The Path to Power (119 page)

Roberts’ remark is an exaggeration. Lyndon Johnson controlled no Congressman that completely. As an analysis of the alteration in Johnson’s status, however, Roberts’ remark was in some respects an understatement. For it was not only junior Congressmen with no influence whom Johnson had helped.

During the campaign, John McCormack had been asking Lyndon Johnson for funds for his Massachusetts delegation and for old friends from other states—and for credit for himself from those other Congressmen for obtaining them. And Johnson had given the Majority Leader what he asked for. Now the Majority Leader owed him something. The situation was duplicated with other members of the House hierarchy. The William H. Sutphin of New Jersey who had pleaded with him for funds—and who had received in return $1,500—was the Assistant Majority Leader. Andrew J. May of Kentucky (“I hope you can do something for me, and I will owe you an undying debt of gratitude”) was chairman of the Military Affairs Committee. Normally, young Congressmen were suppliants to the Majority Leader, or the Assistant Whip, or committee chairmen, for favors. In the case of this young Congressman, the situation had been reversed. The extent of the reversal was dramatized the first time the House Naval Affairs Committee met following the election. Normally, in a committee, seniority was the determining factor. When the Democrats moved into their seats this time, Johnson was still five seats away from the chairmanship. But three of the five men ahead of him in seniority owed him favors because of his contributions to their campaigns. He had been not only dealing with the most senior members of his party in the House, but dealing with them from a position of independent strength. When he asked Sam Rayburn and John McCormack to come to a luncheon meeting, they came.

Nor, during the campaign, had he dealt only with Congressmen. When he had asked labor leaders in New York to intervene in a strike in the State of Washington, he had been playing a national political role. And his work with powerful political figures across the country had not consisted merely of liaison work. There had been a “Chicago line.” Precisely what it was, how Johnson operated through it, or how much he gave through it cannot be determined. But it had a connection with Chicago Boss Ed Kelly. By the end of the campaign, he had become acquainted with, had worked with—had funneled money through—some of the most powerful men in America. There was a New York connection, too. At first, the connection had been Tommy Corcoran; it was he who raised cash from New York garment-center leaders such as Hillman or Lubin or Dubinsky. But by the end of the campaign, Johnson was personally acquainted with them; several of them, in fact, were to become strong Johnson allies and generous Johnson financial backers. Men such as Kelly and Lubin were not without influence on Congressmen; after the 1940 campaign, Johnson was in a position to ask them to use that influence; a Congressman who would not respond to a Johnson request might receive a telephone call from his own home town. He even had a potential ally—if a low-level one—on the staff of the Democratic National Committee. Paul Aiken wrote to Johnson, “One of your chief boosters, Swagar Sherley, has been spending a lot of time with me in the last few days,” and as a result Aiken would look Johnson up on his
next trip to Washington. All these things combined to radically alter Johnson’s status.

The alteration was apparent at Georgetown dinner parties, where he dozed off at table less frequently. His need to be the center of attention at parties had been thwarted by the degree to which, in Washington, attention was a function of power, but now, as Dale Miller puts it, “because of his political power,” he was more often the center of attention. The alteration was apparent in the House cloakrooms and dining room, where, before the 1940 campaign, some fellow Representatives would snub Johnson, greeting other colleagues while ignoring him because, as one says, “they wouldn’t put up with him.” He still acted the same way in the House Dining Room, strolling through it nodding to left and right as if he were a visiting celebrity, “head-huddling,” talking loudly. But his colleagues “put up with him” now. Symbolically, the shrinking away was much less evident. The fellow Congressman whose lapel he grasped while staring into his eyes and talking nose to nose was often a colleague who had appealed to him for help, and who had received that help—a colleague, moreover, who not only had needed him once, but who would need him again. A Congressman who was thinking about his next campaign didn’t resent Lyndon Johnson’s arm around his shoulders—he was all too happy to have it there. Before 1940, Johnson had never been shy about asking for favors, “irritating” colleagues by his insistence when he had no favors to do them in return. He was in position now to return favors—in a big way. And if other Representatives still felt irritated, they no longer allowed the irritation to show. Says one: “A lot of guys still didn’t like him, but unlike before [the 1940 campaign], you tolerated his idiosyncrasies. Because you knew this guy was going somewhere. You knew—I don’t think most of us knew how he had done it, but we knew he had done it—that he had already started going somewhere. A lot of guys still didn’t like him, but they knew they might need him someday. Now he was a guy you couldn’t deny any more.”

T
HE NEW POWER
he possessed did not derive from Roosevelt’s friendship, or from Rayburn’s. It did not derive from seniority in the House, nor even—despite the relationship that power in a democracy bears to the votes of the electorate—to his seat in it. His power was simply the power of money. To a considerable extent, the money was Herman Brown’s. A single corporation, Brown & Root, may have given Democratic congressional candidates more money than they received from the Democratic National Committee. Lyndon Johnson had been attempting to, as Rowe puts it, “build a power base.” He had succeeded. His power base wasn’t his congressional district, it was Herman Brown’s bank account. Although he was young, he had been seeking national power for years. Now the power of money had given him some.

Simultaneously, it had given a new kind of power to Texas—through him.

