Means of Ascent (23 page)

And it didn’t deter James from giving Lady Bird Johnson advice as to how to proceed, advice that may have carried with it the strong implication that the judges before whom her application would be argued if the adversary opposed her would not be wholly unsympathetic to her cause. James was to say that he discussed the case with a top FCC counsel and engineer.

They applied for it
—not strange that the Johnsons decided to do so, after the chief aide to one of the judges told them in advance “why don’t you apply for it?” The hearing would be a quasi-judicial proceeding, and a judge is not supposed to hear one side of a case without the other side having an opportunity to respond—as had been done. In addition to the lawyers for KWOW, at least two other persons were upset at the
changes granted KTBC. After running into James Ulmer at a broadcasting convention, Leonard Marks, a Washington attorney who had left the FCC and was now representing KTBC, reported to Johnson that Ulmer was saying “that he had completed all the engineering on 590 and that you came in and stole it from him.” (Ulmer added, according to a memo from Marks, that he would not write the story, “but whether he did so or not,
somebody else probably
would.”) Also angry was
Elliott Roosevelt, the President’s son, who had gone into the radio business in Texas in partnership with oilman
Sid Richardson. (Elliott’s relationship with his father was strained at this time and he was receiving no help from the White House with his radio interests.) On August 31, 1943, after having lunch with Elliott, John Connally reported to Johnson that an angry Elliott had said during the
lunch that “there was a controversy when KTBC got nighttime operations … but that Mr. Johnson had the skids greased with the commission.”

Was Lyndon Johnson’s influence—influence that translated into access and entrée into inside information and advance information—even more deeply at work? Had he known in advance something that no one else knew? Had he known, even before his wife bought KTBC, that if she bought it the FCC would change the conditions that had hamstrung the station in the past?

Lady Bird Johnson purchased KTBC in February, and in June made her application, the application that was so rapidly approved, for the change in hours and frequency. That was fast enough. But had Lyndon Johnson known even before June that such an application would be approved? In April, Lyndon and Lady Bird asked a Dallas radio announcer who had been the emcee of Johnson’s traveling road show in the 1941 campaign,
Harfield Weedin, to become
manager of their new station, offering him a ten percent share of the profits. Weedin was reluctant to accept, because he felt that under the existing FCC restrictions on the station’s operation, profits were unlikely. “You couldn’t really make much money with just a daytime station,” he says. But, he also recalls, Johnson assured him that “if I took the job, I would not be bothered with that”; the restrictions were going to be lifted
“very shortly.” Johnson said, “Look, the frequency is going to be changed. We’re going to go full time. I have it in the works right now.” He specifically told Weedin that the lifting of the restrictions was “all set,” and Weedin believed him, because, Weedin says, Johnson understood that the restrictions were an insurmountable handicap. “Frankly,” Weedin says, “I don’t feel he would have bought it if he
didn’t know he was going to get those changes.” The Johnsons’ meeting with Weedin took place only two months after they had purchased the station, but Johnson was saying that the changes that would transform it were already “all set”—as indeed they very shortly proved to be.

Whether or not Lyndon Johnson had known of the changes in advance, they totally transformed the property his wife had purchased. She had, in effect, purchased 1150 on the radio dial. After FCC approval of her application for increased broadcasting hours and a new frequency, when a listener turned his dial to 1150, all he heard was static. There was
no longer any station at that spot on the dial. The station was now at 590, which meant that it sounded
different: louder, clearer. And it was on at night, when more people wanted to listen to it. Only its call letters were the same; otherwise, within months of the time Mrs. Johnson had bought a station so cheaply, that station no longer existed. (And at the earliest possible moment—as soon as the war ended and necessary materials became available—the transformation became even greater. In 1945, the FCC allowed KTBC to quintuple its power, from a thousand to five thousand
watts, a change that meant the station could be heard in sixty-three counties.)

