Means of Ascent (26 page)

G
RADUALLY
, Lyndon Johnson put together the kind of staff he wanted—composed of men who had demonstrated an unusual willingness to allow him to dictate their lives:
Sherman Birdwell, who, as one of his boyhood playmates in the Hill Country, had followed Lyndon around obediently, attempting to imitate his mannerisms, an imitation he had continued while working for Johnson in the National Youth Administration;
Willard Deason, who at college had served as Johnson’s front man in his campaign to attain campus power, and who thereafter had demonstrated his unquestioning obedience by switching from a promising career in education to a career in law because Johnson told him to, and then, when Johnson decided another switch was in order, by leaving the law to work for Johnson at the NYA;
Walter Jenkins, who had been in Johnson’s service
only since 1939, but who had made up for his late start by his willingness to work for his Chief “like a slave” and by a psychological dependence on him at least equal to that of his elders.

The quality that was crucial to Johnson in the people he wanted working for him was revealed in his choice in 1945 of a new KTBC general
manager, the job Harfield Weedin had once held. By this time, after Hicks’ turndown, Johnson was culling candidates for positions in his radio office as thoroughly as he did for his political office. For each of the three or four final candidates, he took a separate page on a yellow legal pad, drew a line
down the center of the page, and listed, on opposite sides of the line, the man’s “assets” and “liabilities.” For a long time he studied the pages. Then, on one of the pages, he underlined, on the “asset” side of the line, a single word—underlined it three or four times, decisively. The word was
loyalty
, and the name on the top of the page was
Kellam
.

As a youth,
Jesse Kellam must have seemed an unlikely candidate for the Johnson team, for, as was seen in
The Path to Power
, he was regarded not as a man who took orders, but as a man who gave them. As a roustabout in the Texas oil fields, and later at San Marcos, as a 140-pound fullback who played without a helmet, Kellam had been noted for his viciousness as well as his toughness (once he deliberately fractured an opponent’s
ankle), and for his leadership abilities: although he was a fullback, he called signals; a teammate says: “In the huddle, Jesse spoke and we listened. He had command presence.” But Johnson, the great reader of men, could read the most difficult text. Despite Kellam’s toughness and command presence—and considerable ambition—when Johnson met him for the first time, in 1933, Kellam was a $100-a-month high school football coach in a backwater
Texas town. After eight years in that job, he had, at the age of thirty-three, with Texas in the grip of the Depression, all but lost hope of finding a way out of the dead end in which his life was mired. Johnson, the twenty-five-year-old congressional secretary, had one, and only one, truly desirable patronage job—with the state Department of Education—at his disposal; he gave it to Kellam. When, two years later, Johnson became state director of the NYA, he asked
Kellam to join his staff. Kellam did not want to leave the state job, but he did. And when Johnson resigned from the NYA to run for Congress, and needed someone he could trust to keep the NYA organization loyal to him, he selected Kellam as his successor.

Basic economic considerations may have played a role in tying Kellam closely to Johnson. The man who had gotten him his government executive position could have it taken away from him, and if that man turned against him, who would give him another one? “Lyndon had Jesse absolutely in his power,” says someone familiar with both men. “And Jesse knew it.” Now in 1945, that power was greater than ever. With the NYA disbanded, Kellam, returning
from the Navy at the age of forty-three, had no job waiting. And although Johnson gave him a job, the KTBC general managership, he did not give him a contract, so Kellam had no security; responding to an FCC questionnaire a few years later, Kellam said he had a contract, “
an oral one.” This “contract,” he said, included a provision
for a percentage of the net profits. And who determined the percentage? The “
station ownership.” His economic dependence on Lyndon Johnson’s pleasure was as total as ever.

