Master of the Senate (3 page)

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I
N THE CLOAKROOM AS WELL
, however, standing near its center, the focus of activity in it, was another senator, the Democratic Leader and hence the Senate’s Majority Leader, Lyndon Baines Johnson.

He was not a member of the liberal faction, far from it. His state, Texas, had been one of the eleven Confederate states, and his accent was often (not always, for his accent changed depending on whom he was talking to) the same syrupy southern drawl as that of the Barbour County registrar, and he used many of the same words and phrases—including the word that David Frost hated; Lyndon Johnson was, in fact, using that word a lot in the Democratic cloakroom that Summer. “Be ready to take up the goddamned nigra bill again,” he told one of the southern senators, Sam Ervin of North Carolina. Walking over to a group of southerners, he told them there was no choice but to take it up, and to pass at least part of it. “I’m on your side, not theirs,” he told them. “But be practical. We’ve got to give the goddamned niggers
something.”
“Listen,” he told James Eastland of Mississippi, who was anxious to adjourn for the year, “we might as well face it. We’re not gonna be able to get out of here until we’ve got
some
kind of nigger bill.”

Johnson’s voting record—a record twenty years long, dating back to his arrival in the House of Representatives in 1937 and continuing up to that very day—was consistent with the accent and the word. During those twenty years, he had never supported civil rights legislation—any civil rights legislation. In Senate and House alike, his record was an unbroken one of votes against every civil rights bill that had ever come to a vote: against voting rights bills; against bills that would have struck at job discrimination and at segregation in other areas of American life; even against bills that would have protected blacks from lynching. His first speech in the Senate—a ringing defense of the filibuster that was a key southern tactic—had opened with the words “We of the South,” and thereafter, as this book will demonstrate, he had been not merely a member of the Senate’s southern anti-civil rights bloc, but an active member; not merely one of the senatorial “sentries” whom Richard Russell deployed on the floor to make sure that the liberals could not sneak a bill through (although he was a vigilant sentry), but one of the South’s strategists. He had been raised to power by the Southern Bloc, had been elected Democratic Leader through its support. He was, in fact, the protégé, the anointed successor, of the bloc’s great general, the senator Richard Russell had chosen to carry its banner when he himself should one day be forced to lay it down.

Johnson’s methods, moreover, were different from the methods of the liberals, not a few of whom disliked and deeply distrusted him. They spoke of principles and ideals—the traumas of his youth had made him despise men who spoke in such abstractions; calling them “crazies” and “bomb-throwers,” he cut off their attempts to move conversations to high ground by saying, “It’s not the job of a politician to go around saying principled things.” While they spoke of kindness, compassion, decency, he had already displayed a pragmatism and ruthlessness striking even to Washington insiders who had thought themselves
calloused to the pragmatism of politics. While the Douglases and Humphreys spoke of truth and honor, he was deceitful, and proud of it: at that moment, in the Democratic cloakroom, as he talked first to a liberal, then to a conservative, walked over first to a southern group and then to a northern, he was telling liberals one thing, conservatives the opposite, and asserting both positions with equal, and seemingly total, conviction. Tough politicians though some of the liberals were, they felt themselves bound, to one degree or another, by at least some fundamental rules of conduct; he seemed to feel himself bound by nothing; he had to win every fight in which he became involved, said men and women who had known him for a long time—
“had
to win,
had to!”
—and to win he sometimes committed acts of great cruelty.

But he was about to become—beginning in that summer of 1957—the greatest champion that the liberal senators, and Margaret Frost and the millions of other black Americans, had had since, almost a century before, there had been a President named Lincoln.

T
HIS BOOK
is in part the story of that man, Lyndon Baines Johnson. He is not yet the thirty-sixth President of the United States, but a senator—at the beginning of the book, in 1949, the newly elected junior senator from Texas; then the Democratic Party’s Assistant Leader, then its Leader, and finally, in 1955, when the Democrats became the majority party in the Senate, the Senate’s Majority Leader. And the Lyndon Johnson of this book is very different from the man Americans would later come to know as President.

