Read Online The Passage of Power by Robert A. Caro - Free Book Online Page B

at six o’clock in the morning to discuss the situation and ask for advice, and in 1948, in these calls, Ed Clark heard, over and over, one word. “ ‘Humiliation ,’ ” Clark would recall. “That was what he kept repeating. ‘I’ll be humiliated. I’ll be ruined. If I run, I’m going to lose—I’ll be humiliated.’ ” Now, in 1958, a race for a much greater prize stretched before him—a race for a prize so vast that the attention not just of a state but of an entirecountry would be focused on it. So the possibility of defeat—of humiliation—loomed before him larger than ever, and
“If he didn’t try, he couldn’t fail.”
    So he didn’t try.
    On the Senate floor, in 1958, he was the same as he had always been: a man in command—from the moment, just before noon each day, when he pushed open the tall double doors at the rear of the Chamber so hard that they swung wide as he strode through them, and came down the four broad steps to the front-row center Majority Leader’s desk.
    No assistant accompanied him as he walked down to the little clutch of journalists waiting for him in the well below his desk. He knew all the details himself: the intricacies of bills, not only major bills but minor ones, too; the number that each bill had been assigned on the Senate Calendar; where in the subcommittee or full committee approval process it stood at the moment; what new amendments had been added to the bill, or defeated, that day, and why they had been added or defeated; what the arguments on each side had been; when the bill would be brought to the floor for a vote.
    And there was never any question of him making a slip and giving the journalists information he didn’t want them to have. “You didn’t get any more than Lyndon Johnson wanted to tell you,” one of them says. “Never.… He knew exactly what he wanted to say—and that was what he said. Period. I never felt in all those years that he ever lost control [of one of those briefings]. He was always
in charge.
”
    In charge—“in command”—journalists said about him. In part, they say, it was because of the aura around him, what one of the journalists says was “the knowledge we had of what this guy
had
done, of what this guy could do. Of what he wanted to be.” But there was something more. As another reporter says: “Power just emanated from him. There was that look he gave. There was the way he held his head. Even if you didn’t know who he was, you would know this was a guy to be reckoned with. You would feel: don’t cross this guy.… He would look around the Chamber—it was like he was saying, ‘This is
my
turf.’ ”
    Prowling the Chamber during debates, he would put a long arm around a senator, grasp his lapel firmly with the other hand, put his face very close to his colleague’s as he tried to persuade him. His hands never stopped moving, patting a senator’s shoulder, straightening a senator’s necktie, jabbing a senator’s chest, gesturing expressively, his face breaking into a grin if the senator agreed to the proposition being made, turning cold and hard if he didn’t. He would be snatching a tally sheet out ofBobby Baker’s hands—or, dispatching Bobby on an errand, grabbing his shoulders and shoving him violently up the aisle if he wasn’t moving fast enough; rasping at the assistant of some other senator, who was still back in the Senate Office Building, “Get your fucking senator
over
here!”
    During votes he controlled the very rhythm of the roll call. For some reason—perhaps all his senators were present, and there were absentees on the other side—he might want the roll call to be fast, before anything could change.Or, if he didn’t have all his men there, he wanted the vote to be slow. Standing at that front-row desk, towering over the well, dominating the Chamber of the Senate of the United States, Lyndon Johnson would raise his right hand high in the air and make “revving-up circles” to