Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  Other senators soon came to realize this crucial fact of Capitol Hill life, and to ask for Johnson’s intercession with the mighty Speaker. A bill vital to Clinton Anderson was passed in the Senate, but, Anderson wrote Johnson, “Our … problem is to get action in the House,” where it would go before a committee whose chairman was sponsoring his own, competing, proposal on the subject. “I have written Speaker Rayburn,” Anderson wrote, but he knew that his letter wouldn’t be enough, so he also wrote Johnson: “I hope to enlist your continued interest in piloting this legislation to enactment.” Even the most powerful Senate committee chairmen—Allen Ellender of Agriculture, for example—would ask. “You put a little note on Lyndon’s desk and ask him kindly to get in touch with our friend the Speaker on the Sugar Bill,” Ellender told Dorothy Nichols over the phone one day. “It has been pending there for quite some time. We want to clear up the decks. Put a little note on his desk and let him talk to Sam Rayburn.”

  When Johnson used his influence with Rayburn on a senator’s behalf, he made sure the senator knew it. After writing Anderson that “I appreciate the difficulties which may arise in moving the measure through the House [and] I shall be glad to do what I can to be helpful in this regard,” he let Anderson know the minute the bill had been passed. “I want you to know I have spoken to Speaker Rayburn,” he wrote Ellender, whose bill also passed. Few emotions are more ephemeral in the political world than gratitude: appreciation for past favors. Far less ephemeral, however, is hope: the hope of future favors. Far less ephemeral is fear, the fear that in the future, favors may be denied. Thanks to Sam Rayburn, Lyndon Johnson now had, at least to a limited extent, those emotions on his side in dealing with senators; he had something to promise them, something to threaten them with.

  ANOTHER SOURCE of power was money.

  Lyndon Johnson had been using money as a lever to move the political world for a long time—ever since, as a young worker in a congressional campaign, he had sat in a San Antonio hotel room behind a table covered with five-dollar bills, handing them to Mexican-American men at the rate of five dollars a vote for each vote in their family.*

  For years, men had been handing him (or handing to his aides, for his use) checks or sometimes envelopes stuffed with cash—generally plain white letter-size envelopes containing hundred-dollar bills—for use in his own campaigns, or in the campaigns of others. His first campaign for Congress, in 1937, was perhaps the most expensive campaign for a congressional seat in the history of Texas.† During his first campaign for the Senate, in 1941, envelopes stuffed with cash cascaded into Texas from Washington attorneys and the New York City garment district unions. Some of these campaign contributions were carried in a more casual fashion. Recalling one trip on which he brought between $10,000 and $15,000, Walter Jenkins says, “I went down to Texas carrying this money in bills stuffed into every pocket.” The amounts of cash heading south were so large that Johnson sometimes lost the personal control over its use that was important to him. Corcoran “went up to the garment district and raised money for Johnson, and we … sent it to Texas,” Jim Rowe was to say. “Johnson called and said: ‘Where’s that money? I need it!’” When Rowe told him who was carrying it, Johnson exploded, apparently because the courier had authority to distribute funds on his own. Rowe recalls Johnson saying: “Goddamn it—it’ll never get to me. I’ll have to meet him at the plane and get it from him.” And money was being raised in Texas, too. Because campaign contributions were not a deductible business expense, Brown & Root distributed to company executives and lawyers hundreds of thousands of dollars in deductible “bonuses” and “attorneys’ fees,” which Internal Revenue Service agents came to believe were then funneled, in both checks and cash, to the Johnson campaign—contributions on a scale unprecedented at the time even in the freewheeling world of Texas politics. A tax-fraud investigation of Brown & Root launched by the IRS was cut off only after Johnson had solicited the personal intervention of President Roosevelt.‡ During Johnson’s second—1948—Senate campaign, hundred-dollar bills had been given to his aides in stacks so large that sometimes letter-size envelopes couldn’t hold them. Picking up $50,000 in “currency” in Houston, John Connally had to bring it back to Austin in what he calls a “brown paper sack like you buy groceries in” (which he left in a booth in an all-night diner, the Longhorn Cafe, where he had stopped for a bite to eat with fellow Johnson assistant Charles Herring, so that the two attorneys rushed back to the diner in a panic that was assuaged only when they saw the bag still lying in the booth). A paper bag Connally brought back from Houston on another occasion contained $40,000.* “They were spending money like Texas had never seen,” Ralph Yarborough, later a United States Senator from Texas but in 1948 an activist Democratic politician in Texas, was to recall. “And they did it not only so big but so openly.”

