The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  That the Johnsons weren’t “resented” even more than they were was because no one took them seriously any more. Some pitied them, Sam in particular. “People pitied him because of his wife,” Ava says. “She was such a swell person, and smart—but she was not a helper. She was not a person to get up of a morning and get the kids dressed and off to school.” Everyone knew how Mabel Chapman had turned him down, and, Wilma says, “I used to think at the time it was a shame he hadn’t married her, because she would have managed his house and managed his children. And Rebekah just couldn’t manage at all.” But most ridiculed them. They weren’t disliked so much as laughed at. August Benner’s description of Sam had been sharpened: people said about him: “Sam Johnson’s a smart man, but the fool’s got no sense”—and that was the definitive word on him, that and the word “drunkard.” Tears may come to Stella Gliddon’s eyes when she tells about the first time Sam Johnson didn’t wear a tie, but she is the exception; there is a glint of amusement and pleasure in the eyes of others who talk about Sam and the highway, even if not many are as blunt as John Dollahite, who says, chuckling: “He did a lot for that road, all right, Sam did.”

  As for Rebekah, when the women of Johnson City heard her remark that “Now is the time to put something in children’s heads,” they said, “Maybe she ought to try putting something in their stomachs.” The Johnson home, these women say—in adjectives an interviewer hears over and over again—was “filthy, dirty. It was a dirty house!” And the Johnson children, these women say, were just little dirty ragamuffins. Sam and Rebekah Johnson had always been resented for their pretensions. Now, with those pretensions exposed in all their hollowness, the Johnsons were ridiculed. In Johnson City terms, they did, indeed, appear ridiculous. They were the laughingstock of the town.

  *State securities-regulating measures were known as “Blue Sky” laws because one legislator said that promoters were unloading everything but the blue sky on gullible investors.

  7

  “The Bottom of the Heap”

  WITH THE CHANGE in the Johnsons’ fortunes, their relationship with their son Lyndon changed as well. The change was dramatic—so dramatic that it is possible to date it.

  Descriptions of Sam Johnson’s relationship with his son in Austin—from fellow legislators, legislative staffers and others who saw them together there—provide two contrasting descriptions of that relationship. And the contrast is, in fact, as sharp as if there had been two Sam Johnsons in the Legislature, and hence two different sons. Some of these men vividly describe a son who idolized his father, who not only imitated him—his lapel-grabbing, his nose-to-nose conversational technique—so closely that “it was humorous to watch,” but who also tried, as one legislator put it, to “stand or sit as close to his father as he could get,” who, in another’s words, “stuck as close to Sam as his shadow,” and who, when Sam sent him on an errand, ran eagerly to obey. Others describe—just as vividly—a boy who not only refused to run errands for his father (“Whenever Sam wanted him to do something, Lyndon was always interested in doing something else”) but who refused to listen to his father or to obey him, who, in fact, defied him so blatantly that one legislator says that “There wasn’t a very friendly feeling between them at all. To tell you the truth, he wouldn’t pay much attention to anything his father wanted him to do.”

  The difference in descriptions is explained by a difference in dates. The men who remember a son who loved and respected his father were those who observed the Johnsons in 1918 or 1919 or 1920—when the father was successful. Those who remember a different son were those who observed the Johnsons in 1921 or 1922 or 1923—when the father was a failure.

  HAD THE LEGISLATORS visited the Johnson home, that shabby ranch in Stonewall at which the family lived “just long enough to go broke,” they would have seen the contrast etched in acid.

  Lyndon Johnson had been so close to his parents—imitating his father, dressing like him, talking with him, politicking with him, listening to his mother’s stories, learning his alphabet and his spelling at her knee, choosing as his favorite poem “I’d Rather Be Mama’s Boy.” Now his father was still a father who went off to the Legislature and fought for “The People” and wouldn’t take any favors from the “the interests,” but he was also a father who was the laughingstock of the county. His mother still read poetry and told her children that “principles” were the important thing, and that “a lie is an abomination to the Lord,” but she was also a mother who didn’t iron, so that he often had to go out in rumpled clothes, and who didn’t cook, so that sometimes he went to bed hungry.

