The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  Then, at dawn on April 9, the day of the Illinois primary, German troops struck across the defenseless Danish border, and German destroyers and troopships suddenly loomed out of a snowstorm off the coast of Norway, torpedoing Norwegian gunboats as troops poured ashore. Denmark was overrun in a matter of hours; Norway’s main ports were all in Nazi hands—the phony war was over. Roosevelt defeated Garner in Illinois by eight to one. Garner was finished on April 9—and he knew it. If he hadn’t known it, clues were promptly furnished. As Columnist Ray Tucker wrote:

  The most down-hearted man on Capitol Hill is Vice President John Nance Garner. His friends have deserted him—left him cold. …

  When Jack was riding high, … his office was the gathering place of … Senators. They rushed in every hour of the day to seek advice or to toss off a quick drink. …

  But … his office is no longer a magnet for the politicos. The most popular vehicle on Capitol Hill these days is the Third Term bandwagon.

  Refusing to bow out of the race, Garner said defiantly that his name would be presented to the Convention if only as a gesture, but a gesture was all it would be. Although Texas’ precinct conventions would be held on May 4, the primary itself, the last in the country, would not be held until May 27—by which time, primaries in other states would have completely eliminated him as a threat to Roosevelt. Roosevelt appears to have seen this—and also to have seen and accepted that while he might crush Garner everywhere else, he could not defeat him in his home state—and he now decided not to wage an all-out war against Garner in Texas. The loudest of the voices for Roosevelt —Maverick—was abruptly silenced; his statements against the Vice President ceased, reportedly on a suggestion directly from the President. Near the end of March, Roosevelt had told Ickes that

  He does not want any fight made for Roosevelt delegates in Texas. He thinks that Texans are unusually full of state pride and that they would resent an outside candidate coming in, even if that candidate were the President himself. He had already sent word to others in Texas not to fight for delegates. At the end he became realistic and, with a smile said: “Of course, it is not well to go into a fight unless we know that we can win.”

  But while the President’s reason for fighting Garner in Texas had faded, that of Johnson and Wirtz had not—and they apparently persuaded the President that the fight should go on. During the first week in April, the tall, eager young Congressman and his calm, cigar-smoking advisor made a series of visits to the White House. What they said is not known, but one aspect of the situation was revealing. In Texas, politicians knew that Garner’s popularity, coupled with his control of the party apparatus, gave Roosevelt no chance to win the delegation; in Washington, 1,600 miles away, where Texas sentiment was reported to the White House primarily by Johnson and Wirtz, the impression was given that the President had a good chance of taking the delegation and completing his enemy’s humiliation. Johnson and Wirtz also may have appealed to other sides of the President’s character. Roosevelt, Joseph Alsop and Robert Kintner were to write, had earlier told Johnson and “other Texan New Dealers” that “he wanted no part of” a fight against Garner in Texas, but “then he was shown documents and other evidence of the character of the Garner campaign in Wisconsin and Illinois, which was extremely bitter and highly personal in its attacks on the President. This angered him. … [Jesse] Jones again pleaded with him not to carry the fight into Garner’s home state. But the Texan New Dealers voiced the opposing view, and the President agreed.” Whatever the reasons for Roosevelt’s reversal, on April 12 Wirtz was able to write Mayor Tom Miller of Austin: “The President has not ‘called off the dogs,’ and you can take this as authentic. … Everything from this end looks good. I asked Ed [Clark] to communicate with you and [Harold] Young and let me know who you all could agree on as state organizer with absolute authority to discuss the campaign, and what such a campaign would cost.” The campaign Wirtz was talking about, Clark was soon informed, was a war in which no quarter was to be given: a battle in the precinct conventions, in the state convention—a well-financed campaign to take from Garner even the votes of his own state.

  And whatever Roosevelt’s reasons for wanting to continue the fight against Garner in Texas, the motive of Johnson and Wirtz was now to become more clear, because of the nature of the campaign they directed. Although it was ostensibly a campaign against John Garner, its real target was not Garner but Sam Rayburn.

