The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson I

It came from Dallas—from anti-New Deal oilmen who didn’t care what Lyndon Johnson’s politics were so long as he protected their profits. In 1941, the specter of federal regulation by the hated Ickes was becoming more and more of a possibility, and they needed protection in Washington more than ever, and their trusted advisor, Alvin Wirtz, assured t

Ickes could describe him as a “kid Congressman.” “Kid,” in some terms, he may have been—a thirty-one-year-old Congressman from a remote and isolated political district. But after that telegram, he was, in terms of power, a kid Congressman no longer. Unknown though his name remained to the public in the state’s other twenty congressional districts,

Johnson came to the use of money in elections very early. While he was still a congressional assistant, he sat in a San Antonio hotel room buying votes with five-dollar bills. An extravagant use of this lever characterized his own campaigns from the first: his initial race for Congress, in 1937, was one of the most expensive congressional campaigns

During his eleven years as a Congressman, therefore, no national bill introduced by Lyndon Johnson that would have affected the people of the United States became a law of the United States.

As the robber barons of the last century looted the nation’s earth of its wealth—its coal and coke, its oil and ore, its iron, its forests, the very surface of its earth to provide a footing for the rails of their railroads—and used part of that wealth to ensure that the nation’s government would not force them to give more than a pittance of their

If the Bunton eye was famed throughout the Hill Country, so was the Bunton personality. The Bunton temper was fierce and flaring, and the Bunton pride was so strong that some called it arrogance—although a writer describing one of the family notes that the arrogance was softened by a “shadow of sadness running through his features,” and pictures of

On June 28, Werner submitted his final report on Case S.I.-19267-F, showing tax deficiencies of $1,099,944 and a penalty of $549,972. But even this was to be scaled down. After a series of further conferences between IRS officials and Wirtz, Brown & Root was ultimately required to pay a total of only $372,000. There were of course no fraud indi

The backing of Bailey’s lieutenants gave him, in his first term in the Legislature, the chairmanship of a key legislative committee. A committee chairman’s power was used to build more power. Legislators who received favors from him were expected to give favors in return. And the favors Rayburn asked for were, like the favors he gave, shrewdly chos

Congressmen who were worried about money to ensure their return to Capitol Hill had learned that all the money they needed was available from Texas—from Texas and from the new industrial order of the Southwest, of which Texas was the heart—and that Lyndon Johnson, more than any other single figure, controlled it.