The Passage of Power (110 page)

Johnson’s statement about President Kennedy may or may not have been accurate; there is certainly no confirmation for it that the author could find. But whether or not Kennedy had made a commitment without demanding a specific written
quid pro quo
in return, he, Lyndon Johnson, wasn’t going to make one. That wasn’t his style. “If they [Kennedy] was committed, they ought not to be committed unless it’s a mutual affair,” he said. He had the power to make Jones and the
Chronicle
do what he wanted them to do—and he was going to make them do it, in writing. “We want a very simple, easy little letter,” he said. And unless he got it there wasn’t going to be a bank merger. “I ain’t gonna do it otherwise.… You can just say you know me well enough to know that, by God, that as long as that letter ain’t there, the approval ain’t there.”

G
EORGE
B
ROWN
DID
KNOW
Lyndon Johnson well enough. Perhaps, in matters of business, no one knew him as well. “Let me talk to Gus,” he finally said. “I can explain things to him, without quoting you or anything, and he can go and get
John to do it.” Johnson agreed to that, “but,” he added, “you be damned sure that you and Gus … You get me that letter.” There was a pause—a silence on the phone line. Lyndon Johnson wanted an answer. “Okay?” he asked. “Okay,” Brown replied.

Brown got him the letter. John Jones wrote it the next day. While it didn’t contain the precise words Johnson had used, the promise to “support your administration as long as you’re there,” the letter’s wording—“While you have your capable hand on the reins of this administration, the
Chronicle
will do everything it properly can to help keep the Democratic Party in office”—was evidently close enough to satisfy Johnson, perhaps because the letter also contained a written promise of the “special coverage” in Washington that Johnson had demanded, and by the man he wanted for that coverage.
“Everett Collier … leaves next week for Washington, where he has been assigned by me as a special editorial writer, background man or whatever is necessary,” Jones wrote. “I think he can be helpful.” On January 8, the President, back in Washington, telephoned George Brown from the Oval Office. “The letter came in just like it should have,” he said. And, he said, he had kept his part of the bargain. “We signed that thing this morning and made them [the Justice Department] reverse themselves, and the consolidation’s [merger] approved.” He had to hang up now, Johnson told Brown, he had to work on his State of the Union speech, which he would be giving in a little more than an hour. He telephoned Jones. “John, much obliged for your letter,” he said. “That thing [approval of the merger] signed this morning.… From here on out, we’re partners.” (Johnson got the date wrong. Although the approval of the merger had been finalized in principle by January 7, it wasn’t until the 13th that Comptroller of the Currency Saxon announced that it had been formally approved.)

“We’re partners”—
Johnson’s statement to the
Chronicle
’s publisher was borne out by the newspaper’s eagerness to comply with their agreement. Even he could find no fault with the paper’s efforts. Talking with Albert Thomas on January 20, he asked,
“Is
the
Chronicle
for us now?” and answered the question himself: “All out, all the time, aren’t they?” (“They’ve been that for about two or three [weeks],” Thomas replied. “Every other page” had a favorable story now, the congressman said.) When, on February 9, Johnson told Valenti to plant
“a
paragraph” in the
Chronicle,
Valenti said he was confident
William P. Steven, the
Chronicle
’s editor, would comply. “Bill Stevens [
sic
], every time I send him, ask him anything, boy, he has it in the paper the next day.… Stevens has been
real
good about it.” The
Chronicle
was indeed to endorse Lyndon Johnson in 1964. It would not endorse another Democratic presidential candidate for forty-four years.
²

T
HE POWER TO INVESTIGATE
, the power to regulate, the power to license—those were not the only powers of government with which Lyndon Johnson,
implacable, unyielding, refusing to accept anything less than exactly what he wanted, was, from behind closed doors at the LBJ Ranch, threatening the press during that Christmas vacation.

