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

by Robert A. Caro

both lanes were crowded, so that Lyndon, who was driving, had to get cars in his lane to pull off to the side of the road if he wanted to pass them. And the horn on Martin’s car didn’t work. “And then,” Koeniger says, “and this is what I’ve thought of many times to show how aggressive Lyndon was—he’d pull right up behind some car and bang the side of his door, just smash it—hard—with his open palm so it sounded like a crash, almost, over and over until they’d pull over. Chauffeur-driven cars, some of them. Rich people out for a holiday. But that long arm would just reach out the window and just smash and smash. And the other car would swerve over and we’d go by and they’d glare at us. I wouldn’t have done that, but Lyndon was just determined to get there on time.”

In Austin, he had seen the legislators who accepted the beefsteak, the bourbon and the blondes, who lived at the Driskill while his father lived at the boardinghouse. His father had refused to be like them, and he had seen what happened to his father. His mother had believed that poetry and beauty were the most important things in life, and she had refused to ever stop believing that, and he had seen what happened to his mother. The most striking characteristic of both his parents was that they were idealists who stuck to their ideals. They had been trying ever since he was a little boy to teach him that what mattered was principle, and sticking to principle. Lyndon Johnson’s college career—and his career after college, from beginning to end—would demonstrate what he thought of their teachings.

But the aspect of Lyndon Johnson’s character most remarkable to other students was his lack of embarrassment when caught out in an exaggeration or an outright falsehood. “You could catch him in a lie about something, and it was like he didn’t care,” Richards says. “The next day he’d be back lying about the same thing again.” Says Clayton Stribling: “He never seemed to resent [being found out]. He just didn’t care. He wouldn’t get mad. He’d be back the next day talking the same as ever.”

In practice he has no reticence in cutting me off in the middle of a sentence to comment on its inadequacy, and to make pointed suggestions for improvement.

This is basically how Rene Vidal trains his students as well.

“His attitude was, all the minor details must be taken care of, everything must be taken care of, and of course we must win. But the thing was: if you took care of all the minor details, you would win. If you stayed up late, if you did just absolutely everything you could do—well, from it would grow everything. The world’s going to open. God, he made you believe, man—you weren’t just [debaters]. You were people who were going to succeed. And we began to see that was true. He was sending you out in the world, where other people are applauding you.

For Gene Latimer—sixty-five years old at the time he spoke, sitting alone in a little apartment in a little town in Texas, a tiny Irish elf with sad eyes that often spill over with tears as he describes his life as an employee of Lyndon Johnson, so that he periodically excuses himself and goes into the bathroom to wash them off—understands, even if he was unable to cure, his own psychological dependence on Johnson: to listen to him talk is to hear a man who is fully aware that during his sixteenth year, he surrendered—for life—his own personality to a stronger personality. To listen to him talk is to hear a man who is fully aware that he has been used as a tool.

Gene Latimer speaks of Lyndon Johnson with idolatry. “I don’t think he’s ever been scared in his life.” And he talks of him with fear. “He can be mean. He can make people cry. He can make you feel so bad that you could go out and shoot yourself.” And he talks of him with a feeling deeper than idolatry or fear. “I had such tremendous respect for the man,” he says. “I don’t know any other man I had such respect for. And, hell, you just had faith—hell, he could talk you into anything and make you feel it was right, and absolutely necessary and proper. He can make you cry, he can make you laugh—he can do anything. And if you like him, then he puts things on such a personal basis, you know. You felt like I belong to him, and he belongs to me. Whatever you do, you do it for him”

His willingness to work endless hours for Lyndon Johnson did not include a willingness to surrender his personality to him. He was afraid of surrendering his personality. “Lyndon was always in a position of command,” he says. “I never felt equal. Ordinarily, I’m aggressive and belligerent. My nature is such that if I can’t be an equal, I will not remain in a situation, and he was so demanding that—well, you lose your individuality if you allow someone to be too demanding for too long.”

In later years, Johnson’s penchant for forcing subordinates to watch him defecating would be called by some an example of a wonderful “naturalness.” Others would find it, as one journalist put it, “in part, a method of control. Bring Douglas Dillon into the bathroom with you, and he has a little less independent dignity.” This tactic was, indeed, “a method of control.” The first person on whom it was employed was L. E. Jones—and those who observed it, knew it was being done to humiliate him, and to prove to him who was boss.

Four hundred and thirty-five Congressional districts: among them districts represented by Congressmen of long seniority whose favor even a President had to court; among them districts represented by Congressmen who chaired powerful committees; among them districts represented by Congressmen who were allies of the New Deal; among them districts represented by Congressmen who worked hard for their districts. Few districts fared better under the New Deal’s programs than this district with a junior Congressman who opposed the New Deal, a Congressman who seldom visited his office—this district whose only asset on Capitol Hill was a young secretary who worked for it with a frantic, frenzied, almost desperate aggressiveness and energy.

