The Path to Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson #1)

by Robert A. Caro

The first settlers did not realize they were crossing a significant line. They came into the new land blithely. After all those years in which they had feared their fate was poverty, they saw at last the glimmerings of a new hope. But in reality, from the moment they first decided to settle in this new land, their fate was sealed. Dreaming of cotton and cattle kingdoms, or merely of lush fields of corn and wheat, they went back for their families and brought them in, not knowing that they were bringing them into a land which would adequately support neither cattle nor cotton—nor even corn or wheat. Fleeing the crop lien and the furnishing merchant, hundreds of thousands of Southerners came to Texas. Of all those hundreds of thousands, few had come as far as these men who came to the Hill Country. And they had come too far.

BUT WHAT, really, had the People’s Party—the farmers who called themselves “Alliancemen”—asked for? Only that when men found themselves at the mercy of forces too big for them to fight alone, government—their government—help them fight. What were the demands for railroad and bank regulation, for government loans, for public-works projects, but an expression of a belief that after men have banded together and formed a government, they have a right, when they are being crushed by conditions over which they have no control, to ask that government to extend a helping hand to them—if necessary, to fight for them, to be their champion? They had asked too early, that was all. Franklin Roosevelt wasn’t their President yet. Lyndon Johnson wasn’t their Congressman.

But Sam Johnson accepted nothing. It was not that he shunned the whorehouses and the bars; he didn’t—he is remembered as an enthusiastic participant in the wildest of Austin’s parties. He is remembered, in fact, as being a loud and boastful reveler—somewhat foolish when in his cups. But if he was foolish, he was foolish on his own money; he insisted on paying for his own drinks and his own women. And if he is remembered as being loud, he is also remembered as being honest—conspicuously honest; a rather quixotic figure, in fact, in the Austin atmosphere.

She started the younger students on spelling bees and “ ’rithmetic matches,” which gave them their first chance to stand up in front of an audience. Then they progressed to “declamation” of poems, to “pantomimes and dialogues,” then to debates, and, finally, the high-school pupils would have to speak extemporaneously on subjects they would study in the books, pamphlets and magazines Rebekah ordered from the extension library at the University of Texas in Austin. The girls felt keenly that they were “country”—that they lacked social graces—so Rebekah expanded the curriculum to include dancing: fifty years and more later, one of her pupils, asked what kind of dancing, suddenly became lost in reverie and then, all at once, began humming, very softly, with her wrinkled old face smiling in reminiscence, “Little red wagon painted blue, little red wagon painted blue, little red wagon painted blue, skip to m’Lou, my darling.”

It was at the Albert School, moreover, at about this time—the time when his father was failing on the ranch—that he first made a remark that one of his schoolmates there, Anna Itz, remembers quite vividly. A group of children was sitting under the big hackberry tree near the school during recess, Mrs. Itz says, and “All of a sudden, Lyndon looked up at the blue sky and said, ‘Someday, I’m going to be President of the United States.’ We hadn’t been talking about politics or the Presidency or anything like that. He just came out with it.” The other children laughed at him, and said they wouldn’t vote for him, Mrs. Itz recalls. “He said, ‘I won’t need your votes.’ ”) Lyndon would not do his homework, and he became so boisterous in school that the teacher complained to his parents.

Once, Ava says, Lyndon told her and Margaret that he “was working up his nerve” to ask Kitty Clyde for a date anyway—he guessed, he said, that he would ask her to go with him to the annual Johnson City-Fredericksburg baseball game and picnic. Kitty Clyde said she’d have to ask her parents. She came back and said she wouldn’t be able to go. After that, Lyndon never asked her again. (SOME TIME THEREAFTER, Kitty Clyde and Krause broke up. Her father thereupon sent her to the University of Texas, insisting she live in the Masonic Dormitory, whose tenants were not allowed to have dates. She returned to Johnson City after college, but never dated Lyndon again, and eventually married another local boy, who her father thought had good prospects, but who worked in the Ross store until it was sold. When Lyndon became President, he invited Kitty Clyde and her husband to Washington and took them for a flight on Air Force One.)

