But while the percentage had not been forthcoming, the other important promise that had motivated Weedin to come to KTBC—carte blanche, the assurance that he would really be in charge—had for a time been kept. As the station became stronger, however, that promise too began to be broken.
Weedin had been consulting almost daily with Mrs. Johnson, and the two of them had been getting along very well. As for the Congressman, during the first six months or so he left Weedin alone. “But once we got into the fact that we were making money and it looked like we were really on our way,” that changed, Weedin was to say. He felt that the change was also due to the Johnsons’ realization that “this thing was a hell of a lot—a great money-maker, and it was going to be bigger and bigger.” Whatever the reason, “I did not have the carte blanche at the end of that time I had had in the early days.” When Johnson was in Austin, he would come into the station and check the books. “Lyndon really took over. He was the one who made all the decisions. She wouldn’t ever, I don’t think, dare to tell me to do something without checking with Lyndon.”
There was a more serious, if less tangible, source of tension between the two men. During the 1941 campaign, Weedin had become a fervent admirer of Lyndon Johnson. “He must have sold me, or somebody sold me, or I sold myself on doing whatever I could to get him elected. So I became a thorough Lyndon Johnson follower.” For a time after Weedin went to work for Johnson at KTBC, this admiration grew even more intense—he believed that Johnson would be President of the United States someday; he proudly hung Johnson’s picture on the wall of his office. Weedin’s attitude toward Johnson was that of a younger man toward an older man who is his hero. Now, however, Johnson was not Weedin’s candidate but Weedin’s employer—and a new element entered the relationship. Attempting to define it, Weedin says, “The minute he walked in, he’d take over the room.… He had a tremendously commanding presence, and as everyone says, the one-on-one things, he was fantastic.” He speaks of Johnson’s “domination.… He never let up on that at all. He was a completely overwhelming man in person.” And, he says, Johnson “intimidated” him: “He was the only person who could ever make me nervous.” During their discussions about the station, “he would grill me.”
Whenever he would come in, I would be so up on things that I wanted to tell him that were going on, I’d done so much homework on everything to report to him, that I was a bundle of [nerves]. And I’m not a nervous man, but I was a bundle of nerves going in to talk to him. And he would start to ask a question and I would answer him before he would finish the question, because I knew what it was. And that used to infuriate him. He said, “Let me ask the question before you answer!” And the thing that made him mad, it was always the question he was going to ask, and I could answer it just from the first couple or three [words].
No matter how admiring, respectful and intimidated Weedin was by Lyndon Johnson, he couldn’t be as admiring, respectful and intimidated as Johnson wanted him to be. Other employees of KTBC saw this. John Hicks recalls: “He wanted Harf to be a slave, and Harf just wasn’t like that. He was young and eager, but he had a kind of dignity about him. He just couldn’t be what Johnson wanted.” He was very bright—and he did know the questions Johnson was about to ask. And that was too bright for Lyndon Johnson.
In February, 1944, Weedin received his induction notice from the Navy. Then he asked Lyndon Johnson for ten percent of the profits that KTBC had earned during the ten months he had been manager—the ten percent that Lyndon Johnson had promised him. These profits were approximately $50,000, so Weedin’s share should, he calculated, be about $5,000, and that was what he asked for. What was Johnson’s reaction? “He was upset that I asked for it.” At first he told Weedin that he wouldn’t give him anything. At last he said he would give him a thousand dollars. When Weedin tried to negotiate that figure, Johnson made clear that the discussion was over: that was not only his offer, it was his final offer. “He told me that was what I was going to get,” Weedin says. “So I took it.”
