NotitiesThe Path to Power
Robert A. Caro
In "The Path to Power" beschrijft Robert A. Caro de complexe karakterontwikkeling van Lyndon B. Johnson, zijn politieke strategieën en de uitdagingen waarmee hij werd geconfronteerd. Het boek legt de nadruk op Johnson's pragmatisme en zijn vermogen om relaties op te bouwen, terwijl het ook de sociale en politieke context van zijn tijd verkent. Caro's diepgaande analyse onthult de ambities en morele dilemma's die Johnson als leider vormden.
Again and again, he harked back to one particular incident he could not get out of his mind: while riding an elevator in the Capitol one day, he had struck up a conversation with the elevator operator—who had said that he had once been a Congressman, too. (Location 174)
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KNOWING LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON—understanding the character of the thirty-sixth President of the United States—is essential to understanding the history of the United States in the twentieth century. (Location 208)
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That line, another expert could say in 1921, runs down the entire United States: “the United States may be divided into an eastern half and a western half, characterized, broadly speaking, one by a sufficient and the other by an insufficient amount of rainfall for the successful production of crops by ordinary farming methods.” (Location 579)
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Success—or even survival—in so hard a land demanded a price that was hard to pay. It required an end to everything not germane to the task at hand. It required an end to illusions, to dreams, to flights into the imagination—to all the escapes from reality that comfort men—for in a land so merciless, the faintest romantic tinge to a view of life might result not just in hardship but in doom. Principles, noble purposes, high aims—these were luxuries that would not be tolerated in a land of rock. (Location 855)
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expression of a belief that after men have banded together and formed a government, (Location 1143)
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Markeren(Geel) - Locatie 1446 (Location 1147)
Not only brutally hard work, but loneliness—what Walter Prescott Webb, who grew up on a farm and could barely restrain his bitterness toward historians who glamorize farm life, calls “nauseating loneliness”—was the lot of a Hill Country farm wife. Loneliness and dread. During the day, there might be a visitor, or at least an occasional passerby on the rutted road. At night, there was no one, no one at all. No matter in what direction Rebekah looked, not a light was visible. (Location 1446)
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“Aunt Rebekah said, ‘Oh, yes, you can.’ And she said, ‘Pretty is just skin-deep, darling.’ Ooooh, I’ll never forget her saying that. (Location 1548)
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Businessmen, bankers—“ there were plenty of legislators constantly looking after their interests,” McFarlane says. “The farming people and the working people—if somebody didn’t speak up and take their point and represent them, unless somebody really had their interests at heart, spoke up and took care of their interests, they had no one to look after their interests. And Sam Johnson did speak up on their behalf. (Location 2005)
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But the gossip about Sam Johnson was harsh and ruthless even for a small town. In part, this was because of the nature of Johnson City. Gossip was so powerful a force in many small towns partly because of their isolation: there wasn’t much for people to be interested in except each other’s lives. (Location 2178)
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Before he went to California, he was just a happy-go-lucky boy. When he came back, well, I saw a serious boy then. I saw a man. I saw what disappointment had done.” (Location 3027)
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The doubts and fears that tormented him manifested themselves in silence. “Normally, Lyndon was so outgoing, so bubbling, so loud,” Ethel Davis says. “But sometimes he would turn quiet, and stay quiet all day, and when Lyndon was quiet like that, you could see he was really down.” (Location 3336)
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Many students doubted the sincerity behind the compliments and the admiration, because, they noticed, no matter what the professor was saying, Johnson would never disagree. (Location 3407)
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His unpopularity with women students would not have aroused particular comment on campus, had it not been for the zealousness with which he tried to retouch reality. (Location 3516)
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THE MOST STRIKING ASPECT of Lyndon Johnson’s secrecy, however, was not the success with which he imposed it on others but the success with which he imposed it on himself. (Location 4102)
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Sam Ealy Johnson, an idealist “straight as a shingle” whose uncompromising adherence to the beliefs and principles with which he had entered politics made him a hero to some, was nonetheless a political failure who didn’t accomplish any of his most cherished aims. His son had, in the campus arena which was the only arena in which he had yet fought, accomplished his aims—because the impedimenta which hampered his father did not hamper him. He had won believing in nothing—without a reform he wanted to make, without a principle or issue about which he truly cared (“ We didn’t care if the argument was true or not.”). He had demonstrated, moreover, not only a pragmatism foreign to his father but a cynicism foreign as well: he had persuaded students—had persuaded them earnestly, his arm around their shoulders, looking intently into their eyes—that they should not cast votes that would help a secret organization, without letting them know that he was a member of a secret organization. (Location 4188)
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The son of the man of whom “you always knew where he stood” let no one know where he stood. (Location 4197)
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Nothing could change him. Some men—perhaps most men—who attain great power are altered by that power. Not Lyndon Johnson. The fire in which he had been shaped—that terrible youth in the Hill Country as the son of Sam and Rebekah Johnson—had forged the metal of his being, a metal hard to begin with, into a metal much harder. (Location 4427)
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Says Goode: “His attitude was, all the minor details must be taken care of, everything must be taken care of, and of course we must win. But the thing was: if you took care of all the minor details, you would win. (Location 4620)
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To supplement his salary, he taught at night: a businessmen’s course in the Dale Carnegie method. (Location 4664)
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Lyndon Johnson’s first day in the Capitol was the day Texas came to power in it—a power that the state was to hold, with only the briefest interruptions, for more than thirty years. (Location 4747)
