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With the last DLC out, the mighty "Dark Souls" franchise is done:

 

LBJ III, Master of the Senate:

 

"As for the Senate’s basic committee and staff structure, that had been established in 1890. During the intervening decades, government had grown enormously—in 1946 the national budget was three hundred times the size it had been in 1890—but the staffs of Senate committees had grown hardly at all. To oversee that budget, the Senate Appropriations Committee staff consisted of eight persons, exactly one more than had been on that staff decades earlier. Not only were they ridiculously small, the staffs of Senate committees had little of the technical expertise necessary to understand a government which had become infinitely more complicated and technical. The salaries of congressional staff members were so low that Capitol Hill could not attract men and women of the caliber that were flocking to the executive branch. "

 

"So little importance was attached to staff that many senators didn’t hire even the six to which they were entitled, and an astonishingly high proportion of the approximately 500 employees on senators’ personal staffs and the 144 on the staff of Senate committees were senators’ relatives"

 

Anyone seeking an explanation of the Senate’s willingness to allow the rise of the executive agreement, which freed it from the details of foreign policy, need look no further: the Senate simply had no staff adequate to handle the details of foreign policy."

 

"The staff of senatorial committees was controlled by the committee chairmen; giving individual senators more staff would therefore dilute the chairmen’s power, and the chairmen were not eager to have it diluted. The press referred to the proposed administrative assistants as “assistant senators,” reinforcing senators’ apprehensions at establishing “a cadre of political assistants who would eventually be in a position to compete for their jobs.” Senior senators, entrenched in power under the old system, had, as one would put it, a “suspicion… that they had little to gain and much to lose from a change in the status quo.” Richard Strout of The New Republic was to say that “Congress has a deep, vested interest in its own inefficiency.” It wasn’t outside forces that kept the Senate inefficient—fifty years out of date. It was the Senate itself, for its own reasons"

. What was a President to them, to these senators who said, “We were here before he came, and we’ll be here after he’s gone”?

"Capitol Hill, he concluded, has a “subtle influence,” a “certain indefinable inertia, the scarcely noticeable desiccation of ambition, force and will.” Senators fall all too easily under this influence, are beaten “just by the sheer ponderous weight of an institution moving too slowly towards goals too petty and diverse.”"

 

"AFTER THE WAR, the institutional inertia seemed to grow worse, in part because with the war’s end the rationale for executive dominance lost some of its force, in part because the war’s end allowed journalists to focus on the inertia more intensely—and in part because with the passage of time one cause of the inertia was indeed growing worse, since its root cause was the passage of time, and its effect on men."

 

"hen a freshman senator—one who had been in the Chamber three or four months—got to his feet” to join in the chorus of praise. “That son of a bitch,” Borah whispered loudly. “That son of a bitch.” Borah “didn’t dislike the speaker,” the elderly senator would explain. “He just didn’t feel that he should speak up so soon.”
The more impressive a new senator’s pre-Senate accomplishments might be, the more determined were the Senate elders to teach him that those accomplishments meant nothing here"

 

"In 1949, when Lyndon Johnson came to the Senate, the three most powerful Senate committees, by most rankings, were Appropriations, Foreign Relations, and Finance. Southerners were chairmen of all three."

 

"Also, this is a good
example of the first principle of power – when you have power, always feign powerlessness."

LBJ III pg. 185

 

"There had been many such scenes in Lyndon Johnson’s suite in the House Office Building, for, says his chief aide, John Connally, “Johnson created his own theater,” staging real-life dramas which he claimed to have witnessed, using members of the staff in supporting roles. "

 

"Johnson inspired his staff, too, giving each of them whatever would inspire him and cement his allegiance—making some of them, who wanted to make their mark on the world, to be a part of history, feel that if they stuck with him, they would be; as one put it, “You felt that the world was moving, and Lyndon was going to be one of the movers, and if you worked for him, you’d be one of the movers”; making others, who wanted less to make a mark than to advance in life, believe that sticking with him was the way to do that, too; as J. J. (Jake) Pickle, one of his men in Texas, put it, “that Mr. Johnson had the prospects of being a … national figure, and he’d take you along with him…. It was the best way to get ahead."

 

"Because his treatment of his staff had become known on Capitol Hill, Johnson had been stymied for years in the House in attempts to recruit talented individuals to work for him"

 

“Lyndon would maneuver people into positions of dependency and vulnerability so he could do what he wanted with them. I had watched what he did with Walter Jenkins. He broke Jenkins. To work for Lyndon Johnson, you had to be willing to accept the blacksnake [whip], and not even scream.”

 

 “It was all right to deal with Johnson as long as you had a little independence. But if you were on his payroll—well, I had seen how he treated people who were on his payroll.”

 

“Senator Wirtz called me in. He said, ‘John, I know you don’t want to go to Washington. I don’t blame you. But, you know, I just don’t really think we have any choice.’” Connally told Johnson, however, that, choice or not, he would stay for only a single Senate session, and his unhappiness in the job was so evident that, at the end of the session, Johnson allowed him to leave for fear he would infect the rest of the staff.

LBJ III pg. 215

 

"He had a genius for studying a man and learning his strengths and weaknesses and hopes and fears, his deepest strengths and weaknesses: what it was that the man wanted—not what he said he wanted but what he really wanted—and what it was that the man feared, really feared.
He tried to teach his young assistants to read men—“Watch their hands, watch their eyes,” he told them. “Read eyes. No matter what a man is saying to you, it’s not as important as what you can read in his eyes”—and to read between the lines more interested in men’s weaknesses than in their strengths because it was weakness that could be exploited, he tried to teach his assistants how to learn a man’s weakness. “The most important thing a man has to tell you is what he’s not telling you,” he said. “The most important thing he has to say is what he’s trying not to say.” For that reason, he told them, it was important to keep the man talking; the longer he talked, the more likely he was to let slip a hint of that vulnerability he was so anxious to conceal. “That’s why he wouldn’t let a conversation end,” Busby explains. “If he saw the other fellow was trying not to say something, he wouldn’t let it [the conversation] end until he got it out of him.” And Lyndon Johnson himself read with a genius that couldn’t be taught, with a gift that was so instinctive that a close observer of his reading habits, Robert G. (Bobby) Baker, calls it a “sense”; “He seemed to sense each man’s individual price and the commodity he preferred as coin.” He read with a novelist’s sensitivity, with an insight that was unerring, with an ability, shocking in the depth of its penetration and perception, to look into a man’s heart and know his innermost worries and desires.
Such reading is a pursuit best carried out in private—Lyndon Johnson alone with a man, getting to know him one on one. And Johnson’s gift was not only for reading men but also for using what he read—for using what a man wanted, to get from him what he wanted, to sell the man on his point of view, or on himself. "

 

"The essence of his persuasiveness was his ability, once he had found out a man’s hopes and fears, his political philosophy and his personal prejudices, to persuade the man that he shared that philosophy and those prejudices—no matter what they happened to be. In words that are echoed by Busby and Jenkins, and by many others who had an opportunity to observe Lyndon Johnson at length, Brown was to say that “Johnson had the knack of always appealing to someone about someone [that person] didn’t like. If he was talking to Joe, and Joe didn’t like Jim, he’d say he didn’t like Jim, too—that was his leadership, that was his knack.” But such a technique worked, of course, only if Jim wasn’t around—and only if there was also no one around who might one day happen to mention to Jim what Johnson had said about him. It worked best if no one was around, if the conversation was strictly “one on one.” Moreover, since Johnson used the technique not only about personalities but also about philosophies—liberals thought he was a liberal, conservatives that he was a conservative—it worked best if there was no one present from the other side. He “operated best in small groups, the smaller the better,” Jenkins said"

 

in his character: by his instinct for power (“He never got very far away from Rayburn”); by his ambition (he was “in a hurry—in a great, great hurry” and “He was willing to make the compromises necessary, I believe, to stay in Congress”); and by the method by which he concealed views that might stand in the way of the realization of that ambition—a method that, she felt, required great strength. Lyndon Johnson talked so much, she saw, but he never said anything that could be “quoted back against him later.” “Was it just caution?” she was to say. “Just that he didn’t want to have a lot of his words come back at him? … He was witty, he would tell stories, he was humorous. But he was always aware that what he said might be repeated or remembered—even years later. And he didn’t want someone to come back years later, and say, ‘I remember when you said …’” She began to realize, she says, that Lyndon Johnson was very “strong.” In Washington, she was to say, “everyone tried to find out where you stood. But he had great inner control. He could talk so much—and no one ever knew exactly where he stood.” This tall, lanky, charming man was actually “one of the most close-mouthed men I ever knew.”

 

"But if that was still Lyndon Johnson’s manner inside his office, it was no longer his manner outside. As Paul F. Healy wrote in the Saturday Evening Post, “when he barks commands, his underlings jump like marionettes,” but “away from the [office], his tone is casual and conciliatory.” Behind the closed doors of 231, he may have been the old Lyndon Johnson, but as soon as he stepped out of his office, he was a new Lyndon Johnson—a senatorial Lyndon Johnson."

 

" And, while the senator talked, Lyndon Johnson listened—listened with an obsequiousness, a deference “that you wouldn’t believe.”
The deference was unvarying not merely in private but in public—on the little stage that was the Democratic cloakroom."

