DECADES LATER, Tommy Corcoran, reminiscing, would say that "Lyndon Johnson's whole world was built on that dam."
Corcoran was referring to the effect the dam produced on the relationship between Johnson and Herman Brown. In Brown, Johnson had found an older man with a rare immunity to his charm. With his genius for sniffing out political realities, soon after his arrival in Austin as NYA director, he had divined Brown's importance in the capital, and had taken every excuse to drop by the big white house on Niles Road for advice. But advice was all he got; flattery, even Lyndon Johnson's flattery, was too cheap a coin for the purchase of Herman Brown's friendship. Although in the congressional campaign the contractor's support of Avery had been pro forma, providing him only with money and not with the full weight of his influence, and although he had hedged even this small bet with a token contribution to Johnson, he had done so only out of deference to Wirtz's opinion. Brown did not share that opinion. A firm believer in experience, he had never seen Johnson in action in Washington, and didn't believe Wirtz when Senator told him that a youth still in his twenties could fill Old Buck Buchanan's boots. Moreover, Herman Brown was a hater. He hated Negroes and he hated unions—in part, for the same reason. Having worked so hard all his life, he hated laziness and he believed that Negroes were lazy, and that unions encouraged laziness in white men; after World War II, he would, with the assistance of Alvin Wirtz and Ed Clark, ram through the Texas Legislature some of the most vicious anti-labor laws in America. And Brown hated the man—that Man in the White House—whose policies were helping unions and Negroes. He had coined his own word for New Deal programs: "Gimme's." Lazy men, he said, were always saying "Gimme," and now the country had a President who was giving them the handouts they were demanding. The very thought of programs that gave people benefits they hadn't earned brought to Brown's narrow, hard face that red flush that men feared. He saw, too, that these programs would lead to increased taxation. The very thought that government—politicians who never worked (Herman Brown, who had bought so many politicians, despised politicians)—was going to take his money for which he had worked so hard and give it to people too lazy to work—"well," George Brown says, "Herman really hated that idea." His feelings toward Roosevelt had made him ill-disposed toward a candidate who was shouting "Roosevelt, Roosevelt" up and down the district, and in the face of such shouts, Alvin Wirtz's assurances about Johnson's private dislike of the New Deal had a somewhat hollow ring. Johnson, so eloquently mouthing the phrases of the despised New Deal, had seemed, in fact, to epitomize everything Brown disliked. Every time Johnson left after one of his visits, George Brown recalls, "Herman would be saying how he'd never do—how impractical he was." And Johnson wasn't made to feel particularly welcome in Brown's home.
But Herman Brown was a man with his own code of honor. "He always paid his debts," Ed Clark says. "He would always find a way to balance his books. He would never let a man do more for him than he did for that man." And he knew how big a debt he owed Lyndon Johnson for obtaining the authorization that made the dam—and Brown & Root's contracts—legal. When, after Congress adjourned in August, 1937, Johnson returned to Austin, Brown told Clark to bring Johnson along to the house on Niles Road, and soon, Clark says, "Lyndon was over at Herman's house every night."
For a while, the atmosphere was still tense because of Herman's wife, Margaret. A pert, fiery woman with a good education and mind, she liked a chance to display them. She argued with her husband as an equal, and received equal time, and she resented Johnson's practice of talking only to her husband and all but ignoring her. Moreover, Margaret Brown was, in George Brown's words, "a very refined person." Certain of Johnson's habits—his gobbling down of food and his constant combing of his hair, even in her living room—disgusted her. "Margaret really didn't like him," Clark says.
Driving away from Niles Road after one tense evening, however, Johnson said to Clark: "I'm not getting along well with Mrs. Brown, am I?" Recalls Clark: "I said, 'I'm glad you asked me that. I didn't want to bring it up, but now that you asked, it's my duty to tell you.' At that time, Lyndon had a little blue comb … and he was constantly pulling it out and combing his hair, and constantly jumping up and looking in the mirror. Margaret couldn't stand that, and I told him so. And I said, 'If you'd stop talking all the time, and listen a little, you'd get along with her better.' And he did what I told him. No one ever saw that little blue comb again, and he got along better with Margaret" (although the more she talked with him, the more appalled she was at his lack of education; how could anyone be a Congressman, she sometimes commented after he had left, with so little knowledge of history?).
