Master of the Senate (63 page)

The strongest argument that Lyndon Johnson was not now and had never been a liberal, of course, was a record of militant anti-Communism, and he selected a dramatic setting to remind Texas of his victory over the FPC “commissar”: the annual meeting, held in 1949 in El Paso, of delegates from southwestern rural electrification cooperatives—many of them men who had been assisted by Leland Olds in their battles to establish those co-ops.

In his speech, Johnson told the delegates that during the renomination fight, an REA spokesman—“a man purporting to speak for all of you”—had endorsed Olds. And in allowing this man to do so, Johnson hinted, the delegates had been used as tools by Communists. The argument that Olds was opposed by the power lobby, Johnson said “was simply not true—it was the same old smokescreen behind which many men hide when they need to hide their records. If Joe Stalin were nominated, I suppose his pals would try to arouse support by shouting that the power lobby was against him. You have a bigger job to do than serve as a tool of the smear artists and the propagandists….” Johnson warned the delegates—who were acutely aware, of course, that their co-ops’ continued expansion depended upon Washington’s approval of their loan applications—that their error in judgment had better not be repeated. “The graveyard of good intentions is filled with the remains of individuals and organizations who nosed into affairs which were not their own,” he said. “For your political life as for your business life, I recommend a four
[sic]-word
slogan: ‘Stay out of the Red!’” He warned the delegates not to “permit REA to become the lambskin in which the wolves of alien radicalism cloak themselves.”

The most significant meetings Lyndon Johnson held on this tour, however, were not the public ones but the private. When the Brown & Root plane delivered him to Texas, it delivered him first to Houston, where a Brown & Root limousine met him and took him to the Brown & Root suite in the Lamar Hotel.
Waiting for him there, in Suite 8-F, were men who really mattered in Texas: Herman and George Brown, of course, and oilman Jim Abercrombie and insurance magnate Gus Wortham. And during the two months he spent in Texas thereafter, the Senator spent time at Brown & Root’s hunting camp at Falfurrias, and in oilman Sid Richardson’s suite in the Fort Worth Club.

These meetings were very private. During his stay in 8-F, a Houstonian—important but not important enough to be part of the 8-F crowd—telephoned Johnson’s office in Washington to try to arrange an appointment, but Busby was careful not to let him know even that Johnson was in Houston. When Johnson was at Falfurrias—the most private place of all—even high federal officials couldn’t reach him, not even his longtime ally Stuart Symington, who was told the “Senator cannot be reached by telephone”; the Secretary of the Air Force was reduced to leaving a message for Johnson to call him. To the extent possible, his whereabouts were concealed from everyone in Washington—even from members of his staff there. During his week at Falfurrias, Busby attempted to reach him through his Austin office; Mary Louise Glass, in that office, would tell him only that “Mr. Johnson has just advised me that he is taking a vacation himself—on a ranch—and cannot be reached until he comes out of the shinnery.” Even the most urgent communications from Washington—the envelopes from Walter Jenkins to Johnson marked “personal and confidential”—were held in Austin by Mary Louise instead of being forwarded.

T
HE BROWN BROTHERS
had been assuring their conservative friends for years that Lyndon wasn’t really a liberal, that he was as “practical” as they were, and now they were almost gloating in this proof that they had been correct. As their lobbyist Oltorf recalls, “Even after everything Lyndon had done—even after the Taft-Hartley and the way he fought Truman on the FEPC and all that—they [independent oilmen] had still been suspicious. They still thought he was too radical. But now he had tangibly put something in their pockets. Somebody who put money in their pockets couldn’t be a radical. They weren’t suspicious any more.” Herman Brown was a businessman who wanted value for money spent. As George, who echoes his brother’s thinking, says, “Listen, you get a doctor, you want a doctor who does his job. You get a lawyer, you want a lawyer who does his job. You get a Governor, you want a Governor who does his job.” Doctor, lawyer, governor, congressman, senator—when Herman “got” somebody, he wanted his money’s worth. And now he had gotten it—gotten it and more. The men associated with Herman Brown had gotten it, too. A long time ago, in 1937, when Lyndon Johnson had first run for Congress, Ed Clark had decided to “buy a ticket on him.” Now that ticket had paid off big.

