Master of the Senate (66 page)

Johnson filled up his new space seemingly overnight. It was the Preparedness
Investigating
Subcommittee; he needed investigators. He wanted the best—which he considered to be investigators from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And he wanted them to be supervised by someone experienced at supervising FBI investigators—an official who, as he put it, had been “high up” in the FBI. He got him, too. J. Edgar Hoover gave him the name of Lyon L. (Slug) Tyler, the former deputy chief of the bureau’s investigative division, who had recently resigned to enter private law practice. Although Tyler idolized Hoover, he had said no to Hoover’s attempts to retain him, and when Lyndon Johnson first telephoned him, he said no to him, too. His first thought, he was to recall, was: “I ain’t for Capitol Hill. I’m trying to get a law practice started.” When Johnson asked him to at least come in and talk, he said there was no point.

But “no one said no to Lyndon Johnson.” Since his call to Tyler himself had failed to produce the desired result, he made other calls—to Tyler’s old friends at the FBI. And he gave them a potent argument to use with a man who worshiped his old boss. “I began to get calls from my friends,” Tyler would recall. “They would tell me that because I had refused to even consider Johnson’s offer, the Senator was pestering Hoover to find someone else. They would say, ‘At least go up there and talk. All you got to do is go up there, and you’ll get Hoover off the hook.’”

When he went “up there”—when Mary Rather ushered him into Johnson’s private office and shut the door behind him—Tyler found himself being offered not only good money (the same top civil service salary he had been earning at the FBI) and good staff (“He had three top people coming in that day—one from ONI [the Office of Naval Intelligence]; he was a great man for borrowing people. And he told me to bring in men from the FBI: the best men I knew”), but inspiration. “We need you! Your country needs you! Put a staff together,
and get ‘em rollin’, and you can go on your way. But right now, we need you. We’re at war! This is a big world war we’re getting into, and we need some top-class help. This is gonna be the Truman Committee of the Third World War!” So deeply affected was Tyler that when he walked out of 231 he no longer had one idol but two. “Lyndon, I thought, had great, great strength,” Tyler says. “He could talk you into anything. Listen—he had to me some of the drive of J. Edgar Hoover. What more can I say?”

By August 15, two weeks after the Preparedness Subcommittee had held its first organizational meeting, the subcommittee’s staff—lawyers, accountants, researchers, stenographers, investigators—numbered twenty-five, three times as many as the staff of Tydings’ parent committee. Lyndon Johnson, still in his second year in the Senate, had assembled a staff not only larger than that of most other senators—perhaps larger than that of
any
other senator—but more qualified. In just two weeks, in that small-scale Senate of 1950, Lyndon Johnson had created his own little empire, and it was an empire of talent.

H
AVING ACQUIRED A STAFF
with remarkable speed, Johnson used it with remarkable speed.

Speed was essential. Tydings’ intention of taking over the defense mobilization investigation after his re-election in November gave Johnson less than three months to compile a record so impressive that his chairman would find it embarrassing to supplant him, and in fact he had even less time than that. A number of House committees were beginning their own mobilization investigations; at least one senior senator, Homer Ferguson, was making noises about forming a special Select Senate Committee, and the committee that produced the first newsworthy result would have the important first public identification as the investigating body. Johnson needed to have a report ready fast—and he did. Most of the subcommittee’s staff reported for work on August 15. The subcommittee’s first report was released to the press three weeks later.

Johnson was able to produce a report so quickly because much of it was simply a recycling of a report that had been all but completed—by another Armed Services subcommittee he had been chairing—before the Korean War began: a routine study analyzing the implications for America’s rubber supply should some future major war break out in the Far East, source of the world’s natural rubber. The bulk of the Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee’s report—issued on September 5—was simply a rewriting of that earlier study which had found that war in the Far East would be “an obvious threat” to America’s rubber supply and had advocated reactivating America’s World War II synthetic-rubber-producing program. There was nothing particularly new or significant in the report; in fact, by the time it appeared, the Administration had already begun reactivating the program.

