The Path to Power

by O profissional

First of the series "The Years of Lyndon Johnson"

31. A Contract and Three Telegrams

DURING THE SUMMER of 1939, however, he took a desperate step.

This maneuver involved Sam Rayburn. Its backdrop was one of the great dramas of American political history: the blood feud between the President of the United States—and the Vice President.

This feud had been raging since shortly after the two men had run together for the second time, teammates, in one of the greatest election triumphs in American history.

Even before the 1936 election, John Nance Garner, perturbed over the direction the New Deal was taking, had been protesting to Franklin Roosevelt. Garner had felt the emergency measures of the Hundred Days were necessary; he felt that the President had saved the country. But by 1934, he felt the emergency was over; the measures should be phased out. As early as October, 1934, in a blunt letter to Roosevelt from Uvalde, he advised him to "cut down as far as possible, the cost of government. … Pardon me for mentioning this matter because it is not my 'butt-in,' but it does pertain to the expenditure of federal funds which goes with living within your income and paying something on your debts." The still more liberal measures of 1935's "Second Hundred Days"—measures such as Social Security, the Wagner Labor Relations Act, and, above all, inheritance and stepped-up income taxes—were the very antithesis of the simple, rugged frontier philosophy in which Cactus Jack Garner believed with all his heart. The continued heavy governmental expenditures and annual budget deficits of the "New Deal"—how Cactus Jack hated that phrase!—must inevitably lead, he believed, to another Depression; thirty years later (in 1965, when Garner was ninety-six), a Washington journalist would travel to Uvalde to ask him if he had any advice for government. "Stop the spending!" the old man growled.

His protests had been strictly private. If individualism was one pillar of Garner's philosophy, loyalty was another, loyalty to party and loyalty to his leader; the politician he loathed above all others was Maury Maverick, who stood for everything he detested, and who had, moreover, beaten his friends, the old "City Machine," in San Antonio; but when Maverick ran for re-election in 1936—against the City Machine—Garner arranged for the financing of Maverick's campaign, because Roosevelt had asked him to do so. Sometimes his feelings about the New Deal showed in personal letters to Texas. When, in 1936, an old friend, the wealthy Houston lumberman John Henry Kirby, who was the chairman of the ultracon-servative Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution, demanded: "How long are you going to tolerate the apostasy of the Roosevelt Administration…?" Garner replied tersely: "You can't do everything you want to and I can't do half what I would like to do. You don't control everybody you would like to and I am in a similar fix. I think that answers your question." But his feelings had—before the 1936 election—never showed in Washington. Disagree with administration proposals though he might, he lobbied for them with the conservatives who had been his friends during his thirty years on Capitol Hill. "No man was more influential in the Senate than Garner," Joseph Alsop and Turner Catledge wrote in their detailed and invaluable book on the court fight, The 168 Days; "In the President's first administration larger numbers of senators had seen the light on New Deal measures in [Garner's] private office with the well-stocked liquor closet … than anywhere else in Washington."

Then, at the end of 1936, just weeks after the election, came the sitdown strikes. Garner's sizable fortune, as well as that of his Texas friends and of his Southern friends in Congress, had been built on cheap labor. In Uvalde, located as it was beyond the 98th meridian, little cotton was grown; instead, Garner grew pecans, and pecans were picked by the Mexican-Americans who made up more than half of Uvalde's population. The work was hard—after the pecans were knocked out of the trees, they had to be shelled, a job which required strong hands—and for it Garner paid one cent per pound; a good man could, his fingers bleeding from a hundred small cuts, pick as many as a hundred pounds in a day—one dollar for a day's work. 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." Not that white labor earned much more in Uvalde. Garner built and rented out homes. The union scale for carpenters in Texas was one and a quarter an hour; Garner paid his carpenters the quarter, although there were a few who worked their way up to fifty cents an hour—until they made a mistake ("like sawing a board a mite too short," an Uvalde carpenter explained; "why, back you go first thing to twenty-five cents. Just one mistake, that's all"). To men accustomed to treating laborers like serfs, the very idea of unions was anathema. (There were none in Uvalde.

"Mr. Garner, he don't like unions," another carpenter explained. "The plumbers, they had a union once, but they don't now.") And sitdown strikes were the ultimate outrage, for this form of labor strife, in which workers seized possession of their employer's plant and stayed there, "sitting down" at their jobs, threatened the sacred right of private property. At a Cabinet meeting, Garner said, as he was to recall it, "They permitted men to take over other people's property. In Texas we would call that stealing. That's when I said … the federal government owed it to the country to protect the property. … I got ugly about it and cussed and raised Cain."

He also went to see Roosevelt personally. As he related the discussion to his lifelong friend and authorized biographer, journalist Bascom Timmons:

I asked the President, "Do you think it is right?"

"No," he replied.

"Do you think it is legal?"

"No," he replied.

Garner left this meeting under the impression that Roosevelt had promised to immediately issue a statement denouncing the new labor tactic and, if the situation worsened, to take stronger action. But neither statement nor action materialized. This was not the first time that Garner felt Roosevelt had broken his word; he believed the President had repeatedly promised him to balance the budget. John Gunther was to write about Roosevelt's "worst quality," a "deviousness," a "lack of candor" that "verged on deceit." Men who had known Roosevelt longer—when he had been Governor of New York—used stronger words; in Albany it had been whispered that a commitment from the Governor could not be trusted; New York City's ordinarily mild-mannered legislative representative, Reuben Lazarus, told him to his face: "Governor, from now on we deal in writing; and I'm going to demand a bond on your signature." His State Park Commissioner, Robert Moses, not mild-mannered, shouted at him one day: "Frank Roosevelt, you're a goddamned liar and this time I can prove it! I had a stenographer present!" Garner told a friend that the President "was a charming fellow. … But he was a hard man to have an understanding with. He would deviate from the understanding." To a man like Garner, no judgment could have been harsher. In the world of Capitol Hill, where a congressional session was round after round of hastily formed alliances, trust in a man's word was all-important; Garner himself was known for honoring his promises, however inconvenient they later proved. In 1937, sitdown strikes were widening, and no presidential action was forthcoming. Alsop and Catledge wrote that Garner, feeling "he had been fooled by the President all through the business," "flew into a fury." Garner in a fury was a man who lost control of his tongue. At a conference with Roosevelt, a conference at which Majority Leader Joseph T. Robinson was present, Garner was to say that "We went at it hot and heavy"—so hot and heavy that, Alsop and Catledge reported, "Before very long both men had forgotten their self-control and were using such language to one another that Joe Robinson, horrified, shouted them down and forced them to end the conference."

And then, on February 5, 1937, Roosevelt introduced his court-packing bill.

Neither Garner nor any congressional leader had been given so much as a hint that such a measure was being prepared; summoned to the White House, they were informed half an hour before Roosevelt announced it to the press. (Garner was to say, moreover, that Roosevelt had assured him and Robinson not three weeks before that there would be little other than appropriations bills for Congress to consider.)

During his first term, the President had been generally scrupulous in consulting with Capitol Hill; had his second election led him to feel that he no longer needed to consult, "that," as Alsop and Catledge put it, "compliance with his wishes had become automatic? … His overconfidence blinded him," Alsop and Catledge were to conclude.*

There were huge Democratic majorities in both houses. The men who managed the majorities had an all but unblemished record of perfect subservience to the White House; they also had the inconvenient habit of offering advice when their advice was asked. … Therefore neither Garner nor Robinson … nor anyone else was to be admitted to the secret. The carelessness of congressional feelings was carried so far that the President … determined to attach a copy of the bill to the message, as though to suggest that congressional erasure of the merest comma would not be allowed.

The President's lack of courtesy was far from the only reason for Garner's instant distress over the bill. The tough little Texan was not a man given to abstract thought, but there were a few concrete elements of government in which he deeply believed; the Constitution was one of them, and in the instant he first heard the President's proposal, he had no doubt that the Constitution was threatened by it. After the meeting, Garner was to recall, "I loaded my automobile with Senators and Representatives and took them back to the Capitol. We were all so stunned we hardly spoke." According to most accounts, the first reaction came during that ride from Texan Hatton Sumners, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. "Boys," he said, "here's where I cash in my chips." But it may actually have come earlier—from Garner; as he was leaving the meeting, he was to say, he had a quiet word with Attorney General Homer Cummings, who had secretly drafted the court-packing measure. "General," Garner said, "it will be many, many moons before the boss signs that bill." Capitol Hill was soon left in no doubt about Garner's feelings; a few hours later, while the presidential message was being read in the Senate Chamber, Garner left the rostrum, stalked into the Senators' private lobby behind the Chamber, and there let a group of Senators know his reaction by holding his nose with one hand and making a thumbs-down gesture with the other.

Most congressional leaders agreed with that feeling, but party loyalty led Garner to refuse to oppose the bill publicly and to attempt to arrange a compromise. When, however, he led a group of his colleagues to put their case before the President, Roosevelt "laughed in their faces, so loudly that a number of them were exceedingly annoyed." (So confident was Roosevelt that he was, Alsop and Catledge wrote, "in a laughing mood in those days, when suggestions of compromise were made.")

But by May, with renewed tension over sitdown strikes and general labor unrest, the Vice President was, in Tommy Corcoran's words, "off the reservation … almost in open revolt." Soon it was common gossip in the cloakrooms that he had told Senator Wheeler, a leader of the opposition to the Court measure, "Burt, you're a real patriot." When Senator Vandenberg emotionally denounced sitdown strikes as no better than revolution, Garner left the rostrum, went down to the Senate floor and embraced the Republican in full view of the galleries. He was "doing a lot of damage," Corcoran reported. And then Garner took his most dramatic—and effective—step. On June 11, in the midst of the congressional session, he left Washington and went home to Uvalde.

ALTHOUGH GARNER gave no explanation for his departure, the reason was so evident that it exposed to public view the split—the "terrible breach," Alsop and Catledge were to call it—between the New Dealers at one end of Pennsylvania Avenue and the conservatives at the other. It solidified the opposition of wavering and doubtful Senators. By now, moreover, Roosevelt had begun to understand that compromise would be necessary—and that he needed Garner to obtain the best compromise possible. On June 18, Jim Farley, Garner's old friend, found the President "smoldering over the absence of the presiding officer of the Senate."

"Why in Hell did Jack have to leave at this time for?" he fumed through a cloud of cigarette smoke. "I'm going to write and tell him about all these stories and suggest he come back. … He's got to come back."

Roosevelt's letter was packed with Roosevelt charm, but for Jack Garner the charm had long since worn thin. He did not return to Washington until July 19, and he did so aboard the funeral train of his friend Majority Leader Robinson, who had died suddenly of a heart attack. Garner had boarded the train in Little Rock, where the thirty-odd Senators on board greeted him "like a long-lost father." Wrote Alsop and Catledge: "The old Texas fox had made a quick trip from Uvalde, with a purpose spurring him on. He had seen the Democratic party disintegrate in the court fight, and now he had returned to pick up the pieces." During the train ride back after Robinson's funeral, he conferred with the Senators, and the next morning, he arrived at the White House. When, after "a great show of cordiality" by Roosevelt, the subject turned to the court fight, Garner asked him, "Do you want it with the bark on or off, Cap'n?" Roosevelt threw back his head and, with a hearty laugh, said he would have it with the bark off. "All right," Garner said. "You are beat. You haven't got the votes."

Roosevelt empowered Garner to work out a compromise. When it evolved—an agreement to recommit the court-reorganization bill to the Senate Judiciary Committee with the understanding that when it reappeared on the Senate floor, all mention of the Supreme Court would have been removed—it was an almost unmitigated defeat for the President, one which allowed him to save face only in that there would be some reorganization of lower courts. Alsop and Catledge, who did the most thorough job of contemporary interviewing of participants, concluded that Garner "wanted to do the best he could for the President"—and in fact did so, faced as he was with the overwhelming senatorial sentiment against the bill and the desire of some Senators to defeat it outright as a salutary lesson to the President. On one occasion, when he was attempting to bargain with Wheeler, the Montanan told him "with considerable firmness" that the opposition did not have to compromise at all, since it had enough votes to do as it pleased. But Roosevelt, "sore and vengeful," in intimates' words, took the loss hard. Wrote Alsop and Catledge: "He knew there was no way out of an immediate humiliation, but he had made up his mind that if he had to suffer the men in Congress whom he held responsible would suffer doubly later on." And he felt that he knew who was most responsible. To Farley, a "fuming" President said: "He didn't even attempt to bargain with Wheeler. He just accepted Wheeler's terms. If Garner had put up any kind of a fight, the thing could have been worked out differently." Corcoran, one of the President's principal strategists in the fight, said flatly that "it was the Vice President who had betrayed the President."

And the emotion was not one-sided. Garner felt Roosevelt was again "deviating" from "understandings." In the fight to replace Robinson as leader, the two men agreed, in Garner's recollection, not to interfere. In Garner's view, he kept his word, while Roosevelt did not, maneuvering to secure the election of Kentucky's Alben Barkley. Garner had also, in a memorandum, asked the President a question: "When was the government going to balance the budget?" Garner had asked the question before, and had been given a flat promise in reply: "I have said fifty times that the budget will be balanced for the fiscal year 1938. If you want me to say it again, I will say it either once or fifty times more. That is my intention." But the budget for fiscal 1938 proved to be heavily unbalanced.

