6

“The Right Size”

HIS FIRST STEPS along the Senate path showed how rocky it might be for him.

All Lyndon Johnson’s life he had been grabbing—for more than his share of boardinghouse food, for more than his share of radio advertising, for House committee seats to which he was not entitled. And now he tried to grab for the first two things he wanted in the Senate: committee seats and office space.

He made his moves fast. The three most desirable committees were Appropriations, Finance, and Foreign Relations, and luckily, or so Johnson thought, the senior senator from his own state, Tom Connally, was not only a power on two of them—chairman of Foreign Relations and ranking member of Finance—but was also, thanks to the Senate’s long Christmas recess, ready to hand. And hardly had Connally arrived back in his hometown of Marlin in early November when Johnson flew up to see him, accompanied by John Connally (no relation to the Senator). They were met at Waco, the nearest airport, by Frank C. (Posh) Oltorf, then a second-term member of the Texas Legislature, who drove them to Marlin and went up with them to Connally’s suite in the Falls Hotel, where the two younger men sat on a sofa as the old senator and the new one chatted.

“After a while,” Oltorf recalls, “Lyndon said he’d like to discuss committee assignments, and he’d like to be on Foreign Relations and of course he’d like to be on Finance.”

Senator Connally, Oltorf recalls, took out of his breast pocket a little book with the list of Senate committees, and pulled his glasses down on his nose to leaf through it. He took a long, leisurely puff on his big cigar. Then, looking at Johnson over his glasses, he said, “Well, now, Lyndon, let’s see. Oh, now, here’s the Agriculture Committee. You could get on that, and you could help the farmers. You’re for the farmers, ain’t you, Lyndon?”

Johnson said he was. “I thought I heard you say something about it during the campaign,” Senator Connally said. Connally’s “eyes were just twinkling,” Oltorf recalls, and he paused to savor the moment. “And you can get on the Armed Services Committee,” Connally said, “and then you could help A&M [the Agricultural & Mechanical College of Texas, which depended on federal grants for military research and Officers Training Corps programs]. You’re for A&M, ain’t you, Lyndon?” Oltorf does not recall whether or not Johnson made any reply to this question. “By this time he was sitting there with his arms crossed; he never cracked a smile. Johnson didn’t like to get worked over.”

Connally looked at him again over his glasses. “And then, Lyndon, after you’ve been in the Senate for a while, then you can get on the Foreign Relations Committee or the Finance Committee, and render a real public service.”

Speed was of no more assistance on office space. Within days of his election, Johnson was telephoning Carl Hayden, whose Rules Committee assigned offices. Of course, he said, he understood that offices were generally allocated according to seniority, but he hoped that an exception could be made in his case, since under seniority he would be entitled only to a three-room office, not one of the more desirable four-room suites, and his circumstances were exceptional, since Texas was the largest state in area and sixth-largest in population, and he would need a large staff to serve his constituency. Hayden gave him a noncommittal reply on the phone, and then sent a letter, saying simply that as a result of retirement or defeat, six four-room suites were to be vacated, and they would be “tendered to the six senior senators now occupying three-room suites.”

These rebuffs only made Johnson intensify his efforts, using the lever which could move so much in Washington. Aware that both Hayden and former Majority Leader Alben Barkley, who was leaving the Senate to become Vice President but was still immensely popular on Capitol Hill, were old friends of Rayburn, he asked the Speaker to intercede with them, and Rayburn did. And Johnson had his own coterie of friends within the Truman Administration, most notably his fellow Texan, Attorney General Tom Clark, who assured him that he could persuade the President to “put in a good word with” Barkley, and he asked these friends to make some calls, and they did. He wrote more letters. Giving up on Foreign Relations and Finance (since without Connally’s support, appointment to either one would be highly unlikely), he switched his attention, writing to Appropriations Chairman Kenneth McKellar that “I want very much to … have you as my chairman,” and to Barkley and the influential Walter George that “Since Texas joined the Union in 1845, only one Texas Senator has served” on Appropriations, “and this was more than twenty-five years ago,” and that this inequity was all the more glaring because Texas was currently receiving more federal appropriations than all but three other states. And in mid-December, Johnson went up to Washington to make his mark on the Senate in person.

His first encounter was with a young Capitol policeman who was stationed outside the Senate Office Building entrance to ensure that no one but senators parked near that door—he was one of the young men who had been told, about senators, “Whatever they want you to do, you do it.” There were no assigned parking spaces, but as could be expected the more junior senators left the three or four spaces nearest the entrance for their seniors.

Pulling around the corner from Massachusetts Avenue, Johnson drove his Cadillac onto Delaware and pulled into the parking space nearest the door. Since Johnson had not yet been given a District of Columbia license plate with a senatorially low number, the young policeman did not know he was a senator, and came up to the car to protest. Johnson simply ignored him, and went inside; the young man, having ascertained his identity, didn’t say anything when he returned. Arriving earlier than any other senator for the next few mornings, Johnson parked in the same space, but one day he found another car already in it. Although there were other empty spots along the curb immediately behind it, Johnson’s fury led the policeman to secure a “Reserved” stanchion and put it in that spot the next day to ensure that it would be available for Johnson. Nonetheless, not long thereafter there was again another car in that spot when Johnson pulled up. Telephoning the Capitol Police Chief, Olin Cavness, Johnson told him to “Get that goddamned car out of there!” Calling Johnson back a few minutes later, Cavness said that he had checked with the policeman, and the car belonged to a senior senator. Cavness evidently felt that that explanation would end the matter, but it didn’t. “Well,” Johnson said, “while I’m getting some more seniority, you put a cop there every morning to guard my space until I get there!” Cavness told the policeman to put not one but two “Reserved” signs in that space. That device worked because no one cared to inquire about the signs, and they would remain until Johnson’s car would turn onto Delaware, and the officer, who had been watching for him, would hastily roll them up out of the space so Johnson could park there.

But that was his only victory on the mid-December trip; he may have been able to win in a conflict with a young “policeman”; he had less luck with senators.

For two or three days he did what he had done during his days in the House, striding around the Senate Office Building corridors to various offices, bounding in the door with a big smile, saying, “Hi! I’m Lyndon Johnson from Texas, How’s everyone from Pennsylvania today?” saying it so winningly that he would draw smiles even from the traditionally dour Senate receptionists, asking, “Is the Senator in?” “Is he alone?” and, if the answers were affirmative, walking over to the door to the private office, knocking on it, opening it, and asking if he could come in and chat for a few minutes.

He got the chats—the invariably courteous Hayden, for example, “never refused to see anyone,” and of course he would never be too busy to see a friend of Mr. Sam’s—but the chats (and pro forma promises to “do everything I can to help”) were all he got. The levers Johnson had tried to use were levers outside the Senate, and the Senate reacted to their use as the Senate always reacted to outside pressures. Barkley brushed him off with a letter so cold that Rayburn, to whom Johnson showed it, tried to console him by saying that “of course” it must have been “written and signed by one of his secretaries.” Walter George was courtesy itself at first as he let Johnson know that it was “inappropriate” for a new senator to try to bypass the seniority system, but when Johnson persisted in his arguments, he all but showed him out of his office. He tried writing Barkley again; this time the former Majority Leader did in fact let his secretary reply to “your letter with further reference to your desire to be assigned to Appropriations,” in a missive even colder than the first. After all the letters he had written and the phone calls he had made to try to force his way onto Foreign Relations or Finance or Appropriations, he was no closer to a place on these committees than if he had written no letters or made no phone calls at all. As for office space, Hayden told Johnson that while he had more seniority than four of the House members who had “come over” with him, and, of course, more than the eight newly elected senators who had no House service, he had less seniority than the eighty-three other senators, and he wouldn’t be assigned an office suite until all eighty-three had chosen theirs. It appeared to him, Hayden said, that the most desirable three-room suite available for Senator Johnson might be Number 231, which would be appropriate since it was the suite that had been occupied by his two predecessors from Texas, Senators Morris Sheppard and Pappy O’Daniel. Perturbed not only by 231’s size but by its location—next to a snack bar and, in the northwest corner of the building, inconveniently distant from the “subway” to the Capitol—and possibly misled by the softness of Hayden’s tone, Johnson may have pressed him too hard to alter this line of reasoning; Hayden finally ended the discussion with a remark which, for Hayden, was unusually sharp: “The trouble with you, Senator, is that you don’t have the seniority of a jackrabbit.” And not long thereafter another letter from Hayden arrived: “I am pleased to inform you that the three-room suite 231, Senate Office Building, now occupied by Senator O’Daniel, has been assigned to you for your office.” And when Johnson said he assumed that, in that case, he would also be assigned the extra little room in the basement—102-B—that O’Daniel had had the use of, Hayden replied that unfortunately Senator Forrest Donnell of Missouri had requested that extra room. Senator Donnell had more seniority than Senator Johnson. That room would be assigned to Senator Donnell. Lyndon Johnson’s trip got him nothing that he had gone to Washington to obtain.

UNPRODUCTIVE THOUGH THAT TRIP to Washington may have been, however, Lyndon Johnson did not return from it unhappy. For the Senate Office Building had not been the only place he had visited on that trip. He had also gone over to the Capitol—and had looked, for the first time as a senator, at the Senate Chamber.

Walter Jenkins, who was with him at the time—they had entered the Chamber by the side door near the Senate Reception Room, he would recall years later—would never forget that moment. With the Senate not in session, only a single row of lights was turned on in the ceiling high above, and the Chamber was shadowy and dim, but those lights reflected off the polished tops of the ninety-six senators’ desks as the long arcs stretched away in the gloom.

Lyndon Johnson stood just inside the doorway, silently staring out over the Chamber, for what Jenkins would remember as “quite a long time.” And then he muttered something, speaking in such a low voice that Jenkins felt he was “speaking to himself.” And if Jenkins would not recall Lyndon Johnson’s exact words, he did recall the gist of what he said—that the Senate was “the right size.”

Jenkins felt he understood what Johnson meant by that, as did Horace Busby, to whom Jenkins repeated the words not long thereafter.

