The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  But there was a difference between father and son.

  Patman, who was friends with both—he served with Sam in the Texas House and with Lyndon, for ten years, in the nation’s—saw the difference in political terms. “Sam’s political ambitions were limited,” he says. “He didn’t have any aspirations to run for Congress. He wanted only local prestige and power, and the Texas House was fine for him as his limit, because it was close to home and made him feel important.” But Patman saw Sam and Lyndon only in Austin and Washington. Those who saw father and son in their home town saw the difference in human terms.

  By these people, the difference is often described in terms of that conversational technique that father and son shared. Both grabbed arms and lapels, shoved faces close, but as Truman Fawcett says, in Sam Johnson’s case, “there was a friendliness underneath it. Sam wouldn’t try to come over you.” That is not what these people say was “underneath it” in Lyndon’s case. About the father, Stella Gliddon says, “His eyes were keen, but it seemed like he always had a smile—he had a happy face.” About the father, Emmette Redford says, “He was always friendly—laughing and joking.” About the son, Emmette Redford says: “If there was an argument, he had to win. He had to. He was an argumentative kid—if he’d differ with you, he’d hover right up against you, breathing right in your face, arguing your point with all the earnestness. … I got disgusted with him. Sometimes, I’d try to just walk away, but … he just wouldn’t stop until you gave in.”

  Other Johnson City residents—relatives, friends and neighbors of the Johnsons—make the same distinction as Redford: Sam, they say, liked to argue; Sam’s son liked to win arguments—had to win arguments. Sam wanted to discuss; Lyndon wanted to dominate.

  Patman is only partially right about their ambition. Sam’s may not have been as big as Lyndon’s, but that may have been a function only of education: a function only of the fact that Sam hardly went to school, and Lyndon did, and that even when Lyndon was a boy, the world, through the radio particularly, was impinging more on the consciousness of the Hill Country than it had when his father was a boy; a function only of the fact that Lyndon’s horizons were broader. And Sam’s ambition was, in terms of the Hill Country, big enough—huge, in fact. The difference between Sam and Lyndon lay not so much in what they wanted, but in the intensity with which they wanted it.

  An example that many who knew him give to illustrate what they are talking about is Lyndon and the ear-popping.

  Money—cash money—was very important to Lyndon even at the age of ten and eleven, even, in fact, when he was several years younger than that.

  Cash was short for almost everyone in Johnson City, and especially so for children, and any boy or girl who had a few nickels was looked up to by the other children. But Lyndon was no shorter on nickels than his playmates; as a matter of fact, he had more than most of them, for Sam was always generous with his children. “He had a lot more [money] than most of us did,” Milton Barnwell says.

  But he wanted still more.

  Boys in Johnson City would “pop ears” then. Popping ears meant grabbing an earlobe and yanking it—hard. Generally this was done as a trick, one boy coming up behind another and taking him by surprise, for it hurt—“it hurt,” says Barnwell, “a lot.”

  But Lyndon had very big ears [Barnwell says]. Harold Withers had more money than the other kids because his dad had a store. He used to say to Lyndon, “I’ll give you five cents to pop your ears five times.” Lyndon would always say yes. Harold would start. Tears would run down his [Lyndon’s] face—“Ooooh, Harold, not so hard, Harold!”

  “Okay, then, give me my five cents back.”

  And every time, Lyndon would say, “Go ahead,” and he’d be all scrooged down crying, and every time Harold popped him, he’d go Ow. But he always let Harold do it. And after Harold did it five times, if he asked Lyndon if he would let him do it five more times for another five cents, Lyndon would say yes.

  Says another one of the boys who would stand watching, Payne Rountree: “You would give him a nickel, and he’d stand there, and tears would come into his eyes, and he’d still stand there.

  “Because he wanted that nickel.”

  TRYING TO EXPLAIN, Stella Gliddon says: “Let me tell you what I think was in Lyndon Johnson. First, his father was politically minded—you have to say that first. But with Lyndon, there was an incentive that was born in him to advance and keep advancing. Oh, Sam had that. More than anyone else around here. Sam had that incentive, he had it fierce. But he didn’t have it anywhere near like Lyndon did.”

