CHAPTER 13

PASSING THE LORD’S PRAYER

IT WAS HOT AS HELL INTEXAS IN1953AND 1954—HOTand dry as an old boot. Summertime temperatures reached 114 in Austin, and Christmas Day 1953 saw the thermometer hit 90. Mothers armed their children with washrags to open car doors so they would not blister their palms. Normal rainfall in Amarillo was 20.8 inches a year; in 1953, only 13.05 inches fell. This came on top of three years of drought. At Laredo, the Rio Grande River bed dried up for the first time in recorded history.¹

Residents of the Hill Country drilled deep into the limestone seeking to tap into an ever receding aquifer. The only animal that seemed to thrive was the buzzard. Everything was brown—the grass, the riverbeds, the dust-covered trees. Texans were reminded again that, despite all their oil, life was tenuous and prosperity uncertain. It was in this heat-blasted and stressed environment that Lyndon Johnson was compelled to run for reelection to the U.S. Senate.

 

BY1953, the individual who had emerged to become LBJ’s chief political adviser and consultant was George Reedy, chief of staff of the Democratic Policy Committee. He was a most unlikely choice. Short, heavy-set, with short-cropped, prematurely gray hair, Reedy was a slow-moving, slow-talking, first-rate political analyst. A native of Illinois, he came from a long line of liberals. His grandfather had been a conductor on the Underground Railway. While a student at the University of Chicago, George had taken a number of classes under Paul Douglas.²

LBJ became acquainted with Reedy when the latter was working as a political correspondent for UPI. From 1953 until 1963, when be became President Johnson’s first press secretary, Reedy poured out a steady stream of memos on virtually every subject under the sun, from Texas politics to Taft-Hartley to U.S. Passing the Lord’s Prayer policy in Indochina. He was a close reader of the national political scene and a master of the art of the possible. Reedy was, of course, skilled at protecting Johnson’s political flanks, but he shared his boss’s ideals. Jim Rowe recalled, “In many ways George was a mirror of the Senator’s thinking. I had trouble deciding which was which.”³

“George lived a life that only a political junkie could live,” Harry McPherson recalled. “He would get to work very late in the day, late morning, and he … would … turn out these memos … He would leave the office about … six-thirty, something like that, and he would go over to northeast Washington to Gusti’s, an Italian restaurant that used to be over on the Florida Avenue market. And he would drink an enormous number of martinis and he would hold court either with a secretary or whatever, a labor leader … And sometimes he would come back at eleven o’clock at night and dictate … Reedy would keep Geraldine [Williams, now Geraldine Novak] waiting unmercifully there until eleven-thirty or twelve o’clock at night and then come back and dictate to her.”⁴

The Texas senatorial election was never far from Johnson’s and Reedy’s minds; in April 1953, Jim Rowe reported the views of John Lane, former aide to Congressman George Mahon, who had just returned from a six-week tour of the Lone Star State. “Lane saw a lot of people all over Texas,” Rowe reported, “and he thinks [you] had better get home and do some work … He found a unanimity of feeling against you … The Eisenhower people didn’t like you because you weren’t one of them, and the Stevenson people didn’t like you because you weren’t one of them.”⁵The first objective, Johnson and Reedy agreed, should be to torpedo or cripple potential challengers. “You had more people getting set to run against Lyndon Johnson for the Senate than you had voters in the average Texas precinct,” Reedy later recalled.⁶

By tradition, Texas governors were limited to two terms, and there was wide-spread speculation that Allan Shivers would challenge LBJ. Another name batted about by the pundits was that of Attorney General John Ben Sheppard. Word was that Coke Stevenson was still bitter and was hosting Beat Johnson strategy sessions at his ranch. The red-baiting Martin Dies was always available. By far the most dangerous, of course, was Shivers, who, at the close of the 1952 campaign season, had gained complete control of the Democratic party machinery in Texas.

Early in 1953 Sam Houston Johnson arranged for a congressional banquet in Washington to honor his brother. Governor Shivers was, of course, invited. Traditionally, “these luncheons were strictly off the record affairs with no official press,” Sam Houston recalled, but this time, quietly, he invited selected members of the fourth estate, especially correspondents from Texas papers. At the gala, both Sam Rayburn and Price Daniel delivered oral tributes. Not to be out-done, Shivers rose to declare, “I am proud to call Lyndon my personal friend … The state of Texas has never had a finer senator, and I personally hope he’ll stay here a long time.”⁷

“Shivers Endorses Johnson” ran the headlines across Texas the next day. The state’s leading neo-Republican was furious, but there was little he could do. After Lyndon officially declared for reelection in October, newspapers quoted Shivers as saying that his wife did not want to raise their four children in Washington and hinted that he would make a run at a third term as governor.⁸

Nevertheless, the Johnson team concluded that the leader should conduct a two-and-a-half-week whirlwind preemptive campaign in Texas in the fall of 1953 to beef up his numbers in the polls, line up the big money, and drive out other potential contenders. In Houston, the senator spoke to the Mid-Continental Oil and Gas Association. His message was that the only thing standing between the petroleum industry and unfavorable rulings on the tide-lands and depletion allowance was the senior Democratic leadership in Congress. They might not like it, but Johnson and Rayburn were all they had.⁹Amarillo, Lufkin, Tyler, and all points in between were recipients of the Johnson treatment. Reedy later estimated that the candidate made two to three speeches a day and shook a quarter of a million hands.¹⁰By the time the tour ended, LBJ’s approval rating with voters had climbed from the 50 percent level in late 1952 to 63 percent.¹¹

If anything, liberals both in Texas and nationally were more upset with Johnson than with conservatives. Creekmore Fath, a liberal lawyer from Austin, had written Drew Pearson contending that during the 1952 presidential campaign, LBJ had sat on his butt “while Texas went to pot.”¹²Frustrated over having to choose between the interests of their state and the national party, the defeat of Ralph Yarborough in the governor’s campaign, and their virtual exclusion from the state Democratic party apparatus, liberals vowed to get Johnson. In 1954, with the financial backing of Mrs. R. D. “Frankie” Randolph, a lumber and banking heiress from Houston whom one contemporary described as “a traitor to her class,” a group of liberals merged two existing weeklies to create a statewide voice for the enlightened: TheTexas Observer.

