The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  With older men who possessed power, Johnson had always been “a professional son”—utterly deferential (“Yes, sir,” “No, sir”). Was this a technique that he employed on Roosevelt, and that endeared him to the President? “The only man I think he never quarreled with was Roosevelt, and maybe that was because he [Roosevelt] was always President,” Rowe says. With older men, moreover, he was always the most attentive of listeners. Was this a quality that endeared him to a man who loved to talk—and who, lonely, needed someone to talk to? Or was the crucial quality ability—that rare ability so many older men recognized? The reasons for the rapport between the President and the young Congressman were, Rowe emphasizes, “complicated.” Johnson, Rowe says, “used” Roosevelt “when he could.” And, he says, “Roosevelt knew he was being used.” But whatever the reasons, the rapport was there—and it was deep.

  EVER SINCE HE HAD ARRIVED in Washington nine years before, Lyndon Johnson had, first as a congressional secretary and then as a Congressman, been touching every base: cultivating not only bureaucrats, but their secretaries and their assistants, and their assistants’ assistants, and their secretaries, until entire government bureaus knew him, liked him—wanted to do things for him. He used the same technique with members of the White House staff.

  The basis of their friendliness toward him was their belief that he loved their chief as they did. The White House was “filled with the fierce loyalty and warm affection that he [Roosevelt] inspired,” Robert E. Sherwood wrote. “If you could prove possession of these sentiments in abundance, you were accepted as a member of the family and treated accordingly.” Marvin McIntyre, the “soft touch” among the presidential secretaries, had long been convinced that Johnson was a devout Roosevelt worshipper, but General Edwin M. (“Pa”) Watson, the presidential secretary who was now in charge of appointments and was therefore official guardian of the door to the Oval Office, was, behind his amiable exterior, a much tougher customer, and had for a long time been notably immune to the Johnson charm. Now Pa, too, had been completely won over—as was demonstrated by a remark he made when Jim Rowe was attempting to persuade him to give another Congressman a few minutes of the President’s time. “Is he like Lyndon?” Pa asked. “Is he a perfect Roosevelt man?” Friendly with two presidential secretaries, Johnson didn’t neglect the third, cultivating Stephen T. Early at every opportunity.

  He didn’t neglect anyone in the White House. The fight against Garner had certified his bona fides with Missy LeHand, Roosevelt’s longtime personal secretary. But Missy had an assistant, Grace Tully, who took most of the President’s dictation. She was a fortyish spinster, and Johnson had always had particular success winning the friendship of such women; now he devoted a great deal of effort to winning Miss Tully’s, sometimes stopping by her apartment on Connecticut Avenue and giving her a lift to work. The effort was successful; so fond was she of him and so convinced of his loyalty to the man she was to call “one of the great souls of history” that she would later suggest (with a rather dramatic misunderstanding of Johnson’s ambitions) that he be made a presidential secretary.

  This determination to “touch every base” paid dividends. Pa Watson guarded only the front door to the Oval Office. There was a “back door,” too. This was the door to the small, cluttered office—on the opposite side of the Oval Office from Watson’s—that was shared by LeHand and Tully. Visitors Roosevelt wanted to see without the knowledge of the press—“off-the-record” guests, in the parlance of the White House inner circle—would use this door, entering the White House by an unfrequented side entrance, then going up the back stairs to Missy’s office, to be ushered into the President’s presence by her. This door was used as well by knowledgeable young White House staffers, because the two personal secretaries possessed virtually unlimited access to the President; “everyone had to go through Pa—except Missy and Grace,” Corcoran recalls. If one of these two women knew Roosevelt was alone, she could bring someone in for a quick moment’s discussion in which the President could give him the decision or guidance he needed, “so if Pa wouldn’t let you in, you went around back to Grace, and she or Missy got you in.” A refinement of this procedure was also employed. If Rowe, say, or one of the President’s five other administrative assistants (the men with a “passion for anonymity” whose offices were across narrow West Executive Avenue in the old State, War, and Navy Building) asked Watson for an appointment with the President, he might be told that the schedule was filled, but that Watson would try—no guarantees—to fit him in between appointments if he wanted to wait with other visitors in his spacious anteroom. “And you’d sit there,” says Rowe, “and if Pa wouldn’t let you in fast enough, you’d go out and go around back to Missy [and ask her], ‘When do I get in? I’ve got to talk to the President.’ Then you’d go back and sit in Pa’s office again, and Missy would tell Roosevelt, and he would tell Pa, ‘I need to talk to Jim Rowe. Get him, will you?’ And Pa would say, ‘He’s right here.’ It was a game.” This version of the game was used frequently by those of the young men the two women were fond of. “I learned—I always went in through the back door,” Rowe says. “And Lyndon got in like me—through the back door.” Fond though Watson was of Johnson, Pa was a vigilant guardian of the President’s time, and had Johnson asked for more than occasional bits of it, he might easily have worn out his welcome with the General. So he used the more informal route—which is one reason his name seldom appears in the White House logs that chronicle the President’s official visitors.

