CHAPTER 6

CONGRESS

IN LATEFEBRUARY1937, LYNDON HAPPENED TO BE INHouston on National Youth Administration business. As usual, he stayed with his Uncle George. The morning after he arrived, the two men chatted while George shaved. Lyndon opened theHouston Post and, after a stunned silence, read the headline aloud: “Congressman J. P. Buchanan of Brenham Dies.” Seventy-year-old James P. “Buck” Buchanan, a twenty-year veteran of the Tenth Congressional District and chair of the House Appropriations Committee, had dropped dead of a heart attack. “Son, I have $400 in the bank, and if you’ll announce for Congress, I’ll give you the $400,” George Johnson told his nephew.¹The thought had already crossed Lyndon’s mind. He had to return to Austin to host visitors from the Kansas NYA, but, as he later recalled, he found it impossible to keep his mind off politics: “I kept thinking that this was my district and this was my chance … The day seemed endless … I had to pretend total interest in the things we were doing and seeing. There were times when I thought I would explode from the excitement bottled up in-side … Finally, finally, the tour ended and I went home.”²

After consulting with Lady Bird and finding her not unalterably opposed, Lyndon got on the phone and called a meeting for the next afternoon at Jesse Kellam’s house. Willard Deason, who was in San Antonio on NYA business, and Dan Quill came up. Sam Fore drove in from Floresville. Rebekah and Sam were there. Also in attendance was former state senator and prominent Austin attorney Alvin Wirtz, whom Lyndon had named chair of the state NYA advisory board. They took stock. The race would be all uphill; an article on the 23rd on Buchanan’s death and the forthcoming special election in theAustin American-Statesman had not even mentioned Lyndon’s name. Lyndon and Lady Bird’s savings amounted to about $3,900. Wirtz advised that the campaign would cost a minimum of $10,000. His opinion, everyone recognized, was key to making the decision whether or not to run. Indeed, Alvin Wirtz would be one of the most important figures in Lyndon and Lady Bird’s lives for the next decade.³

The son of a carpenter, Alvin Wirtz had worked his way through the University of Texas and the UT School of Law. Upon graduation in 1917 he had moved to Eagle Lake and opened a practice. Shortly thereafter, he relocated to Seguin, which was a better base for a German American with legal and political ambitions. In 1922, with the help of Sam Ealy Johnson, he was elected to the state senate, where he served until 1930. Wirtz became acutely aware that Texas’s future and his future as a politician depended in part on developing better means of water conservation and usage. While living in Seguin, he became involved in an enterprise to build a chain of privately owned dams on the Guadalupe River. But he quickly learned that the real key to the economic development of central Texas was the Colorado River. If its billions of gallons of water could be dammed into reservoirs, the frequent floods that periodically ravaged its watershed could be eliminated. Moreover, hydroelectric plants associated with the dams could provide electricity to homes and attract industry to the region. In 1935, the Texas legislature created the Lower Colorado River Authority and authorized it to create and administer a network of dams and power stations for flood control, power production, water conservation, and irrigation. Wirtz was named general counsel to the LCRA. Without federal money, however, the LCRA and its system of dams would remain a pipe dream. Wirtz had supported both Kleberg and Buchanan because they had promised to work in Washington to make the dream of public power in Texas come true. With Buck Buchanan’s death, Wirtz and his associates needed to find a reliable individual to take his place in the House. LBJ was young, but he was well connected on the Hill and there was no question about his commitment to the cause of public power and economic development in central Texas.⁴But there was more to the Wirtz-Johnson relationship than utility.

As he climbed the ladder of political power, Lyndon made excellent and repeated use of surrogate fathers. Indeed, he could almost qualify as a professional protégé; the number of men who “were like a father to him” would make Lyndon look like Abraham in reverse. Alvin Wirtz was one of the first. “You have been more like a father to me than a mere friend and adviser,” Johnson would write in 1938. “You are the finest companion in the world, the best sport, the pattern of a man.”⁵LBJ had met Wirtz when, as a boy, he had accompanied his father to the legislature. He had visited his offices in both Seguin and Austin while he was at college, and after he became secretary to Kleberg he began consulting Wirtz on a regular basis. Mary Rather, who worked in Wirtz’s office and would later become one of LBJ’s secretaries, remembered the first time she saw Johnson: “He came in, and he didn’t stay long, but he turned the place upside down … He was tall and thin, and his hair was black and curly … His eyes were dark brown and they had a twinkle.” At the time she thought, “He’s like a tornado, that young man,” recalling Josephine’s comment on Napoleon when she first met him.⁶“He … had a tremendous influence upon Lyndon through the years,” Welly Hopkins said of Wirtz.⁷“He kind of treated Lyndon like a son,” Virginia Durr recalled.⁸

Wirtz was a tall, heavy-set man, outgoing, warm, with a cigar continually clenched between his teeth. He and his wife, Kittie Mae, loved to give parties and entertain. He was also possessed of a brilliant legal mind and an iron will. He coveted political influence and wealth, and he managed to acquire a great deal of both. In politics he preferred to stay behind the scenes, attending state and national Democratic conventions and raising money. As a businessman and lawyer, he took the long view of things. Thus did he support the NYA and regional development projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority and the LCRA. But he also cultivated corporate clients, including Humble Oil, and worked assiduously for their interests.⁹“Alvin Wirtz knew how to carry buckets of bubbling acid on both shoulders without spilling a drop,” remarked Senator Tom Connally. “He had some of the most reactionary and ignorant Texans as his law clients, and he pursued their interests ruthlessly against a lot of helpless people. On the other hand, he loved Roosevelt and the New Deal.”¹⁰

On matters of race, he was at best a paternalist. It was probably Wirtz who had authored Lyndon’s letter to John Corson regarding naming a black to the state advisory board. “I remember Alvin and Lyndon and all of them sitting down at our house on Seminary Hill [in Washington, D.C.,] one Sunday afternoon,” Virginia Durr recalled. “I was off on the right to vote [for blacks]. Alvin said, ‘Now you know if you do get that through, all the colored people are going to vote, and that’s going to really mess things up.’ I said, ‘Well, why shouldn’t they vote?’ he said, ‘Look, I like mules, but you don’t bring mules into the parlor.’ ”¹¹

That fateful day in February 1937, in Jesse Kellam’s house, Alvin Wirtz first went over the negatives of Lyndon’s running for Buck Buchanan’s seat. He would have to give up his job as director of the NYA, and economic times were worse than uncertain. A number of older, more seasoned politicians would certainly seek the seat. And, of course, there was the money. Lady Bird stepped in and declared that she could come up with the $10,000. With that, Wirtz told Lyndon to go ahead and he would do all that he could to help. The rest of the group immediately pledged their meager savings. “I think I gave him around $500 which I had in my savings account,” Deason said. “And I had a new Chevrolet automobile that he needed for a campaign car, and I gave him that. Before I did, I took it down to my hometown of Stockdale and borrowed an-other $500 on the car and gave him that $500 plus the car.”¹²

Several days later, Bird got on the phone with her father in Karnack. According to the community property laws that then prevailed, she and her two brothers had been entitled to half of the family estate upon their mother’s death in 1918. At the time, the value of T. J. Taylor’s real property was estimated to be around $100,000. During the 1920s he had settled with the two boys but not with Lady Bird. What she wanted, Bird told her father on that day in late February, was a $10,000 advance on her inheritance. “Well, Lady Bird, today’s Sun-day,” he told her. “I don’t think I could do it before morning, about nine o’clock.” That would be fine, she said.¹³“I was on the other end of the phone, my heart pumping the whole time,” Johnson later recalled.¹⁴To his credit, Lyndon never let anyone forget who bankrolled his first campaign. That Sunday evening, even before the money was deposited in the bank, Johnson issued a statement to the press declaring his candidacy.

