“If you can’t come into a room and tell right away who is for you and who is against you, you have no business in politics.”
Gossip was so powerful a force in many small towns partly because of their isolation: there wasn’t much for people to be interested in except each other’s lives.
Shortly after Sam’s downfall, O. Y. Fawcett, proprietor of Johnson City’s drugstore, coined a remark which soon gained wide circulation. “Sam Johnson,” he said, “is too smart to work, and not smart enough to make a living without working.”
Jobs were hard to come by at San Marcos, for so many of the students needed them, but, unknown to Lyndon, no sooner had he left for school than his father, who had a nodding acquaintance with the college president, Cecil Eugene Evans (Sam Johnson had fought for increased legislative appropriations for teachers’ colleges), had written him asking him to give Lyndon one.
embodied in that Farm Relief Act, and in all those years no action of lasting significance had been taken in their behalf. It hadn’t taken Franklin D. Roosevelt a Hundred Days to give them that action. He had needed only sixty-nine. And on May 13, when Lyndon Johnson opened the usual letters from constituents asking for help, there was help available for him to give them.
“He was smiling and deferential,” Tommy Corcoran, a keen observer of the Washington scene, was to say of Johnson, “but hell, lots of guys can be smiling and deferential. He had something else. No matter what someone thought, Lyndon would agree with him—would be there ahead of him, in fact. He could follow someone’s mind around—and figure out where it was going and beat it there.…” And he touched every base; leaving a bureaucrat’s office, he smiled and chatted with his assistants and his secretaries until, soon, he had entire bureaus, top to bottom, willing to help him.
Few districts fared better under the New Deal’s programs than this district with a junior Congressman who opposed the New Deal, a Congressman who seldom visited his office—this district whose only asset on Capitol Hill was a young secretary who worked for it with a frantic, frenzied, almost desperate aggressiveness and energy.
The salutation in the draft was “Dear Henry,” and Johnson crossed it out, writing “Dear Mr. Secretary” in its place, saying, “Look, I can’t call him Henry.” There was a pause, and then Lyndon Johnson added: “There’s going to come a day when I will, but it’s not now.”
“The significant thing was—and you could see this very clearly—that the older men trusted him,” Jones says.
Failure of a chairman to respond regularly was the excuse Johnson needed to have a co-chairman appointed—and these co-chairman were not Kleberg men but men with whom Johnson had, during his tour, established a personal rapport.
Reinforcing the gratitude, in some cases, were self-interest and ambition. The ability of a contemporary, a young man with whom they had gone to school, to distribute jobs reinforced their belief that he was “going somewhere, somewhere UP.”
Lady Bird dropped by to talk to Gene that afternoon, and when Johnson arrived to pick up Dorothy, she was there. Lyndon already knew, through Gene, who Lady Bird was; he quietly asked her to meet him for breakfast the next morning in the coffee shop of the Driskill Hotel. She says she didn’t plan to, but she was in Austin to consult with an architect about remodeling the Brick House, the architect’s office was next to the Driskill, and as she passed the coffee shop, she saw Lyndon sitting at a table at its window. As he realized she wasn’t planning to join him, he frantically waved at her until she did. Then he took her for a drive. On it, he first showered her with questions (“I never heard so many questions; he really wanted to find out all about me”), and then—this man whose “mind could follow another mind around and get there before it did”—with answers, answers, as she puts it, to “questions that hadn’t been asked.… He told me all sorts of things I thought were extraordinarily direct for a first conversation”—about “his ambitions,” how he was determined to become somebody,
He assured her of his ambition (“My dear Bird, This morning I’m ambitious, proud, energetic and very madly in love with you—I want to see people—want to walk thru’ the throngs—want to do things with a drive …”) and pressed her for an affirmative response to his suit (“I see something I know I want—I immediately exert efforts to get it—I do or I don’t but I try and do my best.… You see something you might want … You tear it to pieces in an effort to determine if you should want it … Then you … conclude that maybe the desire isn’t an ‘everlasting’ one and that the ‘sane’ thing to do is to wait a year or so …”). He assured her of his interest in the cultural matters so important to her (“Every interesting place I see I make a mental reservation and tell myself that I shall take you there when you are mine. I want to go through the Museum, the Congressional Library, the Smithsonian, the Civil War battlefields and all of those most interesting places …”), and pressed (“Why must we wait twelve long months to begin to do the things we want to do forever and ever?”).
He early announced, “I’d like to have coffee in bed,” and I thought, “What!?!? Me?!?!” But I soon realized that it’s less trouble serving someone that way than by setting the table and all.… Did she also realize that it was less trouble to bring him his newspaper in bed, so that he could read it as he sipped his coffee? To lay out his clothes, and, so that he wouldn’t be bothered with the chore of placing things in pockets, to herself put his pen—after filling it—in the proper pocket, his cigarette lighter—after checking the level of its fluid—in the proper pocket, his handkerchief and money in the proper pocket? To shine his shoes? He insisted that she do these chores, and she did them.
Poverty, he was to say, only “tries men’s souls”; it is loneliness that “breaks the heart. Loneliness consumes people.”
When Silent Cal Coolidge noted that “You don’t have to explain something you haven’t said,”
GIFTED THOUGH HE WAS at arousing paternal feelings—not only Rayburn’s but those of Roy Miller and Rasch Adams and Alvin Wirtz—he had been unable to translate affection into advancement.
“We have got to [make] these young people … feel that they are necessary,” she said. And, she said, they should be given “certain things for which youth craves—the chance for self-sacrifice for an ideal.”
