The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  During the Spring, Johnson had personally asked Postmaster General Farley to fire Nalle and replace him with his own nominee, Ray E. Lee, the former newsman whom he had hired to do public relations for the NYA. Farley’s early benevolence toward an engaging congressional secretary had, however, vanished now that there were doubts about Johnson’s loyalty to his old ally Jack Garner. He told Johnson that “enemies” of Johnson had asked him not to fire Nalle, and he declined to do so, citing a number of notably lame reasons to show that such a firing would be illegal. Johnson thereupon managed to have the matter brought to Roosevelt’s attention by James Rowe, and the President in fact mentioned it to Farley after a Cabinet meeting. But he did so only cursorily, and when Farley told him, “You can forget it,” saying that the dismissal would be illegal, the President apparently did just that; he didn’t pursue the matter.

  But that had been before the Lewis blast. About a week after it, Johnson raised the matter again, and this time Roosevelt promised to see that Nalle was fired as soon as Congress adjourned. Adjournment brought no action, however, and with the President preparing to leave Washington on a vacation trip, Johnson was becoming increasingly agitated about the matter. On August 10, overcoming Rowe’s reluctance to “pester” the President, he prevailed on him to write a memo to Missy LeHand: “I don’t know whether in the rush of getting away, the President should be bothered about this, but Lyndon Johnson has been so insistent the past couple of days I will leave it up to your judgment. He says he will not and cannot go back to Texas until the President acts. …” When the memo was put before the President, it turned out that his inaction had been due only to oversight. Reminded of his promise, Roosevelt carried through on it—as firmly as even Johnson could have wished. Back to Rowe (in the President’s hand) came the message: “Tell the Post Office that I want this done right away for Cong. Lyndon Johnson. That it is legal and to send me the necessary papers. Tell Lyndon Johnson that I am doing it.” Before the month was out, so was Nalle, and Lee replaced him, thereby ending the threat to Johnson’s reelection chances. In fact, he would be unopposed for reelection in 1940.

  During the month following the Lewis episode, Roosevelt not only protected Johnson but tried to promote him.

  One of the subjects discussed when, through Charles Marsh, Johnson finally got the opportunity to talk personally to the President was the rural electrification program being carried out in his district. This was a matter of great interest to the President, and he was apparently impressed by Johnson’s vivid description of the benefits that the Pedernales Electric Cooperative had brought to Hill Country farmers, and by Johnson’s claim (which would have startled officials of Texas Power & Light, enraged at what they viewed as the ruthless use of government power to bludgeon them into a surrender of their properties) that the program had been carried out with unprecedented cooperation between government and a private utility. On the day that Marsh and Johnson met with Roosevelt, Benjamin V. Cohen wrote the President that “As you will see … Lyndon Johnson … has done an admirable job working out the problems of Texas’ little TVA. … We are slowly building up a record to prove that cooperation between public and private power is not impossible as Willkie claims.” With the post of REA Administrator about to become vacant, Roosevelt added Johnson’s name to the list of possible appointees. (When the President asked the opinion of Henry Wallace, who, of course, had spent weekends at Longlea with Johnson, and who frequently relied on Marsh’s advice, Wallace replied that “I am so enthusiastic … that I am quite ready to recommend his appointment. … Lyndon has followed so closely the rural electrification program, has such zeal for it, is so well-rounded a New Dealer, and has such good judgment and general competence, that I think he will make an excellent selection.”) Immediately after the meeting of the Texas delegation at which Johnson carried out Roosevelt’s wishes—it may have been at the Oval Office session at which Johnson regaled the President with his description of the delegation meeting—Roosevelt formally offered him the REA post.

  The offer was significant principally because it indicated the strength of the impression Johnson had made on Roosevelt once he got the chance to spend time with him: the directorship of a nationwide agency, particularly one as fast-growing, and politically important, as REA, was not the kind of job offered to many men still short of their thirty-first birthday. The REA post was, in addition, a particularly challenging job, as Roosevelt was well aware; he had two weeks earlier remarked to Ickes that “it was difficult to find the right kind of man for administrator because the man had to be a builder and at the same time a finance man.”

