The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  But the quietness would return, and sometimes, Estelle Harbin says, “it was very bad.” She felt she understood why he ran—not only physically but “in his mind, too”: because “he had a burning ambition to be somebody. He didn’t know what he wanted to be, but he wanted to be somebody.” He ran, she says, because “he couldn’t stand not being somebody—just could not stand it. So he was trying to meet everyone, to learn everything—he was trying to gobble up all Washington in a month.” Dining with him at night she sometimes felt that even after the long day’s work, “he was still running in his head.” Walking toward her bus in the dark, watching him running awkwardly down Capitol Hill toward the Dodge, she would hope that he would relax when he got there. But often, when the next morning she turned into the only open door in the House Office Building and his pale face looked up at her, he would say something that told her he had been running all night, too. When he got quiet, she says, it was because he was doubting himself, because he was afraid he would never get to be somebody. Or, she says, it was because he had been hurt—deeply hurt—by some offhand remark. “He was very sensitive to the other person, and he was very sensitive himself,” she says. “And he was very, very easily hurt.” Because she felt she understood him, “sometimes,” Estelle Harbin says, “I felt very sorry for him.”

  HE RAN HARDER. In June, 1932, Miss Harbin, for personal reasons, returned to Texas. Johnson had the opportunity to hire a new assistant—two, in fact, since among the information he had acquired at the Dodge was the fact that a $130-per-month patronage job as mailman in the House Post Office traditionally “belonged” to the Fourteenth District. And he had his new assistants already picked out. He brought Gene Latimer and L. E. Jones to Washington.

  Latimer, the little Irish boy with the “wonderful smile”—“the best-natured little guy you ever saw,” says one of the Dodge residents—came for love. His fiancee’s family had moved there, and Latimer was anxious to be near her and to earn enough money to get married, and the only job he had been able to find in Depression-racked Houston had been as a delivery boy. Johnson told him a job was waiting for him in Washington. “L.E.” came for ambition. The son of an impoverished druggist, he had spent his childhood in a Houston slum from which he was desperate to escape; he had worked his way through two years at Rice University, but was afraid he would have trouble getting a job when he graduated. Johnson wrote him, “I know you are going places and I’m going to help you get there,” and said the place to start was a government job in Washington.

  He got them cheap. So that he could keep for himself the balance remaining for 1932 in the district’s $5,000 annual clerk-hire allowance, Johnson had arranged for Latimer, who arrived several months before Jones, to be given the $130-per-month mailman job, which put him on the payroll of the House Post Office instead of the district. Since that job was not yet open, he had arranged for Congressman Kleberg to pay Latimer out of his own pocket: $25 per month. He would not need much money, Johnson assured him; he could share Johnson’s room at the Dodge and therefore have a place to sleep for only $15 per month, leaving $10 to spend as he pleased. After a month, Latimer told Johnson that he simply could not live on $10. Johnson arranged to have Kleberg pay him $57. For several months, that was Latimer’s total salary.

  When he finally began receiving his $130, Latimer found that to be a low wage even in Depression Washington, too low to enable him to save enough money so he could get married. It was, however, a higher wage than Jones received. Johnson had persuaded Kleberg to increase his own share of the $5,000 allowance for 1933 to the maximum permitted by law: $3,900. Jones’ annual salary was therefore the remaining $1,100, or $91.66 per month.

  And he got his money’s worth. Many Congressmen required House patronage employees—mailmen, elevator operators, gallery doorkeepers—to work an hour or two each day in their own offices after getting off work. But an hour or two was not what Johnson had in mind. He asked the House Postmaster to assign Latimer to the earliest shift, which began at five a.m. and ended at noon. Johnson allowed Latimer to take a half-hour for lunch but no more: at twelve-thirty sharp each day, Latimer was to be in Room 258—ready for work.

