Working

by Robert A. Caro

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  FOR SOME TIME, I was afraid Mr. Corcoran was right. From what I had already learned about Johnson’s obsession with secrecy, I was quite prepared to believe that in this particularly sensitive area he had made sure that there was going to be nothing to find. And the Cork was right on another point, too: without something in writing—documentation, in other words—about this most sensitive of political areas, even if I discovered what had happened, I wasn’t going to be able to put it in my book. But the change in Johnson’s status—the fact that October, 1940, was a turning point in his career, that during that month this young congressman had been elevated above the ranks of other young congressmen to a place of some significance in the House of Representatives—made me feel it was imperative that I find out and document what had happened in that month. What had made so many congressmen—including powerful senior congressmen, barons of Capitol Hill—become supplicants to him, asking this junior congressman for a few minutes of his time? And if indeed the transformation had to do with money, I had to find documentation of what had happened; without something in writing, I wasn’t going to be able to write about it.

  But Alan’s words were in my mind. I had been looking at only Lyndon Johnson’s general “House Papers” because I knew they bore on an area—Lyndon Johnson as a young congressman—that I was planning to include in my book. But the boxes labeled “House Papers” might not be the only boxes that dealt with Johnson’s early congressional career. There were also, for example, those LBJA files. I hadn’t even begun turning the pages in them.

  I started to rethink things. Among the boxes of documents that had been taken out of Johnson’s general “House Papers” and put into other “collections” including the “Selected Names” collection, were the LBJA boxes, the collection of letters and memos to and from “close associates.” And Corcoran had said the answer to my question was “money,” and if money was involved, the place to start looking was at Brown & Root, the Texas road- and dam-building firm whose principals, Herman and George Brown (Root had died years before), had been before 1940 the secret but major financiers of Johnson’s early career and had already, before 1940, begun receiving federal contracts through his efforts. When it came to money, there were no closer associates than Herman and George. I didn’t have much hope of finding anything in writing, but their files were files in which I should nonetheless have been turning every page.

  I started doing that now. To make room on my cart, I lugged up to the archivist’s desk a number of general “House Papers” boxes and requested boxes from the “Selected Names” collection instead. When they arrived, I started with Box 13 and pulled out the file folders for Herman. A lot of fascinating material in their 237 pages which I could use later in my books, but nothing shedding light on the 1940 change in which I was interested. George’s correspondence was in Box 12. There were about 230 pages in his file. I sat there turning the pages, every page, thinking that I was probably just wasting more days of my life. And then, suddenly, as I lifted yet another innocuous letter to put it aside, the next document was not a letter but a Western Union telegram form, turned brown during the decades since it had been sent—on October 19, 1940. It was addressed to Lyndon Johnson, and was signed “George Brown,” and it said, in the capital letters Western Union used for its messages: YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO HAVE CHECKS BY FRIDAY…HOPE THEY ARRIVED IN DUE FORM AND ON TIME. It also named the people who were supposed to have sent the checks: six of Brown & Root’s subcontractors. And Tommy Corcoran had been wrong: Lyndon Johnson had put something in writing. Attached to the telegram was a copy of his response to George. ALL OF THE FOLKS YOU TALKED TO HAVE BEEN HEARD FROM, it said. I AM NOT ACKNOWLEDGING THEIR LETTERS, SO BE SURE TO TELL ALL THESE FELLOWS THAT THEIR LETTERS HAVE BEEN RECEIVED…YOUR FRIEND, LYNDON B. JOHNSON. Johnson had added by hand: “The thing is exceeding my expectations. The Boss is listening to my suggestions, thanks to your encouragements [sic].”

  So there was the proof that Lyndon Johnson had received money from Brown & Root in October, 1940 (and that it had brought him into some sort of contact with “The Boss,” Johnson’s name for President Franklin Roosevelt). In his telegram, Brown named six people who were supposed to have sent the checks. How much had they sent? What scale of money were we talking about? Why hadn’t Brown & Root sent the money itself? And more important, what had happened to the money? How did Johnson use it? How was it distributed? What was the mechanism by which it was distributed? There was no clue in the telegram, or in Johnson’s reply. But the money had come from Texas, and George and Herman had friends who, I knew, had been contributing, at the Browns’ insistence, to Johnson’s first campaigns. Most of the contributors, I had been told, were oilmen, in Texas parlance “big oilmen.” I started calling for the big oilmen’s folders in LBJA SN. And, sure enough, there was a letter, dated in October, from one of the biggest of the oilmen, Clint Murchison.

