The atmosphere which had surrounded Lyndon Johnson in the Little Congress (and, before that, at San Marcos) was now deepening around him in the big Congress. The powerful older men to whom he was so deferential were fond of Lyndon Johnson, as were a few—very few—of his contemporaries, most of them unassertive men such as Van Zandt or a fellow Texas Congressman, Robert Poage. With others, however, there was less fondness. Says another Texas Congressman, O. C. Fisher: “He had a way of getting along with the leaders, and he didn’t bother much with the small fry. And let me tell you, the small fry didn’t mind. They didn’t want much to do with him, either.” Even the admiring Van Zandt says that “People were critical of him because he was too ambitious, too forceful, too pushy. Some people didn’t like him.” In the House Dining Room, says Representative Wingate Lucas of Fort Worth, “guys would come [in] and sit down” at a table near where Johnson was sitting; they would greet all their fellow members nearby, except him. “And he would get up and say, ‘Well, Joe, why in hell didn’t you speak to me?’ Well, they hadn’t spoken to him because they didn’t like him. They wouldn’t put up with him.” The situation was summed up in a symbolic gesture—a shrinking away. The old, hereditary Johnson habit of grasping a man’s lapel with one hand and putting his other arm around the man’s shoulders, holding him close while staring into his eyes and talking directly into his face didn’t offend all fellow congressmen, some of whom liked the intimacy of the gesture, but more were offended. They would draw back from his hand, shrug away from his arm. And sometimes, if he didn’t take the hint, they would react sharply. At least once, when he took a congressman’s lapel in his hand, the congressman knocked his hand away. Without at least a modicum of power behind them, his techniques of manipulating men were ineffective, and earned him only unpopularity. With increasing frequency, moreover, his fellow members’ eyes now betrayed something that to Lyndon Johnson was as unpleasant as dislike. Johnson was always reading men’s eyes. He knew when his colleagues didn’t even know who he was. And, with increasing frequency, that was the case. A new Representative, George Smathers of Florida, was sworn in in January, 1946. When, almost two years later, he saw, on the wall of Mrs. Douglas’s office, “a big theatrical picture … of a shiny-haired fellow, I asked her who he was.” Until that moment, Smathers recalls, “I wasn’t even aware of his existence.” Though Johnson had never spent much time in the House Chamber, had never listened to the speeches of others, he had, at least during his earlier years in the House, spent a lot of time in the cloakroom. Now he started going to the cloakroom less and less, and Van Zandt understood why. “He couldn’t work up the enthusiasm any more.”
Estelle Harbin, who had known Lyndon Johnson well when he was young, had said that he “couldn’t stand being just one of a crowd—just could not stand it.” Mrs. Douglas, who came to know Lyndon Johnson well now, when he was no longer so young, was to use similar words. “He never spoke in the House, you know, except on rare, rare occasions. He didn’t spend much time listening to others in the House. He usually voted and then left the Chamber, loping off the floor with that great stride of his as though he was on some Texas plain.” And “if he did remain, he looked the picture of boredom, slumped in his chair with his eyes half closed. Then suddenly he’d jump to his feet, nervous … restless, as if he couldn’t bear it another minute.” His days were punctuated with inconsequential, but painful, reminders of his lack of status and power. Posing for photographic portraits of the committees on which he sat hurt his pride. In the formal portraits of the committees at their daises, he was embarrassingly distant from the chairman. Informal portraits, such as one of the Naval Affairs Committee taken after a luncheon with James Forrestal at the Navy Department, were worse. Forrestal and several of his top deputies were seated in the single row of chairs, and officious committee aides made certain that the remaining chairs were occupied by the most senior congressmen; Johnson had to stand behind them, among the less senior congressmen, distinguished from the group only by his height. He “couldn’t stand being just one of a crowd”—but, increasingly, one of a crowd was what he was.
Whenever, during these post-war years, Johnson attempted to assert his importance, he was only reminded of how little of it he possessed.
