The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  Another end was publicity. First, he organized the Little Congress debates. Previously, anyone who wished could speak; now only assigned speakers could take the floor during the sixty minutes allotted to each side. He made the assignments, naming teams to represent both sides of an issue currently before Congress (one “floor leader” would generally be the aide of the Congressman who had introduced the bill, the other the aide of a Congressman who opposed it); kept checking with the leaders to make sure they were actively organizing their teams; further formalized the atmosphere by assigning speakers places at the long witness table that ran across the front of the Caucus Room. Sitting at the center of the long, raised horseshoe dais, used by congressional committees, he ran the debates strictly. Says Payne: “The first time he presided, everyone knew: by George, here was a man who was running the show. The Little Congress was run by the same rules as the House of Representatives, and he knew those rules. He was his own parliamentarian, and there wasn’t anyone who could argue with him about whether the proceedings were proceeding according to the rules, because he knew them. He was in command.” At the end of each debate, the Little Congress voted on the “bill.” Once he had the debates organized, he asked newspapers to cover them. Congressional aides generally reflected their bosses’ feelings, he told reporters, and Little Congress votes on pending legislation were therefore previews of upcoming votes in the Big Congress. Moreover, since the Little Congress floor leaders were the same men who were helping their bosses prepare to lead the upcoming fights in the House, the debates would provide a preview not only of votes but of maneuvers to come. The reporters came—and were impressed; “one of the most interesting forums in Washington,” the Washington Post said. Finding that House votes could indeed be predicted on the basis of voting in the Little Congress, they began to cover it fairly regularly. Payne recalls: “Every week there’d be a meeting, and every week there would be stories in at least a couple of the Washington papers”—and stories on the Little Congress generally contained a statement from, or at least a mention of the name of, its Speaker. The chance for press coverage made even the most famous political figures receptive to Johnson’s invitations to address it. When Johnson said he was inviting the colorful and controversial Huey Long to speak, recalls another Little Congress member, Wingate Lucas, “none of us thought he could pull it off.” But sure enough, Long came—the Caucus Room was, another member says, “just crowded with newsreel cameras. Pathé News and Metro News and all that. … There were lights all over the place, these movie lights. A tremendous number of reporters were there.” And when Long came into the room, surrounded by a phalanx of tough-looking bodyguards, the Speaker of the Little Congress was there to welcome him, shaking his hand and smiling at him as the flashbulbs popped and the cameras rolled.

  Soon, 200 or more Congressional aides were crowding into the Caucus Room every week. Johnson organized other events—including a three-day trip, which many secretaries remember vividly forty-five years later, on which 293 secretaries toured New York City with a motorcycle escort provided by Mayor La Guardia, and, in the evening, were the Mayor’s guests at Radio City Music Hall. Then the Congressional aides went on to West Point, from which they returned to Washington by train. “I remember Lyndon roaming up and down the aisles, from car to car, eyes flashing, smiling, too excited to sit still,” Payne says. The annual banquet, held at the Mayflower Hotel, became an elaborate affair, with prominent speakers and formal dress. Says Lucas, who, some years later, would be Speaker himself: “Little Congress became quite a big thing. When we had a debate, members of Congress would show up. To hear the points on each side and to get an indication of how the members themselves would vote. Members [of Congress] wanted their bills debated by the Little Congress for publicity, and because it would help prepare them for debate on the floor. A Congressman would come to you and say, ‘I’d like to get the Little Congress to debate one of my bills.’ I remember one Congressman from California doing this. He had a copy of his bill in his pocket, and he gave it to me, and he gave me a pitch for it. So if you were Speaker, you were respected by members of Congress, and called upon by members of Congress.” In a remarkably short time—taking into account congressional recesses which he spent back in Texas, in less than a year spent on Capitol Hill—Lyndon Johnson had, through an organization in which advancement had previously depended upon longevity on the Hill, lifted himself dramatically out of the anonymous crowd of congressional aides.