A silent man, he stood there silently until the train arrived and his son was about to board it. Then he suddenly reached out and pressed some bills into his son’s hand. Twenty-five dollars. Sam never forgot that; he talked about that twenty-five dollars for the rest of his life. “God knows how he saved it,” he would say. “He never had any extra money. We earned just enough to live. It broke me up, him handing me that twenty-five dollars. I often wondered what he did without, what sacrifice he and my mother made.” And he never forgot the four words his father said to him as he climbed aboard the train; he was to tell friends that he had remembered them at every crisis in his life. Clutching his son’s hand, his father said: “Sam, be a man!”

Two incidents in the campaign showed that he had not forgotten his father’s four words of advice. A man approached him one day and said that a ten-dollar contribution to an influential farmer would ensure the votes of the farmer’s relatives. “I’m not trying to buy the office,” Rayburn replied. “I’m asking the people to give it to me.” He and his opponent, Sam Gardner of Honey Grove, became friends and, near the end of the campaign, rode from town to town together in a one-horse buggy; arriving in a town, they would take turns standing in the back of the buggy and speaking. In one town, Gardner became ill and spent three days in bed. Although Gardner appeared to be leading, Rayburn didn’t use the three days to campaign; he spent them with Gardner, nursing him. Gardner was to be a friend of Sam Rayburn’s all his life.

In Austin, Sam Rayburn didn’t forget where he came from. Enlisting in the small band (which included, of course, Sam Ealy Johnson, then in his second term in the Legislature) which fought “The Interests” and talked of “The People,” he introduced bills to regulate railroads and banks. Unlike some of that band, he never sold out. Years later, when someone mentioned that Rayburn’s father had not left him much of an inheritance, Rayburn quickly corrected him—his father, he said, “gave me my untarnished name.” He kept it untarnished.

It was while he was in Austin, where legislators were bought wholesale, that there was first heard a saying that men would be repeating for fifty years: “No one can buy Sam Rayburn.”

He refused not only fees but travel expenses for out-of-town speeches; hosts who, thinking his refusal pro forma, attempted to press checks upon him quickly realized they had made a mistake: the face, already so hard, would become harder; Rayburn would say, “I’m not for sale”—and then he would walk away without a backward glance, as he had walked away from a President. His integrity was certified by his bankbook. At his death, at the age of seventy-nine, after decades as one of the most powerful men in the United States, a man courted by railroad companies and oil companies, his savings totaled $15,000.

Soon he had a road-building contract of his own. (Having stretched himself to the limit to finance it, he almost went broke when rains turned the road into a sea of mud and forced him to stop work; at one point, when he could not afford to buy feed for his mules, a local merchant, taking pity on him and the mules, gave him credit. Decades later, Herman learned by chance that the merchant had gone broke in the Depression and, old now, was living in poverty on an isolated West Texas ranch. A day or two later, there arrived in the old man’s mailbox a check big enough to keep him in comfort for the rest of his life.)

Sam Johnson had not made a speech for so many years, but he had never made a better speech than the one he made now for his son. Describing it, Lyndon Johnson was to say that while making it, “My father became a young man again. “He looked out into all those faces that he knew so well and then he looked at me and I saw tears in his eyes as he told the crowd how terribly proud he was of me and how much hope he had for his country if only his son could be up there in the nation’s capital with Roosevelt and Rayburn and all those good Democrats. There was something in his voice and in his face that day that completely captured the emotions of the crowd. When he finally sat down, they began applauding and they kept applauding for almost ten minutes. I looked over at my mother and saw that she, too, was clapping and smiling. It was a proud moment for the Johnson family.”

“We home-folks know how ridiculous that charge is.… We know that Lyndon Johnson’s campaign has been financed by his own small savings, by contributions of his family and friends, received a few dollars at a time.” Purchasing still more time, Johnson put the old Judge on the air again and again. His opponents’ charges about Johnson’s unprecedented expenditures were buried under Johnson denials, broadcast thanks to Johnson’s unprecedented expenditures.

His 3,000-vote plurality—a plurality whose dimensions had been utterly unsuspected—came principally from the farmers and the ranchers he had visited one by one, from the people in whom he had invested time no other candidate for Congress had ever given them, from the people who had, on Election Day, repaid that investment in kind, giving up their own time—the time so valuable to them—to make the trip, sometimes quite a long trip, to the polling place to cast their votes for Lyndon Johnson.

