Master of the Senate (81 page)

Bobby “made the Senate his home,” an article stated. “[He] experienced the major episodes of a young man’s life under the great dome of the Capitol itself. There he grew into long pants, had his first shave, went to high school, received his diploma … met his wife and courted her. His wedding reception in 1948 was held in the Capitol…. Other boys have aunts and uncles beaming at their receptions. Bobby had five United States senators.” He was truly, reporters said, the “child of the United States Senate.” When a senator, Walter George, told him to upgrade his name, he did so. “A gentleman of the old school who enjoyed being thought of as an elder statesman, he responded to elaborate courtesies. ‘Bobby,’ he said, shortly after I had turned twenty-one, ‘you’ve got a boy’s name and now you’re a man. It doesn’t have enough decorum or dignity. I’d strongly advise you to change it.’” His father was offended when he changed Bobby to Robert, Baker was to relate, but “Senator George … was delighted and thereafter treated me in the warmest possible fashion.” By 1951, everyone around the Senate knew him, everybody talked to him freely; he knew a lot of Senate secrets. And Baker worked at knowing
secrets; as the writer Evan Thomas was to put it, he “made it his business to know things: who owed whom a favor, who was drunk, who was on the take, who was sleeping with his secretary.” If an instrument was needed for obtaining information in the Senate world, it would be hard to find a better one than this twenty-two-year-old page.

And for Lyndon Johnson, Bobby Baker made clear, he would be a willing, eager instrument. The waiter who brought them sandwiches at their first meeting had felt that Baker seemed “drawn to LBJ by some invisible magnet,” and thereafter the attraction had only increased. “I found him fascinating from that first talk in 1948,” Baker was to recall. “I was, indeed, beguiled by him.” He flattered Johnson unmercifully, implored him to give him chores to carry out. Says one of Johnson’s staff: “He was an unabashed lackey, a bootlicker. He’d think of all manner of excuses to come in the office and see Johnson, and he’d tell him about all the things he was doing for him, all the little ways he was helping him.” “A bootlicker, but an agile one,” Evan Thomas was to call him. He carried out Johnson’s errands efficiently, and as quickly as he could—often at a trot. “He would scurry around the Capitol corridors, often scribbling notes as he walked,” his biographer would write. “He hunched a bit as he moved, and as a result some people began to call him ‘the mole,’” a description made more exact by his face, which was narrow, with a very large nose (which he later had altered) and a forehead and chin which both receded sharply, giving him a pointed-face look. He tried, somewhat unsuccessfully because he was much shorter and stooped, to stand in Johnson’s commanding attitude, and to walk as he walked; he had better luck talking like Johnson: “His voice seemed to take on a bit of the Johnson twang,” his biographer wrote. He was to name not one but two of his children—Lynda and Lyndon John—after him. Johnson’s response was all that Baker could have wished: “You’re like a son to me, because I don’t have a son of my own,” he told him.

When Lyndon Johnson asked Bobby Baker what was going on around the Senate, the young man always had a lot to tell him. And Johnson took steps to make sure Baker would have even more to tell. He took the unusual step of inviting a Senate staffer to the small dinner parties at Thirtieth Place at which the other guests were senators and journalists. “In the intimacy of the dinner table,” as Evans and Novak were to write, “the men spoke frankly and unguardedly.” Sometimes at such parties, there would be three or four tables. Johnson could hear only what was said at the table at which he was sitting; with Baker present, and at another table, Johnson had a pair of sharp ears there, too.

There was another venue in which senators let their guard down, and Johnson installed Baker there, as well. Sometime in 1951, Johnson casually mentioned to McFarland and to Maybank, that Bobby had been doing such a good job, didn’t they think it would be nice to give him some sort of meaningless title? Johnson even suggested one: Bobby could be an assistant to Skeeter Johnston; he could be called “Assistant, Democratic Cloakroom.” The duties of
Baker’s new job were nebulous, but the title freed him from the status, and duties, of page. And whatever the duties might be, they certainly had something to do with the cloakroom—which meant that Bobby now had a reason to spend a lot of time there.