Meeting in a conference room in the Driskill Hotel, Randolph and other founders selected Ronnie Dugger, former muckraking editor of theDaily Texan , to be the first editor. For the next six years Dugger and theObserver would lead the attack against the oil and gas interests, the Shivercrats, and “the ledge” (Texas state legislature), which, according to Dugger, comprised the largest collection of self-seeking, special interest-dominated provincials ever assembled in one place. Convinced that Johnson was at best a reactionary and at worst an appeaser, theTexas Observer and Dugger in particular would be thorns in Lyndon Johnson’s side from 1954 on.¹³At the same time, on the national level, Drew Pearson was joined by Democratic mainstays like the Louisville (Kentucky)Courier-Journal in complaining that Senate Democrats were being “led into the bondage of timid, calculating and narrow politics … to save the skin of a single colleague [LBJ].”¹⁴

 

JOHNSON’S RUNfor a second term took place against the backdrop of the ongoing, bitter struggle between Shivercrats and liberal loyalists within the Texas Democratic party. The conflict was far more than a factional dispute; it was ideological and both class- and race-based. Not only were Shivers and his followers advocates of small government and low tax regimes, they were for the most part out-and-out racists. Later, as chairman of the Board of Regents at the University of Texas, Shivers would declare that blacks would be admitted to the institution over his dead body. An admirer of Joe McCarthy, the governor was attracting national press coverage by advocating the death penalty for “convicted Communists.”¹⁵

The working-class liberal loyalists in the Lone Star State supported unionization, government aid to the disadvantaged, and regulation of corporations and agribusiness. White-collar liberals were appalled by McCarthyism and generally supported theBrown decision. In 1952, shut out of the Democrat power structure, Maury Maverick and the liberals had bolted the state convention. “Who will go with me to La Villita?” the diminutive firebrand had asked and then led the liberal rump on a march in the rain to San Antonio’s restored Hispanic district.¹⁶It seemed that the fortunes of former New Dealers and loyalists had reached rock bottom.

In the months that followed, however, Maverick and his followers, like Alvin Wirtz before them, took a page from the neo-Republican book. For the first time, they began organizing at the precinct level, and leaders like D. B. Hardeman worked to unify the faction: “We started in 1953 and 1954, you see, to work out a peace, a modus vivendi, between the loyal, moderate Democrats and the liberal Democrats, to get them to live together. There were a lot of people who were not for organized labor, we’ll say, who still were loyal Democrats.”¹⁷

Out of this came the Texas Democratic Advisory Council, an umbrella organization that oversaw the effort to mobilize voters at the grassroots level.¹⁸“There was the illusion that a lot of people had,” said Hardeman, “that you could build a coalition of the Negro, the Latin American, the labor man, the loyal Democrats, and the liberal intellectuals, and you’d have 51 percent.”¹⁹

The liberal loyalists settled on Ralph Yarborough to challenge whomever the neo-Republicans might put forward for governor in 1954, but try as they might, they were unable to recapture control of the party machinery. When liberal loyalists arrived in Mineral Wells for the state convention in 1954 they found that the state committee had not reserved any hotel rooms for them. Blacks were already barred from the city’s hotels by custom. Some delegates had to stay as far away as one hundred miles. When a contingent attempted to hold a preconvention caucus in a city park, the sheriff’s posse showed up and threatened them with billy clubs. Inside the convention hall, the liberal loyalists found that they had been relegated to the back of the room and allocated one seat for every two delegates. The chair refused to recognize liberal loyalist delegates who wished to speak or make a motion, and the keynote speaker referred to liberals as communists. The final indignity came at the close of the proceedings, when those out of favor discovered that their cars had been hauled off to the city pound, where they were forced to pay $13 each to liberate them.²⁰

Unfortunately for LBJ, the election of 1948 would not go away. By February 1954, George Parr was in the headlines again, first when he became involved in “a bloody court house corridor brawl at Alice” with two Texas Rangers and second when state Attorney General Sheppard and U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell announced a state-federal investigation into the Duke of Duval’s tax returns. All the old stories about Box13 began appearing in the state press. “This Parr business has been resurrected to the point where it is now the hottest it has ever been,” Everett Looney, an Austin lawyer and Democratic activist, wrote Johnson. “Shivers and John Ben Sheppard seem to have an undeclared friendly war on between them to see who is to get the credit for slaying the dragon.”²¹

Dudley T. Dougherty, a thirty-year-old, first-term state representative from Beeville, threw his hat in the ring in mid-February. He was both a naïf and an eccentric. A millionaire businessman and landowner, Dougherty had been Texas’s single largest contributor to the Stevenson campaign in 1952. Amazingly, during his campaign run against Johnson he would accept financial help and advice from the Committee on Constitutional Government, a notorious anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi outfit.²²

