Means of Ascent (18 page)

Forty years later, Mrs. Johnson was renowned for her
graciousness, her dignity, her poise under even the most difficult conditions, for the capability as a political speaker and as a President’s wife that she had displayed as the First Lady of the United States. During interviews for this book, she was invariably helpful, cooperative, pleasant, but she seldom showed the depths of her emotions. When the interviews reached 1942, however, Lady
Bird Johnson suddenly blurted out: “1942 was really quite a great year!”

S
PEAKING OF THE QUALITIES
that Lady Bird Johnson revealed for the first time while her husband was away at war, Nellie Connally says: “
I think she changed. But I think it was always there. I just don’t think it was allowed out.”

After Johnson returned from the war (“I was shaken when I saw him,” Lady Bird remembers. “He had been through a lot. He had lost [weight].… My feeling was at once protective, and I wanted to get him a lot of milkshakes”), it was again not allowed out. Mrs. Johnson says that after her husband’s return, “I did not go into the office regularly.” Nothing could elicit from Mrs. Johnson’s lips
one word that could possibly be construed as a criticism of her husband. Oh no, she says with emphasis, she was not at all disappointed to stop working and return to her previous life. “I was glad to turn over the responsibility.” The turnover was complete. Any illusions Mrs. Johnson may have held about now being included in her husband’s political discussions were shattered at one of the first of those discussions, when she ventured to stay in the room after it
began. “
We’ll see you later, Bird,” her husband said, dismissing her. He treated her as he had before.

So impressed had Austin political and business leaders been with Mrs.
Johnson that one day, Ed Clark recalls, when a group of them were at lunch, someone said, “
kidding, you know,” “Maybe she’s going to decide that she likes that office, and then he’s going to wish he hadn’t gone off to war.” This joking became so widespread that it reached print in district newspapers; a letter to
the
Goldthwaite Eagle
, for example, said that instead of re-electing Johnson to Congress in absentia, “
I’d call a convention … and nominate Mrs. Lyndon Johnson for Congress to take her husband’s place while he is fighting for his country. She would make a good congressman.” The joking reached Johnson’s ears—and after he returned, he took pains to put it to rest, to make
clear that his wife’s role as caretaker of his office while he was in the Pacific, and indeed her role in his overall political life, had never been significant. Once, in Austin, with a group of people present, he was asked if he discussed his political problems with Lady Bird. He replied that of course he did. “I talk everything over with her.” Then Lyndon Johnson paused. “Of course,” he said, “I talk my problems over with a lot of people. I
have a nigger maid, and I
talk my problems over with her, too.”

In other areas, also, Lyndon Johnson treated his wife as he had before. On August 19, Alice Marsh wired Johnson:
HOPE WE CAN HAVE THAT BIRTHDAY PARTY
. Whether or not they did is not known, but Alice and Johnson resumed their affair. The weekends at Longlea started again.

Lady Bird’s Aunt Effie knew how much her niece wanted a house, and now she told the young wife that she would pay most of the purchase price if Lady Bird found one that she wanted to buy. Moreover, there would be money from the estate of Uncle
Claude Patillo of Alabama, who had recently died. By the Fall of 1942 his estate was being settled, and Mrs. Johnson was informed that she would eventually be receiving about $21,000. “Now
we can go and get that house,” she told her husband.

The two-story brick colonial at 4921 30th Place, a quiet street in the northwest section of Washington, was a modest eight-room house with a screened veranda at the rear, but she loved it. Her husband liked it too, but he insisted on bargaining and issuing ultimata to the owners. When they refused to accept his “take-it-or-leave-it” figure, the deal seemed dead. Coming home to their apartment one day, Lady Bird found her husband talking politics with
Connally and asked if she could discuss the house with him. Her husband listened to her arguments, and then, without a word of reply, resumed his conversation with Connally as if she had never spoken. For once in her life—the only time in her married life that any of her friends can recall—Lady Bird Johnson lashed back at her husband.

“I want that house!” she screamed. “Every woman wants a home of her own. I’ve lived out of a suitcase ever since we’ve been married. I have no home to look forward to. I have no children to look forward to. I have
nothing to look forward to but another election.” In the retelling of this story, the denouement has a patina of cuteness. Johnson was reported to have asked Connally, “What should I
do?,” to which Connally is said to have replied: “I’d buy the house.” This may not have been the actual dialogue, but by the end of 1942 the house was bought—for $18,000, about $10,000 of which Aunt Effie put up—and Lady Bird had her home. “You see,” Mrs. Johnson carefully explains, “I didn’t feel unhappy. I was happy about the house.”

