Master of the Senate (27 page)

E
VERY STAGE
of Lyndon Johnson’s career had been marked not only by pragmatism but by what is, in a democracy in which power is conferred by elections, the ultimate pragmatism: the stealing of elections. Even at little Southwest Texas State Teachers College in San Marcos, where campus politics had previously been little more than a joke and elections the most casual of affairs, Johnson stole elections. On Capitol Hill, the pattern was repeated. Lyndon Johnson cheated not only in the election in which he won the presidency of the Little Congress, but in succeeding elections in which his allies won; “Everyone said it: ‘In that last election, that damn Lyndon Johnson stole some votes again,’” and on the one occasion on which a Little Congress ballot box was actually opened, the accusations proved to be true. He had stolen thousands of votes in his first campaign for the Senate. When that number proved
insufficient (because, thanks to his mistake, his opponent was able to steal even more), his reaction was to try to steal still more—by trying to persuade the corrupt border county dictator George Parr to go further than Parr had ever gone before. But even the notorious Parr would not go to the lengths that Johnson wanted. “Lyndon, I’ve been to the federal penitentiary, and I’m not going back for you,” he said. At every stage of Johnson’s political career, he had stretched the rules of the game to their breaking point, and then had broken them, pushing deeper into the ethical and legal no-man’s-land beyond them than others were willing to go. In this 1948 campaign—in this “all or nothing” campaign, his last chance—the pattern became even clearer. He stole not thousands but tens of thousands of votes, and when they weren’t sufficient to defeat Stevenson (asked about the attempt made decades later to portray Stevenson aides as also stealing votes, Edward A. Clark, the longtime “Secret Boss of Texas,” would laugh, “They didn’t know how, and Governor Stevenson didn’t know how”), he stole still more, and in this later theft, which culminated in the finding of the decisive “votes” (supposedly cast by 202 voters who voted in alphabetical order) six days after the polls closed, he went further than anyone had gone before, violating even the notably loose boundaries of Texas politics. Even in terms of a most elastic political morality—the political morality of 1940s Texas—his methods were immoral.

An investigation into the theft was halted, largely through the legal ingenuity of Johnson’s brilliant attorney Abe Fortas, at the very moment at which testimony was coming to a climax before a federal Master in Chancery appointed by a United States District Court judge. Asked later what his report would have concluded had the proceeding been allowed to continue, this official said flatly: “I think Lyndon was put in the United States Senate with a stolen election.”

No matter how he was put there, however, he was there. “Do you solemnly swear?” Vandenberg asked, and when Lyndon Johnson replied, “I do,” his years in the wilderness were over.

A
T FIRST GLANCE
, the place he had worked so hard to reach seemed peculiarly unsuited to him—unsuited both to his nature and to his ambition.

Austere, restrained, dignified, courtly, refined—these were not the adjectives that, in January, 1949, sprang first to mind in describing Lyndon Johnson. Big as he was, he seemed even bigger. In part, the reasons were physical. Everything about him was outsize, dramatic. His arms were long even for a man of his height, and his hands, those huge, mottled hands, were big even for those arms, and then there was his great head, with the big, jutting nose, the big, jutting jaw, those immense ears, the powerful shape of the massive skull emphasized because his thinning hair was slicked down flat against it with “Sta-comb” hair tonic. And, most of all, there were his eyes, under long, heavy black eyebrows. People in the Texas Hill Country believed that the key to understanding Lyndon Johnson was to remember that he was a descendant of a clan, legendary in the Hill Country, named Bunton. Generations of Bunton men had possessed not only great ambition and a “commanding presence” that enabled them to realize it (they were elected to public office—to the Congress of Texas when it was an independent republic, to the Texas Legislature after it became a state—in their twenties, as Lyndon Johnson had been elected to public office in his twenties), but they were also tall like Lyndon—always over six feet—and had features strikingly similar to his, including the big ears, jaw and nose, the heavy black eyebrows and, in particular, what the Hill Country called “the Bunton eye.” Generations of Buntons had eyes so dark a brown that they seemed black, so bright that they glittered, so piercing that their glare was memorably intimidating. “If you talked to a Bunton,” said Lyndon’s cousin Ava Johnson Cox, “you never had to wonder if the answer was yes or no. Those eyes told you. Those eyes talked. They spit fire.” From the time he was a baby, all through his youth and young manhood, Lyndon Johnson, the Hill Country agreed, had the Bunton eye. And in Washington, where no one had ever heard of the Buntons, people were also struck by Lyndon Johnson’s eyes. Years later,
a British journalist would leave his first audience with the President to write, “Afterward, you chiefly remember the eyes, steady and unrelenting under half-lowered lids.” (The journalist would also write that those eyes showed an “exceptional wariness,” and he was correct about that, as correct as he would have been had he been writing in 1949. Johnson’s assistants, who often said among themselves that their boss never trusted anyone, were joking that January that he didn’t even trust Santa Claus. On the day before Christmas, 1948, walking with several of them along a Washington street, he had come across a costumed Santa Claus—a friendly-faced elderly man—soliciting contributions for the Salvation Army. Johnson had asked the man if he could hire him to entertain the children at a Christmas party in his home that evening, and when the man agreed, had handed him two twenty-dollar bills as a down payment. As he was walking away, however, he whirled around, came back, and demanded the bills. When the Santa Claus returned them, he tore them in half, and gave one half back to the man. “Here,” he said, “you get the other half if you show up.”)

