While J. M. West had been anxious to enter the radio business, his sons and Kingsbery had not seemed to care one way or the other. Apparently feeling that Wirtz’s silence was a signal that the sale to the Wests was never going to receive FCC approval, and fearing that behind-the-scenes maneuvering might be taking place in Washington, Ulmer, representing the station’s owners, had, in 1942, let it be known in the Austin business community that if a new, firm offer for KTBC was received, the West option might be circumvented, surrendered or sold for a token amount. Several Austin businessmen thereupon expressed interest in KTBC at the same time that Mrs. Johnson was doing so. One prospective purchaser was William Drake, a lumber-company president who would later become Mayor of the city. Other businessmen recall that Drake was quite determined to acquire the station. Edward Joseph, one of the city’s leading realtors and owner of a clothing store, says, “Bill Drake … made an offer on the station.… He made an offer on it, but Lyndon just reached out and got it from under him.” (Joseph adds that “because of that … they sort of fell out and for a long time they were on the outs because of that.”) Another businessman, more sophisticated in the ways of politics than Drake, took his experience with the FCC and Johnson more philosophically. He was William J. Lawson, a former Texas Secretary of State, who by 1942 had become a successful businessman in Austin. In partnership with two other businessmen, Lawson had recently acquired an FCC construction permit, the first step toward obtaining a license, for KBWD, a five-hundred-watt station in Brownwood, Texas, and it had proved to be a lucrative business deal. Obtaining a permit for a station in Brownwood, Lawson had found, was simple. He had simply sent in the application, and back—very quickly, as he recalls—had come FCC approval. The two businessmen (impressed by the financial possibilities of small radio stations—“This thing’s a gold mine!” one said) bought out his share even before the license for KBWD was granted—for what Lawson considered a handsome profit. In 1942, Lawson recalls, “I wanted to do the same thing in Austin, with KTBC.” But, he found, becoming the owner of a station in Austin was not as simple as becoming the owner of a station in Brownwood. After making a tentative agreement with Ulmer, Lawson sent the FCC a preliminary inquiry (“not even an application—it never got to the application stage”) as to how to proceed, but, he says, “before I could get anything done, I got this odd letter—a form letter [not] even a dictated letter” that had the effect of discouraging him from proceeding further. Telephoning a veteran Capitol Hill staff member, D. Roland Potter, Lawson asked him to find out from his contacts at the FCC what had happened. Potter called back, telling Lawson that his contacts said that “ ‘Congressman Johnson was in to see us.’ … They said that Congressman Johnson had indicated an interest in the license, and based on the information he had given them, I [Lawson] was financially unstable.”
“Their excuse didn’t make any sense,” Lawson says. “They had already issued me one [permit], you know.” Why would they find him suitable for one station and unsuitable for another? His financial situation, he says, had only improved since the Brownwood application. Lawson was very far from a political neophyte. He had been, in fact, a key strategist in Governor O’Daniel’s victory over Johnson the previous year. And, being no neophyte, Lawson knew that this time Johnson had beaten him. He dropped any further effort to obtain KTBC. “I never made an issue out of it because I would have been fighting with the Congressman, and he had already made his point with the Commission,” he explains.
Despite Durr’s assertion, therefore, other prospective purchasers were in the picture—or, rather, might have been, if not for Lyndon Johnson’s entrée, his access to the Commission’s ear. Johnson, Lawson believed, had told the Commission that Lawson was “financially unstable.” Untrue though this statement was, the Commission may have accepted it—because there was no one to refute it.
In courts of law, to the extent that only one side in a case has access to a judge, to that extent justice is diminished, since in such an ex parte proceeding the other side cannot be heard. The power of regulatory agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission is, in not a few respects, the power of a judge. But before the Commission, in the case of KTBC, the other side was not heard. The Johnson side—Lyndon Johnson, Lady Bird Johnson, Alvin Wirtz—could get appointments with an FCC commissioner and a top FCC staffer to discuss the Johnson application in person; the opposing applicant could get only “a form letter [not] even a dictated letter.”
