The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  “Lyndon never got in a lick,” Ava says. “It was pitiful. Every time he got up, that old boy knocked him down—he had fists like a pile-driver. Lyndon’s whole face was bloody, and he looked pretty bad.” And finally, lying on the ground, he said: “That’s enough.”

  When Lyndon had recovered a little, Ava says, he realized that one of his father’s cufflinks was missing, and he got “very upset,” After a while, someone found it and gave it back to him, but there was nothing anyone could do about the shirt; it was thoroughly bloodstained. But it wasn’t Lyndon’s injuries that most impressed Ava, it was his demeanor. “Lyndon was always so talkative, so lively,” she says. He had lost fights before—“Lyndon always lost”—but as soon as they were over, he would always be chattering away in no time. But all the way home to Johnson City, he didn’t say a word. The group stopped at Flatt’s Creek to clean him up, and he still didn’t say anything. “He was very subdued,” Ava says. “He acted like a guy who had had all the wind taken out of his sails.” When they took up a collection and gave him enough money to pay his fine—while he had still been lying on the ground, Sheriff Klaerner had bent over and handed him a summons for disorderly conduct—Lyndon thanked them, but in a voice so low that Ava had never heard it before. Possibly his depression was due to the beating he had taken—“He’d had fights before, but he’d never gotten walloped like this,” she says—but his cousins didn’t think so. After they had dropped him off at his house, he walked inside without a word, and Ava and Margaret agreed that they had seen Lyndon in a similar mood only once before: when he had come back from California. And, Ava says, she and Margaret agreed that the reason for the depression was the same both times: “Something had made him realize that he wasn’t cock of the walk.”

  WAS AVA RIGHT? Did the dance teach Lyndon Johnson the same lesson that his California experience had taught him? Was he silent and depressed by the realization that his hopes were doomed? Realizing how hard it was to be somebody in the Hill Country, he had tried twice, in running away to Robstown and California, to escape from it, but to escape without following the course his parents wanted him to take. But both attempts had failed. On his return from the second, had he tried to be something in the Hill Country—and had he had pounded into him, every morning that he put on the work shirt, that he couldn’t be? Hadn’t there been an increasing desperation in his actions during the past year; hadn’t the boasting become wilder, the shirts brighter and more expensive, the nighttime pranks more and more frenetic? And had, then, his beating by the hard fists of the Hill Country farm boy, his humiliation before his friends, been a final pounding into him of the reality about the Hill Country, where the physical was all that mattered. Had the beating been a final confirmation of the realization that he was never going to be somebody as long as he stayed in Johnson City—that even at a dance in a bare hall he couldn’t be somebody—that there was no choice for him but to get out, even if the only way out was his parents’ way? Is it possible to read into his “That’s enough” a surrender not just in a dance-hall fight but in the larger fight he had been waging for years: the fight to be somebody without following the course his parents wanted him to take? No one can say. No one knows what Lyndon Johnson thought that night, on the way home and lying in bed, and no one will ever know. But the next morning, he told his parents he would go to college.

  WHEN, HOWEVER, he left for college the following week, he did not leave in a spirit of reconciliation with his parents. He would not, in fact, even permit his father to drive him to San Marcos, preferring to hitchhike the thirty miles, carrying a cardboard suitcase, rather than accept a favor from him. And he didn’t attend college in that spirit, either; the values he took from college were not at all what his parents had envisioned, as was perhaps symbolized following graduation by his lifelong reluctance—a reluctance so strong that it was seldom broken—to read books. They wanted him to go to college to learn about literature and art, Beauty and Truth. He wanted to be somebody, to stand out, to lead, to dominate. He may not yet have known how to accomplish that, but he certainly knew how not to accomplish it: his parents—the lesson of their lives—had taught him. In Austin, he had seen the legislators who accepted the beefsteak, the bourbon and the blondes, who lived at the Driskill while his father lived at the boardinghouse. His father had refused to be like them, and he had seen what happened to his father. His mother had believed that poetry and beauty were the most important things in life, and she had refused to ever stop believing that, and he had seen what happened to his mother. The most striking characteristic of both his parents was that they were idealists who stuck to their ideals. They had been trying ever since he was a little boy to teach him that what mattered was principle, and sticking to principle.

