The Path to Power (58 page)

Angered by his recalcitrance, President Wilson threw the weight of the White House behind Rayburn’s opponent in the next Democratic primary. Holding his seat nonetheless, Rayburn, on his return to Congress, introduced half a dozen railroad bills against the President’s wishes, secured the passage of several, and was eventually to play a crucial role in winning the eight-hour day for railroad workers. Admiring colleagues gave him a nickname: “The Railroad Legislator.” And he was active—defiantly and eloquently active, often against the wishes of party leaders—in other areas, including the creation of the Federal Trade Commission.

One aspect of the legend that
was
true was his personal integrity. Men learned in Washington what they had learned in Austin: no one could cross Sam Rayburn—and no one could buy him. Lobbyists could not buy him so much as a meal. Not even the taxpayer could buy him a meal. Spurning the conventional congressional junket, Rayburn would during his forty-eight years in Congress take exactly one overseas trip—a trip to inspect the Panama Canal that he considered necessary because his committee was considering Canal legislation—and on that trip he insisted on paying his own way. He refused not only fees but travel expenses for out-of-town speeches; hosts who, thinking his refusal
pro forma
, attempted to press checks upon him quickly realized they had made a mistake: the face, already so hard, would become harder; Rayburn would say, “I’m not for sale”—and then he would walk away without a backward glance, as he had walked away from a President. His integrity was certified by his bankbook. At his death, at the age of seventy-nine, after decades as one of the most powerful men in the United States, a man courted by railroad companies and oil companies, his savings totaled $15,000.

Sam Rayburn’s blocky figure—pounding along the Capitol corridors with strides that one observer likened to the pumping of a piston—seemed broader now, even more massive, the face beneath the bald skull even more grim and hard. The impression of physical strength was not misleading. Once, two big Congressmen—one was a 230-pound six-footer, Thomas Blanton of Texas, the name of the other has been lost in time—got into a fistfight. Stepping between them, Rayburn pushed them apart. Then, bunching each man’s lapels in one hand, he held them apart, his arms rigid. Standing between two men almost a head taller who were thrashing furiously in his grip, he held them, each with one hand, until they had quieted down, as effortlessly as if they had been two crying babies. But it was not his physical
strength that most impressed his colleagues. About his integrity, one said: “Amidst the multitude, he was the incorruptible.” About his accomplishments when he was still new on the Hill, another said, introducing him on the floor for a speech in 1916, during his second term in Congress, “He is a member young in years, but old in accomplishment.” In a body in which seniority or powerful friends ordinarily determined a member’s standing, Sam Rayburn, who possessed neither, was already, solely because of the strength of his personality, a formidable figure.

H
E WAS GOING
to need this strength.

As a boy, he had vowed that he would become Speaker of the House of Representatives. Now, as he stood each day amidst the milling and confusion of the House floor, there loomed above him, so aloof and alone on the topmost tier of the triple-tiered white marble dais, the single, high-backed Speaker’s chair. From the day he arrived in Congress, he wanted to be in that chair, wanted the Speaker’s gavel in his hand. He knew how he would wield it—just as he knew for whom: for the People, against the Interests. For years, no Speaker had dominated the House, and the result was confusion and ineffectiveness; it was during his early years in the House that Sam Rayburn, in a private conversation, suddenly burst out: “Someday a man will be elected who’ll bring the Speakership into respectability again. He’ll be the real leader of the House. He’ll be master around here, and everyone will know it.” He knew himself to be capable of such mastery: had he not, after all, demonstrated it already, in another Speaker’s chair? He felt, moreover, that the high-backed chair and the gavel were his destiny; had not every other element of his boyhood prediction—election to the Texas House, to its Speakership, to the national Congress—already been fulfilled?

His first years in the House may have given him the illusion that the fulfillment of that destiny was not far off. During those years, he had dealt with a President and with presidential advisors, had seen his name in the Eastern press, had become somewhat of a figure in the House. Now reality set in—the long reality.

In 1918, the Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives. They were not to regain it for twelve years. For twelve years, Sam Rayburn would be in the minority.

A minority Congressman of insignificant seniority had power to realize neither his dreams for others nor his dream for himself. There was no way of circumventing, no way of battering down, this fact. John Garner had said, “The only way to get anywhere in Congress is to stay there and let seniority take its course.” Rayburn had not wanted to believe that. Now he learned that he had no choice. As the prosperity of the Twenties waxed brighter, so did the fortunes of the Grand Old Party, the party identified
with the glow: Harding was succeeded by Coolidge, and Coolidge by Hoover, and Republican majorities in Congress grew and grew and grew again—and Democratic Congressmen were allowed little voice in its affairs. Sam Rayburn, who had rushed toward his destiny, was going to have to wait.

The waiting was made harder by the lack of assurance that it would ever be rewarded. Rayburn could remember when, at thirty, he had been the youngest Congressman; he had still been young—thirty-six in 1918—when the waiting began. Now he was no longer so young: he passed forty and then forty-five. And instead of growing closer, his goal seemed to be receding before him. After the 1928 elections, when Hoover beat Smith, there were only 165 Democrats left in the House, to 269 Republicans; never had the party’s prospects of regaining control of the House seemed more remote. Nor, of course, would a Democratic victory in itself end Rayburn’s waiting. He was not the first Democrat in line for the Speakership; he was not even first within the Texas delegation—if the Democrats turned to Texas for a Speaker, they would turn to the delegation’s most powerful and most senior member, the popular Garner, who had been in Congress since 1902.

