LYNDON JOHNSON was so energetic and ingenious a Congressman that a knowledgeable observer called him "the best Congressman for a district that ever was." He was, moreover, secure in his congressional seat. In 1938, he would be one of eight Texas Congressmen who did not have an opponent in the Democratic primary, or in the general election in November. In 1940, he would again be unopposed. But a Congressman was not what Lyndon Johnson wanted to be. No sooner had he won the Tenth District seat than he was trying to leave it—as rapidly as possible.
On the day after he had been elected to the House of Representatives, while he was still in the hospital recuperating from his appendicitis attack, he had begun preparing for the next step toward his great goal by writing National Youth Administration officials to urge that Jesse Kellam's appointment as Texas NYA director be made permanent. His success in securing that appointment for his loyal Number Two man had ensured that his statewide organization would be kept in place, and he worked continuously to build it up and to utilize it. NYA work was only part of what his NYA men were doing all across Texas: whenever one visited a town to check on an NYA project, he was supposed also, says one, "to go to the Courthouse to see the Mayor" and other local politicians, and to see "the school people" and the postmasters, who were often key figures in a local political structure. The NYA man was instructed to put in a good word for Congressman Johnson, and to ask if, although Johnson was not the Mayor's own Congressman, there was any service Johnson could perform for him or for his town. He was also told to keep his ears open for political gossip, and report it to "the Chief." And these reports were not ignored. Says one NYA man, J. J. (Jake) Pickle, "I would write him long letters. And he would call me about them. He would re-explore what I had said. 'Why did he say that? Repeat that.'" The practice in Johnson's Washington office was, moreover, the same now that he was a Congressman as it had been when he was a congressional secretary: no matter how busy the office might be, requests from "important people"—people with money or political clout—from the other twenty congressional districts in Texas were to be given urgent priority.
Every Wednesday, the Speaker's Dining Room on the ground floor of the Capitol was reserved for a luncheon meeting of the Texas congressional delegation: two Senators, twenty-one Representatives (and, of course, should he want to sit in, Vice President Garner). At one luncheon each month, members of the delegation were permitted to bring occasional guests, either VIP's from their districts who happened to be in Washington or Washington notables. But such invitations were issued sparingly. Says James H. Rowe, who spent a lifetime in the inner circles of power: "It was a great honor to be invited. I think that, in a lifetime, I got there five times or maybe six."
At the other luncheons, guests were generally not permitted—no matter how important they might be. It was understood that these lunches were for business: to plan strategy or to iron out differences within the delegation so that Texas would present its customary united front. "You couldn't bring guests except on that one day," Congressman George H. Mahon of Lubbock recalls. "That was the unwritten law."
Lyndon Johnson did not obey this law, and he violated it in a manner particularly infuriating to the other members of the delegation: he invited to the "closed" lunches not only his constituents—but theirs. On one Wednesday, for example, Amon Carter, Jr., son of the publisher of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and the paper's editor, James Record, were in Washington, and they asked Fort Worth's Congressman, Wingate Lucas, if they could come to the famous delegation luncheon. But Lucas had once before asked Sam Rayburn for permission to bring an influential constituent to a closed session and had been refused. "There was no one I would rather take," Lucas says. "These were my two key supporters. But it was a closed session. I told them I couldn't take them. I went to the luncheon, and I was sitting there, and Lyndon Johnson walks in, and who do you think was with him?" Seeing Lucas, young Amon waved at him. Lucas sheepishly waved back.
(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.)
Another unwritten but very firm law prohibited a Congressman from interfering in the affairs of other districts. Johnson did not obey this law, either. Asking the White House for an increase in funding for the Reserve Officers Training Corps at Texas A&M University, in Luther A. Johnson's Sixth District, he wrote that although the university was not in his district, "it is mine by adoption."
And when federal grants were given in other districts—even grants for projects with which Johnson had had absolutely no connection—his tactics could be even more irritating.
Normally, if a project receiving a grant was located in a district with a Democratic Congressman, officials of the federal agency giving the grant would telephone that Congressman so that he could announce it, and thereby get credit for it. If the project was in Texas, however, Johnson's friends in the agencies would often telephone him instead—and it would be Johnson who made the announcement. "I had been pushing for an extension of the Public Health Service Hospital in Fort Worth," Lucas recalls. "Lyndon hadn't had anything to do with it. But when it came about, Lyndon announced it, without even bothering to notify me." And even when agency officials notified the district Congressman, they notified Johnson as well, and the efficiency of his staff, coupled with his long cultivation of the wire-service reporters, ensured that it was his name, not the other Congressman's, that would be attached to the announcement.
"A lot of the delegation was sore as hell," says the AP's Lewis T. ("Tex") Easley. They were, in fact, so sore that Johnson found it expedient to beat a retreat—but only a partial retreat. "He realized it was getting them too mad," Easley says. "So after a while, he would announce it jointly." The shift didn't do much to alleviate tensions. After several "joint" announcements of federal projects in Corpus Christi, Dick Kleberg, his former employer and the friendliest of men, could scarcely bring himself to nod to Johnson when they passed in the halls.
THE ILL-FEELING engendered in the Texas delegation by such tactics was exacerbated by Johnson's personality. His efforts to dominate other men succeeded with one or two fellow Texans (most notably, quiet, unassertive Representative Robert Poage of Waco), but with most of the delegation, tough, successful politicians in their own right, they aroused only resentment—as did his efforts to dominate every room in which he was present. As he strolled through the House Dining Room at lunchtime, acting if he were some visiting celebrity, nodding to left and right, "head huddling" with one man or another, or as he sat at a table, talking too loudly, other Congressmen muttered under their breaths. Albert Thomas of Houston would sit staring at Johnson, snarling sotto voce: "Listen to that sonofabitch talking about himself." Other mutters were occasioned by what Lucas calls "insincerity." Johnson "was so insincere," Lucas says. "He would tell everyone what he thought they wanted to hear. As a result, you couldn't believe anything he said." Ewing Thomason of El Paso had served in the Texas Legislature with Sam Johnson, and initially had gone out of his way to befriend Sam's son. Approaching Thomason in the dining room one day, Lyndon Johnson promised him his support on a controversial issue. "Ewing," he said earnestly, "if there's anyone you can believe, it's me." Then he swung across the room and started talking to several Congressmen who happened to be opposing Thomason on the issue. Thomason muttered: "There's that sonofabitch telling them the same thing he told me."