The Leland Olds fight had paid off for Lyndon Johnson, too, and he knew it. He had known for years that he needed the wholehearted support of the oilmen and of men like Clark for the money necessary if he were ever to realize
his dreams. Now, at last, he had that support, and he was as happy as his aides had ever seen him. “It is a real pleasure to be around him when he is feeling this way,” Warren Woodward wrote Busby. Back in the house on Dillman Street in Austin for Christmas, Lyndon Johnson wrote a letter to Justice William O. Douglas. “This has been one of the finest years—perhaps the finest—of our lives,” he said.

A
ND WHAT ABOUT
the effect of the fight in another house—Leland Olds’ house in Washington on McKinley Street?

There was very little money in that house. By October, Leland Olds had not received a paycheck for four months, and the Oldses’ meagre savings were almost exhausted. President Truman wrote him, “Of course, I felt very badly about your situation. I sincerely hope that it will work out all right for you individually.” And the President tried to make it work out as well as possible. Telling reporters he “would still like to find a government job for Olds”—one that would not require Senate approval—he thought he had found one: as a consultant to his nominee as Secretary of the Interior, Oscar L. Chapman. But there were delays. Although Olds’ appointment did not need Senate approval, Chapman’s did, and Democratic National Chairman Boyle told a reporter confidentially that although Olds “is in desperate financial straits,” his appointment could not be announced “until after Chapman’s confirmation for fear it would cause Chapman grave difficulties with the Senate.” Olds could not hold out. In January, 1950, the President created a Water Resources Policy Commission, headed by Morris Cooke, apparently primarily to provide Olds with a salary; he was the Commission’s only paid member, with a salary drawn from a presidential emergency fund. The following year he was shifted to a salaried post on an interagency committee studying the development of natural resources in New England.

After January, 1953, however, there was no Truman in the White House—and no job in government for Leland Olds, now sixty-two years old. He would never hold a government job again. On the advice of friends and admirers, he established a consulting firm, Energy Research Associates, with two employees—himself and a secretary—in a small office on K Street furnished with used furniture. Rural electrification cooperatives and public power systems retained him for research projects for which, recalls the American Public Power Association’s Alex Radin, “He charged modest fees.”

Speaking at conventions of rural electrification organizations, Olds imparted his philosophy to the organizations’ young officials—the new generation of crusaders for public power—and they came to revere him. When, in 1984, the author arrived at Alex Radin’s office in Washington to interview him, he noticed open on Radin’s desk a black-bound book he recognized. It was the bound transcript of the 1949 hearings on Leland Olds’ renomination. “Yes,”
Radin said, “I’ve been reading the Lyndon Johnson hearings.” During the interview, even while Radin was discussing other subjects, his eyes kept glancing toward the transcript. Finally, he reached out for it, and showed the author the page—142—to which it was open. “Johnson is trying here to get Olds to say the members of the FPC who opposed him [Olds] were tools of the private power companies,” Radin said, “and Olds replies, ‘I do not think along those lines. I try to assume that every man is good.’ All the time I knew him, that was how he acted about Lyndon Johnson, and the others who attacked him. I never once heard him express one word of recrimination.” Then, so that the author could read the exchange for himself, Radin handed him the transcript. It was battered and dog-eared. “Yes, I’ve read it and re-read it many times,” Radin said.

While the young officials could give Olds work, however, the fees they could pay were modest. After he lost his FPC post, says a friend, “He was a poor man the rest of his life.”

A
ND THERE WERE
worse things than poverty.

Maud Olds had insisted, over Leland’s objections, on attending the subcommittee hearings. “My mother sat there with my father all day long,” their daughter Zara Olds Chapin says, listening to witnesses call her husband a traitor and a jackass and a crackpot, listening to Lyndon Johnson sneer at him and demand that he “answer that question ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ and stop hedging and dodging.”

“It was a very bitter time,” Zara says, “a very hurtful time for my mother…. You just can’t believe that human beings can turn on you like that.” And, of course, every morning her mother had to open her front door, where the newspapers were waiting, with their headlines.

