The Path to Power (101 page)

“A sullen world” was, in Burns’ phrase, “girding for war”; a sullen Congress refused to change the Neutrality Act to give the President more room to maneuver on behalf of the embattled democracies. Summoning Senate leaders to the White House, Roosevelt pleaded with them. Then Garner asked them if there were enough votes to change the Act—and summed up: “Well, Captain, we may as well face the facts. You haven’t got the votes; and that’s all there is to it.” He had turned the Vice Presidency,
Time
said, from “a sarcophagus into a throne.”

And if 1939 was Garner’s year on Capitol Hill, it was his year in the polls, too. In March, the Gallup Poll asked the question: “If Roosevelt is not a candidate, whom would you like to see elected?” Jim Farley received 8 percent, Cordell Hull 10 percent—John Garner 45 percent. And Roosevelt could hardly have been sanguine about the results if his name had been included in the poll: 53 percent of all Democrats were opposed to a third term. As the
New Republic
had to report with chagrin, political prognosticators generally felt that a candidate with so commanding a lead could not be overtaken; pollster Emil Hurja said that “Mr. Garner is so far ahead of all other candidates that he cannot be stopped.” If he was to be stopped, certainly, only one man could do it—just as Garner himself was the only man who could stop Roosevelt if Roosevelt chose to run. As the
Congressional Digest
put it, “It is a case of Franklin D. Roosevelt, epitome of the New Deal, … against John Nance Garner, to whom much of the New Deal is anathema.” Discussing possible candidates with Jim Farley at Hyde Park, Roosevelt said: “To begin with, there’s Garner, he’s just impossible.” Although other names would continually be floated, the contest had, in 1939, narrowed down to two men—each of whom not only hated the other personally but hated also much of what the other stood for.

R
OOSEVELT DECIDED
to attack Garner in his own state. There was reason to think this bold tactic might have success. While the reactionary “interests” which ran Texas were solidly against the President, the state’s people had, at least in the past, been overwhelmingly behind him; they had given him a seven-to-one margin over Landon in 1936. Even if he could not defeat Garner in the state’s 1940 Democratic primary, might he not at least poll
a respectable number of votes against him, enough to embarrass him? And being forced to fight in his own stronghold might keep Garner on the defensive.

If he was to fight Garner in Texas, however, Roosevelt needed a man in Texas—someone to direct his strategy in the state, preferably someone prominent enough throughout the state to serve as a rallying point for New Deal enthusiasm. The list of potential candidates, however, was very short. A Senator would have been ideal, but one, Tom Connally, had earned the President’s bitter enmity by opposing the court-packing proposal. And while the other—mild-mannered Morris Sheppard—was a loyal New Dealer, he put personal loyalties above political, and his personal loyalty belonged to the man who had come to Congress at virtually the same time as he, thirty-six years before. Among the state’s Congressmen, Maury Maverick would, a year earlier, have been a logical choice, because his willingness to speak out for liberal causes had not only endeared him to Roosevelt but had made him a statewide name. Another Congressman, W. D. McFarlane of Graham, Sam Johnson’s onetime Populist ally in the State Legislature, was an eager volunteer for the job. On the Texas leg of Roosevelt’s 1938 cross-country “purge trip,” the trip on which Garner had refused to meet him, the President had praised Maverick and McFarlane. But despite the praise, by 1939 both Maverick and McFarlane were no longer in Congress, having lost their congressional seats to conservative opponents.
*
Garner had had his San Antonio friends support Maverick in 1936; in 1938, the Vice President had quietly passed the word that he wanted Maverick “crushed”—and crushed he was, by Paul Kilday, who stated that his goal was “the elimination from Congress of one overwhelmingly shown to be the friend and ally of Communism.”

