The Path to Power (99 page)

But some of them began to catch on. Liberals found it was useless to ask him to speak in support of a bill in which they were interested. Conservatives found it impossible to persuade him to speak in support of
their
legislation. The judgment implied in Izac’s statement that Johnson was “very, very silent” on the floor came to be a widespread judgment among Johnson’s colleagues. Pragmatism was of course not unknown on Capitol Hill; for many Congressmen it was a way of life—caution was only common sense. But, in the opinion of more and more of his fellows, Lyndon Johnson’s pragmatism and caution went beyond the norm: colleagues committed to causes began to regard him with something akin to scorn.

And then, of course, there was the aspect of his personality that had been so noticeable since his boyhood on the vacant lots of Johnson City, where, if he couldn’t pitch, he would take his ball and go home—the quality which led one Johnson City companion to say, “If he couldn’t lead, he didn’t care much about playing.” That aspect had been noticeable in Washington, too. “He couldn’t stand not being somebody—just could not
stand
it,” Estelle Harbin had said. Lyndon Johnson could not endure being only one of a crowd; he needed—with a compelling need—to lead, and not merely to lead but to dominate, to bend others to his will.

At cocktail parties, he could hold the stage when the other guests were young New Dealers, and even for a time, by the force of his personality, when the guests included older men with more power. But in power-obsessed Washington, when older, more powerful men were present, he couldn’t hold the stage for long. And on Capitol Hill, where the pecking order was so clearly and firmly established, and he was near the bottom, he was able to hold attention much less. His stories, vivid though they were, commanded much less attention in a congressional cloakroom than in a Georgetown living room.

He wanted to give advice. It was good advice—he had a rare talent not only for politics but for organization, and Congressmen were continually searching for ways to improve the organization of their offices, a skill of which he was the master. But few of his colleagues wanted advice from a junior colleague. He wanted to give lectures—pontificating in the cloakroom or back of the rail as he had pontificated in the Dodge Hotel basement. But his fellow Congressmen resented his dogmatic, overbearing tone at least as strongly as his fellow congressional secretaries had resented it. His skills at manipulating men were useless without at least a modicum of power to back them up, and he possessed no power at all. Says James Van Zandt of Pennsylvania: “When he wanted something, he really went after it. He would say: ‘Now, Goddammit, Jimmy, I helped you on this, and I want you to help me on this.’” And, Van Zandt adds, “Johnson kept asking for favors, and he simply didn’t have that many to give in return.” He tried too hard—much too hard—to trade on what minor “help” he had given. “You can do those things once or twice,” Van Zandt says. “He did them too frequently. People would get irritated.”

The pattern which had emerged in the Little Congress (and, before that, at San Marcos) was repeated in the Big Congress. The older men to whom he was so deferential were fond of Lyndon Johnson. Among his contemporaries, those whom he needed and to whom he was also deferential—Rowe and Corcoran, for example—were also fond of him. Another few—very few—of his contemporaries in Congress were fond of him, most of them unassertive men such as Poage and Van Zandt. But the feeling of others was quite different. Says O. C. Fisher, whose Texas district adjoined Johnson’s Tenth: “He had a way of getting along with the leaders, and he didn’t bother much with the small fry. And let me tell you, the small fry didn’t mind. They didn’t want much to do with him, either.” Even Van Zandt, one of his admirers, says: “People were critical of him because he was too ambitious, too forceful, too pushy. Some people didn’t like him.” As he walked through the House Dining Room, the resentment that followed him did not come only from members of the Texas delegation. Says Lucas: “Guys [from other states] would come [in] and sit down” at a table near where Johnson was sitting; they would greet all their fellow members nearby, except him. “And he would get up and say, ‘Well, Joe, why in hell didn’t you speak to me?’ Well, they hadn’t spoken to him because they didn’t like him. They wouldn’t put up with him.” The situation was summed up in a symbolic gesture—a shrinking away. Lyndon Johnson still practiced his habit of grasping a man’s lapel with one hand and putting his other arm around the man’s shoulders, holding him close while staring into his eyes and talking directly into his face. Some of his fellow Congressmen didn’t mind him doing this, even liked having him do it. Recalls Van Zandt: “He would put his hand on my shoulder and say, ‘Now, look, Jimmy …’ I liked him a lot. You always felt relaxed in his presence.” But
others—many others—did mind. They would draw back from his hand, shrug away from his arm. And sometimes, if he didn’t take the hint, they would get angry. Once he took a Congressman’s lapel in his hand, and the Congressman knocked his hand away. Without power to back it up, his manner of dealing with his colleagues earned him not the power he craved, but only unpopularity.

