The Path to Power (102 page)

The resolution that was finally read to a cheering House by Representative Luther A. Johnson of Corsicana—who said that it had been endorsed by the entire Texas delegation—did not contain a specific repudiation of the allegations about labor and whiskey. It said: “We who know him [Garner] best cannot refrain from expressing our deep resentment and indignation at this unwarranted and unjustified attack on his private and public life. The Texas delegation has complete confidence in his honesty, integrity and ability.”

Johnson made the most of his role in this episode. He described it to Roosevelt personally, who “chuckled” as he related it to Harold Ickes. Ickes was later to recount in his
Secret Diary
what Roosevelt said.

As Johnson recounted the episode to other New Dealers high and low, his extraordinary ability as a storyteller was never in better evidence. “Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson was in to see me,” Ickes wrote in his diary. “He told me the very vivid story of the meeting of the Texas
delegation. … The pressure on Johnson was terrific. Sam Rayburn lost his temper. At one point he said to Johnson: ‘Lyndon, I am looking you right in the eye,’ and Johnson replied: ‘And I am looking you right back in the eye.’ Johnson says that he kept his temper and that after it was all over, Rayburn apologized to him. However, Johnson refused to move.”

Johnson’s depiction of his role in the delegation may have been somewhat exaggerated. On one point, Roosevelt had definitely received a false impression: Johnson was not “given the task” of drafting the final resolution; it was drawn up by Luther Johnson and two other senior members of the delegation, Milton H. West and Charles L. South. And in any case, the resolution—which Johnson did, after all, sign along with the other members—is certainly not a weak statement. His confrontation with Rayburn was apparently not as dramatic in fact as in the telling; other members of the delegation and Texans familiar with its actions would later not recall any confrontation. When newspapermen, intrigued by the stories they were hearing, sought to learn if there was a split in the Texas delegation, its members were surprised; their reaction was summed up by Albert Thomas of Houston, who said, in reply to a reporter’s question, “Of course every member of the Texas delegation is for Vice President Garner [for President].” When the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
two days later sought to pin down members of the delegation as to whom they were supporting for President, Johnson’s reply, echoing that of several other members, dodged the issue, in a way that amounted to something less than a ringing repudiation of the Vice President. “My esteem and regard for Vice President Garner, based upon eight years’ friendship, was clearly expressed in the resolution of the Texas delegation asserting our complete confidence in his honesty, integrity and ability,” he said. “Since the Vice President has not announced his desire to become a candidate for President, I feel an announcement from a new Congressman should await, not precede, his decision.” Still, whatever the extent of Rayburn’s entreaties or wrath, Johnson had resisted them. If there had been calculation behind his stand (“He could see that Garner’s day was over”)—a high form of political calculation, given the Vice President’s popularity at the time—there was courage behind it, too; given Rayburn’s power and personality, considerable courage. And Johnson’s portrayal of the confrontation was very convincing. By the time he had finished taking his story around the offices of key administration aides, he was something of a hero to the New Dealers.

Most important, he had impressed, and, apparently, won the liking of, their chief—as was to be proven twice within the next month.

On the first occasion, Roosevelt stepped into a dispute in Johnson’s own district to protect the young Congressman from Garner’s wrath.

“If a person wronged me,” Garner was to say years later, “I never rested easy until I got even.” Now Cactus Jack tried to get even with Lyndon Johnson. Still serving as postmaster in Austin was Buck Buchanan’s
appointee, Ewell Nalle, a member of a family that had long been politically powerful in the city, and an old friend of Garner’s. Even before the Lewis-Garner explosion, as suspicions had begun to arise during the Spring of 1939 about Johnson’s attitude toward Garner’s presidential aspirations, Nalle had received instructions from Garner or Garner’s allies to begin stirring up opposition to Johnson—opposition which could pose a threat to him when he had to run again in 1940, since the Austin postmaster controlled more than two hundred jobs. Immediately after Johnson’s recalcitrance over the “Lewis resolution,” reports from his district told Johnson that Nalle was intensifying his opposition.

