The Path to Power (43 page)

T
HOUGH
he no longer had time to eat dinner with the Dodge boys, he was still a participant in their late-evening bull sessions—but the tone of his participation had rapidly changed. Coming in late from work, he would walk into a discussion in one of the crowded little basement cubicles, and begin at once to dominate it. He didn’t want to talk about anything but politics, and steered every conversation onto that subject. And while only a week or two before he had been asking questions at the Dodge, now he wasn’t asking any more, he was telling—talking as if he knew all the answers. “We used to have discussions,” one of the young men was to say. “Now we were having lectures—lectures by Lyndon.”

His demeanor had changed not only in a basement but in a balcony. In January, he and Estelle Harbin had sat on the steps of the gallery of the House of Representatives like “two scared field mice” during President Hoover’s address to Congress. In February, the President addressed Congress again. Several Congressional secretaries, sitting in the gallery reserved for them, remember Johnson coming in late, pushing aggressively to get to an empty seat, and introducing himself to everyone around him in a very loud voice. One secretary sitting in a front row of the gallery remembers people hunching down a little in embarrassment, and says that he was doing so, too, when he felt a tap on his shoulder and, turning, found the tall young man who was making all the fuss leaning down toward him, and stretching out his arm for a handshake. “Lyndon Johnson from Johnson City, Texas!” the young man said loudly. “Dick Kleberg’s secretary.”

His demeanor had also changed in the halls of the House Office Building. When he wasn’t working the telephone in 258, Johnson had begun roaming those corridors with the air of a successful politician. Says a secretary to a Pennsylvania Congressman: “I remember him bounding in the door every day with a big smile, and saying, ‘Hi! How’s everyone from Pennsylvania today?’ He just
radiated
self-confidence.”

He acted like a successful politician in other ways, too. Despite the thinness of his suits, his first paycheck went not for warm clothing, but for a formal portrait—and a hundred prints—by Washington’s most expensive photographer. Inscribing and autographing the pictures (“To Gene and the members of the Sam Houston High debating club. I love you all—Lyndon B. Johnson”), he mailed them back to Texas, as if he were a Congressman responding to constituents’ requests for an autographed picture. Recalling this mailing, one secretary says: “What I remember about Lyndon Johnson was his fantastic assurance in everything he did.”

C
ONFIDENCE
? Assurance? The photographs weren’t the only communications that Lyndon Johnson sent to Texas. No sooner had he arrived in Washington than he began writing to Gene Latimer, Luther (“L.E.”) Jones and
other former students at Sam Houston High. These letters were not the conventional letters from a teacher to former students. Though he wrote them late at night after a grinding day in Kleberg’s office, they were not brief notes but detailed descriptions of his life in Washington that often ran four handwritten pages. And in them, he didn’t merely ask his former pupils to stay in touch; he pleaded with them to stay in touch. The happy-go-lucky Latimer was not a faithful correspondent; Jones was, but on one occasion he didn’t reply promptly. “Dear L.E.,” said the next letter from Washington, “Have you forgotten me?” And when Jones wrote back, Johnson replied: “Thanks for your letter. … I had almost begun to think you had quit me too. Haven’t been able to get a line out of Gene et al for weeks. … It’s now after 12 and I’ve just finished work. Must drop Gene a note also. Love and for goodness sakes write me a long letter now.” Johnson’s letters reveal not only a penchant for secrecy rather surprising in personal notes (on one, entirely innocuous, he wrote: “Burn this—others probably won’t understand the personal references”), but also concern about how his own letters were being received (“Hope you won’t be bored with this long letter”), and an urgent need to be reassured that these two young men to whom he had once been close still wanted to be close to him. Pouring out affection, he asked—over and over, in every letter, in fact, that survives—that the affection be reciprocated. In a letter written on a Sunday night (“Have not been out of the office all day. Didn’t get up until late this morning so I was forced to rush to work and have been at it until only a few minutes ago. I never get time to do anything but try to push the mail out”), he told Jones: “You are a real boy. I love you and Gene as if you were my own.” The letter ends: “Thanks for your … letter. I’m waiting for another … letter.”

Other letters were needed even more. If a few days went by without the mailbags containing a letter in Rebekah Johnson’s carefully rounded script, Estelle Harbin says, “you could see him get quiet and homesick.”

