CHAPTER 11

A POPULIST GENTLEMEN’S CLUB

LYNDONJOHNSON’S PERSONALITY, LIKE THE NATURE OFCongress and, indeed, the human condition, was rife with opposites and the tension between them. Ambition versus public interest. One versus many. Faith versus doubt. The Declaration of Independence spoke not of community in its opening lines but of individual rights and dissolution of unjust governments. The Preamble to the Constitution, by contrast, focused on community, wholeness, oneness. As rhetorician Wayne Fields has noted, the Great Seal of the Republic symbolizes the tension: the eagle clutches in its beak a banner withpluribus emblazoned to the right andunum to the left. In a sense, Congress, rooted in particularism, regionalism, and parochial interest, represents the many, and the presidency, with its fictional persona speaking with the “national voice,” the one.¹

The dichotomy is certainly not absolute. Long before Johnson, nationalists in Congress such as Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun in the nineteenth century and Sam Rayburn and Arthur Vandenburg in the twentieth had stepped forward to advance the cause of unity. Many of the great reform movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—Populism, Progressivism, the New Deal-Fair Deal—were driven by legislators who had a vision of community rooted not just in liberty but in government as well. Although frequently used to buttress an unjust status quo and to protect vested interests, the conservative image of a Jeffersonian America in which the federal government served principally to preside over a nation of independent property-owning individuals was certainly a form of nationalism. Even the most parochial of legislators have held an image of the ideal community in their collective mind. The difference between liberals and conservatives, to oversimplify, has been that the left has argued that social justice is the primary glue of the American comity, as well as the core of true patriotism, and the right has insisted that maximum liberty is the cement of the republic and the defining element in patriotism. Moreover, virtually all legislation passed by Congress is a result of compromise among contending interests, personalities, and regions in which representatives and senators are compelled to act in behalf of the larger good.

Nevertheless, the prospect of realizing the dream of one out of many through the mechanism of the bicameral legislature has often daunted American nationalists. Observing the workings of Congress in 1869, Henry Adams was appalled:

Within the walls of two rooms are forced together in close contact the jealousies of thirty-five million people,—between individuals, between cliques, between industries, between parties, between branches of the Government, between sections of the country, between the nation and its neighbors. As years pass on, the noise and the confusion, the vehemence of this scramble for power or for plunder, the shouting of reckless adventurers, of wearied partisans, and of red-hot zealots in new issues,—the boiling and bubbling of this witches’ cauldron, into which we have thrown eye of newt and toe of frog and all the venomous ingredients of corruption, and from which is expected to issue the future and more perfect republic,—in short, the conflict and riot of interests, grow more and more overwhelming.”²

HARRYTRUMAN’S1948CAMPAIGN had succeeded against all expectation in part because he had chosen to run against Congress. He claimed to represent “the people,” while castigating the people’s representatives as “do-nothings.” Now, in his annual message to Congress in January 1949, President Truman gave legislators a chance to redeem themselves by approving the various components of his domestic program, the Fair Deal. Over the next year, the now Democratic-controlled House and Senate handed him a number of victories. They increased the minimum wage from forty to seventy-five cents an hour and extended the Social Security Act, bringing 10 million new workers under its provisions. Truman’s greatest victory for the disadvantaged was the Housing Act of 1949, which appropriated large sums to clear slums and build 810,000 units of low-cost housing over the next six years.

There were defeats. In the wake of a gigantic lobbying effort by the American Medical Association, Congress rejected the president’s plan for national health insurance. Led by the conservative coalition, the House and Senate also turned back the so-called Brannan Plan, which would have established a guaranteed income for farm families. Most disappointing for Truman was Congress’s obstructionism in the area of civil rights. During the 1948 campaign the president had placed himself squarely behind a broad program of civil rights legislation. Truman advocated federal protection against lynching, anti-poll tax legislation, the establishment of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), and the prohibition of segregation in interstate transportation. For the first time since Reconstruction, the status of African Americans had become a national issue.

Strom Thurmond and Fielding Wright had managed to carry only a handful of states in the Deep South in 1948, but because of the seniority system, the Dixiecrats maintained their strong position in Congress. Mississippi senator and outspoken segregationist James Eastland took over as chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee. From this deceptively innocuous position, he wreaked havoc on the administration’s civil rights program. John Stennis, Mississippi’s other senator, headed a Rules Subcommittee that oversaw anti-poll tax legislation. In the House, William Colmer, congressman from Mississippi, used his position on the Rules Committee to preserve Jim Crow.³From these power niches southern states’ righters continued not only to block civil rights legislation but also to present a compelling critique of the welfare state. The New Deal-Fair Deal’s advocacy of collective bargaining for labor unions, welfare programs for the disadvantaged, and civil rights for blacks, especially the FEPC, gave rise to an uneasy alliance between the old planting aristocracy and New South industrialists. Their alliance was cemented with a virulent anticommunism. Presidential candidate Thurmond warned of a “federal police state, directed from Washington, [that] would force life in each hamlet in America to conform to a Washington pattern.”⁴

 

INDECEMBER1948,preparing to assume his seat, LBJ summoned Bobby Baker, the chief page of the Senate. Though holding one of Washington’s humbler positions, this twenty-year-old prodigy had become something of a power broker by virtue of his encyclopedic knowledge of the workings of the Senate and its personalities. “Mr. Baker,” Johnson said (Bobby, a diminutive hustler who craved respect, was pleased by the formality), “I understand you know where the bodies are buried in the Senate. I’d appreciate it if you’d come to my office and talk to me.”⁵For two hours Johnson and Baker discussed the power structure, the committee system, and the social roadmap of the Senate. “Lyndon and I became close very quickly because we both knew how to count, and he was very quick to learn all there was to know about each and every senator,” said Baker.⁶

He was going to have to do some things that Truman and the liberal wing of the Democratic party would find offensive, Johnson told the young man. He would have to continue to support Taft-Hartley and he would have to support the oil and gas industry. “Frankly, Mr. Baker,” he said, “I’m for nearly anything the big oil boys want because they hold the whip hand and I represent ’em. Yeah, I represent farmers and working men,” he said, but “the New Deal spirit’s gone from Texas and I’m limited in what I can do.” And he would have to oppose the administration’s civil rights program, especially the FEPC. “My state is much more conservative than the national Democratic party,” he said. “I got elected by just 87 votes and I ran against a caveman.”⁷

Johnson was forced to cram his sixteen-member staff—twice the Senate average—into the three rooms of Suite 321 of the Senate Office Building. LBJ pressed the leadership for one of the four-room suites reserved for senior members, but had to settle for a separate office on the next floor down and a fourth telephone line.⁸“When LBJ was first elected to the senate,” recalled Leslie Carpenter, a Texas journalist, “he wanted his office open 24 hours a day. He did not want anybody calling Sen. Lyndon Johnson and his office didn’t answer.”⁹

LBJ announced in the Texas press that he would see every Texan requesting an audience, a potential queue of 7.5 million. He organized the staff into eight-hour shifts and expected them to handle up to 650 letters, 500 phone calls, and 70 visitors a day. Johnson continued to obsess on the mail. He actively solicited letters and laid down strict rules as to how they should be answered. “To Texans, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson is their Senator,” a memo to his staff declared. “He is not an aloof, unapproachable figure about whom they read in the newspapers … They want the letter they receive in reply to be personal—almost like a father writing his son … It must never be forgotten that the voter is sovereign.”¹⁰

To oversee his team, which included Walter Jenkins, Dorothy Nichols, Mary Rather, Warren Woodward, Glynn Stegall, and Horace Busby, Johnson persuaded John Connally to come up, at least for a shakedown period. Even then Connally was a lion to some, a jackal to others. Busby recalled with admiration his “lavish personality,” great good looks, and obvious intelligence. “Rayburn had an extravagant, very high opinion of John Connally,” Rayburn aide D. B. Hardeman recalled. “He said he thought he had more natural ability than any man of his age that he’d ever known.”¹¹“I thought he was a cold-blooded opportunist,” said Virginia Durr. “I think John was essentially a servile character … He was a man who was always on the make, and he was always sucking up and buttering up people he thought could help him.”¹²

Connally, who worked on and off for oil man Sid Richardson, represented basically the viewpoint of Richardson, Clint Murchison, and the Brown brothers. Texas and America were ideally the homes of swashbuckling capitalists, aided by subservient state and federal governments, who looked after the common people out of a sense of noblesse oblige and a desire to maintain social order. Civil rights definitely did not resonate. “My private opinion,” Connally wrote Johnson concerning the Roosevelt administration’s efforts to facilitate voting for military personnel stationed overseas, “is that this is but a cover up for these damn social workers who are trying to destroy the poll tax in the southern States to try to help the Negroes.”¹³

When Connally returned to Texas in September to continue his quest to become a millionaire, Johnson named Walter Jenkins to replace him. Jenkins, a bespectacled, intense man, a Catholic who would eventually sire nine children, would remain an essential part of the LBJ team until he left under a cloud in 1964. Observers were unanimous in praising Jenkins for his loyalty, selflessness, intelligence, work ethic, and tact. He became familiar with every detail of the Johnsons’ business enterprises as well as LBJ’s political affairs. He never leaked to the press unless his boss told him to. According to Washington lawyer and New Dealer Tommy Corcoran, no one other than Lady Bird was more central to Lyndon’s success. “When they come to canonize political aides, he [Jenkins] will be the first summoned, for no man ever negotiated the shark-infested waters of the Potomac with more decency or charity or came out on the other side with his integrity less shaken,” said future aide Bill Moyers.¹⁴But there was something unnatural about Jenkins’s attachment to his boss. Moyers himself was secretly contemptuous of Jenkins’s psychological dependence on LBJ.

