There had been many such scenes in Lyndon Johnson’s suite in the House Office Building, for, says his chief aide, John Connally, “Johnson created his own theater,” staging real-life dramas which he claimed to have witnessed, using members of the staff in supporting roles. A favorite was the scene in Sam Rayburn’s Capitol hideaway the day Roosevelt died, and the White House had telephoned to summon Vice President Truman, who was having a drink in the hideaway, to take the oath. “Johnson acted the whole thing out,” Busby would recall. “He placed the chairs—‘This is how close [to Truman] I was.’ He played Rayburn and Truman. He moved over to where Rayburn would have been sitting, and put on Rayburn’s grim scowl. ‘Harry, the White House is on the line.’ Then he showed us Truman walking banty-style across the room,” and spoke with thin lips hardly moving, as Truman sometimes spoke. “‘They want me at the White House, Sam.’” Then Johnson played himself for a moment; not knowing what had happened, he said, he started to ask Rayburn a question, and told Busby to give Rayburn’s response. “Say, ‘No, no, Lyndon, not now.’” So Busby said, “No, no, Lyndon, not now,” trying to scowl grimly as he did so. It detracted nothing from the drama, in Busby’s eyes, when he learned later that, despite what Johnson said, he had not, in fact, been present at this historic occasion, but had only heard about it later from other men who had been.
Johnson inspired his staff, too, giving each of them whatever would inspire him and cement his allegiance—making some of them, who wanted to make their mark on the world, to be a part of history, feel that if they stuck with him, they would be; as one put it, “You felt that the world was moving, and Lyndon was going to be one of the movers, and if you worked for him, you’d be one of the movers”; making others, who wanted less to make a mark than to advance in life, believe that sticking with him was the way to do that, too; as J. J. (Jake) Pickle, one of his men in Texas, put it, “that Mr. Johnson had the prospects of being a … national figure, and he’d take you along with him…. It was the best way to get ahead.”
But drama and fun and inspiration weren’t all he filled his office with. Entering his office in the morning, he would stride from desk to desk. If an assistant’s desk was cluttered with papers, he might say, with a snarl in his voice, “Clean up your fucking desk.” If an assistant’s desk was clean, he might say, with a snarl in his voice, “I hope your mind isn’t as empty as that desk.” Moving from desk to desk, he would pick up or yank out of a typewriter whatever paper an aide was working on, and, one says, “look to see if anything was wrong with it—and God help you if he found something. Jesus, he could rip a man up and down.” “God, you’re stupid,” he would yell at one assistant. “You couldn’t find your ass if you were using both hands!” To another he would shout, “You couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel.” Or a letter might remind him of a phone call he had been intending to make; he would reach out and grab the nearest phone—even if at that moment a secretary was talking to someone on it. Ripping the phone out of her hands as she was in the middle of a sentence, he would cut off the call and dial the number he wanted. As for incoming calls, they had to be answered on the first ring—or else. “If you were on the phone with someone and someone else called, you had to put that [first] person on hold immediately, so you could pick up the second [person] on the first ring,” says Ashton Gonella, who would come to work for Johnson several years later. After several tongue-lashings when she violated that rule, Ms. Gonella devised the strategy of keeping her phone off the hook, so that when it rang she could answer it by simply pressing the button that lit up on her six-line telephone console. Opening the top drawer of Jenkins’ desk, Johnson would take out the sheet Jenkins had to fill out each evening showing how many constituent letters each member of the staff had answered the previous day. The daily quota was a hundred letters per person; if a box on the sheet contained the number “fifty-five,” he would shout, “That’s forty-five good Texans who didn’t get the service they deserved yesterday”—and that was only the first shout. “His rages were terrible,” says Congressman Richard Boiling, who witnessed some. “I mean almost literally—if he’d had a whip in his hand, I’m sure he would have given them a couple of lashes with it.” Once, Gene Latimer felt it would make sense to draw a large map of Texas, with each of the state’s 254 counties and the name of its county chairman, and pin it up in the office so that his fellow aides could see which chairman to notify about a constituent’s problem. Because it took all day for him to do that, however, the next morning the box by the name “Latimer” had a zero in it. Johnson turned that stare—“that terrible stare”—on the little man who adored him so and was so psychologically dependent on him. When Latimer explained what he had done, Lyndon Johnson asked, “I don’t pay you to make maps, do I?” Latimer said he didn’t. “The next time you do something like that, I’ll rip the fucking thing right off the wall,” Johnson said. On another occasion, when he had buzzed out from his inner office for a Scotch, a secretary made a mistake and poured sherry instead. Yelling “You’ve poisoned me!” Johnson hurled the glass against a wall so hard that it shattered. And then he sat at his desk, not saying a word, just staring at the secretary, through the long minutes during which, using paper towels from the bathroom, she knelt on the floor blotting up the sherry and picking up the pieces of glass. On another occasion, when, as Nellie Brill Connally, John’s wife, who worked for Johnson for four years, recalls, “I didn’t get a telephone number fast enough for Mr. Johnson, he threw a book at me. I was a little afraid of him after that.”
