The Path to Power (108 page)

He was not—during Roosevelt’s Presidency—to have what he had expected to have. He remained loyal, a rock for Roosevelt in the Forties as he had been in the Thirties. The three previous Speakers, Rainey, Byrns and
Bankhead, had been weak—at the time Rayburn picked up the gavel, the potential power of the Speakership had been all but forgotten. Under Rayburn, it was to be remembered. And his strength and personal popularity comprised a key factor in the passage, in that body dominated by anti-New Deal Southerners, of much legislation that otherwise might not have been passed despite Roosevelt’s wishes. (“Hell, Sam,” said one, “if it wasn’t for you, there are about fifty of us from the South who’d walk right out on him.”)

His strength was at Roosevelt’s service in foreign affairs as well. In August, 1941, the Selective Service Act, which had, a year earlier, established America’s first peacetime draft, was about to expire. Unless the Act was extended, not only would most of the men in uniform be discharged, but no new ones could be drafted. And despite Roosevelt’s pleas for extension, pressure on Congress to let it die had reached almost a frenzy under the prodding of powerful isolationist organizations and of delegations of mothers.

Rayburn knew the draft was needed. Talking with George Brown, he suddenly fell silent. The grim face turned even grimmer. After a while, he said quietly, “The war clouds are gathering, George.” Rayburn didn’t stay in the Speaker’s chair during the three days of bitter debate; he went back to the spot in which he had stood for so many years, back behind the rail, and he worked the cloakroom, calling in almost thirty years’ worth of favors. Wrote a friend: “This was a time when he did not hesitate, all else failing, to make the ultimate plea: ‘Do this for me.’”

As he returned to the chair to preside over the vote on the bill—the galleries above him crammed with uniformed soldiers on leave, weeping mothers and isolationist delegations—he knew he had not picked up enough votes. But he had the gavel in his hand. The Republicans were holding back the votes of several GOP Congressmen opposed to the Act, and several others were planning to change their votes from support to opposition as soon as they saw how many votes were needed to defeat the measure—since under House rules a member can change his vote until the result is announced. They never got a chance. Without the new votes and the switches, the slip the tally clerk handed to Rayburn was 203 for the bill, 202 opposed. In the very moment he read those figures Rayburn pounded down his gavel and announced the vote, freezing it. Enraged Republicans, milling in the well of the House, demanded reconsideration; by using, too fast for his opponents to keep up with him, a series of intricate parliamentary procedures—and, finally, when he was cornered, pounding down his gavel to finalize the vote, and grimly defying their leaders to do something about it—he kept the one-vote margin. He had stretched House rules to a point at which they would have broken had not the power of his iron personality stood behind his rulings—“but,” a friend wrote, “the end result was that, when …
Japanese bombers struck Pearl Harbor less than four months later, the United States had an Army of 1,600,000 men instead of a token force of 400,000.”

But if he was to be allowed to push through Roosevelt’s policies, he was to be allowed very little voice in their formulation. The charming presidential missives on Bonham’s annual Sam Rayburn Day resumed. The two men had been born in the same month in 1882, and each January birthday greetings were exchanged, charming greetings from Roosevelt, admiring greetings from the man who had Roosevelt’s picture on his desk at home; “I thank God for you on this day, because at sixty years of age you are ripe and strong for the burden that would crush a less determined man,” Rayburn wrote in January, 1942. Real input into policy was not, however, to be among the favors Roosevelt conferred. Each Monday, in meetings highly publicized by the press, Rayburn and McCormack of the House, Barkley of the Senate, and Vice President Wallace would meet with the President, ostensibly to map policy, in luncheons marked by camaraderie and joking. (“Sam Rayburn mentioned that he had been in conference with Mrs. Luce. The President and all the rest of us began to kid him, and Sam turned pink.”) But Rayburn was not impressed by such stroking, or by the crowd of photographers who would snap the “Big Four” on the White House steps as they were leaving. These meetings, Henry Wallace was to note, aroused Rayburn’s “resentment” because at them “the President never suggests any legislation,” so that the meetings amounted to no more than “glad hand affairs of very little significance”; on another occasion Rayburn complained to Wallace “that the President didn’t take him sufficiently into his confidence.” (Nonetheless, Wallace also noted, Rayburn “was quite loyal to Roosevelt.”) Jonathan Daniels saw how easily Rayburn’s feelings were hurt. And Daniels saw how often Roosevelt hurt them. “He said he felt he could be much more useful if he could see the President by himself. I asked him if he could not do this and he said of course he could—but—he gave the impression of feeling that his advice was not wanted.”

