Leadership

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Within a matter of months, Kleberg’s office had developed a reputation as one of the most efficient on Capitol Hill. For Congressman Kleberg, “a bluff and good natured, multi-millionaire,” the situation was ideal. Preferring to spend his time playing golf, poker, or polo, he was happy to let Lyndon run the show, and Lyndon, in turn, was delighted with the vacuum Kleberg afforded him. From the start, Johnson gave first priority to constituent requests, understanding the central importance of strengthening Kleberg’s elected base at home. Through prompt and helpful answers to the hundreds of petitioners who wrote each month—veterans with claim of injuries sustained during World War I, desperate farmers hoping for aid from the agricultural administration, unemployed men and women in need of a government job—word of Kleberg’s reflected zeal began to spread across the district; on the inside, Lyndon’s reputation as a doer was established.

  Since most of the constituent case work involved problems with one bureaucracy or another, Johnson had to spend hours each day penetrating the bureaucratic maze, figuring out where the power lay, identifying and targeting the person who would make the ultimate decision. Then his bombardment commenced—hectoring pressure combined with contagious enthusiasm, flattery mingled with threat, until the determination he sought was finally made. He believed that “every problem had a solution,” Jones marveled. He refused to take no for an answer, and when the constituent received what he was hoping for, Johnson was jubilant, treating each successful case as a major victory for the team. With stunning audacity and speed, Lyndon Johnson had become a congressman in all but name.

  By the age of twenty-five, Lyndon Johnson was on the path to a political career. He had come a long way in the three short years since that moment at the Henly picnic when he raced through the crowd to deliver his first political speech. Earlier than the three men we have studied, he had laid out an elaborate blueprint for a different kind of leadership, an executive competence and a distinctive, grinding pattern of behavior that would mark his management style the rest of his days. Already he had become a consummate political animal, a man with a dowsing rod inexorably drawn to every reservoir of power. The instinctive ability to locate the gears and levers of power in any institution, to secure wise and faithful mentors, and to transform minor positions into substantial founts of influence would accompany every stage of his upward climb.

  In contrast to Abraham Lincoln, who was able to relax with poetry and drama; or Theodore Roosevelt, who was interested in birds, the mating habits of wolves, and the latest novels; or Franklin Roosevelt, who spent happy hours sailing, playing with his stamps, enjoying poker and genial social chatter, Lyndon Johnson could never unwind. Luther Jones never remembered him reading a novel, or, indeed, reading anything other than the newspapers and current magazines he obsessively devoured. He rarely went to movies or plays, for he disliked sitting in the dark for three hours unable to talk. At baseball games, he would insist on talking politics between innings and even between pitches. At social events, he danced with the wives of congressmen and government officials rather than with single girls, discussing the latest news and political gossip as they twirled across the floor. All his life, he would continue to work at this same compulsive pace, as if victory and success might somehow reclaim the steady love and affection he had been denied as a child.

  * * *

  The same qualities Lyndon brought to every stage of his climb—single-minded determination, contagious enthusiasm, flattery mingled with threats, indefatigable energy, and an overwhelming personality—were conspicuous in his successful endeavor to win the hand of Claudia “Lady Bird” Taylor in marriage. If Theodore Roosevelt waged a concerted yearlong campaign to woo his wife and her family, Lyndon, with not a second to spare, accelerated the process, reaching his goal in a matter of weeks.

  The daughter of a wealthy businessman, Lady Bird had recently graduated from the University of Texas with a degree in journalism. After a single date in Austin, Johnson, to his credit and good fortune, decided not to let this intelligent, reserved, sensitive, and shrewd woman go. During their first conversation, she later remembered, he told her all manner of “extraordinarily direct” things about himself—“his salary as a secretary to a congressman, his ambitions, even about all the members of his family, and how much insurance he carried. It was as if he wanted to give a complete picture of his life and of his capabilities.” She thought he was “very, very good-looking, with lots of black, wavy hair,” but considered it “sheer lunacy” when on their second date he asked her to marry him.

  “I’m ambitious, proud, energetic and madly in love with you,” he declared. “I see something I know I want—I immediately exert efforts to get it.” On his next visit to Austin two months later, he issued an ultimatum: “We either get married now or we never will.” When she agreed, he released a “Texas yip,” and then drove straight to San Antonio, where they were married in a simple ceremony that same day. “I don’t think Lady Bird ever had a chance once he set eyes on her,” Latimer observed three decades later. She was his “balancing wheel,” Jones said. He was constitutionally impatient; she was constitutionally calm. He was abrupt and profane; she was gentle and gracious. Without such forbearance and devotion, without a love steadily given and never withdrawn, the course of Lyndon Johnson’s ascent amid the most complicated intrigues of the political world becomes inconceivable.

  Furthermore, the home Lady Bird established in Washington proved instrumental not only to Lyndon’s stability but to his enlarging ambitions. Lady Bird offered a welcoming hospitality to Lyndon’s guests at any time of day or night. He might call her as late as six or seven to say he was bringing home a half-dozen people, and by the time they arrived, the table would be set, drinks ready, the supper cooking.

