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

by Robert A. Caro

In 1890, taking command of the Democratic Party in a dozen states, the Alliancemen won control of their legislatures, elected six Governors and sent to Washington four Senators and more than fifty Congressmen

young Democrat William Jennings Bryan nervously made his way up the aisle and, speaking on behalf of farmers against Eastern interests, said, “We have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned; we have entreated and our entreaties have been disregarded; we have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came.

The silver Democrats did not leave the Democratic Party but took it over instead; “the Boy Orator of the Platte” became the party’s Presidential nominee.

Bryan’s campaign was gallant but underfinanced, and the Republican Party, run by Mark Hanna, who shook down railroad corporations, insurance companies and big-city banks for campaign contributions on a scale never before seen, won what one historian calls “a triumph for big business, for a manufacturing and industrial rather than an agrarian order, for the Hamiltonian rather than the Jeffersonian state.”

The Hill Country broke Sam Johnson’s health. He sold the farm in September, 1922, moved back into Johnson City, and took to his bed with a long-drawn-out illness.

Sam Johnson, who could walk into a room and know in an instant who was for him and who was against him, was a man who knew what people were thinking. And what they were thinking about him had changed—rapidly and completely. In a span of time that seems to an outsider remarkably brief, he had been transformed in the eyes of his home town from a figure of respect to a figure of ridicule.

The fierceness of the town’s prejudices and the rigidity of its intolerance led Stella Gliddon to call it “almost a Puritan town. In those days, people were considered bad for things that we take for granted now. They were the friendliest people, but they were very religious people, too.” Such people had never forgiven Sam Johnson for believing in the Darwinian theory, or for admiring Al Smith, or for voting against Prohibition.

Bankers at least had—in Sam’s unpaid loans—reason for their new attitude toward him. The rest of the Hill Country had no such reason. What it had reason for was gratitude—for the pensions he had arranged, for the loans he had given, for the highway he had gotten built. Instead, there was relish and glee in the Hill Country’s reaction to Sam Johnson’s fall. John Dollahite’s grandfather was one of those for whose pension Sam had worked. In discussing Sam today, however, John Dollahite does not mention the pension until asked. What is mentioned—at length—is Sam Johnson’s illness, for Dollahite has it all diagnosed. “Due to drink,” he explains. “You see, too much liquor thins your blood and you don’t have the resistance to throw off things.”

The difference in descriptions is explained by a difference in dates. The men who remember a son who loved and respected his father were those who observed the Johnsons in 1918 or 1919 or 1920—when the father was successful. Those who remember a different son were those who observed the Johnsons in 1921 or 1922 or 1923—when the father was a failure.

Lyndon’s attitude during Sam’s absences was striking; in the evenings, he would read the newspaper as his father did, and would lounge on his parents’ bed to do it. It is, of course, possible to place a Freudian interpretation on his behavior toward his father and some biographers do—but one complication must be taken into account: he was as hostile, defiant and cold to his mother as to his father. Her tears could make him sit sullenly through the violin lessons she had arranged for him, but nothing could make him practice; Rebekah finally told the teacher not to bother coming again. Meals were scenes of daily conflict, for to Rebekah table manners were as important as the tablecloth she insisted on using instead of oilcloth, as one of the last remnants of her cherished gentility.

Mortified though they were at the injustice of the new rule (far from not needing money, Puls needed it badly; he had been counting on the Pedagog salary to pay his tuition; without it, he would have to drop out of college), they had no inkling at first that it had been devised solely to make them ineligible—and they had no inkling that Lyndon Johnson had done the devising. Kyle was especially shocked to learn the truth. He and Johnson were very different young men—the slender, bespectacled, studious Kyle was a voracious reader, a brilliant student who received in reality the A’s that Johnson only said he received, a brilliant debater who, undefeated during his junior year, won in reality the debating victories that Johnson only said he won—but they shared an interest in politics (although Kyle was more interested in the science than the practice). They argued constantly in history and social-science courses—Kyle, a professor says, could argue Johnson “to a standstill”; he had read the books that Johnson only said he had read—but Kyle had enjoyed those arguments, had thought the give-and-take of ideas was what college was all about, and he had believed that Johnson enjoyed them, too. During Johnson’s pre-Cotulla days at college, Kyle says, “I befriended him when no one else would have anything to do with him,” and Johnson had apparently reciprocated, inviting him to his home to meet his parents. During Johnson’s post-Cotulla days, he had needed the support of “townies” for...