Brian Smith had persuaded many of his neighbors to sign up, and now, more than a year after they had paid their five dollars, and then more money to have their houses wired, his daughter Evelyn recalls that her neighbors decided they weren’t really going to get it. She recalls that “All their money was tied up in electric wiring”—and their anger was directed at her family. Dropping in to see a friend one day, she was told by the friend’s parents to leave: “You and your city ways. You can go home, and we don’t care to see you again.” They were all but ostracized by their neighbors. Even they themselves were beginning to doubt; it had been so long since the wiring was installed, Evelyn recalls, that they couldn’t remember whether the switches were in the ON or OFF position. But then one evening in November, 1939, the Smiths were returning from Johnson City, where they had been attending a declamation contest, and as they neared their farmhouse, something was different. “Oh my God,” her mother said. “The house is on fire!” But as they got closer, they saw the light wasn’t fire. “No, Mama,” Evelyn said. “The lights are on.” They were on all over the Hill Country. “And all over the Hill Country,” Stella Gliddon says, “people began to name their kids for Lyndon Johnson.”

The cars that had brought these people—pulled up in a long line behind the crowd—were dusty with travel. “Most of the crowd was old people,” Stella Gliddon recalls. “You know, people that Mr. Sam had gotten pensions for. Some of them had come a long way.” One aged widow, so crippled by arthritis that she hadn’t left her house in five years, had insisted that two of her sons carry her out to their car and drive her from their lonely ranch in Marble Falls. Some had come farther. Members of Sam’s little band of legislators had come to say goodbye to the man who had fought beside them for “the People.” One, R. Bouna Ridgway, lived in Dallas. He had heard of Sam Johnson’s death only the previous day and had driven all night—almost 300 hard miles—to be at the funeral of a man he had not seen in years.

In August, 1941, the Selective Service Act, which had, a year earlier, established America’s first peacetime draft, was about to expire. Unless the Act was extended, not only would most of the men in uniform be discharged, but no new ones could be drafted. And despite Roosevelt’s pleas for extension, pressure on Congress to let it die had reached almost a frenzy under the prodding of powerful isolationist organizations and of delegations of mothers. Rayburn knew the draft was needed. Talking with George Brown, he suddenly fell silent. The grim face turned even grimmer. After a while, he said quietly, “The war clouds are gathering, George.” Rayburn didn’t stay in the Speaker’s chair during the three days of bitter debate; he went back to the spot in which he had stood for so many years, back behind the rail, and he worked the cloakroom, calling in almost thirty years’ worth of favors. Wrote a friend: “This was a time when he did not hesitate, all else failing, to make the ultimate plea: ‘Do this for me.’ ”

Neither Herman nor his brother George had ever seen a ship being built. “We didn’t know the stern from the aft—I mean the bow—of the boat,” George recalls. Nonetheless, in 1941, at about the time that their Corpus Christi Naval Air Station contract was rising toward $100,000,000, the brothers were awarded a lucrative Navy contract to build four subchasers. (The brothers established a new corporate entity for the purpose: says George, “They needed a name to put on the contract, and I said, ‘Brown Shipbuilding.’ That was all there was to it.”) When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the four subchasers were not yet completed, but a Navy Department official told the brothers, “We’ll put you in the destroyer business.” During the war, Brown Shipbuilding—under contracts with provisions so favorable that profits were all but guaranteed—would carry out $357,000,000 worth of work for the Navy.

AND WHAT OF THE RETURN reaped by the oilmen on an investment in Lyndon Johnson that, as years passed, was to grow and grow? What did they want from government? They wanted a lot: not only continuation of the oil depletion allowance and of other tax benefits, and of exemption from federal regulation but new benefits, and new exemptions—and other new, favorable, government policies. As the future will demonstrate, they wanted government favoritism on a scale so immense that it would become a significant factor in the overall political and economic development of the United States. In 1940, they had not yet achieved what they wanted. But they were asking too early, that was all. Lyndon Johnson wasn’t their Senator yet.

On August 30, Sam Rayburn wrote back, stilted and formal even now. “Dear Bird,” he wrote, “Your note was very refreshing and highly appreciated by me. You know that no two people are closer to me in friendship and love than you and Lyndon. It has been a great heritage to have known you so intimately and well.” Although the pain was very bad that day, the hand that wrote that letter did not shake. There was not a tremor in the name “Sam Rayburn.” The next morning, Rayburn went home to Bonham to die. A friend who spent time with him during his last days explained why he did not stay in Washington, where he could have gotten better medical assistance: Rayburn, the friend wrote, thought that “Washington was such a lonely city for a country boy to get sick in.”