 

"And at the first Democratic caucus, there was no grabbing of lapels, no leaning into the faces of his colleagues, not a trace of the former pomposity or aggressiveness. What there was was the friendliness and politeness of “the junior to the senior,” and when he introduced himself, he did so with a deprecatory nickname that referred to his narrow, last-gasp victory in the recent election. Coupled with a grin, it was very charming. “Howdy,” he said to old senators and new, southern senators and northern. “Howdy, I’m Landslide Lyndon."

 

"was his constant subtle—and sometimes not so subtle—maneuvering to get into the center of photographs and to make gestures, such as holding up a commanding finger, that made him the photographs’ focal point."

 

" Representative Johnson had fought unceasingly to get the credit even for projects in other congressmen’s districts—even for projects with which he had absolutely no connection."

 

"He watched groups of senators talk, and watched which one the others listened to. And he watched with eyes that missed nothing. Woody understood. Other observers thought the “Big Bulls” were simply the committee chairmen, that being a chairman automatically made you a “Big Bull.” Lyndon Johnson knew better; the reader of men was doing a lot of reading sitting there in the Chamber. Lyndon Johnson was studying which senators had the respect of their fellows—and why they had that respect."

 

"How complete was the transformation in Lyndon Johnson? How successfully did he change his outward character? When, in 1950, the first major article appeared about him in a national magazine, it described him as “mild-mannered.” The first cover story about him, in Newsweek in 1951, said, “His manner is quiet and gentle, and everything he does, he does with great deliberation and care.” And perhaps the definitive word came from that epitome of senatorial civility, Majority Leader Lucas. Asked about Lyndon Johnson, Lucas said, “I found him at all times what I would term a gentleman of the old school.”"

 

"And much of the flattery had a particular—and very cunningly calculated—objective: to make the subject feel for Lyndon Johnson that particularly strong form of fondness, maternal or paternal affection. After telling a female administrator how much he loved and respected his mother, he would tell her that she reminded him of his mother. He would ask her advice about some problem, and when she gave it, would say, as one administrator recalls, that “what I had said was like what his mother had said…. I was sort of flattered.” He would tell a male professor how much he loved and respected his father. He would tell the professor that he so much appreciated his help. “If you were my own father, you couldn’t have done more for me,” he said to one."

 

"In Washington, as secretary to Congressman Richard Kleberg of Corpus Christi, the techniques were the same—right down to the posture and the particular form of flattery.These techniques aroused contempt from Johnson’s contemporaries on both College and Capitol Hills.

 

LBJ III pg. 225

 

Excellent insights, first 2 months at the Senate

 

"NOW LYNDON JOHNSON was in the Senate. He had learned who the Senate’s “Big Bulls” were—and almost without exception, these bulls were Old Bulls. So, Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote, “he could see at once what was required.” After her conversations with Johnson, Ms. Goodwin was to write that he recognized “that the older men in the Senate were often troubled by a half-conscious sense that their performance was deteriorating with age.” Johnson told her—these are his words: “Now they feared humiliation, they craved attention. And when they found it, it was like a spring in the desert; their gratitude couldn’t adequately express itself with anything less than total support and dependence on me.”"

 

"The attention was tailored to the man—by a master tailor."

 

"The question of deteriorating performance was handled, too. Reports were a constant of Senate life, and many senators did not have assistants capable of writing reports of which they would not be ashamed. Johnson did, and in the most delicate of terms, he would sometimes offer an older senator the services of such an aide.
Old men crave not only attention but affection, and Johnson did not forget that, instructing aides drafting letters to them for his signature to make the letters “real sweet.” Old men want to feel that the experience which has come with their years is valuable, that their advice is valuable, that they possess a sagacity that could be obtained only through experience—a sagacity that could be of use to young men if only young men would ask. Lyndon Johnson asked. “I want your counsel on something,” he would say to one of the Old Bulls. “I need your counsel.” And when the counsel was given—and of course it was given: who could resist so earnest an entreaty?—it was appreciated, with a gratitude rare in its intensity. He would pay another visit to the senator’s office to tell him how he had followed his advice, and how well it had worked. “Thank you for your counsel,” he would say to one senator. “I needed that counsel.” “Thank you for giving me just a little of your wisdom,” he would say to another senator. “I just don’t know what I would have done without it.” When one of the Old Bulls, asked for his advice, told Johnson that he didn’t know enough about the matter, Johnson would say, “Oh, I’ll rely on your judgment any time. Your judgment’s always been good.” And the earnestness—the outward sincerity—of his words, the obvious depth of his gratitude, made the words words that an old man might treasure.

 

“The very frequency of his statements that an older politician was ‘like a Daddy to me’ tends to cast doubt on the profundity of some of these relationships,” an academic was to write after interviewing many senators; the doubts would have been confirmed had he been walking beside Lyndon Johnson and John Connally just after they left the office of an elderly senator to whom Johnson had just been, for quite a few minutes, elaborately and fawningly grateful for a piece of advice. “Christ, I’ve been kissing asses all my life,” Lyndon Johnson said, with what Connally recalls as a “snarl.” But the technique was as effective as it had always been.

 

"Baker knew little about Johnson, he was to recall. “He was just another incoming freshman to me.” But by the end of the talk, he knew a lot more. Johnson, he was to recall, “came directly to the point. ‘I want to know who’s the power over there, how you get things done, the best committees, the works.’ For two hours, he peppered me with keen questions. I was impressed. No senator ever had approached me with such a display of determination to learn, to achieve, to attain, to belong, to get ahead. He was coming into the Senate with his neck bowed, running full tilt, impatient to reach some distant goal I then could not even imagine.”"

 

"At each stage of his life, his remarkable gift for cultivating and manipulating older men who could help him had been focused at its greatest intensity on one man: the one who could, in each setting, help him the most. This focus, too, was deliberate; while he was still in college, Lyndon Johnson told his roommate Alfred (Boody) Johnson: “The way to get ahead is to get close to the one man at the top.”
In Texas, the older men most responsible for Lyndon Johnson’s earliest success were the college’s president, Cecil Evans, and the canny—and feared—Alvin Wirtz. Each of these men had a daughter. Neither had a son"

Governor Russell at work:

 

"These achievements were based on the same techniques he had employed as House Speaker. He neither publicized his ideas nor pressed them on legislative committees; he would, he promised one committee chairman, “get squarely behind the plan of reorganization that you finally decide on.” This was a tough job, he wrote the chairman, “but you are equal to it and when it is completed you will have rendered a real service to the state.” He would “flatter, cajole, encourage and support others to get out in front to achieve a desired goal,” Fite explains. “Russell had a knack for making other people feel important,” for giving credit to others"

 

“he led without people realizing that the action was his rather than their own.” Within eighteen months, many of his goals had been achieved."

 

Senator Russell:

 

" Intimidated by the prospect of a second rebellious southern demagogue raising havoc with inflammatory speeches, Robinson decided, as Russell was to put it, “to buy his peace with me”—by giving him one of the five Appropriations seats.*"

 

And Glass had quickly become fond of Dick Russell. “Old Ed Smith thinks he’s gonna get it, but he’s not worth a damn and I’m not going to give it him,” Glass told Russell. Instead, he told Russell, he was giving it to him. 

 

"Russell fully understood that power had come to him so quickly only by a very unusual coincidence. “I got to be [subcommittee] chairman, in my first year, which was a great rarity, because of a feud,” he was to say."

 

"Russell would sit in the Marble Room for hours, reading newspapers from other states. Senators came to realize that he understood not only their bills but the reasons they had introduced them; he possessed a remarkably detailed knowledge of political and economic conditions in their states."

 

"Equally impressive was his ability with people. After he had been in the Senate for a quarter of a century, Time magazine was to report that “Russell does not have a single personal enemy” in it. The head was tilted back, but the blue eyes looking down from it could be warm and friendly, as was his gentle, musical southern drawl. If he accepted you, he had a way of making you feel you belonged. "

 

"If there was affection for Dick Russell, there was also respect—respect that would become exceptional, perhaps unique, within the Senate in its universality and depth.
This respect was a tribute not only to Russell’s knowledge and expertise—of the Senate, of the individual states, of parliamentary procedure, of tradition and precedent—but also to the integrity with which the knowledge was employed. "

 

" Quietly, dispassionately, Russell would make sure the senator understood not only the reasons why he should take the same position on the bill that Russell was taking, but the reasons why he should take an opposing position. Both sides of the issue would be given equal weight. Asked years later “[To] what would you attribute his ability to sway votes and opinions in the Senate?” Ervin would say: “I would attribute it to the fact that he told the truth…. People had so much respect in his intellectual integrity they knew that he was telling the truth when he described what the contents of a bill were or what the effects of that bill would be.”"

 

"“hero of the drama” was the “very unobtrusive young man from Georgia…. The winning compromise in each instance was Mr. Russell’s own idea.”
As if displeased with even this meagre amount of publicity, Russell took further pains to cloak his Senate work in anonymity, often, after he had devised a compromise amendment, asking another senator to introduce it so that the other senator would be given the credit. So successful was he in keeping his name out of newspapers that he was frequently not even mentioned in connection with bills passed only after he had worked out the compromises which made passage possible. Within the world of the Senate, however, his ability to untangle legislative knots was widely recognized. "

 

"Richard Russell’s rationalizations made it easier for non-southern senators seeking rationalizations to vote with the South; his approach, so different from that of the Senate’s racist demagogues, was vastly more effective in defending the cause that was so precious to him. And the more perceptive of the southern senators realized this. As Sam Ervin was to put it: “Dick Russell always carried on his combat in such a knightly fashion that he never aroused the antagonism of the people most determined to overcome his efforts. He had an uncanny capacity to do that…. Most southerners possess that capacity more or less to a limited degree, but Dick Russell possessed it to an unsurpassed degree."

