Master of the Senate (86 page)

Amazing, and, in Elizabeth Rowe’s
word, fun.

Lyndon Johnson’s sentences were the sentences of a man with a remarkable gift for words, not long words but evocative, of a man with a remarkable gift for images, homey images of a vividness that infused the sentences with drama. A special interest group—organized labor in Texas, say—was never merely weak, it was “not much stronger than a popcorn fart.” In the Johnsonian lexicon, a House-Senate joint committee was not merely a meaningless legislative exercise; “Hell,” he would say, “a joint committee’s as useless as tits on a bull.” About a Republican senator expounding on NATO, he said, “He doesn’t know any more about NATO than an old maid does about fucking.” He would say that one man was “as wise as a tree full of owls,” that another was “as busy as a man with one hoe and two rattlesnakes.” Glancing out the window of 231, he would say, “It’s raining as hard as a cat pissing on a flat rock.” Ridiculing a Republican senator who thought he was making a national reputation with his expertise on economics, he said, “Making a speech on economics is a lot like pissing down your leg. It may seem hot to you, but it never does to anyone else.”

And, of course, the sentences would often be strung together in stories, many of them set in the Hill Country. They were about drunks, and about preachers—there was one about the preacher who at a rural revival meeting was baptizing converts in a creek near Johnson City and became overenthusiastic. One teenage boy was immersed for quite a long time, and when his head was lifted out of the water, one of the congregation called out from the creek bank, “Do you believe?” The boy said, “I believe,” and the preacher promptly put his head under again. Again, when he emerged, someone shouted out, “Do you believe?” and again the boy said, gasping this time, “I believe.” Down he went again, and this time, when the preacher lifted his head up, someone shouted, “What do you believe?”

“I believe this son of a bitch is trying to drown me,” the boy said.

Then there was the preacher who became irritated because every time he came to Johnson City, one farmer would sit in the front row, promptly go to
sleep, and snore very loudly through the preacher’s sermon. “He finally got tired of it,” Johnson would say, “and decided to play a little joke on this farmer, and while he was sleeping, he said in a rather low voice, ‘All of you people who want to go to heaven, please stand,’ and everybody stood except the fellow in the front who was sleeping. And when they sat down, the preacher said in a very loud voice, ‘Now all of you folks that want to go to hell, please stand,’ and that stirred the fellow, and he waked up, and he heard the preacher say, ‘Please stand,’ so he jumped up, and he looked around and saw that no one else was standing with him, and he said, ‘Preacher, I don’t know what you’re voting on, but you and I seem to be the only two people for it.’”

And the stories were about himself. An unhappy childhood can be a novelist’s capital, and it was Lyndon Johnson’s capital, too. If he was as sensitive as a novelist in reading other men, he was as vivid as a novelist in depicting the hardships of his youth, in describing the blisters he got from chopping cotton (“The skin would come off your fingers like a glove,” he would say, seeming to peel off the skin from his fingers as he did so), or the Hill Country farm wives (“Those ol’ women—their faces jes’ like prunes from the sun”), or in talking about his family’s poverty. And he embellished his stories with a license so broad it might have been literary. “He frequently talked about the things that they didn’t have when he was a young boy,” George Smathers recalls. “They didn’t have firewood on certain occasions when they would get cold. I remember one time when we were in Florida and it suddenly turned cold. We were out on a boat and we couldn’t get warm, and I remember Johnson saying something to the effect that ‘I haven’t been this cold since I was a kid living back on the Pedernales.’ I said, ‘My God, did it get this cold?’ ‘Oh, sure it got this cold,’ but, he said, ‘the thing about it was we didn’t even have heat of any kind. We just had to huddle up around whatever firewood we could gather.’ He said, ‘That was pretty tough getting warm when six of you were trying to back up to one fire.’ He would talk about things like that.” No such scene had ever occurred in the Johnson home, poor though it was, but the description of it, and of other exaggerated scenes of his boyhood poverty, had the desired effect. It was, Smathers says, because of “things like that” that “I think he was very much inspired to lift himself and his family out of those conditions.”

And few novelists could have been more perceptive in their insights into human nature.

One afternoon in Johnson’s office he told a story about “the judge down in Texas during the Depression.”

“They called him up one night—this [state] senator did, and said, ‘Judge, we just abolished your court.’

“He said, ‘Well, why’d you abolish my court?’

“The senator said, ‘Well, we got to consolidate the courts for economy reasons, and yours was the last one created.’

“‘Well,’ he said, ‘you didn’t do it without a hearing, did you?’

“The senator said, ‘Yes, we had a hearing.’

