Lady Bird and Lyndon

by Betty Boyd Caroli

  Rebekah uncharacteristically omitted her maiden name from page one of A Family Album. Because of the enormous pride she took in her ancestors, she usually found a way to fit “Baines” into any conversation. Her father, Joseph Wilson Baines, had left Louisiana as a child, when his pious, scholarly father was summoned to Texas to edit the state’s first Baptist newspaper and then to head the Baptist university, Baylor. With a young British tutor in tow, the family must have caused some amused comment on the rough-and-tumble frontier, but the proud Baineses were not the type to care.

  As an adult, Joe Baines started out following in his staid father’s footsteps, teaching school and editing a newspaper. But then he ventured into riskier territory, including politics and land speculating. His fragile blond wife, Ruth, who was only fourteen (and his student) when he had proposed marriage, passed on her good looks to their daughter Rebekah but not much more; she rates only a footnote in A Family Album. It was Joe Baines who held center stage as the “dominant force” in young Rebekah’s life, the “adored parent, reverenced mentor, and most interesting companion.”

  Just “call me lucky,” Rebekah suggested, as she looked back over her youth: lucky to be born in McKinney, Texas, in 1881, just as her father was primed to outdo his devout Baptist parents. When the governor appointed him secretary of state for Texas, Joe moved his family from tiny McKinney to Austin, the state capital. By the time Rebekah started school in 1887, Joe Baines had installed his wife and their three children in an imposing limestone house outside Blanco, where he dealt in land and practiced law. Even without a British tutor, his offspring decided they had a superb education because they had him—Joe Baines taught them to “think and to endure, the principle of mathematics, the beauty of simple things.” No wonder Rebekah set her sights high: she would become a journalist, she vowed, and write the great Confederate novel.

  But Joe Baines had reached too high. Buying up acres like books, he overextended himself, and when he could not pay his debts, the bank auctioned off his two-thousand-plus acres and the family home. The Baineses had to vacate their two-story showplace and move into a much smaller wooden structure in Fredericksburg, slightly further west. Rebekah later glossed over what she called “severe and sudden financial reverses” by claiming that the entire family “adjusted readily and cheerfully to financial change.” But that hardly seems an accurate description of how she and her siblings fared in the downsizing. Her brother had to sell his horse and fancy rubber-wheeled buggy, and she went to work. Joe Baines continued to dabble in real estate, and when Rebekah wasn’t helping him out, doing secretarial chores, she clerked in a bookstore and submitted articles to regional newspapers, hoping for publication that would bring her a dollar or two. Joe Baines continued to take an interest in politics, and in 1902, at age fifty-six, he won his first election and took a seat in the Texas legislature.

  It was a single term, and as Joe’s health declined, the downward spiral of his life swirled faster. Bookish and pious, he was a loving and treasured mentor to Rebekah but no match for the competition in the thistly Hill Country. When he died, in 1906, at age sixty, he left a family struggling to support themselves. His wife, once accustomed to live-in servants, started taking in boarders. Rebekah, at twenty-six, had to face facts. She had passed the age when most American women married, and she had not written a page of that novel.

  Before Joe Baines died, he had encouraged Rebekah to interview the young legislator elected to the seat Joe had just vacated—Sam Ealy Johnson Jr. The two men had become acquainted during political campaigns, and the older man had taken note of Sam’s affability and his ambition. Even without a day in college, Sam had passed a local teachers exam by studying on his own, and he had then taught school for two years. That set him a bit apart from most of the males in his family, who talked rough and showed little interest in education.

  The cowboy credentials of the Johnson clan also appealed to Joe Baines, whose own upbringing was light on adventure. Sam Johnson’s father and his Uncle Tom had made names for themselves as trail drivers who moved cattle along the Chisholm Trail. It was the golden age for the cattle class, a time when a day’s work included sleeping beside a campfire and keeping an eye out for rustlers. Trail drivers dealt with cowhands and ranchers. They rarely crossed paths with book-lined rooms or college presidents, and Baptist abstemiousness of the kind practiced by the Baineses was pretty much a joke with them.

