The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  And the impression he wanted to make was the impression he made: Evans mentioned Johnson’s efficiency several times in his short talks at the weekly “general assembly” in Old Main’s second-floor auditorium. He began to listen to Johnson’s suggestions on student job assignments; “He got next to Prexy and … he got me promoted to ‘inspector of buildings’ at twenty-five dollars a month,” his roommate Boody Johnson says. Prexy even fell in with a scheme to help Lyndon pay his tuition. “About that time,” Lyndon Johnson would recall, “I couldn’t get tuition from any other source.” He also needed money for food. He asked Evans to allow him and his roommate, who were already living rent-free above his garage, to earn money by painting the garage. Evans not only agreed, but allowed them wages of forty cents per hour—“That was a craftsman’s wages,” Johnson would recall; other students got twenty cents per hour for similar work. And when one painting did not give Johnson enough money to stay in school, Evans told him to paint the garage again—and again. According to some students, the garage was painted four times that term. Once or twice, Evans even took Johnson with him to Austin.

  Evans’ references to Johnson in his assembly talks created an impression on campus that the student was close to the president. And the student fostered that impression. When asked where he lived, he replied, “At the president’s house.” He was only the president’s office boy, and to dramatize the difference in status between him and Nichols, his desk had been placed outside the railing in the president’s waiting room, not inside it like Nichols’. But Johnson made the position of his desk work for him, jumping up and greeting everyone who came into the office, and doing so in such an expansive manner that, Nichols says, “Some of them probably thought he was running the place. Smooth as silk.” Decades later, a woman student would remember how Johnson “opened a swinging gate to admit me to President Evans’ office for an interview which led to my [first job].” Leaving the office to deliver messages from the president, he made a production out of it. A pencil would be tucked behind an ear, a huge sheaf of papers would be clutched in one hand, and he would always be in a hurry, bursting out of the office and rushing down the halls of Old Main or along the dirt paths to another building with a long, gangling stride, his arms swinging vigorously if awkwardly out from his sides, too busy to stop and talk—a busy man, on the president’s work. No one knew that Johnson’s sole responsibility on his occasional trips to Austin with Evans was to report to Evans on what one legislative committee was doing, if the president was tied up before another committee; Johnson talked at every opportunity about how “Prexy and I” worked together in Austin to obtain funds for the college. At every opportunity, moreover, he would try to be seen in public with Evans, and in public he acted so differently from the way he did in private that Nichols was astounded by the contrast with the humble, obsequious Lyndon of the office. Introducing the president to his friends, chatting and laughing ostentatiously with him—even, once, patting him on the back (the campus buzzed about that for days)—he created an impression of familiarity. Many faculty members believed he had a far more important job than was actually the case. And Johnson never took advantage of this belief, never listened to faculty members with less deference than before. He still sat “at their knees” and drank in everything they had to say, and, Whiteside says, “Boy, you could see they loved it.”

  His popularity with the faculty did not, however, carry over to the students.

  Mylton Kennedy, who echoes Whiteside’s vivid description of Johnson sitting at his instructors’ knees and drinking in avidly all they had to say, pauses and finally says: “Words won’t come to describe how Lyndon acted toward the faculty—how kowtowing he was, how suck-assing he was, how brown-nosing he was.” And if students disliked Lyndon Johnson because of his attitude toward the faculty, they disliked him even more because of his attitude toward them. If he was obsequious to those above him, he was overbearing to those who were not.

  He had come to San Marcos with the same tendency to “talk big” that he had displayed in Johnson City, and if, when he first arrived at college, he had had little to talk big about, he made maximum use of what he did have. He would introduce himself as “Lyndon Johnson from Johnson City,” leaving the impression that he was a member of the town’s founding family. If he was asked directly whether he was, he would confirm that impression, saying that Johnson City had been founded by his grandfather, a statement that was, of course, not true. One of the first editorials he wrote for the Star made a point of mentioning “my heritage of Southern blood.” (In a later editorial, he made a point of expressing admiration for Jefferson Davis.)