As for Margaret's husband, Johnson had learned to read him, and had realized that he had to be treated differently from most other men—because, unlike most men, flattery was not what he wanted.
Herman Brown liked to talk politics and government; those subjects fascinated him. And when he talked politics, he didn't want agreement or deference—that was why he never tired of talking to Margaret, because she, liberal in political philosophy like her father, never agreed with him. ("Oh, you learned that from some damned radical professor!" Herman would shout at her. "No, dear," she would reply, quietly but firmly, "I learned that at my father's breakfast table.") He wanted argument—hot, violent argument—and it was difficult for him to get what he wanted; in Texas, men interested in politics knew the role that Herman Brown played in Texas politics—and were, those smart enough to give him a good argument, smart enough to be afraid of him.
Lyndon Johnson gave him what he wanted. "They'd have serious fights," recalls George Brown. "Dare each other to get up and hit 'em." One of the two men would ask the other "what'd he think about the Mayor, or this legislator or that one. And they'd argue about it. Herman would say"—and as George imitates Herman, he shows a man poimding a table with angry, heavy blows of his fist—"Herman would say, 'Now, Goddammit, Lyndon, you know that's not so!'"
Sometimes even George thought his brother and Johnson were going to come to blows; "I'd intervene, and have them make up." But George also knew that Herman acted that violently only with someone "he really liked. If Herman liked you, he'd talk a lot, and pound the table. If Herman didn't like you, he'd just smile and not say anything." ("That's right," says one of Herman's lobbyists. "And, boy, when you saw that smile—watch out!") The very violence of Herman's reactions, George says, was an indication of how much he liked Lyndon Johnson.
Liked him—and, more and more, respected him. Johnson, after all, was not the only one of the two who was a reader and manipulator of men. Often they discussed legislators, and, says Frank C. Oltorf, who would later, as one of Herman Brown's lobbyists, witness many such discussions, "you could see they both knew what the other was talking about."
When their discussions centered on legislation rather than legislators, there was also a considerable area of common ground. Brown had been afraid that Johnson was not "practical" enough, but now he learned that Wirtz had been correct. "Basically, Lyndon was more conservative, more practical than people understand," George Brown says. "You get right down to the nut-cutting, he was practical. He was for the Niggers, he was for labor, he was for the little boys, but by God … he was as practical as anyone." And his brother soon realized this; even Johnson's defense of Roosevelt was couched in terms with which Herman had no quarrel. "Herman would be ranting and raving about New Deal spending, and Lyndon would say, 'What are you worried about? It's not coming out of your pocket. Any money that's spent down here on New Deal projects, the East is paying for. We don't pay any taxes in Texas. … They're paying for our projects.'" About this time, George started visiting Johnson in Washington, and he reported back to his brother that indeed many Southern Congressmen were going along with Roosevelt for this same reason; George says, "Lyndon would take me to these meetings of the Southern Congressmen, and that's the way they'd be talking. That the South would get these dams and these other projects, and it would come out of the other fellow's pocket. The Presidents before Roosevelt—Coolidge, Hoover—they never gave the South anything. Roosevelt was the first one who gave the South a break. That's why he had more plusses than minuses, because he was getting them all this money." The relationship between Herman Brown and Lyndon Johnson, George Brown says, was based on the same equation: "He [Herman] felt that Lyndon had more plusses than minuses."
Plusses, moreover, other than philosophical.
Herman Brown was a poor boy from a small town who had, as a youth, worked on a road gang, with mules and a fresno. So was Lyndon Johnson. "He [Johnson] would joke about building roads and shoveling gravel," George Brown recalls. "The stories he would tell were about what a hard time he had growing up. About how poor he had been. About how poor the Hill Country was. They were both poor boys. So there was a kinship there." Johnson had also "gotten his brother and sisters out of there"; Herman Brown, who had gotten one of his brothers out—who would have gotten the others out, had they only been willing to work—liked that, too.