  By the time Sam Ealy Johnson was born in 1877, his father (Sam Sr.) and Uncle Tom were recognized across a wide swath of western Texas as major cattle dealers. They had gotten their start before the Civil War, then taken time off to fight before resuming business at their headquarters along the Pedernales River. Between the big slaughterhouses of Abilene and the ranches around Blanco, the Johnson brothers acted as middlemen who bought cattle from locals, maintained a holding pen for keeping herds until they acquired a sufficient number to start the drive north, and then hired hands to help move the animals along the famous trail. The profits could be enormous if all went well. Buying at $3 or $4 a head, they could expect to sell for ten times that at the trail’s end. But not all went smoothly during what could be a two-month drive: rivers rose, rustlers stole, cattle took sick or ran off.

  Trail driving did not leave a man much time for family life. Tom Johnson never married, and Sam looked for a wife who could take care of herself, run a household, and oversee a family during his long absences. Eliza Bunton, nineteen years old when he married her in 1867, did not disappoint. Besides bearing a large brood of children, she made her way into a book, Leading Pioneer Women, for hiding under her kitchen’s floorboards an entire day, infant clutched to her chest to stifle his cries, so that invading “Red Warriors” could not find her.

  Something of a local heroine by the time Rebekah Baines met her, Eliza Bunton Johnson was known for her good looks and practicality. When times were good and the money plentiful, she gladly accepted from her brother-in-law a splendid silver-mounted carriage and matched span of horses. Then, when times turned bad, she sold them off, using the proceeds to buy a property that later became the Johnson home. A striking, tall woman, with piercing black eyes, and magnolia-white skin, Eliza was often singled out as quintessential Bunton, and the story goes that her grandson, Lyndon, was only a few hours old when one relative looked him over and pronounced him pure Bunton in appearance.

  When Rebekah Baines went to interview handsome Sam Ealy Johnson Jr. in 1906, she had a list of questions about what he, as a new state legislator, was going to do for his constituents back in the 89th District. At first she found him cagey, unwilling to provide much in the way of quotable quotes, but she liked his looks. He was, she wrote long after he was dead, a “personable young man, slender and graceful, immaculately groomed, agreeable and affable in manner and with great personal magnetism.” For his part, Sam had never been interviewed by a pretty young blonde before, and he was smitten with this one, who could talk as knowingly as he about law making and the problems of the world.

  In the months that followed, Sam squired Rebekah to a Confederate reunion and campaign rallies, including one where his hero William Jennings Bryan spoke. He was clearly enchanted with “a girl who really liked politics,” and he lost no time proposing marriage. Just eight months after her adored father died, Rebekah accepted. Perhaps she hesitated to spring the news on her still grieving family, but more likely she feared they would not approve her choice. Whatever her reason, she did not tell them until after the fact. Her sister, Josefa, later admitted that the marriage took them all by surprise: “We didn’t really know about it at the time.” Then she added diplomatically, “We were very much pleased, of course.” When Rebekah’s own son eloped in similar fashion, she could hardly have objected. He was acting in family tradition.

  Sam Johnson settled Rebekah in the same house near Stonewall where he had been living on his own, “batchin it,” and occasionally sharing the space with a homeless ranch hand or two. The house lacked any sign
of a woman’s touch. The overcrowded little rooms, without electricity or indoor plumbing, required hard work if they were to be kept cozy and clean, but Rebekah tried to look on the bright side. Better times surely lay ahead, she kept telling herself, as she “shuddered over the chickens and wrestled with a mammoth iron stove.”

  The exact size and comfort of the house where Sam and Rebekah started out—and the location of Lyndon’s birth—remain in dispute a century later because the family gave such radically different descriptions of it. Although Rebekah liked to emphasize the hardship of living in a small “cabin” in the first years of her marriage, she later tried to give a more upscale image, calling it a “rambling farmhouse.” Her claim that she was shocked at its limitations when she first went to live there as a young bride is surely an exaggeration. She had grown up only thirty miles away, and since her father dealt in real estate and was involved in politics, she would have had many opportunities to see houses like this one.

