Lyndon had consulted a very small circle before making his decision. Most important was a man who had become a trusted mentor in Austin—Alvin Wirtz, an influential lawyer and politician who was serving as chair of the advisory board of Texas NYA. “Wirtz had a wife and daughter,” his secretary Mary Rather said. “But he would have loved to have had a son. And he loved him [Lyndon] as a son.” When Wirtz told him he would need at least $10,000 to make a run, Lady Bird called her father to ask for the money. “Ten thousand dollars,” her father asked. “Isn’t that a great deal? What about five thousand or three thousand?” “No,” Bird said, “we’ve been told it must be ten.” “All right,” he replied, “ten thousand will be transferred to Lyndon’s bank by tomorrow morning.” And, Lyndon remembered, “I was at the bank at 9 a.m. the next morning and there it was.” As soon as “the die was cast,” Luther Jones recalled, before he had publicly announced, before he had even sent in his resignation from the NYA, Johnson “walked out on the street, and he immediately, first person we passed, stuck his hand out and said, ‘I’m Lyndon Johnson. I’m running for Congress.’ I bet he shook hands with fifty people before we got to his car.”
Johnson read his official announcement from the porch of the Johnson City home. After Lyndon spoke, Sam Johnson, stricken the year before by a massive heart attack, rose to embrace his son. “My father became a young man again,” Johnson recalled. “He looked out into all those faces he knew so well and then he looked at me and I saw tears in his eyes as he told the crowd how terribly proud he was of me and how much hope he had for our country if only his son could be up there in the nation’s capital with Roosevelt and Rayburn and all those good Democrats. When he finally sat down, they began applauding and they kept applauding for almost ten minutes. I looked over at my mother and saw that she, too, was clapping and smiling. It was a proud moment for the Johnson family.”
Johnson’s strategy left the competitive field flat-footed. To stand out from the better-known pack, he presented himself as a “total Roosevelt man,” trumpeting his support not only for the popular aspects of the New Deal but for the president’s recent court-packing plan which had aroused strong opposition. “I don’t have to hang back like a steer on the way to the dipping vat,” Johnson declared in his best Hill Country vernacular. “I’m for the president. When he calls on me for help I’ll be where I can give him a quick lift, not out in the woodshed practicing a way to duck.” While several of his competitors eventually backed the court-packing plan, Johnson had already fashioned himself FDR’s man in the race.
From the start of the campaign, Johnson believed he could win so long as “he could get up earlier and meet more people and stay up later than anybody else.” The youngest man in the contest, Lyndon would simply out-campaign his rivals. He would stop “in every store, every fire station, every place of business,” a campaign worker recalled, and he would personally meet every person in there all the way to the back door where the janitor was sitting. He would “press the flesh” and “look them in the eye,” as his father had advised him so long ago, and as he had reiterated to the members of his debate team. While his competitors focused on population centers in large cities and towns, Lyndon ventured to every small village and crossroads, searching out far-flung homes and farms. If he spied the glow of a kerosene lamp in the distance, he would back up his car and head for it. With his long legs, he could climb over barbed-wire fences to talk with farmers plowing their fields. He kept his speeches short. “A five minute speech,” he pointed out, “with fifteen minutes spent afterward is much more effective than a fifteen minute speech, no matter how inspiring, that leaves only five minutes for handshaking.”
He seemed to have “a phenomenal memory not just for names and faces, but for the people behind those names and faces,” a historian remarked. What seemed an inborn trait, however, was a deliberately nurtured talent, as it was for Lincoln. Johnson’s driver Carroll Keach described the ritual the candidate would follow after each encounter on the campaign trail. He would murmur to himself, meditating out loud. “It was like he was going over his mental notes,” Keach recalled. “Who the people were, and little things about them, and who their relatives were,” as if he were making “a mental imprint in the back of his mind.” Even more importantly, though generally not self-reflective, Lyndon conducted “discussions with himself about what strategy had worked and hadn’t worked, and what strategy he should use the next time.” If things hadn’t gone well, he would scold himself. “ ‘Boy, that was dumb!’ ‘Well, you’ll just have to do better, that’s all.’ ”
So great was Lyndon’s anxiety two days before the special election that perspiration poured down his face as he solicited votes door-to-door in Austin. Severe pains racked his stomach and he felt nauseous. After delivering a speech at a big rally that evening, he collapsed. Rushed to the hospital, doctors found that his appendix was on the verge of rupturing. An emergency operation was necessary. His campaign came to a dead halt. Left in a state of limbo with nowhere to go, no flesh to press, no one to persuade and charm, Lyndon agonized. But his long days of relentless, unstoppable effort had paid off. From his hospital bed he learned that he had won the election, beating his nearest opponent by more than three thousand votes.
