CHAPTER 12

LEADER

ALVINWIRTZ,LBJ’SMENTOR AND GUARDIAN OF NEWDeal Democrats in Texas, celebrated his sixty-third birthday in 1950. Political troubles were once again brewing in the Lone Star State, but the power broker was confident that he would come out on top. On October 27, he took time out from his busy schedule to attend a football game between Texas, his alma mater, and Rice. In the midst of the excitement and hubbub, Wirtz suffered a heart attack and died. His death “was kind of the end of an era … one of the final blows that ushered us into having to stand on our own,” Lady Bird later recalled. He was an “advisor and mentor and friend and sort of court of last resort.”¹Lyndon found Wirtz’s passing deeply depressing. It reminded him of his family’s history of heart disease and his own mortality. Johnson would soon sorely miss Wirtz’s advice, as the ongoing intra-party feud in Texas would turn ugly, smearing him as a murderer and, worse, a disloyal Democrat.

As ever, LBJ’s opponents were the Texas regulars, Democrats-cum-Republicans. They had found a new, formidable champion in the person of Allan Shivers. The lieutenant governor had become governor when Beauford Jester had been found dead aboard his train on July 11, 1949. The forty-two-year-old native of Port Arthur was tall, handsome, smart, ambitious, and Machiavellian. His father, a district court judge, had suffered one financial failure after another, creating a deep-seated sense of financial insecurity in Allan. Shivers was torn between a desire to be the ultimate political power broker in his native state and its richest citizen.²If he could have both, so much the better.

On race, he had no real convictions. “Oh, I don’t think Allan cared a thing in the world about race,” D. B. Hardeman said, “he could teach it flat or teach it round.”³The Brown brothers, Amon Carter, and Clint Murchison were a bit too liberal for Shivers. He gravitated toward reactionaries like E. B. Germany of Lone Star Steel and the oil crazies like H. L. Hunt. “Niggers in their place” and “The only good commie is a dead commie” were the slogans favored by his intimates. While Jester’s body was still warm in his grave, Shivers began moving protégés of Coke Stevenson into high appointive positions in the state government.

In the runup to the state convention scheduled for September 1950, Shivers maneuvered to bring the Democratic party under his personal control, and he lured Jake Pickle away from the Johnson camp to help him. Having purged party workers at the precinct level who were not tried-and-true Shivercrats, the governor was in complete control of the state convention when it met. The delegates were so cowed that you could almost hear them moo, Sam Rayburn said.⁴

Shivers next set his sights on controlling the 1952 Democratic State Convention that would choose delegates to the national gathering. It became increasingly clear that the governor and, if he could help it, the state’s delegation would support only a candidate who came out four-square for state ownership of offshore oil lands.

Initially, LBJ went out of his way to maintain a good relationship with Shivers. The two men “respected each other quite a lot as leaders,” Walter Jenkins recalled, but there was never any warmth or intimacy between the two, as there was between Johnson and Connally.⁵Maury Maverick pled with LBJ to intervene and do battle with the Shivercrats in behalf of the loyalists, but Johnson was reluctant. Meddling in state politics had usually proven damaging to the careers of U.S. senators from Texas. Only three senators had represented the state for more than one term; Charles Culberson, Morris Sheppard, and Tom Connally. All three had scrupulously avoided entanglement in state politics.⁶

Nevertheless, if Shivers decided to challenge Johnson for his Senate seat in 1954, LBJ would need all the support from the loyalists that he could garner. For his part, Rayburn was convinced that if the Republicans nominated a candidate who was strong on the tidelands issue, and the Democrats did not, Shivers would lead Texas into the Eisenhower column. Rayburn and Johnson agreed that the speaker would find and persuade a solid, liberal Democrat to run against Shivers in 1952 while Johnson would work behind the scenes to persuade Shivers that it was in his best interests to support the national party.

 

INFEBRUARY1952, Rayburn and R. T. Craig, a leader of the loyalist Democrats, approached Ralph Yarborough. He was hesitant. “I didn’t want to because I intended to run for attorney general, an office I believed I could win,” he recalled. “They persisted and persisted, and finally I agreed when they assured me of all the financial help I might need.”⁷In the meantime, Shivers told reporters that in his opinion, the delegates Texas sent to the Democratic presidential nominating convention should not commit to support any individual until his position on the tidelands and civil rights issues became clear. Shivers wanted Texas to control drilling rights up to twenty-seven miles offshore, and the Shivercrats and Dixiecrats wanted a nominee who would “get rid of the ’48 civil rights stuff.” Nevertheless, through intermediaries and then directly, Shivers promised Johnson and Rayburn that he would not bolt the party.⁸

Meanwhile, the governor had decided to flex his political muscles by running one of his protégés, Price Daniel, against the senior senator from Texas, Tom Connally. As Texas attorney general, Daniel had been outspoken in his support for state ownership of the tidelands. Statewide polls showed pervasive disenchantment with Connally, whom his enemies portrayed as far more interested in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee than the welfare of his fellow Texans. He announced his retirement in early 1952, virtually ensuring Daniel’s election. Connally would later charge that Johnson had privately promised Shivers that he would support Daniel. Sweet revenge, perhaps, for the elder statesman’s snubbing of him when, as a freshman, Johnson came around looking for support for a choice committee assignment. Connally, however, believed that the governor had thoroughly cowed LBJ. And, in fact, the junior senator had every reason to believe that Shivers was willing to play hardball.

In 1948, a deputy sheriff in Alice named Sam Smithwick had become involved in a dispute with a local radio commentator who was then denouncing him for operating a string of beer joints. Hearing that the clean government crusader was going to mention one of his children in a disparaging way, Smithwick sought out his nemesis, pulled his .45, and shot him dead, a deed for which he was sentenced to life in prison. In 1952, Smithwick wrote Coke Stevenson from prison, insisting that five days before the shooting, two Mexican Americans had delivered into his hands the contents of Box 13 from the famous 1948 senatorial campaign. In return for leniency from the state, he was willing to produce them. Stevenson set out immediately for Huntsville and the state prison. “I had left the ranch and got as far as Junction,” Calculatin’ Coke recounted, “when I got the information that he was dead.”⁹

Indeed, the former deputy sheriff was found hanging from the bars in his cell. Shivers’s friends began spreading the word that Johnson together with South Texas political boss Archie Parr had had Smithwick murdered to cover up their theft of the 1948 senatorial election. LBJ went so far as to confront Shivers over the matter, but he, of course, denied it: “I think it was a psychopathic case—an old, ignorant man about to die trying to get himself out of the pen, and getting no answer, he committed suicide.”¹⁰

From Washington LBJ sought to put the matter in perspective. “I don’t know what a convicted murderer might have done prior to committing suicide in an attempt to get release from prison,” but Stevenson’s (and Shivers’s) release of the letter was “a continuation of a fight by a group of disgruntled, disappointed people.”¹¹Nevertheless, Johnson was shocked. “Shivers charged me with murder,” he later told Ronnie Dugger with incredulity. “Shivers said I was amurderer!”¹²

 

WHEN THEDEMOCRATS GATHEREDin their state convention on May 27, 1952, in San Antonio, the Shivercrats were firmly in control; thirty-five hundred of the four thousand delegates were loyal to the governor. Asked if he would support Sam Rayburn as a favorite son candidate, Shivers archly replied, “I would kill to know what his views [on civil rights and the tidelands issue] are.” Upon hearing of Shivers’s impudence, congressman Wright Patman, a loyalist, muttered, “Sam Rayburn’s views were well known long before the governor was born.”¹³Despite being overwhelmingly outnumbered, loyalists represented by Maury Maverick, fiery as ever, and Austin attorney John Cofer attempted to ram a loyalty oath through the convention. Shouted down, they marched their band of followers out of the convention hall, stopping for an occasional fistfight along the way.¹⁴

The Mavericks then held their own rump convention to select loyalist delegates to the national meeting. A firsthand observer described the crowd: “While most of the leaders were evidently of the professional and middle classes—lawyers, some businessmen, a few members of the academic profession …—without doubt, the majority of the rank-and-file were obviously working class people, many of them Negroes, and some Latin-Americans. Indeed, the general atmosphere was a unique mixture of western religious camp meeting (considering the fervor of most of the speakers), a labor union picnic, and a Tammany Hall clambake without the clams.”¹⁵

