The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  Another reason that the staff didn’t feel driven was gratitude. Ernest Morgan was from the Hill Country, and, he says, “The Depression really hit this area hard.” But because it was farm country, food, while not plentiful, was cheap. The job in a café near the San Marcos railroad station with which he had worked his way through college, where he had been a debater and a White Star—a nine-hour-a-day, six-day-a-week job—paid only five dollars a week, but it included meals, so he had the luxury of feeling pity for “the city people” who got off the arriving trains and begged for food. The café’s owner “made a woodpile, and a person who wanted a meal could chop wood for an hour for twenty-five cents, which was the cost of a one-plate meal. And what was really sad was a father would chop wood, and he’d come in with his wife and two kids, and they’d all divide the one plate.” But after San Marcos, Morgan went to a city himself—to Austin, to become a lawyer by attending the University of Texas Law School—and learned what hunger was like. To earn money, he typed for a professor for fifteen dollars a month. But at times, “I would run out.

  One time a guy asked me, “How long’s it been since you’ve eaten?” and I said, “Two or three days,” and he gave me a dollar, and I went to a café, and I first ordered the dinner, which was thirty or thirty-five cents, and when I got through, I was just as hungry as when I started, so I ordered a hot roast beef sandwich, and then I suddenly got sick, and I had to run out the door and throw up in the street, and I wasted almost all of that dollar.

  Fear of living out his life on a farm had brought Morgan to San Marcos, and then to the university, but the fate he had feared loomed ahead of him now. He couldn’t go on. “And then I heard—I don’t remember how—that Lyndon was running the NYA. I had known Bill Deason, and I applied, and Bill said he would have to check with Lyndon. And the next day he called back, and said, ‘Are you ready to go to work?’ And I said, ‘Yes sir! Right now!’” The next day he began working as an NYA “project supervisor,” a part-time job that allowed him to continue at law school—and that paid sixty-five dollars per month. That was, he says, “a big pile of money in those days.” “I don’t believe,” he says, “that I would ever have made it through law school without that particular job.” And he did not forget who had given it to him. After noting that he was “very appreciative” of Johnson’s help, Morgan adds, “I would have done anything within reason that he asked me to do.”

  Morgan’s poverty was not unusual: many of the men who came to work as NYA executives were rescued from circumstances similarly desperate. And they felt as grateful as Morgan to their rescuer.

  In some cases, gratitude was reinforced by fear. Morgan could look forward to a law degree—a profession. Most of the men working beside him in the NYA offices had no such prospects; in fact, many natives of the Hill Country were all too aware that they might have difficulty finding any other job if they lost the high-paying, prestigious job Lyndon Johnson had given them. Their fear of losing it not only contributed to the energy with which they performed it, but made easier deference to the man who had given it—and who could take it away. Says one of those who declined to give such deference, and who therefore did not “make the team,” “He knew he had them by the hairs because where else were they going to go? That’s why he knew he could treat them like that, and they had to take it. And you know, once you start taking it, well, you get into the habit, you know, and habits get harder and harder to break. They got so used to taking his abuse that after a while they hardly knew they were taking it.”

  Reinforcing gratitude and fear was ambition. Deason is not the only one of Lyndon Johnson’s NYA “boys” who cites self-interest—“sense enough to try to tie on”—in explaining his allegiance to Johnson. Johnson played on their ambition, of course; his future was a frequent topic of the back-yard discussions. “We knew he was going to run for something,” Jones says. And, Jones says, “you felt, knowing him, that whatever he ran for, he would win.” If he did, he assured them, his victories would be theirs. They believed that—believed that when he had better jobs to give out, they would get them. So few paths out of poverty existed for a Texas farm boy then. These young men felt they were on one of those paths—perhaps the only one they would ever find—and they were eager to stay on it.

