antoine-roquentin:

We requested a lot of boxes, looking through a lot of file folders that, from their description in the “Finding Aids,” one would assume contained nothing of use to me—and the wisdom of Alan’s advice was proved to me again and again. Someday, I hope to be able to leave behind me a record of at least a few of the scores and scores of times that that happened, some of which may be of interest, at any rate to fellow-historians; for now, I’ll give just one example. 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 legislator. 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 Johnson’s arrival in Congress, in May, 1937, his letters to committee chairmen and other senior congressmen had been in a tone befitting a new congressman with no power—the tone of a junior beseeching a favor from a senior, or asking, perhaps, for a few minutes of his time. 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, I put them in 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 order, after a single date, November 5, 1940, Election Day—the tone was frequently the opposite. And it wasn’t just with powerful congressmen. After that date, Johnson’s files also contained letters written to him by mid-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?

At that time, I was constantly flying back and forth between Austin and Washington. Papers don’t die; people do, and I was giving first priority to interviewing the men and women who, during the nineteen-thirties, had been members of a circle of New Deal insiders to which the young congressman from Texas had been admitted.

One member of this circle was Thomas G. Corcoran, a pixieish, ebullient, accordion-playing Irishman known as Tommy the Cork, who had been an aide to Franklin Roosevelt and had since become a legend in Washington as a political fixer and a fund-raiser nonpareil. I just loved interviewing Tommy the Cork. He was at that time in his late seventies, but if he came into the lobby of his K Street office building while I was waiting for the elevator, he would say, “See you upstairs, kid,” as he opened the door to the stairwell. And often, when I reached the eleventh floor, where his office was situated, he would be standing there grinning at me when the elevator door opened. He was, in the best sense of the word (truly the best to an interviewer anxious to learn the innermost secrets of political maneuverings), totally amoral. He cared for nothing. Once, on a morning that we had an interview scheduled, I picked up the Washington Post over breakfast in my hotel room to see his name in big headlines and read a huge story about his role in a truly sordid Washington scandal. I expected to find a broken, or at least a dejected, man when I was ushered into his office. Instead, he gave me a big grin—he had the most infectious grin—and, when I didn’t bring up the subject of the story but he could tell it was on my mind, he said, “It’s just free advertising, kid, free advertising. Just as long as they spell my name right.”

Tommy the Cork had once told me about one of his most effective fund-raising techniques. When the man he was asking for money wrote a check and handed it across the desk to him, Mr. Corcoran, no matter what the amount—no matter if it was more than he had hoped for—would look at it with an expression of disdain, drop it back on the man’s desk, and, without saying a word, walk toward the door. He had never once, he told me—exaggerating, I’m sure, but how much?—he had never once been allowed to reach the door without the man calling him back, tearing up the check, and writing one for a larger amount. And now, when I asked Mr. Corcoran what had changed Lyndon Johnson’s status in October, 1940, he said, “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.

For some time, I was afraid that Mr. Corcoran was right. From what I had already learned about Johnson’s obsession with secrecy, I was prepared to believe that in this particularly sensitive area he had made sure that there was going to be nothing to find. And the Cork was right on another point, too: without something in writing—documentation, in other words—even if I discovered what had happened I wasn’t going to be able to put it in my book. But the change in Johnson’s status—the fact that during October, 1940, this young congressman had been elevated to a place of some significance in the House of Representatives—made me feel it was imperative that I find out and document what had happened in that month.

Alan’s words were in my mind. I had been looking at only Lyndon Johnson’s general “House Papers,” but these boxes might not be the only ones that dealt with Johnson’s early congressional career. There were also, for example, those LBJA files, containing letters and memos to and from “close associates.” I hadn’t even begun turning the pages in them.

Corcoran had said that the answer to my question was money, and if money was involved the place to start looking was Brown & Root, the Texas road-and-dam-building firm, whose principals, Herman and George Brown (Root had died years before), had been the secret but major financiers of Johnson’s early career; by 1940, Brown & Root had already begun receiving federal contracts through Johnson’s efforts. When it came to money, there were no closer associates than Herman and George. I didn’t have much hope of finding anything in writing, but their files were files in which I should nonetheless have been turning every page.

