Upon his arrival in Washington it was both natural and expectable that Johnson would want to learn how things worked in the nation’s capital—the relationships and sources of power—just as he had at Johnson City, San Marcos, and Cotulla. The task, of course, was more formidable. Many a small-town giant had been swallowed up by a city whose concerns were as varied as the affairs and populace of the nation. Nevertheless, to Johnson the activating principles were much the same. If he had more to learn than ever before, that meant only that there was no time to waste. The day after his arrival he moved into the Dodge Hotel, where he would be assured of natural and informal contact with the seventy-five other congressional secretaries resident in the same building.
Before Johnson had even finished unpacking his suitcase, he was walking up and down the hall, knocking on doors, shaking hands, and telling each person his life history and future plans. One bathroom at the end of the corridor served all the tenants on the long floor. That first night, as Johnson later described it, he went in and out four times and took four separate showers so that he could talk with as many people as possible. The next morning, beginning at 7 A.M., he went into the bathroom five different times at ten-minute intervals to wash his face and brush his teeth. Within a week, Johnson had chosen five young men who he had decided were the most clever, the most experienced, and the most informed to be his “teachers.” He possessed, Johnson liked to claim years afterward, a sensitive mechanism which allowed him immediately to evaluate the intelligence of a person and the worth and validity of his information.1
With the help of his new acquaintances, Johnson wanted to take apart the clock of the congressional world in order to discover what made it tick and how each of the many tiny pieces fit together. He had already learned to concentrate on events behind the scenes, but he needed guidance in working his way through the informal channels of power. At the same time, he wanted to understand the pros and cons of the major policy struggles that would be confronting the Congress in the months ahead. So desperately did Johnson crave this knowledge that his every conversation, whether over meals or during strolls around the Monument, became a planned interview in which he probed, questioned, and directed the discussion to his ends. At lunch, he deliberately pushed himself to the head of the cafeteria line so that he could finish eating before the others sat down, and be free to concentrate on the questions he wanted to ask. If the answer seemed unclear or incomplete, he would demand clarification. If he was still not satisfied, he would turn to someone else and ask for a counteropinion. “The astonishing thing was,” a fellow resident later said, “that Lyndon made us feel as if we were the pupils and he were the teacher and we wanted to be sure to perform as well as we could.”2 Living in the Dodge, another resident, Arthur Perry, observed, “was like living in a permanent debating society, with Lyndon as the focal point.”3
If people were the main source of Johnson’s education, he also read the three daily newspapers in the Washington of 1931, as well as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the local Texas papers. Every evening he assembled a packet of night reading, including the dailyCongressional Record, copies of pending bills, pamphlets, booklets, newsletters of various organizations, official publications, and committee reports; he relaxed in bed with a sheaf of government documents as others relax with a good mystery. Congressional secretary Arthur Perry, who observed the education of Lyndon Johnson in the ways of government, concluded, “This skinny boy was as green as anybody could be, but within a few months he knew how to operate in Washington better than some who had been here twenty years.”4
As Johnson was learning his way on Capitol Hill, the administration, led by Herbert Hoover, was fighting for its survival and that of the national economy. Johnson arrived in Washington in the winter of 1931, as the nation entered its third year of depression. Twenty-eight thousand businesses had failed that year, farm income had dropped three billion dollars, and eight million people—one worker in every seven—were unemployed. Belief that the decline was a temporary misfortune was being displaced by the apprehension that the sources of collapse might be fundamental and resistant to known remedies. Still, Washington was not entirely a gloomy, stagnant city that winter. Having controlled the administration of national government for more than seven decades—interrupted only by the administrations of Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson—the Republican Party was now on the defensive. In ways yet undefined, the old order was changing. And amid such enormous distress there was an inevitable intensity, a sense of excitement mingled with hope, in the mounting prospect of new leaders and new policies. Washington shared this anticipation with the country, but Washington also had more personal and specific concerns. It was a town with only one business—national politics and government—and the old management was on the run. One could already foresee new opportunities for the talented and ambitious, dangers for the long-established. And there would be plenty of talk in what Henry James had called the City of Conversation.
It was, to the extent that James’ characterization was fair, a city marvelously adapted to the talents of Lyndon Johnson. Conversation for him was always a medium through which he sought to impose his will, as well as a source of information that helped him direct his energies toward desired goals. By analyzing the composition of San Marcos College and inquiring into the wishes of diverse student groups, he had been able to consolidate and activate the powerful coalition of nonathletes that had helped topple the Black Stars. In the late 1950s, as Senate Majority Leader, he would utilize a decade of investigation into the political imperatives and personal qualities of individual Senators to devise civil rights legislation that members could support for different, often contradictory, reasons. His intuitive grasp of the ways in which men and institutions might be moved to action was always grounded in an extensive accumulation of detailed knowledge, deliberately and laboriously acquired. Information was power, or, at least, a primary instrument of power. It strengthened, made more effective, his drive for control over successively larger environments until the arena became so vast it could not be comprehended in the same fashion by even the most tireless and encompassing mind. And such information would serve his compelling inward need to neutralize the possibility of surprise; a possibility which he perceived as a danger, and a danger which would be increased by uncertainty or ignorance about the motives, capacities, and intentions of others. In the process of self-education, as in so many of Johnson’s modes of operation, the imperatives of psychic structure coalesced with the pragmatic requirements for achievement in the political world.
Richard Kleberg took little interest in his duties as a Congressman, devoting his time, energy, and interest to the Washington social scene. As a result, Lyndon Johnson had almost complete responsibility for the office. Within a week’s time, Johnson recognized that he needed help. Characteristically, he turned to old friends, persuading Gene Latimer and Luther Jones, two star debaters from San Marcos, to join the staff. The three young men worked eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, managing to create a fully functioning office in less than three weeks’ time. But not without tension. The story is told and retold of a Saturday evening when Johnson came back to the office after dinner to find both Gene and Luther gone. On Luther’s desk was a note saying that they had gone to an early movie and would be back at nine. Feeling betrayed, Johnson began angrily sorting through a pile of mail; on the bottom was a postcard from a constituent demanding to know why his letter, sent a week before, had not yet been answered. Grabbing the card, Johnson ran to the local theater, searched through the darkness until he found Gene and Luther, and led them outside, where, standing in the street, he delivered a five-minute monologue on responsibility, public service, and democracy. “Can I see the card, Lyndon?” asked Gene. Johnson gave it to him. “Why, Lyndon, that’s Charlie Davis, the fellow with all those complications over at the Department of Agriculture. And, Lyndon, don’t you remember, that’s your case.” Anxious to smooth things over, Johnson invited his associates to a local restaurant, where five minutes after the first drink arrived, he jumped up. “Okay, we’ve been relaxing long enough, now let’s get back to work, there’s still three more good working hours until we fold.”5
Johnson did not permit the demands of Kleberg’s office to keep him from pursuing his education in the operation of Congress. He accepted an extra job as doorkeeper on the Democratic side. This entailed bringing onto the House floor cards from visitors who wanted a Congressman to come to the lobby for a talk, a relatively menial task previously assigned to some teenage relative of a Congressman. It allowed Johnson to observe, from the perspective of the House floor, the give and take, the speeches and whispered conversations, and the application of rules and precedents that play so fundamental a role in the legislative process. Enabled to follow his natural inclination to learn more from observation than from study, Johnson worked to master the complex, formal procedures that governed the House, and fathom the unwritten, equally inviolable code of authority and privilege that determined the actual power of House members and decisively shaped the legislative product.
