How a Freshman Senator Came to Control the US Senate in Four Years

In December 1948, a veteran senator from Texas decided to teach the newly elected Lyndon B. Johnson a lesson in humility, deliberately offering him the worst committee available. Four years later, that same freshman controlled the entire Senate.

Robert Greene tells the story in The Laws of Human Nature (2018) as an example of the law of defensiveness: the idea that no one gives ground because they’re told to, only when they stop feeling attacked. Greene didn’t research the story in archives. He takes it, in his novelistic style, from the Johnson biography written by historian Robert Caro, Master of the Senate (2002), which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003.

A calculated snub

Senator Tom Connally of Texas, with nearly twenty years of seniority and a seat on two of the Senate’s most coveted committees, already knew Johnson’s reputation: ambitious, impatient, a bit aggressive.

When Johnson hinted that, as a fellow Texan, Connally could help him land a seat on a prestigious committee, Connally decided to “put him in his place.” He offered him the agriculture committee, one of the least desired, and capped the humiliation by reminding him that he had campaigned as a “friend of the farmers.”

Johnson couldn’t hide his displeasure. Connally concluded, satisfied, that he’d reach the important committees in ten or twenty years, like everyone else.

The disguise of the diligent student

What happened next surprised the whole Senate. Instead of insisting or complaining, Johnson completely changed his behavior.

He started visiting veteran senators in their offices almost daily, waiting patiently in reception until they’d see him. Once inside, he asked about their families, their favorite sports teams, anything that showed he had taken the trouble to research that person.

Above all, he asked for advice. He listened with visible attention and afterward quoted that senator by name in front of others, giving him public credit for every idea.

The senators expected the impulsive, ambitious man they had heard so much about. Instead they found someone who jokingly introduced himself as “Landslide Lyndon.”

The nickname had a history. Johnson had won the runoff of the 1948 Texas Democratic primary against Coke Stevenson by 87 votes, thanks to ballots that turned up days later in the Box 13 precinct of Alice, in Jim Wells County. Caro devotes much of his previous volume, Means of Ascent (1990), to that election and concludes it was rigged. Johnson never admitted it. Joking about the nickname was a way to defuse the issue before anyone else could raise it.

The perfect target: Richard Russell

Johnson soon identified his most valuable ally: Richard Russell of Georgia, one of the most powerful senators in the institution. A bachelor, solitary, with no protégés of his own.

He landed a seat on the armed services committee to have constant access to Russell. He cultivated a shared interest in baseball and the Civil War, though neither subject naturally mattered to him.

He began inviting Russell to dinner at his home every week, where his wife, Lady Bird, cooked Southern dishes.

The relationship deepened to the point that Russell began calling him his “protégé,” the only young senator he treated that way in his entire career.

After a hunting trip to Texas, he wrote to Johnson:

Since I got home, I have wondered whether I would wake up and find that I had dreamed I made a trip to Texas. Everything was so perfect that it is hard to admit it could have happened in real life.

Richard Russell

The Korea subcommittee coup

In 1950, when the Korean War broke out, the Senate created a subcommittee to investigate the military’s preparedness. Johnson proposed chairing it temporarily while the senator entitled to it by seniority focused on his reelection campaign.

Russell stepped in on his behalf. Johnson, with barely a year and a half of experience, ended up at the head of a subcommittee with enormous public visibility.

And he turned out to be a master at handling the press: he shielded the findings from leaks and handed out information only to a select group of friendly reporters.

Hubert Humphrey’s conversion

One of the most revealing cases is that of Senator Hubert Humphrey, a charismatic liberal from Minnesota who had been shunned by his colleagues after publicly criticizing the Senate in his first speech.

He was relegated to the worst committees; nobody returned his greeting in the hallways. He sometimes cried on his way home.

One day Johnson approached him on the Senate subway and praised him without reservation, then pointed out, with the same warmth, that he spent too much time preparing speeches and too little being pragmatic.

He invited him to his office for a drink, and Humphrey came back again and again. Johnson shared his methods for counting votes, his stories about Franklin D. Roosevelt, and a concrete offer: if they worked together, there would be no limit to how high Humphrey could rise.

Humphrey later summed up the effect of Johnson’s personality with a memorable image: “He came on like a tidal wave. He went through walls. He would come through a door and take over the whole room.”

