The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  But coming back, while it may have been in luxury, was still coming back. Lyndon Johnson had gone to California in the hope of finding a way to achieve the security and respect he wanted without following the course laid out by the parents with whom he was in such violent conflict. For a few months, sitting behind Tom Martin’s big desk in that paneled law office, acting like a lawyer—believing, because of Martin’s promise to him, that he would be a lawyer, would be one, moreover, without having to go to college as his parents wanted—he had been sure that he had found the way. He had been given hope. Now he had had to come back. The hopes had been smashed. Before he went to California, Stella Gliddon says, he had been over at her house almost every day. Now she heard he was back, but for some weeks she never saw him. And then, when he finally came around again, she says, “I saw a changed person. Before he went to California, he was just a happy-go-lucky boy. When he came back, well, I saw a serious boy then. I saw a man. I saw what disappointment had done.”

  HE BEGAN RUNNING AROUND with what Johnson City called the “wild bunch,” a group of young men older than he—he was eighteen—who prowled the countryside at night, seizing whatever pathetic opportunities for mischief the Hill Country afforded. Waiting until their fathers were asleep, they took the family cars and held drag races outside of town, or rendezvoused in the hills with bootleggers to buy a jug of moonshine. When they went to the weekend dances, they would pick up a jug first, and at the dance they would get drunk and start fights. They put Eugene Stevenson’s buggy up on the roof of his barn, and broke into henhouses and stole a few hens for whiskey money.

  While most of their escapades were harmless, some began to skirt closer to the law. When Lyndon and his friends heard that a German farmer, Christian Diggs, had made his annual batch of grape wine, they pried loose boards from his barn and stole a fifty-five-gallon barrel, worth a not inconsiderable amount of money in Hill Country terms—and Diggs was persuaded only with difficulty not to go to the sheriff. They hung a few sticks of dynamite in trees in Johnson City, and ignited them to scare the townspeople—that was just a prank, but it stopped being funny when it was learned that they had obtained the dynamite by breaking into the State Highway Department storage shed. That was a state offense, and the sheriff passed word around Johnson City that whoever had done it had better not do it again. “I always hated cops when I was a kid,” Johnson was to say, and on this occasion he defied them; a few nights later, they stole more dynamite and shattered the large mulberry tree in front of the school. The Highway Department put a watchman at the shed; after he fell asleep one night, Lyndon and his friends broke in, stole more dynamite, and hung it from the telephone line that ran across Courthouse Square. Then, Bob Edwards says, “we lit the thing and got in the car and ran like hell”—and the ensuing explosion knocked all the windows out of the Johnson City Bank. The sheriff let it be known that the next time something like this happened, he would make arrests. Lyndon’s Grandmother Baines repeated her prediction that “That boy is going to end up in the penitentiary,” and Johnson City, which had always known that he was going to come to no good, felt that he was well on the way to fulfilling her prophecy. And, perhaps, so did Lyndon Johnson himself. Recalling his boyhood, he once said: “I was only a hairsbreadth away from going to jail.”

  His parents were terrified of what was going to become of him. His mother would hear no criticism—“No matter what they came and told her Lyndon had done, it was always the other boys’ fault for persuading him to go along,” a friend says—but she could not blink the fact of who the other boys were. The Redfords and Fawcetts were in college, and Lyndon was hanging around with the Criders and other young men who weren’t ever going to go to college, who were going to spend their lives working on the highway or on the ranches—who were going to spend their lives at manual labor. His father understood why Lyndon was acting this way. “If you want to get noticed,” he would say, “there are better ways.” Sam Johnson made other attempts to get through to his son. In May, 1926, Lyndon again wrecked his father’s car on a nocturnal drive, this time smashing it beyond repair, and again ran away, this time to the New Braunfels home of an uncle. His father telephoned him there, and, Lyndon was to recall:

  My daddy said: “Lyndon, I traded in that old car of ours this morning for a brand-new one and it’s in the store right now needing someone to pick it up. I can’t get away from here and I was wondering if you could come back, pick it up, and drive it home for me. And there’s one other thing I want you to do for me. I want you to drive it around the Courthouse Square five times, ten times, fifty times, nice and slow. You see there’s some talk around town this morning that my son’s a coward, that he couldn’t face up to what he’d done, and that he ran away from home. Now I don’t want anyone thinking I produced a yellow son. So I want you to show up here in that car and show everyone how much courage you’ve got. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes sir,” I replied. I hung up the phone, shook hands with my uncle, and left right away.

