The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  With or without formal appointment, Johnson saw no way around Flynn’s opposition, particularly without Rayburn in his corner. He drafted a letter to Roosevelt saying that after discussing

  the matter of my participation in the Congressional campaigns with Ed Flynn and several of my colleagues here on the Hill … I have come to the conclusion that because of the shortness of time and the possible resentment of such informal participation in the sphere [of] influence of well-established outfits, it would be inadvisable to make further attempts to work out the suggested arrangement with Mr. Flynn.

  He redrafted the letter before sending it to Roosevelt, in the reworking revealing some of his techniques, for the missive’s five brief paragraphs contain subtle denigration of the work of the man he wanted to replace (“Certainly the job is there to be done. My own youth and inexperience may be in error, but I feel tonight that we do stand in danger in the lower House”); flattery (“I know in your wisdom you will work it out”); subtle pointing out why he was well suited for the job (the campaign, he said, was “effective in cities” but not “in the fifty per cent remaining”—which, of course, was in rural areas such as the one he represented); and a personal touch (noting that “we lost eighty-two seats in 1938,” he said that the present forty-five margin “gives me the night-sweats at three a.m.”).

  Despite the letter, Roosevelt would agree to Johnson’s participation only on the original, very informal, basis. A note from FDR to McIntyre on October 4 said: “In the morning will you call up Congressman Lyndon Johnson and tell him that Flynn strongly recommends that we proceed on the original basis as worked out between him and Congressman Drewry which will give Johnson a chance at once to send out the letters which were agreed on, but which made no reference to the President, and that he should do this right away. …” Johnson, however, was still reluctant to accept so informal a role, particularly without Rayburn’s support, and that support was still not forthcoming.

  But Sam Rayburn was becoming desperate.

  If the Democrats lost control of the House, he would lose the Speakership he had just assumed after twenty-eight years of waiting—and every indication was that they were going to lose.

  Since 1938, when the Republicans had almost doubled their House holding, from 88 seats to 170, every special election necessitated by the death of a member had confirmed the trend toward the GOP. In 1940, the trend had been accelerating. In the seven special elections held since the first of the year, the Republican share of the vote had risen an average of 6 percent. Democrats had hoped that that trend would be reversed in a presidential election year, but those hopes had been dealt a body blow just three days before Rayburn had become Speaker, for on September 13, in congressional voting in Maine, the Democratic vote in the three Maine congressional districts was down—by the same 6 percent. That 6 percent figure was especially ominous because, in 1938, no fewer than 100 of the 265 Democratic seats had been won by less than 6 percent of the vote. The Republicans needed to gain only forty-eight seats to take control of the House in 1940—and elect their own Speaker. Democrats and Republicans alike felt that the GOP would gain more than that number. “Regardless of the outcome of the Presidential election,” the New York Herald Tribune reported on September 15, “Republicans are confident and Democrats fearful that the next House of Representatives will be organized and controlled by the Republican Party for the first time in ten years. … Those who deal with figures cannot avoid the ‘trend’ which set in in the congressional elections of 1938 and its continuation in all congressional off-year elections since then. …” Democrats couldn’t even get back home to campaign. Deepening crisis in Europe and the Far East, and the need for new crisis legislation—the Selective Service Act, funding for new military bases—forced Congress to remain in session all Summer and into September. September drew to a close, and no major new legislation was before Congress, and the gleeful Republicans, backed by the press (“In such a time of crisis the institution through which the will of the American people is expressed ought not to leave Washington,” editorialized the New York Times), insisted that it stay in session. As Arthur Krock wrote on September 24:

  … the Democratic House majority is in real danger whoever may win the Presidency. That is what is disturbing the Democratic members as the time of the session lengthens, and the Republicans, while equally anxious to campaign, count on that to keep the adjournment cake and eat it too. They would then go to the country, crying out against adjournment “at such a time” and making all the political hay which could be gathered in season.

  And in to many of the Democratic members, trapped in Washington, poured reports that they were in trouble back home, and that time was growing too short to repair the damage. Sam Rayburn had spent twenty-eight years in Congress waiting to be Speaker; was he to be Speaker for only four months?

  Over and over again Rayburn was told that a principal reason for the impending electoral disaster was lack of money. Visiting the Chicago headquarters of the party’s Midwest Division, Charles Marsh reported that “Chicago is a skeleton, because no money has trickled from New York West yet. I walked through a graveyard … with yawning offices everywhere. Apparently no money for payrolls, no definite amounts to make planning for radio and speaker’s bureau.” Roosevelt’s personal popularity would pull the President through, Marsh predicted, but it wouldn’t pull enough Congressmen with him. “I believe the lower house of Congress may be lost by not getting money West now.”

  And there was no money. In August, Rayburn had asked Flynn to set aside $100,000 to help congressional candidates. At the end of September, the Democratic National Committee had not contributed a penny. On October 2, a letter from Flynn’s finance chairman, Wayne Johnson, must have made Rayburn realize how remote was the chance of significant financial assistance to his “fellows” from the DNC: Congressman William D. Byron of Maryland had made a personal trip to National Committee headquarters at the Biltmore to ask for financial help; Johnson wrote Rayburn, “Will you see what you can do to help Congressman Byron if his need is as acute as he thinks.” As for the National Committee, Wayne Johnson wrote, “We have had such difficulty in getting money to keep things running to date that I don’t know how much we will have to help the Congressional Campaign Committee.”

