Master of the Senate (65 page)

Speed was necessary, for the odds against him getting the job were very long. For one thing, an investigation might well fall under the jurisdiction of the Senate’s Committee on Expenditures in Executive Departments, chaired by John McClellan. Had the powerful and prickly McClellan moved to assume jurisdiction, no senator would have opposed him. But McClellan didn’t move. Johnson did: he had an emissary, Truman’s Secretary of the Air Force, Stuart Symington, respectfully point something out to the President: Expenditures’ ranking Republican member, who would play a prominent role if that committee investigated the Administration’s war effort, was Joe McCarthy. With an election coming up and the Democrats by no means certain of retaining control of the Senate, McCarthy might, in fact, soon be the committee’s chairman. That possibility should be eliminated before anyone focused on it. Truman took the point. He was soon on the phone to Majority Leader Scott Lucas, to, in Busby’s words, “get an investigation started, and started quick, and put it in the Armed Services Committee.”

That move reduced the odds against Johnson only slightly. Grasping the potential in such an investigation, Armed Services Chairman Millard Tydings wanted to head it himself. At that very moment, however, Tydings was getting bad news from the home front—
his
home front, the state of Maryland, where he would be up for election in November. He had been chairman of the Senate’s
Select Committee on McCarthy, which, earlier that year, had brought to light the lack of proof, and of truth, behind McCarthy’s Wheeling speech, and McCarthy, out for revenge, was planning to campaign against him. Tydings had survived a 1938 purge attempt by Franklin Roosevelt, but this threat, his advisers were telling him—more and more urgently each day—was worse; he was in a fight for his political life, and had better concentrate on his re-election campaign. Still, Tydings tried to keep his options open. Although, formally staking Armed Services’ jurisdiction over the investigation, he emerged from a committee meeting on July 17 to announce that, pursuant to a resolution introduced by Senator Lyndon Johnson, the committee had established a seven-member “Preparedness Investigating” subcommittee “similar to the one headed during World War II by President Truman,” the announcement did not name the subcommittee’s membership, much less its chairman; Tydings apparently intended either to take the chairmanship himself after he had been re-elected or to return jurisdiction to the full committee which he chaired. And if Tydings did not take the chairmanship himself, of course, the committee had several senior senators (most notably Russell, the Senate’s leading expert on military readiness) who would be more logical choices than a freshman senator.

Seeing his precious opportunity slipping away, Johnson pleaded for a chance to talk to Tydings in person—“Millard, as indicated twice today, I shall be delighted to discuss my position with you at any time … that may be convenient for you”—a chance he was apparently not given. In a letter he wrote Tydings on July 19, there was, before the requisite disclaimer, a note of desperation. “I believed that I would be named chairman of the group authorized by the resolution I introduced. Since this would only be in line with the usual practice of the Senate, I thought I had some right to expect this. I have no political ambitions to further, however, so I have no intention of objecting if you want to name yourself chairman.” In a July 25 memorandum, Johnson sought to reassure Tydings that the subcommittee would pose no threat to his authority as chairman of the full Armed Services Committee, or to his ability to take credit for the subcommittee’s findings. As chairman of the parent committee, Tydings would have full authority over the subcommittee’s expenditures, the memo said; its expenses and the salaries of its staff, which would be limited to a mere $25,000, “shall be paid … upon vouchers approved by T
HE CHAIRMAN OF THE COMMITTEE.
” (The crucial words were capitalized.) Tydings would have full authority over the subcommittee’s staff—not that there would be much staff. “You would designate such members of our [Armed Services Committee] professional staff as you saw fit to be the nucleus around which additional investigators could be employed when, and if, they were needed,” Johnson promised. “You would be expected to designate and approve any additional investigators.” And it would be Tydings, not the subcommittee’s chairman, who, the memo promised, would have full authority over the subcommittee’s reports—and the right to release them: “The subcommittee would submit all
reports, recommendations, etc., to the full committee—not to the Senate or to the public. The full committee then would decide what, if any, reports would be presented to the Senate by the chairman of the full committee.” And the memorandum closed with a note of urgency. “In view of the fact that other resolutions are now being introduced calling for similar investigations by other and special committees, I think it is important that announcement of the [membership] of our subcommittee should be made at the earliest possible date.”