“‘Well, who the devil would testify
my
court ought to be abolished?’

“‘Well,’ he said, ‘the head of the State Bar Association.’

“The judge said, ‘Let me tell you about the head of the State Bar Association. He’s a shyster lawyer, and his daddy ahead of him was.’”

At this point, the men listening to Lyndon Johnson started to smile, but he had only begun.

“‘Well, the mayor of the city came down and testified against you.’

“‘Well,’ the judge said, ‘let me tell you about that mayor. He stole his way into office. He padded the ballot boxes. He counted ’em twice. Who else testified?’

“‘Well,’ the senator said, ‘the banker.’

“‘Well, he’s been charging usurous rates jest like his daddy and his grand-daddy ahead of him did.’”

The men in Lyndon Johnson’s office would be laughing now, as he paused. Then he resumed. The state senator, he said, now told the judge, “‘Well, Judge, I don’t think we ought to talk any longer. You’re gettin’ your blood pressure up, and you’re all excited, and it’s late tonight. I just thought I’d tell you that the Legislature has adjourned. Somebody
did
offer an amendment to abolish your court, but we didn’t have a hearing—I was just kidding you—and nobody came down and testified against you at all. But I fought the amendment and killed it, and the bill’s gone to the Governor, and he’s signed it, and you’re safe, and I just thought I’d call you up and make you feel better.’ The judge said, ‘Thank you, Senator, but
why
did you make me say those
ugly
things about three of the best friends any man ever had?’” As Johnson leaned back in his chair, his feet up, his arm holding the glass out for a refill, his listeners would be roaring with laughter.

M
OST OF THE STORIES WERE
, of course, about politics. They were about political history, about scenes he had witnessed, or, to be more precise, that he said he had witnessed: about the scene in Sam Rayburn’s office when the call came that FDR was dead; about Huey Long, angered by the dirty campaign that the Arkansas political machine was waging in 1932 against elderly Hattie Caraway, the only woman senator at the time, shouting on the floor of the Senate (Johnson said he had seen this scene from the gallery), “I’m going down to Arkansas and pull those big bullies off that poor old woman’s neck.” Or they were about current political situations—he seemed to have a story apropos every one. Once a group of senators were talking about a colleague who might have had trouble winning re-election except that his opponent was as inept a campaigner as he was, and Johnson said, “That reminds me of the fellow down in Texas who says to his friend, ‘Earl, I am thinking about running for sheriff against Uncle Jim Wilson. What do you think?’ His friend says, ‘Well, it depends on which of you sees the most people. If you see the most, Uncle Jim will win. If he sees the most, you will win.’”

Johnson’s gift for mimicry made his listeners
see
the characters he was describing, Huey Long or Harry Truman or FDR; his big, ungainly frame brought to life his preachers and drunks and good-ol’-boy Hill Country ranchers. There was a natural rhythm in his words that drew his listeners into the story, caught them up in it, a rough rhetoric that nonetheless relied on devices such as parallel construction that might have been used by a highly educated orator, as well as the timing—unhurried, perfect—of a master narrator. And as Lyndon Johnson spoke, his face spoke, too, expressions chasing themselves across it with astonishing rapidity; his huge, mottled hands spoke, too, palms turned up in entreaty or down in dismissal, forefinger or fist punching the air for emphasis, hands and fingers not only punctuating the words but reinforcing them. He had what Busby called “the schoolteacher habit of laying his fingers down to make his points—one, two, three.” And, of course, his piercing dark eyes, those Bunton eyes, the eyes that the Hill Country said “talked”—they were speaking, too. His whole body spoke, with expressive posture and gestures; once, he was telling a few senators about a horrible embarrassment that had occurred to Bob Kerr, who maintained that he was a teetotaler, and whose political support in Oklahoma was indeed heavily dependent on the temperance vote in a largely dry state. Kerr, giving a barbecue in Washington, had had several steers butchered on his ranch and flown up to provide the meat, but a typographical error in the Associated Press dispatch on the event had informed Oklahomans that Kerr had had several “beers” flown up. And, as Johnson got to that point in the story, his face breaking into a wide grin, he threw up both arms and ducked behind them in a boxer’s defensive gesture against a big punch. Afternoon after afternoon, the staff in the outer office of Suite 231 would hear warm, delighted laughter from behind the closed door of Johnson’s private office. “People like to laugh, and he made the senators laugh,” Warren Woodward says. “So it was just natural that they liked Mr. Johnson.”

