The Path to Power (114 page)

Others got the news at home. Nan Wood Honeyman had been campaigning in Portland for months, but was making no headway—largely, she felt, because Sam Rayburn had not been able to deliver on the commitment she believed he had made to her at the Democratic Convention in July. Receiving Johnson’s questionnaire, she had responded with a telephone call on October 17, and John Connally’s “memo for LBJ” summarizing the call (Connally may have been taking shorthand notes on an extension) began:

Mrs. Honeyman had asked that contribution be sent to her at her house, and the next day there arrived at 1728 S.W. Prospect Drive the telegram (AS RESULT MY VISIT TO CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE … YOU SHOULD RECEIVE …). The first letter from the committee contained the pre-Johnson contribution: $150. She thought that was the airmail special-delivery letter to which Johnson had been referring. She was appreciative, but $150 wasn’t going to help much. Her opponent was on the way home, she wrote, and “has sent word to raise an extra $1,500 for him right away in spite of the fact that his literature covers the city, he has been on the radio from Washington once or twice a week for some time and his face and ‘One good term deserves another’ on huge billboards meets me at every turn.” Then, on October 19, the Johnson contribution—$500—arrived. RECEIVED 5 POINT PROGRAM TODAY, she wired back in jubilation.

And they were very grateful. “The text of your thoughtful and kind telegram had been read to me over Long Distance telephone, so that on my return from a thorough tour of four counties of my district, I today found two Air Mail letters,” Martin Smith wrote Johnson. “I appreciate your personal efforts in my behalf.” McLaughlin said simply: “I am glad you are where you are.” When the first $500 arrived from Johnson, Izac had dashed
off a letter: “Thanks a million.” And before that letter could even be dropped in the mail, he had to add: “P.S. Your airmail letter of the 19th [the letter which contained another $500] just arrived. Again many thanks.” “Dear Lyndon,” Nan Honeyman wrote, “I have been on the verge of calling you all day instead of writing because it is such fun to hear you. … The second contribution from the National Committee arrived on the heels of the first one and the raise of the ante was grand and I know my gratitude belongs to you.”

They were to become more grateful. For Lyndon had only begun raising money.

Some he obtained through personal acquaintance. Tom Corcoran, in New York raising money for Roosevelt, arranged for some cash contributions from garment-center unions, which he brought to Washington himself and gave to Johnson (as Corcoran was to relate). Another union with political money to spend was the United Mine Workers. John L. Lewis might be for Willkie, but did the UMW really want a Republican Congress? UMW chief counsel Welly Hopkins recalls that “He hadn’t been in place [with the Congressional Campaign Committee] more than twenty-four hours when he called me and said he wanted to see what the mine workers could do toward helping the campaign.” Hopkins presented Johnson’s case to the union’s secretary-treasurer, Tom Kennedy; Johnson went to see Kennedy, and, Hopkins says, “I think he went away satisfied as far as the responses that the mine workers made.” Money from New York came not only from Seventh Avenue but from Wall Street, $7,500 arriving from the investment banker brothers Paul and Cornelius Shields through the offices of the wealthy New Yorkers he had met through Ed Weisl. Some he obtained because of his ability to arouse paternal fondness in older, powerful, wealthy men. Charles Marsh did not even have to be asked; no sooner had he learned of Johnson’s assignment to save Congress for the Democrats than, busy though he was working on the Wallace campaign, he volunteered at once the two commodities with which he was so free: advice and money. Recalls Alice Glass’ sister, Mary Louise, Marsh’s private secretary: “Charles said to him, ‘Boy, you’ve got to get some money. You can’t do that on goodwill.’” Contacting four business associates in Texas, Marsh arranged that each would give him $1,000 per week until the campaign ended, and that he would add to their contributions $1,000 per week of his own, and forward each week a total of $5,000 to Johnson; “I had to keep track of who paid,” she says. (Allowing Marsh to know that other men were similarly helping his “protégé” might have dulled the edge of his enthusiasm for the task, so this information was not given to him.) So fast did the money come in that Johnson was able to broaden his assistance. Martin Smith had been so thrilled to receive the Congressional Committee’s checks for $200 and $500. Before the week was out, he would receive a second $500 check. A filled-in questionnaire and letter requesting financial help
arrived from Representative William H. Sutphin of New Jersey on October 17. Johnson dictated a reply saying, “I am going to make an especial effort to find some way to get you some financial assistance,” but before he had had a chance to sign and mail the letter, the influx of funds had enabled him to be more specific. On the bottom, he added a postscript: “Today I’m asking a Texas friend of mine to give me $500.00 for you. If he does I’ll take it to the Cong. Committee and ask them to rush it to you tonight.” Actually, Johnson had either the money or the assurance of it in hand when he wrote that, and the $500 was sent that night.

