The Path to Power (83 page)

B
ELOW HOPKINS AND ICKES
, field marshals of the New Deal, below Ben Cohen, one of its principal theoreticians, and Tommy Corcoran, for a time not only its principal recruiting officer but one of its principal strategists, were the lieutenants of the New Deal—the able young liberals, fired with a fervent idealism, who had poured into Washington from all over the United States to enlist in the great crusade. These men, not Cabinet-level Secretaries or even Undersecretaries but their subordinates, possessed no independent power of their own—no official title of significance, no White House access, no discretion over the distribution of funds—but they could be important to a Congressman. “What is a government?” Corcoran once asked. “It’s not just the top man or the top ten men. A government is the top one hundred or two hundred men. What really makes the difference is what happens down the line before—and after—the big decisions are taken.” Having met the field marshals and taken them into camp, Johnson repeated his triumph with the lieutenants.

He concentrated his efforts on a particular handful of them.

One link between these men was the issue of public power. They were all veterans of the fight for either the crucial Public Utilities Holding Company Act of 1935 (the Rayburn-Fletcher Act) or of the subsequent battles to administer the Act, or of the battles to build the huge dams which, by creating new hydroelectric power, would destroy the utilities’ monopoly. A dam—-the Marshall Ford Dam—was the first problem Johnson had to confront when he got to Congress, and it was during his efforts to solve this problem that he met and dealt with most of these young lieutenants.

Another link was intellect. The hundred or two hundred key young New Dealers included many brilliant men. Johnson’s handful was among the most brilliant. Their leaders were the drafters of the keystone act, Corcoran and Cohen—or, to be more precise, Corcoran, for the kindly, gentle Cohen, who, a friend wrote, “looks and talks like a Dickens portrait of an absent-minded professor,” was too shy and dreamy to be a leader; his genius was the genius of the lone and pure intellect. Corcoran’s performance at Harvard Law had so impressed Felix Frankfurter that he gave him the best job then at his command: the secretaryship to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. But even so, men who knew them well had learned that Corcoran’s mind was not the equal of his silent partner’s; after one meeting at which Corcoran did almost all the talking, Sam Rayburn confided to a friend: “Cohen’s the brains.”

The handful included one of Corcoran’s successors as Holmes’ secretary, James H. Rowe, a tall, studious, bespectacled young attorney (in 1937, twenty-eight years old, the same age as Lyndon Johnson) whose path to Washington had led from Butte, Montana, through Harvard University and Harvard Law School. While serving as one of several low-level assistants who were helping Corcoran and Cohen in the drafting of the
Holding Company Act and in defense of the PWA against power company lawsuits, Rowe had caught Corcoran’s eye, and Corcoran had placed him in a low-level White House job—secretary to the President’s son James—where he would shortly catch the President’s eye.

This handful of men included William O. Douglas, thirty-eight, a sandy-haired former Yale Law School professor who as an SEC Commissioner was a key figure in the administration of the Holding Company Act (“The Holding Company in the utilities field had become a monster,” he was to write), and it included the first man Douglas had brought to Washington to assist him, a short, slight, silent young Jew from Memphis with olive skin, large, liquid eyes—and, another Yale professor says, “the most brilliant legal mind ever to come out of the Yale Law School”: twenty-six-year-old Abe Fortas. It included Janeway, at twenty-four a Washington-based business writer for
Time, Life
and
Fortune
magazines, and twenty-seven-year-old Arthur E. Goldschmidt, known as “Tex” because he came from San Antonio, who had been brought to Washington after graduating from Columbia University, and who worked under Harry Hopkins. With the exception of Janeway, these men—Corcoran, Cohen, Douglas, Rowe, Fortas, Goldschmidt—often saw each other at work; for a time, in fact, three of them—Cohen, Fortas and Goldschmidt—occupied adjoining offices in the suite used by the Division of Public Power on the sixth floor of the Department of the Interior. And they saw each other after work—Corcoran and Cohen shared an apartment and the younger men—Rowe, Fortas and Goldschmidt—all lived within a block or two of each other in small, rented houses in the Georgetown section of Washington that had until recently been a Negro slum but was rapidly being taken over and refurbished by young white New Dealers. “We were a kind of a group,” Goldschmidt says. “We were not organized. But we knew each other, and we saw a lot of each other.”

