The Path to Power (53 page)

Johnson, of course, always
did
call back—and provided influential district residents not only with the assistance they requested, whether it was hard-to-obtain hotel reservations on their trips to Washington, or aid of a more significant nature, but also with assistance they had never thought of requesting. For example, a Corpus Christi businessman named Elmer Pope wanted introductions to the staff of the House Interstate Commerce Committee in connection with a bill that would provide federal aid for Corpus Christi; Johnson provided him with the introductions—and, unasked, with a detailed memorandum on the need for the legislation which Pope could present to the staffers.

Attempting to impress these influential men with his entrée and competence, to make them feel secure in his hands, he was careful not to let them realize what young and low-level hands they were; he tried to never let them see his living quarters (one prominent visitor from Texas who saw the Dodge basement—Welly Hopkins—was shocked: “They were living just like youngsters, like in a dormitory,” he recalls). When they asked for hotel reservations, he provided them—as if it were easy for him to do so; they never suspected that because he possessed in fact no influence with hotels, he was often forced to frantically telephone one after another until he found a room—and, sometimes, when he had been turned down everywhere, to make a trip in person to see a reservation manager, and spend his own money on a big tip. He never gave them even a hint of the difficulties he might encounter in attempting to secure interviews for them with high-ranking officials—difficulties which occurred frequently with officials who did not need Congressman Kleberg’s support on a pending bill, and who had never even heard of Congressman Kleberg’s secretary. His care was rewarded. Businessmen from the Fourteenth District were as impressed as he could have wished. And when businessmen from other Texas districts complained to them that
their
Congressman couldn’t provide much help with the Washington bureaucracy, they would suggest that they contact Dick Kleberg’s secretary.

The newly formed Lower Colorado River Authority, for example, was planning to operate not in South but in Central Texas. But its counsel was Alvin Wirtz, and he told the board members that it was to the Fourteenth District office that the Authority should look for help in Washington. The board member who accompanied Wirtz to Washington, Thomas C. Ferguson, saw that Wirtz was correct.

Entrée was vital to the LCRA, whose planned construction of a series of flood-control dams required not only funding from the PWA but permits from a dozen federal agencies. Provisions of the legislation under which the State of Texas had created the agency, moreover, made it necessary to obtain the funding and permits without delay. “We needed to see people quickly,” Ferguson says. “We were pressed for time.” Some of the officials they needed to see, Ferguson says, were “high officials”; one was Jerome N.
Frank, then chief attorney of the Federal Power Commission. “And we couldn’t get in to see them. Senator Wirtz said, ‘Let’s go over to Kleberg’s office and see Lyndon. Maybe he can help.’” Ferguson was surprised to see how friendly the powerful Wirtz was with this young secretary. “They had a love fest there, for a few minutes,” Ferguson says. Then Wirtz told Johnson whom he needed to see. Johnson made an excuse not to call Frank and the other officials while Wirtz and Ferguson were present; he didn’t want them to witness the shifts to which he would be put to arrange the appointments. When, that night, he telephoned the two Texans at their hotel, he simply told them the appointments had been arranged, as if it had been no trouble at all. And he created the image he had wanted to create. “Johnson called over there, and got us in to see them real quick,” Ferguson recalls. “He helped us a whole lot. Senator Wirtz was very much impressed, and so was I. He knew Washington. He could get you in to any place.”

That was the word on Lyndon Johnson. That he “knew Washington,” that he could “get you in to any place.” And now that word was beginning to circulate in wider and wider circles; it was beginning to be heard in conversations of wealthy and influential men across the length and breadth of Texas. John Garner, they said, was a good man to know in Washington. Certain senior and powerful Texas Congressmen were good men to know. Certain senior and powerful Texas lobbyists were good men to know. And so was a young man who was only a secretary to a Congressman. More and more, in Houston and Lubbock and El Paso, businessmen who needed help in Washington were turning not to the offices of their own Congressmen but to Dick Kleberg’s office, and to Dick Kleberg’s secretary. Although he was the secretary for only one congressional district, he was creating an acquaintance—the kind of acquaintance that matters—in twenty congressional districts, across the entire huge state.

H
E WAS CREATING
—across that state—more than an acquaintance.

