The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  “The work was hot and he wanted to come home,” a Johnson City friend, Fritz Koeniger, recalls, “but he didn’t want to come home and be punished. So he wrote to Ben Crider, and Ben told his brother Walter to bring it up with Mr. Sam. Walter asked him: ‘Have you heard anything from Lyndon, Mr. Johnson?’

  “‘No. His mother is worried to death about him.’ (Pause.) ‘And so am I.’

  “‘Well, Ben’s got a letter from him,’ Walter says. ‘And he says he’s working on a steam boiler down in Robstown. Those old steam boilers are mighty dangerous. The people down there won’t work on those boilers.’

  “Sam got up and walked down the street in a deep study. Then he swung around and walked back, and said, ‘Walter, here’s ten dollars for gas. You drive down there just as fast as you can, and get Lyndon, and bring him home!’”

  Then Sam went home and telephoned Robstown, telling Lyndon to come home with Walter. But Lyndon wouldn’t let his father know he wanted to. Pretending that he was having a good time where he was, he said he would come home only if Sam promised never to punish him for the car wreck—or even to mention it. And when his father finally agreed, Lyndon insisted that his mother come to the phone and say she had heard the promise, so that in the future he would have a witness. And thereafter, whenever Sam, angry at Lyndon, would start to bring up the car wreck, Lyndon would say, “Mama, you remember, he said he wouldn’t do it”—and Rebekah would say, “Now, that’s out, Sam. You promised.” And Lyndon’s father would always drop the subject.

  Lyndon could always outsmart his father.

  But if Lyndon’s car accident was a topic banned from the Johnson household, Lyndon’s college career was not, and conflict flared again and again as September approached. Johnson City was abuzz over the fact that five children from a single graduating class, the most in the city’s history, were going to college—and the parents of the sixth felt very bad. In September, Lyndon drove to Kyle to visit the last of the original Buntons, his Great-uncle Desha, who, tended by a former slave, old Uncle Ranch, who was almost as feeble as he, was dying—on the same ranch he had founded almost sixty years before and had managed to hold on to ever since, and would be able to pass on, unencumbered by mortgage, to his sons. But if Lyndon was offered any financial assistance for his higher education, it was not sufficient to change his mind. On the day that four of his former classmates went to San Marcos to enter college—Kitty Clyde, of course, went to Austin—Lyndon went, too, in response to a direct order. But he returned to Johnson City without registering, and stood sullenly under the lash of his father’s tongue. And, a week or two later, he ran away again.

  THIS TIME, he ran not south but west—to California.

  Four older boys, discouraged by the lack of work in Johnson City, were planning a job-hunting trip to the coast in Walter Crider’s old “T-Model,” which they had purchased for twenty-five dollars. When Lyndon asked his parents for permission to accompany them, Rebekah became hysterical, and Sam flatly forbade him to go. Lyndon boasted that he was going anyway. Told about the boast, Sam said, “Weeelll, I’m just gonna wait until they’re all loaded up, and then I’m gonna yank him out of that car.” One Wednesday in November, however, Sam heard of a farm for sale near Blanco at a cheap price, and drove down to investigate. The boys had been planning to leave that Friday, but, Lyndon’s brother says, “The minute he [Sam] took off, Lyndon ran into his room, pulled his already-packed suitcase from under the bed, and quickly called his fellow travelers together. In less than ten minutes, they … zoomed out of town at close to thirty miles an hour.” Returning some hours later, Sam

  exploded in several different directions. I had never heard such rich, inventive language. … Cranking the phone as if it were an ice-cream machine, he called the sheriff of nearly every county between Johnson City and El Paso on the far western border of Texas, asking them to arrest his runaway son,

  but for some reason no one did.

  After Lyndon Johnson became President, he would frequently enthrall reporters—and biographers—with his dramatic description of this California trip, which he said he took because “it meant one less mouth for my poor daddy to feed.” In a typical description, he said the five travelers had been so naive and frightened (“None of us had been off the farm for a trip longer than the road to town”) that

  We’d camp out along the railroad tracks at night, and always our first chore would be to dig a hole in which to bury our money. The heaviest member of our party always slept over our cache. We didn’t propose to be robbed. Finally we came to a place where a hole in the ground was no longer necessary. The money we had just trickled away. When we were broke and job hunting, we separated.