  For a while after this episode, tensions eased between Lyndon and his father, but soon he began to sneak out at night and take the new car without permission. Then, in September, his father grew sick, and had to lie in bed for months—since he was unable to work, bringing no money at all into the house. When he got up—got up to put on his khaki work shirt and go back to the road gang—his emotions were noticeably rawer than before, and tensions rose. On weekends, Lyndon liked to sleep most of the day; his father, awakening him, would shake his bed violently. And when, one morning after Lyndon had sneaked out the car, Sam ran out of gas on the way to work, he came raging back to confront his son; when Lyndon, lying, denied that he had used the car, Sam slapped him in the face—“just with his palm, not his fist, but hard; Mr. Sam was a big man,” says Edwards, who was present. Lyndon started to run away, Edwards says, but “Mr. Sam yelled, ‘C’mere, Lyndon! Goddamn, you all come here!’ And Lyndon had to come back. And his daddy slapped him again. Lyndon was crying, ‘Oooh, Daddy, that’s enough, Daddy. I won’t do it any more.’ But the next night, he stole the car again.” When, now, Sam stood talking with Rebekah about Lyndon, knowing he would overhear, there was a harsh tone in the voice in which he spoke harsh words. “Nope, Rebekah, it’s no use,” he would say. “That boy’s just not college material.”

  The strategy hurt Lyndon, but it didn’t have the effect Sam had hoped. “If you want to get noticed,” he had said, “there are better ways.” But his parents’ way was going to college—and over and over again during this year, he said defiantly that he wasn’t going to go.

  But Lyndon Johnson was going to go to college. Had he been as much a Johnson as his father, he might—like his father—never have gone. He might—like his father—have spent his life fighting the realities of the Hill Country and being crushed by them. But he wasn’t primarily a Johnson. Beneath the foppish silk shirts was a Bunton. People might call Sam Johnson impractical. No one ever called a Bunton impractical. If there was only one way to accomplish their purpose, the Buntons found that way and took it. Once Lyndon Johnson fully understood the reality of his circumstances, he wouldn’t go on fighting them. He may not have wanted to go to college, he may have been determined not to go to college—but if going to college was the only way to accomplish his ends, to escape, to get out of the Hill Country not as a laborer but as something better, go he would. And after he returned from California, the Johnson who was also a Bunton was taught—the hard way—that there was indeed only one way to accomplish his ends.

  After he returned from California, he worked for the State Highway Department.

  The work started at dawn. Six a.m. sharp was the time the State Highway Department cars left Courthouse Square for the job site, with the road gang on board. And this time the job wasn’t merely gravel-topping, or smoothing off, a road. This time the job was building a road.

  Because little mechanical equipment was available, the road was being built almost entirely by hand. It wasn�
��t being paved, of course; in 1926, Hill Country roads were still made of that rocky Hill Country “caliche” soil that was as white as the limestone of which it was composed, and as hard. For a while, to earn his two dollars a day, Johnson “drove” a “fresno,” a two-handled metal scoop pulled by four mules. He would stand behind the scoop, between its handles. Because he needed a hand for each handle, the reins leading to the mules were tied together and wrapped around his back, so that man and mules were, really, in harness together.

  Lifting the handles of the scoop, Johnson would jam its front edge into the caliche. Urging the mules forward, he pushed as they pulled—pushing hard to force the scoop through the rocky soil. When the scoop contained a full load, he pressed down on the handles, straining with the effort, until the scoop rose free of the ground. Then, still pressing down on the handles with all his might, the reins still cutting into his back, he directed the mules to the dumping place, where he would pull up the handles to dump the heavy load. “This was a job which required … a strong back,” says one description of the work. “This, for a boy of … seventeen, was backbreaking labor.”