His role on the Naval Affairs Committee could hardly have added to his enjoyment of life in Congress. He and Warren Magnuson, a dashing bachelor who sat in the next chair in the committee’s lower horseshoe, had, according to one of Carl Vinson’s aides, discovered “how to play up to” the chairman by telling him “stories”—stories with a sexual tinge: “humorous dirty jokes and the details of amorous escapades, which he enjoyed with real vicarious pleasure.” Devoted to his invalid wife, Vinson, Magnuson says, “went home early each afternoon to take care of his wife, and he never invited anyone to visit him. … He was a recluse.” But the two young Congressmen began dropping in on him, telling him their “stories,” and, Magnuson says, “Before long we were in solidly with the Admiral.” Fond though he may have been of them, however, they were still only ensigns on a very tight ship—as Johnson was constantly, and painfully, being reminded. Occasionally, during the questioning of a witness, he would essay a small witticism. “Is the Gentleman from Texas finished?” Vinson would demand dryly. The gavel would crash down. “Let’s proceed,” the chairman would say. Johnson had become fascinated with tape recorders, which were, in 1939 and 1940, large, clumsy devices just beginning to come into public use. One morning, he brought a tape recorder into the committee room before the hearing began, and set it up at his seat, running the wire over to a microphone which he placed on the witness table. Vinson arrived, slouched down in his seat, lit up a cigar, and then, just as he was about to gavel the hearing to order, noticed the recorder.

Peering over the glasses teetering on the end of his nose, he said, “Now what does the Gentleman from Texas have there?”

“A tape recorder, Mr. Chairman,” Johnson replied. “We have a witness from Texas this morning. I’d like to record his statement, and send it to the radio stations down in Texas.”

“Well,” Vinson said, “the Gentleman is not going to do that. We are not going to record witnesses, and we are not going to send statements back to the district.” He curtly ordered Johnson to remove the recorder from the room; to Johnson’s humiliation, he had to do so before the eyes of the visitor from Texas.

When Johnson had been sworn in in 1937, only two Congressmen had been younger than he. Now, in 1939, there were quite a few younger. He was no longer even the youngest Congressman from Texas. Newspaper articles on the state’s congressional contingent often mentioned “the baby
of the delegation,” and they were referring to Lindley Beckworth of Gladewater, near Marshall, who had been elected in 1938 at the age of twenty-five. Although Johnson would not be thirty-one until August, 1939, he was no longer a particularly youthful Congressman. He was only a junior Congressman, one of several hundred junior Congressmen.

One of a crowd.

A
T THE OTHER END
of Pennsylvania Avenue, too, he seemed to be retreating rather than advancing.

Unable to see President Roosevelt in person, he attempted on March 24, 1939, to catch his attention and elicit a response with a rather unusual letter. It was ostensibly a recommendation of an acquaintance for a federal post, but it began:

If Johnson had hoped to thus elicit a response from “the Chief,” however, he was to be disappointed. The response came instead from presidential secretary Stephen Early, and it was distinctly
pro forma
: “You may be sure that your comments will be given careful consideration,” it said. (In the event, Johnson’s candidate did not get the post.)

During that same month, Johnson wrote Roosevelt requesting increased funding for the Texas A&M ROTC unit. The White House referred the request to the War Department—which cursorily rejected it.

There was, White House aides agree, no particular reason for Johnson’s complete lack of success in making contact with the man in the Oval Office. There was, they say, no reason that he
should
have made contact. “You’ve got to have a reason to see a President,” Rowe explains. Johnson had no reason. And Rowe—and other New Dealers who knew of Johnson’s unsuccessful efforts—could see no hope that he
would
have a reason, not, at least, in any immediate future. He was after all only a junior Congressman from one of the most remote and isolated regions in the United States.

Those of them who, like Rowe, guessed his ambitions, could see no way that he would get to be a Senator, much less a national power—not in the foreseeable future, at least. How could he possibly transform a political
base that consisted of an isolated district in a remote region of far-off Texas into a national base?

