Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  The most significant meetings Lyndon Johnson held on this tour, however, were not the public ones but the private. When the Brown & Root plane delivered him to Texas, it delivered him first to Houston, where a Brown & Root limousine met him and took him to the Brown & Root suite in the Lamar Hotel. Waiting for him there, in Suite 8-F, were men who really mattered in Texas: Herman and George Brown, of course, and oilman Jim Abercrombie and insurance magnate Gus Wortham. And during the two months he spent in Texas thereafter, the Senator spent time at Brown & Root’s hunting camp at Falfurrias, and in oilman Sid Richardson’s suite in the Fort Worth Club.

  These meetings were very private. During his stay in 8-F, a Houstonian—important but not important enough to be part of the 8-F crowd—telephoned Johnson’s office in Washington to try to arrange an appointment, but Busby was careful not to let him know even that Johnson was in Houston. When Johnson was at Falfurrias—the most private place of all—even high federal officials couldn’t reach him, not even his longtime ally Stuart Symington, who was told the “Senator cannot be reached by telephone”; the Secretary of the Air Force was reduced to leaving a message for Johnson to call him. To the extent possible, his whereabouts were concealed from everyone in Washington—even from members of his staff there. During his week at Falfurrias, Busby attempted to reach him through his Austin office; Mary Louise Glass, in that office, would tell him only that “Mr. Johnson has just advised me that he is taking a vacation himself—on a ranch—and cannot be reached until he comes out of the shinnery.” Even the most urgent communications from Washington—the envelopes from Walter Jenkins to Johnson marked “personal and confidential”—were held in Austin by Mary Louise instead of being forwarded.

  THE BROWN BROTHERS had been assuring their conservative friends for years that Lyndon wasn’t really a liberal, that he was as “practical” as they were, and now they were almost gloating in this proof that they had been correct. As their lobbyist Oltorf recalls, “Even after everything Lyndon had done—even after the Taft-Hartley and the way he fought Truman on the FEPC and all that—they [independent oilmen] had still been suspicious. They still thought he was too radical. But now he had tangibly put something in their pockets. Somebody who put money in their pockets couldn’t be a radical. They weren’t suspicious any more.” Herman Brown was a businessman who wanted value for money spent. As George, who echoes his brother’s thinking, says, “Listen, you get a doctor, you want a doctor who does his job. You get a lawyer, you want a lawyer who does his job. You get a Governor, you want a Governor who does his job.” Doctor, lawyer, governor, congressman, senator—when Herman “got” somebody, he wanted his money’s worth. And now he had gotten it—gotten it and more. The men associated with Herman Brown had gotten it, too. A long time ago, in 1937, when Lyndon Johnson had first run for Congress, Ed Clark had decided to “buy a ticket on him.” Now that ticket had paid off big.

  The Leland Olds fight had paid off for Lyndon Johnson, too, and he knew it. He had known for years that he needed the wholehearted support of the oilmen and of men like Clark for the money necessary if he were ever to realize his dreams. Now, at last, he had that support, and he was as happy as his aides had ever seen him. “It is a real pleasure to be around him when he is feeling this way,” Warren Woodward wrote Busby. Back in the house on Dillman Street in Austin for Christmas, Lyndon Johnson wrote a letter to Justice William O. Douglas. “This has been one of the finest years—perhaps the finest—of our lives,” he said.

  AND WHAT ABOUT the effect of the fight in another house—Leland Olds’ house in Washington on McKinley Street?

  There was very little money in that house. By October, Leland Olds had not received a paycheck for four months, and the Oldses’ meagre savings were almost exhausted. President Truman wrote him, “Of course, I felt very badly about your situation. I sincerely hope that it will work out all right for you individually.” And the President tried to make it work out as well as possible. Telling reporters he “would still like to find a government job for Olds”—one that would not require Senate approval—he thought he had found one: as a consultant to his nominee as Secretary of the Interior, Oscar L. Chapman. But there were delays. Although Olds’ appointment did not need Senate approval, Chapman’s did, and Democratic National Chairman Boyle told a reporter confidentially that although Olds “is in desperate financial straits,” his appointment could not be announced “until after Chapman’s confirmation for fear it would cause Chapman grave difficulties with the Senate.” Olds could not hold out. In January, 1950, the President created a Water Resources Policy Commission, headed by Morris Cooke, apparently primarily to provide Olds with a salary; he was the Commission’s only paid member, with a salary drawn from a presidential emergency fund. The following year he was shifted to a salaried post on an interagency committee studying the development of natural resources in New England.

