The Anatomy of Greatness
Great of History profile
A humiliated Hill Country boy who read other men's hopes and fears the way scholars read texts, Johnson flattered, bought, bullied and stole his way to power, then, once his ambition and his compassion finally pointed the same way, used that same mastery of people to pass the first civil rights laws since Reconstruction.
Top traits
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Critical acts
- 1
Turning Social Clubs into Machines (San Marcos and the Little Congress)
He saw that "in the Depression, campus jobs, with their tiny cash stipends, represented the only means by which these young men could stay in school," and that whoever won campus politics could control those jobs.
- 2
Building a Money Machine (Brown & Root and KTBC)
He made Brown rich through federal contracts, including "lucrative 'change orders'" on the Marshall Ford Dam, and Brown "ordered up contributions from dozens of subcontractors" and gave from his own firm's funds, going "to the edge of the law and, some Internal Revenue Service agents were later to contend, over that edge into the realm of fraud in order to…
- 3
Stealing the 1948 Senate Election
He campaigned by helicopter, the "Johnson City Windmill," over towns where his family had been ruined. He accused Stevenson of a "secret deal" with "labor dictators" to repeal Taft-Hartley ("a yearling with the labor boss brand on his hip") while he himself was quietly taking labor money from the Northeast.
- 4
Becoming Russell's Protégé and the Youngest Leader in Senate History
He studied the Senate before he tried to move it, sitting for hours at his rear desk "learning, studying" the manners of the gentlemen senators and "which senators had the respect of their fellows—and why." Then he set out "to learn his third" R.
- 5
Passing the Civil Rights Act of 1957
"During Lyndon Johnson's previous political life, compassion had constantly been in conflict with ambition, and invariably ambition had won... And now, at last, in 1957, it was" compatible.
- 6
Taking Command after Dallas
He insisted on taking the oath on the ground in Dallas before Air Force One took off, with the White House photographer present, to show continuity. He begged every Kennedy man to stay, "I need you now more than President Kennedy needed you."
Maxims
Find the lonely old man and become his son
Evans, Wirtz, Rayburn, Roosevelt and Russell were all powerful men with no son or with a lonely private life, and Johnson filled that gap: Sunday breakfasts, baseball games, a kiss on Rayburn's bald head. He calculated it, but it was also returned.
Read the eyes, not the words
"No matter what a man is saying to you, it's not as important as what you can read in his eyes." He kept men talking until they let slip what they were trying not to say, because that was where their weakness, and so his leverage, lay.
Learn to count before you learn to argue
He taught Humphrey that "the first lesson of politics is to be able to count," and he wouldn't take a bill to the floor on an optimistic tally. The 1957 jury-trial amendment passed 51 to 42 because he had changed its text until the numbers worked.
Never relax until the ballot boxes are sat on
In 1941 he let the border bosses report early and watched a Senate seat he had "won" disappear overnight. He never made that mistake again. In 1948 the decisive votes came in six days after the polls closed. See "The Loop on the Seven."
Choose the right-sized room for your gift
He was lost among 435 congressmen and in his element among ninety-six senators, because his power was persuasion one-on-one. He recognised the fit in a single look from the Chamber doorway. See "'The Right Size.'"
Part IThe Story
The Right Size
In December 1948, before he had even been sworn in, the new senator from Texas walked into the empty Senate Chamber by a side door and stopped. The Senate was not in session. Only a single row of ceiling lights was on, and it reflected off "the polished tops of the ninety-six senators' desks as the long arcs stretched away in the gloom." Lyndon Johnson stood just inside the doorway, silently staring, for "quite a long time." Then he muttered, as if speaking to himself, that the Senate was "the right size."
His first trip to Washington as a senator-elect had gone badly. Carl Hayden had refused him a bigger office: "The trouble with you, Senator, is that you don't have the seniority of a jackrabbit." He had arrived in the Senate on a margin of eighty-seven votes out of nearly a million, votes that had been stolen for him, and the men who ran the place knew it.
But his aides Walter Jenkins and Horace Busby understood what he meant in the doorway. In the House, with its 435 members, everything was "done en masse." A Senate subcommittee might have three members, and "a member of a three-man subcommittee needed to sell only one other senator to carry his point." Lyndon Johnson was, as the contractor George Brown put it, "the greatest salesman one on one who ever lived." "From the first day on," Jenkins said, "he knew he could be effective there.... It was his place. He was at his best with small groups, and he was one of only ninety-six senators. With only ninety-five others—he knew he could manage that."
