The Path to Power (106 page)

Lest this latter connection be overlooked, the White House went out of its way to point it out, presidential secretary Early stating that “Rep. Lyndon
B. Johnson … presented Wirtz’s name,” and letting reporters know further that, as the
Press
reported, “Neither Texas Senator was consulted,” nor was Sam Rayburn or Jesse Jones. To readers of political signals, therefore, it was clear that Lyndon Johnson had become a key White House ally—perhaps
the
key White House ally—in Texas. In White House inner circles, it was also quickly made clear that the man appointed at Johnson’s suggestion was going to play a major role in the Roosevelt campaign in Texas. Roosevelt “told us that Garner had to be sent home permanently to his 6,000 neighbors in Uvalde, Texas, so that he could add to his millions,” presidential aide David K. Niles says. “And this crucial task went to Alvin Wirtz.” (The Roosevelt campaign in Texas was shortly to be beefed up by the appointment of another Johnson supporter, Austin attorney Everett L. Looney, as Assistant United States Attorney General.)

Another signal from the White House was private. The Navy Department was quietly informed that Lyndon Johnson was to be consulted—and his advice taken—on the awarding of Navy contracts in Texas.

Following this signal, a number of Texans flew up to Washington. One was Herman Brown. Another was Edward A. Clark, who had left his post as Texas Secretary of State to go on retainer for Brown & Root and to begin using his political acumen on Herman Brown’s behalf. Still another was an old Brown associate whose qualification for this trip was his ability to know where political money could most profitably be distributed in Texas: Claud Wild, Sr. (While he was in Washington, Herman may have been handed a letter written by Roosevelt. Its contents are not known: no copy of it can be found; the only reference to it comes in a February 9, 1940, letter from Lyndon Johnson to George Brown noting that “Herman came in last night,” which states, “Am enclosing the President’s letter.”)

After Herman’s trip to Washington, two alterations in the
status quo
quickly became apparent. First, Brown & Root was, in obtaining coveted Navy Department contracts, no longer just one of a crowd.

The Corpus Christi Naval Air Station, “not emergent” in January, in February was moved abruptly, if quietly, onto the “preferred list” of Navy construction projects with the highest priority. The contract for the air base (which, it was now decided, would be of the “cost-plus” type so profitable to contractors) was not, it was also decided, to be put out for competitive bidding, but was to be awarded on a “negotiated basis.” And the only firm with which serious negotiations were held turned out to be Brown & Root; the firm’s lack of experience in air base construction, which less than three months before had kept it from getting a contract for a similar base, was no longer mentioned. Because the contract was so big, Brown & Root was to be required to share the profits—if not the work—with another contractor, who had a long association with the New Deal. “The White House said we had to take in [Henry] Kaiser,” George Brown recalls. But when George arrived in Washington during either the last week in March or the first week in April
to work out the details of Kaiser’s participation, “Ben Moreell said, ‘You don’t have to give him half.’” Moreell probably intended Kaiser’s share to be only slightly smaller than half, but the vagueness of the Admiral’s instructions gave Brown & Root leeway—and Herman told George how to take advantage of that leeway. Meeting with Kaiser at the Shoreham Hotel, George Brown, an unknown Texas contractor, showed the famous industrialist (famous, among other reasons, for his toughness in negotiations) a little Texas toughness. “I offered him twenty-five percent. He said, ‘That’s an insult.’ I said, ‘Henry, we don’t need you. We don’t need your organization.’ So we sat around and talked and then I said, ‘Well, I have to be going.’ He said, ‘Well, what are you going to do?’ I said, ‘I already told you what I’m going to do.’” And 25 percent was all Kaiser got. (To keep Kaiser’s participation in the profits secret—Kaiser’s participation in the work itself was almost nil—his share was in the name of the Columbia Inspection Company. The Bellows firm was also a participant. “We needed someone who had done buildings,” Brown explains. “We hadn’t done many.”) To keep other contractors from becoming interested, preparations for the Corpus Christi project were carried on in secrecy. Blueprints and specifications were drawn up by the Navy not in Texas but in Pensacola, Florida. By the time the imminent building of the base was made public, drawings and specifications were almost complete—and, it was revealed, hundreds of acres of the land needed (on Flour Bluff, a point of land at the tip of Corpus Christi Bay) were already under option. Plans for the base became public knowledge on May 15, when the House Naval Affairs Committee opened hearings on a bill that would provide funds for twelve new naval air bases. The Corpus Christi base would be by far the largest, almost twice as large as any of the others. And there were other differences between this and the other bases—most notably the speed with which, now that the plans were public, they were finalized. After a meeting with President Roosevelt, Committee Chairman Vinson announced that “because of the urgency of the project,” Corpus Christi would be the only one of the twelve bases for which funds would be provided immediately—in the appropriations bill itself; funding for the other bases would have to wait for the later passage of a deficiency appropriations bill. Lyndon Johnson told the
Corpus Christi Caller
that the bill “would be reported favorably and acted on in the House before the end of the week.” That rush schedule was met, and within two more weeks the bill had been passed by the Senate. Shortly after noon on June 13, 1940, President Roosevelt signed a contract for the construction of the base on a cost-plus fixed fee basis. According to the
Corpus Christi Caller
, it was the first cost-plus fixed fee contract Roosevelt had personally signed. The contract fixed a price of $23,381,000 for the base, with the contractors to be paid an additional $1.2 million for doing the work. Even as these figures were being announced, however, those connected with the project knew they would be shortly altered. In fact, before the end of the
year, the authorized cost of the project would be quietly increased to nearly $30 million. In February, 1941, the appropriation was increased twice, first by an additional $13 million and then by $2 million more, raising the cost to $45 million. Each increase, of course, carried with it a proportionate increase in the contractors’ fee. By this time, other contractors, some of them politically well connected themselves, were anxious to obtain part of the job, but, says Tommy Corcoran, a close friend of the Under Secretary of the Navy in charge of such contracts, James V. Forrestal: “Mr. Forrestal twisted a hell of a lot of tails to” keep the work in the hands of “Lyndon’s friends,” Brown & Root. As war clouds gathered, and then broke in thunder, and the need for trained fliers—and for facilities to train them—became more urgent, the increases in funding for the base grew larger; appropriations for the Corpus Christi base soared to more than $100 million.

