September was approaching—September, when tens of thousands of young Texans would have to drop out of school unless they received help. The NYA state directors had not been appointed until late July, the enrollment and salary quotas had not been issued until August 15, and these guidelines had to be interpreted state by state and then explained to the college deans and high school principals who would have to select the jobs that met them. And the size of Texas made explaining more difficult than in other states, even after the NYA allowed Johnson to divide the state into four districts, each with its own District Director. “There was [still] a lot of travel involved,” Deason was to recall. “These young district men [directors] we had out there would maybe be setting up a project in one county seat today and trying to get another started a hundred miles away the same day. He might work until eleven-thirty in the morning at one, and just jump in his car and get to the other one by one or two in the afternoon and try to work there.”
Attempts to make haste were snarled by a human factor: the reluctance of college and high school administrators to decide which students would be given the precious NYA jobs. Twelve percent of their students might be eligible for NYA aid, but a much higher percentage needed such aid; 29,000 college students would apply for the 5,400 jobs available in Texas. Futures—the chance for an education, the chance to get off the farm—hung in the balance on administrators’ decisions, and they knew it. Dean Victor I. Moore of the University of Texas, who during the Spring term, a few months before, had dug deep into his own meager savings to keep a few students in school, arrived at the NYA offices with the list of the 761 students he had selected out of more than 3,500 applicants, and, as he handed the list to Deason, said: “I feel like I have blood on my hands.” Shrinking from such decisions, other administrators delayed submitting the necessary lists to the NYA as the precious days passed.
Adding to the snarl was red tape. To ensure that student aid would go only to bona-fide students, the NYA required that all aid recipients carry at least 75 percent of the normal academic schedule. Compliance with this requirement had to be certified by the college for each student, and then by the NYA. To ensure that the jobs provided by the college would not deprive adults of work, the NYA required that NYA jobs not be work that could be done out of the regular college budget. To avoid alienating organized labor, pay scales had to be set at the hourly rates for comparable labor in the area. And to avoid criticism that the students were “boondoggling,” the jobs had to be necessary, not “make work.” Compliance with these requirements—and with a dozen more—had to be certified. For each student employee, therefore, the college had to fill out long, complicated forms—in quadruplicate, so that while the college kept one copy, others could be sent to the state NYA, the WPA and the State Department of Education. Only after certifications from all three agencies had been received by the Federal Disbursing Office in San Antonio would the desperately needed checks be mailed out—not to the students, but to the NYA office, which would in turn, under national NYA procedures, distribute them to the colleges, which would in turn distribute them to the students. When dealing with high school students, only students whose families were on relief were eligible; no application could be processed by the NYA until certification of such fact was received from either the Texas Relief Commission or the WPA; both these agencies, swamped with their own work, and believing that it was more important to get heads of families certified for their own programs than to certify students, gave low priority to NYA certifications. And if a form was filled out incorrectly, the WPA would simply return it, often after weeks had passed. The NYA’s Washington office added to the confusion by continually issuing new sets of regulations which often contradicted one another. By late August, many state directors were telling Washington that they could not possibly implement the programs in time for September registration.
THE NYA’S TEXAS OFFICES had originally been a three-room suite in the seven-story Littlefield Building, one of the tallest buildings in the little city of Austin; now the NYA office expanded into five rooms, and then six and seven, all crammed with people, as the staff expanded and expanded again.
The staff was very young. With few exceptions, its members shared two characteristics: they had gone to college at San Marcos, and they had graduated only recently; of the first twenty-six men Lyndon Johnson appointed to administrative posts in the Texas NYA (women in the NYA offices worked only as secretaries), nineteen were in their twenties.
