In his trips to Austin, Lyndon picked up a lot from his father, besides the pleasure of staying at the Driskill without leaving a paper trail. Lyndon began to walk and talk just like the older man, so much so that fellow legislator Wright Patman said the resemblance was “laughable.” Amiable Sam Johnson prided himself on listening to people (and one of his observations, “When you’re talking, you’re not learning anything,” became a favorite of Lyndon’s). But Sam didn’t just listen with his ears—he showed his total attention by edging up close to a man, eyeballing him with those piercing black eyes and wrapping a long arm around his shoulders. When Sam Johnson wanted to make a point of his own, he backed it up with a pointed finger, right at his listener’s nose. At six foot three, the lanky legislator might have seemed intimidating to shorter men, but his genial manner and obvious concern won them over. To young Lyndon, the message was clear: right-in-your-face pressure had to be modulated with a good dose of friendly concern.
The boy absorbed the legislative gossip that came his father’s way, including potentially harmful details about personal improprieties, and he saw how tidbits got stored away for later use. Sam drummed into his son that if you walked into a room and couldn’t figure out what every person was thinking, you didn’t deserve to be in politics. It was another way of teaching that “every man has his price,” and Lyndon learned the lesson well.
During the regular legislative session, which started in January and ran for two months, Sam had to rely on others to operate the ranch. As the eldest of his children, Lyndon became the designated man of the house, charged with helping his mother and seeing that daily chores—feeding chickens and chopping wood—got done. He quickly figured out how to foist tasks on his younger siblings, freeing himself to roam with his buddies. The resentment they later showed him (and the wariness with which they accepted his favors) resulted from bitter experience. After he became president, one of his sisters made headlines with her statement that he was “always bossy.”
In his part of Texas, Sam Johnson became known as a populist Democrat, fiercely intent on protecting the underdog. The list of the laws he sponsored included aid for state pensioners and for rural families who needed roads. Small-time investors received his support in a measure called the Blue Sky Law. When the German Americans in Sam’s district found themselves demonized as “Huns” during World War I, Sam stood up for and defended them. He earned the goodwill of other constituents by attacking the Ku Klux Klan so fiercely that he received death threats.
Rebekah, in highlighting her husband’s accomplishments, overlooked all these and focused on one of his very early legislative victories—the Alamo Purchase Bill, which provided for the state of Texas to buy the historic site in San Antonio and turn over its management to the elite Daughters of the Republic of Texas. Sam was only one of several legislators (and hardly the most significant) who backed the purchase, but it was the measure that Rebekah saw as tying him (and her) to the wealthy tier of old Texas—to the people she thought mattered most.
What Rebekah omitted entirely in telling Sam Johnson’s story is striking, although entirely understandable. Her husband drank, and he drank a lot, especially when he was losing money instead of making it. In 1921, when his exaggerated plans to earn a fortune in cotton were ruined by a disastrously bad market, he began a depressing physical decline that lasted until his death sixteen years later. He had taken out huge loans to buy equipment, hire hands, and lease land, and when the price of raw cotton tanked to a fraction of what it had been, he could not begin to pay back all that he owed.
Lyndon would later claim that his father lost $100,000, the equivalent of more than $1 million in 2014 dollars, in that debacle, but it was more likely only about half that. Whatever the exact figure, Sam Johnson never recovered, and it became clear that he would not provide a success story to suit his wife. His political contacts continued to find small jobs for him, on highway projects or streetcar inspecting, but cash was tight. By the time Lyndon entered college in 1927, Sam could not come up with the money for him to enroll, and Lyndon had to borrow from a neighbor. Lyndon’s four younger siblings (including three sisters) would all go to college, but on a shoestring of loans and student jobs. At Sam’s death in 1937, he left a widow so destitute that Lyndon, a married congressman, was her chief support, and he took out a life insurance policy on himself, naming his mother, not his wife, as beneficiary.
The much diminished Sam Johnson was not the man Lyndon had observed earlier. During his son’s most formative years, when tall, rangy Sam was still a respected figure in his community, he stood out as a model. When he started skidding, however, his trips to the local bars growing longer and more destructive, Lyndon was ashamed of him. Enlisting a friend to accompany him one night to the local saloon to entice Sam to come home, Lyndon explained how much his mother, who never permitted a drop of alcohol at her table, suffered at seeing her husband drunk. The son vowed not to disappoint his high-reaching mother as his father had done.
Faced with such opposite parental models when he graduated from high school in 1924, fifteen-year-old Lyndon had not yet figured out how to combine the staid, reverent, class-conscious Baines genes with those of the cussing, imbibing Johnsons. So he did what lots of other young men were doing at the time—he headed west.
California appeared wide open in the 1920s, ready to accommodate dreams of any size. In Hollywood, the embryonic film industry was looking for top talent from New York and Europe, but even a little-schooled farm boy could find employment somewhere—in the burgeoning office buildings, newly opened oil fields, or on truck farms whose owners bragged they were feeding the entire nation. Ben Crider, the older brother of a high school buddy, had already made his way to Los Angeles, and his letters home, outlining the rich opportunities waiting there, were an enticement to others to join him.