The urgency stemmed from the possibility that Buchanan’s sixty-two-year-old widow would announce for his seat. Wirtz had learned that Governor Allred was pledged to support her if she decided to run, but Mrs. Buchanan had made it clear that if significant opposition materialized, she would not make the race. LBJ’s early announcement took her out of the picture.

Members of the Roosevelt administration were at first opposed to Johnson’s candidacy. Hearing of his Texas director’s plans, Aubrey Williams went to Thomas G. Corcoran, a New Deal whiz kid who had the president’s ear. “Tommy, you’ve got to get the President to make this guy Johnson lay off running for the Congressional seat down in Austin,” Corcoran remembered him saying. “He’s my whole youth program in Texas, and if he quits I have no program down there.” Corcoran went to Roosevelt, but before the White House could act to restrain Johnson, he had announced. The administration’s preferred candidate was Bob Montgomery, the Johnsons’ close friend and sometime adviser. Montgomery “was the smartest man I ever met,” Lyndon said. “He was a man of the people and a populist.”¹⁵Clearly, he would compete with Johnson for the New Deal vote. Montgomery was disappointed, but faced with his friend’s candidacy, he, too, decided not to run. The Monday morning after the announcement, Lyndon met first thing with Wirtz at his offices in the Little-field Building. “So he walked out of the office, we got on the elevator … walked out on the street,” Luther Jones recalled, “and he immediately, first per-son we passed, stuck his hand out and said, ‘I’m Lyndon Johnson. I’m running for Congress.’ I bet he shook hands with fifty people before we got to his car.”¹⁶

 

IN THE1937SPECIAL ELECTION, Johnson would face eight other candidates, several of whom were favored over him. The leading contender was C. N. Avery, a fifty-eight-year-old businessman who had been Buchanan’s campaign manager and secretary. He was able to pose as Buck’s natural heir. Merton Harris of Smithville, an assistant state’s attorney, had nearly defeated Buchanan in 1932 and believed that 1937 was his year. Judge Sam Stone of Williamson County, the second largest county in the district, threw his hat in the ring, too, as did Austin attorney Polk Shelton, who had been a star athlete at Southwest Texas Teachers’ College and was a veteran of the Great War.¹⁷What the twenty-eight-year-old Johnson needed was an issue that would distinguish him from the rest of the pack. That issue, Alvin Wirtz and Sam Fore advised him, should be Frankl in Delano Roosevelt.¹⁸Fore told Johnson that “the important thing about this race is FDR. People like him, and he’s in hot water over that Court-packing thing. He needs our help and we are going to come out loud and clear for him.”¹⁹

At first glance, a Texas congressional campaign based on “Franklin D. and Lyndon B.” might have seemed risky in the extreme. Texas and the South had embraced the first New Deal because it had provided direct relief to individuals, saving banks, small farms, and businesses; it had poured money into local economies. A July 1933 survey conducted by the Federal Emergency Relief Agency revealed that in seventy southern counties some thirty-seven thousand families, 15 percent of the entire population, had received federal aid.²⁰By the end of the 1930s, the federal government had invested more than $2 billion in the region. As of May 1936, the Public Works Administration had completed more than six hundred projects in the Lone Star State alone.²¹

Beginning in 1935, however, the New Deal began emphasizing structural reform. The Wagner Act sought to empower organized labor by endorsing the principle of collective bargaining. Regional development programs like the TVA and LCRA were allegedly competing with privately owned businesses. The Farm Security Administration was seen by agribusiness as a threat to its drive to enclose small farms into large, efficient, corporate entities. Conservatives denounced Social Security as creeping socialism.

Although oil, the Houston ship channel, agribusiness, the insurance industry, and various New Deal initiatives to promote economic development in the South and West had placed Texas on the road to modernization, it resisted. The voters’ mind-set was still very rural. Peter Molyneaux, editor of theTexas Monthly , described it: “In general it is a habit of thought to which almost anything which transcends a purely agricultural form of society is in some degree alien. In its most narrow form the rural habit of thought is a neighborhood habit of thought, prescribed in its outlook by the interests and horizons of a rural countryside.”²²Southern conservatives supported early New Deal programs like the Agricultural Adjustment Administration and the National Youth Administration because they could control them, ensuring that the federal government subsidized rather than sabotaged the existing social and economic structures.²³

But as Roosevelt used the WPA, Social Security, the Wagner Act, and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration to build his famous New Deal coalition composed of organized labor, African Americans, big-city political machines, tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and women, old-line southern Democrats felt they were losing control. Southerners were involved in the administration of programs but not in the central planning that gave rise to them. The famous brain trust included not a single prominent son or daughter of Dixie. The three southerners who were members of FDR’s cabinet had little or no impact on economic and social policy. Committed to the philosophy of individualism and wedded to a landed aristocracy and the institutions that served it, they came to see Roosevelt and his programs as subversive.²⁴

There was, in addition, a broad streak of populism evident in a number of Texas politicians who rose to prominence during the 1930s. Typical was Wright Patman, who would represent his east Texas congressional district in Washington for forty years. He championed the little man without proposing any alterations in existing institutions. Indeed, like the Populists of the 1890s, he depicted the process of modernity as a threat. He condemned large national banks headquartered on the East Coast, high interest rates, and chain stores owned and operated by outsiders. He denounced a national economy in which the industrialists and bankers of the Northeast colonized and exploited the agricultural South and West. During the Depression, Patman voted for most New Deal programs, but the entire enterprise made him uneasy. Unlike other southern liberals such as Frank Porter Graham, Johnathan Daniels, and Aubrey Williams, Patman feared industrialization and urbanization. By 1935, FDR sensed the revolt impending within his own party.²⁵

Of particular concern to conservatives in the South was Roosevelt’s Judicial Reorganization Bill, or “Court-packing plan.” On February 5, 1937, little more than two weeks after his second inauguration, the president forwarded to Congress without warning a judiciary reorganization bill. The measure provided that whenever any federal judge who had served ten years or more failed to retire at age seventy, the president might appoint an additional judge to his court. No more than fifty judges could be named under the Act, and the maximum size of the U.S. Supreme Court was fixed at fifteen. The latter provision was the crux of Roosevelt’s plan; it would have allowed him to expand the existing nine-member Supreme Court by six justices. Roosevelt justified his bill on the grounds of crowded dockets and the physical inability of the aged justices on the Supreme Court to perform their duties. In reality, frustrated and angered by the Court’s invalidation of so much New Deal legislation, including the Agricultural Administration Act and National Industrial Recovery Act, the president feared that none of his important social and economic reforms would survive the scrutiny of the justices. He was especially concerned about the fate of the Social Security and the National Labor Relations Acts.