Soon after the election, Lyndon met President Franklin Roosevelt. Returning to the port of Galveston, Texas, after a fishing cruise in the Gulf of Mexico, the president greeted the young congressman-elect at the dock and invited him to join his special train as it traveled through the state. Though neither a tarpon fisherman nor a devotee of naval matters, Lyndon, nonetheless, made the most of his opportunity. “I’ve just met the most remarkable young man,” Roosevelt later told White House aide Tommy Corcoran. “Now I like this boy, and you’re going to help him with anything you can.”
* * *
So Lyndon Johnson entered the House of Representatives as a protégé of President Roosevelt, the supreme of a long lineage of fatherly mentors who had abetted his climb: San Marcos president Cecil Evans, Welly Hopkins, Sam Rayburn, Alvin Wirtz. While there is a measure of truth to the criticisms of those who thought that he drew close to older men only to facilitate his rise, Johnson’s search for mentors also represented his own emotional need and provided an occasion to learn. “He was very much of a hero worshipper,” one New Dealer observed. “He had people he looked up to and depended on.” He listened intently to their stories, absorbed their expertise, valued their guidance, and performed whatever tasks they outlined. If he utilized them for his advancement, his devotion to them was authentic, his loyalty to and performance for them without equal.
As Johnson settled in Washington to take up his new position, he recognized once again, as he had during his first days as NYA administrator, the importance of making a striking and dramatic impression before the workaday tasks of the job inundated him. During the campaign, he had promised the people that if elected, he would bring electricity to the Hill Country; that if he had to lobby the president to make it happen, he would do just that. Now, he intended to keep that pledge.
When Franklin Roosevelt took office, nine out of ten American farms had no electricity. “The lack of electric power divided the United States into two nations,” one historian notes, “the city dwellers and the country folk.” Farm wives enjoyed none of the conveniences of twentieth-century life—refrigerators, washing machines, irons, vacuum cleaners. Farmers had to rely on hand labor to draw water from a well or milk the cows. For decades, private utility companies had refused to install power lines in rural areas, maintaining that the rate of return in thinly populated areas precluded a profit. With the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1933 and the Rural Electrification Administration in 1935, the New Deal had brought electricity to millions of farm families, but the needs of the people of the Hill Country had been ignored. Though two government-sponsored dams were being completed in Texas to control floodwaters and potentially generate hydroelectric power, the REA guidelines for buildin
g lines and wiring houses required a population density of at least three farms per mile—a requirement the Hill Country could not meet by half. After failing to persuade the REA administrator, John Carmody, to make an exception to the population density requirement, Johnson prevailed upon Tommy Corcoran to arrange a meeting with President Roosevelt.
The story of the two White House meetings between two of the wiliest politicians of the age finally resulted in a triumph for Lyndon Johnson, a testament to his great salesmanship skills. But the meetings also served as a testament to Roosevelt’s humor, judgment, and ability to cut through the rigid parameters of bureaucratic restrictions. The first meeting was congenial but Johnson came away stymied. Roosevelt, as was his habit when not wanting to directly refuse someone, simply filibustered. “Did you ever see a Russian woman naked?” Roosevelt deflected. “And then he started telling me,” Johnson remembered, “how their physique was so different from the American woman because they did the heavy work.” Johnson entered into the conversation with Roosevelt but “before I knew it,” he lamented, “my fifteen minutes was gone . . . and I found myself in the West Lobby without ever having made my proposition. So I had to go back and make that damn appointment all over again.”
