After they were married, when Coke rode out over his ranch, Teeney rode beside him; she was a good enough rider so that when he was working with cattle, she could work with him, although she couldn’t handle his big brown “cutting horse,” Nellie, and Coke found her a black named Elgin with a very smooth gait. When he was doing work with which she couldn’t help, such as clearing cedar or driving fenceposts, she would pack a lunch and bring it to him, and sit by him as he worked (worked, in his sixties now, hour after hour, swinging the huge sledgehammer as he had when he was young). Teeney seemed to want to spend every minute with Coke. Late in the afternoons they would swim in that beautiful river, with the herons and the cranes standing nearby, and the deer coming down to drink.
And as for Coke, he was a different man—or, rather, he was the man he had been when he was young, and had driven his car down the middle of the river on a bet. “I’m going to say a word about Mr. Stevenson now that you wouldn’t believe,” Bob Murphey says. “Bubbly. Uncle Coke was just bubbling. He just worshipped her.” Murphey had a wife himself now, and she says, “He never walked in the kitchen that he didn’t grab her and squeeze her and give her a big kiss. They were just so happy with each other!” Other friends, visiting the ranch, would watch Teeney and Coke reading together and talking. “They had the same kind of humor, the same way of looking at things,” Ernest Boyett says. “That dry way of observing people. They could sit and talk for hours. If that wasn’t happiness, I don’t know what was.”
And when, on January 16, 1956, the second anniversary of their marriage, they had a daughter, Jane, Coke Stevenson’s love for the little girl became, for the people of the Hill Country, a part of the story that had become, during his own lifetime, a legend to the people of Texas.
He gave her a precious possession that he had obtained for himself during countless mornings with his books. He gave her history.
As soon as the little girl was old enough to understand (and she was old enough very young; at three and a half she was not only reading adult books but could speak fluent Spanish), Stevenson began telling her stories—wonderful stories—about the history of the United States, and of Texas—and of Greece and Rome. After she started school, on days when snow or ice made the roads impassable and she couldn’t get to school, he and Teeney would take over her education themselves, reading to her. And when Jane was nine, Coke and Teeney started showing Jane history for herself. They had read her the accounts of the Alamo, of course, and of the battles of San Jacinto and Goliad and Sabine Pass, and they took her to all those sites, but they also ranged farther afield. They took her to see the Oregon Trail, reading Parkman’s The Oregon Trail as they drove; the three of them followed the trails of Lewis and Clark. “And many of the other Western trails, too, trails we never hear of,” Teeney recalls. “Coke knew all the trails.” There was the Revolution and the Founding Fathers, and there were trips to Mount Vernon and Monticello, and there was the Civil War, and all the battlefields that made up part of the history that Coke Stevenson loved. By the time Jane was a teenager, she had been taken by her mother and father to every one of the forty-eight states, and to several provinces of Canada, also. And there was a trip to a place nearer home. Coming home from school one evening when she was eleven, Jane told her father and mother that her class had begun studying how the state government worked. Coke took her to Austin so she could see it work for herself; once again, there was the whisper in the halls of the Capitol, “Coke Stevenson’s here,” and people came out of their offices into the halls to see a tall, erect old man holding by the hand a skinny little girl in pigtails.
And she appreciated the gift. “Jane was a good student, and a good historian,” Teeney says. “Those trips were good.” She loved history, and she and her father were very close. A reporter who spent several days with Coke when Jane was twelve was struck by the slim, pretty girl, and by her relationship with her father. “Stevenson is gentle-voiced with her, calls her ‘baby,’ ” the reporter wrote. “And you sense her love for the man who is big in her history books.” And when she became a teenager, Coke Stevenson made for Jane what was, for him, the ultimate sacrifice. Newspapers across Texas chronicled it in amazement: “A telephone has been installed on the Coke Stevenson Ranch.” “Well,” Stevenson drawled, “you know how teenagers are.”
