The Path to Power (70 page)

The image he cultivated so carefully had other aspects as well. He was fond of saying, “I’m only a country boy,” and of reminding new acquaintances that he was from a small town, Seguin. Even other Texans who used that camouflage were startled by the thickness with which Wirtz applied it. When, in Washington, he was asked where Seguin was located, he would reply, “Oh, it’s a fur piece from Austin.” Says one Texan, himself a “professional country boy,” who heard that reply in Washington: “‘A fur piece’—my God, they weren’t even saying that in
Texas
any more!” The camouflage was used in courthouses, where Wirtz seemed the typical country lawyer, plodding and slow in his presentations. Even his signature was slow and deliberate, “the most deliberate thing I ever saw,” Hopkins says. Signing a letter—after taking a very long time reading it—he did so as if reluctant to put his name to it, his hand tracing out the A and J in big, painfully slow circles.

But those who knew Alvin Wirtz well, knew better. Welly Hopkins was his first protégé—the man Wirtz chose to succeed him in the Senate. “Slow in his movements, slow in his speech, but he had a mind as quick as chain lightning,” Hopkins says. “I’ll never forget the first time I saw [Alvin Wirtz] in a courtroom. [It was] when I was still down in Gonzales … in the old Gonzales courtroom. He and the opposition lawyer” were arguing “in front of the Judge, and each would talk in turn, and suddenly I realized that he [Wirtz] was not only thinking even with him, but that he was ahead of him—that he was three steps ahead of him, all the time.” Some legislative observers came to the same realization. “On the Senate floor,” says one, “you did not want to be opposing Senator Wirtz in a thinking match.”

And it was not on the floor—not in the open—that Wirtz was most dangerous. Fighting for passage of bills to regulate the growing oil industry and to curb patronage in state bureaucracy by instituting civil service
requirements, a liberal Governor, Dan Moody, called five special sessions of the Legislature in 1929, only to see his program defeated all five times. Moody and his aides were not even aware that Wirtz was active in the fight; says an Austin observer: “They never knew until years later that it was Wirtz who had beaten them every time.” As a lobbyist—for the same reactionary oil interests he had been representing unofficially as a legislator—his technique was as soft as his drawl. A threat or an offer was never direct. The most he might say to a legislator was, “I just want you to know that I have been employed by a group to help pass this bill. There is a great deal of interest in seeing that it is passed. I hope you’ll vote the courage of your convictions.” But a legislator who didn’t take the hint would find arrayed against him the power not only of the most politically active oil company in Texas, Humble Oil & Refining (known respectfully in Austin as “the ’Umble”) but of Humble’s chief competitor, the Magnolia Petroleum Company (“the Magnolia”)—for, competitors though they were, Wirtz represented both of them. And in the next legislative redistricting, legislators who had not taken his hint often found themselves redistricted out of the Legislature; they went to their graves never knowing it was Wirtz who had maneuvered them out of their seats. Politics in Austin was as loud and flamboyant a business as it had ever been, but among those few men familiar with the innermost corridors of power in the Capitol there was growing awareness that slipping along those corridors was a silent, smiling figure. Ed Clark, for example, saw that it was not on Wirtz’s back porch but in the dimly lit library behind it that he did his real work—silent and alone. Clark, who was to work closely with Wirtz for years, says, “What he wanted was P-O-W-E-R—power over other men. He wanted power, but he didn’t want to get it by running for office. He liked to sit quietly, smoke a cigar. He would sit and work in his library, and plan and scheme, and usually he would get somebody out in front of him so that nobody knew it was Alvin Wirtz who was doing it. He would sit and scheme in the dark. He wasn’t an outgoing person. But he was the kind of person who didn’t want to lose any fights. And he didn’t lose many.”

Stealth was his style. Ignoring the assistance of secretaries at the law firm of Powell, Wirtz, Rauhut & Gideon (“If you knew Alvin Wirtz,” says another attorney, “you would know that his name would never come first”), he wrote many letters in longhand—because he didn’t want even a secretary to know what was in them. Nor did he want his partners to know. The only partner in whom he even occasionally confided was the junior, and very young, Sim Gideon; Wirtz’s letters to Gideon were often addressed to his home rather than the office because, as he wrote in one letter: “I don’t want this in the firm’s files.” Since wire-tapping was not yet a widespread practice, Wirtz transacted as much business as possible over the telephone; “Senator didn’t want anything on paper that didn’t have to be,” Gideon explains.

