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

by Robert A. Caro

But although in 1942 and 1943 Lyndon Johnson’s political influence was not great, it was quite strategically situated in regard to the purchase of a radio station. In the “very close-knit group,” in which, as Virginia Durr put it, “there was a great intertwining of both personal and intergovernmental relationships,” three members were intimately connected with the governmental agency whose approval of the purchase would be necessary. Clifford Durr was an FCC commissioner, one of the seven-member board that ran the agency; W. Ervin “Red” James was Durr’s chief assistant at the Commission. As for Lyndon Johnson’s bluntest tool, barely a year into private practice, already becoming known as “the greatest wirepuller in history,” Tommy Corcoran had many wires to pull in the FCC—including some that ran all the way to the top: both the Commission’s chairman, James Fly, a former classmate of Corcoran’s at Harvard Law, and its former chief counsel, William J. Dempsey, a thirty-two-year-old Corcoran protégé, owed their appointments largely to his influence. (Dempsey’s predecessor, insufficiently responsive to a telephone call from “Tommy Corcoran at the White House,” had found himself dismissed on twenty-four hours’ notice.) And while Dempsey was now in private practice (sharing an office suite with Corcoran, with both men representing private clients before a notably accommodating FCC), many officials still at the top of the FCC were indebted to Corcoran for their jobs: the agency ...