Attempting during the long, frustrating week following the July 17 committee meeting to enlist Truman’s influence on his behalf, Johnson issued a number of statements designed to reassure the President that he need not fear criticism from any subcommittee headed by Lyndon Johnson. Pointedly re-emphasizing in one statement that establishment of the subcommittee would “cut off other indiscriminate investigations of the emergency [defense] effort,” he added, “I personally do not believe we have time for criticism at the present moment.”

If Truman intervened, his intervention was not sufficient: the President’s influence on Capitol Hill was on the wane. Tydings refused to budge. For a freshman senator to get this prized subcommittee chairmanship, he would need an ally—a patron—more influential within the Senate than the President.

And this freshman senator had that ally. “He had talked it over beforehand with Senator Russell and asked his help in convincing [Tydings] to give him the subcommittee despite his lack of seniority,” a journalist familiar with the situation was to recall. Although Russell had agreed to help, he had hitherto not thrown his full weight into the scales. Now he did so—and with Russell on his side, Lyndon Johnson didn’t need anyone else. As Symington was to put it, “Russell was for him. There were no other factors that mattered.”

While Tydings may not have been talking to Johnson, he now began talking with Russell, in the secrecy of the Marble Room. The details of those conversations are not known—because, as always with Russell, they took place in confidence—but their outcome was clear. “As was generally the case in delicate maneuvers involving Russell, there was no rancor, no controversy; but it somehow came to pass that Tydings, faced with the rigors of a difficult campaign, decided that he did not want to take on additional time-consuming duties,” John A. Goldsmith wrote. Saying privately that he would assume the subcommittee chairmanship himself when, with the re-election threat disposed of, the Senate reorganized in January, 1951, Tydings, on July 27, 1950, simply announced that Lyndon Johnson would be chairman.

The significance of the appointment to Johnson’s career was instantly apparent. “Senator Johnson of Texas today faces opportunities for fame, public service and political advancement almost without equal for a senator serving his first term,” Leslie Carpenter wrote. “Those opportunities are fundamentally the same as those that confronted Senator Truman … in 1941. And no one has to be told what happened to Truman.” And, Carpenter pointed out, Truman had
been in his seventh year in the Senate when he was given his great opportunity. “Johnson is only in his second year.” As
The Nation
reported, “With the outbreak of the Korean War dozens of Congressmen recognized that the impact of a tremendous rearmament program would open up new fields for legislative investigation and that national reputations could be built by skillful employment of the power to probe.” Dozens had recognized it; one had gotten it—thanks largely to his third
R.

A
ND ONCE
L
YNDON
J
OHNSON
had the opportunity, he made the most of it—displaying gifts more rare than the ability to court an older man.

The Senate as a whole—and most senators individually—may not have grasped the importance of staff, of a new kind of staff suited to the new, more complicated postwar world, but Lyndon Johnson had grasped it from the day he arrived in the Senate. And now, assembling a staff for the Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee, he set out to create what he had had in mind.

He had promised Tydings that the “nucleus” of the subcommittee’s staff would be the staff of the parent Armed Services Committee, but that staff consisted of former career military officers, not at all what Johnson had in mind. So from the moment he got what he wanted from Tydings—the chairmanship—the promises he had given Tydings were moot.

Assembling part of the subcommittee’s staff was easy, for it was already on his payroll. The “best man with words” whom he knew—Horace Busby—was simply moved out of 231 and down the hall to a little cubicle in the Armed Services suite, and on the cubicle’s door was painted the title “Editor of Subcommittee Reports.” Another man of unusual abilities was on a payroll that Johnson treated as his own: that of Alvin Wirtz’s Austin law firm. John Connally had thought that he had finally found a refuge from Johnson there, but Wirtz now informed Connally that while he would remain on salary with the firm, he would also have assignments from the subcommittee.

