Master of the Senate (68 page)

Lyndon Johnson didn’t want any mishaps. He wanted to minimize the chance of controversy and confrontation—wanted to have publicity without, so far as possible, the danger of bad publicity. And he succeeded: by making not hearings but reports—the forty-four printed, formal reports issued by his subcommittee during his chairmanship—the basis of his subcommittee’s work.

These reports, based either on investigations by the subcommittee staff or, in not a few cases, on work previously done by other government agencies (several were simply rewritings of studies that had been carried out by the research service of the Library of Congress) were drafted (or rewritten) by Siegel and then redrafted by Cook and Walter Jenkins. Then they were rewritten
again by Busby or Reedy, two experts in summarizing findings in pithy introductions and summaries. (And, of course, they were then edited by the senator-editor who was an expert himself.) Only then would the galleys printed by the Government Printing Office—generally the fourth set of galleys, so much reworking had been done—be shown to the other senators on the subcommittee, an inescapable step since their signatures were needed on it to show that the report was approved by a majority.

Around these reports was drawn a curtain of secrecy. Cook and Jenkins and Busby knew better than to talk with newspapermen, and now the new members of the subcommittee staff were informed of this in a staff meeting—informed unforgettably. “If you get any calls [from reporters],” Lyndon Johnson said, “refer them to George or to Walter. I’ll talk for Preparedness. No one else talks.” Then he paused, as if considering whether he had said enough, and then, evidently concluding he hadn’t, went on—this time in a low, quiet voice almost throbbing with threat. “Remember,” he said, “no one speaks for Lyndon Johnson except Lyndon Johnson.
No one!”
One of the new staff members, a big, tough former FBI agent named Daniel F. McGillicuddy, recalls: “He looked around that room at each one of us, looked into our eyes, looked into our eyes to see that we understood. We
understood.
That was the first time I had ever met Lyndon Johnson. I walked out of that room knowing one thing for sure: I didn’t
ever
want to tangle with that guy.”

Precautions were taken to guard against anyone letting a journalist see the galleys. Only a few copies—“fifteen, maybe, no more,” McGillicuddy says—of each draft were printed, and staff member Wally Engel “had to guard them with his life.” The galleys were kept in a safe in the subcommittee’s offices, and each copy was numbered in the upper right corner so that Johnson could, if necessary, trace its circulation.

It would, of course, have been possible for journalists to wait outside the room in which the subcommittee was meeting or holding a hearing and question senators or witnesses as they emerged, but that would have required the reporters to know there was a meeting or hearing going on, and often they didn’t, for Johnson didn’t announce a schedule. A reporter who asked would be told the time, of course, but Johnson would explain to him that the subcommittee would be covering classified information, and in the patriotic atmosphere of the time, that statement would generally be sufficient to dissuade a reporter from pressing for admission. “We just didn’t do anything to encourage reporters to come around,” Busby recalls, and not many did.

These measures gave Johnson an unusual degree of control over the newspaper coverage his subcommittee received. That coverage had to be based mostly on the printed reports—the final reports, from which all areas of disagreement had been removed, all controversy smoothed over. “Johnson wanted the press only after the whole thing was done,” Busby says. “You just ran the mimeograph machine, and handed it out.” Moreover, these measures helped to
ensure that news about the subcommittee would have to come from Johnson, and from Johnson alone.

The secrecy which surrounded the reports gave Johnson another great advantage in dealing with the press. It infused the reports with an aura of importance, as if information so tightly guarded must be significant. A journalist lucky enough to be given advance information about a report’s contents could tell, and convince, his editors that the findings were significant because he believed they
were
significant. And, of course, it made the reporter look good to his editors: he was the one who had gotten the scoop; he was the one who had, his bosses back in New York now knew, that valuable Washington commodity, access. It made journalists eager to obtain advance information about the reports; grateful if they got the information, and less disposed to evaluate it with a critical eye, particularly since they would want to be given an advance look at the next report.

