The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  Lyndon’s jurisdiction included the hallway outside Evans’ office, and that was where he always seemed to be mopping when the president came by. Their conversations continued. And then Lyndon asked if he could work directly for him. Evans had only one assistant—an instructor, Tom W. Nichols, who served part-time as his secretary. Lyndon said that Evans should have another—an office boy, who could carry his messages (the campus had no internal telephone system) and run other errands so that Nichols wouldn’t have to run them, and who could mind the office when Nichols was teaching. The assistant registrar, Ethel Davis, who worked across the hall from Evans’ office, remembers her amazement at the young man’s effrontery. “He was so sure of himself; he just told Dr. Evans he wanted a job there.” She was even more amazed at the result. “Evidently, Evans approved of his attitude, because he gave him the job,” she says. The salary was fifteen dollars per month. Within five weeks of his arrival at the college—before, in fact, he had even been admitted to it—he was working in the president’s office, in a job which hadn’t even existed before he got there.

  LYNDON JOHNSON did prove his credits—just barely, and thanks to his mother (“I remember the night before I took my college entrance exams, she sat up all night trying to teach me plane geometry and I had had difficulty with it all through Johnson City High School—and the minimum grade required to get into college was seventy and I made seventy—perhaps with some generous treatment on the part of the grader”)—and was admitted to college on March 21, 1927. But he became more and more discouraged and depressed.

  Easy as the schoolwork was, it was hard for him. He knew he was weak in grammar; about this time he wrote a vivid description of himself as “a tired homesick freshman … foundering in a sea of sentences in English 101.” He had thought he was strong in debate—he considered it his strongest subject—but during the first term of his freshman year he received a “D” in debate; “he was very upset about this,” a girl in the course recalls. Yet it was not scholastic but financial problems that preyed most on his mind. Rooming with Boody meant that he didn’t have to pay rent, but he had to eat. To save money, he arranged a two-meal contract, “noon” and “supper,” at Mrs. Gates’ boardinghouse, the cheapest he could find, at sixteen dollars a month. At night, he would sometimes be very hungry. The Bobcat, the students’ hangout at the bottom of College Hill, charged ten cents for an egg sandwich and twenty cents for a ham-and-egg sandwich; years later, he would remember that “he’d always have the egg, and he’d always wish for the ham.” And there were the little expenses of college life—little but so large to him that, decades later, he could recall them down to the nickels and dimes: “I had only two meals—that was sixteen dollars—and my laundry cost seventy-five cents a week, about three dollars a month, and then you had all your books and stuff. …” Looming always ahead of him was the tuition bill, which came due every three months: “I just never did have it. … Every time it came tuition-paying time, I would [just about] get evicted—I would just about [have enough to] get home. It was seventeen dollars, and I just never did have the money to pay my tuition.” He had borrowed money, “and I couldn’t pay it back.” He had shot up to his full growth now, six-foot-three-and-a-half inches, and he was embarrassed to go to class with his ankles and wrists sticking out of his clothes. During the Spring or Summer of 1927, he wrote his friend Ben Crider, who had returned to California and a job in a cement factory, saying, as he later recalled it, “I just can’t make it, and I’ve got to drop out. I’m in debt forty-fifty dollars. And I got tuition time. And I want to come and get a job. Can you get me one?”

  He had also been writing his mother of his discouragement, and, unknown to him, Rebekah, realizing how close he was to the gruff older boy, had written to Ben, begging him to encourage Lyndon to continue in school. The two letters—from Lyndon and from Lyndon’s mother—were received at about the same time by the man who had once been half of a two-man pick-and-shovel team. He went to the factory superintendent and arranged for a job for Lyndon. But on his way back to his room to write his young friend, he stopped and thought for a while. And then he turned and walked in a different direction, to his bank, and asked the teller how much money he had in his account, and when the teller told him (the amount is recalled variously as $81 or $103 or $106), he said he’d like to withdraw it all. And when he wrote the letter, it said:

  Well, I can get you a job. Five dollars a day. I’ve talked to the superintendent, and he said I’ve got a job waiting for you. But I hope you won’t come. They’re breathing this dust that goes into your lungs, and a lot of them are getting lung disease from it. I hope you don’t have a future like that, because it’s Hell out here. I’m sending you all the money I got in the bank, hoping that you’ll stay in college.

  “Eighty-one dollars!,” Lyndon Johnson, reminiscing decades later, would recall. “I was the richest man on the campus! And I took that eighty-one dollars, and I paid all my debts, and I paid my next term’s bill.”

