"}We requested a lot of boxes, looking through a lot of file folders \nthat, from their description in the \u201cFinding Aids,\u201d one would assume \ncontained nothing of use to me\u2014and the wisdom of Alan\u2019s advice was \nproved to me again and again. Someday, I hope to be able to leave behind\n me a record of at least a few of the scores and scores of times that \nthat happened, some of which may be of interest, at any rate to \nfellow-historians; for now, I\u2019ll give just one example. I had decided \nthat among the boxes in which I would at least glance at every piece of \npaper would be the ones in Johnson\u2019s general \u201cHouse Papers\u201d that \ncontained the files from his first years in Congress, since I wanted to \nbe able to paint a picture of what he had been like as a young \nlegislator. And as I was doing this\u2014reading or at least glancing at \nevery letter and memo, turning every page\u2014I began to get a feeling: \nsomething in those early years had changed.
For some time after \nJohnson\u2019s arrival in Congress, in May, 1937, his letters to committee \nchairmen and other senior congressmen had been in a tone befitting a new\n congressman with no power\u2014the tone of a junior beseeching a favor from a\n senior, or asking, perhaps, for a few minutes of his time. But there \nwere also letters and memos in the same boxes from senior congressmen in\n 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\n back over my notes, I put them in chronological order, and when I did \nit was easy to see that there had indeed been such a time: a single \nmonth, October, 1940. Before that month, Lyndon Johnson had been \ninvariably, in his correspondence, the junior to the senior. After that \nmonth\u2014and, it became clearer and clearer as I put more and more \ndocuments into order, after a single date, November 5, 1940, Election \nDay\u2014the tone was frequently the opposite. And it wasn\u2019t just with \npowerful congressmen. After that date, Johnson\u2019s files also contained \nletters written to him by mid-level congressmen, and by other \ncongressmen as junior as he, in a supplicating tone, whereas there had \nbeen no such letters\u2014not a single one that I could find\u2014before that \ndate. Obviously, the change had had something to do with the election. \nBut what?
At that time, I was constantly flying back and forth \nbetween Austin and Washington. Papers don\u2019t die; people do, and I was \ngiving first priority to interviewing the men and women who, during the \nnineteen-thirties, had been members of a circle of New Deal insiders to \nwhich the young congressman from Texas had been admitted.
One member of this circle was Thomas G. Corcoran, a pixieish, \nebullient, accordion-playing Irishman known as Tommy the Cork, who had \nbeen an aide to Franklin Roosevelt and had since become a legend in \nWashington as a political fixer and a fund-raiser nonpareil. I just loved\n interviewing Tommy the Cork. He was at that time in his late seventies,\n but if he came into the lobby of his K Street office building while I \nwas waiting for the elevator, he would say, \u201cSee you upstairs, kid,\u201d as \nhe opened the door to the stairwell. And often, when I reached the \neleventh floor, where his office was situated, he would be standing \nthere grinning at me when the elevator door opened. He was, in the best \nsense of the word (truly the best to an interviewer anxious to learn the\n innermost secrets of political maneuverings), totally amoral. He cared \nfor nothing. Once, on a morning that we had an interview scheduled, I \npicked up the Washington Post over breakfast in my \nhotel room to see his name in big headlines and read a huge story about \nhis role in a truly sordid Washington scandal. I expected to find a \nbroken, or at least a dejected, man when I was ushered into his office. \nInstead, he gave me a big grin\u2014he had the most infectious grin\u2014and, when\n I didn\u2019t bring up the subject of the \nstory but he could tell it was on my mind, he said, \u201cIt\u2019s just free \nadvertising, kid, free advertising. Just as long as they spell my name \nright.\u201d
Tommy the Cork had once told me about one of his most \neffective fund-raising techniques. When the man he was asking for money \nwrote a check and handed it across the desk to him, Mr. Corcoran, no \nmatter what the amount\u2014no matter if it was more than he had hoped \nfor\u2014would look at it with an expression of disdain, drop it back on the \nman\u2019s desk, and, without saying a word, walk toward the door. He had \nnever once, he told me\u2014exaggerating, I\u2019m sure, but how much?\u2014he had \nnever once been allowed to reach the door without the man calling him \nback, tearing up the check, and writing one for a larger amount. And \nnow, when I asked Mr. Corcoran what had changed Lyndon Johnson\u2019s status \nin October, 1940, he said, \u201cMoney, kid, money.\u201d Then he added, \u201cBut \nyou\u2019re never going to be able to write about that.\u201d I asked why not. \n\u201cBecause you\u2019re never going to find anything in writing,\u201d he said.
