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

by Robert A. Caro

Moreover, they felt that Johnson, for all his physical awkwardness and social gaucheries, his outsized ears and nose, was a very attractive man, because of what Alice Hopkins calls that “very beautiful” white skin, because of his eyes, which were, she says, “very expressive,” because of his hands—demonstrating with her own hands how Johnson was always touching, hugging, patting, she says, “His hands were very loving”—and, most of all, because of the fierce, dynamic energy he exuded.

“It was,” she concludes, “his animation that made him good-looking.” Whatever the combination of reasons, the attraction, they say, was deep. “Lyndon was the love of Alice’s life,” Mrs. Hopkins says. “My sister was mad for Lyndon—absolutely mad for him,” Mary Louise says.

Charles Marsh, as owner of the only district-wide organ of public opinion, was perhaps the individual in Johnson’s congressional district most important to his continuation in office.

Johnson, moreover, was silent about the physical side of their relationship.

Displaying the same coarseness that, at college, had led him to exhibit his penis and call it “Jumbo,” he would show no reticence whatever about the most intimate details of extramarital relationships. His descriptions of his amours were not only exhibitionistic but boastful; particularly with cronies, he would seem almost to need to make other men acknowledge his sexual prowess. There was, seemingly, no aspect of an afternoon in bed—not even the most intimate details of a partner’s anatomy—that he did not consider grist for his vivid storytelling ability.

Jumbo penis lol

“She wouldn’t marry Marsh after she met Lyndon,” Mary Louise says. “She wanted to marry Lyndon.” Those of the regulars at Longlea who did know dreaded the day when Marsh would find out.

“They were unbelievably discreet,” Mrs. Hopkins notes. “They were never seen together” in public, and when they were together at Longlea, “they were so discreet” that, she says, no one could have guessed that they were lovers. Until Alice told her, she says, “I had seen them both many times at Longlea, and I never knew.” Says Mary Louise: “Nothing showed. Nothing at all.”

Harold Young, who had watched Johnson “play” many an older man, felt he had never played one better that he did Charles Marsh; never, he felt, had Johnson been more “humble,” more the “great flatterer.”

Marsh’s increasing fondness for Johnson disturbed Alice more and more; her own inclination would have been to reveal the truth to Marsh; she had agreed to wait until the time was ripe, but she felt there was something more dishonorable than she had bargained for in the situation as it was evolving. But Johnson seemed to find it completely feasible to have the relationship he wanted not only with the man’s mistress but with the man.

And he proved to be right. His discretion gave him rewards. During the same years in which he was making love to the woman Marsh loved, Marsh was giving him more than advice and affection.

Marsh said he would sell Johnson a nineteen-acre tract for the same price he had paid: $12,000. “It was a marvelous buy, and we knew it,” Lady Bird says. She borrowed the money from her father, Brown & Root chipped in by building a road out to the land, and by grading and landscaping it—and, for the first time, the Johnsons owned property.

So that will give him some rest.” Potential opponents realized that in 1938, Johnson would have not only overwhelming financial support, but enthusiastic press support.

Watching Lyndon Johnson fawn over the children’s father when he was present, knowing all the time that Johnson was sleeping with their mother when he was absent; watching Johnson praise the older man to his face, knowing all the time that behind his back he was taking from him the woman he loved; seeing how unshakably deferential, how utterly humble, he was in playing upon Marsh’s affections, this observer, a lover of Charles Dickens, was reminded forcefully of a character in David Copperfield—a character who, she felt, lacked only a Southern drawl to be Lyndon Johnson in the flesh. “Every time I looked at Lyndon,” she says, “I saw a Uriah Heep from Texas.”

Wow

Lady Bird Johnson was easy to ignore.

Her husband insisted that she wear makeup and high heels, and, more and more, she did so, but he could not, except on rare occasions, force her to wear dresses of any but the dullest colors, and her appearance was still drab. And nothing, it seemed, could ease her terrible shyness.

Seeing that in her relationship with Lyndon, her opinion didn’t count, they gave it little consideration themselves. Marsh, in fact, seems to have been in some doubt as to her name; he was constantly referring to her as “Lyndon’s wife.”

“Everybody was trying to be nice to her, but she was just … out of place.” And the attitude of the regulars was influenced also by the attitude she herself displayed; Lady Bird Johnson herself appears to have felt that she was out of place at Longlea.

