The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  Something very big was on the horizon. In 1938, Congress, at President Roosevelt’s request, had authorized the expenditure of a billion dollars on a “two-ocean” Navy. By early 1939 it had become clear that a substantial portion of that billion would be spent on the construction of naval bases and training stations for a greatly expanded Navy Air Force. On April 26, 1939, Roosevelt had signed into law a bill authorizing the expenditure of $66,800,000 for the first of such bases. Brown’s attention was already focused on the Navy because Lyndon Johnson was a member of the Naval Affairs Committee. He decided to bid on one of the bases—in San Juan, Puerto Rico—authorized in the April bill.

  In April, 1939, however, Lyndon Johnson still had not yet gained entrée to the President, and his attempt to give Brown & Root a helping hand was rebuffed in a manner suitable to what he was—a Congressman without influence. Within two days of the signing of the naval air base bill, he had to confess to George Brown that “I talked with Admiral Moreell [Vice Admiral Ben Moreell, in charge of the Navy’s shore construction program] and he said there is nothing further that we can do at this time.” On May 16, he promised George, “I’ll do all I can to get you any information on the Puerto Rico project and will let you know when anything breaks,” but added, “You know how hard it is to get any dope in advance”—the statement of a man not on the inside of decisions. Seeking to offset its lack of experience in areas of construction required by this job, Brown & Root took as a partner on its Puerto Rico proposal the W. S. Bellows Construction Company of Houston, and submitted a bid, but the firm was shown no favoritism, as George Brown noted in a letter to Johnson, which stated, “I got some inquiries from the Naval Department for additional data” but added that these inquiries have “apparently … been sent to all prospective contractors.” The entrée to the President that Johnson gained thereafter may have entitled him to help on a postmastership and the offer of the REA post; it did not involve any say in the awarding of a huge federal contract—as Johnson learned when, after another firm was awarded the contract in November, he demanded an explanation from Moreell. The Admiral brushed him off by sending him a memo from a lower-ranking officer: “Pursuant to your inquiry relative to the reason why Brown & Root, Inc. (and W. S. Bellows Co.) … were not selected as the contractors for the San Juan Air Base project …,” while both firms had “extensive construction experience,” they had no experience whatsoever in the type of construction necessary to build a naval air base.

  A naval air base and training station had been proposed for Texas—on the Gulf at Corpus Christi—in the mid-1930’s, and indeed its construction had been recommended by the Navy in September, 1938. The city’s Congressman, Richard Kleberg, and South Texas’ most influential figure in Washington, Roy Miller, had been actively pushing for the project for more than three years. But Kleberg’s family was a major Garner financial backer, and Roy Miller was Garner’s campaign manager. Herman Brown had been interested in the Corpus Christi base from the first, but he was a Garner financial backer (as, indeed, was fitting, since his views on organized labor, on the balanced budget—and on communists, socialists and liberals—were indistinguishable from the Vice President’s. “From what I see in the papers,” his brother George happily wrote Roy Miller in May, 1939, “things seem to be moving along all right for the ‘V.P.’”). Other big Texas contractors who might have been considered for the job were also identified with Garner—or with Reconstruction Finance Corporation head Jesse Jones of Houston, of whose oft-professed loyalty to the New Deal Roosevelt had become—correctly—suspicious. After Kleberg had been making optimistic predictions for months, he had to admit in September, 1939, that “There has been no intimation as to whether it is intended to build the training station here [in Corpus Christi] in two years or fifteen.” The Navy’s construction program, surging ahead in other locations, remained stalled in Texas; as late as January 9, 1940, Moreell told a House subcommittee that the Corpus Christi project was “not viewed as emergent”—testimony that led the subcommittee to reject even a $50,000 request for making surveys of the proposed base site.

