The Path to Power (49 page)

Four hundred and thirty-five Congressional districts: among them districts represented by Congressmen of long seniority whose favor even a President had to court; among them districts represented by Congressmen who chaired powerful committees; among them districts represented by Congressmen who were allies of the New Deal; among them districts represented by Congressmen who worked hard for their districts. Few districts fared better under the New Deal’s programs than this district with a junior Congressman who opposed the New Deal, a Congressman who seldom visited his office—this district whose only asset on Capitol Hill was a young secretary who worked for it with a frantic, frenzied, almost desperate aggressiveness and energy.

A
VETERAN TEXAS POLITICIAN
, watching Lyndon Johnson, at the age of twenty-one, ramrodding eight tough districts in a Lieutenant Governor’s race, had called him a “wonder kid” of politics. Welly Hopkins, watching him work “all the byways” of Blanco, Comal, and Guadalupe counties, had spoken of his “very unusual” political ability. The same ability had been evident even earlier—in San Marcos, where Lyndon Johnson had not only captured campus politics, but had created campus politics. Now what his brother called his “natural vocation” was to be seen on a larger stage.

There existed in Washington an organization called “The Little Congress.”

It was a moribund organization. Formed in 1919 to provide congressional secretaries with experience in public speaking and a knowledge of parliamentary procedures, it was modeled on the House of Representatives and held debates under House rules. But it had degenerated into little more than a social club, whose desultory meetings, held in the Cannon Building’s chandeliered Caucus Room, were attended by no more than a few dozen secretaries.

But the White Stars of San Marcos had also been considered a social club. In April, 1933, Johnson approached a few carefully selected fellow residents of the Dodge Hotel and asked them to help him become the “Speaker,” or presiding officer, of the Little Congress.

As in the House of Representatives, seniority and line of succession had determined the selection of previous Speakers: at each election, only one new officer, a sergeant-at-arms, always an older man with long Washington tenure, was chosen; the other officers each simply moved up one notch, the former sergeant-at-arms being nominated for clerk and the clerk
being nominated for Speaker; there was never any opposition. Johnson, however, had a plan to sidestep this practice.

The plan depended on secrecy. By counting votes, says William H. Payne, who ran for sergeant-at-arms on the Johnson ticket, Johnson had determined that so many new secretaries had been brought to Capitol Hill in March by the new Congressmen elected in the Roosevelt landslide that their votes would give him the Speakership—if the older secretaries, who still far outnumbered the newer ones, did not realize what he was planning and turn out in force at the April meeting. To minimize chances of discovery, he waited to launch his campaign until only a day or two before the election, and when he campaigned, he campaigned not in person but by telephone—remaining in Kleberg’s office and calling new secretaries in other congressional offices to ask for their votes—so that there would be as little activity visible as possible. He had discovered another cache of votes: although only congressional secretaries had attended past meetings of the Little Congress and there existed a general impression that only secretaries were eligible for membership, the organization’s bylaws actually made any person on the “legislative payroll”—which included Capitol Hill mailmen, policemen and elevator operators appointed under congressional patronage—eligible, so long as he paid his two-dollar dues. Johnson told Latimer to round up his mailmen friends, and bring them to the meeting—and he told Latimer not to tell them about the meeting until the last possible moment. He asked a friendly elevator operator to do the same with the other elevator men—and repeated the enjoinder of secrecy. And on the night of April 27, 1933, as a few handfuls of Little Congress regulars sat all but lost in the rows of seats in the spacious Caucus Room, they were taken completely by surprise when, just as the meeting was about to begin, there suddenly burst into the room enough people with unfamiliar faces to elect as Speaker a tall, thin twenty-four-year-old from Texas, whom few of the older men even knew. “Who is that guy?” one asked as Johnson came forward to take the gavel.

(When, the next day, the older men collected their wits, they had other questions: about the honesty of the election. Many of the votes that had elected Johnson, they said, had been cast by men not eligible to vote. Many of the mailmen and elevator operators who had shown up for the first time had not paid their dues, they said, and hence were not members of the Little Congress. Moreover, they said, many of the new voters could not be members even if they paid dues: Johnson’s supporters, they charged, had simply rounded up every Capitol Hill employee they could find, whether or not the employee had been appointed under congressional patronage. There were complaints that, as Lucas puts it, “He stole that election.” If the charge was true, the election was, of course, the second he had stolen.)

