The Path to Power (67 page)

Johnson in the hospital, after his appendicitis attack, surrounded by congratulatory telegrams

Right:
Johnson at the depot to return to Washington as a Congressman. A poignant scene, given the father-son relationship. He walked alongside his mother, ahead of his father, who could not keep up, and was aboard before his father arrived. Sam started to climb up, Lyndon bent down: father and son kissed.

The Galveston handshake: The new Congressman, whose platform had been “Roosevelt! Roosevelt! Roosevelt!” meets FDR for the first time. Between them, Governor James Allred (who later would be airbrushed out).

Mary Henderson recalls watching him in a crisis, when he was “absolutely frantic with worry.” And she recalls that when the crisis was over, “he said: ‘I have never been in need of people, or been in trouble, without looking around and finding your face.’ And he put his arm around me. And I was nobody. Oh, you wanted to please him more than anything.” He joked with them. On a trip to Houston, he shared a hotel room with Mary’s husband, Charles (Herbert Henderson’s younger brother). During the night, Henderson was awakened by groans from the other bed. “Charlie! Charlie!” Johnson moaned. “I feel terrible. I need a drink of water.” Henderson jumped up and ran to the bathroom. When he returned with the water, however, the light was on, and Johnson was sitting up in bed, smiling. The jokes had an edge—they were designed for the same purpose as the cursing: so that Johnson could display his dominance over his men; Henderson told his wife he understood that Johnson had moaned because he didn’t want to have to get up and get the water himself—but the edge was honed differently for each man, differently and precisely. Henderson didn’t resent getting up for the water, or said he didn’t, and Henderson’s fellow workers didn’t resent, or said they didn’t resent, the jokes played on
them
. He gave each one of his “boys” a precisely measured dosage—of cursing, of sarcasm, of hugging, of compliments: of exactly what was needed to keep them devoted to his aims. He was more than a reader of men, he was a master of men. And these men, the first on whom he had an opportunity to fully exercise his mastery, not only served him, but loved and idolized him.

“I knew that he would be moving into something with a bigger challenge,” Deason says. “I had a sense of destiny for him.” When young Chuck Henderson had still been engaged to Mary, then a secretary back in Ashtabula, Ohio, he wrote to her, she says, “I’m working for the greatest guy in the world. Someday he’s going to be President of the United States. And he’s only twenty-seven years old!” Mary found this hard to believe, but when she arrived in Austin to get married—Lyndon Johnson was best man—and to become a secretary in the NYA offices, she saw at once why Chuck believed it. “I find it hard to understand when I talk about it now,” she says. “But he had what they call now a charisma. He was dynamic, and he had this piercing look, and he knew exactly where he was going, and what he was going to do next, and he had you sold down the river on whatever he was telling you. And you had no doubts that he was going to do what he said—no doubts at all. You never thought of him being only twenty-seven years old. You thought of him like a big figure in history. You felt the power. If he’d pat you on the back, you’d feel so honored. People worked so hard for him because you absolutely adored him. You loved him.” She saw why Chuck—and Chuck’s brother, and Chuck’s friends: all the men in the NYA offices—wanted so badly to stay on his team. “Working for him was very exciting. Fascinating. History was being made. The country was being turned around. And Lyndon was one of the turners—
one of the makers and the doers and the shovers. And you knew he was going to be doing even more. You knew he was going places. And you wanted to be on his wagon when he went.”
Idolized
. “I named my only son after him and in all probability, as far as I know, he was the first boy to be named after Lyndon Johnson,” says Fenner Roth proudly. The first, but not the last; there would, among others, be not only a Lyndon Johnson Roth but a Lyndon Baines Crider.

D
ECADES LATER
, Willard Deason would be asked about the genesis of the political machine with which Senator Lyndon B. Johnson controlled Texas. “It all went back to that NYA,” he said.

As Dick Kleberg’s secretary, Johnson had cached men in bureaucratic nooks and crannies in Washington and all across Texas. His NYA post allowed him to bring these men together under his leadership. Now he could observe them at work, in action; could assess precisely not only personalities but potentialities. He could dispense with those not suited to his purposes.

Moreover, he could, with more jobs at his disposal, add to their ranks, and personally assess the new recruits. The “sifting out” left him with a cadre of men—perhaps forty in number—proven in his service, instruments fitted to his hand. Included in their ranks were specialists: not only the gifted speechwriter Herbert Henderson; but a skilled public relations man: in 1936, he brought into the NYA former
Austin American
managing editor Ray E. Lee. Johnson’s ability to see the potential in the most unlikely of raw materials had also provided him with a chauffeur. When Gene Latimer’s closest friend, a slow-talking, phlegmatic teen-ager named Carroll Keach, had come to Washington from Houston, Johnson had told him to learn typing and stenography, but, Keach says, “I was very inept. I mean, I was just a beginner.” Johnson would not give him a job in
his
office, placing him in the Federal Housing Administration mailroom instead. But when Maverick was elected, Johnson recommended Keach to the new Congressman, who hired him for his office. And on the trip back to Texas, Keach accompanied Johnson. Johnson, who so distrusted other people behind the wheel, noticed that Keach, who didn’t talk much anyway, concentrated on his driving. And he noticed that unlike most of his assistants, the calm young man did not become flustered when he berated him. Now he put Keach on the NYA payroll, and used him as his chauffeur.