This was a significant aspect of his work in the 1940 campaign. Texas had had power in Washington for nine years—since Dick Kleberg’s victory had given the Democrats control of the House in November, 1931, and John Garner had taken the Speaker’s chair. But that power had been somewhat personal, and therefore in constant danger of vanishing. Much of it had been embodied in, and exercised through, Garner, leader of the Lone Star State’s delegation and the key protector of the state’s interests in Washington, not only because of his position but because of the power of his personality. The ephemeral nature of power based on individuals was vividly demonstrated by the fact that Cactus Jack was, abruptly, no longer even going to be present in Washington. Sam Rayburn’s ascension to the Speakership and Texas’ continuing hold on key committee chairmanships in both House and Senate meant that Texas still had power in the capital, but great as this power was, it could disappear in a day—Election Day. Because of Texas’ predilection for keeping its Congressmen in office indefinitely, there was little fear that they themselves would lose some November, but their power rested on an overall Democratic majority in the House and Senate that depended on less reliable states. A Democratic loss would cost them their chairmanships and their power. And a Republican victory was not the only way in which Texas could lose power: a chairmanship could be lost through death, as Buchanan’s death had cost Texas the key Appropriations post, and the key “Texas chairmanships” in the House were held by elderly men. In the world of the pork barrel and the log roll, Texas had a commanding position because of Joseph Jefferson Mansfield; let that elderly wheelchair-bound man die, and Texas’ power over public works would vanish in the instant of his death. A chairmanship could be lost through individual ambitions; arrangements had, in fact, already been finalized for the Agriculture Committee’s Marvin Jones to resign his House seat for a federal Judgeship immediately after the election. In 1932, Texas had held not only the Speakership but five key House chairmanships; Jones’ departure would reduce the number to three.

Moreover, because, in a legislative body, personal relationships are so important, the effects of increased Republican strength would be for some period of years irreparable. A Republican victory would sweep out of office Congressmen with whom Texans had long and close alliances. The Democrats might return to a majority—but they might be different Democrats.

The power of money was less ephemeral than power based on elections or individuals. It could last as long as the money lasted, exerting its effect not only on an incumbent but on his successors. And there was enough oil in Texas so that it would last, in political terms, a long time. Lyndon Johnson had become the conduit for the oilmen’s money. To the extent that he could remain the conduit, his power would endure.

And there was a lot more Texas money available than had been apparent in the 1940 campaign. Lyndon Johnson’s base had been Herman Brown’s money, but he had expanded that base by adding to Herman’s cash, Sid Richardson’s and Clint Murchison’s. The extent of their wealth made his power base infinitely expandable. It could become a factor in campaigns other than those for members of the House of Representatives. It could exert more influence. To the extent that he remained in charge of its distribution, he could exert more influence. In terms of power in Washington, his power was still quite small, but if the amount of money at his command grew larger, his power might grow with it.

If journalists did not generally understand the reason for Johnson’s new status, some of them were aware of it. Wrote Alex Louis, a correspondent for a Texas newspaper chain:

A symbolic scene had dramatized Louis’ analysis. John Garner’s last Cabinet meeting—the end of his active political life in Washington—had been held on October 4, and at its conclusion the grizzled Vice President came up to the President and said, “Well, goodbye, Boss.” He clapped the President on the shoulder with one hand and gripped him with the other, appearing, in Ickes’ description, “to be a very pleasant fellow indeed, saying farewell to a man to whom he was deeply attached.” Then he turned and walked out of the room. Ickes was a witness to the farewell because he had been waiting “after Cabinet” to have a word with the President. The word was on behalf of Lyndon Johnson; at the time, Johnson had not yet been given a role in the national congressional campaign, and he had asked Ickes to urge Roosevelt to give him one. Roosevelt had already decided to do so, and he
told Ickes this. In the very moment in which the old Texan was making his exit from the national political scene, therefore, arrangements were being made for the entrance onto the national stage of a younger representative of the great province in the Southwest.

L
YNDON JOHNSON’S WORK
with Democratic congressional candidates had in effect added a new factor to the equation of American politics. The concept of financing congressional races across the country from a single central source was not new, but the Democrats had seldom if ever implemented the concept on the necessary scale or with the necessary energy. “No one before had ever worked at it,” James Rowe says. “Johnson worked at it like hell. People running for Congress in those days never had much money; it had been that way for years, but Lyndon decided to do something about it; he got in it with both feet, the way he did everything, and he raised a hell of a lot of money.” In effect, says Robert S. Allen, “he was being a one-man national committee for congressmen”—an apt analogy; although he was ostensibly “assisting” the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, his connection with that body consisted almost entirely of the checks he brought to it; otherwise, working out of his own office and with his own staff, he operated entirely on his own. The scale of money he raised for congressional races was unusually large for his party; his involvement in other aspects of congressional races—liaison with the White House, and, through the White House, with other government departments; furnishing candidates with information—was unprecedentedly active. Almost incredibly—although confirmed by the surviving Congressmen of that era—so was the coordination and financing of speakers’ tours that he undertook. As to the liaison between candidates and White House on approval of public works and other governmental projects, this had not been undertaken on a similar scale even by the better-organized Republicans, possibly because under Republican Presidents, in the pre-New Deal era, the federal government had not sponsored public-works projects on the broad-scale basis that existed in 1940. Nor had the liaison-in-reverse that he undertook: the use of Congressmen as sources of information, the rapid collecting of their information, its collating and dispatch to the White House. By the 1980’s, when Democratic and Republican congressional committees would be large-scale operations that furnished services and money to candidates, it would be difficult to imagine an era in which most Congressmen were left to fight their campaigns without significant help from their national party, but before Lyndon Johnson, that was, certainly in the case of the Democrats and to some extent in the case of Republicans, largely the practice. Discussing what Lyndon Johnson did in the campaign of 1940, James Rowe says flatly: “Nobody had ever done this before.”