  He remained in California for two years, he said, and during this time,

  Nothing to eat was the principal item on my food chart. That was the first time I went on a diet. Up and down the coast I tramped, washing dishes, waiting on tables, doing farm work when it was available, and always growing thinner.

  When finally he returned to Johnson City—hitchhiking the entire fifteen hundred miles—he said,

  The trip back home was the longest I’ve ever made. And the prettiest sight I ever saw in my life was my grandmother’s patchwork quilt at the foot of my bed when I got home.

  Lyndon Johnson’s description of the trip, however, no matter how enthralling to biographers—a passage in a typical biography reads: “Johnson was barely able to survive on the grapes he picked, the dishes he washed and the cars he fixed. … [He] lived the vagabond life”—is no more accurate than the reason he gave for taking it.

  Once California had been the frontier, the land of opportunity to the west, and in the Hill Country it was still thought of as the land of opportunity. “Everyone in Johnson City wanted to go to California,” Louise Casparis says. “They thought you could make money out there”—and the five boys believed they were on the trail of fortune; they named their car “the Covered Wagon.” Arriving in El Paso (population 74,000), they were thrilled by it because it was the first time any of them had been in a “big city.” Traveling up through New Mexico and then across Arizona on plank roads, crossing the Colorado River on a ferry, they felt very much like explorers. “We had a lot of fun,” Rountree says. And when they arrived in Tehachapi, California, where a number of Johnson City boys, including Lyndon’s close friends Ben Crider and Fritz Koeniger, were working in a cement plant, while only two of the travelers could obtain jobs in the plant and two others did indeed pick grapes and do other farm work in the San Joaquin Valley, if Lyndon Johnson picked any grapes, he picked very few. His cousin Tom Martin, son of the well-known attorney Clarence Martin, had become a prominent attorney himself in San Bernardino, and what Johnson actually did as soon as he arrived in California was to telephone Martin and ask if he could work as a clerk in his law office. Martin, after calling the Johnsons and obtaining their consent, agreed. He drove to Tehachapi to pick Lyndon up and took him straight to the best men’s shop in San Bernardino, where he bought him two expensive suits, and then brought him to his home, a four-bedroom ranch house. And what Johnson actually did, from beginning to end of his fabled stay in California, was not tramp up and down the coast, “with nothing to eat,” “washing dishes, waiting on tables, doing farm work,” but work in his cousin’s paneled office and live in his cousin’s comfortable home.

  YET IF THERE WAS no poverty or hunger on the trip, there were terrors nonetheless.

  Martin had given Johnson hope: he promised to make him a lawyer. In California as in Texas, he explained, admission to the bar required passing a written examination, which he felt—and Lyndon said he agreed—Lyndon wouldn’t be able to pass, even after studying law in Martin’s office; not without more education than had been provided at Johnson City High. In neighboring Nevada, however, no written examination was required, and the oral examinations were very informal, especially when the candidate came recommended by a prominent attorney. Martin was friends with several prominent atto
rneys in Nevada, he said, and if Lyndon studied law in his office—no more than a few months would be needed—he would arrange with one of his friends to have Lyndon admitted to the Nevada bar. Practicing in Nevada wouldn’t be a good idea, Martin said; that state was still sparsely settled and rather impoverished. But once he was a lawyer in Nevada, Johnson could be admitted to the California bar under a provision which made such admission all but automatic for any lawyer from another state. And as soon as he was admitted, Martin would take him into his own profitable practice.

