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

by Robert A. Caro

Goldschmidt was not the sharpest tool; he would not rise to great heights in Washington. But, easy-going and not as intensely fired by personal ambition as the other members of this group, he was malleable material in Johnson’s hands. He was, in addition, passionately idealistic, and the focus of his passion was public power. When Johnson put the case for the Marshall Ford Dam in those te...

The little group of which Johnson was a part was an unusual group. Two of its members—Douglas and Fortas—would sit on the highest court in the country. Others—Corcoran and Rowe—would be part (as, indeed, Douglas and Fortas, too, would be part) for decades to come of the nation’s highest political councils. In the years immediately after Johnson came to Washington as a Congressman, they were already young men on the rise.

But, as one of them—Corcoran—says with a smile, “Gradually, these guys found they were working for Lyndon Johnson.” Working for Johnson, Corcoran says, “on projects for his district”—and, in particular, on one project: that huge dam being built in that isolated gorge in faraway Texas.

Moreover, Herman Brown was a hater. He hated Negroes and he hated unions—in part, for the same reason. Having worked so hard all his life, he hated laziness and he believed that Negroes were lazy, and that unions encouraged laziness in white men; after World War II, he would, with the assistance of Alvin Wirtz and Ed Clark, ram through the Texas Legislature some of the most vicious anti-labor laws in America. And Brown hated the man—that Man in the White House—whose policies were helping unions and Negroes. He had coined his own word for New Deal programs: “Gimme’s.” Lazy men, he said, were always saying “Gimme,” and now the country had a President who was giving them the handouts they were demanding.

Johnson, so eloquently mouthing the phrases of the despised New Deal, had seemed, in fact, to epitomize everything Brown disliked.

But Herman Brown was a man with his own code of honor. “He always paid his debts,” Ed Clark says. “He would always find a way to balance his books. He would never let a man do more for him than he did for that man.” And he knew how big a debt he owed Lyndon Johnson for obtaining the authorization that made the dam—and Brown & Root’s contracts—legal.

No one ever saw that little blue comb again, and he got along better with Margaret” (although the more she talked with him, the more appalled she was at his lack of education; how could anyone be a Congressman, she sometimes commented after he had left, with so little knowledge of history?).

As for Margaret’s husband, Johnson had learned to read him, and had realized that he had to be treated differently from most other men—because, unlike most men, flattery was not what he wanted.

He wanted argument—hot, violent argument—and it was difficult for him to get what he wanted; in Texas, men interested in politics knew the role that Herman Brown played in Texas politics—and were, those smart enough to give him a good argument, smart enough to be afraid of him.

Lyndon Johnson gave him what he wanted. “They’d have serious fights,” recalls George Brown. “Dare each other to get up and hit ’em.” One of the two men would ask the other “what’d he think about the Mayor, or this legislator or that one. And they’d argue about it. Herman would say”—and as George imitates Herman, he shows a man pounding a table with angry, heavy blows of his fist—“Herman would say, ‘Now, Goddammit, Lyndon, you know that’s not so!’

Sometimes even George thought his brother and Johnson were going to come to blows; “I’d intervene, and have them make up.” But George also knew that Herman acted that violently only with someone “he really liked. If Herman liked you, he’d talk a lot, and pound the table. If Herman didn’t like you, he’d just smile and not say anything.” (“That’s right,” says one of Herman’s lobbyists. “And, boy, when you saw that smile—watch out...

“Basically, Lyndon was more conservative, more practical than people understand,” George Brown says. “You get right down to the nut-cutting, he was practical. He was for the Niggers, he was for labor, he was for the little boys, but by God … he was as practical as anyone.”

“Herman would be ranting and raving about New Deal spending, and Lyndon would say, ‘What are you worried about? It’s not coming out of your pocket. Any money that’s spent down here on New Deal projects, the East is paying for. We don’t pay any taxes in Texas.… They’re paying for our projects.’