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The House convened at noon; most Congressmen spent mornings in their offices handling their district’s “casework”—individual requests from constituents—either taking care of it themselves or calling bureaucrats to tell them that their secretaries would be calling, thereby smoothing the secretaries’ way. Kleberg, however, spent his mornings sleeping off the previous evening’s poker-and-bourbon session, and his afternoons indulging another passion—golf—at Washington’s famous Burning Tree Golf Club. On his trips to Capitol Hill, his first stop would be the congenial House cloakroom—not his office, in which the work bored him. He seldom appeared in Room 258* before the House adjourned in the late afternoon—when he would show up to welcome friends, his own and Miller’s, dropping by for a drink. On many days, he never showed up at all. Room 258 was a Congressman’s office without a Congressman. The work of the Fourteenth District was left to the Congressman’s secretary. (Location 4785)
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For Lyndon Johnson, the mystique of the mail went beyond the political. He had always done every job “as if his life depended on it.” Believing that “if you did just absolutely everything you could do, you would succeed,” he had tried to perform—perfectly—even minor tasks that no one else bothered with. For such a man, congressional mail, which consisted so largely of minor details—of small, unimportant requests—was a natural métier. Doing everything one could do with the mail meant answering every letter—and that was what he insisted his office must do. (Location 5047)
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His willingness to work endless hours for Lyndon Johnson did not include a willingness to surrender his personality to him. (Location 5164)
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My nature is such that if I can’t be an equal, I will not remain in a situation, and he was so demanding that—well, you lose your individuality if you allow someone to be too demanding for too long.” (Location 5166)
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There was desperation in the mail sacks he opened each morning. (Location 5287)
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First, he ended the banking crisis. Although every bank in America had closed in the early-morning hours before the Inaugural, most could reopen safely if only their depositors’ confidence was restored. In part, their confidence was restored by legislation. The Roosevelt administration’s first bill provided for the reopening of banks under Treasury Department licenses that in effect guaranteed their soundness; if a specific bank did not have sufficient funds, the Federal Reserve Board would lend funds against the bank’s assets. But mostly, their confidence was restored by his confidence. When he smiled on the crisis, it seemed to vanish. After the legislation had passed—in a single day—Franklin D. Roosevelt held, on March 12, his first “Fireside Chat.” “I want to talk for a few minutes ... about banking,” he said. “When the people find out that they can get their money—that they can get it when they want it—the phantom of fear will soon be laid. ... I can assure you that it is safer to keep your money in a reopened bank than under the mattress.” When the banks began reopening the next morning, the long lines were gone. Depositors put back their money so quickly, in fact, that in a single day the excess of deposits over withdrawals was more than $ 10 million in the Federal Reserve Districts alone. Then he turned to the farm crisis. That crisis was not weeks old, but decades—except for a few periods of prosperity such as that caused by the World War, the condition of America’s farmers had been worsening steadily for more than a century. But Roosevelt turned to it not reluctantly but with a will. On March 16, twelve days after he had taken office, he sent farm legislation, accompanied by a special message, to Congress. The words of the message, five paragraphs long, were words that farmers—and their fathers and grandfathers—had been waiting all their lives to hear. “At the same time that you and I are joining in...
... emergency action to bring order to our banks,” he told Congress, “... I deem it of equal importance to take other and simultaneous steps. ... One of these ... seeks to increase the purchasing power of our farmers and ... at the same time greatly relieve the pressure of farm mortgages. ...” Of equal importance—of equal importance to banks! For generations, farmers had been begging their government to recognize their problems as it recognized those of institutions such as banks; they had been pleading for acknowledgment that they were as important to their government, as worthy of its help, as the institutions in which they deposited their money. Now, in a phrase, the recognition and the acknowledgment had been conferred. (Location 5444)
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Note: In a phrase
No matter what someone thought, Lyndon would agree with him—would be there ahead of him, in fact. He could follow someone’s mind around—and figure out where it was going and beat it there. ...” And he touched every base; leaving a bureaucrat’s office, he smiled and chatted with his assistants and his secretaries until, soon, he had entire bureaus, top to bottom, willing to help him. (Location 5524)
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He was his own parliamentarian, and there wasn’t anyone who could argue with him about whether the proceedings were proceeding according to the rules, because he knew them. He was in command.” At the end of each debate, the Little Congress voted on the “bill.” Once he had the debates organized, he asked newspapers to cover them. Congressional aides generally reflected their bosses’ feelings, he told reporters, and Little Congress votes on pending legislation were therefore previews of upcoming votes in the Big Congress. Moreover, since the Little Congress floor leaders were the same men who were helping their bosses prepare to lead the upcoming fights in the House, the debates would provide a preview not only of votes but of maneuvers to come. (Location 5671)
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The chance for press coverage made even the most famous political figures receptive to Johnson’s invitations to address it. (Location 5680)
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He never campaigned publicly for them. “Word just circulated around that so-and-so was Johnson’s candidate,” Payne says. “He did everything behind the scenes.” But behind the scenes he was very effective. (Location 5700)
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Other Capitol Hill aides witnessed similar scenes. Not only, they came to realize, did Lyndon Johnson know powerful officials who were in a position to help him, these officials knew him, knew him and liked him—and wanted to help him. (Location 5731)
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And when, in January, 1934, Garner made his move—Texas Congressmen who submitted recommendations to Farley on federal postmasterships in the redistricted counties were told to clear them with the Vice President—Johnson knew how to use the weapon he had forged. He leaked the agreement to the press—not to a local Texas newspaper, but to the Associated Press. (Location 5764)
