Working

by Robert A. Caro

  I telephoned her—her voice was soft, with a calm, dignified quality to it—and got more detail: how her husband, David, had helped her rehearse for the second hearing, how she had had no difficulty recalling, for the Civil Rights Commission, Beel Stokes’ exact words because they were still vivid in her mind.

  I asked her my questions: what was the hearing like? what did you see? Not much of a response at first, but, I pressed: when you were sitting there, what did the room look like?

  We weren’t sitting, she said. She and the other two applicants had stood in front of the counter at which, during the day, people stood while they were conducting their business with the county clerk. So the registrars were sitting behind the counter?, I asked. They weren’t sitting either, she said. They were just standing behind the counter.

  I understood why: my sentence would say, “No one offered them a chair, and the registrars didn’t bother to pull up chairs for themselves, because the hearing wasn’t going to take very long.” I kept asking. What color were the walls? (“white—they needed a painting”). What decorations were hanging on them? (just photographs of county officials). I had enough details so that I should be able to make the reader visualize the dingy and plainly furnished—meanly furnished—room, and the contempt the registrars had had for the applicants: they hadn’t even bothered to sit down. I had, from the transcript of her testimony, the words Beel Stokes had used. But what was Stokes’ expression—what were the expressions on the three registrars as Stokes spoke these words? “You could see in their eyes they were laughing at us,” Margaret Frost said.

  I had all I needed: a good story, and enough details to make the reader see the setting in which it took place. Why did I say to myself: is there any more to the story? I had the story. Plenty of details. I kept saying to myself: schmuck, this is what you always do. You don’t need any more details. This is the story you wanted: an example of the difficulties and humiliations that black Americans experienced when they tried to vote. You got it—now just write it. I wanted the reader to feel the indignation I felt at the way this dignified, soft-spoken woman had been treated, and I had enough detail so that if I could write the story well enough, it would accomplish that end.

  Of course I deserve neither admiration nor censure (or, for that matter, contempt)—for not stopping there. There is still so much about myself that I don’t understand, but, by putting down on paper these short recollections, I have come to understand that this was simply another instance, among so many, in which there were available to me no alternatives. I simply knew that I couldn’t write the Barbour County episode without trying to find out if there was any more to it.

  And of course there was: nothing that even resembled a big revelation, but a single additional incident. And as David Frost related it to me over the phone when I called back the Frost number and this time asked to speak to him, I felt that if I could include that incident and write it well enough, it would add a dimension to readers’ understanding of the depths of the plight of black men and women in the South in the middle of the twentieth century. It wasn’t just that they couldn’t vote; if, because of their attempts to vote, they were persecuted, there was no one—literally, no one—to whom they could turn for help.

  When I asked David Frost if he himself had ever attempted to register he said he had, some years before—and had in fact succeeded. But, he said, that had not turned out to be a happy experience for him. Previously, he said, white people in Eufala had always been friendly to him, had called him “David” or “Boy.” But after he registered, they called him “Nigger,” a word, he said, “I just hated, hated.” And when whites heard that he was planning to actually cast a ballot on Election Day, he said, a car had pulled up in front of his house, and the men in it had shot out the lights on his porch. He had thought of calling the police, but as the car drove away, he saw that it was a police car.

  Frost also gave me my first education—I was to get a lot more as I worked on the book over the next few years—about other tactics used in the white South to keep black people from voting: about, for example, the denial of “crop loans” by small-town bankers. Crop loans were the advance that cash-poor farmers needed each year to buy the seeds for the crop they were intending to plant. A black farmer who had registered to vote would go to the bank as usual for the loan—only to be told that this year there wouldn’t be one, so that, often, he lost his farm. Lost his farm! So that he would have to, as I wrote, load his wife and children into his run-down car “and drive away, sometimes with no place to go.” I was learning all right. And the story about the police car made me understand more deeply than before the full dimensions of what black Americans faced in the South: a situation where, when someone threatened you, you couldn’t ask the police to protect you. There wasn’t, really, anyone you could ask.

  * * *

  —

  OF COURSE THERE WAS more. If you ask the right questions, there always is.

  That’s the problem.

  “My eyes were just out on stems”: Lady Bird Johnson

  There was only one topic about which, during an interview, I didn’t ask a single question—or even dare to look at the person I was interviewing, who was Lady Bird Johnson.

  The topic was Alice Glass.

  I had been intending to deal in only a few lines with the many women with whom Lyndon Johnson had had sex. This was less because of some ethical or moral conception of my responsibilities as author than because, although these “affairs” were numerous, none of them seemed to have any significance for him personally or to have any connection with his political or governmental activities.