And they began to see a lot of Lyndon Johnson.

He met them in the course of his work for the Marshall Ford Dam. He would telephone and ask them to lunch. He would invite them for Sunday afternoon cocktails at the small, one-bedroom apartment he and Lady Bird had rented in the Kennedy-Warren Apartment House on Connecticut Avenue.

And soon they were inviting him back. The little group would often get together for informal dinner parties or for back-yard cookouts, and Lyndon and Lady Bird became regulars at them.

He cultivated them. He was—in the beginning, at least—deferential, attentive to their opinions. He listened with what seemed like awe as Tommy Corcoran talked about how the lights had burned all night in the Treasury Department when, back in 1933, they had been trying to work out a plan to save the banks. He gave them small presents—a locket for a baby daughter, for example—small but appreciated; “At that time we were not
so used to getting presents,” Jim Rowe says. “Though you have warned me about pestering you with mash notes,” Elizabeth Rowe wrote him, “I can’t allow anything as lovely as your little locket to go unnoticed. Really, you do spoil our daughter. … I can’t think of anything nicer to wish for my daughter than that you would be an honorary uncle. So … from now you shall be Uncle Lyndon.” Small and large—the largest being Texas turkeys that, beginning in 1937, were hand-delivered by Johnson’s secretaries every Christmas to all the members of this group; when she received her first turkey, Mrs. Rowe was astonished by its size; “I had never seen such a big turkey,” she recalls. “I didn’t have anything big enough to cook it in.” Telephoning Johnson to thank him, she said, “You must have had a turkey crossed with a beef.” When they were promoted, they received his enthusiastic congratulations. Johnson wrote Rowe when he was made one of President Roosevelt’s six administrative assistants, “My dear Jimmie: If I owned a big truck such as the movers use and get in front of me with when I’m in a hurry to go places, I couldn’t send you more congratulations on your elevation today than you will find borne by this note. I rejoice with you. And I rejoice with our President that he has such an able pair of shoulders as yours and such a fine mind as you to relieve him of some of the crushing load. …”

He helped them. On the day, May 13, on which he had arrived in Washington as a newly elected Congressman, the first office he had visited had been that of the newly elected Majority Leader, and in that office he stooped down and kissed a bald head, and the grim face beneath it had broken into a smile. Sam Rayburn was very glad to see Lyndon Johnson back in Washington. When Johnson asked him to stand beside him at his swearing-in in the well of the House, as his sponsor, he was very touched. The furniture in the Johnsons’ apartment was a little worn from use by previous occupants, but, starting on the very next Sunday, their apartment was frequently adorned with the short, broad figure that was, in the catalog of Washington power, a more prized ornament than ever. And Rayburn returned the hospitality in a very significant manner. One of his first acts after his election as Leader had been to reinstitute Jack Garner’s “Board of Education,” and each day after the House had adjourned, a handful of Congressmen met in a room on the ground floor of the Capitol to “strike a blow for liberty” with a late-afternoon drink. The men invited to this hideaway—which was furnished only with dark leather easy chairs, a long, dark leather sofa, a fireplace, a desk at which Rayburn presided, and a picture of Robert E. Lee—were almost all leaders of the House; the single exception was Wright Patman, who possessed a qualification that was, in Rayburn’s eyes, more important than seniority: he had been one of the little band of Populists in the Texas Legislature who never sold out. One day, Rayburn invited Johnson down for a drink after the session. Thereafter, leaving the floor at the end of the day, the Leader would frequently growl to Johnson: “Come
on down.” Behind the hideaway’s tall, narrow door, the twenty-eight-year-old freshman was drinking with Speaker Bankhead, and Minority Whip McCormack, and Rules Committee Chairman Sabath, and as a result he knew quite a bit about the inner workings of the House. The young New Dealers from the White House end of Pennsylvania Avenue were in constant need of information about the Capitol Hill end, about the chances of passage of some bill vital to their agency, about the status of the bill: where, precisely, it was stalled—in committee or subcommittee or the bill-drafters’ offices—and why, and who could get it unstalled. Their bosses were constantly asking them to find out some piece of information about Congress.

