LYNDON JOHNSON WAS ABLE to win these victories, to become this champion, in part because of where he came from.
Texas was in the South—one of the eleven Confederate states—but in a crucial respect, the Texas Hill Country wasn’t southern. Because rainfall sufficient to grow cotton petered out just before its eastern edge, little cotton was grown there, and there were very few Negroes there—none at all in Johnson City. “There were no ‘darkies’ or plantations in the arid Hill Country where I grew up,” Johnson was to recall. “I never sat on my parents’ or grandparents’ knees listening to nostalgic tales of the antebellum South.” This was not to say that the Hill Country wasn’t part of the South. “In Stonewall and Johnson City I never was a part of the Old Confederacy,” he was to say. “But I was part of Texas…. And Texas is a part of the South…. That Southern heritage meant a great deal to me.” Southern racial attitudes existed in the Hill Country—the word “nigger” was in common use—but with few Negroes to focus on, or to pose a threat, the attitudes were more casual than in the rest of the South; the atmosphere in which Lyndon Johnson was raised was not steeped in racism, and neither was he. He never exhibited, in word or deed, the visceral revulsion that southern racists like Bilbo and Eastland displayed at the very thought of Negroes and whites mingling together in social situations, or at work, or at the thought of them having sexual intercourse together or of racial intermarriage; never exhibited the conviction of a Richard Russell that “mongrelization” would lead to the end of civilization. Lyndon Johnson’s use of words like “nigger” and “boy” to hurt or intimidate was primarily an example of the way the lash that was his tongue sought out the most vulnerable spot in everyone, not just blacks: in using those words, Lyndon Johnson was guilty less of racism than of cruelty. At least once, in fact, dealing with an African-American employee, he used these epithets, and the pain they caused, in a different way, to teach the employee the lesson Johnson felt everyone had to learn, a lesson Johnson felt would lead to an improvement in the employee’s life: that it was necessary to accept reality, to face harsh facts and push beyond them, to be pragmatic, which in the employee’s case meant to accept that he would always be the target of these epithets, would always be the target of prejudice, and that he had to accept that fact—because only by accepting it could he move beyond prejudice and achieve his ambitions.
The employee, a native of Wichita Falls, Texas, Robert Parker, was, indeed, ambitious. He would, during the 1960s, become maitre d’ of the Senate Dining Room. During the 1940s and 1950s he was one of Johnson’s “patronage” employees, holding down a Johnson-arranged job as a District of Columbia postman and being paid by the Post Office Department while earning his patronage by serving without pay as bartender and waiter at Johnson’s parties, and, after Johnson acquired the use of the Democratic Leader’s limousine, filling in as his chauffeur when Johnson’s regular driver, Norman Edwards, had a day off.
“Yet for years,” Parker would write in his autobiography, Capitol Hill in Black and White, Johnson “called me ‘boy,’ ‘nigger,’ or ‘chief,’ never by my name….” Parker felt there were political reasons that could explain Johnson’s use of these terms in public. “He especially liked to call me nigger in front of southerners and racists like Richard Russell,” he was to write. “It was … LBJ’s way of being one of the boys,” and once, when “we were alone,” Johnson “softened a bit” and said, “I can’t be too easy with you. I don’t want to be called a nigger-lover.” But Johnson also used those terms in private. “Whenever I was late, no matter what the reason, Johnson called me a lazy, good-for-nothing nigger,” Parker wrote. And there was an incident that occurred one morning in Johnson’s limousine while Parker was driving him from his Thirtieth Place house to the Capitol. Johnson, who had been reading a newspaper in the back seat, “suddenly…lowered the newspaper and leaned forward,” and said, “‘Chief, does it bother you when people don’t call you by name?’”
