The Path to Power (110 page)

And after the conventions, when the fight was over, the man who had so carefully stayed out of Texas returned to it—for private talks with many of the Garner leaders. Some of these men had had doubts about Lyndon Johnson, but these talks resolved them; the few minor gaps in his fences were mended. George Brown had known that Johnson could do it. Talking as conservatively with conservatives as he talked liberally with liberals—“that was his leadership. That was his knack.” And George Brown was right. He arranged for Johnson to meet in a Houston hotel room with two ultra-conservative, Roosevelt-hating Texas financiers. “He went in there, and in an hour he had convinced them he wasn’t liberal,” Brown would recall.

“This is a year of strange politics,” said an article in the
Austin American-Statesman
. “Texas runs into some of its most amazing contradictions and cross currents. … New cleavages threaten a deep and serious
break in Texas Democratic solidarity. It is a strange, confused, uncharted field—the field of national politics today.” Strange, confused and uncharted it was—a minefield that could easily have destroyed the political future of anyone attempting to build a future in Texas politics in 1940. But through this field, one man—a novice in statewide politics—picked his way, with sure and silent steps.

A
FTER THE ROOSEVELT-GARNER FIGHT
in Texas, Lyndon Johnson would always have entrée at the White House. But after the fight ended, in May, 1940, that entrée was again restricted. Lyndon Johnson no longer had a reason to see the President. Impatient—after the death of his father and uncle, almost desperately impatient—to move along the route he had mapped out for himself, he had no means of doing so.

And then this genius of politics found a way.

The way was money. At first, again, the money was Herman Brown’s.

Thanks to the profits from the Marshall Ford Dam and the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station contracts, there was plenty of it. However, in political terms, the most significant aspect of Brown’s bankroll was not its size but its availability for any purpose Johnson specified. George Brown had promised that Lyndon need only tell him “when and where I can return at least a portion of the favors. Remember that I am
for
you, right or wrong, and it makes no difference if I think you are right or wrong. If you want it, I am for it 100%.” Most politicians are forced, in mapping out the next step in their careers, to choose a step that can be financed. Johnson did not have this problem; he could concentrate solely on which step would be best for his career. Whatever road he chose, he could be sure it would be paved by money from Brown & Root. Furthermore, the aims of the Congressman coincided with those of the corporation. The man with the obsession to build—build big—knew that the way to build big was through Washington. Influence within the national government was what Herman Brown needed, and influence within that government—political power that reached beyond Texas—was what Lyndon Johnson wanted. Each of them could obtain what he wanted through the other.

The most obvious use of readily available money for someone aiming at national political power was in the campaign of the man whose strong hands held the reins of national power in such a firm grip. With the great financial resources of the Republican Party solidly behind the campaign of
Wendell Willkie, the President’s re-election campaign was in severe financial difficulties, and these difficulties were a prime source of conversation in Washington, and of concern to Johnson’s New Deal companions. Around him, in conversations in the cloakroom or on the floor of the House, at cocktail parties and dinner parties, swirled talk of campaign funds, and of where to get them. Furthermore, Johnson could have adduced from his own recent experience with Roosevelt that the President might not prove ungrateful for campaign contributions. Having already provided such contributions to Roosevelt for a state campaign, it seemed the obvious course, the logical course, for Lyndon Johnson to provide contributions for the President’s national campaign, and indeed men such as Charles Marsh suggested this course to him.

It was not a suggestion he accepted. No one can know why, but it is possible to list several considerations which may have influenced his decision. In a presidential campaign he would be only one of many contributors—considering the scale of contributions from New York and other financial centers of the Northeast, not even one of the biggest. The President’s gratitude would be proportionate. Moreover, any tangible power and patronage that might result from Roosevelt’s gratitude would be held at Roosevelt’s whim—and could be withdrawn at his whim. Independent power could not result from such a situation, any more than if he had accepted the President’s offer of the REA post. Using Herman Brown’s money in Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign would probably not get Lyndon Johnson what he wanted; it was necessary for him to find another way of using it.

And he did.

One facet of Lyndon Johnson’s political genius was already obvious by 1940: his ability to look at an organization and see in it political potentialities that no one else saw, to transform that organization into a political force, and to reap from that transformation personal advantage. He had done this twice before, transforming a social club (the White Stars) and a debating society (the Little Congress) into political forces that he used to further his own ends. Now he was to do it again.