FDR’s court-packing scheme touched off a storm of controversy in Congress. It gave credence to the charge of “caesarism” hurled at Roosevelt by critics on the right. The anti-New Deal press charged the president with deception and duplicity. Republicans waged a quiet, largely invisible campaign against the court-packing plan, but left the public fracas in Congress to members of the president’s own party. Large numbers of Democrats, including some usually re-liable New Deal supporters, deserted Roosevelt for the first time.

Given its distrust of central planning, its reverence for existing institutions, and its seeming commitment to the strict constructionist views of the Court’s conservative majority, Texas would seem to have been a logical state to lead the charge against Roosevelt and the court-packing plan, despite his carrying the state in 1936. For Johnson to link his fate with that of the New Yorker in the White House was risky at best. But as Wirtz and Fore knew, the Tenth District, which included Austin and Travis County, was not necessarily typical of the rest of the state. Education levels were high throughout the region. Although the Germans of the Hill Country were conservative in their way, they did not have the same fears about modernization that Patman’s East Texas constituents did. The state capital was the intellectual and political center of the state. “We comprised a predominately liberal group by yesterday’s definition of liberal,” said Paul Bolton describing Austin’s press corps during the 1930s.²⁶FDR had carried the Tenth District nine to one in the 1936 election. Straw polls conducted during the campaign indicated that voters favored the Judicial Reform Act by margins of seven or eight to one.

Johnson was enthusiastic about hitching his star to FDR. Aside from being good politics, throwing his lot in with the president appealed to the idealistic young Texan. Moreover, such a strategy might provide him access to the White House and the corridors of power in Washington if he did indeed win.

 

THE WEEK FOLLOWING ISSUANCEof the press release, LBJ reannounced his candidacy at public rallies in San Marcos and Johnson City. “San Marcos was exactly the right place to launch the campaign,” Lady Bird said. “I sat on the stage behind Lyndon, and I remember his mother and sisters were up there. One of the most reassuring things I saw was the governor … sitting there close to the front.”²⁷In Johnson City, Lyndon read his statement from the front porch of his boyhood home. Sam Ealy, who had suffered a major heart attack in 1935, and Rebekah were living there once again. One reporter estimated that the entire population of Johnson City turned out to hear their candidate. After Lyndon announced, Sam rose to address the crowd. “My father became a young man again,” Lyndon said, describing the scene. “He looked out into all those faces he knew so well and then he looked at me and I saw tears in his eyes as he told the crowd how terribly proud he was of me and how much hope he had for his country if only his son could be up there in the nation’s capital with Roosevelt and Rayburn and all those good Democrats … When he finally sat down, they began applauding and they kept applauding for almost ten minutes.”²⁸

What Johnson and Wirtz wanted, quite naturally, was the public endorsement of both the Allred and Roosevelt administrations. Allred was sympathetic but unwilling to stick his neck out. The governor said as much to Johnson, but indicated that he would do what he could behind the scenes to help. Noticing that Lyndon was wearing a brand-new snap-brim fedora in the style of Dick Tracy, Allred told him that that would never do and presented him with the Stetson that he had worn during his successful bid for the governorship.²⁹

Meanwhile, Wirtz had gone to see Claude Wild, who had managed Allred’s campaign, to see if he would do the same for Johnson. “Who the hell is Lyndon Johnson?” Wild is reported to have said. Nonetheless, he signed on for a fee of $5,000 and an agreement by Lyndon to follow his campaign instructions to the letter.³⁰

The Johnson campaign also experienced mixed success in Washington. Wirtz, Harry Hopkins, and others wrote various high-ranking members of the administration seeking endorsements. “Since this will be the first election held in any of the states since the President announced his program [of judiciary re organization] … and since the press through all news agencies will ‘play up’ the result of this race as indicative of public sentiment on the court issue,” it would well behoove the administration to lend all support to Lyndon Johnson, Hopkins wrote Charles West of the Interior Department.³¹West did not reply, but Elliot Roosevelt, Franklin and Eleanor’s second son, who owned a string of radio stations in Texas, told his listeners that he looked forward to a “glorious victory” by the former NYA state director.³²

If nothing else, Johnson was determined to outwork his opponents. “Don’t ever let me be in the house when there’s daylight and keep the screen locked until dark,” he told Bird.³³As he had promised, Sam Fore spent much of the campaign at Lyndon’s elbow, giving him advice and handing out introductions. “I know the first few days of the first campaign Sam Fore came up there,” recalled campaign worker and friend Wilton Woods, “and he got in the back seat of that Chevrolet, and we’d go down the road and Sam’d see a guy plowing that was going to be close to the fence … and he told Lyndon, ‘Now, Lyndon, you jump that fence, give him a card and tell him that you’re for Roosevelt … Now, don’t waste a lot of time with one person. We’ve got too much ground to cover.’ ” Fore had a strategy for town campaigning as well: “ ‘Now Lyndon, we’re going to stop on this edge of town and Wilton’s going to go to the other edge. He’s going to order us some hamburgers, and meanwhile we’re going to be walking that-a-way … Now you go in every place of business between here and there, and you don’t stop and shake hands with the guy behind the cash register. Pass him up. Go to the kitchen and talk to the hired help, because there’s more of them. They’ll listen better and they haven’t committed themselves like the guy behind the cash register.’ ”³⁴

The city of Austin, where the Johnson clan was virtually unknown, would be key. “I took him out to South Austin to the end of what we call Main Street, Congress Avenue, which was almost the southern limit of Austin at that time,” Sherman Birdwell said. “Another person took our car back toward town five or six blocks, and we would just go in every store, every fire station, every place of business and he would personally meet every person in there all the way to the back door to where the janitor was sitting.”³⁵Some of his hard work with the NYA began to pay off. “I did all the driving,” Carroll Keach, another aide, said. “If he had close friends in the town, they would put us up for the night … He had built quite a base there of friendships with the public officials, school people from the college level on down, business leaders, civic leaders at all levels.” There was the omnipresent sound truck with loudspeaker playing patriotic songs and announcing that Candidate Johnson would be speaking at the town square at a specified time. “While he was speaking, I’d go around town putting placards in drugstores and tacking up placards and handing out stickers,” recounted Keach. “His speeches were all extemporaneous. He carried his stuff in his head.”³⁶“It seems incredible,” Paul Bolton later said, “but LBJ said in effect that he had to exercise all of his will power to campaign as was expected of him in the small towns, walking up and down main street, with a handshake and a smile for every person. He said in substance that he recoiled from offering his hand to a stranger.”³⁷The will to win would be sufficient to overcome these and any other deficiencies, LBJ was convinced.

