CHAPTER 14

BACK FROM THE EDGE

LYNDON EVALUATED HIMSELF—HE WAS ALWAYS GRADINGhimself and everyone around him—by the level of activity he was able to sustain. His day began at 6:30A.M. , when he awoke to skim the previous day’sCongressional Record. Breakfast frequently consisted of black coffee and several cigarettes.¹He rose and dressed in expensive silk double-breasted suits, and with cufflinks and tie in place, he departed for the Capitol at 7:30 in his chauffeur-driven limousine while perusing thePost, New York Times , andBaltimore Sun on the way. Arriving at the office, he would go over the day’s schedule with Bobby Baker and Walter Jenkins.

The morning was spent in committee meetings and on the phone with committee chairs. Lunch, if there was time to eat, consisted of heavy southern fare: chicken-fried steak or meatloaf, for example, accompanied by some form of potato, preferably fried. The food was downed in huge, wolfing mouthfuls as rapidly as possible. During the afternoon, the leader was on the floor, managing the day’s activities. Between five and six he would retire to the Board of Education or the Senate secretary’s lounge to have a drink and rehash the day’s events.

He frequently returned to his office to plan for the next day, not leaving for home until around ten. There, after consuming several drinks (not watered down at home) to relax, he would have dinner, invariably in the presence of politicians, journalists, or staffers he had invited on the spur of the moment. LBJ would then read himself to sleep, skimming memos, mail, and messages brought to the house around midnight by a Senate messenger. Frequently, he would awake in the middle of the night to phone a staffer or another senator with an item that needed immediate attention—at least in his opinion. At 6:30 the routine began again.

Bobby Baker estimated that the leader was consuming at least a fifth of Cutty Sark a day, although he was never drunk, and he smoked incessantly. Johnson’s weight soared to 225.

 

LYNDON ANDLADYBIRDwere scheduled to go to George Brown’s posh estate in Middleburg, Virginia, on July 2, 1955, for the Independence Day weekend. Brown’s country retreat was Huntland Farms, a historic 413-acre property complete with gorgeous five-bedroom home, two gatehouses, a gardener’s cottage, stable, gardens, and a dairy, situated in the lush green, rolling hills of northern Virginia.²Lyndon would have to drive down for the July 4 celebration by himself. It was Lucy’s eighth birthday, and she was suffering with a fever. Lady Bird would have to postpone until the next day, if she could come at all.

On the evening of July 1, Lyndon dined out with Sam Rayburn and Senator Stuart Symington. Rayburn noted that his friend was drinking more heavily than usual and had dark circles under his eyes. The speaker urged him to ease off, and Johnson promised that he would.

The next morning, LBJ went to his tailor’s, where he was measured for two new suits, one brown and one navy blue. Before leaving town for Huntland Farms, he held an afternoon press conference with three wire service reporters. His plan was to tout the accomplishments of the first session of the 84th Congress and outline plans for the next session. One of the journalists, John Chadwick, a soft-spoken AP reporter, asked repeatedly why the Democrats were not pressing ahead with plans to amend the restrictive, anticommunist McCarran-Walter Immigration Bill. Herbert Lehman and other liberals were then advocating its outright repeal. Lyndon, who had been chain-smoking throughout the conference, blew up. He screamed at Chadwick, pounded the table, impugned his motives, completely lost control. The reporters and staff sat in stunned silence at this uncharacteristic outburst. Embarrassed, LBJ canceled the remainder of the session.³

Johnson and his chauffeur, Norman Edwards, were not able to leave Washington until nearly 5P.M. No sooner had the limo crossed the Potomac than LBJ became uncomfortable. “I remember it suddenly began to seem terribly close,” he later recalled, “and I told Norman to turn on the air conditioner. He said it was already on, and I said to turn it on full steam, and he said it was already on full steam and was getting very cold.” Lyndon began experiencing severe pain in his chest and midsection. He remembered thinking that it was indigestion, perhaps the cantaloupe and hot dog he had wolfed down at lunch.⁴

When he arrived at Huntland Farms, he stayed downstairs in the trilevel house instead of going up to where the other guests were enjoying a drink before dinner. Hearing that the leader had arrived but was not well, George Brown went down to find his guest lying down in one of the bedrooms. He had had a bad day, Johnson told Brown: aggravating reporters and an unhealthy lunch. Did he have anything for indigestion? Brown gave him a bicarbonate of soda, but the pain continued. Johnson was sweating profusely. Suspecting heart trouble, Brown sent for one of the other guests, Senator Clinton Anderson, who had recently recovered from a major heart attack. Brown told Johnson of his fears. He had some digitalis prescribed for a heart murmur. Would LBJ like to try it? Anything, Johnson said.⁵

The pain was growing more intense. By this time Anderson had arrived. After Johnson described his symptoms, Anderson exclaimed, “My God, man, you’re having a heart attack.”⁶They should call a doctor immediately and have the leader rushed to the hospital. Johnson initially protested. TheWashington Post was about to publish its article touting LBJ as a presidential possibility for 1956, and the Texan did not want the balloon popped before it even got off the ground.⁷But, overwhelmed by nausea and pain, Johnson quickly changed his mind, and the local doctor was sent for.

When Brown’s physician arrived, he realized immediately that LBJ was suffering a major heart attack. He was surprised the digitalis had not exacerbated the situation and killed him. The patient would have to be rushed to Bethesda Naval Hospital, which had a major heart unit. Middleburg could boast but one ambulance, which doubled as a hearse. It was summoned and arrived some twenty minutes later.

With the mortician driving and the doctor in the front, the ambulance-hearse, with Johnson reclining in the back and Frank “Posh” Oltorf, Brown and Root’s Washington lobbyist, at his side, set off for the hour-long trip north. Meanwhile, Brown had called Lady Bird and given her the news, which she took calmly. She set off to meet the party at the hospital. Fearing that he would die before they got to Bethesda, Johnson pulled Oltorf down close to his face and whispered the location of his will. It was in a drawer in his office at KTBC. “I’ve left everything to Lady Bird,” he confided. “She’s been the most wonderful wife in the world.”⁸

Would he be able to smoke again? LBJ asked the doctor. “Well, Senator, frankly, no,” the doctor replied. Johnson, who was thoroughly addicted, heaved a great sigh and said, “I’d rather have my pecker cut off.”⁹

 

WHENJOHNSON REACHEDBETHESDA,Lady Bird, George Reedy, Walter Jenkins, and other staffers were there to meet him at the emergency entrance. He pulled Bird down to him and told her how much he loved her. While they were waiting for the elevator to take him up to the cardiac unit on the seventeenth floor, Lyndon asked for a cigarette. You can’t smoke anymore, Senator Johnson, said Dr. Willis Hurst, the young navy doctor who would take charge of his care. Just one last one, he begged, and Hurst nodded his assent. “So, he had this—you never saw such a look of just savoring every second of that cigarette before he handed it back,” Lady Bird said, “and it wasn’t but a few moments before he turned gray, and I had never seen a person go into shock, and it really was scary. And at that moment, they gathered up speed, picked him up, took him away.”¹⁰Lady Bird followed. What should she do about the two suits he had just been fitted for? she asked. Keep the dark blue one, Lyndon said. It would be suitable no matter how things turned out. As the doctors put him in the oxygen tent, Johnson almost died. His blood pressure dropped to zero over forty. For the next two days, it was nip and tuck, but with every passing hour, the leader’s chances of surviving the coronary occlusion improved.¹¹

