Means of Ascent (8 page)

Johnson was at the center of this circle for reasons not merely of politics but of personality. “There was never a dull moment around him,” Fortas says. “If Lyndon Johnson was there, a party would be livelier. The
moment he walked in the door, it would take fire.” Quick wits flashed at these parties, and none flashed quicker than his. Grabbing little Welly Hopkins and pulling him up on a table in a Spanish restaurant to
dance an uninhibited “flamenco,” arranging elaborate practical jokes that included a surprise sixtieth birthday party that Franklin Roosevelt gave for
Sam Rayburn after Johnson had lured him to the White House on the pretext that an angry President wanted to give him a dressing down, trading humorous notes with Fortas over the relative excellence of Texas and Tennessee pecans, organizing get-togethers (“He was a great one
for spur-of-the-moment parties,”
Elizabeth Rowe remembers. “He’d call up and say, ‘I’m about to leave the office. Get ol’ Jim and come on out.’ ”), he was, in Mrs. Rowe’s word, “fun.” “He could take a group of people and just
lift
it up. That’s what no one understands about Lyndon Johnson—that he
was fun!”
Women were very aware of him,
of his big hands that were always touching shoulders and arms in a friendly manner, of the
energy that made them describe him as “handsome” despite the outsized ears and nose, of the vivid contrast between the milky white skin and the piercing dark eyes and heavy, wavy coal-black hair and eyebrows. As for men, when they didn’t hear from Johnson for a few days, they missed him. Once, Rowe telephoned Johnson’s office “to
see,” as he wrote him, “
if you had fallen in front of a train.” “There has been a deadly silence around here for some time,” he added. “Miss Gilligan [Rowe’s secretary] says it makes this office very dull.”

And he was more than fun. He was a dominant figure because of his physical presence—over six feet three inches tall, with long arms and huge hands, that aggressively jutting nose and jaw, and a flashing smile and eyes.

Adding to the dominance was an air of command. He had been giving orders for years now—to his assistants and, before that, to officials of the Texas N.Y.A. He was accustomed to being listened to: he carried himself with authority. And he had, as well, an air of belief. A superb raconteur, he was always ready with the latest inside stories about the great figures of Congress, mimicking them hilariously. And when he talked about two worlds of which his friends
knew nothing—the world of Texas politics and vivid figures like Ma and Pa Ferguson, and the world of the Texas
Hill Country—he spoke with a passion they never forgot, his voice now soft and confiding, now booming: the voice of a natural storyteller. Bill Douglas, an ardent outdoorsman and no mean conversationalist himself, loved to hold forth about the furies of nature he had witnessed on his Western trips; even Douglas’s stories paled when
Lyndon Johnson was talking about the rampages of the Pedernales or of Hill Country “gully-washers.” And when Johnson spoke about the poverty in the Hill Country—and about what the New Deal’s programs meant to his constituents—then,
says
Elizabeth Rowe, “his belief in what he was fighting for just poured out of him and it was very impressive.” As the tall, skinny figure strode awkwardly back and
forth in those narrow Georgetown living rooms, with clumsy, lunging strides, awkwardly flailing his arms to emphasize a point, he was, in the words of his friends, “eloquent,” “
spellbinding.”

He was equally eloquent in explaining to these ardent liberals why, although he believed in liberal programs, he quite often didn’t vote for them—and almost never fought for them. “
I would reproach him very bitterly,”
Virginia Durr recalls. “Johnson would put his arm around me—Lyndon put his arm around all the girls—and say, ‘Honey, I know you’re right. I’m for
you.… But we haven’t got the votes.’ ” He didn’t want to be associated with too many lost causes, he made clear. Says Jim Rowe, “
Once I was pushing him for something liberal, and … he said, ‘Just remember our old friend
Maury Maverick isn’t here any more. Maury got too far ahead of his people, and I’m not going to do that.’ ” But
Johnson’s attitude went beyond caution. He ridiculed—intensely and harshly—politicians who fought for ideals and principles. Says
Helen Gahagan Douglas, the stunningly beautiful and intelligent actress who became part of the little circle after she was elected to Congress in 1944, but who had been invited to its parties whenever, in the years before that, she came to Washington, “He
made fun of those who refused to
bend.…”