Parker was to recall that “I answered cautiously but honestly, ‘Well, sir, I do wonder. My name is Robert Parker.’” And that was evidently not an answer acceptable to Johnson. “Johnson slammed the paper onto the seat as if he was slapping my face. He leaned close to my ear. ‘Let me tell you one thing, nigger,’ he shouted. ‘As long as you are black, and you’re gonna be black till the day you die, no one’s gonna call you by your goddamn name. So no matter what you are called, nigger, you just let it roll off your back like water, and you’ll make it. Just pretend you’re a goddamn piece of furniture.’”
Parker found that incident in Johnson’s limousine difficult to explain—or forgive. Years later, as he stood beside Lyndon Johnson’s grave thinking of all Johnson had done for his people, Parker would say he was “swirling with mixed emotions.” Lyndon Johnson, he would write, had rammed through Congress “the most important civil rights laws this country has ever seen or dreamed possible.” Because of those laws, Parker would write, he felt, at last, like a free man. “I owed that freedom to him…. I loved the Lyndon Johnson who made them possible.” But remembering the scene in the limousine—and many other scenes—Parker was to write that on the whole working for Johnson was “a painful experience. Although I was grateful to him for getting me a job … I was afraid of him because of the pain and humiliation he could inflict at a moment’s notice. I thought I had learned to fight my bitterness and anger inside…. But Johnson made it hard to keep the waves of bitterness inside…. But I had to swallow or quit. If I quit, how would I support my family? I chose survival and learned to swallow with a smile.” And, Parker would write, “I hated that Lyndon Johnson.” The words Johnson shouted from the back seat in the limousine that day—“As long as you are black, and you’re gonna be black till the day you die, no one’s gonna call you by your goddamn name”—those words, Parker was to write, “stuck in my belly like a fishhook for thirty years until I almost believed them.” Yet that lesson Parker learned—that he had “to swallow” in order to get ahead—was taught to him in part by the man who shouted in his ear, “Let it roll off your back like water, and you’ll make it. Just pretend you’re a goddamn piece of furniture.”
Lyndon Johnson was able to win these victories in part because of empathy—a deep sense of identification with the poor, including the dark-skinned poor; he understood their thoughts and emotions said felt their thoughts and emotions as if they were his own. And this was not surprising, for in a way they were his own. His empathy was deeply rooted in his personal experience, in blisters and sunburn and windburn and humiliation.
This empathy was also a product of the place from which he came. Because there were so few Negroes or Mexicans in the Hill Country and no money in that impoverished land to import Negroes or Mexicans to work the crops, when one of the few farmers who grew cotton needed it chopped or picked, “there wasn’t any Mexicans or niggers to do it,” as Lyndon’s friend Otto Crider was to recall, “so everybody, including the kids, went out to do it,” and one of the kids doing this work they called “nigger work” was young Lyndon Johnson.
One Texas chronicler was to call cotton “a man-killing crop.” Chopping it—thinning out the rows by hacking out every other plant with a hoe—is hard, and when picking time comes, the pickers strap on kneepads and hang long burlap sacks around their necks, and all day long, from before daybreak until dark, under that broiling Hill Country sun, they stoop and crawl along the cotton rows, dragging after them the sacks that grow heavier and heavier as they are filled with the cotton bolls. After just one day of this work, even a young man, even a boy, has trouble straightening his back at night, and even work-hardened hands are raw and bleeding from the sharp-pointed cotton hulls. Lyndon Johnson’s hands never became hardened; his soft white Bunton skin refused to callus but only blistered, one blister forming on top of another. Nonetheless, at the age of nine and ten, Lyndon Johnson was doing this work, out in the stony Hill Country cotton fields on his hands and knees, dragging the sack behind him. His older cousin Ava, who
often worked beside him, remembers him whispering to her, “Boy, there’s got to be a better way to make a living than this. There’s got to be a better way.”
