Means of Ascent (25 page)

Gradually, however, the “wonderful feeling” faded. For the vision of “unlimited funds” to improve KTBC was not the only promise that was not being honored. The promised written contract, with its ten percent of KTBC’s profits, did not materialize. During the first six months of the Johnson ownership, the Congressman himself did not come to Austin often, but when he did, Weedin would bring up the subject and the
Congressman would stall. “Lyndon would never give me a contract because he could never decide if the ten percent was before or after taxes,” Weedin says. In 1944, despite the station’s substantial profits, Weedin was still receiving no money other than his salary—that inadequate salary, so much lower than his salary at his former station, that he had agreed to accept only because of the promise of a share of the profits.

But while the percentage had not been forthcoming, the other important promise that had motivated Weedin to come to KTBC—
carte blanche
, the assurance that he would really be in charge—had for a time been kept. As the station became stronger, however, that promise too began to be broken.

Weedin had been consulting almost daily with Mrs. Johnson, and the two of them had been getting along very well. As for the Congressman, during the first six months or so he left Weedin alone. “But once we got into the fact that we were making money and it looked like we were really on our way,” that changed, Weedin was to say. He felt that the change was also due to the Johnsons’ realization that “this thing was a hell of a lot—a
great money-maker, and it was going to be bigger and bigger.” Whatever the reason, “I did not have the
carte blanche
at the end of that time I had had in the early days.” When Johnson was in Austin, he would come into the station and check the books. “Lyndon really took over. He was the one who made all the decisions. She wouldn’t ever, I don’t think, dare to tell me to do something without checking with Lyndon.”

There was a more serious, if less tangible, source of tension between the two men. During the 1941 campaign, Weedin had become a fervent
admirer of Lyndon Johnson. “He must have sold me, or somebody sold me, or I sold myself on doing whatever I could to get him elected. So I became a thorough Lyndon Johnson follower.” For a time after Weedin went to work for Johnson at KTBC, this admiration grew even more intense—he believed that
Johnson would be President of the United States someday; he proudly hung Johnson’s picture on the wall of his office. Weedin’s attitude toward Johnson was that of a younger man toward an older man who is his hero. Now, however, Johnson was not Weedin’s candidate but Weedin’s employer—and a new element entered the relationship. Attempting to define it, Weedin says, “The minute he walked in, he’d take over the room.… He had a
tremendously commanding presence, and as everyone says, the one-on-one things, he was fantastic.” He speaks of Johnson’s “domination.… He never let up on that at all. He was a completely overwhelming man in person.” And, he says, Johnson “intimidated” him: “He was the only person who could ever make me nervous.” During their discussions about the station, “he would grill me.”

No matter how admiring, respectful and intimidated Weedin was by Lyndon Johnson, he couldn’t be as admiring, respectful and intimidated as Johnson wanted him to be. Other employees of KTBC saw this. John Hicks recalls: “He wanted Harf to be a slave, and Harf just wasn’t like that. He was young and eager, but he had a kind of dignity about him. He just
couldn’t
be what Johnson wanted.” He was very bright—and he
did
know the questions Johnson was about to ask. And that was too bright for Lyndon Johnson.

In February, 1944, Weedin received his induction notice from the Navy. Then he asked Lyndon Johnson for ten percent of the profits that KTBC had earned during the ten months he had been manager—the ten percent that Lyndon Johnson had promised him. These profits were approximately $50,000, so Weedin’s share should, he calculated, be about
$5,000, and that was what he asked for. What was Johnson’s reaction? “He
was upset that I asked for it.” At first he told Weedin that he wouldn’t give him anything. At last he said he would give him a thousand dollars. When Weedin tried to negotiate that figure, Johnson made clear that the discussion was over: that was not only his offer, it was his final offer. “He told me that was what I was going to get,” Weedin says. “So I took it.”

