Means of Ascent (10 page)

And, Connally says, “
We had a lot of fun.” They traveled by train, two tall, black-haired young Texans, dramatically handsome in their Navy blue and gold uniforms, having the good times of young sailors at war but not at sea.
Jesse Kellam, Johnson’s one-time subordinate at the Texas NYA and now its director, came out to the Coast to join them, ostensibly to facilitate the inculcation of NYA on-the-job training
techniques in the shipyards. Although notably little inculcating was done, there was a lot of partying, and a lot of practical jokes: when Kellam got drunk at a party one evening, Johnson had a photographer fake pictures of Kellam and some girls, and in the morning showed them to Kellam, who pleaded with Johnson not to show them to his wife. On one train trip, with both Johnson and Kellam high, a post-midnight wrestling match got out of hand; Connally was able to break it up only by
pouring cold water over them, and then pulling Kellam away from Johnson and locking him out of the compartment. “
The next morning,” Connally recalls, “we got into Sun Valley, Idaho. Johnson got off—he was in a good mood; his hat was turned up—he was saying good morning to people, and someone replied, It may be good for you, but you kept us up all night.” The stops between trips were fun, too—particularly in Los
Angeles, where the two officers were supposedly conferring with personnel of a shipyard there but spent considerable time in a more glamorous locale.
Edwin Weisl, Sr., the politically powerful New York attorney and organizer of Johnson’s northeastern financial support, was counsel for Paramount Pictures, and he flew out to Hollywood and, in Connally’s words, “arranged things for us.” Johnson and Connally went to screenings and to
parties with movie stars,
ate in the famous Paramount Cafeteria, where they met Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd and
Bonita Granville;
Cecil B. DeMille said, “I want to introduce you to the greatest young singer in America” and presented them to Deanna Durbin. Johnson had never been satisfied with the posed photographs of himself that he sent out to constituents by the thousands, and Weisl arranged for long
sessions with a Hollywood photographer so Johnson could determine the poses in which he looked best. In an effort to reduce the ungainliness of Johnson’s gestures during speeches, the photographer had the Congressman pretend to give a speech and photographed the gestures so Johnson could see them for himself. A voice coach was provided.

To at least one observer, Johnson seemed rather uninterested in the war.
Alice Glass, a shade under six feet tall, with creamy skin and long, reddish-blond hair, a woman so spectacular that the noted New York society photographer
Arnold Genthe called her “the most beautiful woman I have ever seen,” was a small-town girl from Marlin, Texas, who had been installed as mistress of Longlea, an 800-acre estate in the
northern Virginia hunt country, by the immensely wealthy publisher of the
Austin American-Statesman
,
Charles E. Marsh, by whom she had borne two children. Witty, elegant, hostess of a brilliant table and a sparkling salon of politicians and intellectuals, she possessed a political acumen so keen that the toughest Texas politicians enjoyed talking politics with her; it was Alice Glass who devised the compromise (“
Give Herman the dam and let Lyndon have the land”) that pulled the Congressman and the ruler of
Brown & Root off the collision course that, in 1937, had threatened Johnson’s career. Alice Glass had been Lyndon Johnson’s mistress for more than three years, in a passionate love affair of which Marsh, patronizing and paternalistic toward the young Congressman, was unaware. (In 1939, the publisher had helped Johnson financially by
selling him land in Austin at a giveaway price. In 1940, he offered Johnson an oil deal that would have made him rich; Johnson refused it, because, he said, if the public knew he had oil interests, “it would kill me politically.”) Observing Johnson’s willingness to sit silently listening to Alice read poetry, knowing the risks he took in being the lover of the consort of a man so vital to his political career—this affair stands out in his life as perhaps
the only episode in it that ran counter to his ambitions—the Longlea circle believed that his feelings for Alice were unique, a belief shared by Alice, who had told intimates that she and Johnson had discussed marriage. In that era, a divorced man would be effectively barred from public office, but she said that Lyndon had promised to get divorced anyway and accept one of the several job offers he had received to become a corporate lobbyist in Washington. As a result, she kept
fending off marriage proposals from Marsh. “She wouldn’t marry Charles after she met Lyndon,” her
sister, Mary Louise, says. The alacrity with which Johnson leapt into the 1941 Senate race when
Morris Sheppard died, however, made her realize that her lover’s political ambitions would always take priority, and that divorce was not a realistic hope, and, after the 1941 campaign, she finally agreed to marry the powerful
publisher. But, an idealist herself who had first been attracted to Johnson because she felt
he
was an idealist
(“a young man who was going to save the world”), she still believed in his idealism, and when, despite her marriage, he asked her to visit him in California, she went. He was, she felt, a young man on his way to fight a war or at least to participate in the war effort.

