The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  “Now, I never asked for your vote on this bill. I never said a word to you about this bill. I knew you wouldn’t vote for this bill, and I never said a word to you about it. But you came across the room just now and told me you wish you could have voted with me.

  “So I’m going to tell you something now. You could have voted with me. I’ve known that district since before you were born, and that vote wouldn’t have hurt you one bit. Not one bit. You didn’t vote with me because you didn’t have the guts to.”

  The flush on the huge head was so dark now that it looked almost black. The men standing with Rayburn backed away. “So don’t you come crawling across the room telling me you wish you could have voted for the bill. ’Cause it’s a damn lie. It’s a damn lie. And you’re a damn liar. You didn’t vote for the bill ’cause you didn’t have the guts to. You’ve got no guts. Let me tell you something. I didn’t raise the issue, but you did. You came across the room. So let me tell you something. The time is coming when the people are going to find out that all you represent is the Chamber of Commerce, and when they find that out, they’re going to beat your ass.”

  A young state legislator who had considered challenging the Congressman for his seat had dropped the idea because he didn’t have enough political clout. Not a week after his confrontation with Rayburn, the Congressman walked into the House Dining Room for lunch and saw the legislator sitting there—at Rayburn’s table. When the legislator returned home, he had all the clout he needed, and the Congressman’s political career was over. Rayburn drove him not only out of Congress, but out of Washington. He tried to stay on in the capital, looking for a government job or a lobbying job, but no job was open to him. And none would ever be—not as long as Sam Rayburn was alive.

  The temper—backed by the political power—made men afraid of Rayburn. They tried to gauge his moods. “When he would say ‘She-e-e-e-t,’ drawing the word out, I knew he was still good-natured,” recalls House Doorkeeper “Fishbait” Miller. “But if he said it fast, like ‘I don’t want to hear a lot of shit from you,’ I knew I was in trouble.” Some Congressmen, says House Sergeant-at-Arms Kenneth Harding, were “literally afraid to start talking to him.” Says Harding: “He could be very friendly. But if he was frowning, boy—stay away. I mean, if he was coming down a corridor and he was frowning, people were literally afraid to start talking to him. They feared to get close to him. They were afraid of saying the wrong thing.” And if the great heavy head wore not only a frown but that dark red flush, “when he came down a corridor,” it was “a stone through a wave. People would part before him.”

  BUT IF MEN WHO SAW SAM RAYBURN only in the halls of Congress feared him, men who also saw him outside those halls pitied him.

  As a child, loneliness had been what he dreaded most. “Loneliness breaks the heart,” he had said. “Loneliness consumes people.” Now he was a man, who had attained the power he had so long sought. But he had learned that even power could not save him from what he dreaded.

  During the hours in which Congress was in session, of course, he was surrounded by people wanting to talk to him, clamoring for his attention, hanging on his every word.

  But Congress wasn’t always in session. It wasn’t in session in the evenings, or on weekends. And when Congress wasn’t in session, Sam Rayburn was often alone.

  He had wanted so desperately not to be alone. He had wanted a family—a wife and children. Driving through the Washington suburbs with a friend not long after he first arrived in the capital, he had said, as they passed the Chevy Chase Country Club, “I want a house that big,” and when the friend asked him why, he said, “For all my children.” Adults, another friend says, “were scared of Rayburn, but children weren’t. They took to him instinctively. They crawled all over him and rubbed their hands over his bald head.” He would sit talking to a little girl or boy for hours—with a broad, gentle grin on that great, hard face to which, it sometimes seemed, no man could bring a smile. Friends who saw Sam Rayburn with women realized that his usual grim demeanor concealed—that, in fact, the grimness was a mask deliberately donned to conceal—a terrible shyness and insecurity. He was always afraid of looking foolish; he would never tell a joke in a speech because, he said, “I tried to tell a joke once in a speech, and before I got through, I was the joke.” And this fear seemed accentuated when he was with women. He had fallen in love once—with the beautiful, dark-haired, eighteen-year-old sister of another Texas Congressman, his friend Marvin Jones; Rayburn was thirty-six at the time. Although he wrote Metze Jones regularly, nine years passed before he asked her to marry him; friends say it took him that long to work up the nerve. And when—in 1927, when Rayburn was forty-five—they finally became engaged, he asked her to make the engagement short; “I was in a great hurry to get married … before she changed her mind,” he wrote a friend. The marriage lasted three months. Rayburn never spoke of what had happened; so tight-lipped was he on the subject that most men who met him in later years never learned he had been married. (Once, when he was an old man, he was talking to a group of Girl Scouts, one of whom asked why he wasn’t married. “Oh, I’m so cranky that nobody would have me,” he said. “I’ll marry you,” one of the girls said. Rayburn laughed.) Fishbait Miller, who knew about the marriage—in working with Rayburn for thirty years, he learned things about Rayburn despite Rayburn—says that even after Metze remarried, Rayburn “kept watch over her from a distance”; when her daughter from the second marriage contracted polio, the girl was admitted immediately to the famed polio treatment center at Warm Springs despite the long waiting list. (“It is true that someone can be powerful and you can feel very sorry for him,” Miller says. “I felt sorry for Rayburn because he lost the woman he loved.”) For years thereafter, Rayburn had not a single date. He may, in fact, never have had more than a few scattered dates; no one really knows. After Metze left him, Sam Rayburn was alone. He moved into two rooms in a small, rather dingy apartment house near Dupont Circle, where he lived for the rest of his life.

