CHAPTER 9

TRUMAN AND THE COMING
OF THE COLD WAR

ONAPRIL12, 1945, JOHNSON STRODE INTOSAMRayburn’s hideaway office hoping to find other members of the Board of Education and have a drink. What he found was a somber solitary speaker. FDR had just died of a heart attack in Warm Springs, Georgia, Rayburn declared.

Like many, LBJ was overwhelmed with grief. Everyone knew that Roosevelt was desperately ill, so ill that he had to deliver his State of the Union message seated. But they had always thought of him as somehow immortal. It seemed impossible that the voice of a new nationalism that had pulled the country out of Depression and defeated Hitler was gone. Lyndon grieved for himself and for the people. “He was just like a daddy to me always; he always talked to me just that way,” he said. “I don’t know that I’d ever have come to Congress if it hadn’t been for him. But I do know I got my first great desire for public office because of him.”¹“The people who are going to be crushed by this,” he subsequently told a reporter, “are the little guys—the guy down in my district, say, who makes $21.50 driving a truck and has a decent house to live in now, cheap, because of Mr. Roosevelt.”²

Later, in a speech at the Roosevelt presidential library in Hyde Park, Johnson would declare, “He was an Easterner and a New Yorker but the second important task he set himself was to bring to the West the electric power, the rural electrification and the water which it needed to grow. And the West and the South will forever love him.”³

For days after the president’s passing, Johnson would give way to fits of weeping and long periods of withdrawal. “The day Roosevelt was buried the whole town was just immobile, frozen, stunned, almost disbelieving, almost angry that it could have happened to them,” Lady Bird recalled. “Lyndon actually went to bed, and I myself wanted to go down and stand on the street corner and watch the cortege pass by … I said, ‘Let’s go down,’ and he turned to me almost with hostility and said something about how he just didn’t see why, did I think it was a show … I’m still sorry I didn’t. So we just sat glued to the radio.”⁴Back in the office Dorothy Nichols tearfully asked Lyndon, “Who do we have now?” Johnson said, “Honey, we’ve got Truman now … There is going to be the damnedest scramble for power in this man’s town in the next two weeks that anybody ever saw in their lives.”⁵

Johnson was right. With FDR’s death and the end of the war in sight, the political waters were roiled to a degree the country had not seen since the onset of the Great Depression. The end of the war released pent-up energy and desires. Americans were tired of war, of violence, of rationing, of intrusive government; they wanted to return to normal family life and the pursuit of material gratification. The U.S. military was quickly demobilized, and a conservative coalition in Congress abruptly ended wartime controls on the economy and blocked efforts to expand the New Deal. Women and ethnic minorities, especially African Americans, anticipated that wartime opportunities would extend into the post-war period, but they were mistaken. The white, male-dominated power structure demanded that blacks, Hispanics, and women resume their normal, circumscribed roles in national life.

 

COMPARED TOEUROPE,life in postwar America was idyllic. As head of a delegation to investigate the status of “naval properties” in the European theater, LBJ toured Britain, the continent, and North Africa in May 1946, where he surveyed entire blocks of London in ruins and witnessed hundreds of Italians lining up for rations of a thick soup made from the garbage from the American enlisted men’s mess. He flew over and landed near German cities with endless blocks of neatly bulldozed rubble, beneath which lay the stinking corpses of tens of thousands of bodies. In Rheims, the delegation met the hero of the hour, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, whom they found charming, unassuming, and anxious to please. Lyndon, however, was more impressed by a forty-five-minute audience with the pope.

According to aide Donald Cook’s notes of the conversation, the pontiff and the congressman discussed “the sadness of the struggle, the terrible consequences of the war, the necessity for peace and rehabilitation and the drawing together again of mankind to the extent that it was possible.” Johnson seemed totally unaware of Pius XII’s dalliance with the forces of fascism. There was much sightseeing in Rome and Paris, where Lyndon and a group found time to attend the Follies. “One night we went to the Folies-Bergere and he did not like it,” said Virginia “Jerry” English, a Red Cross worker and old friend of Johnson and Connally. “He [LBJ] got up and left: ‘I’m going. Any of you want to stay, can.’ It’s burlesque, and if you don’t understand the language, of which I’m not too familiar either, it’s kind of dull. If you’re not interested in naked women.”⁶

In Naples the delegation dined with Admiral William A. Glassford, commander of Allied naval forces in the Mediterranean. He lived in a sumptuous villa overlooking the Bay. While the group feasted on assorted delicacies and the finest wine, which the admiral was having flown in from France, Johnson could see starving women and children begging in the streets. He never forgot the scene, it added a cynicism to his view of high-ranking military officers that would remain with him for the rest of his life.⁷

Before the delegation’s departure for home, Lyndon met with U.S. Ambassador Jefferson Caffrey in Paris. The Europe that they had known, he warned, was being threatened by the forces of international communism from within and without. The Red Army was in physical occupation of Eastern Europe, including the eastern third of Germany and Berlin, and there were strong domestic communist parties operating in both France and Germany.”⁸It was a warning that was given to the new president of the United States as well, a warning he would quickly take to heart.

