The Path to Power (22 page)

Hollis Frazier

Clayton Stribling

Ella So Relle

Henry Kyle

Medie Kyle

Edward Puis

Joe Berry

Mylton Kennedy

Ruth Lewis

The “wonder kid” of politics and Welly Hopkins celebrating Welly’s election to the Texas Senate, 1930, in Mexico

He refused to obey his father’s most direct orders: to do chores or schoolwork—or to stop using his shaving mug. Lyndon didn’t need to shave yet, but he liked to show off to his friends by pretending to shave with Sam’s shaving mug and ivory-handled straight razor. His father forbade him to use them, but if his father wasn’t home, he would do so anyway. “No one could boss him or persuade him to do anything he didn’t want to do,” Sam Houston says.

In his relationship with his father, moreover, there became apparent now an unusually violent strain of competition. “There was a kind of tension between them,” Sam Houston says. “Even in small, unimportant matters, they seemed to be competing.” When Rebekah was ailing, she would sleep in the girls’ room, and her husband would be alone in their big double bed. On cold winter nights, he would call into the boys’ room, where Lyndon and Sam Houston would be sleeping in a double bed, “Sam Houston, come in here and get me warm.”

“I would crawl out of bed and scramble into his room like a little puppy, snuggling my always-warm body against his,” Sam Houston says. “Pretty soon he’d fall asleep and start snoring, with me right next to him, holding mighty still and afraid to squirm even a little because it might awaken him.” But then, he remembers, “I’d hear Lyndon calling me: ‘Sam Houston, come on back, I’m getting cold.’

“Back I’d go,” Sam Houston says, “moving away from Daddy quiet as a burglar and snuggling up to my big brother.” But, he says, “that might not be the end of it.” Later on, “Daddy might get cold again and would call me back to
his
bed”—and then Lyndon would call again, his tone superficially sleepy and friendly, but with a note in it that Sam Houston knew as a note of command, and throughout the night, to avoid trouble between his father and his brother, the little boy would shuffle sleepily back and forth between their beds.

To outsmart his father, to get the better of him, Lyndon would go to considerable lengths. Once, in fact, he displayed an insight into his father’s weakness, and an ability to do the planning and preparation necessary to take advantage of it and use it for his own ends, rather unusual for a fourteen-year-old boy.

During the 1923 legislative session, Sam telephoned Lyndon to come to Austin so that he could buy him a suit. Lyndon asked Milton Barnwell to drive him—but to make two trips instead of one, to take him to Austin not only on the day Sam had specified but on the day before as well. Lyndon knew that his father was planning to buy him an inexpensive seersucker suit. He wanted a more expensive model. And he had thought of a way of arranging things so that his father, concerned as he always was with appearances and anxious not to seem to appear poor, would be too embarrassed not to buy it for him.

At the store, Barnwell watched Lyndon’s arrangements in awe. Selecting
a cream-colored Palm Beach suit—a twenty-five-dollar suit, as Barnwell remembers it—he tried it on to make sure that it looked good on him and that there was one in his size. Then he told the salesman that when he and his father came in the next day, the salesman should pretend that he had never seen Lyndon before. And he told the salesman what to say. The next day, the boys drove back to Austin and went to the store with Sam. When Sam told the salesman he wanted to buy his son a suit, the salesman said he had one that might look nice on the young man and would the young man like to try it on? He brought out the Palm Beach suit—which of course turned out to be the right size. It was not in Sam’s nature to ask to see a less expensive suit. “Sam like to have a fit,” Barnwell recalls. “But he went ahead and bought Lyndon that suit.”

A
S THE REALITY
of what had happened to him began to sink in on Sam Johnson, as he had to walk every day past stores that had cut him off, and stop and talk in the street every day with people who knew he had been cut off, his temper became more and more frayed. His mouth, day by day, pulled tighter and grimmer; his eyes, which had always been so piercing, now, often, glared defiantly back at the world. When he came home now, he would sometimes go straight into his bedroom without stopping for his old happy greeting to his children. The door of the bedroom might remain shut for hours, recalls one of his children’s playmates, but “if the kids were making noise or she was having trouble with one of them, he might come storming out,” and Sam Johnson in his rage, a big man with a loud, harsh voice and those glaring eyes, could be a fearsome sight to a child. “We were all afraid of Mr. Sam,” another playmate, Bob Edwards, testifies. One of his daughter Rebekah’s beaux refused to come in the house if Mr. Sam’s car was out front. “He could say ugly things if he was angry,” Louise Casparis says.

