The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  HE WAS GOING to need this strength.

  As a boy, he had vowed that he would become Speaker of the House of Representatives. Now, as he stood each day amidst the milling and confusion of the House floor, there loomed above him, so aloof and alone on the topmost tier of the triple-tiered white marble dais, the single, high-backed Speaker’s chair. From the day he arrived in Congress, he wanted to be in that chair, wanted the Speaker’s gavel in his hand. He knew how he would wield it—just as he knew for whom: for the People, against the Interests. For years, no Speaker had dominated the House, and the result was confusion and ineffectiveness; it was during his early years in the House that Sam Rayburn, in a private conversation, suddenly burst out: “Someday a man will be elected who’ll bring the Speakership into respectability again. He’ll be the real leader of the House. He’ll be master around here, and everyone will know it.” He knew himself to be capable of such mastery: had he not, after all, demonstrated it already, in another Speaker’s chair? He felt, moreover, that the high-backed chair and the gavel were his destiny; had not every other element of his boyhood prediction—election to the Texas House, to its Speakership, to the national Congress—already been fulfilled?

  His first years in the House may have given him the illusion that the fulfillment of that destiny was not far off. During those years, he had dealt with a President and with presidential advisors, had seen his name in the Eastern press, had become somewhat of a figure in the House. Now reality set in—the long reality.

  In 1918, the Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives. They were not to regain it for twelve years. For twelve years, Sam Rayburn would be in the minority.

  A minority Congressman of insignificant seniority had power to realize neither his dreams for others nor his dream for himself. There was no way of circumventing, no way of battering down, this fact. John Garner had said, “The only way to get anywhere in Congress is to stay there and let seniority take its course.” Rayburn had not wanted to believe that. Now he learned that he had no choice. As the prosperity of the Twenties waxed brighter, so did the fortunes of the Grand Old Party, the party identified with the glow: Harding was succeeded by Coolidge, and Coolidge by Hoover, and Republican majorities in Congress grew and grew and grew again—and Democratic Congressmen were allowed little voice in its affairs. Sam Rayburn, who had rushed toward his destiny, was going to have to wait.

  The waiting was made harder by the lack of assurance that it would ever be rewarded. Rayburn could remember when, at thirty, he had been the youngest Congressman; he had still been young—thirty-six in 1918—when the waiting began. Now he was no longer so young: he passed forty and then forty-five. And instead of growing closer, his goal seemed to be receding before him. After the 1928 elections, when Hoover beat Smith, there were only 165 Democrats left in the House, to 269 Republicans; never had the party’s prospects of regaining control of the House seemed more remote. Nor, of course, would a Democratic victory in itself end Rayburn’s waiting. He was not the first Democrat in line for the Speakership; he was not even first within the Texas delegation—if the Democrats turned to Texas for a Speaker, they would turn to the delegation’s most powerful and most senior member, the popular Garner, who had been in Congress since 1902.

  If a Democratic victory did come to pass, moreover, would he still be in a position to take advantage of it? Would he still be in Congress? He had already had several close primary races, and it seemed to him, pessimistic as he was by nature, inevitable that he would one day lose. “My ambition has been to rise in the House,” he wrote to one of his sisters in 1922. “But nobody can tell when the Democrats will come into power and then a race every two years—they will finally get a fellow in a district.” So many men had waited patiently for the tides of history to turn—and had been defeated before the turn came. Had been defeated, or had become ill, or had died. So many men who had once dreamed of rising to the Speaker’s chair had died without achieving their ambition. Was he to be only one of these?

  Waiting was hard enough. He had to wait in silence. Seniority might one day lift him to the chairmanship of his committee. Seniority alone would never enable him to climb the triple dais. The Speaker was elected by a vote of the majority party, a vote based not only on seniority but on popularity, particularly among the party’s influentials. He needed friends. He couldn’t make enemies. He needed friends not only for his own dreams but for the dreams he dreamed for what he had referred to as “the large yet poor class.” Even if he became committee chairman—even if he became Speaker—the forces which would oppose him, the Interests he hated, would be strong. If he wanted not just to hate them but to beat them, he would need allies among his colleagues; he would need, in fact, every ally—every friend—he could get. The savagery with which he fought made enemies. He would have to stop fighting. Sam Rayburn, who had never bided his time, who had rushed to fight the oppressors of “the People,” was going to have to bide his time now. This man who so hated to be licked, who said that being licked “almost kills me,” was going to have to take his lickings now—take them in silence.

  He waited. He had made so many speeches during his first six years in the House; during these next twelve, he made so few; entire sessions would pass without the representative of Texas’ Fourth Congressional District taking the floor. And he was hardly more loquacious in private. He took to standing endlessly in the aisle at the rear of the House Chamber, his elbows resting on the brass rail that separated the aisle from the rows of seats, greeting passing members courteously, listening attentively to their problems, but saying very little himself; if he was pressed to say something, his words would be so few as to be cryptic. Those twelve years were the years in which the legend of Sam Rayburn’s taciturnity was born. The heavy lips compressed themselves into a thin, hard line, so grim that even in repose the corners of his mouth turned down. The Republicans passed legislation raising the tariffs again, helping the railroads; the lips of the “Railroad Legislator” remained closed. Men who had not known him before had no idea how much strength it took for him to keep them closed. When Silent Cal Coolidge noted that “You don’t have to explain something you haven’t said,” Rayburn told people that that was “the smartest thing he’d ever heard outside of the Bible.” He took to quoting the remark himself; he talked sometimes about men who “had gotten in trouble from talking too much.” Was he reminding himself what he was doing—and why he had to do it?