While Lyndon Johnson was not, as his two assistants knew, a reader of books, he was, they knew, a reader of men—a great reader of men. He had a genius for studying a man and learning his strengths and weaknesses and hopes and fears, his deepest strengths and weaknesses: what it was that the man wanted—not what he said he wanted but what he really wanted—and what it was that the man feared, really feared.

He tried to teach his young assistants to read men—“Watch their hands, watch their eyes,” he told them. “Read eyes. No matter what a man is saying to you, it’s not as important as what you can read in his eyes”—and to read between the lines: more interested in men’s weaknesses than in their strengths because it was weakness that could be exploited, he tried to teach his assistants how to learn a man’s weakness. “The most important thing a man has to tell you is what he’s not telling you,” he said. “The most important thing he has to say is what he’s trying not to say.” For that reason, he told them, it was important to keep the man talking; the longer he talked, the more likely he was to let slip a hint of that vulnerability he was so anxious to conceal. “That’s why he wouldn’t let a conversation end,” Busby explains. “If he saw the other fellow was trying not to say something, he wouldn’t let it [the conversation] end until he got it out of him.” And Lyndon Johnson himself read with a genius that couldn’t be taught, with a gift that was so instinctive that a close observer of his reading habits, Robert G. (Bobby) Baker, calls it a “sense”; “He seemed to sense each man’s individual price and the commodity he preferred as coin.” He read with a novelist’s sensitivity, with an insight that was unerring, with an ability, shocking in the depth of its penetration and perception, to look into a man’s heart and know his innermost worries and desires.

Such reading is a pursuit best carried out in private—Lyndon Johnson alone with a man, getting to know him one on one. And Johnson’s gift was not only for reading men but also for using what he read—for using what a man wanted, to get from him whathewanted, to sell the man on his point of view, or on himself. And this, too, as Jenkins and Busby knew—as indeed everyone who had spent much time with Lyndon Johnson knew—was a talent that operated best in private. “Lyndon was the greatest salesman one on one who ever lived,” George R. Brown said of him, and in that sentence “one on one” was the operative phrase. The essence of his persuasiveness was his ability, once he had found out a man’s hopes and fears, his political philosophy and his personal prejudices, to persuade the man that he shared that philosophy and those prejudices—no matter what they happened to be. In words that are echoed by Busby and Jenkins, and by many others who had an opportunity to observe Lyndon Johnson at length, Brown was to say that “Johnson had the knack of always appealing to someone about someone [that person] didn’t like. If he was talking to Joe, and Joe didn’t like Jim, he’d say he didn’t like Jim, too—that was his leadership, that was his knack.” But such a technique worked, of course, only if Jim wasn’t around—and only if there was also no one around who might one day happen to mention to Jim what Johnson had said about him. It worked best if no one was around, if the conversation was strictly “one on one.” Moreover, since Johnson used the technique not only about personalities but also about philosophies—liberals thought he was a liberal, conservatives that he was a conservative—it worked best if there was no one present from the other side. He “operated best in small groups, the smaller the better,” Jenkins said.

For eleven years, however, Lyndon Johnson had been trapped in a body so large that he couldn’t work in small groups, much less one on one. Everything in the House of Representatives was done en masse, from the swearing-in by the Speaker at the opening of each Congress—where all 435 members, crowded together on the long benches in the House Chamber, stood up together, raised their hands and repeated the words of the oath in unison, as if they were a group of draftees being inducted into the Army—to committee meetings: each House committee was a substantial body in itself; on the House Armed Services Committee Johnson had been one of thirty-six members, so many that at meetings they had to sit on a long dais in two tiers. With its hundreds of members, its crowded, noisy corridors and cloakrooms, with its strict formal rules and leadership structure made necessary by its size, the House was an environment in which, as one observer put it, members “could be dealt with only in bodies and droves.”

The Senate was very different. With fewer than a hundred members, it was less than a quarter of the size of the House, a much more personal, more intimate, body, one in which, as a commentator puts it, “most interactions were face to face.” The great reader of men would have to read only a relatively small number of texts. Furthermore, because of the longer senatorial terms, those texts would not be constantly changing as they were in the House. They could be perused at length, pored over; studied and restudied. What text could, under such favorable circumstances, remain impenetrable to Lyndon Johnson’s eyes? He would have ample opportunity not only to read his men, but to make use of what he read—in ideal conditions. In subdivisions of the Senate, the contrast with the House became even more dramatic. Most Senate committees had only thirteen members, so that a committee meeting was a small group of men sitting relaxed around a table. Each Senate committee had subcommittees to handle specific areas of the committee’s business, and most Senate subcommittees had only five, or perhaps seven, members; not a few had only three. A member of a three-man subcommittee needed to sell only one other senator to carry his point. And Lyndon Johnson was “the greatest salesman one on one who ever lived.”

And, Jenkins would say, Johnson appears to have felt all this—to have felt the implications of the Senate’s smallness for his particular talents—in that moment in the doorway of the Senate Chamber, in that moment when he stood staring out at those ninety-six individual desks. “From the first day on,” Jenkins says, and Jenkins explains that he means from that day when Johnson stood in the doorway, “from the first day on, he knew he could be effective there, make his influence felt. It was the right size—just the right size. It was his place. He was at his best with small groups, and he was one of only ninety-six senators. With only ninety-five others—he knew he could manage that.”

THE DIFFERENCE—and the implications—must have been dramatized to Johnson even more vividly by the swearing-in ritual for the thirty-two newly elected or re-elected senators at the opening ceremonies of the Eighty-first Congress. He was in the fifth group of four senators to be sworn in, and it was a distinguished group. Behind Johnson as he walked down the aisle, escorted by old Tom Connally, Chairman of the mighty Foreign Relations Committee, was the young Tennessean, Estes Kefauver, his arm held by the old Tennessean McKellar, Chairman of Appropriations, and then Robert S. Kerr of Oklahoma, escorted by old Elmer Thomas of Oklahoma, Chairman of Agriculture, and South Carolinian Olin Johnston, escorted by the Charleston aristocrat Burnet Rhett Maybank, Chairman of Banking and Currency. They walked down the aisle slowly—McKellar hobbling on his cane, Thomas, his eyesight almost gone, shuffling, feeling for each of the four steps with his feet—but with dignity, and the face of Vandenberg above them as they approached was the face of “the Lion of the Senate” familiar from a score of magazine covers. All four of the just-elected senators were over six feet tall; they stood very straight as, their right hands raised, they took the oath with the older men beside them. And after they had answered, “I do,” a clerk pushed the Senate Register (“a well-bound book kept for that purpose”) toward them, and Lyndon Johnson signed, at nine minutes past noon, and went not to a crowded bench but to a desk, his own desk.

LATER, he took the little subway beneath the Senate to the office he hadn’t wanted. And though Suite SOB 231 may have had only three rooms instead of four, they were senatorial rooms—high-ceilinged, spacious. On one wall of his private office, adjacent to his private bathroom, was a delicate marble fireplace, the hearth flanked by two slender marble columns. Above the fireplace was a tall gilt-framed mirror. And behind his desk was a high, wide, arched window, recessed and framed in mahogany. It looked out over the green parks of the Capitol Plaza, and beyond the plaza was the long Mall, and the great pillar of the Washington Monument. Margaret Mayer of the Austin American-Statesman, who had known him for many years in Texas and who had covered the 1948 campaign, went to interview him there. Referring to the hard campaign—and perhaps, since Ms. Mayer was a perceptive reporter, to his hard life—she asked him if it had all been worth it to be seated at last in that office. Lyndon Johnson winked at her, and nodded—and grinned.

HIS PATH IN THE SENATE was also made smoother by other gifts that he possessed—talents that he had been demonstrating all his life, and that he now demonstrated again, vividly, during his first year in the Senate.

One was an ability to transform his outward personality, his demeanor and mannerisms—not to change his nature, but to conceal it—an ability that had always been one of Lyndon Johnson’s most striking characteristics, as had a strength of will that enabled him to make a transformation remarkably thorough.

The most recent of these changes had occurred during the very election that had won him this Senate seat. The campaign’s first months, when he had been confident of success, had been filled with the familiar explosions at his subordinates: vicious tirades, laced with obscenities and with insults designed to find his target’s most vulnerable point, that made both women and men weep. He had refused to control himself—had seemingly found it impossible, so sudden and violent were the rages, to control himself—even in public, even in places where the tirades would be witnessed by the voters he was trying to court. Arriving at one Rotary Club meeting where he had expected to give only brief remarks, he was told that a longer talk would be desirable; wheeling on his hapless advance man, he screamed, as the club members gaped, “I thought it was just gonna be coffee, doughnuts and bullshit!” Armored against critical newspaper articles by his friendships, crucially important in Texas journalism, with publishers, he refused to control himself even in front of reporters, not only shocking them with his treatment of secretaries (unable to bear watching him shout “unbelievable” obscenities at the sweet-faced, soft-voiced Mary Rather, who was standing head bowed and crying in front of him, Felix Mc-Knight of the Dallas News suddenly found himself jumping in front of her, yelling “You can’t talk to her like that! Apologize to her!”), but giving them a taste of the treatment themselves (“C’mon,” he shouted to stubby Dave Cheavens of the Associated Press, who was sensitive about his weight, “Won’t those fat little legs of yours carry you any faster than that?”).

His treatment of people not connected with the campaign who were similarly unable to defend themselves—waiters and bellhops, desk clerks and cooks—was the same. Storming into a hotel kitchen, a towering figure holding a large steak in one hand and waving it in a cook’s face, he raged: “Who ever told you you were a cook? Didn’t you ever hear of cutting the fat off? I’ve never seen so much fat on a steak in my life.” And he seemed to feel he didn’t have to control himself; “Lyndon just seemed to think he was entitled to talk to people that way,” one reporter says.