  To Lyndon, this seemed a chance—his first real chance—to be someone without bowing to his parents’ wishes and going to college. Fritz Koeniger was rooming with Lyndon, who had persuaded Tom to let Koeniger work as a clerk in his office, and, Koeniger says, “Lyndon wanted to be a lawyer, wanted it very badly.” He threw himself into his work with an energy he had never displayed before. If at home he had had to be shouted out of bed, now he jumped up and dressed in an almost frantic haste—so anxious to get to work, in fact, that he developed a habit Koeniger had never heard of: instead of untying his necktie at night, which would have required him to spend half a minute or so retying it in the morning, Lyndon would loosen the knot enough to pull it over his head and hang it, still tied, on a doorknob, so that he could just pull it over his head and tighten the knot in the morning. And when he got to the office, he not only raced to do whatever work Martin assigned him, but in every spare minute bent over Martin’s big lawbooks with a fierce concentration. “He had always been ambitious, even back in Johnson City,” Koeniger says, but there was a new level of intensity about that ambition now. “He wanted to get ahead in the world, wanted to be something, and he wanted it so bad that he was aggressive,” Koeniger says. “He was very aggressive.” Martin, as renowned an orator as his father, was active in Democratic politics in San Bernardino, and had been invited to speak at a Labor Day picnic. But the night before, he, Lyndon and Koeniger had driven over to Los Angeles to a party for two Johnson City newlyweds who had come to California, and they had slept over. As soon as they started driving to San Bernardino the next morning, they saw that the holiday traffic was so heavy that they might not get to the picnic on time. The road had only two lanes, one in each direction, and both lanes were crowded, so that Lyndon, who was driving, had to get cars in his lane to pull off to the side of the road if he wanted to pass them. And the horn on Martin’s car didn’t work. “And then,” Koeniger says, “and this is what I’ve thought of many times to show how aggressive Lyndon was—he’d pull right up behind some car and bang the side of his door, just smash it—hard—with his open palm so it sounded like a crash, almost, over and over until they’d pull over. Chauffeur-driven cars, some of them. Rich people out for a holiday. But that long arm would just reach out the window and just smash and smash. And the other car would swerve over and we’d go by and they’d glare at us. I wouldn’t have done that, but Lyndon was just determined to get there on time.” He did—they arrived just as the master of ceremonies was asking, “Is the Honorable Thomas J. Martin in the audience? He is scheduled to speak at this time.” Martin shouted up, “Here I am!” Koeniger was never to forget that long arm beating—smashing on the car door.

  For a few months, Lyndon’s hopes seemed on the way to realization. Martin’s practice was booming. He had impressed Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., and did legal work for him, and he also did a lot of divorce work, some for movie actresses from whom he received fees that sounded wonderfully large to the two Hill Country youths. He had a knack for publicity—once, recalls Koeniger, he “saved up” his divorce cases for several weeks, and then gave them all to his two “assistants” in a bunch; “Lyndon and I took them down and filed them in the courthouse all at once, and we got a big headline in the San Bernardino Sun because it was the most divorce cases ever filed in one day.” And Lyndon was doing more and more of the paperwork in the office, and, Martin said, making good progress in his law reading.

  But there was more than one facet to Martin’s character. He had blighted a brilliant career in Texas before coming to California. Elected to the Legislature at twenty-one, he had resigned to enlist (it was his seat that Sam took in the special election of 1917), and returned as a war hero with a lieutenancy and a silver star, awarded, the citation read, for his bravery in going “into the front line, which was under severe artillery and machine gun fire, in order to encourage … his regiment.” He was named police chief of San Antonio, and had been nominated for district attorney when he became involved in a series of escapades (on one occasion, drunk, he and some friends drove around the city shooting out streetlights). He resigned and left town while a grand jury was considering an indictment against him. When, during the summer of 1925, his wife, Olga, took their little son back to Texas for a visit, “she hadn’t more than left San Bernardino on the train” when Martin organized a “party” that was to go on (“more or less continuously,” Koeniger says) for more than two months.

  The key participants were Martin and his actress girlfriend, Lottie. Martin had, in Koeniger’s words, a “great capacity” for Gordon’s gin, and a bootlegger client—whom he had been keeping out of jail for years—to supply it. “Any time you need anything, just call,” the bootlegger told the two youths, and, on Martin’s behalf, they called frequently during the ensuing two months, during all of which, Koeniger says, Martin remained “pretty much drunk.”

