invested in oil wells, real estate, and banking. Charles

invested in oil wells, real estate, and banking. Charles Marsh knew Col. Edward House, who was Woodrow Wilson’s silent partner on matters of state, and Marsh quickly grasped the power of someone working behind the scenes with no publicity, while being at the center of political intelligence matters. Marsh’s engagement in politics followed this rule, and Hopper’s book details how Marsh, his friends, and his home were used to facilitate desired policies. By the late 1930s, Marsh took a great interest in the political potential of Lyndon Baines Johnson. In the autumn of 1937, Marsh invited LBJ and Lady Bird Johnson out to Longlea. At the time, Lady Bird was 24, Lyndon Johnson, 29, Alice Glass, 26, and Charles Marsh was 50.

Longlea: Alice, Charles, and LBJ Robert Caro, in his book, “The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power,” describes the Longlea the Johnsons saw in 1937 and many times afterwards. LBJ, captivated ' by Alice, and she with him, made many solo trips to Longlea as their love affair grew.

“Longlea,” set on a thousand acres in the northern Virginia hunt country, was named for the eighteenth-century Sussex manor house on which it was modeled, but it could have been named for its setting. The roads toward it, toward its blue-slate roof and great chimneys that rose above the soft Virginia hills, led across long, rolling meadows, and the meadows before it were nothing to the meadow behind it. The broad flagstone terrace at the rear of Longlea - a terrace 110 feet long - was bordered by a low stone parapet. Beyond the parapet, the land dropped steeply down to a narrow river. And beyond the river, before the first of the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a vast, empty meadow (or “lea”) stretched for miles. But, however appropriate the name, knowledgeable visitors to the Charles Marsh estate did not refer to it by that