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a hunger for power in its most naked form, for power not to improve the lives of others, but to manipulate and dominate them, to bend them to his will. For the more one learns—from his family, his childhood playmates, his college classmates, his first assistants, his congressional colleagues—about Lyndon Johnson, the more it becomes apparent not only that this hunger was a constant throughout his life but that it was a hunger so fierce and consuming that no consideration of morality or ethics, no cost to himself—or to anyone else—could stand before it.
Congressmen who were worried about money to ensure their return to Capitol Hill had learned that all the money they needed was available from Texas—from Texas and from the new industrial order of the Southwest, of which Texas was the heart—and that Lyndon Johnson, more than any other single figure, controlled it.
Fehrenbach notes, “but there was a difference to the Anglo frontier in Texas that colored the whole struggle, that embued it with virulent bitterness rare in any time or place. The Anglo frontier in Texas was not a frontier of traders, trappers and soldiers, as in most other states. It was a frontier of farming families, with women and small children, encroaching and colliding with a long-ranging, barbaric, war-making race.”
“If you can’t come into a room and tell right away who is for you and who is against you, you have no business in politics.”
THE REACTION OF the targets of this barrage of compliments is documentation of the adage that where flattery is concerned, no excess is possible.
Texans were elected on December 7, 1931, not only to the Speakership of the House but to the chairmanships of five of its most influential committees. Lyndon Johnson’s first day in the Capitol was the day Texas came to power in it—a power that the state was to hold, with only the briefest interruptions, for more than thirty years.
“Have we gone mad? Have we no idea that if we carry this period of unrest from one week to another, a panic will break loose, which all the tariffs under heaven will not stem? Yet we sit here to take care of some little interest in this state or that.… ‘My state! My state!’ My God! Let’s hear ‘My country!’ What good is your state if your country sinks into the quagmire of ruin!”
Iowa farmers, singing, “Let’s call a farmers’ holiday,/A holiday let’s hold;/We’ll eat our wheat and ham and eggs/And let them eat their gold,”
He didn’t know whether what he was going to try would work, the new President said: “I tell you frankly that it is a new and untrod path.” But he was going to try. “I tell you with equal frankness that an unprecedented condition calls for the trial of new means.” And if these means didn’t work, he said, he would be the first to admit it. And then he would try something else.
Maverick saw that this young secretary understood without being told what many politicians never understand: that voters’ reluctance to do extensive reading makes simplicity the key to successful political prose.
When Lady Bird (her nickname was given her at the age of two by a Negro nurse because “She’s purty as a lady bird”)
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.”
During the twentieth century, three of the presidential landslides in America have been followed by a presidential maneuver that might be laid at least in part to overconfidence: Roosevelt’s landslide in 1936 by the attempt to pack the Court; Lyndon Johnson’s in 1964 by escalation of the Vietnam War; Richard Nixon’s of 1972 by the Watergate cover-up.
