Master of the Senate (33 page)

E
NTERING THE
S
ENATE
O
FFICE
B
UILDING
each morning—through the main entrance if he had dropped off Congresswoman Douglas first; otherwise, having parked in that space reserved for him on Delaware Avenue, through the Delaware entrance—he was the same Lyndon Johnson. The Delaware entrance was a back door, but the door was bronze, tall and heavy, and the walls inside
were marble—highly polished marble adorned with fluted pilasters and ornate bronze sconces. Then there were columns, and, beyond them, across a circular vestibule, a bank of three elevators—set within tall arches, whose heavily ornamented bronze doors shone like gold. He would press the buttons on all three elevators—and, in a fever of impatience, press them again. And if an elevator did not then instantly arrive, he would whirl, his jacket flaring out around him, and run up a long, curving flight of stairs—a hulking, hurrying, forward-leaning figure in a flapping suit and wide, garish, hand-painted necktie, taking stairs two at a time in that setting of marble and bronze. As a young congressional assistant almost twenty years before, coming up Capitol Hill in the morning from the modest hotel where he lived in a basement room, he had had to pass the Senate Building and the Capitol to reach his office in the House Office Building, and he had run past them in his haste to get to work. He had a shorter way to go to reach his office now, as he had a shorter way to go to reach his great goal, but he was still running. At the top of the stairs his loping steps would carry him between a pair of tall columns, into that long, high-ceilinged corridor with its marble floor reflecting the ceiling lights, and its row of tall mahogany doors—to the second one on the right, the door to the reception room of his office.

When he pushed open that door, he was, in dealing with his staff, the same Lyndon Johnson. With the exception of Connally, the staff was composed of the kind of men and women Lyndon Johnson wanted—men and women who had demonstrated an unusual willingness to absorb personal abuse: Woody; Mary Rather, who stood head bowed while obscenities swept over her; Glynn Stegall, whose hands would shake as Lyndon Johnson humiliated him in front of his wife; Walter Jenkins, whom Johnson worked “like a nigger slave”—two roomfuls of men and women willing to let him use the blacksnake.

And he used it. When he arrived at 231 each morning, after screeching into that parking space in front of the SOB as the young policeman hurriedly pushed the “Reserved” stanchions out of his way, “the door would,” in the words of one man, “blow open and Johnson—Jesus God, he filled up the whole room the minute he came in, and if he was really in a bad mood, he would be so excruciatingly rude I would gasp.”

“First thing every morning, he would make the rounds, stopping at every desk, and beating up on them,” Horace Busby recalls. Then, with a parting bellow—“C’mon, let’s function! let’s function!!”—he would vanish through the door to his private office, leaving behind two rooms in which, frequently, at least one woman would have been reduced to tears, and men would be sitting stunned by their boss’s fury. And even then he might reappear. “If a phone rang a second time, you could be sure that that door would open, and …”