For\n some time, I was afraid that Mr. Corcoran was right. From what I had \nalready learned about Johnson\u2019s obsession with secrecy, I was prepared \nto believe that in this particularly sensitive area he had made sure \nthat there was going to be nothing to find. And the Cork was right on \nanother point, too: without something in writing\u2014documentation, in other\n words\u2014even if I discovered what had happened I wasn\u2019t going to be able \nto put it in my book. But the change in Johnson\u2019s status\u2014the fact that \nduring October, 1940, this young congressman had been elevated to a \nplace of some significance in the House of Representatives\u2014made me feel \nit was imperative that I find out and document what had happened in that\n month.
Alan\u2019s words were in my mind. I had been looking at only \nLyndon Johnson\u2019s general \u201cHouse Papers,\u201d but these boxes might not be \nthe only ones that dealt with Johnson\u2019s early congressional career. \nThere were also, for example, those LBJA files, containing letters and \nmemos to and from \u201cclose associates.\u201d I hadn\u2019t even begun turning the \npages in them.
Corcoran had said that the answer to my question \nwas money, and if money was involved the place to start looking was \nBrown & Root, the Texas road-and-dam-building firm, whose \nprincipals, Herman and George Brown (Root had died years before), had \nbeen the secret but major financiers of Johnson\u2019s early career; by 1940,\n Brown & Root had already begun receiving federal contracts through \nJohnson\u2019s efforts. When it came to money, there were no closer \nassociates than Herman and George. I didn\u2019t have much hope of finding \nanything in writing, but their files were files in which I should \nnonetheless have been turning every page.
I started doing that \nnow. I requested Box 13 in the LBJA \u201cSelected Names\u201d collection and \npulled out the file folders for Herman. There was a lot of fascinating \nmaterial in the files\u2019 two hundred and thirty-seven pages, but nothing \non the 1940 change. George\u2019s correspondence was in Box 12. There were \nabout two hundred and thirty pages in his file. I sat there turning the \npages, every page, thinking that I was probably just wasting more days \nof my life. And then, suddenly, as I lifted yet another innocuous letter\n to put it aside, the next document was not a letter but a Western Union\n telegram form, turned brown during the decades since it had been \nsent\u2014on October 19, 1940. It was addressed to Lyndon Johnson, and was \nsigned \u201cGeorge Brown,\u201d and it said, in the capital letters Western Union\n used for its messages: \u201cYOU WERE SUPPOSED TO HAVE CHECKS BY FRIDAY \u2026 HOPE THEY ARRIVED IN DUE FORM AND ON TIME.\u201d
It\n also named the people who were supposed to have sent the checks\u2014six of \nBrown & Root\u2019s business associates. And Tommy Corcoran had been \nwrong: Lyndon Johnson had for once put something in writing. Attached to the telegram was a copy of his response to George. \u201cALL OF THE FOLKS YOU TALKED TO HAVE BEEN HEARD FROM,\u201d it said. \u201cI\n AM NOT ACKNOWLEDGING THEIR LETTERS, SO BE SURE TO TELL ALL THESE \nFELLOWS THAT THEIR LETTERS HAVE BEEN RECEIVED \u2026 YOUR FRIEND, \nLYNDON B. JOHNSON.\u201d Johnson had added by hand, \u201cThe thing is \nexceeding my expectations. The Boss is listening to my suggestions, \nthanks to your encouragements.\u201d
So there was the proof that \nJohnson had received money from Brown & Root in October, 1940 (and \nthat it had brought him into some sort of contact with \u201cthe Boss,\u201d \nJohnson\u2019s name for President Franklin Roosevelt). But how much had the \nsix donors sent? Why hadn\u2019t Brown & Root sent the money itself? And,\n more important, what had happened to the money? How did Johnson use it?\n What was the mechanism by which it was distributed? There was no clue \nin the telegram, or in Johnson\u2019s reply. But the money had come from \nTexas, and George and Herman had friends who, I knew, had contributed, \nat the Browns\u2019 insistence, to Johnson\u2019s first campaigns. Most of the \ncontributors, I had been told, were oilmen\u2014in Texas parlance, \u201cbig \noilmen.\u201d
I started calling for the big oilmen\u2019s folders. And, sure enough, there was a letter,\n dated in October, from one of the biggest of the oilmen, Clint \nMurchison. Murchison dealt with senators or with the Speaker of the \nHouse, Sam Rayburn, the leader of the Texas delegation; he hardly knew \nthe young congressman; in his letter to Johnson, he misspelled his name \n\u201cLinden.\u201d But he was evidently following Brown & Root\u2019s lead. \u201cWe \nare enclosing herewith the check of the Aloco Oil Co\u2026 . for $5,000, \npayable to the Democratic Congressional Committee,\u201d his letter said. \nAnother big oilman was Charles F. Roeser, of Fort Worth: the amount \nmentioned in the letter I found from him was again five thousand, the \npayee the same.
