Master of the Senate (26 page)

T
HOSE YEARS
—1941 to 1948—were Lyndon Johnson’s years in the wilderness. He had been lured always by the gleam from a single goal. As a youth, working on a road gang with the reins of a mule-drawn “fresno” scoop shovel looped around his back so that he was in effect in harness with the mules, his hands blistered and bleeding from the fresno’s handles, his face seared in
Summer by the fierce Hill Country sun and in Winter by the fierce Hill Country wind, the tall, skinny, awkward youth had told his fellow workers, “I’m going to be President of the United States one day.” Once he was on the path he had mapped out to that goal, mapped out with a sophistication and pragmatism striking in one so young, he almost never spoke of it, but despite his silence those who knew him best understood his ambition. James H. Rowe Jr., who spent more time with Johnson than any of the other rising young New Dealers, says, in words echoed by other members of their Washington circle, “From the day he got here, he wanted to be President.” Johnson was later to tell journalists that his two daughters had been given the same initials as he because “this way we can use the same luggage,” but during his House years he would be more frank with his aide Horace Busby. Telling Busby to refer to him in press releases as “LBJ,” the young congressman said: “FDR-LBJ, FDR-LBJ—do you get it? What I want is for them to start thinking of me in terms of initials.” It was only presidents whom headline writers and the American public referred to by their initials; “he was just so determined that someday he would be known as LBJ,” Busby says. And sometimes, as if he could not endure the frustration of his hopes, what he really wanted burst out of him, as it did one evening when he was alone with his old friend Welly Hopkins: “By
God
, I’ll be President someday!” So long as the path to that goal lay open before him, nothing could make him turn off it. It ran only through Washington—national power, not state power, was the key. He refused to run for the governorship of Texas; to aides who assured him he would win the governorship, he explained that he didn’t want to—that that job could never be more than a “detour” on his “route,” a detour that might turn into a “dead end.”

So long as the path lay open, not even the chance for financial security could turn him from it. Tormented during his prewar House years by his lack of money, continually complaining that he had “nothing” (not a thousand dollars in the bank, he said), he spoke constantly of ending up like his father, who had died penniless, and pleaded with the Texas tycoons who had bankrolled his career, to bankroll
him;
to put him in the way of making “a little money.” But when, in 1940, they offered him a lot of money—a partnership in an oil company, offered on terms that made it virtually a gift, worth perhaps three quarters of a million dollars—he turned the offer down because, he explained, “I can’t be an oil man”; if the public knew he had oil interests, “it would kill me politically.” In discussing his political ambitions, Johnson had previously spoken to these men only of the House and Senate—he had said over and over that, as one of them recalls, “he wanted to remain in Congress until a Senate seat opened up, and then run for that seat, that the Senate was his ultimate goal in politics”—and had never mentioned any other office. But Johnson’s congressional district was safe—being an oilman couldn’t hurt him there. And it certainly couldn’t hurt him if he ran for the Senate in oil-dominated Texas. Then these supporters realized that there was another office for which, indeed, a candidate
would be “killed” by being an “oilman”—and they realized at last what Lyndon Johnson really wanted, and how much he wanted it.

But now, after 1941, the path was closed. For the next seven years, Lyndon Johnson remained stuck in the House of Representatives. Men and women who knew him in Washington describe him in words that echo words used to describe him by men and women who knew him in Johnson City—words which, in fact, he had, in his youth, used about himself. “He had to
be somebody
,” they would say, “just
had to
,” could not stand, in the words of one of them, “to be one of a crowd—just could not
stand
it.” But in the House, with its 435 members who jammed its cloakrooms and jostled in the aisles of its chamber, its 435 members of whom only a few handfuls—members who had been there for decades—had significant authority, he couldn’t, as a junior congressman, be anything
but
one of a crowd.