 

"There is only the fact that in the House that he headed, no anti-lynching legislation was passed. He “avoided,” in his biographer’s careful term, “inflammatory and emotional issues such as lynching…"

 

" The margins of his victories were growing steadily narrower. And Richard Russell’s public statements as well as private letters were beginning occasionally to show less of the “moderation” and “restraint” that had always characterized them in the past, as if the veneer were cracking, just a little but enough to reveal what lay beneath. "

LBJ III pg. 272

 

"BEHIND THE PERSONALITY was the power—the senatorial brand of power.
Russell’s dominance on the Armed Services Committee, a dominance that lasted for more than a quarter of a century, gave him a full measure of power in dealing with other senators—at least with any senator whose state contained an Army camp or an airfield or a naval base (or indeed any defense-related installation), or a major defense contractor. That power was magnified by his role on the Appropriations Committee (of which he would also later become dominant member and then chairman). In 1949, he was still, as he had been since 1933, Chairman of Appropriations’ agricultural subcommittee—so that he still stood athwart that strategic Senate narrows, in a position to exact tribute from any senator who needed funding for an agricultural project. Magnifying his power further was his leadership of the Southern Caucus, which of course included in its ranks guardians of other senatorial narrows: chairmen of other two Appropriations subcommittees, other chairmen of Standing Committees, so the power of the South—the power exercised at Russell’s command—was interwoven between committees and subcommittees into a very strong web indeed"

 

"If further magnification was needed, it was provided by his role within his party. Richard Russell was the only senator who sat on both the Democratic Policy Committee, which controlled the flow of legislation to the floor, and the Democratic Steering Committee, which controlled the party’s committee assignments."

 

"Another freshman senator, newly elected and nervous, was to recall how he told Russell that he had been warned that if he opposed certain legislation, a number of powerful senators might punish him by opposing projects for his state. "

 

"RUSSELL’S USE of his immense power to punish senators instead of to help them was very seldom referred to—perhaps because it was exercised with the same diffidence; Richard Russell rarely if ever used the direct threat."

 

"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 gracious-ness, 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"

 

LBJ III pg. 308

 

"With his fellow senators, he was invariably courteous, friendly, even cordial. But, more and more, as year followed year, that friendship also had a limit: the point at which intimacies, personal confidences, might have been exchanged but were not, because of the barrier around Richard Russell which was never lowered. He seemed unable to express affection, unable to talk about personal matters, to bridge the distance between himself and even a colleague he liked. The grave demeanor, the judiciousness and reserve, might bring him the respect of his colleagues; it did not make any of them his intimates."

 

"AFTER LYNDON JOHNSON’S DISCUSSION with Bobby Baker (“Dick Russell is the power”), in late December 1948, Johnson abruptly dropped his requests for a seat on Appropriations. There was, he would explain, only one way to get close to a man whose life was his work: “I knew there was only one way to see Russell every day, and that was to get a seat on his committee. Without that we’d most likely be passing acquaintances and nothing more. So I put in a request for the Armed Services Committee.”"

 

"At first, he would drop by only in the late afternoon, after the Senate had adjourned for the day. He was very deferential and formal in his approach. He would not ask the receptionist to tell Senator Russell he was there; instead, he would write a note asking if it would be convenient for Senator Russell to see Senator Johnson, and ask her to take it in. And he would keep the conversation focused on the committee’s work, asking Russell questions about it, asking advice on how best to carry out some committee assignment he had been given"

 

"ohnson’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,” 

 

He began spending time with Russell not only after the Senate recessed for the day but before it convened. Although Johnson had generally eaten breakfast in bed ever since, with his wedding ceremony, he had acquired someone to bring it to him, he now began rising early and breakfasting in the senators’ private dining room—as it happened, at the same hour that Russell ate breakfast there. More and more frequently, the two senators had breakfast together, discussing Armed Services Committee business"

 

"And, more and more, he was spending time with Russell on weekends. Not many senators worked on Saturdays, but Russell did, of course, and Johnson did, too. "

 

And in these early mornings and late evenings I made sure that there was always one companion, one Senator, who worked as hard and as long as he, and that was me, Lyndon Johnson. 

 

"“You never, ever, saw them at Lyndon’s house together.” “Lyndon didn’t want his two daddies to see how he acted with the other one,” explains Jim Rowe.

Not all the time Johnson and Russell spent together on weekends was spent working, or reading the papers. For Russell found that this new senator from Texas shared—enthusiastically—some of his own interests. Those new enthusiasms that Johnson now revealed were as surprising to his assistants as his love for baseball. One, for example, was the War Between the States."

 

"BUT RUSSELL WASN’T RAYBURN. Rayburn hungered, yearned, for love—for a wife, for children, in particular for a son. It wasn’t a son that Richard Russell wanted, it was a soldier—a soldier for the Cause"

 

"For Johnson to get what he wanted from Russell, he would have to prove to him that they had the same feelings on the issue that dominated Russell’s life.

 

"ohnson’s attentions to him, his courtship, flattered and pleased Russell not only emotionally, of course, but, more importantly, in an intellectual, dispassionate way. Russell, after all, had himself zeroed in on power in the Senate from the moment of his arrival there, and was, in his coolly rational way, very aware of his own position in the Senate. He understood Johnson’s tactics and appreciated them. “Senator Russell was extremely favorably impressed by how he just got started on the right foot and seemed to know where the sources of power were, and how to proceed,” Darden would say.
Russell was also impressed by other qualities that Johnson possessed: his diligence, for one. Russell had little patience with colleagues not familiar with all the facts regarding a piece of legislation. Men had said of Richard Russell that he read the Congressional Record every day; now men were saying that about Lyndon Johnson. No one could fool a senator who worked as hard as did Russell about how hard another senator was working, and he saw that now, at last, there was another senator who worked as hard as he. He was impressed—this general who worried that he was letting down his Cause by not being sufficiently in tune with the modern age—by “how well-organized his [Johnson’s] office was”; he was impressed by Johnson’s energy and drive, by how he got things done.
Lyndon Johnson, Richard Russell was to say, “was a can-do young man.” He had played tutor or patron to other young senators, he was to say; Johnson “made more out of my efforts to help him than anyone else ever had.” The master legislator, the matchless parliamentarian, knew that there was another master in the Senate now."

LBJ III, Pg. 390

 

Johnson destroys Olds's political career

 

"It was important for Johnson not only that Olds be defeated, but that he, Johnson, be given credit for that defeat. The oilmen had never been enthusiastic about Johnson; they had poured money into his 1948 campaign only because of Herman Brown’s personal assurances that he could be counted on. He would need their money for his 1954 re-election campaign—and for the campaigns he saw beyond. It was essential that he demonstrate to them that they could depend on him—that he could be counted on not just to work in their behalf, but to work effectively—and Olds’ renomination process was the ideal opportunity for such a demonstration"

 

"“This [Olds’ defeat] transcended philosophy, this would put something in their pockets. This was the real bread-and-butter issue to these oilmen. So this would prove whether Lyndon was reliable, that he was no New Dealer. This was his chance to get in with dozens of oilmen—to bring very powerful rich men into his fold who had never been for him, and were still suspicious of him. So for Lyndon this was the way to turn it around: take care of this guy!"

 

"Surprise was also vital because if Olds became aware of the scope and intensity of the attack that was to be launched on him, he might arrive at the subcommittee hearing with an attorney—an attorney experienced in such hearings and unintimidated by senators, an attorney who might, for example, request a recess if unexpected charges were suddenly made about writings or events that had occurred so long in the past that the witness needed an opportunity to familiarize himself with them before he answered questions about them. "

 

nd then he turned to Leland Olds—forgetting, as he did so, to be “senatorial,” so that the rest of Lyndon Johnson’s speech, which lasted fifty minutes, was delivered in a hoarse shouting voice.
Johnson repeated all the charges that had been made against Olds"

 

"THE BROWN BROTHERS had been assuring their conservative friends for years that Lyndon wasn’t really a liberal, that he was as “practical” as they were, and now they were almost gloating in this proof that they had been correct. As their lobbyist Oltorf recalls, “Even after everything Lyndon had done—even after the Taft-Hartley and the way he fought Truman on the FEPC and all that—they [independent oilmen] had still been suspicious. They still thought he was too radical. But now he had tangibly put something in their pockets. Somebody who put money in their pockets couldn’t be a radical. They weren’t suspicious any more.” Herman Brown was a businessman who wanted value for money spent. As George, who echoes his brother’s thinking, says, “Listen, you get a doctor, you want a doctor who does his job. You get a lawyer, you want a lawyer who does his job. You get a Governor, you want a Governor who does his job.” Doctor, lawyer, governor, congressman, senator—when Herman “got” somebody, he wanted his money’s worth. "

 

"The Leland Olds fight had paid off for Lyndon Johnson, too, and he knew it. He had known for years that he needed the wholehearted support of the oilmen and of men like Clark for the money necessary if he were ever to realize his dreams. Now, at last, he had that support, and he was as happy as his aides had ever seen him. “It is a real pleasure to be around him when he is feeling this way,” Warren Woodward wrote Busby. Back in the house on Dillman Street in Austin for Christmas, Lyndon Johnson wrote a letter to Justice William O. Douglas. “This has been one of the finest years—perhaps the finest—of our lives,” he said"

LBJ III, pg.  395

 

"And the engagement had ended in victory—in the utter rout of the liberal forces. Was the South’s great general now beginning to feel that perhaps he had found not merely a soldier for the Cause, but something more: a leader for the Cause, a new general—someone who might one day be able to pick up its banner when he himself finally had to let it fall? It would not be for another year or so that Richard Russell began to hint at such a feeling, but there was, almost immediately after the 53–15 vote, impressive testimony to at least the warmth of his feelings for Johnson."

