Means of Ascent

by Robert A. Caro

  The next weeks were a bad time for her. There were few telephone calls, and they were from Hawaii and then from New Zealand, and then there was one from Australia in which her husband said he was about to go into the combat zone; the weather in Washington was warm, and the windows in the Johnson apartment would be open, so that Gladys Montgomery, who lived in the apartment below, was awakened when the phone would ring “around three or four in the morning,” and Mrs. Montgomery could not help overhearing the words with which Lady Bird ended each call: “Good night, my beloved.” Then, for some time, there were no calls at all; the next word was a report that her husband was in a naval hospital in the Fiji Islands, dangerously ill. There were weeks of worry.

  During these weeks, she ran his office. There were no longer any instructions in the margin of a letter to help her, although with a particularly thorny question she could call John Connally or Alvin Wirtz in Austin. She was on her own.

  Every day brought some new problem to be solved. A relative of a constituent had died in Palestine, and a lawyer from Palestine was needed to handle the estate. When Lady Bird went to the State Department, she was told arrangements would have to be made through the British Embassy (“I didn’t see the Ambassador—I wasn’t that size of an applicant,” Mrs. Johnson says—“but I did get to see” an official, “a very nice gentleman, with courtly manners. He said, ‘Won’t you join me for a bit of tea?,’ and he reached into the drawer with an almost conspiratorial wink, and took out two lumps of sugar and dropped one in my cup and one in his”).

  “There were always mothers who said they hadn’t heard from Johnny in months and months,” she recalls. “Would I please find out where Johnny was.” There were “a whole lot of folks who wanted to get into Officers Candidate School, knowing they were going to be drafted sooner or later.” There were the businessmen with half-completed plants “so you had to plead their cause before the War Production Board or whatever.… ‘Strategic materials’ and ‘OCS’ and lots of things became just a part of your vocabulary.…”

  And she learned she could solve the problems. “You know,” she would recall, “the squeaking wheel gets the grease. And if you keep after the Army Department or the Navy Department or the Red Cross long enough, and pester them enough, we could help them. For one thing, it was down the street from us, and it was sixteen hundred miles from them, so you could help them.” The constituent got his lawyer from Palestine, and Austin got its Air Force base, and a lot of Johnnys were located, and Lady Bird Johnson heard mothers sobbing with relief on the telephone when she told them that their son was alive, he just hadn’t bothered to write, you know how young men are.

  She learned, moreover, that she could solve problems in her own way. She could never use her husband’s methods, but she could use her own. If she was a squeaking wheel, it was a wheel that squeaked very politely. Recalling forty years later the lessons she learned during the summer of 1942 about helping constituents, she says: “If you’ll just be real nice about it, and real, real earnest, courteous and persistent, you could help them.” She never let her smile slip, or raised her voice, or said a harsh word, but she never stopped trying to solve a problem—and a lot of them were solved. Edward A. Clark, an Austin attorney who needed a great deal of help, both for himself and for his clients, with the War Production Board and other government agencies, and who had not looked forward at all to having to rely on a woman, says: “When she took over that office, she was wonderful. She gave wonderful service. And she did it without ever raising her voice or fussing—she never shouted even at a secretary. She thanked anyone who brought her a pencil. She was just as sweet and kind to them. She was grateful to everyone.” And as she got the lawyer, and the Air Force base, and the other things the constituents wanted, Lady Bird Johnson got something for herself, too—something she had never had before: confidence.

  “The real brains of the office were O.J. and Mary,” she is careful to say, in recalling 1942. “And yet I played a useful role.”

  When, years later, she would be asked how the summer of ’42 had changed her, she would always, as was invariable with her, put the changes in the context of her husband. “The very best part of it,” she would say, “was that it gave me a lot more understanding of Lyndon. By the time the end of the day came, when I had shifted the gears in my mind innumerable times, I could know what Lyndon had been through.… I was more prepared after that to understand what sometimes had seemed to be Lyndon’s unnecessary irritations.…” When, at the end of the day, Nellie or someone else wanted her to make still another decision—where to eat dinner, for example—she would “get almost mad at them.”

