Late in the afternoon of Election Day, the corrupt South Texas border bosses whose support he had purchased asked him when they should report the voting results from their counties, and he violated a fundamental rule of Texas politics: report your key precincts—the ones in which you control the result—only at the last minute so your opponent would not know the total he had to beat; otherwise, in a state in which not a few isolated rural precincts were “for sale,” beating it would be all too easy. With a steadily widening lead feeding his overconfidence, Johnson had loftily told the South Texas bosses they could report their vote whenever they pleased. They reported immediately, and late that evening, even as headlines were proclaiming his victory and his supporters were parading him on their shoulders in triumph as he whooped and shouted in wild celebration, O’Daniel’s strategists were making quiet arrangements. The next day, sitting at a telephone with his face turning ashen at the news, Lyndon Johnson found out that he had not won but lost. After ten years of victories, in this, his most important campaign, there was not victory but defeat.
Now Johnson had to go back to Washington, had to go back not as the youngest Senator, not as perhaps the brightest star in the new galaxy that in 1941 was rising over the political horizon, but as merely the Congressman he had been before. He had had the aura of the winner. Now he was going back a loser. So going back was hard.
And going back was made harder by the unusually powerful hereditary strain, famous in the Texas Hill Country, that ran through Lyndon Johnson’s family, the Buntons. Generation after generation, the “Bunton strain” had produced dark-haired men well over six feet tall, all of whom had strikingly similar, and dramatic, features: a long nose that jutted far out of the face, a sharp jaw that jutted almost as far, huge ears with very long lobes. Their eyes, vividly set off by milky, “magnolia white” skin, were so dark a brown that they seemed black, so bright that they glittered, so piercing that they often appeared to be glaring. And the “Bunton eye” was no better known for its fierceness than were the Bunton pride and ambition: the phrases that Hill Country ranchers used about young Lyndon—that something “born in him,” bred in him, “demanded” that he always be “in the forefront,” “at the head of the ring”—were the same phrases that had been used about his forebears. Buntons possessed also a “commanding presence” and an “eloquent tongue” that led them to try, at an early age, to realize their ambition through politics. Lyndon Johnson, born on August 27, 1908, had been elected to Congress at the age of twenty-eight, the same age at which his grandfather had won his first elective office; Johnson’s father had won his at twenty-seven. And going back was hard in part because of the poignant circumstances of Lyndon Johnson’s youth. When he was thirteen, his father’s sudden financial failure had hurled his family, in what seemed like an instant, from a respected position in the isolated little town of Johnson City to what Lyndon was to call “the bottom of the heap.” The boy was condemned to live out the remainder of his youth in a continual insecurity that made him dread, month after month, that his family would lose the modest home that was all they possessed. Where once he had been able to charge more in stores than other children, now he could charge nothing at all, and had to stand watching while his friends bought candy because their parents had credit. The boy who, in the words of his favorite cousin, Ava Johnson, who grew up with him and loved him, “had to be the leader in everything he did, just had to, just could not stand not to be, had to win,” was now the son of a man who “owed everybody in town,” a member of a family held in contempt. He heard his father’s acquaintances whisper as he passed on the street, “He’ll never amount to anything. Too much like Sam.” And going back was hard because the insecurity and humiliation aggravated the already powerful inherited strain that formed the base of his complex personality: he had to “be somebody,” he had to be successful and appear successful; he had to win and be perceived as a winner. It was the interaction of his early humiliation with his heredity that gave his efforts their feverish, almost frantic, intensity, a quality that journalists would describe as “energy” when it was really desperation and fear, the fear of a man fleeing something terrible.
Making the return even harder—much harder—was the fact that he not only had lost, but had allowed victory to be stolen from him.
