5
AT FIRST GLANCE, the place he had worked so hard to reach seemed peculiarly unsuited to him—unsuited both to his nature and to his ambition.
Austere, restrained, dignified, courtly, refined—these were not the adjectives that, in January, 1949, sprang first to mind in describing Lyndon Johnson. Big as he was, he seemed even bigger. In part, the reasons were physical. Everything about him was outsize, dramatic. His arms were long even for a man of his height, and his hands, those huge, mottled hands, were big even for those arms, and then there was his great head, with the big, jutting nose, the big, jutting jaw, those immense ears, the powerful shape of the massive skull emphasized because his thinning hair was slicked down flat against it with “Sta-comb” hair tonic. And, most of all, there were his eyes, under long, heavy black eyebrows. People in the Texas Hill Country believed that the key to understanding Lyndon Johnson was to remember that he was a descendant of a clan, legendary in the Hill Country, named Bunton. Generations of Bunton men had possessed not only great ambition and a “commanding presence” that enabled them to realize it (they were elected to public office—to the Congress of Texas when it was an independent republic, to the Texas Legislature after it became a state—in their twenties, as Lyndon Johnson had been elected to public office in his twenties), but they were also tall like Lyndon—always over six feet—and had features strikingly similar to his, including the big ears, jaw and nose, the heavy black eyebrows and, in particular, what the Hill Country called “the Bunton eye.” Generations of Buntons had eyes so dark a brown that they seemed black, so bright that they glittered, so piercing that their glare was memorably intimidating. “If you talked to a Bunton,” said Lyndon’s cousin Ava Johnson Cox, “you never had to wonder if the answer was yes or no. Those eyes told you. Those eyes talked. They spit fire.” From the time he was a baby, all through his youth and young manhood, Lyndon Johnson, the Hill Country agreed, had the Bunton eye. And in Washington, where no one had ever heard of the Buntons, people were also struck by Lyndon Johnson’s eyes. Years later, a British journalist would leave his first audience with the President to write, “Afterward, you chiefly remember the eyes, steady and unrelenting under half-lowered lids.” (The journalist would also write that those eyes showed an “exceptional wariness,” and he was correct about that, as correct as he would have been had he been writing in 1949. Johnson’s assistants, who often said among themselves that their boss never trusted anyone, were joking that January that he didn’t even trust Santa Claus. On the day before Christmas, 1948, walking with several of them along a Washington street, he had come across a costumed Santa Claus—a friendly-faced elderly man—soliciting contributions for the Salvation Army. Johnson had asked the man if he could hire him to entertain the children at a Christmas party in his home that evening, and when the man agreed, had handed him two twenty-dollar bills as a down payment. As he was walking away, however, he whirled around, came back, and demanded the bills. When the Santa Claus returned them, he tore them in half, and gave one half back to the man. “Here,” he said, “you get the other half if you show up.”)
Johnson’s size was also emphasized by his awkwardness, by his long, lunging strides, by the vigorous, sweeping gestures of his arms to make a point. When he burst through a door, with those long strides and that commanding air, “he just filled up a room,” as one acquaintance put it. His clothes were dramatic, too. Although he owned blue suits, most of them didn’t look like those worn by other senators; so rich and shimmering was their fabric that friends joked about Lyndon’s “silver suits,” and even with his conservative blue suit, and even when he was wearing it with a starched white shirt, he often didn’t wear one of his many understated Countess Mara neckties but rather one of the style known in Texas as a “Fat Max” tie: short, very wide, and garishly hand-painted, some with placidly grazing horses, some with bucking broncos—one favorite had shapely cowgirls astride—some with oil field derricks. Gold glinted from his wrists—the cuffs of his shirts were fastened by notably large solid gold cuff links in the shape of Texas, with a diamond in the center to show the location of Austin; his gold watch was so heavy that when he went to a doctor, he was careful to remove it before he stepped on the scale—and it glinted from his waist, where his belt buckle was also large and solid gold. His initials seemed to be everywhere: his belt buckle was monogrammed, as were his shirts (not only on the breast pocket but on at least one cuff) and his pocket handkerchief, and when he wasn’t wearing the Texas cuff links, he was wearing links that proclaimed, in solid gold, “LBJ” from each wrist. And the shirts he preferred weren’t white—he often wore shirts and ties which were both cut from the same bolt of checked or polka-dotted cloth—and the suits he preferred weren’t blue. When he wore one of his favorite outfits, of which every element—trousers, vest, jacket, tie—was a monochromatic pale brown, Lyndon Johnson was, one journalist recalls, “a mountain of tan.”
