The Path to Power (50 page)

Brown was to receive a larger shock. While they were chatting in Friant’s office, the door opened, and in walked Friant’s boss, the great personnel director himself, chief patronage dispenser of the New Deal, Postmaster General James A. Farley. Brown stared almost speechless at this living legend, but Farley, he says, “was very affable and shook hands.” And Lyndon Johnson, who had met Farley when the Postmaster General had accompanied Vice President Garner to the King Ranch some months before, was affable right back. “This is my friend Russell Brown from Rhode Island,” he said. Farley, who never forgot a name—or a political affiliation—remembered something McGuire and Friant hadn’t. He asked Brown if he was Charles Brown’s son, and then said to Friant: “What are you doing helping a Republican?” A moment of tension ensued, but it evaporated when Johnson, putting his arm around Brown, said expansively: “He’s
mah
Republican.” Everyone burst out laughing, Brown recalls, with the Postmaster General, beaming at Johnson, laughing loudest of all.

Other Capitol Hill aides witnessed similar scenes. Not only, they came to realize, did Lyndon Johnson know powerful officials who were in a position to help him, these officials knew
him
, knew him and liked him—and
wanted
to help him. A measure of this feeling was the number of patronage jobs Johnson obtained in the AAA and other newly formed New Deal agencies such as the Homeowners Loan Corporation and the Federal Land Bank. Such jobs were generally rationed by the New Deal on the basis of a Congressman’s importance. The office of the average Congressman might be given four or five, the office of a senior or powerful Congressman perhaps twenty, the office of a committee chairman as many as thirty, or, in rare cases, forty. The office of Richard Kleberg, a Congressman with neither seniority nor power, was given fifty.

D
ID HIS ABILITY
with the powerful consist merely of the capacity to make friends with them?

One Texan notably unmoved by Johnson’s charm was Vice President Garner, whose desire for new friendships was limited. “Me and my wife,”
tough old Cactus Jack explained once. “My son and his wife. We four—and no more.” As for his paternal instincts toward bright young men, even his son was able to obtain a loan from him only after he had agreed to pay a very high rate of interest. In May, 1933, the Texas Legislature redrew the state’s congressional districts. Seeing Garner’s hand in the redistricting, Texas Congressmen feared it would be present as well in the confusion that was bound to follow. During the year-and-a-half interim before the redistricting went into effect in January, 1935, federal patronage in counties that had been shifted from one district to another would be in dispute between the old Congressman they had elected and the new one into whose district they had been shifted. In some counties, moreover, a vacuum would exist: three new districts had been formed by taking counties away from old districts; these counties would have no opportunity to elect a new Congressman until November, 1934. Aware of Garner’s ruthlessness and appetite for power—and of his long and close friendship with patronage dispenser Farley—Texas Congressmen feared he would step into the vacuum by claiming, as the state’s highest federal official, the patronage power in counties in which it was in dispute. Despite a number of secret caucuses among themselves, however, they still didn’t know how to meet this threat.

One of their secretaries did. Lyndon Johnson had not, of course, been present at the caucuses, but Kleberg had told him about them, and Johnson had a suggestion. If, instead of fighting among themselves, all twenty-one Congressmen, plus Senators Connally and Sheppard, agreed on a division of patronage powers, both vacuum and confusion would be eliminated. In the absence of a vacuum, Garner’s maneuvers would become more difficult to carry out; without confusion to cloak them, they would be revealed as a naked grab for power. A united front among the Congressmen would deter Farley, too, since he would be interfering in a state’s internal politics against the wishes of its entire congressional delegation. Such a united front, Johnson said, should take the form of a non-legal but signed “gentlemen’s contract” between all Texas Congressmen and Senators stating that patronage power in every Texas county should remain in the hands of its present Congressman until the redistricting went into effect. And when Kleberg asked how Connally and Sheppard, who might themselves see confusion as an opportunity for patronage gains, could be induced to go along with the Congressmen, his secretary had an answer for that, too: since the two Senators, jealous of their statewide powers, would be as worried as the Congressmen about the Garner threat, only a small inducement would be necessary: the right, previously reserved to the local Congressman, to name the postmaster in their hometowns.

