The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  Herman’s decision, signaled by the Rotary Club speeches of November, 1937, to launch a campaign for a bigger dam created a rift in the budding friendship. Another source of friction was Johnson’s proposed Austin Public Housing Authority, which would condemn slums, raze several blocks of tenements in the city’s Negro slum and replace them with modern apartments. Many of the tenements were owned by Brown, who was making a tidy profit from them. Herman didn’t want to lose the profit, and at the first hint that condemnation procedures might be invoked if he refused to sell, he erupted into rage at the thought that government might take away his land. But it was at this point that the suggestion “Give Herman the dam and let Lyndon have the land” was made and led to a compromise. Johnson began pushing for the high dam. And George’s reports, each time he returned from Washington, on how hard Johnson was working for the dam—how successfully he was cultivating Fortas and the others—convinced Herman of the sincerity of his efforts.

  Lyndon Johnson’s work for Brown & Root did not end with his success in obtaining the appropriation for the dam’s enlargement.

  Because Brown & Root’s equipment, including the massive cableway, was already in place at the remote Marshall Ford dam site, while any other contractor would have to include in his bid the cost of transporting and installing equipment and building a cableway, bidding on the enlargement of the dam was cursory; Herman Brown had considerable leeway in setting a price—$27,000,000—on the work. And once he had the contract, he began working to maximize the profit he would make under it.

  Nor was his first price his last. Rather, as soon as he had his price, he wanted the price to be higher.

  The order of the day on the Bureau of Reclamation’s “Colorado River Project” was the change order, that magical device by which favored contractors are permitted, once they have been awarded a contract, to quietly change its details to increase their profits. Other contractors, particularly in those pre-war days, when government leniency with contractors was not yet a fact of construction life, might find a request for a change order disapproved; with top officials at Interior and Reclamation, including Harold Ickes himself, so obviously committed to the dam, lower-ranking bureaucrats and engineers were reluctant to delay the project by disapproving Brown & Root’s stream of requests for changes in specifications and unit prices. And when they did disapprove, for sometimes Herman Brown’s requests were so large that the engineers and bureaucrats could not choke them down, Lyndon Johnson got on the phone to them—or to their superiors. On the contract for the low dam, the Bureau of Reclamation had audited the work closely to keep the lid on profits. Now the lid was off. In auditing Brown & Root’s requests, and the firm’s compliance with contract provisions, in fact, Bureau engineers used Brown & Root’s own figures. The delays—caused by government caution and evaluation of work done, or by bureaucratic red tape—which cut into other contractors’ profits were substantially eliminated for Brown & Root through Johnson’s manipulation of Goldschmidt and his cultivation of other key bureaucrats. Officials telephoned him the moment necessary approvals were signed, and he then made sure the forms were rushed to the next agency—and began pushing there.

  He worked with Brown & Root as closely as if he were one of the firm’s employees, an employee anxious to impress his boss with his diligence; a typical letter assured Herman: “It is needless for me to tell you that we are humping ourselves on the jobs we have to do here and that this little note … is being knocked off between conferences.” George rather than Herman was the Brown with whom he was in day-to-day contact—Herman was out on the Colorado, ramrodding the work—and Lyndon Johnson and George Brown reported to each other in detail, exulted with each other over each success. “Finally got together with government engineers, Puis, Moritz, McKenzie on the prices for the new work at Marshall Ford,” Brown wrote Johnson on one occasion. “Cut us from $50,000 to $20,000 for flood hazards, and cut concrete 50¢ a yard; we had asked it be cut only 25¢. The rest of the prices are the same as the original contract. Puis, who is out of the Denver office, left that night to return to Denver and write up the change order.” After being written up, the change order was sent to Washington, where Johnson took over. Approval by the Comptroller General, then by Interior, and then by Reclamation, was necessary; Johnson obtained these approvals for Brown & Root in a single day, as a telegram from him to George Brown reported:

  CONFIDENTIAL. COMPTROLLER-GENERAL SIGNED DECISION THIS MORNING AT 11:30 APPROVING USE OF CHANGE ORDER 67 MARSHALL FORD DAM AS REQUESTED BY THE DEPARTMENT. … I GOT DECISION SENT BY SPECIAL MESSENGER TO INTERIOR AND WILL CHECK RECLAMATION LATER THIS AFTERNOON.

