To at least one observer, Johnson seemed rather uninterested in the war. Alice Glass, a shade under six feet tall, with creamy skin and long, reddish-blond hair, a woman so spectacular that the noted New York society photographer Arnold Genthe called her “the most beautiful woman I have ever seen,” was a small-town girl from Marlin, Texas, who had been installed as mistress of Longlea, an 800-acre estate in the northern Virginia hunt country, by the immensely wealthy publisher of the Austin American-Statesman, Charles E. Marsh, by whom she had borne two children. Witty, elegant, hostess of a brilliant table and a sparkling salon of politicians and intellectuals, she possessed a political acumen so keen that the toughest Texas politicians enjoyed talking politics with her; it was Alice Glass who devised the compromise (“Give Herman the dam and let Lyndon have the land”) that pulled the Congressman and the ruler of Brown & Root off the collision course that, in 1937, had threatened Johnson’s career. Alice Glass had been Lyndon Johnson’s mistress for more than three years, in a passionate love affair of which Marsh, patronizing and paternalistic toward the young Congressman, was unaware. (In 1939, the publisher had helped Johnson financially by selling him land in Austin at a giveaway price. In 1940, he offered Johnson an oil deal that would have made him rich; Johnson refused it, because, he said, if the public knew he had oil interests, “it would kill me politically.”) Observing Johnson’s willingness to sit silently listening to Alice read poetry, knowing the risks he took in being the lover of the consort of a man so vital to his political career—this affair stands out in his life as perhaps the only episode in it that ran counter to his ambitions—the Longlea circle believed that his feelings for Alice were unique, a belief shared by Alice, who had told intimates that she and Johnson had discussed marriage. In that era, a divorced man would be effectively barred from public office, but she said that Lyndon had promised to get divorced anyway and accept one of the several job offers he had received to become a corporate lobbyist in Washington. As a result, she kept fending off marriage proposals from Marsh. “She wouldn’t marry Charles after she met Lyndon,” her sister, Mary Louise, says. The alacrity with which Johnson leapt into the 1941 Senate race when Morris Sheppard died, however, made her realize that her lover’s political ambitions would always take priority, and that divorce was not a realistic hope, and, after the 1941 campaign, she finally agreed to marry the powerful publisher. But, an idealist herself who had first been attracted to Johnson because she felt he was an idealist (“a young man who was going to save the world”), she still believed in his idealism, and when, despite her marriage, he asked her to visit him in California, she went. He was, she felt, a young man on his way to fight a war or at least to participate in the war effort.
The contrast between Johnson’s activities and the grim battles being reported daily in the newspapers was not lost on Alice, however, and she grew disillusioned. Years later, jokingly suggesting in a letter to a mutual friend, Brown & Root lobbyist Frank C. (Posh) Oltorf, that they collaborate on a book on Johnson, she said, “I can write a very illuminating chapter on his military career in Los Angeles, with photographs, letters from voice teachers, and photographers who tried to teach him which was the best side of his face.” Her sister says that “She was disgusted, just disgusted with him after that trip,” although she was still powerfully attracted to him sexually. Alice’s closest friend, Welly Hopkins’ wife, says simply: “Lyndon was the love of Alice’s life.” As for Johnson, his feelings for Alice no longer precluded seeing other women.
After Alice returned east, “we had an interesting time up and down the West Coast,” Connally says. In every city, the two young officers stayed at the best hotels—the Town House Hotel in Los Angeles, the Del Coronado in San Diego, the Empire in San Francisco. Sometimes the Navy paid; sometimes Alice’s husband paid: Charles Marsh had arranged for Johnson to have the use of “due bills” (credits from hotels in payment for advertising) that hotel chains had given his various newspapers. The two young naval officers went on lighthearted shopping expeditions. In San Francisco, in a store owned by a Japanese named Matsomoto, who was about to be interned as an alien, “we bought robes and blouses at just giveaway prices—he followed us out into the street just begging us to buy more,” Connally says. Connally purchased a gray silk robe with blue piping that forty years later was still one of his cherished possessions.
DURING THOSE TEN WEEKS, the movements of the Johnson Squadron were cloaked in secrecy. There were strategic reasons for this, of course. Back in December, when Johnson had entered the service, the Houston Post, a friendly paper, had noted that by going to the West Coast he had been “placed in line for possible early action against the Japs,” but, friendly though the Post was, it had been compelled to add, “Of course, if Mr. Johnson should be merely getting himself a safe, warm naval berth for use as a pre-campaign headquarters and [to] cash in on his patriotism, the purpose of his entering the service would become obvious, and the voters would be certain to react accordingly.” The Post, and voters in his own congressional district in Texas, might not, should they learn the nature and location of his activities as December passed into January, and January into February, March and April, view Sun Valley, Idaho, as the front line for “action against the Japs”; they might even view his job as “a safe, warm naval berth”—they might even “react accordingly.” Another strategic reason involved Charles Marsh, who had business interests on the West Coast, and flew there while his wife was with Johnson. Wanting to visit Johnson, Marsh had his secretaries telephone Johnson’s office in Washington to ascertain his whereabouts, but since Johnson’s secretary, Mary Rather, was able to tell Marsh’s secretaries that because of military secrecy, she did not know where Johnson was, the danger of the publisher dropping in unexpectedly on his wife and the young man of whom he was fond was averted.