Few secretaries to a Congressman would want to be a messenger boy; the same time could be spent writing speeches, preparing for hearings, or in the unending exchange of views and gossip with colleagues. Johnson was not simply an eager young man anxious to assume any task that might come his way. His choice derived from a comprehension of how he might advance his purposes and ambitions. Racing across the San Marcos campus with messages from the president, he was preparing his claim to other benefits that Mr. Evans could confer, and, more significantly, to partake in that authority which he seemed so anxious to serve. As a Senate leader, despite his responsibilities for high matters of national and party policy, he would assume the “burden” of assigning office space understanding that the prospect of spacious accommodations might prove more persuasive than the most powerful argument in debate.
The job of congressional messenger helped Johnson to acquire data that would enhance his effectiveness as a Congressman’s assistant. More significant in Johnson’s rise, it facilitated contact with older men and the opportunity to solicit their approval. Throughout his life, Johnson’s ambitions were assisted by powerful and successful patrons. His capacity to establish such relationships was one of his most extraordinary attributes, one that we shall examine more fully in the context of his Senate years.
Necessarily, the first step was to bring himself to the attention of those whose help or approval he sought. Johnson’s access to the House chamber gave him the chance to meet dozens of Representatives. In conversations on the floor he cultivated his relationship with Sam Rayburn and Wright Patman, both of whom had served in the Texas legislature with his father. As he walked with House members to the lobby where visitors were waiting, Johnson talked so rapidly and with such vigor that Congressmen could not help but pay attention and remember.
Johnson knew, however, that political power could not be based solely on the capacity to gain notice from and win the respect of other individuals, or even to dominate their actions. The necessary foundation for achievement in Congress was an elected base in the congressional district or state. History had demonstrated that even the most august Senate leader, deferred to by his colleagues and by Presidents, could be eliminated from public life because he had failed to give adequate attention to the needs and vanities of his constituents back home. So Johnson, in his management of the Kleberg office, gave first priority to constituent requests. Through prompt and helpful answers to the several hundred people who wrote in each month for help or information, word of Kleberg’s zeal on behalf of his constituents would begin to spread across the district. Since many of these requests—especially those from the most substantial citizens—involved personal contact, Johnson was also beginning to make a reputation for himself among the solid citizens of Texas as a helpful man, one who got things done. And since most of this “case work” involved problems with one bureaucracy or another (a pension not paid, a request not granted, a contract not fulfilled), Johnson had to spend hours each day penetrating the bureaucratic maze. He sought the knowledge—not easily accessible—of who had the power of decision over the particular matter in question, and, the source of authority identified, by what means influence could be exerted. This often required innumerable telephone calls. But in the end persistence usually paid off.
At the time Johnson began work for Congressman Kleberg, the legislative secretaries belonged to a discussion group called the Little Congress.6 If less formally structured on the basis of seniority than its parent body, the Little Congress had become a kind of old-timers’ club, led by the most senior staff members, and with agendas that avoided controversial speakers and topics. More and more, newcomers to the Hill were declining to join what had once been a prestigious and influential group. Lyndon Johnson decided before his first meeting was over that he wanted to be Speaker. It would be a struggle because of the seniority rule, but he thought he could win. The best way to wage a fight, he perceived, was to increase the membership of the organization by promising something new and different—an extension of the technique used at San Marcos.
Johnson began his campaign by caucusing five of his friends and getting their support. Soon, by patrolling the House corridors, they had talked with every legislative assistant on the Hill. They sought to persuade all of them to attend the next session of the Little Congress, where they could help revitalize the organization.
This intensive canvassing by Johnson and his friends brought about two hundred people to the organizational meeting. The meeting room, which had been half empty for years, was filled to capacity. The Old Guard placed their senior member in nomination. One of Johnson’s lieutenants placed in nomination the name of Lyndon Johnson. The senior member delivered a routine account of the past activities of the organization. Then Johnson stood up and promised that if he was elected Speaker, he would change the character of the Little Congress; he would bring in celebrated speakers, sponsor important debates, arrange votes on pending issues. Under his leadership, it would become not only an educational forum but also a significant force on the Hill. At twenty-three, Lyndon Johnson became the youngest Speaker in the history of the Little Congress.
Johnson never relaxed in his information-gathering and in his efforts to familiarize himself with the political process. Accompanying colleagues to a baseball game, he would insist on talking politics between the innings and even between pitches. At a swimming pool, he would paddle around for a few minutes, then wait for the others to join him in conversation. He rarely went to movies or plays because he disliked sitting quietly in a dark theater for three hours. Parties were bearable since he could invariably find someone ready to talk politics. At the Texas Society Ball, he danced with the wives of Congressmen rather than with single girls and discussed the latest news in that evening’s paper.7
Increasingly, the hours away from his office or the House lobby became a continuation of the compulsive political quest. Sleeping four or five hours a night, he began to cultivate an unusual capacity to nap for a few minutes at idle moments—while riding in the back of a car or sitting at his desk—to recharge his energies for the hours to come. Almost all his associates were engaged in some governmental work—Congressmen, staff members, and bureaucrats. He came to evaluate their conduct and opinions in terms of political significance: what it told him about the motives and intentions of others, how current controversies were likely to be resolved, which demands or claims were likely to be met and which refused. Increasingly, he came to view all relationships as continually shifting political combinations based largely on shared self-interest. And to a considerable extent he was accurate, for politicians generally form alliances and not friendships. Individuals and institutions achieve their ends through continual barter. But deals are not bonds. Indeed, intense emotional involvement with anything—with issues, ideology, a woman, even a family—can be a handicap, not only consuming valuable time, but, more importantly, reducing flexibility and the capacity for detached calculation needed to take maximum advantage of continually changing circumstances.
Certainly, most participants in public life are not as intensely “political” as Lyndon Johnson was. His obsessive single-mindedness was an aspect of his nature that had evolved from the inner need to protect himself from the perplexing hazards of his childhood. Whatever its source, this quality was an invaluable asset in his public career. Through a relentless scrutiny of people and events based on the assumption that human activity was essentially “political,” a system of exchange, he was able to achieve an extraordinary degree of mastery and success within his environments; whether dealing with the intense politics of family, small town, or college or the machinations of Washington, he was uncommonly equipped for the process of mastery. Each successive victory vindicated his outlook and fortified the qualities that had brought him success. Before long he had become a consummate political animal. This may help explain the frenzied quality of Johnson’s enterprising activity, his scrupulous avoidance of tranquillity. More and more, he depended upon his skills in politics to stave off the consequences of inner conflicts, and provide him a surrogate for love and acceptance.
The picture which emerges from the above description is that of a man for whom all human contacts had a purpose. He wanted to be liked by everyone he met, but defined friendship in terms of a willingness to accommodate his ends. “I was always very lonely,” Johnson told me toward the end of his life.
