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May 8 - July 24, 2017
He was a teller of tales that not only amused his listeners but convinced them, for when a point needed to be made, he often made it with a story—he had what a journalist calls “a genius for analogy”—made the point unforgettably, in dialect, in the rhythmic cadences of a great storyteller.
The correlation between leaders and great storytellers is very high, so not surprised.
Power corrupts—that has been said and written so often that it has become a cliché. But what is never said, but is just as true, is that power reveals.
His colleagues called him Leader. “Good morning, Leader,” they would say. “Could I have a minute of your time, Leader?” they would say. “Great job there, Mr. Leader.” “Mr. Leader, I never thought you could pull that one off.” And a Leader he was.
The Judiciary Act established the system of federal, circuit and district courts, and the jurisdictional lines between them, that endure to this day, and established as well the principle, not mentioned in the Constitution, that state laws were subject to review by federal courts.
Contrasting the Senate with the “vulgar demeanor” of the House of Representatives, de Tocqueville, after his tour of the United States in 1831, was to comment that “The Senate contains within a small space a large proportion of the celebrated men of America. Scarcely an individual is to be seen in it who has not had an active and illustrious career: the Senate is composed of eloquent advocates, distinguished generals, wise magistrates, and statesmen of note, whose arguments would do honor to the most remarkable parliamentary debates of Europe.”
Interesting we are going into a full history of the senate not just LBJ
Patrick Brown liked this
Writing in 1885, Professor Woodrow Wilson said that since a President was forced to deal with the Senate on treaties “as a servant conferring with a master,” its power was unbalancing the whole system of checks and balances.
But with the crack of the assassin’s gunshot that struck down McKinley, and, to the rage of Senator Mark Hanna, put “that damned cowboy” Theodore Roosevelt in the White House, the era of weak Presidents was over.
The power of the President may have swept across the country, and indeed across part of Capitol Hill. It came to a halt at the door to the Senate Chamber.
This is comforting in the current landscape to be reminded of the amount of checks and balances that the senate has.
“If we do not do this great thing now … the terrible task will have to be done once more,” Woodrow Wilson had warned. Was his analysis correct? Would another world war have come—as it came only twenty years later—if the Senate of the United States had ratified the Treaty of Versailles, and the Covenant of Nations?
But there is at least a possibility that America’s participation in the League might have heartened the Western democracies when Hitler and Mussolini began to test their will. There is at least a possibility that if all the democracies had been united, history might have been different. The Senate, which in the previous century, during its Golden Age, had kept alive for forty years—forty vital years—the possibility of peace for the Union, in the twentieth century had struck a great, perhaps mortal, blow at the possibility of peace for the world.
Crazy. Blaming WWII on the senate.
These feelings now crested in a great wave of humanitarian concern, an outraged, impassioned demand for social justice, that became known as the Progressive Movement.
And thereafter TR’s speeches on the tariff and the monetary system were first submitted to Aldrich for approval;
Crazy power - he gets to approve the presidents speeches?!
A tide of concern about the impact of industrial concentration on America had begun rising during the Gilded Age—had begun rising soon after the end of the Civil War in 1865, in fact. At first, the tide had risen slowly, but by the 1880s and ’90s, it was rising fast. But all through the Gilded Age, the Senate had stood against the tide. At the turn of the century, with the onset of the Progressive Era, the tide became a wave—a great wave of conscience, of anger over injustice, of demand for a cleansing of government and for a mobilization of government to meet the needs of its people. The wave
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The wave of Progressivism and reform washed across America, through statehouses and city halls, even through the White House. When the wave crashed against the Senate, it broke on the Senate, the waters falling away from it as they had been falling away for half a century. The Senate stood as it had been standing for so long—a mighty dam standing athwart, and stemming, the tides of social justice.
impressive
Most of the men puffing the big cigars in the legendary smoke-filled room at the 1920 Republican convention were senators—someone remarked that the room looked like a Senate in miniature with Henry Cabot Lodge biting off brief comments while the others ruffled through possible presidential candidates “like a deck of soiled cards”—
Decades of the seniority rule had conferred influence in the Senate not on men who broke new ground but on men who were careful not to.
This is the problem with any seniority rule system. I wonder if this was by conscious design - and also if it is still the case?
