Only when he asked himself that question, George Brown recalls, did he finally realize, after three years of intimate association with Lyndon Johnson, what Johnson really wanted. And only when, at the end of that week, Johnson firmly refused Marsh’s offer did Brown realize how much Johnson wanted it.
GEORGE BROWN, who had thought he knew Lyndon Johnson so well, realized during that week at the Greenbrier that he didn’t know him at all. Their lives would be entwined for thirty more years: as Brown & Root became, thanks to Johnson, an industrial colossus, one of the largest construction companies—and shipbuilding companies and oil-pipeline companies—in the world, holder of Johnson-arranged government contracts and receiver of Johnson-arranged government favors amounting to billions of dollars, suave George Brown and his fierce brother Herman became, in return, the principal financiers of Johnson’s rise to national power. But at the end of those thirty years—on the day Lyndon Johnson died—George Brown still felt that to some extent he didn’t really know him.
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. During his Presidency, his Great Society, with its education acts and civil-rights acts and anti-poverty acts, brought to crest tides of social change that had begun flowing during the New Deal a quarter of a century before; after his Presidency, the currents of social change were to flow—abruptly—in a very different course. When he became President, 16,000 American advisors were serving in Vietnam—in a war that was essentially a Vietnamese war. When he left the Presidency, 536,000 American combat troops were fighting in Vietnam’s jungles, 30,000 Americans had died there, and the war had been “Americanized”—transformed into a war that would, before it was ended, exhaust America financially and soak up the blood of thousands upon thousands of its young men; into a war abroad that at home caused civil disobedience that verged on civil insurrection; into a war that transformed America’s image of itself as well as its image in the eyes of the world. Lyndon Johnson’s full term as President began in triumph: the 1964 landslide that Theodore H. White calls “the greatest electoral victory that any man ever won in an election of free peoples.” It ended—to the chant, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” from a generation to whom he was the hated war maker—with his announcement that he would not again ask the nation to elect him its leader. The Great Society; Vietnam—the Presidency of Lyndon Johnson, only five years in span, was nonetheless a watershed in America’s history, one of the great divides in the evolution of its foreign and domestic policies. And in this evolution, Johnson’s personality bore, in relation to other factors, an unusually heavy weight, both because of its overpowering, elemental force—he seemed at times to brood, big-eared, big-nosed, huge, over the entire American political landscape—and because of the unusual degree to which the workings of that personality were (perhaps not on the surface, but in reality) unencumbered by philosophy or ideology. It was also during Johnson’s Presidency that there developed the widespread mistrust of the President that was symbolized by the phrase, coined during his administration, “credibility gap.” And if, during the long evolution from a “constitutional” to an “imperial” Presidency, there was a single administration in which the balance tipped decisively, it was the Presidency of Lyndon Johnson. Both these latter developments, which were to affect the nation’s history profoundly, were to a considerable extent a function of this one man’s personality.
Knowledge of the inner workings of Lyndon Johnson’s character illuminates a Presidency; knowledge of the broader outlines of his life illuminates far more. For the drama of his life—and of the lives, so inextricably linked with his, of his father and grandfather—was played out against a panorama vast in scope: the panorama of the westward movement in America, and particularly in America’s Southwest. The story of Lyndon Johnson is the story of the slow settlement of endless, empty, fearsomely hostile plains and hills with the “dog-run” log cabins of families who would for generations that added up to a century remain not only poor—bereft of modern machinery, of electricity, of a thousand amenities urban America took for granted—but isolated: cut off from the rest of America. Lyndon Johnson grew up in the Hill Country of Texas during the 1920s, the Age of Radio, the Age of the Movies. But there were few movies, and almost no radios—and no paved roads and no electricity and so little money that the economy was basically an agricultural barter economy—in the Hill Country during the 1920s, or, indeed, during the 1930s. And the story of Lyndon Johnson is, in microcosm, the story of how, at last, government, deaf for generations, finally, during the New Deal, during the Age of Roosevelt, answered the pleas of impoverished farmers for help in fighting forces too big for them to fight alone. The story of Lyndon Johnson is the story of the great dams that tamed the rivers of the West, and turned their waters into electric power—for it was because of Lyndon Johnson that great dams were built in the Hill Country. And the story of Lyndon Johnson is the story of the electric wires, gleaming silver across dun-brown plains and hills, which linked the life of the West, as railroads had linked its commerce, to the rest of America—for it was Lyndon Johnson who brought those wires to the Hill Country. When, in 1937, at the age of twenty-eight, Johnson became their Congressman, Hill Country farmers were still plowing their fields with mules because they could not afford tractors. Because they had no electricity, they were still doing every chore by hand, while trying to scratch a living from soil from which the fertility had been drained decades before. They were still watching their wives made stooped and old before their time by a life of terrible drudgery, a life that seemed, as one Hill Country woman put it, “out of the Middle Ages.” Four years later, the people of the Hill Country were living in the twentieth century. Lyndon Johnson had brought them there.