Johnson was on a short trip to Austin when he met Claudia Taylor—or “Lady Bird,” as she had been called since she was a child—just as she was graduating from the University of Texas with a degree in journalism. He was immediately drawn to this shy and sensitive young woman. Later he said that he knew at once that Lady Bird was a woman of great common sense and reasonableness. Her opinions were remarkably shrewd. And beyond all this, beyond her gift of intelligent judgment, she had an even more precious quality—absolute dependability. To his credit and good fortune, Lyndon Johnson determined not to let this woman go.8
Within two hours of the meeting, Johnson arranged to see Lady Bird at 8 A.M. the following day. After breakfast, he suggested a drive in the country. “He told me all sorts of things that I thought were extraordinarily direct for a first conversation,” Lady Bird later said, “about how many years he had been teaching, his salary as a secretary to a Congressman, his ambitions, even about all the members of his family, and how much insurance he carried. It was as if he wanted to give me a complete picture of his life and of his capabilities.”9 During this first conversation, Johnson also told her about Rebekah and said that he would like it if the two of them could meet sometime. Lady Bird casually responded that it would be nice to meet Johnson’s mother, whereupon Johnson changed direction and headed for Johnson City. And for the rest of his few days in Texas Johnson resolved “to keep her mind completely on me until the moment I had to leave for Washington four days later. I invited her to come with me to Kleberg’s ranch in Corpus Christi. I had business there, but I knew she’d be impressed by seeing me walk so comfortably around this famous ranch.”10
“Everything was so big at that ranch,” Lady Bird recalled, “the rooms, the fields, the beds, the chairs, that I felt a little like Alice in Wonderland coming into a kingdom of giants. Somehow I knew, though I wasn’t sure why, that this was a trip I would never forget.” Yet when they drove away, she later admitted, she found herself curiously anxious to get home. There was something so consuming about the man with whom she had now spent the last three days that she had an impulse to run back to her own life.11 But Johnson recognized this impulse: If she wanted to go home, why that was fine with him—he would go with her. She had met his mother, now he would meet her father. So Lyndon and Lady Bird set off together for Karnack, Texas, and the large, white house, known locally as the Brick House, where Lady Bird had grown up and her father, Thomas Taylor, still lived.
Mr. Taylor had grown up in Evergreen, Alabama. His parents were poor dirt farmers. There were a number of plantations nearby, the largest of which belonged to the Patillo family. Minnie Patillo, the same age as Thomas Taylor, rode her new horse beyond their plantation one summer day and found herself on unfamiliar terrain. Turning the horse around, she stumbled on a log and fell. Taylor found her lying on the ground, bandaged her leg, gave her some water, and brought her to the Patillo home. For months afterward Minnie Patillo and Taylor met secretly. After a year of such meetings, Tommy asked Minnie’s father for her hand in marriage. Old Man Patillo laughed at the presumptuous boy and told him to leave, at which point Tommy is reputed to have answered: “You’ll see, I’m going away to make a lot of money and I’ll be back. And when I come, you’ll beg me to marry your daughter.” Tommy left Alabama for Karnack, Texas. There he built and stocked a grocery store. Within six years Taylor had become a successful businessman and had accumulated enough money to buy the largest house in Karnack and to change Mr. Patillo’s mind. He went to Alabama and returned to Karnack with Minnie Patillo as his bride.
Lady Bird had only the vaguest recollections of the mother who was to die when she was five. The descriptions of friends and relatives suggest a dreamy woman who spent a lot of time by herself, walking in the woods, reading novels and reciting poetry. Minnie’s health was never good; her three pregnancies, two boys and a girl, spent her strength. A fourth pregnancy, when Lady Bird was five years old, ended in death for both the child and the mother. When Minnie died, her unmarried sister, Effie, came to live at the Taylor home. “I was very lucky,” Lady Bird later said. “No one could have been a better second mother to me than Aunt Effie. I loved her very much.” Relatives remember Lady Bird as a well-behaved child whose calm demeanor suggested an unusually strict control over her feelings.12
She was a diligent student and graduated at the top of her class in both high school and college. To all those who knew her at the time, she seemed a very capable and remarkably disciplined young woman.
Lady Bird’s father had waited six years for his bride; the young man she was now bringing to her home from Austin was equally determined, if far less patient. They reached the Taylor family home in time for dinner with Captain Taylor, as Lady Bird’s father was called. Lady Bird recalls that after dinner, taking her aside, Mr. Taylor remarked: “Daughter, you’ve been bringing home a lot of boys. But this time you’ve brought a man.” The morning after this meeting, so unlike his humiliation at Mr. Davis’ table, Johnson returned to Washington. When he had gone, Lady Bird felt what she later described as an unaccustomed loneliness. “I had never before considered myself a lonely person,” she said. “I had spent so much of my life by myself that I had gotten used to being alone. But then Lyndon came into my life and in one week’s time he had become so much a part of me that when he left, I felt his absence terribly. It was embarrassing to admit that so much could happen in such a short time. Here was this man I barely knew talking about marriage and I was seriously considering the idea.”13
Daily, Johnson wrote or telephoned Lady Bird from Washington. When he returned to Texas seven weeks later, his first stop was at the Taylor home, where he urged: “Let’s get married. Not next year, after you’ve done over the house, but about two weeks from now, or right away. If you say no, it just proves that you don’t love me enough to dare to marry me. We either do it now, or we never will.”14 The following week, on November 17, 1934, Lyndon married Lady Bird, a match which provided that totally secure and loyal center to his private life which alone could have sustained him through the exigencies of his public career, and its four-year aftermath.
Two weeks after the marriage, the newlyweds received these sincere and shrewd congratulations:
My precious children:
Thinking of you, loving you, dreaming of a radiant future for you, I someway find it difficult to express the depth and tenderness of my feelings. Often I have felt the utter futility of words, never more than now when I would wish my boy and his bride the highest and truest happiness together.
My dear Bird, I earnestly hope that you will love me as I do you. Lyndon has always held a very special place in my heart. Will you not share that place with him, dear child? It would make me very happy to have you for my very own, to have you turn to me in love and confidence, to let me mother you as I do my precious boy.
I hope and hope you know is composed of desire and expectation, that Lyndon will prove to be as true, as loyal, as loving and as faithful a husband as he has been a son.
My dear boy, I have always desired the best in life for you. Now that you have the love and companionship of the one and only girl I am sure you will go far. You are fortunate in finding and winning the girl you love and I am sure your love for each other will be an incentive to you to do all the great things of which you are capable. Sweet son, I am loving you and counting on you as never before.
My dearest love to you both,
Mamma15
Here extended to Lady Bird in these disarming and prayerful sentiments is a full share in the franchise of her son, of which she will remain chief proprietor. Her closing—“counting on you as never before”—is ambiguous and somehow ominous. Counting on him for what? His loyalty to his wife? His continuing success in the public world? Continuing loyalty to his mother? That Rebekah remained the signal woman and influence in Lyndon’s life there can be no doubt. It is a testament to her love for him and to the power of her own thwarted aspirations. That Lady Bird would become not her adversary but the chief lieutenant of her surrogate’s rise is a testament to her shrewdness.