T
HE SIDEWALKS OF
W
ASHINGTON
were filled with uniforms by the time Lyndon Johnson returned from the South Pacific—khaki and navy and the off-grays of Australians and New Zealanders—and by the end of the next year a surprising number of them sported service ribbons from different theaters of war, and then the ribbons bore the stars that signified major battles: North Africa, the Solomons, the
Aleutians, Sicily, the skies over France and Germany. Seemingly endless caravans of Army trucks and jeeps rumbled through the city on their way to the huge embarkation areas north and south of the capital. Near the Mall, the drab wooden “temps” hastily built during World War I and never torn down had sprouted long wings and annexes. Soldiers with fixed bayonets walked beats outside the tall iron fence in front of the White House, and the cars that pulled up into the
driveway disgorged Admirals and Generals. Washington was a city at war.

For a while after his return, Lyndon Johnson attempted to find a place in the war—at, of course, a rank he considered appropriate. The job he had his eye on now was Secretary of the Navy, and when, in October, 1942, the man in that job,
Frank Knox, was away from Washington on an inspection tour for the President, Johnson planted with
Walter Winchell,
Drew Pearson and other friendly columnists the
rumor that Knox was about to resign and that he himself was in line for the post. Noting that if Johnson was appointed Secretary, he would be working with MacArthur, Pearson wrote: “Lyndon Johnson as Secretary of the Navy, Douglas MacArthur at the helm—that ought to be a good combination.”
George W. Stimpson, the Washington correspondent for several Texas newspapers, writing that the suggestion of Johnson’s appointment “has
caught on like wildfire,” said that if Johnson was appointed, he would, at thirty-four, be the second youngest Cabinet officer in history; Alexander
Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury at thirty-three, had been the youngest. (“Johnson,” Stimpson wrote, “spent several months on active duty as a Lieutenant Commander, in the Southwest Pacific area. He ate, slept and fought alongside men in all branches of the service in half a dozen hot
spots.”) The wildfire, however, was limited to credulous journalists; Roosevelt, although still fond of Johnson, and willing to chat with him over breakfast, was apparently unwilling to consider giving him a high wartime post. Next came mysterious leaks (from Johnson, to reporters) of an imminent “
secret government mission” to London—the kind of liaison mission that
Harry Hopkins was performing between Roosevelt and
Winston Churchill, perhaps. (“Johnson,” the Associated Press reported, “has been conferring almost daily at the War, Navy Department and the White House.”) But there was no mission to London either.

Once Johnson realized that he was not to be given a high position in the war, the change in his attitude toward it was dramatic. In
O. J. Weber’s recollection, “
He regarded it as an interference with his agenda.” He resented its demands on his staff, but, despite the strategic placement of
Willard Deason in the Navy’s
Bureau of Personnel, and Johnson’s
influence with Forrestal himself, the Congressman was defeated in a string of engagements with young aides, who, otherwise totally loyal to his service, persisted in regarding service to their country as a higher priority. Weber, for example, was so determined to serve that, after failing a Navy eye examination, he drank “gallons of
carrot juice” in an attempt to improve his vision, and applied for enlistment as an Air Force communications cadet. But
every time he was notified to report for duty, Weber recalls, Johnson would say, “
Well, I just can’t spare you right now. I’ll call someone and have him take care of it.”

“This happened two or three times,” Weber says, “and I really wanted to get in the war.” The young secretary outmaneuvered Johnson by telephoning the colonel in charge of enlistments and telling him that the next time he received one of the Johnson-initiated telephone calls, the colonel should say that Weber was vitally needed in the Air Force. John Connally, who had been only temporarily deferring to Johnson’s wishes in accompanying
him to the West Coast, now refused to leave the Navy, and kept pushing for combat duty. After a staff job in North Africa, in 1945 he was finally assigned to the aircraft carrier
Essex
, operating off Japan, and rapidly won a reputation throughout the fleet for his coolness in directing the carrier’s fighter planes as its group combat officer. A young Austin attorney,
Charles Herring, turned out to be a competent replacement for Connally, and when
Herring told Johnson that his number had been called in the draft, Johnson attempted to persuade him not to go, insisting that the opportunity of working in Washington was too good to
pass up. Then when Herring said that his orders had already been cut, Johnson said, “
Hell, I’ll cancel that right now.” And when Herring insisted on serving his country, Johnson exploded: “You’re crazy!”