  Alice Glass (above, at Longlea)

  Franklin D and Lyndon B during an FDR trip to Texas

  Above: Abe Fortas and James H. Rowe, two of Johnson’s young New Dealer group

  The victors: the men who came to power in Texas as a result of the Garner-Roosevelt fight—Edward Clark, E. H. Perry, Herman Brown, Lyndon Johnson, and Austin Mayor Tom Miller

  Vice President John (“Cactus Jack”) Garner, with Texas Senators Tom Connally and Morris Sheppard

  George Brown, Johnson, Tommy (“the Cork”) Corcoran at an airport in Texas, November, 1940

  Johnson’s habitual greeting to Rayburn: a picture taken in later years

  The Congressman of the Tenth District and his staff in his Johnson City office: John Connally, Walter Jenkins, Dorothy Nichols, Herbert Henderson

  Johnson at the Santa Rita Housing Project, for which he fought, in Austin

  The Mansfield (originally Marshall Ford) Dam. Johnson’s first task as Congressman was obtaining authorization for its completion. Opposite, above: Johnson, at the dedication ceremonies, kneeling beside Joseph Jefferson Mansfield, Chairman of the House Rivers and Harbors Committee, with Alvin Wirtz at left.

  Sign at the headquarters of the Pedernales Electric Cooperative (Johnson’s greatest accomplishment on behalf of the Hill Country) which in 1939 brought electricity for the first time to the farmers of the district

  Left: Lyndon Johnson at the Pedernales Electric Cooperative Building, Johnson City, 1939

  Lady Bird Johnson during the 1941 Senate campaign

  Above: Gerald Mann, gaunt and tired after weeks of touring the state

  THE FIRST SENATE CAMPAIGN, 1941

  Pappy O’Daniel, with his children Mickey-Wickey and Molly, and their capitol-dome-shaped sound truck

  The campaigner: bellowing, pleading, shaking hands, reading a telegram of support from Washington, in staged shots with constituents, and his “All-Out Patriotic Revue”

  From victory to defeat. Johnson’s last speech, election morning, on the porch of his boyhood home. Reading the congratulatory telegrams election night, and elated in his moment of triumph. Bad news starts to come in, and, finally, “It’s gone.”

  Lyndon Johnson, 1941

  Close as he and George Brown had become, Lyndon Johnson may have shied away from suggesting frankly even to him what he felt Brown & Root should do. In October, 1939, with the Corpus Christi base still not included on the list of the Navy’s “preferred” projects, George wrote him, “I have been sitting here all week waiting to hear from you. … I felt that you had something on your mind last week but did not get around to getting it off.” But George may have figured it out for himself. He ended this letter by writing:

  In the past I have not been very timid about asking you to do favors for me and hope you will not get any timidity if you have anything at all that you think I can or should do. Remember that I am for you, right or wrong, and it makes no difference if I think you are right or wrong. If you want it, I am for it 100%.

  Opposing John Garner would be a huge gamble for a Texas contractor. But it would not be the largest gamble ever taken by Herman Brown, not for the man who had mortgaged everything he had accumulated in twenty years of terribly hard work to begin work on a dam before it had been authorized. And this new gamble, if successful, would give him the chance to build something even bigger than the dam—and to make even bigger money building it. A signal went out. In Houston, where Brown & Root’s headquarters were located, Herman Brown’s political influence was growing, and the city’s Congressman, Albert Thomas, a junior Representative with negligible clout in Washington, was known to take Herman’s orders unquestioningly. In August, Congressman Thomas had said, “Of course every member of the Texas delegation is for Vice President Garner.” Now, in December, 1939, Thomas made another statement. He was not for Garner after all, he said. He was for Roosevelt. />
  That signal from Texas was answered by several signals from Washington—from the White House. They involved Lyndon Johnson, and Brown & Root. The first, on January 2, 1940, was a public signal: a presidential appointment. The post involved was a major one: Under Secretary of the Interior. The appointee would be second in command only to Harold Ickes in the giant department. It went to a Texan—“the choicest plum handed out to a Texan in years,” said the Houston Press. And the Texan it went to was Alvin J. Wirtz, who was not only an attorney for Brown & Root but was identified with Lyndon Johnson.