WEEDIN’S EXPERTISE and contacts had been indispensable to Lyndon Johnson during the first months of the new ownership of KTBC, but with his other new employees the Congressman had more leeway, and as soon as they were hired he began inculcating in them the qualities he considered desirable in employees. At staff meetings—held frequently during his stays in Austin—he would combine appeals to naked self-interest and to higher ideals, including the ideal he held highest of all: “loyalty.” Standing before them, hands thrust deep in his trouser pockets jingling change and keys, he would tell them that “We are building this station. It’s going to be big. And you can grow along with it. Work hard, and be loyal, and you’ll be rewarded.” Sometimes he played the role of a father, one staff member recalls: “We’re all one big family here, and we have to help each other and be loyal to each other.” Sometimes he was more the high school football coach. “His staff meetings were like half-time talks,” another employee says: “ ‘Every team has to have a quarterback, and I’m the quarterback. And I don’t want anyone dropping the ball.’ ” And there were private meetings, in which he was more blunt. In public, he talked about “loyalty”; in private, he gave staff members his definition of that quality. “I want real loyalty,” he told one young staffer. “I want someone who will kiss my ass in Macy’s window, and say it smells like roses.”
Despite all his efforts at instruction, however, he experienced difficulty in lining up the kind of team he wanted. In filling jobs in his political organization, his screening process had been deliberate and painstaking. For his radio organization, he was forced to hire people—to allow Weedin to hire people—whom he, Lyndon Johnson, hardly knew, and he was constantly being disappointed in them. In part, this was because they saw the way he treated Lady Bird. Ann Durrum Robinson, the station’s continuity writer, says that “Mrs. Johnson didn’t come down [to the station] too much. Mr. Johnson was the one who came down,” but that several times she had lunch with her. And at these lunches—at any time he wasn’t with her—“she came across as a very intelligent, capable person.” But when the Johnsons were together, his treatment of her—“I’d really rather not go into the personal things. I’m a great admirer of hers, and I’d rather not. It detracts from her [to tell how she was treated by her husband]. I feel disloyal to her if I tell what she took from him.” Newswriter Jack Gwyn says: “He talked to her as though she were a serving girl. So I saw the way he used his family. He used his family without conscience.” In part, it was because they saw the way he had treated Weedin, using him—and then refusing to keep his promise to him. And in part, it was because of the way he treated them. They gradually came to realize that their salaries were low—lower than those earned in comparable jobs on other stations—and their hours were longer. “How long did you work?” Mrs. Robinson says. “You worked until the work was finished.” She was working fourteen hours a day, for a salary of about thirty-five dollars a week, and there was no pay for her hours of overtime. When several members of the staff drove to Dallas one weekend to attend a meeting of a union that was attempting to organize employees of radio stations, Johnson, Jack Gwyn recalls, “was very upset. He called a meeting and said that he was disappointed in us for doing that. He thought we were like a family, and he would take care of everything. We had nothing to worry about. He would take care of us. It was a firm way—like he was dealing with recalcitrant children.” Moreover, he at least attempted to treat them with the abusiveness with which he treated the employees of his congressional office. The KTBC offices had an intercom system, and if, when Johnson was on the premises, he wanted to speak to someone, he would simply flick on the switch that connected him with that person’s office and begin talking—without inquiring if there was a visitor present. “He’d just come on and start talking,” Mrs. Robinson says. And often he would say things that KTBC staffers would not want anyone else to hear. “He might come through the intercom angry, bawling someone out, when you were talking to a sp
onsor,” Mrs. Robinson recalls. “He could be very abusive.” They were afraid of being treated this way—and, after a while, of having no choice but to be treated this way. As they got to know Lyndon Johnson, some of the staff members grew afraid of falling under his power. “I think he had a gift for getting from people whatever he wanted,” Mrs. Robinson felt. “I remember thinking that the Three E’s of manipulation are ‘ensnare,’ ‘enthrall’ and ‘enslave.’ And he was adept at any one of the three.” Among themselves, some staff members talked of the dangers of becoming “enslaved” by Lyndon Johnson, who, they felt, tried to “get someone so obligated that they couldn’t [leave his employ].… He would bestow favors, to make it so worthwhile to be attached.” Once you accepted a favor, “there was a large amount of gratitude” that made it harder to leave.