His lack of interest in the body’s general legislative work had always been noticeable, and it remained so, particularly after a 1943 fiasco in which he tried to push himself into national prominence by introducing a bill that would have usurped the jurisdiction of a committee of which he was not a member. During the more than eleven years that Lyndon Johnson would eventually serve in the House, he would introduce only four bills that would have had an effect beyond the borders of his own congressional district. In fact, he introduced only three intra-district bills: a total in eleven years of only seven bills, less than the number introduced by any of the twenty other representatives who entered Congress in the same year he did. (Only two of his bills—two minor measures that affected only his own district—were enacted into law.) He made almost as few formal speeches as laws, and seldom participated in informal discussions and debates, the daily give-and-take of legislative business. Entire years passed in which he did not rise even once to make a point of order, or any other point; to ask or answer a question; to support or attack a bill under discussion; to participate, by so much as a single word, in an entire year’s worth of floor proceedings. Although Johnson adherents would contend in later years that he was active in the House in other ways—by quietly lobbying his colleagues in the cloakrooms on behalf of liberal causes, for instance—this picture could hardly be contradicted more strongly by the men who knew: the men he had supposedly lobbied. As one of his fellow congressmen says: “He just simply was not especially interested in general legislation that came to the floor. Some of us were on the floor all the time, fighting for liberal causes. But he stayed away from the floor, and while he was there, he was very, very silent.” Liberal colleagues believed him to be liberal at heart; conservative colleagues believed him to be conservative. Says one extremely conservative Republican congressman, “Politically, if we disagreed, it wasn’t apparent to me. Not at all.” In fact, no one really knew his heart because he seldom fought for an issue or even expressed a definite opinion about it.

His insistence on being the center of attention, of dominating any room in which he found himself, had never slackened. At Washington dinner parties, he
wanted to do the talking, and if someone else held the floor for any length of time, he would go to sleep at the table—or pretend to, his eyes closing, his head nodding forward. When he woke up, friends say, “he woke up talking,” and if he was still not allowed to hold the floor, his eyes would close again. But in Washington, people’s willingness to listen is a coefficient of the power of the person talking. Lyndon Johnson didn’t have much power, and as it became more and more apparent that he wasn’t
going
to have much, at least in any foreseeable future, it became harder for him to hold the stage. And on Capitol Hill, Johnson was constantly trying to “domineer” over his fellow congressmen, to lecture them on politics in a dogmatic, overbearing tone, to act as if they owed him favors, and these efforts were arousing more and more resentment. Frequently, when he indulged in a characteristic habit of putting one arm around a colleague’s shoulders and grasping the colleague’s lapel with his other hand, the colleague would draw back from the hand; at least once, a colleague angrily knocked it away. All too frequently, colleagues with whom he had served for years would come into the House Dining Room and pointedly ignore him as they walked past his table. Lyndon Johnson hated his years in the House, the House in which—this man who could not stand being only “one of a crowd”—he was only one of the hundreds of congressmen who had no power or ability to accomplish anything, whose days were punctuated with reminders of his lack of status. He started avoiding the Democratic cloakroom and the floor; “He couldn’t work up the enthusiasm anymore,” a colleague says. The seven years from 1941 to 1948 were years of hopelessness and despair, seven years in what was for Lyndon Johnson the bleakest possible wilderness: a life without any political power that he considered meaningful.

D
EEPENING THE DESPAIR
was another consideration—one that sometimes seemed to prey upon Lyndon Johnson’s mind more than any other. Power in the House of Representatives could come only through seniority—through waiting; waiting for many years—and Lyndon Johnson was convinced that he didn’t
have
many years. Throughout his boyhood, he had heard relatives repeating a piece of family lore: that all Johnson men had weak hearts and died young. Then, while he was still in college and his father was barely fifty years old, his father’s heart had begun to fail; Sam Ealy Johnson died, after years of heart trouble, in 1937, twelve days after his sixtieth birthday. One of Sam’s two younger brothers—Lyndon’s uncles—died of a massive heart attack in 1939, at the age of fifty-seven. The other suffered one heart attack in 1946, at the age of sixty-five, and a second in 1947, and was to live his last years as a near-invalid. Lyndon was always deeply conscious of his marked physical resemblance to his tall, gawky, big-eared, big-nosed father; his shoulder-hugging and lapel-grasping was an inherited mannerism. Wright Patman, who served in Congress with Lyndon Johnson and in the Texas Legislature with his father, says “Lyndon clutched you like his daddy did when he talked to you. They looked alike,
they walked the same, had the same nervous mannerisms. He was so much like his father that it was humorous to watch.” Lyndon was convinced, to what one of his secretaries calls “the point of obsession,” that he had inherited the family legacy. “I’m not gonna live to be but sixty,” he would say. “My daddy died at sixty. My uncle …” Now, as he grew older, whenever it was suggested that he might make his career in the House of Representatives, he would reply, in a low voice, “Too slow. Too slow.” The long, slow path to power in the House might be the only one open to him, but he felt it was not a path feasible for him to follow.