Mutter though they did, however, few cared to raise their voices—for they didn't want Sam Rayburn to hear them. "Rayburn had this very strong feeling for Lyndon," Lucas says. "And that feeling protected Lyndon. Nobody in the delegation wanted to get Rayburn mad."
THE OTHER MEMBERS of the delegation understood why Johnson was making speeches—and friends—all across Texas.
He certainly made no secret of the fact that he wanted to be a United States Senator, says George Mahon, who, without such ambitions himself, was tolerant of Johnson. Chatting with Mahon in the cloakroom, or walking back to the Cannon Building with him, Johnson would frequently pull out a newspaper clipping dealing with local conditions—not conditions in Austin, but in Houston, or Dallas, or Lubbock. "He would always have an editorial from the Dallas paper or the El Paso paper, and he would sit down next to you on the floor [of the House] and tell you or ask you [about it]. …" Influential citizens from other districts were cultivated not only when they were visiting Washington, but back home as well. He solicited speaking invitations from cities all across Texas, and, Mahon says, "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."
But Lyndon Johnson's fellow Texans saw no possibility that those ambitions would be realized—at least not for years and years. Neither of the state's two Senators, Tom Connally and Morris Sheppard—both in their early sixties—was considering retirement, and their immense popularity made remote indeed the possibility that either would be retired by the electorate. Should one of the two seats become vacant for some reason, Lyndon Johnson would not be the first choice to fill it. That would be Governor Allred, who wanted the job, or any one of several other state officials with a statewide reputation. Johnson would not be first even among the state's Congressmen; several would be more logical choices—most notably Maury Maverick, a White House favorite, or the energetic and ambitious Wright Patman, who was widely known for his authorship of the Patman Bonus Bill and several pieces of Populist legislation. 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. The isolation of that district—the expanse of empty plains that surrounded it and cut it off from the rest of Texas—had kept its Congressman unknown in most of the huge state. Says a Dallas political figure: "I had never even heard the name of Lyndon Johnson at that time."
None of the Texas delegation saw the real ambition—the goal toward which a Senate seat, like a congressional seat, would be only a stepping-stone. Had they seen it, they would have scoffed at it, and not only because of Johnson's youth and lack of power. 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. When, in 1946, his congressional colleagues gave Sam Rayburn a car, the plaque on it would read: "To Our Beloved Sam Rayburn—Who would have been President if he had come from any place but the South." But no member of the delegation saw the true goal, none got even a glimpse of it. When, in fact, his congressional colleagues were discussing the possibilities of a Southerner obtaining national office, Johnson would aver that there was no chance of that, and that a Southerner would be foolish to leave a secure seat on Capitol Hill to try for national office: "This is our home; this is where we have our strength," he would say.
Others did see the real goal—despite him. George Brown, of course, knew after that day on the blanket at the Greenbrier when Johnson turned down wealth in the interests of some unstated ambition. Rowe, who was keenly observant in his quiet way—and who spent more time with Johnson than any of the other young New Dealers—says, "From the day he got here, he wanted to be President." And one time, at least, Johnson did reveal himself. One evening, alone with Welly Hopkins, he burst out: "By God, I'll be President someday." But even the few who guessed the goal at which Lyndon Johnson was really aiming could not imagine how he could ever realize it. A Senate seat was not the only path to it—national power of another type, behind-the-scenes power, might help him along the road—but men conversant with such power—the young New Dealers he had cultivated—could not see how he could possibly obtain some of it, at least not in any foreseeable future. They were his friends, but they were only young and junior members of the Administration. The fact that he was also young and junior was emphasized by the difficulty Corcoran had experienced trying to get him even a few minutes with the President to obtain approval of the Pedernales Electric Co-operative loan.
As soon as he had arrived in Washington in May, 1937, Johnson had attempted to capitalize on the glow of the Galveston meeting, using every possible opening, no matter how slim; during 1937, he requested autographed pictures not only from the President but from the President's son, James, from presidential secretary Marvin McIntyre, from every White House staffer he had met, however briefly—and the requests were accompanied by reminders of the circumstances of his election (sending a copy of the Galveston photograph to "My dear Marvin," Johnson noted that "This photograph was taken … shortly after my election to Congress in the hot fight over reorganization of the Judiciary"), and by reminders of his loyalty; his letters referred to Roosevelt as "the Chief." On Christmas Eve, 1937, he had delivered to the President, to his son, to McIntyre, and to other White House staffers the huge turkeys (so big they seemed to have been "crossed with a beef"), accompanied by carefully composed notes. "Dear Mr. McIntyre," one said, "The other day I went up into the hills of Central Texas where I was born to pick out the finest turkey I could get my hand on for the President. … I'm asking my secretary to deliver this turkey to you at the White House, for the President. … And I want to tell you that one of the reasons my own Christmas is so pleasant and joyous is due to the fact that with a million things to do, you have also had time to take a youngster on the hill under your wing when he needed it and to give him a lot of help, encouragement and advice. I am very grateful. Most sincerely yours, Lyndon."