Henceforth, Johnson announced, meetings would be held not every month but every week, and would include not only debates but speeches by “prominent figures.” And although the new Speaker declared that the reason for this innovation was to make the meetings livelier, his teen-age assistants knew that there was another reason as well: says Latimer, “It gave him an excuse to go and see Huey Long or Tom Connally or a Texas Congressman who was head of a committee he thought he might need for something, and invite them to speak, and once he got in to see somebody, the Chief, being the way he was, would make them remember him.”

If political tactics, for example, were being discussed, Johnson would be the center of the discussion; if the discussion concerned political issues—philosophy, principles, ideas, ideals—Johnson would not even be part of it. Realizing, as he entered a room in which a bull session was being held, that its topic was a serious issue, he would try to duck back out of the room before he was seen. If he was already participating in a bull session and it turned to such an issue, he would quietly slip out of the room, or, if he remained, would refuse, even if drawn into the discussion, to allow himself to be pinned down to a specific stand. He would refuse to take a stand even when directly challenged to do so, turning aside the challenge with a joke, or a Texas anecdote. Pressed to the wall, he would say he simply hadn’t yet made up his mind on the issue.

Lyndon Johnson was using his boss’ boat, his boss’ car, to pay the enormous telephone bills his boss’ money, to make friends—but he was making friends not for his boss but for himself. A new political organization was being created in the district, an organization which was coming, more and more, to be centered not on the district’s Congressman but on the Congressman’s secretary.

“I remember hearing Lyndon say that this business of getting these people jobs is really the nucleus of a political organization for the future,” Russell Brown says. In his attempts to obtain patronage, he did not—the secretary to an obscure Congressman—have much ammunition to work with. So he could not afford to let any opening slip away.

Leaving Sam Houston High School to become Kleberg’s secretary, he had persuaded school officials, in somewhat of a quandary because of the suddenness of his departure, to hire Hollis Frazier—college debater and White Star—to replace him as debate coach. Frazier, at Johnson’s suggestion, later passed on the job to White Star Bert Horne; Richards passed on his to White Star Buster Brown.

Back on the road again, Johnson would be driving “like a crazy man.” Because of his behavior at the service station, however, Jones and Latimer felt that behind the “craziness”—the frenzied, frantic, almost desperate aggressiveness and haste—lay thorough, painstaking care. And because of the long, intense silences, they believed that behind the haste lay also the most careful, calculating “thinking, planning.” Those who knew only the public Lyndon Johnson saw the energy and the aggressiveness. Those who knew him best of all, the two youths who for years had not only worked in the same room with him but slept in the same room with him, saw the preparation—the long, intense, silent, secret preparation—behind the energy and aggressiveness.

When Silent Cal Coolidge noted that “You don’t have to explain something you haven’t said,” Rayburn told people that that was “the smartest thing he’d ever heard outside of the Bible.”

Says Ken Harding: “He had many worshippers, but very few close friends. You held him in awe. You didn’t dare get close to him. People feared to get close to him, because they were afraid of saying the wrong thing. And because people were afraid to get close to him, he was a very lonely guy. His life was a tragedy. I felt very, very sorry for Sam Rayburn.”

He didn’t want the people to stop. “The nature of the man,” says one NYA staffer, “is to think of a hundred things for you to do during the day that you can’t get done. I don’t care what the problem is, he’d start looking at it and he’d start asking questions, and he’ll have fifty thoughts and fifty things for you to get done in the next hour. And then he’ll take off with his shirttail flying and leave you to do it.” And then, says another, “Tomorrow he’d want to know why you didn’t get through with it.”

Not all the rage was real. Sometimes, at the height of a tantrum—as Johnson stood screaming, flailing the air with his arms as epithets poured from his contorted mouth, seemingly out of control—an important telephone call would come in. Without a moment’s pause, he would pick up the telephone—and his voice would be soft and calm, and, if the caller was important, deferential. Then the call would be over, the phone would be replaced in its cradle and without a moment’s pause the rage would resume. Lyndon Johnson employed curses as he employed competition: for the control of men.

During those long evenings in the back yard, he didn’t merely read NYA regulations; he put them into perspective, an inspiring perspective, explaining how the NYA was trying to salvage the lives of young men and women who were walking the streets or riding the rails in despair, who were cold and hungry. Look, fellows, he would say, these rules are a lot of nonsense, but we have to follow them, because we have to put the kids to work, we have to get them into school and keep them there, and we have to do it fast. We can’t have Washington sending the forms back because we didn’t fill them out right, because every day more of them drop out of school, and we lose ’em forever.