The antagonism between the two men could no longer be hidden. At Cabinet meetings, Ickes noted in August, 1937, the President "doesn't overlook any chance to send a pointed barb, albeit with a laugh, in the direction of the Vice President." And if Roosevelt expected Garner to be faced down, he did not know his man. In December of that year, Roosevelt was discussing his upcoming message to Congress when, staring straight at Garner down the length of the long Cabinet table, he said, "Jack, I am going to reassert leadership." He said he had temporarily put it on the shelf because he was tired. Replied Garner: "You were afraid, Mr. President." Roosevelt repeated that he had been tired. "… Both scared and tired," Garner retorted. Wrote Ickes: "I have never heard anyone talk like this to the President, and the President did not pursue the subject any further." Now, in 1938, with the economy sliding into a "new Depression," Roosevelt was considering new government pump-priming expenditures—which would further unbalance the budget being prepared for fiscal 1939. In April, 1938, Garner warned the President that such expenditures would meet with considerable congressional opposition—making these statements with "vehemence"; he left Roosevelt's office, the New York Times noted, "red-faced and non-committal." In an unusual outburst to a reporter, he said, "We've been trying this New Deal spending orgy for six years, and where has it got us…? I for one refuse to support more reckless spending. It's got to stop." And he apparently told friends that if it didn't stop, he would stop it; it is "openly whispered in Texas, among Mr. Garner's home advisers, that he will lead the opposition in Congress to measures not acceptable to many Democrats," the Times reported. Among the measures not acceptable was Roosevelt's attempt to reorganize, and expand, the White House staff and the executive branch of government generally; this measure—on its face, as James MacGregor Burns says, "one of the least controversial Roosevelt had ever proposed"—brought to a boil the long-simmering anti-Roosevelt bitterness in Congress, which, despite heroic efforts by Sam Rayburn, and the prodigal use by Roosevelt of patronage to try to bring Congressmen to heel, voted down the "dictator bill." "As the vote was announced," Burns recounts, "wild cheering broke out among representatives in the chamber. Congress was in open revolt."

At this time, Roosevelt took his first public cognizance of the rumors about the rift between him and Garner. He denied that it existed. When Garner was asked about it, "he merely smiled, then tightened his lips." But then came the purge, a cross-country trip on which Roosevelt attempted to defeat in their district primaries selected Representatives and Senators who had opposed him. John Garner, to whom party unity was so vital, could hardly believe that a President was doing this to members of his own party; in fact, at the time of the court compromise, he had personally promised Senators—his intimates believe on the basis of a commitment given to him by Roosevelt—that there would be no reprisals from the White House. Some of Roosevelt's targets were, moreover, among Garner's oldest friends and closest allies. He no longer bothered to keep his feelings secret. In Texas, where Roosevelt snubbed Garner's friend Senator Tom Connally by announcing from the back platform of his train the appointment to a federal judgeship of a Texan who was a Connally enemy, Garner stayed home in Uvalde, telling reporters he was busy "fishing." The President of the United States had come to the Vice President's state—and the Vice President had refused to meet him! When Garner returned to Washington from Texas, on December 18, 1938, Garner and Roosevelt met privately for the last time. "We didn't get anywhere," Roosevelt told Farley. "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." At the next Cabinet meeting, Garner's feelings spilled over. When the hated liberal Henry Wallace began discussing new plans to reduce the cotton surplus, the Vice President, in Ickes' words,

opened up all along the line on cotton. The Vice President said that people had moved into the South because they liked to be free and the freedom that they wanted was the right to grow as much cotton as they wanted to grow. He believes that restricting crops is bad, both economically and politically. He reminded the President that he had discussed this subject with him at their recent conference.

He "opened up" in his Capitol Hill stronghold, too. A week after the Cabinet meeting, Time reported that congressional Democrats were determined to have "economy" in government at last—and that "if they need a leader, John Garner stood ready to lead." The nation was given at last a glimpse of the power he had long wielded: in what Time called "an unusual spectacle, … a scene that may in fact have been all but unprecedented in American politics," on the same day, two Cabinet members, appointees of the President, had to call, "hat in hand," on the Vice President to plead for congressional approval of the President's policies—Wallace to try to persuade him on acreage restrictions, Harry Hopkins to obtain Senate confirmation as Secretary of Commerce. Roosevelt himself had to go to Garner hat in hand; when Hopkins came close to breaking under the vicious questioning by a Senate committee, Roosevelt asked his Vice President, in Ickes' phrase, "to call off the dogs 'for the sake of the party.'" Garner did. He refused, however, to give in on acreage, and also beat the President on the relief bill. In the Cabinet now, the two men who sat at opposite ends of the table could barely contain their enmity for each other. Sometimes when Roosevelt was talking, Garner would begin talking—not in a whisper—at his end of the table. Sometimes, in what Ickes felt was a "truculent … very unpleasant" manner, he would interrupt the President, saying, "Well, didn't I tell you so?" or "You remember that I brought that up two or three years ago." Said Ickes: "How the President takes this from Garner, or anyone else, is more than I can understand. … I suspect that there is growing up in the President's heart a hatred of Garner. …" Notified during a Cabinet meeting of still another Senate defeat by Garner's allies, Roosevelt, staring down the table at Garner, said, "Well, that is that. Now we will go on to Chapter Two." After the meeting, talking with Ickes, he said, "Do you notice that I am whistling?" (And he was, more or less, from between his teeth, Ickes says.) "Then he added, 'I always whistle when I'm mad.'"

By 1939, Ickes himself, seeing Garner's "old, red, wizened face on the rostrum above the President when the President delivered his message to Congress," found him "disgusting." Even the King and Queen of England were not exempt from his rudeness! At the White House dinner for Their Majesties, "He was as full of life as a kitten. He has no breeding or natural dignity and I doubt if he exercised any more self-restraint than he would have shown at a church supper in Uvalde, Texas. … He pawed the King with his hands. … To Garner the King was simply a visiting Elk."

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." Time reported in a March 20, 1939, cover story on Garner, titled "Undeclared War," that "John Garner has become to arch New Dealers a symbol of sabotage. They consider him a prairie politician whose archaic notions, plus popular veneration for long public service, accidentally make him the leader of reaction against six years of enlightened reform." The articles of the young New Dealers' "journalistic friends" reflected the intensity of their feelings about the old Texan. Wrote Hamilton Basso in the New Republic, "His heart, and most of his mental processes, belong to the America of 1875. … As a person, he is not liked. … Mr. Garner has taken his personal smallness, his lack of generosity, and forged it into a political principle. The metaphysicians may argue that this, per se, is not evil: but on a human plane, it is certainly not good. … He has no imagination, no convictions, and he substitutes political cynicism for social understanding." In his Newsweek column, Raymond Moley, himself long gone from the reservation, offered a different opinion:

A good many of the "feature articles" about Mr. Garner manage to suggest that he's a kind of glorified clown, spending his time thinking up what the next wisecrack should be, what kind of funny hat to wear the next time his picture is taken, and what he can eat and drink that will look well in the newsreels. The trouble with those who write such pieces—and there are a good many earning a living in Washington—is that they can never take a man for what he is. They have seen so many phonies in their day … that they automatically conclude that nothing is what it seems to be.

It is true that Mr. Garner is picturesque. I have never thought of calling him anything but Mr. Garner. … Not many people call him Jack to his face. There is dignity about the man. … He's picturesque only because his method of life, which is simple and natural, contrasts so weirdly with the sham living that goes on in Washington. … He's a man who lives his life as he wants to live it. …

The New Dealers' feelings were reciprocated by the object of their scorn. He detested what even their journalist friends had to concede was their "slightly ostentatious intellectualism," and what he saw as a hypocrisy which made them talk of principles when, as he told a friend, "All they're interested in is staying in power." They were, in Garner's view, unscrupulous men who were persuading the President to desert his party, the party Garner loved.

And now the feud was climaxing, for the presidential election of 1940 was drawing steadily closer.

Historians may puzzle over when Franklin Roosevelt decided to defy the Third Term tradition and run for the Presidency again, but John Garner's intimates never had the slightest doubt as to what the decision would be—"Why, he is panting to run," one of them said as early as the Autumn of 1938—and neither did Garner, although Roosevelt had assured him he would not run again. "He has too much power and is continually asking for more," he had told Timmons; that predilection could lead to only one decision. Later, he would tell Timmons, "He will never leave the White House except in death or defeat."

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." Whether or not he wanted the Democratic nomination for himself—whether, as his advisors were to maintain, he was standing for the nomination merely as an anti-third-term symbol—or whether, as the New Dealers said, the seventy-year-old poker player, having long bided his time, had at last found himself holding a royal flush and could scarcely contain his greed at the pot within his grasp—he was determined that the nomination would not go to Franklin Roosevelt.

And Roosevelt, whether or not he had decided to run again, was determined that his successor not be someone who might tear down what he had built; he was determined to deny the nomination to any of the Democratic conservatives who did not believe in the New Deal—in particular, he was determined that the nomination would not go to John Garner.

Nineteen thirty-nine was Garner's year. The war was open now. The "Garner gang" of conservative congressional barons, Time magazine said, had long been bound together by "intangible ties of friendship for and trust in the old man. … Since Speaker 'Uncle Joe' Cannon, who finally met in Jack Garner his match at poker, no man [has] enjoyed such influence among members on both sides of the aisle in both Houses as this stubby, stubborn, pink & white billiken with the beak of an owl, eyebrows like cupid's wings, tongue of a cowhand." And he was using that influence to the full. During the first months of 1939, Congress defeated several Roosevelt proposals. Then the President proposed a new public works program, for self-liquidating projects, which would include the creation of "a revolving fund fed from the earnings" of these projects which could be used "to finance new projects when there is need of extra stimulus of employment." Garner felt that this proposal would free the executive branch from the need of congressional approval for these projects. "This bill in some particulars is the worst that has come up here," he said. "It gives the President discretion to spend billions where he wants to, how he wants to and when he wants. It is another step away from constitutional government and toward personal government." The House, by a substantial majority, refused even to take it up for debate.

Previously, the President had relied on Garner to kill, or hamstring, potentially damaging congressional investigations. Now, a young Texas Congressman, Martin Dies, Jr. (thirty years before, Garner had served in the House with Martin Dies, Sr.), was given a substantial appropriation for his House Un-American Activities Committee, which, as William Leuchten-berg puts it, "served the purposes of those who claimed that the New Deal was a Red stratagem." And over furious administration opposition, Congress passed—and Roosevelt was forced to sign—the Hatch Act, which would in the event prove ineffective (because, Garner believed, the administration did not enforce it), but which, at the time of its passage, was believed to be a deterrent to political activity by federal employees. The reason for its passage was common knowledge in Washington: at the 1936 Democratic Convention, a majority of the delegates had been made up of postmasters, United States marshals, IRS employees and other federal officeholders, who might be disposed to favor an incumbent President. Garner and his conservative allies wanted to make sure that the incumbent President would have no such advantage at the 1940 Convention.

"A sullen world" was, in Burns' phrase, "girding for war"; a sullen Congress refused to change the Neutrality Act to give the President more room to maneuver on behalf of the embattled democracies. Summoning Senate leaders to the White House, Roosevelt pleaded with them. Then Garner asked them if there were enough votes to change the Act—and summed up: "Well, Captain, we may as well face the facts. You haven't got the votes; and that's all there is to it." He had turned the Vice Presidency, Time said, from "a sarcophagus into a throne."

And if 1939 was Garner's year on Capitol Hill, it was his year in the polls, too. In March, the Gallup Poll asked the question: "If Roosevelt is not a candidate, whom would you like to see elected?" Jim Farley received 8 percent, Cordell Hull 10 percent—John Garner 45 percent. And Roosevelt could hardly have been sanguine about the results if his name had been included in the poll: 53 percent of all Democrats were opposed to a third term. As the New Republic had to report with chagrin, political prognosticators generally felt that a candidate with so commanding a lead could not be overtaken; pollster Emil Hurja said that "Mr. Garner is so far ahead of all other candidates that he cannot be stopped." If he was to be stopped, certainly, only one man could do it—just as Garner himself was the only man who could stop Roosevelt if Roosevelt chose to run. As the Congressional Digest put it, "It is a case of Franklin D. Roosevelt, epitome of the New Deal, … against John Nance Garner, to whom much of the New Deal is anathema." Discussing possible candidates with Jim Farley at Hyde Park, Roosevelt said: "To begin with, there's Garner, he's just impossible." Although other names would continually be floated, the contest had, in 1939, narrowed down to two men—each of whom not only hated the other personally but hated also much of what the other stood for.

ROOSEVELT DECIDED to attack Garner in his own state. There was reason to think this bold tactic might have success. While the reactionary "interests" which ran Texas were solidly against the President, the state's people had, at least in the past, been overwhelmingly behind him; they had given him a seven-to-one margin over Landon in 1936. Even if he could not defeat Garner in the state's 1940 Democratic primary, might he not at least poll a respectable number of votes against him, enough to embarrass him? And being forced to fight in his own stronghold might keep Garner on the defensive.

If he was to fight Garner in Texas, however, Roosevelt needed a man in Texas—someone to direct his strategy in the state, preferably someone prominent enough throughout the state to serve as a rallying point for New Deal enthusiasm. The list of potential candidates, however, was very short. A Senator would have been ideal, but one, Tom Connally, had earned the President's bitter enmity by opposing the court-packing proposal. And while the other—mild-mannered Morris Sheppard—was a loyal New Dealer, he put personal loyalties above political, and his personal loyalty belonged to the man who had come to Congress at virtually the same time as he, thirty-six years before. Among the state's Congressmen, Maury Maverick would, a year earlier, have been a logical choice, because his willingness to speak out for liberal causes had not only endeared him to Roosevelt but had made him a statewide name. Another Congressman, W. D. McFarlane of Graham, Sam Johnson's onetime Populist ally in the State Legislature, was an eager volunteer for the job. On the Texas leg of Roosevelt's 1938 cross-country "purge trip," the trip on which Garner had refused to meet him, the President had praised Maverick and McFarlane. But despite the praise, by 1939 both Maverick and McFarlane were no longer in Congress, having lost their congressional seats to conservative opponents.* Garner had had his San Antonio friends support Maverick in 1936; in 1938, the Vice President had quietly passed the word that he wanted Maverick "crushed"—and crushed he was, by Paul Kilday, who stated that his goal was "the elimination from Congress of one overwhelmingly shown to be the friend and ally of Communism."