Obtaining such information was no trouble for Corcoran, who could get it through the White House liaison men (in some matters,
he
was the liaison man), or for SEC Commissioner Douglas. But the more junior Rowe and Fortas and Goldschmidt had to get the information themselves, and hard information—not rumor but fact—was difficult to obtain from the closed, confused world of Capitol Hill. But Johnson, thanks to his attendance in Rayburn’s hideaway, often had the information. Moreover, they had seen with their own eyes that he knew Rayburn well; the Leader, with his immense power and fearsome mien, was an unapproachable figure to them. Loving the company of men young enough to be his sons, Rayburn had begun, after he had spent enough time with Corcoran and Cohen so that he could relax a little with them, to invite them occasionally—perhaps once every six weeks or two months—to his little apartment for a Sunday stag breakfast, which he would cook with a big apron tied around his chest. Even on such social occasions, however, the Leader’s reserve never melted more than slightly; none of the young men ever felt close enough to him to ask the questions they needed to ask. But these young men saw—with the same amazement with which Lyndon Johnson’s San Marcos classmates had watched him pat the feared Prexy Evans on the back—Lyndon Johnson lean over and kiss the Leader’s bald pate. They knew that if Johnson didn’t himself have the information they needed, he could get it from Rayburn. On minor matters, he might even, on their behalf, ask the Leader not just for information but for assistance. Furthermore, he was learning his way very quickly through the maze that most Congressmen never master. “He learned the levers in Congress very fast,” Rowe says. And he was willing to place this knowledge at the service of this small group of men. “I would call and say, ‘How do I handle this?’” Rowe says. “He would say, ‘I’ll call you right back.’ And he would call back and say, ‘This is the fellow you ought to talk to.’” Says Fortas: “He was close to Rayburn, and an ever-widening coterie of friends on the Hill, and he helped us. He ran errands for us on the Hill. He was very useful to us.”

And he made them like him.

“At parties, he was
fun
,” Elizabeth Rowe says. “That’s what no one understands about Lyndon Johnson—that he was
fun
.”

He was, in fact, the life of these parties. Quick wits flashed at them, and none flashed quicker than his. “When I think of the old Lyndon, I think of old-fashioned joshing, kidding around,” Goldschmidt’s wife Elizabeth Wickenden says. “The small talk was great,” Jim Rowe says. “He always had a good Texas story that was in point.” He knew three worlds—the world of Congress, about which they knew little, and two worlds about which they knew nothing: the world of Texas politics, and the world of the Texas Hill Country, the world from which he had come. He spoke to them about those worlds—with an eloquence they never forgot, his voice now soft and confiding, now booming—the voice of a natural storyteller. He was always ready with the latest inside stories about Congress, stories on which they hung because such information was important to them, but also because in the telling he mimicked accurately and hilariously the characters he was talking about; pacing back and forth, a tall, gangling figure in those small living rooms, he filled those rooms with drama.

“His greatest stories,” Mrs. Rowe says, and the rest of the group agrees, “would be about Texas.” He told them about political figures of whom they had hardly heard—Ma and Pa Ferguson, Big Jim Hogg, Jimmy Allred—but whom he painted in colors so vivid that they wanted to hear more. And when he talked about the Hill Country, “then,” Mrs. Rowe says, “he could be very eloquent indeed.” He talked about the days of the cattle drives, and about the poverty of the people. Bill Douglas, a great talker himself, frequently talked about soil conservation; even Douglas’ stories paled before tales of the rampages of the Pedernales or the Lower Colorado. And when Johnson was talking of the poverty of the Hill Country—and about what New Deal programs meant there—then, even Tommy Corcoran, customarily the life of every party himself with his Irish chatter and his accordion, might stop talking for a while.

And it wasn’t just his stories that made them like him. He was a great player of practical jokes. On the morning after a cookout at the Fortases’ at which the Johnsons and George R. Brown of Brown & Root had been guests—and at which Brown had had a bit to drink—a bouquet of flowers from Brown arrived for Carole Fortas, with the note: “Sorry if I misbehaved.” Since he hadn’t, the Fortases were puzzled. When Fortas asked Johnson what Brown meant, Johnson said that the next morning he had told Brown, whose memory of the evening was hazy, that he had dropped a steak, liberally covered with Worcestershire sauce, on the Fortases’ living-room rug.