Master of the Senate (36 page)

“The very frequency of his statements that an older politician was ‘like a Daddy to me’ tends to cast doubt on the profundity of some of these relationships,” an academic was to write after interviewing many senators; the doubts would have been confirmed had he been walking beside Lyndon Johnson and John Connally just after they left the office of an elderly senator to whom Johnson had just been, for quite a few minutes, elaborately and fawningly grateful for a piece of advice. “Christ, I’ve been kissing asses all my life,” Lyndon Johnson said, with what Connally recalls as a “snarl.” But the technique was as effective as it had always been. “Johnson thought, in those days at least, that that kind of technique was effective with anybody,” says Booth Mooney, one of his Senate aides, and the belief was borne out by the results, the results even with Rules Committee Chairman Hay den. In December, Hay den had refused to give Johnson that extra room in the basement that he had asked for; in February
Hayden found that an extra room was, indeed, available. Soon it had become apparent that most of the Senate’s Old Bulls were looking fondly on Lyndon Johnson. And their feelings contributed to a change in Johnson’s behavior that was noticeable to the assistants who had worked for him in his pre-Senate days. Busby, struck by Johnson’s calm during their learning sessions on the Chamber floor, now began to notice the calmness spreading to activities outside the office. “When he got to the Senate,” Busby says, “all of a sudden, he didn’t act so driven any more.” John Connally says that “After a month or two, he seemed to be—outside the office, I mean—so much more at ease than he had ever been before.” And Walter Jenkins uses a somewhat different, and very telling, image. “Mr. Johnson took to the Senate as if he had been born there,” he says. “It was obvious it was
his
place.”

His place. All at once, in the Senate—in this place that was so different from any other place he had ever been—Lyndon Johnson seems to have felt, within a very few weeks of his arrival in it, at home.

A
ND THERE WAS ANOTHER ASPECT
of the Senate that was especially well suited to Lyndon Johnson, and was particularly helpful to his advancement within it. While the Senate may have been ruled by its southerners, the southerners were ruled by one man—and he was lonely.

Johnson had learned this, too, that December—had learned it at least partly in a conversation in his old House office near the end of the month.

The conversation was with a young man named Bobby Baker. Baker was only a twenty-year-old Senate page, but he already possessed a reputation that distinguished him from the other pages—a reputation to which Johnson referred when, on that December trip, he telephoned him and said, “Mr. Baker, I understand you know where the bodies are buried in the Senate. I’d appreciate it if you’d come by my office and talk to me.”

Baker knew little about Johnson, he was to recall. “He was just another incoming freshman to me.” But by the end of the talk, he knew a lot more. Johnson, he was to recall, “came directly to the point. ‘I want to know who’s the power over there, how you get things done, the best committees, the works.’ For two hours, he peppered me with keen questions. I was impressed. No senator ever had approached me with such a display of determination to learn, to achieve, to attain, to belong, to get ahead. He was coming into the Senate with his neck bowed, running full tilt, impatient to reach some distant goal I then could not even imagine.” A waiter from the Senate Dining Room who brought sandwiches and coffee to the two men saw a rapport forming; Baker “leaned across the table as if drawn to LBJ by some invisible magnet.” And if Johnson wanted to know where true power lay in the Senate, Baker knew the answer. “Dick Russell was
the
power,” he was to say. And, he was to say, Johnson immediately “recognized” something about Russell: “that Russell, who was no longer so young, was a bachelor and lonely.”

That was perhaps the single most important piece of information that Lyndon Johnson acquired that December. At each stage of his life, his remarkable gift for cultivating and manipulating older men who could help him had been focused at its greatest intensity on one man: the one who could, in each setting, help him the most. This focus, too, was deliberate; while he was still in college, Lyndon Johnson told his roommate Alfred (Boody) Johnson: “The way to get ahead is to get close to the one man at the top.”

In Texas, the older men most responsible for Lyndon Johnson’s earliest success were the college’s president, Cecil Evans, and the canny—and feared—Alvin Wirtz. Each of these men had a daughter. Neither had a son.

Crusty, aloof “Prexy” Evans seemed to other students to be surrounded by an “invisible wall.” But Lyndon Johnson, refusing to be rebuffed, babbling boyishly away while gazing at him with adoration, flattering him in editorials (“Great as an educator and as an executive, Dr. Evans is greatest as a man”), telling him he looked on him as a father, had breached the wall, and Evans treated Johnson with more affection than he had ever shown a student—a notably paternal affection.