All during the 1920’s, farmers held out a hand to their government, but the administrations of Harding and Coolidge were deaf to their pleas. Seeing the industrialists of the Northeast prospering behind a wall of protective tariffs—tariffs that helped the Northeast at their expense—farmers asked for tariff reform. But when, in 1927, Congress finally passed the McNary-Haugen Bill for tariff reform, Coolidge vetoed it, claiming it violated the sacred principle of laissez-faire—“although,” as the historian Frank Freidel notes, “on the very day of his … veto, he signed an order increasing by 50 percent the tariff on pig iron.” In 1928, Congress passed McNary-Haugen again; Coolidge again vetoed it. In 1929, Herbert Hoover, Coolidge’s Secretary of Commerce, builder of the immense Department of Commerce Building that was a temple to American business, became President, having carried forty of the forty-eight states. A new tariff bill was introduced; Hoover said that if it was passed he would veto it, so Congress didn’t bother to pass it. Farmers asked for debt relief; Hoover’s reply was that federal mortgages were already available, and so they were—from a federal agency whose directors seemed to feel they were running a company store, so onerous were the terms of its loans. By 1931, one out of every four of its borrowers was delinquent—and the agency was busily foreclosing: during 1931 alone, almost 4,000 American families were thrown off their farms by their government. Hoover’...

“He was smiling and deferential,” Tommy Corcoran, a keen observer of the Washington scene, was to say of Johnson, “but hell, lots of guys can be smiling and deferential. He had something else. No matter what someone thought, Lyndon would agree with him—would be there ahead of him, in fact. He could follow someone’s mind around—and figure out where it was going and beat it there.…” And he touched every base; leaving a bureaucrat’s office, he smiled and chatted with his assistants and his secretaries until, soon, he had entire bureaus, top to bottom, willing to help

Lyndon Johnson educated his district himself; hour after hour he sat in Room 1322 telephoning his county agents; when he heard about an influential farmer who was balking, he telephoned the farmer.

With approval from a dozen different bureaus required for each contract, contracts from other districts might be stalled for months. Johnson would show up at each bureau—and contracts from the Fourteenth District were approved and back in the mail within days. In a White House ceremony on July 28, 1933, President Roosevelt presented the first AAA check for plowed-under cotton. Its recipient was farmer William E. Morris—of the Fourteenth District’s Nueces County.

Only the furnishing of new collateral would persuade the mortgage companies to wait for their money. The farmers felt they didn’t have any collateral, and in the traditional sense they didn’t: their savings, even the butter-and-egg money, were long gone; not only every acre of land but every piece of machinery was already mortgaged. But Lyndon Johnson had thought of new collateral: crops that hadn’t been planted yet. The farmers, he thought, should each agree to give their mortgagor a landlord’s share—a third—of the 1934 crop in exchange for a year’s extension on the mortgage. The mortgage companies might not normally agree to this, but Johnson felt they would now if they could be given assurances that the extension would enable them to get their money, not only current interest payments but the arrears as well.

Whatever the New Deal program, Johnson reaped for his district every dollar it could provide.

The same young men who had heard him denouncing the New Deal when with Miller heard him praising it when talking with Congressmen such as Wright Patman, who had not yet abandoned the Populism he had espoused in the Texas Legislature. Once, a congressional aide, who had just heard him “talking conservative” with Martin Dies, came across him, “not an hour later,” “talking liberal” with Patman—espousing a point of view diametrically opposite to the one he had been espousing sixty minutes before. When talking with older men, men who could help him, Lyndon Johnson “gave them,” this aide says, “whatever they wanted to hear.”