  Little Congress bylaws allowed a Speaker only a single term. While Johnson made no attempt to change the bylaws—in the opinion of at least one ally, because there had already been too many rumors about the circumstances under which he had been elected—he kept control of the organization through hand-picked candidates. He never campaigned publicly for them. “Word just circulated around that so-and-so was Johnson’s candidate,” Payne says. “He did everything behind the scenes.” But behind the scenes he was very effective. A half-dozen Johnson allies—all distinguished by their willingness to defer to his orders—would telephone other members before each election to suggest who should be supported. Members who, in the open balloting, failed to follow the suggestion did not thereafter receive invitations to speak, and it became understood that antagonizing Lyndon Johnson was not a good idea for anyone who wanted to advance in the only organization in which, for congressional secretaries, advancement was possible. “He had a machine,” says secretary Lacey Sharp. “And if you wanted to run, you had better have the blessings of Lyndon Johnson.” The machine’s existence had become an acknowledged reality in the self-contained little world of Capitol Hill. Another secretary, newly arrived on the Hill, recalls seeing Johnson for the first time. Struck by his appearance—his height, his huge ears, his flashing eyes and smile, the confidence with which he walked, arms akimbo, down a House Office Building corridor—the secretary asked a friend who he was. Replied the friend: “That’s the Boss of the Little Congress.”

  DID HIS VOCATION—his “very unusual ability”—work only with contemporaries? Only with the congressional secretaries who were his equals in rank? The Speakership of the Little Congress may have furnished him entrée to officials other secretaries never got to talk to; it was the use he made of the entrée that awed those contemporaries who had a chance to see him use it.

  At the Department of Agriculture, for example, the hundreds of patronage jobs created by the new AAA programs were dispensed by three tough Tammany politicians: Julien N. Friant, special assistant to the Secretary of Agriculture and Jim Farley’s personal representative in the department, and Friant’s assistants, Vincent McGuire and Lee Barnes. Even Congressmen had difficulty getting these men on the phone; for most congressional secretaries, personal communication was all but impossible. But congressional secretary Lyndon Johnson wanted another assistant to help with his district’s mail, and, with no more room on the district’s payroll, he wanted the assistant, Russell M. Brown, a young law student from Rhode Island, put on Agriculture’s. Aware of the inaccessibility of Agriculture’s personnel trio, Brown was startled when Johnson said casually that they would run over and see them. He was even more startled by the reception Johnson received. When Johnson told McGuire, whose office they went into first, “Mac, I got to have a job for Russ here,” Mac replied simply, “I can arrange it, Lyndon.” (“That’s great,” McGuire added with a smile, “Texas helping Rhode Island.”) Then McGuire asked Johnson, “Would you like to say hello to the boss?” and they all strolled down to Friant’s office, where the reception was equally warm. (“The Chief and Friant got along fine,” Latimer remembers. “I don’t even know how they got to know each other, but anything Friant could do for the Chief, he was happy to do.”)

  Brown was to receive a larger shock. While they were chatting in Friant’s office, the door opened, and in walked Friant’s boss, the great personnel director himself, chief patronage dispenser of the New Deal, Postmaster General James A. Farley. Brown stared almost speechless at this liv
ing legend, but Farley, he says, “was very affable and shook hands.” And Lyndon Johnson, who had met Farley when the Postmaster General had accompanied Vice President Garner to the King Ranch some months before, was affable right back. “This is my friend Russell Brown from Rhode Island,” he said. Farley, who never forgot a name—or a political affiliation—remembered something McGuire and Friant hadn’t. He asked Brown if he was Charles Brown’s son, and then said to Friant: “What are you doing helping a Republican?” A moment of tension ensued, but it evaporated when Johnson, putting his arm around Brown, said expansively: “He’s mah Republican.” Everyone burst out laughing, Brown recalls, with the Postmaster General, beaming at Johnson, laughing loudest of all.

  Other Capitol Hill aides witnessed similar scenes. Not only, they came to realize, did Lyndon Johnson know powerful officials who were in a position to help him, these officials knew him, knew him and liked him—and wanted to help him. A measure of this feeling was the number of patronage jobs Johnson obtained in the AAA and other newly formed New Deal agencies such as the Homeowners Loan Corporation and the Federal Land Bank. Such jobs were generally rationed by the New Deal on the basis of a Congressman’s importance. The office of the average Congressman might be given four or five, the office of a senior or powerful Congressman perhaps twenty, the office of a committee chairman as many as thirty, or, in rare cases, forty. The office of Richard Kleberg, a Congressman with neither seniority nor power, was given fifty.

  DID HIS ABILITY with the powerful consist merely of the capacity to make friends with them?

