IN THE FLOOD of endorsements from "big names" in Washington on behalf of Lyndon Johnson's senatorial bid, had one name been, for most of the campaign, conspicuously absent?
Sam Rayburn's coldness in October, 1940, when he had been reluctant to endorse Johnson for a post with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, had been thawed somewhat by Johnson's performance in that role; Rayburn knew how much he owed Johnson for helping to preserve the Democratic majority in the House, and thereby helping him keep the Speakership. Rayburn was a man who always paid his debts. After the campaign, he was again courteous to Lyndon Johnson on Capitol Hill.
But the thaw was only partial. The greatest favor Rayburn had bestowed on him—entrée to the "Board of Education," where crucial House decisions were made and strategy was discussed—was withdrawn; no longer, when Rayburn left the Speaker's chair in the late afternoon and headed for the room in which the House leaders met, did he invite Johnson to "come on down." Had the Speaker guessed—or learned—how Lyndon Johnson had betrayed his friendship; how, to help his own career, the young man of whom he had been so fond had turned the President against him by falsely portraying him as the President's enemy? To an effusive letter from Johnson in November, 1940, after the campaign had ended, there was no reply. A month later, Johnson arranged to be one of the speakers at an "appreciation banquet" held for Rayburn in Dallas, and played a high card to a man who so desperately wanted a son: Johnson said he had been a young boy accompanying his father to the State Legislature when he had first met Sam Rayburn; ever since, he said, he had regarded Mr. Sam as "like a father to me." When, however, Congress reconvened in 1941, Johnson found the door to the Board of Education still closed to him, and it remained closed all that year; during this year, encountering House parliamentarian Lewis Deschler late one afternoon on the landing of the staircase near the Board room, he said, almost shouting: "I can get into the White House. Why can't I get into that room?"
This was a rare outburst, however. It was not in Lyndon Johnson's interest for Capitol Hill to become aware that he was no longer on intimate terms with the Speaker, so few hints of the true state of affairs escaped his lips. As for Sam Rayburn, whose grim face had turned only harder now that he held at last the gavel—and the power and the responsibility that came with it—no one would have dared to ask him. It was generally assumed, therefore, that the relationship was intact. Johnson's staff hoped the Speaker would come to Texas and campaign for Johnson, and they were sure he would at least endorse him—and they were planning to make the endorsement a centerpiece of the campaign by emphasizing it, over and over, in a series of newspaper advertisements and in brochures. When they learned that Rayburn had, during the week of April 22, helped dissuade Wright Patman from making the race, they were sure he had done so on Johnson's behalf, and that the endorsement would follow shortly.
It didn't, and approaches were therefore made to the Speaker. At first, they were indirect; one was made, still in late April, through Representative Poage of Waco, who told Johnson of Rayburn's response: "He said that he did not feel that he should make any kind of statement in the 'Record,' although he was writing all of those that he had an opportunity telling them that he was definitely for you."
Private letters were not sufficient; what was needed was a public endorsement, and it was needed early in the campaign. During the next weeks, Rayburn was pressed harder and harder, but no endorsement was forthcoming. On May 29, Johnson telegraphed John Connally—and one of the significant aspects of this telegram is that Johnson is asking someone else to call Rayburn rather than doing it himself—YOU OR SENATOR [WIRTZ] CALL RAYBURN TODAY AND ASK HIM IF HE WILL RELEASE OR PERMIT YOU TO RELEASE STATEMENT … TO THE EFFECT THAT HE IS GOING TO VOTE FOR AND SUPPORT ME FOR SENATOR. … TELL HIM THIS OUGHT TO BE DONE TODAY IN ORDER TO HELP US GET ORGANIZED IN NORTH TEXAS. No Such Statement was released.
Johnson's puzzled aides began to wonder about the enthusiasm of even the private support that Rayburn was supposedly providing. Rayburn was a powerful force not only in his own seven-county congressional district but all across North Texas. The courthouse politicians in the little towns that dotted the prairies north of Dallas awaited only Mr. Sam's word to swing into action for Lyndon Johnson. The word did not come. By June, the puzzlement among Johnson's supporters was finding expression in letters. Warren Bellows wrote Connally expressing concern about the situation in North Texas. Judge Loy in Grayson County is very powerful up there, he said,
and is a personal friend of Sam Rayburn. I have been trying to get somebody to have Rayburn to phone Loy [but Loy] has not yet heard from Rayburn, although I made this suggestion nearly a month ago. …
P.S. Can't you get Rayburn down to Texas for a speech? This would help more than anything else.
