AND THEN it could see it for itself.
In December, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, a quiet, dignified black seamstress, Rosa Parks, refused to move to the back of a bus to make room for a white passenger, and was arrested for violating the Alabama bus segregation laws. A meeting in the church of Mrs. Parks’ pastor, a twenty-six-year-old black preacher named Martin Luther King Jr. who, as Taylor Branch has written, “looked and acted much older than his years,” called for a boycott of the buses on the following Monday morning, but since many of Montgomery’s blacks would have no alternative means of getting to their jobs except to walk for miles, no one was really sure the boycott would work. On Monday morning, the Reverend King’s wife, Coretta, was looking anxiously out her window to see the first morning bus, which was usually jammed with Negro maids on their way to work. Then she saw it. It was empty. “So was the next bus, and the next,” Branch reported. “In spite of the bitter cold, their fear of white people, and their desperate need for wages, Montgomery’s Negroes were staying off the buses.” That morning, there was another startling development. At the courthouse where Mrs. Parks was being tried—she would be fined fourteen dollars—the only spectators expected were the usual few relatives of the accused. Instead, when the door to the courtroom was opened, five hundred black Americans were standing in the corridor and spilling back down the stairs out onto the street. That evening, Martin Luther King Jr. was drafted as the first president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, and he made his first speech to the group. And with his first sentence, “We are here in a general sense, because first and foremost—we are American citizens—and we are determined to apply our citizenship to the fullness of its means,” there was a murmur of assent, and when he said, “And you know, my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron heel of oppression,” there was a sudden, rising cheer, and when he cried, “If we are wrong—the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, God almighty is wrong! … If we are wrong—justice is a lie,” a mighty leader was born. And the Montgomery Negroes made the boycott stick; at last southern Negroes had found a weapon—nonviolence—with which to challenge white supremacy, and had found the courage to use it. And again, as in the Till case, their courage, like Mose Wright’s courage, furthered the “educational process.” The bus boycott was in a big city, not an isolated hamlet, and it went on not for a week as the Till trial had, but for months. Television coverage increased. With the fuel from the Montgomery bus boycott added to the national fire started by the Till case, the furor in the North was not going away.
WHICH MEANT THAT IN JANUARY, 1956, Lyndon Johnson, returning to Washington after his heart attack, was going to have to make a decision, a decision that was to bring to the surface, within a character filled with deep contradictions, perhaps the deepest contradictions of all.
31
The Compassion
of Lyndon Johnson
LATER, WHEN HE WANTED his presidency to be remembered in history for its great civil rights legislation, Lyndon Johnson would often declare that he had, during his entire life, been free from racial prejudice. “I’m not prejudiced nor ever was,” he told one biographer. “I never had any bigotry in me. My daddy wouldn’t let me.” His biographers took him at his word, and so did his assistants. In a typical comment—one of a hundred (one of hundreds, really) of similar comments from Johnson’s aides—George Reedy says, “The man had less bigotry in him than anybody else I have ever met… Johnson had none in him…not racial, ethnic, or religious prejudices.” So did his friends, or, to be more precise, those of his friends to whom he “talked liberal.” “I’m telling you this man does not have prejudice,” Helen Gahagan Douglas was to insist.
Like everything else about Lyndon Johnson, however, the question of his prejudice wasn’t so simple. While in Georgetown he talked one way to men and women of liberal views, of tolerance toward human beings of other colors and persuasions, talked to them so passionately that they believed he was tolerant toward minorities, anxious to help them, waiting only for the right moment; talked so passionately that even civil rights crusader Virginia Durr accepted his response to her reproaches about his long silence on civil rights (a comradely hug and an assurance that “Honey, you’re dead right! I’m all for you, but we ain’t got the votes. Let’s wait till we get the votes”), he talked quite another way in Suite 8-F of the Lamar Hotel in Houston to men of intolerance, to men who felt that Negroes and Mexican-Americans were inherently dumb, dirty, lazy, stupid, looking only for handouts (“gimmes,” as 8-F’s presiding spirit, Herman Brown, called black Americans) and talked to them, too, so passionately that they believed he shared those feelings, shared them fully.
Their beliefs about Lyndon Johnson, their descriptions of the way he talked to them, were not made a part of the journalism of the time, or of the history that has been written about it, because these men, unlike the Georgetown liberals, did not talk to journalists or historians—for more than twenty years after they became legendary figures in Texas, Herman and George Brown tried to avoid giving interviews, and every time an historian proposed writing a history of Brown & Root, they blocked the attempt. But their opinion of Johnson’s attitudes is just as strong as the liberals’ opinion; and what they felt was that, while he had to be diplomatic and not express them publicly, his attitudes were the same as theirs. And although their names are not known to history as are those of the Washington liberals, they were just as close to Lyndon Johnson as the liberals were: Herman and George were the major financiers of his rise; Ed Clark, who “bought a ticket” on him in 1937, was his principal lawyer, and the man who kept Texas in line for him, for thirty years; when Johnson left Washington at the end of each congressional session, it was to the watering holes of these men—Falfurrias, St. Joe, Fort Clark—that he repaired, for the week-long, whiskey-soaked hunting trips that played so crucial a role in his political career. His rise was financed by men so bigoted that to talk to them when their guard was down was to encounter a racism whose viciousness had no limit; sitting in his apartment on Austin’s Nineteenth Street on the day that signs went up with the new name the Austin City Council had given the street—“Martin Luther King Boulevard”—Clark was so filled with rage that as soon as the author of this book walked in, Clark told a “joke”: “Did you hear about how the Reverend King went to Africa to look for his roots, but as he were climbing the tree, a baboon shat in his face?” During an earlier interview, Clark had been asked if Lyndon Johnson’s views about Negroes and Mexican-Americans were any different from his own. Smiling a slow, amused smile, he replied in his East Texas twang, “If there were any difference at all, it were not apparent to me.”