 

BY HIS OWN ADMISSION,Harry Truman was not the best-equipped person in the country to occupy the Oval Office. He was somewhat undereducated, had no experience in foreign affairs, and had been shut out of the decision-making process by Roosevelt. He tended to analogize Kansas City politics to international affairs, seeming always to want to simplify the complex. He was given to clichés but also to plain speech, such as “The buck stops here,” and he carefully cultivated the image of a no-nonsense, practical, decisive public leader. He had no sympathy for “intellectual” or “nonpolitical” liberals. As he confided to one aide, he wanted to distance himself from the “crackpots and lunatic fringe” that had unduly influenced FDR and put the country through wasteful and pointless social and economic “experiments.”

Truman’s emphasis on personal loyalty led to charges, partially true, of cronyism, and he was given to intemperance in public statements, occasionally lapsing into profanity when provoked. Yet, Harry Truman was a man of integrity and courage, devoted to the interests of his country. He was an experienced administrator and a fairly effective politician. He understood budgetary matters and the political process. In foreign affairs he proved, after his first two years in office, a tough-minded defender of the nation’s economic and strategic interests as he perceived them.

In the domestic sphere, Truman was a moderate New Dealer, believing that the government had a responsibility to care for those unable to care for themselves and to ensure fair play in the marketplace. He was, moreover, a lifelong crusader against discrimination based on race or religion. Though initially tentative, Truman was always tough in a crisis; he had no intention of giving in to antireformists at home or would-be aggressors abroad.

 

WITHIN SIX MONTHS OFROOSEVELTS DEATH,Truman and Republicans in Congress, joined by conservative, mostly southern, Democrats, were locked in a bitter struggle over aspects of economic and social policy. In September 1945, the president called on the House and Senate to revive the reform program that had been sidetracked by World War II, including the extension of Social Security to cover farm and other workers, an increase in the minimum wage, creation of a national health insurance system, and reorganization of the executive branch. Instead, Congress rejected the president’s attempt to extend the New Deal and enacted the most far-reaching antiunion bill ever passed by a national legislature.

Johnson was initially encouraged by Truman’s statements and programs, if not by the man. Despite the Republican resurgence in Texas and his longing for statewide office, LBJ clung to the New Deal, continuing to believe that a commitment to social justice was at the heart of both patriotism and liberalism. Like many economists and government officials, LBJ feared that the end of hostilities and reconversion to a peacetime economy would produce a new economic downturn.

In late August 1945, he convened a meeting of businessmen, state officials, and academics in Austin to discuss ways and means for reabsorbing returning servicemen and war workers into the peacetime economy. The best way was for the private enterprise system to do the job, he told the group, but if it could not, public works and other community projects funded by taxpayers must take up the slack. “We’re going to try to make our system work,” Johnson said, “but we’re not going back to 1933. I know that hungry, sick, jobless, illiterate men lead nations into war. I’m for local self-government, but a hungry man can’t eat it. I’m for states’ rights, but you can’t feed that to a starving baby.”⁹

Johnson voted for the Employment Act of 1946. As originally envisioned, the measure would have committed the federal government to public works and controlled inflation to hold unemployment to a certain level. To Johnson and Truman’s dismay, conservatives watered the measure down, limiting it to establishing a Council of Economic Advisers to make recommendations to the president on measures to combat depression and recession. In the end liberals decided to accept this half-loaf. LBJ was a passionate supporter of the Hill-Burton Act that began with a five-year, $375 million appropriation to assist states in building hospitals. Denying that the measure was part of a nefarious scheme to nationalize the nation’s hospitals and doctors, he declared in a rare speech on the floor of the House, “The fly which eats at the open privy of a slum area has no scruples about carrying polio to the child in a silk-stocking area. The health of a community can be no better than the health of those least able to afford medical and hospital care.”¹⁰

By the fall of 1945, Roosevelt New Dealers were being pushed out of power by Truman and his lieutenants. “Truman’s line is, ‘Let me have men about me not too smart,’ ” quipped Tommy Corcoran. The last straw for the New Deal crowd was the forced resignation of Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. Corcoran again: “It was funny last night. I was out at Bill Douglas’ with Hugo [Black], and Ickes … and some others and I couldn’t help saying to myself, ‘Well, here’s a bunch of guys … that had the world in their hands last year, and now they’re just a bunch of political refugees … a helpless bunch of sheep.’ ” Corcoran, of course, should have included himself among their number.¹¹From their vantage points in Congress, Rayburn and Johnson were relatively safe from the Truman broom, but they, too, lamented the fall of the house of Roosevelt.

By February 1946, Johnson and Rayburn had become thoroughly disgusted at the administration’s failure to confront and control the conservative coalition. Truman’s incompetence was going to cost the Democratic party heavily at the forthcoming midterm elections, they believed. “Sam says we’ve got to have some brains in there,” Johnson reported to Corcoran and company. “You know how bad off we are, don’t you?” The New Dealers briefly plotted to have William O. Douglas, then a member of the Supreme Court, named to replace Ickes and from that position to rebuild the New Deal coalition from within. But the enigmatic Douglas proved unwilling to leave the Court. Increasingly, Tommy Corcoran, James Rowe, Abe Fortas, and Harold Ickes began to think of Lyndon Johnson as the most likely caretaker of the New Deal flame.¹²

 

THE BURGEONING POWER STRUGGLEin Washington focused not just on the postwar domestic agenda, but on a new international conflict that most Americans did not, at first, want to join. There was no thought of returning to isolationism; revelations concerning the Holocaust convinced Americans that the Axis powers had constituted a threat not only to Western civilization but to humanity in general. Congress and the Truman administration rejected isolationism and declared their support for a new world order based on collective security and the creation of an interdependent world economy that would bring prosperity to all. The rush to internationalism, the willingness to assume a leading role on the world stage, stemmed from the fact that many Americans believed that the defeat of the Axis signaled the beginning of a long period of peace and tranquility in international affairs. A new, global struggle with Soviet-style communism was not what most had in mind.

