Means of Ascent (27 page)

Politics, and only politics, could give him what he wanted. But in politics, he had no place to go. The summer of 1942—when Johnson had returned from the war—was the summer in which Pappy O’Daniel had won his full Senate term; that seat was therefore occupied until 1948. The term of the state’s other Senate seat was up in 1946, but that seat had been held by
Tom Connally since 1928. Connally was a power not only in
Washington, where he was chairman of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee—it was the Connally Resolution that called for United States participation in the
United Nations—but in Texas, where, as the author of the
oil depletion allowance and other legislation favoring the oil industry, he was regarded as the champion of the state’s dominant interest. A challenge to this picturesque figure—with
his frock coat, string tie, and big black hat covering the head of senatorial gray hair curling at the back—would be merely quixotic. The Texas governorship was a possibility, and indeed in 1946 there would be speculation that Johnson would run for the governorship, but on Johnson’s road map, the governorship—or any other state post—would be only a detour, a detour that might turn into a dead end. State office had no interest for him, he reiterated
whenever the subject was brought up; years later, when John Connally was leaving Washington to run for
Governor of Texas, Johnson would ask him, “
What the hell do you want to be Governor for? Here’s where the power is.” As for
appointive office, as he often explained to supporters, “You have to be your own man”—his own man, not someone else’s; an elected official whose position had been
conferred on him by voters, not by a single individual—who could, on a whim, take the position away. The ladder to his great dream had only three rungs, and appointive office was not one of them. Sometimes, as if he could not endure the frustration of his hopes, what he really wanted burst out of him, as it had with
John Hicks in Hirsh’s Drugstore—and as it sometimes did in Washington with old friends from Texas; one evening, alone with Welly
Hopkins, he snarled: “
By
God
, I’ll be President someday!” He had mapped out his route so long ago, had mapped it out so carefully, had held to it so grimly, had plunged along it so fiercely. But now his progress was halted. He was stuck in the House of Representatives—that House of which he was only an insignificant member.

So these were very bad years for Lyndon Johnson.

A
ND THEY GOT WORSE
.

With Roosevelt in the presidency, Johnson at least had the aura of a White House insider. Just after five o’clock in the afternoon of April 12, 1945, the telephone rang in the “Board of Education” room, and Sam Rayburn picked up the receiver. On the line was Roosevelt’s press secretary, Stephen Early, asking to speak to Harry Truman. When the Vice President, who had been presiding over the Senate, arrived a few minutes later, Rayburn gave him
the message,
and Truman called Early, listened for a moment, and hurriedly left for the White House. Soon the news broke, and Sam Rayburn began to cry.

Lyndon Johnson was to say that when the telephone call came, “
I was just looking up at a cartoon on the wall—a cartoon showing the President with that cigarette holder and his jaw stuck out like it always was. He had his head cocked back, you know.…” The cartoon may have provided him with inspiration. When a reporter, his friend William S. White of the
New York Times
, arrived to interview him for his reaction, he
found Johnson standing with a cigarette holder in
his
mouth, and
his
jaw stuck out.

The interview, printed in the
Times
the next day, was dramatic: White wrote that the tall young Congressman stood in “a gloomy Capitol corridor,” with “tears in his eyes” and his Rooseveltian cigarette holder clamped in “a shaking jaw,” and cried out: “God! God! How he could take it for us all!” The article emphasized Johnson’s closeness to Rayburn: Johnson told White that he had been in the Board
of Education room when the telephone call came—an assertion which may not have been accurate.
¹
It also emphasized his closeness to Roosevelt; recalling that the President had once sent him a photograph of his dog Fala inscribed “
From the master to the pup,” Johnson said, “He was just like a Daddy to me always; he always talked to me just that way. He was the
only person I ever knew—anywhere—who was never afraid. Whatever you talked to him about, whatever you asked him for, like the projects in your district, there was just one way to figure it with him.… You could be damn sure that the only test he had was this: Was it good for the Folks.… The people who are going to be crushed by this are the little guys—the guy down in my district, say, who makes $21.50 driving a truck and has a decent house to
live in now, cheap, because of Mr. Roosevelt.” And it
emphasized the closeness between their philosophies (“There are plenty of us left here to try to block and run interference, as he had taught us, but the man who carried the ball is gone—gone”), although the point was also made that despite the closeness, independence had been maintained: “They called the President a dictator and some of us they called ‘yes men.’
Sure, I yessed him plenty of times—because I thought he was right—and I’m not sorry for a single ‘yes’ I ever gave. I have seen the President in all kinds of moods—at breakfast, at lunch, at dinner—and never once in my five terms here did he ever ask me to vote a certain way, or even suggest it. And when I voted against him—as I have plenty of times—he never said a word.”