Worried that he had gone too far and that the Democratic Convention in Chicago, where Rayburn would preside as permanent chairman, might not seat the Texas delegation, Shivers flew to Washington to confer with party leaders. Met at the airport by Johnson, the governor made the rounds, assuring any and all that he would support the Democratic ticket in the fall. Rayburn did not believe him. Neither did Maury Maverick, who showed up in Chicago with a rival delegation of loyalists. “Every night the rich Shivers gang parked in the best hotels in big private suites,” journalist Alfred Steinberg recalled, “while the Maverick crowd jammed into small rooms at cheaper hotels, but during the day both armies were at the convention hall, where the credentials committee listened to their arguments.”¹⁶

Finally, after LBJ arranged a face-to-face meeting between Shivers and Rayburn in Rayburn’s hotel suite in which the governor once again pledged his loyalty to the Democratic ticket, the credentials committee consented to seating his delegation. Maverick and his followers were ordered up to the galleries. Defiant to the last, the fire-brand from San Antonio denounced national chairman Frank McKinney for “bootlicking the Dixiecrats.”¹⁷

On the first ballot, Senator Estes Kefauver led with 340 votes, Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson came in second with 273, and Richard Russell was third with 268. President Truman arrived in Chicago and made it clear in no uncertain terms that Stevenson was his choice. He captured the nomination on the third ballot, but the Texas delegation refused to make it unanimous, voting for Russell to the end.¹⁸It was another sign of the tension between southern Democrats and the rest of the party. Johnson hoped to be Stevenson’s running mate—he even claimed Stevenson had “promised” the vice presidential spot in exchange for his peacemaking with Shivers and Russell—but the choice went to Senator John Sparkman of Alabama, a tried-and-true southerner whose loyalty to the national party was unquestioned. Johnson’s name was never mentioned.¹⁹

As the election of 1952 approached and America’s frustration with the Korean War drove Harry Truman’s popularity ever downward, leading Republicans approached General Dwight D. Eisenhower, president of Columbia University (on leave), and supreme commander of NATO. The intensely ambitious Eisenhower was a novice at conventional politics. His military background and orthodox midwestern views convinced him, however, that the Republican party was a natural fit.

After some delay, he accepted the offer of support from GOP moderates, who were anxious to withhold the nomination from Senator Taft. He confided to friends that his overriding objective was to save the country from the perils of isolationism. Although the Taft people dominated the Republican National Committee, they were outmaneuvered at the national convention, and the wildly popular war hero was nominated on the first ballot. Among other things, he came out four-square for state ownership of the tidelands, thereby ensuring the support of many Texans.

During the ensuing campaign, Governor Shivers goaded Stevenson into stating publicly and aggressively his support for federal ownership of the mineral-rich offshore lands. Then, despite his pledge to the contrary, Shivers bolted the national party and threw the weight of his machine behind the Republican ticket.

At the Democratic party State Convention in early September, the governor won approval for resolutions backing Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, Ike’s red-baiting running mate, and denouncing “the Federal larceny of our tidelands” and federal exploitation of minority groups through “class legislation” labeled “civil rights.”²⁰Rayburn was furious. “He felt that Shivers had lied to him and betrayed him,” Booth Mooney said, “and it was the kind of thing that he didn’t forget.”²¹

 

AS THE FALL ELECTIONS APPROACHED,the speaker of the House and the minority leader of the Senate found themselves in a precarious position. Adlai Stevenson may have been the most unpopular man in Texas. With Eleanor Roosevelt, Jim Rowe, and other New Deal-Fair Dealers calling almost daily, Sam Houston Johnson told his brother that he had no choice if he aspired to high national office but to vigorously support the Democratic nominee. LBJ was hardly enthusiastic. “Well, Sam Houston,” Lyndon exclaimed to his brother, “why should I be for him? Goddamnit, he promised Rayburn and Russell he’d put me on the ticket and then he didn’t do it. And he couldn’t have gotten it without Rayburn and Russell and me. And then—goddamn foolLBJhe let Allan Shivers go up there and trip him on tidelands. What do you want to do, crucify me?”²²

But support Stevenson he did. Johnson made speeches throughout the state and boarded the Stevenson campaign train when it came through Texas. In Fort Worth, Amon Carter let LBJ know that if he dared to introduce the Democratic candidate, he could forget about any future support from theStar-Telegram. Johnson introduced Stevenson, and it was years before Carter would even take a call from LBJ.²³

Eisenhower won easily, including Texas, where he garnered 53 percent of the 2,075,946 votes cast. A statewide Belden poll indicated that Johnson’s stand for Stevenson had caused his approval rating with voters to drop from 60 percent to 50 percent.²⁴TheDallas Morning News observed hopefully that the campaign had left Lyndon vulnerable to Allan Shivers, who was “leaving all political doors open—including that of running for the U.S. Senate in 1954.”²⁵

Johnson continued to believe that he could finesse Texas while advancing his career on the national scene by staying on good terms with the national Democratic party. In fact, LBJ’s support for Stevenson and Alben Barkley paid immediate dividends. Eisenhower’s political coattails were not long, but they were long enough to give the Republicans a majority in the Senate, albeit a bare one. When former GOP Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon declared that he was an independent, the Republicans found themselves prevailing by a mere one vote. One of the Democrats defeated was Majority Leader Ernest McFarland, beaten by Arizona department store magnate and reserve air force general Barry Gold-water. The Democratic leadership was up for grabs.

 

AT FIRST GLANCE,becoming leader of Senate Democrats seemed an act of political suicide. Scott Lucas had assumed the post in 1949 and been defeated in 1950; McFarland suffered the same fate in 1952, after taking over the post the previous year. But LBJ had great confidence in his ability to get the most out of whatever office he held. Moreover, he reasoned that if he could not bring Texas to New Deal?Fair Deal America, he would bring the nation to Texas—states’ rights, tidelands, military-industrial complex, and all. As minority leader he could unify a badly broken party. He could ingratiate himself with his constituents by cooperating with Eisenhower and the moderate wing of the Republican party.²⁶

The leadership post was Richard Russell’s for the asking. There wasn’t a Democrat in the upper house who would vote against him. But Johnson knew the Georgian well enough to believe that he would not take it. LBJ was one of the first to get on the phone and urge Russell to become leader: “I’ll do the work and you be the boss.”²⁷As Johnson had suspected, Russell wanted none of it. In the first place, the post was a minority position; the job was to merely react rather than lead. Second, the Georgian would have to give up his position as leader of the Dixie Association and moderate his public statements on race if he were to have any ties at all to Humphrey, Clark, Herbert Lehman, and the other liberals. Third, though he did not say it, he was simply not up to the stress and abuse that came with the job. When Russell declined his friend’s offer, Johnson then asked Russell to support him for the post. As a southwesterner he could unify the caucus, and besides, he told Russell, he needed the prestige of the office to gain reelection in Texas. His friend readily agreed to support him.

