CHAPTER 16

LOST IN SPACE

ONOCTOBER4, 1957,THE SOVIETUNION SHOCKEDthe West by sending the world’s first man-made satellite,Sputnik (“traveling companion”), into orbit. That accomplishment, realized before the United States had perfected its own missile system, upset the scientific and, potentially, military balance between the two countries. Then, on November 2, the Russians launchedSputnik II , with a payload six times heavier than that carried by the first space vehicle, again proving their apparent superiority in missile technology. At that point, the Soviet Union also possessed the largest army in the world and was developing a navy second only to that of the United States. Secretary Dulles warned that Russia had overcome the “preponderance of power” that the United States had enjoyed since 1945.

In the wake ofSputnik , Americans became well-nigh obsessed with Soviet science and technology. Ignoring the fact that Russia had concentrated its resources on the military sector and in so doing doomed the rest of the economy to obsolescence and inefficiency, Americans were overcome by a sense of inferiority. Conservative Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire sounded the tocsin, declaring that the “time has clearly come to be less concerned with the depth of pile of the new broadloom rug or the height of the tail fin of the new car and to be more prepared to shed blood, sweat and tears.”¹Sputnikseemed to confirm Democratic charges that the GOP was the party of hedonism and materialism and that Eisenhower was more interested in playing golf than in defending the free world.

The Johnsons were at the ranch in Texas when news ofSputnik flashed across the nation’s television screens. The majority leader understood the implications. The Russians had now achieved parity with the United States in delivery systems; the threat that gave massive retaliation and brinkmanship their credibility was gone. If the Soviets and Chinese communists decided to unleash their vast armies on the free world, what could the United States do?²

Not surprisingly, the White House tried to minimize the importance of theSputnik launch. Eisenhower had left that Friday for a week of golf at his farm outside Gettysburg. Informed on Saturday morning of the successful orbit, he left the administration’s response to Press Secretary James C. Hagerty and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. They assured the media and the nation thatSputnik came as no surprise to Washington and that there was no cause whatever for alarm.

Press and public were not reassured. The editors ofLife compared the launching ofSputnik to the shots fired at Lexington and Concord and called on Americans to respond as the Minutemen had.³

 

THE “MISSILE GAP”was an issue on which Democrats of all stripes could agree. For years, cold warriors like Senators Henry Jackson of Washington and Stuart Symington of Missouri had been raising a hue and cry about the deplorable state of the nation’s defense under the penurious Eisenhower administration. Symington had been particularly vocal. Aside from the principles involved, the Missouri senator saw theSputnik controversy as the perfect stepping stone to the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960. He urged Richard Russell to convene the Armed Services Committee and hold hearings.

On October 5, Russell himself told a Georgia audience, “We now know beyond a doubt that the Russians have the ultimate weapon—a long range missile capable of delivering atomic and hydrogen explosives across continents and oceans.”⁴Two weeks later, the Democratic Advisory Council, which included former President Truman and Adlai Stevenson, accused the Eisenhower administration of “unilateral disarmament at the expense of our national security.”⁵

No less than Symington, LBJ was mindful of the political moment, and he intended to take advantage of it for his and his party’s benefits. “The integration issue is not going to go away,” George Reedy observed. “The only possibility is to find another issue which is even more potent. Otherwise the Democratic future is bleak … Sputnik fulfills the requirements.”⁶

But, as in the past, Johnson believed that the wisest posture for senatorial Democrats was one of constructive criticism. Early in his career he had sensed how powerful was the average American’s loyalty to their commander in chief and the armed forces in times of crisis. Woe to those who were perceived to be undermining General President Eisenhower and the Joint Chiefs at a time when the nation faced a mortal threat from the forces of international communism. The leader believed that an investigation was in order, but it should be impartial and bipartisan—and he should be in charge.

Johnson beefed up his Preparedness Subcommittee staff with the addition of New York attorney Ed Weisl and Don Cook, plus three prominent scientists from Harvard, Rice, and Cal Tech. As the missile gap hearings prepared to get under way, LBJ emphasized the importance of fairness to the subcommittee’s other members, Democrats Symington, Kefauver, and Stennis and Republicans Bridges, Flanders, and Saltonstall. The only guilty parties in the inquiry, he said, were Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev.⁷

 

BY THE TIMEthe Soviet Union launched its firstSputnik , an American missile program was well under way. Until the spring of 1954, the concept of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of delivering atomic warheads to targets thousands of miles away had been impractical because existing atomic bombs had been too heavy and guidance systems too primitive. But then the United States successfully tested a hydrogen bomb in the Marshall Islands. A thousand times more powerful than the devices that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a thermonuclear warhead was also much lighter. Moreover, one would have to land only roughly adjacent to a target to destroy it.

By October 1957, six major missile programs were under way in the United States at an annual cost of more than $1 billion.⁸Symington and members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff believed that this was far too little and warned that the United States was lagging behind the Soviet Union in the development of ICBMs. In November, several days after the launch of the firstSputnik , the Gaither Commission, impaneled to make recommendations on the nation’s system of fallout shelters, delivered its report. It went far beyond civil defense and warned that the United States would soon be vulnerable to a Russian nuclear attack. The commission report recommended an increase in defense spending of $40 billion over the next five to eight years. But Eisenhower was as budgetary-minded as ever, and resisted pressure for increased spending.Sputnik or noSputnik , the president declared, he was not going to bankrupt the nation.⁹

The president had another reason for not overreacting. Since 1956, high-flying U-2 reconnaissance planes had been taking photographs of the Soviet Union, pictures of a strip of Russian territory 125 miles wide by some 3,000 miles long, with images clear enough to make a newspaper headline legible. Eisenhower had known of the first two Soviet ICBM tests that occurred in 1957, and the CIA had warned him aboutSputnik. U-2 observations showed that the Russians were only a couple of months ahead of the United States in missile technology and nowhere near ready to deploy ICBMs. The problem was that the existence of the U-2s was top-secret information. Ike had not shared it with the Gaither Committee, and he refused to reveal it either to the Preparedness Subcommittee or the American people.¹⁰He was certain that the existing missile program was more than adequate, but he could not prove it.¹¹

 

