Master of the Senate (62 page)

And then, at 11:20 p.m., the subcommittee’s chairman rose, laid his speech on a lectern that had been placed on his desk, and began to read.

He took a moment to praise the impartiality with which he had conducted the hearings (“Every person who sought a hearing received a hearing. I believe Senators will find the record is complete”) and to raise the standard of senatorial independence against Truman’s attempted intervention. And then he turned to Leland Olds—forgetting, as he did so, to be “senatorial,” so that the rest of Lyndon Johnson’s speech, which lasted fifty minutes, was delivered in a hoarse shouting voice.

Johnson repeated all the charges that had been made against Olds: that the FPC chairman had schemed to substitute his own views for those of Congress; that he had substituted “confiscation” for regulation; that he had “advocated the assumption of complete Federal control” of natural gas producers; that he had made “vile and snide remarks” to “undermine and discredit” members of the FPC who did not agree with him, conducting an “insidious campaign of slander.” Seizing on the remark he had finally elicited from Olds that if he was no longer a member of the Commission, and the anti-regulation commissioners thereby became the majority, the Commission would not carry on “as active a regulation policy,” Lyndon Johnson quoted that statement to the Senate, and interpreted it. “This, indeed, is a strange position,” he shouted. “Here is a man declaring publicly and proudly that his colleagues on the Commission are virtually unworthy of the public confidence; declaring that he, and he alone, is capable and willing to defend the public interest.”

Then he turned to the hearings, portraying them in a light that would have been startling to anyone who had been present at them—as if their focus had not been natural gas at all but rather electric power, defining the words “special interests” and “power interest” and “utilities” as if the interests involved were not oil and natural gas but electric cooperatives and companies.

By using this definition Johnson was able to say that the “power interests” had not opposed Olds as newspapers had charged, but rather had supported him. “During the hearings,” he said, “not a single representative of power interests appeared to oppose Mr. Olds; the only representative of any utility who did appear came to testify in behalf of Mr. Olds. Hundreds of telegrams and letters have come to my office the past few days opposing Mr. Olds’ confirmation; not one has been signed by a representative of the electric utilities.” But, Johnson said, these “forces … have been at work on behalf of Mr. Olds…. Is it not self-evident that for favors granted, for services rendered, these ‘dragons of special privilege’—which Leland Olds supposedly combats three times daily and twice on Sundays—are now log-rolling in the oldest of Washington traditions, seeking for Leland Olds what both he and they so desperately need…. An attempt has been made to blackmail Congress into accepting his appointment through the simple device of charging all who oppose Leland Olds with being tools of ‘special interests’—many of which are actually supporting his nomination, and he knows it.”

And then, a few minutes after midnight, Lyndon Johnson came to the heart of his speech.

It began with a disclaimer—“I do not charge that Mr. Olds is a Communist”—but continued with phrases that were clearly intended to keep that possibility alive in the minds of his listeners.

“I do not charge that Mr. Olds is a Communist. No member of the subcommittee made any such accusation. I realize that the line he followed, the phrases he used, the causes he espoused resemble the party line today; but the Communist tie is not the tie that binds Leland Olds’ writings of the 1920s to his doctrines of the 1940s.” Rather, Johnson said, that “tie” was an “unmistakably clear purpose.” “Leland Olds had something in mind when he began to build his political empire across the Nation; he had something in mind when he chose to force a show-down with the Senate over his power to write laws of his own; he had something in mind when he chose to disregard the clear language of the Natural Gas Act and plot a course toward confiscation and public ownership.”

The purpose, Johnson said, had become clear in the 1920s. Leland Olds chose, Johnson said, “to travel with those who proposed the Marxian answer. His choice was not dictated by necessity; the company he chose, he chose of his own free will. He spoke from the same platforms
[sic]
with Earl Browder. He accepted subsidy from the so-called Garland Fund, a fund created and expended to keep alive Marxist organs and Marxist groups.”

And “why did these writings stop in 1929?” Johnson asked. Only, he said,
“because Leland Olds, the advocate—Leland Olds, the man with a purpose,” found he could advance that purpose more successfully from within the government. “There he has been ever since,” Lyndon Johnson told the Senate. “From 1929 to 1949, discretion has stilled Leland Olds’ pen; his purpose and his methods have found sanctuary in the legalistic prose of commission opinions—prose which affects many more men than the Federated Press affected….”

