The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  OF ALL THE MEN influential in Tenth District politics, Lyndon Johnson was close to only one. Reaching Austin at the end of his 166-mile drive, he turned not toward his home but onto Congress Avenue, and pulled up in front of the Littlefield Building. The floor to which he went was not the sixth, where his own offices were located, but the seventh, on which Alvin Wirtz worked. And there he asked Wirtz for his support.

  Like two other older men who had hitherto played large roles in Johnson’s adult life—Cecil Evans and Sam Rayburn—Alvin Wirtz had no son of his own. Perceptive observers in Washington would find this similarity significant when, later, they saw the young man and the older one together. “Lyndon would always call him ‘Yes, sir,’ and ‘No, sir,’” Virginia Durr says. “It was the junior to the senior, you see. … Lyndon had these relationships with older men like Alvin and Sam Rayburn. They both sort of treated him like a son.” And, in Austin, Wirtz’s secretary, Mary Rather, made a similar observation; she had, in fact, been astonished at her boss’ behavior when, one day early in 1935, a lanky young man—“just as tall as he could be, and just as thin as he could be”—whom she had never seen before, “came dashing in” to Wirtz’s staid office “with his long, fast steps”; her boss, usually so studiedly unemotional, “rushed out and grabbed him and hugged him. He was tickled pink to see him. … After he left, I said to Senator Wirtz: ‘Who was that young man?’” She was to see a lot more of him. Telephoning Wirtz from Washington to inform him of his NYA appointment, Johnson asked him to find him office space—which Wirtz did, in the building where he himself worked. He named Wirtz chairman of the NYA’s State Advisory Board, and they consulted frequently. When Johnson entered Wirtz’s reception room, Wirtz would tell Miss Rather: “Here comes m’boy Lyndon.” Hugging him, he would say: “Hello, Lyndon, m’boy.” After Johnson emerged from Wirtz’s private office and went back to his own, Senator would come out, puffing on a cigar, and tell her how quickly Johnson had caught on to a complicated engineering problem; “I just can’t get over the young man grasping these things so quickly,” he would say. Although Wirtz made himself available as confidant to many bright young men, his attitude toward Johnson, Miss Rather saw, was special. “He was ambitious for him. And he thought he had the ability. And he loved him. Senator Wirtz had a wife and daughter—he was fond of them. … But he would have loved to have had a son. And he loved him [Lyndon] like a son.” (Wirtz was to inscribe a picture of himself: “To Lyndon Johnson, whom I admire and love with the same affection as if he were in fact my own son.”)

  Nonetheless, had it not been for the dam in which Alvin Wirtz’s dreams were now invested, his paternal affection for Lyndon Johnson might have found forms of expression other than support for Johnson’s congressional candidacy. To a businessman-politician like Wirtz, his Congressman’s friendship was all-important; he would not ordinarily risk antagonizing the probable winner of the congressional race by backing an opponent; he would want to side with the winner, not with a candidate whose chances were as slim as Johnson’s.

  Now, however, the dam was all-important. It lay at the point of death; it would, in fact, be effectively dead if the necessary legislation was not rushed through Congress—if it was not, in fact, passed during the congressional session that had already begun, and that would adjourn within a few weeks after Buchanan’s successor was sworn in. It could not be revived by Buchanan’s shy, politically unsophisticated widow. And, Wirtz felt, it was unlikely to be revived by Buchanan’s campaign manager. Friendly C. N. Avery may have been; forceful he was not. An adjective frequently used to describe him is “easy-going”; in Wirtz’s opinion, he was rather weak and lazy. Moreover, well-known though Avery was in the Tenth District, Senator had observed on his trips to Washington that Congressmen and bureaucrats effusive in their greetings when they passed the powerful Buchanan in the halls of the Capitol, tendered only perfunctory courtesies to his aide. Says Welly Hopkins, familiar with Senator’s thinking on the subject: “He [Avery] didn’t have the drive. And he didn’t know his way to first base in Washington.”

  Such drawbacks would not normally be decisive considerations in the selection of a Texas Congressman. He could be expected to remain in Congress long enough to learn his way around all the bases, and to acquire enough seniority to offset lack of drive. He would eventually be a committee chairman himself, a power like Old Buck had been. Had it not been for the Marshall Ford Dam, Wirtz’s support might well have gone to Avery. It would probably not have gone to Lyndon Johnson.

