The Path to Power (42 page)

Johnson didn’t know the problems of this district—not of teeming San Antonio, not of gracious Corpus Christi and humming Port Aransas, the district’s two port cities, not of the farmers and ranchers in the little towns he had passed in between. He had never even
heard
of some of those towns. He didn’t know the problems, and he didn’t know the people. Since Kleberg’s predecessor had been a Republican, there were a lot of patronage jobs to be filled by a newly elected Democrat. As Johnson opened the mail bags, there spilled out on his desk requests to the Congressman for postmasterships and assistant postmasterships and rural-route mail-delivery assignments, for jobs with the federal government in Washington and for recommendations that would help to obtain jobs with the state government in Austin, for appointments to West Point and the Naval Academy, for help in obtaining contracts to supply food or to pave roads at Fort Sam Houston or Kelly Field. The new secretary didn’t know the names signed to the letters or mentioned in them, much less the names’ political significance. There were scores of jobs to be filled; he had no idea who should be getting them.

And he didn’t know Washington.

The hundred new Congressmen who had come to Washington in December, 1931, had brought with them a hundred new secretaries, but few were less sophisticated than twenty-three-year-old Lyndon Johnson. When Estelle Harbin, a twenty-eight-year-old secretary from Corpus Christi who had been hired to assist Johnson, met him for the first time in January, 1932—at the Missouri-Pacific Railroad station in San Antonio; Johnson had gone home to Texas when Congress recessed for Christmas, and now was returning to Washington—she saw “a tall, real thin boy” who couldn’t stop
talking about the wonders of train travel; he asked her excitedly, “Have you ever ridden in a Pullman? I never did until I went up with Mr. Kleberg. Have you ever eaten in a dining car? I never did.” When Johnson received his first monthly paycheck, he told Miss Harbin that he wanted to deposit it in a bank, but that he didn’t know how to open a bank account; he had never had one. And as for the intricacies of government, “That,” says Miss Harbin, “was a whole new world to us.” The mail sacks contained letters from secretaries of farm cooperatives asking for the Congressman’s support of an application for a loan from the Division of Cooperative Marketing of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, or for assistance from the Department of Agriculture’s Federal Farm Board, and hundreds of letters from veterans seeking assistance on pension and disability problems, each one with individual problems, each one complicated—mailbags full of requests requiring action from some federal agency or department or bureau. The new secretary didn’t even know
which
agency or department or bureau—and when, after a day or two of fruitless telephoning, he decided to go to the Veterans Bureau in person, he found himself standing in front of a building a block square and ten stories high, each floor filled with hundreds of offices.

“We didn’t know which bureau to go to, to ask about something, or to try to get something done,” Estelle Harbin recalls. “We didn’t know you could get books from the Library of Congress—and, my God, we never even
thought
of asking them for information. I wanted a plant for the office, but I had no idea you could get one by calling up the United States Botanic Garden. My God, we didn’t know
anything!
The first time we heard that there was a little train that Senators could ride [from the Senate Office Building] to the Capitol—well, we just couldn’t believe
that!
Lyndon didn’t know how to type, and he didn’t know how to dictate a letter—he had never dictated one. We were two ignorant little children.” Kleberg gave them his two complimentary gallery tickets to President Hoover’s address to a joint session of Congress, but when they arrived, all the seats had been taken, and they sat, Miss Harbin recalls, “on the two top steps,” not saying a word. “Lyndon was there beside me as scared as I was. We sat there like two scared field mice.”

Johnson could not persuade his boss to read the mail, much less dictate replies. If he asked the Congressman to call a government bureau on behalf of a constituent, Kleberg would always agree, but he never seemed to get around to doing it. When Johnson asked him to call an official so that he, Johnson, would have an easier time dealing with him, that call never seemed to be made, either. Johnson realized that he would have to handle the mail himself. And three times each day, the mailman would arrive with another bundle of it. “The mail really dismayed him at first,” Miss Harbin recalls; Johnson was to describe his own feelings about it: “I felt I was going to be buried.”

S
OME OF THE INFORMATION
he needed could be obtained from the Hill’s elderly spinster secretaries; with them, he displayed the same gift with elderly women that had awed his boyhood friends back in Johnson City. “He was always so courteous,” Miss Harbin recalls, “and there was never a little favor that was too much trouble for him to do.” Soon—“in nothing flat,” Miss Harbin says—in every office along those long cold corridors on the first floor of the House Office Building, there was a warm smile for Lyndon Johnson. But he needed more knowledge—more tips on how to get things done in Washington’s bewildering bureaucratic maze—than the elderly women could give him. And he was living in the right place to get it.

