Johnson was especially emphatic about his role in dealing with the FCC: he said he had no role. And this, too, was repeated by the press, at least in part because it had no choice. Life magazine reported that “The FCC leans to a defensive attitude concerning its treatment of the Johnsons’ radio-tv interests and insists that the President—either as representative or senator—has never tried to affect agency rulings. There is no evidence that he did intervene by word or deed.” The Wall Street Journal stated that “FCC public records show not a single intervention by Representative, Senator, Vice President or President Johnson in quest of a favor for his wife’s company.”
But although in 1942 and 1943 Lyndon Johnson’s political influence was not great, it was quite strategically situated in regard to the purchase of a radio station. In the “very close-knit group,” in which, as Virginia Durr put it, “there was a great intertwining of both personal and intergovernmental relationships,” three members were intimately connected with the governmental agency whose approval of the purchase would be necessary. Clifford Durr was an FCC commissioner, one of the seven-member board that ran the agency; W. Ervin “Red” James was Durr’s chief assistant at the Commission. As for Lyndon Johnson’s bluntest tool, barely a year into private practice, already becoming known as “the greatest wirepuller in history,” Tommy Corcoran had many wires to pull in the FCC—including some that ran all the way to the top: both the Commission’s chairman, James Fly, a former classmate of Corcoran’s at Harvard Law, and its former chief counsel, William J. Dempsey, a thirty-two-year-old Corcoran protégé, owed their appointments largely to his influence. (Dempsey’s predecessor, insufficiently responsive to a telephone call from “Tommy Corcoran at the White House,” had found himself dismissed on twenty-four hours’ notice.) And while Dempsey was now in private practice (sharing an office suite with Corcoran, with both men representing private clients before a notably accommodating FCC), many officials still at the top of the FCC were indebted to Corcoran for their jobs: the agency had, in the knowing Washington term, been thoroughly “Corcoranized.”
Johnson also had at his command a weapon much more blunt than Tommy the Cork—and much more powerful. Sam Rayburn was as much a symbol of integrity in Washington as Corcoran was a symbol of the use of influence. Johnson was able to use Rayburn’s name—feared throughout the capital—even though Rayburn might not be aware it was being used.
While radio stations were regulated by the FCC, the FCC was itself regulated—by Congress, which gave regulatory agencies their money and their powers. “The antennae of most commissioners,” it would be written, “are sensitive to the faintest signals from Capitol Hill.…” At no agency was this sensitivity more acute than at the FCC. “Of all the watchdogs,” Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson were to write, “the FCC seems the most eager to sit up and beg or roll over and play dead at the command of Congress.” If the commissioners’ antennae were sensitive to signals from congressmen, the antennae of Commission staffers were sensitive to the relay of such signals from the commissioners. Albert A. Evangelista, who during the 1940s, as an engineer in the FCC’s Standard Broadcast Division, handled preliminary applications for radio station licenses, says that the process “was different when a congressman intervened.” When a congressman contacted a commissioner about an application from a favored constituent, the commissioner would “route it to the right department.” “If it was ‘congressional,’ it would get priority,” Evangelista recalls. “When we got referrals from a congressman, that was something I had to work on right away.” James E. Barr, who in 1943 was a senior engineer in the FCC’s Standard Broadcast Division, says: “What you were afraid of was that” if you did not act favorably or fast enough on an application in which a congressman was interested, the congressman “would call a commissioner, and the commissioner would call and say, ‘Put ’em on the air.’ There was a lot more political influence in those early days.”
And sensitivity had never been higher than it was at this moment. If there was a single year of maximum susceptibility to congressional pressures at the FCC, it was 1943, the year in which Lady Bird Johnson purchased her radio station. In 1943, the Commission was fighting with Congress not over increases in its budget or definitions of its power, but for its very existence.