J
OHNSON’S ACCEPTANCE SPEECH
was somewhat derivative from a speech delivered a month before by another man lately come to Washington. “My election,” he said, “will mark a New Deal for all Little Congresses.” (He also promised to “be mindful” of the “forgotten man,” by naming committees on “an equitable basis of membership and seniority.”) Derivative or not, however, a new deal was what he delivered: he transformed the Little Congress of Capitol Hill as he had transformed the White Stars of College Hill. He turned a social organization into a political organization—into an organization, moreover, to serve his own ends.

One of those ends was entrée—the entrée a congressional staffer needed but found so hard to obtain. Henceforth, Johnson announced, meetings would be held not every month but every week, and would include not only debates but speeches by “prominent figures.” And although the new Speaker declared that the reason for this innovation was to make the meetings livelier, his teen-age assistants knew that there was another reason as well: says Latimer, “It gave him an excuse to go and see Huey Long or Tom Connally or a Texas Congressman who was head of a committee he thought he might need for something, and invite them to speak, and once he got in to see somebody, the Chief, being the way he was, would make them remember him.”

Another end was publicity. First, he organized the Little Congress debates. Previously, anyone who wished could speak; now only assigned speakers could take the floor during the sixty minutes allotted to each side. He made the assignments, naming teams to represent both sides of an issue currently before Congress (one “floor leader” would generally be the aide of the Congressman who had introduced the bill, the other the aide of a Congressman who opposed it); kept checking with the leaders to make sure they were actively organizing their teams; further formalized the atmosphere by assigning speakers places at the long witness table that ran across the front of the Caucus Room. Sitting at the center of the long, raised horseshoe dais, used by congressional committees, he ran the debates strictly. Says Payne: “The first time he presided, everyone knew: by George, here was a man who was running the show. The Little Congress was run by the same rules as the House of Representatives, and he knew those rules. He was his own parliamentarian, and there wasn’t anyone who could argue with him about whether the proceedings were proceeding according to the rules, because he
knew
them. He was in
command
.” At the end of each debate, the Little Congress voted on the “bill.” Once he had the debates organized, he asked newspapers to cover them. Congressional aides generally reflected their bosses’ feelings, he told reporters, and Little Congress votes on pending legislation were therefore previews of upcoming votes in the Big Congress. Moreover, since the Little Congress floor leaders were the same men who were helping their bosses prepare to lead the upcoming fights in the House, the debates would provide a preview not only of votes but of maneuvers to
come. The reporters came—and were impressed; “one of the most interesting forums in Washington,” the
Washington Post
said. Finding that House votes could indeed be predicted on the basis of voting in the Little Congress, they began to cover it fairly regularly. Payne recalls: “Every week there’d be a meeting, and every week there would be stories in at least a couple of the Washington papers”—and stories on the Little Congress generally contained a statement from, or at least a mention of the name of, its Speaker. The chance for press coverage made even the most famous political figures receptive to Johnson’s invitations to address it. When Johnson said he was inviting the colorful and controversial Huey Long to speak, recalls another Little Congress member, Wingate Lucas, “none of us thought he could pull it off.” But sure enough, Long came—the Caucus Room was, another member says, “just crowded with newsreel cameras. Pathé News and Metro News and all that. … There were lights all over the place, these movie lights. A tremendous number of reporters were there.” And when Long came into the room, surrounded by a phalanx of tough-looking bodyguards, the Speaker of the Little Congress was there to welcome him, shaking his hand and smiling at him as the flashbulbs popped and the cameras rolled.