Before being wheeled up to the seventeenth floor, Johnson had also spoken to Reedy. Call Earle Clements, he said, and tell him he was to assume the responsibilities of majority leader. Issue a statement to the press that he had had a heart attack, “a real belly buster,” that Clements was going to take over the Senate, and that he was going to resign. Reedy called Clements and LBJ’s friends in the press, but he made no mention of resignation. “I took it upon myself to let him think that one over, because I had a feeling that he would change his mind on it,” Reedy said. He was right; Johnson did not castigate him for failing to mention resignation, and the subject was never raised again.¹²

 

ON THE MORNING OFJULY5, Clements interrupted the proceedings of the Senate to read an announcement to his colleagues: “Senator Lyndon B. Johnson has had a myocardial infarction of a moderately severe character. He was quite critically ill immediately following the attack, but his recovery has been satisfactory. He should be able to return to the Senate in January.”¹³

The statement touched off a chain reaction of sympathetic expressions from members of both parties. Herbert Lehman of New York, the liberal who had so often crossed swords with the leader, rose with a proposed resolution. It called on the Senate to “stand in silent prayer to the Almighty for the early and complete recovery of the majority leader, the beloved senior senator from Texas.” For a full minute, senators, staff, and visitors stood in silence.¹⁴

 

“STAY WITH MEBIRD,”Johnson had said to his wife before he went under. “I’d rather fight with you beside me.” Realizing that Lyndon’s recuperation would take weeks, Lady Bird moved into the room next to his and prepared for the long haul. She called the office and gave orders that important pieces of mail be brought directly to her so that she could sign them.¹⁵

The patient did not adjust to his post-heart attack regimen easily. As he recovered, he sank into the deep depression that is typical among heart patients as they realize that their lives will be forever altered and constrained. “When Johnson was in great despair,” George Reedy recalled, “he’d just sort of lie there and sulk. Quite often you’d be with Johnson and all of a sudden, you’d feel that he wasn’t there at all, that there was some representation of Johnson alongside of you, something mechanical, something—that he was a doppelganger.”¹⁶Johnson had reason for despair: he could not eat, drink, smoke, fornicate, or politic. What would he do?

Soon the depression was punctuated by periods of mania. “Then one day he got up and he hollered to have somebody come up and give him a shave, and just in a matter of minutes that whole damned hospital started to click,” Reedy said. “He took over the corridor, installed a couple of typewriters there, he was dictating letters, he was just going full speed.”¹⁷

LBJ wheedled permission to listen to the radio from Dr. James Cain, friend and long-time family physician, who said okay, on the condition that his patient not listen to newscasts or any other programming that would upset him. Of course, as soon as he had the radio, Johnson did nothing else but listen to the news, and he ordered a separate transistor with an earplug so that he could tune in more than one program at a time.¹⁸When Lady Bird refused him cigarettes, he would have a screaming fit. Reedy remembered his keeping a pack in the table beside his bed so that he could obtain some small comfort from rolling one around in his mouth.

Gradually, Johnson began comforting himself by reading the hundreds of letters of condolences that came pouring in. “He’d read them over and over and over again,” Reedy recalled. “It finally got to a point where we couldn’t let them all in his room: there wouldn’t have been enough room for him … There was sort of an unspoken yearning of his.”¹⁹It was as if the letters were validations of his continued existence. Vice President Nixon came by to visit, as did President Eisenhower on his way out of town for a Big Four meeting in Europe. Hubert Humphrey wrote, “I miss having you get after me, I miss your good humor. Yes, we are just lonesome for you … Once you have recovered, God only knows what will happen around this town! Lyndon Johnson tired was a ball of fire; Lyndon Johnson rested will make the atom bomb obsolete!” Former President Truman wrote, and newspapers of all persuasions paid tribute to his leadership and political skills.

The patient’s mood became more upbeat. During these weeks of convalescence, Lady Bird conferred with Dr. Cain, asking him if Lyndon’s return to the Senate would mean a significantly shorter life. “We thought about this some,” Cain later recalled. “I remember telling her that I didn’t think he should retire from politics, that I thought if he were sitting on the porch at the LBJ Ranch whittling toothpicks, he’d have to whittle more toothpicks than anybody else in the country. Politics had been his life. It was what he knew, what he liked; and I told her that we had no evidence that continuing on working with a degree of moderation would shorten his life a bit.”²⁰

On July 22, the majority leader gave an interview toNewsweek and then a few days later granted an audience to a group of old reporter friends. When they commented on his weight loss, he had Sarah McClendon, the only female in the group, turn around and he then dropped his bed gown to show them just how thin he was. On August 7, he left the hospital and spent the following two weeks receiving colleagues, reporters, and well-wishers at home.

 

ONAUGUST25, Lyndon and Lady Bird flew from Washington to Fredericksburg on millionaire Wesley West’s private airplane. “He was the thinnest thing you have ever, ever seen, and his clothes were just hanging on him,” Mary Rather remembered. “And of course, Mrs. Johnson looked bad, too.”²¹

Dr. Hurst told Rather, who had agreed to stay through the fall recuperation, that the patient would be moody, one day demanding calls, mail, messages, and action and the next barely bothering to speak. He was right, but, of course, everything with LBJ tended to be exaggerated. He became obsessed with his exercise regimen and his diet. His doctors told him that he must walk at least a mile a day. So he got in his automobile and measured off a half mile, which took him from the ranch house to the gatepost in the fence surrounding the property. It was just a couple of hundred yards farther to Cousin Oriole’s, so every evening he would walk to Oriole’s house and back.

For the first time in his life, Johnson began to count calories. Bird and Mary Rather set up shop in the living room with books on nutrition and various devices to measure and weigh. Once, when he was being served some water-melon, he asked how many calories and Lady Bird told him sixty-five. When he subsequently learned that the caloric value of a slice was eighty-five, he blew up. “You would have thought the world had come to an end or he’d been betrayed,” Reedy said.²²

To facilitate his rehabilitation, Lady Bird had a swimming pool installed in the front yard. In addition to his daily walk, LBJ began paddling about in the water.