“But he had what they call now a charisma. He was dynamic, and he had this piercing look, and he knew exactly where he was going, and what he was going to do next, and he had you sold down the river on whatever he was telling you. And you had no doubts that he was going to do what he said—no doubts at all. You never thought of him being only twenty-seven years old. You thought of him like a big figure in history. You felt the power. If he’d pat you on the back, you’d feel so honored. People worked so hard for him because you absolutely adored him. You loved him.” She saw why Chuck—and Chuck’s brother, and Chuck’s friends: all the men in the NYA offices—wanted so badly to stay on his team. “Working for him was very exciting. Fascinating. History was being made. The country was being turned around. And Lyndon was one of the turners—one of the makers and the doers and the shovers.

He had tried to do everything—everything—possible to succeed, to earn respect, to “be somebody.” “There was a feeling—if you did everything, you would win.”

All politicians shake hands, of course. But they didn’t shake hands as Lyndon Johnson did. “Listen,” Lyndon Johnson would say, standing, lean and earnest and passionate, before a Hill Country rancher he remembered from his youth. “Listen, I’m running for Congress. I want your support. I want your vote. And if you know anybody who can help me, I want you to get them to help me. I need help. Will you help me? Will you give me your helping hand?” Will you give me your helping hand?—it was only as he asked that last question that Lyndon Johnson raised his own hand, extending it in entreaty.

In later years, the men who sat with him in his living room during his first campaign would speak of Johnson on the record in terms of his “energy.” Off the record, they speak of the fear that sometimes filled their Chief’s voice. “He would say things like, ‘Well, you can just cross off Bastrop after today. Take a pencil and just cross it off!’ Or, ‘Well you really put a knife into me in Brenham, didn’t you? Just put it in and twisted it!’ There was a lot on the line, and he was afraid he was going to lose. He was terribly afraid he was going to lose.” But after the outbursts came the work. Tired though Johnson might have been, no part of it was scanted. Had someone failed to persuade a local leader? Should he try another approach? What should it be? Should someone else try? Who would be best? What should he say? What could be done in the leader’s box that hadn’t been done already?

If no leader would introduce Lyndon, Sam said, he should stop searching for mediocre adults as substitutes, but instead should be introduced by a young child, an outstanding young child. And the child should introduce him not as an adult would introduce him, but with a poem, a very special poem. You know the poem, he told Rebekah—the one about the thousands.

That was indeed the reason he won—and the reason no politician had thought he could win. The polls had not shown his strength at the forks of the creeks, for no poll bothered with the people at the forks of the creeks, as no candidate visited them. But Lyndon Johnson had visited these people. And they had sent him to Congress.

And while their congratulations had been strictly pro forma, his replies were not. You didn’t lose, he told Avery, just as I didn’t win. “It was a victory for President Roosevelt.” He repeated that to Sam Stone—“My dear Judge: Thank you very much for your kind telegram. The people voted to support President Roosevelt and his program, and the victory is his”—and, since the Judge would be a more dangerous future opponent than Avery, went on at more length: “You warned me you would show us how to carry Williamson County, and I congratulate you upon the support the homefolks gave your candidacy. Please tell your and my friends there that I admire the way they stood by you.” And to the opponent he considered most dangerous of all—Polk Shelton, who had campaigned with energy, and whose strong beliefs Johnson feared would impel him to run again—his reply went even further: “Thank you for your kind telegram and your pledge of support.… I hope you will always feel that my efforts are at your disposal. Whatever service I may be able to render will be cheerfully and gladly done.”

(Shelton didn’t know the full extent of the trouble Johnson was taking to become his friend; Johnson had not, in fact, just parked his car when Shelton came out; he had parked it an hour before, and had been sitting in it for an hour waiting for Shelton to come, to take advantage of the “chance” meeting.) Shelton was not the only opponent thus disarmed; Tom Miller gave Johnson a postelection contribution of $100 to meet any campaign deficit he might have.

What might prevent a Dan Quill or another man from behaving to his enemies the way Lyndon Johnson behaved would be pride or embarrassment—or any one of a hundred conventional emotions, such as a natural desire to gloat, even for a day or two, over a fallen, and vicious, foe. But Lyndon Johnson had determined many years before the emotion that would govern his life—the emotion that, with “inflexible will,” would be the only emotion that he would allow to govern his life. “It is ambition,” he had written, “that makes of a creature a real man.” Pride, embarrassment, gloating: such emotions could only hinder his progress along the road he saw so clearly before him—the “vision” he had indeed held for so long. They were luxuries in which he would not indulge himself.

“He [Johnson] was smiling and deferential, but, hell, lots of guys can be smiling and deferential,” he says. “Lyndon had one of the most incredible capacities for dealing with older men. I never saw anything like it. He could follow someone’s mind around, and get where it was going before the other fellow knew where it was going. I saw him talk to an older man, and the minute he changed subjects, Lyndon was there ahead of him, and saying what he wanted to hear—before he knew what he wanted to hear.”