  Now he had more to talk big about—and he talked bigger. And he wouldn’t let anyone else talk. The young man so eager to sit and listen to the faculty seemed determined that everyone else was going to sit and listen to him. Fellow students who ate at Mrs. Gates’ boardinghouse remember two things about Lyndon Johnson most vividly: how he grabbed for food and gulped it down and grabbed for more, trying always to get more than his share—“He had those long arms, and he would reach out with that fork and get the last biscuit on the plate, even if it was on the other end of the table, and if there was one pork chop that was bigger than the others, no one was going to get it but Lyndon Johnson,” says one of those students—and how he also grabbed more than his share of the conversation. Says another of Mrs. Gates’ boarders, Horace Richards: “He was a very good talker. He would tell these stories about his father, and about Jim Ferguson, and about all the things that had happened in Austin. And he was a great imitator. He would imitate these Germans from around Fredericksburg with their accents, and he was very entertaining sometimes, particularly to some of these country boys who really didn’t talk very much. But if someone else tried to talk—well, he just wouldn’t let them. He’d just interrupt you—my God, his voice would just ride over you until you stopped. He monopolized the conversation from the time he came in to the time he left. I can still see him reaching and talking, reaching and talking.”

  The dislike of Lyndon Johnson had a particularly sharp edge, moreover, because of a certain lack of accuracy in his conversation. The students didn’t know of all the inaccuracies. He told the men at the table that he had an IQ of 145, and they never found out that that was not the case.* He told them he had high marks—years later, most of them would still be under the impression that he was, in the words of one, “a brilliant student, absolutely brilliant—straight A’s”—which also wasn’t the case.† He had made the college debating squad—not the first team, as he would ever after maintain, but one of three alternating teams—and shortly after he arrived at San Marcos, it was announced that debaters would be awarded school letters as were athletes. At Mrs. Gates’ table, Lyndon let it be known that he had persuaded Dr. Evans to make this decision—his auditors, who did not know that the decision had actually been made before he arrived in San Marcos, were greatly impressed. If students didn’t know about these inaccuracies, however, they knew about many others. Johnson’s debating partner was Elmer Graham, an older student, back in college after teaching four years to make enough money to continue. Graham did most of the preparation for the team—“I was studying to be a minister, and I had been preaching at country churches, so I was used to organizing material”—and most of the debating, too; he would generally lead off with the primary argument, and then, after Lyndon had given the first rebuttal, Graham would give the final rebuttal. But he didn’t mind that, and admired Lyndon’s instinct for the jugular; “Lyndon’s debating was more clever than profound. The one thing I can honestly say about Lyndon is that he had a knack of finding a weak point in the other team’s argument, and coming back at it pretty good.” He was fond of Lyndon—until he started hearing the reports of the debates with which his partner was regaling diners at Mrs. Gates’. “It was a little bit irritating,” Reverend Graham recalls. “I would hear that he had said all these things that were so devastating. Well, he hadn’t said them at all
. Either I had said them, or no one had said them. Lyndon liked Lyndon, no doubt about that. He bragged quite a bit about the debating.”

  The exaggerations in Johnson’s political stories were also sometimes revealed; as a result, some of Mrs. Gates’ boarders agreed with one who said: “I just didn’t believe that he was as much on the inside of big decisions in Austin as he claimed.” They were ready to laugh when Whiteside, one day, related what had been said when he pressed Lyndon about his father, whom “he was continually depicting as a member of the state’s highest political councils.”

  “‘What does your father do?’

  “‘Well, uh, he works for Jim Ferguson.’

  “‘Oh, what’s he do?’

  “‘Well, uh, he’s the bus inspector.’”

  He talked a lot about girls, too. His brother, Sam Houston Johnson, recalls that more than once, when he visited his brother at San Marcos, Lyndon, coming back into the room naked after a shower, would take his penis in his hand, and say: “Well, I’ve gotta take oP Jumbo here and give him some exercise. I wonder who I’ll fuck tonight.”

  He devoted to his appearance an amount of time—and, considering his financial situation, money—inordinate even for a college man. He was continually experimenting with new styles for his black, wavy hair, which he considered his most attractive feature: parting it in the middle or on the side, slicking it flat with Sta-comb or working—endlessly, it seemed to his roommates—to get it pompadoured just right. Despite the expense, he was frequently at the barbershop for forty-cent haircuts and twenty-five-cent shaves (“He was very hard to shave,” says the barber. “He had that very tender white skin …”). Worried that his neck was too long and thin, he would practice scrunching it down between his shoulders—practice endlessly, a roommate recalls. Before a date, he would spend quite a long time dressing. “He’d stand in front of the mirror and comb his hair, and dress, and get everything just right when he was going out,” Boody says. Then he would scrunch down his neck, and head out for the evening’s encounter.

