In his relationship with his father, moreover, there became apparent now an unusually violent strain of competition. “There was a kind of tension between them,” Sam Houston says. “Even in small, unimportant matters, they seemed to be competing.” When Rebekah was ailing, she would sleep in the girls’ room, and her husband would be alone in their big double bed. On cold winter nights, he would call into the boys’ room, where Lyndon and Sam Houston would be sleeping in a double bed, “Sam Houston, come in here and get me warm.”
“I would crawl out of bed and scramble into his room like a little puppy, snuggling my always-warm body against his,” Sam Houston says. “Pretty soon he’d fall asleep and start snoring, with me right next to him, holding mighty still and afraid to squirm even a little because it might awaken him.” But then, he remembers, “I’d hear Lyndon calling me: ‘Sam Houston, come on back, I’m getting cold.’
“Back I’d go,” Sam Houston says, “moving away from Daddy quiet as a burglar and snuggling up to my big brother.” But, he says, “that might not be the end of it.” Later on, “Daddy might get cold again and would call me back to his bed”—and then Lyndon would call again, his tone superficially sleepy and friendly, but with a note in it that Sam Houston knew as a note of command, and throughout the night, to avoid trouble between his father and his brother, the little boy would shuffle sleepily back and forth between their beds.
To outsmart his father, to get the better of him, Lyndon would go to considerable lengths. Once, in fact, he displayed an insight into his father’s weakness, and an ability to do the planning and preparation necessary to take advantage of it and use it for his own ends, rather unusual for a fourteen-year-old boy.
During the 1923 legislative session, Sam telephoned Lyndon to come to Austin so that he could buy him a suit. Lyndon asked Milton Barnwell to drive him—but to make two trips instead of one, to take him to Austin not only on the day Sam had specified but on the day before as well. Lyndon knew that his father was planning to buy him an inexpensive seersucker suit. He wanted a more expensive model. And he had thought of a way of arranging things so that his father, concerned as he always was with appearances and anxious not to seem to appear poor, would be too embarrassed not to buy it for him.
At the store, Barnwell watched Lyndon’s arrangements in awe. Selecting a cream-colored Palm Beach suit—a twenty-five-dollar suit, as Barnwell remembers it—he tried it on to make sure that it looked good on him and that there was one in his size. Then he told the salesman that when he and his father came in the next day, the salesman should pretend that he had never seen Lyndon before. And he told the salesman what to say. The next day, the boys drove back to Austin and went to the store with Sam. When Sam told the salesman he wanted to buy his son a suit, the salesman said he had one that might look nice on the young man and would the young man like to try it on? He brought out the Palm Beach suit—which of course turned out to be the right size. It was not in Sam’s nature to ask to see a less expensive suit. “Sam like to have a fit,” Barnwell recalls. “But he went ahead and bought Lyndon that suit.”
AS THE REALITY of what had happened to him began to sink in on Sam Johnson, as he had to walk every day past stores that had cut him off, and stop and talk in the street every day with people who knew he had been cut off, his temper became more and more frayed. His mouth, day by day, pulled tighter and grimmer; his eyes, which had always been so piercing, now, often, glared defiantly back at the world. When he came home now, he would sometimes go straight into his bedroom without stopping for his old happy greeting to his children. The door of the bedroom might remain shut for hours, recalls one of his children’s playmates, but “if the kids were making noise or she was having trouble with one of them, he might come storming out,” and Sam Johnson in his rage, a big man with a loud, harsh voice and those glaring eyes, could be a fearsome sight to a child. “We were all afraid of Mr. Sam,” another playmate, Bob Edwards, testifies. One of his daughter Rebekah’s beaux refused to come in the house if Mr. Sam’s car was out front. “He could say ugly things if he was angry,” Louise Casparis says.