But some of the considerations that tied Kellam to Johnson may have been more subtle than economic ones. Men who had observed the relationship between the two men had watched a powerful personality becoming steadily submerged in one much more powerful, until little trace of the first remained. Although Kellam was eight years older than Johnson, he called Johnson “Mr. Johnson.” Johnson called him “Jesse.” His gratitude for a word of praise
from Johnson was almost painful to watch—although not as painful as his reaction to Johnson’s anger. What Johnson said to Kellam behind closed doors at the NYA is not known, but on more than one occasion, when the door of Johnson’s office opened, NYA staffers had been astonished to see Kellam, outwardly the toughest and most self-possessed of men, emerge crying. Now Kellam had his own office at KTBC. Johnson would enter it and shut the door when he wanted to
confer privately with him. And more than once, when the door opened and Johnson strode out, staffers at KTBC passing the door saw Kellam sitting at his desk, tears running down his hard face.

Although Kellam enjoyed giving orders, in a coldly domineering fashion, from Johnson he took orders, with a slavish obedience. Some of the orders made other men marvel. One was to meet Johnson’s plane when he flew into Austin. Since Johnson often traveled on private planes, his time of arrival was frequently uncertain. But that did not matter. If, for example, he would be flying from Houston after dinner with the Brown brothers, he would tell Kellam only that he
would telephone him from Houston as he was leaving. So afraid was Jesse Kellam that he would miss that call that he would hardly stir from his office until it came. One evening, a member of the KTBC staff left something in the radio station’s offices and came back late at night to pick it up. At first, he thought the executive offices were deserted because no lights were on in them. As he passed the office of the general manager, however, he saw, in the shadows inside, a
figure behind the desk. It was Kellam, sitting alone in the dark, waiting for the phone to ring.

And it wouldn’t be only at the Austin airport that Kellam would be in attendance. Once, a storm prevented a Pioneer Airlines flight on which Johnson was returning from a speech in Midland from landing in the capital. The pilot announced that they would land instead in Temple, sixty miles to the north. Johnson told the pilot to contact the Austin control tower. “My man” will be waiting for me at the Austin airport, he said. Tell him to drive to
Temple and pick me up there. In Temple, the weather was again too stormy to land. The pilot announced he would try Waco, another thirty miles north. Johnson had the pilot notify the Temple control
tower that when his man arrived, he was to be told to proceed to Waco. When the plane succeeded in landing there, Johnson had to wait an hour—but at the end of an hour, Kellam arrived. Says a man who was on the airplane, “He was following the plane around
Texas. If he had had to go to Dallas, he would have gone to Dallas”—so that Lyndon Johnson’s car would be available as soon as possible.

Kellam’s loyalty to Johnson became famous in Austin. Says Ed Clark: “Johnson could tell him to do anything, and the only reply would be ‘I’ll be there.’ He never had a conflict when Johnson wanted him. He never had plans. He would change any plans.” Not only Jesse Kellam’s career but his life was lived at Lyndon Johnson’s pleasure.

As for Kellam’s ability, that was held in lower esteem. In New York, in later years, as the Johnson media enterprises grew into multi-million-dollar properties, men who dealt with Kellam could not understand how such a man had come to be in charge of them. “I knew Kellam very well,” says one CBS executive. “He was a nice guy, but he knew nothing about radio and television. He just didn’t understand the business.” They just
didn’t understand. Johnson was simply following with KTBC the pattern he had followed during his entire career. When he had been a young congressional secretary, two assistant secretaries, even younger, had worked under him. And it was not the brilliant, energetic but independent Luther E. Jones (later to be known as the “finest appellate lawyer” in Texas) whom Johnson selected to be a permanent member of his team but the other assistant, the more malleable, if
considerably less talented,
Eugene Latimer. He had followed this pattern in hiring men for the NYA, and for his congressional office, and in his recommendations for even low-level federal patronage jobs. As a general rule (the most notable exceptions in these early years were John Connally and
Horace Busby), the men he picked were not the brightest available, nor the men with the most initiative or ability. They were, rather, the men who had
demonstrated the most unquestioning obedience—not merely a willingness but an eagerness to take orders, to bow to his will. While he called it “loyalty,” the capacity he prized most in his subordinates was actually the capacity for subservience.

