The Passage of Power (98 page)

In his committee—“Senate Finance,” as it was known on Capitol Hill—the same was true. No chairman could have been more considerate, more polite, to
the committee members. Members were given all the time they required to be heard in committee sessions; these were senators, Old Harry would say; they shouldn’t be cut off. The sincerity of his beliefs combined with the courtesy with which he fought for them won him the respect, and indeed affection, of opponents, even of
Paul Douglas, not only a fervent liberal—the most liberal member of Byrd’s committee—but an economist by training, the author of influential books espousing liberal economic policy.
“He
hated public debt with a holy passion,” Douglas was to write of Byrd. “With little or no sympathy for poor people, and instinctively on the side of the rich and powerful, of whom he was one, he nevertheless had a certain rugged personal honesty and a genial air of courtesy toward his opponents, except when severely pressed.… I developed a real respect for him.”

While he ran the committee graciously, however, he ran it unyieldingly.
“He
had a habit of slapping” a fellow senator on the back and laughing, “as if they were both enjoying a good joke,” while he was denying a request, recalls the Republican committee member
Norris Cotton of New Hampshire, and he did it when Cotton asked him for a hearing on a bill he had introduced. “He continued to pat me on the shoulder, and to laugh, but he said, ‘Sorry, boy, you can’t have a hearing on it.’ ” Cotton repeated the request several times, saying it would be embarrassing for him to have to tell constituents he couldn’t get “even a hearing,” but Byrd simply repeated the refusal each time. “Then, with a final hearty laugh and slap on the back, he ushered me out.”

His
economic philosophy was a businessman’s philosophy. No one ever called him a reader or a particularly deep thinker, or even a man with more than a surface understanding of the field—the fiscal and tax policy of the United States—in which Senate Finance played so significant a role. He was, he often said,
“blind
to charts,” on which economists rely so heavily. He couldn’t understand them, he said; as a member of his committee was to recall, “he said … if you wanted to convince him you had to present it so he could understand it, and he could understand a column of figures.” The figure that was important to him was the bottom line: one that showed a profit, or, in the case of government, a surplus, not a deficit. The “deceptively apple-cheeked apple-grower” had a “frank pleasure in the arts of business,” the
Saturday Evening Post
noted; government, he believed, must be run like one, with debt kept to a minimum and the federal budget as firmly balanced as the ledgers of a successful corporation.

And if Harry Byrd’s story was a businessman’s story, it was the story of a very tough, and very shrewd, businessman. In 1902, his father, having lost what remained of the Byrd money, all but bankrupt and about to lose the local newspaper that was the last thing he owned, agreed to turn it over to fifteen-year-old Harry, who dropped out of school—he was to have no further formal education. He struggled for ten years to make the newspaper succeed under the load of debt that had been placed on it; since its credit had been cut off, he had to raise six dollars a day in nickels, dimes and quarters to pay, cash on delivery, for the newsprint on which the next day’s paper would be printed.
“When
you have to
hunt for them that way, you get to know how many cents there really are in a dollar,” he was to say.

With the newspaper at last in the black, he turned to apples, first spraying orchards, then leasing them, saving every penny so he could begin buying them, working endless hours year after year, until his orchards, which produced a million bushels a year, stretched for miles across the Shenandoah Valley. Only then did he go into politics, running for governor.

Feeling, as a friend wrote, that
“debt
had robbed him of his youth and education,” the “characteristic that distinguished him above anything else [was]” that “extreme obsessive hatred of debt,” his “fixation” on frugality. The words he used on the subject had an almost religious intensity.
“Improvident
political promises and programs are sinful,” he said once. “They are perpetrated on innocent citizens by demagogues.” He said that
“The
American dollar is the only thing today that is holding the world together,” and
“Once
the American dollar goes down, we will go into an age of international darkness.” The role he could play in defending economy in government, in balancing the budget, was, to him, another friend said,
“almost
a sacred duty.”