There was another obvious choice: Sam Rayburn. But this was the Sam Rayburn of whom it was said, “If he was your friend, he was your friend forever. He would be with you—
always
. The tougher the going, the more certain you could be that when you looked around, Sam Rayburn would be standing there with you.” In a contest between Roosevelt and Garner, Rayburn’s preference was not for Garner but for the man whose picture stood on his desk at home in Bonham. Garner was his friend, but Roosevelt was his hero. Moreover, the philosophy of the New Deal was his philosophy; Garner’s was not. “There is much more of contrast than of similarity between the two Texans,” wrote Raymond Moley, who knew them both well, and the contrast was deeper than the differences in their bank balances, or the fact that Rayburn would not accept a free pass from the railroads, while Garner rode back and forth to Texas in the luxuriously
furnished private car of the president of the Missouri-Kansas-Pacific line. As Moley explained, Garner “is a big business man” with few “prejudices against financial power” and “limited sympathy for the underprivileged. Rayburn is more likely to suffer for those who fail.” Garner’s opposition to the New Deal had, Moley says, “opened a fissure” between him and Rayburn. Furthermore, Rayburn had no doubt that Roosevelt would eventually decide to run again—and he had no doubt that if Roosevelt ran, he would crush any other candidate. Garner’s campaign for the nomination would not only be one in which Rayburn did not believe, it was, Rayburn knew, bound to be a losing fight. But while Roosevelt was his hero, Garner was his
friend
—had been his friend for a quarter of a century. More, Garner had been his patron. During Rayburn’s difficult early years in Congress, it was Garner who had given him the helping hand that enabled him to start climbing the House ladder. In 1937, when Rayburn had been in danger of losing his fight to be Majority Leader (and next in line for his yearned-for Speakership), Garner had rushed back from Texas to throw his weight on the scales and tip them in Rayburn’s favor. (Rayburn’s reply, when a reporter had asked about the propriety of the Vice President’s intervention in a congressional matter, was instructive: “In the first place,” he said, “Jack Garner is my friend.”) When, in 1939, Garner asked him to manage his campaign for the 1940 Democratic presidential nomination, he agreed. And once he had enlisted in Garner’s cause, it didn’t matter how tough the going was. Attempting to pry Rayburn away from his fellow Texan, “White House sources” raised the possibility that, despite Rayburn’s leadership of New Deal causes, he might not be the President’s choice to replace Speaker Bankhead, whose heart disease was rapidly worsening. This threat to Rayburn’s long-held dream was a grave one—Roosevelt’s potential in Capitol Hill succession battles had been demonstrated by his success in winning the Senate Majority Leadership for Alben Barkley—but Woodrow Wilson could have told Roosevelt what Rayburn’s response to a presidential threat would be. Previously, Rayburn had been somewhat circumspect in his remarks on the presidential race. After the first White House leaks appeared, he issued a more pointed statement: “I am for that outstanding Texan and liberal Democrat, John N. Garner, for the presidential nomination in 1940, believing that if elected he will make the country a great President.” Roosevelt’s reaction to Rayburn’s defiance was revealed a month later. Rayburn’s district held a celebration in his honor each August. “In previous years,” Stephen Early wrote in a memo to the President, “you have sent messages to Sam Rayburn on the occasion of the celebration. … Ordinarily I would take care of this without troubling you but in light of Rayburn’s recent declarations, I think it is best to leave the decision to you.” Roosevelt’s decision was not to send a message. During succeeding months—as long as Garner was in the presidential race, in fact—Roosevelt would not even autograph a picture for Rayburn; when, for example, Rayburn’s secretary,
Alla Clary, sent a photograph taken by one of Rayburn’s friends to the White House for a routine presidential autograph, Missy LeHand returned it unsigned.

L
YNDON JOHNSON’S APPLICATION
for the post of leader of the Roosevelt forces in Texas was at first not considered seriously. A junior Congressman was hardly the ideal leader of the presidential campaign in a pivotal state. Nor did Johnson enjoy White House entrée at this time—a fact which had been forcibly brought home to him during the President’s “purge” trip of July, 1938. He was not on the initial list of Texas Congressmen invited aboard the President’s train; only a last-minute invitation wangled for him en route by the friendly McIntyre got him aboard. Once aboard, his name was added to the list of Congressmen on whom Roosevelt bestowed public praise, but not to the list of those allowed a private few minutes with FDR—an omission which must have provided a bitter contrast to the hours of intimate conversation with the President he had enjoyed on that other train trip through Texas just a year before.
*
The Spring of 1939, when the initial jockeying over the Garner nomination was taking place, was the time when Johnson could not elicit a presidential response even to a letter.

