The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  In general, his students didn’t resent the shouting or the insistence on perfection. One of them—William Goode, later a renowned sociologist—says this was partly because of the insistence: “He made you feel important just because he’s nagging at you so much. He’s throwing his whole self into improving you.” Partly it was because the students could see that he was working himself as hard as he was working them. When they handed in written assignments, the assignments were handed back the following day, always. And they were handed back with their margins filled with comments. For some months, another teacher, Byron Parker, roomed in the same house as Johnson. He remembers that sometimes when he went to sleep, Johnson would be sitting at a little desk piled high with his students’ papers, and sometimes when he woke up the next morning, Johnson would still be sitting there, correcting the last of the papers; he had not slept that night. “He did that job as if his life depended on it,” William Goode says. His classes were “very exciting, and everybody thought so. He wasn’t a sitdown teacher—he strode back and forth and harangued. He was overpowering as hell.”

  Out of his public-speaking classes, the new teacher had to select a debating team. The two youths he chose were both, in those Depression years, delivery boys, but there the similarity ended. Luther E. Jones, seventeen (known as “L.E.”), was tall, handsome, brilliant, but stiff and aloof— “smart as hell, but cold as hell,” a student says. “And so reserved, I remember thinking, ‘How the hell is he going to get up on a stage and sell himself?’” Gene Latimer, a short, stocky, sixteen-year-old whose hair never stayed combed, was, this student says, “an Irish charmer, with a cocky, wonderful smile and a marvelous gift of gab.” But he was rebellious, insolent, notorious for not doing his assignments, always in some kind of mischief. “They were not the ones people expected Mr. Johnson to pick,” a student says.

  But Mr. Johnson was a reader of men. “At first he is not my favorite teacher,” Latimer says.

  He impinges too much on my hours of leisure. … In practice he has no reticence in cutting me off in the middle of a sentence to comment on its inadequacy, and to make pointed suggestions for improvement.

  Soon, the rebellious, independent Irish boy who had never willingly obeyed any teacher was waiting anxiously for an expression of approval in this teacher’s eyes.

  In competition he sits at the back of the auditorium and has an unsettling habit of frowning and ruefully shaking his head just when I think I am on the right track. But once in a while he opens his mouth in amazement at how clearly I am making a point. He sits up very straight and looks around in wonderment at the audience to make sure they’re not missing this. And it is then he makes me think I have just personally thought of, and am in the process of enunciating, an improvement on the Sermon on the Mount.

  Johnson had somehow seen in Gene Latimer—as he had in Willard Deason, another man not easily led—someone who would accept his leadership, totally and unquestioningly. Latimer would work for Johnson off and on for much of his life as, in the words of another Johnson staff member, “his slave—his totally willing slave.” In his oral history, Latimer says of Johnson: “He [is] the best friend I shall ever have.”

  Having picked his men, he trained them. No one at Sam Houston High had ever witnessed training like this. Day after day, teachers passing the auditorium late in the afternoon—hours after classes had been dismissed—would hear voices and, looking in, would see Jones or Latimer (or Margaret Epley and Evelyn Lee, the two women debaters) or one of the “declaimers,” five or six students who had lost out for the debate team but represented the school in declamation contests, up on the stage, practicing. And seated in the audience, commenting on their delivery, was their coach. Delivery was only part of what he was teaching. William Goode, one of the declaimers, says: “He picked out your suit for contests, [or] how much lipstick and what dress you wore. Nothing was too small. Everything had to be made perfect. … It was a total enveloping process.” And the work in the auditorium was only part of the work. Day after day, the debating team polished its delivery; night after night, it polished its arguments. The topic for the Interscholastic League Debates—the state championships—was: “Resolved: That the Jury System Should Be Abolished.” In the evenings, Johnson and his debaters read everything they could find on the jury system. But, other teachers noticed, the debaters didn’t seem to mind the work their coach loaded on them. “He worked the life out of them, but they would do anything for him,” one says.

  Then the schedule of practice debates began. No one in Texas had ever seen a schedule like this. In informal, “no-decision” contests, the Sam Houston High School team faced every team in Houston that would debate them. Then the team left Houston: writing letters to scores of high schools, arranging without any assistance all the complicated logistics involved, the new debating coach had, in his first year as coach, arranged a tour—hundreds of miles long—of a magnitude beyond any ever before scheduled by a Texas high school debating team.

  The time spent driving those hundreds of miles could not be wasted; as they drove, Lyndon Johnson’s debaters practiced. The debates themselves were learning experiences: a telling point or anecdote used by another school had to be incorporated into their own presentation. They debated one school on their way west from Houston, and a week or two later, on their way back, they debated the same school again—and its coach heard the Sam Houston High team using the very arguments his team had used on them in the first debate.