The general abuse he would direct at offenders was, aides say, “not so bad” no matter how loud it was shouted at you in front of your fellow workers, not compared to the personal remarks Lyndon Johnson made, for he possessed not only a lash for a tongue but a talent for using it to find a victim’s most sensitive spot. When he would buzz for coffee, “it had to be hot,” recalls one secretary, who was recently divorced and very sensitive about that fact. One morning it wasn’t hot enough: “No wonder you couldn’t keep your husband,” Johnson said to her. “You can’t even make coffee.”
He insisted on ordering every aspect of his staff members’ lives—the way they dressed down to the knots in his men’s neckties; or his women’s weight, hairdo, and makeup. “Well, I see we’re putting on a few pounds, aren’t we?” he would say to a secretary. (“Which meant that you’d better go on a diet,” says Yolanda Boozer, one of his secretaries.) “Or if you hadn’t had your hair done, he would come into the office and say, ‘Well, it’s getting a little windy out there, isn’t it?’” If such hints did not produce the desired result, he would be more direct. To one secretary—with whose appearance he was still dissatisfied—he said, “Why don’t you put on some lipstick, and then I’d like you to send a letter.” “He was adamant about your not having a run in your stocking. He could see it a mile away. I’d be so nervous every time I’d start to walk away from him. I knew I would get the complete up-and-down look. I mean scrutiny. And if you had even a little bit of a run, you’d better change those stockings. It was best always to have an extra pair in your drawer.” He explained his concern about weight to Busby, telling him, “I don’t see the front of my secretaries, I don’t see them until they’ve put something down on my desk and are walking away. I don’t want to look at an Aunt Minnie. I want to look at a good, trim back end.” And Ashton Gonella understood his insistence on other aspects of appearance. “Everybody had to be perfect, so appearance was all-important to him. When I came to work for him, I had long hair, which was the style at the time. One morning, he said, ‘You’re going to the beauty shop today, and you’re going to have ten pounds cut off that.’”
