When I began The Path to Power, I had this romantic idea about Sam, that he was such a great legislator, fighting for people and all. Then one day Lyndon’s cousin Ava, his favorite cousin, said to me—I could tell she really didn’t like it when I talked about Sam in so admiring a way—she said, “Let’s drive out to the Johnson Ranch.” So we drove out to the Johnson Ranch and you got there and that grass-covered landscape looks beautiful, and fertile. And she said, “Now, get out of the car.” I got out of the car. Ava was an old woman but a very forceful woman. She said, “Now kneel down,” and I knelt down, and she said, “Now stick your fingers into the ground.” And I stuck my fingers into the soil and I couldn’t even get them into the ground the length of my finger. There was hardly any soil on top of that rock. There was enough to grow the beautiful grass but not enough to grow cotton or graze cattle. Ava said to me, “Do you understand now? Sam didn’t really see. He didn’t want to see. It looked so beautiful.” In other words, she was saying, he didn’t see the reality of it. The reality—the hard unblinking facts. He deluded himself.
Now what’s the relationship of this to Lyndon Johnson’s political activities? Of all his political abilities—and he had so many remarkable political abilities—one of the most remarkable was his ability to count votes. To know in advance which way a congressman or a senator—and during his six years as Majority Leader, he had to know every senator because he was often operating with a one-vote majority, 48 Democrats, 47 Republicans and Wayne Morse, an independent—to know how every senator was going to vote on a particular motion or piece of legislation. Vote-counting—accurate vote-counting: to be right in your count, when you have to be right—is a very rare ability. Sometimes a senator will mislead his Leader—the Majority or Minority Leader—about how he’s going to vote, or will say he’s undecided himself and isn’t going to decide until the last minute, or even until the roll call itself has begun, and sometimes a senator is torn between conflicting pressures or beliefs. One day he feels he’s going to vote Aye and the next day he feels he’s going to vote Nay. Sometimes a senator doesn’t know himself until the very last minute where he’s going to come down.
And there’s another reason vote-counting is difficult, which relates particularly to the place of Lyndon Johnson’s youth. Vote-counting is not only a vital political art but one that’s really hard to master. Very few people can master it because, as I put it in Master of the Senate, it is an art “peculiarly subject to the distortions of sentiment and romantic preconceptions. A person psychologically or intellectually convinced of the arguments on one side of a controversial issue feels that arguments so convincing to him must be equally convincing to others.” And therefore, as one of Johnson’s vote-counters put it, “Most people tend to be much more optimistic in their counts than the situation deserves….True believers were always inclined to attribute more votes to their side than actually existed.” But Lyndon Johnson never had that problem. His father had been the man of optimism—“great optimism.” Lyndon had seen firsthand, when his father failed, the cost of optimism, of wishful thinking. Of hearing what one wants to hear. Of failing to look squarely at unpleasant facts. Because his father purchased the Johnson Ranch for a price higher than was justified by the hard financial facts, Lyndon Johnson had felt firsthand the consequences of romance and sentiment. Optimism—false optimism: for many people, it’s just an unfortunate personal characteristic. For Lyndon Johnson, it was the bite of the reins into his back as he shoved, hour after hour, under that merciless Hill Country sun, pushing the Fresno through the sun-baked soil.
Of all the aspects of Lyndon Johnson that impressed people when he arrived in Washington, vote-counting came first. Over and over when I was interviewing in Washington someone would say to me, He’s the greatest vote-counter who ever lived. James H. Rowe, Jr., was a Washington insider for thirty years, the trusted, powerful adviser to Democratic presidents starting with Franklin Roosevelt. And he met Johnson when Johnson came to Washington as a congressman in 1937. He told me that even in those early days, Johnson was the very best at counting. He would figure it out—how so-and-so would vote…What—what exactly—would swing him.” He tried to teach his staffers, as Majority Leader he would send them to talk to senators, find out which way they were going to vote, and report back to him. And the report that got him—you can’t say angriest, because he was often angry, he was often flying into ferocious rages—but the report that would invariably set off one of these rages was one from a staffer who came back and said something like “I think he’s going to vote this way.” Johnson would say, snarl at him really, “What good is thinking to me? I need to know!” Bobby Baker, who was his chief vote-counter, said, “He never wanted to be wrong, never. I learned I had better never be wrong.”
