The Passage of Power by Robert A. Caro Read Free Book Online

and had driven his men, reciting that mantra, “If we do
everything,
” and now he told them what “everything” was going to mean in the campaign for the nomination: They would each shortly be assigned a group of states for which they would be responsible, and they would make contact with—and try to win to Johnson’s side—every member of those states’ convention delegations. Between them, and others who would be brought aboard and assigned responsibility for other states, “we were,” Herring recalls, “going to see every Democratic delegate in the United States.” So, having heard similar sales pitches before, they felt they knew what would quickly come next: the list of states to which each of them was assigned and then the barrage of orders telling them what they were to do to win those states’ delegates for Lyndon, orders that would include details of each delegate’s political, personal and financial situation, and then the follow-up calls from Johnson—the calls, often in the middle of the night, in which he did not bother to identify himself but simply began, as soon as the telephone receiver was picked up, to ask questions, demand answers (Had this been done? Had that been done? Why hadn’t more been done?) and to give new assignments.
    But this time, as month after month passed in 1958, nothing came, not even the list of assigned states. “We didn’t hear anything at all,” Kilgore says. And when, puzzled, they called the two men they normally called when they had questions—John Connally, who had left Johnson’s staff to become attorney for the wealthy oilmanSid Richardson but who would, Johnson had told them, be running the campaign, and Walter Jenkins, the member of Johnson’s staff most able to convey Johnson’s thinking—the answers they received were evasive. Oh, he would be running, Connally and Jenkins told them. Of course he would be running. He just wasn’t running yet.
    But, as month followed month, and 1958 drew to a close, and the convention and election year of 1960 drew closer, the assignments were still not forthcoming.
    M EN WERE PUZZLED in Washington, too. When a group of attorneys—a dozen leading legal and political minds of the New and Fair Deals—had, in 1957, been brought together in the conference room atCorcoran & Rowe to devise wording that would facilitate passage of thecivil rights bill, the senior partner of thatinfluential Washington law firm had told them, “You know, we’re all pros here, and we can talk to each other. We know we’re here to elect Lyndon Johnson President.” And now, in 1958, with the bill passed, “it was,” Reedy says, “time to move.” Hardly had the year begun when the firm’s other name partner was sitting in Johnson’s office in the Capitol explaining what Johnson had to do.
    He had to broaden his support beyond the South, Jim Rowe said, but the big northern states were controlled by a few bosses—Dick Daley of Illinois, Dave Lawrence of Pennsylvania,Mike DiSalle of Ohio,Carmine De Sapio andMike Prendergast in New York,John Bailey of Connecticut. To win the support of these hard-eyed men, and of party chieftains in smaller northern states, he would have to demonstrate that, although he was a southerner, he could attract support in non-southern states, not in liberal strongholds like Illinois or Pennsylvania or New York, perhaps, but certainly in the border states, and in the western and Rocky Mountain states. That could only be done, Rowe said, if he entered some of the Democratic primaries that would be held in 1960. There would be sixteen of them, and some of them seemed naturals for Johnson:Indiana, for example, a conservative state with strong ties to the South; andWest Virginia, whose junior senator,Robert C. Byrd, a Johnson acolyte, was already urging him to run, promising to deliver the state for him—a state so overwhelmingly Protestant that even if a Kennedy candidacy had somehow managed to pick up steam, it