In the beginning, the speeches were chiefly about Roosevelt, the New Deal, and even the Judicial Reorganization Plan. “The entire program of social reform instituted under President Roosevelt,” Johnson told one audience, depended on the Supreme Court. The people had spoken clearly; they wanted certain economic and social reforms and the conservative majority was trying to thwart the will of the people. Emphasizing the role that the LCRA would play in the economic development of central Texas, he declared that “any candidate who poses as a friend of the Colorado River Authority but is against Court reform is contradicting himself.”³⁸

LBJ was not the only candidate supporting Roosevelt and the court-packing plan. “C. N. Avery Backs the President of the United States,” proclaimed one campaign poster. While promising not to be a mere yes man, Sam Stone declared his support for the New Deal and judicial reform. Attacking his opponents as “eight in the dark,” Johnson insisted that this support was half-hearted or feigned entirely: “There is only one who will fight [opponents of the president], who will fight them until the last dog is dead, without a compromise. They know I am that man.” When Senator Houghton Brownlee, another candidate, dared condemn court packing, Johnson accused him of “stabbing the president and the people in the back.”³⁹Leader of the opposition to LBJ’s candidacy in San Marcos and environs was none other than Carol Davis’s dad, who declared that if that son of a poor dirt farmer were elected, he (Johnson) would support public ownership of all utilities.⁴⁰

Johnson was an enthusiastic but not particularly effective speaker, especially over the radio. Early polls in theSan Antonio Express , theSan Antonio Light , and theDallas News put Avery in the lead and predicted that Johnson would come in third.⁴¹If Lyndon were going to create some separation between himself and the other candidates, his advisers said, he was going to have to sling a little mud. Both he and Lady Bird protested. “Mrs. Johnson,” Claude Wild told Lady Bird, “you’re going to have to make up your mind whether you want your husband to be a congressman or a gentleman.”⁴²He did not want the office if it meant he had to get down in the gutter, Johnson declared. But after Wild threatened to resign, he and Lady Bird gave in. He began labeling Avery a Washington lobbyist who lived in an $8,000-a-year hotel suite and spent most of his time in cocktail bars.⁴³He dismissed Polk Shelton as an attorney who had “spent his life defending criminals, racketeers, and underworld characters.”⁴⁴Brownlee was nothing more than an “economic royalist” who had devoted his career to serving the power companies and special interests.

Suddenly, Johnson began picking up support. Those blacks who could vote in the Tenth District favored him, in part thanks to his NYA work. During the campaign, Johnson met with Austin’s black leaders in the same church basement that had served as a meeting ground when he was launching his youth programs. He told them there would be things that he could do and could not do as a congressman but that he would work for change and that he would see that black votes counted in Washington. “He was very favorable [sic] disposed toward us, and he was askin’ for our help,” F. R. “Friendly” Rice, principal of the black high school in Austin, recalled. During one speaking stop in a small central Texas community, Johnson paused to shake hands with a knot of blacks who had gathered, causing an interracial fistfight to break out after he left.⁴⁵

On the night of April 8, two days before the election, Lyndon addressed a rally at the courthouse in Austin. “After the speech was over,” Sherman Birdwell recalled, “I went up to where he was and he was covered with perspiration. It wasn’t a particularly hot night … He was covered with perspiration and he was constantly wiping his brow and he turned to me and said: ‘I’m sick. Stand here beside me.’ ” As soon as the rally was over, he was taken to Seton Hospital where, shortly after midnight, the doctor removed his appendix.⁴⁶The candidate was so afraid of being accused of staging an illness for sympathy that he tried to postpone the operation. When that proved impossible, he insisted that Senator Brownlee’s brother, who was a physician, attend in order to certify that his appendix was indeed ready to burst.⁴⁷

Election day brought a surprisingly decisive victory. Although Johnson garnered only slightly less that 28 percent of the vote, he polled almost thirty-two hundred votes more than Merton Harris, his closest opponent. Sam Stone and C. N. Avery, the early favorites, came in fourth and fifth, respectively. Of the ten counties that made up the Tenth District, Lyndon finished third in two, second in two, and first in six, including Travis, where he received nearly 3,000 out of the 10,300 votes cast. A postelection photograph depicts him, wan, disheveled, but happy, his hospital bed covered with congratulatory telegrams.⁴⁸

 

THE NEW CONGRESSMAN,thirty pounds lighter, was persuaded to put off his departure for Washington until he could recuperate from his surgery. There was another reason for delay. FDR had decided to couple a Gulf Coast fishing trip with a rendezvous with his new champion from Texas. The meeting would highlight popular support for the administration’s position and place the New Deal’s seal of endorsement on Congressman Johnson. LBJ was, of course, delighted when Governor Allred told him to be prepared to meet Roosevelt in Galveston on May 11. In the early morning hours of May 10, Lyndon drove with Elliot Roosevelt in the president’s open touring car from Houston to Galveston. FDR, tanned and relaxed from his nine-day fishing trip aboard the presidential yacht,Potomac , rolled down the gangway at Galveston harbor to be greeted by Governor Allred, Mayor Harry Levy, and Congressman Johnson. After the mayor presented FDR with the keys to the city, hailing him as “the Pericles of the West,” the president and his new protégé posed for pictures. Observers noted that Johnson’s suit hung loosely on him and that his face was still pale and pinched. As expected, Roosevelt asked Johnson to accompany him by train as he traveled to College Station to address the cadet corps of Texas A&M, where Elliot served on the Board of Trustees. LBJ was now FDR’s official champion in Texas, and FDR would be LBJ’s official public role model.⁴⁹

Rather brashly, LBJ asked the president during their postelection conversations on the train to see that he received Buchanan’s seat on the powerful House Appropriations Committee. Rebuffed, Johnson told the president of a life-long interest in the navy and naval matters in general. It was two years since Hitler had renounced the Versailles Treaty, openly rearming, and one year since he re-militarized the Rhineland. Mussolini had invaded Ethiopia in 1935, and Japan was at war with China. Johnson understood that the Roosevelt administration sympathized with the victims of aggression and wanted to help. Although isolationists would prevent America from entering the war until after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt intended to do everything in his power to strengthen the military, especially the navy. Johnson knew that the president had an abiding interest in the sea and had served as Wilson’s assistant secretary of the navy. The House Naval Affairs Committee would be the perfect thing for the newly elected congressman. This agreed, Johnson outlined plans for a federally funded naval station at Corpus Christi.

Several of LBJ’s contemporaries feared that their friend would come on too strong with FDR. Come on strong he did, acting the part of Washington insider, referring to prominent New Dealers by their first names and denouncing Roosevelt’s enemies in the harshest terms. The president was far from put off, however. After he returned to Washington, FDR called Harold Ickes to sing Johnson’s praises. Ickes recalled the president saying that “if he [Roosevelt] hadn’t gone to Harvard, that’s the kind of uninhibited young pro he’d like to be—that in the next generation the balance of power would shift south and west, and this boy could well be the first Southern President.”⁵⁰

Despite his electoral victory and Roosevelt’s seal of approval, Lyndon was as insecure as ever. Charles Little, an NYA staff member, was in Dallas when he heard that FDR was coming to Fort Worth to visit Elliot’s family. He booked two rooms at the Worth Hotel and drove to Dallas in hopes of seeing the president and Lyndon. “I met the train and was standing about two or three cars from the end of the train where the President was getting off,” Little recalled. “It just so happened Lyndon stepped off of a railroad car about fifty feet from me … He came over to visit and we talked while the President was saying a few words at the end of the train. Then Elliot and his dad and all of their party took off for Elliott’s home.” At this point, the train began pulling out, headed for Fort Worth. A flustered LBJ told Little goodbye and tried to get back on the train. But no one knew him, and the Secret Service would not let him on. Finally, with LBJ trotting behind the last car, a conductor recognized him and hoisted him aboard. Little then drove to the Fort Worth train station and found the presidential train deserted. “Here was Lyndon, sitting in a railroad car that was half dark. He was really dejected. He was all by himself … Lyndon was going to sleep on the Pullman by himself. ‘It’s all I can do,’ ” he told his friend. Little persuaded him to spend the night instead with him at the Hotel Worth. “Lyndon was despondent for he felt terrible physically,” Little said. “One of his remarks then to me was, ‘You know, I feel like maybe I made a mistake running for Congress. Here I am’—I think he said seven thousand dollars in debt—‘and I don’t know any way in the world I’m going to get out of debt.’ ”⁵¹

