CHAPTER 4

THE SECRETARY

LYNDON DREAMED OF A LIFE IN POLITICS , BUT IN THEmeantime, he had to have a job. He had to support himself, and his siblings as well. In 1930, the year his son officially entered the working world, Sam Ealy was employed by the Railroad Commission. Sam never made more than $150 a month, yet he and Rebekah were determined that each of their children would attend college. “During those years … all of us children got through college by helping each other,” Lyndon recalled. “When I graduated and started teaching, I helped the younger ones. When my sister graduated and began teaching, she helped the younger ones.”¹Sam and Rebekah continued to live in the house on Burleson Street, taking in boarders, while Rebekah and Josefa attended Southwest Texas State Teachers College.²

Other than his mother and father, perhaps the relative Lyndon was closest to was Sam Ealy’s brother, George Desha Johnson, who was chair of the history and government department at Sam Houston High School in Houston. In visits and letters, nephew and uncle had discussed history and politics over the years. In the spring of 1930, Lyndon’s last term in college, George used his considerable influence with Superintendent E. E. Oberholtzer to have Lyndon appointed to a position teaching public speaking and business arithmetic at a salary of $160 a month. Unfortunately, the Great Depression, then beginning its second year, had caused a hiring freeze, and the job in Houston was contingent on a vacancy opening up. None did, so Lyndon persuaded his old friend George Barron, superintendent of schools at Pearsall, to give him a job teaching speech and government at $1,530 a year.³Pearsall, where Carol Davis had taught, was a small town some thirty-five miles north of Cotulla.

Lyndon had not been in Pearsall a month when he got a call from his Uncle George. The position at Sam Houston High had opened up. He promptly marched into George Barron’s office, perched himself on the corner of the superintendent’s desk, and said, “George, I look upon you as an older brother. I feel somehow that you have a kindred feeling toward me. If I didn’t feel that way toward you, I wouldn’t make this request.”⁴He wanted out of his contract in order to take a job in the state’s largest, most exciting city. “I don’t want to leave you,” he told Barron, “but what I am looking for in life will not be found in Pearsall.”⁵The indulgent Barron agreed to release his new teacher on the condition that he find a replacement. Lyndon had already thought of that. His sister Rebekah and a friend took the job, splitting the salary between them.

 

DESPITE THEDEPRESSION,Houston in 1930 was a dynamic city. During the previous decade, the population had nearly doubled to three hundred thousand. The federally funded Houston ship channel, connecting the city to the Gulf of Mexico, had been completed just prior to World War I, ensuring Houston’s future as a major port. The first of the east Texas oil wells, Spindle-top, had come in in 1901. The 1920 census reported oil as the leading industry in the state, responsible for $240 million in products for the preceding year. Houston was at the geographic and economic center of that industry.⁶In addition to oil storage and refining plants and shipbuilding yards, the thriving metropolis boasted oil field equipment manufacturing concerns, cotton warehouses, and numerous financial institutions. The Depression had had an impact. The jobless loitered on city street corners or stood in line waiting for bread and soup, but there was a sense in the city that the downturn was temporary and that the future held great promise.⁷

Lyndon moved in with George Johnson and his extended family in their two-story, white frame house in downtown Houston some ten blocks from the high school. Occupying the house with George, a bachelor, were Jessie Johnson Hatcher, a widow, and her daughter and son-in-law, Ava and John Bright, and their two daughters. Bright coached football and taught math at Sam Houston High. Lyndon shared a room with his Uncle George. The two rode to work together virtually every day of the year that Lyndon lived in Houston.⁸He augmented his income by taking a job teaching speech in night school for the Houston Independent District.

The newest faculty member was delighted to learn that Sam Houston High had a debate team and that it had not fared well in recent competitions. Here was a chance for a twenty-two-year-old novice teacher to make his mark. As the speech instructor, Lyndon was the ex officio debate coach. The goal that he set for himself and his team was nothing less than a state championship in interscholastic league competition. Gene Latimer, one of the team members, recalled his initial experience with “the Chief,” as he came to be called: “Let’s say it is an October day in 1930 at Sam Houston High School as I enter my speech class. A few things become quickly apparent. If I am to continue on the debate team, my outside activities will be confined to after-school practice and visits to the city library in search of arcane references to the jury system, which is the subject selected for this year’s high school debates.”⁹

Lyndon immediately held a series of class competitions to select his team; the male winners were Gene Latimer and Luther Jones, the females Margaret Epley and Evelyn Lee. From December to April, when the ISL competitions were held, Coach Johnson arranged for more than fifty practice debates, beginning with archrival San Jacinto High, and extending to schools throughout east and central Texas.¹⁰“I never will forget—the principal of the school was W. J. Moyes, and I can recall two or three discussions where I was present and heard rather vigorous arguments by Mr. Johnson,” Luther Jones recalled. “He’d be asking for money, for example, to take the debaters on trips, and he would be informed that it had never been done. Mr. Johnson would say, ‘Yes, but you’ve never had a teacher like me.’”¹¹Lyndon recruited other teachers to judge practice sessions. When they would whisper criticisms to him, he would yell at the offending speaker, cutting him or her off. He would roam the room, sit, watch, wait, criticize, his arms flailing, and walk again. “If they would take one side of the question, I would take the other, and I would just try to run them underground, just almost stomp them,” he later said. “But always make it clear that I loved them, so they never ran completely off. But I’d humiliate them and embarrass them, and I would make fun of them and everything until they got to where they could take care of themselves, which they did.”¹²He also kidded his team, encouraged them, and made them feel valued. He had his students stand up in front of class and act silly, making animal noises, for example, until they felt comfortable. He once challenged his class to debate the virtues of string or the proposition “Spit is a horrid word.” When no one accepted, he delivered a fifteen-minute oration on string.¹³

During competitions, the Chief would sit in the back of the auditorium making eye contact with his debaters. Gene Latimer reconstructed the scene: “Once in a while he opens his mouth in amazement at how clearly I am making a point. He sits up straight and looks around in wonderment at the audience to make sure they’re not missing this. And it is then that he makes me think I … am in the process of improving on the Sermon on the Mount.”¹⁴Reflecting his mother’s passion for poetry, Lyndon displayed a penchant for romantic, sentimental language. “Bob Ingersoll was a great speaker of 75 years ago,” Luther Jones said. “One of these was a speech at his brother’s grave. Lyndon used to read that because it’s filled with beautiful language.”¹⁵On April 1, the Sam Houston debaters defeated Milby High for the right to represent Houston in the county competition. The debates took place before a packed house. “I used to have pep rallies before debating contests,” Lyndon said. “I’d have people get up and sing songs, and I’d have people hurrah for Jones and Latimer, just like you would at a football game. And we had them running out of seats at the final debate and you couldn’t get in. Every place was taken in the balcony, every one on the floor, and they were sitting in the windows to hear the debate.”¹⁶The Sam Houston debaters went on to win the district and to earn a place in the state finals in Austin. The girls were defeated in the first round; Latimer and Jones lost in the finals by a vote of three to two. After congratulating the winners, Lyndon went into the bathroom and threw up.¹⁷By the time the Chief was done, “we were more important than the football team,” Latimer recalled.¹⁸