 

TRUE TO FORM,Johnson was hard on himself and hard on his staff. He worked nonstop, frequently arriving at the office at 6:30 in the morning and working into the night, “arguing, listening, ‘needling,’ explaining, compromising, chain-smoking and chain-telephoning.”¹⁵He expected the same intensity from his staff, whom he tended to absorb until they became mere extensions of himself. “He consumes people almost without knowing it,” observed Senate aide Harry McPherson. “He wants everything once the deal is made, once the friendship is established … There’s a period in which it’s almost suffocating.”¹⁶Early each day he would stop and pick up Mary Rather on his way to work, “and by the time I sat down he was giving me instructions,” she recalled. “I learned to keep my notebook outside my purse. By the time we reached the office, he had outlined a whole day’s work for me.”¹⁷

The senator thought nothing of chewing out an aide in public for a mistake, real or perceived. George Reedy, who would become Johnson’s lieutenant for political strategy and public relations, was a notorious butt of the senator’s ridicule. The pipe-smoking, rotund Reedy was regularly blistered in front of reporters and staff for failing to come up with the right information at the right time. Johnson considered goading staff over work issues to be a perfectly legitimate method of management. But he was also capable of gratuitous cruelty. On one occasion, at a party where staff were present, guests were putting in drink orders. Rather requested a martini. Johnson, who was standing nearby, turned to her and said, “Um-huh, um-huh, there you are, there you are. We were out the other night and you had a little too many martinis and you made a complete ass out of yourself. I guess that’s what you’re fixing to do tonight.” Ervin “Red” James, who witnessed the scene, recalled that the humiliated young woman just stood there, tears rolling down her cheeks. The next day, Johnson presented her with a new handbag.¹⁸

Norman Heine, who once worked for Johnson when he was a congressman, described the sometimes terrible vortex that he created around himself. “I felt even before I left that I was treated, not as an adult and an intelligent person,” he told John Connally, “but as a child and inferior … When I was in the Navy, I often wondered whether I could get along on my own or not … It’s been quite a mental relief for me to find that I actually can make the grade, and the only way I’d ever work for Lyndon again is to feel beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was actually needed by him, and be sure within my own mind, that it was not I who needed him.”¹⁹

Strong personalities like Connally, Busby, and McPherson were able to stand up to their boss and accept the consequences. They appreciated his underlying idealism, his drive to succeed, and his unparalleled skills as a political tactician. To be associated with Johnson was to be always near the center of action and to be involved with causes that were worthwhile. He and those around him resided at the very heart of the American political enterprise, and that enabled him to continue to attract able and talented subordinates.

 

JOHNSON LEARNED THE WAYSof the Senate quickly. His meeting with Bobby Baker was only the beginning of a massive effort to gather intelligence on the upper house and to insinuate himself into its power structure. He proved spectacularly successful. Sometime later, LBJ granted an audience to historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. “Most informative morning I ever spent,” Schlesinger subsequently told John Kenneth Galbraith. “Never got a word in edgewise … Johnson went over every member of the Senate—his drinking habits, his sex habits, his intellectual capacity, reliability, how you manage him.”²⁰

Hubert Humphrey, the liberal from Minnesota who entered the Senate with Johnson, recalled, “He knew all the little things that people did. I used to say he had his own private FBI. If you ever knew anybody, if you’d been out on a date, or if you had a drink, or if you’d attended a meeting, or you danced with a gal at a night club, he knew it! It was just incredible!”²¹Johnson used personal information to prevent his colleagues from using his own peccadilloes against him and to ensure that they honored the bargains they had made with him. Though even when they did not, there is no evidence of his ever leaking personal information about a colleague to the press. And he rarely if ever asked a fellow senator to do something that would cause his electoral defeat.

Johnson was not a man to tolerate fools easily, however. Those in the upper house who were lazy, stupid, or unwilling to compromise were subjects of his scorn.²²Infrequently, his contempt would burst forth in a public display. After one of his colleagues failed on the floor of the Senate to carry out his assigned duties, Johnson “just reamed him out like he was a bad boy in the family,” Reedy recalled. When one of his staffers advised him that such outbursts could be counterproductive, LBJ replied, “But he’s a stupid bastard.”²³

The power structure in the Senate, then as now, was more tightly controlled than that of the House. Clout resided primarily with the chairs of the permanent committees. Because seniority ruled, most of the committees were controlled by southerners, beginning with Richard Russell of Georgia. At the time, it was generally deemed impossible for a southerner to be elected president, so the best and the brightest political personalities south of the Mason-Dixon line aspired to the Senate.

Russell was generally considered the best of the best. Born in 1897 in Winder, Georgia, he had practiced law and then been elected speaker of the Georgia House, governor, and in 1933 U.S. senator. By 1949 Russell was a towering if lonely figure. A confirmed bachelor who resided in a suite at the Mayflower Hotel, he spent most of his weekends reading or attending an occasional baseball game. His only love was the Senate. He knew its history and workings intimately and was devoted to its role as a stately brake on innovation, a preserver of American traditions. Russell knew as much about the constituencies of his fellow senators as they did themselves.²⁴

Russell was a southerner, a segregationist, and a nationalist. His lifelong struggle was to devise a strategy that would defeat or slow the civil rights movement and at the same time keep his native region in the Democratic party and not far from the mainstream of American life. Like LBJ, he saw economic development as a key to progress in the South. He was a devoted servant of the military-industrial complex. His position as second in command to the ineffective Carl Hayden on the Armed Services Committee ensured the proliferation of bases and defense plants in Georgia and the rest of the South. He became self-appointed leader of the southern caucus or “Dixie Association,” the senators from the eleven states of the former Confederacy who gathered regularly to plan the defeat of anti-poll tax legislation or forestall the creation of new FEPCs.²⁵

Johnson immediately anointed himself a Russell protégé. He sought the Georgian’s advice at every turn and began inviting him to the Johnson home most Sundays to dine and while away the hours. Lynda and Lucy were encouraged to call their guest “Uncle Dick.” LBJ flattered the Georgian, listened to his stories, and encouraged him to run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1952.²⁶He made sure that his desk on the floor of the Senate was next to the Georgian’s and he wrangled a seat on the Armed Services Committee.²⁷

Johnson cultivated Russell because he resided at the seat of power in the Senate and shared some of LBJ’s goals for the South and the nation. He was a master of the art of compromise and persuasion, an art the Texan greatly admired. He was, even when it came to the divisive issue of civil rights, a “patriot,” able in the end to put the nation’s interest ahead of the prejudices of white southerners. Russell in turn saw Johnson as the political figure that he could never be, a southerner with western ties, a nationalist who could hold the sprawling, diverse republic together, and perhaps even be the first man from a former Confederate state since Woodrow Wilson to sit in the White House.²⁸Eventually, LBJ would gain the upper hand with the “Wizard of Winder,” making him a handmaid, however reluctantly, to Johnson’s vision of the future. “That goddamned Johnson!” Russell once remarked to Bobby Baker. “The son of a bitch, you can’t say no to him!”²⁹

 

THE SESSION OFCONGRESSthat convened on January 3, 1948, featured eighteen freshmen senators, fourteen of whom were Democrats. Of these, eight had defeated Republican incumbents. The Class of ’48, of which Johnson was a part, would be remarkable. It included Robert Kerr of Oklahoma, Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, Joe Clark of Pennsylvania, Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, Mike Mansfield of Montana, Paul Douglas of Illinois, Frank Graham of North Carolina, Clinton Anderson of New Mexico, and Russell Long of Louisiana. Kerr quickly rose to prominence as a debater and deal maker. The owner of $100 million in natural gas property, the Oklahoman made no apologies about acting as the chief spokesman for the oil and gas lobby. After LBJ acquired the family homestead in Stonewall, Texas, he, Kerr, and Wayne Morse of Oregon would lounge around the Senate cloak room and talk the talk of gentlemen ranchers.³⁰Paul Douglas, former economics professor and marine hero, would become one of the Senate’s most relentless liberals. But none of the newcomers would become better known for a commitment to social justice than Hubert Humphrey, the former mayor of Minneapolis who had gained national notoriety by delivering a fiery pro-civil rights speech on the floor of the 1948 Democratic National Convention.

