The Best and the Brightest (90 page)

He was not a man to be underestimated; he sought power and found it, and relished exercising it; he did not like being out alone on a position and he was brilliant at working others to a position which he intended to take so that they would stand together, there would be plenty of protective coloration. As a man of great force and intelligence, he had mastered a certain kind of power as no one had in Washington in years; he performed in the Senate with such subtlety and skill that there were newspapermen in Washington who would leave their offices to go down to the Hill to watch him when there was a particular scenario coming up, knowing that it would above all be a performance, orchestrated, skilled and almost joyful.

With all that ability, however, there were limits imposed by the regionalism. What he had exploited also held him back. Even at the 1960 convention, when he was chosen for the Vice-Presidency, it was not a recognition of the breakdown of the regional prejudice, but rather a confirmation of it; he could help bind a badly divided party, he could work with the South and try and hold it to what would be a traditionally liberal campaign in the North. It was not that inviting an office; it is a somewhat futile office under the best of conditions, but these were even worse conditions for a man as restless as Johnson, who had been a powerful figure as Majority Leader and who would serve a strong-willed President younger than he. It had more than the usual elements of being the end of the road, and only Sam Rayburn’s deep animosity toward Richard Nixon, toward the Nixon who had called the Democratic party the party of treason, the attack upon the loyalty of an institution that Mr. Sam revered, made him advise Lyndon to take it. That he might help beat Richard Nixon.

Even then his old enemies rebelled and there was talk of a floor fight against him; the liberals and labor leaders from the great industrial states were less than grateful for his leadership in those congressional years. Yet Johnson had been a liberal, perhaps even, it was said, a Texas populist, who had been one of Franklin Roosevelt’s most loyal New Dealers, a young man who had been anointed in Washington upon his arrival by none other than FDR himself. FDR, he liked to say, had been like a daddy to him. Was Johnson liberal, or was he conservative? His bitterest enemies were the committed Texas liberals, the Yarborough people, the Texas
Observer
people. They knew him back home. Who was he, anyway? Liberal, conservative, or just very ambitious? He was the kind of man who seemed to be at ease with the power structure of Texas, the richest and most conservative of the rich and conservative, and yet in the spring of 1960 he could tell friends and reporters flying back from a campaign meeting in Binghamton, New York, while complaining about the fat cats he had met that night, “No member of our generation who wasn’t a Communist or a dropout in the thirties is worth a damn.”

Johnson’s first major job in the Depression had been as an assistant to Richard Kleberg, a conservative congressman and owner of the vast King Ranch. This job had brought no great ideological hardship; rather, Johnson seemed more irritated by Kleberg’s laziness than his politics. He went back to Texas in 1935 to head the state’s National Youth Administration. There, helping to find work for young people, he was also building a political base, and when there was a sudden vacancy in 1937 caused by the death of the incumbent congressman, Johnson immediately declared himself a candidate.

It was at the time of the first low point in Franklin Roosevelt’s presidential history. Awed and intoxicated by his own 1936 landslide (46 out of 48 states), Roosevelt had moved to change the one institution in the nation which still blocked his program, by attempting to expand the Supreme Court. He immediately overstepped his popularity; the reaction was quick and intense. All sorts of opposition to Roosevelt which was then dormant suddenly surfaced, and this was particularly true of Texas: the President’s enemies were clearly using the Court packing as a means of rallying support against him. (Almost twenty years later Johnson was still acutely aware of this, and after his own landslide victory against Goldwater he was ferocious in pushing legislation through as quickly as he could, always as though time were running out, saying that once the Congress feels it has given too much, it is bound to react and reassert its own independence.) Of the seven candidates running for the Texas seat in the special election, only Johnson wholly committed himself to the New Deal, so when he won, it was a symbol which Roosevelt grasped at.