The members of his staff knew that they would have to work in the Senate Office Building the same hours they had worked in the House Office Building—hours which had astonished people who learned about them. All members of that staff worked six days a week, and sometimes seven; the men who handled the
mail had to work alternate Sundays. And these were very long days. Some of the staff—those who unloaded the mail each morning from the big gray mailbags—had to be waiting at the office when the bags arrived at seven o’clock. Others started the day at either eight or eight-thirty. And no matter when they started in the morning, they usually had to work into the evening—sometimes quite late into the evening. Nadine Brammer, who would come to work for him in 1955, wrote a friend that she arrived early in the morning, “and sometimes I don’t see daylight again until the next morning. Usually, we have a sandwich at our desks for lunch, and it’s dark, most evenings, when we leave.” Nor did the workday end when they went home. If Johnson had a thought during the night that he wanted to communicate to a member of his staff, he simply picked up the telephone and called him or her at home, no matter what the hour. “There wasn’t even a hello, or a ‘This is Congressman Johnson,’” one says. “You were woken up at two or three A.M. and there was a voice in your ear giving an order.” The men on the staff were worked to exhaustion. One congressman was having a drink with Lyndon Johnson late one evening in his House hideaway office, and Johnson buzzed for Walter Jenkins. “The door opened, and there was this guy—shirt rumpled, tie askew, face pale, standing in the door holding a yellow legal pad waiting for orders—like a slave.” A friend of Jenkins who would visit him in Washington and board with him for a few nights recalls him returning to his home so tired that he fell asleep in the bathtub. “Johnson was working him like a nigger slave,” he says. And always Johnson was reminding the staff that the indispensable quality he required in them was “loyalty”—and he defined what he meant by that: “I want real loyalty. I want someone who will kiss my ass in Macy’s window and stand up and say, ‘Boy, wasn’t that sweet!’”
Because his treatment of his staff had become known on Capitol Hill, Johnson had been stymied for years in the House in attempts to recruit talented individuals to work for him—with a single exception, his administrative aide John Connally. The remarkable abilities of this future Governor of Texas (which impressed everyone who came into contact with him: John Kennedy would make Connally his Secretary of the Navy, Richard Nixon his Secretary of the Treasury—and Nixon called him the man best qualified to succeed him as President) had camouflaged the lack of other top-flight talent on Johnson’s congressional staff. The Congressman himself felt Connally possessed an abundance of the indispensable attribute. “I can call John Connally at midnight, and if I told him to come over and shine my shoes, he’d come running,” Johnson would say. “That’s loyalty!” But now Connally had evidently decided that ten years of doing it in Macy’s window was enough. Not long after the election that sent Johnson to the Senate, Connally flatly refused to return to Washington with him, and accepted a job with the Austin law firm of Alvin J. Wirtz, the former state senator and canny political string-puller who was the single most powerful figure in Johnson’s congressional district and a key figure in Johnson’s career.
Johnson had several replacements in mind, men of outstanding qualifications and Washington expertise, but, having observed how he treated his staff, they declined to join it. Trying to tempt Bryce Harlow, who would later serve as a high-level assistant to Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and who was already a highly respected congressional aide, Johnson offered him not only a salary but stock in his radio station. And Johnson’s proposition was reinforced by Connally, who was friendly with Harlow and came to his office to plead with him to take his job, saying, “For God’s sake, I can’t go on like this.” But there was a problem of ethics; pragmatic though Harlow might be about politics, he knew he would have a problem with Lyndon Johnson’s brand of pragmatism. “I went and spoke to Vinson about it. This was a man whom Lyndon was close to. The old man sat there and looked at me very penetratingly. Then he wheeled around and looked out the window. Dead silence. Wheeled back around: ‘Bryce, it won’t work. You wouldn’t last six months. Lyndon cuts his corners too close.’ And I knew he was right. I knew somewhere along the line he would take some action I could not go along with, and I’d have to say, ‘I can’t do that, Senator.’” And there was a personal problem. “Lyndon would maneuver people into positions of dependency and vulnerability so he could do what he wanted with them. I had watched what he did with Walter Jenkins. He broke Jenkins. To work for Lyndon Johnson, you had to be willing to accept the blacksnake [whip], and not even scream.” Harlow determined that, no matter what Johnson offered him, he would never work for him. Then Johnson offered the job to Jim Rowe, a successful lawyer and one of Washington’s most respected political insiders. But Rowe says, “It was all right to deal with Johnson as long as you had a little independence. But if you were on his payroll—well, I had seen how he treated people who were on his payroll.” And the effect of Connally’s absence was going to be exacerbated by the fact that Johnson was in the Senate now—as became apparent to Johnson with the first assignment he gave one of Connally’s assistants, Warren Woodward.
