The Path to Power (89 page)

What did “show,” in fact, would have tended to disarm even the most suspicious of men. During his weekends at Longlea, Lyndon Johnson not only displayed his gift for secrecy, he displayed another gift; his capacity for the cultivation of an older man who was important to him, with utter disregard of his true feelings.

He was still at Marsh’s beck and call; on scores of occasions like the Sunday on which Marsh brought Leinsdorf to Washington, all Marsh had to do was summon him, and he was there—willing, anxious, eager to be of service. He still agreed fulsomely with Marsh’s political analyses and prognostications on world affairs, and was the first to point out that Charles had been right again on some prediction. He still asked Marsh for advice—and was so grateful when Charles gave it that the older man gave more and more. Harold Young, who had watched Johnson “play” many an older man, felt he had never played one better that he did Charles Marsh; never, he felt, had Johnson been more “humble,” more the “great flatterer.”

Marsh had to be away from Washington frequently on business, but these trips did not interrupt the courtship of the older man by the younger, for he continued it by telegram, wiring Marsh in New York or Chicago or Baltimore to ask for advice: “NEED VISIT WITH YOU. WIRE WHERE CAN REACH YOU OR CALL ME AT HOME TONIGHT”; on another occasion, when Johnson was planning to go to Texas, he wrote the publisher, “I do hope you will be back this way before we leave. I need the inspiration and stimulant that a couple of hours with you always gives me.” Or he would give congratulations to Marsh on his perspicacity; on December 15, 1939, for example,
while Marsh was checking on business investments in New York, he received a telegram from Johnson in Washington which stated: “SOME INTERESTING AND RATHER AMUSING DEVELOPMENTS HERE YESTERDAY WHICH CONFIRMED A PREDICTION YOU MADE IN AUGUST.”

Marsh’s response was all Johnson could have wished. To his telegrams requesting advice came back telegrams giving it—advice on how to place an ad in country newspapers so that it would receive prominent display, for example (“
MERELY ENCLOSE A CHECK FOR
$20.00. …
I DO NOT THINK YOU WILL FIND THAT ANY OF THEM WILL RETURN THE CHANGE
…”). When Marsh felt that Johnson needed advice in more detail than was feasible for a telegram, an “Extra Rush!” wire would tell the Congressman: “
SUGGEST YOU TELEPHONE COLLECT
…
TONIGHT
.” And sometimes he felt Johnson needed advice in person—“
ARRIVE WASHINGTON SEVEN FORTY-FIVE TUESDAY MORNING IF PLANE ON TIME WOULD BE PLEASED HAVE BREAKFAST WITH YOU MAYFLOWER HOTEL
.” The advice was on personal as well as political matters, and it reveals not only the paternal feeling Marsh had toward Johnson, but his total ignorance of the relationship between Johnson and Alice; some of the advice, in view of that relationship, can be read with a certain feeling of irony. On April 9, 1940, during a period when the affair between Lyndon and Alice was at its most torrid, Marsh, who had left Longlea the previous evening on a business trip, telegraphed Johnson: “
I DID NOT LIKE THE WAY YOU LOOKED LAST NIGHT. YOU WERE NOT WELL SHAVED. PLAY AS MUCH GOLF AS POSSIBLE WITH ALICE
. …”

Marsh became, in fact, more and more fond of the young man he considered his protégé. Sometimes, lonely on his travels around the country, he would be moved to telegraph Johnson his affection; from the Stevens Hotel in Chicago, he wired Johnson on September 16, 1940: “
DEAR LYNDON: WAKING UP THIS MORNING WITH A GREAT DISTASTE FOR MID-WEST SENATORS, I FOUND IT MORE PLEASANT TO WRITE YOU A NOTE
.”

Marsh’s increasing fondness for Johnson disturbed Alice more and more; her own inclination would have been to reveal the truth to Marsh; she had agreed to wait until the time was ripe, but she felt there was something more dishonorable than she had bargained for in the situation as it was evolving. But Johnson seemed to find it completely feasible to have the relationship he wanted not only with the man’s mistress but with the man.

And he proved to be right. His discretion gave him rewards. During the same years in which he was making love to the woman Marsh loved, Marsh was giving him more than advice and affection.

