The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  They were also willing to work long hours because they were not working alone. If they awoke at five, it was because their boss was awake at five, and if they trudged up Capitol Hill before daylight, their boss trudged beside them. The days they spent chained to typewriters, he spent chained to the telephone—bullying and begging on behalf of their constituents. And often, after they had returned to their little room and were falling asleep, they would hear their boss still tossing restlessly on his narrow bed. “He worked harder than anyone,” Latimer says. “His head was still going around when the rest of us had knocked off.”

  OTHER FACTORS, however, were also involved.

  Sometimes, Latimer rebelled. Rebellion was generally related to his fiancee. Although Johnson had brought him to Washington ostensibly so that he could be near her, the work schedule that Johnson had set up for him left little time for romance. He was allowed time off from the office to see her on Sundays after three p.m.—and only on Sundays after three p.m.

  Johnson’s response to rebellion might be a sneer: a sneer with a particularly telling point. Once, when Latimer had requested an evening off and was being viciously tongue-lashed by Johnson for his temerity, “I couldn’t stand it, and I packed the little wicker suitcase I had come up with, and said I was leaving.” Towering over the little Irish boy, Johnson said, sneering, “How are you going to get back?” When Latimer, sobbing, said, as he recalls it, that he would rather hitchhike all the way to Texas than remain, Johnson said: “What are you going to do when you get there? How are you going to get a job? If you leave, how are you ever going to marry Marjorie?”—questions which enunciated an aspect of the Johnson-Latimer relationship that was generally unmentioned but that was one of the realities that underlay it: that Latimer had no money, that his only source of money was Lyndon Johnson, that, without Johnson, he would not have a job, in a time when jobs were hard to come by; that, in short, he needed Johnson so badly that he had little choice but to do whatever Johnson wanted. The suitcase was unpacked, and Latimer remained.

  But rebellion was rare. To so skilled a reader of men, Gene Latimer was an easy text. Revolt could be anticipated, and headed off. “He wouldn’t really have a talk with you for months,” Latimer says. “And then he would hug you, and he might spend an hour talking about your problems. He didn’t do it very often, so you might think he was getting a hell of a lot for not very much, but if he did it very often, it wouldn’t mean very much, you know.” The way Johnson did it, it meant so much that the hug and the talk generally ended even the hint of revolt.

  He could deflect any of Latimer’s desires. The youth was always broke during his years in Kleberg’s office—as might be expected on so low a salary. He was always falling behind in his bills for clothing and dry cleaning, and he relates with gratitude how Johnson consolidated his bills, and then collected his salary himself, and paid the bills out of it, putting Latimer on a $10-per-week allowance. But he also relates how once, “when the pain had been severe for some time, I summoned up the considerable courage it took to ask [him] about the possibility of a small increase in salary. He listened with sympathetic concern, commented at some length on the shortage of money and jobs all over the country at the time and especially in our own office, then told me he had been thinking for some time on how to reward the excellent work I had been doing. He had finally decided that I merited having my name put on the office stationery as assistant secretary. As he described the prestige and glory of such an arrangement, I could see the printing stand out six inches.” Latimer accepted the title instead of a raise; “I never questioned the procedure,” Latimer says. “Indeed, it just seemed to follow as a matter of course.”

