Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  But she did stand it, and in fact her devotion to him—her love for him—seemed only to grow stronger. He had only to put his arm around her for her face to grow noticeably happier. There was obviously a strong physical tie between them. Stuart Symington was struck by two incidents that occurred in 1951 while he and the Johnsons and Mary Rather were having dinner in the little back yard behind the Thirtieth Place house. “Lady Bird said, ‘Stu, have another little piece of chicken,’ and I said, ‘Thanks but I’ve had all I can eat,’ and she said, ‘Oh, please, have just one more piece’—and Johnson blew. ‘Goddammit, Bird, leave the man alone! Didn’t you hear what he said? Goddammit, the man doesn’t want any more chicken! Goddammit!’ And I never forgot it, he was so brutal with her.” But that same year, Symington visited the Johnsons in Texas, and they drove out to the Hill Country for a picnic and while they were sitting on a blanket, Lyndon “said to her, putting his arm around her, ‘Let’s jest do a little ‘spoonin’ ’—and the light in her face was something to see.” Whatever the reasons, her adoration for her husband was visible to everyone. Once her biographer, Jan Jarboe Russell, asked her if she resented doing menial chores for him—bringing him breakfast in bed, etc. “Heavens, no,” Lady Bird replied. “I was delighted to do it. I adored him.”

  THE MODEST HOUSE on Thirtieth Place seemed too small for its furniture. Not long after the Johnsons had purchased it, Lyndon, annoyed by the amount of time Lady Bird was taking to pick out furniture, went to an auction one day and purchased an entire houseful. But the furniture—large, heavy Victorian pieces—was evidently from a much larger house. Lady Bird had thereafter decorated “every inch of that house,” as Elizabeth Rowe would recall; in the rather small dining room, for example, not only the windows but a wall mirror were hung with heavy red draperies. And the house seemed too small for all the people who lived in it—not only the Johnsons and their two girls but also Zephyr Wright and a changing cast of staff members and visitors from Texas who slept up on the third floor; “Texas friends descend on them all hours of every day, and stay for a drink, a meal, or a week,” a journalist wrote. “Lady Bird takes it in stride.” And it seemed too small for the man around whom life in it revolved.

  The clock radio beside Lyndon Johnson’s bed was set for seven-thirty, but on most days the bedside buzzer with which he called for breakfast rang down in the kitchen well before that time; it wasn’t an alarm that jerked Lyndon Johnson out of sleep. He would often have made several calls to his assistants during the night when he thought of things that needed doing, and he would wake up thinking of more; as he lay in bed eating the breakfast that Ms. Wright had brought up on a tray—usually a Texas grapefruit, toast, and a big plate of spicy Hill Country sausage—drinking innumerable cups of coffee, and lighting the first of the day’s cigarettes, he would be telephoning assistants at their homes and, at about eight, telephoning SOB 231 to see what the morning’s mailbag had brought. And he would be reading: not only the Washington Post and Times-Herald, and the New York Times, but the Congressional Record. (Each day’s Record, covering the previous day’s activities, was printed at about six o’clock in the morning, and he had asked for it to be delivered to his home; five days a week a green truck from the Government Printing Office pulled up on the quiet street at about seven o’clock and a gray-uniformed GPO employee would lay a copy at the Johnson front door; sometimes the ink would still be wet and would smear Lyndon Johnson’s fingers as he read it, turning the pages very fast but focusing on them very intently.) He would tear out articles as he read. As he shaved in the bathroom—with an electric razor because he considered it easier than a straight blade on his tender skin, and because he considered an electric razor faster, and he didn’t want to waste time—and combed his hair, concentrating on covering a growing thin spot on the back of his head, he would be dictating letters, memos, and reminders to himself to Lady Bird, who was sitting on the bed with her stenographer’s notebook. By eight-thirty or so, Walter Jenkins or Mary Rather would have arrived to take more dictation, and tension and haste would sharpen in Lyndon Johnson’s voice as he put on the clothes his wife had laid out for him. The upstairs doorknobs were decorated with knotted neckties; believing that tying a tie each day wrinkled it—and also took too much time—he simply loosened his ties to take them off at night, and hung them, knots intact, on doorknobs, ready to be slipped on again. By nine, he would be out the door, and driving down Connecticut; sometimes, if he wasn’t picking up Congresswoman Douglas, he would pick up Mary Rather and drive her to work, weaving in and out of cars, shouting at their drivers, mingling dictation and diatribes, gearing up for the day ahead. He wouldn’t return home until after the Senate had adjourned for the day at five or six o’clock, and after he had attended Rayburn’s Board of Education and had done several hours’ work in his office, and then he would often bring last-minute guests.