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Others familiar with the episode say White’s description is accurate except for the hyphenated adjective; Cactus Jack Garner was not even half amused. Garner’s question, moreover, was a natural one. “This boy Lyndon Johnson”—a twenty-five-year-old congressional assistant—had defeated, in a small but bitter skirmish, the Vice President of the United States. (Location 5777)
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Other residents noticed that on two consecutive nights, Johnson would argue on opposite sides of the same issue. And then, in a very short time, he stopped arguing about issues at all. He would no longer, in fact, even discuss them. His silence in this area was especially conspicuous because of his volubility in all others. If political tactics, for example, were being discussed, Johnson would be the center of the discussion; if the discussion concerned political issues—philosophy, principles, ideas, ideals—Johnson would not even be part of it. (Location 5885)
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Amidst the swirl of ideas, Lyndon Johnson seemed unmoved. The son of the man who had said, “It’s high time a man stood up for what he believes in” seemed ready to stand up for nothing. (Location 5895)
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Ambition was not uncommon among those bright young men in the Dodge, but they felt that Johnson’s was uncommon—in the degree to which it was unencumbered by even the slightest excess weight of ideology, of philosophy, of principles, of beliefs. “There’s nothing wrong with being pragmatic,” a fellow secretary says. “Hell, a lot of us were pragmatic. But you have to believe in something. Lyndon Johnson believed in nothing, nothing but his own ambition. Everything he did—everything—-was for his ambition.” (Location 5910)
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Having spent years in close proximity to Johnson, they are certain that any beliefs of his, regardless of what they may have been, would have not the slightest influence on his actions. (Location 5920)
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Maverick saw that this young secretary understood without being told what many politicians never understand: that voters’ reluctance to do extensive reading makes simplicity the key to successful political prose. (Location 5936)
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Johnson did not want even his boss doing anything without him knowing about it. “He didn’t want anyone to see Mr. Kleberg without going through him first; he didn’t want anyone seeing Kleberg that he didn’t know about.” (Location 5984)
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Gratitude—and other aspects of the quality he considered most important, the unquestioning obedience that he called “loyalty”—was, in fact, the prime qualification for a man receiving a Johnson job. (Location 6159)
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The road he saw before him—the road to the dim, vast ambition about which he never spoke—was a very long road. Though its general direction—elective office—had become clear, he still couldn’t see its turnings, still didn’t know which of many paths he would follow. But now, as a result of his genius in distributing jobs, he could be sure that, whatever the paths he chose, he would not be without assistance when he trod them. As a far-seeing and determined explorer caches hidden supplies along a route he knows he will follow in years to come, so that they will be waiting for him when he needs them, Lyndon Johnson had cached along his route the resource indispensable to his plans: men. These men were hidden now, low-level aides in nooks and crannies of large bureaucracies. But they were ready to march at his command; when he needed them, he would be able to call them, and they would come. (Location 6230)
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And then, on this, their first date, he asked her to marry him. (Location 6406)
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“God knows how he saved it,” he would say. “He never had any extra money. We earned just enough to live. It broke me up, him handing me that twenty-five dollars. I often wondered what he did without, what sacrifice he and my mother made.” And he never forgot the four words his father said to him as he climbed aboard the train; he was to tell friends that he had remembered them at every crisis in his life. Clutching his son’s hand, his father said: “Sam, be a man!” (Location 6603)
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His standards were very simple—and not subject to compromise. He talked a lot about “honor” and “loyalty,” and he meant what he said. “There are no degrees in honorableness,” he would say. “You are or you aren’t.” Harsh though that rule was, he lived up to it—says one of his fellow legislators: “He had a reputation for honesty and fair dealing. You could always swear by anything Sam told you”—and he insisted that others live up to it, too. “Once you lied to Rayburn, why, you’d worn out your credentials,” an aide says. “You didn’t get a second chance.” (Location 6678)
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The Republicans “talk about the hard deal the producer is getting in this bill,” Rayburn said. The Republican Party, he said, is always “willing and anxious to take that small rich class under its protective wing, but unwilling at all times to heed the great chorus of sad cries ever coming from the large yet poor class, the American consumer.” (Location 6719)
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When Silent Cal Coolidge noted that “You don’t have to explain something you haven’t said,” Rayburn told people that that was “the smartest thing he’d ever heard outside of the Bible.” (Location 6820)
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An expert in procedure—oh, absolutely an expert in matters of procedure. The young men had anticipated problems in the full House because of the legislation’s complexities; “If you amended Section 7, it might have an effect on Section 2 and 13, and so on,” Landis was to say. But, thanks to Rayburn, the complexities made passage easier, not harder. (Location 6924)
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And he has received little credit from history, in part because he left almost no record of his deeds in writing; not in memoirs, not even in memos—as David Halberstam says, he “did all his serious business in pencil on the back of a used envelope.” (When asked how he remembered what he had promised or what he had said, he would growl: “I always tell the truth, so I don’t need a good memory to remember what I said”)—in part because, shy, he shrank from publicity: “Let the other fellow get the headlines,” he said. “I’ll take the laws.” (Location 7002)
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He would never ask a man to do anything against his own interests. “A Congressman’s first duty is to get re-elected,” he would say, and he would advise young Congressmen: “Always vote your district.” If a Congressman said that a vote Rayburn was asking for would hurt him in his district, Rayburn would always accept that excuse. But Rayburn knew the districts. And if the excuse wasn’t true, Rayburn’s rage would rise. (Location 7033)
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After breakfast, Lady Bird would suggest that Lyndon and Mr. Sam read the Sunday papers together while she cleaned up, and he began staying longer and longer. Lyndon Johnson was provided with ample opportunity to exercise the talents that had led people to call him “a professional son” on this man who so desperately wanted a son. (Location 7133)