Beyond all this, the suits were outsize. Wanting them to conceal his weight—a disproportionate amount of which was in his stomach; he would shortly begin wearing a girdle in an attempt to conceal what was sometimes an enormous paunch—he had them cut extremely full and long, with wide lapels, and there was therefore a lot of that rich, glossy fabric on display; so generous was the cut that even when his weight was at its upper limits (not the 240 of his presidential years but about 220 or 225), the unbuttoned jackets of his suits flared out around his hips when he walked fast or whirled around, and when he was thinner, his jackets not only flared open but flapped around him. And his trousers were cut extremely long and full, to the despair of his tailor, who complained that Johnson always looked as if he was stepping on the cuffs, and they flapped around his ankles as he rushed down a corridor or up a flight of stairs. Even when he wore a fedora or other conventional eastern hat, it was usually tilted all the way back on his head, in the casual manner of the Southwest, and he often wore a big, gray, broad-brimmed Texas Stetson instead. And while he might be wearing black shoes, at other times he wore cowboy boots, richly embroidered and polished to a high gloss; “You could see him bend down a dozen times a day to buff them up with a handkerchief,” a colleague recalls. Hurrying down the crowded corridors of the House Office Building—and he seemed always to be hurrying, always to be rushing, rudely elbowing people—he had seemed, with his Texas stride and his Texas boots and his Texas hat and his Texas tie, very much the representative of the great, raw province in the Southwest, swaggering through the halls of state. How would he fit in at the Senate Office Building?
And he seemed even bigger than he was for reasons that went deeper than the physical.
He could dominate a room with his charm. In his circle of young New Dealers in Washington, he was the life of every party with his practical jokes, his quick wit, his wonderful “Texas stories” about the hellfire preachers and tough old sheriffs of the Hill Country, his vivid imitations of Washington figures, and his exuberance; jumping up on a table in a Spanish restaurant, he pulled little Welly Hopkins up with him to dance a flamenco. “At parties, he was fun,” Elizabeth Rowe says. “That’s what no one understands about Lyndon Johnson—that he was fun.” Said Abe Fortas: “There was never a dull moment around him. The moment he walked in the door, [a party] would take fire. Maybe in a different way than the party had been going when he came in, but it would take fire.” And he wanted to dominate every room he was in. If he couldn’t lead, he didn’t want to play—wouldn’t play. That had been true in Johnson City, the isolated, impoverished little huddle of houses deep in the Hill Country vastnesses, where as a teenager who owned the only regulation baseball in town, he had brought a saying to life; “Lyndon was a terrible pitcher,” one Johnson City boy remembers, “but if we didn’t let him pitch, he’d take his ball and go home.” It had been true at the Georgetown parties at which he would go to sleep at the dinner table. He had to win every argument—“just had to.” That was what had been said about him by the Johnson City boys and girls among whom he had grown up. That was what had been said about him by his college classmates. That was what had been said about him by his colleagues in the House of Representatives. And in every setting, his demeanor in disputation had been the same. One of those Johnson City companions was to recall about young Lyndon that “if he’d differ with you, he’d hover right up against you, breathing right in your face, arguing your point…. I got disgusted with him. Sometimes, I’d try to walk away, but… he just wouldn’t stop until you gave in.” And, of course, in the House of Representatives as in the Legislature in Austin which he visited with his father, he had “clutched you like his daddy did when he talked to you.”
Imbuing his arguments with special force was a theory that he held very strongly—according to his brother, had held ever since, as a boy, he had heard a salesman say, one day in the Johnson City barbershop, “You’ve got to believe in what you’re selling.” The remark made such an impression on Lyndon that during his boyhood, Sam Houston Johnson says, “he was always repeating that.” Decades later, in retirement at his ranch near Johnson City, Lyndon Johnson would still be repeating it, in expanded form, telling Doris Kearns Goodwin: “What convinces is conviction. You simply have to believe in the argument you are advancing: if you don’t, you’re as good as dead. The other person will sense that something isn’t there, and no chain of reasoning, no matter how logical or elegant or brilliant, will win your case for you.”
He made himself believe in his arguments—believe with absolute conviction—through a process that was characteristically intense. Having observed the process repeatedly, longtime associates had been so impressed with it that they coined phrases to describe it: the “revving up,” they called it, or the “working up.” Ed Clark, who had known Johnson since his NYA days, and who for almost twenty years would be his principal attorney and principal operative in Texas, would say that “He [Johnson] was an emotional man, and he could start talking about something and convince himself it was right, and get all worked up, all worked up and emotional, and work all day and all night, and sacrifice, and say, ‘Follow me for the cause!’—‘Let’s do this because it’s right!’” The process was all-consuming. In describing Lyndon Johnson talking about a cause in which he believed, his Washington and Texas circles use words like “vibrancy,” “intensity,” “energy,” “passion”—and “spellbinding.” It was not just the big body but the passions and emotions boiling up within it that made him seem so big. “He was big all right,” says one acquaintance, “but he got bigger as he talked to you.”