The significant aspect of his earlier network, its statewide scope, was emphasized now; the NYA operated in every one of Texas’ 254 counties. The NYA provided, throughout Texas, contracts to local businessmen who might be politically well connected, and jobs not only for the cadre but for the public. It did so in a minor way. Its total funding—just slightly more than $2 million during Lyndon Johnson’s term as director—was only a small fraction of that spent by the state government, or
by other federal agencies in Texas. But with forty men personally loyal to a single leader, with a speechwriter and a public relations man, with jobs and contracts to distribute—it was a political organization.
His
political organization.

H
IS
NYA job allowed Lyndon Johnson to expand not just his organization but his acquaintance. Austin was a city whose life was dominated by politics as its skyline was dominated by the gigantic pink dome—modeled on (but even larger than) the great dome in Washington—of the State Capitol. A substantial portion of its permanent population, 70,000 in 1935, consisted of state officials and bureaucrats; when the Legislature was in session, the city’s hotels and boardinghouses were crowded with legislators and lobbyists. If one spent enough time on Austin’s main thoroughfare, Congress Avenue—a street (built wide enough to allow U-turns by prairie wagons pulled by two teams of horses) that began at the foot of the Capitol and ran from it down low hills and wide terraces to the Colorado River three-quarters of a mile away—one would meet most of the men important in Texas politics.

Lyndon Johnson, whose Littlefield Building office was at Congress and Sixth Street, met them. To some he could introduce himself because he was Sam Johnson’s son; his young assistants were startled (because he spoke so derogatorily of his father) at how many influential men remembered the Chief’s father, and remembered him in such a way that they were disposed to be friendly to this young man who resembled him so closely that more than one elderly legislator, seeing the long, gaunt frame, and the smiling face with the huge ears, white skin and black hair, coming toward him, thought for a moment that young Sam Johnson was walking Congress Avenue again. He knew others through his work, which gave him entrée to the most powerful men in Austin, for, despite his youth, he was, after all, a representative—since most federal agencies had established their Texas headquarters in San Antonio or Dallas, practically the
only
representative—of the central government in this isolated little provincial capital. He was, moreover, a representative of the fabled New Deal, with access to New Deal funds; as much as any man, its representative in the capital of Texas. Influential men with college-age children who needed jobs to help pay their way or with a child who had recently graduated and could use a job on the NYA staff itself, realized that this young man had such jobs to dispense. Lyndon Johnson had no trouble meeting the most influential men of Texas.

Meeting such men, he made friends of them, with the facility and rapidity at winning over older people that had amazed his contemporaries in Johnson City and San Marcos. Nervous about meeting them, worried about the impression he would make, he attempted to disguise the nervousness by appearing totally at ease. Emerging from the Littlefield Building, he would habitually take off his suit jacket and sling it, as if carelessly, over
one shoulder. He would turn up the brim of his fedora—turn it up as far as it would go, in fact, so that it touched the crown—in an attempt to add another touch of insouciance. But these attempts at casualness were undermined. Unable to keep from checking his reflection in the windows of the stores he passed, he continually straightened and tightened his necktie. He carried a blue comb clipped to his shirt pocket, and, as he walked, he constantly combed his hair, smoothing its waves and pushing higher his pompadour; even if he was wearing a hat, he would sometimes, staring at his reflection, take the hat off and use the comb—just in case he met someone walking with his wife and had to doff the hat. Despite these preparations, the sight of an influential figure approaching in the distance would precipitate panic. Ducking into the doorway of the nearest store, he would hurriedly tuck in his shirt, recheck his tie, hitch up and carefully adjust his pants and belt and then pat his pompadour into perfection—after which, looking his absolute best, he would saunter, with exaggerated carelessness, toward the man for whom these preparations had been made.

Witnesses to this Congress Avenue toilette could not keep from laughing. Edward A. Clark, then Texas’ Secretary of State, says: “Everyone knew about Lyndon’s little blue comb.” But the laughter was friendly. Listening
at
them, sitting at their knees drinking in their wisdom, following their minds, agreeing with their thoughts before they had uttered them, he made these men like him, and he cemented their affection by hiring their children; many NYA secretaries were daughters of state influentials.

They grew friendly—and, increasingly, respectful. When he had been Kleberg’s secretary, Clark says, “everybody in Austin knew Lyndon was a good fellow to see up there if you needed something out of one of the departments.” Now, meeting him on Congress Avenue, men who “needed something” in Washington asked him how to obtain it—and found his advice sound. They told their friends he was a good man to talk to.