  One Texan notably unmoved by Johnson’s charm was Vice President Garner, whose desire for new friendships was limited. “Me and my wife,” tough old Cactus Jack explained once. “My son and his wife. We four—and no more.” As for his paternal instincts toward bright young men, even his son was able to obtain a loan from him only after he had agreed to pay a very high rate of interest. In May, 1933, the Texas Legislature redrew the state’s congressional districts. Seeing Garner’s hand in the redistricting, Texas Congressmen feared it would be present as well in the confusion that was bound to follow. During the year-and-a-half interim before the redistricting went into effect in January, 1935, federal patronage in counties that had been shifted from one district to another would be in dispute between the old Congressman they had elected and the new one into whose district they had been shifted. In some counties, moreover, a vacuum would exist: three new districts had been formed by taking counties away from old districts; these counties would have no opportunity to elect a new Congressman until November, 1934. Aware of Garner’s ruthlessness and appetite for power—and of his long and close friendship with patronage dispenser Farley—Texas Congressmen feared he would step into the vacuum by claiming, as the state’s highest federal official, the patronage power in counties in which it was in dispute. Despite a number of secret caucuses among themselves, however, they still didn’t know how to meet this threat.

  One of their secretaries did. Lyndon Johnson had not, of course, been present at the caucuses, but Kleberg had told him about them, and Johnson had a suggestion. If, instead of fighting among themselves, all twenty-one Congressmen, plus Senators Connally and Sheppard, agreed on a division of patronage powers, both vacuum and confusion would be eliminated. In the absence of a vacuum, Garner’s maneuvers would become more difficult to carry out; without confusion to cloak them, they would be revealed as a naked grab for power. A united front among the Congressmen would deter Farley, too, since he would be interfering in a state’s internal politics against the wishes of its entire congressional delegation. Such a united front, Johnson said, should take the form of a non-legal but signed “gentlemen’s contract” between all Texas Congressmen and Senators stating that patronage power in every Texas county should remain in the hands of its present Congressman until the redistricting went into effect. And when Kleberg asked how Connally and Sheppard, who might themselves see confusion as an opportunity for patronage gains, could be induced to go along with the Congressmen, his secretary had an answer for that, too: since the two Senators, jealous of their statewide powers, would be as worried as the Congressmen about the Garner threat, only a small inducement would be necessary: the right, previously reserved to the local Congressman, to name the postmaster in their hometowns.

  Johnson drafted the agreement: “Until January 1, 1935, present representatives of the district shall control in counties of their present existing districts. … We ask that this agreement be respected by all [federal] departments and offices.” Kleberg was reluctant to engage in a fight, particularly with his old friend Garner, but Johnson told him that the existence of a clear agreement was the best way to avoid one—and when he reminded Kleberg, to whom personal honor was very important, that in return for support in his last election, he had promised federal positions to supporters in Bexar County, which had been removed from his district in the redisricting, and that if the right of appointment was given to Garner, he would be unable to live up to his promises, Kleberg agreed to circulate the “contract” to the whole delegation. Everyone signed it. And when, in January, 1934, Garner made his move—Texas Congressmen who submitted recommendations to Farley on federal postmasterships in the redistricted counties were told to clear them with the Vice President—Johnson knew how to use the weapon he had forged. He leaked the agreement to the press—not to a local Texas newspaper, but to the Associated Press. Huge headlines (REVOLT AGAINST PATRONAGE ARRANGEMENT) and angry editorials (“Postmaster Farley’s insistence upon giving Garner control … will make political orphans of dozens of Texas counties”) in Texas, combined with nationwide publicity, produced precisely the effect Johnson had calculated. Within the week, Garner had beaten a hasty retreat. In the presence of a “grievance committee” of Texas Congressmen, he dictated a document of unconditional surrender—a letter of his own to Farley: “Dear Jim: … a committee representing the Texas delegation are in my office at this moment. They are very much worried about the proposal that I pass on qualifications of postmasters in the new districts in Texas, and, to be frank with you, Jim, I am worried about it myself because of the friction that might arise between the Texas members of Congress and myself. … I want to ask you if you won’t relieve me of the burden of saying anything about the qualifications of any postmaster anywhere in Texas.” Farley agreed to Garner’s request, dashing off a letter of his own telling Texas Congressmen to submit their recommendations directly to him as in the past. William S. White, then an Associated Press correspondent in Washington, recounts that “for days [Garner] went among fellow Texans with a scowling, half-amused demand: ‘Who in the hell is this boy Lyndon Johnson; where the hell did Kleberg get a boy with savvy like that?’” Others familiar with the episode say White’s description is accurate except for the hyphenated adjective; Cactus Jack Garner was not even half amused. Garner’s question, moreover, was a natural one. “This boy Lyndon Johnson”—a twenty-five-year-old congressional assistant—had defeated, in a small but bitter skirmish, the Vice President of the United States.

