The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  He didn’t forget where he came from—or where he was going. He discussed his ambitions with his fellow members of the Texas House of Representatives as bluntly as he had done, years before, with his brothers and sisters. He wanted to be Speaker of the House, he said, and he told them quite frankly why: “I’ve always wanted responsibility because I want the power responsibility brings.”

  Not only did he know what he wanted, he knew—seemed to know instinctively—how to get it. Like Sam Johnson, he had an instinctive gift for the legislative process, but, unlike Sam Johnson, he was not a romantic or a dreamer. When he helped someone, he insisted on help in return, even when the recipient of his aid was his idol.

  Arriving in Austin, Rayburn found his idol on trial there: debate was raging over the threatened legislative investigation of Joseph Weldon Bailey, now a United States Senator accused of selling out to the railroads and to Standard Oil. Rayburn, who throughout his life was to refuse to believe those charges, offered his support to Bailey’s legislative lieutenants, pointing out that, as the representative from Bailey’s old district, his opinion might carry more weight than that of the average freshman legislator. But in return for his support, he said, he wanted more than might be given the average freshman legislator. He gave his support—and proved, during his first days in the Legislature, a very effective, if quiet, figure in Bailey’s defense. And he got what he wanted in return. The backing of Bailey’s lieutenants gave him, in his first term in the Legislature, the chairmanship of a key legislative committee.

  A committee chairman’s power was used to build more power. Legislators who received favors from him were expected to give favors in return. And the favors Rayburn asked for were, like the favors he gave, shrewdly chosen. Hardly had he arrived in the Texas House, it seemed, when he was a power in it, thanks to a gift—a rare gift—for legislative horsetrading.

  He had other gifts, too—in particular, a very unusual force of personality.

  In part, that force was physical. Sam Rayburn was a short man—five-foot-six-inches—but his body was broad and massive, the chest and shoulders so broad and thick that they bulged through the cheap fabric of his suits. His head, set on a bull neck, was massive, too, and seemed even more massive than it was, for already, in his twenties, he was going almost completely bald, so that the loom of the great bare skull was unsoftened by hair. His wide, heavy face could be pleasant in private, but in public it was expressionless, immobile, grim; so hard were the thin line of the lips and the set of the wide, jutting jaw that, except for the eyes that smoldered in it, it might have been the face of a stone statue—and it exuded an immense, elemental strength.

  That aura was not dispelled by Sam Rayburn’s character.

  Already men were whispering about his temper. When he lost it, and he lost it often, a deep flush would rise along the bull neck and completely cover the great head, and the lips, so grim, would twist in a snarl, and the voice, so low, would rasp. “In dark moods,” one observer was to write, “his profanity was shattering,” and as he cursed, he spat—and, as the observer tactfully put it, “If a … cuspidor was handy, that was fine. If there wasn’t, it was too bad.” In a rage, “Mr. Rayburn’s face blackened in a terrible scowl and his bald head turned deep red. … That was the way he looked in a rage, and few cared to see such a mien turned upon themselves.” When he lost control of that temper, he was deaf to reason; not even considerations of career or ambition could stand before it. The most feared figure in Austin was the recently retired Governor, Tom Campbell; the ruthlessness he had exhibited in the Statehouse, rumor had it, had not been tempered since he had become lobbyist for the state’s banking interests—and the power of those interests still enabled him to punish opponents. Rayburn, fighting bank-sponsored legislation in his committee, and pushing his own, became an opponent. Campbell planted in cooperative newspapers stories that Rayburn was fighting in committee because he was afraid to fight in the open—articles that Rayburn considered an attack on his personal honor. Friends aware of his temper urged him not to lose it; Campbell, they warned him, had destroyed the careers of other men who had opposed him even indirectly. Rayburn thereupon took the floor of the House with a speech that was not indirect. His own bills, he said, “are in the interest of the people, and I will stand here day by day and vote for them. … It matters not to me what Mr. Campbell’s views are.” Pausing, he raised his great head and stared straight at Campbell, who was sitting in the gallery, not speaking again until everyone in the Chamber was staring at Campbell, too. Then he said: “It matters not to me whether Tom Campbell stands for a measure or against it. Tom Campbell, in my opinion, is the least thing to be considered in legislation.” The temper, the aura of immense strength, the legislative cunning, the implacable standards: in Austin, men learned that they couldn’t buy Sam Rayburn—and that they couldn’t cross him.

  Nor was his temper the only striking aspect of Sam Rayburn’s character. His colleagues talked not only of his rage but of his rigidity.

  His standards were very simple—and not subject to compromise. He talked a lot about “honor” and “loyalty,” and he meant what he said. “There are no degrees in honorableness,” he would say. “You are or you aren’t.” Harsh though that rule was, he lived up to it—says one of his fellow legislators: “He had a reputation for honesty and fair dealing. You could always swear by anything Sam told you”—and he insisted that others live up to it, too. “Once you lied to Rayburn, why, you’d worn out your credentials,” an aide says. “You didn’t get a second chance.” His colleagues learned, however, that if they paid Sam Rayburn what they owed him, they would never be short-changed; his friendship, they learned, was a gift to be cherished. “If he was your friend, he was your friend forever,” one man was to say. “He would be with you—always. The tougher the going, the more certain you could be that when you looked around, Sam Rayburn would be standing there with you. I never met a man so loyal to a friend.”