The director, young himself, drove that staff. “He was very nervous,” says Ernest Morgan, San Marcos graduate, White Star, twenty-three years old. “If he wanted you to bring him a letter, he’d be edgy until you brought it.” Often he couldn’t wait for it to be brought to him; “Tell Morgan to get me that letter!” he’d shout through his office door to a secretary—but a moment later, the shout would be followed by the shouter. Shoving back his chair, he would jump up from his desk, lunge across the room and out the door, and almost run, with that awkward arms-akimbo stride, to Morgan’s office, and stand there—“edgy”—while Morgan searched through his files. “He dictated very fast,” says one of his secretaries, Mary Henderson. And while dictating, “he just couldn’t sit still,” striding around the room, acting out the letter, gesticulating with his long arms, jabbing with his forefinger as if making a speech, sometimes, if the phrase he wanted eluded him, waving his arms in the air in a frenzy of frustration. And when he had finished composing an important letter, he “couldn’t wait” to see it on paper: “Where’s that letter? How you doin’ with that letter, Mary?” Or a secretary transcribing a letter would look up from her typewriter and see him standing there behind her in a corner of the office, staring at the typewriter. “Everything had to be done now!” says another staff member. “And he could get very, very angry if something couldn’t be done immediately.” Each of thousands of letters—from mayors, county commissioners, school board presidents, college deans, high school principals, students, state and federal officials—was, he ordered, to be answered the day it arrived. In Washington, two typewriters had been at his disposal; here there were twenty—and with twenty, as with two, he “didn’t want those typewriters ever to stop.” He didn’t want the mimeograph machine to stop, either; if, with all available hands busy at other work, he saw the machine standing idle, he would frantically crank the handle himself until dragged away by other business.
He didn’t want the people to stop. “The nature of the man,” says one NYA staffer, “is to think of a hundred things for you to do during the day that you can’t get done. I don’t care what the problem is, he’d start looking at it and he’d start asking questions, and he’ll have fifty thoughts and fifty things for you to get done in the next hour. And then he’ll take off with his shirttail flying and leave you to do it.” And then, says another, “Tomorrow he’d want to know why you didn’t get through with it.”
As he had utilized competition to make two employees work faster in Washington, he used the same spur to make twenty work faster now, telling each man about some other who was working faster. “He would pair us off, or there’d be two or three of us,” one recalls. “He would work Ray [Roberts] against Bris [Al Brisban], or C.P. [Little] against Fenner [Roth],” and “you were always behind somebody else. He had it down to a fine point. I don’t care how hard I worked. I was always behind.”
The mail descended on their desks in tall stacks, and as the day passed into evening, and the evening drew later, the sight of the stacks—the evidence of work not done—seemed to make him wild. Answering often required telephoning some state agency for information, but Johnson, rushing through the office and seeing a clerk on the telephone, would shout: “Goddammit, do you spend all your time on the phone?” In his frustration, he sometimes began cursing someone for no apparent reason. “Listening to him, I heard every curse word I had ever heard, and some combinations I had never heard,” Morgan says. “God, he could rip a man up and down.” Birdwell, soft-spoken, s
weet-tempered, “the gentlest man who ever lived,” literally cowered before Lyndon Johnson in his rage—stood before him with head lowered and shoulders bent under the lash of Johnson’s tongue. Curses were not the only words that hurt. His gift for finding a man’s most sensitive point was supplemented by a willingness—eagerness, almost—to hammer at that point without mercy. The brilliant Herbert Henderson, for example, had been an alcoholic; Johnson never let him forget it. Another staff member, unable because of the Depression to find a job in the United States, had for a time worked at a humiliatingly low-level post in an American company’s Peru office. He was ashamed of that fact, and was ashamed also of the fifty-dollar-per-month salary he had been forced to accept in private industry in order to return to Texas. Johnson never let this staffer—or anyone else within earshot—forget these facts. “Why don’t you go back to Peru?” he would shout. “Maybe you can get by with work like this there! Why don’t you go to China? Why don’t I just fire you? Then you can go back to making fifty dollars a month. You know why you were making fifty dollars a month, don’t you? Because that’s what you’re worth!”
