The Path to Power (45 page)

In general, he never questioned Johnson at all. Ask Latimer why he was willing to work so hard, and he replies first, “I guess I didn’t know there was any other way to do it. He was the only guy I had worked for. And he keeps the pressure on you all the time. …” But Latimer himself knows this is only part of the explanation, and he soon goes on. For Gene Latimer—sixty-five years old at the time he spoke, sitting alone in a little
apartment in a little town in Texas, a tiny Irish elf with sad eyes that often spill over with tears as he describes his life as an employee of Lyndon Johnson, so that he periodically excuses himself and goes into the bathroom to wash them off—understands, even if he was unable to cure, his own psychological dependence on Johnson: to listen to him talk is to hear a man who is fully aware that during his sixteenth year, he surrendered—for life—his own personality to a stronger personality. To listen to him talk is to hear a man who is fully aware that he has been used as a tool. Once, during the long days he spent with the author in his little apartment—difficult days for both men—he said: “He never talked
to
me too much, because with someone like me, all he wanted was to keep me busy. When he saw me: ‘Where’s your [stenographer’s] book? I want you to take this down.’ When he saw me, he just wanted to know what orders he could give me.” But the awareness is accompanied by acceptance, not resentment. Johnson called him “Son”; he called Johnson “Chief.” Asked if he ever called Johnson by his first name, he replied, shocked: “I would never have
dreamed
of calling him by his first name. He was
The Chief!
” Lyndon Johnson had found a man who liked taking orders as much as he liked giving them. Gene Latimer speaks of Lyndon Johnson with idolatry. “I don’t think he’s ever been scared in his life.” And he talks of him with fear. “He can be mean. He can make people cry. He can make you feel so bad that you could go out and shoot yourself.” And he talks of him with a feeling deeper than idolatry or fear. “I had such tremendous respect for the man,” he says. “I don’t know any other man I had such respect for. And, hell, you just had faith—hell, he could talk you into
anything
and make you feel it was right, and absolutely necessary and proper. He can make you cry, he can make you laugh—he can do anything. And if you like him, then he puts things on such a personal basis, you know. You felt like I belong to him, and he belongs to me. Whatever you do, you do it for
him
.”

He did a lot for him. Gene Latimer would work for Lyndon Johnson for the next thirty-five years, as “his slave—his totally willing slave.” This term of service would not, however, be continuous. In 1939 began the first in a series of many nervous breakdowns; Latimer spent a substantial portion of his life recuperating from them—and from recurrent, severe, bouts of alcoholism. He understood their cause. “The work broke me,” he says. But as soon as he recuperated, he would always return to the same work. Because the work was for Lyndon Johnson.

J
OHNSON’S RELATIONSHIP
with L. E. Jones was more complex. The tall, handsome Jones was a very different type of personality. A brilliant young man who would later be known as the “finest appellate lawyer” in Texas, a “lawyer’s lawyer” consulted by even its most famous attorneys (“He is,” one magazine stated, “the man with probably the finest technical legal
knowledge in the state”), L.E. was as precise as Latimer was easy-going (“His shorthand looked like it was printed in a book,” Gene says), as stiff and cold as Latimer was warm. And he was very ambitious. He was willing to work the killing hours that Johnson demanded because Johnson had played on that ambition: “You work hard for me, and I’ll help you.” Jones would remember “being awakened at five a.m. and walking to the office in the snow, and wondering was it worth it.” But he concluded it was worth it because “I always had the feeling that if I worked for Lyndon Johnson, goodies would come to me. … I was on the make, too. … I wanted to improve myself.” He was, however, also very independent—as independent as Latimer was dependent. In later life, he would never join a law firm, because he did not want partners; at the peak of his career, when he was earning impressive legal fees, he worked alone in a converted, book-lined garage behind his house in Corpus Christi. His willingness to work endless hours for Lyndon Johnson did not include a willingness to surrender his personality to him. He was afraid of surrendering his personality. “Lyndon was always in a position of command,” he says. “I never felt equal. Ordinarily, I’m aggressive and belligerent. My nature is such that if I can’t be an equal, I will not remain in a situation, and he was so demanding that—well, you lose your individuality if you allow someone to be too demanding for too long.” A struggle—never stated but, Jones feels, understood by both men—went on. Johnson ridiculed the college education Jones had obtained with such effort, and of which he was so proud. Letters Jones wrote would be rejected, slashed across, and if Jones asked for an explanation, Johnson would say they were “too literary”—“Is that what they taught you at college, L.E.? Dumbest goddamned thing I ever read.” A mistake in spelling in an L. E. Jones letter, recalls another man who spent some time in Kleberg’s office, “was a very rare thing, but whenever there was one,” Johnson “made quite a point of it—‘My God, L.E., aren’t you
ever
going to learn how to spell? Don’t they teach you
anything
in college?’” For some time, Jones refused to surrender. If Johnson was discussing current events over dinner and Jones saw a parallel to something that had happened in Rome or Greece, he would mention it, despite Johnson’s displeasure. If he disagreed with Johnson, he would express his disagreement; if he had an opinion, he would state it.

