Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  DEEPENING THE DESPAIR was another consideration—one that sometimes seemed to prey upon Lyndon Johnson’s mind more than any other. Power in the House of Representatives could come only through seniority—through waiting; waiting for many years—and Lyndon Johnson was convinced that he didn’t have many years. Throughout his boyhood, he had heard relatives repeating a piece of family lore: that all Johnson men had weak hearts and died young. Then, while he was still in college and his father was barely fifty years old, his father’s heart had begun to fail; Sam Ealy Johnson died, after years of heart trouble, in 1937, twelve days after his sixtieth birthday. One of Sam’s two younger brothers—Lyndon’s uncles—died of a massive heart attack in 1939, at the age of fifty-seven. The other suffered one heart attack in 1946, at the age of sixty-five, and a second in 1947, and was to live his last years as a near-invalid. Lyndon was always deeply conscious of his marked physical resemblance to his tall, gawky, big-eared, big-nosed father; his shoulder-hugging and lapel-grasping was an inherited mannerism. Wright Patman, who served in Congress with Lyndon Johnson and in the Texas Legislature with his father, says “Lyndon clutched you like his daddy did when he talked to you. They looked alike, they walked the same, had the same nervous mannerisms. He was so much like his father that it was humorous to watch.” Lyndon was convinced, to what one of his secretaries calls “the point of obsession,” that he had inherited the family legacy. “I’m not gonna live to be but sixty,” he would say. “My daddy died at sixty. My uncle …” Now, as he grew older, whenever it was suggested that he might make his career in the House of Representatives, he would reply, in a low voice, “Too slow. Too slow.” The long, slow path to power in the House might be the only one open to him, but he felt it was not a path feasible for him to follow.

  CONSTANT AS WAS HIS ULTIMATE AMBITION, during those seven years there sometimes seemed no possibility of its realization, and without that possibility—or at least the chance for some form of increased power—the complexity of Lyndon Johnson’s motivations became clear.

  Despite repeated campaign promises to “serve in the trenches” if war came, for months after Pearl Harbor he maneuvered to stay out of any combat zone, and finally, forced into one, flew on a single bombing mission as an observer and then hurried back to Washington. There he tried to obtain high civilian rank—he campaigned vigorously for an appointment as Secretary of the Navy which would have made him one of the youngest Cabinet officers in history—but when he didn’t get the job, his interest in the war faded, so markedly that to an aide it was obvious that if he couldn’t have real authority in it, “he regarded it as an interference with his agenda”; he attempted to dissuade his young assistants from enlisting, or, if they were drafted, often tried to have their draft notices rescinded so that they could continue serving him rather than their country.

  During his prewar years as a congressman, he had, in a monumental feat of ingenuity and resolve, brought electricity to his isolated district, in a single stroke bringing the farmers and ranchers of the Hill Country into the twentieth century. And he had maximized the effect within it of so many New Deal programs that he had been called “the best congressman for a district there ever was.” During these next seven years, with his programs in place and being carried forward by an efficient staff, his interest in his district steadily waned. In a state which routinely re-elected incumbent congressmen, there was no realistic chance he would lose his seat, but he was increasingly less involved with his job. He had been interested, deeply involved, in working for his constituents so long as that work held out the prospect—the imminent prospect—of leading to something more, but so dramatically did his interest wane the moment it appeared that his work for his district might have to be an end in itself, that helping people seemed to mean as little to him as helping the war effort. Without the prospect of new, greater power, the power he possessed was meaningless to him.

  So long as the path to power lay open before him, he had been willing to defer, even to sacrifice, his need for financial security. Now, with that path closed—perhaps forever—the deferring was over. During the seven years following his defeat in the 1941 Texas senatorial election, Lyndon Johnson grabbed for money as greedily as he had grabbed for power, using his political influence to do so, and using it so successfully that by 1948 he was boasting that instead of a thousand dollars he had a million, a small fortune at that time.