 

"For Dick Russell, who had just spent ten months in Washington with very little warmth in his life, it was a week basking in warmth, and in admiration—and the thank-you note he sent to Johnson from Winder showed how pleasant the week had been. “Dear Lyndon,” he wrote. “Ever since I reached home I have been wondering if I would wake up and find that I had just been dreaming that I had made a trip to Texas. Everything was so perfect that it is difficult to realize that it could happen in real life.”"

 

"But if you do everything, you’ll win. Johnson had already done something. The White House was concerned about adverse congressional reaction to Truman’s failure to ask congressional authorization to send in troops. In the event, despite tense moments—Robert Taft declared that the President had “usurped the power of Congress”—substantial reaction did not materialize; several senators were to write letters to the President expressing their support. Johnson did everything he could to make sure his letter would have the strongest possible impact on the President."

 

The tone of the letter had to be perfect, he said. And it had to get there first, before a letter from any other senator. He would get to the office early Wednesday morning, he told Busby, “and I want that letter on my desk when I get in. I want it on Truman’s desk when he gets there in the morning.” 

 

 Although the relationship between Johnson and Truman would never be particularly warm (Margaret Truman says that her father “never quite trusted him”), a moderate thaw, with occasional reverses, can be dated from this exchange.

 

"Speed was necessary, for the odds against him getting the job were very long."

LBJ III, pg. 403

 

*Tactics: Disarming the opponent

*The critical importance of a powerful patron

*Generate inspiration/crusader spirit

 

"Seeing his precious opportunity slipping away, Johnson pleaded for a chance to talk to Tydings in person—“Millard, as indicated twice today, I shall be delighted to discuss my position with you at any time … that may be convenient for you”—a chance he was apparently"not given.

 

"In a letter he wrote Tydings on July 19, there was, before the requisite disclaimer, a note of desperation. “I believed that I would be named chairman of the group authorized by the resolution I introduced. Since this would only be in line with the usual practice of the Senate, I thought I had some right to expect this. I have no political ambitions to further, however, so I have no intention of objecting if you want to name yourself chairman.” In a July 25 memorandum, Johnson sought to reassure Tydings that the subcommittee would pose no threat to his authority as chairman of the full Armed Services Committee, or to his ability to take credit for the subcommittee’s findings."

 

Attempting during the long, frustrating week following the July 17 committee meeting to enlist Truman’s influence on his behalf, Johnson issued a number of statements designed to reassure the President that he need not fear criticism from any subcommittee headed by Lyndon Johnson."

 

"If Truman intervened, his intervention was not sufficient: the President’s influence on Capitol Hill was on the wane."

 

"If Truman intervened, his intervention was not sufficient: the President’s influence on Capitol Hill was on the wane. Tydings refused to budge. For a freshman senator to get this prized subcommittee chairmanship, he would need an ally—a patron—more influential within the Senate than the President.
And this freshman senator had that ally. “He had talked it over beforehand with Senator Russell and asked his help in convincing [Tydings] to give him the subcommittee despite his lack of seniority,” a journalist familiar with the situation was to recall. Although Russell had agreed to help, he had hitherto not thrown his full weight into the scales. Now he did so—and with Russell on his side, Lyndon Johnson didn’t need anyone else. As Symington was to put it, “Russell was for him. There were no other factors that mattered.”

 

"The significance of the appointment to Johnson’s career was instantly apparent. “Senator Johnson of Texas today faces opportunities for fame, public service and political advancement almost without equal for a senator serving his first term,” Leslie Carpenter wrote. “Those opportunities are fundamentally the same as those that confronted Senator Truman … in 1941. And no one has to be told what happened to Truman.” "

 

" As The Nation reported, “With the outbreak of the Korean War dozens of Congressmen recognized that the impact of a tremendous rearmament program would open up new fields for legislative investigation and that national reputations could be built by skillful employment of the power to probe.” Dozens had recognized it; one had gotten it—thanks largely to his third R"

 

"The Senate as a whole—and most senators individually—may not have grasped the importance of staff, of a new kind of staff suited to the new, more complicated postwar world, but Lyndon Johnson had grasped it from the day he arrived in the Senate. And now, assembling a staff for the Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee, he set out to create what he had had in mind."

 

"Lyndon Johnson had a different level of help in mind: was the “best man with words” on the subcommittee staff?—he wanted the “best man with numbers,” too. That man, Donald Cook, a trained accountant as well as a very sharp lawyer, was not a commissioner’s assistant but a full commissioner, vice chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, in fact—at that very moment, in fact, under consideration for the SEC’s chairmanship. Johnson wanted him instead to run the Preparedness Subcommittee’s day-to-day operation. And he got him. Cook didn’t want to leave the SEC—the chairmanship, as a stepping-stone to the wealth that was his goal, was what he had been aiming at, hitherto with Johnson’s support. But he wasn’t given a choice; Johnson had arranged his career—the positions with Tom Clark’s Justice Department; the SEC commissionership—and, it was made clear to him, Johnson could stop arranging. Cook was told—in so many words—that if he wanted Johnson’s future backing for the SEC chairmanship, he would first have to be chief counsel of Johnson’s subcommittee"

 

"but inspiration. “We need you! Your country needs you! Put a staff together, and get ‘em rollin’, and you can go on your way. But right now, we need you. We’re at war! This is a big world war we’re getting into, and we need some top-class help. This is gonna be the Truman Committee of the Third World War!” So deeply affected was Tyler that when he walked out of 231 he no longer had one idol but two. “Lyndon, I thought, had great, great strength,” Tyler says. “He could talk you into anything. Listen—he had to me some of the drive of J. Edgar Hoover. What more can I say?”"

 

"By August 15, two weeks after the Preparedness Subcommittee had held its first organizational meeting, the subcommittee’s staff—lawyers, accountants, researchers, stenographers, investigators—numbered twenty-five, three times as many as the staff of Tydings’ parent committee. Lyndon Johnson, still in his second year in the Senate, had assembled a staff not only larger than that of most other senators—perhaps larger than that of any other senator—but more qualified. In just two weeks, in that small-scale Senate of 1950, Lyndon Johnson had created his own little empire, and it was an empire of talent"

LBJ III pg. 412

 

*Ruthless action to achieve the goal, even if the action itself has no real substance

 

"Speed was essential. Tydings’ intention of taking over the defense mobilization investigation after his re-election in November gave Johnson less than three months to compile a record so impressive that his chairman would find it embarrassing to supplant him, and in fact he had even less time than that."

 

" A number of House committees were beginning their own mobilization investigations; at least one senior senator, Homer Ferguson, was making noises about forming a special Select Senate Committee, and the committee that produced the first newsworthy result would have the important first public identification as the investigating body. Johnson needed to have a report ready fast—and he did. Most of the subcommittee’s staff reported for work on August 15. The subcommittee’s first report was released to the press three weeks later"

 

"ohnson was able to produce a report so quickly because much of it was simply a recycling of a report that had been all but completed—by another Armed Services subcommittee he had been chairing—before the Korean War began: a routine study "

 

"There was nothing particularly new or significant in the report; in fact, by the time it appeared, the Administration had already begun reactivating the program"

 

". In a democracy, the bedrock of political power is public support, so one of the most basic requirements for a public official is the ability to influence public opinion, and the journalists who mold it. None of the lower arts of politics is more essential to the politician than the ability to obtain favorable publicity, and the subcommittee’s first report demonstrated that its chairman was a master of that art. Although most of what the report said was neither new nor significant, Johnson made it seem new and significant—by saying it in phrases brilliantly calculated to catch the journalistic eye"

 

Some of these phrases were written by Johnson’s little wordsmith— contained in the draft report Horace Busby brought into Johnson’s office. Some were Johnson’s own, written onto the draft in his bold handwriting, the phrases of a great storyteller who all his life had displayed a gift for the dramatic. The report was infused with a sense of drama

LBJ III pg. 430

 

*Tactic:  Mundane assets cleverly disguised as sensational valuables.

 

"Lyndon Johnson didn’t want any mishaps. He wanted to minimize the chance of controversy and confrontation—wanted to have publicity without, so far as possible, the danger of bad publicity. And he succeeded: by making not hearings but reports—the forty-four printed, formal reports issued by his subcommittee during his chairmanship—the basis of his subcommittee’s work.
These reports, based either on investigations by the subcommittee staff or, in not a few cases, on work previously done by other government agencies (several were simply rewritings of studies that had been carried out by the research service of the Library of Congress) were drafted (or rewritten) by Siegel and then redrafted by Cook and Walter Jenkins. Then they were rewritten again by Busby or Reedy, two experts in summarizing findings in pithy introductions and summaries. (And, of course, they were then edited by the senator-editor who was an expert himself.)"