Shortly after he took the office, Humphrey made the mistake of attacking Harry Byrd, a reactionary machine politician from Virginia who held senior positions on the Armed Services and Finance Committees. Unaccustomed to the mores of the Senate, Humphrey leveled his charges while Byrd was off the Senate floor and out of town for family reasons. The following day, senators from both parties stood to defend Byrd.³¹As a result, Humphrey was completely ostracized by his fellow Democrats. One day, while walking past a knot of southern senators, Humphrey overheard a remark by Russell obviously meant for his ears: “Can you imagine the people of Minnesota sending that damn fool down here to represent them?”³²The naturally gregarious Humphrey was deeply hurt. Gradually, however, Humphrey, Douglas, and a number of other liberals were accepted into the club.³³

Indeed, despite their profound differences over civil rights, unionization, the regulatory functions of the federal government, and other issues, a strain of populism united the senators from the South, West, and Midwest. Once, Harry McPherson recalled, Humphrey took the floor to speak against Republican Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson’s latest proposal on farm subsidies, based on a sliding scale. “He was bone-tired and in a passionate, hoarse-voiced, and angry ten minute harangue, he declared ‘Hubert Humphrey did not come to the United States Senate to vote for sixty percent of living wage!’ ” Russell, who, during the early New Deal, had sponsored legislation creating the Rural Electrification Administration and the Farmers Home Administration, was heading out of the chamber. When Humphrey began to speak, he turned around, came back and sat down in front of him. Russell called to Olin Johnston, the son of a tenant farmer, now representing the Piedmont of South Carolina, and some others. “They all began to listen and to pound the table … It was a damned revival.” “I used to notice the hands of men like Kerr and Johnson and Bill Fulbright and some others of that … class,” McPherson later observed. “Their hands are generally big and scaly, freckled and hairy … There’s a very common look about them—a worker’s look—even though some of them, like Fulbright, had been an academic all their lives.”³⁴“I’m a reactionary when times are good,” Russell once said. “In a depression, I’m a liberal.”³⁵

On the Republican side, the dominating figure was Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, son of the former president and perennial presidential aspirant. A states’ rights conservative, he was a trenchant foe of the welfare state and the preeminent champion of business interests. He spoke for those Republicans who held a pseudo-religious view of America as a largely stateless society of self-regulating individuals. For them, the Great Depression had been a cataclysmic event that had paved the way for the greatest threats to democracy, free enterprise, and individual liberty that the republic had yet encountered: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. With the defeat of Thomas Dewey in 1948, Taft assumed the role of “Mister Republican” and took the point in criticizing Truman and all he stood for. In the wake of the president’s upset victory, Taft told reporters, “It defies all common sense to send that roughneck ward politician back to the White House.” His philosophy as majority leader was summed up in a statement attributed to him: “The business of the opposition is to oppose.”

Determined to get the most for his constituents, Johnson attempted to go straight to the top of the committee system. He wanted appropriations but in the end had to settle for Armed Services and Interstate and Foreign Commerce. From the one he was able to facilitate the growth of the military-industrial complex in Texas, and from the other, to protect the oil and gas industry. Using these power centers, he quickly racked up credits with constituents large and small: Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) home loans to veterans, the bargain basement sale of government assets to the University of Texas, a huge RFC credit to the Lone Star State Steel Plant in northeast Texas, and government subsidies to a tin smelting operation in Texas City. Gradually, many businessmen, industrialists, and planters who had opposed Johnson began to come around. In the spring of 1950, former governor Jimmy Allred reported that virtually no one in south Texas had a negative thing to say about him.³⁶

According to the program LBJ had in mind, there were two objectives that were in potential conflict: not to take positions that would be perceived as controversial in Texas and to cultivate close ties with the White House and the national Democratic party. The contradiction between these two was quickly highlighted by two issues: civil rights and regulation of the oil and gas industry. Legislative remedies for racial injustice had proved virtually impossible. Under existing Senate rules, the membership could end filibusters by a two-thirds vote, but cloture, as such action was called, was not applicable to debate on motions to consider a bill—thus the possibility for an interminable talkathon.

In March 1949, the administration launched a campaign to have cloture apply to all debate in hopes of paving the way for passage of its civil rights legislation. When Dick Russell called a meeting of the twenty-two members of the Dixie Association to plot strategy for preventing any modification of Rule 22, the cloture rule, Estes Kefauver and Johnson were conspicuously absent. TheWashington Post took note. “I think the next morning must have been one of the most disillusioning mornings of Lyndon Johnson’s life, ever,” Horace Busby said. Telephone messages from old New Dealers such as Tommy Corcoran, Jim Rowe, and Ben Cohen were stacked up. “Oh, no,” Rowe said to Busby. “What does wonder boy think he’s doing? That’s not the way you play the game. He can’t be a senator from Texas and amount to anything if he’s going to start behaving like this. What is he, a goddamned idealist or something?”³⁷LBJ’s lieutenant recalled that he had never seen his boss more disgusted.

A day or two later, Russell made a formal appointment and came by to see Johnson. “Senator Russell just took him up on the mountaintop and gave him a picture of what lay ahead if he didn’t keep faith with his southern colleagues,” Busby recalled. “He’d never get recognized on the floor when he needed it, and he’d never get bills passed for Texas.”³⁸But Russell also expressed sympathy when Johnson stated his position: his opposition to the poll tax and lynching and his vision of an America with a progressive South as one of its essential components.

A few days later, LBJ summoned Busby and told him he intended to deliver his maiden speech in the Senate on Rule 22, but that he wanted to focus on cloture, not civil rights. In the meantime, Alvin Wirtz and Jimmy Allred had arrived in Washington. Together with John Connally, they convinced a reluctant Johnson that he could not placate white sensibilities unless he condemned Truman’s civil rights program, especially the FEPC. The Senate was packed on the appointed day. “The galleries were filled with all these conspicuous figures from Washington’s past; everybody came up there to see Johnson make his maiden speech,” Busby recalled. “So they got there and he started out speaking and before long—he could get himself more wrought up making a speech, internally, than anybody I’ve ever seen. And he wasn’t very long into the speech until the perspiration started showing on the back of his coat and on his forehead.”³⁹

Johnson began by staunchly defending the Senate’s right to unlimited debate and attacked the administration’s civil rights program, especially the FEPC. To Russell’s delight, he took the high ground on cloture. The Senate had been established in part to protect the rights of the few against the passion of the many. The rights of all minorities were at stake. “When I say minority,” the freshman from Texas declared, “I do not limit the term to mean only the South … It belongs to all the Nation, and to all the minorities—racial, religious, political, economic, or otherwise—which make up this nation.” He went on to denounce racism. “No prejudice is so contagious or so dangerous,” LBJ proclaimed, “as the unreasoning prejudice against men because of their birth, the color of their skin, or their ancestral background.” The current debate had nothing to do with “the Negro race,” with the South’s desire to perpetuate bigotry and hatred. He was as opposed as any American to the poll tax and lynching, the junior senator from Texas declared, but federal laws, federal control had not been the answer in 1869 and were not the answer in 1949.⁴⁰Subsequently, in May and July 1950, Johnson joined with Tom Connally to vote nay on a cloture motion during southern filibusters against the FEPC bill.⁴¹

Blacks in Texas and liberals in Washington were not pleased. The executive secretary of the Houston branch of the NAACP cabled, “The Negroes who sent you to Congress are ashamed to know that you have stood on the floor against them today. Do not forget that you went to Washington by a small majority vote and that was because of the Negro vote.” The organization even sent a delegation to Washington to plead with Johnson directly, but to no avail. “Your old friends who remember the high stepping, idealistic, intelligent young man who came here as a bright young Congressman in 1938 expect more of you than that,” Rowe complained.⁴²

Johnson was infuriated by the mixed signals his New Dealer friend was sending. In response, he donned the mask worn by Booker T. Washington a half-century earlier. “I think all men are created equal,” he wrote Rowe. “I want all men to have equal opportunity. Yes, I even think your civil rights slogans are eloquent and moving. But when you and Humphrey … reach the point of translating your humanitarian spirit into law you seem always to lose any sense of charity, faith in your fellow man, or reasonableness.” What the nation was witnessing was “two blind unreasoning minorities” colliding.⁴³What the country needed, he told Rowe, was a “frontal assault on the ‘ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-fed’ problem facing part of our nation. Until this problem is met, all your other legislation is built upon sand.”⁴⁴

Nevertheless, Johnson was stung by the criticism. With an eye to appeasing his liberal friends and to solidifying his position with Texas’s largest minority, the junior senator in 1949 ostentatiously came to the aid of a Mexican American family victimized by white racism. In January of that year, Dr. Hector Garcia, a prominent south Texas physician, called LBJ asking for his help. It seemed that the white-owned funeral home in the small Texas community of Three Rivers was refusing the use of its facilities for the reburial of a Mexican American soldier, Felix Longoria, killed in the Philippines during World War II. Johnson told Garcia to try again, but if the Rice Funeral Home still insisted on discriminating, he and President Truman would see that Private Longoria was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery. Soon the Texas papers and then the national press had gotten wind of the story; both lauded Johnson’s humanitarianism. The local mortician continued to refuse to see his chapel desecrated with the bones of a brown American, and the remains were duly buried at Arlington, with the Johnsons and Truman’s military aide, General Harry Vaughn, in attendance.