Johnson’s size was also emphasized by his awkwardness, by his long, lunging strides, by the vigorous, sweeping gestures of his arms to make a point. When he burst through a door, with those long strides and that commanding air, “he just filled up a room,” as one acquaintance put it. His clothes were dramatic, too. Although he owned blue suits, most of them didn’t look like those worn by other senators; so rich and shimmering was their fabric that friends joked about Lyndon’s “silver suits,” and even with his conservative blue suit, and even when he was wearing it with a starched white shirt, he often didn’t wear one of his many understated Countess Mara neckties but rather one of the style known in Texas as a “Fat Max” tie: short, very wide, and garishly hand-painted, some with placidly grazing horses, some with bucking broncos—one favorite had shapely cowgirls astride—some with oil field derricks. Gold glinted from his wrists—the cuffs of his shirts were fastened by notably large solid gold cuff links in the shape of Texas, with a diamond in the center to show the location of Austin; his gold watch was so heavy that when he went to a doctor, he was careful to remove it before he stepped on the scale—and it glinted from his waist, where his belt buckle was also large and solid gold. His initials seemed to be everywhere: his belt buckle was monogrammed, as were his shirts (not only on the breast pocket but on at least one cuff) and his pocket handkerchief, and when he wasn’t wearing the Texas cuff links, he was wearing links that proclaimed, in solid gold, “LBJ” from each wrist. And the shirts he preferred weren’t white—he often wore shirts and ties which were both cut from the same bolt of checked or polka-dotted cloth—and the suits he preferred weren’t blue. When he wore one of his favorite outfits, of which every element—trousers, vest, jacket, tie—was a monochromatic pale brown, Lyndon Johnson was, one journalist recalls, “a mountain of tan.”

Beyond all this, the suits were outsize. Wanting them to conceal his
weight—a disproportionate amount of which was in his stomach; he would shortly begin wearing a girdle in an attempt to conceal what was sometimes an enormous paunch—he had them cut extremely full and long, with wide lapels, and there was therefore a lot of that rich, glossy fabric on display; so generous was the cut that even when his weight was at its upper limits (not the 240 of his presidential years but about 220 or 225), the unbuttoned jackets of his suits flared out around his hips when he walked fast or whirled around, and when he was thinner, his jackets not only flared open but flapped around him. And his trousers were cut extremely long and full, to the despair of his tailor, who complained that Johnson always looked as if he was stepping on the cuffs, and they flapped around his ankles as he rushed down a corridor or up a flight of stairs. Even when he wore a fedora or other conventional eastern hat, it was usually tilted all the way back on his head, in the casual manner of the Southwest, and he often wore a big, gray, broad-brimmed Texas Stetson instead. And while he might be wearing black shoes, at other times he wore cowboy boots, richly embroidered and polished to a high gloss; “You could see him bend down a dozen times a day to buff them up with a handkerchief,” a colleague recalls. Hurrying down the crowded corridors of the House Office Building—and he seemed always to be hurrying, always to be rushing, rudely elbowing people—he had seemed, with his Texas stride and his Texas boots and his Texas hat and his Texas tie, very much the representative of the great, raw province in the Southwest, swaggering through the halls of state. How would he fit in at the Senate Office Building?

And he seemed even bigger than he was for reasons that went deeper than the physical.

