LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON LIBRARY ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION LBJ Library 2313 Red River Street Austin, Texas 78705 http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/biopage.asp GEORGE REEDY ORAL HISTORY, INTERVIEW VIII PREFERRED CITATION For Internet Copy: Transcript, George Reedy Oral History Interview VIII, 8/16/83, by Michael L. Gillette, Internet Copy, LBJ Library. For Electronic Copy on Compact Disc from the LBJ Library: Transcript, George Reedy Oral History Interview VIII, 8/16/83, by Michael L. Gillette, Electronic Copy, LBJ Library. GENERAL SERVICES ADi1INISTRATION NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS SERVICE LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON LIBRARY Legal Agreement pertaining to the Oral History Intervie\'Is of George E. Reedy In accordance with the provisions of Chapter 21 of Title 44, United States Code and subject to the terms and conditions hereinafter set forth, I, George E. Reedy of f~ilwaukee, Hisconsin do hereby give, donate and convey to the United States of America all my rights, title and interest in the tape recordings and transcripts of the personal interviews conducted on August 16 and 17, 1983 at Milwaukee, Wisconsin, October 14. 1983 at Newton, Massachusetts, and December 20 and 21, 1983 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and prepared for deposit in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library. Thi sass i gnment is st!bject to the fo 11 o\'Ji ng terms and conditi ons: (1) The transcripts shall be available for use by researchers as soon as they have been deposited in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library. (2) The tape recordings shall be available to those researchers who have access to the transcripts. (3) During my lifetime, I retain all copyright in the material given to the United States by the terms of this instrument. Thereafter, the copyright in both the transcripts and tape recordings shall pass to the United States government. During my lifetime, researchers may publish brief "fair use" quotations from the transcripts and tape recordings \tJith­ out my express consent in each case. (4) Copies of the transcripts and tape recordings may be provided by the Library to researchers upon request. (5) Copies of the transcripts and tape recordings may be deposited in or loaned to institutions other than the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library. INTERVIEW VIII DATE: August 16, 1983 INTERVIEWEE: GEORGE E. REEDY INTERVIEWER: Michael L. Gillette PLACE: Mr. Reedy's office, Milwaukee, Wisconsin Tape 1 of 6 R: --successful leader. G: Let's start with that. R: Okay. G: 1955 you were talking about. R: Right. 1955 was the year that Johnson really surged forward. Up to that point he had been engaged in an endeavor to prove that he was a successful leader, something that took some proving simply because everybody was skeptical, not only of him but of any Democratic leader. The disorganization in the Democratic Party, which resulted in the defeat in 1952, was so extreme that it was generally thought that nobody could pull the Democrats together at any point. And Johnson was especially suspect because he was from an ex-Confederate state, and at that moment the strains between the southerners and the liber­ als had reached very extreme proportions. But by 1955 everybody had reached the conclusion that Johnson could run the Senate; there was no question about that. What was in their minds I think more than anything else was the question of what he would do with it. And 1955 and 1956 were the two years in which he began to lay down some sort of a coherent program, largely a populist Reedy -- VIII -- 2 program, really, which gave a positive expression to his leadership. It was largely based upon various social values and was not really in accord with the overall trend of liberalism at that time, because liberalism had gotten quite far away'from populism. Unfortunately for the liberals, they were incapable of finding very many of their own issues, and so they had to hop aboard the populist bandwagon because there was really no other place for them to go. Their hearts were much more in civil rights, in immigration, in various types of legis­ lation which they thought spread, let's say, civil liberties rather than civil rights. But again, there was only so far they could go with that, and what Johnson did was to start breaking through with a modernized populist program. G: Did the fact that the Democrats were now in a majority affect the way Johnson worked? R: Not really. Not really, because the majority wasn't that great. One of the realities, as we'll see when we get to the next two years, is that as the majority got bigger, part of the degree of his control faded. You see, one of the virtues of having a slim majority is that it tends to drive people together. When the majority is slim, people think twice before going against their colleagues. When there is a very large majority, there's a tendency on the part of many senators to forget any type of identification they have with political parties and to just go every which way. There was no essential difference between the way he acted when he was in the minority and the way he Reedy -- VIII -- 3 acted when he was in the majority, and 11m not even sure that it made too much difference in terms of the votes. Johnson did not count the votes in terms of Democratic and Republican, which really is a reflection of his rather profound although somewhat inarticulate grasp of the workings of Congress. The ratio of Republicans to Democrats in either house of Congress is a matter of very little significance. It has a certain symbolic signi­ fi cance, it dec ides who wi 11 control the formal instruments of power. But as everyone discovered very early, the formal instruments of power are not necessarily the instruments that run Congress. For a long period of time, Congress was run in a coalition of Democrats and Republicans, and the formal Democratic leadership, which was always rather liberal, was completely helpless to do anything about it. About all it could do was it maintained some dignity, and at times it couldnlt even do that. G: Johnson himself moved from the Commerce Committee to the Finance Committee that year. R: Right. G: Why did he do that? R: There were a number of reasons. One, he discovered a certain amount of embarrassment being on the Commerce Committee because it has juris­ diction over the federal communications system. That immediately raised some suspicions of hanky-panky with the Federal Communications Commission in regard to his wifels radio station. Reedy -- VIII ~- 4 G: Let me ask you here, did you ever see any influence that he brought to bear in that? R: No. No, and I don't believe he ever did. But for a man in his position, bringing influence to bear would be utterly and completely irrelevant. But to think that the members of the Federal Communications Commission would be unaware when they were dealing with KTBC that the husband of the woman who owned it was one of the most powerful figures in Washington, anyone that would believe that will believe twenty-two impossible things before breakfast. And of course, what is much more important than governmental influence, there is no doubt whatsoever that the people that controlled the networks were well aware of the status that Johnson had in the political scene in Washington, D.C. That's something that nothing can be done about. I do not know and rather doubt whether he ever consciously--well, he may have--but I'm confident that he never made any direct use of his position with either the Federal Communications Commission or with the top people in the networks. But I think that he would have had to have been very naive not to be aware of the fact that his position alone was something that would carry a tremendous amount of weight, no matter what he did. Then, by the way, we had a direct rule in the office that under no circumstances were we to intervene for constit­ uents or anyone else with the Federal Communications Commission. G: Oh, really? R: Yes. We had that same rule on tax matters with the Internal Revenue Service. If a constituent would write us a letter complaining about Reedy -- VIII -- 5 the Federal Communications Commission or something of that nature, we would not even turn that letter over to the agency as we would with any other letter. G: Why were those two singled out? R: Well, Federal Communications Commission for the obvious reason of Lady Bird's holdings in radio, KTBC. The tax, the Internal Revenue Service, because most of the major scandals of the preceding few years had been efforts to intervene with the Internal Revenue Service. You may remember [John] Williams of Delaware, for instance, who found some absolutely horrific scams going on inside the Internal Revenue Service. So those two were off limits. G: Well, do you think that the move from a Commerce Committee to the Finance Committee also had to do with legislation that was going to be before the Senate? R: Not particularly, because I think he would have had the same influence regardless of what committee he was on. But nevertheless, there was considerably more prestige to the Finance Committee than there is to the Commerce Committee. One thing you have to realize is that the primary leverage for any type of revenue legislation is with the Congress rather than with the President. This is something of which Congress is very, very keenly aware.