He loved the Congress and studied it; he could catalogue the strengths and weaknesses of every man there. The strength of a man put him off, but his weaknesses attracted him; it meant a man could be used. Whereas Kennedy had been uneasy in the face of another man’s weakness, it embarrassed him and he tended to back off when a man showed frailty, to Johnson there was a smell of blood, more could come of this. But he understood men only through that one prism, how they performed and handled the Congress (even on the subject of the loss of China, it was the fact that in losing China, Truman had first lost the Congress which haunted him. The reaction to the loss had not necessarily come from the population, it had come from the Congress). This attitude was a weakness in itself, for not everyone shared his thirst for congressional work or his opinion that it was the only forum. One reason he misjudged John Kennedy as an opponent was that he did not take Kennedy seriously in the Senate. Kennedy clearly did not care, did not really bother with his congressional work and was therefore not, in Johnson’s eyes, an entirely serious person.
As Lyndon Johnson admired men who got things done, men to be measured by their achievements, surely so too would the nation; it would choose a doer, a man, not a handsome young talker, a boy. As congressman and senator he created his own network of power, men who worked through him to move things, and he extracted his particular price and added more layers of power to his original base. But it was always done privately; he went partially public only after it was all done, and even then, when he dealt with the press, he was the private man, calling in a small claque of reporters whom he knew and trusted. He would sit down and explain his great victory, though within certain limits; he would not compromise future victories for the sake of immodesty now. And the reporters would play the game, they knew the ground rules: how much credit would go to Lyndon—never too little, mind you—and how much to the others, perhaps a little extra credit to a particular senator to ensure even greater co-operation the next time around. Out of this came his almost neurotic view of the press, two very conflicting views: first, that you owned the press, you summoned them and they wrote good stories, and second, that the press was an enemy, it was disloyal, that if it did not belong to you, then someone else had bought and thus you had to be wary. Rich publishers. Or the Kennedys. Or the big interests. Thus you had to get in there quickly and make your pitch. When Bill White left after covering Johnson in the Senate for the New York Times he was replaced by Russell Baker, and Baker heard about the change about six o’clock one evening. A few minutes later there was a telephone call and a booming voice over the phone, and it was, it said, Senator Johnson, what great news that Baker would be covering him, they would get along very well, even better than Johnson had with Bill White. Baker’s reputation as a fearless reporter was going to be made; anything Baker wanted to know, his friend Lyndon Johnson would tell him. Anything. Johnson loved the Times, admired Baker’s work. “For you, I’ll leak like a sieve,” he said.
He was concerned about the reputations of the reporters who covered him and worried about their professional prestige, since it was a reflection of his prestige, particularly during the vice-presidential years. When Time magazine decided to switch the assignment of John Steele, who had long been Time’s envoy to Johnson, and replace him with a younger man named Loye Miller, the Vice-President was particularly upset. Was this another humiliation? Another taste of vice-presidential ashes? Steele and others in the Time empire rushed to reassure him: it was just the opposite, it was a re-evaluation in Time’s eyes of the importance of the Vice-Presidency, and Loye Miller was the best they had, their brightest young star, scion of a great newspaper family, his father was a famous editor in Knoxville. There were brilliant things ahead for Loye Miller, and in recognition of the very big things ahead, perhaps the biggest ones, he was being given this choice assignment, this plum, an intimate relationship with Lyndon Johnson. And Johnson smiled and welcomed Miller. It is one of the sad aspects about great flatterers like Lyndon Johnson that among the few things they are vulnerable to is flattery. Shortly afterward Johnson was in New York and of course paid a state visit to the head of the Luce empire, Henry Luce himself. Johnson began with a long tribute to Luce, what a great man he was, how much the communications world of America owed to him, and yet even the greatest men eventually had to step aside and Johnson was delighted by the knowledge that he, Johnson, could vouch for the remarkable young man who would succeed Henry Luce, this fine, handsome, talented, brilliant young man, a scion of a great newspaper family. Some of the Time executives noticed a look of surprise and shock on Luce’s face as Johnson was carrying on. After the Vice-President left, Luce grabbed a high-ranking aide and asked, “Who the hell is Loye Miller?”