The President interrupted a vacation to greet the new young congressman in Galveston the day after the election, and thus did Johnson start his career twice blessed. Sam Rayburn, his father’s old friend from their days in the Texas Legislature, had just become House Majority Leader, a powerful ally for a freshman congressman; now the President himself was committed to him, telling the bright and powerful men of the New Deal to watch out for this young congressman from Texas, he was a hot one. And out of that first year came friendships specifically forged at Roosevelt’s direction, which would last Johnson’s entire career, ties to men like Abe Fortas, Ed Weisl, William O. Douglas. He was also given a seat on the Naval Appropriations Committee, a choice assignment on a committee which was the forerunner of the House Armed Services Committee. In those days he was Roosevelt’s man, straight and simple; even in showdown conflicts with Rayburn he chose Roosevelt; it was the height of a new powerful Presidency, and the White House could do more for a young congressman than anyone else.

But Roosevelt’s popularity would soon ebb in certain sectors of the country and Texas was one of the first to feel a new conservatism. A young ambitious politician in Texas would not want to look like a prisoner of the New Deal; in 1941 when Johnson made his first race for the Senate he found that Texas was changing, that the New Deal was less popular there and that he was beaten largely because he bore the onus of the New Deal. Too liberal, too much of a spender. He would not make that mistake again. Slowly he began to change his image, and he began to assert a certain independence from the Administration and to concentrate on armed preparedness as an issue, a decision which offended neither Roosevelt nor Texans. He stayed with the New Deal as long as he could, though he declared his independence from it soon after Roosevelt’s death.

As the coloration of Texas politics changed, so did Johnson. The new oil money was beginning to dominate the old rural agricultural economy, and an ambitious young congressman who coveted a Senate seat had to come to terms with it. The oil money had gone after Sam Rayburn in 1944 and if it had not cost Rayburn his congressional seat, as the oil people intended, it forced him to stay home and campaign during the 1944 convention, thus depriving him of any chance to get on the ticket with Roosevelt. Lyndon Johnson, who did not intend to stay in the House and who planned a statewide race, had to come to terms with the new money in the mid-forties. He did it by developing close ties to George and Herman Brown, old contracting friends who had moved into oil by getting into natural-gas transmission, buying the Little Big Inch pipe line in 1947. The Browns buffered Johnson with the oil people and eased the transition for what Robert Novak and Rowland Evans in their excellent book on Johnson would call “a lateral movement into the center of the new oil power.” He had paid his price. Thus he had become respectable; he had done it to survive, but it was typical of the price the Democratic party in general was paying to stay in power.

At the end of the war and in the immediate postwar years Johnson made himself even more respectable with the Texas business community by becoming an activist for defense spending. He could be vigilant on the subject of defense spending against the Communist expansion, and simultaneously forge growing links to a massive new industry beginning to flex its muscle in American society. He was typical in that era of many in the Democratic party who were more than glad to change the political subject in the postwar years from the domestic reform of the New Deal to defense and foreign policy. In the House and later in the Senate, Johnson became both an advocate of greater defense spending, and at the same time, with that special duality of his (the kind of duality which allowed him to turn the lights off at the White House while sending the Pentagon budget skyrocketing), became known as a tough critic of potential waste in military spending. He became an advocate of greater air power, breaking with the Truman Administration on this issue, accusing the Administration in effect of not making our air wing adequate (in the postwar years the poor Army could never match the Air Force for congressional support. There was always much more political and business interest in a contract for a multibillion-dollar airplane than there was for an Army contract for new webbing on boots).

His dissent with the Truman Administration never hurt his relationship with the President, who knew exactly the game Johnson was playing; he had played it himself. Yet Johnson’s belief in military preparedness and defense spending was a very real part of his outlook, an extension of the way he had felt in 1941 when he helped Roosevelt prepare this country for a war which seemed so distant to many Americans. To be for defense spending in those days seemed to be against isolationism, so in those years he was identified as a great friend of the military. Technically, he was; he helped them get the money they needed, though actually he did not like them or admire many of them. Johnson, who was always so well prepared himself, always better informed than his subordinates, thought they were sloppy in their work, that they left too much to subordinates, and he was uneasy with their parochial view and prejudices, and with their definition of loyalty, which was too limited by his standards. It was to service, not necessarily even to country, and certainly not to Lyndon Johnson. They had to be watched; it was all right when they were temporarily on your side, but they could not really be counted on.