  Among the many guests, none played a larger role in Lyndon’s future than Sam Rayburn, the Democratic congressman from Bonham, Texas, who had served with Lyndon’s father in the state legislature and would go on to become speaker of the house for seventeen years. Without a wife or family of his own, “Mr. Sam” was often lonely in the hours when the House was not in session. Sensing this, Lyndon more and more frequently began inviting him for dinner, invitations that soon extended to breakfasts on weekends so the two men could read the Sunday papers together. The warmth and informality of the atmosphere engendered a genuine companionship, providing Lyndon with a wise, trusted, and most useful mentor and Mr. Sam with the affectionate and loyal son he never had. And soon, Mr. Sam’s exercise of brute political force would prove indispensable to Lyndon’s attainment of the next way station of his political rise.

  On a Tuesday morning in June 1935, by executive order, President Franklin Roosevelt created the National Youth Administration. The NYA was designed to save “a lost generation” of young people by providing part-time work for students from needy families who could not otherwise afford to stay in school, as well as full-time jobs for thousands of unemployed youths between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one. That very Tuesday, Lyndon approached Mr. Sam and proposed himself as the perfect candidate for director of the Texas NYA. Straightaway, Rayburn asked an uncharacteristic favor of Texas senator Tom Connally: “He wanted me to ask President Roosevelt to appoint Lyndon Johnson,” Connally recalled. “Sam was agitated.” That this was a matter of significant personal import for Rayburn was so apparent and persuasive that Connally agreed at once. Connally was unable to convince Roosevelt, however, that the twenty-six-year-old Lyndon, with no administrative experience, was qualified to run a statewide agency. In truth, the largest staff Lyndon had ever managed consisted of three people. Furthermore, another man had been announced for the post before Rayburn appealed to the president. Nonetheless, Roosevelt heeded Rayburn’s wish. In short order, the White House acknowledged that “a mistake had been made.” The post would go instead to Kleberg’s congressional secretary, Lyndon Baines Johnson.

  Concerns about Johnson’s youth and inexperience were soon put to rest as it became increasingly clea
r that the youngest state director in the United States possessed a rare cluster of executive skills. “I’m not the assistant type,” he rightly told a friend upon leaving Kleberg’s office. “I’m the executive type.” Recruiting a staff that would eventually comprise nearly fifty people posed the first hurdle. He began by summoning the same young men he had teamed with since college, at Sam Houston High, and in Kleberg’s office. They were familiar with his driving leadership, they had witnessed his modus operandi in smaller arenas, and they were ready for a larger challenge. Most of them were poor, like himself; they, too, had found it necessary to scavenge for jobs in the depressed time in order to stay in college. For them, as for Johnson, the mission of the NYA—to provide education, training, and jobs for young people—was personal. “We gathered that dream in ourselves and agreed to be a part of it and go to work,” one staffer recalled.

  The enormity of the statewide undertaking overwhelmed Johnson until he came up with an ideal plan to “start the ball rolling” with an all-important inaugural project. He would put thousands of out-of-school youth to work building roadside parks along state highways where travelers could stop to rest, have something to eat, and go to the bathroom. Within a matter of weeks, Washington approved the paperwork and the plan was put into operation. While the NYA paid for the labor, the State Highway Department provided the supervision, the trucks, and the material. State engineers trained the young men to mix concrete, build driveways off the roads into the parks, lay bricks for barbecue pits, construct picnic tables and benches, plant shade trees and curbside shrubs. Johnson was “beside himself with happiness” when the first project was up and running, for he knew that it would create an atmosphere of success. When the roadside parks project proved successful, he made sure it was publicized throughout Texas, and in a short time it actually became “a model for the nation.”

  Lyndon’s performance during this first undertaking opened the door to supplementary funding and scores of additional projects. Within six months, Johnson had convinced officials in 350 agencies—schools, hospitals, libraries, recreational facilities—to provide the material and supervision for their particular project. Eighteen thousand young people were at work repairing school buses, surveying land, and building arbors, swimming pools, school gyms, and basketball courts. It was as if the recreational and extracurricular projects he had once furnished out of his own pocket for recess and after-school activities at Cotulla could now be expanded with federal monies across all of Texas. When Eleanor Roosevelt came to Texas in 1936, she asked to meet the youthful state director about whom she had heard so much.

  As the pressure increased, however, accounts of the Chief’s frantic, harsh, even abusive behavior toward his staff multiplied. “Everything had to be done NOW,” one staffer recalled. “And he could get very angry if something couldn’t be done immediately.” Seconds after dictating a letter, he “couldn’t wait” to see the finished product. “Where’s that letter?” he would shout to his secretary; if his howl didn’t produce the desired result, he would pull the letter midstream from the typewriter. “The hours were long and hard,” recalled Bill Deason, another old friend Johnson had recruited. The team worked six days a week, from 8 a.m. to midnight. Sundays were reserved for staff meetings to go over what had been done and outline plans for the week ahead. The lights and the elevators in the government building were supposed to be turned off at 10 p.m., but Johnson persuaded the building manager to leave them on until midnight, and sometimes 1 a.m., until the building owner intervened. There were no “clockwatchers” on the staff; indeed, it seemed as if Johnson had simply “never heard of a clock.”

