The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  By the end of 1936, more than 20,000 youths were receiving NYA aid, either at school or work, in Texas. And a huge expansion of the state’s entire NYA program was planned for the Spring of 1937. In 1936, the NYA had built a greenhouse, and planted in it more than 6,000 trees and shrubs which, in 1937, were to be transplanted to the scores of new roadside parks scheduled for construction that year. And in 1937, for the first time, the NYA was to begin building not just roadside parks but bigger parks in towns and cities. Still more substantial projects were to get under way. After eighteen months of urging on local officials, a substantial number of proposals for new schools, community centers and halls to house fire trucks of local fire companies had been received, and the blueprints completed. Materials and equipment had been obtained, and construction was about to start on a dozen of these projects.

  On February 22, 1937, however, Lyndon Johnson got the chance for which he had been waiting. And, without a moment’s hesitation, he grabbed it.

  *After one conference at which former Secretary of War Newton D. Baker said there was “plenty of opportunity for young people of initiative and spirit to earn a living,” she wrote him, “I confess that my own imagination has been extremely lacking for the last few months! If you have any convincing suggestions … I shall be more than grateful.” (Baker had no such suggestions.)

  *Was there something else that made the roadside park an especially attractive idea to Johnson? The project he selected was one—practically the only one possible—in an area of work with which he himself was familiar. He himself, after all, had once been in a group of youths, riding, picks and shovels in hand, in a flatbed Department truck out to a creek.

  *Lyndon Johnson’s relationships with Negro colleges and schools during his NYA directorship—significant in light of his later relationship with civil rights legislation—will be explored in depth in Volume II.

  20

  The Dam

  HE GOT THE CHANCE because of a dam—and because of what that dam meant to two men.

  The dam was in one of the most deserted regions of the Hill Country. To reach it, you drove northwest out of Austin on a narrow, unpaved, gravel-topped road. About ten miles deep in the hills, you turned off the road onto an even narrower path that had been hacked through the dense cedar brakes. You bumped along its rough surface for another eight miles, heading deeper and deeper into the empty hills, passing scarcely a sign of human habitation, until suddenly the path ended in a void that was a deep, wide canyon. Walking to the edge of the canyon, you looked down—and far below you were a battalion of rumbling bulldozers, scores of trucks, 2,000 scurrying men, and, rising out of the bed of the river that had cut the canyon, a broad wall of masonry twenty-seven stories high and more than a mile long: one of the largest structures built by man.

  The dam (named Marshall Ford* because it was located at the spot at which cattle from the Marshall Ranch had been driven across the Lower Colorado River—before the cedar had covered the hills, gobbled up the last of the grass and ended grazing in the area) was being built by the United States Bureau of Reclamation to control the floods which periodically roared down the 700-mile-long valley of the Lower Colorado, sweeping away the precious fertile soil on its banks. But to the two men most responsible for its construction, the dam had a more personal significance.

  To one of them, the significance was simple—as simple as the man. His name was Herman Brown, and he wanted to build big things, and to make big money building them.

  He had wanted that for a long time. The son of a Belton, Texas, shopkeeper, he went into the construction business in 1909, at the age of sixteen, earning two dollars a day carrying a rod to assist surveyors. Road-building —fresno and mule-team road-building—was a rough business in Texas then; the weekend sprees of the building crews, tough ex-cowhands and oil-field roustabouts, generally landed them in jail, from which the contractor would bail them out on Monday morning, and the crews lived next to the mule corrals, in crowded tents.

  Herman Brown was to live in those tents for almost ten years. A rather small, slender boy, unexceptional in appearance, he had a way with men; in 1913, when he was twenty, he was made a foreman. When, a year later, his boss went broke, he paid off his young foreman’s back wages by giving him four mules and a fresno. At the age of twenty-one, Brown was a contractor.