But Dougherty and his handlers had decided that the only chance an unknown had against an incumbent like LBJ was to run an extreme, McCarthyite campaign. Thus, at the time of his announcement, the Beeville tycoon declared himself an isolationist, called for a U.S. pullout from the UN, and denounced FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower as mentally incompetent pro-communists.²³“It’s the sort of thing you dream and pray and hope will happen,” George Reedy later recalled with a smile.²⁴During a campaign “talkathon” on television, Dougherty called Eleanor Roosevelt “an old witch.” “Lyndon Johnson’s the luckiest sonofabitch in the world,” Maury Maverick observed to Creekmore Fath.²⁵The contest, as everyone had predicted, was a charade; Johnson polled 883,000 to Dougherty’s 354,000.²⁶

Dougherty’s token opposition to Johnson in 1954 hardly signaled an end to the internecine wars that plagued the Texas Democratic party. The national GOP had hoped to convince neo-Republicans—Shivercrats—to desert their nominal but traditional affiliation with the Democrats. Ike duly signed a quitclaim bill that gave Texas control of its tidelands, and he openly courted Shivers. Of course, the Shivercrats—as the self-proclaimed heirs of Thomas Jefferson, small government, and states’ rights—claimed to be the true Democrats. They differed from Dixiecrats like Richard Russell in two important ways: there was none of the populism in them that appeared in so many southern legislators at midcentury, and they tended to be true believers in McCarthyism rather than mere political opportunists.

Once again, Texas liberals sent Ralph Yarborough forth to do battle with Shivers and the regulars. Yarborough, who had acquired his social conscience working as a harvester in the wheat fields of Oklahoma and as a roustabout in the oil fields around Bolger, Texas, boasted an enviable war record. He had ended his service in World War II with the rank of colonel.²⁷Flowery in speech, temperamental, idealistic, and dogged, Yarborough would become synonymous with Texas liberalism for the next twenty years.

Shivers immediately took the low road by charging that his opponent’s campaign was dominated by “Communist labor racketeers.” Auspiciously for him, CIO-led retail workers in Corpus Christi walked out on strike in the midst of the campaign. The governor empanelled a special commission to investigate the extent of communist subversion in the Gulf Coast labor movement, and a subsequent special session of the legislature passed a measure punishing membership in the Communist party with a $20,000 fine and twenty years in prison. Shivers had wanted the death penalty.

Meanwhile, the governor’s people retained an ad firm to put together a TV spot depicting the dire situation in Corpus Christi. The piece was shot at 5A.M. and, not surprisingly, showed deserted streets, while the narrator warned that this was what all of Texas would look like if Yarborough won. Yarborough, who had stayed abreast of Shivers in the first primary, lost by eighty thousand votes in the second round. He blamed the Port Arthur story, and liberals looked toward the 1956 elections more embittered than ever.²⁸

Of course, LBJ attempted to steer clear of the YarboroughShivers showdown. He worked to appease liberals by supporting New Deal-Fair Deal legislation in Congress during 1954, while quietly massaging and manipulating Shivers. “I am always going to know that whatever you do or say is not in any way calculated to do anything but help me,” he told the governor over the phone in November. “I appreciate that,” Shivers replied. “I think it would hurt you for me to endorse you.”²⁹But the split in the Democratic party was too deep, too emotional, too ideological for it to be finessed, and in the future, both sides would look constantly to Johnson for any signs of loyalty or apostasy.

 

JOHNSON’S RELATIVELY EASY RACEfor reelection freed him up to focus on the 1954 midterm congressional elections. Typically, the party out of power gained seats in a nonpresidential election year, and both Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson anticipated making the move from minority to majority leaders. In the campaign, LBJ was determined to portray the Democrats as the more unified of the two parties and, ironically, the most helpful to a still overwhelmingly popular president. All the Republicans seemed to have going for them was Ike’s bland charisma and the soft-on-communism issue. One reason Johnson had played the McCarthy issue so carefully, waiting for the Republicans to take the lead, was so that the GOP could not use Democratic opposition to the Wisconsin demagogue in the midterm elections.

If LBJ thought that such a stratagem would spike the guns of such inveterate red-baiters as Vice President Nixon, he was wrong. In a forty-eight-day, thirty-one-state speaking tour, Nixon blamed previous Democratic administrations for the fall of China, the “defeat” in Korea, and the mess in Indochina. Any and all Democrats running for national office were both soft on communism and crypto-socialists.

Rayburn and Johnson, who privately referred to Nixon as a “fascist,” struck back. The Senate minority leader declared to one campaign crowd, “They’re trying to tell you there are nothing but a bunch of Communists among the Democrats in Washington. I suppose they mean that good old red Communist Harry Flood Byrd … Do you think that Walter George of Georgia is a Communist? … Do you think that Dick Russell is a Communist or Big Ed Johnson?”³⁰LBJ’s principal contribution to the 1954 midterm elections was a ten-day swing through the West, where liberals Jim Murray of Montana and Joseph O’Mahoney of Wyoming were in fights for their lives.

The results of the 1954 congressional elections did not meet LBJ’s expectations, but they were sufficient. The Democrats gained seventeen seats in the House, returning Rayburn to the speakership. Both Murray and O’Mahoney won, as did Johnson and Humphrey, in landslides, but when the dust had settled, the Democrats controlled forty-eight seats in the Senate, the same number they had before the elections.

