Master of the Senate (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #3)

by Robert A. Caro

In this campaign, Russell showed his courage (he was hurled through the windshield of his car in an automobile accident, and his upper lip was torn open from one end to the other and four of his teeth knocked out; putting the teeth in his pocket, and fastening his lip down with adhesive tape, he continued campaigning without canceling a single speech).

She knew she was miscarrying again, yet she insisted that Lyndon go to the office although she was in intense pain and running a high fever. She called the doctor as soon as he had driven away, but before an ambulance arrived she began to hemorrhage badly. As she was being carried out of the house on a stretcher, she asked a visiting friend from Austin to mail an important letter to Texas, told her how much postage to put on it, and insisted that a dinner party the following evening, to which she had invited Rayburn and two guests, not be canceled, saying, “Lyndon has to eat anyway, and they’re already invited,” and requesting that her friend act as hostess in her place. Her condition was listed as critical for more than a week, but she recovered—and became pregnant again.

Olds provided these young men with not only technical skills but inspiration. The long columns of figures, he made them see, weren’t just figures—they were the key to a better life for tens of thousands—hundreds of thousands, millions—of farmers and their wives and children. He made his assistants understand that if they could get electric rates down, farmers would be able to alleviate the terrible drudgery of their lives. And he made the young men understand that if they could understand the figures, the rates would come down.

Knowing now that Humphrey wanted the same thing that he did, wanted it perhaps almost as badly as he did, Lyndon Johnson used that knowledge—used it so skillfully that the intensity of Humphrey’s ambition would serve only to make him a better tool for realizing Johnson’s ambition.

Because of these divisions, passage of most significant legislation required putting together, for each bill, a new, unique, collection of votes, and the margin would always be narrow—every vote counted. And Lyndon Johnson needed on each separate major bill votes not only for the bill but for the unanimous consent agreement that alone could insure that the bill could be brought to a vote, and that the differences between voting blocs and between individual senators had been sufficiently bridged so that when the votes were counted he would have a majority. So each major bill was the subject of countless negotiations.

So caught up was Johnson in the race he was running now that, once again, as for most of his life, dates meant nothing to him; trying to set up a conference with Adlai Stevenson or his campaign manager, Tom Finnegan, he scribbled a note to Stevenson: “I’d like to see you or Finnegan [on] Dec. 25th.” If there was a reason that the December 25 page in his appointment book had been blank, the reason didn’t seem to cross Lyndon Johnson’s mind.

After Russell had “delivered an impassioned talk on the sanctity of the 1896 decision [Plessy] by the Supreme Court,” Eisenhower wrote, “I merely asked, ‘Then why is the 1954 decision not equally sacrosanct?’ Russell ‘stuttered,’ and finally said, ‘There were wise men on the Court. Now we have politicians.’ ” Then, according to Eisenhower, he asked Russell to name a single member of the 1896 Court, and “He just looked at me in consternation and the subject was dropped.”