The Path to Power (96 page)

McIntyre, who was fond of Johnson, was his soft spot on the staff, and he worked on him, but while Mac may have been flattered by a request for an autographed picture, he could do nothing for him without his boss’ approval and, whatever the reason—whether the President had been irritated by Johnson’s boasts of intimacy (one Texas newspaper said that the President “regarded the Texan as one of the banner-carriers of the administration”); whether he felt that Johnson was pushing his slim acquaintance—the President appears to have felt he had done quite enough for a freshman Congressman. In September, 1937, McIntyre agreed to try to do some small favor for Johnson—its exact nature is unclear—but had to write him, “I regret very much that I have been unable to accomplish your desire. …” Replies to Johnson’s recommendations on presidential appointments—for Governor Allred as United States Solicitor General, for example—were form letters, perfunctory and non-committal, letters not even from the President but from one of his secretaries. Flatter though he might, Johnson could not flatter his way into the presidential presence; as late as June, 1938, a year after he had come to Washington as a Congressman, he still had not seen Roosevelt personally; when, at that time, he attempted to secure through McIntyre his first appointment—for “five minutes” in “the next five or six days” to see the jovial companion of his Texas train trip—McIntyre apparently had to tell him that his request had been turned down. Worried—for Allred had asked him to present in person an invitation to Roosevelt to attend the dedication of a public works project in Texas, and
Johnson did not want to confess to the Governor that he had no access at all to the President—he made, on June 8, a formal, written request to Roosevelt for “ten minutes on Thursday or Friday”; he was given an appointment—for August 15. And before that date arrived, the appointment was canceled. The PEC audience, in September, 1938, did not improve the situation. In succeeding months, Johnson, despite requests, did not get through the door of the Oval Office again. During his first two years in Washington, that was his only audience with Roosevelt.

O
N CAPITOL HILL
, developments were very discouraging. He might be a member of Rayburn’s “Board of Education,” but in the world of Congress, where seniority ruled with an iron hand, without seniority even admittance to that select drinking society meant little—as Johnson learned the very first time he attended a meeting of the Naval Affairs Committee.

The committee’s chairman, Carl Vinson, was from the little town of Milledgeville in Georgia’s red-clay hill country. He had not yet been nicknamed “the Swamp Fox” in tribute to a mastery of legislative stratagems which Southerners compared to Francis Marion’s mastery of guerrilla warfare, but he had already been nicknamed “the Admiral” in recognition of his autocratic manner in dealing with the Admirals of what he called “My Navy” (whom he humiliated by pretending he didn’t know their names while ordering them around like cabin boys); with members of the hated “quote Upper House unquote”; and with the twenty-six members of his committee. Slouched down in the center of the two-tiered horseshoe of committee seats in the committee room on the third floor of the Cannon Building, his glasses teetering on the very tip of his long nose, chewing on the shredded remains of a ten-cent cigar, spitting at the spittoon that was always nearby, dressed in a collar two sizes too big and in baggy, food-stained suits, “he looks,” one reporter was to write, “like the country lawyer he is, and about once removed from the cracker barrel,” but he ran the committee, in the words of another observer, “like a dictator.” When, at that first meeting, Johnson, seated on the lower horseshoe among the junior members, began questioning a witness—along with the junior member sitting next to him, young Warren Magnuson of Seattle—Vinson gaveled the hearing into recess and said, as Magnuson recalls the words: “I want to see you two boys in the back room.” In his small, bare private office behind the hearing room, Magnuson says, “he let us have it.” “We have a rule in this committee,” the chairman said. New members were not allowed to ask so many questions; in his first year on the committee, a member was allowed to ask one question; in his second year, two, “and so on.”