Using his own phrase to describe the process, Johnson would tell his young assistants that in order to carry a point, it was necessary to “fill yourself up” with the arguments in its favor. “You just have to get full of your subject and let it fly,” he was to say. And he accomplished this so thoroughly that he filled himself to overflowing, as if the body, big as it was, could not contain the emotions, and they blazed out of his eyes, made one of his arms grab his listener’s lapel to hold the man close while he tried to persuade him, made a forefinger jab into the man’s chest, made his face push into his auditor’s, forcing the other man’s head back, as if to physically insert the arguments into it—getting closer also to better ascertain if the arguments were working. “I want to see ’em, feel ’em, smell ’em,” he said—he wanted his hands on them as he spoke to them. This was not a style of discourse which had endeared itself to colleagues in the House of Representatives, and it hardly seemed likely to do so with the new colleagues he was going to have now.
The physicality of Lyndon Johnson extended into areas besides that of argument. During the 1940s, Capitol Hill was, of course, very much a man’s world, in which locker-room humor and morals were common; besides, almost half the members of the House, having been raised on farms, were accustomed to earthiness. But even some of these men were startled at Lyndon Johnson’s earthiness. “He would piss in the parking lot of the House Office Building,” says Wingate Lucas, a farm boy who represented Fort Worth. “Well, a lot of fellows did that. I did it. But the rest of us would try to hide behind a car or something. Lyndon wouldn’t. He just didn’t care if someone noticed him.” In fact, Lucas says, he seemed to want to be noticed. “I remember once, we were walking across the lot and some [female] secretaries were behind us, and he just stopped and began to take a piss right in front of them.”
He would also urinate in front of his own secretaries—and since some of them were attractive young women, this, too, was startling to those who witnessed it. During the years in the House, he had a one-room hideaway office on the top floor of the House Office Building—without a toilet, but with a washbasin in the corner of the room, concealed behind a wood and green-burlap screen. While entertaining guests in the hideaway, or dictating to a secretary, he would pull the screen aside and urinate in the basin. Sometimes he would put the screen back before he did so—and sometimes he wouldn’t.
He had always displayed great pride in his sexual apparatus. Even at college, where sexual boastfulness is a staple of campus existence, Lyndon Johnson’s boastfulness—and exhibitionism about his sexual prowess—had been striking to his fellows. Exhibiting his penis to his roommates, Johnson called it “Jumbo”; returning to his room after a date, he would say, “Jumbo had a real workout tonight,” while relating physical details of the evening, including details of his companion’s most intimate anatomy. And if he was urinating in a bathroom of the House Office Building and a colleague came in, Johnson, finishing, would sometimes turn to him with his penis in his hand. Without putting it back in his pants, he would begin a conversation, still holding it, “and shaking it, as if he was showing off,” says one man with whom he did this. He asked another man, “Have you ever seen anything as big as this?”
None of the body parts customarily referred to as “private” were private when the parts were Lyndon Johnson’s. Nervous and restless, he couldn’t seem in public to stop moving, and among the movements was an inordinate amount of scratching: of his chest, of his stomach—and of areas not generally scratched in public. He was constantly pulling his trousers lower, either in front or back, while complaining about his tailor’s failure to provide him with sufficient “ball room,” and he was continually, openly and at length, scratching his rear end—quite deeply into his rear end sometimes. He would plunge a hand into a side pocket of his trousers and scratch his groin. “Crude,” says Representative Richard Boiling of Missouri. “Crude. Barnyard. Always scratching his crotch and picking his nose in mixed company. I’ll never forget—one time he had some injury—hernia or something—and even with the girls present in his office he pulled his pants down to show it. And he’d sit at his desk, and it wouldn’t matter if there was a woman there—he’d pull up his scrotum while talking. We men used to be a bit embarrassed.”
There was, in fact, a purpose to at least some of his crudeness. Years before, while he was still only an assistant to a congressman, Lyndon Johnson himself had had two assistants, two teenage young men who had been his students when he was a high school teacher back in Texas. One, Gene Latimer, gave Johnson the unquestioning deference Johnson wanted; he would work for him for thirty-five years as “his slave—his totally willing slave.” The other, Luther E. Jones, would not; ambitious and independent, he was afraid that “you lose your individuality if you allow someone to be too demanding for too long,” and if he disagreed with Johnson about something, he would voice his disagreement. Jones, a neat young man who was invariably well scrubbed, with his hair carefully slicked down, was reserved, almost prim, in physical matters; “Any kind of coarseness or crudeness just disgusted him,” a friend says. Johnson began summoning Jones to take dictation from him while he was sitting on the toilet. “At first,” Latimer says, “L.E. attempted to stand away from the door, but Johnson insisted he stand right over him. L.E. would stand with his head averted, and take dictation.” As both Latimer and Jones understood, the tactic was a “method of control”—employed to humiliate Jones, and make him acknowledge who was boss. Years later, Richard Goodwin, a speechwriter who had just begun working for Johnson, was summoned to the President’s bathroom in the White House. Watching Johnson, “apparently in the midst of defecation,” staring at him “intently, looking for any sign of embarrassment,” and “lowering his tone, forcing me to approach more closely,” while “calculating my reaction,” Goodwin realized that he was being given a kind of “test.” Goodwin passed—and so had many of the staff members to whom Johnson had given the same test during his years in the House of Representatives.
