The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  Mortified though they were at the injustice of the new rule (far from not needing money, Puis needed it badly; he had been counting on the Pedagog salary to pay his tuition; without it, he would have to drop out of college), they had no inkling at first that it had been devised solely to make them ineligible—and they had no inkling that Lyndon Johnson had done the devising. Kyle was especially shocked to learn the truth. He and Johnson were very different young men—the slender, bespectacled, studious Kyle was a voracious reader, a brilliant student who received in reality the A’s that Johnson only said he received, a brilliant debater who, undefeated during his junior year, won in reality the debating victories that Johnson only said he won—but they shared an interest in politics (although Kyle was more interested in the science than the practice). They argued constantly in history and social-science courses—Kyle, a professor says, could argue Johnson “to a standstill”; he had read the books that Johnson only said he had read—but Kyle had enjoyed those arguments, had thought the give-and-take of ideas was what college was all about, and he had believed that Johnson enjoyed them, too. During Johnson’s pre-Cotulla days at college, Kyle says, “I befriended him when no one else would have anything to do with him,” and Johnson had apparently reciprocated, inviting him to his home to meet his parents. During Johnson’s post-Cotulla days, he had needed the support of “townies” for Deason’s election, and, as Kyle was their leader, had cultivated him. “I thought we were friends,” Kyle says. Enraged though he had been by Richards’ railroading of the junior class vote, he had thought that Johnson was only one of the group following Richards around that day; he had not the slightest suspicion that Johnson was its leader. Now he had not the slightest suspicion of Johnson’s role in conceiving the “Depression” argument that had deprived him of the editorship. And he was as unaware of the existence of a secret organization called the White Stars as he was of how Lyndon Johnson really felt about being argued to a standstill. The previous year, Kyle recalls now, “two of his henchmen [Richards and Woods] asked me … would I be willing to be a member of a group that would try to get more money for these literary activities, forensic activities, because the football team was getting too much money. I never got the idea that [it] was a secret group, I never knew that Lyndon was even a member of it.” After he declined the invitation (“I said all these people you all are fighting are my friends”), he never again, although he previously had been class president, won another student office. Without understanding how, he felt that Richards and Woods were somehow behind those defeats. Now he felt that, in some way he didn’t understand, they were also behind his defeat for the editorship, and as soon as he learned about it, he recalls, “I sought them out, and stopped them on the side of Old Main and cursed them with every name in the book. They just stood and looked at me and grinned.” But he never guessed—never had even a suspicion—who was behind Richards and Woods. Not until “the very last part of school,” some weeks after the decisive council meeting, was Kyle told that Johnson had been the moving force at the meeting, and that, moreover, “Lyndon had been working for years to keep me from getting any honors at all.” Puis also suspected nothing. “All the time this was going on,” he says, whenever he saw Lyndon Johnson on the campus, Johnson would smile in a friendly way and “stop and talk just like nothing was happening.”

  Puis, ironically in light of the argument Johnson had used to sway the council, had to spend “a horrible year” in Bishop, Texas, to earn enough money to return to college. He left for Bishop, he says, with “a bad taste” in his mouth. “He [Johnson] started [the politicking] at San Marcos,” Puis says. “He had to start it. If he hadn’t done the politicking and maneuvering, he couldn’t have been outstanding. He wasn’t an outstanding student, and he wasn’t outstanding in anything else. He was just the type of character who was snaky all the time. He got power by things you or I wouldn’t stoop to. But he got the power, and he cheated us out of jobs we had worked very hard for, and had earned.” Kyle and his sister had enough money to continue at San Marcos, but they dropped out, too—and would not return until Johnson had graduated and left. “We left college because of him,” Kyle says. “Because of disgust at what he did.” The disgust would not fade for years, Kyle’s friends say. Says Ella So Relle, who did not herself learn until years later the real reason the council rejected her recommendation for her successor: “Henry was very smart, and he was very idealistic, and he just could not tolerate what he saw as political purposes.” Says another student, who has asked not to be identified: “It was as if Henry, who had lived a very sheltered life, found out all at once just how dirty life could really be.”

  CLASS PRESIDENTS, Student Council members, Gaillardians, Star and Pedagog editors—when Lyndon Johnson had returned from Cotulla in June, 1929, all had been members of a clique that had scorned Lyndon Johnson. By the time he graduated in August, 1930, all had been replaced by members of a clique led, in fact if not in name, by Lyndon Johnson. His enemies had been supplanted by his allies, and with remarkable speed. In little more than a year, he, a young man with a long-standing interest in politics but absolutely no political experience, had manipulated a campus political structure—created a campus political structure—so that he, still one of the most disliked students on campus, exerted over it more influence than any other student.

  “Thinking back on those wonderful … monologues, … I can clearly see that political stratagems have always been my brother’s natural vocation and favorite pastime,” Sam Houston Johnson writes. Natural vocation: the insight of a brother who, throughout his life, would display considerable brotherly insight. Lyndon Johnson had come to his new field already an expert in it.

