Master of the Senate (83 page)

Lyndon Johnson had become a “regular” in that room when he first came to Congress, a twenty-eight-year-old freshman hoisting a glass with the great House barons every afternoon after the House recessed for the day. His betrayal of Rayburn in 1939 had resulted in his exclusion from the hideaway for almost three years—“I can get into the White House; why can’t I get into that room?” he had shouted in frustration to House Parliamentarian Lewis Deschler in 1941—but on his first day back in Congress after his return from the Pacific in 1942, Rayburn not only had invited him to “come downstairs” but had even handed him the most prized of status symbols on the south side of the Capitol: his own key to the hideaway door.

Lyndon Johnson was a senator now, but he still had that key—the only senator who had one, the only senator who was a regular at Rayburn’s “Board Meetings”—and that key meant power if it was used correctly. Senate passage of a bill vital to a senator was only half the action required on Capitol Hill; the bill also had to be passed by the House, and in the House, Rayburn ruled. It was during this era that, angry over the defeat of a bill he favored, he simply announced that there would be a second vote, and, calling twenty freshmen representatives to his office, flatly ordered them to vote for it—which they did, so that the measure was passed. It was during this era that, the night before the vote on a controversial resolution, he said, “I don’t want one word said against this resolution on the floor”—and not one word was said. Sometimes, when he was up on the triple dais, his stocky body, massive, totally bald head and grim, unsmiling face dominating the Chamber, a member would attempt to raise a perfectly legitimate point of order. “The Chair does not desire to hear the gentleman on the point of order,” Rayburn would say—and would stand there, impassive, unmoving until the gentleman sat down.

Walter Jenkins had one assignment that took precedence over all others: to notify Johnson—
immediately
—when the House adjourned for the day. Johnson would usually set out on the long walk to the south side of the Capitol as soon as Jenkins’ call came; on the rare afternoons on which he was delayed, Rayburn would telephone 231, without identifying himself would bark, “Tell Lyndon I’m waiting for him,” and slam down the phone, as if embarrassed at this admission of need. When Johnson was told that the Speaker had called, he would abruptly cut short whatever he was doing, and hurry out of the Senate Chamber or the cloakroom. As he walked along an arcaded passage and then
around a small, colonnaded rotunda, a tall figure, alone and intent, he would be leaning forward in his haste, his ungainly but very long stride eating up the bright blue and gold tiles, his arms swinging stiffly and out of rhythm with his steps. He had to walk almost the whole length of the long Capitol, and as he reached the immense central Rotunda beneath the dome, and then, beyond the Rotunda, Statuary Hall, he would sometimes break into an awkward, gangling trot, his suit jacket flaring out, as he crossed their wide spaces, past the statues of Benton and Houston and La Follette. Reaching the House side, tiles now red and white, he would check his stride, though still walking very fast, pass the Speaker’s Lobby, crowded in the late afternoon with members who could not go where he was going, run down a flight of stairs two at a time, and enter the unmarked door.

Sometimes he seemed to resent these trips as if they were journeys to Canossa. One afternoon he was talking to Jim Rowe when Jenkins’ call came. “I’ve got to go over there to the Board of Education and kiss his ass again, and I don’t want to do it,” Lyndon Johnson said. But this feeling was never in evidence in the “Boardroom.” He came through its door every afternoon with a smile on his face so broad that, as one of the other regulars says, “Every time Johnson saw Rayburn he would light up like I do when I see my grandson.” House members in Rayburn’s hideaway for the first time—intimidated, as most men were intimidated, by the stern, unsmiling Speaker—were astonished at what Johnson did next. Walking over to the huge mahogany desk at which Ray-burn sat, he would bend over and kiss the Speaker on the top of his bald head. Sometimes he would say, in a loving, deeply solicitous tone, “How are you, Mr. Sam?” And sometimes he would say, “How are you, my beloved?” (“Mr. Ray-burn would play gruff.”) Other men watched how Johnson “handled” Rayburn. “In that room, he [Rayburn] was boss, and Johnson acknowledged that,” one says. Says another: “It was never ‘Sam.’ It was always ‘Mr. Sam,’ or ‘Mr. Speaker,’ and ‘Lyndon.’ There was never a feeling that they were equals. Never.” Says another: “Johnson was quite deferential to him. He would argue with him, but always in such a way that you knew who was the boss.” Another sums up Johnson’s tone and demeanor simply as “Sirring.” Occasionally Rayburn would grow irritated with Johnson. “Lyndon couldn’t sit still,” one regular says. “He was always jumping up and walking around. And the Speaker would say, ‘Sit down, Lyndon. You’re making me nervous.’” Johnson might ask him for an opinion, or a decision, on some matter, and Rayburn would give it. And if Johnson tried to argue, Rayburn would simply repeat what he had said—repeat it in exactly the same words. “That was the conclusive remark. That was the end of that conversation.”