To both mother and wife Lyndon Johnson would always ascribe a scarcely credible perfection. But it is evident that they were crucially different women. The mother’s inordinate passion for her son had been employed to spur achievements which she herself had determined. The wife endeavored to sustain and better organize the terrible energy Rebekah had been instrumental in setting loose. Where Rebekah withdrew into a stony anger over Sam’s spontaneous Thanksgiving Day invitation, Lady Bird gracefully hosted unexpected throngs, welcoming the political friends Lyndon perpetually invited to their house. Where the mother confided her severest disappointments to her son, Lady Bird complained to no one. Amid the most complicated intrigues and struggles of her husband’s career she remained outwardly composed and reasonable. If his incessant demands and orders (he instructed her to avoid full skirts and low shoes, often picked out her clothes, depended on her not only to manage the house but to lay out his clothes in the morning, fill his pens and his lighter, put the correct pocket items in place, pay his bills—in short, to manage him) or his occasional abuse in front of company became too much for her to bear, she possessed, or soon developed, a strange ability to take psychic leave.
Such phrases as “Her spirit took flight to some remote place” or “Her soul was elsewhere,” if much out of fashion, suggest the nature of the phenomenon that was to be Lady Bird’s saving grace with so devouring a man. “Bird,” Johnson would call out at such moments, “are you with me?” And straight off, her accustomed alertness and competence reappeared.16 Without such devotion and forbearance, without a love steadily given and never withdrawn, the course of Lyndon Johnson’s continuing ascent in the world of politics becomes inconceivable.
During the final year of his life, he told me that he had come to understand that. She was his support, a helper in and necessary condition to his great enterprise—a figure central to his life.
In June of 1935, President Roosevelt created, by Executive Order, the National Youth Administration, to provide jobs for hundreds of thousands of young people forced out of work or school by the Great Depression. Roosevelt signed the order on a Tuesday morning; that same afternoon Johnson was on the phone with Sam Rayburn, Alvin Wirtz, Maury Maverick, and Tom Connally, proposing himself as the perfect candidate for Director of the Texas NYA.
It was characteristic of Johnson to react with celerity when he saw something he wanted and thought he could attain. (Yet, as we shall see, he could be equally hesitant if the object of his ambition seemed more uncertain.) His quickness gave him an immediate advantage over potential competitors. It was to assist him at many turning points, from his first congressional nomination to his selection for a leadership post in the Senate. In this instance Johnson’s opportunism in lining up support resulted in his appointment—within a month of the Executive Order—as the youngest NYA Director in the country.
So Johnson left Washington, but for a while only, knowing that power of the kind he desired was accessible only to those elected to office. He had used his time in Kleberg’s office to impress and befriend several wealthy and influential Texans. But in order to attain elected office he would also need to create a much broader political base. He saw in the NYA an ideal vehicle for building the constituency from which he could return to Washington on his own. And the job itself was admirably suited to Johnson’s personal talents. The program’s purpose—providing constructive labor for young people—had virtually complete public acceptance. Thus it was unnecessary to fight for support from public platforms. His task was to enlist individuals and institutions, public and private, as “sponsors” of work projects. It was the type of face-to-face persuasion at which he excelled.
With his characteristic and decisive energy, Johnson canvassed the state—by car, phone, and plane—talking with officials in the road departments, schools, hospitals, universities, libraries, conservation bureaus, and recreational facilities—swiftly signing up 350 sponsors who agreed to provide the materials, housing, and supervision for their particular project. Within six months, eighteen thousand young Texans were at work building parks, constructing buildings, painting murals, planting grass, repairing school buses, sewing clothes, surveying land, and laying bricks. Johnson worked at his office or on the road from seven in the morning until eleven at night. From 11 P.M. to 1 A.M. or later, he read the volumes of regulations and orders that flowed continuously from the national NYA, and prepared field reports to Washington which detailed how many youths were at work, for how many hours, and what they were doing. He was totally immersed in his work. “You’d ask him about the weather,” a friend recalled, “and he’d start talking about the projects.” Once again, Johnson’s single-minded labors brought rewards. Aubrey Williams, the national NYA Director, spoke of Lyndon Johnson as the best administrator he had. When Eleanor Roosevelt visited Texas in 1936, she called on the NYA headquarters in Austin, telling reporters she wanted to meet this brilliant young man about whom she had heard such high praise.17
The NYA job not only helped Johnson to move closer to his political goals, but also influenced his approach to public problems. It gave him direct acquaintance with the implementation of public policy, challenging him to develop new resources and new skills. In other ways, it constricted Johnson’s vision: the NYA experience confirmed his belief that in order to meet public goals it was necessary only to pass a good bill and put a good man in charge. This reinforcement of his assumption that all Americans wanted essentially the same thing would make it increasingly difficult for him to understand and deal with the conflicts of a later time when the country was divided over goals themselves.
As NYA Director, Johnson was responsible for conducting visitors from other states through his operation in Texas. He would remember one of these visitors—the Director of the Kansas NYA—for the rest of his life. As Johnson described it, he was staying in a seedy hotel in Houston on the Saturday when the woman arrived. While they were walking through a park he saw a copy of the Houston Post lying open on a bench. The headline caught his eye: “Congressman James P. Buchanan of Brenham Dies.” The moment he saw that, he later said, his mind began churning with the possibilities and hazards of this windfall. “I just couldn’t keep my mind on [my visitor]. I kept thinking that this was my district and this was my chance. The day seemed endless. [She] never stopped talking. And I had to pretend total interest in everything we were seeing and doing. There were times when I thought I’d explode from all the excitement bottled up inside. The worst thing was that I couldn’t say a word about it. Finally, finally, the tour ended and I went home.
“As soon as I got home,” Johnson continued, “I talked with Bird and then I called Senator Wirtz—the biggest single influence of my life [an honor variously applied to his mother, his father, his wife, and several friends]. ‘Bad idea!’ Wirtz responded. ‘Why, you’ve only been here twelve months. You don’t even know the mayor. You’re young, enthusiastic, and ambitious and all that, but that’s not enough.’ ‘Well, that’s what I was thinking,’ I said. ‘Wait a minute now,’ Wirtz replied. ‘Now I don’t mean to say there’s nochance. Why don’t I come over and let’s talk it out.’
“So Wirtz came over and he and Lady Bird went on a half-mile walk. Bird just wanted to know if it was idiotic or not. She was going to call her daddy for money if we went ahead. We had $3,900 in baby bonds, but we needed much more. Finally Wirtz said go ahead. Bird called her daddy. I was on the other end of the phone, my heart pumping the whole time. She told him what we were thinking, that if we did go we would need $10,000 of the money her mother had left her. ‘Ten thousand dollars,’ her father asked. ‘Isn’t that a great deal? What about five thousand or three thousand?’ ‘No,’ Bird said, ‘we’ve been told it must be ten.’ Then he decided right just as he always did where I was concerned and said: ‘All right, ten thousand will be transferred to Lyndon’s bank by tomorrow morning.’ And I was at the bank at 9 A.M. the next morning and there it was.”18
Several days after Buchanan’s funeral, almost all of the four hundred residents of Johnson City gathered to hear Sam Johnson’s boy announce his candidacy for the United States Congress. Once again, his swiftness to act proved critical. Buchanan’s widow had been planning to announce her own candidacy within the week. Had she been the first to announce, it would have been difficult for others to challenge the bereaved widow. Moreover, widespread recognition of her name would have been an important advantage since the special election was to be held in only six weeks. Once Johnson announced, seven others followed his lead. Mrs. Buchanan decided not to run.