  But she also saw some changes that were not in the context of her husband.

  “After a few months,” she says, “I really felt that if it was ever necessary, I could make my own living—and that’s a good feeling to have. That’s very good for you, for your self-esteem and for your place in the world—because, well, I didn’t have a home. I didn’t have any children, and although I had a tremendously exciting, vital life, I didn’t have any home base, so to speak, except for Lyndon, and it’s good to know that you yourself, aside from a man, have some capabilities, and I found that out, er, er, er, to my amazement, rather.”

  Forty years later, Mrs. Johnson was renowned for her graciousness, her dignity, her poise under even the most difficult conditions, for the capability as a political speaker and as a President’s wife that she had displayed as the First Lady of the United States. During interviews for this book, she was invariably helpful, cooperative, pleasant, but she seldom showed the depths of her emotions. When the interviews reached 1942, however, Lady Bird Johnson suddenly blurted out: “1942 was really quite a great year!”

  SPEAKING OF THE QUALITIES that Lady Bird Johnson revealed for the first time while her husband was away at war, Nellie Connally says: “I think she changed. But I think it was always there. I just don’t think it was allowed out.”

  After Johnson returned from the war (“I was shaken when I saw him,” Lady Bird remembers. “He had been through a lot. He had lost [weight].… My feeling was at once protective, and I wanted to get him a lot of milkshakes”), it was again not allowed out. Mrs. Johnson says that after her husband’s return, “I did not go into the office regularly.” Nothing could elicit from Mrs. Johnson’s lips one word that could possibly be construed as a criticism of her husband. Oh no, she says with emphasis, she was not at all disappointed to stop working and return to her previous life. “I was glad to turn over the responsibility.” The turnover was complete. Any illusions Mrs. Johnson may have held about now being included in her husband’s political discussions were shattered at one of the first of those discussions, when she ventured to stay in the room after it began. “We’ll see you later, Bird,” her husband said, dismissing her. He treated her as he had before.

  So impressed had Austin political and business leaders been with Mrs. Johnson that one day, Ed Clark recalls, when a group of them were at lunch, someone said, “kidding, you know,” “Maybe she’s going to decide that she likes that office, and then he’s going to wish he hadn’t gone off to war.” This joking became so widespread that it reached print in district newspapers; a letter to the Goldthwaite Eagle, for example, said that instead of re-electing Johnson to Congress in absentia, “I’d call a convention … and nominate Mrs. Lyndon Johnson for Congress to take her husband’s place while he is fighting for his country. She would make a good congressman.” The joking reached Johnson’s ears—and after he returned, he took pains to put it to rest, to make clear that his wife’s role as caretaker of his office while he was in the Pacific, and indeed her role in his overall political life, had never been significant. Once, in Austin, with a group of people present, he was asked if he discussed his political problems with Lady Bird. He replied that of course he did. “I talk everything over with her.” Then Lyndon Johnson paused. “Of course,” he said, “I talk my problems over with a lot of people. I have a nigger maid,
and I talk my problems over with her, too.”

  In other areas, also, Lyndon Johnson treated his wife as he had before. On August 19, Alice Marsh wired Johnson: HOPE WE CAN HAVE THAT BIRTHDAY PARTY. Whether or not they did is not known, but Alice and Johnson resumed their affair. The weekends at Longlea started again.

  Lady Bird’s Aunt Effie knew how much her niece wanted a house, and now she told the young wife that she would pay most of the purchase price if Lady Bird found one that she wanted to buy. Moreover, there would be money from the estate of Uncle Claude Patillo of Alabama, who had recently died. By the Fall of 1942 his estate was being settled, and Mrs. Johnson was informed that she would eventually be receiving about $21,000. “Now we can go and get that house,” she told her husband.

