The Path to Power (136 page)

Also cementing the bond between the two men was Johnson’s talent as a “professional son.”

He knew now how much he needed “Mr. Sam.” For the next two decades, Sam Rayburn held power in Washington. Presidents came and went—Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy—but whoever was President, Sam Rayburn was Speaker; he held the post he had dreamed of as a boy for almost seventeen of the twenty-one years after 1940, more years than any other man in American history. Over his branch of government his power was immense, so great that it spilled over into the government as a whole. Johnson needed him not only at the moment, when he was still only a junior member of the body the older man ruled; he needed him for the realization of his great ambition. And he knew it. If you want to be President, he told William O. Douglas during the 1940’s, “you’ve got to do it through Sam Rayburn.” And, needing the Speaker as his friend, Johnson
devoted his energy and his skill to making him one. He reiterated his version of their first meeting (“My dear Mr. Speaker,” he was to write in 1957, “when I was a very little boy in knee breeches and high button shoes, my Daddy told me that ‘there’s a young fellow from Bonham who’s a mighty good friend and don’t you go forgetting it.’ I promised to remember—and that was the smartest promise I ever made in my life”)—reiterated it so often that Rayburn eventually came to believe that he remembered it, too; nominating Johnson for the Presidency in 1960, Rayburn said: “I’m going to present to you today a man that I have known since his babyhood. …” As Rayburn grew old, that story came to mean more and more to him; at one banquet, when Rayburn was seventy-six, Senator Ralph Yarborough was to recall, “Lyndon was telling the story about how Sam had first seen him running up and down the aisles [of the Texas House of Representatives] in short pants. He was telling how ‘he’s been like a father to me.’ I saw tears come out of Rayburn’s eyes at this banquet and roll down his cheeks.”

When Lynda Bird was born in 1944, Johnson telephoned Rayburn with the news and made a point of telling him he was the first person he had called, even before he had telephoned his own mother. He entertained Rayburn’s favorite sister, Lucinda (“Miss Lou”), on her annual visits to Washington, and, when she was back in Bonham, wrote her to keep her up to date on the Speaker’s health, and sent her presents, including candy in boxes so elaborate that she kept them on her vanity table as decorations. And he did nothing to discourage the bond between Rayburn and Lady Bird. During the first decade of her marriage, Lady Bird was not usually present at dinners at which her husband discussed serious political business—unless the Speaker was present. If he was, she would be brought along—even if she was the only wife there. During the war years, she recalls, sometimes a group of Texans would go out to dinner, at the Occidental, or to Hall’s Restaurant for bluepoints and lobster; “This would be the Speaker, and perhaps Wright Patman, and others. … The other men would leave their wives home, because they would be talking business. There would be three or four or five men and me—for some reason, Lyndon always took me.”

A
LTHOUGH THE RELATIONSHIP
between Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn was restored, it was to be subtly different than it had been before. Johnson’s actions in the 1940 Garner-Roosevelt fight had lifted from Rayburn’s eyes the curtain of uncritical affection through which he had hitherto regarded the younger man. If Sam Rayburn loved Lyndon Johnson, the love was no longer blind. Men who sat in the Board of Education during the next twenty years were aware of this even if most Washingtonians were not. Says Richard Boiling: “A constant refrain was about his [Johnson’s] arrogance and egotism. He [Rayburn] said to me several times the same words: ‘I
don’t know anyone who is as vain or more selfish than Lyndon Johnson.’” He appears to have understood now what drove the younger man; Ramsey Clark says, in words echoed by other men who knew both, “He understood Johnson. I’ve heard him talk about Johnson, and his ambition. I don’t think it was blind love at all.”

But Clark also says, and Boiling agrees, and so do Ken Harding and D. B. Hardeman and other men who sat, afternoon after afternoon, in the Board of Education as the dramas of power were played out, that while the “love” may not have been “blind,” love it certainly was. Sam Rayburn could criticize Johnson, but he let no one else do so. Once, after Johnson’s 1948 campaign for the Senate, a reporter from Texas was riding in the Speaker’s limousine and remarked that Johnson had stolen the election; Rayburn had the chauffeur stop the car, and ordered the reporter out of it. Says Hardeman: “It was a father-son relation, with all that that implies. … Johnson would just infuriate him, but he would defend Johnson against all comers. He loved him in the way: he’d like to wear the bottom of his britches out.”