In Austin, Johnson would tell Wirtz’s associates—men he knew would repeat the remark to Wirtz—“Senator Wirtz has been like a father to me.” And when Johnson entered Wirtz’s office, that studiously calm, reserved, and ruthless political string-puller would jump up and hug him, saying, “Here’s m’boy, Lyndon. Hello Lyndon, m’boy.” Johnson’s success in making Wirtz as well as Evans feel that Lyndon looked upon him almost as a father, in making Wirtz, like Evans, feel that Lyndon was the son he had never had, is attested to by Wirtz’s inscription on a photograph of himself: “To Lyndon Johnson, whom I admire and love with the same affection as if he were in fact my own son.”

I
N
W
ASHINGTON
, the pattern had been repeated with two men. One was Sam Rayburn, and the other’s last name also began with the letter
R.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt had sons, four of them, but he was so distant from them, and, indeed, to some extent, from his wife, that in a way he was lonely, too.

The instant rapport that had been kindled between Roosevelt and Johnson at their very first meeting—the rapport that had led the President to tell Tommy Corcoran, “I’ve just met the most remarkable young man,” and to order Corcoran to “help him with anything you can” (and to arrange Johnson’s appointment to the House Naval Affairs Committee because he, Roosevelt, had been active in naval affairs when
he
was a young man)—had lasted and deepened with time. The President would tell Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes that Johnson was “the kind of uninhibited young pro he would have liked to have been as a young man”—and might have been “if I hadn’t gone to Harvard.” The President offered to appoint Johnson Administrator of the Rural Electrification Administration, put him in charge of the Democratic Congressional Campaign
Committee—intervened in Johnson’s 1941 race for the Senate to an extent he had never done in any congressional race since his disastrous attempt to intervene in 1938 Senate races, and that he had vowed he would never do again. His feeling for Johnson, says Jim Rowe, the Roosevelt aide in the best position to observe the interplay between the two men, was a “special feeling.”

About the basis of this feeling relatively little is known, because the meetings between Johnson and Roosevelt took place in the privacy of the White House living quarters. Describing the President as a lonely man whose wife was often traveling, Johnson was to say that “He’d call me up” and “I used to go down sometimes and have a meal with him”—breakfast alone with the President in Roosevelt’s spartan bedroom, the President sitting up in bed, or in the President’s private study, with the two men dining off a bridge table. And the President and the young congressman would talk together not only in the upstairs, private quarters of the White House but in the Oval Office as well. The frequency of these meetings is unknown, as is the nature of the conversations at them. When Roosevelt died, Johnson told a friendly reporter, “He was just like a Daddy to me; he always talked to me just that way.” But it is not known whether he used the Daddy image—or other fatherly images—when he was talking to FDR, nor to what extent he was with the President the “professional son.” There were certainly other reasons for the rapport between the older man and the younger, among them, as Rowe notes, Roosevelt’s confidence in Johnson’s complete loyalty to the New Deal (a confidence that would prove unfounded almost as soon as Roosevelt died, when Johnson began publicly disassociating himself from the New Deal), and in Johnson’s ability: “Johnson was in many ways just more capable than most of the people Roosevelt saw…. You’ve got to remember that they were two great political geniuses.” But, Rowe feels, as do other presidential aides, that there was also a “father-son” element to the relationship, and there are moments, such as Roosevelt’s determination to cheer “Lyndon” up following his 1941 defeat, that are difficult to attribute to solely political considerations. And the aides agree that whatever the reason for the “special feeling,” special the feeling certainly was. Men like Corcoran and Cohen conjecture that with Roosevelt, as with Rayburn, Lyndon Johnson read the older man, studied him, learned him—and used what he learned. And whatever the reasons, Roosevelt indisputably put his power behind Johnson’s career to an extent he did for few, if any, other congressmen.

N
OW
J
OHNSON HAD BEEN TOLD
that
the
power in the Senate was Russell, Russell who, like Johnson’s two great Washington patrons, had a lonely personal life—Russell who, like Rayburn, had no one. Schoolchildren in mid-century America learned their so-called “three Rs”—readin’, ’ritin’ and ’rithmetic. Lyndon Johnson, who had already learned two
Rs
so well, set out now to learn his third.