LBJWOULD DOMINATE the Preparedness Subcommittee hearings that opened in November. He introduced witnesses, led cross-examinations, and acted as principal spokesman to the press. His motives were several. Despite protestations to the contrary, there were partisan considerations. Here was what the American people should take away from the proceedings, Reedy declared: “It took the Russians four years to catch up with our atom bomb; it took the Russians nine months to catch up with our hydrogen bomb; now we do not even have a timetable for catching up with their satellite.”¹²There were political considerations. Johnson intended to contain Symington, so that he, rather than the Missourian, would become the recognized congressional expert on space and the missile gap. And there were economic factors. Johnson wanted American activities beyond the stratosphere to be dominated by a civilian agency rather than the military. He perceived the political benefits to himself but also the potential economic boon to the nation, and particularly Texas, of an accelerated space program. Finally, theSputnik crisis might actually be the issue that got America moving again.¹³It could be the spark that led to the “realization of America’s full potential,” observed Abe Fortas, Johnson’s friend and confidant.¹⁴

 

THE INDIVIDUALS WHO DOMINATEDthe first week of hearings were Edward Teller, “the father of the hydrogen bomb;” Vannevar Bush, who had mobilized the U.S. scientific community during World War II; and General James Doolittle, who had led the daring 1942 bombing raid on Tokyo. Bush, who enraged the Eisenhower administration by termingSputnik America’s greatest defeat since Pearl Harbor, observed that although the United States had fallen dangerously behind the Russians, it was not too late. With effort and commitment of resources, America could catch up. Rather than crash weapon development programs, Bush emphasized long-term investment in scientific research. Doolittle painted with an even broader brush, arguing for an “overhaul [of] our own educational program,” with a view to producing more scientists and engineers.¹⁵

LBJ and his advisers took the argument one step further.Sputnik should be used to advance the cause of social justice and social security for all Americans. “The Romans dominated the world because they could build roads,” George Reedy observed. “They did not learn to build roads because they were planning a military weapon but because they needed them for their whole economy … The British dominated the world because they could build the best ships. But these ships were not designed to be naval weapons. They were built because the British needed ships to carry their commerce and to explore the new world.”¹⁶

On October 9, Eisenhower had rashly promised the American people that the United States would have a satellite in orbit by December, this despite the fact that theVanguard missile that was to carry the payload had never been fully tested. Fearing a possible public relations disaster, the Defense Department closed the launch area, but more than a hundred reporters and TV cameramen gathered along the road to Cape Canaveral in Florida, the launch site. On December 6,Vanguard’ s first-stage engine ignited. Amid a huge burst of flame and cloud of smoke the rocket lifted off the launch pad for a few feet, hovered, and then fell back and exploded. The national sense of humiliation and betrayal was almost palpable. “Flopnik,” “Dudnik,” “Kaputnik” were some of the names the press invented for the failure.¹⁷“How long, how long, O God,” LBJ exclaimed to reporters, “how long will it take us to catch up with the Russians?”¹⁸

On January 7, 1958, the day before Eisenhower’s State of the Union address, the majority leader addressed the Democratic caucus. “Control of space means control of the world,” he declared. Republican budget constraints were endangering present and future generations of Americans. He subsequently submitted to Congress seventeen recommendations on space and the missile program, which, as intended, clearly identified the Democratic party with a topic that was at once fearsome and exhilarating: challenging and beating the Russians in missile technology and taking the lead in exploring outer space.¹⁹Johnson’s handling of theSputnik crisis was “a minor masterpiece,” declared columnists Evans and Novak.²⁰

On February 6, LBJ spearheaded a Senate resolution establishing a Special Committee on Space and Astronautics whose mission was to draft legislation for a national space program. To no one’s surprise, he was chosen chair, and on April 14, he and Styles Bridges cosponsored an administration-backed bill creating the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA).²¹Dry and dull as it seemed, organization would be everything, Jim Rowe told LBJ; it “may well determine whether life or death will be the fate of this planet.”²²Although Eisenhower originally favored placing the space program within the Defense Department, Vice President Nixon and presidential space adviser James R. Killian sided with Johnson.²³Following a White House conference with LBJ in attendance, the way was cleared for the space measure to become law on July 29, 1958.²⁴

TheSputnik crisis would set the stage for a period of national soul-searching. New Deal-Fair Deal liberals within the Democratic party would turn the missile gap into an education, health care, Social Security, social justice gap. With a vengeance, they would join the cold war to the cause of domestic reform. Without some degree of social and economic security for blacks, Reedy reminded Johnson, the civil rights issue would never go away. LBJ’s lieutenant was thinking defensively as well. “It is vitally important that the defense emergency not be used as an excuse for cutting back on the social gains our country has made,” he told his boss.²⁵

But increasingly, Johnson would think offensively. The gap, real or perceived, could be used to fulfill the promise of the New Deal-Fair Deal and enable the Democrats to recapture the White House.

 

THE MISSILE GAP,coupled with a severe recession that began in December 1957, moved the Democratic Congress to action. John Sparkman called for more public housing, Robert Kerr more extensive and longer unemployment relief, Albert Gore a new Public Works Administration, Paul Douglas lower trade barriers, and Jack Kennedy higher levels of unemployment compensation. LBJ took these and combined them into a ten-point program, which he outlined at a dinner honoring Harry Truman. With Eisenhower fighting him every step of the way, the majority leader guided measures through the Senate that appropriated $1.8 billion for housing and $1.8 billion for highway construction and extended the Hill-Burton Hospital Construction Act for three more years. Congress also barred Ezra Taft Benson from reducing parity payments to farmers below 1957 levels. In addition, the House and Senate renewed the Reciprocal Trade Act, authorized the largest expenditure in U.S. history for medical research—$300 million—and increased Social Security benefits.²⁶

In Johnson’s opinion, however, Congress’s most important achievement in 1958 was passage of the National Defense Education Act, which provided $1 billion over seven years for loans and fellowships to college students. Ed Weisl and Glen Wilson of the Preparedness Subcommittee staff had worked up a comprehensive study comparing the American and Soviet educational systems. “The Soviets are now producing scientists and engineers at more than twice the rate of the United States,” they reported. “The magnitude of the need is difficult to comprehend. What is needed is money, in large amounts.”²⁷Wilson and committee staffer Gerry Siegel envisioned a “Johnson Plan,” the heart of which would be a college scholarship program “based on the philosophy that in our country we must eventually extend the privilege of higher education to all who are able to receive it.” Higher incomes earned by college graduates would swell the tax base and more than cover the cost of federally funded scholarships.²⁸

 

BY THE SPRING OF1958,Johnson had whipsawed the administration into accepting a full-blown partnership between Eisenhower and Dulles on the one hand and on the other, Johnson, Russell, and Fulbright, who would become chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1959. Dulles and the majority leader talked frequently on the phone, so frequently that the Republican leadership began to complain.

