Means of Ascent (21 page)

On January 2, Mrs. Johnson mailed Wirtz a check for $17,500 to be placed in escrow for the sale, and deposited $7,500 in her account in the American National Bank to be applied against the station’s outstanding debts; when she had done that, Lyndon and Lady Bird’s total remaining liquid assets may have been as little as $938 in the bank, plus $6,000 in savings bonds.

On January 18 the West brothers agreed to sell their option to her for $17,500 “subject to the approval of the FCC.” On January 23, 1943, Mrs. Johnson filed an application (filled out by Wirtz), asking the FCC’s consent to a transfer of control of KTBC from the old owners to her. On February 16, the Secretary of the FCC wrote, “The consent of the Federal Communications Commission is hereby granted.” The Wests—first the
father, then the sons—had been attempting for three years to obtain such a consent. Mrs. Lyndon Johnson had obtained it in twenty-four days.

B
ECAUSE
KTBC
WAS PURCHASED
in his wife’s name and she became president of the company and was active in its affairs, Lyndon Johnson was able to maintain for the rest of his life that the company, which was eventually to consist of a galaxy of radio and television stations, was not his but hers—all hers and only hers. Asked at a press conference during his presidency about a possible conflict of
interest, he said there could not conceivably be any in his case “because
I don’t have any interest in government-regulated industries of any kind and never have had.” He did not own the company, he said. “
All that is owned by Mrs. Johnson.” He derived no income from it, he said. He did not participate in its affairs, he said, and played absolutely no role in its decisions or operations. He repeated these
assertions over and over—in terms that could not have been more unequivocal: “
I have never received any funds or cast any votes in connection with it,” he said on one occasion; on another, asked by reporters about the operations of KTBC, he replied: “
I am unfamiliar with it.” He had his lawyers repeat the assertions: “
It was her station; don’t let anyone tell you to the
contrary,” said
Leonard H. Marks, an attorney who was an assistant to the general counsel for the FCC until 1946, when he entered private practice, in which he represented the Johnson interests. And his spokesman: “
As you know,”
George Reedy, one of his press secretaries, said, “the President stated shortly after he took the oath of office that he had no television holdings.… As the
American people know, the President had devoted all of his time and energy to the public business and he is not engaged in any private enterprise directly or indirectly.” And his old friends:
Elizabeth Wickenden Goldschmidt says, “
I remember Lady Bird sitting there at their dining room table in Washington with all the books of the station laid out in front of her. She really worked very hard at running that station and she was a very astute
businesswoman.” During the Johnson Presidency, a number of reporters attempted to probe the Johnson empire. But their efforts were hamstrung by inadequate access to Johnson family financial records (which continues today), and by the reticence of KTBC employees, Johnson political aides, FCC commissioners and staff members and Austin businessmen; members of all these groups have become dramatically more candid in recent years. Moreover, during the 1960s journalists did not have
access to memoranda and letters that can be found today scattered through a score of different files in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Austin. Despite these obstacles, during the Johnson Presidency the enterprise of a handful of journalists—most notably ground-breaking efforts by
Louis M. Kohlmeier,
of the
Wall Street Journal
,
John Barron, of the
Washington Star
, and
William Lambert and
Keith Wheeler, of
Life
—raised doubts about Johnson’s assertions. But as Johnson responded to their articles with his own estimates of his assets, estimates far lower than theirs, and with forceful reemphasis of his assertions, his estimates and assertions were often repeated without much analysis by the bulk of the press, and the findings in the few pioneering articles became blurred in the public consciousness. In an
“exclusive” article, one typical of the prevailing tone of press coverage,
U.S. News & World Report
stated in May, 1964: “
This is a success which Mrs. Johnson scored on her own, while her husband was deeply involved in affairs of the House and Senate.”

Johnson was especially emphatic about his role in dealing with the FCC: he said he had no role. And this, too, was repeated by the press, at least in part because it had no choice.
Life
magazine reported that “
The FCC leans to a defensive attitude concerning its treatment of the Johnsons’ radio-tv interests and insists that the President—either as representative or senator—has never tried to
affect agency rulings. There is no evidence that he did intervene by word or deed.”
The Wall Street Journal
stated that “
FCC public records show not a single intervention by Representative, Senator, Vice President or President Johnson in quest of a favor for his wife’s company.”

