The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  Although he could read better than most of the other children at the school, Lyndon refused to read at all—unless Miss Kate held him on her lap in front of the class. Most of the children were a little awed by their tall teacher, but Lyndon teased her and showered her with affection. “Lyndon used to come up to me and look so shy and cute and then he’d say, ‘Miss Kate, I don’t likè you one bit!’ I would be so shocked. Then he would laugh and say, ‘I just love you!’” His mother dressed him in red Buster Brown suits or white sailor suits or in a cowboy outfit, complete to a Stetson hat, and Lyndon not only didn’t object to being dressed differently from the other boys, who wore farm clothes—he insisted on it. “He wanted to stand out,” Ava explains. When Miss Kate excused one of her students to use the privy out back, the student had to write his name on one of the two blackboards that flanked the back door. The other students wrote their names small; whenever Lyndon left the room, he would reach up as high as he could and scrawl his name in capital letters so huge that they took up not one but both blackboards. His schoolmates can remember today—seventy years later—that huge LYNDON B. on the left blackboard and JOHNSON on the right.

  Relatives as well as schoolmates recognized this desire to get attention—to stand out. Once, he bought a little china clown as a Christmas present for an aunt, but because he didn’t want his gift to be just one of many under the Christmas tree, he gave it to her weeks in advance, informing her loudly: “It cost me a dime and it’s worth every penny.” Trying to explain his behavior, Ava says: “He wanted attention. He wanted to be somebody.”

  HE WANTED MORE.

  His cousin Ava would ride by the Johnson farmhouse on her donkey, Molly, to take him to school. Not only did Molly belong to her, but Ava, at seven, was three years older than Lyndon. Nevertheless, after just a few days, Lyndon began demanding that he ride in front and hold the reins—and when Ava imitates Lyndon demanding, her voice grows harsh and insistent.

  “‘Ah wanta ride in front!’

  “‘No, ah’m older, Lyndon, and it’s mah donkey.’

  “‘No, ah’m bigger! Ah wanta ride in front! Ah wanta ride in front!’ And in the front he got.”

  A few weeks later, Lyndon was given his own donkey, and on that donkey there was never any question who would ride in front, not even when boys older than Lyndon were riding with him. “Well,” recalls his Aunt Jessie Hatcher, “there’d be four or five boys in the neighborhood, and they all came. They’d all ride that donkey. All got on the donkey, but Lyndon was in the forefront, he was the head. And he had the quirt to make the donkey go.”

  Furthermore, Mrs. Hatcher says, even when the boys were participating in other activities, Lyndon was still in the forefront. “Whatever they were doing, Lyndon was the head. … He was always the lead horse. Made no difference what come nor what went, he was the head of the ring.”

  He had to be the head—and he had to make sure everyone knew it. The adjective most frequently used to describe him in the recollections of friends and relatives is “bossy”—and their descriptions of his relationships with other children make that adjective seem too pale. Ava, who even as a girl was motherly, and who loved her little cousin (Lyndon called her Sister), nonetheless recalls how Lyndon liked meringue pie, and how another little boy at the Junction School, Hugo Klein, said he had a piece in his lunchbox, and she recalls how, during recess before lunch, while Hugo was playing outside, Lyndon ate Hugo’s pie, and calmly walked out to play “with pie all over his face.” And when Hugo started crying, and Ava asked Lyndon, “What have you been doing?” Lyndon replied calmly, “Ah was just hungry, Sister. And ah got me some pie.”

  In Johnson City, where the Johnsons moved in September, 1913, when Lyndon was five, there were more children—and Lyndon’s behavior grew more striking.

  He didn’t want to play with children his own age. Boys much older were in school with him, and even in his grade, because some boys had missed whole years of school helping on their families’ farms, and some had been very late starting. Ben Crider, whose father had said, “I ain’t gonna have no educated sonofabitch in my family,” had finally defied him and started the first grade at the age of fourteen. Although Ben was six years older than Lyndon and mature for his age—a big, gruff, friendly ranch boy—Lyndon small, scrawny, awkward, soon became his friend. The Crider and Johnson families had long been friends, Ben explains, “ever since Indian time,” and “Lyndon took a liking to me. One thing about Lyndon—he wouldn’t run with anyone his own age. He wanted to run with older people, usually about five to ten years older.” And on the whole, it wasn’t a case of a little boy tagging along after older boys. It was almost a case of him leading them.

