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(And as I would subsequently learn, not just on the history of New York. Years later, working on a biography of Lyndon B. Johnson and living in Texas, I was told there might be a description of one of Johnson’s forebears in a three-volume collection of unedited reminiscences by “The Trail Drivers of Texas,” published in Dallas in 1929. Ina and I searched for those volumes in libraries and used bookstores all over Texas without success; returning to New York, and checking back into the Allen Room, I decided to look up the collection in the New York Public Library’s catalogue. There it was; I filled out a pink slip, and an hour or so later, the three volumes—invaluable volumes, as it turned out—were sitting on the Allen Room cart.)
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IT WAS NOT books, however, that were the most wonderful things I found in the Allen Room.
When I had used my key for the first time, opened the big door and, carrying my typewriter, walked into the room, none of the people at the desks in it looked up from their work to give me more than a cursory glance. But one of the glances was from a face easily recognizable because of its patriarchal beard; I recognized it because I had seen it not long before on television. The man sitting at the desk next to me was Joseph P. Lash, author of a book that I much admired, Eleanor and Franklin.
And that evening, after everyone in the room had left, I walked from desk to desk reading the names on the pink slips sticking out of the books, to find out the identity of the people sitting there. One of the names was “Milford”—Nancy Milford, who had written Zelda. One was “Flexner.” The compact little man with the muttonchop whiskers who had been sitting at the first desk when I walked in—who had sat, in shirtsleeves and suspenders, typing diligently hour after hour without even looking up—was James Thomas Flexner, who had already published three volumes of his magisterial biography of George Washington.
Another name was “Lundberg.” That was a name that might have faded somewhat from the consciousness of literary America, but it had faded not at all from mine; time and again, when I had been writing about the powerful Gold Coast robber barons who had fought Moses on Long Island, I had turned for facts—always there and always reliable—to America’s 60 Families, written in 1937 by Ferdinand Lundberg. The day I read the names of the writers to whose work space I had been admitted was the day that I felt I might be a writer, after all.
And these writers provided more for me than merely the glow of their names. In my memory, no one spoke to me for the first few days I was in the room. Then one day, I looked up and James Flexner was standing over me. The expression on his face was friendly, but after he had asked what I was writing about, the next question was the question I had come to dread: “How long have you been working on it?” This time, however, when I replied, “Five years,” the response was not an incredulous stare.
“Oh,” Jim Flexner said, “that’s not so long. I’ve been working on my Washington for nine years.”
I could have jumped up and kissed him, whiskers and all—as, the next day, I could have jumped up and kissed Joe Lash, big beard and all, when he asked me the same question, and, after hearing my answer, said in his quiet way, “Eleanor and Franklin took me seven years.” In a couple of sentences, these two men—idols of mine—had wiped away five years of doubt.
After a while, the writers of the Allen Room invited me to lunch, which we thereafter ate almost every day in the employees’ cafeteria in the library basement. These writers included not just some who were already famous, but some who were, at the time, little better known than I was, like John Demaray, Lucy Komisar, Irene Mahoney and Susan Brownmiller, who was working on Against Our Will and would sit at the desk adjoining mine for the next two years, her petite feet, clad in brightly striped socks, sticking under the partition that divided our desks, giving me an odd feeling of companionship.
The cafeteria setting could hardly have been more grubby—or more gratifying. The talk was often about problems of research and writing: about the mysteries of our craft, our shared craft. Suddenly, just by being given a desk in the Allen Room, I had been made to feel a part of the community of writers.
On a row of bookshelves in the Allen Room were copies of the books that had been written there, not merely the Lash, Milford, Flexner, and Lundberg books, but also Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and Theodore H. White’s The Making of the President: 1964.
In September, 1974, The Power Broker was published, and I went off on a promotion tour, and then on a long vacation. One day, in the spring of the following year, I waited until the evening, when I knew the room might be empty, and went back to see if The Power Broker was on those shelves.
It was.
That was the place, of all places, where it belonged.