Ambition was not uncommon among those bright young men in the Dodge, but they felt that Johnson’s was uncommon—in the degree to which it was unencumbered by even the slightest excess weight of ideology, of philosophy, of principles, of beliefs. “There’s nothing wrong with being pragmatic,” a fellow secretary says. “Hell, a lot of us were pragmatic. But you have to believe in something. Lyndon Johnson believed in nothing, nothing but his own ambition. Everything he did—everything—was for his ambition.” A saying about Johnson had gained wide currency among these young men because they felt it described him accurately: “Lyndon goes which way the wind blows.”

As the New Deal’s new programs resulted in new bureaucracies, and as the bureaucracies swelled and swelled again, thousands of new federal jobs were created, jobs that could be filled with minimal reference to merit, since Congress, in approving the new agencies, had thoughtfully exempted many of them from civil service requirements. The choice jobs were out of the reach of Lyndon Johnson’s Congressman, junior and inactive as he was, not to mention the reach of his secretary. But the secretary secured quite a few jobs in the lower echelons: in government mailrooms (Gene Latimer was still working in the House Post Office, and now Latimer’s best friend, his former Houston High classmate Carroll Keach, was working in the mailroom of the Federal Housing Administration); and in government galleries (a rotating succession of young men served as doorkeepers in the House visitors’ galleries); at the endless banks of desks in the Department of Agriculture’s South Building (where Eloise Quill had been joined by several other young women from the Fourteenth Congressional District of Texas), and in the immense federal warehouse on D Street, Southwest, that was the temporary headquarters of the Treasury Department’s vastly expanded Procurement Division (where at least one of its 2,000 clerks, Ivan D. Bell, addressed Lyndon Johnson as “Chief”); and in nooks and crannies of federal service ranging from library stacks on Capitol Hill (several Kleberg constituents, including Johnson’s olde...

A network had sprung up, a network of men linked by an acquaintance with Lyndon Johnson, who were willing, because of Lyndon Johnson, to help one another. Johnson had few jobs at his disposal; if one of them was vacated by the friend for whom he had obtained it, he wanted it to be passed on to another friend. White Star Deason’s acquiescence to Johnson’s insistence that he not return to Alamo Heights High School meant that a job would be vacant there when school reopened in September, 1934. Deason did not notify the school of his change of heart until the very day that classes began in September. And it had been arranged that at the very moment Deason was telephoning a school official to tell him he needed a new teacher, a new teacher was actually standing in the official’s office, application in hand: White Star Horace Richards, who was quickly hired. “We always passed jobs on this way,” Deason says. Johnson, in fact, had “passed on” his own. Leaving Sam Houston High School to become Kleberg’s secretary, he had persuaded school officials, in somewhat of a quandary because of the suddenness of his departure, to hire Hollis Frazier—college debater and White Star—to replace him as debate coach. Frazier, at Johnson’s suggestion, later passed on the job to White Star Bert Horne; Richards passed on his to White Star Buster Brown.

The student aid program was, moreover, accomplishing its purpose. In 1935, it had encouraged students to return to school; in 1936, it kept those students in school. The fact that almost 40 percent of the students receiving NYA help in 1936 had received it in 1935 marked the beginning of a trend that would have pleased Eleanor Roosevelt: with the help of the NYA, a substantial percentage of Texas students who would otherwise—with the Depression still gripping the state—have had to drop out of school would make it through, year after year, all the way to graduation; by June, 1939, the NYA’s fourth year, more than a thousand graduating college seniors had received NYA aid for each of their four years.

