From his arrival in Washington in 1931, congressional secretary Johnson sought to cultivate the Speaker, using as entree the fact that his father had served in the Texas Legislature with Rayburn, but the attempt did not take root until he married Lady Bird in 1934. Rayburn’s heart went out to this young woman who he saw was as shy as he. Growing paternally fond and immensely protective of her, he began coming to the Johnsons’ small apartment for dinners, at which Lady Bird cooked “Mr. Sam’s” favorite Texas foods, and he accepted invitations regularly for breakfasts on Sundays, the Sundays on which he had nothing to do. The “professional son” had ample opportunity to employ his talents. Sometimes, to the amazement of all who witnessed it, Lyndon would lean over and kiss the feared Speaker on his bald head.
Once, with Lady Bird back in Texas, Lyndon, alone in Washington, developed pneumonia. Rayburn sat beside him all night in the hospital, so afraid of waking the young man that he wouldn’t stand up even to brush away the ashes from the cigarettes he chain-smoked during the night. In the morning, his vest was covered with ashes. Not long thereafter Rayburn placed Lyndon Johnson on the first rung of the ladder he wanted to climb. Known never to ask anyone—not even a friend—for a favor, for Johnson he begged a favor of a man with whom he had never been friendly, asking Senator Tom Connally to obtain the Texas state directorship of the newly formed National Youth Administration for a twenty-six-year-old congressional secretary without a shred of administrative experience, refusing to leave Connally’s office until the senator agreed. When, two years later, Johnson returned to Washington as a congressman, Rayburn made him a “regular” at the famed “Board of Education” sessions he conducted every afternoon in a House hideaway. There would be a break in their relationship early in 1939, when, for the first time, Rayburn was in the way of Johnson’s ambition. Because Rayburn was the logical choice to succeed John Garner as Roosevelt’s key man in Texas—chief dispenser of New Deal patronage in the state—and Johnson wanted the job himself, he betrayed Rayburn, poisoning Roosevelt’s mind against him. For almost three years thereafter, Rayburn rebuffed Johnson’s attempts to resume relations. But when, after Pearl Harbor, Johnson enlisted and left Washington—for a war zone, Rayburn assumed—Rayburn’s heart melted toward Lyndon as the coldness of a father toward an estranged son melts in a moment when the boy is in danger.
During the rest of Rayburn’s life, Johnson would sometimes blurt out remarks like the one he once made in Texas: “Goddammit, I have to kiss his ass all the time….” But in Rayburn’s presence, Johnson would play on the Speaker’s paternal feelings, repeatedly telling others, in Rayburn’s presence, that he was “just like a Daddy to me.” At one banquet, Senator Ralph Yarborough was to recall, “Lyndon was telling how ‘he’s been like a father to me.’ I saw tears come out of Rayburn’s eyes and roll down his cheeks.”
A note Johnson received from another elderly, lonely House power during his first weeks as a senator demonstrated the effectiveness of his techniques. Carl Vinson may have seen Johnson’s flaws clearly, as his advice to Bryce Harlow shows, but that didn’t stop him from missing him. Most junior members of Vinson’s Armed Services Committee tried to stay out of the way of the cigar-chewing, tobacco-juice-spitting little dictator known as “the Admiral.” Johnson had put himself in Vinson’s way—and had stayed there, despite many early rude rebuffs, dropping around, week after week, year after year, to the apartment in which Vinson lived with his invalid wife to tell him the ribald stories and the latest congressional gossip he loved. And now, in 1949, the note Johnson received was in the pleading tone of an elderly man who misses, very much, a young one. “Don’t forget your old friend during this session of Congress,” Carl Vinson wrote. “Keep in touch with me.”
NOW LYNDON JOHNSON was in the Senate. He had learned who the Senate’s “Big Bulls” were—and almost without exception, these bulls were Old Bulls. So, Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote, “he could see at once what was required.” After her conversations with Johnson, Ms. Goodwin was to write that he recognized “that the older men in the Senate were often troubled by a half-conscious sense that their performance was deteriorating with age.” Johnson told her—these are his words: “Now they feared humiliation, they craved attention. And when they found it, it was like a spring in the desert; their gratitude couldn’t adequately express itself with anything less than total support and dependence on me.”