 

"hen 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!”"

 

These measures gave Johnson an unusual degree of control over the newspaper coverage his subcommittee received. That coverage had to be based mostly on the printed reports—the final reports, from which all areas of disagreement had been removed, all controversy smoothed over.

 

“Johnson wanted the press only after the whole thing was done,” Busby says. “You just ran the mimeograph machine, and handed it out.” Moreover, these measures helped to ensure that news about the subcommittee would have to come from Johnson, and from Johnson alone.

 

The secrecy which surrounded the reports gave Johnson another great advantage in dealing with the press. It infused the reports with an aura of importance, as if information so tightly guarded must be significant. A journalist lucky enough to be given advance information about a report’s contents could tell, and convince, his editors that the findings were significant because he believed they were significant. And, of course, it made the reporter look good to his editors: he was the one who had gotten the scoop; he was the one who had, his bosses back in New York now knew, that valuable Washington commodity, access. It made journalists eager to obtain advance information about the reports; grateful if they got the information, and less disposed to evaluate it with a critical eye, particularly since they would want to be given an advance look at the next report.

 

And advance information was available, for one of the most important of the lower arts of politics is the leak. "

 

"Now, in 1950, Lyndon Johnson had ammunition to work with—real ammunition. He used it with a flair, infusing it with drama, emphasizing to favored reporters the risks he was taking in letting them see one of the still-secret reports. "

 

"he excitement and feelings of complicity—of alliance—that journalists felt at being involved in such intrigues comes through in their memos"

 

" “He worked at keeping the press on his side,” comments Marshall McNeil of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “He made a point of seeing all newspapermen, and everyone left thinking that he was Lyndon’s best friend.”"

 

"“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."

 

" patrician aversion to disputes or controversy that made him “shrink from quarreling.”"

 

 

LBJ III pg. 450

 

*LBJ would not tolerate anymore than all 7 critical signatures over every issue-sought compromise

 

"And if problems still remained, Johnson would personally discuss them with the objecting senator. Then he would try to find a way of modifying the report yet again to meet the objections while not modifying it so much that some other subcommittee member might object. In seeking such compromises, he was notably amenable to his colleagues’ points of view, so much so that staff aides—not Cook or Siegel, perhaps, but others less closely tied to Johnson—came to feel that he cared less about the content of the report than about the fact that there be a report."

 

"During these negotiations, he would compliment the senators, with that gift for the perfect compliment."

 

" He would charm them: if one of the senators complimented him back, Lyndon Johnson would grin, with a warm grin that crinkled up his big face, and say, “Well, Ah sure do wish mah parents had been here to hear you say that, Senator. Mah father would have enjoyed it. And mah mother would have believed it.”"

 

"He used his stories, those wonderful stories, told in that persuasive Texas drawl, to make points—whatever points needed to be made."

 

"If the compliments and the stories didn’t work, he would cajole and plead with a senator for his signature, would work from the high ground (a unanimous report would demonstrate that the subcommittee members weren’t motivated by partisan considerations, he would say, and with a war going on, that was important; “Hell, we’ve got boys dyin out there”) and from lower ground (framing his arguments in pragmatic political terms, he would explain to a colleague precisely how a proposed report would strengthen him in his own state, displaying a remarkably detailed familiarity of that state’s political situation). He would use every variety of argument, all couched in sentences whose very rhythms infused them with a force and persuasiveness that made them hard to resist: telling one of the subcommittee members that he was the only one still refusing to sign a report, he would say, “Ah talked to Styles. He’s goin’ along. Ah talked to John. He’s goin’ along. Hell, even ol’ Wayne’s goin’ along.” Implied, if not stated, was the question: Do you want to be the only member standing in the way of the subcommittee’s work?
And most significantly, if, despite all the charm and the cajoling and the pleading, one senator still continued to refuse to go along, said he simply could not sign the report, that would not be the end of the matter."

 

Perhaps the senator had made clear that he didn’t want to discuss the matter any further, and had done so in terms so firm it would have been a mistake for Lyndon Johnson to try to schedule yet another meeting with him. In that case, no new meeting would be scheduled—although one would in fact occur. Alone behind the closed door of his private office, Johnson would prepare new arguments, forecast the senator’s replies to them, prepare his own responses to those replies, rehearse his delivery. Through the door his aides would hear the Chief’s voice: “Now, Styles, you’ve got a real strong point there, but here’s the thing….” He would, in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s words, fashion “a detailed mental script from which he would speak—in a manner designed to seem wholly spontaneous—when the meeting took place…. The meeting itself might seem like an accidental encounter in a Senate corridor; but Johnson was not a man who roamed through halls in aimless fashion: when he began to wander, he knew who it was he would find.”

 

For a recalcitrant subcommittee member, even home offered no sanctuary. The telephone would ring, and on it would be the subcommittee’s chairman, wanting o discuss the matter again. If the senator continued to disagree, Johnson would telephone him again—later in the evening or on a weekend. In these conversations, he never threatened—he had nothing to threaten with, of course—or demanded. He was respectful, deferential—humble, even. But he was also untiring. Other senators wanted to spend time with their wives and children. They had other things they wanted to do besides talk about a subcommittee report. But if he did not have agreement—the signature he needed to make the report unanimous—Lyndon Johnson would not stop talking about the report"

 

And the thing is: he got them to change. He got them to change, even guys who had said flatly they weren’t going to change. The reason was that he was going to invest more time than they would.” 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. You’d agree just to get rid of him.” He just wouldn’t stop until you gave in. He hadn’t stopped in Courthouse Square, and he didn’t stop now, wouldn’t stop, because he couldn’t stop. He had to win, had to. “One way or another, he just refused to have a single vote against him,” BeLieu says.
And he didn’t have one. “This unanimity is especially remarkable because the group is a cross-section of Senate political opinion,” one journalist said.

 

" Johnson emphasized that he played golf only as a means of advancing some purpose with Symington or some other influential partner. “He confesses privately that he does not enjoy the game and can’t waste the time it would take to really learn it.” "

 

"But for Johnson it is Topic A-to-Z…. He refuses to be trapped into thinking about or discussing sports, literature, the stage, the movies, or anything else in the world of recreation.”

 

Johnson had bid for the cover—the cover of a national magazine with a circulation of more than two million—with the tried and true technique of which he had, during this year, so repeatedly demonstrated his mastery: a leak of a still-secret subcommittee report."

 

" And, Lord, though, the press tore him to pieces…. It became apparent to everyone very quickly in Washington that the report did not have any substance to it and that he [Johnson] had used it as bait to get this cover on Newsweek magazine."

 

"ONCE THE PRESS had taken its first hard look behind the catchphrases, it would never again view Lyndon Johnson’s Defense Preparedness Subcommittee in quite the same way. Coverage of the subcommittee reports that followed the “Guns and Butter” embarrassment was notably less enthusiastic than had previously been the case. So dramatically was the perception of the subcommittee altered that by 1953, Time’s James McConaughy would report confidentially to his editors that while he himself considered the criticism unjust, the subcommittee was in fact “often criticized as too publicity seeking.” Another Time reporter, Clay Blair, summed up its work as “much ado about nothing"

 

"If the changed perception had a crippling effect on the subcommittee, however, it had no such effect on Lyndon Johnson’s career.
He had, after all, already gotten out of the subcommittee a great deal of publicity—a favorable national image, even a cover story in a national magazine."

 

" He was “Johnson of the Watchdog Committee,” the “Watchdog in Chief.” In a single great leap—with a single issue, preparedness; with a single instrument, a brand-new subcommittee—he had thrust himself up out of the mass of senators."

 

"THE SIGNIFICANCE of the damage to the subcommittee’s image was also diminished by another factor, moreover. Even in the midst of that great leap, even as Lyndon Johnson had still been directing the subcommittee, issuing the reports, holding the press conferences, his eyes had been focusing on something else.
Lyndon Johnson’s political genius was creative not merely in the lower, technical aspects of politics but on much higher levels. "

 

"

LBJ III pg. 460

 

*Senators as "one-man institutions"

*Like in office meetings, the use of filibuster by one's enemies as a mean to block anything from being accomplished or to weaken the leaders.  This is reinforced by  threats of punishment.

*Without threatening, punishing, and awarding subordinates one will gain much popularity but at the same time will gradually lose the power of leadership.

 

he Senate had certainly chosen no “leaders”; why would the ambassadors of sovereign states want to be led? A senator referred to as a “Leader”—Majority Leader or Minority Leader—was therefore leader not of the Senate but only of his party’s senators, elected not by the Senate but by them in a party conference, or “caucus,” to chair the caucuses and “lead” their parties on the Senate floor"

 

" Until 1913, when newspapers mentioned Senate “leaders,” they were referring, as one study states, to “leadership exercised through an individual’s oratorical, intellectual, or political skills, not from any party designation, formal or informal.” "

 

Elected Democratic Leader in 1925, Robinson was Minority Leader until 1933, when the Roosevelt landslide made him Majority Leader, and he ran his party with a firm hand, dividing up Senate patronage, appointing as Senate employees men loyal to him, disciplining rebellious senators. But he ran it on behalf of thePresident—no matter who the President happened to be."

 

"Robinson’s leadership of the Senate coincided, moreover, with one of the most distressing periods of Senate impotence."