  Lyndon Johnson’s college career—and his career after college, from beginning to end—would demonstrate what he thought of their teachings.

  Part II

  ESCAPE

  8

  “Bull” Johnson

  IN ALL THE 24,000 square miles of the Hill Country, there was only one college.

  It wasn’t much of a college. Its Main Building—surmounted by four spires and by layers of arches, gables, pinnacles and parapets—had been built to impress, and had been placed on the highest hill in the San Marcos area, so that its red spires, trimmed with gold paint, glittered for miles across the hills as if Camelot had been set down in dog-run country. But “Old Main,” as it was known, and three other buildings lined up on the steep stairstep campus—a library so rickety that when, the year before, it had enlarged its reference department on the second floor, that floor had begun to cave in and all encyclopedias had had to be hastily moved downstairs; a rough, wooden, barnlike “gymnasium”; and a squat, unadorned classroom structure—were, except for a few frame houses, converted to classrooms, the extent of the campus of Southwest Texas State Teachers College at San Marcos. Because there were no dormitories, its students boarded in shabby frame houses that clustered around the foot of College Hill and, although concrete walks would shortly be laid, they still trudged to school up dirt paths that had been cleared through scrubby cedar patches, and around sagging wire fences that defined back yards. The college had been opened, in 1903, as a normal school, most of whose classes were at the high-school level and whose catalogue stated: “It should be kept in mind that this school is not a university, or even a college. … It may lead its students to see the advantages of higher education, and it may hope to influence them to seek these advantages in college or university, but it cannot undertake itself to give them.” Academic standards had only recently improved; as late as 1921, its president had admitted that, in some respects, “We know very well that … we are not meeting acceptable college standards”; it was only in 1923 that the school had been allowed to change its name from Normal School to Teachers College—1927, the year Lyndon Johnson arrived, was, in fact, the year the college would graduate its first fully accredited class. And the improvement was limited because Texas still classified teachers’ colleges as “third-class” colleges, and professors were therefore paid less than high-school teachers—which made attracting first-rate faculty members difficult; in 1919, the president had succeeded in persuading one teacher with a doctorate to join his faculty; ever since, he had been trying in vain to get another Ph.D. to come to San Marcos; several of the fifty-six faculty members had no degree at all. It was a common saying in Texas educational circles that men who taught at “San Marcos” (as the college was commonly known) were there because they couldn’t find a job anywhere else; some of the professors had not bothered to update their lectures for so many years that their lecture notes were literally yellow with age. And the students attending San Marcos had few illusions about the quality of education they were receiving. “The reason I went?” says one. “I had saved four hundred dollars, and I looked at the catalogues of different schools, and this was the only place I could get a year of school for four hundred dollars.” “It was a poor b
oy’s school,” its alumni say; “most of the kids were there because they couldn’t afford to go anywhere else.”

  But to many of these young men and women from the land of the dog-run, Old Main was the largest building they had ever seen, larger even than their county courthouses; its spires loomed over them, taller by far than the spires of their churches. The crowd of students in which they stood in front of Old Main on Registration Day was the largest crowd they had ever been in—the most people they had ever seen gathered together in one place. And some of them had another reason for being nervous as they stood there dressed in new suits or dresses (or, because some of them were very poor, in clothes that weren’t new; there were sunbonnets on some of the women, and overalls on some of the men in that crowd): many Hill Country high schools were considered so inadequate by the state that some of their courses weren’t accredited, and they weren’t sure they would be admitted. It had been a desperate struggle for many of them to raise even the tiny San Marcos tuition; they had made the struggle because they felt the education they could obtain at San Marcos was their only chance of escaping a life of physical toil, and they were worried that San Marcos wouldn’t give them that chance. Professor David F. Votaw, who was in charge of admissions, would never forget those young farm men and women coming into his office with their transcripts clutched in their callused hands. “Very frequently,” Votaw says, “they came into my office with fear in their eyes. Considerable fear.”