A surrender of sorts was to occur, however. Strikingly neat and clean—invariably well scrubbed, his hair carefully slicked down, every button buttoned on his double-breasted suits, his shirts highly starched—Jones was as aloof and reserved, almost prim, in physical matters as about everything else. “Any kind of coarseness or crudeness just disgusted him,” a friend says. Johnson began making Jones take dictation from him while Johnson was sitting on the toilet.

The toilet in Kleberg’s office suite was set in a short corridor between
its two rooms. Johnson would sit down on it, and, Latimer says, “there would come a call: ‘L.E.!’ L.E. would say, ‘Oh, God,’ because he hated this.” He would take his pad, and go to the bathroom. At first, he attempted to stand away from the door, but Johnson insisted he come right into the doorway, so he would be standing over him, and “L.E. would stand with his head and nose averted, and take dictation.”

In later years, Johnson’s penchant for forcing subordinates to watch him defecating would be called by some an example of a wonderful “naturalness.” Others would find it, as one journalist put it, “in part, a method of control. Bring Douglas Dillon into the bathroom with you, and he has a little less independent dignity.” This tactic was, indeed, “a method of control.” The first person on whom it was employed was L. E. Jones—and those who observed it, knew it was being done to humiliate him, and to prove to him who was boss.

Jones had little choice but to accept the humiliation; the job was his only chance to realize his ambition. He continued working for Johnson for more than two years, until, in 1935, he had saved enough money to pay tuition at the University of Texas Law School, and then he left for Austin. He and Johnson were on friendly terms when he left—Johnson told him that when he finished law school, he would keep his promise and help him get a government job—but leave he did. To a friend who asked him why, he said he felt that if he stayed, “He’d be devoured.”

(T
HE LATER
Johnson-Jones relationship reveals the quality Johnson considered indispensable in a subordinate. He did indeed help Jones obtain a government job—as an attorney with the Justice Department in 1938—and kept in touch with him thereafter, when Jones was in private practice. In his most desperate crisis—the legal battle that climaxed the 1948 Senatorial election—he turned to him, asking Jones to join his legal team for the duration of the crucial appeal, and Jones did, indeed, join it. The end of the appeal, however, signaled the end of any working relationship.

The Johnson-Jones relationship contrasts sharply with that between Johnson and Latimer. Jones was the more intelligent of the two assistants—and Johnson’s awareness of his brilliance is proven by the fact that Johnson turned to him in time of crisis. From four years of personal observation, moreover, Johnson must have realized that Jones would have been the hardest-working of aides. But, except for two brief periods of part-time employment, Jones would never again be on his payroll—and Latimer would be on it for much of his life.

What are the implications of this contrast? Was brilliance not enough to qualify a man for permanent work for Lyndon Johnson? Was hard work not enough? In fact, as would be demonstrated as soon as Johnson began
hiring men on a large scale, the crucial qualification was subservience. Dignity was not permitted in a Johnson employee. Pride was not permitted. Utter submission to Johnson’s demands, the submission that Jones called “a surrender of personality,” a loss of “your individuality to his domination,” was required. Otherwise, no matter how brilliant or hard-working, a man or woman could not work for Lyndon Johnson.)