Johnson drafted the agreement: “Until January 1, 1935, present representatives of the district shall control in counties of their present existing districts. … We ask that this agreement be respected by all [federal] departments and offices.” Kleberg was reluctant to engage in a fight, particularly
with his old friend Garner, but Johnson told him that the existence of a clear agreement was the best way to avoid one—and when he reminded Kleberg, to whom personal honor was very important, that in return for support in his last election, he had promised federal positions to supporters in Bexar County, which had been removed from his district in the redisricting, and that if the right of appointment was given to Garner, he would be unable to live up to his promises, Kleberg agreed to circulate the “contract” to the whole delegation. Everyone signed it. And when, in January, 1934, Garner made his move—Texas Congressmen who submitted recommendations to Farley on federal postmasterships in the redistricted counties were told to clear them with the Vice President—Johnson knew how to use the weapon he had forged. He leaked the agreement to the press—not to a local Texas newspaper, but to the Associated Press. Huge headlines (REVOLT AGAINST PATRONAGE ARRANGEMENT) and angry editorials (“Postmaster Farley’s insistence upon giving Garner control … will make political orphans of dozens of Texas counties”) in Texas, combined with nationwide publicity, produced precisely the effect Johnson had calculated. Within the week, Garner had beaten a hasty retreat. In the presence of a “grievance committee” of Texas Congressmen, he dictated a document of unconditional surrender—a letter of his own to Farley: “Dear Jim: … a committee representing the Texas delegation are in my office at this moment. They are very much worried about the proposal that I pass on qualifications of postmasters in the new districts in Texas, and, to be frank with you, Jim, I am worried about it myself because of the friction that might arise between the Texas members of Congress and myself. … I want to ask you if you won’t relieve me of the burden of saying anything about the qualifications of any postmaster anywhere in Texas.” Farley agreed to Garner’s request, dashing off a letter of his own telling Texas Congressmen to submit their recommendations directly to him as in the past. William S. White, then an Associated Press correspondent in Washington, recounts that “for days [Garner] went among fellow Texans with a scowling, half-amused demand: ‘Who in the hell is this boy Lyndon Johnson; where the hell did Kleberg get a boy with savvy like that?’” Others familiar with the episode say White’s description is accurate except for the hyphenated adjective; Cactus Jack Garner was not even half amused. Garner’s question, moreover, was a natural one. “This boy Lyndon Johnson”—a twenty-five-year-old congressional assistant—had defeated, in a small but bitter skirmish, the Vice President of the United States.

F
EW
—if any—congressional secretaries implemented New Deal programs more successfully than Lyndon Johnson. His assistants were, therefore, surprised when they realized what Johnson thought of the New Deal.

The man with whom he was “most in tune,” says L. E. Jones—and Gene Latimer and Russell Brown agree—was Roy Miller, the legendary lobbyist who had made the district’s office his own.