The contrast between Johnson’s activities and the grim battles being reported daily in the newspapers was not lost on Alice, however, and she grew disillusioned. Years later, jokingly suggesting in a letter to a mutual friend,
Brown & Root lobbyist
Frank C. (Posh) Oltorf, that they collaborate on a book on Johnson, she said, “
I can write a very illuminating chapter on his military career in
Los Angeles, with photographs, letters from voice teachers, and photographers who tried to teach him which was the best side of his face.” Her sister says that “
She was disgusted, just disgusted with him after that trip,” although she was still powerfully attracted to him sexually. Alice’s closest friend, Welly Hopkins’ wife, says simply: “Lyndon was the love of Alice’s life.” As for Johnson, his feelings for
Alice no longer precluded seeing other women.

After Alice returned east, “we had
an interesting time up and down the West Coast,” Connally says. In every city, the two young officers stayed at the best hotels—the Town House Hotel in Los Angeles, the Del Coronado in San Diego, the Empire in San Francisco. Sometimes the Navy paid; sometimes Alice’s husband paid: Charles Marsh had arranged for Johnson to have the use of “
due bills” (credits
from hotels in payment for advertising) that hotel chains had given his various newspapers. The two young naval officers went on lighthearted shopping expeditions. In San Francisco, in a store owned by a Japanese named Matsomoto, who was about to be interned as an alien, “we bought robes and blouses at just giveaway prices—he followed us out into the street just begging us to buy more,” Connally says. Connally purchased a gray silk robe with blue piping that
forty years later was still one of his cherished possessions.

D
URING THOSE TEN WEEKS
, the movements of the Johnson Squadron were cloaked in
secrecy. There were strategic reasons for this, of course. Back in December, when Johnson had entered the service, the
Houston Post
, a friendly paper, had noted that by going to the West Coast he had been “
placed in line for possible early action against the Japs,” but, friendly though the
Post
was, it had been compelled to add, “Of course,
if Mr. Johnson should be merely getting himself a safe, warm naval berth for use as a pre-campaign headquarters and [to] cash in on his patriotism, the purpose of his entering the service would become obvious, and the voters would be certain to react accordingly.” The
Post
, and voters in his own congressional district in Texas, might not, should they learn the nature and location of his
activities as December passed into January, and January into February, March and April, view Sun Valley, Idaho, as the front line for “action against the Japs”; they might even view his job as “a safe, warm naval berth”—they might even “react accordingly.” Another strategic reason involved Charles Marsh, who had business interests on the West Coast, and flew there while his wife was with Johnson. Wanting to visit Johnson, Marsh had his
secretaries telephone Johnson’s office in Washington to ascertain his whereabouts, but since Johnson’s secretary,
Mary Rather, was able to tell Marsh’s secretaries that because of military secrecy, she did not know where Johnson was, the danger of the publisher dropping in unexpectedly on his wife and the young man of whom he was fond was averted.