Herman Brown was a poor boy with vast ambitions. Ambition was the wellspring of his character, at least in his brother's view. "We were always reaching. We never had any walking-around money, because we were always reaching above our heads. We never felt we had it made. We were always reaching for the next plateau. We were just always reaching, that's all." Lyndon Johnson's ambitions were different, but their size wasn't. "Hell, running for Congress when he had a good job, and no one thought he could win—that was a gamble," George Brown says. "He was a gambler. He wasn't afraid to take a gamble. He was just reaching all the time, like Herman and me. Herman could understand him."
And poverty and ambition were not all that Herman Brown and Lyndon Johnson had in common. Many poor boys have ambitions—even great ambitions. Few are willing to make the sacrifices necessary to achieve them. Herman Brown, who had, year after year, lived in a tent, and then, year after year, practically lived in a car—slept in a car, ate in a car—had made the sacrifice; and the sacrifice—the work, the effort—had become very important to him. A man who had worked as hard as Herman Brown could tell exactly how hard another man was working. He may not have liked what Lyndon Johnson was saying in the 1937 campaign, but when someone told Herman Brown how Johnson was not only making a dozen speeches a day, but driving hundreds of miles to do it, Herman Brown, better perhaps than any other man, could appreciate the sacrifice, the effort, the work—and, in his grudging, tough way, admire it.
Herman's decision, signaled by the Rotary Club speeches of November, 1937, to launch a campaign for a bigger dam created a rift in the budding friendship. Another source of friction was Johnson's proposed Austin Public Housing Authority, which would condemn slums, raze several blocks of tenements in the city's Negro slum and replace them with modern apartments. Many of the tenements were owned by Brown, who was making a tidy profit from them. Herman didn't want to lose the profit, and at the first hint that condemnation procedures might be invoked if he refused to sell, he erupted into rage at the thought that government might take away his land. But it was at this point that the suggestion "Give Herman the dam and let Lyndon have the land" was made and led to a compromise. Johnson began pushing for the high dam. And George's reports, each time he returned from Washington, on how hard Johnson was working for the dam—how successfully he was cultivating Fortas and the others—convinced Herman of the sincerity of his efforts.
Lyndon Johnson's work for Brown & Root did not end with his success in obtaining the appropriation for the dam's enlargement.
Because Brown & Root's equipment, including the massive cableway, was already in place at the remote Marshall Ford dam site, while any other contractor would have to include in his bid the cost of transporting and installing equipment and building a cableway, bidding on the enlargement of the dam was cursory; Herman Brown had considerable leeway in setting a price—$27,000,000—on the work. And once he had the contract, he began working to maximize the profit he would make under it.
Nor was his first price his last. Rather, as soon as he had his price, he wanted the price to be higher.
The order of the day on the Bureau of Reclamation's "Colorado River Project" was the change order, that magical device by which favored contractors are permitted, once they have been awarded a contract, to quietly change its details to increase their profits. Other contractors, particularly in those pre-war days, when government leniency with contractors was not yet a fact of construction life, might find a request for a change order disapproved; with top officials at Interior and Reclamation, including Harold Ickes himself, so obviously committed to the dam, lower-ranking bureaucrats and engineers were reluctant to delay the project by disapproving Brown & Root's stream of requests for changes in specifications and unit prices. And when they did disapprove, for sometimes Herman Brown's requests were so large that the engineers and bureaucrats could not choke them down, Lyndon Johnson got on the phone to them—or to their superiors. On the contract for the low dam, the Bureau of Reclamation had audited the work closely to keep the lid on profits. Now the lid was off. In auditing Brown & Root's requests, and the firm's compliance with contract provisions, in fact, Bureau engineers used Brown & Root's own figures. The delays—caused by government caution and evaluation of work done, or by bureaucratic red tape—which cut into other contractors' profits were substantially eliminated for Brown & Root through Johnson's manipulation of Gold-schmidt and his cultivation of other key bureaucrats. Officials telephoned him the moment necessary approvals were signed, and he then made sure the forms were rushed to the next agency—and began pushing there.