During the Spring, Johnson had personally asked Postmaster General Farley to fire Nalle and replace him with his own nominee, Ray E. Lee, the former newsman whom he had hired to do public relations for the NYA. Farley’s early benevolence toward an engaging congressional secretary had, however, vanished now that there were doubts about Johnson’s loyalty to his old ally Jack Garner. He told Johnson that “enemies” of Johnson had asked him not to fire Nalle, and he declined to do so, citing a number of notably lame reasons to show that such a firing would be illegal. Johnson thereupon managed to have the matter brought to Roosevelt’s attention by James Rowe, and the President in fact mentioned it to Farley after a Cabinet meeting. But he did so only cursorily, and when Farley told him, “You can forget it,” saying that the dismissal would be illegal, the President apparently did just that; he didn’t pursue the matter.

But that had been before the Lewis blast. About a week after it, Johnson raised the matter again, and this time Roosevelt promised to see that Nalle was fired as soon as Congress adjourned. Adjournment brought no action, however, and with the President preparing to leave Washington on a vacation trip, Johnson was becoming increasingly agitated about the matter. On August 10, overcoming Rowe’s reluctance to “pester” the President, he prevailed on him to write a memo to Missy LeHand: “I don’t know whether in the rush of getting away, the President should be bothered about this, but Lyndon Johnson has been so insistent the past couple of days I will leave it up to your judgment. He says he will not and cannot go back to Texas until the President acts. …” When the memo was put before the President, it turned out that his inaction had been due only to oversight. Reminded of his promise, Roosevelt carried through on it—as firmly as even Johnson could have wished. Back to Rowe (in the President’s hand) came the message: “Tell the Post Office that I want this done right away for Cong. Lyndon Johnson. That it is legal and to send me the necessary papers. Tell Lyndon Johnson that I am doing it.” Before the month was out, so was Nalle, and Lee replaced him, thereby ending the threat to Johnson’s re-election chances. In fact, he would be unopposed for re-election in 1940.

During the month following the Lewis episode, Roosevelt not only protected Johnson but tried to promote him.

One of the subjects discussed when, through Charles Marsh, Johnson finally got the opportunity to talk personally to the President was the rural electrification program being carried out in his district. This was a matter of great interest to the President, and he was apparently impressed by Johnson’s vivid description of the benefits that the Pedernales Electric Cooperative had brought to Hill Country farmers, and by Johnson’s claim (which would have startled officials of Texas Power & Light, enraged at what they viewed as the ruthless use of government power to bludgeon them into a surrender of their properties) that the program had been carried out with unprecedented cooperation between government and a private utility. On the day that Marsh and Johnson met with Roosevelt, Benjamin V. Cohen wrote the President that “As you will see … Lyndon Johnson … has done an admirable job working out the problems of Texas’ little TVA. … We are slowly building up a record to prove that cooperation between public and private power is not impossible as Willkie claims.” With the post of REA Administrator about to become vacant, Roosevelt added Johnson’s name to the list of possible appointees. (When the President asked the opinion of Henry Wallace, who, of course, had spent weekends at Longlea with Johnson, and who frequently relied on Marsh’s advice, Wallace replied that “I am so enthusiastic … that I am quite ready to recommend his appointment. … Lyndon has followed so closely the rural electrification program, has such zeal for it, is so well-rounded a New Dealer, and has such good judgment and general competence, that I think he will make an excellent selection.”) Immediately after the meeting of the Texas delegation at which Johnson carried out Roosevelt’s wishes—it may have been at the Oval Office session at which Johnson regaled the President with his description of the delegation meeting—Roosevelt formally offered him the REA post.

The offer was significant principally because it indicated the strength of the impression Johnson had made on Roosevelt once he got the chance to spend time with him: the directorship of a nationwide agency, particularly one as fast-growing, and politically important, as REA, was not the kind of job offered to many men still short of their thirty-first birthday. The REA post was, in addition, a particularly challenging job, as Roosevelt was well aware; he had two weeks earlier remarked to Ickes that “it was difficult to find the right kind of man for administrator because the man had to be a builder and at the same time a finance man.”

