The Path to Power (120 page)

A
HALLMARK OF
J
OHNSON’S CAREER
had been a lack of any consistent ideology or principle, in fact of any moral foundation whatsoever—a willingness to march with any ally who would help his personal advancement. His work with the congressional campaign committee brought this into sharper focus. Because Democratic congressional candidates in the one-party South had no opposition in the November elections, he was providing money only to Democrats in the North—who were primarily liberals. But the money came from men who were not liberals. Some of them, in fact, were arch-conservatives; among the “Texas friends” who had provided funds for Lyndon Johnson to distribute were men who would be bankrollers in 1944 of the “Texas Regulars,” Texans who bolted the party rather than support Roosevelt. He was helping New Dealers with the money of men who hated the New Deal.

In dealing with these men, Johnson did not make the slightest effort to paper over this conflict in his fund-raising efforts, nor was it necessary for him to do so. Political philosophy played not the smallest role in his appeals for money. During the next congressional campaign in 1942, after Ed Flynn had again attempted to freeze him out but had again been thwarted by Johnson’s control over Texas money (replied oilman G. L. Rowsey to a Flynn plea for funds: “My delay in replying is due to the fact that I expected to be in contact with our congressman, Honorable Lyndon Johnson … I desire to know his wishes in this matter and to make my contribution to or through him”), Johnson, exasperated by Rayburn’s continued failure to understand the new realities, wrote the Speaker that “these $200 driblets will not get the job done.” What was needed, Johnson said, was to “select a ‘minute man’ group of thirty men, each of whom should” raise $5,000, for a total of $150,000. … “This should be done between now and next Wednesday. … There isn’t any reason why, with the wealth and consideration that has been extended, we should fall down on this.” The logic behind that advice was the logic of Mark Hanna. Mobilizing the business community against the threat of Bryan and the populist philosophy embodied in his candidacy, the Boss of Ohio raised political contributions to a new level in 1896 by transforming campaign financing, in the words of his biographer, “from a matter of political begging… into a matter of systematic assessment according to the means of the individual and institution,” an assessment in which each great insurance company, railroad and bank would “pay according to its stake in the general prosperity of the country. …” “Dollar Mark” made campaign financing, in other words, a political levy upon wealth based straightforwardly upon gratitude. For past government help in acquiring that wealth and upon the hope of future government protection of that wealth, and of government assistance in adding to it. Johnson’s fund-raising, not being for a presidential race, was on a much smaller scale than Hanna’s, but it was based on the same naked philosophy of pure self-interest: “the wealth and consideration that has been extended.” And, as had been true in the case of Hanna, who raised millions more for a presidential campaign than had ever been raised
before, Johnson’s logic was irresistible to those—oilmen and contractors—at whom it was directed. His confidence that the $150,000 could be raised in five days was justified; it was, and it was distributed just as rapidly to those candidates Johnson selected.

I
F
H
ERMAN
B
ROWN
regarded the campaign contributions he funneled through Lyndon Johnson as an investment, he received a healthy return on it.

Neither Herman nor his brother George had ever seen a ship being built. “We didn’t know the stern from the aft—I mean the bow—of the boat,” George recalls. Nonetheless, in 1941, at about the time that their Corpus Christi Naval Air Station contract was rising toward $100,000,000, the brothers were awarded a lucrative Navy contract to build four subchasers. (The brothers established a new corporate entity for the purpose: says George, “They needed a name to put on the contract, and I said, ‘Brown Shipbuilding.’ That was all there was to it.”) When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the four subchasers were not yet completed, but a Navy Department official told the brothers, “We’ll put you in the destroyer business.” During the war, Brown Shipbuilding—under contracts with provisions so favorable that profits were all but guaranteed—would carry out $357,000,000 worth of work for the Navy.

A
ND WHAT OF THE RETURN
reaped by the oilmen on an investment in Lyndon Johnson that, as years passed, was to grow and grow? What did they want from government?