J
OHN
H
ICKS
was not the only man who fled from Johnson’s embrace, fearing his domination. “I was one of his favorites,” says
Jack Gwyn. But when, one Sunday, during a confidential chat, Johnson said, “You know, I admire loyalty above everything else,” Gwyn made the mistake of replying: “You’re right. If you hire a man eight hours a day, he owes you
eight hours a day.” Johnson hastened to correct him. “I mean more than that,” he said. “I don’t mean just that kind of loyalty, I mean
real
loyalty.
Look at John Connally. I can call John Connally at midnight, and if
I told him to come over and shine my shoes, he’d come running.
That’s
loyalty.”

Gwyn, to his surprise, suddenly heard himself replying: “Congressman, if anyone called me at midnight and told me to come over and shine his shoes, I’d tell him to go fuck himself.” Johnson was immediately apologetic. “Well, I didn’t mean it literally,” he said. “I’m not gonna call someone at midnight.” But, Gwyn says, the exchange had crystallized feelings that had been growing in him, and “I decided
to leave. Johnson didn’t demand a great ability. He demanded ‘loyalty,’ and what he meant by loyalty was a kind of total submission. If you worked for Lyndon Johnson, you sold your soul to him. You could see it happening to other people around you. You saw that
Jesse Kellam had no soul of his own. You saw that other guys close to him no longer had souls of their own. You wrote [in
The Path to Power]
how he could reduce Jesse Kellam
to tears. I saw that. And I’ve seen Kellam sit in that office of his waiting for Lyndon to arrive. If his plane didn’t get in on time, or he [Johnson] had only said, ‘I’ll be there [sometime] Friday night,’ he wouldn’t leave. He would sit there until midnight if he had to. I was afraid it would happen to me.” Gwyn took a job with an advertising agency in Fort Worth; “I just wanted to get out of there.”

But although, after a while, almost all of the original staff members of KTBC—not only Weedin, Hicks, Gwyn and Mrs. Robinson but others who, forty years later, did not want their names to be used in a book about Lyndon Johnson—left the station, their loss was not an irreplaceable one. They were replaced—almost invariably with people willing to give Lyndon Johnson the kind of “loyalty” he liked.

D
ESPITE THE MONEY
he was making in the years after he returned from his Navy service, these were not happy years for Lyndon Johnson. The men and women who had a chance to observe him most closely—as a youth, as a congressional secretary, as a Congressman—speak of Johnson’s “low” times, when “he got real quiet,” and “it was bad.” These years were “very bad.” Although
he wanted money, had always wanted it, money was not what he wanted most—
needed
most—as
George Brown had realized during that vacation at the Greenbrier. The hunger that gnawed at him most deeply was a hunger not for riches but for power in its most naked form; to bend others to his will. At every stage of his life, this hunger was evident: what he always sought was not merely power but the acknowledgment by others—the deferential,
face-to-face, subservient acknowledgment—that he possessed it.
“
You had to ask. He insisted on it.”
It had been evident in the men with whom he surrounded himself, in the way he treated them, in his unceasing efforts, even as a junior Congressman, to dominate other congressmen, to dominate every room in which he was present, in fact, save only the bright, sunny oval room in the White House and Rayburn’s dim basement hideaway in
the Capitol. And the kind of power he craved he could never obtain from the radio business. Indeed, he came to realize—and intimates like George Brown and Edward Clark watched the realization growing in him—that in a sense, as the proprietor of a radio station whose income was derived from the sale of advertising time, he was often placed in a position antithetical to the one he wanted to be in. In asking a businessman to purchase time on his station, he was not
conferring a favor—a transaction which would result in power for him—but receiving one. His use of political influence to grant the businessman a favor in return was still only a trading of favors, not a conferring. If he was a very well paid salesman, nonetheless selling, not buying, was what he was doing—with all that that implied in personal
relationships. Says George Brown: “Ordering people around—well, you don’t order
around people you’re trying to sell something to.” Says Clark: “He wanted people to kiss his ass. He didn’t want to have to kiss people’s asses. And selling [radio] time—you have to kiss people’s asses sometimes. In business you have to. He liked power, and so he was unhappy in business.”