  When he wasn’t operating the fresno, Johnson worked with Ben Crider, who had come back from California, as a pick-and-shovel team. “He’d use the shovel and scoop the dirt up, and I’d pick it up out of the ground, or vice versa,” Crider recalls. And, Crider says, such work was “too heavy” for Johnson. He would come home at flight—work started at daybreak, it ended at dusk—exhausted. His skin—that soft white Bunton skin—refused to callus; blister formed on top of blister on his hands, which were often bleeding. He still tried to impress the other workers—at lunch hour, one says, he “talked big … he had big ideas … he wanted to do something big with his life”—but if he had ever had any difficulty seeing the reality of his life, it must have been clear to him now. He was down in that hated Hill Country rock, down in that rock for two dollars a day, down working beside youths who knew that Kitty Clyde had jilted him because her father had predicted he was going to end up doing work like the work he was in fact doing. And the home he went to at night was again a home to which people brought charity; Sam fell sick again, and stayed sick for months, and without income, there was, again, no money in the house for food, and other families would bring cooked dishes to the Johnsons.

  He had started work in Winter. “It was so cold,” Ben Crider recalls. “That was the worst part of it—getting so cold you had to build a fire to thaw out your hands before you could handle a pick and shovel. And we have done that many a day—build us a fire and thaw and work all day.” Spring was more pleasant, but Spring was followed by Summer, the Hill Country summer where laborers toiled beneath that almost unbearable Hill Country sun with their noses and mouths filled with the grit that was the dried soil the wind whipped into their faces. And Summer became Autumn and then Winter again; the first cut of the wind of this new Winter may have slashed into Lyndon Johnson’s consciousness the realization that this wasn’t his first year on the road gang any more, that he had been working on it for an entire year, and now a second year was starting, and he was still on the road gang. He had boasted to his cousins in Robstown that he was going to work with his brains and not his hands. That had been in 1924. Now it was 1927, and he was still working with his hands. The boy who had wanted so desperately to escape from the cage that was Johnson City had not done so.

  So many others had, moreover. The streets of the little town were empty now of many of the faces he had grown up with. Not only Kitty Clyde but all his classmates were away at college. All three Redford boys were at college, as were his cousins Ava and Margaret. Even Louise Casparis, who had been his mother’s maid, was going to college now. But, almost three years after he had graduated from high school, Lyndon wasn’t going to college. All during his boyhood, he had boasted to his friends that he wouldn’t work with his hands. Well, his friends weren’t working with their hands any more. But he was.

  Still he wouldn’t go. Instead, determined not to continue his education as his parents wanted but desperate to stand out, to be somebody—born with a flaming ambition but born in an area that offered ambition no fuel; driven into desperation by the conflict between lineage and landscape—he flailed frantically, trying to stand out every way but their way.

  He was seizing now on anything that might offer prestige. He took to talking frequently about the Baineses’ “Southern blood”—which, he emphasized to Ava and Margaret, they possessed, too; once, Ava recalls, Lyndon warned her sternly not to dance with a certain young man because “he’s common.” At dances, Lyndon dressed differently from other men—and acted differently. Entering a small, bare Hill Country dance hall with his friends, wearing a brightly colored silk shirt, his hair elaborately pompadoured and waved and glistening with Sta-comb, he would walk in front of them, swaggering and strutting—or, rather, so awkward was he, trying to swagger and strut; when his friends attempt to imitate the way he looked, they stick their stomachs far out, pull their shoulders far back, and let their arms flap awkwardly far away from their bodies, so that they look quite silly—and that is how they say Lyndon looked. Even Ava, so fond of him, says, “A lot of times he looked smart-alec, silly-like.” His “big talk” grew bigger; he was frequently predicting now that he would be “the President of the United States” one day.

