The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  “I got a letter from Margaret Mayer worried me a little,” Johnson said, as the taped recording of the conversation reveals, and he read Jackson some of her questions. Jackson was a longtime supporter of Johnson, continually trying to cultivate his acquaintance. The editor said he hadn’t known about the letter, that “she certainly shouldn’t be doing it,” and “I can assure you that it’ll be stopped.”

  That wasn’t good enough for Johnson, however. When Jackson said he would “talk to our people” about the best way to stop it, Johnson told him what to say to those people. The names he mentioned during the conversation were those of the Times-Herald’s publisher and board chairman, John W. Runyon; the paper’s president, James F. Chambers Jr.; and Clyde Rembert, president of the radio and television stations, KRLD and KRLD-TV, owned by the paper—and Johnson’s instructions included references to the power of the federal government, and of the President in particular, and they included as well a hint that were Ms. Mayer not stopped, he might use those powers against the newspaper: that if the Times-Herald continued investigating him, he might investigate the Times-Herald.

  “Tell them … that you all don’t want to be picking a fight with somebody like this,” Lyndon Johnson said. “We might want to ask [for] some of you all’s records up there [in Dallas]. I imagine I could get that done.”

  If a newspaper was investigated by the federal government, a particularly vulnerable area would be its profitable radio and television stations, since all broadcasting stations are under the authority of the Federal Communications Commission, and in few businesses was the role of government as crucial as in broadcasting, for not only were the very licenses which allowed the use of the airwaves granted and periodically renewed solely at the FCC’s sufferance, but the agency possessed virtually unchallengeable authority over every aspect of a station’s operations. Johnson brought the Dallas stations’ operations into the conversation. Under FCC regulations a significant criterion for its decision on the renewing of a station’s license was a comparison of the percentage of the station’s broadcast time that it had devoted to non-commercial—non-revenue-producing—public service broadcasting with the percentage of its “commercial,” or revenue-producing, broadcasting. Too high a “commercial” percentage, too low a public service percentage, could imperil a station’s license. Hinting that he had assisted KRLD in this area in the past, Johnson hinted also that he might, were Mayer’s investigation not cut off, adopt a different attitude in the future.

  “Get this goddamned Margaret Mayer satisfied … because I’ll ask Clyde Rembert how much commercial he is,” Johnson said. “I remember he was 98 percent when I was helping him.” And there were other areas of the station’s operations for which records might be requested, other questions that might be asked about KRLD if Mayer persisted in asking about KTBC, questions that related not to licenses and the FCC but to taxes, which would of course involve the Internal Revenue Service. “I hadn’t been inquiring … what you make, and what your profit is, and what your estate tax was, and how much you paid … and all that kind of stuff,” Johnson said.

  At one point in the conversation with Jackson, Johnson may have dropped a hint that the areas of investigation could be broadened even further. “Just tell them,” the President said to Jackson, “just tell Jim Chambers, whoever’s running the show up there, just say, ‘Listen, this guy [Johnson] might ask for some of yours, or some of our, records.’ ” His instruction to the newspaper’s managing editor to warn Chambers, the newspaper’s president, or “whoever’s running the show up there,” that the federal government might ask for “some of our records” evidently refers to the newspaper’s corporate records. But Johnson was telling Jackson to warn his people also that federal agencies might ask not only for “some of our records” but in addition for “some of yours”—words that could be taken as a hint that not only corporate records but personal records, including tax records, might be investigated, audited, as well.

  Don’t let Mayer know he had intervened, Lyndon Johnson told Jackson. “A President oughtn’t be calling about chickenshit stuff like this.” But he wanted her investigation stopped, and he wanted it stopped fast. When Jackson said he would relay the message to the paper’s owners, Johnson said, “Do that, and let me know in the morning.” In the morning, at eleven o’clock on Sunday, the editor telephoned to reassure the President. “We’ll take care of the thing tomorrow,” he said. Margaret Mayer would not be told that Johnson had called him, he said. She would be told that Kellam had called “and asked what he should do about the letter” and that Kellam had been told to simply ignore it, “that we didn’t want the information, if she’d written the story we wouldn’t have published it.”

  Johnson, concerned that his involvement be kept secret, then said that he would prefer that Kellam send her a “cursory-like” letter, and send a copy to Jackson, and that “then, when you get it, you say [to Mayer] ‘What in the hell is this? We don’t want to spend all of our time inquiring into matters that’s none of our business. They might be inquiring into some of our affairs that are their business.’ ” Jackson agreed to that approach.

  STOPPING MARGARET MAYER had been easy. Another Texas journalistic enterprise on which Lyndon Johnson embarked during that Christmas trip was on a more difficult—and much more ambitious—scale. It involved not an individual reporter but an entire newspaper: the state’s largest, and perhaps most influential, newspaper, the Houston Chronicle (circulation 259,000). The Chronicle had at times been critical of him, and had endorsed Richard Nixon in 1960. He set out that Christmas to stop the criticism, and to stop it immediately. And he set out to do more: to obtain the newspaper’s unqualified support, and to obtain it not only for the near future, but for a considerably longer duration—for as long, in fact, as he held the presidency, no matter how long that might turn out to be. And he set out to get a guarantee of that support—in writing.