  In general, he never questioned Johnson at all. Ask Latimer why he was willing to work so hard, and he replies first, “I guess I didn’t know there was any other way to do it. He was the only guy I had worked for. And he keeps the pressure on you all the time. …” But Latimer himself knows this is only part of the explanation, and he soon goes on. For Gene Latimer—sixty-five years old at the time he spoke, sitting alone in a little apartment in a little town in Texas, a tiny Irish elf with sad eyes that often spill over with tears as he describes his life as an employee of Lyndon Johnson, so that he periodically excuses himself and goes into the bathroom to wash them off—understands, even if he was unable to cure, his own psychological dependence on Johnson: to listen to him talk is to hear a man who is fully aware that during his sixteenth year, he surrendered—for life—his own personality to a stronger personality. To listen to him talk is to hear a man who is fully aware that he has been used as a tool. Once, during the long days he spent with the author in his little apartment—difficult days for both men—he said: “He never talked to me too much, because with someone like me, all he wanted was to keep me busy. When he saw me: ‘Where’s your [stenographer’s] book? I want you to take this down.’ When he saw me, he just wanted to know what orders he could give me.” But the awareness is accompanied by acceptance, not resentment. Johnson called him “Son”; he called Johnson “Chief.” Asked if he ever called Johnson by his first name, he replied, shocked: “I would never have dreamed of calling him by his first name. He was The Chief!” Lyndon Johnson had found a man who liked taking orders as much as he liked giving them. Gene Latimer speaks of Lyndon Johnson with idolatry. “I don’t think he’s ever been scared in his life.” And he talks of him with fear. “He can be mean. He can make people cry. He can make you feel so bad that you could go out and shoot yourself.” And he talks of him with a feeling deeper than idolatry or fear. “I had such tremendous respect for the man,” he says. “I don’t know any other man I had such respect for. And, hell, you just had faith—hell, he could talk you into anything and make you feel it was right, and absolutely necessary and proper. He can make you cry, he can make you laugh—he can do anything. And if you like him, then he puts things on such a personal basis, you know. You felt like I belong to him, and he belongs to me. Whatever you do, you do it for him.”

  He did a lot for him. Gene Latimer would work for Lyndon Johnson for the next thirty-five years, as “his slave—his totally willing slave.” This term of service would not, however, be continuous. In 1939 began the first in a series of many nervous breakdowns; Latimer spent a substantial portion of his life recuperating from them—and from recurrent, severe, bouts of alcoholism. He understood their cause. “The work broke me,” he says. But as soon as he recuperated, he would always return to the same work. Because the work was for Lyndon Johnson.

  JOHNSON’S RELATIONSHIP with L. E. Jones was more complex. The tall, handsome Jones was a very different type of personality. A brilliant young man who would later be known as the “finest appellate lawyer” in Texas, a “lawyer’s lawyer” consulted by even its most famous attorneys (“He is,” one magazine stated, “the man with probably the finest technical legal knowledge in the state”), L.E. was as precise as Latimer was easy-going (“His shorthand looked like it was printed in a book,” Gene says), as stiff and cold as Latimer was warm. And he was very ambitious. He was willing to work the killing hours that Johnson demanded because Johnson had played on that ambition: “You work hard for me, and I’ll help you.” Jones would remember “being awakened at five a.m. and walking to the office in the snow, and wondering was it worth it.” But he concluded it was worth it because “I always had the feeling that if I worked for Lyndon Johnson, goodies would come to me. … I was on the make, too. … I wanted to improve myself.” He was, however, also very independent—as independent as Latimer was dependent. In later life, he would never join a law firm, because he did not want partners; at the peak of his career, when he was earning impressive legal fees, he worked alone in a converted, book-lined garage behind his house in Corpus Christi. His willingness to work endless hours for Lyndon Johnson did not include a willingness to surrender his personality to him. He was afraid of surrendering his personality. “Lyndon was always in a position of command,” he says. “I never felt equal. Ord
inarily, I’m aggressive and belligerent. My nature is such that if I can’t be an equal, I will not remain in a situation, and he was so demanding that—well, you lose your individuality if you allow someone to be too demanding for too long.” A struggle—never stated but, Jones feels, understood by both men—went on. Johnson ridiculed the college education Jones had obtained with such effort, and of which he was so proud. Letters Jones wrote would be rejected, slashed across, and if Jones asked for an explanation, Johnson would say they were “too literary”—“Is that what they taught you at college, L.E.? Dumbest goddamned thing I ever read.” A mistake in spelling in an L. E. Jones letter, recalls another man who spent some time in Kleberg’s office, “was a very rare thing, but whenever there was one,” Johnson “made quite a point of it—‘My God, L.E., aren’t you ever going to learn how to spell? Don’t they teach you anything in college?’” For some time, Jones refused to surrender. If Johnson was discussing current events over dinner and Jones saw a parallel to something that had happened in Rome or Greece, he would mention it, despite Johnson’s displeasure. If he disagreed with Johnson, he would express his disagreement; if he had an opinion, he would state it.