The Truman administration itself was initially reluctant to confront the Soviets in Central Europe and the Near East. During the first year after the war, America’s 11 million-person armed forces dwindled to 2 million. Four years of propaganda had portrayed the Russians as America’s gallant allies and Stalin as friendly old “Uncle Joe.” Most Americans found it difficult to make the transition to thinking of the Russian leader as another Hitler bent on world domination. Not only was Truman inexperienced and uninformed concerning world affairs, but he picked as his first secretary of state James F. Byrnes, a man who was better known for his ability to deal with Congress than with experienced foreign diplomats. New Dealers like Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace insisted that the Soviet Union, devastated by the war, was in no position to conquer Europe, much less the world. The task ahead, he argued, was to disarm Moscow’s fears by extending economic aid and distancing America from Great Britain and the other declining imperial powers.

Gradually, however, as the Soviet Union consolidated its power in Eastern Europe, American attitudes began to harden. In the first week of March 1946, Truman arranged for Winston Churchill to deliver a major speech on foreign affairs at Westminster College in Missouri. With Truman on the speaker’s stand, Churchill declared that an “iron curtain” had descended across Europe from the Baltic to the Adriatic. Behind that frontier, the forces of communist totalitarianism ruled. The Soviet Union was an inherently expansionist power, and the forces of international communism would sweep over Europe if the United States did not intervene, Churchill declared. In January 1947, Truman replaced Byrnes as secretary of state with General George C. Marshall, the architect of Allied victory over the Axis.

To head the newly formed policy planning staff in the department, the secretary chose George Kennan, a career diplomat and seasoned student of Russian culture and politics. In February 1947, Kennan published an article in the prestigious journalForeign Affairs entitled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” It was nothing less than a call to arms. Russia’s wartime and postwar advance on Europe was simply another chapter in the never-ending story of the effort by the barbaric peoples of the Asiatic heartland to overrun Western civilization, he wrote. Because the United States was part of this civilization and because the Western democracies had been gravely weakened by the war, America would have to act. The best approach would be containment, a policy of less than war itself but of opposing force with force, of drawing a line, establishing a defensive perimeter and telling the Russians, “Thus far you shall go and no farther.”

An opportunity to implement the new approach was not long in coming. In late February 1947, Great Britain informed the United States that for financial reasons it was dismantling its outposts in the eastern Mediterranean and cutting off aid to its allies in that area.

Moscow was not slow to take advantage of the resulting power vacuum. Starting in 1944, the pro-Western Greek monarchy had been fighting a bitter civil war against an insurgent force that included a significant contingent of communists and that received aid from communist Yugoslavia. In addition, Turkey was then being pressured by the Soviet Union to grant it permission to build bases on the Bosporus and elsewhere in the country. Stalin had even massed several divisions of the Red Army along the Soviet-Turkish border. Truman and Marshall quickly decided that the United States would have to assume Britain’s role in the eastern Mediterranean.

On March 12, 1947, the president addressed a joint session of Congress. He asked for $400 million in emergency aid for Greece and Turkey. More important, he requested approval for Kennan’s containment strategy. “It must be the policy of the United States,” Truman declared, “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure.”¹³Within days, Congress had overwhelmingly approved the Truman Doctrine. The civil war in Greece ended in less than two years, and Turkey succeeded in resisting pressure from the Kremlin. America’s conflict with communism was only just beginning, however. In the summer of 1947, in the Marshall Plan, Congress approved a multibillion-dollar aid program to stabilize and reconstruct the war-devastated countries of Western Europe.

 

INITIALLY,LBJ believed that the best approach to the international situation was continued efforts at Soviet-American cooperation. Mounting anticommunist hysteria in the United States alarmed him. Although he had been only thirteen at the time, he could remember the first Red Scare following World War I, when Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer had led a nationwide witch hunt for “reds” and “subversives.” When, in May 1946, Congress voted to convert the House UnAmerican Activities Committee into a permanent standing committee, LBJ was one of only eightyone House members voting no. He vigorously supported a plan developed by financier Bernard Baruch for the international control of atomic energy. “We are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead,” he said in support of Baruch’s scheme.¹⁴

But as the Truman Administration moved toward a policy of confrontation, so did Johnson. His commitment to preparedness was a given. Between 1945 and 1948 he served on the Naval Affairs Committee, the Armed Services Committee, and the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. He established a close relationship with Assistant Secretary of War for Air Stuart Symington and became an ardent advocate of a seventy-group air force. He railed against the “budget politicians . . . [who] would give us the second best Army, Navy and Air Force,” and quoted Air Force General Ira Eaker’s remark that “having the second best air force is just like having the second best poker hand.”¹⁵In 1947 Johnson spoke in behalf of both the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan.¹⁶

