Master of the Senate (69 page)
Read Master of the Senate Online
Authors: Robert A. Caro
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When, years later, Cook’s appointment was mentioned to an expert on Senate hiring practice—Donald A. Ritchie, associate historian in the Senate Historical Office—he refused at first to believe it had occurred.
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The proposal was for the establishment of a system of Universal Military Training, a cause for which Russell was the longtime champion on Capitol Hill and for which Russell had introduced legislation (Senate Bill S.I) in 1948, 1949, and 1950. It had been carried forward in those years by the Armed Services Committee because he wasn’t yet chairman, and could therefore adhere to his lifelong practice of avoiding the spotlight on legislation in which he was interested. Not being the “point man” on this legislation was particularly important to Russell because he was simultaneously proposing a bill that would have fostered segregation in the armed forces by allowing draftees to elect to serve in racially segregated units; knowing that this bill would be defeated, he didn’t want UMT entangled with it. After Tydings’ defeat in 1950, however, Russell became Armed Services’ chairman, so he “delegated” the UMT hearings in January, 1951, to its Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee, and extensive hearings were held on S.I. But this delegation was in name only; as Richard T. McCulley, Historian of the National Archives’ Center for Legislative Archives and author of
A History of the Senate Committee on Armed Services
, writes, “On S. 1 the Preparedness Subcommittee was functioning as an arm of the full Committee … rather than as an [independent] investigative entity.” Russell, McCulley says, was using the subcommittee “to facilitate the work of the full Committee and to meet his own political needs.” In contrast to all its other work, in this lone instance the “Investigating” subcommittee wasn’t even investigating; in what Russell’s aide William Darden calls an “unusual” step, Russell had given “an investigative subcommittee a legislative job”: analyzing the merits of a specific bill. The hearings were in all but name hearings by the full committee, even down to the fact that the key staffers involved were not the ones Johnson had hired but two regular Army officers, General Verne Mudge and Colonel Mark Galusha, whom Johnson had not wanted for Preparedness, and who had been working on UMT for Russell for years. In other aspects, too, the subcommittee was acting less under Johnson’s direction than Russell’s, and its procedures in this instance were in sharp contrast to the rest of its work. Not only the subcommittee’s members but other members of the full committee sat in on the hearings: Russell, Ralph Flanders of Vermont and John Stennis of Mississippi, for instance, sat on the dais, questioned witnesses and made statements. The hearings were not even funded under the Senate resolution providing funding for the subcommittee but rather under the resolution providing funding for the full Armed Services Committee. And when the bill came to the floor, although Johnson was called its floor manager, it was actually Russell who, as his biographer Gilbert Fite says, “skillfully guided the bill through the Senate. He granted interruptions and time to key supporters….” When a conference committee met to reconcile Senate and House versions of the bill, Russell was its chairman. (The bill eventually provided that it would become effective only if Congress approved an implementation procedure to be proposed by a special commission; since Congress never did so, the bill never went into effect.) “The UMT thing—that was a Russell operation, not Johnson’s,” Horace Busby said. A similar situation existed with four “task forces” established by the Armed Services Committee during the Eighty-second Congress. Although they were called “task forces” of Preparedness, “Chairman Johnson chaired no Task Force and attended no Task Force meeting,” McCulley writes. Some of them included senators who were not even members of Preparedness, and not Johnson’s men but Mudge and Galusha handled the bulk of the staff work.
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For a fuller account of this incident, see Volume 1,
The Path to Power
, pp. 266–68.
Out of the Crowd
T
HE
J
OHNSON
S
UBCOMMITTEE
had far less impact on the defense effort than the Truman Committee had had, and not only because the police action in Korea was not the Second World War but because, unlike Truman’s work, so much of Johnson’s was based not on original research—on-the-spot inspections—but on previously compiled documents simply reworked in the interests of publicity. Dan McGillicuddy, who was to work for Preparedness for thirteen years, eventually as its assistant chief counsel, came to feel that “The whole thing was to get Johnson’s name in the papers.” And, McGillicuddy says, Johnson wasn’t any too particular about how he did it. “He was looking for the sensational,” McGillicuddy says. “Hell! Twenty-six reports in one year! These things weren’t being carefully researched. They’d get a report from somewhere, and Reedy would wrap it up in catchy phrases, and they’d put it out, and hope it caught on. He [Johnson] was fishing for a program of national interest.” The Army colonel who later became the committee’s staff director, Kenneth E. BeLieu, echoed McGillicuddy’s feelings in an interview; then, asked if the subcommittee’s impact during these two and half years had been significant, BeLieu smiled and said, “No, not really.”
