Master of the Senate (28 page)

The physicality of Lyndon Johnson extended into areas besides that of argument. During the 1940s, Capitol Hill was, of course, very much a man’s world, in which locker-room humor and morals were common; besides, almost half the members of the House, having been raised on farms, were accustomed to earthiness. But even some of these men were startled at Lyndon Johnson’s earthiness. “He would piss in the parking lot of the House Office Building,” says Wingate Lucas, a farm boy who represented Fort Worth. “Well, a lot of fellows did that. I did it. But the rest of us would try to hide behind a car or something. Lyndon wouldn’t. He just didn’t care if someone noticed him.” In fact, Lucas says, he seemed to want to be noticed. “I remember once, we were walking across the lot and some [female] secretaries were behind us, and he just stopped and began to take a piss right in front of them.”

He would also urinate in front of his own secretaries—and since some of them were attractive young women, this, too, was startling to those who witnessed it. During the years in the House, he had a one-room hideaway office on the top floor of the House Office Building—without a toilet, but with a washbasin in the corner of the room, concealed behind a wood and green-burlap screen. While entertaining guests in the hideaway, or dictating to a secretary, he would pull the screen aside and urinate in the basin. Sometimes he would put the screen back before he did so—and sometimes he wouldn’t.

He had always displayed great pride in his sexual apparatus. Even at college, where sexual boastfulness is a staple of campus existence, Lyndon Johnson’s boastfulness—and exhibitionism about his sexual prowess—had been striking to his fellows. Exhibiting his penis to his roommates, Johnson called it “Jumbo”; returning to his room after a date, he would say, “Jumbo had a real workout tonight,” while relating physical details of the evening, including details of his companion’s most intimate anatomy. And if he was urinating in a bathroom of the House Office Building and a colleague came in, Johnson, finishing, would sometimes turn to him with his penis in his hand. Without putting it back in his pants, he would begin a conversation, still holding it, “and shaking it, as if he was showing off,” says one man with whom he did this. He asked another man, “Have you ever seen anything as big as this?”

None of the body parts customarily referred to as “private” were private when the parts were Lyndon Johnson’s. Nervous and restless, he couldn’t seem
in public to stop moving, and among the movements was an inordinate amount of scratching: of his chest, of his stomach—and of areas not generally scratched in public. He was constantly pulling his trousers lower, either in front or back, while complaining about his tailor’s failure to provide him with sufficient “ball room,” and he was continually, openly and at length, scratching his rear end—quite deeply into his rear end sometimes. He would plunge a hand into a side pocket of his trousers and scratch his groin. “Crude,” says Representative Richard Boiling of Missouri. “Crude. Barnyard. Always scratching his crotch and picking his nose in mixed company. I’ll never forget—one time he had some injury—hernia or something—and even with the girls present in his office he pulled his pants down to show it. And he’d sit at his desk, and it wouldn’t matter if there was a woman there—he’d pull up his scrotum while talking. We men used to be a bit embarrassed.”

There was, in fact, a purpose to at least some of his crudeness. Years before, while he was still only an assistant to a congressman, Lyndon Johnson himself had had two assistants, two teenage young men who had been his students when he was a high school teacher back in Texas. One, Gene Latimer, gave Johnson the unquestioning deference Johnson wanted; he would work for him for thirty-five years as “his slave—his totally willing slave.” The other, Luther E. Jones, would not; ambitious and independent, he was afraid that “you lose your individuality if you allow someone to be too demanding for too long,” and if he disagreed with Johnson about something, he would voice his disagreement. Jones, a neat young man who was invariably well scrubbed, with his hair carefully slicked down, was reserved, almost prim, in physical matters; “Any kind of coarseness or crudeness just disgusted him,” a friend says. Johnson began summoning Jones to take dictation from him while he was sitting on the toilet. “At first,” Latimer says, “L.E. attempted to stand away from the door, but Johnson insisted he stand right over him. L.E. would stand with his head averted, and take dictation.” As both Latimer and Jones understood, the tactic was a “method of control”—employed to humiliate Jones, and make him acknowledge who was boss. Years later, Richard Goodwin, a speechwriter who had just begun working for Johnson, was summoned to the President’s bathroom in the White House. Watching Johnson, “apparently in the midst of defecation,” staring at him “intently, looking for any sign of embarrassment,” and “lowering his tone, forcing me to approach more closely,” while “calculating my reaction,” Goodwin realized that he was being given a kind of “test.” Goodwin passed—and so had many of the staff members to whom Johnson had given the same test during his years in the House of Representatives.