By the midpoint of Eisenhower’s second term, he and Dulles would not meet with Knowland and his colleagues on foreign policy issues without the Democratic leadership present, for fear of alienating Johnson.²⁹The majority leader wanted to earn a reputation as a creative contributor to U.S. diplomatic and defense policy, while gaining leverage with the administration over other issues. He also wanted to embarrass the GOP for having openly attacked both the Roosevelt and Truman administrations during times of grave national peril. Accusing the political opposition of being unpatriotic was, for LBJ, beyond the pale.

“Lyndon Johnson has never ridden higher,” John Steele wrote in the cover story that appeared in the March 17, 1958, issue ofTime , “and he should be a happy man. But he is not and he may never be.”³⁰

Steele was right; one of the sources of LBJ’s discontent was his portrayal by the national press. TheTime piece he found particularly galling. The article took Johnson seriously as a political figure but not as an individual. No man had ever had more control over Congress, Steele wrote. LBJ had single-handedly held the Democratic party together during the difficult Eisenhower era. The journalist noted the quote by Edmund Burke prominently displayed on the leader’s wall: “Those who would carry on great public schemes must be proof against the worst fatiguing delays, the most mortifying disappointments, the most shocking insults, and worst of all, the presumptuous judgment of the ignorant upon their designs.”

But as an individual, Johnson was painfully imperfect: vain, simultaneously oversensitive and insensitive, undereducated, unsophisticated, complicated, maudlin, humorless, and self-pitying. “He sits at his command-post desk in Office G-14, Senate wing, U.S. Capitol, restless with energy, tumbling with talk,” Steele wrote. “He flashes gold cuff links, fiddles with the gold band of a gold wristwatch, toys with a tiny gold pill box, tinkers with a gold desk ornament … His LBJ brand appears everywhere, on his shirts, his handkerchiefs, his personal jewelry, in his wife’s initials, in his daughters’ initials … Lyndon Johnson would rather be caught dead than in a suit costing less than $200.” The LBJ portrayed inTime was gauche. “When host at his LBJ Ranch near Johnson City, Texas,” Steele wrote, “he often serves hamburgers cut to the shape of Texas. But an unavoidable symmetrical flaw seems to bother him. ‘Eat the Panhandle first,’ he urges his guests.” The final picture in the piece was of the ranch house with the caption “Eat the Panhandle First.”³¹

LBJ ordered George Reedy to bar John Steele from the leader’s offices. With difficulty, Reedy dissuaded him, pointing out that such discriminatory action would give the magazine an excuse for continued attacks.³²Lady Bird and his staff labored to convince him that the article might have been “flippant” and “snide” but that on the whole it was positive, and the cover was a plus. “You are entirely too sensitive to press criticism,” Jim Rowe told Johnson. “It has now become a subject of active and amused comment among the Washington press.”³³

Rebekah, who was delighted to have been quoted, was also reassuring: “The article inTime is basically good. It tells of your strength, accomplishments, consecration to service, high abilities, and outstanding qualities, but in the effort to picture you as one who has frailties and faults as well as virtues, the writer descends to exaggeration and superficiality.” But as was always the case with his mother, in the midst of lavish praise there was the rebuke. “Clothes are merely incidental and not a matter of vital importance in the life of a great statesman,” she scolded. “You want to stay near the people, to never lose ‘the common touch,’ to understand their interests, hopes and hardships, and most of them are poor people.”³⁴

Johnson may have been so upset by the Steele article because it depicted the Texan as a leading contender for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination. Such talk, which had abounded in the national press for months, flattered Lyndon’s ego but aroused intense anxieties as well. Would he be up to the job? Did he really have a chance to win? Could he stand rejection if he lost? What would a run for the presidency do to his health, mental as well as physical? Indeed, so overwrought did LBJ become at talk of him as presidential timber that he half believed that such stories were part of a plot by those out to get him. “I regret that all too frequently these past weeks my name and picture have been much in the news,” he wrote his mother. “This fact creates many problems in assuaging the hurt pride of others. Then, too, I can envision the inevitable downfall that must and will come. I know the reaction of men to fame and I am fearful that there are some who seek by the means of a great and enormous publicity—an inordinate one—to bring about my destruction.”³⁵

So persistent was his boss in complaining about the damage presidential stories were doing to him, that, exasperated, Reedy observed that there was only one way to stop such talk: “Step down from any position of influence and prestige.”³⁶LBJ replied that he had already been considering giving up the leadership. Throughout his political career, Johnson had threatened to resign whatever position he held when he was feeling sorry for himself. But this time, apparently, was different. Ironically, although abdication would quiet the presidential speculation in the press, it would actually put him in a better position to compete for the highest office in the land. The leadership was a notoriously bad springboard to the White House. Indications were that the Democrats were going to win big in the upcoming midterm elections. A large majority would make it more difficult for the leader to control affairs. It would be Democrat against Democrat rather than Democrat against Republican.³⁷

Johnson continued to consider resignation into May, but then decided against it. Without his power base, he would become fair game for those who hated him. “There will be people who will turn on you unexpectedly just because the wolf pack always turns on the fallen leader,” Reedy told him. Drew Pearson would jump on his personal life with a vengeance. There would be much speculation that the Johnson heart was about to give out, literally and figuratively. And who, after all, would keep the South in the Democratic party?³⁸

 

DURING THE TUMULTUOUS DEBATESover the 1957 civil rights bill, the Eisenhower Doctrine, and his leadership of the Democratic party, LBJ was periodically distracted by problems with his family’s health. During the 1956 presidential nominating convention in Chicago, Rebekah informed Lyndon and Lady Bird that she had discovered “nodules” under her arm. A subsequent doctor’s prognosis was chilling: lymph sarcoma.³⁹