The most significant difference was that, although the relationship was restored, no longer did Rayburn give his love and support to Lyndon Johnson for nothing; he demanded from him, in political matters at least, the respect, even deference, that he received from other men. The door to the Board room on the ground floor of the Capitol was open to Johnson again, but in that room, Rayburn ruled, and Johnson acknowledged that fact. Even in later years, when Johnson was the leader of one house of Congress as Rayburn was of the other, he acknowledged that. The acknowledgment was in the names by which each referred to the other: “It was never ‘Sam,’” says one man. “It was always ‘Mr. Sam’ or ‘Mr. Speaker,’ and ‘Lyndon.’” Says another: “There was never a feeling that they were equals. Never. Even after [Johnson became Majority Leader], Johnson was quite deferential to him. He would argue with him, but always in such a way that you knew who was the boss.” If there was a disagreement, Johnson would preface his argument by saying, “Mr. Speaker, we’re going to do whatever you want, but here’s what I think.” If he did it that way, Brown & Root lobbyist Frank Oltorf says, Rayburn would go along—but he wouldn’t go along otherwise. Even Walter Jenkins, who idolized Johnson, says, “He kowtowed to Mr. Rayburn unbelievably.” What Rayburn demanded, Johnson gave.

Occasionally, Johnson’s feelings—his true feelings—about what he gave became apparent, but he never let Rayburn see them. When he was in the Senate, he would sometimes say to Jim Rowe, “Oh, Rayburn’s so goddamned difficult—I’ve got to go over there to the Board of Education and kiss his ass, and I don’t want to do it.” But he went over, and did it—afternoon after afternoon, year after year. In 1957, when he was Majority Leader, he attended the dedication of the Sam Rayburn Library in Bonham. While he was talking with several prominent Texans, one of Rayburn’s aides,
House Doorkeeper “Fishbait” Miller, came up and told him the Speaker would like to see him. He waved Miller aside twice, and, when Miller persisted, exploded: “Goddammit, I have to kiss his ass all the time in Washington. I don’t have to do it in Texas, too, do I? I’m not coming!” But then he ran after Miller to make sure that the message wasn’t delivered, and hurried off to see the Speaker.

And in return for giving Rayburn what Rayburn wanted, Johnson got what
he
wanted. For the twenty years after Pearl Harbor, Sam Rayburn was one of the rocks—one of the firmest rocks—on which Lyndon Johnson’s career was built.

I
N
A
UGUST
, 1961, Sam Rayburn, seventy-nine years old, virtually blind but still Speaker of the House, was dying of cancer, so racked by pain that he was finally forced to curtly inform a shocked and silent House—while giving it no hint of the true nature of his illness, which he had long concealed—that although Congress was still in session, he was going to leave Washington and return to Texas for medical treatment. Vice President Lyndon Johnson was in Berlin, dispatched there by President Kennedy to reassure that city of American support. (On August 17, when Kennedy had telephoned Johnson to ask him to go to Berlin, he had reached him at Rayburn’s apartment at the Anchorage, and Johnson had replied that he had been planning to go fishing with Rayburn that weekend. Rayburn had interrupted to tell him to go to Berlin; they could go fishing another weekend, he said.)

On August 21, Johnson returned to Washington. Lady Bird, at Andrews Air Force Base Airport to greet him, suddenly looked around and to her surprise saw Sam Rayburn standing there behind her, as he had stood at Union Station so many years before.

On August 30, Sam Rayburn wrote back, stilted and formal even now. “Dear Bird,” he wrote, “Your note was very refreshing and highly appreciated by me. You know that no two people are closer to me in friendship and love than you and Lyndon. It has been a great heritage to have known you so intimately and well.” Although the pain was very bad
that day, the hand that wrote that letter did not shake. There was not a tremor in the name “Sam Rayburn.” The next morning, Rayburn went home to Bonham to die. A friend who spent time with him during his last days explained why he did not stay in Washington, where he could have gotten better medical assistance: Rayburn, the friend wrote, thought that “Washington was such a lonely city for a country boy to get sick in.”

P
EARL
H
ARBOR
was to derail Lyndon Johnson’s career.

