CHAPTER 7

Emperor of the Senate

THE MONDAY MORNING in October 1958 when I changed jobs began unchanged from my previous routine. I drove my Ford convertible from our three-room apartment in Georgetown, dropped my wife (my Indiana girlfriend whom I married in September 1957) at the Washington Evening Star where she was a reporter-trainee, then went up to the news media parking area off the Capitol’s east front.

Nothing was really the same, however. While there were dozens of AP reporters covering Congress, the Wall Street Journal then assigned only three reporters to Capitol Hill: Al Otten, to take an overview and cover the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means committees, and one man each for everything else in the Senate (that was me) and the House (my former AP colleague and future national television star Paul Duke).

First, I had to cover business-oriented news in greater detail than any other general publication or wire service. There was no time to write these stories for the newspaper. They had to be dictated off the cuff while standing up in the Journal’s closetlike booth in the Senate Press Gallery. I also had to dictate breaking business news to the Dow-Jones news ticker. Second, I was expected to get plenty of exclusives, ahead of everybody else. Third, I was supposed to produce “leaders” (long, comprehensive reporting stories for page one) and perhaps “editpagers” (editorial page analytic features).

On a beat as busy as the Senate, there was no time to write leaders and editpagers during the workday, so they had to be taken home for nighttime and weekend attention. I loved it. This was the caviar to compensate for the mashed potatoes of business-news coverage. I wrote more than my share of leaders. But where I excelled was the editorial page. I wrote more editpagers than any of the paper’s reporters before, since, or ever. (Since then an iron wall has separated the editorial page and the news sections.) Freed from circumscribed regional news, I now saw the world as my oyster. I could write an editpager about anything, national or international, political or ideological, economics or foreign policy—anything I could sell to the editorial page.

I made a sale my first week on the job: an editpager on Everett Dirksen, about to become Senate Republican leader succeeding William Knowland. Until I came to Washington, my lasting impression of Dirksen was the bombastic Old Guard Republican I had watched on television at the 1952 Republican National Convention in Chicago. Dirksen stuck with Bob Taft to the bitter end, insisting that Thomas E. Dewey was leading the party to defeat a third time, this time with Eisenhower. Now, five years later, Dirksen was much subtler. He was also more of an Eisenhower man than Knowland, who had backed Ike in Chicago.

After making calls to Senate contacts I had developed over the last year and a half, I turned in this copy to Bureau Chief Clark:

Senate Republicans, badly outmaneuvered by a slim Democratic majority during the past four years, will exchange the bludgeon for the rapier in the next Congress. The wielder of the new weapon: Everett McKinley Dirksen, the velvet-voiced Senator from Illinois.

G.O.P. Senators long have looked with grudging admiration on the ability of Democratic Leader Lyndon B. Johnson to effect compromises…. Now, in Mr. Dirksen, they will have a leader bound to borrow more than one page from the Johnson book….

To the tourist watching the Senate, Mr. Dirksen, 64, is the prototype of a Senator. Tall, with white, curly hair, he is one of the Senate’s last exponents of old-fashioned oratory. Mr. Dirksen employs hand gestures, alliteration, polysyllabic words and a mellifluous voice in a style that has led critics to dub him, “the wizard of ooze.”

Behind this façade, however, is a toughness that may be deeper than the famed Knowland severity.

Al Clark called me in, and said this was really an excellent piece, much more sophisticated than my AP work. “Bob,” he asked, “did you write that entirely by yourself, or did somebody help you?” Clark was less than adroit in personal relations.

Al Clark was unpopular in his own bureau, for which he would pay sooner than he could imagine. He was a rural southern conservative in a bureau filled with urban northern liberals. Reporters in the bureau, feeling superior to Clark, made fun behind his back of his stilted language and awkward behavior. I think he saw me as not quite a kindred spirit but somebody a little more conservative than the other reporters and somebody who might give him respect. I quickly concluded he was an excellent newspaperman in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Clark forwarded the Dirksen piece to the editorial page in New York, which published it without significant change.

Dirksen would treat me differently as the Wall Street Journal Senate correspondent than he had as an AP regional reporter. He became easy to get on the phone and easy to see. After the new session of Congress opened in 1959 with Dirksen the Senate minority leader, he invited me to one of his cocktail hours with intimates in late afternoon that in those days were staples of senior members of Congress.

