The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  He wouldn’t fight publicly. He didn’t write laws—and he didn’t write speeches, at least not speeches to be delivered in Washington. The speeches that the brilliant Henderson kept turning out were delivered only on Johnson’s trips home to the district. This was a dramatic departure from the usual practice among Congressmen, who were allowed merely to insert their speeches into the Congressional Record without bothering to read them on the floor of the House. All that was required—under the House rule allowing members virtually unlimited freedom to “revise and extend” their remarks in the Record—was that a member read the opening words of a speech, and hand it to a clerk for reprinting in the Record. Because anything printed in the Record can be reprinted at government expense, and then mailed at government expense under the franking privilege, Congressmen used the right to “revise and extend” to have tens of thousands of copies of their statements reprinted and mailed to their constituents, thereby gaining free publicity and creating the impression of deep involvement in national issues. The Record was crammed with speeches never spoken on the floor. But, although Johnson made maximum use of other avenues of publicity, very few of the remarks “extended” were extended by him. Entire years went by in which he did not use the device even once.*

  His record in regard to “real” speeches—talks of more than a paragraph or two in length that were actually delivered in the House—was even more striking.

  On August 8, 1941, after weeks of prodding by Sam Rayburn, who felt it was time, and more than time, for Johnson to raise his voice in the House, Johnson stepped into the well of the House to advocate the extension of the Selective Service Act. The date was noteworthy. He had been a Congressman for four years. With the exception of a brief memorial tribute to Albert Sidney Burleson when Burleson died in November, 1937, this was the first speech he had made.

  He didn’t make another one for eighteen months. Rising then to argue for his absenteeism bill, he could say, “Mr. Speaker, in the four terms that I have served in this House I have seldom asked your indulgence.” After the absenteeism fight, he didn’t make another speech for almost another three years. Entire years went by without Lyndon Johnson addressing the House even once.† In fact, until 1948, when the necessities of his campaign for the United States Senate changed his methods, he had, during eleven years in Congress, delivered a total of ten speeches—less than one a year.

  He wouldn’t fight in the well of the House—and he wouldn’t fight on the floor. His demeanor during debates—during the give-and-take argumentation about legislation—was noteworthy. Imitating it, his colleague Helen Gahagan Douglas of California depicts a person sitting slouched far down in a chair, his head in one hand; “He looked the picture of boredom, slumped in his chair with his eyes half-closed,” she says. And he seldom stayed long. “He never spoke in the House, you know, except on rare, rare occasions.” And, Mrs. Douglas adds, “He didn’t spend much time listening to others in the House.” He might sit for a while, “the picture of boredom,” and “then suddenly he’d jump to his feet, nervous … restless, as if he couldn’t bear it another minute. He might stop to speak to some member on the floor of the House or to the Speaker. … Then he’d leave.” As he departed, “loping off the floor with that great stride of his as though he was on some Texas plain,” she says, “he always gave the impression of someone in a hurry.”

  The “Mavericks” did a lot of fighting on the floor. When Johnson arrived in Washington, they expected him to enroll in their ranks—a not unnatural expectation, since they had read about this man who had “shouted Roosevelt, Roosevelt, Roosevelt,” and had won by supporting the President on the Supreme Court-packing issue. Roosevelt was their hero and the President’s causes their causes, and Maverick had assured them that this young man whom he said he knew well held the same views as they. In fact, Johnson enrolled for a time—for several weeks, he attended the dinners at Renkel’s. But then he stopped attending, and the Mavericks found that if he held their views, he would not argue for them. Not that he would argue against them. Says one of them, Edouard V. M. Izac of California: “He just simply was not especially interested in general legislation that came to the floor of the House. Some of us were on the floor all the time, fighting for liberal causes. But he stayed away from the floor, and while he was there, he was very, very silent.” And Izac’s evaluation—which is echoed by others among Johnson’s colleagues—is documented, quite dramatically, by the record of Johnson’s participation in House discussions and debates. The record is almost non-existent. Whole years went by in which Johnson did not rise even once to make a point of order, or any other point, not to ask or answer a question, not to support or attack a bill under discussion, not to participate, by so much as a single word, in an entire year’s worth of floor proceedings in the House.*

  His attitude toward comments that would be made public through the press was equally notable. He was not one of the Congressmen who sought out reporters to comment on some national issue. On the contrary, he would go to unusual lengths to avoid having to reveal his opinion. A reporter would be standing in a corridor, soliciting comments from passing Congressmen. Johnson would start to turn into that corridor, see the reporter, whirl on his heel, and hastily walk back the way he had come.

