The Path to Power (84 page)

He entertained. At a Spanish restaurant one evening, flamenco music was playing. Johnson, so tall, grabbed little Welly Hopkins, and the two of them jumped up on a table and began dancing together. “There was never a dull moment around him,” Fortas says. “If Lyndon Johnson was there, a party would be livelier. The moment he walked in the door, it would take fire. Maybe in a different way than the party had been going when he came
in, but it would take fire. … He was great fun, a great companion.” Says Elizabeth Rowe: “He enjoyed living so much that he made everyone around him enjoy it more. He could take a group of people and just lift it up.”

As they got to know him better, their fondness was, more and more, tinged with admiration. Politics was their profession, and they were, most of them, very good at it; this little group included men who were already, or would be, among the master politicians of the age. A master of a profession knows another when he sees him, and they knew they were seeing one now. Rowe, asking Johnson more and more frequently for information on Congress, came to realize that the information was invariably correct; following this freshman Congressman through the maze of Capitol Hill, one would make very few wrong turns. They all came to realize this. “He knew how things happened, and what made things happen,” Fortas says. “He knew the nuts and bolts of politics. We were all more or less technicians, and he was the best technician, the very best.” Counting Congress—estimating the votes on bills important to them—was a frequent pastime at the parties. “He was a greater counter,” Rowe says. “Someone would say, we’ve got so many votes, and Johnson would say, ‘Hell, you’re three off. You’re counting these three guys, and they’re going to vote against you.’” “He was the very best at counting,” Fortas says. “He would figure it out—how so-and-so would vote. Who were the swing votes. What, in each case—what, exactly—would swing them.” Fortas pauses for a moment. Then he says: “I may not have adequately explained to you how good a politician he was. He was the very best.”

They admired his thoroughness, his tirelessness—the way he threw himself into every aspect of politics, into everything he did, with an enthusiasm and effort that seemed limitless. He already possessed an amazing store of knowledge about individual Congressmen and their districts through his capacity for absorbing and retaining information. “He was a pack rat for information,” Fortas says. “And he was very, very intelligent. He never forgot anything. He would work harder than anyone else. I have never known a man who had such a capacity for detail.” Recommendations were the order of the day for these canniest of the young New Dealers; all of them were working to insert friends and allies into key positions in government agencies. Lyndon Johnson was doing this, too—“He was always pushing someone for some appointment or other,” Rowe recalls—and a Johnson recommendation had special quality to it. Rowe recalls one of the first vacancies he was put in charge of filling after he became a White House administrative assistant: an Assistant Attorney Generalship. “One of the names on the list was Welly Hopkins.” Rowe thought he might casually ask Johnson for information about him, “just because he was from Texas, too”—he had certainly no intention of giving Johnson, a freshman Congressman, any input into the appointment. But, Rowe recalls, “I called Lyndon up, and he said, ‘Ah’ll be up!’” Startled, Rowe asked, “What do you mean?”

“I’ll be up in ten minutes!” replied Johnson. And ten minutes later, Johnson, having run out of his office in the Cannon Building, jumped into his car and roared up Pennsylvania Avenue, was in Rowe’s office in the old State, Navy and War Department Building next to the White House, “pounding on my desk—in a nice way—and saying: ‘The best man!’” (“Lyndon,” Rowe pointed out, “you don’t know who the other men are”—but Hopkins got the job.)

Rowe and Corcoran, disciples of Justice Holmes, called the tirelessness and enthusiasm that they admired “energy.” “Holmes used to say that in the last analysis the only thing that mattered was energy,” Corcoran says, “and Lyndon just bristled with it.” Fortas, more precise, says, “It was a matter of intensity more than anything, an intense concentration on whatever was being talked about, or on whatever was the problem in hand.” But however they defined it, they admired it—admired it to such an extent that while they might feel that they themselves were, in Fortas’ word, “technicians,” some of them were beginning to feel that Johnson might be something more. Fortas customarily cloaked himself in reserve and an air of gravity that he may have considered necessary for a man who was very young indeed for the posts he held, and who looked even younger. Or his reserve may have been natural: “I was born old,” he once told Goldschmidt, almost ruefully. Sometimes, he seemed to be measuring every word he spoke—he had already adopted the mannerism of stroking his chin slowly before answering a question—and he seemed determined never to let himself reveal enthusiasm; Eliot Janeway was astonished, therefore, when Fortas expressed his feeling about Johnson to him and added, “The guy’s just got extra glands.” Listening to Jim Rowe speak about Johnson, one can hear beneath the words the struggle of a strong personality to avoid becoming submerged in a personality stronger still. “Listen, I mean, I worked for Roosevelt and Holmes. They were the two perfect people. Johnson was never going to [become one of my idols]—he and I were of an age—but he didn’t bore me for one minute. He never bored anyone. He was a magnetic man physically, and you never knew what was going to happen next. He was a remarkable man.”

