The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  “So,” says one of the PEC’s first directors, “we went back to Lyndon. The only man who could talk for us.”

  He had tried to talk to the REA, going all the way up to the new Administrator, John Carmody, but had had no luck. There was only one man left to talk to. Johnson asked Corcoran to get him in to see the President.

  In later years, Johnson told many stories—each different—of what he said to the President, and what the President said to him when Corcoran finally, after considerable difficulty, obtained an audience for him. According to his story on one occasion, Roosevelt picked up the telephone while Johnson was still in the room, called Carmody and said, “John, I know you have got to have guidelines and rules and I don’t want to upset them, but you just go along with me—just go ahead and approve this loan. … Those folks will catch up to that density problem because they breed pretty fast.” On September 27, 1938, a telegram arrived at the temporary Johnson City office of the Pedernales Electric Cooperative: the REA, it said, had granted the PEC a loan of $1,322,000 (shortly to be raised to $1,800,000) to build 1,830 miles of electric lines that would bring electricity to 2,892 Hill Country families.

  IN SO IMPOVERISHED AN AREA, the very existence of a large-scale—and government-financed—construction project was significant. The average wage in the Hill Country had been about a dollar or $1.50 per day, but workers on government projects were paid the minimum wage in the area: forty cents an hour or $3.20 per day. Three hundred men would be employed on the PEC project, but when Babe Smith arrived to open the PEC’s first hiring office, in Bertram, several times three hundred men were standing in line to apply for these jobs. Many were given to men who had wanted electricity but had not been able to raise the five-dollar deposit; they paid it out of these wages. Herman Brown—Brown & Root had been given the contract to construct the PEC lines—was able to hire men who were known to be very hard workers. They needed to be. The poles that would carry the electrical lines had to be sunk in rock. Brown & Root’s mechanical hole-digger broke on the hard Hill Country rock. Every hole had to be dug mostly by hand. Eight-or ten-man crews would pile into flatbed trucks—which also carried their lunch and water—in the morning and head out into the hills. Some trucks carried axemen, to hack paths through the cedar; others contained the hole-diggers. “The hole-diggers were the strongest men,” Babe Smith says. Every 300 or 400 feet, two would drop off and begin digging a hole by pounding the end of a crowbar into the limestone. After the hole reached a depth of six inches, half a stick of dynamite was exploded in it, to loosen the rock below, but that, too, had to be dug out by hand. “Swinging crowbars up and down—that’s hard labor,” Babe Smith says. “That’s backbreaking labor.” But the hole-diggers had incentive. For after the hole-digging teams came the pole-setters and “pikemen,” who, in teams of three, set the poles—thirty-five-foot pine poles from East Texas—into the rock, and then the “framers” who attached the insulators, and then the “stringers” who strung the wires, and at the end of the day the hole-diggers could see the result of their work stretching out behind them—poles towering above the cedars, silvery lines against the sapphire sky. And the homes the wires were heading toward were their own homes. “These workers—they were the men of the cooperative,” Smith says. Gratitude was a spur also. Often the crews didn’t have to eat the cold lunch they had brought. A woman would see men toiling toward her home to “bring the lights.” And when they arrived, they would find that a table had been set for them—with the best plates, and the very best food that the family could afford. Three hundred men—axemen, polemen, pikers, hole-diggers, framers—were out in the Edwards Plateau, linking it to the rest of America, linking it to the twentieth century, in fact, at the rate of about twelve miles per day.

  Still, with 1,800 miles of line to build, the job seemed—to families very eager for electricity—to be taking a very long time. After the lines had been extended to their farms, and the farms were wired, they waited with wires hanging from the ceiling and bare bulbs at the end, for the lines to be energized. “It will not be long now until mother can throw away the sad irons,” the Blanco County News exulted. But month after month passed, for the lines could not be energized until the entire project was substantially completed. As the months passed, the Hill Country’s suspicion of the government was aroused again. Brian Smith had persuaded many of his neighbors to sign up, and now, more than a year after they had paid their five dollars, and then more money to have their houses wired, his daughter Evelyn recalls that her neighbors decided they weren’t really going to get it. She recalls that “All their money was tied up in electric wiring”—and their anger was directed at her family. Dropping in to see a friend one day, she was told by the friend’s parents to leave: “You and your city ways. You can go home, and we don’t care to see you again.” They were all but ostracized by their neighbors. Even they themselves were beginning to doubt; it had been so long since the wiring was installed, Evelyn recalls, that they couldn’t remember whether the switches were in the ON or OFF position.