  George Brown was afflicted with a lisp. Very slight, it affected his pronunciation of only a few words. But because one of those words was “million” (he pronounced it “mee-yon”), the lisp was now to begin proving troublesome to him. For the Marshall Ford Dam was to make that word an essential part of his vocabulary. On the original $10 million Marshall Ford contract—the contract drawn up, and largely carried out, before Lyndon Johnson had begun working on Brown & Root’s behalf—the firm, so recently all but broke, had earned a profit of a million dollars. The firm’s profit on the subsequent Marshall Ford contract—the contract which brought the total for the entire dam to $27 million—is unknown, but out of a single $5 million appropriation for the high dam, George Brown wrote Lyndon Johnson that Brown & Root’s profit was about $2 million (“which,” Brown added, “is a nice bit of work …”). That appropriation, moreover, was for construction; contractors generally made a higher percentage of profit on excavation contracts. Brown & Root had made a million dollars out of the first contract for the Marshall Ford Dam. Out of subsequent contracts for the dam, they piled, upon that first million, million upon million more. The base for a huge financial empire was being created in that deserted Texas gorge.

  Herman Brown was a businessman who wanted value for money spent. His relationships with politicians were measured by that criterion. George Brown, who echoes his brother’s thinking, says, “Listen, you get a doctor, you want a doctor who does his job. You get a lawyer, you want a lawyer who does his job. You get a Governor, you want a Governor who does his job.” Doctor, lawyer, Governor, Congressman—when Herman “got” somebody, he wanted his money’s worth. And with Johnson, he was getting it—and more.

  Herman Brown was a man who always balanced his books. When he had been asked for a significant contribution to Johnson’s 1937 campaign, he had refused to make one. Now, in 1938, Johnson would be running again. Herman Brown let Johnson know that he would not have to worry about finances in this campaign—that the money would be there, as much as was needed, when it was needed. In Ed Clark’s words, “Herman gave Lyndon his full weight.”

  Herman Brown’s full weight meant the support not only of Brown & Root, but of Brown & Root’s subcontractors, of the banks in Austin with whom Brown & Root banked, of the insurance brokers who furnished Brown & Root performance bonds, of the lawyers in Austin who received Brown & Root’s fees, the businessmen in Austin who supplied Brown & Root with building materials, and the local politicians, not only in Austin but throughout the Tenth Congressional District, accustomed to receiving Brown & Root campaign contributions in return for road-building contracts. These men had followed Herman’s lead during the 1937 campaign, and had supported Avery. Now they would follow Herman’s lead again. When Lyndon Johnson ran for Congress in 1938, he wouldn’t have to raise money from Houston merchants, and he wouldn’t have to raise money late at night, after a long day on the road. All the funds he needed would be available at his command—more funds, in fact, than he could possibly use.

  25

  Longlea

  IF HERMAN BROWN was the behind-the-scenes force in the Tenth Congressional District, the public force was the district’s influential daily newspaper, the Austin American-Statesman.*

  The American-Statesman’s owner did not share Brown’s immunity to flattery. His susceptibility, in fact, was ac
ute.

  Charles E. Marsh, who had earned a Phi Beta Kappa key at the University of Oklahoma while working his way through college stoking furnaces, had made money early—while still in his twenties, he had purchased, for a few hundred dollars, a small North Dakota newspaper, had promptly sold it to the Scripps-Howard chain for $10,000, and, with a partner, E. S. Fentress, had headed for Texas to create a chain of his own. And he had made it fast. By 1930, either alone or in partnership with Fentress, he owned newspapers not only in Austin but in fourteen other Texas cities, and in another dozen cities in other states. Thanks to his guarantee of Sid Richardson’s bank loans, he was Richardson’s partner in some of the most profitable oil wells in West Texas, and the sole owner of other profitable wells of his own. And in Austin, he owned the streetcar franchise and the largest single bloc of stock in the Capital National Bank, as well as vast tracts of real estate. Having made money, he liked to play the patron with it. A tall man—six-feet-three—he had the broad, high forehead and the beaked nose of a Roman emperor, and a manner to match. Tips to headwaiters were dispensed with a gesture reminiscent of a king tossing coins to subjects. Gifts were on an imperial scale: the newspaper he gave to a young reporter as a “tip” was only a weekly, but he was almost as generous with a profitable daily, selling the Orlando (Florida) Sentinel to Martin Andersen for what Andersen says was “nothing down and at a price which enabled the paper to be paid out over a comparatively short number of years.” Richardson was only one of many young wildcatters he bankrolled. The dividends he wanted from his munificence were gratitude and deference: he wanted to be not only the patron but the seer; “he always had to be the pontificator, the center of attention,” Welly Hopkins says, adding, in words echoed by other men who knew Charles Marsh, “he was the most arrogant man I ever met.”

