The Passage of Power (3 page)

L
ITTLE OF THAT
potential—those possibilities—was to be realized. This book is not the story of Lyndon Johnson’s five-year presidency as a whole, but only of
its brief first phase, and the longer story will not be a triumphant one. His presidency would, as I have written, be marked by victories: his great personal victory, his election, in November, 1964, to the presidency in his own right by what was then, and, as of this writing almost half a century later, is still, the greatest popular majority ever won by a candidate for the American presidency, and his great legislative victories. Taken as a whole, the bills passed between the beginning of 1964 and the end of 1968 make the Johnson presidency one which saw the legislative realization of many of the noblest aspirations of the liberal spirit in America. Not only the two great
civil rights measures but
Medicare and
Medicaid, and the sixty separate education laws, including the Act that created
Head Start—however inadequately thought through and in some cases flawed and contradictory some of these measures might have been, due to the haste with which he pushed them through, they were laws of which liberals had dreamed for decades, laws that embodied government’s responsibility to fulfill what Johnson’s father, the Populist legislator, believed was the highest duty of government: to help people caught in “the tentacles of circumstance.”

Yet victories would not, as I have written, be the only hallmarks that would make the presidency of Lyndon Johnson vivid in history. Civil rights, the
War on Poverty, Medicare, Head Start—but Vietnam. Vietnam and the credibility gap. The loss of trust in the presidency, of belief in what the President was saying, escalated under Richard Nixon, Johnson’s successor, but it began under Johnson.

And there were other casualties. The cost of the
Vietnam War had to be borne by the same national treasury that was funding the War on Poverty, and the implications of that fact for liberal dreams would be devastating. Monumental as were some of the achievements of Lyndon Johnson’s Administration, they were as nothing beside the dreams he had enunciated in that first State of the Union speech. Although there would be many reasons that the poverty war was lost, one of the main reasons was the Asian war.

T
HE TRANSITION PERIOD
on which we are concentrating in this volume contains the seeds of all that was to follow. Few as they were, the decisions that Lyndon Johnson made about Vietnam during these seven weeks (he was, as will be seen, making every effort to keep them few, to tamp down Vietnam as a political issue until after the November, 1964, election) nonetheless display the secrecy and deceit that were to play such a large role in making Vietnam—and Johnson’s presidency—a tragic drama. But the story of Lyndon Johnson during the opening, transition, weeks of his presidency is a triumphant story, one in which it is possible to glimpse the full possibilities of presidential power—of that power exercised by a master in the use of power—in a way that is visible at only a few times in American history.

W
HEN HE WAS YOUNG
—seventeen and eighteen years old—Lyndon Johnson worked on a road gang that was building a highway (an unpaved highway: roads in the isolated, impoverished Texas Hill Country weren’t paved in the 1920s) between Johnson City and Austin.

With little mechanical equipment available, the road was being built almost entirely by hand, and his job, when he wasn’t half of a pick-and-shovel team with
Ben Crider, a burly friend—six years older—from Johnson City, was “driving” a “fresno,” a heavy two-handled metal scoop with a sharpened front edge, that was pulled by four mules. Standing behind the scoop, between its handles, as the mules strained forward to force the scoop through the hard Hill Country caliche soil, he would push as they pulled. Since he needed a hand for each handle, the reins were tied together and wrapped around his back, so for this work—hard even for older men; for a tall, skinny, awkward teenager, it was, the other men recall, “backbreaking labor,” “too heavy” for Lyndon—Lyndon Johnson was, really, in harness with the mules. But at lunch hour each day, as the gang sat eating—in summer in whatever shade they could find as protection from the blazing Hill Country sun, in winter huddled around a fire (it would get so cold, Crider recalls, that “you had to build a fire to thaw your hands before you could handle a pick and shovel … build us a fire and thaw and work all day”)—Lyndon would, in the words of another member of the gang, “talk big” to the older men. “He had big ideas.… He wanted to do something big with his life.” And he was quite specific about what he wanted to do: “I’m going to be President of the United States one day,” he predicted.