  While present at the party—it took place, after all, at the house in which they were living—Lyndon and Koeniger were more spectators than participants. They each had a “girlfriend,” but only to have someone to go to the party with; Lyndon’s was Martin’s secretary, who would come over from the office with him; their relationship was platonic. What the two young men mainly did that summer—Lyndon with feverish earnestness—was try to hold Martin’s law practice together, for, with the onset of the “party,” Martin completely abandoned it.

  At first, the task was fun. When a client telephoned, Koeniger says, he or Lyndon would in turn telephone Martin, “and he’d tell us what to tell the client, and to cover up for him not being there.” When Martin was too much under the weather to be of assistance, they would decide themselves what “legal advice” to give—“Lyndon and I were practically running the office.”

  But it wasn’t fun for long. “We had to pay filing fees and other expenses that lawyers have,” Koeniger explains. “And we had to pay the office rent. Several times Lyndon mentioned to Tom, ‘We’ve got to raise some money.’” The first few times, Martin gave him some, but then he grew evasive, and his two clerks realized he no longer had any to give. Lyndon and Koeniger had never been on salary—“we had just kind of been sharing with Tom on anything that came in.” They paid some filing fees themselves, and then some of the back rent—and found themselves, Koeniger says, “flat broke.” And the landlord began coming around to demand the rest of the rent. Then they learned that a mortgage payment was coming due on Martin’s house. Lyndon Johnson, who had for years watched his father, broke, worry about losing his home, realized with a start that he was in the same position. And Lyndon had an additional worry. He suddenly realized that in advising clients when Martin was unable to, he had in fact been practicing law without a license. If one of the clients found out, he could be arrested. He could go to jail! And several clients for whom legal papers hadn’t been filed as they had expected—because there was no money to pay the filing fees—were beginning to ask suspiciously what was going on. Whether or not jail was a real possibility, it loomed very real indeed for the two unsophisticated youths. Lyndon was terrified—they both were. Years later, with real feeling in his voice, Koeniger would say: “This was a terrible experience.”

  And then Lyndon Johnson found out that he wasn’t going to be a lawyer after all. In assuring him that he would be able to obtain a Nevada license, Martin had overlooked the fact that Nevada had an age requirement; a lawyer had to be at least twenty-one. In this summer of 1925, Lyndon was only seventeen; h
e would have to wait four years! Koeniger isn’t sure whether or not Lyndon had known this earlier, but he is sure—for he remembers his friend’s shock and dismay when he found it out—that he hadn’t known about another requirement. Martin had assured him that once he obtained a Nevada license, it would be easy for him to obtain a California license. California law, however, required that such reciprocal licenses go to attorneys who had been practicing in another state for at least three years. It wouldn’t be four years before Lyndon could practice in California—it would be seven! And at the same time that Lyndon learned this dismaying fact, Koeniger says, he learned another one: Nevada was in the process of tightening up its previously slack requirements for obtaining a license to practice law; it was going to be much more difficult to obtain one without a college degree, so difficult that it might be all but impossible to obtain one with only a Johnson City High School education.

  In September, 1925, Martin received word that his wife was on her way back from Texas, driving back with his father, Clarence Martin. “When we got the word that Olga was coming home—of course Lottie understood that; no trouble there—Tom said, ‘Now, you take the car and take Lottie back to Hollywood, and Lyndon and I will clean up. We’ve got to remove any trace of any woman being here.’ Olga never did find out, and when she came back, Tom said, ‘Now, boys, we’re going to straighten up and practice law.’” But the young men had been too scared. “We hadn’t wanted to desert Tom, but we had resolved that when Olga came back, we’d leave,” Koeniger says. “After this terrible experience, we had resolved that we didn’t want to go on any more.” As soon as Olga arrived, they left. Koeniger took the first job he was offered—in a box-making factory in Clovis—and couldn’t leave San Bernardino fast enough, so thoroughly frightened had he been. And when, a week later, Clarence Martin started driving back to Texas, Lyndon went with him. In October or November, 1925—less than a year, not two years as he later said—after he had run away from Johnson City, Lyndon Johnson came back home. Just as his stay in California was not at all as he described it, neither was his trip back. He said he hitchhiked home; in fact, he was driven to his front door in Clarence Martin’s big Buick.