The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  This time, the man whose name Johnson was invoking played an active role in the race. Ignorance of Texas politics may partially explain Roosevelt’s original decision to support Johnson, but it does not explain the extent or the enthusiasm of his support. As if his press-conference hint had not been sufficiently broad, leaks went out from the White House to sympathetic columnists. “Roosevelt has a fatherly interest in young Johnson,” Pearson and Allen wrote. Said Alsop and Kintner:

  Although overburdened with the huge war effort and facing the gravest decision in this country’s history, the President still takes a personal interest in the campaign of his protégé, Representative Lyndon B. Johnson. … Intimates disclose that the President and his small group of advisors are receiving regular reports on the campaign and that the President has lost none of his determination to give Johnson every aid. … As much as any candidate in recent years Johnson is running under the White House banner.

  The President’s support went beyond hints and leaks. Johnson wanted Vice President Wallace’s aide Harold H. Young, the burly, brilliant Dallas attorney, seconded to his campaign for its duration. The Vice President refused to let Young go; the President intervened, and when Johnson flew down to Texas to open the campaign, Young was sitting beside him on the plane. Johnson had asked which Department of Agriculture officials could best help him, and Roosevelt apparently said he would find out. Informed that they were Milo Perkins, Maston White and Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Grover Hill, the President sent Rowe a memo: “Will you pass the word on to Lyndon Johnson and do the necessary.” The necessary was a direct order to the three men, delivered by Rowe, to give Johnson any help he wanted.

  Rowe had been designated liaison between the White House and Johnson’s camp. One of his first tasks was to ensure that Johnson received credit for all federal spending in Texas. He says: “Word went out—from me—to all departments, all departments in Washington: no projects approved for Texas unless Lyndon Johnson is notified.” In cases in which Rowe did not possess sufficient forcefulness, a more forceful man stepped in. Thomas Corcoran wouldn’t be “White House Tommy” much longer, but in April, 1941, he could still use the magic words that had given him that nickname, and he used them on behalf of Lyndon Johnson. On the very day Johnson left for Texas, he requested approval of a certain Rural Electrification project, asking for its approval before he left. An REA official said such rapid action was simply impossible. The phone rang in the official’s office: “This is Tommy Corcoran at the White House. Congressman Johnson wants this today, and the White House wants him to have it today.” Not only had Rowe, Corcoran and other Roosevelt aides been told to help Johnson, but their fondness for Johnson, and their fear of an O’Daniel (or Dies) victory made them eager to help him; Harold Ickes took the trouble to telephone Dies’ hometown himself to check on whether the Congressman had paid his real-estate taxes. “Everybody was helping him,” Rowe says. “And I’m thinking of all the liberals, all the way.” Their feelings are summed up in a memorandum from Pa Watson, who felt Lyndon was the “perfect Roosevelt man”; on a letter from a Texas politician critical of Johnson, Watson wrote: “Referred to Sec. Ickes for his perusal and then the ash-can.”

  The on-the-scene beneficiary of all this help was Walter Jenkins, who had been left behind in Washington when John Connally and Herbert Henderson left for Texas to work in the campaign. When Johnson needed something from the federal agencies, it was Jenkins who had to visit the officials involved. The shy twenty-three-year-old had no experience doing this. “I had been answering mail,” he says—filling constituents’ requests for farming pamphlets—when he wasn’t directing tourists around the Cannon Building in his guard’s uniform. Suddenly, he had to deal with Steve Early, Missy LeHand, Grace Tully, Jim Rowe and the legendary Corcoran. When Johnson told him his new assignment, he was at first “scared, nervous.” But, he says, “I received a wonderful reception—it was just unbelievable to me.”

  Tommy the Cork couldn’t have been nicer: “I talked to him lots of times. He was still very powerful, and when you asked him something, he could do it.” Even the Old Curmudgeon was nice. Once, Johnson told Jenkins to see Secretary Ickes personally about some matter too sensitive to be broached over the telephone, “and I remember thinking I couldn’t possibly get to see Ickes.” But Ickes’ office returned his call immediately, and said the Secretary could see him—immediately. (“I was very excited,” Jenkins says.) And when he told Ickes what Johnson needed, Ickes said that Johnson would have it. No matter what he asked these officials to do, Jenkins says, they did it. In fact, in many cases he didn’t have to ask. The White House would “often” call him about “something we hadn’t even asked about. I think that Mr. Roosevelt had put the word out to do anything possible” to help Lyndon Johnson “within reason … and sometimes beyond reason. … He [Roosevelt] wanted Mr. Johnson to win so bad.”