  Lyndon Johnson’s use of money in other politicians’ campaigns had also been instrumental in his rise. It was money given to other candidates that, in 1940, had furnished him his first toehold on national political power. Obtaining an informal post with the moribund Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, he had arranged for newly rich Texas contractors and independent oilmen, anxious to enlarge their political influence in Washington, to make contributions to the committee, with the stipulation that they be distributed at his discretion.

  That was when the checks and the envelopes stuffed with cash began to pour into his office in Washington—not into his office in the House Office Building because of federal strictures against receiving contributions on federal property, but into a five-room suite he rented in an office building on E Street, the Munsey Building, to circumvent those regulations: to circumvent not their spirit, which was to discourage the sale of political influence, but their technical letter. Tommy Corcoran handed him several cash-filled envelopes, filled with bills from the New York garment-center unions, and trusted couriers from Texas, including William Kittrell, the veteran Texas lobbyist, handed him others. To circumvent another federal law, the Federal Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibited any political contributions from corporations and set a limit of $5,000 on contributions from individuals, Herman and George Brown arranged to have business associates—subcontractors, attorneys, an insurance broker—send $5,000 each, in their own names, to the Congressional Campaign Committee.† On the scale of political contributions of the time, these contributions had a substantial heft. When six of these checks arrived at once, Lyndon Johnson had provided, through Brown & Root, more money than the committee received from any other source. And more and more checks came in, from Brown & Root, and from other Texas oilmen and contractors.

  Lyndon Johnson was quite frank about why businessmen should be happy to make these contributions. When, the following year, removed in a power struggle from a formal job at the Congressional Campaign Committee, he became exasperated by the stinginess of some contributors, and by Sam Ray-burn’s failure to understand why they should be more generous, he wrote the Speaker that “These $200 droplets will not get the job done.” What was needed, he said, was to “select a ‘minute man’ group of thirty men, each of whom should raise $5,000, for a total of $150,000.” And, he added, “There isn’t any reason why, with the wealth and consideration that has been extended, we should fall down on this.” Wealth and consideration—the favors, the political influence that had provided FCC licensing favors that had let radio station owners grow rich, and federal oil depletion allowances that had let oil field operators grow richer; that had procured federal contracts to build and provision military installations in the Tenth Congressional District for favored Austin businessmen, and much larger contracts—such as the contract (it eventually grew to $357,000,000, then one of the largest in Navy history) that the Navy gave to Brown & Root early in 1941 to build sub-chasers and destroyers, despite the fact that, at the time, Brown & Root had never built a single ship of any type (and, as George Brown was to say, “We didn’t know the stern from the aft—I mean the bow—of the b
oat”).* Johnson was asking for contributions, in other words, on grounds of naked self-interest: political contributions should be given in return for past government help in acquiring wealth and upon the hope of future government protection of that wealth, and of government assistance in adding to it.

  That argument was evidently persuasive. The droplets again became a gusher, and the needed money was again raised—although because Johnson felt himself unwelcome in Campaign Committee headquarters, some of the envelopes came into his House office, and the money they contained was distributed from there. Lyndon Johnson’s first national political power was simply the power of money, used as campaign contributions; it had given him whatever small taste of power he had for a year or two enjoyed in the House.