So, for example, when Lyndon Johnson made his offer to John Hicks, Hicks did not accept it on the spot. The offer was made, in March, 1944, in Hirsh’s Drugstore, on Congress Avenue. Johnson had told Hicks to meet him there after he finished his last newscast of the day at ten p.m. Normally, the drugstore closed at eight, but, as Hicks says, “when the Congressman wanted it open, it stayed open. They even kept a man there to make us sandwiches.” And when Hicks arrived the Congressman was sitting there, slouched down in one of the booths along the right-hand wall of the restaurant, waiting for him. “Johnny,” he said, “I want you on my team. Harfield’s going into the service, and I’m going to need someone here at the station [as general manager]. And I’m going to need someone to represent me in Austin. I’m going to lend you ten thousand dollars. And I want you to take it and buy yourself a Cadillac car. And I want you to move to a [better] apartment. I want you to be somebody. Furnish the apartment. Get Regina a fur coat. I want you to join the Rotary and the Kiwanis, and be somebody here in Austin.”
The young announcer was earning only seventy-five dollars a week. “Ten thousand dollars—that was more money than I had ever heard of,” he recalls. But then, Hicks says, he asked Johnson, “Congressman, how can I ever pay you back?” And when Johnson replied, expansively, genially, with an easy, charming smile, “Johnny, don’t you worry about that. You let me worry about that,” Hicks suddenly felt himself drawing back.
“That was when I said, ‘Uh, oh,’ ” he recalls. He wouldn’t be able to pay the “loan” back—not in any foreseeable future—and Johnson must have known that. “I said, This man is buying something, and I don’t know that I want to be bought. I’ll be beholden to him.’ ” When the young man hesitated, Johnson elaborated on the further potentialities of his offer. “He said, ‘I want you to know that I’m going to be President of this country someday. And you can come along with me. I want you on my team.’ It was like he was saying, ‘All right, boys. Here’s the bandwagon. Hop on.’ ” But he also made clear what he expected in return. “He said to me that if I took the loan, ‘I would expect your complete loyalty and cooperation in anything I want you to do. I will give total loyalty, and I expect total loyalty. If I call you up at two o’clock in the morning, and tell you to be somewhere, I want you on that horse.’ ” Hicks had seen what this man was like, and “I didn’t want to be beholden to this man.” So instead of hopping on the bandwagon, Hicks said, “Sir, I’m going to have to think this over,” and he went home, in his car, which was not a Cadillac, to the “tiny” house he rented, and to his wife, for whom he would very much have liked to buy a fur coat, and talked it over with her. “We talked it over all night,” Regina Hicks recalls. “Because not only was it a good way to get out of the service, but it was security.” Says John Hicks: “I would never be able to save ten thousand dollars. It was very tempting. [I was] twenty-five years old, and with a brand-new baby boy …” Yet they decided to turn the offer down. “I knew that if I took that money from him, I would be his from then on. And I was a little too independent to be beholden to anybody. I knew that if I took his money, I would be on his team”—not just in broadcasting, but in politics, too.
THE NEXT DAY, when Johnson came into the station, Hicks told him he thought it would be better that he not take the loan, because he couldn’t repay it. “You are crazy,” Johnson said. And, Hicks recalls, that was all Johnson said: “It was like a curtain came down.” The Congressman turned and left. So far as Hicks remembers, Johnson never spoke to him again. Since it was clear that he “had no future” at KTBC, shortly thereafter he resigned. But if Johnson didn’t understand Hicks’ refusal, Hicks’ friends at the station did. Jack Gwyn, for example, says he understood perfectly. Had Hicks accepted the loan and purchased a house, Gwyn says, “I had this vision of a house with a huge picture of Lyndon Johnson over the fireplace.”
(Did someone else understand, even if she did not say so directly? Although Lyndon Johnson never repeated his offer, he did send an emissary. The evening after Hicks’ refusal, Lady Bird, dropping by the Hickses’ home, brought up the subject. She did so, however, in a noticeably “halfhearted” manner. And when John Hicks repeated his refusal, Mrs. Johnson said she understood, and she said so in a way that made Hicks feel that “she did understand.” He and Regina were to speculate to each other that Mrs. Johnson “had seen other people take their ten thousand dollars and had seen what happened to them.”)
