The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  Goldschmidt was not the sharpest tool; he would not rise to great heights in Washington. But, easy-going and not as intensely fired by personal ambition as the other members of this group, he was malleable material in Johnson’s hands. He was, in addition, passionately idealistic, and the focus of his passion was public power. When Johnson put the case for the Marshall Ford Dam in those terms, Goldschmidt believed him—and was willing to do anything he could to advance the cause of the dam.

  Johnson knew how to make the most of such willingness. He had been assiduously cultivating Clark Foreman, director of Interior’s Division of Public Power—the agency whose approval on a thousand pieces of paper was necessary for so large and complicated a project. Painting for Foreman a harrowing picture of how the LCRA’s programs were being snarled in bureaucratic red tape, he asked Foreman to assign a single official to handle and be familiar with LCRA problems. And Johnson said he knew just the man: “Why don’t we get Tex over there?” he asked. Foreman agreed. Construction of the dam would take almost three more years; during that time, many rulings from Interior on LCRA requests would be expedited by the malleable Goldschmidt.

  The little group of which Johnson was a part was an unusual group. Two of its members—Douglas and Fortas—would sit on the highest court in the country. Others—Corcoran and Rowe—would be part (as, indeed, Douglas and Fortas, too, would be part) for decades to come of the nation’s highest political councils. In the years immediately after Johnson came to Washington as a Congressman, they were already young men on the rise. But, as one of them—Corcoran—says with a smile, “Gradually, these guys found they were working for Lyndon Johnson.” Working for Johnson, Corcoran says, “on projects for his district”—and, in particular, on one project: that huge dam being built in that isolated gorge in faraway Texas.

  FOR THE HIGH DAM, Johnson needed help on Capitol Hill—help of a dimension far greater than any of the young New Dealers could provide. For the dichotomies in the project’s financing that Fortas had managed to paper over for Harold Ickes—because Ickes was disposed to favor the project—could not be papered over for Congressmen who had no feelings about it one way or the other. As soon as the necessary legislation was brought before a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, the lack of logic—or legality—in the arguments became apparent. And when the subcommittee’s chairman, Representative Charles H. Leavy of the state of Washington (who had apparently been enlisted in the dam’s cause without fully understanding its problems), introduced the necessary amendment, to increase the Marshall Ford allocation, and make the increase non-reimbursable, before the full House of Representatives, which was sitting as the Committee of the Whole, members of the subcommittee attempted to make these issues public.

  The amendment was to the Rivers and Harbors Bill, which stated clearly that all projects built by the Bureau of Reclamation were “to be reimbursable under the reclamation law.” The clerk droned out the words: “Amendment offered by Mr. Leavy after the word ‘reimbursable,’ insert, ‘except to the Colorado Project, Texas.’”

  Immediately, there was an objection, from the conservative Republican John Taber of New York. “Mr. Chairman,” he said, “I make a point of order against the amendment. … It excepts the Colorado River project from reimbursing its cost to the Government. It is a general provision of these reclamation acts that these things shall be reimbursable to the Treasury.”

  Leavy replied that “it is not a reclamation project in any sense; it is a flood-control project. It is authorized in the Flood Control Act.”

  Others were ready to jump in. Robert F. Rich,* a Pennsylvania Republican, started to ask the questions that would expose the contradictions. Hadn’t the government given $10 million for the Colorado River Project “with the expectation that [the] money was to be paid back out of the sale of power …?” Leavy said that was true. Well, Rich demanded, wasn’t the government now being asked to provide $2 million more for the same project? “If this [$10 million] money that was lent has to be paid back from power so generated, then tell me why they should not pay this $2,050,000 added to the [$10 million] that they have previously agreed to pay back? If the gentleman can explain that to the House and to the Members of this Congress, then I would like him to do it.”

  “I do not know whether I can do it in the limited time I have left at my disposal,” Leavy said. In fact, he could not do it at all, for the amendment violated not only law—under the law, every Bureau of Reclamation project was reimbursable—but logic. As Leavy attempted to explain it, he floundered.

