Sublime

Brown & Root might be breaking the law if it gave money to the Johnson campaign, but Brown did not let the law deter him from backing his candidate to the hilt. He simply took precautions to conceal what he was doing. These precautions had to be more extensive than the ones he had taken the previous year, for the scale of his contributions was

Three white men approached Lamar Smith, who during World War II had enlisted in the Army at the age of forty-nine, and who now, having returned from the war to build up a profitable farm, had enlisted in another battle: “He was determined,” an admirer would say, “that his people would have a say in local government.” The three men warned Smith to s

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The Leland Olds fight had given Johnson the newspaper support he had previously lacked. A hundred articles portrayed him as the senator who had stood up against a President and against subversion—and when he returned to the great province in the Southwest (in a symbolically appropriate chariot, Brown & Root’s new DC-3), he did so as its hero, o

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

To the people of East Tremont, East Tremont was family. In its bricks were generations.

And if there was subtlety now in the making of this profit, the making was still, for the machine, the motive. The greed was only refined, not eliminated.