Before returning, however, Johnson sought Corcoran’s advice. Roosevelt liked demonstrations, presentations, pictures, drawings, and maps, Corcoran told him, “the bigger the better. That’s where you made your mistake. Don’t argue with him, Lyndon, show him.” So Johnson assembled an exhibition of three-foot pictures of the two recently constructed dams and a map of the transmission lines that showed the power flowing to the “city big shots” while neglecting the poor folk in the countryside—represented by pictures of old tenant farmer houses. Aware that he was about to be solicited, Roosevelt focused keenly on the pictures of the dams. “I have never seen better or more marvelous examples of multiple-arch construction. It’s real ingenuity.” This time, Johnson knew enough not to be sidetracked into a conversation about engineering marvels. He hit upon the tactic of absolute silence, until finally, Roosevelt lifted his gaze from the pictures. “Lyndon, now what in the hell do you want? Just why are you showing me all these?”
“Water, water everywhere, not a drop to drink! Power, power, everywhere but not in a home on the banks of these rural rivers!” Johnson began explaining that the people in his district could not get power because of a population density requirement in the REA guidelines. He then, as he later told Lady Bird, painted “a mental picture of all those women out there, old before their time, bending over the wash pot, and all those men getting up on a cold winter morning to milk those cows, where there could have been electric washing machines and milking machines.” This aspect of the story was not confined to facts and figures; it was grounded in emotional memories of his mother hauling water from a well, washing clothes on a corrugated washboard, forced to heat the iron on a red-hot wood stove even at the height of summer, scrubbing floors on her hands and knees, consumed by backbreaking chores that left her too exhausted to read the books piled high beside her bed.
Roosevelt was enthralled by the gifts of a fellow storyteller. In the end, he surrendered to the conviction of the young man himself. He asked his secretary to get REA head John Carmody on the line. “John, I have a young congressman in here, Lyndon Johnson. Carmody said yes, he knew me and had turned me down. The REA could not afford to build transmission lines where there were only one and a half customers per square mile.” Roosevelt listened, and then turned on the charm. “John, I know you’ve got to have guidelines and rules and I don’t want to upset them, but you just go along with me—just go ahead and approve this loan and charge it to my account. I’ll gamble on those folks because I’ve been down in that country and those folks—they’ll catch up to that density problem because they breed pretty quick.” Johnson was exultant. “I walked out of there with a million dollar loan,” he remembered, savoring the successful meeting as “one of the happiest moments of my life.”
To Johnson’s lasting regret, his father did not live to witness and share in his son’s achievement. The summer after Lyndon took his seat in the House, Sam suffered another heart attack. For two months, he remained in the hospital, kept inside an oxygen tent. When Johnson returned home that fall, Sam pleaded with his son to bring him “home to that little house in the hills where people know when you’re sick and care when you die.” Johnson resisted at first; the doctors had told him that his father needed oxygen and that no oxygen tent was available in Stonewall. “You have to help me, son,” Sam said. Johnson understood. “I brought him his clothes, helped him dress, and I carried him home.” In his own room, surrounded by family and friends, his father seemed to improve, but two weeks later, shortly after his sixtieth birthday, Sam Johnson died.
* * *
The same sense of purpose that fueled Johnson’s dedication to rural electrification animated a series of kindred New Deal projects. Not long after he took office, Congress passed a bill providing federal funds to cities for slum clearance and public housing projects. In early 1938 the first three grants were awarded: New York, New Orleans, and Austin. How did a small southern city like Austin end up as one of the three successful applicants? “Because,” the general counsel of the U.S. Housing Authority, Leon Keyserling, explained, “there was this first-term congressman who was so on his toes, and so active and so overwhelming.”
