The Passage of Power (18 page)

In addition, while he was at last actively planning his campaign within his inner circle, outside that circle he was still refusing even to acknowledge that he would one day become a candidate. His public refusals might be laid to the fact that by saying—so often and so convincingly—that his Senate responsibilities were his first priority, he had trapped himself: with the Senate still in session, how could he openly run for President? But that explanation doesn’t make clear why he didn’t say—
wouldn’t
say; adamantly refused to let his representatives like Irv Hoff say, even in private—that he would announce his candidacy after the Senate adjourned. And he
wouldn’t
say that, or let men like Hoff say it, not even in private, not even in the West, where he had to have delegates if he was to stop Kennedy, not even to men in the West, who, if he didn’t say it, would—with the time before the convention growing short—align themselves irrevocably to another candidate.

Despite the Kennedys’ activities, there was still solid Johnson sentiment in the West, but politicians there had to be assured that the sentiment would be requited.
“They’re
a pretty cagey bunch of guys out there, and they’re not going to support someone who maybe won’t run, and then they’ve alienated the guy who was going to win,” Hoff said. “It was pretty hard to sell a guy if all you could say was: ‘Maybe he’s going to run.’ ” Flying back to Washington, Hoff told Johnson that he had to give western delegates at least an assurance that while he was not announcing at the moment, he would eventually do so. “I said, ‘Senator, I’ve
got nothing to sell. The media out there all want to know if you’re running. What can I tell them?’ He said, ’Irv, I’m not at this point saying. I have ten bills I have to pass here.”

At one point, Hoff thought he had made Johnson understand. In
Idaho, where the Hells Canyon Dam was rising day by day, and where political leaders knew who had gotten them the dam at last, the Democratic state chairman,
Tom Boise, had told Hoff that, despite all the Kennedy efforts, many party leaders were still considering supporting Johnson. “These guys were
for
Johnson,” Hoff says. “If we had been able to tell them that he was going to run, we’d have had that delegation.” He explained this to Johnson, and Johnson accepted an invitation to speak in Lewiston, Idaho, and afterwards to have a drink with Boise and his leaders in a hotel suite. But in the suite, Johnson said all the right things—except the one thing it was necessary for him to say. “Lady Bird had gone to bed in another room, and he was in his living room, walking around in his pajamas holding a drink, stirring it with his big finger. They said, ‘We’re for you, but we need to know if you’re going to run.’ He said, ‘What the hell do you think I’m out here for—catching butterflies? Do you see me carrying a net?’ ” But there were future government positions at stake, careers at stake, issues at stake—with the convention so close, rhetorical humor wasn’t enough. They pressed him further. But all Johnson would say was, “I’ll let you know.… You’ll be the first to know.” Recalling the scene years later, Hoff would say, “It was like he couldn’t bring himself to say it. He had flown out there to say it, but he couldn’t bring himself to get the words out.” Witnessing similar scenes,
Bobby Baker felt he understood them, that
“The
problem was LBJ’s fear of being defeated”: that saying it would be admitting that he was trying, and trying might mean failing, “so he couldn’t bring himself to say it.” After Johnson had gone to bed, Boise told Hoff quietly that Johnson’s assurances had not been adequate. “He said,
‘We’ve
got to know, and we’ve got to know pretty soon. I’m for him one hundred percent, but we’ve got to know.’ ” Hoff understood, but when he raised the subject the next day, Johnson again refused to authorize him to give Boise any firm assurance.

And at least Johnson was willing to go to Idaho, where people were friendly. To any suggestion that he visit a state where his reception would be problematical, he was still shying away, quite violently.

There was a hint of desperation now in the telephone calls that Walter Jenkins was receiving from
California. An opening—an 81-vote opening—was ready to be exploited there, he was being told.
Pat Brown’s attempt to keep his delegation uncommitted until he could decide on a candidate was falling apart, and despite the governor’s hostility to Johnson,
“If
I could bring Lyndon in contact with” the delegates themselves, “he would own them like he does everybody he meets,” Judge
Walter Ely told Jenkins on January 25.

The old problem remained, however. Among the key California Democrats favorably disposed toward Johnson was the delegation’s vice chairman, Clinton D.
McKinnon. “I asked him if he would help,”
Leonard Marks reported to Jenkins. “He says he can’t make a commitment until he knows for sure that Johnson is a candidate. He says when I ask him to help Johnson I am talking about some very practical things in his life, and something that might affect his future so he wants to make sure that he is a candidate.”