  Rayburn was determined to save Garner from the humiliation of having to fight to hold on to his own state. For months, he had worked loyally for his old friend. “I do hope,” he wrote a Texas ally on March 8, 1940, “that we can keep down any contest in Texas. I am working on the people who I think might lead a third term movement [in Texas] just as hard as I can to keep it down.” But as the hopelessness of Garner’s candidacy had become evident, he had begun working for a compromise that would save the seventy-one-year-old Vice President from embarrassment, and let him retire from public life with dignity. The solution he devised was to have the Texas convention instruct the state’s delegation to cast a first-ballot vote for Garner, while at the same time endorsing Roosevelt’s policies,* to make clear that support of its favorite-son candidate did not mean diehard opposition to the President (and to end any hope of a Stop Roosevelt movement, to which Rayburn was, of course, opposed). Going to the White House, he had sued for an honorable peace on behalf of the man with whom he had worked for thirty years—and had for a time thought he had succeeded. Roosevelt, who at the time had decided to drop the fight in Texas, agreed; as one newspaper put it, “His [the President’s] first act, designed to restore friendly political relations with [Garner], was to inform New Dealers in Texas that he has no desire of contesting the Vice President for the Lone Star State’s 46 delegates.”

  After Johnson and Wirtz persuaded the President to change his mind and the campaign for the delegates was resumed under their direction, the direction pointed straight at Rayburn. It was kicked off with a telegram to him. Ed Clark and Tom Miller, two Austinites acting under orders from Johnson and Wirtz, sent a telegram to Rayburn on Thursday, April 12, demanding to know how he stood “as between President Roosevelt and Vice President Garner.” The Garner organization in Texas, it said, “has been engaged in a very unwise, cruel and ruthless effort to politically assassinate Roosevelt. We concede your past loyalty to the Democratic Party and trust that you will again evidence this by not trying to stop Roosevelt. …”

  In his reply to this telegram—and in subsequent events—was given definitive proof of Sam Rayburn’s character. The going was to be very tough for his friend now. Wrote columnists Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen:

  The great Lone Star State of Texas, where Jack Garner was born and with whose heretofore unfailing backing he rose to fame and fortune, is today the stage of what, in the opinion of insiders, will be his last political battle. … For the grizzled old warrior, it is a bitter and ironic clash: bitter because he finds himself on the defensive in his home bailiwick, where he reigned supreme for many years; ironic because he actually is only a pawn in a struggle in which he has no personal stake.

  But throughout his last battle, Sam Rayburn stood beside him like a rock. “Torn between his loyalty to Roosevelt and his close personal friendship with Garner and the old leaders,” the columnists wrote, he is “the unhappiest man in the bitter melee. … Sam also fears the effect it may have on his own speakership ambitions …” But his reply to the Clark-Miller telegram was unequivocal. “No knowing person doubts my loyalty to the policies and accomplishments of the Roosevelt administration and I shall advocate that the convention … pass resolutions strongly endorsing those policies and accomplishments,” he said. But, he added, “John Garner has been a distinguished congressman from Texas for thirty years. He has been the state’s only Speaker and Vice President, its most distinguished citizen since Sam Houston. His fellow citizens of Texas should honor him by sending a delegation to the national convention instructed to vote f
or him for the Democratic nomination for President.”

  A maneuver by Lyndon Johnson’s followers had thus forced Rayburn to take a stand against Roosevelt. But what good was the maneuver if the stand was not known—and widely known? What good was the maneuver if the stand did not receive wide publicity—if Rayburn was not portrayed publicly as a foe of the President, as part of the Stop Roosevelt movement? The Clark-Miller telegram of Thursday did not find its way into print, and neither did Rayburn’s reply of Saturday. So on Sunday another attempt was made to get the news out. A discreet leak was made to Paul Bolton, an INS reporter in Austin friendly to Johnson (he would later work for him). Approaching Mayor Miller at Austin’s annual Dogwood Day Dinner on Sunday night, Bolton said, in Miller’s words, “that he heard from Washington that I had a message from Rayburn.” This attempt failed because Miller had not been informed of the part he was supposed to play. Not realizing that the exchange of telegrams was supposed to be made public, the Mayor replied that he considered Rayburn’s telegram “a personal message that I did not care to divulge.” That attempt having failed, still another device was employed to get Rayburn’s position publicized. As Miller put it, “Someone from Washington wired a special story about the telegram to a great many Texas newspapers.” This device worked. Rayburn’s stand was on the front page—and portrayed in the light in which it was supposed to be portrayed.

  RAYBURN BACKS GARNER, the Washington Post headlined on Monday morning. The device also gave Clark and Miller an opportunity to send another telegram, with guaranteed publicity. As if Rayburn’s answer had not been clear enough, they wired: “We concede your past loyalty to the Democratic party and we trust that you will again evidence this by not trying to stop Roosevelt. … Are you trying to stop Roosevelt along with Roy Miller [and] Blalock, or do you just want to give Mr. Garner a first-round complimentary vote at Chicago?” These telegrams had their intended effect. As the lead paragraph in the Dallas Morning News story put it: “Majority Leader Sam Rayburn of the House of Representatives was brought squarely into the Roosevelt-Garner fight.” And he was brought into that fight in the way Johnson intended; the crucial phrase “Stop Roosevelt” had been emphasized. Rayburn was portrayed as a leader not just of the Garner campaign but of the Stop Roosevelt movement.

