Master of the Senate
Review 3: Initiation

"Master of the Senate" is the third book in Robert A. Caro's series, "The Years of Lyndon Johnson." It is more than 1,000 pages long. For the next seven Fridays, Flak will follow Caro's work as it unfolds across a critical period in Senate history: 1949 to 1960. This was an era when Lyndon Johnson catapulted himself to the rank of majority leader after a single term, grabbed the Senate by the balls, and started winning the battle for the civil rights.

"History is a story. People who write history just to get the facts down, I don't have much sympathy for."
— Robert Caro, Boston, 5-14-02

In person, Robert Caro is amazingly evocative of his work. It's as though a sophisticated computer program had read several pages of "Master of the Senate" and extrapolated the exact sort of individual required to produce the text. He's gently self-deprecating. Precise and judicious without sounding forced or pretentious. Laser-focused. Steady as a rock, but with the potential to get worked up — even giddy — over particularly revealing or surprising historical anecdotes.

The heart of Caro's presentation at a recent appearance at the Boston Public Library was, fortuitously, about "Master of the Senate's" third hundred pages: the destruction of Leland Olds.

Every gang has an initiation rite. In many cases, the price for joining — for partaking of the benefits of brotherhood — is an act of violence against an enemy.

For Lyndon Johnson, who badly wanted to consolidate his power over the Texas energy barons whose money and influence could help propel him to the presidency, the target was clear: Leland Olds, the head of the Federal Power Commission, up for renomination. Like Johnson, Olds was a New Dealer and Roosevelt supporter whose enthusiastic support of rural electrification made him a hero in many parts of the country. But unlike Johnson, Olds got in the way of Big Power by preventing a large hike in the cost of natural gas, suddenly a booming commodity. Though Olds allowed rates to rise to a level considered generous by impartial analysts, the Texas holdings of one company alone stood to gain an additional $389 million by increasing rates 5 cents over what Olds had allowed.

Olds was no pinko — he believed in capitalism, and believed profits were what kept industry around to serve consumers. What he didn't believe in was huge corporate profit at the expense of customers.

But in younger days, Olds had been more radical, and, writes Caro,

saw the power of big money in government. When a keynote speaker at the 1928 Republican Convention boasted that the United States had achieved a 25 percent rise in the GNP at the same time that labor costs were falling by 10 percent, Olds said, the boast was "hollow... unless he shows what the party has done for the millions of workers laid off in the process. Never was it more clear that the Republican Party is the party of big business, the party which represents the closest alliance between industrial rulership and political administration."

Olds' youthful railing would come back to haunt him. As a younger man, a journalist, his arguments against organized corporate influence in universities, in churches and especially in government directly echoed modern leftist rhetoric about corporate power corrupting America's nominally representative democracy. Reading it in 2002 is somewhat electric — the same issues seem to be in play, the same powers seem to be at the table.

At Caro's Boston talk, a raggedly bearded, bespectacled, rambling eco-liberal type — a perennial fixture at question and answer sessions in college towns — rose to ask Caro an interesting question: Has corporate influence in American politics receded or increased in strength since Johnson's time? How were the powers that Leland Olds opposed similar to the Powers That Be in modern America?

Caro dodged the question. He didn't, he insisted, have the proper knowledge to speak about current events. On one hand, it sounded like the evasive answer of an academic man not interested in getting drawn into the muck of modern politics. But on the other hand, it sounded like the kind of answer a man who has spent decades working on a series of books about a single politician would give. Don't speak until you're prepared. Thoroughly prepared.

Caro dodges little to nothing about Olds' destruction, however — the story is told in rich detail. As a younger man, Olds had been a journalist writing on labor issues for a syndicate called the Federated Press. His articles were picked up by dozens of mainstream publications — and the Daily Worker, the organ of the American Communist Party.

So when Olds showed up at a Senate confirmation hearing that he expected to be a virtual cakewalk, he received a nasty shock: Johnson had laid an ambush that would prove to be a fatal shock to the career of one of the nation's most well-respected and accomplished liberal public servants.

Facing a subcommittee chaired by Johnson, a one-time ally, Olds found himself staring down a batch of seven resolutely anti-Communist senators — and a pile of extremely well-organized, hostile and trumped-up testimony drawing on his old clips to prove he was still a Communist sympathizer.

Never mind that Olds had completed two five-year terms with the FPC and received nothing but accolades from senators on both sides of the aisle. Johnson's handpicked evidence and witnesses, mostly drawing on carefully culled — and often distorted — articles more than 20 years old, was enough to convince the hand-picked subcommittee to recommend that Olds not be reconfirmed.

By the time Olds' nomination made it to the Senate floor, the damage was done. The stink of Communism, made newly toxic by the "losing" of China and the Alger Hiss trial, clung to the man. Never mind that Olds had always opposed Communism and never advocated the overthrow or disruption of the US government.

Johnson himself clinched Olds' defeat with his emotional, searing testimony to the Senate, which ended on a memorable line: "Shall we have a commissioner or a commissar?"

The vote wasn't close. Olds' nomination was defeated 53-15. He was forever scarred by the experience, and never again worked at a high level of government or industry. His wife suffered a nervous breakdown. By breaking and betraying an honest man, Johnson won the support of the Texas industrialists, and he had deeply impressed Senator Richard Brevard Russell, who now saw in Johnson a level of organization — generalship, really — necessary to carry on the South's glorious senatorial battle against civil rights once he handed off the banner.

Johnson was now a force to be feared.

— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)

— Juliette Crane (cran0066 at hotmail dot com)