The Path to Power (41 page)

A
LITTLE MORE SELF-CONFIDENCE
. Not, to this woman who had known Lyndon Johnson longer than the faculty and students of Sam Houston High, a lot. In fact, she emphasizes, sometimes, despite Lyndon’s new popularity, she felt as “sorry for him” as she had in San Marcos. He didn’t have a girlfriend; in fact, she believes, during the year he taught in Houston, he never asked a girl for a date. Another old friend was in Houston, coaching at Galina Park: Boody Johnson. Boody and Lyndon spent a lot of evenings together; Boody confirms that “old Rattling Bones” didn’t have any dates in Houston. And to Boody it was obvious that Lyndon needed to be with someone—needed it so badly that Boody sometimes wondered if his former roommate was afraid to be alone. His new popularity had not reduced his
dependence on the one person he felt would always be there to listen to him, a dependence expressed not only in seven-hour weekend drives home to San Marcos (where his family was now living) but in letters. His sister Rebekah recalls that every time she came home, her mother would chide her for not writing more frequently, and show her how many letters her brother had written during the same period. “There were whole
stacks
of Lyndon’s letters,” his sister says. And when told that his Houston colleagues describe him as self-confident and cheerful there, she is surprised. “Lyndon was very lonely in Houston,” she says. “Quite down-hearted and blue.”

If Miss So Relle recognized the same insecurities in Lyndon Johnson in Houston that she had seen in San Marcos, she recognized also, in long talks they had together, the same ambition—not just the general ambition (“climbing and climbing”) but the specific. “He had this job, it was a good job,” she says. “But he was always thinking, ‘What can I do next?’ ‘What should my next job be?’” And he didn’t want the next job to be in teaching; much as he liked that field, he had no intention of staying in it. He had known for a long time what he wanted. He was constantly talking politics. A fellow teacher remembers sitting around after debating practice, “drinking Cokes … with a group of Sam Houston High kids, and you [Johnson] analyzed the political technique of Joe Bailey for us; and we argued about Jim Ferguson, … and you said, ‘When I go into politics I am going to use these fellows’ effective methods and avoid their mistakes—I’m learning from them.’” Talking politics—and thinking politics. He was constantly referring to
Battle for Peace
, a collection of the speeches of Pat Neff. Some years later, he would give Neff’s book to L. E. Jones, and Jones found the margins filled with Johnson’s handwriting: he had not only read the speeches of one of his state’s greatest speech-makers, but had analyzed them—and decided how they could have been improved.

He had moved fast during his first year in Houston. He began his second year moving even faster. Teams of “declaimers” were dispatched to Kiwanis and Rotary clubs, and to other high schools and junior high schools, to talk on “timely civic topics”; assemblies at his own school began revolving more and more around his debaters (“I don’t think there was one at which Mr. Johnson’s boys or girls weren’t speaking”); there was not enough room in his public-speaking courses for all the students who wanted to take them. And by November the debate season was gearing up: repeating his promise to win the state championship, he had arranged a series of elimination contests to select a new team. On November 25, however, while he was chatting in the school’s administration offices, a secretary said there was a telephone call for him. On the line was Richard Kleberg, whom Johnson had never met but who had just won a special election to fill a vacancy in Texas’ Fourteenth Congressional District. He said that he would need a private secretary in Washington (that was then the title of a Congressman’s Administrative
Aide), and that Johnson had been recommended to him by his political ally Welly Hopkins—and he asked Johnson when he could come to Corpus Christi for an interview. A fellow teacher who was present in the administrative offices recalls that, for a moment, Johnson “was so excited he didn’t know what to say”; then he told Kleberg he would call back in a few minutes, and when he did, he said he could come immediately. At the interview, he was offered the job, and when the new Congressman personally telephoned Principal Moyes, an immediate leave of absence was arranged. Five days after the telephone call, Lyndon Johnson left for Washington with Kleberg, clothes packed in a cardboard suitcase, aboard the crack streamliner, the
Bluebonnet
. Arriving in Washington late the following evening, they checked into the luxurious Mayflower Hotel, where they shared a room. About seven o’clock the next morning, Kleberg telephoned room service for a large pot of coffee—which was, as Johnson wrote in a letter a few days later, “an eye opener and a good excuse for the secretary to get his shave and bath and be on his way.”

