The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  And what Johnson did with that power was revealing.

  He gave his friends jobs—the best jobs. Within a few months after his return from Cotulla, the twenty-five-dollar-a-month part-time “inside” jobs, which formerly had been held almost entirely by Black Stars, were held almost entirely by White Stars. But he didn’t give himself a job to supplement his salary as Evans’ assistant. The regular paycheck he had received at Cotulla had enabled him to pay his debts, but not to save any money for the year ahead, and, with his spending as free as ever, he still needed money badly. But there were only a few twenty-five-dollar jobs, and he didn’t take one; every job he controlled, he gave away. Money had always been important to him, but there was something more important.

  In the opinion of some of his allies, the manner with which he gave showed what was important. “He was always willing and ready to do whatever he could. In fact, it seemed to please him for you to ask him to do something for you,” one says. But you had to ask. He insisted on it. One White Star was too proud to do so; no job was given to him. When this student told Richards that he was going to drop out of school, Richards, thinking that Johnson must be unaware of the situation, told him about it. Johnson, he found, was fully aware—but adamant. He told Richards, “If he’s got too much pride to ask me for a job, I ain’t going to give him one. Let him ask me. If he asks me, I’ll give him anything I’ve got, but he’s got to ask me.” The White Star asked—and was given. “Lyndon wanted to show off his power, see?” Richards says. The opinion is echoed by other White Stars. What was important to Johnson, they feel, was the acknowledgment—the deferential, face-to-face, acknowledgment—that he had the power.

  AND WHAT HE wanted from power, power gave him.

  His personality hadn’t changed. He still strutted, both on wheels (he honked his horn repeatedly as he drove up College Hill to make sure everyone saw him in his car) and on foot (“I can see him now walking up that hill, slinging his arms and talking to everybody with that smile. He was always head-huddling people. He always had something that they had to confer about”). He was still as deferential as ever to professors and as domineering as ever to students—the same mixture of bootlicker and bully. And the reaction of many students to that personality hadn’t changed. The “in” crowd still wouldn’t accept him—would hardly talk to him, in fact. “Lyndon was always the string-puller behind the scenes,” says Joe Berry. “He found those he could use, and used them, and those he couldn’t, he worked behind the scenes to put down. And he was just anathema to me.” The more idealistic students still noticed that if, when Johnson approached a group of students, he realized they were discussing a serious issue in campus politics, he would hastily walk away. “He’d avoid us because he didn’t want to have to take a position,” one says. “He never took strong positions, positions where you knew where Lyndon stood. He was only interested in himself and what could help himself.” This reaction was still not confined to “ins” and idealists. His campus-wide nickname remained “Bull.” He still—on a campus on which women outnumbered men three to one—had difficulty getting dates, so much difficulty that one student says that “After Carol Davis, he never had a real girlfriend.”

  His involvement in campus politics had, for some students, only intensified the reaction—by piling distrust atop dislike. Says Helen Hofheinz: “He could be very gracious and very pleasant. But I just didn’t trust him. He was likable. He was smart. But he would do anything to get his way. He was a very brilliant man. But he’d cut your throat to get what he wanted.” Ella So Relle recalls the election that Horace Richards says Johnson “stole.” The students were so naive about politics that no one was quite sure what had happened, she says, “but everybody felt it wasn’t straight, and everybody felt that if it wasn’t straight, it was Lyndon Johnson who wasn’t straight.” Thanks to his involvement in campus politics, however, the reaction was no longer universal. Though some students despised his methods, others, more pragmatic, were aware of the power that those methods had gotten him. This recognition complicated their feelings. Richards, who was one of them—a wry, sardonic, self-seeing man—admits that while he didn’t like Johnson any more than he ever had, he made considerably more effort to make Johnson like him. “It’s just like everything else—if you feel this guy can help me if he likes me, you’re going to be awful nice to him.” Quite a few students were coming to understand that Johnson could help them. “He had power. He was secretary to the president. … If there was anything to give away, he would know. It paid to know him.” And, understanding, they acted toward Bull Johnson not with disdain but with deference. “It was quite noticeable that quite a few boys who had always said they couldn’t stand him started to act now as if they liked him.”

