Robert A. Caro by Master of the Senate

Author:Master of the Senate [Senate, Master of the]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-42203-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-07-22T05:00:00+00:00

Though these barons were called Democrats, they were unenthusiastic about the leading Democratic presidential contenders—Stevenson, Harriman, and Kefauver, all liberals—and may have preferred another four years with the safely moderate Eisenhower in the White House. By cooperating with the President on such issues as the tariff and foreign aid and by hamstringing investigations that might have embarrassed the Administration, Johnson was acting not only in his own interest but in their interest as well.

The “cooperation” issue was raised publicly in April, in a very dramatic setting. Washington’s great annual Democratic gathering, the black-tie Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner, was usually held in a hotel ballroom, but the guest of honor in 1955 was the man whom the Associated Press called “the beloved ‘Mr. Sam’ of legions of Democrats.” No ballroom in Washington could accommodate the more than thirty-seven hundred Democrats from across the United States, the largest such crowd in history, who were coming to pay tribute to Sam Rayburn, and the dinner had to be moved to Washington’s National Guard Armory. Facing the audience above the dais was a gigantic cartoon of Jefferson and Jackson welcoming Rayburn to the Democratic pantheon, and the cartoon was flanked by huge portraits of FDR and of the most famous living Democrat, Harry S Truman.

Following tributes to Rayburn by Eleanor Roosevelt (“My husband counted on him and never found him wanting”) and Adlai Stevenson (“He was there when the record was made”), and Rayburn’s characteristically humble response (“I accept this honor feeling my inadequacy”), Lyndon Johnson, in his speech, repeated the statement he had made so frequently: that Democrats wanted a “party of moderation” in 1956. But when the seventy-one-year-old Truman spoke, assailing the GOP’s “cynicism”—the “most cynical political behavior” since the Harding era—in the familiar Truman rhythms, suddenly the audience, chanting “Give ’em hell, Harry,” louder and louder, seemed to remember that the Democratic Party, in leading America out of the Great Depression, and in fighting for social justice, had not been the “party of moderation” at all. And the next morning, in his suite at the Mayflower, the ex-President gave William White an interview in which he made clear that it was not only Republicans who he felt had recently been guilty of “cynical political behavior.”

He did not want to criticize the Eisenhower Administration’s Formosa policy, Truman said, because “I haven’t got a great deal of information on the subject.” But, he said, he did want to criticize one aspect of the situation: “that,” as White put it, “the Senate had not adequately debated the subject. Had there been such a debate, the former President observed, he would have felt no anxiety at all over the ultimate decision, whatever it might have been.” And Truman made clear, with Trumanesque vividness of phrase, whom he blamed for the lack of debate—and for other aspects of recent Democratic policy as well. “I have got tired a long time ago of some mealy-mouthed senators who kiss Ike on both cheeks,” he said. “Mr. Truman did not name these senators,” White wrote.

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