He had so much money, in fact, that he was not only meeting requests for funds, but soliciting more requests—
asking
Congressmen to ask for money. On the bottom of Lyndon Johnson’s letter accompanying the $300 check for McLaughlin of Nebraska was a scrawled postscript: “If you badly need more funds, let me know and I’ll try some more.” To one Congressman who hadn’t asked for funds, James M. Barnes of Illinois, he wrote: “Do you have desperate need for money, Jim? If so, wire or write me air mail how much and I’ll try to get some and send through congressional committee for you.”

J
OHNSON WAS APPARENTLY
anticipating a large contribution from the Democratic National Committee. He had asked its secretary, Paul Aiken, for $25,000, and seems to have felt he had received a commitment for at least a substantial portion of that amount, but when the check from New York arrived, it was for only $5,000, and after Johnson had taken that over to the National Press Building on October 21, he was out of funds. But although Sam Rayburn had not been easily convinced of the efficacy of Lyndon Johnson’s fund-raising methods, his doubts must have been ended by the success of his first telephone calls to Dallas. Now the Speaker was going to Dallas in person.

Bonham, his home town, had scheduled a celebration in honor of his becoming Speaker, and Rayburn had left for Texas on October 17. At the celebration (at which bands from the eleven high schools in his district paraded through the streets of his little town), he was presented with a gavel carved by a local carpenter out of bois d’arc wood, and with a gift from Colonel W. T. Knight of Wichita Falls, unofficial spokesman of that city’s oilmen, who, Rayburn’s friend C. Dwight Dorough writes, “that morning … had collected $2,000 from people in Wichita Falls for the National Democratic War Chest, and … had come to present the money in person.” The need for that gift—and for more like it—would shortly be driven home to Rayburn, for on October 23, he received two communications from Johnson. They were both enclosed in the same envelope. The first had been written, on the twenty-first, as a telegram, but not sent in that form; the secretive
Johnson had marked the telegram “Personal & Confidential. Personal Delivery Only,” but who could be certain that those instructions would be obeyed? “I started to send you the attached wire yesterday but because I hesitated to send a wire, I am enclosing it in this letter,” Johnson wrote. The enclosed “wire” said that a “careful check” of congressional races around the country had disclosed that it was not 77 Democratic candidates who were in trouble, but 105. And, it said, there was no more money available to help them. “Barrel has been scraped.” It urged Rayburn to appeal for funds. “Our friends can be helpful now if they want to be by writing me airmail special delivery Munsey Building and directing me to apply as per attached list which I will make up. Hope when you talk to them today and Wednesday in Dallas you will impress importance doing this at once. Hope we can get total at least equivalent to amount I suggested to Paul …”