  Sometimes, he wouldn’t have finished all his office chores when he had to get home to greet guests. The huge stack of letters that his staff had churned out that day might not all be reviewed and signed, for instance. Then that work would be done at home. While his guests were talking and having a cocktail in the living room, he would sit in a corner, a tall stack of papers in front of him, talking along with them but reading and signing as he talked.

  THERE WERE, of course, two individuals at 4921 Thirtieth Place who did not fit into that routine: Lynda Bird Johnson, age five in 1949, and Lucy Baines Johnson, age two.

  During the first nine years of their marriage, Lady Bird Johnson had become pregnant three times, but had suffered three miscarriages. In 1943, she had conceived again. Lyndon Johnson badly wanted a son—and apparently had no doubts that his wishes would be answered. Writing on November 22, 1943, to congratulate L. E. Jones on the birth of Jones’ baby, he said, “You may be interested to know that I am expecting a boy in March.” Talking to friends in Washington, with Lady Bird present, he seemed so convinced of this that Jim Rowe had felt called upon to inject a note of caution, writing him on March 4, 1944, “I do assure you, as a gentleman who desperately wanted a son and never told his wife about it either before or after the event, that if your fate is the same as mine you will in three months’ time no more think of having a son instead of a daughter than of voting with Pappy O’Daniel.” This caution was reinforced by Rayburn, and it apparently had some effect, for when Jones wrote Johnson the next week, “Here’s hoping it’s a boy,” Johnson wrote back, “I hope I’ll be as lucky as you, but at this point I’m not as particular about a boy as I was at first.” Lynda Bird Johnson was born, on March 19, 1944, only after twelve torturous hours of labor, and doctors, as readers may remember, strongly advised Mrs. Johnson not to become pregnant again; and when, in 1946, this advice was disregarded, its wisdom was almost tragically proven—as was Lady Bird’s courage. She knew she was miscarrying again, yet she insisted that Lyndon go to the office although she was in intense pain and running a high fever. She called the doctor as soon as he had driven away, but before an ambulance arrived she began to hemorrhage badly. As she was being carried out of the house on a stretcher, she asked a visiting friend from Austin to mail an important letter to Texas, told her how much postage to put on it, and insisted that a dinner party the following evening, to which she had invited Rayburn and two guests, not be canceled, saying, “Lyndon has to eat anyway, and they’re already invited,” and requesting that her friend act as hostess in her place. Her condition was listed as critical for more than a week, but she recovered—and became pregnant again. “We’re waiting for baby brother,” Lyndon told friends. On July 2, 1947, Lucy Baines Johnson was born, in a delivery so difficult that when the doctor held her up for the first time, he said, “I never thought I’d see you.” Johnson never stopped expressing his desire for a son; “You know I always wanted a boy,” he would tell his secretary Ashton Gonella. In an interview with Stewart Alsop published in 1959, he said, “I’ve always wished Lady Bird and I had a son. If we had [had] a boy, I’d want him t
o be a politician or a teacher or a preacher…. Someone who … has an influence on events.”

  On the days Johnson went to his Senate office, he was telephoning, giving dictation, and reading the newspapers and the Record from the moment he awoke, so he had little time in the mornings to spend with his two daughters. Since he rarely returned before they were asleep, they seldom saw him during the evenings of the days on which he went to his office. And since those days were six of the seven in the week, their time with him was necessarily somewhat limited. There remained Sundays, of course, but as Lynda Bird was to say during an interview in 1989, “Daddy was the kind of man who believed it was more important to invite Richard Russell… over for Sunday breakfast than to spend the time alone with his family.”

  It might have been expected that this gap in the lives of the two little girls would be filled by their mother, who had taken such risks to bear them—particularly since she was a woman with such seemingly boundless warmth and patience for her husband’s colleagues and constituents. But this was not the case. Men and women who lived for a time at Thirtieth Place during 1949 and the early 1950s couldn’t believe Lady Bird’s attitude toward her children. “I never saw a mother-daughter relationship like it,” recalls Margaret Mayer. “Lady Bird let everyone know that, no matter what, Lyndon came first.” She spent her days with his constituents, her evenings accompanying him to Washington social events. When she was gone, the girls’ baby-sitter was one of Johnson’s secretaries, Willie Day Taylor, a gentle woman who Lady Bird says “became almost a second mother.” Sometimes, Mary Rather, or Ollie Reed, the Johnsons’ next-door neighbor, would act as baby-sitter. “The little Johnson girls are being raised by committee,” another neighbor said. “I felt deprived,” Lucy would admit years later. “I wanted a normal life. I wanted a father who came home at a reasonable hour, and a mother who made cookies. That wasn’t what we had.” “Why are you always going out, Mama?” Lynda Bird would ask. Their mother was going out because she had made her choice. “You either have to cut the pattern to suit your husband or cut it to suit your children,” she was to say. “Lyndon is the leader,” she was to explain to a journalist. “Lyndon sets the pattern. I execute what he wants. Lyndon’s wishes dominate our household.” Her friends could hardly credit the faithfulness with which that pattern was followed. “Lady Bird was so subservient and so under the spell of Lyndon Johnson that it made it difficult for the kids,” one says. Another, B. A. Bentsen, wife of Congressman (and later Senator) Lloyd Bentsen, talking about Lynda, says, “It was just so sad. She wouldn’t cry, but you could just tell she wished things were different.”