  In 1948, he decided to take one last desperate gamble, entering a race for the Senate although he would be running against Coke Robert Stevenson, the only man in the state’s history to hold all three of its top governmental posts—Speaker, Lieutenant Governor, Governor—and a public figure so beloved in Texas that in the last Democratic primary he had entered, the crucial election in a one-party state, he had carried every one of the state’s 254 counties, the only candidate for Governor or Senator who had ever done so. “The Cowboy Governor,” as he was known, was considered invincible.

  The stakes of the gamble were all the higher because under Texas law Johnson could not run for the Senate without relinquishing his House seat and his eleven years of seniority. One of Johnson’s key advisers was not exaggerating when he says of the 1948 race, “That was it! All or nothing.” Johnson himself recoiled from the risk. “At first,” he was to say, “I just could not bear the thought of losing everything.” But he took the gamble—because the imperatives of his character gave him no choice: another congressman might have decided not to take such a risk, because losing would mean he might have to leave Washington, with its excitement and glamour. But for Lyndon Johnson, not excitement or glamour but power was the basic need; to stay on in Washington without it was intolerable to him. If he lost, he said, he would leave politics forever, and go into business; he may have been born to politics, may have been a master of the political game, but without power he didn’t want to remain in it.

  EVERY STAGE of Lyndon Johnson’s career had been marked not only by pragmatism but by what is, in a democracy in which power is conferred by elections, the ultimate pragmatism: the stealing of elections. Even at little Southwest Texas State Teachers College in San Marcos, where campus politics had previously been little more than a joke and elections the most casual of affairs, Johnson stole elections. On Capitol Hill, the pattern was repeated. Lyndon Johnson cheated not only in the election in which he won the presidency of the Little Congress, but in succeeding elections in which his allies won; “Everyone said it: ‘In that last election, that damn Lyndon Johnson stole some votes again,’” and on the one occasion on which a Little Congress ballot box was actually opened, the accusations proved to be true. He had stolen thousands of votes in his first campaign for the Senate. When that number proved insufficient (because, thanks to his mistake, his opponent was able to steal even more), his reaction was to try to steal still more—by trying to persuade the corrupt border county dictator George Parr to go further than Parr had ever gone before. But even the notorious Parr would not go to the lengths that Johnson wanted. “Lyndon, I’ve been to the federal penitentiary, and I’m not going back for you,” he said. At every stage of Johnson’s political career, he had stretched the rules of the game to their breaking point, and then had broken them, pushing deeper into the ethical and legal no-man’s-land beyond them than others were willing to go. In this 1948 campaign—in this “all or nothing” campaign, his last chance—the pattern became even clearer. He stole not thousands but tens of thousands of votes, and when they weren’t sufficient to defeat Stevenson (asked about the attempt made decades later to portray Stevenson aides as also stealing votes, Edward A. Clark, the longtime “Secret Boss of Texas,” would laugh, “They didn’t know how, and Governor Stevenson didn’t know how”), he stole still more, and in this later theft, which culminated in the finding of the decisive “votes” (supposedly cast by 202 voters who voted in alphabetical order) six days after the polls closed, he went further than anyone had gone before, violating even the notably loose boundaries of Texas politics. E
ven in terms of a most elastic political morality—the political morality of 1940s Texas—his methods were immoral.

  An investigation into the theft was halted, largely through the legal ingenuity of Johnson’s brilliant attorney Abe Fortas, at the very moment at which testimony was coming to a climax before a federal Master in Chancery appointed by a United States District Court judge. Asked later what his report would have concluded had the proceeding been allowed to continue, this official said flatly: “I think Lyndon was put in the United States Senate with a stolen election.”

  No matter how he was put there, however, he was there. “Do you solemnly swear?” Vandenberg asked, and when Lyndon Johnson replied, “I do,” his years in the wilderness were over.

  5

  The Path Ahead

  AT FIRST GLANCE, the place he had worked so hard to reach seemed peculiarly unsuited to him—unsuited both to his nature and to his ambition.