  After January, 1953, however, there was no Truman in the White House—and no job in government for Leland Olds, now sixty-two years old. He would never hold a government job again. On the advice of friends and admirers, he established a consulting firm, Energy Research Associates, with two employees—himself and a secretary—in a small office on K Street furnished with used furniture. Rural electrification cooperatives and public power systems retained him for research projects for which, recalls the American Public Power Association’s Alex Radin, “He charged modest fees.”

  Speaking at conventions of rural electrification organizations, Olds imparted his philosophy to the organizations’ young officials—the new generation of crusaders for public power—and they came to revere him. When, in 1984, the author arrived at Alex Radin’s office in Washington to interview him, he noticed open on Radin’s desk a black-bound book he recognized. It was the bound transcript of the 1949 hearings on Leland Olds’ renomination. “Yes,” Radin said, “I’ve been reading the Lyndon Johnson hearings.” During the interview, even while Radin was discussing other subjects, his eyes kept glancing toward the transcript. Finally, he reached out for it, and showed the author the page—142—to which it was open. “Johnson is trying here to get Olds to say the members of the FPC who opposed him [Olds] were tools of the private power companies,” Radin said, “and Olds replies, ‘I do not think along those lines. I try to assume that every man is good.’ All the time I knew him, that was how he acted about Lyndon Johnson, and the others who attacked him. I never once heard him express one word of recrimination.” Then, so that the author could read the exchange for himself, Radin handed him the transcript. It was battered and dog-eared. “Yes, I’ve read it and re-read it many times,” Radin said.

  While the young officials could give Olds work, however, the fees they could pay were modest. After he lost his FPC post, says a friend, “He was a poor man the rest of his life.”

  AND THERE WERE worse things than poverty.

  Maud Olds had insisted, over Leland’s objections, on attending the subcommittee hearings. “My mother sat there with my father all day long,” their daughter Zara Olds Chapin says, listening to witnesses call her husband a traitor and a jackass and a crackpot, listening to Lyndon Johnson sneer at him and demand that he “answer that question ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ and stop hedging and dodging.”

  “It was a very bitter time,” Zara says, “a very hurtful time for my mother…. You just can’t believe that human beings can turn on you like that.” And, of course, every morning her mother had to open her front door, where the newspapers were waiting, with their headlines.

  The hurt was deepened by the behavior of some of her neighbors—particularly as, a few months after the hearings, McCarthyism began to cast its pall over Washington. More than one couple on McKinley Street whom the Oldses had considered friends—“people we had had to our house for dinner,” Zara says with an indignation undimmed after four decades—became noticeably reluctant to be seen talking to them. “They wouldn’t even come into our yard,” she says. One neighbor, in the past, would always stop if
she saw Maud outside and chat with her. Now the neighbor passed by without stopping, and finally she told Maud—as Maud related—that “she didn’t dare” to stop and talk.

  “That was the atmosphere in Washington then,” Zara says. “They were afraid they would be tainted if they were seen talking to someone who had been called a Communist. They said they didn’t feel he was a Communist, but that their career in government might be hurt. That was the atmosphere in Washington then. Mother understood that, but it hurt Mother very much.”

  Maud had always been what her family and friends call “high-strung,” “intense,” and in 1944, she had suffered what they describe as a “nervous breakdown.” She had been recovered for years, but now, after the hearings and the snubs in the street, “she became very upset,” Zara says. During the months following the hearings, she lost twenty-five pounds. Sometimes someone walking into a room in the Olds house which they had thought was empty would find Maud Olds standing there, silently weeping.