A few of the younger men around the President such as Corcoran and Cohen (and the even younger, more junior, Jim Rowe) admired Rayburn. “Your country owes you a great deal which most of the plain people will never know about,” Rowe wrote him. But, after 1940, Corcoran and Cohen faded from the White House scene. To the remaining members of the White House inner circle, men such as Steve Early, Pa Watson and Marvin McIntyre and women such as Missy LeHand and Grace Tully, and to bright young newcomers to that circle, Rayburn was indistinguishable from other Southern conservatives. More important—to this palace guard to whom disloyalty to the President was the cardinal sin—Rayburn had been, they believed, a leader of the Stop Roosevelt movement. This feeling echoed the attitude of their boss, a man to whom a sturdy independence
such as Rayburn’s was not a prized quality. Their attitude toward this slow-talking Texan was snide; after a Rayburn speech, McIntyre jotted a sarcastic memo to Roosevelt: “Understand Sam was very proud of his literary effort.” When Daniels told McIntyre that Rayburn’s “pride” had been “worn thin” by his “treatment at the White House,” McIntyre replied that “Rayburn, like all other Speakers, has gotten swell-headed.” Rayburn told Rowe: “There’s nobody in the White House I can talk to.”

Because of the size of Texas, and the philosophical as well as geographical diversity among its various regions, there had not been a single person through whom the White House worked in Texas, as there might have been in a smaller, more unified state. Nonetheless, for a long time Garner had been the key link between the White House and Texas, the individual to whom, more than any other, the Roosevelt administration had turned first in matters of patronage and policy affecting the great province to the southwest. Now Garner was gone. With the state’s two Senators shunning statewide power, with the hollowness of Jesse Jones’ professions of loyalty to the New Deal now apparent, and with Maury Maverick waging a losing fight for his own political survival, Garner’s role would, in the normal course of events, have been filled by Rayburn, as the state’s senior, and by far most powerful, official in the national government. Once Roosevelt had apparently intended Rayburn to fill that role; he had begun giving him the Texas patronage that would have cemented that position. Normally, Roosevelt would have continued doing so. The new Speaker’s advice would have been the first solicited in matters of both policy and politics affecting the state. Normally, Sam Rayburn would have been the President’s man in Texas.

But he wasn’t. The telegrams to Rayburn from Austin had been cleverly designed to force him into a position which would antagonize the President. Lyndon Johnson’s “vivid” description to Roosevelt of the John L. Lewis episode had emphasized Rayburn’s anti-Roosevelt role, as had the reports Johnson and Wirtz gave to the President at their private meetings. (Rayburn’s statement “appeared to the President as an attack from within the Administration. …”) And the telegrams—together with the leaked newspaper stories about them, stories that relied on “information” from Johnson—cemented that impression. After those telegrams, the White House had an accurate impression of Sam Rayburn as a Garner supporter, but it also had a false impression of Rayburn as Roosevelt’s enemy, as a leader not only of the Garner campaign but of the whole Stop Roosevelt movement, as the enemy of the man he not only idolized but whom he had, on a hundred occasions, loyally served. After those telegrams, Sam Rayburn could never be Roosevelt’s man in Texas. He had been tarred beyond cleansing by a brush wielded by Lyndon Johnson. And the tarring gave Johnson what he wanted. By mid-1940, Johnson was Roosevelt’s man in
Texas. As Washington columnist Jay Franklin reported, “A virtual freshman Representative … is now the acknowledged New Deal spokesman in the Lone Star State.”