F
OR ALMOST
a year and a half after he went to work for Richard Kleberg, veterans were, in general, the only constituents for whom Lyndon Johnson could win victories. Though the mail sacks might be bulging with pleas for help, he had no help to give.

Outside San Antonio, the Fourteenth District was farming country, and for farmers the Crash had come long before 1929—with the resumption after the war of the great harvests of Europe; the 1920’s had been one long bad decade for farmers. After Black Thursday, times grew worse. Prices fell, and fell, and fell again, until they reached levels “not seen in generations or even in centuries.” By 1932, farmers were being paid twenty-five cents for a bushel of wheat, ten cents for a bushel of oats, seven cents for a bushel of corn—prices below what they had been in Colonial days; the prices of some farm commodities were, in actual value, at the level of the Middle Ages. While farmers were forced to sell low, they were also forced—in part by tariffs which kept high the price of manufactured goods—to buy dear. By 1930, it took a farmer almost three wagonloads of produce to buy the manufactured goods that one wagonload would have purchased in 1920. War-inflated crop prices had lured him into debt to buy more land and new machinery to work it, so that he could raise more crops. The plunge in crop prices made paying off that debt impossible; he was, in fact, forced to go deeper into debt just to purchase seed for another crop: the mortgage load on American farms, $3 billion when the war began, was $10 billion in 1930. The interest on those mortgages was so high that farmers could not pay it. During a five-year period ending March 1, 1932, one out of every eight farms in the United States would be up for forced sale because of mortgage or tax delinquencies.

All during the 1920’s, farmers held out a hand to their government, but the administrations of Harding and Coolidge were deaf to their pleas. Seeing the industrialists of the Northeast prospering behind a wall of protective tariffs—tariffs that helped the Northeast at their expense—farmers asked
for tariff reform. But when, in 1927, Congress finally passed the McNary-Haugen Bill for tariff reform, Coolidge vetoed it, claiming it violated the sacred principle of
laissez-faire
—“although,” as the historian Frank Freidel notes, “on the very day of his … veto, he signed an order increasing by 50 percent the tariff on pig iron.” In 1928, Congress passed McNary-Haugen again; Coolidge again vetoed it. In 1929, Herbert Hoover, Coolidge’s Secretary of Commerce, builder of the immense Department of Commerce Building that was a temple to American business, became President, having carried forty of the forty-eight states. A new tariff bill was introduced; Hoover said that if it was passed he would veto it, so Congress didn’t bother to pass it. Farmers asked for debt relief; Hoover’s reply was that federal mortgages were already available, and so they were—from a federal agency whose directors seemed to feel they were running a company store, so onerous were the terms of its loans. By 1931, one out of every four of its borrowers was delinquent—and the agency was busily foreclosing: during 1931 alone, almost 4,000 American families were thrown off their farms by their government. Hoover’s solution for falling farm prices was the creation of a Federal Farm Board empowered to stabilize farm prices by buying a farmer’s produce for more than it was worth. While the Farm Board’s right hand was working to implement this solution, however, its left hand was working against it. Even farmers, traditionally among the most independent and conservative of Americans, now were coming to understand that the heart of the problem was overproduction, that, as one writer put it, “surplus is ruin”; there was a surprising amount of agreement among farm groups that some kind of government limit on production was necessary. But the Farm Board, by paying high prices for crops while refusing to limit the amount grown, encouraged farmers to grow more rather than less; the funds Hoover committed to the Board, inadequate to begin with, ran out without even a dent being made in the agricultural crisis; the net result of its policies may, in fact, have made it worse. (Hoover’s solution was to ask farmers—many of whom were unable to survive on what they were presently raising—to voluntarily raise less.)

