The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  Arriving in San Antonio with Latimer and Jones in tow (he had persuaded the genial Kleberg to “donate” all three of them to the Maverick campaign), Johnson put them to work mailing out brochures. He himself began writing them. Maverick saw that this young secretary understood without being told what many politicians never understand: that voters’ reluctance to do extensive reading makes simplicity the key to successful political prose. As the worried opponent—San Antonio’s corrupt and long-entrenched “City Machine”—stepped up its advertising, Maverick asked Johnson for help writing his own advertising, as well as his speeches. Soon Johnson was not only a writer but an adviser—one of Maverick’s inner circle. “The significant thing was—and you could see this very clearly—that the older men trusted him,” Jones says. And he was a campaigner as well—a campaigner whose “very unusual ability to meet and greet the public” was as effective in San Antonio’s teeming Mexican-American ghettoes as in the isolated little towns of the Hill Country. The abrazo, or embrace, was a key element in campaigning among Mexican-Americans, and Lyndon Johnson had always been addicted to hugging and kissing. Towering above swarthy men in bright-colored shirts and old women in black rebozos, the tall, skinny, pale young man with big ears and long arms was a conspicuous figure as he abrazoed his way enthusiastically through the crowded, pushcart-jammed San Antonio slums. Maverick won the June primary, but not by the requisite plurality, so a second primary, in August, was required. Johnson spent most of the intervening two months handling Kleberg’s affairs in Corpus Christi, but on weekends he would race back to San Antonio; during the Summer of 1934, therefore, Lyndon Johnson was working simultaneously for one of the most reactionary members of Congress—and for a man who would, immediately upon his arrival on Capitol Hill a few months later, be one of the most radical.

  THE 1934 MAVERICK CAMPAIGN also marked Lyndon Johnson’s first involvement with one of the more pragmatic aspects of politics. Awakening early one morning a day or two before the election, in the big room in San Antonio’s Plaza Hotel that he shared with Johnson, L. E. Jones experienced an awakening of another sort. Johnson was sitting at a table in the center of the room—and on the table were stacks of five-dollar bills. “That big table was just covered with money—more money than I had ever seen,” Jones says. Jones never learned who had given the cash to Johnson—so secretive was his boss that he had not even known Johnson had it—but he saw what Johnson did with it. Mexican-American men would come into the room, one at a time. Each would tell Johnson a number—some, unable to speak English, would indicate the number by holding up fingers—and Johnson would count out that number of five-dollar bills, and hand them to him. “It was five dollars a vote,” Jones realized. “Lyndon was checking each name against lists someone had furnished him with. These Latin people would come in, and show how many eligible voters they had in the family, and Lyndon would pay them five dollars a vote.”

  “EVERYTHING WAS FOR HIS AMBITION.” “Elective office,” Johnson was starting to say now, was what he wanted. “You’ve got to be your own man if you’re going to amount to anything,” he told Russell Brown. He knew which elective office he wanted. Once, Brown recalls, “he was talking about somebody who … had run to succeed his boss … and he said: ‘That’s the route to follow.’”

  A few adjustments began to be made in the physical arrangement of Suite 1322. In most congressional offices, the senior aide placed his desk as far as possible from the front door, so that subordinates would “handle”—and shield him from—casual visitors, who would be mainly tourists from the district. Now Johnson moved his desk immediately inside the entrance door, “so that,” in Latimer’s words, no visitor could “possibly advance further without his interception.” In part, Latimer says with his wry, knowing grin, the purpose of the shift was “to keep the typewriters humming. If anyone talked to L.E. or me, we’d have to stop typing. And that typing was supposed never to stop.” But Latimer began to suspect there were other reasons as well. Johnson did not want to be shielded from visitors from the district; visitors were voters. The new position of his desk ensured that he met voters. A favor routinely bestowed by Congressmen’s offices— passes to House and Senate galleries—frequently impressed visitors and made them grateful. Johnson wanted visitors—voters—to receive that favor from him, and the position of his desk ensured that they would. “The casual visitor who just ‘happened to be in town’ was weeded out” by Johnson, who “talked with him thirty seconds, and had him out of the office and on his way in another thirty, happily clutching” his passes, Latimer says. (“All the while, the typewriters never lost a beat.”) Sometimes, moreover, a casual visitor would turn out to be what Latimer calls “an important person” back home. “The Chief would steer him into Mr. Kleberg’s [vacant] private office,” sit down—behind the Congressman’s desk—chat with him, ask if there was any favor he could do for him, strike up a friendship—which would be cemented a few days later by a “buttering up” letter from Latimer.