He had expected to run against Pappy O’Daniel again in just a year—in the Democratic primary that would be held during the summer of 1942 for the full six-year term in the same Senate seat. He hoped for Roosevelt’s backing in 1942, and the President’s negative response to Rayburn’s request for an interview for Gerald Mann was not the only indication that this hope was to be granted. When, in October, 1941, Wright Patman asked for an appointment to solicit the White House support to which he felt his record entitled him, Roosevelt wouldn’t even see him. In 1942, moreover, Johnson would be starting not as an unknown candidate but as one whose name had been made—through hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of advertising—almost a household word in Texas. The statewide Johnson-for-Senator campaign organization established and perfected in 1941 was champing at the bit for 1942. He would have Brown & Root behind him again, which meant that he would again have all the money he needed. He was confident that he would win. But the outbreak of war—and his pledge to serve in it—made running in 1942 an impossibility. It would be seven years before he got another chance.

And when, in 1948, he got this chance, there would be a slight alteration in the platform on which he ran. In 1941, his platform had been “all-out,” “100 percent” support of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. In 1948, he no longer supported the principles and programs for which Roosevelt had stood.

With a few exceptions, he opposed them.

Even before Roosevelt’s death, the change had begun, for even before Roosevelt’s death, Johnson had decided that the power in Texas—the power that could enable him to move up to the second rung on his three-rung
ladder—lay not with the people of Texas, who loved the President, but with the state’s small circle of rulers, who hated him. In February, 1943, Johnson sent them a signal. One of their voices in Washington was House Un-American Activities Committee Chairman Martin Dies, to whom the New Deal was a Communist conspiracy. An effort was under way in Congress to end the Committee’s existence. Johnson voted to continue it, and to increase the funding for its work.

Harold Young, a dedicated liberal, was astonished when he heard of this vote by the man he had so ardently supported, and telephoned Johnson, “You mean to tell me you voted for that son-of-a-bitch to get more money?” Admitting that he had indeed done so, Johnson said, “I never claimed to be a liberal.” “Well,” said Young, “you sure fooled hell out of me.” Then and there, he coined a new nickname that he felt epitomized the cowardice before powerful forces of the man he had previously admired: “Lyin’-down Lyndon.”

So long as Roosevelt was still alive—in power—the change was muted. The sentiments Johnson expressed in Texas, 1,600 miles from Washington, were not expressed in the capital, except to a small clique which revolved around Corcoran, now ousted by the President from the circles of official power and already transformed, with remarkable speed, into a lobbyist growing rich on fees from some of the country’s most reactionary businessmen who hired Tommy the Cork to help them circumvent the laws he had written. By 1942, Charles Marsh was to say in dismay that both Corcoran and Johnson had “reached the conclusion that the public is now tired of the New Deal and they must be given something new.” Corcoran arranged for Johnson to deliver in Portland, Oregon, a speech that, according to Marsh, “kicks the New Deal into a cocked hat.” At the last moment, Johnson edited out most of the anti-New Deal rhetoric, but a few paragraphs remained to give the tone. The speech was delivered—on December 8, 1942—at farewell ceremonies for the obsolete battleship
Oregon
, which was being scrapped to provide steel for the war effort. Johnson said there was other scrapping to be done as well: of a government that, he said, had grown too big. Many Depression-era government agencies, such as “these old domestic museum pieces, the PWA, FHA and WPA,” he said, “have now outlived their usefulness,” as have “men who have become entrenched in power without making or keeping themselves fit for the exercise of that power, men who love their country and would die for it—but not until their own dangerously outdated notions have caused others to die for it first.

In 1944, during the anti-Roosevelt revolt by the reactionary Texas Regulars, Johnson sided with his state’s New Dealers, but, with Wirtz’s help, he tried frantically to keep his role in the fight as minimal as possible, disguising it so successfully that after this battle the disgusted Bill Kittrell, another Texas liberal who had backed Johnson in the belief that Johnson was also a liberal, began telling friends: “Lyndon will be found on no barricades.”

Muted though it was during Roosevelt’s life, however, the change had come very early—within a few months after the 1941 senatorial campaign, in fact. Even before he sent out public signals with his vote on the Dies Committee, he had, in a series of quiet meetings arranged by Roy Miller and Herman Brown and Alvin Wirtz and Ed Clark, let key figures in the Texas plutocracy know what Miller and Brown and Wirtz and Clark already knew: that, as Roy’s son, Dale, puts it: “He gave the impression of being much, much more liberal than he actually was—his manner personified the New Deal—he looked the part: he was young, dynamic, outgoing. But… he gave a lot more impression of being with the New Deal than he actually was. …” Or as George Brown says, “He [said he] was for the Niggers, he was for labor, he was for the little boys, but by God … you get right down to the nut-cutting, he was practical.” “Basically,” George Brown says, “Lyndon was more conservative, more practical than people understood”—and by the mid-1940’s, Brown says, in Texas at least, “people,” the people who mattered,
did
understand. “You could see what side he was really on, then.”

