The Path to Power (121 page)

Touching every base paid off in another way as well. The arrogant Corcoran habitually had Missy LeHand take him into the Oval Office, and didn’t bother paying much attention to other members of the presidential secretariat. But in 1941, for reasons never explained, Roosevelt dropped Tommy the Cork, and because Miss LeHand suffered a stroke, there was no one to get him in through the back door to repair the damage. One of the reasons that the break between the two men couldn’t be restored, Rowe suggests, was the fact that Corcoran “always went through Missy, and Missy died.” Lyndon Johnson would never make such a mistake. He had taken care to be friends not only with Miss LeHand but with her assistant, and LeHand’s illness did not close the back door to him; in fact, it was more open than ever, for Grace Tully was in some ways the easiest mark for the Johnson charm of anyone on Roosevelt’s staff, and she was very useful to him.

Not only would he personally hand to her a memo that he wanted the President to see, so that she could put it on top of the pile, but he would, Rowe says, “
tell
Grace something that he didn’t want to put in a memo. He would say, ‘Grace, will you tell him ____? But don’t take any notes, and don’t tell anyone else.’”

He didn’t work only through Tully, of course; he didn’t have to, so long as Rowe was his friend. Often, he would visit Rowe in his office; sometimes—since the President would be more likely to read a memo from Rowe than from him—his purpose would be to obtain Rowe’s imprimatur on a Johnson proposal; “he would come over, for example, if there was a memo he wanted to make sure Roosevelt saw; he would say, ‘I can’t write. You write it. You do it for both of us.’ Johnson was a great man for ‘Jim Rowe and I think …’” Rowe and Johnson were quite close now; their late-afternoon telephone conversations had become almost a custom, one that was not interrupted even when Johnson was in Texas—although when he initiated a long-distance call, he took care to have his secretary reverse the charges. (Once, when a secretary neglected to do so in advance, Johnson told her that if she couldn’t make some
ex post facto
arrangement to have the White House pay for the thirty-minute call, she would have to pay for it herself.) When Rowe didn’t hear from Johnson for a few days, he missed him; once he dropped Johnson a note: “There has been a deadly silence around here for some time. Miss Gilligan [Rowe’s secretary] says it makes this office very dull. I got so worried about it last week I called to see if you had fallen in front of a train. I was relieved to find you were only in Texas.” And close as he was to Rowe—and hard as he worked to maintain that closeness—Rowe was not the only one of the President’s six administrative assistants he was cultivating. When he ran up the stairs that pierced the forest of columns on the towering, grotesque facade of the State, War, and Navy Building, and then ran up an inside flight of stairs to “Death Row,” as the administrative assistants had dubbed their line of offices on the second floor, he might be heading for any of the six offices. And no matter which one he was heading for, he could be sure of a warm welcome in it.

S
HORTLY AFTER DAYLIGHT
on April 9, 1941, the telephone rang in the Johnsons’ Washington apartment. Walter Jenkins was telephoning from the police desk at the front door of the Cannon Building, where, he told Lyndon Johnson, he had just heard a startling piece of news: during the night, Morris Sheppard, the senior United States Senator from Texas, had died of a stroke.

“Well, I won’t be in this morning,” Johnson said.

Under Secretary of the Interior Alvin Wirtz was also awakened early that morning. His secretary, Mary Rather, got to their offices at Interior unusually early because she had heard the news, but when she opened the door to Wirtz’s private office, there he was, already sitting at his desk. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he asked. Soon he and Johnson were mapping strategy for a Johnson campaign to fill the seat that Sheppard had held for twenty-seven years.

The principal obstacle to Johnson’s candidacy was the one that had confronted him in his race for the House four years before: most voters had never heard of him. The voters of his Tenth Congressional District knew him, of course, and so did the voters of the Fourteenth, which he had earlier served as a congressional secretary. But in the state’s other nineteen congressional districts, his name was all but unknown. Shortly after Sheppard’s death, an East Texas radio station asked its listeners to send in postcards indicating the name of their favorite candidate. Not one of the hundreds of replies bore the name of Lyndon Johnson.

There were, moreover, potential candidates whose names were household words throughout Texas: the state’s Governor, W. Lee O’Daniel; its youthful Attorney General, Gerald C. Mann; Congressman Martin Dies, chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. A Belden
Poll—the Texas version of the Gallup Poll—taken shortly after Sheppard’s death showed that 33 percent of the state’s voters favored O’Daniel in a Senate race, 26 percent Mann, 9 percent Dies—and 5 percent Johnson.

Johnson’s best hope of overcoming this handicap was the same strategy that had worked so well in 1937: linking his name with the name that was still magic in the state; just six months before, Franklin D. Roosevelt had crushed Willkie in Texas by a margin of more than four to one. Strong reasons existed for the President’s active support of a liberal in the special election that would be held to fill Sheppard’s seat. He obviously didn’t want either Dies, the Garner protégé whose committee had begun investigating New Deal agencies, or the conservative, isolationist O’Daniel in the Senate; a memo circulating in the White House warned that the election of either is a possibility “too frightful for contemplation.” But there was also a reason—a very strong reason—why the liberal should not be Lyndon Johnson but Gerald Mann.