Not long after Johnson’s return from the war, Roosevelt disappointed him in another matter. Johnson’s possession of a measure of political influence that lifted him above the ranks of other junior congressmen was based on his
fund-raising efforts during the 1940 elections. In a stroke of inspiration, he had seen in the moribund Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee an opportunity for personal political advantage. Obtaining an
informal post with the committee, he had arranged for newly rich Texas contractors and independent oilmen to make contributions to it, with the stipulation that they be distributed at his discretion. This control over money urgently needed by congressmen running for re-election had given him their gratitude, and, in the House in general, a new respect, the first respect not based on his relationship with Roosevelt or Rayburn; his role with the campaign committee had given him his
first taste of national power of his own. He had expected to perform the same role in 1942.

Between 1940 and 1942, however,
Edwin W. Pauley, a burly, loquacious one-time oil-field roustabout who had become a successful California wildcatter, had emerged as a Democratic fund-raising force. His success in obtaining campaign contributions for the Democratic National Committee in 1940 had led Democratic National Chairman
Edward J. Flynn, Boss of the Bronx and a longtime Roosevelt intimate, to name him the party’s
secretary, and in 1942, the President, impressed with him, appointed him treasurer. By October, journalists were referring to the oilman’s fund-raising activities as “
the great hot spell,” for, as one wrote, “he turned on the heat to a degree that left many rich gentlemen permanently scorched,” and succeeded in lifting the party out of debt. Antagonized by Johnson’s aggressiveness—Johnson had been given only an
informal post with the Congressional Campaign Committee in 1940 because of Flynn’s objection to any formal connection—Flynn was not anxious to see him play even an informal role in the
1942 congressional campaigns. More to the point, because of Pauley’s emergence, Johnson was no longer needed. His ace in the hole had been the fact that only he possessed access to the Texas oilmen; when, in 1940, Flynn had attempted to circumvent him and
obtain their contributions himself, they had refused to contribute except through Johnson. Because of their common interests—and, in some cases, business ties—Pauley had access to the same money. When, in 1942, Flynn solicited Texas contributions, there was some reluctance—Brown & Root and liberal businessmen such as
Stanley Marcus of the Neiman-Marcus department store refused to give except through Johnson—but when it was
explained that handling all contributions
through the National Committee would be more efficient, most of the big Texas contributors followed Flynn’s suggestion.

Roosevelt appears to have wanted Johnson back in his 1940 role, but Roosevelt at war had little patience with politics. At a press conference, he responded to a political question by saying that too many reporters “
haven’t waked up to the fact that this is a war. Politics is out.” To his aides, some of whom felt he did not understand that a poor showing by his party in the congressional elections would damage the President as
well, he expressed similar sentiments. The battles on which the President’s attention was focused that October were for Stalingrad and Guadalcanal, not Capitol Hill; only his direct intervention could have forced Johnson on Flynn, and that intervention was not forthcoming. Finally, on October 14,
Marvin McIntyre told Johnson and the newest White House aide,
Jonathan Daniels, whom Johnson had quickly cultivated, that the President would
see them at 10:15 the next morning in the family quarters of the White House. But when the two men arrived, they were told, after being kept waiting in the Red Room, that the President would see them in his office instead. They went to Pa Watson’s office right outside the President’s, where they were joined by McIntyre. After a while, Watson said, “You gentlemen will not be in there for long, will you? Make it snappy.” Johnson, “obviously getting
his feelings hurt,” according to Daniels, told Watson, “I have nothing to talk to the President about, he wanted to see us.” Watson told the two men they should “go in and speak to him, even if just for a minute,” but then Watson went into the President’s office and when he emerged, he reported that the President had said that “maybe it would be better to see us later.” Johnson strode out of the room.
“It looked for a minute as if he had gone out in a pique,” Daniels was to relate. By the time he and McIntyre caught up to Johnson, he had recovered himself; his face showed nothing; “he said he thought we were right behind him.” But when Johnson attempted to get another appointment, Watson told him that the President had no time for political matters. At the last moment, Johnson wrote a concerned Rayburn that “
these $200
droplets will not get the job done.” What was needed, Johnson wrote, was to “select a ‘minute man’ group of thirty men, each of whom should raise $5,000, for a total of $150,000”; “there isn’t any reason why, with the wealth and consideration that has been extended, we should fall down on this,” he said. The money was indeed raised, but Johnson, having no direct role in the campaign committee, did not receive
credit or influence. It had been money—campaign contributions to which he alone had access—that had given him his first lever to move the political world. Now that lever had been eased out of his grasp. In 1944, a single scene dramatized his loss. At a boisterous Democratic dinner in Dallas, at which Pauley announced to loud cheers and rebel yells that Texas had raised
more for the party that year than any other state but New York, Johnson had to sit
watching as State Treasurer
Harry L. Seay presented the Californian with a $50,000 check—a check that represented the combined contributions of men who had once channeled their checks through
him
.