The Path to Power (105 page)

Sign at the headquarters of the Pedernales Electric Co-operative (Johnson’s greatest accomplishment on behalf of the Hill Country) which in 1939 brought electricity for the first time to the farmers of the district

Left:
Lyndon Johnson at the Pedernales Electric Co-operative Building, Johnson City, 1939

Lady Bird Johnson during the 1941 Senate campaign

Above:
Gerald Mann, gaunt and tired after weeks of touring the state

THE FIRST SENATE CAMPAIGN, 1941

Pappy O’Daniel, with his children Mickey-Wickey and Molly, and their capitol-dome-shaped sound truck

The campaigner: bellowing, pleading, shaking hands, reading a telegram of support from Washington, in staged shots with constituents, and his “All-Out Patriotic Revue”

From victory to defeat. Johnson’s last speech, election morning, on the porch of his boyhood home. Reading the congratulatory telegrams election night, and elated in his moment of triumph. Bad news starts to come in, and, finally, “It’s gone.”

Lyndon Johnson, 1941

Close as he and George Brown had become, Lyndon Johnson may have shied away from suggesting frankly even to him what he felt Brown & Root should do. In October, 1939, with the Corpus Christi base still not included on the list of the Navy’s “preferred” projects, George wrote him, “I have been sitting here all week waiting to hear from you. … I felt that you had something on your mind last week but did not get around to getting it off.” But George may have figured it out for himself. He ended this letter by writing:

Opposing John Garner would be a huge gamble for a Texas contractor. But it would not be the largest gamble ever taken by Herman Brown, not for the man who had mortgaged everything he had accumulated in twenty years of terribly hard work to begin work on a dam before it had been authorized. And this new gamble, if successful, would give him the chance to build something even bigger than the dam—and to make even bigger money building it. A signal went out. In Houston, where Brown & Root’s headquarters were located, Herman Brown’s political influence was growing, and the city’s Congressman, Albert Thomas, a junior Representative with negligible clout in Washington, was known to take Herman’s orders unquestioningly. In August, Congressman Thomas had said, “Of course every member of the Texas delegation is for Vice President Garner.” Now, in December, 1939, Thomas made another statement. He was not for Garner after all, he said. He was for Roosevelt.

That signal from Texas was answered by several signals from Washington—from the White House. They involved Lyndon Johnson, and Brown & Root. The first, on January 2, 1940, was a public signal: a presidential appointment. The post involved was a major one: Under Secretary of the Interior. The appointee would be second in command only to Harold Ickes in the giant department. It went to a Texan—“the choicest plum handed out to a Texan in years,” said the
Houston Press
. And the Texan it went to was Alvin J. Wirtz, who was not only an attorney for Brown & Root but was identified with Lyndon Johnson.