  Ambitious though that objective was, Johnson had a weapon powerful enough to obtain it. The Chronicle’s president, John T. Jones Jr., was also the president of Houston’s National Bank of Commerce, which had been attempting to merge with another Houston bank, the Texas National—and bank mergers require federal approval. Although the boards of directors of both banks had authorized the merger in July, the necessary approval had not been forthcoming due to opposition from the Federal Reserve Bank, which felt that the merger “would have a strongly adverse effect on competition,” and from the Justice Department’s Anti-Trust Division, which said, in a memo to Comptroller of the Currency James J. Saxon, that because both banks were strong, profitable institutions, a merger was not required, and that approval of this one “would set a precedent nationwide where all big banks in big cities would come flooding in asking for permission to merge.” This, Anti-Trust’s memo said, “is a very serious objection.”

  High stakes were riding on the approval. Stock market analysts felt that the merger would substantially boost the price of Commerce Bank shares—and the Houston Endowment, a charitable foundation with extensive business interests of which Jones was chairman, owned 2.75 million shares. With the Federal Reserve and Justice opposed, presidential intervention would be necessary to obtain the approval. And Johnson wanted Jones to pay for the intervention—with the written guarantee of his newspaper’s support.

  The President had spelled out the price of his intervention in a call from the ranch to Jack Valenti, who was acting as an intermediary because through his Houston advertising agency he was acquainted with Jones. In a telephone call to Valenti on Christmas Day, Johnson used the word “lung” to mean “voice”—the Chronicle’s “voice,” or editorial support—but the quaintness of the synonym could disguise neither the harshness of the price he was demanding, nor his determination to exact it. “I ain’t going to do it [approve the merger] … unless they give me their lung as long as I’m in public life,” Johnson told Valenti. “And I mean when I call them and want them to run something, I want them to run i
t.” The criticism in the Chronicle had to stop. “I’ve been hazed by it, and I’m tired of the hazing.”

  He told Valenti to arrange to have Jones come to the ranch for a meeting on December 27. The meeting should be kept “just as low [secret] as you can,” he said. Because he hadn’t dealt much with Jones, and the publisher might therefore not understand that when Lyndon Johnson set a price, he intended to get it, he told Valenti to have Jones bring along two Houston business tycoons with whom he had had dealings for many years, and who understood that point very well, George Brown and Gus Wortham, whose American General Insurance Company handled most of Brown & Root’s insurance. Wortham had been pouring money into Lyndon Johnson’s coffers for more than twenty years, through both the purchase of advertising time on KTBC and campaign contributions (because, George Brown was to say, “Herman [Brown] twisted his arm” to make him do so). And his insurance company owned 120,000 Houston Commerce Bank shares.

  But Brown, who was in Houston’s Methodist Hospital with a bleeding ulcer, couldn’t make the trip—Albert Thomas, Brown & Root’s representative in the House of Representatives, came instead—and the meeting did not produce a satisfactory result, as the President informed Brown during a hospital room telephone call on January 2. Although during the visit to the ranch, Jones had expressed the Chronicle’s support, the expression had not been as unequivocal—and did not cover as long a time span—as Johnson wanted, he told Brown. “He [Jones] finally came around and said, ‘Whenever you need anything call on us.’ There’s a hell of a lot of difference” between that and what he was asking for, he said.

  He had made that clear to Wortham following the December 27 visit, he told Brown; had spelled out what he wanted in the written guarantee. “I told Gus [Wortham]—I told Jack [Valenti] to tell him [Gus] to get John Jones to write me a letter telling me he is our friend.” Jones, he said, should write, “Dear Mr. President.… So far as I’m personally concerned and the paper is concerned, it’s going to support your administration as long as you’re there. Sincerely, your friend, John Jones.” (Johnson’s suggested text also contained a reference to another commitment he wanted. Jones, he said, should write “we’re making arrangements for special coverage in Washington by the Chronicle”—by which, it would later become clear, he meant that the Chronicle’s managing editor, Everett Collier, would be dispatched to the capital to cover his presidency. Collier was prone to boasting that “I have been a close friend of the President for many years,” and had in fact been a Johnson acolyte since he had been one of his students at Sam Houston High School, one who idolized him and was always following him around. “I was under his feet constantly there,” Collier would say.)

  “AS LONG AS YOU’RE THERE”—a commitment that the Chronicle would support him, not just for the moment, and not just through the next year’s election campaign, but for as long as he was President, whether that be one year or five or nine. No mention in the letter of any specific Administration policies: the letter would be a commitment to support “your administration” whatever its policies might be. And the commitment was to be in writing, in a letter signed by the newspaper’s president. Despite Wortham’s assurances that the letter would be written, it still hadn’t arrived, Johnson told Brown. And unless it did, he said, there would be no bank merger. “I’m not going to approve it.… I’m just not going to do it,” he said.

