“He won that election in the byways,” Bill Deason says. Ava Cox says: “That’s what made Lyndon Johnson be elected the first time. … He told them: ‘I know what you people are up against. Because I’m one of you people.’ And it wasn’t the people of the cities who elected him, but it was the people from the forks of the creeks.”
That was indeed the reason he won—and the reason no politician had thought he could win. The polls had not shown his strength at the forks of the creeks, for no poll bothered with the people at the forks of the creeks, as no candidate visited them. But Lyndon Johnson had visited these people. And they had sent him to Congress.
NOTHING ABOUT HIS VICTORY, however, was as significant as his reaction to it.
“I’m coming back as a Congressman,” he had vowed, and he had kept that vow. And he had done so fast—as he had lived his entire life fast: he had been perhaps the youngest state director of any New Deal agency, now he was, at twenty-eight, although not “the youngest Congressman” he now claimed to be, one of the youngest. He was the same age as his hero ancestor John Wheeler Bunton had been when Bunton had first been elected to public office, only a year older than his father had been when he had first been elected. Was he content? Was he happy now—even for a day?
He was desperately weak—not just because of the appendicitis but because of the effort that had preceded it. He was later to say that during the campaign’s forty days, he had lost forty pounds. When the campaign began, 181 pounds had been stretched thin over his six-foot-three-inch frame. His weight when he entered Seton Hospital is not known, but when he left the hospital two weeks later—after two weeks of bed rest, and a hospital diet designed to fatten him up—his weight was back up only to 151 pounds.
On the day after the election, congratulations had arrived in stacks. (Phrases in the letters from people who had known him as a boy or as a college student or as a congressional secretary provided a panorama of his life. Marsalete Summy, who had heard him talk of his ambitions in a Johnson City schoolyard, wrote: “You have always had a vision ever since I have known you and I am most happy to see that it is being fulfilled for you.” Vernon Whiteside wrote reminding him of “the day at San Marcos” when “I separated you and Babe Kennedy.” Arthur Perry, the older secretary who had taken him under his wing when he got to Washington, wrote: “My dear Congressman!!! Do I get a kick out of that!—Well, sir, when I used to see you wearing those summer suits in the winter time, and skimping on lunches until pay day, the prospect of your becoming Congressman in the immediate future, I must confess, appeared a little indefinite.” Remembering that, when he had found himself in trouble, he had turned for help to the younger man, Perry also wrote: “On the other hand, when I recall your presentation before the Civil Service Commission … I might have known I was in the presence at that moment of a budding ‘People’s Choice.’” And, aware that Johnson was not quite as wholeheartedly a New Dealer as the campaign had made him appear, he also wrote: “We will be expecting you to make a ‘balance the budget’ speech in the House.”) Early on the morning after Election Day, Johnson sent for his aides, and told them that all the messages had to be answered at once—that very day. Sitting up in bed, smoking one cigarette after another, he began to dictate replies. Many people had expressed a desire to see him so that they could express their congratulations in person, he was told; he wanted to see them, he replied; a schedule of visits should be set up at once; he had a lot of people to see before he left for Washington—and he wanted to leave for Washington fast.
The first letters to be answered, moreover, were those not from friends but from enemies: the concession messages from his opponents. And while their congratulations had been strictly pro forma, his replies were not.
You didn’t lose, he told Avery, just as I didn’t win. “It was a victory for President Roosevelt.” He repeated that to Sam Stone—“My dear Judge: Thank you very much for your kind telegram. The people voted to support President Roosevelt and his program, and the victory is his”—and, since the Judge would be a more dangerous future opponent than Avery, went on at more length: “You warned me you would show us how to carry Williamson County, and I congratulate you upon the support the homefolks gave your candidacy. Please tell your and my friends there that I admire the way they stood by you.” And to the opponent he considered most dangerous of all—Polk Shelton, who had campaigned with energy, and whose strong beliefs Johnson feared would impel him to run again—his reply went even further: “Thank you for your kind telegram and your pledge of support. … I hope you will always feel that my efforts are at your disposal. Whatever service I may be able to render will be cheerfully and gladly done.”
