Means of Ascent

by Robert A. Caro

  Although Kellam enjoyed giving orders, in a coldly domineering fashion, from Johnson he took orders, with a slavish obedience. Some of the orders made other men marvel. One was to meet Johnson’s plane when he flew into Austin. Since Johnson often traveled on private planes, his time of arrival was frequently uncertain. But that did not matter. If, for example, he would be flying from Houston after dinner with the Brown brothers, he would tell Kellam only that he would telephone him from Houston as he was leaving. So afraid was Jesse Kellam that he would miss that call that he would hardly stir from his office until it came. One evening, a member of the KTBC staff left something in the radio station’s offices and came back late at night to pick it up. At first, he thought the executive offices were deserted because no lights were on in them. As he passed the office of the general manager, however, he saw, in the shadows inside, a figure behind the desk. It was Kellam, sitting alone in the dark, waiting for the phone to ring.

  And it wouldn’t be only at the Austin airport that Kellam would be in attendance. Once, a storm prevented a Pioneer Airlines flight on which Johnson was returning from a speech in Midland from landing in the capital. The pilot announced that they would land instead in Temple, sixty miles to the north. Johnson told the pilot to contact the Austin control tower. “My man” will be waiting for me at the Austin airport, he said. Tell him to drive to Temple and pick me up there. In Temple, the weather was again too stormy to land. The pilot announced he would try Waco, another thirty miles north. Johnson had the pilot notify the Temple control tower that when his man arrived, he was to be told to proceed to Waco. When the plane succeeded in landing there, Johnson had to wait an hour—but at the end of an hour, Kellam arrived. Says a man who was on the airplane, “He was following the plane around Texas. If he had had to go to Dallas, he would have gone to Dallas”—so that Lyndon Johnson’s car would be available as soon as possible.

  Kellam’s loyalty to Johnson became famous in Austin. Says Ed Clark: “Johnson could tell him to do anything, and the only reply would be ‘I’ll be there.’ He never had a conflict when Johnson wanted him. He never had plans. He would change any plans.” Not only Jesse Kellam’s career but his life was lived at Lyndon Johnson’s pleasure.

  As for Kellam’s ability, that was held in lower esteem. In New York, in later years, as the Johnson media enterprises grew into multi-million-dollar properties, men who dealt with Kellam could not understand how such a man had come to be in charge of them. “I knew Kellam very well,” says one CBS executive. “He was a nice guy, but he knew nothing about radio and television. He just didn’t understand the business.” They just didn’t understand. Johnson was simply following with KTBC the pattern he had followed during his entire career. When he had been a young congressional secretary, two assistant secretaries, even younger, had worked under him. And it was not the brilliant, energetic but independent Luther E. Jones (later to be known as the “finest appellate lawyer” in Texas) whom Johnson selected to be a permanent member of his team but the other assistant, the more malleable, if considerably less talented, Eugene Latimer. He had followed this pattern in hiring men for the NYA, and for his congressional office, and in his recommendations for even low-level federal patronage jobs. As a general rule (the most notable exceptions in these early years were John Connally and Horace Busby), the men he picked were not the brightest available, nor the men with the most initiative or ability. They were, rather, the men who had demonstrated the most unquestioning obedience—not merely a willingness but an eagerness to take orders, to bow to his will. While he called it “loyalty,” the capacity he prized most in his subordinates was actually the capacity for subservience.

  JOHN HICKS was not the only man who fled from Johnson’s embrace, fearing his domination. “I was one of his favorites,” says Jack Gwyn. But when, one Sunday, during a confidential chat, Johnson said, “You know, I admire loyalty above everything else,” Gwyn made the mistake of replying: “You’re right. If you hire a man eight hours a day, he owes you eight hours a day.” Johnson hastened to correct him. “I mean more than that,” he said. “I don’t mean just that kind of loyalty, I mean real loyalty. Look at John Connally. I can call John Connally at midnight, and if I told him to come over and shine my shoes, he’d come running. That’s loyalty.”