Master of the Senate

In 1952, after the Democrats lost to Eisenhower, the party’s Senate leadership fell vacant. Russell declined it for himself and offered it to Johnson, who accepted on one condition: that Russell remain his mentor. At forty-four, he became the youngest Democratic leader in Senate history.

Soon afterward, Johnson set out to change the seniority system that decided who chaired each committee, regardless of whether that senator was still fit for the job. Russell warned him: “You’re touching the most sensitive matter for the Senate. You’re playing with dynamite.”

Johnson spent weeks phoning reluctant senators, pouring drinks in his office, and rehearsing each one’s arguments behind closed doors before meeting with them. He never argued or forced anything; he listened, offered concessions, and called back if the answer didn’t come. When the plan went public, the watchword among his colleagues was simple: “Let Lyndon work.”

The epiphany about the size of the club

Before reaching the Senate, Johnson had spent twelve years in the House of Representatives without standing out much. It was too large and complex a body for his style, which was more at ease in one-on-one dealings than in front of a big audience.

According to Greene, shortly before taking his seat, Johnson had a decisive insight while walking through the Senate chamber: unlike the House, this place was really a small club, a kind of gentlemen’s club where a hundred people could get to know each other one by one.

That observation changed his plan entirely. He was aggressive by nature, so he would have to hold back. Instead of arguing or imposing himself, he would let others talk and concentrate on observing them, until he had built up a detailed knowledge of their insecurities, their predictable votes, and the favors each one needed. Over time, that knowledge would become the currency of all his influence.

Why direct pressure doesn’t work, according to Greene

Greene explains that from childhood everyone develops a system of defenses: a personal space, first physical and later psychological, that no one should invade without permission. When someone tries to win us over by force (pleading, pressuring, or appealing to guilt), those defenses don’t give way. They harden.

What does lower them, in his analysis, is feeling validated: being seen as intelligent, competent, or trustworthy by the other person, without feeling judged. Johnson didn’t win over Russell or Humphrey by laying out superior arguments. He made them feel their judgment mattered, and from there he built an influence no formal position could have given him so quickly.

What Greene leaves out

Greene’s account omits two things that Caro documents in detail.

The first is that Johnson’s interest wasn’t genuine. Greene himself admits that baseball and the Civil War didn’t matter to him, and Caro describes a politician who studied each senator to work out what he could give him and what he could ask of him. Calling it “attention” is generous: it was a power strategy, effective and deliberate.

The second is that the same man who was so docile with the veterans was, according to many testimonies Caro gathered, harsh and often humiliating with his subordinates and with anyone who wasn’t useful to him.

Our reading: the story helps explain how influence works, not as a model of conduct.

What research says about strategic flattery

What Johnson was doing has a name in social psychology: ingratiation, a repertoire that includes flattery, agreeing with the other person’s opinions, and doing them favors.

A meta-analysis by Randall Gordon (1996) pooled dozens of studies and found that ingratiation clearly increased how much people liked the ingratiator, while its effect on performance evaluations was positive but small. In other words, flattery works better for being liked than for looking competent.

The limit was studied by Roos Vonk (1998) in what she called the slime effect. In her experiments, a person who was nice to superiors and unpleasant to subordinates was judged extremely unlikable and fake: the friendliness directed upward raised suspicions of ulterior motives, and the treatment of those below confirmed them.

Seen this way, Johnson’s success in the Senate from 1949 to 1953 depended on the veterans seeing only one of his two faces. It was a small, highly hierarchical club of a hundred people, and they were at the top.

Johnson’s strategy comes close to the profile of what negotiation calls a collaborative negotiator: someone who puts the relationship and the other side’s interests first to build sturdier long-term agreements. If you’d like to identify your own pattern in situations like these, you can take our negotiation style quiz.

Sources

• Caro, R. A. (1990). The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent. Alfred A. Knopf.
• Caro, R. A. (2002). The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate. Alfred A. Knopf.
• Gordon, R. A. (1996). Impact of ingratiation on judgments and evaluations: A meta-analytic investigation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71(1), 54-70. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.71.1.54
• Greene, R. (2018). The Laws of Human Nature. Viking.
• Vonk, R. (1998). The slime effect: Suspicion and dislike of likeable behavior toward superiors. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(4), 849-864. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.74.4.849