The Envelopes, Please...

Eight years after his death, Lyndon Johnson remains one of the most compelling, infuriating and least understood visionaries ever to fill the presidency. In the October issue of the Atlantic, Biographer Robert Caro details the darker side of L.B. J. He charges that Johnson was sent "envelopes stuffed with cash" while he was Vice President, and that as President, Johnson misused the power of his office to build a personal fortune. Johnson, writes Caro, "died with the American people still ignorant not only of the dimensions of his greed but of its intensity."

The charge that as Vice President Johnson was sent, through one of his aides, a $50,000 cash contribution is not new, even though the Atlantic issued a press release touting the disclosure. Gulf Oil Lobbyist Claude Wild Jr. testified in 1975 that he made such political donations. Caro says that his three-volume biography -- the 30,000-word article was excerpted from the first volume, to be published next fall -- will be extensively footnoted. His book The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, which won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for biography, is meticulously documented.

Johnson began receiving large contributions from lobbyists representing the new energy-and-technology wealth of the Southwest while a Congressman, Caro writes, and he built his political power by distributing the money among other Democrats in return for their allegiance. When he became President in 1963, he put his assets into a "blind trust" and publicly relinquished control of them. Caro, however, asserts that Johnson had private telephone lines installed in the Oval Office linking him to attorneys administering the trust, and that he would spend several hours a day directing his business affairs.

"Johnson wouldn't take a bribe," says George Reedy, his former press secretary.

"But he would take money for campaign committees. There's not a single major politician of the period who didn't." Large cash contributions to campaign funds were legal in those preWatergate days. Donald Thomas, one of Johnson's former lawyers, concedes that the President kept in touch with his investments.

Adds Reedy: "He had more telephones in his office than there are at Bell Labs."

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