He was rebuffed even in an attempt to assert his power over one of his committee’s young staff members. Thirty-year-old Bryce N. Harlow did not, in Johnson’s opinion, show him sufficient subservience, so in 1947, the Congressman attempted, Harlow says, “to take me to the Johnson School.” During a subcommittee discussion of a bill Harlow had drafted, Johnson suddenly asked him if some minor point had been checked with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. The demand, says Harlow, who already, as congressional liaison during World War II for General George C. Marshall, had earned a reputation as an expert in legislation, was “ridiculous—it didn’t have to be checked.” He told Johnson so, and explained the reason. But Johnson turned to Subcommittee Chairman William E. Hess, of Ohio, and said contemptuously, “Well, Mr. Chairman, I move the bill be tabled until the staff member checks with the RFC and finishes the job he was supposed to do.”
Harlow made the check as Johnson wanted, and said nothing further about it. A tiny, slender man (years later, taking the lectern at a Washington dinner, he would tell the audience, “Don’t wait for the rest of me. I’m standing up”), soft-spoken, gentle and courtly, he may have seemed sufficiently malleable to be a prime candidate for the Johnson School, and the headmaster may have decided that a further lesson was in order. Shortly after the first incident, Harlow wrote “some report with a recommendation as to what the subcommittee should do”—just a standard report with the recommendation in the usual form—and, to his surprise, “Johnson requested an executive session.” No sooner had the doors been shut than Johnson said, “I want to register a vehement protest against what the staff has done. It’s an insult to the committee.”
“I was astonished,” Harlow recalls, “and so was Bill Hess. [Hess said,] ‘What’s eating you?’ Johnson says, ‘He’s telling the committee what to do. He’s telling us how to vote.’ ” And when Hess pointed out that Harlow had only made a recommendation, as he had been instructed to do, Johnson, his voice heavy with sarcasm, said, “Let’s just dissolve the Armed Services Committee, then. Let’s just appoint Harlow to represent the Congress of the United States.”
But Johnson had mistaken Harlow’s character. Decades later, when a journalist could write that “Harlow is respected to the point of reverence in political Washington,” one reason for the respect was that, devoted though he was to Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, both of whom he served in high-level positions, he insisted on telling them what he believed, not what they wanted to hear. (When someone said, “It must take courage to tell a President he’s wrong,” Harlow replied, “It takes courage not to do it if you know you should. It may hurt you, but if you don’t do it, you can’t live with yourself. That’s an expensive trip.”) And Johnson also misunderstood Harlow’s financial situation. “Lyndon would maneuver people into positions of dependency and vulnerability so he could do what he wanted [with them],” and “he thought he could do that to me,” because, Harlow says, Johnson assumed that, like most staff members, Harlow needed the job. But Johnson didn’t know that Harlow could return whenever he wished to the family textbook-publishing business, the Harlow Publishing Company, in Oklahoma City. After the executive session, when Hess told him, in Harlow’s recollection, “Now, Bryce, don’t you take this personally. I don’t want you to get upset over this,” Harlow replied by saying that “Johnson likes to pick on me.… This is the second time,” that “I will not accept his further acerbity in the committee”—and that he was therefore resigning, immediately. Hess, knowing how perturbed Carl Vinson would be at the loss of the young staff aide for whose opinion the former chairman (and still ranking Democrat on the committee) had already developed great respect (he would promote him to chief clerk of the committee when the Democrats regained cont
rol of the House), telephoned “the Admiral”—who came to Harlow’s office and attempted to persuade him to stay. And when Harlow refused, saying, “You listened to that, you saw what happened,” Vinson took him by the arm, said, “All right, you come with me now, we’re going over to see Lyndon,” and, holding on to his arm, brought him over to the Speaker’s Lobby, sat him down and summoned Johnson off the floor. He told Johnson to sit down, too, and then, sitting down himself between the two men, Vinson said: “Now, Lyndon, you put on quite a show this morning. And now Bryce is going to quit.” The Admiral turned to Johnson and said: “We can’t have that. So you’re going to tell him you’re not going to do that any more.”