The most significant aspect of this development involved federal contracts. Before 1940, Jesse Jones had frequently been “consulted” on these contracts. (As RFC head, Jones could of course award RFC contracts himself.) After 1940, Jones was to be largely ignored. Before 1940, Senators Connally and Sheppard had occasionally been consulted—not as often as Connally, in particular, would have liked, but occasionally. After 1940, requests from the Senators for input into contract awards were fobbed off. And before 1940, the Texan most often consulted had been John Garner. Rayburn’s lack of interest in this area was already legendary in Washington. Once, following authorization of the Denison Dam in his district, he had been discreetly sounded out on the identity of his favorite contractor; he didn’t have one, he replied. But, in the normal course of events, the opinion of the Speaker of the House of Representatives would at least have been asked when a major public works or defense contract was to be handed out in his state. Now it would not be. Freezing Jones, Connally, Sheppard and Rayburn out of major contract decisions in Texas did not, however, result in a vacuum in this crucial area. For even as the vacuum was being created, it was being filled—by the man who had done so much to create it: a “virtual freshman Representative.”

Johnson’s influence over the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station contract had in itself given him a major role in construction in Texas, for so huge was that $100 million piece of work in that state (the total amount of work let by the State Highway Department in 1940 was only $27 million) that Brown & Root put to work on it subcontractors from all over the state. And with the nation gearing up for war with growing intensity, and with the military bases that already dotted Texas expanding, his influence was to increase, for the word was passed by the White House that Lyndon Johnson was to be “consulted” on expansion contracts. Minuscule though these contracts may have been in comparison with gigantic Corpus Christi, they were important to the firms which received them; in Johnson’s own district, for example, a contract for approximately $71,000 to the Taylor Bedding Co. for mattresses for Navy barracks was one of the largest this firm had ever received, as were federal contracts for several hundred thousand dollars of construction work that went to the Ainsworth Construction Co. of Luling. Contractors all across Texas were grateful for REA line-laying contracts arranged by Johnson. The word was out in Washington. Federal contracts in Texas were, as Corcoran puts it, to be given to “Lyndon’s friends.” “And,” Corcoran says, “once he could get public money for his friends, he was made.”

He was indeed “made”—by the “public money” represented by federal
contracts. He had been able to bring to the Roosevelt re-election campaign a resource which no other Texan could offer: Herman Brown’s money. And he had used that resource as a base. Because he could provide that money to the Roosevelt campaign in Texas, he was given a commanding role in that campaign. Because he played that role, he was given input into the awarding of other federal contracts. Because he possessed that input, men who wanted those contracts—and they included some of the most powerful men in Texas—had to come to him.

In a sense, that third telegram had signaled this fact. Lyndon Johnson’s name had been placed beside Sam Rayburn’s on that telegram; he had been treated by the President as “on the same footing” with the Majority Leader of the House of Representatives. Treating Johnson as Rayburn’s equal in the Oval Office, of course, had had merely symbolic significance. Treating him as a full-fledged power in Texas in the awarding of federal contracts had a significance that went far beyond symbolism. Men who could read the map of power understood the significance of the fact that the largest contract ever awarded in Texas—a contract of almost unbelievable magnitude—had been awarded to Lyndon Johnson’s friend. Ickes could describe him as a “kid Congressman.” “Kid,” in some terms, he may have been—a thirty-one-year-old Congressman from a remote and isolated political district. But after that telegram, he was, in terms of power, a kid Congressman no longer. Unknown though his name remained to the public in the state’s other twenty congressional districts, it was now not only known but respected by powerful and influential men in those districts. Lyndon Johnson had been maneuvering since shortly after coming to Washington as a congressional secretary in 1931 to obtain statewide power. Now he was able to procure for men who mattered in Texas—all across Texas—not merely hotel reservations and appointments with federal officials, but federal contracts. Thanks to Herman Brown’s money, and to the skill with which he had employed it as a political resource, he was much further now along the road he saw stretching before him.