When he was seventeen or eighteen, moreover, Lyndon Johnson worked on a Texas State Highway Department “road gang,” gravel-topping stretches of the road between Johnson City and Austin. The workers on most such road gangs were Negroes or Mexicans; the work was brutally hard and the pay was only two dollars a day. This particular gang was all white, but the work it was doing was nonetheless “nigger work.” At times, he would be half of a pick-and-shovel team, working with Otto Crider’s brawny brother Ben. “He’d use the shovel and scoop the dirt up”—that hard Hill Country limestone caliche—“and I’d use the pick[ax] and pick it up, or vice versa,” Ben recalls, and, he recalls, that work was “too heavy” for the skinny, ungainly teenager. At other times, Lyndon “drove” a “fresno,” a heavy, two-handled iron scoop pulled by two mules. “Driving” a fresno meant standing behind the scoop, between its handles, with a hand on each handle. Since the driver didn’t have a hand free, the reins were tied together and wrapped around his back, so that he and the mules were, really, in harness together. Lyndon would have to lift the handles of the heavy scoop, jam its front edge into the hard ground, and push hard to force the scoop through the rocky soil, as the mules pulled. When the scoop was filled with earth and stones, he would have to press down on the handles, straining with the effort, until the scoop rose off the ground. Then, still pressing on the handles as hard as he could, the reins still cutting into his back, he would have to drive the mules to the spot where he could dump the heavy load. “This, for a boy of…seventeen, was backbreaking labor,” Crider says. In summer, working in the unshaded hills under that merciless Hill Country sun was almost unbearable, and the laborers worked with their noses and mouths filled with the dried soil the wind whipped into their faces. Winters could be so cold that the men had to thaw out their hands around a fire before they could handle their picks and shovels. Lyndon Johnson worked on that road gang for almost a year. All his life, he would hate the very thought of physical labor, and he never forgot what cotton picking and road-gang work—that “nigger work”—was like. Harry McPherson, who went to work for Lyndon Johnson in 1956, would comment that his new boss “did not pretend, as many Southerners did, that Negroes ‘really enjoyed’ the southern way of life,” and that he didn’t “romanticize” that life, including the menial work that was part of it. How could Lyndon Johnson have romanticized that work? He had done it.
But Lyndon Johnson’s empathy for the poor and the dark-skinned came not from experience alone but also from insight. It was rare insight, provided by rare ability: his ability to read people so deeply, to look so deeply into their hearts and see so truly what they were feeling that he could feel what they were feeling—and could therefore put himself in their place.
During the first twenty years of his life, he had little contact with people whose skins were not white, but he spent his twenty-first year—from September, 1928, through June, 1929—teaching them, at the “Mexican school” in the little town of Cotulla on the flat, barren plains of the South Texas brush country.
There he saw into his pupils’ lives. When “lunch hour” came, he saw that the children had no lunch, and were hungry. He went to visit their homes—on the “wrong” side of the tracks of the Missouri-Pacific Railroad that divided Cotulla into Anglo and Mexican sections—and saw the tiny, unpainted, tin-roofed, crumbling hovels, with neither electricity nor running water, in which they lived. (Lyndon himself lived that year on the “Anglo” side of the tracks but in accommodations only marginally better: a room he shared with another, older boarder, in a small, shabby house on stilts next to the railroad tracks; at night he would be kept awake by the rumble of the long trains that passed endlessly, carrying bawling cattle up from Laredo.) He learned the slave wages that his pupils’ fathers were being paid by Anglo farmers.
And he saw into his pupils’ hearts. “I saw hunger in their eyes and pain in their bodies,” Lyndon Johnson would say years later. “Those little brown bodies had so little and needed so much.” He saw hunger and pain—and he saw more. “I could never forget seeing the disappointment in their eyes and seeing the quizzical expression on their faces—all the time they seemed to be asking me, ‘Why don’t people like me? Why do they hate me because I am brown?’”
