The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  Before leaving Austin for Karnack, Johnson had asked Governor Allred to do all he could to make sure that the meeting would actually take place, to make sure that it would be photographed—and to ask the President to use his influence to secure him a place, coveted by all Congressmen from farming districts, on the House Agriculture Committee. During the eleven days in which the presidential yacht Potomac, escorted by Navy destroyers, cruised off the Texas coast, where the big silver tarpon were running, it touched in at Port Aransas for an hour, and Allred went aboard to arrange details of the Galveston reception. After meeting with Roosevelt, he wrote to Johnson, who was recuperating at Karnack, that the President “will be very happy indeed to see you when he lands at Galveston. … He was intensely interested in the details of your campaign, and himself brought up the committee matter which you and I discussed. I suggested to him that you all should have your picture made together next week, and this was entirely agreeable.” (The Governor, fond of Johnson, had been disturbed by his haggard condition when he visited him after the campaign; he suggested now that “it might be well for you to come on down” two days early, “and spend Saturday and Sunday there resting.”) And when, on May 11, the Potomac and its escorting destroyers, their crews lining the rails in dress whites, stood into Galveston Bay and a gangplank was run down from her deck to the pier, Johnson, still very thin, but with a white oleander (Galveston’s symbol) cheerful in his lapel, was standing at its foot, along with the Governor and a beribboned Major General from nearby Fort Crockett, in a three-man group at the head of the assembled dignitaries.

  They waited almost an hour. Then there was a stir on deck, and sideboys began their shrill piping, and suddenly at the top of the gangplank, just a few feet away, was the massive head, the heavy, confidently tilted jaw, the broad smile that Lyndon Johnson had seen only in newsreels or newspaper photographs or, during a speech, from a distant gallery—the face, bronzed by the Gulf sun, of the man whose banner he had carried for forty days. The gangplank was narrow enough so the President could rest his weight on both handrails at once, and he swung himself down it. When his foot hit the dock, cannon roared in salute from Fort Crockett across the bay, a drum major’s baton flashed in the downbeat to “Hail to the Chief,” Governor Allred said, “Mr. President, I’d like to present our new Congressman,” and Franklin Roosevelt shook Lyndon Johnson’s hand.

  THE PHOTOGRAPH SESSION was all Johnson could have desired: the President stood patiently as the cameras clicked, smiling broadly as his big bronzed right hand clutched Johnson’s (Roosevelt’s body concealed his left hand, which was clutching the gangplank railing for support; the next day, a typical newspaper report said, “The President … chuckled happily as he went unassisted down the gangplank”). Johnson had not been assigned to ride with Allred and Galveston Mayor Adrian F. Levy in the President’s open touring car; he rode in one of the trailing cars assigned to lesser dignitaries as the presidential motorcade, thunderous cheers rolling behind it, wound through streets packed with the largest crowds in Galveston’s history to a specially constructed ramp, up which the President’s car was driven so that he could speak while sitting in it. (Introducing him, the Mayor said, “As we were driving along, I told our President that it must be a wonderful thing for a man to know that he is so universally loved. … Just as the time of Pericles was called the Golden Age of Athens, so President Roosevelt’s time will be called the Golden Age of Democracy.”) Johnson was, however, on the open rear platform of the President’s special train as, at ten a.m., it pulled out of the Galveston station with Roosevelt standing on the platform smiling and waving—with his other hand clutching the rail. (There were, in fact, two hands on that rail; the other one was Johnson’s. Separated from the President by Allred, he reduced the distance between himself and Roosevelt—and thereby kept himself from being cropped out of newspaper photographs—by a subtle little maneuver. The President, beyond Allred, was on his right. Johnson had been holding his white Stetson in his right hand, the hand closest to the President; as photographers began shooting, he shifted the Stetson to his left hand, placed his right hand on the rail, and slid it a few inches toward the President, so that he could shift his body slightly in front of Allred without blatantly leaning into the picture.) And he, together with Allred, had been invited to ride in the President’s private railroad car; when the President left the platform and went inside, the three men, together with White House aides Marvin McIntyre and Edwin M. (“Pa”) Watson, chatted throughout the three-hour trip to College Station, where the President was to review 3,000 khaki-clad ROTC cadets from Texas Agricultural and Mining College.

