The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  The twenty-two-year-old Jenkins had been thrilled by other calls he had been taking. “It was the most exciting night of my life,” he would recall. “I thought I was in the high cotton. All those big shots, you know,” voices on the telephone that had previously been only names in a newspaper. And then the call from the biggest name of all. “Mr. Roosevelt called and asked how many seats we were going to lose, and Mr. Johnson said, ‘We’re not going to lose. We’re going to gain.’” He and Rowe got on extensions and talked to the President. Recalls Rowe: “Johnson got good, early counts and we both got on the telephone … and told him [Roosevelt] how many Congressmen we had elected, and it was impressive—a helluva lot of Congressmen. And it impressed the hell out of Roosevelt. I remember that.”

  LESSER POLITICIANS were also impressed. Knowledgeable Democrats in Washington had reluctantly reconciled themselves to the loss of a considerable number of seats in the House. Instead, they had gained eight (while losing three in the Senate). “My father expected to lose,” Ken Harding recalls. “We were the most surprised people in the world when we didn’t lose.”

  Many of the men most directly affected—the Democratic candidates—gave considerable credit for the surprise to Lyndon Johnson. Despite the frenzy of the last days before the election, several candidates had taken time out from their campaigning to write to express appreciation for the help he had given them. “I want to thank you again from the very depths of my heart for the interest you have taken in me, because of the confidence which you have manifested and the effort you have put forth,” Arthur Mitchell wrote. Said Nan Honeyman: “As darling as I think it was of you I still was a bit perturbed over your taking all the trouble to enlist the interest of the state of Texas in my welfare. Really, darling, that was too good of you and of them. How can I thank you? If I am elected I shall really owe the victory to your efforts.” After the election, similar letters were received at the Munsey Building from scores of men who remembered the yellow rectangles from Western Union that had arrived with the information, or the money, they needed, and who wanted to thank the man who had sent them. “Before you came to my rescue, I was really getting discouraged,” John Kee of West Virginia wrote. Thanking Johnson for the money he sent, John F. Hunter of Ohio wrote, “We were able to put on some thirty short radio programs in the last two days.” Lansdale G. Sasscer of Maryland said, “I used it among our colored vote very effectively both for the President and myself.” “Certainly I never had such grand cooperation from the Congressional Committee before,” wrote Draper Allen of Michigan. “This is … the first time I have ever received any financial assistance from Washington, and I assure you I deeply appreciate it.” And some of the gratitude was expressed in a form that must have been particularly pleasing to a man looking down a long road. “Congratulations on your fine and successful work in the campaign,” wrote Pat Morrison of South Dakota. “We look forward to the date, not too far distant, when our delegation will be able to be of aid and assistance to you.” Says Walter Jenkins: There was a lot of gratitude among his colleagues for what he had done. “I saw it in the phone calls and the letters. And the feeling of respect. It built him up from being just—he was barely a first-term Congressman—to probably the most…” Here Jenkins pauses and searches for the right word; and finally says, “He was the hero.” The same feeling was expressed by observers less impressionable than Jenkins. Wrote Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen in their “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column:

  To the boys on the Democratic side of the House of Representatives, many of them still nervously mopping their brows over narrow escapes, the hero of the hair-raising campaign was no big-shot party figure.

  The big names got all the publicity, but in the House all the praise is for a youngster whose name was scarcely mentioned. But he left his mark on the battle—as GOP campaign managers will ruefully attest.

  Their Nemesis and the Democrats’ unknown hero was Lyndon Baines Johnson, a rangy, 32-year-old, black-haired, handsome Texan who has been in Congress only three years but who has political magic at his fingertips and a way with him that is irresistible in action.

  How Johnson took over the Democratic congressional campaign, when it looked as if the party was sure to lose the House, and without fanfare turned a rout into a cocky triumph, is one of the untold epics of the election.

  Gratitude is an emotion as ephemeral in Washington as elsewhere, but Lyndon Johnson obtained from his work with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee a reward more lasting.

