President Kennedy’s eloquence was designed to make men think; President Johnson’s hammer blows are designed to make men act.
“In some ways Congress is like a dangerous animal that you’re trying to make work for you. You push him a little bit and he may go just as you want but you push him too much and he may balk and turn on you. You’ve got to sense just how much he’ll take and what kind of a mood he’s in every day. For if you don’t have a feel for him, he’s liable to turn around and go wild. And it all depends on your sense of timing.” (emphasis mine)
When people hear that Robert Caro has written more than 3,000 pages on Lyndon B. Johnson, they often assume Caro chose Johnson as a subject because of his presidential achievements. In reality, Caro chose to write about Johnson because of his legislative record:
[Johnson] made the Senate work. For a century before him, the Senate was the same dysfunctional mess it is today. He’s Majority Leader for six years, the Senate works, it creates its own bills. He leaves, and the day he leaves it goes back to the way it was. And it’s stayed that way until this day. Only he, in the modern era, could make the Senate work.
As Senate Majority Leader, Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Civil Rights Act of 1960, the first Civil Rights Acts since Reconstruction. Even Johnson’s presidential legacy is largely a result of his legislative achievements. In the five years Johnson was President, he passed "the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, a liberal immigration bill, and some seventy different education bills."
Johnson’s extraordinary legislative success stemmed from a crucial ability that Caro identifies throughout his books: the capacity to recognize fleeting opportunities and to seize them instantly—to strike while the iron is hot.
There are many examples of Johnson striking while the iron was hot in his political career. But none of those examples illustrate Johnson’s impeccable timing as well as his legislative leadership in the Senate.
1. The 1957 Civil Rights Act
Johnson was eyeing the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination, but as a legislator with a perfect anti-civil rights record, the northern Democratic machine would not support his candidacy. He needed to pass the 1957 Civil Rights Act—the first since 1875.
Through ingenious maneuvering, Johnson kept the civil rights bill alive and slowly progressing throughout the spring of 1957. By early July 1957, the bill was stalled. Southerners would not accept a bill with a fully intact Part III, which would allow the federal government to send troops into their states to enforce the laws and judicial decisions, and liberals wanted to keep the bill with its current wording, for they firmly believed their cause was just and just causes do not require compromise. A filibuster seemed imminent. Compromise seemed impossible. But Johnson had a talent:
To recognize the opportunity when suddenly, without warning, it came.
The talent required had, moreover, to consist not alone of insight but also of decisiveness, of an ability not only to recognize a crucial moment but to seize it, to see the opening—and to strike; to move fast enough so that the opportunity did not vanish, perhaps never to come again. It was the ability to recognize the key that might suddenly unlock votes that had seemed locked forever away—and to turn the key, and turn it fast.
One day in the middle of debates on the civil rights bill on the Senate floor, Johnson noticed that liberal Senator Clint Anderson had been sitting in the chamber for the past two to three days. When Johnson strolled over to Anderson’s desk, Anderson showed him an amendment to Part III, which Anderson believed would be acceptable to the southerners by removing language allowing for federal intervention. Anderson suggested:
Johnson should arrange to have [Anderson’s work] introduced as an amendment by some southerner or conservative who opposed Part III. And almost without a pause, almost in the instant that Clint Anderson made his suggestion, Lyndon Johnson saw what was wrong with it—and also saw what was right with it, saw what it could mean, if only it was used correctly. And he saw in that instant how it could be used correctly. “Okay,” he said, approving the amendment. But then he added: “You do it.”
Many amendments had been discussed over the preceding months. But this amendment was different from the others:
This one was being suggested not by an enemy of civil rights but by a friend, by a prominent liberal, by a member of the Douglas Group. Johnson felt at that moment, as we know from George Reedy, that moderate Democrats, anxious to find a way out of the civil rights impasse but not willing to accept an enemy’s suggestion, might accept an amendment that came from one of their own. He saw in an instant that this amendment should be not merely suggested by but also introduced by a friend: in fact, by the man who had written it. Put the amendment in, Johnson was telling Anderson, but don’t have it put in by a southerner. “You do it.”
Seeing, in Anderson’s amendment, the weapon that could break the impasse, Lyndon Johnson had seized that weapon, and wielded it. Equally important, he had wielded it decisively, in the instant it came to his hand. He had had to wield it at that instant—at any moment, the opening it gave him might have disappeared; the focus might shift to some other amendment that would divide the Senate even more irreparably than it was already divided. The mood on the floor, already growing more bitter by the minute, might grow so bitter that no compromise would be accepted. By seeing the opportunity, seizing it, and making the most of it, Lyndon Johnson had turned the tide. He had gotten the South the support it needed to remove an important element of the bill, but because he had done so, the South had not killed the bill. Thanks to him, it was still alive.