  Then, however, while turning pages in a folder whose label, “Public Activities–Biographic Information–Naval Career,” hinted very strongly that turning pages in this folder would be a total waste of time, and whose contents seemed to consist largely of mimeographed copies of a press release about Johnson’s activities in the Pacific in 1942, there was, suddenly, an age-browned Western Union form: CHARLES BELIEVES YOU SHOULD FILE FOR SENATE, it said. POLLS SHOW YOU LEADING. NO ONE ELSE SHARES HIS OPINION ENTHUSIASTICALLY. IF POSSIBLE, TELEPHONE. LOVE, ALICE MARSH.

  I knew what the telegram was about because of another one, which I had found in the Roosevelt Papers at Hyde Park. An election for a United States senator from Texas was going to be held in 1942, and Johnson wanted to enter the Democratic Primary, whose winner would almost certainly be elected in that then solidly Democratic state, instead of running for re-election to Congress. President Roosevelt, who had given his backing to the state’s former governor, James V. Allred, didn’t want him to. Johnson, who ordinarily would not have even considered defying FDR’s wishes, had at first agreed to support the governor, but in May, 1942, was having second thoughts, and among the Roosevelt Papers was a copy of a telegram from presidential secretary Marvin McIntyre warning him very firmly to put them out of his mind. I knew who “Charles” was, of course. Charles Marsh was an individual crucially important to Johnson’s early career since he was not only publisher of the only district-wide daily newspaper in Johnson’s congressional district, but was also an immensely wealthy man with strong paternal feelings toward the young congressman. Trying to free Johnson from financial worries, he had already taken a step in that direction by selling him a tract of land in Austin at a price far below its value. Alice Marsh must be Charles’ wife. But why, I wondered as I read the telegram, would she be telegraphing Johnson in Australia with political advice—advice that, whether or not the telegram was the reason, he had followed? I called for the “Marsh, Charles” folder in the “Selected Names” collection, and in it, amid many communications from Marsh to Johnson, was one, in August, 1942, from Marsh’s wife. HOPE WE CAN HAVE THAT BIRTHDAY PARTY, it said.

  About that time two other things happened, for the first of which I might give myself a little credit, the other of which was due to nothing but pure luck. Among the box
es for which Alan Hathway’s stricture had proven repeatedly golden were those in the 12 boxes grouped together under the title “Pre-Presidential Confidential File,” which, the library’s description said, contained ‘ “material taken from other files because it dealt with potentially sensitive areas.” Among the letters and memoranda in Box 10 of this file, which mostly contained material dating from 1942, was a large manila envelope. On it, someone had written “To Be Opened Only By LBJ or JBC.” Next to it in the file was what had been inside: a leather traveling portfolio containing four photographs, of an elegant, attractive woman. I had no idea who she was; I had never seen another picture of that person—and when I asked the archivists, none of them had, either. I couldn’t ask “JBC,” since at the time John Bowden Connally, Johnson’s assistant at the time, had not yet consented to talk to me. That was the first of the two things. The second, which came out of nowhere, occurred not long thereafter. The telephone on the archivist’s desk in the Reading Room rang, and the archivist said the call was for me, and when I picked up the phone it was the reception desk downstairs in the lobby, and the docent on duty said there were two women there who wanted to talk to me, and would I come down. I did, and one of the women said they had read The Power Broker, and therefore “We know you’re going to find out about Alice,” and she said she was Alice’s sister. “I was her best friend,” the other put in. The sister said, “We don’t want her portrayed as just another bimbo. She was much, much more than that. We want to tell you about her.” And the friend, Alice Hopkins, said, “Lyndon’s relationship with her wasn’t like anything else in his life.”

  Over coffee in the Villa Capri café, they told me about Alice, who was not at the time of the photographs actually Alice Marsh but still Alice Glass. And her sister, Mary Louise Glass, took out her wallet and showed me her photograph, which of course was a picture of the woman in the leather traveling portfolio upstairs, and told me that if I wanted to find out more about her I should go to their hometown, Marlin, and there talk particularly to Posh Oltorf, the Brown & Root lobbyist, who had been her close platonic friend.

  Over the next few weeks, Ina and I drove up to that sleepy little town in the middle of nowhere several times, and heard enough to know that Alice Glass was in truth not just another bimbo, that although, as I was to write, “Alice Glass was from a country town…she was never a country girl,” that she had come to Austin as a secretary to a state legislator, that, as one legislator recalled, “Austin had never seen anything like her,” a woman a shade under six feet tall with reddish blond hair that, if she loosened it fell to her waist, creamy-white skin and features so classic that the famed photographer Arnold Genthe was to call her “the most beautiful woman” he had ever seen; that on the same night Charles Marsh met her, he left his wife and children and took her east, and that, when, on a trip to England, she saw the majestic eighteenth-century manor house called “Longlea,” he built her a replica of it on a thousand-acre estate in the Virginia Hunt Country, where she led the Hazelmere Hunt (“the only thing Texas about Alice was her riding,” a friend told me; “she could really ride”), and created a glittering salon of journalists and politicians—to which, in 1937, the new congressman from Texas was invited with Lady Bird, and soon began coming weekend after weekend. At first, her sister and her friend said, both Johnsons came, but soon, they said, “he would leave her on weekends, weekend after weekend,” and come to Longlea, where “sometimes Charles would be there, and sometimes Charles wouldn’t be there,” because Lyndon and Alice had become lovers, in an affair that lasted for years, right under the nose of a man vitally important to Lyndon’s career.