Johnson read his statement from the porch of the white house in Johnson City where as a boy he had spent so many hours listening to his father talk politics. Twelve months before, Sam had suffered a serious heart attack and was forced into retirement. But after his son announced his candidacy, he struggled to his feet. “My father became a young man again,” Johnson said, describing the scene. “He looked out into all those faces he knew so well and then he looked at me and I saw tears in his eyes as he told the crowd how terribly proud he was of me and how much hope he had for his country if only his son could be up there in the nation’s capital with Roosevelt and Rayburn and all those good Democrats. There was something in his voice and in his face that day that completely captured the emotions of the crowd. When he finally sat down, they began applauding and they kept applauding for almost ten minutes. I looked over at my mother and saw that she, too, was clapping and smiling. It was a proud moment for the Johnson family.”19
As manager of Johnson’s campaign, Wirtz decided that his first and most difficult problem was to differentiate his candidate from the others. Johnson himself was never adept at separating himself from political opponents on the basis of substantive convictions. Indeed, he was always to shy away from direct confrontation on controversial issues. His strength as a political campaigner was not in public combat, but in the ability to organize, assemble greater resources, and run faster and longer than anyone else. Yet, at this stage, he was a political unknown compelled to find some way of persuading voters to select him over seven opponents, all of whom were Democrats and strong supporters of Roosevelt. Wirtz saw his opportunity in Roosevelt’s recent proposal to enlarge the Supreme Court to fifteen members in order to ensure a pro–New Deal majority. None of the candidates for the Buchanan seat had yet been willing to endorse the already controversial “court-packing” plan. Wirtz suggested that Johnson state his complete agreement and then denounce his opponents as enemies of the plan and, therefore, of FDR. Johnson agreed. “I didn’t have to hang back,” Johnson told his audiences, “like a steer on the way to the dripping vat. I’m for the President. When he calls on me for help, I’ll be where I can give him a quick lift, not out in the woodshed practicing a quick way to duck.”20 In the course of the race, three of Johnson’s opponents stated that they, too, were supporting the plan, but by then it was too late. The impression that Johnson stood alone against all the others had already been created.
Johnson poured massive energy into those forty-two days of campaigning—a torrential, seemingly tireless flow of personal activity and labor which no other candidate could match. He visited every village in the district, walked countless streets, shook hands with everyone he met. If he saw someone working in a field as he drove by, he would stop the car so he could talk with the farmer as he did his plowing. The experience of this campaign vindicated his belief that politics was essentially personal relations. In a twenty-minute appearance, he limited his speeches to five minutes so that he could spend the remaining fifteen minutes “touching” his audience. “A five-minute speech,” he later said, “with fifteen minutes spent afterward is much more effective than a fifteen-minute speech, no matter how inspiring, that leaves only five minutes for handshaking.”21 When he did speak, he promised to help President Roosevelt, talked of his intention to bring electricity to the farm—milking machines to ease the farmer’s labor, washing machines to reduce his wife’s drudgery, light for the family home. His slogan, less commonplace than it would be now: “Lyndon is a man who gets things done.”
In the week before the election, Johnson developed stomach pains. Barely able to speak, he refused to slow down until two days before the election. The pains had become so sharp that he had to be rushed to an Austin hospital. An emergency operation removed his appendix.
From his hospital bed he learned that he had received twice as many votes as his nearest rival. At the age of twenty-nine, he had been elected to the Congress of the United States. And there was another victory—the exultance of his mother: “My dear Lyndon,” Rebekah wrote,
To me your election not alone gratifies my pride as a mother in a splendid and satisfying son and delights me with the realization of the joy you must feel in your success, but in a measure it compensates for the heartache and disappointment I experienced as a child when my dear father lost the race you have just won. The confidence in the good judgment of the people was sadly shattered then by their choice of another man. Today my faith is restored. How happy it would have made my precious noble father to know that the first-born of his first-born would achieve the position he desired. It makes me happy to have you carry on the ideals and principles so cherished by that great and good man. I gave you his name. I commend you to his example. You have always justified my expectations, my hopes, my dreams. How dear to me you are you cannot know my darling boy, my devoted son, my strength and comfort.… Always remember that I love you and am behind you in all that comes to you.…22
Upon his release from the hospital, the new Congressman spent only two days at home before leaving for Washington. His father accompanied him to the train station. Johnson later described the complicated feelings he experienced that day. As he waited for the train, he recalled the scene at the same station six years earlier when he was leaving for his first trip to Washington to become Kleberg’s legislative secretary. Then his father had been strong and healthy; now Lyndon had to bend over to kiss the old man whose frame was bent by sickness. But years later, Johnson still recounted his father’s parting words: “Now you get up there, support FDR all the way, never shimmy and give ’em hell.”23
During the summer Sam Johnson suffered another major heart attack. He was put in the hospital and kept in an oxygen tent for months. When Lyndon returned to Texas on his father’s sixtieth birthday, Sam pleaded with his son to take him out of the lonely hospital and back to his home where he could be with friends and family. At first Lyndon resisted. The doctors said that Sam needed an oxygen tent, and none was available in Stonewall. But Sam Johnson would not listen to logical objections. “Lyndon,” his son recalled him saying, “I’m going back to that little house in the hills where the people know when you’re sick and care when you die. You have to help me.”
Finally, Johnson agreed. “I realized,” Johnson said later, “how dangerous it was to let my father go home. But I also believed that a man had a right to live and to die in his own way, in his own time. God knows that hospital depressed me something terrible and I was only visiting. No matter how sweet the nurses and the doctors are, they’re not your family. They don’t really know anything about you, they don’t know anything about all the things that are going on in your head. In fact, they won’t even talk to you about the fact that you’re going to die because they’re so busy running around pretending that you’re absolutely fine. So there you are, facing the most frightening event you’ll ever face, and you’re all alone. Yes, I understood why my daddy wanted to leave and I respected his wish. I brought him his clothes, I helped him dress, and I carried him home.”24
In his own room in the Johnson City house, Sam briefly seemed to improve. Then only two weeks later, on October 23, 1937, he died. The funeral was held the next day and Sam’s body was laid to rest beside that of his father in the small family graveyard.
Shortly after his election to the House, Johnson was invited to meet President Roosevelt, who was then on a cruise in the Gulf of Mexico. The new Congressman was asked to join the President when the presidential yacht came into Galveston. There have been many colorful descriptions of that first encounter between Johnson and the man who was to be his patron, exemplar, and finally the yardstick by which he would measure his achievement. It has been reported that Johnson attempted to create an instant intimacy with Roosevelt.25 He used a warm, familiar tone as if the two were old friends and equals. He asked personal questions about Roosevelt’s family and his fishing luck. Instead of dismissing this brash young man for his impertinence, the President evidently enjoyed the conversation. Yes, the fishing was good: he had caught two tarpon, one of which weighed ninety pounds and was almost five feet long. Yes, he felt relaxed on the boat and liked the open air. He invited Johnson to join him at the dockside ceremonies and ride next to him in the open car on the way to the railroad station. During their ride, Johnson, remembering that the President was especially interested in the Navy, talked of his own interest in warships and of his concern for American naval power. If there is considerable question about the depth of Johnson’s knowledge and interest in naval affairs, there can be none about his capacity to deal with persons of authority by appealing to their preferences. At the close of the trip, Roosevelt handed Johnson a slip of paper, saying, “I can always use a good man to help out with naval matters in Congress. Here’s a telephone number. When you get to Washington, call it and ask for Tom. Tell him what we’ve talked about.” Tom turned out to be Thomas Corcoran, an influential member of Roosevelt’s staff. The slip of paper meant a coveted seat on the House Committee on Naval Affairs.