  Gwyn, to his surprise, suddenly heard himself replying: “Congressman, if anyone called me at midnight and told me to come over and shine his shoes, I’d tell him to go fuck himself.” Johnson was immediately apologetic. “Well, I didn’t mean it literally,” he said. “I’m not gonna call someone at midnight.” But, Gwyn says, the exchange had crystallized feelings that had been growing in him, and “I decided to leave. Johnson didn’t demand a great ability. He demanded ‘loyalty,’ and what he meant by loyalty was a kind of total submission. If you worked for Lyndon Johnson, you sold your soul to him. You could see it happening to other people around you. You saw that Jesse Kellam had no soul of his own. You saw that other guys close to him no longer had souls of their own. You wrote [in The Path to Power] how he could reduce Jesse Kellam to tears. I saw that. And I’ve seen Kellam sit in that office of his waiting for Lyndon to arrive. If his plane didn’t get in on time, or he [Johnson] had only said, ‘I’ll be there [sometime] Friday night,’ he wouldn’t leave. He would sit there until midnight if he had to. I was afraid it would happen to me.” Gwyn took a job with an advertising agency in Fort Worth; “I just wanted to get out of there.”

  But although, after a while, almost all of the original staff members of KTBC—not only Weedin, Hicks, Gwyn and Mrs. Robinson but others who, forty years later, did not want their names to be used in a book about Lyndon Johnson—left the station, their loss was not an irreplaceable one. They were replaced—almost invariably with people willing to give Lyndon Johnson the kind of “loyalty” he liked.

  1 In later years, Johnson propagated the myth that he had made a Christmas Day visit to the West Ranch to arrange the sale; he may have gone to the West Ranch, but the crucial meeting was in Suite 8-F at the Lamar—a place Johnson avoided mentioning whenever possible, since to anyone familiar with the Browns, it would be proof of his link with them.

  7

  One of a Crowd

  DESPITE THE MONEY he was making in the years after he returned from his Navy service, these were not happy years for Lyndon Johnson. The men and women who had a chance to observe him most closely—as a youth, as a congressional secretary, as a Congressman—speak of Johnson’s “low” times, when “he got real quiet,” and “it was bad.” These years were “very bad.” Although he wanted money, had always wanted it, money was not what he wanted most—needed most—as George Brown had realized during that vacation at the Greenbrier. The hunger that gnawed at him most deeply was a hunger not for riches but for power in its most naked form; to bend others to his will. At every stage of his life, this hunger was evident: what he always sought was not merely power but the acknowledgment by others—the deferential, face-to-face, subservient acknowledgment—that he possessed it. “You had to ask. He insisted on it.” It had been evident in the men with whom he surrounded himself, in the way he treated them, in his unceasing efforts, even as a junior Congressman, to dominate other congressmen, to dominate every room in which he was present, in fact, save only the bright, sunny oval room in the White House and Rayburn’s dim basement hideaway in the Capitol. And the kind of power he craved he could never obtain from the radio business. Indeed, he came to realize—and intimates like George Brown and Edward Clark watched the realization growing in him—that in a sense, as the proprietor of a radio station whose income was derived from the sale of advertising time, he was often placed in a position antithetical to the one he wanted to be in. In asking a businessman to purchase time on his station, he was not conferring a favor—a transaction which would result in power for him—but receiving one. His use of political influence to grant the businessman a favor in return was still only a trading of favors, not a conferring. If he was a very well p
aid salesman, nonetheless selling, not buying, was what he was doing—with all that that implied in personal relationships. Says George Brown: “Ordering people around—well, you don’t order around people you’re trying to sell something to.” Says Clark: “He wanted people to kiss his ass. He didn’t want to have to kiss people’s asses. And selling [radio] time—you have to kiss people’s asses sometimes. In business you have to. He liked power, and so he was unhappy in business.”