Mann was an ardent New Dealer; although he had never met the President, “Gerry was a Roosevelt
worshipper
,” an aide recalls. He had, in fact, worked for Johnson in 1937 because of Johnson’s all-out support of the New Deal. And Mann had a much better chance to win than Johnson did.

A small-town boy who worked on farms and in a local hotel to earn money to attend Southern Methodist University in Dallas, the slender, speedy back was twice named to all-conference football teams and became famous throughout Texas as SMU’s “Little Red Arrow.” He possessed three enthusiasms somewhat rare among politicians: for God, for poetry and for the law as an abstract force that could promote the general good. Determined to study at the best law school in the country, he took his wife and baby son to Melrose, Massachusetts, where, while commuting to Harvard Law School, he worked two shifts a day in a garment factory—until parishioners of the Congregationalist Church in Gloucester, impressed by the Sunday School sermons of the intense, handsome young man, made him their pastor. Thanks to football, he had entered politics with a statewide reputation, and in public office he had burnished it. Returning to Texas from Harvard, he had become one of Governor James Allred’s Assistant Attorney Generals and had produced some notably progressive legislation (including a revision of Sam Johnson’s now-outdated “Blue Sky Law”), and then had been Ed Clark’s predecessor as Secretary of State. In 1938, at the age of thirty-one, he had run for Attorney General. Finishing second to an experienced and popular politician in the first primary, Mann overtook him in the run-off and beat him by an astonishing 130,000 votes. Replacing the political hacks in the Attorney General’s office with bright young lawyers, Mann raised its notoriously low standards, waged what Texas historian Seth McKay calls “continuous war” against loan sharks and usurious finance companies and, most significantly, instituted strict enforcement of the state’s anti-trust laws, hitherto all but ignored by state administrations subservient to business interests.
During his first two-year term, scores of anti-trust suits were filed, and a substantial portion were won. So popular was he that when, in 1940, he ran for re-election, no one ran against him. Thirty-four years old, already twice elected to statewide office, he was in 1941 by far the best-known and most-respected young public official in Texas. “A brilliant career was predicted for him in Texas politics,” McKay writes. And when Sheppard died, several of the state’s leading newspapers spontaneously joined in asking him to run for the Senate. O’Daniel had said he wasn’t running; if the immensely popular Governor entered the race, Mann had the best chance to beat him. If O’Daniel stayed out, a Belden Poll showed, he would beat Dies, although the vote would be close. The only way Dies could win, in fact, was if another New Dealer—such as Lyndon Johnson—entered the race, and split the New Deal vote.

A little deceit was necessary to offset this reasoning. Roosevelt and the White House staff knew little about the internal politics of Texas, of course—as had been amply demonstrated the year before. In 1941, as in 1940, most of the information given to the President about Texas came from Johnson and Wirtz, and from Johnson’s admirers on the White House staff (whose information of course came mostly from him). This information was not strictly accurate. The President was told that Mann possessed neither guaranteed loyalty to the New Deal nor the statewide reputation necessary to defeat Dies (or O’Daniel, should the Governor choose to run); a Johnson-inspired memo told Roosevelt that Mann was “unbranded and unknown.”

Several influential Texans, including Senator Tom Connally, tried to explain the true situation to Roosevelt, but the President’s fondness for Johnson predisposed him to be convinced by his arguments. Roosevelt, who had, following the 1938 “purge” attempt, re-adopted his pose of never intervening in an intrastate Democratic fight, orchestrated a scenario designed to show—without his actually saying so—that he was intervening in this one. He arranged for Johnson to see him on April 22, just before his regular Tuesday press conference, so that arriving reporters would see Johnson emerging from the Oval Office. While the reporters watched, Johnson announced his candidacy from the White House steps, saying he would campaign “under the banner of Roosevelt.” And when the reporters, crowding into the Oval Office, asked the President if he had given Johnson permission to wave that banner, Roosevelt replied: “First, it is up to the people of Texas to elect the man they want as their Senator; second, everybody knows that I cannot enter a primary election; and third, to be truthful, all I can say is Lyndon Johnson is a very old, old friend of mine.” Then, as
Time
magazine put it, the “correspondents laughed, and he laughed with them.” F.D.R. PICKS JOHNSON TO DEFEAT DIES, said the headline in the
Dallas Morning News
.