  But Johnson had prepared for this situation. In case of a demand for a roll call, he was to tell Wirtz, “I had at least nineteen members of the Texas delegation with me.” If “any questions were raised, Judge Mansfield was going to tell of the dangerous floods in past years on the Colorado River.” Texas’ amenable Marvin Jones was in the chair. These preparations might not have been sufficient, given the violations of law and logic involved in the amendment, but law and logic could not stand on Capitol Hill against raw power—and Johnson had power on his side.

  Years later, another Representative, Richard Boiling of Missouri, would describe the crucial moment in the fight he had had to make—in 1951, during the first months of his first term in Congress—for a dam in his district. The dam had been defeated in committee. Boiling had brought the proposal up again before the full House, but knew he didn’t have the votes there, either. Although Rayburn, at the instance of his friend, Harry Truman of Missouri, had been friendly to Boiling, the new Congressman hadn’t understood what Rayburn’s friendship could mean, and he had not asked him for help on the dam bill. But, Boiling says, as he was sitting nervously on the House floor, “I felt someone sit down beside me. I didn’t pay any attention to who it was,” but when Boiling stood up to speak in support of the dam, the figure beside him stood up, too—and it was Sam Rayburn. Rayburn didn’t say a word, Boiling recalls. He didn’t have to. The fact that he was standing beside Boiling meant that Sam Rayburn wanted the bill passed—and the House passed it.

  In 1951, Sam Rayburn would be Speaker of the House. In 1938, he was only Majority Leader. But he was Sam Rayburn. As Leavy fumbled for an explanation, Rayburn stood up and walked forward to stand beside him. As Leavy finished a sentence, Sam Rayburn said: “The gentleman is correct, yes.” He stood there beside Leavy until Marvin Jones banged down his gavel and called the question, and the House agreed that Leavy was correct.

  “After … Marvin Jones, who was acting as chairman, ruled,” Johnson exulted in a letter to Wirtz that night, “we knew we had won and the less we said, the better. We got Sam Rayburn to answer one of Rich’s questions in order to indicate to all Democrats that the Majority Leader favored the amendment and when Sam got in the Record we took a vote and called it a day.” A jubilant Wirtz wrote back that Johnson had accomplished “the impossible.” (Wirtz received another letter as well. “Dear Alvin,” Sam Rayburn wrote, “I am mighty glad that Lyndon could get through the additional appropriation for Marshall Ford Dam. Whatever little help I was able to give him was given freely and gladly, as I think Lyndon is one of the finest young men I have seen come to Congress. If the District will exercise the good judgment to keep him here, he will grow in wisdom and influence as the years come and go.”)

  *Lyndon Johnson was later to write to George Brown that, had Brown been present at the hearing, “I suppose Mr. Rich’s comments would have cut you to the quick.”

  24

  Balancing the Books

  DECADES LATER, Tommy Corcoran, reminiscing, would say that “Lyndon Johnson’s whole world was built on that dam.”

  Corcoran was referring to the effect the dam produced on the relationship between Johnson and Herman Brown. In Brown, Johnson had found an older man with a rare immunity to his charm. With his genius for sniffing out political realities, soon after his arrival in Austin as NYA director, he had divined Brown’s importance in the capital, and had taken every excuse to drop by
the big white house on Niles Road for advice. But advice was all he got; flattery, even Lyndon Johnson’s flattery, was too cheap a coin for the purchase of Herman Brown’s friendship. Although in the congressional campaign the contractor’s support of Avery had been pro forma, providing him only with money and not with the full weight of his influence, and although he had hedged even this small bet with a token contribution to Johnson, he had done so only out of deference to Wirtz’s opinion. Brown did not share that opinion. A firm believer in experience, he had never seen Johnson in action in Washington, and didn’t believe Wirtz when Senator told him that a youth still in his twenties could fill Old Buck Buchanan’s boots. Moreover, Herman Brown was a hater. He hated Negroes and he hated unions—in part, for the same reason. Having worked so hard all his life, he hated laziness and he believed that Negroes were lazy, and that unions encouraged laziness in white men; after World War II, he would, with the assistance of Alvin Wirtz and Ed Clark, ram through the Texas Legislature some of the most vicious anti-labor laws in America. And Brown hated the man—that Man in the White House—whose policies were helping unions and Negroes. He had coined his own word for New Deal programs: “Gimme’s.” Lazy men, he said, were always saying “Gimme,” and now the country had a President who was giving them the handouts they were demanding. The very thought of programs that gave people benefits they hadn’t earned brought to Brown’s narrow, hard face that red flush that men feared. He saw, too, that these programs would lead to increased taxation. The very thought that government—politicians who never worked (Herman Brown, who had bought so many politicians, despised politicians)—was going to take his money for which he had worked so hard and give it to people too lazy to work—“well,” George Brown says, “Herman really hated that idea.” His feelings toward Roosevelt had made him ill-disposed toward a candidate who was shouting “Roosevelt, Roosevelt” up and down the district, and in the face of such shouts, Alvin Wirtz’s assurances about Johnson’s private dislike of the New Deal had a somewhat hollow ring. Johnson, so eloquently mouthing the phrases of the despised New Deal, had seemed, in fact, to epitomize everything Brown disliked. Every time Johnson left after one of his visits, George Brown recalls, “Herman would be saying how he’d never do—how impractical he was.” And Johnson wasn’t made to feel particularly welcome in Brown’s home.