  “He was a very brilliant young man,” Ben Crider says. “The boys his age just wasn’t his class mentally.” And, some of the older boys felt, neither were they. They let Lyndon play poker with them, and—his father had taught him how to play—he more than held his own. The older boys saw that he talked—and thought—faster than they did. Ben and the others stood guiltily tongue-tied when the owner of the land on which they had earlier that day illegally shot and killed a baby deer—one whose antlers had not yet grown any “points”—suddenly appeared and asked them if they had shot any deer, but Lyndon said they sure had—a big “five-pointer”—and made up an elaborate story which cooled the owner’s suspicions.

  It was, in fact, more a case of his insisting on leading them. When the older boys were discussing what they wanted to do that day, Lyndon always had a suggestion, and, surprisingly often, he persuaded them to go along with it. “Lyndon Johnson was a natural born leader,” Ben Crider would say. “… And if he couldn’t lead, he didn’t care much about playing, it seemed like.” “Lyndon was a good boy, but he was overpowering if he didn’t get his own way,” says another of the older boys, Bob Edwards. “He had a baseball, and the rest of us didn’t have one. We were all very poor. None of us had a ball but him. Well, Lyndon wanted to pitch. He wasn’t worth a darn as a pitcher, but if we didn’t let him pitch, he’d take his ball and go home. So, yeah, we’d let him pitch.”

  HE DIDN’T HANG AROUND only with boys. As he grew older—nine or ten—he started to give shoeshines in Cecil Maddox’s barbershop across from the new courthouse, not only, his friends believe, to earn money, but because the barbershop was the place where men gathered. “Lyndon always had to be in on everything,” Emmette Redford says. “Every time someone came to town—a drummer, a politician running for something, whatever—Lyndon was there quicker than anyone could be, and invariably he was in the front row, right in front of the fellow. And, of course, the barbershop was the center of gossip and talk.” The men delighted in asking Lyndon questions, because, as Stella Gliddon put it, they liked the way that “He just shot the answers right back at them.” And it wasn’t only boys that he tried to lead. By the time he was ten or eleven, his father, embarrassed to have a son doing such work, had made him stop giving shines, but he still spent a lot of time in the barbershop. Only one newspaper was delivered to Johnson City each day—a single copy of a daily newspaper, two or three days old, that arrived early every afternoon with the mail from Marble Falls. Lyndon always tried to be the first person in town to read that paper, so that he would know the news first, Joe Crofts recalls. “Lyndon would make a bee line from school down there to the barbershop, and he’d get up there in the [barber] chair and read that paper from cover to cover.” And sitting up there in that chair, he would not only tell the customers or hangers-on in the barbershop what the news was, but would pontificate on it as well, a twelve-year-old holding court on Courthouse Square. And if one of the men disagreed with him, Lyndon would not hesitate to argue, arguing with somewhat more deference than he showed Emmette Redford, but with no less perseverance, refusing to stop arguing, attempting to win the man to his view. He wanted men as well as boys to defer to his opinions.

  Trying to describe the fierce, burning ambitions that drove his father, his mother used the word
“competition.” Trying to describe the young Lyndon Johnson, who was starting to shoot up now into a tall, very skinny, gangling boy with long, awkwardly dangling arms, white, pale skin, black hair and piercing eyes—and who looked so much like his father that many Johnson City residents, in describing him, still say simply, “He looked like Sam”—the same word is often repeated. “Everything was competition with Lyndon,” his cousin Ava says. “He had to win.”

  He was happiest, his relatives say—the only time he was happy, they say—when he was, in the Hill Country phrase, “politicking” with his father.

  Politics was an important part of the table talk in Sam Johnson’s house—just as it had been in his father’s house. For Sam still believed in what he had first believed. At least one copy of a weekly Populist newspaper, the Pathfinder, was sent to Blanco County, to Sam Johnson’s house. “Uncle Sam got ideas from that,” Ava recalls. “I remember one was government ownership of railroads. Another was the Socialist Party. Eugene Debs. He said that it was going to be one of the leading parties in the United States and we’d better learn what it was.”