  There was no more breaking of House customs, no more defiance of party leaders. He had disregarded Garner’s advice once. Now he sought it, became the older Texan’s protégé. His hotel, the Cochran, was the Washington residence of many prominent members of the House. In the evenings, they would pull up easy chairs in a circle in the lobby and talk; Rayburn made it his business to become part of that circle: a respectful, advice-asking, attentively listening part. If he felt he knew as much as they, they never knew it. In later years, he would frequently quote a Biblical axiom: “There is a time to fish and a time to mend nets.” This was net-mending time for him—and he mended them. The House hierarchy came to look upon him with paternalistic fondness. And these older men learned that on the rare occasions on which Sam Rayburn did speak, there was quite a bit of sense in what he had to say. They saw, moreover, that he had what one observer was to call an “indefinable knack for sensing the mood of the House”; he seemed to know, by some intuitive instinct for the legislative process, “just how far it could be pushed,” what the vote on a crucial bill would be if the vote was taken immediately—and what it would be if the vote was delayed a week. Asked decades later about this knack, he would reply: “If you can’t feel things that you can’t see or hear, you don’t belong here.” He never discussed this knack then—or admitted he had it—but the older men saw he did. And the older men learned they could depend on him—once he gave his word, it was never broken; Garner tendered him his ultimate accolade: “Sam stands hitched.” Garner and other Democratic leaders admitte
d him to the inner circles of House Democrats, “employed him,” as one article put it, “to do big jobs in tough fights, and were repaid by his hard-working loyalty.” It was during these years that, when some young member asked him for advice on how to succeed in Congress, he began to use the curt remark: “To get along, go along.”

  He used his growing influence to make friends among young Congressmen, but the alliances thus struck were made very quietly. Recalls one Congressman: “He would help you. If you said, ‘Sam, I need help,’ he might say, ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ He might just grunt. But when the bill came up, if you had needed some votes changed, the votes were changed.”

  More and more now, other Congressmen turned to him. Said one, Marvin Jones:

  The House soon spots the men … who attend a committee session where there isn’t any publicity, who attend during the long grind of hearing witnesses, who day after day have sat there. … Men will come in and out of an executive session, but there are only a few men who sit there and watch every sentence that goes into the bill and know why it went in. … The House soon finds out who does that on each committee.

  A Congressman, required to vote on many bills he knows little about, “learns to rely heavily on those few men,” Jones was to say. “I could give you some of the names of those men. … There was Sam Rayburn. …”

  “TO GET ALONG, GO ALONG”—wait, wait in silence. It was hard for him to take his own advice—how hard is revealed in the letters he wrote home. “This is a lonesome, dark day here,” he wrote.

  You wouldn’t think it, but a fellow gets lonesomer here, I think, than any place almost. Everybody is busy and one does not find that congeniality for which a fellow so thirsts. … It is a selfish, sourbellied place, every fellow trying for fame, perhaps I should say notoriety … and are ready at all times to use the other fellow as a prizepole for it. … I really believe I will here, as I did in the Texas Legislature, rise to a place where my voice will be somewhat potent in the affairs of the nation, but sometimes it becomes a cheerless fight, and a fellow is almost ready to exclaim, “what’s the use!”

  He wrote that letter in 1919. The cheerless fight had just started. He would have to fight it for twelve more years. But he fought. He took his own advice. He waited in silence, waited and went along, for twelve years, acquiring not only seniority but friends, until on December 7, 1931, the day on which, thanks to Dick Kleberg’s election, the Democrats regained control of Congress, the day Lyndon Johnson came to Washington, he became not Speaker—it would be another nine years before Sam Rayburn became Speaker—but chairman of the House Interstate Commerce Committee. One more year of waiting was required, because of the general governmental paralysis during Herbert Hoover’s last year in office. But on March 4, 1933, the new President was sworn in—and then, after all those years of waiting, Sam Rayburn showed what he had been waiting for.

  At Roosevelt’s direction, legislation had been drafted giving the federal government authority to regulate the issuance of securities for the protection of those who bought them. Rayburn, who had seen so many financially unsophisticated farmers invest the little spare cash they had been able to scrape together in worthless stocks or bonds, had fought for similar legislation more than twenty years before—not only in Austin but in Washington; it was, of course, over his attempt to give the federal government authority over the issuance of railroad securities that the freshman Congressman had defied Woodrow Wilson. That attempt had been unsuccessful, as had decades of Populist outcry for meaningful federal legislation; in the face of Wall Street opposition, the most Populists could get was state “Blue Sky” laws (the Texas law had, of course, been authored by the Gentleman from Blanco County). But when he had made that attempt, Rayburn had been a junior member of the Interstate Commerce Committee. Now he was its chairman. There was uncertainty over which committee had jurisdiction over Roosevelt’s proposed “Truth-in-Securities” Act, but Speaker Henry Rainey was a friend of Rayburn’s. “I want it,” Rayburn told him. Rainey gave it to him.

