LYNDON JOHNSON: CONSERVATIVE
Shannon, William V.
Lyndon Johnson: Conservative by WILLIAM V. SHANNON This is the third of a series of articles exploring Presidential possibilities for 1960. Earlier articles have dealt with Senator Stuart...
...They were exciting times for a young man in Washington interested in politics, and no young man was more interested than Johnson...
...He worked very hard, twice as hard as most Congressional secretaries...
...A graduate of Baylor, she was one of the few women college graduates in that part of Texas at the turn of the century, Lyndon Johnson was born into this locally well-known but financially not well-off family on August 27, 1908, the first of five children...
...When she was an infant, her Negro nurse exclaimed, "Why, she looks just like a little ladybird...
...Johnson made the most of the opportunity...
...He has in recent months made pioneering journeys to Boston, Brooklyn, and other Northern cities...
...Johnson always asks first: "Is it politically feasible now...
...He was more successful as a local politician and state legislator...
...The humble four-room farmhouse in which Johnson was born still stands a mile down the road...
...He was 18, the year was 1926, and he was a tall, big boned, gangly, headstrong youth who did not like books and could not seem to settle down...
...Senator Stuart Symington is dependent mainly and Senator Hubert Humphrey...
...f If the country wishes to have a conservative President for another four years, Lyndon Johnson is unquestionably the best available...
...He participated in the all-night "bull sessions," listened eagerly to the gossip, and came to know well many of the young men coming into the new alphabetical agencies...
...Johnson Finds Himself In the Political Arena Johnson is the grandson of an early Texas pioneer who migrated to the west central part of the state in 1846 and founded Johnson City, Texas (current population 650...
...His younger brother is in the trucking business...
...The nomination of Johnson would represent a reversal of those decisions and a reversion to the pre-1932 state of affairs...
...He dropped out one year to teach grade school to a class of Mexican children in the village of Cotula...
...The business community and its allied conservative interests could rest easy, knowing that nothing liberal or unprecedented would be done while Johnson was in the White House, just as nothing surprisingly liberal has been done in the Senate these past seven years...
...Lyndon Johnson: Conservative by WILLIAM V. SHANNON This is the third of a series of articles exploring Presidential possibilities for 1960...
...Johnson attended the local public schools and earned average grades...
...Johnson Emerges First as An All-Out New Dealer In 1935, Johnson quit Washington to lay the foundations of a political career in Texas...
...Only a trip to Russia is needled to make his Presidential candidacy official...
...There were smiles and handshakes for the photographers and a long, friendly chat on the trip to the Capital...
...During this period, Johnson married Claudia Taylor, better known as Ladybird...
...Roosevelt took an active interest in Texas politics...
...Senator Hubert Humphrey is clearly a liberal in the mainstream of the Roosevelt-Truman tradition...
...As recently as thirty years ago it must be remembered, Democrats were the party of the South and Northwest...
...Over the years, Johnson has become indifferent to issues and problems for their own sake...
...She inherited from an uncle 3,000 acres of Alabama farm land...
...After graduating from college, Johnson taught speech and coached debating in a high school in a suburb of Houston...
...For a rookie Congressman of 28, it was quite a laying on of hands...
...She is the daughter of a wealthy East Texas family...
...If the Democrats this year choose a Texan who leads a moderate-conservative coalition, who voted for the Taft-Hartley Act, sabotaged the pro-civil rights rules reform in the Senate, aggressively defends the predatory oil and gas interests, is indifferent to civil liberties issues, and makes "economy first" speeches to the Chamber of Commerce, then they will be delivering their party into the hands of its old possessors...
...of his three sisters, one is married to a minister, another to a building contractor, and the third to the business manager of the radio station owned by Johnson's wife...
...With the help of Representative Sam Rayburn, another old acquaintance of his father, he obtained an appointment as head of the National Youth Administration in Texas...