With his wavy silver mane, his suits and waistcoats of rich fabric, the small but perfect diamond in his lapel, and, of course, his pearl-gray Borsalino, Miller looked to the three admiring young assistant secretaries like the very model of a Southern Senator. Erect and dignified (“He didn’t even
own
a short-sleeved shirt,” says his son, Dale), he strode through the Capitol as if he owned it—which, some said, in the areas in which he was interested, he did; for legislators like Sam Johnson, who had refused to accept a drink from Roy Miller without buying him one back, were apparently almost as rare in Washington as in Austin, and, with the seemingly unlimited funds at his disposal for “campaign contributions,” he bought national legislators as easily as state. Echoing the
Austin American-Statesman
’s judgment that he was “perhaps the most effective single lobbyist Washington has ever known,” the
Saturday Evening Post
commented that “perhaps no one outside official life has a wider acquaintance among congressmen. … For twenty years he has had the status of a quasi-public figure.” The Congressman most important to Texas Gulf Sulphur, which needed deep harbors for the freighters carrying away the sulphur it mined along the Gulf Coast, was Rivers and Harbors Committee Chairman Mansfield. Precisely at noon each day, Miller arrived at Mansfield’s office and closeted himself with the crippled Congressman for half an hour. Precisely at 12:30, a House page arrived to push Mansfield’s wheelchair—with Miller striding alongside it, somewhat in the manner of a Roman emperor displaying a captive in a triumphal procession—through the underground passageway between the Longworth Building and the Capitol, and
into the House Restaurant, where it was placed at a large round table just inside the door known as Roy Miller’s Table, in honor of the man who picked up the checks at it. “A surprising number of representatives,” the
Saturday Evening Post
reported, “knew his hat and coat, when it hangs on its accustomed peg in the House restaurant”—a discreet reference to the fact that many Congressmen checked to see that he was present before they entered the restaurant, lest they be forced to pay for their meals themselves. Nor was Miller’s generosity confined to the House dining room. So awed was Jim Farley by Miller’s munificence during Farley’s trips to Texas that the mimeographed advice given by the normally discreet Postmaster General to a group of Congressmen leaving for a Miller-sponsored Texas junket began: “Carry only what money you need before you get to Texas. You will not be able to spend a dime in the State of Texas.” The consummate lobbyist, Miller did not confine his friendships to the powerful. “He knew policemen, he knew the elevator operators, and he knew everybody in the offices,” Latimer says. “He would come in and talk to them, and never mention the Congressman. He’d come by if you were working ten, eleven o’clock at night: ‘Can I take you all out and buy you a drink?’ And then he would buy you a wonderful dinner.” The objects of these attentions might be aware of his motives (as Latimer puts it, “When he wanted to see a Congressman, he could ask the secretary, ‘You reckon the Congressman’s busy?’ And they’d break a leg getting him in to see him”), but they were flattered and charmed nevertheless. The three young assistant secretaries in the Fourteenth District office admired Miller and were awed by him—by his manner (“He was so suave and smooth,” Jones says); by his salary (“He was making $80,000 a year, and this was during the Depression!” Latimer says); by his luxurious suite at the Mayflower; by the ease with which, in those days before regular air service, he seemed to stride around the country as easily as he did around the Capitol (“Roy Miller would call from Texas … and say, ‘I’m going to be in the office in the morning,’” Brown recalls. “It was always quite a thing that he’d call from Texas on Monday and be in the office on Tuesday, because he would come up with his private airplane”). And so, they say, was their immediate superior. “Lyndon hero-worshipped Roy Miller,” Jones says.

If in public Miller seemed the archetypal Southern Senator, in private he might have been the model for another caricature: the wealthy businessman venomously ranting and raving in Peter Arno’s
New Yorker
cartoons, about That Man in the White House. Miller and a group of friends would often gather in Kleberg’s inner office for a late-afternoon drink. These men were Roosevelt-haters, who saw in the President’s programs the erosion of the power and the privilege so dear to them, and their hatred was made more bitter by the President’s popularity, which forced them, for the sake of expediency, to keep their feelings hidden. (Expediency dictated concealment
of their feelings on many subjects. One of the Miller group was Martin Dies, later chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities; Jones vividly remembers Dies coming off the floor of the House in 1935 after making a speech supporting a new bid by the veterans for payment of the bonus. “There, that’ll sound good back home,” Dies said, and then, unable to contain his true feelings any longer, snarled: “Goddamned Reds!”) So in the privacy of Kleberg’s office, their laughter at the latest scatological joke about Franklin’s physical disabilities, or about Eleanor, was all the louder, and their railings against “Reds” and about the “dictatorship” being foisted on the American people, and about the “socialists,” “communists,” “Bolsheviks” and—worst of all—college professors who surrounded the dictator were all the more vehement. Of that group—Dies, Kleberg himself, Horatio H. (“Rasch”) Adams, a Kleberg golfing partner and reactionary lobbyist for General Electric, other ultra-conservative Texas Congressmen such as Nat (“Cousin Nat”) Patton, James P. (“Buck”) Buchanan and Hatton W. Summers—no one laughed louder or railed more vehemently than Miller. Lyndon Johnson was always invited in for a drink. And since the door between the suite’s two rooms was open, Jones, Latimer and Brown could hear what their Chief was saying.