There was another obvious choice: Sam Rayburn. But this was the Sam Rayburn of whom it was said, "If he was your friend, he was your friend forever. He would be with you—always. The tougher the going, the more certain you could be that when you looked around, Sam Rayburn would be standing there with you." In a contest between Roosevelt and Garner, Rayburn's preference was not for Garner but for the man whose picture stood on his desk at home in Bonham. Garner was his friend, but Roosevelt was his hero. Moreover, the philosophy of the New Deal was his philosophy; Garner's was not. "There is much more of contrast than of similarity between the two Texans," wrote Raymond Moley, who knew them both well, and the contrast was deeper than the differences in their bank balances, or the fact that Rayburn would not accept a free pass from the railroads, while Garner rode back and forth to Texas in the luxuriously furnished private car of the president of the Missouri-Kansas-Pacific line. As Moley explained, Garner "is a big business man" with few "prejudices against financial power" and "limited sympathy for the underprivileged. Rayburn is more likely to suffer for those who fail." Garner's opposition to the New Deal had, Moley says, "opened a fissure" between him and Rayburn. Furthermore, Rayburn had no doubt that Roosevelt would eventually decide to run again—and he had no doubt that if Roosevelt ran, he would crush any other candidate. Garner's campaign for the nomination would not only be one in which Rayburn did not believe, it was, Rayburn knew, bound to be a losing fight. But while Roosevelt was his hero, Garner was his friend—had been his friend for a quarter of a century. More, Garner had been his patron. During Rayburn's difficult early years in Congress, it was Garner who had given him the helping hand that enabled him to start climbing the House ladder. In 1937, when Rayburn had been in danger of losing his fight to be Majority Leader (and next in line for his yearned-for Speakership), Garner had rushed back from Texas to throw his weight on the scales and tip them in Rayburn's favor. (Rayburn's reply, when a reporter had asked about the propriety of the Vice President's intervention in a congressional matter, was instructive: "In the first place," he said, "Jack Garner is my friend.") When, in 1939, Garner asked him to manage his campaign for the 1940 Democratic presidential nomination, he agreed. And once he had enlisted in Garner's cause, it didn't matter how tough the going was. Attempting to pry Rayburn away from his fellow Texan, "White House sources" raised the possibility that, despite Rayburn's leadership of New Deal causes, he might not be the President's choice to replace Speaker Bankhead, whose heart disease was rapidly worsening. This threat to Rayburn's long-held dream was a grave one—Roosevelt's potential in Capitol Hill succession battles had been demonstrated by his success in winning the Senate Majority Leadership for Alben Barkley—but Woodrow Wilson could have told Roosevelt what Rayburn's response to a presidential threat would be. Previously, Rayburn had been somewhat circumspect in his remarks on the presidential race. After the first White House leaks appeared, he issued a more pointed statement: "I am for that outstanding Texan and liberal Democrat, John N. Garner, for the presidential nomination in 1940, believing that if elected he will make the country a great President." Roosevelt's reaction to Rayburn's defiance was revealed a month later. Rayburn's district held a celebration in his honor each August. "In previous years," Stephen Early wrote in a memo to the President, "you have sent messages to Sam Rayburn on the occasion of the celebration. … Ordinarily I would take care of this without troubling you but in light of Rayburn's recent declarations, I think it is best to leave the decision to you." Roosevelt's decision was not to send a message. During succeeding months—as long as Garner was in the presidential race, in fact—Roosevelt would not even autograph a picture for Rayburn; when, for example, Rayburn's secretary, Alla Clary, sent a photograph taken by one of Rayburn's friends to the White House for a routine presidential autograph, Missy LeHand returned it unsigned.

LYNDON JOHNSON'S APPLICATION for the post of leader of the Roosevelt forces in Texas was at first not considered seriously. A junior Congressman was hardly the ideal leader of the presidential campaign in a pivotal state. Nor did Johnson enjoy White House entrée at this time—a fact which had been forcibly brought home to him during the President's "purge" trip of July, 1938. He was not on the initial list of Texas Congressmen invited aboard the President's train; only a last-minute invitation wangled for him en route by the friendly McIntyre got him aboard. Once aboard, his name was added to the list of Congressmen on whom Roosevelt bestowed public praise, but not to the list of those allowed a private few minutes with FDR—an omission which must have provided a bitter contrast to the hours of intimate conversation with the President he had enjoyed on that other train trip through Texas just a year before.* The Spring of 1939, when the initial jockeying over the Garner nomination was taking place, was the time when Johnson could not elicit a presidential response even to a letter.

But as Spring turned to Summer, Johnson found a role he could play. Because of the leverage its committee chairmen wielded with Congressmen from other states, the Texas congressional delegation was the power base for Garner's presidential bid. The canniness of the delegation's veteran members—augmented, of course, by the political wisdom, and cash, of its "associate member," Roy Miller—and the nationwide political contacts built up during decades of dealing on Capitol Hill, made the delegation in a sense the general staff of the Garner campaign as well; at its weekly luncheon meetings—and whenever, in fact, Texas Congressmen got together—the Vice President's strategy was discussed and planned. The White House needed to know what was going on in those meetings. It needed a spy in the Texas ranks.

Lyndon Johnson volunteered for this mission. No formal enlistment was necessary; he simply began to relay information to members of the White House staff, primarily to Corcoran, and occasionally to Rowe—with his customary assiduity. "He was working at it, I'll tell you that," Rowe says. Johnson was playing a dangerous game, Rowe says, "and sooner or later they would find out, but he could see over the horizon, and he could see that Garner's day was over, and he was playing with our crowd instead of the Garner crowd." Obtaining information on the discussions in the Texas delegation had been "very hard," Rowe says, but it suddenly became much easier. "If we wanted to know something: 'Call Lyndon Johnson.'"

In July, he took on a new role. There was one asset that only he among the Texas Congressmen possessed: Charles Marsh's friendship. Texas newspapers were overwhelmingly anti-Roosevelt, but Marsh's six Texas newspapers, including the influential paper in the state capital, were for him. The publisher of six pro-Roosevelt Texas dailies had very little difficulty getting in to see the President, and when Marsh requested an appointment, he asked if he could bring Johnson along. On July 14, 1939, "Pa" Watson sent an aide a note: "Put Mr. Charles Marsh down for an appointment with the President on Wednesday. Mr. Marsh is the owner of a large string of papers supporting the President in Texas." And on the note, someone—either Watson or the aide—added in handwriting: "And Representative Lyndon Johnson." At this meeting, Johnson impressed the President with his enthusiasm for the Third Term, and with his political acumen. Something else was at work as well. Marsh and Roosevelt had been acquainted since the President's days as Governor of New York, and they had not gotten along well, at least in part because of Marsh's imperious personality, which allowed him to show deference not even to a Governor. At the White House meeting, strain was again evident. But Marsh, the enthusiastic New Dealer, wanted to support Roosevelt, and Roosevelt wanted his support, and a buffer to make the relationship smoother was available—and Lyndon Johnson thus became the link to the most influential pro-Roosevelt organ in Texas.

Then, two weeks later, came an opportunity for Johnson to dramatize—vividly—his loyalty to the President.

During a bitter hearing on proposed amendments that would weaken wages-and-hours legislation, John L. Lewis exploded to the House Labor Committee: "The genesis of this campaign against labor … is not hard to find. [It] emanates from a labor-baiting, poker-playing, whiskey-drinking, evil old man whose name is Garner." As committee members gasped, the lion-maned CIO leader, pounding the table until the ashtrays jumped, went on: "Some gentlemen may rise in horror and say, 'Why, Mr. Lewis has made a personal attack on Mr. Garner.' Yes, I make a personal attack on Mr. Garner for what he is doing, because Garner's knife is searching for the quivering, pulsating heart of labor."

With reporters racing through Capitol corridors searching for comment, Sam Rayburn summoned the Texas delegation to his office to issue a formal resolution denying the accuracy of Lewis' description of the Vice President. But Roosevelt and his advisors did not want that description denied; as Kenneth G. Crawford wrote in the Nation, "If they know the church-going public, its reaction will be: where there's so much smoke there must be some firewater." Roosevelt himself was shortly to give emphasis to Garner's drinking with his remark at a Cabinet meeting, "I see that the Vice President has thrown his bottle—I mean his hat—into the ring." Telephone calls were hastily placed to the office of their secret ally within the Texas delegation, Lyndon Johnson. Corcoran was later to say: "Everybody called him. I called him. Ickes called him. … There wasn't any doubt about what the Old Man wanted."

By the time Johnson arrived in Rayburn's office, a resolution had already been prepared stating, among other points, that Garner was neither a heavy drinker nor unfriendly to labor. Johnson refused to sign it. There ensued what the Washington Post later called "considerable discussion." Rayburn finally suggested that he take Johnson into his office and talk to him, but Johnson apparently stood his ground.

The resolution that was finally read to a cheering House by Representative Luther A. Johnson of Corsicana—who said that it had been endorsed by the entire Texas delegation—did not contain a specific repudiation of the allegations about labor and whiskey. It said: "We who know him [Garner] best cannot refrain from expressing our deep resentment and indignation at this unwarranted and unjustified attack on his private and public life. The Texas delegation has complete confidence in his honesty, integrity and ability."

Johnson made the most of his role in this episode. He described it to Roosevelt personally, who "chuckled" as he related it to Harold Ickes. Ickes was later to recount in his Secret Diary what Roosevelt said.

Some grandiloquent resolutions had been drafted in advance and every member of the delegation was asked to sign on the dotted line. Among other things these resolutions declared that Garner was not a whiskey drinker and that he was not unfriendly to labor. The only voice raised in opposition was that of Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson, of Austin. Johnson said that he could not subscribe to any such language and that the delegation would look foolish if such a statement were issued because everyone knew that Garner was a heavy drinker and that he was bitterly opposed to labor. The argument went on for some two hours with Johnson maintaining his ground. Then Sam Rayburn suggested that he take Johnson into his office and talk to him. Of course everyone thought that Rayburn would administer a spanking. However, Johnson still continued to hold his ground and the crestfallen Rayburn led him back to the caucus where he said that he hadn't been able to do anything with him. It was agreed that unless every member signed the resolutions there was no point in issuing them. So the task was given to Johnson to draft such resolutions as he would be willing to sign.

As Johnson recounted the episode to other New Dealers high and low, his extraordinary ability as a storyteller was never in better evidence. "Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson was in to see me," Ickes wrote in his diary. "He told me the very vivid story of the meeting of the Texas delegation. … 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."

Johnson's depiction of his role in the delegation may have been somewhat exaggerated. On one point, Roosevelt had definitely received a false impression: Johnson was not "given the task" of drafting the final resolution; it was drawn up by Luther Johnson and two other senior members of the delegation, Milton H. West and Charles L. South. And in any case, the resolution—which Johnson did, after all, sign along with the other members—is certainly not a weak statement. His confrontation with Rayburn was apparently not as dramatic in fact as in the telling; other members of the delegation and Texans familiar with its actions would later not recall any confrontation. When newspapermen, intrigued by the stories they were hearing, sought to learn if there was a split in the Texas delegation, its members were surprised; their reaction was summed up by Albert Thomas of Houston, who said, in reply to a reporter's question, "Of course every member of the Texas delegation is for Vice President Garner [for President]." When the Fort Worth Star-Telegram two days later sought to pin down members of the delegation as to whom they were supporting for President, Johnson's reply, echoing that of several other members, dodged the issue, in a way that amounted to something less than a ringing repudiation of the Vice President. "My esteem and regard for Vice President Garner, based upon eight years' friendship, was clearly expressed in the resolution of the Texas delegation asserting our complete confidence in his honesty, integrity and ability," he said. "Since the Vice President has not announced his desire to become a candidate for President, I feel an announcement from a new Congressman should await, not precede, his decision." Still, whatever the extent of Rayburn's entreaties or wrath, Johnson had resisted them. If there had been calculation behind his stand ("He could see that Garner's day was over")—a high form of political calculation, given the Vice President's popularity at the time—there was courage behind it, too; given Rayburn's power and personality, considerable courage. And Johnson's portrayal of the confrontation was very convincing. By the time he had finished taking his story around the offices of key administration aides, he was something of a hero to the New Dealers.

Most important, he had impressed, and, apparently, won the liking of, their chief—as was to be proven twice within the next month.

On the first occasion, Roosevelt stepped into a dispute in Johnson's own district to protect the young Congressman from Garner's wrath.

"If a person wronged me," Garner was to say years later, "I never rested easy until I got even." Now Cactus Jack tried to get even with Lyndon Johnson. Still serving as postmaster in Austin was Buck Buchanan's appointee, Ewell Nalle, a member of a family that had long been politically powerful in the city, and an old friend of Garner's. Even before the Lewis-Garner explosion, as suspicions had begun to arise during the Spring of 1939 about Johnson's attitude toward Garner's presidential aspirations, Nalle had received instructions from Garner or Garner's allies to begin stirring up opposition to Johnson—opposition which could pose a threat to him when he had to run again in 1940, since the Austin postmaster controlled more than two hundred jobs. Immediately after Johnson's recalcitrance over the "Lewis resolution," reports from his district told Johnson that Nalle was intensifying his opposition.

During the Spring, Johnson had personally asked Postmaster General Farley to fire Nalle and replace him with his own nominee, Ray E. Lee, the former newsman whom he had hired to do public relations for the NYA. Farley's early benevolence toward an engaging congressional secretary had, however, vanished now that there were doubts about Johnson's loyalty to his old ally Jack Garner. He told Johnson that "enemies" of Johnson had asked him not to fire Nalle, and he declined to do so, citing a number of notably lame reasons to show that such a firing would be illegal. Johnson thereupon managed to have the matter brought to Roosevelt's attention by James Rowe, and the President in fact mentioned it to Farley after a Cabinet meeting. But he did so only cursorily, and when Farley told him, "You can forget it," saying that the dismissal would be illegal, the President apparently did just that; he didn't pursue the matter.