  During those three weeks in the Munsey Building, his secretaries had compiled lists of Congressmen who had asked for money, and the amounts for which they had asked. And then the lists had been placed before Lyndon Johnson—for decisions. If Sam Rayburn or John McCormack requested a specific amount of money for a specific Congressman, Johnson would honor the request, but these requests were relatively infrequent. And except in those few cases, the decision as to which Congressman got money, and how much he got, would be Lyndon Johnson’s decision. His alone. O.K., he wrote next to some requests. None, he wrote next to others. “1,000 would be a lifesaver”—None. “An additional $300 will, I am sure, get results”—None. Out. The words and numbers he wrote on those lists were a symbol of a power he now possessed—over the careers of his colleagues. The power was a limited one—it was the power of the purse, and the purse was not a large one. Small though it might be in comparison to the purse which financed a presidential campaign, however, it was not small to most of the men whose campaigns it was financing; it was substantial in terms both of their needs and of their expectations. They needed its contents, needed it badly. What Lyndon Johnson wrote beside their names had played a role—a small role but a definite role—in determining their fates.

  Returning to Washington after the election, Congressmen compared notes on their campaigns, and in these discussions the name of Lyndon Johnson kept coming up; when someone mentioned it to a freshman Congressman, Augustine B. Kelley of Pennsylvania, Kelley said: “Oh, Lyndon Johnson! He really had a lot to do with me getting elected. He sent money up to my campaign. He’d call up from Washington to see how we were getting along, and what we needed. ‘Gus, what do you need?’ And he sent me money, and kept up with my campaign.” Listening to his colleagues talk, a Congressman who had received campaign funds from Johnson—funds on a scale unprecedented for a central Democratic congressional financing source—would realize that Johnson had contributed funds, on a similar scale, to scores of Congressmen. Through cloakrooms and Speaker’s Lobby spread a realization that, in some way most of them did not understand, this young, junior, rather unpopular Congressman, a scant three years on the Hill, had become a source—an important source—of campaign funds.

  For some of these funds—the money from Texas—he had, moreover, become the sole source. The telegrams candidates had received from Johnson announcing that funds were on the way had said they had been contributed by “my good Democratic friends in Texas.” By his friends. The recipients did not know who those friends were—and even were they to find out, they could hardly ask these Texans with whom they were not even acquainted to contribute to their campaigns. Their only access to this new—and, apparently, substantial—source of money was through Lyndon Johnson. He controlled it. The money they needed could be obtained only through him.

  They were going to need money again in 1942, of course, in less than two years. In 1942—and in succeeding years. Whether or not they liked Lyndon Johnson, they were going to need him. Not merely gratitude but an emotion perhaps somewhat stronger and more enduring—self-interest—dictated that they be on good terms with him.

  This realization—and the reality behind it—abruptly altered Johnson’s status on Capitol Hill. When Congress had left Washington in October, he had been just one Congressman among many. Within a short time after Congress returned in January, the word was out that he was a man to see, a man to cultivate. Harold E. Cole of Boston, a friend of John McCormack, had lost a c
lose race, and was planning to run again. He hadn’t learned until late in the campaign of Johnson’s role in campaign funding, and he didn’t want to make the same mistake again. He wrote Johnson asking if he could come to Washington and drop in and see him. Working closely with Johnson, Jim Rowe had understood what he was trying to accomplish with the money from Texas. “He was really trying to build a power base as a new Congressman,” he says. And he succeeded. Ray Roberts, a Rayburn aide, says that Johnson had

  made lots of enemies [in Congress]. … He was brash, he was eager, … and he wanted people to move out of the way. … The thing that really gave him his power was becoming chairman of the congressional campaign committee. … There were some thirty or forty people [after the 1940 election] that figured they owed their seat in the House to Lyndon Johnson. Whenever he called on them, he could count on this group being for whatever he wanted.