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. In September, 1937, McIntyre agreed to try to do some small favor for Johnson—its exact nature is unclear—but had to write him, "I regret very much that I have been unable to accomplish your desire. …" Replies to Johnson's recommendations on presidential appointments—for Governor Allred as United States Solicitor General, for example—were form letters, perfunctory and non-committal, letters not even from the President but from one of his secretaries. Flatter though he might, Johnson could not flatter his way into the presidential presence; as late as June, 1938, a year after he had come to Washington as a Congressman, he still had not seen Roosevelt personally; when, at that time, he attempted to secure through McIntyre his first appointment—for "five minutes" in "the next five or six days" to see the jovial companion of his Texas train trip—McIntyre apparently had to tell him that his request had been turned down. Worried—for Allred had asked him to present in person an invitation to Roosevelt to attend the dedication of a public works project in Texas, and Johnson did not want to confess to the Governor that he had no access at all to the President—he made, on June 8, a formal, written request to Roosevelt for "ten minutes on Thursday or Friday"; he was given an appointment—for August 15. And before that date arrived, the appointment was canceled. The PEC audience, in September, 1938, did not improve the situation. In succeeding months, Johnson, despite requests, did not get through the door of the Oval Office again. During his first two years in Washington, that was his only audience with Roosevelt.
ON CAPITOL HILL, developments were very discouraging. He might be a member of Rayburn's "Board of Education," but in the world of Congress, where seniority ruled with an iron hand, without seniority even admittance to that select drinking society meant little—as Johnson learned the very first time he attended a meeting of the Naval Affairs Committee.
The committee's chairman, Carl Vinson, was from the little town of Milledgeville in Georgia's red-clay hill country. He had not yet been nicknamed "the Swamp Fox" in tribute to a mastery of legislative stratagems which Southerners compared to Francis Marion's mastery of guerrilla warfare, but he had already been nicknamed "the Admiral" in recognition of his autocratic manner in dealing with the Admirals of what he called "My Navy" (whom he humiliated by pretending he didn't know their names while ordering them around like cabin boys); with members of the hated "quote Upper House unquote"; and with the twenty-six members of his committee. Slouched down in the center of the two-tiered horseshoe of committee seats in the committee room on the third floor of the Cannon Building, his glasses teetering on the very tip of his long nose, chewing on the shredded remains of a ten-cent cigar, spitting at the spittoon that was always nearby, dressed in a collar two sizes too big and in baggy, food-stained suits, "he looks," one reporter was to write, "like the country lawyer he is, and about once removed from the cracker barrel," but he ran the committee, in the words of another observer, "like a dictator." When, at that first meeting, Johnson, seated on the lower horseshoe among the junior members, began questioning a witness—along with the junior member sitting next to him, young Warren Magnuson of Seattle—Vinson gaveled the hearing into recess and said, as Magnuson recalls the words: "I want to see you two boys in the back room." In his small, bare private office behind the hearing room, Magnuson says, "he let us have it." "We have a rule in this committee," the chairman said. New members were not allowed to ask so many questions; in his first year on the committee, a member was allowed to ask one question; in his second year, two, "and so on."
The Admiral may have been exaggerating the rigidity of his rules—but not by much. "He runs a tight ship," other members warned the two young men, and on that ship, seniority was the standard. Junior members he addressed as "Ensign"; only after some years, and only after the member had pleased him with his deference—and silence—would he be promoted to "Commander." When the Admiral starts calling you "Captain," the other members told Johnson and Magnuson, "you know you've arrived," and no one arrived quickly. Attempting to buck the Admiral's system was useless. If you tried to collect information for independent judgments on naval affairs, the Navy wouldn't give it to you—and neither, without specific permission from Vinson, would the committee's own staff members. If you tried to rally other committee members behind an independent stand, you would find the task all but impossible; the favors Vinson had to dispense—not only the small favors, like the junket to Mexico City on a Navy plane, but the big favors, like the location of a naval installation in your district—were denied, usually forever, to a committee member who had incurred his displeasure. Once a new member, currying favor with Vinson, came up to him after a session and said, "Well, I voted with you." Vinson replied curtly: "What the hell do you think I put you on this committee for?" On "that committee," its members said, "there are no disagreements at all." And if you tried to go outside the committee, and challenge a committee report on the floor of the House, your chances of winning such a vote, from members who might also one day want installations and other favors—a promotion or a transfer for a friend or constituent, for example—and who were, in any case, under the control of other committee chairman, were all but nil. 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. And they ran their committees like men answerable to no one; a little more than a decade earlier, one chairman had faced down a rebellion in his committee by declaring, "I am the committee"; under the rule that one House leader was to call "the strongest and most compelling of all rules, the rule of immemorial usage," that declaration was still true in 1937, as it would be true for decades to come. To observe the House of Representatives was to observe what absolute, untrammeled, unchallengeable power did to men.
The House as a whole was run the same way. 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. Ability wouldn't get you into that select circle. Energy wouldn't get you into it. Only age would get you into it. There was only one way to become one of the rulers of the House: to wait.
