Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  Sam Houston tried but failed to become Speaker of the Little Congress, as Lyndon had been. When he lost the election, he and some friends devised an amendment to the organization’s bylaws that gave “power over all social functions” to a five-man committee, which elected him chairman. He then organized a trip to New York for the organization’s members, obtaining free train tickets from one lobbyist, and liquor from another. The staffers nonetheless ran up bills at New York hotels so high that they couldn’t pay them, and a scandal that would have had repercussions for the staffers’ congressional bosses was only narrowly averted. The money situation within Kleberg’s office started to get uglier; there was at least one tailor’s bill, for two hundred dollars, that Sam Houston had the Congressman pay—although some members of the Kleberg family felt the bill was for one of Sam Houston’s suits. And he became involved in an angry dispute over some sexual liaison in the office—the details have been lost in time—that infuriated Kleberg’s wife. Sam left Kleberg’s office for a post—also arranged by Lyndon—as a regional director for the NYA. But the same pattern—of drinking (Sam once spoke of waking up almost every morning in an “alcoholic haze”) and debts and office romances that all seemed to end unpleasantly—repeated itself. Criminal charges were threatened by creditors who had gotten the bad checks. By 1940, Alvin Wirtz, then Undersecretary of the Interior, was trying to procure a job for Sam with the Federal Housing Administration in Puerto Rico to get him far enough away so that he could no longer embarrass Lyndon. “When [the proposed appointment] was announced in the paper, … his creditors began really protesting, and he didn’t get the position,” Brown recalls. (“Amusingly enough,” Brown says, “he said he had made a terrible mistake giving those hot checks. He should just have charged things and not paid for them, then he couldn’t have gotten into any trouble. They could just sue him but they couldn’t bring criminal charges against him. But with the hot checks they could file criminal charges.”) Sam was married that year, to Albertine Summers, a secretary to an Illinois congressman, and had two children, Josefa in 1941 and Sam in 1942, but there was soon a divorce—Albertine remarried—and he seemed to feel little responsibility for the children; in 1956 young Sam was watching the Democratic National Convention when the camera focused on a box reserved for Lyndon Johnson’s family; Sam Houston was pointed out to the boy; it was the first time he had seen his father since infancy.

  After the war, Lyndon gave Sam Houston a job (“I was just a flunky,” he was to say) in his congressional office, but the drinking and irresponsibility had grown worse, and he would disappear for weeks at a time on drunken sprees. He had an affair with one of his brother’s secretaries, and in April, 1948, in Biloxi, Mississippi, they had an illegitimate child, a boy who would be named Rodney. The parents had intended to put Rodney up for adoption at birth (“the 1948 campaign was coming up, and he [Sam Houston] was afraid someone would find about me,” Rodney was to say), but his aunt Josefa, who was unable to bear children, said she wanted to adopt him, and she did. The Johnson family tried to conceal (not only from outsiders but from their mother) the fact that Josefa’s adopted baby was actually Sam’s child, but, as Rodney was to say, “I looked so much like Sam Houston that there was no concealing it”; at one family Christmas celebration, Cousin Oreole made the parentage clear even to Rebekah Baines Johnson when she said, pointing at Rodney, “Well, that’s the Bunton in the family right there.” (Rodney would die of AIDS in 1989.)

  When Johnson was elected to the Senate, he put Sam Houston on his staff, but again, as Sam complained, “I was still just a flunky in Lyndon’s office.” His desk was just inside the front door, next to the receptionist’s, not in the room behind it, in which Connally, Busby, and Jenkins sat. He went to Mexico, disappeared for months and came back terribly thin; at one point he weighed only 120 pounds. Meeting him for the first time, Booth Mooney found himself looking at a man who was “so much like a shrunken version of the Senator that I would have known who he was even if he had not referred early and often in that initial conversation to ‘my brother….’” His health had broken; his ulcer seemed never to heal; he kept drinking. About the time that Lyndon and Lady Bird were buying the ranch, Sam Houston was in and out of hospitals, sometimes for treatment of alcoholism, sometimes for what appear to have been nervous breakdowns. “It was a great relief to learn that Sam Houston is under hospital care,” Rebekah Baines Johnson wrote Lyndon once. “I am so glad you put him where he can rebuild his shattered nerves.”