  Roberts’ remark is an exaggeration. Lyndon Johnson controlled no Congressman that completely. As an analysis of the alteration in Johnson’s status, however, Roberts’ remark was in some respects an understatement. For it was not only junior Congressmen with no influence whom Johnson had helped.

  During the campaign, John McCormack had been asking Lyndon Johnson for funds for his Massachusetts delegation and for old friends from other states—and for credit for himself from those other Congressmen for obtaining them. And Johnson had given the Majority Leader what he asked for. Now the Majority Leader owed him something. The situation was duplicated with other members of the House hierarchy. The William H. Sutphin of New Jersey who had pleaded with him for funds—and who had received in return $1,500—was the Assistant Majority Leader. Andrew J. May of Kentucky (“I hope you can do something for me, and I will owe you an undying debt of gratitude”) was chairman of the Military Affairs Committee. Normally, young Congressmen were suppliants to the Majority Leader, or the Assistant Whip, or committee chairmen, for favors. In the case of this young Congressman, the situation had been reversed. The extent of the reversal was dramatized the first time the House Naval Affairs Committee met following the election. Normally, in a committee, seniority was the determining factor. When the Democrats moved into their seats this time, Johnson was still five seats away from the chairmanship. But three of the five men ahead of him in seniority owed him favors because of his contributions to their campaigns. He had been not only dealing with the most senior members of his party in the House, but dealing with them from a position of independent strength. When he asked Sam Rayburn and John McCormack to come to a luncheon meeting, they came.

  Nor, during the campaign, had he dealt only with Congressmen. When he had asked labor leaders in New York to intervene in a strike in the State of Washington, he had been playing a national political role. And his work with powerful political figures across the country had not consisted merely of liaison work. There had been a “Chicago line.” Precisely what it was, how Johnson operated through it, or how much he gave through it cannot be determined. But it had a connection with Chicago Boss Ed Kelly. By the end of the campaign, he had become acquainted with, had worked with—had funneled money through—some of the most powerful men in America. There was a New York connection, too. At first, the connection had been Tommy Corcoran; it was he who raised cash from New York garment-center leaders such as Hillman or Lubin or Dubinsky. But by the end of the campaign, Johnson was personally acquainted with them; several of them, in fact, were to become strong Johnson allies and generous Johnson financial backers. Men such as Kelly and Lubin were not without influence on Congressmen; after the 1940 campaign, Johnson was in a position to ask them to use that influence; a Congressman who would not respond to a Johnson request might receive a telephone call from his own home town. He even had a potential ally—if a low-level one—on the staff of the Democratic National Committee. Paul Aiken wrote to Johnson, “One of your chief boosters, Swagar Sherley, has been spending a lot of time with me in the last few days,” and as a result Aiken would look Johnson up on his next trip to Washington. All these things combined to radically alter Johnson’s status.

  The alteration was apparent at Georgetown dinner parties, where he dozed off at table less frequently. His need to be the center of attention at parties had been thwarted by the degree to which, in Washington, attention was a function of power, but now, as Dale Miller puts it, “because of his political power,” he was more often the center of attention. The alteration was apparent in the House cloakrooms and dining room, where, before the 1940 campaign, some fellow Representatives would snub Johnson, greeting other colleagues while ignoring him because, as one says, “they wouldn’t put up with him.” He still acted the same way in the House Dining Room, strolling through it nodding to left and right as if he were a visiting celebrity, “head-huddling,” talking loudly. But his colleagues “put up with him” now. Symbolically, the shrinking away was much less evident. The fellow Congressman whose lapel he grasped while staring into his eyes and talking nose to nose was often a colleague who had appealed to him for help, and who had received that help—a colleague, moreover, who not only had needed him once, but who would need him again. A Congressman who was thinking about his next campaign didn’t resent Lyndon Johnson’s arm around his shoulders—he was all too happy to have it there. Before 1940, Johnson had never been shy about asking for favors, “irritating” colleagues by his insistence when he had no favors to do them in return. He was in position now to return favors—in a big way. And if other Representatives still felt irritated, they no longer allowed the irritation to show. Says one: “A lot of guys still didn’t like him, but unlike before [the 1940 campaign], you tolerated his idiosyncrasies. Because you knew this guy was going somewhere. You knew—I don’t think most of us knew how he had done it, but we knew he had done it—that he had already started going somewhere. A lot of guys still didn’t like him, but they knew they might need him someday. Now he was a guy you couldn’t deny any more.”

