“He learned the levers in Congress very fast,” Rowe says. And he was willing to place this knowledge at the service of this small group of men. “I would call and say, ‘How do I handle this?’ ” Rowe says. “He would say, ‘I’ll call you right back.’ And he would call back and say, ‘This is the fellow you ought to talk to.’ ” Says Fortas: “He was close to Rayburn, and an ever-widening coterie of friends on the Hill, and he helped us. He ran errands for us on the Hill. He was very useful to us.”