Dirksen hosted these small sessions in his ornate suite on the Capitol’s second floor. Everybody drank whiskey, Scotch or bourbon. Two Republican senators from opposite ends of the party’s ideological spectrum—the very liberal Thomas Kuchel of California and the very conservative Roman Hruska of Nebraska—were intimates of Dirksen and were always present. A little later, a third regular appeared: Senator James Pearson of Kansas, who ideologically was equidistant between Kuchel and Hruska. Another Republican senator sometimes completed the invitation list.

When four decades later I told Senate Republican Leader Trent Lott about the Dirksen gatherings, he expressed astonishment that I had been invited and said a reporter could not possibly be present today. The first time I appeared at Dirksen’s invitation, I perceived the other senators lifting eyebrows and wondering what a twenty-seven-year-old newspaper reporter was doing here. After it became apparent I would neither report nor gossip about what I heard there, I was accepted as an occasional guest.

When I first entered the inner sanctum and saw Tommy Kuchel and Roman Hruska, I anticipated a spirited debate over the Republican future. It was nothing of the kind. Dirksen engaged in a soliloquy, starting with old anecdotes appropriate to the news of the day—like the Iranian diplomat asking Dirksen to procure prostitutes to service the regent of Iran on a visit to America.

After the stories, Dirksen would get down to what was going on in Washington—especially the Senate. Nobody, I believe, has ever matched his encyclopedic knowledge of the Senate’s current progress: what bills had been voted out of committee and, remarkably, what was in the bills. Dirksen himself, not a staffer, prepared a one-page precis of every bill reported by committee. At Dirksen’s gatherings, the other senators seldom spoke unless spoken to, and I almost never did. Although I could not print most of what I learned, these sessions provided incomparable intelligence for a rookie Senate correspondent.

         

TIDBITS FROM EVERETT Dirksen expanded my knowledge of what was happening behind the scenes and built my reputation as a reporter, but my first responsibility for the Wall Street Journal was detailed reporting of complicated business-related stories. And a lot of what I was covering now was beyond me. Lost in the complexities of the balance of payments problem, I bought a book by the economist Robert Triffin but was appalled by pages of calculus equations. In college, I had learned about the metaphysical poetry of John Donne but no calculus. I needed sources who could explain these mysteries. Most were staffers, but there were a few helpful senators such as Russell B. Long of Louisiana.

When I met Russell Long in 1959, he had been a senator for ten years but was still only forty years old. He was the son of the assassinated Kingfish, Huey Long, populist, power mad, and dictatorial liege lord of Louisiana in the thirties. Russell, physically the spitting image of Huey, was his father writ small: populist, but on the best of terms with big business; a power politician, but limited to insuring his own political survival rather than ruling Louisiana, much less the United States.

By the time I met him, Russell Long had become a superb legislator. Later, the breakup of his marriage and a struggle with alcohol led to a decline in the sixties and the loss of the Senate Majority Whip’s post to Senator Edward M. Kennedy after the 1968 elections. He once showed up dead drunk at noon for a private luncheon with me in his Capitol hideaway. Living alone in an apartment without window blinds, he would be awakened by the sun after dawn and—hungover or still half-drunk—he sometimes telephoned me to complain about something I had written for that morning’s paper. A second marriage revived Long, dried him out, rehabilitated his career, and launched the longest tenure ever as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. For twenty-eight years, he was my indispensable source.

It began in 1959 during my early months on the Senate beat when the Finance Committee was marking up an insurance tax revision—an area so hideously complicated that it is a mystery to many people who claim to understand it, which I did not. All committee markups then were conducted behind closed doors, and official briefings for the press, barely sufficient for wire services and general newspapers, did not begin to supply the information I needed. Filling in for an absent Al Otten on the insurance tax bill, I was panicky.

Senator Long came to my rescue. He understood the legislation, kept notes on everything that took place and patiently explained it to me. Much of the committee’s activity consisted of rejecting Long’s amendments requested by the insurance industry. I finally asked the senator whether he felt frustrated by this process. Long chuckled: “Oh, no, it’s not like that at all. I don’t expect any of these amendments to get adopted. But I get a campaign contribution for every one of these I introduce. This is my fund-raising season. I love it.”