What the dam needed in Washington was a champion already knowledgeable enough and possessed of sufficient entrée to find—swiftly—bypasses through the bureaucracy: a champion, for example, able to cut through the endless red tape at the Bureau of Reclamation by obtaining the personal interest of the Bureau’s boss, Interior Secretary Ickes—or, perhaps, of the Congressman of whom Ickes was particularly fond, Maury Maverick. What the dam needed in Washington was a champion with entrée to Congressmen powerful enough to roll over those bureaucratic obstacles (the Budget Bureau’s quibbling over legalities, for example) that could not be bypassed—a Congressman such as Sam Rayburn, for example. What the dam needed in Washington was a champion with entrée to the chairman of the committee with jurisdiction over the dam, Rivers and Harbors’ Joseph Jefferson Mansfield—or, if not to Mansfield himself, then to the man whose advice Mansfield followed slavishly, the man who pushed Mansfield’s wheelchair through the halls each day at noon: Roy Miller. And because of his trips to Washington in 1935, Alvin Wirtz was aware not only that Lyndon Johnson “knew Washington,” but that he knew—possessed entrée to—these very men. The young man sitting across his desk from him now was the champion he needed. When Johnson asked for his support, he agreed at once.

Johnson should support Roosevelt’s proposal, Wirtz said—should, in fact, make support of the Supreme Court plan the main plank in his platform. He should support all Roosevelt’s programs. His campaign should be based on all-out, “one hundred percent,” support for the President, for all the programs the President had instituted in the past—and for any program the President might decide to initiate in the future.

With his campaign thus made viable, Johnson was able to bring to it the resource he had created with such care: the organization already in place and at work at the NYA. Kellam, who had been appointed acting director when Johnson resigned to run, let the top NYA staffers know they could campaign for Johnson; to a man they flocked to his banner.

Sam also introduced his son before his first campaign speech, which was delivered from the front porch of the Johnson home. Despite unpleasant memories of the “native-born citizen’s” boyhood personality and family background, Blanco was predisposed to support him. In the rural counties of Texas—counties in which frontier privations and dangers were so fresh a memory and neighborliness therefore so prized a virtue—it was rare indeed for a county not to support its “home man” in a congressional race. Reinforcing this predisposition in Blanco County was the unusual depth of the county’s poverty and isolation. Because its residents not only were poor, but felt poor—felt poor and isolated and utterly cut off from the rest of the world—the success of a Blanco boy in that world was unusually important to them; it gave them a reason for self-respect.

Wild’s enlistment in the campaign could not make the leaders support Johnson, but it would ensure their attendance at—and their permission to hold—the “barbecues” (political rallies highlighted by “speakings”) integral to Texas politics. And Lyndon Johnson’s barbecues were barbecues such as this impoverished district had never seen. Ed Clark describes them as “all the barbecue you could eat and take home, and all the beer you could drink”—at each barbecue, in other words, beef and beer for hundreds of persons. Emmett Shelton describes them in a more pithy term: a “giving away.” “Before then,” he says, “barbecues had never been very elaborate around here. And I tell you, we wanted to have one like his [Johnson’s] once, and we sat down and started figuring out how much it would cost—and there was no way we were ever going to afford it.”

There were a few of these boxes in the Tenth District, and Johnson had the money to buy them. The district contained a substantial Negro vote2—located in several small all-Negro settlements in Blanco County; in Lee County, where there were thousands of black sharecroppers; and in the Austin slums. In Austin and Lee County, at least, the Negro community voted the way its leaders wanted it to vote, and the leaders were for sale—cheap. Johnson had the money to buy them. The Czech vote—several thousand Czechs were grouped together in three or four rural communities—was also for sale; the price for this vote was much higher, but Johnson had enough money to pay it, too.

The voters Lyndon Johnson would have to convince to vote for him—voters most of whom had never even heard the name of Lyndon Johnson—were scattered on their isolated farms and ranches so thinly across those immense spaces that a candidate could drive miles between one voter and the next. Difficult miles. Two major highways ran through the district: east-west U.S. Highway 290, and north-south U.S. Highway 81. Most of the district’s other roads were unpaved; in 1937, the fifty-eight miles of “State Highway 66” between Johnson City and the northern boundary of Burnet County, for example, were largely unpaved. And most of the district’s voters did not live on 290 or 81—or even on 66. Their homes, the farms and ranches on which lay the votes which alone could enable him to take advantage of his great chance, lay on a thousand separate, long, winding, rutted roads that were little more than paths or cow trails.