When he was with the other, conservative, side—mostly in Texas, but with ultra-conservative Texas lobbyists in Washington and big businessmen visiting the capital—Johnson was just as eloquent on that side; “He [Johnson] gave the impression of being much, much more liberal than he actually was,” conservative lobbyist
Dale Miller was able to assure his friends. “
He gave a lot more impression of
being with the New Deal” than was actually the case. As for the Brown brothers, ultra-reactionaries both, their opinion is expressed by George: “
Basically, Lyndon was more conservative, more practical than people understand. You get right down to the nut-cutting, he was practical.
He was for the Niggers, he was for labor, he was for the little boys, but by God … he was as practical as anyone.”
Brown—who saw him with both sides since both Corcoran and Wirtz were on his payroll and Fortas was helping
Brown & Root obtain a dam authorization (and whenever Brown visited Washington, Johnson made the suave contractor part of the circle)—marveled at Johnson’s ability to make liberals think he was one of them and conservatives think he was one of
them:
“
That was his leadership,
that was his knack,” he was to say. The more perceptive of the little circle saw this. “I was never sure whether some of Lyndon Johnson’s votes were cast out of conviction or out of judging what Texas politics required,” Mrs. Douglas was to write. “It was
hard to tell; he never gave any indication. He was willing to make the
compromises necessary, I believe, to stay in Congress.
…” Johnson, she saw, used his homey anecdotes to avoid having to take stands on issues. “He
protected himself by not being serious,” she said. “He was
witty, he would tell stories, he was humorous. But … he was loose, so he could go either way.… He was always aware that what he said might be repeated or remembered—even years later. And he didn’t want someone to come
back years later and say, ‘I remember when you said.…’ ” Watching him talk so much—and say so little—Mrs. Douglas began to realize, she says, that Lyndon Johnson was “strong.” In Washington, she says, “everyone tried to find out where you stood. But he had great inner control, He could talk so much—and no one ever knew exactly where he stood.” Although he talked so much, she says,
“he was one of the most
close-mouthed men I ever knew.” But these practical men excused his refusal to be pinned down on issues. “It’s a defensible position in politics,” Rowe says. And most of the little circle were convinced that, at heart, Lyndon Johnson was liberal like them, and those who believed differently excused him anyway; his refusal to take stands made those of them who were tied to Lyndon Johnson by ambition as well
as affection feel more certain than ever that he was going far—and they wanted to go along with him. Before his defeat in 1941, this young Congressman had become not merely one of this little circle of remarkable young men on the rise, but its center. Now, back in Washington, he was, despite his defeat, its center again.

T
HE SUPPORT
he needed most in Texas was in place, too. During the campaign, Johnson had used money on a scale that Texas had never seen, trying, in the words of local observers, to “buy a state,” and much of the money—hundreds of thousands of dollars—had been generated by one man,
Herman Brown, the ruler of
Brown & Root. Through federal contracts, Johnson had made
Brown rich, and given him the chance to build the huge projects of which he had long dreamed, and Brown had ordered up contributions from dozens of subcontractors on Brown & Root dams and highways and had, in giving from his own firm’s coffers, gone to the edge of the law and, some Internal Revenue Service agents were later to contend, over that edge into the realm of fraud in order to finance Lyndon Johnson’s ambition. Brown wanted to make more millions, and to
build projects even huger. Representative Johnson had brought Brown & Root millions of dollars in profits. What might Senator Johnson be able to do? Now Herman’s younger brother George delivered to Johnson his brother’s pledge: if Lyndon wanted to run in 1942, the money would be available again—all that was needed.