“There can be no question about the environment, the trend of thought, the bent of mind of Leland Olds,” Johnson said. The issue, he said, was clear-cut:

“Shall we have a commissioner or a commissar?”

L
YNDON
J
OHNSON’S SPEECH
put the finishing touches on the portrait of Leland Olds that he had been painting for the Senate. “The debate, as is seldom the case, did change some minds,” one reporter wrote. Aired not in private or in a subcommittee hearing but on the Senate floor, the charges echoed with a heightened authority. And Johnson’s new hint that Olds might have had some insidious plot in mind, that he had stopped writing because he could more effectively accomplish “confiscation and public ownership” from within the government, evidently made some liberal senators who had determined to stand up for Olds, whatever the consequences, reconsider. “It took a brave senator to vote for a man who had been fingered, as Johnson fingered Olds in a committee and as he now did again, even more brutally, in the closing hours of that day on the Senate floor,” Robert Sherrill was to write. Says Professor Harris: “Most senators were far less interested in determining the accuracy of every accusation against Olds than they were in letting the public know and having the record show that they themselves did not vote for a man who was accused of being a communist.” While Johnson was speaking, with his accusations—“Marxian,” “Earl Browder,” “Marxist,” “Commissar”—rolling across the rows of Senate desks, a number of liberal senators quietly rose and left, and did not return for the vote. When the clerk called the yeas and nays, only thirteen Democrats voted yea, along with two Republicans. Leland Olds’ renomination was defeated by a vote of 53 to 15.

When the clerk announced those figures, a reporter wrote, “There was a moment of stunned silence [at] the overwhelming size of the vote.” In what the
Washington Star
said was “about as severe a political licking as any President ever got on a nominee,” Truman had been able to persuade only fifteen of ninety-six senators to support the official he recommended—an official who had already held his job for ten years, an official whose work many senators had come to know and to respect, as, over ten years, they had come to know and respect the man himself.

•    •    •

O
N
C
APITOL
H
ILL
, and throughout political Washington, the vote was viewed as a personal triumph for Lyndon Johnson. “It’s not just every day in the week that a freshman senator can oppose his President, the chairman of his party, governors, mayors, national committeemen and others, and come out with a 53–15 victory,” one senator told a reporter. “Lyndon Johnson almost alone was responsible for the defeat,” Joseph Rauh said. “And he did that as a freshman senator.” John Gunther, making his rounds of Capitol Hill offices to lobby for ADA causes, said, “During the next couple of weeks, walking around the Hill, it became clear that people were a little scared of Lyndon Johnson. All of a sudden, he was big.”

One aspect of the triumph made it especially significant. Dissatisfied with the attendance as Johnson was rising to speak, the two giants from Georgia glanced at each other, and then rose and walked together out of the Chamber to summon other senators. Before long—and well before the crucial “commissar” line was uttered—the number of senators listening to Johnson (even after the discreet liberals had left) was quite respectable.

After the speech, Richard Russell was beaming. As always, he hung back, but Walter George, the Senate’s most renowned speechmaker, hurried over, and told Johnson, “I’ve never heard a more masterful speech against a nomination.” And southerners (along with some conservative Republicans) lined up to shake Johnson’s hand, as they had done after his maiden speech in March.

The strident anti-Communism of Johnson’s rhetoric may have grated on liberals, but it didn’t grate on southerners, most of whom were as fervently anti-Communist as even Johnson could have wished. During his first year in the Senate, Johnson had delivered two major speeches. The first, in March, had announced his enlistment in the ranks of the southerners who ran the Senate. The second had demonstrated that he could be an effective leader in their causes. “In the minds of many,” Lowell Mellett wrote, “the shame of the Senate, in the session now ending, has been written in oil … by a sneak attack on [Leland Olds’] personal reputation, the surefire smear technique of labeling him a Communist or Communist sympathizer….” But the columnist’s analysis also noted that “the Southern bloc emerged from the session stronger than ever.”