  Lyndon Johnson, meeting him for the first time in May, 1937, just after arriving in Washington as a newly elected Congressman, gave him what he wanted. Says Marsh’s secretary: “The first thing I noticed about [Johnson] was his availability. Whenever [Marsh] would ask Lyndon to come by for a drink, no matter that Lyndon was a busy man, he would always come. He was always available on short notice.” The second thing she noticed was his acquiescence. If Marsh wanted to talk, Johnson—seemingly, at least—wanted to listen, and to agree. Marsh liked to pontificate; Johnson drank in what he was saying, and told him how perceptive he was. Marsh liked to give advice; Johnson not only seemed to be accepting it, he asked for more. Marsh had become fascinated by politics; he wanted to feel he was on the inside of that exciting game. Johnson made him feel he was. Marsh may have been a genuine expert in some fields, but politics was not, in Johnson’s opinion, one of them. Among themselves, he and his real political advisors—Wirtz, Corcoran—laughed at Marsh as an amateur. But no one would have guessed Johnson’s feelings from seeing him and Marsh together. He asked Marsh for advice on political strategy, asked him what he should say in speeches—let Marsh write speeches for him, and didn’t let Marsh know that these speeches were not delivered. And, always, in soliciting and listening to Marsh’s opinions, “he was,” Marsh’s secretary says, “very deferential. Very, very deferential. I saw a young man who wanted to be on good terms with an older man, and was absolutely determined to be on good terms with him.”

  And he was. His first conversations with Marsh had taken place in Marsh’s Washington townhouse, or in the suite in the Mayflower Hotel that Marsh used as an office. Now Marsh invited the young Congressman and his shy wife to his country home for the weekend, and in the Autumn of 1937, Lyndon Johnson, accompanied by Lady Bird, drove for the first time to Longlea.

  “LONGLEA,” set on a thousand acres in the northern Virginia hunt country, was named for the eighteenth-century Sussex manor house on which it was modeled, but it could have been named for its setting. The roads toward it, toward its blue-slate roof and its great chimneys that rose above the soft Virginia hills, led across long, rolling meadows, and the meadows before it were nothing to the meadow behind it. The broad flagstone terrace at the rear of Longlea—a terrace 110 feet long—was bordered by a low stone parapet. Beyond the parapet, the land dropped steeply down to a narrow river. And beyond the river, before the first of the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a vast, empty meadow (or “lea”) stretched on for miles. But, however appropriate the name, knowledgeable visitors to the Charles Marsh estate did not refer to it by that name. They called it “Alice’s Place.”

  Alice Glass was from a country town—sleepy Marlin, Texas—but she was never a country girl. She had been twenty years old when, six years before, she had come to Austin as secretary to her local legislator. Some smalltown girls brought to the capital as legislators’ secretaries became, in its wide-open atmosphere, their mistresses as well, but Alice Glass was not destined for a mere legislator. “Austin had never seen anything like her,” one recalls. She stood, graceful and slender, just a shade under six feet tall in her bare feet, and despite her height, her features were delicate, her creamy-white face dominated by big, sparkling blue eyes and framed in long hair. “It was blond, with a red overlay,” says Frank C. Oltorf, Brown & Root’s Washington lobbyist and a considerable connoisseur of women. “Usually it was long enough so that she could sit on it, and it shimmered and gleamed like nothing you ever saw.”