And his own heart went out to them. Out of the insight came indignation—Cotulla’s Anglos treated the Mexicans “just worse than you’d treat a dog,” he was to say, and he was snarling as he said it. After the cotton fields, after the road gang, after Cotulla, there would be present amid the violently contrasting and clashing elements of Lyndon Johnson’s personality one element that was as vivid and as deep as the cruelty, no matter how opposite it might be—an understanding of and sympathy for the poor, particularly for the poor whose skins were dark; a tenderness for them, a compassion for the very people to whom at other times he could be so callous.
Understanding the conditions of the children’s lives, he understood the impact of those conditions. Even his most diligent students were often absent, and he knew why; all his life, he would recall lying in his room before daylight and hearing truck motors and knowing that the trucks were “hauling the kids off … to a beet patch or a cotton patch in the middle of the school year, and give them only two or three months schooling.”
And because he understood that, the prejudices he had against Mexican-Americans, as with the prejudices he held against black Americans, while he expressed them in racial terms, were stereotypes less of race than of culture and class. His view of the characteristics that he thought he saw in blacks and Mexican-Americans—laziness and a predisposition to violence, for example—was very different from the view of southern racists, for unlike them, Lyndon Johnson did not feel that these characteristics were due to some innate, ineradicable defects in their genes expressed in the color of their skin. He believed that they were a product of the lack of education and opportunity with which America had shackled them, and that if that situation were changed, they would be changed: that if people of color were freed from these shackles, they would, in every way, be fundamentally the same as people whose skins were white. He often expressed this belief, often with his customary coarseness. In 1964, he told a Texas friend: “I’m gonna try to teach these Nigras that don’t know anything how to work for themselves instead of just breedin’; I’m gonna try to teach these Mexicans who can’t talk English to learn it so they can work for themselves…and get off of our taxpayers’ back.” The racists in 8-F were wrong about Lyndon Johnson, as wrong as the southern racists whose support he needed on Capitol Hill.
The clearest proof of the genuineness of his feeling that the stereotypical view of minorities would be changed if the circumstances of their lives were changed was how hard he tried, as a twenty-one-year-old schoolteacher, to change the circumstances of those Mexican-American children with whom he came in contact. He tried very hard. He was filled with a need to help. He had taken the teaching job only as a means of earning enough money to finish college, but he became a teacher such as Cotulla had never seen, not only arguing the school board into providing equipment so that his pupils could play games during recess but arranging for games with other schools—baseball games and track meets like the white kids had—and since the board declined to pay for buses to transport his kids to the meets, climbing hovels’ rickety porches to persuade men to whom every day’s work was precious to drive the children in their cars.
As I wrote in The Path to Power, “No teacher had ever really cared if the Mexicans learned or not. This teacher cared.” He arrived at school early and stayed late. “If we hadn’t done our homework, we had to stay after school,” one of his students was to recall—and no matter how long that took, their teacher stayed with them. Insisting that they speak English, he not only handed out spankings to boys who lapsed into Spanish but, to give boys and girls practice in spe
aking English in front of audiences, he formed the school’s first debating team.
He tried to inspire them. “I was determined to spark something inside them, to fill their souls with ambition and interest and belief in the future,” he was to say. Recalls another student: “He used to tell us this country was so free that anyone could become President who was willing to work hard enough.” He told them a story—“the little baby in the cradle,” as a student would call it. “He would tell us that one day we might say the baby would be a teacher. Maybe the next day we’d say the baby would be a doctor. And one day we might say the baby—any baby—might grow up to be President of the United States.”
And the passion of Lyndon Johnson was not limited by the job. Telling the school janitor, Thomas Coronado, that he should learn English, he bought Coronado a textbook to learn it from; before school opened and after it closed, he sat on the steps outside the school with him, tutoring him. “After I had learned the letters, I would spell a word in English. Johnson would then pronounce it, and I would repeat.” The tutoring, Johnson made clear, must not interfere with Coronado’s responsibilities. “He made it very clear to me that he wanted the school building to be clean at all times…. He seemed to have a passion to see that everything was done that should be done—and that it was done right.”
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 114