Added to his belief in defense spending and a need for preparedness came a very real belief in the Communist threat. (When he was President and as criticism on the war mounted, he convinced himself that there was a real Communist conspiracy at work in Washington; his feelings about it hardened and became stronger as sentiment against the war—and against him—also mounted during the sixties.) In Texas, as he made this transition, it allowed him to get along with the big boys and show them that that can-do ability didn’t just work for the poor and the underprivileged. But this also meant that as a senator committed to greater defense spending, to larger defense contracts, he was not disposed to challenge the prevalent anti-Communism of the day, nor the theories which required such great defense spending. To challenge them, to study them too intensely, might have meant to find them wanting and thus necessitate a cutback in defense spending. So the instinct for force, for greater military might, had been nurtured in and by Johnson; it was at once both very real and very convenient, which was a powerful combination for any politician, and he was a symbolic part of a particular phenomenon of the fifties and sixties which found the military budget dominating American life and the great advocates for even greater spending, the Democrats, ostensible members of the party which was soft on Communism.

Very subtly, in the late forties, he had made the transition from New Deal congressman to sound and respectable senator who did not frighten the big interests of Texas. A change of emphasis really. In the early fifties he made his way up the Senate ladder, not through connections to the national Administration, but rather through connections to Richard Russell and Senator Robert Kerr of Oklahoma, personification of the Southern big-interest wing, and in the late fifties he would undergo another transition. He had never been totally content to be just a senator. Now, as national ambitions stirred him, he became a man who spanned regions. He was not of the South but of the
West,
he could pilot civil rights legislation through the Congress, he could heal, he could understand the heartache of both sides, and also he had genuine ability. In discussing his own presidential race, Jack Kennedy had said that he had a right to run for it; no one else had more ability except Lyndon, and Lyndon could never make it because he was a Southerner. The prejudice against him never disappeared, and the sense of prejudice, the hurt always remained in Johnson, made him more interesting and, curiously, more sensitive. Even when he was placed on the ticket in 1960 he was put there to help Easterners, first Jack, who would hold office for eight years, and then perhaps Bobby. And he felt the pain of those three years of the Vice-Presidency; President Kennedy had been particularly aware of his sensibilities, but not everyone else was so sensitive (except for Rusk, who shared the same origins, humiliations and enemies). Johnson, who had always known about one thing, power, who held it and who did not, knew that as Vice-President he was a living lie, that his title was bigger than his role, that he did not have power, that younger, faster men with no titles held and exercised more power. And then suddenly, shockingly, he was President, the awkward easy-to-caricature Southerner replacing the beloved handsome slain Eastern President, shot down in Dallas, a hated city in Johnson’s own Texas. That did not ease his own sense of the prejudice against him as he acceded.

So the perfectly prepared and trained and tuned parliamentary leader moved into the most public office in the world, an entirely different office for which all his previous training was in some ways meaningless, indeed the wrong training; he had learned many of the wrong things. The Presidency is a very different power center; it is not a particularly good place from which to perform private manipulation and to do good things for the folks in spite of themselves. It is at its best when a President identifies what he is and what he seeks as openly as possible, and then slowly bends public opinion toward it. If the President is found manipulating or pressuring a lower figure, putting too much pressure on a congressman, it can easily, and rather damagingly, backfire. Harry Truman was a success in the White House partly because he was openly, joyously and unabashedly Harry Truman; he was what he was, he gloried in attacks on his inadequacies, they being in general the inadequacies of most normal mortal men, and he made his limitations his assets; the American people had a sense of identification with him and what he was trying to do. Franklin Roosevelt was a fine back-room manipulator, but he always had a sense of the public part of his office, of it as a pulpit, and he used the rhythms of radio expertly in seeming to bring the public into his confidence. Lyndon Johnson never could. His office was above all public, but he could never communicate with the people, never be himself.