It wasn’t only congressmen or senators to whom the closing of a military installation represented a threat.
The closing of a base meant the departure of its personnel, and their salaries, some of which would have been spent in local stores and restaurants. The resultant reduction in those businesses’ income would mean a reduction in their expenditures, including their expenditures on advertising—including newspaper advertising. And over Christmas, 1963, Johnson was contemplating the use of that threat against other newspapers, and against another reporter.

Shreveport, Louisiana, was the home of two daily newspapers, the
Shreveport Times
and the
Shreveport Journal,
and of
Barksdale Air Force Base, home of the
Strategic Air Command’s Second Bomb Wing and its fifteen thousand military and civilian personnel. The
Times
and
Journal,
both supporters of racial segregation, had turned against Johnson as his support for civil rights had become clear, and during one of his telephone calls to
Albert Jackson, who in addition to being
Margaret Mayer’s boss was president of the
Southern Newspaper Publishers Association, Johnson asked,
“What
do we need to do about Shreveport? Do I need to really slug them, or just wait until they come around? … I can let them have it good with Barksdale Field and I’m tempted to, the editorials they’re writing.… I’m almost inclined to let them have both barrels.”

Jackson persuaded Johnson to wait “a little bit” on the Shreveport front.
³
He suggested that he come to Washington to advise Johnson on how to handle various publishers, both unfavorable and favorable. Taking him up on the suggestion, Johnson invited him to visit the Oval Office, “and let me and you sit there and have a drink, and call some of these folks, and just say hello to them, without [them] even knowing you’re there.”

On another journalistic front, however, Johnson wasn’t willing to wait. Seventy-three-year-old
Bascom Timmons, who had been reporting from Washington since 1912, had established his own news bureau, which represented more than a dozen newspapers in the capital. The
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
was the one to which he devoted most of his time, and the paper identified him as its chief Washington correspondent. A former president of the
National Press Club, and a member of the Hall of Fame of Sigma Delta Chi, the national journalistic honor society, he was the dean of Texas newspapermen in Washington, and enjoyed, a colleague was to say, “the respect of all the newspaper people in town, and the love of many congressmen.” Those feelings were not shared by Johnson. Timmons’ articles and columns had been infuriating him for years, and during this Christmas vacation—on Christmas Day, in fact—he made a telephone call to the
Star-Telegram
’s owner,
Amon Carter Jr. During the call, the recent decision to
close the Fort Worth Army Depot (with its twenty-six hundred soldiers) was mentioned by the President, as was Fort Worth’s
Carswell Air Force Base, home of six Strategic Air Command squadrons. And a non-military project, to link landlocked Fort Worth to the Gulf of Mexico, was mentioned also. The
Trinity River Navigation Project, that would, through dredging and the construction of a series of dams, make the river navigable to barges all the way from the Fort Worth area to the Gulf 365 miles away, would cost an estimated billion dollars, but it had been a long-cherished dream of
Amon Carter Sr., and after his death had been adopted by his son, and early in 1963, it had been approved by the
Army Corps of Engineers, although the only funds thus far authorized had been for a minor first stage, a dam near Corsicana. And Bascom Timmons was mentioned, too, in a manner that made it seem that the President might be hinting at a connection between the journalist and the air force base, and between the journalist and the dream. After the exchange of Christmas good wishes, the President told Amon Jr., “Now, I want just to leave this one thought.… I’m going to get this budget down. And a lot of things are going by the wayside, and a lot of consolidation is going to take effect. And a lot of things are going to hurt people—like that Army depot the other day.

“We still got a lot of things there, like your Carswell, and your Trinity River, and things that you want. Now, you tell your crowd over at the
Star-Telegram
that you want to be damn sure that you’ve got as competent a man and as thorough a man and as attentive a man as the
New York Times
has got in those press conferences because you want the President’s home state to be represented by
real
intelligence.”

Carter understood what the President was getting at, because he knew how Johnson felt about Timmons; in fact, Johnson had complained to him already about the reporter. “We’re going to try retiring Bascom, which is going to be pretty hard,” the publisher said. “I know … you told me some things about him once before.”