Within a single term he would run the place. Fifteen years later he would be President, spending the power he had accumulated by flattery, money, theft and fear on the first civil rights laws since Reconstruction, and then on Vietnam. Robert Caro, whose volumes on Johnson are the source for nearly everything here, compressed the whole story into two words: "power reveals." This is one of the lives in The Anatomy of Greatness, and it is the one that most refuses to separate the greatness from the methods.
By the Numbers
The Johnson Ledger
87His margin of victory in the 1948 Texas Senate runoff, out of 988,295 votes
200Votes added to Precinct 13 in Alice six days after the runoff
24 daysTime Lady Bird Johnson needed to win FCC approval for KTBC
42His age when Richard Russell made him Senate whip
72–18Senate vote on the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first since Reconstruction
$97.9BThe budget he gave Harry Byrd, under Byrd's $100 billion limit
549,000American troops in Vietnam by the time he left office
The Bottom of the Heap
Caro traces Johnson's drive to a hereditary "Bunton strain" of pride and ambition. It was made far worse by his father's collapse when Lyndon was thirteen, which hurled the family to "the bottom of the heap" in Johnson City. Sam Johnson had been "straight as a shingle," a Populist legislator whom lobbyists couldn't buy a drink, and he died "a penniless bus inspector." His son grew up hearing men whisper as he passed, "He'll never amount to anything. Too much like Sam." He worked on a road gang "harnessed to a grader like a mule."
Out of this came a need to "be somebody," to win and to "be perceived as a winner." Journalists would later describe it as "energy." Caro says "it was really desperation and fear, the fear of a man fleeing something terrible."
The lesson he drew from his father's ruin was specific. "It was most important to Lyndon not to be like Daddy," his brother said. He wanted to be "regarded as a man who scorned ideals and causes as impractical dreams... practical, pragmatic, tough, cynical... not as merely smart but as shrewd, wily, sly." His father had died at sixty, and his uncles had heart attacks. Johnson was convinced, "to the point of obsession," that he had inherited the family legacy. "I'm not gonna live to be but sixty," he said. It put a clock behind his impatience.
Johnson arrived at Southwest Texas State Teachers College in San Marcos, a "poor boys' school," personally unpopular and from a family held in contempt at home. No one there cared about campus politics. Elections for class offices and the Student Council were "casual affairs." The normal course was to study, graduate and take a teaching job.
Johnson saw what no one else bothered to see. "In the Depression, campus jobs, with their tiny cash stipends, represented the only means by which these young men could stay in school," and whoever won campus politics could control those jobs. So he took a small social club, the White Stars, and "created, out of" it "a disciplined and secret political organization." When it still couldn't win honestly, "he taught unsophisticated farm boys how to steal elections." He forced a popular woman candidate out of one race by "blackmailing" her over "a meaningless indiscretion." His classmates called these "things we would never have dreamt of if it hadn't been for Lyndon."
Toward those above him he was a different creature. He sat literally at the faculty's feet on the lawn, wrote flattering editorials in the College Star, and told President Cecil Evans he looked on him as a father. A classmate said, "Words won't come to describe how Lyndon acted toward the faculty—how kowtowing he was, how suck-assing he was, how brown-nosing he was." The yearbook joked that "Bull Johnson has never taken a course in suction." He was, Caro writes, "so much, in rapid alternation, the bully and the bootlicker."
There was another side, and it appeared at twenty. Teaching at the "Mexican School" in Cotulla, "No teacher in that school had ever really cared if the Mexican children learned or not. He cared." He got the children bats and balls, a debating team and transport. Caro's long verdict, though, is that for twenty years afterward, "whenever compassion and ambition had been in conflict, the former had vanished from the landscape of Lyndon Johnson's career."
The Professional Son
In college Johnson told his roommate the rule he would follow for the rest of his life: "The way to get ahead is to get close to the one man at the top." At each stage he aimed his gift for handling older men at whoever could help him most: Evans, then the Austin power broker Alvin Wirtz, then Sam Rayburn and Franklin Roosevelt, and finally Richard Russell. Each was lonely or had no son, and each came to treat him as one. Wirtz inscribed a photograph "To Lyndon Johnson, whom I admire and love with the same affection as if he were in fact my own son." Rayburn once wrote, "God, what I would give for a tow-headed boy to take fishing." Johnson kissed the feared Speaker on his bald head, and when Johnson had pneumonia, Rayburn sat up all night beside him, afraid to brush off his cigarette ash in case he woke the young man.