 

"Even this Senate Leader of whom it has been written that “He did more than any predecessor to define the potential of party leadership” defined it primarily in terms of the program of the Executive Branch; “forceful” and “effective” though he may have been, he was forceful and effective only when he was doing the President’s bidding and was backed by a President’s power. In creating and developing public policy, his role was, in fact, less than minor, since the legislation he advanced was, on balance, legislation of which he deeply disapproved. And the extent to which his power was based on presidential backing was demonstrated when he tried to exert authority on internal Senate matters about which the Administration had no interest—then his vaunted authority seemed strangely diminished; "

 

"The Senate Democrats were divided by a seemingly unbridgeable chasm, however, and the power in the Senate—virtually all the power—was not on the liberal side of that chasm. The committee chairmen who held that power were almost all southern and/or conservative. A Democratic Leader trying to pass Administration legislation found himself trapped on the wrong side of an angrily divided party. And the situation was similar in the Senate GOP, even if less acute because the Republicans, being in the minority, were not expected to get legislation passed. Both parties were dominated by their conservative elders; it was they, not the Majority and Minority Leaders, who held senatorial power.
A Senate “Leader” had little power to lead even on the Senate floor. Because of the tradition of unlimited debate, even after he had brought a bill to the floor, any one of his ninety-five colleagues could halt consideration of the measure merely by talking. Since, as White wrote, “No one may tell any senator how long he may talk, or about what, or when,” a Majority Leader “cannot even control from one hour to the next the order of business on the floor.” Any attempt to do so—to limit the debate in any way—would raise in the minds of southerners and conservatives the spectre of a threat to the sacred. Any Leader contemplating an attempt to break the filibuster that was the tradition’s ultimate expression would know that he would have White’s “eternal majority” firmly against him. And even when there was no filibuster, "

 

"Barkley had learned his lesson, however. While he still presented Administration proposals, he no longer tried particularly hard to force his colleagues to vote for them—because he knew now that he had no power to do so. “I have nothing to promise them,” he explained plaintively. “I have nothing to threaten them with.” This attitude, together with his amiable personality, restored his popularity with his colleagues, but so completely did he relinquish the field to the conservative coalition that liberal senators and commentators routinely referred to the Senate’s “leadership vacuum.”"

 

"Although White had the title, Vandenberg, and conservatives Bridges, Eugene Millikin of Colorado and Robert Taft, had the power. "

LBJ III pg. 487

 

*More examples of well liked Senators that were weak leaders

 

"LYNDON JOHNSON, who so dreaded failure and humiliation, had thus seen with his own eyes, in close-up, the probability of failure and humiliation for anyone who took a Senate leadership position. He was under no illusions about those positions; knowing—this son of Sam Johnson—the cost of illusions, as always he wanted facts, and he asked the Legislative Reference Service of the Library of Congress to list the powers of party floor leaders; when he received the list it contained exactly one item: “priority in recognition” by the chair."

 

"And there seemed no realistic possibility that the situation would change. The leadership was weak because the committee chairmen wanted it weak—and the chairmen had the power to keep it weak."

 

"The choice of McFarland dismayed liberals. He is “an amiable, inoffensive, genuinely likeable ex-judge,” said columnist Lowell Mellett. “He is my friend and everybody’s friend.” But he is “no leader”; during his ten years in the Senate, “he had just gone along … content to be led.”"

 

As a Senate historian was to summarize, “Johnson had no claim to the position, except that he had the backing of Dick Russell.” But that backing was all he needed"

 

MacArthur at the Senate: "I still remember the refrain of one of the most popular barrack ballads of that day, which proclaimed, most proudly, “Old soldiers never die. They just fade away.” And like the soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away—an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty"

 

"“Without rejecting outright a single MacArthur policy, without defending at a single point a single Truman policy, without accusing the General of anything whatever, the Senate’s investigation had largely ended his influence on policy-making. It had set in motion an intellectual counterforce to the emotional adulation that for a time had run so strongly through the country.” It had done, in short, precisely what the Founding Fathers had wanted the Senate to do, what their Constitution had designed it to do: to defuse—cool off—and educate; to make men think, recall them to their first principles, such as the principle that in a democracy it is not generals but the people’s tribunes who make policy. “It was, in all truth, a demonstration of what the Senate at its best was capable of doing,”"

 

"Richard Russell. It was his “power and prestige … employed at a moment of great crisis in America” that had calmed a country that was “as close to a state of national hysteria as it had ever been in its history.” He had displayed, Life magazine said, “firmness, fairness and dignity almost unmatched in recent Congressional history.”"

 

 

"LYNDON JOHNSON PLAYED a minor role in the MacArthur episode, a role that had no relationship to his new post as Assistant Leader. He had assigned his two Preparedness attorneys, Donald Cook and Gerald Siegel, to analyze each evening that day’s testimony and prepare a list of questions for Russell to ask the next day"

 

"Sometimes they would be alone together in Russell’s office in the evenings, and Russell found himself discussing the strategy for the hearings—not specific questions or press releases, not matters of tactics, but the overall strategy—and he found that Reedy was worth discussing strategy with, that it helped to bounce ideas off him, to get other sides of the issue. Reedy, the flaming Wisconsin liberal who had always despised Russell because of the Georgian’s views on civil rights, had come to realize that Russell was not only “the preeminent senatorial tactician” but that he possessed “a grasp of history that was equaled by very few politicians in my memory.” "

 

he had seen that Johnson was a master in the use of this new tool, as he was a master in so many other new tools. He saw that Johnson was capable of adapting the Senate to the new age.heir relationship, already close, had become even closer. “By the end of 1951,” George Reedy says, “the Russell-Johnson relationship was a very, very close relationship.” And it was about this time that Richard Russell paid Lyndon Johnson quite a compliment. 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.”

LBJ III pg. 520

 

* More reminders of how fancy titles disguise lack of power, and often how power is held informally

*Johnson created informal power for himself by turning himself into an often used information source for Senators.  He turned himself into an intermediary.  With the help of a spy he found, Bobby Baker.

 

Johnson had few illusions about the position of Democratic Leader, he had even fewer about the position of Assistant Leader. “The whip’s job is a nothing job,” he told journalist Alfred Steinberg. If he was to advance along that path, however, his progress during the next two years at least was going to have to be through that “nothing” job. So he had set about making, out of nothing, something."

 

" For eighty-six days the debate rolled back and forth, but when Dwight Eisenhower, who had been the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during World War II and was considered an unchallengeable authority on military questions, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that there was “no acceptable alternative” to the “defense of Western Europe” but to send the four divisions, the debate was effectively over"

 

The passage of time had had its inevitable effect on the seniority problem. The Senate Appropriations Committee had become a particularly notorious bottleneck because, as Drew Pearson reported, “Tennessee’s never-say-die Kenneth McKellar, grandpa of the Senate, is now so feeble that he can no longer run the Committee, which passes on all the funds for the entire government. Yet he is so jealous of his powers as chairman that he won’t let another senator run it."

 

The responsibility for Congress’ failures, Galloway wrote, “lies in large part at the door of Senate filibusters…. Filibusters have delayed for decades the enactment of social legislation passed by the House of Representatives and desired by a majority of the American people.”

 

And he delivered that message with the air of an actor trying to remember difficult lines. McFarland was not to improve with practice; it was soon an open secret on Capitol Hill that Old Mac just couldn’t think very fast on his feet. Nor was this man who said, “I just try to get along with people,” adept at the exercise of power. 

 

"Though he was called the Democratic Leader, more than half the Democrats took orders not from him but from Richard Russell, and should it come to a showdown involving the entire Senate, a majority would take orders from Russell and Taft; the conservative coalition, not the Administration, had the votes in a crunch. "

 

His title, “Assistant Leader,” had always been little more than honorary; journalists had the impression that the whip’s job was still the “nothing job” he himself had called it.
Johnson was careful not to disturb that impression. While he was still photographed emerging from the White House, after that first Monday morning he seldom if ever again made the mistake of injecting himself into the exchanges between the Leaders and journalists; he stood silently in the background"

 

For, without the press noticing it, the job was changing.
Part of the change was simply a matter of information"

 

"“Vote-counting”—predicting legislators’ votes in advance—is one of the most vital of the political arts, but it is an art that few can master, for it is peculiarly subject to the distortions of sentiment and romantic preconceptions. A person psychologically or intellectually convinced of the arguments on one side of a controversial issue feels that arguments so convincing to him must be equally convincing to others. And therefore, as Harry McPherson puts it, “Most people tend to be much more optimistic in their counts than the situation deserves…. True believers were always inclined to attribute more votes to their side than actually existed.”"

 

The White House needed to know if it had the votes for a bill it wanted brought to the floor.

 

"

“Safe in the cloakroom senators opened up their heads and their hearts….” And now, when heads and hearts were opened, a very sharp pair of ears was listening.