The difference was a quick and open rapprochement between Johnson and Wayne Morse. The Oregonian, a Republican who had declared himself an Independent in 1953, informed Johnson that he would vote openly and consistently with the Democrats in return for a seat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “I don’t know what he may want, but whatever he wants he’s going to get it, if I’ve got it to give,” LBJ said.³¹Fortunately, the Foreign Relations seat was his to give. With that deal concluded, LBJ was set to become the youngest Senate majority leader in American history.

Within two years of LBJ’s accession to the position, the press would refer to him as the most powerful majority leader in American history, although that was not saying much. The only truly influential majority leader of the twentieth century had been Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas, and his effectiveness had come during the New Deal years of 1934-1937, when FDR could exploit large Democratic majorities in both houses and reform was all the rage. In essence, the position of Senate majority leader, like that of minority leader, had no formal powers associated with it. But LBJ’s influence with the Policy, Steering, and Campaign Committees meant that he would continue to dole out committee appointments to both the entrenched and the up-and-coming, control the scheduling of legislation, and have input into the expenditure of campaign funds.³²

Under Johnson’s rule, all Democratic newcomers were the beneficiaries of at least one desirable appointment; for example, Joe O’Mahoney and Alben Barkley, former senators who had just regained their positions, could have been treated like freshmen, but instead, Lyndon awarded them their first choices.³³By 1955, LBJ had banked an impressive number of political debts, which he could collect when needed. He had helped pass numerous pieces of local and national legislation vital to the reelection prospects of various senators. He had protected others from having to take embarrassing positions on controversial issues. And his stumping during election time had proved undeniably effective. With the Democrats in the majority, the Steering Committee became even more important.

LBJ understood just how important an ally or enemy the Capitol Hill press corps could be. As with his Senate colleagues, he quickly analyzed and categorized members of the fourth estate. William S. White, a friend from the National Youth Administration days, was then covering the Senate for theNew York Times. “I knew that White admired subtlety,” Johnson recalled, and he realized that with a little work he could be perceived as subtle rather than merely devious. “You learn,” Johnson said, “that Stewart Alsop cares a lot about appearing to be an intellectual and a historian—he strives to match his brother’s intellectual attainments—so whenever you talk to him … emphasize your relationship with FDR, and your roots in Texas … You learn that Evans and Novak love to traffic in backroom politics and political intrigue … Mary McGrory likes dominant personalities and Doris Fleeson cares only about issues, so that when you’re with McGrory you come on strong and with Fleeson you make yourself sound like some impractical red-hot liberal.”³⁴

It was at this time that LBJ began the troubling habit of trying to manufacture images of himself for the press, to paint a portrait that he thought the public ought to see. It began innocuously enough, with exaggeration. One story on his life reported that his father spent twenty-four years in the Texas House of Representatives instead of the eleven he had actually served. The burgeoning communications empire in central Texas was Lady Bird’s work alone; he had had nothing to do with it, he told reporters.³⁵

Capitol Hill journalists however, were willing to cut the majority leader some slack in part because they viewed the man in the White House as a light-weight and an incompetent. Angered and frustrated by the obfuscation and nonsequiturs that characterized Ike’s press conferences, Jack Steele of theNew York Herald-Tribune quipped to Reedy that he was going to stop going to the president’s press conferences “because they are too confusing. Aside fromReader’s Digest and western stories, he did not appear to read—even newspapers.³⁶

 

AFTERLBJBECAME MAJORITY LEADER IN 1955, the physical seat of power in the upper house shifted to the quarters of the secretary of the Senate, in this case, Felton “Skeeter” Johnson of Mississippi, situated just off the floor. Senators gathered there to eat, drink, relax, talk, and gamble. “This is where Joe McCarthy lost thousands and thousands of dollars in there playing with Senator Kerr and Clinton Anderson,” Bobby Baker recalled.³⁷The Democratic Policy and Steering Committees gathered there. There were actually two chambers, a lounge, and a dining room. “We had a serious problem of people drinking too much,” recalled Baker, who had become secretary to the majority. “John McClellan at one time was a notorious drunk and very belligerent, very difficult to get along with … But alcoholism is a horrible problem for politicians, because every place you go they’ve got a drink for lunch.”

Nevertheless, Johnson’s quarters were private, intimate, a place where the majority could get its work done. According to Baker, LBJ drank more liquid and consumed less liquor than anyone he had met. From the time he entered Skeeter Johnson’s office until he left, he had a drink in his hand, Cutty Sark and soda. But the staff was under strict orders to use extra tall glasses when serving him and to pour no more than one ounce per drink. This could hardly be said of his colleagues, and, of course, the disparity in drink gave LBJ an edge, except with teetotalers like Kerr.³⁸

As hyperactive as he was, LBJ could not be all places at all times. During his years as majority leader, Bobby Baker as secretary to the Democratic caucus was Johnson’s principal factotum. Although only twenty-six, Baker was a veteran of the Senate. No one knew its personalities, procedures, and traditions better. He could count votes, deliver campaign funds, and arrange for legislation to be brought to a vote—or not. He was not well liked—many referred to him as “Little Lyndon”—but as an extension of the majority leader, he was respected. “He knew who was drunk,” recalled one senator, “who was out of town, and who was out sleeping with whom. He knew who was against the bill and why, and he probably knew how to approach him to get him to swing around.”³⁹

Baker was short, dark, intense, a figure out of a Damon Runyon play, ever on the lookout not only for the interest of the Democratic party and his boss, but for his personal financial well-being as well. Lyndon trusted him implicitly. If LBJ was the Grand Calculator, Bobby Baker was his abacus.

