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

by Robert A. Caro

“You can’t be around the guy” without falling under his influence, Jones says, trying to explain. “First he fills himself up with knowledge, and then he pours out enthusiasm around him, and you can’t stop him. I mean, there’s no way.… He just overwhelms you.”

Cursing his men one moment, he removed the curse the next—with hugs (“I saw him get angry at Sherman Birdwell one time, and he used most of the cuss words and combinations I had ever heard,” Morgan says, “and just as soon as he got through eating his ass out, he had his arm around him”) and with compliments, compliments which, if infrequent, were as extravagant as the curses: remarks that a man repeated to his wife that night with pride, and that he never forgot.

And he put his arm around me. And I was nobody. Oh, you wanted to please him more than anything.”

The jokes had an edge—they were designed for the same purpose as the cursing: so that Johnson could display his dominance over his men;

He gave each one of his “boys” a precisely measured dosage—of cursing, of sarcasm, of hugging, of compliments: of exactly what was needed to keep them devoted to his aims.

He was more than a reader of men, he was a master of men. And these men, the first on whom he had an opportunity to fully exercise his mastery, not only served him, but loved and idolized him.

A master of men

When young Chuck Henderson had still been engaged to Mary, then a secretary back in Ashtabula, Ohio, he wrote to her, she says, “I’m working for the greatest guy in the world. Someday he’s going to be President of the United States. And he’s only twenty-seven years old!”

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.”

“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. And you knew he was going to be doing even more. You knew he was going places. And you wanted to be on his wagon when he went.” Idolized. “I named my only son after him and in all probability, as far as I know, he was the first boy to be named after Lyndon Johnson,” says Fenner Roth proudly. The first, but not the last; there would, among others, be not only a Lyndon Johnson Roth but a Lyndon Baines Crider.

An idol to his followers

He was, moreover, a representative of the fabled New Deal, with access to New Deal funds; as much as any man, its representative in the capital of Texas. Influential men with college-age children who needed jobs to help pay their way or with a child who had recently graduated and could use a job on the NYA staff itself, realized that this young man had such jobs to dispense. Lyndon Johnson had no trouble meeting the most influential men of Texas.

Listening at them, sitting at their knees drinking in their wisdom, following their minds, agreeing with their thoughts before they had uttered them, he made these men like him, and he cemented their affection by hiring their children; many NYA secretaries were daughters of state influentials.

They grew friendly—and, increasingly, respectful. When he had been Kleberg’s secretary, Clark says, “everybody in Austin knew Lyndon was a good fellow to see up there if you needed something out of one of the departments.”

Not state but national power was what he had always wanted. He had known for so long what he wanted to be, and what “route” would take him to his far-off goal. A state job—no matter how good—was not on that road; state politics was, he had said, a “dead end.” In the frustration, almost desperation, of his last months with Kleberg, he had almost decided to abandon his chosen road, but, with the NYA appointment, he was back on it and did not intend to leave it again. The NYA job, attractive as it was, was not the main chance for which he was looking. But if the main chance came, he would recognize it. And he would grab it.

At every one of the state’s eighty-seven colleges—even the state’s four Negro colleges, conspicuously excluded from federal and state aid programs of the past3—NYA programs were a smoothly functioning part of campus life. Some 11,061 high school students were receiving smaller, but helpful checks.

The student aid program was, moreover, accomplishing its purpose. In 1935, it had encouraged students to return to school; in 1936, it kept those students in school. The fact that almost 40 percent of the students receiving NYA help in 1936 had received it in 1935 marked the beginning of a trend that would have pleased Eleanor Roosevelt: with the help of the NYA, a substantial percentage of Texas students who would otherwise—with the Depression still gripping the state—have had to drop out of school would make it through, year after year, all the way to graduation; by June, 1939, the NYA’s fourth year, more than a thousand graduating college seniors had received NYA aid for each of their four years.

Once youths from these areas dropped off the educational path, they were all too often off it for good, never to return.

Some didn’t want to stay on the farm—were, in fact, desperate to move to a city, even without a college education. But they did not possess the skills that city life required; the farm work they hated was the only work they knew. Often, even the basic skills of plumbing or electricity or mechanical work were mysteries to them—as were the job discipline and the subtleties that children raised in the industrial world learn without thinking about them: starting work on time, working set hours, taking orders from strangers instead of their father, playing office politics.

They lacked, moreover, not only skills but, because of their isolation, knowledge of the world of which they dreamed. Isolation was all too often unrelieved by reading; their education, in one-room schools, had been meager, and, as the Lindleys put it: “Theirs are not the homes that have books and magazines.” And giving them skills and knowledge was, as the Lindleys wrote, “a challenge.

“but Texas seems a little further along with the program.” NYA Administrator Williams described Johnson’s work as “a first-class job.”

In 1936, the NYA had built a greenhouse, and planted in it more than 6,000 trees and shrubs which, in 1937, were to be transplanted to the scores of new roadside parks scheduled for construction that year.