He was concerned with Lyndon’s financial future because he had noticed that, despite his $10,000-per-year Congressman’s salary, Johnson was always short of cash. The publisher saw that Lyndon was worried about money, and he didn’t want Lyndon to worry about money: a great future lay ahead of him, and he should be freed from sordid cares. In 1939, therefore, Marsh took his first step toward placing Johnson on a sounder financial
footing. With his gift for making money on a grand scale, he had seen, several years before, how to make it in Austin. Standing on a hill above the small but growing city, he had forecast the direction in which most of its growth would occur, and had promptly purchased large tracts of land there. Now the land was worth considerably more than he had paid for it, but Marsh said he would sell Johnson a nineteen-acre tract for the same price he had paid: $12,000. “It was a marvelous buy, and we knew it,” Lady Bird says. She borrowed the money from her father, Brown & Root chipped in by building a road out to the land, and by grading and landscaping it—and, for the first time, the Johnsons owned property.

The older man helped the younger man not only financially but politically. Although he owned so many newspapers, Marsh’s interest in them was financial rather than journalistic. “Charles just had newspapers to make money with them,” says Mary Louise Glass, his secretary. “Making money did not require editorial quality, and there was no concern with that.” On the rare occasions on which some local issue or individual captured Marsh’s interest and led him to formulate a position on it, he wanted the position expressed not only on the editorial page but—without regard to journalistic ethics—in the news columns. And he left no doubt as to the precise nature of the position he wished taken; making a rare call to the paper’s editor (he usually talked only to “the business people,” Mary Louise says), he would bark unequivocal instructions over the telephone. And after Lyndon Johnson became his protégé, the instructions to Charles E. Green, editor of the
Austin American-Statesman
, often concerned Lyndon Johnson. Marsh would sometimes dictate pro-Johnson editorials—and articles—himself. His newspapers took one position that was particularly pleasing to Johnson: that no one run against him in the next election. As early as January, 1938, an
American-Statesman
editorial, lauding Johnson’s work on the LCRA and other projects, said that he “ought … to be unopposed, and thus freed of the burden of a campaign, so as to give his undivided time to his services in the session that will run almost until primary election day.” This theme was echoed by
American-Statesman
reporters. Wrote one, in the paper’s “Town Talk” column, “I had a nice visit with Cong. Johnson. He looks tired, but I suppose any man who has done as much for his district in the short time that Johnson has, should be tired. Fortunately, I don’t think there’s anyone in his district foolish enough to announce against him. So that will give him some rest.” Potential opponents realized that in 1938, Johnson would have not only overwhelming financial support, but enthusiastic press support.

T
HE REACTION
of the audience—Mary Louise Glass, Welly and Alice Hopkins, and others—to the drama, the drama that Mary Louise calls “Charles and Alice and Lyndon,” being played out before them, month after month, against the beautiful setting of Longlea (without, of course, the knowledge
of one of the three leads), varies from person to person, and their reactions are colored by their attachment to one or another of the participants.

An unequivocal opinion is obtainable from another observer, who has asked not to be quoted by name. This observer’s opinion is colored by the fact that she had reason to be keenly aware, more keenly aware than the other watchers, of a detail almost never mentioned by the others: the fact that not only the principals but two little children of whom Charles Marsh was very fond, and who were very much attached to their father, would be affected by the drama’s denouement.

Watching Lyndon Johnson fawn over the children’s father when he was present, knowing all the time that Johnson was sleeping with their mother when he was absent; watching Johnson praise the older man to his face, knowing all the time that behind his back he was taking from him the woman he loved; seeing how unshakably deferential, how utterly humble, he was in playing upon Marsh’s affections, this observer, a lover of Charles Dickens, was reminded forcefully of a character in
David Copperfield
—a character who, she felt, lacked only a Southern drawl to be Lyndon Johnson in the flesh. “Every time I looked at Lyndon,” she says, “I saw a Uriah Heep from Texas.”

A
ND WHAT
of the other person who had a stake in the drama—a person so lightly regarded by the spectators that most of them all but ignore her when they talk of it?

Lady Bird Johnson was easy to ignore.

Her husband insisted that she wear makeup and high heels, and, more and more, she did so, but he could not, except on rare occasions, force her to wear dresses of any but the dullest colors, and her appearance was still drab. And nothing, it seemed, could ease her terrible shyness.