For an instant, Harlow recalls, he thought Johnson would refuse, but then “he looked at Carl, and he said, ‘Oh, hell, forget it, forget it. We’ll get along all right. Don’t you worry about it.’ ” Johnson made the apology so swiftly and smoothly that it scarcely seemed like an apology. But that was what it was. Lyndon Johnson had been made to humble himself before a staff assistant.
REMINDERS OF his lack of power darkened even his social life. While he had been stuck on the same rung of the Washington ladder, other members of the little circle of ambitious young men had been climbing, some to impressive heights. He had helped Tom Clark get his first job; Tom Clark was now Attorney General of the United States. Abe Fortas had been only an SEC staffer when they met, and then Under Secretary of the Interior. But in 1946 Fortas formed a law firm with Thurman Arnold and Paul Porter, and that firm became a power unto itself in Washington. Even Mrs. Douglas, so admiring of Lyndon Johnson, says that “after Abe got his law firm, Lyndon Johnson was nowhere compared to Abe Fortas.” Because of the force of Johnson’s personality, his charm, and the respect in which he was held for his political acumen, Lyndon Johnson was still very much a part of the circle, as popular as ever, still missed when he was away in Texas. Yet it was noticeable that the center of gravity in the group was shifting somewhat; Fortas, for example, “held forth at length” more now than previously, Mrs. Douglas says. Johnson had always had the habit of falling asleep at dinner parties if he was not the center of attention, of putting his chin down on his chest when someone else began to talk, closing his eyes and dozing off for as long as twenty minutes before “he woke up talking.” He was going to sleep—or pretending to go to sleep—quite often now. When he gave parties in the Johnson home on 30th Place, the guest list was usually impressive, and the guests truly liked him; he made them like him. But, as his friends could see, some of the guests were there primarily because they knew that Sam Rayburn would be there, and sometimes this unpleasant fact was rather obvious to the host.
THERE WERE HUMILIATIONS even back in his own district, even in matters so minor as office space.
Instead of procuring space in a private building in Austin, Johnson had begun demanding offices in the United States Courthouse. Judges and District Attorney Jack Roberts had objected, saying that they were already cramped, but Johnson had gone over their heads to Attorney General Tom Clark, who had discreetly arranged for him to use a two-room suite when District Court was not in session. But when, in 1946, Johnson had his name and title painted on the door of the office he had been loaned, he went too far. Needing the room for his own staff, the District Attorney ordered the custodian to scrape off the lettering. “Subsequently,” as Baxter Taylor, Jr., a real estate officer of the federal Public Buildings Administration, reported to a superior, “Mr. Johnson visited the office, discovered the removal, and objected most vehemently.” The enraged Congressman telephoned John L. Nagle, the Building Administration’s deputy commissioner for real estate management, but Nagle only referred the matter to Taylor, who, after a delay of some months, reported “there is no space in the building … for Mr. Johnson’s use.” Johnson was forced to ask Clark for help, and Clark secured an office for him in the Travis County Courthouse instead, but only after more bureaucratic delays, to each of which Johnson reacted with a rage that masked his sense of humiliation over the incident, which had become widely known—and a source of amusement—in Austin.
IN 1946, moreover, Johnson, who had not encountered serious opposition in his four previous re-election campaigns, was opposed by Austin resident Hardy Hollers. Hollers was a respected attorney, but a political neophyte without even a semblance of a campaign organization. He was running against an incumbent who had compiled a spectacular record of improving the lives of his district’s impoverished farmers and ranchers with giant rural electrification projects and implementation of other New Deal programs, and whose flooding of the district with federal installations such as the giant Bergstrom Air Force Base and federally financed bodies such as the dam-building Lower Colorado River Authority meant that a staggeringly high percentage of its voters relied on a federal paycheck—and who had created a political machine that was also probably without equal in any other congressional district in Texas. Johnson’s margin, while large—he received 42,980 votes, sixty-eight percent of the vote, to 17,782 for Hollers and 2,468 for a third candidate, Charles E. King—was less impressive when viewed against the tendency of Texas voters to routinely return incumbent Senators and congressmen to office—and against the fact that the only district-wide daily newspaper, Charles Marsh’s Austin American-Statesman, had the tone of a Johnson campaign brochure. Political observers were, in fact, rather startled both by the size of the anti-Johnson vote and by the bitterness against the Congressman that surfaced during the campaign.