WHATEVER THE EXPLANATION, the shift in the FCC’s attitude toward KTBC was dramatic after Lady Bird Johnson submitted her application to purchase the station. The five years during which the original owners had been dealing with the FCC had been five years of delays and red tape, or delays and unfavorable rulings—of slowness in every aspect of the bureaucratic process. From the moment the owners agreed to sell to Mrs. Johnson, red tape vanished, all rulings were favorable—and slowness was replaced by speed.
The speed was evident not only in the fact that her application to purchase KTBC, submitted to the FCC on January 23, 1943, was approved on February 16, 1943—in just over three weeks. It was evident also when, later that year, she applied to change the conditions under which the station operated. For the previous owners, changing the restrictions had seemed an insuperable obstacle. For Mrs. Johnson, changing the restrictions was no obstacle at all. In June, 1943, she applied to the FCC for permission to operate twenty-four hours a day—at a new frequency, 590 on the dial, a frequency so much more desirable than the old that the move alone would transform KTBC into a much more viable, and valuable, property. Not only would it make KTBC the first station that Austin listeners could get on their dials but 590 was at the opposite, uncluttered, end of the dial from 1150, an end so uncluttered in the Austin area, in fact, that KTBC would now be heard not only in Austin but in no fewer than thirty-eight surrounding counties throughout central Texas. Her application, abetted by a Wirtz-engineered application for daytime hours submitted by WTAW earlier that same month, was filed with the FCC on June 25. It was approved on July 20.
Was Lyndon Johnson’s influence responsible for the change? Mrs. Johnson, Red James emphasizes, “had a perfect right” to “discuss matters” with him, “unless they were adversary matters.” There was an adversary in this matter, because, as James was (perhaps inadvertently) to recall, the frequency “he [Johnson] wanted to change over to” was a frequency “where the dominant station was WOW in Omaha, Nebraska,” and KWOW’s broadcasts had previously reached south into Texas, a fact which KWOW used in selling advertisers airtime. “I think,” James was to recall, “his lawyer talked to the lawyers for WOW and asked them if they would oppose it if he applied to go on that frequency.… They were a little upset about this.…” But, as James’ own statement thus confirms, the fact that there was an adversary did not deter him from discussing the matter with Lyndon Johnson. And it didn’t deter James from discussing the matter with other FCC officials.
And it didn’t deter James from giving Lady Bird Johnson advice as to how to proceed, advice that may have carried with it the strong implication that the judges before whom her application would be argued if the adversary opposed her would not be wholly unsympathetic to her cause. James was to say that he discussed the case with a top FCC counsel and engineer.
They looked at the thing and said, “We don’t see any particular problems about it.” And I told Mrs. Johnson that, I told Lady Bird. I said, “Why don’t you apply for it? You know, if they set you down for a hearing, so they set you down for a hearing, in a consolidated proceeding.” So they applied for it and got it. The commission granted it.
They applied for it—not strange that the Johnsons decided to do so, after the chief aide to one of the judges told them in advance “why don’t you apply for it?” The hearing would be a quasi-judicial proceeding, and a judge is not supposed to hear one side of a case without the other side having an opportunity to respond—as had been done. In addition to the lawyers for KWOW,
at least two other persons were upset at the changes granted KTBC. After running into James Ulmer at a broadcasting convention, Leonard Marks, a Washington attorney who had left the FCC and was now representing KTBC, reported to Johnson that Ulmer was saying “that he had completed all the engineering on 590 and that you came in and stole it from him.” (Ulmer added, according to a memo from Marks, that he would not write the story, “but whether he did so or not, somebody else probably would.”) Also angry was Elliott Roosevelt, the President’s son, who had gone into the radio business in Texas in partnership with oilman Sid Richardson. (Elliott’s relationship with his father was strained at this time and he was receiving no help from the White House with his radio interests.) On August 31, 1943, after having lunch with Elliott, John Connally reported to Johnson that an angry Elliott had said during the lunch that “there was a controversy when KTBC got nighttime operations … but that Mr. Johnson had the skids greased with the commission.”