Johnson had been present when Roosevelt signed the public housing bill. Acting with his usual dispatch, he set up a meeting with Austin’s mayor and the members of the City Council. “Now, look, I want us to be first in the United States,” he told them. “You’ve got to be willing to stand up for the Negroes and the Mexicans.” After taking a walking tour through the city’s slum district, Johnson described his findings on a radio broadcast: a hundred Mexican and African American families were crowded into a five-block area, each family confined to “one dreary room where no single window let in the sun. Here they slept, they cooked and ate, they washed themselves in a leaky tub after hauling the water two hundred yards. Here they raised their children, ill-nourished and sordid.” When realtors and owners of the slum apartments charged that the government was competing unfairly with private enterprise, Johnson shot back: Yes, indeed, “the government is competing with the shacks and hovels and hogsties and all the other foul holes in which the underprivileged have to live.” Once the application was in, Keyserling recalled, Johnson “was up and down our corridors all the time. It was his go-getterness that got the first project for Austin. That’s how.”
Such was the clamor and din that surrounded Lyndon Johnson when he first took his seat in the House that “a consensus about the boy” and his bright future soon developed among the inner circle of young New Dealers who served in the administration, including Tom Corcoran and Jim Rowe in the White House and Arthur Goldschmidt and Abe Fortas at Interior. Johnson became not simply a member of this group but, as he so intensely craved, the central pin around which the group wheeled. Jim Rowe’s wife, Elizabeth, remembered the “marvelous stories” he told and the way he told them, striding around the room, mimicking the voices and mannerisms of the people he was describing. But his “greatest stories,” bequeathed by his grandfather, were about the Old West in the days of the cattle drives, about the cast of folkloric personalities who had once sat in the governor’s chair in Texas, about his beloved Hill Country. “If Lyndon Johnson was there a party would be livelier,” New Deal attorney Abe Fortas said. “The moment he walked in the door, it would take fire.”
President Roosevelt’s “special interest” in the young congressman also sharpened. There was something he saw in Lyndon Johnson that made him think that “if he [Franklin] hadn’t gone to Harvard, that’s the kind of uninhibited young pro he’d like to be.” Roosevelt went so far as to predict that “in the next generation the balance of power would shift south and west, and this boy could well be the first Southern president.”
II
ADVERSI
TY AND GROWTH
FIVE
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
“I must die or be better”
By the time they were in their late twenties, all four young men knew that they were leaders. In public service, they had found a calling. They had chosen to stand before the people and ask for their support, to make themselves vulnerable. Already, these young men resembled sketches of the leaders we would recognize in the years that followed. For these sketches to become fuller portraits, however, would require the ability to transcend both public and private adversity.
Scholars who have studied the development of leaders have situated resilience, the ability to sustain ambition in the face of frustration, at the heart of potential leadership growth. “Why some people are able to extract wisdom from experience, and others are not,” Warren Bennis and Robert Thomas write, remains a critical question. Some people lose their bearings; their lives are forever stunted. Others resume their normal behaviors after a period of time. Still others, through reflection and adaptive capacity, are able to transcend their ordeal, armed with a greater resolve and purpose.
Soon, each of these four men would experience dramatic setbacks. All of them would fall into depression and consider leaving public life.
* * *
During a bleak winter in 1840, thirty-two-year-old Abraham Lincoln fell into a depression so profound that his friends feared he might kill himself. They confiscated all knives, razors, and scissors from his room. As the Prairie State entered the third year of recession, the legislature, despite Lincoln’s passionate pleas to the contrary, had little choice but to halt work on half-finished railroads, canals, bridges, and roads. As one of the chief architects and advocates of the state’s expansive dreams, Lincoln received the lion’s share of the blame for the ensuing catastrophe. The crushing debt crippled the state, destroyed its credit rating for years, and deterred new pioneers from settling in Illinois. Land values plummeted, thousands lost their homes, banks and brokerage houses closed down. “Lincoln’s roseate hopes of becoming the De Witt Clinton of Illinois,” a friend noted, “faded away like the mists of morning.” Acknowledging that he was “no financier,” Lincoln shouldered responsibility for the crisis and paid a heavy price for that admission. His belief in himself shaken, he announced his retirement from the state legislature at the end of the current term.
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