The king, however, was dead. The day after Roosevelt’s death, one of Johnson’s secretaries, Dorothy Nichols, asked him: “He’s gone; what do we have now?” “Honey,” Johnson replied. “
We’ve got Truman.… There is going to be the damnedest scramble for power in this man’s town for the next two weeks that anyone ever saw in their lives.”

Lyndon Johnson and Harry Truman were acquainted through a mutual friend: Sam Rayburn. Truman and Rayburn, two very tough, very Democratic, politicians, got along well, and the Senator from Missouri held a permanent invitation to the Board of Education. Sometimes Rayburn, invited to a social gathering of party elders, would bring Lyndon along; at one such luncheon at the Mayflower Hotel to celebrate Truman’s nomination as Vice President in 1944, Truman received a
telephone call summoning him to a Senate vote, and Johnson volunteered to drive him to the Capitol; once Truman, along with Rayburn and some other friends, was a dinner guest in the Johnson home. And when the new President delivered an address to a joint session of Congress on April 15, 1945, Johnson wrote him a letter in the tone of an intimate friend: “
Those of us who know you so well were so proud of you today.… We in Texas felt that you were a
part of us long before you belonged to the nation.”

Truman’s reply, however, was little more than a form letter, and during the months that followed Johnson had no other contact with him. In May, Truman appointed Tom Clark United States Attorney General. Johnson and Clark had been working together for years on a number of matters involving the more confidential side of politics, including maneuvers to secure favorable rulings from the FCC for at least two mutual allies, and Clark, who during the 1930s had been a
lobbyist in Austin for the Safeway grocery store chain (and for other major companies: a Texas State Senate investigating committee found in 1937 that Clark had experienced “a
tremendous and startling increase in earnings” after his law partner became Texas State Attorney General), had helped persuade Safeway to advertise on KTBC. During Roosevelt’s Administration, Johnson had pushed vigorously for Clark’s advancement up the Justice
Department
ladder. On the day he was appointed Attorney General, Clark wrote Johnson a handwritten note: “I want you to be the first I write since the nomination … to you I will be ever grateful for a true friendship that opened to me opportunities for service.” But Clark’s appointment was almost the only bright spot for Johnson among the scores of appointments to the new Administration. He had assiduously
cultivated—and won—the affections of many in the circle that surrounded Franklin Roosevelt; now Grace Tully and Marvin McIntyre were gone. There were new faces around the White House—dubbed by reporters the “Missouri gang”—and he knew few of them, none of them intimately. By July, he was writing to Rowe, still on naval duty in the Pacific, in the tone of a disgruntled outsider: “
It is a different town today.…
There is little to stimulate one to doing unbelievable things and such accomplishments as we are likely to make will be of the routine type.… Just what line [Truman’s] subordinates follow has yet to be developed. I have contributed what I could in the way of counsel, but I don’t know that much of it will be followed. Most of our old friends are bewildered.… My own course in political affairs is yet to be charted. We are giving serious
thought to going back to the hill country in Texas and making our contribution to a better world from that spot.” In succeeding months, he reached rather far in attempts to improve his acquaintance with the new President, sending him photographs to sign (including one, a rather far reach even for Johnson, of a picture taken five years before of then Senator Truman posing with Alvin Wirtz, and reminding Truman that Wirtz, “my closest personal
friend … went into Missouri in 1940 to help in the campaign for the ticket”), and one of the huge Christmas turkeys that he had previously sent to Truman’s predecessor, with a note explaining that he was sending it “
Because of your friendship through the years; because of your many kindnesses to me; because I look forward to your company and your counsel in the years to come.” He got the inscriptions (“To
Lyndon B. Johnson, a grand guy and my friend”) and thanks for the turkey, but little company or counsel: during all of 1945, in fact, Lyndon Johnson was in the Oval Office—to which he had once been welcomed with such warmth—exactly once.

