Master of the Senate (60 page)

Repeatedly, as Olds attempted to explain the points he had been trying to make during the 1920s, Johnson would cut in, demanding that he either “repudiate” or “reassert” them. Repeatedly, Olds would try to explain to Johnson that the situation was not as simple as the question made it appear. His thinking had changed, he said over and over, but those writings represented what his thinking had been at the time. He still believed that they represented his thinking at the time. For example, “I did not think then, and I do not think now, that private enterprise in the 1920s was providing a decent family wage or assurance of security or even protection.” And, he said, he therefore could not honestly repudiate them.

But simplicity was what Johnson was interested in. Over and over, when Olds attempted to explain what he had meant by an article, how it related to the times in which it had been written, or how its meaning had been altered by changes in political or economic conditions, Johnson would cut in, demanding that he either “repudiate” what he had written or “reiterate” it.

Whoever framed that question—Alvin Wirtz, Horace Busby, Lyndon Johnson himself—could be proud of its effectiveness, for it placed Olds again in a trap. Refusal to repudiate a specific article could be interpreted to mean that the witness still held the beliefs expressed in it. If he said he did repudiate the article, his repudiation could be taken as proof that he was indeed a “chameleon” willing to express any view that would keep him in power—so that he could further his secret communistic aims.

Had Olds been allowed actually to deal with the articles Lyle had quoted, his answers would have been definitive. The articles may have been “carried in the
Daily Worker
,” he said, but they had not been written
for
the
Daily Worker
, but for the Federated Press subscribers in general, and many other, non-Communist, papers had carried them. (In a further demonstration of Johnson’s sophistry—and of Johnson’s sensitivity to criticism—when Olds said this, the chairman turned to the other senators, made a palms-up gesture of injured innocence,
and said, “The committee has not charged him, and so far as I know no other witness has charged him, with being an employee of the
Daily Worker.
And we do not want the country to get the impression that he has been so charged.”)
*

But Olds almost never got to make his points in an uninterrupted, coherent way. When, for example, he attempted to explain what he had meant when he wrote during the 1920s of the necessity for labor to obtain increased political power, Johnson said: “I am not asking you what you meant. I am asking you what you said.”

“I made that statement, yes,” Olds replied.

“You repudiate it today?” Johnson demanded.

“I repudiate it in the sense in which it is understood by you gentlemen,” Olds said.

“I am not saying what the understanding is. I am asking, do you repudiate or do you reiterate it?”

“I would repudiate it,” Olds said. “… What I was trying to describe is still going on, but I think I would repudiate today the way I said it then. I would say it in different terms today, if that is what you mean.”

More than an hour after Olds resumed the witness stand, with his written statement barely begun, Johnson was still employing this tactic. (“The question the committee is considering is, What did you say? Did you say it? If so, Do you repeat it today? … If you said them, say so. If you believe them, say so. You have a right to say that and thank God in this country a man can still exercise some free speech.”) At that point, Senator McFarland stepped in, as he had done on the first day of Olds’ testimony, saying, “Mr. Chairman, I was just going to suggest that probably the best way would be for us to, nearly as we can, let Mr. Olds finish his statement in chief and then we would go back and bring up anything that we wanted in the nature that the chairman has suggested…. I believe that he ought to get in the record, in any way that he wants to, his explanation and then come back to the questions.” Only then did the pace of the interruptions slacken—they never stopped completely—sufficiently so that, two hours later, Olds could get to the end of his statement.

The “repudiate” or “reiterate” tactic was effective with conservative journalists. Some of them, like nationally syndicated columnist Gould Lincoln, felt they knew how to interpret Olds’ refusal to “repudiate.”

Other conservative journalists felt Olds
had
recanted—and they knew how to interpret
that.
Calling him “chameleon-minded,” the
Dallas Morning News
editorialized that he “no longer thinks along radical lines” only because he is in power. But “what guarantee have we of what his thinking will be tomorrow?” the editorial asked.

The tactic was effective also with the subcommittee members. As a
Time
correspondent explained, some of its members felt that “he is a radical and that he switches position and policy with rapid facility” while others were angered by his refusal to switch—“He had plenty of chances to renounce his inflammatory writings … but he declined to do so—That did weigh heavily against him.”