  But if gratitude and fear and ambition tied these men to Lyndon Johnson, there were other—less selfish—ties. The Chief made his boys feel like part of a team, almost like part of a family. “Well now, let’s play awhile,” he would say. Playing was done ensemble; wives and babies would come with their husbands for back-yard picnics, or they and the Johnsons would spend an afternoon picnicking and swimming at icy Barton Springs, or an evening night-clubbing in the Mexican cantinas of San Antonio. And he made them feel like part of history, too. During those long evenings in the back yard, he didn’t merely read NYA regulations; he put them into perspective, an inspiring perspective, explaining how the NYA was trying to salvage the lives of young men and women who were walking the streets or riding the rails in despair, who were cold and hungry. Look, fellows, he would say, these rules are a lot of nonsense, but we have to follow them, because we have to put the kids to work, we have to get them into school and keep them there, and we have to do it fast. We can’t have Washington sending the forms back because we didn’t fill them out right, because every day more of them drop out of school, and we lose ’em forever. “Put them to work; get them into school!” he would say—and as he spoke, his eyes, shining out of that pale face there in the dark, would reflect the glow of the flickering lanterns. “Put them to work! Get them out of the boxcars!” He lit in even the most stolid of his boys a sense of purpose that they remembered decades later. Says the earnest Deason: “It was during the deep days of the Depression. We had a mission to get the young folks to work as fast as we could.” Most of them found it impossible to resist the spell. “You can’t be around the guy” without falling under his influence, Jones says, trying to explain. “First he fills himself up with knowledge, and then he pours out enthusiasm around him, and you can’t stop him. I mean, there’s no way. … He just overwhelms you.”

  If he drove men, he led them, too. Once, a long-awaited WPA certification of children whose families were on relief and who were therefore eligible for NYA employment arrived late on Friday afternoon. There were 8,000 names on the list, and Johnson told Deason and Morgan that he wanted those 8,000 teenagers at work—on Monday morning. Morgan’s first reaction was despair; the teenagers couldn’t be contacted by mail over the weekend, and the NYA had already found that many teenagers didn’t respond to letters, anyway. Morgan, whose assignment at the time was nothing larger than supervising a roadside park on which about twenty youths were employed, recalls that his first reaction was incredulity. But Johnson told him to take the twenty youths, divide up the 8,000 names among them, and have them spend the weekend going directly to the teenagers’ homes to speak to them in person. “I got the kids in, and stayed there almost until morning, dividing up the names among them, by streets; I’d shout out an address on Guadalupe, and the kid who had Guadalupe would write it down. And Saturday morning, we hit the streets. We didn’t contact all of them, but on Monday morning, we had 5,600 of them down there, and we put them to work. That’s the kind of assignments he’d give you—that would seem nearly impossible. But he taught you you could do them.”

  Cursing his men one moment, he removed the curse the next—with hugs (“I saw him get angry at Sherman Birdwell one time, and he used most of the cuss words and combinations I had ever heard,” Morgan says, “and just as soon as he got through eating his ass out, he had his arm around him”) and with compliments, compliments which, if infrequent, were as extravagant as the curses: remarks that a man repeated to his wife that night with pride, and that he never forgot. He made them feel needed.

  Congressional secretary Lyndon Johnson

  Congressman Richard M. Kleberg

  Roy Miller, the legendary, consummate lobbyist, who used Kleberg�
��s office as if it were his own and with whom Johnson was “in tune”

  “The Chief” with L. E. Jones (left) and Gene Latimer

  Claudia Alta (“Lady Bird”) Taylor, in the summer of 1934

  Lady Bird and Lyndon Johnson on their honeymoon in Mexico, November, 1934

  Sam Rayburn

  Vice President John Garner presents an historic gavel to “The Boss of the Little Congress”

  Maury Maverick and FDR in San Antonio. Johnson helped the fiery radical in his election to Congress in 1934.

  On Congress Avenue: Johnson, back in Austin as State Director of the National Youth Administration, with Willard Deason. The Littlefield Building, at right, housed the offices of the NYA and of Alvin J. Wirtz.