A
FTER A SINGLE NIGHT
sharing his boss’ room, he lived in the basement of a shabby little hotel, in a tiny cubicle across whose ceiling ran bare steam pipes, and whose slit of a window stared out, across a narrow alley, at the weather-stained red brick wall of another hotel. Leaving his room early in the morning, he would turn left down the alley onto a street that ran between the red brick walls of other shabby hotels. But when he turned the corner at the end of that street, suddenly before him, at the top of a long, gentle hill, would be not brick but marble, a great shadowy mass of marble—marble columns and marble arches and marble parapets, and a long marble balustrade high against the sky. Veering along a path to the left, he would come up Capitol Hill and around the corner of the Capitol, and the marble of the eastern facade, already caught by the early-morning sun, would be a gleaming, brilliant, almost dazzling white. A new line of columns—towering columns, marble for magnificence and Corinthian for grace—stretched ahead of him, a line, broken only by the pilasters that are the echoes of columns, so long that columns seemed to be marching endlessly before him, the acanthus leaves of their mighty capitals hunched under the weight of massive entablatures, the long friezes above them crammed with heroic figures. And columns loomed not only before him but above him—there were columns atop columns, columns in the sky. For the huge dome that rose above the Capitol was circled by columns not only in its first mighty upward thrust, where it was rimmed by thirty-six great pillars (for the thirty-six states that the Union had comprised when it was built), but also high above, 300 feet above the ground, where, just below the statue of Freedom, a circle of thirteen smaller, more slender shafts (for the thirteen original states) made the
tholos
, a structure modeled after the place where the Greeks left sacrifices to the gods, look like a little temple in the sky, adding a grace note to a structure as majestic and imposing as the power of the sovereign state that it had been designed to symbolize. And as Lyndon Johnson came up Capitol Hill in the morning, he would be running.

Sometimes, the woman who worked with him, coming to work in the morning, would see the gangling figure running awkwardly, arms flapping, past the long row of columns on his way to the House Office Building beyond the Capitol. At first, because it was winter and she knew that he owned only a thin topcoat and that his only suits were lightweight tropicals suitable for Houston, she thought he was running because he was cold. “We weren’t used to weather like they had in Washington,” Estelle Harbin recalls, “and Lyndon couldn’t afford any warm clothes. When I would get to the office, his cheeks would still be all rosy.” But in Spring, the weather turned warm. And still, whenever she saw Lyndon Johnson coming up Capitol Hill, he would be running.

T
HE DAY
Lyndon Johnson first entered the Capitol—December 7, 1931, the opening session of the Seventy-second Congress—was the day on which the first order of business was the election of a new Speaker of the House of Representatives, and after the election, as the House rose in applause (applause mingled with Indian war whoops and the Rebel yell), a committee escorted to the triple-tiered white marble rostrum a short, red-faced man with fierce white eyebrows, dressed in a cheap, rumpled brown suit and a rancher’s heavy, blunt-toed brogans: John Nance Garner, “Cactus Jack” Garner—Garner of Texas.

Later that day, the great Standing Committees of the House met to select their chairmen. For twelve years, these chairmen had been Republicans; under Coolidge Prosperity and Hoover Prosperity, Democratic rolls had dwindled until one Democratic Congressman was heard to mutter, “We’re going the way of the Whigs.” The Crash had changed the situation; the election of Lyndon Johnson’s new boss, in fact, had sealed the change. The 1930 congressional elections had reduced the Republican majority in the House from 104 to two. By October, 1931, special elections to fill the seats of Representatives who had died had given the Democrats their first majority in the House since 1919. But the majority was only two, and with two seats still vacant and a third held by a member of the Farmer-Laborite Party, three votes were uncertain, and the Democrats could not be sure they would be able to organize the House when it reconvened in December. Then, on November 6, 1931, Harry Wurzbach, the only Republican Congressman from Texas, died. It was the election of Richard Kleberg, a Democrat, in Wurzbach’s district on November 24 that made the Democrats’ majority 218 to 214, and assured them of enough votes to control the House. Within the parties, seniority determined chairmanships, and Democratic Texas had for years been sending Congressmen to Washington and keeping them there. And after the Standing Committees met on December 7, the chairman of the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce was Garner’s right-hand man, Samuel Taliafero Rayburn—Rayburn
of Texas. The chairman of the Rivers and Harbors Committee, overseer and dispenser of funds for the nation’s great public works, was Joseph Jefferson Mansfield—Mansfield of Texas. The chairman of the Judiciary Committee was Hatton W. Sumners of Texas, of the Agriculture Committee Marvin Jones of Texas, of the Committee on Public Buildings and Grounds Fritz Lanham of Texas. Texans were elected on December 7, 1931, not only to the Speakership of the House but to the chairmanships of five of its most influential committees. Lyndon Johnson’s first day in the Capitol was the day Texas came to power in it—a power that the state was to hold, with only the briefest interruptions, for more than thirty years.