  Born in him. To the people of the Hill Country, those are the crucial words. “Don’t you understand?” asks Lyndon’s cousin Ava. “He was a Bunton!”

  6

  “The Best Man I Ever Knew”

  BUT HIS FATHER was also a Johnson.

  In the Legislature—where he was greeted with “warm applause” by those Representatives who remembered him when, in 1918, after a nine-year absence, he rose to be sworn in—he hadn’t changed. He was still, at the age of forty-one, tall and skinny, and he still clomped into the House Chamber in his hand-tooled boots, and he still wore his pants tucked into the boots, and a big Stetson hat, and sometimes a gun, a long-barreled old-style Colt six-shooter (although he may have been the only legislator who still did, and he looked more than a little foolish doing so; Edward Joseph would regularly take it away from him on Saturday nights when Sam was roaring drunk, afraid he’d hurt somebody with it). He still played practical jokes in the House Chamber, and was a leading customer of the bars and whorehouses along Congress Avenue, and he was still loud and boastful when he was sober (“Sam was the cowboy type, a little on the rough side … he shouted slogans when he talked,” Wright Patman says) and very loud and boastful when he was drunk, and sober or drunk, he loved to talk about how his father had driven cattle to Kansas and about the days of the old frontier, which made him seem very foolish in the eyes of some of the legislators.

  And he was still “straight as a shingle.”

  A small band of legislators didn’t live at the Driskill, where the bills were routinely picked up by lobbyists, but at small boardinghouses below the Capitol; the members of this band didn’t accept free lodging from the lobbyists, and they didn’t accept the “Three B’s” (“beefsteak, bourbon and blondes”) which the lobbyists provided to other legislators—several lobbyists maintained charge accounts at Austin whorehouses for their legislator friends. And they didn’t accept anything else, either. Says one of them, W. D. McFarlane: “The special-interest crowd controlled the Legislature. We people down under formed the opinion that the legislators—most of them were lawyers—were taking fees from the special interests. We were taking the people’s fees.” The ranks of this band were thin—very thin—and were constantly growing thinner. McFarlane remembers to this day how one legislator, a friend who often ate dinner with him and Wright Patman—the three of them joking, a little bitterly, about the huge steaks that were being consumed at the Driskill while they ate the hash or chili that was all they could afford on their five-dollar per diem (two dollars after sixty days)—suddenly grew a little reticent during their conversations, and then stopped eating with them altogether, and then cast some votes that shocked them, and then, as soon as the session ended, “moved to Houston—he had hired out to them.” But when Sam Johnson arrived, the members of the little band knew they had a new recruit. The slogans he shouted were the old Populist slogans. The People’s Party had been effectively dead for twenty years—but Sam Johnson still believed in the party’s slogans. He shared with the other members of this little band an almost mystical belief in “The People,” and he believed that it was the duty of government to help them, particularly when they were, as he put it in a speech once (Sam Johnson may have been uneducated, but he had a gift for a phrase), “caught in the tentacles of circumstance.” Shortly after he arrived, there was a vote that showed McFarlane that, as he put it, “Sam wasn’t part of t
he special-interest majority.” Sulphur had been discovered in Texas—in such abundance that three Texas counties were already producing eighty percent of all the sulphur produced in the world. Companies that mined it were determined to keep as much of the profits as possible for themselves, and their chief lobbyist, Roy Miller, once the legendary “Boy Mayor of Corpus Christi,” who wore a pearl-gray Borsalino instead of the customary Stetson, kept his silver hair long and waved, and possessed the mien as well as the mane of a Southern Senator, dispensed the “Three B’s” with the most liberal hand in Austin. Miller’s strategy was to accept a state tax on sulphur production, but at a token rate. Only a handful of legislators fought—in vain—for a higher tax, and Sam Johnson was one of them. This in itself wasn’t conclusive evidence to McFarlane and others who had seen men start out like Sam only to be gradually lured by the “interests,” but they noticed something about Sam that convinced them he never would. While Sam would drink with Roy Miller and the other lobbyists who held court every afternoon at the huge Driskill bar, he would insist on “buying back”—for every drink Miller bought him, they recall, Sam insisted on buying Miller one in return.