Ultimately, passing the Civil Rights Act of 1957 required another genius legislative maneuver. But Johnson managed to pass the Act, paving his way towards a national stage. Johnson’s margin of success was minuscule. The moment the iron became hot—an inherently fleeting moment—Johnson struck it.
2. Post-JFK: Presidential Transition
Right after Johnson became President following JFK’s assassination, he faced a lot of issues passing the presidential legislative program in the Senate. The tax bill was stuck in the Finance Committee with its Chairman Byrd being ideologically opposed to the budget. The Senate of 1963 was different from the Senate of 1959, when Johnson was its Majority Leader. In 1959, Johnson would have easily passed a budget he wanted to get passed. But in the three years of confrontations between Congress and President Kennedy:
Congress, and in particular the Senate, had won so often, had blocked so many Kennedy legislative proposals, that Congress now felt that in such confrontations, power rested on Capitol Hill, not in the White House. And the confidence among congressmen that they could win battles with the President had made them more willing to fight them, had emboldened them to contest the Kennedy program.
In October of 1963—before Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963—as part of his attempts to ease tensions with the Soviet Union, Kennedy "offered to help alleviate its serious food shortage by selling it wheat from America’s surplus, and by allowing Russia, short of foreign exchange reserves, to finance the purchase on credit from the United States Export-Import Bank." Hard-liners in the Senate opposed that proposal, and Senator Mundt of South Dakota submitted an amendment prohibiting the extension of credit for the wheat purchase to the Soviet Union. Right before his assassination, Kennedy tried but failed to defeat the amendment. When Johnson’s team was updating him on the status of legislation before Congress:
In the instant the wheat sale vote was mentioned to [Johnson]—“just the moment he heard about it,” George Reedy says—he knew that because of Kennedy’s death and the resultant change in Presidents, the vote was now about more than the wheat sale, that it now possessed a far broader significance.
Johnson knew that the:
the feeling on Capitol Hill had to be changed. If Congress won, its confidence that it could still defeat the President would make subsequent battles—over civil rights, for example, or the tax cut—much more difficult for him. “We could not afford to lose a vote like that, after only four days in office,” he was to explain in his memoirs. “If those legislators had tasted blood then, they would have run over us like a steamroller [on future votes], when much more than foreign aid would depend on their actions.”
The night before the vote, Johnson began telephoning senators not opposed to the bill.
In essence, he said: Do you want the first action of the United States Senate to be a posthumous repudiation of John F. Kennedy and a slap in the face of Lyndon Johnson.
Framing the issue that way changed votes, and by about eleven o’clock that night, he had enough so that he knew he had won. But for his purpose—to show he was in charge—he wanted not just a victory, but a rout. “That wheat thing—I hope that gets murdered,” he said. He kept making calls. And the vote against the bill the next day would be 57 to 36. “WHEAT BILL—FIRST JOHNSON VICTORY,” the headlines said.
Once again, Caro identifies the talents that enabled Johnson’s success
During his years in the Senate as, year by year, during his time as Assistant Leader and then Leader and Majority Leader, the legend of Lyndon Johnson had grown, one element that had contributed to his mastery of the Senate had been his intuition, his rare gift for seeing the larger implications in an individual bill. Another element had been his decisiveness: his gift, equally rare, not only for sensing in an instant, in the midst of the cut and thrust and parry of debate on the Senate floor, which way the Senate’s mood was running on a bill, and not only, if the mood was running in the wrong direction, for sensing the moment at which the tide might be turned, but a gift as well not only for sensing the moment, but for seizing it—for launching, on the instant, maneuvers that turned the tide.
With the wheat vote, Johnson turned the tide; he reversed the flow of power: over the past three years, power was concentrated in Congress; with the wheat vote, legislative power began flowing down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the White House. In late November 1963, legislative power was just beginning its flow. By July 1964, when Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964, legislative power had finished its flow down Pennsylvania Avenue and was decisively vested at the White House.
Johnson’s genius wasn’t merely working hard—it was sensing the fortunate moment and seizing it before it vanished. Once Johnson astutely acquired the hammer (whether through access to money, power over committee assignments, or control of the Senate schedule), he struck it with determination, decisiveness, and force.