The stories of his flattery soon became legendary. He had learned as a congressman that those out of power are surprisingly susceptible to the flattery of those in power, that flattery by someone in power becomes a special form of recognition. As he rose to higher and higher positions he resorted to greater and greater flattery, finding that few resisted it or were offended by it and that, indeed, most people accepted it as God’s truth. The Johnsonian view of their abilities was similar to their own. Soon Washington was filled with stories of Johnsonian flattery and exaggeration, of Johnson telling Adlai Stevenson that he should be sitting in the President’s chair, of Johnson telling Arthur Goldberg to leave the Court and go to the UN and make peace because the next man who sits in this chair is going to be the man who brought peace in Vietnam. But there were some occasions of mistaken identity and problems caused by the flattery. In July 1967, for instance, after John McNaughton was killed in an airplane crash, Johnson decided, at McNamara’s urging; to appoint an able but little-known Washington lawyer named Paul Warnke, who had been working with McNamara as counsel to the Defense Department. Johnson was determined to pass on the news himself, to flatter Warnke and to impress upon him the importance of being Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, and most of all, the importance and goodness of Lyndon Johnson. So he told his secretary to have the switchboard get Warnke. Shortly thereafter the switchboard located John Carl Warnecke, an architect and social friend of the Kennedys’ who was better known in Washington and a frequent visitor to the White House.
Jack Warnecke got on the phone to hear the President of the United States say, “Mr. Warnke, this is Lyndon Johnson, and Bob McNamara has been telling me of all the great things that you have been doing for your country, how much and how generously you have given of your time, and how helpful you have been, and I am calling to say thank you.”
Warnecke, who had been doing a little work with McNamara on the Kennedy grave site, quickly answered that that was very kind of the President, but he had really done very little work.
“No, Mr. Warnke, this is no time to be modest. We know all about you. There is no man I hold in higher esteem than Bob McNamara and Bob is saying a lot of fine things, very fine things about you. Mr. Warnke, Bob McNamara is a great American and a great Secretary of Defense.”
Warnecke acknowledged that he too admired Bob McNamara and considered him a great American.
“Mr. Warnke, it is refreshing to talk to someone like yourself, a man who could make a great deal of money in private life and yet is willing to give of himself to his country.”
Warnecke answered quickly and truthfully that the sacrifice was very small.
“Mr. Warnke, I know better. I know that you have truly done a fine job for your country and we are not unaware of it—we know of your dedication, and, Mr. Warnke, Bob McNamara needs you and I need you, and I am calling you today because I am naming you as Assistant Secretary of Defense today and it will be in tomorrow’s paper. We are proud of you.”
At which point Warnecke understood and felt himself stumbling over the phone: Yes, a great honor, very touched by it, great regard for President Johnson, great regard for Bob McNamara, worked with him on grave sites, but perhaps a mistake had been made, he could not accept. He
was an . . . architect, an architect could not run things at Defense. Paul Warnke, a lawyer . . . perhaps they wanted Paul Warnke . . .
He could hear a slight halt at the other end of the phone, and then Lyndon Johnson, as effusive as ever, saying, “Mr. Warnke, you too have truly done a fine job for your country, but it does appear that perhaps a mistake has been made.” And so Jack Warnecke did not become an Assistant Secretary of Defense, and the next day when Paul Warnke received a call from the President naming him to the job, he was puzzled that the President was so brief, almost curt.
