The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  IF O’DANIEL COULD USE the popular revival-meeting tune “Give Me That Old-Time Religion,” Johnson could, too—and his lyrics incorporated the name that in Texas was second in potency only to Christ’s: “Franklin D and Lyndon B / They’re good enough for me.” With Pappy having entered the race, moreover, Johnson felt he needed increased support from “Franklin D”—and he got it. Asked at another Oval Office press conference if he had any additional comment on the Texas race, the President “smilingly” replied that “he thought he had done a good job the first time and was quite certain the people of Texas understood him.” (Their understanding was facilitated by a description of the press conference written at Johnson headquarters and run verbatim by scores of obliging weeklies under a headline also written at headquarters: FDR ENDORSES JOHNSON.) Roosevelt also decided that Steve Early should reply to a letter from a Texas voter who had inquired if Johnson was indeed the President’s choice. Although he was still unwilling to have his support stated flatly, Roosevelt directed Early (and James Rowe, who was helping to draft the reply) in precisely what words to use so that his support would be clear nonetheless. And to ensure that it became public, he told Rowe that if the voter did not release Early’s letter, Johnson could release it himself. The letter said:

  … At a press conference several weeks ago, the President made his position perfectly clear. He told the newspapermen that he is not taking any part in the Texas primary as that is solely a question for Texas to decide. In answering a question the President stated something which everybody knows to be true, which is that Congressman Lyndon Johnson is an old and close friend of his.

  Because of O’Daniel’s entry into the race, another presidential letter was requested—this one to help Johnson counter the strength with the elderly that O’Daniel possessed because of his pension plan. Rowe balked at this request. He was continually being pushed by Johnson and Wirtz for greater presidential involvement in the campaign, and he had, over and over again, given them what they asked for. Now he was fearful that he had gotten the President too involved. And he felt that in the suggested wording of this letter, Johnson had gone too far: it attributed to the junior Congressman a totally non-existent role in the fight for Social Security. “I thought he was asking too much. I said, ‘Goddammit, Lyndon, I can’t do too much. We’ve done so much for you already—I can’t go back” and ask for this. He refused to do so, and even sent the President a cautionary note: “The polls show Lyndon leading at this time (but I suspect they are Lyndon’s polls).” But Johnson only used other avenues to reach the President. “Four days later, the letter comes out anyway,” Rowe says. “He just went right around me.”

  Dear Lyndon:

  I have your letter favoring further help for our senior citizens over 60 years of age. As you remember, you and I discussed the problem before the Chicago convention of the Democratic Party last year. Our ideas were incorporated in the party platform, which called for the “early realization of a minimum pension for all who have reached the age of retirement and are not gainfully employed.” I agree with you that the implementation of this pledge is the best solution of the problem. I hope you will come in and talk to me about it when you return.

  Very sincerely yours,

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  (Johnson made the most of this letter, reading it over a statewide radio network and saying, “As your Senator I can and will continue to take your problems to our President. I have worked with him for years and I shall continue to work with him for you.” And Marsh’s American-Statesman—and many country weeklies—carried the story under the headline: F.D. TO HELP JOHNSON ON PENSION PLAN.)

  The wording of this letter made clear to Rowe that he hadn’t understood how far the President was willing to go on behalf of the young Congressman. And Rowe was to be reminded of this again and again. Already well on his way to becoming one of Washington’s smoothest political operators, he understood very well the seldom stated White House rules that governed Roosevelt’s participation in the campaign of even a highly favored candidate, but he became aware that Roosevelt would make an exception to the rules for Lyndon Johnson.

  During the last month of the campaign, Roosevelt’s “special feeling” for Johnson was documented over and over again.

  Much of it was couched in the form of telegrams.