Sometimes this search for the sensational led down false alleys, out of which Johnson was able to scramble only by employing considerable ingenuity. After an unexpected rush of enlistments during the Christmas holidays at the end of 1950, senators’ mailbags began to contain complaints from enlistees’ parents about conditions at overcrowded Lackland Air Force Base, near San Antonio, at which sixty-eight thousand men were receiving basic training. In the middle of the coldest winter on the Texas plains in forty years, parents wrote, their sons were sleeping in unheated tents, with inadequate blankets, clothing, and food. There were reports of suicides and deaths from a pneumonia epidemic. Summoned to a closed session of the Armed Services Committee, Air Force officials said that they had heard the rumors, had already begun investigating them, and that rumors were all they were. There was no epidemic
of pneumonia, or any other illness, at Lackland, they said; every man on the base had adequate blankets, clothing, and food. The base was indeed overcrowded because of the rush of enlistments, and some men were indeed sleeping in tents, but none of the tents was unheated—and, after all, these officials noted, it would not be the first time in history that soldiers had slept in tents. Construction of twenty-five new, centrally heated barracks, and of a new airfield equipped for basic training—Sampson Air Base in Romulus, New York—was being rushed; Sampson’s completion, due within two months, would end the overcrowding. In the interim, the officials said, the Air Force had already curtailed enlistments and Lackland’s population was being reduced daily as men were shipped to other camps for their basic training. The senators were urged not to add fuel to the rumors. As Air Force Secretary Thomas K. Finletter was to say in a letter to Johnson:
We are all extremely solicitous of the welfare of our young men but with large numbers of them now in combat we feel that others should not be encouraged to make public complaint because of minor discomforts and inconveniences. During a period of emergency some very minor hardship must be considered normal. False or exaggerated reports can cause unjustified worry or apprehension on the part of parents and others when they become public issues.
On January 27, 1951, however, Johnson emerged from an Armed Services hearing to announce that the Preparedness Subcommittee was rushing a team of four investigators to Lackland, and on January 31, escalating the sense of urgency, he told reporters that the four investigators were, as the
New York Times
put it, “to make a personal check tonight,” to draw the same “blankets and sleeping gear issued to any recruit,” to “sleep in separate, unheated tents along with the recruits,” to eat with them—and to telephone him personally in Washington in case emergency measures were necessary. And urgency permeated his instructions to the crack team he had selected for the mission—Lyon Tyler, Colonel Mark Galusha, and his two Texas aces, John Connally and Horace Busby. He sent them into battle with an inspirational battle cry: “We’ve got to tell these mothers something!”
“Get down there right away and find out what’s going on,” he told Tyler. “He points his finger at me, and says, ‘You’re an FBI man.
Find out what’s going on!’
” There was no time to be lost, Johnson said. Mothers were worried about their boys. Busby, snug in a public relations berth in Austin, could hardly believe the telephone call that was sending him out into a tent on the freezing Texas plains, but Johnson had no patience with his attempt to beg off. “Listen,” he said, “this is important.
We’ve got to tell these mothers something!”
The initial headlines—“
INVESTIGATORS SLEEP IN LACKLAND TENTS
,” the
Dallas Morning News
said—were as dramatic as any senator could have
desired, particularly because on the day the investigators arrived, a Texas storm swept across the plains, and temperatures plummeted to fifteen degrees. And so were the initial stories from Texas reporters who rushed to the camp because of Johnson’s announcements. “An estimated 20,000 new recruits sleeping in tents at Lackland Field in subfreezing temperatures had company Tuesday night when four investigators crawled in with them,” said the
Morning News.