Russell Long was telling me that the system was no more on the level in Washington than it had been in Lincoln and Indianapolis.

         

IN MID-APRIL 1959, my wife and I separated permanently after nineteen and one-half months of marriage. Neither of us was unfaithful to the other, but we proved incompatible. She was an Indianapolis debutante and provisional member of the Junior League, from a different social, cultural, and religious background than I had known. I realized that at age twenty-eight I was a spoiled only child, very difficult to live with, and perhaps was not meant to be married.

I took it hard. After only six months on the Journal ’s Senate beat, I had to take off several weeks. Washington entailed memories of my short but difficult marriage, and I thought a change of scenery might help, perhaps as a regional political reporter working out of the San Francisco or Dallas bureau. Al Clark told me he would rather keep me in Washington but would do what he could to find me a new venue. But Al Otten, who was becoming a mentor, urged me to suck it up and stick it out in Washington, where he thought my future lay. I took his advice, for which I shall always be grateful.

         

BY THE TIME I returned to the Senate beat, the labor chickens had come home to roost for the Kennedys on their risky attempt to fight union corruption without alienating Big Labor. While they were able to limit the Senate Rackets Committee investigation to Teamsters-bashing, “labor reform” legislation was getting out of hand—just as AFL-CIO leaders had warned the Kennedys it would.

Jack Kennedy’s innocuous bill was supposed to sail through the Senate. But the conservative Democratic senator John McClellan, freed from his role as a Kennedy satellite with the end of the hearings, unexpectedly pushed a labor “bill of rights” guaranteeing rank-and-file union members the right to speak out, sue the union, and inspect its records, with criminal penalties imposed for violating those rights. This was the interference in their business that the union chiefs dreaded. The old Republican–Southern Democratic coalition revived to pass the McClellan amendment, forty-seven to forty-six, in a night session of April 22, 1959.

I dictated this big story off the cuff on deadline, describing it as a major defeat for Senator Kennedy and organized labor. My Press Gallery booth’s direct-line telephone to the Journal ’s Washington bureau rang. It was Al Clark. “Bob,” he said in his deep North Carolina drawl, “you did a good job, but you’re missing the real story. This is a high-level exercise in presidential politics.” He pointed out that Senator Kennedy, Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, and Vice President Richard Nixon, all presidential candidates, were playing high-stakes legislative poker. Clark was belittled behind his back by his bureau’s liberal reporters as a redneck, but in fact he was a shrewd political analyst.

I took Clark’s advice. Using his very words in the lead paragraph (“a high-level exercise in presidential politics”), I went on:

Vice President Nixon, who has been recently emphasizing his conservative tendencies, voted with the coalition to break a tie. In doing so, he not only took sides with the conservatives and against the union “bosses” but, also, dealt at least a temporary setback to Sen. Kennedy….

The severe defeat he [Kennedy] suffered last night was considered at least a temporary setback to his political prestige.

Senate Majority Leader Johnson…made no discernible effort to corral Democrats to support Mr. Kennedy’s position, though he voted for it himself.

The Wall Street Journal was the only newspaper in America to cast the story that way, and I got credit as an astute political reporter. But it was Al Clark’s doing.

The antilabor genie was out of the bottle. The Landrum-Griffin bill, the House version of labor reform, blunted such union weapons as picketing and secondary boycotts. It passed the overwhelmingly Democratic House by twenty-eight votes. When the bill returned to the Senate, I was in my closest contact yet with Jack Kennedy. He was the most attractive political personality that I have met, before or since: handsome, witty, charismatic, and very nice to me. I thought he was much more likable but not nearly as tough as Bobby.

Jack faced an agonizing decision. Now that his reform had become a union-buster, should he try to kill the whole bill? It would not be easy, with no certainty that LBJ would be any more helpful than he had been on the McClellan bill of rights.

Instead, JFK tried to neutralize Landrum-Griffin by removing or softening its antiunion provisions. I covered the Senate-House conference closely, and he lost on every issue. That killed his dreams of going into the presidential campaign with a Kennedy Labor Reform Act. He told me he did not want the final legislative product called the Kennedy-Landrum-Griffin Act, as was offered him. It became law as the Landrum-Griffin Act, and the Kennedys prayed that organized labor would not retaliate against them in the presidential contest ahead.

