The Path to Power (109 page)

H
E WAS ROOSEVELT’S MAN
in Texas—but he was not only Roosevelt’s man.

The President’s popularity with the mass of Texas voters was matched by his unpopularity with the small group of men who ran the state with such a tight grip, as had been proven by the overwhelming roar of acclaim for Garner—and his candidacy—in the state’s Democratic Executive Committee, and in precinct, county and state nominating conventions. The President’s popularity was, moreover, strictly personal, and could not be taken to include voter support of his policies, as had been proven by the defeat of
Congressmen who supported the New Deal. Only one of the state’s twenty-one congressional districts, Lyndon Johnson’s Tenth, could be said to be safely “liberal”; in those few districts—no more than three or four—which were represented by Congressmen such as Sam Rayburn who supported the President, the Congressmen had won election by virtue of their personal popularity rather than by their accord with their constituents’ views. Even after Garner’s last hopes of victory in the presidential nominating race had vanished, the state organization was controlled as tightly as ever by men who had once been bound together by their allegiance to Cactus Jack, but who were now bound, as tightly as ever, by allegiance to a philosophy diametrically opposed to that of the New Deal. Their leader’s views would not change (back home in Uvalde, he pinned a Willkie button to his lapel; twenty years later, he would still be railing against the policies of the man with whom he had twice run to great national victories). And neither would theirs. Many of the leaders of the Garner campaign would, in 1944, be the Texas Regulars who deserted the Democratic Party rather than support Franklin D. Roosevelt.

But, however deep their resentment of the New Deal as a whole or of the Texas leaders of the anti-Garner campaign, the objects of that resentment did not include Lyndon Johnson. The reason was simple: they didn’t know he was one of the leaders. Johnson’s attempt to conceal his views in the Garner-Roosevelt fight had, of course, begun at its beginning. During the very time when he was privately regaling New Dealers with the way he had defied Sam Rayburn to his face in front of the whole Texas delegation, he was dodging every attempt to make him take a public position in the Roosevelt-Garner fight. (His dodging led to an incorrect conclusion, for the AP noted that he had “recently joined in a statement expressing regard for Garner.”) And he had attempted to keep his profile low—invisible, in fact—during the whole of that almost year-long battle. When a Roosevelt-for-President Committee was established in Texas, Tom Miller, not Lyndon Johnson, was its president, Ed Clark its secretary. Miller and Clark—and Maury Maverick and Harold Young and, in the battle’s concluding stages, even Alvin Wirtz—might be roaming Texas making speeches, but Lyndon Johnson appeared on no speakers’ platform.

As much as possible, he did not appear in Texas. The brief trip he made to Austin in March appears, in fact, to have been the only time he ventured within the state’s borders during the months in which the Roosevelt-Garner battle was at its height there. The lengths to which he went to stay out of the state were most dramatically demonstrated when Austin’s Tom Miller Dam, another LCRA project, was dedicated on April 6, 1940. Johnson had obtained the funds for the dam. At the dedication of other dams on the Lower Colorado, and of every other construction project in his district, he was invariably present, and went to great lengths to assure himself the lion’s
share of the publicity. When the Tom Miller Dam was dedicated, the only evidence of Austin’s Congressman was his name on a plaque and a telegram expressing his regret that he could not be present because of “work yet to be accomplished in Washington.”

When he was forced to enter the state, he stayed out of its newspapers. “Johnson was being very cagey,” says Vann Kennedy, editor of the
State Observer
, a weekly published in Austin. “Johnson was being very cautious about getting himself exposed to any unnecessary fire.” Harold Young, who was receiving so much monetary assistance from Johnson, came to realize—to his shock, for he had heard Johnson railing against Garner privately—that he would not do so publicly. “Lyndon didn’t any more want to take a stand on Garner than he wanted to take a stand against the Martin Dies committee,” Young says. It was at this time that the Texas liberal and Rayburn man William Kittrell first coined an expression about Johnson: “Lyndon will be found on no barricades.”