But although in 1942 and 1943 Lyndon Johnson’s political influence was not great, it was quite strategically situated in regard to the purchase of a radio station. In the “
very close-knit group,” in which, as
Virginia Durr put it, “there was a
great intertwining of both personal and intergovernmental relationships,” three members were intimately connected with the governmental
agency whose approval of the purchase would be necessary.
Clifford Durr was an FCC commissioner, one of the seven-member board that ran the agency; W. Ervin “Red” James was Durr’s chief assistant at the Commission. As for Lyndon Johnson’s bluntest tool, barely a year into private practice, already becoming known as “
the greatest wirepuller in history,” Tommy Corcoran had many wires to pull in the FCC—including some
that ran all the way to the top: both the Commission’s chairman,
James Fly, a former classmate of Corcoran’s at Harvard Law, and its former chief counsel,
William J. Dempsey, a thirty-two-year-old Corcoran protégé, owed their appointments largely to his influence. (Dempsey’s predecessor, insufficiently responsive to a telephone call from “Tommy Corcoran at the White House,” had found himself
dismissed on twenty-four hours’ notice.) And while Dempsey was now in private practice (sharing an office suite with Corcoran, with both men representing private clients before a notably accommodating FCC), many officials still at the top of the FCC were indebted to Corcoran for their jobs: the agency had, in the knowing Washington term, been thoroughly “Corcoranized.”

Johnson also had at his command a weapon much more blunt than Tommy the Cork—and much more powerful. Sam Rayburn was as much a symbol of integrity in Washington as Corcoran was a symbol of the use of influence. Johnson was able to use Rayburn’s name—feared throughout the capital—even though Rayburn might not be aware it was being used.

While radio stations were regulated by the FCC, the FCC was itself regulated—by Congress, which gave regulatory agencies their money and their powers. “The antennae of most commissioners,” it would be written, “are sensitive to the faintest signals from Capitol Hill.…” At no agency was this sensitivity more acute than at the FCC. “Of all the watchdogs,”
Drew Pearson and
Jack
Anderson were to write, “the FCC seems the most eager to sit up and beg or roll over and play dead at the command of Congress.” If the commissioners’ antennae were sensitive to signals from congressmen, the
antennae of Commission staffers were sensitive to the relay of such signals from the commissioners.
Albert A. Evangelista, who during the 1940s, as an engineer in the FCC’s Standard Broadcast Division, handled
preliminary applications for radio station licenses, says that the process “
was different when a congressman intervened.” When a congressman contacted a commissioner about an application from a favored constituent, the commissioner would “route it to the right department.” “If it was ‘congressional,’ it would get priority,” Evangelista recalls. “When we got referrals from a congressman, that was something I had to work on
right away.”
James E. Barr, who in 1943 was a senior engineer in the FCC’s Standard Broadcast Division, says: “
What you were afraid of was that” if you did not act favorably or fast enough on an application in which a congressman was interested, the congressman “would call a commissioner, and the commissioner would call and say, ‘Put ’em on the air.’ There was a lot more political influence
in those early days.”

And sensitivity had never been higher than it was at this moment. If there was a single year of maximum
susceptibility to congressional pressures at the FCC, it was 1943, the year in which Lady Bird Johnson purchased her radio station. In 1943, the Commission was fighting with Congress not over increases in its budget or definitions of its power, but for its very existence.

