The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  Meeting such men, he made friends of them, with the facility and rapidity at winning over older people that had amazed his contemporaries in Johnson City and San Marcos. Nervous about meeting them, worried about the impression he would make, he attempted to disguise the nervousness by appearing totally at ease. Emerging from the Littlefield Building, he would habitually take off his suit jacket and sling it, as if carelessly, over one shoulder. He would turn up the brim of his fedora—turn it up as far as it would go, in fact, so that it touched the crown—in an attempt to add another touch of insouciance. But these attempts at casualness were undermined. Unable to keep from checking his reflection in the windows of the stores he passed, he continually straightened and tightened his necktie. He carried a blue comb clipped to his shirt pocket, and, as he walked, he constantly combed his hair, smoothing its waves and pushing higher his pompadour; even if he was wearing a hat, he would sometimes, staring at his reflection, take the hat off and use the comb—just in case he met someone walking with his wife and had to doff the hat. Despite these preparations, the sight of an influential figure approaching in the distance would precipitate panic. Ducking into the doorway of the nearest store, he would hurriedly tuck in his shirt, recheck his tie, hitch up and carefully adjust his pants and belt and then pat his pompadour into perfection—after which, looking his absolute best, he would saunter, with exaggerated carelessness, toward the man for whom these preparations had been made.

  Witnesses to this Congress Avenue toilette could not keep from laughing. Edward A. Clark, then Texas’ Secretary of State, says: “Everyone knew about Lyndon’s little blue comb.” But the laughter was friendly. Listening at them, sitting at their knees drinking in their wisdom, following their minds, agreeing with their thoughts before they had uttered them, he made these men like him, and he cemented their affection by hiring their children; many NYA secretaries were daughters of state influentials.

  They grew friendly—and, increasingly, respectful. When he had been Kleberg’s secretary, Clark says, “everybody in Austin knew Lyndon was a good fellow to see up there if you needed something out of one of the departments.” Now, meeting him on Congress Avenue, men who “needed something” in Washington asked him how to obtain it—and found his advice sound. They told their friends he was a good man to talk to.

  Good not only on Washington, but on Texas. The state’s byzantine politics seemed to hold no mysteries for him. If politics was the dialect of Austin, this young man, these canny politicians realized, possessed a remarkable fluency; his opinions, cloaked though they were in deference, were worth listening to. Lobbyist Bill Kittrell reminded them that he had told them about Lyndon Johnson years before; this, he said, was the “wonder kid” he had been talking about. Now, observing Johnson in person, Austin saw that Kittrell’s description had been accurate. Of all the men Johnson met in Austin, Ed Clark was the one who would, over the long years to come, acquire and hold the most power. Only thirty years old in 1936, he was already not only Secretary of State but chief political advisor to Governor James V. Allred—the man you had to see before you could see the Governor. Clark, whose folksy, giggling, storytelling manner concealed a hard, shrewd mind, was an astute observer of politicians, and he rationed the time he gave each one according to the assessment he made of his future. He began to make it his business, when Johnson came to call on the Governor to solicit his advice on an NYA program, to spend quite a bit of time with Johnson, to be friendly with him, to let Johnson know he could, whenever he might need help, call upon Clark for it. He did so, he recalls—and Ed Clark can always recall exactly why he did things—because “He knew Rayburn, and that meant plenty,” because “He was the hardest worker I ever saw—he couldn’t relax”—and because he had a boundless ability to ingratiate himself with powerful men (“Nothing was too much trouble for him to do … for someone who might be able to help him someday”). Accompanying Johnson to cocktail parties, Clark saw his nervousness up close. “He didn’t want to be standing there by himself,” Clark would recall. “If I started to walk away, he would say, ‘Stand with me, Ed, stand with me.’ Insecurity. There was a lot of insecurity in Lyndon. He had some kind of inferiority complex. You could see that right away.” But Clark, a great reader of men in his own right, saw beyond the nervousness. “I would see him talking to somebody, and I would see what he was doing. He was ingratiating himself. And he could do it so good. I never saw anything like it. He was listening at them. He could start talking to a man at a party, or he could stop a fellow on the street, and in five minutes he could get that man to think, ‘I like you, young fellow. I’ll be for you.’ I considered him a comer. I knew the way he was getting around and meeting the people, getting acquainted. I knew he was figuring on running for office. I didn’t know what office he was going to run for, but I knew he was going to run for some office, and I knew he was going to run for a big office. And I was willing to buy a ticket on him.”

  IN 1936, legislator Ernest O. Thompson asked Johnson to manage his campaign for the chairmanship of the State Railroad Commission. The Commission—unique to Texas—was the body empowered to regulate not only railroads but the production of oil and natural gas. Its chairman was one of the state’s most powerful men, and the popular Thompson, heavily favored to win the post, promised Johnson a commission post with substantial power of his own. Thompson had thought he was doing Johnson a great favor by offering him, at such an early age, statewide power, but Johnson declined the offer.

