The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  When he was forced to enter the state, he stayed out of its newspapers. “Johnson was being very cagey,” says Vann Kennedy, editor of the State Observer, a weekly published in Austin. “Johnson was being very cautious about getting himself exposed to any unnecessary fire.” Harold Young, who was receiving so much monetary assistance from Johnson, came to realize—to his shock, for he had heard Johnson railing against Garner privately—that he would not do so publicly. “Lyndon didn’t any more want to take a stand on Garner than he wanted to take a stand against the Martin Dies committee,” Young says. It was at this time that the Texas liberal and Rayburn man William Kittrell first coined an expression about Johnson: “Lyndon will be found on no barricades.”

  He may not have been present even at the riotous State Democratic Convention in Waco at which the state’s delegation was chosen after fistfights between Garner and Roosevelt supporters. If he was at Waco, he kept a low profile indeed. Asked years later, “Was Mr. Johnson at the state convention?” E. B. Germany, Garner’s reactionary, Roosevelt-hating state chairman, was to reply: “I don’t think he was there. If he was there—I don’t see how he stayed away, but I don’t remember seeing him at the state convention.” He did not materialize on a speakers’ platform where he could be seen by influential Texans until the Democratic National Convention in Chicago—by which time, of course, the battle was over, so he was not called upon to declare his preference.

  His efforts at secrecy were successful.

  The Austin American-Statesman, which took editorial direction directly from its owner, Charles Marsh, almost never mentioned his name in connection with the Roosevelt-Garner fight; as late as March 17, 1940, for example, an article by Raymond Brooks listed the leaders of the Roosevelt campaign in Texas, and Johnson was not mentioned. He stayed out of other newspapers as well. Articles in Texas newspapers identified Tom Miller and Ed Clark—and, later, Alvin Wirtz—as leaders, and included other names—State Democratic Chairwoman Frances Haskell Edmondson, Maury Maverick, railroad Commissioner Jerry Sadler, former Attorney General William McCraw, Harold Young. Seldom was the name of Lyndon Johnson included, and when it was, it was as only a minor figure in the movement to deny the favorite-son vote to Garner; four months after he had summed up the state’s political situation without mentioning Johnson’s name, Walter Hornaday, chief political writer of the Dallas Morning News, added: “… The Garner leaders also believe that Representative Lyndon Johnson is active in the third-term movement. …”

  The fight ended with his anonymity still successfully preserved. The State Observer’s June 3 issue, the issue which covered in detail the Waco convention that was the fight’s final battle, identified Tom Miller as the “originator of the draft-Roosevelt movement in Texas.” As for the movement’s other leaders, the Observer listed many names. The name Lyndon Johnson does not appear even once in that issue.

  One Texas newspaper did attempt at least obliquely to reveal and explain his role—and the reaction to these attempts is instructive. The paper was the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and it may have understood Johnson’s role because its publisher, Amon G. Carter, while reactionary in his political philosophy and a longtime Garner supporter (it was Carter’s famous Stetsons that Garner always wore in Washington), wanted huge new public works for his beloved Fort Worth and, to get them, had maintained ties with the White House. On March 23, 1940, Carter not only expressed the bitterness of the Garnerites in a long editorial (“Normal Texaris are unable to understand those calling themselves Texans who go about urging Texas to desert Garner and to weasel out of its duty to stand by its own”) but also attempted to explain the significance to the Roosevelt movement of public works in the state’s Tenth Congressional District—and of the district’s Congressman. “The whole [Third-Term] outfit gathers round a damsite on the Colorado,” Carter wrote. On April 7, the Star-Telegram sharpened its attack; in attributing the motives behind the anti-Garner movement in Texas not to philosophy but to greed, it said: “So far no advices have come from Washington … that dams of the Lower Colorado River Authority will be abandoned in the event Garner becomes President. But an Austin bloc is alarmed.”