To take Lyndon Johnson at his word—his word that “I never had any bigotry in me”—it is necessary to ignore other words of Lyndon Johnson’s: his own words, written, in his handwriting, in a private diary he kept (the only time he kept a diary) during the month he spent in the Pacific during the Second World War. To take him at his word, it is necessary to ignore still other words—words spoken in his own voice, and preserved on a tape recording made not in the Oval Office with an eye on posterity but by a Lyndon Johnson who thought no one was listening, not knowing that while he was talking to employees on his ranch over a radio telephone in 1967 and 1968, an Associated Press photographer, Steve Stibbens, assigned to take photographs for a feature story on Johnson, had found himself, by accident, listening to the conversations, and had decided to record them because, as he recalls, “I was so shocked—I couldn’t believe what I was hearing—I mean, this was the great civil rights President.”
Crossing the Pacific in May, 1942, the big four-engine Coronado flying boat on which Lyndon Johnson was traveling would put down for refueling at small islands, and Johnson would observe the natives’ behavior. On May 17, on the island of Nouméa, he wrote in his diary, in a neat, cramped script: “Natives very much like Negroes. Work only enough to eat.” After he reached Austr
alia, he was at an air base in Brisbane on June 4 when a violent incident involving black servicemen occurred. John Connally, with whom Johnson later discussed the incident, explained that it reinforced Johnson’s belief that Negroes had a predilection toward drunkenness and violence. “Negro problem—no hard liquor as order Lieutenant,” Johnson wrote in the diary. “Negroes and constables knife threat.” The tape made during Johnson’s presidency a quarter of a century later shows that he subscribed to some of the stereotypes about Mexican-Americans, too. Complaining about the laziness of Mexican-American workers on his ranch to Dale Malechek, his ranch foreman, he said, “I don’t think Mexicans do much work unless there’s a white man with them, so from now on I want a white man with every group.”
A firm hand was necessary with Mexicans, Johnson felt. “I know these Latin Americans,” he told the journalist Tom Wicker in 1964. “I grew up with Mexicans. They’ll come right into your back yard and take it over if you let them. And the next day they’ll be right up on your porch, barefoot and weighing one hundred and thirty pounds and they’ll take that, too. But if you say to ’em right at the start, ‘Hold on, just wait a minute,’ they’ll know they’re dealing with somebody who’ll stand up. And after that you can get along fine.”
To accept Lyndon Johnson’s contention, it is necessary to ignore notes taken by reporters on statements he made in off-the-record conversations—statements that never made their way into print at the time Johnson made them or during the more than three decades that have passed since, but that are available in the Lyndon Johnson Library yet are never included in any of the now-numerous biographies of Lyndon Johnson—statements that further document his acceptance of stereotypes: a belief, for example, that blacks are aggressive motorists. In a conversation with a correspondent for Time magazine on January 29, 1968, he explained why he didn’t want to dispatch gunboats to protect vessels like the U.S.S. Pueblo. “If we started sending gunboats out to protect everybody gathering information we’d have a budget of five hundred billion dollars every year,” Lyndon Johnson said. “That harassment is part of the job. It is just like you driving home at night and you come up to a stop light, and there’s some nigger there bumping you and scraping you.”
To accept Lyndon Johnson’s contention that “I never had any bigotry in me,” it is necessary to ignore certain phrases in his early speeches which revealed his attitude toward people whose skins were not black or brown but yellow. During the late 1940s, his public rhetoric was filled with references to “the menace of Eurasia.” America must not surrender to “the barbaric hordes of godless men in Eurasia,” he said during a speech in 1947. “Without superior airpower America is a bound and throttled giant; impotent and easy prey to any yellow dwarf with a pocketknife,” he said during another speech the same year. These were prepared addresses; his off-the-cuff speeches were not recorded, but persons who followed his campaigns say the speeches were filled with references to “yellow dwarves,” “hordes of barbaric yellow dwarves,” “sneaky yellow dwarves,” and “godless yellow dwarves.”
