Master of the Senate (210 page)

I
NA AND
I are deeply indebted to a number of librarians at archival collections around the United States. We are especially indebted to the Russell Library’s Sheryl Vogt. Her knowledge of the Russell papers was invaluable in steering Ina through the manuscript collection, as was her assistance in reading Russell’s handwriting. Not only did she make Ina’s trips to Athens productive, she was
always available, even years later, to answer any questions we might have. The Eisenhower Library’s Dwight Strandberg was also invaluable to Ina, both with his archival expertise and in making the library a pleasant and efficient research facility. The archivists at the Truman Library were so helpful and efficient that they had every file relating to Lyndon Johnson available and waiting every time Ina arrived in Independence. And Robert Parks at the Roosevelt Library, who remembers Ina from the time she first came to that library twenty-nine years ago as the researcher for
The Power Broker
, has for all that time been unstintedly generous in his assistance. Our gratitude also goes to Norman Chase at the Library of Congress, to Michael Gillette at the National Archives, and to Matthew Gilmore and Roxanna Deane at the Martin Luther King Library in Washington. The morgue of the defunct
Washington Star
, now in residence at that library, has been an invaluable resource for
Master of the Senate
, and Mr. Gilmore and Ms. Deane were very helpful in making it available.

I first met Greg Harness, the Senate Librarian, twelve years ago, when I was starting on this book, and for twelve years he has, with great expertise and unfailing graciousness, been providing me with information that I needed.

W
ILLIAM
H. J
ORDAN
J
R.
went to work for Richard Russell in 1955, and worked for him until Russell died in 1971, staying in the Senator’s office every night until Russell went home. Bill revered the Senator, whom he considers one of the greatest of American statesmen, and during the three decades since his death has worked faithfully to ensure that he received his proper place in history. To try to ensure that I understood Russell and portrayed him accurately, Bill spent many hours talking to me, as well as driving me to Winder and arranging for me to spend time in Russell’s home, and in the family graveyard behind it, as well as to talk with the Senator’s grandnephew, Richard Brevard Russell III. I thank him for that, and for the hospitality that he and his wife, Gwen (who was also a member of Russell’s staff and whose comments on him were also perceptive) extended to me. I thank Bill the more especially because he did all this although I think he understood that my view of Russell would coincide with his only in some respects. There was an honorableness about that that I admire.

Howard E. Shuman brought to the Senate the keen eye of a political scientist and economist, and he observed the Senate close-up for twenty-seven years, as an administrative assistant first to Senator Paul Douglas and then to Senator William Proxmire. His perceptive observations have been embodied in books and in many articles, and they were embodied also in the many hours of his time which he spent educating me about the Senate. I thank him for them.

Many journalists who covered the Senate during the 1950s and Lyndon Johnson during his senatorial and presidential years generously gave me the benefit of their observations and insights in hundreds of hours of interviews. These included Bonnie Angelo, John Chadwick, Benjamin Cole, Allen Drury,
Tex Easley, John Finney, Alan Emory, Rowland Evans, John A. Goldsmith, Seth Kantor, Murray Kempton, William Lambert, Anthony Lewis, Sarah McClendon, Karl Meyer, John Oakes, Irwin Ross, Hugh Sidey, Alfred Steinberg, J. William Theis, Theodore H. White, and Frank Van der Linden.

To a number of journalists, I am more than usually indebted. The word pictures of Lyndon Johnson briefing the press on the Senate floor just before noon each day that were given to me by Robert A. Barr were especially helpful, as was the research on the Senate which Bob volunteered to do for me.

In Neil MacNeil, who came to Washington with the United Press in 1949, and was immediately assigned to the Senate, and who later was the congressional correspondent for many years for
Time
magazine, I found a journalist with a remarkable knowledge of the institution, its history, its mores, and its men. Neil shared all this with me most generously, in many hours of interviews, and in rereading my notes on these talks, I was struck over and over with the depth of his insights. I could use almost the same words in thanking John L. Steele. Over and over again, when I needed a detail to fill out a scene, or a piece of Senate history or custom to augment my knowledge, I had only to pick up a telephone and call Mr. Steele, and my problem was solved. I thank him for both the keenness of his perceptions and his willingness to share them with me.

