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

by Robert A. Caro

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.