In the aftermath of the civil rights battle in the Senate, LBJ proceeded to align himself with the White House on other measures. He voted for extended rent control, federal aid to education, additional low-rent public housing, a higher minimum wage, and expanded Social Security benefits. When a Fort Worth industrialist wrote to complain about wasteful government spending, Johnson lost his temper. “Would you have the government repudiate the national debt so that five billion dollars could be saved?” he asked rhetorically. “Would you scrap all our programs of Veterans’ benefits and throw the Veterans recklessly on to the labor market, compounding the chaos of unemployment?” Should the nation dispense with food inspection, the Public Health Service, national defense and the court system as well?⁴⁵

With the oil and gas lobby, Johnson faced a lose-lose situation. He had to oppose his president, who wanted to cut back the excessive subsidies enjoyed by these industries; yet he could never please industry bosses who were suspicious of him and always on the lookout for another Coke Stevenson. For example, throughout his second term, Harry Truman lobbied Congress to reduce the 27.5 percent oil depletion allowance, a huge tax break based on the gradual consumption of proven resources. But producers in Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and California would have none of it. “We could have taken a 5 or 10 percent figure,” Tom Connally later confided, “but we grabbed 27.5 because we were not only hogs but the odd figure made it appear as though it was scientifically arrived at.”⁴⁶

Arguing that the allowance was necessary to finance expensive exploration operations and to guarantee national self-sufficiency in petroleum, Johnson joined with the majority in defeating various amendments to reduce the depletion allowance. “One could simply not oppose the 27.5 depletion allowance and stay alive as a political figure in Texas,” Harry McPherson said. Nevertheless, “his speeches on the floor in behalf of it were perfunctory and half-hearted.”⁴⁷

Much more controversial than the depletion allowance was the tidelands, or offshore oil deposits, issue. Truman favored federal control of tidelands oil deposits off the Texas coast. Almost to a person, Texans were adamantly opposed. “I’ve known of no other issue that aroused—even including civil rights—such a tremendous statewide emotion in Texas,” George Reedy remembered.⁴⁸Not only were the giant oil concerns and the independents up in arms, but middle-and working-class Texans were as well. The entire public school system plus the University of Texas were funded by proceeds from oil lands. Citizens of the Lone Star State were convinced that their livelihoods and the future of their children depended on oil. “A lot of Texans had an uneasy conscience about civil rights,” Reedy said. “But there was no such thing as an anti-tidelands constituency.”⁴⁹

The issue was almost as emotional in the Northeast. Herblock ran a famous cartoon that was nationally syndicated entitled “Down by Smuggler’s Cove,” which depicted the nation’s oilmen in the light of the moon gathering on the shore to steal the public’s domain.⁵⁰Johnson worked out a compromise in which the states would receive one-third of the proceeds from oil extracted from submerged lands and the federal government two-thirds, but the oil industry rejected it. Privately LBJ told friends that he favored federal control, but in public he staunchly defended states’ rights. During the 1951-1952 session of Congress, he helped pass bills granting all affected states except Texas control over submerged lands three miles offshore. The Lone Star State would control out to ten and a half miles. Truman vetoed the bills, denouncing them as “robbery in broad daylight.”⁵¹

Those who profited from fossil fuel in the Lone Star State were generally a greedy lot, conservative to the point of being crackpots. “I think they regarded Bob Taft with a bit of suspicion as being too liberal,” George Reedy declared.⁵²Thus it was that when Leland Olds, a member of the Federal Power Commission (FPC) since 1939 and an outspoken advocate of regulation of the gas industry, came up for reconfirmation, LBJ led the charge in opposing him. Olds was a fifty-nine-year-old New Yorker educated at Amherst College, where his father had been president. Following graduation, he became a Congregationalist minister, then from 1922 through 1929 worked as labor editor of theFederated Press until Governor Franklin Roosevelt selected him to head the New York State Power Authority. Then in 1939 Olds was tapped for the FPC. As a radical journalist in the 1920s, he had written a number of articles concerning the evils of capitalism and the inevitability of its collapse. He had subsequently moderated his views, but was still something of an icon to unions, consumers, and those favoring federal regulation of private enterprise.⁵³As the nation’s leading advocate for public power, he was anathema to the oil and gas interests.

It fell to LBJ to head the subcommittee of the Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee that held hearings on Olds’s nomination. Johnson realized that in the overheated atmosphere of the early cold war, the nominee’s earlier writings praising Russia and communism would do him in. He met with Olds privately in an effort to persuade him to disavow the fifty-four articles published in “Labor Letter,” his column for the Federated Press. When Olds brushed him off, Johnson decided to lead a no-holds-barred attack. South Texas Congressman John Lyle set the tone when he denounced Olds for sneering at the Fourth of July, referring to the church as “a handmaiden of the capitalist system,” advocating nationalization of the coal, rail, and power industries, and preaching the communist doctrine of class struggle. Olds testified that he was not and had never been a communist and had changed his mind about Russia, but he also refused to disavow his earlier writings. Johnson’s subcommittee voted seven to zero against confirmation, and the full committee concurred by a tally of ten to two.

LBJ should have let the matter rest there, but did not. He took to the floor of the Senate to denounce Olds for his “lifelong prejudice and hostility against the industries he now regulates.”⁵⁴“I do not charge that Mr. Olds is a communist,” he said. “I realize that the line he followed, the phrases he used, the causes he espoused, resemble the party line today,” but that did not make him a communist. Still, Johnson proclaimed, the issue before the Senate was: “Shall we have a Commissioner or a commissar?”⁵⁵By a vote of fifty-three to fifteen the Senate overwhelmingly defeated the Olds nomination. “It was a pre-Joe McCarthy campaign,” Joe Rauh later observed. “It was really vicious.”⁵⁶Drew Pearson, who was close to Olds, would never forgive Johnson. But the mail from Texas was overwhelmingly laudatory. Johnson noted that not only the consistently reactionaryDallas Morning News and Houston Post editorialized against Olds, but the vast majority of small dailies and weeklies did as well.⁵⁷

Johnson’s red-baiting was inexcusable, perhaps, but understandable. As historian Michael Gillette has observed, “The political atmosphere in October 1949 was one of suspicion against leftist government officials. The [Alger] Hiss trial was in the headlines; two days after the Senate vote [on Olds], eleven leaders of the American Communist party were convicted of conspiring to advocate the overthrow of the government … At that time most senators were far less interested in determining the accuracy of every accusation against Olds than they were in letting the public know and having the record show that they themselves did not vote for a man who was accused of being a Communist.”⁵⁸

Despite his wrecking job on the Olds nomination, Johnson continued to be a strong advocate of public power. He worked assiduously for the confirmation of Mon Walgren, a liberal from a public power state, to the FPC.⁵⁹Indeed, according to George Reedy, Horace Busby, and D. B. Hardeman, Johnson was never close to his state’s oil and gas industry. With a few individual exceptions, such as Wesley West, J. R. Parten, and the Brown brothers, big oil and gas continued to oppose him. H. L. Hunt, Sid Richardson, Clint Murchison, and others shared the view of E. B. Germany, CEO of Lone Star Steel, that LBJ was “the very essence of New Dealism and a stalwart of the philosophy of government which had brought this nation to the brink of disaster … He helped sow the seed for the harvest we are now reaping … [of] communists, fellow travelers, pinkos, and traitors to the American way of life firmly entrenched in … power.”⁶⁰

Personally, Johnson found the whole lot disgustingly self-centered and anti-democratic. Booth Mooney, an LBJ aide, recalled a meeting of oil and gas executives in which LBJ castigated them for opposing every piece of social legislation that came down the pike. “ ‘You make it goddamn hard for us to fight your battles up here,’ he said. ‘And it doesn’t help any when stories come out in the papers about your private airplanes and your clubrooms with walls lined with the skins of unborn lambs and the fifty-grand parties you throw. You guys have about as much public relations sense as a tomcat on the prowl on Saturday night.’ Some of his listeners snickered uncomfortably, but none undertook to answer his criticism.”⁶¹

Neither was Johnson a soulmate of Dick Russell and the Dixie Association. LBJ, Hubert Humphrey observed, “was a close friend of Dick Russell’s; a close associate of Walter George [the other Democratic senator from Georgia] … he was on good working relationships with every southerner, but he wasn’t quite southern. He was a different cut. He worked with them on all the issues they were interested in, the depletion allowances, and in the early days on civil rights … But the relationship was never what I considered an emotional one, it was pragmatic.”⁶²

Soon after he entered the Senate, Johnson attended a meeting of the House-Senate Armed Services Committee conference. Harry Byrd Sr. of Virginia had been openly critical of those advocating a 70 group air force. Indignantly, Johnson demanded an apology from “as patrician a patrician as ever served in the Senate,” for impugning the character, motives, and intelligence of 70-group supporters, of which he was one. A “flustered” Byrd apologized, directed that his remarks be stricken from the record, and asked that the committee move on with its business.⁶³Although it was under different circumstances, when Hubert Humphrey, another freshman, had dared criticize Byrd, it had nearly ruined his career.

LBJ recognized early on that if he were going to be a power in the Democratic party and the U.S. Senate, he would have to build a working relationship with his liberal colleagues. His bridge to the twenty-five or so “bomb-throwers,” as he called them, would be Hubert Humphrey. A year into their first term, Johnson began inviting the Minnesotan to his office for a drink and chats about the Senate and public affairs. It seemed an odd choice. Not only had Humphrey angered southerners and the Senate establishment—Timeran his picture on its cover with a tornado in the background, symbolizing the turmoil he would bring to Congress—but he was chair of the Americans for Democratic Action, the same organization that had led a campaign to dump Truman in favor of Dwight Eisenhower or William O. Douglas in 1948. But there was something about Humphrey, an echo of Maury Maverick, perhaps. He was smart, courageous, idealistic, and he wanted to make a difference. Johnson frequently invited Russell to join him and Humphrey for their chats.⁶⁴

Humphrey and Johnson had both been schoolteachers, all three were from small towns, and each had an abiding sympathy for the rural poor. Johnson and Russell begin to think of Humphrey as “a more pragmatic fellow,” who “wanted to learn how to live with people.” To Paul Douglas and his other liberal friends, Humphrey began to argue that at his core Johnson was a New Dealer, but like all who hoped to remain in Congress, he had to adjust his ideas to the political realities of his home state. The liberals came to see Johnson as a man with whom they could do business, his way an avenue to social change, a means to both progress and union. “Johnson was an intensely ambitious man, anxious to get power and hold on to it,” Douglas would say. “He had a progressive background, and I think this had entered into his spirit and was a fundamental feature of his character … But Texas after Roosevelt was a very different place than it had been. Gas and Oil came to the fore … They had become intensely anti-Roosevelt and anti-progressive, and yet they were the dominant characters in the state and in the Democratic party … Johnson, therefore, had this struggle within himself of his native tendencies, his Roosevelt idealism, faced with the hard facts of power politics and economic power.”⁶⁵

The key to Johnson’s success as a senator was his skill in empathizing with his colleagues, but more than that, with his colleagues’ constituents. His ability to get at the essence of other people was unparalleled, Harry McPherson observed. He perceived their fears, their hopes, their strengths, their weaknesses, their idealism, their pragmatism. June White, long-time family friend and wife of journalist William S. White, remembered that “he could read people almost on meeting them … It’s almost as though he knew their assets, their plusses and their negative points, so that he could go … to their plus points and use them, even helping them to use themselves to their best advantage.”⁶⁶“He was like a novelist, a psychiatrist,” Hubert Humphrey said.⁶⁷He could identify with Jewish garment workers, Mexican American farm laborers, African Americans, both rural and urban, and white southerners jealous of their status and fearful of the future.