  Murchison dealt with senators or with the Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn; he hardly knew the young congressman; in his letter to Johnson, he misspelled his name as “Linden.” But he was evidently following Brown & Root’s lead. “We are enclosing herewith the check of the Aloco Oil Co. for $5,000, payable to the Democratic Congressional Committee,” his letter said. Another big oilman was Charles F. Roeser of Fort Worth: the amount mentioned in the letter I found from him was again five thousand, the payee the same.

  So the entity was the Democratic Congressional Committee, or, to give it its full title, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which had previously been nothing more than a moribund subsidiary of the Democratic National Committee. There were a lot of file folders in Boxes 6 and 7 of the Johnson House Papers labeled: “Democratic National Committee.” Those boxes were crammed to capacity. Some of the folders had less than inviting titles: “General—Unarranged,” for example. That was a thick folder, bulging with papers that had been sloppily crammed into it. When I pulled it out of its box, I remember asking myself if I really had to do “General—Unarranged.” But Alan might possibly have been proud of me—and I wasn’t very deep into the folder when I was certainly grateful to him. One of the six people in George Brown’s telegram whom Brown said had sent checks was named “Corwin.” In “General—Unarranged,” not in alphabetical order but just jammed in, was a note from J. O. Corwin, a Brown & Root subcontractor, saying he was “enclosing herewith my check for $5,000, payable to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.” Five thousand dollars. Had each of the six men mentioned in Brown’s letter sent that amount? That seemed likely, and if they had, then that would have been thirty thousand dollars—a substantial amount in the politics of that era. The “Unarranged” file contained, not of course in alphabetical order, letter after letter with details I knew I could use. In other folders, also, were letters in which that same amount was mentioned: five thousand from E. S. Fentress, who I knew had been the partner of Johnson’s patron, Charles Marsh. Were all the donations from Texas in that amount? Big oilmen! One of the biggest, and most politically astute, was Sid Richardson. I looked under the name “Richardson” in file folder after file folder in different collections without any luck. What was the name of that nephew of his whom Richardson, unmarried and childless, allowed to transact some of his business affairs? I had heard it somewhere. What was it? Bass, Perry Bass. I found that name and the donation: “Perry R. Bass, $5,000” in yet another box in the House papers. Letters from many big Texas oilmen of the 1940s—the oilmen who needed guarantees that the oil depletion allowance wouldn’t be taken away, that other, more arcane, tax breaks conferred by the federal government, wouldn’t be touched—were scattered through those boxes. And all the contributions were for five thousand dollars. Of course, they must be. My mind was into all the things I had been reading about political financing and I suddenly remembered what I should have remembered before. Under federal law in 1940 the limit on an individual contribution was fiv
e thousand dollars. How could I have been so slow to get it? Well, I got it now. The Brown & Root contribution to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, funneled through the company’s business associates, had been thirty thousand dollars, more money than the Committee had received from its parent National Committee. And there were so many additional five-thousand-dollar contributions from Texas!

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  BUT THERE WAS a next question: how had this money resulted in such a great change in Lyndon Johnson’s status in Congress? How had he transmuted those contributions into power for himself? He had had no title or formal position with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee; he had tried to get one, I had learned from other files, but had been rebuffed.

  I found the answer in those LBJA files. He had had George Brown instruct each of the “Brown & Root” contributors, and had had the other Texas contributors instructed similarly, to enclose with their checks a letter stating: “I would like for this money to be expended in connection with the campaign of Democratic candidates for Congress as per the list attached.” Johnson had, of course, compiled the list, and while the checks received by the lucky candidates might have been issued by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, each candidate received a telegram from Johnson saying the check had been sent AS RESULT MY VISIT TO CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE FEW MINUTES AGO.