Replying on June 3, Connally had to confess that "We tried to get Rayburn to call him. However, I don't think he ever did. … We are trying to get Rayburn to come to Texas to make a speech, but I don't know what luck we are going to have."
As Election Day neared with still no word from Rayburn, puzzlement turned to anger. The arrogant Marsh, the only one of Johnson's supporters who would dare to express it to Rayburn himself, did so; in mid-June, he telegraphed the Speaker:
IF YOU DON'T SPEAK OR SEND MESSAGE BY SATURDAY NIGHT AT DENISON PLEASE DO NOT SPEAK AT ALL, AS I BELIEVE IT WILL BE POLITICALLY HARMFUL THE LAST WEEK. IT WILL BE INTERPRETED AS RELUCTANT, TARDY, AND POOR STATEMENT. YOUR POSITION, WHATEVER IT IS, ALREADY BECOMING UNIMPORTANT, BECAUSE TIMING COMING TOO SLOW TO BE EFFECTIVE.
Sam Rayburn finally endorsed Lyndon Johnson on June 20, two months after he had been asked to do so—and just a little more than a week before Election Day, too late for the endorsement to be of maximum use. Moreover, the Speaker's public statement was accompanied by little private support. The definitive statement on the extent of Rayburn's backing of Johnson in the senatorial race was the result in Rayburn's own congressional district, in which 31,000 votes were cast. Johnson received only 7,000 of them.
Following the race, Rayburn's true preference in it became clearer. He had become acquainted with Gerald Mann, whose hometown in Sulphur Springs was not far from Bonham, and had liked the young man—a feeling that was reciprocated; "I was very fond of Sam Rayburn," Mann says. Although Johnson was already gearing up for another try at the Senate seat in 1942, Rayburn may have had another young man in mind for the post. On September 2, 1941, with Mann on his way to Washington, Rayburn tried to arrange for him to meet the President; the Speaker told Pa Watson that he thought a "short visit with [the] President would help all [the] way down the line." Had Rayburn wanted Mann all along—and endorsed Johnson only after he had become convinced that the under-financed Attorney General had no chance to defeat the hated O'Daniel? Johnson was able to fend off this threat for a while. Watson told Rayburn that he was sure there would be no difficulty arranging for an appointment with the Attorney General of Texas, but he was wrong about that. On September 11, Watson was informed that "Miss Tully says the President does not want to see Gerald Mann at this time. Mr. Mann ran against Lyndon Johnson for Senator, and Johnson is now in Virginia recovering from a tonsillectomy, and the President wants to see him first." When Rayburn insisted, an appointment was arranged for the next time Mann was in Washington. But the appointment was made for a Sunday, and the Sunday happened to be December 7.
PEARL HARBOUR restored—in an instant—the relationship between Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson.
During the senatorial campaign, Johnson had promised, "If the day ever comes when my vote must be cast to send your boy to the trenches, that day Lyndoti Johnson will leave his Senate seat and go with him." So popular had that promise proven in hawkish Texas that the candidate repeated it in almost every major speech, and in every form of campaign literature. Though his seat was still in the House, the promise could not be broken—not if he wanted to continue to have a political career in Texas. Johnson had some months previously been commissioned a Lieutenant Commander in the United States Naval Reserve, and on December 11 he was placed on active duty. Rising in the House, he said, "Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent for an indefinite leave of absence."
"Is there objection to the request of the Gentleman from Texas?" Rayburn asked. There being none, Rayburn said, "So be it."
The story of the naval service of Lyndon Johnson was to prove a very complicated one; as his actions during the war, and his own, private, statements to contemporaries were to demonstrate, it was a story motivated by considerations at least as much political as patriotic. But to Sam Rayburn, to whom some things were very simple, there was nothing complicated at all about a brave young man in uniform going off to fight for his country, perhaps to die. Rayburn was a profoundly silent man, determined that no one ever be able to guess his feelings. But as the coldness of a father toward an estranged son melts in a moment when the boy is in danger, so Rayburn's coldness to Lyndon Johnson melted now. Their exchanges of friendly letters had long since dried up—there had been none for more than a year—but Johnson wrote one on December 18, a few days before he was to depart for the West Coast. He was worried about the Speaker's health, he said; he hoped Rayburn would take care of himself. During the next few months, he said, "you must carry a burden that few—if any—men in our country can carry. You have never shirked a duty or failed a responsibility. You won't now—unless the old physical self cracks up. So take this suggestion from one much less experienced than yourself: 'Get fitted.'" The letter was signed: "Just one who respects you and loves you—LBJ." Sam Rayburn folded over that letter several times—until it was small enough to fit into his billfold. He carried it around in his billfold for a long time. Then he placed it in a special drawer in his desk: the drawer in which he kept the letters from his mother. When, eighteen years later, officials of the Sam Rayburn Library itemized the contents of that drawer, the letter was still there.