For other aspects of Lyndon Johnson’s personal style as well, adjectives like “restrained” or “dignified” seemed inappropriate. Among his chronic health problems were a severe eczema-like rash on his hands, and a bronchial condition, and the prescribed remedies were employed with a notable openness. He often kept a large bowl of a purple-colored salve called “Lubriderm”
on his desk, and would, even with visitors present, plunge his hands into the bowl, and assiduously rub gobs of ointment into his hands. To combat the nasal congestion produced by the bronchitis, doctors had recommended the use of a nasal inhaler, and the use was frequent—not only in his House office but even on the House floor. Throwing his head all the way back, he would stick the inhaler into one nostril and inhale, with a slurping sound so loud it could be heard clearly in the Press Gallery above. Few settings seemed less appropriate for such behavior than the Senate Office Building, or the Senate Chamber.

T
HE PLACE
to which Lyndon Johnson had come seemed peculiarly unsuited to him, in addition, for reasons more serious than personal style. Because it was ruled by seniority, ability couldn’t move him along the long tables in the committee rooms toward those gavels at the end that conferred power in the Senate. Energy couldn’t move him along. Only the passage of time could do that. There was, it was universally agreed, only one way to become one of the Senate’s rulers: to wait.

Lyndon Johnson had already had a lesson—a terribly harsh lesson—in how long seniority might make him wait. Upon his arrival in the House of Representatives, in 1937, he had been assigned to its Naval Affairs Committee, whose chairman was Carl Vinson, “the Georgia Swamp Fox,” then in his twenty-third year in Congress but still only fifty-three years old, and, as a southern Democrat, virtually guaranteed his seat as long as he wanted it. And of course even Vinson’s death or retirement would not make Johnson chairman. Some of the committee’s Democrats who sat between him and Vinson would lose their seats, some would die, some would become senators—but some would remain on the committee. He would have to survive the chairmanships of these remaining Democrats, the chairmanships laid end to end, before he could become chairman. That prospect was bleak enough, but then, in 1946, Johnson had received a brutal reminder that, because so many years were involved, no one could predict what might happen—so that even waiting was no guarantee. In that year, an unusual concatenation of deaths and defeats among the Democrats on Naval Affairs had left him as the committee’s third-ranking Democrat. Only a single member of his party sat between him and Vinson; the chairmanship had begun to seem within his reach. (Only, of course, because Johnson could not foresee Vinson’s longevity; the Swamp Fox would not retire until 1965, at the age of eighty-one; had Johnson remained on the House Naval Affairs Committee, he would actually have had to wait twenty-eight years before he became chairman.) But it was in 1946 that the House adopted the recommendations of a bipartisan Joint Committee on the Reorganization of Congress, and one of those recommendations was for merging the Naval Affairs and Military Affairs Committees into a single new House Armed Services Committee. Six Democratic members of Military Affairs possessed
greater seniority in the House than he did. His old committee had suddenly disappeared; on his new one, he was not the third-ranking Democrat but the ninth. Nor was that the end of the lesson. In November, 1946, the GOP won control of the House: a vivid reminder of the fact that even outwaiting or outliving all the Democrats ahead of him would not make him chairman if, when his turn in the Democratic line finally arrived, the Democrats were not the body’s majority party.

Lyndon Johnson had fought and twisted in the House to try to break free of the seniority trap. When the traditional “Texas seat” on the powerful Appropriations Committee became vacant, he planted newspaper stories hinting that President Roosevelt wanted him to have it, and half persuaded Speaker Ray-burn that if no one else demanded it, he could have it. But someone else did demand it: Texas congressman George Mahon, who had more seniority. “Ray-burn followed the rules,” Mahon was to recall; regardless of the Speaker’s fondness for Johnson, “If you were in line for it, you got it—that was the way the unvarying rule was.”
*
Rayburn himself had, long before, learned the lesson the hard way. His patron John Nance (Cactus Jack) Garner had said, “The only way to get anywhere in Congress is to stay there and let seniority take its course.” Rayburn had not wanted to believe that, but as the years passed, he had realized he had no choice. He had come to Congress in 1912, at the age of thirty; he did not get his first real power—the chairmanship of the House Interstate Commerce Committee—until 1931, when he was forty-nine; he would eventually become Speaker, all right, but not until 1940, when he was fifty-eight. Lyndon Johnson had studied Rayburn’s career, and had known it wouldn’t do for him.
“Too slow. Too slow!”
The House had been too slow for Lyndon Johnson. What would the Senate be?