  The original structure, a rectangular box with a dividing breezeway, called a “dog run,” down the middle, was razed in the 1940s, when Lyndon’s political prospects were on the rise, to be replaced by a somewhat larger dwelling, with higher ceilings. It had only four rooms, and the front two did double duty, serving for both sleeping and sitting. Neither the extended shack that some historians describe nor the sprawling homestead occasionally portrayed by Rebekah, Lyndon’s birthplace most probably fit somewhere in the murky middle, like so much of the Johnson story. As Lyndon neared the pinnacle in politics, he liked to emphasize his humble beginnings, to the chagrin of his sister Rebekah, who amused her friends by saying: “Lyndon may have been born in a log cabin, but I, sure as hell, wasn’t.”

  Other details of the Johnson story appear just as scrambled, and part of the reason lies with ambitious, class-conscious Rebekah, who kept trying to reconcile the jagged reality of her life with the outsized dreams of her youth. Marriage to Sam Johnson produced plenty of disappointments, but whenever she got the chance, she emphasized his best side and made him (and their life together) sound better than either was. When she recorded details of Lyndon’s birth, she wrote that he was delivered by “Dr. John Blunton of Buda.” But the evidence makes clear that the good doctor, although summoned, did not arrive at the house in time, and the man who later became the thirty-sixth president of the United States exited his mother’s womb attended only by a midwife, not something a proud Baines would like to admit.

  Rebekah spent the first five years of her marriage and gave birth to three children in that little house. Her sister and mother pitched in to help during their summer visits, cooking down fruit preserves and canning vegetables for the winter months. When Sam had a bit of extra money, Rebekah hired a neighbor woman to assist with the heavy lifting and endless laundry, but when money ran low and her relatives departed, she had to manage on her own.

  Rebekah’s rough, red hands attested all her life to that hardship. In 1938, just months after her husband’s death, Rebekah was in Washington when Lady Bird gave a small lunch for her and other guests, including Virginia Durr, a white civil rights leader from Alabama. Durr later recalled how she had sat next to this “extremely beautiful woman . . . very aristocratic . . . [with] beautiful bone structure.” It was her large, swollen, very red hands that drew Durr’s attention, and Rebekah Johnson noticed. As they began eating, she leaned over to Durr and whispered how she had always been “embarrassed and ashamed” of her hands. They had never recovered, she explained, from the hard work of her early married years. But the proud mother of a young man newly elected to the U.S. House of Representatives made clear to Durr that she expected her future to brighten: “Even as a young boy Lyndon used to say to me, ‘Oh Mama, when I get big, I’m going to see that you don’t have to do any of this hard work so you can have pretty white hands.’ ”

  Rebekah Johnson expected this and more out of her firstborn, and from his earliest years she put every effort into helping him achieve all that she feared she never could. She coddled and pushed the young Lyndon, introducing him to the alphabet before he was toilet-trained and teaching him to read by the time he was four. When he started tagging his older cousins down the road to school, she persuaded the teacher to let him attend classes, although he had not reached the required age. When he acted shy about participating in classroom exercises, she convinced the teacher to let him sit on her lap, a privilege that could not have made him popular with other students.

  Even with all the responsibilities of wife and mother, Rebekah clung to the possibility of a career for herself. She still turned out the occasional article for regional newspapers and then enlisted her relatives to help spot any that were published so she could clip them and get paid. Cooking and cleaning bored her, and she liked to sleep late whenever she could, leaving it to her husband to prepare the children’s breakfast and herd them off to school. He was the stern one, insisting that the children memorize speeches of William Jennings Bryan, while Rebekah spent her time directing school plays and concentrating on matters of manners and dress.

  Appearances meant everything to her, and when Sam brought any of his political cronies home for a meal, she made sure to put a linen cover on the table rather than the practical oilcloth that her neighbors routinely used. In her bedroom, where guests gathered to talk when it was too chilly out in the breezeway, she kept her most prized possession, a writing desk, which helped set her home apart from others in the area. Her emphasis on what she considered the “finer things,” such as drama and classical music, fueled her children’s conviction that they were superior, destined for a future brighter than that of their Hill Country friends.