  There were other similarities between Lyndon Johnson’s first campaign for the Senate and his first campaign for the House. In 1941 as in 1937, only he, among all the candidates, possessed an efficient campaign organization. Although it was of course much larger than the 1937 organization, it was in many respects the same organization, from top (Under Secretary Alvin Wirtz directed campaign strategy from his desk in the Department of the Interior) to bottom (Carroll Keach was again Johnson’s chauffeur). The Henderson brothers were on hand again, Herb (the “genius with a pencil”) to write speeches, Chuck to write letters as the man in charge of communication with potential voters. The organization came primarily from the National Youth Administration, and many of the key names on the roster of the Johnson campaign workers of 1941—Kellam, Deason, Ernest Morgan, Fenner Roth—were the names of 1937. John Connally took orders from Wirtz and ran campaign headquarters in Austin.

  It was an organization not only young, energetic and capable but devoted to its leader. When someone sneered at Carroll Keach for again being only Johnson’s chauffeur, Keach replied simply: “Everyone can do something for him. This is what I can do for him.” The “weeding out” begun by Johnson when he had been NYA director had continued under Kellam, and the NYA was composed now of men who had proven the hard way that they were willing to work, willing to take orders, and able to get things done. They were bound to Johnson as they had always been by the force of his personality (Fenner Roth had named his son after his Chief), as well as by self-interest; in 1941, their investment in his future was four years greater than in 1937, and this time the stakes were much bigger: J. J. (“Jake”) Pickle, perhaps the most capable of the post-1937 recruits, had no hesitation about quitting his NYA job for a lower-paying campaign job, in part because “Well, it was expected that you would get your job back after the campaign,” but mostly because “I felt at this time that Mr. Johnson had the prospects of being a state and national figure, and he’d take you along with him. It was a good gamble to do it. It was the best way to get ahead.” It was an organization in place—and its individual members knew their place. The NYA was, after all, a well-organized, going concern; it was, in effect, shifted virtually en masse to the Johnson campaign. And, as in all Johnson operations, there was an iron-clad chain of command, a chain that carried over into the campaign. Superimposed above the NYA boys were Wirtz, Connally and James Blundell, a former Garner supporter who had seen where the future lay, had switched to the New Deal, and was now Connally’s assistant. But the organization below—the organization that carried out the daily campaigning—was largely the NYA organization; the state was divided into districts, along the lines of the NYA districts, and an NYA director supervised each, and gave orders to local NYA men, who were familiar with smaller areas. And because the NYA was a statewide organization, Johnson’s campaign organization was a statewide organization—the first statewide political organization Texas had ever seen. Johnson’s insistence that his NYA workers meet and cultivate local officials would pay off now; the Mayors and County Commissioners whose support he needed would be contacted by me
n who were already their friends. Within a week after his campaign had begun, twelve two-man teams had fanned out from Austin across Texas to carry the message of “Roosevelt and Unity”—and these teams knew whom to see. Having worked in the 1937 campaign, moreover, they knew many little tricks of the political trade. Wingate Lucas knew he was in the hands of professionals from the moment the Johnson team of advance men arrived in his hometown to oversee his preparations for a Johnson speech; the audience was going to sit on a hillside, and Lucas’ aides had been setting up the chairs “right next to each other. And his people said, you never put the chairs so close together at a political rally: you want to make it look like there are more people there.” They removed every other chair; “we spread out those chairs across the whole hillside,” and the press reported that Johnson had drawn a larger audience than in fact he had. “Now that sounds like a simple thing,” Lucas says. “But at the time I didn’t know that.”

  And in 1941 as in 1937, Johnson had money.