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  BEFORE THE CAMPAIGN was over—in that single month, October, 1940—Lyndon Johnson had raised from Texas and had distributed to congressional candidates, campaign funds on a scale that dwarfed anything ever given to Democratic congressional candidates from a single, central source. The documents in those boxes of Johnson “House of Representatives Papers” made that clear. And as I turned the pages in those boxes there were other documents. “General—Unarranged” contained another list. There were two typed columns on each of its thirteen pages, typed by either John Connally or Walter Jenkins; each of these Johnson assistants was to tell me that he had been the one who had typed it. In the left-hand column were the districts of congressmen who had asked the Congressional Committee for money. In the second column were the names of the congressmen and the amount each had asked for—tiny amounts in the terms of later eras—and what, in the congressman’s own telegraphed words, he needed it for. MUST HAVE $250 BY THURSDAY NIGHT FOR LAST ISSUE ADVERTISING, for example. Or $350 BY THURSDAY. HAVE SET UP MACHINERY TO REACH 11,000 ADDITIONAL VOTERS BY MAIL. Or COULD USE $500 FOR WORKERS IN SPANISH AND ITALIAN DISTRICTS. Or NEED $1,000 NOVEMBER 1ST TO HIRE POLL WATCHERS. Or CHANCES BRIGHT…IF WE CAN GET RIGHT AWAY $14 FOR EACH OF FIVE COUNTY PAPERS AND $20 FOR TITUSVILLE HERALD.

  And there was also a third column on the page, or, rather, handwritten notations in the left-hand margin, next to each district, notes dealing with each congressman’s request. The handwriting in that column was Lyndon Johnson’s. If he was arranging for the candidate to be given part or all of what he had asked for, Johnson wrote, “OK—$500” or “OK—$200” or whatever the amount he had decided to give. If he did not want the candidate to be given anything, he wrote “None.” And, by some names, he wrote: “None—Out.” (What did “None—Out” mean?, I was later to ask John Connally. “It meant he [the candidate] was never going to get anything,” Connally said. “Lyndon Johnson never forgot, and he never forgave.”)

  Lyndon Johnson had identified a source of financing for congressional races across the United States, a source that had in the past been used principally on behalf of presidential or senatorial candidates, senatorial candidates mostly from Texas: Texas money. Using the power of House Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas, he had made sure the money came only through him. When, in 1940, officials of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had attempted to go around him directly to the source, writing directly to the oilmen to request contributions, the oilmen had asked Rayburn whom to send the money to, and the oilman had thereupon replied not to the committee but to Lyndon Johnson, writing, in the words of one of them, Charles Roeser, I HAVE DECIDED TO SEND MY CONTRIBUTION…TO YOU….I AM…LEAVING IT UP TO…YOU, TO DECIDE IN WHAT DISTRICTS THESE FUNDS CAN BE BEST USED. And Johnson was not only deciding which candidates would get the money, he was making sure the candidates knew they were getting it from him. “I want to see you win,” he said to them in his letters and telegrams. And here is some money to help. After I finished going through those boxes, I was able to write: “A new source of political money, potentially vast, had been tapped in America, and Lyndon Johnson had been put in charge of it.” And, by the time the congressmen got back to Washington in November after the elections and talked to one another, the word was out. “There was a lot of gratitude for what he had done,” Walter Jenkins said. “He was the hero.”

  Moreover, the congressmen were going to need money for future campaigns, and they had learned that a good way to get it—in some cases the only way—was through Lyndon Johnson. They were going to need him. “Gratitude,” I was to write, “is an emotion as ephemeral in Washington as elsewhere but…not merely gratitude but an emotion perhaps somewhat stronger and more enduring—self-interest—dictated that they be on good terms with him.” As one congressman from that era told me: after October, 1940, “We knew…he had already started going somewhere….He was a guy you couldn’t deny anymore.” In that single month, Lyndon Johnson, thirty-two years old, just three years in the House, had established himself as a congressman with a degree of power over other congressmen, as a congressman who had gained his first toehold on the national power he was to wield for the next thirty years. For someone interested in the sources of political power, as I was, those boxes in the Johnson Library contained such clear evidence of the use to which economic power could be put to create political power.