It was here I first heard direct from the horse’s mouth what senators were considered to be for hire, and to what extent, and to whom; I learned one could not presume that just because two senators shared a common ideology or a common state that they were soul mates. Jealousies played a part, and all the other human factors entered in: competing wives, distaste for another’s lifestyle, class differences, clashing personal goals"

 

"Johnson had learned that Baker was willing to tell him where the bodies were buried. Now he had placed Baker in ideal vantage points to observe the burials. And of course the information Baker thus obtained gave him insight into how senators were likely to vote on a particular bill. "

 

 

"Arranging pairs, arranging schedules, getting minor bills called off the Calendar—mundane chores that no one wanted to do, mundane chores that, left undone, clogged the schedule and slowed the Senate down, little chores that, for many years, no one had done with any diligence. They were being done with diligence now.
If you do everything… The days were long days, and the nights were not just for sleeping. The counting didn’t stop then, the planning didn’t stop. "

 

.” Absenteeism had been crippling the Senate, and no one had seen a solution to the problem. And then suddenly someone had seen a solution—had seen a way, in fact, not only to solve the problem but to turn it to his party’s advantage."

 

"Leader after Leader, Democratic and Republican alike, had complained about their lack of anything to “threaten them with,” of anything to “promise them”; about the paucity of sources of intimidation or reward that would give a Leader enough power so that he could truly lead. Their frustration was understandable. Generations of gifted parliamentarians, determined that the Senate not be led, had done their best to ensure that it couldn’t be, designing an institution in which there existed few levers with which a Leader could move it.

But of all Lyndon Johnson’s political instincts, the strongest and most primal was his instinct for power. The man who was to say “I do understand power…. I know where to look for it” was looking for it now. There were few places within the Senate where a Leader could find it—so he looked for it outside the Senate"

 

"Lyndon Johnson was a senator now, but he still had that key—the only senator who had one, the only senator who was a regular at Rayburn’s “Board Meetings”—and that key meant power if it was used correctly. Senate passage of a bill vital to a senator was only half the action required on Capitol Hill; the bill also had to be passed by the House, and in the House, Rayburn ruled."

 

 “Every time Johnson saw Rayburn he would light up like I do when I see my grandson.”

 

Few emotions are more ephemeral in the political world than gratitude: appreciation for past favors. Far less ephemeral, however, is hope: the hope of future favors. Far less ephemeral is fear, the fear that in the future, favors may be denied. Thanks to Sam Rayburn, Lyndon Johnson now had, at least to a limited extent, those emotions on his side in dealing with senators; he had something to promise them, something to threaten them with.
ANOTHER SOURCE of power was money

 

" And to get as much as possible, Lyndon Johnson took a very direct role in raising money. Clark would for years—decades—be regarded in Texas as the state’s most skilled political fund-raiser, but, Clark says, there was someone better at that art than he. “No one was better at raising money than Lyndon Johnson,” he says. “He would get on the phone and call people, and he knew just what to say.”"

 

What he said sometimes dealt bluntly with “the wealth and consideration that had been extended.” Texas was home to businessmen much smaller than Sid Richardson or Herman Brown, and if some of them were reluctant to contribute, or to contribute as much as Johnson thought they should contribute, he would get on the phone with them personally."

 

"“We called them ‘John’s Special Lists’”—of how much certain businessmen and lawyers could give, and why they should give it. With some of these targets, the reasons were philosophical. “Good Democrat” Connally would write by a name. “Old Roosevelt man.” But with others, the reasons related more to “wealth and consideration"

 

"

LBJ III, pg.532

 

*changing importance of a man warrants greater attention from those that seek to benefit from their association.

*use of new position to advance one's own agenda and expand social network

 

" “LBJ,” Baker was to say in Wheeling and Dealing, “wore a sad hound dog’s look as he said, ‘Bobby, we’re broke and we owe $39,000 for a hotel bill out here. See what you can do.’ … I went to Bart Lytton, president of Lytton Savings and Loan, with the sad tale. He required persuading. ‘I don’t have that much available,’ he said. ‘Even if I did I wouldn’t want it on record that I’d given it.’ I assured Lytton that he’d be protected and stressed the benefits of incurring LBJ’s goodwill"

 

"Johnson sometimes also took a personal hand in distributing money to other senators."

 

"When we got out of the elevator, we went into a closet—I think it was a janitorial closet. He told me to count the money. It was twenty thousand dollars. In one-hundred-dollar bills. I knew why he wanted me to count it. He wanted a witness. So that he could prove that he had given this money. He gave the money to Blakely, saying, ‘I just want you to know I’m on your side.’”
Johnson’s use of money to help finance the campaigns of his colleagues had begun even before he became whip. In 1950, he had funneled Texas cash into the campaign of an old House acquaintance who was trying to move to the Senate"

 

"Lyndon was the guy to see if you wanted to get a bill off the Calendar, Lyndon was the guy to see if you were having trouble getting it passed in the House, Lyndon was the guy to see for campaign funds. There wasn’t anything Lyndon was using these facts for as yet. But in ways not yet visible, power was starting to accumulate around him—ready to be used"

 

" There was a vast source of campaign funds down in Texas, and the conduit to it—the only conduit to it for most non-Texas senators, their only access to this money they might need badly one day—was Lyndon Johnson."

 

"Byrd had always treated Johnson with notable reserve, a reserve that sometimes seemed to border on dislike, and Winchester was seventy-two miles from Washington, but Johnson decided to attend.

 

BECAUSE JOHNSON WAS WHIP, he had a reason for doing what before he had needed excuses for doing: for meeting and talking with other senators, for making friends with them, for selling himself, man to man, one on one.
He sold on the Senate floor. No longer did he have to sit at his desk in the Chamber with only Horace Busby for company, hoping that some senator would “come by and say something to him.” Senators wanting information, senators wanting favors—he had plenty of senators coming by to say something to him now. And he made the most of the opportunity.
It wasn’t only senators from his own party who came by.

 

"During his early days in the Senate, Republican leaders had ignored him; he had not been important enough. Now, however, he was Assistant Democratic Leader, and often in charge of the Democratic side of the floor. "

 

 “Johnson made it a point to be diffident in Wherry’s presence”—and demonstrating that their effectiveness was bipartisan. Wherry began to wander across the center aisle to talk to Johnson with evidentfondness. And when during an evening session convened to pass a Truman Administration bill, Wherry announced that he was going to block it by objecting to every private bill on the Calendar to stall the Senate and block consideration of the President’s measure, Johnson, who had one of the private bills, approached the Nebraskan and said, in a tone that a listener described as “a plea to a superior”he dour Taft resisted every Johnson device to draw him into conversation. So Johnson came up with a ploy irresistible unless Taft wanted to be blatantly discourteous. Leaning across the center aisle, holding a copy of the bill that was under discussion, Johnson would whisper that he had forgotten his eyeglasses, and, with an apology for his constant forget-fulness, would ask Taft to read a particular paragraph to him. Taft would do so, Johnson would be very grateful, and brief exchanges sometimes ensued. Although Johnson wasn’t close to the key Republican yet, he was getting closer

 

AND AS, more and more frequently, senators needing something dropped by his office, he sold there, too. There the subject was politics and only politics, for to many senators, including the host, politics was the most important thing in life, and even senators who regarded themselves as experts on politics came to realize that Lyndon Johnson was worth listening to.

 

MOST OF THE STORIES WERE, of course, about politics. They were about political history, about scenes he had witnessed, or, to be more precise, that he said he had witnessed'

Or they were about current political situations—he seemed to have a story apropos every one. 

Johnson’s gift for mimicry made his listeners see the characters he was describing,

 

here was a natural rhythm in his words that drew his listeners into the story, caught them up in it, a rough rhetoric that nonetheless relied on devices such as parallel construction that might have been used by a highly educated orator, as well as the timing—unhurried, perfect—of a master narrator. And as Lyndon Johnson spoke, his face spoke, too, expressions chasing themselves across it with astonishing rapidity; his huge, mottled hands spoke, too, palms turned up in entreaty or down in dismissal, forefinger or fist punching the air for emphasis, hands and fingers not only punctuating the words but reinforcing them

is whole body spoke, with expressive posture and gestures

And Lyndon Johnson’s stories did more than merely charm his listeners.

 

LBJ Ranch pg.556

 

"AS SOON AS THE LBJ RANCH was in good enough shape to be shown to journalists from Washington and New York, Johnson began to invite them down, because he wanted to use the ranch to create a picture of himself in the public mind—the picture of a self-made man who had pulled himself up in life by his bootstraps, of a man who, no matter how high he had risen, still had his roots firmly in his native soil. He wanted his image to be that of a westerner, or to be more precise a southwesterner—a Texan; a true Texas image: a rancher with a working, profitable ranch.
The image was fashioned with his customary skill."

 

"The tidbits of philosophy he dispensed to journalists were western philosophy. Working with nature was good for a man, particularly for a public official, he would explain. "

 

"ONE KEY PART of the image—that the ranch helped him to relax and reflect, that he was a different man down there from the frenzied, driven Lyndon Johnson whom they knew in Washington—was cultivated with great assiduity. A hammock was part of it; he liked to have magazine and newspaper photographers take his picture when he was lying in it, a beatific grin on his face."

 

"As soon as he arrived, he was a happier man, he would tell reporters, because he was back among “the best people, climate and all-the-way-around best place on earth to live.” "

 

"o convincing was his performance, that Tom Wicker, who had moved from the Winston-Salem Journal to the New York Times, was only expressing the universal journalistic sentiment when he wrote, after a visit to the LBJ Ranch during Johnson’s presidency, that Johnson had an “essential ease” there—“the comfort of certainty, the assurance of belonging.” On the ranch, Wicker wrote, “the President is elemental in a different fashion” from what he was in Washington"

 

"The reality was very different, however; very different, and very sad."