Was Lyndon Johnson’s influence—influence that translated into access and entrée into inside information and advance information—even more deeply at work? Had he known in advance something that no one else knew? Had he known, even before his wife bought KTBC, that if she bought it the FCC would change the conditions that had hamstrung the station in the past?
Lady Bird Johnson purchased KTBC in February, and in June made her application, the application that was so rapidly approved, for the change in hours and frequency. That was fast enough. But had Lyndon Johnson known even before June that such an application would be approved? In April, Lyndon and Lady Bird asked a Dallas radio announcer who had been the emcee of Johnson’s traveling road show in the 1941 campaign, Harfield Weedin, to become manager of their new station, offering him a ten percent share of the profits. Weedin was reluctant to accept, because he felt that under the existing FCC restrictions on the station’s operation, profits were unlikely. “You couldn’t really make much money with just a daytime station,” he says. But, he also recalls, Johnson assured him that “if I took the job, I would not be bothered with that”; the restrictions were going to be lifted “very shortly.” Johnson said, “Look, the frequency is going to be changed. We’re going to go full time. I have it in the works right now.” He specifically told Weedin that the lifting of the restrictions was “all set,” and Weedin believed him, because, Weedin says, Johnson understood that the restrictions were an insurmountable handicap. “Frankly,” Weedin says, “I don’t feel he would have bought it if he didn’t know he was going to get those changes.” The Johnsons’ meeting with Weedin took place only two months after they had purchased the station, but Johnson was saying that the changes that would transform it were already “all set”—as indeed they very shortly proved to be.
Whether or not Lyndon Johnson had known of the changes in advance, they totally transformed the property his wife had purchased. She had, in effect, purchased 1150 on the radio dial. After FCC approval of her application for increased broadcasting hours and a new frequency, when a listener turned his dial to 1150, all he heard was static. There was no longer any station at that spot on the dial. The station was now at 590, which meant that it sounded different: louder, clearer. And it was on at night, when more people wanted to listen to it. Only its call letters were the same; otherwise, within months of the time Mrs. Johnson had bought a station so cheaply, that station no longer existed. (And at the earliest possible moment—as soon as the war ended and necessary materials became available—the transformation became even greater. In 1945, the FCC allowed KTBC to quintuple its power, from a thousand to five thousand watts, a change that meant the station could be heard in sixty-three counties.)
And if others had known that it could be so totally altered, would it have been so cheap? Might there not have been other bidders for so desirable a radio property? And would these other bidders have been so easily deterred as William Lawson had been? Indeed, would Lawson have been so easily deterred? Indeed, would the original owners have been willing to sell—to sell for so little—a twenty-four-hour-a-day station that was first on the dial, and that boomed out all over Austin and throughout central Texas? Would the owners have had to sell, if the property they owned had been the property into which it had now been so rapidly transformed by the FCC?
But no others knew—no others could know for sure, just as they couldn’t be advised by a key figure in the FCC that they shouldn’t worry unduly about a conflict with KWOW. And so there were no other bids for KTBC, and the owners of KTBC were willing to sell cheap.
LADY BIRD JOHNSON flew down to Austin, where, a station employee recalls, she “took one look at the layout and said, ‘I don’t know much about radio, but I do know about cleaning house.’ She bought a pair of overalls, a bunch of brooms and mops, and some soap, and for a solid week she worked on that little walk-up, two-room [sic] station until it fairly sparkled.” She studied KTBC’s contracts with its advertisers to determine how much airtime the station owed them, and how much money the advertisers owed the station. She began trying to straighten out its books, which were a mess. In the legend which would be repeated to reporters year after year, these efforts were what turned the fortunes of KTBC around. “She worked eighteen hours a day for five months before we brought the station into the black,” the employee says. Mrs. Johnson herself takes great pride in her industry during those early months. “The staff was infected with a sense of failure and uncertainty, and sloppiness had become a way of life in that little area, so we just gave it a good thorough cleaning up. I think it kind of improved everybody’s spirits. It certainly did mine.”