Once the Grace Dodge Hotel had been a “ladies’ hotel,” with its name in Old English gilt lettering above its door, the most elegant of the cluster of eight-story red brick hotels at the foot of the long north slope of Capitol Hill near Union Station. With the Depression emptying its rooms, however, its management had decided to cater also to young men whose paychecks were small but, coming from the government, regular. The two basement floors were divided into cubicles, and rented out at $40 per month for rooms on the “A” floor, just one level down from the lobby, with bathrooms that had to be shared only with the tenants of the adjoining room; and $30 for the smaller rooms on the bottom, or “B,” floor, where a single communal bathroom served all rooms, and, since this level was partly below ground, the only daylight came from half-windows, high up on the walls, facing on a back alley. Basement tenants were forbidden to mingle with the Dodge’s upstairs guests—who included two United States Senators and a Supreme Court Justice—or, in fact, to set foot in its lobby, which badly needed painting but still boasted a grand piano, a fireplace, Oriental rugs and glittering chandeliers; they were required to enter and leave by the back-alley door. But the lodgings were cheap and convenient—most of the basement tenants were, like Lyndon Johnson (who lived on “B”), congressional aides whose offices were right up Capitol Hill—and the tenants were young: the Dodge’s basement was crammed with camaraderie, as well as with enthusiasm, ambition and, because many of the aides had several years’ experience, with the expertise Lyndon Johnson needed on how to get things done in Washington. Since they couldn’t afford to eat in the Dodge dining room, the young men walked down to the All States Cafeteria, decorated with plaques of state seals, on Massachusetts Avenue, for a meal that Southern secretaries called the “Fo-bitter” because it cost fifty cents—or, just before payday, to Childs’ Cafeteria, where, one secretary recalls, “you could do pretty well on two bits.” A lot of joking and horseplay went on among the young men standing on line for their food, but Johnson didn’t wait on line. After walking over to Childs’ with the other secretaries, he would, as they entered the cafeteria door, dart ahead, grab a tray, hurry to
choose his food, rush to the large table where they usually sat and wolf down his meal. One of the older secretaries in the group—Arthur Perry, a Capitol Hill veteran then secretary to Senator Tom Connally of Texas—was a shrewd observer of young men. Johnson, he saw, rushed through his food because he wanted to be done with it before the others got to the table—so that eating wouldn’t interfere with his conversation. “That left him free to shoot questions at us while we ate,” Perry would recall. The questions were all on a single theme: how to get things done in Washington, how to get ahead in Washington, how to
be somebody
in Washington. “He’d say, ‘But how did he do it?’ (Whatever it was.) ‘Did he know somebody? Is he a nice guy? What’s his secret of getting ahead?’” The simple answer—the shallow answer—didn’t satisfy him. If one of the other men at the table replied, “I don’t know as he has any special secret—maybe he’s just lucky,” Johnson would say, “I don’t believe in luck. You look into it and you’ll find it’s always a lot more than just luck.” He himself would not stop looking into it until he was satisfied. “If he didn’t like the answers he got, he would argue” on all sides of a question, worrying it from every angle, Perry says. “It took a long time” for Perry “to catch on” to what Johnson was doing, he says, but finally he realized “that most of his arguing was done simply to bring out every possible answer to his arguments. He wanted to be sure he knew all the answers.”

O
NCE HE KNEW HOW
to do things in Washington, he started doing them—with the same frenzied, driven, almost desperate energy he had displayed in Cotulla and Houston, the energy of a man fleeing from something dreadful.

Estelle Harbin, accustomed to the early-rising ways of Texas, would arrive at the House Office Building before eight o’clock, saying good morning to the guard at the desk inside the New Jersey Avenue entrance, and then turning down the corridor to her right. The corridor, which was silent and dark, for congressional offices didn’t open until nine, was longer than a football field, so long that the light from the window at its far end reached only a little way toward her, and so high that the lighted globes on its ceiling did little to dispel its dimness. And when she reached the far end, she would turn left into another corridor, unwindowed and even darker—except that, halfway down it, from the twelfth door on the right, a single shaft of light would always be falling across it from the open door of Room 258.

Often, Lyndon Johnson would be writing when she walked into 258. Because of his difficulty giving dictation, he wrote out the letters he wanted Miss Harbin to type—writing and rewriting them until he was satisfied—and he wanted to finish that work before eight o’clock, because at eight the dollies carrying the new day’s mail began clattering down those long corridors. “The minute the mail arrived, we would start opening it together,
and decide what to do about it,” Miss Harbin says. “Then I’d start [typing] the letters he had written out before I got there, and he would get on the phone.”

He knew whom to call now, and he knew how to talk to the people he was calling. “He had charm to burn,” Miss Harbin says. “He would get someone to do something for him, and then he would hang up and we would laugh about it. Very soon, he had a real pipeline to all the bureaus. And he wouldn’t take no—he would pursue these things like it was life and death. And when he got something for somebody—when we could write and tell somebody that they could look forward to getting something—that was a real victory. He’d put down the phone—
‘Stelle! Yay!’
He’d just practically jump up and down.”

Work not only began unusually early in Room 258 (other secretaries say that no matter how early they arrived, the light in 258 was always on) and was not interrupted by lunch (Johnson and Miss Harbin would eat sandwiches at their desks) but also ended unusually late. The offices that, in those leisurely days, opened at nine, closed at four or four-thirty. Miss Harbin’s boardinghouse stopped serving dinner at eight, she recalls, “so, often, I couldn’t get there in time for dinner.” Generally, the Kleberg office staff would dine at Childs’. “Lyndon knew the price of every dish in that restaurant,” she says, “and a lot of times, we had to put our money on the table and count it to see what we could afford to order. We’d do this in the office [before leaving]. He’d say, ‘This is Wednesday, and on Wednesday they have so-and-so.’ We always had to leave me [bus fare] to get home.” Occasionally their boss would take them to dinner at the Occidental (“Where Statesmen Dine”); “that was a big deal,” Miss Harbin says; “we saw people we recognized from magazines, and we might have oysters on the half-shell.” Soon an unusually heavy stream of letters “telling somebody that they could look forward to getting something” was pouring out of Room 258. But repetition did not dull the thrill Johnson received from each “victory.” And it didn’t dull the edge of his effort. When Spring came, Miss Harbin would sometimes persuade him to take a brief stroll on the Capitol grounds. But although the stroll might begin at a relaxed pace, inevitably, Miss Harbin recalls, she would have to begin trotting, because her companion would be walking faster and faster. “He was so tall and he took such long steps, and I couldn’t keep up with him. I would say something, and he’d slow down, but soon he’d be going faster again. I’d skip to keep up with him, and then I’d have to run.” And when they turned back toward the office he would begin striding faster and faster, “and then he would take my hand, and we’d run, literally run, across the Capitol grounds. He just couldn’t wait to get back to that office.”