As the New Deal’s new programs resulted in new bureaucracies, and as the bureaucracies swelled and swelled again, thousands of new federal jobs were created, jobs that could be filled with minimal reference to merit, since Congress, in approving the new agencies, had thoughtfully exempted many of them from civil service requirements. The choice jobs were out of the reach of Lyndon Johnson’s Congressman, junior and inactive as he was, not to mention the reach of his secretary. But the secretary secured quite a few jobs in the lower echelons: in government mailrooms (Gene Latimer was still working in the House Post Office, and now Latimer’s best friend, his former Houston High classmate Carroll Keach, was working in the mail-room of the Federal Housing Administration); and in government galleries (a rotating succession of young men served as doorkeepers in the House
visitors’ galleries); at the endless banks of desks in the Department of Agriculture’s South Building (where Eloise Quill had been joined by several other young women from the Fourteenth Congressional District of Texas), and in the immense federal warehouse on D Street, Southwest, that was the temporary headquarters of the Treasury Department’s vastly expanded Procurement Division (where at least one of its 2,000 clerks, Ivan D. Bell, addressed Lyndon Johnson as “Chief”); and in nooks and crannies of federal service ranging from library stacks on Capitol Hill (several Kleberg constituents, including Johnson’s oldest sister, Rebekah, were researchers at the Library of Congress) to border-crossing stations on the far-off Rio Grande (federal customs officers along the Mexican border came under Kleberg’s patronage, and by 1935, Latimer says, “Johnson just about had the final say on who got hired to the Border Patrol, and who got promotions. He had quite a few fans down there”). He also plucked a few plums in Texas state agencies, for a telephone call from Roy Miller carried considerable weight in Austin.

Low-ranking and low-paying, these jobs were nonetheless precious, in the Depression, to the persons for whom Johnson obtained them. They included fellow White Stars who had graduated from the teachers’ college at San Marcos only to find teaching positions all but unavailable; other young men from the Hill Country, who had, against long odds, managed to put themselves through not only college but law school—only to find that hanging out a small-town shingle meant starvation, and that joining a big Houston law firm meant a salary of $75 per month—and other young men from the Hill Country who, without a college education, had been able to find no job at all. “Lyndon didn’t make you rich,” says one of them. “But he got you a job.” Ben Crider, who had once loaned his young Johnson City friend money to help him stay in college, now received a $145-per-month job as an appraiser with the Federal Land Bank’s Houston office—and could hardly believe his luck: “The best job I ever had,” he exulted. They were very grateful.

And they knew whom to be grateful to. Although the federal jobs were, as the phrase went, “on the Congressman’s patronage,” the people being placed in them were not the Congressman’s friends, but Lyndon Johnson’s. Driven to Southwest Texas State Teachers College by his dread of spending his life on a farm, White Star Ernest Morgan was to find that the degree he had sacrificed so much to earn was no shield from that dread, for it could not get him a job. But Johnson could. “I was very appreciative of what Lyndon Johnson did for me,” Morgan says.

Reinforcing the gratitude, in some cases, were self-interest and ambition. The ability of a contemporary, a young man with whom they had gone to school, to distribute jobs reinforced their belief that he was “going somewhere, somewhere UP.” And, says one of them, “I had sense enough to tie on [to him], because I wanted to go up with him.”

Gratitude—and other aspects of the quality he considered most important, the unquestioning obedience that he called “loyalty”—was, in fact, the prime qualification for a man receiving a Johnson job. Although one White Star recipient of a job, Horace Richards, possessed an independent cast of mind, all the others were men like little Wilton Woods, who had been willing to write editorials for Lyndon’s signature and to date women for his designs; Fenner Roth, who had been willing to run his errands; and Willard Deason, who had, as his candidate for class president, served as his principal front man in his campaign to attain campus power—men who had demonstrated at college a willingness to follow his leadership. Meeting them for the first time, L. E. Jones observed that they were all slow-talking, good-natured country boys, and that they shared another quality: all, he says, were “yielding” in nature, men willing to take orders.

Some, in fact, now demonstrated that quality anew. Deason, for example, allowed Johnson to order his postgraduate life as he had allowed him to order his undergraduate life. He had been studying law at night while teaching in San Antonio’s Alamo Heights High School, but when, in 1934, he obtained his law degree, school officials “sort of halfway promised me the principalship if I stayed on.” That prospect, with its prestige and its annual salary of more than $4,000, made him ecstatic. Johnson had obtained for him a Summer job as a junior attorney with the Federal Land Bank’s Houston branch, but, dissatisfied both with the job—“little more than a clerk”—and its $125-per-month salary, Deason was planning to return to Alamo Heights in September. Johnson, Deason recalls, “said to me, ‘So you get to be a principal—what’s that? If you’re a lawyer, you can get ahead in the world.’” Johnson “was very insistent that I … stay at the Federal Land Bank.” He stayed.

