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

would be derailed there. He had to decide which primaries he was going to enter, Rowe said, and he had to decide quickly. While the primaries might be two years away, it was none too early to begin setting up organizations—statewide organizations, county-wide organizations, organizations in each state’s individual congressional districts. He had to start immediately making trips to states that would not hold primaries as well as to those that did, meeting the men who would select and, in some cases, control the delegates who would cast votes at the convention; he had to establish personal relationships with them—personal and other kinds: had to find out what they wanted, what promises (of positions in a new presidential Administration, for themselves or for their allies; of rewards even more pragmatic) would enlist their support; what issues they cared about, cared about deeply enough that a candidate’s position on them would be a decisive factor in whether or not they supported him. And, Rowe said, it was important to start doing that, too, as soon as possible: to lock up delegates before they were locked up by someone else.
    Lyndon Johnson had, George Reedy was to say, “an almost mystical belief in Jim’s powers” because of a memorandum that Rowe had written to President Harry Truman in 1948, at a moment when Truman’s re-election campaign looked hopeless. Johnson knew that Truman had kept the memorandum—thirty-two single-spaced typewritten pages, containing a campaign strategy of great specificity and pragmatism, with every one of its recommendations based not on ideology but on what the memo called “the politically advantageous thing to do”—in the bottom drawer of his desk in the Oval Office all during the campaign,using it as a blueprint for his come-from-behind victory overThomas Dewey. Having read it himself, Johnson believed that its brilliance had been proven by Truman’s victory. Feeling that Rowe might be able to do the same for him—could give him, too, a blueprint for reaching the goal that flickered always before him—he had often, as in the case of the “Armageddon” memo, given heavy weight to Rowe’s opinions. But this time, when Rowe gave his advice, Lyndon Johnson rejected it—all of it.
    He wasn’t going to enter any primaries, he told Rowe. He wasn’t going to run around the country giving speeches. He was going to make no overt move at all to get the nomination. Instead, he was going to stay in Washington and stick to running the Senate; he was going, he said, to “tend the store.” He had a responsibility to do that, he said; being Majority Leader was a full-time job, and he was going to concentrate on that job, and simply stay in Washington and do it. The country would see that he was doing it, he said; the country knew what he had accomplished as Majority Leader, and would see that he was doing the responsible thing.
    He would pick up plenty of non-southern support without running around the country, he said. He would get that support right out of Washington. For one thing, he had Mr. Sam. The Speaker, he said, had an awful lot of representatives who owed him favors and who wanted favors from him. And he himself, he said, had his senators. He could count on them, he said, senators likeCarl Hayden,Mike Mansfield,Clint Anderson andDennis Chavez. Ol’ Carl had promised him Arizona; in Montana, he had Mike; Clint and Denny would take care of New Mexico. Let the other candidates run around the country, he said. Since none of them were particularly strong, they would kill each other off in the primaries. None of them had a chance of coming into the convention with anything near the necessary 761 votes. The convention would therefore be deadlocked, he said—and then the party would turn to him, for in the event of a deadlock, the nomination would be decided by the party’s bosses. They wanted a winner; they weren’t going to go for Adlai, a two-time loser whose