  These preparations, combined with his continual, vivid boasting about his sexual successes, gave him a reputation as a ladies’ man—except among those students who were ladies’ men. On a campus where women outnumbered men three to one, it was very easy for most men to get a date, but among the social clique on campus, it was known that getting one was not always easy for Lyndon Johnson. Miss Brogdon would as a matter of course grant him privileges—an extended curfew, permission to drive to Austin—she only grudgingly granted to other students, so couples wanted to double-date with him, but they often had difficulty finding a fourth. His pretty cousin Margaret, who was dating Boody, got him a blind date with her roommate, and, with Boody borrowing a car, the four got to go to a movie in New Braunfels, a considerable treat. Margaret and Boody were looking forward to other trips, but the roommate refused to go out with Lyndon again. His unpopularity with women students would not have aroused particular comment on campus, had it not been for the zealousness with which he tried to retouch reality. “I mean, we all boasted and bragged about girls,” says one man. “But Lyndon’s boasting and bragging were to an extent that was ridiculous. Nobody believed him.”

  To some of his fellow students, in fact, it began to seem unwise to believe Lyndon Johnson on any subject. In their opinion, he seemed almost unable to tell unvarnished truth about even the most innocuous subject. Some of them took to asking him questions just so they could laugh at his answers. “Once I was sitting next to him in class, and I saw him wearing a new tie and socks,” Horace Richards recalls. “I knew where he had bought them, but I asked him where he had bought them. He said, ‘I got them over at Scarborough’s in Austin. I paid a dollar for the socks and a dollar for the tie.’ Scarborough’s was the fanciest store in Austin, and a dollar was a whole lot of money in those days. I said, ‘Lyndon, you’re just lying. You were never in Scarborough’s yesterday. Besides, I saw them in Woolworth’s window yesterday. The socks were ten cents and the tie was twenty cents.’ But Lyndon just had to lie and say he was wearing a dollar tie. It just seemed like he had to lie about everything.” He had made a great point of describing himself as a tough man in a fistfight—something believable, despite his awkwardness, because of his size. During a poker game, however, he began arguing with another student, and wouldn’t stop shouting at him. The other boy jumped up and lunged at him. Johnson, without a single gesture of resistance, immediately fell back on a bed and, as his foe approached, began kicking his feet in the air with a frantic, windmilling motion. The other poker players all remember him lying there and kicking—“like a girl,” Horace Richards says—and they remember him shouting: “If you hit me, I’ll kick you! If you hit me, I’ll kick you!” The other men were astonished. Says Whiteside, one of those present: “He was a coward. You know, every kid in the State of Texas had fights then, but he wouldn’t fight. He was an absolute physical coward. And the thing about it was that he had made such a big thing about what a great fighter he was.”

  But the aspect of Lyndon Johnson’s character most remarkable to other students was his lack of embarrassment when caught out in an exaggeration or an outright falsehood. “You could catch him in a lie about something, and it was like he didn’t care,” Richards says. “The next day he’d be back lying about the same thing again.” Says Clayton Stribling: “He never seemed to resent [being found out]. He just didn’t care. He wouldn’t get mad. He’d be back the next day talking the same as ever.”

  THE BIGGEST MEN on campus were the athletes. They had formed a “secret” organization called the Black Stars, which met in the big meadow on Barney Knispel’s farm for drinking parties at which these burly farm boys consumed beer by the kegful, frequently vomiting it out on the grass, and held “initiation ceremonies,” a highlight of which was convincing a blindfolded initiate that he was kissing a bull’s penis, which was actually the bent elbow of the group’s president, who was called the “Jupiter.” The Black Stars won most of the class offices. They hung around together at the Bobcat, the little shack at the bottom of College Hill run by the Coers brothers, former football stars themselves, and partied together—with the college’s prettiest girls. “Everyone wanted to be part of that crowd,” recalls Ella So Relle. “That was the ‘in’ crowd.”

  Lyndon Johnson wanted very badly to be part of that crowd, and his roommate wanted him to be.