But the coming to power of Texas had nothing to do with Lyndon Johnson then.
His
Congressman had no power; in a body in which power was determined almost solely by seniority, his Congressman, the last one elected, had the least seniority of any of its 435 members.

His Congressman, moreover, had little interest in
being
a Congressman.

Richard Mifflin Kleberg was one of the wealthiest men in Texas, owner of a full twenty percent of the King Ranch, that colossal empire which had been founded by his grandfather, Richard King, and expanded by his father, King’s son-in-law, Robert Kleberg, into a 2,000-square-mile empire—a domain so large that automobiles crossing it had to carry compasses to navigate and there was a full month’s difference in seasons between its southern and northern boundaries. Extending the Ranch’s influence beyond its borders, founding colleges and banks, building railroads, harbors, whole towns, in fact, Robert Kleberg turned much of South Texas into “Kleberg Country.” And when, in 1922, Kleberg suffered a stroke, his son Dick, then thirty-six, was put in charge of the empire’s affairs.

But Richard displayed little interest in his inheritance. During his youth, he had loved to play polo and golf, and to spend his time outdoors (he was renowned even among the King Ranch’s hundreds of hard-riding Mexican
vaqueros
as a great rider, a great roper, a great marksman). In his forties, he still bulldogged steers in rodeos, sat up all night drinking and playing poker, and, accompanying himself on the accordion, singing Mexican songs to the adoring
vaqueros
, who called him “Mr. Dick”; he still vacationed in Mexico City for weeks at a time. He was an easy-going, affable, considerate man. “A sweeter man than Dick Kleberg never lived,” a friend says. “But,” the friend adds, “he was a playboy. As for work, he had no interest in that
whatsoever
.” By 1927, he had let the affairs of the great ranch slide until, almost unbelievably, it was in financial difficulties, and the executors of his father’s estate removed him from authority and turned the administration of its affairs over to his younger brother (who soon had it back on sound footing). Dick didn’t seem to mind; business, he said, was not for him.

Neither, it turned out, was politics. His views on government were strong, if a trifle simplistic. The cause of the Depression, he felt, was Al
Capone. “The trouble with the nation’s economy,” he declared, was simply Prohibition, which “makes it possible for large-scale dealers in illicit liquor to amass tremendous amounts of currency”; the “present economic crisis,” he explained, was due to the “withdrawal of billions of dollars from the channels of legitimate trade” by these bootleggers. His passions were also aroused by Herbert Hoover—not because, as some felt, Hoover was not doing enough to fight the Depression, but because he was doing too much. Kleberg’s first speech in the House, in January, 1932, urged Congress to begin “whittling down … government interference in business and society and the expenses of maintaining these interfering agencies.” Not long thereafter, he sharpened his attacks, calling Hoover’s policies “un-American” because of their “enormous expense.” He had had, however, no interest in entering politics, becoming a candidate as a favor to a friend, the legendary Roy Miller, the onetime “Boy Mayor of Corpus Christi,” whose lobbying activities for the gigantic Texas Gulf Sulphur Corporation were making his pearl-gray Borsalino and silvery mane as familiar in Washington as they had been in Austin. Miller was a Garner ally; when Wurzbach died, the paramount qualification necessary for the Democratic nominee in the Fourteenth District was, in Miller’s view, electability—since his election would give the Democrats the previously Republican seat, and with it the vote that would ensure Garner’s election to the Speakership. And, in Kleberg Country, who was more electable than a Kleberg?