Johnson used his newly won access to the White House to make good on some of the promises he had made to his constituents during the campaign. Later he explained that his first goal was to become a major influence on the lives of the people in the 10th District. To that end, he brought about the construction of a housing project for the slums of Austin, secured two important WPA projects in his district, and, most importantly, successfully labored to persuade the Rural Electrification Administration to bring electric power to the people of the hill country.26 Any town in his district that wanted a new post office or a government project found an effective advocate in Lyndon Johnson. Once again, he built a base of power by supplying goods and services to as many people as he could.
“When I thought about the kind of Congressman I wanted to be,” Johnson said much later in life, “I thought about my Populist grandfather and promised myself that I’d always be the people’s Congressman, representing all the people, not just the ones with money and power.
“My grandfather taught me early in life that neither misery nor squalor is inevitable so long as the government and the people are one … so long as the government assumes the positive role of eliminating the special interests that cause most of our problems in America—particularly the moneylenders largely confined to New York, and those who had the money supply and knowledge and possessions in New York, Chicago, and Boston. They’d always been paid proportionately a far higher percentage of the total end product than they deserved. They lived off our sweat, and even before air conditioning they didn’t know what sweat was. They just clipped coupons and wrote down debentures we couldn’t spell and stole our pants out from under us.”
The anger in Johnson’s voice rose steadily: “And because of them [the moneylenders] the guy who produces that tall piece of maize over there”—pointing to a field hand—“never gets what he deserves. They’re leeches, cancerous, and they’d be unnecessary evils if we had the right kind of money management. And they control our banking and money system. If we ever have a revolution and throw out our system for Communism or fascism, they’ll be the prime reason for it and the first victim. I believed it as a child, and I believe it still.”27
The class antagonisms Johnson expressed here seemed close to the gut of a man whose entire childhood had been spent among struggling farmers. Yet throughout his public life Johnson prudently suppressed these radical sentiments, yielding to the more dominant trend of American thought: the belief that America is a classless society, that any man willing to work can rise to the top, that, in the end, cooperation and conciliation yield better results than provocation and division.
“I never wanted to demagogue against business, Wall Street, or the power companies,” he told me. “I wanted a minimum of rhetoric that would inflame or incite against either business, management, or labor. Whenever I talked with businessmen, I never engaged in personal infighting. I thought FDR was wrong [when he labeled businessmen economic royalists]; he didn’t realize you can appeal to the pride of businessmen—make them know their grandchildren will be looking to see how their money was spent, and if they want to lie comfortable in their grave, they better make sure some of it went to public activities.”28
But Johnson’s critique of the demagogue—in Roosevelt and others—was complicated by a curious mixture of envy, fear, and awe. “When I first came to the Congress with Kleberg, I was simply entranced by Huey Long, so much so that I made a special deal with the doorkeeper to let me know when Long was about to speak on the Senate floor. For leading the masses and illustrating your point humanly, Huey Long couldn’t be beat.”29
Yet if Johnson envied the demagogue his ability to rouse large audiences, he was ultimately frightened by emotionally charged language and its latent prospects of conflict. Beneath his expressed belief that politics required reasonable discussions, not rhetorical speeches, lay a deep characterological fear of direct and open conflict, a lifelong tendency to withdraw from confrontation. And this personal need to avoid conflict at any cost was reinforced by years of service in a legislative process deliberately designed to translate potentially disruptive situations into practical problems resolvable by bargaining and negotiation.
Most professions and professional institutions impose a way of living, a mode of behavior, upon the individual, reinforcing some characteristics, changing others. When Johnson entered the Congress, he had already spent three years in studying and absorbing the traditions, folkways, and precedents of the House of Representatives. He already understood that a freshman Congressman should proceed with caution, defer participation in important public controversies, and refrain from any attempt to establish independent stature, until he has consolidated his position and gained the confidence of his colleagues. Power in the House is based on seniority. Rewards are in the hands of the leadership, and cooperation with that leadership is requisite for any member who wants to be effective. Johnson understood this, and as a member of the House displayed a self-deprecating modesty and a capacity for hard work that helped him win the approval of the two men whose acceptance he most needed: Carl Vinson, chairman of the Committee on Naval Affairs, and Sam Rayburn, respected and powerful member and, in 1940, Speaker of the House.
In the past, Johnson’s initial subordination to his more powerful elders had been a means of acquiring authority. In an institutionalized body, governed by seniority, however, this process was very slow. The House was no institution for a young man in a hurry. Within three years Johnson had become, in his words, “terribly restless and unhappy.” When the first opportunity came, he decided to run for the United States Senate.
Once again, a death provided his opening. On April 9, 1941, Senator Morris Sheppard died of a brain hemorrhage and a special election was called. Johnson again called upon Alvin Wirtz to manage his campaign and looked to President Roosevelt for special support. And, as before, he worked harder, spent more money, made more speeches, and met more people than his opposition. But this time Johnson was up against far more formidable competition in the candidacy of Pappy (Wilbert L.) O’Daniel, the incumbent Governor of Texas. And in 1941, unlike 1937, the young politician’s relationship with Roosevelt would prove a liability in an increasingly conservative Texas. First returns showed that Johnson was the victor by a narrow margin of 5,000 votes. On the second day, delayed returns and some last-minute recounts put O’Daniel ahead by 1,311 votes. Despite several reports of fraud on the part of O’Daniel’s forces, Johnson decided not to contest the election. The reason for this willingness to accept the dubious results is not entirely clear, though colleagues at the time suggest that his decision to hold back was made in the context of an awareness that on his side there were violations of the laws regulating campaign contributions and expenditures.
Looking back on his defeat, Johnson described the months that followed as “the most miserable in my life. I felt terribly rejected, and I began to think about leaving politics and going home to make money. In the end, I just couldn’t bear to leave Washington, where at least I still had my seat in the House. Besides, with all those war clouds hanging over Europe, I felt that someone with all my training and preparedness was bound to be an important figure.”30
As war approached, we can begin to discern in Johnson’s fragmentary references to foreign problems his lifelong tendency to impose his conception of relations within American society onto relations between discordant nations. Consequently, tangible divisions and real clashes of interest were considered disagreements that men of goodwill could resolve to the mutual benefit of all the parties. Johnson ascribed war to a few evil men overriding the preferences of “the people,” who were basically good and who sought a tranquil prosperity. “I am persuaded that the people of the world have no grievances, one against the other. The hopes and desires of a man who tills the soil are about the same whether he lives on the banks of the Colorado or on the banks of the Danube.”31 The danger of conflict arose only when the popular will was displaced by the authoritarian will of a self-aggrandizing few. With men like these, reason, the common ground of discussion, was gone. Stopping such men was possible only if the democratic countries were prepared to meet force with force—a course which Johnson urged on his colleagues in the period preceding Pearl Harbor. “Nothing,” he proclaimed on the House floor, “so challenges the American spirit as tackling the biggest job on earth. That is what this is. Americans are stimulated by the big job—the Panama Canal, Boulder Dam, Grand Coulee, Lower Colorado River developments, the tallest building in the world, the mightiest battleship. So fortification of the greatest democracy makes all other projects seem trivial.”32
Five months after his return to the House, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The next day Lyndon Johnson, the first Congressman to enlist in the armed forces, entered the Navy. Twelve months later, President Roosevelt issued a special order that returned all Senators and Congressmen to Capitol Hill. Nevertheless, Johnson’s memory of this brief service never faded. He considered General MacArthur’s awarding him the Silver Star for participation in an overseas inspection mission in the Australian area as among the high moments of his life. Details of this mission are ambiguous. Depending on his mood and on the nature of the audience, Johnson told the story different ways. On some occasions, he tended to deprecate his own role in the mission, insisting that he was not really the one who should have received the Silver Star. Yet, on other occasions, he described, in detail, his courageous behavior when his plane was surrounded by enemies and almost shot down. One fact is clear: Johnson wore the battle ribbon of his Silver Star in the lapel of his jacket for the rest of his life.
