Means of Ascent (80 page)

Those who knew Coke Stevenson didn’t wonder. Bob Murphey, who had witnessed, better than anyone else, how hard his Uncle Coke had tried to win the Senate race, says, “Thinking back on it now, I truly believe that getting beat for the Senate and marrying Teeney was the best thing that could have happened to him.”

And a reporter who came to do a profile on the former Governor in 1969, when Stevenson was eighty-one years old, didn’t wonder. Watching
Teeney come to meet him, the reporter wrote, “You sense … a protective motherly manner as she approaches her gray bear of a husband”—not that her husband seemed to need protection; he worked, the reporter wrote, “like a ditchdigger.”
Teeney insisted that Coke show the reporter the historic marker that had been erected by the Texas State Historical Commission on the lawn of the Kimble County Courthouse. The marker had been placed in honor of a Texas institution. “Coke R. Stevenson,” it began. “Strong, Resourceful, Conservative Governor …” The reporter realized he was talking to “the only man in Texas who can look out his office window and see his own
monument.” He realized how proud Coke was of the marker—at least partly because it bore the key word. “A conservative—he’s one who holds things together,” he told the reporter. “He shouldn’t fight all progressive movements, but he should be the balance wheel to hold the movement to where it won’t get out of hand.” He
had
been a conservative Governor, he said. “When I left office I left a thirty-five
million dollar surplus.” He mentioned the old-age pensions he had tripled and the public welfare payments he had increased and the prison reforms and the more humane treatment in state institutions for the insane, and the reporter realized how very proud Coke Stevenson was of his whole life. Then Teeney and Coke drove the reporter out to the ranch, and he saw the house, and the love with which it was filled.

Finally, they went down to the river. A rowboat was there, and Coke explained that “Jane rows upstream, me downstream,” and Teeney broke in to say with a smile: “Then they both get tired, and I have to row.” A recent flash flood had changed the contours of the banks, and as the boat moved along, Coke Stevenson, eighty-one years old, suddenly jumped up in the boat and shouted, pointing excitedly at an Indian burial mound that the flood had
uncovered. And there were springs, new springs. “There’s another one,” he said. “And look! There’s another!”

“He takes in the whole scene, waterfalls and deer and turkey and gentle flow of river,” the whole panorama of the beautiful canyon, the reporter wrote. And then, still standing up in the boat, Coke Stevenson threw his arms wide, in a gesture of triumph and joy.

S
ENATORS OF THE
U
NITED
S
TATES
are sworn in in groups of four, and at ten minutes past noon on January 3, 1949, Lyndon Baines Johnson, with his wife and John Connally and Buzz and Woody watching from the crowded galleries above, walked down the Senate’s red-carpeted center aisle beside Burnet R. Maybank of South Carolina, who was being sworn in for a new term, and two Senators-elect like himself,
Robert S. Kerr of Oklahoma and
Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. Standing stiffly above them on the dais, his right palm upraised,
Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, the Senate’s president
pro tern
, read the oath—“Do you solemnly swear that you will support and defend the Constitution of the United States …”—and the four replied together: “I do.” Then, after stepping to the parliamentarian’s desk below Vandenberg, and signing his name in the Senate Register, Johnson walked to his seat in the last row on the Democratic side of the Chamber. Later that day, sitting in his new offices in front of a high arched window that framed the Mall and the Washington Monument, he was interviewed by
Margaret Mayer of the
Austin American-Statesman
, who had followed him through most of his long campaign. Miss Mayer asked him “if it had all been worth it.” He nodded, and winked. Then he strode out of his office and down the corridor to the elevator. He rang the elevator bell three times—the signal that a Senator was waiting.

The Senate into which Lyndon Johnson was sworn was as dominated by seniority as the House of Representatives. Power resided in the Senate “Club” or “Inner Circle,” which consisted largely of the chairmen and ranking members of the Senate’s great Standing Committees, and of four party leaders—two floor leaders and two assistant floor leaders or “whips”—who, unlike the Speaker of the House, were not formal officials of the Senate but in effect held the limited powers the committee barons deigned to allow them. The sole basis for accession to a chairmanship was
length of service in the Senate: a vacant chairmanship went to the man of the majority party who had been longest on that committee—and once a man became chairman, the post was his for the duration of his political life; nothing, not even senility, could change that. As a result, six of the fourteen committee chairmen were in their fourth or fifth Senate terms, having served a quarter of a century or more. Neither energy nor ability could circumvent the seniority rule. To become a leader in the Senate, it seemed, required waiting—years of waiting.