The secrecy, however, extended also to the Navy. The movements of the two officers appear to have been almost as much of a mystery to their superiors as to the voters. Connally is careful to add to his description of the “fun” they had in California, “in spite of these little incidents, we were really working.” Even so, their commanding officer appears to have encountered some difficulty in keeping track of their movements. On February 15, more than two weeks after Johnson had been dispatched to the Coast, Professor Barker was contacted, not by Johnson but by one of Johnson’s secretaries in Washington, O. J. Weber, who said he would be forwarding some reports from his boss. “Where is that man?” Barker asked Weber. “Tell him to let me know where he’s going to be so I can send him reports, orders, etc. from time to time or we’ll get in a jam.” When Weber provided Barker with an address at which Johnson could be reached, Barker wrote the Lieutenant Commander, “I’m very glad to know your whereabouts as we have had trouble getting any address to which to send mail. Please keep us advised.” Johnson thereupon wrote Barker that “our messages and letters are evidently crossing each other.” But the difficulties in communications—always, of course, a problem in a combat zone—continued. When, on March 5, Johnson sent progress reports on various shipyards to his superior, Barker wrote back that he was glad to have them, but added, “I’ve been wondering how things were progressing” in other assignments Johnson had been given before he left Washington.
One thing at which Johnson was working was politics. Every day, not one but several letters from his congressional office would arrive at the Empire Hotel in San Francisco with reports on various district problems—ranging from appointments to the service academies and rural postmasterships to procuring for Austin businessmen priorities that would enable them to obtain scarce raw materials; moreover, in Texarkana, where Brown & Root was building a military depot, heavy pressure from the Office of Price Administration was needed to reduce high rentals, “which,” Weber reported, “is forcing Brown & Root to lose many men each week.” Johnson would write instructions on the handling of each problem in the margins of the reports, or would reply by letter if his instructions were detaile
d. And he and Connally were also wrestling with the larger political problem. In the first excitement of the outbreak of war, and Johnson’s going on active service, it had been assumed by everyone—including Johnson—that he would certainly not be running for the Senate nomination in the summer of 1942, and he had promised to support former Governor James V. Allred, a longtime ally, against Pappy O’Daniel. When Roosevelt had given Allred his blessing, Allred had formally entered the race. But now, as the May 31 filing deadline drew closer, although everyone else concerned still felt that Johnson could not possibly run, Johnson was no longer so certain. The upcoming election would fill one Texas senatorial seat for six years; the other was held by Tom Connally, re-elected just two years before and as immensely popular as ever. Johnson felt, John Connally recalls, that “he might not ever have another chance as good as this.” Connally and Wirtz told him—Connally with the diffidence of a subordinate, Wirtz with the quiet certitude that made him the “only man Johnson listened to”—that running was not feasible; that, as Connally recalls, “war fever was extremely high at this time, patriotism was high, and it would have indicated he was more interested in his political future than the war.” But Johnson appears to have been unwilling to let even a war defer his ambition; he kept trying to find an excuse to escape from his promise to Allred and to run. Although President Roosevelt made it clear that he wanted the Allred candidacy to go forward as agreed, so that there would be no split in the liberal vote, Johnson refused to drop the subject, and he and Connally analyzed the situation from every angle, day after day—“this went on for weeks,” Connally recalls—and Johnson began quietly maneuvering to be “drafted” for the nomination.
He was also working diligently at obtaining promotion within the Navy. While he was not reporting often to his superior, Professor Barker, he was lobbying with Barker’s boss, Undersecretary Forrestal, for a job in which the roles of superior and subordinate would be reversed. And he wrote to Forrestal’s personal aide, Commander John Gingrich:
All over the place there is in evidence great need of positiveness, leadership, and direction. There is much that I should be doing that I am not. One does not function well without authority and responsibility.
When and if you or the Boss run into a problem that requires energy, determination, and a modicum of experience give me the word. I need more work.
Lady Bird says that the period from January to April of 1942 was “a very frustrating time of high hopes which didn’t come to fruition.… That [was] a nonproductive few months, and he didn’t like it a bit.” A “constant stream of letters” was coming back to her, she says, “and after a while I could tell in his letters that there was an increasing frustration and feeling that he wasn’t being useful, he wasn’t getting the best out of his time.… Lyndon had been used to running his own show in Congress—and in the NYA, too.”