The second alteration that followed Herman Brown’s trip to Washington was that the Roosevelt-for-President campaign in Texas was no longer short of cash.

Three hundred dollars was a minor item in that campaign. Harold Young, who a week or two before had been so short of funds for running the campaign in Dallas, was shortly to be able to report:

Building up a precinct organization cost money, but the money was available, thanks largely to Herman Brown.

E
VEN AS THE FIGHT
in Texas was being joined, however, the reason for it was fading away. 1939 may have been John Garner’s year. 1940, the year that mattered, was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s. March was indeed “a low point
for the President,” but, although he remained silent as to his intentions, the fox was ready to leave his lair. He had stuck his nose out, in fact, on February 24. That was the last day on which the President could have forbidden the entering of his name in Illinois, whose primary would be held on April 9—and he had not done so. The name of Franklin D. Roosevelt was going to be on a primary ballot. And with every increase in international tension, Americans became increasingly aware that they might soon be at war, and it became more and more evident that the Democratic Convention would select to lead the nation through war the man who had led it through the Depression. Politicians began backing away from Garner’s candidacy. Observing him at a dinner in Washington, Ickes gloated that “All his buoyancy seemed to have deserted him. He looked glum and unhappy and did very little talking. I suppose there is no doubt that he realizes he is in for a terrific beating at the hands of the President.” His fears were confirmed on April 2, in Wisconsin, where he had once expected to win most of the delegates; instead, he suffered a smashing defeat.

Then, at dawn on April 9, the day of the Illinois primary, German troops struck across the defenseless Danish border, and German destroyers and troopships suddenly loomed out of a snowstorm off the coast of Norway, torpedoing Norwegian gunboats as troops poured ashore. Denmark was overrun in a matter of hours; Norway’s main ports were all in Nazi hands—the phony war was over. Roosevelt defeated Garner in Illinois by eight to one. Garner was finished on April 9—and he knew it. If he hadn’t known it, clues were promptly furnished. As Columnist Ray Tucker wrote:

Refusing to bow out of the race, Garner said defiantly that his name would be presented to the Convention if only as a gesture, but a gesture was all it would be. Although Texas’ precinct conventions would be held on May 4, the primary itself, the last in the country, would not be held until May 27—by which time, primaries in other states would have completely eliminated him as a threat to Roosevelt. Roosevelt appears to have seen this—and also to have seen and accepted that while he might crush Garner everywhere else, he could not defeat him in his home state—and he now decided not to wage an all-out war against Garner in Texas. The loudest of the voices for Roosevelt
—Maverick—was abruptly silenced; his statements against the Vice President ceased, reportedly on a suggestion directly from the President. Near the end of March, Roosevelt had told Ickes that

But while the President’s reason for fighting Garner in Texas had faded, that of Johnson and Wirtz had not—and they apparently persuaded the President that the fight should go on. During the first week in April, the tall, eager young Congressman and his calm, cigar-smoking advisor made a series of visits to the White House. What they said is not known, but one aspect of the situation was revealing. In Texas, politicians knew that Garner’s popularity, coupled with his control of the party apparatus, gave Roosevelt no chance to win the delegation; in Washington, 1,600 miles away, where Texas sentiment was reported to the White House primarily by Johnson and Wirtz, the impression was given that the President had a good chance of taking the delegation and completing his enemy’s humiliation. Johnson and Wirtz also may have appealed to other sides of the President’s character. Roosevelt, Joseph Alsop and Robert Kintner were to write, had earlier told Johnson and “other Texan New Dealers” that “he wanted no part of” a fight against Garner in Texas, but “then he was shown documents and other evidence of the character of the Garner campaign in Wisconsin and Illinois, which was extremely bitter and highly personal in its attacks on the President. This angered him. … [Jesse] Jones again pleaded with him not to carry the fight into Garner’s home state. But the Texan New Dealers voiced the opposing view, and the President agreed.” Whatever the reasons for Roosevelt’s reversal, on April 12 Wirtz was able to write Mayor Tom Miller of Austin: “The President has not ‘called off the dogs,’ and you can take this as authentic. … Everything from this end looks good. I asked Ed [Clark] to communicate with you and [Harold] Young and let me know who you all could agree on as state organizer with absolute authority to discuss the campaign, and what such a campaign would cost.” The campaign Wirtz was talking about, Clark was soon informed, was a war in which no quarter was to be given: a battle in the precinct conventions, in the state convention—a well-financed campaign to take from Garner even the votes of his own state.

And whatever Roosevelt’s reasons for wanting to continue the fight
against Garner in Texas, the motive of Johnson and Wirtz was now to become more clear, because of the nature of the campaign they directed. Although it was ostensibly a campaign against John Garner, its real target was not Garner but Sam Rayburn.