Not all the rage was real. Sometimes, at the height of a tantrum—as Johnson stood screaming, flailing the air with his arms as epithets poured from his contorted mouth, seemingly out of control—an important telephone call would come in. Without a moment’s pause, he would pick up the telephone—and his voice would be soft and calm, and, if the caller was important, deferential. Then the call would be over, the phone would be replaced in its cradle and without a moment’s pause the rage would resume. Lyndon Johnson employed curses as he employed competition: for the control of men.
Sometimes his treatment of his staff seemed colored by cruelty as much for its own sake as for the sake of the work. Once, rushing by a desk with the mail piled high, he snarled at its occupant in a voice loud enough to be heard by everyone in the room: “I hope your mind’s not as messy as that desk.” The employee, by desperate effort, succeeded in getting to the bottom of the pile before the next mail arrived, and then wiped off the desk so its clear surface would earn the boss’ approval. The boss’ reaction: “I hope your mind’s not as empty as that desk.” The staff would joke about his constant practice of keeping a subordinate whom he had summoned to his office standing before him, often for quite a long time, while he silently studied papers on his desk. And the silence might be preferable to what followed when he deigned to look up; men who will talk in detail about every other aspect of the NYA days will not discuss what Lyndon Johnson said to them in private; “I’ll never tell you that,” one man said, “I’ll never tell anyone that.”
All days were work days. “There weren’t any hours with him; there weren’t any days of the week.” The days did not include breaks, coffee or otherwise, and lunch was a sandwich at the desk, or a hamburger or a bowl of chili hastily gulped at a six-stool café downstairs. And the days were often nights as well. On their first evening in the Littlefield Building, Johnson, Kellam, Deason and Birdwell had suddenly been plunged into darkness when the lights in the office went off. Opening the door to the hall, they found the entire building in darkness. Groping his way down the six flights of stairs to the basement, Johnson located the building superintendent, who told him that the generator which supplied the building’s electricity was switched off every night promptly at ten o’clock. By the time Johnson had groped his way back upstairs, however, there were flickers of light in the NYA office. The building’s original gas lights—little tubes sticking out of the walls, with glass bowls around them—had never been removed, and through some oversight the gas had never been turned off; Kellam had discovered that the lights could be lit with matches. Thereafter, because work in the NYA offices was seldom finished by ten o’clock, the work was often finished by gaslight; because the elevators were powered by electricity, the staff became accustomed to feeling their way down the stairs in the dark.
Then, emerging onto Congress Avenue, where their cars were parked, they would usually drive not to their homes but to Johnson’s. Half of a small two-family frame dwelling at 4 Happy Hollow Lane, it had a large back yard. It was in that back yard that, in the nights, the work went on.
In 1967, during her husband’s Presidency, Lady Bird Johnson would say that in their marriage “Lyndon is the leader. Lyndon sets the pattern. I execute what he wants. Lyndon’s wishes dominate our household. … Lyndon’s tastes dominate our household.” This pattern antedated the Presidency. Lady Bird was not told in advance when her husband would be home, or how many guests he would be bringing with him. But, no matter how late the hour or how large the number, she was expected to cook them dinner—and she did, with a graciousness and a smile that made them feel at home. Usually, food was gobbled between talk of work. Then, curtly ordering Lady Bird to bring dessert out to them, Lyndon would lead the group into the back yard.
The discussions there often concerned the latest bulletin from NYA headquarters in Washington. “That was the hardest thing: to understand the regulations,” Deason says. “There was a lot of confusion at the beginning.” So in the back yard, by lantern light, Birdwell says, “we would go over” those rules and regulations, “paragraph by paragraph, and page by page.”
Every paragraph. Every page. “Lyndon would take this book, and he would start reading very carefully, line by line. … He would ask us, ‘Now, what do y’all think this means?’ and we’d discuss it—‘It means so and so.’” Sherman Birdwell had thought he knew his boyhood playmate well, but now he realized he had never seen him at work: “He was very, very detailed, far more than I knew Lyndon was. … He got down to exactly what Washington was trying to tell us ought to be done and what it meant to us. … He wanted things to be absolutely correct.” The discussion would be ended not by their exhaustion but by the subject’s; as the hours passed, some of the young men sitting there in the dim light would surreptitiously leaf ahead through the booklet to see how many pages were left, because they knew that Johnson would not let them go home until the last page had been turned.
