PEARL HARBOR was to derail Lyndon Johnson's career.

He had expected to run against Pappy O'Daniel again in just a year—in the Democratic primary that would be held during the summer of 1942 for the full six-year term in the same Senate seat. He hoped for Roosevelt's backing in 1942, and the President's negative response to Rayburn's request for an interview for Gerald Mann was not the only indication that this hope was to be granted. When, in October, 1941, Wright Patman asked for an appointment to solicit the White House support to which he felt his record entitled him, Roosevelt wouldn't even see him. In 1942, moreover, Johnson would be starting not as an unknown candidate but as one whose name had been made—through hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of advertising—almost a household word in Texas. The statewide Johnson-for-Senator campaign organization established and perfected in 1941 was champing at the bit for 1942. He would have Brown & Root behind him again, which meant that he would again have all the money he needed. He was confident that he would win. But the outbreak of war—and his pledge to serve in it—made running in 1942 an impossibility. It would be seven years before he got another chance.

And when, in 1948, he got this chance, there would be a slight alteration in the platform on which he ran. In 1941, his platform had been "all-out," "100 percent" support of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. In 1948, he no longer supported the principles and programs for which Roosevelt had stood.

With a few exceptions, he opposed them.

Even before Roosevelt's death, the change had begun, for even before Roosevelt's death, Johnson had decided that the power in Texas—the power that could enable him to move up to the second rung on his three-rung ladder—lay not with the people of Texas, who loved the President, but with the state's small circle of rulers, who hated him. In February, 1943, Johnson sent them a signal. One of their voices in Washington was House Un-American Activities Committee Chairman Martin Dies, to whom the New Deal was a Communist conspiracy. An effort was under way in Congress to end the Committee's existence. Johnson voted to continue it, and to increase the funding for its work.

Harold Young, a dedicated liberal, was astonished when he heard of this vote by the man he had so ardently supported, and telephoned Johnson, "You mean to tell me you voted for that son-of-a-bitch to get more money?" Admitting that he had indeed done so, Johnson said, "I never claimed to be a liberal." "Well," said Young, "you sure fooled hell out of me." Then and there, he coined a new nickname that he felt epitomized the cowardice before powerful forces of the man he had previously admired: "Lyin'-down Lyndon."

So long as Roosevelt was still alive—in power—the change was muted. The sentiments Johnson expressed in Texas, 1,600 miles from Washington, were not expressed in the capital, except to a small clique which revolved around Corcoran, now ousted by the President from the circles of official power and already transformed, with remarkable speed, into a lobbyist growing rich on fees from some of the country's most reactionary businessmen who hired Tommy the Cork to help them circumvent the laws he had written. By 1942, Charles Marsh was to say in dismay that both Corcoran and Johnson had "reached the conclusion that the public is now tired of the New Deal and they must be given something new." Corcoran arranged for Johnson to deliver in Portland, Oregon, a speech that, according to Marsh, "kicks the New Deal into a cocked hat." At the last moment, Johnson edited out most of the anti-New Deal rhetoric, but a few paragraphs remained to give the tone. The speech was delivered—on December 8, 1942—at farewell ceremonies for the obsolete battleship Oregon, which was being scrapped to provide steel for the war effort. Johnson said there was other scrapping to be done as well: of a government that, he said, had grown too big. Many Depression-era government agencies, such as "these old domestic museum pieces, the PWA, FHA and WPA," he said, "have now outlived their usefulness," as have "men who have become entrenched in power without making or keeping themselves fit for the exercise of that power, men who love their country and would die for it—but not until their own dangerously outdated notions have caused others to die for it first.

What about over-staffed, over-stuffed government that worries along like a centipede? [he demanded]. … While we work and fight to end the career of the paperhanger of Berlin, what are we doing about the careers of our artists in paperhanging, who plaster us with forms and blanks and hem us in with red tape? … The roll of candidates, human and otherwise, for our national wartime scrap heap, is too long to be called here. Scrap them we must. End the entrenchment of the unfit we must. Break the hold of dead hands we must. … We are wound and wound in little threads like a spider's web.

In 1944, during the anti-Roosevelt revolt by the reactionary Texas Regulars, Johnson sided with his state's New Dealers, but, with Wirtz's help, he tried frantically to keep his role in the fight as minimal as possible, disguising it so successfully that after this battle the disgusted Bill Kittrell, another Texas liberal who had backed Johnson in the belief that Johnson was also a liberal, began telling friends: "Lyndon will be found on no barricades."