How could he possibly—in any foreseeable future—be anything more than an obscure Congressman? Lyndon Johnson could not endure being only one of a crowd. But as the Spring of 1939 turned into Summer, one of a crowd was all he was—and, for long years to come, it seemed, that was all he was likely to be.

D
URING THE SUMMER
of 1939, however, he took a desperate step.

This maneuver involved Sam Rayburn. Its backdrop was one of the great dramas of American political history: the blood feud between the President of the United States—and the Vice President.

This feud had been raging since shortly after the two men had run together for the second time, teammates, in one of the greatest election triumphs in American history.

Even before the 1936 election, John Nance Garner, perturbed over the direction the New Deal was taking, had been protesting to Franklin Roosevelt. Garner had felt the emergency measures of the Hundred Days were necessary; he felt that the President had saved the country. But by 1934, he felt the emergency was over; the measures should be phased out. As early as October, 1934, in a blunt letter to Roosevelt from Uvalde, he advised him to “cut down as far as possible, the cost of government. … Pardon me for mentioning this matter because it is not my ‘butt-in,’ but it does pertain to the expenditure of federal funds which goes with living within your income and paying something on your debts.” The still more liberal measures of 1935’s “Second Hundred Days”—measures such as Social Security, the Wagner Labor Relations Act, and, above all, inheritance and stepped-up income taxes—were the very antithesis of the simple, rugged frontier philosophy in which Cactus Jack Garner believed with all his heart. The continued heavy governmental expenditures and annual budget deficits of the “New Deal”—how Cactus Jack hated that phrase!—must inevitably lead, he believed, to another Depression; thirty years later (in 1965, when Garner was ninety-six), a Washington journalist would travel to Uvalde to ask him if he had any advice for government. “Stop the spending!” the old man growled.

His protests had been strictly private. If individualism was one pillar of Garner’s philosophy, loyalty was another, loyalty to party and loyalty to his leader; the politician he loathed above all others was Maury Maverick, who stood for everything he detested, and who had, moreover, beaten his friends, the old “City Machine,” in San Antonio; but when Maverick ran for re-election in 1936—against the City Machine—Garner arranged for the financing of Maverick’s campaign, because Roosevelt had asked him to do so. Sometimes his feelings about the New Deal showed in personal letters to Texas. When, in 1936, an old friend, the wealthy Houston lumberman John Henry Kirby, who was the chairman of the ultracon-servative Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution, demanded: “How long are you going to tolerate the apostasy of the Roosevelt Administration…?” Garner replied tersely: “You can’t do everything you want to and I can’t do half what I would like to do. You don’t control everybody you would like to and I am in a similar fix. I think that answers your question.” But his feelings had—before the 1936 election—never showed in Washington. Disagree with administration proposals though he might, he lobbied for them with the conservatives who had been his friends during his thirty years on Capitol Hill. “No man was more influential in the Senate than Garner,” Joseph Alsop and Turner Catledge wrote in their detailed and invaluable book on the court fight,
The 168 Days;
“In the President’s first administration larger numbers of senators had seen the light on New Deal measures in [Garner’s] private office with the well-stocked liquor closet … than anywhere else in Washington.”

Then, at the end of 1936, just weeks after the election, came the sitdown strikes. Garner’s sizable fortune, as well as that of his Texas friends and of his Southern friends in Congress, had been built on cheap labor. In Uvalde, located as it was beyond the 98th meridian, little cotton was grown; instead, Garner grew pecans, and pecans were picked by the Mexican-Americans who made up more than half of Uvalde’s population. The work was hard—after the pecans were knocked out of the trees, they had to be shelled, a job which required strong hands—and for it Garner paid one cent per pound; a good man could, his fingers bleeding from a hundred small cuts, pick as many as a hundred pounds in a day—one dollar for a day’s work. Mexicans were satisfied with that wage, Garner would explain. “They are not troublesome people unless they become Americanized. The Sheriff can make them do anything.” Not that white labor earned much more in Uvalde. Garner built and rented out homes. The union scale for carpenters in Texas was one and a quarter an hour; Garner paid his carpenters the quarter, although there were a few who worked their way up to fifty cents an hour—until they made a mistake (“like sawing a board a mite too short,” an Uvalde carpenter explained; “why, back you go first thing to twenty-five cents. Just one mistake, that’s all”). To men accustomed to treating laborers like serfs, the very idea of unions was anathema. (There were none in Uvalde.