 

LYNDON LATER REMEMBERED1930-31 as one of the best years of his life. One of the reasons was Uncle George Johnson. A tall, balding, gracious man, he seemed to have none of the demons that tormented Sam Ealy. Childless, he lavished his attention on his nieces and nephews, but particularly Lyndon, probably because of his interest in politics and history. George was a “yellow dog” Democrat (meaning that he would have voted for “an old yellow dog” if it were running on the ticket), whose principal historical interest was the age of Andrew Jackson. He talked often to his young protégé of the life and times of Old Hickory.¹⁹The president who had been Sam Houston’s friend made no secret of his attachment to the great republican principles of Thomas Jefferson, which assumed continual conflict between liberty and power and between virtue and corruption. Public virtue, which required a willingness to subordinate private interests to the common good, was essential to preserving the precarious balance between liberty and power, Jackson (and Uncle George) believed. The best means of combating corruption in a society undergoing rapid and profound change, Jackson argued, was to hold fast to majority rule, limited federal power, and government protection of the interests of ordinary citizens. Jackson’s ability to blend his idealism with practical politics captured Uncle George’s and Lyndon’s imagination. “The first president I really loved was Jackson,” Lyndon later told an interviewer.²⁰

Both SWT President Cecil Evans and George Johnson were passionate about politics and no doubt fantasized about running for office, but they would not leave the security of academia. Instead, they projected their dreams onto Lyndon. “I was never disinterested in politics,” he later recalled. “But I did think about teaching. Dr. Evans … and my Uncle George both had the same idea, that teaching was a wonderful profession and gave a man a satisfaction that he could never get out of just making money, but it did have one drawback … The teacher was a law unto himself in the classroom, and it wasn’t the competitive operation that either the law or politics would bring out. They bring out more of what is in you than teaching.”²¹“I never heard him [George] tell Lyndon to get into politics,” one of George’s colleagues said, “but I did hear him say that ‘if I were a young man like you, I’d run for Congress.’”²²

Lyndon’s opportunity came when Congressman Harry M. Wurzbach, the lone Republican representing Texas in the House of Representatives, died suddenly on November 6, 1931. The governor called a special election to be held twelve days thence to fill the vacancy. The Fourteenth District that Wurzbach represented stretched north from Corpus Christi on the coast to San Antonio and from there northwestward into the Hill Country. The cattle and oil interests that dominated the district were determined to control the seat. To this end, Roy Miller, chief lobbyist for Texas Gulf Sulphur, persuaded Richard Kleberg to become one of eight candidates for the position. Kleberg was heir to the famous King Ranch that stretched more than one hundred miles from Corpus south to Brownsville.²³

The upper part of the congressional district included Sam Ealy’s old legislative district, so it was natural for Miller to enlist his aid in the campaign. There was another connection with the Johnsons as well. Kleberg’s father had been president of the Texas Cattle Raisers Association when Sam’s friend, Dayton Moses, had served as its chief counsel. Finally, Kleberg remembered that as a young law student in Austin, he had been in the galleries when Sam had made his famous speech defending the liberties of German Americans. Sam readily agreed to help and even managed to draft Lyndon for a few days’ service.²⁴

Kleberg won by several thousand votes over his nearest opponent and, inexperienced as he was, began searching immediately for an administrative assistant (then called simply “secretary”). He offered the job to Felix McKnight, a Houston journalist, who accepted, but he had not reckoned on Sam Johnson. Secretary to the newly elected congressman would be the perfect entrée into politics for Lyndon, Sam Ealy decided. He immediately enlisted the aid of Welly Hopkins and Dayton Moses. Both called Roy Miller, who was impressed with descriptions of Lyndon’s energy and political instincts and with the notion of gaining a political foothold in the area between San Marcos and Fredericksburg for Kleberg’s run at a regular term in 1932. “Lyndon knows almost every man, woman and child in Blanco County,” Hopkins told him, “and has a wide acquaintance in Comal, Kendall and Guadalupe counties.”²⁵Helen Weinberg, a history teacher, was in the office when Lyndon was summoned to take a long distance call: “He was so excited he didn’t know what to say,” she remembered. “When he hung up, he turned to me and said with great excitement, ‘Mr. Kleberg wants me to be his private secretary. I’ll have to go up and tell Uncle George.’”²⁶George was as excited as his nephew, of course. Lyndon called Kleberg back and arranged a meeting for the 29th. Driving to Gonzales the day before, he rendevouzed with his mother and father at Welly Hopkins’s house. The next day, the four drove to Corpus, where Lyndon met first with Miller and then with Kleberg. Hopkins remembered that the young high school teacher made a very favorable impression as a likeable, hard-working individual who would be devoted to his boss’s interests. He got the job, and Miller arranged for McKnight to return to his paper.²⁷

Lyndon persuaded the administration to grant him a leave of absence from his teaching job at Sam Houston. Willard Deason recalled that he wanted to make a good impression when he arrived in Washington, but “like the rest of us … he never had a dollar ahead on anything.” So he borrowed his Uncle George’s overcoat and Deason’s new leather suitcase.²⁸The train carrying Lyndon and his new boss was scheduled to leave Houston at four in the afternoon on December 2. “All that day I’d gone about feeling excited, nervous, and sad,” he later recalled. “I was about to leave home to meet the adventure of my future. I felt grown-up, but my mind kept ranging backward in time. I saw myself as a boy skipping down the road to my granddaddy’s house. I remembered the many nights I had stood in the doorway listening to my father’s political talks. I remembered the evenings with my mother when my daddy was away. Now all that was behind me. On the platform more than two dozen people, relatives and friends, waited about to say goodbye. I tried to say something important to my mother, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. When the train came, I felt relieved. I kissed my parents and climbed aboard.”²⁹His recollection seems maudlin, even contrived, but it was not. “He was inclined to be emotional,” Luther Jones recalled. “He was fiercely loyal to those he loved. He loved people and they loved him.”³⁰

The appointment as Kleberg’s secretary introduced Lyndon not only to the nation’s capital, but also to the congressman’s opulent lifestyle. Kleberg and his assistant rode first-class aboard the sleek Bluebonnet Express that provided a direct connection between Houston and Washington. Once there, the two shared a red-carpeted room at the Mayflower Hotel—“Washington’s finest,” Lyndon wrote a former student—shared early morning coffee brought by room service, and took daily cab rides to and from the House Office Building.³¹The new secretary went with his boss to pay his respects to Congressman John Nance Garner from Uvalde, Texas, who, it was rumored, would be the next speaker of the House. Lyndon remembered the future vice president as a close-mouthed man with “cold blue eyes.”³²His second evening in Washington, Lyndon and Kleberg had dinner with Senator Morris Sheppard at the Occidental, which Lyndon subsequently described in a letter to Luther Jones as “an exclusive Washington eating place where they advertise: ‘Where Statesmen Dine.’”³³“You just had to look around, and it was very exciting to me to realize that the people, many of them that you were passing, were probably congressmen at least, maybe senators, members of the cabinet,” he later recalled his first impressions. “And there was the smell of power. It’s got an odor, you know, power, I mean.”³⁴

 

THERE WAS NO WAY, of course, that Lyndon could match Richard Kleberg’s lifestyle. Although he made $3,900 a year, a princely sum in the Depression era, his family obligations and his decision to supplement the salaries of a staff to help him run Kleberg’s office meant that he would have to live as frugally as possible. Besides, he had a lot to learn and he wanted to get as close to his peers—other congressional secretaries—as possible.

