The Making of Barbara Jordan
I looked over Jordan, and what did I see?
(Page 5 of 7)
The game, of course, was politics. Jordan studied the Senate’s procedure so closely that within weeks she was recognized as one of its leading parliamentarians, not above using, as she puts it, “the trickers’ tricks.” Among politicians political skill is respected apart from ideology, and Jordan quickly demonstrated that she had great technical skills. She only spoke when she knew what she wanted, she didn’t preach or harangue, she concentrated on a few subjects and became the Senate expert on them. She never embarrassed a fellow senator; she always gave the impression she understood his own political situation and left him room for self-respect. She shattered stereotypes about blacks: to racists she wasn’t shiftless and dumb and she didn’t smell bad; to guilt-ridden liberals, who believed that all blacks would be liberal, pure-of-heart, and anti-establishment, she proved to be a hard-nosed politician who gave no hint she had suffered under segregation.
She also shrewdly combined her exacting and aloof sense of dignity with warm good humor. Since it softens the abrasiveness of conflict, humor is among the most valuable political skills. Few politicians appreciate a somber ideologue, even if he is on their side. Jordan came to the Senate as a female and a black, an inevitable damper for the club’s easy sexual and racial humor. It didn’t work out that way. “There have always been jokes told on the floor of the Senate,” Kennard recalls. “Sexual, racial, good taste, bad taste. No one would have ever thought of including Mrs. Colson [a previous female senator]; no one would have ever thought of not including Barbara. She had a superb sense of humor and could even top old Parkhouse when she wanted to. We’d clean it up a little bit for her, because she just required by God respect. I’m sure the antics of the Senate frustrated her, seemed too frivolous. But she never let on. She put up with it, participated in it, and she used it.” (Extemporaneous political humor doesn’t always translate very well, but here are two examples: Senator Chet Brooks, addressing Jordan: “Senator, the only thing missing in this portrait is your voice; without your voice, it just isn’t you.” Jordan, in reply: “Senator, these walls have been needing a touch of color, and when my painting hangs amid the august people on the walls of this chamber, believe me, it’s gonna talk.” Reporter: “Senator Jordan, congratulations on your election to Congress.” Jordan: “Thank you, but that’s premature. I still have a Republican opponent in the fall, but since none of you seem to know who he is, I’m not about to tell you his name.”) She was, in short, one of the boys. She would joke with them, drink with them, stay up late, play the guitar and sing songs with them. But there was something at the center she always held back. In both her personal and her political life, there was no way to assume you knew her, or to take her for granted.
“Even though Barbara was with us on almost every crucial issue,” said one liberal senator, “somehow you never could assume she would be. If you had a real good bill, you know, that did everything right, that had in it all the sort of things she had been supporting, you still couldn’t just check off her vote on your scorecard. You had to go see her, reason with her, make her understand what you wanted to do. The same was true of her personal contacts. While she had the easy banter and could be one of the boys, few politicians felt they really knew her. If they tried to get too close, she would cut them off cold. Land Commissioner Bob Armstrong recalls one occasion, when he was in the Legislature: “It was one of those parties Charlie Wilson used to give. Barbara was there, and she and I stayed up almost all night—laughing, joking, telling stories, playing the guitar, and singing songs. It was one of the happiest nights I’ve spent. I really felt I knew her—she was like my sister. The next day or so I ran into her in the Capitol and went rushing up, and—nothing. She was polite, but everything I thought was there between us just wasn’t. I don’t regret that experience we had together. I was just surprised.”
Now some politicians are committed people, as are some friends. Many committed Texas liberals and conservatives believe that if someone is against you on one issue of principle, then he is automatically against you on all issues of principle; that he is, in short, either a friend or an enemy. If a man is your enemy on civil rights, so this sort of absolutist political approach goes, then he will be your enemy on environmental matters, gun control, education, taxation, labor issues. Jordan’s, however, was not a seamless fabric of political ideology. She approached issues one at a time, and she took her allies where she found them.