  Contractors had to know how to handle mules, and they had to know how to handle men. Herman knew how to handle both. With the mules he was gentle, with the men he was rough; from his first job, the word about Herman Brown began to get around in the construction industry in Texas: “You either do things Herman’s way, or else.” And they had to know how to handle politicians, too, in a state where politics centered on a county-courthouse system as corrupt as anything Tammany Hall ever envisioned. Herman had a gift for handling politicians—all the way up the line from the Sheriffs who could facilitate the Monday-morning bailing out of his crews to the County Judges who handed out highway contracts—and an understanding that it was in the pockets of politicians that his slender funds would be most profitably invested. In Texas, political influence was often exerted through lawyers. No matter how tight his finances—and for many years they would be very tight—Herman always found enough for “legal fees.” Soon he had a road-building contract of his own. (Having stretched himself to the limit to finance it, he almost went broke when rains turned the road into a sea of mud and forced him to stop work; at one point, when he could not afford to buy feed for his mules, a local merchant, taking pity on him and the mules, gave him credit. Decades later, Herman learned by chance that the merchant had gone broke in the Depression and, old now, was living in poverty on an isolated West Texas ranch. A day or two later, there arrived in the old man’s mailbox a check big enough to keep him in comfort for the rest of his life.)

  Soon he had many contracts, in counties scattered all across Texas. To oversee these jobs, sometimes hundreds of miles apart, and to bid for new ones in county seats hundreds of miles apart, he spent endless days in a car. For years, he would work all day on one job, and then sleep in the car while his chauffeur (a very low-paid luxury, considering the wage scale for a Negro driver at the time) drove all night to the next job, on which Brown would work all day before getting into the car to sleep while the chauffeur drove all night again to get to the next job. In a single year, Herman Brown traveled, over unpaved, bumpy, rutted roads, more than 75,000 miles.

  That figure was calculated by an aide, not by Herman Brown. He measured not his effort but the profit it brought. But the profit was, considering the effort, minimal. In so impoverished a state, public works contracts were very small; as late as 1927, the average road construction contract was only $90,000—a sum out of which the contractor had to pay wages for his men, and buy feed for his mules, materials and equipment, bonding and insurance. And the profit was often not even in cash; contractors were generally paid off in “paving notes,” secured by municipal real estate, and due to mature in five or ten years—by which time various tiny Texas towns and sparsely inhabited counties hoped to have sufficient cash to redeem them. Herman Brown had been living in a tent on the job in 1909. He was still living in a tent (when he wasn’t living in that car) in 1917, when he married a pert young college graduate, Margaret Root; it was to a tent that he brought his bride for their wedding night, and a tent was their first home. As important to him as profit was the scale of the work he was doing. With the vision of the great builder, he thought in terms of projects that would leave his mark on the face of the earth—for centuries; on his first visit to Rome, he headed straight for the Colosseum, and, with a penknife, chipped away at its stone to collect samples which he could take back to Texas for an analysis of its composition; at last he would know, he said, what the Romans had put into it to make the Colosseum stand for two thousand years. In Texas, however, the scale was as unsatisfactory as the money. The state could not afford public works of the size of which Herman Brown dreamed.

  Herma
n Brown had two partners. He acquired the first because he loved his wife; at her request, he took her brother, Dan (the “Root” of Brown & Root), into the business. He acquired the second—after Dan had died; the name of the firm was left unchanged out of Herman’s deference to his wife’s feelings—because he loved his younger brother, George.

  Having quit college, George was working for Anaconda Copper in its great mines near Butte, Montana. Attempting “to break into the engineering end” of the company, he had advised his superiors where to drill to hit a new copper vein, and, although his shift ended at three a.m., he had risen at six, and had gone alone into the deserted mine to “see if they had hit.” He saw—as he was careful to emphasize fifty years later—that “they had hit,” but in his moment of jubilation, the mine caved in. Falling rock fractured his skull and cut open a vein. “I could see the blood spurting out of my head.” The floor started to collapse beneath him, leaving a seemingly bottomless pit below, but “there was a beam there—twelve inches wide—and I got to it as the shaft caved in.” Lying down on that twelve inches of steel over the chasm, “I pressed the vein in my head against a rock, with that side of my head down, and when I became unconscious, that shut off the bleeding.” Eight hours later, George Brown was brought out of the mine, with fractures not only of his skull but of bones throughout his body. He was sent home to Belton, and when Herman heard how close George had come to death, he let his penniless brother have half of the business he had spent ten years building up, “at terms he could afford.”

