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

by Robert A. Caro

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.

Ambition

Influential or not, moreover, anyone who wrote to Johnson was to receive a reply—as fast as it could be typed and mailed.

Keeping control of the NYA was very important to him; it was, after all, a statewide agency—and thus a potential statewide political organization. Just one day after he had become Kleberg’s secretary, Ella So Relle had seen that “he was thinking this was a stepping stone. As soon as he got a job, he thought, now that I’m in this, how can I use this job for the next step?”

Some of these letters must have recalled painful memories—E.

Sometimes the same letter would be presented to Johnson for signature over and over, and each time would remain unsigned—as if he could not bear to sign it.

Lyndon climbed aboard the train before his father arrived at the door. Sam Johnson, however, started to climb up after him, and turned up his face. Lyndon bent down, and father and son kissed.

“I never saw anything like it. He could start talking to a man … and in five minutes he could get that man to think, ‘I like you, young fellow. I’m going to help you.’

“When we get down to Texas, we have to arrange to have the Congressman-elect, who ran on a pro-New Deal, pro-Court Reform platform, to see the President.”

Governor Allred said, “Mr. President, I’d like to present our new Congressman,” and Franklin Roosevelt shook Lyndon Johnson’s hand.

The conversation’s other particulars are not known (although back in Washington, the President would talk about the young man who had defied every entrenched political leader in his district to run—alone among eight candidates—in support of the court-reform bill, and who was, incidentally, interested in the Navy, as he had himself been as a young man).

President said that the Agriculture Committee seat was Johnson’s if he wanted it, but that he would suggest the Naval Affairs Committee instead; he liked to see a young man like Johnson taking an interest in that field; powerful as Naval Affairs was now, he said, world trends might well make it more powerful still.

He telephoned Tommy himself. As Corcoran recalls the President’s words: “He said, ‘I’ve just met the most remarkable young man. Now I like this boy, and you’re going to help him with anything you can.’

Finally he said casually—oh, very casually—‘Fred, there’s a fine young man just come to the House. Fred, you know that fellow Lyndon Johnson? I think he would be a great help on Naval Affairs.’

Corcoran, even before he met the young man, had been impressed by the speed with which he had won the President’s favor. “That was all it took—one train ride,” he says.

Lyndon Johnson’s college classmates had thought that his talent with older men was nothing more than flattery, “kowtowing, suck-assing, brown-nosing” so blatant that “words won’t come to describe it,” but Corcoran, a King of Flatterers himself, knew it was much more. He knew a master of the art when he saw one. “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.”

Can talk to old men

Ed Weisl was calling to say, “I just had a funny kind of a call from Harry [Hopkins]. Did you ever hear of some kid in Congress named Lydie Johnson?”

One link between these men was the issue of public power.

Another link was intellect. The hundred or two hundred key young New Dealers included many brilliant men.

And they began to see a lot of Lyndon Johnson. He met them in the course of his work for the Marshall Ford Dam. He would telephone and ask them to lunch. He would invite them for Sunday afternoon cocktails at the small, one-bedroom apartment he and Lady Bird had rented in the Kennedy-Warren Apartment House on Connecticut Avenue.

And soon they were inviting him back. The little group would often get together for informal dinner parties or for back-yard cookouts, and Lyndon and Lady Bird became regulars at them.

But these young men saw—with the same amazement with which Lyndon Johnson’s San Marcos classmates had watched him pat the feared Prexy Evans on the back—Lyndon Johnson lean over and kiss the Leader’s bald pate.

Furthermore, he was learning his way very quickly through the maze that most Congressmen never master.

“He learned the levers in Congress very fast,” Rowe says. And he was willing to place this knowledge at the service of this small group of men. “I would call and say, ‘How do I handle this?’ ” Rowe says. “He would say, ‘I’ll call you right back.’ And he would call back and say, ‘This is the fellow you ought to talk to.’ ” Says Fortas: “He was close to Rayburn, and an ever-widening coterie of friends on the Hill, and he helped us. He ran errands for us on the Hill. He was very useful to us.”

And it wasn’t just his stories that made them like him. He was a great player of practical jokes.

“He enjoyed living so much that he made everyone around him enjoy it more. He could take a group of people and just lift it up.”

As they got to know him better, their fondness was, more and more, tinged with admiration.

They admired his thoroughness, his tirelessness—the way he threw himself into every aspect of politics, into everything he did, with an enthusiasm and effort that seemed limitless. He already possessed an amazing store of knowledge about individual Congressmen and their districts through his capacity for absorbing and retaining information. “He was a pack rat for information,” Fortas says. “And he was very, very intelligent. He never forgot anything. He would work harder than anyone else. I have never known a man who had such a capacity for detail.”

but he didn’t bore me for one minute. He never bored anyone. He was a magnetic man physically, and you never knew what was going to happen next. He was a remarkable man.”

His size was one factor in this dominance. He was, of course, over six feet three inches tall, and his arms were very long, and his hands very big, and the sweeping, vigorous gestures he made with those long arms seemed to fill those little rooms. His awkwardness was a factor—the clumsy, lunging strides as he paced back and forth telling his “Texas stories,” the ungainly flailing of his arms to make a point—as was his restlessness, which kept him always in motion: sitting down, jumping up, walking, talking, never still.