  He used the words “just” and “fair” a lot, and his colleagues learned that he meant those words, too. “Whether or not he liked an issue was actually immaterial,” a friend said. “He kept saying he wanted to find out what was right—and after a while, you realized: by God, he was trying to do just that.”

  He would spend “about three terms” in the Legislature, he had told his brothers and sisters so many years before, and then he would be elected Speaker. During his third term, he ran for Speaker. His speech in the well of the House was to the point. “If you have anything for me,” he told his colleagues, “give it to me now.” It was a personal appeal, and the response was personal. Bailey’s weight was behind him, but that was not a decisive factor—not for a candidate supported by none of the state’s major power interests. “Sam Rayburn was elected,” says one of his colleagues, “because of the simple respect everyone had for him.” (For a moment, the iron facade cracked and the emotion beneath it showed—but only for a moment. When the vote was announced, recalls a friend, “Sam jumped up and gave a cotton-patch yell and then sat down real quick—like he was ashamed of himself.” There was another brief crack—during his acceptance speech. “Up in Fannin County there is an old man already passed his three score, and by his side there sits an old woman at whose feet I would delight to worship,” he said. “For them also I thank you.”)

  A Speaker’s power was used to get more. That power (the Speaker’s “rights and duties”) had been undefined; when, at his direction, they were defined now—by a committee of his friends—the definition gave the Speaker unprecedented power. He had no reluctance to use it. He himself recalled that “I saw that all my friends got the good appointments and that those who voted against me for Speaker got none.” Even supporters could not threaten him; when he turned down their nominee for a clerkship, their spokesman told him, “If you don’t appoint her, I’ll get up a petition signed by a majority.” “I don’t give a damn if every member signs your petition,” Rayburn replied. “I still won’t appoint h
er.” And he knew what he wanted to use his power for: during his single year as Speaker, the Texas House of Representatives passed significant legislation regulating utilities, railroads and banks—including bills whose passage the Populists had been urging, without hope, for years.

  A single year: he had, after all, told his brothers and sisters that he would be in Congress by the age of thirty, and now, in 1912, he was thirty. He appointed a committee to redraw the boundaries of congressional districts, and the committee removed from the Fannin County district the home county of the State Senator who would have been his most formidable opponent. Running for Congress, he evoked his destiny. “When I was a schoolboy,” he said, “I made up my mind that I was going to run for Congress when I was thirty. … I have reached that age, and I am running for Congress. I believe I have lived to be worthy of your support. I believe I will be elected.” He displayed a quiet but effective wit: “I will not deny that there are men in the district better qualified than I to go to Congress, but, gentlemen, these men are not in the race.” And he was elected.

  DECADES LATER, when Sam Rayburn was a legend, one aspect of the legend, fostered by the brief, almost cryptic terseness of his rare speeches, was taciturnity, at least in public. And the reporters who created the legend, who had not known Sam Rayburn when he was a young Congressman, assumed that such taciturnity had always been a Rayburn characteristic.

  It hadn’t. He had been in Congress less than a month, in fact, when he took the floor. He was aware, he said, of “the long-established custom of this House, which … demands that discussions … shall be left … to the more mature members,” but he was going “to break” that custom—to “refuse to be relegated to that lockjawed ostracism.” He was refusing, he said, because he represented 200,000 people, and they needed someone to speak for them—and, in his speech, which lasted for almost two hours, he did indeed speak for them, pouring out all the bitterness and resentment that had, a generation before, made the northeast corner of Texas a stronghold of the Texas Alliance and of the People’s Party.

  The issue was the tariff. The House, newly Democratic, was, under the spur of the newly inaugurated Woodrow Wilson, debating the Underwood Bill, which would begin to reform the tariff laws that Populists hated by, for example, placing shoes as well as steerhides on the free list.

  The Republicans “talk about the hard deal the producer is getting in this bill,” Rayburn said. The Republican Party, he said, is always “willing and anxious to take that small rich class under its protective wing, but unwilling at all times to heed the great chorus of sad cries ever coming from the large yet poor class, the American consumer.” What’s wrong, he demanded, with reducing the price of the shoes a man “must buy to protect the feet of his children?” The system that kept that price high was “the most indefensible system the world has ever known.” Under it, “the poor man … is compelled to pay more than the rich man,” and “manufacturers fatten their already swollen purses with more ill-gotten gains wrung from the horny hands of the toiling masses,” from the people who “have forever been ground under the heel of taxation with a relentless tread.”

