Means of Ascent (81 page)

T
HE RESEARCH
for these first two volumes of my life of Lyndon Johnson, two volumes which together cover what I consider the “Texas part” of the work since in the volumes to come the focus will shift to Washington, has taken place over the past fourteen years. A portion of it has taken place at a single location: a desk—two and a half feet by four feet—in the Reading Room on the eighth floor of the Lyndon Baines
Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas, where, on periodic visits to the Library, I sat while the Library’s archivists wheeled in to me on large wooden carts the document cases, some plain red or gray cardboard, most covered in red buckram (and stamped with a gold replica of the presidential seal), which contain the written materials—letters, memoranda, scribbled notes, transcripts of telephone conversations, speech texts—relating to my subject’s
boyhood, his early years as a schoolteacher, congressional aide, and Texas State Director of the National Youth Administration, his eleven and a half years as a Congressman from Texas’ Tenth Congressional District and his 1948 campaign to become one of the state’s two United States Senators. Other boxes contain his Senate Papers, which I have studied primarily for my third volume, but which of course contained more than a little information that helped illuminate that
earlier period. In all, during those fourteen years, a total of 787 boxes were delivered to my desk. They contained, by the Library’s estimate, 629,000 pages of documents. How many of those pages I read I don’t know, but I read a lot of them.

The time I have spent at that desk has been a wonderful time—thrilling, in fact. From the first time I thought of becoming a biographer, I never conceived of my biographies as merely telling the lives of famous men but rather as a means of illuminating their times and the great forces that shaped their times—particularly political power, since in a democracy political power has so great a role in shaping the lives of the citizens of that democracy. What I
set out to try to do was to examine the way power works in America in the middle of the twentieth century. I have been
fascinated by political power ever since I was a reporter and realized how little I knew about it—and you can learn quite a bit about that subject if you just sit there and read enough documents in the Lyndon Johnson Library.

A single example—one of a hundred that could be given—will perhaps illustrate what I mean. When I was beginning the research, one of my first interviews was with Thomas G. (“Tommy the Cork”) Corcoran, Franklin Roosevelt’s political man-of-all-work and a Johnson intimate during his early rise to power. By this time I had found that the crucial time in which young Johnson was elevated from the mass of congressmen to a congressman with
influence over other congressmen—a Congressman with at least his first toehold on national power—occurred during a single month: October, 1940. When I asked Corcoran how Johnson had attained this power, Corcoran replied, in his gruff, cryptical way: “Money, kid. Money. But you’re never going to be able to write about that.” When I asked him why I would never be able to write about that, he replied, “Because you’re never going to find
anything in writing.” For some years thereafter—perhaps three or four years—I felt that Corcoran was correct, but then, among those hundreds of boxes in the Johnson Library, there before me—suddenly—in Boxes 6, 7, 8 and 9 of the Johnson House Papers, to be exact, was the written documentation of what Corcoran had meant, and I was able to understand, and, I hope, to explain (in Chapter 32 of Volume I) Lyndon Johnson’s leap to national power
through the campaign contributions he obtained from Texas oilmen and contractors to whom he alone had access and that he distributed, at his sole discretion, to other congressmen.

H
ERE
is a description of the papers in the Johnson Library that form part of the foundation of these first two volumes—and an explanation of how they are identified in the Notes that follow.

Each document from the LBJ Library is cited in the Notes by the title of the folder in which it can be found, the box number and the
collection in the Library. If no folder title is included in the citation, the folder is either the name of the correspondent in the letter or, in the case of files kept alphabetically, the appropriate letter (a letter from Corcoran, for example, in the folder labeled C).

W
RITTEN DOCUMENTS
can never tell the whole story, of course, and, as in the first volume, I have also relied heavily on interviews with the men and women closest to Lyndon Johnson during the seven years covered by this volume. Thirteen of the men and women who were, during these years, particularly close to Lyndon Johnson were alive when I began work on this book, and I have interviewed all of them, most of them in repeated, lengthy
interviews. They are George R. Brown, Horace Busby, Edward A. Clark, John B. Connally, Thomas G. Corcoran, Helen Gahagan Douglas, Abe Fortas, Welly K. Hopkins, Walter Jenkins, Gene Latimer, Mary Rather, James H. Rowe, Jr., and Warren G. Woodward. (Busby and Woodward came to Johnson’s staff later than the rest of this group—only during the last year of this period—but were quickly put on an intimate footing with him.)

During this time, Johnson’s two principal assistants in his congressional office were Connally and Jenkins, both of whom joined his staff in 1939. Jenkins, who succeeded Connally as Johnson’s administrative aide during this period, had helped me greatly with his recollections on the first volume; for this volume, he continued his detailed assistance until his final illness. He died in November, 1985. Connally refused during the entire period of research on
my first volume even to respond to requests for an interview. Some two years after it was published, however, Governor Connally said he had read the book, and now wanted to talk to me at length. He told me that the only way in which he could free the requisite bloc of uninterrupted time would be at his ranch in South Texas. For three days there, we talked, from early in the morning until quite late at night, about his thirty-year association with Lyndon Johnson. Governor Connally had
told me that he would answer any question I put to him, without exception. He was true to his word, and discussed with me—as indeed he also did at a subsequent lengthy interview—with considerable, and sometimes startling, frankness, perhaps a score of pivotal events in Lyndon Johnson’s life in which he was a key participant. His interviews were especially valuable because, in more than one case, he is the only participant in those events still alive. I am all the
more grateful to him because his silence about some of these events that he broke in talking to me was a silence that had lasted for decades.

During his years as a Congressman in Washington, Johnson was part of a quite remarkable group of young men and women: Benjamin V.
Cohen, Thomas G. Corcoran, Helen Gahagan Douglas, Abe Fortas, Arthur Goldschmidt, Eliot Janeway, James H. Rowe, Jr., and Elizabeth Wickenden Goldschmidt. These men and women—once the bright young New Dealers—gave me their time with varying degrees of generosity, but some of them were very generous indeed, and
when the meaning of documents in the Library was not clear, they often made it clear. These men and women had ringside seats at Lyndon Johnson’s rise to power. Perceptive as they are, they understood what they were watching, and they can explain it. The greatest single loss to my research, in my opinion, came with the death of Abe Fortas after I had had only a single interview with him. But even in that one interview, he explained things for which I would otherwise have had no
explanation.

If many of the names above are known to readers familiar with American political history, the name of Edward A. Clark is not. The only high public position he ever held was as United States Ambassador to Australia during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. Because I rely on his recollections quite as much as on those of the more famous figures, however, I feel I should identify him. In 1936, this canny politician was already not only Texas Secretary of State but chief
political adviser to Governor James V. Allred. Seventeen years later, in 1953, as the most powerful lawyer and lobbyist in Austin, he was named “the Secret Boss of Texas” by the
Reader’s Digest
. Thirty years after
that
—in 1982—he was still identified as “one of the twenty most powerful Texans.” Of all the men with whom Lyndon Johnson would be allied in Texas, Clark was the one who would, over the long years to come,
acquire and hold the most power in that state. More to the point, so far as my work is concerned, he was Brown & Root’s lawyer—and, for twenty years, Lyndon Johnson’s. When I finished the first volume of this work, I wrote that “over a period of more than three years, Mr. Clark … devoted evening after evening to furthering my political education.” During these past seven years, the education has continued, to my
benefit.