W
EEDIN’S EXPERTISE
and contacts had been indispensable to Lyndon Johnson during the first months of the new ownership of KTBC, but with his other new employees the Congressman had more leeway, and as soon as they were hired he began inculcating in them the qualities he considered desirable in employees. At staff meetings—held frequently during his stays in Austin—he would combine appeals to naked self-interest and to
higher ideals, including the ideal he held highest of all: “loyalty.” Standing before them, hands thrust deep in his trouser pockets jingling change and keys, he would tell them that “We are building this station. It’s going to be big. And you can grow along with it. Work hard, and be loyal, and you’ll be rewarded.” Sometimes he played the role of a father, one staff member recalls: “We’re all one big family here, and we have to
help each other and be loyal to each other.” Sometimes he was more the high school football coach. “His staff meetings were like half-time talks,” another employee says: “ ‘Every team has to have a quarterback, and I’m the quarterback. And I don’t want anyone dropping the ball.’ ” And there were private meetings, in which he was more blunt. In public, he talked about “loyalty”; in private, he
gave staff members his definition of that quality. “I want
real
loyalty,” he told one young staffer. “I want someone who will kiss my ass in Macy’s window, and say it smells like roses.”

Despite all his efforts at instruction, however, he experienced difficulty in lining up the kind of team he wanted. In filling jobs in his political organization, his screening process had been deliberate and painstaking. For his radio organization, he was forced to hire people—to allow Weedin to hire people—whom he, Lyndon Johnson, hardly knew, and he was constantly being disappointed in them. In part, this was because they saw the way he treated Lady
Bird. Ann Durrum Robinson, the station’s continuity writer, says that “Mrs. Johnson didn’t come down [to the station] too much. Mr. Johnson was the one who came down,” but that several times she had lunch with her. And at these lunches—at any time he wasn’t with her—“she came across as a very intelligent, capable person.” But when the Johnsons were together, his treatment of her—“I’d really rather not
go into the personal things. I’m a great admirer of hers, and I’d rather not. It detracts from her [to tell how she was treated by her husband]. I
feel disloyal to her if I tell what she took from him.” Newswriter
Jack Gwyn says: “He talked to her as though she were a serving girl. So I saw the way he used his family. He used his family without conscience.” In part, it was because they saw the way he had
treated Weedin, using him—and then refusing to keep his promise to him. And in part, it was because of the way he treated
them
. They gradually came to realize that their salaries were low—lower than those earned in comparable jobs on other stations—and their hours were longer. “How long did you work?” Mrs. Robinson says. “You worked until the work was finished.” She was working fourteen hours a day, for a salary of about
thirty-five dollars a week, and there was no pay for her hours of overtime. When several members of the staff drove to Dallas one weekend to attend a meeting of a union that was attempting to organize employees of radio stations, Johnson, Jack Gwyn recalls, “was very upset. He called a meeting and said that he was disappointed in us for doing that. He thought we were like a family, and he would take care of everything. We had nothing to worry about. He would take care of us.
It was a firm way—like he was dealing with recalcitrant children.” Moreover, he at least attempted to treat them with the abusiveness with which he treated the employees of his congressional office. The KTBC offices had an intercom system, and if, when Johnson was on the premises, he wanted to speak to someone, he would simply flick on the switch that connected him with that person’s office and begin talking—without inquiring if there was a visitor
present. “He’d just come on and start talking,” Mrs. Robinson says. And often he would say things that KTBC staffers would not want anyone else to hear. “He might come through the intercom angry, bawling someone out, when you were talking to a sponsor,” Mrs. Robinson recalls. “He could be very abusive.” They were afraid of being treated this way—and, after a while, of having no choice but to be treated this way. As they got to
know Lyndon Johnson, some of the staff members grew afraid of falling under his power. “I think he had a gift for getting from people whatever he wanted,” Mrs. Robinson felt. “I remember thinking that the Three E’s of manipulation are ‘ensnare,’ ‘enthrall’ and ‘enslave.’ And he was adept at any one of the three.” Among themselves, some staff members talked of the dangers of becoming “enslaved”
by Lyndon Johnson, who, they felt, tried to “get someone so obligated that they couldn’t [leave his employ].… He would bestow favors, to make it so worthwhile to be attached.” Once you accepted a favor, “there was a large amount of gratitude” that made it harder to leave.