  To many Texans, who had never received one, there was a mystique about telegrams, and they were handy props at campaign rallies because they could be pulled from a pocket and read to an audience. A steady stream of telegrams was sent to Texas at the direction of the White House, to be pulled from Johnson’s pocket and waved dramatically before crowds at rallies, and read by him (to make sure that the audience would remember the message, he read the telegram twice or even three times), and be printed in Marsh’s six papers or in the weeklies that ran the canned stories emanating from his headquarters, and be reproduced in the hundreds of thousands of campaign flyers and pamphlets and brochures that, day after day, poured into homes throughout Texas. Some were endorsements: from Vice President Wallace, from Interior Secretary Ickes and Navy Secretary Frank Knox and other Cabinet members—even from Eleanor Roosevelt, who scarcely knew (and didn’t particularly like) Johnson. And there were numerous telegrams from the President himself. One was designed to counter criticism of Johnson’s long absence from his duties in Washington during a national emergency. (Roosevelt had declared one on May 27, with the Wehrmacht massing on the Russian front and the Battle of the Atlantic at fever pitch—the German battleship Bismarck had just been sunk off the French coast.) Johnson sent a plea for help to Missy LeHand, telling her: I AM BEING CALLED A SLACKER TO AN OLD TRUSTED FRIEND. To ensure getting the reply he wanted, he had Wirtz draft one:

  … WE SHOULD NOT LOSE SIGHT OF OUR ULTIMATE OBJECTIVE WHICH IS THE DEFENSE OF OUR DEMOCRATIC WAY OF LIFE. … UNDER OUR DEMOCRATIC PROCESSES THE PEOPLE OF TEXAS … ARE ENTITLED TO BE INFORMED OF ISSUES BY THE CANDIDATES THROUGH PERSONAL APPEARANCE. THEREFORE, MY ANSWER TO YOUR WIRE IS, STAY IN TEXAS UNLESS CONDITIONS CHANGE SO THAT I THINK IT NECESSARY TO SEND FOR YOU, BUT RETURN IMMEDIATELY AFTER ELECTION AS I WILL BE NEEDING YOU THEN. GOOD LUCK.

  FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

  Thinking the telegram went too far, Rowe deleted the words after “election,” but the rest of the telegram went out over the President’s signature with few other changes; the headline in the Houston Chronicle read: STAY ON FIRING LINE, JOHNSON TOLD IN WIRE—and the attacks ceased. There was a telegram orchestrated by Corcoran on parity in farm prices. At Tommy’s suggestion, Roosevelt, who was about to sign a new farm parity bill, told Wirtz over the phone that if Johnson sent him a telegram before plans for the signing were announced, he would, in Corcoran’s phrase, “be willing to respond to” the telegram with one of his own. Since this would foster the (incorrect) impression that Johnson had played a significant role in the bill’s passage, Johnson jumped at the opportunity. The wily Wirtz attempted unsuccessfully to sneak past Rowe into the President’s “reply” a “Good luck,” which could be interpreted to mean that the President was openly supporting Johnson, but otherwise the President’s reply, I WILL APPROVE THE PARITY LOAN BILL THAT YOU HAVE SO ARDENTLY SUPPORTED, was all that a candidate could have desired, (FARMERS GIVEN PARITY—JOHNSON GETS THE JOB DONE, headlined the Bertram Enterprise. Unsophisticated rural voters were told that “President Roosevelt, urged to do so by Cong. Lyndon Johnson of Texas, signed into law the farm parity bill. … [Johnson] stopped his campaigning and wired his friend, Roosevelt, and shortly thereafter …”) A private exchange of telegrams provided insight into the relationship between the President and the young Congressman. When Roosevelt proclaimed the May 27 national emergency, Johnson wired him from Tyler, Texas: YOUR VOICE GAVE ME HAPPINESS TONIGHT, WE WHO HAVE WORKED WITH YOU KNOW THAT YOU HAVE NEVER FAILED WHEN THE HIGH LINE CALLED FOR COURAGE. WHEN HITLER’S MAN THREATENED, WE KNEW THE ANSWER BEFORE YOU SPOKE. I HOPE TO BE WITH YOU BATTLING FOR YOUR FRIENDS AGAINST YOUR ENEMIES ON THE SENATE FLOOR. Roosev
elt’s Staff drafted a form reply, but the President, when signing it, added to it by hand three words that made it personal: “Your old friend, Franklin D. Roosevelt.”