But as Spring turned to Summer, Johnson found a role he could play. Because of the leverage its committee chairmen wielded with Congressmen from other states, the Texas congressional delegation was the power base for Garner’s presidential bid. The canniness of the delegation’s veteran members—augmented, of course, by the political wisdom, and cash, of its “associate member,” Roy Miller—and the nationwide political contacts built up during decades of dealing on Capitol Hill, made the delegation in a sense the general staff of the Garner campaign as well; at its weekly luncheon meetings—and whenever, in fact, Texas Congressmen got together—the Vice President’s strategy was discussed and planned. The White House needed to know what was going on in those meetings. It needed a spy in the Texas ranks.

Lyndon Johnson volunteered for this mission. No formal enlistment was necessary; he simply began to relay information to members of the White House staff, primarily to Corcoran, and occasionally to Rowe—with his customary assiduity. “He was working at it, I’ll tell you that,” Rowe says. Johnson was playing a dangerous game, Rowe says, “and sooner or later they would find out, but he could see over the horizon, and he could see that Garner’s day was over, and he was playing with our crowd instead of the Garner crowd.” Obtaining information on the discussions in the Texas delegation had been “very hard,” Rowe says, but it suddenly became much easier. “If we wanted to know something: ‘Call Lyndon Johnson.’”

In July, he took on a new role. There was one asset that only he among the Texas Congressmen possessed: Charles Marsh’s friendship. Texas newspapers were overwhelmingly anti-Roosevelt, but Marsh’s six Texas newspapers, including the influential paper in the state capital, were for him. The publisher of six pro-Roosevelt Texas dailies had very little difficulty getting in to see the President, and when Marsh requested an appointment, he asked if he could bring Johnson along. On July 14, 1939, “Pa” Watson sent an aide a note: “Put Mr. Charles Marsh down for an appointment with the President on Wednesday. Mr. Marsh is the owner of a large string of papers supporting the President in Texas.” And on the note, someone—either Watson or the aide—added in handwriting:
“And Representative Lyndon Johnson.”
At this meeting, Johnson impressed the President with his enthusiasm for the Third Term, and with his political acumen. Something else was at work as well. Marsh and Roosevelt had been acquainted since the President’s days as Governor of New York, and they had not gotten along well, at least in part because of Marsh’s imperious personality, which allowed him to show deference not even to a Governor. At the White House meeting, strain was again evident. But Marsh, the enthusiastic New Dealer, wanted to support Roosevelt, and Roosevelt wanted his support, and a buffer to make the relationship smoother was available—and Lyndon Johnson thus became the link to the most influential pro-Roosevelt organ in Texas.

Then, two weeks later, came an opportunity for Johnson to dramatize—vividly—his loyalty to the President.

During a bitter hearing on proposed amendments that would weaken wages-and-hours legislation, John L. Lewis exploded to the House Labor Committee: “The genesis of this campaign against labor … is not hard to find. [It] emanates from a labor-baiting, poker-playing, whiskey-drinking, evil old man whose name is Garner.” As committee members gasped, the lion-maned CIO leader, pounding the table until the ashtrays jumped, went on: “Some gentlemen may rise in horror and say, ‘Why, Mr. Lewis has made a personal attack on Mr. Garner.’ Yes, I make a personal attack on Mr. Garner for what he is doing, because Garner’s knife is searching for the quivering, pulsating heart of labor.”

With reporters racing through Capitol corridors searching for comment, Sam Rayburn summoned the Texas delegation to his office to issue a formal resolution denying the accuracy of Lewis’ description of the Vice President. But Roosevelt and his advisors did not want that description denied; as Kenneth G. Crawford wrote in the
Nation
, “If they know the church-going public, its reaction will be: where there’s so much smoke there must be some firewater.” Roosevelt himself was shortly to give emphasis to Garner’s drinking with his remark at a Cabinet meeting, “I see that the Vice President has thrown his bottle—I mean his hat—into the ring.” Telephone calls were hastily placed to the office of their secret ally within the Texas delegation, Lyndon Johnson. Corcoran was later to say: “
Everybody
called him. I
called him. Ickes called him. … There wasn’t any doubt about what the Old Man wanted.”

By the time Johnson arrived in Rayburn’s office, a resolution had already been prepared stating, among other points, that Garner was neither a heavy drinker nor unfriendly to labor. Johnson refused to sign it. There ensued what the
Washington Post
later called “considerable discussion.” Rayburn finally suggested that he take Johnson into his office and talk to him, but Johnson apparently stood his ground.