  Hard-boiled and demanding, this tall, big-boned woman, with her knifelike voice, could cut cold anyone who disagreed with her, even if that person was her own flesh and blood. When Lyndon refused to take violin lessons, which he called “sissy stuff,” she did not speak to him for days, even though the two lived in the same house. Her punishing silence hurt all the more because she continued to lavish attention on his siblings. It was a lesson in retribution that Lyndon learned well. Although he did not deal well with cruelty aimed at him, he relished dispensing it, and “freezing out” became a favorite way to deal with those who disappointed or crossed him.

  • • •

  Sam Ealy Johnson Jr. also played a significant part in Lyndon’s early years, and one biographer titled his book about the thirty-sixth president: Sam Johnson’s Boy. As a member of the state legislature from 1905 to 1909, Sam moved easily among the locally important politicos. But by the time of his first son’s birth in August 1908, his finances had taken a beating, and Sam left government to concentrate on supporting his growing family.

  In spite of the rosy picture Rebekah painted of her husband, his ability to provide spiked and plummeted. Recovering from that first financial downturn soon after his marriage, he made new investments, then went bust again. Years after the fact, D. Jablow Hershman, author of several books on mental disorders, wrote that Sam Ealy Johnson had a “typical manic’s career” making repeated changes in occupation and taking foolish gambles that reduced his family to poverty.

  Hershman’s judgment seems a bit harsh, considering the fact that in the pre-safety-net era, many farmers and small-time investors suffered similar peaks and troughs through no fault of their own. Crops failed; prices fluctuated in ways no one could predict. Like many other Americans in the early 1900s, Sam’s dependents had a roller-coaster ride. When times were bad, they cut back or went without. But Hershman was right in that Sam rode the good times to their upper limits. When he felt flush, after making a sizable profit in a real estate deal or a cattle sale, he splurged, moving his family into an upscale house in Johnson City and driving them around in a shiny Model T. Johnson City, named for a Johnson forebear well before Sam and Rebekah arrived, had only a few hundred residents at the time, and the closest railroad was in Fredericksburg, thirty miles to the west. But it felt like a busy metropolis compared to
the isolated ranch. Instead of a one-room schoolhouse with a single teacher, Lyndon and his siblings attended the more imposing two-story Johnson City School, with its faculty of five. But when Sam Johnson’s luck turned again and his bank account dwindled, it was back to that low-ceilinged house on the Pedernales, where Lyndon and his younger brother slept on the porch.

  Between 1918 and 1925, when Lyndon was an impressionable adolescent, his father returned to serve again in the state legislature, providing the boy with an invaluable starter course in politics. Representing his home district in the statehouse was only a part-time job, but when the legislature was in session, Sam had to stay in Austin for days at a time. He often took Lyndon with him so he could sit in on House debates and listen to after-hours discussions in back rooms and public bars. The son watched lobbyists dispense a range of favors, from booze to the company of women, in order to win something for their clients in return. Sam Ealy Johnson had a reputation for being exceptionally honest and hard to corrupt, but it seems unlikely that any legislator survived for long without registering some recognition for his efforts.

  Since service in the legislature was compensated at only $5 a day, a little extra help, in the form of payoffs from lobbyists, came in handy. Lawmakers felt justified in accepting assistance, especially if offered in a form other than cash, such as a paid vacation for the lawmaker’s family in one of Austin’s finer hotels. Sam Johnson’s family stayed at the Driskill, and although evidence is lacking for who paid, it is perfectly reasonable to expect that they thought they were entitled to a vacation in Austin, because they sacrificed so much by Sam’s being away from home. That kind of recognition—gifting a politician’s family for the work he did—was not limited to Texas; nor was it deemed necessarily unethical at the time. When General Motors delivered to the White House a new Cadillac for First Lady (and horse lover) Lou Hoover in 1929, she wrote the car company an enthusiastic “thank you” for adding to her Cadillac stable.