The Path to Power Read Free Page A

during Johnson’s Presidency that there developed the widespread mistrust of the President that was symbolized by the phrase, coined during his administration, “credibility gap.” And if, during the long evolution from a “constitutional” to an “imperial” Presidency, there was a single administration in which the balance tipped decisively, it was the Presidency of Lyndon Johnson. Both these latter developments, which were to affect the nation’s history profoundly, were to a considerable extent a function of this one man’s personality.
    Knowledge of the inner workings of Lyndon Johnson’s character illuminates a Presidency; knowledge of the broader outlines of his life illuminates far more. For the drama of his life—and of the lives, so inextricably linked with his, of his father and grandfather—was played out against a panorama vast in scope: the panorama of the westward movement in America, and particularly in America’s Southwest. The story of Lyndon Johnson is the story of the slow settlement of endless, empty, fearsomely hostile plains and hills with the “dog-run” log cabins of families who would for generations that added up to a century remain not only poor—bereft of modern machinery, of electricity, of a thousand amenities urban America took for granted—but isolated: cut off from the rest of America. Lyndon Johnson grew upin the Hill Country of Texas during the 1920s, the Age of Radio, the Age of the Movies. But there were few movies, and almost no radios—and no paved roads and no electricity and so little money that the economy was basically an agricultural barter economy—in the Hill Country during the 1920s, or, indeed, during the 1930s. And the story of Lyndon Johnson is, in microcosm, the story of how, at last, government, deaf for generations, finally, during the New Deal, during the Age of Roosevelt, answered the pleas of impoverished farmers for help in fighting forces too big for them to fight alone. The story of Lyndon Johnson is the story of the great dams that tamed the rivers of the West, and turned their waters into electric power—for it was because of Lyndon Johnson that great dams were built in the Hill Country. And the story of Lyndon Johnson is the story of the electric wires, gleaming silver across dun-brown plains and hills, which linked the life of the West, as railroads had linked its commerce, to the rest of America—for it was Lyndon Johnson who brought those wires to the Hill Country. When, in 1937, at the age of twenty-eight, Johnson became their Congressman, Hill Country farmers were still plowing their fields with mules because they could not afford tractors. Because they had no electricity, they were still doing every chore by hand, while trying to scratch a living from soil from which the fertility had been drained decades before. They were still watching their wives made stooped and old before their time by a life of terrible drudgery, a life that seemed, as one Hill Country woman put it, “out of the Middle Ages.” Four years later, the people of the Hill Country were living in the twentieth century. Lyndon Johnson had brought them there.
    E SSENTIAL THOUGH it may be to understand Lyndon Johnson—his character and his career—this understanding is hard to acquire. He made it hard. Enlisting all his energy and all his cunning in a lifelong attempt to obscure not only the true facts of his rise to power and his use of power but even of his youth, he succeeded well. He told stories readily and repeatedly (filling them with vivid, convincing, detail) about the year he spent in California as a teenager, about his college girlfriend and the denouement of their relationship, about his father, whom he often sought to portray as a drunken ne’er-do-well—about, in fact, a hundred aspects of his youth. And not merely many but most of these stories were false. Aiding in his success, moreover, was an aspect of his temperament with which, during his Presidency,