The Path to Power (103 page)

A Gallup Poll that month revealed that Garner’s popularity had not slipped; if Roosevelt did not run, he was the favorite of 58 percent of registered Democrats. And if Roosevelt
did
run—if President opposed Vice President in Democratic primaries?—the answer to that question seemed, in the first months of 1940, to be far from open and shut. With the economy sagging, and unemployment remaining stubbornly high, with congressional opposition so strong that Roosevelt dared not introduce a single significant new program, and with the “phony war” muddying the international situation and all the President’s diplomatic efforts thwarted, March, 1940, was, as James MacGregor Burns wrote, “a low point even for Roosevelt’s second term.” On March 10, the
Washington Post
stated that “the
Texan is believed to have a good chance to win” when the two men clashed head to head in the California primary in May.

For more than a year, Roosevelt had been pursuing a strategy that Burns calls “broadening the field in order to prevent any candidate from getting too far ahead”—hinting at support for Harry Hopkins or Paul McNutt, for example. The strategy had destroyed the hopes of all other candidates, but it hadn’t even dented Garner’s. Now the Democratic Convention was close. Garner was immensely popular with many Democratic state bosses. If, when the Convention began, his candidacy was still strong, several “favorite son” delegations—the Alabama delegation pledged to Speaker Bankhead, for example—would fall into line behind him. New Dealers “concede that Garner, with Texas’ forty-six delegates, California’s forty-four, some Wisconsin, Illinois and probably a few scattered delegates in other states, will aggregate nearly 500” of the 551 delegates needed for nomination, the
Washington Post
reported. Even if this estimate was high, any substantial strength for Garner would do damage. As Burns puts it:

The chief obstacle to such a draft was John Garner. Were he to arrive in Chicago with a sizable bloc of votes, the “Stop Roosevelt” movement would be strong enough to preclude a draft. Garner had to be destroyed before the Convention. Roosevelt’s earlier inclination to put him on the defensive by attacking him in his home state hardened. Another consideration was expressed in Marsh’s
American-Statesman:
“If Roy Miller … selects [the Texas] delegation, such a delegation will be used as a trading block for the anti-New Deal group in the convention.” New Dealers felt they had to try to at least cut into Garner’s strength in the Texas delegation, place on it enough Roosevelt men to prevent it from being the Convention’s
anti-Roosevelt rallying point. The odds against an attack in Texas succeeding even in such limited objectives were long—but the attempt had to be made. The decision was taken. Texas was to be made a battleground.

But the battle required money. The state’s size made radio the best means of rallying Roosevelt sentiment, but the cost of statewide radio hook-ups was substantial by 1940 standards. Even local rallies were expensive. The price of the permit necessary to hold a rally at the Dallas Fairgrounds, for example, was $300, and the incidental expenses of such a rally might run $1,000 more, even without figuring in the cost of newspaper advertising to attract a crowd. Such costs were multiplied by the system under which the state’s delegation to the National Convention would be chosen. The delegates would be selected at a State Democratic Convention. The delegates to this convention would be selected by conventions in all of the state’s 254 counties. And the delegates to these county conventions would be selected at precinct conventions—thousands of them—which would be held throughout the state on May 4. Money could play a decisive role in a precinct convention, which might consist of no more than a few handfuls of persons (anyone who had voted in the last election was eligible to attend) gathered in a school or firehouse. Just finding out who was eligible cost money. The names of voters in the previous election were listed in the office of the County Tax Assessor, but these lists had to be purchased. Then there was the problem of finding out which of the eligible voters favored your candidate. This was generally accomplished by telephone calls from a popular local politician or politician’s wife. “You’d go to a county clerk’s wife and say, ‘You’re not doing anything. How about taking this seventy-five dollars or hundred dollars, and calling some people,’” recalls Harold H. Young, a burly, brilliant, idealistically liberal attorney who was in charge of the Roosevelt campaign in Dallas and Fort Worth. Then, in Young’s words, “it was a matter of who got your folks [voters who favored your candidate] out” to the precinct convention. Direct mailings, which cost money for mimeographing and stamps, were used. And, of course, on the evening of the convention, automobiles—with their drivers given “gasoline and expense money”—were needed. The amount required for a single precinct was not large, but, with thousands of precincts, the total required was considerable.

The Garner campaign in Texas, of course, had all the money it needed. The utilities, the railroads, the major oil companies such as the ’Umble and the Magnolia, the great ranchers and lumbermen and cotton families—the state’s monolithic establishment that had long dominated its politics, largely through the use of financial pressure—were united behind the candidacy of the man who had long stood as its symbol. And as soon as the Garner forces realized—to their astonishment and rage—that Cactus Jack was to be challenged on their home ground, they mobilized, in what the
Dallas
Morning News
called “the most painstaking preparations in recent Texas political history.”