  Lyndon Johnson, who had been to California and roamed the halls of the huge Capitol in Austin, wouldn’t have been awed by Old Main. But he had other reasons to be nervous. Almost three years before, he had said that, coming from Johnson City High School, “he didn’t have a full education.” Now, after not attending school for three years, what education he had, had faded. So inadequate was Johnson City High School considered, moreover, that none of its graduates were admitted to San Marcos until they had “proven” their credits by taking a six-week course in the San Marcos “Sub-College” and then passing qualifying examinations. There would be examinations in algebra and geometry, which he had managed to pass in high school only with considerable help from his cousin Ava. How, after three years away from school, was he going to pass algebra and geometry now? Was he—after finally consenting to go to college—not going to be able to get into college? And with his father able to give him no financial assistance at all, he was standing on the registration line with barely enough money in his pocket for the registration fee, and he was going to have to start paying for room and board almost immediately. Within two weeks, in fact, he would be vainly asking one of his father’s friends for a loan: “I am unable to make sufficient money to cover my expenses. … Unless I can arrange in the next ten days for a loan, I am going to be compelled to leave school. … I know of no relative to whom I can go for assistance.” If he got in, how was he going to get the money to stay in? “I knew Lyndon,” Ava recalls. “I could always tell how he was feeling. I was standing on line with him that day when he was waiting to register, and he was one scared chicken.”

  And then his turn came, and he went into Votaw’s office.

  He knew he had to prove credits, he said, and he was ready to do so. He was ready to do anything necessary to obtain a college education. He had had a “little bit of a roving disposition” when he was younger, and had “gotten out” and seen “some of the world, and hit against some of its rough edges.” Now he wanted to improve conditions in the world, and he had realized that in order to do this, he needed an education, to be better equipped to deal with them. “Lyndon sat down there and talked to me for thirty or forty minutes,” Votaw says. “He outlined a program which he expected to follow. He had planned long in advance. He just about told me everything he was going to do. … I have always thought that a boy who knew where he was going would be more likely to get there than one who didn’t. And he certainly appeared to know where he was going. I don’t believe I ever met anyone with more plans that appeared reasonable, workable plans than Lyndon. … I was very much impressed.” Impressed in particular, Votaw says—and if he appears to remember too well, to have re-created a conversation in the light of this boy’s later fame, other faculty members remember him telling them that same day in 1927, “I’ve just met a boy who’s going places”—because so many of the applicants came with “considerable fear,” and this applicant was such a refreshing contrast: “There was absolutely no fear.”

  Admitted to the Sub-College, Lyndon needed a room. His cousin Margaret, a student at San Marcos, had been dating a fellow student who was also named Johnson but was no relation, and when, several months earlier, this student, Alfred (“Boody”) Johnson, had visited her in Johnson City, she had asked him to persuade her recalcitrant cousin to go to college. Boody, the captain of the San Marcos football team, and, according to a student poll, the most popular student, was the biggest man on campus, and, a friend would say, “he had the biggest heart, too”; he was a very generous young man. When, during Boody’s visit to Johnson City, Lyndon had said he couldn’t afford room rent, Boody had invited him to share the rent-free apartment—two tiny rooms above the president’s garage—that had been given to him because he was the football captain. Now, appearing at Boody’s door, Lyndon reminded him of his invitation. Whether or not Boody remembered issuing it, circumstances had changed during the intervening months: Boody now had another roommate, halfback Clayton Stribling, who would also have to agree to let Lyndon move in, and Stribling, who had gone to high school with Lyndon, despised him. But when Stribling showed no disposition to agree, Lyndon—to his surprise—didn’t take umbrage. “He said, ‘Won’t you help a poor boy?’ I said, ‘Do you have the president’s permission?’ Of course, he didn’t, and he didn’t answer. But he said, ‘Won’t you help a poor boy?’ What could I say? I asked, ‘How long do you want to stay?’ and he said, ‘Thirty days,’ so I let him move in.”