And there was in all his abuse and inspections and orders an element of crudity—of that “barnyard” talk that made men “a bit embarrassed” when it poured out in front of female members of the staff. While Johnson was making his round of the desks one morning, John Connally was talking on the phone to
Jake Pickle, who worked for Johnson in Texas, and told Johnson, calling across the room, that one of Pickle’s assignments had not yet been completed. “Tell Jake to get his finger out of his ass,” Johnson yelled back. On another occasion, Jenkins told him about a lack of cooperation from some agency bureaucrat. “What does he want?—me to kiss his ass?” Johnson shouted. “Tell him I’ll kiss him on both cheeks. I’ll kiss him in the middle, too, if he wants it.” His office conversation was permeated by sexual imagery. “Take that tie off,” he would tell one of his male staffers. “That knot looks like a limp prick.” Standing in the middle of the outer-office desks, he retied the tie in the Windsor knot, wider and more shaped than the traditional four-in-hand, which was becoming fashionable in 1949, and then stepped back to admire his handiwork. “Look at that!” he said. “He’s got a man’s knot now, not a limp one.” And assignments to his staff were sometimes made in the same tone. When, during his presidency, a woman reporter wrote critical articles about him, he would tell White House counsel Harry McPherson, “What that woman needs is you. Take her out. Give her a good dinner and a good fuck.” And, McPherson would learn, the President wasn’t kidding. Joseph A. Califano Jr., to whom McPherson related the incident, writes that “Periodically the President would ask McPherson if he’d taken care of the reporter. Every time she took even the slightest shot at the President, he’d call Harry and tell him to go to work on her.” Lyndon Johnson was never kidding when he gave such instructions. He had been doing it at college, even if his language had been more circumspect, in keeping with that earlier time; says Wilton Woods, one of the “White Stars,” the San Marcos social group that Johnson turned into a political organization: “Lyndon’s idea was to get a real nice-looking girl and see if you could control her. Date her and see how she comes out….” Sometimes, during his presidency, the instructions were more specific, as befitted the sexually more explicit Sixties. Califano writes that “LBJ made a similar suggestion [similar to the one he made to McPherson] when I advised him of the problems James Gaither, an aide on my staff, was having with Edith Green, the irascible Democratic congresswoman from Oregon…. Johnson became irritated with our inability to deal with her. In exasperation one evening he said to me, ’Goddamn it! You’ve been trying to drag me into this thing when I’ve got a hundred other problems. Well, I’m going to tell you how to get our bill. There’s no point in my calling that woman. Gaither is a good-looking boy. You tell him to call up Edith and ask her to brunch this Sunday. Then he can take her out, give her a couple of Bloody Marys, and go back to her apartment with her. Then you know what he does? Tell him to spend the afternoon in bed with her and she’ll support any Goddamn bill he wants.” During Johnson’s Senate years—the still relatively discreet Fifties—his instructions in this area were generally couched more circumspectly: suggesting that a “handsome young staff member” date a woman whose support he needed, he simply said, “Let nature take its course”—but they were nevertheless clear.

But if that was still Lyndon Johnson’s manner inside his office, it was no
longer his manner outside. As Paul F. Healy wrote in the
Saturday Evening Post
, “when he barks commands, his underlings jump like marionettes,” but “away from the [office], his tone is casual and conciliatory.” Behind the closed doors of 231, he may have been the old Lyndon Johnson, but as soon as he stepped out of his office, he was a new Lyndon Johnson—a senatorial Lyndon Johnson.

“The other senators weren’t coming to him,” Warren Woodward recalls. “He had to go to them.” And as he went, usually leaving 231 by the door to his private office, and heading down the dim corridors, his very stride changed, into a slower, calmer, more dignified pace. And when he reached the office to which he was heading, his demeanor in January could hardly have been more different from his demeanor the month before. The aggressiveness was replaced by the most elaborate courtesy. Not only did he no longer barge into senators’ private offices, he took steps to emphasize that he wouldn’t even think of barging in. Even if he had already telephoned for an appointment, he would, entering the senator’s outer office, ask the receptionist if the senator was free, and even if he was told that the senator was free—even if he was told that the senator was expecting him, and he could go right in—he wouldn’t go in until the assistant had sent in a note saying that Senator Johnson was in the outer office and would like to see him. And in the case of the most formal senator of all, he went even further. Recalls Harry Byrd’s administrative assistant, John (Jake) Carlton: “He [Johnson] would come in and sit on my desk, and he would say, ‘Hi, Jake,’ and chat with me. After a while, he would say, ‘Oh, by the way, Jake, is the Senator in?’ ‘Yes, would you like to see him?’ Johnson would say, ‘I’d like to if you don’t mind,’ but he wouldn’t walk right in even if I motioned to him that he could. He would wait until I got up and opened the door—so the Senator [Byrd] would know that he was going in only after I had opened the door.”

When he was in a senator’s private office, furthermore, Johnson no longer launched straight into the business about which he had come. “He wouldn’t say, ‘Senator, I’ve got to talk to you about…’” He would ask about the senator’s health, about his wife’s health, would solicit his advice, his opinions, inquire about the manner in which some national issue was playing with voters in his home state, get him talking about things he wanted to talk about. And, while the senator talked, Lyndon Johnson listened—listened with an obsequiousness, a deference “that you wouldn’t believe.”

The deference was unvarying not merely in private but in public—on the little stage that was the Democratic cloakroom.