“My eyes were just out on stems. They would have interesting people from the world of art and literature and politics. It was the closest I ever came to a salon in my life.… There was a dinner table with ever so much crystal and silver.…”

During the loud arguments to which she sat quietly listening, books would be mentioned; Lady Bird would, on her return to Washington, check those books out of the public library—check them out and read them. Because of Marsh’s preoccupation with Hitler, she checked out a copy of Mein Kampf, read it—and learned it. She never attempted to talk about it at Longlea, even though when Hitler’s theories were discussed thereafter, she was aware that, while Marsh knew what he was talking about, no one else in the room did—except her. And she read other books, too; one Summer is still remembered by the Longlea regulars as the “Summer that Lady Bird read War and Peace.”

Alice Hopkins, while saying that “She was just … out of place,” says immediately thereafter that “If everyone was just trying to be nice to her,” she would be nice right back, calm and gracious—“She was self-contained.” Even Alice’s sister noticed that there was something “quite remarkable in her self-discipline—the things she made herself do. She was forever working” not only on her reading, but on her figure—she had always been “dumpy,” but now the extra weight came off, and stayed off.

“Of course” Lady Bird must have known of her husband’s affair with Alice Glass, Frank Oltorf says. “Oh, I’m sure she did.” Why else, the regulars point out, would she think that her husband was going—without her—on so many weekends to Longlea when, as she could easily have determined, Charles Marsh was not at home? Says Mary Louise:

“The thing I could never understand was how she stood it. Lyndon would leave her on weekends, weekend after weekend, just leave her home. I wouldn’t have stood it for a minute.”

But stand it she did. “We were all together a lot—Lyndon and Lady Bird and Charles and Alice,” Mary Louise says. “And Lady Bird never said a wo...

THE PASSION eventually faded from Johnson’s relationship with Alice Glass. She married Charles Marsh, but quickly divorced him, and married several times thereafter. “She never got over Lyndon,” Alice Hopkins says. But the relationship itself survived; even when he was a Senator, Lyndon Johnson would still occasionally dismiss his chauffeur for the day and drive his huge limousine the ninety miles to Longlea; the friendship was ended only by the Vietnam War, which Alice considered one of history’s horrors. By 1967, she referred to Johnson, in a letter she wrote Oltorf, in bitter terms. And later she told friends that she had burned love letters that Johnson had written her—because she didn’t want her granddaughter to know she had ever been associated with the man responsible for Vietnam.

THE SHADE OF THIS WOMAN

Johnson seemed unable to meet the demands he was making on himself. His insistence on overseeing every detail, because he “never could really be sure that things would go right unless he was in control of everything—everything!” had not diminished with success.

“Johnson was working him like a nigger slave,”

Soon new PWA grants—for a new wing on the municipal hospital, for a new building at the municipal airport, for new streetlights—were flowing into the city at a rate that, the Mayor told friends, he would never have believed possible.

Perry, an elderly retired cotton broker, chairman, but Alvin J. Wirtz, vice chairman and key figure—had been quickly established at Johnson’s urging, and had proposed a $714,000 project to tear down the squalid shacks in Austin’s three slum areas and replace them with three modern garden-apartment projects, one for whites, one for blacks and one for Mexican-Americans.

Austin’s loan application would be the first from anywhere in the country to arrive on the desk of Federal Housing Administrator Nathan Straus; Austin would be one of the first five cities to receive FHA approval.

The New Deal’s effect on the Hill Country had been more limited than its effect on more prosperous Texas counties such as the Fourteenth District’s counties down on the Gulf Coast. The reason—as always in the Hill Country—was the land.

The fertility of much of the rest of the land had been so thoroughly drained by erosion and over-cropping, and by the aridity of the climate, that it didn’t pay to plant seed in it anyway.

In Blanco County, for example, only about 35,000 acres—less than 10 percent of the land—had been under cultivation in 1933. This land was divided among 708 farmers, so that the average farmer was working only about fifty acres, perhaps thirty in cotton. The 40 percent reduction required by the AAA and its successor acts meant a reduction for the average farmer of only twelve acres.

The people of the Hill Country were grateful for what the New Deal had done for them; little as had been the help they had realized from its programs, it was far more help than anyone had ever given them before.

But their lives were not changed by the New Deal.

The Hill Country was a country in which there was unbelie...

Lyndon Johnson didn’t invent any of the programs that provided this help for a people of a section of America which so badly needed help. He just got as much out of the programs as he could. “He got more projects, and more money for his district, than anybody else,” Corcoran says. By Johnson’s own estimate, he got $70 million. “He was,” says Corcoran, “the best Congressman for a district that ever was.”