And Lyndon Johnson’s stories did more than merely charm his listeners. “I like to make points with jokes,” he would say, and he was very effective doing so, so effective that Evans and Novak were to speak of his “genius for analogy.” To emphasize the importance of the Democrats presenting their image as a compassionate party, he would tell a story that showed that the OOP’s image was quite different, saying that a Texan who needed a heart transplant was given his choice of three hearts: one from a healthy twenty-three-old skiing champion who had just been killed in an avalanche; one from a healthy twenty-year-old football player who had just died of a football injury. “Of course,” the surgeon added, “there’s also this seventy-nine-year-old Republican banker who’s just passed away.” The man thought a moment, and said he would take the banker’s heart. When the surgeon asked why, the man said, “I just wanted to make sure I was getting a heart that had never been used.”

D
URING THESE TWO YEARS
—1951 and 1952—Lyndon Johnson was trying to make something out of nothing in Texas, too. He was trying to make the Pedernales Valley “Johnson Country” again.

There was a lot of Johnson sweat in that valley—and a lot of Johnson tears. In the 1860s and ’70s, the Johnson Ranch had been the largest on the Pedernales, and indeed the largest in that whole area of central Texas, its corrals stretching for miles along the northern bank of the little river. The original Johnson brothers, Sam Ealy and Tom, who had ridden into the Hill Country determined to make themselves “the richest men in Texas,” had seemed for a while on the way to realizing that goal, driving huge herds north to Abilene and returning with their saddlebags filled with gold, with which they assembled even larger herds and bought land not only along the Pedernales but in Austin and Fredericksburg as well. But the last of those drives had been three-quarters of a century before. Sam and Tom were Johnsons—romantics, unbusinesslike and impractical, dreamers of big dreams, dreamers unwilling to be bothered with details, and in the Hill Country’s opinion, too “soft” for that hard land. In a very short period of time—two or three years of cattle-killing drought, Comanche horse-stealing raids, and disastrously unlucky cattle drives—they had lost everything. Tom died in 1877, according to family legend flat broke. Sam had married a Bunton, and that saved him from his brother’s fate. Eliza Bunton was a tall woman with “raven hair, piercing black eyes and magnolia-white skin” who was not only one of the very few women to ride on the long cattle drives north through Indian territory but who rode, rifle in hand, out ahead of the herd to scout. She was known for the canny bargaining with which she sold her eggs and chickens, and for an expression she was given to repeating, an expression that might have been the Buntons’ motto: “Charity begins at home.” In 1887 Eliza and Sam Ealy had scraped together enough money to move back to their beloved Pedernales, to a 433-acre tract, on which they raised a few cows but mostly cotton, near the land that had once been the Johnson
Ranch. In August, 1907, their eldest son, Sam Ealy Johnson Jr., had brought his bride, Rebekah Baines of Fredericksburg, to this new “Johnson Ranch,” to a little “dog-run” cabin, two boxlike rooms on either side of a breezeway—not far from his parents’ house. Their first child, Lyndon, was born there a year later, and the family lived there until 1913, when they moved fourteen miles down the river into Johnson City, an “island town” cut off from the rest of the world, a tiny huddle of houses in the midst of a vast and empty landscape. Sam Ealy Jr., the idealist and romantic—in the Hill Country’s opinion too much a Johnson with not enough of the tough Bunton practicality—dreamed of expanding this holding, of re-creating the great “Johnson Ranch.” When his parents died, their other children wanted to sell the 433 acres, for which they had been offered a good price, but Sam Jr. wouldn’t hear of selling the family heritage, and to keep it in the family, to keep his dream alive, he outbid a wealthy in-law, paying far too much for the property, and in 1919 moved back to his parents’ house, planning to raise cotton for a few years and then to start up a herd again. But in that valley the reality was the soil, which wasn’t as fertile as Sam Ealy guessed it was, not fertile enough to support cotton or cattle, and the reality was the weather, which didn’t produce enough rainfall to support either. And cotton prices fell instead of staying high, as he had been sure they would. During the years in which Lyndon was twelve and thirteen and fourteen years old, his father was going broke on the Pedernales. These were the years during which, Lyndon was to say, his family fell so rapidly “from the A’s to the F’s”—during which the Johnsons “dropped to the bottom of the heap.” His father lost the 433 acres in 1922 and fell into debt so deep that he would never be able to pay it off; he and Rebekah, and their five children—Lyndon, his younger brother, Sam Houston Johnson, and three sisters—moved back to Johnson City, into a house which he was able to keep only because his brothers, out of charity, paid the interest on the mortgage. During the intervening years, there was no Johnson Ranch on the Pedernales. When Lyndon and Lady Bird were in Texas, they lived in Austin, in a house on Dillman Street.