  Now, in the Senate, the cascade of cash continued. Some insight into these contributions would be furnished years later, and almost by accident, because of a 1975 Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit against the Gulf Oil Corporation that grew out of an investigation not into Lyndon Johnson but into the Watergate scandal. Testifying in this lawsuit, Claude Wild Jr. said he had become Gulf’s chief Washington lobbyist, reporting to the company’s general counsel, David Searls, on November 1, 1959. “Do you recall your first assignment?” he was asked. “One of the first assignments I had resulted from a commitment that” Searls “had made to then Senator Lyndon Johnson,” Wild replied. “The commitment was that Gulf Oil would furnish $50,000 to Senator Johnson for his use, and … I was furnished $10,000 on five separate occasions which I delivered to Walter Jenkins, who was Senator Johnson’s primary aide.” The money, Wild testified, was in “cash.” No one asked him at the time the denominations of the bills, or how they were carried, but in 1987 he told the author of this book that “probably it was hundreds,” carried in “plain white envelopes.” He said that the money could have been given either to help finance Johnson’s 1960 presidential campaign, or to help Johnson finance other senators’ campaigns—“it was for whatever he wanted.” He also testified that he had later made another payment, twenty-five thousand dollars, to Johnson “staff members” for “his or his delegate’s use in assisting members of Congress whom he hoped to see elected or re-elected.”

  And Wild’s contributions were not the largest being delivered to Johnson. Men familiar with this aspect of Texas politics agree that his most important fund-raisers were Tommy Corcoran; John Connally, who carried cash given by, among others, Sid Richardson; Ed Clark, courier for, among others, Clint Murchison, Brown & Root, and the Humble Oil Company; and, on occasion, George R. Brown himself. By the time the author learned about the cash-filled envelopes, Brown had died, so the author could not ask him about them. But he did discuss them with both Connally and Clark, and both men spoke freely—indeed, somewhat boastfully—about flying up to Washington with envelopes tucked into the inside breast pockets of their suit jackets. And both Connally and Clark, as well as intimates familiar with the fund-raising efforts of these two men during the 1950s, agree that they brought to Washington amounts far larger than those about which Wild testified. Asked if the largest amounts he carried were of the same scale as the forty- or fifty-thousand-dollar contributions he had transported in a sack in 1948, Connally shook his head no, grinned, and said that the amounts he carried increased, particularly after he became Richardson’s personal attorney in 1951. “I handled inordinate amounts of cash,” he said. Clark, moreover, points out that Wild didn’t go to work for Gulf until 1959. Before that, contributions to Johnson were made by Chief Counsel Searls. Searls had died before the SEC began its investigation of Gulf, and therefore did not himself testify, but he worked closely with Clark for years; it was, for example, primarily Searls to whom Clark was referring when he explained how he had persuaded Gulf to purchase Lyndon Johnson’s political influence by purchasing advertising time on Johnson’s radio station, KTBC: “I had friends there. I spoke to them about it, and they understood. This wasn’t a Sunday school proposition. This was business.”* Clark didn’t put anything in writing about his association with Searls; the “Secret Boss of Texas” never put anything about money in writing, but in every instance in which one of Clark’s statements could be checked against something in writing, the statement proved to be accurate, and when he was asked about Wild’s testimony, he said, “I knew about that fifty thousand. I knew about two hundred thousand.” And Gulf was only one oil company—and there were non-oil businesses in Texas, too.

  Some idea of the free-and-easy atmosphere that surrounded Lyndon Johnson’s fund-raising relationship with Texans would be documented in transcripts of telephone calls made in early 1960. “I have some money that I want to know what to do with,” George Brown said in a call to Johnson’s office on January 5. “I was wondering … just who should be getting it, and I will be collecting more from time to time.” (The answer to Brown’s question is not transcribed.) Ed Clark was raising so much that some of it had to stay in Texas to await the next trip down before Jenkins or some other Johnson aide could pick it up. “Woody,” Jenkins wrote Warren Woodward on January 11, “Ed Clark tells me that he has received some assistance from H. E. Butt. I wonder if you could go by and pick it up and put it with the other [we] put away before I left Texas.” Clark says that Brown’s money was for the presidential run for which Johnson was gearing up that January, and that Butt’s was for Johnson to contribute to the campaigns of other senators, but that often he and the other men providing Johnson with funds weren’t even sure which of these two purposes the funds were for. “How could you know?” Ed Clark was to say. “If Johnson wanted to give some senator money for some campaign, Johnson would pass the word to give money to me or Jesse Kellam or Cliff Carter, and it would find its way into Johnson’s hands. And it would be the same if he wanted money for his own campaign. And a lot of the money that was given to Johnson both for other candidates and for himself was in cash.” “All we knew was that Lyndon asked for it, and we gave it,” Tommy Corcoran was to say.