He worked with Brown & Root as closely as if he were one of the firm's employees, an employee anxious to impress his boss with his diligence; a typical letter assured Herman: "It is needless for me to tell you that we are humping ourselves on the jobs we have to do here and that this little note … is being knocked off between conferences." George rather than Herman was the Brown with whom he was in day-to-day contact—Herman was out on the Colorado, ramrodding the work—and Lyndon Johnson and George Brown reported to each other in detail, exulted with each other over each success. "Finally got together with government engineers, Puis, Moritz, McKenzie on the prices for the new work at Marshall Ford," Brown wrote Johnson on one occasion. "Cut us from $50,000 to $20,000 for flood hazards, and cut concrete 50¢ a yard; we had asked it be cut only 25¢. The rest of the prices are the same as the original contract. Puis, who is out of the Denver office, left that night to return to Denver and write up the change order." After being written up, the change order was sent to Washington, where Johnson took over. Approval by the Comptroller General, then by Interior, and then by Reclamation, was necessary; Johnson obtained these approvals for Brown & Root in a single day, as a telegram from him to George Brown reported:
CONFIDENTIAL. COMPTROLLER-GENERAL SIGNED DECISION THIS MORNING AT 11:30 APPROVING USE OF CHANGE ORDER 67 MARSHALL FORD DAM AS REQUESTED BY THE DEPARTMENT. … I GOT DECISION SENT BY SPECIAL MESSENGER TO INTERIOR AND WILL CHECK RECLAMATION LATER THIS AFTERNOON.
George Brown was afflicted with a lisp. Very slight, it affected his pronunciation of only a few words. But because one of those words was "million" (he pronounced it "mee-yon"), the lisp was now to begin proving troublesome to him. For the Marshall Ford Dam was to make that word an essential part of his vocabulary. On the original $10 million Marshall Ford contract—the contract drawn up, and largely carried out, before Lyndon Johnson had begun working on Brown & Root's behalf—the firm, so recently all but broke, had earned a profit of a million dollars. The firm's profit on the subsequent Marshall Ford contract—the contract which brought the total for the entire dam to $27 million—is unknown, but out of a single $5 million appropriation for the high dam, George Brown wrote Lyndon Johnson that Brown & Root's profit was about $2 million ("which," Brown added, "is a nice bit of work …"). That appropriation, moreover, was for construction; contractors generally made a higher percentage of profit on excavation contracts. Brown & Root had made a million dollars out of the first contract for the Marshall Ford Dam. Out of subsequent contracts for the dam, they piled, upon that first million, million upon million more. The base for a huge financial empire was being created in that deserted Texas gorge.
Herman Brown was a businessman who wanted value for money spent. His relationships with politicians were measured by that criterion. George Brown, who echoes his brother's thinking, says, "Listen, you get a doctor, you want a doctor who does his job. You get a lawyer, you want a lawyer who does his job. You get a Governor, you want a Governor who does his job." Doctor, lawyer, Governor, Congressman—when Herman "got" somebody, he wanted his money's worth. And with Johnson, he was getting it—and more.
Herman Brown was a man who always balanced his books. When he had been asked for a significant contribution to Johnson's 1937 campaign, he had refused to make one. Now, in 1938, Johnson would be running again. Herman Brown let Johnson know that he would not have to worry about finances in this campaign—that the money would be there, as much as was needed, when it was needed. In Ed Clark's words, "Herman gave Lyndon his full weight."
Herman Brown's full weight meant the support not only of Brown & Root, but of Brown & Root's subcontractors, of the banks in Austin with whom Brown & Root banked, of the insurance brokers who furnished Brown & Root performance bonds, of the lawyers in Austin who received Brown & Root's fees, the businessmen in Austin who supplied Brown & Root with building materials, and the local politicians, not only in Austin but throughout the Tenth Congressional District, accustomed to receiving Brown & Root campaign contributions in return for road-building contracts. These men had followed Herman's lead during the 1937 campaign, and had supported Avery. Now they would follow Herman's lead again. When Lyndon Johnson ran for Congress in 1938, he wouldn't have to raise money from Houston merchants, and he wouldn't have to raise money late at night, after a long day on the road. All the funds he needed would be available at his command—more funds, in fact, than he could possibly use.