Means of Ascent

by Robert A. Caro

  Johnson’s admirer Rowe was to explain the contrast between Johnson’s treatment by Roosevelt and his treatment by Truman by saying simply, “You’ve got to have a reason to see a President.” With Roosevelt, there had been reasons: Johnson’s fund-raising capabilities; his role, through the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, as link between the White House and Capitol Hill; his role as “Roosevelt’s man” (and spy) on the Texas delegation. Now his fund-raising and campaign-committee functions had been taken over by someone else, and Rayburn was Truman’s man for Texas. But Rowe’s explanation does not mention the paternal rapport that Roosevelt aides call a “special feeling,” and that had led that President to break his own rules in lavishing campaign and other assistance on the young congressman. And Rowe’s explanation also ignores Truman’s feelings about Johnson—which were, in the early years of the Truman Presidency, quite different from Roosevelt’s.

  Lyndon Johnson’s remarkable talent for cultivating and manipulating older men who possessed power that could help his ambitions—the obsequiousness so profound that scornful contemporaries referred to him as a “professional son”—had been exercised to the fullest on Sam Rayburn. He kissed the fearsome Speaker on his bald head, repeatedly told others, in Rayburn’s presence, that the Speaker was “just like a Daddy to me”—and was in the Board of Education (and anywhere else he was in Rayburn’s company) utterly deferential, respectful and admiring, “playing” this lonely older man like the “great flatterer” contemporaries called him. But Harry Truman had been a visitor to the “Board”; he had been present when Johnson was “playing” Rayburn. “He tried to play Truman the way he played Rayburn,” says Board member Richard Bolling, a Congressman from Missouri. “But Truman had watched him doing it with Rayburn. So when Lyndon started doing it with him, he knew exactly what Lyndon was doing. And so it didn’t work.” During this period, Stuart Symington says, Johnson “tried to be friendly with the new President.” But Truman, he says, “was a pretty sharp judge of character.” Truman’s daughter, Margaret, says that because her father had witnessed the professional son in action with Rayburn, “he never quite trusted him.…”

  The situation grew still more discouraging. Johnson’s chief remaining ally in the Administration’s higher reaches was Secretary of the Interior Ickes; early in 1946, after testifying before a Senate committee that Edwin Pauley, nominated by Truman as Undersecretary of the Navy, had dangled before the Democrats a $300,000 gift from West Coast oilmen if the federal government were to drop a suit to obtain title to tidelands oil, Ickes resigned, a resignation Truman quickly and angrily accepted. Tommy Corcoran, once so influential with the White House, was so thoroughly disliked and distrusted by Truman that the President had ordered his telephone tapped. Johnson sought for chinks in the wall around the new President; when Truman’s mother died in Grandview, Missouri, Johnson wrote him that he was donating a book in memory of the “first Mother of the Land” to the Grandview Public Library. Truman replied with a note that thanked Johnson but added, “I regret to advise you that Grandview has no Public Library.…” Johnson worked assiduously at cultivating two younger members of the Truman team, Clark Clifford and Secretary of the Air Force Stuart Symington, but, in Clifford’s case, as Clifford later recalled, “It was a slowly developing relationship.” With Symington, the results came faster, for the Secretary’s fervent conviction of the need for an Air Force much larger than Truman was advocating dovetailed with Johnson’s need to procure new federal contracts for the vast aircraft plants that had sprung up during the war on Texas plains. But the conflict between Symington’s stance and Truman’s meant that Johnson’s closeness with the Secretary was attained only at the cost of more coolness from the White House.

  Moreover, with the waning of the Roosevelt influence, conservatives had consolidated their political power in Texas. If Johnson was ever to run for the Senate, he needed their support, and needed to erase from their minds the impression that he was a New Dealer. In these post-war years, Harry Truman submitted to Congress an impressive new liberal agenda to end the wartime hiatus in social reform: increased Social Security benefits, a higher minimum wage, federal aid to education, prepaid medical care, health insurance, and—in what would, if passed, be the first major civil rights legislation of the century—laws against lynching and against segregation in interstate transportation and laws ensuring the right to vote and establishing a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC). Speaking out as he had never before done in Congress, Lyndon Johnson in 1947 opposed most of Truman’s “Fair Deal.” The proposed civil rights program, he was to say, was a “farce and a sham—an effort to set up a police state in the guise of liberty.” It is, he was to say, “the province of the state to run its own elections. I am opposed to the anti-lynching bill because the federal government has no more business enacting a law against one form of murder than another. I am against the FEPC because if a man can tell you whom you must hire, he can tell you whom you cannot employ.”