The experience of World War II would make a far-reaching and decisive impression on Lyndon Johnson. For him, as for most others of his generation, it would be the event that resonated in their minds whenever they thought about international affairs: the decisive lesson. “From the experience of World War II,” he later claimed, “I learned that war comes about by two things—by a lust for power on the part of a few evil leaders and by a weakness on the part of the people whose love for peace too often displays a lack of courage that serves as an open invitation to all the aggressors of the world.”33 Throughout the late forties he described the lessons of World War II in language strikingly parallel to his explanation of the reasons that led him into his own war in Asia.
“One thing is clear,” Johnson said in the House in 1947. “Whether communist or fascist or simply a pistol-packing racketeer, the one thing a bully understands is force and the one thing he fears is courage.… I want peace. But human experience teaches me that if I let a bully of my community make me travel the back streets to avoid a fight, I merely postpone the evil day. Soon he will chase me out of my house.”34 “Indeed,” Johnson continued in conversation, “if you let a bully come into your front yard, the next day he’ll be up on your porch, and the day after that he’ll rape your wife in your own bed. But if you say to him at the start, ‘Now, just hold on, wait a minute,’ then he’ll know he’s dealing with a man of courage, someone who will stand up to him. And only then can you get along and find some peace again.”35
Only if the American people were brave enough to overcome the temptation to flee responsibility could the bully be stopped. “We have fought two world wars,” Johnson argued in 1947, “because of our failure to take a position in time. When the first war began, Germany did not believe we would fight. Well-meaning pacifists sincerely desired peace. The Great Commoner [William Jennings Bryan] resigned from the highest position in the Cabinet because he thought Wilson’s foreign policy too aggressive. Thus the Kaiser was led to believe we were complacent and lacked courage. Unrestricted submarine warfare began and we went to war. During earlier stages of World War II, Roosevelt enunciated the doctrine of quarantining aggressors. But there were protests … the America Firsters led by Colonel Lindbergh exploited the hesitancy of many of our citizens to prepare for adequate national defense. The tactics of these ostriches and their fellow travelers encouraged indeed if they did not induce Hitler to ignore us and the Japs to attack us.”36
The way to prevent conflict was to stop aggressors at the start—the lesson of Munich. In every war, Johnson believed, the enemy is an alien force that “invades” the allies’ house. Such a view does not facilitate an understanding of civil war. And from the fact of America’s initial indifference to European politics, Johnson concluded that the indifference that kept us from taking an early and firm position was the cause of both world wars. America alone, our attitudes and behavior, were the key to war and peace. Nor was this mode of thought unique to Lyndon Johnson. On the contrary, it was deeply rooted in the American experience, as Louis Hartz has argued: “Americans seem to oscillate between fleeing from the rest of the world and embracing it with too ardent a passion. An absolute national morality is inspired either to withdraw from ‘alien’ things or to transform them: it cannot live in comfort constantly by their side.”37
In the 1940s truth seemed simple, even if the task seemed hard. Johnson shared the nation’s faith that America’s problems, and those of the world, could be resolved if our will was steadfast and we applied enough power at the right time. So Americans accepted the mantle of leadership with the enormous confidence that comes from the conviction that the ends of action are never in doubt, and that the achievement of those ends is always within the power of the brave and skillful. The unquestioned belief in the American mission—the seed of both terrible evil and tremendous good—was the fountainhead of both the man’s and his country’s postwar enterprise and benevolence.
“We in America are the fortunate children of fate,” Johnson said in 1946. “From almost any viewpoint ours is the greatest nation; the greatest in material wealth, in goods and produce, in abundance of the things that make life easier and more pleasant … nearly every other people are prostrate and helpless. They look to us for help—for that inherent courageous leadership.… If we have excuse for being, that excuse is that through our efforts the world will be better when we depart than when we entered.”38
This was the spirit that persuaded America to tackle the problem of European recovery. “If this foreign aid bill becomes a law,” Johnson argued in 1947 in support of the Marshall Plan, “for the first time in the history of the world a great Nation will attempt to urge peace. We can discard the dismay and cynicism of the past and assume a new posture of statesmanship, we can prepare to fight the peace. By sending food, by sending financial aid, by sending both abroad, we contest with evil in a battle for peace. If despair is replaced by faith, if desolation is replaced by construction, if hunger is answered by food—if those things are done, we shall be victors in the battle.”39
There was in this statement another assumption characteristic of America: that war itself could be eliminated by eliminating the poverty that left “the people” vulnerable to the tactics and seductions of evil leaders. What self-determination was to Woodrow Wilson, a healthy Gross National Product was to Lyndon Johnson—the assurance of peace with justice. “Only when we root out the very causes of war,” Johnson later suggested, “the poverty of man’s body, the privation of his spirit, the imprisonment of his liberties, will there be a final surrender of violence itself.”40 In Europe, events in the wake of World War II seemed to justify this faith. Wealth, invincible optimism, and the military protection of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization proved a powerful combination for the restoration of Western Europe. America’s enthusiasm and sense of boundless possibility were further augmented when the aftermath of war was accompanied neither by reversion to economic disarray nor by political isolationism. “It was a wonderful time,” Johnson recalled later. “We were the strongest nation in the world, perhaps even in history, confident, alive, and victorious.”41
During the years right after World War II, the tendency to equate America’s way of life with the goals of civilization itself was so widespread that it had become nothing less than a national assumption. American ethnocentricity deepened, and as the cold war began, a new adversary arose. “As we Americans debate these issues,” Johnson warned in 1948, “the great Russian bear, a bear who walks like a man, is stalking across Europe; and to every citizen of that unhappy continent, a bear on the back doorstep is much more persuasive than an eagle across an ocean.… Where the great bear’s shadow touches, all else is blotted out. If Italy is lost, Greece will be cut off and Turkey isolated. The bell has tolled for Rumania, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia. It is tolling for Finland, Norway, Sweden. Each toll of the bell brings closer the day when it could toll for you and for me.”42
“I pray,” Johnson said in a spirit reminiscent of Theodore Roosevelt’s concern with America’s manly virtues, “we are still a young and courageous Nation, that we have not grown so old and so fat and so prosperous so that all we can think about is to sit back with our arms around our money bags. If we choose to do that I have no doubt that the smoldering fires will burst into flame and consume us—dollars and all.”43
In the hour of new crisis, Johnson believed, the American nation must summon its greatest resource—national unity. “These are days when we must put country above party; national interest above self-interest.… Over Berlin hangs the cloud of World War III. In meeting that crisis we do not ask whether our foreign policy follows the Republican line or the Democratic line. We ask only that it follow the American line.”44 This was the spirit of bipartisanship from which the policy of containment was born.