  This work might be over at eight or nine o’clock in the evening, Latimer says, “but often I would stay until eleven-thirty or midnight.” During much of this time, Johnson would be out of the office, cultivating bureaucrats or other congressional secretaries. Latimer would be alone in 258, an eighteen-year-old boy working eighteen-hour days. Soon Johnson found a way to get even more work out of him. “My job in the Post Office was sorting the mail, pitching it into different bins, and we made two or three deliveries [each day]. He urged me to pitch the mail faster, and I got so I did it faster than any other clerk, and then between deliveries I might have ninety minutes free at a time. And I’d run over to the office [Kleberg’s office] and do ninety minutes of typing” before heading back to the Post Office for more mail-sorting and delivering. And “then, at the end of the shift, I’d rush over to that little corner place and eat that fifteen-cent stew and rush over to the office so I could be at work at twelve-thirty.”

  By the time Jones arrived in Washington—a third bed was moved into the little room at the Dodge—Kleberg had been given a two-room suite, Office 1322, in the new House Office Building (now known as the Longworth Building) which had just been opened alongside the old one. A routine was soon established for the staff of that office. It began before five, when Johnson shook Latimer awake and started him on his way up Capitol Hill. Not long thereafter, he would awaken Jones. Pulling on their clothes—Johnson had taught Jones his trick of taking off his necktie still knotted so he wouldn’t have to waste time tying it in the morning—Johnson and Jones would hurry out of the Dodge and up Capitol Hill in the dark, past the shadowy mass of the Capitol and into the Longworth Building. To avoid wasting time awakening the napping night elevator operator, they ran up the winding stairs, dimly lit from eagle sconces, to the third floor. Having raced through his mail-sorting and delivering, Latimer would arrive at about the same time—at Johnson’s request, he had been assigned to a route which included 1322, so he brought the mail himself.

  Ripping open the mail sacks, Johnson began sorting through the mail—“reading it so fast that you couldn’t believe he was reading it, but he was,” Latimer says. At first, Johnson had dictated replies to every letter, but he had discovered that his former debater had a gift of Irish blarney with not only the spoken but the written word. Johnson wanted to flatter “important people” with whom he was corresponding, Latimer says, “to butter them up,” and “he liked to have the butter laid on thick. It was almost impossible to put too much on. If he wanted to tell someone he liked him, he didn’t want to say, ‘I like you.’ He wanted to say, ‘You’re the greatest guy in the world.’” Latimer says, “I did get to be a master of laying it on, all right,” and he is not exaggerating; a typical letter refers to Sam Fore, a newspaper publisher from Floresville, as “The Saint Paul of Floresville.” Soon Johnson, riffling through the mail as rapidly as if he were dealing a deck of cards, would hand many letters to Latimer with only the briefest of instructions—“Say yes. Say no. Tell him we’re looking into it. Butter him up”—and Latimer would expand those instructions exactly as Johnson wished; Johnson had, in fact, discovered a genius in a minor art form: the letter to constituents. When the last letter had been dealt, Latimer sat down at his desk, in front of a heavy Underwood typewriter, and began typing. To dictate replies to letters on which more detailed instruction was needed, Johnson would lead Jones, carrying a stenographer’s pad, into the adjoining room, so that, as Latimer explains, “his dictating wouldn’t distract me, because my typewriter was supposed never to stop.”

  When the dictating was finished, and Jones had sat down at his Underwood, Johnson would “mark up” district newspapers, the big San Antonio and Corpus Christi dailies and the scores of smalltown weeklies, putting checkmarks next to the articles (a wedding, a birth, the opening
of a new business, a local Kiwanis Club election) which merited a letter of congratulation. “He insisted on getting every paper in the district, no matter how small,” Latimer says. “And some of those papers would just be filled with checkmarks.” By the time most congressional offices opened and began sorting mail, Kleberg’s staff had finished sorting it and were well into answering it.