Yet Johnson wouldn’t even visit California. After first accepting, and then declining, a number of speaking engagements there in January, he repeated that performance in February. At the end of March, Hoff, who had been touring California sounding out individual delegates, sent Jenkins two memos telling him that
although
“Johnson
hadn’t
even set foot in California for too many years,” he still had a chance to win a substantial number of delegates there.
“The
California delegation is far from being committed to anyone,” Hoff said.
“Kennedy
may have a few more commitments than anyone else but all the delegates are very friendly to Johnson.” But, Hoff said, if he “is going to get any place in this delegation, he has just got to come out here.” There was simply no alternative. “They all know who he is but don’t know him. You can’t turn the Johnson sentiment into solid support without Johnson coming out.”

Johnson then agreed to go during the Senate’s Easter recess, and
Bobby Baker told Ely to arrange a statewide tour, saying, “I can practically guarantee you he will be there.” The guarantee proved worthless, however; at the last minute, Bobby had to tell Ely that “The senator is disinclined to come.” In desperation, Ely tried to telephone Johnson directly; Johnson refused to take the call. Phoning Jenkins, Ely said that many of the delegates were saying of Johnson, “Oh, he is the best man, but … he is not a real candidate.”

“Hell, Walter, he either wants it or he doesn’t,” Ely said, “and he has never even been out here to make a speech.… Walter, he simply must let people see him. It is when they meet him and shake his hand that they are won over. I just don’t believe he can do it unless he comes.… There comes a time when you can’t just continue to keep fighting for a phantom.”

T
O MAKE MATTERS WORSE
,
civil rights came up again. The assurance Johnson had given liberals to persuade them to support the weak 1957 Act—that it would be quickly amended to strengthen it (“Don’t worry, we’ll do it again in a couple of years”)—had not been redeemed in 1958 or 1959; in ’59, in fact, Johnson’s power had been the principal obstacle. Emboldened by the 1958 elections, which had given liberals an overwhelming two-to-one (64 to 34) majority in the Senate, liberal senators moved to amend Rule 22, the “filibuster rule” that ensured the tactic’s effectiveness. Johnson placed himself in their path. “Jesus, it was rough,” recalled one of them. “Lyndon was going around with two lists in his inside pocket. One was for committee assignments and anything else you wanted, and the other was for Rule 22. He didn’t talk about the first until you’d cleared on the second, and that was all there was to it.” With no new legislation to strengthen
the
civil rights bill in 1958 or 1959, he had to produce some in 1960 if he was to reduce the hostility of northern convention delegates.

Liberals were insisting now on the part of the 1957 bill that had been cut out:
Part III
, the section that would ban segregation in public venues such as theaters, restaurants, hotels, buses and trains—and in schools, where, six years after the
Brown vs. Board of Education
decision, only a tiny percentage of black children were going to school with white children in the South. Without enactment of
Part III
, the federal government would still in effect have done nothing about the most painful injustices to which millions of American citizens were subjected because of their race.

Johnson had hoped that Richard Russell, understanding Johnson’s need to placate liberals, would compromise as he had done in ’57, but, as I have written,
“However
much affection Russell might feel for Lyndon Johnson, the overriding reason that Russell wanted him to become President was to protect the interests of the South; when Johnson’s interests collided with those interests, it was the South’s, not Johnson’s, that would be protected,” and to Russell,
Part III
, in any form, struck at the heart of the southern way of life. By banning segregation in social settings, it would, Russell felt, inevitably lead to what was for the Georgian the horror of horrors: what he called the
“mongrelization
” of the noble white race. When, in January, 1960, Johnson tried to explain that he had no choice but to bring a civil rights bill to the floor, Russell, “cool” and “aloof,” said,
“Yes
, I understand that you let them jockey you into that position. I understand.” A Johnson proposal to bypass the southern-controlled Judiciary Committee and bring the bill to the floor by adding its provisions to a House measure on an unrelated topic caused the first rupture in the eleven-year alliance of the two legislative titans; Russell called the move
“a
lynching of orderly procedure in the Senate.”