  However, there was not much chance that Johnson would accept the post. Previously an independent agency, REA was in the process of being transferred into the Agriculture Department, so that its head would report not to the President but to a Cabinet officer. Johnson understood where power came from in a democracy. “You have to be your own man,” he had told Russell Brown years before—his own man, not someone else’s; an elected official whose position had been conferred on him by voters, not by one man—who could, on a whim, take the position away. Hearing, back in Austin, about Roosevelt’s offer, the wily Wirtz wired him: “Think you would be making a mistake which you would afterwards regret for years if you act on proposition,” warning Johnson, in a follow-up letter, that he might “be side-tracked or shelved when you get out.” Johnson immediately assured Wirtz that he needn’t worry. Having fought his way at last onto the road that could lead him to achieve his ultimate ambition, he could not be persuaded by anyone—not even Franklin Roosevelt—to turn off it. “Dear Mr. President,” he replied, “Thanks for your offer to appoint me Administrator of the REA. … My own job now, however, is a contract with the people of the Tenth District of Texas, which I hope to complete satisfactorily and to renew every two years as long as I appear useful.” In a strikingly cordial reply, which, with Roosevelt’s permission, Johnson released to the press, the President wrote back:

  Dear Lyndon:

  I was very sorry that you did not feel that you wanted to accept the proffer of the Administrator of the Rural Electrification Administration, but I do think I ought to tell you that very rarely have I known a proposed candidate for any position receive such unanimous recommendations from all sources as was the case with you.

  But I do understand the reasons why you felt that you should stay as a representative of your district. I congratulate the Tenth District of Texas.

  THEN HE FOUND A MEANS of moving further along the road. The means was money—Herman Brown’s money. All through 1939, of course, Johnson had been advancing Herman’s interests, working diligently for the enlargement of the Marshall Ford Dam and for the profitable change orders on that project. The Browns were grateful. On May 2, 1939, George, who, of course, did nothing without clearing it with his older brother, wrote, “I hope you know, Lyndon, how I feel reference to what you have done for me and I am going to try to show my appreciation through the years to come with actions rather than words if I can find out when and where I can return at least a portion of the favors.” The effort to find out “when and where” the favors could be returned continued; before long George would be writing Lyndon, in response to a Johnson remark about “the ninety-six old men” in the Senate: “I have thought about you often out here and don’t know whether or not you have made up your mind about what future course you want to take, but some day in the next few years one of the old ones is going to pass on, and if you have decided to go that route I think it would be ‘gret’ to do it.” No matter what the route, Johnson was assured in letters from Brown & Root headquarters on Calhoun Road in Houston, he could be certain of the firm’s all-out support.

  In December of 1939, John Garner announced his presidential candidacy. He did so in a terse statement from Uvalde, and then, despite efforts to question him by reporters who had traveled hundreds of miles to do so, he left without another word on a week-long hunting trip with an old friend, a Uvalde garage
mechanic. His supporters were more forthcoming. The facade that the Vice President was running only because the President wasn’t was stripped away; E. B. Germany, Garner’s Texas state chairman, attacked Roosevelt directly, and Roy Miller’s son, Dale, already a considerable lobbyist in his own right, wrote in the Texas Weekly that “regardless of what anyone may do, Mr. Garner will be a candidate, and he will be in the race to the finish.” Garner’s supporters, Miller wrote, have never believed that a President “could prove so faithless to democratic principles” as to seek a third term, but if Roosevelt should try to “repudiate this cherished American principle,” which “is as embedded in our system of government as if it was written in the Constitution itself,” Garner was going to stop him. Germany’s speech “closes the door to compromise. … The Garner-for-President movement has cast the political die. … To the President and the third-term apostles, it offers the olive branch of good will if they want it, and the club of resolute and relentless opposition if they don’t.” Martin Dies and other Garner supporters began using in public some of the words they had been using for years in private—in Dick Kleberg’s office, among other places. Railing against the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and its president, David Dubinsky (spelled Dubinski in the San Antonio Evening News), against organized labor in general and the National Labor Relations Board in particular, San Antonio Congressman Kilday said that “Socialists” had infiltrated the Democratic Party, and that only a Garner victory would drive them out. As for the principals themselves, after a Cabinet meeting in January, 1940, Ickes used the words “hatred” and “savage” to describe a Roosevelt attack on “Congress”; in response, “The Vice President’s face turned blood red and he retorted angrily. … Then he accused the President of attacking our form of government.”