GRADUALLY, Lyndon Johnson put together the kind of staff he wanted—composed of men who had demonstrated an unusual willingness to allow him to dictate their lives: Sherman Birdwell, who, as one of his boyhood playmates in the Hill Country, had followed Lyndon around obediently, attempting to imitate his mannerisms, an imitation he had continued while working for Johnson in the National Youth Administration; Willard Deason, who at college had served as Johnson’s front man in his campaign to attain campus power, and who thereafter had demonstrated his unquestioning obedience by switching from a promising career in education to a career in law because Johnson told him to, and then, when Johnson decided another switch was in order, by leaving the law to work for Johnson at the NYA; Walter Jenkins, who had been in Johnson’s service only since 1939, but who had made up for his late start by his willingness to work for his Chief “like a slave” and by a psychological dependence on him at least equal to that of his elders.
The quality that was crucial to Johnson in the people he wanted working for him was revealed in his choice in 1945 of a new KTBC general manager, the job Harfield Weedin had once held. By this time, after Hicks’ turndown, Johnson was culling candidates for positions in his radio office as thoroughly as he did for his political office. For each of the three or four final candidates, he took a separate page on a yellow legal pad, drew a line down the center of the page, and listed, on opposite sides of the line, the man’s “assets” and “liabilities.” For a long time he studied the pages. Then, on one of the pages, he underlined, on the “asset” side of the line, a single word—underlined it three or four times, decisively. The word was loyalty, and the name on the top of the page was Kellam.
As a youth, Jesse Kellam must have seemed an unlikely candidate for the Johnson team, for, as was seen in The Path to Power, he was regarded not as a man who took orders, but as a man who gave them. As a roustabout in the Texas oil fields, and later at San Marcos, as a 140-pound fullback who played without a helmet, Kellam had been noted for his viciousness as well as his toughness (once he deliberately fractured an opponent’s ankle), and for his leadership abilities: although he was a fullback, he called signals; a teammate says: “In the huddle, Jesse spoke and we listened. He had command presence.” But Johnson, the great reader of men, could read the most difficult text. Despite Kellam’s toughness and command presence—and considerable ambition—when Johnson met him for the first time, in 1933, Kellam was a $100-a-month high school football coach in a backwater Texas town. After eight years in that job, he had, at the age of thirty-three, with Texas in the grip of the Depression, all but lost hope of finding a way out of the dead end in which his life was mired. Johnson, the twenty-five-year-old congressional secretary, had one, and only one, truly desirabl
e patronage job—with the state Department of Education—at his disposal; he gave it to Kellam. When, two years later, Johnson became state director of the NYA, he asked Kellam to join his staff. Kellam did not want to leave the state job, but he did. And when Johnson resigned from the NYA to run for Congress, and needed someone he could trust to keep the NYA organization loyal to him, he selected Kellam as his successor.
Basic economic considerations may have played a role in tying Kellam closely to Johnson. The man who had gotten him his government executive position could have it taken away from him, and if that man turned against him, who would give him another one? “Lyndon had Jesse absolutely in his power,” says someone familiar with both men. “And Jesse knew it.” Now in 1945, that power was greater than ever. With the NYA disbanded, Kellam, returning from the Navy at the age of forty-three, had no job waiting. And although Johnson gave him a job, the KTBC general managership, he did not give him a contract, so Kellam had no security; responding to an FCC questionnaire a few years later, Kellam said he had a contract, “an oral one.” This “contract,” he said, included a provision for a percentage of the net profits. And who determined the percentage? The “station ownership.” His economic dependence on Lyndon Johnson’s pleasure was as total as ever.
But some of the considerations that tied Kellam to Johnson may have been more subtle than economic ones. Men who had observed the relationship between the two men had watched a powerful personality becoming steadily submerged in one much more powerful, until little trace of the first remained. Although Kellam was eight years older than Johnson, he called Johnson “Mr. Johnson.” Johnson called him “Jesse.” His gratitude for a word of praise from Johnson was almost painful to watch—although not as painful as his reaction to Johnson’s anger. What Johnson said to Kellam behind closed doors at the NYA is not known, but on more than one occasion, when the door of Johnson’s office opened, NYA staffers had been astonished to see Kellam, outwardly the toughest and most self-possessed of men, emerge crying. Now Kellam had his own office at KTBC. Johnson would enter it and shut the door when he wanted to confer privately with him. And more than once, when the door opened and Johnson strode out, staffers at KTBC passing the door saw Kellam sitting at his desk, tears running down his hard face.
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