  The job was a far more attractive post than the one Lyndon Johnson had asked for not a year before when, still Kleberg’s secretary, he had pleaded with Welly Hopkins for a post in the State Attorney General’s office. But he was no longer a secretary. Not state but national power was what he had always wanted. He had known for so long what he wanted to be, and what “route” would take him to his far-off goal. A state job—no matter how good—was not on that road; state politics was, he had said, a “dead end.” In the frustration, almost desperation, of his last months with Kleberg, he had almost decided to abandon his chosen road, but, with the NYA appointment, he was back on it and did not intend to leave it again. The NYA job, attractive as it was, was not the main chance for which he was looking. But if the main chance came, he would recognize it. And he would grab it.

  THE FRENZY on the sixth floor of the Littlefield Building bore fruit. Few states met the NYA quotas when schools and colleges reopened in September, 1935. NYA Administrator Aubrey Williams was to admit on October 28 that the youth agency had gotten off to “a very bad start.” But the quota was met in Texas. By September, 1936, the Texas NYA program was running with notable efficiency. Returning to campus after the Summer vacation, 7,123 students enrolled not only in college but in the NYA, whose fifteen-dollar monthly stipend was keeping them in college. At every one of the state’s eighty-seven colleges—even the state’s four Negro colleges, conspicuously excluded from federal and state aid programs of the past*—NYA programs were a smoothly functioning part of campus life. Some 11,061 high school students were receiving smaller, but helpful checks.

  The student aid program was, moreover, accomplishing its purpose. In 1935, it had encouraged students to return to school; in 1936, it kept those students in school. The fact that almost 40 percent of the students receiving NYA help in 1936 had received it in 1935 marked the beginning of a trend that would have pleased Eleanor Roosevelt: with the help of the NYA, a substantial percentage of Texas students who would otherwise—with the Depression still gripping the state—have had to drop out of school would make it through, year after year, all the way to graduation; by June, 1939, the NYA’s fourth year, more than a thousand graduating college seniors had received NYA aid for each of their four years.

  The students the NYA kept in school in Texas were students who deserved to be in school. Of 5,713 NYA-aided college students surveyed during the 1938–1939 school year, the grades of 54 percent were above the school average; 27 percent had average grades; and only 19 perc
ent were below average. If the explanation lies partly in the fact that, to some extent, college administrators selected above-average students for NYA help, these students nonetheless kept their marks above average while holding down NYA jobs.

  The Texas NYA was, in fact, accomplishing purposes only vaguely, if at all, envisioned in Washington, where colleges were often thought of as the ivied, lavish campuses of the Northeast. Many Texas colleges, only a few years old and engaged in a continual struggle just to keep their doors open, had been unable to build needed facilities. For example, ten years after the founding of Texas Technological College, its campus was still only a treeless, barren tract on the plains just below the Panhandle, with inadequate library and laboratories, and with dormitory space for only 600 of its 3,000 students. Falling enrollment from among the children of the plains’ struggling farmers and ranchers had imperiled its existence. The NYA not only got Texas Tech’s students back to school, but put them to work building needed facilities, planting trees and bushes, and sodding the quadrangles.

  One NYA program, begun in Texas at the suggestion of Lyndon Johnson’s old boss, President Cecil Evans of Southwest Texas State Teachers College, was designed to help young people who had never been to college and who—without help—would not be able to go for some time. There were many such youths in Texas who, after graduating from high school, had found that their families, in desperate financial straits, could not spare them from the farm and who had gone to work, intending to resume their education when the grip of the Depression eased. To educators like Evans—he had watched enrollment at San Marcos falling steadily since the Depression began—this trend spelled tragedy. In sparsely settled rural areas, higher education was not an accepted part of life. Once youths from these areas dropped off the educational path, they were all too often off it for good, never to return. What was needed, Evans felt, was a way to maintain in such youths, through desperate times, a link with education—to allow them to keep at least a toehold on the path to the better life that they once had sought. To do so, he suggested creation of a Freshman College Center. At it, students whose families were on relief, and who could not be spared from the farm or ranch, were offered, upon graduation from high school, the opportunity to take one or two tuition-free college courses while continuing to live and work at home. A college could not afford to pay the professors for such a center, he said, but the NYA could—and if the teachers hired by the NYA were those who had been laid off by colleges and were now on relief, teachers as well as students would be helped. By March, 1936, twenty Freshman College Centers were operating in Texas.

  Another NYA program used colleges to help young men and women who didn’t want to go to college. Some wanted to stay on the farm; the NYA did not attempt to change their feelings, only to show them how life on the farm could be better than they had known it, while giving them a little cash to ease life there. Rural youths were brought to the campus for a four-month vocational course in such areas as animal husbandry, dairy manufacturing, farm-machinery repair; experts taught young men how to build sanitary hog wallows and better chicken houses, young women how to can faster and more efficiently. In return—and in return for a monthly NYA wage—boys working under the direction of foremen hired by the NYA built dormitories, and girls sewed sheets and pillowcases to be used in them.