Having learned that Representative
Eugene Cox of Georgia, ranking majority member of the Rules Committee and a leader of the House’s Southern bloc, had used a $2,500 “legal fee” from a Georgia radio station to purchase stock in the station, FCC Chairman Fly in January, 1943 (the month, as it happened, in which Mrs. Johnson was submitting her application to the Commission), had
announced that the
station’s license would not be renewed without a public hearing. Cox’s response was to call the FCC “the
nastiest nest of rats to be found in this country.” Charging that Fly “is
guilty of a monstrous abuse of power and is rapidly becoming the
most dangerous man in the government,” Cox proposed the establishment of a House committee to investigate the FCC “
Gestapo”—and around Cox’s proposal crystallized Congress’s long-building resentment of the New Deal and “bureaucratic dictatorship.” The House named Cox himself chairman of the investigating committee—thereby, as T.R.B. wrote in
The New Republic
, “putting a
judicial wig and robe on an accused man to try his own accusers.” For the next six months, from January to July, 1943, the
Cox Committee conducted an investigation characterized by the questioning in secret of witnesses who were summoned without warning and who were denied not only counsel but even access to transcripts of their own testimony. Against editorial criticism—“
indecent,”
The New Republic
said; the
Washington Post
editorialized that Cox “has
perverted and distorted the important
investigative functions of Congress to intimidate those who exposed his own corrupt practices”—Congress closed ranks; indeed, a second committee, the Communist-hunting
Dies Committee, began to focus on the FCC. “
All around Washington,” one of the Commission’s key staffers was to recall, “we heard it whispered that FCC would get it in the neck. We wondered where the ax would fall and
how deeply it would cut.” Then, in February, the FCC learned that the ax might cut very deeply indeed: an amendment, added to an appropriations bill, proposed eliminating all appropriations for the FCC, “thereby,” as one representative put it, “cutting the Commission off without a cent, thus
in effect abolishing it.” As a liberal Congressman wrote, “all the confident forces of conservatism and reaction were arrayed behind
that amendment,” and “those forces constituted an unquestioned majority in the House.” The FCC had, in fact, only one real hope on Capitol Hill, and it was Sam Rayburn, who was to recall, “
I wrote the law that passed the Federal Communications Commission.… I was in on the borning,” and who had proven before, more than once (most recently a year and a half before, in the extension of the Selective Service Act), that, because
of the respect in which he was held and because of his unique force of personality, he could stand on the triple dais—alone against a majority of his colleagues—and bend the House to his will. Lyndon Johnson was “Sam Rayburn’s boy”—that was common knowledge in Washington. The FCC could be expected to be sensitive to any requests from Sam Rayburn’s boy. Furthermore, the Rayburn connection aside, the FCC, so short on allies in Congress,
could be expected during this life and death struggle to be particularly sensitive to a congressman who was actively and energetically fighting in Congress on its behalf.

And that was precisely what this congressman was doing. During the very month in which Mrs. Lyndon Johnson was applying to the FCC, Lyndon Johnson, who had never before displayed any particular interest in that agency, was making himself its champion.

The assistance he gave was discreet, secret—and crucial. He didn’t communicate with Durr directly. “
Lyndon sort of kept away from me,” the FCC commissioner was to recall; “we didn’t talk about it.” But Lyndon communicated with Durr’s chief assistant, Red James, in late-night telephone calls during which, speaking in code—Rayburn was “the bald-headed
fellow,” House Majority Leader
John McCormack “the Irishman,” Cox “the chairman”—Johnson provided inside information, vital to the FCC, on the direction of the next congressional attack, and advice on what the Commission could do to counter it. “He was sort of acting as a spotter, telling us where to put the next shell, and giving us Sam Rayburn’s reactions,” Durr was to recall. Nor was
Johnson’s assistance to the Commission limited to information and advice. As the House massed more and more solidly against the FCC, its only hope seemed to be Rayburn’s intervention, and Johnson was working to procure that intervention, playing on the Speaker’s feeling that Cox’s investigative methods (and his $2,500 “legal fee”) were bringing his beloved House into disrepute; trying to overcome the Speaker’s reluctance to set
aside tradition and interfere with the internal workings of a committee. And on at least two occasions, when the FCC’s cause looked particularly desperate, he succeeded in persuading Rayburn to come to its defense. At one particularly pivotal point, when the Commission learned that Cox was planning to make public an affair that the married Chairman Fly was reportedly having, James, in an attempt to head Cox off, took “this up with LBJ”—who took it up with
Rayburn. Johnson reported Rayburn’s reaction to James: the Speaker had “called the Chairman in, and told him, ‘Now, Gene, there, Gene. There ain’t gonna be no sex!’ ” Cox was a power in the House, but Rayburn was Rayburn, whom no man crossed; Cox’s plans to publicize Fly’s alleged affair were dropped—abruptly and completely. Then, in what was to be characterized as “an
unusual and bold
step” to procure Rayburn’s help, Durr sent several petitions not to the Cox Committee but directly to the Speaker, setting out the facts about Cox’s $2,500 “retainer” and asking the Speaker to remove Cox as the committee’s chairman. And one midnight, James was awakened by a phone call: “
This voice says, ‘All right, no names. But today the bald-headed fellow met with the Irishman and the chairman. He
said this, ‘You’ve been my friend for thirty-five years, but I can’t stand this any longer and you’re going to have to step down!’ ” Cox was Rayburn’s friend, but the House was Rayburn’s love, and Cox was sullying its reputation. Cox abruptly announced his resignation from the investigating committee; as soon as he finished, Rayburn left the dais, stepped down into the well of the House and praised him, asserting that
“my confidence in his honor and integrity is unshaken,” words which were the price Sam Rayburn had to pay to preserve the honor and integrity of the House.