 

LBJLOOKED at a legislative session as a whole. Early on, he decided which measures would be desirable and necessary to pass. “He could see the combinations of support that had to be put together for each and how they would interrelate,” staffer Gerry Siegel said.⁴⁰If senators from agricultural states were assured that their northern colleagues would vote for 90 percent parity, they were likely to go along with legislation funding systems of mass transit. There were ways to vote for measures of racial justice other than laws guaranteeing equality under the law or advancing the cause of school integration—public housing, minimum wage, and extension of unemployment benefits, for example. Johnson was extremely flexible about blending interests and arranging compromises, but once the calculus of a session had been worked out, he was rigid, even ruthless, about enforcing it. His tone with his colleagues and members of the administration was economical, austere, and at times imperious. He used the logic of the equation he had produced with devastating effect. And he did not lie or misrepresent. “From my experience with him, in all those ballots we had when I was on the same side with him or against him,” Alabama Senator John Stennis recalled, “he never did tell me anything false about the bill or what was in it. Or what he would or wouldn’t do. He just didn’t do it. And therefore he could always come back to you.”⁴¹He had no use for those who would not play by his rules. Shortly after the opening of the 84th session, Estes Kefauver, who had repeatedly refused to toe the leader’s line, called LBJ and asked to be placed on the Policy Committee. Johnson flatly refused. The Policy Committee was his “cabinet” and he was entitled to pick whom he wished.⁴²

Johnson did not view the Senate as a debating society.⁴³The body that he sought to master should not be a forum for the Websters and Calhouns of the world to persuade their colleagues and the public through grand rhetorical flourishes and paeans to patriotism. In fact, debate and unambiguous rhetoric could be quite damaging. For the legislative calculus to work, deals had to be negotiated directly among individuals and interest groups. The leader had to put on different faces for different audiences, and it was frequently unwise to provide information or argument that was not pertinent to the task. “The process itself,” Johnson told an interviewer, “required a certain amount of deception. There’s no getting around it. If the full implications of any bill were known before its enactment, it would never get passed.”⁴⁴Unrehearsed debates could only hamper, even cripple the process.

This approach put LBJ exactly in the center of the action. Only he had the full picture; only he was privy to all intelligence gathered, whether political or personal. All would have to turn to him and were in some respect dependent on him, the Senate’s version of the Wizard of Oz. Horace Busby observed that Johnson was trying to make a virtue of the American political system which blurred distinctions and clouded issues. “His philosophy was the antithesis of parliamentary democracy,” Busby wrote; it could be called “non-partisan nationalism.” “We are a nation of financial conservatives” LBJ said in 1959. “At the same time, we are a nation of liberals in regard to our fellow human beings. In no other nation on earth is concern for human want and need and opportunity so nearly universal … Conservatism and liberalism always have—and I believe always will—go hand in hand … Our system of partisan politics—which had come to mean so much to us today—is not a system ordained and established by the Constitution.”⁴⁵In this sense, LBJ’s political philosophy was much more akin to James Monroe’s, Herbert Hoover’s, and Dwight Eisenhower’s than FDR’s (pre-1938) or Woodrow Wilson’s.

 

JOHNSON’S PHILOSOPHYof legislative leadership placed him once again on a collision course with the left wing of his own party. For liberals like Joe Rauh, conflict constituted the path to progress, whereas to liberals like LBJ, conciliation and cooperation were the best means to achieve the desired end. Rauh came to believe that Johnson was nothing more or less than an Eisenhower Republican seeking to patch together a coalition of moderate conservatives in the South that would marginalize northern and eastern liberals. “Some people would say, well he’s got as good a voting record as [New York liberal Republican Senator Jacob] Javits,” Rauh later observed. “But in the context of the Democratic party that was saying nothing.” When Rauh was elected president of the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) in the spring of 1955 his acceptance speech was an attack on the Johnson leadership.⁴⁶

To LBJ’s dismay, Adlai Stevenson used his influence—over LBJ’s and Sam Rayburn’s objections—to have Paul Butler named chair of the Democratic National Committee. A slender, idealistic young lawyer from South Bend, Indiana, Butler was a fiery partisan who had nothing but contempt for Eisenhower and his minions and for the policy of conciliation.⁴⁷

 

WHENLBJASSUMED the minority leadership in 1953, nearly everyone doubted his ability to do the job. When he became majority leader two years later, most Democrats were confident that he could unify and lead the Senate contingent; the question was where he would lead it. But the differences between Douglas, Humphrey, and other Senate liberals and the leader had to do much more with means than ends. LBJ always emphasized that it was the president’s and not Congress’s responsibility to develop and initiate a legislative program. Congress could only react to what it received, and he publicly resisted liberal demands that the Democrats in Congress formulate a program of their own. But LBJ let the president know that this attitude depended on various department and bureau heads consulting closely with the Democratic chairs of appropriate Senate committees before drafting and introducing legislation. If the Democrats were going to be in on any crash landings, they would have to be in on the takeoff as well. Eisenhower proved amenable to a deal. “If there are any roadblocks thrown in the way of cooperation, I am not going to be responsible,” the president stated for the record.⁴⁸Johnson sensed that Ike cared more about foreign affairs, specifically foreign aid and military alliances, than he did about blocking domestic reform, and he used this fact to broaden and deepen the New Deal-Fair Deal reform structure during the 1950s.