The rest of the September 5 report dealt with the government’s surplus-property disposal program, under which, since World War II, it had been shutting
down defense plants and selling them off to private industry. The report said that the Preparedness Subcommittee had found “a number of instances in which plans were going ahead for the ‘surplus’ sale” of plants “which appeared to be essential to our current mobilization needs,” including a synthetic rubber plant in Akron, Ohio. The day after the subcommittee was formed, Stuart Symington told Johnson that that plant, closed since the end of World War II, was in the process of being sold by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to a private company, which was planning to reopen it. Johnson wrote RFC Chairman Harley Hise, urging him to cancel the sale, and to keep the plant closed and available for defense use. There was nothing particularly exciting in this, either; Symington had informed the White House at the same time he told Johnson, and by the time the report was issued, the sale had already been canceled, as had plans for putting three other rubber plants on the market. Nor was the case for such cancellations clear-cut. A body of expert opinion held that such plants might be better prepared to produce rubber for defense purposes if they were reopened and running, and had only to be converted from civilian to defense use, than if they remained closed and had to be reconditioned from scratch. With the public in an outcry over the country’s lack of readiness for war, Truman appears to have ordered the plants retained, and the overall synthetic-rubber program increased (by a token 80,000 tons per year) as the simplest way to avoid a controversy in which he could hardly have helped looking bad. But the cancellation of the Akron sale allowed Johnson to claim a victory in the subcommittee report, which stated: “Because of this [the subcommittee’s] intervention, fortunately, the Government still has this essential plant.”

The most significant aspect of the first report of the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee was not its contents but the way it was presented. During his entire career, Lyndon Johnson had demonstrated, again and again, a remarkable proficiency in the mechanics of politics, in the lower-level, basic techniques that are essential to political success but that some politicians never seem to learn. Lyndon Johnson had never
had
to learn these techniques. From the moment he entered politics—from those first Hill Country campaigns, now so many years behind him—he had seemed to
know
them, to know them instinctively, and to practice them with a rare ingenuity, a resourcefulness, a sureness of touch, as unerring as it was untaught. In a democracy, the bedrock of political power is public support, so one of the most basic requirements for a public official is the ability to influence public opinion, and the journalists who mold it. None of the lower arts of politics is more essential to the politician than the ability to obtain favorable publicity, and the subcommittee’s first report demonstrated that its chairman was a master of that art. Although most of what the report said was neither new nor significant, Johnson made it
seem
new and significant—by saying it in phrases brilliantly calculated to catch the journalistic eye.

Some of these phrases were written by Johnson’s little wordsmith—
contained in the draft report Horace Busby brought into Johnson’s office. Some were Johnson’s own, written onto the draft in his bold handwriting, the phrases of a great storyteller who all his life had displayed a gift for the dramatic. Phrases like
“darkest days” “business as usual” “too little and too late”
leapt out of the final report. “During the darkest days of the Korean crisis, evidence was found of a ‘business as usual’ attitude in some quarters charged with responsibility in the preparedness program,” it said. “We must not have too little and be too late in our rubber program.” The report was infused with a sense of drama: the subcommittee, it said, was trying “to make certain that we are not continuing to demobilize with one hand while trying to mobilize with the other.” The subcommittee, it said, “has fought at every Government level for a maximum reactivation of our synthetic-rubber producing program. The word fought is used advisedly.” Its prose was aggressive. Noting that the subcommittee had asked the National Munitions Board to discuss the rubber program, and “to date no reply or acknowledgment has been received,” it said: “Either the Munitions Board has a program or it has not. If it has a program it could readily be described. If it has no program it should be candidly admitted.” There was urgency in the report—a shout of warning, a call to arms: “We face the distinct threat of a war of attrition…. Not only the Nation’s security but its very existence is challenged….” And Johnson had thought up one phrase that was particularly original and vivid, and Busby happily included it in the press release he handed to newspapermen along with the report: “If we find in the other fields into which we move the same siesta psychology that we found in surplus disposal and rubber, our work is certainly cut out for us.”