  Alfred T. Johnson had been born and reared on a lonely ranch in the empty wastes of West Texas, and had thought he was doomed to that life—until one day, at tiny Lytle High School, someone put a football in his hands. One of the most famous players in Texas high school football history had been a great halfback named Boody Johnson, and on that day at Lytle, as the shy, rangy ranch boy began to run with the ball, someone yelled in awe, “Look at ol’ Boody Johnson go!” Word of his ability spread, and one day a coach from Southwest Texas State Teachers College showed up and offered him the San Marcos version of a scholarship—a job sweeping out campus buildings—and he took it; “My dad worked hard all his life, and I had worked hard all my life,” he would say. “If I could get me an education, I could let my brain work for me instead of my hands.” The Southwest Texas Bobcats were a tough team (“After bulldogging steers all our lives, you think it was tough tackling a guy?” Clayton Stribling asks), but during practice scrimmages they had as little success tackling Boody as high school teams had had; a talented athlete—he was a star baseball and basketball as well as football player—he was elected captain. In an age in which, even at faraway San Marcos, football players were lionized, he was the campus hero; under his picture in the Pedagog is the caption: “The stalwart Boody Johnson.”

  But it is not the remembrance of his athletic ability that—fifty years later—makes San Marcos students smile when they remember the stalwart Boody Johnson. “He was the fatherly type,” a football player says. “If things were going bad in a game, he’d call a time-out, and gather the team around, and say, ‘Now, look, fellows,
we’re here to play football,’ and settle everybody down.” He didn’t settle down only football players. “You always felt you could go to him with your problems,” says one woman. “He was a very kind person. Gruff and tough, but very kind. He was just like a father to everybody.” His unselfishness was legendary, and not just on the football field (where, because the other halfback, Lyons McCall, a good runner, was a poor blocker, Boody volunteered to do most of the blocking while McCall carried the ball—if the team was behind in the last minutes of a game, however, the players would growl: “Give it to Boody”). “Boody was the kind of guy who, if you woke him up in the middle of the night and told him your car had broken down, would get out of bed and walk five miles to help you—nothing was too much trouble for him,” Vernon Whiteside says. And he was always so soft-spoken and slow-talking and friendly; no campus activity was complete unless Boody was part of it: he played the lead in romantic comedies and sang the solo in “Sweet Adeline” with the campus barbershop quartet. “Old Boody,” Ella So Relle would say, fifty years later, smiling and crying a little at the same time. “Gruff old Boody. A sweeter, calmer human being I never met.” And, she adds, “a more complete contrast with Lyndon could not be found. You would see them walking around campus together—Lyndon talking, talking, talking, swinging those arms, and Boody so calm and sweet. You just could not imagine how two boys so different could be friends.”

  But friends they were—so close that the campus, seeing them so often together, called them “Johnson and Johnson.” Slow-talking Boody admired Lyndon’s glibness. “He had a wonderful way about him,” he recalls. “Once Lyndon and myself were sitting there on the campus, after Lyndon had gotten himself a pipe, and Dean Speck came by, and he said: ‘Lyndon, you know we don’t allow any smoking on campus.’ ‘I’m not smoking, Dean Speck.’ ‘Well, Lyndon, you’ve got your pipe in your mouth.’ ‘Yes, Dean Speck, and I’ve got my shoes on my feet, but I’m not walking.’ I nearly died laughing, and Dean Speck did, too, and he said something like, ‘Good boy,’ and went on walking. Well, I could never have thought of saying something like that.” Shy Boody admired Lyndon’s effusiveness. “He was so warm and affectionate,” he says. “The first time I brought him home, he grabbed my mother and hugged and kissed her, and my sisters—my father said, ‘That boy you brought down here—I thought he was going to kiss me!” And fatherly Boody was touched by something he saw in the skinny boy three years younger than himself. Before dates, he would lend Lyndon money—money he had earned in his campus jobs—and would tie his bow tie. And then, when Lyndon was ready to leave, he would dance around Boody, jabbing out at him with his fists—“he’d make like he was going to fight, punch you and all,” Boody says, still smiling at the memory. Just as the fatherly older boy who had been Lyndon Johnson’s best friend in Johnson City, Ben Crider, had helped him, so Boody tried to help him. He asked the Black Stars to make Lyndon a member.