  Roosevelt saved his best shots for strategic moments late in the campaign. One was a rumor, planted by Corcoran with friendly reporters in Washington, that the President would go to Texas and campaign for Lyndon Johnson. The Marsh newspapers, and the hundreds of captive weeklies, played up the rumor; so widely was it believed in Texas that the Legislature passed a resolution inviting the President to inspect the state’s defense plants during his trip. Another was a word: “preposterous.” Some time before, Governor O’Daniel had suggested that Texas form its own army and navy to protect America’s southern border from invasion. Roosevelt had not replied at the time; on the night of June 27, Election Eve, he denounced the plan with that word, which appeared in headlines as Texas voters went to the polls the next day. Tommy Corcoran was often the instrument through which the President intervened in state elections to help candidates he favored; like Rowe, Corcoran tries to explain that Roosevelt’s intervention in Texas in 1941 was something special. “In that 1941 race, we gave him everything we could,” Corcoran says. “Everything.”

  JOHNSON’S MANEUVERS in the Legislature had done the job on O’Daniel. Campaigning by his children, and by recorded speeches, had not been the same as the personal campaigning at which he was the master; at one of his rallies, a record of an O’Daniel speech stuck on one of his key phrases. Before it could be unstuck, it had said, “I want to go to Washington to work for the old folks, the old folks, the old folks, the old folks. …” The audience laughed. “The Governor’s radio speeches have been marked for their note of worry and frantic exhortation, in marked contrast to the previous calm and good humored self-confidence which he has always showed heretofore and which he showed in his announcement speech in May,” the State Observer reported. “His personal campaigning always raises his strength. People come to see him and go away convinced. … There is no doubt that O’Daniel’s failure to make a personal campaign over the state has hurt him.” But, trapped by the Legislature’s refusal to adjourn, he couldn’t get away from Austin until the closing days of the campaign. When he did, he found that it was too late to catch up with the argument conceived by Johnson and disseminated by hundreds of campaign workers. “The people who raised Mr. O’Daniel from a hillbilly flour salesman to the heights of the Governor’s chair are divided about the wisdom of sending him to Washington as Senator,” the State Observer reported. “The old age pensioners … still love him, but … feel that he can help them more in Texas than in Washington.” Frantic, Pappy made increasingly bizarre campaign promises: to purge Congress if it failed to pass a bill outlawing strikes; to do away with the federal debt; to force the Legislature to provide the necessary $100 million per year for his pension plan. After assailing Johnson as a “water carrier” for the President, a yes man who would simply carry out Roosevelt’s orders, he abruptly switched and said he had always supported the President himself, adding that he wanted to go to Washington so that he could rescue Roosevelt from the “professional politicians” surrounding him. But nothing helped. The Observer reported “undisputable evidence that the Governor is weaker than ever before, and that his campaign … has not caught the fire which characterized his previous campaigns.”

  In June, Gerald Mann was still doing what he had been doing in April: touring the state alone except for a driver and, occasionally, a single other aide—each day traveling 300 or 400 miles, making eight or nine speeches, plus a dozen or so impromptu wagon-bed talks in little towns, doing most of his sleeping in the back seat of his car. Without sufficient funds, without any organization to speak of, “he never stopped fighting, not for one day during that whole time,” D. B. Hardeman says.

  One spur that roweled him forward was indignation. To a man of such deep convictions, there was something almost immoral about the Johnson campaign, with its theatrics, its use of money, the unadorned appeal to selfishness in its argument that Johnson should be elected because he could get more federal contracts for Texas. Moreover, Roosevelt supporter though Mann was, he was disturbed at the brutal use of federal power in a state election. Having won two statewide elections, he was hardly a political naif, but never, he was to say, had he seen anything like this. “They spent so much money in that campaign,” he recalls. “And they did it overwhelmingly. And they had no qualms about it. I heard that Corcoran was down here in Texas. And Wirtz. And Harold Young from the Vice President’s office. And Grover Hill. There was an invasion of Texas by Washington bureaucrats, coming down here with money, or the ability to raise money. They were people who were in a position to exact money.”

