Obtaining such information was no trouble for Corcoran, who could get it through the White House liaison men (in some matters, he was the liaison man), or for SEC Commissioner Douglas. But the more junior Rowe and Fortas and Goldschmidt had to get the information themselves, and hard information—not rumor but fact—was difficult to obtain from the closed, confused world of Capitol Hill. But Johnson, thanks to his attendance in Rayburn’s hideaway, often had the information. Moreover, they had seen with their own eyes that he knew Rayburn well; the Leader, with his immense power and fearsome mien, was an unapproachable figure to them. Loving the company of men young enough to be his sons, Rayburn had begun, after he had spent enough time with Corcoran and Cohen so that he could relax a little with them, to invite them occasionally—perhaps once every six weeks or two months—to his little apartment for a Sunday stag breakfast, which he would cook with a big apron tied around his chest. Even on such social occasions, however, the Leader’s reserve never melted more than slightly; none of the young men ever felt close enough to him to ask the questions they needed to ask. But these young men saw—with the same amazement with which Lyndon Johnson’s San Marcos classmates had watched him pat the feared Prexy Evans on the back—Lyndon Johnson lean over and kiss the Leader’s bald pate. They knew that if Johnson didn’t himself have the information they needed, he could get it from Rayburn. On minor matters, he might even, on their behalf, ask the Leader not just for information but for assistance. Furthermore, he was learning his way very quickly through the maze that most Congressmen never master. “He learned the levers in Congress very fast,” Rowe says. And he was willing to place this knowledge at the service of this small group of men. “I would call and say, ‘How do I handle this?’” Rowe says. “He would say, ‘I’ll call you right back.’ And he would call back and say, ‘This is the fellow you ought to talk to.’” Says Fortas: “He was close to Rayburn, and an ever-widening coterie of friends on the Hill, and he helped us. He ran errands for us on the Hill. He was very useful to us.”
And he made them like him.
“At parties, he was fun,” Elizabeth Rowe says. “That’s what no one understands about Lyndon Johnson—that he was fun.”
He was, in fact, the life of these parties. Quick wits flashed at them, and none flashed quicker than his. “When I think of the old Lyndon, I think of old-fashioned joshing, kidding around,” Goldschmidt’s wife Elizabeth Wickenden says. “The small talk was great,” Jim Rowe says. “He always had a good Texas story that was in point.” He knew three worlds—the world of Congress, about which they knew little, and two worlds about which they knew nothing: the world of Texas politics, and the world of the Texas Hill Country, the world from which he had come. He spoke to them about those worlds—with an eloquence they never forgot, his voice now soft and confiding, now booming—the voice of a natural storyteller. He was always ready with the latest inside stories about Congress, stories on which they hung because such information was important to them, but also because in the telling he mimicked accurately and hilariously the characters he was talking about; pacing back and forth, a tall, gangling figure in those small living rooms, he filled those rooms with drama.
“His greatest stories,” Mrs. Rowe says, and the rest of the group agrees, “would be about Texas.” He told them about political figures of whom they had hardly heard—Ma and Pa Ferguson, Big Jim Hogg, Jimmy Allred—but whom he painted in colors so vivid that they wanted to hear more. And when he talked about the Hill Country, “then,” Mrs. Rowe says, “he could be very eloquent indeed.” He talked about the days of the cattle drives, and about the poverty of the people. Bill Douglas, a great talker himself, frequently talked about soil conservation; even Douglas’ stories paled before tales of the rampages of the Pedernales or the Lower Colorado. And when Johnson was talking of the poverty of the Hill Country—and about what New Deal programs meant there—then, even Tommy Corcoran, customarily the life of every party himself with his Irish chatter and his accordion, might stop talking for a while.
And it wasn’t just his stories that made them like him. He was a great player of practical jokes. On the morning after a cookout at the Fortases’ at which the Johnsons and George R. Brown of Brown & Root had been guests—and at which Brown had had a bit to drink—a bouquet of flowers from Brown arrived for Carole Fortas, with the note: “Sorry if I misbehaved.” Since he hadn’t, the Fortases were puzzled. When Fortas asked Johnson what Brown meant, Johnson said that the next morning he had told Brown, whose memory of the evening was hazy, that he had dropped a steak, liberally covered with Worcestershire sauce, on the Fortases’ living-room rug.
He entertained. At a Spanish restaurant one evening, flamenco music was playing. Johnson, so tall, grabbed little Welly Hopkins, and the two of them jumped up on a table and began dancing together. “There was never a dull moment around him,” Fortas says. “If Lyndon Johnson was there, a party would be livelier. The moment he walked in the door, it would take fire. Maybe in a different way than the party had been going when he came in, but it would take fire. … He was great fun, a great companion.” Says Elizabeth Rowe: “He enjoyed living so much that he made everyone around him enjoy it more. He could take a group of people and just lift it up.”
