The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  His astuteness, however, allowed him to see through—and resent—Johnson’s attempt to make friends with him by portraying himself in their first conversation as just another country boy. Coleman says he realized quickly that “He was one of those highly adaptable fellows. When he was up on the Hill, he dressed and acted like he came from the city, but when he met up with someone like myself who had come from a small town in the interior of Mississippi, he acted like a fellow who had grown up with me.” Moreover, Coleman, who had decided that he wanted to become an officer of the Little Congress, also realized during their first conversation that Johnson would support only those who were “willing to knuckle under” to him—and he was not one for knuckling under. He decided to run for the Speakership at the next election, which would be held in March.

  Rounding up support for his attempt to defeat Johnson proved unexpectedly easy—particularly among secretaries from Texas. Coleman was warned, however, that support did not necessarily mean victory; he was told about the alleged miscounting of votes, and about the rumors that votes were cast by mailmen and policemen who were not members of the Little Congress. He and his three closest allies—Texans Lloyd Croslin, Wingate Lucas and Gore Hinzley—decided to demand that the votes be counted publicly, in front of the entire membership, and that ballots be signed, so that each voter’s eligibility could be checked. (There was hesitancy among Coleman’s supporters about insisting on signed ballots because of Johnson’s methods toward beaten opponents; as Coleman puts it, “If people who voted against him could be identified, this, of course, gave the winners a chance for revenge on those who voted against them; I remember Croslin and Lucas and Hinzley telling me, ‘You better win. We don’t want to lose and have Lyndon Johnson’s unhappiness about it.’”)

  The March meeting was stormy. Coleman’s opponent was William Howard Payne, but Coleman’s allies made clear in their speeches in the House Caucus Room that the chief issue was Payne’s chief supporter. “It was really Lyndon we were running against,” Lucas says. Pointing to Johnson, who was sitting silently in a corner, Croslin shouted: “That’s the man we’re going to defeat. He’s been boss too long. We’re not going to be bossed!” Looking directly at Johnson, he said: “You’re not going to tell us what to do.” (Johnson said nothing.) Then Coleman’s supporters proposed the new voting procedures; Lucas said: “We’re going to have the ballots counted in the open, and we’re going to have a membership list and check the ballots against it.” Although Johnson again sat silent, his supporters opposed the new rules. Only after a long, angry debate were they adopted.

  Their adoption meant that the March, 1935, meeting of the Little Congress would be the first time that the suspicions which had surrounded elections in which Lyndon Johnson had been involved—elections not only in Washington but at San Marcos—would be given objective scrutiny. And the first time the suspicions were checked, the result proved to be precisely what Johnson’s opponents had charged it would be. When the signatures on the ballots were checked against the membership list—by two tellers, one from each side, sitting in front of the audience—a number of votes for Payne did, in fact, prove to have been cast by non-members. With these votes included, Johnson’s candidate would have won. With those votes thrown out, Johnson’s candidate lost.

  JOHNSON’S REACTION to the defeat surprised those who had expected him to attempt a comeback in the next election—although it might not have surprised his boyhood playmates, who had known that “If he couldn’t lead, he didn’t care much about playing.” Having lost the leadership of the Little Congress, Johnson displayed no further interest in it. The Caucus Room had been the only place in Washington in which he had possessed prestige and status of his own. Now he was only one of the crowd there, too.

  (Not long thereafter, the old informal voting methods were reinstated, and the checking of votes was abolished. “There was no more need to check,” Lucas explains. A later Speaker of the Little Congress, James F. Swist, who came to the organization in 1939, years after Johnson had left it, expresses surprise that checking had ever been considered necessary. “My God,” Swist says, “who would cheat to win the presidency of something like the Little Congress?”)

  IN HIS EFFORTS to “be somebody,” he began frantically, almost desperately, to cast about in wider and wider circles. Welly Hopkins, to whom Johnson appealed for help, says, “He wanted to get ahead. He had that burning ambition. He wanted to climb that ladder. But he didn’t know exactly how he was going to climb. Just what order he had in his mind I don’t think he knew any more.”

  Despite previous statements to Hopkins that the real political future lay in national politics and that state government was a “dead end,” he now asked Welly to get him a state job. “In a vague way, he wanted to come back to Texas, and [Alvin] Wirtz and I talked to Bill McCraw [newly elected State Attorney General], and Bill said he didn’t know him, but if Wirtz and I wanted him to, he would find a place for him, and Wirtz and I told Lyndon that.” But the job actually offered turned out to be at a level that Johnson considered humiliatingly low.

  In his desperation, he even considered leaving politics. Wirtz, paternally fond of Johnson and impressed by his ability, had offered him a partnership in his Austin law firm if he obtained a law degree, and in September, 1934, he had enrolled in evening classes at Georgetown University Law School. At law school, however, his boyhood reluctance—refusal, almost—to study boiled over again. Extremely defensive about his education (“There we go again with that Latin,” he would grumble under his breath to Russell Brown, who sat next to him in class. “Why don’t they stick to plain English?”), he was nonetheless not prepared to make up his deficiencies by studying. Willing to learn specific rules of law, he was unwilling—defiantly, determinedly unwilling—to learn the historical or philosophical reasoning behind them. Johnson’s law school career, during which, Brown says, “Lyndon never recited once in class,” was, at any rate, ended after two months by his marriage. “He dropped out of law school to marry Lady Bird,” L. E. Jones says.