With his younger four children, Sam’s anger never outlasted his wife’s soft “Now, Sam, I’ll take care of that.” “You could see that a minute after he had said these things, he would be sorry he had said them,” Louise Casparis says. His children knew it. If they were misbehaving, Louise says, Mrs. Johnson would say, “‘I’ll tell your father,’ but that didn’t scare them one bit.” He was, in fact, very close to his children, particularly Sam Houston, who would get up before sunrise to have an hour alone with his father, to watch him while he shaved in the flickering light of a kerosene lamp hung over the kitchen sink, to eat the breakfast he cooked—“fried eggs, smoked ham, hominy grits or huge servings of pan-fried potatoes, all of them freely sprinkled with tabasco sauce”—and to listen to his wonderful stories, the stories Lyndon would no longer listen to. “Sitting there in the half-light of dawn, my feet not quite reaching the floor, I would listen hours on end to Daddy’s stories about the Legislature in Austin, about colleagues named Sam Rayburn, Wright Patman and Jim Ferguson, that great Populist who later became Governor. Naturally, I couldn’t really understand most of what he told me, but I could sense it was all very important and sometimes very funny. My daddy had a way of poking fun at even the most serious things. …”
With his older son, however, Sam’s anger had a different quality. Once, Lyndon, learning that Sam Houston had, by months of diligent saving, managed to accumulate eleven dollars, suggested that his little brother—who, unlike their sisters, idolized him—“go partners” with him and buy a secondhand bicycle “together.” Sam Houston was thrilled. “My favorite and only big brother—six years older than me—offering to be partners with me! Of course, I accepted.” But the bike, which Lyndon chose, turned out to be the right size for Lyndon—but far too big for eight-year-old Sam Houston, whose feet couldn’t even reach the pedals. Trying to ride it, he crashed. “When my daddy came home that night and heard about my accident and our partnership, he gave Lyndon a lecturing he never forgot. I had seldom seen him so angry. ‘You give Sam Houston his money back,’ he said in a low, threatening voice.” While on that occasion, Lyndon obeyed, his defiance of his father’s orders on most occasions continued, as did his refusal to do chores or schoolwork, and Sam’s bitterness and frustration at his own life would often flare into rage at his eldest son. Returning home unexpectedly one day to find Lyndon, his face covered with lather, using his razor and mug against his wishes, Sam snatched the razor strop out of Lyndon’s hand, marched him off to the back porch and spanked him with it. There were many spankings—at least one of which was undeserved. Irritated by Lyndon’s posturing while holding court in Cecil Maddox’s spare barber chair, several of the barbershop hangers-on decided to teach him a lesson. Knowing he would soon be coming, they smeared the seat of the chair with a fiery oil of mustard solution. It took only a moment to soak through the seat of Lyndon’s pants, and he began first to squirm, and then, yelling, “I’m burning! I’m burning!” he jumped out of the chair and started pulling his pants down. Recalls Crofts: “He was on fire, and he began to cry and holler—we were just big ol’ kids—and he got his pants down, but he didn’t take them completely off, and he ran out on the sidewalk.” His father, whose little real-estate office was also on Courthouse Square, “heard him hollering out there” and came running over, “and I never will forget, I always held that against Mr. Johnson, he took his belt off, and he grabbed Lyndon by the hand, and one of the pants legs came off, and ol’ Lyndon was going around there, and Mr. Johnson was holding him by one hand, and every so often, why, he’d pop him one across the seat with the belt.” Maddox kept trying to tell Sam what happened, but Sam was so angry he “wouldn’t listen to him.” When, finally, he did, he growled, “Well there isn’t any kid of mine going to run up and down the street with his bare butt hanging out.”
BUT SPANKING, or even a more emphatic form of corporal
punishment, wasn’t an unusual method of discipline in Johnson City; it was, in fact, standard, and generally accepted as such. Lyndon’s friend Bob Edwards, for example, says: “My daddy had a razor strop, and he never sharpened a razor on it—he wore it out on me. My daddy had a pair of cowboy boots, and he just wore them out on the instep kicking my heinie. But he didn’t do it out of meanness at all. My daddy was just trying to raise me the way his daddy raised him.” And Sam Johnson’s spankings were not unusually severe; quite the opposite, in fact. His car—his “T Model” Ford—had become the crux of his battle of wills with his son, who, against his repeated orders, would sneak it out of the Johnson barn at night after his parents were asleep, pushing it, often with his cousins Ava and Margaret and friends like Truman Fawcett, down the slope from the barn and out to the road so that the noise from starting it wouldn’t wake them up. Not infrequently, Sam would find out the next day what had happened. Once, Lyndon’s cousin Ava recalls, he and his brother Tom “came up to school, and they marched us right back over to Sam’s house and out on that back porch and whipped our heinies with their razor strops.” Truman, she says, had been “real scared” of Sam, but while the children were being marched along from school, “Lyndon had whispered to us: ‘When he hits the first lick, scream like it’s killing you, and he’ll go easy.’ We all hollered and screamed, and afterwards Truman whispered, ‘He hardly hit me at all.’ That was the way Uncle Sam was, you know. We knew we could get away with murder. Uncle Sam would never really hit anyone.”