  THE RELIEF FROM DEPRESSION was only temporary—and not just because the eighty-one dollars soon ran out. The doubts and fears that tormented him manifested themselves in silence. “Normally, Lyndon was so outgoing, so bubbling, so loud,” Ethel Davis says. “But sometimes he would turn quiet, and stay quiet all day, and when Lyndon was quiet like that, you could see he was really down.” Sometimes these “down” periods began with a mail delivery that did not include an envelope addressed in Rebekah Johnson’s beautifully rounded script. He wrote his mother several times a week, and she wrote him almost every day—letters of effusive encouragement and endearment (“My dearest love”; “My splendid sweet son”); there had begun a torrent of mail from his mother that would not end until Rebekah’s death thirty years later. And now, in San Marcos, when she missed a day or two, the silence would come over him, and he would tell her how much he needed her letters. “Dearest Mother,” he wrote once, “Have all of my books arranged before me in preparation for a long evening of study. You can’t realize the difference in atmosphere after one of your sweet letters. I know of nothing so stimulating and inspiring to me as one of your encouraging, beautifully-written letters. … Mother, I love you so. Don’t neglect me. …” His relationship with his father had not improved—Lyndon’s letters were all addressed, “Dearest Mother”; not one bore a salutation to his father, and although Rebekah asked him at least to put in a line sending his love to Sam, he could not make his fingers write those words. Years later, he would recall that his father had said, “You don’t have enough sense to take a college education.” “Damn I wanted to show him!” he would recall, and when, during his second term at college, he received fairly good grades, “I took them home—they were on a little yellow card—and I threw them down in front of him and I said, ‘Does that look like I’ve got enough sense to take a college education?’” But his relationship with his mother, the mother who had never ceased encouraging him and believing in him, had been transformed during the week she spent with him in San Marcos getting him through his “proving” exams; at every opportunity, he would catch a ride home to Johnson City, and more than once, so deeply did he need her reassurances of his ability and of her love, he would, unable to get a ride, head out on the lonely San Marcos-Johnson City road on foot, hoping to hitchhike the thirty miles home; years later, in a letter to her son, Rebekah Johnson would recall “the long confidential talks we used to have when you would come in from San Marcos and sit on the bed and tell me all your hopes, disappointments and dreams.”

  But no one in San Marcos saw anything more than the occasional silences.

  Lyndon Johnson organized a Blanco County Club for students from his home county. He wasn’t elected president—or vice president, secretary or treasurer—but he was given a job that no one else wanted: writing articles on the club’s meetings for the campus newspaper, the College Star. And when he wrote the article on its first meeting, its lead was not about the election—or the officers’ names; the first senten
ce of the article read: “The students of Blanco County were called together by Lyndon Johnson Thursday afternoon.” And in his articles on later meetings, in the list of “students attending,” his name led all the rest. Soon his name came first on the Star’s own masthead. Sometime during the Spring of 1927, Ben Crider, back from California on vacation, visited Lyndon in San Marcos, and Lyndon took him to the College Star offices and said, “Ben, I would like to edit this.” The editor-in-chief, Crider recalls, “poked fun at Lyndon making a remark like that. Lyndon hadn’t had a haircut in probably two months and was just a kid.” But that Summer, back in California, Crider, returning to his room after a day in the cement factory, found an envelope from San Marcos. It contained a copy of the Star, and on top of the masthead, underlined in red so that Crider couldn’t miss it, was “Lyndon B. Johnson, Editor-in-Chief.” All the paper’s regular editors had left school for the summer. Johnson, who had had no newspaper experience, had said he had, and, aided by the fact that no one else wanted the job in the Summer, had been given it. He asked his mother to write the first editorial, which he printed as written. But soon he was making his first innovation on the Star: using larger headlines—blaring full-page streamers for even ordinary events—than any editor had used before.

  JOHNSON’S EDITORSHIP and later stints as editorial writer presented him with an opportunity to express admiration for college officials. He took full advantage of the opportunity—so full, in fact, that some students felt that his articles and editorials bore little resemblance to reality. Dean of Women Mary C. Brogdon, guardian of campus morals, for example, was the campus Gorgon, a stout, stern spinster with a smile as rigid as her corsets, who was merciless to the coed who tried to shorten her skirts to the flapper length popular in the East or to the male student who kept one of her girls out five minutes past the 10:30 p.m. curfew; she had been known to insist on the expulsion of a boy who had failed to obtain her written permission before taking a coed for a drive in his new automobile. But in an article on a meeting of the college literary society, Johnson wrote: “After the meeting, the group had the best time of all, when Miss Brogdon invited the members down to the Cafeteria, where she had refreshments—lemonade and cakes—waiting for them. The refreshments idea of Miss Brogdon’s proved to be the best part of the whole evening and the boys think she is one of the best sports on the Hill.” Dean of Faculty Alfred H. Nolle was described by the new editor in a stream of adjectives: “alert, experienced, specially trained, just, capable, interested … strong and vital.” And when Johnson turned his pen to the most important college official, his enthusiasm soared still higher, not only in articles (the pedantic dullness of Evans’ speeches was a source of amusement to most students, but this student, reporting on an Evans speech, wrote that it was “very interesting … he made his talk bristle with interesting facts”) but in an editorial which he made sure no one could miss by placing it on the front page:

  Great as an educator and as an executive, Dr. Evans is greatest as a man. Here we find a man who cherishes a fellowship with the humanities of life. He plans for deeds that live, leaving indelible impress on the lives of the youth of the college. With depth of human sympathy rarely surpassed, unfailing cheerfulness, geniality, kind firmness and friendly interest in the youth of the state, Dr. Evans has exerted a great influence for good upon the students of S.W.T.S.T.C. He finds great happiness in serving others.