And, harshest fact of all about Congress, even waiting was no guarantee. On Naval Affairs, the wait would probably be long, for Vinson, who had come to Congress in 1914 at the age of thirty, was now one of the youngest chairmen—in 1937, only fifty-three years old. As a Southern Democrat, he could probably hold his district indefinitely. As long as the Democrats held Congress, he would be chairman until he died or retired, an event that might be many years away. (In fact, it would be twenty-eight years away: Vinson would be chairman* until 1965, when he retired at the age of eighty-one.) And Vinson's departure would not, of course, make Johnson chairman. If, in 1937, he turned in his seat on the lower horseshoe, he could see above him a whole line of faces—the committee's senior Democratic members, who sat on Vinson's left—that stood between him and the chairman's gavel. Since he was the committee's most junior member—the one last elected, the one with the least seniority—even the Democrats on the lower horseshoe, even the thirty-two-year-old Magnuson, stood between him and the chairmanship. Some of the Democrats would lose their seats, some would die, some might become Senators—but, with the exception of those who left the committee in these ways, he would, in effect, have to survive the chairmanships of all these men, the chairmanships laid end to end, before he became chairman. And, of course, even if he waited out all those chairmanships, he might still not be chairman. 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. He couldn't help being aware of all those Republicans who had waited patiently during the twelve years of Republican rule (and, of course, for long years before that) as the Republicans ahead of them died or retired, who had inched on their committee's dais chair by chair toward the only chair on that dais that mattered, and then—just as they were about to reach it—had, in an instant, had the chair snatched away from them as their party lost control of the House. A young Congressman such as Lyndon Johnson could see such men, old now, pausing for breath as they climbed the long stairs to the Capitol, or napping in the large, overstuffed chairs in the cloakrooms after lunch—it was so easy to sink into those big chairs and have lunch brought to you on the solid trays that fit across both arms instead of eating standing up at the counter in the cloakroom so you could get back to work. There were even a few who were turning senile, and who would sit in the Chamber hour after hour, staring into space, refusing to retire gracefully, still hanging on, year after year. Or he could see men—Democrats—who had finally reached the chairmanship, but so late in life that it no longer meant much to them. Another Congressman—Donald Riegle, who, in 1966, came to Congress at twenty-eight, the same age as Lyndon Johnson—would see the same thing: "Some of these [chair] men can't hear very well, can't see very well, have difficulty working a full day." He would muse about what it meant to him: "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." And he would describe also his feeling that nothing would change the system, for the men who would have to change it had invested too much of their own lives in it: having waited so long for power, they would, now that they had it, do nothing to dilute it. Congress could be a trap as cruel in its way as the Hill Country—a trap with jaws, the system called seniority, strong enough to hold fast even Lyndon Johnson's ambition.
IN 1938, a year after he came to Congress, Lyndon Johnson made an effort to break out of that trap.
The only House committee in which a junior member was anything more than a cipher was Appropriations, and of all the House committees, only Appropriations had the power to fund government programs. Other committees could authorize a program, but the money for it had to come—in a separate bill—from Appropriations. The Appropriations Committee therefore had unique power. More important to a young Congressman such as Johnson, its members were divided into thirteen subcommittees—each of which had autonomy unique among House subcommittees. Because of the diversity of Appropriations' work—it had to cover the whole range of government operations, not just agriculture, say, or defense—the members of each subcommittee became the experts in the field it covered, and the committee chairman, eighty-year-old Edward T. Taylor of Colorado, customarily deferred to its decisions. Even more important to a young Congressman, these subcommittees were small—in 1937, most had only six or seven members—and their smallness kept the meetings informal, so even an initiate had a chance to contribute something, and members with a few years' seniority often were allowed considerable input. A Congressman—even a junior Congressman—who was named to Appropriations would become automatically, if not a power in the House, at least more than one of the herd.
In 1938, the traditional "Texas seat" on Appropriations fell vacant, and although George Mahon wanted it and had seniority, Johnson tried to step into it, planting newspaper stories hinting that his "close administration contacts" would enable him to use the Appropriations post to obtain more federal projects for Texas.
But he never had a chance. The Texas seat would be filled by the Texas delegation, and on that delegation, Mahon recalls, "Mr. Rayburn had the power." Although Mahon knew of Rayburn's paternal fondness for Johnson, he never worried about the result. "Whatever Rayburn said went," he says. "But Rayburn followed the rules." And the rule that mattered was seniority. "I was the senior Texan who wanted the spot," Mahon says. "I was in line for it. If you were the next man in line, you got it—that was the way the unvarying rule was." Mahon got it—found the immediate rewards he had expected ("Even as a new member of Appropriations," he says, "if you were on Appropriations, you were courted by other members"), and began the climb to greater rewards: in eleven years, he would be chairman of his subcommittee, in twenty-six years, at the age of sixty-four, chairman of the full committee; for his remaining fifteen years in Congress (until he retired at seventy-nine), he would be a power on Capitol Hill. Johnson didn't get it; he remained a member of the Naval Affairs Committee—a junior member of a committee on which junior members were limited even in the number of questions they could ask.
HARDLY HAD HE ARRIVED in Congress, moreover, when an event occurred which apparently convinced him that, even if the long, slow path to power in the House had been the only one open to him, it might not be possible for him.
The speech that Sam Ealy Johnson gave for his son was the last speech he ever made. His heart had been failing for years, and in July, 1937, two months after his son's election to Congress, he suffered another massive heart attack, and doctors told Rebekah it was just a matter of time. He was taken to the Scott & White Clinic in Temple, Texas, where more modern medical facilities were available than in the Hill Country, and he was kept there, often in an oxygen tent, for the next two months. But when Lyndon returned from Washington during the congressional recess of September and visited his father, Sam asked to be taken home to Johnson City. Lyndon protested, but Sam said, "Give me my breeches, Lyndon, I want to go home where people know when you're sick and care when you die." Lyndon checked him out of the hospital, and drove him home, where, on October 23, 1937, twelve days after his sixtieth birthday, Sam Ealy Johnson died.
The next day he was taken to the Johnson burial ground on the banks of the Pedernales, the only acre left to the Johnsons from the Johnson Ranch that Sam had tried so hard to keep in the family. The burial ground was about a half mile upstream from the house to which he had brought Rebekah when they were first married. It was about a hundred yards from the gully—"the gully big enough to walk elephants in"—that Sam had filled and refilled with soil in a vain attempt to grow cotton.
He had asked to be carried to the burial ground not in a modern hearse but in an old-fashioned one—in one of the tall hearses with the carved wooden "draperies" covering the side glass that had been used before the invention of the automobile. One had been found in San Marcos—mounted not on a wagon but on the bed of a Model T Ford—and it clattered out of Johnson City and down the side path to the ford across the Pedernales through which Sam had, as a young man with dreams, so often spurred his horse on the way to the Legislature in Austin. Governor Allred was riding, with Secretary of State Ed Clark, in a car behind the hearse; Clark, anxious to curry favor with Lyndon Johnson, had persuaded the Governor to attend. Since the two men had been told so many times—by Lyndon—that his father was only an impoverished drunk, they had thought that the funeral would be poorly attended and that they would be doing the new Congressman a great favor. Therefore, they were surprised when they reached the river crossing. Across the river, the bank of the Pedernales was covered with people as far as the eye could see.
