Means of Ascent (19 page)

In the House, as well as in the war effort, he wasn’t being allowed to lead.

A bare score of men—the Speaker, the Majority Leader and Whip, the most powerful committee chairmen—held genuine power in the 435-member body, and admission to this oligarchy was strictly by seniority. A handful of favored younger congressmen such as Johnson and
Wright Patman who were granted entrance to Rayburn’s Board of Education could drink with these men, but they couldn’t rule with them. And the great Standing
Committees of the House were run by chairmen answerable to no one—as was evident at every meeting of the
Naval Affairs Committee, of which Johnson had been a member since he had been sworn in as the representative from the Tenth Congressional District of Texas in May, 1937.

The committee’s chairman,
Carl Vinson, called the Navy “My Navy” and ordered its Admirals around like cabin boys. He treated his 26-member committee the same way. Slouched in the center of the two-tiered horseshoe of seats in the high-ceilinged committee room, glasses teetering on the tip of his long nose, mangled cigar dangling from his lips, his suits baggy and food-stained, his collar two sizes too big, the onetime country
lawyer from a little town in Georgia ran the committee, one observer noted, “like a dictator,” and scarcely allowed junior members like Johnson (who were addressed as “ensign”) to question witnesses. When, occasionally, in questioning a witness, Johnson would essay a small witticism, Vinson would demand dryly, “
Is the gentleman from Texas finished?” The gavel would crash down. “Let’s proceed,” the
chairman would say. That committee, an observer said, is a “one-man committee.… On that committee, there are no disagreements”; the only voice that mattered was the chairman’s soft Georgia drawl. For Lyndon Johnson’s voice to matter on that committee, he would have to be chairman. Although deaths and early retirements among other members of the Naval Affairs Committee had elevated him from the lower to the upper tier of the committee horseshoe with
unusual rapidity,
Warren Magnuson, elected in a regular election and sworn in in January, 1937, three months before him, still sat between him and the chairman’s gavel—and so did three other men, all of whom might be chairman before him—even if the Democrats retained control of the House. And none of the four could be chairman so long as Vinson was there (as indeed he would be there until 1965, when he retired at the age of eighty-one).

There were other ways of leading within the House—but, as was seen
in the first volume of this work, Johnson had never attempted them. His record on the introduction of national legislation—legislation which would have an effect outside his own district—had been striking. During his first six years in Congress, he introduced exactly one such bill: the bill to create a job for himself by merging the National Youth Administration
and the Civilian Conservation Corps into a single agency, to whose chairmanship he hoped to be appointed. And if he didn’t introduce legislation himself, he also didn’t fight for legislation introduced by others. He didn’t fight publicly. It was not merely laws that Congressman Lyndon Johnson didn’t write, but
speeches. His record in regard to “real” speeches—talks of more than a paragraph or two that were actually
delivered in the House—had been as dramatic as his record on legislation. During his first months in Congress, in 1937, he delivered a brief memorial tribute to his predecessor. In 1941, he gave a speech advocating the extension of the Selective Service Act—the only other speech he had given in six years in Congress. In a marked departure from the usual practice among congressmen, he rarely even made use of the common device of inserting speeches delivered elsewhere in
the
Congressional Record;
entire years had passed during which he had not employed this device even once.

He was as reluctant to fight on the floor of the House as he was to fight in the well. The liberal Southwestern congressmen known as “
Mavericks” after their leader,
Maury Maverick, were surprised when Johnson kept finding excuses to avoid attending their weekly dinners, but soon realized that while he professed to hold their views, he would not argue for them. Not that he
would argue against them. As Representative Edouard V. M. Izac of California says, in an evaluation echoed by other congressmen: “He just simply was not especially interested in general legislation that came to the floor of the House. Some of us were on the floor all the time, fighting for liberal causes. But he stayed away from the floor, and while he was there, he was very, very silent.” The record of Johnson’s participation in House discussions and debates
supports Izac’s evaluation. As was seen in the first volume, that record is almost nonexistent. Entire years passed without Johnson rising even once to make a point of order, or any other point; to ask or answer a question; to support or attack a bill under discussion; to participate, by so much as a single word, in an entire year’s worth of floor proceedings in the body of which he was a member.
¹

His attitude toward taking public stands in the press was equally notable. Other congressmen might seek out reporters to comment on some national issue; Lyndon Johnson, starting to turn into a Capitol corridor
and seeing a reporter standing there soliciting comments on a day when a hot issue was before the House, would whirl on his heel and hastily walk back around the corner.

