The Path to Power (82 page)

T
HE ADDRESSES
to which he was sending those letters were not all within the district. Just as he had, as a Congressman’s secretary, encouraged influential persons from other districts to come to him for help, now, as a Congressman, he replied to congratulations from out-of-district influentials with similar encouragement, as in his reply to the publisher of a weekly newspaper in Vernon, near the Oklahoma border, almost 300 miles away. (R. H. Nichols to Johnson: “Congratulations … I remember with gratitude your many services to our family while you were with Mr. Kleberg”; Johnson to Nichols: “Thank you … Any time I can be of some service to you I want you to call on me.”) Influential or not, moreover, anyone who wrote to Johnson was to receive a reply—as fast as it could be typed and mailed. Sitting propped up in his hospital bed, his face still gray with the shock of the operation, he dictated fifty different form letters to be sent out, so that recipients wouldn’t realize that the letter they received was a form letter.

Among the first letters he wrote were letters to officials of the National Youth Administration in Washington. He wanted them to make permanent Jesse Kellam’s temporary appointment as the NYA’s Texas director. He wrote, in addition, to Sam Rayburn, to Senator Morris Sheppard, to anyone whose intercession with the NYA hierarchy might conceivably be helpful. Keeping control of the NYA was very important to him; it was, after all, a statewide agency—and thus a potential statewide political organization. Just one day after he had become Kleberg’s secretary, Ella So Relle had seen that “he was thinking this was a stepping stone. As soon as he got a job, he thought, now that I’m in this, how can I use this job for the next step?” Nothing had changed. Johnson already knew what the next step was going to be—and for it he needed a statewide organization.

O
N ONLY ONE GROUP
of letters did he delay putting his signature. These were replies to congratulatory letters which mentioned his father.

Writing to congratulate Johnson on April 12, for example, William P. Hobby had mentioned his admiration for Sam Ealy Johnson. Although Hobby was one of the most powerful men in Texas—a former Governor who was now publisher of the
Houston Post
—and although Johnson immediately dictated a reply to his letter, he did not sign the typed reply for almost a month.

Quite a few letters mentioned Lyndon Johnson’s father, and his record in answering them is striking, considering the promptness with which all other letters were answered. Some of these letters must have recalled painful memories—E. B. House, for example, wrote, “Your father served as road foreman under me in 1925–26”—but others had a very different tone: A. R. Meador, for example, wrote that

No matter what the tone of the letter mentioning his father, the replies were delayed, sometimes for quite some time. The Meador letter, for example, was not answered for more than three weeks. (Johnson’s reply, moreover, contained no mention of his father.) Sometimes the same letter would be presented to Johnson for signature over and over, and each time would remain unsigned—as if he could not bear to sign it.

T
HE DOCTORS HAD TOLD
HIM he would be out of the hospital a week after the operation—by April 15 or 16. A send-off dinner was being planned for the new Congressman, and he told the planners to hold it on April 26, because he was very eager to be off. But he suffered a setback. The doctors told him he would have to rest, but after a day or so, he tried to resume working from his hospital bed—and this time there was a more serious setback. Its precise nature is unknown—in referring to it, Johnson aides and relatives use two adjectives: “nervous” and “exhausted.” Talking to an old friend, Edna Frazer, on the telephone on April 20, eleven days after her husband had entered the hospital, Lady Bird said that he “was not progressing as [he] should.” Writing to Mrs. Frazer the following day, L. E. Jones reported that: “Two or three times in the last day or two, the Chief has tried to do a little dictating. Every time it seemed to have a bad effect. So now the doctors
won’t let him write any letters. We all expected he would be out of the hospital by now. The delay no doubt has been caused by the excessive number of visitors.” On that day, all Johnson’s appointments were abruptly canceled—as were plans for the dinner. He remained in the hospital until April 24 or 25, and his doctors allowed him to leave then only after he and Lady Bird told them that he would be able to rest more quietly someplace out of the district, and that he would go not to Washington but to her father’s home in Karnack, to spend at least another two or three weeks resting there. On April 27, the new Congressman went down to the depot of the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad with his wife and parents, his face, still thin, very white above his dark blue suit. He had told reporters he was going to Washington, and the train did in fact go to Washington. But Johnson and Lady Bird were to get off when the train stopped in Marshall; her father would be waiting there to take them to his house, where they would rest until Johnson was better.

