(1)
Robert
A. Caro,
Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power (1983)
Rayburn who hated the railroads, whose freight charges fleeced the
farmer, and the banks, whose interest charges fleeced the farmer,
and the utility companies, which refused to extend their power lines
into the countryside, and thus condemned the farmer to darkness.
Rayburn who hated the "trusts" and the "interests"-
Rayburn who hated the rich and all their devices. Rayburn who hated
the Republican Party, which he regarded as one of those devices-hated
it for currency policies that, he said, "make the rich richer
and the poor poorer"; hated it for the tariff ("the robber
tariff, the most indefensible system that the world has ever known,"
he called it; because the Republican Party "fooled ... the
farmer into" supporting the tariff, he said, the rich "fatten
their already swollen purses with more ill-gotten gains wrung from
the horny hands of the toiling masses"); and hated it for Reconstruction,
too: the son of a Confederate cavalryman who "never stopped
hating the Yankees," Rayburn, a friend once said, "will
not in his long lifetime forget Appomattox"; for years after
he came to Congress, the walls of his office bore many pictures,
but all were of one man-Robert E. Lee; in 1928, when his district
was turning to the Republican Hoover over Al Smith, and he was advised
to turn with it or risk losing his own congressional seat, he growled:
"As long as I honor the memory of the Confederate dead, and
revere the gallant devotion of my Confederate father to the Southland,
I will never vote for electors of a party which sent the carpetbagger
and the scalawag to the prostrate South with saber and sword."
Rayburn who hated the railroads, and the banks, and the Republicans
because he never forgot who he was, or where he came from.
(2)
Alfred Steinberg, Sam Johnson's Boy (1968)
Rayburn came to Congress in 1913, with the Wilson influx, by the
narrowest of margins. The opportunity arose when Choice Randell,
representative from the Fourth Congressional District, quit to make
an unsuccessful race for the Senate. Rayburn had seven opponents
in the House contest, and it went down to the final wire in doubt.
Of the 21,236 votes, he emerged with less than 25 per cent of the
total. Yet his vote of 4,983 gave him the election, for the highest
vote of any other candidate was 4,493.
When
Rayburn first came to Washington, John Nance Garner let him share
his office until one became available for him. And as the bald but
fair-haired boy of Garner, Rayburn was given a coveted post on the
House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee. Here old-timers
recalled that he buttered up Committee Chairman William C. Adamson,
who also became his sponsor.
But
before long Garner realized that Rayburn intended to compete with
him eventually for House leadership. In 1924 their relationship
grew strained, said Tom Connally, when Garner tried to get House
Democrats to elect him minority leader. By chance he discovered
that protégé Rayburn was quietly boosting Finis Garrett
of Tennessee, the state where Rayburn was born, for the same post.
When Garrett won, Garner lost his enthusiasm for the double-dealer,
though he let him stay in his private drinking club.
During
Rayburn's early House period he was known for his coarse practical
jokes. But he subdued himself on purpose, adopted a dour expression,
and clothed himself like an undertaker. Despite his early poverty,
while in Congress he managed to acquire a comfortable two-story
white colonial house on a substantial farm-ranch near Bonham. This
was essential for prestige purposes to impress visiting politicians,
who noted the permanent roots in the soil of Texas with approbation.
Lyndon Johnson caught the significance of this facade on early visits
to Bonham. He listened with interest when Rayburn told company he
was "busy as a cranberry merchant" on the farm and detailed
so many orders to "Old Henry," his colored herdsman, that
he gave the impression he was first a farmer and second a member
of Congress.
The Lyndon Johnson-Sam Rayburn relationship developed quickly into
a son-father kinship. "Sam had married Metze Jones, the sister
of Marvin Jones, a member of the House from Amarillo, in 1927,"
said Tom Connally. "In fact, Sam and Marvin got married at
the same time in a double ceremony. But on their joint honeymoon,
the bridegrooms did such powerful drinking that the brides fled
in the middle of one night and later got divorces." After that
Rayburn called himself a bachelor and became a doting uncle to his
flock of nephews and nieces.
(3)
Robert Dallek, Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times
(1991)
No
one in the House was more important to Lyndon Johnson, however,
than Sam Rayburn, his fellow Texan from Bonham in the northeast
corner of the state. At the age of fifty-five, after twenty-four
years in the House, Rayburn had become Majority Leader in January
1937. A short, stocky man with a bald head, broad shoulders, and
a thick-set, powerful neck, Rayburn dressed in dark suits that gave
him the "somber, immaculate" look of "a capable undertaker."
A normally "poker-faced expression" or "stern demeanor"
added to his grave appearance. A bachelor with few interests outside
of the House of Representatives, which he once described as "my
life and my love," Rayburn was a lonely man. On Sundays, he
would awake unhappy at the prospect of a day without the excitement
of the Capitol. "God help the lonely, for loneliness consumes
people," he once said when facing a quiet day.