And Johnson knew something else. Momentum can be lost. “A measure must be sent to the Hill at exactly the right moment,” he was to explain. “Timing is essential. Momentum is not a mysterious mistress. It is a controllable fact of political life.” The time to catch a wave is at its crest. And while the wave of emotion, of affection and adoration, for the martyred young President would roll on for decades—is still rolling on today, almost half a century after Dallas—its crest, the height of the Kennedy tide, came in the weeks immediately following Dallas, in the weeks of Lyndon Johnson’s transition. By rushing to push through Kennedy’s bills, Johnson caught the crest. The maneuvers by which he made them begin to move through Congress were made easier—in some cases were only made possible—by that wave of emotion. Had he not caught the tide at its absolute height, he might well have lost some of its force, and as the Senate fight of 1964 was to demonstrate, every ounce of that force would be necessary to pass the civil rights bill. By moving as quickly as he did, Johnson caught a tide, seized a moment, that might not have lasted very long.
While Johnson largely struck while the iron was hot, there are two cases when he failed to take advantage of incredible opportunities.
1. 1941 Special Senate Election
When Johnson was a congressman in April 1941, Morris Sheppard—U.S. Senator from Texas—died from a stroke. The moment Johnson learned of Sheppard’s death, he decided to run for the vacant Senate in the special election.
Johnson ran a good campaign. FDR gave Johnson a lot of support including credit for federal spending in Texas and almost explicit endorsements. Johnson’s access to an immense amount of money ensured that voters throughout Texas heard about his candidacy on radio and in newspapers all the time. More importantly, with the immense amount of money, Johnson bought all votes which were available for sale in the state, mostly in South Texas.
The last statewide poll before the election showed Johnson in the lead with 31 percent of the vote and O’Daniel—Johnson’s main opponent and then-Governor of Texas—with 26 percent. On Election Day, Johnson felt that he couldn’t lose. Johnson’s headquarters were celebrating the win on Election Day. Caro continues:
But Lyndon Johnson was to make a mistake.
He made it at the very last moment—on Election Day, in fact. Arriving around noon at the Stephen F. Austin Hotel from Johnson City, where he had voted in the morning after making a last speech from the front porch of his boyhood home and kissing all the mothers and grandmothers, as he had kissed them as a teenager, he took a sleeping pill and napped for a while in the bedroom of his suite, while his mother stood guard in the living room to keep anyone from disturbing him. Awakening in the late afternoon, he learned that the news was good; the early returns had put him ahead of O’Daniel, and his lead was steadily widening. Mann and Dies [other candidates] were clearly out of the race. He was also told that George Parr and the other South Texas bosses had been telephoning to find out when they should report their counties’ votes—and he told them, either personally or through an aide, that they should report them immediately.
For a while, everything seemed fine. With more than 96 percent of votes in, Johnson had a 5,152 vote lead. Newspapers in the state were announcing his win. But the reality of Texas politics was such that:
Not all the votes were counted on Election Day.
The urban vote was counted on Election Day, of course—by 1941, voting machines were in use in most Texas cities—and most of the rural vote, too, although most rural voting in Texas was still by paper ballot. The results from some rural precincts, however, often didn’t trickle in until several days after a statewide election—and the explanation, in some cases, did not lie merely in the isolation of these precincts and the fact that, in some of them, the county judge might not have a telephone with which to communicate with the Texas Election Bureau.
There existed in the upper levels of Texas politics common knowledge about the precincts that were for sale, the “boxes” in which the county judge wouldn’t “bring in the box” (report the precinct totals to the Election Bureau) until the man who had paid him told him what he wanted the total to be, the precincts in which the county judge took the rather flimsy locked tin ballot box (to which the judge had the key) to his home to count the ballots at leisure and in privacy (and, if necessary, to insert some new ones), with confidence that no one would ever be able to discover—and certainly not to prove—what he had done.
From this knowledge follows a rule:
Since in a close election, precinct results could thus be altered, it was a fundamental rule of Texas politics not to report your important precincts—the ones in which you controlled the result—early. By reporting your total, you let your opponent know the figure he had to beat, and in Texas, it was all too easy then to beat it. Even if a judge had already reported the result in his precinct, so long as he hadn’t officially certified it, he could change it, saying he had made a mistake in his arithmetic. Johnson had violated this rule, perhaps out of overconfidence, perhaps because his intelligence network had assured him that O’Daniel, his principal opponent, had made no preparations to change any boxes, and would have difficulty doing so now because, except in South Texas, [O’Daniel] had alienated the “professional politicians”—the county judges and commissioners whose cooperation he would have needed. But the vote was to be changed nonetheless.
