Sunday Review: Who was Lyndon Johnson?—Part 2 (book review)

Master of the Senate

By Jonathan Price

[Sequel to The Passage to Power]

The events of The Passage to Power actually were momentous and compelling, and the legislation Johnson passed as President was momentous. But Master of the Senate, the preceding volume, is perhaps even more surprising and effective in what it reveals and in its techniques. After all, the major substance of this tome involves parliamentary strategy, the counting of votes, and recondite legislative maneuvers. The average reader or, e.g., high school student would consider this extremely boring. It’s the inside-baseball version of how a bill becomes law, although here it’s often about how it never gets to become law, especially in the case of Civil Rights legislation. Yet it’s the attention to this kind of detail that eventually made Johnson not only majority leader of the U.S. Senate, but ultimately President of the United States (with the caveat of the Kennedy assassination providing the most effective transition for a Southern Democrat).
    Caro understands the difficult task he has set himself, and gives us such a broad portrait that we understand the power the Constitution gives the Senate (primarily, as Washington once explained it, as a “cooling saucer” to the hot democratic passions of the populace and the House of Representatives) and the importance of cloture and of knowing the Senate’s arcane rules.

Richard Russell, Jr. (1897-1971)

Neither Johnson, nor his now pretty-much-forgotten mentor, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, misunderstood the importance of these rules—not just for petulant nitpicking, but for achieving ends. Caro makes clear that it was these rules and their mastery that allowed a minority—the Southern caucus of representatives and especially Senators—to bottle up Civil Rights legislation from 1875 on. Caro’s longitudinal history of the Senate shows how it declined from an honored and sophisticated debating society in the mid-19th century to a kind of comic obstructionist institution for most of the first part of the 20th century. When Johnson first became a Senator from Texas in 1948, the Senate was known for blocking virtually every progressive idea, including many that were widely supported by the electorate. When Johnson became Majority leader in 1953, the position was so dishonored that its last two occupants had suffered in prestige and power merely from assuming it. Johnson figured out how to create new committees and links to standing ones so that he could skillfully and, often approvingly, exert power.

LBJ and Russell

    Caro makes this process engaging. He does it with a number of surprising vignettes that initially appear to be digressions or even padding. There is a long background and history of Richard Russell, who was exceedingly talented and hard-working and seemingly idealistic, yet also a thoroughgoing bigot. It’s now pretty much forgotten, but Russell was a key figure in the de-fanging of MacArthur when he returned to the U.S. after defying a President, and emerged temporarily as a hero and wanted to convince the American congress to go to war with China.

Leland Olds, 1890-1960

    An entire, long three-chapter sequence is devoted to Leland Olds. Who? Exactly. And yet Caro endows this long-forgotten American bureaucrat with energy and charisma that matches Johnson’s. Olds had been a scholar, writer, social worker, and minister before he led the Federal Power Commission for 12 years, and his reappointment in the early 1950s seemed certain until he was blindsided by a Johnson-led inquiry that focused on speeches and articles Olds had written some 20 years before, which in the context of the Communist witch hunts of the 1950s looked surprisingly socialistic. Olds was at the time a Truman official being questioned by another Democrat supervising a Democratic committee; Olds was a decent man who had done nothing wrong, except that his policies protected consumers from rate increases and thus threatened the profits of a key Johnson support group, natural gas companies. The hearings that ensued were dramatic in the way they undermined a very good man and transformed a committee into an organ for Johnson’s self-promotion. But as an indication of Johnson’s complexity and perhaps insensitivity is the passage that occurs in a recess during the hearings, where the removal of Olds from power is clear, and Johnson emerges to walk by Olds and his wife. “Then he stopped, came up behind Olds, and put his hand on his shoulder....‘Lee,’ he said, ‘I hope you understand there’s nothing personal in this. We’re still friends, aren’t we? It’s only politics, you know.’”

A running theme throughout Master of the Senate is the treatment of African Americans and the fate of Civil Rights legislation—it’s an issue that carries over, of course, to the succeeding volume [reviewed in the first installment]. The contemporary reader, especially those as old as I am, thinks he or she knows this history and its high and low points.

But Caro’s description of the fate of Emmett Till is harrowing and painful—a lynching in modern times that finally evoked the sorrow and pity of a majority of the country, yet resulted in no change in the treatment of African-Americans. An even more disturbing coda to the description is the revelation that Till’s two murderers, inevitably acquitted by an all-white jury, two years afterward proudly told Look Magazine (for pay) how they had beaten and tortured Till and thrown him into the Tallahatchie river.
    It is hard to finish either volume of this biography without being impressed by Johnson’s energy, personality, cleverness, intensity, and sense of how to wield power. It is also inescapable that by many standards he was deceitful and corrupt, and inveterably and skillfully misleading. Johnson acquired a great deal of oil money from Texas magnates (Sid Richardson, Brown and Root, and others), often in cash, which he dispensed pretty much as he saw fit to further his career or gain support for legislation sympathetic to oil profits, and undoubtedly for other ends.

It’s clear also that just about anyone who did business with Johnson politically was strong-armed into advertising on his TV and radio stations, thus funneling profits directly to him. He convinced Southern senators he was on their side and would be sympathetic to segregation as President, and somehow convinced (at least some) liberals otherwise.

At the end of this two-volume sequence Johnson has become a hero in some respects. But who is Lyndon Johnson? Is he the man who uses the word “nigger” to his Southern confederates or comments that Mexican-Americans are lazy and work better when a white man is among them, or is he the first national leader in a hundred years to begin to redress the wrongs of slavery and racism in some meaningful way? Is he really a man who was never subject to bigotry, as his latter protestations to the national press and to confidant-biographers like Doris Kearns Goodwin would have it?
    Every man or woman who seeks the Presidency has an ego bigger than the state of New Jersey (to misapply an old joke about Bryant Gumble), and Johnson’s emerges as the biggest. He was tireless and apparently ruthless in his pursuit of the grand office. Caro argues that he had some principles of altruism and honor, but they were always subordinated to ambition and pragmatism and only prevailed when the two coincided. I’m unsatisfied with Caro’s lack of evaluation of Johnson’s actual position. I’m never quite sure whether Johnson was essentially a crook, or one of the most hidden and disguised idealists in American public life.
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Copyright © 2013 by Jonathan Price

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