 

THE84TH SESSION,which LBJ would come to dominate, did not get off to an auspicious start. For weeks, the leader had been bothered by pains in his lower back. When Ike delivered his State of the Union message on January 5, 1955, Johnson was gasping with pain. Two weeks later, he took the train to Rochester, Minnesota, where at the Mayo Clinic he was diagnosed once again with kidney stones. His doctor, James C. Cain, a fellow Texan who was married to Alvin Wirtz’s daughter, advised him to rest to see if he could pass the stone. If that tactic proved unsuccessful, surgery would be necessary. He rested as best he could, but, as in the past, the stones refused to dislodge. Lyndon spent eleven days at the clinic, was operated on, and recuperated at the ranch for another twelve days.

Meanwhile, Sam Rayburn had become embroiled in a public feud with the administration, just the sort of situation Johnson was determined to avoid. Populist to the core, Rayburn opened the session with an assault on the administration’s Robin Hood-in-reverse tax policy. He introduced an across-the-board tax cut of $20 for every man, woman, and child in the country. (The previous year, the administration had pushed through a tax reduction measure, but it had favored only the wealthy and corporations.) Conservatives—Taftites, progressive Republicans, and southern Democrats—rose as one to denounce the Rayburn proposal. The measure would cost the Treasury $2.3 billion a year and lead to runaway inflation. Rayburn’s initiative, clearly rooted in the social justice movement, was bound to resurrect the conservative coalition that Johnson had been working so hard to break up.

Though still in pain, LBJ returned to Washington on February 12 to try to restore peace. The House had passed Rayburn’s measure by a slim five-vote margin, but his measure died aborning in the Senate Finance Committee, with southern Democrats Harry Byrd and Walter George joining with seven Republicans to vote against it. As he struggled to work out a compromise, Lyndon was stricken again and had to return to the Mayo Clinic. Two weeks later, he was back, this time with the expelled stone in a jar and a steel-ribbed corset supporting his torso.⁴⁹The best the leader could manage was a tax measure that accorded heads of households a mere $20 credit. Dependents would receive $10 and spouses nothing. The compromise satisfied neither liberals nor conservatives, and it went down to defeat.⁵⁰

Despite this early disappointment, the 84th Congress would pass two hundred bills more than its predecessor. Though it considered some of the more controversial issues of the day, the first session produced nary a filibuster. Among LBJ’s triumphs was a three-year extension of the Reciprocal Trade Extension Act, a measure traditionally anathema to Taftites and some southern Democrats. At Democratic urging, the Senate considered the first increase in the minimum wage in six years. The leader let the bill, which provided for a raise from seventy-five cents to a dollar an hour, languish until one day in June. With its principal opponents off the floor, he had it brought up and passed almost without debate. Spessard Holland of Florida, a leading opponent of the measure who was in the Senate dining room at the time, returned to the floor and began hollering and pounding the leader’s desk. “Well, Spessard,” Johnson replied calmly, “I had a little quorum call. If you fellows aren’t on the job around here, I’ve got legislation to pass.”⁵¹Johnson’s support of the minimum wage bill initiated what was to be a lifelong friendship with David Dubinsky, the diminutive, dynamic Jew who headed the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.⁵²

Perhaps LBJ’s most satisfying legislative victory during the first 1955 session was passage of a public housing bill. The Republican-controlled 83rd Congress had virtually obliterated federally financed public housing. With the administration lukewarm, observers predicted that there was little chance of a new housing bill in 1955. Publicly, LBJ agreed, and the ADA blasted him for “affably acquiescing to the Republican assault on liberalism.”⁵³

Meanwhile, Johnson had helped guide through the Senate Banking Committee a bill sponsored by Alabama’s John Sparkman that would build 135,000 units of housing over three years. Unwilling to completely expose itself on the issue, the administration, whose congressional spokesman on housing was Senator Homer Capehart of Indiana, proposed an amendment that would build 70,000 units over two years. Initial head counts indicated that southern Democrats would vote for the Capehart version. “Lyndon,” said the corpulent conservative, “this is one time I’ve really got you. I’m going to rub your nose in it!”⁵⁴But behind the scenes, the leader persuaded four northern liberals to support the Sparkman measure even though it did not go as far as they wished. He then appealed to the basic conservatism of his southern colleagues and convinced them to vote against both the Sparkman bill and the Capehart substitute. The leader gambled that the Sparkman bill would garner enough Republican votes to pass and he would not need the southerners. And that is what happened. As the final vote was announced—forty-four for and thirty-eight against—Capehart “was a slumped down hulk … And Bill Knowland, his face a fiery red, stared stunned at the … tally sheet in front of him.”⁵⁵Reedy remembers that “the press gallery nearly collapsed out of sheer shock, because they’d all written stories that morning predicting that this would be a major defeat for Lyndon Johnson as Democratic leader.”⁵⁶

 

QUIETLY,Johnson did what he could to contain the forces of extreme anti-communism. McCarthy the man might be discredited, but McCarthyism the movement was alive and well. As soon as the midterm elections were over, he and Rayburn began to plot the undoing of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Its functions could be transferred to “the much more responsible House Judiciary Committee, which has an excellent and deserved reputation for fairness and integrity,” suggested George Reedy. Failing that, all communist-investigating bodies could be consolidated under a joint congressional committee under Senators Russell and McClellan.⁵⁷

