Master of the Senate (75 page)

Each of Barkley’s defeats—and there were many defeats—was chronicled with glee by the Washington correspondents, who competed in mocking him, nicknaming him “Bumbling Barkley” and claiming that he consulted the White
House even before he salted his soup. In March, 1939,
Life
magazine asked reporters to name the ten most able senators; the Majority Leader did not make the list. “As the unhappy Barkley has too often learned,” Joseph Alsop wrote in 1940, “the slightest misstep will allow a committee to make the wrong report, or tangled parliamentary procedure to bring the wrong business before the Senate, or a debate to go the wrong way, or an important roll call vote to be lost.”

When the Leader did attempt to assert his authority, the result was fiasco. Unable to enforce attendance by normal methods—with absenteeism so widespread that obtaining a quorum had become an almost daily problem—Barkley first appealed to his colleagues, telling them indignantly in 1942 that “the least they could do” was “remain at their desks and try to give the impression that they were doing their duty whether they were or not.” Finally Barkley ordered the sergeant-at-arms to bring absent senators to the Chamber. Asked “Do you mean Senator McKellar, too?” he replied, “I mean
everyone!”
Roused from his hotel room, McKellar was escorted to Capitol Hill. The enraged Tennessean, whose seat in the Chamber was next to Barkley’s, refused to speak to him for a year, and at the next Democratic caucus, to teach the Leader a lesson, nominated for caucus secretary his own candidate, who defeated Barkley’s.

In 1944, driven to desperation by yet another demonstration of Roosevelt’s contempt for the Senate, Barkley resigned as Majority Leader. The Democratic caucus quickly re-elected him, thinking, as one senator put it, that “Now he speaks for us to the President,” but Barkley shortly resumed his role as a presidential flag-carrier, even after the flag became Truman’s.

Barkley had learned his lesson, however. While he still presented Administration proposals, he no longer tried particularly hard to force his colleagues to vote for them—because he knew now that he had no power to do so. “I have nothing to promise them,” he explained plaintively. “I have nothing to threaten them with.” This attitude, together with his amiable personality, restored his popularity with his colleagues, but so completely did he relinquish the field to the conservative coalition that liberal senators and commentators routinely referred to the Senate’s “leadership vacuum.”

As the Democratic Leader of the Senate became the butt of jokes, so did Wallace White, leader of the Republican minority from 1943 to 1946 and Majority Leader in 1947 and 1948. Although White had the title, Vandenberg, and conservatives Bridges, Eugene Millikin of Colorado and Robert Taft, had the power. White’s candor about his lack of authority (he told reporters who asked about GOP plans, “Taft is the man you want to see”) didn’t save him from ridicule. Watching from the Press Gallery as he frequently looked two rows back at Taft for guidance, journalists suggested, in print, that a rearview mirror be placed on his desk, and named him “Rearview White.”

Taft’s influence led
Time
to call him “boss of probably the most efficiently organized GOP Senate the nation has ever seen” (a rather drastic oversimplification, since it ignored the GOP Senate of William Allison and Nelson
Aldrich), but during the Forties Taft’s only formal party post was chairman of its Steering Committee. He didn’t want the job of Leader, with its scheduling and other responsibilities; he had, as one observer put it, “no desire to monitor the often dreary floor debate.” And he had no sufferance for fools. He placed many of his party colleagues in that category, but, as Leader, he would have had to plead for their votes. Vandenberg, Bridges and Millikin didn’t want the job either (although Bridges would later take it—on condition that it be only for one year; Taft finally accepted the post in January, 1953, but he died just four months later), just as the most influential figures on the Democratic side of the aisle—Walter George, Carl Hayden, and of course Richard Russell—didn’t want it. When Lyndon Johnson arrived in the Senate in 1949, it had been for some years a well-known fact that any of these men—particularly Russell and Taft—could have had the leadership job for the asking, but that they had all refused to accept it. And if Johnson needed any proof of the wisdom of that decision, all he had to do was to watch, during his first two years in the Senate, the fate of the man who
had
accepted it.

