Master of the Senate (93 page)

In describing Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey describes him as subtle. “He was a born political lover. It’s a most amazing thing. Many people look upon Johnson as the heavy-handed man. That’s not really true. He was sort of like a cowboy making love.” He describes him as fierce: “a lion … clever, fast and furious when he needed to be and kind and placid when he needed to be.” He describes him as an elemental force of nature. “He’d come on just like a tidal wave sweeping all over the place. He went through walls. He’d come through a door, and he’d take the whole room over. Just like that. Everything.”
In describing Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey paints with his own words—unwittingly, perhaps, but vividly—a portrait of two strong personalities in interplay, and of one, strong though it was, coming more and more under the spell of the other.

O
F ALL
J
OHNSON’S QUALITIES
, none impressed Hubert Humphrey more than the fact that, as he was to say, “Johnson was always able to take the measure of a man. He knew those that he could dominate; he knew those that he could out-maneuver. Right off the bat he sized you up.”

Did Lyndon Johnson “size up” Hubert Humphrey? Were these talks behind the closed door of Johnson’s office a perusal, a studying—a reading, by a master reader of men, of a very difficult text?

It is possible that Lyndon Johnson never had a more difficult text to read, for the interplay between him and Hubert Humphrey was very complicated. It was, after all, not only Johnson whose life was fired by burning ambition; that quality was blazoned as boldly as idealism across Humphrey’s life; with his characteristic frankness, he had once asked a group of Minneapolis supporters, “What’s so un-American about being ambitious? Of course I’m ambitious.” Both men were, in fact, fired by the same ambition, reaching for the same distant goal. Joe Rauh, who first met Humphrey in 1947, recalls that “From the moment we met, he was talking about how he was going to be President someday.” In fact, about a month before the 1948 Democratic Convention, when he was still only a young mayor—utterly inexperienced in national affairs, and little known outside Minnesota—he persuaded Rauh and two other ADA friends who were acquainted with Eleanor Roosevelt, Eugenie Anderson and James Loeb, to travel up to Hyde Park and ask her if he should skip the Senate race against Joe Ball and instead follow the course her husband had taken in 1920, when he ran as Vice President on a losing ticket, and try to go on Truman’s ticket (which virtually all the experts expected to also be a losing ticket) as a prelude to a later presidential run. (Mrs. Roosevelt replied that “Of course [if you run for Vice President] you’re going to get better known.”) It was only after the utter impossibility of obtaining the vice presidential nomination became apparent to him that he settled down to concentrate on the Senate race. That great goal was to glimmer before Humphrey, always out of his reach but always to be sought for, throughout his life. He was to make three all-out tries for the presidency—in 1960; 1968, when he received the Democratic nomination and almost won the election; and 1972—and he was about to make a fourth try, in 1976, when the realization was borne in on him that he was about to be defeated this time by cancer. These were two men, almost the same age, who never took their eye from the same target. It was not only Lyndon Johnson who was so driven that his quest was filled with “energy” that made other men, even men of great energy, marvel; it was not only Lyndon Johnson who brought to
his quest a willingness to sacrifice sleep and family and so many other considerations that influence other men. And if Lyndon Johnson was strong, what was the man Paul Douglas had been moved to liken to the Bible’s heroic David? Hubert Horatio Humphrey, a spindly youngster with a sunny smile and a strikingly open, bright cheerfulness that “made you feel good when he was around,” was the son of a small-town druggist who struggled to make a living in a series of the little towns that dot the windswept prairies of Minnesota and South Dakota; he got himself to college, but then was forced to drop out for six years and work behind the counter to help his father survive in a Depression-ravaged area where their farmer-customers had no money to pay their bills; he eventually returned to graduate and then get a master’s degree through sheer determination. And as Mayor of Minneapolis—elected at thirty-four, he was the youngest mayor in the city’s history—he was uncompromising in ramming through measures for social justice: when even the publisher of the city’s leading black newspaper urged him to drop his fight for a municipal FEPC because of the bitterness it was engendering, he replied, “To hell with that, it’s right and it’s going through”; while he was Mayor, a mayor who hung two big portraits of Franklin Roosevelt in his office, Minneapolis became not only the first city with an effective FEPC but the first city to offer free chest X-rays to those who couldn’t pay for them. And he was so tough in ending police brutality toward blacks and union strikers that when he died, Thurgood Marshall, the great black attorney, would say that of all Hubert Humphrey’s achievements, none had impressed him more than “what he did with the police.” When Hubert Humphrey and Lyndon Johnson sat talking behind the closed doors of Johnson’s office, it was not only one of those two men whose life was a study in determination and strength of will.