The New York Times, May 19, 1995
Lyndon Johnson
While I was researching The Power Broker, and learning more and more about Robert Moses’ amassing of political power and use of political power, I came to feel more and more strongly what I had felt when I first conceived of the book: that if (and this was a big “if” with me) I could just write it well enough, tell the story of his life the way it should be told, that story would cast light on the realities of urban political power, power in cities, power not just in New York but in all the cities of America in the middle of the twentieth century. And when I finished that book, I knew the one I would like to do next: a book about national political power. And I felt that I had learned that if you chose the right man, you could show quite a bit about power through the life of that man.
But you have to choose the right man. How do you do that?
I spent a lot of time trying to figure that out. I came to feel that one way was to find someone who had done something no one had done before, as Robert Moses, in a democracy in which political power supposedly comes from being elected, had, without ever being elected to anything, amassed an unprecedented amount of power—far more power, in fact, than any city or state official who had been elected—had held that power for more than four decades, and with it had done so much to shape a great city in the image he wanted. If you choose that man, the man who did something no one else had done, and can figure out how he did it, you get insights into the essence of power.
So I said, Who did something like that nationally? Something that no one had done before. Lyndon Johnson. It was his six years—1955 through 1960—as Senate Majority Leader. For a hundred years before Lyndon Johnson, since the halcyon era of Webster, Clay, and Calhoun, no one had been able to make the Senate work—as, in the fifty-nine years since Lyndon Johnson left the Senate, no one’s been able to make the Senate work. But he made it work. During the six years of his leadership, in fact, the Senate became the center of governmental ingenuity, creativity and energy in Washington. For example, no civil rights bill had passed the Senate since 1875, during Reconstruction. In 1957, he succeeded in passing a civil rights bill, a weak one, but a necessary first step toward getting a stronger one—it was the first civil rights bill to pass in eighty-two years. When he set out to pass it, passage seemed impossible in a Senate utterly dominated by the mighty “Southern Caucus.” How did he do it? In the Johnson Library, you can see his Senate tally sheets, with the names of the then ninety-six senators. And every day Johnson had a new tally sheet, and you can see the vote changing day by day as he fights for those votes one by one. I wanted to figure out how he changed the votes.
LBJA
When you walk into the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum for the first time, you are in the building’s museum portion, and you see Johnson’s long, black, armored presidential limousine and letters he and his mother exchanged while he was in college. I asked the receptionist at the front desk where the Lyndon Johnson Papers were, and she said I would see them if I walked down to the end of the first row of exhibits and turned the corner.
So I did.
In front of me was a broad
, tall marble staircase. At its top was a glass wall four stories high. Behind the glass, on each of the four stories, were rows of tall red boxes—175 rows across, each row six boxes high—with, on the front of each box, a gold circle that was a replica, I was to learn, of the presidential seal. All I could see from the bottom of the stairs were those boxes, but as I climbed the stairs, there came into view behind them more boxes, long lines of them. The only light on the four floors was that at the front, and the rows of boxes stretched back into gloom and then darkness as far as I could see.
I took an elevator up to the library’s tenth floor to be interviewed by an archivist and given a card admitting me to the Library’s Reading Room, where researchers had their desks and could request the boxes that they wanted to look through; the card was good for six months, and would have to be renewed then. The archivist asked me if I thought I would need a renewal. I said probably.
Unfortunately for my peace of mind, I asked if I could be given a look at one of the four floors of boxes, and unfortunately my request was granted. It was like asking a doctor to be honest and give you all the bad news, and having him do just that. I started walking down an aisle between shelves of boxes, six shelves on each side, walls of boxes taller than me. It seemed like a long way to the end of the aisle. And what was looming over me, stretching before me, were just two rows of boxes, of the nine rows on that floor. There were four floors of boxes.
