The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  “Lady Bird, go get me another piece of pie.”

  “I will, in just a minute, Lyndon.”

  “Get me another piece of pie!”

  Wingate Lucas says, “He’d embarrass her in public. Just yell at her across the room, tell her to do something. All the people from Texas felt very sorry for Lady Bird.” Seeing her shyness, her almost visible terror at having attention called to herself, acquaintances were soon making a remark that would be repeated for decades by acquaintances of the Johnsons: “I don’t know how she stands it.”

  The interest in culture—the promises to take her to museums and libraries “and all of those most interesting places” “when you are mine”—was somewhat less apparent once she was, in fact, his. Exploring Washington thrilled her—“I remember a song, ‘Walking in a Winter Wonderland,’” she says. “I’d just walk and explore, because it was all so fresh and new.” But, because Lyndon worked all day, every day, and she was too shy to make friends, she did the exploring alone. In the evenings, he might not be in the office, but that did not mean he would be in a place that did not interest him. He would not, except on the rarest of occasions, take Lady Bird even to a movie; as for plays, when, in desperation, she purchased two tickets to the Theatre Guild’s four-play season at the National Theatre, her husband would take her to the door; he would not go inside. Russell Brown says:

  I was always prepared to see her home, but she never would let me do so. She always went home by herself. … But I went to the Theatre Guild that season with her. I remember he used to bring her and say, “Now, I’ll see you later.” … They were fairly expensive tickets, and so on. But he wouldn’t go to the theater.

  Her hopes of sitting quietly, sharing the joy of a good book with her husband, were not frequently fulfilled. She had, in fact, no more success than L. E. Jones had had in persuading him to look for more than a minute or two at any printed matter less timely than a news magazine or the Congressional Record. She then tried to underline paragraphs in books she thought he should read, but even if the subject was politics or government, his lack of interest was so marked that she was soon playing a scene that would have been familiar to residents of Johnson City who had watched Lyndon Johnson’s mother following him to the front gate in the morning reading his lessons to him because he would not read them himself; if he would not read an underlined passage, Lady Bird would try to read it to him, sometimes following him about the apartment to do so.

  She found it easier to fulfill other functions that Johnson regarded as wifely, however much they may have conflicted with her own training or expectations of married life. Here are her own words on the subject:

  He early announced, “I’d like to have coffee in bed,” and I thought, “What!?!? Me?!?!” But I soon realized that it’s less trouble serving someone that way than by setting the table and all. …

  Did she also realize that it was less trouble to bring him his newspaper in bed, so that he could read it as he sipped his coffee? To lay out his clothes, and, so that he wouldn’t be bothered with the chore of placing things in pockets, to herself put his pen—after filling it—in the proper pocket, his cigarette lighter—after checking the level of its fluid—in the proper pocket, his handkerchief and money in the proper pocket? To shine his shoes? He insisted that she do these chores, and she did them.

  ONE CHORE WAS particularly difficult for her. Hospitality is, of course, a potent political weapon, and Johnson was, of course, planning to employ it. Hardly had they moved into their little apartment when he informed Bird that a Congressman—Maury Maverick—and his wife would be coming for dinner.

  Not only her shyness but her upbringing in a house full of Negro servants made entertaining difficult for the young wife; until the day she moved to Kalorama Road, she recalls, “I had never swept a floor, and I certainly had never cooked.” Mrs. Maverick says that when she entered the Johnsons’ apartment, in which a table had been set in the living room, and met Lady Bird, she felt “as if a little girl had invited me”—and not just because of the obvious nervousness of her small, slim hostess. “One of the first things I saw was a Fannie Farmer cookbook open on the table,” Mrs. Maverick says. “Staring at me was a recipe for boiled rice. The menu included baked ham, lemon pie and, of course, the rice. The ham and pie were very good, but I’ll never forget that rice. It tasted like library paste. To this day, I connect boiled rice and library paste.”

  But Mrs. Maverick was also struck by the bride, by her sweetness and graciousness as a hostess, by the way, covering her nervousness with a smile that never wavered, she made both the Congressman and his wife, so much older than the Johnsons, feel at home in the little apartment. Others were struck by the same qualities: Congressmen like Marvin Jones and Ewing Thomason who condescended to accept a staffer’s dinner invitation because the staffer’s father was Sam Johnson; young reporters (“Get the furniture insured for Friday night,” Johnson told Bird one day. “I’m having a bunch of newspapermen out there … we’ll have a wild evening”); older congressional secretaries like Kate George and younger contemporaries of her husband’s—all felt, as she said good night to them at the door with “Y’all come back real soon, hear now?” that she really wanted them to. And this graciousness, Lady Bird Johnson’s remarkable ability to make anyone feel at home, was, within just a few months of their marriage, to give her husband’s career the biggest boost it had yet received.

