The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  So long as Roosevelt was still alive—in power—the change was muted. The sentiments Johnson expressed in Texas, 1,600 miles from Washington, were not expressed in the capital, except to a small clique which revolved around Corcoran, now ousted by the President from the circles of official power and already transformed, with remarkable speed, into a lobbyist growing rich on fees from some of the country’s most reactionary businessmen who hired Tommy the Cork to help them circumvent the laws he had written. By 1942, Charles Marsh was to say in dismay that both Corcoran and Johnson had “reached the conclusion that the public is now tired of the New Deal and they must be given something new.” Corcoran arranged for Johnson to deliver in Portland, Oregon, a speech that, according to Marsh, “kicks the New Deal into a cocked hat.” At the last moment, Johnson edited out most of the anti-New Deal rhetoric, but a few paragraphs remained to give the tone. The speech was delivered—on December 8, 1942—at farewell ceremonies for the obsolete battleship Oregon, which was being scrapped to provide steel for the war effort. Johnson said there was other scrapping to be done as well: of a government that, he said, had grown too big. Many Depression-era government agencies, such as “these old domestic museum pieces, the PWA, FHA and WPA,” he said, “have now outlived their usefulness,” as have “men who have become entrenched in power without making or keeping themselves fit for the exercise of that power, men who love their country and would die for it—but not until their own dangerously outdated notions have caused others to die for it first.

  What about over-staffed, overstuffed government that worries along like a centipede? [he demanded]. … While we work and fight to end the career of the paperhanger of Berlin, what are we doing about the careers of our artists in paperhanging, who plaster us with forms and blanks and hem us in with red tape? … The roll of candidates, human and otherwise, for our national wartime scrap heap, is too long to be called here. Scrap them we must. End the entrenchment of the unfit we must. Break the hold of dead hands we must. … We are wound and wound in little threads like a spider’s web.

  In 1944, during the anti-Roosevelt revolt by the reactionary Texas Regulars, Johnson sided with his state’s New Dealers, but, with Wirtz’s help, he tried frantically to keep his role in the fight as minimal as possible, disguising it so successfully that after this battle the disgusted Bill Kittrell, another Texas liberal who had backed Johnson in the belief that Johnson was also a liberal, began telling friends: “Lyndon will be found on no barricades.”

  Muted though it was during Roosevelt’s life, however, the change had come very early—within a few months after the 1941 senatorial campaign, in fact. Even before he sent out public signals with his vote on the Dies Committee, he had, in a series of quiet meetings arranged by Roy Miller and Herman Brown and Alvin Wirtz and Ed Clark, let key figures in the Texas plutocracy know what Miller and Brown and Wirtz and Clark already knew: that, as Roy’s son, Dale, puts it: “He gave the impression of being much, much more liberal than he actually was—his manner personified the New Deal—he looked the part: he was young, dynamic, outgoing. But… he gave a lot more impression of being with the New Deal than he actually was. …” Or as George Brown says, “He [said he] was for the Niggers, he was for labor, he was for the little boys, but by God … you get right down to the nut-cutting, he was practical.” “Basically,” George Brown says, “Lyndon was more conservative, more practical than people understood”—and by the mid-1940’s, Brown says, in Texas at least, “people,” the people who mattered, did understand. “You could see what side he was really on, then.”

  On the day of Roosevelt’s death, Johnson’s reporter friend William S. White wrote that he found the young Congressman in “a gloomy Capitol corridor,” with “tears in his eyes,” and “a white cigarette holder”—similar to Roosevelt’s—clamped in “a shaking jaw.” He told White that when the news came, “I was just looking up at a cartoon on the wall—a cartoon showing the President with that cigarette holder and his jaw stuck out like it always was. He had his head cocked back, you know. And then I thought of all the little folks, and what they had lost.” He told White, “He was just like a Daddy to me always; he always talked to me just that way. …” Then, White wrote, Johnson cried out, “God! God! How he could take it for us all!”

  But the King was dead. The day after Roosevelt’s death, one of Johnson’s secretaries, Dorothy Nichols, asked him: “He’s gone; what do we have now?” “Honey,” Johnson replied, “we’ve got Truman. … There is going to be the damnedest scramble for power in this man’s town for the next two weeks that anyone ever saw in their lives.”

