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

by Robert A. Caro

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 hook them up. Moving houses would set a precedent, a company spokesman explained: Who knew how many farmers would try to move houses near electricity? Where would it all end?

AWFUL

As John Gunther was to ask: “Who and what should own a river, if not the people as a whole?” But these attempts had been stymied by the powerful utilities lobby and by the Republican Party which embodied its principles.

The Rayburn Utilities Holding Company Act had begun breaking up the giant monopolistic systems which had so tightly controlled—and limited, in the interest of profit—the production and distribution of electricity. And great government-financed dams, such as Marshall Ford and “Big Buchanan,” were being built across rivers throughout the West.

Roosevelt wanted the electricity generated at these dams to be made available not to utility companies but to farmers, and to be available so inexpensively that it would “become a standard article of use … for every home within reach of an electric light line.”

In January, 1936, therefore, the Roosevelt administration introduced a bill that would remove REA from the relief set-up and make it an independent agency, and that would allow it to make self-liquidating loans to cooperatives established by the farmers themselves. Provision was also made for small loans to individual families, to enable them to wire their homes and purchase appliances.

“We want to make the farmer and his wife and family believe and know that they are no longer the forgotten people, but make them know that they are remembered as part of—yea, they are the bulwark of the Government.”

Farmers not forgotten . Bulwark of America

To the utility lobbyists’ argument that farmers were too “unsophisticated” to organize cooperatives or handle complicated legal questions, and too poor to pay electric bills, Rayburn replied that “the lobbyists did not take into account the spirit and determination of the people who form the backbone of this nation.”

Go Sam Rayburn

On the floor, Rayburn had less trouble; his quiet, terse remarks cut to the heart of an argument; to the free-enterprisers,

The conflict over inclusion of the utilities was compromised by allowing them to be eligible for REA loans, but giving preference to non-profit bodies such as cooperatives. On May 11, 1936, Congress passed the new REA bill. Within the next eighteen months, electricity was brought to half a million American farms. Hundreds of thousands of other farmers were forming cooperatives so that they could get electricity, too—and rural electric rates were beginning to drop in many areas. The times were changing—and they were changing fast.

Bill was pased for farmer electrification

The crucial criterion the REA established to ensure this was population density: the agency said it would make no loan in any area in which the electrical lines to be built would serve an average of less than three farms per mile.

“Pedernales Electric Co-operative” met in Austin with an REA representative, Russell Cook. Cook put it to them straight: “You have too much land and not enough people.” Says one of the men at the meeting: “He was just very discouraging. He said, ‘You want to go [lay lines] to one of the most remote areas of the whole country. We simply can’t do that. It’s impossible.’

Johnson replied: “I’ll get it for you. I’ll go to the REA. I’ll go to the President if I have to. But we will get the money!”

“Lyndon Johnson had inspired me,” he says. “He had made me feel there was a chance.”

The people of the Hill Country were leery of lawyers: lawyers meant mortgages and foreclosures. Legal documents—documents they did not understand—turned them skittish: Who knew what hidden traps lay within them? Were they signing something that would one day allow someone to take their land away?

Creation of the PEC, he said, would free the Hill Country from dependence on the Northeast: “We may see the opening up of manufacturing interests here where the raw materials are grown. Why should we continually send our wool to Boston? Why not manufacture it here or anyway … get it ready to spin right where it is grown?”

According to his story on one occasion, Roosevelt picked up the telephone while Johnson was still in the room, called Carmody and said, “John, I know you have got to have guidelines and rules and I don’t want to upset them, but you just go along with me—just go ahead and approve this loan.… Those folks will catch up to that density problem because they breed pretty fast.”

On September 27, 1938, a telegram arrived at the temporary Johnson City office of the Pedernales Electric Co-operative: the REA, it said, had granted the PEC a loan of $1,322,000 (shortly to be raised to $1,800,000) to build 1,830 miles of electric lines that would bring electricity to 2,892 Hill Country families.

Three hundred men—axemen, polemen, pikers, hole-diggers, framers—were out in the Edwards Plateau, linking it to the rest of America, linking it to the twentieth century, in fact, at the rate of about twelve miles per day.