Although Russell’s backing made him a virtual lock for the job, LBJ left nothing to chance. The day after the election, Johnson, then at the ranch, phoned Bobby Baker and several senators. He solicited their support and had Baker persuade Senator Burnet Maybank of South Carolina to wire Russell urging him to take the leadership job but expressing his support for Johnson if this proved impossible. Baker then let it be known among other members of the Democratic caucus that LBJ was Maybank’s second choice.²⁸

Among the senators he contacted that day was Kentucky’s liberal Earle Clements. Johnson promised the first-term Democrat the minority whip’s position; within hours, Clements was on the phone with other liberals trying to convince them that LBJ was not the reactionary the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) made him out to be. He contacted newly elected John F. Kennedy, who had defeated Henry Cabot Lodge in Massachusetts, and secured his vote. Johnson then phoned Allan Shivers to try to ensure that the governor would not take advantage of the distractions posed by the leadership position and run against him in 1954. He told Shivers he was considering running and asked his reaction. “I think it’s great. You ought to do it,” he responded. “The only thing that bothers me,” LBJ said, “this position is open because [McFarland] has just been defeated … I don’t want to take this position and get defeated in the next election.” The governor got the message. “Well, “I don’t think you run that risk,” he said. “I think you ought to take it because you know how to do the job, and you’ll do a great job and be a great service to the country and to Texas to have its own senator in that position.”²⁹

News that LBJ was lining up votes for the leadership did not sit well with liberals and several others like Bill Fulbright, who was mad at Johnson at what he believed was his lukewarm support of Stevenson. “The night that Eisenhower swept Stevenson off the boards,” Joe Rauh, then head of the ADA, recalled with disgust, “most everybody did what I did—they got drunk! I had a hangover for a couple of days. But Johnson was too smart for that … The ADA did try in December [November] of ’52 to see if there wasn’t some way to get a rival candidate and defeat Johnson.”³⁰As usual, LBJ knew of the move almost before it got under way. “Jim Rowe called and said he just wanted to tell you that some of the Liberals are getting ready to try to knife you,” Walter Jenkins told his boss. “The play is to try to put the heat on Lister Hill to run.”³¹

Johnson’s reaction to the machinations of this cabal was first to call Adlai Stevenson and see that he did not interfere. Paul Douglas’s staff was going around spreading dirt about him, Johnson told him over the phone. Humphrey was trying to paint him as the Dixiecrat candidate. “If there is something I should do I would like to do it,” Stevenson said. “I don’t think there is anything you should do,” Lyndon said. “The first thing the press says is that the Governor is telling the Senate what to do.” Stevenson readily agreed to stay out of the matter.³²

Johnson then called Humphrey and innocently asked for his support. He couldn’t do it, Hubert replied. He was already committed to Senator James Murray of Montana, a senior member of the upper chamber and a staunch liberal. “There was no chance of defeating him,” Humphrey later wrote in his memoirs, “but, after some discussion, we decided that we ought to nominate our own candidate, at least as symbolic resistance. At that state in American liberalism, it seemed important to have a symbol even if you lost with it.”³³

The Democratic caucus was scheduled to meet on January 2, 1953. Shortly before it convened, Humphrey and the liberals tried to trade their block of votes for some substantive concessions. Senator Lester Hunt of Wyoming and Humphrey called on Johnson and told him they would throw their support to him if he would put Paul Douglas and Herbert Lehman on the Senate Democratic Policy Committee. LBJ told them he didn’t need their votes and curtly dismissed them. Shortly after returning to his office from that “awful meeting,” Humphrey got a call from Johnson. “Come on down here alone. I want to talk to you.” Humphrey complied and recalled finding him “in a take-charge, no-nonsense mood I would see often after that.” Johnson asked him how many votes he had. Fourteen to seventeen, Humphrey replied. “First of all, you ought to be sure of your count. That’s too much of a spread. But you don’t have them anyway.” He asked Humphrey to list those who were going to vote for Murray. “You don’t have those senators,” LBJ said. “I have personal commitments that they’re going to vote for me. As a matter of fact, Senator Hunt, who was just in here with you, is going to vote for me. You ought to quit fooling around with people you can’t depend on.” His tone softening, Johnson said, “When this election’s over and I’m leader, I want you to come back to me and we’ll talk about what we’re going to do. I want to work with you and only you from the bomb throwers.”³⁴

The caucus convened, and Richard Russell delivered a warm nominating speech. He hailed the Texan’s record of party loyalty, his commitment to “human values,” and his skills as a conciliator. Russell expressed “complete confidence” in Johnson’s ability to serve the “party to which we adhere & [the] country & people we seek to serve.”³⁵Theodore Francis Green, representing the East, and Dennis Chavez of New Mexico, representing the West, delivered seconding speeches. On the first ballot, Murray received Humphrey’s vote, plus those of Douglas, Hunt, and Lehman, as well as his own. Murray withdrew, and LBJ was elected unanimously. At forty-four, he was the youngest majority leader in history.

 

AHUMBLEDHUMPHREYduly called on the leader as he had been ordered. “Now, what do you liberals really want?” he asked Humphrey. Jim Murray on the Policy Committee, Humphrey replied. All right, Johnson said, but it was a poor choice. “He’s too loud,” Johnson said. “He’s going to go along with me on everything I want. You know that.” He then agreed to liberal representation on the Steering Committee and the Finance, Judiciary, Commerce, and Appropriations committees. Once again, he told Humphrey to go back and tell his fellow “bomb throwers” that he was their designated representative to the leadership.³⁶

Thus began an intimate political and personal relationship, frequently savage on Johnson’s part. Nadine Eckhardt, a young Texan who went to work for Johnson a year or so later, recalled attending a small party for Eleanor Roosevelt at the Capitol. “I had been standing with Hubert having a drink and talking to him,” she recalled. “Then I think I walked away and I heard LBJ say, ‘Hubert!’ and he snapped his fingers … Hubert jumped just like he had a little spring in him, you know, just right over like ‘yes, Lyndon’ [panting], and that really bothered me about Hubert Humphrey.”³⁷

George Reedy believed that LBJ genuinely liked Humphrey, and more than that, was a bit jealous of him. “He envied his ability to get up and talk about anything any time he felt like it,” Reedy said. “and also Johnson would have dearly loved to have represented a state where he could be a free-wheeling [liberal] politician like Humphrey.”³⁸But to Johnson, Humphrey lacked toughness. “When I picture Hubert in my mind,” he later said, “I picture him with tears in his eyes; he was always able to cry at the sight of something sad, whether it be a widow with her child or an old crippled-up man. And that part, it’s just fine; it shows he can be touched … The trouble is that he’s never learned to put feelings and strength together; all too often he sways in the wind like a big old reed, pushed around by the pressures of staff and friends and colleagues.”³⁹

 

WHENLYNDONJOHNSON ASSUMEDthe leadership of the Democratic caucus in early 1953, the party was in shambles. Contemporary observers were fond of quoting Will Rogers’s famous line: “I am not a member of any organized party. I am a Democrat.”⁴⁰According to George Reedy, there were at least four factions among Senate Democrats. “You had some of the far right, or some of the far segregationists,” he recalled, “and you had some of the way-out liberals who were even to the left of Humphrey, people like Kefauver [and Mike Monroney of Oklahoma]. And you had the westerners. Then you had … some of the northern moderates.”⁴¹There were only two men who thought that LBJ could bring order out of this chaos: Richard Russell and Johnson himself. “All of them were very, very skeptical of the Johnson leadership,” Reedy said. “But there was just nobody else.”⁴²

The Republican party was triumphant but deeply divided as well. Reedy, who had become chief political analyst not only for Lyndon Johnson but also for the Democratic caucus in the Senate, again surveyed the scene. The GOP contingent in the upper house comprised three identifiable factions: the “Old Guard” Republicans who longed for the halcyon days of Hoover and Coolidge but who stood for a distinct program and were responsible politicians; a progressive wing that supported basic New Deal reforms but believed they should be circumscribed; and a group of “wild men,” the product of twenty years of opposition psychology, who stood for nothing but were determined to seize political power through exploiting the people’s fear of communism.

The glue that held these uneasy factions together was Robert Taft. Unquestioned leader of the Old Guard, he could constrain the wild men while playing to the progressives. The latter, strong in the East and West but isolated in Congress, were willing to help Taft in order to have some share of power.⁴³Eisenhower’s views on foreign affairs were clearly progressive. On economic and social issues, the new president was obsessed with balancing the budget, but he made it clear that he had no intention of dismantling the New Deal?Fair Deal programs put in place by his Democratic predecessors.

To conservatives like Bob Taft, Eisenhower was weak, naïve, and ripe for manipulation by the liberal wing of the party. He and his followers could not forget that Ike had been nominated at the Republican convention with the help of such eastern liberal Republicans as Henry Cabot Lodge, Nelson Rockefeller, and John Foster Dulles. Although Taft himself was intelligent and perceptive, his contingent of senators included Reedy’s wild men, reactionary in domestic matters and isolationist in foreign affairs, who were determined to roll back the New Deal and resurrect Fortress America—Albert Jenner of Indiana and John Bricker of Ohio being prime examples. When he learned at a meeting at the White House in April 1953 that the administration’s first budget would be $5.5 million in the red, Taft himself turned crimson, pounded the table, and told the president, “With a program like this, we’ll never elect a Republican Congress in 1954. You’re taking us down the same road Truman traveled. It’s a repudiation of everything we promised in the campaign.”⁴⁴From that point on, the congressional wing of the GOP and the White House were frequently at loggerheads.