On the long platform, there took place a scene somewhat poignant to those who knew something of Lyndon Johnson’s relationship with his parents. He walked ahead of his father, alongside his mother; his father was so ill (he would, in fact, be dead within the year) that he could not keep up, and fell behind. Lyndon climbed aboard the train before his father arrived at the door. Sam Johnson, however, started to climb up after him, and turned up his face. Lyndon bent down, and father and son kissed.

E
VER SINCE HIS BOYHOOD
in Johnson City, Lyndon Johnson had displayed a remarkable talent for making a favorable impression on older men who possessed power—and for making it with startling rapidity. So keen-eyed a connoisseur of politicians as Ed Clark says, “I never saw anything like it. He could start talking to a man … and in five minutes he could get that man to think, ‘I like you, young fellow. I’m going to help you.’”

At San Marcos, Lyndon Johnson’s talent had worked with the president of the college. Now he was to try it on another president.

Within a few minutes after he had passed Stone in the balloting and knew he had won, he had telegraphed his friends among the wire service reporters in Washington, informing them not only of his victory, but of the manner in which he hoped they would identify the victor—for what had helped him in the Hill Country could help him in Washington, too. He got the identification he wanted. The Associated Press story flashed across the United States that Saturday night—by Ed Jamieson (who sent a copy to Johnson with the inscription: “Hope it suits your Honorable Highness”)—began, “Youthful Lyndon B. Johnson, who shouted his advocacy of President Roosevelt’s court reorganization all over the tenth Texas district, was elected today. … [He] said he considered the result a vote of confidence in Mr. Roosevelt and his program.” With news scanty on a Saturday night, the story made front pages of newspapers all across the country—including newspapers in Washington. TEXAS SUPPORTER OF COURT CHANGE APPEARS ELECTED, a
Washington Post
headline read. Encouraging news was in rather short supply at the White House just then, with Roosevelt’s court plan reeling under blows from both House and Senate; two days after Johnson’s election, the Supreme Court would, by upholding the New Deal’s Wagner Act, deliver its own body blow. To reinforce the identification, Johnson asked local supporters to telegraph it to the White House; said one telegram addressed to Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Election of Johnson to Congress …
was a high testimonial of your great leadership. … Your reorganization of the Supreme Court was made the main issue. …” This strategy produced the desired effect, and at a timely moment, for the President, who was shortly to leave for a fishing vacation in the Gulf of Mexico, had just announced that he would disembark in the Texas port of Galveston at the conclusion of his cruise, and would begin his return train trip to Washington by traveling the length of the state. On April 20, someone in the White House placed a memorandum in the President’s “Trip File”: “When we get down to Texas, we have to arrange to have the Congressman-elect, who ran on a pro–New Deal, pro–Court Reform platform, to see the President.”

Before leaving Austin for Karnack, Johnson had asked Governor Allred to do all he could to make sure that the meeting would actually take place, to make sure that it would be photographed—and to ask the President to use his influence to secure him a place, coveted by all Congressmen from farming districts, on the House Agriculture Committee. During the eleven days in which the presidential yacht
Potomac
, escorted by Navy destroyers, cruised off the Texas coast, where the big silver tarpon were running, it touched in at Port Aransas for an hour, and Allred went aboard to arrange details of the Galveston reception. After meeting with Roosevelt, he wrote to Johnson, who was recuperating at Karnack, that the President “will be very happy indeed to see you when he lands at Galveston. … He was intensely interested in the details of your campaign, and himself brought up the committee matter which you and I discussed. I suggested to him that you all should have your picture made together next week, and this was entirely agreeable.” (The Governor, fond of Johnson, had been disturbed by his haggard condition when he visited him after the campaign; he suggested now that “it might be well for you to come on down” two days early, “and spend Saturday and Sunday there resting.”) And when, on May 11, the
Potomac
and its escorting destroyers, their crews lining the rails in dress whites, stood into Galveston Bay and a gangplank was run down from her deck to the pier, Johnson, still very thin, but with a white oleander (Galveston’s symbol) cheerful in his lapel, was standing at its foot, along with the Governor and a beribboned Major General from nearby Fort Crockett, in a three-man group at the head of the assembled dignitaries.