For Bobby Baker, the cloakroom was a fertile field, because, as he himself was to put it, senators felt safe there. “No prying newsmen,” no constituents, apart from a few exceptions no staff members “need apply for admittance behind those sacrosanct doors,” he was to recall. “Safe in the cloakroom senators opened up their heads and their hearts….” And now, when heads and hearts were opened, a very sharp pair of ears was listening.

Two years earlier, Lyndon Johnson had summoned Bobby Baker to his office because he had heard that Baker knew “where the bodies are buried.” During the intervening two years, Johnson had learned that Baker was willing to tell him where the bodies were buried. Now he had placed Baker in ideal vantage points to observe the burials. And of course the information Baker thus obtained gave him insight into how senators were likely to vote on a particular bill. The counting of votes on the Democratic side had been the province of Skeeter Johnston, the punctilious, dignified Secretary for the Majority. Skeeter still counted votes, still gave the counts to Lyndon, still thought it was his counts on which the leadership was basing its decisions. But it wasn’t. Bobby Baker had quietly begun making his own counts. He was a very good counter, and not only because of the information he had collected. Bobby, McPherson says, was no “true believer”; he was not one of those who “just can’t help but feel that the issue is so clear on their side that the people must vote that way…. Bobby didn’t let that kind of consideration affect him, maybe because he didn’t have terribly strong convictions himself.”

It was important to Lyndon Johnson that the information—Bobby’s information and the information he himself had collected—on those long tally sheets be accurate. Eyeglasses perched on his nose, he would hold a sheet in one hand, and the thumb of the other hand would move down the list of names, name by name, pausing on each line, making sure that no numbers were skipped or repeated, and that he knew—
knew
—that each senator would vote as the sheet showed he would vote. The thumb moved very slowly. Sometimes it would pause by a name for quite some time while Lyndon Johnson reflected,
and it would not move down to the next name until those reflections had been completed. The tall young senator standing with a tally sheet in hand, head bowed over it, sometimes seemingly lost in the numbers on the sheet, oblivious to the world around him, was a picture of concentration. He was a picture of determination—of a man resolved not to make a mistake.

If these predictions of upcoming Senate votes were never complete, if the sheets usually contained more than a few blanks, they were nonetheless the best predictions available—by far. The White House learned that if it wanted to know what would happen if it pressed for a vote on some major Administration measure, the best person to ask would be the Assistant Leader. Senators learned that if they wanted to know what would happen on a vote on some minor issue, some intra-state issue important only to them, the best person to ask would be the Assistant Leader. In the world of the Senate, in which, for years now, nobody had known what was going on, an awareness was gradually growing that now, at last, somebody did.

Baker was also a source of other information, more routine but nonetheless vital. Votes needed not only to be counted but to be produced. If an Administration measure was coming up, it was the Leader’s responsibility to know where the bill’s supporters could be reached—in their offices, at their homes, in a mistress’s apartment, on the golf course, in a bar—so that they could be summoned to the floor in time to vote. More often than not, McFarland didn’t know. But when he was back in Arizona, the responsibility fell to the Assistant Leader. Lyndon Johnson told Bobby Baker he wanted him to know the whereabouts of every Democratic senator at all times. Soon, recalls McFarland’s administrative assistant, Roland Bibolet, “whenever some senator went someplace, Bobby would always have a phone number where he could be reached. Or where he couldn’t be reached, and why he didn’t want to be reached.” During his two years as Democratic whip, Johnson forged a tool for his use—a tool perfectly fitted to his hand.

T
HE CHANGE IN THE WHIP’S JOB
was a matter of more than information.

One of the Majority Leader’s routine responsibilities was scheduling activities in the Senate’s “morning hour,” the period—actually two hours long—at the beginning of each day’s session during which routine resolutions and petitions and certain “unobjected to” bills could be introduced. With McFarland often in Arizona—and, when he was in Washington, uninterested in so mundane a chore—resolutions, petitions, and bills were piling up.