  Noting past federal generosity for Carter’s own pet projects in Fort Worth, Ickes replied by jeering that, after Roosevelt was reelected, “you and other such ‘leaders’ will be the first to hie you to the pie counter” for more federal funds. Carter’s reaction was to focus his attention more closely on the LCRA dams. Ickes had publicly promised to reveal, when asked, the legal fees paid to private attorneys in connection with all PWA projects. Now Carter instructed his Washington correspondent, Bascom Timmons, to demand from the PWA the total amount of the legal fees paid to Alvin J. Wirtz in connection with LCRA projects.

  This figure, paid between 1935 and 1939, was $85,000, a staggering amount in terms of legal fees customary in Texas at the time. And the $85,000 from the PWA was only a drop in the bucket that Wirtz had filled at those dams. Once the question of his legal fees was opened, it might be only a matter of time before it was discovered that he had received for work on the dams fees not only from the PWA but as the attorney for the Insull interests, as court-appointed receiver of those interests in bankruptcy proceedings, and, of course, from Brown & Root. If a spotlight was turned on those dams, moreover, the Congressman responsible for their construction —the Congressman who had pushed for those legal fees—would be caught in its glare. The light had to be turned off.

  The strategy evolved to do so is contained in a memorandum found in Alvin Wirtz’s papers. This memo is unsigned, and unaddressed, and its author is unknown. In it, both Wirtz and Johnson are referred to in the third person, although at least one member of Wirtz’s staff feels that, because of the secretiveness of both men (and because the wording of the memo reflects Johnson’s style), these references do not eliminate either Johnson or Wirtz as the possible author of the memo. In any case, the memo reflects, according to all living members of the Wirtz-Johnson camp, the thinking of that camp: to counter the threat of an attack with a counterattack—a savage counterattack—against not only Garner and Roy Miller, but also Sam Rayburn.

  The writer of the memorandum appreciates the significance of the Carter threat; while the PWA feels that $85,000 was a “fair fee,” he writes, its disclosure “will have [the] effect of smearing Wirtz.” The response should be to let Rayburn know that if the Wirtz fees are to be disclosed, other disclosures will be made: the press will be given “something that will be good nationwide publicity—how much Garner, Mrs. Garner, Tully Garner have received from the Govt, over a period of 40 years; that Ed Clark wants to figure up how much he, Sam, has made, travelling expenses, etc. in 25 years; that Everett Looney … has figures on how much Roy Miller paid to try to buy the Texas Legislature. …” As significant as the strategy revealed in the memo—the savage attack not only on Garner and Miller, who were used to such accusations, but on Sam Rayburn, who was so proud of his “untarnished name” (which would no longer be untarnished if it was linked in the press with a figure of approximately $225,000, which would represent, of course, only the standard Congressman’s salary, but would look bad in the papers)—was the care taken in the memo that neither Alvin Wirtz nor Lyndon Johnson should be linked with that strategy. The threat should be delivered to Rayburn by Maury Maverick, the memo states, not by Wirtz. “Senator ought to be rather independent in the matter, and not be concerned about it. … Maury ought to call Sam. … Better this way than for Senator to get involved.” As for Johnson, the memo goes further in stressing that he had nothing to do with the attacks on Amon Carter that had emanated from Washington. Referring to the “pie counter” missive, the memo begins: “Ickes has replied to Amon Carter, writing a real mean letter,” and then hastens to add: “Secretary [Ickes] didn’t consult Lyndon, and he didn’t know about it.” Lyndon Johnson—or his advisors—may have been directing all-out war on the Garnerites, but the Garnerites were not to know. When it became necessary for either Wirtz or Johnson t
o get publicly involved with the anti-Garner fight—when it was necessary for some key Texan in Washington to return to Texas and publicly lead the fight—it was Wirtz, always so concerned about the political future of the young man he considered his protégé, who dropped his mask and did so.