  Austere, restrained, dignified, courtly, refined—these were not the adjectives that, in January, 1949, sprang first to mind in describing Lyndon Johnson. Big as he was, he seemed even bigger. In part, the reasons were physical. Everything about him was outsize, dramatic. His arms were long even for a man of his height, and his hands, those huge, mottled hands, were big even for those arms, and then there was his great head, with the big, jutting nose, the big, jutting jaw, those immense ears, the powerful shape of the massive skull emphasized because his thinning hair was slicked down flat against it with “Sta-comb” hair tonic. And, most of all, there were his eyes, under long, heavy black eyebrows. People in the Texas Hill Country believed that the key to understanding Lyndon Johnson was to remember that he was a descendant of a clan, legendary in the Hill Country, named Bunton. Generations of Bunton men had possessed not only great ambition and a “commanding presence” that enabled them to realize it (they were elected to public office—to the Congress of Texas when it was an independent republic, to the Texas Legislature after it became a state—in their twenties, as Lyndon Johnson had been elected to public office in his twenties), but they were also tall like Lyndon—always over six feet—and had features strikingly similar to his, including the big ears, jaw and nose, the heavy black eyebrows and, in particular, what the Hill Country called “the Bunton eye.” Generations of Buntons had eyes so dark a brown that they seemed black, so bright that they glittered, so piercing that their glare was memorably intimidating. “If you talked to a Bunton,” said Lyndon’s cousin Ava Johnson Cox, “you never had to wonder if the answer was yes or no. Those eyes told you. Those eyes talked. They spit fire.” From the time he was a baby, all through his youth and young manhood, Lyndon Johnson, the Hill Country agreed, had the Bunton eye. And in Washington, where no one had ever heard of the Buntons, people were also struck by Lyndon Johnson’s eyes. Years later, a British journalist would leave his first audience with the President to write, “Afterward, you chiefly remember the eyes, steady and unrelenting under half-lowered lids.” (The journalist would also write that those eyes showed an “exceptional wariness,” and he was correct about that, as correct as he would have been had he been writing in 1949. Johnson’s assistants, who often said among themselves that their boss never trusted anyone, were joking that January that he didn’t even trust Santa Claus. On the day before Christmas, 1948, walking with several of them along a Washington street, he had come across a costumed Santa Claus—a friendly-faced elderly man—soliciting contributions for the Salvation Army. Johnson had asked the man if he could hire him to entertain the children at a Christmas party in his home that evening, and when the man agreed, had handed him two twenty-dollar bills as a down payment. As he was walking away, however, he whirled around, came back, and demanded the bills. When the Santa Claus returned them, he tore them in half, and gave one half back to the man. “Here,” he said, “you get the other half if you show up.”)

  Johnson’s size was also emphasized by his awkwardness, by his long, lunging strides, by the vigorous, sweeping gestures of his arms to make a point. When he burst through a door, with those long strides and that commanding air, “he just filled up a room,” as one acquaintance put it. His clothes were dramatic, too. Although he owned blue suits, most of them didn’t look like those worn by other senators; so rich and shimmering was their fabric that friends joked about Lyndon’s “silver suits,” and even with his conservative blue suit, and even when he was wearing it with a starched white shirt, he often didn’t wear one of his many understated Countess Mara neckties but rather one of the style known in Texas as a “Fat Max” tie: short, very wide, and garishly hand-painted, some with placidly grazing horses, some with bucking broncos—one favorite had shapely cowgirls astride—some with oil field derricks. Gold glinted from his wrists—the cuffs of his shirts were fastened by notably large solid gold cuff links in the shape of Texas, with a diamond in the center to show the location of Austin; his gold watch was so heavy that when he went to a doctor, he was careful to remove it before he stepped on the scale—and it glinted from his waist, where his belt buckle was also large and solid gold. His initials seemed to be everywhere: his belt buckle was monogrammed, as were his shirts (not only on the breast pocket but on at least one cuff) and his pocket handkerchief, and when he wasn’t wearing the Texas cuff links, he was wearing links that proclaimed, in solid gold, “LBJ” from each wrist. And the shirts he preferred weren’t white—he often wore shirts and ties which were both cut from the same bolt of checked or polka-dotted cloth—and the suits he preferred weren’t blue. When he wore one of his favorite outfits, of which every element—trousers, vest, jacket, tie—was a monochromatic pale brown, Lyndon Johnson was, one journalist recalls, “a mountain of tan.”

