Johnson’s use of political influence to expand his business would cement a lifelong association with Austin attorney Ed Clark, who would become the most powerful attorney in the state. Clark had induced the owner of a statewide chain of grocery stores, and the vendors he purchased from, to advertise on KTBC. In exchange for his patronage, Johnson intervened with the OPA, the wartime government agency that rationed various commodities, to allocate the store an extra 150,000 cases of grapefruit in 1944. Clark also arranged for General Electric to advertise on the station and even sponsored the popular World News Today program. His other lawyer friend Alvin Wirtz signed on Humble Oil, which selected KTBC to carry their broadcast of football games. Johnson persuaded the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) to approve a $1,250,000 loan for the Jaques Power Saw Company so that the latter could advertise on his radio station. It was well-known that the best way to secure some favor from Lyndon was to advertise on his radio station.161 During 1942, before the Johnsons bought the station, the monthly advertising revenue had been $2,600 per month. After the Johnsons’ purchase, the revenue rose almost immediately, and by December 1943 it was $5,645. In 1944, it was $13,500; in 1945, it was $15,300; and in 1946, $22,700 per month. By 1946, revenue totaled $272,500. Lyndon Johnson powered the station’s ascendancy, selling not merely the groceries and appliances advertised on his radio but political influence.162
During his vice presidency, the above scheme would begin backfiring on him, as will be seen in chapter 4, when his Senate aide and protégé Bobby Baker would coerce kickbacks, channeled through the purchase of advertising time on KTBC in Austin, from an insurance salesman doing business in Maryland, who had no business activities in Texas. Insurance agent Don Reynolds would testify to the other illegal activities he witnessed, including that Baker collected “large amounts of cash, from $10,000 to $13,000 at a time,” on behalf of Johnson.163 Unfortunately for Reynolds, his testimony was taken on November 22, 1963, after which the investigations into Johnson’s illegal schemes were quickly scuttled.
Johnson as a Freshman Senator
Soon after Johnson returned to Washington as the newly “elected” Texas senator, he demonstrated both his willingness to give big political paybacks to his financial benefactors and propensity for savagely attacking political opponents, in his 1949 campaign to oust Leland Olds, the veteran chairman of the Federal Power Commission. Olds’s record as chairman was impeccable, and his work was completely in accordance with the congressional standards established for the commission, but because of his effectiveness as a commissioner, he was not liked by certain influential men in Texas who felt he was a threat to their ongoing acquisition of untold fortunes. For this reason, he was to lose his position, meager wealth, home, and financial security. He eventually died as a virtual pauper, all thanks to Lyndon B. Johnson.
The story is still relevant—in fact it is essential to understand Johnson’s ruthlessness—because it illustrates Johnson’s single-minded determination to ruin people if they did not submit to his will. In this case, Olds didn’t accept the unwritten requirement to go easy on Johnson’s benefactors—owners and managers of behemoth power companies—who preferred regulatory rules that favored themselves over the interests of ordinary citizens and power consumers. It is ironic that Johnson would take credit throughout his life for how he had fought for those same power companies to electrify the rural parts of his district in the 1930s and 1940s, yet in 1949, when the power companies finally complied, largely because of the efforts of Leland Olds more than any other man alive, Johnson would savagely attack the real architect of the program.
As a newly elected senator, Lyndon B. Johnson immediately began planning his campaign to oust Leland Olds, whom The New Republic had called “the central force and will” of the commission.164 For months, Johnson devised a project that would ensure Olds would be bushwhacked in a process that Olds had assumed would be a routine approval of his third term on the commission. Once the hearings and subcommittee debate commenced, Olds was unmercifully attacked for his writings twenty-some years earlier, in which he had advanced the idea that public interests were superior to the corporate interests of the power companies. This material was turned against him, and now he was accused of having Communist leanings and running the commission like a “commissar,” then purposely given very little time to comply with requests for huge amounts of old records and information. Thus, a man who was in fact a very effective administrator was called “a traitor and a jackass and a crackpot … Johnson [would] sneer at him and demand that he answer the question ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and stop hedging and dodging.”165 He repeatedly interrupted Olds when he tried to explain his earlier position, “demanding that he either ‘repudiate’ or ‘reassert’ them.” It was a vicious and brutal attack on a man whose exemplary work history provided no substantive reason for having his nomination rejected.
