The Anatomy of a Political Crucifixion
What power looks like, up close. Inspired by Robert Caro's 'Master of the Senate'.
![The Crucifixion, Fra Angelico (Guido di Pietro) (Italian, Vicchio di Mugello ca. 1395–1455 Rome), Tempera on wood, gold ground The Crucifixion, Fra Angelico (Guido di Pietro) (Italian, Vicchio di Mugello ca. 1395–1455 Rome), Tempera on wood, gold ground](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F269d433f-f8f7-4fff-a8d6-e7340c357eab_928x1200.jpeg)
It’s 1949. You are a Democrat Senator from Texas and your ultimate goal is to become U.S. President. You will lie and cheat with glee in pursuit of your goal1.
Because you got President Roosevelt to love you, so do the liberal democrats. For now.
There’s a problem; if you want to be president, you are going to need a lot of money for your presidential campaign. You aren’t going to do this with some namby-pamby grassroots fundraise. You’re going to have to have to turn to the real wealth in this country.
You’re going to need the Texas Oilmen. The Texas Oilmen you’ve held at arms-length in your rise to the Senate, the same ones who suspect you are some Roosevelt New Dealer Democrat.
You are going to have to give the Oilmen something big, something meaningful, for them to consider backing your bid like they did for Eisenhower.
Luckily, you sense an opportunity.
The Oilmen have been complaining for ten years about the Chairman of the Federal Power Commission (FPC), a man named Leland Olds. During his chairmanship, Lelands Olds actually enforced rules like the 1938 Natural Gas Act, capping prices on natural gas, and advocated for utilities to be owned by cooperatives rather than corporations.
Olds is no ordinary bureaucrat. Trained as a mathematician at Amherst, he had spent freezing winters as a social worker in the slums of South Boston, where he listened to children cough tuberculosis through thin walls. Later, he was ordained as a minister in a working-class parish in Brooklyn. A man of the people, for the people.
What makes Olds truly dangerous to the Oilmen is not his idealism but his effectiveness. In the last five years, he forced natural gas companies to refund millions to Kansas City residents after overcharging them, and he brought electricity to millions of American farms, with the utilities companies dragging. He has friends in the people and in Congress. Hell, because he helped you electrify some parts of Texas, you even owe the guy.
Well, Olds’ five year renomination as FPC chairman is coming up in the Senate. Although reappointments are almost always procedural — no one remembers the last time a renomination was blocked — you know that successfully blocking Olds will win you the favor of the Oilmen2. What’s more, since no one cares about renomination hearings it’ll be child’s play to convince Edwin Johnson to let you be chairman of the relevant subcommittee That’s the easy part.
The major challenge is going to be keeping your public reputation intact while winning over the Oilmen. To win, you’ll have to
Convince the Senators in the subcommittee to deny Leland Olds’ appointment
Minimize damage from liberal backlash
Make sure the Oil men know that this was your doing
So, what do you do?
Stack the subcommittee.
Given his support of nationalizing utilities, the obvious angle will be to paint Olds as a communist. Easy enough to convince Bricker and Capehart, and a couple other rabid anti-communist Democrat and Republican Senators. Given your own connection to Roosevelt, you can also privately reassure Leland Olds and your liberal supporters that you’ll make sure the trial as balanced as possible.
Maintain surprise
If Leland Olds knew that the reappointment might be blocked, he could bring an attorney that knows how to deal with some hardball Senators. His dozens of political friends would intervene and testify on his behalf. No, that would wreck your trial, so you’ve got to keep it absolutely silent.
You’ll tell Leland Olds and his supporters in the Senate that it’ll just be a routine reappointment.
Tightly choreograph testimonies.
You know that Olds has about 1800 articles he wrote in his years as a journalist. Get your congressional staff to spend the next three months to cherry pick quotes to show his ‘communist sympathies’. Show these in advance to Bricker and Capehart to light their fury.
Then use your friendship with Olds to get his written statement in advance.
Alvin Wirtz, the slick and cruel Texas Oil lobbyist, will coach the witnesses. Using Olds’ statement, you two will get the witnesses to preemptively attack the weakest parts.
To keep the image of impartiality, let Bricker and Capehart hurl the most inflammatory accusations.
Write the headlines
Have your staff leak the cherry-picked snippets of Olds' writings to friendly journalists.
When the hearings begin, make sure the press gets wind of the most damaging testimonies first.
After your speech on the Senate floor, have your team ready with soundbites. "Shall we have a commissioner or a commissar?" will be eaten up by the Texas papers, painting you as a lone crusader standing up against communism and the pressure of the administration. You’ll then be able to call up the Brown brothers and other Oilmen and point to the headlines.
At the same time, make sure never to directly call Olds a communist; “I never called Lee a communist — in fact I had to pull Bricker and Capehart back into their seats!” you can tell your liberal supporters.
Finally, the day comes and the plan goes perfectly.
At first the journalists are here. You calmly make sure that your priority is for “every man to have his say”. You even defend Olds at some points by emphasizing that no one is calling him a Communist.
After what looks like a routine renomination, the journalists bore and leave, and you turn on the heat. Now, every time Olds begins to make a substantive point, you cut him off, demand he answer binaries (“do you reassert your writings or do you not?”), and divert attention from any meaningful points.
Bricker and Capehart attack like mad dogs, red faced, leaning forward and shaking the clippings from his writing. Senator Reed declares Olds is a “full-fledged, first-class Communist”.
The tenor of the Senate changes.
The majority are now convinced that Leland Olds is a communist while the opposition liberal Democrats, so scared of being called “red”, quietly rise and leave, abstaining from the vote. Leland Olds’ renomination is defeated 53 to 15. All this without you ever directly calling him a Communist.
Afterwards, you see Leland Olds in a corridor outside the hearing room. He is broken. You pat him on the shoulder: “Lee, I hope you know there’s nothing personal in this. We’re still friends aren’t we. It’s only politics you, know.”
No one wants to touch a Communist, so he’s cast out of D.C. You know he won’t find another job easily — he won’t be a problem for the natural gas or oil again.
You have now won their favor.
Congratulations, you are well on your way to becoming the 36th President of the United States.
As you may recall, it is your close association with President Franklin Roosevelt which prevented you from being prosecuted for buying votes in the Texas Senate election.
Says John Connally, who would shortly leave the Wirtz law firm to become Oilman Sid Richardson’s attorney: “This [Olds’ defeat] transcended philosophy, this would put something in their pockets. This was the real bread-and-butter issue to these oilmen. So this would prove whether Lyndon was reliable, that he was no New Dealer. This was his chance to get in with dozens of oilmen—to bring very powerful rich men into his fold who had never been for him, and were still suspicious of him. So for Lyndon this was the way to turn it around: take care of this guy!” - Caro, Robert A. Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson III. Ch 10, Vol. 3. Vintage, 2009.
Very reminiscent of Oppenheimer.