Lyndon pooled his meager resources with Ben Crider’s younger brother and two others to buy a rattletrap of a car, and then drove off, leaving the Hill Country and a deeply disappointed Rebekah Baines Johnson behind. Although she recognized that her son never developed her interest in books, she still envisioned him going to college and accomplishing more than any man in her family had ever done. When word came back that Lyndon was doing menial jobs, running an elevator and making deliveries, she continued to pray that this was only a temporary deviation from the high road she had in mind for him.
After twenty months, Lyndon returned to Texas, back to the nest and his surest supply of loving attention, which he had already judged as essential to his well-being as oxygen. His father’s political connections helped him find a job, driving a truck in road construction, but Lyndon soon angered some of his co-workers by getting out of the hard labor the same way he had offloaded chores on his younger siblings. The road crew’s rancor toward him may have set the stage for an exceptionally unpleasant Saturday night brawl when Lyndon evidently got bruised up a bit. A couple days later he surprised and delighted his mother by telling her he was tired of working with his hands. Now he was ready to use his brains. Would she help him get into college?
Rebekah walked to the phone and called Southwest Texas State Teachers College at San Marcos, and before she hung up, she had arranged not only for his admission but also for a job to help pay his expenses. Aware that he lacked some of the entrance requirements, she coached him, and in one bravado performance stayed up to tutor him all night for a math test he barely passed. She had already worked on his public speaking skills, having instructed him and other neighborhood children in what was then called “expression.” One of Lyndon’s female cousins explained how Aunt Rebekah would drill them on public speaking; she pounced on poor diction or faulty grammar while reminding them to stand tall and gesture and make eye contact with their listeners. Lyndon benefited from his mother’s elocution lessons, but his cousin Ava said he never could match his father’s eloquence, especially when addressing a large group.
Pious Rebekah, who liked to write across the seal of
her letters “Mizpah” from Genesis 31:49, meaning “May the Lord keep Watch between you and me while we are away from the other,” made a good choice in sending Lyndon to San Marcos. Southwest Texas State Teachers College, with only seven hundred students, enrolled three females for every male, and Rebekah could expect her lean, six-foot-plus son to make a splash with the farmers’ daughters, even if he did have some rough edges. Although University of Texas at Austin was much larger and more prestigious, Johnson City residents favored San Marcos because of its proximity (only forty miles away) and less stringent entry requirements. Rebekah’s younger sister had already attended San Marcos, where her mother ran her boardinghouse, so the entire family knew their way around the town.
When he started college classes in February 1927, eighteen-year-old Lyndon was a curious mix. Rebekah’s prodding and outsized ambition had produced a cocky young man who thought he could wangle anything from anyone. But his father’s depressing downfall remained a stark reminder that failure loomed. Lyndon was haunted by memories of his Grandmother Bunton; the take-charge woman whose name got into history books for outsmarting the men who invaded her household ended up paralyzed by a stroke that left her unable to move or speak. She died when he was only eight, but the image of her shocking incapacity stayed with him for life, a potent warning about the elusiveness of dominance. For a young man who put the highest value on physical strength and maintaining control, the worst nightmare was losing power. At all costs, he did not want to fail like his father and grandmother.
Some of the tools of success were already in the hands of college freshman Lyndon. He had learned to ingratiate himself with older people and pick out those in a position to help him. His boyhood friends noted how he took time to talk with their mothers, complimenting them on their cooking or their appearance; and then their mothers favored him, with an extra piece of pie or a compliment about what a fine example he set for the other boys. At San Marcos, his fellow students called it brownnosing. But to Lyndon, it was a way to improve his chances.
Although his first student job was as janitor, Lyndon soon caught the eye of the college president and became his assistant. With a desk just outside the president’s office, he was known as someone who could pull strings: arrange an appointment with President Cecil E. Evans on short notice or reach the right person at the most propitious time.
The small campus provided Lyndon a setting to try out the political skills learned from his father. When he arrived, the “Black Stars,” a group of the leading jocks, controlled student activities and the funds that supported them—they decided how money was allotted, which athletic teams got what, and who wrote for the school newspaper. Lyndon quickly organized the opposing “White Stars” to squeeze them out, and by the time he left, the Black Stars had trimmed their expectations and lost their monopoly over dates with the most popular women on campus. Although Lyndon later boasted that he defanged the Black Stars entirely, he actually was more accommodating, beginning to use the looking-for-common-ground approach that would serve him later in Washington.
In campus elections, he became his own polling outfit, counting votes before they were cast. If his candidate was lagging behind, he stayed up all night trying to bend ears and change minds. Using techniques for which he later became famous, he would zero in on the “undecideds” or those who owed him a favor and use every available argument to bring them around. Some classmates complained that he was bossy, self-centered, and employed unfair tactics—like blackmailing the opposition with threats of exposing personal matters that they preferred keeping private. Whether it was an off-the-cuff comment about a candidate’s personal failings or a story about a family’s closeted skeletons, Lyndon stored tidbits away, to release—or threaten to release—at the opportune time. Using his arsenal of persuasive weapons, he engineered his roommate’s election as Senior Class president and his own ascension to editor of the school paper. He perched himself on a three-footed stool of power, supported by the newly formed White Stars, the student newspaper, and a desk near the college president’s office.