Although he was only twenty-eight, he had been giving orders for a long time now—to L. E. Jones and Gene Latimer and the rest of the staff in Kleberg’s office; to scores of NYA officials. He was accustomed to being listened to, and the air with which he carried himself was in part the air of command.

And when they weren’t, his behavior was also striking. Even as a boy, of course, he could not endure being only one of a group—in a companion’s phrase, “could not stand, just could not stand not being the leader,” not only of boys his own age but of older boys. “If he couldn’t lead, he didn’t care much about playing.” The need to dominate was as evident in Georgetown living rooms as in the vacant lots of Johnson City, as evident with Abe Fortas and Jim Rowe and even Tommy the Cork as it had been with Bob Edwards and the Crider brothers.

And if he was not the center of the stage, Lyndon Johnson refused to be part of the cast at all. He would, quite literally, go to sleep. In a group of people in a living room, he would be talking, someone else would begin talking, and Johnson would put his chin down on his chest, his eyes would close—and he would be asleep. He might stay that way for quite some time—twenty minutes or half an hour, say; he probably wouldn’t wake up until Lady Bird nudged him.

And when he woke up, as Rowe puts it, “he woke up talking.” And if he was not then afforded the attention of the group around him, he would go back to sleep again. Elizabeth Rowe describes the sequence this way: “He’d put on a performance, and then pull the curtain down, and then pull it up again.”

“a man who lives at this intensity …” Elizabeth Rowe doesn’t attempt to explain it; she just forgives it.

“Anything he did was all right with me.… Because he was such a good friend.” And because, she adds, when he was awake, he was “such a marvelous, scintillating guest.” Says Welly Hopkins’ wife Alice: “He demanded attention. He demanded it—and he got it.”

“Roosevelt and Rayburn liking him—that gave him the in. And the personal force did the rest. That had to be it, because there was nothing else. He didn’t have power, or money or anything. He just had this personal force—a huge, unique personal force.”

A force so unique, big, and personal

AND HE USED THESE MEN. Hawthorne said of Andrew Jackson that “his native strength … compelled every man to be his tool that came within his reach; and the more cunning the individual might be, it served only to make him the sharper tool.”

These were very cunning men, and Lyndon Johnson made very s...

Even more important, while the ex post facto validation and ratification contained in the House bill made Brown & Root’s contracts legal as far as congressional authorization was concerned, it did not solve, but only blurred, the question of the possible deeper illegality posed by the fact that the dam was being built on land not owned by the federal government.

Despite the favorable impression he had made on Roosevelt, Johnson found that it would not secure a freshman Congressman entrée to the White House. So Johnson used Corcoran’s entrée, asking him to raise the subject of the Marshall Ford Dam with the President. Corcoran found the right moment to do so, and Roosevelt’s response was all Johnson could have wished. Corcoran recalls that “Roosevelt said, ‘Give the kid the dam.’

The President’s casual word, hammered home by Corcoran, painted approval on the Marshall Ford Dam with a brush so broad that minor points were buried—forever—beneath the paint.

The precise nature of their maneuvers are not known, but Jimmy Roosevelt (James H. Rowe, Jr., secretary) began making telephone calls, and Connally was asked to withdraw his amendment—because it was no longer needed. Hopkins quietly withdrew his objections, and on July 22, Johnson, Wirtz and the LCRA directors were invited to the White House.

The dam—the dam that represented so much to Alvin Wirtz and Herman Brown—was secured. Alvin Wirtz’s investment in Lyndon Johnson had paid off.

(the statement that the dam was “inadequate” to provide flood control was embarrassingly accurate; Wirtz, of course, had never intended it to provide flood control; despite his statement to the contrary, he had always intended its primary purpose to be the production of hydroelectric power which could be translated into political power) and personal (the two men felt that Brown had taken advantage of them to obtain a bigger profit).

had said the low dam was for flood control—and the low dam was funded. Any additional funds would have to be for power, would have to be reimbursed—and there was no possible source of reimbursement.

And, in fact, Fortas did. He worked out an elaborate rationale for Wirtz’s plan, and he bridged the $2,635,000 gap. Since that money could not be provided by either of the two agencies building the dam, Fortas proposed that it be provided by a third agency: the Public Works Administration.

But Fortas reasoned—in an elaborately structured memo to PWA Administrator Ickes—that it could build a portion of the dam whose purpose might be defined as neither flood control nor power, because its purpose would be both flood control and power.

Fortas told Ickes that the solution was legal. “I don’t think it was a matter of persuading [Ickes],” Fortas says. “It was a matter of working out the legal theory.”

[But] Abe wrote the memo to Ickes and he put it in the right light.”

And George Brown, who had seen Johnson and Fortas together, felt he understood why Fortas had done it. He touches on a number of reasons. “He [Fortas] came to Washington wanting to help people,” he says. And, he says, there was also a friendship (“Friendship plays so big a role in these things.… We used to go to his house and take off our shoes and socks and drink some”). But it was not Fortas’ friendship for him that played the crucial role, he says, but Fortas’ friendship for Lyndon Johnson. “He liked Johnson,” Brown says. “Johnson made him like him.”