Johnson later wrote an article forThe American Magazine entitled “My Heart Attack Taught Me How to Live.” It was a maudlin if generally accurate account of his pre-attack excesses, the Middleburg episode, and his recovery. He claimed that his near-death experience had changed his life:

My hours of reflection had made me painfully aware that my old life had not been a well-rounded one. In fact, it was so lopsided as to be ludicrous. After all, there was something in the world besides my job. I began consciously looking for some of the good things I had been missing … High on the list of those good things was getting acquainted with my two daughters. They had come to be 11 and 8 years of age, and I hardly knew them at all. Oh, I saw that they were fine, healthy, growing girls who got along well enough in school and seemed to enjoy themselves with their little friends. I was proud of them and loved them. I just didn’t know them … Well, there was time now. I found myself falling easily into a happy relationship with Lynda Bird and Lucy Baines. We played games together—they could give me stiff competition at dominoes—and took turns reading aloud from their books. We watched our favorite television programs together. I was pleased beyond words by their ready acceptance of me. Why, they liked me!²³

LBJ’s days were in fact more leisurely, and he did pay attention to Lucy and Lynda Bird. He would play with the girls, swim a bit, read some history and biography in the afternoons, and play dominoes with A. W. Moursund or Everett Looney, who would drive out from Austin. John Connally dropped by, as did Jake Pickle.²⁴The pace was slower, and there was a prevailing mood of melancholy. “The awareness of his very bad heart attack made it such a long, sad time,” Mary Rather recalled. “He had slowed down so much and the days were so long because we took very few phone calls. We had hardly any visitors and you knew that this worry about his health was on his mind and Lady Bird’s mind every day, plus the big decision about what to do about being a member of Congress and what to do with his life if he didn’t return to Congress.”²⁵

Rebekah arrived to help with her son’s care. According to George Reedy, the staff awaited her coming with dread. By every word, body movement, and voice inflection, she conveyed to her son the message that he was shirking, that he was letting her and the country down, that he needed to get back on the job and prove himself. There were important things to accomplish, and her expectations to be met. “She was so damn mean to him,” said Reedy. “She just had all these impossible standards. I would rather face ten of Al Capone’s gangsters in a back alley than have to spend one hour alone with that woman.”²⁶

Instead of standing up to his mother, Lyndon took out his feelings of frustration and inadequacy on Lady Bird. In front of a large group, he accused his wife of “trying to kill me” when she served him food that he believed exceeded his caloric allowance. Soon Bird was emotionally exhausted. “When Lyndon is out of danger,” she confided to a friend, “I want to go off alone somewhere and cry.”²⁷

 

ONAUGUST24, news broke that President Eisenhower had suffered a major heart attack. Johnson was energized. He spoke to James Hagerty, Ike’s press secretary, two or three times a day at first. Then Jerry Persons, the White House staff man for congressional relations called Lyndon daily to give him an update. Suddenly, 1956 seemed fraught with possibilities. “Our Republican friends are in a state of panic as of today,” Bobby Baker reported from Washington. “The Dixiecrats have been so vicious that they cannot retreat to support either Stevenson, Harriman, or any one of the like stripe. They cannot afford to endorse Nixon or Warren since they know neither can carry a single southern State.”²⁸

On September 28 and 29, Sam Rayburn and Adlai Stevenson paid an official and much publicized visit to the ranch. Newton Minnow, then an adviser to Stevenson, recalled that he, Rayburn, and Grace Tully drove out from Austin and arrived late in the evening. The next morning, with LBJ in the middle, the three addressed a throng of reporters from chairs set up in the front yard. Johnson, looking surprisingly fit, dominated the proceedings. In response to a question, the majority leader declared that the three politicians had not discussed politics. There was one thing he wanted understood, though; “I like Ike.” Sam quickly agreed: “We’re not haters, we never hated Mister Eisenhower and we never will.”²⁹Stevenson opened his mouth as if to talk, but Johnson cut him off. He had supported Stevenson in ’52 and would again if he were nominated. A reporter asked Stevenson if he thought Texas would return to the Democratic column in 1956. Before he could answer, LBJ interjected—“I think Sam and I are in a better position to answer that question”—and took over.

“All of the headlines carried such phrases as ‘Big Three,’ ‘At the Summit.’ ‘Three most powerful men in the Democratic party,’ ” George Reedy subsequently reported. In the South, he said, “Republicans and Democrats alike are universal in their opinion that you alone, as far as our party is concerned, possess the character and integrity necessary to be President.”³⁰He followed up with a series of memos advising his boss on how to convince the electorate that he was indeed the hope of the nation. Reedy had arranged for the addition of Grace Tully to the Johnson staff. The presence of FDR’s former secretary would reassure blacks, Jews, labor, northern liberals, and other members of the old New Deal coalition. After recovering his strength, LBJ should hit the ground running at the opening of the second session of the 84th in January 1956, showing that he had lost none of his energy or skill. Appear to be more a westerner than a southerner, Reedy advised. Most important, present a blueprint for action that will stand in stark contrast to the insipidness of Eisenhower Republicanism.³¹

Other prominent political figures followed Stevenson in paying tribute, even Estes Kefauver. The most interesting contact of that fateful fall, however, came from Joseph P. Kennedy. Using Tommy Corcoran as an intermediary, Joe urged Lyndon to run for president in 1956. If he would privately pledge to take on his son Jack as his running mate, Joe would arrange financing for the ticket. Johnson refused. He was not a candidate, he said. “Young Bobby … was infuriated,” Corcoran recalled. “He believed it was unforgivably discourteous to turn down his father’s generous offer.” Jack himself wasn’t upset, just curious. “Listen Tommy,” Jack subsequently said, “we made an honest offer to Lyndon through you. He turned us down. Can you tell us this: ‘Is Lyndon running without us?’ ” Corcoran replied, “Does a fish swim? Of course he is. He may not think he is and certainly he’s saying he isn’t. But I know God damned well he is. I’m sorry that he doesn’t know it.”³²

LBJ realized that the elder Kennedy was attempting to use him as a stalking horse for Jack. It was likely that Ike would recover and that he would run for a second term. The Republicans had no one else; indeed, with the president out of commission the Taftites, progressives, and wild men were at each other’s throats. Joe wanted to position his son for 1960 by having him named vice presidential candidate on the Democratic ticket in 1956. Ike was likely to win in 1956, but his margin of victory would be much smaller if Johnson rather than Stevenson ran. If Ike swamped Adlai again and Jack occupied second place on the ticket, the defeat could be blamed in part on Kennedy’s Catholicism.

 

AT HIS DOCTOR’S INSISTENCE,LBJ had canceled all his speaking engagements for the remainder of 1955—except two: an innocuous tribute to Sam Rayburn to be delivered at the Texas State Fair in Dallas and a speech dedicating the new dam at Lake Whitney. With his health improving and his ambition pulsating, Johnson decided Whitney would be the place to announce his version of a domestic Fourteen Points. The staff was immediately thrown into a panic. Whitney, situated between Hillsboro and Waco, was tiny. The only possible venue was the National Guard Armory. The place would have to be packed, but how to attract a throng to the middle of nowhere?

