The Passage of Power (58 page)

A
ND THEN THERE WAS
the situation in Lyndon Johnson’s own state. Carrying Texas against the conservative tide rising there had, of course, been hard even in ’60 (even with those votes from the Rio Grande Valley), and since ’60 that tide, strengthened by a backlash against civil rights, had been rising even faster. In 1961
John Tower became the first Republican United States senator elected from Texas since Reconstruction—and, as the United Press reported on October 2,
“The
mere mention of Goldwater as the GOP presidential nominee in 1964 has caused thousands of conservatives” to change party affiliation, sending them into a booming Republican Party in Texas. Were the Arizona conservative to be the nominee, state GOP leaders were predicting, he would carry the state by about the same 200,000-vote margin Eisenhower had rolled up. Kennedy’s approval ratings in Texas, which had been slipping steadily, falling to 59 percent in May, had been plummeting since then, and in September, according to the state’s definitive Belden Poll, were down to 50 percent. Johnson’s popularity, tied to his, had dropped to the same level.

His identification with Jack Kennedy was only one of his problems in Texas. What
George Reedy had warned against two years before—that he would be
“forgotten
” in his home state—had in fact occurred: after three years of trying to stay out of the news, to the mass of the state’s voters he was no longer nearly as towering a figure as he had been. And with the Texans who mattered most in the state’s politics—the reactionary, in fact ultra-reactionary, business establishment: the oilmen and big government contractors, who had always been the source of his most important support, financial and otherwise—with these men his position was even more precarious. Haters of Roosevelt, of the
New Deal, of liberals in general, they had never really forgiven him for going on Kennedy’s ticket; they had taken his decision to do so, after they had contributed so generously to his campaign against Kennedy, as an act of betrayal. And that decision had, in their eyes, been only the beginning of his apostasy. They had believed all those years—because he had made them believe—that he felt the same way as they did about people of color. (
“Basically
, Lyndon was more conservative, more practical than people understand,”
George Brown says. “You get right down to the nut-cutting, he was practical. He was for the Niggers, he was for labor, he was for the little boys, but by God … he was as practical as anyone.”) Reading what Lyndon was saying about civil rights now, they wondered if he had been deceiving them all along.

During the three years since 1960, moreover, there had been what was, in their minds, a more mortal sin, one that involved not philosophy but money. To cool their rage over his acceptance of the vice presidential nomination, he had told them that by becoming a part (an important part: the “Number Two Man”) of the Kennedy Administration, he would be in a position to moderate its policies from the inside, to act as a rein on liberal tendencies, and in particular he had let
them understand that he would be able to be a force within the Administration against the tendencies that mattered most to them: tendencies to regulate, and reduce, their wealth. Business regulation, tax reform, all forms of government intervention in their enterprises—these matters, as
Brown & Root lobbyist Frank C. (“Posh”) Oltorf was to put it, “transcended ideology.… That’s how they viewed politics. ‘Any son of a bitch who makes me a million dollars can’t be all bad.’ As long as you put dollars in their pockets, they’d forgive your ideology.” When it became apparent to them that Johnson did not in fact have the power to protect them from the liberal impulse—
that,
to them, was the unforgivable sin. Early in 1963, a quote from a Texas businessman appeared in the “Washington Whispers” column of
U.S. News & World Report:
“Lyndon
as vice president just can’t do as much for Texas any more as he could as Senate Leader.” That quote was mild; what was being said about Lyndon Johnson in the
Petroleum Club of Houston and the
Riata Club of Dallas and the other big business watering holes of Texas wasn’t.
“He
had promised to protect them,” says Ed Clark, attorney for some of the biggest of them, “and he couldn’t deliver. He couldn’t
deliver
!” Kennedy was still proposing tax reform legislation, bills to close tax loopholes. “
Loopholes!
Those were
their
loopholes he [Kennedy] was talking about!,” Posh Oltorf says. In particular, there was the oil depletion allowance. Although the Kennedy plan ostensibly kept the rate of the allowance at 27½ percent, the oilmen’s attorneys, analyzing the measure, had concluded that changes proposed by the administration in the tax code would cut the effective rate to 17½ percent. To the rest of the world, such a reduction would be only justice—or at least the beginning of justice. To the oilmen, it was robbery. The change—together with the elimination of some of the hundred hidden tax breaks for oil in the Internal Revenue Code—would cost them millions, perhaps billions, of dollars a year. These big businessmen who controlled so much of the state’s political machinery were no longer enthusiastic about controlling it on behalf of Lyndon Johnson, not at all. He was “losing some of his grip on the … party machinery of that state,”
U.S. News
reported.