  Because of the dam, however, the normal course of events would not help Alvin Wirtz or his client Herman Brown. Slow accretion of knowledgeability and power wouldn’t rescue that project; speed—furious speed—was what was necessary. (If Wirtz and Brown needed confirmation of the precariousness of their situation, it was shortly to arrive: on March 6, two weeks after Buchanan died, the Bureau of Reclamation sent to the Bureau of Budget for processing a routine form concerning the dam; the Bureau promptly sent it back, marked DISAPPROVED, noting that not only had the Marshall Ford Dam never been authorized by Congress, but, because of a question over title, there was substantial doubt as to whether it ever would be.) The money from the initial $5 million appropriation would, Brown calculated, run out on September 1—with the Brown & Root balance sheet for the dam still half a million dollars in the red. As a result of the Budget Bureau disapproval, moreover, there was no longer any assurance that Brown & Root would receive even the balance of that initial appropriation; the Bureau of Reclamation immediately sent to the dam site a team of auditors with unusual instructions: the Bureau customarily audited a contractor’s figures only at the end of the job; henceforth, on the Marshall Ford Dam project, each bill, however insignificant, that Brown & Root submitted was to be audited as it came in, so that in the event the Budget Bureau suddenly placed a Stop Order on the whole project, the Bureau would not have paid the firm a cent more than was due it for work actually performed. Herman Brown was face to face with financial ruin, and both he and Wirtz were faced with the ruin of their dreams. A good ol’ boy could never save the Marshall Ford Dam. And neither could a good young boy—a dynamic District Attorney such as the thirty-nine-year-old Harris, for example—without Washington experience. Bright, aggressive and energetic, Harris could be expected to learn his way around Washington quickly, but not quickly enough to save the dam. What the dam needed in Washington was a champion already knowledgeable enough and possessed of sufficient entrée to find—swiftly—bypasses through the bureaucracy: a champion, for example, able to cut through the endless red tape at the Bureau of Reclamation by obtaining the personal interest of the Bureau’s boss, Interior Secretary Ickes—or, perhaps, of the Congressman of whom Ickes was particularly fond, Maury Maverick. What the dam needed in Washington was a champion with entrée to Congressmen powerful enough to roll over those bureaucratic obstacles (the Budget Bureau’s quibbling over legalities, for example) that could not be bypassed—a Congressman such as Sam Rayburn, for example. What the dam needed in Washington was a champion with entrée to the chairman of the committee with jurisdiction over the dam, Rivers and Harbors’ Joseph Jefferson Mansfield—or, if not to Mansfield himself, then to the man whose advice Mansfield followed slavishly, the man who pushed Mansfield’s wheelchair through the halls each day at noon: Roy Miller. And because of his trips to Washington in 1935, Alvin Wirtz was aware not only that Lyndon Johnson “knew Washington,” but that he knew— possessed entrée to—these very men. The young man sitting across his desk from him now was the champion he needed. When Johnson asked for his support, he agreed at once.

  HE ALSO provided Johnson with a strategy. It could be summed up in three words: Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

  Roosevelt’s Supreme Court-packing plan, announced just two weeks before, had promptly been denounced by a Texas Legislature subservient to the state’s reactionary monied interests, but when, on February 20, Harold Ickes, addressing the Legislature during a trip to Texas, had defended the Presiden
t’s proposal, the audience in the packed galleries had leaped to its feet wildly cheering, in a broad hint that the state’s people did not agree with their representatives. Nowhere in the state was support for the President more firm than in the Tenth District, whose Hill Country counties had been the stronghold in decades past of the People’s Party (the birthplace of the Farmers’ Alliance, the Party’s precursor, was, of course, the Hill Country town of Lampasas, a bare two miles north of the district line). An Austin American poll of the district would shortly reveal a majority of seven to one in support of the President’s plan. Johnson should support Roosevelt’s proposal, Wirtz said—should, in fact, make support of the Supreme Court plan the main plank in his platform. He should support all Roosevelt’s programs. His campaign should be based on all-out, “one hundred percent,” support for the President, for all the programs the President had instituted in the past—and for any program the President might decide to initiate in the future.

