The size of the House also played against Johnson’s strengths. The membership, which continually changed after biennial elections, made it difficult for Johnson to build the network of personal relationships that had always been the nucleus of his power. His physical size, his encroachment and determined force of will had given Johnson an insuperable advantage in the context of face-to-face relations. “I always believed,” he said, “that as long as I could take someone in the room with me, I would make him my friend.” The greater the distance from his audience, however, the more diluted, stifled, and ineffective he became. His ability to fathom people’s desires and motivations depended upon repeated, informal exchanges that were not the norm in a body of 435 representatives, separated into different office buildings, protected by ever-enlarging staffs.
Nor, given Johnson’s discomfort in addressing large audiences, was he able to establish a national reputation by speaking out on various issues and participating in floor debates. “Some of us were on the floor all the time, fighting for liberal causes,” a representative from California recalled, “but he stayed away from the floor, and while he was there, he was very, very silent.” Johnson did, of course, continue to service his constituents, but these routine duties no longer gratified his relentless ambition. “I always had the feeling he was a little restless,” his fellow congressman O. C. Fisher recalled, “looking for bigger worlds to conquer.” Indeed, Johnson viewed the seven years spent in the House between 1941 and 1948 as a kind of purgatory.
Not surprisingly, Johnson’s enervation and diminished interest in the job adversely affected his relationship with his staff. “Fits of depression were punctuated by angry outbursts in which he blamed anybody or everybody for his loss,” historian Randall Woods writes. His abusive behavior worsened. “One day I didn’t get a telephone number fast enough for Mr. Johnson and he threw a book at me,” recalled a female staffer. “I was a little afraid of him after that.” Even before the Senate run, Johnson’s two longest-serving aides, Luther Jones and Gene Latimer, had quit. Jones knew after less than a year on the House staff that he simply “had to get away” or be “devoured” by Johnson. Latimer lasted exactly a year to the day of his arrival. “I was literally working myself to death,” he recalled. “I never took a breath.” Johnson quickly replaced Jones and Latimer with able men, but without the inspiration of Johnson’s intensely focused energy, without the thrill of shared engagement in important, beneficial projects, the new team never achieved the camaraderie that had bound the older team together despite their volatile and oppressive “Chief.”
* * *
Though never driven before by the dream of amassing wealth, Johnson began to devote more and more of his time and energy to its acquisition. After a stint in the Navy in the wake of Pearl Harbor, he bided his time in Congress, relegated constituent matters to his staff, and spent his days pursuing the accumulation of what would, before a decade had passed, become a massive fortune. Money, its erratic comings and goings, had been a significant player in Lyndon Johnson’s family from the beginning. The vicissitudes of his father’s business dealings had brewed dissension and insecurity from Lyndon’s childhood years, influencing the sometimes humiliating figure the Johnson family cut in town.
Lyndon Johnson’s multimillion-dollar empire was planted by Lady Bird in 1943 with the purchase of KTBC, a shabby radio station operating on the verge of bankruptcy in Austin, Texas. No sooner had Lady Bird secured this tiny station for the sum of $17,500 from her trust fund than the Federal Communications Commission rained its blessings upon the enterprise, permitting an increase in transmitting power, expanding its hours of broadcast to a full twenty-four hours a day, disallowing all competition, and granting network affiliations. The sum of all these advantageous rulings led finally to a lucrative television contract that begot further investments in bank securities, real estate, and cattle. “Like two young oaks springing up side by side,” a Wall Street Journal reporter summarized, “LBJ’s careers in government and business grew mightily—their trunks rising parallel and branches intertwining.”
To juxtapose Lyndon Johnson, the principal of the elementary school at Cotulla who had spent a significant amount of his meager salary in order to buy athletic equipment and furnish a playground for his Mexican American students, with the congressman whose rightward political drift accelerated as his wealth increased, underscores the loss of bearings he had experienced in the traumatic aftermath of his Senate loss. The ambition to better the lives of others that had given his life direction and meaning during his early years in politics—his work with the NYA, his fight for slum clearance and rural electrification—was now focused solely on himself. He had lost the sense of purpose that had accompanied his drive for power, the doubleness of ambition so central to genuine leadership.
* * *
Lyndon Johnson’s loss of bearings grew more marked upon the death of his greatest political mentor, Franklin Roosevelt. When a U.S. Senate seat opened in 1948, he resolved to make one last try to reach the upper house. As he prepared for the statewide run in an increasingly conservative Texas, he shifted still further to the right, even repudiating his former allegiance to the New Deal. “I think the term ‘New Dealer’ is a misnomer,” he told a reporter. While he still believed in the “development of water power” and in some of the programs Roosevelt backed, he said: “I believe in free enterprise and I don’t believe in the government doing anything that the people can do privately. Wherever it’s possible, the government should get out of business.”
Though he had waited seven years for this opportunity, the forty-year-old Johnson was filled with trepidation. This time there was no safety net of a special election. It was all or nothing; a loss would forfeit his congressional seat with its decade of accrued seniority and lock him out of official Washington for the first time since his twenties. “I just could not bear the thought of losing everything,” he confessed, as if his identity was contingent upon his position and standing. Friends and relatives prodded him to enter, but he remained indecisive. Tired of waiting, a group of his associates suggested that he convince his former congressional aide John Connally to make a bid. That afternoon, Johnson announced that he was running for the United States Senate.