For other aspects of Lyndon Johnson’s personal style as well, adjectives like “restrained” or “dignified” seemed inappropriate. Among his chronic health problems were a severe eczema-like rash on his hands, and a bronchial condition, and the prescribed remedies were employed with a notable openness. He often kept a large bowl of a purple-colored salve called “Lubriderm” on his desk, and would, even with visitors present, plunge his hands into the bowl, and assiduously rub gobs of ointment into his hands. To combat the nasal congestion produced by the bronchitis, doctors had recommended the use of a nasal inhaler, and the use was frequent—not only in his House office but even on the House floor. Throwing his head all the way back, he would stick the inhaler into one nostril and inhale, with a slurping sound so loud it could be heard clearly in the Press Gallery above. Few settings seemed less appropriate for such behavior than the Senate Office Building, or the Senate Chamber.
THE PLACE to which Lyndon Johnson had come seemed peculiarly unsuited to him, in addition, for reasons more serious than personal style. Because it was ruled by seniority, ability couldn’t move him along the long tables in the committee rooms toward those gavels at the end that conferred power in the Senate. Energy couldn’t move him along. Only the passage of time could do that. There was, it was universally agreed, only one way to become one of the Senate’s rulers: to wait.
Lyndon Johnson had already had a lesson—a terribly harsh lesson—in how long seniority might make him wait. Upon his arrival in the House of Representatives, in 1937, he had been assigned to its Naval Affairs Committee, whose chairman was Carl Vinson, “the Georgia Swamp Fox,” then in his twenty-third year in Congress but still only fifty-three years old, and, as a southern Democrat, virtually guaranteed his seat as long as he wanted it. And of course even Vinson’s death or retirement would not make Johnson chairman. Some of the committee’s Democrats who sat between him and Vinson would lose their seats, some would die, some would become senators—but some would remain on the committee. He would have to survive the chairmanships of these remaining Democrats, the chairmanships laid end to end, before he could become chairman. That prospect was bleak enough, but then, in 1946, Johnson had received a brutal reminder that, because so many years were involved, no one could predict what might happen—so that even waiting was no guarantee. In that year, an unusual concatenation of deaths and defeats among the Democrats on Naval Affairs had left him as the committee’s third-ranking Democrat. Only a single member of his party sat between him and Vinson; the chairmanship had begun to seem within his reach. (Only, of course, because Johnson could not foresee Vinson’s longevity; the Swamp Fox would not retire until 1965, at the age of eighty-one; had Johnson remained on the House Naval Affairs Committee, he would actually have had to wait twenty-eight years before he became chairman.) But it was in 1946 that the House adopted the recommendations of a bipartisan Joint Committee on the Reorganization of Congress, and one of those recommendations was for merging the Naval Affairs and Military Affairs Committees into a single new House Armed Services Committee. Six Democratic members of Military Affairs possessed greater seniority in the House than he did. His old committee had suddenly disappeared; on his new one, he was not the third-ranking Democrat but the ninth. Nor was that the end of the lesson. In November, 1946, the GOP won control of the House: a vivid reminder of the fact that even outwaiting or outliving all the Democrats ahead of him would not make him chairman if, when his turn in the Democratic line finally arrived, the Democrats were not the body’s majority party.
Lyndon Johnson had fought and twisted in the House to try to break free of the seniority trap. When the traditional “Texas seat” on the powerful Appropriations Committee became vacant, he planted newspaper stories hinting that President Roosevelt wanted him to have it, and half persuaded Speaker Ray-burn that if no one else demanded it, he could have it. But someone else did demand it: Texas congressman George Mahon, who had more seniority. “Ray-burn followed the rules,” Mahon was to recall; regardless of the Speaker’s fondness for Johnson, “If you were in line for it, you got it—that was the way the unvarying rule was.”* Rayburn himself had, long before, learned the lesson the hard way. His patron John Nance (Cactus Jack) Garner had said, “The only way to get anywhere in Congress is to stay there and let seniority take its course.” Rayburn had not wanted to believe that, but as the years passed, he had realized he had no choice. He had come to Congress in 1912, at the age of thirty; he did not get his first real power—the chairmanship of the House Interstate Commerce Committee—until 1931, when he was forty-nine; he would eventually become Speaker, all right, but not until 1940, when he was fifty-eight. Lyndon Johnson had studied Rayburn’s career, and had known it wouldn’t do for him. “Too slow. Too slow!” The House had been too slow for Lyndon Johnson. What would the Senate be?