T
HE SUBCOMMITTEE
had been carefully selected for its susceptibility to testimony about Leland Olds’ radicalism, and the effect of that testimony had been as powerful as even Lyndon Johnson could have wished—as was proven when, the following morning, Tuesday, October 4, its seven members met in Lyndon Johnson’s office to cast their votes on the nomination. For the President had decided to fight for his nominee. After hearing a summary of the previous day’s testimony, he had written a letter to Commerce Committee Chairman Ed Johnson, and the Coloradan read it to the subcommittee.

“I am aware of the efforts that have been made to discredit Mr. Olds before your committee,” Harry Truman wrote. And it was because of those efforts that he was writing—“because of the nature of the opposition that has been expressed to his confirmation.”

“Nothing has been presented in testimony there which raises any doubt in my mind as to his integrity, loyalty or ability,” Truman said. “Much that has been said about him is largely beside the point. The issue before us is not whether we agree with everything Mr. Olds may have ever said or even whether we agree with all of his actions as a member of the Federal Power Commission. The issue is whether his whole record is such as to lead us to believe that he will serve the nation well as a member of the Federal Power Commission.”

On that issue, Truman said, the record is clear. During ten years on the Commission, “he has served ably, and loyally….” He is “a nationally recognized champion of effective utility regulation; his record shows that he is also a champion of fair regulation.” During those years, Truman said, Olds has “made enemies…. Powerful corporations subject to regulation by the commission have not been pleased with Mr. Olds. They now seek to prevent his confirmation for another term. It would be most unfortunate if they should succeed. We cannot allow great corporations to dominate the commissions which have been created to regulate them.”

Ed Johnson had received Truman’s letter the previous evening, had discussed it with Lyndon Johnson, and a reply had been drafted. It might have been (and perhaps was) drafted by the same hand that had drafted Lyle’s testimony, so closely did it follow its theme.

The President might feel, “Mr. Wisdom” wrote him, that Olds’ articles were “beside the point,” but the subcommittee begged to disagree. “The subcommittee,” he said, “was shocked beyond description by the … views expressed by Olds some years ago.” He would, he said, “include herewith a few excerpts”—and he quoted several of the paragraphs Lyle had quoted.

Certainly, Olds had sounded sincere in claiming that his views had evolved, Ed Johnson said—that was another reason for distrusting him. “The committee found Mr. Olds glib of tongue and very convincing. Like many crusaders for foreign ideologies he has an attractive personality and is disarming to a very high degree.” Despite the presence of four Democrats, members of the President’s party, on the subcommittee, its vote on a resolution, introduced by Lyndon Johnson, to report the presidential nomination to the full committee with the recommendation that it be rejected was a unanimous 7–0. The next day, as the
New York Times
reported, “President Truman’s earnest appeal for the confirmation of Leland Olds for a third term as Federal Power Commissioner fell on deaf ears again” when the full Commerce Committee “voted 10 to 2, against the nominee.”

W
HEN A TELEGRAM ANNOUNCING
the committee vote was read to a meeting of the International Petroleum Association of America in Fort Worth, the eight hundred oil and natural gas producers in attendance broke into cheers and rebel yells.

The reaction was different in Washington—in those precincts of Washington in which Lyndon Johnson had for so long held himself forth as a liberal, as the protégé of Franklin Roosevelt, as a crusader against the forces of conservatism in Texas.

The first reaction was shock—for so thoroughly had the preparations been concealed that it was only as the subcommittee and committee took their votes that the liberal community woke up fully to what had been done. “What a subcommittee!”
The New Republic
exclaimed. “It’s been packed. They even brought in Bricker and Capehart. If we were a defendant in Russia and saw such a mackerel-eyed bunch as that looking down at us from the bench we’d start writing confessions quick.”