The Roosevelt campaign’s shortage of funds was, in contrast, acute. (Because of his personal friction with the President, and because he was planning to concentrate his political contributions behind the vice presidential campaign of frequent Longlea guest Wallace, Charles Marsh’s support for FDR was largely confined to editorials.) When Garner state chairman Myron Blalock declared, “Even here in Texas, there are those small voices who speak out against this distinguished son of the Lone Star State,” Young, a gifted political strategist, saw an opening. He wanted to reply, “That’s true. Nobody’s for FDR except small voices—the people.” But because Young had no money, his rejoinder went unheard. Blalock had spoken on a statewide radio hook-up. Young couldn’t afford even a local broadcast. Garner, Young reported, had a paid worker in every precinct in Dallas; the Roosevelt forces didn’t have a paid worker in
any
precinct. Maury Maverick was leading the Third Term forces in San Antonio, but was all but helpless against the massive outpouring of Garner money in that city.

But Lyndon Johnson was to produce a source of funds.

Success had not diminished Herman Brown’s ambitions. His car still roared endlessly back and forth across Texas as he pushed his projects and searched out new work, so that Lyndon Johnson sometimes had difficulty locating him to make his reports; he would send copies of telegrams to two or three towns at once to make sure one of them reached Brown. And even the giant Marshall Ford Dam had not lessened his “obsession” to build giant projects. Now, moreover, the great dam was almost completed. A score of smaller jobs would not enable him to keep on the payroll the organization he had built up with so much effort, and of which he was so proud. Herman Brown wanted—and needed—something
big
.

Something very big was on the horizon. In 1938, Congress, at President Roosevelt’s request, had authorized the expenditure of a billion dollars on a “two-ocean” Navy. By early 1939 it had become clear that a substantial portion of that billion would be spent on the construction of naval bases and training stations for a greatly expanded Navy Air Force. On April 26, 1939, Roosevelt had signed into law a bill authorizing the expenditure of $66,800,000 for the first of such bases. Brown’s attention was already focused on the Navy because Lyndon Johnson was a member of the Naval Affairs Committee. He decided to bid on one of the bases—in San Juan, Puerto Rico—authorized in the April bill.

In April, 1939, however, Lyndon Johnson still had not yet gained entrée to the President, and his attempt to give Brown & Root a helping hand was rebuffed in a manner suitable to what he was—a Congressman without influence. Within two days of the signing of the naval air base bill, he had to confess to George Brown that “I talked with Admiral Moreell
[Vice Admiral Ben Moreell, in charge of the Navy’s shore construction program] and he said there is nothing further that we can do at this time.” On May 16, he promised George, “I’ll do all I can to get you any information on the Puerto Rico project and will let you know when anything breaks,” but added, “You know how hard it is to get any dope in advance”—the statement of a man not on the inside of decisions. Seeking to offset its lack of experience in areas of construction required by this job, Brown & Root took as a partner on its Puerto Rico proposal the W. S. Bellows Construction Company of Houston, and submitted a bid, but the firm was shown no favoritism, as George Brown noted in a letter to Johnson, which stated, “I got some inquiries from the Naval Department for additional data” but added that these inquiries have “apparently … been sent to all prospective contractors.” The entrée to the President that Johnson gained thereafter may have entitled him to help on a postmastership and the offer of the REA post; it did not involve any say in the awarding of a huge federal contract—as Johnson learned when, after another firm was awarded the contract in November, he demanded an explanation from Moreell. The Admiral brushed him off by sending him a memo from a lower-ranking officer: “Pursuant to your inquiry relative to the reason why Brown & Root, Inc. (and W. S. Bellows Co.) … were not selected as the contractors for the San Juan Air Base project …,” while both firms had “extensive construction experience,” they had no experience whatsoever in the type of construction necessary to build a naval air base.

A naval air base and training station had been proposed for Texas—on the Gulf at Corpus Christi—in the mid-1930’s, and indeed its construction had been recommended by the Navy in September, 1938. The city’s Congressman, Richard Kleberg, and South Texas’ most influential figure in Washington, Roy Miller, had been actively pushing for the project for more than three years. But Kleberg’s family was a major Garner financial backer, and Roy Miller was Garner’s campaign manager. Herman Brown had been interested in the Corpus Christi base from the first, but he was a Garner financial backer (as, indeed, was fitting, since his views on organized labor, on the balanced budget—and on communists, socialists and liberals—were indistinguishable from the Vice President’s. “From what I see in the papers,” his brother George happily wrote Roy Miller in May, 1939, “things seem to be moving along all right for the ‘V.P.’”). Other big Texas contractors who might have been considered for the job were also identified with Garner—or with Reconstruction Finance Corporation head Jesse Jones of Houston, of whose oft-professed loyalty to the New Deal Roosevelt had become—correctly—suspicious. After Kleberg had been making optimistic predictions for months, he had to admit in September, 1939, that “There has been no intimation as to whether it is intended to build the training station here [in Corpus Christi] in two years or fifteen.” The Navy’s construction program, surging ahead in other locations, remained stalled in Texas; as late
as January 9, 1940, Moreell told a House subcommittee that the Corpus Christi project was “not viewed as emergent”—testimony that led the subcommittee to reject even a $50,000 request for making surveys of the proposed base site.