  Sam’s children and nieces and nephews didn’t have to agree with his views, his niece Ava recalls, “but they had to think. Oh my, yes. At dinner, whenever I was over there, he would throw out questions. The government ownership of railroads—we didn’t have any railroads, but we had to know. He said, ‘What do you think of it?’ And the League of Nations—Uncle Sam believed that the League of Nations was going to end war, and we had to know about it.” And after dinner, Sam would pull out his blue-backed speller and there would be spell-downs, with Lyndon and the other children lined up in front of the fireplace until they missed a word, and “We’d have arithmetic contests to see who was the fastest in mathematics.” And, of course, there were Sam’s after-dinner “debates.” Says Stella Gliddon: “I have been in that Johnson home when he lined those kids up in front of the fireplace—even Lucia, who was just barely big enough to stand up, she could hardly talk, she was just a baby.” Trying to hide his smile, Sam would say gruffly: “‘Now, we’re gonna have us a debate here. Now we’re gonna get down to business.’”

  “He was very much a father,” Ava says. “He wanted us to be the best. Not only his kids, but I and my sister and brother, too, because we were his brother’s kids, and we were Johnsons. He wasn’t satisfied with having a bunch of Johnson kids just growing up.”

  Sam’s eldest son was very quick at firing back answers, even if he didn’t know them. “Where does snow come from?” Sam asked once. “What’s it made up out of?” “It’s made out of frozen ice,” Lyndon piped up. Sam laughed: “Well, that’s sort of right. That’s sort of right.”

  And in politics, quite often, he did know the answer.

  Emmette Redford says that Lyndon’s intense interest in politics was in part due to the lack of any laboratory equipment, or so much as a single science course, in the Johnson City school. “There was no way anyone could have cultivated an interest in science even if he had wanted to, but we had first-rate history and civics teachers,” he says. And, Redford says, it was in part due to the town’s lack of other activities. “There were no movie houses then, no nothing. There wasn’t anything in the community except the three churches and the courthouse, and Lyndon was more interested in what happened in the courthouse.” But there was something in Lyndon Johnson when it came to politics that went deeper than either of these explanations. At the age of six or seven, friends recall, he would drop out of a game he had been playing with them in Courthouse Square if he heard a group of men discussing politics nearby, and would walk over and stand on the fringes of the group, listening intently. After his father re-entered politics in 1917, when Lyndon was nine, politicians, state and local, began dropping by the Johnson home for chats and strategy discussions. Usually, these were held on the porch. Behind that porch was a bedroom, with a window opening onto the porch. Lyndon would hide in the bedroom, sitting on the floor, craning upward so that his ear was almost against the window, listening. In 1918, the Governor, William P. Hobby, came to Johnson City for a Fourth of July speechmaking, and had dinner at the Johnsons’. So many local politicians were invited that the children were relegated to the kitchen. But Lyndon hid under the dining room table all through the meal to listen to the talk.

  It was probably in 1918 that Sam Johnson first took Lyndon, then ten years old, to a legislative session in Austin, and thereafter he took him frequently. Doris Kearns relates Johnson telling her (and this Johnson recollection is corroborated by other sources):

  I loved going with my father to the legislature. I would sit in the gallery for hours watching all the activity on the floor and then would wander around the halls trying to figure out what was going on. The only thing I loved more was going with him on the trail during his campaigns for reelection. We drove in the Model T Ford from farm to farm, up and down the valley, stopping at every door. My father would do most of the talking. He would bring the neighbors up to date on local gossip, talk about the crops and about the bills he’d introduced in the legislature, and always he’d bring along an enormous crust of homemade bread and a large jar of homemade jam. When we got tired or hungry, we’d stop by the side of the road. He sliced the bread, smeared it with jam, and split the slices with me. I’d never seen him happier. Families all along the way opened up their homes to us. If it was hot outside, we were invited in for big servings of homemade ice cream. If it was cold, we were given hot tea. Christ, sometimes I wished it could go on forever.

