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The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path To Power
An American success story of a poor kid from Texas who powers his way to the House of Representatives
The Path to Power by Robert A. Caro is one of the finest books written about ambition and power. It provides an insight into the complex person of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 35th President of the United States of America. The story begins with Johnson a young 32-year old U.S. Congressman from the Tenth Congressional District of the state of Texas beseeching George Brown, of Brown & Root Inc., for a source of income, to supplement his modest salary as a congressman.
Brown would be a source of capital for Johnson’s political ambitions for most of his political career. Brown and Charles Marsh, the publisher of an influential Austin newspaper and a man of considerable wealth from many sources and who loved Johnson like a son, had come together to help Johnson with his finances. Marsh—and more specifically Marsh’s wife—would also be an important part of Johnson life.
At a meeting at the luxurious Greenbrier Hotel in the mountains of West Virginia, Marsh offered Johnson his share in a Texas oil company owned by Sid Richardson at no initial cost. Johnson would simply pay Marsh from his yearly profits. What surprised Marsh and Brown was that Johnson turned the offer down. "I can’t be an oil man, he said; if the public knew I had oil interest, it would kill me politically."
That one statement and the refusal to take the money indicated very clearly that this 32-year old congressman had already set his sights on the White House. No one in Texas would have cared if Lyndon Johnson had oil interest, but the electorate considering a presidential candidate would.
Caro paints an colorful picture of a complex man, haunted by his heritage. Johnson’s father, Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr. had served six legislative terms in the Texas House of Representatives. During his years of public service the elder Johnson shunned special interest lobbyist, refusing to allow his vote to be influenced by favors. What killed Sam politically was the same independent mind. Sam Johnson believed in the Darwinian theory of evolution, admired Al Smith, voted against prohibition, and wasn’t a man who frequented church enough for the fundamental religious folks he represented in Congress.
Recognizing his likely defeat in a run for another term in the State legislature, Johnson retired from politics and then fell on even harder economic times. He had already had trouble supporting his family off the meager salary paid to State Representatives. Lyndon was determined never to become his father. He was determined "to be somebody." He was determined to let the world know that Lyndon Johnson was the most clever of men, who could make the system work for him rather than the other way around.
Two illustrations from Caro’s book distinguish the two opposite sides of Lyndon Johnson. His virtuous side is nowhere more poignantly shown than in his service to his constituents in the Hill Country of Texas. When the Tenth Congressional seat became vacant—Congressman Buck Buchanan died suddenly, Johnson faced five formidable opponents. When the counting was done, he emerged with 3000 more votes than his nearest opponent. The people who gave Johnson that majority were not the ones Alvin Wirtz and George and Herman Brown bought for him through advertising and campaign events.
The votes came from the people of the Hill Country, the remote areas of Blanco, Burnet and Hays counties and the other Hill Country counties. "His 3000-vote plurality—a plurality whose dimensions had been utterly unsuspected—came principally from the farmers and the ranchers he had visited one by one, from the people in whom he had invested time no other candidate for Congress had ever given them, from the people who had on Election Day, repaid that investment in kind, giving up their own time—the time so valuable to them—to make the trip, sometimes quite a long trip, to the polling place to cast their votes for Lyndon Johnson.
"His very willingness to travel to these people may have been an important reason that they supported him. Not only were they neglected, they felt neglected—they had always felt neglected; the people of the Hill Country had had to plead even to the People’s Party…. When finally, a candidate for Congress make the effort to come to them, muddying his shoes to walk across fields to talk to them, they were grateful for his coming."
Lyndon Johnson never forgot this act of generosity on the part of the Hill Country citizens. During his time in Washington, they were repaid. The farmers had appealed to Johnson for relief from a devastating flood that the Farm Security Administration had refused to provide because the farmers had mortgaged their land fully and had no collateral. "In December 1938, Johnson arrived at a meeting with the farmers accompanied by a second car full of men." They were from the Farm Security Administration and Johnson had brought them to hear first hand the plight of the farmers.
"Two days later, on Christmas Eve, the farmers’ leaders received a telephone calls from their congressman. The FSA had just agreed to waive the collateral requirements for 400 Tenth District families because of ‘unusual conditions’ he told them. Each family would receive fifty dollars—enough to tide them over until federal seed loans became available in the spring.