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Coleman says he realized quickly that “He was one of those highly adaptable fellows. When he was up on the Hill, he dressed and acted like he came from the city, but when he met up with someone like myself who had come from a small town in the interior of Mississippi, he acted like a fellow who had grown up with me.” (Location 7188)
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The plight of youth, Mrs. Roosevelt felt, was the fault of society; “a civilization which does not provide young people with a way to earn a living is pretty poor,” she said. (Location 7327)
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Despite these preparations, the sight of an influential figure approaching in the distance would precipitate panic. Ducking into the doorway of the nearest store, he would hurriedly tuck in his shirt, recheck his tie, hitch up and carefully adjust his pants and belt and then pat his pompadour into perfection—after which, looking his absolute best, he would saunter, with exaggerated carelessness, toward the man for whom these preparations had been made. (Location 7763)
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Contractors had to know how to handle mules, and they had to know how to handle men. Herman knew how to handle both. With the mules he was gentle, with the men he was rough; (Location 7927)
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With young politicians and lawyers who came to him for advice, he was not only friendly but calm and judicious. While they stated their problem or opinion, he sat quietly, never interrupting, speaking only in encouraging monosyllables, until the young man was finished. Often, he did not say much even then. And when he did speak, he spoke softly and very slowly and deliberately. Says Willard Deason: “He never told you what to do. But when you were finished talking to him, you knew what to do.” (Location 8006)
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Note: Knew
Clark, who was to work closely with Wirtz for years, says, “What he wanted was P-O-W-E-R—power over other men. He wanted power, but he didn’t want to get it by running for office. He liked to sit quietly, smoke a cigar. He would sit and work in his library, and plan and scheme, and usually he would get somebody out in front of him so that nobody knew it was Alvin Wirtz who was doing it. He would sit and scheme in the dark. He wasn’t an outgoing person. But he was the kind of person who didn’t want to lose any fights. And he didn’t lose many.” Stealth was his style. Ignoring the assistance of secretaries at the law firm of Powell, Wirtz, Rauhut & Gideon (“ If you knew Alvin Wirtz,” says another attorney, “you would know that his name would never come first”), he wrote many letters in longhand—because he didn’t want even a secretary to know what was in them. (Location 8043)
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The envelopes containing the announcement of his candidacy—an announcement written in the form of a news story—arrived at newspaper offices containing not only his picture but, although no advertising was being purchased, a check for ten dollars. A covering note from Ray Lee read: “I am enclosing a check for ten dollars which we want you to credit to our account. We shall want to use some advertising space later in the campaign. Here also is Mr. Johnson’s statement announcing for Congress. We hope that you will be able to use this statement this week.” (Location 8608)
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The payments paid off for the Johnson campaign. A campaign worker reported that “I called on the ‘Marble Falls Messenger’ and found that we owe them another $ 5. ... He said that he would not add ‘paid advertisement’ at the end [of a news item written by Johnson’s staff] because it would carry more weight this way.” From beginning to end of the campaign, not only did the amount of Johnson’s paid advertising dwarf that of his opponents, so did the amount of “news coverage”—articles favorable to him written by his aides—that he received. (Location 8618)
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In Washington, and before that in Houston and Cotulla, he had worked so feverishly, driven himself so furiously, forced his young will to be inflexible—had whipped himself into the frantic, furious effort that journalists and biographers would call “energy” when it was really desperation and fear. (Location 8667)
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AFTER THE FORMAL SPEECH, however, Johnson would circulate through the town, shaking hands with its people—and suddenly there was no awkwardness at all. (Location 8771)
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His questions got the other man talking. In no more than an instant, it seemed, a rapport would be established. (Location 8781)
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All politicians shake hands, of course. But they didn’t shake hands as Lyndon Johnson did. “Listen,” Lyndon Johnson would say, standing, lean and earnest and passionate, before a Hill Country rancher he remembered from his youth. “Listen, I’m running for Congress. I want your support. I want your vote. And if you know anybody who can help me, I want you to get them to help me. I need help. Will you help me? Will you give me your helping hand?” Will you give me your helping hand?—it was only as he asked that last question that Lyndon Johnson raised his own hand, extending it in entreaty. (Location 8787)
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They saw that once a voter’s hand was grasped in his, the voter wanted to leave it there. They saw that after he had talked to a voter for a minute or two, his arm around him, smiling down into his eyes, the voter did not want the talk to end. (Location 8799)
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The people before him were, many of them, people he had seen for the first time only a few minutes before. But as a result of his brief conversations with them, he could attach to their faces not only names but circumstances of their lives—and, in so doing, could make them feel that their destiny was linked to Roosevelt’s destiny, and to Lyndon Johnson’s. (Location 8826)
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No Fundamentalist preacher, thundering of fire and brimstone in one of the famed Hill Country revival meetings, had called the people of the Hill Country to the banner of Jesus Christ more fervently than Lyndon Johnson called them to the banner of Franklin Roosevelt. And, as in revival meetings, passions rose. (Location 8846)
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IF MEN, even men who had long known Lyndon Johnson, now became aware of new dimensions of his “gift”—his ability not only to meet but move the public—they became aware also of new dimensions of the effort he would make in using that gift. (Location 8871)