  With Roosevelt dead, Johnson went public with his change of allegiance. Because he had difficulty erasing the earlier pro-Roosevelt image that he had so painstakingly created, in 1947 he called in another friendly reporter, Tex Easley, to correct it, and after an exclusive interview with the Congressman, Easley wrote that while “People all over Texas formed an impression over the years that Lyndon Johnson personified the New Deal … it would be an error to tag Johnson now as a strong New Dealer. That may come as a surprise, but it is true.” Except in certain limited, specific, areas of governmental action—Johnson mentioned three: “development of water power, REA, farm-to-market roads”—he wasn’t a New Dealer, Johnson told Easley; “I think the term ‘New Dealer’ is a misnomer,” he said. “I believe in free enterprise, and I don’t believe in the government doing anything that the people can do privately. Whenever it’s possible, government should get out of business.” As a liberal reporter was later to put it: “Just roads and rural electrification? This could have been Cotton Ed Smith talking, or Jim Eastland. It was certainly no liberal talking.” On another, later, occasion, he sought to excuse his early support of the New Deal by saying, “I was a young man of adventure with more guts than brains. …”

  If in public he was attacking only certain aspects of the New Deal, in private—at least in Texas—he was going much further. He was not a New Dealer, he said, never had been. He had supported Roosevelt, he said, only to get things for Texas. In private, in fact, he was now opposing the New Deal almost as enthusiastically as he had once supported it. During his 1948 senatorial campaign, he supported few, if any, of the programs that had evolved out of, and were carrying forward, the New Deal. He ran not as a New Dealer, but, to the extent possible because of his earlier statements, as an anti-New Dealer. And during the campaign, he attacked much of what was left of the New Deal. The shift in his views can be symbolized in a single issue: labor. In his first campaign for the Senate, he had told Texas labor unions: “I come to you as a friend of labor.” In his second, he came as an enemy—open and bitter. In 1948, it wasn’t Pappy O’Daniel who attacked the “big labor racketeers” and “racketeering Communist [union] leaders who take orders only from Moscow.” Those words were Johnson’s words. Nor was the change limited to labor. Once he had said—over and over, in speeches, in pamphlets, in posters and on huge billboards—that he was “100 percent” for Roosevelt and the New Deal. Now, he still said that he had supported a percentage of New Deal legislation—but the percentage he cited was not 100, or even 50; on twenty-seven major pieces of New Deal legislation, he said, he had voted for the New Deal thirteen times. The Dallas Chamber of Commerce, one of the most reactionary business groups in the United States, checked out his record—and found it so satisfactorily conservative that it enthusiastically endorsed him.

  The change may have come as a shock to Harold Young and Bill Kittrell; it might have shocked Pa Watson, who had considered Lyndon Johnson the “perfect Roosevelt man.” But it would have come as no surprise to the young men who had lived in the Dodge Hotel with Lyndon Johnson, and who had said, “Lyndon goes which way the wind blows.” His relationship with the President and the New Deal demonstrated how well these young men had understood him. Before the paint had faded on the billboards proclaiming his loyalty to Franklin D, Lyndon B had turned against him.

  Debts

  I SOMETIMES NOTIC
E, when reading Acknowledgments sections in other biographies, that the biographers have had the assistance of whole teams of research associates, research assistants and perhaps a typist or two. But I never feel envious of them. I have Ina.

  My wife, Ina Joan Caro, has been all these things—in spades—during the seven years it has taken to complete this book, as she was all these things during the seven years it took me to write my first book. On the first book, she made herself an expert on great urban public works to help with my research into the life of Robert Moses. On this book, she made herself an expert on rural electrification and soil conservation, and then spent long days driving back and forth over the Hill Country searching out elderly farm wives who could explain to her—and through her, to me—the difference that these innovations had made in their lives after Lyndon Johnson brought the innovations to the Hill Country. Searching through smalltown libraries, Ina has unearthed copies of weekly newspapers of the 1920’s and 1930’s that the librarians swore no longer existed. Her incomparable knowledge of big-city library facilities in New York and Washington gives her a seemingly magical ability to say in an instant where a piece of information, no matter how recondite, can be found. And these are just some of the many areas in which, with perseverance and ingenuity, she has been invaluable in the research of this work. In addition, she has typed the massive manuscript—typed some chapters over and over—without a single word of complaint. And she has provided as well not only support and encouragement but many keen critical insights. Long years of gracious selflessness—Shakespeare’s line on the dedication page expresses better than I can what they have meant to me. She has been my sole companion now on two long journeys. I could not ask for a better one.