If a Democratic victory did come to pass, moreover, would he still be in a position to take advantage of it? Would he still be in Congress? He had already had several close primary races, and it seemed to him, pessimistic as he was by nature, inevitable that he would one day lose. “My ambition has been to rise in the House,” he wrote to one of his sisters in 1922. “But nobody can tell when the Democrats will come into power and then a race every two years—they will finally get a fellow in a district.” So many men had waited patiently for the tides of history to turn—and had been defeated before the turn came. Had been defeated, or had become ill, or had died. So many men who had once dreamed of rising to the Speaker’s chair had died without achieving their ambition. Was he to be only one of these?

Waiting was hard enough. He had to wait in silence. Seniority might one day lift him to the chairmanship of his committee. Seniority alone would never enable him to climb the triple dais. The Speaker was elected by a vote of the majority party, a vote based not only on seniority but on popularity, particularly among the party’s influentials. He needed friends. He couldn’t make enemies. He needed friends not only for his own dreams but for the dreams he dreamed for what he had referred to as “the large yet poor class.” Even if he became committee chairman—even if he became Speaker—the forces which would oppose him, the Interests he hated, would be strong. If he wanted not just to hate them but to beat them, he would need allies among his colleagues; he would need, in fact, every ally—every friend—he could get. The savagery with which he fought made enemies. He would have to stop fighting. Sam Rayburn, who had never bided his time, who had rushed to fight the oppressors of “the People,” was going to have to bide his time now. This man who so hated to be licked, who said that being
licked “almost kills me,” was going to have to take his lickings now—take them in silence.

He waited. He had made so many speeches during his first six years in the House; during these next twelve, he made so few; entire sessions would pass without the representative of Texas’ Fourth Congressional District taking the floor. And he was hardly more loquacious in private. He took to standing endlessly in the aisle at the rear of the House Chamber, his elbows resting on the brass rail that separated the aisle from the rows of seats, greeting passing members courteously, listening attentively to their problems, but saying very little himself; if he was pressed to say something, his words would be so few as to be cryptic. Those twelve years were the years in which the legend of Sam Rayburn’s taciturnity was born. The heavy lips compressed themselves into a thin, hard line, so grim that even in repose the corners of his mouth turned down. The Republicans passed legislation raising the tariffs again, helping the railroads; the lips of the “Railroad Legislator” remained closed. Men who had not known him before had no idea how much strength it took for him to keep them closed. When Silent Cal Coolidge noted that “You don’t have to explain something you haven’t said,” Rayburn told people that that was “the smartest thing he’d ever heard outside of the Bible.” He took to quoting the remark himself; he talked sometimes about men who “had gotten in trouble from talking too much.” Was he reminding himself what he was doing—and why he had to do it?

There was no more breaking of House customs, no more defiance of party leaders. He had disregarded Garner’s advice once. Now he sought it, became the older Texan’s protégé. His hotel, the Cochran, was the Washington residence of many prominent members of the House. In the evenings, they would pull up easy chairs in a circle in the lobby and talk; Rayburn made it his business to become part of that circle: a respectful, advice-asking, attentively listening part. If he felt he knew as much as they, they never knew it. In later years, he would frequently quote a Biblical axiom: “There is a time to fish and a time to mend nets.” This was net-mending time for him—and he mended them. The House hierarchy came to look upon him with paternalistic fondness. And these older men learned that on the rare occasions on which Sam Rayburn did speak, there was quite a bit of sense in what he had to say. They saw, moreover, that he had what one observer was to call an “indefinable knack for sensing the mood of the House”; he seemed to know, by some intuitive instinct for the legislative process, “just how far it could be pushed,” what the vote on a crucial bill would be if the vote was taken immediately—and what it would be if the vote was delayed a week. Asked decades later about this knack, he would reply: “If you can’t feel things that you can’t see or hear, you don’t belong here.” He never discussed this knack then—or admitted he had it—but the older men saw he did. And the older men learned they could depend on him—once he gave his word, it was never broken; Garner tendered him his ultimate
accolade: “Sam stands hitched.” Garner and other Democratic leaders admitted him to the inner circles of House Democrats, “employed him,” as one article put it, “to do big jobs in tough fights, and were repaid by his hard-working loyalty.” It was during these years that, when some young member asked him for advice on how to succeed in Congress, he began to use the curt remark: “To get along, go along.”

He used his growing influence to make friends among young Congressmen, but the alliances thus struck were made very quietly. Recalls one Congressman: “He would help you. If you said, ‘Sam, I need help,’ he might say, ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ He might just grunt. But when the bill came up, if you had needed some votes changed, the votes were changed.”

More and more now, other Congressmen turned to him. Said one, Marvin Jones:

A Congressman, required to vote on many bills he knows little about, “learns to rely heavily on those few men,” Jones was to say. “I could give you some of the names of those men. … There was Sam Rayburn. …”

“T
O GET ALONG, GO ALONG
”—wait, wait in silence. It was hard for him to take his own advice—how hard is revealed in the letters he wrote home. “This is a lonesome, dark day here,” he wrote.

He wrote that letter in 1919. The cheerless fight had just started. He would have to fight it for twelve more years. But he fought. He took his own advice.
He waited in silence, waited and went along, for twelve years, acquiring not only seniority but friends, until on December 7, 1931, the day on which, thanks to Dick Kleberg’s election, the Democrats regained control of Congress, the day Lyndon Johnson came to Washington, he became not Speaker—it would be another nine years before Sam Rayburn became Speaker—but chairman of the House Interstate Commerce Committee. One more year of waiting was required, because of the general governmental paralysis during Herbert Hoover’s last year in office. But on March 4, 1933, the new President was sworn in—and then, after all those years of waiting, Sam Rayburn showed what he had been waiting for.