But in the latter stages of the campaign—when he had suddenly realized, with only a month to go, that he was almost hopelessly behind and could not afford to antagonize voters—the tantrums ended, instantly and completely. Busby, who had been assigned to accompany him on the next trip, was dreading the experience (“I had learned one thing—when he got angry, hide!”). Now he watched in astonishment as Johnson greeted the first desk clerk he encountered with a gracious smile, and gracious words, saying, “You have a very fine hotel here. I stayed in it before and I’m looking forward to this visit.” He told the bellhop who carried his baggage to his room, “I’d like to shake hands with you if your hands weren’t so busy.” After the bellhop had put down the bags and had had the handshake, Busby started to give him a tip. “Son, he’s a cheap tipper; I don’t want him tipping you,” Johnson told the bellhop, giving him a five-dollar bill. And the next morning, Busby awoke to find Lyndon Johnson sitting beside his bed. He wasn’t there to give Buzz orders. He was holding something in his hands. “Here, Buzz,” he said, “I went down and got a coffee and doughnut for you.” And he didn’t simply hand the two items to Busby. He would hand the sleepy-eyed young man the coffee, wait until he had taken a sip, and take the coffee back—and only then would hand him the doughnut. After Buzz had taken a bite, Johnson would take the doughnut back, and then hand him the coffee again—sitting beside the bed holding one of the two items himself, so that his assistant wouldn’t have to hold two things at once. During that entire month, that “all or nothing” month, no matter how high the tension rose, Lyndon Johnson was, in Busby’s phrase, “a changed man.” He never lost control of himself—not once.

Now, after the campaign, safely in the Senate, he changed back—but only in some areas of his life.

He was the old Lyndon Johnson driving to work in the morning from his home, a two-story, white-painted brick colonial at 4921 Thirtieth Place in a quiet residential area in northwest Washington—driving down Connecticut Avenue with one hand on the wheel, the other frenziedly twisting the dial on the car’s radio back and forth from one station to another searching for news broadcasts, shouting obscenities at broadcasters who said something with which he didn’t agree. He was constantly sounding his horn to get other drivers out of his way—if they didn’t move aside quickly enough, he would lean out the window and curse them; passing them on their right, he would bang his big left hand down on the outside of his car door to startle them.

His arrival on Capitol Hill was still as ostentatiously attention-getting as possible. His long affair with Alice Glass, the tall, spectacularly beautiful small-town girl from Marlin who had become the elegant hostess of a manor house in the Virginia hunt country, had faded out during the war. That affair, the most serious of Lyndon Johnson’s life, had been kept very secret, in part because Alice was the mistress—she would later be the wife—of a man very important to Johnson, Charles Marsh, publisher of the Austin American-Statesman; in part perhaps because of Johnson’s feelings for her, which men and women privy to the affair believed were so intense that they felt Johnson might divorce Lady Bird and marry her. During his last years in the House, after that relationship ended, Johnson began arriving on Capitol Hill in the morning in the company of another tall, beautiful woman—one who was famous as well. And now that he was in the Senate, he sometimes still got out of his car with her, and they walked to his office openly holding hands.

When Helen Gahagan Douglas was named one of “the twelve most beautiful women in America,” the critic Heywood Broun begged to disagree. “Helen Gahagan Douglas is ten of the twelve most beautiful women in America,” he wrote. At the age of twenty-two, the tall, blond Barnard College student with a long, athletic stride became an overnight sensation in the Broadway hit Dreams for Sale, and she was to star in a succession of hit shows, marrying one of her leading men, Melvyn Douglas. Deciding to study voice, she made her debut in the title role of To sea in Prague, and toured Europe in operas and concerts for two years, before returning to more Broadway starring roles and radio appearances. On screen, she played the cruel, sensual Empress of Kor in the film version of H. Rider Haggard’s novel She. By 1936, the New York Herald Tribune noted that “Helen Gahagan Douglas has made her name in four branches of the arts—theatre, opera, motion pictures, and radio.”

Driving across country with Douglas after their marriage, Helen had been touched by the plight of Okies trekking west, and plunged into a new field—politics—with her usual success. She became Democratic national committee-woman from California, and in 1944, at the age of forty-three, ran for Congress from a Los Angeles district, and won, becoming one of nine women members of the House of Representatives. Washington, one journalist wrote, “had prepared for her tall, stately and gracious beauty, but they weren’t prepared for her brilliance, in short, her brains.” A friend of Eleanor Roosevelt’s (whose husband, Helen said, was “the greatest man in the world”), she was a frequent guest at the White House, while Melvyn remained back in Hollywood making movies. On the House floor she was a striking figure, generally “surrounded,” as one account noted, “by attentive male colleagues,” and she was a riveting, charismatic speaker in her advocacy of liberal causes, particularly civil rights. Declaring that “she stood by the Negro people when they needed a sentinel on the wall,” Mary McLeod Bethune called her “the voice of American democracy.” She won re-election in 1946, and again in 1948, and was one of the most sought-after speakers for liberal rallies across the country. And in an era inwhich age supposedly dimmed a woman’s charms, hers seemed as bright as ever. A profile in the New York Post in 1949 commented that during her years in Congress “her waistline has grown even slimmer, her face leaner.” In her speech at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia the previous year, the Post said, “she boosted her stock still higher by turning out to be gorgeous on television.” The New York Daily News called her the “Number One glamour girl of the Democratic Party.” It was widely expected that she would run for the Senate from California in 1950, and would win.

SHE HAD FIRST MET LYNDON JOHNSON in 1945 when, shortly after she arrived in Congress, he dropped around to her office, “draped his long frame in one of my easy chairs,” and asked how things were going. When she said that she was having trouble organizing her office, he said, “Well, come up and see how my office is run.” She found his office “very impressive. It worked. If he wanted something, it came within a half second.” There were “other industrious offices,” she was to recall, “but the efficiency of this office and the extent that they went to reach … the lives of his constituents in an intimate way was something that utterly fascinated me.” She was impressed as well by qualities which she discerned, with a very penetrating eye, in his character: by his instinct for power (“He never got very far away from Rayburn”); by his ambition (he was “in a hurry—in a great, great hurry” and “He was willing to make the compromises necessary, I believe, to stay in Congress”); and by the method by which he concealed views that might stand in the way of the realization of that ambition—a method that, she felt, required great strength. Lyndon Johnson talked so much, she saw, but he never said anything that could be “quoted back against him later.” “Was it just caution?” she was to say. “Just that he didn’t want to have a lot of his words come back at him? … He was witty, he would tell stories, he was humorous. But he was always aware that what he said might be repeated or remembered—even years later. And he didn’t want someone to come back years later, and say, ‘I remember when you said …’” She began to realize, she says, that Lyndon Johnson was very “strong.” In Washington, she was to say, “everyone tried to find out where you stood. But he had great inner control. He could talk so much—and no one ever knew exactly where he stood.” This tall, lanky, charming man was actually “one of the most close-mouthed men I ever knew.” When, years later, “John Kennedy was killed,” and she realized that Lyndon Johnson would be President, “I remember thinking that one thing was sure, we had heard the last frank response to a question from the press.” And, she felt, she knew where Johnson really stood: she was sure he was a New Dealer like her. “He cared about people; was never callous, never indifferent to suffering…. There was a warmth about the man.” That was why, she says, that “despite some of his votes, the liberals whom he always scoffed at … nevertheless forgave him when they wouldn’t forgive someone else.” While his attempt to portray himself as an insider offended some of his House colleagues, it didn’t offend her. “He knew what was going to happen…. The friendship of Sam Rayburn … had much to do with it, but there was also Lyndon’s own presence, which exuded the unmistakable air of the keeper of the keys.” They shared the same feelings for Roosevelt, she was to say, and “on the day of his funeral” in April, 1945, “we were both very depressed.” Lyndon invited her to come to his fifth-floor hideaway, and “we sat very quietly during the time of the funeral, reminiscing about our President. In this way we became friends. Mutual admiration of Franklin Roosevelt.”

Soon Johnson was coming to the House floor more often than formerly, to sit beside her when she was there—although he didn’t stay long. On the floor, “he looked the picture of boredom, slumped in his chair with his eyes half-closed,” she recalls. “Then, suddenly, he’d jump up to his feet nervous … restless, as if he couldn’t bear it another minute.” And he would leave, “loping off the floor with that great stride of his as though he was on some Texas plain.”

On one occasion on the floor, however, he came to her rescue—or to be more precise brought Rayburn to her rescue.

John Rankin of Mississippi was speaking when he suddenly pointed to a group of liberal representatives who were sitting together and referred to them as “these communists.” The other liberals sat silent, afraid to challenge the Mississippi demagogue—all except Helen Douglas. Standing to make a point of order, she said, “I demand to know if the gentleman from Mississippi is addressing me!”

“Rankin looked at me—oh, what a look—and went right on talking,” she was to recall. Most congressmen had learned not to confront him, and Helen Douglas had herself once been warned by Majority Leader John McCormack, “Remember, Rankin is a killer.” But she didn’t sit down. Instead, in her ringing, melodic voice, she said again, “I demand to know if the gentleman from Mississippi is addressing me!” and went on standing—a tall blond figure on the House floor.

Since the Speaker had to be in the chair for a point of order, Rayburn entered the Chamber and took the podium, saying, “The gentleman from Mississippi will have to answer the congresswoman,” but Rankin, acting as if he had not heard Rayburn, went on talking; as Ms. Douglas recalls, he “was such a fearsome man, he appeared to believe himself untouchable.” Rayburn, not quite sure what the fuss was about, was letting him do so, when Johnson hurriedly approached the podium, Ms. Douglas says. He “had been in the House coffee shop when someone ran in and told him, ‘Helen is taking on Rankin!’ I was told later that he had bounded up the stairs to the Chamber three at a time.” As always he knew the right words to persuade someone to do something. “Who runs this House, you or Rankin?” he whispered up to the Speaker. “Sam scowled and banged his gavel again,” Helen Douglas recalls. “This time his voice was fierce with warning as he again ordered Rankin to answer me.” Rankin “measured Rayburn,” she was to recall. The Speaker did not say another word, but simply stared at Rankin, his face set in the stern mask that men feared. “With obvious pain,” as Helen Douglas recalls, Rankin said, “I am not addressing the gentlewoman from California.”