  If he didn’t fight in public, would he fight in private? Some of the most effective Congressmen, while rather silent in the well of the House or on the floor (although the Congressional Record indicates that few were as silent as Johnson), are active in the aisle at the rear of the House Chamber, or in its cloakrooms. Standing in that aisle, one foot up on the brass rail that separates the aisle from the members’ seats, these “brass-railers” quietly buttonhole fellow members to argue for or against legislation.

  Lyndon Johnson was not one of these Congressmen. Not that he was silent in the rear aisle or in the cloakrooms. He was friendly, gregarious—could, his fellow members agree, even be said to talk a lot.

  But he didn’t say anything. Congressmen now observed what classmates had once observed: that, while he might be speaking very volubly during a conversation on a controversial issue, he wouldn’t take a position on the issue—or, indeed, say anything of a substantive nature. He tried to avoid specifics, and if pinned down, would say what the other person wanted to hear. He did it very well—as discussions with his congressional colleagues reveal. If the Congressman was a liberal, he believes that Lyndon Johnson, as a Congressman, was a liberal. Says the staunchly liberal Mrs. Douglas: “We agreed on so many of the big issues. He basically agreed with the liberals.” But if the Congressman was a conservative, he says that Lyndon Johnson, as a Congressman, was a conservative. Says the reactionary upstate New York Republican Sterling Cole: “Politically, if we disagreed, it wasn’t apparent to me. Not at all.” Great issues came before the House in these years; 1938, for example, was the year in which it was embroiled in bitter battles over President Roosevelt’s proposal to reorganize the executive branch and create new Cabinet departments to facilitate the meeting of new social needs—“the dictator bill,” angry Congressmen called it. 1938 was also the year of the great battle over the wages-and-hours bill, the proposal to free American workers from the bondage of the early industrial age. It was the year of the battle over the proposal to extend and make more meaningful Social Security benefits. And, most significantly of all, 1938, the year in which the New Deal had to face its own recession, was the year of the great debate in Washington over whether to fight that recession with mammoth new spending programs, or whether a balanced budget—the balanced budget which the President himself so devoutly wished for—was more important: an issue whose resolution was to affect the fundamentals of American life for years, if not decades, to come. Lyndon Johnson did not participate—neither with legislation nor with debate, not on the well of the House or on the floor or in its cloakrooms or committees—in these battles. He had shouted “Roosevelt, Roosevelt, Roosevelt” to get to Congress; in Congress, he shouted nothing, said nothing—st
ood for nothing. Not only was he not in the van of any cause, he was not in the ranks, either. Lyndon Johnson would later be called a legislative genius. A legislator is a maker of laws. During the eleven years that Lyndon Johnson served in the lawmaking body that is the House of Representatives, few of its 435 members had less to do with the making of its laws than he.

  Some of the more astute of his colleagues felt that they understood the reason for his silence. Mrs. Douglas, who spent a lot of time with him, speculates on his reasons for acting this way. One that she suggests is “caution”: “Was it just caution? Just that he didn’t want to have a lot of his words come back at him—a more cautious way of working in the Congress than that of many others? … He was witty, he would tell stories, he was humorous. But he was always aware of being responsible for what he said. He was always aware that what he said might be repeated or remembered— even years later. And he didn’t want someone to come back years later, and say, ‘I remember when you said …’” Watching him talk so much—and say so little—Mrs. Douglas began to realize, she says, that Lyndon Johnson was “strong.” In Washington, she says, “everyone tried to find out where you stood. But he had great inner control. He could talk so much—and no one ever knew exactly where he stood.”

  Even years later. By keeping silent, Johnson might, of course, simply be following a proven path to power in the House of Representatives. It was the path that Rayburn had taken—and Rayburn was in power now.

