The Path to Power (65 page)

Fear of living out his life on a farm had brought Morgan to San Marcos, and then to the university, but the fate he had feared loomed ahead of him now. He couldn’t go on. “And then I heard—I don’t remember how—that Lyndon was running the NYA. I had known Bill Deason, and I applied, and Bill said he would have to check with Lyndon. And the next day he called back, and said, ‘Are you ready to go to work?’ And I said, ‘Yes sir! Right now!’” The next day he began working as an NYA “project supervisor,” a part-time job that allowed him to continue at law school—and
that paid sixty-five dollars per month. That was, he says, “a big
pile
of money in those days.” “I don’t believe,” he says, “that I would ever have made it through law school without that particular job.” And he did not forget who had given it to him. After noting that he was “very appreciative” of Johnson’s help, Morgan adds, “I would have done anything within reason that he asked me to do.”

Morgan’s poverty was not unusual: many of the men who came to work as NYA executives were rescued from circumstances similarly desperate. And they felt as grateful as Morgan to their rescuer.

In some cases, gratitude was reinforced by fear. Morgan could look forward to a law degree—a profession. Most of the men working beside him in the NYA offices had no such prospects; in fact, many natives of the Hill Country were all too aware that they might have difficulty finding
any
other job if they lost the high-paying, prestigious job Lyndon Johnson had given them. Their fear of losing it not only contributed to the energy with which they performed it, but made easier deference to the man who had given it—and who could take it away. Says one of those who declined to give such deference, and who therefore did not “make the team,” “He knew he had them by the hairs because where else were they going to go? That’s why he knew he could treat them like that, and they had to take it. And you know, once you start taking it, well, you get into the habit, you know, and habits get harder and harder to break. They got so used to taking his abuse that after a while they hardly knew they were taking it.”

Reinforcing gratitude and fear was ambition. Deason is not the only one of Lyndon Johnson’s NYA “boys” who cites self-interest—“sense enough to try to tie on”—in explaining his allegiance to Johnson. Johnson played on their ambition, of course; his future was a frequent topic of the back-yard discussions. “We knew he was going to run for something,” Jones says. And, Jones says, “you felt, knowing him, that whatever he ran for, he would win.” If he did, he assured them, his victories would be theirs. They believed that—believed that when he had better jobs to give out, they would get them. So few paths out of poverty existed for a Texas farm boy then. These young men felt they were on one of those paths—perhaps the only one they would ever find—and they were eager to stay on it.

But if gratitude and fear and ambition tied these men to Lyndon Johnson, there were other—less selfish—ties. The Chief made his boys feel like part of a team, almost like part of a family. “Well now, let’s play awhile,” he would say. Playing was done ensemble; wives and babies would come with their husbands for back-yard picnics, or they and the Johnsons would spend an afternoon picnicking and swimming at icy Barton Springs, or an evening night-clubbing in the Mexican cantinas of San Antonio. And he made them feel like part of history, too. During those long evenings in the back yard, he didn’t merely read NYA regulations; he put them into perspective, an inspiring perspective, explaining how the NYA was trying to
salvage the lives of young men and women who were walking the streets or riding the rails in despair, who were cold and hungry. Look, fellows, he would say, these rules are a lot of nonsense, but we have to follow them, because we have to put the kids to work, we have to get them into school and keep them there, and we have to do it fast. We can’t have Washington sending the forms back because we didn’t fill them out right, because every day more of them drop out of school, and we lose ’em forever. “Put them to work; get them into school!” he would say—and as he spoke, his eyes, shining out of that pale face there in the dark, would reflect the glow of the flickering lanterns. “Put them to work! Get them out of the boxcars!” He lit in even the most stolid of his boys a sense of purpose that they remembered decades later. Says the earnest Deason: “It was during the deep days of the Depression. We had a mission to get the young folks to work as fast as we could.” Most of them found it impossible to resist the spell. “You can’t be around the guy” without falling under his influence, Jones says, trying to explain. “First he fills himself up with knowledge, and then he pours out enthusiasm around him, and you can’t stop him. I mean, there’s no way. … He just overwhelms you.”

If he drove men, he led them, too. Once, a long-awaited WPA certification of children whose families were on relief and who were therefore eligible for NYA employment arrived late on Friday afternoon. There were 8,000 names on the list, and Johnson told Deason and Morgan that he wanted those 8,000 teen-agers at work—on Monday morning. Morgan’s first reaction was despair; the teen-agers couldn’t be contacted by mail over the weekend, and the NYA had already found that many teen-agers didn’t respond to letters, anyway. Morgan, whose assignment at the time was nothing larger than supervising a roadside park on which about twenty youths were employed, recalls that his first reaction was incredulity. But Johnson told him to take the twenty youths, divide up the 8,000 names among them, and have them spend the weekend going directly to the teen-agers’ homes to speak to them in person. “I got the kids in, and stayed there almost until morning, dividing up the names among them, by streets; I’d shout out an address on Guadalupe, and the kid who had Guadalupe would write it down. And Saturday morning, we hit the streets. We didn’t contact all of them, but on Monday morning, we had 5,600 of them down there, and we put them to work. That’s the kind of assignments he’d give you—that would seem nearly impossible. But he taught you you could do them.”

Cursing his men one moment, he removed the curse the next—with hugs (“I saw him get angry at Sherman Birdwell one time, and he used most of the cuss words and combinations I had ever heard,” Morgan says, “and just as soon as he got through eating his ass out, he had his arm around him”) and with compliments, compliments which, if infrequent, were as extravagant as the curses: remarks that a man repeated to his wife that night with pride, and that he never forgot. He made them feel needed.

Congressional secretary Lyndon Johnson

Congressman Richard M. Kleberg

Roy Miller, the legendary, consummate lobbyist, who used Kleberg’s office as if it were his own and with whom Johnson was “in tune”

“The Chief” with L. E. Jones (left) and Gene Latimer

Claudia Alta (“Lady Bird”) Taylor, in the summer of 1934

Lady Bird and Lyndon Johnson on their honeymoon in Mexico, November, 1934