MORE AND MORE FREQUENTLY, Lyndon and Helen began arriving on Capitol Hill in the mornings in the same car—sometimes hers, more often his. They would park on New Jersey Avenue, about a block and a half from the House Office Building, and walk to it together, holding hands: a conspicuous couple, both tall, both with dramatic features, walking with long strides as they came up Capitol Hill. Often, at the end of the day, they would drive, together or in separate cars, to Helen’s home on Thirty-first Street, where they would have dinner together. They went to parties together. (During the first six months Helen was in Washington, Melvyn was in India, and when he returned, his relationship with Helen proved difficult; “over the next several years,” her biographer Ingrid Winther Scobie was to write, “[their] relationship continued to deteriorate.” He returned to California. In May, 1946, their two children went to California for the Summer, and in September were enrolled in a boarding school near Los Angeles.)

Whatever the considerations that had deterred Lyndon Johnson from advertising his relationship with Alice Glass, they evidently didn’t apply to Helen Douglas. He made sure that people believed he was having a physical relationship with her. Not only would they be holding hands when they arrived together in the morning, they sometimes strolled through the Capitol together, with tourists coming up to the former actress to tell her they had enjoyed one of her performances, and they held hands during those strolls. “They were a handsome couple,” one of Helen’s friends, United Nations bureaucrat Charles Hogan, was to recall. “A strikingly handsome couple together. She’s so much better looking than poor Lady Bird.”

In particular, it seems, he wanted Alice Glass to believe it. When he parked on New Jersey Avenue, he usually parked in front of Number 317, a small building in which Alice’s sister, Mary Louise, who was then working on the staff of a Pennsylvania congressman, had an apartment. “Helen Douglas’ affair with Lyndon started just after she got to Washington,” Mary Louise says. “I know because I used to see them going to work in the mornings holding hands.” And, Mary Louise says, she knew because Johnson wanted her to know. “They would park on the street in front of my house,” even if there were spaces available on New Jersey Avenue closer to the House Office Building, she says, and she felt he parked there so that she would see the hand-holding, and tell Alice about it. If she happened to be coming out of her building while they were parking, Johnson and Helen would walk to work with her; “we’d all go in together.” In fact, she says, Lyndon himself told her sister about his new affair. Before the war, Alice and Charles Marsh had attended the annual Music Festival in Salzburg, Austria, and Helen Gahagan Douglas had sung several concerts there. “Well, I’ve got another girl who spent the summer at Salzburg,” Lyndon told Alice, in a remark that hurt her, and angered Mary Louise. “Just bragging—kissing and telling,” she says.

Some of Johnson’s staff believed the affair was still going on after Johnson was in the Senate. When Horace Busby arrived in 1948, he was told about it by other staff members, and then he saw the hand-holding for himself. “It started not long after she came to the House in 1944, and continued on and off for years,” Busby was to say. Johnson and Douglas would come back to Suite 231 in the Senate Office Building together, enter Johnson’s private office through the door from the corridor, and stay inside “for quite a long time.” Others believed it, too. “Lyndon would park his car in front of the [Douglas] house night after night after night,” says Creekmore Fath, an attorney from Austin who was a Department of Interior official living in Washington at the time. “It was an open scandal in Washington.” More than one friend of the two principals urged Helen to break it off, telling her, “You’ve got to stop Lyndon from doing this.”

This intense phase of the relationship would end in August, 1949, when Helen Douglas returned to California to run for the Senate the following year, in the infamous campaign in which she was defeated by Richard Nixon after his staff published a pamphlet, printed on pink paper, to “prove” she was “soft on Communism,” and launched a whispering campaign harping on the fact that her husband was Jewish. (Lyndon Johnson helped her with advice—it was at his suggestion that she campaigned by helicopter as he had done in Texas in 1948—and with campaign contributions from his Texas financial backers.) She never ran for public office again. According to her biographer, Scobie, she decided her family had “suffered enough” from the demands of her career and tried to repair the damage, but with only limited success. Her attempts to resurrect her stage and singing career met with the same result. She did not again live in Washington. Yet while Johnson was Vice President, he telephoned Busby one weekend—a weekend when Lady Bird was in New York—and told him to come to his house. When he arrived, he found Johnson and Helen Douglas lounging by the swimming pool in the back yard. They held hands throughout the conversation and Busby was struck by the “real and deep feelings” between them.

ENTERING THE SENATE OFFICE BUILDING each morning—through the main entrance if he had dropped off Congresswoman Douglas first; otherwise, having parked in that space reserved for him on Delaware Avenue, through the Delaware entrance—he was the same Lyndon Johnson. The Delaware entrance was a back door, but the door was bronze, tall and heavy, and the walls inside were marble—highly polished marble adorned with fluted pilasters and ornate bronze sconces. Then there were columns, and, beyond them, across a circular vestibule, a bank of three elevators—set within tall arches, whose heavily ornamented bronze doors shone like gold. He would press the buttons on all three elevators—and, in a fever of impatience, press them again. And if an elevator did not then instantly arrive, he would whirl, his jacket flaring out around him, and run up a long, curving flight of stairs—a hulking, hurrying, forward-leaning figure in a flapping suit and wide, garish, hand-painted necktie, taking stairs two at a time in that setting of marble and bronze. As a young congressional assistant almost twenty years before, coming up Capitol Hill in the morning from the modest hotel where he lived in a basement room, he had had to pass the Senate Building and the Capitol to reach his office in the House Office Building, and he had run past them in his haste to get to work. He had a shorter way to go to reach his office now, as he had a shorter way to go to reach his great goal, but he was still running. At the top of the stairs his loping steps would carry him between a pair of tall columns, into that long, high-ceilinged corridor with its marble floor reflecting the ceiling lights, and its row of tall mahogany doors—to the second one on the right, the door to the reception room of his office.

When he pushed open that door, he was, in dealing with his staff, the same Lyndon Johnson. With the exception of Connally, the staff was composed of the kind of men and women Lyndon Johnson wanted—men and women who had demonstrated an unusual willingness to absorb personal abuse: Woody; Mary Rather, who stood head bowed while obscenities swept over her; Glynn Stegall, whose hands would shake as Lyndon Johnson humiliated him in front of his wife; Walter Jenkins, whom Johnson worked “like a nigger slave”—two roomfuls of men and women willing to let him use the blacksnake.

And he used it. When he arrived at 231 each morning, after screeching into that parking space in front of the SOB as the young policeman hurriedly pushed the “Reserved” stanchions out of his way, “the door would,” in the words of one man, “blow open and Johnson—Jesus God, he filled up the whole room the minute he came in, and if he was really in a bad mood, he would be so excruciatingly rude I would gasp.”

“First thing every morning, he would make the rounds, stopping at every desk, and beating up on them,” Horace Busby recalls. Then, with a parting bellow—“C’mon, let’s function! let’s function!!”—he would vanish through the door to his private office, leaving behind two rooms in which, frequently, at least one woman would have been reduced to tears, and men would be sitting stunned by their boss’s fury. And even then he might reappear. “If a phone rang a second time, you could be sure that that door would open, and …”

And there was in all his abuse and inspections and orders an element of crudity—of that “barnyard” talk that made men “a bit embarrassed” when it poured out in front of female members of the staff. While Johnson was making his round of the desks one morning, John Connally was talking on the phone to Jake Pickle, who worked for Johnson in Texas, and told Johnson, calling across the room, that one of Pickle’s assignments had not yet been completed. “Tell Jake to get his finger out of his ass,” Johnson yelled back. On another occasion, Jenkins told him about a lack of cooperation from some agency bureaucrat. “What does he want?—me to kiss his ass?” Johnson shouted. “Tell him I’ll kiss him on both cheeks. I’ll kiss him in the middle, too, if he wants it.” His office conversation was permeated by sexual imagery. “Take that tie off,” he would tell one of his male staffers. “That knot looks like a limp prick.” Standing in the middle of the outer-office desks, he retied the tie in the Windsor knot, wider and more shaped than the traditional four-in-hand, which was becoming fashionable in 1949, and then stepped back to admire his handiwork. “Look at that!” he said. “He’s got a man’s knot now, not a limp one.” And assignments to his staff were sometimes made in the same tone. When, during his presidency, a woman reporter wrote critical articles about him, he would tell White House counsel Harry McPherson, “What that woman needs is you. Take her out. Give her a good dinner and a good fuck.” And, McPherson would learn, the President wasn’t kidding. Joseph A. Califano Jr., to whom McPherson related the incident, writes that “Periodically the President would ask McPherson if he’d taken care of the reporter. Every time she took even the slightest shot at the President, he’d call Harry and tell him to go to work on her.” Lyndon Johnson was never kidding when he gave such instructions. He had been doing it at college, even if his language had been more circumspect, in keeping with that earlier time; says Wilton Woods, one of the “White Stars,” the San Marcos social group that Johnson turned into a political organization: “Lyndon’s idea was to get a real nice-looking girl and see if you could control her. Date her and see how she comes out….” Sometimes, during his presidency, the instructions were more specific, as befitted the sexually more explicit Sixties. Califano writes that “LBJ made a similar suggestion [similar to the one he made to McPherson] when I advised him of the problems James Gaither, an aide on my staff, was having with Edith Green, the irascible Democratic congresswoman from Oregon…. Johnson became irritated with our inability to deal with her. In exasperation one evening he said to me, ’Goddamn it! You’ve been trying to drag me into this thing when I’ve got a hundred other problems. Well, I’m going to tell you how to get our bill. There’s no point in my calling that woman. Gaither is a good-looking boy. You tell him to call up Edith and ask her to brunch this Sunday. Then he can take her out, give her a couple of Bloody Marys, and go back to her apartment with her. Then you know what he does? Tell him to spend the afternoon in bed with her and she’ll support any Goddamn bill he wants.” During Johnson’s Senate years—the still relatively discreet Fifties—his instructions in this area were generally couched more circumspectly: suggesting that a “handsome young staff member” date a woman whose support he needed, he simply said, “Let nature take its course”—but they were nevertheless clear.

But if that was still Lyndon Johnson’s manner inside his office, it was no longer his manner outside. As Paul F. Healy wrote in the Saturday Evening Post, “when he barks commands, his underlings jump like marionettes,” but “away from the [office], his tone is casual and conciliatory.” Behind the closed doors of 231, he may have been the old Lyndon Johnson, but as soon as he stepped out of his office, he was a new Lyndon Johnson—a senatorial Lyndon Johnson.