No one was better at the calculus of high politics than Lyndon Johnson. The number of factors and variables to be taken into account by one who would make sense of and manage American national politics at midcentury was mind-boggling. Each senator and representative had his or her own unique constituency. Powerful vested interests with deep pockets angled for influence. As always, the two major parties refused to display any ideological consistency. Over it all hung the shadow of the cold war and domestic anticommunism.

LBJ’s goals in the aftermath of the 1952 election were, first, to convince the majority of voters in Texas, who had helped elect the Republican ticket, that despite his support of Stevenson, he was not too liberal to represent them in the U.S. Senate; second, as minority leader, Johnson was determined to unify the Democratic party insofar as possible, demonstrating to the American people that it was a fit instrument to rule.⁴⁵

Just days after the election, George Reedy presented a concise recommendation to LBJ on the future of the Democratic party. Eisenhower may have won, but “it is practically a rebuke to the Republican party that they were unable to secure control (that is, firm control) of the House and Senate behind a candidate who rolled up one of the most astounding votes in history.” The Democrats should disregard Robert Taft’s admonition, delivered when he was minority leader during the Truman administration, that “the business of the opposition is to oppose.”

If Eisenhower was going to succeed, he was going to do it on his own; Democrats must not be cast in the role of obstructionists. “The only real hope is to sit back and capitalize on Republican mistakes.” By cooperating with the president on issues of foreign policy, especially foreign aid, in fending off attacks on the New Deal-Fair Deal status quo, and doing combat with the Taft-Jenner-McCarthy wing of the Republican party, the Democrats could assume the mantle of responsibility and plant in the public’s mind the suspicion that Eisenhower was more of a Democrat than a Republican.⁴⁶

Whatever the case, the politics of the 1930s and 1940s were gone; the New Deal coalition was moribund. “Eisenhower’s great appeal is probably due to the fact that this is an era in which class and economic lines are becoming blurred,” Reedy observed. “Roosevelt was a genius in putting together the blocs. But Eisenhower is the genius who makes those people think that the old blocs are just selfish interest groups and all 100 percent Americans will follow him … A political party which bases itself on bloc appeal will be sadly disillusioned.”⁴⁷Johnson was so pleased with the Reedy memo that he had it widely circulated among leading Democrats.

 

FROM1953THROUGH 1958, first as minority and then as majority leader, Johnson ostentatiously posed as leader of the loyal opposition, helping the president when he did battle with the forces of isolation and reaction. “Anyone who decides to enter into direct opposition to the President, must take into account the danger of leaving the country without any policy at all for the balance of the President’s term,” Johnson once observed to liberals who were criticizing his conciliatory approach to the administration. “Any responsible political leader will exhaust all possibilities of persuading the president to take the ‘right’ course before he seeks to block him from taking the ‘wrong’ course. He must always remember that a blockade of the ‘wrong course’ means ‘no course at all.’ There are times when such a drastic measure is justified but those times are rare, and it is a heavy responsibility to determine if they have arrived.”⁴⁸

A Johnson-Eisenhower alliance offered the opportunity to split the Dixiecrats off from the most reactionary elements of the Republican party, thus undermining the conservative coalition that had blocked reform and retarded the drive for social justice since the late 1930s. It would also help protect the party from charges that it was “soft on communism.” McCarthyism was reaching its crescendo in 1952, and the political future of anyone other than a touch anti-communist was unsustainable.

Still, cooperation with the White House stuck in Johnson’s craw. The president had surrounded himself with hard-faced businessmen: George Humphrey as secretary of the treasury, Charles Wilson (“What’s good for General Motors is good for America”) as secretary of defense, and Ezra Taft Benson as secretary of agriculture. Benson, an elder in the Mormon Church, was an avowed opponent of 90 percent parity, and both Humphrey and Wilson were devotees of a balanced budget, whatever the social cost. Eisenhower’s priorities were clear; national defense, a balanced budget, a sound dollar, and then a social safety net with whatever was left over.

This philosophy ran exactly counter to LBJ’s conviction that the only way to avoid class antagonisms and even race war was for the federal government to provide whatever resources were necessary to care for the ill-housed, ill-fed, and undereducated. His support of the administration made him feel like a hypocrite. Once, when he and an aide were thumbing through a portfolio of photographs, LBJ came across one of himself and said, “Have you ever seen a phonier smile in your life? … That’s the way I always look when … I don’t feel sincere. I try all the harder to look sincere and it looks all the worse every time.”⁴⁹Gnawing at Johnson was the belief that what he was doing might be in his best political interests and in the interests of the Democratic party, but that it was a betrayal of his populist roots, of his mother’s Christian idealism, of what made politics worthwhile: the adulation of the masses in response to the authentic prophet of political democracy and economic justice.

As far as Johnson’s thoughts on the new president himself, “I think he regarded Eisenhower as a man who was almost sublimely ignorant of many important things that politicians and people in a supremely political job like the presidency ought to know,” said future staffer Harry McPherson. “He didn’t exactly have contempt for Eisenhower, but he didn’t have much respect for his judgment in some important fields.”⁵⁰George Reedy, who was rapidly becoming Johnson’s alter ego when it came to political intelligence, summed matters up: “First, he is a General, with an American General’s inordinate respect for economic nonsense when uttered by very rich men … Second, he is a General, and, like every American General, he regards politics as a dangerous labyrinth in which it is all too easy to go astray.”⁵¹

Ironically, this created something of a bond between LBJ and Bob Taft. According to Sam Houston, shortly after leaving a meeting with the new president, Taft turned to LBJ and said with disgust, “You see what kind of pickle we’re in. He doesn’t know a damn thing, really, about what goes on. Lyndon, it’s going to be up to you. I’m dying of cancer.”⁵²

 

IN1949, the year Johnson arrived in the Senate, seventeen of the twenty most senior Democrats hailed from states below the Mason-Dixon line, the Southwest, or the small mountain states. Seven southern senators and four each from the Rocky Mountain and southwestern states chaired the fifteen standing committees. No Democratic senator from the East, the Midwest, or the Pacific coast presided over any permanent committee.⁵³

LBJ had to change the balance of power, which meant converting the Steering Committee into a real instrument of power and modifying the seniority rule. The task before him was as daunting as changing the course of the Mississippi. “It was absolutely illogical to take a bunch of old men, which we had an abundance of,” said Bobby Baker, “and give them all the plums in the Senate … I had seen these old men with their greed, not wanting to share their committee assignments.”⁵⁴

Johnson’s first step was to fill three of the six vacant seats on the Steering Committee with liberals. Next he paid court to Richard Russell and persuaded him that it was in the interest of the party and sectional harmony for the corridors of power to be open to all factions.⁵⁵With Russell’s support, Johnson convened the Steering Committee and made a pitch for making aptitude and regional balance as well as seniority criteria for committee appointments. He used the oft-repeated and corny story of the Crider boys to make his point. “When I was a boy in Texas,” he told the assembled committee, “I was a good friend of the Crider boys, Ben and Otto. Now Ben was older, and he was kind of sturdy and outgoing and popular among the boys, and Otto, well he was more shy and retiring.” One day, said Lyndon, he asked if Otto could come and spend the night, but Otto’s mother refused. The disappointed youngster protested, “But, mama, why can’t I go? Ben, he’s already been twowheres, and I ain’t never been nowheres!”⁵⁶

What sold the committee, in addition to Russell and Johnson’s lobbying, was that the leadership could have its cake and eat it, too. The Republican majority had increased membership on each of the fifteen standing committees by one seat, with nine of the ten most desirable, including Appropriations, being increased by two.⁵⁷Senior Democrats could keep their places while new spots went to deserving newcomers. In addition, the committee adopted the Johnson rule, which held that no senator could serve on more than one of the five most desirable committees until all other Democrats had had their first choice filled. Thus was LBJ able to appoint Hubert Humphrey and Mike Mansfield to Foreign Relations, Stuart Symington to Armed Services, John F. Kennedy, Price Daniel, and Russell Long to Finance, Albert Gore to Public Works, and George Smathers to Interstate and Foreign Commerce.⁵⁸Johnson had not only built bridges to the young and hitherto marginalized among Senate Democrats, but created flexibility for the committees’ future appointments. Dispensation of committee assignments would bond dozens of senators more closely to him.