  *Johnson’s previous serious romances had been with two young women whose fathers had each been the richest men in their respective towns. At college he had boasted so openly about his determination to marry money that that desire was recorded in print in the college yearbook. While a congressional assistant, he proposed to Lady Bird on their first date.

  10

  Lyndon Johnson

  and the Liberal

  ANOTHER QUALITY THAT LYNDON JOHNSON had displayed on each stage of his march along the path to power was an utter ruthlessness in destroying obstacles in that path.

  The obstacle in his path now was a man named Leland Olds, the chairman (and, in The New Republic’s phrase, “the central force and will”) of the Federal Power Commission, the five-member body that licensed and regulated facilities to create power from natural resources as well as the sale of that power to the public.

  The furniture in the chairman’s office on the seventh floor of the FPC Building on Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue was federal bureaucratic standard issue, but not much else in that office was. On the big desk, near a rack holding several hickory pipes, lay a mathematician’s slide rule, worn with use. In a corner stood a cello, with classical scores open on a stand; Olds was considered one of Washington’s most accomplished amateur cellists. On the bookshelves, alongside the bound volumes of FPC regulations, were stacks of poetry magazines and dog-eared volumes on philosophy and history, one of which Olds might have been reading while coming to work that morning; he took the trolley instead of the bus because it was smoother, and he could read on it. On the coatrack would be a rumpled tweed sport jacket and the old felt fedora he had worn to work, tipped jauntily down over one eye. He would wander in shirtsleeves through the offices of the younger staff members: a brisk slender figure with a shock of graying hair, and lively pale blue eyes behind wire-rimmed spectacles, puffing on a pipe—“jolly, witty, completely informal, not at all aloof or reserved like the other commissioners, ready to talk about anything, like a professor talking with his students,” one staff member recalls. And when Leland Olds got caught up in a subject (as he often did when the talk turned to the morality behind the Commission’s policies or to the social benefits those policies could provide farmers or the poor), he would talk faster and faster, the words tumbling over each other in a very boyish enthusiasm that sometimes made it seem as if the professor-student role had been reversed. He seemed less like a high-level federal bureaucrat than a scholar or a writer or—when he was talking about morality or social justice—like a social worker or a minister. And those four professions had indeed been Leland Olds’ professions until he was forty-one years old.

  The son of a mathematics professor at Amherst, George D. Olds, who became the college’s president, and Marion Leland, the daughter of a prominent Boston family, Leland Olds, born December 31, 1890, “liked fun,” a college friend was to recall. Just under six feet tall, thin and wiry, with wavy dark brown hair and those striking blue eyes in a gaunt, high-cheekboned face, he was an ardent outdoorsman, a guide and blazer of trails in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, a tennis player good enough to reach the finals of the Eastern State College Championships, a long-distance runner who once, on a bet, ran and walked the almost forty miles from Amherst to Williamstown and arrived before the kickoff of a football game, and a brilliant student who graduated magna cum laude in mathematics. But perhaps the formative experience of Lee Olds’ college years occurred not on a campus but in a slum—during the two summers he worked at a vacation school that had been established by Grace Church in the nearby industrial city of Holyoke, Massachusetts. There the books by Riis and Dreiser and Norris came to life. In Holyoke, he was to say, “I learned at first hand the impact of the industrialism of that period on the lives of the children of wage earners.” Those summers of watching children work all the daylight hours in sweltering, windowless rooms gave him a determination, as he was to put it, to be “of service,” and after graduating in 1912, “I searched for some pursuit which would have some effect toward mitigating the evil of poverty.”

  At first, the search took him into social work—on the staff of a settlement house in the South Boston slums. But a year of seeing the horrors of the sweatshop and hearing the tuberculosis coughs through the thin walls of the railroad flats taught him, he was to say, “a great deal… about the limitations of social work as a means of mitigating poverty.”