  When Sam Houston wasn’t in a hospital, he was often at the new Johnson Ranch. Josefa, who had moved back to Fredericksburg, was often there, too, along with Rodney. So when Lyndon was there, so was his sister, about whom all the stories were told, so was his gaunt, hollow-cheeked, sunken-eyed brother, and so was his brother’s illegitimate son. The Hill Country was religious country—hard-shell, hellfire, revivalist, Fundamentalist, Old Testament religious. No drinking at all was allowed. “Sneaking a beer by Jesus is like trying to sneak daylight by a rooster,” one of Lyndon Johnson’s high-school classmates, John Dollahite, would explain. The fierceness of the region’s prejudices and the rigidity of its intolerance led one of Johnson City’s more enlightened residents, Stella Gliddon, to call it “almost a Puritan town.” Sam Ealy Johnson, Lyndon’s father, had never been a drunk, but he did like a drink, and these good people had known what would come of that. Sam Ealy “was nothing but a drunkard,” Dollahite says. “Always was.” Sam Houston’s drinking, and Josefa’s—and the other things that decent people didn’t mention—were staples of Hill Country conversation now, and Lyndon Johnson, child of the Hill Country, knew it, and knew what the Hill Country must be saying. He knew that the Hill Country, in a sneer at the Johnsons’ attempts at respectability, was calling Rodney “Little Sam Houston.” And to the Hill Country ranchers, breeding was significant, of course. During Lyndon Johnson’s youth, he had had to live with the fact that as “a Johnson” he was regarded as a member of a shiftless, no-account clan; “I don’t want you getting mixed up with those people,” the father of Carol Davis, the girl he had wanted to marry at college, had told her. Lyndon Johnson’s home now was big, gracious and gleaming white. But it was as filled with shadows as if it had been a dog-run, and relaxing there was very hard. He arose even earlier than he did in Washington; during his first years on the ranch, the rural route carrier delivered the mail to his mailbox—it was across the river, up toward Stonewall—about six-thirty, and not long thereafter Johnson would drive across the “low-water” dam and down the dirt road to pick it up; sometimes he would be waiting at the mailbox when the mailman drove up. Waking up early was, of course, routine in the country, where people went to bed early, but while Lyndon Johnson went to bed early, he didn’t sleep any better than he did in Washington, as Mary Rather realized the first time she stayed the night at the ranch. Sometime during the night, hearing a noise outside, she looked out her window. For a few moments, she couldn’t see anything in the darkness. And then she saw a tiny red glow; it brightened and faded. It was the glow of a cigarette—her boss’s cigarette. Lyndon Johnson was standing there in front of his house, smoking. “He didn’t sleep very well there either,” Ms. Rather was to say. There were, in the Hill Country as on Capitol Hill, still the terrible rages, sometimes over things whose significance to him his assistants couldn’t understand, like a coil of barbed wire left near the bottom of a tree (“That’s bad ranching,” he snarled at a ranch hand who had left it there. “You don’t want a cow to get tangled up in that. That’s bad ranching! What do you think—that I spend all this money on cows so you can give them blood poisoning, you——”) or an irrigation line running when it shouldn’t be (“You know that line’s uncapped out there? You’re washing my soil away out there! Get on it!”). There was as much urgency in Texas as in Washington; Lady Bird had filled the living room with antiques; he filled it with telephones and typewriters. A second line was run into the house, and then a third; telephones were installed in al
most every room; visitors were constantly tripping over the wires. He had his desk in the living room, and now a bridge table was set up for a secretary to work at, and then a second bridge table, for a second secretary. And the telephones were snatched out of their hands as if they were all still back together in SOB 231. The wristwatch alarm was always going off to remind him of a call he wanted to make or was expecting to receive.