As O’Daniel was running on an anti-establishment platform, it’s easy to see why Johnson didn’t consider the possibility of vote-stealing on his behalf. But chance intervened. And that chance involved alcohol. O’Daniel was a Prohibitionist. In the weeks before the Senate election, O’Daniel "sent to the Legislature a bill prohibiting the sale of beer or liquor within ten miles of any military base." There was another development:
When, before the start of the campaign, the chairmanship of the state’s three-member Liquor Control Board, whose power over liquor licenses throughout Texas was all but absolute, fell vacant, the Governor had appointed a crusading Prohibitionist preacher to fill the post. The lobbyists had mobilized the Legislature to refuse to confirm the preacher’s appointment, and to turn down as well other O’Daniel nominees for the post, all of whom seemed more interested in closing down the liquor business in Texas than in supervising it—they included the head of the Texas anti-saloon league and the past president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Ten days before the election, however, O’Daniel had succeeded in pushing through his fifth nominee, another Prohibitionist. A second vacancy on the board would occur shortly, and if O’Daniel succeeded in filling that, too, with another Prohibitionist, the Board “could just about have ended the liquor and beer business down here.” Equally important, O’Daniel’s victory reminded Beer, Inc., [formally the Texas Brewers Institute] that a powerful Governor might succeed in winning passage of the bill creating a “dry zone” around military camps. “There were millions and millions of dollars involved now,” Lawson says. “They had to get him out of the Governorship.”
The lobbyists had thought the problem would be solved by O’Daniel’s election to the Senate, which would remove him to Washington and see him replaced in the Governor’s chair by Lieutenant Governor Coke Stevenson, a lifelong Wet and an ally of Beer, Inc. [also known as the Texas Brewers Institute], and its hard-liquor partner. Now O’Daniel appeared to have lost the election, but by only about 5,000 votes; it was at once apparent to these powerful lobbyists that removing the threat would not be difficult at all—particularly since Lyndon Johnson, by having his votes reported early, had let them know precisely how many additional O’Daniel votes would be needed to beat him.
As Johnson was celebrating, Beer, Inc.’s supporters visited county judges who had not yet reported their results. Because of his self-assured confidence, Johnson failed to take reasonable precautions like making his men "ride the polls" to ensure maximum effort of those bringing voters to the precincts and having poll-watchers until judges reported official returns. More brazenly:
In some cases where [Johnson] did have men present, once the election judges reported their [uncertified] totals Saturday night, his men were told they could come in to Austin and join the victory celebration.
Hence, as a result of Beer, Inc.’s efforts, on Tuesday,
Hardly had the Election Bureau office opened when more “corrections” began coming in. By the end of the day, O’Daniel was more than a thousand votes ahead; the official final count would give him 175,590 votes to 174,279 for Johnson, a margin of 1,311.
Lyndon Johnson’s loss had been due to a political fluke. He had been beaten not by his opponent’s friends but by his opponent’s foes; O’Daniel had won the Senate seat not because these men wanted him to be Senator, but because they didn’t want him to be Governor—because they wanted to get him out of Texas. But it was Johnson’s mistake that had enabled these men to take his victory away. He had planned and schemed and maneuvered for ten years—had worked for ten years, worked day and night, weekday and weekend—had done “everything.” And, for ten years, he had won.
He had relaxed for one day. And he had lost.
And the opportunity slipped away.
Johnson thought he’d run for the Senate in 1942 against O’Daniel, but he promised voters that he would fight in WW2 if the US joined the war. As Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Johnson’s chance to run for the Senate in 1942 went out the window. Johnson could not run for the Senate in 1946 because the incumbent Senator Tom Connally was too popular. So 1948 it was. Johnson relaxed for one day. And his mistake delayed his Senate career by seven and a half years.
2. 1958–1960 Democratic Presidential Convention Preparation
By 1958, Johnson was the Majority Leader of the Senate and—as mentioned earlier—had already passed the 1957 Civil Rights Act. He was setting his eyes on the next stage of the ladder: the presidency. As a powerful Majority Leader, he was well-positioned to capitalize on his chance. The iron was hot.
None of the other potential Democratic candidates (Stevenson, Kefauver, Kennedy, and Humphrey) seemed particularly strong. Caro continues:
If he won the nomination, furthermore, he would not have to face Eisenhower, since the beloved President would have served the two terms the Constitution allowed. Neither of the two potential Republican nominees—William Knowland of California and Eisenhower’s Vice President, Richard M. Nixon—would be nearly as formidable. Lyndon Johnson had positioned himself as well as was possible for a southern candidate. Now was the moment to strike. (emphasis mine)
BUT HE DIDN’T.
Sometime in 1958—no one involved knows the exact date—he summoned to his LBJ Ranch six or seven men who were veterans of previous campaigns, greeted them on the front lawn that sloped down from the house to the little Pedernales River, asked them to pull the lawn chairs into a semicircle around him, and told them he had called them together to discuss his upcoming campaign for the presidency. “He was convinced that he was the best man to be President,” recalls one of the group, Texas State Senator Charles Herring, and “he was convinced that he could be nominated and win if we’d work hard enough.” “I’m going to be President,” he told them. That was his destiny. “I was meant to be President.”