Poverty and backbreaking work—clearing cedar on other men’s farms for two dollars a day, or chopping and picking cotton: on your hands and knees all day beneath that searing sun—were woven deep in the fabric of Lyndon Johnson’s youth, as were humiliation and fear: he was coming home at night to a house to which other Johnson City families brought charity in the form of cooked dishes because there was no money in that house to buy food; to a house
on which, moreover, his family was having such difficulty paying the taxes and mortgage that they were afraid it might not be theirs much longer. But woven into it also was that prediction.

In many ways, his whole life would be built around that prediction: around a climb toward that single, far-off goal. As a young congressman in Washington, he was careful not to mention that ambition to the rising young New Dealers with whom he was allying himself, but they were aware of it anyway. James H. Rowe Jr., Franklin Roosevelt’s aide, who spent more time with Johnson than the others, says,
“From
the day he got here, he wanted to be President.” When old friends from Texas visited him, sometimes his determination burst out of him despite himself, as if he could not contain it.
“By
God,
I’ll be President someday!” he exclaimed one evening when he was alone with
Welly Hopkins. And an incident in 1940 showed the Texans how much he wanted the prize he sought, how much he was willing to sacrifice to attain it.

Lack of money had been the cause of so many of the insecurities of his youth, and his election to Congress, far from soothing those fears, had seemed only to intensify them: he talked incessantly about how his father, who had been an elected official himself—a six-term member of the
Texas House of Representatives—had ended up as a state bus inspector, and had died penniless; he didn’t want to end up like his father, he said. He talked about how he kept seeing around Washington former congressmen who had lost their seats—as, he said, he would inevitably one day lose his—and were working in low-paying, demeaning jobs; over and over again he related how once, while he was riding in an elevator in the Capitol, the elevator operator had told him that
he
had been a congressman. Hungry for money, he had already started accepting, indeed soliciting, financial favors from businessmen who wanted favors from him, and had been pleading with two important businessmen—
George R. Brown of the Texas contracting firm of
Brown & Root and the immensely wealthy Austin publisher, real estate magnate and oilman
Charles Marsh—to “find” him a business in which he could make a little money of his own. So when, one autumn day in 1940, the three men—Johnson, Brown and Marsh—were vacationing together at the luxurious Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia, lying on a blanket in front of their adjoining cottages, and Marsh offered Lyndon Johnson a business in which he could make a lot of money, the two businessmen were sure the congressman would accept it. Marsh, who, in Brown’s words, “loved Lyndon like a son,” told him he could have his share in a lucrative oilfield partnership, a share worth three-quarters of a million dollars, without even putting up any money; he could “pay for it out of his profits each year.” To the surprise of both men, however, Johnson said that he would have to think about the offer—and after a week he turned it down. “I can’t be an oilman,” he said; if the public knew he had oil interests, “it would kill me politically.”

Believing they understood Johnson’s political ambitions—Lyndon was always telling them about how he wanted to stay in the House until a Senate seat
opened up, and then run for the Senate, about how the Senate seat was his ultimate goal in politics; never had he mentioned any other office, nor did he mention one during his week at the Greenbrier—Marsh and Brown were shocked by his refusal. Being known as an oilman couldn’t hurt him in his congressional district, or in a Senate race in oil-dominated Texas. But then they realized that there was in fact one office for which he would be “killed” by being an “oilman.” And then they understood that while Lyndon Johnson might hunger for money, that hunger was as nothing beside his hunger for something else.

And unlike others—the many, many others—in Washington who wanted the same thing he did, who had set their sights on the same goal, Lyndon Baines Johnson, born August 27, 1908, had mapped out a path to that goal, and he refused to be diverted from it.