His brother, Sam Houston Johnson, said, “It was most important to Lyndon not to be like Daddy,” and Sam Houston was correct. Their father, Sam Ealy Johnson, was idealistic, romantic, rigidly honest; in wide-open Austin, lobbyists who dispensed the “Three B’s” (“beefsteak, bourbon and blondes”) liberally to other legislators learned that they couldn’t buy Sam Johnson so much as a drink. His colleagues called him “straight as a shingle,” and despite this rigidity, he—an idealistic Populist with a remarkable aptitude for legislative maneuvering—compiled an impressive record in championing causes against the “Interests” and for what he called, almost with reverence, “The People.” And the respect in which he was held by fellow legislators—decades later, one of them, Wright Patman, by that time a powerful United States Congressman familiar with the nation’s most renowned public figures, was to call Sam Ealy Johnson “the best man I ever knew”—was mirrored in the adoring eyes of his son. As a small boy, Lyndon Johnson had tried so hard to imitate his father that people watching him laughed; he had tried to dress like him, right down to a scaled-down version of Sam Johnson’s big Stetson hat. He tried to accompany him everywhere—“right by the side of his daddy wherever he went.” As a teenager, Lyndon Johnson resembled his tall father not only in appearance—“the same huge ears, the same big nose, the same pale skin and the same dark eyes,” recalls Patman, who was to serve with the father in the Legislature and with the son in Congress—but also in mannerisms, most notably in one very distinctive mannerism: when Sam Johnson wanted to persuade a listener of a point, he would drape one long arm around the shoulders of the man he was talking to, with his other hand grasp one of the man’s lapels, and lean into him, talking with his face very close to the listener’s. “Even as a teenager,” Patman was to recall, “Lyndon clutched you like his daddy did when he talked to you.” And when his father took Lyndon campaigning—Sam won six terms in the Texas Legislature—driving from farm to farm in a Model T Ford, stopping by the side of the road to share with his son an enormous crust of homemade bread covered with jam while they talked quietly together—that was a time of which Lyndon Johnson was to say, “Christ, sometimes I wished it could go on forever.”
But it didn’t go on forever. In the Hill Country, ideals and dreams brought disaster when they collided with the inexorable realities of that harsh land. Although, until Lyndon was thirteen, his father was financially successful, business was never what interested Sam Johnson. Texas legislators earned only five dollars a day, and then only on days when the Legislature was in session, but Sam was always available to drive endless miles over rutted roads locating elderly ranchers who didn’t know they were entitled to a pension and helping them with their applications, or to lead long campaigns for better roads that would help farmers get their goods to market. His personal fortunes began to decline. And when, on a romantic impulse to make the whole Pedernales Valley “Johnson Country” again, Sam, ignoring the realities of the worn-out soil and the marketplace, paid far too much to buy back the old “Johnson Ranch,” he plunged himself, seemingly overnight, into a morass of debt from which there was no hope of escape. Always a little resented by Johnson City because of his “air of confidence” (“the Johnsons could strut sitting down”), and because he preferred discussing ideas and principles of government rather than crops and the weather, Sam refused now to change his manner although he “owed everyone in town,” persisted in wearing a jacket and tie instead of work clothes like every other man in Johnson City—and resentment turned to ridicule, ridicule climaxed by a roar of appreciative laughter at a barbecue when a potential political opponent said, “I tell you, ladies and gentlemen, Sam Johnson is a mighty smart man. Bu
t he’s got no sense.” Penniless, doomed to remain in debt until he died, unable to pay his bills in the stores he had to walk past every day, allowed to live in his house only because his brothers guaranteed the mortgage payments, he went to work on a road-grading crew that was building the highway for which he had fought in the Legislature, forced to wear work clothes at last. “He did a lot for that road, all right, Sam did,” one man snickers in recollection. Lyndon’s mother, also an idealist and romantic, who tried to teach her children that “principles” were the important thing, a delicate woman better educated than most Hill Country women (and less suited to the rough life), was unable to keep her five children neat, or even fed very well, and when she remarked, trying to explain the value of education, “Now is the time to put something in children’s heads,” the neighbors sneered, “Maybe she ought to try putting something in their stomachs.”
The Johnsons became, in fact, the laughingstock of the town. Lyndon Johnson was to spend the rest of his youth in a poverty so severe that often he and his brother and three sisters would have gone hungry were it not for food given as charity by relatives and friends, food seasoned with small-town sneers and cruelty. He had to stand in Courthouse Square and watch his high school sweetheart drive by with another man because her parents would not allow her to date “a Johnson.” “I saw how it made Lyndon feel,” his cousin Ava says. “And I cried for him. I had to cry for Lyndon a lot.” He was to work on the road gang himself, harnessed to a grader like a mule during a burning Hill Country summer and a freezing Hill Country winter. Lyndon’s relationship with his father was transformed into one of resentment, tension, blazing clashes of wills, and competition as violent as admiration had once been. And this competition had one dominant theme. After his father’s fall, it was terribly important to Lyndon Johnson that no one think that he had “no sense,” sense as the rough, brutal world of the Hill Country defined the term: “horse sense,” common sense, practicality, realism, pragmatism. Not only did he not want to be regarded as an idealist, or as a fighter for causes, he wanted to be regarded as a man who scorned ideals and causes as impractical dreams, as a man practical, pragmatic, tough, cynical. He wanted the world to see him not as merely smart but as shrewd, wily, sly. This was not, perhaps, a reputation that most men would have wanted. But, as Lyndon Johnson’s demeanor proclaimed, it was the reputation he wanted, wanted and needed—because of the tears and terrors of his youth needed desperately.