  He could, of course, have gone to parties, but his belief that he could not make small talk, his fear that he would make a fool of himself if he tried, made parties an ordeal; he talked for years about the first Washington cocktail party he had gone to, back when he was a freshman Congressman. “I never felt that [the hostess] knew, or cared, whether I was there or not. So I stopped going [to parties].”

  He tried to prolong the hours he spent on Capitol Hill. Jack Garner’s old “Board of Education” had been disbanded, but a few congressional leaders still gathered for a drink at the end of the day, and Rayburn was always there. But the others would leave rather quickly; they had wives, and families, and social engagements, to go to. (Rayburn tried never to let them see that he did not; he never asked them to stay, often made a point of leaving early himself, as if he too had somewhere else to go.)

  “The tough time was the weekends, when everyone went home to his wife,” says D. B. Hardeman, who was to become his aide during the 1950’s. During those later years, Rayburn’s position as Speaker provided him with a staff, and on weekends he would telephone its members, aides like Hardeman and John Holton, House Doorkeeper Miller or Sergeant-at-Arms Harding; he would sound very jovial on the phone, asking them to go fishing with him in some lakes down near the Maryland shore, or to come over for Sunday breakfast and read the Sunday papers with him. Asking was very hard for Sam Rayburn, however, and although the aides would accept his invitations (“Sometimes I had something planned, but I would come because I knew he had nothing to do,” one says), he did not ask often. The pride which made it so hard for him to issue an invitation made it hard for him even to accept one: his aides would, of course, invite him to their homes, but he could not accept too often; he didn’t want anyone to get the idea that he didn’t have anything to do. (His aides knew the truth, however; Rayburn would sometimes instruct Hardeman or Holton to come to the office on a Sunday, on the pretext that there was work to do, but, often, there wasn’t; the
young men would watch him opening all the drawers of his desk, and taking out every paper, “looking for something to do.”) Says Ken Harding: “He had many worshippers, but very few close friends. You held him in awe. You didn’t dare get close to him. People feared to get close to him, because they were afraid of saying the wrong thing. And because people were afraid to get close to him, he was a very lonely guy. His life was a tragedy. I felt very, very sorry for Sam Rayburn.”

  During the 1930’s, he did not yet have a staff that he could telephone. For a while, he made an effort to round up weekend fishing parties from among the Texas Congressmen, driving down to the Maryland lakes on Saturday and sleeping over in cabins Saturday night. “Those who went along for the first time were stunned by the change in Rayburn’s personality,” a friend writes. “Solemn, laconic and brief in the Capitol, on the road he was talkative, humorous and a great tease.”

  But how many times could he ask people to come—and if he was turned down once by someone, no matter how legitimate the excuse, how graciously it was made, how could Sam Rayburn ask again? So if he went to the Maryland lakes, he usually went alone; in a letter to a friend in Texas, these words burst out of him: “God what I would give for a tow-headed boy to take fishing!” And often, during the Thirties, he would spend his weekends in Washington, taking long walks, a lonely figure wandering for hours through the deserted streets, his face set grimly as if he wanted to be alone—as if daring anyone to talk to him.

