But although the Browns were gambling, the power of Buck Buchanan hedged the bet. “Wirtz was telling us that Buchanan would take care of things, that he would arrange it [the authorization] as soon as Congress reconvened [in 1937], and of course we had no doubt of that,” George Brown said. “We had already seen what he could do.” And there were reasons for taking the gamble—compelling reasons. The paper was running out. The Browns needed a job, and there weren’t any jobs in Texas—none big enough to help them at any rate. Everything was broke down here. If the gamble was huge, $1,500,000 was a stake big enough to justify a man in shoving in his whole pile. And Herman Brown was forty-five now. The Marshall Ford job represented the only chance in sight for him to move up to a higher plateau of construction, one of the big jobs he had been dreaming of for twenty years. He decided to go ahead. Brown & Root bid on the contract, were awarded the contract, mortgaged all they owned, purchased the new equipment and, in September, 1936, built the giant cableway—sank, in other words, $1,500,000 into an isolated gorge in the barren Hill Country.
And then the second problem came to light: not only was the Bureau of Reclamation not authorized to build the dam, it was effectively forbidden to build it.
The prohibition was contained in the Act of Congress that had created the Bureau in 1902, and in interpretations of that Act by the Federal Board of Land Appeals. These interpretations had specifically prohibited the Bureau from building any project on land not owned by the federal government. In 1905, for example, the Board of Land Appeals had stated flatly that the Secretary of the Interior “has no authority under the provisions of the Act of 1902 to embark upon or commit the government to any [Bureau of Reclamation] enterprise that does not contemplate the absolute transfer of the property involved to the United States.” The reason for the prohibition was simple. “Well, of course you couldn’t build a dam—a dam that costs millions of dollars—on land you didn’t own,” explains a Bureau official. “If someone else owns the land, you’re just a tenant, and what are you going to do if the landlord says: ‘I don’t want the dam on my land any more. Get it off!’? What are you going to do? You can’t move a dam.” The prohibition had, moreover, been reaffirmed, without qualification, in every opinion on the subject by a federal court or a federal agency. During the Bureau’s three decades of existence, an occasional—very rare—exception to this prohibition had been made, generally through special contractual arrangements between the Bureau and the local body with jurisdiction over the dam. But no such arrangements had been made, or even discussed, between the Bureau and the LCRA. In the case of the Marshall Ford Dam, the prohibition was in force.
In sixteen of the seventeen Western states in which the Bureau was authorized to build dams, this prohibition would have caused no problem. By the terms under which these former Territories had been admitted to the Union, the ownership of all publicly owned lands—which included most of the riverbeds in which dams would be built—was transferred, at the time of admission, to the federal government. But the seventeenth state was Texas, which, before its admission to the Union, had been not a Territory but an independent Republic, a sovereign state. The terms of its admission were different from those for the Territories, and one of the differences was that Texas was admitted to the Union still owning its public lands—including riverbeds.
This difference had apparently been overlooked by the Bureau, possibly because no one was aware of it (the Marshall Ford was the first dam the Bureau was to build in Texas), possibly because of the haste, due to the presidential telephone call, with which the dam was approved. So far as can be determined from the sketchy Bureau files still available today (most of the pertinent records no longer exist) and from the recollections of federal and LCRA attorneys involved, no one in the Bureau had thought to check the title of the land beneath the $10,000,000 dam.
This oversight was, moreover, not correctible easily—if at all. In the Act that had, two years before, created the LCRA, the Texas Legislature had, in the strictest of terms, forbidden it to sell its land to any person or body, including the federal government—or to lease it, to mortgage it, or, indeed, to transfer it in any way whatsoever. And there was no realistic possibility that the Texas statute would be changed in the foreseeable future. These restrictions had been placed in the Act by a Legislature violently jealous of the state’s rights and determined that the federal government should never gain control over one of its rivers—by a Legislature that was, moreover, in the grip of the state’s politically dominant public utilities, who had specifically insisted on the inclusion of the anti-transfer provisions to ensure that no federal power-generating body like the Tennessee Valley Authority could ever be set up in Texas. The Act as a whole was so strict that it effectively foreclosed the normal contractual remedies to the prohibition in the 1902 federal Act.