But then word got out. Tommy Corcoran and Robert L. Clark, a Dallas lawyer, each sent $1,000 to buy tickets and distribute them for free admission. Democrats in Dallas and Fort Worth as well as Waco began making plans to attend. “The National Guard Armory was absolutely packed and jammed” when the leader arrived, Mary Rather recalled.³³

The speech that LBJ delivered that evening had been prepared by George Reedy and Bob Oliver, the chief lobbyist for the United Automobile Workers. Titled “Program with a Heart,” it was a New Deal-Fair Deal call to arms, including expanded Social Security coverage, federal subsidies for housing, school, and hospital construction, a guarantee of 90 percent parity to farmers, elimination of the poll tax, tax cuts for the disadvantaged, regional and national water conservation measures, amendments liberalizing the immigration and naturalization laws, and an agency similar to the Federal Power Commission to regulate interstate gas prices. When Johnson had finished reading his prepared text, he moved closer to the crowd and kept talking extemporaneously. George Reedy: “I had never before seen him take such complete command of an audience. It was virtually a mass orgasm.”³⁴

“I wish you could have been at Whitney,” LBJ wrote Bobby Baker “I have never had a better audience, and it was composed of liberal, moderate and conservative Democrats, Shivercrats, Eisenhower-Democrats, and even Republicans.”³⁵Old New Dealers sensed a liberal Renaissance. “I have come reluctantly to the conclusion that your policy in the last two years had been correct,” Tommy Corcoran wrote LBJ. “As you know, I thought it was wrong and told you so, since I believed in a frontal attack on Eisenhower. I think events, and I do not mean only his heart attack, have proved you right. You sensed the mood of the country far better than anyone else. I do not give Adlai too much credit on this because I think he is essentially a conservative at heart, while I have always believed you are a New Dealer at heart, despite the fulminations of our ADA [Americans for Democratic Action] friends.”³⁶Both Clark Clifford and Abe Fortas endorsed the goals LBJ had articulated and subsequently helped to flesh them out.³⁷

In the context of the mid-1950s, the Whitney speech was remarkable—more liberal than anything Adlai Stevenson had ever uttered. The man who had supposedly caved in to the conservative mood sweeping Texas and the nation, the man who, according to theTexas Observer , was a tool of big oil, the corporations, and agribusiness, had staked his political future on a program that had essentially been written by UAW head Walter Reuther.

Indeed, many around Johnson saw the heart attack and the Whitney speech as a turning point in LBJ’s life and career: George Reedy said, “1955 and 1956 were the two years in which he began to lay down some sort of a coherent program, largely a populist program, really, which gave a positive expression to his leadership.”³⁸

As Johnson saw matters, liberalism had lost its way. The focus increasingly was on remedies affecting the legal status of the disadvantaged and action to protect the civil liberties of Americans under siege by McCarthyism. Johnson was for these things, but the Whitney speech was a call to Democrats and the nation not to forget the ill-housed, ill-fed, and undereducated.

The event was cathartic for Johnson not only because it marked a return from his illness and the longest period of enforced idleness in his life, but also because it signified a return to the values he had been forced to move away from ever since his election to the U.S. Senate. Carl Albert later remarked that the Whitney speech was the beginning of the making of a president.³⁹

 

IN THE AF TERMATHof the heart attack and the Whitney speech, LBJ’s New Deal friends once again began to think of him as FDR’s heir apparent. In November 1955, Tommy Corcoran wrote the Johnsons, “Lyndon can’t keep out of politics because, as Holmes said, ‘To live is to function: there is no other point in living,’ and Lyndon’s functioning is politics. But … the greater political function of Lyndon now is to find a broadening out of his interests in life that relieved his concentration on the infighting of politics and gives his subconscious time to function. His energy had successfully broken him through the gravitational pull that yanks down ordinary politicians.”⁴⁰

That same week. Jim Rowe sent Bird the latest one-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln for her to read to her convalescing husband. He had just returned to Washington from his first visit to the ranch. “Lyndon has a lot to learn from Lincoln,” Rowe observed. “For one thing, when it comes to straight politicking, old Abe makes Lyndon look like an amateur … And it might interest him to know that Lincoln too had his waiting period, while he practiced law after he left Congress.”⁴¹

 

AS THE SECOND SESSIONof the 84th Congress prepared to open, the task ahead, as LBJ and his strategists defined it, was to continue to use the disjuncture between Eisenhower and the Republican party to further the interests of the majority leader and the Democrats. They continued to insist that the president, personally, was untouchable. In the minds of the American people, George Reedy observed, “he has become a myth—a myth which they themselves have created. They want a wise President so in their minds he is a wise President. They want a prudent President so in their minds he is a prudent President. They want a strong leader so in their minds he is a strong leader. It does not matter whether these descriptions are fitting or unfitting. They want the description to fit and they are determined that it will.” Constant efforts to discredit Eisenhower would challenge the nation’s judgment. “No man will admit—if he can help it—that he was a fool!”⁴²

If the Democrats were to retain control of Congress and capture the White House in 1956, they were going to have to wean some 3.5 million voters away from the GOP. “While it is probably true that the old New Deal issues such as public power are dead, there is fortunately, a new kind of ‘liberalism,’ ” Jim Rowe advised Johnson. “The American people want a variety of things which come under the heading ‘general security.’ The American economy is giving the people most of these without any help from the legislators. But there are certain things which can come only from the legislators … expanded Social Security, schools for their children, better roads, better health protection. The demands for all these things together can be the ‘New Liberalism.’ The politician who adequately articulates all these demands will become the successful leader.”⁴³

LBJ was on hand for the opening of the new Congress on January 5, 1956. He appeared a changed man, complete with a new routine. He did not arrive at his office until 10A.M. and he stopped to take a nap every afternoon. The cigarettes were gone, alcohol consumption much diminished, and weight down to 187 pounds.

But life still had its pleasures. With the help of Joseph Duke, the Senate sergeant at arms, the leader lay claim to a small suite of rooms in the Page School on the west side of the Capitol. “He spent a fortune fixing it up down there,” Bobby Baker recalled, “because it was hard to get the heating and air conditioning, because it was sort of what I call the bowels of the Capitol down there. It was on the inside, sort of facing the architect’s office.” Such hideaways were at a premium among the legislators, Baker recalled. “If they met a pretty constituent, they could take them there. If those rooms could talk, it would make a good gossip book … including Johnson.”⁴⁴

By the time LBJ arrived back in Washington, he had also beefed up his staff. Walter Jenkins was still there to run the day-to-day operations and take care of the minutiae. Arthur Perry continued to handle the Texas mail, still a crucial job; there were the Brammers and Booth Mooney.⁴⁵Billy Brammer, a blossoming novelist, spent his days and early evenings serving Johnson and his nights holed up in his apartment, living on Kool-Aid and Butterfingers, writing a sweeping satire of Texas politics, later published asThe Gay Place. To head up the Policy Committee, Jim Rowe was persuaded to leave his lucrative Washington law partnership with Tommy Corcoran. Rowe’s recruitment was classic LBJ. “Lyndon Johnson went after me to come down there and run the Policy Committee, and I said, ‘I’m not going to do it,’ ” as Rowe related the story. “He caused all kinds of people to get in touch with me and say that ‘I think you have an obligation to our nation and to our party and to the Congress to go to help Lyndon Johnson.’ It was embarrassing. I had to sound like someone who didn’t care about any of those things to a lot of very nice people, very well-meaning people, but I could stand it until one night at dinner my wife wasn’t speaking to me—Libby—and I said, ‘What is wrong?’ and she said, ‘I just can’t imagine why you’re doing this to Lyndon.’ ”⁴⁶

