Means of Ascent by Robert A. Caro

coffers, gone to the edge of the law and, some Internal Revenue Service agents were later to contend, over that edge into the realm of fraud in order to finance Lyndon Johnson’s ambition. Brown wanted to make more millions, and to
     build projects even huger. Representative Johnson had brought Brown & Root millions of dollars in profits. What might Senator Johnson be able to do? Now Herman’s younger brother George delivered to Johnson his brother’s pledge: if Lyndon wanted to run in 1942, the money would be available again—all that was needed.
    One problem was not solved. The mightySam Rayburn, Speaker of the House of Representatives, had been very close to Lyndon and LadyBird Johnson. They had learned that his hard, expressionless face concealed tenderness and loneliness, the loneliness of a man who had no wife and children and who was too proud to ever admit he was lonely, who walked the streets of Washington alone on weekends with his face set as
     if daring someone to speak to him, as if he
wanted
to be alone, who went to few parties because he believed he had no gift for small talk. Rayburn’s loneliness was accentuated by his lack of children. He saw in Lady Bird someone as shy as he had once been, and between the fierce Speaker and the timid young woman there grew a love similar to that between a father and daughter; she cooked his favorite foods the way he liked them, and made him, this man who never felt at
     home in Washington, feel at home. For some years, Rayburn had looked on Lyndon as a son; awakening in the hospital during a serious siege of pneumonia, the young congressional secretary found Rayburn sitting beside him, his vest littered with cigarette ashes from a night of smoking, ashes he had not brushed off because he was afraid that any movement would disturb the younger man. Seeing that Johnson was awake, Rayburn had growled: “Now, Lyndon, don’t
     you worry. If you need anything, just call on me.” It was Rayburn, the man who never asked a favor, who begged a favor for Lyndon Johnson, the appointment as Texas NYA director, and thereby gave the congressional secretary the upward boost he needed. And as soon as Johnson won his seat in the House, the Speaker had taken him into its inner circle,
his
circle, even into the sanctuary of sanctuaries, a little hideaway room on the ground floor of the Capitol in which,
     every afternoon, met Sam Rayburn’s “Board of Education,” a group of the great House barons—and twenty-eight-year-old Lyndon Johnson. In July, 1939, however, during the eruption of a long-smouldering feud between Roosevelt and Vice PresidentJohn Nance Garner, Johnson saw his chance to replace Garner as Roosevelt’s man in Texas, chief dispenser of patronage and power for the New Deal, and only Rayburn stood in his way. He
     betrayed the Speaker, fomenting, in concert with Wirtz, a feud betweenRayburn and Roosevelt by leading the President to believe, inaccurately, that Rayburn, actually a staunch New Deal supporter, was its secret enemy. How much Rayburn learned about Johnson’s role in poisoning the President’s mind against him will probably never be known—around his personal feelings Rayburn had erected, decades before, an impenetrable
     wall—but he evidently learned enough, and for the next fifteen months, he was cold to Lyndon Johnson. Johnson’s success in raising funds for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in October, 1940—the fund-raising that had made him a force to be reckoned with by other congressmen—thawed the coldness somewhat, for Rayburn, aware of Johnson’s importance in preserving the Democratic majority and thereby keeping him in the Speakership, was a
     man who always paid his debts. But the thaw didnot extend to readmission to the Board of Education; all during 1941, Johnson received no invitation to the ground-floor hideaway. Encountering House parliamentarianLewis Deschler late one afternoon on the landing of the staircase near