They wanted a lot: not only continuation of the oil depletion allowance and of other tax benefits, and of exemption from federal regulation but new benefits, and new exemptions—and other new, favorable, government policies. As the future will demonstrate, they wanted government favoritism on a scale so immense that it would become a significant factor in the overall political and economic development of the United States.

In 1940, they had not yet achieved what they wanted. But they were asking too early, that was all.

Lyndon Johnson wasn’t their Senator yet.

I
N ORDER TO REAP THE FULLEST BENEFITS
from his work with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Johnson kept working after Election Day. Among the implements he employed were letters—letters with the Johnson touch. These letters, written to powerful officials, all shared a single theme: each official was told that it was he—and he alone—who had made it possible for Johnson to participate in the 1940 campaign. Each official was thanked—humbly, gratefully—for giving a young man his great opportunity. And each official was flattered—with flattery custom-tailored by a master of the art.

Johnson had noticed how entranced Henry Wallace had been at Longlea by his stories about Texas. To the Vice President-elect, Johnson wrote:

John McCormack had a tradition
he
was proud of—the Massachusetts tradition, which included Bunker Hill—and to the Majority Leader, Johnson wrote: “You helped me get in line and to see the whites of a few enemy eyes. I shall not forget it.” (“Until I ran across you,” Johnson also wrote, “it looked … as if the undersigned Texas boy from the hill country wasn’t going to be able to get in with his few rounds. … The big guns were all roaring [and] I didn’t know whether I was going to find a loop-hole through which to point my muzzle-loader.”) The key to Sam Rayburn was the Speaker’s protective, paternal feeling for young men who depended on him, and Johnson wrote Rayburn (after telling him that it was only through “your good offices that I had the chance” to participate in the campaign) that some young Congressmen “would have been out in the bitter winter wind without firewood if you and other veteran hands hadn’t pitched in, accomplished the necessary and effected their rescue.” Letters from this prince of flatterers went not only to men who, like McCormack, had indeed helped him get into the fight, but to men who—as he was well aware—had tried to keep him out of it; to Ed Flynn, he sent a letter of “felicitation and appreciation.”

The most important of these letters began with the simple salutation: “Sir,” and told Franklin Roosevelt:

During the 1940 campaign, Roosevelt and Johnson had had several discussions. Now they were to have more. The President and the young man talked together in the Oval Office—one can only imagine Lyndon Johnson’s feelings during those conversations in that bright, sunny room in which he had for so many years longed to sit. And they talked together in the upstairs, private, quarters of the White House. Johnson had breakfast in Roosevelt’s
spartan bedroom, the President sitting up in bed with a blue Navy cape around his shoulders. He had lunch in the President’s private study, a comfortable room with chintz-covered furniture and walls so full of naval paintings that they seemed almost papered with them, dining with Franklin D. Roosevelt off a bridge table. Johnson, describing the President as a lonely man whose wife was often traveling, is quoted as saying, “He’d call me up” and “I used to go down sometimes and have a meal with him.”

External evidence reveals that one subject they were discussing was Texas, for Roosevelt was, more and more, making Johnson his man in that state: the individual through whom political matters relating to Texas were cleared. These included minor details seemingly far removed from Johnson’s immediate interest. A note requesting a letter of presidential greetings for an East Texas banker was referred by the President not to Sam Rayburn or Jesse Jones—or to the banker’s Congressman, Lindley Beckworth—but to Johnson, with a covering note: “Do you think this is all right to do?” (Johnson’s suggested reply was followed exactly.) And they included matters not minor at all, and very close to Johnson’s heart. With Garner departed, and Rayburn tarred, Johnson’s major remaining rival for the role of the President’s man in Texas was Reconstruction Finance Corporation Chairman Jesse Jones. A symbolic confrontation came on Jones’ own turf: financing that involved RFC bonds. The bonds in question were those of Alvin Wirtz’s Lower Colorado River Authority, $21 million of which had been purchased by the RFC to help the Authority get under way. Superlatively safe investments (because the Authority’s now ample revenues were pledged, through unbreakable bond covenants, to pay the interest and amortization), high-yielding, tax exempt—these bonds were coveted by investors; “I think every bond house in the United States is waiting to get its hands on the Lower Colorado River Authority bonds,” Wirtz was to write to Johnson. Wirtz had his own, favored, bond house in mind, but Jones had another, and he had the power to sell the bonds to whom he chose—and was about to exercise that power when, at a Cabinet meeting, the President handed him a scribbled note:

