Master of the Senate (211 page)

It is difficult to calculate how many interviews I had with Horace Busby. I formally transcribed only seventeen of them; for scores of other lengthy interviews
I made only handwritten notes (sometimes these, too, ran many pages); and is it correct to dignify with the title “interview” a brief telephone call he made to me in order to add a detail to a story he had previously told me, or to tell me a new anecdote about Lyndon Johnson that he had just remembered? I only know that when Buzz died, I still had so many more questions I wanted to ask him.

I had received previous reminders that among the problems involved in the writing of this volume was that of the human life span. Horace Busby was not the only member of Lyndon Johnson’s staff who made an extensive effort to help me understand the extraordinary individual for whom they had worked, and to understand the years Johnson spent in the Senate of the United States. And he was not the only member of Johnson’s staff whose help was cut off abruptly. George Reedy, whom I began interviewing in 1985 over gargantuan platters of choucroute in Milwaukee’s German-American rathskellers, was in later years talking to me by telephone from his room in a nursing home in that city, with the same eagerness as Busby for me to get it right. My notes for a call I made to him on January 14, 1999, show that his first sentence was “I was hoping you would call me back. One point I didn’t make clear …” One day in March, 1999, when I telephoned his room, there was no answer. I didn’t attach any significance to that; there had been other occasions when I hadn’t been able to get in touch with him for a few days. But this time, a day or two after my call, I picked up the
New York Times
and found myself reading his obituary. Ken BeLieu, John Connally, Walter Jenkins, Gene Latimer, Dan McGillicuddy, Mary Rather, Jim Rowe, Slug Tyler, Mary Louise Glass Young—all these people worked in Lyndon Johnson’s various offices during his Senate years, all talked to me at length, and the assistance and insights of each of them were cut off while I still had questions to ask—as has also been the case, I must add, with an unfortunately large number of other men and women who were, in one capacity or another, involved in Johnson’s life, and who have also died. Over and over again during the course of researching these books, I was abruptly reminded of the opportunity I was being given by the cooperation of these men and women—and of how that opportunity wasn’t going to last indefinitely.

I feel it would be gratuitous to say that some of them—perhaps all of them—would not agree with everything I have written. But whatever success I may have had in re-creating the Senate of Lyndon Johnson is due beyond measure to the effort of these people to help me understand him, and the world of the Senate (and it is also due, of course, to the help of members of Johnson’s staff who thankfully are still with us; particularly valuable insights and descriptions have been given me by Roland Bibolet, Yolanda Boozer, Nadine Brammer Eckhardt, Ashton Gonella, Gerald Siegel, and Warren Woodward). Some other members of Johnson’s staff refused my requests for interviews, but they have given extensive oral history interviews to the Johnson Library, so that at least some of their views are on record. And the help of those who did talk to me has, I hope, reduced the significance of those refusals.

In addition to Johnson’s staff, there were other interviews. Eleven were with senators: Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Carl T. Curtis of Nebraska, William J. Fulbright of Arkansas, Eugene J. McCarthy of Minnesota, Edmund S. Muskie of Maine, William Proxmire of Wisconsin, Abraham A. Ribicoff of Connecticut, Stuart Symington of Missouri, Herman Talmadge of Georgia, and Ralph W. Yarborough of Texas. Some of these interviews—with Fulbright, Muskie, and Symington—were extensive and valuable. And about others a particular word might be said. Ralph Yarborough was interviewed, after his retirement from the Senate, in a one-man law firm in Austin that seemed out of a daguerreotype of the Old West, with the mounted horns of a Texas longhorn over the receptionist’s desk and, in his inner office, a long, long old-fashioned conference table covered, from one end to the other, in deep stacks of legal papers. He lavished time on me, in five intensive discussions, in an attempt to make me understand the Senate as he found it when he arrived there in 1957, and Lyndon Johnson as he had known him since he began encountering him in Texas politics during the 1930s. The interview with Herman Talmadge at his home in Henry County, Georgia, was painful—literally, since he was suffering badly from congestive heart failure, and every answer he made to my questions required an effort that was hard to watch. But the answers were given, and they provided me with new insight into Lyndon Johnson’s relationship with the southern senators. Bill Bradley had thought quite deeply about the workings of the Senate, and about the nature of power in it. A series of interviews with him in 1996 both in Washington and in New York were more like lectures from a very thoughtful and perceptive scholar. In addition, Senator Bradley provided one bit of assistance that he was unusually (almost uniquely, in fact) qualified to give. Many of the men who had been present on the Senate floor during the 1950s had told me how Lyndon Johnson was so tall that he “towered” over senators in the well as he stood at his Majority Leader’s front-row desk one step above it, and how his eyes were almost at the level of the clerks and the presiding officer on the dais across the well. Bill Bradley, as I realized from perusing an old program I had kept from a Princeton University basketball game, was six feet four and a half inches tall, just slightly taller than Johnson. When, near the end of the wonderful day on the floor that he arranged for me, he asked if there was anything further he could do to be of assistance, I said there was. The then Majority Leader, Bob Dole, wasn’t at his desk. I asked Senator Bradley if he would mind going over and standing at it, so I could get a picture of precisely to what degree Johnson had in fact “towered” as he stood there. Bill was gracious enough to comply. Since this was an opportunity I was not likely to have again, I was determined to get the picture fixed firmly in my mind no matter how long that took. After a while, I realized that Bill had been standing there for quite some time, and that he was in fact looking at me as if to inquire if he had been there long enough. I said I would appreciate it if he would stand there a while longer, and he did, uncomplainingly—for as long as I needed.

It seems to have become a custom for biographers to total up the number of interviews they conducted for a book. I see by my notes that the number of people I interviewed is 263, but of course not just Busby and Reedy and Yarborough but many of these people were interviewed many times. With some of the key sources for this book—Bob Barr, Dick Bolling, Herbert Brownell, Ed Clark, Ava Johnson Cox, Tex Easley, Bryce Harlow, L. E. Jones, Bill Jordan, Margaret Mayer, Neil MacNeil, Posh Oltorf, Joe Rauh, Jim Rowe, Howard Shuman, John Steele, Arthur Stehling, many others, too—our relationship became so friendly that whenever I had a question, I was able to simply pick up a telephone and call them, informally. And of course those names do not include Dick Baker and Don Ritchie, who during these twelve years have spoken to me, formally, informally, in person, over the telephone, from their office, from their homes, so many times that I am sure they never want to hear from me again. Adding up the interviews I conducted is difficult, but by the most conservative estimate the number is more than a thousand.

Here is a description of the papers in the Johnson Library that form part of the foundation for this third volume—and an explanation of how they are identified in the Notes that follow.

A
WORD OF EXPLANATION
is necessary about the citations in the Notes that read “Georgia Giant.”

These citations refer to a three-hour television documentary, “Richard Russell: Georgia Giant,” which aired in 1970 on Cox Broadcasting’s WSB-TV in Atlanta, Georgia. When the citations read “unedited transcript,” they refer to the typed transcript of twenty-five hours of interviews conducted with Russell by the journalist Harold Suit that were filmed for the documentary, mostly on the front porch of the Russell home in Winder. Quotations from this transcript are identified by the number of the reel of film to which the transcript refers. The citations that read “edited transcript” refer to the typed transcript of the three-hour documentary which actually aired. In two instances, Russell is seen on the first hour of the documentary (actually on the first of three videotapes of the program) talking about his father, and the edited transcript does not contain those quotes, so in those two instances the source is cited as “‘Georgia Giant,’ Tape, Part I.” All transcripts are in the Richard B. Russell Library.