Letters were not the only means by which he dealt with the men who had been his enemies just twenty-four hours before. The powerful Mayor Miller, so hostile during the campaign, was leaving for Washington the next day on a long-planned visit. Because Johnson did not yet have a secretary in Washington to show the Mayor around, he telegraphed his brother, now Congressman Kleberg’s secretary (Sam Houston had returned to Washington a week before) to do it—and to go all out in doing it, to “give him all the privileges and courtesies of the office.” Johnson would have to run again in eighteen months, and, this time, he would be running not in a special election but in a regular primary in which victory would require not the 28 percent of the vote which he had received, but 51 percent. Any prudent politician would take steps to try to make friends out of enemies, but even very prudent politicians were amazed by both the rapidity and the extent of the steps Johnson took. The eminently pragmatic Dan Quill had spearheaded the ward-by-ward fight against Miller in Austin; he knew the bitterness of the fight, and the depth of Miller’s dislike of Johnson; he knew that Johnson had visited Miller’s house many times to beg for a truce, and he knew how rude Miller had been in denying him one. Quill, by coincidence, left for a Washington visit on election night, and when he arrived, dropped in to see Sam Houston Johnson, and saw the telegram. Pragmatic though he was, Quill could hardly believe that Johnson had sent it. When he had left Austin, Miller had been Johnson’s most bitter enemy, “and here he had sent a telegram to take care of him. … I never saw anything like it. … When I got in a fight with a fellow in an election, I didn’t forgive him so quickly. … I don’t know how he did it. I wouldn’t have had the nerve to have been nice to those kind of people, but he was. That was just three days after the election, and he wanted to be nice to Tom Miller. …” Quill recalls saying to Sam Houston: “I’ll tell you, Washington is a big city, but it’s not big enough for Tom Miller and me at the same time.” To avoid bumping into the Mayor, “I came back home.”
(Quill did not know the extent to which Johnson had gone to “take care of” Miller. Because he was afraid his brother would not carry out the task with sufficient diligence, he had asked not only Kleberg’s office but Maury Maverick’s to put itself completely at the Mayor’s disposal.)
No effort had been spared to defeat these men; no effort would be spared to win their friendship. One day, before Johnson left for Washington, Emmett Shelton would step out of his office building to walk up Congress Avenue to the Travis County Courthouse, and would see Johnson getting out of his Pontiac, having apparently just parked it. Johnson said hello to Shelton, asked him where he was going, and then insisted that Emmett join him; he would be glad to give him a lift, he said. As they were driving up Congress Avenue, Shelton realized that he had left some papers in his office. Johnson drove him back. Shelton said he would be a few minutes, and said it was no trouble for him to walk to the courthouse. No, no, Johnson said, I’ll wait. Glad to. Take your time. And the Congressman waited there for Shelton as if he were his chauffeur, and as they talked during the brief drive, “He [Johnson] was gracious, very gracious.” Though he had disliked Johnson, “now,” Shelton says, “he was just nice. He was humble.” More than humble, in fact. “He made you feel he was dirt under your feet.” (Shelton didn’t know the full extent of the trouble
Johnson was taking to become his friend; Johnson had not, in fact, just parked his car when Shelton came out; he had parked it an hour before, and had been sitting in it for an hour waiting for Shelton to come, to take advantage of the “chance” meeting.) Shelton was not the only opponent thus disarmed; Tom Miller gave Johnson a postelection contribution of $100 to meet any campaign deficit he might have.
What might prevent a Dan Quill or another man from behaving to his enemies the way Lyndon Johnson behaved would be pride or embarrassment—or any one of a hundred conventional emotions, such as a natural desire to gloat, even for a day or two, over a fallen, and vicious, foe. But Lyndon Johnson had determined many years before the emotion that would govern his life—the emotion that, with “inflexible will,” would be the only emotion that he would allow to govern his life. “It is ambition,” he had written, “that makes of a creature a real man.” Pride, embarrassment, gloating: such emotions could only hinder his progress along the road he saw so clearly before him—the “vision” he had indeed held for so long. They were luxuries in which he would not indulge himself.