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He stopped at every store, purchasing some small item in each so as to predispose the proprietor toward him—if not cheese and crackers then a can of sardines, which he would open and eat on the counter. If he was lucky, there would be a farmer or two there, and he could talk to several people at once. If no one was inside but the storekeeper, he would talk to the storekeeper, in as casual and unhurried a manner as if he had nothing else in the world to do. Scattered along the roads were filling stations, and he stopped at every one of these, too. At most of these stations, there was only one pump outside, and one voter—the proprietor—inside. But he chatted unhurriedly with that voter. (To ensure that he would be able to buy some gas at each station, he was careful never to fill his tank completely; Polk Shelton’s brother Emmett recalls the lesson in country campaigning that Johnson gave him: “I drove down to Smithville one day; I had been planning to put posters in gas station windows, but every time I would get to one, Lyndon had been there before us. And at each one, he would go in and buy a gallon or two. We didn’t need any gas; I had filled up before we left. So they were a little cold to us.”) (Location 8911)
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Day after day, while his opponents rested for the next Saturday, or delivered a major speech or two, Lyndon Johnson campaigned like this. The district covered 8,000 square miles; there were few sections of it that Johnson didn’t visit. (Location 8931)
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Hick Halcomb began to realize that he was hearing, in one town after another, some version of the same phrase. He would be standing in a town’s courthouse or general store when a farmer from some isolated area entered. “That boy Lyndon Johnson was to see me,” the farmer would say. “That’s the first candidate for Congress that I’ve ever seen.” (Location 8962)
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And then Johnson, sitting beside him, rechecking in the fading sunlight or in the light from the dashboard the list of names he had been handed that morning, would realize that somehow they had missed one, that one farm back there in the hills behind them had not been visited. “If that happened,” Keach recalls, “we would go back, no matter how hungry and tired we were, no matter how far it was. Sometimes, I could hardly believe we were going back, but we always did.” (Location 8969)
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Ed Clark had seen a lot of campaigners. “I never saw anyone campaign as hard as that,” he would recall forty years later. “I never thought it was possible for anyone to work that hard.” (Location 9021)
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There was a tactic, Sam Johnson said, that could make the leaders’ opposition work for him, instead of against him. The same tactic, Sam said, could make the adverse newspaper polls work for him, instead of against him. It could even make the youth issue work for him. If the leaders were against him, he told his son, stop trying to conceal that fact; emphasize it—in a dramatic fashion. If he was behind in the race, emphasize that—in a dramatic fashion. If he was younger than the other candidates, emphasize that. (Location 9083)
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If no leader would introduce Lyndon, Sam said, he should stop searching for mediocre adults as substitutes, but instead should be introduced by a young child, an outstanding young child. And the child should introduce him not as an adult would introduce him, but with a poem, a very special poem. You know the poem, he told Rebekah—the one about the thousands. (Location 9087)
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And that night, at a rally in Henly, in Hays County, Lyndon Johnson told the audience, “They say I’m a young candidate. Well, I’ve got a young campaign manager, too,” and he called Corky to the podium, and Corky, smacking down his hand, recited a stanza of Edgar A. Guest’s “It Couldn’t Be Done”: There are thousands to tell you it cannot be done, There are thousands to prophesy failure; There are thousands to point out to you one by one, The dangers that wait to assail you. But just buckle in with a bit of a grin, Just take off your coat and go to it; Just start in to sing as you tackle the thing That “cannot be done,” and you’ll do it. (Location 9095)
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Purchasing still more time, Johnson put the old Judge on the air again and again. His opponents’ charges about Johnson’s unprecedented expenditures were buried under Johnson denials, broadcast thanks to Johnson’s unprecedented expenditures. (Location 9188)
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That his efforts—combined with his opponents’ lack of effort—were bearing fruit was obvious now. (Location 9216)
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Although the district’s population was estimated at 264,000, only 29,948 persons, one out of every nine residents of the district, went to the polls. And of those voters, only 8,280 cast their votes for Lyndon Johnson. Johnson won the election, in other words, with less than 28 percent of the vote—with only one out of every four votes cast. He won, moreover, with the votes of little more than 3 percent of the district’s population; he was Congressman from a district in which only one out of every thirty-two persons had voted for him.* Johnson had been elected with the fewest votes—by far the fewest votes—of any of the nation’s 435 Congressmen. (Location 9255)
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His 3,000-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. (Location 9273)
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No effort had been spared to defeat these men; no effort would be spared to win their friendship. (Location 9341)
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What might prevent a Dan Quill or another man from behaving to his enemies the way Lyndon Johnson behaved would be pride or embarrassment—or any one of a hundred conventional emotions, such as a natural desire to gloat, even for a day or two, over a fallen, and vicious, foe. But Lyndon Johnson had determined many years before the emotion that would govern his life—the emotion that, with “inflexible will,” would be the only emotion that he would allow to govern his life. “It is ambition,” he had written, “that makes of a creature a real man.” (Location 9352)
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Keeping control of the NYA was very important to him; it was, after all, a statewide agency—and thus a potential statewide political organization. Just one day after he had become Kleberg’s secretary, Ella So Relle had seen that “he was thinking this was a stepping stone. As soon as he got a job, he thought, now that I’m in this, how can I use this job for the next step?” Nothing had changed. Johnson already knew what the next step was going to be—and for it he needed a statewide organization. (Location 9368)
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“What is a government?” Corcoran once asked. “It’s not just the top man or the top ten men. A government is the top one hundred or two hundred men. What really makes the difference is what happens down the line before—and after—the big decisions are taken.” (Location 9513)
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But the dominance went beyond the physical. Although he was only twenty-eight, he had been giving orders for a long time now—to L. E. Jones and Gene Latimer and the rest of the staff in Kleberg’s office; to scores of NYA officials. He was accustomed to being listened to, and the air with which he carried himself was in part the air of command. (Location 9669)
