The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  ROOSEVELT DECIDED to attack Garner in his own state. There was reason to think this bold tactic might have success. While the reactionary “interests” which ran Texas were solidly against the President, the state’s people had, at least in the past, been overwhelmingly behind him; they had given him a seven-to-one margin over Landon in 1936. Even if he could not defeat Garner in the state’s 1940 Democratic primary, might he not at least poll a respectable number of votes against him, enough to embarrass him? And being forced to fight in his own stronghold might keep Garner on the defensive.

  If he was to fight Garner in Texas, however, Roosevelt needed a man in Texas—someone to direct his strategy in the state, preferably someone prominent enough throughout the state to serve as a rallying point for New Deal enthusiasm. The list of potential candidates, however, was very short. A Senator would have been ideal, but one, Tom Connally, had earned the President’s bitter enmity by opposing the court-packing proposal. And while the other—mild-mannered Morris Sheppard—was a loyal New Dealer, he put personal loyalties above political, and his personal loyalty belonged to the man who had come to Congress at virtually the same time as he, thirty-six years before. Among the state’s Congressmen, Maury Maverick would, a year earlier, have been a logical choice, because his willingness to speak out for liberal causes had not only endeared him to Roosevelt but had made him a statewide name. Another Congressman, W. D. McFarlane of Graham, Sam Johnson’s onetime Populist ally in the State Legislature, was an eager volunteer for the job. On the Texas leg of Roosevelt’s 1938 cross-country “purge trip,” the trip on which Garner had refused to meet him, the President had praised Maverick and McFarlane. But despite the praise, by 1939 both Maverick and McFarlane were no longer in Congress, having lost their congressional seats to conservative opponents.* Garner had had his San Antonio friends support Maverick in 1936; in 1938, the Vice President had quietly passed the word that he wanted Maverick “crushed”—and crushed he was, by Paul Kilday, who stated that his goal was “the elimination from Congress of one overwhelmingly shown to be the friend and ally of Communism.”

  There was another obvious choice: Sam Rayburn. But this was the Sam Rayburn of whom it was said, “If he was your friend, he was your friend forever. He would be with you—always. The tougher the going, the more certain you could be that when you looked around, Sam Rayburn would be standing there with you.” In a contest between Roosevelt and Garner, Rayburn’s preference was not for Garner but for the man whose picture stood on his desk at home in Bonham. Garner was his friend, but Roosevelt was his hero. Moreover, the philosophy of the New Deal was his philosophy; Garner’s was not. “There is much more of contrast than of similarity between the two Texans,” wrote Raymond Moley, who knew them both well, and the contrast was deeper than the differences in their bank balances, or the fact that Rayburn would not accept a free pass from the railroads, while Garner rode back and forth to Texas in the luxuriously furnished private car of the president of the Missouri-Kansas-Pacific line. As Moley explained, Garner “is a big business man” with few “prejudices against financial power” and “limited sympathy for the underprivileged. Rayburn is more likely to suffer for those who fail.” Garner’s opposition to the New Deal had, Moley says, “opened a fissure” between him and Rayburn. Furthermore, Rayburn had no doubt that Roosevelt would eventually decide to run again—and he had no doubt that if Roosevelt ran, he would crush any other candidate. Garner’s campaign for the nomination would not only be one in which Rayburn did not believe, it was, Rayburn knew, bound to be a losing fight. But while Roosevelt was his hero, Garner was his friend—had been his friend for a quarter of a century. More, Garner had been his patron. During Rayburn’s difficult early years in Congress, it was Garner who had given him the helping hand that enabled him to start climbing the House ladder. In 1937, when Rayburn had been in danger of losing his fight to be Majority Leader (and next in line for his yearned-for Speakership), Garner had rushed back from Texas to throw his weight on the scales and tip them in Rayburn’s favor. (Rayburn’s reply, when a reporter had asked about the propriety of the Vice President’s intervention in a congressional matter, was instructive: “In the first place,” he said, “Jack Garner is my friend.”) When, in 1939, Garner asked him to manage his campaign for the 1940 Democratic presidential nomination, he agreed. And once he had enlisted in Garner’s cause, it didn’t matter how tough the going was. Attempting to pry Rayburn away from his fellow Texan, “White House sources” raised the possibility that, despite Rayburn’s leadership of New Deal causes, he might not be the President’s choice to replace Speaker Bankhead, whose heart disease was rapidly worsening. This threat to Rayburn’s long-held dream was a grave one—Roosevelt’s potential in Capitol Hill succession battles had been demonstrated by his success in winning the Senate Majority Leadership for Alben Barkley—but Woodrow Wilson could have told Roosevelt what Rayburn’s response to a presidential threat would be. Previously, Rayburn had been somewhat circumspect in his remarks on the presidential race. After the first White House leaks appeared, he issued a more pointed statement: “I am for that outstanding Texan and liberal Democrat, John N. Garner, for the presidential nomination in 1940, believing that if elected he will make the country a great President.” Roosevelt’s reaction to Rayburn’s defiance was revealed a month later. Rayburn’s district held a celebration in his honor each August. “In previous years,” Stephen Early wrote in a memo to the President, “you have sent messages to Sam Rayburn on the occasion of the celebration. … Ordinarily I would take care of this without troubling you but in light of Rayburn’s recent declarations, I think it is best to leave the decision to you.” Roosevelt’s decision was not to send a message. During succeeding months—as long as Garner was in the presidential race, in fact—Roosevelt would not even autograph a picture for Rayburn; when, for example, Rayburn’s secretary, Alla Clary, sent a photograph taken by one of Rayburn’s friends to the White House for a routine presidential autograph, Missy LeHand returned it unsigned.

