The Path to Power Read Free Page B

Washington was to become familiar: an extraordinary preoccupation with, and talent for, secrecy. This talent was striking even in his youth, and in the concealment of his own life story the President outdid himself. On innocuous personal letters written while he was still a young congressional assistant, he wrote: “Burn this.” His years at college provide a vivid illustration of his efforts at concealment, and of their success. While still an undergraduate at Southwest Texas State Teachers College, in San Marcos, hearranged to have excised (literally cut out) from hundreds of copies of the college yearbook certain pages that gave clues to his years there (luckily, other copies escaped the scissors). Issues of the college newspaper that chronicle certain crucial episodes in his college career are missing from the college library. A ruthless use thereafter of political power in San Marcos made faculty members and classmates reluctant to discuss those aspects of his career. And college is merely one example. In a sense, Lyndon Johnson not only attempted to create, and leave for history, his own legend, but to ensure that it could never be disproven.
    W HAT D UMAS M ALONE wrote of Thomas Jefferson, however, is true of Lyndon Johnson: “He loses none of his fascination but he does lose much of his elusiveness when one follows him through life the way he himself went through it, that is, chronologically.” In this three-volume work, Johnson’s life will be told as in fact it unfolded.
    The more one thus follows his life, the more apparent it becomes that alongside the thread of achievement running through it runs another thread, as dark as the other is bright, and as fraught with consequences for history: a hunger for power in its most naked form, for power not to improve the lives of others, but to manipulate and dominate them, to bend them to his will. For the more one learns—from his family, his childhood playmates, his college classmates, his first assistants, his congressional colleagues—about Lyndon Johnson, the more it becomes apparent not only that this hunger was a constant throughout his life but that it was a hunger so fierce and consuming that no consideration of morality or ethics, no cost to himself—or to anyone else—could stand before it.
    It, too, can be seen in college. There he obtained his first power. “San Marcos,” as it was called, was a school that represented for most of its students their only chance to escape from a life of poverty and brutal physical toil. And for many of these students, their only chance of staying in college was to secure campus jobs. Lyndon Johnson obtained the power to give out these jobs, and once he had it, he used it—exacting deference, a face-to-face acknowledgment of this power, from his classmates. His years at college made clear not only this hunger but a willingness to do whatever was necessary to temporarily satisfy it (in the final analysis, it was insatiable). To obtain the power that he wanted, Lyndon Johnson, who was alleged to have won his seat in the United States Senate in a stolen election in 1948, stole his first election at college, in 1930. He won another campus election by the use against a young woman of what his lieutenants call “blackmail.” And a score of political tricks on the same moral level earned him a reputation on campus as a man who was not “straight,” not honest. He was, in fact, so deeply and widely mistrusted at college that the nickname he bore during all his years there was “Bull” (for “Bullshit”) Johnson. Most significant, perhaps,the dislike and distrust of him extended beyond politics. As President, Lyndon Johnson would be accused of lying to the American people. When he was a college student, his fellow students (who used his nickname to his face: “Hiya, Bull,” “Howya doin’, Bull?”) believed not only that he lied to them—lied to them constantly, lied about big matters and small, lied so