A
ND THE
S
ENATE
was ruled by the South, by that mighty Southern Caucus whose unity—that “oneness found nowhere else in politics”—was rooted in its members’ allegiance to a cause almost holy to them. Rising to power in the Senate—to a position within the Senate from which a senator could run for President—depended on the support of southern senators, support which would be forthcoming only after they had been thoroughly convinced that their colleague’s allegiance to that cause was firm.

But that allegiance, essential for success within the Senate, would be fatal to success beyond it—would be fatal in pursuing the goal of which Lyndon Johnson had so long dreamed. There were only eleven southern states, and in
many of the other thirty-seven, sympathy for that Lost Cause was not a recommendation. In the eight most populous states, all of which were in the North or the West, it was, in fact, a taint. In the Senate, these eight states cast only sixteen of ninety-six votes, but in a presidential election, they accounted for more than 40 percent of the electoral vote. “No Democrat could win without us,” Illinois’ Paul Douglas was to say. No Democrat could become president without the North’s support—support not available to an advocate of segregation.

It was, therefore, an article of faith in Washington that no southerner could ever become President of the United States. This belief was stated over and over—without qualification, since no qualification was thought necessary—in conversation, and in articles and columns and editorials. When Lyndon Johnson rode in Speaker Rayburn’s chauffeured limousine, staring at him was a plaque that the Speaker’s Democratic colleagues had had affixed to the back of the front seat: “To our Beloved Sam Rayburn—Who would have been President if he had come from any place but the South.”

Lyndon Johnson was from Texas, one of the eleven states of the Confederacy. The taint of the South was on him. For him to realize his great ambition, that taint would have to be removed. But he could rise to a position from which he could run for President only with the South’s enthusiastic, unqualified support. He had trod a very rocky, narrow path to power before. Was this path—the Senate path—to prove too rocky and narrow even for him?

I
N ADDITION
, he had a problem with his staff—an old problem.

Working for Lyndon Johnson was, in a way, very exciting, for he filled his office with a sense of drama and a sense of fun. Horace Busby had received a full dose of both on the day in 1948 on which he arrived there—a short, curly-haired young man whose editorials in the University of Texas student newspaper had caught Johnson’s eye, and who had been brought to Washington, a few days after his twenty-fourth birthday, to be the congressman’s “idea man” and speechwriter. Busby idolized Franklin Roosevelt, and Johnson had been told that, and when the young man was shown into Johnson’s office to meet him, there, sitting behind the desk, was Franklin Roosevelt, complete to pince-nez glasses, long cigarette holder, and uptilted, outthrust jaw. “Come in, young man, come in,” the figure behind the desk said, in a perfect imitation of Roosevelt’s patrician voice, and, wheeling his big swivel chair around the desk since of course he was paralyzed and couldn’t walk, he took the astonished young man’s hand and said graciously, “Sit down, sit down.” Then, with obvious difficulty, he wheeled himself slowly and painfully back behind the desk, and looked Busby directly in the eye. The big jaw thrust even farther out and up. “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” Franklin Roosevelt said. There followed one of Roosevelt’s fireside chats—“about ten minutes of it,” in Busby’s recollection; “I looked it up later, and it was practically word for word.” And
that was the end of the drama, and time for the joke. Summoning his assistant Walter Jenkins, Johnson reverted to his role as congressman, and, in his own voice, began a serious discussion with him—in the midst of which the cigarette, without warning, suddenly flew out of the holder, and, sailing across the desk, landed smack in an ashtray right in front of the astonished Busby. Johnson’s cigarette holder, he would learn, was equipped with a spring that ejected cigarettes, and Johnson could aim it with accuracy, thanks to hours of practice.