“HE IDOLIZED THAT GIRL. He told me many times that he hoped he would live to see her grown,” Bob Murphey says. He lived to see her nineteen years old and married to a young rancher, and not only did Coke live to a great age, respected throughout the Hill Country, a prophet with honor in his own country, but only in the last three or four years of his life did his health begin to fail; a reporter who went to see him wrote in 1959 that “at 71, the [former] Governor of Texas does hard manual labor six days a week.” All through the 1960s, as he neared eighty, he seemed never to be ill, and he still ranged from Wyoming to Montana to hunt the big elk. And he still worked on his ranch. He had decided to build at least rough roads connecting its fifteen thousand acres, and he did—ninety miles of them—and he took pride in every mile. He never lost his desire to learn new methods; deciding in about 1963, when he was seventy-five, that he wanted to build a large garage for his tractors and other ranch machinery, he decided also that he wanted to build it without supporting columns, so that maneuvering the vehicles would be simpler. Sending away for architectural textbooks, he taught himself the science of cantilevered construction, studying these books as eagerly as, fifty years before, he had studied books to teach himself accounting, and law, and highway construction. He never lost his self-reliance, and his happiness and pride when he did something on his own. And as for the law, “Well,” Teeney says, “Coke just loved the practice of law. And he had just the pick of cases now, from all over the state, and when he got a new case which was difficult,” where the legalities were complicated, he was as enthusiastic and as eager about studying up on the law involved as he had been when he had first started reading law books. His love of his land, the land he had saved so long to buy, and his pride in the improvements he had made on it were so deep that visitors constantly commented on it. Taken on a tour, a guest remarked on the clarity of the water in a large “tank” or pond. “I built that,” the host said. He had built it twenty years before, he said. The water was so clear because he had lined the pond with caliche, which he had lugged from another section of the ranch; sure, he said in response to the guest’s question, “It was a lot of work.” But, Coke Stevenson asked, surveying the results of his labor, “wasn’t it worth it?” If there was a single aspect of the ranch that was dearest to him—with the exception of the falls of the South Llano (“How he loved that river!” Teeney would recall)—it was the springs which kept the ranch green and his cattle watered even during droughts that turned the rest of the Hill Country brown. Every time he discovered a new spring his enthusiasm over the discovery would be as full and pure as the excitement of a young boy.
The love between Coke and Teeney was striking, too, as was the contentment they brought to each other. They were to have twenty-one years together, and they seemed to fall only more and more in love. When he rode his ranch, by horse or car, inspecting it or cutting out cattle, Teeney still rode with him; when he was doing work in which she couldn’t participate, she would still come, carrying lunch, and sit near him for hours as he worked. She began doing some of the research for his legal cases, so she was part of his life in the law, too. Says a friend: “It seemed like they couldn’t bear to be apart for a minute.” Says Murphey: “Uncle Coke told me many times how much joy she had brought him, and how he had never thought he would ever be this happy again.”
Teeney made sure that the Stevenson ranch was no longer isolated. Her husband had friends—from his days as a young legislator, in fact from his days as a young cowman—all over Texas, and now Teeney invited them for visits. “It was sort of an Open House,” one of these friends says. “There were a lot of bedrooms in that house, and sometimes it seemed like t
hey were all filled.” In the evenings, Stevenson and his guests would sit around a mesquite campfire by the river drinking Ten High whiskey and swapping stories, while Coke got a good scorch on the steaks as big as saddle blankets.
COKE STEVENSON and Lyndon Johnson never saw each other again. Stevenson’s hatred and contempt for Johnson never faded, and occasionally it would surface. Asked once, during Johnson’s 1964 campaign for the presidency, to evaluate him, he said, after a long pause: “Well, of course, he is a very, how should I say, skillful politician,” and dropped the subject except to say that he himself would vote for Goldwater. “I’ve been waiting a long time to see a turn toward conservatism.” Those who knew him well knew there were still scars from the 1948 campaign.