This vote-counting ability would be described to me in terms of awe, because no one quite understood where it came from. People would tell me it was almost supernatural, the way he knew how every senator would vote. In fact that’s the word that was sometimes used to me in Washington: Lyndon Johnson’s vote-counting ability was almost “supernatural.” Yet because of my trip to the Johnson Ranch with Ava, I felt that Lyndon Johnson’s genius for vote-counting was in some ways the very opposite of supernatural—that to some extent “natural” would be the best word to describe it. Rooted in nature. A product of the place, created in the place, that Lyndon Johnson was from: that Texas Hill Country. It was the Hill Country that taught him how terrible could be the consequences of a single mistake. When he was counting votes in the Senate he used to stand in the center of the Senate cloakroom holding one of those Senate tally sheets. Aides and senators would be coming up to him and he’d be counting the votes, his thumb moving down the list of senators and pausing at the name of each senator. And, I was told, his thumb would never move until he knew how that senator would vote. If you want to understand what was behind him doing that, think of the land. Think of the place. Think of the sheer ruthlessness, the unforgivingness, of the place. The Hill Country wasn’t a city where at least you have welfare and some other social services to cushion your fall if you fail. You failed in the Hill Country, on your farm or ranch, you lost the place where your family lived, you might have to pack your wife and children into your car and drive off, “sometimes,” as I wrote, “with no place to go.”
A senator from the state of Washington, Henry (Scoop) Jackson, served with Johnson as senator and under the presidencies of both John Kennedy and Johnson. He was asked once, “What was the difference between Kennedy and Johnson?” and Jackson said, “Well, you know Kennedy was so charming. If he needed a senator’s vote he would have him down to the White House. He would explain how badly he needed the vote. But if the senator said that if he gave him this vote, it would ruin him in his state, it would ruin him with his constituency, Kennedy would understand.
“Lyndon Johnson,” Scoop Jackson said, “wouldn’t understand. He would refuse to understand. He would threaten you, would cajole you, bribe you or charm you, he would do whatever he had to. But he would get the vote.” I felt I understood that. Because being charming, being friends, wasn’t what mattered to Johnson. What mattered to him was winning, because he knew what losing could be, what its consequences could be. Hundreds of writers—journalists and the authors of books—all agree that Lyndon Johnson was ruthless. I try to explain why he was ruthless—and a large part of the explanation is the place he came from.
* * *
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AND HOW ABOUT the place he came to: Capitol Hill? He first came there in December, 1931, as a twenty-three-year-old assistant to a Texas congressman. In his whole life, he’d had only one ambition but it was going to have to start on Capitol Hill. When he was on that road gang driving the Fresno and the road gang broke for lunch and was sitting around eating, he would start telling the other men about how he was going to be President of the United States one day. Jim Rowe once said to me, “From the moment he got he
re, there was only one thing he wanted: to be President.” But when I began talking to the people who knew Lyndon Johnson when he started out in Washington as a congressional assistant, it seemed to me as if I was again missing something, like I had missed something at first in the Hill Country: something vague, but important; that there was something crucial that I wasn’t adequately describing in my writing. I wasn’t fully understanding what these people were telling me about the depth of Lyndon Johnson’s determination, about the frantic urgency, the desperation, to get ahead, and to get ahead fast. As if the passions, the ambitions that he brought to Washington, strong though they were, were somehow intensified by the fact that he was finally there, in the place where he had always wanted to be. I wanted, I guess, to show in terms of Washington, to show in terms of Capitol Hill, the contrast between what he was coming from—the poverty, the insecurity, the land of dog-run log cabins—and what he was trying for.