Perhaps the most important addition to the staff was a young lawyer from East Texas who came onboard as assistant to Gerry Siegel, the Policy Committee’s legal counsel. A graduate of the University of the South, Columbia, and the University of Texas, Harry McPherson was a southern liberal of the Ralph McGill-Hodding Carter stripe. A devout Episcopalian, he viewed racial injustice as immoral, anticommunism as overblown and a threat to civil liberties, and the emergence of a labor-farmer-consumer-minority political coalition as a balance to big business as crucial to the future of the republic. McPherson was idealistic, self-deprecating, well-read, and tactful enough to stand up to LBJ without destroying himself. The young Texas attorney who had originally planned on becoming an English teacher would become a personal and political bridge from the New Deal-Fair Deal to the Great Society. “I came to admire his [Johnson’s] politics and his principles … how the country works and how you get things done” McPherson later said.⁴⁷

 

THE THORNIEST PROBLEMconfronting Lyndon Johnson the would-be presidential candidate, LBJ the majority leader, and the Democratic party in general during the mid-1950s was civil rights. TheBrown decision mandating desegregation of public schools marked the beginning, not the end, of the Second Reconstruction. On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, “the cradle of the Confederacy,” a black seamstress and former NAACP official, Rosa Parks, refused to give up her seat to a white and move to the back of the bus. She was duly arrested. Three nights later, black community leaders gathered at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, formed the Montgomery Improvement Association, chose as its head the young, charismatic minister Martin Luther King Jr., and launched a bus boycott among local blacks.

Meanwhile, throughout 1954 and 1955, white supremacists in the South had been organizing to fight theBrown decision. By the end of 1955, no fewer than 568 separate segregationist organizations, including a revived Ku Klux Klan with a membership estimated at two hundred thousand, were operating in the United States. Senator Harry Flood Byrd (D-Virginia) called for a policy of “massive resistance.”

Invoking the memory of John C. Calhoun, Georgia, Mississippi, and Virginia passed resolutions of interposition. “The Deep South Says Never” read the title of a series of articles by John Bartlow Martin on the segregationist movement.⁴⁸“If we submit to this unconstitutional, judge-made integration law,” declared a White Citizens’ Council leader, “the malignant powers of atheism, Communism and mongrelization will surely follow.”⁴⁹

Throughout late 1955 and early 1956, state legislatures passed laws designed to frustrateBrown. Hundreds of different measures were enacted, some revoking the licenses of school employees teaching mixed-race classes, others appropriating state funds to subsidize tuition to all-white private academies, and still others completely shutting down school systems that had been ordered to desegregate.

Early in 1956, southern senators began meeting once again in Richard Russell’s office. The gatherings were stormy. The radical racists—James Eastland (D-Mississippi), Allen Ellender (D-Louisiana), Strom Thurmond (D-South Carolina), and John Stennis (D-Mississippi)—were out for blood. Mob violence had accompanied the University of Alabama’s rejection of Autherine Lucy, and passions were running high. Aside from their own personal feelings, the southerners were being pushed by extremists at home to stand up for Dixie, to show the North that white southerners would not be intimidated.

The heart and soul of the Dixie faction in the Senate continued to be Richard Russell, LBJ’s friend and mentor. The party’s and nation’s rejection of him as a legitimate presidential candidate had shocked and embittered him. “Dick Russell had been a great leader, a great influence for good,” Jim Rowe said, “but after he ran for the presidency and got knocked off as a southerner in 1952, I always thought that Dick became a much narrower southerner and was parochial.”⁵⁰

Beginning with theBrown decision, the senior senator from Georgia would become increasingly obsessed with civil rights. He was ably assisted by the mild-mannered but thoroughly reactionary Harry Byrd of Virginia. Praising the faithful and icing the wavering, Russell and Byrd continually emphasized that unanimity was the key to the bloc’s success, and they made certain there were few defectors. Those who refused to conform risked ostracism and eventual political death. The Dixie Association quickly came to the conclusion that a statement of principles—the “Southern Manifesto”—was the proper response for sympathetic senators and representatives to make to the looming assault on hallowed southern institutions.⁵¹

Despite their general opposition to theBrown decision, southerners in the Senate were deeply split. Thurmond harangued the group with an uncompromising diatribe that called for resistance inside or outside the law, whatever the price. That was too much even for the other fire-breathers, and they turned to North Carolina’s Sam Ervin, an unkempt, deceptively shrewd young lawyer who very much wanted to be reelected to the Senate. TheBrown decision was based on neither law nor precedent, Ervin argued, but solely on “psychology and sociology.” Given the fact that the Warren Court had usurped and exercised a power denied it by “the very instrument it was professing to interpret”—the Constitution—its decision was inoperative.⁵²

Moderates like Fulbright, Sparkman, Lister Hill (D-Alabama), and Price Daniel (D-Texas) drafted their own version, which termed theBrown decision “unwarranted” and pledged that the signers would use all lawful means to bring about its reversal.⁵³The upshot was a compromise. On Monday, March 12, 1956, nineteen senators and seventy-seven representatives issued their defiance. The Court, the “Southern Manifesto” declared, had substituted “naked power for established law,” planted racial hatred and suspicion where there had been friendship and understanding. The signatories pledged to resist integration. Although they added the qualifying phrase “by any lawful means,” the manifesto was taken by white supremacists as a call to arms.⁵⁴

 

CONSPICUOUS BY THEIR ABSENCEon the list of manifesto signers were Albert Gore of Tennessee and Lyndon Johnson of Texas. Withholding his name from this paean to apartheid would be a source of pride for years to come for Lyndon. Senator Richard Neuberger, liberal Democrat from Oregon, described the leader’s decision as “one of the most courageous acts of political valor I have ever seen … in my adult life.”⁵⁵

The leader’s motives were several. First, of course, was his ambition for higher office. “Even though the time may have come when a Southerner could run for President and be elected, he certainly could not do so if he were known as ‘the Southern candidate,’ ” George Reedy advised his boss. “The Nation as a whole might well accept a Southerner as a national leader but not as a sectional leader.”⁵⁶Johnson also believed that civil rights was an issue whose time was coming. In a sense, by presenting the white South with a fait accompli, the Supreme Court had done the region a favor. Nevertheless, it was absolutely necessary to mute his views and proceed very carefully. He managed to convince his colleagues in the Dixie Association and voters in Texas that, as he put it, “I am not a civil rights advocate.”⁵⁷His hands had been tied by his leadership position and by the need to act as a unifying force within the Democratic party.

Personal convictions aside, LBJ dreaded the possibility that Congress would have to consider a civil rights bill in 1956. Much like the Kansas-Nebraska Act a century earlier, a comprehensive civil rights measure had the potential to split the Democratic party right down the middle. According to the staff of the Policy Committee, there were four groups in the party supporting congressional action on civil rights: the “liberals,” who were acting on both principle and emotion; labor, whose northern branches were seeking an accommodation with black workers and who saw the civil rights issue as a means to gain greater say in Democratic party councils; urban bosses, who viewed the black vote as increasingly important to their survival; and black organizations such as the NAACP.⁵⁸But then, of course, the party included those most opposed to civil rights. A preelection tussle in Congress over the issue would fracture Democrats, resulting, perhaps, in another Dixiecrat bolt. The GOP could read the political tea leaves as well as Johnson and his staff, and they were determined not to pass up such an opportunity.