So the recipient was the Democratic Congressional \nCampaign Committee, which had previously been nothing more than a \nmoribund subsidiary of the Democratic National Committee. There were a \nlot of file folders in Boxes 6, 7, 8, and 9 of the Johnson House papers \nlabelled \u201cDemocratic National Committee.\u201d Those boxes contained \nthirty-two hundred pages. Some of the folders had less than inviting \ntitles. \u201cGeneral\u2014Unarranged,\u201d for example, was a thick folder, bulging \nwith papers that had been sloppily crammed into it. When I pulled it \nout, I remember asking myself if I really had to do \n\u201cGeneral\u2014Unarranged.\u201d But Alan might possibly have been proud of me\u2014and I\n wasn\u2019t very deep into the folder when I was certainly grateful to him. \nOne of the six people George Brown said had sent checks was named \nCorwin. In \u201cGeneral\u2014Unarranged,\u201d not in alphabetical order but just \njammed in, was a note from J. O. Corwin, a Brown & Root \nsubcontractor, saying, \u201cI am enclosing herewith my check for $5,000, \npayable to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.\u201d Five \nthousand dollars. Had each of the six men mentioned in Brown\u2019s letter \nsent that amount?
The \u201cUnarranged\u201d file contained letter after \nletter with details I knew I could use. And in other folders I came \nacross letters in which that same amount was mentioned: for example, \nfrom E. S. Fentress, who was the partner of Johnson\u2019s patron, Charles \nMarsh. I knew that one of the biggest and the most politically astute of\n the oilmen was Sid Richardson. I looked under the name \u201cRichardson\u201d in \nfile folder after file folder in different collections, without any \nluck. What was the name of that nephew of his whom Richardson, unmarried\n and childless, allowed to transact some of his business affairs? I had \nheard it somewhere. What was it? Bass, Perry Bass. I found that name and the donation\u2014\u201cPerry R. Bass, $5,000\u201d\u2014in yet another box in the House papers.
Letters\n from many big Texas oilmen of the nineteen-forties\u2014who needed \nguarantees that Congress wouldn\u2019t take away the oil-depletion allowance,\n and that other, more arcane tax breaks conferred by the federal \ngovernment wouldn\u2019t be touched\u2014were scattered through those boxes. And \nall the contributions were for five thousand dollars. Of course, they must\n be. I suddenly remembered what I should have remembered earlier. Under \nfederal law in 1940, the limit on an individual contribution was five \nthousand dollars. How could I have been so slow to get it? Well, I got \nit now. The Brown & Root contribution to the Democratic \nCongressional Campaign Committee, funnelled through the company\u2019s \nbusiness associates, had been thirty thousand dollars, a substantial \namount in the politics of that era, and, in fact, more money than the \ncommittee had received from the D.N.C., its parent organization. And \nthere were so many additional five-thousand-dollar contributions from \nTexas!
But there was a next question: how had this money resulted \nin such a great change in Lyndon Johnson\u2019s status in Congress? How had \nhe transmuted those contributions into power for himself? He had had no \ntitle or formal position with the Democratic Congressional Campaign \nCommittee; he had tried to get one, I had learned from other files, but \nhad been rebuffed.
I found the answer in those LBJA files. He had \nhad George Brown instruct each of the Brown & Root contributors, and\n had had the other Texas contributors instructed similarly, to enclose \nwith their checks a letter stating, \u201cI would like for this money to be \nexpended in connection with the campaign of Democratic candidates for \nCongress as per the list attached.\u201d Johnson had, of course, compiled the\n list, and, while the checks received by the lucky candidates might have\n been issued by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, each \ncandidate received a telegram from Johnson, saying that the check had \nbeen sent \u201cAS RESULT MY VISIT TO CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE FEW MINUTES AGO.\u201d
Before\n the campaign was over\u2014in that single month, October, 1940\u2014Lyndon \nJohnson had raised from Texas, and had distributed to congressional \ncandidates, campaign funds on a scale seldom if ever before given to \nDemocratic congressional candidates from a single, central source. The \ndocuments in those boxes of Johnson\u2019s House papers made that clear.