But that had been before the Lewis blast. About a week after it, Johnson raised the matter again, and this time Roosevelt promised to see that Nalle was fired as soon as Congress adjourned. Adjournment brought no action, however, and with the President preparing to leave Washington on a vacation trip, Johnson was becoming increasingly agitated about the matter. On August 10, overcoming Rowe's reluctance to "pester" the President, he prevailed on him to write a memo to Missy LeHand: "I don't know whether in the rush of getting away, the President should be bothered about this, but Lyndon Johnson has been so insistent the past couple of days I will leave it up to your judgment. He says he will not and cannot go back to Texas until the President acts. …" When the memo was put before the President, it turned out that his inaction had been due only to oversight. Reminded of his promise, Roosevelt carried through on it—as firmly as even Johnson could have wished. Back to Rowe (in the President's hand) came the message: "Tell the Post Office that I want this done right away for Cong. Lyndon Johnson. That it is legal and to send me the necessary papers. Tell Lyndon Johnson that I am doing it." Before the month was out, so was Nalle, and Lee replaced him, thereby ending the threat to Johnson's re-election chances. In fact, he would be unopposed for re-election in 1940.

During the month following the Lewis episode, Roosevelt not only protected Johnson but tried to promote him.

One of the subjects discussed when, through Charles Marsh, Johnson finally got the opportunity to talk personally to the President was the rural electrification program being carried out in his district. This was a matter of great interest to the President, and he was apparently impressed by Johnson's vivid description of the benefits that the Pedernales Electric Cooperative had brought to Hill Country farmers, and by Johnson's claim (which would have startled officials of Texas Power & Light, enraged at what they viewed as the ruthless use of government power to bludgeon them into a surrender of their properties) that the program had been carried out with unprecedented cooperation between government and a private utility. On the day that Marsh and Johnson met with Roosevelt, Benjamin V. Cohen wrote the President that "As you will see … Lyndon Johnson … has done an admirable job working out the problems of Texas' little TVA. … We are slowly building up a record to prove that cooperation between public and private power is not impossible as Willkie claims." With the post of REA Administrator about to become vacant, Roosevelt added Johnson's name to the list of possible appointees. (When the President asked the opinion of Henry Wallace, who, of course, had spent weekends at Longlea with Johnson, and who frequently relied on Marsh's advice, Wallace replied that "I am so enthusiastic … that I am quite ready to recommend his appointment. … Lyndon has followed so closely the rural electrification program, has such zeal for it, is so well-rounded a New Dealer, and has such good judgment and general competence, that I think he will make an excellent selection.") Immediately after the meeting of the Texas delegation at which Johnson carried out Roosevelt's wishes—it may have been at the Oval Office session at which Johnson regaled the President with his description of the delegation meeting—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. The REA post was, in addition, a particularly challenging job, as Roosevelt was well aware; he had two weeks earlier remarked to Ickes that "it was difficult to find the right kind of man for administrator because the man had to be a builder and at the same time a finance man."

However, there was not much chance that Johnson would accept the post. Previously an independent agency, REA was in the process of being transferred into the Agriculture Department, so that its head would report not to the President but to a Cabinet officer. Johnson understood where power came from in a democracy. "You have to be your own man," he had told Russell Brown years before—his own man, not someone else's; an elected official whose position had been conferred on him by voters, not by one man—who could, on a whim, take the position away. Hearing, back in Austin, about Roosevelt's offer, the wily Wirtz wired him: "Think you would be making a mistake which you would afterwards regret for years if you act on proposition," warning Johnson, in a follow-up letter, that he might "be side-tracked or shelved when you get out." Johnson immediately assured Wirtz that he needn't worry. Having fought his way at last onto the road that could lead him to achieve his ultimate ambition, he could not be persuaded by anyone—not even Franklin Roosevelt—to turn off it. "Dear Mr. President," he replied, "Thanks for your offer to appoint me Administrator of the REA. … My own job now, however, is a contract with the people of the Tenth District of Texas, which I hope to complete satisfactorily and to renew every two years as long as I appear useful." In a strikingly cordial reply, which, with Roosevelt's permission, Johnson released to the press, the President wrote back:

Dear Lyndon:

I was very sorry that you did not feel that you wanted to accept the proffer of the Administrator of the Rural Electrification Administration, but I do think I ought to tell you that very rarely have I known a proposed candidate for any position receive such unanimous recommendations from all sources as was the case with you.

But I do understand the reasons why you felt that you should stay as a representative of your district. I congratulate the Tenth District of Texas.

THEN HE FOUND A MEANS of moving further along the road. The means was money—Herman Brown's money. All through 1939, of course, Johnson had been advancing Herman's interests, working diligently for the enlargement of the Marshall Ford Dam and for the profitable change orders on that project. The Browns were grateful. On May 2, 1939, George, who, of course, did nothing without clearing it with his older brother, wrote, "I hope you know, Lyndon, how I feel reference to what you have done for me and I am going to try to show my appreciation through the years to come with actions rather than words if I can find out when and where I can return at least a portion of the favors." The effort to find out "when and where" the favors could be returned continued; before long George would be writing Lyndon, in response to a Johnson remark about "the ninety-six old men" in the Senate: "I have thought about you often out here and don't know whether or not you have made up your mind about what future course you want to take, but some day in the next few years one of the old ones is going to pass on, and if you have decided to go that route I think it would be 'gret' to do it." No matter what the route, Johnson was assured in letters from Brown & Root headquarters on Calhoun Road in Houston, he could be certain of the firm's all-out support.

In December of 1939, John Garner announced his presidential candidacy. He did so in a terse statement from Uvalde, and then, despite efforts to question him by reporters who had traveled hundreds of miles to do so, he left without another word on a week-long hunting trip with an old friend, a Uvalde garage mechanic. His supporters were more forthcoming. The facade that the Vice President was running only because the President wasn't was stripped away; E. B. Germany, Garner's Texas state chairman, attacked Roosevelt directly, and Roy Miller's son, Dale, already a considerable lobbyist in his own right, wrote in the Texas Weekly that "regardless of what anyone may do, Mr. Garner will be a candidate, and he will be in the race to the finish." Garner's supporters, Miller wrote, have never believed that a President "could prove so faithless to democratic principles" as to seek a third term, but if Roosevelt should try to "repudiate this cherished American principle," which "is as embedded in our system of government as if it was written in the Constitution itself," Garner was going to stop him. Germany's speech "closes the door to compromise. … The Garner-for-President movement has cast the political die. … To the President and the third-term apostles, it offers the olive branch of good will if they want it, and the club of resolute and relentless opposition if they don't." Martin Dies and other Garner supporters began using in public some of the words they had been using for years in private—in Dick Kleberg's office, among other places. Railing against the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and its president, David Dubinsky (spelled Dubinski in the San Antonio Evening News), against organized labor in general and the National Labor Relations Board in particular, San Antonio Congressman Kilday said that "Socialists" had infiltrated the Democratic Party, and that only a Garner victory would drive them out. As for the principals themselves, after a Cabinet meeting in January, 1940, Ickes used the words "hatred" and "savage" to describe a Roosevelt attack on "Congress"; in response, "The Vice President's face turned blood red and he retorted angrily. … Then he accused the President of attacking our form of government."

A Gallup Poll that month revealed that Garner's popularity had not slipped; if Roosevelt did not run, he was the favorite of 58 percent of registered Democrats. And if Roosevelt did run—if President opposed Vice President in Democratic primaries?—the answer to that question seemed, in the first months of 1940, to be far from open and shut. With the economy sagging, and unemployment remaining stubbornly high, with congressional opposition so strong that Roosevelt dared not introduce a single significant new program, and with the "phony war" muddying the international situation and all the President's diplomatic efforts thwarted, March, 1940, was, as James MacGregor Burns wrote, "a low point even for Roosevelt's second term." On March 10, the Washington Post stated that "the Texan is believed to have a good chance to win" when the two men clashed head to head in the California primary in May.

For more than a year, Roosevelt had been pursuing a strategy that Burns calls "broadening the field in order to prevent any candidate from getting too far ahead"—hinting at support for Harry Hopkins or Paul McNutt, for example. The strategy had destroyed the hopes of all other candidates, but it hadn't even dented Garner's. Now the Democratic Convention was close. Garner was immensely popular with many Democratic state bosses. If, when the Convention began, his candidacy was still strong, several "favorite son" delegations—the Alabama delegation pledged to Speaker Bankhead, for example—would fall into line behind him. New Dealers "concede that Garner, with Texas' forty-six delegates, California's forty-four, some Wisconsin, Illinois and probably a few scattered delegates in other states, will aggregate nearly 500" of the 551 delegates needed for nomination, the Washington Post reported. Even if this estimate was high, any substantial strength for Garner would do damage. As Burns puts it:

Roosevelt's basic problem, if he chose to run, was not how to get the nomination—his ability to get a decisive convention majority was never in doubt—but how to be nominated in so striking a manner that it would amount to an emphatic and irresistible call to duty. This party call would be the prelude to a call from the whole country at election time. Only a party summons in July, in short, would make possible a popular summons in November.

Standing formidably in the way of such a call was the very thing that made the call necessary—the anti-third-term tradition. … All the polls showed a vast majority opposed to a third term as an abstract matter, and a clear majority opposed to a third term for Roosevelt. …

Roosevelt's task—in the event he finally decided to run—clearly was to bring about a unanimous party draft that would neutralize the anti-third-term sentiment. … If the President were to run again, everything depended on a spontaneous draft.

The chief obstacle to such a draft was John Garner. Were he to arrive in Chicago with a sizable bloc of votes, the "Stop Roosevelt" movement would be strong enough to preclude a draft. Garner had to be destroyed before the Convention. Roosevelt's earlier inclination to put him on the defensive by attacking him in his home state hardened. Another consideration was expressed in Marsh's American-Statesman: "If Roy Miller … selects [the Texas] delegation, such a delegation will be used as a trading block for the anti-New Deal group in the convention." New Dealers felt they had to try to at least cut into Garner's strength in the Texas delegation, place on it enough Roosevelt men to prevent it from being the Convention's anti-Roosevelt rallying point. The odds against an attack in Texas succeeding even in such limited objectives were long—but the attempt had to be made. The decision was taken. Texas was to be made a battleground.

But the battle required money. The state's size made radio the best means of rallying Roosevelt sentiment, but the cost of statewide radio hook-ups was substantial by 1940 standards. Even local rallies were expensive. The price of the permit necessary to hold a rally at the Dallas Fairgrounds, for example, was $300, and the incidental expenses of such a rally might run $1,000 more, even without figuring in the cost of newspaper advertising to attract a crowd. Such costs were multiplied by the system under which the state's delegation to the National Convention would be chosen. The delegates would be selected at a State Democratic Convention. The delegates to this convention would be selected by conventions in all of the state's 254 counties. And the delegates to these county conventions would be selected at precinct conventions—thousands of them—which would be held throughout the state on May 4. Money could play a decisive role in a precinct convention, which might consist of no more than a few handfuls of persons (anyone who had voted in the last election was eligible to attend) gathered in a school or firehouse. Just finding out who was eligible cost money. The names of voters in the previous election were listed in the office of the County Tax Assessor, but these lists had to be purchased. Then there was the problem of finding out which of the eligible voters favored your candidate. This was generally accomplished by telephone calls from a popular local politician or politician's wife. "You'd go to a county clerk's wife and say, 'You're not doing anything. How about taking this seventy-five dollars or hundred dollars, and calling some people,'" recalls Harold H. Young, a burly, brilliant, idealistically liberal attorney who was in charge of the Roosevelt campaign in Dallas and Fort Worth. Then, in Young's words, "it was a matter of who got your folks [voters who favored your candidate] out" to the precinct convention. Direct mailings, which cost money for mimeographing and stamps, were used. And, of course, on the evening of the convention, automobiles—with their drivers given "gasoline and expense money"—were needed. The amount required for a single precinct was not large, but, with thousands of precincts, the total required was considerable.

The Garner campaign in Texas, of course, had all the money it needed. The utilities, the railroads, the major oil companies such as the 'Umble and the Magnolia, the great ranchers and lumbermen and cotton families—the state's monolithic establishment that had long dominated its politics, largely through the use of financial pressure—were united behind the candidacy of the man who had long stood as its symbol. And as soon as the Garner forces realized—to their astonishment and rage—that Cactus Jack was to be challenged on their home ground, they mobilized, in what the Dallas Morning News called "the most painstaking preparations in recent Texas political history."

The Roosevelt campaign's shortage of funds was, in contrast, acute. (Because of his personal friction with the President, and because he was planning to concentrate his political contributions behind the vice presidential campaign of frequent Longlea guest Wallace, Charles Marsh's support for FDR was largely confined to editorials.) When Garner state chairman Myron Blalock declared, "Even here in Texas, there are those small voices who speak out against this distinguished son of the Lone Star State," Young, a gifted political strategist, saw an opening. He wanted to reply, "That's true. Nobody's for FDR except small voices—the people." But because Young had no money, his rejoinder went unheard. Blalock had spoken on a statewide radio hook-up. Young couldn't afford even a local broadcast. Garner, Young reported, had a paid worker in every precinct in Dallas; the Roosevelt forces didn't have a paid worker in any precinct. Maury Maverick was leading the Third Term forces in San Antonio, but was all but helpless against the massive outpouring of Garner money in that city.

But Lyndon Johnson was to produce a source of funds.

Success had not diminished Herman Brown's ambitions. His car still roared endlessly back and forth across Texas as he pushed his projects and searched out new work, so that Lyndon Johnson sometimes had difficulty locating him to make his reports; he would send copies of telegrams to two or three towns at once to make sure one of them reached Brown. And even the giant Marshall Ford Dam had not lessened his "obsession" to build giant projects. Now, moreover, the great dam was almost completed. A score of smaller jobs would not enable him to keep on the payroll the organization he had built up with so much effort, and of which he was so proud. Herman Brown wanted—and needed—something big.