Stories like that, about his flattery and about his exaggeration had started out as something of a private joke among the reporters who covered him. It seemed amusing early in the game, when things were going well; they saw it as part of his attempt to control everything in his environment, to make things turn out the way he wanted, his desire to dominate everything, even the official record. At first it had been small things which amused them: his insistence that he drank bourbon, when in fact he drank Scotch; his stories about an uncle who had stood at the Alamo, when no such uncle had existed. His gradual expansion of his own rather thin war record (which brought him one of the least deserved but most often displayed Silver Stars in American military history) to the point where he could tell a somewhat surprised historian named Henry Graff, invited to the White House to report on Vietnam decision making, that he had earned the Silver Star for helping to shoot down twenty Zeros. Later it expanded to versions of whom he would appoint and whom he would not. In 1964 Dick Goodwin, a former Kennedy speech writer, came back to work for Johnson, and not being a blushing violet, immediately let Hugh Sidey of Life know he was back, and in fact showed him a draft of a speech. Sidey, looking for a subject for his weekly column, decided to write about the return of Goodwin as Johnson’s principal speech writer, only to find that despite the fact that Johnson had been using Goodwin’s drafts, the President insisted, in a face-to-face confrontation, that Goodwin had not written for him. Oh, perhaps a little research here and there, but no speeches. Wasn’t that right, George? Reedy gurgled slightly, a sound of both yes and no. Finally Johnson took Sidey aside and drew a diagram of White House responsibilities. Nowhere did Goodwin appear. At the last moment Johnson wrote in a category, “Miscellaneous,” and penciled in the name “Goodman.” At first these anecdotes enlivened the White House press corps and made for fine after-dinner stories; later, as the pressure of Vietnam mounted and the President’s credibility problems centered on greater issues, they would not seem so amusing.
He was not a man to be underestimated; he sought power and found it, and relished exercising it; he did not like being out alone on a position and he was brilliant at working others to a position which he intended to take so that they would stand together, there would be plenty of protective coloration. As a man of great force and intelligence, he had mastered a certain kind of power as no one had in Washington in years; he performed in the Senate with such subtlety and skill that there were newspapermen in Washington who would leave their offices to go down to the Hill to watch him when there was a particular scenario coming up, knowing that it would above all be a performance, orchestrated, skilled and almost joyful.
With all that ability, however, there were limits imposed by the regionalism. What he had exploited also held him back. Even at the 1960 convention, when he was chosen for the Vice-Presidency, it was not a recognition of the breakdown of the regional prejudice, but rather a confirmation of it; he could help bind a badly divided party, he could work with the South and try and hold it to what would be a traditionally liberal campaign in the North. It was not that inviting an office; it is a somewhat futile office under the best of conditions, but these were even worse conditions for a man as restless as Johnson, who had been a powerful figure as Majority Leader and who would serve a strong-willed President younger than he. It had more than the usual elements of being the end of the road, and only Sam Rayburn’s deep animosity toward Richard Nixon, toward the Nixon who had called the Democratic party the party of treason, the attack upon the loyalty of an institution that Mr. Sam revered, made him advise Lyndon to take it. That he might help beat Richard Nixon.
Even then his old enemies rebelled and there was talk of a floor fight against him; the liberals and labor leaders from the great industrial states were less than grateful for his leadership in those congressional years. Yet Johnson had been a liberal, perhaps even, it was said, a Texas populist, who had been one of Franklin Roosevelt’s most loyal New Dealers, a young man who had been anointed in Washington upon his arrival by none other than FDR himself. FDR, he liked to say, had been like a daddy to him. Was Johnson liberal, or was he conservative? His bitterest enemies were the committed Texas liberals, the Yarborough people, the Texas Observer people. They knew him back home. Who was he, anyway? Liberal, conservative, or just very ambitious? He was the kind of man who seemed to be at ease with the power structure of Texas, the richest and most conservative of the rich and conservative, and yet in the spring of 1960 he could tell friends and reporters flying back from a campaign meeting in Binghamton, New York, while complaining about the fat cats he had met that night, “No member of our generation who wasn’t a Communist or a dropout in the thirties is worth a damn.”