  Noticing that such private audiences were held not only with “important persons” but with any visitor who happened to mention an interesting piece of district political gossip, Latimer felt there was still another reason for the change in the position of Lyndon Johnson’s desk: “He didn’t want anything concerning his district, no matter how small, going on without him knowing about it.” Positioning himself right at the door was Johnson’s best defense against such a contingency, Latimer understood.

  This defense contained one loophole. Each of the two rooms in a Congressional suite had its own door to the corridor outside, and, in the casual atmosphere of the 1930’s, those doors were both generally kept unlocked. Visitors—particularly knowledgeable late-afternoon visitors who were aware which door led to Kleberg’s private office, and who wanted to see the Congressman without being cleared by his staff—were therefore able simply to walk in that door, knowing they would receive his invariably pleasant welcome.

  Now that loophole was closed. Johnson locked his boss’ door—and kept it locked. Kleberg never objected to this new development—he may not have noticed it: he customarily entered and left the two-room suite through the anteroom so that he could chat with his staff. If he did notice it, he did not understand its significance. But Latimer understood. Johnson did not want even his boss doing anything without him knowing about it. “He didn’t want anyone to see Mr. Kleberg without going through him first; he didn’t want anyone seeing Kleberg that he didn’t know about.” Locking Kleberg’s door was an effective device to prevent that. Another effect of this device was in a small but not insignificant way (since a visitor knowledgeable enough to know the right door was probably an important visitor) to isolate the Congressman from his district, to give a tighter hold on it—at his expense—to his secretary.

  Latimer and Jones began to notice some other changes.

  Johnson had always been so diligent in grabbing for his boss the credit for federal projects—a PWA sewer or a CCC camp—in the district. Now he still grabbed the credit—still raced for Western Union and got the wire off to the mayor of the lucky town before Senator Connally or Senator Sheppard—but not always for his boss. More and more now, the releases he dictated began: “Congressman Kleberg’s secretary, Lyndon B. Johnson, announced yesterday that…”

  As was, of course, the custom in all congressional offices, letters advising individuals that they had received federal favors—pensions, visas, private bills—had always gone out over the Congressman’s signature, to ensure that the gratitude was directed to him. Now the letters being mailed out of this office were beginning to have a different signature, as well as a different opening phrase: “In the Congressman’s absence, I am advising you …”

  And more and more of a certain portion of the district’s business—its political business—was no longer transacted by letter.

  In Kleberg Country, all chairmen of county Democratic organizations had been Kleberg men: personal friends of Dick and his relatives, or men
economically in thrall to the King Ranch, either as employees of Ranch-controlled enterprises or as businessmen dependent on its favor. Persuading Kleberg that a tighter organization was needed in the district (not much persuading was needed; says Latimer: “Anything the Chief wanted, Mr. Dick would just say, ‘Sure, go ahead.’ He didn’t care”), Johnson began to tour its nineteen counties*—in a new car that he had persuaded Kleberg to buy (and to which Johnson possessed the only set of keys): an expensive Ford roadster with big balloon tires and seat covers of steerhide stitched together in the King Ranch saddle shop to display the Ranch’s famed Running W brand that was South Texas’ ultimate status symbol. Driving into sleepy cow towns in that car, dressed in an expensive blue suit, “he must have made quite an impression,” Latimer says. He met the Democratic leaders—but he also met other leaders, the local banker, the local lawyer, the editor of the local weekly newspaper, the farmer who, his sharp eyes observed, was the man other farmers listened to at meetings of the local grange or the county AAA crop-control committee. Upon his return to Washington, he asked county chairmen to send in regular reports on local political conditions. Those chairmen who responded found themselves in correspondence with Johnson, who replied to their letters the day they were received, and asked for another letter in return. Failure of a chairman to respond regularly was the excuse Johnson needed to have a co-chairman appointed—and these co-chairman were not Kleberg men but men with whom Johnson had, during his tour, established a personal rapport. He made certain, moreover, that each of these new appointees understood that he owed his appointment not to Kleberg but to him.