During her husband’s campaign for Congress, she had been, as always, pleasant and uncomplaining in serving hot meals to him and his aides at all hours of the night; men who worked for him had come to accept as a matter of course a warm, welcoming smile at the door, no matter when they arrived. But when, occasionally, someone—someone who didn’t know her well—raised, however gingerly, the possibility that she herself might campaign, the very suggestion that she might have to face an audience and speak brought such panic to the face of this woman who had once prayed for smallpox so that she wouldn’t have to speak at her high-school graduation ceremony that the suggestion was always quickly dropped. Following the campaign, an Austin women’s organization had held a party in honor of the wife of the new Congressman; she had been able to avoid making a speech at the party, but she could not avoid standing in a receiving line—and while she had shaken hands and chatted with the strangers filing by, she had done it with so obvious an effort that her friends winced inwardly
as they watched; the bright smile on her face had been as rigid as if it had been set in stone. At Longlea, with so many brilliant raconteurs only too anxious to hold the stage, no such effort was required; she was able to sit for hours, just listening, absolutely silent. And, of course, often Lady Bird was not
at
Longlea. As 1938 became 1939 and 1939 became 1940, with increasing frequency Lyndon Johnson would arrive alone, having left her back in Washington. Sometimes, in fact, he would have dispatched her to Texas. It was necessary for the Johnsons’ car, filled with household possessions, to be driven back and forth at the start and finish of each congressional session, and, often, Johnson had her make the 1,600-mile trip to Austin accompanied by the wife of one of his aides, saying that he had to stay behind in Washington on business; later, he would fly down. “For years,” Lady Bird would say, “my idea of being rich was having enough linens and pots and pans to have a set in each place, and not have to lug them back and forth.”

The attitude of the Longlea “regulars” was, of course, influenced by the attitude her husband displayed toward her: the brusqueness of the orders he gave her, insisting they be instantly obeyed; the short shrift he accorded her infrequent, timid comments. Seeing that in her relationship with Lyndon, her opinion didn’t count, they gave it little consideration themselves. Marsh, in fact, seems to have been in some doubt as to her name; he was constantly referring to her as “Lyndon’s wife.” To Alice’s adoring sister and her best friend, moreover, she was an obstacle to Alice’s happiness, and when they did discuss her, there was more than a hint of mockery in their voices; says Alice Hopkins: “Everybody was trying to be nice to her, but she was just … out of place.” And the attitude of the regulars was influenced also by the attitude she herself displayed; Lady Bird Johnson herself appears to have felt that she was out of place at Longlea. Decades later, describing the estate to the author, she said: “My eyes were just out on stems. They would have interesting people from the world of art and literature and politics. It was the closest I ever came to a salon in my life. … There was a dinner table with ever so much crystal and silver. …” She appears to have felt herself that she had little to contribute to the scintillating conversation there; she felt that her host, for example, not only “looked like a Roman emperor” but was “one of the most fascinating men I have ever met. He knew all sorts of things. He went all over Europe, he went to Salzburg and places like that. … He was the first one who introduced Lyndon to the danger of Hitler. … I think he saw a Nazi rally. He made my blood run cold. But he also made us see why the German people would be for him [Hitler]—that they would be respected and all.” She appears, in fact, to have felt keenly the contrast between herself and her hostess: “I remember Alice in a series of long and elegant dresses, and me in—well, much less elegant,” she says. In a voice with a trace of heroine-worship, she notes that they had known each
other slightly years before in Austin when she was a University of Texas undergraduate and Alice was working in the Capitol, and even then, Lady Bird says, “she was quite an intellectual girl and, you felt, destined for more exciting things than being a legislator’s secretary.” And then, when “we saw them again in Washington, she was even prettier, and just dressed so beautifully. She was very tall, and elegant—really beautiful, in a sort of Amazonian way.” Once, during a Marsh discourse on the Hitler threat, her admiration for Alice moved her to a rare attempt at a witticism—“Maybe Alice can help us fight him,” she said. “She’s so tall and blond she looks like a Valkyrie”—an attempt which was, of course, ignored.

Had they been more observant, however, the Longlea regulars might have noticed qualities in the drab woman as well as in the elegant one. During the loud arguments to which she sat quietly listening, books would be mentioned; Lady Bird would, on her return to Washington, check those books out of the public library—check them out and read them. Because of Marsh’s preoccupation with Hitler, she checked out a copy of
Mein Kampf
, read it—and learned it. She never attempted to talk about it at Longlea, even though when Hitler’s theories were discussed thereafter, she was aware that, while Marsh knew what he was talking about, no one else in the room did—except her. And she read other books, too; one Summer is still remembered by the Longlea regulars as the “Summer that Lady Bird read
War and Peace
.” They snickered at the way she carried the big book with her everywhere—even though, by the end of the Summer, she had finished it, and, because she felt there was something to be gained by a rereading, had promptly begun at the beginning to read it through again.