His tone with these powerful men was very different from the tone he used with
them
; he was as obsequious to those above him as he was overbearing to those below. “In talking with these guys,” L. E. Jones says, “Lyndon was very much the young man, very starry-eyed, very boyish. It was very much the junior to the senior. ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘No, sir.’” Even if there was a vacant seat in Kleberg’s office, Johnson would often be sitting on the floor, his face upturned to whoever was speaking, an expression of the deepest interest and respect on his face, in the manner that had led Vernon Whiteside to say he would “drink up what they were saying, sit at their knees and drink it up.” Says a fellow congressional secretary who observed Lyndon in this type of situation: “With men who had power, men who could help him, Lyndon Johnson was a professional son.” (The reaction would have been familiar, too: proof that, on Capitol as on College Hill, where flattery is concerned, excess is impossible. These men were very fond of Lyndon Johnson—and the fondness had strongly paternal overtones; Rasch Adams, for example, gave Lyndon Johnson advice not only about women but about culture; feeling that his cultural horizons needed broadening, he bought him theater and opera tickets.) And the flattery that Johnson’s three assistants overheard was no stronger than the philosophy. To their surprise, their Chief agreed with Miller, agreed enthusiastically. “Miller just
hated
Roosevelt,” Jones says, “and Lyndon was in tune with Miller. Hell, sometimes he was louder against Roosevelt than Miller was.” Johnson used Miller’s arguments in dealing with Kleberg. Opposed to the AAA program as “socialistic,” Kleberg said he was going
to vote against it. Johnson, like Miller, told the Congressman he must vote for it—not because the program was sound, but because his constituents were overwhelmingly in favor of it, as was Congress; his vote didn’t matter, they said; the bill would pass anyway. This scene was repeated. Kleberg would return to his office from meetings of the Agriculture Committee “just shocked at” new Roosevelt proposals. Johnson agreed that the proposed programs were “terrible,” but, Jones recalls, told Kleberg that he “had to” vote for them “because it was just good politics.”

And Johnson did not—for a while at least—espouse a conservative philosophy only in the company of conservatives. During bull sessions at the Dodge, Johnson, echoing one of Miller’s pet phrases, would say of Roosevelt: “He’s spending us into bankruptcy.” The President’s first priority, he would repeat emphatically, should be to “balance the budget.” A hot topic at the Dodge was Huey Long’s recently published
Every Man a King
. Johnson admired the Louisiana populist, but not for his populism. His admiration was for Long’s speech-making ability and his growing political power; he was critical of his proposal to redistribute the nation’s wealth. And Long shared the President’s fault. “Lyndon was critical of the part [of Long’s book] about spending so much money—you know just spend, spend, spend,” Jones says. Discussing the book with Jones, he dictated several sentences which he told L. E. to write inside its cover—sentences, Jones says, to the effect that “Roosevelt is spending too much money. If we’re not careful, he’ll lead the country into disaster.” Most of the young men of “A” and “B” floors were liberal; Lyndon Johnson was the basement conservative.