LBJ’s relationship with the White House and Harry Truman was mixed. Truman had been unerring in his support of LBJ over Coke Stevenson in the 1948 campaign,⁶⁸but the Texan’s votes in favor of Taft-Hartley and his opposition to both the FEPC and the Olds nomination had rankled. Richard Russell had little respect for Truman, and he let Johnson know it. The junior senator from Texas was sometimes included in the group that the president and Clark Clifford, a principal adviser to the president, assembled to cruise the Potomac aboard the presidential yacht. There LBJ had a chance to rub shoulders with Chief Justice Carl Vinson, Clifford, Truman pal George Allen, and other luminaries. For an entire weekend Truman would preside over an eight-handed poker game lubricated with bourbon and branch water. “Everybody would come and show up in the dining room for breakfast,” Clark Clifford recounted, “and they’d talk about conventions, and they’d talk about past experiences and the past political giants of the Democratic party.”⁶⁹

But there was always a distance. At the end of Johnson’s first year in the Senate, Horace Busby asked why he did not spend more time at the White House. “It’s this curly-headed fellow, Clifford.” What has he got against you, Busby asked? “Clifford’s one of those St. Louis aristocrats. He doesn’t want the President to be around southerners and political types.”⁷⁰The two men would grow closer.

Eventually the relationship warmed. Johnson and Truman had too much in common for it not to. Both were genuine in their sympathy for the common man. Both were pragmatic politicians who detested pretension and thought racial prejudice absurd and a waste of time. LBJ played to Truman’s “exaggerated masculinity,” as George Reedy put it. “You know, his conversation was loaded with words that were so damn blue that even Johnson would blush occasionally … Johnson would always play this old game of contrasting Harry Truman to … some of the more effete liberals and intellectuals in the party. And Harry Truman wound up being a very strong Johnson supporter.”⁷¹

 

IFLBJSOMETIMES DIFFERED with the White House over aspects of domestic policy, he marched pretty much in lockstep with it in foreign affairs. By 1949 the notion prevailed among most Americans that they and their allies faced an international communist threat directed from the Kremlin and bent on world domination. They made little or no distinction between Marxist-Leninist ideology and Soviet imperialism. When China, the most populous nation in the world, fell to the communists in 1949, both government officials and the general public in the United States assumed that the Kremlin was responsible. The triumph of the Chinese communists under Mao Zedong greatly intensified public and official anxiety in the United States and led directly to the Korean War. After the Soviet Union exploded an atomic device in 1949, Truman ordered the military to go ahead with development of a hydrogen bomb. At the same time, Secretary of State Dean Acheson ordered the policy planning staff, now headed by Paul Nitze, to come up with a new defense policy. The result was the National Security Council’s policy statement NSC 68.

The premise underlying NSC 68 was that Marxism-Leninism was inherently totalitarian and expansionist and that the Soviet Union was determined to impose its will on the entire world. Nitze advocated a massive expansion of American military power to enable the United States to meet the threat posed by Soviet communism whenever and wherever it appeared. NSC 68 insisted that the U.S. economy could support a military budget that absorbed up to 50 percent of the GNP, and it recommended that defense spending be increased from $13 billion to $45 billion.

Before the globalist policies inherent in NSC 68 could be carried out, however, the cold war spread to the Korean peninsula and heated up. On June 25, 1950, the army of the communist republic of North Korea crossed the thirty-eighth parallel in an effort to reunify the country by force. South Korean (ROK) forces fled in confusion. Two days later, Truman ordered General Douglas MacArthur, who then headed the Allied occupation government in Japan, to use troops under his command to ensure that the South Korean army was not driven entirely off the peninsula. Subsequently, with American help, ROK forces were able to establish and protect an enclave around Pusan.

LBJ immediately declared his support for the Truman administration’s decision to make a stand in Korea. Johnson hailed the president’s action as one that “gives a new and noble meaning to freedom, gives purpose to our national resolve and determination, convincingly affirms America’s capacity for world leadership.”⁷²Johnson was only being consistent. Throughout 1949 he had supported the administration’s efforts to beef up the armed forces. “He was thoroughly convinced that we lived in a world where the United States would have no real voice or real prestige in international affairs unless it had the necessary defense strength to back it up,” George Reedy observed. It was also clear that he believed in the concept of a monolithic communist threat. “Russia needs … and wants war,” he told the Senate in a speech delivered some two weeks after the North Korean invasion, and placed the outbreak of hostilities in the context of the Soviet drive for world domination.⁷³

As had been true during World War II, LBJ had no intention of sitting on the sidelines during the Korean conflict. Because of his experience in defense and military matters and his seat on the Armed Services Committee, Johnson’s mind turned naturally to the idea of a special Senate watchdog committee that would oversee the relationship between the defense industry and the federal government, simultaneously ensuring efficiency in the war effort and protection of the reputation of the Democratic administration. Working through Russell and Millard Tydings of Maryland, the committee chairman, Johnson had little trouble bringing the special committee into being, with him as its chair.⁷⁴

Between August and September, the committee produced its first wave of reports. They criticized the federal government for “paperwork preparedness,” a “siesta psychology,” and a “business as usual” attitude. They singled out the government Munitions Board for continuing to sell “surplus” property to the private sector at bargain-basement prices when there was a war on. One Texas operator had managed to buy $1.2 million worth of surplus airplane parts for $6.89 and then sell them back to the government for $63,000. For these and other transgressions, especially the failure to stockpile enough synthetic rubber, Truman summarily fired the chairman of the Munitions Board. The air force suddenly canceled a $1,650,000 order for white dress gloves for officers when it was rumored that Johnson was merely thinking about launching an investigation.⁷⁵

Allied forces, made up primarily of South Korean and U.S. troops, were initially restricted to their toehold around Pusan on the southeastern tip of the peninsula. In the fall, however, MacArthur staged a daring amphibious landing at the port of Inchon on the west coast halfway between the thirty-eighth parallel and the southern tip of Korea. The assault was a success, with MacArthur’s troops quickly establishing a beachhead. In the weeks that followed, U.S. marines and army personnel in cooperation with ROK troops pushed out from Pusan and Inchon. Confronted with this two-pronged offensive and Allied fire-power, the North Korean army began to retreat, a retreat that quickly turned into a rout.

As MacArthur’s soldiers neared the prewar boundary between North and South Korea, the Truman administration faced a dilemma. Should the UN command stop at the thirty-eighth parallel, or should it continue northward and reunify the country? MacArthur strenuously recommended the latter course, and Truman’s advisers in Washington soon concurred, arguing to the president that it would be impossible to maintain an independent and secure South Korea as long as the communists were in control of the North. And, of course, the temptation to roll back the frontiers of communism in East Asia was hard to resist.

By the second week in November, MacArthur was within sight of the Yalu River, the boundary separating North Korea from China. With the bitter Korean winter setting in, three hundred thousand Chinese troops crossed the border and smashed the two Allied columns that had penetrated deep into North Korean territory. In his haste and overconfidence, MacArthur had had these two spearheads advance so quickly that they outran their logistical and reserve support. The communists killed or captured a large number of American soldiers, some twenty-three thousand in the vicinity of the Chosin reservoir alone. A remnant of MacArthur’s force fought its way to the coast and escaped, while what remained of the shattered columns retreated before the advancing Chinese. Massing its reserves and utilizing its superior firepower, the UN command halted the communist offensive, but only after the Red Chinese and North Koreans had advanced well below the thirty-eighth parallel. Slowly, painfully, the Allies advanced up the peninsula once again until they reached a line corresponding roughly to the prewar boundary.