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.
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 not all the uniforms were khaki; it was on the riverbank that afternoon that Ava Johnson Cox saw for the first time, standing at attention, several old men in shirts and light-blue riding breeches holding "funny-looking" hats, "like a Stetson but not quite," and realized she was seeing uniforms that had charged up San Juan Hill. 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."
The service began, of course, with "Shall We Gather at the River," and the sound of the singing from hundreds of voices carried up and down the lonely Pedernales Valley. And although he cannot remember exactly what was said, one of Allred's aides was to recall forty years later his astonishment when the minister, during the eulogy, listed Sam Johnson's accomplishments. "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." The service ended with a few words from one of Sam's friends, a rawboned old Texas politician, Railroad Commissioner Lon Smith; the words were taken from Hamlet: "He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again."
A MOMENT OF TENSION occurred after the service when Sam's immediate family, alone in the Johnson home, was sitting around the dining-room table with Lyndon, in his father's chair, disposing of his father's personal effects. Lying on the table was Sam's heavy gold watch and chain, his most prized possession. Lyndon's three sisters and his brother, Sam Houston Johnson, had said hardly a word, but when Lyndon reached out and started to take the watch for himself, Lucia, the youngest and meekest of the sisters, put her hand on his arm and stopped him. "No," she said. "You can't have the watch. That belongs to Sam Houston now. Daddy wanted him to have it. We all know that." Rebekah took the watch and handed it to Lyndon's younger brother.
Sam Houston Johnson was to write, "It was an embarrassing moment for Lyndon, and I felt sorry for him. As a matter of fact, I wanted him to have it because he was the older brother—but I didn't press the point for fear of antagonizing my sisters." On Christmas morning, 1958, more than twenty years later, Sam Houston wrapped the watch and gave it to Lyndon. He recalls telling his brother: "I want you to have the watch. Daddy really wanted you to have it. Anyway, I'm liable to leave it somewhere."
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.
IF HE DID NOT INHERIT—at least not immediately—his father's watch, Lyndon Johnson believed he had inherited something else.
He had always been so deeply aware of his remarkable physical resemblance to his tall, gawky, big-eared, big-nosed father, and his father's habit of grabbing a listener's lapel. 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.
To the heredity and humiliation which had shaped Lyndon Johnson and had spurred him harshly forward was added the spur of fear. He entered one of his periods of deep depression, one that lasted for several months. It was punctuated, as were periods of crisis throughout his life, by illness; twice in a span of a few months he was hospitalized with what is variously described as "bronchitis," "pneumonia" or "nervous exhaustion." During this period, when friends attempted to cheer him up by discussing with him the topic which was ordinarily of deepest interest to him—his future—Johnson, whenever reference was made to the possibility that he might have to make his career in the House of Representatives, would reply, in a low voice: "Too slow. Too slow." Rayburn had begun trudging along that path early—he had been only thirty years old when first elected to Congress in 1912, scarcely older than Johnson was now. He had become Majority Leader in 1937—when he was fifty-five; he was still not Speaker. Sam Johnson had died when he was sixty. And what if the Democrats should lose control of the House before Rayburn's chance came? The path to power in the House—the silence, the obeisance—was not too narrow for Lyndon Johnson, who could follow surefootedly the narrowest political road. But it was too long. He had managed to break out of the trap of the Hill Country; he might not be able to escape the trap of the seniority system before he died.
And then, in 1939, Sam Ealy Johnson's younger brother George Desha Johnson—Lyndon's schoolteacher uncle who had gotten him a job at Sam Houston High and with whom Lyndon had boarded while he was teaching there—suffered a massive heart attack. He died a few months later—at the age of fifty-seven.
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.
Muffled within the institutional structure of Capitol Hill, his voice would be magnified if he chose to address himself to the nation instead of the House. When he spoke in the well of the House, the reporters sitting above him in the press gallery were a sounding board through which his views could reach an entire nation. A Congressman didn't even need the well; the very corridors of Congress, where reporters take down a Congressman's comment on a major development, could be a sounding board. Even a mimeograph machine could be a national megaphone—if the machine was in a Congressman's office; "Any House member can make the news … simply by getting a press handout to the [press] gallery early in the morning," Richard Boiling was to say. "When a major subject is on top of the news … and the wire services are hurrying to assemble a reaction story, any provocative comment from a member of Congress is likely to get scooped up and given a sentence or two." All a Congressman had to do was speak, and he would be a spokesman. Proof of this fact was readily available to Lyndon Johnson in the careers of three Congressmen with whom he was particularly well acquainted: proof from the past, for one junior Congressman who had declined to stay silent, who had refused "to be relegated to that lockjawed ostracism" because he was the voice of 200,000 persons who needed a voice that would be heard, had been Sam Rayburn; and proof from the present, in the persons of Wright Patman, his father's friend, who had risen to influence in the House on stands that his father would have applauded; and of Maury Maverick, whose district adjoined Johnson's; 1937, the year Johnson came to Congress, was the year of peak influence of Maury and his "Mavericks," thirty-five young Congressmen who met every week in Renkel's Cafeteria to discuss strategies for confounding the House's conservative leadership and advancing causes which, as the Washington Post commented, "would have been labeled Bryanesque twenty-five years ago"; Maverick himself had become a national rallying point for such causes. 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.