Sometimes, even when the letters from Texas were regular, he would get quiet, Miss Harbin says. As he had done with Mrs. Marshall in Cotulla and with Ethel Davis in San Marcos, he made a confidante of this somewhat older woman, and, in a maternal way, she was very fond of him and felt she understood him—as perhaps she did, working beside him all day, day after day, the two of them alone in an office. And she had a very different picture of him than did the young men in the Dodge or on Capitol Hill. “Now, Lyndon had a side to him,” she says. “He could get very low. When he got real quiet, it was bad.” She even devised a strategy to cheer him up. Johnson was very proud of working for a Kleberg; he never tired of repeating to acquaintances that the King Ranch was so big that the entire state of Connecticut could be dropped into it and never touch a fence. In these first months, a friendly word from his boss meant a lot to him, Miss Harbin saw, so whenever Kleberg (who, with golf in season, was now coming to Capitol Hill less and less frequently) asked Lyndon to deliver papers to him at his
red-carpeted Mayflower Hotel suite, “I’d wait until Lyndon cleared the building, and I’d call Mr. Kleberg and say, ‘Lyndon is real low—I think he’s real homesick. And he needs some cheering up.’ And Mr. Kleberg would say, ‘Don’t say another word. I’ll take care of it.’ And as soon as Lyndon would get there, Mr. Kleberg would say, ‘Now put those things down, boy, and we’re just going to talk.’ And every time, Lyndon would come back a different person. When he hit the door, his hat would just be on the back of his head with the brim turned up, and he’d be smiling, and he’d say, ‘I’ll tell you, that Mr. Dick is the most wonderful man in the world.’”

But the quietness would return, and sometimes, Estelle Harbin says, “it was
very
bad.” She felt she understood why he ran—not only physically but “in his mind, too”: because “he had a burning ambition to be somebody. He didn’t know what he wanted to be, but he wanted to be
somebody
.” He ran, she says, because “he couldn’t stand not being somebody—just could not
stand
it. So he was trying to meet everyone, to learn everything—he was trying to gobble up all Washington in a month.” Dining with him at night she sometimes felt that even after the long day’s work, “he was still running in his head.” Walking toward her bus in the dark, watching him running awkwardly down Capitol Hill toward the Dodge, she would hope that he would relax when he got there. But often, when the next morning she turned into the only open door in the House Office Building and his pale face looked up at her, he would say something that told her he had been running all night, too. When he got quiet, she says, it was because he was doubting himself, because he was afraid he would never get to be somebody. Or, she says, it was because he had been hurt—deeply hurt—by some offhand remark. “He was very sensitive to the other person, and he was very sensitive himself,” she says. “And he was very, very easily hurt.” Because she felt she understood him, “sometimes,” Estelle Harbin says, “I felt very sorry for him.”

H
E RAN HARDER
. In June, 1932, Miss Harbin, for personal reasons, returned to Texas. Johnson had the opportunity to hire a new assistant—two, in fact, since among the information he had acquired at the Dodge was the fact that a $130-per-month patronage job as mailman in the House Post Office traditionally “belonged” to the Fourteenth District. And he had his new assistants already picked out. He brought Gene Latimer and L. E. Jones to Washington.

Latimer, the little Irish boy with the “wonderful smile”—“the best-natured little guy you ever saw,” says one of the Dodge residents—came for love. His fiancee’s family had moved there, and Latimer was anxious to be near her and to earn enough money to get married, and the only job he had been able to find in Depression-racked Houston had been as a delivery boy. Johnson told him a job was waiting for him in Washington. “L.E.”
came for ambition. The son of an impoverished druggist, he had spent his childhood in a Houston slum from which he was desperate to escape; he had worked his way through two years at Rice University, but was afraid he would have trouble getting a job when he graduated. Johnson wrote him, “I know you are going places and I’m going to help you get there,” and said the place to start was a government job in Washington.

He got them cheap. So that he could keep for himself the balance remaining for 1932 in the district’s $5,000 annual clerk-hire allowance, Johnson had arranged for Latimer, who arrived several months before Jones, to be given the $130-per-month mailman job, which put him on the payroll of the House Post Office instead of the district. Since that job was not yet open, he had arranged for Congressman Kleberg to pay Latimer out of his own pocket: $25 per month. He would not need much money, Johnson assured him; he could share Johnson’s room at the Dodge and therefore have a place to sleep for only $15 per month, leaving $10 to spend as he pleased. After a month, Latimer told Johnson that he simply could not live on $10. Johnson arranged to have Kleberg pay him $57. For several months, that was Latimer’s total salary.