They waited almost an hour. Then there was a stir on deck, and sideboys began their shrill piping, and suddenly at the top of the gangplank, just a few feet away, was the massive head, the heavy, confidently tilted jaw, the broad smile that Lyndon Johnson had seen only in newsreels or newspaper photographs or, during a speech, from a distant gallery—the face, bronzed by the Gulf sun, of the man whose banner he had carried for forty days. The gangplank was narrow enough so the President could rest his weight on both handrails at once, and he swung himself down it. When his foot hit the dock, cannon roared in salute from Fort Crockett across the bay, a drum major’s baton flashed in the downbeat to “Hail to the Chief,”
Governor Allred said, “Mr. President, I’d like to present our new Congressman,” and Franklin Roosevelt shook Lyndon Johnson’s hand.

T
HE PHOTOGRAPH SESSION
was all Johnson could have desired: the President stood patiently as the cameras clicked, smiling broadly as his big bronzed right hand clutched Johnson’s (Roosevelt’s body concealed his left hand, which was clutching the gangplank railing for support; the next day, a typical newspaper report said, “The President … chuckled happily as he went unassisted down the gangplank”). Johnson had not been assigned to ride with Allred and Galveston Mayor Adrian F. Levy in the President’s open touring car; he rode in one of the trailing cars assigned to lesser dignitaries as the presidential motorcade, thunderous cheers rolling behind it, wound through streets packed with the largest crowds in Galveston’s history to a specially constructed ramp, up which the President’s car was driven so that he could speak while sitting in it. (Introducing him, the Mayor said, “As we were driving along, I told our President that it must be a wonderful thing for a man to know that he is so universally loved. … Just as the time of Pericles was called the Golden Age of Athens, so President Roosevelt’s time will be called the Golden Age of Democracy.”) Johnson was, however, on the open rear platform of the President’s special train as, at ten a.m., it pulled out of the Galveston station with Roosevelt standing on the platform smiling and waving—with his other hand clutching the rail. (There were, in fact, two hands on that rail; the other one was Johnson’s. Separated from the President by Allred, he reduced the distance between himself and Roosevelt—and thereby kept himself from being cropped out of newspaper photographs—by a subtle little maneuver. The President, beyond Allred, was on his right. Johnson had been holding his white Stetson in his right hand, the hand closest to the President; as photographers began shooting, he shifted the Stetson to his left hand, placed his right hand on the rail, and slid it a few inches toward the President, so that he could shift his body slightly in front of Allred without blatantly leaning into the picture.) And he, together with Allred, had been invited to ride in the President’s private railroad car; when the President left the platform and went inside, the three men, together with White House aides Marvin McIntyre and Edwin M. (“Pa”) Watson, chatted throughout the three-hour trip to College Station, where the President was to review 3,000 khaki-clad ROTC cadets from Texas Agricultural and Mining College.

Only one specific detail of that conversation is known: after his election, Johnson had visited General Burleson to thank him for his support; the old man had given Johnson part of a brown paper bag on which, after Johnson’s first visit, he had jotted down a predicted order of the finish in the congressional race, with Johnson’s name in first place. President Roosevelt, of course, had been Assistant Secretary of the Navy in the Wilson
administration during the years in which Burleson had been Postmaster General in that same administration; if Roosevelt did not know Burleson, he knew who he was, and Johnson showed him the wrinkled piece of brown paper. The conversation’s other particulars are not known (although back in Washington, the President would talk about the young man who had defied every entrenched political leader in his district to run—alone among eight candidates—in support of the court-reform bill, and who was, incidentally, interested in the Navy, as he had himself been as a young man). But the results of the conversation are known. Although Johnson had expected to leave the train at College Station, Roosevelt invited him to stay aboard all the way to Fort Worth, more than 200 miles away. When the train pulled into that North Texas city at nine p.m., the newly elected Congressman had spent an entire day with the President. Before they parted company, the President said that the Agriculture Committee seat was Johnson’s if he wanted it, but that he would suggest the Naval Affairs Committee instead; he liked to see a young man like Johnson taking an interest in that field; powerful as Naval Affairs was now, he said, world trends might well make it more powerful still. When Johnson accepted his suggestion, Roosevelt was delighted and said he would personally see to the matter as soon as he got back to Washington. And he told Johnson that if he needed help in any other matters, he should call “Tommy”—and, scribbling “Tommy’s” telephone number on a piece of paper, he handed it to Johnson.