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  TO MY WAY of thinking, I had only one question left, and there was only one man who could answer it. I might know the answer, but knowing it wasn’t proving it. Herman Brown was dead. I had to talk to George.

  I had known that wasn’t going to be easy. George and Herman had been proud of their attitude toward would-be interviewers; they had often boasted, with some exaggeration, that neither of them had ever given an interview, and that neither of them ever would. Herman had died before I started on my Johnson books, and George was apparently going to honor the brotherly code. I had been trying to talk to him ever since I started on Lyndon Johnson, with no results, or indeed response. When I telephoned and left a message with his secretary he never called back; when I wrote him letters there was no reply. After I became friends with Brown & Root’s longtime chief lobbyist, Frank “Posh” Oltorf, I asked Posh to intercede, and he did, several times—after which he told me quite firmly that Mr. Brown was never going to talk to me. And if he didn’t, I was going to have a hard time proving in my book why Brown & Root had given the money—or, indeed, why over the decades after 1940, they had given Lyndon Johnson such an immense amount of financial backing.

  Sometimes, a sudden thought does the job. One day, I found myself, in my endless driving around the Hill Country, in the little town of Burnet. In the courthouse square, among the weathered wooden storefronts, there was a handsome new building with the legend “Herman Brown Free Library” on it.

  All at once, something occurred to me. George had loved and idolized his older brother, who had really been more like a father to him than a brother. Since Herman’s death, George had been building public monuments to him all over Texas, not only Herman Brown public libraries, but a Herman Brown Hall for Mathematical Sciences at Rice University. There was a telephone booth in the Burnet square. From it I telephoned Posh, and asked him to call George one more time. Posh said quite firmly that he wasn’t going to do that. I’m only asking you to call one more time, I said, and I want you to say just one sentence to him: tell him that no matter how many buildings he puts Herman Brown’s name on, in a few years no one is g
oing to know who Herman Brown was if he’s not in a book.

  I don’t remember Posh’s reply, but he evidently made the call. The next morning, very early, before I was awake, the phone rang, and it was Mr. Brown’s secretary, asking what time would be convenient for me to meet with him.

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  I THOUGHT WE GOT along very well. When I was ushered in to his office, I found myself with a seventy-nine-year-old man who was almost blind but still vigorous and clear of mind. After he and Herman had begun in the 1930s to build the Marshall Ford Dam, the biggest project on which Brown & Root had ever embarked, and had sunk a million and a half dollars of the firm’s money into it, they found that, because of a quirk in the law, the dam was, in Brown’s words, “illegal,” and therefore that any federal appropriation for it would be illegal. “We had already built the cableway. That cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, which we owed the banks….We had put in a million and a half dollars,” he explained to me. The federal government had been supposed to appropriate the money for it in its 1937 session, but it had now been discovered that any appropriation wouldn’t be legal. The Browns were facing bankruptcy. Johnson, new to Congress though he was, had worked out a device to make it legal. And the Browns had been grateful. (“Remember that I am for you, right or wrong, and it makes no difference if I think you are right or wrong. If you want it, I am for it, 100%,” George wrote him, in another letter I found in LBJA SN.) And Johnson had done more for the Browns, had seen to it that they received the biggest contract they had ever received: to build the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station (“Johnson got us into Corpus Christi,” George told me flatly) and then had seen that they were given more contracts—contracts that totaled hundreds of millions of dollars—to build subchasers and destroyers for the Navy, although, as Mr. Brown told me, “We didn’t know the stern from the aft—I mean the bow—of the boat.” At the end of our interview, which lasted an entire day, he said he had enjoyed it, and would I like to come again. I said I would, and we went to lunch at the Riata Club. Afterwards, he took me to see the legendary “8-F,” Suite 8-F at Houston’s Lamar Hotel, where the biggest of Texas’s big oilmen and contractors met to map out the state’s political future. But evidently the friendliness wasn’t as deep as I thought. When my book, The Path to Power, came out, and Johnson’s associates and the Johnson Library were busy attacking it, George Brown told the library that I had misquoted him.