  Herman was still the absolute boss of Brown & Root, and always would be—a situation with which George was perfectly content; asked what he did in the business, George would reply, “What Herman doesn’t do.” But Herman wasn’t the only one of the brothers with soaring ambitions, and with a willingness to work as hard as was necessary to achieve them. (A third brother was not willing; after a month in the business he left, telling Herman, “I don’t want to work these eighteen-hour days. You’ll kill yourself.” He returned to his job as a streetcar conductor.) George was sent to supervise the building of a small bridge over the San Gabriel River. He had never built a bridge—had never built anything—but he built that bridge, and made a profit on it.

  Gradually the desperate days faded away. It was no longer necessary for Herman Brown to live in a tent; he still spent many nights driving back and forth across Texas, but when he got home, it was to a handsome, white-pillared house at 4 Niles Road, in the fashionable Enfield Road section of Austin. Though he was comfortable, however, Herman Brown was not wealthy, or even particularly well off. Texas jobs were still small jobs; the pay for them was still often in paving notes; he was always short of cash. After twenty years of terrible effort, the man who had wanted to build big things had still never built anything big.

  In 1927 and 1928, moreover, the Brown brothers began to realize that the paving notes—the paving notes which represented most of their resources—might never be paid. The Depression had already begun in Texas; municipalities couldn’t pay their debts; new construction jobs were scarce. Brown & Root’s cash shortage became serious. The firm’s banker advised Herman to sell the notes at a discount—to get whatever he could for them. George remembers: “Our banker in Houston—in 1927 and ’28 and ’29, he kept telling us, ‘You’re going to [have to] sell that paper.’” Herman wouldn’t do it; those notes represented years of effort; he could not bear the thought of selling them for a fraction of their face value—for a fraction of what he had earned. “But finally, in 1929, we had to sell it. I went to Chicago and sold it just before the Depression. We had to discount it, but it was a good thing we sold it. Another month or two, and we wouldn’t have been able to.” And if they hadn’t had the money realized from its sale, Brown & Root would have been out of business. By 1930, George Brown says, “everything was broke down here in this part of the world. It was a good thing we sold it. Because we did, we were the only contractors in Texas who could keep men on the payroll.” Herman Brown managed to preserve the organization it had taken him so many years to create, although there was little work for it. “We lived off that paper in 1930 and 1931 and 1932—for years, really, during the Depression.” And by 1936, the “paper”—to be precise, the proceeds Brown & Root had obtained from selling it—“was running out.” After twenty years as a contractor, Herman Brown was almost broke.

  And then, in 1936, the Bureau of Reclamation announced that it was taking bids for a $10 million dam at the Marshall Ford. It was the job—the big job—for which Herman had been waiting all his life.

  TO THE OTHER MAN, the significance of the dam was subtle—as subtle as the man. He was Alvin J. Wirtz, the former State Senator who had come to Washington in 1935 and been helped in his efforts to obtain federal funding for the newly formed Lower Colorado River Authority by Richard Kleberg’s young secretary.

  Because of the thoroughness with which the life of Franklin Roosevelt has been chronicled, the men who helped him to power—burly, bald, gregarious Jim Farley, for example; wizened, wheezing Louis Howe—have themselves become minor but vivid historical figures, our century’s Northum-berlands and Worcesters. Because the life of Lyndon Johnson—particularly the early decades of his life, the rise to power—has never been chronicled with either depth or accuracy, the figure of Alvin Wirtz has never emerged from the shadows. Johnson said of him: “Alvin Wirtz was my dearest friend, my most trusted counselor. From him … I gained a glimpse of what greatness there is in the human race.” Lady Bird called him “the lodestar of our lives,” and in the long picture gallery at the Johnson Ranch, his picture hangs prominently and bears the identification written by Mrs. Johnson: “Senator A. J. Wirtz—The Captain of My Ship, Any Day.”