  And the reaction from Roosevelt was all that could have been desired by the men who had conceived these maneuvers. Johnson and Wirtz would, during the week following Rayburn’s statement, have three conferences at the White House. After the final one, Wirtz, in a press conference on the White House steps, said that Rayburn’s statement “appeared to the President as an attack from within the Administration, and that Roosevelt felt Rayburn had not correctly portrayed his views.” Wirtz said he was returning to Texas to lead an all-out fight to take the delegation away from Garner.

  In that fight, Rayburn was to continue to be as much a target as the man he was representing. As a young Texas politician wrote Rayburn following an April 24 rally orchestrated by Wirtz: “At the ‘New Deal’ rally here in Dallas … your name was lugged into the discussion mainly by Mayor Tom Miller of Austin. … And some of the others tried in a subtle manner to connect you with certain men, who are supporting Mr. Garner. …”

  Subtle and shrewd, the Johnson-Wirtz strategy gave Johnson what he wanted—as a third telegram would show.

  When Wirtz arrived back in Texas, the all-out fight turned out to be something less; after an initial explosion of impassioned rhetoric, Wirtz said that he had no objection to the Texas delegation giving a first-ballot favorite-son vote to Garner, so long as it was not part of a Stop Roosevelt movement. The Garner leaders thereupon expressed understandable puzzlement over the reason for the “all-out fight.” As soon as the national sentiment for Roosevelt had become unmistakable, they had repeatedly suggested, they said, the very proposal that Wirtz was now suggesting. Blalock, Garner’s state chairman, said: “As heretofore repeatedly stated, we shall advocate that all Texas conventions, precinct, county and state, pass resolutions endorsing the achievements and accomplishments of the Roosevelt administration. Nothing else has ever been in the minds of the Garner advocates.” That statement was disingenuous regarding the period—now just a memory —when Garner had felt he had a chance to win, but it accurately described the feelings of the Garner leaders since the Wisconsin primary. And it had been Rayburn’s desire even before Wisconsin.

  In the event, Rayburn achieved what he had wanted for Garner. Substantial sums of Herman Brown’s money were spent on a campaign to elect at the precinct and county conventions delegates who would vote for Roosevelt on the first ballot.* The Third Term was advertised on radio as well as in newspapers. But the campaign did not shake Garner’s control of the party apparatus. A compromise was therefore agreed upon. It was Rayburn’s compromise—in effect, it would be almost precisely the proposal he had made weeks before.

  Under the terms of the compromise, it would be sealed by a telegram—in the interest of “harmony”—to political leaders in Texas. The telegram said:

  TEXAS ROOSEVELT SUPPORTERS SHOULD ENDORSE NATIVE SON JOHN GARNER AND SEND DELEGATION INSTRUCTED TO VOTE FOR HIS NOMINATION FOR THE PRESIDENCY. … GARNER ORGANIZATION AND HIS SUPPORTERS WILL INSIST THAT STATE CONVENTION APPROVE AND ACCLAIM ADMINISTRATION RECORD AND WILL REFUSE TO BE A PARTY TO ANY STOP ROOSEVELT MOVEMENT.

  WE THINK … BOTH SIDES SHOULD GET TOGETHER AND SEND DELEGATION TO THE NATIONAL CONVENTION WHICH WILL CARRY OUT ABOVE PROGRAM. … WE FEEL SURE SUCH AN UNDERSTANDING WOULD NOT BE DISPLEASING TO THE PRESIDENT.