AND THE SENATE was ruled by the South, by that mighty Southern Caucus whose unity—that “oneness found nowhere else in politics”—was rooted in its members’ allegiance to a cause almost holy to them. Rising to power in the Senate—to a position within the Senate from which a senator could run for President—depended on the support of southern senators, support which would be forthcoming only after they had been thoroughly convinced that their colleague’s allegiance to that cause was firm.
But that allegiance, essential for success within the Senate, would be fatal to success beyond it—would be fatal in pursuing the goal of which Lyndon Johnson had so long dreamed. There were only eleven southern states, and in many of the other thirty-seven, sympathy for that Lost Cause was not a recommendation. In the eight most populous states, all of which were in the North or the West, it was, in fact, a taint. In the Senate, these eight states cast only sixteen of ninety-six votes, but in a presidential election, they accounted for more than 40 percent of the electoral vote. “No Democrat could win without us,” Illinois’ Paul Douglas was to say. No Democrat could become president without the North’s support—support not available to an advocate of segregation.
It was, therefore, an article of faith in Washington that no southerner could ever become President of the United States. This belief was stated over and over—without qualification, since no qualification was thought necessary—in conversation, and in articles and columns and editorials. When Lyndon Johnson rode in Speaker Rayburn’s chauffeured limousine, staring at him was a plaque that the Speaker’s Democratic colleagues had had affixed to the back of the front seat: “To our Beloved Sam Rayburn—Who would have been President if he had come from any place but the South.”
Lyndon Johnson was from Texas, one of the eleven states of the Confederacy. The taint of the South was on him. For him to realize his great ambition, that taint would have to be removed. But he could rise to a position from which he could run for President only with the South’s enthusiastic, unqualified support. He had trod a very rocky, narrow path to power before. Was this path—the Senate path—to prove too rocky and narrow even for him?
IN ADDITION, he had a problem with his staff—an old problem.
Working for Lyndon Johnson was, in a way, very exciting, for he filled his office with a sense of drama and a sense of fun. Horace Busby had received a full dose of both on the day in 1948 on which he arrived there—a short, curly-haired young man whose editorials in the University of Texas student newspaper had caught Johnson’s eye, and who had been brought to Washington, a few days after his twenty-fourth birthday, to be the congressman’s “idea man” and speechwriter. Busby idolized Franklin Roosevelt, and Johnson had been told that, and when the young man was shown into Johnson’s office to meet him, there, sitting behind the desk, was Franklin Roosevelt, complete to pince-nez glasses, long cigarette holder, and uptilted, outthrust jaw. “Come in, young man, come in,” the figure behind the desk said, in a perfect imitation of Roosevelt’s patrician voice, and, wheeling his big swivel chair around the desk since of course he was paralyzed and couldn’t walk, he took the astonished young man’s hand and said graciously, “Sit down, sit down.” Then, with obvious difficulty, he wheeled himself slowly and painfully back behind the desk, and looked Busby directly in the eye. The big jaw thrust even farther out and up. “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” Franklin Roosevelt said. There followed one of Roosevelt’s fireside chats—“about ten minutes of it,” in Busby’s recollection; “I looked it up later, and it was practically word for word.” And that was the end of the drama, and time for the joke. Summoning his assistant Walter Jenkins, Johnson reverted to his role as congressman, and, in his own voice, began a serious discussion with him—in the midst of which the cigarette, without warning, suddenly flew out of the holder, and, sailing across the desk, landed smack in an ashtray right in front of the astonished Busby. Johnson’s cigarette holder, he would learn, was equipped with a spring that ejected cigarettes, and Johnson could aim it with accuracy, thanks to hours of practice.