The next day, LBJ left for Austin to say goodbye to his family. It had been decided that the congressman would take the train to Washington in time to be sworn in on May 13. Lady Bird would follow by automobile with assorted staff and household belongings. A sizable crowd, including Sam Ealy and Rebekah, gathered at the train station to see him off. Sam as usual had advice for his eldest. “Son,” Lyndon remembered him saying, “measure each vote you cast by this standard: Is this vote in the benefit of people? What does this do for human beings? How have I helped the lame and halt and the ignorant and the diseased?” Sacrifice and the general welfare was much on the old man’s mind, for he was dying. He finished by advising Lyndon to follow the two men in Washington he respected most: Wright Patman and Franklin Roosevelt. A photograph taken at the time shows the son, standing on the steps of his train car, leaning down to kiss his father full on the mouth.⁵²

Lyndon arrived in Washington, D.C., the evening of the 12th. The Robert Jacksons met him at the station and took him to their apartment to spend the night. “We walked there from the Union Station, and he kept us up practically all night telling us about his campaign,” Jackson recalled. “My wife, she had never met him before; she was just amazed by him. ‘That man is going to be president of the United States’ … I remember it because I argued that nobody from Texas could ever be President of the United States.”⁵³The next day, with House Majority Leader Sam Rayburn at his side, Lyndon Johnson was sworn in by Speaker William Bankhead in the well of the House. Maury Maverick asked permission to address the chamber for thirty seconds: “Mr. Speaker, the gentleman just sworn in, Mr. Lyndon Johnson, supported the president’s judiciary plan and was overwhelmingly elected.”⁵⁴

 

AS A NEWLY ELECTED CONGRESSMAN,Lyndon Johnson was as junior as junior could be. He was assigned office 503 in the “attic” of the old House Office Building. Two days later, Carroll Keach and Sherman Birdwell, whom Lyndon had hired to be the core of his staff, arrived in Washington. “It was late in the afternoon and we were driving over to the House Office Building,” Birdwell said. “We had not even gone to try to find a place to stay. As we arrived we saw Mr. Johnson walking by the side of the Old House Office Building … We went to the office and there were 213 bags of mail waiting to be opened … and Carroll Keach and I started on them when we got there that night, opening them up and sorting them, till way after midnight.” The two slept on the office floor.⁵⁵Before Lady Bird could arrive with Birdwell’s wife and their furniture in tow, Johnson had rented a two-bedroom apartment on Connecticut Avenue. For the next several years, the couple shared their quarters with various staffers, Aunt Effie, and, of course, the ever-present Sam Houston.

 

SHORTLY BEFORE THEY PARTED COMPANYin Fort Worth, Roosevelt had given Johnson the name of Thomas “Tommy the Cork” Corcoran, the thirty-six-year-old Harvard Law graduate who, as a member of the brain trust, had helped shape much of the First and Second New Deals. Indeed, just back from Washington, FDR called Corcoran: “I’ve just met the most remarkable young man,” he said. “Now I like this boy and you’re going to help him with anything you can.”⁵⁶

Johnson did indeed call, and in the days that followed, the ebullient Irishman introduced his charge to Undersecretary of the Navy James Forrestal and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. Roosevelt had Fred Vinson, the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, to dinner at the White House to put in a good word for the Texan. As head of Ways and Means, Vinson controlled committee assignments, including Naval Affairs. This was just the beginning. At the home of Clifford and Virginia Durr (Clifford was an RFC director; he and Virginia were liberal Alabamians), Lyndon met Senator (and soon to be Supreme Court Justice) Hugo Black; William O. Douglas, a former Yale Law School professor who would ascend to the high court in 1939; Douglas’s protégé, the brilliant Abe Fortas, a twenty-six-year-old lawyer with the Public Power Division in the Interior Department; and Fortas’s boss, Arthur “Tex” Goldschmidt from San Antonio.⁵⁷He also began a lifelong political and personal friendship with James Rowe, who at twenty-eight had helped write the Securities and Exchange Acts. In 1938 Rowe would become White House assistant to James Roosevelt, the president’s son.

“When we first got to Washington,” Lady Bird recalled, “we would go out to Aubrey Williams’s house, which was, as I recall, a big, rambling frame house. They would be likely to have a very lively bunch of people out there … Conversations always got back to politics, but they all had a social-economic bent. There was always a goal to achieve some sort of improvement in agriculture or welfare or building dams or education. Reform and improvement were considered highly possible, and they were the people who were going to do it.”⁵⁸From the very beginning, then, LBJ took his place as a member of what Michael Janeway would call “the House of Roosevelt.”⁵⁹

 

BY CHANCE,Lyndon and Lady Bird were in Austin in October, when Sam Ealy took to bed with his last illness. Stricken with a second heart attack, he developed uremic poisoning and was given only days to live. The elder Johnson did not die well. Lyndon complained to other relatives that his father was uncontrollable, yelling and cursing both doctors and nurses.⁶⁰As the end neared, Sam demanded that Lyndon take him home to Johnson City: “I’m going home where they know when you’re sick and care when you die and love you when you live.”⁶¹His son refused and instead moved him to the apartment at No. 4 Happy Hollow. Sam Ealy died listening to President Roosevelt on the radio making the case for a national minimum wage. He was buried in the family plot by the Pedernales River, across from Stonewall. A family friend in attendance remembered various men muttering under their breath, “Well there went my $1500” and “Yeah, I’ve got $1000 in that too.”⁶²

Russ Brown recalled coming into Johnson’s office some days after the funeral: “He was sitting in his office, and it was half dark in there. He was rubbing his forehead, and he said, ‘My God, Russ, I’m in debt five thousand dollars and all I make is three thousand a year. [He was actually making $10,000 a year as congressman, but he and Lady Bird were repaying her father $500 a month.]⁶³… I’ll never get all my debts paid.’ … And I told him he would … I remember there were tears running down his cheeks, and after I said we’d make it, he said, ‘We’d better, buddy. We’d better.’ ”⁶⁴

 

THE MAJOR LEGISLATIVE ACHIEVEMENTSof Roosevelt’s second term were the second Agricultural Adjustment Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act. But victories for New Dealers were increasingly rare. By 1938, much of the country was in a conservative mood, with the white South positively reactionary. In addition to the repercussions of the bitter court fight and the recession, the growing militancy of labor contributed to a sea of troubles for New Dealers. The occasional outbreaks of violence that accompanied union activities, the passionate rhetoric of union spokesmen, and especially the tactic of the sit-down strike used successfully by the United Auto Workers outraged many middle-class Americans. For them, the strikers’ lack of respect for private property smacked of European radicalism and even anarchism. In effect, the aggressiveness of unions tended to lend credence to charges by right-wing conservatives that the labor movement, coupled with the Wagner Act, was a creature of the New Deal and its chief instrument for destroying free enterprise.