Contemporaries sneered at "a professional son," but Tommy Corcoran, "a prince of flatterers himself, knew he was watching a king": "He could follow someone's mind around, and get where it was going before the other fellow knew where it was going."
In Washington in the early 1930s, as secretary to Congressman Richard Kleberg, Johnson was one of hundreds of anonymous aides. The aides' organisation, the Little Congress, was only a social club. He treated its presidency as "a means of entrée to men of power," and he won it by the San Marcos method: the ballot box was "stuffed with illegal ballots, and then, if even that was not sufficient... miscounted the ballots." When the box was finally opened, "the accusations against Johnson were true." A later President asked in astonishment, "My God, who would cheat to win the presidency of something like the Little Congress?"
The results came fast. By twenty-one he was "the 'wonder kid' of Texas politics"; by twenty-three, "Boss of the Little Congress." At twenty-six he was the youngest of the forty-eight state directors of the National Youth Administration, and at twenty-eight he won a House seat in a race "no one believed he could win." The pattern of secret organisation, patronage over other people's livelihoods, stolen votes and cultivated patrons was set before he was twenty-five.
The Money Machine
A Hill Country congressman in the late 1930s had no money of his own and no base outside his district. Johnson wanted money that could buy power over other politicians, and he understood that open wealth in oil would be fatal: offered an oil partnership by Charles Marsh, he refused because "it would kill me politically."
He found the money elsewhere. Herman and George Brown of Brown & Root, the Texas contractors, wanted federal dams and highways. Johnson made them rich through federal contracts, including "lucrative 'change orders'" on the Marshall Ford Dam. Brown "ordered up contributions from dozens of subcontractors" and gave from his own firm's funds, going "to the edge of the law and, some Internal Revenue Service agents were later to contend, over that edge into the realm of fraud in order to finance Lyndon Johnson's ambition." Johnson took the Texas oil and contractor money, "to which he alone in Washington had access," and used it to revive the "moribund" Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. That gave him "power over other congressmen, national power."
For his personal fortune he used government itself. In January 1943, with perhaps $938 left in the bank, Lady Bird Johnson bought the option on KTBC, a struggling Austin "sundowner" radio station, for $17,500 "subject to the approval of the FCC." The previous owners had tried for three years to get the Commission's consent. "Mrs. Lyndon Johnson had obtained it in twenty-four days." "By 1948, the bottom line had seven figures on it." Johnson began telling friends that he was a millionaire, while publicly claiming to be "unfamiliar" with the station's business.
Thirteen Minutes Over Lae
In 1942 Congressman Johnson, who had promised voters he would serve "in the front lines" if war came, rode along as a Navy observer on a B-26, the Heckling Hare. Over New Guinea the right engine's generator failed, the plane dropped out of formation and turned for home, and a Zero attacked: "All hell broke loose." Lieutenant Greer's flying saved the plane.
Afterward General MacArthur gave Johnson the Silver Star, the Army's third-highest decoration. No one else on the plane was decorated, and "some members of its crew were to fly twenty-five missions without receiving any medal." Johnson had a letter typed turning the medal down: "I cannot in good conscience accept the decoration." Then his attitude changed, and "the change was dramatic and total."
He wore the ribbon in his lapel for the rest of his life and waved the lapel during speeches so audiences would notice it. His thirteen minutes of action became "May, June and part of July," and the single Zero his squadron shot down became "fourteen of 'em go down in flames right in front of me." Joe Kilgore, who had flown thirty-five missions over Europe, heard him complain endlessly that he had only got the Silver Star. Kilgore concluded that Johnson "believed what he was saying. He believed it totally." He could, Kilgore said, "convince himself of anything, even something that wasn't true."
The Loop on the Seven
In 1941 Johnson had tried to buy a Senate seat and lost it by relaxing. He let the South Texas bosses report their votes early, and his opponent's men then found the votes they needed. "He who had stolen elections... had had the election stolen from him instead." He never made that mistake again. Roosevelt teased him about it: "when the election is over, you have to sit on the ballot boxes."
After seven more years stuck in the House, "one of a crowd," he faced in 1948 a Texas legend: former Governor Coke Stevenson, the "Cowboy Governor," who refused to answer attacks. Johnson was a long shot, often sick, and entered the race with an agonising kidney stone. He campaigned by helicopter, the "Johnson City Windmill," over the towns where his family had been ruined. His credo, Caro writes, was "'If you do everything, you'll win.'" "At almost every stop," an aide said, "there was someone he had done something for."
