The Best and the Brightest (89 page)

In Washington his first great mentor was Sam Rayburn, Mr. Sam, who as Majority Leader held great power, who exercised it wisely, meting it out judiciously, but who was never a public figure, never gave long speeches, never tried to get his name in print. Mr. Sam was the first teacher, and the second was Senator Richard Russell from Georgia, who taught him more about Washington, how to maneuver, how to get people indebted to him. In later years Johnson would tell friends how Dick Russell had operated, Russell the bachelor, always with plenty of time for young bright congressmen when they first arrived, taking them around at night, carefully guiding their careers and their social lives, making profound impressions on them with his generosity and intelligence, moving them ever so slightly into his orbit of influence. However, Johnson did not talk about the other half of his particular relationship with Russell, which was similar to that which he had enjoyed with Rayburn and others back in Texas, which was of the bright eager young man who brilliantly cultivates a lonely, forceful, older man of great power (Russell was a bachelor, and Rayburn, briefly married, might as well have been). That was a Johnson specialty, and helped lift him above the average young congressmen of his time. Johnson seemed to be the perfect pupil for both Rayburn and Russell; they were like fathers, he was almost sycophantic, thought some around them, but later, having gone beyond both of them, he could at times be harsh and contemptuous in talking about them. Yet the lessons were clear, these were men who got things done, who did not hang around the fancy men and indulge in the fancy talk of Georgetown dinner parties. These were men.

Like Rayburn, Johnson became an immensely successful parliamentarian, a man of the center able to move slightly to the left or the right depending on his needs and his party’s needs, able to accommodate to the Eisenhower years with few problems (leaving Democrats the feeling that the Eisenhower election over Stevenson had upset neither him nor Rayburn; indeed the congressional leadership was so acquiescent to the Republican White House that the liberals created a Democratic Policy Study group as a means of charting a more independent course). Johnson could move slightly to the left on civil rights as national ambitions began to touch him, but he could also serve as a brake within his party if it moved too far to the left. Similarly, one of the reasons why the Democratic party did so little on major tax reform in the decade of the fifties was the relationship Johnson had with the big money in Texas and their proxies in the Senate (he could say of Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, a constant critic of the oil-depletion allowance, that Douglas would understand it just a bit better if there were a few oil wells in Cook County).

There were two reasons why he was so successful: his own hold on the Senate, and the fact that, teamed with Rayburn, he controlled both branches of the legislature and could control, through Rayburn, the appropriations aspect of legislation. He could thus, for example, keep the military on a long-enough leash to allow them to plan their new weapons systems, and on a short-enough leash to have them keep coming back for more. His congressional position gave him considerable influence within the party of the fifties, a party caught in the conflict between its Southern-dominated Congress and a Northern-dominated mass. If Richard Russell tried to assert the party leadership through the Congress it would split the party, and someone like Hubert Humphrey, representing the liberal-labor elements of the coalition, did not have the horsepower to stand for the party in the Congress. So Johnson was the go-between; each adversary armed him against the other, their divisions fed his strength, he was the compromise figure. He was acceptable to the Southerners, but not really of them, but the more the Northern wing of the party rebelled, the luckier they felt they were to have Johnson. But if he was regionally acceptable to the South, he was for the same reason probably regionally unacceptable to the rest of the party. But he could, holding power in the Senate, make Humphrey glad to deal
with him,
giving the liberals just enough to keep them from going into open rebellion and asserting independent, though futile, leadership.

He loved the Congress and studied it; he could catalogue the strengths and weaknesses of every man there. The strength of a man put him off, but his weaknesses attracted him; it meant a man could be used. Whereas Kennedy had been uneasy in the face of another man’s weakness, it embarrassed him and he tended to back off when a man showed frailty, to Johnson there was a smell of blood, more could come of this. But he understood men only through that one prism, how they performed and handled the Congress (even on the subject of the loss of China, it was the fact that in losing China, Truman had first lost the
Congress
which haunted him. The reaction to the loss had not necessarily come from the population, it had come from the Congress). This attitude was a weakness in itself, for not everyone shared his thirst for congressional work or his opinion that it was the only forum. One reason he misjudged John Kennedy as an opponent was that he did not take Kennedy seriously in the Senate. Kennedy clearly did not care, did not really bother with his congressional work and was therefore not, in Johnson’s eyes, an entirely serious person.