Under federal law, then, the Bureau of Reclamation was required to own the land on which its dams were built; under state law, it could not own the land on which this dam was being built.
Sometime late in 1936—after Brown & Root had begun construction—the Bureau learned about this second problem. Alvin Wirtz (who assured Herman and George that he hadn’t known about it) told the two brothers that some low-level attorney in the office of the Comptroller General had thought to do what no one in Washington had done before: had checked the title for the land under the dam, learned that the federal government didn’t own it, and informed his superior. Wirtz also reported that the Comptroller General, in a face-to-face confrontation with Buchanan, had pointed out that he was charged with the responsibility of certifying the legality of public works contracts. This contract, he said, was clearly illegal. Unless the conflict with the federal law was resolved, he said, he would not approve a second appropriation, whether or not Congress authorized it.
Decades later, George Brown agreed to tell a story he had never told before except to a handful of intimates: the story of the Marshall Ford Dam. He would, he said, never forget the day he and his brother discovered that the federal government was required by law to own the land on which the dam was being built—and that the federal government didn’t own the land. The words “legal” and “illegal”—referring not to lack of congressional authorization but to lack of federal title to the land—recur frequently as he tells about that day. “We had put in a million and a half dollars in that dam, and then we found out it wasn’t legal,” he says. “We found out the appropriation wasn’t legal, but we had already built the cableway. That cost several hundred thousands of dollars, which we owed the banks. And we had had to set up a quarry for the stone, and build a conveyor belt from the quarry to the dam site. And we had had to buy all sorts of equipment—big, heavy equipment. Heavy cranes. We had put in a million and a half dollars. And the appropriation wasn’t legal!”
As he recalls that day, George Brown, eighty-two, almost blind but still physically vigorous and clear of mind, gets up from behind his desk, and begins to pace up and down his long office. Wheeling, he walks back to his desk. It is cluttered with reports, pictures of his wife, memorabilia (including a solid gold ingot, into which his name has been chiseled in Arabic characters, that is a gift from a Shah), but without groping he picks up a small, plain piece of weathered steel; on whatever desk he has had, it has lain in the same place for almost forty years. “There, you see that?” he says. “That’s a piece of the cableway.” He hands it to his visitor, then snatches it back and replaces it in the same spot on the desk, and begins to walk up and down the room again. Reaching out a hand to feel the back of another chair, he sits down and begins to talk again, much more rapidly than is his wont. “That was one of the pulleys,” he says. “One of the pulleys from the cableway. We had put in a million and a half dollars in that dam. Then we found out it wasn’t legal. But we had already—by the time we found this out—built the cableway. That cost several hundred thousands of dollars, which we owed the banks. … The Bureau of Reclamation had been making the appropriations. They were
, under the law, allowed to spend money only on land that was owned by the federal government. They had assumed [that] the land on which the dam was being built was owned by the federal government, because that would be the situation in any other state, but in Texas the federal government didn’t own any land. The appropriations had all been for one year at a time, AND THEY WERE ILLEGAL!!!”
AFTER A DAY OR TWO, as George Brown recalls, Alvin Wirtz came up with a solution. Congress, Wirtz explained, as the nation’s lawmaking body, possesses the power to make legal what is illegal. What was needed, he said, was not just the usual congressional authorization of a dam, but a law which, ignoring the land-ownership issue, specifically authorized the contract under which Brown & Root had been working. Such validation of the contract would blur the question of their original legality. It would no longer be so clear that a clear provision of another law had been violated. The Comptroller General’s office would have an excuse (“something to hang his hat on” is the phrase Brown recalls Wirtz using) for overlooking the fact that, validated or not, the contracts still called for construction of a federal dam on someone else’s land.