To mute differences that could split the party, LBJ placed men on important committees, but ones that could not be used as soapboxes for their favorite cause. For example, he persuaded Humphrey to resign from Agriculture and Labor and Public Welfare, from whence he had launched tirade after tirade against agribusiness and the giant corporations, to take a seat on Foreign Relations. He kept Albert Gore away from the Judiciary Committee, where he might agitate for civil rights legislation.

A special problem was Wayne Morse, a maverick Republican from Oregon who had supported Stevenson in 1952. Liberal Democrats wanted to take in Morse, who had proclaimed himself the sole representative of the Independent Party of America, but LBJ refused, arguing that to do so would require displacing deserving Democrats from Armed Services and Labor, the committees on which Morse had previously sat. Reduced to Public Works and District of Columbia, Morse swore undying enmity toward the leader.⁵⁹

The other instrument of power available to Johnson was the Policy Committee. In an infrequent fit of reform zeal, Congress in 1947 had passed the LaFolletteMonroney Act, sections of which established policy committees for the two major parties. These new bodies were to formulate positions on the major questions of the day so that debate would be clearer and more meaningful. The whole concept was absurd, “the product of some academic political thinking,” said George Reedy. “Under our political system, you are never going to have clear-cut political positions that you can call Democratic or Republican in either the House or the Senate.”⁶⁰

So the Democratic Policy Committee became moribund—until Lyndon Johnson came along. The committee did have the power to schedule legislation, to decide when and in what order measures were to be submitted to committee for consideration. Johnson quickly recognized the latent power of this function and learned to maximize it: “Timing can make or break a bill,” he said. “The first weeks provide the best opportunity to fight off a filibuster, the last weeks to avoid a conference committee, and the middle weeks to explore the issue. Sometimes the best tactic is delay—allowing time for support to build up and plunge—moving immediately to take advantage of momentum. Still other times the best timing inside the Senate depends on what’s going on outside the Senate, such as primaries or elections or marches or something.”⁶¹

Southern dominance of the Democratic caucus had ensured that the Policy Committee remained a conservative bastion. Johnson changed that, appointing four conservatives, two moderates, and three liberals. He also won agreement to a “unanimous consent rule,” requiring that at least 90 percent of the committee approve the introduction of legislation before action was taken.

George Reedy was named chief of staff; he and Johnson subsequently assembled a group of experts to write position papers on issues and help draft legislation. Baker, as secretary to the leader, circulated among the members of the Democratic caucus, uncovering priorities and discovering what trade-offs were necessary to get a bill passed. In return for candid information on where a senator stood on a particular issue or his plans for a forthcoming investigation, Baker provided invaluable information on the forthcoming legislative calendar. “Baker’s information was essential in planning your schedule,” one senator observed. “As soon as he told you it would be safe for you to go home this Wednesday, you could pack up and go, knowing full well that your bill on wildlife would not be brought to the floor that day. Or he might say, ‘You are interested in labor matters, aren’t you. Well, you’d better stick around.’ ”⁶²

In Reedy’s words, the Policy Committee became “a gathering point for the leadership of the Senate to discuss legislation; to come to some conclusions; to help with scheduling; and to work out some of the necessary compromises that you have to have if you are going to get a bill enacted.”⁶³Belying charges of dictatorship from the liberals, LBJ was content to let the Policy Committee and the Steering Committee decide appointment and scheduling matters on their own. “The truth is,” said Harry McPherson, “that it was sort of a general leadership decision that Johnson was quite content with … It wasn’t something that he forced down anybody’s throat.”⁶⁴

 

LYNDONJOHNSONmay have been the greatest intelligence gatherer Washington has ever known, and that in a city of information seekers and manipulators. LBJ wanted to know everything, attitudes, prejudices, philosophies, history, strategies, as well as just raw data. A chance encounter in the cloakroom was more than likely a planned interview. The leader might begin by offering advice that would benefit a colleague politically, or he might initiate the conversation by soliciting advice. He had Lady Bird and Zephyr Wright prepare intimate dinners for groups of legislators, journalists, and federal bureaucrats; hours of conversation preceded and followed. Lyndon missed nothing.

Over time, he assembled a gallery of mental portraits of each of his colleagues: his constituency, his aspirations, his work habits, his play habits, his religious beliefs or lack thereof, and, as Doris Kearns Goodwin noted, his image of himself, what kind of senator he wanted to be. He understood that in the complex world of the mid-twentieth century, senators had some leeway in the constituents they chose to represent and appeal to. It was in this gray area where there existed the most opportunity for persuasion, for Johnson to shape a colleague’s political actions to his own purposes.

Much has been written about Johnson’s persuasiveness, about the dynamics of his face-to-face private meetings with colleagues, about “the Johnson treatment.” The stereotypical version was best rendered by Rowland Evans and Robert Novak—no friends of LBJ—in their 1966 book,The Exercise of Power:

The Treatment could last ten minutes or four hours. It came, enveloping its target, at the LBJ Ranch swimming pool, in one of LBJ’s offices, in the Senate cloakroom, on the floor of the Senate itself—wherever Johnson might find a fellow Senator within his reach. Its tone could be supplication, accusation, cajolery, exuberance, scorn, tears, complaint, the hint of threat … Its velocity was breathtaking … Interjections from the target were rare. Johnson anticipated them before they could be spoken. He moved in close, his face a scant millimeter from his target, his eyes widening and narrowing, his eyebrows rising and falling. From his pockets poured clippings, memos, statistics. Mimicry, humor, and the genius of analogy made The Treatment an almost hypnotic experience and rendered the target stunned and helpless.”⁶⁵

One “target” complained, “I came out of that session covered with blood, sweat, tears, spit, and …SPERM.”⁶⁶

LBJ thought the characterization was absurd. “I’d have to be some sort of acrobatic genius to carry it off,” he told an interviewer, “and the Senator in question, well, he’d have to be pretty weak and pretty meek to be simply standing there like a paralyzed idiot.”⁶⁷The depiction was a function of the intelligentsia’s contempt for him, he believed. “Most of the writing is done by the intellectuals who can never imagine me, a graduate from poor little San Marcos, engaged in an actual debate with words and with arguments, yet debating is what those sessions were all about.” Never having had to persuade anyone of anything, columnists and political writers were like “a pack of nuns who have convinced themselves that sex is dirty and ugly and low-down and forced because they can never have it. And because they can never have it, they see it all as rape instead of seduction and they miss the elaborate preparation that goes on before the act is finally done.”⁶⁸Indeed, Hubert Humphrey would describe the Johnson technique as “making cowboy love.”

Of course, the Johnson treatment was both debate and seduction. Only the significant were bullied or, more often, ignored. Each encounter was carefully planned and scripted. LBJ, Baker, Reedy, and other staffers would put their heads together as a pending piece of legislation headed for a vote. Baker provided a tentative head count. Those senators who were undecided or who were not fixed in place by conviction or political necessity were identified. Especially important were “umbrella” votes, votes that would provide cover for others. For example, if Richard Russell went along on a civil rights or defense issue, other southerners could safely follow suit. The group would analyze the individual’s voting record and his constituency. Johnson would add his wealth of knowledge about the senator’s personal characteristics and predilections. He would then prepare a list of points and questions. A chance meeting would be arranged and the treatment would begin.

The Texan was one of those men who was not afraid of physical intimacy with other males. If he was alone in a room with another man, he would sit next to him with their knees touching. Pats of affection, elbow squeezes, and other gestures were used to punctuate points. Actually, Johnsonhad to stand or sit close to other people in order to touch them. For a man of six feet, three inches, he had exceedingly short arms, so much so that Lady Bird had to special-order his shirts.⁶⁹Nor was he afraid to tell other men that he loved them. The onesidedness of the conversation depended on the stature and intelligence of the individual. Invariably, Johnson made his colleague feel that his was the crucial vote. His ultimate appeal was to the national welfare. “You are a patriot,” LBJ would declare.