  One vote in particular helped consolidate the new image he was cultivating. Public resentment at the post-war wave of strikes and long-smoldering conservative anger at the power the New Deal had given to labor unions crystallized in the Labor-Management Relations Act of 1947—the “Taft-Hartley Act”—which curtailed union powers, outraging workers and labor leaders, who called it a “slave labor bill.” Johnson voted with the congressional majority to pass the Act, and, after the President, in a stinging message, had vetoed it, voted with the bloc that successfully overrode the veto the same day it was delivered. His vote astonished, and enraged, the Texas unionists and liberals whom Johnson had been fervently assuring of his support throughout his previous ten years in Congress. “He was one of those who gutted us in 1947,” H. S. (Hank) Brown of the Texas AFL would say years later. But it furnished the Dale Millers and George Browns with an additional talking point in their efforts to persuade fellow Texas conservatives that “he wasn’t really as liberal as everyone thought he was.” Lest his image, despite these votes, not be changing fast enough, Johnson in 1947 called in a favorite reporter, Lewis T. (“Tex”) Easley, of the Associated Press, for an interview, after which Easley wrote that while “People all over Texas formed an impression over the years that Lyndon Johnson personified the New Deal … it would be an error to tag Johnson now as a strong New Dealer.” In fact, Johnson seemed to be trying to say, that tag would always have been an error. “I think the term ‘New Dealer’ is a misnomer,” he told Easley. “I believe in free enterprise, and I don’t believe in the government doing anything that the people can do privately. Whenever it’s possible, government should get out of business.” George Brown’s friends were starting to believe that maybe Brown had been right all along when he had assured them that despite Johnson’s public posture during the Roosevelt Administration, in reality the Congressman had always been “practical.” Helpful though his new stance may have been in Texas’s ruling circles, however, it didn’t do much for his popularity in the White House.

  Newspapers and national magazines recounted cruises by the President and his intimates down the Potomac on the new presidential yacht Williamsburg, and described the President’s frequent poker games. Johnson was on one cruise on the Williamsburg, but probably only one; he played in the poker games two or three times—when the games were held at the home of Rayburn’s friend Secretary of the Treasury Fred M. Vinson, and Vinson invited him. As for the Oval Office, so far as can be determined, during all of 1946, Lyndon Johnson was in it exactly once—as a member of a delegation of congressmen. In 1947, he may not have been in it even once. As Symington puts it, “Johnson was just never part of Truman’s inner circle at all.” Horace Busby, who joined Johnson’s staff late in 1947, noticed that during his first few months on the job, there was not a single message or telephone call from the White House. Not only was Johnson no longer a presidential protégé, he no longer possessed even a trace of the aura of an Administration insider. He was only a
congressman. Even in his earliest days in Congress a decade earlier, he had been more than that.

  And when, in 1948, an invitation to the Oval Office finally came, it was not the type for which Johnson had hoped. A Johnson suggestion to Truman, written by Busby, for a “re-examination” of the Administration’s program of selling war defense plants to private industry, was released to the press, together with a follow-up letter. Shortly after a few brief paragraphs began clattering out on the wire service tickers, Johnson’s office received a telephone call from the White House. The President would like to see Congressman Johnson the following morning at 11:15.

  Johnson was very excited by the call. “The first thing he did was to go out and get his hair cut and his nails manicured,” Busby recalls. He purchased a new pair of shoes. Hurrying to Lewis & Thomas Saltz, one of Washington’s most prestigious men’s clothing stores, he brought back a boxful of white shirts—“he wasn’t buying them all; they were all different styles, and he just wanted to see which was the most suitable”—and a dozen “presidential” neckties. Calling in another young staff member, Warren Woodward, a dapper dresser, he consulted with him over shirts and ties, and then turned to the folding of his white pocket handkerchief. He wanted all four points showing (“none of this just a few points for him,” Busby says) and precisely aligned, “so he spent part of that evening at his desk,” folding and refolding the handkerchief, “and cursing it when it didn’t come right.” And the next morning, he kept darting out of his inner office to ask Busby and other members of his staff how much time he should leave for the taxi ride to the White House.