And advance information was available, for one of the most important of the lower arts of politics is the leak. Lyndon Johnson’s mastery of this art had been displayed so early—and long before he had substantial ammunition to work with—that his gift for it was obviously natural, instinctive, innate. At the age of twenty-five, still only an assistant to a junior congressman, he had used it to defeat a quiet attempt by the Vice President of the United States, as tough and canny a politician as Texas had ever produced, Cactus Jack Garner, to grab federal patronage from the twenty-one Texas congressmen. Awed by the Vice President’s power and legendary ruthlessness, the congressmen were resigned to the loss of the patronage—until Johnson, through his congressman, Richard Kleberg, told them they didn’t have to lose, that he had a strategy. And a key to the strategy was a leak—his secret disclosure of Garner’s maneuver—not to a Texas newspaper whose publisher, friendly to Garner, might not have printed it but to the Associated Press (through a young reporter from Texas, William S. White, with whom he was acquainted), and the resultant nationwide publicity had forced Garner into a hasty retreat. So impressed had the Vice President been that, as White was to recount, he repeatedly asked, “Who in hell is this boy Lyndon Johnson; where the hell did Kleberg get a boy with savvy like that?”
*

Now, in 1950, Lyndon Johnson had ammunition to work with—
real
ammunition. He used it with a flair, infusing it with drama, emphasizing to favored reporters the risks he was taking in letting them see one of the still-secret reports. Handing an advance copy of one to Frances Levison of
Time’s
Washington bureau on a Friday afternoon, he made her understand that he was able to give it to her only because no one would be looking into the subcommittee’s safe over the weekend—and that Levison
must
get the copy back to him before the safe was opened again, so that the leak couldn’t be traced.
“
PACKETING ADVANCE COPY OF SENATOR JOHNSON’S SUBCOMMITTEE PROGRESS REPORT ON RUBBER, FOR TUESDAY RELEASE
,” Levison cabled her editors in new York, “
THIS PARTICULAR COPY MUST BE RETURNED AFTER WEEKEND, BECAUSE IT IS SPECIALLY SIGNED FOR COMMITTEE FILES.
”

The excitement and feelings of complicity—of alliance—that journalists felt at being involved in such intrigues comes through in their memos. “
NOT FOR USE, WE HAVE READ THE PRELIMINARY DRAFTS OF LYNDON JOHNSON’S COMMITTEE REPORTS ON MILITARY PROCUREMENT, WHICH WILL START ISSUING IN ANOTHER TWO WEEKS, POSSIBLY TEN DAYS. THEY SHOW UP GLARING DELAYS IN PROCURING
3.5
BAZOOKAS
,” Frank McNaughton of
Time’s
Washington bureau cabled New York. And evident also is the extent to which this leaking influenced journalists who might otherwise have been skeptical to accept the evaluation Johnson put on the leaked information. Giving a journalist a look at a report in private provided Johnson with an opportunity to “explain” its significance, and the fact that the report would remain secret until the journalist printed it meant that an evaluation of the explanation could not be obtained from anybody else. The “glaringness” of the delays the preliminary draft “showed up” was, it would later turn out, a matter of debate, but the debate would not take place until the report had already been published in a prominent position in
Time.
And by the time doubts as to the true significance of a subcommittee report surfaced, the subcommittee would be on the verge of issuing a new report—and no one was better than Johnson at making a reporter believe that the report to come would be
BIG!
Even when a promised Johnson “bombshell” fell far short of expectations (as was the case with the procurement report), he was adept at explaining away the shortfall—and in a way that redounded still more to his credit. He had been privately promising James L. McConaughy major revelations about lagging defense deliveries; when the revelations proved less than major, he told McConaughy, as McConaughy reported in his weekly memo to his editors: “Trouble is, the committee can’t figure out a way to tell the public just how bad the situation is without revealing information damaging to security.”

