Master of the Senate (84 page)

That argument was evidently persuasive. The droplets again became a gusher, and the needed money was again raised—although because Johnson felt himself unwelcome in Campaign Committee headquarters, some of the envelopes came into his House office, and the money they contained was distributed from there. Lyndon Johnson’s first national political power was simply the power of money, used as campaign contributions; it had given him whatever small taste of power he had for a year or two enjoyed in the House.

Now, in the Senate, the cascade of cash continued. Some insight into these contributions would be furnished years later, and almost by accident, because of a 1975 Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit against the Gulf Oil Corporation that grew out of an investigation not into Lyndon Johnson but into the Watergate scandal. Testifying in this lawsuit, Claude Wild Jr. said he had become Gulf’s chief Washington lobbyist, reporting to the company’s general counsel, David Searls, on November 1, 1959. “Do you recall your first assignment?” he was asked. “One of the first assignments I had resulted from a commitment that” Searls “had made to then Senator Lyndon Johnson,” Wild replied. “The commitment was that Gulf Oil would furnish $50,000 to Senator Johnson for his use, and … I was furnished $10,000 on five separate occasions which I delivered to Walter Jenkins, who was Senator Johnson’s primary aide.” The money, Wild testified, was in “cash.” No one asked him at the time the denominations of the bills, or how they were carried, but in 1987 he told the author of this book that “probably it was hundreds,” carried in “plain white envelopes.” He said that the money could have been given either to help finance Johnson’s 1960 presidential campaign, or to help Johnson finance other senators’ campaigns—“it was for whatever he wanted.” He also testified that he had later made another payment, twenty-five thousand dollars, to Johnson “staff members” for “his or his delegate’s
use in assisting members of Congress whom he hoped to see elected or re-elected.”

And Wild’s contributions were not the largest being delivered to Johnson. Men familiar with this aspect of Texas politics agree that his most important fund-raisers were Tommy Corcoran; John Connally, who carried cash given by, among others, Sid Richardson; Ed Clark, courier for, among others, Clint Murchison, Brown & Root, and the Humble Oil Company; and, on occasion, George R. Brown himself. By the time the author learned about the cash-filled envelopes, Brown had died, so the author could not ask him about them. But he did discuss them with both Connally and Clark, and both men spoke freely—indeed, somewhat boastfully—about flying up to Washington with envelopes tucked into the inside breast pockets of their suit jackets. And both Connally and Clark, as well as intimates familiar with the fund-raising efforts of these two men during the 1950s, agree that they brought to Washington amounts far larger than those about which Wild testified. Asked if the largest amounts he carried were of the same scale as the forty- or fifty-thousand-dollar contributions he had transported in a sack in 1948, Connally shook his head no, grinned, and said that the amounts he carried increased, particularly after he became Richardson’s personal attorney in 1951. “I handled inordinate amounts of cash,” he said. Clark, moreover, points out that Wild didn’t go to work for Gulf until 1959. Before that, contributions to Johnson were made by Chief Counsel Searls. Searls had died before the SEC began its investigation of Gulf, and therefore did not himself testify, but he worked closely with Clark for years; it was, for example, primarily Searls to whom Clark was referring when he explained how he had persuaded Gulf to purchase Lyndon Johnson’s political influence by purchasing advertising time on Johnson’s radio station, KTBC: “I had friends there. I spoke to them about it, and they understood. This wasn’t a Sunday school proposition. This was business.”
*
Clark didn’t put anything in writing about his association with Searls; the “Secret Boss of Texas” never put
anything
about money in writing, but in every instance in which one of Clark’s statements could be checked against something in writing, the statement proved to be accurate, and when he was asked about Wild’s testimony, he said, “I knew about that fifty thousand. I knew about two
hundred
thousand.” And Gulf was only one oil company—and there were non-oil businesses in Texas, too.