  He wasn’t afraid to stand alone in a hostile House, as he had ten years before, against Joe Bailey. In 1918, anti-German hysteria was sweeping Texas. Germans who showed insufficient enthusiasm in purchasing Liberty Bonds were publicly horsewhipped; bands of armed men broke into the homes of German families who were rumored to have pictures of the Kaiser on the walls; a State Council of Defense, appointed by the Governor, recommended that German (and all other foreign languages) be barred from the state forever. Hardly had Sam Johnson arrived in Austin in February, 1918, when debate began on House Bill 15, which would make all criticism, even a remark made in casual conversation, of America’s entry into the war, of America’s continuation in the war, of America’s government in general, of America’s Army, Navy or Marine Corps, of their uniforms, or of the American flag, a criminal offense punishable by terms of two to twenty-five years—and would give any citizen in Texas the power of arrest under the statute. With fist-waving crowds shouting in the House galleries above, legislators raged at the Kaiser and at Germans in Texas whom they called his “spies” (one legislator declared that the American flag had been hauled down in Fredericksburg Square and the German double eagle raised in its place) in an atmosphere that an observer called a “maelstrom of fanatical propaganda.” But Sam Johnson, standing tall, skinny and big-eared on the floor of the House, made a speech—remembered with admiration fifty years later by fellow members—urging defeat of Bill 15; although its text has been lost, the theme of the speech was that patriotism should be tempered with common sense and justice, and its peroration centered on the fact that the first American boy to die on the bloody battlefields of France was of German descent. Sam’s speech didn’t hurt him politically—it could only increase his popularity among the Germans of Gillespie County, and in the other three counties of his district he was so popular that nothing could hurt him—but he went beyond what was politically necessary for him by privately buttonholing members of the committee considering the bill to urge its defeat—and, almost singlehandedly, he succeeded in persuading the committee to delete from it the section that would have given any citizen the power of arrest. Germans who followed his efforts on the scene felt themselves in his debt; the editor of Austin’s German-language newspaper, Das Wochenblatt, later wrote: “At a time when hate propaganda … was at its worst … he showed courage and fidelity to the trust which [we] put in him. [He] proved himself a true friend in those dark days when so many who had owed their success in public life to their German fellow citizens proved to be their worst enemies.”

  Sometimes he seemed almost to relish standing alone. He fought—against the powerful Texas Medical Association—for the right of optometrists to practice in Texas, and his son would later say that the fact that optometrists had “little money and influence” and were “opposed by a powerful enemy at the time my father took up their cause was—for me—a sufficient explanation of why he chose to stand beside them. Those were the kinds of causes Sam Ealy Johnson enjoyed.” One night at dinner, the small band of legislators was discussing whether or not it was silly for them to fight battles that they couldn’t possibly win; Johnson said it wasn’t. “It’s high time a man stood up for what he believes in,” he said. And these legislators saw that he was willing to do so. “He was not an educated man, anything like that,” one of them was to recall, but “he was a good man, and he was highly respected by his people and the members of the Legislature. When he said something, it was that way—no mealy-mouth business, no ifs, ands or buts.”

  The larger causes for which Sam fought in the Legislature were lost before the fight began; the efforts to force producers of sulphur, oil and natural gas to pay through taxes enough to ameliorate the living conditions of the people of the state from whose earth they were mining such immense wealth never even came close to realization. Efforts to regulate banks, railroads—any of what the little band called “big interests”—never even got out of committee. Their speeches and slogans were hopeless exercises, irrelevancies when the reality of legislative action was considered. In more narrow fights, however, fights which did not affect the interests, Sam Johnson was, in a quiet, behind-the-scenes way, still as effective as he had been during his earlier career.