He also lied. He accused Stevenson of a "secret deal" with "labor dictators" to repeal Taft-Hartley ("a yearling with the labor boss brand on his hip") while he himself was quietly taking labor money from the Northeast. His speechwriter Paul Bolton admitted, "We knew it wasn't true, and I almost felt ashamed of what I was writing sometimes; Coke was so honest." And he bought South Texas. George Parr, the "Duke of Duval," had his enforcer Luis Salas give favoured candidates 80 percent "regardless if the people voted against us." In the first primary Duval County gave Johnson 3,707 votes and Stevenson 66.
On the Friday after the runoff, with virtually all of Texas counted, Stevenson led by 157 votes, 494,096 to 493,939. That morning in the Jim Wells County Courthouse in Alice, the tally sheets were unfolded for final certification. Precinct 13 was the poorest Mexican-American district in Alice, and Salas was its election judge. On Election Night Johnson had had 765 votes there. Now he had 965, "because, according to testimony that would later be given, someone had, since Election Night, added a loop to the '7' to change it into a '9'." The final count was 494,191 to 494,104. Stevenson's men got a brief look at the poll list and found that "the last 201 names on the list... had been written in the same ink... and in the same handwriting," in alphabetical order.
In 1977 Salas confessed he had lied under oath. "Johnson did not win that election," he said. "It was stolen for him." He said Johnson had been in Parr's office three days after the vote, saying, "If I can get two hundred more votes, I've got it won." Caro's verdict is unequivocal: "It wasn't eighty-seven votes that Lyndon Johnson stole to win in 1948, but thousands of votes—many thousands, in fact." Johnson's response was to joke. He stuck out his hand to suspicious senators: "Howdy, I'm Landslide Lyndon." Caro calls these "the eighty-seven votes that changed history": "without that election there would probably have been no Johnson Presidency."
It's Only Politics
His Senate debut was the destruction of a decent man.
Leland Olds had been a Congregationalist minister, a history teacher and a labor journalist before joining the Federal Power Commission. He was an amateur cellist who read poetry on the trolley to work, and he had shown that lower electric rates could pay for themselves. In 1949 he stood between the natural gas producers, among them the Browns, and deregulation worth hundreds of millions of dollars. "This was his chance to get in with dozens of oilmen," John Connally said. It "would prove whether Lyndon was reliable, that he was no New Dealer... take care of this guy!"
Johnson chaired the subcommittee on Olds' renomination. He let Congressman John Lyle of Texas pile photostats of Olds' 1920s labor-press articles on the witness table and accuse him of having "reserved his applause for Lenin and Lenin's system," and of not believing in "our churches, our flag, our schools." By the final vote, "a number of liberals suddenly discovered out-of-town engagements." During a recess, Johnson walked up behind Olds as he stood talking with his wife and put a hand on his shoulder to tell him it was nothing personal. Olds died of a heart attack in 1960, by which time few senators remembered him.
— Lyndon Johnson to Leland Olds, 1949Lee, I hope you understand there's nothing personal in this. We're still friends, aren't we? It's only politics, you know.
The Senility System
The Senate of 1949 was ruled by seniority, which "wags called... the 'senility system,'" and by old southern chairmen. Johnson's House habits of lapel-grabbing and domineering made colleagues knock his hand away. So the most impatient man in Washington did something he had never done: he waited. He pressed all three elevator buttons "in a fever of impatience" and ran up marble stairs two at a time, but as a freshman he sat for hours at his rear desk "among the long, empty arcs of desks," studying the manners of the gentlemen senators and "which senators had the respect of their fellows—and why." "All his previous life had been marked by burning impatience... But in the Senate, he had seen at once, waiting—patience—was necessary. So there would be patience." He stopped barging into offices and waited for an aide to open the door before he went in to see Harry Byrd.
The Senate's real power was Richard Russell of Georgia, leader of the Southern Caucus: a bachelor, "no longer so young," and lonely. Johnson had generally eaten breakfast in bed since his wedding. Now he began eating in the senators' dining room at the hour Russell ate. He went to baseball games because "he knew Dick Russell liked baseball games," and filled Russell's empty Sundays: "I knew how he felt for I, too, counted the hours till Monday would come again." He made sure that in the early mornings and late evenings "there was always one companion, one Senator, who worked as hard and as long as he, and that was me, Lyndon Johnson."