  Behind that strategy lay nothing but pragmatism. Wirtz was not in favor of the Supreme Court plan, he was opposed to it; he had been telling intimates that he was a “constitutional lawyer,” and therefore not in favor of any alteration in the Court’s composition. In private, his phrases were more pungent. His views—not only on Court-packing but on the New Deal as a whole—were the views of the reactionary Roosevelt-hating businessmen of whom he was both legal representative and confidant. Pragmatically, however, the Roosevelt strategy was Johnson’s best chance to win. It would offset his greatest weakness—the fact that he was unknown to the voters—by giving him an instant, popular, identification: “Roosevelt’s man.” It would give him an instant leg-up on several potential candidates who were anti-Roosevelt: State Senator Brownlee, for example, had voted for the Legislature’s condemnation of the Supreme Court plan. And it might obtain for him the support of two passionate New Dealers, Governor Allred and the publisher of the American (and of the Austin Statesman), Charles Marsh.

  Most of the candidates would be pro-Roosevelt, Wirtz said; therefore, Johnson would have to be more pro-Roosevelt than they. If he could identify himself more firmly than any other candidate as the President’s champion, he would obtain the support of district voters eager to show their support for the President in general, and for his Supreme Court plan in particular. L. E. Jones, then clerking for Wirtz’s firm, was taking dictation from Senator when Johnson rushed in on that fateful February 23. He remained throughout the conversation, and says he recalls it vividly. And Wirtz repeated his views at Johnson’s home that evening, with other persons present. They recall Wirtz saying that Johnson’s only chance to win was “to get an issue,” and that the issue should be the Court-packing plan. “The discussion,” Jones says, “was that the Court-packing plan might be a pretty lousy thing, but the hell with it, that’s the way to win. Wirtz said, ‘Now, Lyndon, of course it’s a bunch of bullshit, this plan, but if you’ll flow with it, Roosevelt’s friends will support you.’”

  Jones, of course, was aware that Johnson himself was less than enthusiastic about the New Deal. He never heard Johnson express a private opinion on the Supreme Court proposal, but, he says, “It didn’t make a rat’s ass [of difference] to him one way or the other.” The strategy was accepted in the same spirit in which it was offered.

  WIRTZ’S SUPPORT carried with it cash. As attorney for the Magnolia and the ’Umble, he could tap their lobbying funds; although Johnson would not, of course, announce his candidacy until after Buchanan’s funeral, that very day Wirtz phoned the headquarters of the two oil giants and obtained the first contributions for the Johnson campaign fund.

  Wirtz was also delegated to obtain funds from another source. Asked whether she knew at once that her husband would run for Buchanan’s seat, Lady Bird Johnson replied, “We sure did not know we were going to run. Looking at it pragmatically, we did not have any right to expect we would win. Lyndon was from the smallest of the ten counties. He was quite young. And finances were a problem.”

  Wirtz, in his subtle way, enlisted her enthusiasm. “He and I had a talk, and I asked if there was a chance for Lyndon to win. He was a lawyer, and he had all the reasons lined up why we couldn’t win. And at the same time he had the reasons why we might never get another chance. He said, ‘Yes, there’s a very real chance, and I’d be quite lacking in my duty if I didn’t tell you that it’s not a big chance, but there is a chance.’ So I called my Daddy. …”

  The importance of the call was not so much in the money raised—Wirtz himself would eventually raise far more—but in the speed with which it was made available to the campaign. Fund-raising, even by Alvin Wirtz, took time, and time was a luxury this unknown candidate couldn’t afford. A large sum of seed money, at least $10,000, was needed immediately to get the campaign under way, and when Lady Bird called Cap’n Taylor, and he asked, “How much do you need?” she replied, “We need ten thousand dollars.”

  He said, “Are you sure you can’t get by on five thousand?” I said, “No, we need ten thousand.” He said, “All right—I’ll get it for you.” I said, “Can you get it for us tomorrow morning?” He said, “No, I can’t.” My heart sank. He said, “Tomorrow’s Sunday.” We had been so busy we had completely forgotten what day of the week it was. “But I’ll have it for you Monday morning at nine o’clock.”