  Touching every base paid off in another way as well. The arrogant Corcoran habitually had Missy LeHand take him into the Oval Office, and didn’t bother paying much attention to other members of the presidential secretariat. But in 1941, for reasons never explained, Roosevelt dropped Tommy the Cork, and because Miss LeHand suffered a stroke, there was no one to get him in through the back door to repair the damage. One of the reasons that the break between the two men couldn’t be restored, Rowe suggests, was the fact that Corcoran “always went through Missy, and Missy died.” Lyndon Johnson would never make such a mistake. He had taken care to be friends not only with Miss LeHand but with her assistant, and LeHand’s illness did not close the back door to him; in fact, it was more open than ever, for Grace Tully was in some ways the easiest mark for the Johnson charm of anyone on Roosevelt’s staff, and she was very useful to him.

  Not only would he personally hand to her a memo that he wanted the President to see, so that she could put it on top of the pile, but he would, Rowe says, “tell Grace something that he didn’t want to put in a memo. He would say, ‘Grace, will you tell him ____? But don’t take any notes, and don’t tell anyone else.’”

  He didn’t work only through Tully, of course; he didn’t have to, so long as Rowe was his friend. Often, he would visit Rowe in his office; sometimes—since the President would be more likely to read a memo from Rowe than from him—his purpose would be to obtain Rowe’s imprimatur on a Johnson proposal; “he would come over, for example, if there was a memo he wanted to make sure Roosevelt saw; he would say, ‘I can’t write. You write it. You do it for both of us.’ Johnson was a great man for ‘Jim Rowe and I think …’” Rowe and Johnson were quite close now; their late-afternoon telephone conversations had become almost a custom, one that was not interrupted even when Johnson was in Texas—although when he initiated a long-distance call, he took care to have his secretary reverse the charges. (Once, when a secretary neglected to do so in advance, Johnson told her that if she couldn’t make some ex post facto arrangement to have the White House pay for the thirty-minute call, she would have to pay for it herself.) When Rowe didn’t hear from Johnson for a few days, he missed him; once he dropped Johnson a note: “There has been a deadly silence around here for some time. Miss Gilligan [Rowe’s secretary] says it makes this office very dull. I got so worried about it last week I called to see if you had fallen in front of a train. I was relieved to find you were only in Texas.” And close as he was to Rowe—
and hard as he worked to maintain that closeness—Rowe was not the only one of the President’s six administrative assistants he was cultivating. When he ran up the stairs that pierced the forest of columns on the towering, grotesque facade of the State, War, and Navy Building, and then ran up an inside flight of stairs to “Death Row,” as the administrative assistants had dubbed their line of offices on the second floor, he might be heading for any of the six offices. And no matter which one he was heading for, he could be sure of a warm welcome in it.

  Part VI

  DEFEAT

  34

  “Pass the Biscuits, Pappy”

  SHORTLY AFTER DAYLIGHT on April 9, 1941, the telephone rang in the Johnsons’ Washington apartment. Walter Jenkins was telephoning from the police desk at the front door of the Cannon Building, where, he told Lyndon Johnson, he had just heard a startling piece of news: during the night, Morris Sheppard, the senior United States Senator from Texas, had died of a stroke.