In her three regular session she introduced more that 150 bills and resolutions, about half of which were the apolitical meat and potatoes of legislation, from creating a new court and establishing a new medical school, to closing off the street that ran through TSU and setting safety standards for people who go into manholes. But the rest were solidly liberal: extending the minimum wage to cover non-unionized farmworkers and domestics; a fair labor practices act; pollution control; a whole range of workmen’s compensation acts (her specialty); equal rights and anti-discrimination. She fought for liquor by the drink and against extending the sales tax. But she insisted on not being take for granted, and she had the charisma to make that insistence stick. She always ended up in the corral, but damned if she didn’t have to be rounded up every time.
In the Senate, then, her political techniques were the same ones she would later perfect in Congress: deference to leadership, loyalty to the institution, hard work, humor, an unwillingness to be typecast, all wrapped up in the power and mystery of her personality and topped off with that old standby, her voice—which could either create an easy intimacy or intimidate, seemingly at will. At the end of her first session, her colleagues unanimously passed an unprecedented resolution expressing the Senate’s “warmest regard and affection. . . . She has earned the esteem and respect of her fellow citizens by the dignified manner in which she conducts herself. . . and because of her sincerity, her genuine concern for others, and her forceful speaking ability, she has been a credit to her state as well as her race.” The 30 men then rose and gave her two standing ovations. To call a militant like Curtis Graves a “credit to his race” in the emotion-charged years of the late sixties would have been patronizing and unthinkable; he would have been outraged. Barbara Jordan was pleased. “I have not been treated with any more respect by any group of men anywhere,” she said, apparently unambiguously; when she left in 1972 she said, “Nothing that can happen in my lifetime will equal the memories that I have of my years of service in this chamber.”
The dazzling show she was putting on for her fellow senators caught the eye of the protean godfather of Texas politics, Lyndon Johnson. It was not a good time for the president. The prodigious outpouring of Great Society and civil rights programs was behind him, and the Viet Nam War, no matter how much he wheeled and dealed and plotted and planned, steadily kept pulling him beneath the political waves. His protégé in Texas, John Connally, didn’t care about the Great Society and in fact had done some impressive foot dragging on antipoverty programs and civil rights. This pained Johnson deeply. To LBJ, these programs were more than just legislative accomplishments; they were his legacy, they were what would go beside his name in the history books. All the political operating in the world wasn’t worth a damn if you didn’t do something with it. So far as Johnson could tell, both Connally and his protégé Ben Barnes had inherited his skills but none of his heart.
Barbara Jordan was different. She had many of the qualities Johnson admired: she had a deep respect for legislative bodies and the legislative process, she was uncomfortable with ideologues, and she had great humor and political skills. She admired and recognized what a political accomplishment the Great Society programs were, how much arm twisting and cajoling and convincing and political chips they had used up. But she also knew what they meant to real people. She told him the Voting Rights Act had been crucial in getting her elected. His Texas cronies didn’t appreciate that, and other prominent blacks didn’t appreciate what he had done either—they just kept yelling “More! More! More!” or encouraging separatism, riots, God knows what. When black riots swept Washington and other cities after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Johnson took it personally. “Don’t they realize what I’ve done for them?” he would ask. Barbara Jordan realized what he had done, and told him so. After he had renounced his reelection campaign because of the war, she went to the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, announced she would support him over anyone should he change his mind and openly fought to keep the Texas delegation solidly behind the plank endorsing LBJ’s Viet Nam policy. In the King Lear fantasies of his final year, with John Connally a Republican, Barnes’ political career in ruins, and Nixon dismantling the Great Society, she was the one child who never wavered, who kept his legacy and promised to carry it on. When he died, she said simply, “He was my political mentor and my friend. I loved him and I shall miss him.”
LBJ was a great help to her. He opened establishment doors, attended her fund raisers, touted her to influential politicians and businessmen, helped get her a seat on the Judiciary Committee when she went to Congress. John Connally, however, was another story. She had spoken passionately against his gubernatorial campaign in 1962; he had vetoed her for a place on the State Democratic Executive Committee in 1964. But beyond those earlier clashes was a fierce clash of egos. Connally maddened Jordan by simply ignoring her. She was the star attraction of the 1967 Senate, but he acted as if she didn’t exist. They both had LBJ’s backroom magic, but Connally had Lyndon’s poor-boy materialism and she had Lyndon’s New Deal heart. Blended together, they made a pretty good LBJ. But like half-siblings, she and Connally were fated to clash.
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