The senator who was a fixture there seemed as much out of another, earlier, age as the room itself. Directly opposite the pair of swinging doors opening into the Senate Chamber were two deep leather armchairs. In the afternoons, the distinguished Walter George was given to sitting in one of them, telling stories of old Senate battles. Often now, as the revered George of Georgia
held forth, squinting a bit through his thick-lensed glasses, patting his white hair into place, Lyndon Johnson would be sitting in the chair next to him. He would not be sitting on the floor—he was a senator now, not a student—but in the adjacent armchair, yet his posture and demeanor would have been familiar to his San Marcos classmates. His long legs would not be stretched out but tucked back against the chair, and he would be sitting erect and attentive, his chin resting on one hand, his face, tilted back so he could look full into George’s face as the older man sat beside him, wearing an expression of the deepest interest, his eyes almost shining in admiration as he listened to one anecdote, and then asked George to tell him another. Day after day Walter George held court—with, day after day, the same admiring courtier in attendance. Recalling Lyndon Johnson in his early months in the Senate, Warren Woodward says, “He took his time to maybe ingratiate himself with his fellow senators. Once he got settled down, he saw that [was necessary]. He saw he needed to take his time.” Lyndon Johnson had been running all his life. It was very hard for him to stop running. But he stopped.

T
HE DEFERENCE
was particularly appealing to the senators because it was cloaked in the broad senatorial badinage with which they were comfortable. Johnson had picked this up very quickly, too. He was, in fact, proficient in this aspect of senatorial style by the swearing-in ceremony, when, immediately after the new senators were sworn, the Senate voted for its president
pro tempore
, and Vandenberg, being a Republican and therefore now in the minority, was voted out in favor of Kenneth McKellar. Johnson had of course voted with the Democrats, and after the ceremony he went up to Vandenberg. I want to apologize, he said jokingly, referring to the fact that Vandenberg had sworn him in, for voting against “the man who made me a senator.” He gave the old statesman a warm smile. Vandenberg, usually so reserved with junior senators, instantly responded, “Well, you shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds you,” and then he gave Johnson a warm smile back.

When, on February 2, the twelve new Democratic senators met in the office of Secretary of the Senate Leslie L. Biffle to draw lots for their permanent desk assignments—the last of their seniors having finally made his selection—Johnson began bemoaning the fact that he never had any luck at drawings. Clinton Anderson said he’d bet him a nickel over who would get the better seat, “Well, Ah don’t know, Clint, Ah just don’t know,” he responded. Finally, he agreed to bet a nickel. Anderson drew Desk Number 95, a rear seat, and Johnson and Bob Kerr fell into a joking debate over who would draw last, since Kerr felt the last draw was best. “You were in Congress before me,” Kerr said in a jokingly bullying manner. “Go ahead and draw.” “But you were Governor of a state,” Johnson replied. “That’s higher than a Congressman. You draw first.” Finally they decided they would both draw at the same time. They
stuck their hands into Biffle’s fedora together, and despite their bad luck—the desks they selected were two of the worst in the Chamber, Kerr’s Number 19 being the very last one on the far end of the lowest arc on the Democratic side, Johnson’s Number 18, the desk next to it—when they saw that they had drawn adjoining desks, they grinned at each other, Kerr with a friendliness in his eyes quite unusual for him. (Poor though Desk 18’s location may have been, its provenance could hardly have been better. When Johnson opened its drawer, among the names of its former occupants carved inside was
Harry S Truman.)

Encountering a senator in an SOB corridor, Johnson wouldn’t approach him in a businesslike way but in a comradely, good-humored fashion. “Say, Ah saw one of your constituents the other day,” he might say. “Ah bragged on you. Ah surely did. Ah tell you—by the time Ah got through, he didn’t even recognize you.” Or, Warren Woodward says, “He’d tell a story, and get the other senator laughing. It’s human nature to like that. He ingratiated himself in a way by being fun to be with. He was a great mimic, a great storyteller, and he always had a story ready. But it was always a light-hearted approach. He wouldn’t approach them in a serious way. He stopped saying ‘Senator, I need to talk to you about …’”

And at the first Democratic caucus, there was no grabbing of lapels, no leaning into the faces of his colleagues, not a trace of the former pomposity or aggressiveness. What there was was the friendliness and politeness of “the junior to the senior,” and when he introduced himself, he did so with a deprecatory nickname that referred to his narrow, last-gasp victory in the recent election. Coupled with a grin, it was very charming. “Howdy,” he said to old senators and new, southern senators and northern. “Howdy, I’m Landslide Lyndon.”