But the exchange was also substantive. No one knew the ins and outs of a legislative proposal better than Johnson. And he did not apply the treatment in behalf of causes in which he did not believe. A particular piece of legislation might be onerous on its face, but it was usually crucial to preserving a coalition that served larger purposes. “What convinces is conviction,” he would often say. “You simply have to believe in the argument you are advancing. If you don’t, you are as good as dead. The other person will sense that something isn’t there, and no chain of reasoning, no matter how logical or elegant or brilliant, will win your case for you.”⁷⁰

For those who failed to succumb to the treatment, there was no retribution. That was reserved for those who did not keep their word. “When someone really cries out ‘I can’t do that,’ there’s something that snaps him back up,” Harry McPherson said. “And I’ve seen him become almost tender with people who just said they couldn’t do it, and he’d let them alone … And he hasn’t gone out to try to ruin them later … He had considerable respect for such men.”⁷¹Nor did he pressure his colleagues by threatening to obstruct legislation vital to their political survival. “This nonsense that he blackmails everybody,” said Gerry Siegel, one of the Preparedness Subcommittee staffers, “is just sheer falsehood … This logrolling business, that was not his.”⁷²

Time-Lifereporter John Steele, a not uncritical admirer of LBJ, has commented on the oft-leveled charge of deceit: “Those who know Lyndon least—the unknowledgeable journalist and observer—are those who describe Lyndon as ‘crafty,’ ‘clever,’ ‘maneuvering,’ ‘conniving,’ ‘subtle.’ This is bunk, as any well informed congressional observer knows. There is nothing indirect or crafty about the Johnson approach. More often than not, Johnson performs his feats out in the open—on the Senate floor in front of everyone who knows what’s going on. Furthermore, he’s quite open-handed and completely above board on what he’s done—once his opposition won’t profit from advance information.”⁷³

Johnson’s power was enhanced by his continuing close relationship with Sam Rayburn, now relegated to the position of House minority leader. They continued to confer in the Board of Education or in the Senate leader’s office. The two men saw eye-to-eye on Eisenhower and how to deal with him. “He’s not better qualified to do that job [as President] than I was to do his [as supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe],” Rayburn said, “but you know how folks feel about fellows who come back from war with medals and ribbons.”⁷⁴But he agreed with Lyndon on a policy of constructive cooperation with the White House. “Any jackass can kick a barn down,” Mister Sam told reporters, “but it takes a carpenter to build it.”⁷⁵Rayburn and Johnson benefited from having two Texans highly placed in the new administration. One was Secretary of the Navy (ultimately Secretary of the Treasury) Robert Anderson, a co-owner of KTBC before the Johnsons purchased it, and the other was Oveta Culp Hobby, former head of the Women’s Army Corps and wife of Houston millionaire William Hobby, who headed the newly formed Department of Health, Education and Welfare.⁷⁶

By all accounts, LBJ enjoyed a good working relationship with Majority Leader Robert Taft, less so with William Knowland of California, who succeeded to the leadership when Taft died in 1953. “He was a man of principle,” Gerry Siegel recalled, but “a strange man, a bull in a china shop … He had no real political antennae that were reliable.”⁷⁷According to George Reedy, “He thought the leader of the party should raise a banner and that the party should rally around it. I remember he carried it so far that on occasions he would physically leave the leader’s seat and go to the back of the Senate and take a seat before making a speech opposing Eisenhower.”⁷⁸

Knowland was such a relentless isolationist and Asia Firster that he became known as the senator from Formosa. No sooner had the Californian become leader than there was a test of wills with Lyndon. When the annual Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner drew Democrats out of town, Knowland agreed not to bring anything controversial to the floor of the Senate. He then proceeded to raise the issue of revising Taft-Hartley and several other touchy matters. When Johnson returned, he exploded. After castigating Knowland on the floor of the Senate, he moved to adjourn until all of his colleagues could return. To Know-land’s embarrassment, virtually all of the Republicans, including Taft, who was then in a wheelchair, voted in the affirmative. “Johnson had to whip him a few times before he really began to realize what the situation was,” Walter Jenkins recalled.⁷⁹Soon, however, Knowland had become something of a Johnson disciple. George Reedy recalled that on one of the fairly frequent occasions when LBJ threatened to resign the leadership, Knowland was in the forefront urging him not to do so.⁸⁰

Actually, Knowland was the perfect foil for Johnson because he so often opposed the administration on foreign policy matters. “It is a pity that his wisdom, his judgment, his tact, and his sense of humor lag so far behind his ambition,” Ike said of the majority leader in his diary. Later, he went further: “There seems to be no final answer to the question, ‘How stupid can you get?’ ”⁸¹The upshot was to make Eisenhower increasingly dependent on LBJ for action that he desired from Congress and to pave the way for a Democratic-progressive Republican alliance that would help protect the New Deal-Fair Deal reform structure and advance the cause of internationalism.

 

THE1950SWAS THE DECADE of the war generation. The typical service-man and -woman, over 12 million of them, had spent an average of three years in the military. That experience made domestic life doubly appealing and contributed to a huge bulge in the birth rate (the making of the baby boom generation). The country suffered from an intense housing shortage that it attempted to meet in part with outlying housing developments financed by government-backed, long-term mortgages. In 1947 William Levitt, an aggressive New York developer, purchased twelve hundred acres of cheap Long island farmland and built 10,600 houses. The inexpensive three-bedroom homes were sold almost at once. Other Levittowns followed in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Thus was suburbia born. Long-held savings, continuing government spending for both defense and entitlement programs, and technological innovations drove production, profits, wages, and real income ever upward. Installment buying, easy credit, and the shopping mall created a rampant consumerism that social critics lamented but that the average American thoroughly enjoyed. A burgeoning youth culture simultaneously consumed, conformed, and rebelled. The popular culture icon of the 1950s was Elvis Presley, a working-class, southern kid who blended white country and western and black rhythm and blues. That amalgamation served as an interesting and important counterpart to racial conflict and the civil rights movement.

Two ominous clouds loomed on the American horizon at midcentury: racism, de jure and de facto, and anticommunism. Although Eisenhower made substantial gains among black voters in 1956, African Americans actually lost ground in their battle against discrimination during the first Eisenhower administration. For the first time since the Depression, black income began to decline in relation to white. Between 1937 and 1952, black earnings had climbed to 57 percent of that of whites, but during the next five years it dropped back to 53 percent.

The caste system continued to be most pervasive and most firmly institutionalized in the South. In 1944 inSmith v. Allwright , the Supreme Court had invalidated the white primary, a device that in the largely one-party South had meant disfranchisement for blacks. But neither Roosevelt nor Truman had followed up, and discriminatory application of existing statutes, together with the poll tax, violence, threats of economic reprisals, and other forms of intimidation, kept the voting rolls overwhelmingly white. In eleven southern states in 1957 only 25 percent of African Americans were registered, and far fewer than that were actually permitted to vote. Although the degree varied from moderate in the upper South to extreme in the lower, African Americans faced segregation or exclusion at lunch counters, on public transportation, in schools, in unions, and in the workplace. Violence continued to mar the region’s social life. As late as 1955 a black youth from Chicago, Emmett Till, was killed in Mississippi for “admiring” a white woman. Class combined with caste to make the black southerner a virtual pariah in his native land.

Blocked in Congress and faced with an indifferent executive, African Americans turned increasingly to the courts. By the spring of 1954, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund was pushing five cases, all of which challenged the principle of educational segregation on its face. The five were combined and docketed under the name of Oliver Brown, who was suing in behalf of his daughter Linda, a Topeka, Kansas, schoolgirl who was forced to walk past her neighborhood white school to attend an all-black facility much farther from home.

Central to NAACP lead counsel Thurgood Marshall’s argument, made to the U.S. Supreme Court on December 9, 1952, was that segregation conferred a cumulative stigma on black children. Separation implied inferiority, Marshall argued, and the denial of access to any and all educational institutions purely on the basis of race violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which guaranteed to every citizen equal protection of the laws and stipulated that no one could be denied life, liberty, or property without due process. His opponent stood on legal precedent.Plessy v. Ferguson , the 1898 decision condoning separate but equal, was the law, and sociological and psychological arguments were irrelevant.