The next morning Johnson’s phrase was on front pages all over the country. “‘
SIESTA PSYCHOLOGY
’
LAID TO DEFENSE DEPT
” was the headline in the
New York Herald Tribune.
(The
New York Times
felt its readers needed the term defined: “In Mexico—and in some parts of south Texas—the Spanish word ‘siesta’ defines a habit of halting all work and taking a long nap every afternoon.”) The following morning it was on editorial pages. “No Time for a Siesta” was the headline over the lead editorial in the
Washington Star.
On Sunday the subcommittee was the darling of the feature pages, “
SENATE PREPAREDNESS UNIT GETS OFF TO ROARING START
—Successor to Truman Committee Stirs Up Federal Agencies with Its Recommendations,” the
Star
said. And in the
Washington Post
on the following Sunday, accompanied by a big picture of Johnson, was an article by Robert C. Albright which told readers that “If waffle-bottomed Washington is beginning to rise out of its swivel chair, a new Congressional Committee may have something to do with it…. The Senate’s ‘Johnson Preparedness Committee’ is a new version of the old Truman Committee. It … puts quiet inquiries … ahead of headline hunting. So anonymously hush-hush had it worked that its recent preliminary report caught Washington by surprise, serving notice that the postwar ‘siesta’ is over.” Arthur Krock called the report “a model of its kind,” “an example of Congress at its best.”

•    •    •

A
ND THAT WAS JUST THE FIRST REPORT.
During the next two years, the Preparedness Subcommittee was to issue forty-three more. Most were even shorter on substance than the first. The second, for example, released on November 20, returned to the subjects of surplus disposal and the rubber stockpile, but in two months the subcommittee had been able to find no governmental mistake even as significant as that of the Akron plant; the example most prominently cited in the new report was the sale in August of an alcohol plant in Kansas City to Schenley Distillers, Inc.—and as a Schenley spokesman pointed out when reporters contacted him, the plant, which had stood idle for five years, had been cannibalized of its equipment and was useless unless someone purchased it and re-equipped it; Schenley had agreed to do so, and had contracted to sell the government the alcohol the plant produced, should the government need it. Some of the forty-three reports, following the pattern of the reports on rubber, contended that the government had similarly failed to provide for sufficient stockpiles of strategically important materials such as nickel, tin, tungsten, and wool. Others showed that the government was continuing to sell, as surplus, equipment needed by the armed forces. Underlying the subcommittee’s emphasis on stockpiling, however, was its chairman’s belief, not shared by the Administration or, for that matter, by many defense experts, that the United States should maintain stockpiles adequate not merely for the Korean conflict and any short-term enlargement of that conflict, such as Chinese involvement, but for an all-out global war. The subcommittee’s report that stockpiling of the “critical” nickel supply was “lagging seriously”—and that the government agencies involved were guilty of “complacency” and “a very leisurely approach”—ignored the fact that the stockpile was actually larger than it had been during World War II.

Mundane in substance though the reports may have been, however, that was not the case with their prose. The second report may have been scant on specifics; it was long on phraseology that was grist for a reporter’s typewriter or for a headline writer, as was demonstrated by the lead paragraph in the story about it, on page one, in the
New York Times:
“Government agencies in charge of disposing of so-called military surpluses were accused today by Senate investigators of acting with ‘less prudence than they would display in operating a charity bazaar.’” And there was, from Busby’s typewriter and Johnson’s editorial pen, more to delight the journalistic eye: America’s mobilization was only a “paper preparedness”; Government bureaucrats seem to think the surplus disposal program is “a compulsory giveaway.” Cries of alarm (America was facing “a natural rubber ‘Pearl Harbor,’” the report said) were mingled with vows of vigilance: “As far as the Preparedness Subcommittee is concerned, policies that look good on paper aren’t good enough. Wars aren’t won with memoranda. We intend to see that future performances live up to present promises.” And rolling off the subcommittee’s mimeograph
machines and rushed to the Senate Press Gallery by Busby were press releases about vivid individual examples that made front pages all by themselves, like the East Texas farmer who, in November, told the subcommittee that he had purchased 168 unused aircraft fire control instruments for $6.89, and then, after the Korean War broke out, sold them back to the Air Force for $63,000.