  He was especially bitter about the Republicans’ attempt, then in full stride, to persuade the farmer that tariffs were really in his best interest. The Republicans “talk about the farmer,” he said. What did they know about the farmer? “What consideration have they shown him?” They would find that they underestimated the farmer, he said; they would learn, to their shock, that “they are dealing with a thinking and intelligent class.” The Democratic Party, “the party of the masses,” was in power at last. Its representatives were “men who came from every walk of life, and who were fresh from the people, who knew their hopes and their aspirations, and their wants, and their sufferings.” Its President was “clean and matchless” with “the great heart and mind that he could interpret the inarticulate longings of suffering humanity.” The Democrats would pass the Underwood Bill, reduce the tariffs, break up the “swollen fortunes,” destroy the “trusts,” lift the load from the bending backs, the “stooped and weary backs,” of the farmers and laboring class.

  Decades later, when Sam Rayburn was a legend and reporters constantly quoted his advice to young Congressmen—“To get along, go along”—one aspect of the legend was the assumption that when he was a young Congressman, he had “gone along,” that he had subordinated his own views to those of his party and its leaders.

  He hadn’t. As a young Congressman, he had “gone along” with no one—not even with the President, the President of his own party, whom he idolized.

  During his second year in the House, he wrote—himself, with no staff assistance—a bill embodying the old People’s Party dream of intensified government regulation of railroads, by giving the government authority over the issuance of new securities by the railroads. Happening, by chance, to see the bill, Louis D. Brandeis, then one of President Wilson’s advisors, thought it so good that, says Wilson biographer Arthur Link, it was made one of the three measures that formed the centerpiece of the President’s campaign against the trusts. Despite the opposition of the senior member of the Texas delegation, the popular and powerful John Nance Garner, Rayburn pushed the bill to passage in the House; in a note hand-delivered to Rayburn, the President said he had watched Rayburn’s fight “with admiration and genuine appreciation,” and for some months thereafter invited him frequently to the White House. But the heady moment passed. Railroad lobbyists killed the bill in the Senate, and by the following year, Wilson had had second thoughts; Rayburn was told that the President did not want the bill re-introduced. Although he knew that without White House support the cause was lost—as, indeed, it proved to be—Rayburn refused to stop fighting for it; he introduced the bill anyway. This was an embarrassment to the White House; Rayburn was told the President did not want the bill actively pushed. Rayburn actively pushed it. The President sent the message again—via a messenger whose orders he was sure would be obeyed: the leader of Rayburn’s own state delegation, Cactus Jack Garner himself. Rayburn continued pushing. Then Wilson summoned the obstinate freshman to the White House to give him the order face to face. If Wilson received an answer at all, it was a short one; Rayburn was to recall replying in a single sentence: “I’m sorry I can’t go along with you, Mr. President.” Turning his back on his “clean and matchless” idol, he walked out of the room without another word.

  Angered by his recalcitrance, President Wilson threw the weight of the White House behind Rayburn’s opponent in the next Democratic primary. Holding his seat nonetheless, Rayburn, on his return to Congress, introduced half a dozen railroad bills against the President’s wishes, secured the passage of several, and was eventually to play a crucial role in winning the eight-hour day for railroad workers. Admiring colleagues gave him a nickname: “The Railroad Legislator.” And he was active—defiantly and eloquently active, often against the wishes of party leaders—in other areas, including the creation of the Federal Trade Commission.

  One aspect of the legend that was true was his personal integrity. Men learned in Washington what they had learned in Austin: no one could cross Sam Rayburn—and no one could buy him. Lobbyists could not buy him so much as a meal. Not even the taxpayer could buy him a meal. Spurning the conventional congressional junket, Rayburn would during his forty-eight years in Congress take exactly one overseas trip—a trip to inspect the Panama Canal that he considered necessary because his committee was considering Canal legislation—and on that trip he insisted on paying his own way. He refused not only fees but travel expenses for out-of-town speeches; hosts who, thinking his refusal pro forma, attempted to press checks upon him quickly realized they had made a mistake: the face, already so hard, would become harder; Rayburn would say, “I’m not for sale”—and then he would walk away without a backward glance, as he had walked away from a President. His integrity was certified by his bankbook. At his death, at the age of seventy-nine, after decades as one of the most powerful men in
the United States, a man courted by railroad companies and oil companies, his savings totaled $15,000.

  Sam Rayburn’s blocky figure—pounding along the Capitol corridors with strides that one observer likened to the pumping of a piston—seemed broader now, even more massive, the face beneath the bald skull even more grim and hard. The impression of physical strength was not misleading. Once, two big Congressmen—one was a 230-pound six-footer, Thomas Blanton of Texas, the name of the other has been lost in time—got into a fistfight. Stepping between them, Rayburn pushed them apart. Then, bunching each man’s lapels in one hand, he held them apart, his arms rigid. Standing between two men almost a head taller who were thrashing furiously in his grip, he held them, each with one hand, until they had quieted down, as effortlessly as if they had been two crying babies. But it was not his physical strength that most impressed his colleagues. About his integrity, one said: “Amidst the multitude, he was the incorruptible.” About his accomplishments when he was still new on the Hill, another said, introducing him on the floor for a speech in 1916, during his second term in Congress, “He is a member young in years, but old in accomplishment.” In a body in which seniority or powerful friends ordinarily determined a member’s standing, Sam Rayburn, who possessed neither, was already, solely because of the strength of his personality, a formidable figure.