  Running a statewide campaign had always been expensive in Texas. In part, this was because of the state’s size—800 miles from top to bottom, close to 800 miles across, it is bigger than all New England (with several other states thrown in). In part, it was because the state was largely rural: only a third of its 6,450,000 residents lived in cities; a third lived in small towns, and a third still lived on farms. A substantial percentage of the farmers didn’t possess radios; some didn’t even get a weekly newspaper. In 1941 the only way to reach these people was by the campaigning methods that had been in use in Texas decades before. “You’d put a loudspeaker on some guy’s car, load up the back with literature, mark up a road map for him, and send him out,” driving from one “Saturday town” to another to put up placards, pass out literature and give speeches on the courthouse square, says D. B. Hardeman. Although the cost of individual items such as gasoline, hotels and food was low (a good smalltown hotel charged no more than two or three dollars a night, a like amount would pay for a day’s food, and, recalls one campaigner, “You couldn’t drive far enough in a day to use up two dollars’ worth of gasoline”), overall this type of campaigning was expensive. The campaigner needed money for car repairs and “to buy fellows a beer, to be a big shot, to be able to act like an ‘important representative of headquarters.’” Keeping a man on the road cost about $100 per week, and because of the size of Texas, it was desirable to keep a lot of men on the road. Just keeping in touch with these men was expensive; long-distance telephone bills were no small item. Because of the size of Texas, the cost of every category of campaign expenditure was multiplied; a candidate who wanted to make a significant impact with highway billboards had to think not of hundreds of billboards, but of thousands. A candidate considering the purchase of advertising in weekly newspapers had to consider the fact that there were more than 400 weekly newspapers in Texas. No daily newspaper covered more than a small fraction of the state, so a candidate had to try to buy space in all sixty daily newspapers. And the new (and most effective) medium of campaign communication—radio—was the most expensive of all, and since no radio station reached more than a small fraction of the state, a candidate had to try to buy time on sixty stations.

  Money had played a significant role in the 1941 campaign even before it began. The most logical candidate in Washington was Congressman Wright Patman. The forty-eight-year-old Patman wanted that Senate seat, had been dreaming of it for years—and, having earned a formidable reputation as a crusader for Populist causes, he was qualified for it. But dreams had to surrender to reality. “I wanted to run,” he was to say, but “I couldn’t afford to run. … Of course I knew that I could do more in the Senate, but I told Mr. Rayburn, ‘Lyndon can be financed. It takes a lot of money for the Senate. … I don’t have the money for it in 254 counties in Texas. I don’t have the potential of a good organization with funds to support it. Lyndon has. …’” The most logical candidate in Texas was James Allred, now, retired from the Governorship at the age of forty-two, a federal Judge. Allred, too, wanted the job, but Allred was faced with the same reality—heightened, in his case, by the debt into which he had been plunged by two statewide races, a debt that had proven difficult to erase for an official unsympathetic to the reactionary oil and business interests that financed Texas politics. Publisher Houston Harte, a New Dealer and owner of the only Texas newspaper chain as large as Marsh’s, sent D. B. Hardeman and another young, liberal, reporter, Alex Louis, to the ex-Governor’s home to promise him the support of the seven Harte-Hanks dailies and to ask him to run. “We got Allred so excited he was walking up and down and making campaign speeches,” Hardeman says.

  “But the next morning, early, he rapped on our door. He asked us to go for a walk with him, and … he told us that his wife had just absolutely laid down the law to him. Jo Betsy had said: ‘For the first time in your life, you’re about to get out of debt. You cannot run again.’” Before the campaign even began, lack of money had eliminated two of the strongest potential candidates.

  But Lyndon Johnson had money.

  It came from Washington, because of ideology or self-interest. Traditional sources of New Deal funds, prodded by Tommy Corcoran, contributed, as did attorneys such as the one who made a contribution through Welly Hopkins because he “was building up a law practice and he may or may not have had clients who he thought might be benefited.” It came from New York, from the garment district, because Corcoran assured Dubinsky and Lubin that Johnson was for labor and a liberal (“You’ll be getting a liberal Senator from Texas!” Corcoran growled at them. “What do you want for a nickel?”), and because their idolized leader was so interested in the race (“Everybody knew he was Roosevelt’s pet”), and it came from Wall Street, and from big corporations. Eliot Janeway had been made to understand that the New Deal considered the election of Lyndon Johnson a matter of the highest priority. (“[Justice William O.] Douglas would call me every third day and say, ‘How are you doing for Lyndon?’” Janeway says.) Janeway did well. In 1941, he jokes, he raised so much money for Johnson in New York that he “created a balance-of-payments crisis in New York over that campaign.” The funds raised were carried to Texas by trusted couriers. Says Hopkins: “I… was able to raise a fairly good-sized sum for those days—a few thousand dollars.” He says: “I had checks. And some cash.” Carrying the money to Texas was a new experience, he says. “It was certainly novel to me—I had never had that much cash in my personal life.” Asked in what form the contributions were made, Rowe replies, “It was all cash in those days.” In fact, it was not, as Hopkins’ statement shows, but a steady stream of couriers carrying cash or checks was soon heading for Lyndon Johnson’s headquarters in Austin.