His physical appearance was strikingly different. He was a tall man—a shade under six feet four inches tall—with long arms, and heavily mottled hands so huge that they seemed to swallow the hands of other men, and a massive, powerful head; the back of his skull rose almost straight out of his neck with only a slight softening curve. His features were boldly dramatic: his face, framed by large ears with very long lobes, was a portrait in aggressiveness with its downward-hooking nose that jutted far out of it, its big, sharply pointed jaw that jutted out almost as far, and, under heavy black eyebrows, piercing eyes. But during his Senate years, he was much thinner than he would be as President. Because of his gargantuan appetite, and his repeated attempts at dieting, his weight was constantly rising and falling, but as a senator, he usually weighed scores of pounds less than he would as President. Although his presidential weight was, as one aide puts it, “as closely guarded as a state secret” and he tried to conceal his girth with a heavy girdle, it was sometimes more than 240 pounds; in the Senate, it was generally far less—at the time of the 1957 civil rights fight, for example, he weighed about 180. And during his Senate years, not only did his body seem, in contrast with his presidential years, lean, hard, powerful, vibrant beneath his richly tailored suits, but, with nothing to blur their edges and soften them, the nose and jaw and eyes were even more
prominent than they would be later. During the Senate years, furthermore, the furrows that care and time would later gouge cruelly deep into his cheeks and, in layer above layer, into his forehead were only beginning to appear. By the end of his presidency, the face of Lyndon Johnson, sixty years old when he left office, would be the face of a man harried, grim, beleaguered, and sometimes looking considerably older than his age; the face of Senate Leader Lyndon Johnson, in his forties for most of his senatorial years, was the face of a man confident, cocky, tough, the face of a man in the full flush of power.

It was, however, not in his appearance but in his manner that the contrast between President Johnson and Senator Johnson was most dramatic.

As President, conscious always of television, he tried to be what he conceived of as “presidential,” composed his face into a “dignified” (expressionless, immobile, carefully still) mask, spoke in deliberate cadences that he believed were “statesmanlike,” so that on television, which is where most Americans got to know him, he was stiff, stilted, colorless, unconvincing.

As Senator, he was the opposite.

Still was the last thing his face was then. The bold visage was as mobile as the face of a great actor; expressions—whimsical, quizzical, beseeching, demanding, pleading, threatening, cajoling—chased themselves across it as rapidly and vividly as if some master painter were painting new expressions on it; a “canvas face,” one journalist called it. It was a face that could be, one moment, suffused with a rage that made it a “thundercloud,” his mouth twisted into a snarl, his eyes narrowed into icy slits, and the next moment it could be covered with a sunny grin, the eyes crinkled up in companionable warmth. (Although there was, even in these moments, a wariness in those eyes.) He grinned a lot more often then, and he laughed a lot more often, and when he laughed, he roared, his mouth wide in a roar of laughter, the whole face a mask of mirth. And he was, when he needed to be, irresistibly charming, a storyteller with an extraordinary narrative gift, who could bring to dramatic life the drunks and hellfire preachers and lonely elderly farm wives of his native Texas Hill Country, and, because he was a remarkable mimic, the legendary figures of Washington as well: when he imitated Franklin Roosevelt, a fellow senator says, “you
saw
Roosevelt”; when he imitated Huey Long filibustering on the Senate floor, there was Huey in the flesh. He was a teller of tales that not only amused his listeners but convinced them, for when a point needed to be made, he often made it with a story—he had what a journalist calls “a genius for analogy”—made the point unforgettably, in dialect, in the rhythmic cadences of a great storyteller.

Still was the last thing his hands were. When, as President, he addressed the nation, they were often clasped and folded on the desk before him as if to emphasize the calmness and dignity he considered appropriately “presidential.” During his years as a senator, they were moving—always moving—in gestures as expressive as the face: extended, open and palms up, in entreaty, or
closed in fists of rage, or—a long forefinger extended—jabbing out to make a point. Or they were making some gesture that brought a story vividly to life; Hubert Humphrey, recalling years later Lyndon Johnson explaining that “If you’re going to kill a snake with a hoe, you have to get it with one blow at the head,” said he would never forget “those hands that were just like a couple of great big shovels coming down.”