YET THE STAFF didn’t feel driven. In part, of course, this was because he had chosen them so well.
The jokes had an edge—they were designed for the same purpose as the cursing: so that Johnson could display his dominance over his men; Henderson told his wife he understood that Johnson had moaned because he didn’t want to have to get up and get the water himself—but the edge was honed differently for each man, differently and precisely.
He wanted power, but he didn’t want to get it by running for office. He liked to sit quietly, smoke a cigar. He would sit and work in his library, and plan and scheme, and usually he would get somebody out in front of him so that nobody knew it was Alvin Wirtz who was doing it. He would sit and scheme in the dark. He wasn’t an outgoing person. But he was the kind of person who didn’t want to lose any fights. And he didn’t lose many.”
Like two other older men who had hitherto played large roles in Johnson’s adult life—Cecil Evans and Sam Rayburn—Alvin Wirtz had no son of his own.
The first letters to be answered, moreover, were those not from friends but from enemies: the concession messages from his opponents. And while their congratulations had been strictly pro forma, his replies were not. You didn’t lose, he told Avery, just as I didn’t win. “It was a victory for President Roosevelt.” He repeated that to Sam Stone—“My dear Judge: Thank you very much for your kind telegram. The people voted to support President Roosevelt and his program, and the victory is his”—and, since the Judge would be a more dangerous future opponent than Avery, went on at more length: “You warned me you would show us how to carry Williamson County, and I congratulate you upon the support the homefolks gave your candidacy. Please tell your and my friends there that I admire the way they stood by you.”
“It is ambition,” he had written, “that makes of a creature a real man.” Pride, embarrassment, gloating: such emotions could only hinder his progress along the road he saw so clearly before him—the “vision” he had indeed held for so long. They were luxuries in which he would not indulge himself.
Corcoran, a King of Flatterers himself, knew it was much more. He knew a master of the art when he saw one. “He [Johnson] was smiling and deferential, but, hell, lots of guys can be smiling and deferential,” he says. “Lyndon had one of the most incredible capacities for dealing with older men. I never saw anything like it. He could follow someone’s mind around, and get where it was going before the other fellow knew where it was going.
“If Lyndon Johnson was there, a party would be livelier. The moment he walked in the door, it would take fire. Maybe in a different way than the party had been going when he came in, but it would take fire.… He was great fun, a great companion.”
They admired his thoroughness, his tirelessness—the way he threw himself into every aspect of politics, into everything he did, with an enthusiasm and effort that seemed limitless.
“He was a pack rat for information,” Fortas says. “And he was very, very intelligent. He never forgot anything. He would work harder than anyone else. I have never known a man who had such a capacity for detail.”
“He was a great one for spur-of-the-moment parties,” Elizabeth Rowe recalls. “He’d call up and say, ‘I’m about to leave the office. Get old Jim and come on out.’ ” When the Rowes arrived at the Johnson apartment, they might find two or three other couples also invited by a last-minute telephone call.
He was concerned with Lyndon’s financial future because he had noticed that, despite his $10,000-per-year Congressman’s salary, Johnson was always short of cash. The publisher saw that Lyndon was worried about money, and he didn’t want Lyndon to worry about money: a great future lay ahead of him, and he should be freed from sordid cares. In 1939, therefore, Marsh took his first step toward placing Johnson on a sounder financial footing.
Garner, Timmons wrote, “abhorred even the idea of a third term for any President,” good or bad. The basis for his abhorrence was simple: four decades in Washington had taught him what power did to men. “No man should exercise great powers too long,” he said. On another occasion, he was to say: “We don’t want any kings or emperors in this country. You have to curb the ambitions of every man, even the best of them, [because] they are human.”
Roosevelt’s basic problem, if he chose to run, was not how to get the nomination—his ability to get a decisive convention majority was never in doubt—but how to be nominated in so striking a manner that it would amount to an emphatic and irresistible call to duty.
But it would not be the largest gamble ever taken by Herman Brown, not for the man who had mortgaged everything he had accumulated in twenty years of terribly hard work to begin work on a dam before it had been authorized.
Because of Herman Brown, however, Johnson possessed a source of funds—substantial funds—about which there existed neither uncertainty nor delay.
Suddenly, Democratic candidates all across the country realized that there was someone in Washington they could turn to, someone they could ask for not only money but other types of aid.
Johnson “never did anything through just one person.”
as one chronicler was later to put it, “either stumbled into, or deliberately figured out, that a microphone is an ear and not an auditorium—and you don’t make public speeches to microphones, you don’t shout into them any more than you would shout into your sweetheart’s ear when you wanted to tell her you loved her. O’Daniel learned early that he had Texas by the ear and from that day on he cooed and caroled and gurgled into
Pappy O’Daniel was perhaps the greatest campaigner in the history of Texas—but Lyndon Johnson wasn’t letting him campaign.
Radio was rapidly becoming the most potent political weapon, but it was a weapon that could be wielded only by those who could afford it.
But it was Johnson’s mistake that had enabled these men to take his victory away. He had planned and schemed and maneuvered for ten years—had worked for ten years, worked day and night, weekday and weekend—had done “everything.” And, for ten years, he had won. He had relaxed for one day. And he had lost.
IN UNDERSTANDING what many perceptive men had so much difficulty in understanding—the bond that, for the next twenty years, made Sam Rayburn the ally of a man so utterly opposite to him in both principles and personality—part of the answer lies in Lady Bird Johnson’s sweetness and graciousness, and in the shyness that made Rayburn so fond of her.