Master of the Senate (35 page)

In Washington, as secretary to Congressman Richard Kleberg of Corpus Christi, the techniques were the same—right down to the posture and the particular
form of flattery. Kleberg’s office was the site of a late-afternoon drinking group of powerful reactionaries, including the Red-baiting Congressman Martin Dies and the legendarily powerful lobbyist and financier of Red-baiting causes, Roy Miller of Corpus Christi, any one of them so anti-Roosevelt that he might have posed for Peter Arno’s
New Yorker
cartoon of wealthy businessmen ranting and raving against That Man in the White House. Through an open door in Kleberg’s office suite, the Congressman’s two other young assistants could see Johnson, even when there was a vacant chair, sitting on the floor, face worshipfully tilted up toward whoever was speaking, in L. E. Jones’ words, “very much the young man, very starry-eyed, very boyish, very much the junior to the senior. ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘No, sir.’” And when only one of the older men was with him, he again played the paternal card, telling one powerful lobbyist, “You’ve been like a Daddy to me.”

These techniques aroused contempt from Johnson’s contemporaries on both College and Capitol Hills. In talking with the author, both a classmate and a fellow congressional aide used the same term—“a professional son”—to describe him. The college yearbook chronicled his “sucking up” in print (“Believe It Or Not—Bull Johnson has never taken a course in suction”), and his classmate Mylton Kennedy says, “Words won’t come to describe how Lyndon acted toward the faculty—how kowtowing he was, how suck-assing he was, how brown-nosing he was.” Hearing Johnson “talking conservative” with the ultra-reactionary Dies, and, a few minutes later, “talking liberal” with liberal Congressman Wright Patman—and espousing diametrically opposite points of view with equal passion—many of his fellow congressional assistants felt that, as one says, “There’s nothing wrong with being pragmatic. Hell, a lot of us were pragmatic. But you have to believe in
something.
Lyndon Johnson believed in
nothing
, nothing but his own ambition.” They sneered as they watched Johnson ignore the young, single women at the monthly Texas State Society dances in order to dance almost exclusively with the elderly wives of congressmen and Cabinet officers so that “the wives would introduce him to their husbands.” And on both hills the contempt was tinged with anger because Johnson was as overbearing to those beneath him, or on the same level as he, as he was obsequious to those above him; so much, in rapid alternation, the bully and the bootlicker that Charles Marsh’s daughter, who had a ringside seat as Lyndon fawned humbly over her father while, behind his back, sleeping with her mother (and who was a devotee of Charles Dickens), was reminded “every time I saw Lyndon” of “a Uriah Heep from Texas.”

But on both Hills, the reaction of Johnson’s targets was proof of the adage that where flattery is concerned, no excess is possible. “Boy,” one classmate says of the San Marcos faculty, “you could see they loved it.” And it was the faculty’s patronage that gave Johnson the rewards he wanted at college. In Washington, his techniques were observed by men capable of analyzing—and of appreciating—the talent, and these men say that “deference” and “flattery”
are inadequate to describe it. Watching Lyndon Johnson “play” older men, Tommy Corcoran, a prince of flatterers himself, knew he was watching a king. “He [Johnson] was smiling and deferential, but, hell, lots of guys can be smiling and deferential. Lyndon had one of the most incredible capacities for dealing with older men. He could follow someone’s mind around, and get where it was going before the other fellow knew where it was going. Lyndon was there ahead of him, and saying what he wanted to hear before he knew what he wanted to hear.” The very keen-eyed Ed Clark says, “I never saw anything like it. He would listen
at them
… and in five minutes he could get a man to think, ‘I like you, young fellow. I’m going to help you.’”

The man on whom his talents had been employed most intensively was Sam Rayburn.