The regulars also saw that Rayburn acted very differently toward Lyndon Johnson than he acted toward any of them. After the betrayal, his affection for Johnson was never again uncritical. Talking about the younger man, he at least once used the phrase “vaulting ambition.” Ramsey Clark says, “He understood
Johnson. I’ve heard him talk about Johnson and his ambition. I don’t think it was blind love at all.” Says Richard Boiling: “A constant refrain was about [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.’” But these men agree that although the “love” was no longer “blind,” love it certainly was. Says Rayburn’s assistant D. B. Hardeman: “It was a father-son relationship, with all that implies…. Johnson would just infuriate him, but he would defend Johnson against all comers. He loved him in the way: I’d like to wear the bottom of his britches out.” He loved him—and wanted to help him in any way he could. So when Lyndon asked for a favor—such as House passage of a bill vital to some individual senator—Rayburn would usually grant it.

Other senators soon came to realize this crucial fact of Capitol Hill life, and to ask for Johnson’s intercession with the mighty Speaker. A bill vital to Clinton Anderson was passed in the Senate, but, Anderson wrote Johnson, “Our … problem is to get action in the House,” where it would go before a committee whose chairman was sponsoring his own, competing, proposal on the subject. “I have written Speaker Rayburn,” Anderson wrote, but he knew that his letter wouldn’t be enough, so he also wrote Johnson: “I hope to enlist your continued interest in piloting this legislation to enactment.” Even the most powerful Senate committee chairmen—Allen Ellender of Agriculture, for example—would ask. “You put a little note on Lyndon’s desk and ask him kindly to get in touch with our friend the Speaker on the Sugar Bill,” Ellender told Dorothy Nichols over the phone one day. “It has been pending there for quite some time. We want to clear up the decks. Put a little note on his desk and let him talk to Sam Rayburn.”

When Johnson used his influence with Rayburn on a senator’s behalf, he made sure the senator knew it. After writing Anderson that “I appreciate the difficulties which may arise in moving the measure through the House [and] I shall be glad to do what I can to be helpful in this regard,” he let Anderson know the minute the bill had been passed. “I want you to know I have spoken to Speaker Rayburn,” he wrote Ellender, whose bill also passed. Few emotions are more ephemeral in the political world than gratitude: appreciation for past favors. Far less ephemeral, however, is hope: the hope of future favors. Far less ephemeral is fear, the fear that in the future, favors may be denied. Thanks to Sam Rayburn, Lyndon Johnson now had, at least to a limited extent, those emotions on his side in dealing with senators; he had something to promise them, something to threaten them with.

A
NOTHER SOURCE
of power was money.

Lyndon Johnson had been using money as a lever to move the political world for a long time—ever since, as a young worker in a congressional campaign,
he had sat in a San Antonio hotel room behind a table covered with five-dollar bills, handing them to Mexican-American men at the rate of five dollars a vote for each vote in their family.
*