  It took a long time for Maud Olds to recover, her daughter says, and in some ways, she never recovered. “She always was wishing there was something she could do to get back at the people” who had hurt her husband, Zara says. “She just never stopped wishing that.” She lived until the age of ninety, and, says Zara, “she died hating Lyndon Johnson. Until the day she died, she could hardly say his name.”

  AS FOR THE EFFECT of his renomination fight on Leland Olds himself, he tried not to let anyone see it. Alex Radin, who often traveled and talked with him, says, “I never once heard Leland Olds mention Lyndon Johnson…. I think he sort of buried that part of his life.” But while friends and colleagues who had known Olds before the hearings use words like “bouncy,” “cheerful,” and “enthusiastic” to describe him, men and women who met Olds only after October, 1949, use adjectives like “restrained,” “tense.”

  “My father never really talked much about the hearings,” Zara recalls. “Never really very much at all. He was a stiff-upper-lip kind of guy.” That pose was effective with her for three years after the hearings, but then, returning home for her first extended stay since the hearings, she saw beneath the pose. “It wasn’t anything he said,” she recalls. “But he had lost all his buoyancy. My father had always had so much energy. He wasn’t enthusiastic, and all the other things he always was.”

  Her father, Zara was to say, had loved his work with a consuming passion. He had never lost his enthusiasm for analyzing huge masses of data and finding the significant implications in them: time had always passed unnoticed when he was involved in such work; when he finally went home at night, he was always eager to get up and start at it again the next day. And he loved the fact that in that data lay the possibility of improving people’s lives. “One of my father’s driving things was to make a dent in history by helping human beings,” Zara would say. “I was taught from the time I was a child that the important thing was to get cheap electricity for the common people.” His work with the FPC, she says, was the work he was born to do.

  Now, at the age of fifty-eight, that work had been taken away from him forever. To Zara, the saddest part of her return home was that in the evenings her parents “would go out to dinner and the movies like other people. Daddy had never had time to go out like that.”

  And then, of course, there was another poignant aspect of the situation. To replace Olds, Truman appointed Mon Wallgren, a former senator and crony, who, in 1952, Fortune magazine was to call “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.” During Wallgren’s chairmanship, the policies and regulations that Leland Olds had instituted to break the grip of the private electric utilities and natural gas monopolies were, one by one, reversed.

  Zara would never forget one visit she made to the McKinley Street house in late 1953 or early 1954. She and her parents and her sister Mary were sitting around the dining room table listening to the evening news when suddenly the announcer was talking about yet another policy change that had been announced that day by the FPC, a change that eliminated a regulation for which Olds had once fought. Someone jumped up and switched off the radio, as if it hurt too much to listen. Years later, recalling the incident to the author over the telephone, Zara said she realized in that moment that “My father had seen all the things he’d worked for broken.

  “I have to hang up. I’m crying now,” she said.

  Writing years later about the hearings, Senator Paul Douglas was to say that “Olds was crushed by the experience, and I do not think that he and his family ever recovered from the blow.” The experience, Joseph Rauh says, “killed Olds. I don’t know how many years he lived after that, but he never really recovered himself.”

  ONE OTHER INCIDENT connected with the hearings perhaps deserves mention. It occurred during a brief recess. Leland Olds was standing in the corridor outside the hearing room, talking to his wife and Melwood Van Scoyoc, when Lyndon Johnson emerged and started to walk by. Then he stopped, came up behind Olds, and put his hand on his shoulder.

  “Lee,” he said, “I hope you understand there’s nothing personal in this. We’re still friends, aren’t we? It’s only politics, you know.”

  LELAND OLDS DIED, after suffering a heart attack, on Sunday, August 5, 1960. There were tributes in the Senate—a few tributes: by 1960, few senators remembered Leland Olds. Senator James Murray of Montana said, “A great American passed away last week. He had his enemies, but I wish to state on the floor of the Senate that I believe we owe to Leland Olds a debt of gratitude which was not paid, and may never be paid, but which I wish to acknowledge at this time.” One of the tributes was from the Democratic presidential nominee, John F. Kennedy, who said, “In a sense … developments such as the St. Lawrence Waterway and power projects are a permanent memorial to him,” and added that Olds established “the foundation for the giant power systems that will soon be serving America.”