  Bearing as well as beauty impressed. “There was something about the way she walked and sat that was elegant and aloof,” Oltorf says. “And with her height, and that creamy skin and that incredible hair, she looked like a Viking princess.” Legislators attracted to her at the roaring parties at the Driskill Hotel had sensed quickly that they had no chance with her—and they were right. Charles Marsh had lived in Austin then, in a colonnaded mansion on Enfield Road; at the Driskill parties, he held himself disdainfully aloof, as befitted a man who could make legislators or break them. On the same night in 1931 on which he met Alice Glass, they became lovers; within weeks, Marsh, forty-four, left his wife and children and took her East. He lavished jewels on her—not only a quarter-of-a-million-dollar necklace of perfect emeralds, but earrings of emeralds and diamonds and rubies. “The first time she came back to Marlin and walked down the street in her New York clothes and her jewels, women came running out of the shops to stare at her,” recalls her cousin, Alice, who was also from Marlin. And in Washington and New York, too, men—and women—stared at Alice Glass as they stared at her in Texas. “Sometimes when she walked into a restaurant,” says another man who knew her, “between those emeralds and her height and that red-gold hair, the place would go completely silent.”

  And Longlea was her place. She had designed it, asking the architects to model it on the Sussex country home she had seen when Marsh had taken her to England, working with the architects herself for months to modify its design, softening the massiveness of the long stone structure, for example, by setting one wing at a slight angle away from the front, enlarging the windows because she loved sunlight, insisting that the house be faced entirely with the native Virginia beige fieldstone of which she could see outcroppings in the meadows below; told there were no longer stonemasons of sufficient skill to handle the detail work she wanted, she scoured small, isolated towns in the Blue Ridge Mountains until she found two elderly master masons, long retired, who agreed, for money and her smile, to take on one last job. She furnished it herself, with Monets and Renoirs and a forty-foot-long Aubusson rug that cost Marsh, even at Depression bargain prices, $75,000. And she had designed the life at Longlea, which was, because she loved the outdoors, an outdoor life. She organized a hunt—the Hazelmere Hunt, named after Longlea’s river, the Hazel—and even on weekends on which no hunt was held, horses were always ready in Longlea’s stable, and there would be morning gallops; as Alice took the fences (“The only thing Texas about Alice was her riding,” a friend says. “She could really ride!”), the little black derby she wore while riding would sometimes fall off, and the hair pinned beneath it would stream out behind her, a bright red-gold banner in the
soft green Virginia hills. Warm afternoons would be spent around a pool (built, since Alice liked to swim in a natural setting and in clear, cold water, entirely out of native stone in a tree-shaded hollow); as Alice sat in her bathing suit with her hair, wet and glistening, falling behind her, her guests would try to keep from staring too obviously at her long, slender legs.

  The focus of life at Longlea was not its magnificent interior but the terrace behind it. Breakfast would be served on that broad, long expanse of flagstone, as the morning sun slowly burned away the mist from the great meadow and the mountains behind it. In the evenings, after dinner, it was on the terrace that guests would sit, watching the mist form and the mountains turn purple in the twilight. Life at Longlea was as elegant as its designer. Champagne was her favorite drink, and champagne was served with breakfast—champagne breakfasts with that incredible view—and, always, with dessert at dinner, dinners under glittering chandeliers imported from France. Served by her favorite waiter: the most distinguished of the Stork Club’s headwaiters was a former Prussian cavalryman, Rudolf Kollinger; at Alice’s request, Marsh had hired him to be major domo at Longlea—even though, to entice Kollinger to private service, Marsh had had to hire as well not only his wife but his mistress. Witty herself, Alice loved brilliant talk, and at Longlea the conversation was as sparkling as the champagne, for she filled the house with politicians and intellectuals—Henry Wallace and Helen Fuller and Walter Lippmann—mixing Potomac and professors in a brilliant weekend salon. She had wanted to create her own world at Longlea—she had wanted a thousand acres, she said, because she “didn’t want any neighbors in hearing distance”—and she had succeeded. “Alice Glass was the most elegant woman I ever met,” says Oltorf. “And Longlea was the most elegant home I ever stayed in.” Arnold Genthe, the noted New York society photographer, who for years came regularly to Longlea, first as a guest and then to practice his profession—to spend day after day taking pictures of Alice because, he said, she was the “most beautiful woman” he had ever seen—asked that his ashes be buried at Longlea after he died because it was the “most beautiful place” he had ever seen.