He was as reluctant to fight for a cause in private as he was to fight in public. Some congressmen, even if rather silent in the well of the House or on the floor (although the
Congressional Record
indicates that few were as silent as Johnson), were effective in buttonholing fellow members in the House cloakrooms, or in the aisle at the rear of the House Chamber, where these “brass-railers” would stand with one foot up on the
brass rail that separates the aisle from the members’ desks. Johnson was not silent in the cloakroom or the aisle. Rather, he was friendly, gregarious—voluble, in fact. But, as
Helen Gahagan Douglas observed, the volubility was a method of concealment. His colleagues on Capitol Hill observed what his classmates on College Hill had observed: that while Johnson was likely to dominate a conversation on a controversial issue, at the end of it none of
his listeners would know his position on that issue. He would avoid saying anything substantive; if pinned down, he said what the other person wanted to hear. His avoidance of specifics was deft—as interviews with his colleagues reveal. While none of them can cite specific statements by Johnson to support their feelings, liberal congressmen believe that Lyndon Johnson was a liberal; conservative congressmen believe he was a conservative. Says the reactionary upstate New York
Republican
Sterling Cole, “Politically,
if we disagreed, it wasn’t apparent to me. Not at all.” During his six years
in Congress, years in which great issues had come before it, Lyndon Johnson had managed to steer clear of all of them.

Now, in the beginning of 1943, he broke new ground for himself, introducing a piece of national legislation—with the exception of the self-aggrandizing
NYA-CCC merger proposal, the first such bill he had introduced in seven years—and rising on the floor to argue for it.

This fight ended in a fiasco. Johnson’s bill, a draconian measure that would have curbed absenteeism in war plants by requiring the immediate
drafting of any worker absent from the job too often, fell under the jurisdiction of the House
Labor Committee, but Johnson introduced it instead in his own
Naval Affairs Committee—without extending the courtesy of consultation to Labor Committee
Chairwoman Mary T. Norton of New Jersey. When Mrs. Norton learned about the bill—after the Naval Affairs committee had reported it out favorably—she angrily confronted Vinson, who had to admit in embarrassment that he had incorrectly assumed that the Labor Committee had surrendered jurisdiction. She then demanded that the
Rules Committee, which controls the flow of legislation to the floor, not allow this bill to reach the floor; and the bill died
in the Rules Committee. Following this debacle, Lyndon Johnson did not make another speech in the House during the rest of the war. He did not
introduce another bill. He had little to do with the workings of Congress. And whereas before the war, Johnson had been a dynamic and effective Congressman in improving the lives of his constituents through rural
electrification and other public-works projects, wartime shortages of materials now brought
such projects to a virtual halt.
Work for the Tenth District was largely limited to servicing the requests of individual constituents, and for the duration of the war, increasingly this work was carried on not by Lyndon Johnson but by his staff. His political acumen and energy were, for the duration, no longer used for politics. They were used for making money.

D
URING THE YEARS
before the war, when the path to power lay open before him, Lyndon Johnson had refused to risk a detour even for wealth.

He had wanted money during those years, wanted it passionately. The lack of it—and the resulting insecurity—had underlain so many of the terrors
of his youth. Far from alleviating his fears, moreover, election to Congress had seemed only to intensify them, particularly, say friends with whom he discussed his financial situation, the fear of ending up like his father, who had also been an elected official—six times elected to the
Texas Legislature—but who had died penniless, in the humiliating job of a state bus inspector. So many times since Lyndon had come to Washington, he told these friends, he had seen former congressmen who had lost their seats—as, he predicted, he himself would inevitably one day lose his—working in poorly paid or demeaning jobs; again and again, he harked back to an incident he could not get out of his mind: while riding an elevator in the Capitol one day, he had
struck up a conversation with the elevator operator—who told him that
he
had once been a congressman.

