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As Caro details, Johnson had decided early on that a dirt-poor boy from Texas could be somebody. After winning a congressional seat of his own in 1937, he was certain that he could go all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Yet for all that unbridled ambition, he proved a lackluster Representative. He made few speeches, introduced no legislation of note and would not fight for the passage of anyone else's. Stymied by the seniority system and generally despised by congressional colleagues, he hit upon a way to gain eminence: those cashstuffed envelopes. Caro says that Johnson took hundreds of thousands of dollars from the newly prosperous oil and construction interests of Texas and channeled the money into Democratic congressional campaigns. "The new power he possessed did not derive from Roosevelt's friendship, or from Rayburn's," writes Caro. "His power was simply the power of money."
Caro's Johnson is, for the most part, a heel. But like many another great man, Johnson failed in his efforts to be thoroughly knavish. As a young teacher in a dusty South Texas hamlet, he drove his Mexican-American students relentlessly, and gave them self-respect and ambitions they had never known. In the book's most touching chapter, Caro describes Johnson's enduring love for Alice Glass, the high-spirited mistress and later the wife of Publisher and Oilman Charles Marsh. Their affair began in 1938, after Alice, then 26, met the tall, jug-eared Congressman, then 29, during a party at Longlea, her regal Virginia estate. He arranged a visa extension at her request for Conductor Erich Leinsdorf, an Austrian Jew fleeing the Nazis. The relationship continued until the 1960s, when Alice grew angry at L.B.J.'s conduct of the Viet Nam War.
Johnson bragged crudely about many liaisons after his 1934 marriage to Lady Bird Taylor, but about Alice he was as silent, Caro writes, "as a young man in love." And uncharacteristically rash: Marsh, the owner of several Texas newspapers and one of Johnson's most influential patrons, was someone he could hardly afford to cross. Luckily for Lyndon, Marsh never caught on. The author quotes a witness to the affair: "That was the only time—the only time—in Lyndon Johnson's whole life that he was pulled off the course that he had set for himself."
Caro leaves Johnson shortly after he lost a 1941 election to fill a vacant Senate seat (overconfident of victory, he allowed an opponent to falsify more returns than he did) and headed off to war, a 33-year-old Navy officer. Thus, nearly 800 pages after this saga begins, L.B.J. has barely set foot on the Path to Power. Does the world really need another endless tome about Lyndon Johnson?
The answer lies perhaps less with Johnson than with Caro. His narrative never stumbles, his prose never flattens. The lengthy sketches of supporting players, like Sam Rayburn and Contractor Herman Brown, are masterly in themselves. And the secret love affairs, cash-stuffed envelopes and other reportorial hand grenades seem to come remarkably often for so long a book on so familiar a subject. But then, as acquaintances, biographers and most Americans at least a few years beyond voting age have long known, Lyndon Johnson seldom failed to surprise. Volume II cannot either. The envelopes, please. —By Donald Morrison
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