Leadership Read online

  With the Allied victory in the war, Roosevelt’s tenure in the Navy Department came to a close. “My dear chief,” he wrote Daniels in warm acknowledgment of the mentoring role he had played in his political education. “You have taught me so wisely and kept my feet on the ground when I was about to skyrocket.”

  * * *

  Just as chance had intervened a decade earlier when the bosses chose him to run for the state legislature, so chance played a central role in the selection of thirty-eight-year-old Franklin Roosevelt as the Democratic nominee for vice president in 1920.

  Roosevelt’s name had not even appeared among a list of thirty-nine potential vice presidential candidates printed in the New York Herald on the day the Democratic National Convention opened in San Francisco. By the summer of 1920, public opinion had turned against the Democrats. Woodrow Wilson had suffered a stroke and lay incapacitated in the White House. Weary of both war and progressive reform after eight years of the Democratic administration, Americans were anxious to return to the simpler way of life promised by Republicans in their campaign slogan: “Return to normalcy.” Needless to say, a cheerless mood engulfed the party faithful. Aware that 1920 was not likely to be a Democratic year, the major figures in the party had declined to enter the fray. With no clear front-runners, forty-four ballots were taken before Governor James Cox of Ohio finally secured the presidential nomination. At this point the vice presidential nomination seemed of small concern; the delegates were impatient to get home. Having chosen a candidate from Ohio, the bosses sought geographical balance. Franklin Roosevelt was from the critical state of New York, had carved a reputation for independence, carried a famous name, was young and energetic, and might be used to muster those still faithful to the stricken Woodrow Wilson. He was nominated by acclamation.

  Though his party had little hope of victory, Roosevelt “had everything to gain and nothing to lose” in terms of his own future prospects. As the vice presidential candidate, he would not be blamed for defeat; by campaigning day after day with unflagging energy and exuberance for his party, however, he could build an account of goodwill that could be drawn upon in the future.

  Franklin gave everything he had to the campaign. Traveling by train to nearly forty states, he worked eighteen hours a day. “We really had trouble holding Franklin down on that trip,” Louis Howe recalled. “His enthusiasm was so great that we were after him constantly to keep him from wearing himself down to his bones.” Refusing to listen, he insisted on speaking wherever the train paused, explaining to Howe that if he were elected someday, these people would be his “bosses,” and “they’ve got a right to know what they’re hiring.” A reporter on the train with Franklin marveled that “once he met a man along the road who wielded any political influence whatever, he never forgot him.” Nor did he forget “the particular circumstances” of the man’s connection with the party.

  In the course of delivering nearly eight hundred speeches, he polished the ease of his delivery, speaking so simply and directly, one reporter noted, that he managed to keep “the driest subjects from seeming heavy.” No longer did Eleanor watch with dread when he hesitated, fearing that he might never continue. On the contrary, she told Sara, “it is becoming almost impossible to stop F. now when he begins to speak. 10 minutes is always 20, 30 is always 45 & the evening speeches are now about two hours!” Members of his staff “all get out & wave at him in front, and when nothing succeeds I yank his coattails!”

  Inexperience, hubris, weariness, and a penchant for improvisation led inevitably to mistakes along the campaign trail. In Montana, talking about Latin America, he boasted that as assistant secretary of the navy he “had something to do with running a couple of little republics. The facts are that I wrote Haiti’s Constitution myself, and, if I do say, I think it a pretty good constitution.” Not only was this a gross exaggeration, but it gave Warren Harding, the Republican presidential candidate, ammunition for a blistering counterattack. The story faded quickly, however, providing but a small dent in an otherwise splendid campaign. Franklin Roosevelt had emerged a national figure.

  Prepared from the start for defeat, Roosevelt was not in the least depressed when the Democrats lost by an overwhelming majority. “A darn good sail,” he characterized the abysmal loss. “Curiously enough,” he told a friend, “I do not feel in the least down-hearted. It seems to me that everything possible was done during the campaign.”