  The next job for which Johnson tried was a somewhat surprising choice, considering this lack of interest in formal education. His target was a college presidency. The thousand students at the ten-year-old Texas College of Art and Industries (Texas A&I) in Kingsville wore black blazers decorated with a golden Brahma bull, symbol of the King Ranch, whose funds had helped found the institution. Like most institutions in Kleberg Country, it was still dominated by the Klebergs, and Johnson persuaded Dick Kleberg, who had once been chairman of its Board of Trustees, to support his candidacy. The scholarly Jones, who revered education, was “shocked” by Johnson’s effrontery, not only because of his attitude toward education but because of his lack of qualifications: “All he had was a B.A. degree.” And Jones was “horrified” when Johnson confided to him that he thought he was going to get the job. “There was a period of several weeks when he dreamed, talked about what he would do [as president], talked it all out—how he would revolutionize the college, slant it towards agriculture, make it the greatest college in the United States.” In the event, however, cooler heads intervened, and Jones’ fears—and Johnson’s hopes—turned out to be unfounded.

  Then a new path opened. Johnson, who so admired Roy Miller and Miller’s fellow big-time lobbyists as “real operators,” had often said, “I want to be a big lobbyist like Roy Miller.” Now he got the chance. Miller’s buddy, the reactionary General Electric string-puller Horatio H. (“Rasch”) Adams, paternally fond of Johnson and impressed by his entrée into government departments, formally offered him a job at $10,000 per year (a Congressman’s salary) as his assistant—the Number Two lobbying job in Washington for giant GE. But with the chance actually before him, Johnson hesitated. According to those with whom he discussed Adams’ offer, his reason for hesitating was not principle, but rather a consideration emphasized by Roy Miller. Speaking in terms of the Texas of that era (times would later change in Texas), Miller told Johnson, in several
long, serious talks, that acceptance of the General Electric post might mean the end forever of Johnson’s hopes for elective office, and for a career in the public side of politics. A man identified as a corporate lobbyist, Miller said bluntly, could never win a major office in Texas.

  The offer was nonetheless a heady one for a twenty-six-year-old secretary then earning an annual salary of $3,000. Accepting it would give him not only a salary equal to that of a Congressman but entrée that might well be superior. “Lyndon had stars in his eyes” at the offer, Jones says. “He was impressed. These lobbyists had the run of the Capitol, you know. For two or three weeks, he was speculating how nice it would be to be a big dog like this.” More important, if the path opened to him by Adams was not the path of which Lyndon Johnson had dreamed, it seemed, during these anxious months of 1935, to be the only path open to him. All through his life, an indication of a crisis in Johnson’s career would be a breakdown in his physical health. His first serious illness—the pneumonia that sent him to the hospital—occurred during these months. He was desperate to be “somebody,” and this job would make him “somebody.” Although accepting it would force him to leave, possibly forever, the field of politics which was his “natural vocation,” he was, aides and friends agree, on the verge of accepting it.

  But, as it turned out, he would not have to. His talent at arousing paternal affection in powerful older men would, at the last minute, provide him with opportunity within his chosen field.

  The General Electric job was offered in May or June of 1935. On June 26, 1935, with Johnson about to accept the offer, President Roosevelt announced the creation of a new governmental agency. It would be called the National Youth Administration, its annual budget would be $50 million—and it would be administered in each state by a state director.

  TEXAS SENATOR Tom Connally would have an important voice in the selection of the Texas NYA director. Sam Rayburn went to see him.

  Connally was surprised by the visit. He and Rayburn had never been friends. He was surprised by the purpose of the visit, for he knew, as everyone on Capitol Hill knew, that Rayburn never asked even a friend for a favor. And he was surprised by Rayburn’s demeanor, by the face of this man who never let his feelings show. For feelings were showing now.

  “One day, Sam Rayburn, who had never been friendly toward me, came to see me,” Connally was to recall. “He wanted me to ask President Roosevelt to appoint Lyndon Johnson. … Sam was agitated.” He was, in fact, so agitated that he refused to leave Connally’s office until, Connally says, “I agreed to do this.”

  Connally agreed, but the White House refused to accept his recommendation. It reacted with amusement to the very thought of entrusting a statewide program to a twenty-six-year-old utterly without administrative experience. It announced that the Texas NYA director would be DeWitt Kinard, a former union official from Port Arthur. Kinard was, in fact, formally sworn in to the post.

  Sam Rayburn went to the White House. What he said is not known, but the White House announced that a mistake had been made. The NYA director for Texas was not DeWitt Kinard after all, the announcement said. It was Lyndon B. Johnson.