In 1955, the nation had been swept by a wave of revulsion in the wake of Emmett Till’s lynching. Then there were the protests and police beatings that accompanied Autherine Lucy’s attempt to attend the University of Alabama. As the Montgomery bus boycott dragged on into 1956, acts of terrorism by white thugs and local law enforcement officers increased, further offending moderates, liberals, and conservatives in the North and Midwest.

With a view to recapturing the black vote—the GOP was, after all, the party of Lincoln—and driving a stake into the heart of the Democratic party, Eisenhower and his attorney general, Herbert Brownell, decided to introduce a bill calling for a bipartisan commission to investigate civil rights abuses, a new division in the Justice Department whose sole duty it would be to prosecute civil rights violators, additional powers to enable the federal government to enforce voting rights, and amendments to existing civil rights statutes to protect those seeking their rights.⁵⁹A watered-down version passed the House in July.

As the Senate prepared to receive the bill, LBJ surveyed the scene. Congress was scheduled to adjourn in just four days so that senators and representatives could attend their respective presidential nominating conventions. So far, the Democrats had managed to remain united. The leader consulted with Adlai Stevenson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Hubert Humphrey, and Wayne Morse. All agreed that a divisive debate over civil rights in the Senate would achieve nothing but the election of a Republican president and Congress. Hard-liners such as Paul Douglas and Herbert Lehman, urged on by the ADA and NAACP, however, were determined to force the issue.

Under normal Senate procedure, a bill coming from the House was read on the floor and then referred to the appropriate committee, in this case, most certainly Jim Eastland’s Judiciary Committee. To prevent this from happening, Douglas planned to pick up the bill personally from the House, take it to the floor of the Senate, and ask for a direct and immediate debate by the whole body. Getting wind of the scheme, Johnson had the civil rights bill passed through a side door of the House chamber to a member of his staff. While Lehman, who had been tricked into leaving the floor, was absent, LBJ had the bill read and sent to Eastland’s committee, where it was buried. Douglas, Lehman, and Rauh were furious, but Johnson had ensured that 1956 would not be a repeat of 1948.⁶⁰

 

SAMRAYBURNapproached the 1956 campaign season with grim determination. He was going to make an example of Allan Shivers. The governor, weakened by a series of insurance scandals and rumors of influence peddling within his administration, had decided not to stand for reelection, arranging for his protégé, Price Daniel, to quit the Senate and take his place in the governor’s mansion. But Shivers was determined to head the Texas delegation to the Democratic National Convention scheduled for Chicago in August. Rayburn knew that Shivers would never agree to support Stevenson if he were nominated and suspected that the governor’s plan was to once again deliver the Lone Star State to Eisenhower. He was right, of course. “I’ll have to take that boy’s pants before I’m through,” the speaker exclaimed to a friend.⁶¹

Rayburn was concerned not so much about an Eisenhower victory in Texas, though he was thoroughly committed to Stevenson, as about the integrity and discipline of the state Democratic party. Ike threw his hat in the ring for a second term on March 1, and from that point on, political leaders in Texas conceded that Eisenhower was unbeatable. “This is the worst possible State in the country for personal attacks upon President Eisenhower,” George Reedy advised LBJ. “When Texans voted for Eisenhower in 1952 they had to make a violent emotional break with their past traditions as in many parts of the State, voting Democratic is in the same category as going to Church on Sunday. When a man or a woman makes such a violent emotional break with the past, he or she bitterly resents any criticism of the move.”⁶²

But Eisenhower’s victory, if he won, would be a personal and not a party victory. The GOP in Texas remained weak and marginalized. Its only hope was for Shivers to lead the neo-Republicans out of the Democratic party and formally merge them with the GOP. But how were the Democrats to stop Shivers without overtly attacking Eisenhower?

Shortly before his Whitney speech, LBJ had confided to Rayburn that he was considering running for the presidency as Texas’s favorite son candidate. This would allow him to claim leadership of the Texas delegation and thus deal the coup de grâce to the Shivercrats. Rayburn was initially enthusiastic and agreed to support such a plan, but began to have second thoughts when it seemed that LBJ actually intended to make a serious run at the presidency. Using Jim Rowe as an intermediary, he told LBJ to back off. Rayburn wanted a smooth convention and a quick Stevenson nomination. A SouthWest coalition headed by LBJ would be sure to alienate labor, the urban machines, and northern liberals in general. “He said that you knew you could not have the first spot this time but he thought that what you wanted was the second spot,” Rowe reported.⁶³When LBJ assured the speaker that his candidacy was purely tactical, Rayburn released a telegram to the press on March 7 urging Lyndon to become the chair of the Texas delegation to the national convention as well as the state’s favorite son candidate for the presidency. In a speech on April 10, Johnson accepted.⁶⁴

The Texas that Shivers and Johnson struggled to control in the mid-1950s seemed more than ever a land of contrasts, a state in which new and old, modern and traditional, rich and poor, white and black seemed to live in juxtaposition with each other, side by side, without ever seeming to touch. Willie Morris painted a vivid picture of the Lone Star State in hisNorth Toward Home: “Rigid fundamentalism flourished in modern, skyscraper cities, old Negro women carried laundry on their heads past the low-cut houses of the new suburbia, oil derricks rose high above swamps and cotton fields, television aerials decorated the roofs of sharecroppers’ shacks. Republicans organized clubs in lazy court-house-square towns that had never heard of two-party politics … I traveled all over Texas, from one end to another, and my memory of it as a physical place is like a montage, with brilliant lights and furious machinery in the background, and in the foreground a country café with old men in front, watching big cars speed by.”⁶⁵

It was clear from the beginning that if the Rayburn-Johnson forces were going to triumph at the state convention scheduled for May, they needed the support of the liberal loyalists, who had spent the past two years establishing a formidable organization at the precinct level. “There were 5,000 of these things—5,000 conventions,” George Reedy said. “I think that a small group of dedicated Communists could very easily get into that thing one day and take over the whole party structure in Texas … You had to find these precinct conventions to begin with … They might be in somebody’s back kitchen; they might be in a basement; they might be in a loft … The labor-liberal coalition … didn’t have much of a popular [numerically large, voting] following in Texas, but machinery they did have.”⁶⁶

Before Johnson announced on April 10, he and John Connally, who had been picked to run the favorite son campaign if it materialized, asked Kathleen Voight, wealthy San Antonio liberal and leading light in the Democratic Advisory Council, to come to the ranch. Would the liberal loyalists support him in stopping Shivers, he asked. Voight had already consulted with labor leaders and her colleagues on the DAC. They would back Lyndon for chair of the delegation to the national convention in return for a substantial share of seats and would support him as Texas’s favorite son—but only on the first ballot. Johnson was not pleased, but he agreed to her proposal. Voight then got on the phone with the editors of twelve of the state’s largest newspapers. The deal was done. “Behold,” said Johnson in his announcement on the 10th, quoting Psalm 133, “how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity! It is like the precious oil upon the head.”⁶⁷

