Sublime

The little group of which Johnson was a part was an unusual group. Two of its members—Douglas and Fortas—would sit on the highest court in the country. Others—Corcoran and Rowe—would be part (as, indeed, Douglas and Fortas, too, would be part) for decades to come of the nation’s highest political councils. In the years immediately after Johnson

George Brown had been working closely with Johnson for three years; Johnson’s initial nomination to Congress, in 1937, had, in fact, been brought about to ensure an immensely complicated transaction with a very simple central point: the firm in which George and his brother Herman were the principals—Brown & Root, Inc.—was building a dam near Austin

“I remember hearing Lyndon say that this business of getting these people jobs is really the nucleus of a political organization for the future,” Russell Brown says. In his attempts to obtain patronage, he did not—the secretary to an obscure Congressman—have much ammunition to work with. So he could not afford to let any opening slip away.

Despite the last-minute passage of the Social Security bill, liberal antipathy to Johnson was as strong as ever—stronger, in fact: 1956 had, after all, been the year of the natural gas fight and the exemption of highway workers from the David-Bacon Act, and new revelations about Johnson’s relationship with Brown & Root. Under a headline that was an

If at the Greenbrier Johnson subordinated his desire for personal wealth to his desire to become President, he found, in 1942, a way to reconcile his two ambitions—and in years to come he found a dozen ways, and he entered the Oval Office perhaps the richest man ever to occupy it. Shortly after he assumed the Presidency, Life magazine, in the most

Lyndon Johnson was using his boss’ boat, his boss’ car, to pay the enormous telephone bills his boss’ money, to make friends—but he was making friends not for his boss but for himself. A new political organization was being created in the district, an organization which was coming, more and more, to be centered not on the district’s Congressman but

James H. Rowe, the highly respected lawyer and political insider, who had known Lyndon Johnson for almost twenty years, was aware that, as he was to say, Johnson would always use “whatever he could” to “make people feel sorry for him” because “that helped him get what he wanted from them.” But that awareness didn’t help Rowe when the person from

To whatever extent Johnson in 1957 was already planning, at least in outline, the things he would do if he ever became President, he was planning to betray, and to betray on a very large scale, the men, some of them very clever men, who were, for years, not only his most loyal but his most important supporters. “Civil rights didn’t get accomplished

AFTER LYNDON JOHNSON’S DISCUSSION with Bobby Baker (“Dick Russell is the power”), in late December 1948, Johnson abruptly dropped his requests for a seat on Appropriations. There was, he would explain, only one way to get close to a man whose life was his work: “I knew there was only one way to see Russell every day, and that was to get a seat on