  Being in the Legislature was no longer considered a joke, for the people of the Hill Country were coming to understand how much they needed government—and how much they needed a Representative who could put its power on their side. The symbol of their need was a road, the highway linking the Hill Country to Austin that alone could make feasible the importation of commodities at prices they could afford and allow them to get their produce to market fast enough and in good enough condition to make a profit on its sale. And Sam Johnson got them their road.

  Work on the highway had been begun in 1916, but had since been abandoned. Johnson was the prime mover in getting it resumed. CONCERTED EFFORT GETS FEDERAL AID RESTORED, the Blanco County Record headlined. HON. S. E. JOHNSON RENDERS VALUABLE ASSISTANCE. By the time he left the Legislature, he had a reputation as one of its “leading good-roads men”—and State Highway 20 had been opened all the way from Austin to Fredericksburg.

  But Sam believed government should do more than build roads. His ideals were as shiny as his boots. McFarlane vividly remembers him saying at dinner one night, his face very earnest: “We’ve got to look after these people—that’s what we’re here for.” He was talking about “lower-middle-class people,” McFarlane says, about “poor people”—about all people who were caught within “circumstance’s tentacles.” When drought hit West Texas hard in 1919 and 1920 and the farmers scattered across its vast, naked plains pleaded for help, Sam was a leading figure—perhaps the leading figure—in persuading the Legislature to take the step, unprecedented for Texas, of providing it. Recalling how he obtained a $2 million legislative appropriation for seed and feed, the seed “to be planted by those who are too poor and unable to obtain seed,” the feed “for the work stock of such people,” the Blanco Record Courier said years later:

  Because of his influence and insistence, Texas was one of the first states to recognize the public emergency which arises from a long series of private disasters—the foundation stone upon which has been built the modern conception of government as exemplified in the administration of President Roosevelt.

  Impressive as was the West Texas relief bill to his fellow legislators, who knew how difficult it was to win any public-assistance concessions from the business-dominated, philosophically reactionary Legislature, the small, less noticeable measures Johnson pushed through for his own district—for example, the state aid for schools that allowed the free term to be extended to seven months—were more impressive still. Passage of his bill to force the big cattle-buying houses to pay small ranchers for their stock promptly, his colleagues told reporters, “was a great victory for Rep. Joh
nson.” Businessmen, bankers—“there were plenty of legislators constantly looking after their interests,” McFarlane says. “The farming people and the working people—if somebody didn’t speak up and take their point and represent them, unless somebody really had their interests at heart, spoke up and took care of their interests, they had no one to look after their interests. And Sam Johnson did speak up on their behalf. I remember Sam Johnson as a man who truly wanted to help the people who he felt needed help.” McFarlane was not the only member of the small band of legislators who felt that way about the Gentleman from Blanco County. Fifty years later, Wright Patman, now a powerful United States Congressman who had met and dealt with the nation’s most renowned public figures, would be talking to an interviewer about President Lyndon Johnson, when suddenly he changed the subject slightly.

  “Of course,” Wright Patman said, “his father, Sam E. Johnson, was the best man I ever knew.”

  “LOOKING AFTER” people was something Sam Johnson did even on his own time.

  “He had a kind of idea of government as something that could do things personally for people,” Emmette Redford says, and since there was no one else to provide personal service in the Hill Country, he provided it himself, obtaining pensions for elderly constituents who had once been Texas Rangers or Army scouts, or for the widows of soldiers who had served in the Spanish-American War but who didn’t know how to apply for pensions, driving to San Antonio or Austin or even Houston to help people (some of whom couldn’t even read) find the relevant records or to steer them through the bureaucratic mazes of state or federal agencies. He obtained pensions even for constituents who didn’t know they were entitled to them: “He was always the person we went to, whenever assistance was needed,” Stella Gliddon says. “If there was some legislation to be passed, it was always to Mr. Sam that people went, and he was always there to do it.”