“V
ICTORY
”
WAS A WORD
used in banner headlines all over Texas, and, the state’s newspapers made clear, it was Lyndon Johnson’s victory. In a score of articles he was identified as “Lyndon Johnson, who led the fight against Leland Olds.”

And, the newspapers told Texans, it was a victory that had required great political courage. In his speech, Johnson had portrayed himself as a lone crusader fighting overwhelming forces: the President, the Democratic National Committee and, of course, those “dragons of special privilege” bringing immense pressure to bear for Leland Olds. “The lash of a party line can be painful,” he said. “I do not relish disagreeing with my President and being
unable to comply with the chairman of my party, but I can find no comfort in failing to do what I know is right.” The big Texas newspapers, many of whose publishers had substantial oil and natural gas interests, took the point. “The outstanding feature of the present session of Congress has been the courage displayed by Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas in opposing confirmation,” the
Dallas Times-Herald
said. “It was a whopping triumph for Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas … who led the Senate revolt against pressure attempted in Olds’ behalf by the Democratic national committee,” David Botter wrote in the
Dallas Morning News.
The headline over an editorial in the
Houston Post
, which stated that “left wing columnists and commentators” and the Truman Administration “exerted all possible pressure,” was “
PRINCIPLE VS. PRESSURE.
” Principle had won, the
Post
said, because Johnson had made the issue clear: “The question” was indeed, the
Post
said, “Shall we have a commissioner or a commissar?”

As was often the case, Leslie Carpenter, correspondent for a number of Texas newspapers, was the most enthusiastic writer of all. “At 11:10 pm
[sic]
on the night of Oct. 12,” his story began, “Texas’ lanky 41-year-old Junior Senator Lyndon B. Johnson stepped to the front of the historic Senate Chamber to begin what he considered the ‘most important speech’ of his public career…. When Johnson—who had sat patiently without saying a word while the Olds’ partisans spoke—began speaking, it was evident that the responsibility for proving the case against Olds rested upon the Texas Senator. The Texan spoke calmly, deliberately….” At other points in his narrative, Carpenter said, Johnson spoke “soberly,” “firmly.” “Patiently,” Carpenter wrote, “Johnson unfolded the record.” His opponents, Carpenter said, had been routed. “Columnists and commentators, who had been defending Olds by assailing Johnson, remained silent and said nothing further against Johnson.”

The Texas newspapers lauding Johnson included many which had, a year before, opposed his campaign for the Senate. Now they confessed their error. Said the state’s most influential newspaper, the
Dallas Morning News:
“The junior senator from Texas very properly stands up to this pressure and stands up to his duty as he sees it. The
News
believed and believes that Senator Johnson obtained office as the result of an election by a slender majority counted in his favor in violation of law…. Without retracting anything that has been said, it is possible to commend the Senator de facto for what is certainly personal and political courage in the performance of duty.” The Leland Olds fight had given Johnson the newspaper support he had previously lacked. A hundred articles portrayed him as the senator who had stood up against a President and against subversion—and when he returned to the great province in the Southwest (in a symbolically appropriate chariot, Brown & Root’s new DC-3), he did so as its hero, on a triumphal tour across the vast state on which he spoke before cheering audiences.

•    •    •

T
HE TOUR GAVE HIM
an opportunity to achieve another goal—one he had been trying to achieve since the day Franklin Roosevelt died. As long as his great patron had been alive and lavishing favors on him, Johnson had been identified as a New Dealer, but in the four years since FDR’s death, he had been attempting to make Texans understand that, as a friendly reporter wrote after a 1947 interview, while “People all over Texas formed an impression over the years that Lyndon Johnson personified the New Deal… it would be an error to tag Johnson now as a strong New Dealer.” (In that interview Johnson himself said that the tag would always have been an error, saying “I think the term ‘New Dealer’ is a misnomer….”) Nonetheless, doubts had lingered—were still lingering despite his sterling record in the civil rights and Leland Olds fights; he intended the speeches he made on this tour to lay those doubts to rest. His instructions to Busby were specific, and the young speechwriter, sending Johnson a draft of one talk, attached a note saying he hoped he had succeeded in complying with them. “I hope it is sufficiently conservative. I merely wrote things I do believe, and think you do, too.”