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These were very cunning men, and Lyndon Johnson made very sharp tools of them. They didn’t realize this, of course. In fact, they vehemently deny it. They felt that they were using Lyndon Johnson at least as much as he was using them, and this feeling was important to them; they were clever men, and proud of their cleverness, practical men and proud of their pragmatism; it was important to them that the upper hand in any relationship be theirs; the thought that someone might be taking advantage of them, getting more from them than they from him, would have been difficult for them to swallow (the thought was, in fact, difficult for them to swallow forty years later; the author learned quickly that one way to bring a frown to their faces was to so much as hint that Lyndon Johnson might have been using them more than they were using him). (Location 9701)
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TOMMY CORCORAN was Johnson’s bluntest weapon. Abe Fortas, too young to have entrée but gifted with that lawyer’s mind at which other lawyers marveled, was the sharpest. And this weapon, too, was to be called into use. (Location 9768)
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In 1951, Sam Rayburn would be Speaker of the House. In 1938, he was only Majority Leader. But he was Sam Rayburn. As Leavy fumbled for an explanation, Rayburn stood up and walked forward to stand beside him. As Leavy finished a sentence, Sam Rayburn said: “The gentleman is correct, yes.” He stood there beside Leavy until Marvin Jones banged down his gavel and called the question, and the House agreed that Leavy was correct. (Location 9887)
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the mail, Birdwell saw, was the best way to make people feel “they had a close personal relationship, a close personal rapport, with their Congressman,” so if there wasn’t enough mail, “we had to generate mail.” (Location 10411)
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“He signed every letter,” no matter how brief, or how unimportant the subject matter. “No one rubber-stamped his name on a letter. (Location 10416)
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The gifted Herbert C. Henderson was the one assistant with a special place on the Johnson staff because Johnson considered his speechwriting talent too important to be wasted. He had his own office in which he kept files on all relevant political topics of the day, and wrote speeches for Johnson to deliver on his trips back to the district. Birdwell and Latimer handled the rest of the work. (Location 10425)
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The isolation of the Edwards Plateau—the distances (and inadequate roads) that separated its farms and ranches from Austin and San Antonio, their lack of radio and daily newspapers; the inadequacy of the amateurish weeklies—prevented its inhabitants from learning about developments with which farmers in other areas were familiar. (Location 10529)
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During the 1930’ s, the federal government sent physicians to examine a sampling of Hill Country women. 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. (Location 10787)
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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. (Location 10792)
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AS LATE AS 1935, farmers had been denied electricity not only in the Hill Country but throughout the United States. In that year, more than 6 million of America’s 6.8 million farms did not have electricity. (Location 10881)
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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? (Location 10911)
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Rayburn kept working in his quiet way. When, after some weeks, the conferees returned to the bargaining table, writes the most thorough historian of the affair, “a mood of compromise was apparent.” The conflict over inclusion of the utilities was compromised by allowing them to be eligible for REA loans, but giving preference to non-profit bodies such as cooperatives. On May 11, 1936, Congress passed the new REA bill. Within the next eighteen months, electricity was brought to half a million American farms. Hundreds of thousands of other farmers were forming cooperatives so that they could get electricity, too—and rural electric rates were beginning to drop in many areas. The times were changing—and they were changing fast. (Location 10999)
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THEY WEREN’T CHANGING for the Hill Country. The hopes that had been raised there by the creation of the REA had been dashed when the REA announced the minimum requirements for electrification. The REA Act required loans to be self-liquidating; before a farmers’ electrical cooperative could obtain a loan, therefore, the REA had to be satisfied that the cooperative would be able to repay it, together with annual interest of about 3 percent, within twenty-five years. The crucial criterion the REA established to ensure this was population density: the agency said it would make no loan in any area in which the electrical lines to be built would serve an average of less than three farms per mile. (Location 11005)
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Why should the New Deal be any different? New Deal programs that had helped farmers in other areas hadn’t helped the Hill Country much. More important, perhaps, the New Deal had given other farmers hope. After five years of the New Deal, hope in the Hill Country was still in almost as short supply as cash. (Location 11031)
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Legal documents—documents they did not understand—turned them skittish: Who knew what hidden traps lay within them? Were they signing something that would one day allow someone to take their land away? In vain, the county agents and community leaders tried to explain to the farmers that they were not being asked to surrender control of their land. Many farmers, as one report put it, “had the idea that in signing an easement they were mortgaging their property to the U.S. Treasury.” Thousands of easements were required—not only from farmers who wanted electricity but from farmers who didn’t, because the lines had to cross their land—and it was difficult to persuade the farmers to give them. (Location 11074)
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But the hole-diggers had incentive. For after the hole-digging teams came the pole-setters and “pikemen,” who, in teams of three, set the poles—thirty-five-foot pine poles from East Texas—into the rock, and then the “framers” who attached the insulators, and then the “stringers” who strung the wires, and at the end of the day the hole-diggers could see the result of their work stretching out behind them—poles towering above the cedars, silvery lines against the sapphire sky. And the homes the wires were heading toward were their own homes. “These workers—they were the men of the cooperative,” Smith says. Gratitude was a spur also. Often the crews didn’t have to eat the cold lunch they had brought. A woman would see men toiling toward her home to “bring the lights.” And when they arrived, they would find that a table had been set for them—with the best plates, and the very best food that the family could afford. Three hundred men—axemen, polemen, pikers, hole-diggers, framers—were out in the Edwards Plateau, linking it to the rest of America, linking it to the twentieth century, in fact, at the rate of about twelve miles per day. (Location 11132)
