The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  Cotulla, sixty miles above the Mexican border (ninety below San Antonio), was more a Mexican than an American town. Less than a quarter of its 3,000 inhabitants were “Anglos” and thus entitled to live on the west side of the Missouri-Pacific Railroad tracks; the rest, who worked at slave wages on the area’s ranches or on the farms that huddled close to the Nueces River or to deep artesian wells, lived on the east, or “wrong,” side of the tracks.

  Lyndon Johnson was going to teach on the wrong side. The “Mexican school” (its real name was the “Welhausen School,” after the county judge), was a handsome, long, low, red brick building that had been completed just two years before, but the houses among which it was located were hovels, street after street of tiny, unpainted, tin-roofed, crumbling shanties without even running water. Some, in which families were still living, were falling down, corners of their walls having been eaten by the hordes of huge termites which swarmed everywhere in Cotulla. On the porches of some of these houses, men sat on rusting metal chairs and stared vacantly straight ahead of them. In front of the school was a debris-littered vacant lot; a group of men were squatting in it; others were sitting on the steps of the school. When he saw the area in which he was to teach, Lyndon Johnson must have realized quickly why, with a glut of teachers in Texas, he, still in college, had not only been offered a job, but one with an unusually high salary.

  The Anglo side of Cotulla was better only by comparison. These people were even poorer than the people of the Hill Country. Their tiny, cramped houses sat on stilts three or four feet high to protect them from the termites. The only accommodation Johnson could find was a room—or rather half a room; he would have to share it with another, older boarder—in a small, rather shabby house on stilts next to the railroad tracks on which long trains carrying bawling cattle up from Laredo passed endlessly each night. Near the house in which he boarded, the land sloped up a bit from the tracks. Sometimes, he would walk to the top of this small rise and stand there looking out over the barren land stretching away in all directions. Slanting away to the north, he could see a lighter-colored scar in the brush that was the road leading back to San Antonio. But the road faded in the empty distance.

  DONAHO HAD BEEN UNABLE to lure anyone else from outside Cotulla to teach at the “Mexican school”; the five other teachers were Cotulla housewives, and they treated the job with the contempt they felt it deserved, putting in the minimum time necessary, arriving just as classes started and leaving as soon as they ended. Lyndon Johnson arrived early and stayed late—and he was a teacher like Cotulla had never seen.

  When he went into the “playground” for recess on his first day (he had already been informed that there was no lunch hour at the Welhausen School; these pupils had no lunch), he found a dirt lot bare of both equipment and other teachers; his colleagues relaxed in the teachers’ lounge during recess periods. Donaho, in his joy at seeing a male teacher for Welhausen arrive in Cotulla, had appointed Johnson principal on sight, and the new principal’s first order was that all teachers spend recess supervising games. He persuaded the school board to provide volleyballs and a volleyball net, soft-balls and bats. Then he arranged for activities with other schools—baseball games and track meets like those the white kids had. The school board wouldn’t pay for buses to transport his kids to the meets, but a few—a very few—Mexican families had cars. Climbing the rickety porches of hovels to call on families which had never before been visited by an Anglo, he persuaded men to whom every day’s work was precious to give up the days necessary to take the children to the track meets.

  No teacher had ever really cared if the Mexicans learned or not. This teacher cared. No laughing or joking was allowed in class. “He spanked disorderly boys and tongue-lashed the girls,” one parent recalls. Their greatest handicap, he felt, was their lack of familiarity with English, and he was very strict in making them learn it. He instituted a rule that only English could be spoken on school property; if a student forgot and greeted him with a cheery “Buenos dias” when passing him in the hall, the result was a spanking or tongue-lashing. The playground was directly outside his classroom; hearing Spanish words through its windows, he would rush outside and turn the offending boy over his knee or angrily berate the offending girl. He insisted that students not only speak English, but speak it in front of audiences—he instituted schoolwide assemblies at which pupils performed in skits—and even debate in it, first in assembly, then against other schools. Cotulla’s Mexican students had never had extracurricular activities; within weeks, the new teacher had arranged interscholastic debating contests, declamation contests, even spelling bees. And he didn’t want students reciting speeches or poems by rote; he explained to his students, one of them remembers, that “as soon as we understood what the poem meant, we would be able to speak it correctly,” and “He would coach us for hours on how to speak a piece such as ‘Oh Captain! My Captain!’”

  He displayed scant respect for their own culture. Knowing little Spanish when he arrived in Cotulla, he did not bother to learn very much. His “highly dramatic” lectures on Texas history indicated that he had apparently forgotten “that his swarthy charges were related by blood to those on the losing side” (he depicted Santa Anna, a hero to Mexicans, as a treacherous and cold-blooded murderer). But he was tireless in teaching them his culture. “If we hadn’t done our homework, we had to stay after school that day,” another student says—and if they were not allowed to leave until the assignment was done, their teacher stayed with them. Teaching them—and telling them that if they learned, success would surely be theirs. Says another of his students, Daniel Garcia: “He used to tell us this country was so free that anyone could become President who was willing to work hard enough.” Telling them with an absolute assurance, hammering in the theme over and over, inspiring them with it. He would often begin class with a story about a baby. “The little baby in the cradle,” recalls Juan Ortiz. “He would tell us that one day we might say the baby would be a teacher. Maybe the next day we’d say the baby would be a doctor. And one day we might say the baby—any baby—might grow up to be the President of the United States.”