  Brown’s response in this January 2 call was to mention a number of reasons that Johnson should approve the merger without insisting on a written guarantee.

  One was a matter of discretion: of the inadvisability of putting in writing an arrangement that would, to anyone aware of Jones’ interest in the bank merger, be a blatant quid pro quo: a trade of a government decision for a newspaper’s support. “Albert [Thomas] thought it was too much of a cash-and-carry thing, [that] it was too much of a trade,” Brown said. Anyone who found out about it would “say … they [the newspaper] had committed themselves to you, and you did something for them.” Thomas says “they”—Jones and Wortham—“are committed [to you], but don’t think they ought to do it in writing.” Brown expressed his own doubts on that point. “To have it in writing like that …”

  Johnson dismissed that objection. The letter he had dictated took it into account. “Well, I didn’t tell him to mention the bank [in the letter],” the President said. Brown chuckled as he got the point: that the letter would therefore contain not the whole arrangement but only half of it—the quo but not the quid, no proof in writing of the quid pro quo. “They don’t have to be mentioning the goddamned bank,” Johnson said. The letter would contain only Jones’ pledge of support, and, Johnson said, “It ain’t going to hurt me to have it in writing [from] any goddamned editor in the United States [to] say they’re going to support me.”

  Brown mentioned other considerations that might, he suggested, be reasons for Johnson to approve the merger without insisting on the letter.

  One of them was a commitment that, Jones had been telling his friends, President Kennedy had made to him: that Kennedy, as Brown put it to Johnson now, had “said he was going to approve” the merger—without, although Brown didn’t put this point in so many words, demanding a written guarantee of the Chronicle’s support.

  Johnson responded to that point by saying Kennedy had told him the opposite, that he was going to do exactly what he, Johnson, was doing: demand a letter. “He told me that he would get that Chronicle right in his hip pocket to support him the rest of his life, or he wasn’t going to give them the time of day.” In fact, Johnson said, it was because of the Kennedys—Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department Anti-Trust Division—that he needed the letter. He wanted to let Anti-Trust understand that reversal of its opposition to the bank merger would ensure the Chronicle’s support for the Democratic ticket in 1964. He told Brown, “What I was going to do was take the letter and … say, ’Now, here, goddamn it. You-all’ve got jobs as well as we have. This fellow here [Jones] is important to us and we’ve got to carry this state. And we’ve just got to do this. Period.”

  Johnson’s statement about President Kennedy may or may not have been accurate; there is certainly no confirmation for it that the author could find. But whether or not Kennedy had made a commitment without demanding a specific written quid pro quo in return, he, Lyndon Johnson, wasn’t going to make one. That wasn’t his style. “If they [Kennedy] was committed, they ought not to be committed unless it’s a mutual affair,” he said. He had the power to make Jones and the Chronicle do what he wanted them to do—and he was going to make them do it, in writing. “We want a very simple, easy little letter,” he said. And unless he got it there wasn’t going to be a bank merger. “I ain’t gonna do it otherwise.… You can just say you know me well enough to know that, by God, that as long as that letter ain’t there, the approval ain’t there.”

  GEORGE BROWN DID KNOW Lyndon Johnson well enough. Perhaps, in matters of business, no one knew him as well. “Let me talk to Gus,” he finally said. “I can explain things to him, without quoting you or anything, and he can go and get John to do it.” Johnson agreed to that, “but,” he added, “you be damned sure that you and Gus … You get me that letter.” There was a pause—a silence on the phone line. Lyndon Johnson wanted an answer. “Okay?” he asked. “Okay,” Brown replied.

  Brown got him the letter. John Jones wrote it the next day. While it didn’t contain the precise words Johnson had used, the promise to “support your administration as long as you’re there,” the letter’s wording—“While you have your capable hand on the reins of this administration, the Chronicle will do everything it properly can to help keep the Democratic Party in office”—was evidently close enough to satisfy Johnson, perhaps because the letter also contained a written promise of the “special coverage” in Washington that Johnson had demanded, and by the man he wanted for that coverage. “Everett Collier … leaves next week for Washington, where he has been assigned by me as a special editorial writer, background man or whate
ver is necessary,” Jones wrote. “I think he can be helpful.” On January 8, the President, back in Washington, telephoned George Brown from the Oval Office. “The letter came in just like it should have,” he said. And, he said, he had kept his part of the bargain. “We signed that thing this morning and made them [the Justice Department] reverse themselves, and the consolidation’s [merger] approved.” He had to hang up now, Johnson told Brown, he had to work on his State of the Union speech, which he would be giving in a little more than an hour. He telephoned Jones. “John, much obliged for your letter,” he said. “That thing [approval of the merger] signed this morning.… From here on out, we’re partners.” (Johnson got the date wrong. Although the approval of the merger had been finalized in principle by January 7, it wasn’t until the 13th that Comptroller of the Currency Saxon announced that it had been formally approved.)