  And he wouldn’t obey them. When Sam left on legislative or real-estate business, he would assign Lyndon various chores around the farm. Instead of doing the chores, Lyndon would parcel them out among his sisters and brother. He was a hard taskmaster with them—so “bossy” and domineering that, Wilma Fawcett says, “I had always thought I wanted to have an older brother—until I met Lyndon.” If the younger children didn’t do the chores, they weren’t done, for Lyndon wouldn’t do them; the woodbox on the back porch, which he was supposed to keep filled, would remain empty unless his mother lugged the wood herself. If his father found out what had been going on in his absence, he would lose his temper, particularly when he learned that Lucia or Sam Houston, who were, after all, little more than babies, had been doing heavy physical work, and he would spank Lyndon (he didn’t spank him more frequently only because Rebekah, hating the scenes between father and son, would often conceal Lyndon’s derelictions), and order him to do the chores himself. But the next time Sam left, Lyndon would again order the other children to do them. Lyndon’s attitude during Sam’s absences was striking; in the evenings, he would read the newspaper as his father did, and would lounge on his parents’ bed to do it. It is, of course, possible to place a Freudian interpretation on his behavior toward his father and some biographers do—but one complication must be taken into account: he was as hostile, defiant and cold to his mother as to his father. Her tears could make him sit sullenly through the violin lessons she had arranged for him, but nothing could make him practice; Rebekah finally told the teacher not to bother coming again. Meals were scenes of daily conflict, for to Rebekah table manners were as important as the tablecloth she insisted on using instead of oilcloth, as one of the last remnants of her cherished gentility. Lyndon’s manners now grew so bad that it was apparent to other children that he was deliberately trying to annoy his mother. He ate with loud, slurping noises, violently cramming huge spoonfuls of food into his mouth. Nothing she could do could make him stop; if he was sent away from the table, his manners would be the same when he returned. More than once, watching him eat, his mother began to cry.

  His defiance of his parents was sharpest in the area they considered most important for their children: education. School was a painful experience for Lyndon during the family’s time back on the ranch. The nearby Junction School, which he had attended years before, had only eight grades. For the ninth, Lyndon had to attend the school in the tiny community of Albert, four miles away; most of the children there were German, and many of the classes were taught in that language. An outsider because he spoke little German (and that with an accent the other children found funny), Lyndon was mocked because, although he was twelve years old, he still rode a donkey instead of a horse to school—in part because he was physically very awkward and hence an unsure rider, in part, possibly, because his father was by this time in no mood to give him a horse of his own. After a while Sam relented and gave him a pony, but he would always remember the humiliation; “It helped a little when my mother told me that Jesus rode into Jerusalem on an ass,” he would recall. (Rebekah knew how best to appeal to her son: Lyndon’s desire to be “in the forefront”—to stand out, to be somebody—was as strong as ever; about this time, Lyndon got his first pair of long pants; he arranged for a photographer to come to the ranch to record the occasion—a trip his parents could ill afford. It was at the Albert
School, moreover, at about this time—the time when his father was failing on the ranch—that he first made a remark that one of his schoolmates there, Anna Itz, remembers quite vividly. A group of children was sitting under the big hackberry tree near the school during recess, Mrs. Itz says, and “All of a sudden, Lyndon looked up at the blue sky and said, ‘Someday, I’m going to be President of the United States.’ We hadn’t been talking about politics or the Presidency or anything like that. He just came out with it.” The other children laughed at him, and said they wouldn’t vote for him, Mrs. Itz recalls. “He said, ‘I won’t need your votes.’”) Lyndon would not do his homework, and he became so boisterous in school that the teacher complained to his parents.