  For one of the guests visiting the Johnsons’ little apartment—visiting it more and more frequently; coming regularly, after a while, every Sunday for breakfast, and staying longer and longer each Sunday, sitting always in a straight, hard chair, but, week by week, bending forward more, hands on his knees, to tell stories of Texas, and, more and more relaxed, chatting with Lyndon Johnson hour after hour—was a man who seldom visited anyone, and who had never visited anyone regularly, a man as shy in his own way as Lady Bird was in hers, a small, stocky man with a bald head and a face like a rock: Sam Rayburn.

  18

  Rayburn

  RAYBURN. Rayburn who hated the railroads, whose freight charges fleeced the farmer, and the banks, whose interest charges fleeced the farmer, and the utility companies, which refused to extend their power lines into the countryside, and thus condemned the farmer to darkness. Rayburn who hated the “trusts” and the “interests”—Rayburn who hated the rich and all their devices. Rayburn who hated the Republican Party, which he regarded as one of those devices—hated it for currency policies that, he said, “make the rich richer and the poor poorer”; hated it for the tariff (“the robber tariff, the most indefensible system that the world has ever known,” he called it; because the Republican Party “fooled … the farmer into” supporting the tariff, he said, the rich “fatten their already swollen purses with more ill-gotten gains wrung from the horny hands of the toiling masses”); and hated it for Reconstruction, too: the son of a Confederate cavalryman who “never stopped hating the Yankees,” Rayburn, a friend once said, “will not in his long lifetime forget Appomattox”; for years after he came to Congress, the walls of his office bore many pictures, but all were of one man—Robert E. Lee; in 1928, when his district was turning to the Republican Hoover over Al Smith, and he was advised to turn with it or risk losing his own congressional seat, he growled: “As long as I honor the memory of the Confederate dead, and revere the gallant devotion of my Confederate father to the Southland, I will never vote for electors of a party which sent the carpetbagger and the scalawag to the prostrate South with saber and sword.” Rayburn who hated the railroads, and the banks, and the Republicans because he never forgot who he was, or where he came from.

  Forgetting would have been difficult. He was born, on January 6, 1882, on a forty-acre farm in Tennessee whose worn-out soil could not support so many children—he was the eighth of eleven—and in 1887, the Rayburns moved to a forty-acre farm in Texas, in Fannin County, northeast of Dallas. (The thousand-mile train trip to Texas provided him with one of his most enduring m
emories; from the train windows, he was to recall, he saw “the people … on their trek west, all their earthly belongings heaped on covered wagons, men in plainsmen’s outfits with wide-brimmed hats and guns on their shoulders, leading the oxen.”) The first year in Texas almost finished the Rayburns: floods covered the fields, and boll weevils feasted on the cotton that survived—and out of the forty acres, only two-and-a-half bales. Although Fannin County soil was deep, rich loam, and the rainfall plentiful, forty acres was inadequate for a large family when the interest on the mortgage was 10 percent and cotton was selling for nine cents a pound. The Rayburns managed to hold the farm year after year only because the whole family, even five-year-old Sam, worked in the fields.

  Except for four months each year in a one-room, one-teacher schoolhouse, Sam Rayburn spent his boyhood in the cotton rows. In the Spring, he plowed—plowed while he was still so small that his weight couldn’t keep the plow point in the ground and he had to strain to hold it down as the mules yanked it forward. In the Summer, under the searing Texas sun, he worked with a hoe, chopping at the plants to thin them out, going to bed at night with an aching back, knowing that at daybreak he would be out with the hoe again. And in September, he would be in the rows on his knees—crawling down the rows, dragging behind him a long sack, while he picked the cotton—in the rows day after day, knees raw and bleeding from the crawling, hands raw and bleeding from the picking, back aching even worse than from the chopping. “I plowed and hoed from sun till sun,” Sam Rayburn was to recall. “If some of our city friends who talk about the beauty and romance of farm life would go out and bend their backs over a cotton row for ten or twelve hours per day and grip the plow handles that long, they would see how fast this romance they have read in the novels would leave, and how surely it would come down to a humdrum life of work and toil.” Work and toil—and little to show for it, thanks to the government’s tariff and currency policies. The injustice that farmers felt was embodied in these policies—and that made northeast Texas a stronghold of the People’s Party—was exemplified by the inclusion of steerhides on the “free” (unprotected by tariff) list, which meant that farmers received little for their steerhides, and the inclusion of the shoes manufactured from steerhides on the protected list, which forced farmers to pay high prices for shoes. Cotton prices were kept low, too. When, after a year’s work in the fields by the entire family, its cotton went to the gin, the Rayburns might have left, after paying the furnishing merchant and the mortgage holder and the railroad’s cruelly high freighting charges, in a good year, as much as twenty-five dollars to show for the year’s labor.

