Kilgore patted his breast pocket with a nervous gesture. “All the way up I kept [patting] to make sure it was still there. I was sure everyone knew I had it. When I got to Washington, I called Arthur Perry. I was going to make sure he counted it in my presence to make sure I hadn’t taken out one of those hundred-dollar bills.” As it turned out, however, “he [Johnson] had called Earle Clements, and Clements was in the office when I arrived. I made them count it in my presence.”
So many envelopes were being filled with cash in the Lone Star State that Kilgore was not the only man who transported them to Washington despite a lack of familiarity with such chores. “Twice I personally carried packets of a hundred hundred-dollar bills, the common currency of politics, to Jenkins,” Booth Mooney, whose customary duties were in the speechwriting field, wrote in his book LBJ: An Irreverent Chronicle. “This money came from [oilman H. L.] Hunt, who said substantial contributions were also being sent to Washington by other oilmen and business people in Dallas and Houston.”
• • •
NO MATTER HOW MUCH MONEY WAS RAISED, “it was never enough for Johnson—never,” Ed Clark says. “How much did he want?—he wanted,” Claude Wild says. “He wanted all you could give and more.” And to get as much as possible, Lyndon Johnson took a very direct role in raising money. Clark would for years—decades—be regarded in Texas as the state’s most skilled political fund-raiser, but, Clark says, there was someone better at that art than he. “No one was better at raising money than Lyndon Johnson,” he says. “He would get on the phone and call people, and he knew just what to say.”
What he said sometimes dealt bluntly with “the wealth and consideration that had been extended.” Texas was home to businessmen much smaller than Sid Richardson or Herman Brown, and if some of them were reluctant to contribute, or to contribute as much as Johnson thought they should contribute, he would get on the phone with them personally. One of Clark’s clients, Theo Davis of Austin, owned a wholesale grocery company which had been given contracts to supply central Texas military installations, and he wanted to keep those contracts, and, Clark says, Johnson would “get on the phone with him” and “remind” him what he had to do to keep them, and, Clark says, “He gave Johnson five thousand dollars at a time.” Johnson had John Connally make him lists, Connally recalls—“We called them ‘John’s Special Lists’”—of how much certain businessmen and lawyers could give, and why they should give it. With some of these targets, the reasons were philosophical. “Good Democrat” Connally would write by a name. “Old Roosevelt man.” But with others, the reasons related more to “wealth and consideration.” One Leonard Hyatt would be good for $1,000 partly because he was a “Good Democrat” but also because “You have helped him on Bracero matter,” Connally wrote on one such list. An attorney, Floyd McGown Sr., who “can give and raise” $1,500, had been helped by Johnson years before—“represents Frederick Refrigeration & some other employers since War Labor Board days.” Next to another name, that of Johnson’s Fredericksburg ally Arthur Stehling (“500 to 1500”), Connally wrote, “Had a good year—Two pretty good capital gains transactions”—which, Connally explains, meant two transactions Lyndon had helped Arthur with.
If a more general type of coaxing was required, Johnson was adept at that, too, as is shown by the transcript of a telephone call he made to wealthy oilman Dudley Dougherty, who would be Johnson’s opponent in the 1954 election but, at other times, his ally. He complained about organizational difficulties to Dougherty until Dougherty said, “Let me see if I can dig up five thousand dollars for you.”
“If you can—don’t you get in any hurry,” Johnson said soothingly. But, in fact, he wanted to firm up the arrangement. “You let my boy Warren Woodward in Austin, he is a mighty good boy, or John Connally—they will fly down to your place. If you can help us, I’ll sure appreciate it.” And when it didn’t firm—when Dougherty was apparently going to hang up without any further word about the money—Johnson said, “You tell me when you want Warren Woodward to come down there.”
And sometimes, in the raising, Johnson took a very personal hand indeed, as is shown by two incidents that occurred at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles in 1960.
The first, recounted in Booth Mooney’s book, occurred in an empty clothes closet in Johnson’s hotel suite. The suite “was filled with people,” Mooney was to write, so Johnson led him into the closet “and shut the door. ‘This won’t take long, Booth,’ he said urgently. ‘I just want to tell you we’ve got a lot of bills to pay here and other places. I have to raise a pile of money. Will you talk to Hunt and tell him he’ll never regret it if he’ll contribute ten or twenty to help us get square?’”
