Lone Star Rising: Vol. 1: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1908-1960 by Robert Dallek

Author:Robert Dallek [Dallek, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1991-08-15T06:00:00+00:00

12

For Country, Party, and Self

LYNDON’Selection as majority Whip in January 1951 encouraged a belief among Washington insiders that he was a rising star in the Senate and Democratic party. In the first five months of the year, articles in Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post, two mass-circulation magazines, described him as a political phenomenon, a standout in the “star-packed Freshman Class of 1948.” A fellow senator called him “the most effective freshman he has seen in … eighteen years.” One high ranking Administration official dubbed him a “man of destiny,” while the magazines described him as “just about the hottest young senator in the Capitol,” a lifetime senator, if he wanted to be, and a leading vice-presidential candidate in 1952 or 1956. Since Johnson had entered the Senate, the Post pointed out, “twelve young Texans have been hopefully named Lyndon. … Today, like twelve smiling young apostles, their photographs hang from the senator’s office wall, silent testimony to the fact that his influence already has passed into another generation.”

Johnson relished the notoriety. Journalist and later Johnson biographer Alfred Steinberg remembers an interview with him in the spring of 1951 when Johnson tried to persuade him to write an article not on congressional leaders but “a whole big article on just me alone.” In the lavishly furnished President’s Room off the Senate floor, where Presidents since Lincoln had come when visiting the Senate, Johnson “sat with his knees pressed against mine, a hand clutching my lapel, and his nose only inches away from my nose. When he leaned forward, I leaned back at an uncomfortable angle. ‘What would the pitch of an article on you be?’” Steinberg asked. “‘That you might be a Vice-Presidential candidate for 1952?’ … ‘Vice President hell!’ he whispered. ‘Who wants that? … President! That’s the angle you want to write about me. …You can build up to it by saying how I run both houses of Congress right now.’” Steinberg asked for an explanation of this extraordinary claim: “‘Well, right here in the Senate I have to do all of Boob Mc-Farland’s work because he can’t do any of it And then every afternoon I go over to Sam Rayburn’s place. He tells me all about the problems he’s facing in the House, and I tell him how to handle them. So that’s how come I’m running everything here in the Capitol,’ he finished, gripping me above the knee.”1

Johnson was a master of self-promotion and loved the attention he won so quickly in the Senate. Yet at the same time, he was not as confident about his future as his conversation with Steinberg made it appear. For all his bravado about running the Congress and being presidential timber, he remained uncertain about his political career, even fearing that something unexpected might jeopardize his Senate seat. He knew that men of consuming ambition like himself who cut corners to get ahead and made both powerful enemies and friends could just as quickly be brought down as elevated to higher station.

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