Something very big was on the horizon. In 1938, Congress, at President Roosevelt's request, had authorized the expenditure of a billion dollars on a "two-ocean" Navy. By early 1939 it had become clear that a substantial portion of that billion would be spent on the construction of naval bases and training stations for a greatly expanded Navy Air Force. On April 26, 1939, Roosevelt had signed into law a bill authorizing the expenditure of $66,800,000 for the first of such bases. Brown's attention was already focused on the Navy because Lyndon Johnson was a member of the Naval Affairs Committee. He decided to bid on one of the bases—in San Juan, Puerto Rico—authorized in the April bill.

In April, 1939, however, Lyndon Johnson still had not yet gained entrée to the President, and his attempt to give Brown & Root a helping hand was rebuffed in a manner suitable to what he was—a Congressman without influence. Within two days of the signing of the naval air base bill, he had to confess to George Brown that "I talked with Admiral Moreell [Vice Admiral Ben Moreell, in charge of the Navy's shore construction program] and he said there is nothing further that we can do at this time." On May 16, he promised George, "I'll do all I can to get you any information on the Puerto Rico project and will let you know when anything breaks," but added, "You know how hard it is to get any dope in advance"—the statement of a man not on the inside of decisions. Seeking to offset its lack of experience in areas of construction required by this job, Brown & Root took as a partner on its Puerto Rico proposal the W. S. Bellows Construction Company of Houston, and submitted a bid, but the firm was shown no favoritism, as George Brown noted in a letter to Johnson, which stated, "I got some inquiries from the Naval Department for additional data" but added that these inquiries have "apparently … been sent to all prospective contractors." The entrée to the President that Johnson gained thereafter may have entitled him to help on a postmastership and the offer of the REA post; it did not involve any say in the awarding of a huge federal contract—as Johnson learned when, after another firm was awarded the contract in November, he demanded an explanation from Moreell. The Admiral brushed him off by sending him a memo from a lower-ranking officer: "Pursuant to your inquiry relative to the reason why Brown & Root, Inc. (and W. S. Bellows Co.) … were not selected as the contractors for the San Juan Air Base project …," while both firms had "extensive construction experience," they had no experience whatsoever in the type of construction necessary to build a naval air base.

A naval air base and training station had been proposed for Texas—on the Gulf at Corpus Christi—in the mid-1930's, and indeed its construction had been recommended by the Navy in September, 1938. The city's Congressman, Richard Kleberg, and South Texas' most influential figure in Washington, Roy Miller, had been actively pushing for the project for more than three years. But Kleberg's family was a major Garner financial backer, and Roy Miller was Garner's campaign manager. Herman Brown had been interested in the Corpus Christi base from the first, but he was a Garner financial backer (as, indeed, was fitting, since his views on organized labor, on the balanced budget—and on communists, socialists and liberals—were indistinguishable from the Vice President's. "From what I see in the papers," his brother George happily wrote Roy Miller in May, 1939, "things seem to be moving along all right for the 'V.P.'"). Other big Texas contractors who might have been considered for the job were also identified with Garner—or with Reconstruction Finance Corporation head Jesse Jones of Houston, of whose oft-professed loyalty to the New Deal Roosevelt had become—correctly—suspicious. After Kleberg had been making optimistic predictions for months, he had to admit in September, 1939, that "There has been no intimation as to whether it is intended to build the training station here [in Corpus Christi] in two years or fifteen." The Navy's construction program, surging ahead in other locations, remained stalled in Texas; as late as January 9, 1940, Moreell told a House subcommittee that the Corpus Christi project was "not viewed as emergent"—testimony that led the subcommittee to reject even a $50,000 request for making surveys of the proposed base site.

Close as he and George Brown had become, Lyndon Johnson may have shied away from suggesting frankly even to him what he felt Brown & Root should do. In October, 1939, with the Corpus Christi base still not included on the list of the Navy's "preferred" projects, George wrote him, "I have been sitting here all week waiting to hear from you. … I felt that you had something on your mind last week but did not get around to getting it off." But George may have figured it out for himself. He ended this letter by writing:

In the past I have not been very timid about asking you to do favors for me and hope you will not get any timidity if you have anything at all that you think I can or should do. Remember that I am for you, right or wrong, and it makes no difference if I think you are right or wrong. If you want it, I am for it 100%.

Opposing John Garner would be a huge gamble for a Texas contractor. But it would not be the largest gamble ever taken by Herman Brown, not for the man who had mortgaged everything he had accumulated in twenty years of terribly hard work to begin work on a dam before it had been authorized. And this new gamble, if successful, would give him the chance to build something even bigger than the dam—and to make even bigger money building it. A signal went out. In Houston, where Brown & Root's headquarters were located, Herman Brown's political influence was growing, and the city's Congressman, Albert Thomas, a junior Representative with negligible clout in Washington, was known to take Herman's orders unquestioningly. In August, Congressman Thomas had said, "Of course every member of the Texas delegation is for Vice President Garner." Now, in December, 1939, Thomas made another statement. He was not for Garner after all, he said. He was for Roosevelt.

That signal from Texas was answered by several signals from Washington—from the White House. They involved Lyndon Johnson, and Brown & Root. The first, on January 2, 1940, was a public signal: a presidential appointment. The post involved was a major one: Under Secretary of the Interior. The appointee would be second in command only to Harold Ickes in the giant department. It went to a Texan—"the choicest plum handed out to a Texan in years," said the Houston Press. And the Texan it went to was Alvin J. Wirtz, who was not only an attorney for Brown & Root but was identified with Lyndon Johnson.

Lest this latter connection be overlooked, the White House went out of its way to point it out, presidential secretary Early stating that "Rep. Lyndon B. Johnson … presented Wirtz's name," and letting reporters know further that, as the Press reported, "Neither Texas Senator was consulted," nor was Sam Rayburn or Jesse Jones. To readers of political signals, therefore, it was clear that Lyndon Johnson had become a key White House ally—perhaps the key White House ally—in Texas. In White House inner circles, it was also quickly made clear that the man appointed at Johnson's suggestion was going to play a major role in the Roosevelt campaign in Texas. Roosevelt "told us that Garner had to be sent home permanently to his 6,000 neighbors in Uvalde, Texas, so that he could add to his millions," presidential aide David K. Niles says. "And this crucial task went to Alvin Wirtz." (The Roosevelt campaign in Texas was shortly to be beefed up by the appointment of another Johnson supporter, Austin attorney Everett L. Looney, as Assistant United States Attorney General.)

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.

Following this signal, a number of Texans flew up to Washington. One was Herman Brown. Another was Edward A. Clark, who had left his post as Texas Secretary of State to go on retainer for Brown & Root and to begin using his political acumen on Herman Brown's behalf. Still another was an old Brown associate whose qualification for this trip was his ability to know where political money could most profitably be distributed in Texas: Claud Wild, Sr. (While he was in Washington, Herman may have been handed a letter written by Roosevelt. Its contents are not known: no copy of it can be found; the only reference to it comes in a February 9, 1940, letter from Lyndon Johnson to George Brown noting that "Herman came in last night," which states, "Am enclosing the President's letter.")

After Herman's trip to Washington, two alterations in the status quo quickly became apparent. First, Brown & Root was, in obtaining coveted Navy Department contracts, no longer just one of a crowd.

The Corpus Christi Naval Air Station, "not emergent" in January, in February was moved abruptly, if quietly, onto the "preferred list" of Navy construction projects with the highest priority. The contract for the air base (which, it was now decided, would be of the "cost-plus" type so profitable to contractors) was not, it was also decided, to be put out for competitive bidding, but was to be awarded on a "negotiated basis." And the only firm with which serious negotiations were held turned out to be Brown & Root; the firm's lack of experience in air base construction, which less than three months before had kept it from getting a contract for a similar base, was no longer mentioned. Because the contract was so big, Brown & Root was to be required to share the profits—if not the work—with another contractor, who had a long association with the New Deal. "The White House said we had to take in [Henry] Kaiser," George Brown recalls. But when George arrived in Washington during either the last week in March or the first week in April to work out the details of Kaiser's participation, "Ben Moreell said, 'You don't have to give him half.'" Moreell probably intended Kaiser's share to be only slightly smaller than half, but the vagueness of the Admiral's instructions gave Brown & Root leeway—and Herman told George how to take advantage of that leeway. Meeting with Kaiser at the Shoreham Hotel, George Brown, an unknown Texas contractor, showed the famous industrialist (famous, among other reasons, for his toughness in negotiations) a little Texas toughness. "I offered him twenty-five percent. He said, 'That's an insult.' I said, 'Henry, we don't need you. We don't need your organization.' So we sat around and talked and then I said, 'Well, I have to be going.' He said, 'Well, what are you going to do?' I said, 'I already told you what I'm going to do.'" And 25 percent was all Kaiser got. (To keep Kaiser's participation in the profits secret—Kaiser's participation in the work itself was almost nil—his share was in the name of the Columbia Inspection Company. The Bellows firm was also a participant. "We needed someone who had done buildings," Brown explains. "We hadn't done many.") To keep other contractors from becoming interested, preparations for the Corpus Christi project were carried on in secrecy. Blueprints and specifications were drawn up by the Navy not in Texas but in Pensacola, Florida. By the time the imminent building of the base was made public, drawings and specifications were almost complete—and, it was revealed, hundreds of acres of the land needed (on Flour Bluff, a point of land at the tip of Corpus Christi Bay) were already under option. Plans for the base became public knowledge on May 15, when the House Naval Affairs Committee opened hearings on a bill that would provide funds for twelve new naval air bases. The Corpus Christi base would be by far the largest, almost twice as large as any of the others. And there were other differences between this and the other bases—most notably the speed with which, now that the plans were public, they were finalized. After a meeting with President Roosevelt, Committee Chairman Vinson announced that "because of the urgency of the project," Corpus Christi would be the only one of the twelve bases for which funds would be provided immediately—in the appropriations bill itself; funding for the other bases would have to wait for the later passage of a deficiency appropriations bill. Lyndon Johnson told the Corpus Christi Caller that the bill "would be reported favorably and acted on in the House before the end of the week." That rush schedule was met, and within two more weeks the bill had been passed by the Senate. Shortly after noon on June 13, 1940, President Roosevelt signed a contract for the construction of the base on a cost-plus fixed fee basis. According to the Corpus Christi Caller, it was the first cost-plus fixed fee contract Roosevelt had personally signed. 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. Even as these figures were being announced, however, those connected with the project knew they would be shortly altered. In fact, before the end of the year, the authorized cost of the project would be quietly increased to nearly $30 million. In February, 1941, the appropriation was increased twice, first by an additional $13 million and then by $2 million more, raising the cost to $45 million. Each increase, of course, carried with it a proportionate increase in the contractors' fee. By this time, other contractors, some of them politically well connected themselves, were anxious to obtain part of the job, but, says Tommy Corcoran, a close friend of the Under Secretary of the Navy in charge of such contracts, James V. Forrestal: "Mr. Forrestal twisted a hell of a lot of tails to" keep the work in the hands of "Lyndon's friends," Brown & Root. 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.

The second alteration that followed Herman Brown's trip to Washington was that the Roosevelt-for-President campaign in Texas was no longer short of cash.

3/4/40 3:30

LBJ: delivered $300.00 in cash to Maury on the floor today.

jbc*

Three hundred dollars was a minor item in that campaign. Harold Young, who a week or two before had been so short of funds for running the campaign in Dallas, was shortly to be able to report:

I have rented a room at the Adolphus Hotel at $45.00 per month, have hired the stenographer [for] $25.00 a week, and I have put a publicity man to work at $100.00 per week. Beginning tomorrow, I expect to run a small ad in the Dallas News each day asking those who believe in Roosevelt to write me. … We are rapidly building up a precinct organization which will be sufficient to overpower all opposition by May 4th.

Building up a precinct organization cost money, but the money was available, thanks largely to Herman Brown.

EVEN AS THE FIGHT in Texas was being joined, however, the reason for it was fading away. 1939 may have been John Garner's year. 1940, the year that mattered, was Franklin D. Roosevelt's. March was indeed "a low point for the President," but, although he remained silent as to his intentions, the fox was ready to leave his lair. He had stuck his nose out, in fact, on February 24. That was the last day on which the President could have forbidden the entering of his name in Illinois, whose primary would be held on April 9—and he had not done so. The name of Franklin D. Roosevelt was going to be on a primary ballot. 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." His fears were confirmed on April 2, in Wisconsin, where he had once expected to win most of the delegates; instead, he suffered a smashing defeat.

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. If he hadn't known it, clues were promptly furnished. As Columnist Ray Tucker wrote:

The most down-hearted man on Capitol Hill is Vice President John Nance Garner. His friends have deserted him—left him cold. …

When Jack was riding high, … his office was the gathering place of … Senators. They rushed in every hour of the day to seek advice or to toss off a quick drink. …

But … his office is no longer a magnet for the politicos. The most popular vehicle on Capitol Hill these days is the Third Term bandwagon.

Refusing to bow out of the race, Garner said defiantly that his name would be presented to the Convention if only as a gesture, but a gesture was all it would be. Although Texas' precinct conventions would be held on May 4, the primary itself, the last in the country, would not be held until May 27—by which time, primaries in other states would have completely eliminated him as a threat to Roosevelt. Roosevelt appears to have seen this—and also to have seen and accepted that while he might crush Garner everywhere else, he could not defeat him in his home state—and he now decided not to wage an all-out war against Garner in Texas. The loudest of the voices for Roosevelt —Maverick—was abruptly silenced; his statements against the Vice President ceased, reportedly on a suggestion directly from the President. Near the end of March, Roosevelt had told Ickes that

He does not want any fight made for Roosevelt delegates in Texas. He thinks that Texans are unusually full of state pride and that they would resent an outside candidate coming in, even if that candidate were the President himself. He had already sent word to others in Texas not to fight for delegates. At the end he became realistic and, with a smile said: "Of course, it is not well to go into a fight unless we know that we can win."