So, for example, when Lyndon Johnson made his offer to
John Hicks, Hicks did not accept it on the spot. The offer was made, in March, 1944, in Hirsh’s Drugstore, on Congress Avenue. Johnson had told Hicks to meet him there after he finished his last newscast of the day at ten p.m.
Normally, the drugstore closed at eight, but, as Hicks says, “when the Congressman wanted it open, it stayed open. They even kept a man
there to make us sandwiches.” And when Hicks arrived the Congressman was sitting there, slouched down in one of the booths along the right-hand wall of the restaurant, waiting for him. “Johnny,” he said, “I want you on my team. Harfield’s going into the service, and I’m going to need someone here at the station [as general manager]. And I’m going to need someone to represent me in Austin. I’m going to lend you ten thousand
dollars. And I want you to take it and buy yourself a Cadillac car. And I want you to move to a [better] apartment. I want you to
be
somebody. Furnish the apartment. Get Regina a fur coat. I want you to join the Rotary and the Kiwanis, and
be
somebody here in Austin.”

The young announcer was earning only seventy-five dollars a week. “Ten thousand dollars—that was more money than I had ever heard of,” he recalls. But then, Hicks says, he asked Johnson, “Congressman, how can I ever pay you back?” And when Johnson replied, expansively, genially, with an easy, charming smile, “Johnny, don’t you worry about that. You let
me
worry about that,” Hicks suddenly felt himself
drawing back.

“That was when I said, ‘Uh, oh,’ ” he recalls. He wouldn’t be able to pay the “loan” back—not in any foreseeable future—and Johnson must have known that. “I said, This man is buying something, and I don’t know that I want to be bought. I’ll be beholden to him.’ ” When the young man hesitated, Johnson elaborated on the further potentialities of his offer.
“He said, ‘I want you to know that I’m going to be President of this country someday. And you can come along with me. I want you on my team.’ It was like he was saying, ‘All right, boys. Here’s the bandwagon. Hop on.’ ” But he also made clear what he expected in return. “He said to me that if I took the loan, ‘I would expect your complete loyalty and cooperation in anything I want you to do. I will
give
total loyalty, and I expect total loyalty. If I call you up at two o’clock in the morning, and tell you to be somewhere, I want you on that horse.’ ” Hicks had seen what this man was like, and “I didn’t want to be beholden to this man.” So instead of hopping on the bandwagon, Hicks said, “Sir, I’m going to have to think this over,” and he went home, in his car, which was not a Cadillac, to the
“tiny” house he rented, and to his wife, for whom he would very much have liked to buy a fur coat, and talked it over with her. “We talked it over all night,” Regina Hicks recalls. “Because not only was it a good way to get out of the service, but it was security.” Says John Hicks: “I would never be able to save ten thousand dollars. It was very tempting. [I was] twenty-five years old, and with a brand-new baby
boy …” Yet they decided to turn the offer down. “I knew that if I took that money from him, I would be
his
from then on. And I was a little too independent to be beholden to anybody. I knew that if I took
his money, I would be on his team”—not just in broadcasting, but in politics, too.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, when Johnson came into the station, Hicks told him he thought it would be better that he not take the loan, because he couldn’t repay it. “You
are
crazy,” Johnson said. And, Hicks recalls, that was all Johnson said: “It was like a curtain came down.” The Congressman turned and left. So far as Hicks remembers, Johnson never spoke to him again. Since it was clear that he “had no
future” at KTBC, shortly thereafter he resigned. But if Johnson didn’t understand Hicks’ refusal, Hicks’ friends at the station did.
Jack Gwyn, for example, says he understood perfectly. Had Hicks accepted the loan and purchased a house, Gwyn says, “I had this vision of a house with a huge picture of Lyndon Johnson over the fireplace.”

(Did someone else understand, even if she did not say so directly? Although Lyndon Johnson never repeated his offer, he did send an emissary. The evening after Hicks’ refusal, Lady Bird, dropping by the Hickses’ home, brought up the subject. She did so, however, in a noticeably “halfhearted” manner. And when John Hicks repeated his refusal, Mrs. Johnson said she understood, and she said so in a way that made Hicks feel that “she
did
understand.” He and Regina were to speculate to each other that Mrs. Johnson “had seen other people take their ten thousand dollars and had seen what happened to them.”)