The path ran only through Washington—it was paved with national, not state power—and it had only three steps: House of Representatives, Senate, presidency. And after he had fought his way onto it—winning a seat in the House in 1937 in a desperate, seemingly hopeless campaign—he could not be persuaded by anyone, not even Franklin Roosevelt, to turn off it. In 1939, the President offered to appoint him director of the
New Deal’s Rural Electrification Administration. The directorship of a nationwide agency, particularly one as fast-growing, and politically important, as the REA, was not the kind of job offered to many men only thirty years old, but Johnson turned the offer down; he was afraid, he said, of being “sidetracked.” In 1946, he was urged by his party to run for the governorship of Texas. If he did, he knew, his election was all but assured, and at the time his path seemed to have reached a dead end in Washington: stuck in the House now for almost a decade, with little chance of any imminent advancement to its hierarchy, he seemed to have no chance of stepping into a Senate seat. In the 435-member House, he was still only one of the crowd of junior congressmen, and, as a woman who worked with him when he was young put it, he
“couldn’t
stand not being somebody—just could not
stand
it.” But he still wouldn’t leave the road he had chosen as the best road to the prize he wanted so badly. The governorship, he explained to aides, could never be more than a
“detour
” on his “route,” a detour that might turn into a
“dead
end.” (Some years later, when his longtime assistant
John Connally decided to run for the governorship, Johnson told him he was making a mistake in leaving Washington.
“
Here’s
where the power is,” he said.) In 1948, still stuck in the House, he was about to turn forty, and a new assistant, Horace Busby, saw that
“He
believed, and he believed it really quite sincerely … that when a man reached forty, it was all over. And there was no bill ever passed by Congress that bore his name; he had done very little in his life.” Hopeless though his ambition might seem, however, Lyndon Johnson still clung to it. Instructing Busby to refer to him in press releases as
“LBJ,” he explained:
“FDR
–LBJ, FDR–LBJ. Do you get it? What I want is for them to start thinking of me in terms of initials.” It was only presidents whom headline writers and the American people referred to by their initials;
“he
was just so determined that someday he would be known as LBJ,” Busby recalls.

That year, frantic to escape from the trap that the House had become for him, he entered a Senate race he seemed to have no chance of winning; during the campaign, and during post-campaign vote-counting, he went beyond even the notoriously elastic boundaries of Texas politics, and won.

But the Senate, into which he was sworn in January, 1949, was also only a step toward his goal, only the second rung on a three-rung ladder.

It was a rung on which he seemed very much at home. Lyndon Johnson was, as I have written, a reader of men. He had promulgated guidelines for such reading, which he tried to teach his young staff members.
“Watch
their hands, watch their eyes,” he told them. “Read eyes. No matter what a man is saying to you, it’s not as important as what you can read in his eyes.” Teaching them to peruse men’s weaknesses, he said that “the most important thing a man has to tell you is what he’s not telling you; the most important thing he has to say is what he’s trying not to say”—and therefore it was important not to let a conversation end until you learned what the man wasn’t saying, until you “got it out of him.” Johnson himself read with a genius that couldn’t be taught, with a gift that was so instinctive that one aide,
Robert G. (Bobby) Baker, calls it a “sense.” “He seemed to
sense
each man’s individual price and the commodity he preferred as coin.” And Johnson also had a gift for using what he read. His longtime lawyer and viceroy in Texas,
Edward A. Clark, was to say,
“I
never saw anything like it. He would listen
at them
 … and in five minutes he could get a man to think, ‘I like you, young fellow. I’m going to help you.’ ” Watching Lyndon Johnson “play” older men,
Thomas G. Corcoran, the New Deal insider and quite a player of older men himself, was to explain that “He was smiling and deferential, but, hell, lots of guys can be smiling and deferential. Lyndon had one of the most incredible capacities for dealing with older men. He could follow someone’s mind around, and get where it was going before the other fellow knew where it was going.” These gifts served Lyndon Johnson better in small groups—men marveled at his ability to “make liberals think he was one of them, conservatives think he was one of
them
”—since that tactic worked best when there was no member of the other side around to hear. It worked best of all when he was alone with one man. “Lyndon was the greatest salesman one on one who ever lived,”
George Brown was to say. These gifts had gone largely wasted in the House, whose 435 members “could be dealt with only in bodies and droves,” but the first time Lyndon Johnson walked into the Senate Chamber after his election to that body, he muttered, in a voice so low that his aide
Walter Jenkins, standing beside him, felt he was “speaking to himself,” that the Senate was
“the
right size.”