Although adults backed away from the hard-faced, frowning Speaker, who was as powerful—awesome—in personality and in physical strength, with his short, massive body, as he was in position, children took to “Mr. Sam” instinctively, crawling all over him and rubbing their hands over his great bald head. Talking to a little boy or girl, he could sit for hours with that grim face transformed by a broad, gentle smile. But Rayburn had no children. Terribly shy and insecure with women—as, indeed, he was shy in any social situation—he had married once, but the marriage had lasted only three weeks; no one ever knew why. He dreaded loneliness. “Loneliness breaks the heart,” he said once. “Loneliness consumes people.” But, a man with so much power and so fierce a temper that some congressmen were “literally afraid to start talking to him,” he had to live—all his life—with what he dreaded. While the House was in session, of course, men crowded around him, clamoring for his attention, hanging on his every word, but in the evenings and on weekends, when the House wasn’t in session and other congressmen went home to their families, the Speaker went home to a small apartment near Dupont Circle. Convinced that he couldn’t make small talk, that he made a fool of himself whenever he tried, he seldom went to parties. Too proud to let anyone know he was lonely, he rejected dinner invitations from his assistants. On Sundays, he would walk for hours around the empty streets of downtown Washington, his face set in a stern mask as if he wanted to be alone, as if he didn’t want anyone to talk to him. Sometimes, unable to bear the loneliness, he would telephone an assistant and ask him to come to his office on a weekend, as if he had some urgent task for him. But these young men, watching him opening all the drawers of his desk and taking out every paper, “looking for something to do,” knew the truth—and pitied him. Once, he wrote to a friend, “God, what I would give for a tow-headed boy to take fishing.”

From his arrival in Washington in 1931, congressional secretary Johnson sought to cultivate the Speaker, using as entree the fact that his father had served in the Texas Legislature with Rayburn, but the attempt did not take root until he married Lady Bird in 1934. Rayburn’s heart went out to this young
woman who he saw was as shy as he. Growing paternally fond and immensely protective of her, he began coming to the Johnsons’ small apartment for dinners, at which Lady Bird cooked “Mr. Sam’s” favorite Texas foods, and he accepted invitations regularly for breakfasts on Sundays, the Sundays on which he had nothing to do. The “professional son” had ample opportunity to employ his talents. Sometimes, to the amazement of all who witnessed it, Lyndon would lean over and kiss the feared Speaker on his bald head.

Once, with Lady Bird back in Texas, Lyndon, alone in Washington, developed pneumonia. Rayburn sat beside him all night in the hospital, so afraid of waking the young man that he wouldn’t stand up even to brush away the ashes from the cigarettes he chain-smoked during the night. In the morning, his vest was covered with ashes. Not long thereafter Rayburn placed Lyndon Johnson on the first rung of the ladder he wanted to climb. Known never to ask anyone—not even a friend—for a favor, for Johnson he begged a favor of a man with whom he had never been friendly, asking Senator Tom Connally to obtain the Texas state directorship of the newly formed National Youth Administration for a twenty-six-year-old congressional secretary without a shred of administrative experience, refusing to leave Connally’s office until the senator agreed. When, two years later, Johnson returned to Washington as a congressman, Rayburn made him a “regular” at the famed “Board of Education” sessions he conducted every afternoon in a House hideaway. There would be a break in their relationship early in 1939, when, for the first time, Rayburn was in the way of Johnson’s ambition. Because Rayburn was the logical choice to succeed John Garner as Roosevelt’s key man in Texas—chief dispenser of New Deal patronage in the state—and Johnson wanted the job himself, he betrayed Rayburn, poisoning Roosevelt’s mind against him. For almost three years thereafter, Rayburn rebuffed Johnson’s attempts to resume relations. But when, after Pearl Harbor, Johnson enlisted and left Washington—for a war zone, Rayburn assumed—Rayburn’s heart melted toward Lyndon as the coldness of a father toward an estranged son melts in a moment when the boy is in danger.

During the rest of Rayburn’s life, Johnson would sometimes blurt out remarks like the one he once made in Texas: “Goddammit, I have to kiss his ass all the time….” But in Rayburn’s presence, Johnson would play on the Speaker’s paternal feelings, repeatedly telling others, in Rayburn’s presence, that he was “just like a Daddy to me.” At one banquet, Senator Ralph Yarborough was to recall, “Lyndon was telling how ‘he’s been like a father to me.’ I saw tears come out of Rayburn’s eyes and roll down his cheeks.”

A note Johnson received from another elderly, lonely House power during his first weeks as a senator demonstrated the effectiveness of his techniques. Carl Vinson may have seen Johnson’s flaws clearly, as his advice to Bryce Harlow shows, but that didn’t stop him from missing him. Most junior members of Vinson’s Armed Services Committee tried to stay out of the way of the cigar-chewing, tobacco-juice-spitting little dictator known as “the Admiral.” Johnson had put himself in Vinson’s way—and had stayed there, despite many early
rude rebuffs, dropping around, week after week, year after year, to the apartment in which Vinson lived with his invalid wife to tell him the ribald stories and the latest congressional gossip he loved. And now, in 1949, the note Johnson received was in the pleading tone of an elderly man who misses, very much, a young one. “Don’t forget your old friend during this session of Congress,” Carl Vinson wrote. “Keep in touch with me.”