For years, men had been handing him (or handing to his aides, for his use) checks or sometimes envelopes stuffed with cash—generally plain white letter-size envelopes containing hundred-dollar bills—for use in his own campaigns, or in the campaigns of others. His first campaign for Congress, in 1937, was perhaps the most expensive campaign for a congressional seat in the history of Texas.
†
During his first campaign for the Senate, in 1941, envelopes stuffed with cash cascaded into Texas from Washington attorneys and the New York City garment district unions. Some of these campaign contributions were carried in a more casual fashion. Recalling one trip on which he brought between $10,000 and $15,000, Walter Jenkins says, “I went down to Texas carrying this money in bills stuffed into every pocket.” The amounts of cash heading south were so large that Johnson sometimes lost the personal control over its use that was important to him. Corcoran “went up to the garment district and raised money for Johnson, and we … sent it to Texas,” Jim Rowe was to say. “Johnson called and said: ‘Where’s that money? I need it!’” When Rowe told him who was carrying it, Johnson exploded, apparently because the courier had authority to distribute funds on his own. Rowe recalls Johnson saying: “Goddamn it—it’ll never get to me. I’ll have to meet him at the plane and get it from him.” And money was being raised in Texas, too. Because campaign contributions were not a deductible business expense, Brown & Root distributed to company executives and lawyers hundreds of thousands of dollars in deductible “bonuses” and “attorneys’ fees,” which Internal Revenue Service agents came to believe were then funneled, in both checks and cash, to the Johnson campaign—contributions on a scale unprecedented at the time even in the freewheeling world of Texas politics. A tax-fraud investigation of Brown & Root launched by the IRS was cut off only after Johnson had solicited the personal intervention of President Roosevelt.
‡
During Johnson’s second—1948—Senate campaign, hundred-dollar bills had been given to his aides in stacks so large that sometimes letter-size envelopes couldn’t hold them. Picking up $50,000 in “currency” in Houston, John Connally had to bring it back to Austin in what he calls a “brown paper sack like you buy groceries in” (which he left in a booth in an all-night diner, the Longhorn Cafe, where he had stopped for a bite to eat with fellow Johnson assistant Charles Herring, so that the two attorneys rushed back to the diner in a panic that was assuaged only when they saw the bag still lying in the booth). A paper bag Connally brought back from Houston on another occasion contained
$40,000.
*
“They were spending money like Texas had never seen,” Ralph Yarborough, later a United States Senator from Texas but in 1948 an activist Democratic politician in Texas, was to recall. “And they did it not only so big but so openly.”

Lyndon Johnson’s use of money in other politicians’ campaigns had also been instrumental in his rise. It was money given to other candidates that, in 1940, had furnished him his first toehold on national political power. Obtaining an informal post with the moribund Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, he had arranged for newly rich Texas contractors and independent oilmen, anxious to enlarge their political influence in Washington, to make contributions to the committee, with the stipulation that they be distributed at his discretion.

That was when the checks and the envelopes stuffed with cash began to pour into his office in Washington—not into his office in the House Office Building because of federal strictures against receiving contributions on federal property, but into a five-room suite he rented in an office building on E Street, the Munsey Building, to circumvent those regulations: to circumvent not their spirit, which was to discourage the sale of political influence, but their technical letter. Tommy Corcoran handed him several cash-filled envelopes, filled with bills from the New York garment-center unions, and trusted couriers from Texas, including William Kittrell, the veteran Texas lobbyist, handed him others. To circumvent another federal law, the Federal Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibited any political contributions from corporations and set a limit of $5,000 on contributions from individuals, Herman and George Brown arranged to have business associates—subcontractors, attorneys, an insurance broker—send $5,000 each, in their own names, to the Congressional Campaign Committee.
†
On the scale of political contributions of the time, these contributions had a substantial heft. When six of these checks arrived at once, Lyndon Johnson had provided, through Brown & Root, more money than the committee received from any other source. And more and more checks came in, from Brown & Root, and from other Texas oilmen and contractors.

Lyndon Johnson was quite frank about why businessmen should be happy to make these contributions. When, the following year, removed in a power struggle from a formal job at the Congressional Campaign Committee, he became exasperated by the stinginess of some contributors, and by Sam Ray-burn’s failure to understand why they should be more generous, he wrote the Speaker that “These $200 droplets will not get the job done.” What was needed, he said, was to “select a ‘minute man’ group of thirty men, each of whom should raise $5,000, for a total of $150,000.” And, he added, “There isn’t any reason why, with the wealth and consideration that has been extended, we
should fall down on this.”
Wealth and consideration
—the favors, the political influence that had provided FCC licensing favors that had let radio station owners grow rich, and federal oil depletion allowances that had let oil field operators grow richer; that had procured federal contracts to build and provision military installations in the Tenth Congressional District for favored Austin businessmen, and much larger contracts—such as the contract (it eventually grew to $357,000,000, then one of the largest in Navy history) that the Navy gave to Brown & Root early in 1941 to build sub-chasers and destroyers, despite the fact that, at the time, Brown & Root had never built a single ship of any type (and, as George Brown was to say, “We didn’t know the stern from the aft—I mean the bow—of the boat”).
*
Johnson was asking for contributions, in other words, on grounds of naked self-interest: political contributions should be given in return for past government help in acquiring wealth and upon the hope of future government protection of that wealth, and of government assistance in adding to it.