  In the way of human nature, some did like him. His keen eye had found men who enjoyed taking orders as much as he enjoyed giving them—had found, in students like Bill Deason, Wilton Woods and a freshman named Fenner Roth, individuals who related to domination in a way that pleased him, men he was to keep in his service thirty years and more. By the time he graduated, a small clique followed Lyndon Johnson’s orders enthusiastically as well as slavishly. Some idolized him. Silent little Woods, for example, not only ran Johnson’s errands and did his dirty work with the girls, but wrote his editorials, the editorials in the College Star to which “Editorial Writer Lyndon B. Johnson” signed his own name. “Lyndon was always loading me down with work. He’d say, ‘Write an editorial on Thanksgiving.’ I’d say, ‘Where am I going to get the dope?’ He’d say, ‘Go to the encyclopedia,’”—thereby making Johnson one of the few college students with his own ghost writer (and furnishing material for Johnson biographers who, believing he wrote those editorials, have analyzed them in great depth). And Woods felt honored to be allowed to do so. “We were immature and he was mature. … And he was smart. He could talk wonderfully. I could never talk like he could.”*

  Even some students who didn’t like him, respected him now. The respect was grudging—in Ella So Relle’s words, it was the respect “you’d give a politician who won a political office you knew he didn’t really deserve”—but it was respect nonetheless; Ella herself, for example, campaigned for Lyndon Johnson some years after college. (“Why? Because I also felt that he was very capable, had a lot of energy, and had the ambition to do things that other people didn’t.”)

  The hostility that many of his fellow students felt for Lyndon Johnson is striking in its depth and passion. It does not surface immediately, for not only is it deep, it lies deep—deep and hidden. The researcher begins his interviews on Johnson’s college years expecting to hear about a popular campus leader—because the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library has collected oral histories only from students who describe him in this way. The researcher’s initial round of interviews confirms, in general, this expectation. If, when he interviews men who were not interviewed by the library—an Edward Puis or a Henry Kyle—he gets a different picture, he dismisses it as a biased view, the view of men who lost to Lyndon Johnson and were embittered by the experience. But there are enough puzzling hints even in the interviews with men and women who praise Johnson to make the researcher go back and re-interview them, and when he does, other feelings begin to surface. They surface slowly—because of fear. In some cases, they never surface. Joe Berry, at the time of his interview a faculty member at the University of Texas, is not the only San Marcos alumnus who asks the researcher not to quote him by name because of the power he says the “Johnson group” still wields in Texas (“They could punish me, you know”)—he is merely one alumnus who at last agrees to allow his name to be used. Others never do. But when at last the picture comes clear, it is far from a picture of a popular campus hero. The researcher had at first dismissed Puis’ remark that “He was just the type of character who was snaky all the time” as the bitterness of a man defeated by Lyndon Johnson; now, over and over again, he hears some version of that remark repeated by men who had no defeat to embitter them. The r
esearcher had not even bothered to type up his notes of his interview with Kyle, an interview conducted at the very beginning of his research—so obviously prejudiced and therefore unreliable did he consider that old man. Now he finally persuades other men—a dozen men—to talk about the incidents which Kyle described, and he finds that Kyle described them accurately. By the time the researcher completes his work on Lyndon Johnson’s college years, he knows that one alumnus had not been exaggerating when he said: “A lot of people at San Marcos didn’t just dislike Lyndon Johnson; they despised Lyndon Johnson.” But after Lyndon Johnson, returning from Cotulla, became involved in campus politics, the hostility felt for him by his fellow students was no longer universal, and it was no longer unmixed. To some extent, at least, power had done its work. If there was still disdain, there was at least a leavening of respect.

  Respect—and fear. His power over jobs for students was, on that impoverished campus, real power. “By the end of his time in San Marcos,” says Ella So Relle, “people wanted to make sure they didn’t have his enmity.” However he had obtained power—by broadscale brown-nosing, arrant flattery of the college faculty as a whole and the college president in particular, by the tricking and manipulating of his fellows—obtain it he had. Lyndon Johnson had always wanted attention, and more than attention—he had always wanted people to look up to him, to show him deference and respect. Now, because he had power, he had, at last, a taste of what he wanted.