“What this meant was that some moodier had been to see the President, looking for an inside deal,” Jones wrote in his memoirs, “meddlers wanting to muscle in for a little private smoosh.” He also wrote that he defied the
President and sold the bonds to the highest bidder, but in fact Roosevelt’s intervention dissuaded him from making the sale he had intended, and eventually the bonds, and the “smoosh,” went to the firm favored by Wirtz and Johnson. What else Roosevelt and Johnson talked about we don’t know, just as we don’t know how often they actually talked alone. Did they talk politics—this master of politics who had persuaded a mighty nation to grant him ultimate power for an unprecedented span and this wonder kid of politics who was searching for every possible handhold on the path to power? Did they talk personalities, these two matchless readers of—and manipulators of—men? No one really knows. All we know is their reaction to their discussions, reactions revealed to others. Lady Bird Johnson says her husband saw Roosevelt “often.” She says, “I of course know nothing” about what transpired between them at these meetings, “but I know the mood they left him [her husband] in—which was one of high excitement. … Every time he came from the White House, he was on a sort of high.” As for Roosevelt, he was convinced—quite firmly convinced—that the young Congressman believed in the things he himself believed in. Moreover, Franklin Roosevelt’s initial impression of Lyndon Johnson—the feeling that he was “a most remarkable young man”—had evidently been reinforced by familiarity; in the opinion of James Rowe, the presidential aide with the best opportunity to observe the interplay between Roosevelt and Johnson, the principal reason for the growing rapport between the two men was the President’s belief that Johnson was not only committed but capable. “Johnson was in many ways just more capable than most of the people Roosevelt saw. We’re talking about a very capable man. … You’ve got to remember that they were two great political geniuses.” The President told Anna Rosenberg Hoffman, who worked in congressional liaison for the White House: “I want you to work with that young Congressman from Texas, Lyndon Johnson. He’s a comer, and he’s a real liberal.” The President tendered Johnson the ultimate compliment. He told Harold Ickes that Johnson was “the kind of uninhibited young pro he would have liked to have been as a young man”—and might have been “if he hadn’t gone to Harvard.” And, Ickes recounted, Roosevelt had also said “that in the next generation the balance of power would shift south and west, and this boy could well be the first Southern President.”

With older men who possessed power, Johnson had always been “a professional son”—utterly deferential (“Yes, sir,” “No, sir”). Was this a technique that he employed on Roosevelt, and that endeared him to the President? “The only man I think he never quarreled with was Roosevelt, and maybe that was because he [Roosevelt] was always President,” Rowe says. With older men, moreover, he was always the most attentive of listeners. Was this a quality that endeared him to a man who loved to talk—and who, lonely, needed someone to talk to? Or was the crucial quality ability—that rare ability so many older men recognized? The reasons for the rapport
between the President and the young Congressman were, Rowe emphasizes, “complicated.” Johnson, Rowe says, “used” Roosevelt “when he could.” And, he says, “Roosevelt knew he was being used.” But whatever the reasons, the rapport was there—and it was deep.

E
VER SINCE HE HAD ARRIVED
in Washington nine years before, Lyndon Johnson had, first as a congressional secretary and then as a Congressman, been touching every base: cultivating not only bureaucrats, but their secretaries and their assistants, and their assistants’ assistants, and
their
secretaries, until entire government bureaus knew him, liked him—wanted to do things for him. He used the same technique with members of the White House staff.