 

IN EMBRACING THE ROLEof cold warrior, Johnson’s motives were several. Most obviously, he believed that keeping in step with rapidly hardening public opinion was crucial to his hopes for winning a seat in the Senate. In addition, preparedness was good not just for the country but for Texas and the New South. Johnson, like Richard Russell, John Sparkman, and others, saw the burgeoning military-industrial complex as a means to continue their native region’s economic development.¹⁷Johnson was also acting on conviction and immediate historical memory. “This ‘Truman Doctrine’ is very serous business,” he wrote in a remarkable letter to Alvin Wirtz,

and although I regret the necessity of seeing it through I am confident [the president’s] hand must be upheld and the alternative would be fatal … I personally feel that it is incumbent upon this rich, powerful and still free country to utilize its every resource to help the free peoples of Greece. It is not just a charitable attitude or a maternal feeling that I have toward Greece. It is my own yearning for self-preservation. Marshall very correctly states what I think our viewpoint should be toward Russia—a friendly, reasoned, patient tolerance, but “our action cannot await compromise through exhaustion” … There is no real difference to me between Nazism and Communism … I think, however, we should be very careful to point out that this is only the first step, that it will continue to cost much in money, that it is a terrific gamble that can be won only if the Congress and the people enthusiastically and in unity support the doctrine.¹⁸

LBJ listened particularly to both Charles Marsh and Alvin Wirtz on domestic issues. Here his idealism was even stronger, though it was in constant conflict with the need to appeal to the prejudices of his constituents. His support of rural electrification, public housing, federally funded health care, and full employment measures fit with both Marsh and Wirtz. His positions on organized labor and civil rights bowed to the latter. As Johnson well knew, unions were key to raising the political consciousness of manual laborers in Texas and throughout the South, and thus to combating creeping Republicanism, bringing forth a liberal majority, and incorporating the region into the national mainstream.¹⁹But the New South mix included men like George and Herman Brown and companies like Brown and Root, without whom there would be no workforces to unionize. Paternalists to the core, George and Herman prided themselves on being close to their workers and attentive to their needs. The issue for them was as much control as labor costs. Antiunion they were and to the core.²⁰So, too, was Alvin Wirtz, one of the prime architects of the Lower Colorado River Authority. “The citizen who is prevented by force and violence from going upon, using and enjoying his property in mass picketing is deprived of his civil liberties just as certainly as a prisoner who suffers at the hands of any mob,” he wrote Johnson.²¹Most Texans agreed. Half a million had moved from farms to cities between 1941 and 1947. By 1950, 62 percent of Texans were urban dwellers. Inhibited by antiunion laws pushed through the legislature by O’Daniel and his successors, by the prosperity that prevailed for most white Texans, and by the ideology of rugged individualism, unions were never able to organize more than 15 percent of the state’s 2.5 million nonagricultural workers.²²

Johnson had been outspoken in denouncing wartime strikes. He shared Truman’s perception that union wage demands were excessive and threatened the country with runaway inflation. In 1946, Johnson voted with the administration when the president asked Congress to establish fact-finding boards to investigate labor disputes and compel laborers to return to work while the boards deliberated. In May of that year, when a series of railroad strikes threatened to shut down the nation’s transportation system and interrupt the flow of life-saving goods to war-devastated Europe, Truman asked for permission to draft strikers. Over the outraged protests of liberals, Johnson voted for the measure. He resisted efforts by the Communications Workers of America to unionize KTBC, pointing out that wages there were double the national minimum.²³He would have liked to believe that exercise of the franchise by manual laborers was a more powerful means to self-advancement than unions and strikes, and yet he knew better. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, political expediency, paternalism, and a distaste for confrontation would place him on the side of those seeking to restrict the powers that labor had gained during the 1930s.

 

CIVIL RIGHTS WAS EVEN MORE OF A PROBLEMfor Johnson than workers’ rights. World War II had created a rising level of expectations among African Americans. During the war, labor shortages, coupled with pressure from civil rights activists and certain unions, had increased blacks’ share of defense jobs from 3 to 8 percent. A million African American soldiers had fought to preserve democracy in Europe and the Pacific, and now they were determined to fight for full citizenship under the law and equality of opportunity at home. “I spent four years in the Army to free a bunch of Frenchmen and Dutchmen, and I’m hanged if I’m going to let the Alabama version of the Germans kick me around when I’m back home,” declared one black veteran.²⁴

The particular targets of civil rights organizations such as the NAACP and the Committee on Racial Equality (CORE), formed in 1942 (the name changed to Congress of Racial Equality in 1944), were discrimination in employment, disfranchisement through the poll tax and white primary, and terrorism through beatings, burnings, and lynchings.

Nonviolent black activists attacked racial barriers in both North and South. In Washington, D.C., Patricia Harris led the first sitin to protest segregation and exclusion in public facilities. CORE staged a “freedom ride” to contest discrimination in interstate transport. CORE members also mounted lunch counter sit-ins in New York, New Jersey, and other northern states. The demonstrators were frequently beaten and arrested, but a growing number of public restaurants stopped segregating blacks and whites. In the South, African American veterans headed straight for their local voter registration offices. Most were threatened; many were beaten; some were murdered. In Atlanta, eighteen thousand blacks registered to vote, and in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, three thousand signed up. In these two cities and in Greensboro, North Carolina, embryonic black political machines began to emerge. Altogether, the number of blacks registered to vote in the South increased from 2 percent in 1940 to 12 percent in 1947, yet white segregationists continued to control much of the South, and race riots erupted in cities throughout the country.