When, during those pre-war years, he had been given small opportunities to improve his financial situation, he had accepted them eagerly. In 1939, the paternal, immensely wealthy Charles Marsh, fond of grandiose gestures toward young men, offered Johnson a nineteen-acre tract of Austin real estate at the giveaway price of $12,000. Lady Bird borrowed the money from her father to buy it.
Brown & Root graded and landscaped the tract and
built a road out to it—and, for the first time, the
Johnsons owned property. Johnson had sought further opportunities; hearing that one of two businessmen he had casually introduced to each other at an Austin party in 1940 had later bought a piece of Austin real estate from the other, he asked the seller for a “
finder’s fee.” The startled businessman refused to give Johnson anything, saying he had played no role in the
transaction beyond the social introduction. Considering the matter closed—the transaction, the businessman recalls, was small, and the fee would not have amounted to “more than a thousand dollars, if that”—he was astonished, upon opening his front door to pick up his newspaper early the next morning, to see his Congressman sitting on the curb, waiting to ask him again for the money. And when he again refused, “Lyndon started—well, really, to
beg me for it.…” George R. Brown, whom Johnson was constantly importuning, with increasing urgency, to find him a business of his own, had felt certain that if a substantial opportunity was offered, Johnson would leap at it.

But when the offer came, it was declined. During a vacation with Johnson and Brown at the Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia in the autumn of 1940, Marsh, wanting to free Johnson from financial worries, offered to let the young Congressman purchase his share in a partnership with oilman
Sid Richardson without a down payment, paying for it out of subsequent earnings. Johnson understood that the offer was worth at least three quarters of a million
dollars, but after weighing it for a week, he declined with thanks, politely but firmly. I can’t be an oilman, he said; if the public knew I had
oil interests, “it would kill me politically.”

Brown and Marsh had thought they had measured Johnson’s political ambitions, had thought measuring them was easy, for Johnson was always talking about how he wanted to stay in Congress until a Senate seat opened up, and then run for the Senate, about how that Senate seat was his ultimate goal in politics. Never had he mentioned any other office, nor did he mention one during that week at the Greenbrier. But since being an oilman couldn’t hurt him in his
safe congressional district, or in a Senate race in oil-dominated Texas—since there was only one office for which he would be “killed” by being an “oilman”—after that week Brown and Marsh realized what Johnson really wanted, and how much he wanted it. Money
and power—he wanted both. But the depth of his need for one was as nothing compared with the depth of his need for the other.

His rejection of money on that occasion, however, didn’t mean that he stopped talking about it, or wanting it. A $10,000-a-year
salary such as he drew as a Congressman was considered adequate by other young men in Washington, but it did not even make a dent in his needs. The suits that he had custom tailored, at Lentz & Linden in San Antonio, were the most expensive they sold—$195 apiece—and he purchased
several at a time. Alice Marsh had taught him to turn the length and ungainliness
of his arms to advantage by wearing custom-made shirts with French cuffs, and these shirts, monogrammed, arrived at his apartment in boxloads. His cuff links had to be solid gold, as did his watch; his shoes had to be of the softest leather—custom made—and his boots, custom made, were hand-tooled. He wanted not only maids, but a masseuse. He liked to give gifts, to pick
up checks in expensive night clubs—possession of the resources to do so was very important to him. While he had been on the West Coast during the first months of the war, he had written
O. J. Weber one day, “I
waked up worrying about money,” and he had told the secretary to send him “a list of all unpaid bills that have come in, and we will clear with you before they are paid,” but after reiterating his
concern about finances, he had gone on to ask for news about a new shipment of custom-tailored shirts he had ordered to wear with his Navy uniform (which had also been custom-tailored). Even before the war, after his defeat by Pappy O’Daniel, he had begun taking measures to improve his financial situation: employing George Brown as a conduit, he even made a few purchases of small oil leases that provided him with monthly royalty checks, purchases small enough, and made
discreetly enough, so that they could be kept secret. But the amounts involved were insignificant compared with his needs. The Johnsons were constantly skimping—or at least one of them was; during a week in which boxes of custom-made shirts were delivered to the Johnson apartment, Mrs. Johnson set out, with her carload of boxes, on the long drive to Texas to save the cost of another set of dishes and household implements. As long as the path he had mapped out was open to him,
he deferred his desire for money.