...Johnson's grandfather became a large landowner and cattleman, driving his herds north to market on the historic "long drive" to Abilene and Dodge City in the 1860's and '70's...
...It stands on a hill commanding a view of the Pedernales River valley below...
...The name stuck and Mrs...
...Johnson now invariably uses it...
...He ran away from home after high school and spent a year drifting through California, working here and there, running an elevator or washing dishes...
...It was one of the Southern states in which he was strongest, and several Texas Congressmen were among his most consistent supporters in the House...
...She owns a small apartment house and other real estate, but most of her fortune is in radio and television stations in Austin...
...President Roosevelt was like a daddy to me," Johnson says...
...He returned home and worked as a laborer on a road gang...
...Johnson is the only Democratic Presidential contender whose candidacy poses a sharp philosophical choice...
...And the same is true of Governor Pat Brown of California, Governor Robert Meyner of New Jersey, and the other less well-known favorite sons...
...on moderate and conservative support, but his candidacy does not pose the sharp alternative that Johnson's does because Symington's unwavering liberal voting record in the Senate and his personal friendships with certain Negro and labor leaders blur the choice...
...He is tougher and abler than Stuart Symington...
...He was clever and resourceful and in no time was very popular and well-known around Capitol Hill," Patman recalls...
...In 1931, when he was 23, he got a job as secretary to Texas Representative Richard Kleberg, one of the wealthy owners of the huge King Ranch and a political acquaintance of his father...
...New York, Pennsylvania, and California were rock-ribbed Republican strongholds...
...Johnson became one of the New Dealers in the House whom the President invited for a drink in the evening or for Sunday breakfast...
...Sam Johnson, the Senator's father, inherited the land and later turned it to cotton growing for which it was unsuited...
...He is fantastically sensitive to criticism, much more so than the ordinary poli tician...
...The story of Lyndon Johnson may be regarded from different viewpoints as a political tragedy, a cautionary parable on the cost of success, or a study in the happy adjustment of an intelligent man to intractable circumstance...
...Johnson spent four years in Kleberg's office, the last two of them overlapping the heady opening days of the New Deal...
...Less than two years later, he was back in Washington as a Congressman, having defeated nine opponents to win a special election in April, 1937...
...It is impossible, for example, to imagine Johnson boldly declaring the United States should cease H-bomb testing as Stevenson proposed in 1956 simply because he thought it was the right position and he should speak out...
...Roosevelt, who happened to be fishing off the coast of Texas, made the most of the occasion...
...He had been a deskmate of the young man's father in the Texas legislature from 1921 to 1924...
...They were married after a brief courtship...
...He has visited the United Nations and conferred with the President of Mexico...
...Johnson met Ladybird at a party in Austin, Texas, in 1934...
...If the answer is in the negative, he handles the problem with a platitude...
...Will 1960 see the clock turned back...
...Senator John Kennedy, although attempting to hold and attract moderate and even conservative support, is, like Adlai Stevenson, who made a similar attempt in 1952 and 1956, basically committed to the liberal position on major issues...
...The Johnsons are now millionaires, although not rich by Texas standards...
...Subsequent articles, to appear in early issues, will present the career and record of Adlai E. Stevenson, Vice President Richard M. Nixon, —TH E EDITORS...
...in order to make certain these interests could not exercise a veto in party affairs...
...He would work harder and try harder and understand the job better than does President Eisenhower...
...He has begun making appearances in the farm belt states of Kansas and Iowa...
...Always eager to do a little missionary work, he cultivated the young man from Austin and in the years that followed did what he could to build him up...
...Worked Twice as Hard As Most Secretaries Representative Wright Patman, Texas Democrat, the genial liberal then at the beginning of his long career in the House, remembers Johnson from those days...
...Johnson campaigned as an all-out New Dealer and endorsed President Roosevelt's proposal to reform the Supreme Court...
...they have become mere counters in the endless political game he plays...