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.”

Lbj did it. Light

(Johnson was able to violate the law because its enforcer was Rayburn, the delegation’s leader. Rayburn was customarily very strict about the “no outsiders” rule because the outsiders were, he knew, likely to be the big businessmen and lobbyists he hated. But when Johnson asked permission to bring a guest, Rayburn frequently gave it.)

“Rayburn had this very strong feeling for Lyndon,” Lucas says. “And that feeling protected Lyndon. Nobody in the delegation wanted to get Rayburn mad.”

“When he was in town, he would court them, would call them up. And, of course, if someone important, like a Congressman, calls you up, you’re flattered.” Mahon began to realize that “in my district [which was almost 300 miles from Johnson’s], he [had] made friends with the key people. He courted the right people in the right places [all over] the state. He had statewide ambitions from the day he came up here.”

There was, in the view of the Texas delegation, no realistic chance of a junior Congressman competing with such figures—particularly not a junior Congressman from the Tenth District.

While Texans would later maintain that their state was more part of the West than the South, during the pre-war years they regarded themselves as Southerners, and among Southerners on Capitol Hill it was an article of faith—bitter faith—that no Southerner would ever be President of the United States.

McIntyre, who was fond of Johnson, was his soft spot on the staff, and he worked on him, but while Mac may have been flattered by a request for an autographed picture, he could do nothing for him without his boss’ approval and, whatever the reason—whether the President had been irritated by Johnson’s boasts of intimacy (one Texas newspaper said that the President “regarded the Texan as one of the banner-carriers of the administration”); whether he felt that Johnson was pushing his slim acquaintance—the President appears to have felt he had done quite enough for a freshman Congressman.

Congress, one observer was to write, had given Carl Vinson “a blank check to operate as a one-man committee” on naval matters; on that committee, only one voice mattered: the chairman’s soft Georgia drawl. Lyndon Johnson’s voice, in other words, would not matter until he became chairman.

Vinson’s arrogance was not unique. Most of the great Standing Committees of the House were run by men answerable to no one in Washington—not to the membership of the House (for it was not popularity with their colleagues but only seniority which had given them their chairmanships), not to the leadership of the House (for once the leadership had placed a chairman in his job, it was all but powerless ever to remove him from it), not to the President, and certainly not to the members of their committees.

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

The sprawling 435-member body was an oligarchy whose ruling circle consisted of no more than a score of men: the Speaker, the Majority Leader and Whip, the most powerful committee chairmen. And the only qualification that could secure a Congressman admission to this small, select ring of power—even if he was, like Johnson and Patman, allowed to drink with its members—was seniority.

Only age would get you into it. There was only one way to become one of the ruler...

The Democrats wouldn’t always be in control of Congress, and if, when his turn in the Democratic line finally arrived, the Republicans should be in control, he wouldn’t be chairman then, either. Because the Democrats had taken control of the House only five years before, after twelve years of Republican control, evidence of this harsh fact—of what might happen to him even if he waited—was everywhere before Johnson’s eyes.

“A man can come to Congress when he’s thirty-five, serve here twenty years, and emerge, at age fifty-five, as the ablest man on his committee. But because he has to wait for all the members ahead of him to either retire or die, he may have to wait another twenty years … before he becomes a chairman. You will climb to the top of the ladder eventually. The only catch is you may be in your seventies when the big moment comes.”

There were uniforms on the riverbank, for Sam Johnson had gotten pensions for veterans of the First World War—no one had ever realized for how many until they saw how many elderly men in khaki were standing stiffly at attention as the tall casket rumbled across the river.

And there were uniforms much older even than those of the Rough Riders. Five Confederate veterans had donned their beloved gray uniforms—and pinned to them medals, bright from decades of shining, of the Lost Cause—to honor the man who had managed to secure the meager monthly stipends that had meant so much to them. “Five, I remember the number,” Ava says. “I can see every one in my eye now. You almost never saw those uniforms any more.”

“Why, do you know,” the aide said, “he had done a lot in the Legislature. And it was him who had gotten built that road we drove on from Austin that day. I had never heard one word about that. I had thought he was—well, you know, to tell the truth—just some old drunk.”