  Director Johnson inspecting an NYA project

  The Chief with Sherman Birdwell, who as a boy had obediently followed Johnson and as a man continued to imitate his speech and his stance

  NYA officers Willard Deason (left) and Jesse Kellam

  Sam Ealy Johnson and his sons, Christmas, 1936

  Alvin J. (“Senator”) Wirtz, whom Lady Bird Johnson called “The Captain of My Ship, Any Day”

  Charles Marsh

  Opposite: Suave George Brown and his fierce brother Herman

  The first campaign, 1937: Johnson with a group of supporters

  Johnson in the hospital, after his appendicitis attack, surrounded by congratulatory telegrams

  Right: Johnson at the depot to return to Washington as a Congressman. A poignant scene, given the father-son relationship. He walked alongside his mother, ahead of his father, who could not keep up, and was aboard before his father arrived. Sam started to climb up, Lyndon bent down: father and son kissed.

  The Galveston handshake: The new Congressman, whose platform had been “Roosevelt! Roosevelt! Roosevelt!” meets FDR for the first time. Between them, Governor James Allred (who later would be airbrushed out).

  Mary Henderson recalls watching him in a crisis, when he was “absolutely frantic with worry.” And she recalls that when the crisis was over, “he said: ‘I have never been in need of people, or been in trouble, without looking around and finding your face.’ And he put his arm around me. And I was nobody. Oh, you wanted to please him more than anything.” He joked with them. On a trip to Houston, he shared a hotel room with Mary’s husband, Charles (Herbert Henderson’s younger brother). During the night, Henderson was awakened by groans from the other bed. “Charlie! Charlie!” Johnson moaned. “I feel terrible. I need a drink of water.” Henderson jumped up and ran to the bathroom. When he returned with the water, however, the light was on, and Johnson was sitting up in bed, smiling. The jokes had an edge—they were designed for the same purpose as the cursing: so that Johnson could display his dominance over his men; Henderson told his wife he understood that Johnson had moaned because he didn’t want to have to get up and get the water himself—but the edge was honed differently for each man, differently and precisely. Henderson didn’t resent getting up for the water, or said he didn’t, and Henderson’s fellow workers didn’t resent, or said they didn’t resent, the jokes played on them. He gave each one of his “boys” a precisely measured dosage—of cursing, of sarcasm, of hugging, of compliments: of exactly what was needed to keep them devoted to his aims. He was more than a reader of men, he was a master of men. And these men, the first on whom he had an opportunity to fully exercise his mastery, not only served him, but loved and idolized him.

  “I knew that he would be moving into something with a bigger challenge,” Deason says. “I had a sense of destiny for him.” When young Chuck Henderson had still been engaged to Mary, then a secretary back in Ashtabula, Ohio, he wrote to her, she says, “I’m working for the greatest guy in the world. Someday he’s going to be President of the United States. And he’s only twenty-seven years old!” Mary found this hard to believe, but when she arrived in Austin to get married—Lyndon Johnson was best man—and to become a secretary in the NYA offices, she saw at once why Chuck believed it. “I find it hard to understand when I talk about it now,” she says. “But he had what they call now a charisma. He was dynamic, and he had this piercing look, and he knew exactly where he was going, and what he was going to do next, and he had you sold down the river on whatever he was telling you. And you had no doubts that he was going to do what he said—no doubts at all. You never thought of him being only twenty-seven years old. You thought of him like a big figure in history. You felt the power. If he’d pat you on the back, you’d feel so honored. People worked so hard for him because you absolutely adored him. You loved him.” She saw why Chuck—and Chuck’s brother, and Chuck’s friends: all the men in the NYA offices—wanted so badly to stay on his team. “Working for him was very exciting. Fascinating. History was being made. The country was being turned around. And Lyndon was one of the turners— one of the makers and the doers and the shovers. And you knew he was going to be doing even more. You knew he was going places. And you wanted to be on his wagon when he went.” Idolized. “I named my only son after him and in all probability, as far as I know, he was the first boy to be named after Lyndon Johnson,” says Fenner Roth proudly. The first, but not the last; there would, among others, be not only a Lyndon Johnson Roth but a Lyndon Baines Crider.

  DECADES LATER, Willard Deason would be asked about the genesis of the political machine with which Senator Lyndon B. Johnson controlled Texas. “It all went back to that NYA,” he said.