He
“would
have no truck with Keynesian theories,” recalls
Douglas Dillon, who as secretary of the Treasury dealt with the senator more frequently than any other member of the Kennedy Administration. Franklin Roosevelt had been all right for a while, Byrd was to say; the two governors had become personal friends; he had been an early supporter, the finance chairman, in fact, for FDR’s first presidential campaign;
“then
this fellow Keynes got ahold of him.” He liked to boast that
“I
am the only man left in the
Senate who voted against the Wagner Act and the
TVA.” When President Kennedy, arguing that tax cuts would stimulate the economy and that the concept of a balanced budget was an outdated and
“misleading
 … mythology,” called, in one of his typically eloquent speeches, for
“new
words, new phrases” in economic theory, Byrd had been moved to make a speech of his own—in the old words and phrases. The
“illusions
,” he said, were the ideas that budgets did not have to be balanced, that debt was not evil. No one who witnessed his frustration and genuine indignation at government’s indifference to the old verities could doubt their depth. Jabbing his finger at a sheet of statistics on his desk, one day in 1962, he said,
“The
civilian employment in government went up 35,000 in just the last month.” The red face turned redder with anger. Again and again the finger jabbed the paper. “Just think of that—35,000 in the last month.”

B
ELIEVING THAT THE SIZE
and cost of government should be reduced, that new government programs might be a menace to the American dollar, Byrd,
Russell Long says,
“measured
his success as a senator not by what he passed, but what he stopped from passing.” And at the moment, when the issue before the Finance Committee was the Kennedy tax bill, he was being quite successful.

His use of his powers as chairman—the virtually limitless powers of a
chairman of one of the Senate’s fifteen great Standing Committees, powers that, as was explained in the last volume, were almost never overruled—was of course not confrontational.
“Senator
Byrd was a gentleman of the old school, essentially a country gentleman,” Dillon says. “Always most courteous in his relations with me and others.” When, back in February and March, Kennedy had asked the senator to begin Finance Committee hearings on the tax bill without waiting for the House to pass the measure, all he had done was to explain that doing that would violate Senate procedure.
“The
old man won’t begin [hearings on] the bill until it’s sent over [from the House],” one senator said. “He’s a stickler on this. Of course, one of the reasons for this is that he’s opposed to doing anything anyway.” When, in October, the hearings finally began, they moved very slowly, of course. Testimony thus far—in the hearings’ sixth week—had all been on general topics; the committee had not yet taken up any of the individual amendments submitted by committee members. There were going to be quite a few individual amendments. The chairman had let it be known that members could submit as many of these “special provisions important to them” as they wished. Thirty had been submitted already—and more were coming all the time. And the chairman had let it be known that he understood how important these special provisions were to their sponsors, and that members would be allowed ample time to discuss them. On some days, there were no hearings. (
“He
couldn’t get a quorum, he said.”) To objections that Finance was hearing the same witnesses, and the same testimony, that the House had heard for months on end, Byrd said that senators had to have the opportunity to hear these views for themselves, had to be able to question witnesses themselves, had to have all the time they needed to express their own views on the testimony. He wouldn’t even consider cutting off a United States senator. In dealing with the President’s men, and with the President himself, he was unfailingly courteous, responding to each suggestion for speeding up the committee’s work with some new, technical reason why it couldn’t be speeded up, and unfailingly impossible to pin down. Doodling on a pad during one discussion, Kennedy had written:
“Pillow
fight in the dark with Harry Byrd.”

Some of the Kennedy team did not seem to grasp the reality of what was happening. While describing Byrd’s control of his committee as
“absolute
” (
“nothing
could be done that he [Byrd] opposed”), Dillon also says that although Byrd did not work actively to pass the Kennedy tax reduction bills, “he
did
not oppose them”—a statement that indicates the same lack of understanding of Byrd’s tactics as the Treasury secretary had displayed about Byrd’s mild suggestion that he would like to see the budget come in under $100 billion. He “
did not oppose them
”—that was true; all he was doing was delaying them. A
“sweet
dear guy—loved him,” says the more realistic
Russell Long, but “if he didn’t want something to happen it usually didn’t and vice versa.… Bills didn’t move until he decided they would move.”