I had long admired the photographs of George Tames, and after I began talking with him, I learned that his eye was sharp even when it was not behind a camera. On several days—long days—George took me from room to room in the Capitol and the SOB, recounting to me scenes he had observed in each one, and helping me immeasurably in my attempts to grasp what the Senate was like decades ago.

Katharine Graham provided me with many hours of insights into Washington, into Lyndon Johnson, and into the relationship between Philip Graham and Johnson, so crucial in this volume, and crucial also in the volume to come. Moreover, she graciously provided me with transcripts of a few of her own interviews with people who figure in this book. I list Mrs. Graham here, among the journalists, because I believe this is where she would want to be listed. And I thank also her researcher, Evelyn Small.

In Margaret Mayer, I found a remarkable journalist. Her interviews with Johnson, and the vivid portraits her words painted of him, helped me in my attempts to see him as he was. Ms. Mayer covered him for the
Dallas Times-Herald
for many years, and worked for a short time on his staff. She has a very keen eye, and a real gift for words, and she put both at my disposal.

During our many visits to Austin, Greg Curtis and his wife, Tracy, made things very pleasant for Ina and me, generously driving Texas-length distances to introduce us to various versions of barbecue. My conversations with Greg, who during his many years as editor of
Texas Monthly
elevated that magazine to the first rank of American journalism, were an education to me about Texas’ changing culture. I am grateful for those conversations.

A NOTE ON SOURCES

I
N TRYING TO RE-CREATE
the world of the Senate of the 1950s, and Lyndon Johnson’s place in it, a basic source is of course the written materials found in the Senate Historical Office, the Senate Library, and the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington; in the collections of the papers of individual senators in various libraries around the United States—the papers of Richard B. Russell at the Russell Library in Athens, Georgia, were especially helpful for this work, but so were the papers of senators like A. Willis Robertson at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia; Robert Kerr and Elmer Thomas at the Carl Albert Center at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma; and Herbert H. Lehman at Columbia University in New York City—and in collections such as the NAACP Papers at the Library of Congress. And of course there are the papers in the Johnson Library in Austin, Texas. As I have explained in previous volumes of
The Years of Lyndon Johnson
, the papers in the Johnson Library are stored in document cases, some plain red or gray cardboard, most covered in red buckram (and stamped with a gold replica of the presidential seal). There are 2,082 boxes that deal with the Senate, and they contain, by the Library’s estimate, about 1,665,000 pages of documents. Some of them are only newspaper clippings or form letters to constituents, but there are hundreds of thousands of pages of significant letters, inter- and intra-office memoranda, scribbled notes, transcripts of telephone conversations, and speech texts in various edited versions. I don’t know how many of those pages I’ve read during the twelve years I’ve been working on this volume, but I’ve read a lot of them.

In some areas, these papers are illuminating. The series in the Johnson Senate Papers labeled “Papers Relating to the Armed Services Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee,” for example, are valuable because in order for freshman Senator Lyndon Johnson to obtain the staffing and funding he wanted for this subcommittee, he had to submit to senior senators detailed requests, and not only
these requests but the work papers that went into the final requests provide significant insight into his thinking and maneuvers. The Senate Papers (which are described at the end of this Note) contain the office files and memoranda of various Johnson assistants, most notably Walter Jenkins, George Reedy, Solis Horwitz, and Gerald Siegel, and their reports to Johnson are detailed and informative.

I have found the Johnson papers rather unrevealing, however, about an area that is a major concern of this book: the nature of senatorial (or, in a larger sense, legislative) power, and how Johnson acquired and employed that power; how the Senate works, in other words, and how Lyndon Johnson
made
it work.