N
OW
L
YNDON
J
OHNSON
was in the Senate. He had learned who the Senate’s “Big Bulls” were—and almost without exception, these bulls were Old Bulls. So, Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote, “he could see at once what was required.” After her conversations with Johnson, Ms. Goodwin was to write that he recognized “that the older men in the Senate were often troubled by a half-conscious sense that their performance was deteriorating with age.” Johnson told her—these are his words: “Now they feared humiliation, they craved attention. And when they found it, it was like a spring in the desert; their gratitude couldn’t adequately express itself with anything less than total support and dependence on me.”

The attention was tailored to the man—by a master tailor. James E. Murray of Montana, ranking Democratic member of the Senate Labor Committee in 1949, and, after 1951, chairman, was a liberal hero, and deservedly so. “He is a classic prototype of the New Deal,” a writer was to say, “as nearly pro-labor on all questions as it is possible to be…. To hear Senator Murray’s response when his name is reached on a roll-call is to know at once what the New Deal-Fair Deal position on an issue is.” But in 1949, Senator Murray was seventy-three years old. Once a broad-chested man, bursting with vitality, his stride was now slower, even at times a bit uncertain. And while he was not senile, his mind was not what it had been, and it preferred to dwell in the past, in the days of labor’s triumphs, in the days when it had found, in Franklin Roosevelt, its great champion. Sometimes—increasingly, to one who observed closely—when Murray was dealing with current issues, with current Senate maneuvers and stratagems, the Senator seemed a little tense, a little uncertain. Lyndon Johnson, who had been close to Roosevelt, close to Corcoran and Benjamin V. Cohen and the other young New Dealers with whom Murray had worked in the great days of the New Deal, would, in talking to Murray, turn the conversation to those days—and keep it there. It was noticeable how Murray, once he realized that it was to be kept there, relaxed and became his old charming self. It was noticeable how Murray’s face lit up when, entering the Senate cloakroom, he saw Lyndon Johnson there.

The question of deteriorating performance was handled, too. Reports were a constant of Senate life, and many senators did not have assistants capable of writing reports of which they would not be ashamed. Johnson did, and in the most delicate of terms, he would sometimes offer an older senator the services of such an aide.

Old men crave not only attention but affection, and Johnson did not forget that, instructing aides drafting letters to them for his signature to make the letters “real sweet.” Old men want to feel that the experience which has come with their years is valuable, that their advice is valuable, that they possess a sagacity that could be obtained only through experience—a sagacity that could be of use to young men if only young men would ask. Lyndon Johnson asked. “I want your counsel on something,” he would say to one of the Old Bulls. “I
need
your counsel.” And when the counsel was given—and of course it was given: who could resist so earnest an entreaty?—it was appreciated, with a gratitude rare in its intensity. He would pay another visit to the senator’s office to tell him how he had followed his advice, and how well it had worked. “Thank you for your counsel,” he would say to one senator. “I
needed
that counsel.” “Thank you for giving me just a little of your wisdom,” he would say to another senator. “I just don’t know what I would have done without it.” When one of the Old Bulls, asked for his advice, told Johnson that he didn’t know enough about the matter, Johnson would say, “Oh, I’ll rely on your judgment any time. Your judgment’s always
been
good.” And the earnestness—the outward sincerity—of his words, the obvious depth of his gratitude, made the words words that an old man might treasure.

In Senate as college, he proved the adage that no excess was possible. He gave gruff Edwin C. (Big Ed) Johnson of Colorado a nickname: “Mr. Wisdom,” and used it not only orally but in writing; once, when Big Ed was back in Colorado, Lyndon wrote him: “I certainly do miss the able counsel of Mr. Wisdom.” He used it not only in private but in public. “Boy, whenever you’re in trouble, the thing to do is go to Mr. Wisdom,” he would say, in Ed Johnson’s presence, to whoever else happened to be present. And beyond the specific flatteries and sweetnesses was Lyndon Johnson’s overall demeanor with the Old Bulls: a deference, an obsequiousness, a “fawning” and “bootlicking” so profound that more than one Senate staffer likened him to the same Dickens character. “During Lyndon Johnson’s early days in the Senate, he was a real Uriah Heep,” says Paul Douglas’ administrative assistant, Howard Shuman.