But the scars were smoothed over by happiness. From the day Teeney agreed to marry him, Stevenson never again thought seriously about running in the 1954 campaign against Johnson—or in any other campaign. He simply had no interest in public office. His dream, after all, the dream he had conceived during those nights so long ago on the Brady-Junction trail when six horses had been all he owned, had not been to be Governor, or Senator. His dream had been to be a rancher. And now he could enjoy the realization of that dream. “He would have made a great Senator,” Teeney says. “But he loved his ranch, and the life out here, and he loved practicing law. His life out here was more meaningful for him than it would have been any other way. And he knew that. He understood himself.”
A columnist for the Dallas News, Frank X. Tolbert, came to visit the former Governor. Observing Stevenson’s joy in the ranch, in the boyhood dream that he had turned into reality, witnessing the enthusiasm with which he still planned and built each new improvement, seeing the serenity of the quiet evenings by the river he loved, the affection between him and his wife, the love and respect in which he was held by wife, daughter, friends—by everyone around him—Tolbert wrote: “After spending some time with Coke Robert Stevenson … here by the green, rushing river, I’m wondering if he wasn’t lucky to lose that Senate race by 87 votes.”
Those who knew Coke Stevenson didn’t wonder. Bob Murphey, who had witnessed, better than anyone else, how hard his Uncle Coke had tried to win the Senate race, says, “Thinking back on it now, I truly believe that getting beat for the Senate and marrying Teeney was the best thing that could have happened to him.”
And a reporter who came to do a profile on the former Governor in 1969, when Stevenson was eighty-one years old, didn’t wonder. Watching Teeney come to meet him, the reporter wrote, “You sense … a protective motherly manner as she approaches her gray bear of a husband”—not that her husband seemed to need protection; he worked, the reporter wrote, “like a ditchdigger.” Teeney insisted that Coke show the reporter the historic marker that had been erected by the Texas State Historical Commission on the lawn of the Kimble County Courthouse. The marker had been placed in honor of a Texas institution. “Coke R. Stevenson,” it began. “Strong, Resourceful, Conservative Governor …” The reporter realized he was talking to “the only man in Texas who can look out his office window and see his own monument.” He realized how proud Coke was of the marker—at least partly because it bore the key word. “A conservative—he’s one who holds things together,” he told the reporter. “He shouldn’t fight all progressive movements, but he should be the balance wheel to hold the movement to where it won’t get out of hand.” He had been a conservative Governor, he said. “When I left office I left a thirty-five million dollar surplus.” He mentioned the old-age pensions he had tripled and the public welfare payments he had increased and the prison reforms and the more humane treatment in state institutions for the insane, and the reporter realized how very proud Coke Stevenson was of his whole life. Then Teeney and Coke drove the reporter out to the ranch, and he saw the house, and the love with which it was filled.
Finally, they went down to the river. A rowboat was there, and Coke explained that “Jane rows upstream, me downstream,” and Teeney broke in to say with a smile: “Then they both get tired, and I have to row.” A recent flash flood had changed the contours of the banks, and as the boat moved along, Coke Stevenson, eighty-one years old, suddenly jumped up in the boat and shouted, pointing excitedly at an Indian burial mound that the flood had uncovered. And there were springs, new springs. “There’s another one,” he said. “And look! There’s another!”
“He takes in the whole scene, waterfalls and deer and turkey and gentle flow of river,” the whole panorama of the beautiful canyon, the reporter wrote. And then, still standing up in the boat, Coke Stevenson threw his arms wide, in a gesture of triumph and joy.
18
Three Rings
SENATORS OF THE UNITED STATES are sworn in in groups of four, and at ten minutes past noon on January 3, 1949, Lyndon Baines Johnson, with his wife and John Connally and Buzz and Woody watching from the crowded galleries above, walked down the Senate’s red-carpeted center aisle beside Burnet R. Maybank of South Carolina, who was being sworn in for a new term, and two Senators-elect like himself, Robert S. Kerr of Oklahoma and Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. Standing stiffly above them on the dais, his right palm upraised, Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, the Senate’s president pro tern, read the oath—“Do you solemnly swear that you will support and defend the Constitution of the United States …”—and the four replied together: “I do.” Then, after stepping to the parliamentarian’s desk below Vandenberg, and signing his name in the Senate Register, Johnson walked to his seat in the last row on the Democratic side of the Chamber. Later that day, sitting in his new offices in front of a high arched window that framed the Mall and the Washington Monument, he was interviewed by Margaret Mayer of the Austin American-Statesman, who had followed him through most of his long campaign. Miss Mayer asked him “if it had all been worth it.” He nodded, and winked. Then he strode out of his office and down the corridor to the elevator. He rang the elevator bell three times—the signal that a Senator was waiting.