But while the President's reason for fighting Garner in Texas had faded, that of Johnson and Wirtz had not—and they apparently persuaded the President that the fight should go on. During the first week in April, the tall, eager young Congressman and his calm, cigar-smoking advisor made a series of visits to the White House. What they said is not known, but one aspect of the situation was revealing. In Texas, politicians knew that Garner's popularity, coupled with his control of the party apparatus, gave Roosevelt no chance to win the delegation; in Washington, 1,600 miles away, where Texas sentiment was reported to the White House primarily by Johnson and Wirtz, the impression was given that the President had a good chance of taking the delegation and completing his enemy's humiliation. Johnson and Wirtz also may have appealed to other sides of the President's character. Roosevelt, Joseph Alsop and Robert Kintner were to write, had earlier told Johnson and "other Texan New Dealers" that "he wanted no part of" a fight against Garner in Texas, but "then he was shown documents and other evidence of the character of the Garner campaign in Wisconsin and Illinois, which was extremely bitter and highly personal in its attacks on the President. This angered him. … [Jesse] Jones again pleaded with him not to carry the fight into Garner's home state. But the Texan New Dealers voiced the opposing view, and the President agreed." Whatever the reasons for Roosevelt's reversal, on April 12 Wirtz was able to write Mayor Tom Miller of Austin: "The President has not 'called off the dogs,' and you can take this as authentic. … Everything from this end looks good. I asked Ed [Clark] to communicate with you and [Harold] Young and let me know who you all could agree on as state organizer with absolute authority to discuss the campaign, and what such a campaign would cost." The campaign Wirtz was talking about, Clark was soon informed, was a war in which no quarter was to be given: a battle in the precinct conventions, in the state convention—a well-financed campaign to take from Garner even the votes of his own state.

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.

Rayburn was determined to save Garner from the humiliation of having to fight to hold on to his own state. For months, he had worked loyally for his old friend. "I do hope," he wrote a Texas ally on March 8, 1940, "that we can keep down any contest in Texas. I am working on the people who I think might lead a third term movement [in Texas] just as hard as I can to keep it down." But as the hopelessness of Garner's candidacy had become evident, he had begun working for a compromise that would save the seventy-one-year-old Vice President from embarrassment, and let him retire from public life with dignity. The solution he devised was to have the Texas convention instruct the state's delegation to cast a first-ballot vote for Garner, while at the same time endorsing Roosevelt's policies,* to make clear that support of its favorite-son candidate did not mean diehard opposition to the President (and to end any hope of a Stop Roosevelt movement, to which Rayburn was, of course, opposed). Going to the White House, he had sued for an honorable peace on behalf of the man with whom he had worked for thirty years—and had for a time thought he had succeeded. Roosevelt, who at the time had decided to drop the fight in Texas, agreed; as one newspaper put it, "His [the President's] first act, designed to restore friendly political relations with [Garner], was to inform New Dealers in Texas that he has no desire of contesting the Vice President for the Lone Star State's 46 delegates."

After Johnson and Wirtz persuaded the President to change his mind and the campaign for the delegates was resumed under their direction, the direction pointed straight at Rayburn. It was kicked off with a telegram to him. Ed Clark and Tom Miller, two Austinites acting under orders from Johnson and Wirtz, sent a telegram to Rayburn on Thursday, April 12, demanding to know how he stood "as between President Roosevelt and Vice President Garner." The Garner organization in Texas, it said, "has been engaged in a very unwise, cruel and ruthless effort to politically assassinate Roosevelt. We concede your past loyalty to the Democratic Party and trust that you will again evidence this by not trying to stop Roosevelt. …"

In his reply to this telegram—and in subsequent events—was given definitive proof of Sam Rayburn's character. The going was to be very tough for his friend now. Wrote columnists Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen:

The great Lone Star State of Texas, where Jack Garner was born and with whose heretofore unfailing backing he rose to fame and fortune, is today the stage of what, in the opinion of insiders, will be his last political battle. … For the grizzled old warrior, it is a bitter and ironic clash: bitter because he finds himself on the defensive in his home bailiwick, where he reigned supreme for many years; ironic because he actually is only a pawn in a struggle in which he has no personal stake.

But throughout his last battle, Sam Rayburn stood beside him like a rock. "Torn between his loyalty to Roosevelt and his close personal friendship with Garner and the old leaders," the columnists wrote, he is "the unhap-piest man in the bitter melee. … Sam also fears the effect it may have on his own speakership ambitions …" But his reply to the Clark-Miller telegram was unequivocal. "No knowing person doubts my loyalty to the policies and accomplishments of the Roosevelt administration and I shall advocate that the convention … pass resolutions strongly endorsing those policies and accomplishments," he said. But, he added, "John Garner has been a distinguished congressman from Texas for thirty years. He has been the state's only Speaker and Vice President, its most distinguished citizen since Sam Houston. His fellow citizens of Texas should honor him by sending a delegation to the national convention instructed to vote for him for the Democratic nomination for President."

A maneuver by Lyndon Johnson's followers had thus forced Rayburn to take a stand against Roosevelt. But what good was the maneuver if the stand was not known—and widely known? What good was the maneuver if the stand did not receive wide publicity—if Rayburn was not portrayed publicly as a foe of the President, as part of the Stop Roosevelt movement? The Clark-Miller telegram of Thursday did not find its way into print, and neither did Rayburn's reply of Saturday. So on Sunday another attempt was made to get the news out. A discreet leak was made to Paul Bolton, an INS reporter in Austin friendly to Johnson (he would later work for him). Approaching Mayor Miller at Austin's annual Dogwood Day Dinner on Sunday night, Bolton said, in Miller's words, "that he heard from Washington that I had a message from Rayburn." This attempt failed because Miller had not been informed of the part he was supposed to play. Not realizing that the exchange of telegrams was supposed to be made public, the Mayor replied that he considered Rayburn's telegram "a personal message that I did not care to divulge." That attempt having failed, still another device was employed to get Rayburn's position publicized. As Miller put it, "Someone from Washington wired a special story about the telegram to a great many Texas newspapers." This device worked. Rayburn's stand was on the front page—and portrayed in the light in which it was supposed to be portrayed.

RAYBURN BACKS GARNER, the Washington Post headlined on Monday morning. The device also gave Clark and Miller an opportunity to send another telegram, with guaranteed publicity. As if Rayburn's answer had not been clear enough, they wired: "We concede your past loyalty to the Democratic party and we trust that you will again evidence this by not trying to stop Roosevelt. … Are you trying to stop Roosevelt along with Roy Miller [and] Blalock, or do you just want to give Mr. Garner a first-round complimentary vote at Chicago?" These telegrams had their intended effect. As the lead paragraph in the Dallas Morning News story put it: "Majority Leader Sam Rayburn of the House of Representatives was brought squarely into the Roosevelt-Garner fight." And he was brought into that fight in the way Johnson intended; the crucial phrase "Stop Roosevelt" had been emphasized. Rayburn was portrayed as a leader not just of the Garner campaign but of the Stop Roosevelt movement.

And the reaction from Roosevelt was all that could have been desired by the men who had conceived these maneuvers. Johnson and Wirtz would, during the week following Rayburn's statement, have three conferences at the White House. After the final one, Wirtz, in a press conference on the White House steps, said that Rayburn's statement "appeared to the President as an attack from within the Administration, and that Roosevelt felt Rayburn had not correctly portrayed his views." Wirtz said he was returning to Texas to lead an all-out fight to take the delegation away from Garner.

In that fight, Rayburn was to continue to be as much a target as the man he was representing. As a young Texas politician wrote Rayburn following an April 24 rally orchestrated by Wirtz: "At the 'New Deal' rally here in Dallas … your name was lugged into the discussion mainly by Mayor Tom Miller of Austin. … And some of the others tried in a subtle manner to connect you with certain men, who are supporting Mr. Garner. …"

Subtle and shrewd, the Johnson-Wirtz strategy gave Johnson what he wanted—as a third telegram would show.

When Wirtz arrived back in Texas, the all-out fight turned out to be something less; after an initial explosion of impassioned rhetoric, Wirtz said that he had no objection to the Texas delegation giving a first-ballot favorite-son vote to Garner, so long as it was not part of a Stop Roosevelt movement. The Garner leaders thereupon expressed understandable puzzlement over the reason for the "all-out fight." As soon as the national sentiment for Roosevelt had become unmistakable, they had repeatedly suggested, they said, the very proposal that Wirtz was now suggesting. Blalock, Garner's state chairman, said: "As heretofore repeatedly stated, we shall advocate that all Texas conventions, precinct, county and state, pass resolutions endorsing the achievements and accomplishments of the Roosevelt administration. Nothing else has ever been in the minds of the Garner advocates." That statement was disingenuous regarding the period—now just a memory —when Garner had felt he had a chance to win, but it accurately described the feelings of the Garner leaders since the Wisconsin primary. And it had been Rayburn's desire even before Wisconsin.

In the event, Rayburn achieved what he had wanted for Garner. Substantial sums of Herman Brown's money were spent on a campaign to elect at the precinct and county conventions delegates who would vote for Roosevelt on the first ballot.* The Third Term was advertised on radio as well as in newspapers. But the campaign did not shake Garner's control of the party apparatus. A compromise was therefore agreed upon. It was Ray-burn's compromise—in effect, it would be almost precisely the proposal he had made weeks before.

Under the terms of the compromise, it would be sealed by a telegram—in the interest of "harmony"—to political leaders in Texas. The telegram said:

TEXAS ROOSEVELT SUPPORTERS SHOULD ENDORSE NATIVE SON JOHN GARNER AND SEND DELEGATION INSTRUCTED TO VOTE FOR HIS NOMINATION FOR THE PRESIDENCY. … GARNER ORGANIZATION AND HIS SUPPORTERS WILL INSIST THAT STATE CONVENTION APPROVE AND ACCLAIM ADMINISTRATION RECORD AND WILL REFUSE TO BE A PARTY TO ANY STOP ROOSEVELT MOVEMENT.

WE THINK … BOTH SIDES SHOULD GET TOGETHER AND SEND DELEGATION TO THE NATIONAL CONVENTION WHICH WILL CARRY OUT ABOVE PROGRAM. … WE FEEL SURE SUCH AN UNDERSTANDING WOULD NOT BE DISPLEASING TO THE PRESIDENT.

To achieve the compromise, and thus salvage Garner's dignity, however, Rayburn was subjected to embarrassment—embarrassment which was to have profound political consequences. In conferences between Tommy Corcoran, Harold Ickes and Lyndon Johnson in Washington, and, over the telephone, with Alvin Wirtz in Texas, it was decided that the telegram should be signed not only by Rayburn, as leader of the Garner forces, but by a leader of the Roosevelt forces—and that that leader would be Lyndon Johnson. Because the text of the telegram indicated that the compromise, while guaranteeing Texas' votes for Garner, was not a total victory, Rayburn would have preferred that it not be sent, and that if it was sent, it be released to the press in Texas, "so that," as Ickes put it, "it would be less likely to attract national attention." Johnson, Corcoran, Ickes and Wirtz, however, insisted that it be released from the White House, and that Johnson go with Rayburn to show the telegram to the President. "Rayburn balked at this," Ickes wrote in his Secret Diary. "He did not want to go to the White House, one of his reasons being that he did not want it to appear that in a Texas political matter a kid Congressman like Lyndon Johnson was on apparently the same footing as himself, the Majority Leader." But the compromise gave Rayburn's old friend what Rayburn wanted him to have: the chance to retire with pride, to leave public life with his state's unanimous vote behind him. The compromise also endorsed the accomplishments of the Roosevelt administration, which Rayburn had helped bring about, and in which he believed so deeply. And Johnson and Wirtz held another trump card. With the precinct conventions rapidly approaching, failure to seal the compromise would result in the intra-state fight against Garner that Rayburn had been trying to avoid. For Garner's sake, Rayburn agreed to their terms. "Johnson here and Wirtz in Texas forced the issue until Rayburn reluctantly agreed to go to the White House," Ickes wrote. They were shown into the President's office on April 29. "When Johnson and Rayburn appeared in the President's office that afternoon, he told them benignly that they had been good little boys and that they had 'papa's blessing.' He treated them as political equals, with the malicious intent of disturbing Sam Rayburn's state of mind. I think that he succeeded."

WHETHER OR NOT RAYBURN was disturbed by the White House meeting, he was deeply disturbed by subsequent events.

He had assumed that, whatever the causes of the tension with the New Dealers who had once been his allies, the compromise had ended them. "I am sure," he wrote to a friend, "that no one thinks that I am anti-Roosevelt as I think all will agree that I have done about as much to help him carry out his program as anybody in the United States. What I have wanted was to have a delegation from Texas … without a fight and representing all elements of the Party in Texas."* But that assumption failed to take into account certain aspects of the President's character. Roosevelt would show an unwillingness to forgive—ever—this man who he believed had been part of a "Stop Roosevelt" movement.

Rayburn was shortly to rise to the place he had envisioned for himself as a boy. Speaker Bankhead died of a stomach hemorrhage on September 15. The hollowness of the New Dealers' threats to deny Rayburn power in the House was revealed by the proceedings to select Bankhead's successor; they took two minutes and were unanimous—no one even suggested a name other than Rayburn's. The next day, with Bankhead's body lying in state in the well of the Chamber, Rayburn stood above the casket—on the topmost tier of that tripled-tiered dais, in front of that single, high-backed chair—and took the oath that his fellow Texan, Garner, had taken nine years before. He made no speech; except for a brief eulogy to Bankhead, he said only, picking up the Speaker's gavel, "The House shall be in order." To a friend, a few days later, he said, referring to the town in which he had attended a one-room schoolhouse: "It's a fur piece from Flag Springs." And he added: "I still can't realize I'm Speaker." Then he returned to Bonham, where his constituents honored him by coming to a barbecue in a caravan of cars more than a mile long, each bearing his picture; before he went to the celebration, he made another stop: the cemetery, to stand before his parents' grave.