  Nine was all the grades that the Albert School had; the next year (1921, when Lyndon was thirteen), he went to school in Johnson City, boarding during the week with his Uncle Tom and Aunt Kitty. One evening, Tom came out to the ranch and told Sam that he and Kitty “couldn’t handle Lyndon”; they couldn’t get him to do his homework. When his teachers hinted to his frantic mother that he might not be allowed to “pass on” to the next grade, she and Sam scraped together the tuition to send him, in the Summer of 1922, to the private San Marcos Normal School, thirty miles away, to make up his work. There he spent the allowance that his hard-pressed father had expected to last him through the whole eight-week session within a week, buying candy and ice cream for other students. Hitching a ride back to Johnson City, he joked about the matter with the Gliddons, and the next issue of their paper carried the following social item:

  Linden Johnson, who is attending the San Marcos Normal School, passed through Johnson City to visit his mother and ask “Dad” for another “raise” for incidental expenses.

  But it was no joke to his father. Enraged, he yanked Lyndon into his car, drove him straight back to San Marcos—and left him there without giving him a penny. “He cut Lyndon off and told him never to ask him for anything again,” Sam Houston says. Beneath the polite phrases of a letter his mother sent at this time to a teacher at San Marcos Normal, Flora Eckert, is a note almost of pleading for help.

  Lyndon is very young, and has been considerably indulged, so finds the present situation very trying, I am sure. To be away from home and to be compelled to really study are great hardships to him. … Anything you do for our boy will be deeply appreciated by Mr. Johnson and myself, and should he require much of your time and service we should be glad to remunerate you as you think right. We are very desirous of his completing the work he had begun as it is necessary, as I am sure you realize. …

  The letter has a oneline postscript testament to mother love: “Miss E—When L. is homesick please pet him a little for me.” Lyndon made up the necessary work—but barely. And when he went back to Johnson City High School in the fall of 1922—his father, having sold the ranch for whatever he could get, had moved back to town—the clash of wills continued. His marks were somewhat better (mostly B’s)—not because he worked harder, but because he was so much quicker and more articulate than most of the other students in the little school (there were only ninety students in its eleven grades, and many attended only when farm chores permitted) and he had developed the ability to dazzle his teachers, some of whom did not have much education themselves. As Joe Crofts recalls:

  Lyndon had a very brilliant mind. In fact, I don’t think Lyndon ever knew what it was to ever bring a book home. … In history, … he could run in after recess or after the lunch hour and just glance through the lesson, and he would really know more about it than his teacher. And if by some chance he couldn’t, and figured that he didn’t know very much about the class … he’d come up with just any number of different things and even have the teacher so interested that before you’d know it, the period had gone by, and the rest of us would sit there like a bunch of birds on a telephone line wondering what was taking place.

  At home, his mother was less easy to fool, and she developed a stratagem to help her son absorb knowledge. To a reporter, years later, she confided with a smile:

  Many times, I would not catch up with the fact that Lyndon was not prepared on a lesson until breakfast time of a school day. Then I would get the book and place it on the table before his father and devote the whole breakfast period to a discussion of what my son should have learned the night before, not with Lyndon but with my husband.

  Of course Lyndon was too well trained to interrupt this table talk, and forced to listen, he would learn. That way, and by following him to the gate nearly every morning and telling him tales of history and geography and algebra, I could see that he was prepared for the work of the day.

  But while Mrs. Johnson would indeed, in later years, “confide” the story “with a smile,” smiles are not what Lyndon’s siblings and friends remember of the constant struggle to get him to do his schoolwork; they remember his father shouting angrily: “That boy of yours isn’t worth a damn, Rebekah! He’ll never amount to anything. He’ll never amount to a Goddamned thing!” And if Mrs. Johnson paints a pretty picture of following him to the gate “telling him tales,” the other children recall something else that occurred near the gate; his mother, of course, insisted that Lyndon wear shoes to school, but Lyndon would kick them off as soon as he got out of the gate, and leave them lying in the dust.