That the South would get these dams and these other projects, and it would come out of the other fellow’s pocket. The Presidents before Roosevelt—Coolidge, Hoover—they never gave the South anything.

Roosevelt was the first one who gave the South a break. That’s why he had more plusses than minuses, because he was getting them all this money.”

The relationship between Herman Brown and Lyndon Johnson, George Brown says, was based on the same equation: “He [Herman] felt that L...

“We were always reaching. We never had any walking-around money, because we were always reaching above our heads. We never felt we had it made. We were always reaching for the next plateau. We were just always reaching, that’s all.” Lyndon Johnson’s ambitions were different, but their size wasn’t. “Hell, running for Congress when he had a good job, and no one thought he could win—that was a gamble,” George Brown says. “He was a gambler. He wasn’t afraid to take a gamble. He was just reaching all the time, like Herman and me. Herman could understand him.”

He may not have liked what Lyndon Johnson was saying in the 1937 campaign, but when someone told Herman Brown how Johnson was not only making a dozen speeches a day, but driving hundreds of miles to do it, Herman Brown, better perhaps than any other man, could appreciate the sacrifice, the effort, the work—and, in his grudging, tough way, admire it.

When he had been asked for a significant contribution to Johnson’s 1937 campaign, he had refused to make one. Now, in 1938, Johnson would be running again. Herman Brown let Johnson know that he would not have to worry about finances in this campaign—that the money would be there, as much as was needed, when it was needed. In Ed Clark’s words, “Herman gave Lyndon his full weight.”

Herman Brown’s full weight meant the support not only of Brown & Root, but of Brown & Root’s subcontractors, of the banks in Austin with whom Brown & Root banked, of the insurance brokers who furnished Brown & Root performance bonds, of the lawyers in Austin who received Brown & Root’s fees, the businessmen in Austin who supplied Brown & Root with building materials, and the local politicians, not only in Austin but throughout the Tenth Congressional District, accustomed to receiving Brown & Root campaign contributions in return for road-building contracts.

When Lyndon Johnson ran for Congress in 1938, he wouldn’t have to raise money from Houston merchants, and he wouldn’t have to raise money late at night, after a long day on the road. All the funds he needed would be available at his command—more funds, in fact, than he could possibly use.

By 1930, either alone or in partnership with Fentress, he owned newspapers not only in Austin but in fourteen other Texas cities, and in another dozen cities in other states.

“The first thing I noticed about [Johnson] was his availability. Whenever [Marsh] would ask Lyndon to come by for a drink, no matter that Lyndon was a busy man, he would always come. He was always available on short notice.”

Marsh liked to give advice; Johnson not only seemed to be accepting it, he asked for more. Marsh had become fascinated by politics; he wanted to feel he was on the inside of that exciting game.

Among themselves, he and his real political advisors—Wirtz, Corcoran—laughed at Marsh as an amateur.

He asked Marsh for advice on political strategy, asked him what he should say in speeches—let Marsh write speeches for him, and didn’t let Marsh know that these speeches were not delivered. And, always, in soliciting and listening to Marsh’s opinions, “he was,” Marsh’s secretary says, “very deferential. Very, very deferential.

I saw a young man who wanted to be on good terms with an older man, and was absolutely determined t...

Now Marsh invited the young Congressman and his shy wife to his country home for the weekend, and in the Autumn of 1937, Lyndon Johnson, accompanied by Lady Bird, drove for the first time to Longlea.

“Austin had never seen anything like her,” one recalls. She stood, graceful and slender, just a shade under six feet tall in her bare feet, and despite her height, her features were delicate, her creamy-white face dominated by big, sparkling blue eyes and framed in long hair. “It was blond, with a red overlay,” says Frank C. Oltorf, Brown & Root’s Washington lobbyist and a considerable connoisseur of women. “Usually it was long enough so that she could sit on it, and it shimmered and gleamed like nothing you ever saw.”

On the same night in 1931 on which he met Alice Glass, they became lovers; within weeks, Marsh, forty-four, left his wife and children and took her East. He lavished jewels on her—not only a quarter-of-a-million-dollar necklace of perfect emeralds, but earrings of emeralds and diamonds and rubies.

