Means of Ascent

by Robert A. Caro

  There was, moreover, another point of comparison with his father, one about which he spoke with his brother (and perhaps only with his brother). Sam Ealy Johnson had never been able to recover from the single great mistake he had made: the payment of that ruinously high price for the Johnson Ranch. Lyndon Johnson had made one mistake—in that 1941 Senate race. Was he, too, never to be able to recover? Was he never to get a chance to come back? His early rise had been so fast; now his career had been stalled—he had been stuck in the House for nine years, and then ten and eleven. He talked endlessly about his fate—about the election that had been “stolen” from him, about the bad advice he had received not to contest that election because he would soon get another opportunity, about the war that had prevented him from using that opportunity, about the ingratitude of the young men who had not, upon their return from the war, rejoined his organization. And worse—in the words of one aide, “much worse”—were the times when he wasn’t complaining, when, alone with only one or two aides, his voice getting very low, he would talk dispassionately, almost without emotion, about his chances of advancing in his political career, about his chances of advancing in the House of Representatives, in which he had now spent so many years—the House, to which he had come when he was young, and in which he was trapped, no longer young. “Too slow. Too slow.” Horace Busby says: “He was thirty-nine years old. He believed, and he believed it really quite sincerely … that when a man reached forty, it was all over. And he was going to be forty in 1948. And there was no bill ever passed by Congress that bore his name; he had done very little in his life.…”

  THE 1941 OPERATION for the “gynecological problem” that may have caused Mrs. Johnson’s three miscarriages had apparently not been successful, and the “sadness” the couple felt over their lack of children continued. Then, in 1943, at the age of thirty, Mrs. Johnson conceived again. The child, born on March 19, 1944, in the tenth year of her marriage, was a daughter, named Lynda Bird in a combination of the father’s first name and the second part of “Lady Bird.” At the hospital, Johnson telephoned Sam Rayburn and Carl Vinson with the news, and then his mother. Lady Bird had had a difficult time in labor, and her doctor had suggested she have no more children, but the Johnsons continued trying. On the morning of June 13, 1945, Mrs. Johnson awoke in intense pain, and with a high fever. But, Johnson was to recall, “she insisted that it was all right for me to go to the office. The minute that I left the room, she called the doctor.” A friend from Austin, Virginia Wilke English, was staying with them, and, Mrs. English recalls, before the ambulance arrived, “she started hemorrhaging just very, very badly.” As Lady Bird Johnson was being carried out the door on a stretcher, however, she made the men stop so that she could give Mrs. English some instructions. “There was a manila envelope that was addressed to Jesse Kellam,” Mrs. English recalls. “And it took thirty-four cents worth of postage and I was to put that on and to mail it that day. It had to go out that day.” And, Lady Bird continued, she had invited guests to a dinner party the following evening (“Mr. Rayburn was coming,” and two other guests), and the party was not to be canceled. There would be no problem, she said; their maid, Zephyr Wright, could take care of Lynda Bird, and could cook the dinner, and Mrs. English should act as hostess. “There’s no use to cancel it because Lyndon has to eat anyway, and they’re all invited,” Lady Bird explained. (Says Mrs. English: “Man, I couldn’t believe that.”) At Doctor’s Hospital, where her illness was diagnosed as a Fallopian, or tubular, pregnancy, Mrs. Johnson’s temperature reached 105 degrees. Blood transfusions were needed. Her condition was listed as critical, but after an operation she recovered, although when she returned home, she was forbidden for some time to walk down the stairs. In 1946, Mrs. Johnson became pregnant again, and on July 2, 1947, Lucy Baines Johnson was born. Johnson was later to joke that the two daughters were given the same initials as he and his wife had because “it’s cheaper this way, because we can all use the same luggage,” but to an aide with whom he was as intimate as he was with Horace Busby, he would be more frank: “FDR—LBJ, FDR—LBJ,” he told his young assistant. “Do you get it? What I want is for them to start thinking of me in terms of initials.” “He was just so determined that someday he would be known as LBJ,” Busby explains.