What was unusual was Lyndon’s reaction to spankings. He would indeed scream—scream so loudly and hysterically and piercingly that the screams would echo from one end of the quiet little town to the other. Spankings usually occurred around dinnertime, when Sam would come home and be told about Lyndon’s misdeeds by Grandmother Baines, or would see for himself that the chores hadn’t been done again, and at dinner tables all over Johnson City, the conversation would suddenly be interrupted by those high-pitched yells, and people would say, “Sam’s whipping Lyndon again.”
Johnson City’s children knew Lyndon wasn’t really being hurt—some, like Truman Fawcett, because they had once been present at a “whipping,” others because of physical evidence; when the boys went swimming in the buff in the Pedernales, quite often little rear ends would bear strap marks, but Lyndon’s never did. “I’ve seen him right after we had all heard him hollering and yelling, and he wasn’t hurt at all. He didn’t have a bruise spot on him,” says one playmate. Some adults—like the Fawcetts, who lived diagonally across the street from the Johnsons and could observe them closely—knew this, too. Their son Truman recalls that “We’d be sitting at the table and you could hear Lyndon hollering, and my parents would say, ‘Oh, he’s not hurting him.’” But not all adults understood—and many, ready to believe the worst of a man who “drank,” would tell biographers years later that Sam had been physically brutal to Lyndon. Sitting at their dinner tables, they would say, when they heard Lyndon’s cries, “Sam’s been drinking again, and he’s beating his boy.” And families who lived outside town, and hence were out of earshot, would be notified by “Ol Miz” Spaulding, the telephone operator and a Baptist pillar, who would ring them up and report that “Sam’s killing that boy again.” Lyndon, in fact, sometimes seemed to be going out of his way to reinforce the impression of his father’s brutality. Once, he ran out of the house to hide in a tree—and not only picked one right in Courthouse Square, where there were plenty of people around, but told them he was hiding from his father, acting terrified of Sam, begging them not to tell him where he was. “He always seemed to be trying to make people think that his father was mistreating him,” Emmette Redford says.
Did he want people to know that his mother was mistreating him, too? He was constantly “borrowing” food from other families, even when there was no shortage of food in his own home. Recalls Barnwell: “We could hardly sit down to breakfast without Lyndon standing there with a cup wanting to borrow a cup of flour or a cup of sugar or some coffee. And he made such a production out of it!” He was continually going into the café saying he was hungry and there wasn’t anything to eat at home—and at least once this statement surprised two boys who were sitting, unseen by Lyndon, in the rear of the café, because they had just come from the Johnson home, where they—and Lyndon—had just finished eating. “I think probably he was hungry sometimes,” says one of them. “But nowhere near as often as he said he was.”
Did he want people to know that his little sisters were mistreating him? He was constantly telling people how difficult it was for him to keep his house clean, particularly because his sisters wouldn’t tidy up their bedroom, which was the largest room in the house—“He said they had to have a big room because they’d never keep their clothes up off the floor,” Ava recalls. “He said he had to be after them all the time about how sloppy their room was”—a statement which fell somewhat strangely on the ears of people who visited the Johnsons, and who saw that Lyndon’s room was by far the messiest of all.