  But they were not on the same path. Power in the House was the power Rayburn wanted; the lone chair atop the triple dais was the goal that iron-willed man had set for himself as a boy in a barn. That was his only goal; he had been asked once to run for the Senate, all but assured of success. He had refused to make the race. Although the immense power he wielded as Majority Leader and, after September, 1940, as Speaker, would have allowed him, had he wished to do so, to wield considerable statewide power in Texas, he declined every opportunity to do so. The only interest he ever displayed in the NYA was to obtain Lyndon Johnson’s appointment as its head; the only interest he ever displayed in the PWA was to have it build a dam—the Denison Dam—in his own district; he displayed no interest at all in other statewide organizations the New Deal was creating in Texas—the WPA, for example, or the Rural Electrification Administration; most of the big businessmen who wielded so much statewide power in Texas couldn’t even get an appointment with him on their trips to Washington. Only the House itself mattered.

  But power in the House was not the power at which Johnson was aiming; the triple dais was not high enough for him. The difference between the aims of the older man and the younger had been demonstrated even before Johnson became a Congressman, when, as Kleberg’s secretary, he had placed himself at the service of businessmen who were not from Kleberg’s district. Had not practically his first move as Congressman—made while he was still in his hospital bed—been to keep the statewide NYA under his control? And now were not the letters from his office going out not just to addresses in his district but to addresses in Houston, and Dallas, and El Paso as well? A House seat had been an indispensable staging area on the long road he saw before him; he had no choice but to come back a Congressman. But the House seat was only a staging area; it was not the destination at the end of that long road. He had needed the seat; he didn’t want to stay in it long. So his silence was not for the sake of power in the House; if he was keeping deliberately silent, it was for a different reason. Who could foresee the turnings of so long a road? No matter how safe a particular stand might seem now, no matter how politically wise, that stand might come back to haunt him someday. No matter what he said now, no matter how intelligent a remark might now seem, he might one day be sorry he had made it.

  And so he said nothing.

  HIS STANDING on Capitol Hill—outside the Texas delegation—was, moreover, not improving.

  For a while, he was very popular with his fellow Congressmen, for the same reasons he was popular with the young New Dealers: not only because of his charm, his storytelling ability, his desire to ingratiate and his skill in doing so, but because, in George Brown’s words, “He was a leader of men. Johnson had the knack of always appealing to a fellow about someone he didn’t like. If he was talking to Joe, and Joe didn’t like Jim, he’d say he didn’t like Jim, too—that was his leadership, that was his knack.” And, of course, for a while, congressional liberals thought he was one of them, while congressional conservatives thought he was one of them.

  But some of them began to catch on. Liberals found it was useless to ask him to speak in support of a bill in which they were interested. Conservatives found it impossible to persuade him to speak in support of their legislation. The judgment implied in Izac’s statement that Johnson was “very, very silent” on the floor came to be a widespread judgment among Johnson’s colleagues. Pragmatism was of course not unknown on Capitol Hill; for many Congressmen it was a way of life—caution was only common sense. But, in the opinion of more and more of his fellows, Lyndon Johnson’s pragmatism and caution went beyond the norm: colleagues committed to causes began to regard him with something akin to scorn.

  And then, of course, there was the aspect of his personality that had been so noticeable since his boyhood on the vacant lots of Johnson City, where, if he couldn’t pitch, he would take his ball and go home—the quality which led one Johnson City companion to say, “If he couldn’t lead, he didn’t care much about playing.” That aspect had been noticeable in Washington, too. “He couldn’t stand not being somebody—just could not stand it,” Estelle Harbin had said. Lyndon Johnson could not endure being only one of a crowd; he needed—with a compelling need—to lead, and not merely to lead but to dominate, to bend others to his will.

  At cocktail parties, he could hold the stage when the other guests were young New Dealers, and even for a time, by the force of his personality, when the guests included older men with more power. But in power-obsessed Washington, when older, more powerful men were present, he couldn’t hold the stage for long. And on Capitol Hill, where the pecking order was so clearly and firmly established, and he was near the bottom, he was able to hold attention much less. His stories, vivid though they were, commanded much less attention in a congressional cloakroom than in a Georgetown living room.