The attention was tailored to the man—by a master tailor. James E. Murray of Montana, ranking Democratic member of the Senate Labor Committee in 1949, and, after 1951, chairman, was a liberal hero, and deservedly so. “He is a classic prototype of the New Deal,” a writer was to say, “as nearly pro-labor on all questions as it is possible to be…. To hear Senator Murray’s response when his name is reached on a roll-call is to know at once what the New Deal-Fair Deal position on an issue is.” But in 1949, Senator Murray was seventy-three years old. Once a broad-chested man, bursting with vitality, his stride was now slower, even at times a bit uncertain. And while he was not senile, his mind was not what it had been, and it preferred to dwell in the past, in the days of labor’s triumphs, in the days when it had found, in Franklin Roosevelt, its great champion. Sometimes—increasingly, to one who observed closely—when Murray was dealing with current issues, with current Senate maneuvers and stratagems, the Senator seemed a little tense, a little uncertain. Lyndon Johnson, who had been close to Roosevelt, close to Corcoran and Benjamin V. Cohen and the other young New Dealers with whom Murray had worked in the great days of the New Deal, would, in talking to Murray, turn the conversation to those days—and keep it there. It was noticeable how Murray, once he realized that it was to be kept there, relaxed and became his old charming self. It was noticeable how Murray’s face lit up when, entering the Senate cloakroom, he saw Lyndon Johnson there.
The question of deteriorating performance was handled, too. Reports were a constant of Senate life, and many senators did not have assistants capable of writing reports of which they would not be ashamed. Johnson did, and in the most delicate of terms, he would sometimes offer an older senator the services of such an aide.
Old men crave not only attention but affection, and Johnson did not forget that, instructing aides drafting letters to them for his signature to make the letters “real sweet.” Old men want to feel that the experience which has come with their years is valuable, that their advice is valuable, that they possess a sagacity that could be obtained only through experience—a sagacity that could be of use to young men if only young men would ask. Lyndon Johnson asked. “I want your counsel on something,” he would say to one of the Old Bulls. “I need your counsel.” And when the counsel was given—and of course it was given: who could resist so earnest an entreaty?—it was appreciated, with a gratitude rare in its intensity. He would pay another visit to the senator’s office to tell him how he had followed his advice, and how well it had worked. “Thank you for your counsel,” he would say to one senator. “I needed that counsel.” “Thank you for giving me just a little of your wisdom,” he would say to another senator. “I just don’t know what I would have done without it.” When one of the Old Bulls, asked for his advice, told Johnson that he didn’t know enough about the matter, Johnson would say, “Oh, I’ll rely on your judgment any time. Your judgment’s always been good.” And the earnestness—the outward sincerity—of his words, the obvious depth of his gratitude, made the words words that an old man might treasure.
In Senate as college, he proved the adage that no excess was possible. He gave gruff Edwin C. (Big Ed) Johnson of Colorado a nickname: “Mr. Wisdom,” and used it not only orally but in writing; once, when Big Ed was back in Colorado, Lyndon wrote him: “I certainly do miss the able counsel of Mr. Wisdom.” He used it not only in private but in public. “Boy, whenever you’re in trouble, the thing to do is go to Mr. Wisdom,” he would say, in Ed Johnson’s presence, to whoever else happened to be present. And beyond the specific flatteries and sweetnesses was Lyndon Johnson�
�s overall demeanor with the Old Bulls: a deference, an obsequiousness, a “fawning” and “bootlicking” so profound that more than one Senate staffer likened him to the same Dickens character. “During Lyndon Johnson’s early days in the Senate, he was a real Uriah Heep,” says Paul Douglas’ administrative assistant, Howard Shuman.