In this little group of remarkable young men, he was becoming not merely one of the group, but its center. Soon the small Johnson apartment was the scene of more and more parties: in honor of Maury Maverick (Harold Ickes, who had decided to attend Johnson’s party instead of “a big garden party at the British embassy,” was glad he did; “practically everyone was in his shirt sleeves. I am sure that I enjoyed it more than I would have the formal doings …”); for Ickes himself, on his birthday—Johnson asked Fortas, then PWA general counsel, to make a little speech in Ickes’ honor. (“That shows how smart he was,” Welly Hopkins says. By giving the party, but allowing “Abe to make a birthday speech for his boss,” he “kept his foot in the door—with both of them.”) The parties didn’t have
to be formal occasions. “He was a great one for spur-of-the-moment parties,” Elizabeth Rowe recalls. “He’d call up and say, ‘I’m about to leave the office. Get old Jim and come on out.’” When the Rowes arrived at the Johnson apartment, they might find two or three other couples also invited by a last-minute telephone call.

More and more, wherever the parties were held, he dominated them.

His size was one factor in this dominance. He was, of course, over six feet three inches tall, and his arms were very long, and his hands very big, and the sweeping, vigorous gestures he made with those long arms seemed to fill those little rooms. His awkwardness was a factor—the clumsy, lunging strides as he paced back and forth telling his “Texas stories,” the ungainly flailing of his arms to make a point—as was his restlessness, which kept him always in motion: sitting down, jumping up, walking, talking, never still. The drama of his appearance, which went beyond size and awkwardness, was a factor, too: the vivid contrast of the coal-black hair and heavy black eyebrows against that milky white skin; the outsized nose and huge ears; the flashing smile; the flashing eyes.

But the dominance went beyond the physical. Although he was only twenty-eight, he had been giving orders for a long time now—to L. E. Jones and Gene Latimer and the rest of the staff in Kleberg’s office; to scores of NYA officials. He was accustomed to being listened to, and the air with which he carried himself was in part the air of command.

And it was also the air of belief. He was more than a natural storyteller. The subjects on which he dwelt—the subjects his anecdotes all illustrated—were the poverty of his constituents, and the need to do something about that poverty. And in describing Lyndon Johnson, the words the members of this little group use are “vibrancy,” “vitality,” “urgency,” “intensity,” “energy”—and
“passion.”
“His belief in what he was fighting for just poured out of him,” says Elizabeth Rowe, “and it was very impressive.” As he strode back and forth in those little living rooms, he was, in their words, “eloquent,” “spellbinding”—and, often, they were spellbound.

Not always, of course. And when they weren’t, his behavior was also striking. Even as a boy, of course, he could not endure being only one of a group—in a companion’s phrase, “could not stand, just could not
stand
not being the leader,” not only of boys his own age but of older boys. “If he couldn’t lead, he didn’t care much about playing.” The need to dominate was as evident in Georgetown living rooms as in the vacant lots of Johnson City, as evident with Abe Fortas and Jim Rowe and even Tommy the Cork as it had been with Bob Edwards and the Crider brothers. Most of the group—Fortas and Rowe and Goldschmidt, and their wives—gave him their full attention during his monologues, but sometimes they wouldn’t. And sometimes there were other guests—guests not under his spell. In Washington, the amount of attention a man could command was often in proportion to the amount of power he commanded, and a junior Congressman
commanded none at all. As Rowe puts it, “He was somewhat of a young Congressman, and he was interesting, but eventually people would drift off and start having their own conversation,” or would interrupt him and hold the floor themselves. And if he was not the center of the stage, Lyndon Johnson refused to be part of the cast at all. He would, quite literally, go to sleep. In a group of people in a living room, he would be talking, someone else would begin talking, and Johnson would put his chin down on his chest, his eyes would close—and he would be asleep. He might stay that way for quite some time—twenty minutes or half an hour, say; he probably wouldn’t wake up until Lady Bird nudged him. And when he woke up, as Rowe puts it, “he woke up talking.” And if he was not then afforded the attention of the group around him, he would go back to sleep again. Elizabeth Rowe describes the sequence this way: “He’d put on a performance, and then pull the curtain down, and then pull it up again.”