ESSENTIAL THOUGH it may be to understand Lyndon Johnson—his character and his career—this understanding is hard to acquire. He made it hard. Enlisting all his energy and all his cunning in a lifelong attempt to obscure not only the true facts of his rise to power and his use of power but even of his youth, he succeeded well. He told stories readily and repeatedly (filling them with vivid, convincing, detail) about the year he spent in California as a teenager, about his college girlfriend and the denouement of their relationship, about his father, whom he often sought to portray as a drunken ne’er-do-well—about, in fact, a hundred aspects of his youth. And not merely many but most of these stories were false. Aiding in his success, moreover, was an aspect of his temperament with which, during his Presidency, Washington was to become familiar: an extraordinary preoccupation with, and talent for, secrecy. This talent was striking even in his youth, and in the concealment of his own life story the President outdid himself. On innocuous personal letters written while he was still a young congressional assistant, he wrote: “Burn this.” His years at college provide a vivid illustration of his efforts at concealment, and of their success. While still an undergraduate at Southwest Texas State Teachers College, in San Marcos, he arranged to have excised (literally cut out) from hundreds of copies of the college yearbook certain pages that gave clues to his years there (luckily, other copies escaped the scissors). Issues of the college newspaper that chronicle certain crucial episodes in his college career are missing from the college library. A ruthless use thereafter of political power in San Marcos made faculty members and classmates reluctant to discuss those aspects of his career. And college is merely one example. In a sense, Lyndon Johnson not only attempted to create, and leave for history, his own legend, but to ensure that it could never be disproven.
WHAT DUMAS MALONE wrote of Thomas Jefferson, however, is true of Lyndon Johnson: “He loses none of his fascination but he does lose much of his elusiveness when one follows him through life the way he himself went through it, that is, chronologically.” In this three-volume work, Johnson’s life will be told as in fact it unfolded.
The more
one thus follows his life, the more apparent it becomes that alongside the thread of achievement running through it runs another thread, as dark as the other is bright, and as fraught with consequences for history: a hunger for power in its most naked form, for power not to improve the lives of others, but to manipulate and dominate them, to bend them to his will. For the more one learns—from his family, his childhood playmates, his college classmates, his first assistants, his congressional colleagues—about Lyndon Johnson, the more it becomes apparent not only that this hunger was a constant throughout his life but that it was a hunger so fierce and consuming that no consideration of morality or ethics, no cost to himself—or to anyone else—could stand before it.
