Means of Ascent (7 page)

Cultivating and manipulating older men possessed of power that could advance his ambitions, the young Lyndon Johnson employed obsequiousness and flattery so striking that contemporaries mocked him as a “professional son”—but that was no more striking than the openness with which he explained to them in detail his techniques of cultivation and manipulation, and boasted and gloated over his success in bending older men to his will.
In both high school and college, he courted the daughter of the richest man in town. Not a few youths do that; few take the trouble that Lyndon Johnson took, in both cases, to make sure that his fellow students realized that the principal basis for the courtship was not love or sex but pragmatism. So widely did he make his motives known that his determination to marry for money became the subject of a joke in his college yearbook.

Each stage of his political climb was marked by perhaps the ultimate manifestation of pragmatism in politics in a democracy: the stealing of elections. At his rural college, where campus politics had always been so casual that the stealing of an election had not even been considered a possibility, he stole elections. On Capitol Hill, he arranged to have the ballot box in elections for the presidency of the Little Congress stuffed with illegal ballots, and then, if even
that was not sufficient to give victory to him or his allies, he miscounted the ballots. He did this with an organization that had been only an informal social club of congressional assistants, a group so loosely organized and insignificant that a later president would say, in astonishment: “My God, who would cheat to win the presidency of something like the Little Congress?” He was always secretive about exactly what he had done—no one could ever prove anything
against him—but on both College Hill and Capitol Hill, he made sure with winks, hints, his whole bearing, that everyone knew he had done
something;
as one of his college classmates, a friend, puts it, “Everyone knew that something wasn’t straight. And everyone knew that if something wasn’t straight, it was Lyndon Johnson who had done it.” And at every stage—at college, in the Little Congress, in the big Congress—as soon as he
was in the inner circle, he took pains to let everyone know he was on the inside, putting his arm around other insiders, whispering in their ear while ostentatiously looking around as if to make sure no one
could overhear, strutting to display not only his power but the fact that he had obtained the power by trickery. His attitude proclaimed that if there were any tricks to be played, he would play them, that if any outsmarting was done, it would be he who would be
doing it, that no one was going to outsmart
him
.

Until the 1941 Senate race, no one had. He had tried to steal this race, too—striking deals, buying county bosses. And he had, as usual, been unable to refrain from boasting about what he was doing. As always, he not only outsmarted opponents but displayed a deep need to make sure they—and the public—knew he had outsmarted them. But this time, at the last minute,
he
had been outsmarted. He who had stolen elections, who
had been confident he had stolen
this
election, had had the election stolen from him instead. He had been cheated of victory—as if he, too, like his father, had been only a man who had “no sense.”

So it was hard going back. His wife, who knew how hard it was, says, “I’ll never forget the way he looked, walking away to catch the plane to Washington—striding off, looking very jaunty and putting extra verve into his step. It took a lot of effort on his part to act jaunty.” That, she says, is “a memory of Lyndon that I will always cherish.”

W
HAT MADE IT EASIER
was that he might not have to go back for long. The election for the full Senate term would be in July, 1942, only a year away, and Johnson intended to run in that election. And about a month after his return to Washington in July, 1941, he learned that if he ran, he would have a good chance of winning—for his great patron was his patron still.

Men who had observed Franklin D. Roosevelt’s reaction to other politicians who had lost after he had allowed them to use his name were at first unsure what his reaction would be to a defeated Lyndon Johnson. Johnson himself had observed that after his predecessor as “Roosevelt’s man” on the Texas delegation, his fellow Congressman
W. D. McFarlane, had been defeated despite Roosevelt’s
endorsement, not only had he been unable to obtain even a low-level federal appointment, but he was never again allowed into the presence of the President who had once been so genial to him.

But, just as Roosevelt had during Johnson’s senatorial campaign relaxed his customary strictures against campaign assistance in his efforts to help this young man, for whom his aides said he had a “
special feeling,” so now his reaction to the young man’s loss demonstrated that that feeling had not changed. After his defeat, Lyndon Johnson sent a note to Franklin Roosevelt.