  A Gallup Poll that month revealed that Garner’s popularity had not slipped; if Roosevelt did not run, he was the favorite of 58 percent of registered Democrats. And if Roosevelt did run—if President opposed Vice President in Democratic primaries?—the answer to that question seemed, in the first months of 1940, to be far from open and shut. With the economy sagging, and unemployment remaining stubbornly high, with congressional opposition so strong that Roosevelt dared not introduce a single significant new program, and with the “phony war” muddying the international situation and all the President’s diplomatic efforts thwarted, March, 1940, was, as James MacGregor Burns wrote, “a low point even for Roosevelt’s second term.” On March 10, the Washington Post stated that “the Texan is believed to have a good chance to win” when the two men clashed head to head in the California primary in May.

  For more than a year, Roosevelt had been pursuing a strategy that Burns calls “broadening the field in order to prevent any candidate from getting too far ahead”—hinting at support for Harry Hopkins or Paul McNutt, for example. The strategy had destroyed the hopes of all other candidates, but it hadn’t even dented Garner’s. Now the Democratic Convention was close. Garner was immensely popular with many Democratic state bosses. If, when the Convention began, his candidacy was still strong, several “favorite son” delegations—the Alabama delegation pledged to Speaker Bankhead, for example—would fall into line behind him. New Dealers “concede that Garner, with Texas’ forty-six delegates, California’s forty-four, some Wisconsin, Illinois and probably a few scattered delegates in other states, will aggregate nearly 500” of the 551 delegates needed for nomination, the Washington Post reported. Even if this estimate was high, any substantial strength for Garner would do damage. As Burns puts it:

  Roosevelt’s basic problem, if he chose to run, was not how to get the nomination—his ability to get a decisive convention majority was never in doubt—but how to be nominated in so striking a manner that it would amount to an emphatic and irresistible call to duty. This party call would be the prelude to a call from the whole country at election time. Only a party summons in July, in short, would make possible a popular summons in November.

  Standing formidably in the way of such a call was the very thing that made the call necessary—the anti-third-term tradition. … All the polls showed a vast majority opposed to a third term as an abstract matter, and a clear majority opposed to a third term for Roosevelt. …

  Roosevelt’s task—in the event he finally decided to run—clearly was to bring about a unanimous party draft that would neutralize the anti-third-term sentiment. … If the President were to run again, everything depended on a spontaneous draft.

  The chief obstacle to such a draft was John Garner. Were he to arrive in Chicago with a sizable bloc of votes, the “Stop Roosevelt” movement would be strong enough to preclude a draft. Garner had to be destroyed before the Convention. Roosevelt’s earlier inclination to put him on the defensive by attacking him in his home state hardened. Another consideration was expressed in Marsh’s American-Statesman: “If Roy Miller … selects [the Texas] delegation, such a delegation will be used as a trading block for the anti-New Deal group in the convention.” New Dealers felt they had to try to at least cut into Garner’s strength in the Texas delegation, place on it enough Roosevelt men to prevent it from being the Convention’s anti-Roosevelt rallying point. The odds against an attack in Texas succeeding even in such limited objectives were long—but the attempt had to be made. The decision was taken. Texas was to be made a battleground.

