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

by Robert A. Caro

What the dam needed in Washington was a champion already knowledgeable enough and possessed of sufficient entrée to find—swiftly—bypasses through the bureaucracy: a champion, for example, able to cut through the endless red tape at the Bureau of Reclamation by obtaining the personal interest of the Bureau’s boss, Interior Secretary Ickes—or, perhaps, of the Congressman of whom Ickes was particularly fond, Maury Maverick. What the dam needed in Washington was a champion with entrée to Congressmen powerful enough to roll over those bureaucratic obstacles (the Budget Bureau’s quibbling over legalities, for example) that could not be bypassed—a Congressman such as Sam Rayburn, for example. What the dam needed in Washington was a champion with entrée to the chairman of the committee with jurisdiction over the dam, Rivers and Harbors’ Joseph Jefferson Mansfield—or, if not to Mansfield himself, then to the man whose advice Mansfield followed slavishly, the man who pushed Mansfield’s wheelchair through the halls each day at noon: Roy Miller. And because of his trips to Washington in 1935, Alvin Wirtz was aware not only that Lyndon Johnson “knew Washington,” but that he knew—possessed entrée to—these very men. The young man sitting across his desk from him now was the champion he needed. When Johnson asked for his support, he agreed at once.