In the margin of the note, Roosevelt wrote to his appointments secretary, Edwin M. (“Pa”) Watson: “General Watson—I want to see Lyndon.” When they met, Roosevelt joked with the younger man: “Lyndon,” he said, “apparently you Texans haven’t learned one of the first things we learned up in New York State, and that is that when the election is over, you have to sit on the ballot boxes.” The President had
asked aides what he could do to cheer Lyndon up and had accepted a suggestion from Thomas G. (“Tommy the Cork”) Corcoran, his political man-of-all-work, that the young Congressman be invited to give a speech immediately preceding the President’s at the August national convention of
Young Democrats in Lexington, Kentucky, an invitation that would give Johnson his first national exposure. And Corcoran, who was to recall that “in that
1941 race, we gave him everything we could—everything,” was able, after checking with the Boss, to tell Johnson that in 1942 the giving would be at the same level.

T
HE INSTANT RAPPORT
that had been struck between Roosevelt and Johnson at their very first meeting—in May, 1937, when the young Congressman-elect had traveled to Galveston to meet the President as he returned from a fishing vacation in the Gulf of Mexico—had gained Johnson admittance to a small circle in Washington, one that had revolved around Tommy the Cork, the stocky, ebullient, accordion-playing political manipulator; it
had been Corcoran whom the President had telephoned, upon his return from Texas, to say, “I’ve just met the
most remarkable young man,” and to issue an order: “
help him with anything you can.”

By 1941, however, with Corcoran’s importance at the White House waning, the stars of the circle were Secretary of the Interior
Harold L. Ickes and two Supreme Court Justices, Hugo L. Black and
William O. Douglas, and it included a group of younger men who, like Johnson, were still in their thirties—men not yet influential in Washington, but who had, most of them, already begun to rise, and were rising faster now: a
short,
silent young Jewish lawyer from Memphis with olive skin, large, liquid eyes and “the most brilliant legal mind ever to come out of the Yale Law School,”
Abe Fortas, in 1941 thirty years old, who at Yale Law had caught the eye of Professor Douglas and had been the first man Douglas brought to Washington to assist him at the
Securities and Exchange Commission;
James H. Rowe, Jr.,
thirty-two, of Butte, Montana, and Harvard Law, who had caught Corcoran’s eye, and then, after Corcoran placed him in a low-level White House job, Roosevelt’s;
Eliot Janeway, thirty, a Washington-based business writer for
Time, Life
and
Fortune
magazines; and Arthur E. Goldschmidt, thirty-one, known as “Tex,” from San Antonio and Columbia University. There was a Southern tinge to the circle.
Justice Black, of course, was an Alabamian, and so were two of the circle’s most gregarious members,
Virginia Durr, Black’s sister-in-law, and her husband, Clifford, a lawyer and Rhodes Scholar, as well as their friend
W. Ervin (“Red”) James, a politically well-connected lawyer from Montgomery. Not only Johnson and Goldschmidt but a one-time Hill Country legislator for whom Johnson had once campaigned in Texas,
Welly K. Hopkins, of Seguin, now chief counsel to
John L. Lewis’s
United Mine Workers, and Assistant United States Attorney General
Tom C. Clark, of the politically powerful Clark family of Dallas, were from Texas. In January, 1940, Johnson’s most trusted adviser, former State Senator Alvin J. Wirtz, was appointed Undersecretary of the Interior. Wirtz was already acquainted with most of
the group because of his work as counsel for the Tenth District’s Lower Colorado River Authority and his shadowy role in the financing of other power projects, and political campaigns, throughout the West. A big, burly man with a broad, ever-present smile, he possessed a secretiveness concealed behind a carefully cultivated country-boy manner (“Slow in his movements, slow in his speech, but a mind as quick as chain lightning,” Hopkins recalls) and a ruthlessness
that astonished even hardened Austin political operatives (“He would gut you if he could. But you would never know he did it.… He would still be smiling when he slipped in the knife”). His charm (“terribly amusing, delightful,” Virginia Durr says) and his avuncular manner (“Soft-voiced, very gentle—if you needed a wise old uncle and could have one appointed, he’d be the one,” says Jim Rowe) quickly placed him near the
center of the circle. Two of the most prominent members of the circle had, because of the vicissitudes of politics, left Washington, but whenever former National Youth Administrator
Aubrey Williams of Alabama and former Congressman
Maury Maverick of San Antonio visited the capital, cocktail parties were always arranged in their honor.