  Politics, and only politics, could give him what he wanted. But in politics, he had no place to go. The summer of 1942—when Johnson had returned from the war—was the summer in which Pappy O’Daniel had won his full Senate term; that seat was therefore occupied until 1948. The term of the state’s other Senate seat was up in 1946, but that seat had been held by Tom Connally since 1928. Connally was a power not only in Washington, where he was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—it was the Connally Resolution that called for United States participation in the United Nations—but in Texas, where, as the author of the oil depletion allowance and other legislation favoring the oil industry, he was regarded as the champion of the state’s dominant interest. A challenge to this picturesque figure—with his frock coat, string tie, and big black hat covering the head of senatorial gray hair curling at the back—would be merely quixotic. The Texas governorship was a possibility, and indeed in 1946 there would be speculation that Johnson would run for the governorship, but on Johnson’s road map, the governorship—or any other state post—would be only a detour, a detour that might turn into a dead end. State office had no interest for him, he reiterated whenever the subject was brought up; years later, when John Connally was leaving Washington to run for Governor of Texas, Johnson would ask him, “What the hell do you want to be Governor for? Here’s where the power is.” As for appointive office, as he often explained to supporters, “You have to be your own man”—his own man, not someone else’s; an elected official whose position had been conferred on him by voters, not by a single individual—who could, on a whim, take the position away. The ladder to his great dream had only three rungs, and appointive office was not one of them. Sometimes, as if he could not endure the frustration of his hopes, what he really wanted burst out of him, as it had with John Hicks in Hirsh’s Drugstore—and as it sometimes did in Washington with old friends from Texas; one evening, alone with Welly Hopkins, he snarled: “By God, I’ll be President someday!” He had mapped out his route so long ago, had mapped it out so carefully, had held to it so grimly, had plunged along it so fiercely. But now his progress was halted. He was stuck in the House of Representatives—that House of which he was only an insignificant member.

  So these were very bad years for Lyndon Johnson.

  AND THEY GOT WORSE.

  With Roosevelt in the presidency, Johnson at least had the aura of a White House insider. Just after five o’clock in the afternoon of April 12, 1945, the telephone rang in the “Board of Education” room, and Sam Rayburn picked up the receiver. On the line was Roosevelt’s press secretary, Stephen Early, asking to speak to Harry Truman. When the Vice President, who had been presiding over the Senate, arrived a few minutes later, Rayburn gave him the message, and Truman called Early, listened for a moment, and hurriedly left for the White House. Soon the news broke, and Sam Rayburn began to cry.

  Lyndon Johnson was to say that when the telephone call came, “I was just looking up at a cartoon on the wall—a cartoon showing the President with that cigarette holder and his jaw stuck out like it always was. He had his head cocked back, you know.…” The cartoon may have provided him with inspiration. When a reporter, his friend William S. White of the New York Times, arrived to interview him for his reaction, he found Johnson standing with a cigarette holder in his mouth, and his jaw stuck out.

  The interview, printed in the Times the next day, was dramatic: White wrote that the tall young Congressman stood in “a gloomy Capitol corridor,” with “tears in his eyes” and his Rooseveltian cigarette holder clamped in “a shaking jaw,” and cried out: “God! God! How he could take it for us all!” The article emphasized Johnson’s closeness to Rayburn: Johnson told White that he had been in the Board of Education room when the telephone call came—an assertion which may not have been accurate.1 It also emphasized his closeness to Roosevelt; recalling that the President had once sent him a photograph of his dog Fala inscribed “From the master to the pup,” Johnson said, “He was just like a Daddy to me always; he always talked to me just that way. He was the only person I ever knew—anywhere—who was never afraid. Whatever you talked to him about, whatever you asked him for, like the projects in your district, there was just one way to figure it with him.… You could be damn sure that the only test he had was this: Was it good for the Folks.… The people who are going to be crushed by this are the little guys—the guy down in my district, say, who makes $21.50 driving a truck and has a decent house to live in now, cheap, because of Mr. Roosevelt.” And it emphasized the closeness between their philosophies (“There are plenty of us left here to try to block and run interference, as he had taught us, but the man who carried the ball is gone—gone”), although the point was also made that despite the closeness, independence had been maintained: “They called the President a dictator and some of us they called ‘yes men.’ Sure, I yessed him plenty of times—because I thought he was right—and I’m not sorry for a single ‘yes’ I ever gave. I have seen the President in all kinds of moods—at breakfast, at lunch, at dinner—and never once in my five terms here did he ever ask me to vote a certain way, or even suggest it. And when I voted against him—as I have plenty of times—he never said a word.”