The Constitution’s Framers had given the Senate power to block legislation, to stand as the rampart against the exercise of popular and presidential will. This power was only a negative power, a naysaying power, the power to obstruct and to thwart. But it was an immense power—and the Framers had built the rampart solid enough so that it was standing, thick and strong, in the twentieth century as it had stood in the nineteenth century.
The failure of the world’s most powerful nation to lead—or in general even to cooperate—in efforts, twenty years of efforts, to avert a second world war must be laid largely at the door of its Congress, and particularly at the door of its Senate.
which means “freebooter” or “pirate,” and which passed into the Spanish as filibustero, because the sleek, swift ship used by Caribbean pirates was called a filibote, and into legislative parlance because
“never,” one of its historians was to write, had Americans been “more critical of the United States Senate than in the years which followed World War II.”
During that decade, despite the mandate of three presidential elections, it had stood across and blocked the rising demand for social justice, had stood so solidly that it seemed too strong ever to be breached. In January, 1949, when Lyndon Johnson arrived in it, it was still standing.
“everything,” had worked so hard that a tough Texas political boss said “I never thought it was possible for anyone to work that hard,” had worked with a feverish, almost frantic intensity that journalists would describe as “energy” when it was really desperation and fear, the fear of a man fleeing from something terrible. Throughout all that decade,
one man with whom he did this. He asked another man, “Have you ever seen anything as big as this?”
“You couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel.” Or
“When I was a boy, I would talk for hours with the mothers of my friends, telling them what I had done during the day, asking what they had done, requesting advice. Soon they began to feel as if I, too, was their son and that meant that whenever we all wanted to do something, it was okay by the parents as long as I was there.”
ask fkf advice
And when only one of the older men was with him, he again played the paternal card, telling one powerful lobbyist, “You’ve been like a Daddy to me.”
Lyndon was a smart suckup. He used that daddy line a lot.
The Russells had few servants, and with Judge Russell usually away in Atlanta, the burden of raising thirteen children fell on their mother. Unable to afford clothing for them, she made most of it herself, sewing late into the night by the light of an oil lamp; recalling his mother’s endless drudgery, Richard Jr. was to say that he was ten years old before he saw his mother asleep; previously, he had “thought that mothers never had to sleep.” “My mother,” he was to say, “was the greatest woman I’ve ever known.”
Amazing
“You are my oldest son and you carry my full name,” the Judge wrote once. “You can have—and you must have—a future of usefulness and distinction in Georgia or it will break my heart.… My son—my namesake—never let this thought leave your mind and may it influence your every act.”
Familiar rhetoric. No pressure kid! Growing up with the name Otis Chandler came with similar pressures.
And part of the work was reading: novels (Borodino was almost as real to him as Gettysburg, so many times had he reread War and Peace: decades later, during a tour of Russia, he would be guided around that battlefield by an expert on the battle, who realized, as he was talking with this American, that he was talking to another expert), biographies, works of history: Roman historians and Greek historians, and English—Livy and Thucydides and Macaulay—works that described how kings and emperors and prime ministers had handled issues. And of course anything at all—anything and everything—that was
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who blocked every attempt to pass civil rights legislation with filibusters during which they read telephone books and recipes for pot likker and southern delicacies into the record for hours as if to show their utter contempt for “Northern agitators.”
In scores of speeches he reiterated that he was interested in progress, and opposed only to attempts to force progress too rapidly by means of outside—federal—interference, which, he said, would only inflame passions and make the situation worse, not better.
Under the leadership of Richard Brevard Russell Jr. the Senate was indeed the place where the South did not lose the Civil War. The great gifts for parliamentary rhetoric and maneuver, for personal leadership, of the “knightly” Richard Russell—his courtliness and graciousness, his moderation, his reasonable, genteel words—their cost had to be reckoned in tears and pain and blood. His charm was more effective than chains in keeping black Americans shackled to their terrible past.
Another example of where the power of a single senator was clearly too much and needed a check.
Kris liked this
When he was old, that reporter friend asked him whether perhaps it was fortunate that he had never married, and so had been able to concentrate fully on his work, and Russell answered, “Well, no—well, it certainly has permitted me to have more hours to work … but I would not recommend it to anyone. If I had my life to do over again, I would certainly get married.”
