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

by Robert A. Caro

He had shouted “Roosevelt, Roosevelt, Roosevelt” to get to Congress; in Congress, he shouted nothing, said nothing—stood for nothing. Not only was he not in the van of any cause, he was not in the ranks, either.

Mrs. Douglas, who spent a lot of time with him, speculates on his reasons for acting this way. One that she suggests is “caution”: “Was it just caution? Just that he didn’t want to have a lot of his words come back at him—a more cautious way of working in the Congress than that of many others? … He was witty, he would tell stories, he was humorous. But he was always aware of being responsible for what he said. He was always aware that what he said might be repeated or remembered—even years later. And he didn’t want someone to come back years later, and say, ‘I remember when you said …”

Watching him talk so much—and say so little—Mrs. Douglas began to realize, she says, that Lyndon Johnson was “strong.” In Washington, she says, “everyone tried to find out where you stood. But he had great inner control. He could talk so much—and no one ever knew exactly where he stood.”

Talk much, say little

A House seat had been an indispensable staging area on the long road he saw before him; he had no choice but to come back a Congressman. But the House seat was only a staging area; it was not the destination at the end of that long road. He had needed the seat; he didn’t want to stay in it long. So his silence was not for the sake of power in the House; if he was keeping deliberately silent, it was for a different reason. Who could foresee the turnings of so long a road? No matter how safe a particular stand might seem now, no matter how politically wise, that stand might come back to haunt him someday. No matter what he said now, no matter how intelligent a remark might now seem, he might one day be sorry he had made it. And so he said nothing.

Careful in watching his words, not to bite him back

“He was a leader of men. Johnson had the knack of always appealing to a fellow about someone he didn’t like. If he was talking to Joe, and Joe didn’t like Jim, he’d say he didn’t like Jim, too—that was his leadership, that was his knack.” And, of course, for a while, congressional liberals thought he was one of them, while congressional conservatives thought he was one of them.

And then, of course, there was the aspect of his personality that had been so noticeable since his boyhood on the vacant lots of Johnson City, where, if he couldn’t pitch, he would take his ball and go home—the quality which led one Johnson City companion to say, “If he couldn’t lead, he didn’t care much about playing.” That aspect had been noticeable in Washington, too. “He couldn’t stand not being somebody—just could not stand it,” Estelle Harbin had said. Lyndon Johnson could not endure being only one of a crowd; he needed—with a compelling need—to lead, and not merely to lead but to dominate, to bend others to his will.

Somebody

And on Capitol Hill, where the pecking order was so clearly and firmly established, and he was near the bottom, he was able to hold attention much less. His stories, vivid though they were, commanded much less attention in a congressional cloakroom than in a Georgetown living room.

He wanted to give lectures—pontificating in the cloakroom or back of the rail as he had pontificated in the Dodge Hotel basement. But his fellow Congressmen resented his dogmatic, overbearing tone at least as strongly as his fellow congressional secretaries had resented it. His skills at manipulating men were useless without at least a modicum of power to back them up, and he possessed no power at all.

“Johnson kept asking for favors, and he simply didn’t have that many to give in return.”

“You can do those things once or twice,” Van Zandt says. “He did them too frequently. People would get irritated.”

“Guys [from other states] would come [in] and sit down” at a table near where Johnson was sitting; they would greet all their fellow members nearby, except him. “And he would get up and say, ‘Well, Joe, why in hell didn’t you speak to me?’ Well, they hadn’t spoken to him because they didn’t like him. They wouldn’t put up with him.”

But others—many others—did mind. They would draw back from his hand, shrug away from his arm. And sometimes, if he didn’t take the hint, they would get angry. Once he took a Congressman’s lapel in his hand, and the Congressman knocked his hand away. Without power to back it up, his manner of dealing with his colleagues earned him not the power he craved, but only unpopularity.

Although Johnson would not be thirty-one until August, 1939, he was no longer a particularly youthful Congressman. He was only a junior Congressman, one of several hundred junior Congressmen. One of a crowd.

How could he possibly transform a political base that consisted of an isolated district in a remote region of far-off Texas into a national base?