  To achieve the compromise, and thus salvage Garner’s dignity, however, Rayburn was subjected to embarrassment—embarrassment which was to have profound political consequences. In conferences between Tommy Corcoran, Harold Ickes and Lyndon Johnson in Washington, and, over the telephone, with Alvin Wirtz in Texas, it was decided that the telegram should be signed not only by Rayburn, as leader of the Garner forces, but by a leader of the Roosevelt forces—and that that leader would be Lyndon Johnson. Because the text of the telegram indicated that the compromise, while guaranteeing Texas’ votes for Garner, was not a total victory, Rayburn would have preferred that it not be sent, and that if it was sent, it be released to the press in Texas, “so that,” as Ickes put it, “it would be less likely to attract national attention.” Johnson, Corcoran, Ickes and Wirtz, however, insisted that it be released from the White House, and that Johnson go with Rayburn to show the telegram to the President. “Rayburn balked at this,” Ickes wrote in his Secret Diary. “He did not want to go to the White House, one of his reasons being that he did not want it to appear that in a Texas political matter a kid Congressman like Lyndon Johnson was on apparently the same footing as himself, the Majority Leader.” But the compromise gave Rayburn’s old friend what Rayburn wanted him to have: the chance to retire with pride, to leave public life with his state’s unanimous vote behind him. The compromise also endorsed the accomplishments of the Roosevelt administration, which Rayburn had helped bring about, and in which he believed so deeply. And Johnson and Wirtz held another trump card. With the precinct conventions rapidly approaching, failure to seal the compromise would result in the intrastate fight against Garner that Rayburn had been trying to avoid. For Garner’s sake, Rayburn agreed to their terms. “Johnson here and Wirtz in Texas forced the issue until Rayburn reluctantly agreed to go to the White House,” Ickes wrote. They were shown into the President’s office on April 29. “When Johnson and Rayburn appeared in the President’s office that afternoon, he told them benignly that they had been good little boys and that they had ‘papa’s blessing.’ He treated them as political equals, with the malicious intent of disturbing Sam Rayburn’s state of mind. I think that he succeeded.”

  WHETHER OR NOT RAYBURN was disturbed by the White House meeting, he was deeply disturbed by subsequent events.

  He had assumed that, whatever the causes of the tension with the New Dealers who had once been his allies, the compromise had ended them. “I am sure,�
�� he wrote to a friend, “that no one thinks that I am anti-Roosevelt as I think all will agree that I have done about as much to help him carry out his program as anybody in the United States. What I have wanted was to have a delegation from Texas … without a fight and representing all elements of the Party in Texas.”* But that assumption failed to take into account certain aspects of the President’s character. Roosevelt would show an unwillingness to forgive—ever—this man who he believed had been part of a “Stop Roosevelt” movement.

  Rayburn was shortly to rise to the place he had envisioned for himself as a boy. Speaker Bankhead died of a stomach hemorrhage on September 15. The hollowness of the New Dealers’ threats to deny Rayburn power in the House was revealed by the proceedings to select Bankhead’s successor; they took two minutes and were unanimous—no one even suggested a name other than Rayburn’s. The next day, with Bankhead’s body lying in state in the well of the Chamber, Rayburn stood above the casket—on the topmost tier of that tripled-tiered dais, in front of that single, high-backed chair—and took the oath that his fellow Texan, Garner, had taken nine years before. He made no speech; except for a brief eulogy to Bankhead, he said only, picking up the Speaker’s gavel, “The House shall be in order.” To a friend, a few days later, he said, referring to the town in which he had attended a one-room schoolhouse: “It’s a fur piece from Flag Springs.” And he added: “I still can’t realize I’m Speaker.” Then he returned to Bonham, where his constituents honored him by coming to a barbecue in a caravan of cars more than a mile long, each bearing his picture; before he went to the celebration, he made another stop: the cemetery, to stand before his parents’ grave.

  But Rayburn’s attainment of his lifelong aim was to bring him only limited satisfaction during the four and a half years that remained of Roosevelt’s Presidency. His image of the Speakership had never been limited merely to a gavel and power. “I would rather link my name indelibly with the living pulsing history of my country and not be forgotten entirely after a while than to have anything else on earth,” he had written. He had always felt that the House of Representatives, as a sovereign branch of government, had rights and prerogatives, that it should not merely respond to initiatives of the executive branch but should play a role in the initiation of national policy. As its leader, he had felt, he would be entitled to such a role—specifically, since the House as a whole was too unwieldy to initiate policy, he had believed that a strong Speaker would be included by the President in the policy-making process, would, because he understood the will of the House and could represent that will, at least be consulted while policy was being formulated. His ambitions had never been only for himself. He had always thought of himself in the terms he had enunciated in his first speech in the House, so many years before—as a voice for people who had no other voice, as a voice for his beloved farmers. A man who met him for the first time on a train crossing Texas in 1935 saw him sitting “staring in serious reflection across the countryside”; the man introduced himself, and Rayburn, only half shaken out of his musings, said, as if to himself: “Where is the farmer going? Where is America going?” This man, who was to become Rayburn’s friend, says that “He was a farmer at heart, but with an ambition to help his own kind.” He wanted—wanted passionately—farmers to have a voice in the highest councils of government. And he had always believed that, after he became Speaker, he would be that voice.