Means of Ascent (30 page)

A
DDING TO
J
OHNSON’S ANXIETY
, during these years, was another consideration—one which at times seemed to loom before him more ominously than any other.

According to family lore, Johnson men had weak hearts and died young. All during his youth, Lyndon had heard relatives saying that. Then, while he was still in college, and his father was only in his early fifties, his father’s heart had begun to fail, and Sam Ealy Johnson had died, in 1937, twelve days after his sixtieth birthday. Sam Ealy had two brothers, George and Tom Johnson. George, the youngest of the three brothers, suffered a massive heart attack in
1939 and died a few months later, at the age of fifty-seven. In 1946, at the age of sixty-five, Tom suffered a heart attack, and in 1947 he had a second. Lyndon Johnson, who had always been deeply aware of his remarkable physical similarity
to his tall, gawky, big-eared, big-nosed father, was convinced—convinced to what one of his secretaries calls “the point of obsession”—that he had inherited the family legacy. “I’m not
gonna live to be but sixty,” he would say. “My Daddy died at sixty. My uncle …”He had no patience with attempts to argue him out of this belief; once, when Lady Bird was trying to reassure him that he would not die young, he looked at her scornfully and said flatly: “It’s a lead-pipe cinch.” The long, slow path to power in the House might be the only one open to him, but it was not a path feasible for him to follow. Whenever it
was suggested that he might make his career in the House of Representatives, he would reply, in a low voice: “
Too slow. Too slow.” Rayburn had begun trudging along that path early—he had been only thirty years old when first elected to Congress in 1912—and it had taken him twenty-five years, until 1937, to become Majority Leader; he had not become Speaker until 1940, at the age of fifty-eight. But Sam Johnson had died at the age of
sixty. And what if the Democrats should not be in control of the House when Johnson’s chance came? The path to power in the House—the silence, the obeisance—was not too narrow for Lyndon Johnson, who could follow surefootedly the narrowest political road. But it was too long. He had managed to break the trap of the Hill Country; he might not be able to escape the trap of the seniority system before he died.

There was, moreover, another point of comparison with his father, one about which he spoke with his brother (and perhaps only with his brother). Sam Ealy Johnson had never been able to recover from the single great mistake he had made: the payment of that ruinously high price for the Johnson Ranch. Lyndon Johnson had made one mistake—in that 1941 Senate race. Was he, too, never to be able to recover? Was he never to get a chance to come back? His early rise had
been so fast; now his career had been stalled—he had been stuck in the House for nine years, and then ten and eleven. He talked endlessly about his fate—about the election that had been “stolen” from him, about the bad advice he had received not to contest that election because he would soon get another opportunity, about the war that had prevented him from using that opportunity, about the ingratitude of the young men who had not, upon their return from
the war, rejoined his organization. And worse—in the words of one aide, “much worse”—were the times when he wasn’t complaining, when, alone with only one or two aides, his voice getting very low, he would talk dispassionately, almost without emotion, about his chances of advancing in his political career, about his chances of advancing in the House of Representatives, in which he had now spent so many years—the House, to which he had come
when he was young, and in which he was trapped, no longer young. “Too slow. Too slow.” Horace Busby says: “He was thirty-nine years old. He believed, and he believed
it really quite sincerely … that
when a man reached forty, it was all over. And he was going to be forty in 1948. And there was no bill ever passed by Congress that bore his name; he had done very little in his life.…”