Assembling the rest of the staff was hard, for Johnson wanted men with ability and expertise equal to that of the bright young professionals of the executive agencies “downtown.” For a committee or subcommittee to “borrow help” from “downtown” was strictly against Senate rules, for the use of executive branch personnel violated the Senate’s cherished independence and the principle of separation of powers, and also threatened the Senate’s institutional authority, since personnel not on the Senate payroll were not bound by Senate rules or subject to Senate discipline. Alarmed by the proliferation of “borrowing” under wartime necessity, the Senate had given the rigid longtime regulations prohibiting the practice the force of law by codifying them in the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946. Since passage of the Act, an internal Rules Committee memorandum would report in 1950, the number of borrowed personnel had been sharply reduced, and “nearly all” had been merely low-level clerical or
administrative employees or FBI investigators. The sole exception—the only administrator of more than low rank borrowed from an executive agency since the war—had been an assistant to an agency commissioner.

Lyndon Johnson had a different level of help in mind: was the “best man with words” on the subcommittee staff?—he wanted the “best man with numbers,” too. That man, Donald Cook, a trained accountant as well as a very sharp lawyer, was not a commissioner’s assistant but a full commissioner, vice chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, in fact—at that very moment, in fact, under consideration for the SEC’s chairmanship. Johnson wanted him instead to run the Preparedness Subcommittee’s day-to-day operation. And he got him. Cook didn’t want to leave the SEC—the chairmanship, as a stepping-stone to the wealth that was his goal, was what he had been aiming at, hitherto with Johnson’s support. But he wasn’t given a choice; Johnson had arranged his career—the positions with Tom Clark’s Justice Department; the SEC commissionership—and, it was made clear to him, Johnson could stop arranging. Cook was told—in so many words—that if he wanted Johnson’s future backing for the SEC chairmanship, he would first have to be chief counsel of Johnson’s subcommittee.

In hiring Cook, Johnson circumvented the strictures of the Legislative Reorganization Act, seemingly insurmountable to other senators, with astonishing deftness. Calling Cook’s appointment “temporary,” he said it would be only an unpaid, part-time job; Cook would continue to hold his post, and draw his salary, as SEC vice chairman. In reality, however, despite the “temporary” designation, Cook would devote most of his time to the subcommittee for almost two years (at which point he would in fact be rewarded with the SEC chairmanship). No one challenged the appointment—since he was drawing no salary from the Senate, it did not require approval from Tydings or anyone else—and at the subcommittee’s organizational meeting on July 30, Cook was named its chief counsel. Cook’s dual role—a vice chairman of an executive branch regulatory agency on the staff of a legislative subcommittee
*
—clearly violated both Senate custom and federal law, but Johnson had found a way to maneuver around custom and regulations, had pushed the tactic to the limit (beyond, so far as can be learned, the point to which any other senator had ever gone) and, as had so often been the case with his unprecedented maneuvers, had succeeded with it.

Drafting Cook brought other benefits besides his incisive intelligence. The subcommittee’s budget, including salaries for its staff, was of course only the modest $25,000 that the Armed Services Committee had approved. At the SEC, however, Cook had been planning to hire an “Assistant to the Vice Chairman,”
and a salary line had already been created for that job. Offering it now to a young, Yale-educated SEC attorney, Gerald W. Siegel, who had caught his eye, Cook made it clear that while his salary would come from the agency, his work would be for the subcommittee.

As important as money was space, always in short supply in the Senate Office Building. It was not unusual for congressional committees to use offices in the vast regulatory agency buildings, but under federal regulations rent had to be paid for them. With the vice chairman of an agency on your staff, however, that was a problem easily solved. Six rooms on the second floor of the SEC Building on Second Street were given rent-free to the subcommittee, and filled with SEC accountants and typists whose salaries were still paid by the agency, but who were actually working for the subcommittee. To deflect objections to all these arrangements from the other SEC commissioners, Senator Russell had a quiet word with Senator Maybank, whose Appropriations subcommittee oversaw the SEC budget, and the agency’s annual appropriation was increased by some $200,000.