  As Dick Kleberg’s secretary, Johnson had cached men in bureaucratic nooks and crannies in Washington and all across Texas. His NYA post allowed him to bring these men together under his leadership. Now he could observe them at work, in action; could assess precisely not only personalities but potentialities. He could dispense with those not suited to his purposes.

  Moreover, he could, with more jobs at his disposal, add to their ranks, and personally assess the new recruits. The “sifting out” left him with a cadre of men—perhaps forty in number—proven in his service, instruments fitted to his hand. Included in their ranks were specialists: not only the gifted speechwriter Herbert Henderson; but a skilled public relations man: in 1936, he brought into the NYA former Austin American managing editor Ray E. Lee. Johnson’s ability to see the potential in the most unlikely of raw materials had also provided him with a chauffeur. When Gene Latimer’s closest friend, a slow-talking, phlegmatic teenager named Carroll Keach, had come to Washington from Houston, Johnson had told him to learn typing and stenography, but, Keach says, “I was very inept. I mean, I was just a beginner.” Johnson would not give him a job in his office, placing him in the Federal Housing Administration mailroom instead. But when Maverick was elected, Johnson recommended Keach to the new Congressman, who hired him for his office. And on the trip back to Texas, Keach accompanied Johnson. Johnson, who so distrusted other people behind the wheel, noticed that Keach, who didn’t talk much anyway, concentrated on his driving. And he noticed that unlike most of his assistants, the calm young man did not become flustered when he berated him. Now he put Keach on the NYA payroll, and used him as his chauffeur.

  The significant aspect of his earlier network, its statewide scope, was emphasized now; the NYA operated in every one of Texas’ 254 counties. The NYA provided, throughout Texas, contracts to local businessmen who might be politically well connected, and jobs not only for the cadre but for the public. It did so in a minor way. Its total funding—just slightly more than $2 million during Lyndon Johnson’s term as director—was only a small fraction of that spent by the state government, or by other federal agencies in Texas. But with forty men personally loyal to a single leader, with a speechwriter and a public relations man, with jobs and contracts to distribute—it was a political organization. His political organization.

  HIS NYA job allowed Lyndon Johnson to expand not just his organization but his acquaintance. Austin was a city whose life was dominated by politics as its skyline was dominated by the gigantic pink dome—modeled on (but even larger than) the great
dome in Washington—of the State Capitol. A substantial portion of its permanent population, 70,000 in 1935, consisted of state officials and bureaucrats; when the Legislature was in session, the city’s hotels and boardinghouses were crowded with legislators and lobbyists. If one spent enough time on Austin’s main thoroughfare, Congress Avenue—a street (built wide enough to allow U-turns by prairie wagons pulled by two teams of horses) that began at the foot of the Capitol and ran from it down low hills and wide terraces to the Colorado River three-quarters of a mile away—one would meet most of the men important in Texas politics.

  Lyndon Johnson, whose Littlefield Building office was at Congress and Sixth Street, met them. To some he could introduce himself because he was Sam Johnson’s son; his young assistants were startled (because he spoke so derogatorily of his father) at how many influential men remembered the Chief’s father, and remembered him in such a way that they were disposed to be friendly to this young man who resembled him so closely that more than one elderly legislator, seeing the long, gaunt frame, and the smiling face with the huge ears, white skin and black hair, coming toward him, thought for a moment that young Sam Johnson was walking Congress Avenue again. He knew others through his work, which gave him entrée to the most powerful men in Austin, for, despite his youth, he was, after all, a representative—since most federal agencies had established their Texas headquarters in San Antonio or Dallas, practically the only representative—of the central government in this isolated little provincial capital. He was, moreover, a representative of the fabled New Deal, with access to New Deal funds; as much as any man, its representative in the capital of Texas. Influential men with college-age children who needed jobs to help pay their way or with a child who had recently graduated and could use a job on the NYA staff itself, realized that this young man had such jobs to dispense. Lyndon Johnson had no trouble meeting the most influential men of Texas.