There had been many such scenes in Lyndon Johnson’s suite in the House Office Building, for, says his chief aide, John Connally, “Johnson created his own theater,” staging real-life dramas which he claimed to have witnessed, using members of the staff in supporting roles. A favorite was the scene in Sam Rayburn’s Capitol hideaway the day Roosevelt died, and the White House had telephoned to summon Vice President Truman, who was having a drink in the hideaway, to take the oath. “Johnson acted the whole thing out,” Busby would recall. “He placed the chairs—‘This is how close [to Truman] I was.’ He played Rayburn and Truman. He moved over to where Rayburn would have been sitting, and put on Rayburn’s grim scowl. ‘Harry, the White House is on the line.’ Then he showed us Truman walking banty-style across the room,” and spoke with thin lips hardly moving, as Truman sometimes spoke. “‘They want me at the White House, Sam.’” Then Johnson played himself for a moment; not knowing what had happened, he said, he started to ask Rayburn a question, and told Busby to give Rayburn’s response. “Say, ‘No, no, Lyndon, not now.’” So Busby said, “No, no, Lyndon, not now,” trying to scowl grimly as he did so. It detracted nothing from the drama, in Busby’s eyes, when he learned later that, despite what Johnson said, he had not, in fact, been present at this historic occasion, but had only heard about it later from other men who had been.
Johnson inspired his staff, too, giving each of them whatever would inspire him and cement his allegiance—making some of them, who wanted to make their mark on the world, to be a part of history, feel that if they stuck with him, they would be; as one put it, “You felt that the world was moving, and Lyndon was going to be one of the movers, and if you worked for him, you’d be one of the movers”; making others, who wanted less to make a mark than to advance in life, believe that sticking with him was the way to do that, too; as J. J. (Jake) Pickle, one of his men in Texas, put it, “that Mr. Johnson had the prospects of being a … national figure, and he’d take you along with him…. It was the best way to get ahead.”
But drama and fun and inspiration weren’t all he filled his office with. Entering his office in the morning, he would stride from desk to desk. If an assistant’s desk was cluttered with papers, he might say, with a snarl in his voice, “Clean up your fucking desk.” If an assistant’s desk was clean, he might say, with a snarl in his voice, “I hope your mind isn’t as empty as that desk.” Moving from desk to desk, he would pick up or yank out of a typewriter whatever paper an aide was working on, and, one says, “look to see if anything was wrong with it—and God help you if he found something. Jesus, he could rip a man up and down.” “God, you’re stupid,” he would yell at one assistant. “You couldn’t find your ass if you were using both hands!” To another he would shout, “You couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel.” Or a letter might remind him of a phone call he had been intending to make; he would reach out and grab the nearest phone—even if at that moment a secretary was talking to someone on it. Ripping the phone out of her hands as she was in the middle of a sentence, he would cut off the call and dial the number he wanted. As for incoming calls, they had to be answered on the first ring—or else. “If you were on the phone with someone and someone else called, you had to put that [first] person on hold immediately, so you could pick up the second [person] on the first ring,” says Ashton Gonella, who would come to work for Johnson several years later. After several tongue-lashings when she violated that rule, Ms. Gonella devised the strategy of keeping her phone off the hook, so that when it rang she could answer it by simply pressing the button that lit up on her six-line telephone console. Opening the top drawer of Jenkins’ desk, Johnson would take out the sheet Jenkins had to fill out each evening showing how many constituent letters each member of the staff had answered the previous day. The daily quota was a hundred letters per person; if a box on the sheet contained the number “fifty-five,” he would shout, “That’s forty-five good Texans who didn’t get the service they deserved yesterday”—and that was only the first shout. “His rages were terrible,” says Congressman Richard Boiling, who witnessed some. “I mean almost literally—if he’d had a whip in his hand, I’m sure he would have given them a couple of lashes with it.” Once, Gene Latimer felt it would make sense to draw a large map of Texas, with each of the state’s 254 counties and the name of its county chairman, and pin it up in the office so that his fellow aides could see which chairman to notify about a constituent’s problem. Because it took all day for him to do that, however, the next morning the box by the name “Latimer” had a zero in it. Johnson turned that stare—“that terrible stare”—on the little man who adored him so and was so psychologically dependent on him. When Latimer explained what he had done, Lyndon Johnson asked, “I don’t pay you to make maps, do I?” Latimer said he didn’t. “The next time you do something like that, I’ll rip the fucking thing right off the wall,” Johnson said. On another occasion, when he had buzzed out from his inner office for a Scotch, a secretary made a mistake and poured sherry instead. Yelling “You’ve poisoned me!” Johnson hurled the glass against a wall so hard that it shattered. And then he sat at his desk, not saying a word, just staring at the secretary, through the long minutes during which, using paper towels from the bathroom, she knelt on the floor blotting up the sherry and picking up the pieces of glass. On another occasion, when, as Nellie Brill Connally, John’s wife, who worked for Johnson for four years, recalls, “I didn’t get a telephone number fast enough for Mr. Johnson, he threw a book at me. I was a little afraid of him after that.”