LBJ was intensely aware of the difficulties black Americans faced in the first half of the twentieth century. Lady Bird’s claim that “Lyndon, as a boy, did not see a Black person in the town where he grew up” is somewhat misleading.²⁵The Peyton Colony, a community of several hundred black farmers, descendents of freed slaves, was located outside of Blanco. Austin boasted a sizable black population. One of Lyndon’s Austin playmates remembers the two of them engaging in a popular pastime: chasing “nigger” kids away from Barton Springs, a popular swimming hole. Washington County, situated on the eastern end of the Tenth District, boasted a large black population.

Throughout his early public career, Johnson rubbed shoulders with a number of southern white radicals who were extremely advanced in their views on racial justice: Aubrey Williams, Maury Maverick, Clifford and Virginia Durr, and Charles Marsh.²⁶But for all their enlightenment, these people were part of the elite, as Johnson was; they were paternalists. Moreover, the progressive businessmen on whom Johnson, Texas, and the New South were dependent were still profoundly conservative. “It is my opinion,” Alvin Wirtz said to Johnson, “that people who seek to eradicate racial and religious prejudice by legislation are profoundly unwise. Legislation on racial and religious subjects only adds fuel to the flames. Racial prejudice was never so violent in the South as when Thaddeus Stevens [Civil War and Reconstructionera congressman from Pennsylvania] and his brand of radicals in Congress and the Carpetbaggers in the South sought to legislate out of existence all prejudice and discrimination.”²⁷The Fair Employment Practices Commission (a federal agency proposed by liberals to further the cause of equality of opportunity) was an unconstitutional attempt to interfere with the sanctity of contract: “I have as much right to prefer a white secretary as Clark Foreman has to [prefer] a Negro,” exclaimed the senator. Wirtz had repeatedly denounced the KKK and filed suit against its members during the 1920s, and he found the poll tax indefensible. Yet he did not like federal interference in state matters, and he feared that the Texas regulars would couple the race issue with red baiting and ride a red-and-black scare into power in 1946 and 1948.²⁸

At the core of LBJ’s attitude toward African Americans, a floor beneath which he would not sink, was a belief that blacks must be part of the body politic. Lady Bird remembered him campaigning in Washington and Lee Counties during the 1937 congressional contest. “He was talking to a crowd,” she said, “so when he finished speaking, he began to go around and shake hands with everybody who was about—the heavily armed men, a few women, and out on the outskirts of the crowd, some black people. And he went around and he was shaking hands with all the black people on the edge of the crowd and later on, quietly, his manager for that county came up to him and said, ‘Lyndon, I don’t think you better do that next time. I think you’re gonna offend some of the strongest people in this section.’ And Lyndon made him an unprovoking answer as well as he could and went right on doing it.”²⁹

Beyond enfranchisement and equal access to government programs, however, the Lyndon Johnson of the 1940s was unwilling to go. During 1945-1946 he consistently voted with southern opponents of antilynching, anti-poll tax, and fair employment practices legislation. He claimed that he was acting not against blacks but for states’ rights. He argued in private that there was nothing more useless than a politically dead liberal, citing Maury Maverick.³⁰Besides, he argued, by going along with the Dixie association in Congress, he could win their support for more important bread-and-butter issues which were of vast importance to blacks. It should be noted that such southern progressives as J. William Fulbright also voted consistently against antilynching and anti-poll tax legislation, even going so far as to oppose Aubrey Williams’s confirmation as head of the Rural Electrification Administration.³¹

As far as Johnson’s personal feelings toward race were concerned, the signals are mixed. Robert Parker, a black sharecropper’s son who worked occasionally for the Johnsons when they were giving dinner parties in Washington, claimed that LBJ “niggered” him unmercifully whenever other white southern racists were present. He cited the notorious Senator Theodore G. Bilbo of Mississippi as an example. Yet, there is no evidence that Bilbo, a crude boor as well as a racist, was ever a guest in any of the Johnson homes. Not only would Rowe, Corcoran, Fortas, and other of LBJ’s New Deal cronies have been appalled, so would people like Richard Russell. Homer Thornberry, then a young politico at the University of Texas, recalled visiting Johnson in Washington when he was a congressman. On a streetcar ride to the Capitol, Johnson got up and offered his seat to a Negro woman who would otherwise have had to stand.³²Black Congressman Adam Clayton Powell thought enough of LBJ to come to Texas and campaign for him in his congressional races. “Johnson is not a hater,” Powell told Austin’s black community.³³

Of one thing Johnson was sure: if some degree of justice and opportunity were not offered to blacks, democracy and even the republic itself might not survive. In March 1948, when Horace Busby went to Washington to work for Johnson, they had an interesting opening conversation. “He said, ‘You ought to know how I feel about everything.’ And he toured the world and talked a lot about the prospects of war [with the Soviet Union], which was on everybody’s mind … and then finally he said … ‘And then there are the Negroes … They fought the war; they filled up the war plants, they built the bombers … And now they’re back and they’re not going to take this shit that we give them much longer’ … The point of it was that we were in a race against time, and he said ‘I hope we can, but I’m not sure we can get this system to respond on this. If we don’t do it, blood will run in the streets.’ ”³⁴