  By this time, government agencies were open, and Johnson would get on the phone to them—while the two typewriters clattered away. No coffee was allowed in Kleberg’s office, because Johnson felt making it and drinking it would distract Latimer and Jones from their work. Less ominous distractions also were frowned on. “If he caught you reading a letter from your mother, or if you were taking a crap, he’d say, ‘Son, can’t you please try a little harder to learn to do that on your own time?’” If Latimer asked if he could go out to buy cigarettes, Johnson would say, “What am I paying you for? Buying cigarettes? Buy them on your own time.” “Our job was to keep those typewriters humming,” Latimer says. “He would come down the hall—I could hear his heels clicking—and if he didn’t hear both those typewriters going ninety miles per hour, he wanted to know what the hell was going on.” The natural competitiveness of young men was used as a spur. “The Chief has a knack, or, better said, a genius for getting the most out of those around him,” Latimer recalls. “He’d say, ‘Gene, it seems L.E.’s a little faster than you today.’ And I’d work faster. ‘L.E., he’s catching up with you.’ And pretty soon, we’d both be pounding for hours without stopping, just as fast as we could.”

  The Depression was swelling the mail now, as more constituents asked for jobs and new government programs, and as veterans appealed more urgently for bonus pre-payment. With only one or two staffers in each congressional office, many offices answered more and more of the mail with mimeographed form replies, or with pro forma promises, or simply didn’t reply at all—and still fell further and further behind. Kleberg’s office answered personally every letter that could possibly be answered. For Lyndon Johnson, the mail possessed almost a mystique. At that time government programs touched the lives of few constituents, so the mail—the only means by which a Congressman could keep in touch with his district almost 2,000 miles from Washington—was a key to a Congressman’s power; Johnson could hardly have avoided hearing, over and over, about one former Congressman or another who had “lost touch with his district”—and who was a Congressman no longer. But although other congressional staffers heard the same stories, they didn’t answer every letter. For Lyndon Johnson, the mystique of the mail went beyond the political. He had always done every job “as if his life depended on it.” Believing that “if you did just absolutely everything you could do, you would succeed,” he had tried to perform— perfectly—even minor tasks that no one else bothered with. For such a man, congressional mail, which consisted so largely of minor details—of small, unimportant requests—was a natural métier. Doing everything one could do with the mail meant answering every letter—and that was what he insisted his office must do. And not only must every letter be answered, he told Latimer and Jones, it must be answered the very day it arrived. “The only excuse that was accepted for not answering the same day was that you had lost a file, and, boy, there had better not be too many of those: not being able to find a file—that was some sin!” Latimer says. “And if your reply said, ‘We have asked the Veterans Administration to look into this,’ you really had to ask—that same day. So that the next day, you could write another letter about it.” The early-morning mail delivery was only the first of three—and then four, and then five—made during the day, and still the bundles of each delivery grew heavier. Johnson would sort through the bundles, writing brief instructions on each letter about its handling and dividing the letters between his two aides. After typing his way for hours through a pile of letters, Jones or Latimer would finally be almost to the bottom—and then Johnson would smack down on his desk another pile, “a pile that,” Jones says, “might be a foot high.” And before he would be allowed to leave the office that night, the pile would have to be gone.

  There was no escape from the mail. Small bundles meant not less but more work for the two young men. “It was important to get mail,” Gene Latimer explains. “That was the most important thing. You had to have people writing you. So if the mail got light, we had to generate mail. Any day when we didn’t get a hundred letters was a terrible day. And we had to do something about it.” Letters were solicited, by scanning the weekly newspapers more closely than ever for any conceivable good or bad news that might justify a message of congratulation or condolence—a message in which the Congressman would solicit a reply by asking, in Latimer’s words, “‘How am I doing in Washington? What government programs would you like to see passed?’—that kind of question.” Then came the ultimate refinement of the congratulatory broadside. At some point, Latimer recalls, the “mail fell off” to a point at which

  we were receiving perhaps no more than double that of the usual member. This condition was intolerable for the Chief, and … he decided that each boy and girl graduating from high school in the Fourteenth District that year should have a personal letter of congratulations from his Congressman, commenting on his glorious achievement. There were literally thousands of such graduates each year. So began the production of lists and concurrently the production of forty or fifty letters, different, so the graduates would not receive the same letter. … We had only to take the names in order and write each a personal letter from the Congressman. We whacked away harder and harder, and faster and faster, until we could recite those letters from left to right and from bottom to top.