  “Well, I won’t be in this morning,” Johnson said.

  Under Secretary of the Interior Alvin Wirtz was also awakened early that morning. His secretary, Mary Rather, got to their offices at Interior unusually early because she had heard the news, but when she opened the door to Wirtz’s private office, there he was, already sitting at his desk. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he asked. Soon he and Johnson were mapping strategy for a Johnson campaign to fill the seat that Sheppard had held for twenty-seven years.

  The principal obstacle to Johnson’s candidacy was the one that had confronted him in his race for the House four years before: most voters had never heard of him. The voters of his Tenth Congressional District knew him, of course, and so did the voters of the Fourteenth, which he had earlier served as a congressional secretary. But in the state’s other nineteen congressional districts, his name was all but unknown. Shortly after Sheppard’s death, an East Texas radio station asked its listeners to send in postcards indicating the name of their favorite candidate. Not one of the hundreds of replies bore the name of Lyndon Johnson.

  There were, moreover, potential candidates whose names were household words throughout Texas: the state’s Governor, W. Lee O’Daniel; its youthful Attorney General, Gerald C. Mann; Congressman Martin Dies, chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. A Belden Poll—the Texas version of the Gallup Poll—taken shortly after Sheppard’s death showed that 33 percent of the state’s voters favored O’Daniel in a Senate race, 26 percent Mann, 9 percent Dies—and 5 percent Johnson.

  Johnson’s best hope of overcoming this handicap was the same strategy that had worked so well in 1937: linking his name with the name that was still magic in the state; just six months before, Franklin D. Roosevelt had crushed Willkie in Texas by a margin of more than four to one. Strong reasons existed for the President’s active support of a liberal in the special election that would be held to fill Sheppard’s seat. He obviously didn’t want either Dies, the Garner protégé whose committee had begun investigating New Deal agencies, or the conservative, isolationist O’Daniel in the Senate; a memo circulating in the White House warned that the election of either is a possibility “too frightful for contemplation.” But there was also a reason—a very strong reason—why the liberal should not be Lyndon Johnson but Gerald Mann.

  Mann was an ardent New Dealer; although he had never met the President, “Gerry was a Roosevelt worshipper,” an aide recalls. He had, in fact, worked for Johnson in 1937 because of Johnson’s all-out support of the New Deal. And Mann had a much better chance to win than Johnson did.

  A smalltown boy who worked on farms and in a local hotel to earn money to attend Southern Methodist University in Dallas, the slender, speedy back was twice named to all-conference football teams and became famous throughout Texas as SMU’s “Little Red Arrow.” He possessed three enthusiasms somewhat rare among politicians: for God, for poetry and for the law as an abstract force that could promote the general good. Determined to study at the best law school in the country, he took his wife and baby son to Melrose, Massachusetts, where, while commuting to Harvard Law School, he worked two shifts a day in a garment factory—until parishioners of the Congregationalist Church in Gloucester, impressed by the Sunday School sermons of the intense, handsome young man, made him their pastor. Thanks to football, he had entered politics with a statewide reputation, and in public office he had burnished it. Returning to Texas from Harvard, he had become one of Governor James Allred’s Assistant Attorney Generals and had produced some notably progressive legislation (including a revision of Sam Johnson’s now-outdated “Blue Sky Law”), and then had been Ed Clark’s predecessor as Secretary of State. In 1938, at the age of thirty-one, he had run for Attorney General. Finishing second to an experienced and popular politician in the first primary, Mann overtook him in the run-off and beat him by an astonishing 130,000 votes. Replacing the political hacks in the Attorney General’s office with bright young lawyers, Mann raised its notoriously low standards, waged what Texas historian Seth McKay calls “continuous war” against loan sharks and usurious finance companies and, most significantly, instituted strict enforcement of the state’s anti-trust laws, hitherto all but ignored by state administrations subservient to business interests. During his first two-year term, scores of anti-trust suits were filed, and a substantial portion were won. So popular was he that when, in 1940, he ran for reelection, no one ran against him. Thirty-four years old, already twice elected to statewide office, he was in 1941 by far the best-known and most-respected young public official in Texas. “A brilliant career was predicted for him in Texas politics,” McKay writes. And when Sheppard died, several of the state’s leading newspapers spontaneously joined in asking him to run for the Senate. O’Daniel had said he wasn’t running; if the immensely popular Governor entered the race, Mann had the best chance to beat him. If O’Daniel stayed out, a Belden Poll showed, he would beat Dies, although the vote would be close. The only way Dies could win, in fact, was if another New Dealer—such as Lyndon Johnson—entered the race, and split the New Deal vote.