  The President’s interest, however, turned out to be not in Johnson’s attire but in his political manners. Returning to his office about noon, Johnson did not enter through the outer office in which his staff members sat, but, using a key, through the door that led directly from the corridor to his inner office. The door between the two offices was open. Johnson silently pushed it closed.

  “After a while, he buzzed for me,” Busby says. And when Busby opened the door, his boss “was just an absolute picture of dejection.” Truman, Johnson said, had been furious because he had released the letter to the press before it reached the White House. Johnson imitated the President speaking with his lips in a thin line and hardly moving, as the President did when he was angry. He told Busby that Truman had said, “Lyndon, I don’t like to read my mail in the newspapers.” (Johnson told Busby, “He’s absolutely right. We didn’t let him get the letter before the press had it. We’ve learned a lesson. We must never do it again.”)

  EVEN IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, he was, during these years of 1945, 1946 and 1947, not gaining but losing ground.

  The Speaker did what he could for him. Appointments to two prestigious new committees were in Rayburn’s power, and he appointed Johnson to both the House and Senate Joint Committee on Atomic Energy and to the House Select Committee on Postwar Military Policy, most of whose other members were either chairmen or ranking members of their own committees. But while Johnson impressed David Lilienthal, the first chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, who called him “an able young man, definitely liberal, shrewd, full of savvy,” his attempts to carve out a prominent role for himself on these committees resulted merely in resentment from the other, more senior, members. On select and joint as well as regular committees—as in every phase of life in the House of Representatives—seniority was the dominant factor. Ability couldn’t circumvent it. Energy couldn’t circumvent it. There was only one way to become one of the rulers of the House: to wait.

  And then, in 1946, came two brutal reminders that even waiting was no guarantee.

  In February, 1944, Representative Leonard W. Schuetz of Illinois had died, and in November of that year Warren Magnuson had won a Senate seat—and suddenly only two men (Patrick Henry Drewry of Virginia and Carl Vinson) sat between Johnson and the chairmanship of the House Naval Affairs Committee. Johnson had been inching his way toward the big black leather chairman’s seat in the middle of the double horseshoe of the committee seats; now that chair had begun to seem within reach.2 But Congress, stung by criticism of its inefficiency and inability to come to grips with the complexities of the Atomic Age and the post-war era, had established a bipartisan Joint Committee to study its own organization, and now, in July, 1946, the committee’s recommendations were made, and some of them were adopted—including one for the merging of the House Naval Affairs Committee and the House Military Affairs Committee into a single new Armed Services Committee. On this new committee Vinson would be chairman, but since six Democratic members of Military Affairs possessed greater seniority than Johnson, he would no longer be third-ranking Democrat. Vinson’s health and longevity (and Drewry’s) suddenly became much less relevant to Lyndon Johnson’s future. There were not two Democrats ahead of him now; there were eight.

  Moreover, in November, 1946, for the first time since 1930, the GOP won control of the House. The victory was a potent reminder of the jaws of the seniority trap. Outwaiting or outliving the eight Democrats ahead of him might not help. If, when his turn in the Democratic line finally arrived, the Republicans were the majority, he still wouldn’t be chairman.