Jack Kennedy wanted to come over as a hard, relentless Irishman, but he lost the labor fight and finessed the after-battle strategy—a foretaste of his presidency.

         

IN THE COURSE of the labor legislation fight, I learned more about Barry Goldwater. Next to Dirksen, Goldwater was my closest Senate source. He frequently sent me letters praising my stories and, when was I covering Senate Labor Committee hearings, sometimes would send notes down to me, seated at the press table, to fill me in on his intentions.

On one occasion when I was in the Press Gallery seats watching Senate floor action, Barry motioned me to come down to see him off the floor. He told me of plans to turn the Senate inside out on the Kennedy labor reform bill. He said he had prepared one hundred amendments, giving the Senate a choice: accept his key amendments and improve what business interests considered a sham bill, or defeat every amendment and suffer death by a thousand cuts. It amounted to filibuster by amendment. Goldwater said he hoped I would print just that. I did, in a big story on the back page of the Journal (a choice spot in the newspaper).

It took three days to dispose of the first two Goldwater amendments, and he then declared he had made his point and would offer no other amendments. Made his point? I rushed down from the Gallery to call Goldwater off the Senate floor. I told him he had embarrassed the Wall Street Journal and me by selling me a story that turned out to be pure hokum. Always solicitous, Goldwater told me he was sorry he had embarrassed me and should not have gone overboard. It was a rerun of his Rackets Committee performance when he reneged on promises to dig deep into United Auto Workers violence. Charming though Goldwater was, was he serious?

Even more irritated than I by Goldwater’s performance was the man who drafted the hundred amendments. Michael Bernstein worked for Goldwater as chief counsel of the Republican minority on the Senate Labor Committee and as his resident intellectual on Capitol Hill.

In making the rounds on my Senate beat, I found myself lingering in Bernstein’s office but not to talk labor legislation. I received a tutorial from Mike. He introduced me to Hannah Arendt, Joseph Schumpeter, and much more. He attacked my belief that the country was better off if the two major parties were close in ideology. Since liberals were fighting to take command of the Republicans as well as the Democrats, he argued, conservatives better try to take control of just one party.

         

FROM MY FIRST day as the Journal’s Senate correspondent, I entered a special, difficult environment controlled by Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas. He was no mere majority leader but a dominating presence, the unprecedented emperor of the Senate.

The sense of impending change in Washington heightened when the Democrats gained sixteen Senate seats in their 1958 landslide. That replaced six years of an evenly contested Senate with a sixty-four to thirty-two Democratic majority. Did this mean the postwar gridlock had been broken? On the contrary, it spelled trouble for Lyndon Johnson.

Only two reporters on the Senate beat those last two years of Johnson’s leadership suggested that LBJ had lost his leverage amid so many Democrats. One was Sam Shaffer, the veteran chief congressional correspondent for Newsweek. Garrulous and generous, he was the only old hand in the Senate Press Gallery who offered a helping hand to the Wall Street Journal ’s new correspondent.

Shaffer was a World War II Marine Corps combat correspondent in the Pacific and not intimidated by Lyndon Johnson. But LBJ was nobody to take lightly. That was underlined to me one afternoon in 1960 when I was in the outer office of the Taj Mahal (Johnson’s lavishly redecorated new majority leader’s suite in the Capitol) waiting for a scheduled appointment with him. He never was on time for such meetings, but this wait was unusually long. After an hour, a man barged out of the inner office, his face a mask of anger. It was Kenneth Crawford, Newsweek’s Washington bureau manager.

In the inner office, I found the majority leader no less upset than Crawford. He was never communicative in any interview that I had requested, but this time he was sphinxlike. I did notice something strange. On a table next to Johnson’s desk were two piles of Newsweek, with tabs sticking out of magazines.

What was going on later reached me via the Senate Press Gallery grapevine. LBJ had called in Ken Crawford to ask him to take Sam Shaffer off the Senate beat because he was so “anti-Johnson.” The stacked magazines tabbed Shaffer-written stories that the majority leader considered “anti-Johnson” because they revealed that the emperor had no clothes. Crawford asserted that Shaffer was a damn fine reporter who was going to continue covering the Senate.