  In communicating with these men, he used the telephone. The office’s telephone bills had always been enormous by congressional standards (they were paid not out of the meager congressional telephone allowance but by the King Ranch), but now, each month, when Latimer opened the bill, the list of long-distance calls to Texas grew longer and longer.

  One explanation for Johnson’s increased use of the telephone was his desire for secrecy. The door between Kleberg’s private office and the staff’s anteroom had always been open. Now, more and more, it was closed, for when the private office was vacant, Johnson would go into it to telephone—and shut the door behind him, for hours at a time. When he was forced by Kleberg’s presence (or, more likely, Roy Miller’s) to use his own telephone in the anteroom, he would often cup his hand around the mouthpiece to prevent Latimer and Jones from overhearing his words. Other clues about these conversations were also kept to a minimum. In the past, Johnson’s invariable practice during telephone calls had been to jot down lists of things to be done as a result of the call, so that Latimer and Jones could do them. Now—on these calls made with his hand shielding the mouthpiece—nothing was put in writing. “Once we had known just about everything that was going on in the district,” Latimer says. “Then we started to realize that there was starting to be a lot going on that we didn’t know about.”

  Latimer began to wonder whether use of the telephone was providing Johnson with an advantage beyond secrecy. From the few words he overheard, he knew that the telephone calls to these new friends in the district often concerned favors, including the obtaining of federal patronage jobs, that Johnson was doing for them. Written communications—press releases and letters—were, more and more, bearing Johnson’s name as well as Kleberg’s. In these oral communications, Latimer wondered, was one of those names being omitted entirely? “In a letter,” Latimer says, Johnson “would have to sign the Congressman’s name,” or, even if he signed his own name, he would have to make clear that he was only acting for his boss. “The letter would have to say, ‘At the Congressman’s suggestion, I am doing such-and-such. …’ It might have been dangerous for him otherwise. But on the telephone, it was him—Lyndon Johnson—speaking, not Dick Kleberg.” Latimer had, in fact, discerned an overall pattern in his Chief’s behavior. “Before, he had been making friends for Mr. Dick. Now he was making friends for himself instead.”

  A Johnson-arranged boat trip also fit into this pattern. He persuaded Kleberg that a group of district leaders, in Corpus Christi for an American Legion Convention, should have a day’s outing on his big cabin cruiser. Foreseeing a boring day, Kleberg was more willing to give his boat than himself. And Johnson’s urgings that Kleberg should come along were quite noticeably pro forma—which made them, predictably, unsuccessful. Wright Patman, one of the guests, recalls that, on the “wonderful outing on Dick Kleberg’s big boat,” not Kleberg but Johnson “was the host when we came on board, and he impressed everyone.”

  Lyndon Johnson was using his boss’ boat, his boss’ car, to pay the enormous telephone bills his boss’ money, to make friends—but he was making friends not for his boss but for himself. A new political organization was being created in the district, an organization which was coming, more and more, to be centered not on the district’s Congressman but on the Congressman’s secretary. The purpose of Johnson’s creation was not to take Kleberg’s seat away from him—there was not the slightest chance of anyone defeating a Kleberg in Kleberg Country—but to place him in position to take the seat should it become vacant.

  And he was working to make it become vacant.

  The minimum age at which a person could become a Congressman was twenty-five, and Johnson would become twenty-five on August 27, 1933. During that year, a quiet movement began to float the name of Richard M. Kleberg for the post of Ambassador to Mexico. Leaks were planted in Texas newspapers; one went out on the Associated Press national wire—no one was quite sure who was planting them. There began to be some talk about the possibility in Washington; no one was quite sure who had started it. The Texas State Senate even passed a resolution formally proposing him for the post; the introducer of that resolution was State Senator Welly Hopkins. Kleberg loved the idea; he had little interest in being a Congressman, and, he often said, of all the cities he had ever visited, Mexico City was his favorite. For a while, Miller and other Texas insiders thought he was going to get the Ambassadorship. He didn’t—it went instead to Josephus Daniels. But periodically thereafter, whenever any hint was received in Washington that Daniels was tired of the post, the quiet push for Kleberg would begin again. Having determined the route he wanted to follow, Johnson was paving it.