Muted though it was during Roosevelt's life, however, the change had come very early—within a few months after the 1941 senatorial campaign, in fact. Even before he sent out public signals with his vote on the Dies Committee, he had, in a series of quiet meetings arranged by Roy Miller and Herman Brown and Alvin Wirtz and Ed Clark, let key figures in the Texas plutocracy know what Miller and Brown and Wirtz and Clark already knew: that, as Roy's son, Dale, puts it: "He gave the impression of being much, much more liberal than he actually was—his manner personified the New Deal—he looked the part: he was young, dynamic, outgoing. But… he gave a lot more impression of being with the New Deal than he actually was. …" Or as George Brown says, "He [said he] was for the Niggers, he was for labor, he was for the little boys, but by God … you get right down to the nut-cutting, he was practical." "Basically," George Brown says, "Lyndon was more conservative, more practical than people understood"—and by the mid-1940's, Brown says, in Texas at least, "people," the people who mattered, did understand. "You could see what side he was really on, then."

On the day of Roosevelt's death, Johnson's reporter friend William S. White wrote that he found the young Congressman in "a gloomy Capitol corridor," with "tears in his eyes," and "a white cigarette holder"—similar to Roosevelt's—clamped in "a shaking jaw." He told White that when the news came, "I was just looking up at a cartoon on the wall—a cartoon showing the President with that cigarette holder and his jaw stuck out like it always was. He had his head cocked back, you know. And then I thought of all the little folks, and what they had lost." He told White, "He was just like a Daddy to me always; he always talked to me just that way. …" Then, White wrote, Johnson cried out, "God! God! How he could take it for us all!"

But the King was dead. The day after Roosevelt's death, one of Johnson's secretaries, Dorothy Nichols, asked him: "He's gone; what do we have now?" "Honey," Johnson replied, "we've got Truman. … There is going to be the damnedest scramble for power in this man's town for the next two weeks that anyone ever saw in their lives."

With Roosevelt dead, Johnson went public with his change of allegiance. Because he had difficulty erasing the earlier pro-Roosevelt image that he had so painstakingly created, in 1947 he called in another friendly reporter, Tex Easley, to correct it, and after an exclusive interview with the Congressman, Easley wrote that while "People all over Texas formed an impression over the years that Lyndon Johnson personified the New Deal … it would be an error to tag Johnson now as a strong New Dealer. That may come as a surprise, but it is true." Except in certain limited, specific, areas of governmental action—Johnson mentioned three: "development of water power, REA, farm-to-market roads"—he wasn't a New Dealer, Johnson told Easley; "I think the term 'New Dealer' is a misnomer," he said. "I believe in free enterprise, and I don't believe in the government doing anything that the people can do privately. Whenever it's possible, government should get out of business." As a liberal reporter was later to put it: "Just roads and rural electrification? This could have been Cotton Ed Smith talking, or Jim Eastland. It was certainly no liberal talking." On another, later, occasion, he sought to excuse his early support of the New Deal by saying, "I was a young man of adventure with more guts than brains. …"

If in public he was attacking only certain aspects of the New Deal, in private—at least in Texas—he was going much further. He was not a New Dealer, he said, never had been. He had supported Roosevelt, he said, only to get things for Texas. In private, in fact, he was now opposing the New Deal almost as enthusiastically as he had once supported it. During his 1948 senatorial campaign, he supported few, if any, of the programs that had evolved out of, and were carrying forward, the New Deal. He ran not as a New Dealer, but, to the extent possible because of his earlier statements, as an anti-New Dealer. And during the campaign, he attacked much of what was left of the New Deal. The shift in his views can be symbolized in a single issue: labor. In his first campaign for the Senate, he had told Texas labor unions: "I come to you as a friend of labor." In his second, he came as an enemy—open and bitter. In 1948, it wasn't Pappy O'Daniel who attacked the "big labor racketeers" and "racketeering Communist [union] leaders who take orders only from Moscow." Those words were Johnson's words. Nor was the change limited to labor. Once he had said—over and over, in speeches, in pamphlets, in posters and on huge billboards—that he was "100 percent" for Roosevelt and the New Deal. Now, he still said that he had supported a percentage of New Deal legislation—but the percentage he cited was not 100, or even 50; on twenty-seven major pieces of New Deal legislation, he said, he had voted for the New Deal thirteen times. The Dallas Chamber of Commerce, one of the most reactionary business groups in the United States, checked out his record—and found it so satisfactorily conservative that it enthusiastically endorsed him.

The change may have come as a shock to Harold Young and Bill Kittrell; it might have shocked Pa Watson, who had considered Lyndon Johnson the "perfect Roosevelt man." But it would have come as no surprise to the young men who had lived in the Dodge Hotel with Lyndon Johnson, and who had said, "Lyndon goes which way the wind blows." His relationship with the President and the New Deal demonstrated how well these young men had understood him. Before the paint had faded on the billboards proclaiming his loyalty to Franklin D, Lyndon B had turned against him.