  After the typing came the retyping. No letter was going out of the office unless it was perfect, Johnson said, and to ensure perfection, he read every one. “And if he didn’t like a letter,” Latimer says, “he would just make huge, angry slash marks across it.” No explanation would be vouchsafed. “You had to figure out what was wrong,” Latimer says. “He wouldn’t tell you.” A single error in spelling or punctuation, and the letter was slashed. “He had no compunction at all about making you write them over … even if you had to stay past midnight,” Jones says. “You handed him fifty, sixty letters … and he might mark out every one of them.”

  Sometimes Latimer and Jones would be finished with work by eight or nine o’clock, and would head back to Childs’ for dinner and then to the Dodge for the evening bull sessions. But usually they wouldn’t be finished until 11:30 or midnight. Then they would return to their room to fall exhausted into their beds, to grab a few hours’ sleep—for no matter how late they had worked the night before, they would be dragged from those beds at five o’clock the next morning. Recently completed on the long slope between the Dodge and the crown of Capitol Hill was an elaborate fountain illuminated by colored lights that were turned on only between sunset and sunrise. “I almost never saw that fountain without the lights on,” Latimer says. Returning from his work in the dark, he went back to his work while it was still dark.

  THE WILLINGNESS of the two teenagers to adhere to so brutal a routine—a seven-day routine: Kleberg’s office did not close on weekends—was based in part on admiration for their boss. Listening to him “work the departments” over the telephone, they heard him tailoring his approach to the individual he was talking to, bullying one bureaucrat with a threat of bringing down Congressman Kleberg’s displeasure on his head (or, with increasing frequency, masquerading as the congressman himself), pleading with another: “Look, I’ve got a problem. I’ve got to get you to help me”—and obtaining results that they felt other secretaries could never have achieved. Listening, for example, to Johnson talking to the Veterans Administration about a veteran’s request that a disability be considered “connected” to his war service, which would make the veteran eligible for a pension, Latimer and Jones would be awed by his glibness. “Damage-suit lawyers have a jargon, you know,” Jones says. “Johnson was adept at rationalizing like that. He co
uld sit there and talk like a great lawyer or a doctor.” And they were amazed by his persistence. “He took each case personally,” Latimer says. “He wouldn’t take no.” While congressional offices routinely endorsed a veteran’s request to the VA, denial of the request generally marked the end of the office’s interest in the case. If the veteran was from the Fourteenth District, however, the congressional secretary would react to the denial by taking up the case personally over the telephone. If the telephone appeal did not succeed, the secretary went to the VA in person. If the request was still denied, the secretary, without the veteran asking, filed a formal, written appeal, and procured him a lawyer. When the lawyer appeared before the Board of Veterans Appeals, the secretary of the Fourteenth District was also present. And if the case seemed to be going against his constituent, the secretary did not remain a silent observer. When Lyndon Johnson took a personal hand at a Veterans Board hearing, he displayed his obsession with secrecy, asking that the stenographer be instructed not to take down his remarks, but he also displayed considerable persuasiveness. Reading the typed minutes of the hearing later, Latimer would invariably see the same sentence: Mr. Johnson spoke off the record. “I’d say to myself, ‘Here it comes!’ And sure enough, when they went back on the record again, the attitude would have changed. It was almost unheard of to get someone ‘service-connected’ after it had been denied, but the Chief did it. Many times.”

  The two teenagers’ willingness to work so hard was based in part on their boss’ ability to inspire enthusiasm. To Johnson, Jones says, “every problem had a solution. … He was completely confident, always optimistic. … And this was contagious. It would absolutely grab ahold of you.” Casework was, moreover, not only a crusade but a crusade complete with triumphs, in which the whole office shared. Jones echoes Estelle Harbin: “He would get ecstatic. I mean, we had won a real victory.”