  LYNDON JOHNSON’S APPLICATION for the post of leader of the Roosevelt forces in Texas was at first not considered seriously. A junior Congressman was hardly the ideal leader of the presidential campaign in a pivotal state. Nor did Johnson enjoy White House entrée at this time—a fact which had been forcibly brought home to him during the President’s “purge” trip of July, 1938. He was not on the initial list of Texas Congressmen invited aboard the President’s train; only a last-minute invitation wangled for him en route by the friendly McIntyre got him aboard. Once aboard, his name was added to the list of Congressmen on whom Roosevelt bestowed public praise, but not to the list of those allowed a private few minutes with FDR—an omission which must have provided a bitter contrast to the hours of intimate conversation with the President he had enjoyed on that other train trip through Texas just a year before.* The Spring of 1939, when the initial jockeying over the Garner nomination was taking place, was the time when Johnson could not elicit a presidential response even to a letter.

  But as Spring turned to Summer, Johnson found a role he could play. Because of the leverage its committee chairmen wielded with Congressmen from other states, the Texas congressional delegation was the power base for Garner’s presidential bid. The canniness of the delegation’s veteran members—augmented, of course, by the political wisdom, and cash, of its “associate member,” Roy Miller—and the nationwide political contacts built up during decades of dealing on Capitol Hill, made the delegation in a sense the general staff of the Garner campaign as well; at its weekly luncheon meetings—and whenever, in fact, Texas Congressmen got together—the Vice President’s strategy was discussed and planned. The White House needed to know what was going on in those meetings. It needed a spy in the Texas ranks.

  Lyndon Johnson volunteered for this mission. No formal enlistment was necessary; he simply began to relay information to members of the White House staff, primarily to Corcoran, and occasionally to Rowe—with his customary assiduity. �
�He was working at it, I’ll tell you that,” Rowe says. Johnson was playing a dangerous game, Rowe says, “and sooner or later they would find out, but he could see over the horizon, and he could see that Garner’s day was over, and he was playing with our crowd instead of the Garner crowd.” Obtaining information on the discussions in the Texas delegation had been “very hard,” Rowe says, but it suddenly became much easier. “If we wanted to know something: ‘Call Lyndon Johnson.’”