Meanwhile, Johnson had to come to the rescue of two southern liberals who were old friends of his and Lady Bird’s, Aubrey Williams and Virginia Durr. Mississippi Senator James Eastland and William Jenner, an archconservative from Indiana, had decided to convene a session of the Internal Security Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee in New Orleans to investigate the doings of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, a multiracial organization founded in the 1940s by the Durrs and other racial progressives. In a panic, Virginia called the majority leader. “What do you mean letting Jim Eastland come down here to crucify us?” she cried. He had heard nothing of it, Johnson said. He wasn’t sure what he could do. “Make sure no other Democrat comes with Eastland,” she replied. “Well, sweetiepie, I love you; I’ll do what I can,” Durr remembered him saying.⁵⁸There were no other Democrats with Eastland when he arrived in New Orleans. He did everything possible to paint his intended victims as Negro-loving communists, but to no avail. The only real drama came when Clifford Durr, Virginia’s husband, attempted to leap over the courtroom rail to throttle Eastland and in the process suffered a mild heart attack.

Protecting Aubrey Williams and the Durrs from the Jenner-Eastland Committee was one of the actions of which Johnson was most proud during his years in the Senate. He recognized Eastland as a powerful force who was sometimes helpful on matters affecting the rural poor, but he had nothing but contempt for his politics. “Jim Eastland could be standing right in the middle of the worst Mississippi flood ever known,” he quipped on one occasion, “and he’d say the niggers caused it, helped out some by the Communists.”⁵⁹

 

IN THE SPRING OF1955, Lyndon Johnson was forty-six years old and at the height of his powers. As he bluntly put it, “Eisenhower couldn’t pass the Lord’s Prayer without my help.” In June and July,Newsweek , theNew Republic , and theWashington Post speculated on the possibility of his being nominated for the presidency in 1956 or 1960. He was “the first party leader in modern times to tame the independent Senate,” thePost raved.⁶⁰People respected the majority leader, found him exciting, even fascinating, but few genuinely liked him.

Johnson continued to drive his staff unmercifully and to attempt to control their individual lives, especially the women. His first private secretary was Mary Rather, who went to work for him in 1934. She became the prototype of the slavishly devoted secretary Johnson expected to have around him. A plump brunette whom LBJ snatched from Alvin Wirtz’s office, Rather was soon receiving directions on losing weight and the proper clothes to wear. In 1951, she was succeeded by a vivacious twenty-one-year-old, another brunette, Mary Margaret Wiley. She was soon joined by a twenty-seven-year-old divorced mother of two, Ashton Gonella. Johnson was quick to establish his alpha male position. In his first encounter with Wiley he stuck his head in her office door, barked a few orders, and then vanished. “Blown away,” she later recalled of the meeting, “and a little scared.”⁶¹

LBJ made it clear from the beginning that he regarded his “girls” appearance as a direct reflection on him. “The first day I went to work for him, I wore my hair long and up in a chignon,” Gonella recalled. “He told me if I wanted the job, I needed to get two pounds of hair cut off … He didn’t want to look at me unless I looked the way he wanted. I cut my hair.”⁶²“He liked high heels and he liked lipstick, and he didn’t want your slip showing,” Wiley recalled.⁶³

At the close of business, Johnson would sometimes hold court, with the secretaries sitting around and listening with rapt attention. He would rattle the ice in his glass until Gonella or Wiley or one of the other female staffers fetched him some more Cutty Sark. Serving coffee, drinks, and snacks was part of the secretaries’ job description.⁶⁴The year was 1955, and the cult of female domesticity (if not servility) was a prominent feature of American culture.

Feeling the need for a “liberal couple” in the office, in late 1955 LBJ hired Bill Lee Brammer, who had been working for Ronnie Dugger on the Texas Observer, and his wife, Nadine. “We were Ralph Yarborough liberals,” she recalled. “I was from the [Rio Grande] River Valley, and I just was convinced that all those people were so ugly and nasty to those poor Mexicans. I joined the NAACP when I was a sophomore.”⁶⁵

“He was absolutely terrifying” at first, remembered Nadine. “He was so large and his eyes seemed magnified behind those glasses. It was as though he was a great Tasmanian devil, darting in and out of the office, pouncing on you before you knew it.” One day, as LBJ was helping her out of the back seat of his car, “he took the opportunity to feel me up,” she recalled. “It happened so fast I didn’t even have a chance to complain.”⁶⁶

Johnson seemed incapable of separating women and sex. He wanted pretty, well-dressed, intelligent young women around the office because he assumed everyone would think he was having sex with them. They were part of his mid-century, male politician’s harem, and he wanted nothing but the best and the brightest. “Sex to Johnson was part of the spoils of victory,” said George Reedy. “He once told me that women, booze, and sitting outside in the sun were the only three things in life worth living for.”⁶⁷

The urge in him to seduce was almost irresistible. But he also craved the emotional support that women offered. Reedy believed that Johnson basically accepted his mother’s Victorian view of gender: women were innately more cultured than men and invariably their moral superior; their approval was much to be desired. Thus did LBJ become luminous when women, especially strong women like Virginia Durr and Helen Gahagan Douglas, applauded his sacrifice for the common good.⁶⁸

LBJ’s relationships with his female staffers were not all one-way streets. They acquiesced in his behavior because it was the 1950s, and good-paying jobs for women were hard to come by. Sexual harassment, within limits, was a fact of life. But Johnson treated the women around him as more than just sex objects. His mother had embodied learning, especially in literature and the arts. LBJ gave the female of the species credit for having a brain and for having influence. Knowing Nadine Brammer’s political predilections, he made sure to introduce her to and arrange an audience with Eleanor Roosevelt. When Nancy Dickerson was named national congressional correspondent for a major network, he and Lady Bird threw a party for her on Capitol Hill.⁶⁹

And, of course, some were flattered by his attentions. Power and its display was no less an aphrodisiac in the 1950s than at other times.