I started doing that now. I requested Box 13 in the LBJA “Selected Names” collection and pulled out the file folders for Herman. There was a lot of fascinating material in the files’ two hundred and thirty-seven pages, but nothing on the 1940 change. George’s correspondence was in Box 12. There were about two hundred and thirty pages in his file. 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 business associates. And Tommy Corcoran had been wrong: Lyndon Johnson had for once put something in writing. Attached to the telegram was a copy of his response to George. “ALL OF THE FOLKS YOU TALKED TO HAVE BEEN HEARD FROM,” it said. “I AM NOT ACKNOWLEDGING THEIR LETTERS, SO BE SURE TO TELL ALL THESE FELLOWS THAT THEIR LETTERS HAVE BEEN RECEIVED … YOUR FRIEND, LYNDON B. JOHNSON.” Johnson had added by hand, “The thing is exceeding my expectations. The Boss is listening to my suggestions, thanks to your encouragements.”

So there was the proof that Johnson had received money from Brown & Root in October, 1940 (and that it had brought him into some sort of contact with “the Boss,” Johnson’s name for President Franklin Roosevelt). But how much had the six donors sent? Why hadn’t Brown & Root sent the money itself? And, more important, what had happened to the money? How did Johnson use it? What was the mechanism by which it was distributed? There was no clue in the telegram, or in Johnson’s reply. But the money had come from Texas, and George and Herman had friends who, I knew, had contributed, at the Browns’ insistence, to Johnson’s first campaigns. Most of the contributors, I had been told, were oilmen—in Texas parlance, “big oilmen.”

I started calling for the big oilmen’s folders. And, sure enough, there was a letter, dated in October, from one of the biggest of the oilmen, Clint Murchison. Murchison dealt with senators or with the Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn, the leader of the Texas delegation; he hardly knew the young congressman; in his letter to Johnson, he misspelled his name “Linden.” But he was evidently following Brown & Root’s lead. “We are enclosing herewith the check of the Aloco Oil Co… . for $5,000, payable to the Democratic Congressional Committee,” his letter said. Another big oilman was Charles F. Roeser, of Fort Worth: the amount mentioned in the letter I found from him was again five thousand, the payee the same.

So the recipient was the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which had previously been nothing more than a moribund subsidiary of the Democratic National Committee. There were a lot of file folders in Boxes 6, 7, 8, and 9 of the Johnson House papers labelled “Democratic National Committee.” Those boxes contained thirty-two hundred pages. Some of the folders had less than inviting titles. “General—Unarranged,” for example, was a thick folder, bulging with papers that had been sloppily crammed into it. When I pulled it out, I remember asking myself if I really had to do “General—Unarranged.” But Alan might possibly have been proud of me—and I wasn’t very deep into the folder when I was certainly grateful to him. One of the six people George Brown said had sent checks was named Corwin. In “General—Unarranged,” not in alphabetical order but just jammed in, was a note from J. O. Corwin, a Brown & Root subcontractor, saying, “I am enclosing herewith my check for $5,000, payable to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.” Five thousand dollars. Had each of the six men mentioned in Brown’s letter sent that amount?

The “Unarranged” file contained letter after letter with details I knew I could use. And in other folders I came across letters in which that same amount was mentioned: for example, from E. S. Fentress, who was the partner of Johnson’s patron, Charles Marsh. I knew that one of the biggest and the most politically astute of the oilmen was Sid Richardson. I looked under the name “Richardson” in file folder after file folder in different collections, without any luck. What was the name of that nephew of his whom Richardson, unmarried and childless, allowed to transact some of his business affairs? I had heard it somewhere. What was it? Bass, Perry Bass. I found that name and the donation—“Perry R. Bass, $5,000”—in yet another box in the House papers.

Letters from many big Texas oilmen of the nineteen-forties—who needed guarantees that Congress wouldn’t take away the oil-depletion allowance, and that other, more arcane tax breaks conferred by the federal government wouldn’t be touched—were scattered through those boxes. And all the contributions were for five thousand dollars. Of course, they must be. I suddenly remembered what I should have remembered earlier. Under federal law in 1940, the limit on an individual contribution was five thousand dollars. How could I have been so slow to get it? Well, I got it now. The Brown & Root contribution to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, funnelled through the company’s business associates, had been thirty thousand dollars, a substantial amount in the politics of that era, and, in fact, more money than the committee had received from the D.N.C., its parent organization. And there were so many additional five-thousand-dollar contributions from Texas!

But there was a next question: how had this money resulted in such a great change in Lyndon Johnson’s status in Congress? How had he transmuted those contributions into power for himself? He had had no title or formal position with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee; he had tried to get one, I had learned from other files, but had been rebuffed.