The general abuse he would direct at offenders was, aides say, “not so bad” no matter how loud it was shouted at you in front of your fellow workers, not compared to the personal remarks Lyndon Johnson made, for he possessed not only a lash for a tongue but a talent for using it to find a victim’s most sensitive spot. When he would buzz for coffee, “it had to be hot,” recalls one secretary, who was recently divorced and very sensitive about that fact. One morning it wasn’t hot enough: “No wonder you couldn’t keep your husband,” Johnson said to her. “You can’t even make coffee.”
He insisted on ordering every aspect of his staff members’ lives—the way they dressed down to the knots in his men’s neckties; or his women’s weight, hairdo, and makeup. “Well, I see we’re putting on a few pounds, aren’t we?” he would say to a secretary. (“Which meant that you’d better go on a diet,” says Yolanda Boozer, one of his secretaries.) “Or if you hadn’t had your hair done, he would come into the office and say, ‘Well, it’s getting a little windy out there, isn’t it?’” If such hints did not produce the desired result, he would be more direct. To one secretary—with whose appearance he was still dissatisfied—he said, “Why don’t you put on some lipstick, and then I’d like you to send a letter.” “He was adamant about your not having a run in your stocking. He could see it a mile away. I’d be so nervous every time I’d start to walk away from him. I knew I would get the complete up-and-down look. I mean scrutiny. And if you had even a little bit of a run, you’d better change those stockings. It was best always to have an extra pair in your drawer.” He explained his concern about weight to Busby, telling him, “I don’t see the front of my secretaries, I don’t see them until they’ve put something down on my desk and are walking away. I don’t want to look at an Aunt Minnie. I want to look at a good, trim back end.” And Ashton Gonella understood his insistence on other aspects of appearance. “Everybody had to be perfect, so appearance was all-important to him. When I came to work for him, I had long hair, which was the style at the time. One morning, he said, ‘You’re going to the beauty shop today, and you’re going to have ten pounds cut off that.’”
The members of his staff knew that they would have to work in the Senate Office Building the same hours they had worked in the House Office Building—hours which had astonished people who learned about them. All members of that staff worked six days a week, and sometimes seven; the men who handled the mail had to work alternate Sundays. And these were very long days. Some of the staff—those who unloaded the mail each morning from the big gray mailbags—had to be waiting at the office when the bags arrived at seven o’clock. Others started the day at either eight or eight-thirty. And no matter when they started in the morning, they usually had to work into the evening—sometimes quite late into the evening. Nadine Brammer, who would come to work for him in 1955, wrote a friend that she arrived early in the morning, “and sometimes I don’t see daylight again until the next morning. Usually, we have a sandwich at our desks for lunch, and it’s dark, most evenings, when we leave.” Nor did the workday end when they went home. If Johnson had a thought during the night that he wanted to communicate to a member of his staff, he simply picked up the telephone and called him or her at home, no matter what the hour. “There wasn’t even a hello, or a ‘This is Congressman Johnson,’” one says. “You were woken up at two or three A.M. and there was a voice in your ear giving an order.” The men on the staff were worked to exhaustion. One congressman was having a drink with Lyndon Johnson late one evening in his House hideaway office, and Johnson buzzed for Walter Jenkins. “The door opened, and there was this guy—shirt rumpled, tie askew, face pale, standing in the door holding a yellow legal pad waiting for orders—like a slave.” A friend of Jenkins who would visit him in Washington and board with him for a few nights recalls him returning to his home so tired that he fell asleep in the bathtub. “Johnson was working him like a nigger slave,” he says. And always Johnson was reminding the staff that the indispensable quality he required in them was “loyalty”—and he defined what he meant by that: “I want real loyalty. I want someone who will kiss my ass in Macy’s window and stand up and say, ‘Boy, wasn’t that sweet!’”
Because his treatment of his staff had become known on Capitol Hill, Johnson had been stymied for years in the House in attempts to recruit talented individuals to work for him—with a single exception, his administrative aide John Connally. The remarkable abilities of this future Governor of Texas (which impressed everyone who came into contact with him: John Kennedy would make Connally his Secretary of the Navy, Richard Nixon his Secretary of the Treasury—and Nixon called him the man best qualified to succeed him as President) had camouflaged the lack of other top-flight talent on Johnson’s congressional staff. The Congressman himself felt Connally possessed an abundance of the indispensable attribute. “I can call John Connally at midnight, and if I told him to come over and shine my shoes, he’d come running,” Johnson would say. “That’s loyalty!” But now Connally had evidently decided that ten years of doing it in Macy’s window was enough. Not long after the election that sent Johnson to the Senate, Connally flatly refused to return to Washington with him, and accepted a job with the Austin law firm of Alvin J. Wirtz, the former state senator and canny political string-puller who was the single most powerful figure in Johnson’s congressional district and a key figure in Johnson’s career.