  Previously, the Star had displayed a penchant for sly digs at administration and faculty members, to the point where strict censorship by Nolle and the Dean of Students, H. E. Speck, had been instituted. (“Not with Lyndon, though,” Nolle says. “Lyndon had exceptionally good judgment of what was appropriate, and there was no need to censor, to edit, any of Lyndon Johnson’s writing.”) Now some of the students remarked at the change, not favorably. The college yearbook, the Pedagog, mentioned “Lyndon Johnson, editorial writer, whose outbursts in that line gained wide comment.”

  Comment might have been wider still had the students known about Johnson’s private outbursts—notes placed in the most strategic location possible for a student concerned about his grades: at the end of his examination papers. These notes were targeted for maximum impact on the individual at whom they were aimed. Mrs. V. S. Netterville, for example, was not only an English professor but a devout Baptist. Johnson had previously displayed no interest in the Baptist or any other religion, but that was apparently not the tenor of his note to Professor Netterville; she was so moved by it that she wrote him a letter in reply:

  May I thank you for the note you wrote me at the close of your examination. To have led you through your study of Robert Browning in such a way as to have strengthened your faith is the best reward I could ask for the labor and time I have given the course. …

  May God continue to bless you and keep you always a firm believer.

  Nor did Johnson confine his compliments to the written word. Dropping in to chat with Ethel Davis, the forty-year-old assistant registrar, he would tell her how much he loved and respected his mother. Then he would tell Miss Davis that she reminded him of his mother. Or he would ask her advice on some matter; when she replied, he would tell her, she recalls, that “what I said was like what his mother had said. … I was sort of flattered.” When dealing with members of the administration and faculty in person, in fact, Johnson displayed an admiration so profound that fellow students say that if they described it fully, “no one would believe it.” If, for example, a professor held an informal bull session on the “quadrangle” and Johnson was attending, he could be found sitting at the professor’s feet. “Yes, literally sitting at his feet,” a classmate says: if the professor was sitting on a bench, students might be standing around him, or sitting next to him, but one student, Lyndon Johnson, would often be sitting on the ground, his face turned up to the teacher, an expression of the deepest interest and respect on his face. “He would just drink up what they were saying, sit at their knees and drink it up, and they would pour out their hearts to him.”

  Many students doubted the sincerity behind the compliments and the admiration, because, they noticed, no matter what the professor was saying, Johnson would never disagree. “That was what got me,” says Joe Berry, who, having succeeded Ardis Hopper as president of the Student Council, was often involved in quadrangle discussions about campus issues. “He never took a strong position—you never knew where Lyndon stood.” Says another student leader, Mylton Kennedy: “He would never disagree with anything a faculty member would propose. Having enough knowledge [of how the professor felt], he would make a statement he knew the faculty member would agree with.” Says a third, Vernon Whiteside: “I have heard Lyndon agree enthusiastically with one point of view that a professor was saying, and the very next day, if another professor was giving the opposite point of view, I have heard Lyndon agreeing with that point of view—just as enthusiastically.”

  As for Lyndon’s front-page panegyric on Dr. Evans’ “unfailing cheerfulness” and “geniality,” Evans’ secretary, Tom Nichols, had reservations about the editorial’s sincerity. The president would frequently unleash a fearsome temper on subordinates, and Johnson could tell when a storm was brewing. At first sign of worsening weather, he would find a hasty excuse to get away, and he wouldn’t come back until he had ascertained that Evans had left—usually by sticking his head in the front door of the outer office and whispering to Nichols: “Has he gone yet?”

  THE REACTION OF the targets of this barrage of compliments is documentation of the adage that where flattery is concerned, no excess is possible. Miss Brogdon, so inflexible about her curfew rules, relaxed them for Lyndon Johnson. The professor at whose feet Johnson sat most often was H. M. Greene, a history professor and debate coach; Johnson may have received a D in the debate course taught by another professor, but he made Greene’s debating team, much to the surprise of students who, like one member of the team, considered him “very forceful, but really not a good speaker at all.”

 
; The key to Johnson’s college career—the key, in fact, to whether he would be able to earn enough money so he could have a college career—was Prexy Evans. The public flattery was nothing to the private flattery (witnessed only by Tom Nichols) that went on in the president’s office, and flattery—a striking humbleness, deference, obsequiousness—was not the only weapon employed; Nichols, a non-competitive man, liked Johnson (Nichols was “red of face, a real country boy whom Lyndon could easily get around,” another professor says), but he couldn’t resist remarking on the pains the student took not only to carry out Evans’ assignments diligently, but to dramatize his diligence. Equipping himself with a large note pad, he listed his assignments on it and, when reporting back to Evans, held it up where Evans could not fail to see it. “I have seen him standing at the president’s elbow holding a written list of the items to which he had devoted himself, calling these off and checking with his pencil as the signal that each had been completed,” Nichols says. He began to make his own assignments—looking “eagerly” for them, Nichols says, “to make the favorable impression which he was determined to create”—and would include these on the list, telling Evans of each chore, and then placing next to it a big, bold checkmark.