IF TO SAM RAYBURN Lyndon Johnson was the brave young man going off to war, there was a brave young wife staying behind, the shy, timid young woman, when he had first met her almost as lonely in Washington as he was, to whom his heart had gone out in paternal fondness—and who had repaid him, and more than repaid him, by making him feel at home in the Johnsons' apartment.
After his initial trip to the Coast, Lyndon Johnson returned to Washington. In February, he left again—this time, it was reported, for the South Pacific. He and John Connally, also in Navy uniform, left from Union Station, and Lady Bird Johnson and Connally's wife, Nellie, went down to the station to say goodbye.
So did Sam Rayburn. He had abruptly announced that he was going down to the station with them. The giant terminal was, in Lady Bird's word, a "hubbub," jammed with sailors, soldiers and marines, their women kissing them goodbye. Amid the tumult, Rayburn stood alone, square and silent as he always stood, well behind the young couple of whom he was so fond. As the Johnsons said goodbye to each other, he said nothing. His face was as expressionless as ever.
But after the train had pulled out, he came up to Lady Bird and Nellie. His words were not tender; only if you knew Sam Rayburn would you know what was behind them. "Now girls," Sam Rayburn said, with the gruffness of a man who could never be cheerful no matter how hard he tried, and who knew it, but who was determined to be as cheerful as he could—"Now girls, we're going to get us the best dinner in Washington."
IN UNDERSTANDING what many perceptive men had so much difficulty in understanding—the bond that, for the next twenty years, made Sam Rayburn the ally of a man so utterly opposite to him in both principles and personality—part of the answer lies in Lady Bird Johnson's sweetness and graciousness, and in the shyness that made Rayburn so fond of her. While Lyndon was away during the war, the Speaker hovered over Lady Bird, paternally protective, smoothing her work as she tried to run her husband's office in his absence, providing evenings out for her—and for the wives of other young men who were off to war, not only for Nellie Connally but for Elizabeth Rowe, Jim's wife, for example.
Of all the proofs of the power of Lady Bird's graciousness, perhaps none is more convincing than the fact that she made Sam Rayburn feel at home in her home; for the rest of his life he would come to dinner as often as several times a week; the only stipulation he made was that "that blamed television set" be turned off. She had his favorite recipes down pat, and, with her unfailing warmth, made him feel she was happy to prepare them—when the Johnsons acquired a cook, the cook was taught how to make cornbread and chili the way Mr. Sam liked them. The bond between Lady Bird and Mr. Sam was to become strong. Talking of "the Speaker," she says with a fierceness very unusual for her: "He was the best of us—the best of simple American stock." In his times of sorrow—when a brother or sister died—her heart went out to him; on the occasion of one death, she wrote him: "We wish we could put our arms around you today. Your sadness is ours, too." Rayburn was to write her: "Your friendship for me is one of the most heartening things in my life." During Lady Bird's pregnancies, the Speaker's concern about her health was so deep as to amuse those who witnessed it. He was constantly asking Johnson to telephone her to find out if she was all right; once, when Johnson did not immediately do so, he rasped: "Go call her this minute."
Then came the children: Lynda Bird in 1944 and Lucy Baines three years later. Sam Rayburn had wanted a child so badly, but he had had none, and never would. He loved Lyndon's. He would sit for hours with one of the girls on his lap, patiently listening to her gabble; as soon as Lynda Bird could talk, he taught her a sentence: "We are just two old pals." He gave them birthday parties at his apartment, inviting perhaps ten or twelve of their friends; the children's parents stared as they watched the little girls or boys sitting on the Speaker's lap, or reaching up to hug him—this man whom other men only feared. One of these fathers, the lobbyist Dale Miller, says that he realized watching Sam Rayburn what he had never known—that "He was a kind man, but he would be distressed if he ever thought you had found that out." Lyndon Johnson's family became Sam Rayburn's family—the family he had never had.