T
HE 1941 OPERATION
for the “gynecological problem” that may have caused Mrs. Johnson’s three miscarriages had apparently not been successful, and the “sadness” the couple felt over their lack of children continued. Then, in 1943, at the age of thirty, Mrs. Johnson conceived again. The child, born on March 19, 1944, in the tenth year of her marriage, was a daughter, named Lynda Bird
in a combination of the father’s first name and the second part of “Lady Bird.” At the hospital, Johnson telephoned Sam Rayburn and Carl Vinson with the news, and then his mother. Lady Bird had had a difficult time in labor, and her doctor had suggested she have no more children, but the Johnsons continued trying. On the morning of June 13, 1945, Mrs. Johnson awoke in intense pain, and with a high fever. But, Johnson was to recall, “
she insisted that it
was all right for me to go to the office. The minute that I left the room, she called the doctor.” A friend from Austin, Virginia Wilke English, was staying with them, and, Mrs. English recalls, before the ambulance arrived, “she started hemorrhaging just very, very badly.” As Lady Bird Johnson was being carried out the door on a stretcher, however, she made the men stop so that she could give Mrs. English some instructions. “There was a manila envelope
that was addressed to Jesse Kellam,” Mrs. English recalls. “And it took thirty-four cents worth of postage and I was to put that on and to mail it that day. It had to go out that day.” And, Lady Bird continued, she had invited guests to a dinner party the following evening (“Mr. Rayburn was coming,” and two other guests), and the party was not to be canceled. There would be no problem, she said; their maid, Zephyr Wright, could take care of Lynda
Bird, and could cook the dinner, and Mrs. English should act as hostess. “There’s no use to cancel it because Lyndon has to eat anyway, and they’re all invited,” Lady Bird explained. (Says Mrs. English: “Man, I couldn’t believe that.”) At Doctor’s Hospital, where her illness was diagnosed as a Fallopian, or tubular, pregnancy, Mrs. Johnson’s temperature reached 105 degrees. Blood transfusions were needed. Her condition
was listed as critical, but after an operation she recovered, although when she returned home, she was forbidden for some time to walk down the stairs. In 1946, Mrs. Johnson became pregnant again, and on July 2, 1947, Lucy Baines Johnson was born. Johnson was later to joke that the two daughters were given the same initials as he and his wife had because “
it’s cheaper this way, because we can all use the same luggage,” but to an aide with whom
he was as
intimate as he was with Horace Busby, he would be more frank: “
FDR—LBJ, FDR—LBJ,” he told his young assistant. “Do you get it? What I want is for them to start thinking of me in terms of initials.” “He was just so determined that someday he would be known as LBJ,” Busby explains.

H
IS MOODS SOARED
and sank, but when they sank now, they seemed to sink lower—and to last longer. The years 1946 and 1947–1947, when Lyndon Johnson marked
ten years
in the House which he had been anxious to leave almost from the day he got there—were filled with periods of deepening depression. With his younger aides, for whom it was important that he be the confident leader in whom they could safely repose their
own confidence, he wore a mask of self-assurance, but people who knew him better were worried about him. “
He lost some of his drive, periodically pausing in the middle of his still-crowded work day to stare out the window with a troubled look in his eyes,” his brother was to write. “He might spend a half-hour that way. Then he would suddenly busy himself with paper work and long phone calls, driving himself and his staff as never
before.” A severe eczema-like rash on his hands, always a sign of tension and unhappiness, had bothered him intermittently for years. Now it returned, and remained, making his fingers terribly dry, scaly and painful. Doctors prescribed various ointments, and he often had parts of his fingers wrapped in gauze, but to little effect. Lubriderm, a purple-colored salve, brought temporary relief, and Johnson often kept a bowl of it on his desk, and would continually dip his hands
into it. The rash was particularly annoying when he was signing his mail, because the edges of papers made little slits in the dry, raw skin, and even a drop or two of blood could mess up a letter. Gene Latimer, who returned to work for Johnson in May, 1946, would see him “
driving himself late at night … signing mountains of letters with his right hand frequently wrapped in a hand towel to keep blood from dripping”; Latimer said
the rash “made him suffer with each signature.” But when Latimer begged his adored “Chief” to stop signing, Johnson just shook his head. The signing routine seemed to soothe him, Latimer felt, as if, thinking about the mail, he was able for a while to stop thinking about his larger problems. Johnson was smoking more and more—three packs a day; he seemed now always to be holding a cigarette, and his fingers were stained yellow with nicotine.
Sometimes, lighting a fresh cigarette, he bent over, head low as he took his first puff, inhaled deeply—“
really sucking it in,” an aide says—and sat like that, head bowed, cigarette still in his mouth, for a long minute, as if to allow the soothing smoke to penetrate as deeply as possible into his body. These years were punctuated, as were other periods of crisis throughout his life, by sickness; just after New Year’s Day in 1946,
for
example, he was hospitalized in Austin’s Seton Infirmary. His illness was variously referred to in the press and in letters to constituents as “flu” or “pneumonia,” and some of his symptoms were consistent with these diagnoses. Other symptoms, however, were not. Asked about Johnson’s hospitalization, two aides use the term “nervous exhaustion.” Walter Jenkins said also, “It was bad.” No one
is willing to describe the illness in detail. Whatever its nature, recovery was not rapid. On January 19, Johnson’s aides were responding to inquiries by saying that “he
hopes to return to Washington almost any day now,” and was still in Texas only because of an inability to obtain train or plane reservations. He was still in Seton Infirmary a week later, however, and when, after almost a month in the hospital, he returned to Washington, he was
confined to his bed in his house there. On February 7, he wrote his cousin Oreole that “I am still having trouble with my throat,” and was undergoing a new round of tests at a hospital. On February 12, he was still ill. In March, he was hospitalized for one of his recurrent, painful attacks of kidney stones, and in October, he spent another three weeks in the Seton Infirmary and then in the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, for a bronchial infection, the third time
he was hospitalized that year.