His reaction to injury—or imagined injury—at the hands of people outside his family was just as striking. Once, when he was only ten years old, he and Clarence Redford had been fighting in the Redford front yard, rolling around in the dust, when Emmette Redford came along. Because his father was dead, Emmette says, “I regarded myself as the protector of my brothers, and I yanked them apart and picked up this little shovel that was lying there and turned Lyndon over my knee and whacked him.” It was just an ordinary whack, Redford says, and he was utterly astonished by its consequence: “Lyndon let out a wail so loud I can still remember it. I can still see Lyndon. He was standing there—he had knee britches on and one leg was still up, but the other had fallen down around his ankle, and he was dirty, all covered with dust. And he stood there just screaming—you could hear him from one end of town to the other.” As Lyndon grew older, the pattern of his behavior remained the same. After a male teacher spanked him and Luke Simpson for splashing water on girls in the schoolyard, Luke simply went back to playing. Lyndon raced home, crying, and burst into the house with a story of injustice and mistreatment that brought his father rushing to school for an angry confrontation with the teacher. Sometimes, he would get into fights—just ordinary scuffling and wrestling matches. In the memory of friends, he always lost—he was physically quite uncoordinated; “he threw a baseball like a girl,” one classmate says—and as soon as he started losing, he would run home crying, a tall, skinny, awkward, teenaged boy with dusty cheeks and tears sliding down them, running through the streets of that quiet little town sobbing loudly. “All anyone had to do was touch Lyndon, and he let out a wail you could hear all over town,” Emmette Redford says. “He wanted attention. He wanted everyone to know someone had injured him. He wanted everyone to feel sorry for him.”
His demeanor was unusual in other ways, too. Except for the extent of its isolation, Johnson City was such a typical little Texas town: a courthouse, a little bank, a cotton gin with walls and roof of dingy tin, a water tank on rickety stilts, a café beside which, at a rickety wooden table, old men in faded shirts played dominoes to fill endless hours, a few stores, not so many as a dozen, lined up along a raised wooden sidewalk on whose edge younger men sat desultorily in a row, and beneath which dogs curled up and slept. Straggling away from the courthouse and the street of stores, set down among vacant lots grown over sometimes with corn and sometimes with weeds, were small boxlike houses behind picket fences. Through its dusty streets occasional Model T’s chugged and horses ambled, slowly pulling wooden wagons. But through these streets roamed one boy who wasn’t typical at all. His clothes were different from the other boys’ clothes—sometimes more elegant than their weekday overalls or knickers or even than their Sunday suits, sometimes outlandishly elegant for such a town; by his senior year in high school, he had acquired not only the Palm Beach suit but the only straw boater in Johnson City; on some occasions, he wore blue jeans, but wore them tucked into b
rightly polished boots laced up to the knee, and the shirt he wore with them was a bright yellow silk crepe de Chine, the neck of which he kept open to display either a turtleneck dickey or an ascot; to school (in whose graduation picture he is the only boy wearing a necktie) he sometimes wore, on black hair that was painstakingly pompadoured and waved, and sometimes slicked dramatically flat with Sta-comb, a dapper English tweed cap. And sometimes his clothes were less elegant than other boys’—so dirty and full of holes that even in comparison with them he looked shabby, shabbier than he had to, as if he were dressing for some deliberate effect.
When he approached other boys, he would run up to them and begin to talk, gesturing violently with his arms, grasping their lapels, putting his arm around their shoulders, shoving his face close to theirs. He would hug them—this, in the memory of his childhood companions, was a conspicuous aspect of his behavior. “He was always laying all over my brothers,” says Cynthia Crider. “The thing I remember about him was how he used to hang all over people. Just hang all over them.”
But it was with adults—particularly women, the housewives of Johnson City—that his behavior was most striking. He would flatter women, play up to them. Recalls Stella Gliddon: “‘Miz Stella,’ he would say to me, ‘I love your fried chicken better than anything! Better than anything in the whole wide world!’” And when she invited him to have some, he would say, “Why, Miz Stella, I thought you’d never ask!”—say it with such expressiveness that the sentence became a byword in the Gliddon household, so that whenever Mrs. Gliddon asked her own four children if they would like something to eat, they would reply: “Why, Miz Stella, I thought you’d never ask!”
The Path to Power Page 18