As they got to know him better, their fondness was, more and more, tinged with admiration. Politics was their profession, and they were, most of them, very good at it; this little group included men who were already, or would be, among the master politicians of the age. A master of a profession knows another when he sees him, and they knew they were seeing one now. Rowe, asking Johnson more and more frequently for information on Congress, came to realize that the information was invariably correct; following this freshman Congressman through the maze of Capitol Hill, one would make very few wrong turns. They all came to realize this. “He knew how things happened, and what made things happen,” Fortas says. “He knew the nuts and bolts of politics. We were all more or less technicians, and he was the best technician, the very best.” Counting Congress—estimating the votes on bills important to them—was a frequent pastime at the parties. “He was a greater counter,” Rowe says. “Someone would say, we’ve got so many votes, and Johnson would say, ‘Hell, you’re three off. You’re counting these three guys, and they’re going to vote against you.’” “He was the very best at counting,” Fortas says. “He would figure it out—how so-and-so would vote. Who were the swing votes. What, in each case—what, exactly—would swing them.” Fortas pauses for a moment. Then he says: “I may not have adequately explained to you how good a politician he was. He was the very best.”
They admired his thoroughness, his tirelessness—the way he threw himself into every aspect of politics, into everything he did, with an enthusiasm and effort that seemed limitless. He already possessed an amazing store of knowledge about individual Congressmen and their districts through his capacity for absorbing and retaining information. “He was a pack rat for information,” Fortas says. “And he was very, very intelligent. He never forgot anything. He would work harder than anyone else. I have never known a man who had such a capacity for detail.” Recommendations were the order of the day for these canniest of the young New Dealers; all of them were working to insert friends and allies into key positions in government agencies. Lyndon Johnson was doing this, too—“He was always pushing someone for some appointment or other,” Rowe recalls—and a Johnson recommendation had special quality to it. Rowe recalls one of the first vacancies he was put in charge of filling after he became a White House administrative assistant: an Assistant Attorney Generalship. “One of the names on the list was Welly Hopkins.” Rowe thought he might casually ask Johnson for information about him, “just because he was from Texas, too”—he had certainly no intention of giving Johnson, a freshman Congressman, any input into the appointment. But, Rowe recalls, “I called Lyndon up, and he said, ‘Ah’ll be up!’” Startled, Rowe asked, “What do you mean?”
“I’ll be up in ten minutes!” re
plied Johnson. And ten minutes later, Johnson, having run out of his office in the Cannon Building, jumped into his car and roared up Pennsylvania Avenue, was in Rowe’s office in the old State, Navy and War Department Building next to the White House, “pounding on my desk—in a nice way—and saying: ‘The best man!’” (“Lyndon,” Rowe pointed out, “you don’t know who the other men are”—but Hopkins got the job.)
Rowe and Corcoran, disciples of Justice Holmes, called the tirelessness and enthusiasm that they admired “energy.” “Holmes used to say that in the last analysis the only thing that mattered was energy,” Corcoran says, “and Lyndon just bristled with it.” Fortas, more precise, says, “It was a matter of intensity more than anything, an intense concentration on whatever was being talked about, or on whatever was the problem in hand.” But however they defined it, they admired it—admired it to such an extent that while they might feel that they themselves were, in Fortas’ word, “technicians,” some of them were beginning to feel that Johnson might be something more. Fortas customarily cloaked himself in reserve and an air of gravity that he may have considered necessary for a man who was very young indeed for the posts he held, and who looked even younger. Or his reserve may have been natural: “I was born old,” he once told Goldschmidt, almost ruefully. Sometimes, he seemed to be measuring every word he spoke—he had already adopted the mannerism of stroking his chin slowly before answering a question—and he seemed determined never to let himself reveal enthusiasm; Eliot Janeway was astonished, therefore, when Fortas expressed his feeling about Johnson to him and added, “The guy’s just got extra glands.” Listening to Jim Rowe speak about Johnson, one can hear beneath the words the struggle of a strong personality to avoid becoming submerged in a personality stronger still. “Listen, I mean, I worked for Roosevelt and Holmes. They were the two perfect people. Johnson was never going to [become one of my idols]—he and I were of an age—but he didn’t bore me for one minute. He never bored anyone. He was a magnetic man physically, and you never knew what was going to happen next. He was a remarkable man.”
In this little group of remarkable young men, he was becoming not merely one of the group, but its center. Soon the small Johnson apartment was the scene of more and more parties: in honor of Maury Maverick (Harold Ickes, who had decided to attend Johnson’s party instead of “a big garden party at the British embassy,” was glad he did; “practically everyone was in his shirt sleeves. I am sure that I enjoyed it more than I would have the formal doings …”); for Ickes himself, on his birthday—Johnson asked Fortas, then PWA general counsel, to make a little speech in Ickes’ honor. (“That shows how smart he was,” Welly Hopkins says. By giving the party, but allowing “Abe to make a birthday speech for his boss,” he “kept his foot in the door—with both of them.”) The parties didn’t have to be formal occasions. “He was a great one for spur-of-the-moment parties,” Elizabeth Rowe recalls. “He’d call up and say, ‘I’m about to leave the office. Get old Jim and come on out.’” When the Rowes arrived at the Johnson apartment, they might find two or three other couples also invited by a last-minute telephone call.