Having learned that Representative Eugene Cox of Georgia, ranking majority member of the Rules Committee and a leader of the House’s Southern bloc, had used a $2,500 “legal fee” from a Georgia radio station to purchase stock in the station, FCC Chairman Fly in January, 1943 (the month, as it happened, in which Mrs. Johnson was submitting her application to the Commission), had announced that the station’s license would not be renewed without a public hearing. Cox’s response was to call the FCC “the nastiest nest of rats to be found in this country.” Charging that Fly “is guilty of a monstrous abuse of power and is rapidly becoming the most dangerous man in the government,” Cox proposed the establishment of a House committee to investigate the FCC “Gestapo”—and around Cox’s proposal crystallized Congress’s long-building resentment of the New Deal and “bureaucratic dictatorship.” The House named Cox himself chairman of the investigating committee—thereby, as T.R.B. wrote in The New Republic, “putting a judicial wig and robe on an accused man to try his own accusers.” For the next six months, from January to July, 1943, the Cox Committee conducted an investigation characterized by the questioning in secret of witnesses who were summoned without warning and who were denied not only counsel but even access to transcripts of their own testimony. Against editorial criticism—“indecent,” The New Republic said; the Washington Post editorialized that Cox “has perverted and distorted the important investigative functions of Congress to intimidate those who exposed his own corrupt practices”—Congress closed ranks; indeed, a second committee, the Communist-hunting Dies Committee, began to focus on the FCC. “All around Washington,” one of the Commission’s key staffers was to recall, “we heard it whispered that FCC would get it in the neck. We wondered where the ax would fall and how deeply it would cut.” Then, in February, the FCC learned that the ax might cut very deeply indeed: an amendment, added to an appropriations bill, proposed eliminating all appropriations for the FCC, “thereby,” as one representative put it, “cutting the Commission off without a cent, thus in effect abolishing it.” As a liberal Congressman wrote, “all the confident forces of conservatism and reaction were arrayed behind that amendment,” and “those forces constituted an unquestioned majority in the House.” The FCC had, in fact, only one real hope on Capitol Hill, and it was Sam Rayburn, who was to recall, “I wrote the law that passed the Federal Communications Commission.… I was in on the borning,” and who had proven before, more than once (most recently a year and a half before, in the extension of the Selective Service Act), that, because of the respect in which he was held and because of his unique force of personality, he could stand on the triple dais—alone against a majority of his colleagues—and bend the House to his will. Lyndon Johnson was “Sam Rayburn’s boy”—that was common knowledge in Washington. The FCC could be expected to be sensitive to any requests from Sam Rayburn’s boy. Furthermore, the Rayburn connection aside, the FCC, so short on allies in Congress, could be expected during this life and death struggle to be particularly sensitive to a congressman who was actively and energetically fighting in Congress on its behalf.
And that was precisely what this congressman was doing. During the very month in which Mrs. Lyndon Johnson was applying to the FCC, Lyndon Johnson, who had never before displayed any particular interest in that agency, was making himself its champion.