...LYNDON JOHNSON of Texas, the man who brought "guided democracy" to the United States Senate and a bland, unwonted surface of harmony to the Democratic Party, is prepared this year to attempt to move his moderate-conservative coalition operation from the Capitol to the White House...
...He used to play golf occasionally but it bored him...
...He has more self-confidence and a steadier sense of responsibility than Richard Nixon...
...it has been in the family for more than a hundred years and has been gradually added to by each generation...
...He is deeply afraid of de feat: he would like to be President, but he will not campaign openly and aggressively for the nomination be cause he could not bear to lose...
...The Senator's mother was the daughter of a minister who became the second president of Baylor University...
...He rounded up many members who ordinarily did not attend and when the votes were counted, it turned out that Johnson had been elected "speaker...
...to him defeat is almost synonymous with humiliation...
...In 1936, Roosevelt compelled the repeal of the convention rule requiring a two-thirds majority for the Presidential nomination WILLIAM V. SHANNON is the Washington correspondent and political columnist for the New York Post...
...After he had been in Washington little more than a year, Johnson organized the kind of coup in which he delights...
...The nomination of Lyndon Johnson, however, would represent on the part of the Democratic Party a conscious and significant shift to the right...
...The top posts traditionally went to those senior in service...
...Earlier articles have dealt with Senator Stuart Symington, Missouri Democrat, New York's Republican Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, and last month, Senator John Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat...
...He now goes walking or hunting on his ranch because his doctor recommends getting outdoors...
...Johnson in recent years has bought back in piecemeal fashion several hundred acres of the much larger holdings once owned by his father and grandfather...
...There was then an organization of Congressional secretaries known as "The Little Congress" which met and debated issues in the manner of the real Congress...
...His mother persuaded him to try college...
...East Texas is the fertile, cotton-growing region lying along the Louisiana border which shares the special characteristics of the Deep South and is quite different sociologically from the arid, hilly country in which Johnson grew up...
...Johnson can be a cruel man...
...With that measure hanging in the balance, Johnson's victory was of timely psychological importance...
...He worked his way through doing odd jobs...
...He ordered the special train taking him back to Washington to stop at Austin and pick up the new Congressman...
...The family had almost no money and Johnson was uncertain whether he wanted to go, but he finally entered a state teacher's college where the tuition and fees were nominal...
...He has no hobbies or non-political interests...
...He became "land poor," experienced repeated financial difficulties, and finally lost his lands during the depression of the early '30's...
...He put in long hours and went out of his way to help constituents...
...He in turn was one of F.D.R.'s loyal lieutenants on Capitol Hill...
...The interests of the Southerners, the Texas and California oil men, the Western ranchers and grazers, and the middle classes of the small towns have always been represented in the Democratic Party but not since Franklin Roosevelt's election in 1932 have they had the controlling voice...
...The roomy, comfortable white ranch house on the LBJ Ranch was his grandfather's house...
...he demonstrated that by the part he played in the ruthless, successful fight against the reconfirmation of Leland Olds as chairman of the Federal Power Commission in 1949...
...If he were elected, the balance of power within the party would move decisively, as it has during the last several years in the Senate, from dependence on the big cities and the labor unions to a reliance on the Solid South and the regional economic interest groupings of the plains and mountain states...
...But a major difficulty with the Johnson candidacy is that the country does not ordinarily turn to the Democratic Party when it wants a conservative President...
...He does not, for example, like references to his skill as a "back room manipulator" because he thinks phrases of this kind make him sound sinister...
...Many of those young men such as Paul Porter, Tommy Corcoran, and Justice William O. Douglas remain his close personal friends today...
...He didn't know much about Washington when he arrived, but he was full of ginger and enthusiasm...
...But Johnson had no serious intellectual interests and was too restless to remain a teacher...
...In analyzing the relations of Tex like dominoes...
...Politics proved to be Johnson's true vocation...
Vol. 24 • January 1960 • No. 1