Then there was outrage over the way in which it had been done: over the method used to reject Olds—the Communist smear. As
The New Republic
put it: “Olds, shouts the Senate committee shaking the yellowed pages of newspapers 20 years old, is the glib salesman of a foreign ideology. Who, then, are the Americans? Olds is the product of New England’s Protestant conscience, of social work in Boston slums and of Pennsylvania steel strikes, of Frank Walsh
and Franklin Roosevelt….” The views Olds had held in the 1920s were views so many liberals had held, liberals pointed out. “I know of few men worth their intellectual salt who didn’t have some of the doubts Olds had at the time,” Max Lerner said. In an editorial in the
Washington Post
, Alan Barth wrote that “Like many a young man, he [Olds] was in a great hurry to reform the world [and] said some extravagant things in his column 25 years ago. Taken out of context and looked at in the light of today’s relationship between left and right, they may be made to seem extremely radical. But the social conditions of 25 years ago invited radicalism. A man could denounce open-shop capitalism in those days without being called a Communist or being considered disloyal to the United States. The elder La Follette did so.”

And Olds’ views were not the true reason for the campaign against him, which was,
The Nation
said, actually a “vendetta … a flagrant attempt by vested interests to exclude from office a man who proved too ‘consumer-minded’ to suit their purposes.” The real issue was the immense profits to be made from natural gas, I. F. Stone explained. “This is the reason for the fight on Olds. If he had been willing to knuckle under on the issue, he would have been forgiven the authorship of
Das Kapital
itself.” But, these liberal writers knew, the campaign had been successful, frighteningly successful. As Lerner put it: “Once the issue of Olds-as-onetime-devil was raised, no one dared line up on his side. The hunting of dangerous thought has overridden every other quest. None of the Senators dared to take a chance that someday an opponent would accuse him of having voted for a man who had once criticized our master-institution of corporate power.” And these writers understood the larger implications of that success. “No one in the government service is safe unless he played an intellectual Caspar Milquetoast from the moment he left his teens,” Lerner declared. The Olds case was teaching Washington that “all a lobbyist has to do is dig up something vaguely pink or crimson in a recalcitrant official’s past to ruin him,” I. F. Stone said. As the
Christian Science Monitor
reported: “It is hardly surprising that the case of Leland Olds has embittered Washington as few such cases have in recent years.”

And, as awareness grew of Lyndon Johnson’s role in the campaign, increasingly the liberals’ bitterness began to be directed against him—for many of them were now coming to believe that Lyndon Johnson had betrayed them. The awareness had grown slowly. His friends had not previously focused on the fact that he was the chairman of the subcommittee against which they were raging, but now, criticizing the subcommittee for being “so hostile to Olds that it resembles the House Un-American Activities Committee under J. Parnell Thomas,”
The New Republic
rectified the omission—with a vengeance. In an editorial entitled “The Enemies of Leland Olds,” the magazine said that “Against Olds is a onetime liberal Senator, Lyndon Johnson, born into the family of a poor farmer, brought forward by the New Deal, and carried into office by liberal and labor support. Johnson, who saw his first backer, Aubrey
Williams, hounded out of government on charges of Communism, now is hounding Olds out on the same charges—Johnson, who boasted that ‘Roosevelt was a Daddy to me.’ How Roosevelt would have scorned such backsliding!” Increasingly, in newspaper articles and editorials, the subcommittee was identified as “Johnson’s subcommittee.”

Over the weekend during which Olds was sorting frantically through ancient clippings, trying to assemble his defense, anew issue
of Fortune
magazine appeared on Washington newsstands with an article whose timing was, from Johnson’s point of view, unfortunate. Among the photographs accompanying the article—on the “Big Rich” of the Texas and Louisiana Gold Coasts—was a picture of the two Brown brothers, Herman and George, and the article reminded the capital that “a tremendous item in which they [the Browns] have big holdings is Texas Eastern Transmission Co., owner and operator of the Big Inch and Little Inch pipelines…. Although they are pretty sure that there is no such thing as good publicity, they are well known in select circles. These include potent people in Washington. They once put up $100,000 to back Lyndon Johnson for Congress….” (“This,” Lowell Mellett commented in the
Washington Star
, “may explain the strange tangent taken by the subcommittee under Senator Johnson’s chairmanship.”)