Free The Passage of Power by Robert A. Caro

hurry the clerk through the names, or make a downward shoving motion with his hands meaning “slow down,” “for all the world,” as
Time
said, like “an orchestra conductor” leading the Senate as if it were an obedient orchestra. “It was a splendid sight,” the journalistHugh Sidey would recall years later. “This tall man with … his mind attuned to every sight and sound and parliamentary nuance.… He signaled the roll calls faster or slower. He’d give a signal, and the door would open, and two more guys would run in. My God—running the world! Power enveloped him!”
    And one of the key elements in Lyndon Johnson’s command of his world—the Senate world—was his decisiveness.
    During the previous four years of his majority leadership (the situation would not be ended until a Democratic landslide in November, 1958) he was usually operating with a mere one-vote margin, and in a Senate in which both parties contained differing, hostile blocs, the vote on proposed measures was constantly shifting, changing; amendments that could alter the balance were constantly being introduced, so a Leader had to know the moment at which to allow (or not allow) an amendment, or the moment at which, if he called a bill to the floor, it would pass—to know the moment, and to seize the moment. Month after month, year after year, when those moments came, Lyndon Johnson knew them—and seized them, with a decisiveness so quick and firm that it obviously came naturally to him, that it was obvious that deciding—acting—was something he enjoyed doing, something that he had the will, the desire, the need to do.
    And in his office after the day’s session, in that incredible office with its desk up on a low pedestal so that he sat higher than his guests and its spotlight in the chandelier focused on his chair, that office so opulently furnished that it was nicknamed “the Emperor’s Room” and “the Taj Mahal,” he was in 1958 the same as always, too. Holding court for senators and favored journalists, with his feet, clad in either highly polished black shoes or elaborately hand-tooled “LBJ” boots, up on his desk and a glass of Scotch in his hand (he would hold it out, rattling the ice in it, to summon a pretty secretary for a refill), he would dominate the conversation as he recounted the day’s triumphs and the next day’s strategy: at ease, confident, purposeful, assured.
    E XCEPT WHEN THE SUBJECT turned to the presidential nomination.
    George Reedy orWalter Jenkins might bring in a sheaf of speaking invitations—they were pouring into Johnson’s office every day from all over the country. The boots would come off the desk, and Lyndon Johnson would begin to pace back and forth around the office. Or he would walk over to the window, plunge his hands into his trouser pockets, and stand looking out for long minutes,his tall figure, silhouetted against the fading late-afternoon light, very still—except that his assistants would hear a continual low jingle as his hands restlessly shuffled the coins and keys in his pockets. Returning to the desk, he would agonize over each invitation, unable to decide whether or not to accept it, at one moment saying he would, the next moment changing his mind, wavering back and forth.
    Almost always, he wound up declining—declining even invitations that a candidate (even an unannounced candidate) for the presidency would obviously be well advised to accept; among the seventeen invitations to deliver major speeches he received during March, 1958, were personal requests from the
grande dame
of his party,Eleanor Roosevelt, for a speech before theAmerican Association for the United Nations, and from the governor of Iowa,Herschel C. Loveless, who had recently announced that he had not decided whom his state’s delegation would support in 1960. Sometimes, Johnson would accept one or another invitation—but then invariably would change his mind and refuse (as he did eventually with