Kleberg’s election had helped tip the scales in favor of a Democratic majority in the House. John Nance Garner was indeed elected speaker. As a Texan, Lyndon was able to take a seat in the speaker’s box at the front of the chamber to witness Garner’s swearing in. There he met another young secretary, Robert Jackson. No sooner had he settled in for the ceremony, Jackson later recalled, then he was aware of this “tall, countrified boy, talking loud, embarrassing me,” squeezing into the box. There was a tapping on his shoulder. It was Lyndon, who extended his hand and introduced himself. Abashed, Jackson rose and responded in kind. After some initial patter, Lyndon asked his fellow Texan where he lived. The Dodge Hotel, he replied, which was also home to some twenty other congressional aides. “I’ll move there,” Lyndon said.³⁵

The Dodge was a relatively elegant establishment that had traditionally catered to upper-class women. The dining room, complete with maître d’and white-jacketed stewards, was one of the best in Washington. To cope with the cash shortfall brought about by the Depression, the Dodge began renting rooms on its two basement-level floors to congressional staffers. The B floor, the first floor down, featured large, well-furnished rooms with semiprivate baths. Lyn-don would later occupy one of these, but to save money he moved into one of the twelve cubicles on the men’s side of the A floor where Robert Jackson resided. Each enclosure included two cots, a wash basin, and a table and chair. The twenty or so occupants shared a common shower and toilet facility at the end of the hall. Rent was $20 a month. A duplicate row of cubicles occupied by women employees of Congress composed the other half of the floor. There was, of course, no entryway connecting the two. Occupants came and went by separate outside doorways. The facilities were clean and well-lighted, but the steam pipes hammered loudly and relentlessly in the winter. Lyndon and his fellow secretaries could afford to eat in the hotel dining room only once a month, and then they purchased the cheapest course available for a dollar. When the young staffers were not taking advantage of the House cafeteria, they ate at the lunch counter at the neighboring Continental Hotel, the All States Cafeteria on Massachusetts where a meal could be purchased for fifty cents, or at Child’s Restaurant across from Union Station.³⁶

Although Lyndon was Richard Kleberg’s chief lieutenant, he knew absolutely nothing about a secretary’s duties or how Congress worked behind the scenes. His move to the Dodge was designed not only to save money but also to alleviate his ignorance. By his own account, he took four separate showers his first night there and brushed his teeth five different times the next morning in order to meet as many people as possible. At Child’s he would rush to the head of the line, buy his food, and wolf it down as quickly as he could to be able to question the other staffers while they ate. He organized bull sessions at the Dodge that went long into the night. Living in the basement of that hotel, recalled Arthur Perry, another congressional staffer, “was like living in a permanent debating society, with Lyndon as the focal point.”³⁷Lyndon had to learn quickly because he was thrust into a situation in which he had to be follower and leader, the captain of a team of which he was one of two members.

Richard Kleberg had little or no interest in being a congressman. He had run to represent his class and his vested interests in the national legislature and for the prestige of living large in the nation’s capital. Kleberg was a handsome, athletic man who stood five feet, seven inches and weighed 157 pounds. He loved to ride horses—polo ponies, not quarter horses—and to play golf, which he did as frequently as possible at Burning Tree Country Club in nearby Maryland. Fluent in Spanish, he took frequent trips to Mexico to hobnob with wealthy friends there. In Washington he lived with his wife, Mamie, in a suite at the elegant Shoreham Hotel on Rock Creek Park. He quickly made it clear that he was going to leave all the work to Lyndon. Kleberg’s routine brought him into the office in the late morning, when he would check with Lyndon to see if there were any important visitors with whom he had to spend a few minutes. He would make the noon roll call vote in the House and then depart for Burning Tree and an afternoon of golf. What else could be expected of a man who lived on a ranch that was larger than the state of Rhode Island and whose cattle and oil operations brought in millions each year.³⁸

Initially it was only Kleberg, Lyndon, and a House stenographer who occupied Room 258, a single office facing the inner courtyard of the old House Office Building (now the Cannon Building). In January, Lyndon hired Estelle Harbin, a young woman from Corpus Christi who had been recommended by Roy Miller.³⁹Kleberg’s district included some five hundred thousand souls, making it almost twice as populous as the next largest Texas district. The mail arrived three times a day; soon the office was full to overflowing with letters from veterans asking the congressman’s help in obtaining early payment on bonuses promised at the close of the Great War, from cotton and vegetable farmers asking for legislation guaranteeing crop prices or for help in refinancing their farm mortgages, from small businessmen and bankers asking for low-interest loans. Neither Lyndon nor Estelle had any idea initially in which order to answer the letters or how to meet the needs of the correspondents. They quickly learned. Lyndon continued to hound his contemporaries for information and even had the temerity to approach congressmen themselves. “He’d come across [the hall] and talk to me and want to know just how everything was done,” Marvin Jones, a Texas congressman who was also chair of the House Agriculture Committee, remembered. “He wanted to find out how that big piece of machine operated. And he’d talk to all the other chairmen … And he learned more in six months than the average [novice] learned in twice that length of time.”⁴⁰

The twenty-three-year-old Lyndon was a young man of immense, almost frantic energy, but even working seven days a week, he and Estelle found it difficult to keep up. “I don’t know when I’ve been so tired as I am tonight,” he wrote his mother. “To start to tell you how I’ve worked since I came here would require more time and effort than I feel like expending. I get up at 6 o’clock and go to the office by 7:30, take off 30 minutes sometime during the day for lunch and leave the office about six or seven depending on the correspondence. I run the office force. Mr. Kleberg doesn’t spend an hour a day there and then only signing letters. Frequently I go back at night to finish so I won’t get behind … Am afraid I can’t come home Xmas. You don’t know how I want to.”⁴¹

Lyndon decided to answer personally every letter that came into the office. He would dictate and Estelle would type. More important, he decided to get results for the district’s constituents. Quickly he learned who to call in the Department of Agriculture or Veterans Administration. If the bureaucrat were a woman, particularly an elderly woman, he would sweet-talk; the men he would alternately cajole and threaten. Because “Mr. Dick,” as he called Kleberg, was rarely in the office, Lyndon sometimes posed as the congressman himself. “He was as persuasive on the telephone as he was in person,” Estelle Harbin said. Typically, he refused to take no for an answer, and the office soon acquired a reputation for efficiency and effectiveness throughout the district.