  With his campaign thus made viable, Johnson was able to bring to it the resource he had created with such care: the organization already in place and at work at the NYA. Kellam, who had been appointed acting director when Johnson resigned to run, let the top NYA staffers know they could campaign for Johnson; to a man they flocked to his banner.

  Bill Deason, his first follower, who had begun following his banner in San Marcos years before, was in San Antonio when he heard the news of Buchanan’s death. “I didn’t have to ask anyone what was going to happen,” he says. “Within a few hours after his death, Lyndon called me. … He didn’t mention running. He didn’t mention the death. He just said, ‘You know what’s happened?’ I said yes, and he said, ‘You’d better come on over here.’ … So I got into my car and drove to Austin.”

  The car was Deason’s most precious possession: a gleaming, spotless new Chevrolet which he kept polished to a high gloss. He was particularly proud of the fact that he didn’t owe any money on the car; he had saved for more than two years so that he could buy it free and clear. When he heard that Lyndon Johnson was running, he realized that a campaign car would be needed, one with a loudspeaker attached to its roof; he donated the car to the campaign, and allowed holes to be drilled into its roof for the bolts that secured the loudspeaker. And before he donated the car, he drove it down to his home town of Stockdale, where they knew him at the bank, and borrowed $500 on it—and when he gave Lyndon Johnson his car, he gave him the $500, too.

  Some drove from farther away than San Antonio. Little Gene Latimer was at his desk in the Federal Housing Administration in Washington when he heard that “the Chief” might run. “I called him long distance to ask if he could use any help, and he told me he wished I was there.” Less than two days later, he was. He had hung up the telephone, arranged for a leave (his supervisor, he explains, “was an admirer of Mr. Johnson’s”), run out to his car, and left on the 1,600-mile trip to Austin—and, except to fill the car with gas, he had not stopped driving until he got there; when he arrived, “I was too exhausted to do anything except pass out.”

  Like the Chief, his men were unfamiliar with the district. Unlike Avery’s organization, or Mayor Miller’s, or Brownlee’s or Harris’, they had no contacts, no friends. But they had the enthusiasm of the young—and faith in their leader. In part this faith was based on experience. “No matter what anyone said, we felt he had a chance, because we knew he would work harder than anyone else,” Latimer says. In part it was blind confidence. Deason says he never had “a doubt in the world” that Johnson would win any contest he entered. “We just assumed if he went into it, he would win.”

  ASTRATEGY, money,
an organization—these would give this unknown candidate a slim chance of victory against every opponent but one. Against that one opponent, nothing could give him a chance. Nothing could offset the sentimental appeal of a vote for Old Buck’s widow. If Mrs. Buchanan decided to run, Wirtz told Johnson frankly—and Johnson knew he was right—she would win.

  And it began to look as if she was going to run. Buchanan’s funeral was held on Friday, February 26. On Saturday, the district’s most prominent politicians returned to the black-draped house in Brenham to pledge the sixty-two-year-old Mrs. Buchanan their unanimous support. Among them was Avery, who not only said he would not run if she would, but who also volunteered to serve as her campaign manager, as he had served as her husband’s. Avery’s sentiments were echoed by the other leading candidates, all of whom, the Austin American reported, “will stay out of the race” if she entered it. In this article, Johnson’s name was included in a list of potential candidates; his candidacy, too, the American reported, was “subject to Mrs. Buchanan’s remaining out.”

  All day Saturday, Johnson waited anxiously in his Happy Hollow Lane house as speculation mounted that the widow would run, and then, late on Saturday night, one of Johnson’s friends, who had been waiting at the American’s printing plant, ran into the house with an early copy of the Sunday paper, which contained an article that seemed to confirm the speculation. Although the article’s lead said only that Avery had emerged from a meeting with Mrs. Buchanan’s son to promise that an announcement on her candidacy would be made on Monday, farther down in the story—near the very end—was a paragraph that indicated what the announcement was going to be: “Family associates of Mrs. Buchanan said that Mrs. Buchanan has kept closely familiar with all legislative matters affecting the district. … They said she is thoroughly conversant with the district’s interests in Congress, to carry through the unfinished portions of Cong. Buchanan’s program.”