Almost as offensive to conservatives was the administration’s efforts in behalf of black Americans. “The landlord is always betwixt us, beatin’ us and starvin’ us and makin’ us fight each other,” proclaimed a black tenant farmer in Poinsett County, Arkansas, to an integrated audience. “There ain’t but one way for us to get him where he can’t help himself and that’s for us to get together and stay together.”⁶⁵Beginning in 1934, Arkansas and Alabama tenants, sharecroppers, and farm laborers joined together to organize the Alabama Sharecroppers Union and the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Enraged and frightened, southern landlords, with the support of local political and law enforcement officials, retaliated. At the least, union members saw their credit cut off; at the worst, their homes burned down. In Alabama, members of the private police force operated by Tennessee Coal and Iron stomped Joe Gelders, a University of Alabama professor and union activist, nearly to death.⁶⁶

Outraged in turn by the violence and repression that seemed to be sweeping the South, Eleanor Roosevelt presided over the first meeting of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Birmingham in the fall of 1938. The gathering included Frank Porter Graham, president of the University of North Carolina, and Hugo Black, among others. They concluded that one of the keys to the liberation of the poor of both races was elimination of the poll tax. Legislation to that effect was subsequently introduced into Congress, but it failed.

 

AS FELLOWTEXANS ANDNEWDEALERS,Johnson and Sam Rayburn naturally gravitated toward each other. It would be the start of a famous relationship. Twenty-six years LBJ’s senior, Rayburn had first been elected to the House in 1913. He married once, but only for a brief period; Congress became his wife and children. A short, stocky, prematurely balding man, Sam Rayburn stood for honesty, integrity, and intelligence in the halls of power. Hailing from Bonham, he represented a homogeneous district made up overwhelmingly of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant farmers. He took care of his constituents and fought off occasional challengers to maintain his seat in the House for more than fifty years. Politically, he was a New Dealer rooted in Populism and Progressivism, a strong conservationist, sympathetic to the goals of organized labor, and a late convert to the cause of civil rights.

Like his friend Harry Truman, Rayburn loved to read American history and revered the nation’s institutions and political habits. Indeed, as D. B. Hardeman, his secretary and biographer, observed, Rayburn would have been more comfortable in the nineteenth century than the twentieth. Modern conveniences annoyed him; he was a notoriously bad driver. When dial phones were installed in the Capitol he would not let technicians put one on his desk.⁶⁷His traditionalism was balanced by a compelling sense of justice, the abiding belief that all men had been created equal, and a faith in young people. Rayburn would become speaker in 1940, following the death of William Bankhead, and would occupy that position for the next twenty years. He presided over the House quietly but decisively, holding power meetings in the “Board of Education,” a private hideaway office under the speaker’s formal office. There, decision makers would gather late most afternoons to “strike a blow for liberty,” John Nance Garner’s Prohibition-era euphemism for having a drink. Lyndon Johnson was the only man other than Rayburn who had a key to the Board room.⁶⁸

Rayburn and Johnson would become one of the best-known father-son, mentor-student duos in American history, although in reality, the association was more of a partnership. The two men had a number of things in common. Rayburn lived alone in his apartment in the Anchorage just off Connecticut. He was at times desperately lonely, venturing out only occasionally on fishing trips with colleagues or to baseball games or dinner with friends. But he was miserable when Congress was not in session. LBJ was garrulous, never alone, yet, as, he confessed to an interviewer late in life, frequently lonely. Both loved politics, living it, talking about it, reading about it. Both were vain about their achievements; both were proud men who hated pretension. Johnson offered Rayburn the companionship of his family and personal affection. Beginning in the late 1930s, rarely a week went by when Rayburn did not eat a Sunday meal with the Johnsons. When he would encounter the speaker in a congressional hallway, LBJ would frequently bend down and kiss him on his bald head.

If ever anyone needed a protégé, it was Rayburn, and he early identified the young congressman from the Tenth District as a likely candidate. LBJ recalled that when he was Kleberg’s secretary, he had succumbed to one of his frequent bouts of pneumonia. “Some of the kids [who lived in the Dodge] found me there. I was unconscious, and they got me to the hospital … When I came to and opened my eyes a little bit, sitting over in the chair was a dumpy, bald-headed man, had a vest on. He was nodding; he’d dropped off to sleep. He had a cigarette in his hands and ashes were all down his vest.” It was Rayburn, who had known Sam Ealy and met Lyndon when he was a boy.⁶⁹The two were constantly spatting and making up. Johnson was deferential but not subservient. He began offering advice to the majority leader on how to run the House’s business, and ignored Rayburn’s frequent advice to talk less, listen more, and defer to his elders. LBJ was, Rayburn observed, “a damn independent boy; independent as a hog on ice.”⁷⁰

 

BY THE END OF1939, Johnson had assembled a formidable staff, some on his payroll, others compensated by the House or a federal agency. John Singleton came up from Texas to take a job as Capitol policeman and moonlight for Johnson. He and UT graduate Jake Pickle roomed together in the basement of the Dodge. Sherman Birdwell served as secretary, or chief administrative aid. Herbert Henderson, who apparently held no grudge for his previous firing, came to work as a speechwriter. Luther Jones accepted a temporary job in the office while he looked for another full-time position. Gene Latimer, employed during the day by the Federal Housing Administration, came in nights and weekends to help with the mail. Johnson seemed to have lost none of his ability to inspire. “Concerning myself,” Lyndon’s former student wrote when LBJ contacted him about coming onboard, “I am sure you know that upon your request I will move any place from Houston to Honolulu—at $1.00 per month or anything else you might wish to give me. I have always had the conviction … that you would never ask me to do anything which would not redound to my own personal benefit.”⁷¹

Life in House Office Building 508 was no different than it had been under Lyndon in Kleberg’s office. He drove his workers mercilessly, demanding perfection.⁷²After fifteen months, Birdwell, thirty pounds lighter, resigned. La-timer took over as secretary and lasted exactly one year. “Nature took its toll,” he said, “and [I] had what is commonly called a breakdown.”⁷³In 1939 Lyndon and Lady Bird—she generally had a hand in all hiring decisions, especially those involving women—employed three new staffers, Dorothy Nichols, Walter Jenkins, and John Connally, to run the state office. Henderson joined them. That year was the first and only year that the Texas office was run out of Johnson City.⁷⁴

The principal victim of the Johnson mania, however, was the congressman himself. His ambition, his need to control, his overwhelming sense of responsibility, his perfectionism, and the feeling, continually reinforced by his mother and his own internal voice, that enough was never enough, drove him mercilessly. He was on the go every waking hour, lobbying some federal agency, courting the president or a cabinet member, attending to business in the House, grasping and absorbing every tidbit of political information and gossip he could find, taking care of family, schmoozing, partying. He insisted on reading and signing every letter to every constituent. There was virtually no place nor any situation so intimate that business could not be conducted in its midst. His first congressional office did not include a private bathroom, but there was a sink with running water. Friends and staff remember him going behind a screen and urinating in the sink while continuing to discuss scheduling and the current political situation.⁷⁵“I am in terrible physical condition,” he wrote Jesse Kellam in late 1937, “and I need a week or two of rest.”⁷⁶Johnson developed a nervous rash that made the skin between his fingers crack and bleed.⁷⁷