Radio could reach them hardly at all; by now an established political tool in other areas of the United States, it was a tool with limited use indeed in rural precincts few of whose residents owned one; the first survey of the use of electrical appliances in rural areas of the Tenth District, conducted in 1939, would disclose the presence of a radio in exactly one out of every 119 homes. Out of reach of the media, these voters were—most of them, at least—out of reach also of personal influence. Here and there a local influential—a “lead man,” in Central Texas parlance—wielded influence beyond his immediate family, either because of the local power he might exercise, if he was the town banker or the town lawyer or the County Judge, or simply because people so isolated from news media relied for their political opinions, to an extent unthinkable in a city, on men whose opinions they respected: a successful farmer, for example.

The rapport would be cemented with physical demonstrations of affection. With women, the cement was a hug and a kiss on the cheek. The technique was as effective for him as a candidate as it had been for him as a teen-ager. “Lyndon’s kissing” became almost a joke during the campaign—but a fond joke. One elderly Hill Country rancher, annoyed by his wife’s insistence on attending a Johnson rally, growled, “Oh, you just want to be kissed.”

When the utilities ignored these studies their true attitude became clear: not that rural electric service could not be profitable, but that it would not be as profitable as urban service. Or as surefire. Waiting two or three years for usage to build up was what industry called a “capital risk”; why take a risk for a profit when there existed, in the urban market, profit without risk? “It hardly seems fair that the farm wife had to wait for electricity so much longer than her counterpart in the city for she needed electricity much more,” an historian was to write. But fairness—or social conscience—was not the operative criterion for the utilities; their criterion was rate of return on investment.

When a farmer offered to pay the cost of building a power line to his house, the utilities said they would allow him to do so—but that when it was built, they, not he, would own it. Their policies were quite firm, because they did not want to establish any precedent that might be used as an argument against them. If they once began to lower rates, who knew where such reductions might lead? If they once began to extend lines into rural areas, there would be no end to the demands for more extensions. So no exceptions were permitted. In Lyndon Johnson’s own district, Texas Power & Light policy governing the one electric line permitted only farms within fifty yards of the line to hook up to it. Several scores of farmhouses were near the line, but farther away than fifty yards. Some were not much farther away, and these farmers offered to pay the additional cost involved. TP&L was quite firm in its refusals to allow them to do so; if the company made an exception for one farmer, it was explained, it might have to make exceptions for others in other areas of the state as well. Farmers whose homes were just beyond the fifty-yard limit, farmers who could see those lines every day of their lives, were unable to use them, while they had to watch their wives year by year slaving at tasks that electricity would have made so much easier. Some of these farmers, in desperation, said they would move their houses so that they would be within fifty yards. TP&L said that it still would not h...

To observe the House of Representatives was to observe what absolute, untrammeled, unchallengeable power did to men.

Lyndon Johnson had been maneuvering since shortly after coming to Washington as a congressional secretary in 1931 to obtain statewide power. Now he was able to procure for men who mattered in Texas—all across Texas—not merely hotel reservations and appointments with federal officials, but federal contracts. Thanks to Herman Brown’s money, and to the skill with which he had employed it as a political resource, he was much further now along the road he saw stretching before him.

Most politicians are forced, in mapping out the next step in their careers, to choose a step that can be financed. Johnson did not have this problem; he could concentrate solely on which step would be best for his career. Whatever road he chose, he could be sure it would be paved by money from Brown & Root.