Difficult though the text may have been, however, Johnson read it—and made use of what he read.

It is possible to know why Lyndon Johnson befriended Hubert Humphrey, for in later years Johnson would boast about the use he had made of him, and because of a memorandum “written” during those Senate years by George Reedy but virtually dictated by Johnson, that spelled out, in considerable detail, Humphrey’s usefulness to him.

Humphrey could, Johnson saw, be the bridge to the northern liberals which he needed. They acknowledged the Minnesotan, as much as they acknowledged any man, as their leader; they viewed Johnson as a typical southern conservative, but if Humphrey came to like him and trust him, he would, should Johnson become Democratic Leader, be a link between Johnson and the liberals; there would be at least a beginning of unity among Senate Democrats. He might, indeed, be the only bridge possible; as the “Reedy” memo put it: “Senator Humphrey is about the only force that is able to control the [liberal] extremists.”

Johnson wanted, in fact, to use Humphrey as an emissary between the two senatorial camps, as an instrument of compromise, someone through whom
could be worked out the compromises necessary for unity, necessary to at least soften the antagonisms in the party, the compromises necessary for a Leader to have a chance of success. Such an emissary, to be effective, would have to believe, first, that compromise was desirable, and second, that it was possible. He would have to believe that at bottom there existed some common ground between Lyndon Johnson and the liberals, that their aims were not, after all, totally dissimilar. And, moreover, Johnson wanted Humphrey to be a friendly, sympathetic instrument, so that in negotiating for compromise, he, Lyndon Johnson, would be negotiating through someone who liked and trusted him. Reedy wrote that there was a reason that Humphrey, seemingly so uncompromising, might be such an instrument—because he believed deeply and sincerely in what he was fighting for, and therefore victory in the fight was very important to him. “There are compulsions upon Senator Humphrey—both of conscience and of constituency—which force him to lead a civil rights fight. But he is not going to win a civil rights fight by splitting the Democratic Party. The only way he can win the fight is to drum up enough votes on his side and soften the opposition on the other side.”

Johnson wanted Humphrey not only to bring southern and northern Senate blocs closer together, but to bring
him
, Lyndon Johnson, closer to the northern senators. For him to become President, he needed the North. Viewing him as a typical southern conservative, however, northern liberals, even those of them who were beginning to like him personally, still deeply distrusted his philosophy and aims. He needed the liberal senators to trust him, or at least to feel they could work with him; he needed them to be convinced that at bottom they shared some of the same goals. The best way of convincing them would be to have someone within their own camp who would argue for him. And who better to do that than Humphrey? If the Minnesotan liked and trusted him, he would be the best possible means to the personal rapprochement required for the realization of Lyndon Johnson’s great ambition.

And, lastly, and perhaps most importantly, what Lyndon Johnson wanted in his dealings with Hubert Humphrey was to modulate that great voice. Of all the liberals who could rise on the Senate floor and embarrass—humiliate, in the Johnsonian lexicon—a Democratic Leader by demanding that he pass liberal legislation which he was in fact not able to pass, no one could do so nearly as eloquently and effectively as Humphrey. No senator could enunciate liberal aims more persuasively, could arouse liberal emotions more dramatically, could mobilize national liberal opinion against a Senate Leader more effectively than that mighty orator from the plains, and Johnson knew it, as “Reedy’s” memorandum makes clear: “The most compelling reason” for making Humphrey a link between the two sides, the memorandum states, “is that a running battle between Senator Humphrey and the leadership will place the leadership in the public mind as a ‘sectional southern’ leadership continually battling the northern liberals.” Humphrey, the memo said, is “a national figure
around whom” liberals can rally; if he continues fighting the southern senators, “it would split the party. He has sufficient prestige and sufficient standing that he may do precisely that.” He had to be brought to Johnson’s side.