 

INJOHNCONNALLY,LBJ had finally found a person with the mental toughness, vanity, intelligence, self-assurance, and ambition to work for him without being devoured. Their association would be fundamental to the rest of their lives and to the political history of twentieth-century America. Connally was born on a farm near the south Texas town of Floresville. With a grant from the NYA, he managed to attend the University of Texas, where he spearheaded the UT Independents, a liberal association of ambitious outsiders (including Robert “Bobbie” Strauss, future chair of the Democratic National Committee). With the help of this organization, Jake Pickle would in 1936 become the first nonfraternity president of the student body at Texas. He was succeeded in 1938 by John Connally, who was then in his second year of law school. Meanwhile, the tall, strikingly handsome student from Floresville had become active in university theater, playing the leading role in several productions and assuming the presidency of the Curtain Club, an organization that included such future film luminaries as Zachary Scott and Eli Wallach. It was through the theater that he met his future wife, Nellie Brill, a Tri Delt and campus beauty.

Even during his college days it was clear that Connally saw politics as a means to an end, the end being his own personal advancement. Like Strauss and Joe Kilgore, another classmate and politico, he was not guided by any overriding sense of social justice—the Connallys’ Methodism was more form than substance. He wanted to rise above the insecurities and problems of his fellow man, not immerse himself in them and devote his life to their alleviation. What made him attractive, even to such ultraliberals as Maury Maverick, was that he was not hypocritical about it. “I’ve fought every crazy conservative in this state,” Maverick would say, “but John Connally never had the self-righteousness of the normal reactionary. He’d kick the shit out of you and later he would laugh [with you] about it. He would never invoke Jesus. To him, politics was a game, and he meant to win.” Johnson hired Connally at Alvin Wirtz’s suggestion, who, in turn, had heard about him from a wealthy, liberal oil man and UT regent. Connally reported for duty in the spring of 1939.

When Connally and Jenkins arrived in Washington from Johnson City, they, not surprisingly, took rooms in the basement of the Dodge. Although he immediately demonstrated that he could take what his boss could give and remain absolutely loyal, Connally insisted on maintaining a life for himself. He had a car and that gave him some independence. He never missed the Texas State Society monthly dances and was a frequenter of the Gayety, a scandalous burlesque house owned by Colonel Jimmy Lake. Among his fellow roomers at the Dodge, Connally quickly gained a reputation for vanity. Luther Jones remembered him standing in front of the mirror by the hour brushing his lustrous, wavy hair.⁷⁸

 

FROM HIS FIRST WEEKin Washington LBJ labored to bring the blessings of public power and rural electricity to Central Texas. “I had visions of damming the Colorado and Pedernales Rivers,” he said, “of building a simple, rural electric line out to the farmers that lived in my Hill Country, of flood control, irrigation, cheap power, of conserving the land and putting in new grasses that would prevent excessive wash off and hold the soil. And I knew it was electricity that could do all this.”⁷⁹

At his urging, the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) made a survey of the electricity needs of the forty thousand square miles drained by the Colorado and sent out agents to whip up support for the establishment of rural cooperatives. In the meanwhile, he set about persuading the administration to release another $7.35 million to make loans to these cooperatives. The first obstacle to this joint effort in behalf of cheap and available public power was the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) itself and its administrator, John Carmody. The REA had an ironbound rule that it would loan money only to cooperatives that served areas with a population density of three persons a square mile. The Hill Country averaged only about one and a half.

Finding Carmody immovable, LBJ went straight to FDR. The first time, he got the typical Roosevelt runaround. “I started talking to him,” Johnson recalled, “and President Roosevelt said, ‘Did you ever see a Russian woman naked?’ And I said, ‘No, but then I never have been in Russia,’ and then he started telling me what Harry Hopkins, who had just been to Russia, had told him—how their physique was so different from the American woman because they do the heavy work … Well, before I knew it my fifteen minutes was gone, and old Pa Watson [the president’s appointments secretary] was tugging at the end of my coattails, and I found myself in the West Lobby without even having made my proposition.”⁸⁰

Johnson immediately made another appointment and went to see Tommy Corcoran for advice. “Roosevelt likes pictures, the bigger the better,” he told the congressman. So LBJ ordered a series of thirty-six-inch-high photos of the dams and the regions that their power lines would serve.⁸¹“I had a picture of one of those little old tenant farmer’s houses, you know, under the transmission lines,” he said. Roosevelt looked at the pictures and called Carmody: “John, I know you’ve got to have guidelines, and rules and I don’t want to upset them, but you just go along with me—just go ahead and approve this loan and charge it to my account. I’ll gamble on those folks because I’ve been down in that country and those folks—they’ll catch up to that density problem because they breed pretty fast.”⁸²

Other obstacles to rural electrification included the private power companies and many of the rural dwellers themselves. Texas Power and Light did not want to supply outlying areas, but it did not want the cooperatives to either. Indeed, private power denounced the very concept of cooperatives as socialistic, communistic, classic cases of governmental entities competing with private enterprises and using tax monies to drive them out of business.⁸³“They hated me for these dams,” LBJ subsequently told an interviewer. “They called me a communist.”⁸⁴

Most farmers and ranchers initially resisted paying the $5 membership fee to join a cooperative and the subsequent $2.45 monthly rate. Many rural-dwelling central Texans were dubious about public condemnation of portions of their property for the construction of power lines. Most tenant farmers could not imagine the benefits that electricity would bring. “In those days,” Sim Gideon, an LCRA official, said, “if you built a line out to a rural place, all the man wanted was a drop line in the house [for lighting] … Nobody at that time ever thought about air conditioning and feed mills and milling and washing clothes and radios and television and so many other things.”⁸⁵

Throughout the summer of 1938, LBJ roamed up and down the countryside making the case for public power. By the fall of that year, twenty-five out of twenty-six cities had voted for public power and enough farmers and ranchers had signed up to make several central Texas cooperatives viable. In October 1939, Johnson reported in his constituent newsletter that the people of central Texas were “now getting the benefits of cheap public power.” Previously, consumers had paid one dollar for ten kilowatt hours of power. With the advent of cooperatives, people were receiving fifteen kilowatt hours for seventy-five cents. And this was just the beginning. As recognition for his tireless and successful efforts in behalf of public power, the president offered the post of REA administrator to LBJ. Ickes, Corcoran, and Roosevelt preferred that Johnson, whom Ickes described as the only real liberal in Congress from Texas, stay in the House, and so they breathed a sigh of relief when he respectfully turned down the president’s offer.⁸⁶

 

BY THE MID -1930S FDR had come to identify the South, overwhelmingly rural and poor, as the number one economic problem in the nation. In 1937 he asked a group of southern New Dealers to put together a report and set of recommendations to guide him. During the next year, Aubrey Williams, Cliff and Virginia Durr, Alvin Wirtz, Arthur Goldschmidt, Senator Hugo Black, Congressman Lyndon Johnson, and various southern businessmen gathered regularly at Goldschmidt’s house in Washington. The result was The Report on the Economic Conditions of the South, published in 1938.⁸⁷That document surveyed the region, describing the rural poverty, racial discrimination, external economic exploitation, and sense of alienation that seemed so pervasive. It looked forward to a time when the South would join the political, economic, and social mainstream. Its findings threatened the landed aristocracy and the white political power structures that controlled life in the South, especially in rural areas, but they garnered limited support among southern and western entrepreneurs. George and Herman Brown, founders of Brown and Root Construction Company, were among them.

