The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  But, mostly, Johnson’s money came from Brown & Root. Herman Brown had wanted so fiercely to build big things, and to make big money building them. Now, thanks to Lyndon Johnson, he had been able to do so—had, in fact, made money on a scale perhaps as big as his dreams. But the appetite grows by what it feeds on, and now his dreams were bigger. Representative Johnson had brought Brown & Root millions of dollars in profits. What might not Senator Johnson be able to do? On May 5, 1941, a luncheon was held in Houston at which were present thirty-four Brown & Root “subs,” the subcontractors who had gotten a piece of the work on the Marshall Ford Dam or the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station. They were asked for pledges for the Johnson campaign. And Herman Brown did not ask others to take risks he was unwilling to take himself. Brown & Root might be breaking the law if it gave money to the Johnson campaign, but Brown did not let the law deter him from backing his candidate to the hilt. He simply took precautions to conceal what he was doing. These precautions had to be more extensive than the ones he had taken the previous year, for the scale of his contributions was larger now. Corporation checks, entered on its books as “legal fees,” were given to attorneys, who were instructed to get the money into the hands of the Johnson campaign. They deposited the Brown & Root checks, made out their personal checks for the same amounts (or, in some cases, for 10 percent less, deducting that amount for the service), or drew cash, and brought or mailed the checks or cash to Johnson campaign headquarters in Houston or Austin, or got it to the campaign through routes more circuitous; one lawyer, given $12,500 in “attorneys’ fees,” gave part of it to his partner as a “profit distribution.” His partner promptly gave it right back to him—and he gave it to the Johnson campaign. “Bonuses” were paid to Brown & Root vice presidents—$30,000 apiece to two vice presidents, $33,800 to another, $40,000 to a fourth—who, Internal Revenue Service agents later came to believe, were instructed to give at least part of the money to the campaign as if it were their own. Within the first few weeks of Johnson’s Senate run, Brown had put behind him well over $100,000.

  During the pre-war era, the cost of a typical statewide campaign in Texas was about $50,000; an expensive campaign might run as much as $75,000 or $80,000; says one politician who managed many campaigns during that period: “That was what you figured you’d need to do it right. You seldom got nearly that much, but if you got that [much] money, you could do it right.” But thanks to Herman Brown—and Tommy Corcoran and Eliot Janeway and Welly Hopkins and Sid Richardson and Charles Marsh—Lyndon Johnson had a great deal more than that. He could hire talent—the best that money could buy. Soon top political reporters—lured from their newspapers for the campaign—were, under Herb Henderson’s direction, writing Johnson press releases and cultivating press contacts (along with, in some cases, their editors). He hired not just public relations men, but the best public relations men, including the legendary PR wizard, Phil Fox of Dallas, whose fee was a reported $300 per week. And Johnson could ensure that his press releases would be played as news stories in those weekly newspapers—and there were hundreds in Texas—whose editorial policy could be influenced by cash. Says one former Texas newsman familiar with the practice: “You’d go and say to the publisher of a small weekly newspaper, ‘If your views are sound, we’ll take a $25 ad every week.’” Few candidates for statewide office had utilized this practice on a broad scale, because few candidates possessed the requisite funds—$25 per week for a ten-week campaign, multiplied by hundreds of weeklies, ran into tens of thousands of dollars. Johnson could hire typists, after renting chairs and desks and of course typewriters for them to use; one way to make an unknown candidate known—fast—was through letters to individual voters; dozens of volunteers pounded out such letters, but Johnson wanted professionals as well; soon, in a large room on the mezzanine of Austin’s Stephen F. Austin Hotel, eighty-two secretaries were working under the direction not only of Chuck Henderson but of experienced directors of corporate secretarial pools. (So big did the Austin mailing operations become that even eighty-two typists couldn’t handle it; the students of an Austin secretarial school were commissioned to address 7,000 envelopes a week.) Veteran Texas politicians walked down from the Capitol along Congress Avenue—dominated by gigantic JOHNSON FOR SENATOR and JOHNSON FOR ROOSEVELT AND UNITY signs—-to take a look at the hotel mezzanine for themselves; no letter-writing operation on such a scale had ever been seen in Texas politics.