By the time congressional secretary Lyndon Johnson arrived in Washington in December, 1931, the American farmer’s long slide toward ruin had become a headlong plunge. Foreclosures on farms—many by rural banks which themselves were teetering on the brink of failure—had reached a rate of 20,000 per month. By the end of that year, one-quarter of Mississippi had been auctioned off, one-third of Iowa. Moreover, as William Allen White wrote, “Even though a man has no mortgage on his farm, even though he is not in immediate danger, he is, as a matter of fact, running behind. Every farmer, whether his farm is under mortgage or not, knows that with farm products priced as they are today, sooner or later he must go down. …”

The southern part of Texas’ 200-mile-long Fourteenth Congressional
District had been insulated throughout the 1920’s from the despair roaming the American countryside. The fall in cotton prices was cushioned by the quantity of the crop that could be produced in that four-foot-deep loam—in 1929, Nueces County, hub of the southern part of the district, produced 424,000 bales of cotton, more than any other county in the United States—and by the ease in getting it to market; since ships heading for Europe and the East Coast could dock, at Corpus Christi, within a few miles of the cotton fields, freighting costs and the cost in time were reduced to a minimum. “In many instances,” exulted the
Corpus Christi Caller
, “cotton has been picked and ginned in the morning and compressed and loaded for export the same day.” Even during the first year of the Depression, cotton buyers continued to crowd the seaport city with its row of tall office buildings along the bluff. But when the white bolls opened on the Gulf plain in 1931, warehouses throughout the world were still choked with unsold bales from the 1930 crop; few ships came, prices plummeted to six cents per pound, a level at which it didn’t pay to grow cotton, and even at that price, there were few buyers. Only 330,000 bales would be picked along the Gulf in 1931—and 56,000 of these bales remained unsold. Prices for the onions and tomatoes and watermelons produced by the area’s thousands of small truck farms dropped so low in that year that farmers let them rot on the vine.

Human evidence of the Depression’s existence had begun to filter into Corpus Christi early, for railroads had laid tracks to the very beaches of the Gulf, and despite the railroads’ diligence—the Southern Pacific boasted that its dicks threw 683,000 vagrants off its trains in 1931—the long lines of freight cars from the north now often carried, huddled in corners, or riding the rails underneath, human cargo which debarked when it reached Corpus Christi because that was the end of the line. For a while, local residents seemed to regard the Depression as something that couldn’t happen to them; when it proved impossible to ignore the transients because of their number and importunity, they set up soup kitchens “for strangers seeking food … to keep [them] out of residential areas”; their attitude toward people who couldn’t earn a living was condescending.

By 1931, however, with cotton unsold in the warehouses and tomatoes rotting in the fields, the lines at the soup kitchens were no longer composed entirely of strangers. Even prosperous Gulf Coast farmers were going into debt; by the end of the year, more than half of the 20,000 farms in the Fourteenth District were under mortgage. And now the debts were being called. Farmers saw SHERIFF’S SALE notices being tacked up on neighbors’ houses—on the houses of men who worked as hard as they did; they saw neighbors loading their cars high with their possessions and driving away with their wives crying and their babies looking bewildered, and their older children’s faces averted in shame. Some they never saw again; some they did, and wished they hadn’t: they saw former neighbors, friends, living in shacks in Corpus Christi or Robstown or Alice, and seeking day work. So
desperate were these men that they were willing to pick cotton even in the rain and mud; in the past, because a man must pick cotton on his knees, picking had never been done—at least not by white men—when the fields were muddy. And evicted South Texas farmers couldn’t earn enough to support their families even by working in the mud; “My boy and I worked full nine hours Saturday and made ninety cents, or five cents per hour each,” said one man who referred to himself as a former member of the middle class. More and more had to go on relief; so hard was it for these proud Texans to seek charity that they did not do so until they had sold everything they could sell. Many showed up at the Red Cross or Salvation Army staggering from weakness; they had refused to come in until they were literally starving. (Some of the men, a Salvation Army worker reported, would never have come in at all had it not been for their inability to watch their wives starve.)