Several years later, Johnson’s staff began collecting family mementoes for the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library. Johnson, who had a keen awareness of his place in history, had carefully saved hundreds of items, including some very unlikely ones. But his father’s watch could not be found.

A long-standing belief within the Johnson family held that Johnson men had weak hearts and died young. Now his father was dead, of heart disease, at the age of sixty.

WHILE THE SENIORITY SYSTEM might deny a junior Congressman the opportunity to play a significant role in the committee structure of the House of Representatives, his very membership in the House provided him with an opportunity to play a different type of role. Unable to contribute significantly to legislation, he nonetheless possessed the power to bring an issue to the attention of the nation, and to keep that issue before the nation.

Congressmen such as Rayburn and Patman and Maverick—and, during the Thirties, other Congressmen such as Tom Amlie of Wisconsin and Fiorello La Guardia of New York—had become representatives not just of a district but of causes that affected the welfare of a nation; they had focused America’s attention upon significant issues, had prepared the climate for the passage, if not immediately, then eventually, of significant legislation; had become, by introducing what was, in effect, national legislation, national legislators. This course carried with it rewards for a Congressman who cared about causes.

A cause

During his more than eleven years in the House of Representatives, he introduced only five bills that would affect the country as a whole.

During his eleven years as a Congressman, therefore, no national bill introduced by Lyndon Johnson that would have affected the people of the United States became a law of the United States.

He didn’t introduce legislation himself—and he wouldn’t fight for legislation introduced by others. He wouldn’t fight publicly. He didn’t write laws—and he didn’t write speeches,

Because anything printed in the Record can be reprinted at government expense, and then mailed at government expense under the franking privilege, Congressmen used the right to “revise and extend” to have tens of thousands of copies of their statements reprinted and mailed to their constituents, thereby gaining free publicity and creating the impression of deep involvement in national issues.

“Mr. Speaker, in the four terms that I have served in this House I have seldom asked your indulgence.” After the absenteeism fight, he didn’t make another speech for almost another three years. Entire years went by without Lyndon Johnson addressing the House even once.3 In fact, until 1948, when the necessities of his campaign for the United States Senate changed his methods, he had, during eleven years in Congress, delivered a total of ten speeches—less than one a year.

“He looked the picture of boredom, slumped in his chair with his eyes half-closed,” she says. And he seldom stayed long. “He never spoke in the House, you know, except on rare, rare occasions.” And, Mrs. Douglas adds, “He didn’t spend much time listening to others in the House.” He might sit for a while, “the picture of boredom,” and “then suddenly he’d jump to his feet, nervous … restless, as if he couldn’t bear it another minute. He might stop to speak to some member on the floor of the House or to the Speaker.… Then he’d leave.” As he departed, “loping off the floor with that great stride of his as though he was on some Texas plain,” she says, “he always gave the impression of someone in a hurry.”

“He just simply was not especially interested in general legislation that came to the floor of the House. Some of us were on the floor all the time, fighting for liberal causes. But he stayed away from the floor, and while he was there, he was very, very silent.”

The record is almost non-existent. Whole years went by in which Johnson did not rise even once to make a point of order, or any other point, not to ask or answer a question, not to support or attack a bill under discussion, not to participate, by so much as a single word, in an entire year’s worth of floor proceedings in the House.

Silent

Lyndon Johnson was not one of these Congressmen. Not that he was silent in the rear aisle or in the cloakrooms. He was friendly, gregarious—could, his fellow members agree, even be said to talk a lot. But he didn’t say anything. Congressmen now observed what classmates had once observed: that, while he might be speaking very volubly during a conversation on a controversial issue, he wouldn’t take a position on the issue—or, indeed, say anything of a substantive nature. He tried to avoid specifics, and if pinned down, would say what the other person wanted to hear.

And, most significantly of all, 1938, the year in which the New Deal had to face its own recession, was the year of the great debate in Washington over whether to fight that recession with mammoth new spending programs, or whether a balanced budget—the balanced budget which the President himself so devoutly wished for—was more important: an issue whose resolution was to affect the fundamentals of American life for years, if not decades, to come.