But Johnson was not doing anything to achieve his goal. As "1958 drew to a close, and the convention and election year of 1960 drew closer, the assignments [for groups of states his aides would be responsible for] were still not forthcoming." Johnson was not actively running for the presidency.
Speaking invitations poured into Johnson’s office from across the country—opportunities any presidential candidate would seize. But Johnson would be constantly declining these invitations.
George Reedy or Walter Jenkins [Johnson’s aides] might bring in a sheaf of speaking invitations—they were pouring into Johnson’s office every day from all over the country. The boots would come off the desk, and Lyndon Johnson would begin to pace back and forth around the office. Or he would walk over to the window, plunge his hands into his trouser pockets, and stand looking out for long minutes, his tall figure, silhouetted against the fading late-afternoon light, very still—except that his assistants would hear a continual low jingle as his hands restlessly shuffled the coins and keys in his pockets. Returning to the desk, he would agonize over each invitation, unable to decide whether or not to accept it, at one moment saying he would, the next moment changing his mind, wavering back and forth.
Almost always, he wound up declining—declining even invitations that a candidate (even an unannounced candidate) for the presidency would obviously be well advised to accept; among the seventeen invitations to deliver major speeches he received during March, 1958, were personal requests from the grande dame of his party, Eleanor Roosevelt, for a speech before the American Association for the United Nations, and from the governor of Iowa, Herschel C. Loveless, who had recently announced that he had not decided whom his state’s delegation would support in 1960. Sometimes, Johnson would accept one or another invitation—but then invariably would change his mind and refuse (as he did eventually with every one of the seventeen March requests), and then would regret that he had refused.
This pattern continued throughout 1958, 1959, and even into 1960. The man known for his decisiveness—for sensing the moment and seizing it—was paralyzed. Perhaps none of the stories signify Johnson’s horrendous timing as much as the story of his Idaho visit:
In Idaho, where the Hells Canyon Dam was rising day by day, and where political leaders knew who had gotten them the dam at last [Majority Leader Johnson], the Democratic state chairman, Tom Boise, had told Hoff that, despite all the Kennedy efforts, many party leaders were still considering supporting Johnson. “These guys were for Johnson,” Hoff says. “If we had been able to tell them that he was going to run, we’d have had that delegation.” He explained this to Johnson, and Johnson accepted an invitation to speak in Lewiston, Idaho, and afterwards to have a drink with Boise and his leaders in a hotel suite. But in the suite, Johnson said all the right things—except the one thing it was necessary for him to say. “Lady Bird had gone to bed in another room, and he was in his living room, walking around in his pajamas holding a drink, stirring it with his big finger. They said, ‘We’re for you, but we need to know if you’re going to run.’ He said, ‘What the hell do you think I’m out here for—catching butterflies? Do you see me carrying a net?’ ” But there were future government positions at stake, careers at stake, issues at stake—with the convention so close, rhetorical humor wasn’t enough. They pressed him further. But all Johnson would say was, “I’ll let you know.… You’ll be the first to know.” Recalling the scene years later, Hoff would say, “It was like he couldn’t bring himself to say it. He had flown out there to say it, but he couldn’t bring himself to get the words out.” Witnessing similar scenes, Bobby Baker felt he understood them, that “The problem was LBJ’s fear of being defeated”: that saying it would be admitting that he was trying, and trying might mean failing, “so he couldn’t bring himself to say it.” After Johnson had gone to bed, Boise told Hoff quietly that Johnson’s assurances had not been adequate. “He said, ‘We’ve got to know, and we’ve got to know pretty soon. I’m for him one hundred percent, but we’ve got to know.’ ” Hoff understood, but when he raised the subject the next day, Johnson again refused to authorize him to give Boise any firm assurance.
Johnson’s paralysis directly led to his failure, especially in the West which was essential for him to win as a Southern candidate with limited support from Northern Democrats.
Johnson could have won the West. The Kennedy assigned—in September 1959—to canvass for western delegates was the youngest brother, twenty-seven-year-old Ted. Amiable, gregarious, open, Ted was nonetheless a natural and keenly observant politician, and on this, his first political foray, he quickly realized, he recalls, that the West “was very sympathetic to” Johnson. “They sweet-talked me about my brother. But they said, ‘The reality is: This is Johnson Country. We know how he stands on minerals, on grazing issues, on … We know he’s been a friend of the West.…’ They felt enormously committed to him on the issues. He [Johnson] could have locked that place up without any difficulty at all.”