  But Herman Brown was a man with his own code of honor. “He always paid his debts,” Ed Clark says. “He would always find a way to balance his books. He would never let a man do more for him than he did for that man.” And he knew how big a debt he owed Lyndon Johnson for obtaining the authorization that made the dam—and Brown & Root’s contracts—legal. When, after Congress adjourned in August, 1937, Johnson returned to Austin, Brown told Clark to bring Johnson along to the house on Niles Road, and soon, Clark says, “Lyndon was over at Herman’s house every night.”

  For a while, the atmosphere was still tense because of Herman’s wife, Margaret. A pert, fiery woman with a good education and mind, she liked a chance to display them. She argued with her husband as an equal, and received equal time, and she resented Johnson’s practice of talking only to her husband and all but ignoring her. Moreover, Margaret Brown was, in George Brown’s words, “a very refined person.” Certain of Johnson’s habits—his gobbling down of food and his constant combing of his hair, even in her living room—disgusted her. “Margaret really didn’t like him,” Clark says.

  Driving away from Niles Road after one tense evening, however, Johnson said to Clark: “I’m not getting along well with Mrs. Brown, am I?” Recalls Clark: “I said, ‘I’m glad you asked me that. I didn’t want to bring it up, but now that you asked, it’s my duty to tell you.’ At that time, Lyndon had a little blue comb … and he was constantly pulling it out and combing his hair, and constantly jumping up and looking in the mirror. Margaret couldn’t stand that, and I told him so. And I said, ‘If you’d stop talking all the time, and listen a little, you’d get along with her better.’ And he did what I told him. No one ever saw that little blue comb again, and he got along better with Margaret” (although the more she talked with him, the more appalled she was at his lack of education; how could anyone be a Congressman, she sometimes commented after he had left, with so little knowledge of history?).

  As for Margaret’s husband, Johnson had learned to read him, and had realized that he had to be treated differently from most other men—because, unlike most men, flattery was not what he wanted.

  Herman Brown liked to talk politics and government; those subjects fascinated him. And when he talked politics, he didn’t want agreement or deference—that was why he never tired of talking to Margaret, because she, liberal in political philosophy like her father, never agreed with him. (“Oh, you learned that from some damned radical professor!” Herman would shout at her. “No, dear,” she would reply, quietly but firmly, “I learned that at my father’s breakfast table.”) He wanted argument—hot, violent argument—and it was difficult for him to get what he wanted; in Texas, men interested in politics knew the role that Herman Brown played in Texas politics—and were, those smart enough to give him a good argument, smart enough to be afraid of him.

  Lyndon Johnson gave him what he wanted. “They’d have serious fights,” recalls George Brown. “Dare each other to get up and hit ’em.” One of the two men would ask the other “what’d he think about the Mayor, or this legislator or that one. And they’d argue about it. Herman would say”—and as George imitates Herman, he shows a man poimding a table with angry, heavy blows of his fist—“Herman would say, ‘Now, Goddammit, Lyndon, you know that’s not so!’”