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NYA work was only part of what his NYA men were doing all across Texas: whenever one visited a town to check on an NYA project, he was supposed also, says one, “to go to the Courthouse to see the Mayor” and other local politicians, and to see “the school people” and the postmasters, who were often key figures in a local political structure. (Location 11165)
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Johnson “was so insincere,” Lucas says. “He would tell everyone what he thought they wanted to hear. As a result, you couldn’t believe anything he said.” (Location 11212)
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1938, a year after he came to Congress, Lyndon Johnson made an effort to break out of that trap. The only House committee in which a junior member was anything more than a cipher was Appropriations, and of all the House committees, only Appropriations had the power to fund government programs. Other committees could authorize a program, but the money for it had to come—in a separate bill—from Appropriations. The Appropriations Committee therefore had unique power. More important to a young Congressman such as Johnson, its members were divided into thirteen subcommittees—each of which had autonomy unique among House subcommittees. Because of the diversity of Appropriations’ work—it had to cover the whole range of government operations, not just agriculture, say, or defense—the members of each subcommittee became the experts in the field it covered, and the committee chairman, eighty-year-old Edward T. Taylor of Colorado, customarily deferred to its decisions. Even more important to a young Congressman, these subcommittees were small—in 1937, most had only six or seven members—and their smallness kept the meetings informal, so even an initiate had a chance to contribute something, and members with a few years’ seniority often were allowed considerable input. (Location 11355)
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A Congressman didn’t even need the well; the very corridors of Congress, where reporters take down a Congressman’s comment on a major development, could be a sounding board. (Location 11449)
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“When a major subject is on top of the news ... and the wire services are hurrying to assemble a reaction story, any provocative comment from a member of Congress is likely to get scooped up and given a sentence or two.” All a Congressman had to do was speak, and he would be a spokesman. (Location 11452)
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Markeren(Geel) - Locatie 11506 (Location 11462)
All that was required—under the House rule allowing members virtually unlimited freedom to “revise and extend” their remarks in the Record—was that a member read the opening words of a speech, and hand it to a clerk for reprinting in the Record. Because anything printed in the Record can be reprinted at government expense, and then mailed at government expense under the franking privilege, Congressmen used the right to “revise and extend” to have tens of thousands of copies of their statements reprinted and mailed to their constituents, thereby gaining free publicity and creating the impression of deep involvement in national issues. (Location 11506)
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Whole years went by in which Johnson did not rise even once to make a point of order, or any other point, not to ask or answer a question, not to support or attack a bill under discussion, not to participate, by so much as a single word, in an entire year’s worth of floor proceedings in the House.* (Location 11539)
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Lyndon Johnson did not participate—neither with legislation nor with debate, not on the well of the House or on the floor or in its cloakrooms or committees—in these battles. He had shouted “Roosevelt, Roosevelt, Roosevelt” to get to Congress; in Congress, he shouted nothing, said nothing—stood for nothing. (Location 11563)
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Some of the more astute of his colleagues felt that they understood the reason for his silence. Mrs. Douglas, who spent a lot of time with him, speculates on his reasons for acting this way. One that she suggests is “caution”: “Was it just caution? Just that he didn’t want to have a lot of his words come back at him—a more cautious way of working in the Congress than that of many others? ... He was witty, he would tell stories, he was humorous. But he was always aware of being responsible for what he said. He was always aware that what he said might be repeated or remembered—even years later. And he didn’t want someone to come back years later, and say, ‘I remember when you said ...’” Watching him talk so much—and say so little—Mrs. Douglas began to realize, she says, that Lyndon Johnson was “strong.” In Washington, she says, “everyone tried to find out where you stood. But he had great inner control. He could talk so much—and no one ever knew exactly where he stood.” (Location 11568)
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But the House seat was only a staging area; it was not the destination at the end of that long road. He had needed the seat; he didn’t want to stay in it long. So his silence was not for the sake of power in the House; if he was keeping deliberately silent, it was for a different reason. (Location 11590)
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His skills at manipulating men were useless without at least a modicum of power to back them up, and he possessed no power at all. (Location 11618)
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Garner, Timmons wrote, “abhorred even the idea of a third term for any President,” good or bad. The basis for his abhorrence was simple: four decades in Washington had taught him what power did to men. “No man should exercise great powers too long,” he said. On another occasion, he was to say: “We don’t want any kings or emperors in this country. You have to curb the ambitions of every man, even the best of them, [because] they are human.” (Location 11889)
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Roosevelt’s basic problem, if he chose to run, was not how to get the nomination—his ability to get a decisive convention majority was never in doubt—but how to be nominated in so striking a manner that it would amount to an emphatic and irresistible call to duty. (Location 12155)
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Markeren(Geel) - Locatie 12608 (Location 12246)
Men who could read the map of power understood the significance of the fact that the largest contract ever awarded in Texas—a contract of almost unbelievable magnitude—had been awarded to Lyndon Johnson’s friend. Ickes could describe him as a “kid Congressman.” “Kid,” in some terms, he may have been—a thirty-one-year-old Congressman from a remote and isolated political district. But after that telegram, he was, in terms of power, a kid Congressman no longer. (Location 12608)
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Note: Map
