The Path to Power (137 page)

I
SOMETIMES NOTICE
, when reading Acknowledgments sections in other biographies, that the biographers have had the assistance of whole teams of research associates, research assistants and perhaps a typist or two. But I never feel envious of them. I have Ina.

My wife, Ina Joan Caro, has been all these things—in spades—during the seven years it has taken to complete this book, as she was all these things during the seven years it took me to write my first book. On the first book, she made herself an expert on great urban public works to help with my research into the life of Robert Moses. On this book, she made herself an expert on rural electrification and soil conservation, and then spent long days driving back and forth over the Hill Country searching out elderly farm wives who could explain to her—and through her, to me—the difference that these innovations had made in their lives after Lyndon Johnson brought the innovations to the Hill Country. Searching through smalltown libraries, Ina has unearthed copies of weekly newspapers of the 1920’s and 1930’s that the librarians swore no longer existed. Her incomparable knowledge of big-city library facilities in New York and Washington gives her a seemingly magical ability to say in an instant where a piece of information, no matter how recondite, can be found. And these are just some of the many areas in which, with perseverance and ingenuity, she has been invaluable in the research of this work. In addition, she has typed the massive manuscript—typed some chapters over and over—without a single word of complaint. And she has provided as well not only support and encouragement but many keen critical insights. Long years of gracious selflessness—Shakespeare’s line on the dedication page expresses better than I can what they have meant to me. She has been my sole companion now on two long journeys. I could not ask for a better one.

The more I learn about publishers, the more I realize how extraordinary mine is. Robert Gottlieb has stood beside me now during two books: a tower of strength in his belief in my work, in his perceptive criticism, in his never-failing
encouragement and support. And in an era in which detailed editing of even short manuscripts is rapidly becoming a lost art, Bob Gottlieb not only gave this long manuscript detailed editing, but editing of the unique keenness and brilliance that make him an artist in his field. The grinding pressures of his responsibilities as president of Knopf did not deter him from lavishing on this book his time, his energy and his genius.

Assisting Bob Gottlieb on this book, as she assisted him on
The Power Broker
, is Knopf’s Katherine A. Hourigan. Among the assets she brings to an author is a dedication to making even thick books handsome and readable. Her perceptive editorial criticism is characterized as well by an unflinching integrity. For the endless hours she has devoted to this book I shall forever be grateful.

A
MONG THE MANY OTHER PEOPLE
at Knopf to whom I am indebted, I must thank especially Lesley Krauss, Virginia Tan and my old friends Nina Bourne, Jane Becker Friedman, Bill Loverd and Martha Kaplan.

Perhaps because my books take so long to write, sons as well as fathers work on them. Andrew L. Hughes has long provided me with valued literary as well as legal advice. And on this book, the man handling the ominously large difficulties in production (and handling them impressively indeed) has been Andrew W. Hughes.

O
VER THE YEARS
, my agent, Lynn Nesbit, has always been there when I needed her. If I have never told her how much her help has meant to me, let me do so now.

I
AM GRATEFUL
to many members of the staff of the Lyndon B. Johnson Library for their assistance in my research there. In addition to the Library’s assistant director, Charles Corkran, they are Mike Gillette, Linda Hanson, David Humphrey, Joan Kennedy, Tina Lawson, E. Philip Scott, Nancy Smith and Robert Tissing.

Claudia Anderson, a true historian in the thoroughness of her work and in her devotion to the truth, was particularly helpful in guiding me through the Library’s collections.

My thanks also to H. G. Dulaney, Director of the Sam Rayburn Library in Bonham, Texas; to Joseph W. Marshall, supervisory librarian of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York; to Audray Bateman of the Austin-Travis County Collection of the Austin Public Library; Paul K. Goode of the James C. Jernigan Library at Texas A&I, in Kingsville; John Tiff of the National Park Service in Johnson City; Linda Kuban of the Barker Texas History Center; and to Susan Bykofsky.

S
CORES OF TEXAS POLITICIANS
and political observers gave generously of their time in guiding me through the intricacies of that state’s politics in the 1920’s, ’30’s and ’40’s, but a few deserve special mention. They include Ann Fears Crawford, Vann Kennedy, the late D. B. Hardeman; Arthur Stehling; Sim Gideon and Judge Tom C. Ferguson, who took me step by step through the formation of the Lower Colorado River Authority and the construction of the Marshall Ford Dam, and E. Babe Smith, who taught me much about rural electrification, and its social and political uses.