  Sam’s neighbor August Benner was running against him (largely, some people thought, because he resented Sam cutting through his pasture as a shortcut to the road) and Sam felt that although Benner was regarded as ill-tempered and slow-witted, he would be a formidable opponent because he was German, and the German voters of Gillespie County were by far the largest bloc vote in the district. Learning that about seventy related German families in a valley of one of the Pedernales’ tributary creeks were all planning to vote for Benner, Sam asked a friend to go to the valley, look up the head of the German clan and “Tell him that the sitting judge ain’t in good health and that lots of us are thinking that he [the head of the clan] will be succeeding the judge before too long.” Returning from his errand, the friend reported that he had found the potential judge sitting on a bucket milking his cow: “His wife was in the loft throwing hay down for the cattle. I told him what you said, Sam, and he came up off that bucket like it was hot. And she nearly fell out of the loft.”

  Whether or not Lyndon actually heard these conversations between Sam and his friend—Lyndon says he did; the quotes are from him—he must have heard many concerning the type of political promises and arrangements that Sam made. He also remembered his father giving him many little pieces of political advice; one was, “If you can’t come into a room and tell right away who is for you and who is against you, you have no business in politics.” “And if Lyndon learned politics from his father, he learned it from someone who really knew what he was talking about,” a friend says. “He learned it from a man who was, in his rough way, a master of politics.” In politics, moreover, Sam was a winner. He never lost an election, running for the Legislature six times and winning every time. In the election against Benner, Sam won handily. Benner claimed that fraud had been involved, but his charges were not taken seriously; he did not even show up at the legislative hearing scheduled in Austin to discuss them. And to celebrate, Sam took his son the sixty miles to San Antonio, the largest city Lyndon had ever been in, where they ate tamales at the stands on the streets near the Alamo, which now housed paintings of Travis and Bowie and Crockett and the other heroes of the great battle, and also photographs of the legislators who had saved the Mission from destruction—and one of the pictures Lyndon saw there was of his father.

  Sitting in the swing on the big, screened back porch of the Johnson home, Sam and Lyndon Johnson would have long conversations now. Sometimes, children who were playing in the back yard
would call to Lyndon to come and join them, but when he was talking with his father, he never would. “I remember them sitting on that swing, talking away,” Truman Fawcett says. “We would be playing out back, and they’d be out there talking. They looked like they were having friendly conversations. Those were the only times that I ever saw Lyndon quiet and relaxed.”

  As a child, he had imitated his father. Of all the outfits in which his mother dressed him, he was fondest of the one that made him look like his father; his favorite item of apparel was a scaled-down version of his father’s big Stetson hat. Says Mrs. Hatcher:

  He was right by the side of his daddy wherever he went. When he was little, two years old, he used to go with his daddy down to get a shave. They had to shave him, too. They put him up in that stand, and they put stuff all over his face and took the back of the razor, you know, and shaved it off. Washed his face, set him down, off he went with his daddy.

  His father would sometimes bring back from Austin a printed compendium of bills, either the Congressional Record or the official Journal of the Texas House of Representatives. Once he gave Lyndon a copy; for weeks, the boy carried it everywhere with him, holding it in as conspicuous a fashion as possible.

  As Lyndon grew to be eleven or twelve, the imitation became quite noticeable. Sam Johnson, always friendly, always stopping to talk with everyone he met, was very physical in conversation. The man he was talking to would feel Sam’s arm around his shoulder, or Sam’s hand on his arm or his lapel, and as they talked, Sam’s face would bend closer and closer to his own in an onslaught of friendliness. In the words of Wright Patman, who shared a two-man desk in the Texas House Chamber with the Gentleman from Blanco County, “He would get right up to you, nose to nose, and take a firm hold.” Now, back in the Legislature, Sam brought his son to Austin, bringing him into the Chamber so frequently that some legislators thought he was one of the page boys. By this time, Lyndon, six feet tall, looked very much like his father. “He was a gangling boy, very skinny,” Patman recalls—and he had the same huge ears, the same big nose, the same pale skin, and the same dark eyes. When the mannerisms were added to the picture, the resemblance became remarkable. “They looked alike, they walked the same, had the same nervous mannerisms, and Lyndon clutched you like his daddy did when he talked to you,” Patman says. “He was so much like his father that it was humorous to watch.”