The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  But he never had a chance. The Texas seat would be filled by the Texas delegation, and on that delegation, Mahon recalls, “Mr. Rayburn had the power.” Although Mahon knew of Rayburn’s paternal fondness for Johnson, he never worried about the result. “Whatever Rayburn said went,” he says. “But Rayburn followed the rules.” And the rule that mattered was seniority. “I was the senior Texan who wanted the spot,” Mahon says. “I was in line for it. If you were the next man in line, you got it—that was the way the unvarying rule was.” Mahon got it—found the immediate rewards he had expected (“Even as a new member of Appropriations,” he says, “if you were on Appropriations, you were courted by other members”), and began the climb to greater rewards: in eleven years, he would be chairman of his subcommittee, in twenty-six years, at the age of sixty-four, chairman of the full committee; for his remaining fifteen years in Congress (until he retired at seventy-nine), he would be a power on Capitol Hill. Johnson didn’t get it; he remained a member of the Naval Affairs Committee—a junior member of a committee on which junior members were limited even in the number of questions they could ask.

  HARDLY HAD HE ARRIVED in Congress, moreover, when an event occurred which apparently convinced him that, even if the long, slow path to power in the House had been the only one open to him, it might not be possible for him.

  The speech that Sam Ealy Johnson gave for his son was the last speech he ever made. His heart had been failing for years, and in July, 1937, two months after his son’s election to Congress, he suffered another massive heart attack, and doctors told Rebekah it was just a matter of time. He was taken to the Scott & White Clinic in Temple, Texas, where more modern medical facilities were available than in the Hill Country, and he was kept there, often in an oxygen tent, for the next two months. But when Lyndon returned from Washington during the congressional recess of September and visited his father, Sam asked to be taken home to Johnson City. Lyndon protested, but Sam said, “Give me my breeches, Lyndon, I want to go home where people know when you’re sick and care when you die.” Lyndon checked him out of the hospital, and drove him home, where, on October 23, 1937, twelve days after his sixtieth birthday, Sam Ealy Johnson died.

  The next day he was taken to the Johnson burial ground on the banks of the Pedernales, the only acre left to the Johnsons from the Johnson Ranch that Sam had tried so hard to keep in the family. The burial ground was about a half mile upstream from the house to which he had brought Rebekah when they were first married. It was about a hundred yards from the gully—“the gully big enough to walk elephants in”—that Sam had filled and refilled with soil in a vain attempt to grow cotton.

  He had asked to be carried to the burial ground not in a modern hearse but in an old-fashioned one—in one of the tall hearses with the carved wooden “draperies” covering the side glass that had been used before the invention of the automobile. One had been found in San Marcos—mounted not on a wagon but on the bed of a Model T Ford—and it clattered out of Johnson City and down the side path to the ford across the Pedernales through which Sam had, as a young man with dreams, so often spurred his horse on the way to the Legislature in Austin. Governor Allred was riding, with Secretary of State Ed Clark, in a car behind the hearse; Clark, anxious to curry favor with Lyndon Johnson, had persuaded the Governor to attend. Since the two men had been told so many times—by Lyndon—that his father was only an impoverished drunk, they had thought that the funeral would be poorly attended and that they would be doing the new Congressman a great favor. Therefore, they were surprised when they reached the river crossing. Across the river, the bank of the Pedernales was covered with people as far as the eye could see.

  The cars that had brought these people—pulled up in a long line behind the crowd—were dusty with travel. “Most of the crowd was old people,” Stella Gliddon recalls. “You know, people that Mr. Sam had gotten pensions for. Some of them had come a long way.” One aged widow, so crippled by arthritis that she hadn’t left her house in five years, had insisted that two of her sons carry her out to their car and drive her from their lonely ranch in Marble Falls. Some had come farther. Members of Sam’s little band of legislators had come to say goodbye to the man who had fought beside them for “the People.” One, R. Bouna Ridgway, lived in Dallas. He had heard of Sam Johnson’s death only the previous day and had driven all night—almost 300 hard miles—to be at the funeral of a man he had not seen in years.