One problem was not solved. The mighty
Sam Rayburn, Speaker of the House of Representatives, had been very close to Lyndon and Lady
Bird Johnson. They had learned that his hard, expressionless face concealed tenderness and loneliness, the loneliness of a man who had no wife and children and who was too proud to ever admit he was lonely, who walked the streets of Washington alone on weekends with his face set as
if daring someone to speak to him, as if he
wanted
to be alone, who went to few parties because he believed he had no gift for small talk. Rayburn’s loneliness was accentuated by his lack of children. He saw in Lady Bird someone as shy as he had once been, and between the fierce Speaker and the timid young woman there grew a love similar to that between a father and daughter; she cooked his favorite foods the way he liked them, and made him, this man who never felt at
home in Washington, feel at home. For some years, Rayburn had looked on Lyndon as a son; awakening in the hospital during a serious siege of pneumonia, the young congressional secretary found Rayburn sitting beside him, his vest littered with cigarette ashes from a night of smoking, ashes he had not brushed off because he was afraid that any movement would disturb the younger man. Seeing that Johnson was awake, Rayburn had growled: “
Now, Lyndon, don’t
you worry. If you need anything, just call on me.” It was Rayburn, the man who never asked a favor, who begged a favor for Lyndon Johnson, the appointment as Texas NYA director, and thereby gave the congressional secretary the upward boost he needed. And as soon as Johnson won his seat in the House, the Speaker had taken him into its inner circle,
his
circle, even into the sanctuary of sanctuaries, a little hideaway room on the ground floor of the Capitol in which,
every afternoon, met Sam Rayburn’s “Board of Education,” a group of the great House barons—and twenty-eight-year-old Lyndon Johnson. In July, 1939, however, during the eruption of a long-smouldering feud between Roosevelt and Vice President
John Nance Garner, Johnson saw his chance to replace Garner as Roosevelt’s man in Texas, chief dispenser of patronage and power for the New Deal, and only Rayburn stood in his way. He
betrayed the Speaker, fomenting, in concert with Wirtz, a feud between
Rayburn and Roosevelt by leading the President to believe, inaccurately, that Rayburn, actually a staunch New Deal supporter, was its secret enemy. How much Rayburn learned about Johnson’s role in poisoning the President’s mind against him will probably never be known—around his personal feelings Rayburn had erected, decades before, an impenetrable
wall—but he evidently learned enough, and for the next fifteen months, he was cold to Lyndon Johnson. Johnson’s success in raising funds for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in October, 1940—the fund-raising that had made him a force to be reckoned with by other congressmen—thawed the coldness somewhat, for Rayburn, aware of Johnson’s importance in preserving the Democratic majority and thereby keeping him in the Speakership, was a
man who always paid his debts. But the thaw did
not extend to readmission to the Board of Education; all during 1941, Johnson received no invitation to the ground-floor hideaway. Encountering House parliamentarian
Lewis Deschler late one afternoon on the landing of the staircase near the Board Room, he said, almost shouting, “I can get into the White House. Why can’t I get into that room?” Nor did the thaw extend to more
than perfunctory support for Johnson’s Senate race that year; in Rayburn’s own congressional district, in fact, Johnson ran very badly. And now, not long after Johnson’s return to Washington in July, 1941, Rayburn’s true preference became clearer. Another youthful public official of whom the Speaker was fond, Texas Attorney General Gerald Mann, a fiery New Dealer whose hometown was not far from Rayburn’s own, had been a favorite in the 1941 race
until Johnson entered, and there were those who felt that had Roosevelt not endorsed Johnson, thereby dividing the New Deal vote, Mann, rather than Pappy O’Daniel, would have been the victor in the Senate race. Now there were hints that Mann was Rayburn’s preference for the 1942 race. The Rayburn problem was not an insuperable one, however, so long as Roosevelt held firm, and he did. When, in October, 1941, Mann came to Washington, the Speaker attempted to arrange for
Roosevelt to meet him, telling Pa Watson that “a short visit with the President would help all [the] way down the line.” Roosevelt refused to see Mann. Rayburn insisted, and an appointment was made for Mann’s next trip to Washington, in December, but Johnson was quietly assured by Roosevelt’s aides that the meeting would not change the President’s choice. Other potential candidates—Representative
Wright Patman, for
example, and former Governor
James V. Allred, a liberal and a Roosevelt ally—felt that, with Roosevelt so firm behind Johnson, there was no point in running.

Everything seemed on track for another run. A statewide Johnson campaign organization was being set up. The Brown & Root plane was flying the candidate back and forth between Washington and Texas, and from city to city across the state, as in late October, 1941, he began an unannounced campaign; during a tour of shipyards in Beaumont, the
Beaumont Enterprise
reported, “the central Texas representative whom the President has
called ‘My good friend’ … 
shook hands with more people than the average politician could see in a week.” And Johnson could scarcely restrain himself from making the announcement; asked at a private reception in Beaumont if he would run in 1942, he said, “When we have a prize fight” as close as the 1941 race had been, “it’s usually considered
close enough to call for a return
engagement, don’t you think?”