  This atmosphere would pervade Lyndon Johnson’s fund-raising all during his years in the Senate. He would “pass the word”—often by telephoning, sometimes by having Jenkins telephone—to Brown or Clark or Connally, and the cash would be collected down in Texas and flown to Washington, or, if Johnson was in Austin, would be delivered to him there. When word was received that some was available, John Connally recalls, he would board a plane in Fort Worth or Dallas, and “I’d go get it. Or Walter would get it. Woody would go get it. We had a lot of people who would go get it, and deliver it. The idea that Walter or Woody or Wilton Woods would skim some is ridiculous. We had couriers.” Or, Clark says, “If George or me were going up anyway, we’d take it ourselves.” And Tommy Corcoran was often bringing Johnson cash from New York unions, mostly as contributions to liberal senators whom the unions wanted to support. Asked how he knew that the money “found its way” into Johnson’s hands, Clark laughed and said, “Because sometimes I gave it to him. It would be in an envelope.” Both Clark and Wild said that Johnson wanted the contributions given, outside the office, to either Jenkins or Bobby Baker, or to another Johnson aide, Cliff Carter, but neither Wild nor Clark trusted either Baker or Carter. In Baker’s own memoir, Wheeling and Dealing, a book he wrote with Larry L. King, Baker was to call himself the “official bagman” for Senate Democrats, but Clark was to say he “was the only person in Washington I ever recoiled from,” and Wild was to call him “a crook.” (As would a Federal District Court jury: in 1967, Baker would be found guilty of seven counts of theft, fraud and income tax evasion, in a case that did not involve Johnson. The jury found that in 1962 he had accepted one hundred thousand dollars in “campaign donations” intended to buy influence with various senators, and instead had pocketed the money himself. Jurors told reporters that they felt Baker had lied under oath. Sentenced to one to three years in federal prison, he served sixteen months.) So the two Texas fund-raisers almost always gave their contributions to Jenkins, “but sometimes,” in Clark’s words, “Wal
ter were [sic] not available, or it were not convenient to do that,” and on such occasions they would be given directly to Johnson. Asked if the envelopes were always handed over outside the office, Clark replied, “Usually. Not always.” He said that Johnson was less cautious with him and with Brown and Connally and Wild than with other contributors because “We had had wheelings and dealings for a long time.” Wild responded by noting that before going to work for Gulf in 1959, he had been the Washington representative for the Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, “and they had a much more casual way of doing things” than Gulf. During this period, he said, he had given Johnson “quite a bit” of money—he said he had no idea how much—for the campaigns of other senators, sometimes giving it to Johnson “personally,” in his office. Money also found its way into Johnson’s hands by other means. In 1956, for example, Richard Reynolds of Reynolds Tobacco telephoned Juanita Roberts, one of Johnson’s secretaries, and said, according to a memo Roberts wrote, “He has $500.00 he’d like to contribute toward the Senator’s expenses.” After Gene Chambers, one of Johnson’s assistants, picked up the money, it evidently passed through Johnson’s hands. “Sen. J handed it to A.W. [Moursund] to take care of,” Roberts noted.

  If Johnson was in Texas, he might collect the money himself. Shortly after Joe M. Kilgore had been elected to Congress in 1954, Kilgore says, Johnson came up to him after a meeting in San Antonio and “asked me if I was going to Washington.”

  “When I said I was,” Kilgore recalls, “he said, ‘Here, take this.’ It was an envelope. Inside was ten thousand dollars. ‘Give it to Arthur Perry.’ I had never had ten thousand dollars before. Jane and I didn’t have ten thousand dollars [to our name].”