As Lyndon Johnson admired men who got things done, men to be measured by their achievements, surely so too would the nation; it would choose a doer, a
man,
not a handsome young talker, a
boy.
As congressman and senator he created his own network of power, men who worked through him to move things, and he extracted his particular price and added more layers of power to his original base. But it was always done privately; he went partially public only after it was all done, and even then, when he dealt with the press, he was the private man, calling in a small claque of reporters whom he knew and trusted. He would sit down and explain his great victory, though within certain limits; he would not compromise future victories for the sake of immodesty now. And the reporters would play the game, they knew the ground rules: how much credit would go to Lyndon—never too little, mind you—and how much to the others, perhaps a little extra credit to a particular senator to ensure even greater co-operation the next time around. Out of this came his almost neurotic view of the press, two very conflicting views: first, that you owned the press, you summoned them and they wrote good stories, and second, that the press was an enemy, it was disloyal, that if it did not belong to you, then someone else had bought and thus you had to be wary. Rich publishers. Or the Kennedys. Or the big interests. Thus you had to get in there quickly and make your pitch. When Bill White left after covering Johnson in the Senate for the
New York Times
he was replaced by Russell Baker, and Baker heard about the change about six o’clock one evening. A few minutes later there was a telephone call and a booming voice over the phone, and it was, it said, Senator Johnson, what great news that Baker would be covering him, they would get along very well, even better than Johnson had with Bill White. Baker’s reputation as a fearless reporter was going to be made; anything Baker wanted to know, his friend Lyndon Johnson would tell him. Anything. Johnson loved the
Times,
admired Baker’s work. “For
you,
I’ll leak like a sieve,” he said.

He was concerned about the reputations of the reporters who covered him and worried about their professional prestige, since it was a reflection of his prestige, particularly during the vice-presidential years. When
Time
magazine decided to switch the assignment of John Steele, who had long been
Time
’s envoy to Johnson, and replace him with a younger man named Loye Miller, the Vice-President was particularly upset. Was this another humiliation? Another taste of vice-presidential ashes? Steele and others in the
Time
empire rushed to reassure him: it was just the opposite, it was a re-evaluation in
Time
’s eyes of the importance of the Vice-Presidency, and Loye Miller was the best they had, their brightest young star, scion of a great newspaper family, his father was a famous editor in Knoxville. There were brilliant things ahead for Loye Miller, and in recognition of the very big things ahead, perhaps the biggest ones, he was being given this choice assignment, this plum, an intimate relationship with Lyndon Johnson. And Johnson smiled and welcomed Miller. It is one of the sad aspects about great flatterers like Lyndon Johnson that among the few things they are vulnerable to is flattery. Shortly afterward Johnson was in New York and of course paid a state visit to the head of the Luce empire, Henry Luce himself. Johnson began with a long tribute to Luce, what a great man he was, how much the communications world of America owed to him, and yet even the greatest men eventually had to step aside and Johnson was delighted by the knowledge that he, Johnson, could vouch for the remarkable young man who would succeed Henry Luce, this fine, handsome, talented, brilliant young man, a scion of a great newspaper family. Some of the
Time
executives noticed a look of surprise and shock on Luce’s face as Johnson was carrying on. After the Vice-President left, Luce grabbed a high-ranking aide and asked, “Who the hell is Loye Miller?”

The stories of his flattery soon became legendary. He had learned as a congressman that those out of power are surprisingly susceptible to the flattery of those in power, that flattery by someone in power becomes a special form of recognition. As he rose to higher and higher positions he resorted to greater and greater flattery, finding that few resisted it or were offended by it and that, indeed, most people accepted it as God’s truth. The Johnsonian view of their abilities was similar to their own. Soon Washington was filled with stories of Johnsonian flattery and exaggeration, of Johnson telling Adlai Stevenson that he should be sitting in the President’s chair, of Johnson telling Arthur Goldberg to leave the Court and go to the UN and make peace because the next man who sits in
this
chair is going to be the man who brought peace in Vietnam. But there were some occasions of mistaken identity and problems caused by the flattery. In July 1967, for instance, after John McNaughton was killed in an airplane crash, Johnson decided, at McNamara’s urging; to appoint an able but little-known Washington lawyer named Paul Warnke, who had been working with McNamara as counsel to the Defense Department. Johnson was determined to pass on the news himself, to flatter Warnke and to impress upon him the importance of being Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, and most of all, the importance and goodness of Lyndon Johnson. So he told his secretary to have the switchboard get Warnke. Shortly thereafter the switchboard located John Carl
Warnecke,
an architect and social friend of the Kennedys’ who was better known in Washington and a frequent visitor to the White House.