  Neither Wirtz’s fees nor the information about Garner, Miller and Rayburn was ever made public, possibly because the memo apparently was written on Friday, April 26, and Monday, April 29, was the day on which, with Roosevelt’s intervention, the “harmony” agreement was drafted and the telegram signed by Rayburn and Johnson was sent, and this most serious threat to Johnson’s attempt to keep secret in Texas his role in the Roosevelt campaign died. Amon Carter’s newspaper was, moreover, the only newspaper in Texas to make even an attempt to portray Johnson’s true significance in the fight. In Washington, his leadership (together, of course, with that of Wirtz) of the fight was an open secret; in Texas, it was just a secret. The only time his name received substantial publicity in Texas was when it appeared on the “harmony” telegram along with Rayburn’s—and, because this telegram was signed by Rayburn, and because it was seen in Texas as a compromise, the appearance of his name in this context did not anger the Garner leaders.

  And Johnson’s refusal to take a public stand against Garner even while he was peddling his story about the John L. Lewis episode in the right quarters, his success in keeping his name off the two telegrams to Rayburn (and out of the subsequent press coverage of those telegrams), the care taken to keep his name out of the entire 1940 Garner-Roosevelt fight in Texas (“Lyndon … didn’t know about it”), paid off. To an astonishing degree, the leaders of the Garner movement never became aware of the true extent of Johnson’s role in the fight. Asked, years later, if, during 1940, Johnson brought “any pressure to bear not to have Garner nominated,” E. B. Germany replied: “No, as far as I know he [didn’t]. …” During 1940, two opposing camps were chosen up in Texas, and deep animosity sprang up between them, but surprisingly little of that animosity spilled over onto Lyndon Johnson, because each side appears to have felt that Johnson was on its side.

  And after the conventions, when the fight was over, the man who had so carefully stayed out of Texas returned to it—for private talks with many of the Garner leaders. Some of these men had had doubts about Lyndon Johnson, but these talks resolved them; the few minor gaps in his fences were mended. George Brown had known that Johnson could do it. Talking as conservatively with conservatives as he talked liberally with liberals—“that was his leadership. That was his knack.” And George Brown was right. He arranged for Johnson to meet in a Houston hotel room with two ultra-conservative, Roosevelt-hating Texas financiers. “He went in there, and in an hour he had convinced them he wasn’t liberal,” Brown would recall.

  “This is a year of strange politics,” said an article in the Austin American-Statesman. “Texas runs into some of its most amazing contradictions and cross currents. … New cleavages threaten a deep and serious break in Texas Democratic solidarity. It is a strange, confused, uncharted field—the field of national politics today.” Strange, confused and uncharted it was—a minefield that could easily have destroyed the political future of anyone attempting to build a future in Texas politics in 1940. But through this field, one man—a novice in statewide politics—picked his way, with sure and silent steps.

  *During the twentieth century, three of the presidential landslides in America have been followed by a presidential maneuver that might be laid at least in part to overconfidence: Roosevelt’s landslide in 1936 by the attempt to pack the Court; Lyndon Johnson’s in 1964 by escalation of the Vietnam War; Richard Nixon’s of 1972 by the Watergate cover-up.

  *Maverick’s election as Mayor of San Antonio in 1939 was blighted by his indictment later that year on the charge of using union contributions to pay supporters’ poll taxes; although he would later be acquitted, he was hardly in a position to serve as a President’s standard-bearer.

  *Johnson was unopposed in the 1938 primary, but other Texas legislators running unopposed were among the invitees.

  *This may not have been the first occasion on which the Browns had, at Johnson’s request, assisted Maverick financially. During his 1939 campaign for the San Antonio Mayoralty, Maverick asked Johnson for financial help, because on March 30, 1939, Johnson replied: “I’ve talked with James Rowe, George Brown, et al, and I’m sure you will hear something before long.” On April 7, 1939, Maverick wired: “Have Johnson send me that Gye hundred dollars.”

  *“A clearcut endorsement of the policies and accomplishments of the Roosevelt Administration and an unequivocal instruction to the delegates to vote for Mr. Garner for the Democratic nomination for President is what we want,” he wrote a friend.