  His brother understood part of the reason for this aptitude. “His penchant for nose-counting comes from Daddy,” he wrote. For nose-counting—and for much else. The tall, gangling, big-eared young man with the lapel-holding mannerism and the powerful talent for persuasion was, after all, the son of a man with the same mannerism and the same talent. The young man possessed of an instinctive gift for a campus version of backroom maneuvering was the son of a man who, coming to the State Capitol without experience, had displayed immediately a similar gift.

  But there was a crucial difference between father and son—as a single contrast demonstrates. His father’s most gallant fight was the one he waged, alone in the Texas House of Representatives except for six forlorn allies, against Joseph Weldon Bailey, the Populist who had betrayed the Populists. Once, in a history class, Lyndon Johnson was asked if he had a particular hero. “Joe Bailey,” he replied.

  Sam Ealy Johnson, an idealist “straight as a shingle” whose uncompromising adherence to the beliefs and principles with which he had entered politics made him a hero to some, was nonetheless a political failure who didn’t accomplish any of his most cherished aims. His son had, in the campus arena which was the only arena in which he had yet fought, accomplished his aims—because the impedimenta which hampered his father did not hamper him. He had won believing in nothing—without a reform he wanted to make, without a principle or issue about which he truly cared (“We didn’t care if the argument was true or not.”). He had demonstrated, moreover, not only a pragmatism foreign to his father but a cynicism foreign as well: he had persuaded students—had persuaded them earnestly, his arm around their shoulders, looking intently into their eyes—that they should not cast votes that would help a secret organization, without letting them know that he was a member of a secret organization. A cynicism—and a ruthlessness. He didn’t merely count votes; he stole them. In what a lieutenant termed “blackmail,” he had threatened a frightened girl with the exposure—the exposure and exaggeration, in “big headlines”—of a meaningless, momentary indiscretion. He had exploited the loneliness of women. The son of the man of whom “you always knew where he stood” let no one know where he stood. Men like Kyle and Puis, into whose ambitions he was scheming to plunge a knife, thought he was their friend until the knife wa
s in up to the hilt. These tactics had, of course, been employed within the confines of campus politics, so small-scale and insignificant compared to the politics of the outside world. Within those confines, nonetheless, had emerged a certain pattern to the tactics—the politicking—of Lyndon Johnson. Perhaps the most significant aspect of the pattern was its lack of any discernible limits. Pragmatism had shaded into the morality of the ballot box, a morality in which nothing matters but victory and any maneuver that leads to victory is justified—into a morality that is amorality.

  AND HOW DID Lyndon Johnson himself feel about the ruthless methods he had employed?

  Many years later—forty years later: in 1970, after he had left the Presidency—Lyndon Johnson returned to San Marcos and spent an entire day touring the campus and reminiscing. Late in the afternoon, he sat chatting with four of his former professors, five old men in the shade, and the talk turned to his White Star activities, and to the Student Council, and he made the following statement:

  The freshmen, the sophomores and me—we had a majority. We gave to the Band, the Dramatic Club, the debaters, and we started electing the Gaillardians, and we were still doing it when I left—I don’t know what happened after I left, but we were still doing it when I left. It was a pretty vicious operation for a while. They lost everything I could have them lose. It was my first real big dictat——-Hitlerized—operation, and I broke their back good. And it stayed broke for a good long time.

  The day had been long, particularly for a man with a serious heart condition, and Lyndon Johnson was tired when he made that statement. Perhaps it was the tiredness that let those words—particularly those two words, “dictator” and “Hitlerized”—slip out. But he was not so tired that he didn’t realize what he had said as soon as he had said it. Abruptly cutting off the conversation, he rose from his seat, gathered his aides, and strode away. Had not a young man been present with a tape recorder, posterity would not possess Lyndon Johnson’s own assessment of his first political activity.

  But it was a revealing assessment, and not merely because he had seen himself as a “dictator,” a “Hitler,” and had not recoiled from the sight. The overall tone of the assessment is more revealing than those two words. It was a pretty vicious operation for a while. They lost everything I could have them lose. … I broke their back good. And it stayed broke for a good long time. Did he not see the ruthlessness? He saw it. Was he ashamed of it? He was proud of it.

  “A PRETTY VICIOUS OPERATION”—and sometimes Lyndon Johnson displayed a viciousness that had little to do with the operation. Black Star Frank Arnold was slow academically, but, an immensely strong, quiet and gentle boy, he had other qualities; his courage playing football despite a series of painful injuries had led his teammates to elect him captain and call him Old Reliable; off the field, a friend says, “He was the kind of boy who always had something nice to say to everyone.” And sometimes he had a knack, despite his slowness, of seeing to the heart of a situation; during that Student Council vote on the Star and Pedagog editorships, for example, he had turned on Johnson and said that he didn’t believe in giving something to someone who hadn’t earned it. “He was the kind of boy that everyone liked—except Lyndon,” the friend says. Lyndon didn’t like him at all. Arnold, slow though he was, was dearly loved by one of the brightest girls on campus, pert, pretty Helen Hofheinz. Johnson devised a scheme to break them up.