  HIS MOODS SOARED and sank, but when they sank now, they seemed to sink lower—and to last longer. The years 1946 and 1947–1947, when Lyndon Johnson marked ten years in the House which he had been anxious to leave almost from the day he got there—were filled with periods of deepening depression. With his younger aides, for whom it was important that he be the confident leader in whom they could safely repose their own confidence, he wore a mask of self-assurance, but people who knew him better were worried about him. “He lost some of his drive, periodically pausing in the middle of his still-crowded work day to stare out the window with a troubled look in his eyes,” his brother was to write. “He might spend a half-hour that way. Then he would suddenly busy himself with paper work and long phone calls, driving himself and his staff as never before.” A severe eczema-like rash on his hands, always a sign of tension and unhappiness, had bothered him intermittently for years. Now it returned, and remained, making his fingers terribly dry, scaly and painful. Doctors prescribed various ointments, and he often had parts of his fingers wrapped in gauze, but to little effect. Lubriderm, a purple-colored salve, brought temporary relief, and Johnson often kept a bowl of it on his desk, and would continually dip his hands into it. The rash was particularly annoying when he was signing his mail, because the edges of papers made little slits in the dry, raw skin, and even a drop or two of blood could mess up a letter. Gene Latimer, who returned to work for Johnson in May, 1946, would see him “driving himself late at night … signing mountains of letters with his right hand frequently wrapped in a hand towel to keep blood from dripping”; Latimer said the rash “made him suffer with each signature.” But when Latimer begged his adored “Chief” to stop signing, Johnson just shook his head. The signing routine seemed to soothe him, Latimer felt, as if, thinking about the mail, he was able for a while to stop thinking about his larger problems. Johnson was smoking more and more—three packs a day; he seemed now always to be holding a cigarette, and his fingers were stained yellow with nicotine. Sometimes, lighting a fresh cigarette, he bent over, head low as he took his first puff, inhaled deeply—“really sucking it in,” an aide says—and sat like that, head bowed, cigarette still in his mouth, for a long minute, as if to allow the soothing smoke to penetrate as deeply as possible into his body. These years were punctuated, as were other periods of crisis throughout his life, by sickness; just after New Year’s Day in 1946, for example, he was hospitalized in Austin’s Seton Infirmary. His illness was variously referred to in the press and in letters to constituents as “flu” or “pneumonia,” and some of his symptoms were consistent with these diagnoses. Other symptoms, however, were not. Asked about Johnson’s hospitalization, two aides use the term “nervous exhaustion.” Walter Jenkins said also, “It was bad.” No one is willing to describe the illness in detail. Whatever its nature, recovery was not rapid. On January 19, Johnson’s aides were responding to inquiries by saying that “he hopes to return to Washington almost any day now,” and was still in Texas only because of an inability to obtain train or plane reservations. He was still in Seton Infirmary a week later, however, and when, after almost a month in the hospital, he returned to Washington, he was confined to his bed in his house there. On February 7, he wrote his cousin Oreole that “I am still having trouble with my throat,” and was undergoing a new round of tests at a hospital. On February 12, he was still ill. In March, he was hospitalized for one of his recurrent, painful attacks of kidney stones, and in October, he spent another three weeks in the Seton Infirmary and then in the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, for a bronchial infection, the third time he was hospitalized that year.

  Another Senate election would be held in Texas in 1948—an election in which, he,
Lyndon Johnson, would be a longshot, not only against the incumbent, Pappy O’Daniel, but against any one of a number of candidates who had statewide reputations, for if his 1941 campaign had brought him recognition across the entire state, the intervening seven years had largely erased it: his name was little known to the electorate outside his own district. And he wouldn’t have Roosevelt’s name behind him this time. His chances of winning a 1948 election were not good.

  Moreover, while the 1941 campaign had been a special election to fill the seat opened by Morris Sheppard’s death, 1948 would be a regular election. Texas law prohibited a candidate from running for two offices in the same election. To run for the Senate, he would have to relinquish his House seat, and if he lost the Senate election, he might not be able to take the Tenth District seat back from his successor. And would he even want to return to the House? If he returned, it would be without even the seniority he had accumulated. And why would he want to return even with seniority? The House held nothing for him. Too slow. Too slow. If he lost in a race for the Senate in 1948, he might well be out of politics—the politics which were his life—forever. He could hardly bear to take the chance, to risk so much, on a single throw of the dice. “At first,” he was to tell biographer Doris Kearns, “I just could not bear the thought of losing everything.”

  But what choice did he have? Other public officials in Washington would not take such a risk, if taking it meant they might, should they lose, have to leave Washington; other congressmen and Senators talked of how they were anxious not to return to the towns or cities from which they had come because they would miss the excitement and glamour of Washington, or the ability to be at the center of things. But it wasn’t the excitement or glamour that Lyndon Johnson most wanted, that Lyndon Johnson needed, that Lyndon Johnson had to have. It was power. To stay on in Washington without it was intolerable to him. And since power, substantial power, was not possible for him in the House, he had no choice, really. He had to try for the Senate. However great the sacrifice he might have to make—the sacrifice of his House seat—to enter the Senate race, however long the odds against him in that race might be, he had to enter.

  To his young aides, and to the young supporters like John Connally and J. J. (“Jake”) Pickle who were not his aides but whom he would need, he maintained a pose of indecision, but to the men he depended on most and who would guide his campaign—Herman and George Brown, Alvin Wirtz, Ed Clark—he said that he would try once more, that he would make another run for the Senate in 1948. If he lost, he told them, he would not attempt to re-enter politics. After almost twenty years, after so much effort and striving, his career had boiled down to one last chance.