Johnson’s first major job in the Depression had been as an assistant to Richard Kleberg, a conservative congressman and owner of the vast King Ranch. This job had brought no great ideological hardship; rather, Johnson seemed more irritated by Kleberg’s laziness than his politics. He went back to Texas in 1935 to head the state’s National Youth Administration. There, helping to find work for young people, he was also building a political base, and when there was a sudden vacancy in 1937 caused by the death of the incumbent congressman, Johnson immediately declared himself a candidate.
It was at the time of the first low point in Franklin Roosevelt’s presidential history. Awed and intoxicated by his own 1936 landslide (46 out of 48 states), Roosevelt had moved to change the one institution in the nation which still blocked his program, by attempting to expand the Supreme Court. He immediately overstepped his popularity; the reaction was quick and intense. All sorts of opposition to Roosevelt which was then dormant suddenly surfaced, and this was particularly true of Texas: the President’s enemies were clearly using the Court packing as a means of rallying support against him. (Almost twenty years later Johnson was still acutely aware of this, and after his own landslide victory against Goldwater he was ferocious in pushing legislation through as quickly as he could, always as though time were running out, saying that once the Congress feels it has given too much, it is bound to react and reassert its own independence.) Of the seven candidates running for the Texas seat in the special election, only Johnson wholly committed himself to the New Deal, so when he won, it was a symbol which Roosevelt grasped at.
The President interrupted a vacation to greet the new young congressman in Galveston the day after the election, and thus did Johnson start his career twice blessed. Sam Rayburn, his father’s old friend from their days in the Texas Legislature, had just become House Majority Leader, a powerful ally for a freshman congressman; now the President himself was committed to him, telling the bright and powerful men of the New Deal to watch out for this young congressman from Texas, he was a hot one. And out of that first year came friendships specifically forged at Roosevelt’s direction, which would last Johnson’s entire career, ties to men like Abe Fortas, Ed Weisl, William O. Douglas. He was also given a seat on the Naval Appropriations Committee, a choice assignment on a committee which was the forerunner of the House Armed Services Committee. In those days he was Roosevelt’s man, straight and simple; even in showdown conflicts with Rayburn he chose Roosevelt; it was the height of a new powerful Presidency, and the White House could do more for a young congressman than anyone else.
But Roosevelt’s popularity would soon ebb in certain sectors of the country and Texas was one of the first to feel a new conservatism. A young ambitious politi
cian in Texas would not want to look like a prisoner of the New Deal; in 1941 when Johnson made his first race for the Senate he found that Texas was changing, that the New Deal was less popular there and that he was beaten largely because he bore the onus of the New Deal. Too liberal, too much of a spender. He would not make that mistake again. Slowly he began to change his image, and he began to assert a certain independence from the Administration and to concentrate on armed preparedness as an issue, a decision which offended neither Roosevelt nor Texans. He stayed with the New Deal as long as he could, though he declared his independence from it soon after Roosevelt’s death.
As the coloration of Texas politics changed, so did Johnson. The new oil money was beginning to dominate the old rural agricultural economy, and an ambitious young congressman who coveted a Senate seat had to come to terms with it. The oil money had gone after Sam Rayburn in 1944 and if it had not cost Rayburn his congressional seat, as the oil people intended, it forced him to stay home and campaign during the 1944 convention, thus depriving him of any chance to get on the ticket with Roosevelt. Lyndon Johnson, who did not intend to stay in the House and who planned a statewide race, had to come to terms with the new money in the mid-forties. He did it by developing close ties to George and Herman Brown, old contracting friends who had moved into oil by getting into natural-gas transmission, buying the Little Big Inch pipe line in 1947. The Browns buffered Johnson with the oil people and eased the transition for what Robert Novak and Rowland Evans in their excellent book on Johnson would call “a lateral movement into the center of the new oil power.” He had paid his price. Thus he had become respectable; he had done it to survive, but it was typical of the price the Democratic party in general was paying to stay in power.
The Best and the Brightest Page 69