  Nonetheless, the trip was fun. A certain barrier between the coach and his team, between the teacher and his students, was never lowered. “Lyndon was always the teacher, and I was the pupil,” L. E. Jones says. “He was always in a position of command, and he acted like that.” But they were pupils, and they understood and accepted that. And as long as that understanding existed in the Model A roadster, there could exist also laughter. Assured of his position, Johnson may not have been more relaxed, but he was more jovial. He regaled the four debaters with stories—most of them about politics (“He talked about Welly Hopkins incessantly, about the campaign he had won for Welly Hopkins; he was proud of himself”). They were so fascinated by his stories that they would remember some of them in detail forty-five years later. The hundreds of miles sped by—and not just because of the speed at which Johnson drove. “Though we practice even as we drive, we also sing and joke with the Chief leading,” Latimer recalls. “With the Chief leading the singing and the joking. And these are days to cherish and remember.”

  And the trip—and the whole debating season—was fun because they were heroes. The high schools they visited held dances in their honor, and back at Sam Houston High there were honors, too, for their coach was not only training his team but promoting it, relentlessly and aggressively. Following a visit from Johnson, the editor of the Houston Press wrote in his weekly column: “How to talk is being taught in the Houston public schools. There is a course in public speaking. … It should be encouraged.” To help encourage it, the editor offered a $100 prize to the best public-speaking student at Sam Houston High, to be awarded at Coach Johnson’s discretion. San Jacinto High’s coach, J. P. Barber, angered because he had never succeeded in obtaining such a prize for his school, became angrier still when the Press—and the Houston Post and the Houston Chronicle, both of whose editors Johnson had also visited—gave the Sam Houston High team more coverage than his own four-time champions received. Johnson had been helping to lead pep rallies for the football team, with an enthusiasm and a storytelling gift that made his appearances popular; now he began holding rallies for his own team. The publicity began to get results. Debates early in the year had been held in an auditorium almost as empty as it had been for practice sessions; at one, only seven persons were in the audience. But as the team’s undefeated streak rolled on, the big, balconied room began to fill up for debates. The rewards he had promised his boys and girls began to materialize. Says Goode: “His attitude was, all the minor details must be taken care of,
everything must be taken care of, and of course we must win. But the thing was: if you took care of all the minor details, you would win. If you stayed up late, if you did just absolutely everything you could do—well, from it would grow everything. The world’s going to open. God, he made you believe, man—you weren’t just [debaters]. You were people who were going to succeed. And we began to see that was true. He was sending you out in the world, where other people are applauding you. I’d be sent to an elementary school or Kiwanis Club, for example, to talk to them about some topic, and you’d be applauded, so you never had the feeling that he was a con man. And then the debates came—and we won, for Christ’s sake.” Latimer, Jones, Epley and Lee found their pictures in the papers—not just in the school paper but in the Press and the Post and the Chronicle—under headlines like one that appeared in the Post: SILVER-TONGUED STUDENTS. At rallies, they were cheered by name, with cheerleaders cartwheeling in their honor as they did for football heroes. In April, the city championships were held. They had been won by the San Jacinto team for four consecutive years and had never been won by Sam Houston High; this year Sam Houston won them easily. At a general assembly, Latimer and Jones stood on stage as silver loving cups were presented to the school, and heard their principal, William J. Moyes, call them “two of the best high school debaters ever heard in this city.” The next hurdle, the district meet, “is almost too easy,” Latimer says. In an auditorium so jammed that students were unable to find seats and crammed into window alcoves and stood in the halls to hear, both the men’s and the women’s teams won. The school newspaper ran their pictures—on a page which contained a drawing of a crowing cock and the words: “’Nuff said.”

  During the two weeks before the state championships were to be held in Austin, preparations intensified. With the school caught up in the excitement, whole classes researched the jury system and its alternatives to find new material, and Johnson scheduled still more practice debates. “In Austin,” Latimer recalls, “it is evident that a few other teams had been practicing, too.” Epley and Lee were defeated in one of a series of elimination debates, but Latimer and Jones advanced to the finals. After sixty-seven consecutive victories, one more would give Sam Houston High the state championship Johnson had promised.

  For that final debate, Johnson’s team drew the affirmative. “I just almost cried,” Johnson was to recall. “We had no trouble on the side that it shouldn’t be abolished. But when we had the affirmative,” although his boys had always managed to win anyway, “we always had trouble.” Waiting for the judges’ verdict, the two young men and their coach thought they had won again. Johnson was to remember for the rest of his life the suspense as the judges announced their votes. “They drew it out, and they said affirmative and that brought smiles and then negative and then affirmative and then negative and then they waited a long time and it was negative and we lost it by one vote, 3-2.” Latimer looked first for his coach. “The look on [his] face is one of disbelief, and my worst reaction is that in some ways we have let him down.” But that look passed quickly. “He tells us that we have done well and he comforts us,” Latimer says. And Latimer and Jones never knew that when he was done comforting them, their coach went behind the stage and vomited.