Mr. Johnson flew up to New York, where he called on William S. Paley, the president of the CBS radio network, and asked for a CBS affiliation, which would allow KTBC to carry the network’s famous, nationally known shows, on which advertisers would be more eager to purchase time than on local shows, and for which higher rates could be charged. The affiliation was vital to KTBC, and Johnson knew it. “This is life and death to us,” he wrote a former aide, Gene Latimer. At the time of his visit to Paley, the Federal Communications Commission was determinedly attempting to reduce the networks’ control of independent stations, and Paley was leading an almost frantic fight to persuade Congress to reduce the FCC’s authority over them by amending the law—Sam Rayburn’s law—that had established the Commission. This was only the latest in a series of running battles between the networks and the FCC—battles in which the networks were continually appealing to Congress for help. Did the fact that this applicant for an affiliation was a congressman—“Sam Rayburn’s boy”—have anything to do with CBS’s decision in the matter? Paley and Frank Stanton were to cast the story in folksy terms. Paley would tell David Halberstam that Johnson had simply appeared in his office one day without an appointment; his secretary had come in to see him, Paley said, and “announced that there was a very tall Texan waiting out there in a big hat and boots who said he was a congressman.” Paley went out to meet him, and the Texan, according to Paley, had said, “ ‘Mister Paley, I have this here ticket for a 250-watt [sic] station in Austin and I’d like to join as a CBS affiliate.’ ” Paley had sent the tall Texan to Frank Stanton, CBS director of research, who also handled some affiliate matters. Stanton says he looked at a map, found there was room for an affiliated station in Austin, and gave Johnson the affiliation.
Journalists may have regarded this story skeptically, but they felt they could not disprove it. In fact, however, it is possible to know what would have happened if a noncongressional station owner in Austin had applied for a CBS affiliation—for a noncongressional station owner had applied; had applied, in fact, several times. The other Austin radio station, KNOW, had been energetically attempting for years to secure a CBS affiliation. Every attempt had been rejected by CBS because the network already had an affiliate, KTSA in San Antonio, which could be heard in Austin.
CBS’S DECISION in regard to Lyndon Johnson’s request may have had nothing to do with his political influence. B
ut his political influence had everything to do with many of the advertisers who bought time on KTBC.
The backers who had arranged for money to be contributed to his political campaigns now arranged for money to be contributed to his radio station. Herman Brown gave him some advertisers. Johnson told Harfield Weedin to go to the Houston offices of the American General Insurance Company, which had most of Brown & Root’s insurance business, and American General’s president, Gus Wortham, purchased fifteen minutes of airtime every night. Why did Wortham advertise on KTBC? “We twisted his arm,” George Brown was to recall years later, with a smile. The New York attorney Ed Weisl, Sr., the chief financier of Johnson’s campaign-funding efforts in the Northeast, who was powerful in both political and entertainment circles, gave him some advertisers. The Interstate Theater Chain, for example, bought fifteen minutes a night.
Many of these advertisers were—or during this period would become—connected with Everett Looney and Edward A. Clark, principals in the Austin law firm of Looney & Clark. Ed Clark was coming to be known, as Alvin Wirtz was already known, as a lawyer to go to in Austin if you wanted something from the federal government. Clark, a power in his own right, had never been intimidated by Johnson; he was too independent to take orders from any politician—and too astute: of all the men with whom Lyndon Johnson was associated in Texas, Clark was the one who, over the years, acquired and held the most power. He expressed the same philosophy as Herman Brown: if he invested in—“bought a ticket on,” in his phrase—a politician, he wanted a return on that investment. And, through the radio station, he was to get it. What Johnson wanted was advertising revenues; what Clark wanted was recognition as a lawyer with influence in Washington—and both got what they wanted.
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