Master of the Senate (45 page)

“I had always been taught that if decent people asked you to come to their house you had to go,” he was to recall, and for a few years after arriving in Washington in 1933, he accepted at least some of the invitations to parties and dinners that poured in on a bachelor senator. And, his hostesses said, when he wanted to be, there was no one who could be more urbane and charming. But gradually he accepted fewer and fewer invitations, and by the early 1940s he had all but stopped going to parties except for ones given by or for Georgians. Once, during the 1950s, a Washington reporter asked him exactly how often he did go to a party—cocktail or dinner. Leafing through his desk calendar, Russell discovered that he hadn’t been to one for six months.

He stopped attending other social occasions, too. He had enjoyed hunting, for turkey, quail or deer—bird hunting was his favorite sport, and he owned five or six shotguns—and had regularly gone on hunting parties with old friends from Georgia. And he had enjoyed golf. But gradually he began finding excuses to decline invitations to hunting trips. “Frankly, I have no desire to kill more deer as I have killed more than twenty in my time,” he said in response to one invitation. Gradually, he stopped playing golf. It took too much time, he said. As a young man, he had been a ladies’ man; now he was an older bachelor. He still had dates, but less and less frequently.

With members of his staff, the reserve of this man so conscious of the dignity of a senator of the United States was especially marked. During his early years in the Senate, he had made attempts at camaraderie with his assistants and secretaries, but they were forced and didn’t work out very well, and, year by year, they became fewer and fewer. Finally, he almost never joked with them, or even came out of his private office to wander around their work area; he was very formal in dealing with them. Women employees, his biographer says, “were ‘Miss Margaret’ or ‘Miss Rachel’ in the best traditional southern
manner.” Some of the members of his staff idolized him; they didn’t want to leave him alone in the empty office, and although he never asked them to, when he stayed until six-thirty or seven, as he did most weekday nights, at least one of them would stay in case “the Senator wanted something.” But when he would finish for the day, and take a bottle of Jack Daniel’s out of his drawer and pour himself a drink, he almost never invited one of them in to have a drink with him. Occasionally, one of them would muster the courage to invite the Senator home for dinner; the acceptances were rare and the invitations grew rare, too.

With his fellow senators, he was invariably courteous, friendly, even cordial. But, more and more, as year followed year, that friendship also had a limit: the point at which intimacies, personal confidences, might have been exchanged but were not, because of the barrier around Richard Russell which was never lowered. He seemed unable to express affection, unable to talk about personal matters, to bridge the distance between himself and even a colleague he liked. The grave demeanor, the judiciousness and reserve, might bring him the respect of his colleagues; it did not make any of them his intimates.

He loved baseball, had in his head the day-to-day batting averages, not only of the Washington Senators but of an impressive number of players around the American League. A longtime tradition of the Senate was that on the season’s opening day, senators who liked baseball (and a few selected functionaries such as Secretary of the Majority Felton [Skeeter] Johnston) would attend the game as a group. Russell, his aides say, had a wonderful time going to Opening Day with other senators, but, of course, that was a formal occasion, with the invitations made without any participation on his part being necessary. As for the rest of the season, members of his staff could have gone to games with him, just as they could have invited him to their homes, but one social occasion was as rare as the other. Sometimes the Senator went to a baseball game alone. It was embarrassing for such a man to be alone. If he was the renowned Richard Brevard Russell, the most powerful man in the Senate, why didn’t he have anyone to go with? Would some colleague or staff member or acquaintance see him—and feel sorry for him, or tell people that Dick Russell went to baseball games alone? So Russell went to few baseball games.

W
HEN THE
S
ENATE
was in session, of course, Russell’s life was crowded with committee hearings and discussions about legislation and floor tactics, with professional give-and-take with his colleagues. But the Senate wasn’t generally in session in the evenings, or on weekends.

The respect—almost awe—in which he was held made it difficult for his colleagues to invite him to their homes. He himself lived, during most of his years in Washington, in a small, two-room hotel suite, first in the Woodner
Hotel, then in the Mayflower; finally, in 1962, he moved into a small apartment, furnished as impersonally as a hotel room, in a cooperative apartment house on the Potomac.