It, too, can be seen in college. There he obtained his first power. “San Marcos,” as it was called, was a school that represented for most of its students their only chance to escape from a life of poverty and brutal physical toil. And for many of these students, their only chance of staying in college was to secure campus jobs. Lyndon Johnson obtained the power to give out these jobs, and once he had it, he used it—exacting deference, a face-to-face acknowledgment of this power, from his classmates. His years at college made clear not only this hunger but a willingness to do whatever was necessary to temporarily satisfy it (in the final analysis, it was insatiable). To obtain the power that he wanted, Lyndon Johnson, who was alleged to have won his seat in the United States Senate in a stolen election in 1948, stole his first election at college, in 1930. He won another campus election by the use against a young woman of what his lieutenants call “blackmail.” And a score of political tricks on the same moral level earned him a reputation on campus as a man who was not “straight,” not honest. He was, in fact, so deeply and widely mistrusted at college that the nickname he bore during all his years there was “Bull” (for “Bullshit”) Johnson. Most significant, perhaps, the dislike and distrust of him extended beyond politics. As President, Lyndon Johnson would be accused of lying to the American people. When he was a college student, his fellow students (who used his nickname to his face: “Hiya, Bull,” “Howya doin’, Bull?”) believed not only that he lied to them—lied to them constantly, lied about big matters and small, lied so incessantly that he was, in a widely used phrase, “the biggest liar on campus”—but also that some psychological element impelled him to lie, made him, in one classmate’s words, “a man who just could not tell the truth.” Credibility gap as well as Great Society are foreshadowed in this volume.
The dark thread was still present after college. It would be present throughout his life. The Path to Power, the first of three volumes that will constitute The Years of Lyndon Johnson, ends in 1941, when Johnson is only thirty-two years old. But by 1941, the first major stage of his life is over. A young man—desperately poor, possessed of an education mediocre at best, from one of the most isolated and backward areas of the United States—has attained the national power he craved. He has won not only a seat in Congress but influence that reaches far beyond his district’s borders. And by 1941, also, the major patterns of his entire life are established and clear. In attaining this influence, he has displayed a genius for discerning a path to power, an utter ruthlessness in destroying obstacles in that path, and a seemingly bottomless capacity for deceit, deception and betrayal in moving along it. In every election in which he ran—not only in college, but thereafter—he displayed a willingness to do whatever was necessary to win: a willingness so complete that even in the generous terms of political morality, it amounted to amorality.
ANOTHER PATTERN with significant implications is established in this volume: Lyndon Johnson’s use of money as a lever to move the political world.
Johnson came to the use of money in elections very early. While he was still a congressional assistant, he sat in a San Antonio hotel room buying votes with five-dollar bills. An extravagant use of this lever characterized his own campaigns from the first: his initial race for Congress, in 1937, was one of the most expensive congressional campaigns in Texas political history. During his first Senate campaign, in 1941, men handed him (or handed to his aides, for his use) checks or envelopes stuffed with cash—checks and cash in amounts unprecedented even in the free-spending world of Texas politics—and with these campaign contributions, which totaled hundreds of thousands of dollars, he waged the most expensive senatorial campaign in Texas political history, a campaign so expensive that it amounted to an attempt to buy a state. It was not, however, the use of money in his own campaigns that was to have the deepest significance for Lyndon Johnson’s political career—and for American political history—but his use of money in the campaigns of others. At the beginning of October, 1940, not long after his refusal of Marsh’s offer at the Greenbrier, Johnson was merely a junior Congressman, a rather unpopular one at that, with neither power nor influence on Capitol Hill. During that month, however, as a result of his maneuverings, men came to him bearing checks and envelopes containing cash for him to dole out—at his discretion—to scores of other congressional candidates. By Election Day, 1940, just a month later, Lyndon Johnson was a Congressman with considerable influence—as a colleague put it, “a guy you couldn’t deny any more.” This inpouring of campaign contributions was re-enacted in 1942 (when in a private letter Johnson flatly spelled out, with no circumlocutions, the philosophy which he felt should motivate campaign contributions: money should be given, he wrote, because of “the wealth and consideration that has been extended” to favored oil men and contractors by the federal government). It was to be re-enacted over and over—on a larger and larger scale—in years to come. These later contributions—and their impact on American politics—will be detailed in chronological sequence in the last two volumes. But by 1941, the pattern of such contributions, and of Lyndon Johnson’s use of them, had been firmly established. Congressmen who were worried about money to ensure their return to Capitol Hill had learned that all the money they needed was available from Texas—from Texas and from the new industrial order of the Southwest, of which Texas was the heart—and that Lyndon Johnson, more than any other single figure, controlled it.