  Only one specific detail of that conversation is known: after his election, Johnson had visited General Burleson to thank him for his support; the old man had given Johnson part of a brown paper bag on which, after Johnson’s first visit, he had jotted down a predicted order of the finish in the congressional race, with Johnson’s name in first place. President Roosevelt, of course, had been Assistant Secretary of the Navy in the Wilson administration during the years in which Burleson had been Postmaster General in that same administration; if Roosevelt did not know Burleson, he knew who he was, and Johnson showed him the wrinkled piece of brown paper. The conversation’s other particulars are not known (although back in Washington, the President would talk about the young man who had defied every entrenched political leader in his district to run—alone among eight candidates—in support of the court-reform bill, and who was, incidentally, interested in the Navy, as he had himself been as a young man). But the results of the conversation are known. Although Johnson had expected to leave the train at College Station, Roosevelt invited him to stay aboard all the way to Fort Worth, more than 200 miles away. When the train pulled into that North Texas city at nine p.m., the newly elected Congressman had spent an entire day with the President. Before they parted company, the President said that the Agriculture Committee seat was Johnson’s if he wanted it, but that he would suggest the Naval Affairs Committee instead; he liked to see a young man like Johnson taking an interest in that field; powerful as Naval Affairs was now, he said, world trends might well make it more powerful still. When Johnson accepted his suggestion, Roosevelt was delighted and said he would personally see to the matter as soon as he got back to Washington. And he told Johnson that if he needed help in any other matters, he should call “Tommy”—and, scribbling “Tommy’s” telephone number on a piece of paper, he handed it to Johnson.

  “Tommy” was, of course, “Tommy the Cork,” Thomas G. Corcoran, thirty-six, the stocky, ebullient, accordion-playing political manipulator who was at that moment, as one of the President’s key strategists in the Supreme Court fight, at the very peak of his power and influence.

  Roosevelt, traveling by special train, reached Washington before Johnson. He telephoned Tommy himself. As Corcoran recalls the President’s words: “He said, ‘I’ve just met the most remarkable young man. Now I like this boy, and you’re going to help him with anything you can.’”

  And he helped him himself. On one of Johnson’s first days on the floor of Congress—the floor on which, as a congressional secretary, he had never been permitted to step—Representative Fred M. Vinson of Kentucky, a Democratic power on the Ways and Means Committee, whose Democratic members determined committee assignments, approached him and said, “Young man, I’m indebted to you for a good dinner and an excellent conversation.” He explained that he had been invited to the White House for dinner, and, while “the President was, as always, a most delightful host, I kept wondering just what it was he wanted from me. I knew it was something. Finally he said casually—oh, very casually—‘Fred, there’s a fine young man just come to the House. Fred, you know that fellow Lyndon Johnson? I think he would be a great help on Naval Affairs.’”

  The President also helped Johnson along avenues less formal than a congressional committee assignment (which, of course, Johnson received) but, to a young politician, more important. He talked ab
out him to men much more powerful than Tommy the Cork, or even Fred Vinson—to Harold L. Ickes of PWA and Harry L. Hopkins of WPA; talked about this “remarkable young man,” ordered them to meet him, and to help him. A young man from the Southwest would need connections in New York, the President said to Hopkins, who had excellent New York connections, including not only those who sprang from the same social work background he did, but Edwin Weisl, a New York political financier.

  Corcoran, even before he met the young man, had been impressed by the speed with which he had won the President’s favor. “That was all it took—one train ride,” he says. The achievement earned Johnson Corcoran’s highest accolade: whoever the young man was, he said, he must be “an operator.” Now, meeting him, and watching him operate on Ickes and Hopkins, he was even more impressed. Lyndon Johnson’s college classmates had thought that his talent with older men was nothing more than flattery, “kowtowing, suck-assing, brown-nosing” so blatant that “words won’t come to describe it,” but Corcoran, a King of Flatterers himself, knew it was much more. He knew a master of the art when he saw one. “He [Johnson] was smiling and deferential, but, hell, lots of guys can be smiling and deferential,” he says. “Lyndon had one of the most incredible capacities for dealing with older men. I never saw anything like it. He could follow someone’s mind around, and get where it was going before the other fellow knew where it was going. I saw him talk to an older man, and the minute he changed subjects, Lyndon was there ahead of him, and saying what he wanted to hear—before he knew what he wanted to hear.”