But Rayburn's attainment of his lifelong aim was to bring him only limited satisfaction during the four and a half years that remained of Roosevelt's Presidency. His image of the Speakership had never been limited merely to a gavel and power. "I would rather link my name indelibly with the living pulsing history of my country and not be forgotten entirely after a while than to have anything else on earth," he had written. He had always felt that the House of Representatives, as a sovereign branch of government, had rights and prerogatives, that it should not merely respond to initiatives of the executive branch but should play a role in the initiation of national policy. As its leader, he had felt, he would be entitled to such a role—specifically, since the House as a whole was too unwieldy to initiate policy, he had believed that a strong Speaker would be included by the President in the policy-making process, would, because he understood the will of the House and could represent that will, at least be consulted while policy was being formulated. His ambitions had never been only for himself. He had always thought of himself in the terms he had enunciated in his first speech in the House, so many years before—as a voice for people who had no other voice, as a voice for his beloved farmers. A man who met him for the first time on a train crossing Texas in 1935 saw him sitting "staring in serious reflection across the countryside"; the man introduced himself, and Rayburn, only half shaken out of his musings, said, as if to himself: "Where is the farmer going? Where is America going?" This man, who was to become Rayburn's friend, says that "He was a farmer at heart, but with an ambition to help his own kind." He wanted—wanted passionately—farmers to have a voice in the highest councils of government. And he had always believed that, after he became Speaker, he would be that voice.

He was not—during Roosevelt's Presidency—to have what he had expected to have. He remained loyal, a rock for Roosevelt in the Forties as he had been in the Thirties. The three previous Speakers, Rainey, Byrns and Bankhead, had been weak—at the time Rayburn picked up the gavel, the potential power of the Speakership had been all but forgotten. Under Rayburn, it was to be remembered. And his strength and personal popularity comprised a key factor in the passage, in that body dominated by anti-New Deal Southerners, of much legislation that otherwise might not have been passed despite Roosevelt's wishes. ("Hell, Sam," said one, "if it wasn't for you, there are about fifty of us from the South who'd walk right out on him.")

His strength was at Roosevelt's service in foreign affairs as well. In August, 1941, the Selective Service Act, which had, a year earlier, established America's first peacetime draft, was about to expire. Unless the Act was extended, not only would most of the men in uniform be discharged, but no new ones could be drafted. And despite Roosevelt's pleas for extension, pressure on Congress to let it die had reached almost a frenzy under the prodding of powerful isolationist organizations and of delegations of mothers.

Rayburn knew the draft was needed. Talking with George Brown, he suddenly fell silent. The grim face turned even grimmer. After a while, he said quietly, "The war clouds are gathering, George." Rayburn didn't stay in the Speaker's chair during the three days of bitter debate; he went back to the spot in which he had stood for so many years, back behind the rail, and he worked the cloakroom, calling in almost thirty years' worth of favors. Wrote a friend: "This was a time when he did not hesitate, all else failing, to make the ultimate plea: 'Do this for me.'"

As he returned to the chair to preside over the vote on the bill—the galleries above him crammed with uniformed soldiers on leave, weeping mothers and isolationist delegations—he knew he had not picked up enough votes. But he had the gavel in his hand. The Republicans were holding back the votes of several GOP Congressmen opposed to the Act, and several others were planning to change their votes from support to opposition as soon as they saw how many votes were needed to defeat the measure—since under House rules a member can change his vote until the result is announced. They never got a chance. Without the new votes and the switches, the slip the tally clerk handed to Rayburn was 203 for the bill, 202 opposed. In the very moment he read those figures Rayburn pounded down his gavel and announced the vote, freezing it. Enraged Republicans, milling in the well of the House, demanded reconsideration; by using, too fast for his opponents to keep up with him, a series of intricate parliamentary procedures—and, finally, when he was cornered, pounding down his gavel to finalize the vote, and grimly defying their leaders to do something about it—he kept the one-vote margin. He had stretched House rules to a point at which they would have broken had not the power of his iron personality stood behind his rulings—"but," a friend wrote, "the end result was that, when … Japanese bombers struck Pearl Harbor less than four months later, the United States had an Army of 1,600,000 men instead of a token force of 400,000."

But if he was to be allowed to push through Roosevelt's policies, he was to be allowed very little voice in their formulation. The charming presidential missives on Bonham's annual Sam Rayburn Day resumed. The two men had been born in the same month in 1882, and each January birthday greetings were exchanged, charming greetings from Roosevelt, admiring greetings from the man who had Roosevelt's picture on his desk at home; "I thank God for you on this day, because at sixty years of age you are ripe and strong for the burden that would crush a less determined man," Rayburn wrote in January, 1942. Real input into policy was not, however, to be among the favors Roosevelt conferred. Each Monday, in meetings highly publicized by the press, Rayburn and McCormack of the House, Barkley of the Senate, and Vice President Wallace would meet with the President, ostensibly to map policy, in luncheons marked by camaraderie and joking. ("Sam Rayburn mentioned that he had been in conference with Mrs. Luce. The President and all the rest of us began to kid him, and Sam turned pink.") But Rayburn was not impressed by such stroking, or by the crowd of photographers who would snap the "Big Four" on the White House steps as they were leaving. These meetings, Henry Wallace was to note, aroused Rayburn's "resentment" because at them "the President never suggests any legislation," so that the meetings amounted to no more than "glad hand affairs of very little significance"; on another occasion Rayburn complained to Wallace "that the President didn't take him sufficiently into his confidence." (Nonetheless, Wallace also noted, Rayburn "was quite loyal to Roosevelt.") Jonathan Daniels saw how easily Rayburn's feelings were hurt. And Daniels saw how often Roosevelt hurt them. "He said he felt he could be much more useful if he could see the President by himself. I asked him if he could not do this and he said of course he could—but—he gave the impression of feeling that his advice was not wanted."

A few of the younger men around the President such as Corcoran and Cohen (and the even younger, more junior, Jim Rowe) admired Rayburn. "Your country owes you a great deal which most of the plain people will never know about," Rowe wrote him. But, after 1940, Corcoran and Cohen faded from the White House scene. To the remaining members of the White House inner circle, men such as Steve Early, Pa Watson and Marvin McIntyre and women such as Missy LeHand and Grace Tully, and to bright young newcomers to that circle, Rayburn was indistinguishable from other Southern conservatives. More important—to this palace guard to whom disloyalty to the President was the cardinal sin—Rayburn had been, they believed, a leader of the Stop Roosevelt movement. This feeling echoed the attitude of their boss, a man to whom a sturdy independence such as Rayburn's was not a prized quality. Their attitude toward this slow-talking Texan was snide; after a Rayburn speech, McIntyre jotted a sarcastic memo to Roosevelt: "Understand Sam was very proud of his literary effort." When Daniels told McIntyre that Rayburn's "pride" had been "worn thin" by his "treatment at the White House," McIntyre replied that "Rayburn, like all other Speakers, has gotten swell-headed." Rayburn told Rowe: "There's nobody in the White House I can talk to."

Because of the size of Texas, and the philosophical as well as geographical diversity among its various regions, there had not been a single person through whom the White House worked in Texas, as there might have been in a smaller, more unified state. Nonetheless, for a long time Garner had been the key link between the White House and Texas, the individual to whom, more than any other, the Roosevelt administration had turned first in matters of patronage and policy affecting the great province to the southwest. Now Garner was gone. With the state's two Senators shunning statewide power, with the hollowness of Jesse Jones' professions of loyalty to the New Deal now apparent, and with Maury Maverick waging a losing fight for his own political survival, Garner's role would, in the normal course of events, have been filled by Rayburn, as the state's senior, and by far most powerful, official in the national government. Once Roosevelt had apparently intended Rayburn to fill that role; he had begun giving him the Texas patronage that would have cemented that position. Normally, Roosevelt would have continued doing so. The new Speaker's advice would have been the first solicited in matters of both policy and politics affecting the state. Normally, Sam Rayburn would have been the President's man in Texas.

But he wasn't. The telegrams to Rayburn from Austin had been cleverly designed to force him into a position which would antagonize the President. Lyndon Johnson's "vivid" description to Roosevelt of the John L. Lewis episode had emphasized Rayburn's anti-Roosevelt role, as had the reports Johnson and Wirtz gave to the President at their private meetings. (Rayburn's statement "appeared to the President as an attack from within the Administration. …") And the telegrams—together with the leaked newspaper stories about them, stories that relied on "information" from Johnson—cemented that impression. After those telegrams, the White House had an accurate impression of Sam Rayburn as a Garner supporter, but it also had a false impression of Rayburn as Roosevelt's enemy, as a leader not only of the Garner campaign but of the whole Stop Roosevelt movement, as the enemy of the man he not only idolized but whom he had, on a hundred occasions, loyally served. After those telegrams, Sam Rayburn could never be Roosevelt's man in Texas. He had been tarred beyond cleansing by a brush wielded by Lyndon Johnson. And the tarring gave Johnson what he wanted. By mid-1940, Johnson was Roosevelt's man in Texas. As Washington columnist Jay Franklin reported, "A virtual freshman Representative … is now the acknowledged New Deal spokesman in the Lone Star State."

The most significant aspect of this development involved federal contracts. Before 1940, Jesse Jones had frequently been "consulted" on these contracts. (As RFC head, Jones could of course award RFC contracts himself.) After 1940, Jones was to be largely ignored. Before 1940, Senators Connally and Sheppard had occasionally been consulted—not as often as Connally, in particular, would have liked, but occasionally. After 1940, requests from the Senators for input into contract awards were fobbed off. And before 1940, the Texan most often consulted had been John Garner. Rayburn's lack of interest in this area was already legendary in Washington. Once, following authorization of the Denison Dam in his district, he had been discreetly sounded out on the identity of his favorite contractor; he didn't have one, he replied. But, in the normal course of events, the opinion of the Speaker of the House of Representatives would at least have been asked when a major public works or defense contract was to be handed out in his state. Now it would not be. Freezing Jones, Connally, Sheppard and Rayburn out of major contract decisions in Texas did not, however, result in a vacuum in this crucial area. For even as the vacuum was being created, it was being filled—by the man who had done so much to create it: a "virtual freshman Representative."

Johnson's influence over the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station contract had in itself given him a major role in construction in Texas, for so huge was that $100 million piece of work in that state (the total amount of work let by the State Highway Department in 1940 was only $27 million) that Brown & Root put to work on it subcontractors from all over the state. And with the nation gearing up for war with growing intensity, and with the military bases that already dotted Texas expanding, his influence was to increase, for the word was passed by the White House that Lyndon Johnson was to be "consulted" on expansion contracts. Minuscule though these contracts may have been in comparison with gigantic Corpus Christi, they were important to the firms which received them; in Johnson's own district, for example, a contract for approximately $71,000 to the Taylor Bedding Co. for mattresses for Navy barracks was one of the largest this firm had ever received, as were federal contracts for several hundred thousand dollars of construction work that went to the Ainsworth Construction Co. of Luling. Contractors all across Texas were grateful for REA line-laying contracts arranged by Johnson. The word was out in Washington. Federal contracts in Texas were, as Corcoran puts it, to be given to "Lyndon's friends." "And," Corcoran says, "once he could get public money for his friends, he was made."

He was indeed "made"—by the "public money" represented by federal contracts. He had been able to bring to the Roosevelt re-election campaign a resource which no other Texan could offer: Herman Brown's money. And he had used that resource as a base. Because he could provide that money to the Roosevelt campaign in Texas, he was given a commanding role in that campaign. Because he played that role, he was given input into the awarding of other federal contracts. Because he possessed that input, men who wanted those contracts—and they included some of the most powerful men in Texas—had to come to him.

In a sense, that third telegram had signaled this fact. Lyndon Johnson's name had been placed beside Sam Rayburn's on that telegram; he had been treated by the President as "on the same footing" with the Majority Leader of the House of Representatives. Treating Johnson as Rayburn's equal in the Oval Office, of course, had had merely symbolic significance. Treating him as a full-fledged power in Texas in the awarding of federal contracts had a significance that went far beyond symbolism. Men who could read the map of power understood the significance of the fact that the largest contract ever awarded in Texas—a contract of almost unbelievable magnitude—had been awarded to Lyndon Johnson's friend. Ickes could describe him as a "kid Congressman." "Kid," in some terms, he may have been—a thirty-one-year-old Congressman from a remote and isolated political district. But after that telegram, he was, in terms of power, a kid Congressman no longer. Unknown though his name remained to the public in the state's other twenty congressional districts, it was now not only known but respected by powerful and influential men in those districts. Lyndon Johnson had been maneuvering since shortly after coming to Washington as a congressional secretary in 1931 to obtain statewide power. Now he was able to procure for men who mattered in Texas—all across Texas—not merely hotel reservations and appointments with federal officials, but federal contracts. Thanks to Herman Brown's money, and to the skill with which he had employed it as a political resource, he was much further now along the road he saw stretching before him.

HE WAS ROOSEVELT'S MAN in Texas—but he was not only Roosevelt's man.

The President's popularity with the mass of Texas voters was matched by his unpopularity with the small group of men who ran the state with such a tight grip, as had been proven by the overwhelming roar of acclaim for Garner—and his candidacy—in the state's Democratic Executive Committee, and in precinct, county and state nominating conventions. The President's popularity was, moreover, strictly personal, and could not be taken to include voter support of his policies, as had been proven by the defeat of Congressmen who supported the New Deal. Only one of the state's twenty-one congressional districts, Lyndon Johnson's Tenth, could be said to be safely "liberal"; in those few districts—no more than three or four—which were represented by Congressmen such as Sam Rayburn who supported the President, the Congressmen had won election by virtue of their personal popularity rather than by their accord with their constituents' views. Even after Garner's last hopes of victory in the presidential nominating race had vanished, the state organization was controlled as tightly as ever by men who had once been bound together by their allegiance to Cactus Jack, but who were now bound, as tightly as ever, by allegiance to a philosophy diametrically opposed to that of the New Deal. Their leader's views would not change (back home in Uvalde, he pinned a Willkie button to his lapel; twenty years later, he would still be railing against the policies of the man with whom he had twice run to great national victories). And neither would theirs. Many of the leaders of the Garner campaign would, in 1944, be the Texas Regulars who deserted the Democratic Party rather than support Franklin D. Roosevelt.

