Master of the Senate (89 page)

The complexity of the relationship between Lyndon Johnson and his mother would be demonstrated for the rest of his life; during the twenty years until she died of cancer in 1958, he would help support her, adding monthly payments to the income she received from Social Security and renting the Johnson City house, but except for very rare occasions, he wouldn’t write her; if, during his youth, there had been a steady stream of letters between them—his desperate for encouragement and reassurance, hers providing them with an unstinting hand—during the years since he had first gone to Washington in 1931, the correspondence continued, but with one difference: while his mother was still writing him (“I have been highly incensed all day over Drew Pearson’s hateful thrust…. Courage and forthrightness are synonomous with your name”; “You are a fighter, darling, you have right on your side; you are doing a
wonderful selfless task for your government and for humanity, so keep up a brave heart, my wonderful son, right will triumph again! My dearest love, Mother”), he wasn’t writing her; almost all the letters—hundreds of letters—signed by him were written by members of his staff, for a while by Herbert Henderson, for a while by Walter Jenkins, for some years by Gene Latimer. “He used to say, ‘Write two long pages. Put in a lot of bull. Just fill it up with everything that happened this week,’” Latimer recalls. Unlike his other correspondence, these letters were not letters he read, corrected, and sent back to a staffer for rewriting; “He never sent any back that I remember,” Latimer says, and during his Senate years, after Latimer and Jenkins had learned to duplicate his signature, they were often letters he didn’t even sign. The staff was conscientious about this chore (“Next Sunday is Mother’s Day. Shall I wire her a greeting? ‘… Darling: Mother’s Day just one of three sixty-five I give thanks for you annually. Lyndon’”), but it was one in which he seemed to have very little interest. That he saw as much of her as he did was largely due to Lady Bird. Rebekah had been very hurt that her son’s wedding had been so hastily arranged that she was not invited to it, but Lady Bird understood her (“She was a college graduate and accustomed to more luxuries than she had living out there on a farm, where the going was rough”), and the two women had similar interests; when Lyndon’s mother came to Washington (the invitations were often issued by Lady Bird), the two women would visit antique shops and go “kinship hunting” in Virginia and Maryland. “We would case the county seat for a good place to have lunch, and spot the antique shops, before heading into the big old courthouse” to examine birth and marriage certificates, Lady Bird would say. The two women became friends. “I
liked
her so much,” Lady Bird was to say. “If I had an extra hour in Austin before I had to catch a plane or train to Washington, I would think of all the friends I could call, but I usually decided I would rather go and see Mrs. Johnson. We would sit together and talk about books, about household decorating, about family. We were very good friends, and that is probably better than loving one’s in-laws.” Lyndon’s mother often stayed overnight at the big white ranch house. Visitors from Washington, meeting the gracious, white-haired woman and seeing the affection with which she treated her grandchildren, and the rapport between her and her daughter-in-law, had a hard time understanding why, when she was around, her normally loquacious son sometimes fell into such long silences.

H
IS THREE SISTERS
and his brother were sometimes at the ranch, too.

All four had a nervousness, a fragility of temperament, that was striking to people who met them as adults. Three of them—Sam Houston Johnson and his two oldest sisters, Rebekah and Josefa—developed serious ulcers while they were in their early thirties.

Two of them—Rebekah and Lucia—were to live relatively stable lives.
Rebekah was a tense, high-strung woman; by 1950, her mother, writing about her to Lyndon, would describe her health as “highly precarious.” She married Oscar Price Bobbitt, who went to work for the Johnson radio station as a salesman and eventually rose to be senior vice president of the Johnson television station. Lucia married Birge Alexander, who became area manager of the Federal Aviation Agency in Memphis.