Johnson was very politic about moving into the realm of actually scheduling Senate business, however unimportant. Not wanting to do so when McFarland was in Washington, he would, when the Leader was in Arizona, check on his schedule with Roland Bibolet. “He wanted to know precisely the moment Ernest would be back on the Hill,” Bibolet recalls. If he was unable to get an
answer from Bibolet during the day, he might call during the night. The phone would ring in the darkness of Bibolet’s bedroom, and a voice would say, without preamble, “Roland, I’ve tried and tried, and tried, and I can’t find McFarland.” Bibolet would try to protect his boss: “I know he got the message, and I’ll bet anything he’ll call you first thing in the morning.” Realizing from evasiveness that McFarland’s return was not imminent, Johnson would draw up the morning-hour schedule for the next few days. Democratic senators began to realize that the easiest way to get on that schedule was to ask Lyndon. And at the end of April, 1952, with the Calendar in chaos and the Leader away, the Assistant Leader took a firmer hand.

Calendar Calls were being invariably delayed, or interrupted, by senators’ speeches on unrelated matters. Johnson persuaded Bridges, who was serving his year as GOP leader, to agree that when the Senate convened on May 1, the Calendar would be brought up first, and that only “unobjected to” bills would be considered, so that a large number of them could be disposed of. Then he told a number of Democratic senators who wanted to make
pro forma
speeches, less than five minutes in length, about these bills that if they came to the Chamber at noon on May 1, they would be able to give the speeches and leave fairly quickly. And when, as was all too usual, a senator, in this case Republican James Kem of Missouri, who had not been advised of the agreement, wandered onto the floor and said, “Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to make a short statement on an unrelated topic,” Johnson, standing not at his own desk but at the Majority Leader’s front-row center seat, was firm. He told Kem that under his agreement with Bridges, speeches on unrelated topics were out of order. Since Kem had not known about the agreement, he said, he would allow him to speak nonetheless—but only if he agreed to limit his speech to five minutes; if Kem didn’t agree, Johnson said, he would regretfully be forced to object to him speaking at all. Kem started to bridle at that, but Johnson addressed him with a disarming smile: “I know the Senator does not desire to place himself ahead of other senators. I have told the Senator of the agreement made by the leaders of both sides. In view of that agreement, certain Senators were asked to come to the chamber…. I hope the Senator will confine his request to five minutes. If he does, there certainly will be no objection.” Kem acquiesced—and for once a substantial number of bills were called off the Calendar and enacted.

Democratic senators began asking Johnson if the party’s Policy Committee could schedule a certain bill to be called off the Calendar and brought to the floor, or if another bill could be held on the Calendar and kept off the floor. Johnson would say that he would be glad to see what could be done. He very delicately started asking McFarland—or at least as often, Russell—whether it would be possible to report out, or to delay reporting, various bills. The bills he asked about in 1951 and 1952 were never controversial bills, never major bills, but their enactment (or delay) was important to individual senators, and when
he told a senator he had intervened on his behalf, the senator was grateful. In addition, McFarland or Russell would almost invariably accept Johnson’s suggestions, and word got around: if you had a bill you wanted moved, Lyndon was the guy to see. The Assistant Leader was no longer only providing information about schedules; to a small, but growing, extent, he was
making
schedules—and he was reaping benefits from that seemingly routine role: gratitude and debts, small but debts nonetheless, from his colleagues.

Then there was “pairing”—one of the more indefensible of the devices by which senators were allowed to veil their attendance and voting records from constituents. A senator who was absent on the day of a vote but didn’t want to be recorded as absent, or a senator who was present but didn’t want to have his vote recorded on a controversial bill yet didn’t want a future opponent to be able to accuse him of not voting on that issue, would arrange to be “paired” with an absent senator on the opposite side of that issue. The Leader, or the Assistant Leader, or the bill’s floor manager would then announce before the vote that the senator, “who is necessarily absent,” was “paired on this vote” with the other senator. “If present and voting,” the Leader would say, “the senator … would vote ‘nay,’” and the other senator “would vote ‘yea.’” In a variation of this device—a variation known as a “live pair”—an absent senator would request a senator who would be present, as a personal favor, to refrain from voting and instead to be announced as a “pair.”