  Beyond all this, the suits were outsize. Wanting them to conceal his weight—a disproportionate amount of which was in his stomach; he would shortly begin wearing a girdle in an attempt to conceal what was sometimes an enormous paunch—he had them cut extremely full and long, with wide lapels, and there was therefore a lot of that rich, glossy fabric on display; so generous was the cut that even when his weight was at its upper limits (not the 240 of his presidential years but about 220 or 225), the unbuttoned jackets of his suits flared out around his hips when he walked fast or whirled around, and when he was thinner, his jackets not only flared open but flapped around him. And his trousers were cut extremely long and full, to the despair of his tailor, who complained that Johnson always looked as if he was stepping on the cuffs, and they flapped around his ankles as he rushed down a corridor or up a flight of stairs. Even when he wore a fedora or other conventional eastern hat, it was usually tilted all the way back on his head, in the casual manner of the Southwest, and he often wore a big, gray, broad-brimmed Texas Stetson instead. And while he might be wearing black shoes, at other times he wore cowboy boots, richly embroidered and polished to a high gloss; “You could see him bend down a dozen times a day to buff them up with a handkerchief,” a colleague recalls. Hurrying down the crowded corridors of the House Office Building—and he seemed always to be hurrying, always to be rushing, rudely elbowing people—he had seemed, with his Texas stride and his Texas boots and his Texas hat and his Texas tie, very much the representative of the great, raw province in the Southwest, swaggering through the halls of state. How would he fit in at the Senate Office Building?

  And he seemed even bigger than he was for reasons that went deeper than the physical.

  He could dominate a room with his charm. In his circle of young New Dealers in Washington, he was the life of every party with his practical jokes, his quick wit, his wonderful “Texas stories” about the hellfire preachers and tough old sheriffs of the Hill Country, his vivid imitations of Washington figures, and his exuberance; jumping up on a table in a Spanish restaurant, he pulled little Welly Hopkins up with him to dance a flamenco. “At parties, he was fun,” Elizabeth Rowe says. “That’s what no one understands about Lyndon Johnson—that he was fun.” Said Abe Fortas: “There was never a dull moment around him. The moment he w
alked in the door, [a party] would take fire. Maybe in a different way than the party had been going when he came in, but it would take fire.” And he wanted to dominate every room he was in. If he couldn’t lead, he didn’t want to play—wouldn’t play. That had been true in Johnson City, the isolated, impoverished little huddle of houses deep in the Hill Country vastnesses, where as a teenager who owned the only regulation baseball in town, he had brought a saying to life; “Lyndon was a terrible pitcher,” one Johnson City boy remembers, “but if we didn’t let him pitch, he’d take his ball and go home.” It had been true at the Georgetown parties at which he would go to sleep at the dinner table. He had to win every argument—“just had to.” That was what had been said about him by the Johnson City boys and girls among whom he had grown up. That was what had been said about him by his college classmates. That was what had been said about him by his colleagues in the House of Representatives. And in every setting, his demeanor in disputation had been the same. One of those Johnson City companions was to recall about young Lyndon that “if he’d differ with you, he’d hover right up against you, breathing right in your face, arguing your point…. I got disgusted with him. Sometimes, I’d try to walk away, but… he just wouldn’t stop until you gave in.” And, of course, in the House of Representatives as in the Legislature in Austin which he visited with his father, he had “clutched you like his daddy did when he talked to you.”