Such a course was not invariably quixotic even in terms of immediate results. Anyone who thought a young Congressman's cause was lost before it began to live had only to remember that Sam Rayburn had become the "Railroad Legislator," with significant bills to his credit, by the end of his second term in Congress. Johnson, moreover, had had an opportunity to see this with his own eyes during his years as a congressional secretary, for those years had been the years of Fiorello La Guardia, tiny, swarthy, black-sombreroed, tough enough to face down Garner in the chair and make him like it; La Guardia who fought "the Interests" on behalf of the rural as well as the urban poor ("Fight, farmers, fight. Fight for your homes and your children. Your names will live with Paul Revere"), and who had, in 1932, succeeded in having outlawed (in the Norris–La Guardia Act) the hated yellow-dog contract. Liberal—and radical—stands might eventually destroy a Maverick whose San Antonio constituency, largely military men and Catholics, was conservative. But Lyndon Johnson could have taken such stands with no such fear, for in his district, that stronghold of the People's Party, the New Deal's popularity never waned. Johnson might, in fact, have been expected to take such stands; his victory, after all, had been based on such stands; he had shouted "Roosevelt, Roosevelt, Roosevelt" and promised to support future as well as present New Deal proposals.
Taking stands was not, however, a course which Johnson adopted. He did not take one, in fact, even on the issue on which he had based his campaign. After Johnson took his oath as Congressman on May 13, Maverick had shouted: "Mr. Speaker, the gentleman just sworn in, Mr. Lyndon Johnson, supported the President's judiciary plan and was overwhelmingly elected!" Johnson himself said nothing about the President's plan at the time or—so far as can be determined—at any other time while in Washington. By May 13, Supreme Court-packing had been effectively doomed by congressional opposition. But the fight on the plan was far from over—the Senate Judiciary Committee's crucial 10-8 vote against it would not come until May 18, and maneuvering over the terms of a compromise measure would continue for another two months. But Johnson, who had asked his district to send him to Washington to show support of the President's plan, offered not a single public word of support himself. As for other causes, Johnson's overall record on the introduction of national legislation—legislation which would have an effect outside his own district—was equally striking. Lyndon Johnson became a Congressman in 1937. He did not introduce a national bill in 1937—or in 1938, 1939, or 1940. When he introduced one in 1941—on December 9, two days after Pearl Harbor—it was a bill to create a job for himself by merging the National Youth Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps into a single agency which would train youths for war work in factories and to whose chairmanship he hoped President Roosevelt would appoint him, because of his NYA experience. Since he did not introduce a national bill in 1942, that single bill—an attempt to increase his personal power—was the only piece of national legislation he proposed during his first six years in Congress. Was this a function of inexperience? He was hardly more active in this regard at the end of his House career than at the beginning. He introduced one "national" bill in 1943, and two in 1945—but none in 1946, none in 1947, and only one in 1948. During his more than eleven years in the House of Representatives, he introduced only five bills that would affect the country as a whole.
As striking as the paucity of such bills was their sponsor's effort on their behalf. With a single exception, there was no effort. During his eleven years in the House, only once did Lyndon Johnson appear in support of a national bill he had introduced before the committee to which it had been referred—and, with that one exception, no national bill he introduced received serious (or, indeed, even pro forma) consideration from any House committee. Of the five pieces of legislation of interest to more than his own district which, in eleven years, he placed in the House hopper, four were pieces of paper introduced pro forma—without genuine interest and enthusiasm from their sponsor. The one fight he made, for a 1943 bill aimed at curbing absenteeism in war plants by requiring the drafting of any worker absent too often, ended in fiasco; he apparently introduced it, in his own Naval Affairs Committee, without the courtesy of consulting with the chairman of the committee that had jurisdiction over such measures, the House Labor Committee. The Naval Affairs Committee reported the measure out favorably, but the angry chairman of the Labor Committee asked the Rules Committee, which controls the flow of legislation to the floor, not to let this bill reach the floor; an embarrassed Carl Vinson had to admit that he had assumed—incorrectly—that the Labor Committee had surrendered jurisdiction; and the bill died in the Rules Committee. 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, at least not speeches to be delivered in Washington. The speeches that the brilliant Henderson kept turning out were delivered only on Johnson's trips home to the district. This was a dramatic departure from the usual practice among Congressmen, who were allowed merely to insert their speeches into the Congressional Record without bothering to read them on the floor of the House. All that was required—under the House rule allowing members virtually unlimited freedom to "revise and extend" their remarks in the Record—was that a member read the opening words of a speech, and hand it to a clerk for reprinting in the Record. 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. The Record was crammed with speeches never spoken on the floor. But, although Johnson made maximum use of other avenues of publicity, very few of the remarks "extended" were extended by him. Entire years went by in which he did not use the device even once.*
His record in regard to "real" speeches—talks of more than a paragraph or two in length that were actually delivered in the House—was even more striking.
On August 8, 1941, after weeks of prodding by Sam Rayburn, who felt it was time, and more than time, for Johnson to raise his voice in the House, Johnson stepped into the well of the House to advocate the extension of the Selective Service Act. The date was noteworthy. He had been a Congressman for four years. With the exception of a brief memorial tribute to Albert Sidney Burleson when Burleson died in November, 1937, this was the first speech he had made.
He didn't make another one for eighteen months. Rising then to argue for his absenteeism bill, he could say, "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.† 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 wouldn't fight in the well of the House—and he wouldn't fight on the floor. His demeanor during debates—during the give-and-take argumentation about legislation—was noteworthy. Imitating it, his colleague Helen Gahagan Douglas of California depicts a person sitting slouched far down in a chair, his head in one hand; "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."