  THE APPOINTMENT made Johnson the youngest of the forty-eight state directors of the NYA. He may, in fact, have been the youngest person to be given statewide authority for any major New Deal program. Was he pleased? Was his ambition satisfied—even for a moment? When his appointment was announced, other secretaries crowded into his office to congratulate him. What was his response?

  “When I come back to Washington,” he said, “I’m coming back as a Congressman.”

  *Roosevelt allowed him, for example, to name one of the commissioners of both the Federal Communications Commission and the Interstate Commerce Commission.

  19

  “Put Them to Work!”

  THE NATIONAL YOUTH ADMINISTRATION was the inspiration not of Franklin Roosevelt, but of his wife, who said in May, 1934, “I have moments of real terror when I think we may be losing this generation.”

  “Lost generation” was a phrase occurring with increasing frequency in discussions of America’s youth. Attendance at the nation’s colleges had begun falling in 1931, with more and more parents unable to afford tuition, and with students having a steadily more difficult time obtaining part-time jobs to help pay their way. High school attendance had begun falling in 1932 because steadily increasing numbers of teenagers had to drop out and go to work to help support their families (often at a dime an hour—the prevailing Depression wage for teenage workers); or because their families couldn’t spare them even the money necessary for books, or pencils, or bus fare—or shoes. “Again and again in many states,” wrote the historians of the NYA, Betty and Ernest K. Lindley, “we heard the word ‘shoes’ used as the equation for going to school—‘The children can get to school until it’s snowtime; they can’t go then unless they have shoes.’ Underwear can be made from sugar sacks. Clothes can be patched and remade. Shoes seem the insurmountable obstacle to school attendance.” While no attempt to collect statistics on the young was comprehensive, every attempt was instructive, as if, as the Lindleys put it, the attempts “sank scalpels far enough into the social organism to expose to view conditions far worse than most people had suspected.” The United States had always been proud of its educational system; now, in 1935, with the Depression in its sixth year, a study—one which did not include the Deep South, where educational levels were traditionally low—would disclose that of 35,000 young people employed on NYA work projects, half had never gone to school a day beyond the eighth grade. Out of every hundred such young people, then, only fifty reached high school; out of that fifty, only ten graduated from high school; out of that ten, only three even began college; and out of those three, fewer than two graduated from college—two out of one hundred. As the Lindleys wrote: “The more one sees …, the more insistent becomes the question: ‘Where is the celebrated American school system?’”

  Once out of school, young people found themselves looking for jobs in a world with few jobs to offer. In normal times, some would have been taken on as beginners or apprentices, earning enough to live on while they learned a trade. Now, with even skilled men pounding the pavements, who was hiring apprentices? Of the 22 million persons between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five in the United States in 1935, at least 3.3 million—and perhaps as many as 5 million—were both out of school and out of work, millions of young people drifting through their days with nothing constructive to do.

  For such youths, idle, bereft of hope, even coming home at night was agony. Said one: “Maybe you don’t know what it’s like to come home and have everyone looking at you, and you know what they’re thinking, even if they don’t say it, ‘He didn’t find a job.’ It gets terrible. You just don’t want to come home. …” Many of them—more and more of them, in one of the Depression’s most disturbing developments—didn’t come home. A government investigator watching ragged, bundle-clutching figures jumping off a Southern Pacific freight train as it pulled into the yards in El Paso was shocked to see that “most of them are only boys,” but the railroad “bull” standing beside him told him his surprise was unwarranted. “Most of those on the road nowadays are young men,” he said, “just young fellows, just boys who don’t know where they are going, or why.” Many of them were heading west; poignantly, some of them compared themselves with their forefathers, who had headed in the same direction. But, as the Lindleys wrote, “The last frontier disappeared some forty years ago. When young men now want to move on, they find there is no place to go.” The hospitable Western “Howdy” had been replaced by the “Keep moving” of law enforcement officials who escorted newcomers to the nearest county line. And when they got as far west as they could—to golden California—they found guards posted on the highway to turn them back at the border, and those of them who made it into the state anyway were placed in forced-labor camps until they could be dumped back over the state line. The youths lived in squalid hobo ju
ngles with thieves, alcoholics, drug addicts and ex-convicts, and the railroad bull in El Paso told the federal man, “The worst thing is that the boys may turn into bums. This year, already, they are tougher than they were last year.” Observers with a broader overview held the same opinion. “To workers in the U.S. Children’s Bureau and the National Association of Travelers’ Aid Societies,” William Manchester was to report, “it sometimes seemed that the youth of a nation was being destroyed on the rails.”

  While the New Deal might be making headway in other areas, it was losing ground on the youth front. Every year, either by graduating or dropping out, some 2.25 million more young people were leaving schools and colleges; and every year the number of young people both out of school and out of work rose. And, even more ominously, by 1935, a substantial number had been in that category for a long time. The Depression was in its sixth year now, and, as one 1935 study put it, “boys and girls who were fifteen or sixteen in 1929 when the Depression began are no longer children; they are grown-ups”—adults who had never, since they left school, had anything productive to do; adults embittered by “years of suffering and hardship.” The President’s Advisory Commission on Education was to warn of a whole “lost generation of young people.”