Russell nominated him for whip after only two years in the Senate, at forty-two. When the Democratic Leader's post opened, Russell wrote on his desk calendar, "Saw L. Johnson—buttoned up leadership for him." Johnson became the youngest party Leader in the Senate's history (the previous youngest had been fifty-three), and then Majority Leader, "the most powerful man in the Senate after just a single term there."
The Orchestra Conductor
Previous Leaders had complained, "I have nothing to promise them... I have nothing to threaten them with." Johnson "looked for power in places where no previous Leader had thought to look for it—and he found it." The "Johnson Rule" broke seniority by putting freshmen such as Hubert Humphrey and Mike Mansfield on major committees, which journalists hailed as a "revolution in the ancient system." It also meant committee assignments became favours from the Leader. Patronage, campaign money and the Senate calendar came under his control. As a Senate leader he had Joe Kilgore count out twenty thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills in a janitor's closet, so there would be a witness, before handing it to a candidate in a special Senate election: "I just want you to know I'm on your side."
On the floor he ran the Senate from a front-row desk, with Bobby Baker counting votes, signalling the clerk with circles in the air ("hurry up—he had the votes") or a downward shove ("slow down"). Time compared him to "an orchestra conductor."
Up close there was "the treatment." He would put one arm around a senator's shoulders and grab his lapel with the other hand, then poke the man's chest with his forefinger, "jabbing it harder and harder if the point was still not being taken—and then hugging the senator when it was." His face loomed over the other man's, "forcing the other man's head back." Scoop Jackson contrasted him with Kennedy, who would say he "understood" a senator's refusal. Johnson would "charm you or knock your block off, or bribe you or threaten you, anything to get your vote... And he'd get it." Caro's summary of the Leader is five words: "He made the Senate work."
The First Since Reconstruction
For twenty years, from 1937 through 1956, Johnson had "a perfect 100 percent record of voting against every civil rights bill that had ever made it to the floor, even bills aimed at ending lynching." He had delivered a ninety-minute defence of the filibuster. The Senate was "a mighty dam standing athwart, and stemming, the tides of social justice," and no civil rights bill had passed since 1875. But to win the presidency he needed northern liberals, and a southerner who killed yet another bill could not win them. "During Lyndon Johnson's previous political life, compassion had constantly been in conflict with ambition, and invariably ambition had won." In 1957, at last, they pointed the same way.
He built the votes from pieces that had nothing to do with each other. "I went to a few key southerners and persuaded them to back the western liberals on Hells Canyon. And then, in return, I got the western liberals to back the southerners." That put the bill on the Calendar. He went to the Oval Office and told Eisenhower that "the entire bill would be defeated on the Senate floor" if Part III, the section the South feared would reach into school-desegregation cases, stayed in. "He said he had the votes to do this," and "The President was convinced." The South's other price was a jury-trial amendment, which liberals saw as a guarantee that southerners "would not be jailed for criminal contempt." Johnson won votes for it by extending the same jury-trial right to strikers in labor-dispute contempt cases, which the unions had wanted since Taft-Hartley. At 12:19 a.m. on August 2, the amendment passed 51 to 42.
The Senate passed the bill 72 to 18, "the first time in eighty-two years, the first time since Reconstruction." Its substance was thin, and Johnson told liberals, "We've started something now... Don't worry, it's only the first. We know we can do it now. We know the ropes."
Rufus Cornpone
The road to the White House stalled on his own fear. "If he didn't try, he couldn't fail," John Connally said of his refusal to declare for President in 1960. Johnson himself spoke of being "immobilized" and "paralyzed."
When Rowe asked why he would give up the Majority Leadership to be Kennedy's Vice President, Johnson answered, "Power is where power goes... I'll still control the Senate." He was wrong. His attempt to go on presiding over the Senate Democrats was denounced to his face: "They had to humiliate me in public." Kennedy's aides called him "Rufus Cornpone," and Robert Kennedy hated him. For "a man who dreads above all else what he calls 'humiliation,'" the three vice-presidential years were exactly that.
What the Hell's the Presidency For?
On November 22, 1963, "in an instant, in a gunshot," he was President. Kennedy's staff distrusted him, a "mass exodus" was possible, and Kennedy's tax cut and civil rights bill were both stalled by southern committee chairmen: Harry Byrd in Senate Finance and Judge Smith in House Rules.