Senator’s caution was understandable in light of what
was
on paper. As
his files show, Alvin Wirtz was the kind of lawyer who would slip into a contract a sentence—a sentence that changed the contract’s meaning—in the hope that the opposing lawyer would not notice it. (“My dear Lyndon,” he would later write about one such maneuver, after he had sent off the contract to the unsuspecting attorney—an attorney who thought Wirtz was his friend—“I have not called his attention to the fact, but at the end of Article XI is a sentence” which alters the contract’s import; with the exception of that sentence, he said, the contract “is the same” as the contract we agreed upon, so he will sign it, “so long as he is not advised” of the alteration.) A San Antonio attorney who often watched him in action calls him “a conniver—a conniver like I never saw before or since. Sharp, cunning.” Says another attorney: “He would gut you if he could. But you would probably never know he did it. I mean, that was a man who would do
anything
—and he would still be smiling when he slipped in the knife.”

W
ANTING POWER
, power over other men, Wirtz had early seen dams as the way to get it.

The giant utilities—Texas Power & Light, Dallas Power & Light, San Antonio Gas—that controlled the generation of hydroelectric power in Texas were, in those days when the oil industry was still a relative infant, a major political power in Texas; not only did they make use of their revenues to purchase and control politicians, but in an era in which jobs as much as cash were the currency of politics, they were the state’s largest employers, with thousands of jobs to distribute. These utilities, with their lawyers and lobbyists, were a tight, closed group into which Wirtz had no chance of breaking. But during the 1920’s, a new player entered the field, and Wirtz hastened to attach himself to his team. He was Samuel Insull of Chicago, whose gigantic holding companies already extended from Maine to Florida. Wirtz made himself Insull’s man in Texas. The state’s rivers were under tight state control, and the Chicagoan learned that the Senator from Seguin was the man to see when permits were needed from the State Board of Water Engineers. After he was retained, Wirtz proved useful in many other ways as well. When farmers along the Guadalupe River near Seguin, where an Insull-backed firm from Chicago was building six small dams for irrigation purchases, stubbornly refused to part with their land, Wirtz’s influence with the Legislature procured for the Insull interests the right of eminent domain usually reserved for government. The Chicagoans learned that Wirtz’s fee—-exorbitant as it was; Wirtz was greedy for money as well as power—saved them money in the long run. When the farmers’ land was condemned—by Wirtz-controlled county appraisal boards—the prices set were very low. And when the farmers, believing they had been cheated out of their land, appealed to the courts, they found that Wirtz had considerable influence with courts as well.

Wirtz’s main thrust for power came not along the Guadalupe but along the Lower Colorado. The dam Insull had begun building there (in isolated Burnet County in the Hill Country)—named the George W. Hamilton Dam after one of Insull’s engineers—was a huge dam, one of the largest in the world, and designed not for irrigation but for the generation of hydroelectric power on a vast scale. In its construction alone some 1,500 men would be employed, and Wirtz was given a say in the distribution of some of these jobs. As attorney for the enterprise, moreover, he expected a considerable voice in the utility’s affairs after the dam was completed. The power he wanted seemed within his grasp.

In 1932, however, with the Hamilton Dam half completed, the Insull empire collapsed, and because of the Depression, no alternative method could be found to finance the project. In 1934, with the construction having been stopped for two years, the dam that had been Alvin Wirtz’s dream of empire was still only half completed, its steel skeleton glinting dully in the sun.

There had been another development, moreover. Feeling against Wirtz was running very high among the Guadalupe River farmers who felt they had been cheated by a law sponsored by their own State Senator. On February 26, 1934, Tom Hollamon, Sr., a sixty-seven-year-old farmer who had once been a Texas Ranger, strode into Wirtz’s office, where he was meeting with Insull representatives, and began shooting; before he could be disarmed, one Chicago financier was dead. Hollamon was arrested for murder, but the Hollamon clan was a large one, and the Hollamons were not the only farmers enraged at the Insull firm, and at Wirtz. His former constituents told him to get out of Seguin and never come back; according to an attorney familiar with the case, the warning was issued in the classic Texas phrase: Wirtz was told, “Don’t let the sun set on you in Seguin.” Senator took the advice—he “was just run out of town,” this attorney says—and removed to Austin.