And if the
quid pro quo
was unstated, it was nonetheless implicit. If Johnson liked a publication’s treatment of his subcommittee, and of him, there would be other tidbits—juicier tidbits. For a publication as influential as
Time
, in fact, it was not only copies of reports that were available; so were the transcripts of the subcommittee’s tightly closed executive sessions. And no conversation, not even one in the Oval Office, was off limits, as was made clear by a telex from John Beal, a member of
Time’s
Washington bureau, to his editors in New York.

N
OTHING WAS TOO GOOD FOR THE PRESS.
Lyndon Johnson rationed out his news, soothed reporters who had not been the beneficiary of his latest leak by telling them he had no idea how the information had gotten out, someone else on the subcommittee must have done it, and promising that he would try to make it up to them. “He worked at keeping the press on his side,” comments Marshall McNeil of the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
“He made a point of seeing all newspapermen, and everyone left thinking that he was Lyndon’s best friend.”

And he kept it on his side.
Time
, preparing an article on the first subcommittee report, sent John Beal to get the story of the chairman’s life for a brief biography, and Johnson spent hours telling a story, and while much of it wasn’t true, all of it was charming. “I think that everything considered he deserves a good sendoff in this introduction to
Time
readers,” Beal cabled his editors. The editors, several of whom had themselves been charmed by Johnson at dinner parties, agreed. The magazine sent him off with a nickname, embodied in the headline “
TEXAS WATCHDOG
”; with a paragraph of
Times
peak (“The Senate’s new watchdog committee on U.S. preparedness uttered its first warning growl. After just a month’s sniffing through the U.S. mobilization effort, Texas’ sharp-nosed Lyndon Johnson had caught the strong scent of ‘business as usual’”); and with the observation that “The work that [he] had cut out for himself was just the kind that lifted Missouri’s Senator Harry S Truman out of obscurity.”
(Time
also said he “had set himself a commendable set of rules: don’t spend time looking for headlines.”) The other object of his special attentions, the
New York Times
, had him on its front page three times before the end of 1950, and all across the country newspapers and magazines followed the
Times’
lead. “Mild-mannered but determined” Lyndon Johnson “is beginning to get considerable national publicity,”
The Nation
said. By the end of the 1950 session,
Collier’s
was reporting that Johnson’s “prominence is the undisguised envy of many a member who was his senior in service. Numerous senators are pounding their temples in fury because they did not think of reviving the committee first.”

T
HEN HE GOT A BREAK.

His temporary lease on the subcommittee chairmanship was running out, and, as Horace Busby recalls, “It was expected that when Tydings won reelection,
he would take back the subcommittee.” Even if Johnson’s triumphs made it too embarrassing for the arrogant Marylander to supplant him directly, his chairmanship of the subcommittee’s parent committee, his unchallengeable authority over the subcommittee’s funding and staff, his right (which was, in a way, only logical, given the centrality of the subject to the committee’s work) to make preparedness the business of the full committee and not just of a subcommittee would have assured that Johnson would no longer have the preparedness spotlight to himself.

But, suddenly, Tydings wasn’t going to be returning to the Senate. It was in the 1950 elections that the ferocity and efficacy of Joe McCarthy’s tactics were demonstrated for the first time, and nowhere were they demonstrated more vividly than in Maryland, where Tydings’ opponent was a political nonentity. Raising big money (much of it from Texas ultra-conservatives like the men who had walked the beach on “St. Joe” with Lyndon Johnson; Clint Murchison alone gave ten thousand dollars), the Wisconsin senator assailed Tydings in bitterly vindictive speeches, and arranged for the creation of an effective anti-Tydings tabloid that was distributed across the state; it featured a “composite”—in reality, a totally fake—photograph in which Tydings was shown apparently listening attentively to Earl Browder. (It was the second time that Browder had been of use to Johnson.) When the campaign was over, so was Tydings’ career. The new chairman of the Armed Services Committee was Richard Russell, who reappointed Lyndon Johnson chairman of Armed Services’ Preparedness Subcommittee, and increased its annual budget to $190,000. “When Tydings lost,” Horace Busby recalls, “that’s when people began to say that Lyndon had a charmed life, or was a genius—mostly, that he was a genius.”