And if others had known that it could be so totally altered, would it have
been
so cheap? Might there not have been other bidders for so desirable a radio property? And would these other bidders have been so easily deterred as William Lawson had been? Indeed, would
Lawson
have been so easily deterred? Indeed, would the original owners have been willing to sell—to sell for so little—a twenty-four-hour-a-day station that was first on the
dial, and that boomed out all over Austin and throughout central Texas? Would the owners have
had
to sell, if the property they owned had been the property into which it had now been so rapidly transformed by the FCC?

But no others knew—no others
could
know for sure, just as they couldn’t be advised by a key figure in the FCC that they shouldn’t worry unduly about a conflict with KWOW. And so there were no other bids for KTBC, and the owners of KTBC were willing to sell cheap.

L
ADY
B
IRD
J
OHNSON
flew down to Austin, where, a station employee recalls, she “
took one look at the layout and said, ‘I don’t know much about radio, but I do know about cleaning house.’ She bought a pair of overalls, a bunch of brooms and mops, and some soap, and for a solid week she worked on that little walk-up, two-room [sic] station until
it fairly sparkled.” She studied KTBC’s contracts with its advertisers to determine how much airtime the station owed them, and how much money the advertisers owed the station. She began trying to straighten out its books, which were a mess. In the legend which would be repeated to reporters year after year, these efforts were what turned the fortunes of KTBC around. “She worked eighteen hours a day for five months before we brought the station into the
black,” the employee says. Mrs. Johnson herself takes great pride in her industry during those early months. “
The staff was infected with a sense of failure and uncertainty, and sloppiness had become a way of life in that little area, so we just gave it a good thorough cleaning up. I think it kind of improved everybody’s spirits. It certainly did mine.”

Mr. Johnson flew up to New York, where he called on
William S. Paley, the president of the CBS radio network, and asked for a
CBS affiliation, which would allow KTBC to carry the network’s famous, nationally known shows, on which advertisers would be more eager to purchase time than on local shows, and for which higher rates could be charged. The affiliation was vital to KTBC, and Johnson knew it.
“
This is life and death to us,” he wrote a former aide, Gene Latimer. At the time of his visit to Paley, the Federal Communications Commission was determinedly attempting to reduce the networks’ control of independent stations, and Paley was leading an almost frantic fight to persuade Congress to reduce the FCC’s authority over them by amending the law—Sam Rayburn’s law—that had established the Commission. This
was only the latest in a series of running battles between the networks and the FCC—battles in which the networks were continually appealing to Congress for help. Did the fact that this applicant for an affiliation was a congressman—“Sam Rayburn’s boy”—have anything to do with CBS’s decision in the matter? Paley and
Frank Stanton were to cast the story in folksy terms. Paley would tell
David
Halberstam that Johnson had simply appeared in his office one day without an appointment; his secretary had come in to see him, Paley said, and “announced that there was a very tall Texan waiting out there in a big hat and boots who said he was a congressman.” Paley went out to meet him, and the Texan, according to Paley, had said, “ ‘Mister Paley, I have this here ticket for a 250-watt [sic] station in Austin and I’d like to join as a CBS
affiliate.’ ” Paley had sent the tall Texan to Frank Stanton, CBS director of research, who also handled some affiliate matters. Stanton says he looked at a map, found there was room for an affiliated station in Austin, and gave Johnson the affiliation.

Journalists may have regarded this story skeptically, but they felt they could not disprove it. In fact, however, it is possible to know what would have happened if a noncongressional station owner in Austin had applied for a CBS affiliation—for a noncongressional station owner
had
applied; had applied, in fact, several times. The other Austin radio station, KNOW, had been energetically attempting for years to secure a CBS affiliation. Every attempt had
been rejected by CBS because the network already had an affiliate, KTSA in San Antonio, which could be heard in Austin.

CBS’
S DECISION
in regard to Lyndon Johnson’s request may have had nothing to do with his political influence. But his political influence had everything to do with many of the advertisers who bought time on KTBC.