  But, always, there was reality. Dress as he might at night, every morning at six o’clock he had to be in Courthouse Square, wearing work clothes. The job he hated was the only job available. And then even that was not available. Ferguson man Sam Johnson had worked for “Ma” Ferguson in the 1926 Gubernatorial campaign, but she had been defeated by Dan Moody. And no sooner was Moody inaugurated, on January 18, 1927, than he began replacing all the Ferguson men in the Highway Department with his own followers. Sam Johnson and his son were notified that they wouldn’t have their jobs much longer. The “sense of insecurity” which Emmette Redford says “hung over everyone” certainly hung over the Johnsons then; there were the taxes on the house, and the mortgage, to be paid—over all of the Johnsons now hung the knowledge, every time they looked at their house, that it might not be theirs much longer.

  Then, one Saturday night in February, 1927, Lyndon Johnson went to a dance.

  It was held in Peter’s Hall in Fredericksburg, a big, bare barn of a building undecorated except for benches ranged against the walls—music was provided by a German “Ooom-pah-pah” band—and most of the men were wearing plain shirts and trousers, with here and there a suit. But Lyndon was wearing a shirt of white silk crepe de Chine (he had been saving for weeks to buy it; he boasted to his friends that it cost “more than ten dollars”) with broad lavender stripes and big French cuffs in which he had inserted a pair of huge, gleaming cufflinks he had “borrowed” from his father. At the dance was a pretty, buxom Fredericksburg girl with big blue eyes and blond hair whose father was a well-to-do merchant. She was “going with” a young German farmer whose first name was Eddie, but as soon as the group from Johnson City arrived—Lyndon, his cousins Ava and Margaret, Harold Withers, Cora Mae Arrington, and Tom and Otto Crider—Lyndon told his friends, “I’m just going to take that little Dutch girl away from that old boy tonight, just as sure as the world.” And, Ava says, “He just sauntered across the hall—he looked so silly, I can’t keep from laughing; you don’t know how funny it was; really, you can’t imagine; I can just see him swaggering up to this little old country girl; he’d been to California, he had a lot of new airs—and he just sauntered across the hall, just smiling like the world was his with a downhill pull,” and pulled her out on the floor.

  Eddie, who was standing talking with some friends, didn’t pay any attention at first, but Lyndon bent over and put his cheek against hers, and the Johnson City group could see the farmer get angry. And after Lyndon had brought her back to her seat after one set, the music started again, and he pulled her back onto the floor and repeated his actions. “They had up on the wall, NO CHEEK-TO-CHEEK, and Lyndon
of course was a lot taller than she was, and he bent down and put his cheek next to hers, and he had made this ol’ boy so mad he like to have died.” And he was acting, Ava says, “like ‘I’ve got it made—she’ll be mine in no time.’ Smart-alec.” When the third set began, he started to dance with Eddie’s girl again, but Eddie walked over and tapped him on the shoulder and asked him to step outside.

  “Nice” Hill Country girls wouldn’t “go outside” dance halls then, so for a while Ava and Margaret and Cora Mae Arrington could only speculate about what might be happening, but finally Margaret said, “Well, I’m going to see,” and all three ran out. And when they did, they saw that, as Ava puts it, “Lyndon was getting really beat up!

  “Lyndon was so awkward and this boy was so big and fast,” Ava says. “He’d knock Lyndon down, and Lyndon would get up, and shout, ‘I’ll get you!’ and run at him, and he never got to hit him once that I can recall. He didn’t even get close to him. He’d yell, ‘I’ll get you!’ and run at that Dutch boy, and the Dutch boy would hit him—whoom! And down Lyndon would go again.” Blood was pouring out of Lyndon’s nose and mouth, running down his face and onto the crepe-de-Chine shirt. The Criders, afraid he was going to be badly hurt, started to interfere, but Fredericksburg’s old, tough sheriff, Alfred Klaerner, had been present at the dance, and Sheriff Klaerner had had, for some time now, more than enough of Lyndon Johnson. “We’ll just stand back and let them have it out,” he said, stepping in front of the Criders, and when Otto kept coming, the sheriff knocked him backward and said: “If you try that again, I’ll stick the whole bunch of you in jail.” The Johnson City group stood silent, and the beating went on.