  His first difficulty was with the legislation itself, a poorly drafted bill as confusing as the problems it was trying to solve, and almost completely lacking in any effective enforcement measures. Attempts to patch it up had been hamstrung by Roosevelt’s reluctance to offend the man he had asked to draft it, an old Wilsonian Democrat, Huston Thompson, and since no one knew what to do, the measure seemed likely to die. Then Rayburn paid a visit to Raymond S. Moley, one of Roosevelt’s advisors.

  Rayburn knew what to do, Moley was to recall. The bill “was a hopeless mess,” Rayburn said, and the patching-up should stop. A new bill should be written from scratch, he said, and it should be written “under [his] direction” by new draftsmen, experts in the complicated securities field.

  Moley agreed with Rayburn’s analysis, but felt he could not bring in new draftsmen unless he could find a way around Roosevelt’s reluctance to ease out Thompson. Moley was unwilling to spell out the problem—but he found that he didn’t have to. Before he “went ahead on the draftsmen business,” he said, “it would have to be understood that I was acting directly on his, Rayburn’s, authorization, not the President’s. For all his seeming slowness, there isn’t much Sam misses. He laughed appreciatively. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘you’ve got it.’” On a Friday in early April, three young men began working on a new bill: a Harvard Law School professor, James M. Landis, and two lawyers expert in the securities field, Thomas G. Corcoran and Benjamin V. Cohen. On Monday, they presented their work to the Interstate Commerce Committee.

  Questions from the puzzled committee members about the immensely technical draft lasted all day. All day, the committee’s chairman sat silent. Trying to read his face for clues, the young men found none. They were discouraged. Moley had learned what lay behind the seeming slowness, but they hadn’t, and to them Rayburn seemed, in Cohen’s word, a “countryman”—incapable of understanding so complex a subject. At the end of the day, the chairman asked the young men to wait outside; after a while, he came out, and told them that the committee had approved their work and wanted them to turn it into a finished bill. He said no more; only later did Landis learn that “it was Sam Rayburn who decided that this was a bill worth working on.”

  Rayburn said he wanted them to work with a House legislative draftsman, Middleton Beaman. Beaman was a Rayburn man. “I had thought I knew something of legislative draftsmanship until I met him,” Landis was to say. “For days,” in his office, “deep in the bowels of the old House Office Building,” Beaman, a “rough, tough guy, would not allow us to draft a line. He insisted instead on exploring the implications of the bill to find exactly what we had or did not have in mind. He probed. …” This was, Landis recalls, “exasperating.” The young men began to suspect “that this delay bore symptoms of sinister Wall Street plotting.” Rayburn’s demeanor did not alleviate their suspicions. Dropping by Beaman’s office, he would pick up a draft paragraph and stand there studying it. He didn’t, Landis could see, “know anything about securities,” and they felt he didn’t understand what he was reading; if he did, he certainly gave no sign of it. Sometimes he gave them a word or two of advice, but it was advice so simple, so unsophisticated, that they could hardly keep from laughing at it. He said that “He wanted a strong bill, but he wanted to make sure it was right, that it was fair, that it was just,” Cohen says. He gave no sign of approval, either. The grim face beneath the gleaming bald skull was as immobile as a mask. They didn’t know what to make of him, this man of whom Beaman, and Beaman’s assistants—and everyone else they talked to—seemed so unaccountably afraid, but he certainly didn’t seem to be on their side.

  Their suspicions were seemingly confirmed when Rayburn agreed to Wall Street demands that its representatives be given a hearing to present their views on the draft bill. Suspicion turned to apprehension when they heard that the Street’s views would be presented by three of its most prominent attorneys, led by the feared John Foster Dulles himself. They
would have to rely for their defense on this slow, stolid farmer.

  And then came the hearing. “I confess that when I went in that morning to the hearing, I was scared,” Landis was to recall. “After all, I was something of a youngster.” The hearing was closed, and no records of it exist, but those who were there agree. Two men, John Foster Dulles of Sullivan & Cromwell and Sam Rayburn of Bonham, were the principal antagonists—and the Dulles who stalked into that hearing room slunk out of it. And after the hearing, there came the moment that, Landis was to say, “I’ll never forget,” the moment when he found out what was behind the mask.

  “I went back to my little cubbyhole down in the sub-basement. … About twenty minutes later, I got a call from Sam Rayburn, to come up to his office. Well, naturally, I was worried. I thought maybe all our work was down the drain.” But Rayburn said that the work was just fine, and that they should get right on with it. For the first time, there was an expression on Rayburn’s usually expressionless face. It was a snarl. He began talking about Dulles and about Wall Street lawyers, and he cursed them, “in very obscene language.”