  The more I learn about publishers, the more I realize how extraordinary mine is. Robert Gottlieb has stood beside me now during two books: a tower of strength in his belief in my work, in his perceptive criticism, in his never-failing encouragement and support. And in an era in which detailed editing of even short manuscripts is rapidly becoming a lost art, Bob Gottlieb not only gave this long manuscript detailed editing, but editing of the unique keenness and brilliance that make him an artist in his field. The grinding pressures of his responsibilities as president of Knopf did not deter him from lavishing on this book his time, his energy and his genius.

  Assisting Bob Gottlieb on this book, as she assisted him on The Power Broker, is Knopf’s Katherine A. Hourigan. Among the assets she brings to an author is a dedication to making even thick books handsome and readable. Her perceptive editorial criticism is characterized as well by an unflinching integrity. For the endless hours she has devoted to this book I shall forever be grateful.

  AMONG THE MANY OTHER PEOPLE at Knopf to whom I am indebted, I must thank especially Lesley Krauss, Virginia Tan and my old friends Nina Bourne, Jane Becker Friedman, Bill Loverd and Martha Kaplan.

  Perhaps because my books take so long to write, sons as well as fathers work on them. Andrew L. Hughes has long provided me with valued literary as well as legal advice. And on this book, the man handling the ominously large difficulties in production (and handling them impressively indeed) has been Andrew W. Hughes.

  OVER THE YEARS, my agent, Lynn Nesbit, has always been there when I needed her. If I have never told her how much her help has meant to me, let me do so now.

  I AM GRATEFUL to many members of the staff of the Lyndon B. Johnson Library for their assistance in my research there. In addition to the Library’s assistant director, Charles Corkran, they are Mike Gillette, Linda Hanson, David Humphrey, Joan Kennedy, Tina Lawson, E. Philip Scott, Nancy Smith and Robert Tissing.

  Claudia Anderson, a true historian in the thoroughness of her work and in her devotion to the truth, was particularly helpful in guiding me through the Library’s collections.

  My thanks also to H. G. Dulaney, Director of the Sam Rayburn Library in Bonham, Texas; to Joseph W. Marshall, supervisory librarian of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York; to Audray Bateman of the Austin-Travis County Collection of the Austin Public Library; Paul K. Goode of the James C. Jernigan Library at Texas A&I, in Kingsville; John Tiff of the National Park Service in Johnson City; Linda Kuban of the Barker Texas History Center; and to Susan Bykofsky.

  SCORES OF TEXAS POLITICIANS and political observers gave generously of their time in guiding me through the intricacies of that state’s politics in the 1920’s, ’30’s and ’40’s, but a few deserve special mention. They include Ann Fears Crawford, Vann Kennedy, the late D. B. Hardeman; Arthur Stehling; Sim Gideon and Judge Tom C. Ferguson, who took me step by step through the formation of the Lower Colorado River Authority and the construction of the Marshall Ford Dam, and E. Babe Smith, who taught me much about rural electrification, and its social and political uses.

  My deepest gratitude goes to Edward A. Clark. Over a period of more than three years, Mr. Clark, Lyndon Johnson’s Ambassador to Australia and a dominant figure in Texas politics for more than a quarter of a century, devoted evening after evening to furthering my political education. They were evenings that I will always cherish.

  The town of Marlin, Texas, has produced two persons who observed Texas politics with keen eyes, and can speak about those politics with perception. They are Mary Louise Young and Frank C. (Posh) Oltorf, an historian in his own right, and a most gracious gentleman and host. Thanks to them, and to Ronnie Oltorf, I will always think of Marlin with fondness.

  MANY OF Lyndon Johnson’s boyhood companions were of great assistance to me, but I want especially to thank Truman Fawcett, Wilma Green Fawcett and Clayton Stribling for many days of help. Above all, I want to thank Ava Johnson Cox. Witty and wise, and very knowledgeable indeed about Sam Ealy and Rebekah Baines Johnson, and about their son Lyndon, her favorite cousin, she has contributed immeasurably to this book.

  A Note on Sources

  BECAUSE LYNDON JOHNSON would have been only sixty-seven years old when, in 1975, I began my research on his life, most of his contemporaries were still alive. This made it possible to find out what he was like while he was growing up from the best possible sources: those who grew up with him. And it also makes it possible to clear away in this book the misinformation that has surrounded the early life of Lyndon Johnson.