The assistance he gave was discreet, secret—and crucial. He didn’t communicate with Durr directly. “Lyndon sort of kept away from me,” the FCC commissioner was to recall; “we didn’t talk about it.” But Lyndon communicated with Durr’s chief assistant, Red James, in late-night telephone calls during which, speaking in code—Rayburn was “the bald-headed fellow,” House Majority Leader John McCormack
“the Irishman,” Cox “the chairman”—Johnson provided inside information, vital to the FCC, on the direction of the next congressional attack, and advice on what the Commission could do to counter it. “He was sort of acting as a spotter, telling us where to put the next shell, and giving us Sam Rayburn’s reactions,” Durr was to recall. Nor was Johnson’s assistance to the Commission limited to information and advice. As the House massed more and more solidly against the FCC, its only hope seemed to be Rayburn’s intervention, and Johnson was working to procure that intervention, playing on the Speaker’s feeling that Cox’s investigative methods (and his $2,500 “legal fee”) were bringing his beloved House into disrepute; trying to overcome the Speaker’s reluctance to set aside tradition and interfere with the internal workings of a committee. And on at least two occasions, when the FCC’s cause looked particularly desperate, he succeeded in persuading Rayburn to come to its defense. At one particularly pivotal point, when the Commission learned that Cox was planning to make public an affair that the married Chairman Fly was reportedly having, James, in an attempt to head Cox off, took “this up with LBJ”—who took it up with Rayburn. Johnson reported Rayburn’s reaction to James: the Speaker had “called the Chairman in, and told him, ‘Now, Gene, there, Gene. There ain’t gonna be no sex!’ ” Cox was a power in the House, but Rayburn was Rayburn, whom no man crossed; Cox’s plans to publicize Fly’s alleged affair were dropped—abruptly and completely. Then, in what was to be characterized as “an unusual and bold step” to procure Rayburn’s help, Durr sent several petitions not to the Cox Committee but directly to the Speaker, setting out the facts about Cox’s $2,500 “retainer” and asking the Speaker to remove Cox as the committee’s chairman. And one midnight, James was awakened by a phone call: “This voice says, ‘All right, no names. But today the bald-headed fellow met with the Irishman and the chairman. He said this, ‘You’ve been my friend for thirty-five years, but I can’t stand this any longer and you’re going to have to step down!’ ” Cox was Rayburn’s friend, but the House was Rayburn’s love, and Cox was sullying its reputation. Cox abruptly announced his resignation from the investigating committee; as soon as he finished, Rayburn left the dais, stepped down into the well of the House and praised him, asserting that “my confidence in his honor and integrity is unshaken,” words which were the price Sam Rayburn had to pay to preserve the honor and integrity of the House.
On February 17, 1943, moreover, Rayburn saved the FCC from more than an investigation. The amendment effectively “abolishing” the Commission was about to be overwhelmingly approved when the Speaker again stepped into the well for one of his rare speeches. His force seemed to fill the House Chamber. He had been the author of “the bill to set up the Communications Commission,” he said. “Before that time there was chaos in communications.… I do not appeal to your prejudices or to your passions, but I do want to counsel with your reason.… There is only one agency in the United States of America, let me say to you, that has any control whatsoever over the air of the United States. Do you want by your vote to strike down that only agency?” The amendment was defeated; although the FCC’s budget was slashed by twenty-five percent as a punitive measure, the Commission remained in existence.
Johnson was championing the FCC’s cause not only in the Capitol but in the White House. When the Administration persisted in paying more attention to the war, he attempted to make it understand that, as presidential assistant Jonathan Daniels was to put it, “the Cox Committee investigation is a big job which is being ignored as a little thing,” when, in fact, it was actually an anti-Roosevelt plot; “as I got it from Johnson,” Daniels wrote in his diary, “anti-New Deal lawyers … hope to use this investigation of the FCC as a take-off for smearing the whole Administration or the important people in it.”
ALL DURING THIS PERIOD, of course, Lyndon Johnson was seeing Clifford Durr socially in the evenings and on Sundays, sometimes at Durr’s home, sometimes at his own. As was the case with the Cox investigation, he may have “kept away” from Durr so far as furnishing him with details of the KTBC application was concerned. Durr, a courageous Southern liberal (returning to Montgomery after his term on the FCC ended, in 1948, he and his wife would spend their lives fighting for civil rights there, often representing clients too impoverished to pay a legal fee), was the champion on the FCC of higher standards of programming—increased public service, for example, and fewer commercials. In the handling of more mundane matters, he often relied on Red James, a strikingly more pragmatic lawyer, whose later career would be intermittently intertwined with Johnson’s, and Durr appears to have been unaware of many of the circumstances surrounding the KTBC application. And Johnson was, of course, seeing Red James, too—indeed, throughout this period, he was quite frequently bringing to see James the attorney who was handling the KTBC application: “During all this period of time, Alvin Wirtz used to come to Washington. I regarded Alvin Wirtz very highly, and he and Lyndon Johnson and I would get together and have a highball and go out to dinner, just shoot the bull about things, occasionally go over to Lyndon’s house.… I would be working maybe at the FCC. Along about 4:30 in the afternoon I’d get a call from LBJ, and he’d say, ‘Alvin has come to town. He wants to see you and wants you to come on over and we’ll have a couple of drinks.’ ” (Did Wirtz represent them in the FCC matter? James was asked. “Yes. I’m sure he did.”) And of course this was the period during which Johnson was making his late-night telephone calls to James. Whatever the reason, when Durr and James are discussing KTBC, even while Durr is saying, “I never got any pressures at all from [Johnson],” there emerges, not only in James’ own words but in Durr’s as well, an attitude that a disapproving observer was to describe as “government between friends.”