  A surrender of sorts was to occur, however. Strikingly neat and clean—invariably well scrubbed, his hair carefully slicked down, every button buttoned on his double-breasted suits, his shirts highly starched—Jones was as aloof and reserved, almost prim, in physical matters as about everything else. “Any kind of coarseness or crudeness just disgusted him,” a friend says. Johnson began making Jones take dictation from him while Johnson was sitting on the toilet.

  The toilet in Kleberg’s office suite was set in a short corridor between its two rooms. Johnson would sit down on it, and, Latimer says, “there would come a call: ‘L.E.!’ L.E. would say, ‘Oh, God,’ because he hated this.” He would take his pad, and go to the bathroom. At first, he attempted to stand away from the door, but Johnson insisted he come right into the doorway, so he would be standing over him, and “L.E. would stand with his head and nose averted, and take dictation.”

  In later years, Johnson’s penchant for forcing subordinates to watch him defecating would be called by some an example of a wonderful “naturalness.” Others would find it, as one journalist put it, “in part, a method of control. Bring Douglas Dillon into the bathroom with you, and he has a little less independent dignity.” This tactic was, indeed, “a method of control.” The first person on whom it was employed was L. E. Jones—and those who observed it, knew it was being done to humiliate him, and to prove to him who was boss.

  Jones had little choice but to accept the humiliation; the job was his only chance to realize his ambition. He continued working for Johnson for more than two years, until, in 1935, he had saved enough money to pay tuition at the University of Texas Law School, and then he left for Austin. He and Johnson were on friendly terms when he left—Johnson told him that when he finished law school, he would keep his promise and help him get a government job—but leave he did. To a friend who asked him why, he said he felt that if he stayed, “He’d be devoured.”

  (THE LATER Johnson-Jones relationship reveals the quality Johnson considered indispensable in a subordinate. He did indeed help Jones obtain a government job—as an attorney with the Justice Department in 1938—and kept in touch with him thereafter, when Jones was in private practice. In his most desperate crisis—the legal battle that climaxed the 1948 Senatorial election—he turned to him, asking Jones to join his legal team for the duration of the crucial appeal, and Jones did, indeed, join it. The end of the appeal, however, signaled the end of any working relationship.

  The Johnson-Jones relationship contrasts sharply with that between Johnson and Latimer. Jones was the more intelligent of the two assistants—and Johnson’s awareness of his brilliance is proven by the fact that Johnson turned to him in time of crisis. From four years of personal observation, moreover, Johnson must have realized that Jones would have been the hardest-working of aides. But, except for two brief periods of part-time employment, Jones would never again be on his payroll—and Latimer would be on it for much of his life.

  What are the implications of this contrast? Was brilliance not enough to qualify a man for permanent work for Lyndon Johnson? Was hard work not enough? In fact, as would be demonstrated as soon as Johnson began hiring men on a large scale, the crucial qualification was subservience. Dignity was not permitted in a Johnson employee. Pride was not permitted. Utter submission to Johnson’s demands, the submission that Jones called “a surrender of personality,” a loss of “your individuality to his domination,” was required. Otherwise, no matter how brilliant or hard-working, a man or woman could not work for Lyndon Johnson.)

  *Offices in the Cannon Building have been renumbered. Kleberg’s office is the room—now unnumbered—next to the present Room 244.

  14

  The New Deal

  FOR ALMOST a year and a half after he went to work for Richard Kleberg, veterans were, in general, the only constituents for whom Lyndon Johnson could win victories. Though the mail sacks might be bulging with pleas for help, he had no help to give.