  Of all the strengths Roosevelt displayed during the campaign, none was of greater significance than his ability to assemble and sustain a remarkably talented and staunchly loyal team that would remain together in the years ahead. For his advance man, he selected Stephen Early, a young wire service reporter who would become his White House press secretary. As his speechwriter, he chose another newsman, Marvin McIntyre, who would become his appointments secretary in the White House. To head his New York office, he hired Charles McCarthy, the veteran bureaucrat who had helped him negotiate the intricacies of the naval bureaucracy and who would eventually serve in the Justice Department during his presidency. And, of course, there was Louis Howe, the indispensable figure who would remain by Roosevelt’s side until he died. Such was the atmosphere on the long train rides that storytelling, cards, and drinks regularly alleviated the pressure of preparing itineraries, studying local issues, and drafting speeches. Roosevelt long treasured recollections of the train trip, “a fraternity in spirit.” To each of these men, Roosevelt presented a pair of gold Tiffany cuff links with FDR engraved on one side and the recipient’s name on the other, binding them together in what became known as the “Cuff-Links Club,” an extended family that expanded over the years to include Missy LeHand, his private secretary; Eleanor Roosevelt; Harry Hopkins, the head of the New Deal relief program; and Sam Rosenman, his counsel and chief speechwriter.

  That Franklin Roosevelt had the weight and breadth to lead the nation was already established to all the members of this original team. They were not simply devoted to him; after months of intimate contact, they had come to revere and love him. No one identified Franklin Roosevelt as a potential president earlier and with more certainty than Louis Howe, one of the few people who always called him Franklin. “At that very first meeting,” Howe told a reporter, “I made up my mind that he was Presidential timber and that nothing but an accident could keep him from being President of the United States.”

  FOUR

  LYNDON

  “A steam engine in pants”

  Lyndon Johnson was a gangly twenty-two-year-old college senior in July 1930, when he delivered his first political speech on behalf of former governor Pat Neff, who was running for railroad commissioner—a performance that would set in motion a mysterious chain of events that would eventually lead him to the height of power in Washington, D.C.

  His speech concluded the annual picnic outside the small community of Henly. This picnic was a signal event in South-Central Texas and one Lyndon had attended with his father, Sam Johnson, since he was ten years old. All the candidates for state and local offices were generally present at the daylong “speaking.” As hundreds of citizens milled about, enjoying the barbecue and the outdoor festivities, the candidates were summoned one by one to the makeshift speaker’s stand to make the case for their election. A similar brand of humor and bombast, of folkloric shrewdness and local pride might have been heard a century earlier at the vandoos, where Abraham Lincoln and his fellow aspirants spoke before gatherings of farmers who had come into the village square to auction off their stock, gossip, and especially talk politics.

  At dusk, the master of ceremonies called Pat Neff’s name. When no one responded, he called again to see if someone wanted to speak for him. Still, no one stepped forward. State representative Welly Hopkins remembered vividly what happened next. The master of ceremonies was about to declare a default when suddenly, “I saw coming through the crowd a young fellow, kind of waving his arms about, calling out: By God, I’ll make a speech for Pat Neff!” As the tall young m
an with black curly hair was hoisted upon the tailgate of the wagon bed, which served as a speaker’s platform, he was introduced as “Sam Johnson’s son.” Sam had served in the state legislature for eight years and was widely known and well-liked in the region. Lyndon’s speech, according to Hopkins, was a ten-minute “stem-winding, arm-swinging talk on behalf of Pat Neff.”

  “I’m a prairie dog lawyer from Johnson City, Texas,” Lyndon began. By identifying himself as a prairie dog lawyer he employed a vernacular perfectly tailored to his audience. Prairie dog lawyers had little training in the law; they relied upon passionate advocacy rather than legal precedent to defend their clients before a jury. So young Lyndon, with a self-mocking yet assertive tone, let the picnickers know that while he was not an experienced politician, he intended to throw himself into the task of representing the missing Pat Neff. His style of speaking was “so wrapped up in youthful enthusiasm and sincerity of purpose,” Hopkins recalled, “that his audience came along with him.” While “it wasn’t a rich oratorical style,” there was “a timber in his voice that was pleasantly received.” When he finished his testimony for Neff, the crowd responded with whistles and sustained applause. Indeed, his speech was considered “the hit of the Henly picnic.”