  WHEN LYNDON JOHNSON had first come to Washington, in December, 1931, he had made a determined effort to become friendly with Sam Rayburn. The entrée had been good—as it was with everyone who knew Lyndon’s father; “Dear Sam,” Rayburn was to write, “you are one member with whom I served in the Legislature who I remember with pleasure”—and Rayburn took a liking to the gangling young man. But his cordiality was limited by custom. A congressional secretary could visit a Congressman in his office only on the rare occasions when he had an excuse—a business reason—to be there. Sometimes, in the late afternoon, Kleberg and Roy Miller would go to Rayburn’s office, or to Garner’s (where Rayburn would be present). Watching them walk out, Johnson would tell Latimer or Jones, “Well, they’re going to have some bourbon and branch water.” He wanted to go, but he was never asked. And he had no excuse to see Rayburn outside the office.

  After Lyndon and Lady Bird took their little Kalorama Road apartment in December, 1934, however, Lyndon could invite “Mr. Sam,” as he called him, to dinner.

  When he came, Lady Bird recalls, nothing was too good for him. This was, of course, the rule at many homes to which he was often invited—but to which he came infrequently, or, more probably, only once. At this apartment, however, although the hostess’ smile never wavered, there was not only nervousness behind it but fear: Lady Bird was very much afraid at first of this fierce-looking man. And Sam Rayburn saw behind the smile, and made an effort for this shy, timid young woman, so small and slim that she looked like a little girl—how great an effort can be measured by the number of more sophisticated Washington hostesses for whom he would not make it—to put her at ease. When he saw—she never told him—how homesick she was, he tried to cheer her up by talking about Texas, and about his boyhood on the farm. He told her his favorite foods (“He liked to eat the things he had had at home as a boy: black-eyed peas, cornbread, peach ice cream, good chili,” she recalls), and when he came to dinner thereafter, she cooked them for him, and, she says, as he came more and more frequently, “learned to make them the way he liked them.” And her sweetness and graciousness put him—this man who was seldom at ease without a gavel in his hand—at ease. He began to accept the Johnsons’ invitations not only to dinner but to breakfast—to Sunday breakfast, breakfast on the weekends when he had nothing to do. After breakfast, Lady Bird would suggest that Lyndon and Mr. Sam read the Sunday papers together while she cleaned up, and he began staying longer and longer. Lyndon Johnson was provided with ample opportunity to exercise the talents that had led people to call him “a professional son” on this man who so desperately wanted a son. Other congressional secretaries found one Johnson gesture particularly unbelievable (although it would have been quite believable to San Marcos students who had seen Johnson pat feared Prexy Evans on the back): when, in the halls of Congress, Johnson met Sam Rayburn, he would bend over and kiss him on his bald head.

  So strong was the wall that Sam Rayburn had built around himself that it was not easy even for Lyndon Johnson to break it down. But he broke it down. Although the Johnson living room contained a sofa and an easy chair, Mr. Sam always sat instead in a straight-backed kitchen chair, as if afraid to relax. But more and more often now, he would lean forward and put his hands on his knees and tell stories; “he was a great storyteller,” Lady Bird recalls. “He remembered Woodrow Wilson and all these other figures.” He began to invite Lyndon and Lady Bird to his apartment for breakfast.

  And sometime in the late Spring of 1935—the exact date cannot be determined, but it was while Lady Bird, homesick, had returned to Karnack for a visit in May and June of that year—Lyndon Johnson developed pneumonia and was taken to a hospital. And when he awoke, sitting beside his bed was Sam Rayburn, his usually expressionless face twisted with anxiety. He was so agitated that he had forgotten he was smoking, and his vest was littered with cigarette ashes. “Now Lyndon,” he said, “don’t you worry. Take it easy. If you need money or anything, just call on me.”