  There were uniforms on the riverbank, for Sam Johnson had gotten pensions for veterans of the First World War—no one had ever realized for how many until they saw how many elderly men in khaki were standing stiffly at attention as the tall casket rumbled across the river. And not all the uniforms were khaki; it was on the riverbank that afternoon that Ava Johnson Cox saw for the first time, standing at attention, several old men in shirts and light-blue riding breeches holding “funny-looking” hats, “like a Stetson but not quite,” and realized she was seeing uniforms that had charged up San Juan Hill. And there were uniforms much older even than those of the Rough Riders. Five Confederate veterans had donned their beloved gray uniforms—and pinned to them medals, bright from decades of shining, of the Lost Cause—to honor the man who had managed to secure the meager monthly stipends that had meant so much to them. “Five, I remember the number,” Ava says. “I can see every one in my eye now. You almost never saw those uniforms any more.”

  The service began, of course, with “Shall We Gather at the River,” and the sound of the singing from hundreds of voices carried up and down the lonely Pedernales Valley. And although he cannot remember exactly what was said, one of Allred’s aides was to recall forty years later his astonishment when the minister, during the eulogy, listed Sam Johnson’s accomplishments. “Why, do you know,” the aide said, “he had done a lot in the Legislature. And it was him who had gotten built that road we drove on from Austin that day. I had never heard one word about that. I had thought he was—well, you know, to tell the truth—just some old drunk.” The service ended with a few words from one of Sam’s friends, a rawboned old Texas politician, Railroad Commissioner Lon Smith; the words were taken from Hamlet: “He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.”

  A MOMENT OF TENSION occurred after the service when Sam’s immediate family, alone in the Johnson home, was sitting around the dining-room table with Lyndon, in his father’s chair, disposing of his father’s personal effects. Lying on the table was Sam’s heavy gold watch and chain, his most prized possession. Lyndon’s three sisters and his brother, Sam Houston Johnson, had said hardly a word, but when Lyndon reached out and started to take the watch for himself, Lucia, the youngest and meekest of the sisters, put her hand on his arm and stopped him. “No,” she said. “You can’t have the watch. That belongs to Sam Houston now. Daddy wanted him to have it. We all know that.” Rebekah took the watch and handed it to Lyndon’s younger brother.

  Sam Houston Johnson was to write, “It was an embarrassing moment for Lyndon, and I felt sorry for him. As a matter of fact, I wanted him to have it because he was the older brother—but I didn’t press the point for fear of antagonizing my sisters.” On Christmas morning, 1958, more than twenty years later, Sam Houston wrapped the watch and gave it to Lyndon. He recalls telling his brother: “I want you to have the watch. Daddy really wanted you to have it. Anyway, I’m liable to leave it somewhere.”

  Several years later, Johnson’s staff began collecting family mementoes for the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library. Johnson, who had a keen awareness of his place in history, had carefully saved hundreds of items, including some very unlikely ones. But his father’s watch could not be found.

  IF HE DID NOT INHERIT—at least not immediately—his father’s watch, Lyndon Johnson believed he had inherited something else.

  He had always been so deeply aware of his remarkable physical resemblance to his tall, gawky, big-eared, big-nosed father, and his father’s habit of grabbing a listener’s lapel. A long-standing beli
ef within the Johnson family held that Johnson men had weak hearts and died young. Now his father was dead, of heart disease, at the age of sixty.