After eighteen months of urging on local officials, a substantial number of proposals for new schools, community centers and halls to house fire trucks of local fire companies had been received,

The dam was in one of the most deserted regions of the Hill Country.

as corrupt as anything Tammany Hall ever envisioned. Herman had a gift for handling politicians—all the way up the line from the Sheriffs who could facilitate the Monday-morning bailing out of his crews to the County Judges who handed out highway contracts—and an understanding that it was in the pockets of politicians that his slender funds would be most profitably invested.

(Having stretched himself to the limit to finance it, he almost went broke when rains turned the road into a sea of mud and forced him to stop work; at one point, when he could not afford to buy feed for his mules, a local merchant, taking pity on him and the mules, gave him credit. Decades later, Herman learned by chance that the merchant had gone broke in the Depression and, old now, was living in poverty on an isolated West Texas ranch. A day or two later, there arrived in the old man’s mailbox a check big enough to keep him in comfort for the rest of his life.)

In 1932, however, with the Hamilton Dam half completed, the Insull empire collapsed, and because of the Depression, no alternative method could be found to finance the project. In 1934, with the construction having been stopped for two years, the dam that had been Alvin Wirtz’s dream of empire was still only half completed, its steel skeleton glinting dully in the sun.

Under the $3.3 billion Emergency Relief Appropriation Act passed during the Hundred Days, a newly formed Public Works Administration (PWA) was empowered to give loans and grants to self-supporting enterprises such as public authorities.

The Marshall Ford Dam, that structure in an isolated gorge in the Texas Hill Country, was the vehicle that would give both of these

One problem was that the Bureau had not been authorized to build the dam.

But the Rivers and Harbors Committee had never voted on the Marshall Ford Dam.

Appropriations for a specific project were not supposed to be made until authorization—approval of the project by Congress—was given;

Authorization was supposed to come first—and in the case of the Marshall Ford Dam, authorization had not come at all.

The Comptroller General’s office had noticed the lack of authorization, and had at first refused to approve the initial first-year $5,000,000 expenditure on the $10,000,000 dam. But Buchanan, in a series of tense conferences with that office, had persuaded it to allow work to begin, assuring it that he would have the dam authorized during the 1937 session of Congress.

“And [because of the lack of authorization] they were illegal. Wirtz was telling us all along that the money was wrong, and that if someone in Congress raised a question they would stop it [would stop paying out money under the contract].”

If a Congressman made enough of a fuss over the fact that the Bureau of Reclamation was paying out money for a project that had not been authorized, the money could conceivably even be “stopped” permanently;

Funded by bureau of reclamation with no congressionl approval

The word that George Brown uses to describe the appropriations—“illegal”—is too strong; the dam was not “illegal” in the sense that anyone connected with it was violating a criminal statute; a more precise word would be “unauthorized.”

But in this case the risk was heightened by another factor. So much larger was the dam than any previous Brown & Root project that the company would have to purchase $1,500,000 worth of heavy construction equipment,

If there was no second appropriation, therefore, Herman and George Brown would lose half a million dollars—or most of what they had accumulated in twenty years of harsh struggle.

If the authorization for the dam did not come through in 1937, he would be virtually wiped out.

The Marshall Ford job represented the only chance in sight for him to move up to a higher plateau of construction, one of the big jobs he had been dreaming of for twenty years. He decided to go ahead. Brown & Root bid on the contract, were awarded the contract, mortgaged all they owned, purchased the new equipment and, in September, 1936, built the giant cableway—sank, in other words, $1,500,000 into an isolated gorge in the barren Hill Country.

And then the second problem came to light: not only was the Bureau of Reclamation not authorized to build the dam, it was effectively forbidden to build it.

The reason for the prohibition was simple. “Well, of course you couldn’t build a dam—a dam that costs millions of dollars—on land you didn’t own,” explains a Bureau official. “If someone else owns the land, you’re just a tenant, and what are you going to do if the landlord says: ‘I don’t want the dam on my land any more. Get it off!’? What are you going to do? You can’t move a dam.” The prohibition had, moreover, been reaffirmed, without qualification, in every opinion on the subject by a federal court or a federal agency.

Under federal law, then, the Bureau of Reclamation was required to own the land on which its dams were built; under state law, it could not own the land on which this dam was being built.

State law supersedes

Alvin Wirtz (who assured Herman and George that he hadn’t known about it) told the two brothers that some low-level attorney in the office of the Comptroller General had thought to do what no one in Washington had done before: had checked the title for the land under the dam, learned that the federal government didn’t own it, and informed his superior.

They had assumed [that] the land on which the dam was being built was owned by the federal government, because that would be the situation in any other state, but in Texas the federal government didn’t own any land. The appropriations had all been for one year at a time, AND THEY WERE ILLEGAL!!!”

Lyndon Johnson’s candidacy would not be logical at all. His age—twenty-eight—was a drawback

Lyndon Johnson was, in Dan Quill’s words, “not known at all.”

Many of the district’s political leaders had never heard of him.

Lyndon Johnson had built up, with painstaking effort, a network of such men loyal to him rather than to Dick Kleberg. But that network was in the Fourteenth District, not the Tenth; it couldn’t help him now.

the county leaders of the Tenth District—the leaders he needed now—were, in the main, men he had never met.

Senator Wirtz had a wife and daughter—he was fond of them.… But he would have loved to have had a son. And he loved him [Lyndon] like a son.”