Cultivating and manipulating older men possessed of power that could advance his ambitions, the young Lyndon Johnson employed obsequiousness and flattery so striking that contemporaries mocked him as a “professional son”—but that was no more striking than the openness with which he explained to them in detail his techniques of cultivation and manipulation, and boasted and gloated over his success in bending older men to his will. In both high school and college, he courted the daughter of the richest man in town. Not a few youths do that; few take the trouble that Lyndon Johnson took, in both cases, to make sure that his fellow students realized that the principal basis for the courtship was not love or sex but pragmatism. So widely did he make his motives known that his determination to marry for money became the subject of a joke in his college yearbook.
Each stage of his political climb was marked by perhaps the ultimate manifestation of pragmatism in politics in a democracy: the stealing of elections. At his rural college, where campus politics had always been so casual that the stealing of an election had not even been considered a possibility, he stole elections. On Capitol Hill, he arranged to have the ballot box in elections for the presidency of the Little Congress stuffed with illegal ballots, and then, if even that was not sufficient to give victory to him or his allies, he miscounted the ballots. He did this with an organization that had been only an informal social club of congressional assistants, a group so loosely organized and insignificant that a later president would say, in astonishment: “My God, who would cheat to win the presidency of something like the Little Congress?” He was always secretive about exactly what he had done—no one could ever prove anything against him—but on both College Hill and Capitol Hill, he made sure with winks, hints, his whole bearing, that everyone knew he had done something; as one of his college classmates, a friend, puts it, “Everyone knew that something wasn’t straight. And everyone knew that if something wasn’t straight, it was Lyndon Johnson who had done it.” And at every stage—at college, in the Little Congress, in the big Congress—as soon as he was in the inner circle, he took pains to let everyone know he was on the inside, putting his arm around other insiders, whispering in their ear while ostentatiously looking around as if to make sure no one could overhear, strutting to display not only his power but the fact that he had obtained the power by trickery. His attitude proclaimed that if there were any tricks to be played, he would play them, that if any outsmarting was done, it would be he who would be doing it, that no one was going to outsmart him.
Until the 1941 Senate race, no one had. He had tried to steal this race, too—striking deals, buying county bosses. And he had, as usual, been unable to refrain from boasting about what he was doing. As always, he not only outsmarted opponents but displayed a deep need to make sure they—and the public—knew he had outsmarted them. But this time, at the last minute, he had been outsmarted. He who had stolen elections, who had been confident he had stolen this election, had had the election stolen from him instead. He had been cheated of victory—as if he, too, like his father, had been only a man who had “no sense.”
So it was hard going back. His wife, who knew how hard it was, says, “I’ll never forget the way he looked, walking away to catch the plane to Washington—striding off, looking very jaunty and putting extra verve into his step. It took a lot of effort on his part to act jaunty.” That, she says, is “a memory of Lyndon that I will always cherish.”
WHAT MADE IT EASIER was that he might not have to go back for long. The election for the full Senate term would be in July, 1942, only a year away, and Johnson intended to run in that election. And about a month after his return to Washington in July, 1941, he learned that if he ran, he would have a good chance of winning—for his great patron was his patron still.
Men who had observed Franklin D. Roosevelt’s reaction to other politicians who had lost after he had allowed them to use his name were at first unsure what his reaction would be to a defeated Lyndon Johnson. Johnson himself had observed that after his predecessor as “Roosevelt’s man” on the Texas delegation, his fellow Congressman W. D. McFarlane, had been defeated despite Roosevelt’s endorsement, not only had he been unable to obtain even a low-level federal appointment, but he was never again allowed into the presence of the President who had once been so genial to him.
But, just as Roosevelt had during Johnson’s senatorial campaign relaxed his customary strictures against campaign assistance in his efforts to help this young man, for whom his aides said he had a “special feeling,” so now his reaction to the young man’s loss demonstrated that that feeling had not changed. After his defeat, Lyndon Johnson sent a note to Franklin Roosevelt.
Sir:
In the heat of Texas last week, I said I was glad to be called a water-carrier—that I would be glad to carry a bucket of water to the Commander-in-Chief any time his thirsty throat or his thirsty soul need support, for you certainly gave me support nonpareil.