  Finally, on June 19, Mann’s feelings spilled over. They did so, he was to recall, almost on the spur of the moment, as he was making his 252nd speech of the campaign, before another crowd that was smaller than it should have been and less enthusiastic than it should have been because, he believed, of the effect of the money behind the Lyndon Johnson campaign. He had been “feeling” the money everywhere; suddenly, he began to talk about it. Standing in the bandshell in the courthouse square in Plainview, in the shadow of the town’s huge windmill, he “made his first mention of the campaign tactics of his opponents,” the Dallas News reported—of his opponents and of himself. With the wind tousling his hair—and turning the blades of the windmill overhead—he grinned and said, “I’m just doing this in the old-fashioned way—just a handshake and a talk. I have no mountain music nor entertainers, nor do I give away money. I have no telegrams of endorsement. All I know is how to go out and see the people of Texas—on courthouse squares, street corners and sidewalks. I’m just looking them in the eye.” Then, in detail, he lashed into what he was to call “the invasion of money from Washington.”

  Instantly, he knew that he had touched a nerve, that he was saying something his audience had been waiting to hear. By the time he finished, the crowd was roaring in encouragement; a supporter said, “Gerry, you keep making that speech and you’ll be elected. Don’t make any other speech. Make it from now until Election Day.”

  He did. Two nights later he gave it before a large crowd in Houston. He was appalled, he told his audience, at the Johnson rallies—“political rallies under the guise of patriotic meetings”—and at the lotteries. “These drawings at the congressman’s so-called defense rallies have been held at dozens of places all over Texas—always after the crowd has heard what the congressman has had to say. They have been conducted in the presence of little children all over Texas. What kind of conception of a democratic election do you think such practices are instilling in [their minds]?”

  The use of “free money” was only one aspect of what enraged him, he said. There was also the federal pressure. In a way, he said, it threatened the state’s “independence” by violating Texans’ rights “to elect our own officials without interference from Washington”—Washington which was trying to “cram Lyndon Johnson down our throats.”

  “You know and I know,” he told his audience, “what has happened in this race for the Senate.

  We have seen the tremendous power of the federal hierarchy behind the candidacy of Lyndon Johnson. We have felt the pressure brought to bear upon the countless number of federal employees and Texas citizens employed on federal projects. We have seen the power and the influence of official position wielded in an attempt to influence and dominate a free Texas election. We have seen obvious attempts to take advantage of our love and affection for Franklin D. Roosevelt. We have seen enormous expenditures of money on Texas in this election.

  You and I know that every form of political pressure, supported by enormous expenditures of money, has been applied to dictate to you whom you should elect to the United States Senate.

  “A federal hierarchy,” he said, “is undertaking to set up a federal-controlled political machine in Texas.” He was appalled at the very idea of a candidate asking voters to elect him as a patrio
tic obligation—of, in fact, the very use of “patriotism” as an issue. “There is no issue of patriotism in this campaign,” he declared. “You are simply choosing a Senator.” A candidate who, night after night, tries “to capitalize on the emotion of honest patriotism, cheapens the impulse. … It is like playing on the sacredness of mother love for the purposes of promotion.”

  He was offended by someone campaigning on the ground that he could get more money—in the form of federal projects—for Texas. “The best job is going to be done for Texas in the United States Senate by sending there a man of individual courage, personal convictions and moral stamina to do what he believes is right. … Not political pull but personal integrity is the qualification for getting the job done. … I have stood by principles. I have talked about principles. And you can always count on me to fight for principles.”

  The audience rose up and roared. “That new issue really caught on,” Mann recalls today. He realized, he says, that “I should have started earlier an all-out campaign on the use of money because a lot of people who were voting for Johnson because they wanted O’Daniel beaten didn’t approve of what Johnson was doing or what was being done for him.”