In 1957, Sam Houston, drunk more often than sober, had fallen in his own dining room, severely fracturing his leg. He subsequently developed osteomylitis, and after being operated on, was in a body cast from armpit to heel for a year. Lyndon hired him to join his staff as “political adviser.”⁴⁰

In July, Lyndon wrote his ailing mother: “I believe it is true that the adversity we suffer makes bigger persons of us all. I read a quote from Longfellow the other day that left a great impression on me. ‘It has done me good to be somewhat parched by the heat and drenched by the rain of life.’ The fullest, most complete lives are those that have known suffering and experienced setbacks. All my life I have marveled at the way you have borne with grace, discipline, and immense dignity the abundant difficulties and hardships that have filled your life. That’s the reason you are who you are and when the balance sheet is totaled up it will be said of you that you are a great woman and the most wonderful mother a man ever had.”⁴¹

On September 12, Rebekah Johnson died; she was seventy-eight. Her passing, together with the coming of his fiftieth birthday on August 27, sent Lyndon into a tailspin. He wallowed in memories of his childhood and talked frequently of going home to Texas. “He intermingled almost daily childish tantrums,” George Reedy recalled, “threats of resignation … wild drinking bouts; a remarkably non-paternal yen for young girls; and an almost frantic desire to be in the company of young people.”⁴²

 

THE MORE POWERFULLyndon Johnson became, the more unpopular he seemed to be. In 1958 George Reedy noted a general revulsion against Texas and Texans, especially among northern liberals. In the first place, the Lone Star State was increasingly identified with Big Oil. According to a popular myth circulating among intellectuals and journalists, “The oil industry is evil and greedy and has been pampered by special privileges granted by the Federal government. Texas is the home of the oil industry and therefore is the home of evil and greed. Texas is populated by millionaires, indifferent to the welfare of the people, who ride around in gold-plated Cadillacs lighting dollar coronas with thousand-dollar bills.”⁴³An article in the March 1957 issue ofHarper’s by Ronnie Dugger claimed, “The very forms of government (in Texas) have been corrupted. Instead of the ‘conflict of interest’ of an occasional adviser in Washington, the government in Austin harbors entire agencies which act from an identity of interest with the industries they are charged to regulate … The rich think they can buy stock in the Legislature or an executive agency as they can in a corporation, and they can.”⁴⁴Jim Rowe advised Johnson, “The constant propaganda centering in New York that you and Rayburn run the Congress for the sake of Texas and will pay no attention whatsoever to the rest of the Democratic party outside of the Congress, is steadily growing.”⁴⁵

Typically, Johnson clung to the belief that there was a conspiracy in the press to “get him.” Reedy dismissed the notion, but in such a way as to heighten Johnson’s sense of isolation and persecution. “It is difficult—if not impossible—to conceive of Mark Childs, David Lawrence,Time Magazine, Doris Fleeson, theNew Republic and theChicago Tribune being bought or buying a bill of goods by the same person,” he told his boss.⁴⁶

Reedy was only partially correct. Not a conspiracy, perhaps, but there was a connection between the Democratic Advisory Council, the Americans for Democratic Action, the DOT, and its organ, theTexas Observer. “I’m a long-time contributor to theTexas Observer and very devoted to that paper,” Joe Rauh declared in a 1969 interview. “You see, that was really my only source about Texas politics because I don’t read the Texas papers.”⁴⁷

The image of LBJ that these organizations and theObserver projected throughout 1958 and 1959 was that of a venal hypocrite attempting to act the moderate liberal while serving the interests of Big Oil.⁴⁸He was portrayed as a man obsessed with the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination but without the courage to say so, much less make an open run for it. A self-proclaimed heir of FDR, LBJ was a staunch supporter of Taft-Hartley. He was a stealer of elections and an exploiter of his office for private gain.⁴⁹How could liberals trust a man who in December 1957 addressed the liberal Farmers Union convention in Abilene and then ventured to Houston to hobnob with “the plumed plutocrats … the Dixiecrats, Shivercrats, and Republicans”?⁵⁰

The more enlightened perceived LBJ as weak rather than wicked. In May 1958, the respected political columnist and editor of theNew York Post James A. Wechsler wrote a widely read piece on the Johnson leadership and the future of the Democratic party. LBJ was no reactionary wolf in liberal sheep’s clothing. He was a “notably enlightened Texas senator.” Wechsler’s beef with him was that as majority leader, Johnson had conceived it his role to fashion a historic compromise between the state of Texas—essentially a small government, low-tax, individualistic, special interest-dominated entity—and the liberal forces of the Democratic party. He was being asked to support that compromise, Wechsler said, and he could not. He could not because there was no appreciable difference between the LBJ compromise and “so-called modern Republicanism.”⁵¹

Then there was civil rights. “I do not regard the 1957 Civil Rights Bill as anything approaching the Magna Carta,” Wechsler wrote Jim Rowe, who initiated an extended dialogue with the journalist following his editorial. “I am unwilling to proclaim to the Negroes of New York or of South Africa that we must all be indebted to Johnson for giving them so little so late. Again I must concede that if I lived in Texas I … might well be campaigning for him for Senator.” But he did not live in Texas, and LBJ was Democratic majority leader, not just another legislator from the Lone Star State. “I thought Johnson was at his best when he talked about the essential spiritlessness of the country,” Wechsler said. “But I think the lack of fire which he deplores is in large part a product of the essential conditions of compromise under which he operates.”⁵²

At one level, LBJ empathized with the Post editorial. He would have loved to have stood forthrightly with the forces of liberalism, railed against institutionalized racism and corporate exploitation of the working class, and touted the federal government as an instrument of social and economic justice. But the world was not that simple. He was the senior senator from Texas, not New York; his constituency was more conservative than those of senators from the urban Northeast or industrial Midwest.