With the approach of the winter of 1931–1932, the families living in the shacks needed heat and warm clothing as well as food. Appealing for donations of old stoves, Mrs. L. D. Berry, director of the local Red Cross, made clear that she meant wood stoves; “there is no need for gas stoves, as none of the families can afford gas,” she noted. The families in the shacks were luckier than some families: they at least had shelter. A growing number of evicted farm families did not; elderly men and women, afraid they would die of exposure during the winter, advertised their services in exchange for room and board. The Salvation Army set up fifty cots in an empty warehouse that would once have been filled with cotton; hundreds of persons lined up to use them. Not only the elderly but the young were in need: children were growing out of their clothes and their shoes. Then Mrs. Berry started asking children in school what they had had to eat that day; as a result of their answers, she announced that the Red Cross must immediately begin providing at least one meal a day for 500 schoolchildren.

But the Red Cross had no money to do so. Relief funds were running out. Since President Hoover felt that any involvement in relief by the federal government would weaken the national character, relief remained the province of local municipalities and private agencies, and as winter approached, not only the municipalities of the Fourteenth District but its Red Cross and Salvation Army chapters and local relief committees were all running out of money. Bacon and onions were no longer ingredients in soup-kitchen meals; beans—plain beans—were what the hungry were given to eat. The Salvation Army had reduced its allocation for feeding each client to a penny per day. Its funds were virtually exhausted. And each day the soup-kitchen lines grew longer.

B
Y THE TIME
Lyndon Johnson arrived in Washington, the district’s arrogance was gone; its people were asking the government for help now—for
government participation in relief funding; for government refinancing of farm mortgages; for government support of crop prices; and, more and more, because “surplus is ruin,” for government-enforced crop controls. There was desperation in the mail sacks he opened each morning.

There was desperation in the mail sacks of almost every Congressman, it seemed. Americans everywhere were asking their government for help. Despair was stalking city streets as well as the countryside. In Chicago, 600,000 persons were unemployed, in New York, 800,000; the total of unemployed men in America’s cities was between 15 million and 17 million, and many of these men represented an entire family in want. Witnesses were telling congressional committees that private charities had run out of money, that states and local municipalities which had attempted to shoulder the burden had run out of money—that, for want of federal assistance in relief, growing numbers of America’s people were, literally, starving. During that session of Congress, there were reminders of the nation’s plight not only in Washington’s committee rooms but in Washington’s streets—25,000 reminders: the penniless World War veterans who, in May, 1932, marched up Pennsylvania Avenue, their faces set in concentration as they tried to march in step as they had marched when they were young, and who then encamped with their wives and children in abandoned warehouses and empty stores, and in tents set up in parks, so that “Washington, D.C., resembled the besieged capital of an obscure European state.”

But little help came from the government. When its legislative branch, which had, in December, 1931, turned a deaf ear to suggestions that it forgo its usual two-week holiday, returned in January, it was to begin seven months of wrangling and delay, enlivened only by Congressmen’s near panic when they encountered Bonus Marchers; some Congressmen broke into a run when the ragged men approached. When Congress finally adjourned in July, 1932, the only substantial aid that had been given to farmers was a $125 million increase in the capital available for federal mortgages—an increase so far below the amount needed as to be all but meaningless, particularly since it was not accompanied, despite the pleas of farm organizations, by even a token easing in the onerous interest and repayment schedules. Despite the urgency of witnesses’ pleas for help with relief funding, the Congressmen who had heard those pleas squabbled over minor details for weeks that turned into months—and the provisions of the bill that finally passed were so niggardly that the average relief stipend for a family of four would be fifty cents per day. As for the vital tax and tariff reform bill, special interest blocs squabbled over its provisions, and states traded tariff proposals back and forth until, in May, one Senator was moved to shout: “Have we gone mad? Have we no idea that if we carry this period of unrest from one week to another, a panic will break loose, which all the tariffs under heaven will not stem? Yet we sit here to take care of some little interest in this state or that. … ‘My state! My state!’ My God! Let’s
hear ‘My country!’ What good is your state if your country sinks into the quagmire of ruin!” For months, the
Forum
magazine said, “the country [has] been looking on, with something like anguish, at the spectacle of the inability of the national legislature, in a time of desperate need, to take any action—good, bad or indifferent—for dealing with the crucial problem of national finance.” A columnist, more succinct, called the House of Representatives “The Monkey House,” and his sentiment was echoed by some of the congressmen themselves; declared McDuffie of Alabama: “representative government is dead.”