His remarks about African-Americans and Mexican-Americans before he was President were not isolated remarks. In conversations with friends, Johnson constantly employed the caricature shorthand for people of color—that they were dumb, that they were lazy, that they were prone to drunkenness and violence—to make points in casual conversation, as when, to show, as one man put it, “that he had no particular respect” for Lady Bird’s opinion, he said “I have a nigger maid, and I talk my problems over with her, too.” On other occasions, he made the same point by saying, “I talk my problems over with my nigger chauffeur, too.”
Despite what he claimed, then, Lyndon Johnson was not without prejudice. Like millions of other Americans, he held stereotypes, and sometimes the stereotypes were expressed in racial terms. When, moreoever, Johnson was speaking to a Negro, he often used racial pejoratives. If Negroes were sufficiently subservient to him, he was kind and rather gentle with them, and used these words in a somewhat friendly manner. One afternoon in the mid-1930s, during Johnson’s tenure as Texas director of the National Youth Administration, his old friend State Senator Welly K. Hopkins was talking with Johnson in his NYA office in Austin when a black employee came in. Hopkins was to tell an interviewer for an oral history that Lyndon asked the man what he wanted. “He said, ‘Boy, what do you want?’ Well, he said he wanted to borrow five dollars. ‘Well, what do you want it for, boy?’” Hopkins said that “I could tell the President was going to let him have it”—and after the employee said he needed it so that he could get married, Johnson gave him the money. But sometimes those terms were not used in a friendly way. Lyndon Johnson possessed not only a lash for a tongue, but a rare talent for aiming the lash, for finding a person’s most sensitive point, the rawest of his wounds, and striking it, over and over again, without mercy. With a black American, of course, the rawest point was likely to be the color of his skin, and the names by which he was addressed because of it: “nigger,” for example, or “boy.” And when Lyndon Johnson wanted to hurt a Negro, that was often where he aimed the lash. When the author asked Hopkins if Johnson always used the word “boy” in a joking or paternalistic way, Hopkins shook his head to say no, and related an incident that occurred in the NYA office, on another occasion when he was visiting Johnson. An employee, not of the NYA but of the office building—a middle-aged black man, “a porter or something, I think”—had done something that angered Johnson. “My God, I will never forget how he talked to that man,” Hopkins said. “He would just rip him up and down, and the man would just have to stand there and take it. Lyndon would just keep calling him ‘boy,’ ‘boy.’ ‘You understand that, boy! You got it now, boy! Do this, boy. Do that, boy.’”
Racial stereotypes sometimes governed Johnson’s actions as well as his words. A stereotype that had currency in the Hill Country was that Negroes were terrified of all snakes. Sometimes Johnson or one of his Hill Country friends would catch a snake, sometimes a harmless snake, sometimes a rattlesnake. Johnson would put it in the trunk of his car, and drive to a gas station at which a Negro was working as the gas pump attendant. Pulling up to the pump to get gas, he would tell the attendant that he thought the spare tire in his trunk might need air, and would ask him to take a look at it. Often this practical joke was successful; relating this story, he said, about one Negro attendant, “Boy, you should have seen that big buck jump!” He went on playing this joke not only when he was in college, but when he was a congressional assistant—when he was a congressman, in fact. Once, when he played it while he was a congressman—in 1945 or 1946 at a service station at the corner of First Street and Congress Avenue in Austin—the joke had a different denouement. While Lyndon was “standing there laughing” at the attendant’s shock, the black man picked up a tire iron and, threatening to wrap it around Johnson’s neck, shouted, “I’ll make you a bow tie out of this!” The manager of the service station had to hustle Johnson out a back door to get him away.
BUT THERE WAS A DIFFERENCE between Lyndon Johnson and all the other Americans who held racial stereotypes—and between Lyndon Johnson and all the presidents, save only Abraham Lincoln, who came before him and who came after him. Lincoln freed black men and women from slavery, but almost a century after Lincoln, black men and women—and Mexican-American men and women, and indeed most Americans of color—still did not enjoy many of the rights which America supposedly guaranteed its citizens; they did not—millions of them, at least—enjoy even the most basic right, the right to vote, and thereby choose the officials who governed them. It was Lyndon Johnson who gave them those rights. It was the civil rights laws passed during his presidency—passed because of the inspiring words with which he presented them “We shall overcome,” he said once as a Congress came cheering to its feet, and in front of television sets all over America, men and women of good will began to cry), and because of the savage determination with which he drove them to passage—that gave them the vote, and that mad
e great strides toward ending discrimination in public accommodations, in education, in employment, even in private housing. Lincoln, of course, was President during the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, with its eighteen American presidents, Lyndon Baines Johnson was the greatest champion that black Americans and Mexican-Americans and indeed all Americans of color had in the White House, the greatest champion they had in all the halls of government. With the single exception of Lincoln, he was the greatest champion with a white skin that they had in the history of the Republic. He was to become the lawmaker for the poor and the downtrodden and the oppressed. He was to be the bearer of at least a measure of social justice to those to whom social justice had so long been denied, the restorer of at least a measure of dignity to those who so desperately needed to be given some dignity, the redeemer of the promises made to them by America. He was to be the President who, above all Presidents save Lincoln, codified compassion, the President who wrote mercy and justice into the statute books by which America was governed.
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 113