lago of Politics
Caro, Robert A.
BOOKS lago of Politics THE PATH TO POWER by Robert A. Caro Alfred A. Knopf. 882 pp. $19.95. by Bernard D. Nossiter When Lyndon Johnson was at Southwest Texas State Teachers College in the early...
...Johnson's mother was a sensitive, cultivated woman who cared more for books than housekeeping...
...A bright, attractive young woman, Ruth Lewis, stood in the way of Johnson's control...
...he was for the little boys...
...at home, the Texas contractors and oil and gas men who financed his claim had reason to believe he was one of their own...
...he was as practical as anyone...
...Caro is incapable of writing a dull paragraph or missing a link in the chain of politics, money, and public works...
...he provides some material to suggest that there was more to Johnson than a man driven exclusively by a passion to dominate...
...Even today, these pupils speak of Johnson with affection .Again, as the twenty-seven-year-old director of his state's National Youth Administration (NYA), Johnson drove a devoted staff to win projects that would put jobless Texans back in school or provide some income...
...Johnson spent a year teaching English to Mexican-American children...
...The White Stars had clinched three of the seven places, their rivals another three...
...Above all, he fawned on Sam Ray burn, making a home for that fierce, lonely old man, kissing his bald head, captivating the powerful Speaker even as he once betrayed him...
...For Caro, Johnson is an lago of politics, a monstrous figure, unscrupulous, devoted to no principle except lust for domination, incapable of concentrating his fierce energy on any cause but himself...
...He threatened to expose her in the campus paper he now controlled...
...This almost trivial incident assumes large proportions in Robert Caro's brilliant biography, The Path to Power, the first of three exhaustive volumes that promise to relate in loving detail the scurrilous anecdotes marking Johnson's rise...
...A former correspondent for The Washington Post, Nossiter is the author of "The Myth-makers, " "Soft State," and "Britain...
...In tears, she withdrew, and Johnson's candidate won her place...
...One, of course, was money...
...He was for the niggers...
...he threw himself into the task with such energy that even the janitor caught the fever...
...his freshman not only slipped through the authorization after the fact but persuaded the White House to legalize the unlawful and then even expand the project...
...But Brown had made a good investment...
...He fawned on Franklin Roosevelt and charmed the charmer, although Johnson's remarkable collection of funds from the oil and gas independents to save House Democrats in 1940 was a practical cause for Presidential favor...
...His Brown & Root construction firm was building a multimillion dollar dam in Johnson's district, and the project had neither been authorized by the Congress nor was it legal, since it was rising on state, not Federal, land...
...by Bernard D. Nossiter When Lyndon Johnson was at Southwest Texas State Teachers College in the early Depression years, his classmates called him "Bullshit Johnson" because the truth was not in him...
...Johnson's failure to make speeches or introduce bills is cynical, an attempt to play safe...
...In an incautious moment, Lewis had once briefly passed herself off as a student at the more prestigious Texas University, and word got back to the young Johnson...
...He taught his district to want the benefits he succeeded in bringing to them...
...He flattered his college president to win the best paying job and considerable patronage on the campus at San Marcos...
...In Caro's splendidly documented account—this first volume covers only Johnson's first thirty-three years, to 1941— Bernard D. Nossiter currently covers the United Nations for The New York Times...
...his father was a Populist state legislator who fought the interests and resisted the lobbyists' "beefsteak, booze, and blondes...
...Herman Brown poured lavish sums into what was then a staggering $100,000 campaign to gain Johnson his first Congressional seat in 1937...
...But Caro is scrupulous...
...Envy drove him to revenge against the football players and other campus leaders who were admired and dated the prettiest girls...
...No post was too small for Johnson's grasp...
...Blackmailing a student foreshadows the uninhibited treachery, money, and manipulation of prominent men that propelled Johnson from poverty to power and wealth...
...Caro has drawn a demonic portrait, a creature almost beyond belief...
...The young Johnson organized a secret society, the White Stars, to take over every elective office on the impoverished Hill Country campus...
...But if in his next two volumes the welfare measures of the Great Society and the fulfillment of the civil rights agenda are attributed to the politics of Iago, something will be missing...
...The NYA effort created his first statewide machine...
...Perhaps George Brown, Herman's brother, was nearer the mark when he said of Johnson: "You get right down to the nut-cutting...
...As a Congressman, he worked to assure his constituents of the benefits from the Agricultural Adjustment Administration or Rural Electrification Administration to make grim lives more bearable...
...Brown badly needed a Congressman...
...he was practical...
...He was an ardent teacher to win credits in an era when teaching jobs were short...
...He suggests that Johnson was shaped by the harsh, thin-soiled Hill Country and the poverty it bred, and by his remarkably sympathetic parents...
...If Johnson as a child adored his father, Caro suggests, he turned against him when he failed and made the Johnsons the butt of Johnson City's ridicule...
...Caro, however, does not always apply crass political motives to others...
...But by God...
...Ray-burn's silence in a Republican House of Representatives in the 1920s is a sign of strength...
...he was for labor...
...In the Roosevelt White House, he passed himself off as an archetypal New Dealer...
...In Caro's reading, Johnson always promoted himself...
...The second key element was Johnson's cultivation of powerful elders, playing the "professional son...
...From then on, Brown and his subcontractors, growing richer on war contracts, were spigots, pouring out money to buy rural Texas papers, Mexican-American votes, radio time, county judges, and the rest of the elective apparatus that lifted Johnson to the Senate and ultimately the Presidency...
...two critical elements lie behind Johnson's rise...
Vol. 47 • April 1983 • No. 4