Yet another equally compelling point must be made about Johnson’s methodology; he had prepared for months to ambush Olds, ensuring his target would have no warning and no real opportunity to respond. Johnson meticulously planned the attack, selecting members for the subcommittee who would be susceptible to charges of Olds’s supposed radicalism, scheduling hearings to make it impossible for Olds to assemble the records he needed for an adequate rebuttal, and conducting the hearings in a way that gave opponents as much time as they wanted while severely restricting Olds’s proponents. To avoid completely burning his bridges with liberals who supported Olds, he made sure they attended only the sessions for which most of the other subcommittee members—those he needed to convince of Olds’s supposed Communist background—had scheduling conflicts; on these occasions, Johnson appeared much more magnanimous and gracious to his prey. But when pro-Olds witnesses testified, he became impatient and pressed them to quickly wrap up their testimony; he repeatedly pulled out a large stopwatch and stared at it, and made sure they saw it.166
Johnson’s hearing schedule coincided with a meeting of the International Petroleum Association of America in Fort Worth. When the telegraph came describing how the freshman Texas Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, the subcommittee chairman, had taken on President Truman’s veteran nominee for reappointment to the Federal Power Commission and won a unanimous vote, 7–0, for rejection, the eight hundred attendees jumped with jubilation, breaking into wild hoorays and loud rebel yells.167 During the debate in the full Senate, as Johnson was crucifying Leland Olds, sprinkling his accusations with terms like “Marxist” and “commissar,” he would extend his hand to his quarry in the corridor outside the hearing room, saying, “Lee, I hope you understand there’s nothing personal in this. We’re still friends, aren’t we? It’s only politics, you know.”168 Many of the ninety-six sitting senators who might have otherwise voted for Olds simply walked out, because they did not want to support a man accused—rightly or wrongly—of being a Communist. When the votes were cast, only sixty-eight senators remained on the floor: Olds’s renomination was defeated, fifty-three to fifteen.
Practically all of the leading liberals in Washington, from Eleanor Roosevelt to Tommy “the Cork” Corcoran and Joseph Rauh, felt disgusted and betrayed. Even James Rowe, who had been a Johnson supporter for years, was stunned: “He grabbed onto the goddamned Commie thing and just ran with it and ran with it … Ran it into the ground for no reason we could see.”169 (It is little wonder that, only a decade later, the Democrats opted not to select Lyndon B. Johnson as their nominee for president; and when Kennedy chose him to be his running mate, liberals were predictably shocked and angered). President Truman—no great fan of Johnson after this episode—appointed someone who was more acceptable to Johnson and his benefactors: Mon Wallgren, who proceeded to reverse regulatory policies that Olds had worked years to accomplish. In 1952, Fortune magazine called Wallgren “quite possibly the least effective chairman, or even member, the FPC has ever had … A lazy fellow [and] too preoccupied with politicking to pay proper attention to FPC business.”170
Exac
tly three weeks after John F. Kennedy gave Lyndon B. Johnson the nod to become the vice presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, on August 5, 1960, Leland Olds died a broken man. He was destitute, abandoned by his oldest friends, who did not want to be associated with someone publicly labeled a Communist sympathizer; his wife, Maud, never recovered from the attacks. According to their daughter, Zara Olds Chapin, her mother had accompanied her father to the hearings and heard various witnesses attacking him as a commisar, jackass, and crackpot, watching the newly minted senator sneering at him and alternately acting very solicitous, then patronizing, and next obsequious, constantly changing from one mode of attack to another. Zara would lament that her mother “died hating Lyndon Johnson. Until the day she died, she could hardly say his name.”171
