Means of Ascent (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #2)

by Robert A. Caro

There was the briefest pause, as if he were gathering himself, and over his face came a look that the public, thus far in his presidency, had seldom seen, so careful had he been to wear a mask he considered statesmanlike and dignified. The eyes narrowed a little, and the jaw jutted, and the mouth, barely keeping itself from a snarl, hinted at it, and the tens of millions of people watching on television were looking into a face that many of those in the audience in the Capitol knew already—the face of a Lyndon Johnson determined to win. “Their cause must be our cause, too,” Lyndon Johnson said. “Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.” Briefly, he paused again. He always had so much trouble in his speeches with the emphasis on the words, but he got it right this time. The next four words fell like sledgehammers. “And we shall overcome.” There was a moment of silence, as if, one observer was to say, it took a moment for the audience to realize that the President had adopted the rallying cry of black protest as his own, had joined his voice to the voices of the men and women who had sung that mighty hymn. And then the applause rolled across the Chamber. And there were testimonies to the power of that speech even more eloquent than that applause. One took place in the living room of a local family in Selma, Alabama, where Martin Luther King and several of his aides were watching the speech on...

ABRAHAM LINCOLN struck off the chains of black Americans, but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy’s sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life.

William S. Knudsen had just been named a Lieutenant General and placed in charge of all production for the Army, giving him authority therefore over hundreds of factories producing billions of dollars’ worth of war materiel (and over other Generals working on production). Johnson was lobbying to be placed in a similar position over all Navy production, and over the Admirals responsible for it. But Knudsen was a famous production genius, an immigrant’s son who had risen from the assembly line to the presidency of General Motors and had thereby been in administrative charge of one of the nation’s greatest industrial enterprises. The fact that Lyndon Johnson, who had never directed any industrial enterprise (unless one counts the Texas NYA, whose main function was to provide campus jobs for high school and college students), wanted a comparable job shows how lavish was his appraisal of his own abilities.

A couple of Zeroes were in front of us, and coming in, firing everything they had, and you’re looking right into the face of death when that happens.” Lyndon Johnson, the physical coward who was afraid of a fistfight, was looking into that face. He was, Walker was to say, “just as calm as if we were on a sightseeing tour.… Bullets were singing through the plane all around us and we were being hit by those cannon shells, and he was—well, just calm, and watching everything.” He got down off the stool, so that Walker could push past to the radio. Walker recalls what Lyndon Johnson said as he passed. “Boy,” Johnson said, “it’s rough up here, isn’t it?” And Walker recalls what he said in reply: “Yeah, I’m always scared up here.” And he recalls what Lyndon Johnson did next. “He burst out laughing at me. I’m sure he felt exactly the way I did, but he just didn’t show it. He didn’t show it a bit.”

Hamer told the men in the hotel room to take off their suit jackets so that people could see they weren’t armed. He took his off, too—so that people could see he was. They clattered down the stairs of the rickety little hotel and out onto the dusty main street and, in a scene that would be incredible were it not attested to by witnesses for both sides, walked the two hundred yards to the bank. The lawyers trailed a few paces behind. Coke Stevenson and Frank Hamer walked side by side, two tall, broad-shouldered, erect, silent men—two living legends of Texas, in fact—two men out of another, vanishing age, another, vanishing code, marching down a street in a dusty Texas town to find out for themselves, and prove to the world, how Lyndon Johnson had gotten the two hundred crucial votes.

And he had not just Clark and Ramsey but the man behind Clark and Ramsey. He had wheeled up his biggest gun of all. Telephoning Herman Brown in Houston, he asked him to come in person. No one who knew Herman, and who was aware of his contempt for politicians and his distaste for politicians in groups, thought he would come. “Herman Brown [had] never worked a convention in his life,” his lobbyist Oltorf says. But he worked this one. Herman knew them all, it seemed. He knew the district judges and the county commissioners from the counties in which he had done road contracting work long before there was a Mansfield Dam, and if he didn’t know the judge or the commissioner to whom a stubborn Executive Committee member might listen, he knew a subcontractor, a subcontractor who did work for Brown & Root or who wanted to do work for Brown & Root in the future, who knew the judge or commissioner. He knew the legislators with whom he had dealt on the Manford bills, and on a hundred other items, the men to whom he had sent envelopes filled with cash. And that night in Fort Worth, Herman Brown called in all his chits.

But, during this conference and during the following days, Lyndon Johnson was also to display many of the qualities that made him a leader of men. Among those qualities of leadership was a willingness to take responsibility for his own fate. This quality had been a constant in his career. No matter how strong the lure, he had never tied himself inextricably to Roosevelt or to Rayburn or to Herman Brown. If he had not placed his faith in princes, he was certainly not going to place it in lawyers. He would make up his own mind. Another quality was decisiveness; he might delay for a long time studying a decision, but when the time came to make it, he made it. And if he had to make it without study, if he had to make it fast, he made it fast. Lastly, there was the sheer force of his personality, the dominance of Lyndon Johnson, face to face, over other men, even over ten other men, even over ten famous and respected men operating in the field (the law) of their expertise, not his. Lyndon Johnson might, as on this occasion, be leading men in a battle whose aims and methods would not bear scrutiny. But he would lead.

By the time Jane was a teenager, she had been taken by her mother and father to every one of the forty-eight states, and to several provinces of Canada, also. And there was a trip to a place nearer home. Coming home from school one evening when she was eleven, Jane told her father and mother that her class had begun studying how the state government worked. Coke took her to Austin so she could see it work for herself; once again, there was the whisper in the halls of the Capitol, “Coke Stevenson’s here,” and people came out of their offices into the halls to see a tall, erect old man holding by the hand a skinny little girl in pigtails. And she appreciated the gift. “Jane was a good student, and a good historian,” Teeney says. “Those trips were good.” She loved history, and she and her father were very close. A reporter who spent several days with Coke when Jane was twelve was struck by the slim, pretty girl, and by her relationship with her father. “Stevenson is gentle-voiced with her, calls her ‘baby,’ ” the reporter wrote. “And you sense her love for the man who is big in her history books.” And when she became a teenager, Coke Stevenson made for Jane what was, for him, the ultimate sacrifice. Newspapers across Texas chronicled it in amazement: “A telephone has been installed on the Coke Stevenson Ranch.” “Well,” Stevenson drawled, “you know how teenagers are.”