I've never seen anyone - successful or otherwise - recommend otherwise. #priorities
He generally ate at O’Donnell’s Seafood Grill, on E Street, sitting alone at the counter.
Sad!
“Now you all come back again real soon, you hear.”
Lyndon and Lady Bird had good southern manners - something to keep in mind.
Johnson’s sudden interest in baseball surprised people aware of his previous total lack of interest in any type of sport. “I doubt that Lyndon Johnson had been to a baseball game in his life until he heard that Dick Russell enjoyed the sport,” John Connally says. Connally, the only one of Johnson’s aides who dared to joke with him, would say, “ ‘Well, I see you’ve become a baseball fan. Do you know the pitcher from the catcher?’ He [Johnson] would smile and laugh, and say, ‘You know I’ve always loved baseball.’ I said, ‘No, I’ve never been aware of that.’ ” But Connally understood: “He knew
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lol
it was delivered as a centerpiece of a southern filibuster against Truman’s proposed civil rights legislation that would have given black Americans protection against lynching and against discrimination in employment, and that also would have made it easier for them to vote.
crazy
She played almost no part in her husband’s political life; he didn’t even tell her he was going to run for the Senate in 1941 until after he had announced the fact to the rest of the world in a press conference.
I mean - wow. That doesn't sound like a marriage on equal terms.
take care of this guy.”
“He could talk you into anything. Listen—he had to me some of the drive of J. Edgar Hoover. What more can I say?”
The genesis of the Truman Committee was very much the work of one man. Disturbed by reports of profiteering and waste in the vast military buildup begun in 1940 and by the possibility that his home state of Missouri was not receiving its fair share of defense contracts, Senator Harry Truman decided to try to find out the truth for himself—by leaving Washington, alone in his old Dodge automobile, and driving to military installations and defense plants from Florida to Michigan, covering perhaps ten thousand miles. It was his speech to the Senate on what he had found on this personal inspection
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Great tactic to deep dive into those areas randomly.
“If you get any calls [from reporters],” Lyndon Johnson said, “refer them to George or to Walter. I’ll talk for Preparedness. No one else talks.” Then he paused, as if considering whether he had said enough, and then, evidently concluding he hadn’t, went on—this time in a low, quiet voice almost throbbing with threat. “Remember,” he said, “no one speaks for Lyndon Johnson except Lyndon Johnson. No one!”
That sounds like a line from a movie. No way he actually said that.
“He made a point of seeing all newspapermen, and everyone left thinking that he was Lyndon’s best friend.”
Seeing the huge, cheering crowd in which, Smathers recalls, “there had to be at least a thousand signs, ‘Kennedy/Johnson, Kennedy/Johnson.’ ” Smathers thought “we were doing great”—until Johnson “jumped like he was shot,” whirled on him, and said, “ ‘Look at that son of a bitch! Look at that sign there!’ There was one [unfavorable] sign! It wasn’t a foot high. There were thousands of signs, and that was the one he picked out. ‘Goddammit it! Look at that sign!’ I thought, this is the damndest fellow I had ever seen in my life, here we had all this, and all he could see was [that one sign]. But
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Ridiculously high standards
“Drinking makes you let your guard down,” he would say, and he didn’t want his guard down, ever. When, therefore, he was drinking along with another man, he had as many drinks as the other man—but his were weaker. In his own office, the instructions were strict: the other man’s drinks were to be made regular strength—two or three one-ounce jiggers of whiskey per drink—but, unknown to the other man, Johnson’s own drinks, Cutty Sark Scotch and soda, were not.
This is just devious.
No matter how much time a man was willing to spend arguing with Lyndon Johnson, Lyndon Johnson was willing to spend more. “He would just wear you down. Finally you’d agree—anything to get it over with.
In an undated memorandum that appears to have been written in November or December, 1951, a Time reporter informed his editors in New York that “Russell has soberly predicted that Lyndon Johnson could be President and would make a good one.”
soberly?
“he was a muscular, glandular political man.”
lol
Humphrey could, Johnson saw, be the bridge to the northern liberals which he needed.
he convinced Humphrey as well that since Johnson couldn’t get the nomination it was to his advantage to build up Johnson as a candidate, make him as strong a candidate as possible, because his strength would eventually go to whomever Johnson wanted—and so long as he and Johnson were allies, it would eventually go to him.
wow