  AND DID THAT TASTE LIGHTEN the gloomy side of his character—the side seen by almost no one, but so striking to those who did see it, the sudden, intense silences that Boody called “loneliness” and that one woman said meant that “Lyndon was really down,” the silences that were the outward sign of the doubts and fears that tormented him, of the depression that could be lightened only by the one person in the world of whose love he was sure? In December, 1929, he wrote to her:

  My dear Mother,

  The end of another busy day brought me a letter from you. Your letter always gives me more strength, renewed courage and that bulldog tenacity so essential to the success of any man. There is no force that exerts the power over me that your letters do. I have learned to look forward to them so long and now when one is delayed, a spell of sadness and disappointment is cast over me. …

  I have been thinking of you all afternoon. As I passed through town on my way home to supper, I could see the mothers doing their Christmas shopping. It made me wish for my mother so much.

  No matter how busy he was at San Marcos, he still made frequent trips home to sit on his mother’s bed and talk. His torrent of letters to her—the testimony of his need for reassurance of his ability—had slackened not at all.

  NOW THAT HE POSSESSED POWER, he was no longer without recourse against printed expressions of his fellows’ enmity—as would be demonstrated, during his final term at college, by two incidents.

  Sometime during that term—the month cannot be determined—Star editor Mylton Kennedy wrote an editorial satirizing Lyndon Johnson’s “relationships with the faculty” and with President Evans. But the editorial never appeared—because, Kennedy says, Johnson “went to Dean Speck.” The newspaper had been set in type, and the presses at the Buckner Print Shop were just beginning to roll, when over their rumble, Kennedy heard the telephone ring. When Kennedy answered it, Speck was at the other end. “Have you got an editorial in this issue about Lyndon Johnson?” he asked. And when Kennedy admitted that he did, the dean shouted, “Stop the presses!” (Those were literally the words Speck used, Kennedy says.) He demanded that Kennedy bring him the editorial. And after he read it, he ordered Kennedy to remove it from the paper, and confiscated the few copies already in print.

  The feelings about Johnson that Kennedy had attempted to express did see print in the 1930 Pedagog, however—those feelings and others. The Pedagog’s “Cat’s Claw” section is liberally studded with uncomplimentary references to “Bull” (for “Bullshit”) Johnson, and while some of these references indicate only generalized dislike (“Lyndon Johnson was recently asked if he was a college man or had a horse kicked him!”), some are more specific. The qualities that his fellows believed they saw in Johnson are, in fact, itemized in his college yearbook. Set down in cold print are his determination to marry money (a fake advertisement to persuade students to join a Lonely Hearts Club entices him with the line: “Lyndon, some of our girls are rich”); his penchant for flattering, or “sucking up to,” the faculty (“Believe It Or Not—Bull Johnson has never taken a course in suction”); his loudness and untruthfulness. Two entire pages are devoted to a denunciation of the elections the White Stars stole under his direction—he is depicted hiding behind one of his candidates, and the whole group of White Stars is pictured before a crude drawing of a “nigger in a woodpile”—and those pages include a question which testifies to the distrust with which other students viewed him: “What makes half of your face black and the other half white, Mr. Johnson?” In the 1928 Pedagog, which called him a master of sophistry and of “spoofing the public,” sophomore Lyndon Johnson had been more harshly ridiculed than any other student at his college. In the 1930 Pedagog, senior Lyndon Johnson was again afforded that dubious honor. As his fellows got to know him better, their opinion of him had not softened but hardened. The 1930 Pedagog is a detailed documentation of that opinion—the opinion of his peers about the young man who would one day be the most powerful man on earth.

  The Pedagog was published in June, 1930. Lyndon Johnson graduated in August, and the yearbook did not mar his graduation day. For by August, the copies still available on campus no longer contained the pages in which he was so harshly ridiculed. They had been excised from the volume—by the man who had been his benefactor all through college. “Although probably little worse than other editions of the Pedagog, the 1930 ‘Cat’s Claw’ section was particularly loathsome to President Evans,” his secretary, Tom Nichols, was to write; Evans himself was to write that “a number of pages … aroused bitter resentment among our students.” In fact, only one student was particularly resentful—but he was Lyndon Johnson. Johnson had a talk with the president—and following it, Evans ordered Nichols, Deans Nolle and Speck and several trusted professors to cut out the section in every copy they could lay their hands on; it was removed from several hundred copies.