  * * *

  From the time Lyndon was a small boy, he identified with his father’s political ambitions. In the evenings, when Sam sat in the brown rocker on the porch swapping tales and jokes with three or four political cronies, the boy stood in the half-darkness of the doorway, straining to overhear the comings and goings of people in the legislature. He liked the animated, crude way the men spoke, the deep knowledge they had of the different families in their region.

  “I loved going with my father to the legislature,” Johnson remembered. “I would sit in the gallery for hours watching all the activity on the floor and then would wander around the halls trying to figure out what was going on.” Sam Johnson was a popular figure in the statehouse. “If you can’t come into a room full of people and tell right away who is for you and who is against you, you have no business in politics,” he told his son. Sam “was very friendly,” one colleague recalled, “a very down to earth man, a man who attracted people and knew how to deal with people.” He was known to have an “explosive” temper, “but it was like a sunshine thing,” a neighbor recalled. “It was gone in a minute and then he was always going about doing something nice.” He was a progressive Democrat, speaking up for the people against the interests, supporting bills to establish an eight-hour workday, regulate public utility companies and tax corporations. He championed the underdog, using his office to help poor farmers, Army veterans, and soldiers’ widows. “We’ve got to look after these people,” Sam told a friend, “that’s what we’re here for.”

  Lyndon was his father’s shadow and replica. They shared the same long arms, large nose, enormous ears, and hard squint. Lyndon learned to envelop people in the same fashion. “They walked the same, had the same nervous mannerisms,” recalled Wright Patman, who served with Sam in the state legislature and later became a congressman, “and Lyndon clutched you like his daddy did when he talked to you.” And like his father, gregarious young Lyndon struck up conversations with everyone he met. He became a favorite of all the older women in town, inquiring how they were feeling, how things were going. If he heard a group of men talking politics on the street, he would stand on the sidelines, smitten. At ten, he took a job after school shining shoes at Cecil Maddox’s barbershop, the place where politics and the latest items of news were discussed.

  The only thing Lyndon loved more than accompanying his father to the statehouse was traveling along with him on the campaign trail. “We drove in the Model T Ford from farm to farm, up and down the valley, stopping at every door. My father would do most of the talking. He would bring the neighbors up to date on local gossip, talk about the crops and about the bills he’d introduced in the legislature, and always he’d bring along an enormous crust of homemade bread and a large jar of homemade jam. When we got tired or hungry, we’d stop by the side of the road. He sliced the bread, smeared it with jam, and split the slices with me. I’d never seen him happier. Families all along the way opened up their homes to us. If it was hot outside, we were invited in for big servings of homemade ice cream. If it was cold, we were given hot tea. Christ, sometimes I wished it could go on forever.”

  * * *

  This campaign idyll offered a welcome, albeit temporary relief for both father and son from the discord of the Johnson family household—a place often filled with the severe tensions that contributed to Lyndon’s excitable temperament. All his life, he would vacillate between security and insecurity, assertiveness and obsequiousness, charm and taunting cruelty, a desire to please and a need for control. In contrast to the balanced, secure, and placid childhood upon which Franklin Roosevelt’s genuinely confident and optimistic nature was anchored, Lyndon had to negotiate between his father and mother, each representing very different and clashing worlds of values.

  “My mother told me the first year of her marriage was the worst year of her life,” Johnson remembered. Having grown up in “a two-story rock house, with a fruitful orchard of perfectly spaced trees, terraced flower beds, broad walks,” and a white picket fence, she was utterly unprepared for the disorder and isolation of Sam Johnson’s small cabin on a muddy stream with neither electricity nor indoor plumbing. The daughter of a college-educated lawyer, and herself a graduate of Baylor University at a time when few women attended college, Rebekah Baines had aspired to be a writer when she interviewed the “dashing and dynamic” Sam Johnson for her family newspaper during his first term in the state legislature. A “whirlwind courtship” ensued, leading to marriage and “the problem of adjustment to a completely opposite personality,” as well as “a strange and new way of life.”