The lives of the other two Johnson children were quite different. While Josefa, who was born in 1912, was still an undergraduate at San Marcos, bright, tall and strikingly beautiful, stories about what the Hill Country calls her “looseness” or “wildness” in sexual matters began to spread, and continued to spread after college. So did tales of her drunkenness; Arthur Stehling, the powerful Fredericksburg attorney who kept Gillespie County in line for Lyndon Johnson, was called on more than once to intercede after she had been brought to a sheriff’s office or police station in some small Hill Country town because of complaints about a drunken party in a hotel or motel. She was married to an Army lieutenant colonel in 1940, and Lyndon got her a job with the Texas NYA, but the job didn’t work out—that year Lyndon wrote to his mother that if Josefa refused to learn to type, other arrangements would have to be made—and neither did the marriage; by 1945, she was divorced, and more than once Horace Busby, who in 1948 was delegated to “deal with” the “Josefa situation,” had to deal with the fact that she was in a hospital alcoholic ward. Fascinated by politics, she worked in Lyndon’s 1948 senatorial campaign, and on the Texas Democratic Executive Committee in the 1952 presidential race, and the kind of stories that had followed her at San Marcos reemerged. Says a woman reporter who watched her at conventions and executive committee meetings in those years, “If there was a man to be picked up, Josefa picked him up.” The Josefa Johnson who came to the LBJ Ranch in 1951 and 1952 was a woman with trembling hands and few traces of her former beauty, and what Horace Busby was to call “a frighteningly low opinion of herself; when someone important came into the room, sometimes she would jump up and run out as if she felt they didn’t want to be bothered talking to her.”

During their boyhood, there had been a great closeness between Lyndon Johnson and Sam Houston Johnson, five years younger than he, who would say that he would never forget “those wonderful conversations (monologues, really) that ran through the long Saturday afternoons and Sundays” when he would visit his big brother at San Marcos, and would sit “listening with wide-eyed admiration as my brother” talked of his political stratagems—“even now, I can still visualize him restlessly moving back and forth … his eyes gleaming with anticipation and his deep voice tense with emotion.” This idolatry lasted into adulthood. “He worships you and will do anything for you,” their mother wrote Lyndon in 1937. “You are his hero.” But there was also a great competitiveness, and this, too, lasted into adulthood. Six-foot-one, very handsome and very charming, with a crooked, engaging grin, Sam Houston seemed to some
friends to have a brilliant mind (Bill Deason says, “He was smarter ’n Lyndon in some respects”), particularly about politics, a field in which Sam Houston had the same ability Lyndon had—Sam Houston said they both got it from their father—to see several moves ahead on the political chessboard. “More than any man I have ever known he loved politics for its own sake,” Booth Mooney was to write. “His greatest pleasure was to set up intricate, devious schemes for bringing about the discomfiture of any Texas or Washington politician who dared to oppose his brother.” Graduating from San Marcos at fifteen, he received a law degree from Cumberland College in Lebanon, Tennessee, at nineteen, and it seemed for a while as if he would follow in his brother’s footsteps: when in 1935 Lyndon left his job as Richard Kleberg’s chief assistant to become Texas NYA director, he persuaded the Congressman to hire Sam Houston to succeed him.

But what Sam Houston made of that position was very different from what Lyndon had made of it. He loved to party, loved to drink, and to grandiosely pick up the check when he was out with friends. And he was always buying expensive clothes, for which he couldn’t pay. So that he would have more money, the indulgent Kleberg had him put on the payroll of his family’s King Ranch as a public relations consultant, but Sam used the money to rent an expensive apartment and hire a valet, and his debts only increased. In addition to his own money problems, Sam Houston was creating some for Kleberg. Says Russell Brown, who was a friend of both men, “He didn’t pay much attention to office business. Bills would come in, and instead of methodically compiling them and getting them paid like Lyndon used to do, he would throw them away…. He stopped paying anybody.” A school board in Kleberg’s congressional district actually filed suit to force the Congressman to pay unpaid school taxes. To cover his own debts, Sam started to write checks that bounced, one, to a custom tailor in Washington, for quite a substantial amount.