  The king, however, was dead. The day after Roosevelt’s death, one of Johnson’s secretaries, Dorothy Nichols, asked him: “He’s gone; what do we have now?” “Honey,” Johnson replied. “We’ve got Truman.… There is going to be the damnedest scramble for power in this man’s town for the next two weeks that anyone ever saw in their lives.”

  Lyndon Johnson and Harry Truman were acquainted through a mutual friend: Sam Rayburn. Truman and Rayburn, two very tough, very Democratic, politicians, got along well, and the Senator from Missouri held a permanent invitation to the Board of Education. Sometimes Rayburn, invited to a social gathering of party elders, would bring Lyndon along; at one such luncheon at the Mayflower Hotel to celebrate Truman’s nomination as Vice President in 1944, Truman received a telephone call summoning him to a Senate vote, and Johnson volunteered to drive him to the Capitol; once Truman, along with Rayburn and some other friends, was a dinner guest in the Johnson home. And when the new President delivered an address to a joint session of Congress on April 15, 1945, Johnson wrote him a letter in the tone of an intimate friend: “Those of us who know you so well were so proud of you today.… We in Texas felt that you were a part of us long before you belonged to the nation.”

  Truman’s reply, however, was little more than a form letter, and during the months that followed Johnson had no other contact with him. In May, Truman appointed Tom Clark United States Attorney General. Johnson and Clark had been working together for years on a number of matters involving the more confidential side of politics, including maneuvers to secure favorable rulings from the FCC for at least two mutual allies, and Clark, who during the 1930s had been a lobbyist in Austin for the Safeway grocery store chain (and for other major companies: a Texas State Senate investigating committee found in 1937 that Clark had experienced “a tremendous and startling increase in earnings” after his law partner became Texas State Attorney General), had helped persuade Safeway to advertise on KTBC. During Roosevelt’s Administration, Johnson had pushed vigorously for Clark’s advancement up the Justice Department ladder. On the day he was appointed Attorney General, Clark wrote Johnson a handwritten note: “I want you to be the first I write since the nomination … to you I will be ever grateful for a true friendship that opened to me opportunities for service.” But Clark’s appointment was almost the only bright spot for Jo
hnson among the scores of appointments to the new Administration. He had assiduously cultivated—and won—the affections of many in the circle that surrounded Franklin Roosevelt; now Grace Tully and Marvin McIntyre were gone. There were new faces around the White House—dubbed by reporters the “Missouri gang”—and he knew few of them, none of them intimately. By July, he was writing to Rowe, still on naval duty in the Pacific, in the tone of a disgruntled outsider: “It is a different town today.… There is little to stimulate one to doing unbelievable things and such accomplishments as we are likely to make will be of the routine type.… Just what line [Truman’s] subordinates follow has yet to be developed. I have contributed what I could in the way of counsel, but I don’t know that much of it will be followed. Most of our old friends are bewildered.… My own course in political affairs is yet to be charted. We are giving serious thought to going back to the hill country in Texas and making our contribution to a better world from that spot.” In succeeding months, he reached rather far in attempts to improve his acquaintance with the new President, sending him photographs to sign (including one, a rather far reach even for Johnson, of a picture taken five years before of then Senator Truman posing with Alvin Wirtz, and reminding Truman that Wirtz, “my closest personal friend … went into Missouri in 1940 to help in the campaign for the ticket”), and one of the huge Christmas turkeys that he had previously sent to Truman’s predecessor, with a note explaining that he was sending it “Because of your friendship through the years; because of your many kindnesses to me; because I look forward to your company and your counsel in the years to come.” He got the inscriptions (“To Lyndon B. Johnson, a grand guy and my friend”) and thanks for the turkey, but little company or counsel: during all of 1945, in fact, Lyndon Johnson was in the Oval Office—to which he had once been welcomed with such warmth—exactly once.