Loyalty—the Johnson brand of loyalty—was the quality he looked for in new recruits, too. In determining whether or not it existed in a potential recruit with whom he had had no personal experience, he sometimes had to be guided by what he saw in a single meeting. But he had very sharp eyes. His relationship with these recruits over the years to come was to demonstrate that if Lyndon Johnson was not a reader of books, he was a reader of men—a reader with a rare ability to see into their souls. Nothing was to prove this more dramatically than his selection to receive the best job he had to give—a high-level administrative post with the State Department of Education, obtained through Roy Miller—for the man he chose was regarded by other men as a giver, not a taker, of orders.

The toughness—viciousness—of slim, wiry Jesse Kellam was legendary in oil fields, where he had worked as a roustabout to earn college tuition, and on football fields. At San Marcos, from which he had graduated a year before Johnson arrived at the school, he had been a 140-pound fullback who scorned to wear a helmet, and who once deliberately broke an opponent’s leg. On
another occasion, when a huge opponent had persisted in illegally battering a 200-pound San Marcos tackle, Kellam had beaten him mercilessly until he could no longer rise, and then, standing over him, had said in his low, hard voice: “Now, you quit beatin’ on this little tackle of mine.” The other quality for which he was known was leadership. Although he was the fullback, he called signals, and, a teammate recalls, “In the huddle, Jesse spoke and we listened. He had command presence.”

But the reader of men had read Jesse Kellam. Despite his toughness and command presence—and a fierce, consuming ambition—when Lyndon Johnson met him for the first time in 1933, he was football coach in the dusty backwater town of Lufkin, Texas, earning little more than $100 per month. He had been stuck in that job for eight years; at the age of thirty-three, he had all but lost hope of ever finding a way out of the dead end his life seemed to have hit. Johnson arranged for him to get the state job. When the state Superintendent of Education attempted to renege on his promise to Roy Miller, Kellam, seeing his last hope disappearing, made a desperate telephone call to his young patron. Johnson was in Corpus Christi, but he jumped into his car and raced the 200 miles to Austin (and 200 back) that day to force the Superintendent to deliver on the promise. For almost forty years—starting a year or two thereafter—Jesse Kellam would work directly for Lyndon Johnson. Although he was the older by eight years, he called Johnson “Mr. Johnson.” Johnson called him “Jesse.” Although Kellam liked giving orders—in a coldly domineering fashion (he made a point of never bestowing the courtesy of his full attention on a subordinate; when one was talking to him, his invariable, studied, habit was never to stop shuffling through, and at least ostensibly reading, the papers on his desk)—from one man he took orders, took them unquestioningly, with, in fact, a slavish obedience that, increasing over the years, eventually came to remind observers of Gene Latimer’s; as the years passed, and Kellam’s powerful personality became submerged in a personality more powerful, his gratitude for a word of praise from his master would be almost painful to watch—almost as painful as his reaction to his master’s anger. Latimer was not the only employee whom Johnson could make cry. What he said to Jesse Kellam behind the closed doors of his office is not known, but on more than one occasion, when the doors opened, Kellam, outwardly the toughest and most self-possessed of men, was to emerge with tears running down his hard face.

In obtaining and filling patronage positions, Lyndon Johnson worked very hard. In no field were his energy and his willingness to do whatever was necessary to achieve a goal more evident. Hearing that a job—federal, state or county—was opening up, he would spend hours on the telephone talking to men who might be willing to make another telephone call to the official in charge of hiring someone to fill the job, and who might be willing to ask the official to give it to someone recommended by Dick Kleberg’s secretary.
The 400-mile round trip to save the Education Department position for Kellam was not the only long drive he took in Texas when he felt that his personal appearance might give him a say in the disposition of a job. This work was very important to him. Latimer was with him when he received Kellam’s call telling him that the Superintendent of Education was reneging. Hanging up, Johnson shouted, as he headed for his car: “We can’t let him get away with that!” And, Latimer says, “The Chief was very, very upset.” Patronage was very important to him. “I remember hearing Lyndon say that this business of getting these people jobs is really the nucleus of a political organization for the future,” Russell Brown says. In his attempts to obtain patronage, he did not—the secretary to an obscure Congressman—have much ammunition to work with. So he could not afford to let any opening slip away.