In the process of obtaining the contract to build the Marshall Ford dam, the Brown brothers formed a political and financial alliance with Lyndon Johnson that would prove key to their fortunes and his career. In the early 1920s, the Brown Construction Company received a much needed infusion of cash from Dan Root, Herman’s brother-in-law; hence the changing of the firm’s name to Brown and Root. Like Kaiser and Bechtel, Brown and Root was able to take advantage of the New Deal’s penchant for large, multiuse public works projects to grow into a nationally and then internationally competitive enterprise. What emerged in central Texas in the late 1930s was an informal partnership between the LCRA, Brown and Root, and the federal government, with Alvin Wirtz and Lyndon Johnson providing the legal expertise and political clout, respectively.⁸⁸

The payoff for Johnson was the recognition and popularity that came with economic development and a permanent financial angel to fund his political career. “I hope you know, Lyndon,” George Brown wrote in May 1939, “how I feel [in] reference to what you have done for me and I am going to try to show my appreciation through the years to come with actions rather than words … Remember I am for you, right or wrong and it makes no difference whether I think you are right or wrong. If you want it, I am for it 100%.”⁸⁹In 1939 Brown and Root received the contract to lay some nineteen hundred miles of power lines for the Pedernales Electric Cooperative. “They [Lyndon, Wirtz, and the Brown brothers] were a good deal alike,” Lady Bird said, “in that they shared a vision of a new Texas and they were going to be part of it. By gosh, they were going to make things happen—bring Texas whatever industry and whatever had made the eastern part of the United States the so-called elite and rich part … They were all builders, strong, young, aggressive, determined.”⁹⁰

Johnson’s relationship with the Brown brothers was not the only liaison that would give him sustenance and bring him controversy in these years. For all his hyperactivity, the congressman cut a dashing figure. A reporter for theState Observer caught up with him during one of his visits to Texas, “Lyndon Johnson is six feet three inches tall,” he wrote, “dark, and Robert Taylorish-handsome; weighs 198 pounds which he says is 28 pounds too much; has burning brown eyes, deep black hair, a quirkish grin.”⁹¹

Most women he encountered individually found him attractive, and he they. Monogamy was never part of his life plan. During a political trip to Texas with Walter Jenkins in 1939, the conversation turned to sex. “[He said] he didn’t see anything wrong with people having sex outside of marriage,” Jenkins recalled. “It kind of shocked me. I said, ‘Well, wouldn’t that bother you in your own family?’ He said, ‘Well, not really.’ ”⁹²

Johnson was then in the midst of a seven-year love affair with Alice Glass, the mistress and then wife of Charles Marsh, publishing tycoon and LBJ supporter. “Alice was tall, nearly six feet,” John Connally recalled in his memoir, “red-haired, statuesque, beautiful by any man’s standard.”⁹³But the attraction was more than physical. Glass was sophisticated, poised, intelligent, charming; she had read all the best books and was familiar with the finest wines. At Longlea, Marsh’s elegant eight hundred-acre horse farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains, she presided over elegant dinner parties replete with stimulating conversation from the nation’s political, intellectual, and artistic elite.⁹⁴“Alice had a great presence,” said Frank Oltorf, a lobbyist for Brown and Root and a friend of both the Johnsons and the Marshes. “When she walked in a room, everyone looked at her. She was tall, slim, good-looking, and extremely smart. She had a voice that was both sexy and soothing.”⁹⁵

There were rendezvous in New York, in Texas, and at Longlea. Shortly after Connally became LBJ’s secretary, Johnson left for a trip to New York to meet Alice. He would be staying at the St. Regis Hotel, he told Connally, and gave him the phone number. It was only for emergencies, he told his aide. A couple of days later, Charles Marsh called, looking for Lyndon. “He said he had to talk to Lyndon and ‘no one could find him,’ ” Connally said. Thinking that Johnson surely did not mean to exclude such an important personage as Marsh, Connally proudly gave him the number. Shortly thereafter, a steely voiced LBJ called his aide. “Do you have a brain in your head?” he demanded. “The next time I tell you not to let anyone know where I am, I mean exactly that.”⁹⁶

Johnson feared that Marsh had found them out, but he had not. A number of mutual friends insisted that Marsh never knew. More likely, he did and just did not care. In his office, Johnson kept a special telephone in a bottom drawer of his desk. He left orders that no one was to answer that phone but himself. “When that telephone rang, you knew it was the Horse Lady calling,” said O. J. Weber, then an aide to Johnson.⁹⁷Johnson was absolutely fascinated by Alice; she loved him and believed for some time that he would eventually leave politics, divorce Lady Bird, and marry her.

Lady Bird denied knowing anything about this or other affairs. “I never saw that side of him,” she told an early interviewer. When confronted with proof of the affair, she said, “Lyndon was a people person. It would be strange if he withheld his love from half the people.”⁹⁸

But of course she knew. Lady Bird initially attended dinners at Longlea with her husband and could hardly help noticing how he looked at the openly seductive Alice. Their mutual friends believed that she suffered intensely from the knowledge. “Everything about Longlea—Alice, the fine surroundings, the smart talk—all of it made Lady Bird feel real green,” said one of her friends.⁹⁹She responded by withdrawing physically and emotionally. When forced to be in a social situation where both Lyndon and Alice were present, Lady Bird reacted with exaggerated graciousness.

Privately, quietly, though, Lady Bird fought to save her marriage. She checked dozens of books out of the library, includingWar and Peace , and started wearing more feminine clothes. She lost weight, getting down to 115 pounds, the weight she would maintain throughout her husband’s presidency. She wielded her money, coming up with the $10,000 necessary to enable Lyndon to make his run for Congress. And she tried to become pregnant. The Glass affair depressed her but seemed to increase rather than decrease her attraction to Lyndon.

By any measure, Lyndon could be a boor. James Rowe recalled that during this period, when young New Dealers would gather for a dinner party and Lyndon would be invited, he would inevitably dominate, holding the floor with stories and short lectures until the other guests would drift off and start their own conversations. “When he saw he had lost his audience, he would just go to sleep, just sit there and go to sleep … I think it embarrassed Lady Bird at the time.”¹⁰⁰Still, she seemed to think he was grand. She found the 1937 campaign exhilarating. “Lyndon was never so young, never so vigorous, and never so wonderful,” Lady Bird recalled.¹⁰¹

The Glass affair, like Lyndon’s other extramarital liaisons, came as no surprise. It was something that strong men, like her father, T. J. Taylor, did. And her husband did not boast about his dalliances with women to others. He bragged about his sexual prowess in general, yes, but he never mentioned names, discussed circumstances, or described events. Affairs were hurtful and should be challenged if they were marriage-threatening, Lady Bird believed, but certainly not a reason to end a relationship. Thus did two strong personalities work out the ground rules for a marriage that would last more than four decades.