But Lyndon was ecstatic about his success: The fight against Leland Olds had paid off, and from then on he could count on the unanimous support of key Texas power brokers including Ed Clark and even more importantly, the oilmen, with their bottomless money barrels necessary for him to realize his dreams. Their backing made the ambush of Leland Olds worth the cost to him of the support of the liberal wing of his party; he knew such a loss would only be temporary. And he was in the most happy, euphoric mood as any of his aides had ever witnessed. His aide, Warren “Woody” Woodward, wrote to Horace Busby, “It is a real pleasure to be around him when he is feeling this way.” Johnson wrote to his poker-playing friend Justice William O. Douglas, “This has been one of the finest years—perhaps the finest—of our lives.”172
A few months later, in February 1950, another newly elected senator would begin using similar techniques against many people who had done nothing to deserve such outrageous treatment. Joseph R. “Tailgunner Joe” McCarthy’s behavior was likely influenced by what he witnessed during Leland Olds’s October 1949 confirmation hearings. McCarthy saw that great power and notoriety could be obtained through public humiliation of government employees who could be portrayed as card-carrying Communists, whether or not they really were. Congressman Richard Nixon (R-CA) evidently noticed this tactic as well. Both McCarthy and Nixon molded their confrontational styles on the grand master of reckless, vicious, and irresponsible accusation: Lyndon B. Johnson. According to one of Johnson’s aides, Horace Busby, “McCarthy was scared to death of Johnson. Johnson thought McCarthy would someday come up with a big exposé about Johnson’s past association with communists in the thirties, which he had many. McCarthy was too scared of Johnson as a skillful politician ever to bring any of that stuff up. He never did, and wisely so. He could never have made it credible. So he, you know, you couldn’t be in Washington in the thirties without knowing people who later turned out to be in some cell.”173 Busby’s words leave little doubt about whom McCarthy learned his techniques from.
Johnson’s strength was manipulating men and women, a skill he practiced on the president of his college and perfected throughout his career. He was innately talented at forming psychological blueprints of his targets, categorizing their strengths and weaknesses, backgrounds, and characteristics such as intelligence, attitudes, and prejudices. According to author David Halberstam, Johnson “could catalogue the strengths and weaknesses of every man [in Congress]. The strength of a man put him off, but his weaknesses attracted him; it meant a man could be used. Whereas Kennedy had been uneasy in the face of another man’s weakness, it embarrassed him and he tended to back off when a man showed frailty, to Johnson there was a smell of blood, more could come of this.”174 Senator Hubert Humphrey, who eventually served as Johnson’s vice president, addressed this topic in an oral history interview he did for Joe Frantz and the LBJ Library:
Johnson was like a psychiatrist. Unbelievable man in terms of sizing up people, what they would do, how they would stand under pressure, what their temperament was. This was his genius. He used to tell me many times, “You’ve got to study every member of this body to know how they’re really going to ultimately act. Everything about them, their family, their background, their attitudes, even watch their moods before you even ask them to vote.” He was a master of human relations when it came to that Senate.175
Humphrey elaborated upon the above in another oral history conducted by Michael Gillette:
Johnson always was able to take the measure of a man. He knew those that he could dominate; he knew those that he could outmaneuver. Right off the bat he sized you up.… Johnson knew how to woo people. He was a born political lover. It’s a most amazing thing … what I mean is he knew how to massage the senators. He knew which ones he could just push aside, he knew which ones he could threaten, and above all he knew which ones he’d have to spend time with and nourish along, to bring along, to make sure that they were coming along.176
What Humphrey didn’t say, though he must surely have known, was that the real key to Johnson’s mastery of other people’s future actions was his knowledge of their past secrets; and the key to that kind of hidden information was his access to to J. Edgar Hoover’s most personal and confidential files.