The Admiral may have been exaggerating the rigidity of his rules—but not by much. “He runs a tight ship,” other members warned the two young men, and on that ship, seniority was the standard. Junior members he
addressed as “Ensign”; only after some years, and only after the member had pleased him with his deference—and silence—would he be promoted to “Commander.” When the Admiral starts calling you “Captain,” the other members told Johnson and Magnuson, “you know you’ve arrived,” and no one arrived quickly. Attempting to buck the Admiral’s system was useless. If you tried to collect information for independent judgments on naval affairs, the Navy wouldn’t give it to you—and neither, without specific permission from Vinson, would the committee’s own staff members. If you tried to rally other committee members behind an independent stand, you would find the task all but impossible; the favors Vinson had to dispense—not only the small favors, like the junket to Mexico City on a Navy plane, but the big favors, like the location of a naval installation in your district—were denied, usually forever, to a committee member who had incurred his displeasure. Once a new member, currying favor with Vinson, came up to him after a session and said, “Well, I voted with you.” Vinson replied curtly: “What the hell do you think I put you on this committee for?” On “that committee,” its members said, “there are no disagreements at all.” And if you tried to go outside the committee, and challenge a committee report on the floor of the House, your chances of winning such a vote, from members who might also one day want installations and other favors—a promotion or a transfer for a friend or constituent, for example—and who were, in any case, under the control of other committee chairman, were all but nil. Congress, one observer was to write, had given Carl Vinson “a blank check to operate as a one-man committee” on naval matters; on that committee, only one voice mattered: the chairman’s soft Georgia drawl. Lyndon Johnson’s voice, in other words, would not matter until
he
became chairman.

Vinson’s arrogance was not unique. Most of the great Standing Committees of the House were run by men answerable to no one in Washington—not to the membership of the House (for it was not popularity with their colleagues but only seniority which had given them their chairmanships), not to the leadership of the House (for once the leadership had placed a chairman in his job, it was all but powerless ever to remove him from it), not to the President, and certainly not to the members of their committees. And they ran their committees like men answerable to no one; a little more than a decade earlier, one chairman had faced down a rebellion in his committee by declaring, “I am the committee”; under the rule that one House leader was to call “the strongest and most compelling of all rules, the rule of immemorial usage,” that declaration was still true in 1937, as it would be true for decades to come. To observe the House of Representatives was to observe what absolute, untrammeled, unchallengeable power did to men.

The House as a whole was run the same way. The sprawling 435-member body was an oligarchy whose ruling circle consisted of no more than a score of men: the Speaker, the Majority Leader and Whip, the
most powerful committee chairmen. And the only qualification that could secure a Congressman admission to this small, select ring of power—even if he was, like Johnson and Patman, allowed to drink with its members—was seniority. Ability wouldn’t get you into that select circle. Energy wouldn’t get you into it. Only age would get you into it. There was only one way to become one of the rulers of the House: to wait.