In his hotel room or apartment, he would spend long hours reading, often with a cigarette and a glass of Jack Daniel’s at hand, sometimes with the radio on. He still read the
Congressional Record
every day, and after he became a member of the Armed Services Committee he read not only the transcripts of the endless hours of testimony that the committee had taken, but the exhibits—the analyses and studies and charts—that witnesses had entered into the record to supplement their testimony, as well as classified Army, Navy and Air Force internal reports and memoranda. His apartment was filled with books, including a steady stream of books he requested from the Library of Congress; on many Fridays, a stack delivered from the Library for his weekend reading would be on the corner of his desk in the Senate, ready for him to take home. In the apartment, books, some opened, some with slips of paper sticking out of them to mark passages to which he wanted to refer, would be piled on the desk, on chairs, on the floor—mostly history and biography; during his early years in Washington, he read—again—Gibbon’s complete
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, and in his later years, he read it through a third time.

His life fell into a pattern. He would arrive at the Senate early—at eight or eight-thirty in the morning—and eat breakfast alone in the Senate Dining Room. He would stay at the Senate late. After a day filled with Senate business, and punctuated by lunch at the round table in the dining room, the center of respectful attention whenever he spoke, he would return to his office at four or five o’clock to go through his mail, draft or dictate letters, and return telephone calls. By six-thirty or seven, he would be finished, and would take out the Jack Daniel’s and water, and sip a drink or two while listening to the evening news on the radio, or, in later years, watching it on television. When the news was over, he would get up and leave, often through the door from his private office which opened directly onto the corridor, so that he would not have to make conversation with his staff. He generally ate at O’Donnell’s Seafood Grill, on E Street, sitting alone at the counter. Then he would go back to his small apartment—that apartment where books were stacked on chairs on which no one ever sat; that apartment in which, unless he turned on the radio, there was no human voice—to spend the evening alone, reading.

“The Senate is my life and work,” he told a reporter once. “I don’t have any family or home life. If I don’t get home till late, that’s all right.”

A
FTER
L
YNDON
J
OHNSON’S DISCUSSION
with Bobby Baker (“Dick Russell is
the
power”), in late December 1948, Johnson abruptly dropped his requests for a seat on Appropriations. There was, he would explain, only one way to get close to a man whose life was his work: “I knew there was only one way to see
Russell every day, and that was to get a seat on his committee. Without that we’d most likely be passing acquaintances and nothing more. So I put in a request for the Armed Services Committee.” There was less demand for that committee than for Appropriations (or for Foreign Relations or Finance) and four vacant Democratic seats on it, and when, on January 3, the Senate was organized, and the list of Democratic Steering Committee assignments was read, he was given one of those seats. (His other committee was Interstate and Foreign Commerce, which under the chairmanship of Ed Johnson—“Mr. Wisdom”—supervised the oil and natural gas industries vital to Texas, and on which Johnson had an assignment to carry out for those industries in 1949.) Johnson threw himself into the Armed Services Committee’s work, and he began dropping by Russell’s office to discuss it.

At first, he would drop by only in the late afternoon, after the Senate had adjourned for the day. He was very deferential and formal in his approach. He would not ask the receptionist to tell Senator Russell he was there; instead, he would write a note asking if it would be convenient for Senator Russell to see Senator Johnson, and ask her to take it in. And he would keep the conversation focused on the committee’s work, asking Russell questions about it, asking advice on how best to carry out some committee assignment he had been given. And he would listen to the answers, and listen hard. “If you saw them together, you would not see Johnson walking back and forth, and talking, like he usually did,” John Connally says. “Russell would be doing the talking. He [Johnson] would be sitting quietly, listening, absorbing wisdom, very much the younger man sitting at the knees of the older man.” Had the chairman of Johnson’s other committee been given a nickname? The chairman of this committee wasn’t neglected. Richard Russell, Johnson began saying, was “the Old Master.” The phrase was used frequently—often to the Old Master himself. When Russell offered him a piece of advice, Lyndon Johnson would say, “Well, that’s a lesson from the Old Master. I’ll remember that.”

