The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson I

The key appointive post in that district was the San Antonio post-mastership, which controlled 600 postal-service jobs. Since the incumbent postmaster’s four-year term was to expire during 1934, before Maverick took office, under the “gentlemen’s contract” which Johnson had devised earlier that year, Kleberg, as the area’s former Congressman, had t

To a man of such deep convictions, there was something almost immoral about the Johnson campaign, with its theatrics, its use of money, the unadorned appeal to selfishness in its argument that Johnson should be elected because he could get more federal contracts for Texas. Moreover, Roosevelt supporter though Mann was, he was disturbed at the bruta

For some of these funds—the money from Texas—he had, moreover, become the sole source. The telegrams candidates had received from Johnson announcing that funds were on the way had said they had been contributed by “my good Democratic friends in Texas.” By his friends. The recipients did not know who those friends were—and even were they to find out

On May 11, 1936, Congress passed the new REA bill. Within the next eighteen months, electricity was brought to half a million American farms. Hundreds of thousands of other farmers were forming cooperatives so that they could get electricity, too—and rural electric rates were beginning to drop in many areas.

O’Daniel himself had had nothing to do with the arrangements, but on Monday morning, even he was told about them, and he in turn informed his aides; when one said that Johnson was still thousands of votes ahead, the Governor replied, “Well, that don’t make any difference.” The “drawn anxious looks of those close to O’Daniel” abruptly disappeared, t

Conservative lobbyists and New Deal strategists—both groups were sending cash to Texas to help Lyndon Johnson. This unanimity was displayed in New York, too. The liberal garment center leaders sent more money—and so did New York conservatives who were interested in power; men who hated Roosevelt and what he stood for, but who needed an “in” at the

During the 1940 campaign, Roosevelt and Johnson had had several discussions. Now they were to have more. The President and the young man talked together in the Oval Office—one can only imagine Lyndon Johnson’s feelings during those conversations in that bright, sunny room in which he had for so many years longed to sit. And they talked together in

Johnson came to the use of money in elections very early. While he was still a congressional assistant, he sat in a San Antonio hotel room buying votes with five-dollar bills. An extravagant use of this lever characterized his own campaigns from the first: his initial race for Congress, in 1937, was one of the most expensive congressional campaigns

Lyndon Johnson’s loss had been due to a political fluke. He had been beaten not by his opponent’s friends but by his opponent’s foes; O’Daniel had won the Senate seat not because these men wanted him to be Senator, but because they didn’t want him to be Governor—because they wanted to get him out of Texas. But it was Johnson’s mistake that had enab