Jack Warnecke got on the phone to hear the President of the United States say, “Mr. Warnke, this is Lyndon Johnson, and Bob McNamara has been telling me of all the great things that you have been doing for your country, how much and how generously you have given of your time, and how helpful you have been, and I am calling to say thank you.”

Warnecke, who had been doing a little work with McNamara on the Kennedy grave site, quickly answered that that was very kind of the President, but he had really done very little work.

“No, Mr. Warnke, this is no time to be modest. We know all about you. There is no man I hold in higher esteem than Bob McNamara and Bob is saying a lot of fine things, very fine things about you. Mr. Warnke, Bob McNamara is a great American and a great Secretary of Defense.”

Warnecke acknowledged that he too admired Bob McNamara and considered him a great American.

“Mr. Warnke, it is refreshing to talk to someone like yourself, a man who could make a great deal of money in private life and yet is willing to give of himself to his country.”

Warnecke answered quickly and truthfully that the sacrifice was very small.

“Mr. Warnke, I know better.
I know that you have truly done a fine job for your country
and we are not unaware of it—we know of your dedication, and, Mr. Warnke, Bob McNamara needs you and I need you, and I am calling you today because I am naming you as Assistant Secretary of Defense today and it will be in tomorrow’s paper. We are proud of you.”

At which point Warnecke understood and felt himself stumbling over the phone: Yes, a great honor, very touched by it, great regard for President Johnson, great regard for Bob McNamara, worked with him on grave sites, but perhaps a mistake had been made, he could not accept. He was an . . . architect, an architect could not run things at Defense. Paul Warnke, a lawyer . . . perhaps they wanted Paul Warnke . . .

He could hear a slight halt at the other end of the phone, and then Lyndon Johnson, as effusive as ever, saying, “Mr. Warnke,
you too have truly done a fine job for your country,
but it does appear that perhaps a mistake has been made.” And so Jack Warnecke did not become an Assistant Secretary of Defense, and the next day when Paul Warnke received a call from the President naming him to the job, he was puzzled that the President was so brief, almost curt.

Stories like that, about his flattery and about his exaggeration had started out as something of a private joke among the reporters who covered him. It seemed amusing early in the game, when things were going well; they saw it as part of his attempt to control everything in his environment, to make things turn out the way he wanted, his desire to dominate everything, even the official record. At first it had been small things which amused them: his insistence that he drank bourbon, when in fact he drank Scotch; his stories about an uncle who had stood at the Alamo, when no such uncle had existed. His gradual expansion of his own rather thin war record (which brought him one of the least deserved but most often displayed Silver Stars in American military history) to the point where he could tell a somewhat surprised historian named Henry Graff, invited to the White House to report on Vietnam decision making, that he had earned the Silver Star for helping to shoot down twenty Zeros. Later it expanded to versions of whom he would appoint and whom he would not. In 1964 Dick Goodwin, a former Kennedy speech writer, came back to work for Johnson, and not being a blushing violet, immediately let Hugh Sidey of
Life
know he was back, and in fact showed him a draft of a speech. Sidey, looking for a subject for his weekly column, decided to write about the return of Goodwin as Johnson’s principal speech writer, only to find that despite the fact that Johnson had been using Goodwin’s drafts, the President insisted, in a face-to-face confrontation, that Goodwin had not written for him. Oh, perhaps a little research here and there, but no speeches. Wasn’t that right, George? Reedy gurgled slightly, a sound of both yes and no. Finally Johnson took Sidey aside and drew a diagram of White House responsibilities. Nowhere did Goodwin appear. At the last moment Johnson wrote in a category, “Miscellaneous,” and penciled in the name “Goodman.” At first these anecdotes enlivened the White House press corps and made for fine after-dinner stories; later, as the pressure of Vietnam mounted and the President’s credibility problems centered on greater issues, they would not seem so amusing.