  Even while visiting journalists were writing about how relaxed Lyndon Johnson was on the ranch, members of his staff knew that when journalists weren’t around, Lyndon Johnson’s behavior was in some areas as frenetic in Texas as in Washington. George Reedy was to write that he would sometimes embark on “a wild drinking bout. He was not an alcoholic or a heavy drinker in the commonly accepted sense of those words. But there were occasions when he would pour down Scotch and soda in a virtually mechanical motion in rhythm with the terrible tension building visibly within him and communicating itself to his listeners. The warning signs were unmistakable and those with past experience tried to get away before the inevitable flood of invective. As they found out, it was rarely possible.” Reedy wrote that “there did not appear to be any relationship between the locale and the episode. It could happen in his Capitol office; in the living room of his ranch”; other members of his staff say that it actually happened more often on the ranch, both because in Washington he felt more need to keep his guard up and not “lose control,” and because in Texas he didn’t have Bobby Baker measuring the drinks.

  His behavior in Texas was similar to his Washington behavior in other ways. The journalist Hugh Sidey would write about Lady Bird: “Her constant pacification of the beast in her husband was her greatest achievement…. He caressed other women in front of her.” In Washington, there was in these public “caresses” at least some restraint. In Texas, there was less. Horace Busby was to recall sitting in the back seat of Johnson’s car while Johnson was showing the ranch to a friend of Lady Bird’s who had come to visit. Johnson was driving, with Lady Bird in the front seat at the window and the friend sitting between them. Leaning over the front seat to ask a question, Busby saw that Johnson had his hand “under the woman’s skirt and was having a big time, right there in front of Lady Bird.” (Busby says that “Lady Bird didn’t say a word,” but “after a while” the woman “slapped his hand.”) The journalist Eliot Janeway was to speak of Johnson’s “harem,” saying that “one way you could visualize Lady Bird is as the queen in Anna and the King of Siam. It worked that way; you know the scene where she sits at the table and all the babes—Lady Bird was head wife.”

  *Lyndon’s sisters insisted it go to Sam Houston; Lucia told Lyndon, “Daddy wanted him to have it. We all know that.” In 1958, however, Sam Houston gave it to Lyndon. (See The Path to Power, pp. 543–44.)

  19

  The Orator of the Dawn

  BACK IN WASHINGTON, Lyndon Johnson, as the Democrats’ Assistant Leader, was having ample opportunity to “read” his party’s senators—to learn what it was they wanted, really wanted—and to make use of what he learned, and into one senator he was reading very deeply indeed. It was during 1951 and 1952, William White was to say, that “Lyndon Johnson fixed his restless, reckoning eyes on Hubert Humphrey.”

  If Johnson were to become Democratic Leader, he would find himself faced with the problem that previous Democratic senatorial Leaders had been unable to solve, and that had been a major cause of their failure and humiliation: the hostility-filled chasm between the party’s ardent liberals and defiant conservatives that kept a Leader from presenting a unified front. For him to avoid his predecessors’ fate, he would have to find a bridge over that seemingly unbridgeable gulf, some means of compromise between two factions so bitterly divided that no compromise seemed possible. And since he was regarded as a conservative and would be a Leader placed in power by the conservative bloc, the instrument of compromise would have to be found on the liberal side of the chasm.

  As Nathaniel Hawthorne said of Andrew Jackson, “His native strength … compelled every man to be his tool that came within his reach; and the more cunning the individual might be, it served only to make him the sharper tool.” No man, in 1951, would have seemed less likely to be an instrument of compromise than the senator Johnson chose; no senator, indeed, would have seemed less likely to be anyone’s tool. But the more cunning the man, the sharper the tool—the more uncompromising the man, the better tool he would be for the making of compromises.

  Hubert Horatio Humphrey had burst on the national stage as the very symbol—courageous, passionate—of unwillingness to compromise, as the defiantly unyielding champion of a noble cause.