With his younger four children, Sam’s anger never outlasted his wife’s soft “Now, Sam, I’ll take care of that.” “You could see that a minute after he had said these things, he would be sorry he had said them,” Louise Casparis says. His children knew it. If they were misbehaving, Louise says, Mrs. Johnson would say, “‘I’ll tell your father,’ but that didn’t scare them one bit.” He was, in fact, very close to his children, particularly Sam Houston, who would get up before sunrise to have an hour alone with his father, to watch him while he shaved in the flickering light of a kerosene lamp hung over the kitchen sink, to eat the breakfast he cooked—“fried eggs, smoked ham, hominy grits or huge servings of pan-fried potatoes, all of them freely sprinkled with tabasco sauce”—and to listen to his wonderful stories, the stories Lyndon would no longer listen to. “Sitting there in the half-light of dawn, my feet not quite reaching the floor, I would listen hours on end to Daddy’s stories about the Legislature in Austin, about colleagues named Sam Rayburn, Wright Patman and Jim Ferguson, that great Populist who
later became Governor. Naturally, I couldn’t really understand most of what he told me, but I could sense it was all very important and sometimes very funny. My daddy had a way of poking fun at even the most serious things. …”

With his older son, however, Sam’s anger had a different quality. Once, Lyndon, learning that Sam Houston had, by months of diligent saving, managed to accumulate eleven dollars, suggested that his little brother—who, unlike their sisters, idolized him—“go partners” with him and buy a secondhand bicycle “together.” Sam Houston was thrilled. “My favorite and only big brother—six years older than me—offering to be partners with me! Of course, I accepted.” But the bike, which Lyndon chose, turned out to be the right size for Lyndon—but far too big for eight-year-old Sam Houston, whose feet couldn’t even reach the pedals. Trying to ride it, he crashed. “When my daddy came home that night and heard about my accident and our partnership, he gave Lyndon a lecturing he never forgot. I had seldom seen him so angry. ‘You give Sam Houston his money back,’ he said in a low, threatening voice.” While on that occasion, Lyndon obeyed, his defiance of his father’s orders on most occasions continued, as did his refusal to do chores or schoolwork, and Sam’s bitterness and frustration at his own life would often flare into rage at his eldest son. Returning home unexpectedly one day to find Lyndon, his face covered with lather, using his razor and mug against his wishes, Sam snatched the razor strop out of Lyndon’s hand, marched him off to the back porch and spanked him with it. There were many spankings—at least one of which was undeserved. Irritated by Lyndon’s posturing while holding court in Cecil Maddox’s spare barber chair, several of the barbershop hangers-on decided to teach him a lesson. Knowing he would soon be coming, they smeared the seat of the chair with a fiery oil of mustard solution. It took only a moment to soak through the seat of Lyndon’s pants, and he began first to squirm, and then, yelling, “I’m burning! I’m burning!” he jumped out of the chair and started pulling his pants down. Recalls Crofts: “He was on fire, and he began to cry and holler—we were just big ol’ kids—and he got his pants down, but he didn’t take them completely off, and he ran out on the sidewalk.” His father, whose little real-estate office was also on Courthouse Square, “heard him hollering out there” and came running over, “and I never will forget, I always held that against Mr. Johnson, he took his belt off, and he grabbed Lyndon by the hand, and one of the pants legs came off, and ol’ Lyndon was going around there, and Mr. Johnson was holding him by one hand, and every so often, why, he’d pop him one across the seat with the belt.” Maddox kept trying to tell Sam what happened, but Sam was so angry he “wouldn’t listen to him.” When, finally, he did, he growled, “Well there isn’t any kid of mine going to run up and down the street with his bare butt hanging out.”

B
UT SPANKING
, or even a more emphatic form of corporal punishment, wasn’t an unusual method of discipline in Johnson City; it was, in fact, standard, and generally accepted as such. Lyndon’s friend Bob Edwards, for example, says: “My daddy had a razor strop, and he never sharpened a razor on it—he wore it out on me. My daddy had a pair of cowboy boots, and he just wore them out on the instep kicking my heinie. But he didn’t do it out of meanness at all. My daddy was just trying to raise me the way his daddy raised him.” And Sam Johnson’s spankings were not unusually severe; quite the opposite, in fact. His car—his “T Model” Ford—had become the crux of his battle of wills with his son, who, against his repeated orders, would sneak it out of the Johnson barn at night after his parents were asleep, pushing it, often with his cousins Ava and Margaret and friends like Truman Fawcett, down the slope from the barn and out to the road so that the noise from starting it wouldn’t wake them up. Not infrequently, Sam would find out the next day what had happened. Once, Lyndon’s cousin Ava recalls, he and his brother Tom “came up to school, and they marched us right back over to Sam’s house and out on that back porch and whipped our heinies with their razor strops.” Truman, she says, had been “real scared” of Sam, but while the children were being marched along from school, “Lyndon had whispered to us: ‘When he hits the first lick, scream like it’s killing you, and he’ll go easy.’ We all hollered and screamed, and afterwards Truman whispered, ‘He hardly hit me at all.’ That was the way Uncle Sam was, you know. We knew we could get away with murder. Uncle Sam would never really hit anyone.”