Also cementing the bond between the two men was Johnson's talent as a "professional son."
He knew now how much he needed "Mr. Sam." For the next two decades, Sam Rayburn held power in Washington. Presidents came and went—Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy—but whoever was President, Sam Rayburn was Speaker; he held the post he had dreamed of as a boy for almost seventeen of the twenty-one years after 1940, more years than any other man in American history. Over his branch of government his power was immense, so great that it spilled over into the government as a whole. Johnson needed him not only at the moment, when he was still only a junior member of the body the older man ruled; he needed him for the realization of his great ambition. And he knew it. If you want to be President, he told William O. Douglas during the 1940's, "you've got to do it through Sam Rayburn." And, needing the Speaker as his friend, Johnson devoted his energy and his skill to making him one. He reiterated his version of their first meeting ("My dear Mr. Speaker," he was to write in 1957, "when I was a very little boy in knee breeches and high button shoes, my Daddy told me that 'there's a young fellow from Bonham who's a mighty good friend and don't you go forgetting it.' I promised to remember—and that was the smartest promise I ever made in my life")—reiterated it so often that Rayburn eventually came to believe that he remembered it, too; nominating Johnson for the Presidency in 1960, Rayburn said: "I'm going to present to you today a man that I have known since his babyhood. …" As Rayburn grew old, that story came to mean more and more to him; at one banquet, when Rayburn was seventy-six, Senator Ralph Yarborough was to recall, "Lyndon was telling the story about how Sam had first seen him running up and down the aisles [of the Texas House of Representatives] in short pants. He was telling how 'he's been like a father to me.' I saw tears come out of Rayburn's eyes at this banquet and roll down his cheeks."
When Lynda Bird was born in 1944, Johnson telephoned Rayburn with the news and made a point of telling him he was the first person he had called, even before he had telephoned his own mother. He entertained Rayburn's favorite sister, Lucinda ("Miss Lou"), on her annual visits to Washington, and, when she was back in Bonham, wrote her to keep her up to date on the Speaker's health, and sent her presents, including candy in boxes so elaborate that she kept them on her vanity table as decorations. And he did nothing to discourage the bond between Rayburn and Lady Bird. During the first decade of her marriage, Lady Bird was not usually present at dinners at which her husband discussed serious political business—unless the Speaker was present. If he was, she would be brought along—even if she was the only wife there. During the war years, she recalls, sometimes a group of Texans would go out to dinner, at the Occidental, or to Hall's Restaurant for bluepoints and lobster; "This would be the Speaker, and perhaps Wright Patman, and others. … The other men would leave their wives home, because they would be talking business. There would be three or four or five men and me—for some reason, Lyndon always took me."
ALTHOUGH THE RELATIONSHIP between Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn was restored, it was to be subtly different than it had been before. Johnson's actions in the 1940 Garner-Roosevelt fight had lifted from Rayburn's eyes the curtain of uncritical affection through which he had hitherto regarded the younger man. If Sam Rayburn loved Lyndon Johnson, the love was no longer blind. Men who sat in the Board of Education during the next twenty years were aware of this even if most Washingtonians were not. Says Richard Boiling: "A constant refrain was about his [Johnson's] arrogance and egotism. He [Rayburn] said to me several times the same words: 'I don't know anyone who is as vain or more selfish than Lyndon Johnson.'" He appears to have understood now what drove the younger man; Ramsey Clark says, in words echoed by other men who knew both, "He understood Johnson. I've heard him talk about Johnson, and his ambition. I don't think it was blind love at all."
But Clark also says, and Boiling agrees, and so do Ken Harding and D. B. Hardeman and other men who sat, afternoon after afternoon, in the Board of Education as the dramas of power were played out, that while the "love" may not have been "blind," love it certainly was. Sam Rayburn could criticize Johnson, but he let no one else do so. Once, after Johnson's 1948 campaign for the Senate, a reporter from Texas was riding in the Speaker's limousine and remarked that Johnson had stolen the election; Rayburn had the chauffeur stop the car, and ordered the reporter out of it. Says Hardeman: "It was a father-son relation, with all that that implies. … Johnson would just infuriate him, but he would defend Johnson against all comers. He loved him in the way: he'd like to wear the bottom of his britches out."