But if for a while his dream seemed dead, the New Deal gave him a chance to revive it—bigger than ever.

Under the $3.3 billion Emergency Relief Appropriation Act passed during the Hundred Days, a newly formed Public Works Administration (PWA) was empowered to give loans and grants to self-supporting enterprises such as public authorities. The Texas Legislature was basically conservative and, moreover, dominated by public utilities determined to keep their monopoly on hydroelectric power and to resist federal intrusion into the field. Detailing Wirtz’s maneuvers to persuade the Legislature to create a public authority—the Lower Colorado River Authority—to take over the Hamilton Dam and receive a grant from the PWA to complete its construction would require a book in itself (no such work exists). But because only in its later stages would the maneuvering involve Lyndon Johnson, the detailing will not be done here. In brief, the maneuvering was based on the
techniques—indirection, deceit, secrecy—of which Wirtz was by now a master: at its heart was the lulling of a suspicious Legislature into the belief that the authority’s purpose was not power production at all, but flood control. In 1934, the Legislature passed the bill, and in 1935, Wirtz, who had been appointed LCRA counsel, went to Washington to arrange PWA financing; it was on one of these trips that he had the “love fest” with Dick Kleberg’s young secretary, by whom he was “very much impressed” because he “knew Washington” and “could get you in to any place.” When problems arose in Washington, Wirtz had another maneuver ready. The chairman of the House Appropriations Committee was a Texas Congressman, James P. (“Buck”) Buchanan. Buchanan’s district did not include the Lower Colorado, or Burnet County, the site of the half-completed dam, but Wirtz remedied that defect. A redrawing of congressional districts by the Texas Legislature was even then under way; when it was completed, the boundaries of Buchanan’s district had been changed to include Burnet County, and the dam. Another change took place: the LCRA changed the name of the dam. No longer was it the George W. Hamilton Dam. Now it was the James P. Buchanan Dam. Buchanan was touched; the PWA at first resisted giving a grant to finish the dam, but the Appropriations Committee did, after all, have a not inconsiderable say over Roosevelt’s program; and when Buchanan went to confer with the President about several sticky items, during the last week of June, 1936, he mentioned that he had recently had a birthday and—so he later related to Wirtz and LCRA board member Thomas C. Ferguson (Ferguson is the source of this story)—told Roosevelt: “Mr. President, I want a birthday present.” “What do you want, Buck?” Roosevelt is said to have replied. “My dam,” Buchanan is said to have answered. “Well then, I guess we’d better give it to you, Buck,” the President is said to have replied; picking up the telephone, he gave Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes the necessary order. Whether or not this blunt conversation ever took place, the Order was, indeed, given. The problem posed by the utter unsuitability of the Buchanan Dam for flood control was solved by expanding the Lower Colorado River Project. Now it would be not just one big dam, but two
*
The second dam, twenty-one miles downstream from the Buchanan, was the Marshall Ford Dam, to be built, at a cost of $10,000,000, not by the PWA, but under a grant from the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation. Marshall Ford would be much bigger even than Buchanan, and the focus was shifted to it—particularly Wirtz’s focus. The contractor who was selected to build it, and who began work in September, 1936, under an initial $5 million appropriation, was Brown & Root, Inc.—which happened to be one of Wirtz’s clients.

Since Alvin Wirtz was counsel for both the LCRA and Brown & Root
(and for other clients with interests in the LCRA development) and was court-appointed receiver for the Insull interests, he was collecting legal fees from many sides. He set his schedule of fees high; Ickes considered the ones the PWA had to pay exorbitant, and from that source alone Wirtz received $85,000, an immense fee for a Texas lawyer in those days. But the Marshall Ford Dam represented much more than fees to Wirtz. More than 2,000 men would be employed on that dam, and he would have a voice in their selection. When the dam, or, rather, both dams, together with others already on the drawing boards, were completed and producing electricity—when, in other words, the LCRA had become a gigantic utility—he would, as its counsel, have, he was certain, the dominant voice in its operation. It would provide him not only with money but with power on a big scale.