 

AWEEK BEFOREthe Democratic conclave opened in Dallas, Johnson had Connally bring Kathleen Voight to the ranch once again. Apprehensive as to what was in store, she had Jerry Holleman of the Texas AFL and Fred Schmidt of the CIO accompany her. After dinner, the leader let it be known what he wanted: support from the liberals on the delegation to Chicago to back him not only on the first ballot but on every succeeding ballot until he released them. The three protested that they had no authority from their constituents to make such a pledge. It did not matter, Johnson said; the convention would give him what he wanted.⁶⁸

Connally arrived in Dallas early and began caucusing on the eighteenth floor of the Adolphus Hotel with various precinct chairmen. His lieutenants dispersed to distribute placards emblazoned with the slogan “Love That Lyndon,” as triumphant liberal loyalists demonstrated in the halls demanding a purge of the Shivercrats. LBJ arrived on the opening day of the convention at the State Fair Grounds clad in white suit and white bow tie. He was presented with a white burro and a placard reading “Headed for the White House,” while liberals paraded a black sheep across the auditorium stage with the sign “Shivers—Stray of ’52.”⁶⁹

There were only two issues to be formally taken up by the gathering: selection of delegates to the national convention and the naming of Texas’s national committeeman and committeewoman. Johnson appealed to the liberals to avoid a purge, to keep the door open to former Shivercrats who pledged loyalty to the Democratic party. His effort at reconciliation was greeted with catcalls and cries of “Throw ‘Lyin-Down Lyndon’ Out,” but there was no purge, and a mixed slate of delegates was voted without serious debate. The group was bound to vote for LBJ for as many ballots as he required of them.

There was little conflict over the selection of a national committeeman, the progressive Byron Skelton of Temple, but the committeewoman was an entirely different matter. The liberals were determined to have the red duchess of Houston, Frankie Randolph, that traitor to her class, chosen. Connally hated her, and Johnson feared her. They threw all their weight behind the candidacy of Mrs. Lloyd (Beryl) Bentsen, wife of former congressman and wealthy south Texas businessman Lloyd Bentsen. When liberals began attacking her husband’s ties to oil, gas, and agribusiness, however, she withdrew.⁷⁰

The Connally-Johnson forces then made a last-minute effort to persuade Kathleen Voight, whom they viewed as more of an opportunist than an ideologue, into challenging the cofounder of theTexas Observer. Connally protégé John Singleton recalled the scene: “He [Johnson] was in the bathroom naked, shaving, and I was in the room when the knock came on the door. It was Kathleen Voight to come in to talk to John. Johnson said, ‘Bring her on in,’ so I brought her on in to the bathroom. They sat there and talked while Johnson shaved in the nude.”⁷¹

Voight was not impressed. She had no intention of betraying Randolph and let Connally know in no uncertain terms. The next day, the convention selected Randolph to be the state’s national committeewoman. Lyndon complained that “we got double-crossed, out-maneuvered and out-stayed when it counted.”⁷²

 

THROUGHOUTJUNE ANDJULY,LBJ refused even to acknowledge that he was a true candidate for the presidency, much less make a run in the primaries. Meanwhile, Stevenson was being his usual coy self. “If the party wants me, I’ll run again,” he confided to a friend in late 1955, “but I’m not going to run around like I did before and run to all those shopping centers like I’m running for sheriff.”⁷³But after Estes Kefauver beat him in New Hampshire and Minnesota, Stevenson rolled up his sleeves and won in Florida, New Jersey, Oregon, Washington, D.C., and California.⁷⁴When Kefauver withdrew, it appeared that Adlai was in the driver’s seat. Perversely, the more Stevenson seemed to have the nomination sewn up, the more Johnson led reporters to believe that he would campaign in earnest. Connally opened a campaign headquarters and began organizing an LBJ floor demonstration. When a journalist asked him, “Are you just a favorite son, or are you a serious candidate?” Lyndon answered, “I’m always serious about everything I do.”⁷⁵

In the background, writing his biweekly memos, George Reedy kept his spur to the Johnson ambition. “Even though the primaries left Stevenson ‘the front runner,’ they still do not establish him as the man who can win in November,” he advised his boss.⁷⁶

On August 11, two days before the opening of the Democratic Convention, Harry Truman called a press conference at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago and announced that he was supporting Governor Averell Harriman of New York for the nomination. Truman had lost all respect for Stevenson, having come to the conclusion that he was weak, ineffective, and, at heart, a conservative. Suddenly Johnson seemed to be the man in control, the political kingmaker of 1956.⁷⁷On August 12, he summoned reporters and formally announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president. Rayburn and Rowe were appalled. The speaker, always a bit jealous of his protégé, remarked to reporters, “That damn fool Lyndon thinks he’s going to be nominated president.”⁷⁸

The day Truman announced for Harriman, Rowe tried to rein Johnson in. The South was attempting to use Johnson as a stalking horse, and he should not let it happen. There was no way the Democratic party was going to nominate LBJ in 1956. Labor would not take a southerner: “Your personal friend, Walter Reuther, will lead the fight against you”; the northern bosses, who were increasingly sensitive to the Negro problem, would not take him; and the heart attack would be used by all against him. What Johnson should do was continue to hold himself aloof from the Dixie Association and position himself for 1960. “There is now a danger that Lyndon Johnson will become the Dick Russell of 1956,” he concluded.⁷⁹

Johnson’s vanity had come to the fore, but there was another, more compelling reason for him to press his candidacy. Rumor had it that Harriman’s mission at the Chicago convention was to push the South out of the party. He would use his candidacy as leverage with Stevenson, promising him that he and the labor-boss-Negro-liberal coalition that he represented would carry Adlai over the top when the vote began.⁸⁰But Stevenson would have to stop temporizing on civil rights, Taft-Hartley, and regulation of big business.

Here again was the nightmare specter of the South falling into the arms of the GOP. Johnson regarded Harriman as nothing more than a cynical opportunist. During the preballoting jockeying, the New Yorker came to see Johnson. Jim Rowe was there. “Now, Lyndon, you don’t have to worry about me on this civil rights business,” Harriman said. “All I have to do to keep my people happy is to make a few speeches. I will make the speech, but I’m not going to do anything about it.” After he departed, Johnson turned to Rowe and said, “You liberals, you’re great!”⁸¹LBJ might have had one foot in the West, but he had to speak for the South. He could not stand by and see it driven out of the Democratic party.