The routine took its toll. Though constantly busy and among people, Lyndon grew lonely and discontented that first winter. He seemed to survive on his mother’s twice-a-week letters. One of his roommates remembered that one morning while reading the latest missive from Rebekah, the Texan started weeping and said, “I love my Mother so much.”⁴²“Haven’t been out of the office all day,” he wrote Luther Jones. “Didn’t get up until late this morning so I was forced to rush to work and have been at it until only a few minutes [ago]. I never get time to do anything but try to push the mail out to the people back home. Received over 100 telegrams today … You are a real boy. I love you and Gene [Latimer] as if you were my own. I know you are going places and I’m going to help you get there.”⁴³

As it turned out, Lyndon’s promise to help his protégés get ahead was more than just hyperbole. Typically, however, he tended to view their welfare in terms of his own. He persuaded first Latimer and then Jones to come to Washington and go to work in Kleberg’s office. Latimer, a short, good-natured Irish kid, full of life and energy, came first, in December 1932. His fiancée had moved to Washington, and he was looking for something exciting to do in the capital. After two years of college at Rice University in Houston, Jones, the more serious and studious of the two, decided he needed a job and took Lyndon’s offer in August 1933. The most immediate problem the secretary faced was how to pay his two new employees. A congressman was allotted $5,000 a year to pay for of-fice expenses. As $3,900 of that went for Lyndon’s salary, only $1,100 was left for all the rest. He succeeded in getting Gene a $130-a-month patronage job in the House post office. Because he could get most of his deliveries in before noon, Latimer was free to type for Lyndon in the afternoons and evenings. Jones was more of a problem. Finally, Lyndon decided to reduce his own salary to pay Jones the $1,200 a year he asked for. He moved them into his basement cubicle in the Dodge, where they paid $15 a month each.

By the fall of 1934, Lyndon had moved upstairs to the B level, with its relatively spacious rooms and semiprivate baths.⁴⁴With his new staff in place, he felt he had time to take on an extra job, as assistant doorkeeper on the Democratic side. Tending the door and carrying messages from staff and constituents into the chamber, he quickly got to know most of the members. He was able to listen to debates and familiarize himself with the arcane parliamentary procedures that were so crucial to the flow of legislation. More important, perhaps, he was witness to the whispered conversations and cloakroom deals that revealed the formal and informal power structure in the House. The experience brought home to the young man from the Hill Country that the exercise of power in Washington involved not only what state you represented, what committee assignment you were able to secure, but how strong your personality was, how much you drank, whom you slept with. “He’d say, ‘But how did he do it?’” Russ Brown, a friend, remembered his asking in regard to some legislative coup. “ ‘Did he know somebody? Is he a nice guy? What’s his secret of getting ahead … Well, I tell you one thing, it isn’t any accident … I don’t believe in luck.’”⁴⁵

“At first, Lyndon Johnson was a hard man to work for,” Jones said in a mastery of understatement. He drove himself and his staff relentlessly.⁴⁶Robert Jackson remembered being struck by Johnson’s “absolutely incredibly restless energy.” If he and his staff took time to go to a movie, which was rare, Lyndon would nearly always get up before the end to return to the office or to his room to read mail or the Congressional Record.⁴⁷Estelle Harbin recalled occasionally persuading him to take a walk around the Capitol grounds on a sunny day. By the time they finished, she was running to keep up as he loped to get back to the office.⁴⁸

It was nothing for Latimer and Jones to work seven days a week, twelve or more hours a day. On the way to the office Lyndon would “issue enough instructions to put ten people to work for a month.”⁴⁹Coffee and cigarette breaks were forbidden, and if he could, Lyndon would make his staff eat their lunch at their desk. He was a perfectionist. Latimer remembers having to retype literally hundreds of letters when he first came. The secretary sometimes compared members of his staff unfavorably with one another to instill competition. He could be abusive toward Jones, who was the more aloof and self-contained of the two. He would ridicule his work, tongue-lashing him in front of the rest of the staff. It was with Jones that Lyndon began the repulsive habit of giving instructions or dictating while defecating in the bathroom. And he could be incredibly intrusive. Johnson found out that Latimer had run up bills with the local cleaner, tailor, and other merchants. He summoned the young man and demanded all of the cash he had on him. Stunned, Latimer gave it to him. Lyndon handed back a dollar and said, “Now I’m going to pay your rent over there at the Hotel, and I’m going to give you a dollar a day to eat on … When your checks come in, you’re going to endorse them over to me and I’m going to pay your bills. I’m going to give you twenty-four hours to get me a list of all your bills.” Gene, who enjoyed his drinks, replied tearfully, “You mean I’m not going to get any money for whiskey?” Not one nickel until the bills were paid, his boss replied.⁵⁰

His staff sometimes thought about quitting, but they never followed through. Lyndon did not ask anything of them that he did not ask of himself. He was incredibly loyal to his boss and obviously dedicated to the interests of Kleberg’s constituents. And he was loyal to his staff. When Latimer got married in 1935, Lyndon arranged for a $100 bonus from Kleberg, secured the use of an automobile, and arranged a $2,600-a-year job at the Federal Housing Administration. When Jones and Latimer began attending law school, Johnson gave both a raise and saw that they got two to three hours a day off from work to study. He wrote the two young men’s parents frequently to report on their progress.⁵¹There would be innumerable tales in the future of Lyndon learning of an illness or misfortune suffered by an employee or an employee’s close relative and his paying off debts or hospital bills. Both Jones and Latimer recall that when all was said and done, they liked, even loved Lyndon Johnson. “A reasonable statement is that Lyndon Johnson is hard and he is tough,” Latimer said, “but far from being ruthless to his employees, their welfare was very important to him.”⁵²

 

AT AGE TWENTY-THREELyndon Johnson was a tall—six feet, two or three inches—slender young man with a broad forehead, fair skin, and dark, wavy hair. He was always neatly dressed in suit and tie, as expensive as his limited funds allowed. He smoked Camels and ate sporadically, consuming strange combinations of food, chile and steak, for example, in large amounts. He drank socially, almost as an afterthought. And he read voraciously: all the Washington newspapers plus theNew York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time Life , and of course, theCongressional Record. But not books. He had no time for information that was not absolutely, immediately useful. There was a social life of sorts. Russell Brown, who would later work for Lyndon, remembered galas put on by the Texas Society, frequently at the Dodge. Lyndon would come and dance the night away, but not with the young, pretty, single girls—with the wives of congressmen and senators. There was sex, but in these early frantic months, it was hurried, almost a biological response. “When I think of Child’s [restaurant],” Latimer recalled, “I think of a little discussed side of the Chief, and that is that prior to his marriage … he had an eye for girls with pretty faces and figures and did not regard too much what was behind those faces. One of the beauteous young ladies at Child’s succumbed almost instantly, at least after two or three nights, and I was not to see the Chief until the early hours of the morning.”⁵³