  Sometimes even George thought his brother and Johnson were going to come to blows; “I’d intervene, and have them make up.” But George also knew that Herman acted that violently only with someone “he really liked. If Herman liked you, he’d talk a lot, and pound the table. If Herman didn’t like you, he’d just smile and not say anything.” (“That’s right,” says one of Herman’s lobbyists. “And, boy, when you saw that smile—watch out!”) The very violence of Herman’s reactions, George says, was an indication of how much he liked Lyndon Johnson.

  Liked him—and, more and more, respected him. Johnson, after all, was not the only one of the two who was a reader and manipulator of men. Often they discussed legislators, and, says Frank C. Oltorf, who would later, as one of Herman Brown’s lobbyists, witness many such discussions, “you could see they both knew what the other was talking about.”

  When their discussions centered on legislation rather than legislators, there was also a considerable area of common ground. Brown had been afraid that Johnson was not “practical” enough, but now he learned that Wirtz had been correct. “Basically, Lyndon was more conservative, more practical than people understand,” George Brown says. “You get right down to the nut-cutting, he was practical. He was for the Niggers, he was for labor, he was for the little boys, but by God … he was as practical as anyone.” And his brother soon realized this; even Johnson’s defense of Roosevelt was couched in terms with which Herman had no quarrel. “Herman would be ranting and raving about New Deal spending, and Lyndon would say, ‘What are you worried about? It’s not coming out of your pocket. Any money that’s spent down here on New Deal projects, the East is paying for. We don’t pay any taxes in Texas. … They’re paying for our projects.’” About this time, George started visiting Johnson in Washington, and he reported back to his brother that indeed many Southern Congressmen were going along with Roosevelt for this same reason; George says, “Lyndon would take me to these meetings of the Southern Congressmen, and that’s the way they’d be talking. That the South would get these dams and these other projects, and it would come out of the other fellow’s pocket. The Presidents before Roosevelt—Coolidge, Hoover—they never gave the South anything. Roosevelt was the first one who gave the South a break. That’s why he had more plusses than minuses, because he was getting them all this money.” The relationship between Herman Brown and
Lyndon Johnson, George Brown says, was based on the same equation: “He [Herman] felt that Lyndon had more plusses than minuses.”

  Plusses, moreover, other than philosophical.

  Herman Brown was a poor boy from a small town who had, as a youth, worked on a road gang, with mules and a fresno. So was Lyndon Johnson. “He [Johnson] would joke about building roads and shoveling gravel,” George Brown recalls. “The stories he would tell were about what a hard time he had growing up. About how poor he had been. About how poor the Hill Country was. They were both poor boys. So there was a kinship there.” Johnson had also “gotten his brother and sisters out of there”; Herman Brown, who had gotten one of his brothers out—who would have gotten the others out, had they only been willing to work—liked that, too.

  Herman Brown was a poor boy with vast ambitions. Ambition was the wellspring of his character, at least in his brother’s view. “We were always reaching. We never had any walking-around money, because we were always reaching above our heads. We never felt we had it made. We were always reaching for the next plateau. We were just always reaching, that’s all.” Lyndon Johnson’s ambitions were different, but their size wasn’t. “Hell, running for Congress when he had a good job, and no one thought he could win—that was a gamble,” George Brown says. “He was a gambler. He wasn’t afraid to take a gamble. He was just reaching all the time, like Herman and me. Herman could understand him.”

  And poverty and ambition were not all that Herman Brown and Lyndon Johnson had in common. Many poor boys have ambitions—even great ambitions. Few are willing to make the sacrifices necessary to achieve them. Herman Brown, who had, year after year, lived in a tent, and then, year after year, practically lived in a car—slept in a car, ate in a car—had made the sacrifice; and the sacrifice—the work, the effort—had become very important to him. A man who had worked as hard as Herman Brown could tell exactly how hard another man was working. He may not have liked what Lyndon Johnson was saying in the 1937 campaign, but when someone told Herman Brown how Johnson was not only making a dozen speeches a day, but driving hundreds of miles to do it, Herman Brown, better perhaps than any other man, could appreciate the sacrifice, the effort, the work—and, in his grudging, tough way, admire it.