Despite Stevenson’s almost certain first-ballot victory, LBJ had John Connally go ahead with his nominating speech. It was faux Shakespeare: Johnson was a man who “knows people and they love him, and from that love burns an unquenchable flame of trust.”⁸²Allen Fear of Delaware made the seconding speech for Lyndon; when he began “Ladies and gentlemen, fellow delegates, President Truman, Lady Bird,” a number of delegates could be heard murmuring loudly, “Who’s Lady Bird?”⁸³“They [the leadership of the Texas delegation] were after John Connally,” Jerry Holleman recalled. “And John was on the phone talking to Lyndon, desperately trying to get Lyndon’s permission to let them ask for the floor to switch their vote over to Adlai Stevenson. Remember, Mr. Rayburn was the chairman of the convention; he was the man with the gavel. He wanted Texas to switch its vote, and he waited and he waited and he waited for Texas to change its vote before he finally dropped that gavel, and Texas wouldn’t change its vote because it couldn’t get a release from Lyndon.”⁸⁴The first ballot saw Stevenson winning with 905.5 votes to Harriman’s 210, Johnson’s 80, and Stuart Symington’s 45.5.

With the presidential nomination decided, all eyes turned to the second spot on the ticket. “Go and talk to Adlai,” Johnson told Rowe. “Tell him I want it.” Stevenson greeted the news with a flowery set speech praising the leader. After an hour passed with no word from the candidate, LBJ issued new instructions to Rowe: “Go back and tell Stevenson … that no Texan wants to be vice president. Not only Johnson but Rayburn, no Texan wants to be vice president. The only other thing is I want to be in the meeting where the vice president is selected. I don’t want to be humiliated by not being called into the meeting.”⁸⁵

To everyone’s consternation, Stevenson then announced that he was not going to pick a running mate; he would let the convention decide. The gathering avoided anarchy, but there was a mad scramble for the vice presidential nomination featuring Albert Gore of Tennessee, John Kennedy of Massachusetts, Hubert Humphrey, and Estes Kefauver. Johnson was determined that the Texas delegation not go to Kefauver. Southerners regarded him as a traitor to his region, and the party leadership still believed that he had used the mechanism of the Senate Investigating Committee to further his interests at the expense of the party’s.

Johnson had the Lone Star State go for Gore on the first ballot. With no clear winner, he then favored Humphrey, but a quick canvass of the convention delegates showed little enthusiasm for the Minnesotan.⁸⁶Johnson then settled on Jack Kennedy: “Texas proudly casts its fifty-six votes for the fighting sailor who wears the scars of battle,” LBJ exclaimed over the microphone. Kefauver was selected on the third ballot.⁸⁷

 

WHEN THE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN GOT UNDER WAY,Texas liberals assumed that LBJ would do nothing to help the Stevenson-Kefauver ticket. Some even spread the rumor that Johnson was, like his protégé John Connally, a closet Republican. They were mistaken. The majority leader wanted the Democratic ticket to carry the state, but he wanted it to happen without any overt attacks on Eisenhower. He flew to Santa Fe for a strategy meeting with Stevenson and Kefauver, spoke at fund-raisers in Norfolk, Virginia, and Baltimore, Maryland, and accompanied Kefauver on a tour of Texas. At the same time, with few illusions about Adlai’s chances of defeating Ike, Johnson concentrated instead on seeing that the Democrats retained control of the Senate. He took a special interest in Alan Bible in Nevada, whom he had talked into running for reelection, Wayne Morse in Oregon, Warren Magnuson in Washington, and Frank Church in Idaho.⁸⁸

The presidential contests produced some surprises. Adam Clayton Powell, the black congressman from New York, came out for Eisenhower, for example. Reedy wanted to send the Powell speech to Shivers and have someone ask him publicly if he and Powell were now political bedfellows, but nothing came of it.⁸⁹One Democratic political strategist wanted to attack the Eisenhower administration for being soft on communism, but the party decided to let that sleeping dog lie as well.⁹⁰Nothing mattered. Eisenhower crushed Stevenson by a margin of 10 million popular votes and 457 to 73 in the electoral college. Stevenson, ironically, carried seven southern states, but Texas was not one of them.

There were hopeful signs, however. The Democrats retained control of both Houses, the first time a successful president had not carried at least one house for his party since Zachary Taylor in 1848. The Democrats would prevail in the Senate by a vote of forty-nine to forty-seven. To LBJ’s dismay, however, the outcome was not decided until the 85th Congress had actually convened.

There were two potential obstacles to Johnson’s retaining the majority leader’s position. Price Daniel had captured the governorship of Texas, but there had been two years left on his senatorial term. Under law, it was the prerogative of the sitting governor. Allan Shivers, to name the individual who would fill the unexpired term. Shivers had worked hard to see that Eisenhower carried the Lone Star State, and many assumed that he would appoint a Republican. But the governor named William A. “Dollar Bill” Blakeley, a reactionary Democratic businessman, to fill Daniel’s unexpired term.⁹¹

In Ohio, conservatives had elected Frank Lausche, nominally a Democrat but as conservative as any Republican. When he arrived in Washington for the opening of Congress, no one knew how he was going to vote. To LBJ’s chagrin, Lausche did not attend the opening Democratic caucus. So confident were the Republicans that they actually offered William Knowland’s name as majority leader. But when the decisive vote came, the Ohioan voted Democratic. Lyndon would be majority leader for another two years.⁹²

No sooner had LBJ overcome these obstacles than he faced a challenge from another quarter, the Democratic National Committee and liberals inside and outside the Senate. Eleanor Roosevelt, Joe Rauh, and Adlai Stevenson himself were convinced that Johnson and Rayburn had not gone all out for the national ticket in 1956 and, more important, that their “me-tooism” was a strategy calculated to fail. They wanted Democrats in Congress to enact a legislative program that would clearly distinguish the party from Eisenhower and the GOP and give the 1960 Democratic candidate a platform on which to run.

At the opening of the 85th Congress, Hubert Humphrey and five other Democratic senators issued a sixteen-point manifesto that was intended to constitute such a legislative program. At the same time, Democratic National Committee chair Paul Butler announced the formation of a seventeen-member Democratic Advisory Council “to coordinate and advance efforts in behalf of Democratic programs and principles.” The goal of this group was nothing less than enactment by Congress of each and every plank in the platform drafted at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. “The DAC … was set up as a place where the then very substantial number of Democrats who weren’t in office could express themselves … [and] take … some of the Texas image off the party,” John Kenneth Galbraith, first cochair, recalled.⁹³

A number of DAC activists were concerned, moreover, that Johnson was not using his position and the Senate to educate the American people. “The great leaders of the Senate did more than operate with other Senators in the lobbies and backrooms,” Marietta Tree, a close friend of ADA luminary Arthur Schlesinger, wrote Jim Rowe. Didn’t they see the Senate as a great forum for educating the public in the issues of the day? “The Johnson policy of doing good by stealth must only promote the Eisenhower policy of encouraging people not to think about politics.”⁹⁴

Johnson and Rayburn were appalled. This was a clear challenge to their power and a tactic guaranteed to drive southern Democrats into the arms of the Republicans. Johnson and Rayburn politely declined to become members of the DAC. Of the twenty congressional invitees, only Humphrey and Kefauver joined. What presumption, Johnson told Humphrey. “The American people will bitterly resent the idea that a group of appointive, professional politicians are supervising the work of the men they have elected to Congress.”⁹⁵The DAC duly constituted itself but was treated with cold civility by the two Texans, who now were arguably the most influential Democrats in the nation.⁹⁶