The Path to Power (44 page)

When the dictating was finished, and Jones had sat down at
his
Underwood, Johnson would “mark up” district newspapers, the big San Antonio
and Corpus Christi dailies and the scores of small-town weeklies, putting checkmarks next to the articles (a wedding, a birth, the opening of a new business, a local Kiwanis Club election) which merited a letter of congratulation. “He insisted on getting every paper in the district, no matter how small,” Latimer says. “And some of those papers would just be
filled
with checkmarks.” By the time most congressional offices opened and began sorting mail, Kleberg’s staff had finished sorting it and were well into answering it.

By this time, government agencies were open, and Johnson would get on the phone to them—while the two typewriters clattered away. No coffee was allowed in Kleberg’s office, because Johnson felt making it and drinking it would distract Latimer and Jones from their work. Less ominous distractions also were frowned on. “If he caught you reading a letter from your mother, or if you were taking a crap, he’d say, ‘Son, can’t you
please
try a little harder to learn to do that on your own time?’” If Latimer asked if he could go out to buy cigarettes, Johnson would say, “What am I paying you for? Buying cigarettes? Buy them on your own time.” “Our job was to keep those typewriters humming,” Latimer says. “He would come down the hall—I could hear his heels clicking—and if he didn’t hear both those typewriters going ninety miles per hour, he wanted to know what the hell was going on.” The natural competitiveness of young men was used as a spur. “The Chief has a knack, or, better said, a genius for getting the most out of those around him,” Latimer recalls. “He’d say, ‘Gene, it seems L.E.’s a little faster than you today.’ And I’d work faster. ‘L.E., he’s catching up with you.’ And pretty soon, we’d both be pounding for hours without stopping, just as fast as we could.”

The Depression was swelling the mail now, as more constituents asked for jobs and new government programs, and as veterans appealed more urgently for bonus pre-payment. With only one or two staffers in each congressional office, many offices answered more and more of the mail with mimeographed form replies, or with
pro forma
promises, or simply didn’t reply at all—and still fell further and further behind. Kleberg’s office answered personally every letter that could possibly be answered. For Lyndon Johnson, the mail possessed almost a mystique. At that time government programs touched the lives of few constituents, so the mail—the only means by which a Congressman could keep in touch with his district almost 2,000 miles from Washington—was a key to a Congressman’s power; Johnson could hardly have avoided hearing, over and over, about one former Congressman or another who had “lost touch with his district”—and who was a Congressman no longer. But although other congressional staffers heard the same stories, they didn’t answer every letter. For Lyndon Johnson, the mystique of the mail went beyond the political. He had always done every job “as if his life depended on it.” Believing that “if you did just absolutely everything you
could
do, you would succeed,” he had tried to perform—
perfectly—even minor tasks that no one else bothered with. For such a man, congressional mail, which consisted so largely of minor details—of small, unimportant requests—was a natural métier. Doing everything one
could
do with the mail meant answering
every
letter—and that was what he insisted his office must do. And not only must every letter be answered, he told Latimer and Jones, it must be answered the very day it arrived. “The only excuse that was accepted for not answering the same day was that you had lost a file, and, boy, there had better not be too many of those: not being able to find a file—that was some sin!” Latimer says. “And if your reply said, ‘We have asked the Veterans Administration to look into this,’ you really had to ask—that same day. So that the next day, you could write another letter about it.” The early-morning mail delivery was only the first of three—and then four, and then five—made during the day, and still the bundles of each delivery grew heavier. Johnson would sort through the bundles, writing brief instructions on each letter about its handling and dividing the letters between his two aides. After typing his way for hours through a pile of letters, Jones or Latimer would finally be almost to the bottom—and then Johnson would smack down on his desk another pile, “a pile that,” Jones says, “might be a foot high.” And before he would be allowed to leave the office that night, the pile would have to be gone.

There was no escape from the mail. Small bundles meant not less but more work for the two young men. “It was important to get mail,” Gene Latimer explains. “That was the most important thing. You had to have people writing you. So if the mail got light, we had to generate mail. Any day when we didn’t get a hundred letters was a terrible day. And we had to do something about it.” Letters were solicited, by scanning the weekly newspapers more closely than ever for any conceivable good or bad news that might justify a message of congratulation or condolence—a message in which the Congressman would solicit a reply by asking, in Latimer’s words, “‘How am I doing in Washington? What government programs would you like to see passed?’—that kind of question.” Then came the ultimate refinement of the congratulatory broadside. At some point, Latimer recalls, the “mail fell off” to a point at which

After the typing came the retyping. No letter was going out of the office unless it was perfect, Johnson said, and to ensure perfection, he read every one. “And if he didn’t like a letter,” Latimer says, “he would just make huge, angry slash marks across it.” No explanation would be vouchsafed. “You had to figure out what was wrong,” Latimer says. “He wouldn’t tell you.” A single error in spelling or punctuation, and the letter was slashed. “He had no compunction at all about making you write them over … even if you had to stay past midnight,” Jones says. “You handed him fifty, sixty letters … and he might mark out every one of them.”

Sometimes Latimer and Jones would be finished with work by eight or nine o’clock, and would head back to Childs’ for dinner and then to the Dodge for the evening bull sessions. But usually they wouldn’t be finished until 11:30 or midnight. Then they would return to their room to fall exhausted into their beds, to grab a few hours’ sleep—for no matter how late they had worked the night before, they would be dragged from those beds at five o’clock the next morning. Recently completed on the long slope between the Dodge and the crown of Capitol Hill was an elaborate fountain illuminated by colored lights that were turned on only between sunset and sunrise. “I almost never saw that fountain without the lights on,” Latimer says. Returning from his work in the dark, he went back to his work while it was still dark.