This money was the basic source of Johnson’s power on Capitol Hill. Lyndon Johnson has been described as a legislative genius, a reader of men, a leader of men—countless articles described how he could grasp men’s lapels, peer into their eyes, and talk them around, how he could create consensus out of disparity. Lyndon Johnson was all these things, but his genius would have had far less impact without the money to back it up, without the knowledge on the part of the legislator being approached that the man grasping his lapel possessed the power to advance his political career or—by aiding his opponent—to end it. The “Johnson Treatment”—his blend of threats and pleading, of curses and cajolery—became a staple of the national political folklore. But the picturesque elements of the Johnson Treatment were only tassels on the bludgeon of power.
BECAUSE THIS MONEY came from Texas, the rise of Lyndon Johnson sheds light on the new economic forces that surged out of the Southwest in the middle of the twentieth century, on the immense influence exerted over America’s politics, its governmental institutions, its foreign and domestic policies by these forces: the oil and sulphur and gas and defense barons of the Southwest. As the robber barons of the last century looted the nation’s earth of its wealth—its coal and coke, its oil and ore, its iron, its forests, the very surface of its earth to provide a footing for the rails of their railroads—and used part of that wealth to ensure that the nation’s government would not force them to give more than a pittance of their loot back to the nation’s people, so the robber barons of this century have drained the earth of the Southwest of its riches and have used those riches to bend government to their ends.
Lyndon Johnson was not the architect of their ascendancy, but he was its embodiment and its instrument—its most effective instrument. It was these new economic forces—the oil, gas, defense, space and other new industries of the Southwest—that raised him to power, and
, once he was in power, helped him to extend it. They placed at his disposal sums of money whose dimensions were extraordinary in politics, and he used this money to force other politicians to do his bidding. By 1941, the influence of these new forces on national policy would only be beginning to be felt, but the pattern had been established.
ONLY ONE PATTERN in Johnson’s later life would be substantially different—the change began in late 1942, a year after this book’s conclusion—and this difference must be mentioned here briefly, even if it cannot be detailed until later volumes, since otherwise this book would leave an incorrect impression of the overall shape of his life.
If at the Greenbrier Johnson subordinated his desire for personal wealth to his desire to become President, he found, in 1942, a way to reconcile his two ambitions—and in years to come he found a dozen ways, and he entered the Oval Office perhaps the richest man ever to occupy it. Shortly after he assumed the Presidency, Life magazine, in the most detailed contemporary analysis of his wealth, estimated his “family’s” fortune at $14 million; Johnson’s representatives protested publicly that that estimate was far too high; privately, one of his key advisors now admits that it was far too low. Even had his wealth been no greater than $14 million, that means that during the twenty-one years between 1942 and his assumption of the Presidency in 1963—twenty-one years during which Johnson continually held public office—the Johnson fortune increased at a rate of well over half a million dollars a year.
Although from time to time dedicated investigative journalists produced articles detailing one or another episode in that accumulation, these episodes were never linked to reveal the overall pattern, in large part because of Johnson’s genius for secrecy. The one aspect of his fortune that was explored in depth was the Johnson radio and television interests, which were in his wife’s name (although, as these articles show, the carefully nurtured legend that he had nothing to do with them was largely fiction). There existed a vague public awareness that Federal Communications Commission actions had favored the Johnson radio station and, later, the Johnson television station in Austin. There were jokes—bitter in Austin, knowing in Washington—about the fact that the capital of Texas had to make do with a single television channel. But little public understanding existed of the fact that the FCC not only created the Johnson broadcasting monopoly and insulated it against would-be competitors, but steadily expanded its sphere until it was a radio-television empire that was not limited to Austin or even to Texas. This empire grew from a radio station that was purchased in 1942 for $17,500. By the time Lyndon Johnson entered the Presidency, it was worth $7 million—and was producing profits of $10,000 per week. And the growth of this radio-television empire was only part of the history of his accumulation of wealth. Nor does any detailed exploration exist of the economic fate of those men who, owning their own television stations (or banks, or ranches), tried to compete with Lyndon Johnson, or simply to hold on, against his wishes, to their property—men who were broken financially on the wheel of his power.
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