Johnson had several replacements in mind, men of outstanding qualifications and Washington expertise, but, having observed how he treated his staff, they declined to join it. Trying to tempt Bryce Harlow, who would later serve as a high-level assistant to Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and who was already a highly respected congressional aide, Johnson offered him not only a salary but stock in his radio station. And Johnson’s proposition was reinforced by Connally, who was friendly with Harlow and came to his office to plead with him to take his job, saying, “For God’s sake, I can’t go on like this.” But there was a problem of ethics; pragmatic though Harlow might be about politics, he knew he would have a problem with Lyndon Johnson’s brand of pragmatism. “I went and spoke to Vinson about it. This was a man whom Lyndon was close to. The old man sat there and looked at me very penetratingly. Then he wheeled around and looked out the window. Dead silence. Wheeled back around: ‘Bryce, it won’t work. You wouldn’t last six months. Lyndon cuts his corners too close.’ And I knew he was right. I knew somewhere along the line he would take some action I could not go along with, and I’d have to say, ‘I can’t do that, Senator.’” And there was a personal problem. “Lyndon would maneuver people into positions of dependency and vulnerability so he could do what he wanted with them. I had watched what he did with Walter Jenkins. He broke Jenkins. To work for Lyndon Johnson, you had to be willing to accept the blacksnake [whip], and not even scream.” Harlow determined that, no matter what Johnson offered him, he would never work for him. Then Johnson offered the job to Jim Rowe, a successful lawyer and one of Washington’s most respected political insiders. But Rowe says, “It was all right to deal with Johnson as long as you had a little independence. But if you were on his payroll—well, I had seen how he treated people who were on his payroll.” And the effect of Connally’s absence was going to be exacerbated by the fact that Johnson was in the Senate now—as became apparent to Johnson with the first assignment he gave one of Connally’s assistants, Warren Woodward.
“Woody” was one of the young men deeply dependent psychologically on Lyndon Johnson. Handsome and courageous—during World War II, he had flown thirty-five missions over Europe—he was keenly aware of his limitations. Asked years later about his role in Johnson’s organization, he would say, “Well, I wasn’t in on strategy. I carried his socks and underwear. That’s what I could do for him, and I was proud to do it.” And, knowing he was going to have to take over some of Connally’s duties, he was nervous. “There was a feeling in the office when we moved to the Senate that we had to step up our game to a new level—that the Senate was the Big Leagues,” he would say. And with his first assignment, he—and his boss—found out that the nervousness was justified.
The assignment—in early December, before Johnson had even been sworn in as a senator—was to obtain enough extra tickets to President Truman’s Inaugural Ball so that Johnson could accommodate all his financial backers who wanted to attend.
“I was just as green as a gourd,” Woody would recall. The official he saw first at Inaugural headquarters was unable to satisfy his request, and sent him to see a woman whose name Woody caught as “Miss Masters.”
“I went in and poured out my story” to the lady, Woody said, and when she agreed to help, decided to do her a great favor in return: with the air of someone giving a thrill to a functionary who would be honored to dance with a senator, he said, “I know Senator Johnson will be very grateful, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he wants to have a dance with you.”
When he related the story to Johnson, Johnson was puzzled as to the identity of “Miss Masters”—until the light dawned. “Her name wouldn’t be Mesta, would it?” he said. “You were talking to Perle Mesta!” His assistant had told Washington’s most famous hostess that he would, as a favor, have his boss give her a dance. “Well, that was how green we all were, without John there with his sophistication,” Woody says. Not long after this (and after Harlow and Rowe—and several others—had refused to fill Connally’s place), Johnson began telephoning Connally at Wirtz’s law firm, cajoling and pleading with him to return. “You got to come, John. You got to hire my staff. You got to help me. I’m going to be new. I need help, John.” And when the pleading and cajoling failed, the big hand tightened on the telephone and the voice became low and threatening—“Now, you listen to me! By God, you either come back and reorganize my staff, or find me someone who can!”—and then he slammed the receiver down so hard that the base shook. And a moment later, he picked the up receiver again—to telephone Connally’s new boss. And a few minutes later, Connally would recall, “Senator Wirtz called me in. He said, ‘John, I know you don’t want to go to Washington. I don’t blame you. But, you know, I just don’t really think we have any choice.’” Connally told Johnson, however, that, choice or not, he would stay for only a single Senate session, and his unhappiness in the job was so evident that, at the end of the session, Johnson allowed him to leave for fear he would infect the rest of the staff.
*In an attempt to help Johnson advance outside the traditional House structure, near the end of World War II Rayburn appointed him to two prestigious new “Select” postwar planning committees whose other members were senior members of the House. But Johnson’s attempt to take a leading role on the Select committees earned him the seniors’ displeasure, and the attempt was abandoned.