And, harshest fact of all about Congress, even waiting was no guarantee. On Naval Affairs, the wait would probably be long, for Vinson, who had come to Congress in 1914 at the age of thirty, was now one of the youngest chairmen—in 1937, only fifty-three years old. As a Southern Democrat, he could probably hold his district indefinitely. As long as the Democrats held Congress, he would be chairman until he died or retired, an event that might be many years away. (In fact, it would be twenty-eight years away: Vinson would be chairman
*
until 1965, when he retired at the age of eighty-one.) And Vinson’s departure would not, of course, make Johnson chairman. If, in 1937, he turned in his seat on the lower horseshoe, he could see above him a whole line of faces—the committee’s senior Democratic members, who sat on Vinson’s left—that stood between him and the chairman’s gavel. Since he was the committee’s most junior member—the one last elected, the one with the least seniority—even the Democrats on the lower horseshoe, even the thirty-two-year-old Magnuson, stood between him and the chairmanship. Some of the Democrats would lose their seats, some would die, some might become Senators—but, with the exception of those who left the committee in these ways, he would, in effect, have to survive the chairmanships of all these men, the chairmanships laid end to end, before he became chairman. And, of course, even if he waited out all those chairmanships, he might still not be chairman. The Democrats wouldn’t always be in control of Congress, and if, when his turn in the Democratic line finally arrived, the Republicans should be in control, he wouldn’t be chairman then, either. Because the Democrats had taken control of the House only five years before, after twelve years of Republican control, evidence of this harsh fact—of what might happen to him even if he waited—was everywhere before Johnson’s eyes. He couldn’t help being aware of all those Republicans who had waited patiently during the twelve years of Republican rule (and, of course, for long years before that) as the Republicans ahead of them died or retired, who had inched on their committee’s dais chair by chair toward the only chair on that dais that mattered, and then—just as they were about to reach it—had, in an instant, had the chair snatched away from them as their party lost control of the House. A young Congressman such as Lyndon Johnson could see such men, old now, pausing for breath
as they climbed the long stairs to the Capitol, or napping in the large, overstuffed chairs in the cloakrooms after lunch—it was so easy to sink into those big chairs and have lunch brought to you on the solid trays that fit across both arms instead of eating standing up at the counter in the cloakroom so you could get back to work. There were even a few who were turning senile, and who would sit in the Chamber hour after hour, staring into space, refusing to retire gracefully, still hanging on, year after year. Or he could see men—Democrats—who had finally reached the chairmanship, but so late in life that it no longer meant much to them. Another Congressman—Donald Riegle, who, in 1966, came to Congress at twenty-eight, the same age as Lyndon Johnson—would see the same thing: “Some of these [chair] men can’t hear very well, can’t see very well, have difficulty working a full day.” He would muse about what it meant to him: “A man can come to Congress when he’s thirty-five, serve here twenty years, and emerge, at age fifty-five, as the ablest man on his committee. But because he has to wait for all the members ahead of him to either retire or die, he may have to wait another twenty years … before he becomes a chairman. You will climb to the top of the ladder eventually. The only catch is you may be in your seventies when the big moment comes.” And he would describe also his feeling that nothing would change the system, for the men who would have to change it had invested too much of their own lives in it: having waited so long for power, they would, now that they had it, do nothing to dilute it. Congress could be a trap as cruel in its way as the Hill Country—a trap with jaws, the system called seniority, strong enough to hold fast even Lyndon Johnson’s ambition.

I
N
1938, a year after he came to Congress, Lyndon Johnson made an effort to break out of that trap.

The only House committee in which a junior member was anything more than a cipher was Appropriations, and of all the House committees, only Appropriations had the power to fund government programs. Other committees could authorize a program, but the money for it had to come—in a separate bill—from Appropriations. The Appropriations Committee therefore had unique power. More important to a young Congressman such as Johnson, its members were divided into thirteen subcommittees—each of which had autonomy unique among House subcommittees. Because of the diversity of Appropriations’ work—it had to cover the whole range of government operations, not just agriculture, say, or defense—the members of each subcommittee became the experts in the field it covered, and the committee chairman, eighty-year-old Edward T. Taylor of Colorado, customarily deferred to its decisions. Even more important to a young Congressman, these subcommittees were small—in 1937, most had only six or seven members—and their smallness kept the meetings informal, so
even an initiate had a chance to contribute something, and members with a few years’ seniority often were allowed considerable input. A Congressman—even a junior Congressman—who was named to Appropriations would become automatically, if not a power in the House, at least more than one of the herd.

In 1938, the traditional “Texas seat” on Appropriations fell vacant, and although George Mahon wanted it and had seniority, Johnson tried to step into it, planting newspaper stories hinting that his “close administration contacts” would enable him to use the Appropriations post to obtain more federal projects for Texas.

But he never had a chance. The Texas seat would be filled by the Texas delegation, and on that delegation, Mahon recalls, “Mr. Rayburn had the power.” Although Mahon knew of Rayburn’s paternal fondness for Johnson, he never worried about the result. “Whatever Rayburn said went,” he says. “But Rayburn followed the rules.” And the rule that mattered was seniority. “I was the senior Texan who wanted the spot,” Mahon says. “I was in line for it. If you were the next man in line, you got it—that was the way the unvarying rule was.” Mahon got it—found the immediate rewards he had expected (“Even as a new member of Appropriations,” he says, “if you were on Appropriations, you were courted by other members”), and began the climb to greater rewards: in eleven years, he would be chairman of his subcommittee, in twenty-six years, at the age of sixty-four, chairman of the full committee; for his remaining fifteen years in Congress (until he retired at seventy-nine), he would be a power on Capitol Hill. Johnson didn’t get it; he remained a member of the Naval Affairs Committee—a junior member of a committee on which junior members were limited even in the number of questions they could ask.