  Despite the defeat which ended their months of effort, the debaters were still heroes—and so was their coach. Accepting the trophies the team had won, Moyes, after praising Jones and Latimer, had said that credit for their victories “is due to the splendid work in all lines of public speaking done by Lyndon B. Johnson, who is making a great record in his first year as a teacher in a Houston school.” Now, at a banquet on May 23 in the Lamar Hotel attended not only by faculty and students from Sam Houston High but also by delegations from Houston’s four other high schools, and by the city’s business and political leaders, the principal repeated his praise of the young teacher, which was echoed by a parade of other speakers, including one who had been invited at Johnson’s request, Welly Hopkins. The following day, at a meeting of the Houston School Board—a meeting at which which many teachers’ salaries were again lowered—Johnson’s salary was raised by $100 as he was rehired for the next year.

  Students tried to change their course schedules so that they could attend “Mr. Johnson’s speech class”; in his first year at Sam Houston High, enrollment in his courses increased from 60 to 110. “He was a handsome guy—a tall, lean, handsome, attractive guy who was full of excitement,” one student says. “And he was always up there leading assemblies—he was a charismatic figure at that school.” As for the feelings of the faculty, a reporter was talking to a mathematics teacher, Ruth Daugherty, one day when he saw “a tall and strikingly handsome young man” rushing down a corridor during a break between class periods, towering “above the milling students.” He recalls Miss Daugherty saying: “That man is going to be a big success someday. He’ll be ahead of everybody. Nobody can keep up with him.” He was, in fact, as popular at Sam Houston as he had been unpopular at San Marcos. Describing him as “pleasing in personality, indefatigable in his labors, zealous in all of his undertakings,” the school newspaper added, “Although one of our newest faculty members, he has carved for himself a place in Sam Houston as one of the outstanding teachers.”

  He enjoyed teaching and coaching. He would recall his pride in his debaters—“to see them stand up there … without a note in their hands on a subject with such basic fundamental importance as maintaining a jury system. Children just in high school with no constitutional history backgrounds, with no governmental backgrounds”—and in their victories: “Every time they brought in the judges’ decision I would just look at [them] and smile like I stuck in my thumb and pulled out a big plum and say my how proud am I.” To supplement his salary, he taught at night: a businessmen’s course in the Dale Carnegie method. And he enjoyed that, too. Ella So Relle, his San Marcos classmate who was now teaching at Houston’s Galina Park High School, would sometimes drop in on his businessmen’s class and watch him make each member of his class stand up and try “to sell something silly, like a picture frame,” and Johnson recalls that “I used to stand along the side wall and heckle these successful businessmen to death while they gave their talks, so they’d gain some confidence,” and she says, “I saw at that time a little more self-confidence than he had had in San Marcos. He was in charge, and there was no question he was in charge. And they liked him.”

  ALITTLE MORE SELF-CONFIDENCE. Not, to this woman who had known Lyndon Johnson longer than the faculty and students of Sam Houston High, a lot. In fact, she emphasizes, sometimes, despite Lyndon’s new popularity, she felt as “sorry for him” as she had in San Marcos. He didn’t have a girlfriend; in fact, she believes, during the year he taught in Houston, he never asked a girl for a date. Another old friend was in Houston, coaching at Galina Park: Boody Johnson. Boody and Lyndon spent a lot of evenings together; Boody confirms that “old Rattling Bones” didn’t have any dates in Houston. And to Boody it was obvious that Lyndon needed to be with someone—needed it so badly that Boody sometimes wondered if his former roommate was afraid to be alone. His new popularity had not reduced his dependence on the one person he felt would always be there to listen to him, a dependence expressed not only in seven-hour weekend drives home to San Marcos (where his family was now living) but in letters. His sister Rebekah recalls that every time she came home, her mother would chide her for not writing more frequently, and show her how many letters her brother had written during the same period. “There were whole stacks of Lyndon’s letters,” his sister says. And when told that his Houston colleagues describe him as self-confident and cheerful there, she is surprised. “Lyndon was very lonely in Houston,” she says. “Quite down-hearted and blue.”

  If Miss So Relle recognized the same insecurities in Lyndon Johnson in Houston that she had seen in San Marcos, she recognized also, in long talks they had together, the same ambition—not just the general ambition (“climbing and climbing”) but the specific. “He had this
job, it was a good job,” she says. “But he was always thinking, ‘What can I do next?’ ‘What should my next job be?’” And he didn’t want the next job to be in teaching; much as he liked that field, he had no intention of staying in it. He had known for a long time what he wanted. He was constantly talking politics. A fellow teacher remembers sitting around after debating practice, “drinking Cokes … with a group of Sam Houston High kids, and you [Johnson] analyzed the political technique of Joe Bailey for us; and we argued about Jim Ferguson, … and you said, ‘When I go into politics I am going to use these fellows’ effective methods and avoid their mistakes—I’m learning from them.’” Talking politics—and thinking politics. He was constantly referring to Battle for Peace, a collection of the speeches of Pat Neff. Some years later, he would give Neff’s book to L. E. Jones, and Jones found the margins filled with Johnson’s handwriting: he had not only read the speeches of one of his state’s greatest speechmakers, but had analyzed them—and decided how they could have been improved.