  His benefactor made graduation day a triumph for Johnson, in fact. Evans often said a few personal words about some student to whom he was handing a diploma. But his words about Johnson were unusually complimentary. When the tall, gangling young man strode across the rough wooden stage that had been erected near the bank of the San Marcos River, Nichols says, “there was … a smile on Prexy’s face before the youth came to a halt.” Giving him his diploma, he put a hand on his arm to detain him, turned to the audience, and said: “Here’s a young man who has so abundantly demonstrated his worth that I predict for him great things in the years ahead. If he undertakes his tasks in the future with the same energy, careful thought and determination that he has used in all his work in the classroom, on the campus picking up rocks, or as an assistant in the president’s office, success to him is assured.” The student’s father, sitting next to Nichols, leaned over and whispered: “We shall never forget what President Evans has done for our boy.” His mother wept for pride.

  TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER, Vernon Whiteside, a tourist in Washington, was sitting in the visitors’ gallery of the Senate of the United States when, below him, the doors of the Senate cloakroom swung open, and the Senate’s Majority Leader walked into the Chamber. As he began restlessly roaming the floor, a few of the more knowledgeable tourists nudged each other and whispered as the tall man, talking to each Senator, draped a long arm around his shoulder, seized his lapel and bent into his face, eye to eye, for they recognized these characteristics from articles in newspapers and magazines.

  Whiteside recognized the characteristics, too, but not from an article. The man grabbing lapels and peering into eyes was a heavy man, clad i
n a suit of rich fabric, and he was grabbing and peering in a setting grave and noble, but so familiar were the gestures to Whiteside that these differences faded away, and he was seeing again a scene he had seen before—many times before—on a dusty campus on a hill in San Marcos, Texas. “To me, he was just like he was,” Whiteside says. “He was the same Lyndon he always was, exactly.”

  Whiteside was right. All the characteristics of Majority Leader and President Lyndon Baines Johnson that were so unique and vivid when unveiled on a national stage—the lapel-grabbing, the embracing, the manipulating of men, the “wheeling and dealing”—all these were characteristics that the students at San Marcos had seen. And the similarity extended to aspects of the man less public. The methods Lyndon Johnson used to attain power on Capitol Hill were the same ones he had used on College Hill, and the similarity went far beyond the stealing of an election. At San Marcos, power had resided in the hands of a single older man. Johnson had begged that man for the opportunity to run his errands, had searched for more errands to run, had offered that man an audience when he felt talkative, companionship when he was lonely. And he had flattered him—flattered him with a flattery so extravagant and shameless (and skillful) that his peers had marveled at it. And the friendship of that one older man had armored him against the enmity of hosts of his peers, had given him enough power of his own so that it no longer mattered to him what others thought of him. In Washington, the names of his patrons—of older men who bestowed power on Lyndon Johnson—would be more famous: Rayburn, Russell, Roosevelt. But the technique would be the same.

  So were techniques more complicated than reliance on a single, older individual. The penchant for vote-counting and vote-changing that, during Johnson’s Majority Leadership, was to entrance a nation—that penchant was there at San Marcos. The passion for deception, the obsession with secrecy—they were there, too. Johnson’s entire career, not just as a Congressman but as a Congressman’s secretary, would be characterized by an aversion to ideology or to issue, by an utter refusal to be backed into firm defense of any position or any principle. That characteristic was evident at San Marcos. And the same also, of course, was the talent that was beyond talent—the natural genius for politics—that animated all these techniques. From the day he arrived in Washington, Lyndon Johnson’s rise would be spectacularly rapid; yet in relative terms, what achievement was more spectacular than his achievement at San Marcos, where, within little more than a year after returning from Cotulla, not only did he create a political organization on campus, he created politics on that campus—created it and, unpopular though he was, reaped power from it?