In fact, her husband’s hopes were higher than Lady Bird may have known. He apparently had in mind for himself a post in which he would no longer have to salute Admirals—because he would be an Admiral himself. At least an Admiral. He apparently had in mind a job in which he would be not only an Admiral but in a position to exercise authority over other Admirals. “He wanted something big in Washington, really big,” Tommy Corcoran was to recall. “He had everyone working on it for him. Wirtz was working.…”
A letter from Wirtz at the time is more specific, and also casts light on Johnson’s later contentions that during these months his sole aim was to get into combat. On February 23, 1942, Johnson’s most trusted adviser, to whom he had been talking frequently on the telephone, wrote him: “I can appreciate how you feel and how much you would like to have more power to get things done.” Wirtz said he had therefore attempted—unsuccessfully—to see Roosevelt and had seen presidential aide Pa Watson, and had “suggested that you be made Admiral and given the same comparative job in the Navy that Knudsen has in the Army.”
William S. Knudsen had just been named a Lieutenant General and placed in charge of all production for the Army, giving him authority therefore over hundreds of factories producing billions of dollars’ worth of war materiel (and over other Generals working on production). Johnson was lobbying to be placed in a similar position over all Navy production, and over the Admirals responsible for it. But Knudsen was a famous production genius, an immigrant’s son who had risen from the assembly line to the presidency of General Motors and had thereby been in administrative charge of one of the nation’s greatest industrial enterprises. The fact that Lyndon Johnson, who had never directed any industrial enterprise (unless one counts the Texas NYA, whose main function was to provide campus jobs for high school and college students), wanted a comparable job shows how lavish was his appraisal of his own abilities.
LOBBY THOUGH HE MIGHT at politics and promotion, however, his lobbying was yielding him nothing. Writing to the White House on March 7, he tendered assurances of his support for Allred, and then added a handwritten note, ostensibly to his friend, Roosevelt’s secretary Grace Tully, that he knew she would show to the President:
Things are very dull here with me. How I yearn for activity and an assignment where I can be reasonably productive. I hope sometime you run across something that you think I can do well 24 hours per day.
But the reply, from Roosevelt himself, contained a paragraph indicating that the President regarded the Allred nomination as all but settled; the only other line was, “I hope all goes well with you. My best wishes to you. As ever …”
And as March, the fourth month of war, drew to an end, time was running out for Lyndon Johnson. He had requested a transfer to Pearl Harbor—although what he planned to do there, without any service in or training for the Navy, is unclear. (As it was evidently unclear to his superior; in a letter that month, in which Barker expressed continued exasperation over the communications problem—“I have no address for you”—Barker wrote, “I don’t see how we can find an excuse to send you to Hawaii.”) Also unclear is the degree of enthusiasm with which Johnson was pursuing this request; if he was asking the White House for help in getting into active service, there exists no evidence of it in Roosevelt’s papers, which contain requests from Johnson only for what Corcoran calls “something big” back in Washington. At least two of Johnson’s older advisers—the two most aware of his true role in the war effort—now expressed, each in his own way, the feeling that Johnson was not trying hard enough to get into more active service. “Get your ass out of this country at once to where there is danger, and then get back as soon as you can to real work,” the arrogant Charles Marsh wrote him. “If you can’t sell the Navy on ordering you out, you are not as good as I think you are.… It [the work in Washington] may be in Man Power; it may be in running the congressional campaign; it may be in Congress.… But for God’s sake, get going and quit talking.” Alvin Wirtz’s advice was, as always, tendered in his calm, courteous manner, but while considerably more understated than Marsh’s, it was, in essence, the same advice. After assuring Johnson that he was still trying to get him a post in Washington comparable to Knudsen’s, Wirtz added that “I am doubtful whether it would be altogether advisable for you to be called into the White House before summer and before you have some more active service.”
The wisdom of Wirtz’s advice was becoming clearer every day. Johnson may have felt that an important enough Washington post—one he was, moreover, ordered to take by his Commander-in-Chief in the White House so that he would have no choice but to accept the assignment instead of service in a combat zone—would redeem his campaign pledge to the people of Texas. But no such post had been offered—and what would the voters’ reaction be if he left the Navy without ever having seen battle? The Houston Post (“if Mr. Johnson should be merely getting himself a safe, warm naval berth … the voters would be certain to react accordingly”) was a friendly paper; what would the San Antonio Light say, or Colonel Petsch, or the none-too-friendly Dallas News, should he return to Congress without ever having been “in
the trenches” or “on the deck of a battleship”—without, in fact, ever having been anywhere near a combat zone? Johnson’s secretaries were continually giving inquiring constituents the impression that while the Congressman was, so far as they knew, at last report, on the Pacific Coast, he was there only en route to a destination thousands of miles farther west—the war zone in the Pacific—and indeed might be there already, for all they knew. But voters went on asking—out of solicitude—where the Congressman was. And on March 13, a minor state official and Pappy O’Daniel supporter, O. P. Lockhart, apparently having learned Johnson’s true whereabouts, publicly suggested that if Johnson was going to spend the war on the West Coast, he might as well return to Washington, where at least he would be serving the district; Lockhart called on him either to resign from Congress or to return to it. Rushing out a reply, Wirtz said that “Lyndon Johnson is rendering patriotic and valuable service,” but did not specify what it was. Marsh’s managing editor, Charles E. Green, chimed in, writing that “government censorship does not permit me to say what Lyndon Johnson is doing.… But he’s doing a job for his nation.…”
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