  THE NEW POWER he possessed did not derive from Roosevelt’s friendship, or from Rayburn’s. It did not derive from seniority in the House, nor even—despite the relationship that power in a democracy bears to the votes of the electorate—to his seat in it. His power was simply the power of money. To a considerable extent, the money was Herman Brown’s. A single corporation, Brown & Root, may have given Democratic congressional candidates more money than they received from the Democratic National Committee. Lyndon Johnson had been attempting to, as Rowe puts it, “build a power base.” He had succeeded. His power base wasn’t his congressional district, it was Herman Brown’s bank account. Although he was young, he had been seeking national power for years. Now the power of money had given him some.

  Simultaneously, it had given a new kind of power to Texas—through him.

  This was a significant aspect of his work in the 1940 campaign. Texas had had power in Washington for nine years—since Dick Kleberg’s victory had given the Democrats control of the House in November, 1931, and John Garner had taken the Speaker’s chair. But that power had been somewhat personal, and therefore in constant danger of vanishing. Much of it had been embodied in, and exercised through, Garner, leader of the Lone Star State’s delegation and the key protector of the state’s interests in Washington, not only because of his position but because of the power of his personality. The ephemeral nature of power based on individuals was vividly demonstrated by the fact that Cactus Jack was, abruptly, no longer even going to be present in Washington. Sam Rayburn’s ascension to the Speakership and Texas’ continuing hold on key committee chairmanships in both House and Senate meant that Texas still had power in the capital, but great as this power was, it could disappear in a day—Election Day. Because of Texas’ predilection for keeping its Congressmen in office indefinitely, there was little fear that they themselves would lose some November, but their power rested on an overall Democratic majority in the House and Senate that depended on less reliable states. A Democratic loss would cost them their chairmanships and their power. A
nd a Republican victory was not the only way in which Texas could lose power: a chairmanship could be lost through death, as Buchanan’s death had cost Texas the key Appropriations post, and the key “Texas chairmanships” in the House were held by elderly men. In the world of the pork barrel and the log roll, Texas had a commanding position because of Joseph Jefferson Mansfield; let that elderly wheelchair-bound man die, and Texas’ power over public works would vanish in the instant of his death. A chairmanship could be lost through individual ambitions; arrangements had, in fact, already been finalized for the Agriculture Committee’s Marvin Jones to resign his House seat for a federal Judgeship immediately after the election. In 1932, Texas had held not only the Speakership but five key House chairmanships; Jones’ departure would reduce the number to three.

  Moreover, because, in a legislative body, personal relationships are so important, the effects of increased Republican strength would be for some period of years irreparable. A Republican victory would sweep out of office Congressmen with whom Texans had long and close alliances. The Democrats might return to a majority—but they might be different Democrats.

  The power of money was less ephemeral than power based on elections or individuals. It could last as long as the money lasted, exerting its effect not only on an incumbent but on his successors. And there was enough oil in Texas so that it would last, in political terms, a long time. Lyndon Johnson had become the conduit for the oilmen’s money. To the extent that he could remain the conduit, his power would endure.

  And there was a lot more Texas money available than had been apparent in the 1940 campaign. Lyndon Johnson’s base had been Herman Brown’s money, but he had expanded that base by adding to Herman’s cash, Sid Richardson’s and Clint Murchison’s. The extent of their wealth made his power base infinitely expandable. It could become a factor in campaigns other than those for members of the House of Representatives. It could exert more influence. To the extent that he remained in charge of its distribution, he could exert more influence. In terms of power in Washington, his power was still quite small, but if the amount of money at his command grew larger, his power might grow with it.