The "Mavericks" did a lot of fighting on the floor. When Johnson arrived in Washington, they expected him to enroll in their ranks—a not unnatural expectation, since they had read about this man who had "shouted Roosevelt, Roosevelt, Roosevelt," and had won by supporting the President on the Supreme Court-packing issue. Roosevelt was their hero and the President's causes their causes, and Maverick had assured them that this young man whom he said he knew well held the same views as they. In fact, Johnson enrolled for a time—for several weeks, he attended the dinners at Renkel's. But then he stopped attending, and the Mavericks found that if he held their views, he would not argue for them. Not that he would argue against them. Says one of them, Edouard V. M. Izac of California: "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." And Izac's evaluation—which is echoed by others among Johnson's colleagues—is documented, quite dramatically, by the record of Johnson's participation in House discussions and debates. 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.*
His attitude toward comments that would be made public through the press was equally notable. He was not one of the Congressmen who sought out reporters to comment on some national issue. On the contrary, he would go to unusual lengths to avoid having to reveal his opinion. A reporter would be standing in a corridor, soliciting comments from passing Congressmen. Johnson would start to turn into that corridor, see the reporter, whirl on his heel, and hastily walk back the way he had come.
If he didn't fight in public, would he fight in private? Some of the most effective Congressmen, while rather silent in the well of the House or on the floor (although the Congressional Record indicates that few were as silent as Johnson), are active in the aisle at the rear of the House Chamber, or in its cloakrooms. Standing in that aisle, one foot up on the brass rail that separates the aisle from the members' seats, these "brass-railers" quietly buttonhole fellow members to argue for or against legislation.
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. He did it very well—as discussions with his congressional colleagues reveal. If the Congressman was a liberal, he believes that Lyndon Johnson, as a Congressman, was a liberal. Says the staunchly liberal Mrs. Douglas: "We agreed on so many of the big issues. He basically agreed with the liberals." But if the Congressman was a conservative, he says that Lyndon Johnson, as a Congressman, was a conservative. Says the reactionary upstate New York Republican Sterling Cole: "Politically, if we disagreed, it wasn't apparent to me. Not at all." Great issues came before the House in these years; 1938, for example, was the year in which it was embroiled in bitter battles over President Roosevelt's proposal to reorganize the executive branch and create new Cabinet departments to facilitate the meeting of new social needs—"the dictator bill," angry Congressmen called it. 1938 was also the year of the great battle over the wages-and-hours bill, the proposal to free American workers from the bondage of the early industrial age. It was the year of the battle over the proposal to extend and make more meaningful Social Security benefits. 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. Lyndon Johnson did not participate—neither with legislation nor with debate, not on the well of the House or on the floor or in its cloakrooms or committees—in these battles. 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. Lyndon Johnson would later be called a legislative genius. A legislator is a maker of laws. During the eleven years that Lyndon Johnson served in the law-making body that is the House of Representatives, few of its 435 members had less to do with the making of its laws than he.
Some of the more astute of his colleagues felt that they understood the reason for his silence. 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."
Even years later. By keeping silent, Johnson might, of course, simply be following a proven path to power in the House of Representatives. It was the path that Rayburn had taken—and Rayburn was in power now.
But they were not on the same path. Power in the House was the power Rayburn wanted; the lone chair atop the triple dais was the goal that iron-willed man had set for himself as a boy in a barn. That was his only goal; he had been asked once to run for the Senate, all but assured of success. He had refused to make the race. Although the immense power he wielded as Majority Leader and, after September, 1940, as Speaker, would have allowed him, had he wished to do so, to wield considerable statewide power in Texas, he declined every opportunity to do so. The only interest he ever displayed in the NYA was to obtain Lyndon Johnson's appointment as its head; the only interest he ever displayed in the PWA was to have it build a dam—the Denison Dam—in his own district; he displayed no interest at all in other statewide organizations the New Deal was creating in Texas—the WPA, for example, or the Rural Electrification Administration; most of the big businessmen who wielded so much statewide power in Texas couldn't even get an appointment with him on their trips to Washington. Only the House itself mattered.
But power in the House was not the power at which Johnson was aiming; the triple dais was not high enough for him. The difference between the aims of the older man and the younger had been demonstrated even before Johnson became a Congressman, when, as Kleberg's secretary, he had placed himself at the service of businessmen who were not from Kleberg's district. Had not practically his first move as Congressman—made while he was still in his hospital bed—been to keep the statewide NYA under his control? And now were not the letters from his office going out not just to addresses in his district but to addresses in Houston, and Dallas, and El Paso as well? 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.
HIS STANDING on Capitol Hill—outside the Texas delegation—was, moreover, not improving.
For a while, he was very popular with his fellow Congressmen, for the same reasons he was popular with the young New Dealers: not only because of his charm, his storytelling ability, his desire to ingratiate and his skill in doing so, but because, in George Brown's words, "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.
But some of them began to catch on. Liberals found it was useless to ask him to speak in support of a bill in which they were interested. Conservatives found it impossible to persuade him to speak in support of their legislation. The judgment implied in Izac's statement that Johnson was "very, very silent" on the floor came to be a widespread judgment among Johnson's colleagues. Pragmatism was of course not unknown on Capitol Hill; for many Congressmen it was a way of life—caution was only common sense. But, in the opinion of more and more of his fellows, Lyndon Johnson's pragmatism and caution went beyond the norm: colleagues committed to causes began to regard him with something akin to scorn.
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.
At cocktail parties, he could hold the stage when the other guests were young New Dealers, and even for a time, by the force of his personality, when the guests included older men with more power. But in power-obsessed Washington, when older, more powerful men were present, he couldn't hold the stage for long. 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 advice. It was good advice—he had a rare talent not only for politics but for organization, and Congressmen were continually searching for ways to improve the organization of their offices, a skill of which he was the master. But few of his colleagues wanted advice from a junior colleague. 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. Says James Van Zandt of Pennsylvania: "When he wanted something, he really went after it. He would say: 'Now, Goddammit, Jimmy, I helped you on this, and I want you to help me on this.'" And, Van Zandt adds, "Johnson kept asking for favors, and he simply didn't have that many to give in return." He tried too hard—much too hard—to trade on what minor "help" he had given. "You can do those things once or twice," Van Zandt says. "He did them too frequently. People would get irritated."