The only other Senate reporter to report the ebbing of Johnson’s authority was I, the most junior correspondent in the Gallery. Through 1959, I was pecking away at the press’s conventional wisdom that Johnson was as masterful as ever. On January 21, 1960, I brought my contrarian views to the Journal ’s editorial page, describing LBJ, seeking the presidential nomination, as unable to control Democratic liberals. The “immediate political impact” of the liberal Senate revolt, I wrote, “has been to chop away at Mr. Johnson’s stature” as a masterful Senate leader.

Why would Johnson demand Sam Shaffer’s scalp while he ignored me? Partly because he considered Newsweek more important than the Wall Street Journal, which then was not yet a powerful force. Partly because Shaffer was a much more formidable figure than I.

But LBJ knew what I was writing about him, as indicated in a bizarre incident two months after my liberal revolt column. Late in the evening of March 31, 1960, I was drinking in the Members Bar of the Press Club with my good friend Bob Jensen of the Buffalo Evening News (as I often did after my marriage collapsed). Somebody burst into the bar to say LBJ was in the club’s ballroom, “drunk as a loon.” Jensen and I went to check

The report was not exaggerated. Johnson was attending the seventieth birthday celebration of Bascom Timmons, a famous Texas journalist who headed his own Washington news bureau. To my surprise, I found the majority leader without aides or limo. LBJ, who until then had shown little interest in me and absolutely no affection, spotted me and wrapped one of his long arms around me. “Bob, I like (“lahk” was the Texas pronunciation) you,” he drawled drunkenly, “but you don’t like me.” He chanted it over and over, embracing me and swirling me in a little dance.

Celebrants at the Timmons birthday party, mostly Texans, were as drunk as Johnson and uninterested in saving the majority leader from embarrassment. So, Bob Jensen and I guided the much taller man to the elevator, down to the National Press Building’s 14th Street lobby, and out into a taxi to be taken home.

The next day, a cool, immaculately groomed Senator Johnson was seated, as usual, in the majority leader’s chair on the Senate floor prior to the noon convening time. That was the only time reporters were permitted on the floor, huddled around Johnson’s chair for five minutes of questions and answers. Johnson often, as he did on this occasion, kept his eyes down reading what was in front of him and then looked up suddenly, registering seeming surprise at seeing himself surrounded by reporters. When he did that this time, he stared at me, exclaiming: “Well, Novak, saw you at the Press Club last night. Got a little drunk out, didn’t it?” The other reporters chuckled appreciatively, thinking it was I who had been “a little drunk,” as LBJ intended.

Johnson’s credo was to reward allies and punish adversaries, applying it to journalists as well as politicians. I was not one of his friends, as he sometimes demonstrated with petty behavior. In 1959, Johnson was delaying confirmation of the Philadelphia banker Thomas Gates as secretary of defense. I had been pestering the majority leader for his plans. Near the end of a mini-press conference on the floor, I asked again whether he had plans to confirm Gates. “None at all,” muttered Johnson, without looking up. As I entered the Press Gallery one floor up a few moments later, one of the Gallery’s attendants who knew I was tracking the Gates nomination told me that the Senate had just confirmed him. Johnson had hardly waited for the opening prayer to end before calling up Gates’s nomination and confirming him with no debate and no roll call.

Why, I asked myself, would Johnson engage in juvenile duplicity when it would have cost him nothing and given me no useful news to have told me he was about to confirm Gates? I now understand he wanted to show the cocky young reporter from the Wall Street Journal that Lyndon B. Johnson, and nobody else, was in charge.

Whenever I wanted to see him, seeking some small piece of information, it was difficult to get an appointment and impossible to see him without a long wait. When he initiated a meeting, it frequently came in early evening when I was on deadline or late for a dinner date—as if he were reading my mind.

No reporter, certainly not I, ever rejected such an “invitation.” When I would enter his office, very stiff (at least double strength) Scotch and water drinks would be poured for me as he pressed me to keep up with him, drink for drink. Only years later would I learn that Johnson’s Scotches were watered down so much they were barely alcoholic. He usually called me in to pump me about something he thought I might know, but occasionally would tell me something—not to help me but to help himself. LBJ was a taker, not a giver.