The Path to Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson #1)

by Robert A. Caro

As the New Deal’s new programs resulted in new bureaucracies, and as the bureaucracies swelled and swelled again, thousands of new federal jobs were created, jobs that could be filled with minimal reference to merit, since Congress, in approving the new agencies, had thoughtfully exempted many of them from civil service requirements. The choice jobs were out of the reach of Lyndon Johnson’s Congressman, junior and inactive as he was, not to mention the reach of his secretary. But the secretary secured quite a few jobs in the lower echelons: in government mailrooms (Gene Latimer was still working in the House Post Office, and now Latimer’s best friend, his former Houston High classmate Carroll Keach, was working in the mailroom of the Federal Housing Administration); and in government galleries (a rotating succession of young men served as doorkeepers in the House visitors’ galleries); at the endless banks of desks in the Department of Agriculture’s South Building (where Eloise Quill had been joined by several other young women from the Fourteenth Congressional District of Texas), and in the immense federal warehouse on D Street, Southwest, that was the temporary headquarters of the Treasury Department’s vastly expanded Procurement Division (where at least one of its 2,000 clerks, Ivan D. Bell, addressed Lyndon Johnson as “Chief”); and in nooks and crannies of federal service ranging from library stacks on Capitol Hill (several Kleberg constituents, including Johnson’s olde...