 

"For Lyndon Johnson, his ranch on the Pedernales was a place of memories. No matter where he walked, there was a reminder: the sagging “dog-run” that looked so much like the shack in which he had been born and spent much of his boyhood; the family graveyard, with the tombstones of his father and grandfather, both of whom had failed on the Pedernales"

 

"Sometimes, he would drive into Johnson City. That little town was so unchanged; almost every house was still occupied by the same family that had been living in it when he had been growing up there, so almost every house held memories for him."

 

"He had proven Johnson City wrong, had amounted to quite a lot. But memories still shadowed his time on the ranch. And there were other shadows of the past, for often he would be visited at the ranch by his mother, and his brother and sisters, who had gone through that childhood with him"

 

 

LBJ III pg. 584

 

 

 

*Bitter, lonely first years in the Senate

 

" In the evening, after the Senate day, he would get into his old Buick and drive home to Chevy Chase. And sometimes, driving home, he would cry—Hubert Humphrey, the youngest, and perhaps the best, mayor in the history of Minneapolis, elected to the Senate at the age of thirty-seven in a landslide, Hubert Humphrey who had brought a Democratic convention to its feet with the greatest speech since the Cross of Gold, Hubert Humphrey, as brave as any David who ever faced a Goliath, driving up Connecticut Avenue in the stream of rush-hour cars, with tears running down his face"

 

"Johnson’s attitude toward him was, in fact, distinctly chilly. Then, one day in the spring of 1951, Humphrey came out of the underground door of the Senate Office Building to catch the subway to the Capitol, and Johnson and George Reedy were standing on the platform. During the ride, the two senators sat together, and a surprised Reedy heard Johnson speaking warmly to Humphrey. As Reedy was to recall it, Johnson said, “Hubert, you have no idea what a wonderful experience it is for me to ride to the Senate Chamber with you. There are so many ways that I envy you. You are articulate, you have such a broad range of knowledge, you can present it with such absolute logic.”"

 

"He was like … a psychiatrist. He knew how to appeal to every single senator and how to win him over. He knew how to appeal to their vanity, to their needs, to their ambitions.”"

 

"“He knew Washington as no other man in my experience. He understood the structure and pressure points of the government, and the process and problems of legislation. He understood … the appointed officials. He knew the satellite worlds of Washington: the business lobbyists, the labor movement, the farm and rural-electrification lobbyists, the people interested in health research and social security….”
“I was always fascinated by his knowledge of politics,” Hubert Humphrey was to recall. “If you liked politics, it was like sitting at the feet of a giant.”

 

He describes him as fierce: “a lion … clever, fast and furious when he needed to be and kind and placid when he needed to be.” He describes him as an elemental force of nature. “He’d come on just like a tidal wave sweeping all over the place. He went through walls. He’d come through a door, and he’d take the whole room over. Just like that. Everything.”

 

“Johnson was always able to take the measure of a man. He knew those that he could dominate; he knew those that he could out-maneuver. Right off the bat he sized you up.”

 

"Difficult though the text may have been, however, Johnson read it—and made use of what he read.
It is possible to know why Lyndon Johnson befriended Hubert Humphrey, for in later years Johnson would boast about the use he had made of him, and because of a memorandum “written” during those Senate years by George Reedy but virtually dictated by Johnson, that spelled out, in considerable detail, Humphrey’s usefulness to him.

Humphrey could, Johnson saw, be the bridge to the northern liberals which he needed. They acknowledged the Minnesotan, as much as they acknowledged any man, as their leader; they viewed Johnson as a typical southern conservative, but if Humphrey came to like him and trust him, he would, should Johnson become Democratic Leader, be a link between Johnson and the liberals; there would be at least a beginning of unity among Senate Democrats."

 

"Johnson wanted, in fact, to use Humphrey as an emissary between the two senatorial camps, as an instrument of compromise, someone through whom could be worked out the compromises necessary for unity, necessary to at least soften the antagonisms in the party, the compromises necessary for a Leader to have a chance of success. "

 

"nd, moreover, Johnson wanted Humphrey to be a friendly, sympathetic instrument, so that in negotiating for compromise, he, Lyndon Johnson, would be negotiating through someone who liked and trusted him."

 

"He needed the liberal senators to trust him, or at least to feel they could work with him; he needed them to be convinced that at bottom they shared some of the same goals. The best way of convincing them would be to have someone within their own camp who would argue for him."

 

"And Johnson, capable of making every man his tool, knew how to use Humphrey to attain the ends he wanted."

 

" Johnson made Humphrey believe that ultimately it would be to his own benefit for Johnson’s position to be thus strengthened. "

 

"There was no point in trying to convince a man as intelligent as Hubert Humphrey"

 

"Instead, Johnson acknowledged to Humphrey that he wanted the presidency but said he knew he would never get it—and he convinced Humphrey that he would never get it, explaining to him, with apparently deep conviction, why no one from the South could be President."

 

"Humphrey’s recollections of the conversations in 231 give some hint as to the methods Johnson employed to make him believe that they shared the same principles. One was for Johnson to identify himself with the President who to Humphrey had been the supreme embodiment of these principles."

 

"“Johnson never was a captive of the southern bloc,” he says. “He was trying to be a captain of them, rather than a captive…. He was, I think, biding his time, so to speak, and building his contacts.” "

 

"one of the most important in binding Humphrey to him was to convince Humphrey that Lyndon Johnson was his friend."

 

"I think it’s fair to say he liked me as an individual, as a human being.” He thought he understood why. “Johnson had a sense of humor, and he could kid with me,” he would say. “Johnson didn’t enjoy talking with most liberals. He didn’t think they had a sense of humor."

 

"that both of them would rise (although because he, Johnson, was unlucky enough to be from Texas, Humphrey would rise higher)—but that they would be on the mountain-top together. "

 

"In letters he wrote to Humphrey from Texas during the long Senate recesses, he used over and over again the word Humphrey wanted to hear. “I have been sorely missing your wise advice and friendly counsel,” he wrote in 1953. “I am looking forward to many more years of service with a good friend,” he wrote in 1954. In a letter at a crucial point in their relationship, in 1956, he wrote assuring him, “You will be on the scene as a national leader long after the others are forgotten.
“And you are my friend.”

 

"Hubert Humphrey may have been strong and tough, Johnson saw, but he wasn’t strong enough or tough enough. Most importantly, he wasn’t as strong, as tough, as he himself was.

At the bottom of Humphrey’s character, as Johnson saw, was a fundamental sweetness, a gentleness, a reluctance to cause pain; a desire, if he fought with someone, to later seek a reconciliation, to let bygones be bygones, to shake hands and be friends again. And to Lyndon Johnson that meant that at the bottom of Humphrey’s character, beneath the strength and the ambition and the energy, there was weakness. Years later, he would define this crucial difference between them with Johnsonian vividness of phrase."

 

Hubert Humphrey was trying to use him, just as he was trying to use Hubert Humphrey. Lyndon Johnson knew that. But he knew something else, too. If two men were each trying to use the other, the tougher one would win—and he, Lyndon Johnson, was the tougher."

 

“Compromise is not a dirty word,” he would say. “The Constitution itself represents the first great national compromise”—but to believe it with all the fervor of the convert, the convert who is the most enthusiastic of believers. Not only, he was to say, was compromise not a dirty word; those who refuse to compromise are a threat; “the purveyors of perfection,” as he came to call them, “are dangerous when they … move self-righteously to dominate. There are those who live by the strict rule that whatever they think right is necessarily right. They will compromise on nothing…. These rigid minds, which arise on both the left and the right, leave no room for other points of view, for differing human needs…. Pragmatism is the better method.”

 

"The fact that some of his fellow liberal senators were to come to look upon him as, in his own words, one of the “unprincipled compromisers” bothered him for a while, he was to say; “it doesn’t bother me any more at all. I felt it was important that we inch along even if we couldn’t gallop along, at least that we trot a little bit.”"

 

"THE CONVERSATIONS IN 231  were in a way a testing—a test (of which Humphrey was evidently unaware) of whether Humphrey could and would be the means to Johnson’s ends—and Humphrey evidently passed. Slowly but steadily Johnson began to move Humphrey into a position where he could one day be a bridge between liberals and conservatives, and an instrument of compromise."

 

" “Humphrey utilized this opportunity to show deference by his repeated ‘sir’ to Russell when they discussed the measure,” Steinberg relates. Russell, too, as John Goldsmith puts it, “came to appreciate Humphrey’s intelligence.” And he came to appreciate his sincerity"

 

" The southern senators started to get to know Hubert Humphrey not as a fighter for civil rights but as a human being. And, like most people who got to know Hubert Humphrey as a human being, they liked him. And Humphrey knew who had gotten them to like him. “My apprenticeship of isolation drew to a close as I got to know Lyndon Johnson,” he was to say; it was Johnson who brought even “Dick Russell around to look with some favor on me.” He knew that his relationship with the southerners—his key to acceptance in the Senate, to the end of his time as a “pariah”—was due to Lyndon Johnson. He knew that Johnson had given him a great gift. And, being an intelligent man, he knew that what had been given could be taken away."

 

" While during those years, Johnson, as Doris Kearns Goodwin puts it, “seemed to foresee that someday Humphrey might be useful to him,” that day had not yet come. For it to come, an additional, final ingredient would have to be added to the relationship between the two senators: power, more power than an Assistant Leader possessed."