Another Power Broker

FEW POLITICIANS of the 20th century have attracted as much attention an Lyndon B. Johnson. Even while he was still President, scholars and pundits were trying to unravel the mysteries of the man who gave America both the Great Society and the Vietnam War, and their efforts have continued unabated in recent years. The reason for the interest is clear. Johnson's career represented the basic problem of democratic government: To what extent are policies desirable if their beneficial ends are gained by questionable means?

For the most part, the authors who have analyzed Johnson's life in light of this puzzle have produced shallow, incomplete answers--a succession of talky, pseudo-psychoanalytic books that attribute his obscure and confusing sides to mother-love, or father-hatred, or a desire to enforce the ethic of the Alamo upon an Eastern Establishment he secretly envied.

But 10 years after Johnson's death, Robert A. Caro, already renowned for his biography of Robert Moses, has come forth with the first volume of a biography which through its scope and thoroughness, begins to explain the mystery of the man. Although Caro strikes a tone of undue self-righteousness in his account of some of Johnson's shadier moments, and too often takes such episodes as evidence of both moral and political bankruptcy, he has, on the whole, produced an admirable work. Taking 768 pages of text to tell the story of the first 33 years of Johnson's life (his career to the point of his first, unsuccessful race for the U.S. Senate), the book does justice to its gargantuan subject.

As the book's subtitle indicates, Caro believes the central fact of Johnson's life was his just for power. The author's careful research strips away the elaborate web of myth and half-truth that Johnson and his loyalists constructed to obscure his early life, evoking the heart-rending isolation and desperate poverty of his boyhood in the Hill Country of Texas. Through in-depth interviews with relatives and boyhood friends of the President, many of whom had never before talked with journalists or scholars. Caro create a picture of a boy seeking to escape early deprivations by any means possible--a young man obsessed with wheedling and cajoling his way into attention and influence.

Johnson's earliest frustrations centered on the collapse of his family's economic and social status after his father's failure in a grandiose farming and ranching scheme Earlier, the Johnson had behaved as if they were a cut above the hardscrabble-farmer neighbors--his mother was a college graduate and his father a popular, respected state legislator, both descended from prominent pioneer stock, and their pride fired his ambition. But after Sam Ealy Johnson's fall. Johnson City and Blanco County struck back against their once-haughty denizens, systematically snubbing the Johnsons over a period of years. Humiliation reached a painful peak when Lyndon's high-school romance was thwarted by an angry father distrustful of his "dissolute, irresponsible" family.

Lyndon's nascent attempts at wheeling and dealing came during his college days, another obscure period of his life about which Caro has unearthed intriguing and revealing details. The future President's obsequiousness towards the Southwest Texas State faculty and his manipulation of campus elections foreshadowed his later political machinations. At this stage of the book, though, Caro's mass of detail on Johnson's devious practices as a college student leads him to needlessly damn his subject in advance.

Caro returns to surer ground, though, in the scholarly detective work that uncovered the relationship between Johnson and his main political bankroller, the Texas construction company Brown & Root, Inc. Through obscure, recently released Federal documents, correspondence among Federal officials and Brown & Root representatives, and extensive conversations with company founding partner George Brown. Caro details for the first time the way Johnson's first Congressional campaign, in a 1937 special election, benefitted from the company's desire to receive a $10-million Federal contract to build a dam in the district the future President sought to represent. The author traces painstakingly the later deals that Johnson made with Brown & Root, including millions more dollars worth of Federal dam appropriations and contracts during World War II to build ships for the Navy--all in exchange for massive contributions to Johnson campaigns. Caro's dogged, patient narrative shows its best side in the presentation of the construction company connection, bringing to light major and truly illuminating events and influences on Johnson.

But at other points Caro gets lost in his impressive research and bogs down in detail. He dwells on young Lyndon's dislike of school and disobedience of his parents to the point of tedium, seemingly overwhelmed by the rush of information from newly interviewed Johnson friends and classmates. Similarly, he loses a sense of proportion when he uses the same dramatic, overheated the tone to reveal both Johnson's finagling of a college election and multi-million-dollar Brown & Root schemes.

The biographer occasionally lapses into the tone of a prattling Sunday school teacher, creating a book with little sympathy for its subject. His assertion, for example, that Johnson's will to dominate arose out of his contempt for his parents, who "stuck by their ideals" and failed, does a disservice to the complex man he seeks to analyze. Caro insists that Johnson's conversion of a secret college social club into a political power on the Southwest texas campus revealed in the man a deviousness, a just for secrecy, and "a will of steel" plotting to "not only snatch existing power, but create . . . new power, of dimensions no students had ever had on campus before."

Yet his own details suggest that Johnson's collegiate conduct, while occasionally petty and manipulative, was no more reprehensible than that of many other student politicians then and now. It is difficult to believe, as Caro does, that Johnson's life was entirely a record of "viciousness and cruelty, . . . all-encompassing personal ambition. . . and aggressiveness." Indeed, Caro seeks to cast a pall even over the noblest incident in Johnson's youth, his student-teaching in the Cotulla barrio, interpreting the future President's success in the job as evidence of his need to create situations in which he was in complete control.

BUT CARO'S DISPLEASURE with Johnson's wheeling and dealing is indicative of a deeper ambivalence, an attitude that characterizes almost all public discussion of the 36th President. Caro, like many Americans, balks at the idea that desirable policy can be effected through morally questionable means. Yet one lesson modern politics offers is that good causes--like rural electrification or civil rights for Blacks--frequently are not converted into government action until their proponents adopt the methods of compromise and mutual advantage that their opponents have used all along. Lyndon Johnson may have connived with George and Herman Brown to win Federal contracts and finance political campaigns, but the result of the half-legal dams built by Brown & Root was electric power and flood control for the beleaguered farmers of the Hill Country--people long forgotten by the powerful Texas utility interests. When Johnson ingratiated himself with construction company executives and "wildcatter" oil millionaires in order to finance Democratic efforts in Congressional elections, he was merely helping the Democrats play catch-up in a game of campaign financing in which the Republican Party had a long-established lead.

Somehow, Johnson's dam-financing shenanigans seem less than wholly reprehensible when the reader bears in mind the back-breaking labor involved in household chores in south-central Texas until the young Congressman brought cheap power to the region. Caro separates the cause of the cheap power from its effect, and thus fails to note the main lesson of Johnson's career.

Despite his lack of coherent, consistent political ideals, despite the taint of corruption that surrounds his rise through the political ranks, the fact remains that, at least in the period covered by this book. Lyndon Johnson used his power to the great benefit of his Hill Country constituents. Caro fails to drive home this point; the tone of condemnation that ultimately emerges from his political squeamishness is the biography's only great flaw. Still, the book's thoroughness over-rules this blindness. If Caro's next two volumes are as compelling and groundbreaking as this one, he will have completed a work that, in its premise and its overwhelming presentation of facts, if not in its moralistic judgements, is worthy of its complex and monumental subject.