“Tommy” was, of course, “Tommy the Cork,” Thomas G. Corcoran, thirty-six, the stocky, ebullient, accordion-playing political manipulator who was at that moment, as one of the President’s key strategists in the Supreme Court fight, at the very peak of his power and influence.

Roosevelt, traveling by special train, reached Washington before Johnson. He telephoned Tommy himself. As Corcoran recalls the President’s words: “He said, ‘I’ve just met the most remarkable young man. Now I like this boy, and you’re going to help him with anything you can.’”

And he helped him himself. On one of Johnson’s first days on the floor of Congress—the floor on which, as a congressional secretary, he had never been permitted to step—Representative Fred M. Vinson of Kentucky, a Democratic power on the Ways and Means Committee, whose Democratic members determined committee assignments, approached him and said, “Young man, I’m indebted to you for a good dinner and an excellent conversation.” He explained that he had been invited to the White House for dinner, and, while “the President was, as always, a most delightful host, I kept wondering just what it was he wanted from me. I knew it was something. Finally he said casually—oh, very casually—‘Fred, there’s a fine young man just come to the House. Fred, you know that fellow Lyndon Johnson? I think he would be a great help on Naval Affairs.’”

The President also helped Johnson along avenues less formal than a congressional committee assignment (which, of course, Johnson received)
but, to a young politician, more important. He talked about him to men much more powerful than Tommy the Cork, or even Fred Vinson—to Harold L. Ickes of PWA and Harry L. Hopkins of WPA; talked about this “remarkable young man,” ordered them to meet him, and to help him. A young man from the Southwest would need connections in New York, the President said to Hopkins, who had excellent New York connections, including not only those who sprang from the same social work background he did, but Edwin Weisl, a New York political financier.

Corcoran, even before he met the young man, had been impressed by the speed with which he had won the President’s favor. “That was all it took—one train ride,” he says. The achievement earned Johnson Corcoran’s highest accolade: whoever the young man was, he said, he must be “an operator.” Now, meeting him, and watching him operate on Ickes and Hopkins, he was even more impressed. Lyndon Johnson’s college classmates had thought that his talent with older men was nothing more than flattery, “kowtowing, suck-assing, brown-nosing” so blatant that “words won’t come to describe it,” but Corcoran, a King of Flatterers himself, knew it was much more. He knew a master of the art when he saw one. “He [Johnson] was smiling and deferential, but, hell, lots of guys can be smiling and deferential,” he says. “Lyndon had one of the most incredible capacities for dealing with older men. I never saw anything like it. He could follow someone’s mind around, and get where it was going before the other fellow knew where it was going. I saw him talk to an older man, and the minute he changed subjects, Lyndon was there ahead of him, and saying what he wanted to hear—before he knew what he wanted to hear.”

Fanning out from Ickes and Hopkins and Corcoran, branching down from the White House, was a network of New Deal insiders, men of immense power and influence. Soon, all along the hidden pathways of Washington power, a new name was flashing, sent out so rapidly that sometimes it was garbled in transmission—but sent out from the highest sources. Eliot Janeway, a young political economist from New York who had already become part of this network, was lunching with Ickes in Washington one day when he heard it for the first time. “Ickes told me Roosevelt had said he was frustrated about that boy, that if he hadn’t gone to Harvard, that’s the kind of uninhibited young pro he’d like to be—that in the next generation the balance of power would shift south and west, and this boy could well be the first Southern President.” Ickes said he had met him, and Janeway should, too. “You’ll like him.” After lunch, Janeway says, “I took the Congressional back to New York.” And no sooner had he arrived home than the telephone rang. Ed Weisl was calling to say, “I just had a funny kind of a call from Harry [Hopkins]. Did you ever hear of some kid in Congress named Lydie Johnson?”