  But the battle required money. The state’s size made radio the best means of rallying Roosevelt sentiment, but the cost of statewide radio hook-ups was substantial by 1940 standards. Even local rallies were expensive. The price of the permit necessary to hold a rally at the Dallas Fairgrounds, for example, was $300, and the incidental expenses of such a rally might run $1,000 more, even without figuring in the cost of newspaper advertising to attract a crowd. Such costs were multiplied by the system under which the state’s delegation to the National Convention would be chosen. The delegates would be selected at a State Democratic Convention. The delegates to this convention would be selected by conventions in all of the state’s 254 counties. And the delegates to these county conventions would be selected at precinct conventions—thousands of them—which would be held throughout the state on May 4. Money could play a decisive role in a precinct convention, which might consist of no more than a few handfuls of persons (anyone who had voted in the last election was eligible to attend) gathered in a school or firehouse. Just finding out who was eligible cost money. The names of voters in the previous election were listed in the office of the County Tax Assessor, but these lists had to be purchased. Then there was the problem of finding out which of the eligible voters favored your candidate. This was generally accomplished by telephone calls from a popular local politician or politician’s wife. “You’d go to a county clerk’s wife and say, ‘You’re not doing anything. How about taking this seventy-five dollars or hundred dollars, and calling some people,’” recalls Harold H. Young, a burly, brilliant, idealistically liberal attorney who was in charge of the Roosevelt campaign in Dallas and Fort Worth. Then, in Young’s words, “it was a matter of who got your folks [voters who favored your candidate] out” to the precinct convention. Direct mailings, which cost money for mimeographing and stamps, were used. And, of course, on the evening of the convention, automobiles—with their drivers given “gasoline and expense money”—were needed. The amount required for a single precinct was not large, but, with thousands of precincts, the total required was considerable.

  The Garner campaign in Texas, of course, had all the money it needed. The utilities, the railroads, the major oil companies such as the ’Umble and the Magnolia, the great ranchers and lumbermen and cotton families—the state’s monolithic establishment that had long dominated its politics, largely through the use of financial pressure—were united behind the candidacy of the man who had long stood as its symbol. And as soon as the Garner forces realized—to their astonishment and rage—that Cactus Jack was to be challenged on their home ground, they mobilized, in what the Dallas Morning News calle
d “the most painstaking preparations in recent Texas political history.”

  The Roosevelt campaign’s shortage of funds was, in contrast, acute. (Because of his personal friction with the President, and because he was planning to concentrate his political contributions behind the vice presidential campaign of frequent Longlea guest Wallace, Charles Marsh’s support for FDR was largely confined to editorials.) When Garner state chairman Myron Blalock declared, “Even here in Texas, there are those small voices who speak out against this distinguished son of the Lone Star State,” Young, a gifted political strategist, saw an opening. He wanted to reply, “That’s true. Nobody’s for FDR except small voices—the people.” But because Young had no money, his rejoinder went unheard. Blalock had spoken on a statewide radio hook-up. Young couldn’t afford even a local broadcast. Garner, Young reported, had a paid worker in every precinct in Dallas; the Roosevelt forces didn’t have a paid worker in any precinct. Maury Maverick was leading the Third Term forces in San Antonio, but was all but helpless against the massive outpouring of Garner money in that city.

  But Lyndon Johnson was to produce a source of funds.

  Success had not diminished Herman Brown’s ambitions. His car still roared endlessly back and forth across Texas as he pushed his projects and searched out new work, so that Lyndon Johnson sometimes had difficulty locating him to make his reports; he would send copies of telegrams to two or three towns at once to make sure one of them reached Brown. And even the giant Marshall Ford Dam had not lessened his “obsession” to build giant projects. Now, moreover, the great dam was almost completed. A score of smaller jobs would not enable him to keep on the payroll the organization he had built up with so much effort, and of which he was so proud. Herman Brown wanted—and needed—something big.