Johnson also helped the farmers in more direct ways. The Agricultural Department had a Range Conservation program that no one in the Hill Country had taken advantage of, mostly because they were unaware of the program and even if they were saw no immediate benefit for themselves. The program also excluded the Hill Country in that some of its brush was not covered under the program. Johnson persuaded the Agricultural Department to include the brush of the Hill Country then took on the job of encouraging the farmers to take advantage of the program. Finally, he upped the incentive for clearing the brush to five dollars an acre to be paid to the farmer doing the clearing.
The result of his effort was a resurgence of the grasses that had once colonized the hills. "A total of only 31,000 acres of cedar had been cleared in Blanco County during 1936 and 1937, the two years before Lyndon Johnson became Congressman. In 1938 alone, 63,000 acres were cleared; in 1939, 70,000 acres. In the Tenth District as a whole, hundreds of thousands of acres of brush were chopped away. By the end of 1940, the amount of land under cultivation in the district had increased 400 percent.
"And more than the grass came back."
"He helped the Hill Country through his implementation of a score of New Deal programs. One improvement he made…in 1938 alone, 135 miles of paved farm-to-market roads were completed in Travis County, thanks to WPA grants Lyndon Johnson obtained… Some families that had lost their homes, and were working as tenant farmers on land they once owned, were able to buy back their land—thanks to the government-supported, low-interest loans the new congressman obtained to enable them to pay out the purchase price over forty years at low interest… ‘He got more projects, and more money for his district, than anybody else,’ (Tommy) Corcoran says. By Johnson’s own estimate, he got $70 million. ‘He was,’ says Corcoran, ‘the best Congressman for a district that ever was.’"
No one will ever know if Lyndon Johnson gave the families of his district more than their share of the Federal programs to secure their continuing loyalty or that deep inside he felt a real affection for these poor farmers.
But Lyndon Baines Johnson was not the selfless person to his subordinates that he appeared to be to his constituents. LBJ was a cruel ruthless man bullying those he has power over. To L. E. Jones and Gene Latimer he was a hard-driving boss that expected perfection in their work while they were paid poverty wages. Gene Latimer worked 18-hour days and earned $139 a month. L. E. Jones received only $91 with their boss pocketing a portion of the salary the two men were supposed to receive.
He was a notorious womanizer as well. His most outrageous escapade was with Alice Glass, the beautiful independent-minded mistress of Charles Marsh, the man who loved Lyndon like a son. Johnson and his wife Lady Byrd were frequent guest at Marsh’s rural estate called Longlea, a house modeled on a Sussex country home Alice Glass had seen on a trip to England with Marsh. Johnson and Glass had a long running affair known to everyone at Longlea except Marsh, though the author implies Lady Byrd was aware as well.
Lyndon Johnson was also a man who has powerful friends who expected him to do their bidding. George and Herman Brown wanted to build a dam. In fact, they wanted to build anything that was big and involved lots of money. The dam named Marshall Ford was to be built by the Bureau of Reclamation to control flooding that occurred periodically on the Lower Colorado River, that flows through Austin, Texas. A large portion of the book describes the complex set of events surrounding getting the dam built. Buck Buchanan who held Johnson’s seat previously had gotten a verbal agreement from Franklin D. Roosevelt, to build the dam. Only Buck died of a heart attack and Alan Wirtz and the Brown brothers were banking on Lyndon Johnson to take up the crusade where Buchanan left off.
The problem was one of land ownership. FDR had approved the dam unaware that Texas—entering the Union as a Republic not a territory—owned all its public lands. The lands did not automatically become Federal property upon entering the Union. The Bureau was being asked to build a dam on state-owned property and when the bureaucrats realized the situation they halted the project. Brown & Root had already begun construction and had sunk one and a half million dollars into the project.
It fell to Lyndon to get the White House to intercede and force the Bureau to continue funding the project. Johnson did not fail in his task. He appealed to two of the young New Dealers who surrounded FDR to push for the project with their boss. Abe Fortas and Tommy Corcoran—the latter had begun to be known in Washington as "White House Tommy." They were instrumental in short-circuiting the legislative and bureaucratic red tape to get the job done. Brown & Root got to build the dam and Lyndon Johnson was on his way to becoming a power to be reckoned with in Washington and Texas.
This book is not for the faint at heart. At over 700 pages, the work is a most complete exploration of the early years of LBJ up to his first attempt to run for the Senate. The book reads like a novel with characters that are bigger than life, not the least of which, the main character himself.
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