“The other senators weren’t coming to him,” Warren Woodward recalls. “He had to go to them.” And as he went, usually leaving 231 by the door to his private office, and heading down the dim corridors, his very stride changed, into a slower, calmer, more dignified pace. And when he reached the office to which he was heading, his demeanor in January could hardly have been more different from his demeanor the month before. The aggressiveness was replaced by the most elaborate courtesy. Not only did he no longer barge into senators’ private offices, he took steps to emphasize that he wouldn’t even think of barging in. Even if he had already telephoned for an appointment, he would, entering the senator’s outer office, ask the receptionist if the senator was free, and even if he was told that the senator was free—even if he was told that the senator was expecting him, and he could go right in—he wouldn’t go in until the assistant had sent in a note saying that Senator Johnson was in the outer office and would like to see him. And in the case of the most formal senator of all, he went even further. Recalls Harry Byrd’s administrative assistant, John (Jake) Carlton: “He [Johnson] would come in and sit on my desk, and he would say, ‘Hi, Jake,’ and chat with me. After a while, he would say, ‘Oh, by the way, Jake, is the Senator in?’ ‘Yes, would you like to see him?’ Johnson would say, ‘I’d like to if you don’t mind,’ but he wouldn’t walk right in even if I motioned to him that he could. He would wait until I got up and opened the door—so the Senator [Byrd] would know that he was going in only after I had opened the door.”

When he was in a senator’s private office, furthermore, Johnson no longer launched straight into the business about which he had come. “He wouldn’t say, ‘Senator, I’ve got to talk to you about…’” He would ask about the senator’s health, about his wife’s health, would solicit his advice, his opinions, inquire about the manner in which some national issue was playing with voters in his home state, get him talking about things he wanted to talk about. And, while the senator talked, Lyndon Johnson listened—listened with an obsequiousness, a deference “that you wouldn’t believe.”

The deference was unvarying not merely in private but in public—on the little stage that was the Democratic cloakroom.

The senator who was a fixture there seemed as much out of another, earlier, age as the room itself. Directly opposite the pair of swinging doors opening into the Senate Chamber were two deep leather armchairs. In the afternoons, the distinguished Walter George was given to sitting in one of them, telling stories of old Senate battles. Often now, as the revered George of Georgia held forth, squinting a bit through his thick-lensed glasses, patting his white hair into place, Lyndon Johnson would be sitting in the chair next to him. He would not be sitting on the floor—he was a senator now, not a student—but in the adjacent armchair, yet his posture and demeanor would have been familiar to his San Marcos classmates. His long legs would not be stretched out but tucked back against the chair, and he would be sitting erect and attentive, his chin resting on one hand, his face, tilted back so he could look full into George’s face as the older man sat beside him, wearing an expression of the deepest interest, his eyes almost shining in admiration as he listened to one anecdote, and then asked George to tell him another. Day after day Walter George held court—with, day after day, the same admiring courtier in attendance. Recalling Lyndon Johnson in his early months in the Senate, Warren Woodward says, “He took his time to maybe ingratiate himself with his fellow senators. Once he got settled down, he saw that [was necessary]. He saw he needed to take his time.” Lyndon Johnson had been running all his life. It was very hard for him to stop running. But he stopped.

THE DEFERENCE was particularly appealing to the senators because it was cloaked in the broad senatorial badinage with which they were comfortable. Johnson had picked this up very quickly, too. He was, in fact, proficient in this aspect of senatorial style by the swearing-in ceremony, when, immediately after the new senators were sworn, the Senate voted for its president pro tempore, and Vandenberg, being a Republican and therefore now in the minority, was voted out in favor of Kenneth McKellar. Johnson had of course voted with the Democrats, and after the ceremony he went up to Vandenberg. I want to apologize, he said jokingly, referring to the fact that Vandenberg had sworn him in, for voting against “the man who made me a senator.” He gave the old statesman a warm smile. Vandenberg, usually so reserved with junior senators, instantly responded, “Well, you shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds you,” and then he gave Johnson a warm smile back.

When, on February 2, the twelve new Democratic senators met in the office of Secretary of the Senate Leslie L. Biffle to draw lots for their permanent desk assignments—the last of their seniors having finally made his selection—Johnson began bemoaning the fact that he never had any luck at drawings. Clinton Anderson said he’d bet him a nickel over who would get the better seat, “Well, Ah don’t know, Clint, Ah just don’t know,” he responded. Finally, he agreed to bet a nickel. Anderson drew Desk Number 95, a rear seat, and Johnson and Bob Kerr fell into a joking debate over who would draw last, since Kerr felt the last draw was best. “You were in Congress before me,” Kerr said in a jokingly bullying manner. “Go ahead and draw.” “But you were Governor of a state,” Johnson replied. “That’s higher than a Congressman. You draw first.” Finally they decided they would both draw at the same time. They stuck their hands into Biffle’s fedora together, and despite their bad luck—the desks they selected were two of the worst in the Chamber, Kerr’s Number 19 being the very last one on the far end of the lowest arc on the Democratic side, Johnson’s Number 18, the desk next to it—when they saw that they had drawn adjoining desks, they grinned at each other, Kerr with a friendliness in his eyes quite unusual for him. (Poor though Desk 18’s location may have been, its provenance could hardly have been better. When Johnson opened its drawer, among the names of its former occupants carved inside was Harry S Truman.)

Encountering a senator in an SOB corridor, Johnson wouldn’t approach him in a businesslike way but in a comradely, good-humored fashion. “Say, Ah saw one of your constituents the other day,” he might say. “Ah bragged on you. Ah surely did. Ah tell you—by the time Ah got through, he didn’t even recognize you.” Or, Warren Woodward says, “He’d tell a story, and get the other senator laughing. It’s human nature to like that. He ingratiated himself in a way by being fun to be with. He was a great mimic, a great storyteller, and he always had a story ready. But it was always a light-hearted approach. He wouldn’t approach them in a serious way. He stopped saying ‘Senator, I need to talk to you about …’”

And at the first Democratic caucus, there was no grabbing of lapels, no leaning into the faces of his colleagues, not a trace of the former pomposity or aggressiveness. What there was was the friendliness and politeness of “the junior to the senior,” and when he introduced himself, he did so with a deprecatory nickname that referred to his narrow, last-gasp victory in the recent election. Coupled with a grin, it was very charming. “Howdy,” he said to old senators and new, southern senators and northern. “Howdy, I’m Landslide Lyndon.”

The transformation was very thorough. At the caucus, he was standing to one side chatting with Kerr and Anderson—he had struck up a friendship very quickly with these two fellow newcomers, the former Governor of Oklahoma and the former Secretary of Agriculture, so much so that the three tall south-westerners were already a small “in group” within the Class of ’48—when an Associated Press photographer asked them to pose. Kerr held up a forefinger, as if making a point, as if he were the leader of the threesome. Anderson allowed him to do so, smiling at Kerr for the cameras. And so did Lyndon Johnson. One aspect of his behavior that had annoyed his colleagues in the House of Representatives was his constant subtle—and sometimes not so subtle—maneuvering to get into the center of photographs and to make gestures, such as holding up a commanding finger, that made him the photographs’ focal point. But now he simply smiled at Kerr in the friendliest way, as Kerr held up a finger in his face.

Nothing—not even an insult—could shatter the new facade. The most insulting of senators was Robert Taft, who could cut and hurt. At a party at the home of Philip and Katharine Graham, another guest watched as Taft was “rude and insulting” to Johnson—and the guest noted that Johnson “passed the matter off … in such a gentlemanly manner.”

The greatest potential for conflict was with the other senator from his own state, and Johnson had, on that trip to Marlin, gotten off on the wrong foot with crusty, irritable Marse Tom Connally. But he did everything possible to change the footing. Hardly had John Connally and Walter Jenkins settled into their desks in 231 when tension arose between them and Senator Connally’s assistants over who was going to issue the press releases—and thus obtain the lion’s share of the credit—for public works projects and other federal benefits for Texas. The issue, a long-festering source of conflict between Connally and Pappy O’Daniel, seemed likely to become one with 231’s new occupant, particularly since, as Connally and Jenkins well knew, Representative Johnson had fought unceasingly to get the credit even for projects in other congressmen’s districts—even for projects with which he had absolutely no connection. But, they found out, Senator Johnson had a different view. He gave Busby instructions, which Buzz relayed to Connally and Jenkins in a memo, and the operative order was to “avoid a clash of any variety with the Senator [Connally].” For one thing, Johnson let his aides know, senators were notified before representatives, and there were enough federal projects so that he would get his share of the credit. And, Johnson made clear, a share was enough. Lyndon Johnson had, throughout his life, grabbed for more than his share.

He wasn’t grabbing now.

IN THE AFTERNOONS NOW, Lyndon Johnson would sometimes leave 231, without telling his staff where he was going, and would be gone for hours. For a while, no one in the office knew where he was spending those hours—until one day a Senate page telephoned with a message for Horace Busby. Senator Johnson wanted him to come over to the Capitol and join him on the Senate floor.

After that, Busby would be summoned frequently, either by telephone or by a page who would come to 231 in person and escort him to a side door of the Senate Chamber. Seeing his curly-haired young aide, Johnson would motion him over to his desk, and the page would bring a folding chair and place it next to Johnson’s.

Sometimes the reason for the summons was apparent: a speech was being given that Johnson wanted Busby to hear. Busby understood that Johnson wanted his speeches to sound senatorial, so he wanted his speechwriter to hear what senators sounded like. “He paid particular attention to Senator George,” Busby says, but he also wanted Busby to hear senators who were not regarded as particularly outstanding orators, but who sounded senatorial. “He always wanted me to hear [Leverett] Saltonstall. And he was kind of taken with Henry Cabot Lodge.”

Often, however, Busby would be called to the floor when no major speech was being given, and the Senate was merely transacting routine, monotonous, business. He would sit down next to Johnson as a desultory discussion or slightly more interesting debate ensued, or as a quorum call droned on. Sometimes Johnson would whisper to him behind a cupped hand. “Somebody would be making a motion, and he’d be very attentive to that. He hadn’t had to do that in the House—he wasn’t part of the action over there, and the Speaker or whoever was in the Chair had all the authority over there. There would be some maneuver, and he’d talk to me behind his hand: ‘You think he’s going to succeed at that?’” But often Johnson wouldn’t say anything at all—for quite a long time.