More significant was the reason for the bitterness. Hollers called his campaign “a crusade against corruption in public office,” and its focus was Johnson’s finances and ethics. Johnson, Hollers charged, had “enriched himself in office,” and had enriched his friends as well, during a time in which other men in the Tenth Congressional District had been off at war. He noted that Johnson’s three senior advisers, Wirtz, Clark and Looney, represented the oil companies and the big private utilities Johnson claimed he was opposing; the name of Brown & Root was raised, and, for the first time, publicly linked with Johnson’s; the Congressman, Hollers said, was “an errand boy for war-rich contractors.” “If the United States Attorney was on the job, Lyndon Johnson would be in the federal penitentiary instead of in the Congress,” Hollers said. “Will Lyndon Johnson explain how the charter for KTBC, owned by Mrs. Johnson, was obtained? Will Lyndon Johnson explain … his mushrooming personal fortune?” Johnson’s vigorous contention that he played no role in the affairs of his wife’s station was not convincing in a small city in which the link between KTBC’s advertising and the Congressman was an open secret among the city’s businessmen. As an Austin journalist was to write: “Never again, after this campaign, was Johnson free from the belief … that he used his public power to get money for himself.” Lady Bird was aware of the effect of the 1946 campaign. “That was a watershed,” she was to say. “It was the first time we had ugly things said about us. We ceased to be the young shining knight.” And her husband was aware also—even if the subject was a source of pain to him. (Once, he asked Ed Clark the reason that he was not more “loved” in the district for which he had done so much. “That’s simple,” Clark said, with his customary candor. “You got rich in office.” Johnson leaped to his feet without a word and strode from Clark’s office.) The fact that one out of every three voters had opposed him, in a district to which he had brought such great economic benefits, preyed upon his mind so incessantly that he could not stop talking about it. “He simply could not understand how any of them came to oppose him,” a friend would recall. He wanted, needed, from his constituents not merely support but affection, and never again was he able to make himself believe that he had it.
ADDING TO JOHNSON’S ANXIETY, during these years, was another consideration—one which at times seemed to loom before him more ominously than any other.
According to family lore, Johnson men had weak hearts and died young. All during his youth, Lyndon had heard relatives saying that. Then, while he was s
till in college, and his father was only in his early fifties, his father’s heart had begun to fail, and Sam Ealy Johnson had died, in 1937, twelve days after his sixtieth birthday. Sam Ealy had two brothers, George and Tom Johnson. George, the youngest of the three brothers, suffered a massive heart attack in 1939 and died a few months later, at the age of fifty-seven. In 1946, at the age of sixty-five, Tom suffered a heart attack, and in 1947 he had a second. Lyndon Johnson, who had always been deeply aware of his remarkable physical similarity to his tall, gawky, big-eared, big-nosed father, was convinced—convinced to what one of his secretaries calls “the point of obsession”—that he had inherited the family legacy. “I’m not gonna live to be but sixty,” he would say. “My Daddy died at sixty. My uncle …”He had no patience with attempts to argue him out of this belief; once, when Lady Bird was trying to reassure him that he would not die young, he looked at her scornfully and said flatly: “It’s a lead-pipe cinch.” The long, slow path to power in the House might be the only one open to him, but it was not a path feasible for him to follow. Whenever it was suggested that he might make his career in the House of Representatives, he would reply, in a low voice: “Too slow. Too slow.” Rayburn had begun trudging along that path early—he had been only thirty years old when first elected to Congress in 1912—and it had taken him twenty-five years, until 1937, to become Majority Leader; he had not become Speaker until 1940, at the age of fifty-eight. But Sam Johnson had died at the age of sixty. And what if the Democrats should not be in control of the House when Johnson’s chance came? The path to power in the House—the silence, the obeisance—was not too narrow for Lyndon Johnson, who could follow surefootedly the narrowest political road. But it was too long. He had managed to break the trap of the Hill Country; he might not be able to escape the trap of the seniority system before he died.
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