Following the Chinese intervention, Truman declared a state of national emergency, quadrupled his budget request for defense, and increased the size of the army by 50 percent.⁷⁶Johnson’s response was to criticize the administration for not having prepared earlier, declaring that “we have thrown up a chicken-wire fence, not a wall of armed might.”⁷⁷From late 1950 through 1952, he would urge the fullest possible mobilization of the nation’s material and human resources. Meanwhile, the preparedness subcommittee launched one investigation after another into the defense effort. LBJ and the committee staff carefully avoided stepping on the White House’s toes while at the same time satisfying the Republicans that they were not participating in a whitewash.⁷⁸

Yet, by the fall of 1950, many Americans had become thoroughly frustrated with Harry Truman. Southerners were up in arms over his civil rights policies, liberals were disgusted with his inability to defeat the conservative coalition in Congress and with what they considered his personal vulgarity—he was then spending long hours writing wrathful and profane letters to columnists and reviewers who dared criticize him or his singing daughter, Margaret—and everyone was fed up with the Korean War. Public opinion polls taken in late 1950 indicated that 66 percent of the American people favored pulling out of the war, with 49 percent convinced that entering had been a mistake in the first place.⁷⁹

 

NOT SURPRISINGLY,the Democrats took a beating in the midterm congressional elections, losing twenty-eight seats in the House and five in the Senate, among them the whip, Francis Myers of Pennsylvania.⁸⁰There was not exactly a stampede to fill the now vacant leadership posts. Many considered them to be pathways to political oblivion because those who held them were diverted from the needs of their home states and their constituents. When Bobby Baker first mentioned the possibility of running for whip to Johnson, he laughingly replied, “You’ll destroy me, because I can’t afford to be identified with the Democratic party right now.”⁸¹

But when Russell and Bob Kerr told Johnson that they would support him for whip, he decided to go for it. The chief obstacle was Senator Ernest W. McFarland of Arizona, who wanted to be majority leader and who did not want to have LBJ as his chief lieutenant. “Senator McFarland was not a strong leader,” Bobby Baker recalled. “He in many ways was envious and jealous of Lyndon Johnson.”⁸²For Russell, however, the very fact of McFarland’s weakness was reason enough to see Lyndon fill the number two position. Thus it unfolded that at the party caucus held on January 2, 1951, Lyndon Baines Johnson was selected by acclamation as the youngest whip in Senate history.⁸³

The position hardly seemed worth the effort. It brought LBJ a small private office in the Senate and a desk in the middle of the front row on the chamber floor, but seemingly little else. Traditionally, the whip was nothing more than a vote counter for the majority leader, a job that secretary to the majority Felton “Skeeter” Johnson was more than capable of performing. The whip acted as leader when that person was absent, but McFarland was rarely gone. Nonetheless, LBJ was a master at exploiting whatever office he held. His influence grew as he helped one senator after another bring their pet legislative schemes to first committee and then full Senate vote. He had Russell’s and Kerr’s ear, and he continued to consult ostentatiously with Speaker Rayburn.

 

THE82NDCONGRESSwould become notorious for its investigative committees. More than 130 shined a legislative searchlight on everything from labor racketeering, to organized crime, to the national defense effort. They were considered effective mechanisms for members of the Senate and House to gain national and local headlines as guardians of the public welfare. Johnson’s ongoing probe of the defense effort continued to be among the most conspicuous. With Reedy and Baker’s help, LBJ successfully cultivated reporters fromTime, Newsweek , and theNew York Times. Collier’s and theSaturday Evening Post both ran feature articles on the man and the politician. Indeed, virtually every national publication that covered Congress praised the work of the subcommittee, culminating withNewsweek featuring LBJ, the country’s “watch-dog in chief,” on the cover of its November 1950 issue.

As the media would learn, when evaluating the public career of Lyndon Johnson it was always prudent to distinguish between rhetoric and reality, although in politics, it should be noted, rhetoric sometimes creates reality. For example, it seemed in the waning months of 1951 that the majority whip, caught up in the passions of the cold war, had become an advocate of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. To audiences in west Texas and Dallas, he proclaimed that conflicts like Korea were part of a global plot hatched by the Soviet Union to dominate the world. Proxy wars in which the Kremlin escaped punishment for shedding the blood of others could not be allowed to continue. “Someday, somewhere, some way,” he declared, “there must be a clear-cut settlement between the forces of freedom and the forces of communism. It is foolish to talk of avoiding war.” Several weeks later: “We should announce, I believe, that any act of aggression, anywhere, by any communist forces, will be regarded as an act of aggression by the Soviet Union … If anywhere in the world—by any means, open or concealed—communism trespasses upon the soil of the free world, we should unleash all the power at our command upon the vitals of the Soviet Union.” Challenged by a member of the audience, Johnson declared, “I realize full well the awesome potentialities of this proclamation.”⁸⁴

One of his biographers would dub Johnson “Senator Strangelove” for these Armageddon-like statements, but it should be noted that they were the stuff of brinksmanship and massive retaliation, the foreign policy doctrines that would sweep Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles into power in 1952 and keep them there for eight years. Moreover, when it came down to substantive acts, it seemed that Johnson preferred restraint and sought limited, not total, war.

By March 1951, the war had reached a stalemate, with both sides dug in in the vicinity of the thirty-eighth parallel. The “American Caesar,” as one of his biographers would subsequently dub MacArthur, was not happy; he advocated not only retaking the North, but attacking China. In April, he addressed a public letter to Representative Joseph Martin, Republican minority leader in the House, in which he called for an all-out war effort in Asia to defeat the communists and criticized “diplomats” for being willing to fight with words only. “It seems strangely difficult for some to realize that here in Asia is where the Communist conspirators have elected to make their play for global conquest—if we lose the war to communism in Asia the fall of Europe is inevitable,” MacArthur observed to Martin and through him to the American people. Truman was understandably furious. “The son of a bitch isn’t going to resign on me,” the president heatedly told General Omar Bradley. “I want him fired.”⁸⁵With the concurrence of the Joint Chiefs, Truman on April 11 relieved MacArthur of his command.

Acutely aware of the general’s popularity, especially among conservatives, the Republicans prepared to blast the Democrats once more for being soft on communism and to charge the administration with not supporting its military commanders in the field. MacArthur’s firing was a clear indication of the degree of communist infiltration of the federal government, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin declared. “How can we account for our present situation,” he asked rhetorically, “unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster?”⁸⁶He began referring to Dean Acheson, the nattily attired secretary of state, as “the Red Dean of Fashion.”

The conqueror of Manila and Inchon was welcomed as a returning hero when he arrived in the United States on April 17. He made his way in a triumphal procession from San Francisco to New York, where a ticker-tape parade dumped an unprecedented sixteen tons of confetti on his motorcade. From there he traveled to Washington, where he addressed a joint session of Congress. It was from this lofty platform that MacArthur delivered his “old soldiers never die, they just fade away” speech. Unfortunately for the Truman administration, the general refused to do either. Former President Herbert Hoover declared MacArthur to be the “reincarnation of St. Paul into a great General of the Army who came out of the East.” “I’ll never forget watching him go up Pennsylvania Avenue,” George Reedy recalled. “I had a very strong feeling that if he had said, ‘Come on, let’s take it,’ and had started to charge toward the White House, that whole crowd would have gone with him.”⁸⁷

Johnson found MacArthur’s performance disgusting and, increasingly, alarming. Since his days in the South Pacific he had never had much respect for the man. To LBJ, MacArthur’s fault was not that he was a grandstander, but that he was lazy and inefficient.⁸⁸Moreover, Johnson was then and would continue to be an ardent supporter of civilian control of the military. There was no doubt in his mind that the general was violating his constitutional oath and acting insubordinately against both Truman and the Joint Chiefs. “The basic issue is whether American policy shall be made by the elected officials of the government who are responsible to the people,” he declared in a public statement, “or by military leaders who are responsible only to their immediate superiors.”⁸⁹

Johnson’s was not a popular position in Texas. As he made his way across the nation, MacArthur had taken care to stop in Texas. In Houston, oil and banking magnates Jesse Jones, H. L. Hunt, and Hugh Roy Cullen, who had helped sponsor the visit, presented the hero of Inchon with the keys to a new Cadillac automobile.⁹⁰Walter Jenkins recalled that the MacArthur controversy produced “the largest single mail that we ever had on one issue,” the overwhelming majority favorable to MacArthur and calling for Truman’s impeachment.⁹¹

 

IRONICALLY,it was the Republicans who provided the administration and its supporters with a strategy for extricating themselves from their dilemma. Shortly after the general’s dismissal, congressional Republicans had begun calling for a full investigation into Truman’s foreign and defense policies. Convinced that if given enough rope, the liberator of the Philippines would hang himself, Senate Democratic leaders, including Johnson, enthusiastically supported the idea of letting him testify. The person in charge of the hearings would have to be above reproach, all agreed. Immediately, the Senate gravitated to Richard Russell, a man clearly independent of the Truman administration but at the same time a proven Democratic loyalist. The MacArthur hearings, to be conducted jointly by the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees, would require “a subtle mind,” as George Reedy put it.⁹²

From the beginning, LBJ played a leading role in the proceedings. Russell and Tom Connally, chair of Foreign Relations, would preside, but Lyndon Johnson would sit second chair. To help Russell prepare, Johnson lent him staffers George Reedy and Jerry Siegel. “There were almost daily morning sessions with Russell, Johnson, and myself,” Reedy recalled. “I’d stay up most of the night analyzing the testimony … Then I’d wait until Russell came in, and he and Johnson and I would spend about an hour, sometimes a couple of hours, discussing what was going to happen during the day and thinking of all the various eventualities.”⁹³

The three decided that the worst thing that could happen was for the proceedings to become adversarial. MacArthur must be made to feel secure so that he would spin out his scenario and “the ridiculousness of it would eventually become apparent.” Russell was convinced, and convinced Johnson, that the nation had arrived at a very dangerous point. The American people would not long continue to be willing to shed blood and treasure to preserve the status quo ante bellum—in Korea or anywhere else. The options to containment, however, were isolationism or Armageddon.⁹⁴

Soon Johnson began to take charge of the questioning. He was exceedingly solicitous and patient. “Lister Hill [Democratic senator from Florida] had a favorite word that when you gave somebody honey, he called it a honey fucking,” Bobby Baker said, “and Lyndon Johnson gave Douglas MacArthur the biggest honey fucking I have ever seen in my life.”⁹⁵Gradually, LBJ began to ask questions for which the general did not have good answers. The administration’s chief witness was JCS Chairman General Omar Bradley. MacArthur had been out of the country too long, he said, and had lost sight of global strategy. “Taking on Red China,” he declared at the hearings, would have led only “to a larger deadlock at greater expense.” So long as the United States regarded the Soviet Union as the principal adversary and Europe as the chief prize in the cold war, the all-out conflict in Asia advocated by MacArthur “would involve us in the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time and with the wrong enemy.”⁹⁶Eventually, the logic of the administration’s argument began to take hold, and the furor over MacArthur’s firing died away.