But, however deep their resentment of the New Deal as a whole or of the Texas leaders of the anti-Garner campaign, the objects of that resentment did not include Lyndon Johnson. The reason was simple: they didn’t know he was one of the leaders. (Location 12630)
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“Johnson was being very cautious about getting himself exposed to any unnecessary fire.” (Location 12646)
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The requests were answered—with a thoroughness that would have been familiar to Gene Latimer and L. E. Jones, whose high-school debate coach had taught them that if you took care of all the minor details, if “you did everything you could do—absolutely everything—you would win.” (Location 13427)
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Gratitude is an emotion as ephemeral in Washington as elsewhere, but Lyndon Johnson obtained from his work with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee a reward more lasting. (Location 13796)
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They were going to need money again in 1942, of course, in less than two years. In 1942—and in succeeding years. Whether or not they liked Lyndon Johnson, they were going to need him. Not merely gratitude but an emotion perhaps somewhat stronger and more enduring—self-interest—dictated that they be on good terms with him. This realization—and the reality behind it—abruptly altered Johnson’s status on Capitol Hill. When Congress had left Washington in October, he had been just one Congressman among many. Within a short time after Congress returned in January, the word was out that he was a man to see, a man to cultivate. (Location 13819)
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Now he was a guy you couldn’t deny any more.” (Location 13870)
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The power of money was less ephemeral than power based on elections or individuals. It could last as long as the money lasted, exerting its effect not only on an incumbent but on his successors. (Location 13895)
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LYNDON JOHNSON’S WORK with Democratic congressional candidates had in effect added a new factor to the equation of American politics. The concept of financing congressional races across the country from a single central source was not new, but the Democrats had seldom if ever implemented the concept on the necessary scale or with the necessary energy. “No one before had ever worked at it,” James Rowe says. “Johnson worked at it like hell. (Location 13920)
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A HALLMARK OF JOHNSON’S CAREER had been a lack of any consistent ideology or principle, in fact of any moral foundation whatsoever—a willingness to march with any ally who would help his personal advancement. His work with the congressional campaign committee brought this into sharper focus. Because Democratic congressional candidates in the one-party South had no opposition in the November elections, he was providing money only to Democrats in the North—who were primarily liberals. But the money came from men who were not liberals. (Location 13939)
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EVER SINCE HE HAD ARRIVED in Washington nine years before, Lyndon Johnson had, first as a congressional secretary and then as a Congressman, been touching every base: cultivating not only bureaucrats, but their secretaries and their assistants, and their assistants’ assistants, and their secretaries, until entire government bureaus knew him, liked him—wanted to do things for him. He used the same technique with members of the White House staff. (Location 14057)
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This determination to “touch every base” paid dividends. Pa Watson guarded only the front door to the Oval Office. There was a “back door,” too. This was the door to the small, cluttered office—on the opposite side of the Oval Office from Watson’s—that was shared by LeHand and Tully. Visitors Roosevelt wanted to see without the knowledge of the press—“ off-the-record” guests, in the parlance of the White House inner circle—would use this door, entering the White House by an unfrequented side entrance, then going up the back stairs to Missy’s office, to be ushered into the President’s presence by her. (Location 14075)
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Fond though Watson was of Johnson, Pa was a vigilant guardian of the President’s time, and had Johnson asked for more than occasional bits of it, he might easily have worn out his welcome with the General. So he used the more informal route—which is one reason his name seldom appears in the White House logs that chronicle the President’s official visitors. (Location 14090)
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When Rowe didn’t hear from Johnson for a few days, he missed him; once he dropped Johnson a note: “There has been a deadly silence around here for some time. Miss Gilligan [Rowe’s secretary] says it makes this office very dull. I got so worried about it last week I called to see if you had fallen in front of a train. I was relieved to find you were only in Texas.” And close as he was to Rowe—and hard as he worked to maintain that closeness—Rowe was not the only one of the President’s six administrative assistants he was cultivating. (Location 14109)
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But the organization below—the organization that carried out the daily campaigning—was largely the NYA organization; the state was divided into districts, along the lines of the NYA districts, and an NYA director supervised each, and gave orders to local NYA men, who were familiar with smaller areas. And because the NYA was a statewide organization, Johnson’s campaign organization was a statewide organization—the first statewide political organization Texas had ever seen. (Location 14245)
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In an era in which most radio messages were hard sell, the flour salesman from Fort Worth had, as one chronicler was later to put it, “either stumbled into, or deliberately figured out, that a microphone is an ear and not an auditorium—and you don’t make public speeches to microphones, you don’t shout into them any more than you would shout into your sweetheart’s ear when you wanted to tell her you loved her. O’Daniel learned early that he had Texas by the ear and from that day on he cooed and caroled and gurgled into it.” (Location 14589)
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Markeren(Geel) - Locatie 15515 (Location 15119)
Lyndon Johnson’s loss had been due to a political fluke. He had been beaten not by his opponent’s friends but by his opponent’s foes; O’Daniel had won the Senate seat not because these men wanted him to be Senator, but because they didn’t want him to be Governor—because they wanted to get him out of Texas. But it was Johnson’s mistake that had enabled these men to take his victory away. He had planned and schemed and maneuvered for ten years—had worked for ten years, worked day and night, weekday and weekend—had done “everything.” And, for ten years, he had won. He had relaxed for one day. And he had lost. (Location 15515)
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PEARL HARBOUR restored—in an instant—the relationship between Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson. (Location 15846)
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