  He wanted to give advice. It was good advice—he had a rare talent not only for politics but for organization, and Congressmen were continually searching for ways to improve the organization of their offices, a skill of which he was the master. But few of his colleagues wanted advice from a junior colleague. He wanted to give lectures—pontificating in the cloakroom or back of the rail as he had pontificated in the Dodge Hotel basement. But his fellow Congressmen resented his dogmatic, overbearing tone at least as strongly as his fellow congressional secretaries had resented it. His skills at manipulating men were useless without at least a modicum of power to back them up, and he possessed no power at all. Says James Van Zandt of Pennsylvania: “When he wanted something, he really went after it. He would say: ‘Now, Goddammit, Jimmy, I helped you on this, and I want you to help me on this.’” And, Van Zandt adds, “Johnson kept asking for favors, and he simply didn’t have that many to give in return.” He tried too hard—much too hard—to trade on what minor “help” he had given. “You can do those things once or twice,” Van Zandt says. “He did them too frequently. People would get irritated.”

  The pattern which had emerged in the Little Congress (and, before that, at San Marcos) was repeated in the Big Congress. The older men to whom he was so deferential were fond of Lyndon Johnson. Among his contemporaries, those whom he needed and to whom he was also deferential—Rowe and Corcoran, for example—were also fond of him. Another few—very few—of his contemporaries in Congress were fond of him, most of them unassertive men such as Poage and Van Zandt. But the feeling of others was quite different. Says O. C. Fisher, whose Texas district adjoined Johnson’s Tenth: “He had a way of getting along with the leaders, and he did
n’t bother much with the small fry. And let me tell you, the small fry didn’t mind. They didn’t want much to do with him, either.” Even Van Zandt, one of his admirers, says: “People were critical of him because he was too ambitious, too forceful, too pushy. Some people didn’t like him.” As he walked through the House Dining Room, the resentment that followed him did not come only from members of the Texas delegation. Says Lucas: “Guys [from other states] would come [in] and sit down” at a table near where Johnson was sitting; they would greet all their fellow members nearby, except him. “And he would get up and say, ‘Well, Joe, why in hell didn’t you speak to me?’ Well, they hadn’t spoken to him because they didn’t like him. They wouldn’t put up with him.” The situation was summed up in a symbolic gesture—a shrinking away. Lyndon Johnson still practiced his habit of grasping a man’s lapel with one hand and putting his other arm around the man’s shoulders, holding him close while staring into his eyes and talking directly into his face. Some of his fellow Congressmen didn’t mind him doing this, even liked having him do it. Recalls Van Zandt: “He would put his hand on my shoulder and say, ‘Now, look, Jimmy …’ I liked him a lot. You always felt relaxed in his presence.” But others—many others—did mind. They would draw back from his hand, shrug away from his arm. And sometimes, if he didn’t take the hint, they would get angry. Once he took a Congressman’s lapel in his hand, and the Congressman knocked his hand away. Without power to back it up, his manner of dealing with his colleagues earned him not the power he craved, but only unpopularity.

  His role on the Naval Affairs Committee could hardly have added to his enjoyment of life in Congress. He and Warren Magnuson, a dashing bachelor who sat in the next chair in the committee’s lower horseshoe, had, according to one of Carl Vinson’s aides, discovered “how to play up to” the chairman by telling him “stories”—stories with a sexual tinge: “humorous dirty jokes and the details of amorous escapades, which he enjoyed with real vicarious pleasure.” Devoted to his invalid wife, Vinson, Magnuson says, “went home early each afternoon to take care of his wife, and he never invited anyone to visit him. … He was a recluse.” But the two young Congressmen began dropping in on him, telling him their “stories,” and, Magnuson says, “Before long we were in solidly with the Admiral.” Fond though he may have been of them, however, they were still only ensigns on a very tight ship—as Johnson was constantly, and painfully, being reminded. Occasionally, during the questioning of a witness, he would essay a small witticism. “Is the Gentleman from Texas finished?” Vinson would demand dryly. The gavel would crash down. “Let’s proceed,” the chairman would say. Johnson had become fascinated with tape recorders, which were, in 1939 and 1940, large, clumsy devices just beginning to come into public use. One morning, he brought a tape recorder into the committee room before the hearing began, and set it up at his seat, running the wire over to a microphone which he placed on the witness table. Vinson arrived, slouched down in his seat, lit up a cigar, and then, just as he was about to gavel the hearing to order, noticed the recorder.