When, in June 1951, the Soviet representative to the UN suggested an armistice in Korea with both sides withdrawing beyond their respective sides of the thirty-eighth parallel, Washington leaped at the offer. Tense negotiations began at Panmunjom and dragged on through 1952. The stalemated talks became an issue in the 1952 election, when the Republican candidate, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, promised to go directly to Korea to end the war. He did indeed make the trip, but it was probably his secret threats of nuclear strikes against North Korea and China if they did not agree to a permanent truce that ended the fighting.

 

THEKOREANWARwas a “limited war,” a unique and frustrating byproduct of the Soviet-American nuclear stalemate as well as a civil war with deep roots in Korean history. Though the United States possessed atomic weapons that could have been used to devastate North Korea and communist China, it dared not use them for fear of nuclear retaliation by the Soviet Union in East Asia and even Europe. Thus began a generation of limited, conventional conflicts; total mobilization and a complete commitment to victory were unthinkable as long as the world was under the threat of atomic annihilation. In a sense, however, Korea marked a clear-cut victory for the policy of containment. The United States and its allies had succeeded in “holding the line” against communist aggression. Just as the Berlin Blockade had reassured the noncommunist population of Europe that the Americans would walk the last mile with them, so, too, did the Korean war demonstrate to the people of East Asia that the United States would expend blood and treasure to defend them from the scourge of communism.

The question that the war did not answer was whether the policy of containment was capable of distinguishing between Marxism-Leninism as an economic theory and means to social justice on the one hand and Sino-Soviet imperialism on the other. And it reinforced the fear among the people of developing nations that in its obsessive anticommunism, Washington was willing to ally itself with autocratic regimes—that of Syngman Rhee in South Korea, for example—dedicated to maintaining an unjust status quo.

 

WHILELYNDON BATTLEDto stay afloat on the stormy seas of national politics, Lady Bird was busy raising two daughters and building the family fortune. In 1947, the year before LBJ ran for the Senate, KTBC listed assets of $213,140, including $82,191 in “undistributed profits.”⁹⁷Up to this point Lady Bird had been sole proprietor, but with the station on firm ground, she decided to incorporate. The five hundred shares originally issued by the Texas Broadcasting Corporation were mostly owned by Lady Bird and her daughters, with a small number sold to Jesse Kellam, station manager, Paul Bolton, news editor, nephew and employee O. P. Bobbitt, and Walter Jenkins.⁹⁸LBJ was not a shareholder, but under Texas community property laws he was co-owner of his wife’s shares. Occasionally, the company would issue debentures to him which he converted to cash and used to buy municipal bonds.⁹⁹

At the same time, Lady Bird developed her holdings in Alabama. The properties in Autauga and Chilton Counties that she had inherited were seeded with pine trees, which were subsequently harvested and sold. By the late 1950s, Lady Bird was one of the largest tree farmers in Alabama.¹⁰⁰What really turned LBJ Inc. into an imposing economic entity, however, was a new medium: television. In 1946, there were only eight thousand primitive black-and-white televisions nationwide; by 1960, 45.8 million high-quality sets adorned 90 percent of America’s living rooms. The average television owner spent more time viewing than working.TV Guide became the fastest growing periodical of the 1950s, and the “electronic hearth” transformed the way Americans lived. Instead of reading, exercising, or conversing, the nuclear family gathered faithfully before “the tube” to watch their weekly mystery or variety show.

Lady Bird Johnson was one of a very few entrepreneurs in America who saw television’s vast economic promise. When the FCC opened up television channels, broadcasting companies who received permits found the going rough. Both the Columbia Broadcasting System and Westinghouse Broadcasting actually turned back some of the permits they had purchased.¹⁰¹“I don’t know how many stations were broadcasting in Texas in 1949,” staffer Don Cook said. “I know that by the time we went on the air, there were only maybe six, and maybe five of them were losing big money.”¹⁰²

Yet, Lady Bird sensed that television was the wave of the future, and she had the capital to invest. The FCC issued Texas Broadcasting a license to operate KTBC television on July 11. The station went on the air on Thanksgiving Day 1952 to broadcast the annual University of Texas-Texas A&M football game. In the months that followed, Lyndon personally solicited contracts from the three major program producers: NBC, ABC, and CBS.¹⁰³

KTBC television prospered, in part because it was well run and in part because it was the only VHF station in the state’s booming capital city. As a monopoly, KTBC was able to charge comparatively higher rates for advertising. For example, the station’s base hourly rate for ads was $575 in the early 1960s. Rochester, Minnesota, a roughly comparable city and market but with competition from stations in nearby Minneapolis-St. Paul, charged only $325.¹⁰⁴Writing in theWall Street Journal in 1964, journalist Louis Kohlmeier argued that there were other prospective competitors at the time KTBC was chartered, but they knew that with Johnson’s political clout, the FCC would always favor Texas Broadcasting. He quoted Tom Potter, founding owner of WFAA-TV in Dallas: “Lyndon was in a favorable position to get that station even if somebody had contested it. Politics is politics.” Perhaps so, but there was no law against public officeholders or their relatives engaging in legitimate business activities, and virtually everyone did. Moreover, there was no evidence that the Johnsons used improper influence to gain their license for KTBC.

The same cannot be said for their entry into the Waco television market. After issuing several hundred licenses in 1948, the FCC imposed a moratorium. In February 1952, LBJ contacted the commission in behalf of a constituent, the owner of KWTX Broadcasting Company in Waco, who wanted to apply for a VHF license. Writing on the stationary of the “Office of the Democratic Leader” (LBJ was then majority leader), he pressed federal regulators to give “serious consideration to this problem, based on its merits.”¹⁰⁵

Finally, on December 2, 1954, the FCC granted KWTX its television permit. The previous day, however, it had issued a license to Lady Bird to buy a debt-ridden UHF television station in Waco for $134,000. Lyndon’s constituent complained that his license was almost worthless, because under the Johnson ownership, his UHF rival would command both CBS and ABC programming. Lady Bird quickly found a solution. In return for 29 percent of the stock in KWTX Broadcasting, she let the UHF station go under and persuaded CBS and ABC to commit to the new VHF station.¹⁰⁶

Then in 1956, the Texas Broadcasting Company took over a debt-burdened station in Weslaco, a town situated in south Texas just above the Rio Grande. In return for 50 percent of the stock, Lady Bird paid the owner, O. L. Taylor, $5,000 and loaned him another $140,000. With major network affiliation, KRGT-TV prospered. In 1957, Texas Broadcasting bought the remaining 50 percent of the stock from Taylor for $100,000. In 1961, Bird sold KRGT for $1.6 million.¹⁰⁷At the same time the FCC approved the Weslaco deal, it granted KTBC-TV another increase in power to 316 kilowatts and approved a request from Texas Broadcasting to change its name to LBJ Company. In April 1956, LBJ Company listed assets of $1,534,381. Three years later, the corporation’s total value had climbed to $2,569,503.¹⁰⁸

Throughout his political life, LBJ was terrified that he would be charged with using his political office to further his and his friends’ financial interests. In Congress, he never voted on a single piece of legislation affecting radio or television, and he never went near the FCC. Both Paul Bolton and Leonard Marks insisted that their boss never threatened, cajoled, or coerced the federal bureaucracy to obtain a favorable decision. Yet, the FCC seemingly granted Texas Broadcasting’s and LBJ Company’s every request. KTBC’s broadcasting boundaries were drawn so as to ensure its continuing monopoly in the Austin area.

The fact that Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson were the proprietors was well-known to the staff and commissioners. The Johnsons were close friends with Clifford Durr, a commissioner from 1941 to 1948; Paul Porter, the chair of the Commission for fourteen months between 1944 and 1946; Rosel H. Hyde, who served for over twenty-three years beginning in 1946; and Robert T. Bartley, a Sam Rayburn nephew who held a seat from March 1952 through March 1972.¹⁰⁹These individuals had every reason to pave the way for a Johnson broadcasting empire, not the least of which were ideological and political. All but Hyde were New Deal-Fair Dealers who wanted to see a moderate-to-liberal journalistic voice in Texas established to compete with the likes of theDallas Morning News andHouston Post networks.