  In all newspapers, even those whose editorial policy would not be influenced by money, Johnson could ensure the repetition of his name and of his link with the beloved President by purchasing ads. To run an advertisement in sixty daily newspapers and hundreds of weeklies cost tens of thousands of dollars in a single week; Johnson ran ads on this scale in many of the campaign’s ten weeks. He printed his own newspaper; using the facilities of a cooperative local weekly, the journalists on his payroll composed a four-page full-size newspaper. In it, Roosevelt’s name appeared in headlines almost as many times as Johnson’s. There were catchy renditions of the motto—suitable for singing: “Now all over this state/they’re saying/and it’s going to be/Franklin D and Lyndon B!” (and, of course, there was only one front-page picture—the two men shaking hands in Galveston under the headline: “Old and Close Friends”). And copies of this newspaper were printed and mailed in the hundreds of thousands. Johnson bought radio time in huge hunks; one half-hour of air time in enough stations to blanket the entire state cost approximately $4,000. And then of course there were those thousands of “handshake” billboards—which in strategic locations cost $200 or $300 apiece. Johnson’s barbecues were the most extravagant in Texas political history (by now he was employing Ed Clark’s device of providing enough meat so that everyone attending could not only eat his fill but be encouraged to take home enough for several additional meals), his rallies the most elaborate (with, behind the stage, that huge canvas backdrop of him and Roosevelt shaking hands and the immense words: ROOSEVELT AND UNITY).

  To speak at barbecues and rallies—and to tour their home areas on his behalf—Johnson needed local “lead men” and stump speakers. Although few of them knew him personally, some would campaign for him because they were persuaded that he represented the New Deal. Many, however, required other motivation. Buster Kellam, Jesse’s brother, reported to Jake Pickle on the reception he had received from J. Edward Johnson, an attorney who was reputedly an effective stemwinder, and who had agreed to accompany Kellam on a speaking tour for Johnson in rural counties north of Dallas.

  Mr. Johnson didn’t approve of my coming with just $50. I did my best to explain that there would be more as it was needed. That he didn’t like and made it clear that he wasn’t spending any of his money, and that since he was neglecting his practice, he was entitled to more. He also said that he hesitated about leaving unless he had at least enough money to cover two weeks’ expenses. … I have hopes that by the time you receive this we will be gone, but I do know that won’t be until he has more money.

  The requirements of most of the lead men were satisfied, and soon scores were out hawking the abilities of a candidate they had never met.

  Four years before, campaigning in a district whose voters hardly knew his name, Johnson had overhauled far better-known and more experienced candidates partly through the use of money on a scale unprecedented in that district. Now he was using money on the same scale in twenty-one districts—all across Texas. Lyndon Johnson, in his first campaign for the Senate, was using money on a scale Texas had never seen.

  FOR A WHILE this campaign seemed to be following the course of Johnson’s 1937 race.

  It was enlivened by a touch of humor. Because it was a special election rather than a party primary, any citizen could get his name on the ballot merely by paying a $100 fee, and twenty-seven candidates besides Johnson had taken advantage of this opportunity. One candidate was a radio peddler of various goat-gland concoctions designed to improve, among other things, virility. Another was a laxative manufacturer
(Hal Collins of Crazy Water Crystals) who attracted big crowds at rallies by giving away a free mattress to the couple present who had the most children. A third, “Commodore” Muse Hatfield, felt that Roosevelt had not gone far enough; the Commodore favored the immediate creation of a five-ocean Navy, to be financed by a national lottery. The ballot also included “Cyclone” Davis, who lived under a Dallas viaduct and announced that he didn’t have to campaign because “Providence will place me in the Senate”; a geologist who proposed a $50 monthly pension for everybody over sixty-five and a $5 pension for everyone else; a chiropractor; an ex-bootlegger; an admitted kidnapper; two bearded prophets, and two rocking-chair sages (including a wealthy self-styled “rump farmer” who said he was for “the masses”—by which he apparently meant his masses of impoverished tenant farmers). There were also two candidates whose qualifications rested on their kinship with famous Texans of the past. Joseph C. Bean was a cousin of a pair of legendary Texans: Judge Roy C. Bean, “The Law West of the Pecos,” and Ellis P. Bean, a hero of Texas’ war against Mexico who had gained fame by spending several years in a Mexican prison with a pet lizard named Bill. Edwin Waller III had only one famous ancestor, but that one, Edwin Waller I, had claimed the honor of having begun the Mexican War by committing that war’s first “overt act” (which on closer inspection, turned out to be an argument between Waller and some Mexicans over the use of a small boat).

  Besides Johnson, there were, during the first six weeks of the campaign, two serious candidates: Martin Dies and Gerald Mann.

  The belief that Dies would make a strong candidate lasted only until he entered the race. A fiery stump speaker, the Congressman could evoke hysterical cheers when he addressed the Mothers of Dallas on the prevalence of Communism within the American Youth Congress. But he spoke rather infrequently, doing little touring and relying on a few speeches in the big cities. And even when these speeches were broadcast, the public was often not aware of them, because, although plenty of money was available to Dies for advertising, most of it went unused. He displayed an almost total lack of interest in setting up an organization beyond the boundaries of his own East Texas congressional district; in most of the state, there was no Dies organization at all. The Communist threat was practically the sole topic of his campaign, and it quickly became apparent that while a hard core of “super-patriots” would vote for him, he wasn’t going to be able to add to that base. His strength—which soared to 27 percent the week he announced—declined, week by week, in every poll thereafter.