  BUT WAS HE ALSO PAVING a longer one? One that only he saw? One that he, who talked so much, never talked about at all?

  Since he was not a resident of the adjoining—Twentieth—Congressional district, in which Maury Maverick had won election, he was not planning to run for one of that district’s elective offices. But his interest in the Twentieth district did not cease with Maverick’s election.

  The key appointive post in that district was the San Antonio postmastership, which controlled 600 postal-service jobs. Since the incumbent postmaster’s four-year term was to expire during 1934, before Maverick took office, under the “gentlemen’s contract” which Johnson had devised earlier that year, Kleberg, as the area’s former Congressman, had the right to name the new postmaster. “Kleberg didn’t care” about the successor’s identity, Russell Brown says, but Johnson cared. He had his postmaster all picked out, in fact: Dan Quill, a tough young Tammany-type Texan from the San Antonio stockyards and a power in the city’s labor circles. “You see Dan Quill, and you see five thousand votes,” Latimer says.

  Kleberg’s nomination of Quill evoked demands from the old-line San Antonio machine for intervention by Garner, a longtime ally, but the Vice President, having lost one skirmish over the “gentlemen’s contract,” declined to participate in a second, and when the machine nonetheless persisted in its opposition, Brown remembers, “Lyndon put on a first-class war. I mean he went all out, with all guns blazing” and “got the appointment” for “Kleberg’s” man. To cement Quill’s allegiance to him, he got Quill’s sister, Eloise, a job with the Department of Agriculture in Washington and made a point of being in San Antonio on Saturdays, when Quill’s mother (whom the postmaster adored) made cornbread
and roast beef with brown gravy: “That’s what brought him out to the house a great deal,” Quill says; “he was very fond of her cooking.” Had Johnson devised and promoted the “gentlemen’s contract” in anticipation of the San Antonio postmaster fight—because he already had his candidate for the job picked out? No one knows—Johnson never said. But the appointment that resulted from the contract was to prove important to Johnson over not only the long run—Quill would be his staunch ally in San Antonio for thirty-five years—but the short. An extravagant admirer of Lyndon Johnson (from the first time he met him, Quill says, he knew “he was … way above the average man of his age. He grasped things easily, and the political thing—he just took it over”), Quill was immediately handling small but vital political favors for Johnson in San Antonio and giving jobs to at least a few of Johnson’s San Antonio friends.

  Johnson and Maverick became fast friends when Maury arrived to be sworn in; shortly to enter a hospital for an operation to ease the effects of a crippling wound he had suffered in the Argonne, he could hardly walk, and Brown remembers him holding on to Johnson’s arm for support as the two men walked from the Dodge to Childs’ for breakfast on New Year’s Day. The friendship was based partly on Johnson’s ability to talk as liberal with the liberal Maverick as he could talk conservative with his own conservative Congressman. Discussing a New Deal bill coming up in Congress, he would demand: “You’re not going to throw down the President on this, are you?” Partly it was based on Maverick’s admiration for what he had called Kleberg’s “very efficient” office set-up; at his request, Johnson showed Maverick’s secretary, Malcolm Bardwell, a newcomer to Washington, how to set up the Twentieth District office. (Maverick autographed a photograph: “To Lyndon Johnson, who got me started.”) And partly it was based on admiration for Johnson’s political as well as secretarial skills. “I remember Maury calling the office after he was in Congress” and picking Johnson’s brain, “about legislation and what the effect of it was going to be and what the sentiment of the House was,” Brown says. And Johnson cemented the friendship. Maury’s younger brother, Albert, a resident of Kleberg’s Fourteenth District, was given a coveted patronage post there. Johnson was only a congressional secretary, but he had influence now—influence on a level that most congressional secretaries never achieved—not just in one congressional district but in two.