The pattern which had emerged in the Little Congress (and, before that, at San Marcos) was repeated in the Big Congress. The older men to whom he was so deferential were fond of Lyndon Johnson. Among his contemporaries, those whom he needed and to whom he was also deferential—Rowe and Corcoran, for example—were also fond of him. Another few—very few—of his contemporaries in Congress were fond of him, most of them unassertive men such as Poage and Van Zandt. But the feeling of others was quite different. Says O. C. Fisher, whose Texas district adjoined Johnson's Tenth: "He had a way of getting along with the leaders, and he didn't bother much with the small fry. And let me tell you, the small fry didn't mind. They didn't want much to do with him, either." Even Van Zandt, one of his admirers, says: "People were critical of him because he was too ambitious, too forceful, too pushy. Some people didn't like him." As he walked through the House Dining Room, the resentment that followed him did not come only from members of the Texas delegation. Says Lucas: "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." The situation was summed up in a symbolic gesture—a shrinking away. Lyndon Johnson still practiced his habit of grasping a man's lapel with one hand and putting his other arm around the man's shoulders, holding him close while staring into his eyes and talking directly into his face. Some of his fellow Congressmen didn't mind him doing this, even liked having him do it. Recalls Van Zandt: "He would put his hand on my shoulder and say, 'Now, look, Jimmy …' I liked him a lot. You always felt relaxed in his presence." 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.
His role on the Naval Affairs Committee could hardly have added to his enjoyment of life in Congress. He and Warren Magnuson, a dashing bachelor who sat in the next chair in the committee's lower horseshoe, had, according to one of Carl Vinson's aides, discovered "how to play up to" the chairman by telling him "stories"—stories with a sexual tinge: "humorous dirty jokes and the details of amorous escapades, which he enjoyed with real vicarious pleasure." Devoted to his invalid wife, Vinson, Magnuson says, "went home early each afternoon to take care of his wife, and he never invited anyone to visit him. … He was a recluse." But the two young Congressmen began dropping in on him, telling him their "stories," and, Magnuson says, "Before long we were in solidly with the Admiral." Fond though he may have been of them, however, they were still only ensigns on a very tight ship—as Johnson was constantly, and painfully, being reminded. Occasionally, during the questioning of a witness, he would essay a small witticism. "Is the Gentleman from Texas finished?" Vinson would demand dryly. The gavel would crash down. "Let's proceed," the chairman would say. Johnson had become fascinated with tape recorders, which were, in 1939 and 1940, large, clumsy devices just beginning to come into public use. One morning, he brought a tape recorder into the committee room before the hearing began, and set it up at his seat, running the wire over to a microphone which he placed on the witness table. Vinson arrived, slouched down in his seat, lit up a cigar, and then, just as he was about to gavel the hearing to order, noticed the recorder.
Peering over the glasses teetering on the end of his nose, he said, "Now what does the Gentleman from Texas have there?"
"A tape recorder, Mr. Chairman," Johnson replied. "We have a witness from Texas this morning. I'd like to record his statement, and send it to the radio stations down in Texas."
"Well," Vinson said, "the Gentleman is not going to do that. We are not going to record witnesses, and we are not going to send statements back to the district." He curtly ordered Johnson to remove the recorder from the room; to Johnson's humiliation, he had to do so before the eyes of the visitor from Texas.
When Johnson had been sworn in in 1937, only two Congressmen had been younger than he. Now, in 1939, there were quite a few younger. He was no longer even the youngest Congressman from Texas. Newspaper articles on the state's congressional contingent often mentioned "the baby of the delegation," and they were referring to Lindley Beckworth of Gladewater, near Marshall, who had been elected in 1938 at the age of twenty-five. 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.
AT THE OTHER END of Pennsylvania Avenue, too, he seemed to be retreating rather than advancing.
Unable to see President Roosevelt in person, he attempted on March 24, 1939, to catch his attention and elicit a response with a rather unusual letter. It was ostensibly a recommendation of an acquaintance for a federal post, but it began:
Sir:
Sometimes as I go about my work for the Tenth District of Texas and the United States as a whole, thoughts come into my mind I feel I just have to talk over with the Chief. I know I can't consume your time with them in appointments, but I am persuaded to do what I am doing now—get out my paper and typewriter and drop you a note. …
If Johnson had hoped to thus elicit a response from "the Chief," however, he was to be disappointed. The response came instead from presidential secretary Stephen Early, and it was distinctly pro forma: "You may be sure that your comments will be given careful consideration," it said. (In the event, Johnson's candidate did not get the post.)
During that same month, Johnson wrote Roosevelt requesting increased funding for the Texas A&M ROTC unit. The White House referred the request to the War Department—which cursorily rejected it.
There was, White House aides agree, no particular reason for Johnson's complete lack of success in making contact with the man in the Oval Office. There was, they say, no reason that he should have made contact. "You've got to have a reason to see a President," Rowe explains. Johnson had no reason. And Rowe—and other New Dealers who knew of Johnson's unsuccessful efforts—could see no hope that he would have a reason, not, at least, in any immediate future. He was after all only a junior Congressman from one of the most remote and isolated regions in the United States.
Those of them who, like Rowe, guessed his ambitions, could see no way that he would get to be a Senator, much less a national power—not in the foreseeable future, at least. 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.
*Of the Naval Affairs Committee and then, after 1946, of a new committee which combined Naval Affairs and Military Affairs, the House Armed Services Committee.
*He did not use it in 1940, 1942, 1944, 1945 or 1947. Until 1948, when, after eleven years in Congress, his practice dramatically changed because he was running for United States Senator, he had used this device just fourteen times—a number, like the number of bills he introduced, far below the congressional average.
† 1938, 1939, 1940, 1942, 1944.
*The Congressional Record records not a single such instance of participation by Johnson in House discussion in 1937, 1938, 1939, 1942, 1943 or 1944.