Little as Democratic congressional candidates needed in 1940, however, there was small hope that they would get it from their Congressional Campaign Committee. Because the nation’s business community was so overwhelmingly Republican, funds were traditionally in short supply at Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Biltmore Hotel in New York. The party had been outspent by the GOP in every national election since 1920, and the gap had been huge in 1936. And never had the supply of funds been shorter than in 1940. Fueled by rage at Roosevelt and possessed of an attractive candidate to run against him (“For the first time since Teddy Roosevelt,” said Time, “the Republicans had a man they could yell for and mean it”), the GOP was gearing up—and shelling out—for a supreme effort to put its own man in the White House. After the election, a Senate committee would determine the ratio of expenditures between the two parties as almost two and a half to one. The Democrats, anxious to put such seasoned speechmakers as Harold Ickes on the air, found that they simply “did not have the money to spend” on more than a few such nationwide broadcasts. The five great radio speeches by Roosevelt himself that were to boost his popularity during the last days of the campaign would not have been broadcast had not Richard Reynolds, of the North Carolina tobacco family, appeared on the scene with a last-minute $175,000 loan to pay for the radio time.

Oil money had long been a factor in politics in the United States. In Texas, oil had come in not long after the century; the Spindletop field on the Gulf Coast, which would eventually prove out at a hundred million barrels, one-tenth as much oil as had been produced previously in America, blew in on January 10, 1901. The robber barons who had tapped the oil fields of the Northeast had been using the sale of black gold to purchase politicians for decades before that; the Standard Oil Company, one historian said, did everything possible to the Pennsylvania Legislature except refine it. But the new oil fields of the Southwest had, through the first three decades of the twentieth century, been controlled by the same companies that controlled the old oil fields of the Northeast; with their control of pipelines, markets and refineries—and the capital needed to explore and drill—they bought out or forced out the discoverers of the Texas fields so thoroughly that in 1930 75 percent of the oil in Texas was owned by Standard Oil and its offshoots and rivals such as Humble, Magnolia, Gulf and Sun, and the owners of the other 25 percent had to sell their oil to these companies, who owned the refineries and pipelines, at prices so low that they were effectively prevented from accumulating capital of their own. The companies, and the families back of them, that poured money into politics in Texas—Gulf Oil (the Mellons), Sun Oil (the Pews), Standard Oil (the Rockefellers)—were the same c...

Michigan’s Sixteenth Congressional District, which included part of Detroit, and adjoining Dearborn, site of a giant Ford Motor Company plant, had once been considered a safe Democratic district. Running for his third term in 1936, Congressman John Lesinski had polled 61 percent of the vote, defeating his Republican opponent by 21,000 votes. But in 1938, the margin had been reduced to 10,000–55 percent. And in 1940, the Republican candidate in the Ford-dominated Sixteenth was a Ford: Henry’s cousin Robert. Arriving back in Dearborn to begin his campaign, Lesinski found “hundreds” of ROBERT FORD FOR CONGRESS billboards, and numerous other indications of “unlimited financial backing”—including no fewer than a dozen well-staffed campaign headquarters. Clearly, the district wasn’t safe any longer. It contained voters of fifty-eight nationalities, so literature printed in foreign languages was a necessity. In the 1936 and 1938 elections, the Democratic National Committee had sent truckloads of foreign-language pamphlets to the district—100,000 in Polish alone. Now Lesinski was informed that not one piece of foreign-language literature had been received in the district.

Although he was ostensibly assisting Drewry’s committee, the office he had taken was in another building, the eleven-story Munsey Building at 1329 E Street, Northwest, off Pennsylvania Avenue, away from Drewry’s eyes and supervision. He had done more that busy Monday. The letter and questionnaire were not sent to all his colleagues. Conferring over the telephone with Rayburn, McCormack—and with Paul Appleby, campaign manager for vice-presidential nominee Henry A. Wallace and a politician with a detailed knowledge of the political situation in Midwest congressional districts—he had selected from the 435 Democratic candidates for Congress several score who should be helped.

Roeser’s terse letter to the young Congressman he had never met was a significant document in the political fund-raising history of the United States (and, it was to prove in later years, in the larger history of the country as well). Sam Rayburn had, on his trip to Texas in October, 1940, cut off the Democratic National Committee, and other traditional party recipients of campaign contributions, from the money of the newly rich Texas independent oilmen. These men had been seeking a channel through which their money could flow to the seat of national power 2,000 miles away, to far-off Washington. After Sam Rayburn’s trip to Dallas in October, 1940, they had their channel, a brand-new channel which, ten days before, had not even existed. Sam Rayburn had cut them the channel. A new source of political money, potentially vast, had been tapped in America, and Lyndon Johnson had been put in charge of it. He was the conduit for their cash.