To all appearances, Johnson’s mental and physical fornications with other women did not weaken his relationship with his wife. Sam Rayburn once warned his protégé that his infidelity and gossip about it would limit him politically and expressed concern about Lady Bird. “Bird knows everything about me, and all my lady friends are hers too,” LBJ replied.⁷⁰

In fact, her response to a burgeoning relationship, with nonstaffers at least, was to attempt to ingratiate herself with the seduced. When her husband began sidling up to Nancy Dickerson, a former Badger Beauty at the University of Wisconsin and future NBC reporter, Lady Bird began calling to find out where she purchased her clothes. (After Dickerson made it professionally, they were Dior.) She, too, bowed before his propensity to “play Pygmalion,” as she put it. Frequently, when LBJ was riding in the front seat of his chauffeured limousine and his wife, daughters, and÷or female staff members were in the back seat, he would tell the driver to stop. He would then ask his female passengers to comb their hair and apply fresh lipstick, and they would comply.⁷¹

Lady Bird continued to revel in the role of political helpmate. She would come into the office several times a week, offering tours of the Capitol to constituents and making sure the Senate dining room served Texas-shaped hamburgers to the senator’s luncheon guests. She would later say that these years were the most stimulating of her life. She went often to the Senate gallery and listened to debates, and she spent hours in the evening with her husband, Sam Rayburn, and others talking politics. “Lady Bird was the perfect politician’s wife,” Hope Riddings Miller, society editor for theWashington Post , observed, “because she always insisted on making the other person feel more important than herself. Her whole goal in life seemed to be to make other people feel big and herself small.”⁷²

Occasionally. Bird found it necessary to defend herself. One time, when Zephyr Wright served turkey hash during a post-Thanksgiving dinner for Sam Rayburn, Lyndon upbraided her in front of her guest. “Can’t you have something better for dinner when we’ve got the Speaker here?” Lyndon fussed. Rayburn spoke up to say that turkey hash was one of his favorites. After he and the guests had departed, Bird turned to her husband and said calmly, “Dear, when we have guests, please do not complain about the food that’s being served.” He endured the rebuke in silence.⁷³

Still, Bird seemed not only to accept her husband but to embrace him. At sunset on the ranch, while Lyndon was recovering from his gall bladder surgery, George Reedy caught sight of him and Lady Bird walking arm-in-arm, she with the most blissful look on her face.⁷⁴

 

THOSE WHO WERE PARTof LBJ’s political calculus found him tough, aggressive, honest—and generally humorless. But this was not so for those with whom he felt comfortable. June White, wife of the journalist, remembered “a fascinating, charming evening” with the majority leader: “Impressions weaving in and out, humor weaving in and out. He was in a very, very good mood. There was no greater experience in life than spending time like this with Lyndon Johnson … You could see people, particularly when they were meeting him for the first time, just be charmed out of their wits.”⁷⁵Harry McPherson recalled a number of very distinguished, powerful individuals exclaiming after leaving a small meeting with him: “My God, if people could only see him that way.”⁷⁶

Johnson was a practiced mimic, hilariously cruel in depicting those of whom he disapproved, and warmly sympathetic to those of whom he approved. Horace Busby recalled an astonishing piece of one-man theater performed at one of their first meetings. Johnson reenacted the scene that had unfolded in Sam Rayburn’s office the day FDR died. He played all the parts, Harry Truman, himself, and Rayburn in their respective voices, and was so caught up that he had tears in his eyes when he finished.⁷⁷Johnson was frequently at his worst in large gatherings—big dinners or cocktail parties. “There was a streak—and people will think, anybody that ever reads or hears this will think I’m out of my mind—there was an enormous streak of shyness in him,” Busby would claim. “He was always so afraid that in a graceful social setting that he wouldn’t be mannered properly. Now he took over any party he went to … because if he didn’t take it over it might bite him, in manners.”⁷⁸

Johnson’s ego, though large, was extremely fragile. His antennae were constantly up for slights, for signs he was not being accorded his proper place in the pecking order. His behavior always depended on who he was with and his perception of that person. With the intelligent and sophisticated, especially those who he believed shared his values, he was intelligent and sophisticated. Over the years, his friends and intimates included some of the best minds in Washington: Richard Russell, Abe Fortas, Jim Rowe, Tommy Corcoran, Virginia and Cliff Durr. His mind was supple, quick, penetrating. Fortas claimed that Johnson possessed “one of the brightest, ablest minds I have ever encountered … He had a great power to retain information,” which he could dredge up “accurately and effortlessly.”⁷⁹

Yet, these qualities existed in tension with LBJ’s coarser self, which tended to emerge when he was bored or challenged. His belching, farting, public urinating, sexual boastfulness—in his office once he unzipped his pants, pulled out his penis, and asked rhetorically, “Have you ever seen anything as big as this?” in front of a friend visiting from Texas—frequently stemmed from indifference to the situation or an impulse to live up to a male stereotype that he had probably inherited from his father.⁸⁰If the personal really is political, Johnson should have succeeded in politics only when he was in junior high school.