  Demanding though he was, moreover, he was demanding in a way that made his students like him. “He put us to work,” says Manuel Sanchez. “But he was the kind of teacher you wanted to work for. You felt an obligation to him and to yourself to do your work.” The children he spanked “still liked him.” He displayed toward these children feelings he had never displayed before. Their attendance at school was not regular, and if Johnson sometimes seemed to regard their absences as personal insults to him, he was also to recall lying in his room before daylight and hearing motors and knowing that trucks were “hauling the kids off … to a beet patch or a cotton patch in the middle of the school year, and give them only two or three months schooling.” In December, he took several of his older students down to the Nueces and cut Christmas trees so the classrooms could be decorated. Although he had never been a teacher before, he displayed as much confidence and self-assurance in assuming command over the other teachers as he did in directing his students, and while one bitterly resented him, the others felt as did Mrs. Elizabeth Johnson, who says: “He just moved right in and took over. … We were all crazy about him.” And he drove himself as hard as he drove the students and other teachers. “He didn’t give himself what we call spare time,” Elizabeth Johnson recalls. For a young man, she says, he was a remarkable disciplinarian—the discipline she is talking about, she makes clear, is self-discipline. He became friendly with a calm, quiet Mexican who had been a farm laborer but had become janitor at the school, Thomas Coronado. He told Coronado that he, too, should learn English, and with his own money bought Coronado a book to learn it from. He always arrived at school before anyone else did, and left later, and therefore had time to tutor Coronado. “After I had learned the letters, I would spell a word in English. Johnson would then pronounce it and I would repeat.” Friendly though he was with the janitor, h
owever, “He made it very clear to me that he wanted the school building to be clean at all times. … He seemed to have a passion to see that everything was done that should be done—and that it was done right.”

  IN CALIFORNIA, Lyndon Johnson had displayed the same “passion.” Seeing a chance in his law “studies” there to escape the dreaded life of physical labor, the chance, moreover, to be “somebody,” to have the respect he wanted so desperately, he had grabbed at that chance with the furious energy of someone fleeing a terrible trap. In Cotulla, he was aware that his job represented another chance, a very important one—not because he wanted to remain in Cotulla, but because teaching jobs were very scarce in Texas, and, no matter where he tried to get one, the recommendation from Cotulla would be crucial. And he threw himself into the job, tried to do the best work possible, to be so good a teacher that his excellence could not but be acknowledged. In Cotulla, unlike California, however, he received an immediate compensation—in the coin he most desired. He had sat behind Tom Martin’s desk under false pretenses; here his classroom desk was his legitimately; he had been installed behind it—placed in a dominant position—by outside authority. Of all the students he could have had, moreover, with these students, the impoverished, almost illiterate Mexicans of Cotulla, there was the least possible chance that his authority would be challenged even by children’s normal pranks. Because he was a teacher—a principal, in fact; because his students were Mexicans accustomed to taking orders from and acting subservient to Anglos; because they could barely speak the language in which he was teaching them—there was no question that in his relationship with them he was the superior, the “somebody.” The thirty-two students in his class were the first people he had ever dealt with of whose respect he could be certain unless he lost it through his own efforts. And he acted differently with them than he had with anyone else—in the assurance that was a feature of his teaching style. And he received in return for his energy and his interest and his beneficence a rich measure of the gratitude and respect he had always craved. In his classroom in the Welhausen School, Lyndon Johnson was, for the first time, the somebody he had always wanted to be. In that classroom, people did what they would never do in Johnson City, where he would always be “a Johnson.” They looked up to him. The parents of the children were almost tearfully grateful, and as for the children themselves, “This may sound strange, but a lot of us felt he was too good for us,” Danny Garcia says. “We wanted to take advantage of his being here. It was like a blessing from the clear sky.” Years later, Lyndon Johnson would say: “I still see the faces of the children who sat in my class. … I still see their excited eyes speaking friendship.”

  ONLY OCCASIONALLY were there small signs that what lay behind the passion and the self-discipline might be something other than self-assurance.

  Johnson would march into his classroom in the morning, his stride long, his arms swinging vigorously—and he wanted to march in to music. To a popular vaudeville tune of the day, he composed new words:

  How do you do, Mr. Johnson,

  How do you do?

  How do you do, Mr. Johnson,

  How are you?

  We’ll do it if we can,

  We’ll stand by you to a man,

  How do you do, Mr. Johnson,

  How are you?

  He was quite insistent that every student learn the words, and sing—and sing loud. At first, some of the boys thought he was joking, but if he saw someone not singing, he would get very angry.