  Rebekah’s recourse was tears. Her own mother was a tougher customer. Discovering that Lyndon’s brother, assigned to milk the cow, had bulked out the yield with water from the back-yard pump, Grandmother Baines said angrily, “Bend over, Sam Houston. I’m going to teach you a good Christian lesson right here and now.” When she was in residence at the Johnson home, the girls even cleaned up their room. But Lyndon, already resentful of her presence because he had hoped to be in charge during his father’s absences, would not accept any “Christian lessons.” Between the strict Baptist widow, who would never appear out of her room without every hair in place and her cameo pin precisely centered on her bodice, and the boy whose shoes were defiantly untied, there was, in his brother’s words, a constant “battle of wills.” Infuriated to see eight-year-old Sam Houston staggering under a heavy load of wood that Lyndon had assigned him to carry, Grandmother Baines would order Lyndon to bend over for a spanking, but he would defiantly dance out of her reach, or run out of the house. “More than once,” Sam Houston recalls, “she told my folks and anyone else who would listen, ‘That boy is going to wind up in the penitentiary—just mark my words.’”

  Opposite, above: Eliza and her husband, Sam Ealy Johnson, Sr. (with, left, her mother, Jane Bunton), in front of their “dog-run” on the Pedernales, c. 1897

  Opposite, below: Sam Johnson, Sr. (left), Eliza (fourth from left), and the Buntons in front of her father’s home in Stonewall, c. 1914

  John Wheeler Bunton

  Eliza Bunton Johnson, Lyndon’s grandmother

  Lyndon at eighteen months, 1910

  Lyndon, with cousins Ava and Margaret Johnson, behind Kitty Clyde Ross, 1913

  Lyndon “in the forefront”—at a family picnic in 1913

  Right: Before Lyndon’s graduation, at fifteen, from Johnson City High School. First row: Second from right, cousin Margaret. Second row: Third from right, his sister Rebekah; far right, Kitty Clyde Ross (with whom he was “in love”). Back row: from left, Clarence Redford, John Casparis, Otto Crider, John Dollahite, Lyndon, —, —, Principal Arthur K. Krause (with tie), —, Tom Crider, —, —, George Crofts.

  Starting to meeting, Sunday morning: Sam Jr., and Rebekah Baines Johnson (left); Sam Sr., and Eliza (middle). The Johnsons would meet at Sam Sr.’s house in Stonewall and race to church.

  Johnson City, where the family moved in 1913

  Lyndon’s parents: Rebekah Baines Johnson, 1917; Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr., at home in the Texas House of Representatives, in 1905, the first of his six legislative terms.

  Lyndon, 1924

  Lyndon’s first long pants. Lucia, Josepha, Rebekah, Lyndon, and Sam Houston, in 1921. Lyndon himself arranged for th
e photographer to come to the ranch to record the occasion.

  In California: Cousin Thomas Martin (an attorney in whose office Lyndon worked), Lyndon, Fritz Koeniger, Otto Crider

  Lyndon in 1925, and in December, 1926, in the snow with his sister Rebekah

  “Old Main” at Southwest Texas State Teachers College, San Marcos, 1927

  President Cecil E. Evans, with his little Redbook

  The president’s garage, over which Lyndon and Boody Johnson lived rent free, and which, to earn money, they painted four times in one term.

  Cotulla, 1928

  Carol Davis, whom Lyndon courted at college

  The Pedagog’s opinion of the new politics on campus created by Lyndon Johnson

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Alfred “Boody” Johnson

  Willard Deason

  Wilton Woods

  Fenner Roth

  Vernon Whiteside

  Horace Richards

  Albert Harzke

  Hollis Frazier

  Clayton Stribling

  Ella So Relle

  Henry Kyle

  Medie Kyle

  Edward Puis

  Joe Berry

  Mylton Kennedy

  Ruth Lewis

  The “wonder kid” of politics and Welly Hopkins celebrating Welly’s election to the Texas Senate, 1930, in Mexico

  He refused to obey his father’s most direct orders: to do chores or schoolwork—or to stop using his shaving mug. Lyndon didn’t need to shave yet, but he liked to show off to his friends by pretending to shave with Sam’s shaving mug and ivory-handled straight razor. His father forbade him to use them, but if his father wasn’t home, he would do so anyway. “No one could boss him or persuade him to do anything he didn’t want to do,” Sam Houston says.