  Fanning out from Ickes and Hopkins and Corcoran, branching down from the White House, was a network of New Deal insiders, men of immense power and influence. Soon, all along the hidden pathways of Washington power, a new name was flashing, sent out so rapidly that sometimes it was garbled in transmission—but sent out from the highest sources. Eliot Janeway, a young political economist from New York who had already become part of this network, was lunching with Ickes in Washington one day when he heard it for the first time. “Ickes told me Roosevelt had said he was frustrated about that boy, that if he hadn’t gone to Harvard, that’s the kind of uninhibited young pro he’d like to be—that in the next generation the balance of power would shift south and west, and this boy could well be the first Southern President.” Ickes said he had met him, and Janeway should, too. “You’ll like him.” After lunch, Janeway says, “I took the Congressional back to New York.” And no sooner had he arrived home than the telephone rang. Ed Weisl was calling to say, “I just had a funny kind of a call from Harry [Hopkins]. Did you ever hear of some kid in Congress named Lydie Johnson?”

  BELOW HOPKINS AND ICKES, field marshals of the New Deal, below Ben Cohen, one of its principal theoreticians, and Tommy Corcoran, for a time not only its principal recruiting officer but one of its principal strategists, were the lieutenants of the New Deal—the able young liberals, fired with a fervent idealism, who had poured into Washington from all over the United States to enlist in the great crusade. These men, not Cabinet-level Secretaries or even Undersecretaries but their subordinates, possessed no independent power of their own—no official title of significance, no White House access, no discretion over the distribution of funds—but they could be important to a Congressman. “What is a government?” Corcoran once asked. “It’s not just the top man or the top ten men. A government is the top one hundred or two hundred men. What really makes the difference is what happens down the line before—and after—the big decisions are taken.” Having met the field marshals and taken them into camp, Johnson repeated his triumph with the lieutenants.

  He concentrated his efforts on a particular handful of them.

  One link between these men was the issue of public power. They were all veterans of the fight for either the crucial Public Utilities Holding Company Act of 1935 (the Rayburn-Fletcher Act) or of the subsequent battles to administer the Act, or of the battles to build the huge dams which, by creating new hydroelectric power, would destroy the utilities’ monopoly. A dam—-the Marshall Ford Dam—was the first problem Johnson had to confront when he got to Congress, and it was during his efforts to solve this problem that he met and dealt with most of these young lieutenants.

  Another link was intellect. The hundred or two hundred key young New Dealers included many brilliant men. Johnson’s handful was among the most brilliant. Their leaders were the drafters of the keystone act, Corcoran and Cohen—or, to be more precise, Corcoran, for the kindly, gentle Cohen, who, a friend wrote, “looks and talks like a Dickens portrait of an absent-minded professor,” was too shy and dreamy to be a leader; his genius was the genius of the lone and pure intellect. Corcoran’s performance at Harvard Law had so impressed Felix Frankfurter that he gave him the best job then at his command: the secretaryship to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. But even so, men who knew them well had learned that Corcoran’s mind was not the equal of his silent partner’s; after one meeting at which Corcoran did almost all the talking, Sam Rayburn confided to a friend: “Cohen’s the brains.”

  The handful included one of Corcoran’s successors as Holmes’ secretary, James H. Rowe, a tall, studious, bespectacled young attorney (in 1937, twenty-eight years old, the same age as Lyndon Johnson) whose path to Washington had led from Butte, Montana, through Harvard University and Harvard Law School. While serving as one of several low-level assistants who were helping Corcoran and Cohen in the drafting of the Holding Company Act and in defense of the PWA against power company lawsuits, Rowe had caught Corcoran’s eye, and Corcoran had placed him in a low-level White House job—secretary to the President’s son James—where he would shortly catch the President’s eye.

  This handful of men included William O. Douglas, thirty-eight, a sandy-haired former Yale Law School professor who as an SEC Commissioner was a key figure in the administration of the Holding Company Act (“The Holding Company in the utilities field had become a monster,” he was to write), and it included the first man Douglas had brought to Washington to assist him, a short, slight, silent young Jew from Memphis with olive skin, large, liquid eyes—and, another Yale professor says, “the most brilliant legal mind ever to come out of the Yale Law School”: twenty-six-year-old Abe Fortas. It included Janeway, at twenty-four a Washington-based business writer for Time, Life and Fortune magazines, and twenty-seven-year-old Arthur E. Goldschmidt, known as “Tex” because he came from San Antonio, who had been brought to Washington after graduating from Columbia University, and who worked under Harry Hopkins. With the exception of Janeway, these men—Corcoran, Cohen, Douglas, Rowe, Fortas, Goldschmidt—often saw each other at work; for a time, in fact, three of them—Cohen, Fortas and Goldschmidt—occupied adjoining offices in the suite used by the Division of Public Power on the sixth floor of the Department of the Interior. And they saw each other after work—Corcoran and Cohen shared an apartment and the younger men—Rowe, Fortas and Goldschmidt—all lived within a block or two of each other in small, rented houses in the Georgetown section of Washington that had until recently been a Negro slum but was rapidly being taken over and refurbished by young white New Dealers. “We were a kind of a group,” Goldschmidt says. “We were not organized. But we knew each other, and we saw a lot of each other.”