Primary written sources for the Senate itself, in the National Archives and the Senate Library and in other collections in Washington, are also not as helpful as they might be. For one thing, the source that should be the most basic and complete record for events on the Senate floor—the
Congressional Record
—cannot always be relied on as an accurate reflection of what occurred there. Senators and their assistants routinely “corrected”—meaning “edited,” and, not infrequently, meaning expunged, or made more politic—the words they actually spoke on the floor. Lyndon Johnson made extensive use of this opportunity to alter the historical record, which during his later years in the Senate took place, as his assistant Colonel Kenneth E. BeLieu, staff director of Johnson’s Preparedness Subcommittee from 1957 to 1961, states, in a room behind the Senate floor that “we called Dino’s room, only because it was supervised by a man named Dino. This was … where staffs corrected the Senators’ floor statements for spelling, grammar and content.”

“Often,” BeLieu says, after Senator Stuart Symington and Johnson “had engaged in a spirited floor argument, Ed Welch and I went to Dino’s to do our duties, Ed for Symington and I for the Leader. We both had written their respective and suggested remarks. I announced to Ed, ‘What Lyndon said bears no resemblance to what I wrote for him.’ Ed countered, ‘What Symington said will bear no resemblance to what I’m now writing.’”
*
During Johnson’s earlier years in the Senate, the editing was often done by Donald Cook and George Reedy, sometimes by other members of his staff, and sometimes by Johnson himself. His staff member Solis Horwitz, who worked for him from 1957 to 1959, was to recall that one morning in 1957, when a number of Johnson staffers were meeting in the office of Secretary of the Senate Felton (Skeeter) Johnston, “the Senator came in, and he had made a long speech on the floor that morning and had gotten into a great deal of dialogue. He had the transcript with him, and … he was correcting the transcript while sitting there.” (Horwitz says he “never saw him do that again in all the years that I was with him. Because after that, we always corrected the transcript.”)
†
Other members of the staff said that while
Johnson did the editing himself infrequently during the years after he became Democratic Leader, he did it more frequently during the years before that. One area in which this altering of the
Record
is particularly damaging to historical accuracy is that of civil rights; during interviews, journalists and Senate staff members would vividly recall for me venomous racist remarks that some southern senator or other had made during a debate, but time and again when I went to the
Record
for the relevant date, no such remark (or any approximate version of it) was there.

Primary written sources are also not particularly helpful because of the nature of Senate life in the 1950s, in which so much crucial business—negotiating, persuading, the fashioning of compromises—was conducted not in writing but orally, face to face, or over the telephone, between the people involved, so that the only way to try to re-create the world of the Senate, and of Johnson’s role in it, was to talk to these people.

I began my work on this volume in time for it to be possible for me to do this—but only just in time, as I was reminded, poignantly, by a letter written to the Caros (actually to my wife, Ina), on April 16, 2000, by Johnson’s longtime assistant Horace W. Busby. Buzz, as Ina and I had come to call him, had been rushed to a hospital in Santa Monica, California, the previous weekend. “Quite a time,” he wrote. “In and out of it for two nights—remember thinking it will be hard on Robert, nobody else can tell him about the Vice Presidency.”

In the letter, Buzz said he was recovering. I was not sure he meant that; he closed the letter with a word he had never used before: “Farewell.” He never really recovered, and he died, on May 31, 2000, at the age of seventy-six, without talking to me again.

Buzz’s memory had failed him a bit in the hospital on one point: he
had
talked to me about “the Vice Presidency”—Lyndon Johnson’s vice presidency—and about the presidency, as he had, of course, about Lyndon Johnson’s years in the Senate. I had begun interviewing Buzz in 1976 in Austin. During the 1980s and 1990s, the interviews continued in Washington, some in his office, some in his apartment, some in a coffee shop, the Cozy Corner on Twentieth Street NW, that he liked to frequent, some in restaurants of a higher caliber. Some went on all day. In 1999, in failing health, he moved to Santa Monica, where his children could care for him, and the interviews continued by telephone. And he would write letters to clarify points he felt he had not made clear enough—or that I had stubbornly refused to accept because of conflicting information from other sources—during the conversations. Sometime after he moved, he lost his eyesight. He could still touch-type, however, and the letters continued. The occasional line which ran off the page, and the large, scrawled, very shaky
B
with which he signed the letters in hand, was the only sign of his disability. (“This
B
is not an affectation—best I can do since stroke,” he typed once.)