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Great & Good Friends. House Speaker Rayburn was naturally interested in the son of his old colleague, and his influence on Johnson's career is immeasurable. In 1931, when Lyndon Johnson came to Washington as an aide to Texas Representative Richard Kleberg, part owner of the famed King Ranch, he worked himself into a case of galloping pneumonia and collapsed. When he came to in a hospital, he found Sam Rayburn at his bedside. "Now, Lyndon," said Mister Sam, "you just take it easy and don't you worry. You need some money or anything, you just call on me." Johnson did not need the money, but recalls that "the most comforting moment in my life was to see that man sitting there dribbling cigarette ashes down his vest." (To Johnson's children, Rayburn is still "Uncle Sam, the Speaker.") And in 1935, Rayburn got Johnson a job as Texas director of the National Youth Administration.
In NYA, Johnson put some 20,000 young men to work at such jobs as building and beautifying the state's roadside parks—and he built up a respectable political following which he used as a springboard in 1937 to run for the House of Representatives. Johnson won over nine opponents, and, even before going to Washington, made another great and good friend: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Fishing in Galveston Bay, F.D.R. heard of the young man who had just been elected on the odd—in conservative Texas —platform of support for Roosevelt's plan to pack the Supreme Court. He called Lyndon Johnson aboard his yacht, liked the cut of his jib. When Johnson arrived in Washington, F.D.R. saw to it that he was placed on the powerful House Naval Affairs Committee. Says Johnson of Franklin Roosevelt: "He was like a daddy to me."
A Chance to Blossom. As a Congressman, Lyndon Johnson went pretty much down the line for the New Deal. He ran for the Senate in 1941 against W. Lee ("Pappy") O'Daniel—and got counted out by a highly suspicious 1,311 votes. He ran again in 1948, this time against former Governor Coke Stevenson—and got counted in by an equally suspicious 87 votes. During his first Senate days he was invited to a Southern caucus by the man who today stands as his most powerful backer: Georgia's Senator Richard B. Russell. There was an argument over Southern strategy in fighting a proposed change in the Senate's cloture rule, and Johnson sided with Russell, who was both pleased and impressed. A few days later Russell tipped off Texas reporters that Johnson was about to make a Senate speech that would be worth a story. From that beginning came a close friendship.