  The extent of this misinformation, the reason it exists, and the importance of clearing it away, so that the character of our thirty-sixth President will become clear, became evident to me while researching his years at college. The articles and biographies which have dealt with these years have in general portrayed Johnson as a popular, even charismatic, campus figure. The oral histories of his classmates collected by the Lyndon Johnson Library portray him in the same light. In the early stages of my research, I had no reason to think there was anything more to the story. Indeed, when one of the first of his classmates whom I interviewed, Henry Kyle, told me a very different story, I believed that because Kyle had been defeated by Johnson in a number of campus encounters, I was hearing only a prejudiced account by an embittered man, and did not even bother typing up my notes of the interview.

  Then, however, I began to interview other classmates.

  Finding them was not easy. For years, Johnson’s college, Southwest Texas State Teachers College at San Marcos, had not had an actively functioning alumni association and had lost track of many of its former students, who seemed to be scattered, on lonely farms and ranches, all across Texas, and, indeed, the United States. When I found them, I was told the old anecdotes that had become part of the Lyndon Johnson myth. But over and over again, the man or woman I was interviewing would tell me that these anecdotes were not the whole story. When I asked for the rest of it, they wouldn’t tell it. A man named Vernon Whiteside could have told me, they said, but, they said, they had heard that Whiteside was dead.

  One day, however, I phoned Horace Richards, a Johnson classmate who lived in Corpus Christi, to arrange to drive down from Austin to see him. Richards said that there was indeed a great deal more to the
story of Lyndon Johnson at college than had been told, but that he wouldn’t tell me unless Vernon Whiteside would too. But Whiteside was dead, I said. “Hell, no,” Richards said. “He’s not dead. He was here visiting me just last week.”

  Whiteside, it turned out, had moved from his hometown and was traveling in a mobile home. He had been heading for Florida, where he was planning to buy a condominium, Richards said, but Richards didn’t know which city in Florida Whiteside was heading for. All he knew was that the city was north of Miami, and had “beach” in its name.

  I traced Mr. Whiteside to a mobile home court in Highland Beach, Florida (he had, in fact, arrived there only a few hours before I telephoned), flew there to see him, and from him heard for the first time many of the character-revealing episodes of Lyndon Johnson’s career at San Marcos at which the other classmates had hinted. And when I returned to these classmates, they confirmed Whiteside’s account; Richards himself added many details. And they now told additional stories, not at all like the ones they had told before. I managed to locate still other classmates—who had never been interviewed. Mylton (Babe) Kennedy, a key figure in many of these stories, was found in Denver; I interviewed him in a lounge at the airport there. And the portrait of Lyndon Johnson at San Marcos that finally emerged was very different from the one previously sketched.

  This experience was repeated again and again during the seven years spent on this book. Of the hundreds of persons interviewed, scores had never been interviewed before, and the information these persons have provided—in some cases even though they were quite worried about providing it—has helped form a portrait of Lyndon Johnson substantially different from all previous portraits.

  This is true of virtually every stage and significant episode in his life. Lyndon Johnson was fond of talking about the young woman he courted in college, Carol Davis, now Carol Davis Smith. He told at length how, stung by criticism of his family from her father (who he said was a member of the Ku Klux Klan), he vowed (despite her tears and pleading) not to marry her; how he had gotten married (to Lady Bird) before Carol married; how, during his first campaign for Congress he attacked Carol’s father before taking pity on her “agony” as she listened to his speech; how, when he was hospitalized with appendicitis at the climax of his campaign, he awoke to find her standing in the doorway of his hospital room; how she had proven her love for him by telling him she had voted for him. His version of this thwarted romance—a version furnished with vivid details—has been retold repeatedly in biographies of Lyndon Johnson. But none of the authors who repeated it had interviewed Carol Davis. She was there to be interviewed; she still lives in San Marcos. Two of her sisters and several of her friends, and several of Lyndon Johnson’s friends who observed the courtship, were there to be interviewed. When they are, a story emerges that, while indeed poignant and revealing, bears little resemblance to the one Johnson told. (Apart from the central story told in this book, the following minor details in Lyndon Johnson’s own account do not appear to have been correct: that her father was a member of the Ku Klux Klan; that it was Lyndon who decided not to get married; that she pleaded with him to marry her; that he got married first; that she visited him in the hospital; that she voted for him.)