The Making of a President

By Donald Morrison

THE YEARS OF LYNDON JOHNSON: THE PATH TO POWER by Robert A. Caro; Knopf; 882 pages; $19.95

Even before it was published, this book, like so much else about Lyndon Johnson, was making people angry. Robert A. Caro, whose awesomely detailed, 1,246-page biography of Builder-Bureaucrat Robert Moses, The Power Broker, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975, has been toiling for seven years on a three-part study of the 36th President. Excerpts from the first volume, which takes Johnson from his hardscrabble beginnings up to his World War II service, began appearing a year ago in the Atlantic Monthly. In one such episode, Caro disclosed that Johnson had for years accepted "envelopes stuffed with cash" from backers, even when he was Vice President. A number of L.B.J.'s associates denied the charge strenuously, and Caro has deleted it from Volume I. He has, however, promised to reopen the subject in the second installment, scheduled for completion in two years.

It may take some readers that long to finish this one. As in the Moses book, Caro leaves practically nothing about his man unexamined.*There are seven scholarly pages on the rainfall and soil composition of the Texas hill country in the 19th century. Not for nothing: Caro is explaining why Johnson's farming forebears were doomed to failure despite their heroic labors, a trauma that helped shape the young Lyndon. He began running away from home while still a toddler. As a cousin puts it, "He wanted attention. He wanted to be somebody." After watching his father Sam, an incorruptible six-term state legislator, go broke trying to raise crops in the merciless hill-country dirt, Lyndon opened a propaganda campaign against him. Whenever the boy received a mild thrashing, he would holler loud enough to be heard across Johnson City. He seemed, as Caro puts it, "to be going out of his way to reinforce the impression of his father's brutality." Then, as he did later in life, Johnson also exaggerated reports of his father's drinking, his mother's slovenly housekeeping and the general unhappiness of his upbringing, accounts that are mostly refuted by friends and relatives. Theorizes one: "He wanted people to feel sorry for him."

At Southwest Texas State Teachers College, Johnson was similarly manipulative. He wrote fawning notes to faculty members at the end of his exams and so flattered the college president that the man made Lyndon his assistant. He also stole his first election, a student government contest. L.B.J. was just as smarmy at the next major stop: assistant to Texas Congressman Dick Kleberg. In Washington he cheated his way to victory in another election (for leadership of a group of legislative aides) and carefully cultivated the crowned heads of Congress. Chief among them was House Minority Leader (later Speaker) Sam Rayburn, a fellow Texan who became his beloved mentor, and whom Johnson eventually betrayed in a competition to become Franklin D. Roosevelt's chief operative in Texas. "Lyndon had one of the most incredible capacities for dealing with older men," recalls F.D.R. Brain Truster Tommy Corcoran, whose boss was among those captivated by the Johnson treatment. "He could follow someone's mind around, and get where it was going before the other fellow knew where it was going."

As Caro details, Johnson had decided early on that a dirt-poor boy from Texas could be somebody. After winning a congressional seat of his own in 1937, he was certain that he could go all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Yet for all that unbridled ambition, he proved a lackluster Representative. He made few speeches, introduced no legislation of note and would not fight for the passage of anyone else's. Stymied by the seniority system and generally despised by congressional colleagues, he hit upon a way to gain eminence: those cashstuffed envelopes. Caro says that Johnson took hundreds of thousands of dollars from the newly prosperous oil and construction interests of Texas and channeled the money into Democratic congressional campaigns. "The new power he possessed did not derive from Roosevelt's friendship, or from Rayburn's," writes Caro. "His power was simply the power of money."

Caro's Johnson is, for the most part, a heel. But like many another great man, Johnson failed in his efforts to be thoroughly knavish. As a young teacher in a dusty South Texas hamlet, he drove his Mexican-American students relentlessly, and gave them self-respect and ambitions they had never known. In the book's most touching chapter, Caro describes Johnson's enduring love for Alice Glass, the high-spirited mistress and later the wife of Publisher and Oilman Charles Marsh. Their affair began in 1938, after Alice, then 26, met the tall, jug-eared Congressman, then 29, during a party at Longlea, her regal Virginia estate. He arranged a visa extension at her request for Conductor Erich Leinsdorf, an Austrian Jew fleeing the Nazis. The relationship continued until the 1960s, when Alice grew angry at L.B.J.'s conduct of the Viet Nam War.

Johnson bragged crudely about many liaisons after his 1934 marriage to Lady Bird Taylor, but about Alice he was as silent, Caro writes, "as a young man in love." And uncharacteristically rash: Marsh, the owner of several Texas newspapers and one of Johnson's most influential patrons, was someone he could hardly afford to cross. Luckily for Lyndon, Marsh never caught on. The author quotes a witness to the affair: "That was the only time--the only time--in Lyndon Johnson's whole life that he was pulled off the course that he had set for himself."

Caro leaves Johnson shortly after he lost a 1941 election to fill a vacant Senate seat (overconfident of victory, he allowed an opponent to falsify more returns than he did) and headed off to war, a 33-year-old Navy officer. Thus, nearly 800 pages after this saga begins, L.B.J. has barely set foot on the Path to Power. Does the world really need another endless tome about Lyndon Johnson?

The answer lies perhaps less with Johnson than with Caro. His narrative never stumbles, his prose never flattens. The lengthy sketches of supporting players, like Sam Rayburn and Contractor Herman Brown, are masterly in themselves. And the secret love affairs, cash-stuffed envelopes and other reportorial hand grenades seem to come remarkably often for so long a book on so familiar a subject. But then, as acquaintances, biographers and most Americans at least a few years beyond voting age have long known, Lyndon Johnson seldom failed to surprise. Volume II cannot either. The envelopes, please. --By Donald Morrison

Excerpt

"Alice Glass believed that her passion was reciprocated. According to her intimates, she told them that Johnson and she had discussed marriage. In that era, a divoriced man would be effectively barred from a political career, but, she said, he had told her that he would get a divorce anyway. He had several job offers as a corporate lobbyist in Washington, and he had, she said, promised to accept one of these. Whether or not this was true, the handful of men and women who were aware . . . agree that this relationship was different from other extramarital affairs in which he was a participant. His conduct at Longlea was striking. One [mutual friend], seeing Lyndon and Alice together for the first time, says he could hardly believe his eyes. As Alice sat reading [Edna St. Vincent] Millay in her quiet, throaty voice, he recalls, Johnson sat silent, not saying a word, just drinking in the beautiful woman with the book in her hands. 'I don't believe that Lyndon ever held still for listening to poetry from anyone else,' he says. And although Johnson generally ate, even at Washington dinner parties, as he had always eaten -- scooping up heaping forkfuls of food and cramming them into his wide-open mouth -- at Longlea he made an effort ... to eat in a more normal manner."

*And hardly anything unfootnoted. The book has a five-page "Note on Sources" (largely accounts of how he traced various long-forgotten Johnson friends), a 34-page index and 62 absorbing pages of footnotes. In one, a page long, Caro documents an allegation that Johnson secretly controlled the "blind trust" he established to manage his financial holdings after he assumed the presidency in 1963. The citation also promises more on that subject "in the later volumes."

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