  Stribling’s feelings toward him only intensified, and “at the end of thirty days, I just said: ‘Lyndon, get out.’ He said, ‘I thought you were going to help a poor boy.’ I said, ‘I said you could stay for thirty days. You stayed thirty days. Now just get out.’” But a short time thereafter, Stribling’s father, who was ranching 1,200 acres near Marble Falls, suffered a hernia, and had to ask Stribling to drop out of school and help him. And as soon as Stribling moved out of the apartment, Lyndon, who had become very friendly with Boody, moved back in—and shortly thereafter arranged for a third roommate, star athlete and Student Council President Ardis Hopper. Within a short time after he had arrived at college, freshman Lyndon Johnson was a permanent resident of the college’s only free lodgings—and living with two Big Men on Campus.

  He needed a job. Jobs were hard to come by at San Marcos, for so many of the students needed them, but, unknown to Lyndon, no sooner had he left for school than his father, who had a nodding acquaintance with the college president, Cecil Eugene Evans (Sam Johnson had fought for increased legislative appropriations for teachers’ colleges), had written him asking him to give Lyndon one. He did—but it was a job picking up trash and “chopping weeds” and working on the “Rock Squad,” raking small rocks off the campus and lugging away larger ones.

  Crusty, dignified “Prexy” Evans, as he was called, was an awesome figure on the little campus. He held himself aloof; although he would greet students by name when he saw them, he would almost never stop to talk. He never got “too close to the students,” one recalls. “There seemed to be” around him an “invisible wall … which we didn’t dare go beyond.” But while the other members of the Rock Squad raked and lifted, Lyndon Johnson, whenever he saw the president coming, would run over and talk to him, smiling broadly. And soon the other boys noticed, with astonishment, that Evans was talking, too—and smiling back. The conversations, they noticed, were getting longer and longer.

  Johnson had discovered the chink in Evans’ wall. The chink was politics. Negotiating for funds with legislators and bureaucrats was
part of the job of a president of a state-supported institution, of course, but politics was more than work to Evans: the fascination the field had held for him as a boy working for his father, an Alabama judge, and dreaming of becoming a politician himself, had never waned. He carried with him everywhere a small notebook in which he was constantly writing. On campus, where the notebook was known, because of its color, as “Prexy’s Redbook,” it was assumed that it dealt with college activities, but when, after his death, thirty years of legendary Redbooks were opened by friends, many of the notes were discovered to be observations on local, state and national politics. Opportunities to talk about this subject he loved had been limited on a campus on which even state affairs seemed remote, and on which no one possessed a level of sophistication that made talking interesting, but Evans found he enjoyed talking to this tall, skinny boy with the rake, this boy who knew so many legislators, so many stories about legislators, so many stories about the Governor, who had visited his home, so many behind-the-scenes stories about Austin. And if the young man somewhat exaggerated his involvement in state politics, he nonetheless was always respectful of Evans’ greater knowledge and wisdom, always exceedingly deferential, in fact. He began, moreover—unasked—to run little errands for the president: down College Hill into town early in the morning to get a newspaper so that Evans could read it over breakfast; into town with Mrs. Evans to carry her groceries. Then he told Evans that on the Rock Squad pay scale—twenty cents per hour for a limited number of hours; seven or eight dollars per month was all that could be earned—he would be unable to stay in school. He asked Evans for a job mopping and sweeping classrooms and corridors, which paid thirty cents per hour, or about twelve dollars per month. Such coveted “inside jobs” were, at a college which could not afford athletic scholarships, generally reserved for athletes, but Evans gave Johnson an inside job—mopping the floors in Old Main.