Another Senate election would be held in Texas in 1948—an election in which, he, Lyndon Johnson, would be a longshot, not only against the incumbent, Pappy O’Daniel, but against any one of a number of candidates who had statewide reputations, for if his 1941 campaign had brought him recognition across the entire state, the intervening seven years had largely erased it: his name was little known to the electorate outside his own district. And he
wouldn’t have Roosevelt’s name behind him this time. His chances of winning a 1948 election were not good.

Moreover, while the 1941 campaign had been a special election to fill the seat opened by Morris Sheppard’s death, 1948 would be a regular election. Texas law prohibited a candidate from running for two offices in the same election. To run for the Senate, he would have to relinquish his House seat, and if he lost the Senate election, he might not be able to take the Tenth District seat back from his successor. And would he even want to return to the House? If he
returned, it would be without even the seniority he had accumulated. And why would he want to return even with seniority? The House held nothing for him.
Too slow. Too slow
. If he lost in a race for the Senate in 1948, he might well be out of politics—the politics which were his life—forever. He could hardly bear to take the chance, to risk so much, on a single throw of the dice. “At first,” he was to tell biographer Doris Kearns, “I just
could not bear the thought of losing everything.”

But what choice did he have? Other public officials in Washington would not take such a risk, if taking it meant they might, should they
lose, have to leave Washington; other congressmen and Senators talked of how they were anxious not to return to the towns or cities from which they had come because they would miss the excitement and glamour of Washington, or the ability to be at the center of things. But it wasn’t the excitement or glamour
that Lyndon Johnson most wanted, that Lyndon Johnson needed, that Lyndon Johnson had to have. It was power. To stay on in Washington without it was intolerable to him. And since power, substantial power, was not possible for him in the House, he had no choice, really. He had to try for the Senate. However great the sacrifice he might have to make—the sacrifice of his House seat—to enter the Senate race, however long the odds against him in that race might be, he had to
enter.

To his young aides, and to the young supporters like John Connally and J. J. (“Jake”) Pickle who were not his aides but whom he would need, he maintained a pose of indecision, but to the men he depended on most and who would guide his campaign—Herman and George Brown, Alvin Wirtz, Ed Clark—he said that he would try once more, that he would make another run for the Senate in 1948. If he lost, he told them, he would not attempt to re-enter
politics. After almost twenty years, after so much effort and striving, his career had boiled down to one last chance.

F
OR A TIME
late in 1947, after he had made his decision, that chance appeared to brighten. During that year, Pappy O’Daniel’s popularity had been rapidly eroding because of his buffoonery on the Senate floor, and because of reports of his profiteering in Washington real estate, and it was becoming apparent that O’Daniel was deciding not to run again.

But then came rumors—confirmed in an announcement on New Year’s Day, 1948—that Coke Stevenson, a former Governor of Texas who two years before had retired from office and presumably from public life, would enter the race. O’Daniel was one of the greatest vote-getters in the history of Texas. Coke Stevenson was a much greater vote-getter, by far the most popular Governor in the history of Texas, a public official, moreover, who had risen above
politics to become a legend.