More important than this connection, perhaps, was LBJ’s friendship with Frank Stanton and other media executives. In 1952, after the FCC had granted the license to operate KTBC, George Reedy reported to Johnson that a mutual friend, Theodore Granik, had called from New York. He had lunched with several NBC vice presidents, one of whom (Stanton) had recently met with the senator. “The reaction was extremely favorable,” Granik reported. “[Stanton] … thinks your affiliation with the network would be a wonderful thing since ‘everybody admires’ you as a man who is doing a marvelous job for the country and who always stands behind his word.”¹¹⁰

 

BYAMERICAN MIDDLE-CLASS STANDARDSat midcentury, Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson were a successful couple. He was a U.S. senator and the youngest minority whip in the nation’s history, and she had parlayed a modest inheritance into a small business empire. They began to search for a material badge of their success. For a variety of reasons, the couple turned to the Hill Country and the possibility of a ranch along the Pedernales. Lady Bird had come to love the limestone escarpments, the clear streams, the live oaks, and the bluebonnets of Blanco and Gillespie Counties almost as much as her husband. Ownership of a large farm or ranch would confirm Johnson’s membership in the Senate, a body that one observer termed the most exclusive gentlemen’s club in the world. Russell owned a country place near his home in Winder, Georgia; Kerr, Anderson, Everett Dirksen (GOP minority leader), and Morse all owned large ranches or farms. The time LBJ had spent at Huntland, George and Herman Brown’s estate, and at Charles Marsh’s Longlea had made a deep impression on him. Here the rich and powerful gathered to pay a kind of homage to the country squires who presided. Life could not have been more stimulating. Moreover, ownership of a substantial Hill Country spread would enable Lyndon to recoup psychologically for the humiliation of his father’s failure. It would be an announcement to all of central Texas that he had fulfilled the dreams and atoned for the sins of his ancestors.¹¹¹

In the fall of 1950, Lyndon took Lady Bird to visit his aged Aunt Frank Martin, who still lived in the two-story timber and fieldstone house on the banks of the Pedernales. The dog-trot cabin of his birth lay less than three-quarters of a mile away. Aunt Frank, then seventy-eight and increasingly unable to care for the house and the 243 acres on which it was situated, talked to Lyndon about how wonderful it would be if he and Lady Bird could buy the place and refurbish it as a retreat and site for family reunions. Lady Bird was appalled. The house was falling down and had a colony of bats living in its chimney.¹¹²It seemed to her to resemble nothing more than “a Charles Addams cartoon of a haunted house.”¹¹³Yet, Lyndon had made up his mind, and privately he worked out the arrangements.¹¹⁴

Lady Bird, the woman who had had no home to call her own at the beginning of the 1940s, now had three. “I was really, thoroughly mad,” she recalled, “but it was so obvious that Lyndon was ecstatic that to express my full anger would be like slapping the baby who had not moaned, it wasn’t doing anything wrong … This was his heart’s home. It was really where he wanted to get to.”¹¹⁵She hired a local architect, and from February until July 1952 she would live with Lyndon’s mother in Austin one week each month to oversee the renovations.¹¹⁶

That September the refurbishment had progressed sufficiently for Lady Bird and the girls to live in the Martin house while Lyndon campaigned for Adlai Stevenson around the state. It was raining on Tuesday morning, September 16, 1952, when Bird drove Lynda, then eight, across the wooden bridge to catch her school bus. The rain increased steadily throughout the day. Bird phoned a relative in Johnson City to pick Lynda up after school and keep her overnight. During the next thirty-six hours, twenty inches of rain fell in the Hill Country. Power failed, and every creek and stream in Blanco and Gillespie Counties became raging torrents. Lady Bird and Lucy, who dined in the dark on tomato soup and peanut butter sandwiches, could do nothing but watch the Pedernales rise, sweeping away topsoil, trees, and livestock. As the river approached the front porch, Bird read her daughter stories by the light of a coal-oil lamp. It finally stopped raining shortly after midnight on Wednesday. By midmorning the bright blue Texas sky was filled with rescue planes and helicopters searching for the injured and marooned. Lady Bird had survived the largest and most destructive flood in the Hill Country’s recorded history.¹¹⁷

The ranch recovered and prospered. It became a vital part not only of Lyndon Johnson’s private life but of his public persona as well. As historian Hal Rothman has noted, Johnson’s acquisition and development of “the Ranch” coincided with the rise of the West in the popular imagination. The 1950s marked the heyday of the western in the movies and on television, fromRed River in 1945 toHow the West Was Won in 1962. In this mythic place, Americans, stressed by the tensions of the cold war and dulled by the monotonous conformity of suburbia, could find escape. “The American West became a parable for American society, the challenge that Americans faced in the past that offered ways to face, address, and solve new tensions in the present.”¹¹⁸As a Texan, a rancher, a westerner, Johnson could pose as the new man, free of the taint of urban decay and southern racism.

But in addition, there was a different West, a new frontier that LBJ sought to lay claim to. It was the West of George and Herman Brown, of Sid Richardson, a frontier in which the ten-gallon hat and cowboy boots were but accoutrements to modernization and urbanization. Thus could LBJ pose as a problem solver, a herald of the new age of technology and skyscrapers but a man who was at the same time steeped in the traditions of the Turnerian frontier. The North and Midwest viewed the Southeast as the most backward part of the nation, the most resistant to change, and the most out of step with postwar realities. Southerners viewed the Northeast as economic exploiters and racist hypocrites. For many, the future and its answers were to be found in the West.

LBJ immediately adopted the guise of a rancher: Stetson, khakis, expensive boots, and horse (he was an excellent rider). As with most things in Lyndon Johnson’s life, there were two ranches. There was the natural retreat whose vast blue dome, live oaks, wildflowers, and clear waters nourished his soul. He would rise early and spend an hour just walking and in the evening sit atop a ridge to witness the magnificient sunsets. “This country has always been a place where I could come and fill my cup, so to speak and recharge myself for the more difficult days ahead. Here’s where we come to rest our bones and to collect our thoughts and to lay our plans.”¹¹⁹And there was the public ranch, the endless pictures of LBJ hosting a barbeque for national and then international luminaries, the celebrity deer hunting, the inevitable inspection tours of cattle herds and fence mending.

 

PARENTING DID NOT COME NATURALLYeither to Lyndon or to Lady Bird. Joe Phipps recounts a tale of Lyndon, the father of a three-year-old and a toddler, interacting with his offspring. One Sunday morning he and LBJ, still in his pajamas in bed, were going over campaign strategy. In pops Lady Bird declaring that Lynda and Lucy needed a kiss from their father. Delighted, LBJ straightened the covers and welcomed the giggling girls. For several minutes, father and daughters kissed, tickled, and laughed. As they continued to crawl all over him, their father’s tone changed. “That’s enough,” he said, patting at them, trying to bring gleeful thrashings under control. “You’ve said ‘good morning’ to Daddy. That’s enough. Take it easy.” But neither of the children showed the slightest inclination toward being calmed. “At last, a tremendous roar unloosed, his face grew livid. He was shouting, ‘Bird! Bird! Come get these little sons of bitches off my bed. They’re crawling over me like baby dragons!’ ”¹²⁰

For her part, Lady Bird had never had a mother and had no real model for the job. She loved both her daughters, but she made no bones about who came first: Lyndon. Lucy even came to believe that she and her sister rated third after the family business. When the girls were in grade school, they lived half the year in Washington and the other half in Austin, sometimes with Lady Bird and sometimes with Willie Day Taylor, a former member of Johnson’s staff who became their surrogate mother.

The other powerful figure in their life was the family’s full-time cook, Zephyr Wright, a black college student from Marshall whom Bird hired in 1942.¹²¹Typically, the fall school term was spent in Johnson City and the spring term in a Washington, D.C., school. In Washington, most of the girls’ classmates were Jewish because LBJ refused to live in a section of town with closed housing covenants. Lynda recalled that her classmates were nice and friendly, but she was rarely invited to parties or to sleep over. Her friends were to be found among the gentile offspring of staff members or among neighborhood children.¹²²

Their father loved Lynda and Lucy and followed their upbringing, but he did so from afar. He left the house first thing in the morning and returned in the early evening or later. His contact with his daughters was limited to Sundays or to cocktail hour, when they would politely introduce themselves to the inevitable guests, do a bit of serving, and retire.¹²³Father and daughters dealt with each other as 1950s stereotypes; only later, during his presidency, when they were increasingly self-aware young women and he was burdened with the trials of Vietnam did parent and children break in on each other emotionally and psychologically.

Johnson continued to look beyond his marriage for romance. By the time he entered the Senate, he had taken another lover. Madeline Brown was a twenty-three-year-old account executive working for Glenn Advertising, a firm that produced radio ads for KTBC. Lyndon spotted the five-foot, eight-inch, 118-pound beauty at a party in Dallas in the summer of 1948. He picked her out of the crowd and ordered Jesse Kellam to bring her to Austin at the first opportunity. On October 29, Brown flew to Austin on a Trans Texas airline ticket Kellam sent her. After attending a party at the Driskill sponsored by KTBC, she allowed herself to be seduced by Johnson. According to her account of the affair, his nickname for her was “Pussy Galore,” and hers for him was “Sandow” (for Eugene Sandow, a famous nineteenth-century bodybuilder). “I threw away all my morals for him,” Brown said.

He regarded Lady Bird as his “official wife,” Lyndon reputedly told her. In fact, his wife’s education, breeding, and business acumen benefited him in many ways, but emotionally and physically he felt the need to become involved with other women. In December 1951, Brown bore a son, Stephen, whom she claimed was Lyndon’s. Using Kellam and Bolton as emissaries, he sent regular monthly payments to mother and child until his death in 1973. Privately, Lady Bird scoffed at Brown’s claims, telling staff that she did not believe the affair had ever happened.¹²⁴