This time, the organization was the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Like the Little Congress at the moment when Lyndon Johnson’s gaze fell upon it, the committee was a moribund organization. Established in 1882 to assist Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives with services and campaign funds, its usefulness had seldom if ever reached a significant level. During the 1930’s, under the chairmanship of Patrick Henry Drewry, a diminutive, soft-spoken Representative from the Virginia Tidewater, even that level had been reduced, for Drewry was ill-suited to the role of aggressive fund-raiser, not only because of personal considerations—“He was every inch a country gentleman; he could never ask anyone for a dime,” says a friend—but because of moral and philosophical ones as
well: the very concept of the massive use of money in political campaigns was repugnant to him, and, as a staunch states righter, he saw dangerous implications for the independence of the nation’s elected representatives in the distribution of money through a monolithic central committee. He had therefore decreed that the committee’s maximum contribution to a Congressman would be $250. Few candidates received even this amount. The dichotomy within the Democratic Party, with its bitterly antagonistic liberal and conservative wings, kept the committee’s bank account small: big contributors were unwilling to provide money which might then be channeled by the committee to candidates with opposing political views; for a wealthy liberal, the idea that his money might help finance the campaign of a conservative Midwest Congressman was distasteful—as distasteful as the idea that his money might help a New York liberal was to a wealthy conservative. (Drewry’s lack of enthusiasm for distributing money was especially marked when the distributee was to be a Northern liberal.) The committee’s funds had traditionally come primarily from two sources—contributions from Congressmen themselves, and handouts from the Democratic National Committee—and during Drewry’s chairmanship, these sources had slowed to a trickle. For some decades, the committee had requested $100 from each Democratic member of the House to fund its operation; under Drewry, this request had been reduced by 1938 to $25—and when few members honored it, Drewry made only a token effort to collect.

Democrats who turned to the committee
*
for non-financial help were also likely to be disappointed; although the committee had a speakers’ bureau, headed by E. J. MacMillan, the bureau functioned only in non-presidential election years; when a presidential election was taking place, Congressmen who telephoned to ask for a Cabinet member or other “name” speaker to appear in their districts found MacMillan gone—he was invariably drafted by the National Committee and sent to New York to help in the “national” campaign. The committee’s other staffer was its capable secretary, Victor Hunt (“Cap”) Harding, a political scientist from California and one of the House of Representatives’ deputy Sergeants-at-Arms. During a campaign, Harding would take an office—generally only one room—in the National Press Building at Fourteenth and F streets so that he could accept whatever contributions happened to come in without violating the law which forbade the accepting of campaign contributions in a federal building. During campaigns, therefore, when the Congressional Campaign Committee should have been most active, its office, a dim, green-carpeted room in the basement of the Cannon House Office Building, was often utterly deserted—a condition which sometimes was only slightly improved even on the rare occasions when Drewry scheduled a meeting of the “committee” itself, which consisted of one Congressman from each state; more than once, the only persons who bothered to show up were Drewry and Harding.

In 1940, Democratic congressional candidates were even more desperate than usual for cash. The amounts they needed were, in most cases, small—ridiculously small not only by the standards of later eras but in comparison with the amounts spent during the pre-war era in statewide races and in the presidential campaign. The amounts varied greatly; congressional races in the urban centers of the Northeast could cost tens of thousands of dollars, but in the rest of the nation the situation was far different. In 1928, for example, Ruth Baker Pratt spent $12,000 in her campaign for a House seat from New York City. That was several times the total amount spent that year by all six candidates for the three congressional seats in the State of Oregon. A detailed study of expenditures in House races in that state between 1912 and 1928—the most detailed study available for the pre-war period—showed that of thirty-eight candidates for Congress, only three had spent as much as $3,000. Twenty-four of the 38 had spent less than $1,000. This situation had not changed much in 1938. In that year, the six candidates—three Democrats and three Republicans—for Oregon’s three seats spent a total of $12,987, a little more than $2,000 per candidate. In most other Western and Midwestern states, the range that year was the same. “In the great majority of cases campaigning for a seat in the House of Representatives is not an expensive business,” wrote Louise Overacker, the era’s leading academic expert on campaign finance. Discussions with Congressmen of that era indicate that most campaigns cost less than $5,000. And their recollections are confirmed by insiders who had an overview of the situation, such as Thomas Corcoran and James Rowe. In politics, says Rowe, “Five thousand dollars was a
hell
of a lot of money in those days.”

Little as Democratic congressional candidates needed in 1940, however, there was small hope that they would get it from their Congressional Campaign Committee. Because the nation’s business community was so overwhelmingly Republican, funds were traditionally in short supply at Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Biltmore Hotel in New York. The party had been outspent by the GOP in every national election since 1920, and the gap had been huge in 1936. And never had the supply of funds been shorter than in 1940. Fueled by rage at Roosevelt and possessed of an attractive candidate to run against him (“For the first time since Teddy Roosevelt,” said
Time
, “the Republicans had a man they could yell for and mean it”), the GOP was gearing up—and shelling out—for a supreme effort to put its own man in the White House. After the election, a Senate committee would determine the ratio of expenditures between the two parties as almost two and a half to one. The Democrats,
anxious to put such seasoned speechmakers as Harold Ickes on the air, found that they simply “did not have the money to spend” on more than a few such nationwide broadcasts. The five great radio speeches by Roosevelt himself that were to boost his popularity during the last days of the campaign would not have been broadcast had not Richard Reynolds, of the North Carolina tobacco family, appeared on the scene with a last-minute $175,000 loan to pay for the radio time. The National Committee needed every dollar it could raise for the presidential race, and was going to be able to spare very little funds indeed for its poor relation in Washington.