One who cannot arise to the leadership shall find the fault in himself and not in you.
Sincerely,
Lyndon
In the margin of the note, Roosevelt wrote to his appointments secretary, Edwin M. (“Pa”) Watson: “General Watson—I want to see Lyndon.” When they met, Roosevelt joked with the younger man: “Lyndon,” he said, “apparently you Texans haven’t learned one of the first things we learned up in New York State, and that is that when the election is over, you have to sit on the ballot boxes.” The President had asked aides what he could do to cheer Lyndon up and had accepted a suggestion from Th
omas G. (“Tommy the Cork”) Corcoran, his political man-of-all-work, that the young Congressman be invited to give a speech immediately preceding the President’s at the August national convention of Young Democrats in Lexington, Kentucky, an invitation that would give Johnson his first national exposure. And Corcoran, who was to recall that “in that 1941 race, we gave him everything we could—everything,” was able, after checking with the Boss, to tell Johnson that in 1942 the giving would be at the same level.
THE INSTANT RAPPORT that had been struck between Roosevelt and Johnson at their very first meeting—in May, 1937, when the young Congressman-elect had traveled to Galveston to meet the President as he returned from a fishing vacation in the Gulf of Mexico—had gained Johnson admittance to a small circle in Washington, one that had revolved around Tommy the Cork, the stocky, ebullient, accordion-playing political manipulator; it had been Corcoran whom the President had telephoned, upon his return from Texas, to say, “I’ve just met the most remarkable young man,” and to issue an order: “help him with anything you can.”
By 1941, however, with Corcoran’s importance at the White House waning, the stars of the circle were Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes and two Supreme Court Justices, Hugo L. Black and William O. Douglas, and it included a group of younger men who, like Johnson, were still in their thirties—men not yet influential in Washington, but who had, most of them, already begun to rise, and were rising faster now: a short, silent young Jewish lawyer from Memphis with olive skin, large, liquid eyes and “the most brilliant legal mind ever to come out of the Yale Law School,” Abe Fortas, in 1941 thirty years old, who at Yale Law had caught the eye of Professor Douglas and had been the first man Douglas brought to Washington to assist him at the Securities and Exchange Commission; James H. Rowe, Jr., thirty-two, of Butte, Montana, and Harvard Law, who had caught Corcoran’s eye, and then, after Corcoran placed him in a low-level White House job, Roosevelt’s; Eliot Janeway, thirty, a Washington-based business writer for Time, Life and Fortune magazines; and Arthur E. Goldschmidt, thirty-one, known as “Tex,” from San Antonio and Columbia University. There was a Southern tinge to the circle. Justice Black, of course, was an Alabamian, and so were two of the circle’s most gregarious members, Virginia Durr, Black’s sister-in-law, and her husband, Clifford, a lawyer and Rhodes Scholar, as well as their friend W. Ervin (“Red”) James, a politically well-connected lawyer from Montgomery. Not only Johnson and Goldschmidt but a one-time Hill Country legislator for whom Johnson had once campaigned in Texas, Welly K. Hopkins, of Seguin, now chief counsel to John L. Lewis’s United Mine Workers, and Assistant United States Attorney General Tom C. Clark, of the politically powerful Clark family of Dallas, were from Texas. In January, 1940, Johnson’s most trusted adviser, former State Senator Alvin J. Wirtz, was appointed Undersecretary of the Interior. Wirtz was already acquainted with most of the group because of his work as counsel for the Tenth District’s Lower Colorado River Authority and his shadowy role in the financing of other power projects, and political campaigns, throughout the West. A big, burly man with a broad, ever-present smile, he possessed a secretiveness concealed behind a carefully cultivated country-boy manner (“Slow in his movements, slow in his speech, but a mind as quick as chain lightning,” Hopkins recalls) and a ruthlessness that astonished even hardened Austin political operatives (“He would gut you if he could. But you would never know he did it.… He would still be smiling when he slipped in the knife”). His charm (“terribly amusing, delightful,” Virginia Durr says) and his avuncular manner (“Soft-voiced, very gentle—if you needed a wise old uncle and could have one appointed, he’d be the one,” says Jim Rowe) quickly placed him near the center of the circle. Two of the most prominent members of the circle had, because of the vicissitudes of politics, left Washington, but whenever former National Youth Administrator Aubrey Williams of Alabama and former Congressman Maury Maverick of San Antonio visited the capital, cocktail parties were always arranged in their honor.
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