  And I also heard enough to ascertain for myself that Lyndon Johnson’s long affair with Alice was in fact unlike any affair he had with any other woman. The advice that Alice gave him—always to wear custom-made shirts with French cuffs and cuff links to make his long, ungainly arms look elegant rather than awkward; always to be photographed from the left side, because that side of his face looked better than the right; to wear Countess Mara neckties—he followed slavishly for the rest of his life. But it was the advice she gave him about politics that made the affair interesting to me; on one occasion, during that first year, 1937, she came up with a solution to a problem that, George Brown’s chief lobbyist Posh Oltorf, his most trusted lawyer Ed Clark, and others told me, was threatening to end his congressional career almost before it began. Herman Brown, the fierce ruler of Brown & Root, had financed much of Johnson’s first campaign for Congress, and was prepared to finance the rest of his career; Herman would shortly, as we have seen, be arranging for money to be given to Johnson to distribute to other congressmen, to give him his first toehold on national political power. But late in 1937, Herman and Lyndon were, Oltorf and Clark told me, on a “collision course,” because while Johnson had secured some installments of the financing for the dam that Brown & Root was building outside Austin, he was also, in order to create a federal low-income housing project in that city, arranging for the city to condemn rental houses owned by Herman which were making him a good profit. He was refusing to back down, and Herman had had enough of the young congressman. “He was going to turn on Lyndon,” Posh told me, “and if Herman turned on you, he would never turn back.” And then Alice invited Lyndon and Herman to Longlea, and said to Marsh, “Why don’t you fix things up between them? Why don’t you suggest that they compromise—give Herman the dam, and let Lyndon have the land?” And the advice did indeed fix things up between them. Moreover, Posh and Ed Clark and (later) John Connally all told me, Alice had a political mind that made her advice on politics worth listening to, so much so that there were moments when her advice was decisive in Lyndon Johnson’s decisions—as it had been in 1942, when she sent the telegram to him in Australia. That made the affair, to my thinking, significant enough to be included in my book. And it was, to my thinking, significant also because, as I was to write, it “juts out of the landscape” of Lyndon Johnson’s life “as one of the few episodes in it, and perhaps the only one, that ran counter to his personal ambition”; he was, in the words of one observer, “taking one hell of a chance” with the man in his district perhaps most important to his continuation in office. And it demonstrated as well his talent for secrecy; his fawning over Marsh didn’t let up during the years he was sleeping with Marsh’s mistress, and Marsh’s support of him, both editorial and financial, and his fondness for him, never faltered.

  Moreover, as I learned, Alice’s feelings toward Lyndon provide insight into certain aspects of his career. She fell in love with him, her sister and her best friend (and Posh Oltorf and others) told me, because, deeply idealistic herself, she was entranced by his stories, told over the dinner table and around the swimming pool at Longlea, of how hard life in the Hill Country was, and how he was getting the dams built and the electricity brought to make that life easier; she considered Lyndon an idealist, too, an idealist who knew how to get things done; “she thought,” Mary Louise told me, “he was a young man who was going to save the world.” But that concept endured only until he invited her out to the West Coast in 1942, when she became disillusioned by what I called “the contrast between Johnson’s activities and the fact that he was supposed to be in a combat zone”; Posh showed me (and gave me a copy of) a letter she had written him in later years jokingly suggesting they write a book together on the true Lyndon Johnson: “I can write a very illuminating chapter on his military career in Los Angeles, with photographs, letters from voice teachers, and photographers.” The passion eventually faded from the relationship, although perhaps not completely; Alice married Charles Marsh, but divorced him, and married, and divorced, several times after that; “she never got over Lyndon,” Alice Hopkins said. Even when he was a senator, and vice president, he would drive down to Longlea to see her. But, Posh told me, Vietnam was too much for her; she had told him, Posh said, that she had burned love letters Johnson had written her, because she was ashamed of her friendship
with the man she regarded as responsible for the escalation of the war.

  * * *

  —

  ONE EVENING, our phone rang, and it was Posh. “Bird knows you’ve been to Marlin,” he said in a panic-stricken voice. “So she knows you know about Alice.”

  At that time I was interviewing Mrs. Johnson every few weeks in her office at the Johnson Library, and I was scheduled to see her there that Saturday. On Friday, one of her secretaries came to my desk in the Reading Room. “Mrs. Johnson would like to see you at the ranch on Saturday,” she said. “Come for lunch.”