The Path to Power (72 page)

A
FTER A DAY OR TWO
, as George Brown recalls, Alvin Wirtz came up with a solution. Congress, Wirtz explained, as the nation’s law-making body, possesses the power to make legal what is illegal. What was needed, he said, was not just the usual congressional authorization of a dam, but a law which, ignoring the land-ownership issue, specifically authorized the contract under which Brown & Root had been working. Such validation of the contract would blur the question of their original legality. It would no longer be so clear that a clear provision of another law had been violated. The Comptroller General’s office would have an excuse (“something to hang his hat on” is the phrase Brown recalls Wirtz using) for overlooking the fact that, validated or not, the contracts still called for construction of a federal dam on someone else’s land.

And, Wirtz said, the Comptroller General’s office would be happy to use that excuse. The President, after all, wanted the dam built; so did the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. If the land title issue became a point of general knowledge and debate, passage of the law might be sticky, but Wirtz saw little chance of that happening. No Congressman would make an issue of it, because no Congressman was opposed to construction of this dam in an isolated part of Texas; with the exception of a few Texas Congressmen, no one in Congress was even aware of its existence. And if some low-level bureaucrat wanted to make trouble over the title, Buchanan’s power would keep the trouble to a minimum. Wirtz said he had already spoken to Buchanan about his new idea, and Buck had approved it—had, in fact, said that it would end their problems. Buck had told him not to worry—he would personally see to the passage of the necessary law, and with its passage, everything would be as before. When Congress reconvened in January, 1937, Buchanan was as good as his word. The routine House procedures preliminary to authorization began clicking off. The
Rivers and Harbors Committee was expecting to take up the bill, and approve it, without opposition, in March. There really was no need to worry, Wirtz told the Browns, as long as they had the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee solidly on their side; Buchanan’s power would protect the Marshall Ford Dam in the future, as it had in the past.

And then, on February 22, 1937, Buchanan suffered a heart attack and died.

L
YNDON JOHNSON
was in Houston on February 23, escorting the Kansas state director of the National Youth Administration on a tour of NYA projects in that city, when he suddenly saw, on a park bench, a copy of the
Houston Post
with the banner headline: CONGRESSMAN JAMES P. BUCHANAN OF BRENHAM DIES. He knew at once, he was to recall, that “this was my chance.”

His chance—quite possibly his only chance, for years and years to come. The ladder—elective office in the national government—that he had decided was the only ladder he wanted to climb contained only three rungs: a seat in the House of Representatives, a seat in the Senate, and that last rung, of which he never spoke. The first rung was indispensable; until he was on it, the others would be out of reach. He had to win a House seat, and, because of the impossibility of dislodging Dick Kleberg, only one seat was a realistic possibility: that of Buchanan’s Tenth Congressional District, in which, living in Austin, he was a resident. That seat was, suddenly, vacant, but once it had been filled (through a special election called by Governor Allred), it might well remain filled for many years. Once Texas sent a man to Congress, Texas kept him there. Buchanan had himself won the seat in a special election—twenty-four years before. Impressive though that tenure was, it was not at all unusual for a Representative from the Lone Star State. Sam Rayburn and Hatton W. Sumners, for example, had also been in Congress for twenty-four years; Joseph Jefferson Mansfield and Marvin Jones for twenty years; John Nance Garner, prior to his election as Vice President, had served in the House for thirty years; in 1937, the twenty-one-member Texas House delegation had a longer average tenure—fourteen years—than that of any other state. The man who won Buchanan’s seat would be in that seat to stay. To the astonishment of the visitor from Kansas, his tour was abruptly canceled; he was unceremoniously bundled into Johnson’s big brown Pontiac sedan, which sped the 166 miles back to Austin, roaring
across level, far-flung pastures dotted with grazing cattle, and through the town of Brenham, where Buck Buchanan’s house was being draped in black.

If, as he drove, Lyndon Johnson weighed his chance of gaining Buchanan’s congressional seat, that chance must have seemed very slim.