The members of the little group forgave him this behavior. Fortas excuses it as a result of what he feels was understandable fatigue: “a man who lives at this intensity …” Elizabeth Rowe doesn’t attempt to explain it; she just forgives it. Asked whether she, as a hostess, didn’t resent one of her guests going to sleep in her living room, she replies, “Anything he did was all right with me. … Because he was such a good friend.” And because, she adds, when he was awake, he was “such a marvelous, scintillating guest.” Says Welly Hopkins’ wife Alice: “He demanded attention. He demanded it—and he got it.” He was demanding it now, and getting it, from men who gave it to few men—generally, only to their superiors and to other older men with power, not to men their own age without power (and Lyndon Johnson, their own age, had no power at all). Summing up Lyndon Johnson’s relationship with Fortas, Rowe, Douglas, Goldschmidt, Corcoran and Cohen, Rowe says, in words echoed by most of the group: “Roosevelt and Rayburn liking him—that gave him the in. And the personal force did the rest. That had to be it, because there was nothing else. He didn’t have power, or money or anything. He just had this personal force—a huge, unique personal force.”

A
ND HE USED THESE MEN
.

Hawthorne said of Andrew Jackson that “his native strength … compelled every man to be his tool that came within his reach; and the more cunning the individual might be, it served only to make him the sharper tool.” These were very cunning men, and Lyndon Johnson made very sharp tools of them.

They didn’t realize this, of course. In fact, they vehemently deny it. They felt that they were using Lyndon Johnson at least as much as he was using them, and this feeling was important to them; they were clever men, and proud of their cleverness, practical men and proud of their pragmatism;
it was important to them that the upper hand in any relationship be theirs; the thought that someone might be taking advantage of
them
, getting more from them than they from him, would have been difficult for them to swallow (the thought was, in fact, difficult for them to swallow forty years later; the author learned quickly that one way to bring a frown to their faces was to so much as hint that Lyndon Johnson might have been using them more than they were using him).

But he was using them. An element of mutuality did exist, of course; Johnson was, in Fortas’ words, “running errands” for them on the Hill, giving them information on what Congress was doing, and tips on how to get something done by Congress. But the mutuality was very heavily weighted in Johnson’s favor. He was performing essentially minor chores for them. But what he got from them in exchange was not minor: it was, in fact, the largest thing in his political life during his first years in Congress. What he got from them was the Marshall Ford Dam.

To get the dam completed, he not only used every one of these razor-sharp weapons; he used them with consummate judgment, putting each to the specific use for which it was best suited.

H
E DIDN’T NEED THEIR HELP
on Capitol Hill, not with Rayburn, the grim power of his personality reinforced now with the power of the Majority Leadership, on his side, and with Roy Miller still wheeling Joseph Jefferson Mansfield through the Capitol corridors.

Time to obtain congressional authorization for the dam was very short. Mansfield’s Rivers and Harbors Committee was scheduled to issue its report on the project on May 24, just eleven days after Johnson’s arrival in Washington. But in those eleven days, Johnson obtained what was needed: not merely authorization but the type of authorization Alvin Wirtz had devised. Noting that the Marshall Ford Dam “has never been specifically authorized by Congress and its legality has been brought into question,” the report said that therefore Section 3 of the House Rivers and Harbors Bill would read, “The project known as ‘Marshall Ford Dam,’ Colorado River project, in Texas, is hereby authorized … and all contracts and agreements which have been executed in connection therewith are hereby validated and ratified. …”