On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in the case ofBrown v. The Board of Education of Topeka that racial segregation in the nation’s public schools violated the Constitution. Education, Chief Justice Earl Warren declared in his opinion, constituted a central experience in life and was in fact the key to opportunity and advancement in American society. Those things that children learned in school remained with them for the rest of their lives. “Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race … deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities?” he asked rhetorically. “We believe that it does.” The isolation of black children “from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” The decision concluded: “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal … Any language inPlessy v. Ferguson contrary to these findings is rejected.”⁸²

TheBrown decision struck down a historic system of segregation, a symbol of the American caste system legally mandated in seventeen states, optional in four others. A major shift in the pattern of daily life had been mandated by Washington against the prejudices of millions. Initial reaction from the South was deceptively encouraging. Governor Francis Cherry of Arkansas declared, “Arkansas will obey the law. It always has.”⁸³Alabama chief executive “Big” Jim Folsom responded to reporters’ questions by observing, “When the Supreme Court speaks, that’s the law.”

Several hundred school districts in the border states (Arkansas, Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Oklahoma, and West Virginia) moved to integrate their schools. Many blacks were jubilant. Yet to be effective theBrown decision had to be enforced. In many parts of the South there simply were not enough supporters of the decision to move the mountains required. Demonstrations against Warren and the Court mushroomed. By some estimates, integration trends that had quietly begun without the Court’s intervention actually slowed down or stopped for several years.

One of the cornerstones of white “massive resistance” was an effort to link the civil rights movement with the international communist conspiracy. Before 1945, communism did not inspire the hysterical fear that it did afterward, in large part because it was not linked to Soviet imperialism. With the onset of the cold war, however, antipathy toward communism mounted in the United States until it reached a fever pitch. In response to the House Un-American Activities Committee and charges from conservatives that the Democratic administration was soft on communism, President Truman on March 21, 1947, had issued Executive Order 9835, which mandated a loyalty investigation of each applicant for a federal job and made agency heads “personally responsible” for the loyalty of their employees. Still, the second Red Scare might have died aborning if it had not been for the communization of China, the detonation by the Soviet Union of its first atomic device years ahead of the date predicted, and a series of spectacular spy cases, the most celebrated of which was that of Alger Hiss.

The Hiss trial and the fears and prejudices it raised set the stage for the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy and full-scale anticommunist hysteria in the United States. Born on a farm in central Wisconsin, McCarthy entered politics as much out of a lack of vocational alternative as anything else. Early in 1950, McCarthy decided that he could use the issue of communist infiltration of American institutions to revive his waning political fortunes. During the next four years he terrorized thousands of Americans through his brutal and indiscriminate charges.

When the Republicans gained control of Congress in 1952, McCarthy became head of the Committee on Government Operations and subsequently placed himself in charge of its permanent subcommittee on investigations. Within a year, his ongoing investigation had reached into the media, the entertainment industry, and colleges and universities. Anticommunist directors, producers, and actors vied with each other to come to Washington and denounce peers they suspected of communist sympathies. State legislatures swept up by the fervor of the witch hunt imposed loyalty oaths on the faculties of their state universities. Blacklists, usually the products of gossip and innuendo, ruined the careers of dozens of journalists, particularly in the broadcast field, as well as those of actors, writers, and directors. Indeed, by 1953, if not before, the search for communists and fellow travelers had become so widespread that McCarthy the man had been transformed into McCarthyism the movement.

Like other senators, Johnson originally underestimated the Wisconsin demagogue. “There were some things about McCarthy Johnson couldn’t understand,” George Reedy said. “He recognized him as a menace, but I think he thought that McCarthy was just a northern version of a southern demagogue. Now with the southern demagogue, once he had established his position, you could make a deal with him.” Moreover, “at that time there was a feeling in the Senate that if the people of a state wanted to send a sonofabitch to the Senate, that was their business.”⁸⁴But LBJ and his staff quickly began to perceive that McCarthy was different. He did not have any set goals. He did not care a whit about the Republican party or the Senate. The latter was merely a stage upon which he could perform. McCarthy had managed to bring together “a large number of small fringe groups who were small in number but who had money, newspapers, radio commentators, enthusiastic followers,” Reedy reported to his boss.⁸⁵Gradually, LBJ realized that he was dealing with not only a dangerous individual—“a lethal rattlesnake,” Bobby Baker termed him—but a movement that threatened the very foundations of the republic.

Liberals like Paul Douglas, Joe Rauh, and Drew Pearson argued that the Democratic party should make McCarthyism the centerpiece of its attack on the Republican party. “As leader of the Senate Democrats,” Maury Maverick wrote Lyndon in 1954, “I hope you will do your part to stem the tide. Everybody in the Government is scared to death … There is nobody in Washington to take up for any part of the Constitution for anybody.”⁸⁶

LBJ sympathized, but he and his staff were convinced that to confront McCarthyism head-on would have been suicidal, for him personally, for the Democratic party, and for the nation. A 1954Fortune poll indicated that McCarthy’s popularity among businessmen was higher in Texas than any place other than Chicago.⁸⁷As he put it to William S. White: “At this juncture I’m not about to commit the Democratic party to a high school debate on the subject, ‘Resolved, that communism is good for the United States,’ with my party taking the affirmative.”⁸⁸

Johnson warned Humphrey to keep away from McCarthy. “He just eats fellows like you,” he said. “You’re nourishment for him.”⁸⁹McCarthy is “the sorriest senator up here,” he told Bobby Baker. “Can’t tie his goddamn shoes. But he’s riding high now, he’s got people scared to death some Communist will strangle ’em in their sleep, and anybody who takes him on before the fevers cool—well, you don’t get in a pissin’ contest with a polecat.”

What, then, was to be done? LBJ sensed that McCarthy lacked respect for the two-party system, the Senate, the entire American political process. He was subject to no discipline, and his thirst for attention knew no bounds. Eventually, he would turn on conservatives, southern senators who, though anticommunist, revered the rules of the Senate and adhered to a strict code of personal conduct, and institutions such as the army, which served as a touchstone for superpatriot and average American alike. Then McCarthy’s opponents would have him.⁹⁰

Reinforcing LBJ’s determination to proceed cautiously was the attitude of the administration. Though he personally detested McCarthy and genuinely opposed extremism and witch hunts, Eisenhower contributed to the atmosphere of hysteria that both fed and was fed by McCarthy. In April 1953, the president signed an executive order authorizing the heads of federal departments to dismiss any employee about whom there was reasonable doubt concerning not only his or her loyalty, but his or her “good conduct and character” as well. After the Wisconsin demagogue libeled George Marshall, Eisenhower’s mentor, pressure from friends in the military to take a public position in opposition to McCarthy mounted. Ike still refused, repeatedly telling friends and staff that he did not intend to dignify McCarthy’s antics with public notice. “I don’t intend to advertise this guy,” he told General Lucius Clay.⁹¹

As Johnson had anticipated, McCarthy was soon putting the noose around his own neck. In the spring of 1952, he attacked Darrell St. Claire, the chief of staff of the Rules Committee, for actions he had taken while serving on the State Department’s loyalty board. What McCarthy seemed not to realize was that the Rules Committee was chaired by Carl Hayden of Arizona, and St. Claire was a favorite of his. When Hayden objected on the Senate floor, McCarthy struck back at him, privately referring to the aged Arizonian “as an old, blind, deaf fuddy-duddy.” “God,” George Reedy later observed, “that was a stupid thing for him to do.”⁹²

Shortly thereafter, J. B. Matthews, one of McCarthy’s staff members, published an article in theAmerican Mercury entitled “Reds in the Churches,” in which he accused one hundred leading members of the American Protestant clergy of being fellow travelers. One of these, Methodist Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, was a close friend of Harry Byrd’s. The conservative Virginian took to the floor of the Senate to demand that Matthews provide evidence to support his charges or “stand convicted as a cheap demagogue, willing to blacken the character of his fellow Americans for his own notoriety and personal gain.” The day following, Lyndon encountered Hubert Humphrey in the cloakroom and pulled him aside. “I’ve told you,” he said, “when you let one of these demagogues go long enough, he gets in trouble. This is the beginning of the end for Joe McCarthy.”⁹³

Humphrey was willing to give LBJ the benefit of the doubt, but others were not. Almost from the beginning of his career as a red-baiter, McCarthy had been embroiled in a running feud with syndicated newspaper columnist Drew Pearson. With the journalist denouncing McCarthy as nothing more than a demagogue, and the senator calling Pearson a communist, the conflict reached a climax at a cocktail party at Washington’s exclusive Sulgrave Club. McCarthy kneed Pearson in the groin and slapped him repeatedly. “When are they going to put you in the booby hatch?” the journalist yelled. With McCarthy berating him almost weekly as a tool of the Kremlin, the columnist appealed to Johnson to come to his defense. Pearson recalled that he had supported the Texan in his 1948 bid for the Senate, but LBJ could not forget the Lyin’ Down Lyndon crack. “Drew, you’ve not been kind to me lately,” he said, and refused to lift a hand.