The reality of Presidential conventions is that "for many reasons—patronage is one, and control of delegations is another—the big men at conventions are governors and municipal leaders.”
While Johnson wavered through 1958, 1959, and early 1960, Bobby and Ted Kennedy methodically built organizations state by state, locking in delegates and local power brokers. Johnson didn’t enter any primaries, thus he wasn’t showing state bosses that he was a winner. By the time Johnson woke up and started running for the presidency in late April of 1960 with all the intensity exhibited during previous elections, it was too late. John Kennedy had already built a strong nationwide organization and locked in many delegates in the West.
Johnson didn’t run for the presidency because he was scared of failure.
Asked, years later, for an explanation, Connally [Johnson’s protégé] said that as much as “He [Johnson] wanted the nomination, he did not want to be tarred” with—did not want the stigma of—“having lost it.” And, Connally says, “If he didn’t try, he couldn’t fail.” Says Jim Rowe [another Johnson protégé]: “He wanted one thing. He wanted it so much his tongue was hanging out; then he had another part inside him that said, ‘Why get my hopes up? I’m not going to try. If I don’t try, I won’t fail.’ ”
Johnson’s paralysis cost him the 1960 nomination. He would not become President until November 1963, after JFK’s assassination. By fearing defeat, he ensured it. The iron had been hot, but he waited, and the moment passed.
Johnson’s life plan was to start his nationwide political career in the House, then go to the Senate, and then to the presidency. He fumbled his best chance of these two transitions. Losing the 1941 special Senate election delayed his Senate career by seven and a half years. Not locking in delegates in time for the 1960 Democratic convention delayed his presidency by almost three years. In both of those cases, he almost lost the chance to transition to the next step of the ladder. Winning the 1948 Senate election required stealing votes to secure an 87-vote win (out of 988,295 total votes). And on the day JFK was assassinated, an insurance agent was giving testimony before the Senate Rules Committee about Johnson’s shady business dealings, which could have ruined Johnson. In both cases, Johnson almost lost the chance to ascend to the next step of his "preordained" political ladder.
Just as Johnson recognized moments to seize political opportunities, Caro recognized biographical opportunities. Just as Johnson recognized that legislative moments are fleeting, Caro understood that his opportunity to capture Johnson’s story through firsthand accounts was limited by human mortality.
While writing The Power Broker, Robert Moses’ people said to Caro: “He’ll never talk to you. His family will never talk to you. His friends will never talk to you. Anyone who ever wants a contract from this city or state will never talk to you.” Caro’s saving grace was a journalist telling him about the existence of carbon copies of Park Commission documents.
After finishing The Power Broker, Caro had a contract to write a book about Fiorello La Guardia, but both Caro and his editor Bob Gottlieb agreed that as Caro already wrote about urban political power, he should write his next book about Johnson to explain national political power. But a never-mentioned fact about that decision is timing. Caro published The Power Broker in 1974 and started working on The Years of Lyndon Johnson shortly after. Lyndon Johnson passed away in January 1973. Had Johnson been alive, he would have restricted Caro’s access to his inner circle. At one point in his life, when Johnson was deciding how much money Democratic Congressional candidates would get from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, he sometimes would write "None—Out" next to their names.
What did “None—Out” mean?, [Caro] was later to ask John Connally. “It meant he [the candidate] was never going to get anything,” Connally said. “Lyndon Johnson never forgot, and he never forgave.”
Johnson would not have forgotten or forgiven anyone who disclosed his private dealings to Caro. But because of timing, Caro had a generational biographical opportunity. An adversarial subject had passed away and everyone who interacted with the subject on a day-to-day basis was still alive and would be inclined to talk with Caro because there would be no retaliation from Johnson.
In particular, Caro conducted many interviews with George Reedy and Horace Busby, who were close Johnson aides. Caro would often call them for spur-of-the-moment clarifications, and would understand a firsthand perspective on how Johnson made his decisions. Another political insider that Caro interviewed was Thomas G. Corcoran, also known as "Tommy the Cork." Caro could check in with Johnson confidants about his hunches. One of those hunches was about Johnson’s time in the House. Caro continues:
I had decided that among the boxes in which I would at least glance at every piece of paper would be the ones in Johnson’s general “House Papers” that contained the files from his first years in Congress, since I wanted to be able to paint a picture of what he had been like as a young congressman. I thought that by doing that I could also give some insight into the life of junior congressmen in general. And as I was doing this—reading or at least glancing at every letter and memo, turning every page—I began to get a feeling: something in those early years had changed. For some time after his arrival in Congress, following a special election, in May, 1937, his letters to committee chairmen, to senior congressmen in general, had been in a tone befitting a new congressman with no seniority or power, in the tone of a junior addressing a senior, beseeching a favor, or asking, perhaps, for a few minutes of his time to discuss something. But there were also letters and memos in the same boxes from senior congressmen in which they were doing the beseeching, asking for a few minutes of his time. What was the reason for the change? Was there a particular time at which it had occurred?