No challenge from within the seventeen-member committee could threaten
him. The Democratic Steering Committee, which appointed Democratic senators to committees, was dominated by southerners, and made sure that there was always a comfortable majority among his party’s members of Finance of whose support Byrd could be certain; on the Republican side, the ranking member was Delaware’s Williams, a close personal friend of
Byrd and a fellow rock-hard fiscal conservative, and in general all seven Republican committee members were conservatives and behind the chairman; in 1963, in the event of a challenge to his authority, Byrd could count on the seven Republican votes and, on the Democratic side, in addition to his own vote, of five of the nine other Democrats—in all, a comfortable majority indeed. And, of course, behind him also was the interlocking power of the southern chairmen, and of the chairmen who stood with the South; seldom was that power (and its consequence for a senator who opposed a chairman) expressed as bluntly as it was on one occasion to
Illinois’ Douglas, who was opposing pork-barrel spending bills in several committees. He was informed that unless he stopped he would find “all public works projects for Illinois removed from” bills before Hayden’s Appropriations Committee. Bluntness was not usually required, however. A senator who opposed Harry Byrd would simply find that a bill he had introduced—perhaps a bill he urgently needed to satisfy constituents without whose support he could not be re-elected—that was before Richard Russell’s Armed Services Committee, or
A. Willis Robertson’s Banking Committee, or
John McClellan’s Government Operations Committee, or
James Eastland’s Judiciary Committee, or
Allen Ellender’s Agriculture Committee, or
Lister Hill’s Labor Committee, was simply not moving ahead within the committee process. He would eventually get the idea. Four Finance Democrats—Douglas, Gore, Hartke and Ribicoff—generally opposed Byrd. But they were four among seventeen.

And no challenge from outside the committee could threaten him, either.

Three Presidents had tried a challenge, each apparently believing that since Byrd’s philosophy was so out of touch with that of the country at large, he was vulnerable, and that a President could exploit that vulnerability.

After Byrd had broken with him before the 1934 election,
Roosevelt began funneling federal patronage through Byrd’s political foes in Virginia. Byrd won re-election by forty thousand votes. And when Roosevelt tried another tactic, nominating a federal judge unacceptable to Byrd and to Virginia’s other senator,
Carter Glass, the vote against the nomination in the Senate was 72 to 9, the most one-sided vote in Senate history against a presidential nominee. Truman’s attacks on him in 1952, Byrd said, had
“actually
helped me get re-elected.” Kennedy had tried a different route, trying to go around Byrd by creating an alliance with
Robert Kerr, then the Finance Committee’s ranking Democratic member, and a Senate power himself, as part of which Kerr would have taken
de facto
control of the committee. While some members of the Washington press corps thought that the threat to Byrd’s power was real, it never came even close to a showdown—Kerr, as Dillon noted,
“always
recognized the position of the
chairman and worked with his approval and never against him”—before Kerr’s death in January, 1963. Out of step with majority opinion in America though
Byrd’s philosophy may have been, it was what the residents of his state—or at least those residents who managed to vote—wanted. Every presidential attempt to challenge his power in Virginia had only strengthened that power. Harry Byrd’s Finance Committee was a feudal barony within the governmental system of the United States. He was one of the mighty chairmen who ran their committees as independent fiefdoms—and who were, in effect, although it was never written about in those terms, in alliance against the President, an alliance, now a quarter of a century old, that no President had been able to break.

Two days before Kennedy had left for Texas, the
Washington Post
’s longtime Capitol Hill correspondent,
Chalmers Roberts, had written that
“probably
” Byrd “has never been more powerful than he is today.… Right now he is all-powerful.”
“Go around Harry Byrd,”
as the Kennedy legislative aides kept so blithely suggesting? Smathers wasn’t the only senator who understood the impracticality of that suggestion. Johnson men, of course, had learned the lesson from Johnson.
“You
couldn’t
go around Harry Byrd,”
Horace Busby says.