  Lest this latter connection be overlooked, the White House went out of its way to point it out, presidential secretary Early stating that “Rep. Lyndon B. Johnson … presented Wirtz’s name,” and letting reporters know further that, as the Press reported, “Neither Texas Senator was consulted,” nor was Sam Rayburn or Jesse Jones. To readers of political signals, therefore, it was clear that Lyndon Johnson had become a key White House ally—perhaps the key White House ally—in Texas. In White House inner circles, it was also quickly made clear that the man appointed at Johnson’s suggestion was going to play a major role in the Roosevelt campaign in Texas. Roosevelt “told us that Garner had to be sent home permanently to his 6,000 neighbors in Uvalde, Texas, so that he could add to his millions,” presidential aide David K. Niles says. “And this crucial task went to Alvin Wirtz.” (The Roosevelt campaign in Texas was shortly to be beefed up by the appointment of another Johnson supporter, Austin attorney Everett L. Looney, as Assistant United States Attorney General.)

  Another signal from the White House was private. The Navy Department was quietly informed that Lyndon Johnson was to be consulted—and his advice taken—on the awarding of Navy contracts in Texas.

  Following this signal, a number of Texans flew up to Washington. One was Herman Brown. Another was Edward A. Clark, who had left his post as Texas Secretary of State to go on retainer for Brown & Root and to begin using his political acumen on Herman Brown’s behalf. Still another was an old Brown associate whose qualification for this trip was his ability to know where political money could most profitably be distributed in Texas: Claud Wild, Sr. (While he was in Washington, Herman may have been handed a letter written by Roosevelt. Its contents are not known: no copy of it can be found; the only reference to it comes in a February 9, 1940, letter from Lyndon Johnson to George Brown noting that “Herman came in last night,” which states, “Am enclosing the President’s letter.”)

  After Herman’s trip to Washington, two alterations in the status quo quickly became apparent. First, Brown & Root was, in obtaining coveted Navy Department contracts, no longer just one of a crowd.

  The Corpus Christi Naval Air Station, “not emergent” in January, in February was moved abruptly, if quietly, onto the “preferred list” of Navy construction projects with the highest priority. The contract for the air base (which, it was now decided, would be of the “cost-plus” type so profitable to contractors) was not, it was also decided, to be put out for competitive bidding, but was to be awarded on a “negotiated basis.” And the only firm with which serious negotiations were held turned out to be Brown & Root; the firm’s lack of experience in air base construction, which less than three months before had kept it from getting a contract for a similar base, was no longer mentioned. Because the contract was so big, Brown & Root was to be required to share the profits—if not the work—with another contractor, who had a long association with the New Deal. “The White House said we had to take in [Henry] Kaiser,” George Brown recalls. But when George arrived in Washington during either the last week in March or the first week in April to work out the details of Kaiser’s participation, “Ben Moreell said, ‘You don’t have to give him half.’” Moreell probably intended Kaiser’s share to be only slightly smaller than half, but the vagueness of the Admiral’s instructions gave Brown & Root leeway—and Herman told George how to take advantage of that leeway. Meeting with Kaiser at the Shoreham Hotel, George Brown, an unknown Texas contractor, showed the famous industrialist (famous, among other reasons, for his toughness in negotiations) a little Texas toughness. “I offered him twenty-five percent. He said, ‘That’s an insult.’ I said, ‘Henry, we don’t need you. We don’t need your organization.’ So we sat around and talked and then I said, ‘Well, I have to be going.’ He said, ‘Well, what are you going to do?’ I said, ‘I already told you what I’m going to do.’” And 25 percent was all Kaiser got. (To keep Kaiser’s participation in the profits secret—Kaiser’s participation in the work itself was almost nil—his share was in the name of the Columbia Inspection Company. The Bellows firm was also a participant. “We needed someone who had done buildings,” Brown explains. “We hadn’t done many.”) To keep other contractors from becoming interested, preparations for the Corpus Christi project were carried on in secrecy. Blueprints and specifications were drawn up by the Navy not in Texas but in Pensacola, Florida. By the time the imminent building of the base was made public, drawings and specifications were almost complete—and, it was revealed, hundreds of acres of the land needed (on Flour Bluff, a point of land at the tip of Corpus Christi Bay) were already under option. Plans for the base became public knowledge on May 15, when the House Naval Affairs Committee opened hearings on a bill that would provide funds for twelve new naval air bases. The Corpus Christi base would be by far the largest, almost twice as large as any of the others. And there were other differences between this and the other bases—most notably the speed with which, now that the plans were public, they were finalized. After a meeting with President Roosevelt, Committee Chairman Vinson announced that “because of the urgency of the project,” Corpus Christi would be the only one of the twelve bases for which funds would be provided immediately—in the appropriations bill itself; funding for the other bases would have to wait for the later passage of a deficiency appropriations bill. Lyndon Johnson told the Corpus Christi Caller that the bill “would be reported favorably and acted on in the House before the end of the week.” That rush schedule was met, and within two more weeks the bill had been passed by the Senate. Shortly after noon on June 13, 1940, President Roosevelt signed a contract for the construction of the base on a cost-plus fixed fee basis. According to the Corpus Christi Caller, it was the first cost-plus fixed fee contract Roosevelt had personally signed. The contract fixed a price of $23,381,000 for the base, with the contractors to be paid an additional $1.2 million for doing the work. Even as these figures were being announced, however, those connected with the project knew they would be shortly altered. In fact, before the end of the year, the authorized cost of the project would be quietly increased to nearly $30 million. In February, 1941, the appropriation was increased twice, first by an additional $13 million and then by $2 million more, raising the cost to $45 million. Each increase, of course, carried with it a proportionate increase in the contractors’ fee. By this time, other contractors, some of them politically well connected themselves, were anxious to obtain part of the job, but, says Tommy Corcoran, a close friend of the Under Secretary of the Navy in charge of such contracts, James V. Forrestal: “Mr. Forrestal twisted a hell of a lot of tails to” keep the work in the hands of “Lyndon’s friends,” Brown & Root. As war clouds gathered, and then broke in thunder, and the need for trained fliers—and for facilities to train them—became more urgent, the increases in funding for the base grew larger; appropriations for the Corpus Christi base soared to more than $100 million.