Within just two years, in January, 1951, Lyndon Johnson would be a leader, his party’s whip—an assistant floor leader who, moreover, very quickly began to invest that hitherto largely titular role with new significance. Just two years later, in January, 1953, he would be
the
Leader of his party, only
Minority Leader since the Democrats had lost control of the Senate, but nonetheless the youngest floor leader in the history of the Senate. From that seat in the back row he had moved in only four years to the Democratic Leader’s front-row, center-aisle seat, sitting at the head of men who had served as many terms in that body as he had years there. And within weeks of his election as Leader, he would begin to revolutionize some of the Senate’s most sacrosanct traditions in order to concentrate the barons’ prerogatives in his own hands. By 1955, with the barons’ power broken and the Democrats back in the majority, Lyndon Johnson was the most powerful
Majority Leader in history.

D
URING THE FOURTEEN YEARS
in which this life of Lyndon Johnson has been going forward, librarians across the United States have come to know and respect Ina Caro, an indefatigable researcher of unshakable integrity who happens to be my wife.

For the first volume, in transforming herself into an expert on rural electrification and soil conservation, she spent long days driving back and forth over lonely Hill Country roads searching out elderly farm and ranch women who could explain to her—and through her, to me—the difference that these innovations made in their lives. For this volume, her work has been more with written materials. In pursuing them, she has crisscrossed the United States, spending weeks, for example, going through the papers of former Senator Richard B. Russell in a library in Athens, Georgia, those of Willis Robertson in a library in Williamsburg, Virginia, and those of former Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman in Hyde Park, New York, and Independence, Missouri. My beloved idealist has tracked the maneuverings of supreme pragmatists such as Tommy-the-Cork Corcoran and former United States Attorney General Tom Clark in the National Archives in Washington and in the Truman Library in Independence. These are major institutions. The librarians of tiny libraries in small towns all across Texas know Ina Caro as well. Over and over, she has searched through those libraries until she unearthed copies of weekly newspapers that the librarians believed no longer existed.

She does pioneering work. To cite one example: To find the truth about the fabled “West Side” vote in San Antonio, long a subject of rumor in Texas political circles, Ina wanted to analyze the precinct-by-precinct West Side voting records in a Lyndon Johnson senatorial primary during the 1940s. First she was told that the records no longer existed—an understandable misstatement since during the intervening forty years or so no one had looked at them. Finally she learned that the records did in fact still exist but were about to be destroyed—and had been stored
meanwhile in an abandoned jail. Ina went to the jail, and analyzed the records—and what she found has enriched the book.

I could cite a hundred examples of how Ina’s research has enriched these volumes. She is a true historian, in the highest sense of that term: what she is interested in is the truth, and nothing will deflect her from her search to find it. If there is a farm woman on a ranch a hundred miles, or more, away, over bad roads, a woman who might—just might—tell her something she hadn’t been told before, Ina simply gets into the car and starts driving. If there is a possibility that some obscure folder, previously unopened, in the papers of some United States Senator in some out-of-the-way library will shed light on some maneuver of Lyndon Johnson, Ina will be up at dawn to catch the next plane out.

In a world that is hectic and frenzied, moreover, Ina Caro is quiet, and calm, and wise—and so are her judgments. When, after reading one of my chapters, she makes a comment about it, I have learned I’d better listen. There is a line in Shakespeare: “More is thy due than more than all can pay.” I used that line in dedicating the first volume of this work to Ina, because it was so apt, and, as I finish writing this second volume, there is still no better line to sum up my feelings. Ina, of course, is a medieval historian in her own right, and now her own book—a wonderful book—is going forward.

I don’t know what I am going to do without her help.

W
HEN
R
OBERT
G
OTTLIEB
, who edited my first two books line by line, left Knopf two years ago, he promised me that he would edit this book the same way.