I first got a clue about how I might be able to do this by talking to the young woman who worked with him as the other assistant in that congressman’s office, a woman named Estelle Harbin. I asked her what he had been like and she described him. It was a vivid description. She called him a real tall thin boy, he was gangling, he was skinny, he was awkward, those big ears sticking out, his clothes didn’t fit him well, he had long arms and the sleeves were never long enough, and his wrists were always sticking out of the cuffs. (Alice Marsh, the sophisticated mistress who taught him to wear cuff links was still some years in the future.) He was very poor, Ms. Harbin told me. He arrived in Washington in December, 1931, with a cardboard suitcase and only one coat, a thin topcoat not adequate for Washington winters. I asked Ms. Harbin what would he say to you and she said, Well, he couldn’t stop talking about his train ride to Washington. He would say, “Have you ever ridden in the Pullman [a sleeping car]? I never did until I went up.” “Have you ever eaten in a dining car? I never did.” When he received his first monthly paycheck he told Miss Harbin that he wanted to deposit it in a bank but that he didn’t know how to open a bank account: He had never had one. She also told me how quickly Lyndon Johnson learned, how desperate he was to learn, how he became, so quickly, in her words “the best congressional assistant there ever was.”
One thing that got me was her saying that when he came to work in the morning he was always out of breath because he had been running. He lived in this little hotel, the Dodge Hotel, down Capitol Hill by Union Station. His office was in the House Office Building on the opposite side of Capitol Hill, so his route to work would be to come up from that hotel, up Capitol Hill, and then to come along in front of the entire long east façade of the Capitol, before continuing down on the other side to the House Building. Estelle Harbin lived somewhere behind the Library of Congress, and sometimes she would be coming to work and she would see Lyndon Johnson coming up Capitol Hill. And she said to me that every time he got in front of the Capitol he would start running. Well, I wanted the reader to feel all this. I wanted not just to say that he was coming from poverty, the land of little dog-run cabins, and was trying for something monumental. I wanted to make the reader see the contrast between what he was coming from and what he was trying for—to see the majesty and the power of what he was trying for. I wanted to make the reader see this and feel this as Lyndon Johnson saw and felt it. I kept thinking that the key to doing that, to showing that, was somehow on that walk along Capitol Hill. So I kept taking that walk over and over again—I don’t know how many times I took it, but it was a lot of times—but I didn’t see anything there. Yet obviously something on that walk had excited him and thrilled him so much that he’d break into a run every morning. And I wasn’t seeing anything that would account for that.
Then something occurred to me. Although I had taken this walk a lot of times, I had never done it at the same hour that Lyndon Johnson took it, which was very early in the morning, about 5:30 in the summers, about 6:30 in winter. Since he and Estelle had been raised on ranches, they got up with the sun. I decided to try doing that to see if there was something, and there was. It was something I had never seen before because at 5:30 in the morning, the sun is just coming up over the horizon in the east. Its level rays are striking that eastern façade of the Capitol full force. It’s lit up like a movie set. That whole long façade—750 feet long—is white, of course, white marble, and that white marble just blazes out at you as that sun hits it. And then I felt I had found a way not to lecture the reader on the contrast between what Lyndon Johnson was coming from and what he was striving toward, and how that contrast helped explain the desperation, the frenzied, frantic urgency of his efforts—a way not to tell the reader but to show the reader that point instead. I don’t know whether I succeeded in doing that or not, but for what it’s worth here’s what I wrote about when Lyndon Johnson first came to Washington.