Once again, the elevated stress that elections invariably brought Lyndon began to surface in an array of physical ailments—fevers, chills, stomach pains, headaches, depression, even kidney stones. “You have to realize that a politician—a good one—is a strange duck,” Johnson told campaign worker Joe Phipps. “Anyone who periodically has to get down on hands and knees to beg voters to prove they love him by giving him their vote is really sick. Depending on how obsessed he is, he could be very, very sick. . . . Try to think of me as a seriously ill, dear relative or friend who needs all the care, compassion, comfort and love he can get in order to get well, knowing that in time he will get well. The illness . . . won’t come back till the next election rolls around.”
Johnson’s chief antagonist, Coke Stevenson, a celebrated two-term Texas governor, was, at the beginning of the race, the prohibitive favorite. In the one-party state of Texas, however, where the winner in the Democratic primary was assured of victory in the fall, the campaign revolved around personalities. And no personality was more original than Lyndon Johnson. On the trail, he worked twenty hours a day, shaking hands, making short speeches, giving radio interviews. He “even worked in the bathtub,” his secretary Dorothy Nichols recalled. “You’d be in a little hotel in this little town, and you’d get a summons to come into the bathroom to talk to the Congressman. You’d go in and he’d be in the tub, and he would talk to you and two or three secretaries would come in and take letters. He never stopped.”
Understanding the importance of flamboyantly seizing the attention of the electorate, Johnson crisscrossed the state in a helicopter, something no candidate had previously done. The helicopter—dubbed the “Johnson City Windmill”—was just the vehicle to draw astonished voters from far
-flung corners of Texas. Much as young Franklin Roosevelt had stormed from barns to hayfields in a bedecked red Maxwell in his first campaign for the State Senate, so now Lyndon Johnson combined fun, hokum, and excitement with the techniques of a modern campaign, complete with advance men, sophisticated polling, and radio advertising. Circling the town square or the local football field, he would blast his arrival over the PA system attached to the helicopter runners. “This is Lyndon Johnson, your next United States senator, and I’ll land in just a minute. I want to shake hands with all of you.” If the town lacked a proper landing site he would consult a list of voters from the different small towns and villages who had written him over the years. “Hello there, Mr. Jones,” his voice would boom overhead. “This is your friend Lyndon Johnson. I’m sorry we can’t land today, but I want you to know that I’m up here thinking of you and appreciate your kind letter and comments. I just want you to be sure and tell your friends to vote for me at election time.”
On Election Day, the results were so close that neither candidate was able to declare victory. Both held back, playing the same game of undercounting, overcounting, withholding, and opportune releasing. This time, however, the Johnson campaign played the shrewder hand. In 1941, an overconfident Johnson, anxious to capture headlines of victory the next day, had released the votes in his “bought” precincts prematurely. “In 1948, we learned better,” Johnson’s aide Walter Jenkins recalled. While the cocksure Stevenson campaign released their votes early, “we didn’t rush the people in the counties where we had strong votes. We rather hoped they would hold back” until the very last moment. That way, if “any sort of fraud” was involved, it would be too late for the Stevenson campaign to retaliate.
“They were stealin’ votes in east Texas,” Johnson supporter and Austin mayor Tom Miller recalled, “we were stealin’ votes in south Texas, only Jesus Christ could say who actually won it.” But Jesus wasn’t counting, and, by an eighty-seven-vote margin, “Landslide Lyndon” attained the Senate seat he had coveted for so long.
* * *
By that mere eighty-seven votes, Lyndon Johnson had gained entry to a wholly different institution with different dynamics of power than the House, one far more contoured to his temperament and formidable leadership gifts. Smaller, more intimate, less procedure-bound, and more stable (given the six-year tenure in the Senate rather than the two-year turnover in the House), the Senate was ideally adapted to a leader whose ability to persuade, charm, subdue, and overwhelm depended upon intimate encounters, engaging people face-to-face or in small groups. The Senate’s “folkways” and “unwritten rules of the game” called upon freshman senators to serve a period of apprenticeship, show deference to their elders, refrain from speaking too often on the floor, concentrate on learning the expected “norms of behavior”—habits of mind Johnson had long cultivated.
Had he become a senator in a different era, he might not have been able to exercise his unique leadership talents to full effect. His diminished ability to speak effectively in formal settings, for example, would have made it challenging to achieve recognition during the Senate’s “golden age,” the decades leading up to the Civil War, when the upper chamber debated the central issues of the day and great orators became the nation’s eminent figures—Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, and William Henry Seward of New York. The Senate Johnson now entered was perfectly suited to his trademark leadership style; as aide George Reedy said, Lyndon was “the right man in the right place at the right time.”