  In July, he took on a new role. There was one asset that only he among the Texas Congressmen possessed: Charles Marsh’s friendship. Texas newspapers were overwhelmingly anti-Roosevelt, but Marsh’s six Texas newspapers, including the influential paper in the state capital, were for him. The publisher of six pro-Roosevelt Texas dailies had very little difficulty getting in to see the President, and when Marsh requested an appointment, he asked if he could bring Johnson along. On July 14, 1939, “Pa” Watson sent an aide a note: “Put Mr. Charles Marsh down for an appointment with the President on Wednesday. Mr. Marsh is the owner of a large string of papers supporting the President in Texas.” And on the note, someone—either Watson or the aide—added in handwriting: “And Representative Lyndon Johnson.” At this meeting, Johnson impressed the President with his enthusiasm for the Third Term, and with his political acumen. Something else was at work as well. Marsh and Roosevelt had been acquainted since the President’s days as Governor of New York, and they had not gotten along well, at least in part because of Marsh’s imperious personality, which allowed him to show deference not even to a Governor. At the White House meeting, strain was again evident. But Marsh, the enthusiastic New Dealer, wanted to support Roosevelt, and Roosevelt wanted his support, and a buffer to make the relationship smoother was available—and Lyndon Johnson thus became the link to the most influential pro-Roosevelt organ in Texas.

  Then, two weeks later, came an opportunity for Johnson to dramatize—vividly—his loyalty to the President.

  During a bitter hearing on proposed amendments that would weaken wages-and-hours legislation, John L. Lewis exploded to the House Labor Committee: “The genesis of this campaign against labor … is not hard to find. [It] emanates from a labor-baiting, poker-playing, whiskey-drinking, evil old man whose name is Garner.” As committee members gasped, the lion-maned CIO leader, pounding the table until the ashtrays jumped, went on: “Some gentlemen may rise in horror and say, ‘Why, Mr. Lewis has made a personal attack on Mr. Garner.’ Yes, I make a personal attack on Mr. Garner for what he is doing, because Garner’s knife is searching for the quivering, pulsating heart of labor.”

  With reporters racing through Capitol corridors searching for comment, Sam Rayburn summoned the Texas delegation to his office to issue a formal resolution denying the accuracy of Lewis’ description of the Vice President. But Roosevelt and his advisors did not want that description denied; as Kenneth G. Crawford wrote in the Nation, “If they know the church-going public, its reaction will be: where there’s so much smoke there must be some firewater.” Roosevelt himself was shortly to give emphasis to Garner’s drinking with his remark at a Cabinet meeting, “I see that the Vice President has thrown his bottle—I mean his hat—into the ring.” Telephone calls were hastily placed to the office of their secret ally within the Texas delegation, Lyndon Johnson. Corcoran was later to say: “Everybody called him. I called him. Ickes called him. … There wasn’t any doubt about what the Old Man wanted.”

  By the time Johnson arrived in Rayburn’s office, a resolution had already been prepared stating, among other points, that Garner was neither a heavy drinker nor unfriendly to labor. Johnson refused to sign it. There ensued what the Washington Post later called “considerable discussion.” Rayburn finally suggested that he take Johnson into his office and talk to him, but Johnson apparently stood his ground.

  The resolution that was finally read to a cheering House by Representative Luther A. Johnson of Corsicana—who said that it had been endorsed by the entire Texas delegation—did not contain a specific repudiation of the allegations about labor and whiskey. It said: “We who know him [Garner] best cannot refrain from expressing our deep resentment and indignation at this unwarranted and unjustified attack on his private and public life. The Texas delegation has complete confidence in his honesty, integrity and ability.”

  Johnson made the most of his role in this episode. He described it to Roosevelt personally, who “chuckled” as he related it to Harold Ickes. Ickes was later to recount in his Secret Diary what Roosevelt said.