I asked the archivist how many boxes there were, and how many pages of documents each box held. There were about forty thousand boxes, she said; each had a theoretical capacity of eight hundred pages, but of course, she said, not all of them were completely filled, and some were over-filled; if I would like to know the total number of pages in the boxes, she could tell me that: thirty-two million. I had known that doing research on a president would be a lot different from doing it on Robert Moses, but I hadn’t expected anything like this. I had a bad feeling: during all the years since Alan Hathway had given me that first piece of advice—“Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamned page”—I had never forgotten it; it was engraved in my mind. There would be no turning every page here.
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BUT WHAT PAGES to turn?
I get a sick feeling in my stomach even now as I remember how long it took to answer that question. I started by looking through the library’s “Finding Aids,” a version of a catalogue in black looseleaf notebooks that listed the titles of the file folders in each box. Just for Johnson’s “House of Representatives Papers,” abbreviated by the library as “JHP,” the general files from his office during his eleven years in that body, the time before he was senator and president, there were 349 boxes, containing certainly more—perhaps a lot more—than 200,000 pages, and those weren’t the only boxes in which there were file folders that contained letters, memoranda, reports, speech drafts, etc., that dealt with this period. There were, for example, the “LBJA” files, which included documents that Johnson’s staff had, at various times, shifted from the general “House Papers” files in his office and put into other groupings—the library calls them “collections”—because they were “considered historically valuable or dealt with persons with whom he was closely associated,” collections such as the “Congressional File” (LBJA CF), correspondence with fellow congressmen and senators; the “Selected Names” files (LBJA SN), which contained correspondence and other material with “close associates” that had been taken out of the House Papers, etc., etc. There were sixty-one boxes of LBJA material. And there were other collections from the congressional period as well that contained in the neighborhood of forty-eight thousand pages. At least it wouldn’t be me alone turning the pages. Working in the Reading Room with me would be Ina, in whose thoroughness and perceptivity in doing research I had learned to trust. There weren’t going to be many breaks for lunch: the library was open only from nine to five—on Saturdays only until noon—and that wasn’t nearly enough hours, considering what we had to do.
The way things worked: you’d fill out a slip for the boxes—“JHP 167,” “LBJA SN 23”—you wanted, and in an hour or so an archivist would arrive in the Reading Room wheeling a cart with the boxes on it, and put them on the cart next to your desk, each of them landing with an impressively, and depressingly, heavy thud. A box would remain there until the day—or the next day, or the next—when you finished looking through the file folders it contained. You’d carry it up to the archivist’s desk and give it back. There was room on the cart for only fifteen boxes, and I always had requested more than fifteen, so that when a gap appeared on my cart, it would be so quickly filled with another box that I never had to worry about running out of material.
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OBVIOUSLY WE COULDN’T turn every page, or even a substantial percentage of them. But I knew we had to turn as many as possible. And we turned quite a few, requesting 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 proven to me again and again. Someday, I hope 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 congressman. I thought that by doing that I could also give some insight into the life of junior congressmen in general. 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 his arrival in Congress, following a special election, in May, 1937, his letters to committee chairmen, to senior congressmen in general, had been in a tone befitting a new congressman with no seniority or power, in the tone of a junior addressing a senior, beseeching a favor, or asking, perhaps, for a few minutes of his time to discuss something. 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 for all the documents, I put them into 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 date order, after a single date—November 5, 1940; Election Day, 1940—the tone was frequently the opposite. And, in fact, after that date, Johnson’s files also contained letters written to him by middle-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, so I was giving first priority, whenever they would give me an appointment, to interviewing the men and women who during the 1930s, forty years before, had been members of a circle of young New Deal insiders to which the young congressman from Texas had been admitted.
One of this circle was Thomas G. Corcoran, the 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 fund-raiser nonpareil. I just loved interviewing Tommy the Cork. He was at that time in his late seventies, but if, on a morning on which I had an appointment with him in his office on the seventh floor
of a K Street office building, he came into the lobby 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 seventh floor, he would be standing grinning at me when the elevator door opened. And 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 on which 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 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, said: “It’s just free advertising, kid, free advertising. Just as long as they spell my name right.” He had once told me 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 the Cork 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.