  He instilled fear; he kept everyone on edge. “He would pair us off, or there’d be one or two or three of us and you were always behind somebody else,” recalled Ray Roberts, a member of the staff. He’d go to one person and tell him how great the other was doing and “that he ought to try to catch up”; then the next day he’d reverse the process. “I don’t care how hard I worked,” one staffer lamented, “I was always behind.” Staffers never knew what might trigger an outburst. “God, he could rip a man up and down,” one humiliated team member remembered. It could be a cluttered desk, which he took as a sign of disorganization, or a clean desk, which signified idleness. More often than not, his blistering outbursts were followed by indulgent affection, tactile sentimentality, effusive praise, or contrition. For some team members, Johnson’s oscillating behavior proved too much to bear. A few broke down physically, others quit, but the majority stayed.

  Why did the team members stay on? Leadership studies suggest such behaviors undermine internal motivation, that pitting workers against one another rarely succeeds in the long run, and that public humiliation crushes an employee’s spirit, autonomy, and production. Yet Johnson’s team, by and large, performed magnificently. Aubrey Williams, the national NYA director, publicly declared that the NYA program in Texas was paramount in the entire nation. How did the team accomplish so much, so quickly, and for so long?

  The answers require an appreciation of Johnson’s unsurpassed work ethic, the feeling among staff members that they were learning important skills, and the sense of shared engagement in a significant mission. No matter how late they stayed, nearly all the staff members agreed, Johnson closed the door behind them. No matter how early they arrived, he was already there. “Now, fellows, we can do this,” Johnson exhorted his team, “if you all put your shoulders to the wheel and pitch in.” Here, as in Washington, Lady Bird proved an indispensable ally. By making her home an extension of the workplace, she softened the often inconsiderate harshness of Lyndon’s compulsive pace. Various staff members lived with the Johnsons in a room on the second floor. They ate breakfast and often dinner at the house. “We weren’t like boarders,” Bill Deason recalled, “we had the run of the house and I felt like a member of the family.” Mind-numbing meetings going over NYA rules and regulations, “paragraph by paragraph, page by page,” were often held on the Johnson porch. “This was usually pretty late at night,” William Sherman Birdwell recalled. “Lady Bird always had coffee and cake for us.”

  For the young men, Johnson (though hardly older than they) proved an inspiring mentor, motivating them not only “to work harder,” observed one staffer, but “to be more imaginative, to think of new approaches that we could take to stretch the boundaries or the limitations under which we operated, to be more effective.” They considered him “the greatest organizer” they had ever seen; they marveled at his ability “to put first things first and more or less take them one at a time.” And yet, while focused on the present, he seemed to know what was coming next; they believed he could actually “see around corners.” Working so closely with the most forceful and unusual leader they had ever met, they felt they were daily learning something new. And “we made no bones about it,” Ray Roberts acknowledged. They all knew then, even before Lyndon was thirty, that he was “going somewhere,” and that it would be great to go along with him.

  More than anything else, however, what allowed the staff to endure Lyndon’s overbearing behavior was the sense they were joined together in an incredibly exciting new organization that promised to change the lives of thousands of young people who had lost hope during the early years of the Depression, providing them with jobs, keeping them in school, teaching them marketable skills, renewing their faith in the future. By hitching their lives to Lyndon Johnson, his staffers knew they were riding the momentum, breadth, and meaning of a larger story.

  * * *

  The swiftness with which Lyndon Johnson made life-altering decisions was prominently displayed when an opportunity suddenly arose to run for the House of Representatives. On February 23, 1937, not eighteen months into his directorship of the Texas NYA, Lyndon was conducting the fellow director of the Kansas NYA on a tour of several of his work projects when his eyes fell on the headline of a newspaper left on a park bench: Congressman James P. Buchanan of Brenham Dies. “I just couldn’t keep my mind on my visi
tor,” Johnson later said. “I kept thinking that this was my district and this was my chance. The day seemed endless. She never stopped talking. And I had to pretend total interest in everything we were seeing and doing. There were times when I thought I’d explode from all the excitement bottled up inside.” Not seven weeks later, in a special election conducted against eight far better known and more experienced opponents, the twenty-nine-year-old Lyndon Johnson was elected Buchanan’s successor. How was victory accomplished against older, veteran politicians, all prominent, well-established citizens in a district where, at the outset, Lyndon Johnson was hardly known?

  For a start, Lyndon’s almost instantaneous decision to run cleared the most important obstacle to victory. While the other eight candidates put off their decision until Buchanan’s widow determined if she would run, Lyndon publicly declared three days after the funeral. Buchanan had represented the district for nearly a quarter of a century; it might have been deemed inappropriate to challenge his fifty-seven-year-old widow, who had publicly hinted that she desired the seat. “She’s an old woman,” Sam Johnson shrewdly counseled his son. “She’s too old for a fight. If she knows she’s going to have a fight, she won’t run. Announce now—before she announces. If you do, she won’t run.” Sam’s prediction hit the mark; after Lyndon announced, she resolved not to run.