Some idea of the free-and-easy atmosphere that surrounded Lyndon Johnson’s fund-raising relationship with Texans would be documented in transcripts of telephone calls made in early 1960. “I have some money that I want to know what to do with,” George Brown said in a call to Johnson’s office on January 5. “I was wondering … just who should be getting it, and I will be collecting more from time to time.” (The answer to Brown’s question is not transcribed.)
Ed Clark was raising so much that some of it had to stay in Texas to await the next trip down before Jenkins or some other Johnson aide could pick it up. “Woody,” Jenkins wrote Warren Woodward on January 11, “Ed Clark tells me that he has received some assistance from H. E. Butt. I wonder if you could go by and pick it up and put it with the other [we] put away before I left Texas.” Clark says that Brown’s money was for the presidential run for which Johnson was gearing up that January, and that Butt’s was for Johnson to contribute to the campaigns of other senators, but that often he and the other men providing Johnson with funds weren’t even sure which of these two purposes the funds were for. “How could you know?” Ed Clark was to say. “If Johnson wanted to give some senator money for some campaign, Johnson would pass the word to give money to me or Jesse Kellam or Cliff Carter, and it would find its way into Johnson’s hands. And it would be the same if he wanted money for his own campaign. And a lot of the money that was given to Johnson both for other candidates and for himself was in cash.” “All we knew was that Lyndon asked for it, and we gave it,” Tommy Corcoran was to say.

This atmosphere would pervade Lyndon Johnson’s fund-raising all during his years in the Senate. He would “pass the word”—often by telephoning, sometimes by having Jenkins telephone—to Brown or Clark or Connally, and the cash would be collected down in Texas and flown to Washington, or, if Johnson was in Austin, would be delivered to him there. When word was received that some was available, John Connally recalls, he would board a plane in Fort Worth or Dallas, and “I’d go get it. Or Walter would get it. Woody would go get it. We had a lot of people who would go get it, and deliver it. The idea that Walter or Woody or Wilton Woods would skim some is ridiculous. We had couriers.” Or, Clark says, “If George or me were going up anyway, we’d take it ourselves.” And Tommy Corcoran was often bringing Johnson cash from New York unions, mostly as contributions to liberal senators whom the unions wanted to support. Asked how he knew that the money “found its way” into Johnson’s hands, Clark laughed and said, “Because sometimes I gave it to him. It would be in an envelope.” Both Clark and Wild said that Johnson wanted the contributions given, outside the office, to either Jenkins or Bobby Baker, or to another Johnson aide, Cliff Carter, but neither Wild nor Clark trusted either Baker or Carter. In Baker’s own memoir,
Wheeling and Dealing
, a book he wrote with Larry L. King, Baker was to call himself the “official bagman” for Senate Democrats, but Clark was to say he “was the only person in Washington I ever recoiled from,” and Wild was to call him “a crook.” (As would a Federal District Court jury: in 1967, Baker would be found guilty of seven counts of theft, fraud and income tax evasion, in a case that did not involve Johnson. The jury found that in 1962 he had accepted one hundred thousand dollars in “campaign donations” intended to buy influence with various senators, and instead had pocketed the money himself. Jurors told reporters that they felt Baker had lied under oath. Sentenced to one to three years in federal prison, he served sixteen
months.) So the two Texas fund-raisers almost always gave their contributions to Jenkins, “but sometimes,” in Clark’s words, “Walter were
[sic]
not available, or it were not convenient to do that,” and on such occasions they would be given directly to Johnson. Asked if the envelopes were always handed over outside the office, Clark replied, “Usually. Not always.” He said that Johnson was less cautious with him and with Brown and Connally and Wild than with other contributors because “We had had wheelings and dealings for a long time.” Wild responded by noting that before going to work for Gulf in 1959, he had been the Washington representative for the Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, “and they had a much more casual way of doing things” than Gulf. During this period, he said, he had given Johnson “quite a bit” of money—he said he had no idea how much—for the campaigns of other senators, sometimes giving it to Johnson “personally,” in his office. Money also found its way into Johnson’s hands by other means. In 1956, for example, Richard Reynolds of Reynolds Tobacco telephoned Juanita Roberts, one of Johnson’s secretaries, and said, according to a memo Roberts wrote, “He has $500.00 he’d like to contribute toward the Senator’s expenses.” After Gene Chambers, one of Johnson’s assistants, picked up the money, it evidently passed through Johnson’s hands. “Sen. J handed it to A.W. [Moursund] to take care of,” Roberts noted.

If Johnson was in Texas, he might collect the money himself. Shortly after Joe M. Kilgore had been elected to Congress in 1954, Kilgore says, Johnson came up to him after a meeting in San Antonio and “asked me if I was going to Washington.”

“When I said I was,” Kilgore recalls, “he said, ‘Here, take this.’ It was an envelope. Inside was ten thousand dollars. ‘Give it to Arthur Perry.’ I had never had ten thousand dollars before. Jane and I didn’t have ten thousand dollars [to our name].”