With many of the checks that went out, there went out also a request for a status report, not only on the Congressman’s own chances in his district, but on the President’s. And since many of the men Johnson was asking for these reports were veteran Congressmen—seasoned, experienced (and successful) politicians—their replies were often extremely informative. They were especially informative because when Congressmen took their own, local, polls, unscientific and rudimentary in technique though they were, they sent the results to Johnson, and he could pass them along to the White House—and the results of these polls, of course, were hard facts, the kind of facts for which a candidate and his advisors are so anxious.

Most important, Johnson could not only get information for the President, he could get it for him fast. Roosevelt, worried about a Gallup poll which showed Willkie rapidly cutting into his lead, began a series of radio addresses on October 23. Sending out checks to congressional candidates around the country, Johnson had asked them to repay him with a report on how Roosevelt’s speeches went over;

One more maneuver of a more informal character. Cap Harding’s son, Kenneth, who would succeed him as director of the Congressional Campaign Committee, was running campaigns in California’s Eighth Congressional District. “There was a colored minister who controlled the bloc of colored votes in San Jose, and we bought him for fifty dollars. A small amount of money judiciously spent could mean more than a larger amount of money spent on political advertising. Just a few bucks strategically placed could mean all the difference in the world. But those last few days of a campaign—when the deals were being struck—that was when you either had the cash or you didn’t. And if you didn’t—well, that could mean the end of a man’s career.”

He wasn’t wasting his money. A candidate’s assessment of his chances was discreetly checked and rechecked through other sources; evaluations of the races in Illinois’ twenty-five districts, for example, were telephoned to Johnson by the dean of the state’s congressional delegation, Adolph J. Sabath, chairman of the House Rules Committee.

They were going to need money again in 1942, of course, in less than two years. In 1942—and in succeeding years. Whether or not they liked Lyndon Johnson, they were going to need him. Not merely gratitude but an emotion perhaps somewhat stronger and more enduring—self-interest—dictated that they be on good terms with him.

His power was simply the power of money. To a considerable extent, the money was Herman Brown’s. A single corporation, Brown & Root, may have given Democratic congressional candidates more money than they received from the Democratic National Committee.

The power of money was less ephemeral than power based on elections or individuals. It could last as long as the money lasted, exerting its effect not only on an incumbent but on his successors.

Political philosophy played not the smallest role in his appeals for money. During the next congressional campaign in 1942, after Ed Flynn had again attempted to freeze him out but had again been thwarted by Johnson’s control over Texas money (replied oilman G. L. Rowsey to a Flynn plea for funds: “My delay in replying is due to the fact that I expected to be in contact with our congressman, Honorable Lyndon Johnson … I desire to know his wishes in this matter and to make my contribution to or through him”), Johnson, exasperated by Rayburn’s continued failure to understand the new realities, wrote the Speaker that “these $200 driblets will not get the job done.” What was needed, Johnson said, was to “select a ‘minute man’ group of thirty men, each of whom should” raise $5,000, for a total of $150,000…. “This should be done between now and next Wednesday.… There isn’t any reason why, with the wealth and consideration that has been extended, we should fall down on this.”

Far from establishing rapport with voters, he only managed to emphasize the feeling that he was not one of them, and that, while he might be asking for their help, he didn’t really need it. And he would not allow a voter more than a hurried word or two, if that; Bill Deason says, “He never missed anybody on the street.… He shook hands with every one of them, but he never let them involve him in an argument. He moved fast.…” In fact, he seldom let them involve him in a conversation; the candidate moved through crowds in a cordon of officious aides who pushed people aside, none too gently, hurrying him along as he flashed mechanical smiles to left and right.