“The very frequency of his statements that an older politician was ‘like a Daddy to me’ tends to cast doubt on the profundity of some of these relationships,” an academic was to write after interviewing many senators; the doubts would have been confirmed had he been walking beside Lyndon Johnson and John Connally just after they left the office of an elderly senator to whom Johnson had just been, for quite a few minutes, elaborately and fawningly grateful for a piece of advice. “Christ, I’ve been kissing asses all my life,” Lyndon Johnson said, with what Connally recalls as a “snarl.” But the technique was as effective as it had always been. “Johnson thought, in those days at least, that that kind of technique was effective with anybody,” says Booth Mooney, one of his Senate aides, and the belief was borne out by the results, the results even with Rules Committee Chairman Hay den. In December, Hay den had refused to give Johnson that extra room in the basement that he had asked for; in February Hayden found that an extra room was, indeed, available. Soon it had become apparent that most of the Senate’s Old Bulls were looking fondly on Lyndon Johnson. And their feelings contributed to a change in Johnson’s behavior that was noticeable to the assistants who had worked for him in his pre-Senate days. Busby, struck by Johnson’s calm during their learning sessions on the Chamber floor, now began to notice the calmness spreading to activities outside the office. “When he got to the Senate,” Busby says, “all of a sudden, he didn’t act so driven any more.” John Connally says that “After a month or two, he seemed to be—outside the office, I mean—so much more at ease than he had ever been before.” And Walter Jenkins uses a somewhat different, and very telling, image. “Mr. Johnson took to the Senate as if he had been born there,” he says. “It was obvious it was his place.”
His place. All at once, in the Senate—in this place that was so different from any other place he had ever been—Lyndon Johnson seems to have felt, within a very few weeks of his arrival in it, at home.
AND THERE WAS ANOTHER ASPECT of the Senate that was especially well suited to Lyndon Johnson, and was particularly helpful to his advancement within it. While the Senate may have been ruled by its southerners, the southerners were ruled by one man—and he was lonely.
Johnson had learned this, too, that December—had learned it at least partly in a conversation in his old House office near the end of the month.
The conversation was with a young man named Bobby Baker. Baker was only a twenty-year-old Senate page, but he already possessed a reputation that distinguished him from the other pages—a reputation to which Johnson referred when, on that December trip, he telephoned him and said, “Mr. Baker, I understand you know where the bodies are buried in the Senate. I’d appreciate it if you’d come by my office and talk to me.”
Baker knew little about Johnson, he was to recall. “He was just another incoming freshman to me.” But by the end of the talk, he knew a lot more. Johnson, he was to recall, “came directly to the point. ‘I want to know who’s the power over there, how you get things done, the best committees, the works.’ For two hours, he peppered me with keen questions. I was impressed. No senator ever had approached me with such a display of determination to learn, to achieve, to attain, to belong, to get ahead. He was coming into the Senate with his neck bowed, running full tilt, impatient to reach some distant goal I then could not even imagine.” A waiter from the Senate Dining Room who brought sandwiches and coffee to the two men saw a rapport forming; Baker “leaned across the table as if drawn to LBJ by some invisible magnet.” And if Johnson wanted to know where true power lay in the Senate, Baker knew the answer. “Dick Russell was the power,” he was to say. And, he was to say, Johnson immediately “recognized” something about Russell: “that Russell, who was no longer so young, was a bachelor and lonely.”
That was perhaps the single most important piece of information that Lyndon Johnson acquired that December. At each stage of his life, his remarkable gift for cultivating and manipulating older men who could help him had been focused at its greatest intensity on one man: the one who could, in each setting, help him the most. This focus, too, was deliberate; while he was still in college, Lyndon Johnson told his roommate Alfred (Boody) Johnson: “The way to get ahead is to get close to the one man at the top.”
In Texas, the older men most responsible for Lyndon Johnson’s earliest success were the college’s president, Cecil Evans, and the canny—and feared—Alvin Wirtz. Each of these men had a daughter. Neither had a son.