When he finally began receiving his $130, Latimer found that to be a low wage even in Depression Washington, too low to enable him to save enough money so he could get married. It was, however, a higher wage than Jones received. Johnson had persuaded Kleberg to increase his own share of the $5,000 allowance for 1933 to the maximum permitted by law: $3,900. Jones’ annual salary was therefore the remaining $1,100, or $91.66 per month.

And he got his money’s worth. Many Congressmen required House patronage employees—mailmen, elevator operators, gallery doorkeepers—to work an hour or two each day in their own offices after getting off work. But an hour or two was not what Johnson had in mind. He asked the House Postmaster to assign Latimer to the earliest shift, which began at five a.m. and ended at noon. Johnson allowed Latimer to take a half-hour for lunch but no more: at twelve-thirty sharp each day, Latimer was to be in Room 258—ready for work.

This work might be over at eight or nine o’clock in the evening, Latimer says, “but often I would stay until eleven-thirty or midnight.” During much of this time, Johnson would be out of the office, cultivating bureaucrats or other congressional secretaries. Latimer would be alone in 258, an eighteen-year-old boy working eighteen-hour days. Soon Johnson found a way to get even more work out of him. “My job in the Post Office was sorting the mail, pitching it into different bins, and we made two or three deliveries [each day]. He urged me to pitch the mail faster, and I got so I did it faster than any other clerk, and then between deliveries I might have ninety minutes free at a time. And I’d run over to the office [Kleberg’s office] and do ninety minutes of typing” before heading back to the Post Office for more
mail-sorting and delivering. And “then, at the end of the shift, I’d rush over to that little corner place and eat that fifteen-cent stew and rush over to the office so I could be at work at twelve-thirty.”

By the time Jones arrived in Washington—a third bed was moved into the little room at the Dodge—Kleberg had been given a two-room suite, Office 1322, in the new House Office Building (now known as the Long-worth Building) which had just been opened alongside the old one. A routine was soon established for the staff of that office. It began before five, when Johnson shook Latimer awake and started him on his way up Capitol Hill. Not long thereafter, he would awaken Jones. Pulling on their clothes—Johnson had taught Jones his trick of taking off his necktie still knotted so he wouldn’t have to waste time tying it in the morning—Johnson and Jones would hurry out of the Dodge and up Capitol Hill in the dark, past the shadowy mass of the Capitol and into the Longworth Building. To avoid wasting time awakening the napping night elevator operator, they ran up the winding stairs, dimly lit from eagle sconces, to the third floor. Having raced through his mail-sorting and delivering, Latimer would arrive at about the same time—at Johnson’s request, he had been assigned to a route which included 1322, so he brought the mail himself.

Ripping open the mail sacks, Johnson began sorting through the mail—“reading it so fast that you couldn’t believe he was reading it, but he was,” Latimer says. At first, Johnson had dictated replies to every letter, but he had discovered that his former debater had a gift of Irish blarney with not only the spoken but the written word. Johnson wanted to flatter “important people” with whom he was corresponding, Latimer says, “to butter them up,” and “he liked to have the butter laid on thick. It was almost impossible to put too much on. If he wanted to tell someone he liked him, he didn’t want to say, ‘I like you.’ He wanted to say, ‘You’re the greatest guy in the world.’” Latimer says, “I did get to be a master of laying it on, all right,” and he is not exaggerating; a typical letter refers to Sam Fore, a newspaper publisher from Floresville, as “The Saint Paul of Floresville.” Soon Johnson, riffling through the mail as rapidly as if he were dealing a deck of cards, would hand many letters to Latimer with only the briefest of instructions—“Say yes. Say no. Tell him we’re looking into it. Butter him up”—and Latimer would expand those instructions exactly as Johnson wished; Johnson had, in fact, discovered a genius in a minor art form: the letter to constituents. When the last letter had been dealt, Latimer sat down at his desk, in front of a heavy Underwood typewriter, and began typing. To dictate replies to letters on which more detailed instruction was needed, Johnson would lead Jones, carrying a stenographer’s pad, into the adjoining room, so that, as Latimer explains, “his dictating wouldn’t distract me, because my typewriter was supposed never to stop.”