I found the answer in those LBJA files. He had had George Brown instruct each of the Brown & Root contributors, and had had the other Texas contributors instructed similarly, to enclose with their checks a letter stating, “I would like for this money to be expended in connection with the campaign of Democratic candidates for Congress as per the list attached.” Johnson had, of course, compiled the list, and, while the checks received by the lucky candidates might have been issued by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, each candidate received a telegram from Johnson, saying that the check had been sent “AS RESULT MY VISIT TO CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE FEW MINUTES AGO.”

Before the campaign was over—in that single month, October, 1940—Lyndon Johnson had raised from Texas, and had distributed to congressional candidates, campaign funds on a scale seldom if ever before given to Democratic congressional candidates from a single, central source. The documents in those boxes of Johnson’s House papers made that clear.

As I turned the pages in those boxes, I found other documents. “General—Unarranged” contained another list. There were two typed columns on each of its thirteen pages, typed by either John Connally or Walter Jenkins; each of these Johnson assistants later told me that he had been the one who had typed them. In the left-hand column were the districts of congressmen who had asked the Congressional Committee for money. In the second column were the names of the congressmen and the amount that each had asked for—tiny amounts, in the terms of later eras—and what, in the congressman’s own words, he needed it for. “MUST HAVE $250 BY THURSDAY NIGHT FOR LAST ISSUE ADVERTISING,” for example. Or “$350 BY THURSDAY. HAVE SET UP MACHINERY TO REACH 11,000 ADDITIONAL VOTERS.” Others wanted five hundred dollars “FOR WORKERS IN SPANISH AND ITALIAN DISTRICTS” or “$1,000 ON NOVEMBER 1 TO HIRE POLL WATCHERS,” or wrote, “CHANCES BRIGHT … IF WE CAN GET RIGHT AWAY $14 FOR EACH OF FIVE COUNTY PAPERS AND $20 FOR TITUSVILLE HERALD.”

And there was a third column on the page, or, rather, handwritten notations in the left-hand margin, notes dealing with each congressman’s request. The handwriting in that column was Lyndon Johnson’s. If he was arranging for the candidate to be given part or all of what he’d asked for, he wrote, “OK—$500,” or “OK—$200,” or whatever the amount was he had decided to give. If he did not want the candidate to be given anything, he wrote, “None.” And by some names he wrote, “None—Out.” (What did “None—Out” mean? I later asked John Connally. “It meant he”—the candidate—“was never going to get anything,” Connally said. “Lyndon Johnson never forgot, and he never forgave.”)

Johnson had identified a source of financing for congressional races across the United States, a source that in the past had been used principally on behalf of Presidential or senatorial candidates: Texas money. Using the power of the mighty Speaker, Sam Rayburn, he had made sure the money came only through him. When, in 1940, officials of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee attempted to go around him, to the source, writing directly to the oilmen to request contributions, the oilmen had asked Rayburn whom to send the money to, and then, following the Speaker’s instructions, had replied not to the committee but to Lyndon Johnson, writing, in the words of Charles Roeser, “I HAVE DECIDED TO SEND MY CONTRIBUTION … TO YOU… . I AM … LEAVING IT UP TO … YOU, TO DECIDE IN WHAT DISTRICTS THESE FUNDS CAN BE BEST USED.” And Johnson was not only deciding which candidates would get the money; he was making sure the candidates knew they were getting it from him. “I want to see you win,” he said to them in his letters and telegrams. And here is some money to help. By the time the congressmen got back to Washington in November, after the elections, and talked to one another, the word was out. There was a lot of gratitude for what Johnson had done, Walter Jenkins said: “He was the hero.”

Moreover, the congressmen were going to need money for future campaigns, and they had learned that a good way to get it—in some cases the only way—was through Lyndon Johnson. “Gratitude,” I was to write, “is an emotion as ephemeral in Washington as elsewhere, but … not merely gratitude but an emotion perhaps somewhat stronger and more enduring—self-interest—dictated that they be on good terms with him.” In that single month, Lyndon Johnson, thirty-two years old, just three years in the House, had established himself as a congressman with a degree of influence over other congressmen, as a congressman who had gained his first toehold on the national power he was to wield for the next thirty years. For someone interested in the sources of political power, as I was, those boxes in the Johnson Library contained incontrovertible evidence of the use to which economic power could be put to create political power.