“Mr. Garner, he don’t like unions,” another carpenter explained. “The plumbers, they had a union once, but they don’t now.”) And sitdown strikes were the ultimate outrage, for this form of labor strife, in which workers seized possession of their employer’s plant and stayed there, “sitting down” at their jobs, threatened the sacred right of private property. At a Cabinet meeting, Garner said, as he was to recall it, “They permitted men to take over other people’s property. In Texas we would call that stealing. That’s when I said … the federal government owed it to the country to protect the property. … I got ugly about it and cussed and raised Cain.”

He also went to see Roosevelt personally. As he related the discussion to his lifelong friend and authorized biographer, journalist Bascom Timmons:

Garner left this meeting under the impression that Roosevelt had promised to immediately issue a statement denouncing the new labor tactic and, if the situation worsened, to take stronger action. But neither statement nor action materialized. This was not the first time that Garner felt Roosevelt had broken his word; he believed the President had repeatedly promised him to balance the budget. John Gunther was to write about Roosevelt’s “worst quality,” a “deviousness,” a “lack of candor” that “verged on deceit.” Men who had known Roosevelt longer—when he had been Governor of New York—used stronger words; in Albany it had been whispered that a commitment from the Governor could not be trusted; New York City’s ordinarily mild-mannered legislative representative, Reuben Lazarus, told him to his face: “Governor, from now on we deal in writing; and I’m going to demand a bond on your signature.” His State Park Commissioner, Robert Moses, not mild-mannered, shouted at him one day: “Frank Roosevelt, you’re a goddamned liar and this time I can prove it! I had a stenographer present!” Garner told a friend that the President “was a charming fellow. … But he was a hard man to have an understanding with. He would deviate from the understanding.” To a man like Garner, no judgment could have been harsher. In the world of Capitol Hill, where a congressional session was round after round of hastily formed alliances, trust in a man’s word was all-important; Garner himself was known for honoring his promises, however inconvenient they later proved. In 1937, sitdown strikes were widening, and no presidential action was forthcoming. Alsop and Catledge wrote that Garner, feeling “he had been fooled by the President all through the business,” “flew into a fury.” Garner in a fury was a man who lost control of his tongue. At a conference with Roosevelt, a conference at which
Majority Leader Joseph T. Robinson was present, Garner was to say that “We went at it hot and heavy”—so hot and heavy that, Alsop and Catledge reported, “Before very long both men had forgotten their self-control and were using such language to one another that Joe Robinson, horrified, shouted them down and forced them to end the conference.”

And then, on February 5, 1937, Roosevelt introduced his court-packing bill.

Neither Garner nor any congressional leader had been given so much as a hint that such a measure was being prepared; summoned to the White House, they were informed half an hour before Roosevelt announced it to the press. (Garner was to say, moreover, that Roosevelt had assured him and Robinson not three weeks before that there would be little other than appropriations bills for Congress to consider.)

During his first term, the President had been generally scrupulous in consulting with Capitol Hill; had his second election led him to feel that he no longer needed to consult, “that,” as Alsop and Catledge put it, “compliance with his wishes had become automatic? … His overconfidence blinded him,” Alsop and Catledge were to conclude.
*

The President’s lack of courtesy was far from the only reason for Garner’s instant distress over the bill. The tough little Texan was not a man given to abstract thought, but there were a few concrete elements of government in which he deeply believed; the Constitution was one of them, and in the instant he first heard the President’s proposal, he had no doubt that the Constitution was threatened by it. After the meeting, Garner was to recall, “I loaded my automobile with Senators and Representatives and took them back to the Capitol. We were all so stunned we hardly spoke.” According to most accounts, the first reaction came during that ride from Texan Hatton Sumners, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. “Boys,” he said, “here’s
where I cash in my chips.” But it may actually have come earlier—from Garner; as he was leaving the meeting, he was to say, he had a quiet word with Attorney General Homer Cummings, who had secretly drafted the court-packing measure. “General,” Garner said, “it will be many, many moons before the boss signs that bill.” Capitol Hill was soon left in no doubt about Garner’s feelings; a few hours later, while the presidential message was being read in the Senate Chamber, Garner left the rostrum, stalked into the Senators’ private lobby behind the Chamber, and there let a group of Senators know his reaction by holding his nose with one hand and making a thumbs-down gesture with the other.