As Johnson’s star had been waning in Texas, furthermore, another star—that of John Connally, elected Governor in 1962—had been rising. The same Belden Poll that showed Kennedy-Johnson’s approval at 50 percent put Connally’s at 61 percent, and likely to go higher; formerly undecided voters had begun swinging over to him. Lyndon Johnson’s onetime assistant was heading rapidly toward the pinnacle he would one day occupy as a three-term governor, one of the most popular and powerful in the history of the state. No sooner had Connally moved into the Governor’s Mansion in Austin, moreover, than he began to demonstrate that the organizational and political skills he had deployed for Lyndon Johnson were just as effective on his own behalf. Sitting on the fence of his ranch in Floresville just after sunrise one morning decades later, watching Mexican vaqueros exercising his stable of quarter horses, he would say,
“One
thing I’m proudest of: We built the strongest organization in the history of the
state while I was Governor.” His pride was justified, and the base of his power was the people who controlled Texas: the powerful conservative establishment. Lyndon might have turned liberal; they didn’t have to worry about John. He was already, in the first year of his governorship, showing that he was willing to lower taxes on banks and business, and to fight proposals by liberals in the legislature for increases in the minimum wage. They saw, also, that he was, as governor, talking the same way he had talked as Lyndon Johnson’s aide and
Sid Richardson’s lawyer, as he had been talking all his life; he shared their views—with the fervency of the true believer. Johnson and Connally
“still
had the same political base,”
Joe Kilgore says, but, as the congressman adds, it had become
“just
a little bit more John’s political base than Lyndon’s.”

Adding to the significance for the Kennedys of the Texas businessmen’s affection for the governor they were starting to call “Big John,” was the pivotal role that Texas traditionally played in the financing of Democratic presidential campaigns. The Kennedys were counting on major help from Texas now. And the businessmen would contribute at Connally’s direction.
“John
controlled the money in the state now,” Kilgore says. All through 1962, the President had been asking Johnson to arrange a fund-raising trip to Texas, and there had been no result. The President may once have thought that Johnson could again deliver the Texas money, but by 1963 the White House had begun to recognize that that was no longer the case. For two decades, Lyndon Johnson had been the key to the electoral votes and the money of the great province in the Southwest. He wasn’t anymore, and he knew it. He was telephoning Kilgore
“almost
every night” now, and the congressman felt he knew why: “because I was close to John. He was scared to death that John would control the state in 1964, and might not be controlling it entirely for him.”

Kilgore, who had traveled the Valley with Johnson and Connally during two long election campaigns, knew Johnson’s worries were baseless; that however much the quarter-century-long ties between the two men—the “loyalty,” the psychological ties—that bound Connally to Johnson might fray, in the end they would hold. “Of course, John would have been for him when the chips were down,” he says. But Lyndon wasn’t confident of that: the “falling out” had to come to an end. “After the talk [started] of Kennedy replacing him in 1964, we were in constant contact,” Connally says dryly. “He and I talked about” the possibility that he would be dropped from the ticket. “He told me, ‘Bobby’s around talking about dumping me. We’ve got to show him that we’ve got the power down here.’ ” Connally knew that Johnson was calling him now because he needed him. “He knew I controlled the Texas delegation”—and Texas, he was to tell the author. And he knew why Johnson and Kennedy needed him.
“I
had frankly been elected by the people that President Kennedy needed most, by the moderates and conservatives of the state.… [They] were not supporting him” and “he was looking at a tough election, at least in our part of the country, in 1964.” He understood that when Johnson talked about the necessity of showing
the Kennedys that “we’ve got the power down here,” he really meant showing the President that he, Lyndon Johnson, had power—that he still had power. Connally was very careful to try to leave that impression in the White House, and to make it clear that Johnson would be the same asset to the ticket in Texas that he had always been, and that he, the governor of Texas, considered it imperative that Johnson be Kennedy’s running mate. After one conversation with Connally, Jack Kennedy told
Evelyn Lincoln,
“The
one thing I noticed above everything else was his concern about Lyndon being on the ticket.”