Johnson’s angry response—that
“this
was the only kind of lynching he had ever heard Russell object to”—was blurted out only in private, to two staffers in his limousine; Johnson had had no choice but to repair the breach. Though he made a show of attempting to break a Russell-led southern filibuster, with around-the-clock sessions, veteran Senate observers saw that it was all a charade,
“a
cozy and often rather jolly affair”;
“bonhomie
has been rampant,” one was to write. “The Senate has never seemed more like a gentleman’s club.” Never had the South’s power been more clearly demonstrated than in the 55–42 vote against cloture: not only had liberals been unable to muster the necessary two-thirds vote, they hadn’t even been able to get a majority. Working with Eisenhower’s attorney general,
William P. Rogers, Johnson then watered down
Part III
until by the time it passed little remained but an amendment that supposedly strengthened the voting rights provisions of the 1957 bill but from the start proved next to worthless. Although Russell made a show of dismay at the bill’s passage, it was,
Jacob Javits of New York said,
“a
victory for the Old South.” Accusing Johnson of collaborating with Russell to reduce the measure
to
“only
a pale ghost of our hopes of last fall,” Pennsylvania’s Joseph Clark turned to the southern leaders on the Senate floor, and said,
“The
roles of Grant and Lee at Appomattox have been reversed.
Dick
, here is my sword. I hope you will give it back to me so that I can beat it into a plowshare for the spring planting.”

Having given it what it wanted—a civil rights bill so weak as to be virtually no bill at all—Johnson got the South back, from Russell and the southern senators down to the man in the street: a Gallup Poll showed Johnson with “a wide edge” (35 percent to 20 percent for Kennedy, the runner-up) in the former Confederate states. Liberal magazines and newspapers, on the other hand, with the notable exception of
Philip Graham’s
Washington Post,
found in the weak bill confirmation of their long-held suspicions about him.

Even in the earlier stages of the 1960 fight, before his alliance with the South had become obvious, the issue had hurt him with liberals. On March 6, before his statement against the original
Part III
—at a point where he was still ostensibly fighting for a strong bill—James Reston reported that he had nonetheless
“lost
support in the North.”

“The
explanation of this odd paradox,” Reston said, “is that the debate, accompanied by demonstrations against segregated restaurants in the South, has dramatized the race issue and evidently convinced the Democratic politicians in the large Northern cities that a Texan, even one responsible for putting over a good civil rights bill, would not be a popular candidate in the urban North.” And when, a few days later, it became apparent that the bill Lyndon Johnson was putting over was not at all a “good” bill, liberal distrust of him was back, stronger than ever. Joseph L. Rauh Jr., probably the single most influential figure in the civil rights camp—former chairman of both
Americans for Democratic Action and the
Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, and chief counsel of the United Automobile Workers—had, in 1957, “hated his guts for what he was doing for school desegregation; that was a crime against the Negroes when Lyndon Johnson knocked out
Part III
.” He had nonetheless persuaded other civil rights leaders to support the bill partly because it was important to show that a civil rights bill could be passed, and largely because of Johnson’s promises to revisit and amend it. Now he “hated his guts more than ever—if possible.” The 1960 bill, Rauh says, was “a pile of rubbish and garbage” disguised as a statute. It “was a joke,” he says.
“Everybody
knew it was a joke. Nobody who was really for civil rights then could have supported it,” much less have pushed it through the Senate. And Johnson was
not
really for civil rights, Rauh felt. Not that he was against civil rights; he was simply for anything—on either side—that would help him become President. “It wasn’t that he was a conservative or a radical or anything else; it was simply that he was trying to be all things to all people.” The revered liberal senator
Paul Douglas of Illinois went further. Johnson had remained at least ostensibly neutral in the cloture fight only because he had known the South would win, Douglas said; had the result been in doubt, Johnson would have
thrown his full weight behind the filibuster. Liberal opinion was hardening.
JOHNSON REJECTED
, said the
ADA World,
making clear that what Johnson was being rejected for was the Democratic nomination. The article quoted a liberal congressman who said, “ADA, union officials and colored leaders may not have the votes to put a presidential candidate across at the convention, but they sure have the votes to block a man.” On May 29, speaking before the
American Jewish Congress,
Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the NAACP, praised the civil rights record of Nixon and
“all
the Senator-candidates” for the presidential nomination “except Senator Lyndon B. Johnson.”