My deepest gratitude goes to Edward A. Clark. Over a period of more than three years, Mr. Clark, Lyndon Johnson’s Ambassador to Australia and a dominant figure in Texas politics for more than a quarter of a century, devoted evening after evening to furthering my political education. They were evenings that I will always cherish.

The town of Marlin, Texas, has produced two persons who observed Texas politics with keen eyes, and can speak about those politics with perception. They are Mary Louise Young and Frank C. (Posh) Oltorf, an historian in his own right, and a most gracious gentleman and host. Thanks to them, and to Ronnie Oltorf, I will always think of Marlin with fondness.

M
ANY OF
Lyndon Johnson’s boyhood companions were of great assistance to me, but I want especially to thank Truman Fawcett, Wilma Green Fawcett and Clayton Stribling for many days of help. Above all, I want to thank Ava Johnson Cox. Witty and wise, and very knowledgeable indeed about Sam Ealy and Rebekah Baines Johnson, and about their son Lyndon, her favorite cousin, she has contributed immeasurably to this book.

B
ECAUSE
L
YNDON
J
OHNSON
would have been only sixty-seven years old when, in 1975, I began my research on his life, most of his contemporaries were still alive. This made it possible to find out what he was like while he was growing up from the best possible sources: those who grew up with him. And it also makes it possible to clear away in this book the misinformation that has surrounded the early life of Lyndon Johnson.

The extent of this misinformation, the reason it exists, and the importance of clearing it away, so that the character of our thirty-sixth President will become clear, became evident to me while researching his years at college. The articles and biographies which have dealt with these years have in general portrayed Johnson as a popular, even charismatic, campus figure. The oral histories of his classmates collected by the Lyndon Johnson Library portray him in the same light. In the early stages of my research, I had no reason to think there was anything more to the story. Indeed, when one of the first of his classmates whom I interviewed, Henry Kyle, told me a very different story, I believed that because Kyle had been defeated by Johnson in a number of campus encounters, I was hearing only a prejudiced account by an embittered man, and did not even bother typing up my notes of the interview.

Then, however, I began to interview other classmates.

Finding them was not easy. For years, Johnson’s college, Southwest Texas State Teachers College at San Marcos, had not had an actively functioning alumni association and had lost track of many of its former students, who seemed to be scattered, on lonely farms and ranches, all across Texas, and, indeed, the United States. When I found them, I was told the old anecdotes that had become part of the Lyndon Johnson myth. But over and over again, the man or woman I was interviewing would tell me that these anecdotes were not the whole story. When I asked for the rest of it, they wouldn’t tell it. A man named Vernon Whiteside could have told me, they said, but, they said, they had heard that Whiteside was dead.

One day, however, I phoned Horace Richards, a Johnson classmate who lived in Corpus Christi, to arrange to drive down from Austin to see him. Richards said that there was indeed a great deal more to the story of Lyndon Johnson at college than had been told, but that he wouldn’t tell me unless Vernon Whiteside would too. But Whiteside was dead, I said. “Hell, no,” Richards said. “He’s not dead. He was here visiting me just last week.”

Whiteside, it turned out, had moved from his hometown and was traveling in a mobile home. He had been heading for Florida, where he was planning to buy a
condominium, Richards said, but Richards didn’t know which city in Florida Whiteside was heading for. All he knew was that the city was north of Miami, and had “beach” in its name.

I traced Mr. Whiteside to a mobile home court in Highland Beach, Florida (he had, in fact, arrived there only a few hours before I telephoned), flew there to see him, and from him heard for the first time many of the character-revealing episodes of Lyndon Johnson’s career at San Marcos at which the other classmates had hinted. And when I returned to these classmates, they confirmed Whiteside’s account; Richards himself added many details. And they now told additional stories, not at all like the ones they had told before. I managed to locate still other classmates—who had never been interviewed. Mylton (Babe) Kennedy, a key figure in many of these stories, was found in Denver; I interviewed him in a lounge at the airport there. And the portrait of Lyndon Johnson at San Marcos that finally emerged was very different from the one previously sketched.

This experience was repeated again and again during the seven years spent on this book. Of the hundreds of persons interviewed, scores had never been interviewed before, and the information these persons have provided—in some cases even though they were quite worried about providing it—has helped form a portrait of Lyndon Johnson substantially different from all previous portraits.