He lived in the basement of a shabby little hotel, in a tiny cubicle across whose ceiling ran bare steam pipes, and whose slit of a window stared out, across a narrow alley, at the weather-stained red brick wall of another hotel. Leaving his room early in the morning, he would turn left down the alley onto a street that ran between the red brick walls of other shabby hotels. But when he turned the corner at the end of that street, suddenly before him, at the top of a long, gentle hill, would be not brick but marble, a great shadowy mass of marble—marble columns and marble arches and marble parapets, and a long marble balustrade high against the sky. Veering along a path to the left, he would come up Capitol Hill and around the corner of the Capitol, and the marble of the eastern façade, already caught by the early-morning sun, would be a gleaming, brilliant, almost dazzling white. A new line of columns—towering columns, marble for magnificence and Corinthian for grace—stretched ahead of him, a line…of columns, so long that columns seemed to be marching endlessly before him…the long friezes above them crammed with heroic figures. And columns loomed not only before him but above him—there were columns atop columns, columns in the sky. For the huge dome that rose above the Capitol was circled by columns not only in its first mighty upward thrust, where it was rimmed by thirty-six great pillars (for the thirty-six states that the Union had comprised when it was built), but also high above, three hundred feet above the ground, where, just below the statue of Freedom, a circle of thirteen smaller, more slender shafts (for the thirteen original states)…add[ed] a grace note to a structure as majestic and imposing as the power of the sovereign state that it had been designed to symbolize. And as Lyndon Johnson came up Capitol Hill in the morning, he would be running.
Sometimes, the woman who worked with him, coming to work in the morning, would see the gangling figure running awkwardly, arms flapping, past the long row of columns on his way to the House Office Building beyond the Capitol. At first, because it was winter and she knew that he owned only a thin topcoat and that his only suits were lightweight tropicals suitable for Houston, she thought he was running because he was cold….But in Spring, the weather turned warm. And still, whenever she saw Lyndon Johnson coming up Capitol Hill, he would be running.
Well, of course he was running—from the land of dog-run cabins to this. Everything he had ever wanted, everything he had ever hoped for, was there. And that gigantic stage lit up by the brilliant sun, that façade of the Capitol—that place—showed him that. Showed him that, and if I could write it right, would show the reader as well.
Two Songs
Now I’m working on the final volume of the Johnson biography. I was thinking about Winston Churchill recently, because Churchill wrote a biography of his great ancestor, Lord Marlborough, and someone once asked Churchill how it was coming along, and he said, “I’m working on the fourth of a projected three volumes.” I’m not comparing myself to Winston Churchill, of course, but in this one way we’re sort of in the same boat. I’m working on the fifth of a projected three volumes.
The fifth book, in a way, is a coming together of everything I’ve been trying to do
, because never has there been a clearer example of the enormous impact—both for good and for ill—that political power has on people’s lives than during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. On one side, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, a liberal immigration bill, some seventy different education bills—they’re all passed during the 1960s by President Lyndon Johnson. At the same time, Vietnam: that’s a story that comes to swallow up so much else. Vietnam is 58,000 American dead, and more than 288,000 seriously wounded Americans. Thousands have to live without a leg or an arm for the rest of their lives. And we weren’t even focused on post-traumatic stress disorder back then. Thousands—probably tens of thousands—of other men lived all their lives with PTSD. Vietnam—that’s political power too.
I do most of the research for a book before I start writing, but this volume has been different because on Vietnam the LBJ Library is opening up new files all the time. People are always asking me what my daily schedule is. It’s not fixed. I write each day as long as I can. As I’ve said, I write my first drafts in longhand—pen or pencil—on white legal pads, narrow-lined. I seldom have only one draft in longhand—I’d say I probably have three or four. Then I do the same pages over on a typewriter. I used to type on what they called “second sheets,” brownish sheets, cheap paper like the paper used in the Newsday city room when I was a reporter. But those sheets are letter size. When I started writing books, I switched to white legal-size typing paper. You can get more words on a page that way. I triple-space the lines the way I did as a newspaperman, so there will be plenty of room to rewrite in pencil. I rewrite a lot. Sometimes I look at a page I typed but have reworked in pencil, and there’s hardly a word in type left on it. Or no words in type left at all—every one has been crossed out. And often there’s been so much writing and rewriting and erasing that the page has to be tossed out completely. At the end of the day there will be a great many crumpled-up sheets of paper in the wastepaper basket or on the floor around it.
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