  The second alteration that followed Herman Brown’s trip to Washington was that the Roosevelt-for-President campaign in Texas was no longer short of cash.

  3/4/40 3:30

  LBJ: delivered $300.00 in cash to Maury on the floor today.

  jbc*

  Three hundred dollars was a minor item in that campaign. Harold Young, who a week or two before had been so short of funds for running the campaign in Dallas, was shortly to be able to report:

  I have rented a room at the Adolphus Hotel at $45.00 per month, have hi
red the stenographer [for] $25.00 a week, and I have put a publicity man to work at $100.00 per week. Beginning tomorrow, I expect to run a small ad in the Dallas News each day asking those who believe in Roosevelt to write me. … We are rapidly building up a precinct organization which will be sufficient to overpower all opposition by May 4th.

  Building up a precinct organization cost money, but the money was available, thanks largely to Herman Brown.

  EVEN AS THE FIGHT in Texas was being joined, however, the reason for it was fading away. 1939 may have been John Garner’s year. 1940, the year that mattered, was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s. March was indeed “a low point for the President,” but, although he remained silent as to his intentions, the fox was ready to leave his lair. He had stuck his nose out, in fact, on February 24. That was the last day on which the President could have forbidden the entering of his name in Illinois, whose primary would be held on April 9—and he had not done so. The name of Franklin D. Roosevelt was going to be on a primary ballot. And with every increase in international tension, Americans became increasingly aware that they might soon be at war, and it became more and more evident that the Democratic Convention would select to lead the nation through war the man who had led it through the Depression. Politicians began backing away from Garner’s candidacy. Observing him at a dinner in Washington, Ickes gloated that “All his buoyancy seemed to have deserted him. He looked glum and unhappy and did very little talking. I suppose there is no doubt that he realizes he is in for a terrific beating at the hands of the President.” His fears were confirmed on April 2, in Wisconsin, where he had once expected to win most of the delegates; instead, he suffered a smashing defeat.