This is true of virtually every stage and significant episode in his life. Lyndon Johnson was fond of talking about the young woman he courted in college, Carol Davis, now Carol Davis Smith. He told at length how, stung by criticism of his family from her father (who he said was a member of the Ku Klux Klan), he vowed (despite her tears and pleading) not to marry her; how he had gotten married (to Lady Bird) before Carol married; how, during his first campaign for Congress he attacked Carol’s father before taking pity on her “agony” as she listened to his speech; how, when he was hospitalized with appendicitis at the climax of his campaign, he awoke to find her standing in the doorway of his hospital room; how she had proven her love for him by telling him she had voted for him. His version of this thwarted romance—a version furnished with vivid details—has been retold repeatedly in biographies of Lyndon Johnson. But none of the authors who repeated it had interviewed Carol Davis. She was there to be interviewed; she still lives in San Marcos. Two of her sisters and several of her friends, and several of Lyndon Johnson’s friends who observed the courtship, were there to be interviewed. When they are, a story emerges that, while indeed poignant and revealing, bears little resemblance to the one Johnson told. (Apart from the central story told in this book, the following minor details in Lyndon Johnson’s own account do not appear to have been correct: that her father was a member of the Ku Klux Klan; that it was Lyndon who decided not to get married; that she pleaded with him to marry her; that he got married first; that she visited him in the hospital; that she voted for him.)

Similarly, Lyndon Johnson gave a vivid and fascinating picture of his family and home life. Before they died, his sister Rebekah and his brother Sam Houston both told me that this picture was all but unrecognizable to them. But it is not necessary to accept their word. One can ask others who spent time in the Johnson home—not only daily visitors such as his parents’ friend Stella Gliddon and Lyndon’s cousin Ava, but three more disinterested witnesses: three women who worked or lived in that home as housekeepers. None of these three had ever been interviewed. Lyndon Johnson’s supposed relationship with his mother and father has served as the basis for extensive analysis. The true relationship is also fascinating, but it is not the one that has been analyzed.

Because Lyndon Johnson’s contemporaries were alive, I could walk the same
dusty streets that Lyndon Johnson walked as a boy, with the same people he had walked with. During his boyhood and teenage years in Johnson City, his playmates and schoolmates were his cousin Ava and Truman Fawcett and Milton Barnwell and Bob Edwards and Louise Casparis and Cynthia Crider and John Dollahite and Clayton Stribling. Many of these people—and a dozen more companions of Lyndon Johnson’s youth—are still there in Johnson City, and the rest live on nearby farms and ranches, or in Austin. Together, their stories, and the stories of their parents, who observed gangling young Lyndon through the eyes of adults, add up to a fascinating story—but one which has never been told.

I
N REVEALING
Lyndon Johnson’s life after boyhood—his years as a congressional assistant, as the Texas State Director of the National Youth Administration and as a Congressman—interviews are only one basis of the portrait. A rich mine of materials exists in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas. But although the information is there—in the Library’s collection of 34,000,000 documents which, encased in thousands of boxes, four stories high behind a glass wall, loom somewhat dauntingly over the researcher as he enters the building—this mine, too, has gone largely untapped. Because of this source, however, it is not necessary to speculate or generalize about how the young Congressman rose to national power and influence; one can trace precisely how he did it. In this tracing, too, the fact that when Johnson died, on January 22, 1973, his age was sixty-four, and that many of those who knew him were still alive, is significant. Upon first coming to Washington, he became part of a quite remarkable group of young men: Benjamin V. Cohen, Thomas G. Corcoran, Abe Fortas, James H. Rowe, Eliot Janeway and the lesser-known Arthur (Tex) Goldschmidt. These men—once the bright young New Dealers—gave me their time with varying degrees of generosity, but some of them were very generous indeed, and when the meaning of documents in the Library was not clear, they often made it clear. For these men watched Lyndon Johnson rise to power. Perceptive as they are, they understood what they were watching, and they can explain it.