As\n I turned the pages in those boxes, I found other documents. \n\u201cGeneral\u2014Unarranged\u201d contained another list. There were two typed \ncolumns on each of its thirteen pages, typed by either John Connally or \nWalter Jenkins; each of these Johnson assistants later told me that he \nhad been the one who had typed them. In the left-hand column were the \ndistricts of congressmen who had asked the Congressional Committee for \nmoney. In the second column were the names of the congressmen and the \namount that each had asked for\u2014tiny amounts, in the terms of later \neras\u2014and what, in the congressman\u2019s own words, he needed it for. \u201cMUST HAVE $250 BY THURSDAY NIGHT FOR LAST ISSUE ADVERTISING,\u201d for example. Or \u201c$350 BY THURSDAY. HAVE SET UP MACHINERY TO REACH 11,000 ADDITIONAL VOTERS.\u201d Others wanted five hundred dollars \u201cFOR WORKERS IN SPANISH AND ITALIAN DISTRICTS\u201d or \u201c$1,000 ON NOVEMBER 1 TO HIRE POLL WATCHERS,\u201d or wrote, \u201cCHANCES BRIGHT \u2026 IF WE CAN GET RIGHT AWAY $14 FOR EACH OF FIVE COUNTY PAPERS AND $20 FOR TITUSVILLE HERALD.\u201d
And\n there was a third column on the page, or, rather, handwritten notations\n in the left-hand margin, notes dealing with each congressman\u2019s request.\n The handwriting in that column was Lyndon Johnson\u2019s. If he was \narranging for the candidate to be given part or all of what he\u2019d asked \nfor, he wrote, \u201cOK\u2014$500,\u201d or \u201cOK\u2014$200,\u201d or whatever the amount was he \nhad decided to give. If he did not want the candidate to be given \nanything, he wrote, \u201cNone.\u201d And by some names he wrote, \u201cNone\u2014Out.\u201d \n(What did \u201cNone\u2014Out\u201d mean? I later asked John Connally. \u201cIt meant \nhe\u201d\u2014the candidate\u2014\u201cwas never going to get anything,\u201d Connally said. \u201cLyndon Johnson never forgot, and he never forgave.\u201d)
Johnson\n had identified a source of financing for congressional races across the\n United States, a source that in the past had been used principally on \nbehalf of Presidential or senatorial candidates: Texas money. Using the \npower of the mighty Speaker, Sam Rayburn, he had made sure the money \ncame only through him. When, in 1940, officials of the Democratic \nCongressional Campaign Committee attempted to go around him, to the \nsource, writing directly to the oilmen to request contributions, the \noilmen had asked Rayburn whom to send the money to, and then, following \nthe Speaker\u2019s instructions, had replied not to the committee but to \nLyndon Johnson, writing, in the words of Charles Roeser, \u201cI\n HAVE DECIDED TO SEND MY CONTRIBUTION \u2026 TO YOU\u2026 . I AM \u2026 \nLEAVING IT UP TO \u2026 YOU, TO DECIDE IN WHAT DISTRICTS THESE FUNDS CAN \nBE BEST USED.\u201d And Johnson was not only deciding which candidates \nwould get the money; he was making sure the candidates knew they were \ngetting it from him. \u201cI want to see you win,\u201d\n he said to them in his letters and telegrams. And here is some money to\n help. By the time the congressmen got back to Washington in November, \nafter the elections, and talked to one another, the word was out. There \nwas a lot of gratitude for what Johnson had done, Walter Jenkins said: \n\u201cHe was the hero.\u201d
Moreover, the congressmen were going to need money for future \ncampaigns, and they had learned that a good way to get it\u2014in some cases \nthe only way\u2014was through Lyndon Johnson. \u201cGratitude,\u201d I was to write, \n\u201cis an emotion as ephemeral in Washington as elsewhere, but \u2026 not \nmerely gratitude but an emotion perhaps somewhat stronger and more \nenduring\u2014self-interest\u2014dictated that they be on good terms with him.\u201d In\n that single month, Lyndon Johnson, thirty-two years old, just three \nyears in the House, had established himself as a congressman with a \ndegree of influence over other congressmen, as a congressman who had \ngained his first toehold on the national power he was to wield for the \nnext thirty years. For someone interested in the sources of political \npower, as I was, those boxes in the Johnson Library contained \nincontrovertible evidence of the use to which economic power could be \nput to create political power.