W
HEN
R
ICHARD
B
REVARD
R
USSELL
Jr. was a boy growing up just after the start of the century barefoot and in overalls in a sleepy Georgia farm town, he would often play alone for hours in a big field near his home, carrying a long stick that had been carved to resemble a rifle. Sometimes he would run headlong across the field brandishing the rifle, fall as if wounded, then leap to his feet, pick up the rifle, wave to rally his troops back to the charge, and run forward again. Sometimes he would station himself inside a little circle of wooden planks set atop a low mound of dirt he had piled in the middle of the field, and aim the rifle out as if he was defending a fort.

To friends curious about the long hours Richard spent at the game, Richard’s family explained that the boy loved to play at war, but although there was a war in newspaper headlines at the time—the Russo-Japanese War—that was not the war he was fighting, nor was it war in general but a single war in which he was interested. The charges he was re-enacting were the screaming rush of Longstreet’s brigades at the Second Manassas and Pickett’s last forlorn charge at Gettysburg. The fort he had built he had named Fort Lee. The cause for which he fought was the Lost Cause.

Richard Russell’s boyhood imagination was bound up in that cause—and so was his entire life.

His roots were bound up in it—in the lost dream of the Old South that was crushed at Gettysburg and at Antietam and Vicksburg and Appomattox. His ancestors were part of the upper reaches of the slave-owning patrician aristocracy that dominated the South’s plantation culture and embodied its social graces. The Russells, of English background, had owned plantations in Georgia and South Carolina since Colonial times; Richard’s grandfather established a successful cotton mill near Marietta, Georgia, and married a Brevard, one of the North Carolina Brevards.

But, like so much of that aristocracy, Richard’s family was ruined by the War Between the States: the mill lay in Sherman’s path and was burned down to its brick chimney and floor, while the Russell slaves were freed by Sherman’s troops; Richard’s grandmother fled in a carriage driven by a slave named Monday Russell (for the day of the week on which he was born), who during Reconstruction became a member of the State Legislature; and the family was plunged into poverty. Like so much of that aristocracy, Richard’s family never recovered. It was still an impoverished family when his father, who was descended, as
Eminent Georgians
noted, “from the oldest and choicest American stock,” was born.

Richard Brevard Russell Sr. yearned to restore the family’s name and fortune, and for a time it seemed he would do so. Tall and handsome, a brilliant student at the University of Georgia, from which he graduated at eighteen with a command of five languages, including Latin and Greek, he graduated from law school at nineteen, almost immediately won a reputation as a young lawyer of “remarkable ability,” and was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives at twenty-one as its youngest member. There he quickly established himself as what one writer called “the champion of Georgia’s institutions of higher learning,” leading legislative efforts to establish the state’s first technological college and first women’s college.

Leaving the Legislature at twenty-seven, he was elected solicitor general, or prosecuting attorney, for a seven-county judicial circuit, and would later be elected judge of a succession of Georgia courts, including its Supreme Court—of which he was Chief Justice for sixteen years. He was highly respected as a judge both for “the brilliance of his mind” and for his diligence (“On more than one occasion,” an admirer wrote, “the Chief Justice was known to have worked and labored all night long”); indeed, some of his judicial opinions were called “gems of legal literature.”

But he was not satisfied to be a judge; “always looking,” as one writer put it, “for larger fields to conquer,” he wanted to be Governor or United States Senator—“the Senate post was the one he wanted most.” Richard Russell Sr. could not be politic, however. As a prosecutor his “fearless” disregard of political considerations had angered local politicians. A booming, eloquent stump speaker, he would never deign to moderate his views, “speaking his mind bluntly no matter whom he angered.” Some of his positions were regarded in Georgia as “radical” or even “socialist,” including his insistence that all qualified students (white students, of course) be able to attend the University of Georgia regardless of ability to pay; “the poorest students” should “have an equal chance with the richest,” he said. His bluntness and independence alienated the three or four powerful factions that dominated Georgia politics, so his dreams of higher office were unrealistic. But he pursued them anyway, with a fervor that, as a biographer says, “got in the way of practical considerations, and even of common sense.” He ran for Governor twice, for Senator once,
as well as for Congress twice, and lost each time—usually by humiliatingly large margins.