He could dominate a room with his charm. In his circle of young New Dealers in Washington, he was the life of every party with his practical jokes, his quick wit, his wonderful “Texas stories” about the hellfire preachers and tough old sheriffs of the Hill Country, his vivid imitations of Washington figures, and his exuberance; jumping up on a table in a Spanish restaurant, he pulled little Welly Hopkins up with him to dance a flamenco. “At parties, he
was fun
,” Elizabeth Rowe says. “That’s what no one understands about Lyndon Johnson—that he was
fun.”
Said Abe Fortas: “There was never a dull moment around him. The moment he walked in the door, [a party] would take fire. Maybe in a different way than the party had been going when he came in, but it would take fire.” And he wanted to dominate every room he was in. If he couldn’t lead, he didn’t want to play—
wouldn’t
play. That had been true in Johnson City, the isolated, impoverished little huddle of houses deep in the Hill Country vastnesses, where as a teenager who owned the only regulation baseball in town, he had brought a saying to life; “Lyndon was a terrible pitcher,” one Johnson City boy remembers, “but if we didn’t let him pitch, he’d take his ball and go home.” It had been true at the Georgetown parties at which he would go to sleep at the dinner table. He had to win every argument—“just
had
to.” That was what had been said about him by the Johnson City boys and girls among whom he had grown up. That was what had been said about him by his college classmates. That was what had been said about him by his colleagues in the House of Representatives. And in every setting, his demeanor in disputation had been the same. One of those Johnson City companions was to recall about young Lyndon that “if he’d differ with you, he’d hover right up against you, breathing right in your face, arguing your point…. I got disgusted with him. Sometimes, I’d try to walk away, but… he just wouldn’t stop until you gave in.” And, of course, in the House of Representatives as in the Legislature in Austin which he visited with his father, he had “clutched you like his daddy did when he talked to you.”

Imbuing his arguments with special force was a theory that he held very strongly—according to his brother, had held ever since, as a boy, he had heard a salesman say, one day in the Johnson City barbershop, “You’ve got to believe in what you’re selling.” The remark made such an impression on Lyndon that during his boyhood, Sam Houston Johnson says, “he was always repeating that.” Decades later, in retirement at his ranch near Johnson City, Lyndon Johnson would still be repeating it, in expanded form, telling Doris Kearns Goodwin: “What convinces is conviction. You simply
have
to believe in the argument you are advancing: if you don’t, you’re as good as dead. The other person will sense that something isn’t there, and no chain of reasoning, no matter how logical or elegant or brilliant, will win your case for you.”

He made himself believe in his arguments—believe with absolute conviction—through a process that was characteristically intense. Having observed the process repeatedly, longtime associates had been so impressed with it that they coined phrases to describe it: the “revving up,” they called it, or the “working up.” Ed Clark, who had known Johnson since his NYA days, and who for almost twenty years would be his principal attorney and principal operative in Texas, would say that “He [Johnson] was an emotional man, and he could start talking about something and convince himself it was right, and get all worked up, all worked up and emotional, and work all day and all night, and sacrifice, and say, ‘Follow me for the cause!’—‘Let’s do this because it’s
right!
’” The process was all-consuming. In describing Lyndon Johnson talking about a cause in which he believed, his Washington and Texas circles use words like “vibrancy,” “intensity,” “energy,” “passion”—and “spellbinding.” It was not just the big body but the passions and emotions boiling up within it that made him seem so big. “He was big all right,” says one acquaintance, “but he got bigger as he talked to you.”

Using his own phrase to describe the process, Johnson would tell his young assistants that in order to carry a point, it was necessary to “fill yourself up” with the arguments in its favor. “You just have to get full of your subject and let it fly,” he was to say. And he accomplished this so thoroughly that he filled himself to overflowing, as if the body, big as it was, could not contain the
emotions, and they blazed out of his eyes, made one of his arms grab his listener’s lapel to hold the man close while he tried to persuade him, made a forefinger jab into the man’s chest, made his face push into his auditor’s, forcing the other man’s head back, as if to physically insert the arguments into it—getting closer also to better ascertain if the arguments were working. “I want to see ’em, feel ’em, smell ’em,” he said—he wanted his hands on them as he spoke to them. This was not a style of discourse which had endeared itself to colleagues in the House of Representatives, and it hardly seemed likely to do so with the new colleagues he was going to have now.