Crusty, aloof “Prexy” Evans seemed to other students to be surrounded by an “invisible wall.” But Lyndon Johnson, refusing to be rebuffed, babbling boyishly away while gazing at him with adoration, flattering him in editorials (“Great as an educator and as an executive, Dr. Evans is greatest as a man”), telling him he looked on him as a father, had breached the wall, and Evans treated Johnson with more affection than he had ever shown a student—a notably paternal affection.
In Austin, Johnson would tell Wirtz’s associates—men he knew would repeat the remark to Wirtz—“Senator Wirtz has been like a father to me.” And when Johnson entered Wirtz’s office, that studiously calm, reserved, and ruthless political string-puller would jump up and hug him, saying, “Here’s m’boy, Lyndon. Hello Lyndon, m’boy.” Johnson’s success in making Wirtz as well as Evans feel that Lyndon looked upon him almost as a father, in making Wirtz, like Evans, feel that Lyndon was the son he had never had, is attested to by Wirtz’s inscription on a photograph of himself: “To Lyndon Johnson, whom I admire and love with the same affection as if he were in fact my own son.”
IN WASHINGTON, the pattern had been repeated with two men. One was Sam Rayburn, and the other’s last name also began with the letter R.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt had sons, four of them, but he was so distant from them, and, indeed, to some extent, from his wife, that in a way he was lonely, too.
The instant rapport that had been kindled between Roosevelt and Johnson at their very first meeting—the rapport that had led the President to tell Tommy Corcoran, “I’ve just met the most remarkable young man,” and to order Corcoran to “help him with anything you can” (and to arrange Johnson’s appointment to the House Naval Affairs Committee because he, Roosevelt, had been active in naval affairs when he was a young man)—had lasted and deepened with time. The President would tell Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes that Johnson was “the kind of uninhibited young pro he would have liked to have been as a young man”—and might have been “if I hadn’t gone to Harvard.” The President offered to appoint Johnson Administrator of the Rural Electrification Administration, put him in charge of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee—intervened in Johnson’s 1941 race for the Senate to an extent he had never done in any congressional race since his disastrous attempt to intervene in 1938 Senate races, and that he had vowed he would never do again. His feeling for Johnson, says Jim Rowe, the Roosevelt aide in the best position to observe the interplay between the two men, was a “special feeling.”
About the basis of this feeling relatively little is known, because the meetings between Johnson and Roosevelt took place in the privacy of the White House living quarters. Describing the President as a lonely man whose wife was often traveling, Johnson was to say that “He’d call me up” and “I used to go down sometimes and have a meal with him”—breakfast alone with the President in Roosevelt’s spartan bedroom, the President sitting up in bed, or in the President’s private study, with the two men dining off a bridge table. And the President and the young congressman would talk together not only in the upstairs, private quarters of the White House but in the Oval Office as well. The frequency of these meetings is unknown, as is the nature
of the conversations at them. When Roosevelt died, Johnson told a friendly reporter, “He was just like a Daddy to me; he always talked to me just that way.” But it is not known whether he used the Daddy image—or other fatherly images—when he was talking to FDR, nor to what extent he was with the President the “professional son.” There were certainly other reasons for the rapport between the older man and the younger, among them, as Rowe notes, Roosevelt’s confidence in Johnson’s complete loyalty to the New Deal (a confidence that would prove unfounded almost as soon as Roosevelt died, when Johnson began publicly disassociating himself from the New Deal), and in Johnson’s ability: “Johnson was in many ways just more capable than most of the people Roosevelt saw…. You’ve got to remember that they were two great political geniuses.” But, Rowe feels, as do other presidential aides, that there was also a “father-son” element to the relationship, and there are moments, such as Roosevelt’s determination to cheer “Lyndon” up following his 1941 defeat, that are difficult to attribute to solely political considerations. And the aides agree that whatever the reason for the “special feeling,” special the feeling certainly was. Men like Corcoran and Cohen conjecture that with Roosevelt, as with Rayburn, Lyndon Johnson read the older man, studied him, learned him—and used what he learned. And whatever the reasons, Roosevelt indisputably put his power behind Johnson’s career to an extent he did for few, if any, other congressmen.
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 28