Yet a way of interpreting actions rooted in old traditions that have been successfully applied in the past may result in error and failure when applied to new conditions. What seemed the wisest solution for Western Europe in the 1940s surely was not the solution for Asia in the 1960s, when drawing lines across political borders to mark the limits of permissible Communist advance was perceived as aggressive action by those who now characterized Communism as a house divided, administered from different centers, with conflicting goals and interests.
It was during this period that Johnson laid the financial base which eventually made him a millionaire. Johnson kept the doors to his financial history tightly closed, assuming, even in his most unguarded moments, the posture of an Horatio Alger figure who rose from rags to riches by hard work, determination, pluck, and luck. The story, as I heard Johnson tell it, began in 1943 when he came home from the Navy to discover that an Austin radio station—KTBC—was up for sale.
“The station was bankrupt when we took it over for $17,500—the price of its debts. A series of bad managers had simply let it go, never really pushing for expansion. It was a risky buy, but I had the feeling that with Lady Bird’s energy and talent we could make it go. And we did, we took that little station out of the red. In the first year we made a profit of eighteen dollars. I still remember the big celebration we had. And once we had it in the black, we made sure to keep it there.”45
Beneath this account seems to be a more interesting story—pieced together by investigative reporters—of the connections between Johnson’s public service and his successful private enterprise.46 The evidence is largely inferential; there is no demonstration of any specific illegal or even unethical act. And there may well have been no transgression. The laws by which government regulates business afford ample scope for conferring immense benefits on a favored enterprise without overstepping the limits of statutes or established procedure.
The rising fortunes of KTBC in Texas paralleled Johnson’s rising political career in Washington. As Louis Kohlmeier wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning series in the Wall Street Journal: “Like two young oaks springing up side by side, the LBJ careers in government and business grew mightily—their trunks rising parallel and branches intertwining.”47 From the first year’s profit of eighteen dollars, the assets of KTBC rose to nearly two million dollars in ten years, and to seven million within twenty years. By 1964 the net earnings—with profits accruing to the Johnson family—exceeded $500,000 annually.
A broadcasting enterprise can exist and expand only with government approval. The success of KTBC was vitally dependent upon a long string of favorable decisions handed down by the FCC: permission to increase its transmitting power to 1,000 watts; permission to broadcast twenty-four hours a day; protection against competitive invasion; permission to affiliate with network stations; approval of requests for television permits. And if the FCC was important to KTBC, Lyndon Johnson was important to the FCC. As a member of the Senate Commerce Committee, which is the overseer of the FCC, Johnson was inevitably involved in all the major decisions concerning the status and personnel of the FCC.
The picture that emerges, however, is more subtle than these facts might suggest. Senators who served with Johnson on the Commerce Committee insist that he assiduously refrained from using his committee post or Senate leadership position to influence broadcasting legislation; on the contrary, he stayed in the background on most issues related to the FCC. Nor did Johnson ever involve himself formally with KTBC. In all his business ventures, Johnson followed the pattern he had established in college when he secured the presidency of the student government for the White Stars by putting his loyal friend Bill Deason out front while he remained behind the scenes. Over the years, a succession of Johnson loyalists manned the business offices at KTBC: Lady Bird, Jake Pickle, John Connally, Jesse C. Kellam, and even Bill Deason himself.
Naturally, it was impossible to keep Johnson’s influence—the presence of Johnson’s power—from being felt in both the FCC and the management of KTBC. And how could it be otherwise when television regulation, like most business regulation, is built upon informal alliances and nonpublic agreements between members of Congress, members of interest groups, and members of the federal bureaucracy?
KTBC was only the foundation of Johnson’s accumulation of wealth. He used the station’s profits to make highly profitable investments in land and in bank securities.48 Here again, the nature and scope of Johnson’s operations are obscure. When asked about his land holdings at a press conference on April 16, 1964, Johnson was technically correct when he replied: “I own a little ranch land, something in excess of two thousand acres.”49 But this technical answer ignored the many thousands of acres held under Johnson’s total or partial control in the names of other men. The exact figures are unknown, but it is indisputable that from the base of one radio station acquired in 1943 Johnson accumulated several millions of dollars in the course of his public life.
Still, all these public and private activities were not adequate to Johnson’s energies and ambitions. His work in the House became routine; so, too, his money-making. At the age of forty he felt, as he later described it, that “something was missing from [his] life.” Finally, in 1948, the other Senate seat in Texas opened up. But this would not be a special election. He could run for only one office, and if he lost the Senate fight, then his House seat would also be gone. “At first,” Johnson said, “I just could not bear the thought of losing everything.”50 He had waited seven years for this chance; now that it had finally come, he fell into severe despondency. Friends and relatives urged him on, but he could not make the move. Finally, one morning a group of frustrated friends and associates came to Johnson and suggested that since he was not running, he might help them to persuade young John Connally to take his place. That afternoon Lyndon Johnson announced his candidacy for the United States Senate.
The campaign followed a familiar pattern. In this one-party state personality mattered, not issues. Johnson was able to equivocate on every question; after all, his opponent—Coke Stevenson—was doing the same. This time Johnson deliberately chose to downplay his liberal ties. He rarely mentioned the Roosevelt years and almost never spoke of President Truman. Instead, he continually invoked those three classic and bland political assets: peace, prosperity, and progress. Traveling by private helicopter, he visited twenty towns a day, maneuvering the craft onto pastures, baseball fields, and building tops.
Three weeks before the election an exhausted Johnson was hospitalized for kidney stones. He was unwilling to undergo an operation to remove them, and insisted that no one should know he was in the hospital. Convinced that he could pass the stones himself, Johnson was determined to avoid the necessity for a postoperative recuperation as well as any public disclosure of his illness. But after three days in the hospital with no change in his condition, John Connally, Johnson’s campaign manager, told the press where his candidate was. When Johnson found out what Connally had done, in defiance of his orders, he immediately drafted a statement withdrawing from the race. In essence, he reasoned: “If I can’t control my own campaign, I certainly can’t control the Senate, and if I’m not in control, I’m much better off in Johnson City where no one can hurt me.” Fortunately for Johnson, the aide who was assigned to release the statement disregarded this order, too. On Lady Bird’s advice, the aide decided to wait until morning. During the night, Johnson passed the kidney stones, and in the morning he acted as if absolutely nothing had happened the night before.
The campaign resumed the following day, and on November 3, 1948, by a margin of 87 votes out of 900,000 cast, Johnson was proclaimed the victor. Stevenson immediately charged Johnson with illegal ballot-stuffing. The fight carried all the way to the Supreme Court. There Johnson’s lawyer, Abe Fortas, persuaded the Court that it had no jurisdiction to review the counting of ballots in a Texas Senate election. With the refusal of the judiciary to intervene, Johnson won his Senate seat. But the closeness of the victory left Johnson with the jeering nickname “Landslide Lyndon.” Although he secured the office he had wanted so long, the legitimacy of his power was left in question.