Not a few of my friends who are writers or editors told me—some of them quite forcefully—that that would be impossible, that Bob’s new position as editor of
The New Yorker
would simply be too time-consuming. I, however, never had a moment’s doubt that he would do what he said, no matter how great the difficulties. He had given me his word, and I had learned about Bob Gottlieb’s word.

And he did in fact edit the book just as he said he would edit it. After his long days at
The New Yorker
, he was sometimes too tired to edit the book in the evenings, so he did it on weekends, and we reviewed it on weekends, all through a very hot summer. I remember more than one weekend on which the rest of the literary world seemed to be in East Hampton, where I have a summer home, and Bob’s family was in Williamstown, where he wanted to be—and we spent it together in New York City, battling over semicolons.

The editing process was not only as thorough as those on my earlier books, but the same in most other respects as well. He lavished on this book, as he had lavished on my other books, his talent, his energy and his unique editorial intelligence.

In only one respect was the editing process different this time. Whereas he had managed to edit my first and second books without once, in months of work, ever saying a single complimentary word about them in my hearing, this time, at the very end of the editorial process—as, in fact, we laid down the last page of the manuscript—he did say something. He said, “Not bad.”

K
ATHERINE
H
OURIGAN
, Knopf’s managing editor, has given the same invaluable assistance to every stage of this book that she gave to both
The Power Broker
and
The Path to Power
. Her editorial judgments are characterized, in my opinion, not only by perceptivity but by an unflinching integrity that has only grown stronger over the years. For a number of reasons, this book presented daunting production problems. I have seen the ingenuity and the tireless effort she put into solving them—and I have appreciated it.

Those problems have also taxed the patience, ingenuity and strength of Andrew W. Hughes, the book’s production manager at Knopf. I thank him for his help. Andy’s father, Andrew L. Hughes, has served as my attorney on this work, as he did on my first two books. For the legal (and literary) advice which he began giving me while I was a reporter on
Newsday
and he was its general counsel, and which he has continued giving me ever since, I express to him, too, my deepest appreciation.

Among the many other people at Knopf to whom I am indebted, I must thank especially my old friends Bill Loverd, Nina Bourne, Jane Friedman, Janice Goldklang, Ellis Levine, Mel Rosenthal, Virginia Tan, and Sara Sternen.

I must thank as well a new friend, Sonny Mehta. It is wonderful to find in the publishing world an individual with both a discerning literary sensibility and an understanding of and sympathy for the aims and problems of writers.

Over the years, my agent, Lynn Nesbit, has always been there when I needed her. I value that relationship, and I am glad that it has continued.

T
HE STAFF
of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library have been, over many years now, of more help to me than I can easily express.

As always, Claudia Anderson has been of particular help because of her historian’s instinct and the depth of her knowledge of the contents of the Johnson archives. Tina Houston, the Library’s supervisory archivist, and Mike Gillette, Linda Hanson, Ted Gittinger, David Humphrey, Joan Kennedy, E. Philip Scott, Nancy Smith, Robert Tissing, Shellynne Wucher, Regina Greenwell, Irene Parra and Kathy Frankum deserve—and have—my deep gratitude for years of help.

For some years now I have also had not only the cooperation but the guidance of Dr. Richard A. Baker and Dr. Donald A. Ritchie, Historian and Associate Historian, respectively, of the United States Senate. While the assistance they have given me deals mainly with events that I describe in the next volume, I want to thank them now as well. Baker and Ritchie are both historians of great diligence and insight and I appreciate all they have done.

My thanks also to Dennis Bilger, Archivist, and Benedict K. Zobrist, Director, of the Harry S Truman Library; Betsey Hudon, Special Collections, The University of Texas at Arlington; Margaret Rose, Librarian at the Corpus Christi Public Library; Diane Bruce of the Institute of Texan Culture; Sharon Jenkins, Supervisor at the FCC; Audray Bateman of Austin; Louis Marchiafava of the Houston Metropolitan Research Center; Paul McGlaughlin at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library; Claire Maxwell of the Austin Public Library; Paul K. Goode of the James C. Jernigan Library at Texas A&I, in Kingsville; Don Jacobsen at the Fort Worth Public Library.