  But then one evening in November, 1939, the Smiths were returning from Johnson City, where they had been attending a declamation contest, and as they neared their farmhouse, something was different.

  “Oh my God,” her mother said. “The house is on fire!”

  But as they got closer, they saw the light wasn’t fire. “No, Mama,” Evelyn said. “The lights are on.”

  They were on all over the Hill Country. “And all over the Hill Country,” Stella Gliddon says, “people began to name their kids for Lyndon Johnson.”

  Part V

  NEW FIELDS

  29

  Mr. Johnson Goes to Washington

  LYNDON JOHNSON was so energetic and ingenious a Congressman that a knowledgeable observer called him “the best Congressman for a district that ever was.” He was, moreover, secure in his congressional seat. In 1938, he would be one of eight Texas Congressmen who did not have an opponent in the Democratic primary, or in the general election in November. In 1940, he would again be unopposed. But a Congressman was not what Lyndon Johnson wanted to be. No sooner had he won the Tenth District seat than he was trying to leave it—as rapidly as possible.

  On the day after he had been elected to the House of Representatives, while he was still in the hospital recuperating from his appendicitis attack, he had begun preparing for the next step toward his great goal by writing National Youth Administration officials to urge that Jesse Kellam’s appointment as Texas NYA director be made permanent. His success in securing that appointment for his loyal Number Two man had ensured that his statewide organization would be kept in place, and he worked continuously to build it up and to utilize it. NYA work was only part of what his NYA men were doing all across Texas: whenever one visited a town to check on an NYA project, he was supposed also, says one, “to go to the Courthouse to see the Mayor” and other local politicians, and to see “the school people” and the postmasters, who were often key figures in a local political structure. The NYA man was instructed to put in a good word for Congressman Johnson, and to ask if, although Johnson was not the Mayor’s own Congressman, there was any service Johnson could perform for him or for his town. He was also told to keep his ears open for political gossip, and report it to “the Chief.” And these reports were not ignored. Says one NYA man, J. J. (Jake) Pickle, “I would write him long letters. And he would call me about them. He would re-explore what I had said. ‘Why did he say that? Repeat that.’” The practice in Johnson’s Washington office was, moreover, the same now that he was a Congressman as it had been when he was a congressional secretary: no matter how busy the office might be, requests from “important people”—people with money or political clout—from the other twenty congressional districts in Texas were to be given urgent priority.

  Every Wednesday, the Speaker’s Dining Room on the ground floor of the Capitol was reserved for a luncheon meeting of the Texas congressional delegation: two Senators, twenty-one Repr
esentatives (and, of course, should he want to sit in, Vice President Garner). At one luncheon each month, members of the delegation were permitted to bring occasional guests, either VIP’s from their districts who happened to be in Washington or Washington notables. But such invitations were issued sparingly. Says James H. Rowe, who spent a lifetime in the inner circles of power: “It was a great honor to be invited. I think that, in a lifetime, I got there five times or maybe six.”

  At the other luncheons, guests were generally not permitted—no matter how important they might be. It was understood that these lunches were for business: to plan strategy or to iron out differences within the delegation so that Texas would present its customary united front. “You couldn’t bring guests except on that one day,” Congressman George H. Mahon of Lubbock recalls. “That was the unwritten law.”

  Lyndon Johnson did not obey this law, and he violated it in a manner particularly infuriating to the other members of the delegation: he invited to the “closed” lunches not only his constituents—but theirs. On one Wednesday, for example, Amon Carter, Jr., son of the publisher of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and the paper’s editor, James Record, were in Washington, and they asked Fort Worth’s Congressman, Wingate Lucas, if they could come to the famous delegation luncheon. But Lucas had once before asked Sam Rayburn for permission to bring an influential constituent to a closed session and had been refused. “There was no one I would rather take,” Lucas says. “These were my two key supporters. But it was a closed session. I told them I couldn’t take them. I went to the luncheon, and I was sitting there, and Lyndon Johnson walks in, and who do you think was with him?” Seeing Lucas, young Amon waved at him. Lucas sheepishly waved back.

  (Johnson was able to violate the law because its enforcer was Rayburn, the delegation’s leader. Rayburn was customarily very strict about the “no outsiders” rule because the outsiders were, he knew, likely to be the big businessmen and lobbyists he hated. But when Johnson asked permission to bring a guest, Rayburn frequently gave it.)