THE ADDRESSES to which he was sending those letters were not all within the district. Just as he had, as a Congressman’s secretary, encouraged influential persons from other districts to come to him for help, now, as a Congressman, he replied to congratulations from out-of-district influentials with similar encouragement, as in his reply to the publisher of a weekly newspaper in Vernon, near the Oklahoma border, almost 300 miles away. (R. H. Nichols to Johnson: “Congratulations … I remember with gratitude your many services to our family while you were with Mr. Kleberg”; Johnson to Nichols: “Thank you … Any time I can be of some service to you I want you to call on me.”) Influential or not, moreover, anyone who wrote to Johnson was to receive a reply—as fast as it could be typed and mailed. Sitting propped up in his hospital bed, his face still gray with the shock of the operation, he dictated fifty different form letters to be sent out, so that recipients wouldn’t realize that the letter they received was a form letter.
Among the first letters he wrote were letters to officials of the National Youth Administration in Washington. He wanted them to make permanent Jesse Kellam’s temporary appointment as the NYA’s Texas director. He wrote, in addition, to Sam Rayburn, to Senator Morris Sheppard, to anyone whose intercession with the NYA hierarchy might conceivably be helpful. Keeping control of the NYA was very important to him; it was, after all, a statewide agency—and thus a potential statewide political organization. Just one day after he had become Kleberg’s secretary, Ella So Relle had seen that “he was thinking this was a stepping stone. As soon as he got a job, he thought, now that I’m in this, how can I use this job for the next step?” Nothing had changed. Johnson already knew what the next step was going to be—and for it he needed a statewide organization.
ON ONLY ONE GROUP of letters did he delay putting his signature. These were replies to congratulatory letters which mentioned his father.
Writing to congratulate Johnson on April 12, for example, William P. Hobby had mentioned his admiration for Sam Ealy Johnson. Although Hobby was one of the most powerful men in Texas—a former Governor who was now publisher of the Houston Post—and although Johnson immediately dictated a reply to his letter, he did not sign the typed reply for almost a month.
Quite a few letters mentioned Lyndon Johnson’s father, and his record in answering them is striking, considering the promptness with which all other letters were answered. Some of these letters must have recalled painful memories—E. B. House, for example, wrote, “Your father served as road foreman under me in 1925–26”—but others had a very different tone: A. R. Meador, for example, wrote that
I was raised in Buda, and it was a very happy day to me when Sam Johnson would come to our house and stay all night. My brothers and myself would unhitch the horse from that ol buggy.
My mother who was a friend of your grandfather is now 83 years of age. [She] was so anxious to cast her ballot for you but was not able to get out of the car. So she had someone drive her to the polls and the ballot was brought to the car, “So she could vote for Sam Johnson’s little boy.”
No matter what the tone of the letter mentioning his father, the replies were delayed, sometimes for quite some time. The Meador letter, for example, was not answered for more than three weeks. (Johnson’s reply, moreover, contained no mention of his father.) Sometimes the same letter would be presented to Johnson for signature over and over, and each time would remain unsigned—as if he could not bear to sign it.