In 1941 as in 1937, therefore, the Johnson campaign consisted of a single issue: “Roosevelt. Roosevelt. Roosevelt.” That issue was emphasized
in the candidate’s speeches. What America needed, he said, was “Roosevelt and unity—unity under one management, and for a common purpose: saving America from the dangers ahead; united behind Roosevelt, we’ll save America from the threat of slavery by the Axis.” If he was elected, he said, he would be “100 percent for Roosevelt,” “an all-out Roosevelt Senator,” “just a private under my Commander-in-Chief.” The issue was symbolized by his campaign emblem: the picture of Roosevelt and Johnson shaking hands on the Galveston dock at their first meeting four years before. In that picture, then-Governor Allred had been standing between the two men, but now he was airbrushed out. What remained was two tall, smiling men shaking hands across the empty space where Allred had once stood. This image was used in countless brochures and campaign newspapers. And, painted larger than life, it was plastered on thousands of billboards along highways the length and breadth of Texas—and not only the busy roads leading into Dallas and Houston and El Paso; the state’s great empty spaces were not ignored; before a driver speeding across the vast, flat plains of West Texas or the Panhandle, those two huge figures shaking hands, painted dark against a red-white-and-blue background, would loom up against the sky, miles ahead. The issue was summed up in the campaign’s slogan, which had originally been a private password used with a grin among the Chief’s NYA boys who were out campaigning for him, but which was so catchy that it quickly became the campaign’s public motto as well, appearing in new editions of the brochures and campaign newspapers—and on hundreds of thousands of hastily printed red-white-and-blue bumper stickers, simple and to the point: FRANKLIN D AND LYNDON B!

This time, the man whose name Johnson was invoking played an active role in the race. Ignorance of Texas politics may partially explain Roosevelt’s original decision to support Johnson, but it does not explain the extent or the enthusiasm of his support. As if his press-conference hint had not been sufficiently broad, leaks went out from the White House to sympathetic columnists. “Roosevelt has a fatherly interest in young Johnson,” Pearson and Allen wrote. Said Alsop and Kintner:

The President’s support went beyond hints and leaks. Johnson wanted Vice President Wallace’s aide Harold H. Young, the burly, brilliant Dallas attorney,
seconded to his campaign for its duration. The Vice President refused to let Young go; the President intervened, and when Johnson flew down to Texas to open the campaign, Young was sitting beside him on the plane. Johnson had asked which Department of Agriculture officials could best help him, and Roosevelt apparently said he would find out. Informed that they were Milo Perkins, Maston White and Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Grover Hill, the President sent Rowe a memo: “Will you pass the word on to Lyndon Johnson and do the necessary.” The necessary was a direct order to the three men, delivered by Rowe, to give Johnson any help he wanted.

Rowe had been designated liaison between the White House and Johnson’s camp. One of his first tasks was to ensure that Johnson received credit for all federal spending in Texas. He says: “Word went out—from me—to all departments, all departments in Washington: no projects approved for Texas unless Lyndon Johnson is notified.” In cases in which Rowe did not possess sufficient forcefulness, a more forceful man stepped in. Thomas Corcoran wouldn’t be “White House Tommy” much longer, but in April, 1941, he could still use the magic words that had given him that nickname, and he used them on behalf of Lyndon Johnson. On the very day Johnson left for Texas, he requested approval of a certain Rural Electrification project, asking for its approval before he left. An REA official said such rapid action was simply impossible. The phone rang in the official’s office: “This is Tommy Corcoran at the White House. Congressman Johnson wants this today, and the White House wants him to have it today.” Not only had Rowe, Corcoran and other Roosevelt aides been told to help Johnson, but their fondness for Johnson, and their fear of an O’Daniel (or Dies) victory made them eager to help him; Harold Ickes took the trouble to telephone Dies’ hometown himself to check on whether the Congressman had paid his real-estate taxes. “Everybody was helping him,” Rowe says. “And I’m thinking of all the liberals, all the way.” Their feelings are summed up in a memorandum from Pa Watson, who felt Lyndon was the “perfect Roosevelt man”; on a letter from a Texas politician critical of Johnson, Watson wrote: “Referred to Sec. Ickes for his perusal and then the ash-can.”

The on-the-scene beneficiary of all this help was Walter Jenkins, who had been left behind in Washington when John Connally and Herbert Henderson left for Texas to work in the campaign. When Johnson needed something from the federal agencies, it was Jenkins who had to visit the officials involved. The shy twenty-three-year-old had no experience doing this. “I had been answering mail,” he says—filling constituents’ requests for farming pamphlets—when he wasn’t directing tourists around the Cannon Building in his guard’s uniform. Suddenly, he had to deal with Steve Early, Missy LeHand, Grace Tully, Jim Rowe and the legendary Corcoran. When Johnson told him his new assignment, he was at first “scared, nervous.” But, he says, “I received a wonderful reception—it was just unbelievable to me.”

Tommy the Cork couldn’t have been nicer: “I talked to him lots of times. He was still very powerful, and when you asked him something, he could do it.” Even the Old Curmudgeon was nice. Once, Johnson told Jenkins to see Secretary Ickes personally about some matter too sensitive to be broached over the telephone, “and I remember thinking I couldn’t possibly get to see Ickes.” But Ickes’ office returned his call immediately, and said the Secretary could see him—immediately. (“I was very excited,” Jenkins says.) And when he told Ickes what Johnson needed, Ickes said that Johnson would have it. No matter what he asked these officials to do, Jenkins says, they did it. In fact, in many cases he didn’t have to ask. The White House would “often” call him about “something we hadn’t even asked about. I think that Mr. Roosevelt had put the word out to do anything possible” to help Lyndon Johnson “within reason … and sometimes beyond reason. … He [Roosevelt] wanted Mr. Johnson to win so bad.”