In the first flush of sentiment over Buchanan’s sudden death, the first candidate thought of as Old Buck’s successor was Old Buck’s wife, shy, unassuming and retiring though she was. Should Buchanan’s wife choose not to run, his logical successor would be his longtime campaign manager and friend, chubby, rosy-cheeked C. N. Avery. Not only had Avery been Buchanan’s man in the district, his liaison with constituents, for twenty-four years, but he had married into the politically powerful Nelson family of Round Rock and was therefore politically well-connected himself. And, as a successful businessman in his own right (his quarry supplied the stone for the post offices with which Buchanan had dotted the district), his business connections assured him ample campaign funds. And Avery was universally popular. “He liked to sit back and smoke and talk,” says one district politician. “He was a good ol’ boy.” There were, in addition, other logical candidates: the district’s State Senator, Houghton Brownlee; Austin’s Mayor Tom Miller, the district’s single most powerful political figure; ambitious young (thirty-nine) Merton Harris, who after eight years as a District Attorney was now an Assistant State Attorney General who had been busily working barbecues throughout the district in hope of one day succeeding Buchanan.

Lyndon Johnson’s candidacy would not be logical at all. His age—twenty-eight—was a drawback (no member of the Texas delegation and only two members of the 435-member House were that young), particularly in a farm district, because farmers, conservative in personal relationships, place a high premium on “experience.” And age was only one drawback. Lyndon Johnson had spent four years developing an acquaintance with voters, working with boundless energy and initiative to obtain them pensions, to save their homes, to provide them with a multitude of federal services. But those voters had been residents of the Fourteenth District, not the Tenth. The voters of the Tenth District—the district that held his fate—did not know what he had done, or what he was capable of doing.

They did not know
him
. He had been raised in Blanco County, but Blanco, which had not even been part of this huge, sprawling district until the 1935 redistricting, was its most isolated and remote corner, and the smallest of its ten counties; with a population of 3,800, less than 2 percent of the district’s 264,000 residents, it was all but ignored in district politics. As for the rest of the district, he had scarcely ever visited it during the five years prior to his NYA appointment, years he had spent in Houston and Washington and Corpus Christi. Large parts of it he had scarcely visited during his entire life except when driving across them to get somewhere else. As NYA director, he had, of course, been a resident of the
district for eighteen months, but the directorship was not a job which entailed substantial contact with the public. State officials on Congress Avenue might smile and greet him; on Main Streets in Brenham and Giddings and Liberty Hill and Hutto—in most of the district’s scores of small towns—he would be hard put to find a single familiar face. In contrast to an Avery or a Brownlee who was a familiar figure throughout the entire district, or to Mayor Miller, who boasted that he could greet every passerby in Austin by his first name, Lyndon Johnson was, in Dan Quill’s words, “not known at all.”

T
HE
T
ENTH DISTRICT

Many of the district’s political leaders had never heard of him. Having spent almost four years assiduously cultivating rural leaders and county courthouse politicians, Lyndon Johnson had built up, with painstaking effort, a network of such men loyal to him rather than to Dick Kleberg. But that network was in the Fourteenth District, not the Tenth; it couldn’t help him now. In the Tenth District, most of the officials he knew were state officials who had little to do with a local election; the county leaders of the Tenth District—the leaders he needed now—were, in the main, men he had never met. Even those leaders with whom he was acquainted (and who were, having talked with him, impressed with him) had no reason to support him. Their alliances were already forged and tested by time. They had been working with Avery and Brownlee and Harris for years. They had never worked with Lyndon Johnson.