“Chairman Johnson had the four draw GI clothing, sleep outdoors in unheated tents and eat every meal at a different mess hall,” said the
Austin American-Statesman.
Within the stories, however, were statements of a different tone. Writing that “Lackland officials emphatically deny [the] rumors,” Jerry Banks of the
Morning News
added that the denials appeared accurate. He reported that as he was leaving one tent, “an older recruit—perhaps twenty-four—stepped up and said: ‘Don’t pay any attention to these kids…. I was in the Army before, and it was the same then as it is now.’” In fact, Banks found, it was. “For the most part, the gripes of the recruits are the same ones their older brothers had in World War II and their fathers in World War I.”
That was also the finding of Johnson’s own investigating team. Even on that fifteen-degree night—the coldest night of the year—on which they had slept in the tents, the four investigators had, as Busby was to write in the report summarizing their findings, experienced “no undue cold or other discomfort.” What’s more, Busby’s report stated, there had been no suicides at Lackland, absolutely none. There had been no pneumonia epidemic; in fact, there had been not a single death from pneumonia. “During the past 18 months, there have been only two deaths on the base—one from cancer, one from an automobile accident.” The average daily sick-call attendance at the base was actually lower than it had been when the Korean War began. “The enlistees at Lackland were generally well-clothed…. Food was good.” Morale problem? “No morale problem was found…. The men were generally in good spirits.” And Johnson was informed of the true situation by a telephone call from his own investigators the next day, February 1.
Reassuring though this news would have been to the recruits’ relatives, however, it was not news to which they were immediately given access. Somehow, the urgency about telling mothers
“something”
—giving them some form of comfort—disappeared. In fact, the Johnson Subcommittee told them nothing for almost three weeks (during which, the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
reported, “many parents, relatives and friends of the enlistees … made special trips to [Lackland] because of rumors about conditions there”). Not a single word came from the subcommittee on the subject of the Lackland Air Force Base until February 19.
And when news did come, it was presented with the Johnson touch. The facts that disproved the rumors—that “There have been no suicides at the base as alleged,” no pneumonia “epidemic,” “no morale problem,” and plenty of clothing, blankets, heat and food—were certainly all in the subcommittee
report. But while these facts would have provided reassurance for parents, they would have caused embarrassment for Lyndon Johnson, who by casting doubt on the Air Force’s reassurances—reassurances which had turned out to be true—had helped make the rumors a “public issue.” And these facts were not the main purport of the February 19 newspaper stories. For Johnson’s report presented the facts from a different angle, emphasizing not the points on which the Air Force could not be criticized but rather a point on which it could: the fact that it had accepted more enlistees “than it was capable of processing” at Lackland. In its Conclusion, the report called the Air Force policy on enlistments “irresponsible” and charged, with only the scantiest documentation, that the resultant “overcrowding” had resulted in “the total breakdown of training.”
And if the report’s Conclusion was much stronger than the facts contained in the body of the report, the interviews which Johnson gave about the report—before it was issued—were much stronger than the Conclusion. These interviews were designed to influence journalists, who of course had not yet seen the report, to place on it the emphasis that Johnson wanted. Since a critical evaluation of the document might have resulted in articles embarrassing to him, he called in first—for an exclusive, nationally syndicated interview—a journalist he could be confident would not give it such an evaluation, Marshall McNeil, who during the 1948 Texas senatorial campaign had written not only articles for the Scripps Howard chain of newspapers but speeches for Lyndon Johnson. The day before its release, Scripps Howard’s millions of readers were prepared for it by McNeil’s story that predicted a “blistering report that tans the hides of high Air Force Commanders.” In other interviews Johnson said the report would be “sizzling,” and explained that “It was the greed of the Air Force for the best of the nation’s available manpower” that had led to overcrowding at Lackland. These interviews created the impression that Johnson wanted, even though it would turn out on closer examination that the “total breakdown” meant little more than that the overflow of enlistees had had to be sent to other bases for their basic training.