  Some grandiloquent resolutions had been drafted in advance and every member of the delegation was asked to sign on the dotted line. Among other things these resolutions declared that Garner was not a whiskey drinker and that he was not unfriendly to labor. The only voice raised in opposition was that of Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson, of Austin. Johnson said that he could not subscribe to any such language and that the delegation would look foolish if such a statement were issued because everyone knew that Garner was a heavy drinker and that he was bitterly opposed to labor. The argument went on for some two hours with Johnson maintaining his ground. Then Sam Rayburn suggested that he take Johnson into his office and talk to him. Of course everyone thought that Rayburn would administer a spanking. However, Johnson still continued to hold his ground and the crestfallen Rayburn led him back to the caucus where he said that he hadn’t been able to do anything with him. It was agreed that unless every member signed the resolutions there was no point in issuing them. So the task was given to Johnson to draft such resolutions as he would be willing to sign.

  As Johnson recounted the episode to other New Dealers high and low, his extraordinary ability as a storyteller was never in better evidence. “Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson was in to see me,” Ickes wrote in his diary. “He told me the very vivid story of the meeting of the Texas delegation. … The pressure on Johnson was terrific. Sam Rayburn lost his temper. At one point he said to Johnson: ‘Lyndon, I am looking you right in the eye,’ and Johnson replied: ‘And I am looking you right back in the eye.’ Johnson says that he kept his temper and that after it was all over, Rayburn apologized to him. However, Johnson refused to move.”

  Johnson’s depiction of his role in the delegation may have been somewhat exaggerated. On one point, Roosevelt had definitely received a false impression: Johnson was not “given the task” of drafting the final resolution; it was drawn up by Luther Johnson and two other senior members of the delegation, Milton H. West and Charles L. South. And in any case, the resolution—which Johnson did, after all, sign along with the other members—is certainly not a weak statement. His confrontation with Rayburn was apparently not as dramatic in fact as in the telling; other members of the delegation and Texans familiar with its actions would later not recall any confrontation. When newspapermen, intrigued by the stories they were hearing, sought to learn if there was a split in the Texas delegation, its members were surprised; their reaction was summed up by Albert Thomas of Houston, who said, in reply to a reporter’s question, “Of course every member of the Texas delegation is for Vice President Garner [for President].” When the Fort Worth Star-Telegram two days later sought to pin down members of the delegation as to whom they were supporting for President, Johnson’s reply, echoing that of several other members, dodged the issue, in a way that amounted to something less than a ringing repudiation of the Vice President. “My esteem and regard for Vice President Garner, based upon eight years’ friendship, was clearly expressed in the resolution of the Texas delegation asserting our complete confidence in his honesty, integrity and ability,” he said. “Since the Vice President has not announced his desire to become a candidate for President, I feel an announcement from a new Congressman should await, not precede, his decision.” Still, whatever the extent of Rayburn’s entreaties or wrath, Johnson had resisted them. If there had been calculation behind his stand (“He could see that Garner’s day was over”)—a high form of political calculation, given the Vice President’s popularity at the tim
e—there was courage behind it, too; given Rayburn’s power and personality, considerable courage. And Johnson’s portrayal of the confrontation was very convincing. By the time he had finished taking his story around the offices of key administration aides, he was something of a hero to the New Dealers.

  Most important, he had impressed, and, apparently, won the liking of, their chief—as was to be proven twice within the next month.

  On the first occasion, Roosevelt stepped into a dispute in Johnson’s own district to protect the young Congressman from Garner’s wrath.

  “If a person wronged me,” Garner was to say years later, “I never rested easy until I got even.” Now Cactus Jack tried to get even with Lyndon Johnson. Still serving as postmaster in Austin was Buck Buchanan’s appointee, Ewell Nalle, a member of a family that had long been politically powerful in the city, and an old friend of Garner’s. Even before the Lewis-Garner explosion, as suspicions had begun to arise during the Spring of 1939 about Johnson’s attitude toward Garner’s presidential aspirations, Nalle had received instructions from Garner or Garner’s allies to begin stirring up opposition to Johnson—opposition which could pose a threat to him when he had to run again in 1940, since the Austin postmaster controlled more than two hundred jobs. Immediately after Johnson’s recalcitrance over the “Lewis resolution,” reports from his district told Johnson that Nalle was intensifying his opposition.