Understanding, however, was not what Johnson had in mind, and he was no longer merely a senator or Vice President. He became more explicit about what a President might do with his power. “You all ought to just get the best damn fellow you can for the
Star-Telegram,
” he said. “And I’d have a man there, when he speaks up, he doesn’t say, ‘I’m Bascom Timmons’ …

“And that,” the President said, “will have its effect on other things. Because they’re going to put a lot of Strategic Air Command bases together. They’re going to phase out a lot of stuff.… It’s going to be a complete overhaul. And if I were you, I’d just get the best damn person I could get and have him representing me.… I’d get me a good man covering the White House.”

(Retiring Timmons was accomplished by the
Star-Telegram
sending, in 1964, one additional reporter, and, in 1965, another, to Washington to supplement Timmons’ coverage for the paper and gradually phasing Timmons out of the paper. Timmons himself appears to have been unaware of Johnson’s role in
the phasing out. In an oral history interview he gave in 1969 he said only that
“during
his Administration, I didn’t see him so much because I wasn’t so active as I used to be.” He continued reporting from Washington for other newspapers until his retirement in 1974.

Carswell Air Force Base continued in service, its Seventh Heavy Bomb Wing flying more than thirteen hundred bombing missions over Vietnam. As for the Trinity River Navigation Project, in 1965 the
Johnson Administration proposed, and Congress approved, authorization for the Trinity River Barge Canal to connect Fort Worth to the Gulf at a cost of just under a billion dollars. At the end of Johnson’s presidency, only a small portion of the project had been completed, and it was eventually abandoned.

T
HERE WERE OTHER TIMES
also during that Christmas when he wasn’t on stage, and during these other private interludes it was apparent that other traits—like ruthlessness, traits of Lyndon Johnson ever since his youth in the Hill Country—had not, for all his showmanship, been eliminated but were only being concealed.

There was, for example, his penchant for deception and secrecy.

He wasn’t on stage in either his big white Lincoln Continental convertible or Judge Moursund’s big white Lincoln Continental convertible. On seven of the vacation’s thirteen days the two men were driving around together, two big good ol’ boys with their hunting rifles and their Scotch and their tall stories and their Stetsons pushed back on their heads. Sometimes a secretary—either
Vicky McCammon or
Marie Fehmer—was with them, in the back seat, in case Johnson wanted to give instructions about what McCammon calls
“White
House business.” Moursund, questioned by journalists the next year, would insist that his job as the principal trustee of Johnson’s blind trust was
“to
see to it the Johnsons don’t know what is going on,” and, he would insist, that is what he did; “it’s not at all tough for me to do what I’m supposed to do.” Evidently, however, his job was tougher than he admitted.
“With
Moursund, he would talk about business, not White House business,” McCammon says. “A. W. was a trustee, so there was a whole lot of discussion on different money matters.” The two secretaries were not expected to deal with personal business matters.
“Mr
. Johnson and Judge Moursund would talk privately looking at things [those],” Fehmer says. She became so accustomed to such discussions that after a while
“I
didn’t even take notice of it.”

The President was also making arrangements so that the discussions could continue after his return to Washington. A new telephone was placed on a counter in the kitchen of Moursund’s home. It was “linked by a private telephone circuit to the LBJ Ranch and the White House” so that the judge “can pick up his phone and talk almost instantaneously with the President,” the
Wall Street Journal
was to report. (Although, Moursund insisted—in what the
Journal
described as a “heated” reply to its inquiries—that the Johnsons nonetheless “don’t know what is going on” in their business.)

Moursund was not the only business associate with whom Johnson took drives around his ranch.
Jesse Kellam sometimes accompanied him, and with KTBC’s general manager,
“the
same thing,” McCammon says. And Johnson was to talk regularly with Kellam, too, after he was back in the White House—although in Kellam’s case the arrangements would be more complicated. Sometimes when Kellam was having dinner with friends in Austin the beeper he wore on his belt would buzz. He would excuse himself, saying he had to make a phone call, but he wouldn’t make it from a pay telephone in the restaurant; he would return to his office, and make it from there.