The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson I

What was important to Johnson, they feel, was the acknowledgment—the deferential, face-to-face, acknowledgment—that he had the power.

And the people believed he would. In 1938, he had gotten 51 percent of the vote; in 1940, he got 53 percent, winning re-election as he had won election, by beating a field of well-known politicians without even a run-off. He had stormed out of Fort Worth waving a flour sack in one hand and the Decalogue in the other—and had become the greatest vote

“It is ambition,” he had written, “that makes of a creature a real man.” Pride, embarrassment, gloating: such emotions could only hinder his progress along the road he saw so clearly before him—the “vision” he had indeed held for so long. They were luxuries in which he would not indulge himself.

Lyndon Johnson had always wanted attention, and more than attention—he had always wanted people to look up to him, to show him deference and respect. Now, because he had power, he had, at last, a taste of what he wanted.

For the next two decades, Sam Rayburn held power in Washington. Presidents came and went—Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy—but whoever was President, Sam Rayburn was Speaker; he held the post he had dreamed of as a boy for almost seventeen of the twenty-one years after 1940, more years than any other man in American history.

These tactics had, of course, been employed within the confines of campus politics, so small-scale and insignificant compared to the politics of the outside world. Within those confines, nonetheless, had emerged a certain pattern to the tactics—the politicking—of Lyndon Johnson. Perhaps the most significant aspect of the pattern was its lack of any

In fact, as would be demonstrated as soon as Johnson began hiring men on a large scale, the crucial qualification was subservience. Dignity was not permitted in a Johnson employee. Pride was not permitted. Utter submission to Johnson’s demands, the submission that Jones called “a surrender of personality,” a loss of “your individuality to his domin