In Dallas, where another celebration was held in honor of his new job, Rayburn rode through its streets at the head of a 200-car caravan. Then he conferred with the oilmen. Some of them had by this time exceeded the $5,000 limit on campaign contributions. Some of their new contributions were, therefore, in cash. William Kittrell, the veteran Texas lobbyist who had, years before, called Lyndon Johnson a “wonder kid,” was an intimate of Rayburn and Sid Richardson and other oilmen. Worried that his “Personal Delivery Only” letter to Rayburn would go astray, Johnson wired Kittrell that he had sent the Speaker a letter, adding, PLEASE SEE THAT HE GETS IT. THIS IS URGENT. I AM GATHERING OTHER MATERIAL. (“Material” was the euphemism most frequently used by Johnson to refer to campaign contributions.) Some of the oilmen’s response arrived in Washington in envelopes containing cash that were carried by trusted couriers (Kittrell himself was one of them, according to Corcoran and Harold Young), and were handed to Johnson. How much they contained is not known, because no record of these campaign contributions, or of their distribution to individual candidates, has been found. This money did not pass through the committee, or through the Munsey Building office; Johnson arranged for its distribution, in checks or cash, to candidates through outside means, including channels arranged by Marsh, one of which was Young. Only hints about the existence of these channels are contained in letters found in Johnson’s office files; one example is a note from Johnson to Congressman Claude V. Parsons of Illinois on October 25: “I am sure that by now you have received all the material I had sent you, both through the committee and otherwise”; Parsons wrote back thanking Johnson both for the checks from the committee and “from Harold Young.” There is also an unexplained reference in Johnson’s files to money given “on (the) Chicago line.” As for money that
did
pass through the committee, Johnson had said on Monday (in a statement borne out at least in general by his records) that he was out of money. On Thursday, he gave the committee $16,500.

R
AYBURN DID MORE
in Texas than merely raise money.

The independent oilman perhaps most influential among his fellow wildcatters was Charles F. Roeser of Fort Worth, president of the Independent Petroleum Association; in 1936, Jim Farley had been informed confidentially that Roeser “not only will get money himself, but will raise it from his friends.” The contributions Roeser arranged in 1936 had been made through traditional Democratic channels—sent to Democratic National Committee Chairman Farley at the Biltmore. Roeser had planned to contribute through traditional channels in 1940, also; with Farley no longer national chairman, the oilman had asked Elliott Roosevelt, leaving Fort Worth for a trip north, to find out whom he should send the money to. But although Elliott was to wire him to send the money to Steve Early at the White House, those instructions were not followed, for before Roeser heard from Elliott Roosevelt, he heard from Sam Rayburn. The new Speaker “called me from Dallas and advised that I send my contribution to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in care of Lyndon Johnson,” Roeser was to recall. Roeser had never met Johnson, but he followed Rayburn’s instructions. “Dear Mr. Johnson,” he wrote, “After talking with Sam Rayburn, I have decided to send my contribution for this year’s campaign to you. … I am … leaving it up to the Steering Committee, headed by you, to decide in what districts these funds can be best used.” And not only Roeser’s own $5,000 campaign contribution but the contributions of the independent oilmen who followed his lead went not to the White House or to the Biltmore, as they would have done in the past, but to the Munsey Building. So, moreover, did the contributions of independents who did not follow Roeser’s lead—of men such as Richardson and Murchison who followed no man’s lead. For however independent they were, these men not only trusted Sam Rayburn, but were aware that now that this grim, unsmiling man was armed with the Speaker’s gavel, he was the protector they needed in Washington, and they were therefore willing to follow his instructions—which were to send their money to Lyndon Johnson.

Roeser’s terse letter to the young Congressman he had never met was a significant document in the political fund-raising history of the United States (and, it was to prove in later years, in the larger history of the country as well). Sam Rayburn had, on his trip to Texas in October, 1940, cut off the Democratic National Committee, and other traditional party recipients of campaign contributions, from the money of the newly rich Texas independent oilmen. These men had been seeking a channel through which their money could flow to the seat of national power 2,000 miles away, to far-off Washington. After Sam Rayburn’s trip to Dallas in October,
1940, they had their channel, a brand-new channel which, ten days before, had not even existed. Sam Rayburn had cut them the channel. A new source of political money, potentially vast, had been tapped in America, and Lyndon Johnson had been put in charge of it. He was the conduit for their cash.