The most significant difference was that, although the relationship was restored, no longer did Rayburn give his love and support to Lyndon Johnson for nothing; he demanded from him, in political matters at least, the respect, even deference, that he received from other men. The door to the Board room on the ground floor of the Capitol was open to Johnson again, but in that room, Rayburn ruled, and Johnson acknowledged that fact. Even in later years, when Johnson was the leader of one house of Congress as Rayburn was of the other, he acknowledged that. The acknowledgment was in the names by which each referred to the other: "It was never 'Sam,'" says one man. "It was always 'Mr. Sam' or 'Mr. Speaker,' and 'Lyndon.'" Says another: "There was never a feeling that they were equals. Never. Even after [Johnson became Majority Leader], Johnson was quite deferential to him. He would argue with him, but always in such a way that you knew who was the boss." If there was a disagreement, Johnson would preface his argument by saying, "Mr. Speaker, we're going to do whatever you want, but here's what I think." If he did it that way, Brown & Root lobbyist Frank Oltorf says, Rayburn would go along—but he wouldn't go along otherwise. Even Walter Jenkins, who idolized Johnson, says, "He kowtowed to Mr. Rayburn unbelievably." What Rayburn demanded, Johnson gave.
Occasionally, Johnson's feelings—his true feelings—about what he gave became apparent, but he never let Rayburn see them. When he was in the Senate, he would sometimes say to Jim Rowe, "Oh, Rayburn's so goddamned difficult—I've got to go over there to the Board of Education and kiss his ass, and I don't want to do it." But he went over, and did it—afternoon after afternoon, year after year. In 1957, when he was Majority Leader, he attended the dedication of the Sam Rayburn Library in Bonham. While he was talking with several prominent Texans, one of Rayburn's aides, House Doorkeeper "Fishbait" Miller, came up and told him the Speaker would like to see him. He waved Miller aside twice, and, when Miller persisted, exploded: "Goddammit, I have to kiss his ass all the time in Washington. I don't have to do it in Texas, too, do I? I'm not coming!" But then he ran after Miller to make sure that the message wasn't delivered, and hurried off to see the Speaker.
And in return for giving Rayburn what Rayburn wanted, Johnson got what he wanted. For the twenty years after Pearl Harbor, Sam Rayburn was one of the rocks—one of the firmest rocks—on which Lyndon Johnson's career was built.
IN AUGUST, 1961, Sam Rayburn, seventy-nine years old, virtually blind but still Speaker of the House, was dying of cancer, so racked by pain that he was finally forced to curtly inform a shocked and silent House—while giving it no hint of the true nature of his illness, which he had long concealed—that although Congress was still in session, he was going to leave Washington and return to Texas for medical treatment. Vice President Lyndon Johnson was in Berlin, dispatched there by President Kennedy to reassure that city of American support. (On August 17, when Kennedy had telephoned Johnson to ask him to go to Berlin, he had reached him at Rayburn's apartment at the Anchorage, and Johnson had replied that he had been planning to go fishing with Rayburn that weekend. Rayburn had interrupted to tell him to go to Berlin; they could go fishing another weekend, he said.)
On August 21, Johnson returned to Washington. Lady Bird, at Andrews Air Force Base Airport to greet him, suddenly looked around and to her surprise saw Sam Rayburn standing there behind her, as he had stood at Union Station so many years before.
Dear Mr. Speaker [Lady Bird wrote],
As I stood by that airplane in the gray, grizzly morning waiting for Lyndon, I looked up and saw you and my mind went back to so many times and so many trouble-fraught situations when you have stood by our side. You were dear to take the trouble to come out and I wanted to drop you a line and tell you so.
Next April is my twenty-fifth anniversary as a wife of a member of Congress. This quarter of a century of our lives has been marked most by knowing you.
On August 30, Sam Rayburn wrote back, stilted and formal even now. "Dear Bird," he wrote, "Your note was very refreshing and highly appreciated by me. You know that no two people are closer to me in friendship and love than you and Lyndon. It has been a great heritage to have known you so intimately and well." Although the pain was very bad that day, the hand that wrote that letter did not shake. There was not a tremor in the name "Sam Rayburn." The next morning, Rayburn went home to Bonham to die. A friend who spent time with him during his last days explained why he did not stay in Washington, where he could have gotten better medical assistance: Rayburn, the friend wrote, thought that "Washington was such a lonely city for a country boy to get sick in."