Most congressional leaders agreed with that feeling, but party loyalty led Garner to refuse to oppose the bill publicly and to attempt to arrange a compromise. When, however, he led a group of his colleagues to put their case before the President, Roosevelt “laughed in their faces, so loudly that a number of them were exceedingly annoyed.” (So confident was Roosevelt that he was, Alsop and Catledge wrote, “in a laughing mood in those days, when suggestions of compromise were made.”)

But by May, with renewed tension over sitdown strikes and general labor unrest, the Vice President was, in Tommy Corcoran’s words, “off the reservation … almost in open revolt.” Soon it was common gossip in the cloakrooms that he had told Senator Wheeler, a leader of the opposition to the Court measure, “Burt, you’re a real patriot.” When Senator Vandenberg emotionally denounced sitdown strikes as no better than revolution, Garner left the rostrum, went down to the Senate floor and embraced the Republican in full view of the galleries. He was “doing a lot of damage,” Corcoran reported. And then Garner took his most dramatic—and effective—step. On June 11, in the midst of the congressional session, he left Washington and went home to Uvalde.

A
LTHOUGH GARNER
gave no explanation for his departure, the reason was so evident that it exposed to public view the split—the “terrible breach,” Alsop and Catledge were to call it—between the New Dealers at one end of Pennsylvania Avenue and the conservatives at the other. It solidified the opposition of wavering and doubtful Senators. By now, moreover, Roosevelt had begun to understand that compromise would be necessary—and that he needed Garner to obtain the best compromise possible. On June 18, Jim Farley, Garner’s old friend, found the President “smoldering over the absence of the presiding officer of the Senate.”

Roosevelt’s letter was packed with Roosevelt charm, but for Jack Garner the charm had long since worn thin. He did not return to Washington until July 19, and he did so aboard the funeral train of his friend Majority Leader Robinson, who had died suddenly of a heart attack. Garner had boarded the train in Little Rock, where the thirty-odd Senators on board greeted him “like a long-lost father.” Wrote Alsop and Catledge: “The old Texas fox had made a quick trip from Uvalde, with a purpose spurring him on. He had seen the Democratic party disintegrate in the court fight, and now he had returned to pick up the pieces.” During the train ride back after Robinson’s funeral, he conferred with the Senators, and the next morning, he arrived at the White House. When, after “a great show of cordiality” by Roosevelt, the subject turned to the court fight, Garner asked him, “Do you want it with the bark on or off, Cap’n?” Roosevelt threw back his head and, with a hearty laugh, said he would have it with the bark off. “All right,” Garner said. “You are beat. You haven’t got the votes.”

Roosevelt empowered Garner to work out a compromise. When it evolved—an agreement to recommit the court-reorganization bill to the Senate Judiciary Committee with the understanding that when it reappeared on the Senate floor, all mention of the Supreme Court would have been removed—it was an almost unmitigated defeat for the President, one which allowed him to save face only in that there would be some reorganization of lower courts. Alsop and Catledge, who did the most thorough job of contemporary interviewing of participants, concluded that Garner “wanted to do the best he could for the President”—and in fact did so, faced as he was with the overwhelming senatorial sentiment against the bill and the desire of some Senators to defeat it outright as a salutary lesson to the President. On one occasion, when he was attempting to bargain with Wheeler, the Montanan told him “with considerable firmness” that the opposition did not have to compromise at all, since it had enough votes to do as it pleased. But Roosevelt, “sore and vengeful,” in intimates’ words, took the loss hard. Wrote Alsop and Catledge: “He knew there was no way out of an immediate humiliation, but he had made up his mind that if he had to suffer the men in Congress whom he held responsible would suffer doubly later on.” And he felt that he knew who was most responsible. To Farley, a “fuming” President said: “He didn’t even attempt to bargain with Wheeler. He just accepted Wheeler’s terms. If Garner had put up any kind of a fight, the thing could have been worked out differently.” Corcoran, one of the President’s principal strategists in the fight, said flatly that “it was the Vice President who had betrayed the President.”