Sam Houston tried but failed to become Speaker of the Little Congress, as Lyndon had been. When he lost the election, he and some friends devised an amendment to the organization’s bylaws that gave “power over all social functions” to a five-man committee, which elected him chairman. He then organized a trip to New York for the organization’s members, obtaining free train tickets from one lobbyist, and liquor from another. The staffers nonetheless ran up bills at New York hotels so high that they couldn’t pay them, and a scandal that would have had repercussions for the staffers’ congressional bosses was only narrowly averted. The money situation within Kleberg’s office started to get uglier; there was at least one tailor’s bill, for two hundred dollars, that Sam Houston had the Congressman pay—although some members of the Kleberg family felt the bill was for one of Sam Houston’s suits. And he became involved in an angry dispute over some sexual liaison in the office—the details have been lost in time—that infuriated Kleberg’s wife. Sam left Kleberg’s office for a post—also arranged by Lyndon—as a regional director for the
NYA. But the same pattern—of drinking (Sam once spoke of waking up almost every morning in an “alcoholic haze”) and debts and office romances that all seemed to end unpleasantly—repeated itself. Criminal charges were threatened by creditors who had gotten the bad checks. By 1940, Alvin Wirtz, then Undersecretary of the Interior, was trying to procure a job for Sam with the Federal Housing Administration in Puerto Rico to get him far enough away so that he could no longer embarrass Lyndon. “When [the proposed appointment] was announced in the paper, … his creditors began really protesting, and he didn’t get the position,” Brown recalls. (“Amusingly enough,” Brown says, “he said he had made a terrible mistake giving those hot checks. He should just have charged things and not paid for them, then he couldn’t have gotten into any trouble. They could just sue him but they couldn’t bring criminal charges against him. But with the hot checks they could file criminal charges.”) Sam was married that year, to Albertine Summers, a secretary to an Illinois congressman, and had two children, Josefa in 1941 and Sam in 1942, but there was soon a divorce—Albertine remarried—and he seemed to feel little responsibility for the children; in 1956 young Sam was watching the Democratic National Convention when the camera focused on a box reserved for Lyndon Johnson’s family; Sam Houston was pointed out to the boy; it was the first time he had seen his father since infancy.

After the war, Lyndon gave Sam Houston a job (“I was just a flunky,” he was to say) in his congressional office, but the drinking and irresponsibility had grown worse, and he would disappear for weeks at a time on drunken sprees. He had an affair with one of his brother’s secretaries, and in April, 1948, in Biloxi, Mississippi, they had an illegitimate child, a boy who would be named Rodney. The parents had intended to put Rodney up for adoption at birth (“the 1948 campaign was coming up, and he [Sam Houston] was afraid someone would find about me,” Rodney was to say), but his aunt Josefa, who was unable to bear children, said she wanted to adopt him, and she did. The Johnson family tried to conceal (not only from outsiders but from their mother) the fact that Josefa’s adopted baby was actually Sam’s child, but, as Rodney was to say, “I looked so much like Sam Houston that there was no concealing it”; at one family Christmas celebration, Cousin Oreole made the parentage clear even to Rebekah Baines Johnson when she said, pointing at Rodney, “Well, that’s the Bunton in the family right there.” (Rodney would die of AIDS in 1989.)

When Johnson was elected to the Senate, he put Sam Houston on his staff, but again, as Sam complained, “I was still just a flunky in Lyndon’s office.” His desk was just inside the front door, next to the receptionist’s, not in the room behind it, in which Connally, Busby, and Jenkins sat. He went to Mexico, disappeared for months and came back terribly thin; at one point he weighed only 120 pounds. Meeting him for the first time, Booth Mooney found himself looking at a man who was “so much like a shrunken version of the Senator that I would have known who he was even if he had not referred early and often in
that initial conversation to ‘my brother….’” His health had broken; his ulcer seemed never to heal; he kept drinking. About the time that Lyndon and Lady Bird were buying the ranch, Sam Houston was in and out of hospitals, sometimes for treatment of alcoholism, sometimes for what appear to have been nervous breakdowns. “It was a great relief to learn that Sam Houston is under hospital care,” Rebekah Baines Johnson wrote Lyndon once. “I am so glad you put him where he can rebuild his shattered nerves.”