  His instrument was Whiteside, the fast-talking, handsome ladies’ man. “Lyndon had a Model A,” Whiteside recalls. “He’d say, ‘Call her up and take her out—take my car … just to aggravate him.’ He got a real kick out of that. Because he didn’t like Frank Arnold.” Says Helen: “I had been going with Frank Arnold for years. I was in love with him. And then, all of a sudden, Vernon Whiteside—he just gave me a frantic rush. For two weeks. Meeting me after class and sitting under the trees. I was so naive I never thought Lyndon was back of it. I just thought I had blossomed out. I never took it serious. I was too in love with Frank Arnold. But it was exciting.” Even when she accepted Arnold’s ring, Whiteside persisted. “Lyndon would say, ‘Whyn’t you call her, and get a date tonight, and make her take ol’ Frank’s ring off?’ I’d go up there, and Helen was wearing his engagement ring, and I’d go up there and talk her into taking it off. The next day, it would be back on, but you could see Frank walking around with that worried look on his face. He was so wrapped up in her.” Whiteside’s courtship ended, he says, “when I finally got ashamed of myself.”* Had it been up to Johnson, the false courtship would have continued until the true one had been shattered beyond repair. “That wasn’t politics,” Whiteside says. “That was just Lyndon.”

  Sometimes, the viciousness had nothing at all to do with the operation.

  One student, a Bohemian farm boy, was generally immune from practical jokes because he was so “slow” and gullible—some students believed he might be slightly retarded—as to be too defenseless a target. This student had a severe case of acne, and one evening, talking with Johnson, Whiteside and another student, he said girls wouldn’t go out with him because of it.

  Recalls Whiteside:

  Lyndon said to him that the cure was to get fresh cow manure and put it on your face. He said, “Oh, go on,” and Lyndon said, “Didn’t you ever turn over a cow pile and see how white the grass was underneath, how the manure bleached the grass?”

  So Lyndon said, “Let’s drive [the boy] out to get some,” and we all four of us drove out to some pasture, and he gets out and walks a long ways, and we can’t believe he’s this gullible, and he comes back [with some, which he had put in a shoebox. When they returned to San Marcos,] Lyndon tells him to take a towel and cut eyeholes in it and wrap it around his face. He … came into our room and asked how it was, and Lyndon said, “You don’t have enough on to do any good.” He made him put more on. In the morning, he smelled so bad, you couldn’t go near him. And then Lyndon tells everyone the story, and the next day, when the boy walks in, everyone goes, “Mooooooo.” I tell you, that was the worst thing I ever took part in.

  JOHNSON’S FLATTERY of President Evans had continued—and so had its results. Prexy now displayed toward Lyndon a friendliness he had never displayed to any other student, or, for that matter, to any faculty member; a friendliness that was almost paternal. So at home was Johnson in Evans’ office now that the impression Tom Nichols had noted before Johnson left for Cotulla—“some of them probably thought he was running the place”—was strengthened. Professors, noting that he had Prexy’s ear, tried to get his. “As he was secretary of Dr. Evans, I always stopped and had a little chat with him …,” one says. Even Deans Nolle and Speck were wary of him, leery of crossing him. The strict Nolle, for example, had never relaxed the rule requiring a student to take six physical education courses. When, before he left for Cotulla, Johnson, embarrassed by his awkwardness and lack of physical coordination, asked Nolle for permission to write a paper on athletics instead of attending physical education class, Nolle had refused, and Johnson had received an F in the course. Now, when Johnson repeated the request, Nolle granted it. The meek Speck, as an ex-officio member of both the Student Council and the publications council, was frequently in Johnson’s company—and, says one student, “it was hard to tell who was the student and who was the dean.”

  Then Evans, in an informal way, let his deans know that he wanted Johnson to have a say in assigning students to campus jobs.

  The grip of the Depression, which had started early in the Hill Country, had tightened. A few years before, three bales of cotton would have brought enough money at the gin to send a child to college for a year. Now prices had fallen so low that six to eight bales were needed—six to eight bales of that man-killing labor in the fields so that a man’s son wouldn’t have to labor in the fields. Talk to a score of Hill Country men, and a score remember their mothers taking the cotton money, and adding it to the pennies they had saved out of the egg money, and hiding it away—and trying desperately not to ta
ke it out until tuition time came. Professors tried to help. Some loaned students money. Others, with no money to loan, borrowed money from the bank against their next paycheck to give a young man or woman another term at school. Nonetheless, many students had to pack their cardboard suitcases and turn away from Old Main’s spires. Of 1,187 students enrolled at San Marcos during the spring term of 1929, only 906 came back in the Fall (a “good” figure, the Star said, “because times in this district are hard; it is known that many sacrifices were made”). Jobs—those twenty-cent-an-hour jobs on the Rock Squad, those set-the-alarm-for-three-a.m. boiler-room jobs—were precious now. “Twenty cents an hour, and you either went to school or you didn’t,” Horace Richards says. And, Richards says, “If Lyndon would say (to the deans), ‘This boy is a good boy—give him a job,’ he’d get that job.” Evans had handed Johnson what was, at a “poor boys’ school,” real power.