The basis of their friendliness toward him was their belief that he loved their chief as they did. The White House was “filled with the fierce loyalty and warm affection that he [Roosevelt] inspired,” Robert E. Sherwood wrote. “If you could prove possession of these sentiments in abundance, you were accepted as a member of the family and treated accordingly.” Marvin McIntyre, the “soft touch” among the presidential secretaries, had long been convinced that Johnson was a devout Roosevelt worshipper, but General Edwin M. (“Pa”) Watson, the presidential secretary who was now in charge of appointments and was therefore official guardian of the door to the Oval Office, was, behind his amiable exterior, a much tougher customer, and had for a long time been notably immune to the Johnson charm. Now Pa, too, had been completely won over—as was demonstrated by a remark he made when Jim Rowe was attempting to persuade him to give another Congressman a few minutes of the President’s time. “Is he like Lyndon?” Pa asked. “Is he a perfect Roosevelt man?” Friendly with two presidential secretaries, Johnson didn’t neglect the third, cultivating Stephen T. Early at every opportunity.

He didn’t neglect anyone in the White House. The fight against Garner had certified his
bona fides
with Missy LeHand, Roosevelt’s longtime personal secretary. But Missy had an assistant, Grace Tully, who took most of the President’s dictation. She was a fortyish spinster, and Johnson had always had particular success winning the friendship of such women; now he devoted a great deal of effort to winning Miss Tully’s, sometimes stopping by her apartment on Connecticut Avenue and giving her a lift to work. The effort was successful; so fond was she of him and so convinced of his loyalty to the man she was to call “one of the great souls of history” that she would later suggest (with a rather dramatic misunderstanding of Johnson’s ambitions) that he be made a presidential secretary.

This determination to “touch every base” paid dividends. Pa Watson guarded only the front door to the Oval Office. There was a “back door,” too. This was the door to the small, cluttered office—on the opposite side of the Oval Office from Watson’s—that was shared by LeHand and Tully. Visitors Roosevelt wanted to see without the knowledge of the press—“off-the-record”
guests, in the parlance of the White House inner circle—would use this door, entering the White House by an unfrequented side entrance, then going up the back stairs to Missy’s office, to be ushered into the President’s presence by her. This door was used as well by knowledgeable young White House staffers, because the two personal secretaries possessed virtually unlimited access to the President; “everyone had to go through Pa—except Missy and Grace,” Corcoran recalls. If one of these two women knew Roosevelt was alone, she could bring someone in for a quick moment’s discussion in which the President could give him the decision or guidance he needed, “so if Pa wouldn’t let you in, you went around back to Grace, and she or Missy got you in.” A refinement of this procedure was also employed. If Rowe, say, or one of the President’s five other administrative assistants (the men with a “passion for anonymity” whose offices were across narrow West Executive Avenue in the old State, War, and Navy Building) asked Watson for an appointment with the President, he might be told that the schedule was filled, but that Watson would try—no guarantees—to fit him in between appointments if he wanted to wait with other visitors in his spacious anteroom. “And you’d sit there,” says Rowe, “and if Pa wouldn’t let you in fast enough, you’d go out and go around back to Missy [and ask her], ‘When do I get in? I’ve got to talk to the President.’ Then you’d go back and sit in Pa’s office again, and Missy would tell Roosevelt, and he would tell Pa, ‘I need to talk to Jim Rowe. Get him, will you?’ And Pa would say, ‘He’s right here.’ It was a game.” This version of the game was used frequently by those of the young men the two women were fond of. “I learned—I always went in through the back door,” Rowe says. “And Lyndon got in like me—through the back door.” Fond though Watson was of Johnson, Pa was a vigilant guardian of the President’s time, and had Johnson asked for more than occasional bits of it, he might easily have worn out his welcome with the General. So he used the more informal route—which is one reason his name seldom appears in the White House logs that chronicle the President’s official visitors.