The hurt was deepened by the behavior of some of her neighbors—particularly as, a few months after the hearings, McCarthyism began to cast its pall over Washington. More than one couple on McKinley Street whom the Oldses had considered friends—“people we had had to our house for dinner,” Zara says with an indignation undimmed after four decades—became noticeably reluctant to be seen talking to them. “They wouldn’t even come into our yard,” she says. One neighbor, in the past, would always stop if she saw Maud outside and chat with her. Now the neighbor passed by without stopping, and finally she told Maud—as Maud related—that “she didn’t dare” to stop and talk.

“That was the atmosphere in Washington then,” Zara says. “They were afraid they would be tainted if they were seen talking to someone who had been called a Communist. They said they didn’t feel
he
was a Communist, but that their career in government might be hurt. That was the atmosphere in Washington then. Mother understood that, but it hurt Mother very much.”

Maud had always been what her family and friends call “high-strung,”
“intense,” and in 1944, she had suffered what they describe as a “nervous breakdown.” She had been recovered for years, but now, after the hearings and the snubs in the street, “she became very upset,” Zara says. During the months following the hearings, she lost twenty-five pounds. Sometimes someone walking into a room in the Olds house which they had thought was empty would find Maud Olds standing there, silently weeping.

It took a long time for Maud Olds to recover, her daughter says, and in some ways, she never recovered. “She always was wishing there was something she could do to get back at the people” who had hurt her husband, Zara says. “She just never stopped wishing that.” She lived until the age of ninety, and, says Zara, “she died hating Lyndon Johnson. Until the day she died, she could hardly say his name.”

A
S FOR THE EFFECT
of his renomination fight on Leland Olds himself, he tried not to let anyone see it. Alex Radin, who often traveled and talked with him, says, “I never once heard Leland Olds mention Lyndon Johnson…. I think he sort of buried that part of his life.” But while friends and colleagues who had known Olds before the hearings use words like “bouncy,” “cheerful,” and “enthusiastic” to describe him, men and women who met Olds only after October, 1949, use adjectives like “restrained,” “tense.”

“My father never really talked much about the hearings,” Zara recalls. “Never really very much at all. He was a stiff-upper-lip kind of guy.” That pose was effective with her for three years after the hearings, but then, returning home for her first extended stay since the hearings, she saw beneath the pose. “It wasn’t anything he said,” she recalls. “But he had lost all his buoyancy. My father had always had so much energy. He wasn’t enthusiastic, and all the other things he always was.”

Her father, Zara was to say, had loved his work with a consuming passion. He had never lost his enthusiasm for analyzing huge masses of data and finding the significant implications in them: time had always passed unnoticed when he was involved in such work; when he finally went home at night, he was always eager to get up and start at it again the next day. And he loved the fact that in that data lay the possibility of improving people’s lives. “One of my father’s driving things was to make a dent in history by helping human beings,” Zara would say. “I was taught from the time I was a child that the important thing was to get cheap electricity for the common people.” His work with the FPC, she says, was the work he was born to do.

Now, at the age of fifty-eight, that work had been taken away from him forever. To Zara, the saddest part of her return home was that in the evenings her parents “would go out to dinner and the movies like other people. Daddy had never had time to go out like that.”

And then, of course, there was another poignant aspect of the situation. To replace Olds, Truman appointed Mon Wallgren, a former senator and crony,
who, in 1952,
Fortune
magazine was to call “quite possibly the least effective chairman, or even member, the FPC has ever had…. A lazy fellow [and] too preoccupied with politicking to pay proper attention to FPC business.” During Wallgren’s chairmanship, the policies and regulations that Leland Olds had instituted to break the grip of the private electric utilities and natural gas monopolies were, one by one, reversed.

Zara would never forget one visit she made to the McKinley Street house in late 1953 or early 1954. She and her parents and her sister Mary were sitting around the dining room table listening to the evening news when suddenly the announcer was talking about yet another policy change that had been announced that day by the FPC, a change that eliminated a regulation for which Olds had once fought. Someone jumped up and switched off the radio, as if it hurt too much to listen. Years later, recalling the incident to the author over the telephone, Zara said she realized in that moment that “My father had seen all the things he’d worked for broken.