He may not have been present even at the riotous State Democratic Convention in Waco at which the state’s delegation was chosen after fistfights between Garner and Roosevelt supporters. If he was at Waco, he kept a low profile indeed. Asked years later, “Was Mr. Johnson at the state convention?” E. B. Germany, Garner’s reactionary, Roosevelt-hating state chairman, was to reply: “I don’t think he was there. If he was there—I don’t see how he stayed away, but I don’t remember seeing him at the state convention.” He did not materialize on a speakers’ platform where he could be seen by influential Texans until the Democratic National Convention in Chicago—by which time, of course, the battle was over, so he was not called upon to declare his preference.

His efforts at secrecy were successful.

The
Austin American-Statesman
, which took editorial direction directly from its owner, Charles Marsh, almost never mentioned his name in connection with the Roosevelt-Garner fight; as late as March 17, 1940, for example, an article by Raymond Brooks listed the leaders of the Roosevelt campaign in Texas, and Johnson was not mentioned. He stayed out of other newspapers as well. Articles in Texas newspapers identified Tom Miller and Ed Clark—and, later, Alvin Wirtz—as leaders, and included other names—State Democratic Chairwoman Frances Haskell Edmondson, Maury Maverick, railroad Commissioner Jerry Sadler, former Attorney General William McCraw, Harold Young. Seldom was the name of Lyndon Johnson included, and when it was, it was as only a minor figure in the movement to deny the favorite-son vote to Garner; four months after he had summed up the state’s political situation without mentioning Johnson’s name, Walter Hornaday, chief political writer of the
Dallas Morning News
, added: “… The Garner leaders also believe that Representative Lyndon Johnson is active in the third-term movement. …”

The fight ended with his anonymity still successfully preserved. The
State Observer
’s June 3 issue, the issue which covered in detail the Waco convention that was the fight’s final battle, identified Tom Miller as the “originator of the draft-Roosevelt movement in Texas.” As for the movement’s other leaders, the
Observer
listed many names. The name Lyndon Johnson does not appear even once in that issue.

One Texas newspaper did attempt at least obliquely to reveal and explain his role—and the reaction to these attempts is instructive. The paper was the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
, and it may have understood Johnson’s role because its publisher, Amon G. Carter, while reactionary in his political philosophy and a longtime Garner supporter (it was Carter’s famous Stetsons that Garner always wore in Washington), wanted huge new public works for his beloved Fort Worth and, to get them, had maintained ties with the White House. On March 23, 1940, Carter not only expressed the bitterness of the Garnerites in a long editorial (“Normal Texaris are unable to understand those calling themselves Texans who go about urging Texas to desert Garner and to weasel out of its duty to stand by its own”) but also attempted to explain the significance to the Roosevelt movement of public works in the state’s Tenth Congressional District—and of the district’s Congressman. “The whole [Third-Term] outfit gathers round a damsite on the Colorado,” Carter wrote. On April 7, the
Star-Telegram
sharpened its attack; in attributing the motives behind the anti-Garner movement in Texas not to philosophy but to greed, it said: “So far no advices have come from Washington … that dams of the Lower Colorado River Authority will be abandoned in the event Garner becomes President. But an Austin bloc is alarmed.”

Noting past federal generosity for Carter’s own pet projects in Fort Worth, Ickes replied by jeering that, after Roosevelt was re-elected, “you and other such ‘leaders’ will be the first to hie you to the pie counter” for more federal funds. Carter’s reaction was to focus his attention more closely on the LCRA dams. Ickes had publicly promised to reveal, when asked, the legal fees paid to private attorneys in connection with all PWA projects. Now Carter instructed his Washington correspondent, Bascom Timmons, to demand from the PWA the total amount of the legal fees paid to Alvin J. Wirtz in connection with LCRA projects.

This figure, paid between 1935 and 1939, was $85,000, a staggering amount in terms of legal fees customary in Texas at the time. And the $85,000 from the PWA was only a drop in the bucket that Wirtz had filled at those dams. Once the question of his legal fees was opened, it might be only a matter of time before it was discovered that he had received for work on the dams fees not only from the PWA but as the attorney for the Insull interests, as court-appointed receiver of those interests in bankruptcy proceedings, and, of course, from Brown & Root. If a spotlight was turned on those dams, moreover, the Congressman responsible for their construction
—the Congressman who had pushed for those legal fees—would be caught in its glare. The light had to be turned off.