Kilgore patted his breast pocket with a nervous gesture. “All the way up I kept [patting] to make sure it was still there. I was sure everyone knew I had it. When I got to Washington, I called Arthur Perry. I was going to make sure he counted it in my presence to make sure I hadn’t taken out one of those hundred-dollar bills.” As it turned out, however, “he [Johnson] had called Earle Clements, and Clements was in the office when I arrived. I made them count it in my presence.”

So many envelopes were being filled with cash in the Lone Star State that Kilgore was not the only man who transported them to Washington despite a lack of familiarity with such chores. “Twice I personally carried packets of a hundred hundred-dollar bills, the common currency of politics, to Jenkins,” Booth Mooney, whose customary duties were in the speechwriting field, wrote in his book
LBJ: An Irreverent Chronicle.
“This money came from [oilman H. L.] Hunt, who said substantial contributions were also being sent to Washington by other oilmen and business people in Dallas and Houston.”

•    •    •

N
O MATTER HOW MUCH MONEY WAS RAISED
, “it was never enough for Johnson—never,” Ed Clark says. “How much did he want?—he
wanted
,” Claude Wild says. “He wanted all you could give and more.” And to get as much as possible, Lyndon Johnson took a very direct role in raising money. Clark would for years—decades—be regarded in Texas as the state’s most skilled political fund-raiser, but, Clark says, there was someone better at that art than he. “No one was better at raising money than Lyndon Johnson,” he says. “He would get on the phone and call people, and he knew just what to say.”

What he said sometimes dealt bluntly with “the wealth and consideration that had been extended.” Texas was home to businessmen much smaller than Sid Richardson or Herman Brown, and if some of them were reluctant to contribute, or to contribute as much as Johnson thought they should contribute, he would get on the phone with them personally. One of Clark’s clients, Theo Davis of Austin, owned a wholesale grocery company which had been given contracts to supply central Texas military installations, and he wanted to keep those contracts, and, Clark says, Johnson would “get on the phone with him” and “remind” him what he had to do to keep them, and, Clark says, “He gave Johnson five thousand dollars at a time.” Johnson had John Connally make him lists, Connally recalls—“We called them ‘John’s Special Lists’”—of how much certain businessmen and lawyers could give, and why they should give it. With some of these targets, the reasons were philosophical. “Good Democrat” Connally would write by a name. “Old Roosevelt man.” But with others, the reasons related more to “wealth and consideration.” One Leonard Hyatt would be good for $1,000 partly because he was a “Good Democrat” but also because “You have helped him on Bracero matter,” Connally wrote on one such list. An attorney, Floyd McGown Sr., who “can give and raise” $1,500, had been helped by Johnson years before—“represents Frederick Refrigeration & some other employers since War Labor Board days.” Next to another name, that of Johnson’s Fredericksburg ally Arthur Stehling (“500 to 1500”), Connally wrote, “Had a good year—Two pretty good capital gains transactions”—which, Connally explains, meant two transactions Lyndon had helped Arthur with.

If a more general type of coaxing was required, Johnson was adept at that, too, as is shown by the transcript of a telephone call he made to wealthy oilman Dudley Dougherty, who would be Johnson’s opponent in the 1954 election but, at other times, his ally. He complained about organizational difficulties to Dougherty until Dougherty said, “Let me see if I can dig up five thousand dollars for you.”

“If you can—don’t you get in any hurry,” Johnson said soothingly. But, in fact, he wanted to firm up the arrangement. “You let my boy Warren Woodward in Austin, he is a mighty good boy, or John Connally—they will fly down to
your place. If you can help us, I’ll sure appreciate it.” And when it didn’t firm—when Dougherty was apparently going to hang up without any further word about the money—Johnson said, “You tell me when you want Warren Woodward to come down there.”

And sometimes, in the raising, Johnson took a very personal hand indeed, as is shown by two incidents that occurred at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles in 1960.

The first, recounted in Booth Mooney’s book, occurred in an empty clothes closet in Johnson’s hotel suite. The suite “was filled with people,” Mooney was to write, so Johnson led him into the closet “and shut the door. ‘This won’t take long, Booth,’ he said urgently. ‘I just want to tell you we’ve got a lot of bills to pay here and other places. I have to raise a pile of money. Will you talk to Hunt and tell him he’ll never regret it if he’ll contribute ten or twenty to help us get square?’”