  *Control of this money was kept in the hands of a very few men: New Dealers whose first loyalty was to Wirtz. The few veteran politicians working for Roosevelt in Texas were given little to spend.

  *Even at this stage of the fight, however, nothing superseded the protection of his old friend in Rayburn’s priorities. Another sentence in the letter reads: “I am sure since the exchange of telegrams between Wirtz, Blalock, Lyndon Johnson and me that everybody will go along with the program and instruct the county delegation to vote as suggested in the telegrams.” In rereading this letter after it had been typed by a secretary, Rayburn was evidently afraid that it was not clear enough. After the word “vote,” he inserted by hand: “for Garner.”

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  Campaign Committee

  AFTER THE ROOSEVELT-GARNER FIGHT in Texas, Lyndon Johnson would always have entrée at the White House. But after the fight ended, in May, 1940, that entrée was again restricted. Lyndon Johnson no longer had a reason to see the President. Impatient—after the death of his father and uncle, almost desperately impatient—to move along the route he had mapped out for himself, he had no means of doing so.

  And then this genius of politics found a way.

  The way was money. At first, again, the money was Herman Brown’s.

  Thanks to the profits from the Marshall Ford Dam and the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station contracts, there was plenty of it. However, in political terms, the most significant aspect of Brown’s bankroll was not its size but its availability for any purpose Johnson specified. George Brown had promised that Lyndon need only tell him “when and where I can return at least a portion of the favors. 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%.” Most politicians are forced, in mapping out the next step in their careers, to choose a step that can be financed. Johnson did not have this problem; he could concentrate solely on which step would be best for his career. Whatever road he chose, he could be sure it would be paved by money from Brown & Root. Furthermore, the aims of the Congressman coincided with those of the corporation. The man with the obsession to build—build big—knew that the way to build big was through Washington. Influence within the national government was what Herman Brown needed, and influence within that government—political power that reached beyond Texas—was what Lyndon Johnson wanted. Each of them could obtain what he wanted through the other.

  The most obvious use of readily available money for someone aiming at national political power was in the campaign of the man whose strong hands held the reins of national power in such a firm grip. With the great financial resources of the Republican Party solidly behind the campaign of Wendell Willkie, the President’s reelection campaign was in severe financial difficulties, and these difficulties were a prime source of conversation in Washington, and of concern to Johnson’s New Deal companions. Around him, in conversations in the cloakroom or on the floor of the House, at cocktail parties and dinner parties, swirled talk of campaign funds, and of where to get them. Furthermore, Johnson could have adduced from his own recent experience with Roosevelt that the President might not prove ungrateful for campaign contributions. Having already provided such contributions to Roosevelt
for a state campaign, it seemed the obvious course, the logical course, for Lyndon Johnson to provide contributions for the President’s national campaign, and indeed men such as Charles Marsh suggested this course to him.

  It was not a suggestion he accepted. No one can know why, but it is possible to list several considerations which may have influenced his decision. In a presidential campaign he would be only one of many contributors—considering the scale of contributions from New York and other financial centers of the Northeast, not even one of the biggest. The President’s gratitude would be proportionate. Moreover, any tangible power and patronage that might result from Roosevelt’s gratitude would be held at Roosevelt’s whim—and could be withdrawn at his whim. Independent power could not result from such a situation, any more than if he had accepted the President’s offer of the REA post. Using Herman Brown’s money in Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign would probably not get Lyndon Johnson what he wanted; it was necessary for him to find another way of using it.

  And he did.

  One facet of Lyndon Johnson’s political genius was already obvious by 1940: his ability to look at an organization and see in it political potentialities that no one else saw, to transform that organization into a political force, and to reap from that transformation personal advantage. He had done this twice before, transforming a social club (the White Stars) and a debating society (the Little Congress) into political forces that he used to further his own ends. Now he was to do it again.