The strategy evolved to do so is contained in a memorandum found in Alvin Wirtz’s papers. This memo is unsigned, and unaddressed, and its author is unknown. In it, both Wirtz and Johnson are referred to in the third person, although at least one member of Wirtz’s staff feels that, because of the secretiveness of both men (and because the wording of the memo reflects Johnson’s style), these references do not eliminate either Johnson or Wirtz as the possible author of the memo. In any case, the memo reflects, according to all living members of the Wirtz-Johnson camp, the thinking of that camp: to counter the threat of an attack with a counterattack—a savage counterattack—against not only Garner and Roy Miller, but also Sam Rayburn.

The writer of the memorandum appreciates the significance of the Carter threat; while the PWA feels that $85,000 was a “fair fee,” he writes, its disclosure “will have [the] effect of smearing Wirtz.” The response should be to let Rayburn know that if the Wirtz fees are to be disclosed, other disclosures will be made: the press will be given “something that will be good nationwide publicity—how much Garner, Mrs. Garner, Tully Garner have received from the Govt, over a period of 40 years; that Ed Clark wants to figure up how much he, Sam, has made, travelling expenses, etc. in 25 years; that Everett Looney … has figures on how much Roy Miller paid to try to buy the Texas Legislature. …” As significant as the strategy revealed in the memo—the savage attack not only on Garner and Miller, who were used to such accusations, but on Sam Rayburn, who was so proud of his “untarnished name” (which would no longer be untarnished if it was linked in the press with a figure of approximately $225,000, which would represent, of course, only the standard Congressman’s salary, but would look bad in the papers)—was the care taken in the memo that neither Alvin Wirtz nor Lyndon Johnson should be linked with that strategy. The threat should be delivered to Rayburn by Maury Maverick, the memo states, not by Wirtz. “Senator ought to be rather independent in the matter, and not be concerned about it. … Maury ought to call Sam. … Better this way than for Senator to get involved.” As for Johnson, the memo goes further in stressing that he had nothing to do with the attacks on Amon Carter that had emanated from Washington. Referring to the “pie counter” missive, the memo begins: “Ickes has replied to Amon Carter, writing a real mean letter,” and then hastens to add: “Secretary [Ickes] didn’t consult Lyndon, and he didn’t know about it.” Lyndon Johnson—or his advisors—may have been directing all-out war on the Garnerites, but the Garnerites were not to know. When it became necessary for either Wirtz or Johnson to get publicly involved with the anti-Garner fight—when it was necessary for some key Texan in Washington to return to Texas and publicly lead the fight—it was
Wirtz, always so concerned about the political future of the young man he considered his protégé, who dropped his mask and did so.

Neither Wirtz’s fees nor the information about Garner, Miller and Rayburn was ever made public, possibly because the memo apparently was written on Friday, April 26, and Monday, April 29, was the day on which, with Roosevelt’s intervention, the “harmony” agreement was drafted and the telegram signed by Rayburn and Johnson was sent, and this most serious threat to Johnson’s attempt to keep secret in Texas his role in the Roosevelt campaign died. Amon Carter’s newspaper was, moreover, the only newspaper in Texas to make even an attempt to portray Johnson’s true significance in the fight. In Washington, his leadership (together, of course, with that of Wirtz) of the fight was an open secret; in Texas, it was just a secret. The only time his name received substantial publicity in Texas was when it appeared on the “harmony” telegram along with Rayburn’s—and, because this telegram was signed by Rayburn, and because it was seen in Texas as a compromise, the appearance of his name in this context did not anger the Garner leaders.

And Johnson’s refusal to take a public stand against Garner even while he was peddling his story about the John L. Lewis episode in the right quarters, his success in keeping his name off the two telegrams to Rayburn (and out of the subsequent press coverage of those telegrams), the care taken to keep his name out of the entire 1940 Garner-Roosevelt fight in Texas (“Lyndon … didn’t know about it”), paid off. To an astonishing degree, the leaders of the Garner movement never became aware of the true extent of Johnson’s role in the fight. Asked, years later, if, during 1940, Johnson brought “any pressure to bear not to have Garner nominated,” E. B. Germany replied: “No, as far as I know he [didn’t]. …” During 1940, two opposing camps were chosen up in Texas, and deep animosity sprang up between them, but surprisingly little of that animosity spilled over onto Lyndon Johnson, because each side appears to have felt that Johnson was on its side.