After a while, the conversations no longer took place only in Russell’s office. Russell would be drafting a committee report, or reading over one that he had assigned Johnson to work on, and there might be more work to do on it. Or there might be a line of questioning to be worked out for witnesses in the next day’s hearings. Johnson would be helping. Why didn’t they finish over dinner? he would suggest. Lady Bird had dinner waiting for him. It would be no trouble at all for her to put on another plate. It would make things easier all around. “You’re gonna have to eat somewhere anyway,” he would say. And after a few such invitations, Russell accepted one.

When the dinner guest at Thirtieth Place was Richard Russell, Lyndon Johnson’s table manners would have pleased even his mother. Says Posh Oltorf, who was occasionally a fellow guest, “He was an entirely different person with Russell than he was ordinarily. There was no reaching, no slurping. Johnson was on his very best behavior.”

At Thirtieth Place, moreover, Johnson had his great helpmate, and she was as valuable with Russell as she had been with Rayburn. The help was of a different kind, of course. The bond between Lady Bird Johnson and Sam Rayburn—lovingly daughterly on the one hand, lovingly paternal on the other—was the bond between a fierce, stern man whose fierceness and sternness concealed a terrible shyness and a young woman whose unwavering smile concealed a shyness and timidity just as terrible. And she saw Rayburn, whose portrait was the only one she would place in the living room of the Johnson Ranch, as the exemplar of all that was great in the common American people from which she, her husband, and the Speaker all sprang. Talking of “the Speaker,” she says, with a passion very unusual for her: “He was the best of
us
—the best of simple American stock.”

Richard Brevard Russell wasn’t one of
us
, and had no desire to be, and Lady Bird’s keen eyes saw it all in an instant. “I early knew that his father was, I think the chief judge in Georgia, and I remember a very patrician picture of him swearing in his young son, Dick Russell—and I would hear stories [from Georgians] of seeing the Russell family drive into town on a Saturday afternoon with Mrs. Russell sitting very erect and very starched, and extremely well groomed…. They were quality.” When an interviewer from the Lyndon Johnson Library tries to suggest that her husband and Russell were intimates, Mrs. Johnson quietly sets him straight. “Senator Russell was always—there was a certain aloofness in him, it’s my feeling,” she says. “Although he had humor and he could have warmth, he was something of a loner. There was an aloofness, and you would be presumptuous to say, ‘He’s my best friend.’… He was a great friend, a dear friend, but he was not the sort of person with whom you could broach intimate things….”

But the love Lady Bird Johnson had for Rayburn was no deeper than the respect she had for Russell. “He was a patriot right through and through,” she says. “In appraising him I think you would have to get in the words, ‘enormous sense of integrity.’… If he told you something, that was so.” He was, she says, “a towering person…. I never looked at him without admiration.” And of course Mrs. Johnson was a very southern woman, very devoted to the ideals and philosophy of the South, and, as she puts it, “Dick Russell was the archetype and bellwether of the South.” And, in a way, the help Lady Bird gave her husband with his third
R
was the same she gave him with his second. No one, no matter how reserved, could remain untouched by the warmth with which Lady Bird Johnson would say, as she bid a guest good-bye, “Now you all come back again real soon, you hear.” In both cases, her warm graciousness made a man who seldom visited other people’s homes feel at home in hers, sufficiently at home so that he would come again and again.

The wisdom of Johnson’s choice of committees—his insight that the only way to get to know Russell was to work with him—was documented, for, as Mrs. Johnson says, “As far as trying to sign him up for a dinner party three
months in advance, I doubt if I’d have had much luck, or if I would have had the nerve to try…. He was always much sought after for parties, you know, and very unlikely to go…. He was our visitor so many times, but it was much more likely to be on the spur of the moment. They’d be working together on something and they would not be finished with it, and Lyndon would say something about, come on and go home with him, and Lady Bird will give us some—whatever we had. That was the way it usually happened.” And when he got to the Johnsons, there would be, no matter what the hour, that wonderful welcoming smile.