W
HEN HE HAD INTRODUCED
J
OHNSON
as “Landslide Lyndon” at the Democratic caucus in January, 1949, Scott Lucas was the newly elected Majority Leader, a well-tailored, self-confident man whose classic Roman profile and taste for the spotlight had earned him the sobriquet “the John Barrymore of the Senate.” Eager for the job, which he thought would bring him the national attention he openly craved, he seemed well qualified for it, being both popular with his colleagues and tough. “Formidable in debate,” he had “a quality of playing for keeps,” William White said. “Nobody goes out of the way to take him on.” His political philosophy qualified him for the job, too: Russell approved him for it not only because his ancestors came from the South but because, as Rowland Evans and Robert Novak put it, while his “postures were liberal, his visceral instincts often tended to be conservative—particularly on matters concerning civil rights.” And he was smilingly certain that he could handle it. He presided at his first caucus with an air of satisfaction, which seemed to increase perceptibly as he strode from it to the Majority Leader’s long black limousine that stood waiting for him in the portico beneath the steps in front of the Capitol’s north wing.

But his confidence didn’t last long. Every Monday morning, the limousine brought him to the White House, where he, along with Assistant Leader Francis Myers of Pennsylvania and House Democratic leaders, received from Truman a list of legislation that the President wanted passed. Then the car returned him to Capitol Hill, where the southerners, who chaired the committees that would handle the legislation, let him know—quietly, courteously but firmly—that it would not be passed.

As the Democratic President pressed insistently for civil rights, compulsory
health insurance, and other Fair Deal legislation (and for a bill repealing Taft’s Taft-Hartley Act), the Democratic Leader tried to at least bring this legislation to the floor—and found himself caught between the southern senators, who had begun viewing him with anger, and liberal senators, who assailed him on the floor for not pushing the bills with sufficient enthusiasm. And as the liberal legislation remained stalled, the press kept demanding that he pass it by exercising the “powers” of the leadership—powers that did not exist. Within three months, Lucas had become an object of scorn in liberal journals like
The New Republic
, which referred to him as the “ever more futile Majority Leader.” Reporting in April that “there are rumors that [Lucas] has already had enough” and would resign, the magazine added “Such a move could only be for the best.” By July, the more sympathetic White was writing about Lucas’ “worn and haggard” look. By the end of his first year as Leader, Lucas had national attention, all right, but not the kind of which he had dreamed. While “it now seems certain history is going to remember his name, what history is going to say about him is” much more debatable,
Collier’s
said. Trollope’s Plantagenet Palliser did not dread the morning newspapers more than this once-confident man who had been so proud of what he had thought was a thick skin. “The hostile estimates of his leadership were so incredible to him that he knew no way even to begin to cope with them,” White wrote. He had developed, in the words of another reporter, a “perennial look of a man whose finger is caught in a mousetrap,” a new habit of writing little poems to remind himself of the inadvisability of losing his temper (“Senators who preside / Shouldn’t rhyme, shouldn’t chide”)—and a bleeding stomach ulcer that required hospitalization.

The second year was worse. Goaded by President and press into gingerly trying to bring up the FEPC, Lucas confronted a southern bloc so completely in control of the Senate that it defeated the bill without even bothering to filibuster. His efforts to liberalize an anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic displaced-persons bill antagonized conservatives of both parties. Once, when he stepped off the floor for a few minutes, the arch-conservative William Langer of North Dakota made a motion to adjourn, and the Senate did so—without the Majority Leader even being aware of that fact. Rushing back to the floor in a rage, Lucas called Langer a “snake.” Chaos erupted, with liberals and conservatives shouting epithets at each other, and for the rest of the year, a year in which Lucas was often in pain from his ulcer, the floor was the scene of repeated angry outbursts.
The New Republic
appealed to Taft for help because “the Democratic Majority Leader is completely out of control of the situation.”

And two years was as much time as Lucas was to have, for his senatorial term expired in 1950. All that year, the formidable former congressman Everett Dirksen had been campaigning against him back in Illinois, dramatizing his absence from the state by “debating” an empty chair on which sat a big placard: “Reserved for Scott Lucas.” As early as January, reporters were writing that Lucas was in “a serious fight for his political future.” All that year, he was
warned that he had better get back home and campaign. He was, however, trapped by his leadership responsibilities. He felt—correctly—that he would be criticized if he left Washington before the Senate had completed the minimum business necessary to keep the government in operation, but he could not persuade the Senate to complete that business. The Senate did not adjourn until September, two months before the election, which Lucas lost. Years later, just another lobbyist in Washington, he would confide that his two years as Majority Leader of the United States Senate had been the most unhappy years of his life.

