The Path to Power (15 page)

“He was a very brilliant young man,” Ben Crider says. “The boys his age just wasn’t his class mentally.” And, some of the older boys felt, neither were they. They let Lyndon play poker with them, and—his father had taught him how to play—he more than held his own. The older boys saw that he talked—and thought—faster than they did. Ben and the others stood guiltily tongue-tied when the owner of the land on which they had earlier that day illegally shot and killed a baby deer—one whose antlers had not yet grown any “points”—suddenly appeared and asked them if they had shot any deer, but Lyndon said they sure had—a big “five-pointer”—and made up an elaborate story which cooled the owner’s suspicions.

It was, in fact, more a case of his
insisting
on leading them. When the older boys were discussing what they wanted to do that day, Lyndon always had a suggestion, and, surprisingly often, he persuaded them to go along with it. “Lyndon Johnson was a natural born leader,” Ben Crider would say. “… And if he couldn’t lead, he didn’t care much about playing, it seemed like.” “Lyndon was a good boy, but he was overpowering if he didn’t get his own way,” says another of the older boys, Bob Edwards. “He had a baseball, and the rest of us didn’t have one. We were all very poor. None of us had a ball but him. Well, Lyndon wanted to pitch. He wasn’t worth a darn as a pitcher, but if we didn’t let him pitch, he’d take his ball and go home. So, yeah, we’d let him pitch.”

H
E DIDN’T HANG AROUND
only with boys. As he grew older—nine or ten—he started to give shoeshines in Cecil Maddox’s barbershop across from the new courthouse, not only, his friends believe, to earn money, but because the barbershop was the place where men gathered. “Lyndon always had to be in on everything,” Emmette Redford says. “Every time someone came to town—a drummer, a politician running for something, whatever—Lyndon was there quicker than anyone could be, and invariably he was in the front row, right in front of the fellow. And, of course, the barbershop
was the center of gossip and talk.” The men delighted in asking Lyndon questions, because, as Stella Gliddon put it, they liked the way that “He just shot the answers right back at them.” And it wasn’t only boys that he tried to lead. By the time he was ten or eleven, his father, embarrassed to have a son doing such work, had made him stop giving shines, but he still spent a lot of time in the barbershop. Only one newspaper was delivered to Johnson City each day—a single copy of a daily newspaper, two or three days old, that arrived early every afternoon with the mail from Marble Falls. Lyndon always tried to be the first person in town to read that paper, so that he would know the news first, Joe Crofts recalls. “Lyndon would make a bee line from school down there to the barbershop, and he’d get up there in the [barber] chair and read that paper from cover to cover.” And sitting up there in that chair, he would not only tell the customers or hangers-on in the barbershop what the news was, but would pontificate on it as well, a twelve-year-old holding court on Courthouse Square. And if one of the men disagreed with him, Lyndon would not hesitate to argue, arguing with somewhat more deference than he showed Emmette Redford, but with no less perseverance, refusing to stop arguing, attempting to win the man to his view. He wanted men as well as boys to defer to his opinions.

Trying to describe the fierce, burning ambitions that drove his father, his mother used the word “competition.” Trying to describe the young Lyndon Johnson, who was starting to shoot up now into a tall, very skinny, gangling boy with long, awkwardly dangling arms, white, pale skin, black hair and piercing eyes—and who looked so much like his father that many Johnson City residents, in describing him, still say simply, “He looked like Sam”—the same word is often repeated. “Everything was competition with Lyndon,” his cousin Ava says. “He had to win.”

He was happiest, his relatives say—the only time he was happy, they say—when he was, in the Hill Country phrase, “politicking” with his father.

Politics was an important part of the table talk in Sam Johnson’s house—just as it had been in
his
father’s house. For Sam still believed in what he had first believed. At least one copy of a weekly Populist newspaper, the
Pathfinder
, was sent to Blanco County, to Sam Johnson’s house. “Uncle Sam got ideas from that,” Ava recalls. “I remember one was government ownership of railroads. Another was the Socialist Party. Eugene Debs. He said that it was going to be one of the leading parties in the United States and we’d better learn what it was.”

Sam’s children and nieces and nephews didn’t have to agree with his views, his niece Ava recalls, “but they had to think. Oh my, yes. At dinner, whenever I was over there, he would throw out questions. The government ownership of railroads—we didn’t have any railroads, but we had to know. He said, ‘What do you think of it?’ And the League of Nations—Uncle Sam
believed that the League of Nations was going to end war, and we had to know about it.” And after dinner, Sam would pull out his blue-backed speller and there would be spell-downs, with Lyndon and the other children lined up in front of the fireplace until they missed a word, and “We’d have arithmetic contests to see who was the fastest in mathematics.” And, of course, there were Sam’s after-dinner “debates.” Says Stella Gliddon: “I have been in that Johnson home when he lined those kids up in front of the fireplace—even Lucia, who was just barely big enough to stand up, she could hardly talk, she was just a baby.” Trying to hide his smile, Sam would say gruffly: “‘Now, we’re gonna have us a debate here. Now we’re gonna get down to
business
.’”

“He was very much a father,” Ava says. “He wanted us to be the best. Not only his kids, but I and my sister and brother, too, because we were his brother’s kids, and we were Johnsons. He wasn’t satisfied with having a bunch of Johnson kids just growing up.”

Sam’s eldest son was very quick at firing back answers, even if he didn’t know them. “Where does snow come from?” Sam asked once. “What’s it made up out of?” “It’s made out of frozen ice,” Lyndon piped up. Sam laughed: “Well, that’s sort of right. That’s sort of right.”

