Robert Caro. The Years of Lyndon Johnson

“Though George Brown wasn’t surprised by Marsh’s offer, he was surprised by the response it received.  Johnson thanked Marsh, polite, ingratiating and deferential as he always was with the older man.  But he was also, Brown recalls, quite firm.  He would like to think the offer over, he said, but he felt almost certain he was going to have to decline with thanks.  I can’t be an oil man, he said; if the public knew I had oil interests, it would kill me politically.

“All that week, Lyndon Johnson considered the offer – in a setting that emphasized what he would be giving up if he declined it.  The Greenbrier [Hotel in the mountains of West Virginia] – with its immense, colonnaded main House rearing up, gleaming white, in the midst of 6,500 acres of lush lawns and serene gardens, its vast,  marble-floored ballroom in which guests danced under huge cut-glass chandeliers, its cupolaed Spring House, around which, every afternoon, chilled champagne was served at canopied tables, its arcade lined with expensive shops, its indoor swimming pool as big as a lake, its battalions of green-liveried servants, its fleet of limousines which met guests arriving at a nearby station in their private railroad cars – was, as Holiday magazine put it, ‘opulent America at its richest,’ the distillation of all that was available in the United States to the wealthy, and not to others.  As the three men lay every morning on their blanket, which had been spread on a slope in front of their accommodations – a row of white cottages, set away from the main building for privacy, which were the resort’s most expensive – Johnson discussed the offer with Brown, telling him details of his life he had often told him before:  about the terrible poverty of his youth, about his struggle to go to college – and about the fact (which, Brown felt, preyed constantly on his mind) that after three years in Congress, three years, moreover, in which he had accumulated, thanks to President Roosevelt’s friendship, far more than three years’ worth of power, he still had nothing – not a thousand dollars, he said – in the bank.  Again and again he spoke to Brown of his fear (a fear which, Brown believed, tormented him) of ending up like his father, who had also been an elected official – six times elected to the Texas State legislature – but had died penniless.  He talked repeatedly about his realization that a seat in Congress was no hedge against that fate; so many times since he had come to Washington, he said, he had seen former Congressmen, men who had once sat in the great Chamber as he was sitting now, but who had lost their seats – working in poorly paid or humiliating jobs.  Again and again, he harked back to one particular incident he could not get out of his mind:  while riding an elevator in the Capitol one day, he had struck up a conversation with the elevator operator – who had said that he had once been a Congressman, too.  He didn’t want to end up an elevator operator, Johnson said.  Accepting Marsh’s offer would free him from such fears forever – Brown could see that Johnson had not misunderstood the offer, that he was aware he had been offered great wealth.  But again and again Johnson returned to the statement he had made when Marsh had first made the offer:  “it would kill me politically.”

“George Brown had been working closely with Johnson for three years; Johnson’s initial nomination to congress, in 1937, had, in fact, been brought about to ensure an immensely complicated transaction with a very simple central point:  the firm in which George and his brother Herman were the principals – Brown & Root, Inc. – was building a dam near Austin under an unauthorized arrangement with the federal government, and it needed a Congressman who could get the arrangement authorized.  Johnson had succeeded in doing so – the Browns made millions of dollars from that federal contract – and ever since he had been trying to make them more, an effort that had recently been crowned with success by the award to Brown & Root of the contract for a gigantic United States Navy base at Corpus Christi.  Having worked with Johnson so long, Brown felt he knew him – and knew how important money was to him, how anxious he was to obtain it.  He sensed, moreover, that this anxiety was increasing, a belief nurtured not only by the growing intensity of Johnson’s pleas that the Browns find him a business of his own, but by a story circulating among Johnson’s intimates:  several months before, at a party, Johnson had introduced two men, and one of them had later purchased a piece of Austin real estate from the other.  The seller, a local businessman, had been astonished when the Congressman approached him one evening and asked for a ‘finder’s fee’ for the ‘role’ he had played in the transaction.  Telling Johnson that he hadn’t played any role beyond the social introduction, he had refused to give him anything, and had considered the matter closed; the transaction, he recalls, was small, and the finder’s fee would not have amounted to “more than a thousand dollars, if that.’  When, therefore, he opened the front door of his home at seven the next morning to pick up his newspaper, he was astonished to see his
Congressman sitting on the curb, waiting to ask him again for the money.  And when he again explained to Johnson that he wasn’t entitled to a fee, ‘Lyndon started – well, really, to beg me for it – and when I refused, I thought he was going to cry.’  Brown, knowing how desperate Johnson had recently been over a thousand dollars, was surprised to see him hesitating over three-quarters of a million.

“He was surprised also by Johnson’s reason for hesitating.  It would kill me politically – what ‘politically’ was Johnson talking about?  Until that week at the Greenbrier, Brown had thought he had measured Johnson’s political ambition – had measured it easily, he thought, for Johnson talked so incessantly about what he wanted out of politics.  He was always saying that he wanted to stay in Congress until a Senate seat opened up, and then run for the Senate.  Well, his congressional district was absolutely safe; being an oil man couldn‘t hurt him there.  And when he ran for the Senate, he would be running in Texas, and being an oil man wouldn’t hurt him in Texas.  For what office, then, would Johnson be ‘killed’ by being an ‘oil man’?

“Only when he asked himself that question, George Brown recalls, did he finally realize, after three years of intimate association with Lyndon Johnson, what Johnson really wanted.  And only when, at the end of that week, Johnson firmly refused Marsh’s offer did Brown realize how much Johnson wanted it.”  (Robert Caro, “Introduction” to The Path to Power (pp. xiv-xvi), Vol. 1 of The Years of Lyndon Johnson.)