But, Johnson was convinced, any fool could see that he was not kowtowing to the Shivercrats; he had first crushed them and now was opening the door for them to come onboard the political ark on his terms. He had humbled the Democrats of Texas and was battling the Democratic Advisory Council because if the former had their way, Texas would go Republican, and if the latter prevailed, the entire South would fall to the GOP. The Democratic party was and would continue to be the party of reform and social justice. “It has been many decades since the Republican party offered labor anything but a court injunction and a group of strikebreakers,” as George Reedy put it.⁵³And if the Democratic party was relegated to permanent minority status, as it would be if the South defected, what would happen to the cause of reform and social justice?⁵⁴

There was the cold war to think about as well. “The United States simply cannot fight Jefferson Davis and Nikita Khrushchev at the same time,” George Reedy noted.⁵⁵

In effect, Johnson was trapped by his ideals and by geographic and historical circumstance, and he realized it. If he followed the course he knew to be in the interests of the masses and the party that served them, he was bound to be unpopular with the self-appointed spokesmen of his Texas constituents. And he craved the people’s love and approval above almost all else. His angst was terrific, and its corrosive effect on the Johnson personality became increasingly marked.

 

THROUGHOUT HIS YEARSas majority leader, LBJ was able to gain some respite from his schedule and his obsessions by retiring with his family to the ranch. The big, comfortable house on the banks of the Pedernales was balm “to his spirit and heart,” Lady Bird recalled. “This country,” he remarked in 1957, “has always been a place where I could come and fill my cup … and recharge myself for the more difficult days ahead.”

After Congress adjourned in August 1953, the Johnsons spent five months at the ranch. Following the 1954 recess, Lyndon, Bird, and the girls stayed in the Hill Country until Congress reconvened in January 1955. The heart attack kept LBJ at the ranch from summer through fall. In 1956 and 1957, he spent the greater part of the months of August, September, and October and half of November and December there. The fall and early winter were LBJ’s favorite times. There was respite from the blistering summertime heat and drought, and there were doves and deer to hunt.⁵⁶

During the 1958 campaigning season, a host of important politicos made the pilgrimage to the Pedernales. Visitors drove the sixty miles from Austin to the stone-pillared entrance to the ranch. LBJ could be found outside relaxing by the pool, sipping a diet Fresca, or inside taking phone calls.

Guests were ushered into the large living room, which was decorated with overstuffed sofas and chairs, a stone fireplace, and, in the corner, a domino table ready for action. LBJ rose at daybreak and found some way to let his guests know that they were to follow suit. There was the inevitable tour of the ranch house grounds, beautifully covered with bright green coastal Bermuda grass framed by fields of bluebonnets lovingly planted by Lady Bird. After dinner, LBJ usually insisted on leading his guest by flashlight to Cousin Oriole’s cottage, about a half mile from the ranch house. He would call out to Oriole—Mrs. J. W. Bailey, whose mother was a Bunton—and the elderly lady would appear in bathrobe and slippers. Cousin Oriole was tall, rough-hewn, but gracious. She would invite one of the guests to sit in the horsehair love seat on the porch. Visitors could see that the house was simple but well cared for, with a white metal bed in the only bedroom. She would discuss religion and inquire after her uninvited guests’ welfare. Often, Lyndon would bring her an autographed picture of himself.⁵⁷One can only wonder what the old lady thought of this charade, of being a living relic of the poor boy past that Lyndon sought to create for his guests.

Deer hunts were usually by safari rather than from the hunting tower. Lyndon and his party loaded into late-model Lincoln Continentals or Cadillacs. At a preselected spot, where ranch hands had been driving deer toward the convoy, Lyndon would stop. Windows were rolled down and host and guests blasted away without ever getting out of the cars. On the way back to the ranch house, LBJ would drive among his swelling herd of cattle, blowing on his car horn, which roughly imitated the bellow of a bull in rut. Guests were treated to a harangue on the lineage and value of the animals. From the pastures he alerted the kitchen staff by car phone to have meals ready at a certain time.⁵⁸The routine was repeated over and over as the roster of visiting politicians, journalists, and friends changed.

 

BY THE TIMEthe congressional campaigning season got under way in 1958, it was clear that Eisenhower could no longer carry the GOP. During the winter of 1957-1958, a severe recession gripped the country. Many of America’s leading industries were operating at less than 70 percent, and unemployment mounted rapidly.Sputnik seemed to confirm Democratic charges that Eisenhower was a modern-day Nero who golfed while America burned. In contrast, the Democrats had demonstrated that they could stick together and were fit to rule. By July, pundits were predicting sweeping Democratic gains in both houses of Congress when voters went to the polls in November. Together with George Smathers and Earle Clements, LBJ ran the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee with skill and energy and made campaign appearances in eight states.⁵⁹The results of the midterm elections were astounding, far surpassing the predictions of the most optimistic party strategists. In the House, the Democrats gained a nearly two-to-one advantage, 282 to 153, and in the Senate they increased their majority from two to twenty: sixty-four to thirty-four.⁶⁰Never in American history had one party made such gains in that body.

Ironically, LBJ and Sam Rayburn were ambivalent about the severe thumping the GOP had taken. Both the speaker and the majority leader had predicted that with large majorities, Democrats would be much harder to control. Internecine warfare was likely to break out, with possible dire consequences for 1960 and for LBJ’s leadership. And they were right. Jim Rowe warned LBJ that he would have to sever his tacit alliance with the Eisenhower White House and make substantial concessions to northern liberals. Much would be expected from the 87th Congress from voters looking for an excuse to vote Democratic in 1960.

To appease the fifteen new Democratic senators, five liberals and ten moderates, the leader announced on November 7 a twelve-point legislative program that would further extend the New Deal-Fair Deal, protect farmers, workers, consumers, and small businessmen from Republican reactionaries, and differentiate the Democratic party from the Eisenhower administration. Both Frank Church and Hubert Humphrey renewed their pledges of loyalty to both Johnson and his political strategy. But others were not so compliant. Joe Clark, a liberal blueblood from mainline Philadelphia, disliked the leader from the day he took his seat in the Senate in 1957. “He was a hypocritical s.o.b,” Clark later said. “He was a typical Texas wheeler-dealer with no ethical sense whatever, but a great pragmatic ability to get things done.”⁶¹

Clark was not Johnson’s only liberal critic in the new Senate. As he had in 1958, LBJ delivered his own state of the union address to the Democratic caucus the day before Eisenhower gave his to the joint session on January 8, 1959. After outlining his legislative agenda, the leader adjourned the meeting, declaring that there would be no need for another caucus until the following January. Offended, first-term Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire dared to openly criticize the leadership. “There has never been a time when power has been as sharply concentrated as it is in the Senate today,” he declared in a speech on February 23. In subsequent harangues he blasted the leader not only for “one-man rule,” but for formulating Democratic policy in the Senate “on an ad-lib, off-the-cuff basis.” Wayne Morse, Paul Douglas, and Joe Clark stood in the wings and applauded.⁶²