“Usually, there weren’t many senators around,” Busby recalls. Two or three senators interested in a particular bill would come onto the floor, and, the bill disposed of, would leave, to be replaced by two or three others. Individual senators would wander in and out. Stars and spear carriers changed: the majority and minority leaders wandered in and out; the Senate reporters who recorded every word spoken on the floor changed regularly, every thirty minutes; clerks would come and go on the lower level of the dais. But Lyndon Johnson would remain, sitting at his desk, intent and still, a long, motionless figure slouched down deep in his chair, his head resting on a big hand, among the long, empty arcs of desks. “He was just sitting there watching the Senate,” Busby recalls.

Busby soon came to understand that he had really been summoned because Johnson was going to be there for many hours, and wanted company. “It was like part of him was a spectator, and he liked to have someone sitting there with him,” Busby says. But for a long while he couldn’t understand why Johnson was there for so many hours. “It was obvious that the reason was very important to him, but I didn’t know what it was,” he says. “I didn’t know what he was doing there,” sitting hour after hour on the almost-deserted Chamber floor as the afternoon oozed away in quorum calls and the dull staccato chant of the Calendar Call. And then Busby did understand. “He was learning, studying.”

In part, he was studying senatorial procedure, those arcane Senate rules, although, Busby noticed, after Johnson observed that on thorny parliamentary points the party leaders or the senator in the chair usually consulted the Senate Parliamentarian, Charles L. Watkins, instead of relying on their own knowledge, he became less interested in procedure; he, too, would be able to refer questions to Watkins. In part, he was studying senatorial demeanor—the manners of senators of the United States.

Woodward says, “He [Johnson] had a general feeling that when you moved to the Senate you had to be more statesmanlike, more senatorial.” Saltonstall and Lodge and Alabama’s Lister Hill were being studied not merely because they spoke in a senatorial manner, but because they acted “senatorial”: formal, dignified, courtly in the best sense of those words. Saltonstall and Lodge, Busby says, “were gentlemen, real New England gentlemen, the kind of person you didn’t find in Texas.” Hill was a gentleman, too, if of the southern mode. What Johnson was trying to learn from them was not merely speech-making but a mode of senatorial discourse, the manner in which they introduced motions and bills, and spoke in debate.

And in part, Johnson was studying men, not their demeanor but what lay underneath.

The Senate Chamber, was, after all, a good place to observe his new colleagues. Most of the time, senators were in their offices or in the hearing rooms of their committees; you might get to know the senators who served on the same committees as you yet see other senators seldom—unless you saw them on the floor. In the Chamber, Johnson could study all the senators—could read them.

From his desk at the far end of the lowest arc, Lyndon Johnson watched the figures moving among the desks, coming up and down the center aisle, chatting together in the well. He watched which senators went over to other senators to chat with them—and which senators sat at their desks and let other senators come to them. He watched two senators talk, and watched if they talked as equals. He watched groups of senators talk, and watched which one the others listened to. And he watched with eyes that missed nothing. Woody understood. Other observers thought the “Big Bulls” were simply the committee chairmen, that being a chairman automatically made you a “Big Bull.” Lyndon Johnson knew better; the reader of men was doing a lot of reading sitting there in the Chamber. Lyndon Johnson was studying which senators had the respect of their fellows—and why they had that respect.

Studying men—and making friends with them. “Just because he was there,” Busby explains, some of the other senators would “come by and say something to him.” The senators who wandered over to say a word would not be Taft or Kenneth Wherry: Johnson was too junior for the Republican Leaders to cross the aisle to talk to him. “But occasionally” his own Leader, Scott Lucas, “might come over and say something.”

These studies took a lot of time. The session would go on for hours, and hour after hour Lyndon Johnson would sit slouched down in his chair, head on hand, all but unmoving. All his previous life had been marked by burning impatience—by a restlessness terrible in its urgency, by an unwillingness to wait, by a feeling that he couldn’t wait. But in the Senate, he had seen at once, waiting—patience—was necessary. So there would be patience.

FINALLY SCOTT LUCAS would move that the Senate adjourn for the day. Standing and stretching, Lyndon Johnson would say, “C’mon, Buzz,” leave the Chamber, and walk down to the subway to the Senate Office Building. Entering 231, he would often throw a violent tantrum, bellowing at his staff. After he went into his private office, slamming the heavy door behind him, one of the four buttons on Jenkins’ telephone would light up with the pale yellow light that meant it was in use; Walter and John and Buzz and Woody would know the Chief was on the telephone. But often the person he had called was another senator, and if that was the case, the Chief wouldn’t be doing much talking. Recalls John Connally: “Time and again, I’d go in there, and I would see him leaning back in his chair, just listening”—saying hardly a word.

The big leather chair was in front of the wide, high, arched window, which faced west so that the late-afternoon sun came through the Venetian blinds in bright bars. As Lyndon Johnson leaned back in the chair, or slouched down into it on the base of his spine, his big, brightly polished black shoes resting on the desk, one hand holding a telephone to his ear, the other hand would almost invariably be holding a cigarette, and another cigarette or two would be dying in an ashtray on the desk, and the smoke from the cigarettes would curl lazily up through those bars of light. And often those curls of smoke would be the only things moving in that end of the room, so intently was Lyndon Johnson concentrating on what he was hearing. The big head that loomed dark, almost black, in front of those bright bars was very still. Woodward, in whose mind the face of Lyndon Johnson was never still, could hardly believe what he was seeing. He knew—after years of traveling with Johnson, no one knew better—how hard it was for Lyndon Johnson to listen. But after listening on the Senate floor all afternoon, now, in the evening, Lyndon Johnson was listening still.

How complete was the transformation in Lyndon Johnson? How successfully did he change his outward character? When, in 1950, the first major article appeared about him in a national magazine, it described him as “mild-mannered.” The first cover story about him, in Newsweek in 1951, said, “His manner is quiet and gentle, and everything he does, he does with great deliberation and care.” And perhaps the definitive word came from that epitome of senatorial civility, Majority Leader Lucas. Asked about Lyndon Johnson, Lucas said, “I found him at all times what I would term a gentleman of the old school.”

AND LYNDON JOHNSON had other gifts which made the Senate, at first glance so unsuited to him, very well suited indeed.

For one thing, it was a place ruled by old men; the most powerful senators, the Big Bulls who could help him along his path, were almost all old. And Lyndon Johnson had always had a gift with old men who could help him. As with all his talents, he had analyzed it himself. “I always liked to spend time with older people,” he would tell Doris Kearns Goodwin, and, besides, spending this time had a purpose, even when he had been a boy. “When I was a boy, I would talk for hours with the mothers of my friends, telling them what I had done during the day, asking what they had done, requesting advice. Soon they began to feel as if I, too, was their son and that meant that whenever we all wanted to do something, it was okay by the parents as long as I was there.”

It was a remarkable gift. At college, his deference, humility, obsequiousness with older men and women who possessed the academic world’s version of power—college administrators and professors—had been carried to such extremes that his awed classmates say that if they described it fully, “no one would believe it.” It included the posture he adopted with his professors. “Literally sitting at [their] feet,” a classmate would recall; if a professor or dean was holding an informal bull session on a lawn on College Hill, sitting on a bench, other students might be sitting next to him or listening while standing up; Lyndon Johnson would almost invariably be sitting on the ground, his face turned up to the professor, his expression one of deep interest and respect. He would, another classmate says, “never disagree with anything a faculty member” said, and he would go further: “he would make a statement that he knew the faculty member would agree with”—make it with the deepest enthusiasm, although, not long before, the same classmate had heard him, with a professor of opposite views, espousing those views with the deepest enthusiasm. It included flattery not only oral but written, written privately in notes to his teachers strategically placed at the end of his examination papers (such as one to an English professor who was a devout Baptist thanking her for “strengthening” his religious faith), and publicly: during his editorship of the College Star, the traditional sly digs at college administrators of earlier years were replaced with editorials full of extravagant praise—flattery from a young man gifted not only in reading men but in using what he read. Instead of ignoring a trait embarrassing to his subject, Johnson’s editorial would focus on that trait, praising it, as if, only twenty years old though he was, he possessed an instinctive, untaught understanding that his subject must be aware of his weak point, so that a word of reassurance about it would be the word that would mean the most: describing a speech by a professor whose pedantic dullness made students snicker, Johnson wrote that “he made his talk bristle with interesting facts”; writing about a stern Dean of Women so rigid about campus morals that she had once expelled a boy for giving a coed a lift in an automobile, Johnson said that “the boys think [Dean Brogden] is one of the best sports on the Hill.” And much of the flattery had a particular—and very cunningly calculated—objective: to make the subject feel for Lyndon Johnson that particularly strong form of fondness, maternal or paternal affection. After telling a female administrator how much he loved and respected his mother, he would tell her that she reminded him of his mother. He would ask her advice about some problem, and when she gave it, would say, as one administrator recalls, that “what I had said was like what his mother had said…. I was sort of flattered.” He would tell a male professor how much he loved and respected his father. He would tell the professor that he so much appreciated his help. “If you were my own father, you couldn’t have done more for me,” he said to one.

In Washington, as secretary to Congressman Richard Kleberg of Corpus Christi, the techniques were the same—right down to the posture and the particular form of flattery. Kleberg’s office was the site of a late-afternoon drinking group of powerful reactionaries, including the Red-baiting Congressman Martin Dies and the legendarily powerful lobbyist and financier of Red-baiting causes, Roy Miller of Corpus Christi, any one of them so anti-Roosevelt that he might have posed for Peter Arno’s New Yorkercartoon of wealthy businessmen ranting and raving against That Man in the White House. Through an open door in Kleberg’s office suite, the Congressman’s two other young assistants could see Johnson, even when there was a vacant chair, sitting on the floor, face worshipfully tilted up toward whoever was speaking, in L. E. Jones’ words, “very much the young man, very starry-eyed, very boyish, very much the junior to the senior. ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘No, sir.’” And when only one of the older men was with him, he again played the paternal card, telling one powerful lobbyist, “You’ve been like a Daddy to me.”