The Senate into which Lyndon Johnson was sworn was as dominated by seniority as the House of Representatives. Power resided in the Senate “Club” or “Inner Circle,” which consisted largely of the chairmen and ranking members of the Senate’s great Standing Committees, and of four party leaders—two floor leaders and two assistant floor leaders or “whips”—who, unlike the Speaker of the House, were not formal officials of the Senate but in effect held the limited powers the committee barons deigned to allow them. The sole basis for accession to a chairmanship was length of service in the Senate: a vacant chairmanship went to the man of the majority party who had been longest on that committee—and once a man became chairman, the post was his for the duration of his political life; nothing, not even senility, could change that. As a result, six of the fourteen committee chairmen were in their fourth or fifth Senate terms, having served a quarter of a century or more. Neither energy nor ability could circumvent the seniority rule. To become a leader in the Senate, it seemed, required waiting—years of waiting.
Within just two years, in January, 1951, Lyndon Johnson would be a leader, his party’s whip—an assistant floor leader who, moreover, very quickly began to invest that hitherto largely titular role with new significance. Just two years later, in January, 1953, he would be the Leader of his party, only Minority Leader since the Democrats had lost control of the Senate, but nonetheless the youngest floor leader in the history of the Senate. From that seat in the back row he had moved in only four years to the Democratic Leader’s front-row, center-aisle seat, sitting at the head of men who had served as many terms in that body as he had years there. And within weeks of his election as Leader, he would begin to revolutionize some of the Senate’s most sacrosanct traditions in order to concentrate the barons’ prerogatives in his own hands. By 1955, with the barons’ power broken and the Democrats back in the majority, Lyndon Johnson was the most powerful Majority Leader in history.
DEBTS,
BIBLIOGRAPHY,
NOTES
AN
D INDEX
Debts
DURING THE FOURTEEN YEARS in which this life of Lyndon Johnson has been going forward, librarians across the United States have come to know and respect Ina Caro, an indefatigable researcher of unshakable integrity who happens to be my wife.
For the first volume, in transforming herself into an expert on rural electrification and soil conservation, she spent long days driving back and forth over lonely Hill Country roads searching out elderly farm and ranch women who could explain to her—and through her, to me—the difference that these innovations made in their lives. For this volume, her work has been more with written materials. In pursuing them, she has crisscrossed the United States, spending weeks, for example, going through the papers of former Senator Richard B. Russell in a library in Athens, Georgia, those of Willis Robertson in a library in Williamsburg, Virginia, and those of former Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman in Hyde Park, New York, and Independence, Missouri. My beloved idealist has tracked the maneuverings of supreme pragmatists such as Tommy-the-Cork Corcoran and former United States Attorney General Tom Clark in the National Archives in Washington and in the Truman Library in Independence. These are major institutions. The librarians of tiny libraries in small towns all across Texas know Ina Caro as well. Over and over, she has searched through those libraries until she unearthed copies of weekly newspapers that the librarians believed no longer existed.
She does pioneering work. To cite one example: To find the truth about the fabled “West Side” vote in San Antonio, long a subject of rumor in Texas political circles, Ina wanted to analyze the precinct-by-precinct West Side voting records in a Lyndon Johnson senatorial primary during the 1940s. First she was told that the records no longer existed—an understandable misstatement since during the intervening forty years or so no one had looked at them. Finally she learned that the records did in fact still exist but were about to be destroyed—and had been stored meanwhile in an abandoned jail. Ina went to the jail, and analyzed the records—and what she found has enriched the book.
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