Even had funds been ample at the Biltmore, there would have been little disposition to divert them to the National Press Building. Farley, bitter at the President he believed had deceived him, resigned in August as chairman of the Democratic National Committee. His replacement, Edward J. Flynn, Boss of the Bronx, did not possess Farley’s national acquaintance. “I did not know many” Senators and Congressmen, he was to recall. They were aware, moreover, that Flynn’s loyalty ran only to the President; “Many of them were suspicious of me and displayed no great enthusiasm over my appointment. They fully realized that the appointment was purely personal on the President’s part and that he had not consulted with them before he made it. …” Flynn was not particularly enamored of them, either: attempting to enlist the fund-raising help of prominent Senators and Congressmen, he found that “few if any” were willing to help. Tensions could not be eased by the National Committee staff, for it was a new staff brought in by Flynn, and it consisted of men he knew—New York men, unfamiliar with the embattled campaigners from Capitol Hill, and hence not particularly anxious to assist them in their campaigns.

For many Democratic Congressmen, raising funds of their own was going to be harder in 1940 than ever before. “The year 1936,” Alexander Heard has noted in his landmark study of campaign financing,
The Costs of Democracy
, “was a turning point in the history of political party fund-raising. The policies and methods of Franklin Roosevelt’s first term produced political alignments more along economic-class lines than any since the McKinley-Bryan era.” Democratic Congressmen from large cities—where burgeoning labor unions were expressing their appreciation for pro-labor New Deal policies with lavish campaign contributions—were aided by these new alignments. Other Congressmen—and that included most Congressmen—were hurt. Once, a Congressman from a rural district or a district that included a small city had been able to rely on contributions from the district’s businessmen. By 1940, these businessmen—and their contributions—had turned against the New Deal.

The outlook had not been particularly bright for congressional Democrats even before campaign finances were included in their calculations. In 1938, the Democrats had lost eighty-two seats in the House. Since they had gone into that election with an overwhelming congressional majority
from the Roosevelt landslide of 1936, they still held a substantial 265-to-170 margin, but polls early in 1940 showed that about sixty additional Democrats could expect to lose their seats in 1940. And the campaign financial picture added to the gloom. Recent studies had documented the decisive role of money in elections; in one study of 156 state and local elections, all but eleven had been won by the side that reported spending the most money. Politicians had long since reached the same conclusion. Professionals firmly believed that, as Heard put it, “the side with more money has a better chance of winning.” In only two of the twenty presidential elections since 1860 had the party which spent less money come out the winner; those were the elections of 1932 and 1936, and the rule had been shattered by the Depression combined with the extraordinary popularity of Roosevelt—but now the Depression was over and so, apparently, was at least some of Roosevelt’s popularity, and the old rule could be expected to reassert itself. At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in July, pols could be heard muttering gloomily about the lack of funds. Some of them turned to Rayburn for help. Nan Wood Honeyman of Portland, Oregon, once the only female member of Congress, had been defeated in 1938, and had learned the necessity of adequate campaign financing. In 1940 she was attempting to win back her seat, and at the Convention asked Tommy Corcoran and Rayburn for help. Corcoran, in his breezy, confident way, “asked how much it would take—‘two, three, five thousand?’—indicating a willingness to do the necessary.” When the amount needed was set at $5,000, Corcoran said he would contribute $2,000, apparently by tapping private sources in New York, and Mrs. Honeyman said she could raise $2,000 herself from local contributions. That left $1,000, and on the last day of the Convention, Rayburn, in a conversation at which Johnson was present, agreed to find her some funds. As it turned out, however, he was unable to do so. His hope that the Congressional Campaign Committee would be funded by the National Committee more generously than usual was already dimming. When he attempted to convince Flynn to set aside $100,000 for help in congressional campaigns, the reaction was reserved. He repeated his plea by letter (“A great many of these fellows need help”), adding: “Let me say to you again … how important it is to re-elect a Democratic House. I remember when President Wilson lost the House in 1918, his path was made rather rough by the Republicans investigating everything that had been done. …” Rayburn then threatened “to keep the funds raised by the congressional committee separate from the National Committee treasury and use them for the members of Congress in need of campaign assistance,” but the Congressional Committee’s lack of fund-raising ability made this threat an empty one. No further word came to Portland from Corcoran, whose time and money-raising abilities were, shortly after the Convention, assigned to the presidential campaign, and when Mrs. Honeyman contacted Rayburn through an intermediary in Washington, he was forced to reply in
embarrassment that he would see that she got help “when and if there are funds available to the Congressional Campaign Committee.” He was forced to give a similar answer to other candidates who asked for assistance. At a dispirited Democratic caucus on the subject of fund-raising, the only suggestion Rayburn could make was that Congressmen who had ample funds or safe seats should contribute to the campaigns of those of their colleagues who were broke or in danger—but that suggestion would not solve the problem, as Rayburn himself knew even as he made it.