  The stage was the 1948 Democratic National Convention, the last non-air-conditioned convention ever held by either major party, and the temperature on the podium in Philadelphia’s Convention Hall was ninety-three degrees. It was the convention’s third day, the day scheduled for President Truman’s renomination and acceptance speech, but the delegates’ mood, dispirited and downcast because Truman was considered to have no chance to win (in the hall, Alben Barkley was to recall, “the very air smelled of defeat”), had turned angry, over civil rights.

  Party leaders, up to the President himself, had concluded that if any slim chance of victory existed, that chance rested on the only section of the country that, in good times and bad, remained solidly Democratic, and they felt that that chance would disappear completely if the party antagonized the South. They had, therefore, agreed that the platform’s civil rights plank would be bland and unspecific enough to satisfy the South; it even contained a sentence—“We call upon the Congress to exert its full authority to the limit of its constitutional powers to protect these rights”—particularly agreeable to segregationists, who could, as journalist Irwin Ross was to put it, “interpret [it] as meaning that little federal action was possible, for in their view Congress’ constitutional powers were severely limited by the doctrine of states’ rights.” And the convention’s organizers had tried to muffle dissent over the civil rights plank by including only about twenty liberals (and only four from the militant Americans for Democratic Action) on the 108-member Platform Committee.

  Refusing to bow to the committee’s majority, however, these liberals had held out during the first two days of the convention for a much stronger, uncompromising, civil rights plank, one that endorsed the proposals Truman himself had made two years earlier. They had even rallied some support in the committee, largely because of Humphrey, the thirty-seven-year-old Mayor of Minneapolis, Minnesota, who seemed to have a devotion to civil rights, and who, as Mayor, had not only secured in his city the passage of the nation’s first effective Fair Employment Practices ordinance, but had also worked doggedly to erase the city’s previous reputation as “the anti-Semitism capital of America.”

  When, fifteen months earlier, sophisticated eastern liberal leaders had gotten their first look at Humphrey during an ADA Midwest organizational conference in Chicago, he had seemed very unimpressive, with his overly somber black suit, a Phi Beta Kappa key dangling ostentatiously from a gold chain across his vest, and a penchant for farmyard anecdotes so corny they made the Ivy Leaguers wince—until he rose to speak. Decades later, Harvard-educated Joseph Rauh could still recall how “dazzled” he had been by the young Mayor’s passion and sincerity, how he had brought the audience to its feet, applauding and cheering, and how, during the long evening of talk that followed, Humphrey had won their hearts. As uncompromising on the page as on the platform, he had demanded in an article he wrote for the Progressive that the Democratic Party and the Administration “lead the fight for every principle” in the “To Secure These Rights” report. “It is,” he wrote, “all or nothing.” And now, in a steaming meeting room in Philadelphia’s Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, he still wouldn’t compromise, fighting so unflinchingly against party leaders for a stronger civil rights plank that, after one heated exchange, Senator Scott Lucas of Illinois muttered angrily, “Who does this pip-squeak think he i
s?”—the first of a dozen times Lucas was to use that word, sputtering with anger, in the angry hours that followed. At first, only four or five other committee members supported Humphrey, but as the hours passed and he kept fighting, sweat dripping down his thin, pale face, others began to be swayed by arguments that were not only moral but political; didn’t they understand, he demanded of the stony-faced party elders on the committee, that the black vote was becoming pivotal in the North’s big cities, and that, if the Democratic Party didn’t stand up for a strong plank, they might lose that vote? The battle went on for two days and nights; Humphrey’s friends, knowing that when he got involved in a fight, he forgot about eating, sent him in food (he was, despite their efforts, to lose eighteen pounds from an already thin frame during the convention). At the end, the liberals’ proposals lost by a big majority, and the “moderate” plank was adopted; calling it “a sellout to states’ rights,” “a bunch of generalities,” Humphrey said that when, the following day, the platform was brought to the convention floor for ratification, the liberals would offer a minority plank, and ask the convention as a whole to adopt it instead of the moderate proposal.