C
ONSTANT AS WAS HIS ULTIMATE AMBITION
, during those seven years there sometimes seemed no possibility of its realization, and without that possibility—or at least the chance for some form of increased power—the complexity of Lyndon Johnson’s motivations became clear.

Despite repeated campaign promises to “serve in the trenches” if war came, for months after Pearl Harbor he maneuvered to stay out of any combat zone, and finally, forced into one, flew on a single bombing mission as an observer and then hurried back to Washington. There he tried to obtain high civilian rank—he campaigned vigorously for an appointment as Secretary of the Navy which would have made him one of the youngest Cabinet officers in history—but when he didn’t get the job, his interest in the war faded, so markedly that to an aide it was obvious that if he couldn’t have real authority in it, “he regarded it as an interference with his agenda”; he attempted to dissuade his young assistants from enlisting, or, if they were drafted, often tried to have their draft notices rescinded so that they could continue serving him rather than their country.

During his prewar years as a congressman, he had, in a monumental feat of ingenuity and resolve, brought electricity to his isolated district, in a single stroke bringing the farmers and ranchers of the Hill Country into the twentieth century. And he had maximized the effect within it of so many New Deal programs that he had been called “the best congressman for a district there ever was.” During these next seven years, with his programs in place and being carried forward by an efficient staff, his interest in his district steadily waned. In a state which routinely re-elected incumbent congressmen, there was no realistic chance he would lose his seat, but he was increasingly less involved with his job. He had been interested, deeply involved, in working for his constituents so long as that work held out the prospect—the imminent prospect—of leading to something more, but so dramatically did his interest wane the moment it appeared that his work for his district might have to be an end in itself, that helping people seemed to mean as little to him as helping the war effort. Without the prospect of new, greater power, the power he possessed was meaningless to him.

So long as the path to power lay open before him, he had been willing to defer, even to sacrifice, his need for financial security. Now, with that path closed—perhaps forever—the deferring was over. During the seven years following his defeat in the 1941 Texas senatorial election, Lyndon Johnson grabbed for money as greedily as he had grabbed for power, using his political influence to do so, and using it so successfully that by 1948 he was boasting that instead of a thousand dollars he had a million, a small fortune at that time.

In 1948, he decided to take one last desperate gamble, entering a race for the Senate although he would be running against Coke Robert Stevenson, the only man in the state’s history to hold all three of its top governmental posts—Speaker, Lieutenant Governor, Governor—and a public figure so beloved in Texas that in the last Democratic primary he had entered, the crucial election in a one-party state, he had carried every one of the state’s 254 counties, the only candidate for Governor or Senator who had ever done so. “The Cowboy Governor,” as he was known, was considered invincible.

The stakes of the gamble were all the higher because under Texas law Johnson could not run for the Senate without relinquishing his House seat and his eleven years of seniority. One of Johnson’s key advisers was not exaggerating when he says of the 1948 race, “That was
it!
All or nothing.” Johnson himself recoiled from the risk. “At first,” he was to say, “I just could not bear the thought of losing everything.” But he took the gamble—because the imperatives of his character gave him no choice: another congressman might have decided not to take such a risk, because losing would mean he might have to leave Washington, with its excitement and glamour. But for Lyndon Johnson, not excitement or glamour but power was the basic need; to stay on in Washington without it was intolerable to him. If he lost, he said, he would leave politics forever, and go into business; he may have been born to politics, may have been a master of the political game, but without power he didn’t want to remain in it.