Within six months, Lyndon had established his dominance over Richard Kleberg, personally as well as politically. He was always deferential to Mr. Dick and mindful of his interests, but one did not come into Lyndon’s sphere with any sort of vulnerability without being subsumed. And Kleberg had vulnerabilities. He was not a person of ambition, but of tastes and appetites. He was a student of classical Spanish, a connoisseur of horses and fine whiskey, an avid sportsman. He sent his four children to private schools and lived with his wife, “Miss Mamie,” in the city’s most expensive hotel. Though rich, Kleberg was constantly cash-strapped because most of his wealth was tied up in land, cattle, and oil rigs. “He got five thousand dollars a year as chairman of the King Ranch corporation and ten thousand dollars a year as congressman,” recalled Sam Houston, who would replace Lyndon as Kleberg’s secretary. His mother was secretary-treasurer of the corporation and would provide funds when approached, but Kleberg frequently did not want to ask or simply forgot. As a result, creditors were constantly knocking at his door, or rather, the door of House office 258. As with Gene Latimer, Lyndon took over. He would sit down periodically with his boss, go over the bills, and tell Kleberg how much money he needed. Eventually, the congressman gave his secretary the authority to sign his personal checks.⁵⁴

When Miss Mamie initially attempted to make personal use of Lyndon and the staff, she was rebuffed. One time she called and asked Johnson to pick up her daughter, Mary Etta, at the train station; he replied simply, “Mrs. Kleberg … we don’t have any chauffeurs here.”⁵⁵She was at first offended, but Mamie Kleberg, like her husband, soon came to place her trust in the young man from Johnson City. Hailing from Brenham, Mamie Searcy had attended the University of Texas, where she had been a beauty queen. “She was quite a handsome-looking woman,” Russ Brown recalled, “and she had real grace and charm.”⁵⁶In 1932, Mr. Dick had an affair with another woman. Mamie got wind of it and fled in tears to Corpus Christi. Lyndon intervened to try to patch things up, and from the beginning she treated him as a confidant. “It tore my heart out … to leave him,” she wrote, “but I knew I would never get myself straightened out up there … I am so thankful that you are with him.”⁵⁷Kleberg attempted a reconciliation but to no avail. Upset and exhausted, the congressman followed his wife to Corpus, but she would not see him.

Lyndon arrived on the scene and informed Mamie that he was going to camp out on her front porch until she relented. Eventually she did, and the couple was reunited. “Mr. Kleberg was on the edge of a nervous breakdown,” she subsequently wrote Lyndon. “He is so appreciative of all you have done and could not love you more if you were his own son, and I feel just like he does, Lyndon. If you had not been in Corpus the night I went all to pieces, I know I would have done something desperate … Love from us both—your other Mother.”⁵⁸Mamie suspected that the other woman was Estelle Harbin. She was not, but Lyndon and Mr. Dick decided that it would be better if Estelle left. Lyndon got her a job with the Texas Railroad Commission. According to Sam Houston, the ever suspicious Mamie intermittently rifled through her husband’s and even Lyndon’s mail. Sometime in 1934 or 1935 she came across a letter from Estelle to Johnson: “Lyndon, you don’t know how much I appreciate you getting me out of that mess.” Mamie interpreted this to mean that Estelle had been her husband’s lover and that Lyndon had been an accomplice. She never forgave him.⁵⁹

 

MAMIE ANDRICHARDKLEBERGwere not the only Americans on the verge of a nervous breakdown in 1932; hundreds of thousands of others were suffering. The country was entering the depths of its unprecedented Depression. The Republican presidential candidate in 1928 was Herbert Hoover, a wealthy mining engineer with a distinguished record of public service, who easily defeated Alfred E. Smith. Hoover was the high priest of free regulated capitalism. It was to society’s benefit for the rich to get richer, he argued, because the wealth would “trickle down” to even those occupying the lowest rungs on the socioeconomic ladder. His philosophy rested on two principles: individual self-help and voluntary cooperation. Enlightened self-interest would presumably motivate businessmen to pursue self-regulation to achieve economic stability and prosperity. Described by his public relations team in 1928 as the great engineer, an efficiency expert, able administrator, humanitarian, and even “miracle man,” Hoover appeared to be precisely the individual needed to perpetuate the prosperity of the 1920s. He proclaimed the arrival of a new day in his inaugural address and predicted that the free enterprise system would end poverty in America in his lifetime.

Less than six months after his inauguration, in the fall of 1929, the Hooverian vision collapsed with a resounding stock market crash that heralded the onset of the Great Depression. By midsummer 1932, the gross national product had declined by more than 50 percent. Unemployment grew from 4 million in October 1930 to between 12 and 14 million during the first months of 1933. National income declined from $87 million in 1929 to $40 million in 1933. Adjusted for the cost of living, per capita income declined from $681 to $495 per year. Some two hundred thousand residents of Chicago converged on the Loop in a hunger march, chanting “We want bread.” Everywhere, unemployed men by the thousands simply stood on street corners waiting futilely for something to happen. In rural areas, farmers suffered from the twin tragedies of drought and depression. During the early part of the 1930s rain simply disappeared from certain parts of the country. Huge dust storms rolled across the plains, darkening the sky and depositing silt over a vast area of the United States. In the Midwest, Milo Reno’s National Farm Holiday Association set up armed roadblocks in an effort to call attention to the farmer’s plight by stopping the flow of milk and food to the nation’s urban dwellers. Young men and women stopped going to college, and families disintegrated. In many cases, rural dwellers were forced to resort to barter to survive.

By experience, temperament, and philosophy, Herbert Hoover was unprepared to deal with the Depression. He was no laissez-faire economist of the classical school. He approved of friendly regulation of businesses clothed with public interest, and he championed order and efficiency in finance and industry rather than destructive competition. At the same time, he believed that under almost no circumstance should the government provide jobs to citizens to combat unemployment. And he was convinced that relief activities were a duty of private charities and local governments rather than the federal authority. Eventually, under intense pressure from Congress and the states, Hoover would initiate a federal public works program and would secure from Congress the legislation necessary to create the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (1932) to extend federal credit to banks, insurance companies, and various industries, but all major economic indices continued to decline.

Dick Kleberg did not care for the president any more than the common man did, but it was because he considered him too liberal, not too conservative. Like his friend and patron, Roy Miller, Kleberg “was a democrat in name only,” Russ Brown said. “He was a wealthy man, and he associated with wealthy people and he had no feeling for the needs of the economically underprivileged in the community. This was not part of his background and he hadn’t trained himself to think about it or to worry about it at all.”⁶⁰Kleberg and Miller, who flew back and forth from Washington to Corpus Christi in Kleberg’s private plane, were in fact reactionaries who embraced the notion of the divine right of wealth. Well-dressed, well-groomed, and well-fed, they were as insensitive as rocks. Miller treated Kleberg’s office as his own, occupying the congressman’s desk during his frequent absences and conducting Gulf Sulphur’s business. They believed that workers had no right to organize and were in fact economic units whose labor was to be bought or sold at whatever rate the market dictated. The only action they wanted from the government was help to maintain the prices of cattle, oil, and cotton. Indeed, Kleberg and his sponsors were about as far removed as could be in temperament, philosophy, and experience from the Hill Country Johnsons.