 

LYNDON CONTINUED TO SEEALICEGLASSduring the two years following the end of the war. One Saturday morning in the fall of 1945, he stopped by the apartment of Waddie Bullion, his friend and the family accountant. Bullion was still on duty with the navy, but his wife, sister-in-law, and infant son were there. Johnson had just dropped off his car for John and Nellie Connally, who lived down the hall, to use for the day. As Lyndon played with baby John, he explained unabashedly to the women how he was going to spend the day. Alice Glass was going to pick him up and they were going to enjoy each other’s company. Waddie’s wife, who knew who Alice was and about the affair, was appalled, but recalled that Johnson was almost aglow with anticipation.³⁵

He also continued to coddle Sam Houston, who had taken to drinking himself into unconsciousness and running up hotel bills again.³⁶“We do not see how a man in your brother’s position can possibly afford to allow a matter of this kind to stand against his record,” one creditor wrote to LBJ.³⁷He continued to send money not only to Sam Houston but also to the wife and child whom his brother had abandoned.³⁸

 

AS THE1946CAMPAIGN SEASON APPROACHED , Johnson seemed unusually subdued. Harold Ickes observed that “he is toning down a bit. He is not so young and exuberant, as he used to be.” Johnson would not have disagreed. “I have found that age has probably mellowed me some,” he wrote Wirtz, “because in my younger days I didn’t hesitate to charge hell with a bucket of water or ask a man to move out of his own house if it would help me. Now I am a little more considerate and those things are a little more distasteful to me.”³⁹

In fact, a series of illnesses, rather than age, probably had more to do with LBJ’s “mellowness.” In February 1946 he was hospitalized with yet another bout of pneumonia. Within a month of his release he had developed kidney stones. “I am not sure the kidney stone has been born yet,” he wrote Wirtz, “but I am expecting the X-rays to show two possible stones and now they can’t find any but they think maybe it could have gone into the bladder.”⁴⁰Despite allusions to the contrary, however, Johnson had no intention of retiring from public life.

John Connally was of the opinion that his boss ought to run for governor of Texas, in part because he coveted Johnson’s congressional seat. During the closing months of 1945, Connally secured agreement from Homer Rainey, Buford Jester, state Attorney General Grover Sellers, and other potential candidates for the Democratic nomination that they would not run if Lyndon decided to seek the office. “When he got all this worked out and presented it to the Congressman,” Horace Busby said, “the Congressman said he had absolutely no interest in the ticky little things that governors did. He wasn’t interested in pardons, he wasn’t interested in highway contractletting, he wasn’t interested in textbook contracts … they were all primitive and too conservative for him around there … The future lay in what people did in Washington.” Connally stomped out, and the two did not speak for several weeks.⁴¹

To challenge Johnson in 1946, the regulars put forward Hardy Hollers, a forty-five-year-old attorney and decorated army colonel. In addition to a distinguished war record, Hollers could boast of having assisted Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson in his prosecutorial activities at the Nuremberg war crimes trials. Over the next ten weeks, he and his handlers charged Johnson with virtually every kind of political and ethical wrongdoing imaginable. Hollers continually compared his extended service in combat to LBJ’s single mission. He accused Johnson of using his position to enrich himself and his friends. He charged that Brown and Root had grown rich and fat on government wartime contracts secured for them by their congressman and that they had allegedly not only financed Johnson’s political career but also enriched him personally.

Hollers also declared in speeches and newspaper interviews that his opponent had used improper influence with the FCC to secure broadcast business for his wife and friends. He made much of the fact that Lyndon and Lady Bird had acquired a “luxurious” duplex on Dillman Street in Austin from W. S. Bellows, a Brown and Root partner, and he insisted that Johnson’s henchmen had offered him “a fat government job” if he would drop out of the race.⁴²

Johnson, Wirtz, and Connally, who, mollified, had agreed to be campaign manager, decided that they would have to answer Hollers charge by charge. Johnson called a mass meeting for Wooldridge Park in downtown Austin and invited the media to come and pay close attention. With Lady Bird sitting on the dais at a desk piled high with tax records and canceled checks, Johnson dared the opposition to show that he had bribed, been bribed, or profited personally from his office. Neither he nor his friends had offered Hollers a job in the government. As for the house on Dillman (built by Bellows for his mistress, who committed suicide in 1943), he and Lady Bird had paid $15,490 in cash for the duplex and he had the canceled check to prove it. From there, Johnson departed for an intensive automobile canvass of the Tenth District.

“I had been working at the Austin papers for three years in 1946,” newspaperwoman Margaret Mayer recalled. “One morning Buck Hood [editor of theAustin American] told me to bring a notebook and come with him. We drove out to 1901 Dillman and we went upstairs … There in the living room, sitting around mostly in yard chairs, because I think they hadn’t furnished the apartment yet … were some ten men, as I recall. Johnson was lying on a couch. He was dressed or undressed as the case may be in a pair of shorts … They were just plain old boxer shorts. He was unfazed by my walking in. I was the only woman there.”⁴³The meeting was to plan “this ten-day whirlwind campaign with which he was going to beat Hardy Hollers.”