There was even a small footnote to this demonstration of the risks involved in becoming a member of the Senate’s Democratic leadership. Lucas was not the only member of the leadership who had run for re-election in November, 1950. Assistant Leader Francis Myers had also been running. And he had also lost.

L
YNDON
J
OHNSON
, who so dreaded failure and humiliation, had thus seen with his own eyes, in close-up, the probability of failure and humiliation for anyone who took a Senate leadership position. He was under no illusions about those positions; knowing—this son of Sam Johnson—the cost of illusions, as always he wanted facts, and he asked the Legislative Reference Service of the Library of Congress to list the powers of party floor leaders; when he received the list it contained exactly one item: “priority in recognition” by the chair. He then directed George Reedy, as Reedy recalls, to conduct his own search “of the records, the precedents and the memories of old-timers,” but priority of recognition was “the only thing I could find.” Other than that, Reedy concluded, party leaders possessed no authority whatsoever; senatorial power was held by the same forces—the Southern Caucus, the conservative coalition, most of all by the committee chairmen—that had held power for so long. And there seemed no realistic possibility that the situation would change. The leadership was weak because the committee chairmen wanted it weak—and the chairmen had the power to keep it weak.

But what alternatives did Lyndon Johnson have? The road to a chairmanship for himself was seniority, and it was a long road—too long.
*
Leadership positions were the only positions in the Senate for which length of tenure was not an inflexible requirement. During the last months of 1950, Johnson’s life was filled with the activity of his Preparedness Subcommittee, but, increasingly, the activity wasn’t satisfying him. More and more often now, in the late afternoons, the staff in the front room of 231 would again hear the click as the corridor door to the private office opened and shut, and the creak as the big
chair took the weight of the big body, and then, for a long time, the silence. And now, again, when the buzzer finally sounded on Walter Jenkins’ desk, often he would open the door to find no lights on, and his Chief slouched deep in his chair in the gathering gloom, his face hidden behind his hand. Looking back on this period in his life, Lyndon Johnson would tell Doris Kearns Goodwin that he had felt an “increasing restlessness.” He simply couldn’t stand, Jim Rowe was to recall him saying, to “just wait around again” as he had done in the House—as he had done in the House for so many years. Becoming a part of the Democratic floor leadership would be a risk, a gamble—to this man who feared humiliation as well as defeat, a great risk, a great gamble—but he had taken great risks before; he had gotten to the Senate on the greatest gamble of all, running against the unbeatable Coke Stevenson. And the alternative was to wait, and keep “taking orders.” He couldn’t bear to do that. Sometime in November or December, 1950, as Goodwin was to put it, “He told Russell that a leadership position was one of the most urgently desired goals of his life.”

R
USSELL, OF COURSE
, could have had the now-vacant Democratic leadership—the majority leadership, since the Democrats would have a two-vote majority in the incoming Eighty-second Congress—had he wanted it, but he didn’t, for the same reasons that had kept him from taking the job in the past. As his aide William Darden puts it, “With him, the scheduling problem would have been the big [problem]. Senator Russell was a person who just didn’t want to be bothered with details. He didn’t want people saying to him, ‘Please don’t vote this afternoon—my wife is sick, etc’” And there were political considerations. Russell felt, his aides say, that a Majority Leader had an obligation to give at least a modicum of support to a President of his own party, “and there were a lot of things in the Truman program that he didn’t want to have to support.” In addition, the attacks from the liberals were louder than ever. When, that November, a letter from Alabama’s John Sparkman urged him to accept the leadership because “You could bring [it] into a new position of prestige and power,” Russell wrote back: “You and I both know that as a general rule the South is blamed for everything which does not meet with the approval of our critics,” and to have a southerner as Majority Leader “would cause criticism of his acts to fall upon the South as a whole.” To forestall such criticism, Russell felt, the new Leader should not be a southerner but a friend of the South, someone who would keep the Senate on its present, southern course, without rocking the boat.