same legal adviser for three decades—for longer than three decades, in fact, for when, during the 1960s, I was a young and totally inexperienced investigative reporter for
Newsday
, Andrew L. Hughes was its calm, deliberate—and ever wise—attorney. On
Master of the Senate
, as on my first three books, he has given me not only valuable legal guidance, but valuable literary guidance, too. It seems only a fitting part of the wonderful continuity of my writing life that his son Andrew W. Hughes is also a big part of my work. Andy, Knopf’s vice president of production and design, supervised the production of my first two Johnson volumes, and is of course supervising it on this volume, too. I want to say a special word about Andy. I am aware of all the problems that my possibly excessive attention to detail has caused, and I want to say thanks to him for solving them—and for the way my books look when, finally, they actually appear.

Thanks also to these people at Knopf: Pat Johnson, Karen Mugler, Carol Carson, Kathy Zuckerman, Nicholas Latimer, and Gabrielle Brooks. For the past year and a half, Nathan Chaney has been Kathy Hourigan’s assistant. His unfailing cheerfulness has meant a lot to me in rushed times.

As for Carol Shookhoff, also a longtime compatriot, she has been of help to me in so many ways that I hardly know how to thank her.

My literary agent—she has, of course, always been my agent—is Lynn Nesbit. She was one of the first people to read the manuscript of this book, and I waited anxiously for her opinion, for I have learned that she has a literary sensibility I can always trust.

Lynn has always been there when I needed her. Thanks.

I
N 1975
, the Senate created a Senate Historical Office, and within a remarkably short time thereafter the institution possessed, for the first time, an institutional memory, and, for journalists and historians, a storehouse—a treasure house, really—of information about it.

This occurred because of the two historians who were appointed—and to this day have been its only—Senate Historian and Associate Historian, respectively:
Richard A. Baker and Donald A. Ritchie. It would have been easy for the Historical Office to become simply another bureaucratic backwater lodged in a few rooms in the Senate’s Hart Office Building. But Drs. Baker and Ritchie are historians in the highest sense of the word. They made it their business to learn their subject, previously a real
terra incognita
on the American political landscape—to learn it, and to
know
it, inside and out, in all its ramifications, and to make that knowledge available to anyone who wanted to write about it.

A principal beneficiary of their largesse has been me. Since I began trying to learn about the Senate twelve years ago, I have badgered Dick Baker and Don Ritchie incessantly for information about the institution’s history, its rules and precedents, its procedures, and the men who have served it.

I have been impressed times beyond counting with the extent to which these two men have had the most arcane facts at their fingertips—and impressed even more by their willingness, which so far as I can tell has no limits, to spare no effort to find out facts they didn’t know. A single example—it involves Dr. Ritchie but plenty of other examples would involve Dr. Baker—will show what I mean. To illustrate how early in his Senate years Lyndon Johnson’s quest for extra office space had begun, members of his staff laughingly told me about his attempt, during 1950, his second year in the Senate, to do something—it is not clear exactly what—to commandeer a tiny passageway (four square feet in size) that had once existed in the thick wall between his office—SOB 231 in what is now the Senate’s Russell Building—and the Senate Cafeteria next door; the passageway had at some time in the past been boarded up and plastered over on the side leading to Johnson’s office and used as a closet for cafeteria workers. Johnson’s staffers couldn’t tell me exactly how the attempt had been resolved, and I couldn’t find out, so I asked Don Ritchie to help. He ran down architectural drawings, and correspondence, but, as it happened, he couldn’t find out. On May 2,1994, after a final effort, he wrote me, “Dear Bob: I’ve spent this morning in search of four square feet…. How I wish I could report that I know exactly the answer to your question, but honestly I don’t.” In a sense, then, he had not been able to help me in that instance (which is the reason the incident is not in the body of my book), but in a more important sense, what mattered was his willingness to make so earnest an effort to help. And the closet inquiry was one of the few inquiries I made during the twelve years I was working on this book to which Don—or Dick Baker—didn’t find the answer, often after painstaking effort. I have abused shamefully the helpfulness of these two distinguished historians—each of them is the author of several books of his own—interviewing and telephoning them constantly, at their homes and in the evenings and on weekends, to fill in the vast blanks in my knowledge about the Senate. They never complained, were always helpful—and I will be forever grateful for that help. Any mistakes about the Senate in this book are there in spite of them; the responsibility is all mine. But to whatever extent the book is an accurate depiction of the Senate, it is accurate because of them.

•    •    •

F
OR ME
, during the past twelve years, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library has meant a single person: Claudia Wilson Anderson.

Claudia came to work on Johnson’s papers before there
was
a library. It opened in 1971; she had already been working on Johnson’s papers since March, 1969, when the archives of the newly departed President were still stored at the Federal Building in downtown Austin.

During the intervening years, she has become the Library’s great expert on the domestic presidential papers of the Johnson Administration, and on what the Library calls “Pre-Presidential Material”—which includes, of course, the Senate archives which form so large a part of the foundation for this volume.

Claudia is a Senior Archivist at the Library—a title which does not adequately do justice to her abilities, or to her significance in the study of American history. Like Dick Baker and Don Ritchie, she is an historian in the highest sense of the word. She knows—she has made it her business to know—the archival material in her charge as thoroughly as it is possible for a single human being to know those thousands of boxes of documents. And she wants historians—and through them history and the world—to know that material. And in addition to this motivation—the motivation of the true historian—there is about her work a rare integrity and generosity of spirit. I can’t even imagine how many questions I have asked of Claudia (Where would I find material on this senator or that issue? Didn’t I once, years ago, see a piece of paper somewhere in which George Reedy was advising Johnson not to keep ignoring Hubert Humphrey? What file might that be in?). No matter how many questions I asked her, however, I cannot remember one on which she didn’t make as much of an effort as possible to answer it. And beyond such help on individual inquiries, her overall expertise—her guidance through the Lyndon Johnson Archives—has been the guidance of a perceptive and discriminating expert. I notice that every biographer of Lyndon Johnson has thanked Claudia for her help. They should have. History’s knowledge of Johnson will be richer for her help. I can’t imagine any biographer who owes her more than I do.

A
T THE
J
OHNSON
L
IBRARY ALSO
, Linda Seelke, E. Philip Scott, Ted Gittinger, and Kyla Wilson have been of help with this volume, and I thank them.