  Then, over the weekend beginning October 5, premonition turned to panic, for on that weekend, Democrats, desperate over discouraging reports from their districts, began drifting away from Washington; by October 8, when an informal “recess” was finally arranged, more than a hundred members had already left for home on what the Times called “French Leave,” and others, the Times reported, were threatening “to quit the capital regardless of what the body decides to do about … remaining in daily session.” And when they arrived back in their districts, they found that the reports were all too true. In district after district, Democratic Congressmen who had won by comfortable margins in 1936, and by smaller margins in 1938, returned home in 1940, with less than a month to go before the election, to find that they were behind, and that their opponents’ campaigns were well organized and well financed, with plenty of help from Washington—while they were getting no help at all.

  Michigan’s Sixteenth Congressional District, which included part of Detroit, and adjoining Dearborn, site of a giant Ford Motor Company plant, had once been considered a safe Democratic district. Running for his third term in 1936, Congressman John Lesinski had polled 61 percent of the vote, defeating his Republican opponent by 21,000 votes. But in 1938, the margin had been reduced to 10,000—55 percent. And in 1940, the Republican candidate in the Ford-dominated Sixteenth was a Ford: Henry’s cousin Robert. Arriving back in Dearborn to begin his campaign, Lesinski found “hundreds” of Robert ford for congress billboards, and numerous other indications of “unlimited financial backing”—including no fewer than a dozen well-staffed campaign headquarters. Clearly, the district wasn’t safe any longer. It contained voters of fifty-eight nationalities, so literatur
e printed in foreign languages was a necessity. In the 1936 and 1938 elections, the Democratic National Committee had sent truckloads of foreign-language pamphlets to the district—100,000 in Polish alone. Now Lesinski was informed that not one piece of foreign-language literature had been received in the district. When he telephoned the Biltmore to find out when some would be arriving, he could not even get through to anyone who could give him a reply. Compiling a detailed list of the minimum needed—50,000 pamphlets in Polish, 5,000 each in Hungarian, Ukrainian, Italian and Russian—he telegraphed it to the Biltmore, and this time he got a reply. The pamphlets had been set in type, he was told, but there was no money available to print them. And he couldn’t get campaign buttons. He pleaded for a visit by Roosevelt to his district, reminding Washington of the great crowds the President had drawn in Detroit in 1936, but he couldn’t get Roosevelt. That was understandable and standard for any campaign; every Congressman wanted a popular President in his district. But Lesinski couldn’t even get a picture of Roosevelt! So few posters of the President were available that they were framed under glass to preserve them and carried from one rally to another; not one could be spared, Lesinski was to write, to hang in his own headquarters! John Lesinski knew he was in trouble. He needed all the help he could get. And he couldn’t even get a poster.

  Lesinski’s experience was being repeated, that first part of October, in scores of congressional districts. In 1940, radio was still not the most expensive campaign item for Congressmen; most spent more money on billboards. “When you saw a lot of billboards for your opponent,” recalls a man who ran many congressional campaigns in the pre-war era, “you knew that he must have a well-financed campaign in other areas, too.” Now, in district after district, the Congressman arrived home to find his opponent’s face staring down at him from billboards—and to realize what that meant. And when he wrote or telephoned his Congressional Campaign Committee for help, he found that not only cash but the most basic types of other campaign materials were difficult to obtain. In previous elections, the committee had relayed requests for buttons, posters, bumper stickers, literature, nationally prominent speakers, to the parent Democratic National Committee, and Farley’s efficient staff, sympathetic to Congressmen and experienced in solving their problems, had done their best to meet their requests. Now, with Farley and his staff abruptly gone, and with Farley’s replacement, Flynn, interested almost exclusively in Roosevelt’s election, the National Committee, its resources more limited than ever, was all but ignoring Congressmen’s requests.

  Overshadowing every other problem for the returning Congressmen was their shortage of campaign funds. Lesinski had pleaded with Drewry for help; what he received was a check for $100, a very small amount of ammunition with which to fight a Ford. That was not an ungenerous contribution by Drewry’s standards, particularly given the state of the Congressional Committee’s bank account. The long-awaited subvention from the Democratic National Committee finally arrived on October 10. It was not the $100,000 for which Rayburn had asked, but $10,000. Parceled out among seventy-eight candidates in contributions of $100 or $200, it was an amount too small to make a difference in the fight on which hung Sam Rayburn’s fate. Not since the New Deal had swept into office in 1932 had Democratic candidates for Congress needed more help—and instead they were getting less help. Tallying the frantic telephone calls from the Congressmen, Democratic congressional leaders realized that the fight was being lost. With Roosevelt’s once-substantial lead slipping week by week until Gallup polls in early October showed Willkie pulling into a virtual dead heat, the outlook for the House worsened. “You could have cut the gloom around Democratic congressional headquarters with a knife,” Pearson and Allen were to recall. “The campaign committee, headed by Representative Pat Drewry, a charming and dawdling Virginian, had collapsed like the minister’s one-horse shay. Activity had so bogged down that hard-pressed candidates had quit even asking for help. For the Republicans it looked like a lead-pipe cinch to regain control of the House.”