Soon, 200 or more Congressional aides were crowding into the Caucus Room every week. Johnson organized other events—including a three-day trip, which many secretaries remember vividly forty-five years later, on which 293 secretaries toured New York City with a motorcycle escort provided by Mayor La Guardia, and, in the evening, were the Mayor’s guests at Radio City Music Hall. Then the Congressional aides went on to West Point, from which they returned to Washington by train. “I remember Lyndon roaming up and down the aisles, from car to car, eyes flashing, smiling, too excited to sit still,” Payne says. The annual banquet, held at the Mayflower Hotel, became an elaborate affair, with prominent speakers and formal dress. Says Lucas, who, some years later, would be Speaker himself: “Little Congress became
quite
a big thing. When we had a debate, members of Congress would show up. To hear the points on each side and to get an indication of how the members themselves would vote. Members [of Congress] wanted their bills debated by the Little Congress for publicity, and because it would help prepare them for debate on the floor. A Congressman would come to you and say, ‘I’d like to get the Little Congress to debate one of my bills.’ I remember one Congressman from California doing this. He had a copy of his bill in his pocket, and he gave it to me, and he gave me a pitch for it. So if you were Speaker, you were respected by members of Congress, and
called upon
by members of Congress.” In a remarkably short time—taking into account congressional recesses which he spent back in Texas, in less than a year spent on Capitol Hill—Lyndon Johnson had, through an organization in which advancement had previously
depended upon longevity on the Hill, lifted himself dramatically out of the anonymous crowd of congressional aides.

Little Congress bylaws allowed a Speaker only a single term. While Johnson made no attempt to change the bylaws—in the opinion of at least one ally, because there had already been too many rumors about the circumstances under which he had been elected—he kept control of the organization through hand-picked candidates. He never campaigned publicly for them. “Word just circulated around that so-and-so was Johnson’s candidate,” Payne says. “He did everything behind the scenes.” But behind the scenes he was very effective. A half-dozen Johnson allies—all distinguished by their willingness to defer to his orders—would telephone other members before each election to suggest who should be supported. Members who, in the open balloting, failed to follow the suggestion did not thereafter receive invitations to speak, and it became understood that antagonizing Lyndon Johnson was not a good idea for anyone who wanted to advance in the only organization in which, for congressional secretaries, advancement was possible. “He had a machine,” says secretary Lacey Sharp. “And if you wanted to run, you had better have the blessings of Lyndon Johnson.” The machine’s existence had become an acknowledged reality in the self-contained little world of Capitol Hill. Another secretary, newly arrived on the Hill, recalls seeing Johnson for the first time. Struck by his appearance—his height, his huge ears, his flashing eyes and smile, the confidence with which he walked, arms akimbo, down a House Office Building corridor—the secretary asked a friend who he was. Replied the friend: “That’s the Boss of the Little Congress.”

D
ID HIS VOCATION
—his “very unusual ability”—work only with contemporaries? Only with the congressional secretaries who were his equals in rank? The Speakership of the Little Congress may have furnished him entrée to officials other secretaries never got to talk to; it was the use he made of the entrée that awed those contemporaries who had a chance to see him use it.

At the Department of Agriculture, for example, the hundreds of patronage jobs created by the new AAA programs were dispensed by three tough Tammany politicians: Julien N. Friant, special assistant to the Secretary of Agriculture and Jim Farley’s personal representative in the department, and Friant’s assistants, Vincent McGuire and Lee Barnes. Even Congressmen had difficulty getting these men on the phone; for most congressional secretaries, personal communication was all but impossible. But congressional secretary Lyndon Johnson wanted another assistant to help with his district’s mail, and, with no more room on the district’s payroll, he wanted the assistant, Russell M. Brown, a young law student from Rhode
Island, put on Agriculture’s. Aware of the inaccessibility of Agriculture’s personnel trio, Brown was startled when Johnson said casually that they would run over and see them. He was even more startled by the reception Johnson received. When Johnson told McGuire, whose office they went into first, “Mac, I got to have a job for Russ here,” Mac replied simply, “I can arrange it, Lyndon.” (“That’s great,” McGuire added with a smile, “Texas helping Rhode Island.”) Then McGuire asked Johnson, “Would you like to say hello to the boss?” and they all strolled down to Friant’s office, where the reception was equally warm. (“The Chief and Friant got along fine,” Latimer remembers. “I don’t even know how they got to know each other, but anything Friant could do for the Chief, he was happy to do.”)