Johnson’s position was somewhat stronger with a few Austin business
leaders and lobbyists—the sources of campaign funds—thanks to his policy of cultivating, as Kleberg’s secretary, “important persons” from outside Kleberg’s district; in this respect, at least, those four years of effort had not been entirely wasted. But his position with these men, while stronger, would not be strong enough to help significantly. Their gratitude—and contributions—would be limited. Austin businessmen would give their real support to their fellow businessman and longtime friend Avery, who had been obtaining lucrative government contracts for them for years. And businessmen who did not support Avery would support Brownlee or Harris—familiar, trusted faces. They would not support Lyndon Johnson. Indeed, documentation for these pessimistic conclusions had been provided that very day by the district’s leading newspaper: the
Austin Statesman
. The
Statesman
had named possible candidates to succeed Buchanan, in a list that included not only the favorites, but long shots as well. The name of Lyndon Johnson had not even been mentioned.

O
F ALL THE MEN
influential in Tenth District politics, Lyndon Johnson was close to only one. Reaching Austin at the end of his 166-mile drive, he turned not toward his home but onto Congress Avenue, and pulled up in front of the Littlefield Building. The floor to which he went was not the sixth, where his own offices were located, but the seventh, on which Alvin Wirtz worked. And there he asked Wirtz for his support.

Like two other older men who had hitherto played large roles in Johnson’s adult life—Cecil Evans and Sam Rayburn—Alvin Wirtz had no son of his own. Perceptive observers in Washington would find this similarity significant when, later, they saw the young man and the older one together. “Lyndon would always call him ‘Yes, sir,’ and ‘No, sir,’” Virginia Durr says. “It was the junior to the senior, you see. … Lyndon had these relationships with older men like Alvin and Sam Rayburn. They both sort of treated him like a son.” And, in Austin, Wirtz’s secretary, Mary Rather, made a similar observation; she had, in fact, been astonished at her boss’ behavior when, one day early in 1935, a lanky young man—“just as tall as he could be, and just as thin as he could be”—whom she had never seen before, “came dashing in” to Wirtz’s staid office “with his long, fast steps”; her boss, usually so studiedly unemotional, “rushed out and grabbed him and hugged him. He was tickled pink to see him. … After he left, I said to Senator Wirtz: ‘Who was that young man?’” She was to see a lot more of him. Telephoning Wirtz from Washington to inform him of his NYA appointment, Johnson asked him to find him office space—which Wirtz did, in the building where he himself worked. He named Wirtz chairman of the NYA’s State Advisory Board, and they consulted frequently. When Johnson entered Wirtz’s reception room, Wirtz would tell Miss Rather: “Here comes m’boy Lyndon.” Hugging him, he would say: “Hello, Lyndon,
m’boy.” After Johnson emerged from Wirtz’s private office and went back to his own, Senator would come out, puffing on a cigar, and tell her how quickly Johnson had caught on to a complicated engineering problem; “I just can’t get over the young man grasping these things so quickly,” he would say. Although Wirtz made himself available as confidant to many bright young men, his attitude toward Johnson, Miss Rather saw, was special. “He was ambitious for him. And he thought he had the ability. And he loved him. Senator Wirtz had a wife and daughter—he was fond of them. … But he would have loved to have had a son. And he loved him [Lyndon] like a son.” (Wirtz was to inscribe a picture of himself: “To Lyndon Johnson, whom I admire and love with the same affection as if he were in fact my own son.”)

Nonetheless, had it not been for the dam in which Alvin Wirtz’s dreams were now invested, his paternal affection for Lyndon Johnson might have found forms of expression other than support for Johnson’s congressional candidacy. To a businessman-politician like Wirtz, his Congressman’s friendship was all-important; he would not ordinarily risk antagonizing the probable winner of the congressional race by backing an opponent; he would want to side with the winner, not with a candidate whose chances were as slim as Johnson’s.