No sooner had Johnson arrived than he set about figuring out the structural machinery of the institution. It quickly became apparent to the freshman senator that power resided in an informal coalition, an inner club of southern Democrats and conservative Republicans. A bargain had been struck whereby the conservative Republicans would vote with the South against civil rights legislation and, in return, the southern Democrats would oppose liberal social and economic measures. Conceived in the struggle to defeat Roosevelt’s court-packing plan (which ironically catapulted Johnson into Congress), this coalition had solidified its authority over the years by securing strategic committee chairmanships and displaying a keen and imperious parliamentary acumen. The undisputed leader of this inner club, commanding the respect of almost every member of the Senate, was Richard Russell.
From the beginning, Johnson recognized Russell’s mentorship would be the linchpin to his hopes of gaining influence in the Senate. He was, of course, not alone among his freshman colleagues in recognizing Russell’s unique position in the Senate hierarchy, but he alone set in motion a strategy to ingratiate himself with the courtly senior senator. “The way you get ahead in the world, you get close to those that are the heads of things,” Johnson had told his college roommate when he took a job mopping floors in the hallway outside the president’s office. Shortly after his Senate entrance Johnson realized “there was only one way to see Russell every day, and that was to get a seat on his committee. Without that we’d likely be passing acquaintances and nothing more. So I put in a request for the Armed Services Committee—and fortunately, because of all my work on defense preparedness in the House, my request was granted.” Though the two men were wildly dissimilar in temperament and style, they shared a consuming devotion to work. The Senate was the bachelor’s entire existence; Russell embodied the Senate much the way Rayburn embodied the House.
Lyndon Johnson respected, loved, dutifully served, and thoroughly exploited both mentors. He understood the anxiety and loneliness both men experienced when they were away from work. “Russell found in the Senate what was for him a home,” Johnson explained. “With no one to cook for him at home, he would arrive early enough in the morning to eat breakfast at the Capitol and stay late enough at night to eat dinner across the street. And in these early mornings and late evenings I made sure there was always one companion, one senator, who worked as hard and as long as he, and that was me, Lyndon Johnson. On Sundays the House and Senate were empty, quiet, and still; the streets were bare. It’s a tough day for a politician, especially if, like Russell, he’s all alone. I knew how he felt for I, too, counted the hours till Monday would come again, and knowing that, I made sure to invite Russell over for breakfast, lunch, or brunch or just to read the Sunday papers. He was my mentor, and I wanted to take care of him.”
The central decision an aspiring senator makes is how to spend time and resources, to determine what kind of role he might choose to fill—a spokesman on national issues, a regional leader, an expert in a specific field. Johnson aimed to secure a leadership post in the operation of the party itself, beginning with the admittedly insubstantial post of assistant party leader, known as the party whip. With effort and luck, he might transition to party leader. Most senators in the late 1940s and early 1950s shunned these official positions, which, given the entrenched power of the inner club, were largely symbolic. Moreover, the time-consuming duties of corralling votes kept party leaders trapped in Washington, vulnerable to opposition at home. It was not coincidental that in 1950, both the Democratic Party whip and the Democratic minority leader were defeated for reelection.
Acting with his usual dispatch, Johnson sought to seize upon the opening chance provided and thrust himself forward for party whip. Recognizing a potential others had overlooked, he extravagantly beseeched Russell for the job he called “one of the most urgently desired goals of his life.” In 1951, with Russell’s support, he became the youngest party whip in history; two years later, when the post of minority leader opened through yet another reelection defeat, he launched a characteristic quicksilver campaign, and, despite initial opposition from liberals, was unanimously elected.
In every leadership position thus far attained, Johnson had understood the importance of achieving a bold and eye-catching beginning. This time, he inaugurated a dramatic shift in the way committee assignments were awarded. Sensing a building resentment on the part of freshman senators who were prevented by seniority fr
om important committees, he persuaded Russell and his fellow coalition members to promise each new senator at least one choice committee assignment. While this required a slight modification of the seniority rule, Johnson convinced the inner circle that the present system stifled energetic young talent that could benefit the Senate as a whole. With this single change, Johnson promptly gained the favor and gratitude of all the freshman senators, who henceforth considered him their patron.
Having made inroads to win the backing of junior senators, he was careful not to slight the seniors. On the contrary, he catered to the older senators as he had always catered to his elders. He assisted them with committee preparations, provided concise summaries on issues, showed overt and lavish respect. As age slowed them down, “they feared humiliation, they craved attention. And when they found it, it was like a spring in the desert; their gratitude couldn’t adequately express itself with anything less than total support and dependence on me. And besides, I always liked to spend time with older people.”
In the months following his election as party leader, Johnson exponentially expanded his ability to convert operating and procedural tasks into sources of genuine power. Intuitively, he had fathomed the potential in the commonplace functions of messenger, gatekeeper, and appointment-maker. According to rules, the party leader was responsible for scheduling bills for floor debate. Johnson assumed this taxing task with alacrity. If a colleague required prompt action on a pet bill or wanted to delay a controversial vote, he would seek Johnson’s assistance. Another workaday job he transformed into an influential resource was discovered in a loophole in the Senate rules that enabled him to transfer the responsibility of assigning office space from the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration to the party leader’s office. Before long, a marked hierarchy of choice accommodations in the new Senate office building belonged to Johnson’s allies; those antagonistic to him were relegated to the smaller, older office building.
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