G
EORGE
R
UFUS
B
ROWN
, of Brown & Root, Inc., had never previously talked at length to interviewers or historians, but finally agreed to talk with me, out of deep affection for his remarkable brother Herman—an affection which had led George to attempt in several ways, among them the building of the Herman Brown Memorial Library in Burnet, to perpetuate Herman’s name. After two years of refusing to respond to my letters and telephone calls, he decided that although Herman’s name might be engraved on buildings, in a few years no one would know who Herman Brown was unless he was portrayed in a book, and that he could not be portrayed because no one knew enough about him. I told him that I could not say that my portrait of his brother would be favorable, but that if he discussed Herman with me in depth, the portrait would at least be full. He told me stories which he said had never been told outside the Brown & Root circle, and told me still more at a subsequent interview, which also lasted an entire day. Taken together, these stories add very substantially indeed to knowledge of the relationship between Lyndon Johnson and Brown & Root, a relationship that has been until now largely a matter not only of speculation and gossip, but of incorrect speculation and gossip. Mr. Brown’s account has, moreover, been verified in every substantial detail by others; to cite one example, his account of the extraordinary story behind the construction of the Marshall Ford Dam, and of Lyndon Johnson’s role in it, was corroborated by Abe Fortas and Tommy Corcoran, who handled the Washington
end of the matter, and by the Bureau of Reclamation official involved on the site, Howard P. Bunger.

T
HE PERSONS
who knew Lyndon Johnson most intimately during his years as a congressional secretary were the assistants who worked in the same room with him: Estelle Harbin, Luther E. (L. E.) Jones and Gene Latimer. (Jones and Latimer also lived in the same room with Johnson.) They had been interviewed before, but never in depth. For a while, Carroll Keach worked with him in the same office; later, Keach became his chauffeur. Still later, in 1939, Walter Jenkins became Johnson’s assistant. These persons gave generously of their time, although some of these interviews—particularly those with Latimer and Jenkins—were difficult for both sides, because of the emotional wounds which were reopened. I should mention here that John Connally, who became a secretary to Mr. Johnson in 1939, refused during the entire period of research on this book to respond to requests for an interview.

L
ADY
B
IRD
J
OHNSON
prepared carefully for our nine interviews, reading her diaries for the years involved, so that she could provide a month by month, detailed description of the Johnsons’ life. Some of these were lengthy interviews, particularly one in the living room of the Johnson Ranch that as I recall it lasted most of a day. These interviews were immensely valuable in providing a picture of Lyndon Johnson’s personal and social life, and of his associates, for Mrs. Johnson is an extremely acute observer, and has the gift of making her observations, no matter how quietly understated, quite clear. The interviews were less valuable in regard to her husband’s political life. In later years, Mrs. Johnson would become familiar with her husband’s work, indeed perhaps his most trusted confidante. This was not the case during the period covered by this first volume. (The change began in 1942—shortly after this volume’s conclusion—when Mrs. Johnson, with her husband away during the war, took over his congressional office, and proved, to her surprise as well as his, that she could run it with competence and skill.) During this earlier period, Mrs. Johnson was not familiar with much of the political maneuvering in which her husband was engaged, as she herself points out. Once, when I asked if she had been present at various political strategy sessions, she replied, “Well, I didn’t always want to be a part of everything, because I was never. … I elected to be out a lot. I wasn’t confident in that field. I didn’t want to be a party to absolutely everything.”

Although from the first I made it clear to Mrs. Johnson that I would conduct my own independent research into anything I was told by anyone, for some time she very helpfully advised members of the semi-official “Johnson Circle” in Texas that she would have no objection if they talked with me. At a certain point, however—sometime after the interviews with Mrs. Johnson had been completed—that cooperation abruptly and totally ceased.

O
NE FURTHER NOTE
of detailed explanation on a particular source may be of interest to some readers. When, in the Notes that follow, I refer to the “Werner File,” I refer to a collection of papers written by Elmer C. Werner, a Special Agent of the Internal Revenue Service, who in the years 1942, 1943 and 1944 was in effective day-by-day charge of the IRS investigation of Brown & Root, Inc.’s political financing, largely of Lyndon Johnson’s 1941 campaign for the United States Senate.

These papers fall generally into three categories. The first is summaries of the investigation: a 14-page “Chronological History of the Investigation of the Case
SI-19267-F and Related Companies” and a five-page report, “In re: Brown and Root, Inc. et al,” which Mr. Werner wrote for his superiors and which summarizes the conclusions reached by the team of IRS agents on the case. The second is his office desk calendar, for the year 1943, with brief notes jotted down by day to show his activities. The third is 94 pages of his handwritten, detailed, sometimes verbatim transcriptions of the sworn testimony given by Brown & Root officials and others before IRS agents.