These techniques aroused contempt from Johnson’s contemporaries on both College and Capitol Hills. In talking with the author, both a classmate and a fellow congressional aide used the same term—“a professional son”—to describe him. The college yearbook chronicled his “sucking up” in print (“Believe It Or Not—Bull Johnson has never taken a course in suction”), and his classmate Mylton Kennedy says, “Words won’t come to describe how Lyndon acted toward the faculty—how kowtowing he was, how suck-assing he was, how brown-nosing he was.” Hearing Johnson “talking conservative” with the ultra-reactionary Dies, and, a few minutes later, “talking liberal” with liberal Congressman Wright Patman—and espousing diametrically opposite points of view with equal passion—many of his fellow congressional assistants felt that, as one says, “There’s nothing wrong with being pragmatic. Hell, a lot of us were pragmatic. But you have to believe in something. Lyndon Johnson believed in nothing, nothing but his own ambition.” They sneered as they watched Johnson ignore the young, single women at the monthly Texas State Society dances in order to dance almost exclusively with the elderly wives of congressmen and Cabinet officers so that “the wives would introduce him to their husbands.” And on both hills the contempt was tinged with anger because Johnson was as overbearing to those beneath him, or on the same level as he, as he was obsequious to those above him; so much, in rapid alternation, the bully and the bootlicker that Charles Marsh’s daughter, who had a ringside seat as Lyndon fawned humbly over her father while, behind his back, sleeping with her mother (and who was a devotee of Charles Dickens), was reminded “every time I saw Lyndon” of “a Uriah Heep from Texas.”

But on both Hills, the reaction of Johnson’s targets was proof of the adage that where flattery is concerned, no excess is possible. “Boy,” one classmate says of the San Marcos faculty, “you could see they loved it.” And it was the faculty’s patronage that gave Johnson the rewards he wanted at college. In Washington, his techniques were observed by men capable of analyzing—and of appreciating—the talent, and these men say that “deference” and “flattery” are inadequate to describe it. Watching Lyndon Johnson “play” older men, Tommy Corcoran, a prince of flatterers himself, knew he was watching a king. “He [Johnson] was smiling and deferential, but, hell, lots of guys can be smiling and deferential. Lyndon had one of the most incredible capacities for dealing with older men. He could follow someone’s mind around, and get where it was going before the other fellow knew where it was going. Lyndon was there ahead of him, and saying what he wanted to hear before he knew what he wanted to hear.” The very keen-eyed Ed Clark says, “I never saw anything like it. He would listen at them… and in five minutes he could get a man to think, ‘I like you, young fellow. I’m going to help you.’”

The man on whom his talents had been employed most intensively was Sam Rayburn.

Although adults backed away from the hard-faced, frowning Speaker, who was as powerful—awesome—in personality and in physical strength, with his short, massive body, as he was in position, children took to “Mr. Sam” instinctively, crawling all over him and rubbing their hands over his great bald head. Talking to a little boy or girl, he could sit for hours with that grim face transformed by a broad, gentle smile. But Rayburn had no children. Terribly shy and insecure with women—as, indeed, he was shy in any social situation—he had married once, but the marriage had lasted only three weeks; no one ever knew why. He dreaded loneliness. “Loneliness breaks the heart,” he said once. “Loneliness consumes people.” But, a man with so much power and so fierce a temper that some congressmen were “literally afraid to start talking to him,” he had to live—all his life—with what he dreaded. While the House was in session, of course, men crowded around him, clamoring for his attention, hanging on his every word, but in the evenings and on weekends, when the House wasn’t in session and other congressmen went home to their families, the Speaker went home to a small apartment near Dupont Circle. Convinced that he couldn’t make small talk, that he made a fool of himself whenever he tried, he seldom went to parties. Too proud to let anyone know he was lonely, he rejected dinner invitations from his assistants. On Sundays, he would walk for hours around the empty streets of downtown Washington, his face set in a stern mask as if he wanted to be alone, as if he didn’t want anyone to talk to him. Sometimes, unable to bear the loneliness, he would telephone an assistant and ask him to come to his office on a weekend, as if he had some urgent task for him. But these young men, watching him opening all the drawers of his desk and taking out every paper, “looking for something to do,” knew the truth—and pitied him. Once, he wrote to a friend, “God, what I would give for a tow-headed boy to take fishing.”

From his arrival in Washington in 1931, congressional secretary Johnson sought to cultivate the Speaker, using as entree the fact that his father had served in the Texas Legislature with Rayburn, but the attempt did not take root until he married Lady Bird in 1934. Rayburn’s heart went out to this young woman who he saw was as shy as he. Growing paternally fond and immensely protective of her, he began coming to the Johnsons’ small apartment for dinners, at which Lady Bird cooked “Mr. Sam’s” favorite Texas foods, and he accepted invitations regularly for breakfasts on Sundays, the Sundays on which he had nothing to do. The “professional son” had ample opportunity to employ his talents. Sometimes, to the amazement of all who witnessed it, Lyndon would lean over and kiss the feared Speaker on his bald head.

Once, with Lady Bird back in Texas, Lyndon, alone in Washington, developed pneumonia. Rayburn sat beside him all night in the hospital, so afraid of waking the young man that he wouldn’t stand up even to brush away the ashes from the cigarettes he chain-smoked during the night. In the morning, his vest was covered with ashes. Not long thereafter Rayburn placed Lyndon Johnson on the first rung of the ladder he wanted to climb. Known never to ask anyone—not even a friend—for a favor, for Johnson he begged a favor of a man with whom he had never been friendly, asking Senator Tom Connally to obtain the Texas state directorship of the newly formed National Youth Administration for a twenty-six-year-old congressional secretary without a shred of administrative experience, refusing to leave Connally’s office until the senator agreed. When, two years later, Johnson returned to Washington as a congressman, Rayburn made him a “regular” at the famed “Board of Education” sessions he conducted every afternoon in a House hideaway. There would be a break in their relationship early in 1939, when, for the first time, Rayburn was in the way of Johnson’s ambition. Because Rayburn was the logical choice to succeed John Garner as Roosevelt’s key man in Texas—chief dispenser of New Deal patronage in the state—and Johnson wanted the job himself, he betrayed Rayburn, poisoning Roosevelt’s mind against him. For almost three years thereafter, Rayburn rebuffed Johnson’s attempts to resume relations. But when, after Pearl Harbor, Johnson enlisted and left Washington—for a war zone, Rayburn assumed—Rayburn’s heart melted toward Lyndon as the coldness of a father toward an estranged son melts in a moment when the boy is in danger.

During the rest of Rayburn’s life, Johnson would sometimes blurt out remarks like the one he once made in Texas: “Goddammit, I have to kiss his ass all the time….” But in Rayburn’s presence, Johnson would play on the Speaker’s paternal feelings, repeatedly telling others, in Rayburn’s presence, that he was “just like a Daddy to me.” At one banquet, Senator Ralph Yarborough was to recall, “Lyndon was telling how ‘he’s been like a father to me.’ I saw tears come out of Rayburn’s eyes and roll down his cheeks.”

A note Johnson received from another elderly, lonely House power during his first weeks as a senator demonstrated the effectiveness of his techniques. Carl Vinson may have seen Johnson’s flaws clearly, as his advice to Bryce Harlow shows, but that didn’t stop him from missing him. Most junior members of Vinson’s Armed Services Committee tried to stay out of the way of the cigar-chewing, tobacco-juice-spitting little dictator known as “the Admiral.” Johnson had put himself in Vinson’s way—and had stayed there, despite many early rude rebuffs, dropping around, week after week, year after year, to the apartment in which Vinson lived with his invalid wife to tell him the ribald stories and the latest congressional gossip he loved. And now, in 1949, the note Johnson received was in the pleading tone of an elderly man who misses, very much, a young one. “Don’t forget your old friend during this session of Congress,” Carl Vinson wrote. “Keep in touch with me.”

NOW LYNDON JOHNSON was in the Senate. He had learned who the Senate’s “Big Bulls” were—and almost without exception, these bulls were Old Bulls. So, Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote, “he could see at once what was required.” After her conversations with Johnson, Ms. Goodwin was to write that he recognized “that the older men in the Senate were often troubled by a half-conscious sense that their performance was deteriorating with age.” Johnson told her—these are his words: “Now they feared humiliation, they craved attention. And when they found it, it was like a spring in the desert; their gratitude couldn’t adequately express itself with anything less than total support and dependence on me.”

The attention was tailored to the man—by a master tailor. James E. Murray of Montana, ranking Democratic member of the Senate Labor Committee in 1949, and, after 1951, chairman, was a liberal hero, and deservedly so. “He is a classic prototype of the New Deal,” a writer was to say, “as nearly pro-labor on all questions as it is possible to be…. To hear Senator Murray’s response when his name is reached on a roll-call is to know at once what the New Deal-Fair Deal position on an issue is.” But in 1949, Senator Murray was seventy-three years old. Once a broad-chested man, bursting with vitality, his stride was now slower, even at times a bit uncertain. And while he was not senile, his mind was not what it had been, and it preferred to dwell in the past, in the days of labor’s triumphs, in the days when it had found, in Franklin Roosevelt, its great champion. Sometimes—increasingly, to one who observed closely—when Murray was dealing with current issues, with current Senate maneuvers and stratagems, the Senator seemed a little tense, a little uncertain. Lyndon Johnson, who had been close to Roosevelt, close to Corcoran and Benjamin V. Cohen and the other young New Dealers with whom Murray had worked in the great days of the New Deal, would, in talking to Murray, turn the conversation to those days—and keep it there. It was noticeable how Murray, once he realized that it was to be kept there, relaxed and became his old charming self. It was noticeable how Murray’s face lit up when, entering the Senate cloakroom, he saw Lyndon Johnson there.

The question of deteriorating performance was handled, too. Reports were a constant of Senate life, and many senators did not have assistants capable of writing reports of which they would not be ashamed. Johnson did, and in the most delicate of terms, he would sometimes offer an older senator the services of such an aide.