  Another unwritten but very firm law prohibited a Congressman from interfering in the affairs of other districts. Johnson did not obey this law, either. Asking the White House for an increase in funding for the Reserve Officers Training Corps at Texas A&M University, in Luther A. Johnson’s Sixth District, he wrote that although the university was not in his district, “it is mine by adoption.”

  And when federal grants were given in other districts—even grants for projects with which Johnson had had absolutely no connection—his tactics could be even more irritating.

  Normally, if a project receiving a grant was located in a district with a Democratic Congressman, officials of the federal agency giving the grant would telephone that Congressman so that he could announce it, and thereby get credit for it. If the project was in Texas, however, Johnson’s friends in the agencies would often telephone him instead—and it would be Johnson who made the announcement. “I had been pushing for an extension of the Public Health Service Hospital in Fort Worth,” Lucas recalls. “Lyndon hadn’t had anything to do with it. But when it came about, Lyndon announced it, without even bothering to notify me.” And even when agency officials notified the district Congressman, they notified Johnson as well, and the efficiency of his staff, coupled with his long cultivation of the wire-service reporters, ensured that it was his name, not the other Congressman’s, that would be attached to the announcement.

  “A lot of the delegation was sore as hell,” says the AP’s Lewis T. (“Tex”) Easley. They were, in fact, so sore that Johnson found it expedient to beat a retreat—but only a partial retreat. “He realized it was getting them too mad,” Easley says. “So after a while, he would announce it jointly.” The shift didn’t do much to alleviate tensions. After several “joint” announcements of federal projects in Corpus Christi, Dick Kleberg, his former employer and the friendliest of men, could scarcely bring himself to nod to Johnson when they passed in the halls.

  THE ILL-FEELING engendered in the Texas delegation by such tactics was exacerbated by Johnson’s personality. His efforts to dominate other men succeeded with one or two fellow Texans (most notably, quiet, unassertive Representative Robert Poage of Waco), but with most of the delegation, tough, successful politicians in their own right, they aroused only resentment—as did his efforts to dominate every room in which he was present. As he strolled through the House Dining Room at lunchtime, acting if he were some visiting celebrity, nodding to left and right, “head huddling” with one man or another, or as he sat at a table, talking too loudly, other Congressmen muttered under their breaths. Albert Thomas of Houston would sit staring at Johnson, snarling sotto voce: “Listen to that sonofabitch talking about himself.” Other mutters were occasioned by what Lucas calls “insincerity.” Johnson “was so insincere,” Lucas says. “He would tell everyone what he thought they wanted to hear. As a result, you couldn’t believe anything he said.” Ewing Thomason of El Paso had served in the Texas Legislature with Sam Johnson, and initially had gone out of his way to befriend Sam’s son. Approaching Thomason in the dining room one day, Lyndon Johnson promised him his support on a controversial issue. “Ewing,” he said earnestly, “if there’s anyone you can believe, it’s me.” Then he swung across the room and started talking to several Congressmen who happened to be opposing Thomason on the issue. Thomason muttered: “There’s that sonofabitch telling them the same thing he told me.”

  Mutter though they did, however, few cared to raise their voices—for they didn’t want Sam Rayburn to hear them. “Rayburn had this very strong feeling for Lyndon,” Lucas says. “And that feeling protected Lyndon. Nobody in the delegation wanted to get Rayburn mad.”

  THE OTHER MEMBERS of the delegation understood why Johnson was making speeches—and friends—all across Texas.

  He certainly made no secret of the fact that he wanted to be a United States Senator, says George Mahon, who, without such ambitions himself, was tolerant of Johnson. Chatting with Mahon in the cloakroom, or walking back to the Cannon Building with him, Johnson would frequently pull out a newspaper clipping dealing with local conditions—not conditions in Austin, but in Houston, or Dallas, or Lubbock. “He would always have an editorial from the Dallas paper or the El Paso paper, and he would sit down next to you on the floor [of the House] and tell you or ask you [about it]. …” Influential citizens from other districts were cultivated not only when they were visiting Washington, but back home as well. He solicited speaking invitations from cities all across Texas, and, Mahon says, “When he was in town, he would court them, would call them up. And, of course, if someone important, like a Congressman, calls you up, you’re flattered.” Mahon began to realize that “in my district [which was almost 300 miles from Johnson’s], he [had] made friends with the key people. He courted the right people in the right places [all over] the state. He had statewide ambitions from the day he came up here.”