Johnson’s admirer Rowe was to explain the contrast between Johnson’s treatment by Roosevelt and his treatment by Truman by saying simply, “
You’ve got to have a reason to see a President.” With Roosevelt, there had been reasons: Johnson’s fund-raising capabilities; his role, through the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, as link between the White House and Capitol Hill; his role as
“Roosevelt’s man” (and spy) on the Texas delegation. Now his fund-raising and campaign-committee functions had been taken over by someone else, and Rayburn was Truman’s man for Texas. But Rowe’s explanation does not mention
the paternal rapport that Roosevelt aides call a “special feeling,” and that had led that President to break his own rules in lavishing campaign and other assistance on the young congressman. And
Rowe’s explanation also ignores Truman’s feelings about Johnson—which were, in the early years of the Truman Presidency, quite different from Roosevelt’s.

Lyndon Johnson’s remarkable talent for cultivating and manipulating older men who possessed power that could help his ambitions—the obsequiousness so profound that scornful contemporaries referred to him as a “
professional son”—had been exercised to the fullest on Sam Rayburn. He kissed the fearsome Speaker on his bald head, repeatedly told others, in Rayburn’s presence, that the Speaker was “just like a Daddy to
me”—and was in the Board of Education (and anywhere else he was in Rayburn’s company) utterly deferential, respectful and admiring, “playing” this lonely older man like the “great flatterer” contemporaries called him. But Harry Truman had been a visitor to the “Board”; he had been present when Johnson was “playing” Rayburn. “He tried to play Truman the way he played Rayburn,” says Board member
Richard Bolling, a Congressman from Missouri. “
But Truman had
watched
him doing it with Rayburn. So when Lyndon started doing it with him, he knew exactly what Lyndon was doing. And so it didn’t work.” During this period, Stuart Symington says, Johnson “tried to be friendly with the new President.” But Truman, he says, “was
a pretty sharp judge of character.” Truman’s daughter,
Margaret, says that because her father had witnessed the professional son in action with Rayburn, “he
never quite trusted him.…”

The situation grew still more discouraging. Johnson’s chief remaining ally in the Administration’s higher reaches was Secretary of the Interior Ickes; early in 1946, after testifying before a Senate committee that Edwin Pauley, nominated by Truman as Undersecretary of the Navy, had dangled before the Democrats a $300,000 gift from West Coast oilmen if the federal government were to drop a suit to obtain title to tidelands oil, Ickes resigned, a
resignation Truman quickly and angrily accepted. Tommy Corcoran, once so influential with the White House, was so thoroughly disliked and distrusted by Truman that the President had ordered his telephone tapped. Johnson sought for chinks in the wall around the new President; when Truman’s mother died in Grandview, Missouri, Johnson wrote him that he was donating a book in memory of the “
first Mother of the Land” to the Grandview Public Library.
Truman replied with a note that thanked Johnson but added, “
I regret to advise you that Grandview has no Public Library.…” Johnson worked assiduously at cultivating two younger members of the Truman team, Clark Clifford and Secretary of the Air Force Stuart Symington, but, in Clifford’s case, as Clifford later recalled, “It was
a slowly developing relationship.” With Symington, the results came faster,
for the Secretary’s fervent conviction
of the need for an Air Force much larger than Truman was advocating dovetailed with Johnson’s need to procure new federal contracts for the vast aircraft plants that had sprung up during the war on Texas plains. But the conflict between Symington’s stance and Truman’s meant that Johnson’s closeness with the Secretary was attained only at the cost of more coolness from the White House.

Moreover, with the waning of the Roosevelt influence, conservatives had consolidated their political power in Texas. If Johnson was ever to run for the Senate, he needed their support, and needed to erase from their minds the impression that he was a New Dealer. In these post-war years, Harry Truman submitted to Congress an impressive new liberal agenda to end the wartime hiatus in social reform: increased Social Security benefits, a higher minimum wage, federal aid to
education, prepaid medical care, health insurance, and—in what would, if passed, be the first major civil rights legislation of the century—laws against lynching and against segregation in interstate transportation and laws ensuring the right to vote and establishing a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC). Speaking out as he had never before done in Congress, Lyndon Johnson in 1947 opposed most of Truman’s “Fair Deal.” The proposed
civil rights program, he was to say, was a “
farce and a sham—an effort to set up a police state in the guise of liberty.” It is, he was to say, “the province of the state to run its own elections. I am opposed to the anti-lynching bill because the federal government has no more business enacting a law against one form of murder than another. I am against the FEPC because if a man can tell you whom you must hire, he can tell you whom you
cannot employ.”