In later years, Johnson demonstrated his process to two of JFK’s famed advisers. Robert Dallek’s account references John Kenneth Galbraith’s story about how Johnson spent a whole morning with Arthur Schlesinger, examining “every member of the Senate—his drinking habits, his sex habits, his intellectual capacity, reliability, how you manage him. Arthur said, ‘Most informative morning I ever spent. Never got a word in edgewise.’ Not long afterward, Johnson told Galbraith, ‘I’ve been meeting with your friend, Arthur Schlesinger. Really had a very good meeting. We had a long talk. He’s a right smart fellow. But damn fellow talks too much.’”177 Hubert Humphrey saw that Johnson’s efforts culminated in dirt on every sitting U.S. senator: “He knew all the little things that people did. I used to say he had his own private FBI. If you ever knew anybody, if you’d been out on a date, or if you’d had a drink, or if you’d attended a meeting, or you danced with a gal at a nightclub, he knew it! It was just incredible! I don’t know how he was able to get all that information, but he lived and breathed and walked and talked politics … He was just totally immersed in it.”178
Lyndon Johnson’s other great skill stemmed from his Texas upbringing and forms a common trait of many people who live there, especially in the area known as the Hill Country outside of Austin, who often harness country colloquialisms to generate vivid descriptions. For example, instead of saying, “Appearances can be deceptive,” a Texan might remark, “Just because a chicken has wings doesn’t mean it can fly.” Author J. Evetts Haley, himself a native of the Lone Star State and familiar with the art of crafting the perfect Texas idiom, provided other examples, about how Lyndon fit in so well to the political scene in Washington (“He took to the techniques of influence and pressure like a kitten to a warm brick”) and how, after Speaker Sam Rayburn had taken Lyndon under his wing, his “career began to glitter like burnished brass.”179 Robert Caro described the Johnsonian lexicon: Instead of calling a special interest group weak, or a House-Senate joint committee a meaningless legislative exercise, Johnson would say the former was “not much stronger than a popcorn fart,” and the latter was “as useless as tits on a bull.”180 Johnson’s skill was such that he could craft such an expression instantly, on the fly, to describe whatever the situation might require.
A more technical, non-Texan way of summarizing Johnson’s treatment of others might be, “The overt manipulation of people through the use of psychoanalytical assessments targeted to his subject’s weaknesses, administered simultaneously as he overpowers and seduces his target with verbal entreaties framed in Texas colloquialisms.” In his book Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, Robert Dallek portrayed Johnson’s trademark:181
Evans and Novak described it as “supplication, accusation, cajolery, exuberance, scorn, tears, complaint, the hint of threat. It was all of these together. It ran the gamut of human emotions. Its velocity was breathtaking, and it was all in one direction. Interjections from the target were rare. Johnson a
nticipated them before they could be spoken. He moved in close, his face a scant millimeter from his target, his eyes widening and narrowing, his eyebrows rising and falling. From his pockets poured clippings, memos, statistics. Mimicry, humor, and the genius of analogy made ‘The Treatment’ an almost hypnotic experience and rendered the target stunned and helpless.”
Jeff Shesol, author of Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud That Defined a Decade, elaborated upon the above:
Johnson bent his colleagues backward, physically and figuratively, under his enormous frame and by the sheer force of his will. Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota would slink from a room, pleading for a cigarette break, to escape a face-to-face encounter with LBJ. The Johnson Treatment was partly intuitive and partly the product of discreet calculation. LBJ’s understanding of a senator’s individual vulnerabilities was innate, but he also scripted, rehearsed, and contrived seemingly spontaneous encounters in Capitol corridors. “Johnson knew how to woo people,” remembered Humphrey, the frequent object of LBJ’s attention. “He was sort of like a cowboy making love … He knew how to massage the senators.” Johnson knew whom to nurture, whom to threaten, and whom to push aside. The whole chamber seemed subject to his manipulation. “He played it like an organ,” exclaimed Times’s Hugh Sidey. “Goddamn, it was beautiful! It was just marvelous.”182 (emphasis added)
Elements that enhanced Johnson’s manipulative abilities were his sense of timing and the seeming spontaneity with which the events he choreographed appeared to his targets. As Robert Dallek wrote, Johnson practiced creating this illusion on his colleagues: “Johnson usually designed his approaches to other senators to seem to be wholly spontaneous—as an accidental encounter in a Senate corridor leading to a private talk. In fact, they were carefully planned … the product of meticulous calculation”183 (emphasis added).
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