The secrecy, however, extended also to the Navy. The movements of the two officers appear to have been almost as much of a mystery to their superiors as to the voters. Connally is careful to add to his description of the “fun” they had in California, “in spite of these little incidents,
we were really working.” Even so, their commanding officer appears to have encountered some difficulty in keeping track of their movements.
On February 15, more than two weeks after Johnson had been dispatched to the Coast, Professor Barker was contacted, not by Johnson but by one of Johnson’s secretaries in Washington,
O. J. Weber, who said he would be forwarding some reports from his boss. “
Where is that man?” Barker asked Weber. “Tell him to let me know where he’s going to be so I can send him reports, orders, etc. from time to time or
we’ll get in a jam.” When Weber provided Barker with an address at which Johnson could be reached, Barker wrote the Lieutenant Commander, “
I’m very glad to know your whereabouts as we have had trouble getting any address to which to send mail. Please keep us advised.” Johnson thereupon wrote Barker that “our messages and letters are evidently
crossing each other.” But the difficulties in
communications—always, of course, a problem in a combat zone—continued. When, on March 5, Johnson sent progress reports on various shipyards to his superior, Barker wrote back that he was glad to have them, but added, “
I’ve been wondering how things were progressing” in other assignments Johnson had been given before he left Washington.

One thing at which Johnson
was
working was politics. Every day, not one but several letters from his congressional office would arrive at the Empire Hotel in San Francisco with reports on various district problems—
ranging from appointments to the service academies and rural postmasterships to procuring for Austin businessmen priorities that would enable them to obtain scarce raw materials; moreover, in Texarkana, where Brown &
Root was building a military depot, heavy pressure from the
Office of Price Administration was needed to reduce high rentals, “which,” Weber reported, “is forcing Brown & Root to lose many men each week.” Johnson would write instructions on the handling of each problem in the margins of the reports, or would reply by letter if his instructions were detailed. And he and Connally were also wrestling with the
larger political problem. In the first excitement of the outbreak of war, and Johnson’s going on active service, it had been assumed by everyone—including Johnson—that he would certainly not be running for the Senate nomination in the summer of 1942, and he had promised to support former Governor
James V. Allred, a longtime ally, against Pappy O’Daniel. When Roosevelt had given Allred his blessing, Allred had formally entered the
race. But now, as the May 31 filing deadline drew closer, although everyone else concerned still felt that Johnson could not possibly run, Johnson was no longer so certain. The upcoming election would fill one Texas senatorial seat for six years; the other was held by
Tom Connally, re-elected just two years before and as immensely popular as ever. Johnson felt, John Connally recalls, that “he
might not ever have
another chance as good as this.” Connally and Wirtz told him—Connally with the diffidence of a subordinate, Wirtz with the quiet certitude that made him the “only man Johnson listened to”—that running was not feasible; that, as Connally recalls, “
war fever was extremely high at this time, patriotism was high, and it would have indicated he was more interested in his political future than the war.” But Johnson appears
to have been unwilling to let even a war defer his ambition; he kept trying to find an excuse to escape from his promise to Allred and to run. Although President Roosevelt made it clear that he wanted the Allred candidacy to go forward as agreed, so that there would be no split in the liberal vote, Johnson refused to drop the subject, and he and Connally analyzed the situation from every angle, day after day—“this went on for weeks,” Connally
recalls—and Johnson began quietly maneuvering to be “drafted” for the nomination.

He was also working diligently at obtaining promotion within the Navy. While he was not reporting often to his superior, Professor Barker, he was lobbying with Barker’s boss, Undersecretary Forrestal, for a job in which the roles of superior and subordinate would be reversed. And he wrote to Forrestal’s personal aide, Commander John Gingrich:

Lady Bird says that the period from January to April of 1942 was “
a very frustrating time of high hopes which didn’t come to fruition.… That [was] a nonproductive few months, and he didn’t like it a bit.”
A “constant stream of letters” was coming back to her, she says, “and after a while I could tell in his letters that there was an increasing frustration and feeling that he wasn’t
being useful, he wasn’t getting the best out of his time.… Lyndon had been used to running his own show in Congress—and in the NYA, too.”

In fact, her husband’s hopes were higher than Lady Bird may have known. He apparently had in mind for himself a post in which he would no longer have to salute Admirals—because he would be an Admiral himself. At least an Admiral. He apparently had in mind a job in which he would be not only an Admiral but in a position to exercise authority over other Admirals. “He wanted
something big in Washington, really big,” Tommy
Corcoran was to recall. “He had everyone working on it for him. Wirtz was working.…”