Whenever, in later years, Durr was asked about the KTBC application, he was quick to point out that it was in Lady Bird’s name, and to say that “Lyndon never had a thing to do with it.”
Bird came to me and said there was a chance to buy this radio station in Austin, and as I recall she said for about $22,000. She either had the money or could borrow the money on this inheritance she had of the Autauga County property. She could raise that much money, and she wanted to know whether I thought it would be a wise investment. So I gave her some figures on the earnings of well-run stations at the time. They were making an awful lot of money.… I heard generally around the FCC that this was a very poorly run station. I remember our engineers complaining about the engineering operations and getting all … frequencies and things of that sort. I told her that it seemed to me if she could get that station on its feet and get it well managed, it ought to be a very good investment.
There was nothing wrong with Bird’s visit, Durr says.
Now, there wasn’t any skulduggery that I ever saw at the FCC. It was more or less the routine approval of the purchase of a station. This had to be approved by the FCC, but nobody else was in the picture.…
There was nothing wrong with that, Durr says. And, James, whom Bird also used to visit, makes the same point: “She used to come down and see me quite often and discuss matters, as she had a perfect right to do, unless they were adversary matters.…”
It is possible, of course, that during all their dinners and telephone conversations with Durr and James, Wirtz or Johnson did not mention the radio station to the two FCC officials. But Mrs. Johnson did, and after her visits Durr and James spoke to lower-level FCC staffers about KTBC—which, whether Durr and James intended this or not, would have signaled these staffers that their superiors were personally interested in the matter.
Not that all staffers needed to read such indirect signals. Lyndon Johnson may not, as Durr and James maintain, have been talking to them directly about KTBC, but his contention that he never intervened with the FCC would have fallen strangely on the ears of James Barr, who, as an official of the FCC’s Standard Broadcast Division all during the 1940s, had to pass on some of Mrs. Johnson’s applications. One day, while he was consid
ering one of these applications, his telephone rang; when he picked it up, he found Mrs. Johnson’s husband, Congressman Johnson, on the line. “He wanted to get a radio station, and what I remember is, he wouldn’t take no for an answer,” Barr recalls. “I can still hear him when I tried to explain: ‘Now, Mr. Barr … Now, Mr. Barr …’ The thing that impressed me was that he was on a first-name basis with Red James.” And although Johnson, Durr and James were reticent about telephone calls they may or may not have made, or influence they may or may not have used, Tommy Corcoran, never reticent about anything, was not. “I helped him out with that [the KTBC application]—all up and down the line,” he said. With Fly? “I told you—all up and down the line,” he said. And when he was asked whether the fact that Lyndon Johnson was a Congressman, a Congressman important to the FCC, had helped his wife obtain a radio license, Corcoran reacted at first only with silence, and a look of contempt that someone should have to ask so obvious a question. Finally he growled: “How do you think these things work? These guys [FCC staffers] have been around. You don’t have to spell things out for them.”
Moreover, about one significant point, Durr is incorrect. If “nobody else was in the picture,” that wasn’t because nobody else wanted to be.
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