Not yet old enough to vote in a national election, Lyndon had already figured out a lot about how politics worked. From his mother, he had picked up the importance of charm and refinement as well as the tactics for punishing those on the other side. From his father, he learned how to calculate the odds and increase his own chances in every political deal. The combination was a recipe for achieving real power.
Not every venture succeeded. In a town the size of San Marcos, word of his family’s background got around. After Lyndon met and courted Carol Davis, the mayor’s daughter, he accompanied the Davis family to the 1928 Democratic nominating convention in Houston. But Carol’s parents decided he was still more the product of failed cowhands than of Baines preachers, and on their insistence Carol dropped Lyndon.
A special mentor at San Marcos—Professor Howard M. Greene—encouraged Lyndon’s interest in government and politics, and the grateful student would later bring Greene to Washington and introduce him to President John F. Kennedy as “the man who started the fire under me . . . gave me my first course in government and my last.” Greene’s credentials were not those of the typical academic—he was a maverick, who announced he did not need a Ph.D. because no one had anything to teach him. An eccentric on campus, he fancied plaid shirts and untied ties, and when he lectured, feet on the desk, he kept a spittoon nearby. On a farm outside San Marcos, he raised prized pigs and developed a breed that later made headlines, but the indelible mark he left on many of his students had nothing to do with pigs.
His most famous protégé, Lyndon Johnson, ought to have been walking on air as he surveyed his successes at San Marcos. But the “highs” resulting from on-campus victories were punctuated by periods of despair when he questioned whether he should even be in college. He envied the wealthier students who had fancier clothes than he, and he chafed at the prospect of having to stay three years at San Marcos to earn a degree. After mulling over his prospects, he wrote his old buddy Ben Crider, who had remained in Los Angeles, and inquired about the current job market. Once again, Rebekah stepped in. She wrote her own letter to Crider, begging him to help her keep Lyndon in school. Crider didn’t mention Mrs. Johnson’s letter when he replied to Lyndon’s, but he enclosed a loan of $80, and Lyndon remained in college.
Lyndon often mused that he felt short-changed, with a degree from a state teachers college rather than an elite Eastern university. Although his parents argued it was the man, not the alma mater, that determined success, he never could make himself believe it. Yet San Marcos served him well. It gave him the confidence to stand out and test his power. His cousin Ava recalled that he could convince the women students to do just about anything he wanted, to support his White Stars or any changes he advocated in his newspaper columns. When his co-workers and critics later labeled Lyndon’s manipulative ways “the treatment,” they often added that it was at San Marcos that he refined the basics of how “the treatment” worked.
Southwest Texas State Teachers College also provided a flexible academic calendar so students could withdraw temporarily to earn money. When his own funds ran low, Lyndon took off the academic year 1928–1929 and taught school in Cotulla, a tiny town 130 miles south of San Marcos, halfway to the Mexican border, in a school that enrolled mostly Mexican Americans. As the only male on the faculty of four, he automatically became principal, although he had just turned twenty and had never taught a day in his life.
That one year at Cotulla probably did more to shape Lyndon than all his classes at San Marcos. He developed a genuine sympathy for the underdog. Coming from a family that had struggled at times, he now encountered students from homes where they never had enough to eat. Although his salary was only $125 a month, he started taking from it to buy pencils and school supplies for those who didn’t have them, and he set up a sports field and supervised after-school games.
The Cotulla students loved him, and he garnered their lifelong regar
d for staying after the closing bell to help them. Some of them followed him doggedly after he left their town, asking him for jobs as soon as they were old enough to work in his office. A busload of alumni later traveled miles to watch him, as president of the United States, sign a new law that would inject much needed funds into schools like theirs. He had touched their lives in ways they would never forget, and they had touched his. He would repeatedly cite them for making him understand how poverty crippled people, and how lack of opportunity set the stage for a lifetime of failure.
Back at San Marcos at the end of his teaching year, Lyndon finished up his bachelor’s degree. But he faced a miserable market at graduation in August 1930, when nearly one in ten of the nation’s workers did not have a job. His Uncle George, head of the history department in one of Houston’s biggest high schools, tried to make a place for him there, but failed, leaving Lyndon to accept the best offer he received—from a sleepy little town south of San Antonio, Pearsall. With a population of only a couple hundred, it was not the sort of place a restless go-getter like Lyndon Baines Johnson wanted to tarry.
In just one month, he was out of there, geared for something bigger. He was twenty-two years old, with a college degree that even he knew was second-rate. But he had a healthy respect for the opinions of strong women, like his mother, and she had made very clear she thought he could outdo everyone, including her adored father and her disappointing husband. He still had to find a remedy for his bottomless pit of self-doubt, and he had to find someone to supply the inexhaustible, unwavering support that he absolutely required. But if he could manage that, who knew how high he could climb?
Lady Bird and Lyndon Page 5