These men were bound together by adherence to Roosevelt and the
New Deal—and specifically by a single issue,
public power, the source of which, the giant hydroelectric power dams being built in the West, was
financed by Ickes’ Department of the Interior; Fortas, Goldschmidt and
Benjamin V. Cohen, the other half, with Corcoran, of the New Deal’s fabled “Gold Dust
Twins,” had once occupied adjoining offices in the sixth-floor suite of Interior’s Division of Public Power. Most members of the circle were veterans either of the fight for the crucial Public Utilities Holding Company Act of 1935 and the subsequent skirmishes over administering the Act or of the battles to build the huge dams which would destroy the utilities’ monopoly. There were differences among them—most dramatically over civil rights; those, like the
Durrs, who burned for justice for blacks, were appalled by the attitude of friends like Wirtz, who, once, when
Virginia Durr asked him why he was opposed to giving blacks the vote, told her flatly, “Look,
I like mules, but you don’t bring mules into the parlor.” But the public power issue was overriding. Wirtz, Mrs. Durr was to recall, “
wasn’t a man of any radical sympathies
at all, but he did believe in government in the water thing.”

They saw a lot of each other. The younger ones—the Rowes, Fortases and Goldschmidts—lived within a block or two of each other in small, rented houses in the Georgetown section of Washington that had until recently been a slum but was rapidly being taken over and gentrified by young New Dealers, and they would often get together in the evening for informal dinners and back-yard cookouts. On weekends, the parties would be in the riverfront garden of Hugo
and
Josephine Black in Alexandria, or at the Durrs’ gracious house on Seminary Hill with the big tree in the back yard, or the Ickes’ farm at Olney, Maryland. Before their return to Texas to fun for the Senate, Lyndon and Lady Bird had been regulars at these gatherings, and
Lyndon would invite the others for Sunday-afternoon cocktails at the small, one-bedroom apartment he and Lady Bird had rented in the Kennedy-Warren Apartment
House on Connecticut Avenue.

Johnson in fact had been at the center of this circle, in part for practical, political reasons.
¹
He possessed something these young men needed: access to Speaker of the House
Sam Rayburn. During Johnson’s early years in the House, they had watched in amazement as he leaned over and kissed the bald head of the Speaker, whose grim mien, fearsome temper and immense
power made most men wary of even approaching him. And by the time, in 1939, that that entrée had been somewhat curtailed, Johnson had learned the levers of power in the House, and had
cultivated the friendship of other House leaders. These young men from the executive branch were in constant need of information from the closed, confusing world of Capitol Hill, and Johnson obtained it for them. “I would call and say, ‘How do I handle
this?’ ” Rowe remembers. “He would say, ‘I’ll call you right back.’ And he would call back and say, This is the fellow you ought to talk to.’ ” Then, during the 1940 campaign, they, and many Washington political insiders, had suddenly realized that the young Congressman possessed access to another valuable political commodity: cash and checks from those Texas oilmen and contractors for use in the campaigns of other
congressmen; he was the conduit—the chief conduit—to sources of campaign financing of which the rest of Washington had barely even been aware.

Rowe, who had been the liaison between the White House and the revitalized Congressional Campaign Committee, had been impressed not merely with the money Johnson raised but with the astuteness with which he doled it out, and with which he handled a hundred other campaign chores from a single, centralized office. “Nobody had ever done this before,” Rowe was to say. The members of this little circle were very good at politics; some were already, and some
would eventually be, among the master politicians of the age. A master of a profession knows another when he sees him. “Counting” Congress—estimating the votes on bills important to them—was a frequent pastime at their parties. “He was a great counter,” Rowe says. “Someone would say, we’ve got so many votes, and Johnson would say, ‘Hell, you’re three off. You’re counting these three guys, and they’re
going to vote against you.’ ” “He was the very best at counting,” Fortas says. “He would figure it out—how so-and-so would vote. Who were the swing votes. What, in each case—what, exactly—would swing them.” And he was more than a counter. “He knew how things happened, and what made things happen,” Fortas says. These men knew they had a much better formal education than he did, but
they knew that in the world of politics it was he who was the teacher. Once they were discussing a problem, and what a book said about it, and one of the group said, “Lyndon hasn’t read that.” “That’s all right,” someone else replied. “We can tell him what the books say, and then he can tell us how to solve the problem.” Money made him important to them in other ways, too; when, for example, Corcoran suddenly found himself out
of the White House and looking for clients in his new law practice, Johnson saw to it that he was placed on retainer by
Brown & Root, the Texas contracting firm, owned by George and Herman Brown, that had lavishly poured money into his campaigns.