“His [Lyndon’s] thinking, if you could call it that, was Populist,” Robert Jackson recalled.⁶¹His father’s life, in practice, and his mother’s life, in theory, had been built on the notion of helping other people. During Lyndon’s months in Washington, virtually all of his waking hours had been devoted to taking care of the needs of others. “When I first went to work for Mr. Kleberg,” Luther Jones recalled, “a large part of the work of the office consisted of helping veterans of World War I get their claims for service compensation to show that any ailment they then had was connected with some injury they sustained in the war. Lyndon spent an enormous amount of time on this … His service [provided relief for] hundreds of them.”⁶²

Lyndon was also exposed to legislators who were very different from Kleberg. He left standing orders with the doorman of the House to call him whenever the newly elected senator from Louisiana, Huey Long, was making a speech. Dressed in iridescent suits that ran from maroon to lime green and two-toned shoes, the short, wavy-haired demagogue quickly earned a reputation as the new champion of the common man. Both quoting the Bible and spouting racist anecdotes, Long attacked monopoly capitalism and proposed a massive redistribution of wealth through confiscatory taxation. Campaigning for Hattie Carraway, who was running for governor of Arkansas, he told the citizens of that state that 540 men on Wall Street made more money each year than all the farmers in the country and that he wasn’t going to allow the situation to continue. Criticized back in the Senate by Democratic Majority Leader Joe T. Robinson for interfering in the politics of his native Arkansas, Long counterattacked in an incident Lyndon would never forget. “He had this chocolate silk suit on,” he later recalled, “and his brighttoned brown-and-white shoes, and he was just marching back and forth.” He marched over to Robinson, a very conservative and very portly man, and put his hand on the majority leader’s shoulder. Almost affectionately, Long told the galleries, “I wasn’t in Arkansas to dictate to any human being. All I went to Arkansas for was to pull these big, potbellied politicians off this poor little woman’s neck.”⁶³

In 1935, while making a bid for the Democratic nomination for president, Long would promulgate his “Share Our Wealth” program. It promised every American family a homestead worth $5,000 and an annual income of $2,500 to be paid for by expropriating the holdings of the nation’s wealthiest citizens. “He hated poverty with all his soul and he spoke against it until his voice was hoarse,” Lyndon later told an interviewer. “For leading the masses and illustrating your point humanly, Huey Long couldn’t be beat.”⁶⁴To the young secretary from the Hill Country, Hoover was the opposite: a donothing president, the tool of Wall Street who thought that “constitutional government gave every man, woman, and child the right to starve.”⁶⁵“Giving a man a chance to work and feed his family and provide for his children does not destroy his initiative,” Lyndon would later say. “Hunger destroys initiative. Hopelessness destroys initiative. Ignorance destroys initiative. A cold and an indifferent government destroys initiative.”⁶⁶The task facing Lyndon Johnson, one that had confronted him in Cotulla and that would reappear throughout his career, was how to finesse the conservatives. His double-pronged strategy was to cultivate them personally and then, if necessary, invoke the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian ideology of representative democracy to justify government activism in behalf of the under-privileged.

In May and June 1932, twelve to fourteen thousand unemployed and destitute veterans descended on Washington to lobby for passage of a $2.4 billion soldiers’ bonus bill. Congress had passed such a measure immediately following the Great War, but it was in the form of a paid-up insurance policy that would come due in 1945. The veterans wanted their money now, when they needed it. After marching down Pennsylvania Avenue, the tattered Bonus Expeditionary Force, as the media dubbed the group, built a shantytown on Anacostia Flats on the edge of the capital. Hoover denounced the bonus bill as an unnecessary raid on the treasury that would unbalance the budget. With the gaunt veterans, who had risked their lives for their country and who represented the ultimate injustice of the Depression, vowing to sit it out all summer if necessary, the House took up the measure.

When Lyndon learned that his boss intended to vote against the bonus bill, he rebelled. Confronting Kleberg, he pounded on his desk, shouting, “Mr. Kleberg, Mr. Kleberg, you can’t do this!” Congressmen and senators were elected to represent their constituents, Lyndon said, and mail from the district was running fifteen to twenty to one in favor. He knew what was best for his people, Mr. Dick replied, and an unbalanced budget was not in their interest. Maybe not, but there were a huge number of veterans in the Fourteenth District, and if Kleberg voted no he would not be representing their or anybody’s interests after the fall elections.⁶⁷Lyndon’s boss voted for the bonus; it passed the House only to fail in the Senate.

When some six thousand veterans still refused to go home, Hoover called on the military, which dispatched a contingent of troops under the command of a young brigadier general named Douglas MacArthur. Declaring that the very “institutions of our Government” were being threatened, he led a small army equipped with tanks and machine guns, clearing the veterans from Anacostia and burning down their shantytown. Lyndon was appalled. He would never forget seeing “the Bonus Army being driven down Pennsylvania Avenue by quirts like sheep by a man on a white horse.”⁶⁸

 

AS A NUMBERof his contemporaries have observed, Lyndon Johnson tended to absorb people, particularly people who were weaker willed than he and who were useful to his larger ends. Thus it was with Richard Kleberg. Lyndon placed his desk strategically in the office so that anyone wanting to see the congressman had to go through him. He prepared memoranda for his boss on the major issues of the day, cultivated other congressmen and their staffs on his behalf, and saw that he got full credit with the people of the Fourteenth District for everything positive that the office did. The individual services—veterans’ benefits, green cards, Reconstruction Finance Corporation loans, agricultural aid—ran into the thousands. Once a full staff was in place, Lyndon decided that every boy and girl in the district graduating from high school should get a letter of congratulation from the congressman. “When he was Kleberg’s secretary,” recalled Sam Fore, a Floresville newspaper editor and mentor of Lyndon’s, “he made a number of trips back to our county—Wilson County—and he’d have those farmers and ranchers meet him at the courthouse and give him their troubles. He’d take them in his car even to Houston to try to save their farms through the Federal Land Bank … I think he stayed about two or three weeks one time just on jobs like that, doing things for people in distress.”⁶⁹As Robert Montgomery, a young UT economist who had gone to work for the Department of Agriculture, said, being secretary to Congressman Kleberg was excellent training for Lyndon because he could be Congressman Kleberg, or rather Congressman Johnson using Kleberg’s name.⁷⁰

It never crossed Lyndon’s mind to run against Kleberg. Loyalty, Russ Brown recalled his friend saying, was the most important of all human virtues. “If a fellow is brilliant and energetic and smart and he’s not loyal, then I don’t know who he’s being brilliant and energetic and smart for,” he said, “and I haven’t got room for him around me.”⁷¹Lyndon and his boss returned to Texas and stumped the Fourteenth District as if there were no tomorrow. Kleberg’s secretary and campaign manager linked up with Fore, the 275-pound Seguin newspaper editor and Democratic activist who had contacts throughout the district. Typically, Lyndon covered more territory and saw more people in a shorter time than any advance man in the district’s memory. He “wasn’t one of those who walked into the office and sat down and wasted a lot of time,” a Seguin attorney remembered. “He covered not only the area around the office but all of Seguin in a whirlwind fashion and yet he saw everybody and talked to everybody.”⁷²Kleberg won the nomination, capturing ten of eleven counties in the Four-teenth District and winning the general election easily.⁷³