But, however deep their resentment of the New Deal as a whole or of the Texas leaders of the anti-Garner campaign, the objects of that resentment did not include Lyndon Johnson. The reason was simple: they didn't know he was one of the leaders. Johnson's attempt to conceal his views in the Garner-Roosevelt fight had, of course, begun at its beginning. During the very time when he was privately regaling New Dealers with the way he had defied Sam Rayburn to his face in front of the whole Texas delegation, he was dodging every attempt to make him take a public position in the Roosevelt-Garner fight. (His dodging led to an incorrect conclusion, for the AP noted that he had "recently joined in a statement expressing regard for Garner.") And he had attempted to keep his profile low—invisible, in fact—during the whole of that almost year-long battle. When a Roosevelt-for-President Committee was established in Texas, Tom Miller, not Lyndon Johnson, was its president, Ed Clark its secretary. Miller and Clark—and Maury Maverick and Harold Young and, in the battle's concluding stages, even Alvin Wirtz—might be roaming Texas making speeches, but Lyndon Johnson appeared on no speakers' platform.

As much as possible, he did not appear in Texas. The brief trip he made to Austin in March appears, in fact, to have been the only time he ventured within the state's borders during the months in which the Roosevelt-Garner battle was at its height there. The lengths to which he went to stay out of the state were most dramatically demonstrated when Austin's Tom Miller Dam, another LCRA project, was dedicated on April 6, 1940. Johnson had obtained the funds for the dam. At the dedication of other dams on the Lower Colorado, and of every other construction project in his district, he was invariably present, and went to great lengths to assure himself the lion's share of the publicity. When the Tom Miller Dam was dedicated, the only evidence of Austin's Congressman was his name on a plaque and a telegram expressing his regret that he could not be present because of "work yet to be accomplished in Washington."

When he was forced to enter the state, he stayed out of its newspapers. "Johnson was being very cagey," says Vann Kennedy, editor of the State Observer, a weekly published in Austin. "Johnson was being very cautious about getting himself exposed to any unnecessary fire." Harold Young, who was receiving so much monetary assistance from Johnson, came to realize—to his shock, for he had heard Johnson railing against Garner privately—that he would not do so publicly. "Lyndon didn't any more want to take a stand on Garner than he wanted to take a stand against the Martin Dies committee," Young says. It was at this time that the Texas liberal and Rayburn man William Kittrell first coined an expression about Johnson: "Lyndon will be found on no barricades."

He may not have been present even at the riotous State Democratic Convention in Waco at which the state's delegation was chosen after fistfights between Garner and Roosevelt supporters. If he was at Waco, he kept a low profile indeed. Asked years later, "Was Mr. Johnson at the state convention?" E. B. Germany, Garner's reactionary, Roosevelt-hating state chairman, was to reply: "I don't think he was there. If he was there—I don't see how he stayed away, but I don't remember seeing him at the state convention." He did not materialize on a speakers' platform where he could be seen by influential Texans until the Democratic National Convention in Chicago—by which time, of course, the battle was over, so he was not called upon to declare his preference.

His efforts at secrecy were successful.

The Austin American-Statesman, which took editorial direction directly from its owner, Charles Marsh, almost never mentioned his name in connection with the Roosevelt-Garner fight; as late as March 17, 1940, for example, an article by Raymond Brooks listed the leaders of the Roosevelt campaign in Texas, and Johnson was not mentioned. He stayed out of other newspapers as well. Articles in Texas newspapers identified Tom Miller and Ed Clark—and, later, Alvin Wirtz—as leaders, and included other names—State Democratic Chairwoman Frances Haskell Edmondson, Maury Maverick, railroad Commissioner Jerry Sadler, former Attorney General William McCraw, Harold Young. Seldom was the name of Lyndon Johnson included, and when it was, it was as only a minor figure in the movement to deny the favorite-son vote to Garner; four months after he had summed up the state's political situation without mentioning Johnson's name, Walter Hornaday, chief political writer of the Dallas Morning News, added: "… The Garner leaders also believe that Representative Lyndon Johnson is active in the third-term movement. …"

The fight ended with his anonymity still successfully preserved. The State Observer's June 3 issue, the issue which covered in detail the Waco convention that was the fight's final battle, identified Tom Miller as the "originator of the draft-Roosevelt movement in Texas." As for the movement's other leaders, the Observer listed many names. The name Lyndon Johnson does not appear even once in that issue.

One Texas newspaper did attempt at least obliquely to reveal and explain his role—and the reaction to these attempts is instructive. The paper was the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and it may have understood Johnson's role because its publisher, Amon G. Carter, while reactionary in his political philosophy and a longtime Garner supporter (it was Carter's famous Stetsons that Garner always wore in Washington), wanted huge new public works for his beloved Fort Worth and, to get them, had maintained ties with the White House. On March 23, 1940, Carter not only expressed the bitterness of the Garnerites in a long editorial ("Normal Texaris are unable to understand those calling themselves Texans who go about urging Texas to desert Garner and to weasel out of its duty to stand by its own") but also attempted to explain the significance to the Roosevelt movement of public works in the state's Tenth Congressional District—and of the district's Congressman. "The whole [Third-Term] outfit gathers round a damsite on the Colorado," Carter wrote. On April 7, the Star-Telegram sharpened its attack; in attributing the motives behind the anti-Garner movement in Texas not to philosophy but to greed, it said: "So far no advices have come from Washington … that dams of the Lower Colorado River Authority will be abandoned in the event Garner becomes President. But an Austin bloc is alarmed."

Noting past federal generosity for Carter's own pet projects in Fort Worth, Ickes replied by jeering that, after Roosevelt was re-elected, "you and other such 'leaders' will be the first to hie you to the pie counter" for more federal funds. Carter's reaction was to focus his attention more closely on the LCRA dams. Ickes had publicly promised to reveal, when asked, the legal fees paid to private attorneys in connection with all PWA projects. Now Carter instructed his Washington correspondent, Bascom Timmons, to demand from the PWA the total amount of the legal fees paid to Alvin J. Wirtz in connection with LCRA projects.

This figure, paid between 1935 and 1939, was $85,000, a staggering amount in terms of legal fees customary in Texas at the time. And the $85,000 from the PWA was only a drop in the bucket that Wirtz had filled at those dams. Once the question of his legal fees was opened, it might be only a matter of time before it was discovered that he had received for work on the dams fees not only from the PWA but as the attorney for the Insull interests, as court-appointed receiver of those interests in bankruptcy proceedings, and, of course, from Brown & Root. If a spotlight was turned on those dams, moreover, the Congressman responsible for their construction —the Congressman who had pushed for those legal fees—would be caught in its glare. The light had to be turned off.

The strategy evolved to do so is contained in a memorandum found in Alvin Wirtz's papers. This memo is unsigned, and unaddressed, and its author is unknown. In it, both Wirtz and Johnson are referred to in the third person, although at least one member of Wirtz's staff feels that, because of the secretiveness of both men (and because the wording of the memo reflects Johnson's style), these references do not eliminate either Johnson or Wirtz as the possible author of the memo. In any case, the memo reflects, according to all living members of the Wirtz-Johnson camp, the thinking of that camp: to counter the threat of an attack with a counterattack—a savage counterattack—against not only Garner and Roy Miller, but also Sam Rayburn.

The writer of the memorandum appreciates the significance of the Carter threat; while the PWA feels that $85,000 was a "fair fee," he writes, its disclosure "will have [the] effect of smearing Wirtz." The response should be to let Rayburn know that if the Wirtz fees are to be disclosed, other disclosures will be made: the press will be given "something that will be good nationwide publicity—how much Garner, Mrs. Garner, Tully Garner have received from the Govt, over a period of 40 years; that Ed Clark wants to figure up how much he, Sam, has made, travelling expenses, etc. in 25 years; that Everett Looney … has figures on how much Roy Miller paid to try to buy the Texas Legislature. …" As significant as the strategy revealed in the memo—the savage attack not only on Garner and Miller, who were used to such accusations, but on Sam Rayburn, who was so proud of his "untarnished name" (which would no longer be untarnished if it was linked in the press with a figure of approximately $225,000, which would represent, of course, only the standard Congressman's salary, but would look bad in the papers)—was the care taken in the memo that neither Alvin Wirtz nor Lyndon Johnson should be linked with that strategy. The threat should be delivered to Rayburn by Maury Maverick, the memo states, not by Wirtz. "Senator ought to be rather independent in the matter, and not be concerned about it. … Maury ought to call Sam. … Better this way than for Senator to get involved." As for Johnson, the memo goes further in stressing that he had nothing to do with the attacks on Amon Carter that had emanated from Washington. Referring to the "pie counter" missive, the memo begins: "Ickes has replied to Amon Carter, writing a real mean letter," and then hastens to add: "Secretary [Ickes] didn't consult Lyndon, and he didn't know about it." Lyndon Johnson—or his advisors—may have been directing all-out war on the Garnerites, but the Garnerites were not to know. When it became necessary for either Wirtz or Johnson to get publicly involved with the anti-Garner fight—when it was necessary for some key Texan in Washington to return to Texas and publicly lead the fight—it was Wirtz, always so concerned about the political future of the young man he considered his protégé, who dropped his mask and did so.

Neither Wirtz's fees nor the information about Garner, Miller and Rayburn was ever made public, possibly because the memo apparently was written on Friday, April 26, and Monday, April 29, was the day on which, with Roosevelt's intervention, the "harmony" agreement was drafted and the telegram signed by Rayburn and Johnson was sent, and this most serious threat to Johnson's attempt to keep secret in Texas his role in the Roosevelt campaign died. Amon Carter's newspaper was, moreover, the only newspaper in Texas to make even an attempt to portray Johnson's true significance in the fight. In Washington, his leadership (together, of course, with that of Wirtz) of the fight was an open secret; in Texas, it was just a secret. The only time his name received substantial publicity in Texas was when it appeared on the "harmony" telegram along with Rayburn's—and, because this telegram was signed by Rayburn, and because it was seen in Texas as a compromise, the appearance of his name in this context did not anger the Garner leaders.

And Johnson's refusal to take a public stand against Garner even while he was peddling his story about the John L. Lewis episode in the right quarters, his success in keeping his name off the two telegrams to Rayburn (and out of the subsequent press coverage of those telegrams), the care taken to keep his name out of the entire 1940 Garner-Roosevelt fight in Texas ("Lyndon … didn't know about it"), paid off. To an astonishing degree, the leaders of the Garner movement never became aware of the true extent of Johnson's role in the fight. Asked, years later, if, during 1940, Johnson brought "any pressure to bear not to have Garner nominated," E. B. Germany replied: "No, as far as I know he [didn't]. …" During 1940, two opposing camps were chosen up in Texas, and deep animosity sprang up between them, but surprisingly little of that animosity spilled over onto Lyndon Johnson, because each side appears to have felt that Johnson was on its side.

And after the conventions, when the fight was over, the man who had so carefully stayed out of Texas returned to it—for private talks with many of the Garner leaders. Some of these men had had doubts about Lyndon Johnson, but these talks resolved them; the few minor gaps in his fences were mended. George Brown had known that Johnson could do it. Talking as conservatively with conservatives as he talked liberally with liberals—"that was his leadership. That was his knack." And George Brown was right. He arranged for Johnson to meet in a Houston hotel room with two ultra-conservative, Roosevelt-hating Texas financiers. "He went in there, and in an hour he had convinced them he wasn't liberal," Brown would recall.

"This is a year of strange politics," said an article in the Austin American-Statesman. "Texas runs into some of its most amazing contradictions and cross currents. … New cleavages threaten a deep and serious break in Texas Democratic solidarity. It is a strange, confused, uncharted field—the field of national politics today." Strange, confused and uncharted it was—a minefield that could easily have destroyed the political future of anyone attempting to build a future in Texas politics in 1940. But through this field, one man—a novice in statewide politics—picked his way, with sure and silent steps.

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*During the twentieth century, three of the presidential landslides in America have been followed by a presidential maneuver that might be laid at least in part to overconfidence: Roosevelt's landslide in 1936 by the attempt to pack the Court; Lyndon Johnson's in 1964 by escalation of the Vietnam War; Richard Nixon's of 1972 by the Watergate cover-up.

*Maverick's election as Mayor of San Antonio in 1939 was blighted by his indictment later that year on the charge of using union contributions to pay supporters' poll taxes; although he would later be acquitted, he was hardly in a position to serve as a President's standard-bearer.

*Johnson was unopposed in the 1938 primary, but other Texas legislators running unopposed were among the invitees.

*This may not have been the first occasion on which the Browns had, at Johnson's request, assisted Maverick financially. During his 1939 campaign for the San Antonio Mayoralty, Maverick asked Johnson for financial help, because on March 30, 1939, Johnson replied: "I've talked with James Rowe, George Brown, et al, and I'm sure you will hear something before long." On April 7, 1939, Maverick wired: "Have Johnson send me that Gye hundred dollars."

*"A clearcut endorsement of the policies and accomplishments of the Roosevelt Administration and an unequivocal instruction to the delegates to vote for Mr. Garner for the Democratic nomination for President is what we want," he wrote a friend.

*Control of this money was kept in the hands of a very few men: New Dealers whose first loyalty was to Wirtz. The few veteran politicians working for Roosevelt in Texas were given little to spend.

*Even at this stage of the fight, however, nothing superseded the protection of his old friend in Rayburn's priorities. Another sentence in the letter reads: "I am sure since the exchange of telegrams between Wirtz, Blalock, Lyndon Johnson and me that everybody will go along with the program and instruct the county delegation to vote as suggested in the telegrams." In rereading this letter after it had been typed by a secretary, Rayburn was evidently afraid that it was not clear enough. After the word "vote," he inserted by hand: "for Garner."