  It came from Dallas—from anti–New Deal oilmen who didn’t care what Lyndon Johnson’s politics were so long as he protected their profits. In 1941, the specter of federal regulation by the hated Ickes was becoming more and more of a possibility, and they needed protection in Washington more than ever, and their trusted advisor, Alvin Wirtz, assured them they would get it from Johnson. Those of the wildcatters who had dealt personally with the young Congressman could assure their fellows that, unlike Rayburn, who was far too independent for their taste, Johnson would take orders. (On April 23, in fact, an exchange of telegrams had occurred which demonstrated the peremptory tone they used to him, and his eagerness to please them. Arch Underwood, the reactionary oil-and-cotton baron, had asked Johnson for some unknown favor in Washington, and Johnson had not replied. At two p.m., Underwood sent Johnson a three-word telegram: tell me something. Johnson’s reply, sent a few hours after he received Underwood’s wire, said: TRIED TO GET YOU AT DALLAS BUT WAS TOLD YOU HAD JUST LEFT. … [HAROLD] YOUNG LEAVING HERE WITH ME FRIDAY NIGHT. AM GOING TO TRY TO DO JOB IN WHICH YOU ARE INTERESTED BEFORE I LEAVE.) Bill Kittrell, who along with Bill McCraw was Johnson’s contact with the oilmen, was able to wire him shortly after he announced that he was running: HAVE TALKED LECHNER, ARCH, ARMISTEAD, BROOKS, PURL AND CLARK.
ALL OKAY. They were indeed. A few of the oilmen’s contributions to the Johnson campaign are recorded: W. T. Knight, $2,000; Sid Richardson, $3,000; Clara Driscoll, $5,000. But most are not. The oilmen made them in cash through McCraw or Kittrell or Wirtz: on one occasion, Kittrell handed Johnson an envelope bulging with bills; on several occasions, Wirtz, who directed the campaign from a private office away from campaign headquarters, called Wilton Woods over to it. Woods says that Wirtz gave him cash to pay various “office expenses,” and that the amount Wirtz gave him totaled $25,000.

  It came from Charles Marsh. The alacrity with which Johnson had leaped at this chance for higher political office—after promising Alice Glass that he would leave politics, get a divorce and marry her—had led to a breach in his relationship with Marsh’s mistress. (He would repair this breach shortly after the election, and their relationship would enter one of its most intense phases.) But Marsh, of course, was unaware of the relationship. On the day Sheppard died, the publisher had pledged Johnson his support in the race, which he was to point out was for a “25-year senatorship.” At first, for reasons that can only be guessed at, Johnson pointedly did not respond, and did not ask for help from this man who liked to be asked. But now, needing him, he asked—so skillfully that Marsh dropped all personal business and rushed to Texas. Marsh liked to write speeches and plan campaign stratagems—it gave him the feeling of being on the inside of politics. He spent the ten weeks of the campaign driving his Buick convertible back and forth across Texas to be on hand whenever Lyndon Johnson arrived in a big city. As he drove (like many wealthy Texans, he refused to use a chauffeur), he dictated speeches and memos to his secretary, Alice’s sister Mary Louise, who was sitting beside him, so that he could hand them to Lyndon when they met. With automobile air-conditioning still unknown, some of these long drives, often on narrow, badly paved roads, were memorable for their discomfort. “In one day,” Mary Louise recalls, “Charles and I drove from Amarillo to San Angelo—all day long in the heat.” But he was perfectly happy doing this for the young man of whom he was so fond. And Marsh was not only writing speeches, he was getting them on the air. FCC regulations required that radio time for political speeches be paid for in advance, and Marsh paid. Although this was a period in which he was, by his standards, somewhat short of ready cash, he donated thousands of dollars to Lyndon’s campaign, and raised thousands more; his partner, E. S. Fentress, gave $5,000 himself. Richardson wasn’t the only impoverished wildcatter Marsh had helped to hold on to his leases; Jack Frost of the Byrd-Frost Oil Company was another. Frost wasn’t interested in politics, but now that he had made his money, he would donate to any politician Marsh asked him to, and Marsh asked him to donate to Lyndon Johnson. Whenever Marsh passed through Dallas, he would, Mary Louise says, “get some fellows in for a meeting.” The money raised at such meetings would be pooled with his own, in his own bank account. Arriving in a city, Marsh would drive first to the local radio station, or send Mary Louise, and pay for radio time with his own checks, so that Marsh’s checking account became almost an official arm of the Johnson campaign.