The doctors found that, out of 275 women, 158 had perineal tears. Many of them, the team of gynecologists reported, were third-degree tears, “tears so bad that it is difficult to see how they stand on their feet.” But they were standing on their feet, and doing all the chores that Hill Country wives had always done—hauling the water, hauling the wood, canning, washing, ironing, helping with the shearing, the plowing and the picking. Because there was no electricity.

THE LACK OF ELECTRICITY meant that the days of the people of the Hill Country were filled with drudgery; at night they were denied the entertainment—movies, radio—that would have made the drudgery more bearable. The radio could, moreover, have ended the area’s isolation. The feeling of the Hill Country youngsters of the 1920’s—Lyndon Johnson’s generation—that “we were completely cut off out here,” that “we were back in the woods, compared to the rest of the world,” that “everything had already happened before we found out about it,” was the feeling of the 1930’s generation as well.

NO RADIO; no movies; limited reading—little diversion between the hard day just past and the hard day just ahead. “Living was just drudgery then,” says Carroll Smith of Blanco. “Living—just living—was a problem. No lights. No plumbing. Nothing. Just living on the edge of starvation. That was farm life for us. God, city people think there was something fine about it. If they only knew …”

Farm life in Hill Country

Frederick Law Olmsted had found the same situation—houses at which there was “no other water-closet than the back of a bush or the broad prairies”—on his journey through the Hill Country in 1857. He had been shocked then, because the America he knew had advanced beyond such primitive conditions. Now it was 1937; four more generations had been living in the Hill Country—with no significant advance in the conditions of their life. Many of the people of Lyndon Johnson’s congressional district were still living in the same type of dwelling in which the area’s people had been living in 1857: in rude “dog-run” shelters one board thick, through which the wind howled in the winter. They were still squatting behind a bush to defecate. Because of their poverty, they were still utterly bereft not only of tractors and feed grinders, but of modern medical assistance—and were farming by methods centuries out of date.

Behind the rest of the country

ALTHOUGH THEY UNDERSTOOD that, as Louise Casparis says, “we were behind the rest of the world,” natives of the Hill Country did not realize how far behind the rest of the world.

The life of Hill Country natives was, moreover, the same life that their mothers and fathers—and grandmothers and grandfathers—had lived; how were they to know, except in general, vague, terms, that there was another kind of life?

But it was very hard. After you spent all morning lugging those big buckets back and forth, you felt more like an ox or a mule than a human being.

Portland was just a little town. It was no great metropolis. But moving from Portland into the Hill Country was like moving from the twentieth century back into the Middle Ages.”

For two decades and more, in states all across the country, delegations of farmers, dressed in Sunday shirts washed by hand and ironed by sad iron, had come, hats literally in hand, to the paneled offices of utility-company executives to ask to be allowed to enter the age of electricity.

considering the exorbitant rates the companies quoted.” Why, rural leaders such as Hobbs and Ellis demanded, wouldn’t the power industry learn from Henry Ford, who had proved that the cheaper you make a good commodity, the higher will be your returns; if the power companies kept farm rates low, farmers would buy more electricity. If they kept rates high, the effect would be an endless circle: farmers would use little power because of high rates, and utilities would continue charging high rates because of low usage.

Waiting two or three years for usage to build up was what industry called a “capital risk”; why take a risk for a profit when there existed, in the urban market, profit without risk?

“It hardly seems fair that the farm wife had to wait for electricity so much longer than her counterpart in the city for she needed electricity much more,” an historian was to write. But fairness—or social conscience—was not the operative criterion for the utilities; their criterion was rate of return on investment. As long as the rate was higher in the cities, they felt, why bother with the farms? Their attitude was reinforced not only by their political power but by their contempt for country people.

City folk dont like no farm folk

When a farmer offered to pay the cost of building a power line to his house, the utilities said they would allow him to do so—but that when it was built, they, not he, would own it. Their policies were quite firm, because they did not want to establish any precedent that might be used as an argument against them. If they once began to lower rates, who knew where such reductions might lead? If they once began to extend lines into rural areas, there would be no end to the demands for more extensions.

Several scores of farmhouses were near the line, but farther away than fifty yards. Some were not much farther away, and these farmers offered to pay the additional cost involved. TP&L was quite firm in its refusals to allow them to do so; if the company made an exception for one farmer, it was explained, it might have to make exceptions for others in other areas of the state as well.