Mayer covered the campaign. Each morning at the crack of dawn, the un-air conditioned Ford would set out with her in the back seat and Lyndon in the front, beside the driver. She was expected not only to write the day’s story but to act as the candidate’s valet. “Your job was not just to follow him around and report for the paper,” she recalled. “You also took care of his Stetson, because he had two. He would wear his good one in the car. When he got out at the court-house square you were supposed to hand him the worn one, the dirty one … You also kind of looked after his fresh suits, because he would change during the day, en route, at least once, and his throat lozenges and hand cream … You know, his hand would get raw.”⁴⁴

Johnson promised the good life for the common man and lambasted big oil. A popular song of the day was “Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?” LBJ would have a musical group sing the song and then he would begin to talk about his dream of a world of full employment, adequate housing, educational opportunity for all, and an end to poverty.⁴⁵

As a springboard for a future Senate race, or to ensure that he had no opposition in 1948, Johnson wanted to win big. “I would like to get a landslide vote this time and thereby obviate the necessity of having to put up with any more Hollers[es] two years from now,” he wrote Jim Rowe.⁴⁶Toward the end of the campaign, Connally and his lieutenants put together “Johnson’s Hill Billy Boys,” a four-piece band that warmed up the candidate’s evening crowds and played background for movie star Gene Autry, who came from California to lend support; Johnson had helped the movie star get into the Air Transport Command at the beginning of the war and had facilitated his discharge at the end. Autry sang his signature “Back in the Saddle Again,” ending with the exhortation, “Let’s put my friend Lyndon back in the saddle again, because that’s where he belongs.”⁴⁷

Another come-on used by the Johnson campaign was to offer ice-cold free watermelon. On one occasion, the tactic backfired; a group of boys got into a watermelon rind fight right in front of the platform while the candidate was speaking. Forgetting to cover his microphone he yelled, “John, Jake, Joe, somebody, get those godamned kids out from in front of here … Watch out, Gene, one of them is going to hit you!”⁴⁸For Washington County’s heavily German American population, the Johnson forces carried the day by persuading Anheuser-Busch to supply free beer for campaign rallies.⁴⁹

When the final vote was in, Johnson had bested Hollers by better than two and a half to one: 42,672 to 17,628. He carried all ten counties, even Washington. Nevertheless, Johnson complained of feeling beat up by the campaign. The 1946 election made him aware of his strengths and caused him to think of the Senate once again, but it also alerted him to the implacable hostility toward him by the state’s most powerful conservatives.⁵⁰

 

LADYBIRDhad become pregnant again in 1945, but it turned out to be a tubal pregnancy, a condition from which her mother had suffered. It almost killed Lady Bird, too. Sometime during the first trimester, she began hemorrhaging. Lyndon was not home. Desperate with pain, she called her doctor, who sent an ambulance. “I knew that I was in a life-threatening situation,” she recalled. “When they were putting me in the ambulance, I remember that I was glad that Lyndon and I were well off, that we had enough money, and wondered what it would be like to be that sick without any money at all.”⁵¹An aide finally located Lyndon and he rushed to the hospital. The doctor informed him that his wife was losing a lot of blood and the choice basically was between saving mother or saving child. Lyndon did not hesitate. Horace Busby, then a brand-new staffer, recalled, “The idea of losing her filled him with panic. He told them to do whatever was necessary to save Bird.”⁵²

Happily, on July 2, 1947, Lady Bird gave birth to their second daughter, Lucy Baines. This, too, had been a difficult pregnancy. When at long last the doctor had the baby in his arms, Lady Bird remembered him saying, “I never thought I’d see you.”⁵³Apparently, she and Lyndon never considered her side of the family in the selection of first names. Lucy was named for Lucia, Lyndon’s youngest sister and Lady Bird’s favorite among his siblings.⁵⁴

All the while Lyndon and Lady Bird were heading up a second family, the staff of KTBC and their spouses. It was at the radio station in Austin that Johnsonian paternalism appeared in its purest form. There were advantages to being a member of the family, but there was also a price to pay. The first benefit was security; employees were rarely fired, there were health insurance and a profit and stock sharing plan, and the Johnsons extended aid and sympathy that was at times heroic. Joe Phipps, who had signed on as morning announcer in late 1945, recalled that when the daughter of an employee was diagnosed with throat cancer, the congressman sprang into action: “ ‘Get me Jim Cain at Mayo’s,’ he orders the operator. ‘We’ve got this girl down here, maybe dying,’ he tells his personal physician. ‘A monster’s in her throat. Eating her up. Cancer … thyroid cancer … That’s what the little bastard’s eating on, her thyroid. You’ve got to cure her.’ He listens, finally breaking in, ‘The family doesn’t have that kind of money. Hell, you know that. No family has that kind of money. They’ll pay all they can. I’ll give a little. You’ll give a little … Your job is the easy one. You just have to cure her. She has the hard job. She has to go on living.’ ”⁵⁵

On the debit side, no one at KTBC was allowed any freedom of expression; the development of radio “personalities” was verboten. Operational manuals governed every aspect of the day’s work. Employees, including station manager Jesse Kellam, cleaned toilets until finally LBJ was prevailed upon to hire part-time janitorial help. Johnson advised female employees on matters of dress, when to have babies, and whom to choose as mates.