  As for the other possibilities for leadership in the body of which Lyndon Johnson had been a member since 1937, Johnson’s post-war record was nearly identical with his pre-war record. He introduced one bill that would have an effect outside his own district in 1945: a minor measure, never effectively implemented, to give veterans priority in purchasing certain surplus goods after the needs of the federal government were provided for. He did not introduce a single piece of “national” legislation in 1946 or 1947. In 1948, he introduced a bill, whose details were never completely spelled out and for which he did not fight, to amend the Selective Service Act to “draft industries as well as men.” By the close of his career in the House of Representatives at the end of 1948, the record would be clear. During his more than eleven years as a member of the House, he introduced only four bills that would affect the country as a whole; in fact, since he introduced only three intra-district bills, he introduced only seven bills in all. Twenty other representatives entered Congress in January, 1937, and were still there at the end of 1948, so that their terms were roughly contemporaneous with his. One, Eugene J. Keogh of Brooklyn, an energetic legislator (who would later be responsible for the so-called “Keogh Bill,” a pension measure), introduced 169 bills during those twelve years. Three other representatives among those twenty introduced more than one hundred bills, Many of the twenty introduced fewer than that, but not one introduced as few as seven. Johnson introduced fewer pieces of legislation than any congressman who served in Congress during the same years as he. As for passage of legislation, the record is little better. Of the seven bills he introduced, two—two that affected only his district—were signed into law. Twelve of the twenty congressmen had more bills signed into law than that. And since the two pieces of Johnson-introduced legislation that became law were bills affecting only his district, during Johnson’s more than eleven years as Congressman no bill introduced by him that would have affected the people of the United States as a whole became a law of the United States.

  His reluctance to fight for others’ bills had, moreover, become even more pronounced. He refused to speak out for causes—refused, it sometimes seemed, to speak out on any issue with the exception of military preparedness; refused to take stands; refused to write not only laws but speeches. Was the Congressional Record crammed, month after month, year after year, with speeches delivered by congressmen in their home districts and then “revised and extended” so that they would be reprinted in the Record and thereby create the impression of involvement in national issues? Very few of those speeches were by Lyndon Johnson. Had entire years passed before the war in which he did not insert a single speech in the Congressional Record? Entire years passed now: 1944, 1945 and 1947. In regard to “real” speeches—talks longer than a paragraph or two actual
ly delivered in the House—their paucity was likewise dramatic. During his first eleven years in Congress, he delivered a total of ten speeches—less than one a year. He refused also to fight in the press on national issues.

  He refused to fight not only in public but in private. Helen Gahagan Douglas was a congresswoman herself now, and her earlier impression of Johnson’s constant awareness “that what he said might be repeated or remembered—even years later” was confirmed. She noticed that at dinner parties Johnson still talked a lot—but he still seemed never to say anything substantive. She felt she understood those tactics. Lyndon Johnson, Mrs. Douglas says, was looking down a “very long road.”

  But he was making no progress along it. Instead, there were continual reminders that he was slipping back.

  Once, his future on Capitol Hill had seemed so bright. He and Warren Magnuson had talked so often about how badly they both wanted to become Senators, and they had both assumed that it would be Johnson, with his access to the White House and to campaign funds, who would reach that goal first. But it was Magnuson who was sitting in the upper house. Indeed, during Johnson’s years in the House, nine members had advanced to the Senate, while he remained behind. Johnson had once been the “baby” of the 21-man Texas delegation, and considered to have a bright future on it (when he had been sworn in at the age of twenty-eight, in fact, only two of the 435 members of the House were younger than he). Now, with his fortieth birthday—August 27, 1948—approaching, many members of the Texas delegation were progressing faster toward committee chairmanships or ranking memberships, passing him on the road to substantial power in the House. In a note of irony, there were no fewer than ten congressmen named “Johnson”; seven of them stood higher in the House hierarchy than he. Rayburn’s friendship still gave him the aura of an insider, but it was only Rayburn’s friendship that did so, and he was getting a little old to still be “Sam Rayburn’s boy.” He no longer possessed any power of his own, and since he could not resist trying to dominate other men, he was constantly being reminded of this. His attempts to act toward his fellow congressmen as he had acted when he had possessed at least a modicum of independent power—the power of giving them campaign contributions or, because of his White House access, administrative favors—aroused only resentment. Says Representative James Van Zandt of Pennsylvania: “When he wanted something, he really went after it. He would say: ‘Now, goddamnit, Jimmy, I helped you on this, and I want you to help me on this.’” And, Van Zandt adds, “Johnson kept asking for favors, and he simply didn’t have that many to give in return.” He tried too hard—much too hard—to trade on what minor “help” he had given. “You can do those things once or twice,” Van Zandt says. “He did them too frequently. People would get irritated.”