So irritating did LBJ find Proxmire that he did him the honor of attacking him by name on the floor of the Senate. Proxmire needed a “fairy god-mother” or a “wet-nurse,” Johnson told his colleagues. Frustrated, Clark and Proxmire gradually desisted, but Democratic liberals remained restive and their numbers were imposingly large.⁶³

Resentment against Johnson was as much over form as substance. He was perceived by Washington insiders as both arrogant and grasping. On the eve of Ike’s 1958 and 1959 State of the Union messages, Capitol wits declared that the majority leader “will resent Ike’s interference in governmental affairs” and reported that “Senator Lyndon Johnson entered the House chambers to a sustained rising ovation. He was accompanied by the President.”⁶⁴Jack Kennedy, who had been returned to the Senate from Massachusetts by an astounding eight hundred thousand-vote margin, amused his campaign audiences with this story: God had told him in a dream that he not only would be reelected, but would be the next president. When he told Stu Symington about the dream, Symington had responded that oddly enough, he had had the same dream. When they both told Lyndon of their visions, he observed, “That’s funny. For the life of me I can’t remember tapping either of you two boys for the job.”⁶⁵

The leader’s hoarding of office space while others, especially freshmen, suffered in cramped quarters was notorious. TheChicago Tribune dubbed him the “Maharajah of Texas.” His domain consisted of twenty cathedral-size rooms, ornately decorated and thickly carpeted. “On the ceiling Constantino Brumidi’s famous frescoes of Madonna-like women and cherubim look down on the majority leader as he talks to the unending flow of visitors to his office,”⁶⁶a reporter for theDallas Morning News wrote after visiting the leader in the historic chambers of the District of Columbia Committee. There were in addition, the offices occupied by his Preparedness and Space Committees, a private room off the gallery just over the Senate floor, the majority conference room on the second floor of the Capitol, and a seven-room suite across the hall from the Senate chamber. The new digs were decorated in green and gold with plush furniture. Visitors who managed to penetrate to the leader’s inner office were greeted by the sight of a lighted, full-length portrait of LBJ himself.⁶⁷

 

BY THE FALL OF1958, Lyndon Johnson was considering the possibility that he might become president, although he continually denied his candidacy. “There is no vestige of a Johnson-for-President organization,” John Steele wrote his editors. “But Lyndon has strong sinews of strength running through the South, the Southwest, the West up to the California line, and now in Indiana, Missouri, touching here and there in Illinois, south of Chicago. If such a line was to be consolidated with a Southwestern alliance at its heart, if there was a convention deadlock … Lyndon Johnson could find himself the nominee.”⁶⁸

Johnson would wake up in the morning desperately wanting to be president, George Reedy recalled, and then by afternoon be completely repelled by the idea. If he were not going to be a formal candidate, Johnson decided, at least he could make himself an attractive option.

The majority leader bullied the administration into allowing him to make a speech before the UN on the exploration of outer space. The national press gave the address positive reviews; so did international journalists, although they were somewhat nonplussed by the press conference that followed. He was “a country boy from Texas come to howdy and shake,” LBJ told the assembled reporters. He quoted his daddy, Lady Bird, and Isaiah. Pulling a telegram from his pocket, he announced that his daughters, Lucy and Lynda, had congratulated him and Lady Bird on their twenty-fourth wedding anniversary. “We’re so happy you married each other,” he read. What had all this to do with international politics, the men and women from Reuters,Le Monde , and theManchester Guardian wondered, but ascribed Johnson’s performance to the eccentricities of American politics.⁶⁹

Cornpone aside, Johnson boasted a sophisticated political philosophy that resonated with many Americans at mid-century. In a further effort to burnish his image as a statesman and political thinker as well as doer, LBJ published an article in the winter 1958 edition of theTexas Quarterly. Echoing FDR, he declared, “I am a free man, a U.S. Senator, and a Democrat, in that order. I am also a liberal, a conservative, a Texan, a taxpayer, a rancher, a businessman, a consumer, a parent, a voter … At the heart of my own beliefs is a rebellion against this very process of classifying, labeling and filing Americans under headings.”⁷⁰

In a sense, Johnson was a Madisonian. Like the Constitution that he helped write, James Madison did not envision the need for institutionalized political parties. Coalitions would form, but they would be temporary, and this was for the best. LBJ agreed. “Our system of partisan politics—which has come to mean so much to us today—is not a system ordained and established by the Constitution,” he declared in 1959. “The spirit of the Constitution is hostile to the concept of competitive partisanship.”⁷¹

As the nation came to grips with questions of wealth distribution, resource allocation, war and peace, civil rights, and political representation, positions were more likely to be determined by the content of particular disputes than by party labels or slogans. In a contest where today’s enemies might be tomorrow’s allies, conflicts were sure to be less severe, less damaging. Fuzziness, Johnson argued, was not simply a political expedient, but an authentic reflection of the “American people’s own ambiguities of conviction and purpose.”⁷²

“With few rare exceptions,” Johnson insisted, “the great political leaders of our country have been men of reconciliation—men who could hold their parties together. Lincoln never permitted the radical Republicans to drive more moderate elements out of the party. Woodrow Wilson appealed to elements throughout the nation and only went down to failure when he became too doctrinaire and too arbitrary. FDR successfully maintained a coalition that ranged all the way from [South Carolina senator and power broker] Jimmy Byrnes to [wealthy industrialist] Leon Henderson. Theodore Roosevelt was a great political figure up to the point that he split his own party.”⁷³

Johnson’s “non-partisan nationalism,” as Horace Busby termed it, was very much in tune with the pluralistic and consensus-oriented 1950s.⁷⁴It was no accident that 1959 saw the publication of Daniel Bell’sThe End of Ideology.