More and more, wherever the parties were held, he dominated them.
His size was one factor in this dominance. He was, of course, over six feet three inches tall, and his arms were very long, and his hands very big, and the sweeping, vigorous gestures he made with those long arms seemed to fill those little rooms. His awkwardness was a factor—the clumsy, lunging strides as he paced back and forth telling his “Texas stories,” the ungainly flailing of his arms to make a point—as was his restlessness, which kept him always in motion: sitting down, jumping up, walking, talking, never still. The drama of his appearance, which went beyond size and awkwardness, was a factor, too: the vivid contrast of the coal-black hair and heavy black eyebrows against that milky white skin; the outsized nose and huge ears; the flashing smile; the flashing eyes.
But the dominance went beyond the physical. Although he was only twenty-eight, he had been giving orders for a long time now—to L. E. Jones and Gene Latimer and the rest of the staff in Kleberg’s office; to scores of NYA officials. He was accustomed to being listened to, and the air with which he carried himself was in part the air of command.
And it was also the air of belief. He was more than a natural storyteller. The subjects on which he dwelt—the subjects his anecdotes all illustrated—were the poverty of his constituents, and the need to do something about that poverty. And in describing Lyndon Johnson, the words the members of this little group use are “vibrancy,” “vitality,” “urgency,” “intensity,” “energy”—and “passion.” “His belief in what he was fighting for just poured out of him,” says Elizabeth Rowe, “and it was very impressive.” As he strode back and forth in those little living rooms, he was, in their words, “eloquent,” “spellbinding”—and, often, they were spellbound.
Not always, of course. And when they weren’t, his behavior was also striking. Even as a boy, of course, he could not endure being only one of a group—in a companion’s phrase, “could not stand, just could not stand not being the leader,” not only of boys his own age but of older boys. “If he couldn’t lead, he didn’t care much about playing.” The need to dominate was as evident in Georgetown living rooms as in the vacant lots of Johnson City, as evident with Abe Fortas and Jim Rowe and even Tommy the Cork as it had been with Bob Edwards and the Crider brothers. Most of the group—Fortas and Rowe and Goldschmidt, and their wives—gave him their full attention during his monologues, but sometimes they wouldn’t. And sometimes there were other guests—guests not under his spell. In Washington, the amount of attention a man could command was often in proportion to the amount of power he commanded, and a junior Congressman commanded none at all. As Rowe puts it, “He was somewhat of a young Congressman, and he was interesting, but eventually people would drift off and start having their own conversation,” or would interrupt him and hold the floor themselves. And if he was not the center of the stage, Lyndon Johnson refused to be part of the cast at all. He would, quite literally, go to sleep. In a group of people in a living room, he would be talking, someone else would begin talking, and Johnson would put his chin down on his chest, his eyes would close—and he would be asleep. He might stay that way for quite some time—twenty minutes or half an hour, say; he probably wouldn’t wake up until Lady Bird nudged him. And when he woke up, as Rowe puts it, “he woke up talking.” And if he was not then afforded the attention of the group around him, he would go back to sleep again. Elizabeth Rowe describes the sequence this way: “He’d put on a performance, and then pull the curtain down, and then pull it up again.”
The members of the little group forgave him this behavior. Fortas excuses it as a result of what he feels was understandable fatigue: “a man who lives at this intensity …” Elizabeth Rowe doesn’t attempt to explain it; she just forgives it. Asked whether she, as a hostess, didn’t resent one of her guests going to sleep in her living room, she replies, “Anything he did was all right with me. … Because he was such a good friend.” And because, she adds, when he was awake, he was “such a marvelous, scintillating guest.” Says Welly Hopkins’ wife Alice: “He demanded attention. He demanded it—and he got it.” He was demanding it now, and getting it, from men who gave it to few men—generally, only to their superiors and to other older men with power, not to men their own age without power (and Lyndon Johnson, their own age, had no power at all). Summing up Lyndon Johnson’s relationship with Fortas, Rowe, Douglas, Goldschmidt, Corcoran and Cohen, Rowe says, in words echoed by most of the group: “Roosevelt and Rayburn liking him—that gave him the in. And the personal force did the rest. That had to be it, because there was nothing else. He didn’t have power, or money or anything. He just had this personal force—a huge, unique personal force.”
AND HE USED THESE MEN.
Hawthorne said of Andrew Jackson that “his native strength … compelled every man to be his tool that came within his reach; and the more c
unning the individual might be, it served only to make him the sharper tool.” These were very cunning men, and Lyndon Johnson made very sharp tools of them.
The Path to Power Page 69