The backers who had arranged for money to be contributed to his
political campaigns now arranged for money to be contributed to his radio station.
Herman Brown gave him some advertisers. Johnson told
Harfield Weedin to go to the Houston offices of the
American General Insurance Company, which had most of
Brown & Root’s insurance business, and American
General’s president,
Gus Wortham, purchased fifteen minutes of airtime every night. Why did Wortham advertise on KTBC? “
We twisted his arm,” George Brown was to recall years later, with a smile. The New York attorney Ed Weisl, Sr., the chief financier of Johnson’s campaign-funding efforts in the Northeast, who was powerful in both political and entertainment circles, gave him some advertisers. The Interstate Theater
Chain, for example, bought fifteen minutes a night.

Many of these advertisers were—or during this period would become—connected with
Everett Looney and Edward A. Clark, principals in the Austin law firm of
Looney & Clark. Ed Clark was coming to be known, as Alvin Wirtz was already known, as a lawyer to go to in Austin if you wanted something from the federal government. Clark, a power in his own right, had never been intimidated by Johnson;
he was too independent to take orders from any politician—and too astute: of all the men with whom Lyndon Johnson was associated in Texas, Clark was the one who, over the years, acquired and held the most power. He expressed the same philosophy as Herman Brown: if he invested in—“bought a ticket on,” in his phrase—a politician, he wanted a return on that investment. And, through the radio station, he was to get it. What Johnson wanted was
advertising revenues; what Clark wanted was recognition as a lawyer with influence in Washington—and both got what they wanted.

One of the powerful Texans with whom Clark would be associated for years was Howard E. Butt, of Corpus Christi, owner of the statewide H.E.B. chain of grocery stores. “
I knew Mr. Butt’s interest in politics,” Clark says, and, he recalls, he knew Butt needed someone to help with problems he was having with federal agencies in Washington—particularly, during those wartime years, with the
Office of Price
Administration. So, Clark says, he advised Mr. Butt to advertise on KTBC. Because the station’s records have not been released, it is difficult to learn any details about Butt’s advertising, but it may have been done through companies whose products were sold in H.E.B. stores and who would advertise on KTBC and mention H.E.B. in their ads. In a letter written on October 27, 1943, Clark told Johnson, “
I am today writing to Corpus so that Howard
Butt will contact the advertisers whose products he sells at his stores in Austin so that he will have an opportunity to get coverage here.” Butt soon found out how wise Clark’s advice could be. In 1944, when the OPA was limiting each distributor’s number of cases of grapefruit that could be harvested and packed in the
Rio Grande Valley, Johnson intervened and persuaded the agency to allocate Butt 150,000 extra cases. “
I
was happy to be able to call Mr. Howard Butt after our conversation [about the grapefruit] today,” Clark wrote Johnson on February 3, 1944, and, indeed, everyone involved got something out of this arrangement: Butt got 150,000 extra cases of grapefruit, and the profits from selling them; Clark got recognition as an attorney with influence in Washington; KTBC got advertising revenues.

Butt’s was not the only company that Ed Clark advised to advertise on KTBC. Clark already had a connection with the
General Electric Company, and on October 27, 1943, he was able to write Johnson that General Electric’s popular “World News Today” program would be going on KTBC. “
Thanks for the wonderful job on GE,” Johnson replied. “That’s the most important thing that has been accomplished
lately.” Among Clark’s contacts were major oil companies, who worked together to exert political influence in Washington; one was Gulf Oil—Gulf wasn’t a client of Looney & Clark, Clark says, “but I had friends there. I spoke to them about it [advertising on KTBC], and they understood. This wasn’t a Sunday-school proposition. This was business.”

Not all the advertisers came through Clark. Wirtz was on a retainer from Humble Oil, a subsidiary of Standard Oil. Humble sponsored football games on the
CBS network, under an arrangement in which the giant oil company selected the stations which carried the games. KTBC was selected. Wirtz had other clients that wanted things from the federal government, and they, too, began to advertise on KTBC.