THE DOCTORS HAD TOLD HIM he would be out of the hospital a week after the operation—by April 15 or 16. A send-off dinner was being planned for the new Congressman, and he told the planners to hold it on April 26, because he was very eager to be off. But he suffered a setback. The doctors told him he would have to rest, but after a day or so, he tried to resume working from his hospital bed—and this time there was a more serious setback. Its precise nature is unknown—in referring to it, Johnson aides and relatives use two adjectives: “nervous” and “exhausted.” Talking to an old friend, Edna Frazer, on the telephone on April 20, eleven days after her husband had entered the hospital, Lady Bird said that he “was not progressing as [he] should.” Writing to Mrs. Frazer the following day, L. E. Jones reported that: “Two or three times in the last day or two, the Chief has tried to do a little dictating. Every time it seemed to have a bad effect. So now the doctors won’t let him write any letters. We all expected he would be out of the hospital by now. The delay no doubt has been caused by the excessive number of visitors.” On that day, all Johnson’s appointments were abruptly canceled—as were plans for the dinner. He remained in the hospital until April 24 or 25, and his doctors allowed him to leave then only after he and Lady Bird told them that he would be able to rest more quietly someplace out of the district, and that he would go not to Washington but to her father’s home in Karnack, to spend at least another two or three weeks resting there. On April 27, the new Congressman went down to the depot of the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad with his wife and parents, his face, still thin, very white above his dark blue suit. He had told reporters he was going to Washington, and the train did in fact go to Washington. But Johnson and Lady Bird were to get off when the train stopped in Marshall; her father would be waiting there to take them to his house, where they would rest until Johnson was better.
On the long platform, there took place a scene somewhat poignant to those who knew something of Lyndon Johnson’s relationship with his parents. He walked ahead of his father, alongside his mother; his father was so ill (he would, in fact, be dead within the year) that he could not keep up, and fell behind. Lyndon climbed aboard the train before his father arrived at the door. Sam Johnson, however, started to climb up after him, and turned up his face. Lyndon bent down, and father and son kissed.
*Some 41,000 votes had been cast in the 1936 Democratic primary, which Buchanan won.
23
Galveston
EVER SINCE HIS BOYHOOD in Johnson City, Lyndon Johnson had displayed a remarkable talent for making a favorable impression on older men who possessed power—and for making it with startling rapidity. So keen-eyed a connoisseur of politicians as Ed Clark says, “I never saw anything like it. He could start talking to a man … and in five minutes he could get that man to think, ‘I like you, young fellow. I’m going to help you.’”
At San Marcos, Lyndon Johnson’s talent had worked with the president of the college. Now he was to try it on another president.
Within a few minutes after he had passed Stone in the balloting and knew he had won, he had telegraphed his friends among the wire service reporters in Washington, informing them not only of his victory, but of the manner in which he hoped they would identify the victor—for what had helped him in the Hill Country could help him in Washington, too. He got the identification he wanted. The Associated Press story flashed across the United States that Saturday night—by Ed Jamieson (who sent a c
opy to Johnson with the inscription: “Hope it suits your Honorable Highness”)—began, “Youthful Lyndon B. Johnson, who shouted his advocacy of President Roosevelt’s court reorganization all over the tenth Texas district, was elected today. … [He] said he considered the result a vote of confidence in Mr. Roosevelt and his program.” With news scanty on a Saturday night, the story made front pages of newspapers all across the country—including newspapers in Washington. TEXAS SUPPORTER OF COURT CHANGE APPEARS ELECTED, a Washington Post headline read. Encouraging news was in rather short supply at the White House just then, with Roosevelt’s court plan reeling under blows from both House and Senate; two days after Johnson’s election, the Supreme Court would, by upholding the New Deal’s Wagner Act, deliver its own body blow. To reinforce the identification, Johnson asked local supporters to telegraph it to the White House; said one telegram addressed to Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Election of Johnson to Congress … was a high testimonial of your great leadership. … Your reorganization of the Supreme Court was made the main issue. …” This strategy produced the desired effect, and at a timely moment, for the President, who was shortly to leave for a fishing vacation in the Gulf of Mexico, had just announced that he would disembark in the Texas port of Galveston at the conclusion of his cruise, and would begin his return train trip to Washington by traveling the length of the state. On April 20, someone in the White House placed a memorandum in the President’s “Trip File”: “When we get down to Texas, we have to arrange to have the Congressman-elect, who ran on a pro–New Deal, pro–Court Reform platform, to see the President.”
The Path to Power Page 67