And in politics, quite often, he did know the answer.

Emmette Redford says that Lyndon’s intense interest in politics was in part due to the lack of any laboratory equipment, or so much as a single science course, in the Johnson City school. “There was no way anyone could have cultivated an interest in science even if he had wanted to, but we had first-rate history and civics teachers,” he says. And, Redford says, it was in part due to the town’s lack of other activities. “There were no movie houses then, no nothing. There wasn’t anything in the community except the three churches and the courthouse, and Lyndon was more interested in what happened in the courthouse.” But there was something in Lyndon Johnson when it came to politics that went deeper than either of these explanations. At the age of six or seven, friends recall, he would drop out of a game he had been playing with them in Courthouse Square if he heard a group of men discussing politics nearby, and would walk over and stand on the fringes of the group, listening intently. After his father re-entered politics in 1917, when Lyndon was nine, politicians, state and local, began dropping by the Johnson home for chats and strategy discussions. Usually, these were held on the porch. Behind that porch was a bedroom, with a window opening onto the porch. Lyndon would hide in the bedroom, sitting on the floor, craning upward so that his ear was almost against the window, listening. In 1918, the Governor, William P. Hobby, came to Johnson City for a Fourth of July speechmaking, and had dinner at the Johnsons’. So many local politicians were invited that the children were relegated to the kitchen. But Lyndon hid under the dining room table all through the meal to listen to the talk.

It was probably in 1918 that Sam Johnson first took Lyndon, then ten years old, to a legislative session in Austin, and thereafter he took him frequently. Doris Kearns relates Johnson telling her (and this Johnson recollection is corroborated by other sources):

Sam’s neighbor August Benner was running against him (largely, some people thought, because he resented Sam cutting through his pasture as a shortcut to the road) and Sam felt that although Benner was regarded as ill-tempered and slow-witted, he would be a formidable opponent because he was German, and the German voters of Gillespie County were by far the largest bloc vote in the district. Learning that about seventy related German families in a valley of one of the Pedernales’ tributary creeks were all planning to vote for Benner, Sam asked a friend to go to the valley, look up the head of the German clan and “Tell him that the sitting judge ain’t in good health and that lots of us are thinking that he [the head of the clan] will be succeeding the judge before too long.” Returning from his errand, the friend reported that he had found the potential judge sitting on a bucket milking his cow: “His wife was in the loft throwing hay down for the cattle. I told him what you said, Sam, and he came up off that bucket like it was hot. And she nearly fell out of the loft.”

Whether or not Lyndon actually heard these conversations between Sam and his friend—Lyndon says he did; the quotes are from him—he must have heard many concerning the type of political promises and arrangements that Sam made. He also remembered his father giving him many little pieces of political advice; one was, “If you can’t come into a room and tell right away who is for you and who is against you, you have no business in politics.”
“And if Lyndon learned politics from his father, he learned it from someone who really knew what he was talking about,” a friend says. “He learned it from a man who was, in his rough way, a master of politics.” In politics, moreover, Sam was a winner. He never lost an election, running for the Legislature six times and winning every time. In the election against Benner, Sam won handily. Benner claimed that fraud had been involved, but his charges were not taken seriously; he did not even show up at the legislative hearing scheduled in Austin to discuss them. And to celebrate, Sam took his son the sixty miles to San Antonio, the largest city Lyndon had ever been in, where they ate tamales at the stands on the streets near the Alamo, which now housed paintings of Travis and Bowie and Crockett and the other heroes of the great battle, and also photographs of the legislators who had saved the Mission from destruction—and one of the pictures Lyndon saw there was of his father.

Sitting in the swing on the big, screened back porch of the Johnson home, Sam and Lyndon Johnson would have long conversations now. Sometimes, children who were playing in the back yard would call to Lyndon to come and join them, but when he was talking with his father, he never would. “I remember them sitting on that swing, talking away,” Truman Fawcett says. “We would be playing out back, and they’d be out there talking. They looked like they were having friendly conversations. Those were the only times that I ever saw Lyndon quiet and relaxed.”

As a child, he had imitated his father. Of all the outfits in which his mother dressed him, he was fondest of the one that made him look like his father; his favorite item of apparel was a scaled-down version of his father’s big Stetson hat. Says Mrs. Hatcher:

His father would sometimes bring back from Austin a printed compendium of bills, either the
Congressional Record
or the official
Journal
of the Texas House of Representatives. Once he gave Lyndon a copy; for weeks, the boy carried it everywhere with him, holding it in as conspicuous a fashion as possible.

As Lyndon grew to be eleven or twelve, the imitation became quite noticeable. Sam Johnson, always friendly, always stopping to talk with everyone he met, was very physical in conversation. The man he was talking to would feel Sam’s arm around his shoulder, or Sam’s hand on his arm or his lapel, and as they talked, Sam’s face would bend closer and closer to his own
in an onslaught of friendliness. In the words of Wright Patman, who shared a two-man desk in the Texas House Chamber with the Gentleman from Blanco County, “He would get right up to you, nose to nose, and take a firm hold.” Now, back in the Legislature, Sam brought his son to Austin, bringing him into the Chamber so frequently that some legislators thought he was one of the page boys. By this time, Lyndon, six feet tall, looked very much like his father. “He was a gangling boy, very skinny,” Patman recalls—and he had the same huge ears, the same big nose, the same pale skin, and the same dark eyes. When the mannerisms were added to the picture, the resemblance became remarkable. “They looked alike, they walked the same, had the same nervous mannerisms, and Lyndon clutched you like his daddy did when he talked to you,” Patman says. “He was so much like his father that it was humorous to watch.”