However, there was not much chance that Johnson would accept the post. Previously an independent agency, REA was in the process of being transferred into the Agriculture Department, so that its head would report not to the President but to a Cabinet officer. Johnson understood where power came from in a democracy. “You have to be your own man,” he had told Russell Brown years before—his own man, not someone else’s; an elected official whose position had been conferred on him by voters, not by
one man—who could, on a whim, take the position away. Hearing, back in Austin, about Roosevelt’s offer, the wily Wirtz wired him: “Think you would be making a mistake which you would afterwards regret for years if you act on proposition,” warning Johnson, in a follow-up letter, that he might “be side-tracked or shelved when you get out.” Johnson immediately assured Wirtz that he needn’t worry. Having fought his way at last onto the road that could lead him to achieve his ultimate ambition, he could not be persuaded by anyone—not even Franklin Roosevelt—to turn off it. “Dear Mr. President,” he replied, “Thanks for your offer to appoint me Administrator of the REA. … My own job now, however, is a contract with the people of the Tenth District of Texas, which I hope to complete satisfactorily and to renew every two years as long as I appear useful.” In a strikingly cordial reply, which, with Roosevelt’s permission, Johnson released to the press, the President wrote back:

T
HEN HE FOUND A MEANS
of moving further along the road. The means was money—Herman Brown’s money. All through 1939, of course, Johnson had been advancing Herman’s interests, working diligently for the enlargement of the Marshall Ford Dam and for the profitable change orders on that project. The Browns were grateful. On May 2, 1939, George, who, of course, did nothing without clearing it with his older brother, wrote, “I hope you know, Lyndon, how I feel reference to what you have done for me and I am going to try to show my appreciation through the years to come with actions rather than words if I can find out when and where I can return at least a portion of the favors.” The effort to find out “when and where” the favors could be returned continued; before long George would be writing Lyndon, in response to a Johnson remark about “the ninety-six old men” in the Senate: “I have thought about you often out here and don’t know whether or not you have made up your mind about what future course you want to take, but some day in the next few years one of the old ones is going to pass on, and if you have decided to go that route I think it would be ‘gret’ to do it.” No matter what the route, Johnson was assured in letters
from Brown & Root headquarters on Calhoun Road in Houston, he could be certain of the firm’s all-out support.

In December of 1939, John Garner announced his presidential candidacy. He did so in a terse statement from Uvalde, and then, despite efforts to question him by reporters who had traveled hundreds of miles to do so, he left without another word on a week-long hunting trip with an old friend, a Uvalde garage mechanic. His supporters were more forthcoming. The facade that the Vice President was running only because the President wasn’t was stripped away; E. B. Germany, Garner’s Texas state chairman, attacked Roosevelt directly, and Roy Miller’s son, Dale, already a considerable lobbyist in his own right, wrote in the
Texas Weekly
that “regardless of what anyone may do, Mr. Garner will be a candidate, and he will be in the race to the finish.” Garner’s supporters, Miller wrote, have never believed that a President “could prove so faithless to democratic principles” as to seek a third term, but if Roosevelt should try to “repudiate this cherished American principle,” which “is as embedded in our system of government as if it was written in the Constitution itself,” Garner was going to stop him. Germany’s speech “closes the door to compromise. … The Garner-for-President movement has cast the political die. … To the President and the third-term apostles, it offers the olive branch of good will if they want it, and the club of resolute and relentless opposition if they don’t.” Martin Dies and other Garner supporters began using in public some of the words they had been using for years in private—in Dick Kleberg’s office, among other places. Railing against the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and its president, David Dubinsky (spelled Dubinski in the
San Antonio Evening News
), against organized labor in general and the National Labor Relations Board in particular, San Antonio Congressman Kilday said that “Socialists” had infiltrated the Democratic Party, and that only a Garner victory would drive them out. As for the principals themselves, after a Cabinet meeting in January, 1940, Ickes used the words “hatred” and “savage” to describe a Roosevelt attack on “Congress”; in response, “The Vice President’s face turned blood red and he retorted angrily. … Then he accused the President of attacking our form of government.”