Means of Ascent by Robert A. Caro Page A

the Board Room, he said, almost shouting, “I can get into the White House. Why can’t I get into that room?” Nor did the thaw extend to more
     than perfunctory support for Johnson’s Senate race that year; in Rayburn’s own congressional district, in fact, Johnson ran very badly. And now, not long after Johnson’s return to Washington in July, 1941, Rayburn’s true preference became clearer. Another youthful public official of whom the Speaker was fond, Texas Attorney General Gerald Mann, a fiery New Dealer whose hometown was not far from Rayburn’s own, had been a favorite in the 1941 race
     until Johnson entered, and there were those who felt that had Roosevelt not endorsed Johnson, thereby dividing the New Deal vote, Mann, rather than Pappy O’Daniel, would have been the victor in the Senate race. Now there were hints that Mann was Rayburn’s preference for the 1942 race. The Rayburn problem was not an insuperable one, however, so long as Roosevelt held firm, and he did. When, in October, 1941, Mann came to Washington, the Speaker attempted to arrange for
     Roosevelt to meet him, telling Pa Watson that “a short visit with the President would help all [the] way down the line.” Roosevelt refused to see Mann. Rayburn insisted, and an appointment was made for Mann’s next trip to Washington, in December, but Johnson was quietly assured by Roosevelt’s aides that the meeting would not change the President’s choice. Other potential candidates—RepresentativeWright Patman, for
     example, and former GovernorJames V. Allred, a liberal and a Roosevelt ally—felt that, with Roosevelt so firm behind Johnson, there was no point in running.
    Everything seemed on track for another run. A statewide Johnson campaign organization was being set up. The Brown & Root plane was flying the candidate back and forth between Washington and Texas, and from city to city across the state, as in late October, 1941, he began an unannounced campaign; during a tour of shipyards in Beaumont, the
Beaumont Enterprise
reported, “the central Texas representative whom the President has
     called ‘My good friend’ … shook hands with more people than the average politician could see in a week.” And Johnson could scarcely restrain himself from making the announcement; asked at a private reception in Beaumont if he would run in 1942, he said, “When we have a prize fight” as close as the 1941 race had been, “it’s usually consideredclose enough to call for a return
     engagement, don’t you think?”
    There was, however, an interruption in his plans:Pearl Harbor.
    1 Here, and in several other places, I have recapitulated material—including quotations from interviews—from Volume 1,
The Path to Power
, because it seemed to me necessary to establish the context in which certain events of the present volume take place. (Among the other places are the descriptions of Lyndon Johnson’s early years in Congress, his relationship
     with Sam Rayburn, Lady Bird’s early years and the Rio Grande Valley.)

2

All Quiet on the Western Front
    I N THE OPENING SPEECH of Lyndon Johnson’s 1941 campaign, the line that had drawn the most enthusiastic applause was one he delivered after warning of the possibility of war, and of the need for America to be prepared: “If the day ever comes when my vote must be cast to send your boy to the trenches—that day Lyndon Johnson will leave his Senate seat to go with him.” Finding as the campaign
     progressed that that pledge was a surefire crowd-pleaser in patriotic, militaristic Texas, with its glorious history of wars against Mexico and the Comanches, he repeated it day after day, in person and over the radio, on courthouse lawns in small towns and in big-city auditoriums. He played variations on the sentence. He promised that if war came, he would never ask for a desk job in Washington; that when the shooting started he “would be in the front line,
     in the trenches, in the mud and blood with