On the day of Roosevelt’s death, Johnson’s reporter friend William S. White wrote that he found the young Congressman in “a gloomy Capitol corridor,” with “tears in his eyes,” and “a white cigarette holder”—similar to Roosevelt’s—clamped in “a shaking jaw.” He told White that when the news came, “I was just looking up at a cartoon on the wall—a cartoon showing the President with that cigarette holder and his jaw stuck out like it always was. He had his head cocked back, you know. And then I thought of all the little folks, and what they had lost.” He told White, “He was just like a Daddy to me always; he always talked to me just that way. …” Then, White wrote, Johnson cried out, “God! God! How he could take it for us all!”

But the King was dead. The day after Roosevelt’s death, one of Johnson’s secretaries, Dorothy Nichols, asked him: “He’s gone; what do we have now?” “Honey,” Johnson replied, “we’ve got Truman. … There is going to be the damnedest scramble for power in this man’s town for the next two weeks that anyone ever saw in their lives.”

With Roosevelt dead, Johnson went public with his change of allegiance. Because he had difficulty erasing the earlier pro-Roosevelt image that he had so painstakingly created, in 1947 he called in another friendly reporter, Tex Easley, to correct it, and after an exclusive interview with the Congressman, Easley wrote that while “People all over Texas formed an impression over the years that Lyndon Johnson personified the New Deal … it would be an error to tag Johnson now as a strong New Dealer. That may come as a surprise, but it is true.” Except in certain limited, specific, areas of governmental action—Johnson mentioned three: “development of water power, REA, farm-to-market roads”—he wasn’t a New Dealer, Johnson told Easley; “I think the term ‘New Dealer’ is a misnomer,” he said. “I believe in free enterprise, and I don’t believe in the government doing anything that the people can do privately. Whenever it’s possible, government should get out of business.” As a liberal reporter was later to put it: “Just roads and rural electrification? This could have been Cotton Ed Smith talking, or Jim Eastland. It was certainly no liberal talking.” On another, later, occasion, he sought to excuse his early support of the New Deal by saying, “I was a young man of adventure with more guts than brains. …”

If in public he was attacking only certain aspects of the New Deal, in private—at least in Texas—he was going much further. He was not a New Dealer, he said, never had been. He had supported Roosevelt, he said, only to get things for Texas. In private, in fact, he was now opposing the New Deal almost as enthusiastically as he had once supported it. During his 1948 senatorial campaign, he supported few, if any, of the programs that had evolved out of, and were carrying forward, the New Deal. He ran not as a New Dealer, but, to the extent possible because of his earlier statements, as an anti-New Dealer. And during the campaign, he attacked much of what was left of the New Deal. The shift in his views can be symbolized in a single issue: labor. In his first campaign for the Senate, he had told Texas labor unions: “I come to you as a friend of labor.” In his second, he came as an enemy—open and bitter. In 1948, it wasn’t Pappy O’Daniel who attacked the “big labor racketeers” and “racketeering Communist [union] leaders who take orders only from Moscow.” Those words were Johnson’s words. Nor was the change limited to labor. Once he had said—over and over, in speeches, in pamphlets, in posters and on huge billboards—that he was “100 percent” for Roosevelt and the New Deal. Now, he still said that he had supported a percentage of New Deal legislation—but the percentage he cited was not 100, or even 50; on twenty-seven major pieces of New Deal legislation, he said, he had voted for the New Deal thirteen times. The Dallas Chamber of Commerce, one of the most reactionary business groups in the United States, checked out his record—and found it so satisfactorily conservative that it enthusiastically endorsed him.

The change may have come as a shock to Harold Young and Bill
Kittrell; it might have shocked Pa Watson, who had considered Lyndon Johnson the “perfect Roosevelt man.” But it would have come as no surprise to the young men who had lived in the Dodge Hotel with Lyndon Johnson, and who had said, “Lyndon goes which way the wind blows.” His relationship with the President and the New Deal demonstrated how well these young men had understood him. Before the paint had faded on the billboards proclaiming his loyalty to Franklin D, Lyndon B had turned against him.