  And it wasn’t the work and toil—or the poverty—from which he suffered most. Except when telling stories about the war (the most prominent object in the living room was a framed picture of General Lee), his father, the bearded Confederate veteran, was a gentle but very silent man, and his mother (“Hard Boss,” the family called her because of her rigidity), who loved and was devoted to her children, was careful to conceal her affection; to Sam’s parents, a biographer says, “any show of sentiment toward young children was a sign of weakness.” All through his boyhood, Sam’s life was the cotton fields—the fields and little else. If, Sunday, chores were light, they were supposed to be replaced not by play but by piety. “Many a time when I was a child and lived way out in the country,” Sam Rayburn later recalled, “I’d sit on the fence and wish to God that somebody would ride by on a horse or drive by in a buggy—just anybody to relieve my loneliness.” Terrible as were the toil and the poverty, the loneliness was worse. Poverty, he was to say, only “tries men’s souls”; it is loneliness that “breaks the heart. Loneliness consumes people.”

  IN THE BLEAKNESS and boredom of Sam Rayburn’s childhood, there stood out a single vivid day.

  Fannin County’s Congressman was Joseph Weldon Bailey, who, as Minority Leader of the House of Representatives, “dominated the Democratic minority like an overseer and conducted himself like a conqueror,” and was expected, if the Democrats won control of Congress, to become Speaker. Bailey was one of the greatest of the great Populist orators. When he spoke in the House, it was said, “his tones lingered in the chamber like the echo of chimes in a cathedral.” In 1894, when Sam Rayburn was twelve, Bailey spoke in Bonham, the county seat. And Sam Rayburn heard him.

  He was to remember, all his life, every detail of that day: how it was raining so heavily that his mule took hours to cover the eleven miles to town; how he felt when he arrived at the covered tent “tabernacle” of the Bonham Evangelical Church, where Bailey was speaking. “I didn’t go into that tabernacle. I’d never been to Bonham since we bought the farm, and I was scared of all the rich townfolks in their store-bought clothes. But I found a flap in the canvas, and I stuck there like glue while old Joe Bailey made his speech.” And most vividly of all, he remembered Joe Bailey. “He went on for two solid hours, and I scarcely drew a breath the whole time. I can still feel the water dripping down my neck. I slipped around to the entrance again when he was through, saw him come out, and ran after him five or six blocks until he got on a streetcar. Then I went home, wondering whether I’d ever be as big a man as Joe Bailey.”

  Passing the barn the next morning, his brothers heard a voice inside. Looking through the door, they saw their little brother standing on a feeding trough, practicing a political speech. From the day he heard Joe Bailey, Sam Rayburn knew what he was going to be. Knew precisely. He told his brothers and sisters, and friends; as one recalls his words, “I’m going to get myself elected to the State Legislature. I am going to spend about three terms there and then I want to be elected Speaker. After that, I am going to run for Congress and be elected.” He would be in the House of Representatives, he said, by the age of thirty. And eventually, he said, he would be its Speaker, too. Sam’s ambition became a joke on the Rayburn farm; his brothers and sisters would stand outside the barn and laugh at the speeches being made inside. But the speeches went on. And in 1900, when he was eighteen years old, Sam Rayburn, standing in a field with his father one day, told him he wanted to go to college.