“He had noticed something in the State Department briefing cards, he said.  ‘The people I talked to tonight, out of a hundred nations, there are only six of them that have an income of as much as eighty dollars a month.  We don’t really recognize how lucky and fortunate we are until something tragic like this happens to us.  Here is our President shot in the head and his wife holds his skull in her lap as they drive down the street.  Here is our Governor who looked around and said, “Oh, no, no, no,” and because he turned a bullet just missed his heart.  It went down through his lung into his leg and tore his left hand off.  And, then, yesterday, they take the law into their own hands.  We have to do something to stop that hate, and the way we have to do it is to meet the problem of injustice that exists in this land, meet the problem of inequality that exists in this land, meet the problem of poverty that exists in this land, and the unemployment that exists in this land.’” (Robert Caro, The Passage of Power, p. 420).

“The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act would not be Lyndon Johnson’s only victories in the fight for social justice.  Other bills passed during his Administration made strides toward ending discrimination in public accommodations, in education, employment, even in private housing.  Almost a century after Abraham Lincoln had freed black men and women from slavery, ‘black men and women – and Mexican-American men and women, and indeed most Americans of color – still did not enjoy many of the rights which America supposedly guaranteed its citizens,’ I have written.  ‘It was Lyndon Johnson who gave them those rights.’  Lincoln had been president during the nineteenth century.  During the twentieth century, of all of its seventeen American presidents, ‘Lyndon Baines Johnson was the greatest champion that black Americans and Mexican-Americans and indeed all Americans of color had in the White House, the greatest champion they had in all the halls of government.  With the single exception of Lincoln, he was the greatest champion with a white skin that they had in the history of the Republic.  He was to become the lawmaker for the poor and the downtrodden and the oppressed.  He was to be the bearer of at least a measure of social justice to those to whom social justice had so long been denied, the restorer of at least a measure of dignity to those who so desperately needed to be given some dignity, the redeemer of the promises made to them by America.’  ‘It is time … to write it in the books of law.’  By the time Lyndon Johnson left office, he had done a lot of writing in those books, had become, above all Presidents save Lincoln, the codifier of compassion, the President who, as I have said, ‘wrote mercy and justice into the statute books by which America was governed.’  And as president he had begun to do that writing – had taken a small but crucial, ineluctable, first step toward breaking the century-old barriers that, at the time he took office, still stood against civil rights on Capitol Hill – with that telephone call he had made to Representative Bolling on December 2, 1963; with that decision he had made, so early in his presidency, to support the discharge petition; with that decision he made, when he realized that only one lever was available to him, to lean into it with all his might.”  (Robert Caro, The Passage of Power, pp. 569-70)

(The word “magisterial” was surely invented to describe Robert Caro’s eloquent, monumental, and galvanizing account of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, 4 volumes, 3,388 pages, and 36 years in the making -- with one, or two, more volumes to go.  Having won the Pulitzer Prize for The Power Broker, about the New York urban planner and titan Robert Moses, Caro has continued his obsessive fascination with the nature and levers of power in this multi-volume biography of the 37^th President of the United States:  The Path to Power (1982), an account of the tall, awkward Johnson’s move from the hard-scrabble Texas hill country to the House of Congress, winning the National Book Critics Circle Award (Caro, not Johnson); Means of Ascent (1990), a gripping account of how Johnson stole his first Senate seat with an 87-vote margin, winning the same award again; Master of the Senate (2002), winner of Caro’s second Pulitzer Prize as well as the National Book Award, beginning with a 100-page account of the history of the Senate and telling the story of how Johnson became its youngest majority leader, turning a moribund institution into a force to be reckoned with, maneuvering to passage the first civil rights legislation since 1875; and, ten years later, The Passage of Power (2012), which, after describing Johnson’s wretched powerlessness as Vice President, while in the shadow of JFK, spends the second half of its 700 pages recording in riveting detail what it was that Johnson accomplished in the 47 days between JFK’s assassination and his State of the Union address the following January, achieving critical tax cut and civil rights legislation while “yanking the bit out of Congress’s teeth” (p. 601).

We despised him back then.  “Hey, Hey, LBJ!  How many kids did you kill today?!” chanted the protesters.  I still remember dancing, if not in the streets, alongside the freeway in Wisconsin or Minnesota, when my wife and I heard the incredible news, that Johnson had decided not to run for a second term in 1968.  So it has come as a real revelation to discover the shadows of light and dark, the streaks of ugliness and the wealth of compassion that made of him, finally, neither an ogre nor a hero, but a human being who used power ruthlessly, at times for his own sake, but at times as well for the sake of good.

“Caro has learned about Johnson’s rages, his ruthlessness, his lies, his bribes, his insecurities, his wheedling, his groveling, his bluster, his sycophancy,” writes Charles McGrath in a recent article in the New York Times Magazine entitled “Robert Caro is a Dinosaur,” but he also writes of “his charm, his kindness, his streak of compassion, his friends, his enemies, his girlfriends, his gofers and bagmen, his table manners, his drinking habits….”  “If Caro’s Moses is an operatic character – a city-transforming Faust,” McGrath concludes, “his Johnson is a Shakespearean one:  Richard, III, Lear, Iago and Cassio all rolled into one.  You practically feel Caro’s gorge rise when he describes how awful Johnson was in college, wheeling and dealing, blackmailing fellow students and sucking up to the faculty, or when he describes the vicious negative [Senate] campaign Johnson waged against Coke Stevenson.  But then a volume later, describing Johnson’s championing of civil rights legislation, he seems to warm to his subject all over again.”

Already widely acknowledged as the greatest political biography of the century, Robert Caro’s Years of Lyndon Johnson is simply magnificent – easily one of the half dozen greatest works that I have had the pleasure of reading.  The shadows of Vietnam loom ahead.)