To my way of thinking, I had just \none question left, and there was only one man who could answer it. I \nmight know the answer, but knowing it wasn\u2019t proving it. Herman Brown \nhad died before I started on my Johnson books. I had to talk to George.
I\n had known that wasn\u2019t going to be easy. George and Herman had been \nproud of their attitude toward interviewers; they had often boasted, \nwith some exaggeration, that neither of them had ever given an \ninterview, and that neither of them ever would. I had been trying to \ntalk to George ever since I started on Lyndon Johnson, with no results, \nor indeed response. When I telephoned and left a message with his \nsecretary, he never called back; when I wrote him letters, there was no \nreply. After I became friends with Brown & Root\u2019s longtime chief \nlobbyist, Frank (Posh) Oltorf, I asked Posh to intercede, and he did, \nseveral times\u2014after which he told me quite firmly that Mr. Brown was \nnever going to talk to me. And, if he didn\u2019t, I was going to have a hard\n time proving in my book why Brown & Root had \ngiven the money\u2014or, indeed, why in the decades after 1940 it had given \nLyndon Johnson such an immense amount of financial backing.
Sometimes\n a sudden thought does the job. One day, I found myself in the little \nTexas town of Burnet. In the courthouse square, among the weathered \nstorefronts, there was a handsome new building bearing the legend \n\u201cHerman Brown Free Library.\u201d
All at once, something occurred to \nme. George had loved and idolized his older brother, who had really been\n more like a father to him. Since Herman\u2019s death, George had been \nbuilding public monuments to him all over Texas, not only Herman Brown \npublic libraries but a Herman Brown Hall for Mathematical Sciences, at Rice University.
There\n was a telephone booth nearby. From it I telephoned Posh, and asked him \nto call George one more time. Posh said that he wasn\u2019t going to do that.\n I\u2019m only asking you to call one more time, I said, and I want you to \nsay just one sentence: tell him that, no matter how many buildings he \nputs Herman Brown\u2019s name on, in a few years no one is going to know who \nHerman Brown was if he\u2019s not in a book.
I don\u2019t \nremember Posh\u2019s reply, but he evidently made the call. The next morning,\n very early, before I was awake, the phone rang, and it was Mr. Brown\u2019s \nsecretary, asking what time would be convenient for me to meet with him.
At\n the meeting, I thought that Mr. Brown and I got along very well. When I\n was ushered into his office, I found myself with a \nseventy-nine-year-old man who was almost blind but still vigorous and \nclear of mind. After he and Herman had begun, in the nineteen-thirties, \nto build the Marshall Ford Dam, the biggest project on which Brown &\n Root had ever embarked, and had sunk much of the firm\u2019s money into it, \nthey had found that, because of a quirk in the law, the dam was, in \nBrown\u2019s words, \u201cillegal.\u201d \u201cWe had already built the cableway. That cost \nseveral hundred thousands of dollars, which we owed the banks\u2026 . We \nhad put in a million and a half dollars,\u201d he explained to me. The \nfederal government was supposed to appropriate the money for the dam in \nits 1937 session, but it had now been discovered that any appropriation \nwouldn\u2019t be legal. The Browns were facing bankruptcy. Johnson, new to \nCongress though he was, had worked out a device to make the dam project \nlegal. And the Browns had been grateful. (\u201cRemember that I am for\n you, right or wrong, and it makes no difference if I think you are \nright or wrong. If you want it, I am for it 100%,\u201d George wrote him, in \nanother letter that I found.) And Johnson had done more for the Browns, \nhad seen to it that they received the biggest contract they had ever \nreceived: to build the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station. He\u2019d then seen \nthat they were given more contracts\u2014contracts worth hundreds of millions\n of dollars\u2014to build subchasers and destroyers for the Navy, this \ndespite the fact that, as Mr. Brown told me, \u201cWe didn\u2019t know the stern \nfrom the aft\u2014I mean the bow\u2014of the boat.\u201d
At the end of our \ninterview, which lasted an entire day, Mr. Brown said that he had \nenjoyed it, and would I like to meet again. I said I would, and we went \nto lunch at the Ramada Club. Afterward, he took me to see the legendary \n\u201c8-F,\u201d Suite 8-F at Houston\u2019s Lamar Hotel, where the biggest of Texas\u2019s \nbig oilmen and contractors met to map out the state\u2019s 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.