Playing his accordion and singing in Spanish to San Antonio’s thousands of Mexican-American voters, waving a big sombrero as he led rodeo parades (and, at the Robstown Rodeo, roping and throwing a calf in a respectable fourteen seconds), telling funny stories, Kleberg won easily. But campaigning was the extent of his interest in his new job. At Lyndon Johnson’s request, he had, on their first day in Washington, taken his secretary around to introduce him to his influential friends (“Hello, Dick, you old cow-puncher,” Garner said; he had a word for Dick’s secretary, too, as soon as he caught his name: “You Sam Johnson’s boy?” he asked), but had done little thereafter to help him with his work. Kleberg had given Miller what Capitol Hill called “carte blanche”: permission to use his office—Room 258—as if it were his own. The lobbyist “was in there every day,” says one congressional secretary, dictating letters to Miss Harbin (not only letters Miller signed with his own name but letters he signed with Kleberg’s), telephoning for appointments with departmental and Cabinet officials (always in Kleberg’s name rather than his own—but when Kleberg went, Miller always went with him). The House convened at noon; most Congressmen spent mornings in their offices handling their district’s “casework”—individual requests from constituents—either taking care of it themselves or calling bureaucrats to tell them that their secretaries would be calling, thereby smoothing the secretaries’ way. Kleberg, however, spent his mornings sleeping off the previous evening’s poker-and-bourbon session, and
his afternoons indulging another passion—golf—at Washington’s famous Burning Tree Golf Club. On his trips to Capitol Hill, his first stop would be the congenial House cloakroom—not his office, in which the work bored him. He seldom appeared in Room 258
*
before the House adjourned in the late afternoon—when he would show up to welcome friends, his own and Miller’s, dropping by for a drink. On many days, he never showed up at all. Room 258 was a Congressman’s office without a Congressman. The work of the Fourteenth District was left to the Congressman’s secretary.

In some districts, this might not have mattered much. With air travel still in its infancy, distances insulated Congressmen—and their secretaries—from their constituents; few came to Washington to be greeted, entertained, and taken on tours of the capital. Because the national government touched the lives of its citizens only occasionally, there was little communication between them and the Representative who was their link to it; the office of a Congressman representing a typical Western district might receive only ten or fifteen letters a day, most of them from job-hunters or from veterans needing assistance to obtain or increase government pensions. Many Congressmen therefore employed only one of the two secretaries allowed them by law; many—by one estimate, more than half—paid the rest of their $5,000 “clerk-hire” allowance to a relative who never bothered to show up in the office. Some secretaries were, moreover, elderly spinsters who had spent a lifetime working for one or another “Member” and who were notably slow in the performance of their duties. Life was leisurely on Capitol Hill; the House Office Building—there was only one House Office Building then, the one now known as the Cannon Building; each Congressman’s office consisted of a single room—was a place of open doors; in the late afternoon, members and secretaries would drop in on each other, desk drawers would be opened, and bottles would be pulled out for a friendly drink.

But Texas’ Fourteenth was not a typical district. Included in its half-million residents—twice as many as the average Texas district—was one of the nation’s largest concentrations of servicemen and veterans, the constituents who made the most demands on a Congressman, for San Antonio was the site of Fort Sam Houston, the nation’s largest Army post, and the center of a ring of military aviation fields. Tens of thousands of men had trained in the city (31,000 at Kelly Field alone during World War I), enough had married there so that San Antonio was jocularly known as “the Mother-in-law of the Army”—and enough had made their homes there after their enlistments were up to ensure that the district’s congressional office would have an outsize share of mail about pensions, disability benefits, and the new issue that was agitating ex-servicemen in 1931: pre-payment of their bonus for World War service. Kleberg’s predecessor had been ill
for more than a year, so that his office had fallen behind in its work even before his death; when Lyndon Johnson opened the door to Room 258 for the first time, gray sacks bulging with months’ accumulation of mail were heaped before him.

And the new Congressman’s new secretary didn’t know the district. Its northern end was the Hill Country, including his home county, Blanco, but from the southernmost ridge of the familiar hills, the district stretched more than 200 miles farther south. On his first trip through it, Lyndon Johnson drove south to San Antonio as he had on his way to Cotulla and Pearsall, but then turned not southwest on a sandy track across treeless, desolate plains toward Mexico, but southeast, on a broad, well-paved highway that ran past pastures of lush grass filled with fat cattle, and cotton fields that stretched to the horizon. This land, beneath its grass and cotton, was not the parched whitish soil of the Hill Country, but the rich black loam of the coastal plain, loam with an average depth of four feet; the Fourteenth District included some of the richest land in all Texas. And when Johnson reached the southern border of his new responsibility, he was looking at palm trees and fishing boats and freighters and the great half-moon shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico.