And he didn’t know Washington.
The hundred new Congressmen who had come to Washington in December, 1931, had brought with them a hundred new secretaries, but few were less sophisticated than twenty-three-year-old Lyndon Johnson. When Estelle Harbin, a twenty-eight-year-old secretary from Corpus Christi who had been hired to assist Johnson, met him for the first time in January, 1932—at the Missouri-Pacific Railroad station in San Antonio; Johnson had gone home to Texas when Congress recessed for Christmas, and now was returning to Washington—she saw “a tall, real thin boy” who couldn’t stop talking about the wonders of train travel; he asked her excitedly, “Have you ever ridden in a Pullman? I never did until I went up with Mr. Kleberg. Have you ever eaten in a dining car? I never did.” When Johnson received his first monthly paycheck, he told Miss Harbin that he wanted to deposit it in a bank, but that he didn’t know how to open a bank account; he had never had one. And as for the intricacies of government, “That,” says Miss Harbin, “was a whole new world to us.” The mail sacks contained letters from secretaries of farm cooperatives asking for the Congressman’s support of an application for a loan from the Division of Cooperative Marketing of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, or for assistance from the Department of Agriculture’s Federal Farm Board, and hundreds of letters from veterans seeking assistance on pension and disability problems, each one with individual problems, each one complicated—mailbags full of requests requiring action from some federal agency or department or bureau. The new secretary didn’t even know which agency or department or bureau—and when, after a day or two of fruitless telephoning, he decided to go to the Veterans Bureau in person, he found himself standing in front of a building a block square and ten stories high, each floor filled with hundreds of offices.
“We didn’t know which bureau to go to, to ask about something, or to try to get something done,” Estelle Harbin recalls. “We didn’t know you could get books from the Library of Congress—and, my God, we never even thought of asking them for information. I wanted a plant for the office, but I had no idea you could get one by calling up the United States Botanic Garden. My God, we didn’t know anything! The first time we heard that there was a little train that Senators could ride [from the Senate Office Building] to the Capitol—well, we just couldn’t believe that! Lyndon didn’t know how to type, and he didn’t know how to dictate a letter—he had never dictated one. We were two ignorant little children.” Kleberg gave them his two complimentary gallery tickets to President Hoover’s address to a joint session of Congress, but when they arrived, all the seats had been taken, and they sat, Miss Harbin recalls, “on the two top steps,” not saying a word. “Lyndon was there beside me as scared as I was. We sat there like two scared field mice.”
Johnson could not persuade his boss to read the mail, much less dictate replies. If he asked the Congressman to call a government bureau on behalf of a constituent, Kleberg would always agree, but he never seemed to get around to doing it. When Johnson asked him to call an official so that he, Johnson, would have an easier time dealing with him, that call never seemed to be made, either. Johnson realized that he would have to handle the mail himself. And three times each day, the mailman would arrive with another bundle of it. “The mail really dismayed him at first,” Miss Harbin recalls; Johnson was to describe his own feelings about it: “I felt I was going to be buried.”
SOME OF THE INFORMATION he needed could be obtained from the Hill’s elderly spinster secretaries; with them, he displayed the same gift with elderly women that had awed his boyhood friends back in Johnson City. “He was always so courteous,” Miss Harbin recalls, “and there was never a little favor that was too much trouble for him to do.” Soon—“in nothing flat,” Miss Harbin says—in every office along those long cold corridors on the first floor of the House Office Building, there was a warm smile for Lyndon Johnson. But he needed more knowledge—more tips on how to get things done in Washington’s bewildering bureaucratic maze—than the elderly women could give him. And he was living in the right place to get it.
Once the Grace Dodge Hotel had been a “ladies’ hotel,” with its name in Old English gilt lettering above its door, the most elegant of the cluster of eight-story red brick hotels at the foot of the long north slope of Capitol Hill near Union Station. With the Depression emptying its rooms, however, its management had decided to cater also to young men whose paychecks were small but, coming from the government, regular. The two basement floors were divided into cubicles, and rented out at $40 per month for rooms on the “A” floor, just one level down from the lobby, with bathrooms that had to be shared only with the tenants of the adjoining room; and $30 for the smaller rooms on the bottom, or “B,” floor, where a single communal bathroom served all rooms, and, since this level was partly below ground, the only daylight came from half-windows, high up on the walls, facing on a back alley. Basement tenants were forbidden to mingle with the Dodge’s upstairs guests—who included two United States Senators and a Supreme Court Justice—or, in fact, to set foot in its lobby, which badly needed painting but still boasted a grand piano, a fireplace, Oriental rugs and glittering chandeliers; they were required to enter and leave by the back-alley door. But the lodgings were cheap and convenient—most of the basement tenants were, like Lyndon Johnson (who lived on “B”), congressional aides whose offices were right up Capitol Hill—and the tenants were young: the Dodge’s basement was crammed with camaraderie, as well as with enthusiasm, ambition and, because many of the aides had several years’ experience, with the expertise Lyndon Johnson needed on how to get things done in Washington. Since they couldn’t afford to eat in the Dodge dining room, the young men walked down to the All States Cafeteria, decorated with plaques of state seals, on Massachusetts Avenue, for a meal that Southern secretaries called the “Fo-bitter” because it cost fifty cents—or, just before payday, to Childs’ Cafeteria, where, one secretary recalls, “you could do pretty well on two bits.” A lot of joking and horseplay went on among the young men standing on line for their food, but Johnson didn’t wait on line. After walking over to Childs’ with the other secretaries, he would, as they entered the cafeteria door, dart ahead, grab a tray, hurry to choose his food, rush to the large table where they usually sat and wolf down his meal. One of the older secretaries in the group—Arthur Perry, a Capitol Hill veteran then secretary to Senator Tom Connally of Texas—was a shrewd observer of young men. Johnson, he saw, rushed through his food because he wanted to be done with it before the others got to the table—so that eating wouldn’t interfere with his conversation. “That left him free to shoot questions at us while we ate,” Perry would recall. The questions were all on a single theme: how to get things done in Washington, how to get ahead in Washington, how to be somebody in Washington. “He’d say, ‘But how did he do it?’ (Whatever it was.) ‘Did he know somebody? Is he a nice guy? What’s his secret of getting ahead?’” The simple answer—the shallow answer—didn’t satisfy him. If one of the other men at the table replied, “I don’t know as he has any special secret—maybe he’s just lucky,” Johnson would say, “I don’t believe in luck. You look into it and you’ll find it’s always a lot more than just luck.” He himself would not stop looking into it until he was satisfied. “If he didn’t like the answers he got, he would argue” on all sides of a question, worrying it from every angle, Perry says. “It took a long time” for Perry “to catch on” to what Johnson was doing, he says, but finally he realized “that most of his arguing was done simply to bring out every possible answer to his arguments. He wanted to be sure he knew all the answers.”
ONCE HE KNEW HOW to do things in Washington, he started doing them—with the same frenzied, driven, almost desperate energy he had displayed in Cotulla and Houston, the energy of a man fleeing from something dreadful.
Estelle Harbin, accustomed to the early-rising ways of Texas, would arrive at the House Office Building before eight o’clock, saying good morning to the guard at the desk insi
de the New Jersey Avenue entrance, and then turning down the corridor to her right. The corridor, which was silent and dark, for congressional offices didn’t open until nine, was longer than a football field, so long that the light from the window at its far end reached only a little way toward her, and so high that the lighted globes on its ceiling did little to dispel its dimness. And when she reached the far end, she would turn left into another corridor, unwindowed and even darker—except that, halfway down it, from the twelfth door on the right, a single shaft of light would always be falling across it from the open door of Room 258.
Often, Lyndon Johnson would be writing when she walked into 258. Because of his difficulty giving dictation, he wrote out the letters he wanted Miss Harbin to type—writing and rewriting them until he was satisfied—and he wanted to finish that work before eight o’clock, because at eight the dollies carrying the new day’s mail began clattering down those long corridors. “The minute the mail arrived, we would start opening it together, and decide what to do about it,” Miss Harbin says. “Then I’d start [typing] the letters he had written out before I got there, and he would get on the phone.”
He knew whom to call now, and he knew how to talk to the people he was calling. “He had charm to burn,” Miss Harbin says. “He would get someone to do something for him, and then he would hang up and we would laugh about it. Very soon, he had a real pipeline to all the bureaus. And he wouldn’t take no—he would pursue these things like it was life and death. And when he got something for somebody—when we could write and tell somebody that they could look forward to getting something—that was a real victory. He’d put down the phone—‘Stelle! Yay!’ He’d just practically jump up and down.”
Work not only began unusually early in Room 258 (other secretaries say that no matter how early they arrived, the light in 258 was always on) and was not interrupted by lunch (Johnson and Miss Harbin would eat sandwiches at their desks) but also ended unusually late. The offices that, in those leisurely days, opened at nine, closed at four or four-thirty. Miss Harbin’s boardinghouse stopped serving dinner at eight, she recalls, “so, often, I couldn’t get there in time for dinner.” Generally, the Kleberg office staff would dine at Childs’. “Lyndon knew the price of every dish in that restaurant,” she says, “and a lot of times, we had to put our money on the table and count it to see what we could afford to order. We’d do this in the office [before leaving]. He’d say, ‘This is Wednesday, and on Wednesday they have so-and-so.’ We always had to leave me [bus fare] to get home.” Occasionally their boss would take them to dinner at the Occidental (“Where Statesmen Dine”); “that was a big deal,” Miss Harbin says; “we saw people we recognized from magazines, and we might have oysters on the half-shell.” Soon an unusually heavy stream of letters “telling somebody that they could look forward to getting something” was pouring out of Room 258. But repetition did not dull the thrill Johnson received from each “victory.” And it didn’t dull the edge of his effort. When Spring came, Miss Harbin would sometimes persuade him to take a brief stroll on the Capitol grounds. But although the stroll might begin at a relaxed pace, inevitably, Miss Harbin recalls, she would have to begin trotting, because her companion would be walking faster and faster. “He was so tall and he took such long steps, and I couldn’t keep up with him. I would say something, and he’d slow down, but soon he’d be going faster again. I’d skip to keep up with him, and then I’d have to run.” And when they turned back toward the office he would begin striding faster and faster, “and then he would take my hand, and we’d run, literally run, across the Capitol grounds. He just couldn’t wait to get back to that office.”
THOUGH he no longer had time to eat dinner with the Dodge boys, he was still a participant in their late-evening bull sessions—but the tone of his participation had rapidly changed. Coming in late from work, he would walk into a discussion in one of the crowded little basement cubicles, and begin at once to dominate it. He didn’t want to talk about anything but politics, and steered every conversation onto that subject. And while only a week or two before he had been asking questions at the Dodge, now he wasn’t asking any more, he was telling—talking as if he knew all the answers. “We used to have discussions,” one of the young men was to say. “Now we were having lectures—lectures by Lyndon.”
His demeanor had changed not only in a basement but in a balcony. In January, he and Estelle Harbin had sat on the steps of the gallery of the House of Representatives like “two scared field mice” during President Hoover’s address to Congress. In February, the President addressed Congress again. Several Congressional secretaries, sitting in the gallery reserved for them, remember Johnson coming in late, pushing aggressively to get to an empty seat, and introducing himself to everyone around him in a very loud voice. One secretary sitting in a front row of the gallery remembers people hunching down a little in embarrassment, and says that he was doing so, too, when he felt a tap on his shoulder and, turning, found the tall young man who was making all the fuss leaning down toward him, and stretching out his arm for a handshake. “Lyndon Johnson from Johnson City, Texas!” the young man said loudly. “Dick Kleberg’s secretary.”
His demeanor had also changed in the halls of the House Office Building. When he wasn’t working the telephone in 258, Johnson had begun roaming those corridors with the air of a successful politician. Says a secretary to a Pennsylvania Congressman: “I remember him bounding in the door every day with a big smile, and saying, ‘Hi! How’s everyone from Pennsylvania today?’ He just radiated self-confidence.”
He acted like a successful politician in other ways, too. Despite the thinness of his suits, his first paycheck went not for warm clothing, but for a formal portrait—and a hundred prints—by Washington’s most expensive photographer. Inscribing and autographing the pictures (“To Gene and the members of the Sam Houston High debating club. I love you all—Lyndon B. Johnson”), he mailed them back to Texas, as if he were a Congressman responding to constituents’ requests for an autographed picture. Recalling this mailing, one secretary says: “What I remember about Lyndon Johnson was his fantastic assurance in everything he did.”
CONFIDENCE? Assurance? The photographs weren’t the only communications that Lyndon Johnson sent to Texas. No sooner had he arrived in Washington than he began writing to Gene Latimer, Luther (“L.E.”) Jones and other former students at Sam Houston High. These letters were not the conventional letters from a teacher to former students. Though he wrote them late at night after a grinding day in Kleberg’s office, they were not brief notes but detailed descriptions of his life in Washington that often ran four handwritten pages. And in them, he didn’t merely ask his former pupils to stay in touch; he pleaded with them to stay in touch. The happy-go-lucky Latimer was not a faithful correspondent; Jones was, but on one occasion he didn’t reply promptly. “Dear L.E.,” said the next letter from Washington, “Have you forgotten me?” And when Jones wrote back, Johnson replied: “Thanks for your letter. … I had almost begun to think you had quit me too. Haven’t been able to get a line out of Gene et al for weeks. … It’s now after 12 and I’ve just finished work. Must drop Gene a note also. Love and for goodness sakes write me a long letter now.” Johnson’s letters reveal not only a penchant for secrecy rather surprising in personal notes (on one, entirely innocuous, he wrote: “Burn this—others probably won’t understand the personal references”), but also concern about how his own letters were being received (“Hope you won’t be bored with this long letter”), and an urgent need to be reassured that these two young men to whom he had once been close still wanted to be close to him. Pouring out affection, he asked—over and over, in every letter, in fact, that survives—that the affection be reciprocated. In a letter written on a Sunday night (“Have not been out of the office all day. Didn’t get up until late this morning so I was forced to rush to work and have been at it until only a few minutes ago. I never get time to do anything but try to push the mail out”), he told Jones: “
You are a real boy. I love you and Gene as if you were my own.” The letter ends: “Thanks for your … letter. I’m waiting for another … letter.”
Other letters were needed even more. If a few days went by without the mailbags containing a letter in Rebekah Johnson’s carefully rounded script, Estelle Harbin says, “you could see him get quiet and homesick.”
Sometimes, even when the letters from Texas were regular, he would get quiet, Miss Harbin says. As he had done with Mrs. Marshall in Cotulla and with Ethel Davis in San Marcos, he made a confidante of this somewhat older woman, and, in a maternal way, she was very fond of him and felt she understood him—as perhaps she did, working beside him all day, day after day, the two of them alone in an office. And she had a very different picture of him than did the young men in the Dodge or on Capitol Hill. “Now, Lyndon had a side to him,” she says. “He could get very low. When he got real quiet, it was bad.” She even devised a strategy to cheer him up. Johnson was very proud of working for a Kleberg; he never tired of repeating to acquaintances that the King Ranch was so big that the entire state of Connecticut could be dropped into it and never touch a fence. In these first months, a friendly word from his boss meant a lot to him, Miss Harbin saw, so whenever Kleberg (who, with golf in season, was now coming to Capitol Hill less and less frequently) asked Lyndon to deliver papers to him at his red-carpeted Mayflower Hotel suite, “I’d wait until Lyndon cleared the building, and I’d call Mr. Kleberg and say, ‘Lyndon is real low—I think he’s real homesick. And he needs some cheering up.’ And Mr. Kleberg would say, ‘Don’t say another word. I’ll take care of it.’ And as soon as Lyndon would get there, Mr. Kleberg would say, ‘Now put those things down, boy, and we’re just going to talk.’ And every time, Lyndon would come back a different person. When he hit the door, his hat would just be on the back of his head with the brim turned up, and he’d be smiling, and he’d say, ‘I’ll tell you, that Mr. Dick is the most wonderful man in the world.’”
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