The problem with Johnsonian-Madisonian pluralistic, consensus politics, critics argued, was that many groups and interests—minorities, the poor, uneducated isolated rural dwellers, migrant workers, and inner-city slum dwellers—were not granted access to the playing field. To critics of the Johnson philosophy, the American political landscape was like a high plateau with steep sides, with “legitimate” interests battling for position on the high ground and the disfranchised and voiceless struggling futilely to climb up the steep sides.⁷⁵

LBJ would not have disagreed with such an analogy. He would have argued that all needed to be admitted to the playing field, and he would work to gain them access. He was also struggling to see that a significant group—white southerners—were not thrown off the plateau and into the pit of political oblivion. Unfortunately, the very aggregation he was trying to save was battling to keep another significant group—black Americans—off the plateau.

LBJ understood that, ironically, the fate of these two peoples were tied inextricably together. He believed that if southern whites were cast into darkness, southern blacks would find it that much more difficult, if not impossible, to ascend. Insofar as it was necessary to keep the South in the Democratic party, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Russell were in general agreement.⁷⁶The difference between Russell and Johnson was that the Georgian wanted to make southern nationalism the cornerstone of mainstream politics, whereas the majority leader wanted to bring the South into the political mainstream.

 

WHEN CONGRESS CONVENEDin January 1959, the national press was abuzz about the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination. Despite his Catholicism, the glamorous John F. Kennedy led the pack. Close behind were Hubert Humphrey, the darling of labor and civil rights groups, Stuart Symington, who hoped to capitalize on his reputation as an expert on questions of national defense, and Adlai Stevenson, the sentimental favorite of old New Dealers. And there was Lyndon Johnson.

In January, theSaturday Evening Post ran a generally laudatory piece by Stewart Alsop entitled “Lyndon Johnson: How Does He Do It?” Alsop predicted that LBJ would run for the presidency, but quietly, indirectly: “Johnson, with his hatred of failure, will not become an active candidate and thus risk the humiliation suffered by his friend Richard Russell as the Southern candidate in 1952.”⁷⁷Alsop proved to be right on the money.

Throughout the fall and winter of 1958, Jim Rowe had urged LBJ to declare and make an open run at the presidency. Johnson steadily refused, although he did nothing to discourage those who wanted to tout his candidacy. In January 1959, a frustrated Rowe cast his lot with Hubert Humphrey. Arthur Schlesinger later speculated that this “defection” fit in perfectly with the majority leader’s plan. A vigorous run by the Minnesotan would help hold the Kennedy forces in check, and then, when a deadlock emerged at the convention, LBJ would have his old friend Rowe in a strategic position in the Humphrey camp.⁷⁸

Johnson’s strategy, then, continued to be to pose as the most effective majority leader the country had ever produced, a figure with a balanced view toward the civil rights issue, and a politician-statesman whose knowledge of the world was increasing daily. Johnson’s Madisonian political philosophy was a reflection of the Texan’s deeply held beliefs and his experiences but also a product of what he believed the American people really desired. Pragmatists to the core, Americans wanted a flexible, able person to lead them who could reach out to groups all along the political spectrum. They instinctively feared division and so could support a man and an approach that would contain the extremes that continually threatened to tear the country apart. “Someone must at all costs keep this broad and diverse country together,” Jim Rowe wrote LBJ. “Slowly the problem is getting worse and slowly the men of good will in both sections of the country are beginning to wonder about, and therefore to accept, the possibility of defeat.”⁷⁹

 

ON RARE OCCASIONS,an issue came up in the Senate on which liberals and the Eisenhower administration could agree, and LBJ shone. Such an issue was statehood for Alaska and Hawaii. Statehood bills had come before a number of previous Congresses and had gotten nowhere. Southerners were opposed to Hawaii’s admission because of its racially mixed population. Senator Daniel K. Inouye later recalled that Hawaiian statehood was a pure civil rights issue: “The argument against the statehood bill, although not articulated publicly, was that if Hawaii became a state you would have representation by a strange looking people. As one senator said, ‘How would you like to be sitting next to a fellow named Yamamoto?’ ”⁸⁰

The Eisenhower administration favored statehood for Hawaii, convinced that it would enter the Union as a Republican state, but opposed Alaska out of the same political considerations. By 1958, pressure within and without Congress had built up for admission of Alaska. Opponents and supporters once again tried to link the two territories, but Johnson convinced John Burns, the delegate from Hawaii, not to go along. Backers of Hawaiian statehood should take the gamble that Alaska’s admission would start a landslide for Hawaii. Burns, at great risk to his political career, agreed.

Alaska was duly admitted in 1958, and in March 1959 the Hawaiian statehood bill came up before the Senate. An observer recalled the scene:

At 3:34P.M. on March 11, the day Governor William E. Quinn of Hawaii was to arrive, Johnson brought the bill up on the floor of the Senate and the speechmaking began. For the first three hours of the debate, Johnson wasn’t even on the floor, having turned over the majority leader’s duties temporarily to thirty-five-year-old Senator Frank Church of Idaho, one of his favorites … At 6:58P.M. Johnson returned. He was impeccably dressed in an expensive gray suit, white shirt and conservative gray tie. He wore horn-rimmed glasses, as he always does except when being photographed … I was seated in the gallery with one of Johnson’s assistants, who explained his every move. The assistant said, “He’s talking to Willis Robertson of Virginia and now to Olin Johnston of South Carolina and now to Harry Byrd of Virginia, all opponents of the bill. He’s keeping them soothed down. Now he’s talking to Wayne Morse of Oregon. Lyndon wants him to limit his speech to a few minutes. Morse nodded, so I guess he’ll keep it short … ” While they spoke Johnson wandered from desk to desk, talking to about a dozen senators, both Democrats and Republicans, concentrating on the southerners … At 7:19P.M. , the speeches were still going on, but little attention was being paid to them. Johnson was moving all over the floor. Suddenly, he stopped and twirled his fingers. His assistant said, “That means he wants a fast roll call. All the pages are out rounding up the senators for a vote.” Senators began to pour through the doors of the chamber, and in a matter of seconds, the room was filled for the first time since the debate began … At 7:36P.M. , Johnson himself got up to make the closing remarks. He said simply, “This is an important thing for the people of Hawaii and the United States, and I request a vote.” The roll call began, and by 7:52 it was all over. Hawaii statehood had won by a vote of seventy-six to fifteen. In just over four hours Johnson had accomplished what no one had been able to do in forty years.⁸¹

BY THE FALL OF1958, LBJ’s patience with the Eisenhower administration and with bipartisanship was wearing thin. The president’s numerous vetoes had embarrassed Congress generally and him specifically. When an opportunity presented itself to poke a stick in the administration’s eye, Johnson, although somewhat reluctantly, took it.