  Outside San Antonio, the Fourteenth District was farming country, and for farmers the Crash had come long before 1929—with the resumption after the war of the great harvests of Europe; the 1920’s had been one long bad decade for farmers. After Black Thursday, times grew worse. Prices fell, and fell, and fell again, until they reached levels “not seen in generations or even in centuries.” By 1932, farmers were being paid twenty-five cents for a bushel of wheat, ten cents for a bushel of oats, seven cents for a bushel of corn—prices below what they had been in Colonial days; the prices of some farm commodities were, in actual value, at the level of the Middle Ages. While farmers were forced to sell low, they were also forced—in part by tariffs which kept high the price of manufactured goods—to buy dear. By 1930, it took a farmer almost three wagonloads of produce to buy the manufactured goods that one wagonload would have purchased in 1920. War-inflated crop prices had lured him into debt to buy more land and new machinery to work it, so that he could raise more crops. The plunge in crop prices made paying off that debt impossible; he was, in fact, forced to go deeper into debt just to purchase seed for another crop: the mortgage load on American farms, $3 billion when the war began, was $10 billion in 1930. The interest on those mortgages was so high that farmers could not pay it. During a five-year period ending March 1, 1932, one out of every eight farms in the United States would be up for forced sale because of mortgage or tax delinquencies.

  All during the 1920’s, farmers held out a hand to their government, but the administrations of Harding and Coolidge were deaf to their pleas. Seeing the industrialists of the Northeast prospering behind a wall of protective tariffs—tariffs that helped the Northeast at their expense—farmers asked for tariff reform. But when, in 1927, Congress finally passed the McNary-Haugen Bill for tariff reform, Coolidge vetoed it, claiming it violated the sacred principle of laissez-faire—“although,” as the historian Frank Freidel notes, “on the very day of his … veto, he signed an order increasing by 50 percent the tariff on pig iron.” In 1928, Congress passed McNary-Haugen again; Coolidge again vetoed it. In 1929, Herbert Hoover, Coolidge’s Secretary of Commerce, builder of the immense Department of Commerce Building that was a temple to American business, became President, having carried forty of the forty-eight states. A new tariff bill was introduced; Hoover said that if it was passed he would veto it, so Congress didn’t bother to pass it. Farmers asked for debt relief; Hoover’s reply was that federal mortgages were already available, and so they were—from a federal agency whose directors seemed to feel they were running a company store, so onerous were the terms of its loans. By 1931, one out of every four of its borrowers was delinquent—and the agency was busily foreclosing: during 1931 alone, almost 4,000 American families were thrown off their farms by their government. Hoover’s solution for falling farm prices was the creation of a Federal Farm B
oard empowered to stabilize farm prices by buying a farmer’s produce for more than it was worth. While the Farm Board’s right hand was working to implement this solution, however, its left hand was working against it. Even farmers, traditionally among the most independent and conservative of Americans, now were coming to understand that the heart of the problem was overproduction, that, as one writer put it, “surplus is ruin”; there was a surprising amount of agreement among farm groups that some kind of government limit on production was necessary. But the Farm Board, by paying high prices for crops while refusing to limit the amount grown, encouraged farmers to grow more rather than less; the funds Hoover committed to the Board, inadequate to begin with, ran out without even a dent being made in the agricultural crisis; the net result of its policies may, in fact, have made it worse. (Hoover’s solution was to ask farmers—many of whom were unable to survive on what they were presently raising—to voluntarily raise less.)

  By the time congressional secretary Lyndon Johnson arrived in Washington in December, 1931, the American farmer’s long slide toward ruin had become a headlong plunge. Foreclosures on farms—many by rural banks which themselves were teetering on the brink of failure—had reached a rate of 20,000 per month. By the end of that year, one-quarter of Mississippi had been auctioned off, one-third of Iowa. Moreover, as William Allen White wrote, “Even though a man has no mortgage on his farm, even though he is not in immediate danger, he is, as a matter of fact, running behind. Every farmer, whether his farm is under mortgage or not, knows that with farm products priced as they are today, sooner or later he must go down. …”