To my way of thinking, I had just one question left, and there was only one man who could answer it. I might know the answer, but knowing it wasn’t proving it. Herman Brown had died before I started on my Johnson books. I had to talk to George.

I had known that wasn’t going to be easy. George and Herman had been proud of their attitude toward interviewers; they had often boasted, with some exaggeration, that neither of them had ever given an interview, and that neither of them ever would. I had been trying to talk to George ever since I started on Lyndon Johnson, with no results, or indeed response. When I telephoned and left a message with his secretary, he never called back; when I wrote him letters, there was no reply. After I became friends with Brown & Root’s longtime chief lobbyist, Frank (Posh) Oltorf, I asked Posh to intercede, and he did, several times—after which he told me quite firmly that Mr. Brown was never going to talk to me. And, if he didn’t, I was going to have a hard time proving in my book why Brown & Root had given the money—or, indeed, why in the decades after 1940 it had given Lyndon Johnson such an immense amount of financial backing.

Sometimes a sudden thought does the job. One day, I found myself in the little Texas town of Burnet. In the courthouse square, among the weathered storefronts, there was a handsome new building bearing the legend “Herman Brown Free Library.”

All at once, something occurred to me. George had loved and idolized his older brother, who had really been more like a father to him. Since Herman’s death, George had been building public monuments to him all over Texas, not only Herman Brown public libraries but a Herman Brown Hall for Mathematical Sciences, at Rice University.

There was a telephone booth nearby. From it I telephoned Posh, and asked him to call George one more time. Posh said that he wasn’t going to do that. I’m only asking you to call one more time, I said, and I want you to say just one sentence: tell him that, no matter how many buildings he puts Herman Brown’s name on, in a few years no one is going to know who Herman Brown was if he’s not in a book.

I don’t remember Posh’s reply, but he evidently made the call. The next morning, very early, before I was awake, the phone rang, and it was Mr. Brown’s secretary, asking what time would be convenient for me to meet with him.

At the meeting, I thought that Mr. Brown and I got along very well. When I was ushered into his office, I found myself with a seventy-nine-year-old man who was almost blind but still vigorous and clear of mind. After he and Herman had begun, in the nineteen-thirties, to build the Marshall Ford Dam, the biggest project on which Brown & Root had ever embarked, and had sunk much of the firm’s money into it, they had found that, because of a quirk in the law, the dam was, in Brown’s words, “illegal.” “We had already built the cableway. That cost several hundred thousands of dollars, which we owed the banks… . We had put in a million and a half dollars,” he explained to me. The federal government was supposed to appropriate the money for the dam in its 1937 session, but it had now been discovered that any appropriation wouldn’t be legal. The Browns were facing bankruptcy. Johnson, new to Congress though he was, had worked out a device to make the dam project legal. And the Browns had been grateful. (“Remember that I am for you, right or wrong, and it makes no difference if I think you are right or wrong. If you want it, I am for it 100%,” George wrote him, in another letter that I found.) And Johnson had done more for the Browns, had seen to it that they received the biggest contract they had ever received: to build the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station. He’d then seen that they were given more contracts—contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars—to build subchasers and destroyers for the Navy, this despite the fact that, as Mr. Brown told me, “We didn’t know the stern from the aft—I mean the bow—of the boat.”

At the end of our interview, which lasted an entire day, Mr. Brown said that he had enjoyed it, and would I like to meet again. I said I would, and we went to lunch at the Ramada Club. Afterward, he took me to see the legendary “8-F,” Suite 8-F at Houston’s Lamar Hotel, where the biggest of Texas’s big oilmen and contractors met to map out the state’s political future.

amazing article. those oil tax breaks basically underpinned the profitability of what was a very risky industry for decades. they played a key role in the fates of a lot of presidents. FDR, of course, was beholden to the three texans who held the position of speaker of the house in a row in the 1930s for passage of his new deal programs. later on, political scientist thomas ferguson pinpoints one of the key factors in the fall of carter and the rise of reagan in carter ending the oil depletion allowance. it was the 1980 election when the oil industry switched from backing democrats to backing republicans, where they have remained to this day. there was actually an earlier democratic president who apparently wanted to end it too: jfk. many conspiracy theories surrounding his assassination foreground figures who were members of suite 8-f, and their belief that they would have a friendly face in an lbj presidency.