  Mann’s candidacy was a different story. The young Attorney General’s personal qualities attracted loyalty. The wording on the plaque he had hung on the wall behind his desk—“I sacrificed no principle to gain this office and I shall sacrifice no principle to keep it”—did not strike a false note with those who knew him, and neither did his habit of carrying around a Bible and reciting poetry; the most cynical of politicians had to admit, as one puts it, “There was a guy who you wouldn’t dare to ask him to do anything even slightly wrong”; D. B. Hardeman, the Austin journalist and an astute observer of Texas politics, says that Mann was “a very deep Christian, a very sincere man, a very clean man—politically, financially. A very gentle man. He had practically the loftiest ideals of any public servant I ever knew.” He had, Hardeman says, “assembled an outstanding staff, because men were very loyal to him.” When Senator Sheppard died, these young Assistant Attorney Generals asked him to run, and volunteered to resign and campaign for him—which meant that he would have at least the nucleus of a campaign organization.

  He also, of course, had a statewide “name”—a very respected one, as had been demonstrated by the unsolicited newspaper editorials that echoed his aides’ request that he run, and by his rating in the first Belden Poll: second only to Governor O’Daniel. And he had a fierce, driving energy that resembled Johnson’s. Having launched the type of campaign that had given him his upset victory in 1938—a campaign that resembled Johnson’s 1937 campaign in the refusal of the young candidate to spare himself—he was driving hundreds of miles each day, and giving dozens of speeches, in every corner of Texas. His intensity and earnestness made him a compelling speechmaker; slender, clean-cut, very handsome, he was an impressive figure in front of a county courthouse. O’Daniel was still saying he didn’t plan to run, and a poll taken on May 12 to determine what would happen if he didn’t showed that without the Governor in the race, Mann would receive 42 percent of the vote, Dies 40 percent, Johnson 15 percent and all the other candidates a total of 3 percent. Mann felt that Dies was not a substantial threat because of his unwillingness to work, or to organize. As for Johnson, Mann liked him, but felt “the people of the state didn’t know Lyndon Johnson.” He felt he was going to win.

  In two respects, however, Mann’s campaign was very different from Johnson’s. A score of his former assistants were out enthusiastically working for him—an adequate campaign nucleus by traditional Texas standards. But it was not adequate in comparison with the Johnson campaign. And while Mann’s workers were able, trained lawyers, they weren’t able, trained campaign workers; they didn’t know the local officials, as Johnson’s men did. “Johnson had this network of young, aggressive operators from the NYA … that Mann couldn’t match,” says Hardeman (who himself joined Mann’s campaign). “They knew more about how to organize a campaign, how to get a campaign manager in each county and city, how to get people to put up placards and pass out literature and ring doorbells … Johnson’s operation was just a better political operation than Gerald Mann’s.”

  The second—more significant—deficiency in the Mann campaign was in its funding. Although Mann had spent relatively little in his first race for Attorney General, he had spent more than he possessed, and in 1941, three years after the race, he was still paying off debts from it. He told his two campaign managers, his brother, Guy L. Mann, and his former law partner, Sam McCorkle of Dallas, that they were not to place him further in debt for this race. They didn’t follow his instructions; strapped for cash, they arranged loans from the Republic National Bank of Dallas. But the amount of money available to Mann from this loan—and from contributions from his backers—was minuscule beside Johnson’s. The difference was visible in Austin, where Johnson had eighty-two typists on the hotel mezzanine, and scores of other campaign workers, whereas the Mann-for-Senate headquarters consisted of Hardeman, and a few other volunteers. The same contrast existed in other cities, where Johnson headquarters were filled with paid, trained workers. “We didn’t have any big headquarters staff anywhere,” Mann says. In Dallas, for example, “my organization consisted primarily of Guy Mann and Sam McCorkle.” This lack of staffing hurt in innumerable ways: Johnson’s traveling “teams,” for example, sent back from each town they visited lists of individuals who might be potential supporters, with a little personal data on each one; when these lists arrived at headquarters, letters with a personal touch carefully added by Chuck Henderson and other expert Johnson letter-writers were sent to these individuals (over the candidate’s signature), and repeated “follow-up” letters were sent thereafter to win them to Johnson’s side or keep them there. Thousands and thousands of such letters were drafted, typed and mailed. Mann could do nothing comparable.

  Nor could Mann’s men do much traveling—not when such campaigning cost a hundred dollars per man per week. Johnson had twelve two-man teams out full time; as for Mann, he says, “We didn’t have any teams out—it would take all the money we had to keep me on the road, and to buy some advertising. We didn’t have that kind of money at all.”

  It was sometimes hard for Mann’s headquarters even to keep in touch with his campaigners: “telephoning over an area that was bigger than all New England—just the cost of it was an impossibility,” Hardeman recalls.