And, Wirtz said, the Comptroller General’s office would be happy to use that excuse. The President, after all, wanted the dam built; so did the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. If the land title issue became a point of general knowledge and debate, passage of the law might be sticky, but Wirtz saw little chance of that happening. No Congressman would make an issue of it, because no Congressman was opposed to construction of this dam in an isolated part of Texas; with the exception of a few Texas Congressmen, no one in Congress was even aware of its existence. And if some low-level bureaucrat wanted to make trouble over the title, Buchanan’s power would keep the trouble to a minimum. Wirtz said he had already spoken to Buchanan about his new idea, and Buck had approved it—had, in fact, said that it would end their problems. Buck had told him not to worry—he would personally see to the passage of the necessary law, and with its passage, everything would be as before. When Congress reconvened in January, 1937, Buchanan was as good as his word. The routine House procedures preliminary to authorization began clicking off. The Rivers and Harbors Committee was expecting to take up the bill, and approve it, without opposition, in March. There really was no need to worry, Wirtz told the Browns, as long as they had the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee solidly on their side; Buchanan’s power would protect the Marshall Ford Dam in the future, as it had in the past.
And then, on February 22, 1937, Buchanan suffered a heart attack and died.
*Later renamed Mansfield after the Rivers and Harbors Committee chairman.
*And several smaller dams, including one that would be completed almost simultaneously with Buchanan, a Roy Inks Dam near Marble Falls.
Part IV
REAPING
21
The First Campaign
LYNDON JOHNSON was in Houston on February 23, escorting the Kansas state director of the National Youth Administration on a tour of NYA projects in that city, when he suddenly saw, on a park bench, a copy of the Houston Post with the banner headline: CONGRESSMAN JAMES P. BUCHANAN OF BRENHAM DIES. He knew at once, he was to recall, that “this was my chance.”
His chance—quite possibly his only chance, for years and years to come. The ladder—elective office in the national government—that he had decided was the only ladder he wanted to climb contained only three rungs: a seat in the House of Representatives, a seat in the Senate, and that last rung, of which he never spoke. The first rung was indispensable; until he was on it, the others would be out of reach. He had to win a House seat, and, because of the impossibility of dislodging Dick Kleberg, only one seat was a realistic possibility: that of Buchanan’s Tenth Congressional District, in which, living in Austin, he was a resident. That seat was, suddenly, vacant, but once it had been filled (through a special election called by Governor Allred), it might well remain filled for many years. Once Texas sent a man to Congress, Texas kept him there. Buchanan had himself won the seat in a special election—twenty-four years before. Impressive though that tenure was, it was not at all unusual for a Representative from the Lone Star State. Sam Rayburn and Hatton W. Sumners, for example, had also been in Congress for twenty-four years; Joseph Jefferson Mansfield and Marvin Jones for twenty years; John Nance Garner, prior to his election as Vice President, had served in the House for thirty years; in 1937, the twenty-one-member Texas House delegation had a longer average tenure—fourteen years—than that of any other state. The man who won Buchanan’s seat would be in that seat to stay. To the astonishment of the visitor from Kansas, his tour was abruptly canceled; he was unceremoniously bundled into Johnson’s big brown Pontiac sedan, which sped the 166 miles back to Austin, roaring across level, far-flung pastures dotted with grazing cattle, and through the town of Brenham, where Buck Buchanan’s house was being draped in black.
If, as he drove, Lyndon Johnson weighed his chance of gaining Buchanan’s congressional seat, that chance must have seemed very slim.