  16

  In Tune

  FEW—if any—congressional secretaries implemented New Deal programs more successfully than Lyndon Johnson. His assistants were, therefore, surprised when they realized what Johnson thought of the New Deal.

  The man with whom he was “most in tune,” says L. E. Jones—and Gene Latimer and Russell Brown agree—was Roy Miller, the legendary lobbyist who had made the district’s office his own.

  With his wavy silver mane, his suits and waistcoats of rich fabric, the small but perfect diamond in his lapel, and, of course, his pearl-gray Borsalino, Miller looked to the three admiring young assistant secretaries like the very model of a Southern Senator. Erect and dignified (“He didn’t even own a short-sleeved shirt,” says his son, Dale), he strode through the Capitol as if he owned it—which, some said, in the areas in which he was interested, he did; for legislators like Sam Johnson, who had refused to accept a drink from Roy Miller
without buying him one back, were apparently almost as rare in Washington as in Austin, and, with the seemingly unlimited funds at his disposal for “campaign contributions,” he bought national legislators as easily as state. Echoing the Austin American-Statesman’s judgment that he was “perhaps the most effective single lobbyist Washington has ever known,” the Saturday Evening Post commented that “perhaps no one outside official life has a wider acquaintance among congressmen. … For twenty years he has had the status of a quasi-public figure.” The Congressman most important to Texas Gulf Sulphur, which needed deep harbors for the freighters carrying away the sulphur it mined along the Gulf Coast, was Rivers and Harbors Committee Chairman Mansfield. Precisely at noon each day, Miller arrived at Mansfield’s office and closeted himself with the crippled Congressman for half an hour. Precisely at 12:30, a House page arrived to push Mansfield’s wheelchair—with Miller striding alongside it, somewhat in the manner of a Roman emperor displaying a captive in a triumphal procession—through the underground passageway between the Longworth Building and the Capitol, and into the House Restaurant, where it was placed at a large round table just inside the door known as Roy Miller’s Table, in honor of the man who picked up the checks at it. “A surprising number of representatives,” the Saturday Evening Post reported, “knew his hat and coat, when it hangs on its accustomed peg in the House restaurant”—a discreet reference to the fact that many Congressmen checked to see that he was present before they entered the restaurant, lest they be forced to pay for their meals themselves. Nor was Miller’s generosity confined to the House dining room. So awed was Jim Farley by Miller’s munificence during Farley’s trips to Texas that the mimeographed advice given by the normally discreet Postmaster General to a group of Congressmen leaving for a Miller-sponsored Texas junket began: “Carry only what money you need before you get to Texas. You will not be able to spend a dime in the State of Texas.” The consummate lobbyist, Miller did not confine his friendships to the powerful. “He knew policemen, he knew the elevator operators, and he knew everybody in the offices,” Latimer says. “He would come in and talk to them, and never mention the Congressman. He’d come by if you were working ten, eleven o’clock at night: ‘Can I take you all out and buy you a drink?’ And then he would buy you a wonderful dinner.” The objects of these attentions might be aware of his motives (as Latimer puts it, “When he wanted to see a Congressman, he could ask the secretary, ‘You reckon the Congressman’s busy?’ And they’d break a leg getting him in to see him”), but they were flattered and charmed nevertheless. The three young assistant secretaries in the Fourteenth District office admired Miller and were awed by him—by his manner (“He was so suave and smooth,” Jones says); by his salary (“He was making $80,000 a year, and this was during the Depression!” Latimer says); by his luxurious suite at the Mayflower; by the ease with which, in those days before regular air service, he seemed to stride around the country as easily as he did around the Capitol (“Roy Miller would call from Texas … and say, ‘I’m going to be in the office in the morning,’” Brown recalls. “It was always quite a thing that he’d call from Texas on Monday and be in the office on Tuesday, because he would come up with his private airplane”). And so, they say, was their immediate superior. “Lyndon hero-worshipped Roy Miller,” Jones says.