T
HE WILLINGNESS
of the two teen-agers to adhere to so brutal a routine—a seven-day routine: Kleberg’s office did not close on weekends—was based in part on admiration for their boss. Listening to him “work the departments” over the telephone, they heard him tailoring his approach to the individual he was talking to, bullying one bureaucrat with a threat of bringing down Congressman Kleberg’s displeasure on his head (or, with increasing frequency, masquerading as the congressman himself), pleading with another: “Look, I’ve got a problem. I’ve got to get you to help me”—and obtaining results that they felt other secretaries could never have achieved. Listening, for example, to Johnson talking to the Veterans Administration about a veteran’s request that a disability be considered “connected” to his war service, which would make the veteran eligible for a pension, Latimer and Jones would be awed by his glibness. “Damage-suit lawyers have a jargon, you know,” Jones says. “Johnson was adept at rationalizing like that. He could sit there and talk like a great lawyer or a doctor.” And they were amazed by his persistence. “He took each case personally,” Latimer says. “He wouldn’t take no.” While congressional offices routinely endorsed a veteran’s request to the VA, denial of the request generally marked the end
of the office’s interest in the case. If the veteran was from the Fourteenth District, however, the congressional secretary would react to the denial by taking up the case personally over the telephone. If the telephone appeal did not succeed, the secretary went to the VA in person. If the request was still denied, the secretary, without the veteran asking, filed a formal, written appeal, and procured him a lawyer. When the lawyer appeared before the Board of Veterans Appeals, the secretary of the Fourteenth District was also present. And if the case seemed to be going against his constituent, the secretary did not remain a silent observer. When Lyndon Johnson took a personal hand at a Veterans Board hearing, he displayed his obsession with secrecy, asking that the stenographer be instructed not to take down his remarks, but he also displayed considerable persuasiveness. Reading the typed minutes of the hearing later, Latimer would invariably see the same sentence:
Mr. Johnson spoke off the record
. “I’d say to myself, ‘Here it comes!’ And sure enough, when they went back on the record again, the attitude would have changed. It was almost unheard of to get someone ‘service-connected’ after it had been denied, but the Chief did it. Many times.”

The two teen-agers’ willingness to work so hard was based in part on their boss’ ability to inspire enthusiasm. To Johnson, Jones says, “every problem had a solution. … He was completely confident, always optimistic. … And this was contagious. It would absolutely grab ahold of you.” Casework was, moreover, not only a crusade but a crusade complete with triumphs, in which the whole office shared. Jones echoes Estelle Harbin: “He would get ecstatic. I mean, we had won a real
victory
.”

They were also willing to work long hours because they were not working alone. If they awoke at five, it was because their boss was awake at five, and if they trudged up Capitol Hill before daylight, their boss trudged beside them. The days they spent chained to typewriters, he spent chained to the telephone—bullying and begging on behalf of their constituents. And often, after they had returned to their little room and were falling asleep, they would hear their boss still tossing restlessly on his narrow bed. “He worked harder than anyone,” Latimer says. “His head was still going around when the rest of us had knocked off.”

O
THER FACTORS
, however, were also involved.

Sometimes, Latimer rebelled. Rebellion was generally related to his fiancee. Although Johnson had brought him to Washington ostensibly so that he could be near her, the work schedule that Johnson had set up for him left little time for romance. He was allowed time off from the office to see her on Sundays after three p.m.—and only on Sundays after three p.m.

Johnson’s response to rebellion might be a sneer: a sneer with a particularly telling point. Once, when Latimer had requested an evening off and was being viciously tongue-lashed by Johnson for his temerity, “I couldn’t stand
it, and I packed the little wicker suitcase I had come up with, and said I was leaving.” Towering over the little Irish boy, Johnson said, sneering, “How are you going to get back?” When Latimer, sobbing, said, as he recalls it, that he would rather hitchhike all the way to Texas than remain, Johnson said: “What are you going to do when you get there? How are you going to get a job? If you leave, how are you ever going to marry Marjorie?”—questions which enunciated an aspect of the Johnson-Latimer relationship that was generally unmentioned but that was one of the realities that underlay it: that Latimer had no money, that his only source of money was Lyndon Johnson, that, without Johnson, he would not have a job, in a time when jobs were hard to come by; that, in short, he needed Johnson so badly that he had little choice but to do whatever Johnson wanted. The suitcase was unpacked, and Latimer remained.

But rebellion was rare. To so skilled a reader of men, Gene Latimer was an easy text. Revolt could be anticipated, and headed off. “He wouldn’t really have a talk with you for months,” Latimer says. “And then he would hug you, and he might spend an hour talking about your problems. He didn’t do it very often, so you might think he was getting a hell of a lot for not very much, but if he did it very often, it wouldn’t mean very much, you know.” The way Johnson did it, it meant so much that the hug and the talk generally ended even the hint of revolt.

He could deflect any of Latimer’s desires. The youth was always broke during his years in Kleberg’s office—as might be expected on so low a salary. He was always falling behind in his bills for clothing and dry cleaning, and he relates with gratitude how Johnson consolidated his bills, and then collected his salary himself, and paid the bills out of it, putting Latimer on a $10-per-week allowance. But he also relates how once, “when the pain had been severe for some time, I summoned up the considerable courage it took to ask [him] about the possibility of a small increase in salary. He listened with sympathetic concern, commented at some length on the shortage of money and jobs all over the country at the time and especially in our own office, then told me he had been thinking for some time on how to reward the excellent work I had been doing. He had finally decided that I merited having my name put on the office stationery as assistant secretary. As he described the prestige and glory of such an arrangement, I could see the printing stand out six inches.” Latimer accepted the title instead of a raise; “I never questioned the procedure,” Latimer says. “Indeed, it just seemed to follow as a matter of course.”