  There was no comment from the Democratic vice presidential nominee.

  13

  “No Time for a Siesta”

  WHEN RICHARD RUSSELL congratulated him on his victory over Leland Olds, Johnson replied: “I’m young and impressionable, so I just tried to do what the Old Master, the junior senator from Georgia, taught me to do.” And his note to the master included the most potent of code words: “Cloture is where you find it, sir, and this man Olds was an advocate of simple majority cloture on the gas producers.” Of all the spoils that Johnson reaped from his victory over Olds, perhaps the most valuable was the fact that it reinforced, and indeed heightened, Richard Russell’s favorable opinion of him, and not just of his philosophy—Communism was, of course, second only to civil rights on Russell’s list of the plagues that beset mankind—but of his potential.

  In a previous engagement—the Civil Rights Battle of March 1949—and in the many small skirmishes of a Senate year, Johnson had shown Russell that he would be a loyal soldier for the Cause. Now, in the Olds engagement, Johnson had not only organized the forces against Olds, but had planned their strategy and tactics, led them on the field of battle. And the engagement had ended in victory—in the utter rout of the liberal forces. Was the South’s great general now beginning to feel that perhaps he had found not merely a soldier for the Cause, but something more: a leader for the Cause, a new general—someone who might one day be able to pick up its banner when he himself finally had to let it fall? It would not be for another year or so that Richard Russell began to hint at such a feeling, but there was, almost immediately after the 53–15 vote, impressive testimony to at least the warmth of his feelings for Johnson. The Senate adjourned for the year on October 19, six days after the Olds vote. Before he left for Texas, Johnson extended an invitation to Russell to join him there on a hunting trip in November. And Russell, who had turned down so many invitations to hunting trips, accepted this one.

  Their destination was “St. Joe,” as it was known to
the select few who were invited there—St. Joseph Island, the twenty-one-mile-long island in the Gulf of Mexico that had once been a fishing resort but had been purchased by Sid Richardson and turned into his own private island, on which he built a hunting lodge so luxurious that its cost embarrassed even him and he never revealed it.

  Johnson had arranged a week-long stag party on St. Joe, and the stags were some of the biggest in the Texas business herd: not only Richardson but Clint Murchison, Amon Carter, Myron Blalock and, of course, Herman Brown. It was a group that held views quite similar to Russell’s on Communism and labor unions and Negroes and the importance of ending government interference with free enterprise, a group that had long considered Russell the leader of the good fight on these issues and had been looking forward to meeting him. Although none of them was noted for an interest in books, Russell found he had a lot to talk about with them, that conversation was, in fact, relaxed and easy, for they shared an interest, these hard, tough men who wanted so much from government, in politics. And with Herman Brown in particular—Herman who loved to talk not only about politics but about issues (and who didn’t want to talk about them with “some damned radical professor”), Herman who loathed Negroes and unions because Negroes were lazy and unions encouraged laziness in white men, Herman who called New Deal programs “gimmes” because they gave government handouts to lazy men who were always saying “gimme”—with Herman in particular Russell got along famously. And, of course, not only the perfectly arranged duck hunting and the strolls, in total privacy, along the beautiful beaches in the sun, but also the luxury of the accommodations, the deferential black retainers everywhere, the lavish dinners prepared by a chef flown in from New Orleans for the week, the long evenings after dinner in which a lot of Old Weller was consumed, added to the pleasantness of those days in the Gulf. For Dick Russell, who had just spent ten months in Washington with very little warmth in his life, it was a week basking in warmth, and in admiration—and the thank-you note he sent to Johnson from Winder showed how pleasant the week had been. “Dear Lyndon,” he wrote. “Ever since I reached home I have been wondering if I would wake up and find that I had just been dreaming that I had made a trip to Texas. Everything was so perfect that it is difficult to realize that it could happen in real life.”