  FOR A TIME late in 1947, after he had made his decision, that chance appeared to brighten. During that year, Pappy O’Daniel’s popularity had been rapidly eroding because of his buffoonery on the Senate floor, and because of reports of his profiteering in Washington real estate, and it was becoming apparent that O’Daniel was deciding not to run again.

  But then came rumors—confirmed in an announcement on New Year’s Day, 1948—that Coke Stevenson, a former Governor of Texas who two years before had retired from office and presumably from public life, would enter the race. O’Daniel was one of the greatest vote-getters in the history of Texas. Coke Stevenson was a much greater vote-getter, by far the most popular Governor in the history of Texas, a public official, moreover, who had risen above politics to become a legend.

  1 House parliamentarian Lewis Deschler was later to say that Johnson arrived at the Board of Education only after Rayburn had left, and asked Deschler, “Where’s everybody?”

  2 During the 1940s, no one could have predicted the amazing longevity of Vinson’s career in the House.

  Part II

  THE OLD AND THE NEW

  8

  The Story of Coke Stevenson

  IN ALL THE VAST and empty Hill Country, there was no more deserted area than the seventy miles of rolling hills and towering limestone cliffs between Brady and Junction, about eighty miles west of Johnson City. Only a few widely scattered ranch houses dotted that area; for long stretches, after night fell, not a single light marked a human presence. Beginning in the year 1904, however, there was one light. It was the light of a campfire. Each night it was in a different location, for it marked the camp of a wagon traveling each week back and forth between Brady and Junction. Lying in the little circle of flickering light cast by the fire was a single person: a slender teenage boy. He would be lying beside the fire on his stomach, reading a book.

  The boy was the son of impoverished parents. He was determined to be something more, and his determination had led him to haul freight between Junction and Brady. Older men, deterred by the loneliness of five nights alone each week in the trackless hills and by the seven dangerous, often impassable, streams that would have to be forded on each trip, had refused even to try to do that. But the boy had tried, and had succeeded. The little freight line was beginning to pay. Yet he was determined to be something more. He wanted a profession, and had written away to a correspondence school for textbooks on bookkeeping. And at night, he would be studying them, in the little circle of light from his campfire.

  The boy was Coke Robert Stevenson. And if that scene—the single circle of light in the dark and empty hills; the boy within that circle, studying to get ahead; the courage and ambition which had brought the boy out into the emptiness—symbolizes the legend of the West, so, indeed, Coke Stevenson’s whole life was the raw material out of which that legend is made.

  His father was an itinerant schoolteacher who would travel with his family—Coke, born in 1888, was the oldest of eight children—to remote communities on the Texas frontier and offer to hold a “term of school,” usually about three months, for thirty dollars a month. Coke, named after Governor Richard Coke, a Confederate veteran who in 1873 wrested the government of Texas from the hated Carpetbaggers and Reconstruction, got his only schooling in his father’s classes; in his entire life, he had twenty-two months of formal education.

  The Stevensons’ poverty had forced Coke to go to work at the age of ten, building fences and digging irrigation ditches on nearby ranches for a dollar a week. By the time he was twelve, he was a cowhand on a ranch; at fourteen, while his father and mother homesteaded in Kimble County, deep in the Hill Country, the slender, dark-haired, serious-faced boy was herding steers in the fierce winds that whipped across the rugged mesas of the Continental Divide, in New Mexico. By that time, he wanted a ranch of his own, wanted one desperately. Asked in later years what his early ambitions had been, he replied: “I never had any doubt. I wanted to be a rancher.” His mother noticed that out of every pay he received, no matter how small it was, her son was careful to save something.

  When Coke was sixteen, his father opened a small general store in Junction, a little town in Kimble County wedged between high, green hills on the banks of the Llano River. Stocking the store was a problem; it was as hard to bring manufactured goods into the Hill Country, cut off from the rest of Texas not only by its hills and its vast distances but by the lack of roads and railroads, as it was for Hill Country farmers and ranchers to get their produce out of the Hill Country to market. A railroad had that very year pushed a line as far as Brady, some seventy miles away, but the Brady-Junction “road” was no more than a rough, rocky trail winding over the steep, jagged hills; in rainy spells it turned into a ribbon of mud. And rain made the seven swift Hill Country streams between Brady and Junction swell and race, and fording them could be dangerous even for a man on horseback; the thought of bringing a loaded wagon across all seven of them twice on each round trip was daunting. Men saw only danger in that trip; for Hill Country farmers and ranchers, one writer said, “the task of bringing in supplies and getting the fruits of their labor to market was an arduous one even when the roads were at their best. It was more than man and beast could stand when conditions were at their worst.” But while Coke Stevenson saw the danger, he saw s
omething else as well. Years later he would tell a friend: “I saw opportunity.” With his savings he bought a wagon and six horses.