  A little deceit was necessary to offset this reasoning. Roosevelt and the White House staff knew little about the internal politics of Texas, of course—as had been amply demonstrated the year before. In 1941, as in 1940, most of the information given to the President about Texas came from Johnson and Wirtz, and from Johnson’s admirers on the White House staff (whose information of course came mostly from him). This information was not strictly accurate. The President was told that Mann possessed neither guaranteed loyalty to the New Deal nor the statewide reputation necessary to defeat Dies (or O’Daniel, should the Governor choose to run); a Johnson-inspired memo told Roosevelt that Mann was “unbranded and unknown.”

  Several influential Texans, including Senator Tom Connally, tried to explain the true situation to Roosevelt, but the President’s fondness for Johnson predisposed him to be convinced by his arguments. Roosevelt, who had, following the 1938 “purge” attempt, re-adopted his pose of never intervening in an intrastate Democratic fight, orchestrated a scenario designed to show—without his actually saying so—that he was intervening in this one. He arranged for Johnson to see him on April 22, just before his regular Tuesday press conference, so that arriving reporters would see Johnson emerging from the Oval Office. While the reporters watched, Johnson announced his candidacy from the White House steps, saying he would campaign “under the banner of Roosevelt.” And when the reporters, crowding into the Oval Office, asked the President if he had given Johnson permission to wave that banner, Roosevelt replied: “First, it is up to the people of Texas to elect the man they want as their Senator; second, everybody knows that I cannot enter a primary election; and third, to be truthful, all I can say is Lyndon Johnson is a very old, old friend of mine.” Then, as Time magazine put it, the “correspondents laughed, and he laughed with them.” F.D.R. PICKS JOHNSON TO DEFEAT DIES, said the headline in the Dallas Morning News.

  In 1941 as in 1937, therefore, the
Johnson campaign consisted of a single issue: “Roosevelt. Roosevelt. Roosevelt.” That issue was emphasized in the candidate’s speeches. What America needed, he said, was “Roosevelt and unity—unity under one management, and for a common purpose: saving America from the dangers ahead; united behind Roosevelt, we’ll save America from the threat of slavery by the Axis.” If he was elected, he said, he would be “100 percent for Roosevelt,” “an all-out Roosevelt Senator,” “just a private under my Commander-in-Chief.” The issue was symbolized by his campaign emblem: the picture of Roosevelt and Johnson shaking hands on the Galveston dock at their first meeting four years before. In that picture, then-Governor Allred had been standing between the two men, but now he was airbrushed out. What remained was two tall, smiling men shaking hands across the empty space where Allred had once stood. This image was used in countless brochures and campaign newspapers. And, painted larger than life, it was plastered on thousands of billboards along highways the length and breadth of Texas—and not only the busy roads leading into Dallas and Houston and El Paso; the state’s great empty spaces were not ignored; before a driver speeding across the vast, flat plains of West Texas or the Panhandle, those two huge figures shaking hands, painted dark against a red-white-and-blue background, would loom up against the sky, miles ahead. The issue was summed up in the campaign’s slogan, which had originally been a private password used with a grin among the Chief’s NYA boys who were out campaigning for him, but which was so catchy that it quickly became the campaign’s public motto as well, appearing in new editions of the brochures and campaign newspapers—and on hundreds of thousands of hastily printed red-white-and-blue bumper stickers, simple and to the point: FRANKLIN D AND LYNDON B!