Even after they went home, the work went on, for home for two members of the staff was 4 Happy Hollow Lane; at Johnson’s suggestion, Willard Deason and L. E. Jones had rented the Johnsons’ spare room. Even after he and Jones had tumbled tiredly into bed, Deason recalls, “We weren’t off duty … because he could yell upstairs and say, ‘What did you do about this?’, ‘What did you do about that?’ His mind was still working.” In the morning, it seemed to begin working the moment he awoke—“when he woke up, he was immediately wide awake,” Mrs. Johnson says, “and he was likely to immediately reach for the papers or whatever correspondence he brought home with him from the office.” And when, after Lady Bird had brought him—along with the newspaper—coffee in bed, and he had showered and shaved and dressed in the clothes (pen, cigarette lighter, handkerchief and wallet already in the pockets) that she had laid out for him, and in the shoes she had shined, and had tightened the necktie he had left hanging, knotted, over a doorknob the night before, he ate breakfast with Deason and Jones, he would often say something that made them realize, as Latimer had realized in Washington, that it had gone on working in the dark.
YET THE STAFF didn’t feel driven. In part, of course, this was because he had chosen them so well. His selections—men like Kellam, Deason, Roth and Birdwell—proved, every one, to be men who were not only willing to work all day, every day, but who were also willing to take orders, and curses, without resentment; to be humiliated in front of friends and fellow workers; to see their opinions and suggestions given short shrift. As the staff grew larger, however, its ranks could no longer be filled only from the director’s personal acquaintance. He had to hire men he knew slightly or not at all—White Stars who had come to San Marcos after he had left, and whom he hired on the recommendation of Fenner Roth or Deason, for example. Some of these new recruits proved unsuitable, but mistakes were rectified. It was during Johnson’s tenure as NYA director that there took place the pro
cess Deason calls “the sifting out.”
Some new recruits resigned because they weren’t willing to work Johnson’s hours. “There might be a guy in West Texas [300 or 400 miles from Austin],” Deason says. “Johnson would say to him, ‘We’re having a meeting Saturday night. Get here six o’clock Saturday.’ That would mean he would work until noon Saturday, then get into a car and drive here, and meet from six to ten. And we’d meet again on Sunday, and at four o’clock he’d say, ‘Okay, get home and get started Monday morning,’” Some men, Deason says, “quit” because “they couldn’t go the pace. … They just couldn’t gear themselves to go Lyndon Johnson’s pace, so they just had to fall by the wayside. They didn’t make the team, so to speak.” Some resigned because they weren’t willing to accept Johnson’s abuse; as Deason puts it with his usual discretion, “Lyndon Johnson pushed and shoved and cajoled—and [there were] those who could not bear to be pushed and shoved and cajoled.” Or, if they didn’t resign, they were fired—not by Lyndon Johnson, of course; Deason understood that: “He couldn’t afford to make enemies; he was looking down the road,” but by Deason. “He’d say, ‘So-and-so just can’t cut it. Let him go as easy as you can.’”
Lyndon Johnson liked to call a subordinate “son”—even though the employee might be older than he. He liked a subordinate to call him “Chief.” The recruits who “made the team”—who survived the “sifting out”—were, in almost every case, men who allowed this paternalism full scope. Their distinguishing characteristic (in addition to energy and a striking capacity for hard work) was not intelligence; in decades to come, outsiders in Washington or New York who came in contact with these early “Johnson men” in business or politics, and who assumed from their rank and status a certain level of mental capacity, would be astonished by the reality. Nor was this characteristic dignity or pride; these qualities were, in fact, notably absent in most of these early Johnson men. Their distinguishing characteristic was a remarkable subservience and sycophancy; observers noted that they seemed to like calling him “Chief” and being called “son.”
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