At the same time, young men on the staff were pressured to produce as many children as quickly as possible. “If three months went by after the wedding and Johnson could not detect the beginnings of abdominal swelling,” Phipps said, he would grow almost distraught. Sensing a romantic void, he would approach the new bridegroom, press a $20 bill into his hand, and tell him, “Take your wife out to dinner. Candlelight. Soft music. Take her dancing. Give her a night of real romance. Soften her up. Get her to feeling ‘dreamy.’ Be gentle. Show how much you love her. Prove you’re a man. I want a baby out of this.” If males were among the subsequent offspring, at least one was expected to be named Lyndon. He could be brutal to Kellam, a spare, neatly dressed, prematurely gray man. Phipps recalled that an obviously angry Johnson would periodically storm into the manager’s office, located on the first floor of the Brown Building. “Let’s go for a walk,” he would tell Kellam. “An hour or so later,” Phipps recalled, “Kellam would return, red-eyed, then slump down at his desk as if his world had collapsed. His eyes would be wet. He’d cover them … I came to fear that internally KTBC’s general manager was a mess.”⁵⁶The highlight of the year was the station Christmas party, at which Lyndon and Lady Bird presided, handing out presents, Lyndon delivering an inspirational pep talk. His remarks were partly thankful, partly self-serving, punctuated with guilt trips and ending with an appeal to loyalty.

 

IT HAD BECOME CLEARthat if LBJ wanted to enter the U.S. Senate it would have to be by way of Pappy Lee O’Daniel’s seat. The thought of running again for the upper house filled him with anxiety. He would have to relinquish his congressional position and risk sacrificing his entire political career. “I just could not bear the thought of losing everything,” he later told an interviewer.⁵⁷The political tea leaves were extraordinarily difficult to read in 1948.

Out of the White House since 1932, the Republicans looked forward to the election of 1948 with a great deal of anticipation. Harry Truman’s modest physical appearance, his lack of formal education, his failure to get his program through Congress, and his occasional public profanity combined to reinforce the popular notion that he was not fit to govern. The conservative wing of the party preferred Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, but the feeling among the moderate majority was that he was too austere and would prove to be a poor campaigner. Party leaders approached the hero of Normandy, Dwight D. Eisenhower, but he played coy. Thus it was that the Republicans turned to the man who had led them to defeat in 1944, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York. Dewey had compiled a progressive record as governor and firmly supported the policy of containment.

The Democratic party, meanwhile, was torn apart by internal disputes. Leading the charge against Truman and the Democratic establishment was former Secretary of Agriculture and Vice President Henry A. Wallace. He was the self-appointed champion of the blue-collar worker and small farmer, both black and white. Wallace charged that the Democratic party had been taken over by big business and southern segregationists. The Iowan also vehemently attacked the Truman administration’s decision to get tough with the Soviet Union. In 1947, he organized the Progressive Citizens of America and notified the world that he would run on a third-party ticket. Democratic liberals, newly organized into the Americans for Democratic Action, maneuvered desperately to avoid choosing between Wallace and Truman. The two approached General Eisenhower, but he rebuffed them.

To make matters worse, southern Democrats were up in arms over the president’s civil rights program. Truman had been a staunch opponent of the Ku Klux Klan in Missouri, and in 1947, at his behest, a prestigious commission had produced a study of race relations in America entitledTo Secure These Rights. It was a searing indictment of segregation and discrimination and a resounding call for federal action to ensure that African Americans were accorded their constitutional rights. Truman enthusiastically endorsed its findings and recommendations.

When the Democratic Convention assembled in Philadelphia in July, the long-anticipated fight between liberals, headed by Mayor Hubert Humphrey of Minneapolis and the conservative, southern wing of the party, erupted. After a bitter floor fight, the convention adopted a civil rights plank demanding a Fair Employment Practices Commission and federal antilynching and anti-poll tax legislation. Delegates from Dixie made good on their promise to bolt if the party made a commitment to civil rights and immediately walked out of the convention. A few days later, the exhausted rump nominated Truman, largely because, a number of journalists observed, they had no other choice.

Meanwhile, disgruntled southern Democrats gathered in Birmingham, Alabama, waved Confederate flags, paid homage to Jefferson Davis, and founded the States Rights Democratic party. The Dixiecrats, as the southern dissidents were subsequently labeled, nominated South Carolina Governor J. Strom Thurmond for president. The segregationists hoped that they could capture enough electoral votes to throw the election into the House of Representatives, where they might strike a sectional bargain that would preserve their beloved racial system. “The Dixiecrat defection marked the exit of the South from the New Deal coalition,” historian Kerry Frederickson writes, “and the reorientation of the national party toward its more liberal wing … By breaking with the Democratic party, the Dixiecrat movement demonstrated to conservative Southerners that allegiance to one party was ‘neither necessary nor beneficial’ and thus served as the crossover point for many southern voters in their move from the Democratic to the Republican column.”⁵⁸

In other words, 1948 marked the beginning of a two-party system in the South and a way station in the gradual transformation of that region into a Republican stronghold. Ironically, no one would do more to accelerate that trend than Lyndon Johnson.