  Once, moreover, while Johnson was out of the room, Danny Garcia went to the front of the classroom and began imitating the teacher—a performance easy to make funny because of Johnson’s awkward walk. Suddenly the class stopped laughing, and when Garcia turned around, there was the teacher in the doorway. Grabbing the boy by the hand, Johnson took him into an empty room. “I thought I was going to get a lecture,” Garcia recalls, but instead, “He turned me over his knee and whacked me a dozen times,” and as Garcia felt the force of the blows, he realized that Johnson was angrier than he had ever seen him. And when he re-entered the now hushed classroom, Johnson said something that the students considered quite striking. As Amanda Garcia recalls it, he asked them how they could make fun of him: “He told us we were looking at the future President of the United States.”

  An unusual remark for someone so sure of himself. With these students—more than with any other group he had encountered—Lyndon Johnson should have been confident of respect, and of the “friendship” he himself said he saw in their eyes. Yet at the slightest sign—even a false sign: a typical schoolboy imitation, someone not singing his song—that that respect and affection might be less than absolute, he reacted so strongly. Was it possible that nothing could convince him that he had respect?

  That nothing could make him, deep inside himself, feel secure?

  IN THE EVENINGS, there was little to do in Cotulla, and had there been any entertainment available, Lyndon Johnson would have had difficulty paying for it. Out of his monthly salary check, he was paying off his car, and the $75 bank loan, and the other, smaller, debts he had left behind in San Marcos. “He was broke from payday to payday, always borrowing a dollar here and a dollar there,” says his landlady, Mrs. Sarah Tinsley Marshall. But he was very gay—“as exuberant,” a Cotulla acquaintance says, “as a young boy. He was a happy-go-lucky sort of a fellow.”

  Johnson made a friend of Mrs. Marshall. “Lyndon confided in me a lot,” she says. “Lyndon looked on me sort of as a second mother.” His attitude toward illness surprised her: “If he got just a little sick, it scared him half to death,” she says. But she was happy to take care of him; whenever he caught cold, she would boil water in a dishpan, and put mustard in it, and have him soak his feet. Her boarder’s attitude toward food would have been familiar to Hugo Klein, the little boy at the Junction School whose pie Lyndon ate, or to Lyndon’s fellow diners at Mrs. Gates’ boardinghouse in San Marcos. “Lyndon just took everything for granted in my house,” Mrs. Marshall recalls. “One day I baked a coconut cake. He slipped into the kitchen and started eating it. He was down to one piece when I came in. He looked up and said, ‘Miz Sarah, if you give me this piece, I’ll buy you another cake.’” But Mrs. Marshall didn’t mind. “I didn’t care, and he knew I wouldn’t care. He just did about like a son would do in his own home.” With another boarder, Marthabelle Whitten, a plump waitress who worked in Cotulla’s café, he would joke and twist her arm, trying to force her to say “Calf-rope”—Cotulla slang for “I give up.” And then he would ask her to press a shirt or tie—“He was always in a hurry; he would run in and say, ‘Marty, won’t you please press this tie for me?’”—and Miss Whitten always would, and would be happy to do so. Sometimes, he would play bridge with the older man who was his roommate, and two sisters, and then “He was always the life of the party.”

  Only occasionally, he would get very quiet, and stay quiet, sometimes for days. People would see him wandering up the rise in back of town, a tall, skinny, awkward figure staring into those endless, empty distances. Most times, he was “light-hearted like most twenty-year-olds,” Mrs. Marshall says. But “Sometimes, Lyndon could be as serious as an old man.”

  Mrs. Marshall didn’t know what was behind the sudden quietnesses. Only his mother, to whom he wrote almost daily during his months down in South Texas, knew—his mother and Boody. Boody had graduated while Lyndon was in Cotulla, but was planning to return to San Marcos for more courses in the Summer of 1929, when Lyndon would be back in college. He had agreed to room with Lyndon then, and Lyndon wrote again and again reminding him of this arrangement, making sure his friend would be there when he got back. “He was very lonely down there in Cotulla,” Boody says. “Very lonely.” Perhaps the best indication of how Lyndon Johnson felt about the nine months—September, 1928, through May, 1929—that he spent in Cotulla comes from his wife, who saw it mostly through his eyes when, years later, he told her about the experience. “That was a little dried-up tow
n,” Lady Bird Johnson says. “It was just a dying little town.” And then—in words that startled an interviewer who, during long hours of previous conversation with Mrs. Johnson, had become convinced that nothing, no provocation, no matter how strong, would draw from her diplomatic lips so much as a single word even faintly derogatory about anyone or anything—she says: “That was one of the crummiest little towns in Texas.”

  HIS ONLY GOOD TIMES came when he drove over to see Carol Davis, who was teaching in Pearsall, another little South Texas town.

  Carol was apparently not the only member of the couple who was experiencing qualms about the relationship. Sarah Marshall, in whom Johnson was confiding, recalls that “He was beginning to feel they didn’t have … much in common.” She remembers her young boarder saying: “Miz Sarah, this girl loves opera. But I’d rather sit down on an old log with a farmer and talk.” But his qualms didn’t prevent him from courting her determinedly, almost frantically, telephoning her, writing her, taking her to see touring opera companies in San Antonio, and other musical events, or movies, or just driving the thirty-three miles to Pearsall to see her almost every evening she said she was free.