Hunt declined to give that help, Mooney says, but Johnson had more success with another appeal, this one recounted by Bobby Baker. “LBJ,” Baker was to say in Wheeling and Dealing, “wore a sad hound dog’s look as he said, ‘Bobby, we’re broke and we owe $39,000 for a hotel bill out here. See what you can do.’ … I went to Bart Lytton, president of Lytton Savings and Loan, with the sad tale. He required persuading. ‘I don’t have that much available,’ he said. ‘Even if I did I wouldn’t want it on record that I’d given it.’ I assured Lytton that he’d be protected and stressed the benefits of incurring LBJ’s goodwill. ‘On the other hand,’ I said, ‘he can be a miserable prick if he feels someone has let him down.’ Bart groaned, but motioned me into a public men’s room nearby.” In one of the stalls, Baker was to write, Lytton “gave me two $10,000 personal checks made out to cash. I delivered them to LBJ, who took one look and said, ‘Hell, Bobby, this is just a little over half of it.’” Nonetheless, “Senator Johnson pocketed the checks, though grumbling under his breath….”
Johnson sometimes also took a personal hand in distributing money to other senators.
“On one occasion,” Baker was to write, “I was asked to transmit $5,000 from Lyndon B. Johnson” to Styles Bridges. “As was the Washington practice, Johnson handed me the boodle in cash. ‘Bobby,’ he said, ‘Styles Bridges is throwing an “appreciation dinner” for himself up in New Hampshire sometime next week. Fly up there and drop this in the kitty and be damn sure that Styles knows it comes from me.’” On another occasion, in 1957, Joe Kilgore relates, Johnson gave a contribution to William Blakely, who had been appointed to Texas’ other senatorial seat to replace the retiring Price Daniel, and was running for the permanent seat in a special election.
“He [Johnson] called me to come over to his office,” Kilgore says. “When I got there, he said, ‘Come on, I’m meeting Bill Blakely down on the sidewalk.’ We left his office and went down in an elevator. While we were in the elevator, he said, ‘Here, hold this,’ and stuck something in my hand. I looked down and it was a big wad of money. When we got out of the elevator, we went into a closet—I think it was a janitorial closet. He told me to count the money. It was twenty thousand dollars. In one-hundred-dollar bills. I knew why he wanted me to count it. He wanted a witness. So that he could prove that he had given this money. He gave the money to Blakely, saying, ‘I just want you to know I’m on your side.’”
Johnson’s use of money to help finance the campaigns of his colleagues had begun even before he became whip. In 1950, he had funneled Texas cash into the campaign of an old House acquaintance who was trying to move to the Senate, Earle Clements of Kentucky. Now, in 1952, there were senatorial elections again, and Johnson used financing on a broader scale. And Johnson’s financing of colleagues’ campaigns was not limited to money he distributed himself. Stuart Symington, making his first try for the Senate in 1952, had wealthy financial backers in Missouri, but as one of them was to write, “We can’t raise money in the quantities you Texans can.” In September and October, 1952, Johnson raised it—largely from Herman Brown. “I gave him some money and I sent a man down to help him at Lyndon’s instigation,” Brown would recall years later, after he had become enraged by Symington’s refusal to vote for further natural gas deregulation
. “But Symington has very little ability, the least of any of them. I’ve got a nigger chauffeur who’s got more ability than Symington—although maybe I shouldn’t express myself so frankly.”