  GIFTED THOUGH HE WAS at arousing paternal feelings—not only Rayburn’s but those of Roy Miller and Rasch Adams and Alvin Wirtz—he had been unable to translate affection into advancement. On the very day in 1931 on which he had been appointed to his new job, he had begun planning to leave it. To Ella So Relle’s congratulations on that day, he had replied that the post of congressional secretary was only “a stepping stone”—only the bottom rung on the political ladder he was so anxious to climb. Now, however, it was 1935—and he was still on the same rung. For almost four years he had been tirelessly ingratiating himself with Congressmen, agreeing with their views, dancing with their wives, “always campaigning”—and where had the campaigning gotten him? Long aware of what the next rung should be (it had been years now since, hearing about a congressional secretary who had succeeded to his boss’ seat, he had said: “That’s the route to follow”), he had attempted to set out upon that route the moment he was eligible, subtly attempting, as his twenty-fifth birthday approached, to turn Congressman Kleberg into Ambassador Kleberg. Now the birthday approaching was his twenty-seventh, and the route was still blocked—blocked, since no one could beat a Kleberg in Kleberg Country, by an immovable object that was giving no signs of moving of its own accord. Dick Kleberg’s lack of interest in his job had led Johnson to hope that he would tire of being a Congressman. To his dismay, however, he saw that, while Kleberg remained bored by Washington politics, he had discovered the attractive possibilities of Washington social life; with a sinking heart, Johnson was coming to realize that his boss had no intention of leaving his job. A South American Ambassadorship might still have changed his mind, of course, but an Ambassadorship was no longer a realistic possibility for a man whose hostility to the “Bolshevik” in the White House had become obvious.

  If there was a longer route—to a higher peak than a Congressional seat—a route that only he saw, he had tried to start along that route too, had worked for the most radical as well as the most reactionary Congressman, had trimmed his sail to every wind, had done favors and created an acquaintance not just in his district but throughout Texas. But acquaintance had thus far borne no more fruit than had affection; he was no closer to achieving his great ambition in 1935 than he had been in 1931.

  During his first months in Washington, Estelle Harbin had seen that “he couldn’t stand not being somebody—just could not stand it.” “I’m not the assistant type,” he had said. But the little daily humiliations—having to step back when his Congressman stepped into the MEMBERS ONLY elevator, having to wait
outside the Congressional cloakrooms because he was not allowed inside—reminded him daily that, after almost four years, an assistant was what he was; that he was not a somebody, but a nobody—just one of the crowd of low-paid, powerless congressional secretaries.

  OTHER DEVELOPMENTS, too, were making Johnson’s life in Washington less pleasant than it had been.

  Among his contemporaries, at least, he had been somebody: “the Boss of the Little Congress.” But in 1935, that changed, too.

  The whispers about the way in which Lyndon Johnson had won the organization’s Speakership had not died away—because, with each succeeding election, invariably won by the candidate of “the Boss of the Little Congress,” they started up again. The belief that elections were being, in the word of his fellow secretary Wingate Lucas, “stolen,” that the ballot boxes were being stuffed with the votes of mailmen, policemen and postmen who were not members of the Little Congress, and that Johnson was directing the stuffing, was widespread. And so was the belief that if such stuffing did not produce a majority for the Johnson slate, the votes would simply be miscounted by the organization’s elected clerk, who was, of course, a Johnson man. “Everybody just knew this,” Lucas says; “everybody said it. They said, ‘In that last election, that damn Lyndon Johnson stole some votes again.’” This belief—and his domineering manner—had antagonized many of his fellow secretaries. His popularity among his Washington peers had, in fact, descended to a level little higher than it had been among his San Marcos peers. But his fellow secretaries had never challenged the control of the Little Congress by his “machine,” the cadre of his supporters who accepted his dominance, in part because of fear of incurring his displeasure and thereby losing any chance of advancement in the only organization in which advancement was possible for a secretary. However, among the new secretaries who came to Washington with Congressmen elected in November, 1934, was a gawky youth, obviously fresh from the country, who arrived in Washington even younger than Johnson had three years before, and who possessed his own considerable “natural vocation” for politics; he was twenty-year-old James P. Coleman, a tall, skinny Mississippi farm boy who would shortly begin a whirlwind political career that would propel him to the Governorship of Mississippi at the age of forty-one. Coleman was sufficiently astute to be impressed by Johnson at the first Little Congress meeting he attended, in January, 1935. “He was a very tall fellow and had a very commanding personality when he stood up to talk. And he was extremely well-informed. He always knew the issues. And—well, he just had something. It sticks out on some folks and not on others.”