Going back over my notes for all the documents, I put them into chronological order, and when I did it was easy to see that there had indeed been such a time: a single month, October, 1940. Before that month, Lyndon Johnson had been invariably, in his correspondence, the junior to the senior. After that month, and, it became clearer and clearer as I put more and more documents into date order, after a single date—November 5, 1940; Election Day, 1940—the tone was frequently the opposite. And, in fact, after that date, Johnson’s files also contained letters written to him by middle-level congressmen, and by other congressmen as junior as he, in a supplicating tone, whereas there had been no such letters—not a single one that I could find—before that date. Obviously the change had had something to do with the election. But what?
In one of Caro’s interviews with Tommy the Cork, Caro asked him what had changed Lyndon Johnson’s status in October, 1940. Tommy the Cork responded:
“Money, kid, money.” Then he added: “But you’re never going to be able to write about that.” I asked why not. “Because you’re never going to find anything in writing,” he said.
Tommy the Cork’s comment gave Caro something essential: direction. He didn’t know where the evidence was, but he now knew what had changed Johnson’s status in October 1940. Armed with this insight, he turned to boxes containing Johnson’s correspondence with "Brown & Root, the Texas road- and dam-building firm whose principals... had been before 1940 the secret but major financiers of Johnson’s early career." Caro continues:
I sat there turning the pages, every page, thinking that I was probably just wasting more days of my life. And then, suddenly, as I lifted yet another innocuous letter to put it aside, the next document was not a letter but a Western Union telegram form, turned brown during the decades since it had been sent—on October 19, 1940. It was addressed to Lyndon Johnson, and was signed “George Brown,” and it said, in the capital letters Western Union used for its messages: YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO HAVE CHECKS BY FRIDAY…HOPE THEY ARRIVED IN DUE FORM AND ON TIME. It also named the people who were supposed to have sent the checks: six of Brown & Root’s subcontractors. And Tommy Corcoran had been wrong: Lyndon Johnson had put something in writing.
Even when insiders don’t provide direct evidence, they provide direction that wouldn’t exist if Johnson had forbidden those insiders from talking with Caro.
Even when the people Caro talked to were not close Johnson confidantes, the fact they were still alive provided Caro with invaluable insights. While Johnson liked publicly portraying his college years as a happy and popular time in his life, finding Vernon Whiteside and Ella So Relle allowed Caro to accurately portray Johnson’s socially unpopular college years.
Many important people mentioned to Caro how Johnson worked extremely hard on his first Congressional campaign. But none of them gave Caro a vivid example of how hard Johnson worked. Until Caro talked with Carroll Keach who was Johnson’s campaign driver.
Ed Clark had seen a lot of campaigners. “I never saw anyone campaign as hard as that,” he would recall forty years later. “I never thought it was possible for anyone to work that hard.”
AND CLARK DIDN’T KNOW how hard Lyndon Johnson was really working. No one knew—with the exception of Carroll Keach. Because only Keach, alone in the car with Johnson for hours each day, knew what Johnson was doing in the car.
The great distances that had to be covered in Texas political campaigns, and the amount of time that politicians were therefore forced to spend traveling by car, had created a Texas political custom: while their chauffeurs drove them from town to town, most politicians spent considerable time sleeping. Keach would watch Johnson try to sleep. “He would try to rest between people,” he says. “He sat in the front seat next to me, and I would see him close his eyes, but never for more than a minute or two, and then he’d just jerk up. He couldn’t sleep.”