  Some didn’t want to stay on the farm—were, in fact, desperate to move to a city, even without a college education. But they did not possess the skills that city life required; the farm work they hated was the only work they knew. Often, even the basic skills of plumbing or electricity or mechanical work were mysteries to them—as were the job discipline and the subtleties that children raised in the industrial world learn without thinking about them: starting work on time, working set hours, taking orders from strangers instead of their father, playing office politics. They lacked, moreover, not only skills but, because of their isolation, knowledge of the world of which they dreamed. Isolation was all too often unrelieved by reading; their education, in one-room schools, had been meager, and, as the Lindleys put it: “Theirs are not the homes that have books and magazines.” And giving them skills and knowledge was, as the Lindleys wrote, “a challenge. It is difficult to provide sound work for isolated boys and girls who have no way of getting to or from a construction job, a workshop, or a sewing room in a town twenty miles away from their farms.” If the young men and women from the thinly scattered farms of the Hill Country or the endless barren plains of West Texas who wanted a different life were to be given a chance at it—even if the chance was only to become a mechanic—providing the chance would be very difficult.

  To meet this challenge, Resident Training Centers were established. Texas farm youths were brought together in groups to be taught “useful [city] occupations” on four college campuses, paying for their instruction by practicing their newly acquired skills on projects the colleges needed. San Marcos, for example, had, years before, purchased three white frame houses on College Hill, intending to turn them into laboratories and classrooms. The college had never had enough money to do so—but the college had fifty empty dormitory beds, and fifty youths, paid twenty-one dollars a month by the NYA, were brought in to work on those houses. Since San Marcos was in the Hill Country, part of the work had to be with rock: chipping away at stubborn limestone and digging boulders out of the ground so that pipes could be laid for plumbing, piling the boulders atop one another and cementing them in place as retaining walls. The young men tore out walls, built new ones, installed bathrooms, built stone steps to the front doors, sodded the lawns. This work was done in the mornings; by noon, a solid six hours’ work had been completed by these farm boys who rose with the sun. In the afternoons, they went to classes. A visitor found that the college’s industrial-arts building had “taken on the appearance of an eastern factory going full blast. At a drafting table in one corner is a lad who has long yearned to know the intricacies of mechanical drawing, [poring over] his plans and specifications under the eyes of an instructor. Another is at the forge, his eyes glued to the glowing rod he holds in the coals. A group of youths are repairing the engines of college automobiles and maintenance vehicles under the eye of a master mechanic.” They learned to read blueprints (NYA instructors insisted that no matter how simple the job—building a chair or a cabinet, for example—the trainee work from plans, “because,” as one said, “they can’t ever expect to earn their livings as carpenters or cabinetmakers if they can’t read drawings”); to make the required mathematical calculations; to learn the properties of materials.

  The fifty boys went to San Marcos for four months. At the end of that time, work on the three buildings was half completed; the second group of fifty, who arrived the day after the first group left, completed it. And if the college gained three dormitories, what the youths acquired, while less tangible, was nonetheless significant to them, whose world had consisted so largely of their families. The very act of getting beyond the boundaries of their own counties was important; a young woman at an NYA Resident Training Center in Arkansas said, “At first I was kind of homesick. You know how it is when you’ve never been away from home at all. Not even farther than five miles.” Just the feeling of being part not only of a family but of a group—of living and working with people who were not their relatives—was important. At Johnson’s insistence, moreover, Resident Centers in Texas elected their own self-governing councils, and colleges provided a “citizenship course”: twenty-eight lectures on subjects ranging from the Constitution to proper table manners. As a college president in Arkansas put it, “The associations these boys get from their new environment would be worth this whole thing even if they didn’t get a single other thing.” (In fact, so poor were some of them that just being fed regularly was important to them; one Texas supervisor says that in their first week or two at an NYA Resident Center, they might gain ten to fifteen pounds.)

  The program also helped young women, who were brought in from the farms and taught n
ot only the homemaking skills felt appropriate for young women but secretarial skills. And they, too, received intangible benefits—as is indicated by one description, written by a young woman reporter for the Brenham Banner-Press after visiting an NYA Resident Training Center at Washington County Junior College, near Brenham, Texas, at which were studying twenty-eight women, each of whom had been the valedictorian of her high school class—and each of whom had, immediately after graduation, gone back to farm life. “When you were young,” the reporter wrote to her audience of farm and smalltown readers, “didn’t you dream about that grandest of all youthful experiences—the day when you could go to college and live in a dormitory and get an education that would open the portals of the world to you? Certainly we all had that dream and yet, how few of us ever realized it. However, some dreams do come true, and twenty-eight girls are now having their dream of real college life fulfilled. …”

  THE PROGRAM of the Texas NYA was hailed throughout the state. Declaring that isolated farm families had never before been helped by any government program, the Dallas Journal said: “The lads from the forks of the creeks deserve some chance in life. And the NYA is going to give them that chance.”

  It was hailed beyond the state. Several of its innovations, including the roadside parks, were copied elsewhere. “Similar roadside parks are being built in Oklahoma,” the Oklahoma Farmer-Stockman commented, “but Texas seems a little further along with the program.” NYA Administrator Williams described Johnson’s work as “a first-class job.”