  To the heredity and humiliation which had shaped Lyndon Johnson and had spurred him harshly forward was added the spur of fear. He entered one of his periods of deep depression, one that lasted for several months. It was punctuated, as were periods of crisis throughout his life, by illness; twice in a span of a few months he was hospitalized with what is variously described as “bronchitis,” “pneumonia” or “nervous exhaustion.” During this period, when friends attempted to cheer him up by discussing with him the topic which was ordinarily of deepest interest to him—his future—Johnson, whenever reference was made to the possibility that he might have to make his career in the House of Representatives, would reply, in a low voice: “Too slow. Too slow.” Rayburn had begun trudging along that path early—he had been only thirty years old when first elected to Congress in 1912, scarcely older than Johnson was now. He had become Majority Leader in 1937—when he was fifty-five; he was still not Speaker. Sam Johnson had died when he was sixty. And what if the Democrats should lose control of the House before Rayburn’s chance came? The path to power in the House—the silence, the obeisance—was not too narrow for Lyndon Johnson, who could follow surefootedly the narrowest political road. But it was too long. He had managed to break out of the trap of the Hill Country; he might not be able to escape the trap of the seniority system before he died.

  And then, in 1939, Sam Ealy Johnson’s younger brother George Desha Johnson—Lyndon’s schoolteacher uncle who had gotten him a job at Sam Houston High and with whom Lyndon had boarded while he was teaching there—suffered a massive heart attack. He died a few months later—at the age of fifty-seven.

  WHILE THE SENIORITY SYSTEM might deny a junior Congressman the opportunity to play a significant role in the committee structure of the House of Representatives, his very membership in the House provided him with an opportunity to play a different type of role. Unable to contribute significantly to legislation, he nonetheless possessed the power to bring an issue to the attention of the nation, and to keep that issue before the nation.

  Muffled within the institutional structure of Capitol Hill, his voice would be magnified if he chose to address himself to the nation instead of the House. When he spoke in the well of the House, the reporters sitting above him in the press gallery were a sounding board through which his views could reach an entire nation. A Congressman didn’t even need the well; the very corridors of Congress, where reporters take down a Congressman’s comment on a major development, could be a sounding board. Even a mimeograph machine could be a national megaphone—if the machine was in a Congressman’s office; “Any House member can make the news … simply by getting a press handout to the [press] gallery early in the morning,” Richard Boiling was to say. “When a major subject is on top of the news … and the wire services are hurrying to assemble a reaction story, any provocative comment from a member of Congress is likely to get scooped up and given a sentence or two.” All a Congressman had to do was speak, and he would be a spokesman. Proof of this fact was readily available to Lyndon Johnson in the careers of three Congressmen with whom he was particularly well acquainted: proof from the past, for one junior Congressman who had declined to stay silent, who had refused “to be relegated to that lockjawed ostracism” because he was the voice of 200,000 persons who needed a voice that would be heard, had been Sam Rayburn; and proof from the present, in the persons of Wright Patman, his father’s friend, who had risen to influence in the House on stands that his father would have applauded; and of Maury Maverick, whose district adjoined Johnson’s; 1937, the year Johnson came to Congress, was the year of peak influence of Maury and his “Mavericks,” thirty-five young Congressmen who met every week in Renkel’s Cafeteria to discuss strategies for confounding the House’s conservative leadership and advancing causes which, as the Washington Post commented, “would have been labeled Bryanesque twenty-five years ago”; Maverick himself had become a national rallying point for such causes. Congressmen such as Rayburn and Patman and Maverick—and, during the Thirties, other Congressmen such as Tom Amlie of Wisconsin and Fiorello La Guardia of New York—had become representatives not just of a district but of causes that affected the welfare of a nation; they had focused America’s attention upon significant issues, had prepared the climate for the passage, if not immediately, then eventually, of significant legislation; had become, by introducing what was, in effect, national legislation, national legislators. This course carried with it rewards for a Congressman who cared about causes.