  The two-story brick colonial at 4921 30th Place, a quiet street in the northwest section of Washington, was a modest eight-room house with a screened veranda at the rear, but she loved it. Her husband liked it too, but he insisted on bargaining and issuing ultimata to the owners. When they refused to accept his “take-it-or-leave-it” figure, the deal seemed dead. Coming home to their apartment one day, Lady Bird found her husband talking politics with Connally and asked if she could discuss the house with him. Her husband listened to her arguments, and then, without a word of reply, resumed his conversation with Connally as if she had never spoken. For once in her life—the only time in her married life that any of her friends can recall—Lady Bird Johnson lashed back at her husband.

  “I want that house!” she screamed. “Every woman wants a home of her own. I’ve lived out of a suitcase ever since we’ve been married. I have no home to look forward to. I have no children to look forward to. I have nothing to look forward to but another election.” In the retelling of this story, the denouement has a patina of cuteness. Johnson was reported to have asked Connally, “What should I do?,” to which Connally is said to have replied: “I’d buy the house.” This may not have been the actual dialogue, but by the end of 1942 the house was bought—for $18,000, about $10,000 of which Aunt Effie put up—and Lady Bird had her home. “You see,” Mrs. Johnson carefully explains, “I didn’t feel unhappy. I was happy about the house.”

  5

  Marking Time

  THE SIDEWALKS OF WASHINGTON were filled with uniforms by the time Lyndon Johnson returned from the South Pacific—khaki and navy and the off-grays of Australians and New Zealanders—and by the end of the next year a surprising number of them sported service ribbons from different theaters of war, and then the ribbons bore the stars that signified major battles: North Africa, the Solomons, the Aleutians, Sicily, the skies over France and Germany. Seemingly endless caravans of Army trucks and jeeps rumbled through the city on their way to the huge embarkation areas north and south of the capital. Near the Mall, the drab wooden “temps” hastily built during World War I and never torn down had sprouted long wings and annexes. Soldiers with fixed bayonets walked beats outside the tall iron fence in front of the White House, and the cars that pulled up into the driveway disgorged Admirals and Generals. Washington was a city at war.

  For a while after his return, Lyndon Johnson attempted to find a place in the war—at, of course, a rank he considered appropriate. The job he had his eye on now was Secretary of the Navy, and when, in October, 1942, the man in that job, Frank Knox, was away from Washington on an inspection tour for the President, Johnson planted with Walter Winchell, Drew Pearson and other friendly columnists the rumor that Knox was about to resign and that he himself was in line for the post. Noting that if Johnson was appointed Secretary, he would be working with MacArthur, Pearson wrote: “Lyndon Johnson as Secretary of the Navy, Douglas MacArthur at the helm—that ought to be a good combination.” George W. Stimpson, the Washington correspondent for several Texas newspapers, writing that the suggestion of Johnson’s appointment “has caught on like wildfire,” said that if Johnson was appointed, he would, at thirty-four, be the second youngest Cabinet officer in history; Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury at thirty-three, had been the youngest. (“Johnson,” Stimpson wrote, “spent several months on active duty as a Lieutenant Commander, in the Southwest Pacific area. He ate, slept and fought alongside men in all branches of the service in half a dozen hot spots.”) The wildfire, however, was limited to credulous journalists; Roosevelt, although still fond of Johnson, and willing to chat with him over breakfast, was apparently unwilling to consider giving him a high wartime post. Next came mysterious leaks (from Johnson, to reporters) of an imminent “secret government mission” to London—the kind of liaison mission that Harry Hopkins was performing between Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, perhaps. (“Johnson,” the Associated Press reported, “has been conferring almost daily at the War, Navy Department and the White House.”) But there was no mission to London either.