Jack Kennedy was not an easy man to fool, however. Johnson
“did
not want the President to see for himself how little prestige and influence the Vice President then had in his own home state,” Ken O’Donnell was to write—in a comment that shows that the President
had
seen. “The more liberal Texas Democrats … had always been against him,” O’Donnell wrote, and “since he had joined the
New Frontier, his fellow conservatives had turned against him.”

By early 1963, the President was becoming quite insistent on arranging that fund-raising trip to Texas, but Johnson, aware that funds would be raised only on Connally’s say-so, had had to admit that the matter should be arranged through the governor. And Connally, “who had,” as O’Donnell understood,
“no
desire to be marked as a Kennedy supporter in Texas, had been stalling off the President,” using as an excuse the fact that he was in the midst of his first legislative session as governor. Finally, during a presidential swing through the West in June, Kennedy, Connally, and Johnson were alone in a hotel room in El Paso.
“Well
, Lyndon, are we ever going to get this trip to Texas worked out?” Kennedy asked—but as Connally knew, while “he was addressing Vice President Johnson, he was speaking to me.” And Johnson’s reply—“Well, the Governor is here, Mr. President, let’s find out”—was a tacit admission that decisions about the trip were Connally’s to make.

“I knew at that point my string had run out,” Connally was to recall, but he asked Kennedy what kind of a trip he had in mind, and Kennedy proposed that the trip revolve around Johnson’s birthday, August 27, and that there be five separate fund-raising dinners in the state’s five principal cities—Dallas, Houston, Fort Worth, San Antonio and Austin. Connally, shocked at the scope of the proposal, said he would “like to think about that.” Holding the dinners on Johnson’s birthday would be “a serious mistake” because it was too hot in Texas in August; people weren’t interested in politics in August: it was, he told Kennedy, “the worst month of the year to have a fundraising affair in Texas.”

During the summer, Johnson kept trying to persuade Connally to accept the multi-dinner proposal, and Connally kept replying, “Well, that is a mistake.” Kennedy was later to tell his wife that
“John
Connally wanted to show that he was independent and could run on his own and … he wanted to show that he didn’t need Lyndon Johnson.” Indeed, he didn’t, and the polls that summer were proving that, and the Kennedys read polls. And if Connally didn’t need Lyndon Johnson, was Johnson really what Jack Kennedy needed in Texas? If Connally
was more popular and also controlled the money he needed, perhaps it was Connally he should be working through instead. Furthermore, Connally would be running for re-election in November, 1964. Whether or not Lyndon Johnson was Jack Kennedy’s running mate, the name of a powerful, popular Texan would be on the ballot with him.

The whole situation in Texas was an irritant to Kennedy. His Vice President was from Texas, yet he was being told it would be difficult to carry the state.
“That
thought irked him,” Connally was to say. “We shouldn’t have a hard race in Texas,” the President told the governor.

A
FEUD, PERSONAL AS WELL
as political, between Connally and United States Senator Ralph W. Yarborough had split the state’s Democrats into two bitterly hostile factions. A presidential candidate wants a united party behind him in key states when he is running;
“The
last thing we want is a big political fight in Texas in 1964,” O’Donnell had told Yarborough back in January. But since then the feud had grown only more bitter, and the Vice President wasn’t helping to mend it, and Kennedy had become aware that he
couldn’t
help much, that, as the President was to tell
Ben Bradlee that fall, Johnson had become “a
less
viable mediator than he had been.” If Johnson wasn’t the best person to raise money for him in Texas, if he wasn’t particularly popular in Texas, if he wasn’t a particularly viable mediator in Texas—what was the reason to keep him on the ticket?