  Accustomed to culture, books, and intellectual discussions about philosophy and literature, Rebekah found that the man she had fallen in love with enjoyed nothing more than sitting up half the night with his political cronies, drinking beer, sharing gossip, swapping stories. She had originally hoped that Sam would run for national office and carry her away to the nation’s capital, where ideas and ideals would be discussed, but he soon made it clear that he had no interest in leaving home. Meanwhile, her own days and nights were consumed in the tedium of drawing water from the well, feeding chickens, boiling clothes, and scrubbing floors on her hands and knees, leaving insufficient time for the unread books “piled high” in her bedroom, and no time at all for writing. She was miserable. “Then I came along,” Lyndon said, “and suddenly everything was all right again. I could do all the things she never did.”

  Lyndon seemed at first the perfect instrument for Rebekah to realize her ambitions. Relatives and friends claimed they had “never seen such a friendly baby,” nor one as inquisitive and intelligent. He learned the alphabet before he was two, learned to read and spell before he was four, and at three could recite long passages from Longfellow and Tennyson. “I’ll never forget how much my mother loved me when I recited those poems,” Johnson said. “The minute I finished she’d take me in her arms and hug me so hard I sometimes thought I’d be strangled to death.” Even after she gave birth to four other children, Lyndon remained Rebekah’s favorite. “I remember playing games with her that only the two of us could play. And she would always let me win even if to do so we had to change the rules. I knew how much she needed me. I liked that. It made me feel big and important. It made me feel I could do anything in the world.”

  But opposite the bright and beaming side of the moon was an equally dark side—an insecurity that would plague Lyndon Johnson for the rest of his life. When he failed to fulfill his mother’s ambitions for him—when he became a sluggish student or resisted continuing violin and dancing lessons—she withdrew her love and affection. “For days after I quit those lessons she walked around the house pretending I was dead,” Johnson glumly said. “And then,” he added, “I had to wat
ch her being especially warm and nice to my father and sisters.” Love was alternately lavished and snatched away, a quid pro quo for obedience and achievement. In later years, Johnson would exhibit a similar pattern in dealing with friends, colleagues, and members of his staff. He would blanket someone with generosity, care, and affection, but in recompense, expect total loyalty and sterling achievement. Failing this standard was perceived by him as a betrayal. His affection would be withdrawn, a pattern of behavior so pronounced it earned the epithet, the Johnson “freeze-out.”

  * * *

  Storytelling played a central role in young Lyndon’s life, just as it had in the lives of young Abraham, Theodore, and Franklin. When tensions in the Johnson household flared, Lyndon found the “perfect escape” down the road at his grandfather’s house. There, the two of them could share an hour or more while Sam Ealy Sr. elaborated upon his cowboy days driving a herd of fifteen hundred cattle from ranches in Texas up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene, Kansas. “I sat beside the rocker on the floor of the porch,” Johnson recollected, “thinking all the while how lucky I was to have as a granddaddy this big man with the white beard who had lived the most exciting life imaginable.”

  Sam Senior possessed a narrative gift able to shape those early adventures into a vast trove of seminal tales that would form the building blocks of Lyndon’s heroic conception of leadership. Central to such stories was the image of the lead cowboy driving cattle through icy rivers, ever vigilant to avoid the ultimate horror of the stampede.

  Lyndon’s idealization of the bold cowboy in his beloved grandfather’s cattle-driving tales shaped his concept of manhood, just as the perilous tales of hunters and deerslayers living on the margins of wilderness informed Theodore Roosevelt’s ideal of the heroic male. The extravagant oral tradition of the Old West infused Johnson’s language. Only Abraham Lincoln, who had actually endured physical danger and the bitter hardships of wilderness life, never romanticized his family’s past.