  Once Johnson realized that he was not to be given a high position in the war, the change in his attitude toward it was dramatic. In O. J. Weber’s recollection, “He regarded it as an interference with his agenda.” He resented its demands on his staff, but, despite the strategic placement of Willard Deason in the Navy’s Bureau of Personnel, and Johnson’s influence with Forrestal himself, the Congressman was defeated in a string of engagements with young aides, who, otherwise totally loyal to his service, persisted in regarding service to their country as a higher priority. Weber, for example, was so determined to serve that, after failing a Navy eye examination, he drank “gallons of carrot juice” in an attempt to improve his vision, and applied for enlistment as an Air Force communications cadet. But every time he was notified to report for duty, Weber recalls, Johnson would say, “Well, I just can’t spare you right now. I’ll call someone and have him take care of it.”

  “This happened two or three times,” Weber says, “and I really wanted to get in the war.” The young secretary outmaneuvered Johnson by telephoning the colonel in charge of enlistments and telling him that the next time he received one of the Johnson-initiated telephone calls, the colonel should say that Weber was vitally needed in the Air Force. John Connally, who had been only temporarily deferring to Johnson’s wishes in accompanying him to the West Coast, now refused to leave the Navy, and kept pushing for combat duty. After a staff job in North Africa, in 1945 he was finally assigned to the aircraft carrier Essex, operating off Japan, and rapidly won a reputation throughout the fleet for his coolness in directing the carrier’s fighter planes as its group combat officer. A young Austin attorney, Charles Herring, turned out to be a competent replacement for Connally, and when Herring told Johnson that his number had been called in the draft, Johnson attempted to persuade him not to go, insisting that the opportunity of working in Washington was too good to pass up. Then when Herring said that his orders had already been cut, Johnson said, “Hell, I’ll cancel that right now.” And when Herring insisted on serving his country, Johnson exploded: “You’re crazy!”

  Not long after Johnson’s return from the war, Roosevelt disappointed him in another matter. Johnson’s possession of a measure of political influence that lifted him above the ranks of other junior congressmen was based on his fund-raising efforts during the 1940 elections. In a stroke of inspiration, he had seen in the moribund Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee an opportunity for personal political advantage. Obtaining an informal post with the committee, he had arranged for newly rich Texas contractors and independent oilmen to make contributions to it, with the stipulation that they be distributed at his discretion. This control over money urgently needed by congressmen running for re-election had given him their gratitude, and, in the House in general, a new respect, the first respect not based on his relationship with Roosevelt or Rayburn; his role with the campaign committee had given him his first taste of national power of his own. He had expected to perform the same role in 1942.

  Between 1940 and 1942, however, Edwin W. Pauley, a burly, loquacious one-time oil-field roustabout who had become a successful California wildcatter, had emerged as a Democratic fund-raisin
g force. His success in obtaining campaign contributions for the Democratic National Committee in 1940 had led Democratic National Chairman Edward J. Flynn, Boss of the Bronx and a longtime Roosevelt intimate, to name him the party’s secretary, and in 1942, the President, impressed with him, appointed him treasurer. By October, journalists were referring to the oilman’s fund-raising activities as “the great hot spell,” for, as one wrote, “he turned on the heat to a degree that left many rich gentlemen permanently scorched,” and succeeded in lifting the party out of debt. Antagonized by Johnson’s aggressiveness—Johnson had been given only an informal post with the Congressional Campaign Committee in 1940 because of Flynn’s objection to any formal connection—Flynn was not anxious to see him play even an informal role in the 1942 congressional campaigns. More to the point, because of Pauley’s emergence, Johnson was no longer needed. His ace in the hole had been the fact that only he possessed access to the Texas oilmen; when, in 1940, Flynn had attempted to circumvent him and obtain their contributions himself, they had refused to contribute except through Johnson. Because of their common interests—and, in some cases, business ties—Pauley had access to the same money. When, in 1942, Flynn solicited Texas contributions, there was some reluctance—Brown & Root and liberal businessmen such as Stanley Marcus of the Neiman-Marcus department store refused to give except through Johnson—but when it was explained that handling all contributions through the National Committee would be more efficient, most of the big Texas contributors followed Flynn’s suggestion.