How much did Brown, and other Texans, contribute at Johnson’s instigation to Symington’s 1952 Missouri senatorial campaign? In a painful interview with the author in 1982, Symington at first attempted to minimize the amount and to contend that it had been given only in the form of checks, checks that, as legally required, had been reported. The author then showed him contradictory information. “Well, I remember Johnson sent my campaign manager somewhere to get money for me. It wasn’t much—five thousand or ten thousand dollars—but it was a nice gesture.” The author asked if the amount might have been higher. “I’m pretty certain it wasn’t fifteen thousand,” Symington said. “Maybe it was ten thousand. Nobody could buy me for ten thousand dollars.” Asked if the money had been cash, Symington said, “I don’t know. My worst characteristic as a politician was my inability to raise money.” The money—at least much of it—was in cash: in hundred-dollar bills. And the amount may have been far higher than Symington’s estimate. Ten thousand dollars—in cash—was the amount contributed to Symington in 1952 by oilman Wesley West alone. Arthur Stehling, one of Johnson’s lawyers, was to recall sitting in Johnson’s ranch house during the fall of 1952, listening to Johnson discuss over the telephone the financial needs of various senators: “He would say, ‘Well, I’ve got twenty for him, and twenty for him and thirty for him.’ Symington was always the highest.” Twenty or thirty thousand dollars were paltry amounts by the fund-raising standards that would be in place at the end of the twentieth century; they were quite substantial amounts by mid-century standards. And Johnson’s use of money, like his use of Rayburn, was getting him what he wanted, as Ed Clark saw. “Roosevelt would pay people off in conversation or speeches,” Clark says. “Johnson went right to the heart of it. The nitty-gritty. ‘How much do you have to have to make this campaign go?’” When senators returned to Washington after the 1952 elections, there was a new awareness on the north side of the Capitol. There was a vast source of campaign funds down in Texas, and the conduit to it—the only conduit to it for most non-Texas senators, their only access to this money they might need badly one day—was Lyndon Johnson.
Lyndon was the guy to see if you wanted to get a bill off the Calendar, Lyndon was the guy to see if you were having trouble getting it passed in the House, Lyndon was the guy to see for campaign funds. There wasn’t anything Lyndon was using these facts for as yet. But in ways not yet visible, power was starting to accumulate around him—ready to be used.
WITH HIS COLLEAGUES, still, no favor was too small for Johnson to perform, no favor too big. Nothing was too much trouble. In March, 1952, Harry Byrd’s thirty-five-year-old daughter, Westwood, died after falling from her horse during a fox hunt. Her funeral was to be held in Winchester, Virginia, near the Byrd family home, Rosemont. Byrd had always treated Johnson with notable reserve, a reserve that sometimes seemed to border on dislike, and Winchester was seventy-two miles from Washington, but Johnson decided to attend.
Not wanting to go alone, he persuaded Warren Magnuson to accompany him, telling Maggie he would pick him up at the Shoreham and drive him down. When the morning of the funeral dawned with heavy rain, Magnuson tried to demur, but Johnson told him he had no choice but to go, that “everyone in the Senate is going to be there—including the Republicans.”
But, as Lyndon Johnson was to report to Horace Busby when he telephoned him later that day, “You know how many United States senators were there? Two! Maggie and me!” When he saw that, he told Busby, he had “almost got cold feet” and decided it might be better to simply turn around and go home. But he stayed, and he and Magnuson stood in the cemetery, holding their hats in their hands in the rain, on the other side of the grave from the Byrd family, directly across from the Senator, whose head was bowed in grief. And suddenly, while the minister was reading the service, Harry Byrd looked up and saw them. “He looked at us, and then he looked back at me,” Johnson told Busby. “I don’t know what that look meant, but I’ll bet a dollar to a dime that was a very important look.”
BECAUSE JOHNSON WAS WHIP, he had a reason for doing what before he had needed excuses for doing: for meeting and talking with other senators, for making friends with them, for selling himself, man to man, one on one.
He sold on the Senate floor. No longer did he have to sit at his desk in the Chamber with only Horace Busby for company, hoping that some senator would “come by and say something to him.” Senators wanting information, senators wanting favors—he had plenty of senators coming by to say something to him now. And he made the most of the opportunity.