Pearson responded by tearing into LBJ. For six weeks in his columns and in a series of radio broadcasts, he attacked the leader’s ethics. He accused him of playing footsie with the administration by suppressing Preparedness Subcommittee reports to the effect that General Motors, Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson’s former company, was reaping unwarranted profits from defense contracts. In addition, he charged Johnson and Russell with blocking an investigation into waterfront racketeering in longshoremen’s unions. “Drew is blackmailing me,” LBJ complained to Al Friendly of theWashington Post , but he refused to budge on McCarthy.⁹⁴

Meanwhile, Joe McCarthy’s antics were threatening to plunge the nation into political chaos. By the close of 1953, he had turned from terrorizing the Democratic party to attacking his fellow Republicans and the army. During the course of his investigation into an alleged spy ring in the Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, the junior senator from Wisconsin came across the case of Dr. Irving Peress, a New York dentist drafted during the Korean War.

McCarthy charged that the army had promoted Peress to the rank of major and given him an honorable discharge despite the fact that he had taken the Fifth Amendment when questioned about his allegedly communist activities. He demanded that the names of all persons connected with the Peress case be turned over to him. When Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens refused, McCarthy vented his spleen on General Ralph Zwicker, commandant of Camp Kilmer, where Peress had been inducted. Zwicker refused to criticize his superiors or to discuss security procedures in the army. McCarthy denounced him as a disgrace to the uniform and observed that he did not have the brains of a five-year-old child.

Stevens and the army counterattacked, filing twenty-nine charges against McCarthy, the committee counsel, Roy Cohn, and others. Among other things, the army claimed that the committee had sought a commission and special treatment for G. David Schine, Cohn’s assistant, who had been drafted. McCarthy responded with forty-six charges of his own. Hearings were held from April 22 through June 17, 1954, by the Senate Committee on Government Operations, with Karl Mundt (R-South Dakota) in the chair.

As usual, McCarthy managed to dominate the proceedings, though it was he who was on trial. For thirteen days he browbeat Stevens as a rapt national audience watched over the new medium of television. McCarthy constantly interrupted witnesses, making insinuating comments or shouting “Point of order.” When the Wisconsin senator implied that a young associate of army counsel Joseph Welch’s was a communist sympathizer, Welch expressed the disgust felt by much of the committee and most of the onlookers: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” Technically, neither the army nor McCarthy emerged victorious from the hearings, but the grand inquisitor had clearly lost. A Gallup poll revealed at the close of the hearings that McCarthy’s approval rating had dropped to 35 percent. He had at last become a liability to the Republican party.

The moment of truth had finally arrived for the GOP. “It is a Republican problem … because they built Senator McCarthy to his present position of power,” Reedy told Johnson. “They accepted his help gladly when he was attacking Democrats. They must now decide whether they will suffer the consequences.”⁹⁵

On June 17, 1954, two days after the army-McCarthy hearings ended, Senator Ralph Flanders, an elderly Republican from Vermont, introduced a resolution calling for McCarthy’s removal from the Committee on Government Operations. The Wisconsin senator was as defiant as ever. Acknowledging that he sometimes played hardball, McCarthy declared that “as long as I am in the United States Senate … I don’t intend to treat traitors like gentlemen.” But the aura of fear and impregnability began to crumble. Flanders openly ridiculed him: “He dons his war paint … goes into his war dance … emits war whoops. He goes forth to battle and proudly returns with the scalp of a pink dentist.”⁹⁶

The distinguished television journalist Edward R. Murrow ran a series of film clips on his show,See It Now , showing McCarthy at his worst. As the opposition to McCarthy began to coalesce around Flanders, he and his supporters changed their proposal to a resolution of censure. Democratic liberals were ready to lead the public charge, but again Johnson restrained them.⁹⁷

Finally, after the midterm elections in November, LBJ spoke out. The red-baiter from Wisconsin had publicly characterized Utah Senator Arthur Watkins as “stupid” and “cowardly” and alleged that his select committee then exploring censorship was doing the work of the Communist party. Such charges belonged more properly on the wall of a men’s room rather than in the pages of theCongressional Record , LBJ declared.⁹⁸

Behind the scenes, the leader lined up Democratic votes. All but one, Senator John F. Kennedy, who was then in the hospital recovering from back surgery, agreed to vote yea. Subsequently, by a tally of sixty-seven to twenty-two the Senate approved a resolution of condemnation. Though McCarthy would remain on the scene until his death in 1957, he was finished as a force in American life. “He never recovered,” Harry McPherson recalled. “I would just see him lurch down the halls in the mornings, and he had a kind of bloated face with heavy jowls, he really looked terrible. And he would make those long, awful, incomprehensible speeches, seconded by other Republican drunks.”⁹⁹

Some liberals, such as Joe Rauh, would never forgive LBJ for what they considered his timidity during the McCarthy era. “Johnson was awful on Joe McCarthy, he was absolutely dreadful,” he later observed. “Never said a word on McCarthy until the censure came through … Bullies are always scared of other bullies.”¹⁰⁰Those concerned with the welfare of the Democratic party were more complementary. “It took the genius of a Lyndon Johnson to completely castrate Joe McCarthy,” Bobby Baker later claimed. “There was nobody else in there that had the mentality to destroy a Hitler-type person like … McCarthy.”¹⁰¹An overstatement perhaps, but no one else had the power to restrain liberal Democrats from going after the junior senator from Wisconsin and in the process destroying themselves and the party. Both Humphrey and Douglas would give the Texan high marks for his leadership.

 

WITHJOEMCCARTHY’S DEMISE, the search for communists within the federal bureaucracy and military abated somewhat, but others had found a use for McCarthyism. In the years immediately followingBrown , red-baiting the civil rights movement became an important part of the segregationist South’s campaign against integration.

Conservative white southerners found anticommunist legislation and litigation particularly useful in harassing the civil rights movement. By spotlighting the backgrounds of those few activists who were communists and the more numerous who had participated in popular front activities during the 1930s, segregationists hoped to paint the entire civil rights movement red. By 1953 virtually all southern states had loyalty oaths on their books. By coupling these statutes with a drive to have attorneys general declare the NAACP and other civil rights organizations subversive, segregationists hoped to torpedo the mounting drive for racial justice. Southern racists joined with conservative Republicans in an effort to equate communism with socialism and socialism with liberalism. Thus could they invoke traditional states’ rights doctrine to object to and obstruct federal efforts to regulate voting, education, hiring, housing, and public accommodations.

Unlike their Civil War forefathers, post-World War II southern conservatives were dedicated nationalists. Their goal was to link Americanism to states’ rights. They defended decentralized, state-based government as a patriotic cause, often quoting Thomas Jefferson and John C. Calhoun in the same sentence. “Southerners devoted to ‘Jeffersonian principles’ are in control of Congress,” George Reedy informed LBJ in February 1953. “They will launch a campaign to put the Democratic party back on ‘the main road’ … and destroy the control of ‘Northern pressure groups’ which are ruining the party.”¹⁰²Completing the circle, they linked state loyalty and security programs to their massive resistance to civil rights. By this arrangement, integration constituted a giant collectivist step toward federal control of economic, social, and political institutions. In this strategy, then, it was not just unsouthern to support federal over state control of important issues like education, race, and internal security. It was un-American.

Such was the world of Lyndon Johnson.