The "frenetic, frantic, arm-waving" man was replaced by "a disciplined calmness," which Caro calls "a triumph not only of genius but of will." He insisted on taking the oath on the ground in Dallas before Air Force One took off, with the White House photographer present, to show continuity. He begged every Kennedy man to stay: "I need you now more than President Kennedy needed you." To George Meany it was "I need you as we've never needed you before," and Meany answered, "we'll go down the line with you." The Kennedy men mocked the line among themselves ("Ahhh need you, really ah do"), but they stayed.
On the night of November 26, advisers sat around his dining room table drafting his first address to a joint session of Congress. Most of them warned him not to stress civil rights. It would antagonise the southerners who controlled Congress, and the bill had no chance anyway. The man they were advising had voted against every civil rights bill for twenty years. "In the early hours of the morning," one of the wise, practical people around the table told him to his face that a President should not spend his power on lost causes, however worthy.
"Well, what the hell's the presidency for?" Lyndon Johnson replied.
The next day he used the nation's grief as leverage. "No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long." When pressing the governors, the words "burst out of him": the bill should pass "so that we can say to the Mexican in California or the Negro in Mississippi or the Oriental on the West Coast or the Johnsons in Johnson City that we are going to treat you all equally and fairly, and you are going to be judged on merit and not ancestry, not on how you spell your name." Those who doubt his sincerity, Caro writes, "simply haven't paid sufficient attention."
— Lyndon Johnson, address to a joint session of Congress, November 27, 1963We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.
Then he went to work on the old men. He cut the budget to $97.9 billion so that Byrd, whose limit was $100 billion, could claim victory, and he threw his weight behind a discharge petition, "a procedure rarely invoked because it offends traditionalists," to pry the civil rights bill out of Smith's committee. Smith soon announced hearings.
He needed a commission on the assassination the country would believe, and he wanted Russell on it. He did not ask first. He had the list of members handed out, waited until the presses were rolling, and at 8:55 p.m. called Russell in Winder, Georgia, to tell him. When Russell protested, Johnson worked through deceit, the danger of war, patriotism and command, and finished with gratitude: "you—you made me and I know it, and I don't ever forget.... I'm a Russell protégé."
Within a month the civil rights bill had been "broken... free of the congressional logjam," and the tax cut was "on the road to passage." "At that moment," Johnson said, "the power of the federal government began flowing back to the White House." Caro calls it "political genius in action." The Civil Rights Act was signed on July 2, 1964, after Johnson told Humphrey how to get Everett Dirksen: "You drink with Dirksen! You talk to Dirksen! You listen to Dirksen!"
Credibility Gap
Caro warns that the qualities Johnson suppressed during the transition "had not... been eliminated from his nature." The same weeks that freed the civil rights bill held his first Vietnam decision. "I am not going to lose Vietnam," he said. "I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went."
Campaigning in 1964, he promised "we are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves." Within a month of his inauguration the bombers were going north, "with Johnson personally selecting many of the bombing targets," and in April 1965 he sent 40,000 men into a land war. When the change leaked, he "ordered his aides to deny that such a decision had been made." By the time he left office "549,000 American troops were mired in a hopeless jungle war," and 58,000 Americans died there. Soldiers wore buttons reading "Ambushed at Credibility Gap." Protesters outside the White House chanted, "Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?"
He had always "lied about big matters and small," down to the claim that his great-grandfather "died at the Alamo." A fellow congressional aide said, "Lyndon Johnson believed in nothing, nothing but his own ambition." The cruelty, too, had never gone away. His staff was made up of people "who had demonstrated an unusual willingness to absorb personal abuse": Mary Rather, "who stood head bowed while obscenities swept over her"; Glynn Stegall, "whose hands would shake as Lyndon Johnson humiliated him in front of his wife." He told staffers their ties looked "like a limp prick." He shouted at Lady Bird across a crowded dinner, "Get me another piece of pie!"
That is the whole of the man in Caro's volumes. The stolen elections and Leland Olds showed what he would do to get power. "What the hell's the presidency for?" showed what he wanted to do with it. Vietnam showed what the same habits did when they were aimed at a war instead of a roll call. "Power reveals," Caro writes. Once a man has it, "it is no longer necessary for him to hide those traits."
Part IIThe Playbook
Johnson is not a model to copy whole. He is a manual of how power is actually accumulated in institutions run by people, written by a man who had no money, no family name and no natural constituency, and who stopped at very little. Several of the methods that made him effective also made him dangerous, and the honest way to study them is to keep both facts in view.
The principles
- 1.Read what a man is not telling you.
- 2.Get close to the one man at the top.
- 3.Look for power where no one else looks.
- 4.Learn to count, and never overestimate.