In the first flush of sentiment over Buchanan’s sudden death, the first candidate thought of as Old Buck’s successor was Old Buck’s wife, shy, unassuming and retiring though she was. Should Buchanan’s wife choose not to run, his logical successor would be his longtime campaign manager and friend, chubby, rosy-cheeked C. N. Avery. Not only had Avery been Buchanan’s man in the district, his liaison with constituents, for twenty-four years, but he had married into the politically powerful Nelson family of Round Rock and was therefore politically well-connected himself. And, as a successful businessman in his own right (his quarry supplied the stone for the post offices with which Buchanan had dotted the district), his business connections assured him ample campaign funds. And Avery was universally popular. “He liked to sit back and smoke and talk,” says one district politician. “He was a good ol’ boy.” There were, in addition, other logical candidates: the district’s State Senator, Houghton Brownlee; Austin’s Mayor Tom Miller, the district’s single most powerful political figure; ambitious young (thirty-nine) Merton Harris, who after eight years as a District Attorney was now an Assistant State Attorney General who had been busily working barbecues throughout the district in hope of one day succeeding Buchanan.
Lyndon Johnson’s candidacy would not be logical at all. His age—twenty-eight—was a drawback (no member of the Texas delegation and only two members of the 435-member House were that young), particularly in a farm district, because farmers, conservative in personal relationships, place a high premium on “experience.” And age was only one drawback. Lyndon Johnson had spent four years developing an acquaintance with voters, working with boundless energy and initiative to obtain them pensions, to save their homes, to provide them with a multitude of federal services. But those voters had been residents of the Fourteenth District, not the Tenth. The voters of the Tenth District—the district that held his fate—did not know what he had done, or what he was capable of doing.
They did not know him. He had been raised in Blanco County, but Blanco, which had not even been part of this huge, sprawling district until the 1935 redistricting, was its most isolated and remote corner, and the smallest of its ten counties; with a population of 3,800, less than 2 percent of the district’s 264,000 residents, it was all but ignored in district politics. As for the rest of the district, he had scarcely ever visited it during the five years prior to his NYA appointment, years he had spent in Houston and Washington and Corpus Christi. Large parts of it he had scarcely visited during his entire life except when driving across them to get somewhere else. As NYA director, he had, of course, been a resident of the district for eighteen months, but the directorship was not a job which entailed substantial contact with the public. State officials on Congress Avenue might smile and greet him; on Main Streets in Brenham and Giddings and Liberty Hill and Hutto—in most of the district’s scores of small towns—he would be hard put to find a single familiar face. In contrast to an Avery
or a Brownlee who was a familiar figure throughout the entire district, or to Mayor Miller, who boasted that he could greet every passerby in Austin by his first name, Lyndon Johnson was, in Dan Quill’s words, “not known at all.”
THE TENTH DISTRICT
Many of the district’s political leaders had never heard of him. Having spent almost four years assiduously cultivating rural leaders and county courthouse politicians, Lyndon Johnson had built up, with painstaking effort, a network of such men loyal to him rather than to Dick Kleberg. But that network was in the Fourteenth District, not the Tenth; it couldn’t help him now. In the Tenth District, most of the officials he knew were state officials who had little to do with a local election; the county leaders of the Tenth District—the leaders he needed now—were, in the main, men he had never met. Even those leaders with whom he was acquainted (and who were, having talked with him, impressed with him) had no reason to support him. Their alliances were already forged and tested by time. They had been working with Avery and Brownlee and Harris for years. They had never worked with Lyndon Johnson.
Johnson’s position was somewhat stronger with a few Austin business leaders and lobbyists—the sources of campaign funds—thanks to his policy of cultivating, as Kleberg’s secretary, “important persons” from outside Kleberg’s district; in this respect, at least, those four years of effort had not been entirely wasted. But his position with these men, while stronger, would not be strong enough to help significantly. Their gratitude—and contributions—would be limited. Austin businessmen would give their real support to their fellow businessman and longtime friend Avery, who had been obtaining lucrative government contracts for them for years. And businessmen who did not support Avery would support Brownlee or Harris—familiar, trusted faces. They would not support Lyndon Johnson. Indeed, documentation for these pessimistic conclusions had been provided that very day by the district’s leading newspaper: the Austin Statesman. The Statesman had named possible candidates to succeed Buchanan, in a list that included not only the favorites, but long shots as well. The name of Lyndon Johnson had not even been mentioned.
The Path to Power Page 59