When Sam Houston wasn’t in a hospital, he was often at the new Johnson Ranch. Josefa, who had moved back to Fredericksburg, was often there, too, along with Rodney. So when Lyndon was there, so was his sister, about whom all the stories were told, so was his gaunt, hollow-cheeked, sunken-eyed brother, and so was his brother’s illegitimate son. The Hill Country was religious country—hard-shell, hellfire, revivalist, Fundamentalist, Old Testament religious. No drinking at all was allowed. “Sneaking a beer by Jesus is like trying to sneak daylight by a rooster,” one of Lyndon Johnson’s high-school classmates, John Dollahite, would explain. The fierceness of the region’s prejudices and the rigidity of its intolerance led one of Johnson City’s more enlightened residents, Stella Gliddon, to call it “almost a Puritan town.” Sam Ealy Johnson, Lyndon’s father, had never been a drunk, but he did like a drink, and these good people had known what would come of that. Sam Ealy “was nothing but a drunkard,” Dollahite says. “Always was.” Sam Houston’s drinking, and Josefa’s—and the other things that decent people didn’t mention—were staples of Hill Country conversation now, and Lyndon Johnson, child of the Hill Country, knew it, and knew what the Hill Country must be saying. He knew that the Hill Country, in a sneer at the Johnsons’ attempts at respectability, was calling Rodney “Little Sam Houston.” And to the Hill Country ranchers, breeding was significant, of course. During Lyndon Johnson’s youth, he had had to live with the fact that as “a Johnson” he was regarded as a member of a shiftless, no-account clan; “I don’t want you getting mixed up with those people,” the father of Carol Davis, the girl he had wanted to marry at college, had told her. Lyndon Johnson’s home now was big, gracious and gleaming white. But it was as filled with shadows as if it had been a dog-run, and relaxing there was very hard. He arose even earlier than he did in Washington; during his first years on the ranch, the rural route carrier delivered the mail to his mailbox—it was across the river, up toward Stonewall—about six-thirty, and not long thereafter Johnson would drive across the “low-water” dam and down the dirt road to pick it up; sometimes he would be waiting at the mailbox when the mailman drove up. Waking up early was, of course, routine in the country, where people went to bed early, but while Lyndon Johnson went to bed early, he didn’t sleep any better than he did in Washington, as Mary Rather realized the first time she stayed the night at the ranch. Sometime during the night, hearing a noise outside, she looked out her window. For a few moments, she couldn’t see anything in the darkness. And then she saw a tiny red glow; it brightened and faded. It was the glow of
a cigarette—her boss’s cigarette. Lyndon Johnson was standing there in front of his house, smoking. “He didn’t sleep very well there either,” Ms. Rather was to say. There were, in the Hill Country as on Capitol Hill, still the terrible rages, sometimes over things whose significance to him his assistants couldn’t understand, like a coil of barbed wire left near the bottom of a tree (“That’s bad ranching,” he snarled at a ranch hand who had left it there. “You don’t want a cow to get tangled up in that. That’s
bad ranching!
What do you think—that I spend all this money on cows so you can give them blood poisoning, you——”) or an irrigation line running when it shouldn’t be (“You know that line’s uncapped out there? You’re washing my soil away out there! Get on it!”). There was as much urgency in Texas as in Washington; Lady Bird had filled the living room with antiques; he filled it with telephones and typewriters. A second line was run into the house, and then a third; telephones were installed in almost every room; visitors were constantly tripping over the wires. He had his desk in the living room, and now a bridge table was set up for a secretary to work at, and then a second bridge table, for a second secretary. And the telephones were snatched out of their hands as if they were all still back together in SOB 231. The wristwatch alarm was always going off to remind him of a call he wanted to make or was expecting to receive.