- 5.Choose the room that fits your gift, then study it before you move it.
- 6.Rewrite the deal until the votes appear.
- 7.Give the stubborn man his number and his credit.
- 8.Present the ask as already done.
- 9.Pass the weak first version; the door stays open.
- 10.Know what the power is for.
Principle 1
Read what a man is not telling you
Jenkins and Busby knew Johnson was "not... a reader of books" but "a reader of men—a great reader of men," interested in "what it was that the man wanted—not what he said he wanted but what he really wanted." He tried to teach it. "Watch their hands, watch their eyes... Read eyes. No matter what a man is saying to you, it's not as important as what you can read in his eyes."
He was "more interested in men's weaknesses than in their strengths because it was weakness that could be exploited." "The most important thing a man has to tell you is what he's not telling you," he said, and he would not let a conversation end until the other man let slip what he was hiding. The gift has an ethical edge that cannot be filed off. It is the same skill whether you use it to meet someone's real need or to find his price.
Tactic: In any negotiation, treat the stated position as the least important information in the room; keep the conversation going until you learn what the other side actually wants and actually fears.
Principle 2
Get close to the one man at the top
At every stage Johnson identified the one person whose favour mattered most and made himself indispensable to him. He found powerful men who were lonely or had no son, and he filled the gap with time: Sunday breakfasts, baseball games, a companion at the office in the early mornings and late evenings. He calculated it, but it was also returned. The cost showed among his equals, who called him "a professional son." And the debts were eventually called in, as Russell learned on the night of the Warren Commission call.
Tactic: Identify the one sponsor whose backing changes your trajectory, learn what is missing from that person's life, and supply it consistently over years rather than asking for anything up front.
Principle 3
Look for power where no one else looks
At San Marcos no one cared about campus politics, and Johnson saw that campus elections controlled the jobs poor students needed to stay in school. In the Senate he found power in patronage, scheduling, committee assignments and campaign money, powers that had "seemed inconsequential" in restrained hands and that he used "without restraint."
"I do understand power, whatever else may be said about me," he said. "I know where to look for it, and how to use it."
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Where Johnson Found Leverage
Each office he held had a source of power its previous occupants had ignored.
| Arena | The overlooked lever |
|---|---|
| San Marcos | Campus jobs that poor students depended on |
| Capitol Hill aides | The Little Congress as entrée to men of power |
| The House | Texas money revived through the campaign committee |
| The Senate | Committee seats, patronage and the calendar under the Leader |
| The presidency | The discharge petition and the nation's grief |
Tactic: When you join an organisation, map the formal powers of your role that predecessors left unused; the procedure everyone else considers too minor or too impolite to invoke is often the decisive one.
Principle 4
Learn to count, and never overestimate
"Johnson said the first lesson of politics is to be able to count," Humphrey recalled. "I have never forgotten that." Walter Jenkins warned Bobby Baker "never to overestimate" Johnson's votes on a controversial bill, because "defeat was something the Chief wanted to avoid at all costs." He "saw no value in glorious defeats."
Counting was also how he controlled tempo. Once he had a majority, he wanted the question called at once. When he was short, he stretched the roll call while stragglers were rounded up.Tactic: Never take a proposal to a decision on an optimistic tally; know the real count before the meeting, and if you are short, change the timing or the proposal rather than hoping.
Principle 5
Choose the room that fits your gift, then study it before you move it
Johnson was lost among 435 congressmen and in his element among ninety-six senators, because his power was persuasion one on one. He recognised the fit from a doorway. And then, unusually for him, he waited, learning which senators had the respect of their fellows, and why. Caro describes a related ability "to transform his outward personality... not to change his nature, but to conceal it." The tantrums of 1948 ended "instantly and completely" when they began to cost him, and after Dallas the arm-waving man gave way to "a disciplined calmness."
Tactic: Pick arenas whose size and structure suit how you actually win, and in a new arena spend your first months learning its manners and its real hierarchy before trying to move it.
Principle 6
Rewrite the deal until the votes appear
The 1957 bill was not passed on its merits. It was passed because Johnson treated its text as something to be rewritten until the numbers worked. He traded southern votes on the Hells Canyon dam for western votes to bring the bill to the Calendar. He dropped Part III to satisfy the South, using the threat that he had the votes to kill everything. Then he attached a jury-trial right for strikers, so that labor-friendly moderates could vote for the jury-trial amendment as a pro-labor measure. Caro's comment on the swap: "The result of Johnson's cynicism this time was not merely a step forward for himself but a step forward for a great cause."