How could he possibly—in any foreseeable future—be anything more than an obscure Congressman? Lyndon Johnson could not endure being only one of a crowd. But as the Spring of 1939 turned into Summer, one of a crowd was all he was—and, for long years to come, it seemed, that was all he was likely to be.

Mexicans were satisfied with that wage, Garner would explain. “They are not troublesome people unless they become Americanized. The Sheriff can make them do anything.”

“Jack is very much opposed to the spending program; he’s against the tax program, and he’s against the relief program. He seems to be pretty much against everything and he hasn’t got a single concrete idea to offer on any of these programs. It’s one thing to criticize but something else again to offer solutions.”

Younger New Dealers, including, as one reporter wrote, “those ambitious young intellectuals around Mr. Roosevelt and their journalistic friends, get blue in the face when you mention John Garner’s name.”

Garner, Timmons wrote, “abhorred even the idea of a third term for any President,” good or bad. The basis for his abhorrence was simple: four decades in Washington had taught him what power did to men. “No man should exercise great powers too long,” he said. On another occasion, he was to say: “We don’t want any kings or emperors in this country. You have to curb the ambitions of every man, even the best of them, [because] they are human.” Often now, there crept into his blunt conversation, when discussing Roosevelt, the word “dictator.”

The White House needed to know what was going on in those meetings. It needed a spy in the Texas ranks.

“If we wanted to know something: ‘Call Lyndon Johnson.’

The pressure on Johnson was terrific. Sam Rayburn lost his temper. At one point he said to Johnson: ‘Lyndon, I am looking you right in the eye,’ and Johnson replied: ‘And I am looking you right back in the eye.’ Johnson says that he kept his temper and that after it was all over, Rayburn apologized to him. However, Johnson refused to move.”

Roosevelt formally offered him the REA post. The offer was significant principally because it indicated the strength of the impression Johnson had made on Roosevelt once he got the chance to spend time with him: the directorship of a nationwide agency, particularly one as fast-growing, and politically important, as REA, was not the kind of job offered to many men still short of their thirty-first birthday.

Another signal from the White House was private. The Navy Department was quietly informed that Lyndon Johnson was to be consulted—and his advice taken—on the awarding of Navy contracts in Texas.

The contract fixed a price of $23,381,000 for the base, with the contractors to be paid an additional $1.2 million for doing the work.

As war clouds gathered, and then broke in thunder, and the need for trained fliers—and for facilities to train them—became more urgent, the increases in funding for the base grew larger; appropriations for the Corpus Christi base soared to more than $100 million.

And with every increase in international tension, Americans became increasingly aware that they might soon be at war, and it became more and more evident that the Democratic Convention would select to lead the nation through war the man who had led it through the Depression.

Politicians began backing away from Garner’s candidacy. Observing him at a dinner in Washington, Ickes gloated that “All his buoyancy seemed to have deserted him. He looked glum and unhappy and did very little talking. I suppose there is no doubt that he realizes he is in for a terrific beating at the hands of the President.”

Then, at dawn on April 9, the day of the Illinois primary, German troops struck across the defenseless Danish border, and German destroyers and troopships suddenly loomed out of a snowstorm off the coast of Norway, torpedoing Norwegian gunboats as troops poured ashore. Denmark was overrun in a matter of hours; Norway’s main ports were all in Nazi hands—the phony war was over. Roosevelt defeated Garner in Illinois by eight to one. Garner was finished on April 9—and he knew it.

And whatever Roosevelt’s reasons for wanting to continue the fight against Garner in Texas, the motive of Johnson and Wirtz was now to become more clear, because of the nature of the campaign they directed. Although it was ostensibly a campaign against John Garner, its real target was not Garner but Sam Rayburn.

Talking as conservatively with conservatives as he talked liberally with liberals—“that was his leadership. That was his knack.”

“He went in there, and in an hour he had convinced them he wasn’t liberal,” Brown would recall.

One facet of Lyndon Johnson’s political genius was already obvious by 1940: his ability to look at an organization and see in it political potentialities that no one else saw, to transform that organization into a political force, and to reap from that transformation personal advantage.

He had done this twice before, transforming a social club (the White Stars) and a debating society (the Little Congress) into political forces that he used to further his own ends. Now he was to do it again.