Now, however, the dam was all-important. It lay at the point of death; it would, in fact, be effectively dead if the necessary legislation was not rushed through Congress—if it was not, in fact, passed during the congressional session that had already begun, and that would adjourn within a few weeks after Buchanan’s successor was sworn in. It could not be revived by Buchanan’s shy, politically unsophisticated widow. And, Wirtz felt, it was unlikely to be revived by Buchanan’s campaign manager. Friendly C. N. Avery may have been; forceful he was not. An adjective frequently used to describe him is “easy-going”; in Wirtz’s opinion, he was rather weak and lazy. Moreover, well-known though Avery was in the Tenth District, Senator had observed on his trips to Washington that Congressmen and bureaucrats effusive in their greetings when they passed the powerful Buchanan in the halls of the Capitol, tendered only perfunctory courtesies to his aide. Says Welly Hopkins, familiar with Senator’s thinking on the subject: “He [Avery] didn’t have the drive. And he didn’t know his way to first base in Washington.”

Such drawbacks would not normally be decisive considerations in the selection of a Texas Congressman. He could be expected to remain in Congress long enough to learn his way around all the bases, and to acquire enough seniority to offset lack of drive. He would eventually be a committee chairman himself, a power like Old Buck had been. Had it not been for the Marshall Ford Dam, Wirtz’s support might well have gone to Avery. It would probably not have gone to Lyndon Johnson.

Because of the dam, however, the normal course of events would not
help Alvin Wirtz or his client Herman Brown. Slow accretion of knowledgeability and power wouldn’t rescue that project; speed—furious speed—was what was necessary. (If Wirtz and Brown needed confirmation of the precariousness of their situation, it was shortly to arrive: on March 6, two weeks after Buchanan died, the Bureau of Reclamation sent to the Bureau of Budget for processing a routine form concerning the dam; the Bureau promptly sent it back, marked DISAPPROVED, noting that not only had the Marshall Ford Dam never been authorized by Congress, but, because of a question over title, there was substantial doubt as to whether it ever would be.) The money from the initial $5 million appropriation would, Brown calculated, run out on September 1—with the Brown & Root balance sheet for the dam still half a million dollars in the red. As a result of the Budget Bureau disapproval, moreover, there was no longer any assurance that Brown & Root would receive even the balance of that initial appropriation; the Bureau of Reclamation immediately sent to the dam site a team of auditors with unusual instructions: the Bureau customarily audited a contractor’s figures only at the end of the job; henceforth, on the Marshall Ford Dam project, each bill, however insignificant, that Brown & Root submitted was to be audited as it came in, so that in the event the Budget Bureau suddenly placed a Stop Order on the whole project, the Bureau would not have paid the firm a cent more than was due it for work actually performed. Herman Brown was face to face with financial ruin, and both he and Wirtz were faced with the ruin of their dreams. A good ol’ boy could never save the Marshall Ford Dam. And neither could a good young boy—a dynamic District Attorney such as the thirty-nine-year-old Harris, for example—without Washington experience. Bright, aggressive and energetic, Harris could be expected to learn his way around Washington quickly, but not quickly enough to save the dam. What the dam needed in Washington was a champion already knowledgeable enough and possessed of sufficient entrée to find—swiftly—bypasses through the bureaucracy: a champion, for example, able to cut through the endless red tape at the Bureau of Reclamation by obtaining the personal interest of the Bureau’s boss, Interior Secretary Ickes—or, perhaps, of the Congressman of whom Ickes was particularly fond, Maury Maverick. What the dam needed in Washington was a champion with entrée to Congressmen powerful enough to roll over those bureaucratic obstacles (the Budget Bureau’s quibbling over legalities, for example) that could not be bypassed—a Congressman such as Sam Rayburn, for example. What the dam needed in Washington was a champion with entrée to the chairman of the committee with jurisdiction over the dam, Rivers and Harbors’ Joseph Jefferson Mansfield—or, if not to Mansfield himself, then to the man whose advice Mansfield followed slavishly, the man who pushed Mansfield’s wheelchair through the halls each day at noon: Roy Miller. And because of his trips to Washington in 1935, Alvin Wirtz was aware not only that Lyndon Johnson “knew Washington,” but that he knew—
possessed entrée to—these very men. The young man sitting across his desk from him now was the champion he needed. When Johnson asked for his support, he agreed at once.