  There is, however, some aptness in the fact that shadows surround the figure of Alvin Wirtz. For it was in the shadows that he worked.

  One would not think it to meet him on Congress Avenue—a big, burly man with a broad, ever-present smile—and be favored with his open, friendly greeting, or to sit across from him, in his unpretentious law office in the Littlefield Building, as he chatted amiably, tilted comfortably back in his low swivel chair, smoking a big black cigar. At his home—a white Colonial mansion off Enfield—he made mint juleps with his own hand, served them on the back porch, and, as one of his guests says, “He was always smiling, and so relaxed that he just made you feel right at home.” Virginia Durr, who knew him later in Washington, speaks of his “warmth of personality,” of his “funny stories.” He “was just such a sweet fellow,” she says. He was “terribly amusing,” he was “delightful. It just made you feel good to see Alvin.”

  With young politicians and lawyers who came to him for advice, he was not only friendly but calm and judicious. While they stated their problem or opinion, he sat quietly, never interrupting, speaking only in encouraging monosyllables, until the young man was finished. Often, he did not say much even then. And when he did speak, he spoke softly and very slowly and deliberately. Says Willard Deason: “He never told you what to do. But when you were finished talking to him, you knew what to do.” His advice was valued. Says Welly Hopkins: “He had a sort of aura of dignity about him—he didn’t say a whole lot, but when he said something, you listened.” Says Charles Herring, another rising Texas politician: “He would never raise his voice. But you could feel his strength.” Although he was no longer in the State Senate, young Austin politicians felt that he was truly senatorial; the title “Senator” seemed to fit him so well that they used it about him without the customary preceding article—“Senator says” or “I’m seeing Senator today”—as if there were no other Senator. His manner was no less impressive to young men, even the smartest young men, in Washington. Says one of the smartest, James H. Rowe: “He was a soft-voiced Texan, which is unusual in itself. He was the summer-up, who would not say anything while everyone else was talking, and then would say, ‘Well, I think …’ Charming, very gentle—If you needed a wise old uncle, and didn’t have one, and co
uld have one appointed, he’d be the one.”

  The image he cultivated so carefully had other aspects as well. He was fond of saying, “I’m only a country boy,” and of reminding new acquaintances that he was from a small town, Seguin. Even other Texans who used that camouflage were startled by the thickness with which Wirtz applied it. When, in Washington, he was asked where Seguin was located, he would reply, “Oh, it’s a fur piece from Austin.” Says one Texan, himself a “professional country boy,” who heard that reply in Washington: “‘A fur piece’—my God, they weren’t even saying that in Texas any more!” The camouflage was used in courthouses, where Wirtz seemed the typical country lawyer, plodding and slow in his presentations. Even his signature was slow and deliberate, “the most deliberate thing I ever saw,” Hopkins says. Signing a letter—after taking a very long time reading it—he did so as if reluctant to put his name to it, his hand tracing out the A and J in big, painfully slow circles.

  But those who knew Alvin Wirtz well, knew better. Welly Hopkins was his first protégé—the man Wirtz chose to succeed him in the Senate. “Slow in his movements, slow in his speech, but he had a mind as quick as chain lightning,” Hopkins says. “I’ll never forget the first time I saw [Alvin Wirtz] in a courtroom. [It was] when I was still down in Gonzales … in the old Gonzales courtroom. He and the opposition lawyer” were arguing “in front of the Judge, and each would talk in turn, and suddenly I realized that he [Wirtz] was not only thinking even with him, but that he was ahead of him—that he was three steps ahead of him, all the time.” Some legislative observers came to the same realization. “On the Senate floor,” says one, “you did not want to be opposing Senator Wirtz in a thinking match.”