And, not on television but in person, he was, in the force of his personality, overwhelming. In the Senate’s cloakroom or its corridors or on the Senate floor, one thick arm would be around a fellow senator’s shoulders, pulling him close, and the other hand would be grabbing his colleague’s lapel, or straightening his tie, and then the forefinger of that hand would be poking his points forcefully into the senator’s chest. His face would be very close to the senator’s face, looming above it and forcing the other man’s head back, or, in a peculiar cocking gesture, turning sideways, and coming up under his colleague’s face. And all the time he would be talking, arguing, persuading, with emotion, belief, conviction that seemed to well up inside him and pour out of him—even if it poured out with equal conviction on opposite sides of the same issue; if Lyndon Johnson seemed even bigger than he was—“larger than life,” in the phrase so often used about him—it was not only because of the size of his huge body or his huge hands but because of his passions: burning, monumental. His magnetism drew men toward him, drew them along with him, made them follow where he led.

A
ND WHEN
, on the floor, Lyndon Johnson was running the Senate, he put on a show so riveting that Capitol Hill had never seen anything like it during the previous century and a half of the Republic’s existence—as it has never seen anything like it since.

Tall and confident, with a gangling, awkward, but long and swinging stride, “the Western movie barging into the room,” in the words of one journalist—he would prowl the big chamber restlessly, moving up and down the aisles, back and forth along the rows of desks. Throwing himself down beside a senator who was sitting on one of the couches in the rear of the Chamber, he would talk to him out of the side of his mouth. Another colleague would enter. Jumping up, Johnson would hug him, joking with him or whispering earnestly in his ear. Moving over to a senator seated at a desk, and then to another, he would sit down beside a man or bend over him, sometimes with both his arms planted firmly on the target’s desk, so that he could not rise and get away. Taking another man by the arm, he would lead him off to one side of the Chamber, drape his arm around his shoulders, and begin whispering urgently. And when Lyndon Johnson was talking to one of his colleagues, his hands seemed never to stop moving, patting a senatorial shoulder, grasping a senatorial lapel, jabbing a senatorial chest—jabbing it harder and harder if the point was still not
being taken—and then hugging the senator when it was. Or, if it wasn’t, the reporters in the Press Gallery above would see Johnson bending closer and talking in a very low voice—and they would see the other senator’s face change, as the threat was pounded in, along with Johnson’s determination to carry it out.

And then, at the climactic moments—the moments when the clerk called for the yeas and nays, and the Senate of the United States made its decision on whether to transform a bill into the law of the land—the power of Lyndon Johnson as Majority Leader was fully revealed, in a manner that veteran Senate watchers, accustomed, some of them over decades, to the body’s traditionally slow-paced, drowsy atmosphere and to the previous courtliness and decorum of its rituals, at first found all but incredible.

When after days of maneuvering, with votes changing back and forth and back again, Johnson suddenly had enough votes in hand for victory, so long as none of the votes changed again, he wanted the vote taken—immediately. His front-row center desk at the edge of the well below the dais was a step up from the well, and he was so tall that when he stood at his desk, his eyes were almost at a level with those of the presiding senator across the well. “Call the question!” Johnson would say—and if the senator did not respond fast enough, he would snarl at him, in a voice clearly audible in the gallery,
“CALL THE QUESTION!”

And when the vote was taken, it was taken at the precise pace Lyndon Johnson wanted. Sometimes he had all his men there at the moment of the vote, and his opponents didn’t; sometimes he didn’t have all his men there—stragglers were still being rounded up, sometimes they hadn’t been found—so sometimes he wanted the roll call fast, and sometimes he wanted it slow. And he set the tempo accordingly. Standing at his desk, directly in front of the clerk calling the roll, Lyndon Johnson would raise his big right hand, and with the pen in his hand, or simply with a long forefinger, would make circles in the air, “like an airport mechanic signaling a pilot to rev up the motors,” as
Time
magazine put it. This signal to the clerk meant, as Johnson’s aide George Reedy would say, “hurry up—he had the votes and wanted them recorded” before the situation changed. Or he would make a downward shoving motion with his open hands, meaning “slow down”—“he didn’t have the votes but would get them if only he had a little more time.” Senators would be hurrying into the Chamber, crowding into the well. Lyndon Johnson would stand at the edge of the well—looking, because he was a step above the men in it, even bigger than he was, towering over the men before him—a long arm raised over them, making big circles, “for all the world,” as
Time
said, like “an orchestra conductor” leading the Senate the way a conductor led an obedient orchestra.