Tactic: When a direct vote isn't there, stop arguing the merits and change the package: link unrelated issues, drop the clause that loses the most votes, and add one that gives a wavering bloc a reason of its own to say yes.
Principle 7
Give the stubborn man his number and his credit
Harry Byrd needed a budget under $100 billion and the right to say he had forced a President to meet it. Johnson gave him both, at $97.9 billion: "Now you can tell your friends that you forced the President of the United States to reduce the budget." On Dirksen: "You've got to let him have a piece of the action. He's got to look good all the time." To Humphrey: "You drink with Dirksen! You talk to Dirksen! You listen to Dirksen!"
The same man threatened in private, and at the top: reporters in the gallery watched him bend close to a senator "and they would see the other senator's face change, as the threat was pounded in." Credit in public, pressure in private.
Tactic: Find the specific number or symbol your opponent needs in order to claim victory, give it to him if it costs you little, and let him take the credit publicly.
Principle 8
Present the ask as already done
Russell learned he was on the Warren Commission after the press had the list. Presented with a fact rather than a request, the old senator could only bargain over his dignity. Johnson then ran through every tool he had in a single call. When Russell said he had never been told, Johnson claimed he had. Then came the danger of rumours that Khrushchev and Castro were behind the killing, then duty, then command: "I can't arrest you. And I'm not going to put the FBI on you. But you're goddamned sure going to serve." He even brought in Russell's nephew, dangling a job.
It worked, and it cost something. Russell "refused to let that misrepresentation stand." A tactic like this spends the relationship it rests on, which is why Johnson used it on the patron whose loyalty he had banked longest.
Tactic: When a refusal would be costly and the relationship can absorb it, commit publicly first and negotiate second; the other party's choice becomes how to accept, not whether to.
Principle 9
Pass the weak first version; the door stays open
The 1957 Act "contained only limited substance," and liberals hated what had been cut from it. Joe Rauh "hated his guts." But George Reedy argued that critics "failed to recognize the irrelevancy of the point... it opened a major branch of American government to a tenth of the population for which all legislative doors had been slammed shut since 1875." Johnson's answer was that the first law was the point: "We've started something now... it's only the first. We know we can do it now. We know the ropes." George Reedy said Johnson believed "that if he got one civil rights act through, he could get more... it would be no longer a question of yes or no, but how much." Seven years later he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Tactic: When a reform has been blocked for decades, ship the thin version that can pass; once the precedent exists, the argument shifts from whether to how much.
Principle 10
Know what the power is for
For most of his life Johnson accumulated power as an end in itself. Four days into the presidency, told not to waste his power on a lost cause, he asked the question that defines him: "Well, what the hell's the presidency for?"
Caro's reading is that "power always reveals." With a small amount of power in the Senate he did a small thing for civil rights; with a great deal, "it didn't take him long to reveal at least part of what he wanted to do with it." The same man then used the same certainty, the same secrecy and the same willingness to deceive on Vietnam. Compare Deng Xiaoping, another master of power who spent it on transformation and on repression alike.
Tactic: Decide in advance what you would spend accumulated power on, and spend it on that; leverage that is never spent on a cause tends to be spent on self-protection instead.
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Part IIIMaxims
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Find the lonely old man and become his son. Evans, Wirtz, Rayburn, Roosevelt and Russell all had a gap in their lives, and Johnson filled it with Sunday breakfasts, baseball games and a kiss on a bald head. He calculated it, and it was returned.
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Read the eyes, not the words. "No matter what a man is saying to you, it's not as important as what you can read in his eyes." The leverage is in what a man is trying not to say.
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Learn to count before you learn to argue. The 1957 jury-trial amendment passed 51 to 42 because he changed its text until the numbers worked.
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Never relax until the ballot boxes are sat on. He lost in 1941 by reporting early. In 1948 the decisive votes came in six days after the polls closed.
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Wait when the room demands it, however much it hurts. The man who pressed every elevator button sat for hours on a nearly empty Senate floor, because "waiting—patience—was necessary."
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Pass the weak law; the door stays open. "We know we can do it now. We know the ropes."
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Power reveals what the climb concealed. The stolen elections showed what he would do to get power; "What the hell's the presidency for?" showed what he wanted to do with it.
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Beware the man who can convince himself of anything. The self-belief that turned thirteen minutes over New Guinea into a legend powered his persuasion, and in the end it produced the Credibility Gap.