“Woody” was one of the young men deeply dependent psychologically on Lyndon Johnson. Handsome and courageous—during World War II, he had flown thirty-five missions over Europe—he was keenly aware of his limitations. Asked years later about his role in Johnson’s organization, he would say, “Well, I wasn’t in on strategy. I carried his socks and underwear. That’s what I could do for him, and I was proud to do it.” And, knowing he was going to have to take over some of Connally’s duties, he was nervous. “There was a feeling in the office when we moved to the Senate that we had to step up our game to a new level—that the Senate was the Big Leagues,” he would say. And with his first assignment, he—and his boss—found out that the nervousness was justified.
The assignment—in early December, before Johnson had even been sworn in as a senator—was to obtain enough extra tickets to President Truman’s Inaugural Ball so that Johnson could accommodate all his financial backers who wanted to attend.
“I was just as green as a gourd,” Woody would recall. The official he saw first at Inaugural headquarters was unable to satisfy his request, and sent him to see a woman whose name Woody caught as “Miss Masters.”
“I went in and poured out my story” to the lady, Woody said, and when she agreed to help, decided to do her a great favor in return: with the air of someone giving a thrill to a functionary who would be honored to dance with a senator, he said, “I know Senator Johnson will be very grateful, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he wants to have a dance with you.”
When he related the story to Johnson, Johnson was puzzled as to the identity of “Miss Masters”—until the light dawned. “Her name wouldn’t be Mesta, would it?” he said. “You were talking to Perle Mesta!” His assistant had told Washington’s most famous hostess that he would, as a favor, have his boss give her a dance. “Well, that was how green we all were, without John there with his sophistication,” Woody says. Not long after this (and after Harlow and Rowe—and several others—had refused to fill Connally’s place), Johnson began telephoning Connally at Wirtz’s law firm, cajoling and pleading with him to return. “You got to come, John. You got to hire my staff. You got to help me. I’m going to be new. I need help, John.” And when the pleading and cajoling failed, the big hand tightened on the telephone and the voice became low and threatening—“Now, you listen to me! By God, you either come back and reorganize my staff, or find me someone who can!”—and then he slammed the receiver down so hard that the base shook. And a moment later, he picked the up receiver again—to telephone Connally’s new boss. And a few minutes later, Connally would recall, “Senator Wirtz called me in. He said, ‘John, I know you don’t want to go to Washington. I don’t blame you. But, you know, I just don’t really think we have any choice.’” Connally told Johnson, however, that, choice or not, he would stay for only a single Senate session, and his unhappiness in the job was so evident that, at the end of the session, Johnson allowed him to leave for fear he would infect the rest of the staff.
*In an attempt
to help Johnson advance outside the traditional House structure, near the end of World War II Rayburn appointed him to two prestigious new “Select” postwar planning committees whose other members were senior members of the House. But Johnson’s attempt to take a leading role on the Select committees earned him the seniors’ displeasure, and the attempt was abandoned.
6
“The Right Size”
HIS FIRST STEPS along the Senate path showed how rocky it might be for him.
All Lyndon Johnson’s life he had been grabbing—for more than his share of boardinghouse food, for more than his share of radio advertising, for House committee seats to which he was not entitled. And now he tried to grab for the first two things he wanted in the Senate: committee seats and office space.
He made his moves fast. The three most desirable committees were Appropriations, Finance, and Foreign Relations, and luckily, or so Johnson thought, the senior senator from his own state, Tom Connally, was not only a power on two of them—chairman of Foreign Relations and ranking member of Finance—but was also, thanks to the Senate’s long Christmas recess, ready to hand. And hardly had Connally arrived back in his hometown of Marlin in early November when Johnson flew up to see him, accompanied by John Connally (no relation to the Senator). They were met at Waco, the nearest airport, by Frank C. (Posh) Oltorf, then a second-term member of the Texas Legislature, who drove them to Marlin and went up with them to Connally’s suite in the Falls Hotel, where the two younger men sat on a sofa as the old senator and the new one chatted.
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 23