In October 1958, Eisenhower nominated retired Admiral Lewis Strauss to be secretary of commerce. For a variety of reasons, Strauss’s nomination did not reach the Senate until March 1959, when he had already been serving four months unofficially in the cabinet. Before being tapped to head Commerce, Strauss had served a five-year term as head of the Atomic Energy Commission. Aggressively conservative and arrogant, the former naval officer had managed to make a bitter enemy of Senator Clinton P. Anderson, chair of the Senate Committee on Atomic Energy. Moreover, Strauss had proven himself a determined foe of public power and an opponent of greater congressional oversight of the atomic energy industry. Finally, he, along with his pal, scientist Edward Teller, had angered liberals by arbitrarily singling out Robert Oppenheimer, chief scientist on the Manhattan Project, as a security risk.⁸²

Strauss and Anderson had butted heads repeatedly, the admiral winning the undying enmity of the New Mexico senator, who did not possess a college education, by implying that he was not capable of understanding many of the complex issues associated with atomic energy. In fact, Eisenhower had moved Strauss from the AEC to Commerce because he was convinced that he could not win reappointment to the post he held.⁸³

Anderson pressed the majority leader to mobilize the Senate to block Strauss from having a cabinet post. Johnson initially declined. Only seven times in the nation’s history had the Senate denied a president his choice for a cabinet position, and not once since 1925. A quick head count indicated that despite his conservatism and uncooperativeness, Strauss would win approval from the Commerce Committee by a count of fourteen to three. Following a week of condescending and noncommittal replies, however, his margin had slipped to nine to eight. Both Gale McGhee, an outspoken opponent of confirmation, and Anderson pled with Johnson to intercede. He was still reluctant. “The vote is not even going to be close,” the leader, uncharacteristically out of touch, told Earle Clements. Yes it will, Clements replied: “There are four votes that are going to vote just like you vote.”⁸⁴

Clements was right. Quietly, behind the scenes, the leader began to mobilize his colleagues against the Strauss nomination. LBJ did not publicly take a stand until June 19, the day of the vote. Kennedy, Symington, and Richard Neuberger followed Johnson’s lead in voting no, and Fulbright absented himself from the Senate floor. Minority Leader Everett Dirksen had counted on all four. The final tally was forty-nine against to forty-six for. In addition to the four Democrats, two other votes had been decisive, that of populist William Langer of North Dakota and Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, both Republicans. “Johnson had a lot of sway with Mrs. Smith,” Harry McPherson recalled. “She thought he was pretty terrific, and he could usually get her vote … No one knew how it was going to come out except Johnson; he knew every vote. And the clerk said, ‘Mrs. Smith.’ ‘No.’ And there was ‘Ahhh’—you could hear the breath exhale. And Barry Goldwater said, ‘Goddamn!’ And you could hear it all over the chamber.”⁸⁵

 

WITH THE ENDof the congressional session in September 1959, all political eyes turned to the forthcoming presidential race. Journalist Carroll Kilpatrick remembered accompanying Richard Nixon on a western speaking tour in the fall of 1959: “Late one night there weren’t but four or five reporters with him and he invited us into one of the airport rooms while we waited for the plane to be refueled. We sat there for an hour or so and we talked about Johnson … He said, ‘He is the ablest one … he would be a successful president, would be an able president … But he has two strikes against him: one that he is from Texas, and one that he has had a heart attack.’ ”⁸⁶

Later, Kilpatrick and several colleagues had dinner at the National Press Club with John F. Kennedy. “Lyndon would make the ablest president of any of us running,” JFK observed, “but he can’t be elected.”⁸⁷Kennedy was of the opinion that the majority leader was too thoroughly identified with the South and thus unacceptable to the liberal-labor group. These observations were, of course, somewhat self-serving, but George Reedy thought it to his boss’s advantage if this image of LBJ as qualified but unelectable be spread. “This leaves the public with the impression that a bunch of ‘scheming politicians’ are plotting to keep the nation from having its best leader because they are seeking to placate ‘pressure groups,’ ” Reedy advised Johnson.⁸⁸

Despite the urgings of Connally and some of his other advisers LBJ refused to declare his candidacy and made no preparations to enter the spring primaries. He believed that if he declared, he would immediately become the frontrunner and wind up as the target of a Stop Johnson movement that would probably be successful. But there was another reason. Johnson was profoundly distrustful of his ability to compete with the likes of Kennedy and Humphrey in a beauty contest. Charisma, charm, rhetorical flair that could be so apparent in one-on-one or small group encounters completely deserted LBJ in front of large crowds, especially when such appearances were being televised. And the more his presidential ambitions grew, the more tepid and noncommittal his speeches became.⁸⁹His only chance, Johnson perceived, was to let the other Democratic hopefuls kill each other off and then have the party turn to him at the convention.

Being an unannounced candidate for president also would help LBJ’s bid for reelection to the Senate in 1960, he and his staff believed. In the spring of 1959, the Johnson forces in Texas had succeeded in having state election laws altered to move the primaries up from July and August to May and June and to allow a candidate to compete for two national offices at the same time. Thus could LBJ run for reelection to the Senate in the spring and then stand for the presidency if the Democratic National Convention tapped him in July.

There seemed little to worry about as far as Texas was concerned. A Belden poll taken in May showed that LBJ had slipped alarmingly among minorities, low-income groups, and women; approval among Latinos was 40 percent, blacks 39 percent, and “lower socio-economic levels” 44 percent. But it also showed that in any contest matching him against either Price Daniel or Jim Wright, the popular young congressman from Dallas, Johnson would win in a landslide.⁹⁰

But politics are fickle, especially in Texas. Conservatives could always choose to remember Johnson as an avid New Dealer, and even moderate liberals were barely reconciled.⁹¹In the end, however, Texas chauvinism could always be counted on. As long as Johnson was considered a legitimate contender for the presidency, voters in the Lone Star State would support him through thick and thin. “An awful lot of people want to play Presidential politics,” George Reedy observed to his boss. “This is understandable because for many Texans this is the only chance they have ever had—or may ever have again—to be in on a serious Presidential show.”⁹²