  Sam Rayburn realized the situation, and if he hadn’t, a letter misdirected to Congressional Committee secretary Cap Harding would have helped him realize it by giving him additional evidence of the financial odds against House Democrats. Contributions to the Republican Party from A. Felix du Pont, Jr., and his wife, Lydia, had been delivered to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee by mistake. The checks were for $3,000 and $4,000, respectively. And they were from just two du Ponts. No fewer than forty-six du Ponts were active Republican contributors. Apparently still unwilling to put Lyndon Johnson in charge of the congressional effort, Rayburn now tried frantically to find someone else. But no one else wanted the job. Recalls one of Rayburn’s aides: “It appeared that the Democrats were … going to lose the House. No one wanted to risk his political future by being congressional campaign manager for the House.” Rayburn talked to “two or three other people,” but found “nobody available.” Earlier in October, he told Roosevelt what he had told Flynn: “that if this House were lost—even though he was reelected—it would tear him to pieces just like it did President Wilson after the Republicans won the House in 1918.” He asked Roosevelt to appoint Johnson to the post he wanted, Chip Robert’s now-vacant National Committee secretaryship. Flynn again refused to accept that appointment, but Johnson now agreed to accept the informal role with the Congressional Committee that he had earlier refused. Apparently changing his mind yet again, Flynn appears to have demurred even at this, but on October 13, Rayburn begged Roosevelt to get Johnson into the congressional campaign in some capacity, formal or informal, and to do it fast. The President agreed to do so. He reportedly said: “Tell Lyndon to see me tomorrow.” Lyndon saw the President the next day —October 14—at breakfast, and that afternoon not only Flynn but Drewry sent out the letters that assigned Johnson a role in the campaign.

  The role could hardly have been more informal. Drewry’s letter said only that Johnson would “assist the Congressional Committee.” No specific position or title was mentioned. While the role may have been informal, however, it was a role not on the district level or the state level, but on the national level. Rushing out of the White House, Lyndon Johnson placed a call to Houston—to Brown & Root.

  *Actually, services were supposedly dispensed not by the Congressional Campaign Committee but by the Democratic National Congressional Committee, but these committees were actually the same body, operating out of the same office and with the same staff; the two names had been adopted to avoid various complications of campaign-financing laws.

  *He appears to have seen it from the beginning. Although no oil had been discovered in his district, a local attorney, Harris Melasky, had begun representing some of the formerly broke wildcatters who owned wells in East Texas; Johnson went to a lot of trouble cultivating Melasky in 1938 and 1939—although none of Johnson’s advisors in the district could figure out why.

  *Whether he asked to be formally appointed chairman in Drewry’s place, or whether he would have been satisfied to have Drewry remain, as a figurehead, while he accepted another post, is uncertain; some sources believe the former, some the latter.

  32

  The Munsey Building

  THE GREAT POLITICAL FUND-RAISERS—the Tommy Corcorans of Washington, the Ed Clarks of Texas—agree that most businessmen who contribute to political campaigns don’t contribute enough to accomplish their purposes. They want Ambassadorships or contracts or input into policy, but they don’t give enough to get what they want. Their contributions are grudging, or slow in coming, or too small to place the recipients under sufficient obligation to them. “There’s always just a few,” says Clark, “only the most sophisticated and the smartest,” who give “real money” and who give it eagerly enough, and early enough, so that they can reap the maximum return on their investment. Herman Brown, on top of whose native shrewdness had been overlaid the sophistication obtained from more than a decade of involvement in the financing of state politics and polit
icians, was one of the few. “When Herman gave,” says Ed Clark, “he gave his full weight.” When Johnson’s call reached Brown & Root headquarters, the response was immediate. Since the Federal Corrupt Practices Act prohibited political contributions by corporations, money could not come directly from Brown & Root. Because of a $5,000 limit on an individual’s contribution to a political organization during any one year, not enough of it could come from Herman, or from his brother George. Therefore, Herman arranged to have six business associates—subcontractors, attorneys, his insurance broker—send money, in their names, to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. And Herman acted fast. Johnson had made his telephone call on Monday, October 14. On Saturday, October 19, George Brown telegraphed Johnson: YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO HAVE CHECKS BY FRIDAY. … HOPE THEY ARRIVED IN DUE FORM AND ON TIME. JOHNSON WAS ABLE TO REPLY BY RETURN WIRE: ALL OF THE FOLKS YOU TALKED TO HAVE BEEN HEARD FROM. MANY, MANY THANKS. I AM NOT ACKNOWLEDGING THEIR LETTERS, SO BE SURE TO TELL ALL THESE FELLOWS THAT THEIR LETTERS HAVE BEEN RECEIVED. The amount of each check was the maximum contribution allowed under the law: $5,000. The initial Brown & Root contribution to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee was $30,000—more money than the committee had received from the Democratic National Committee, which had in previous years been its major source of funds.