  Such a course was not invariably quixotic even in terms of immediate results. Anyone who thought a young Congressman’s cause was lost before it began to live had only to remember that Sam Rayburn had become the “Railroad Legislator,” with significant bills to his credit, by the end of his second term in Congress. Johnson, moreover, had had an opportunity to see this with his own eyes during his years as a congressional secretary, for those years had been the years of Fiorello La Guardia, tiny, swarthy, black-sombreroed, tough enough to face down Garner in the chair and make him like it; La Guardia who fought “the Interests” on behalf of the rural as well as the urban poor (“Fight, farmers, fight. Fight for your homes and your children. Your names will live with Paul Revere”), and who had, in 1932, succeeded in having outlawed (in the Norris–La Guardia Act) the hated yellow-dog contract. Liberal—and radical—stands might eventually destroy a Maverick whose San Antonio constituency, largely military men and Catholics, was conservative. But Lyndon Johnson could have taken such stands with no such fear, for in his district, that stronghold of the People’s Party, the New Deal’s popularity never waned. Johnson might, in fact, have been expected to take such stands; his victory, after all, had been based on such stands; he had shouted “Roosevelt, Roosevelt, Roosevelt” and promised to support future as well as present New Deal proposals.

  Taking stands was not, however, a course which Johnson adopted. He did not take one, in fact, even on the issue on which he had based his campaign. After Johnson took his oath as Congressman on May 13, Maverick had shouted: “Mr. Speaker, the gentleman just sworn in, Mr. Lyndon Johnson, supported the President’s judiciary plan and was overwhelmingly elected!” Johnson himself said nothing about the President’s plan at the time or—so far as can be determined—at any other time while in Washington. By May 13, Supreme Court-packing had been effectively doomed by congressional opposition. But the fight on the plan was far from over—the Senate Judiciary Committee’s crucial 10-8 vote against it would not come until May 18, and maneuvering over the terms of a compromise measure would continue for another two months. But Johnson, who had asked his district to send him to Washington to show support of the President’s plan, offered not a single public word of support himself. As for other causes, Johnson’s overall record on the introduction of national legislation—legislation which would have an effect outside his own district—was equally striking. Lyndon Johnson became a Congressman in 1937. He did not introduce a national bill in 1937—or in 1938, 1939, or 1940. When he introduced one in 1941—on December 9, two days after Pearl Harbor—it was a bill to create a job for himself by merging the National Youth Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps into a single agency which would train youths for war work in factories and to whose chairmanship he hoped President Roosevelt would appoint him, because of his NYA experience. Since he did not introduce a national bill in 1942, that single bill—an attempt to increase his personal power—was the only piece of national legislation he proposed during his first six years in Congress. Was this a function of inexperience? He was hardly more active in this regard at the end of his House career than at the beginning. He introduced one “national” bill in 1943, and two in 1945—but none in 1946, none in 1947, and only one in 1948. During his more than eleven years in the House of Representatives, he introduced only five bills that would affect the country as a whole.
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br />   As striking as the paucity of such bills was their sponsor’s effort on their behalf. With a single exception, there was no effort. During his eleven years in the House, only once did Lyndon Johnson appear in support of a national bill he had introduced before the committee to which it had been referred—and, with that one exception, no national bill he introduced received serious (or, indeed, even pro forma) consideration from any House committee. Of the five pieces of legislation of interest to more than his own district which, in eleven years, he placed in the House hopper, four were pieces of paper introduced pro forma—without genuine interest and enthusiasm from their sponsor. The one fight he made, for a 1943 bill aimed at curbing absenteeism in war plants by requiring the drafting of any worker absent too often, ended in fiasco; he apparently introduced it, in his own Naval Affairs Committee, without the courtesy of consulting with the chairman of the committee that had jurisdiction over such measures, the House Labor Committee. The Naval Affairs Committee reported the measure out favorably, but the angry chairman of the Labor Committee asked the Rules Committee, which controls the flow of legislation to the floor, not to let this bill reach the floor; an embarrassed Carl Vinson had to admit that he had assumed—incorrectly—that the Labor Committee had surrendered jurisdiction; and the bill died in the Rules Committee. During his eleven years as a Congressman, therefore, no national bill introduced by Lyndon Johnson that would have affected the people of the United States became a law of the United States.

  He didn’t introduce legislation himself—and he wouldn’t fight for legislation introduced by others.