He was “in tune” with Miller not only in talk but in action. His closest associate among Texas politicians was Welly Hopkins, who, between trips to Washington to obtain RFC loans for clients of his law firm (he always spent his free time on these trips with Johnson; once, they went to New York together to see the Empire State Building), was distinguishing himself back in Texas as one of the state’s most vociferous Red-baiters (he was also leading the fight in the Texas State Senate against attempts to regulate the use of child labor). When Kleberg’s bid for re-election was challenged in the Democratic primary by a more liberal candidate, Johnson, Miller and Hopkins orchestrated a campaign to turn back the challenge in the time-tested method of Texas reactionaries: refusing to discuss the liberal’s positions, they tarred him as a “communist,” guilty of “radicalism” and “similar filth and slime.” Although it is difficult to ascertain the precise stands of Kleberg’s opponent, Carl Wright Johnson, because in a district so completely controlled by the King Ranch, no newspaper would give Carl Johnson more than cursory coverage, he was, in general, attacking Kleberg for advocating a federal sales tax which would fall hardest on the poor—while at the same time advocating other federal legislation which
would largely exempt Texas Gulf Sulphur from paying any federal taxes at all. Johnson imported the fiery little stem-winder (“Lyndon called me from Corpus Christi and said, ‘Dick’s in trouble down here’”)—who used his customary strategy, with its customary success. Turning to Carl Johnson at the end of a county-fair debate, Hopkins recalls, “I said to this guy: ‘Your heart’s black, and your mind’s Red. …’ And he was finished.” (Roy Miller issued a formal denial of the charge. “The company I represent has absolutely no interest in federal legislation,” he said.) Miller’s son, Dale, already a knowledgeable lobbyist in his own right, had, in a brief first meeting with Johnson, gotten the impression that he was a New Dealer. “His manner personified the New Deal,” he says. “He looked the part. He was young, dynamic, outgoing—the new wave of the future.” Dale Miller was, therefore, surprised that “my father, who was very, very conservative in his political philosophy,” was “comfortable” with Kleberg’s secretary. But his father, Dale recalls, assured him that Johnson “was not a wild-eyed liberal,” and as Dale himself got to know Johnson better, he understood what his father had been trying to tell him. “He [Johnson] gave the impression of being much, much more liberal than he actually was. He gave a lot more impression of being with the New Deal” than was actually the case.

Jones had realized this, too—and the realization never ceased to astonish him. Watching Johnson’s constant display of thank-you letters from constituents, Jones had seen in his Chief a deep “need for gratitude,” and, as Jones puts it, “For someone who needs gratitude, the New Deal is the natural philosophy, because it lets you do things for people, and therefore gives you the greatest opportunity to get gratitude.” He was seeing, at the closest range, how effectively Lyndon Johnson was translating the new government programs into action; not one of the thousand Congressional aides, Jones says, could possibly have been better at implementing the philosophy of the New Deal. And yet, Jones says—and Brown and Latimer and other contemporaries who knew Johnson at the time agree—he was implementing the philosophy without believing in it.

B
UT IF IN THE OPINION
of these congressional secretaries, Lyndon Johnson’s true feelings were in harmony with those of reactionaries such as Roy Miller, the secretaries also heard him singing quite a different tune when he was in the company of powerful older men of a different persuasion. The same young men who had heard him denouncing the New Deal when with Miller heard him praising it when talking with Congressmen such as Wright Patman, who had not yet abandoned the Populism he had espoused in the Texas Legislature. Once, a congressional aide, who had just heard him “talking conservative” with Martin Dies, came across him, “not an hour later,” “talking liberal” with Patman—espousing a point of view diametrically
opposite to the one he had been espousing sixty minutes before. When talking with older men, men who could help him, Lyndon Johnson “gave them,” this aide says, “whatever they wanted to hear.”

Younger men he gave nothing. The shift in his behavior at the Dodge was quite sudden. For a time, he had been “B” Floor’s conservative; then, abruptly, he started, in the words of another “B” Floor resident, “shifting gears,” drawing back from his position. Other residents noticed that on two consecutive nights, Johnson would argue on opposite sides of the same issue. And then, in a very short time, he stopped arguing about issues at all. He would no longer, in fact, even discuss them.