  His father said that he had no money to send him. “I’m not asking you to send me, Pa,” Sam said. “I’m asking you to let me go.” The cavalryman’s back was stooped from the fields now; he was old; two of his eight sons had already left the farm; the loss of a third pair of strong hands would be hard to bear. “You have my blessing,” he said. On the day Sam left, his clothes rolled up and tied with a rope because he had no suitcase, his father hitched up the buggy and drove him to the railroad station. A silent man, he stood there silently until the train arrived and his son was about to board it. Then he suddenly reached out and pressed some bills into his son’s hand. Twenty-five dollars. Sam never forgot that; he talked about that twenty-five dollars for the rest of his life. “God knows how he saved it,” he would say. “He never had any extra money. We earned just enough to live. It broke me up, him handing me that twenty-five dollars. I often wondered what he did without, what sacrifice he and my mother made.” And he never forgot the four words his father said to him as he climbed aboard the train; he was to tell friends that he had remembered them at every crisis in his life. Clutching his son’s hand, his father said: “Sam, be a man!”

  Tuition at East Texas Normal College, a handful of buildings on a bleak prairie, was twelve dollars a month; to supplement his parents’ gift, he got a job sweeping out a nearby elementary school, and became the college’s bellringer, running up to the bell tower every forty-five minutes to signal the end of a class period. Unable even with those jobs to stay in school, he dropped out, and taught for a year in a one-room school to earn money, then returned, to take a heavy load of courses and graduate with his class. (He was so ashamed of his only suit and its frayed elbows that he tried to avoid attending the graduation ceremony.) Then he got another teaching job, this one in Fannin County, held it for two years, and in 1906, at the age of twenty-four, announced for the Legislature.

 
HE CAMPAIGNED on a little brown cow pony, riding from farm to farm. Unable to make small talk, he discussed farm problems, a short, solid young man with a hairline that was already receding, and earnest brown eyes. At each farm, he asked who lived on the next farm, so that when he got there, he could call them by name. Two incidents in the campaign showed that he had not forgotten his father’s four words of advice. A man approached him one day and said that a ten-dollar contribution to an influential farmer would ensure the votes of the farmer’s relatives. “I’m not trying to buy the office,” Rayburn replied. “I’m asking the people to give it to me.” He and his opponent, Sam Gardner of Honey Grove, became friends and, near the end of the campaign, rode from town to town together in a one-horse buggy; arriving in a town, they would take turns standing in the back of the buggy and speaking. In one town, Gardner became ill and spent three days in bed. Although Gardner appeared to be leading, Rayburn didn’t use the three days to campaign; he spent them with Gardner, nursing him. Gardner was to be a friend of Sam Rayburn’s all his life.

  The votes were cast on a Saturday, but, because the ballot boxes had to be brought in to the county clerk’s office in Bonham, and the ballots counted by hand, the results would not be announced until Tuesday. Sam arranged for a friend with a fast horse to bring the news the eleven miles to the Rayburn farm. On Tuesday, he sat with his family in the living room, waiting for the hoofbeats that would announce his destiny. It was victory, by 163 votes.

  In Austin, Sam Rayburn didn’t forget where he came from. Enlisting in the small band (which included, of course, Sam Ealy Johnson, then in his second term in the Legislature) which fought “The Interests” and talked of “The People,” he introduced bills to regulate railroads and banks. Unlike some of that band, he never sold out. Years later, when someone mentioned that Rayburn’s father had not left him much of an inheritance, Rayburn quickly corrected him—his father, he said, “gave me my untarnished name.” He kept it untarnished. He wouldn’t drink at the Driskill, and wouldn’t live there; rooming at a cheap boardinghouse below the Capitol, he shared a small room to save his five-dollar-per-day salary for tuition at the University of Texas Law School. After paying his tuition, he was to recall, he had so little money that once, after offering to buy a soda for a Representative named Pharr, he realized that he had only a nickel to his name; “so when we got to the counter, I told Pharr I wasn’t feeling so well and would not take anything. He went on and got his drink and I paid for it. … I don’t know what I’d have done if he had ordered a dime drink.” But when, shortly after he had obtained his law degree and joined a law firm, one of his partners handed him the largest check he had ever seen as his share of a monthly retainer from the Santa Fe Railroad, he handed it back—and added that he would never “accept a dollar of the railroad’s money.” To his partner’s request for an explanation, he replied: “I said to him that I was a member of the Legislature, representing the people. …” Legislators were routinely presented with free railroad passes; Rayburn returned his, even though, at the time he refused his pass, he was desperately lonely in Austin and unable to return home because he could not afford the fare. (His mother approved. “We often wish for you to be with us,” she wrote, “but we would rather wait a little longer than for you to accept free passes.”) It was while he was in Austin, where legislators were bought wholesale, that there was first heard a saying that men would be repeating for fifty years: “No one can buy Sam Rayburn.”