It wasn’t only senators from his own party who came by. During his early days in the Senate, Republican leaders had ignored him; he had not been important enough. Now, however, he was Assistant Democratic Leader, and often in charge of the Democratic side of the floor. Most Democrats ridiculed the Republican Leader, Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska, one of Dean Acheson’s “primitives,” for his malapropisms on the Senate floor (“Indigo China”; the “Chief Joints of Staff”; India’s fierce soldiers were “gherkins”; not infrequently he would refer to a colleague as “the senator from junior”), and were careful to keep out of his way, not only because in private life Wherry was an undertaker who loved his work, and if one were not careful, one found oneself listening to unpleasantly intimate details of the embalming process, but because so intense was Wherry’s “hatred” for Democrats that he was likely to take offense at some innocuous remark a Democratic senator made in conversation, and, when he was thus offended, he would delight in objecting to, and thereby blocking, the offender’s most precious private bills. Several older senators advised Johnson to avoid Wherry. But avoidance would not suit Johnson’s purposes; instead, he threw himself in Wherry’s path as often as possible, employing on him his customary techniques—as Alfred Steinberg was to write: “Johnson made it a point to be diffident in Wherry’s presence”—and demonstrating that their effectiveness was bipartisan. Wherry began to wander across the center aisle to talk to Johnson with evident fondness. And when during an evening session convened to pass a Truman Administration bill, Wherry announced that he was going to block it by objecting to every private bill on the Calendar to stall the Senate and block consideration of the President’s measure, Johnson, who had one of the private bills, approached the Nebraskan and said, in a tone that a listener described as “a plea to a superior”: “You know how I never do anything except Senate work.” Tonight, he said, he had made an exception and had promised to go to one of Gwen Cafritz’s dinner parties. “So couldn’t you just let my one little bill go through?” Acquiescing with a smile, Wherry added, “I’d rather do business with you than anybody else on your side, Lyndon.” Sometimes, in fact, Lyndon Johnson would even have a conversation with Bob Taft. In McFarland’s absence, Johnson would be sitting in the Leader’s front-row seat on the center aisle. Taft, managing some piece of legislation on the floor, would sit at the Republican first desk directly across the aisle—temptingly near. At first, the proximity did Johnson no good; the dour Taft resisted every Johnson device to draw him into conversation. So Johnson came up with a ploy irresistible unless Taft wanted to be blatantly discourteous. Leaning across the center aisle, holding a copy of the bill that was under discussion, Johnson would whisper that he had forgotten his eyeglasses, and, with an apology for his constant forget-fulness, would ask Taft to read a particular paragraph to him. Taft would do so, Johnson would be very grateful, and brief exchanges sometimes ensued. Although Johnson wasn’t close to the key Republican yet, he was getting closer.
He sold in the Democratic cloakroom, where the now-familiar tableau was still being repeated almost every day—Walter George pontificating from an easy chair, Lyndon Johnson, in the adjoining easy chair, listening reverently. Chatting with other Big Bulls in the cloakroom, often in similar, one-on-
one conversations in adjoining armchairs or on a sofa, Johnson’s tone was as soft and calm as ever, his attitude as humble. Advice was still being sought: “I need your counsel on something,” or “I want to draw on your wisdom on something,” or “I need the counsel of a wise old head here.” Assistance was still being offered—with Senator Byrd, for example, assistance in counting. The Virginia squire was the most fervent of believers in a conservative economic policy, and when he was pushing a tax or budget proposal, he was anxious to know what the vote would be, but, patrician to the core, he had never been able to bring himself to ask a colleague how he planned to vote. After Johnson became whip, Byrd got this information without asking; Johnson had Bobby Baker ask, and then would relay the finding to Byrd—always offhandedly, subtly, as if he didn’t know how anxious Byrd was.
And in the cloakroom now, there was also, sometimes, a new tableau. Lyndon Johnson would be standing in the center of the long, narrow space between the couches. Senators wanting favors or information would be coming up to him, Bobby Baker would be darting to his side, whispering something in his ear, darting away again, working the telephones. Often, the Assistant Leader would be holding one of the long Senate tally sheets, and he would be writing numbers on it; sometimes, a telephone page would run up to him excitedly, saying that the White House was on the phone; Johnson would go over to one of the booths, take the call, and report what the numbers were. And, more and more frequently—when he was talking not with George or Byrd, but with one of the less powerful senators—as he talked, one of Lyndon Johnson’s long arms would come up and drape itself over his colleague’s shoulders, in warm camaraderie.
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 67