Witty herself, Alice loved brilliant talk, and at Longlea the conversation was as sparkling as the champagne, for she filled the house with politicians and intellectuals—Henry Wallace and Helen Fuller and Walter Lippmann—mixing Potomac and professors in a brilliant weekend salon. She had wanted to create her own world at Longlea—she had wanted a thousand acres, she said, because she “didn’t want any neighbors in hearing distance”—and she had succeeded.

ALTHOUGH ALICE GLASS resembled a Southern belle—an exceptionally tall and lovely Southern belle—her friends knew that appearances were deceiving.

“She was a free spirit—very independent—in an era when women weren’t that way,” says her sister, Mary Louise.

She didn’t believe in marriage, and she had refused to marry Marsh, even though she h...

And, possessed of brains as well as beauty, she did not, like many Southern girls, try to hide the fact that she was as intelligent as the men she was talking to. She expected them to listen to her opinions as she listened to theirs—and if one was reluctant to do so, she could make him regret that reluctance.

“Above everything else,” says her sister, “Alice was an idealist.” She admired politicians who, in her view, tried to “help people,” and detested those who were interested solely in their own advancement, or, worse, in using public office to make money. She herself wanted very badly to help people. “She had a very particular view of the kind of place the world should be,” her sister says, “and she was willing to do anything she had to do to make things come out right for people who were in trouble.

She was the kind of person who understood very well that she couldn’t do much to help—Alice could be very realistic—but she was also the kind of person who wasn’t willing not to do anything because she couldn’t do it all. She felt you had to try.”

Leinsdorf recalls Johnson saying that he had “exerted his pressure to have the customary phrase ‘You have seven days to leave the United States’ changed to ‘You have six months.’

The next step, Johnson explained, was to have Lemsdorf’s status changed to “permanent resident”—a change which could be accomplished only if he went abroad and returned as a regular immigrant.

Marsh was impressed by Johnson’s efficiency. Alice was impressed by something else. The young Congressman had brought Leinsdorf’s documents to Longlea personally, and had brought with him also a letter to the Consul in Havana.

As Johnson began coming to Longlea more frequently, she was moved by further manifestations of what she considered the same spirit.

Those stories about the poverty of the people from whom he came—the people of the Texas Hill Country—those stories, told so eloquently, that could bring a hush even to a Washington dinner party, were dramatic indeed told in the stillness of a Longlea evening, and so was his determination to help his people, to bring them the dams and federal programs that would change their lives.

Alice Glass, who wanted to help people, believed that Lyndon Johnson shared the same desire. She believed that he was unlike the other politicians who came to Longlea, and whose conversation revealed, before a weekend was over, that their only interest was personal advancement. She believed that she had finally met a politician who was not constantly scheming...

she came to believe, moreover, that he possessed not only the desire but the ...

“She thought he was a young man who was going to save the world.”

And she admired also what she considered his indifference not only to political but to financial advancement. The talk surrounding the immensely wealthy man with whom she lived dealt largely with money, particularly when their guests were close friends like Herman and George Brown. “She was just sick of money, money, money,” her sister says. Johnson, with his seeming total lack of interest in the subject, was a refreshing change.

Doesnt care about money

He told her he didn’t like the way he looked in photographs; she noticed that one side of his face—the left—photographed much better than the right; for the rest of his life, he would try to allow only the left side to be seen in photographs.

Sometime late in 1938 or early in 1939, Alice Glass told her cousin that she and Lyndon were lovers, and had been for some months.

Lyndon and Alice spent many afternoons alone together in those apartments. And, more and more, Lyndon and Alice were together at Longlea.

ATTEMPTING TO ANALYZE why Alice was attracted to Lyndon Johnson, the best friend and the sister who were her two confidantes say that part of the attraction was “idealism”—the beliefs and selflessness which he expressed to her—and that part of the attraction was sexual.