While campaigning for Kleberg, Lyndon followed the contest for the Democratic nomination for president with rapt attention. Even as a congressional secretary, he acquired a reputation for political prescience. That reputation was based in part on instinct and in part on a never-ending search for political information. “Lyndon dropped by my office almost every day,” Texas Congressman Wright Patman remembered. “He wanted to talk politics—who was doing what and what the probable outcome would be.”⁷⁴He did the same thing with Sam Rayburn from Bonham, Martin Dies of Lufkin, and even John Nance Garner. He read all of the political pundits, including Raymond Clapper, whom he liked, and Walter Lippmann, whom he did not (smart but too theoretical—and pretentious).⁷⁵As a result, Johnson’s political intelligence was among the best in the capital. Treated to a Lyndon tour de force on the upcoming House elections, a dazzled Robert Montgomery remarked to his wife that Johnson was a savant, one of Plato’s political animals who “just knew.”⁷⁶In the presidential race, Lyn-don was putting his money on a young man from New York named Franklin D. Roosevelt. “Very quickly after I met [Lyndon], the campaign of 1932 started,” Robert Jackson said, “and he was just terribly stirred up about the Roosevelt campaign and Franklin Roosevelt. Radios were not very common then. Car radios were especially unusual, but Arthur Perry [another congressional aide] had a little Chevy coupe with a radio in it. Every time Roosevelt talked, and it was broadcast we would get in this little coupe and drive around.”⁷⁷

 

BY1932 FDRHAD EMERGED as the leading contender for the Democratic nomination, but he was by no means a shoo-in. By promising the vice presidency to John Nance Garner of Texas, speaker of the House and a presidential hopeful, the New Yorker survived a serious “Stop Roosevelt” movement and won the nomination. Shattering precedent, he flew to Chicago to accept in person and promised the American people “a new deal.” The ensuing campaign between Roosevelt and Hoover was a rather dull affair. Although Roosevelt traveled extensively, his radiant smile and air of self-confidence on constant display, he took few risks and spoke primarily in general, even vague terms about how he intended to combat the economic crisis. He did, however, lay the blame for the Depression at the feet of Hoover and the Republican party. Because Americans tended to share this view, they elected Roosevelt in a landslide. Although the Socialist and Communist Parties were convinced that the severity of the economic crisis would expose the bankruptcy of capitalism and prompt a massive shift in popular support to their causes, American voters proved to be less radical than the left hoped and the right feared. They rejected the revolutionary alternatives offered by socialist and communist candidates and opted for a capitalist system shorn of its defects.

Inauguration day in Washington was cold and rainy, so Lyndon and his friend Robert Jackson watched the proceedings from the shelter of John Nance Garner’s office in the Capitol. It was a striking scene. Despite the weather, a huge crowd gathered, anxious, fearful, expectant. Soldiers with machine guns stood guard. Roosevelt was resplendent in cutaway and top hat. Lyndon later recalled the famous Rooseveltian phrase, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” and his quote from Proverbs: “Where there is no vision the people perish.” Those words, he recalled in 1964, would stay with him the rest of his life.⁷⁸

 

LYNDONJOHNSON WAS MIGHTILY AFFECTEDby the New Deal, and it would be slightly affected by him. Roosevelt did not enter office with any master plan for solving the myriad problems that faced the nation, but his lack of ideological inhibitions meant that he had few qualms about using federal power to alleviate human suffering and to correct what he perceived as grievous flaws in the economic system. Nor was he averse to experimentation to achieve the desired results. The ideological sources of the New Deal were as numerous as they were diverse. The host of economists, former social workers, business-men, young lawyers, and others who converged on Washington to build the new order represented a bewildering array of economic philosophies and policy perspectives. Among them were fiscal conservatives wedded to government economy and balanced budgets, advocates of deficit spending to expand mass purchasing power, and devotees of expensive federal social programs. Some were reformers from Theodore Roosevelt’s day; a few were Woodrow Wilson-style progressives; still others represented a younger generation that had come of age in the postwar years. Yet, Franklin Roosevelt stood as the central figure in the New Deal, its spokesman and symbol; he was the one who gave it what coherence it possessed and who saw that proposals were enacted into law. Some have argued that Roosevelt was incapable of sustained thought and possessed more style than substance, but no one has questioned his mastery of the art of politics, his skills in communication and public relations, and his fine-tuned sensitivity to the shifting moods of the public and Congress.

During the first two and a half years of the Roosevelt administration, Congress, overwhelmingly Democratic in both houses, would pass more than a hundred laws creating dozens of new government agencies and programs. They were designed to save American capitalism by providing relief and jobs to the millions of unemployed and then reforming the system to ensure that the Great Depression did not repeat itself. Congress convened on March 9 and passed legislation providing government guarantees and funds to the struggling banking system. The Truth in Securities and Securities Exchange Acts aimed at preventing another stock market crash. A host of new public works agencies, the most important of which was the Works Progress Administration (WPA), were created to provide jobs for the struggling workforce. The Public Utility Holding Company Act sought to bring regulation to an industry manifestly clothed with the public interest. Labor benefited from passage of the Wagner, or National Labor Relations Act that sanctioned, for the first time, the principle of collective bargaining. Two Agricultural Adjustment Acts established a system of payments to farmers, first to destroy some existing crops and livestock and subsequently not to plant a certain portion of their acreage or not to raise a portion of the livestock they had planned to raise in an effort to limit production and elevate farm prices. A reorganized Farm Credit Administration emerged to provide low-interest loans to farmers. In August 1935, Congress passed the Social Security Act, which set up a system of old-age insurance, compelled employers to contribute to state unemployment programs, and offered federal aid to the states on a matching basis for the care of the nation’s crippled, blind, dependent mothers and children, and for the establishment of public health systems.

Like Charles Lindbergh, Herbert Hoover, and most of Wall Street, Richard Kleberg believed that the Roosevelt administration was nothing but a bunch of socialists who were waging war against the free enterprise system. When he announced his intention to vote against legislation creating the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Federal Emergency Relief Corporation, and other New Deal agencies, Lyndon could no longer stand mute. The confrontation came over the first Agricultural Administration Act that, to raise prices, proposed to pay farmers not to plant. Kleberg came into the office one afternoon to find his secretary emptying his desk into cardboard boxes. “What’s the matter?” the congressman asked. “I’m going home,” Lyndon replied. Seeing his golf game going down the drain, Kleberg pled, “My gosh, Lyndon, you can’t go off and leave me.” Lyndon said, “Well, Mr. Dick, I feel like the folks back home sent us up here to support the President, and that’s what we’ve got to do. If you don’t do that, they’re bound to think I’m not supporting him either, and I just can’t face them … Our people are for this legislation by ten-to-one or more.”⁷⁹In fact, Texas farmers hated the Act: it ran counter to their go-it-alone ethos, and it made no sense to be paid not to produce. Kleberg observed that he knew what was best for the people and that he was going to vote his conscience. Fine, said Lyndon. The congressman would have to do without his services—and he would be sure to lose the next election. Kleberg relented and voted for the AAA.