Instead, he worked—in a rather unusual fashion. Leaving a town, Johnson would begin talking, not to Keach but to himself, about the people he had met there, the personal and political likes and dislikes that they had revealed. “It was like he was going over his mental notes,” Keach says. “Who the people were, and little things about them, and who their relatives were, or how someone had reacted to some remark he had made. Someone didn’t like something he had said—why not? ‘I don’t understand why she didn’t react to such-and-such.’ ” In this sense, the talking was a review, and a preparation—a review of the people and town he had just visited, and a preparation for the next time he would visit them, so he would know what to say to them. “It was like he was having discussions with himself about what strategy had worked or hadn’t worked, and what strategy he should use the next time.” But the talking was also a critique of himself: self-criticism that was harsh, merciless. “He would talk about whether he had had a successful day, and if he had made a good impression or not. And lots of the time he felt he wasn’t doing too good. And he would tell himself it was his own fault. ‘Boy, that was dumb!’ or ‘Well, you just lost that box. You lost it, and you need it.’ ” And it was exhortation—self-exhortation that was also harsh and merciless. “ ‘Well, you’ll just have to do better, that’s all.’ ‘You’ll just have to do something else.’ ” And as Keach listened, he would try out “something else,” practice different approaches he could use the next time he saw the person, run through—aloud—the names of “people that he thought could talk to him.” The two men spent hours in the car together, and hour after hour Johnson would talk this way to himself, lashing himself for his mistakes at the last town, lashing himself into readiness for the next town. And always “like memorizing,” going over and over people’s names and their relatives and their prejudices as if to chisel them into his mind so that they would spring to his lips the next time he saw them.
Only Keach saw the full extent of his fatigue. “Boy, sometimes he would get so tired,” he says. “He would just slump there. He would close his eyes, but he couldn’t sleep. So he’d start talking again. Maybe he had finished his memorizing about one town, going through all the people. So he’d just start all over again, right at the beginning. And he’d just get more and more tired. But when we’d get to the next town, he’d just bound out of the car, and start walking around like he was fresh as could be. He never let the voters see his fatigue.”
If Keach was not alive when Caro was writing The Years of Lyndon Johnson, this story would have been lost to history.
Arguably the most important story that Caro uncovered involved Johnson’s 87-vote win in the 1948 Senate election. Every other Johnson biography up to that point said "some version of the statement: no one will ever know if [the election] was really stolen." Caro, on the other hand, determined that he would do everything possible to find what really happened in that election before writing the same dejected statement. This determination led Caro to look for Luis Salas, who was the presiding election judge at Box 13, which gave Johnson a last-minute victory with an 87-vote margin. No one knew where Salas lived, but through a lot of conversations, Caro tracked an ever-moving Salas to Houston. In the first conversation between Caro and Salas, Salas showed Caro a book he had written. The book was "ninety-four pages long. Its title was "Box 13."" In that book, Salas admitted to and provided proof of helping Johnson steal the 1948 Senate election. Through perseverance combined with timing, Caro found concrete proof of one of the most important facts of Johnson’s life, a fact which could be concretely proven only as long as Luis Salas was alive.
But Caro’s biographical opportunity was not unlimited. Just as time provides opportunities, it also takes them away. In the "A Note On Sources" section in Master of the Senate published in 2002, Caro mentioned how:
I had received previous reminders that among the problems involved in the writing of this volume was that of the human life span...
Over and over again during the course of researching these books, I was abruptly reminded of the opportunity I was being given by the cooperation of these men and women—and of how that opportunity wasn’t going to last indefinitely.
This opportunity is summarized by Caro’s saying "papers don’t die; people do." It is the understanding of this opportunity which prompted Caro to immediately jump on a plane every time a person in Johnson’s life was willing to speak to him. Same as Johnson, Caro had a deep belief that if you don’t take immediate advantage of an opportunity in front of your face, it will pass.
Ultimately, every decision has an opportunity cost. At practically every decision node, Caro chose depth over breadth. When Caro was interviewing subjects, he would go deep into specific parts of Johnson’s life. This meant that when Caro’s interview subjects passed away, many parts of Johnson’s life had not yet been discussed.
Once [Horace Busby] had a stroke, and when he got out of the hospital, he wrote Ina a letter. He wrote that, when he was afraid he was going to die, he thought, “It will be hard on Robert, nobody else can tell him about the vice presidency.”
In some ways, writing later volumes is more challenging because so many people who witnessed Johnson in action have passed away by the time Caro is going deep into that part of Johnson’s life. By choosing to write about Johnson right after publishing The Power Broker, Caro struck while the iron was hot. But as with all opportunities, they don’t last indefinitely.
Both Johnson and Caro shared the same deep belief: if you don’t take immediate advantage of an opportunity in front of your face, it will pass. Hard work brought them to their moments, but what distinguished them was a willingness to immediately strike.
Despite the 1941 Senate race and the 1960 Presidential Democratic Convention setbacks, Johnson continued on his path and eventually became President of the United States. Similarly, despite many witnesses passing away and COVID derailing his Vietnam trip, Caro continues working on the last volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson.
Setbacks don’t define life; successes do. Well-executed strikes compensate for earlier fumbles.
Some moments are opportune. The iron is hot. But the iron cools quickly, and those who hesitate may find their moment has passed forever. When opportunities present themselves, strike while the iron is hot.