  And they began to see a lot of Lyndon Johnson.

  He met them in the course of his work for the Marshall Ford Dam. He would telephone and ask them to lunch. He would invite them for Sunday afternoon cocktails at the small, one-bedroom apartment he and Lady Bird had rented in the Kennedy-Warren Apartment House on Connecticut Avenue.

  And soon they were inviting him back. The little group would often get together for informal dinner parties or for back-yard cookouts, and Lyndon and Lady Bird became regulars at them.

  He cultivated them. He was—in the beginning, at least—deferential, attentive to their opinions. He listened with what seemed like awe as Tommy Corcoran talked about how the lights had burned all night in the Treasury Department when, back
in 1933, they had been trying to work out a plan to save the banks. He gave them small presents—a locket for a baby daughter, for example—small but appreciated; “At that time we were not so used to getting presents,” Jim Rowe says. “Though you have warned me about pestering you with mash notes,” Elizabeth Rowe wrote him, “I can’t allow anything as lovely as your little locket to go unnoticed. Really, you do spoil our daughter. … I can’t think of anything nicer to wish for my daughter than that you would be an honorary uncle. So … from now you shall be Uncle Lyndon.” Small and large—the largest being Texas turkeys that, beginning in 1937, were hand-delivered by Johnson’s secretaries every Christmas to all the members of this group; when she received her first turkey, Mrs. Rowe was astonished by its size; “I had never seen such a big turkey,” she recalls. “I didn’t have anything big enough to cook it in.” Telephoning Johnson to thank him, she said, “You must have had a turkey crossed with a beef.” When they were promoted, they received his enthusiastic congratulations. Johnson wrote Rowe when he was made one of President Roosevelt’s six administrative assistants, “My dear Jimmie: If I owned a big truck such as the movers use and get in front of me with when I’m in a hurry to go places, I couldn’t send you more congratulations on your elevation today than you will find borne by this note. I rejoice with you. And I rejoice with our President that he has such an able pair of shoulders as yours and such a fine mind as you to relieve him of some of the crushing load. …”

  He helped them. On the day, May 13, on which he had arrived in Washington as a newly elected Congressman, the first office he had visited had been that of the newly elected Majority Leader, and in that office he stooped down and kissed a bald head, and the grim face beneath it had broken into a smile. Sam Rayburn was very glad to see Lyndon Johnson back in Washington. When Johnson asked him to stand beside him at his swearing-in in the well of the House, as his sponsor, he was very touched. The furniture in the Johnsons’ apartment was a little worn from use by previous occupants, but, starting on the very next Sunday, their apartment was frequently adorned with the short, broad figure that was, in the catalog of Washington power, a more prized ornament than ever. And Rayburn returned the hospitality in a very significant manner. One of his first acts after his election as Leader had been to reinstitute Jack Garner’s “Board of Education,” and each day after the House had adjourned, a handful of Congressmen met in a room on the ground floor of the Capitol to “strike a blow for liberty” with a late-afternoon drink. The men invited to this hideaway—which was furnished only with dark leather easy chairs, a long, dark leather sofa, a fireplace, a desk at which Rayburn presided, and a picture of Robert E. Lee—were almost all leaders of the House; the single exception was Wright Patman, who possessed a qualification that was, in Rayburn’s eyes, more important than seniority: he had been one of the little band of Populists in the Texas Legislature who never sold out. One day, Rayburn invited Johnson down for a drink after the session. Thereafter, leaving the floor at the end of the day, the Leader would frequently growl to Johnson: “Come on down.” Behind the hideaway’s tall, narrow door, the twenty-eight-year-old freshman was drinking with Speaker Bankhead, and Minority Whip McCormack, and Rules Committee Chairman Sabath, and as a result he knew quite a bit about the inner workings of the House. The young New Dealers from the White House end of Pennsylvania Avenue were in constant need of information about the Capitol Hill end, about the chances of passage of some bill vital to their agency, about the status of the bill: where, precisely, it was stalled—in committee or subcommittee or the bill-drafters’ offices—and why, and who could get it unstalled. Their bosses were constantly asking them to find out some piece of information about Congress.