Old men crave not only attention but affection, and Johnson did not forget that, instructing aides drafting letters to them for his signature to make the letters “real sweet.” Old men want to feel that the experience which has come with their years is valuable, that their advice is valuable, that they possess a sagacity that could be obtained only through experience—a sagacity that could be of use to young men if only young men would ask. Lyndon Johnson asked. “I want your counsel on something,” he would say to one of the Old Bulls. “I need your counsel.” And when the counsel was given—and of course it was given: who could resist so earnest an entreaty?—it was appreciated, with a gratitude rare in its intensity. He would pay another visit to the senator’s office to tell him how he had followed his advice, and how well it had worked. “Thank you for your counsel,” he would say to one senator. “I needed that counsel.” “Thank you for giving me just a little of your wisdom,” he would say to another senator. “I just don’t know what I would have done without it.” When one of the Old Bulls, asked for his advice, told Johnson that he didn’t know enough about the matter, Johnson would say, “Oh, I’ll rely on your judgment any time. Your judgment’s always been good.” And the earnestness—the outward sincerity—of his words, the obvious depth of his gratitude, made the words words that an old man might treasure.

In Senate as college, he proved the adage that no excess was possible. He gave gruff Edwin C. (Big Ed) Johnson of Colorado a nickname: “Mr. Wisdom,” and used it not only orally but in writing; once, when Big Ed was back in Colorado, Lyndon wrote him: “I certainly do miss the able counsel of Mr. Wisdom.” He used it not only in private but in public. “Boy, whenever you’re in trouble, the thing to do is go to Mr. Wisdom,” he would say, in Ed Johnson’s presence, to whoever else happened to be present. And beyond the specific flatteries and sweetnesses was Lyndon Johnson’s overall demeanor with the Old Bulls: a deference, an obsequiousness, a “fawning” and “bootlicking” so profound that more than one Senate staffer likened him to the same Dickens character. “During Lyndon Johnson’s early days in the Senate, he was a real Uriah Heep,” says Paul Douglas’ administrative assistant, Howard Shuman.

“The very frequency of his statements that an older politician was ‘like a Daddy to me’ tends to cast doubt on the profundity of some of these relationships,” an academic was to write after interviewing many senators; the doubts would have been confirmed had he been walking beside Lyndon Johnson and John Connally just after they left the office of an elderly senator to whom Johnson had just been, for quite a few minutes, elaborately and fawningly grateful for a piece of advice. “Christ, I’ve been kissing asses all my life,” Lyndon Johnson said, with what Connally recalls as a “snarl.” But the technique was as effective as it had always been. “Johnson thought, in those days at least, that that kind of technique was effective with anybody,” says Booth Mooney, one of his Senate aides, and the belief was borne out by the results, the results even with Rules Committee Chairman Hay den. In December, Hay den had refused to give Johnson that extra room in the basement that he had asked for; in February Hayden found that an extra room was, indeed, available. Soon it had become apparent that most of the Senate’s Old Bulls were looking fondly on Lyndon Johnson. And their feelings contributed to a change in Johnson’s behavior that was noticeable to the assistants who had worked for him in his pre-Senate days. Busby, struck by Johnson’s calm during their learning sessions on the Chamber floor, now began to notice the calmness spreading to activities outside the office. “When he got to the Senate,” Busby says, “all of a sudden, he didn’t act so driven any more.” John Connally says that “After a month or two, he seemed to be—outside the office, I mean—so much more at ease than he had ever been before.” And Walter Jenkins uses a somewhat different, and very telling, image. “Mr. Johnson took to the Senate as if he had been born there,” he says. “It was obvious it was his place.”

His place. All at once, in the Senate—in this place that was so different from any other place he had ever been—Lyndon Johnson seems to have felt, within a very few weeks of his arrival in it, at home.

AND THERE WAS ANOTHER ASPECT of the Senate that was especially well suited to Lyndon Johnson, and was particularly helpful to his advancement within it. While the Senate may have been ruled by its southerners, the southerners were ruled by one man—and he was lonely.

Johnson had learned this, too, that December—had learned it at least partly in a conversation in his old House office near the end of the month.

The conversation was with a young man named Bobby Baker. Baker was only a twenty-year-old Senate page, but he already possessed a reputation that distinguished him from the other pages—a reputation to which Johnson referred when, on that December trip, he telephoned him and said, “Mr. Baker, I understand you know where the bodies are buried in the Senate. I’d appreciate it if you’d come by my office and talk to me.”

Baker knew little about Johnson, he was to recall. “He was just another incoming freshman to me.” But by the end of the talk, he knew a lot more. Johnson, he was to recall, “came directly to the point. ‘I want to know who’s the power over there, how you get things done, the best committees, the works.’ For two hours, he peppered me with keen questions. I was impressed. No senator ever had approached me with such a display of determination to learn, to achieve, to attain, to belong, to get ahead. He was coming into the Senate with his neck bowed, running full tilt, impatient to reach some distant goal I then could not even imagine.” A waiter from the Senate Dining Room who brought sandwiches and coffee to the two men saw a rapport forming; Baker “leaned across the table as if drawn to LBJ by some invisible magnet.” And if Johnson wanted to know where true power lay in the Senate, Baker knew the answer. “Dick Russell was the power,” he was to say. And, he was to say, Johnson immediately “recognized” something about Russell: “that Russell, who was no longer so young, was a bachelor and lonely.”

That was perhaps the single most important piece of information that Lyndon Johnson acquired that December. At each stage of his life, his remarkable gift for cultivating and manipulating older men who could help him had been focused at its greatest intensity on one man: the one who could, in each setting, help him the most. This focus, too, was deliberate; while he was still in college, Lyndon Johnson told his roommate Alfred (Boody) Johnson: “The way to get ahead is to get close to the one man at the top.”

In Texas, the older men most responsible for Lyndon Johnson’s earliest success were the college’s president, Cecil Evans, and the canny—and feared—Alvin Wirtz. Each of these men had a daughter. Neither had a son.

Crusty, aloof “Prexy” Evans seemed to other students to be surrounded by an “invisible wall.” But Lyndon Johnson, refusing to be rebuffed, babbling boyishly away while gazing at him with adoration, flattering him in editorials (“Great as an educator and as an executive, Dr. Evans is greatest as a man”), telling him he looked on him as a father, had breached the wall, and Evans treated Johnson with more affection than he had ever shown a student—a notably paternal affection.

In Austin, Johnson would tell Wirtz’s associates—men he knew would repeat the remark to Wirtz—“Senator Wirtz has been like a father to me.” And when Johnson entered Wirtz’s office, that studiously calm, reserved, and ruthless political string-puller would jump up and hug him, saying, “Here’s m’boy, Lyndon. Hello Lyndon, m’boy.” Johnson’s success in making Wirtz as well as Evans feel that Lyndon looked upon him almost as a father, in making Wirtz, like Evans, feel that Lyndon was the son he had never had, is attested to by Wirtz’s inscription on a photograph of himself: “To Lyndon Johnson, whom I admire and love with the same affection as if he were in fact my own son.”

IN WASHINGTON, the pattern had been repeated with two men. One was Sam Rayburn, and the other’s last name also began with the letter R.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt had sons, four of them, but he was so distant from them, and, indeed, to some extent, from his wife, that in a way he was lonely, too.

The instant rapport that had been kindled between Roosevelt and Johnson at their very first meeting—the rapport that had led the President to tell Tommy Corcoran, “I’ve just met the most remarkable young man,” and to order Corcoran to “help him with anything you can” (and to arrange Johnson’s appointment to the House Naval Affairs Committee because he, Roosevelt, had been active in naval affairs when he was a young man)—had lasted and deepened with time. The President would tell Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes that Johnson was “the kind of uninhibited young pro he would have liked to have been as a young man”—and might have been “if I hadn’t gone to Harvard.” The President offered to appoint Johnson Administrator of the Rural Electrification Administration, put him in charge of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee—intervened in Johnson’s 1941 race for the Senate to an extent he had never done in any congressional race since his disastrous attempt to intervene in 1938 Senate races, and that he had vowed he would never do again. His feeling for Johnson, says Jim Rowe, the Roosevelt aide in the best position to observe the interplay between the two men, was a “special feeling.”

About the basis of this feeling relatively little is known, because the meetings between Johnson and Roosevelt took place in the privacy of the White House living quarters. Describing the President as a lonely man whose wife was often traveling, Johnson was to say that “He’d call me up” and “I used to go down sometimes and have a meal with him”—breakfast alone with the President in Roosevelt’s spartan bedroom, the President sitting up in bed, or in the President’s private study, with the two men dining off a bridge table. And the President and the young congressman would talk together not only in the upstairs, private quarters of the White House but in the Oval Office as well. The frequency of these meetings is unknown, as is the nature of the conversations at them. When Roosevelt died, Johnson told a friendly reporter, “He was just like a Daddy to me; he always talked to me just that way.” But it is not known whether he used the Daddy image—or other fatherly images—when he was talking to FDR, nor to what extent he was with the President the “professional son.” There were certainly other reasons for the rapport between the older man and the younger, among them, as Rowe notes, Roosevelt’s confidence in Johnson’s complete loyalty to the New Deal (a confidence that would prove unfounded almost as soon as Roosevelt died, when Johnson began publicly disassociating himself from the New Deal), and in Johnson’s ability: “Johnson was in many ways just more capable than most of the people Roosevelt saw…. You’ve got to remember that they were two great political geniuses.” But, Rowe feels, as do other presidential aides, that there was also a “father-son” element to the relationship, and there are moments, such as Roosevelt’s determination to cheer “Lyndon” up following his 1941 defeat, that are difficult to attribute to solely political considerations. And the aides agree that whatever the reason for the “special feeling,” special the feeling certainly was. Men like Corcoran and Cohen conjecture that with Roosevelt, as with Rayburn, Lyndon Johnson read the older man, studied him, learned him—and used what he learned. And whatever the reasons, Roosevelt indisputably put his power behind Johnson’s career to an extent he did for few, if any, other congressmen.

NOW JOHNSON HAD BEEN TOLD that the power in the Senate was Russell, Russell who, like Johnson’s two great Washington patrons, had a lonely personal life—Russell who, like Rayburn, had no one. Schoolchildren in mid-century America learned their so-called “three Rs”—readin’, ’ritin’ and ’rithmetic. Lyndon Johnson, who had already learned two Rs so well, set out now to learn his third.