And Johnson, capable of making every man his tool, knew how to use Humphrey to attain the ends he wanted. Was there, shining out of that text, ambition? Knowing now that Humphrey wanted the same thing that he did, wanted it perhaps almost as badly as he did, Lyndon Johnson used that knowledge—used it so skillfully that the intensity of Humphrey’s ambition would serve only to make him a better tool for realizing Johnson’s ambition. Since a rapprochement with the liberals would strengthen Johnson’s position in his run for the presidency, and Humphrey was of course smart enough to see this, Johnson made Humphrey believe that ultimately it would be to his own benefit for Johnson’s position to be thus strengthened. For Humphrey to believe that, he had to believe that Johnson was no threat to his presidential dreams, and, that in fact, building up Johnson’s support would wind up helping him more than Johnson. And Johnson made him believe that.

The exact words he employed we do not know, for there is no record of these conversations. But we do know the general nature of the arguments he employed—for Humphrey believed them and later repeated them to others. There was no point in trying to convince a man as intelligent as Hubert Humphrey—and Johnson fully understood the keenness and depth of Hubert Humphrey’s intellect—that Johnson didn’t want the presidency. Instead, Johnson acknowledged to Humphrey that he wanted the presidency but said he knew he would never get it—and he convinced Humphrey that he would never get it, explaining to him, with apparently deep conviction, why no one from the South could be President. And he convinced Humphrey as well that since Johnson couldn’t get the nomination it was to his advantage to build up Johnson as a candidate, make him as strong a candidate as possible, because his strength would eventually go to whomever Johnson wanted—and so long as he and Johnson were allies, it would eventually go to him. Humphrey, believing him, was to explain all this in a strictly off-the-record conversation with Robert Manning, then a reporter for
Time
magazine, who relayed Humphrey’s words to his editors in a confidential memo: “Nobody can love politics as much as Johnson does, and not want to be President,” Humphrey told Manning. But, Humphrey also said, “for all his political sagacity and influence on party affairs, even if he guns for it, he’s not repeat not going to be nominated.” In fact, Humphrey explained to Manning, Johnson’s ambition would end up helping him, Hubert Humphrey, receive the nomination, since “Johnson votes [the votes from southern states] could very well determine who else gets the nomination,” and those votes “could very well go to Humphrey.” During those chats behind the closed door in 231, Johnson was not the only one of the two young senators who was trying to use the other. If Johnson needed the North if he was ever to become President, and saw Humphrey as a means to obtaining it, so did
Humphrey need the South—and see Johnson as a means of obtaining it. And Johnson made sure that Humphrey kept seeing him that way. Carl Solberg, the author of the only thoroughly documented biography of Humphrey, concludes that in his dealings with Lyndon Johnson, Humphrey was thinking that only one of them was going to be President—and that he was going to be the one; that he had a better chance because he wasn’t from Texas; that while Johnson might be under the impression that he was using him, in reality, he was using Johnson.

Was there, shining out of that text, idealism? Personal admiration—awe, even—could never be a decisive influence with a man who believed as deeply in principles, in moral goals, as did Hubert Humphrey. “Our little group of 25
[sic]
or so liberal senators were very suspicious of Johnson, in those early years, very suspicious of him!” Humphrey was to recall.
He
was very suspicious of Johnson. In order for him to ally himself with Johnson, he would have to be convinced that the alliance would not involve any betrayal of principle—that, in fact, the alliance would improve the chances for realization of those goals.

Humphrey’s recollections of the conversations in 231 give some hint as to the methods Johnson employed to make him believe that they shared the same principles. One was for Johnson to identify himself with the President who to Humphrey had been the supreme embodiment of these principles. Like the great storyteller he was, Johnson brought alive those two paintings on Humphrey’s office wall, talking endlessly about his private dinners and breakfasts with FDR. Humphrey could never get enough of these stories, and to him they did indeed validate Johnson’s liberalism. “Johnson was a Roosevelt man,” Humphrey says. “That was his greatest joy. To remind people that Roosevelt looked upon him as his protégé. A hundred times I heard him mention that, you know. That was his great moment…. This made him in a sense, in his contacts with many people like myself, a sort of New Dealer.” And Johnson talked also about Ben Cohen and Tommy the Cork and other almost legendary New Dealers with whom he was friends. “David Dubinsky was another one of his heroes, and the ILGWU, and how he and David always worked together.” And Johnson also talked, as only Lyndon Johnson could talk, about the episodes in his life in which he had fought for the things in which liberals believed, about fighting the private utilities to bring electricity to the Hill Country, about the months he had spent in Cotulla. “I knew he was very sympathetic to the Mexican-Americans,” Humphrey says. “Johnson never forgot that he was a schoolteacher down there.”