It was a temporary victory. The scion of the King Ranch steadfastly refused to embrace other aspects of the New Deal. In 1935, with the Social Security Act pending, Lyndon had to go through the whole routine again.⁸⁰Johnson was particularly enthusiastic about the Federal Housing Administration. When consumers had to rely solely on private lending institutions, a homebuyer had to agree to pay off the mortgage in five years and put up as much as one-third of the cost as down payment. Banks could or could not renew at the end of five years; if they did, they charged exorbitant refinancing fees. With the establishment of the FHA, it became possible to take out a twenty-five-year mortgage with a 10 percent down payment. Private institutions had to follow suit or lose out completely.⁸¹

It was in the application of New Deal programs to the citizens of the Fourteenth District that Lyndon proved most effective, however. The object of the AAA was to restore to American farmers the purchasing power they had enjoyed during the peak years 1909-1914. This was to be done by means of a domestic allotment scheme for basic commodities such as cotton, wheat, corn, and pigs. The incentive for farmers to reduce acreage under cultivation was a system of government subsidies, known as “benefit payments.” The AAA would pay out $100 million in 1933 to farmers to destroy existing crops and livestock. Lyndon worked furiously to persuade farmers that limits on production were the only answer to the persistent farm depression, and in the end the Fourteenth District had one of the highest percentages of farmers signing up for the program. Similarly, after the administration pushed through Congress legislation creating a Federal Land Bank to refinance farm mortgages, Lyndon saw to it that every struggling farmer in south Texas knew about and took advantage of the low-interest loans.⁸²

Lyndon met some of the dozens of young Ivy League lawyers and economists who flocked to Washington during the New Deal; most he did not like. They dressed better than he did, and many did not have to work for money. And they refused to give him his due because he was from Texas.⁸³His famous dislike of eastern intellectuals would not stem from any sense of inferiority. “Johnson had awfully strong class feelings,” Horace Busby, his friend and future speech writer, recalled. “They were not of someone from the underclass feeling strongly against the upper class; it was the fact that Johnson [felt] … that there were an awful lot of people from the upper classes elsewhere who did not understand he was from the upper class in Johnson City. I mean, it was aristocrat against aristocrat.”⁸⁴With those young New Dealers who he felt were not condescending, Johnson established close ties. The AAA general counsel Jerome Frank and staffers Adlai E. Stevenson, Abe Fortas, and Alger Hiss all became friends.⁸⁵

During a late-night bull session in the Dodge House involving Lyndon, Arthur Perry, Texas Senator Tom Connally’s assistant, and Robert Jackson, the subject of the “Little Congress” came up. In 1919, legislative secretaries had created a model house of representatives, complete with speaker and parliamentary rules. The body quickly degenerated into a closed debating society dominated by a handful of the oldest and most conservative of the secretaries. It was a shame, Perry observed, because the organization could be used to share useful information and bring in speakers of national prominence. “Why don’t you run for speaker?” Perry asked Lyndon. “I might just do that,” he replied.⁸⁶

The next organizational meeting was scheduled for April 1933. Quietly Lyndon and his friends began to circulate among the congressional staff. Most had not participated in the Little Congress, believing that the $2 yearly dues were not worth it. Lyndon campaigned against the “standpatters,” who ran the organization, calling them “dictatorial” and “reactionary” and promising his own new deal: open debate and stimulating speakers. On the evening of the election, the usually half-empty committee room was packed with more than 250 people. “It was quite an occasion,” Carroll Keach, who worked in Kleberg’s office, recalled. “It was held in the Democratic caucus room … the main caucus room in the old House Office Building. It was packed to the rafters and people even standing around the walls … They had all the news media of the day there, klieg lights all over the place.”⁸⁷The old guard shouted that many in the room were not eligible and that it was only Johnson’s second meeting, which was true. Nevertheless, the vote was held, and Lyndon won two to one. Immediately, he moved to placate his defeated foes, promising that his appointments would be nonpartisan and reflect both seniority and membership. The Little Congress coup brought Lyndon his first national publicity. TheWashington Evening Star ran a two-column story under the heading “Little Congress Upset: Progressives Put Over New Slate in Election.”⁸⁸

 

AT VARIOUS TIMES DURING HIS YOUNG LIFE, Lyndon had been advised by his elders to earn a law degree. Both Sam Ealy and Lyndon had been fascinated by Clarence and Tom Martin’s careers. There was power and money in the profession. In 1934, Alvin Wirtz, who had preceded Welly Hopkins in the Texas State Senate and who was an old friend of Sam’s, became a member of an up-and-coming law firm in Austin. During one of Lyndon’s visits back home, Wirtz urged him to go to law school. He could then come back to Austin, join the firm, and make “a ton of money.”⁸⁹Lyndon thought it over and decided to give it a try. Georgetown Law School offered early evening courses, from five o’clock to seven, for federal employees who got off work at 4:30. Lyndon enrolled for classes beginning in September. Russell Brown recalled that first class: “This big tall fellow from Texas sat right beside me. He looked over at me and he said, ‘I’m Johnson from Texas.’ I said, ‘I’m Russell Brown from Rhode Island.’ He was cordial in sort of an impersonal way.”⁹⁰

After a week or so, Lyndon, Brown, and Luther Jones went to dinner. Lyndon asked Brown why he always seemed to know the answers. Because he did not have a job and could study when he was not pounding the pavement looking for work, Brown said. Lyndon replied that he wished he had that luxury; he usually had to go back to the office and work after class was over. But Luther Jones, who confronted the same routine, found time to study for an hour or two every night after returning to the Dodge. He noticed that his boss neglected to hit the books even when he had the chance. For Lyndon, the law was too abstract and too much of a detour from his chosen profession: politics and public service. When a professor went over the procedure required to pass a law in Congress, he scoffed. He knew more about it than his teacher. He wanted to know why the legal profession insisted on using Latin terms when plain English would do. “I should say that Lyndon’s attendance at the law school was, to say the least, sporadic,” Brown recalled. “He was probably running congressional errands for the Congressman or meeting with people and setting up arrangements, making political alliances and friends.”⁹¹Still, he could have gotten by. Brown, for whom Lyndon found a job as assistant doorkeeper of the House, took excellent notes. He, Lyndon, and Luther would have intensive study sessions in his room over a meat market. “He had a mind like a sponge, quick and alert and very perceptive,” Brown recalled. He was aware of and interested in the great theoretical divide that separated most legal scholars: the traditionalists or “natural law” advocates, who insisted that the Constitution and other legal statutes be read narrowly with a view to what the framers had in mind, legal precedent, and little else, and proponents of “sociological jurisprudence,” who agreed that the Constitution and federal law should be interpreted in the social, economic, and political contexts from which the case in question arose. “In the course of our conversation,” Philip Kane, another of Lyndon’s Georgetown classmates, recalled, “we began to discuss Reverend Francis E. Lucey, S. J., then regent of the Law School and Professor of Jurisprudence. It should be noted that Father Lucey was strictly a Natural Law scholar and did not think much of Justice [Oliver Wendell] Holmes, particularly of Holmes’s approach to moral issues. [LBJ’s] comments were ‘That Father Lucey can certainly talk. He knows his material and puts it over to the students. But I can’t go for that Natural Law stuff.”⁹²It did not take Lyndon long to decide that law school was a useless diversion. He did not even bother to take the first-term exams. There was another reason for his neglect of his legal studies. In September 1934, Lyndon had met Claudia Alta Taylor.