The Path to Power (23 page)

What was unusual was Lyndon’s reaction to spankings. He would indeed scream—scream so loudly and hysterically and piercingly that the screams would echo from one end of the quiet little town to the other. Spankings usually occurred around dinnertime, when Sam would come home and be told about Lyndon’s misdeeds by Grandmother Baines, or would see for himself that the chores hadn’t been done again, and at dinner tables all over Johnson City, the conversation would suddenly be interrupted by those high-pitched yells, and people would say, “Sam’s whipping Lyndon again.”

Johnson City’s children knew Lyndon wasn’t really being hurt—some, like Truman Fawcett, because they had once been present at a “whipping,” others because of physical evidence; when the boys went swimming in the buff in the Pedernales, quite often little rear ends would bear strap marks, but Lyndon’s never did. “I’ve seen him right after we had all heard him hollering and yelling, and he wasn’t hurt at all. He didn’t have a bruise spot on him,” says one playmate. Some adults—like the Fawcetts, who lived diagonally across the street from the Johnsons and could observe them closely—knew this, too. Their son Truman recalls that “We’d be sitting at the table and you could hear Lyndon hollering, and my parents would say, ‘Oh, he’s not hurting him.’” But not all adults understood—and many, ready to believe the worst of a man who “drank,” would tell biographers years
later that Sam had been physically brutal to Lyndon. Sitting at their dinner tables, they would say, when they heard Lyndon’s cries, “Sam’s been drinking again, and he’s beating his boy.” And families who lived outside town, and hence were out of earshot, would be notified by “Ol Miz” Spaulding, the telephone operator and a Baptist pillar, who would ring them up and report that “Sam’s killing that boy again.” Lyndon, in fact, sometimes seemed to be going out of his way to reinforce the impression of his father’s brutality. Once, he ran out of the house to hide in a tree—and not only picked one right in Courthouse Square, where there were plenty of people around, but told them he was hiding from his father, acting terrified of Sam, begging them not to tell him where he was. “He always seemed to be trying to make people think that his father was mistreating him,” Emmette Redford says.

Did he want people to know that his mother was mistreating him, too? He was constantly “borrowing” food from other families, even when there was no shortage of food in his own home. Recalls Barnwell: “We could hardly sit down to breakfast without Lyndon standing there with a cup wanting to borrow a cup of flour or a cup of sugar or some coffee. And he made such a
production
out of it!” He was continually going into the café saying he was hungry and there wasn’t anything to eat at home—and at least once this statement surprised two boys who were sitting, unseen by Lyndon, in the rear of the café, because they had just come from the Johnson home, where they—and Lyndon—had just finished eating. “I think probably he was hungry sometimes,” says one of them. “But nowhere near as often as he said he was.”

Did he want people to know that his little sisters were mistreating him? He was constantly telling people how difficult it was for him to keep his house clean, particularly because his sisters wouldn’t tidy up their bedroom, which was the largest room in the house—“He said they had to have a big room because they’d never keep their clothes up off the floor,” Ava recalls. “He said he had to be after them all the time about how sloppy their room was”—a statement which fell somewhat strangely on the ears of people who visited the Johnsons, and who saw that Lyndon’s room was by far the messiest of all.

His reaction to injury—or imagined injury—at the hands of people outside his family was just as striking. Once, when he was only ten years old, he and Clarence Redford had been fighting in the Redford front yard, rolling around in the dust, when Emmette Redford came along. Because his father was dead, Emmette says, “I regarded myself as the protector of my brothers, and I yanked them apart and picked up this little shovel that was lying there and turned Lyndon over my knee and whacked him.” It was just an ordinary whack, Redford says, and he was utterly astonished by its consequence: “Lyndon let out a wail so loud I can still remember it. I can still see Lyndon. He was standing there—he had knee britches on and
one leg was still up, but the other had fallen down around his ankle, and he was dirty, all covered with dust. And he stood there just
screaming
—you could hear him from one end of town to the other.” As Lyndon grew older, the pattern of his behavior remained the same. After a male teacher spanked him and Luke Simpson for splashing water on girls in the schoolyard, Luke simply went back to playing. Lyndon raced home, crying, and burst into the house with a story of injustice and mistreatment that brought his father rushing to school for an angry confrontation with the teacher. Sometimes, he would get into fights—just ordinary scuffling and wrestling matches. In the memory of friends, he always lost—he was physically quite uncoordinated; “he threw a baseball like a girl,” one classmate says—and as soon as he started losing, he would run home crying, a tall, skinny, awkward, teen-aged boy with dusty cheeks and tears sliding down them, running through the streets of that quiet little town sobbing loudly. “All anyone had to do was touch Lyndon, and he let out a wail you could hear all over town,” Emmette Redford says. “He wanted attention. He wanted everyone to know someone had injured him. He wanted everyone to feel sorry for him.”

His demeanor was unusual in other ways, too. Except for the extent of its isolation, Johnson City was such a typical little Texas town: a courthouse, a little bank, a cotton gin with walls and roof of dingy tin, a water tank on rickety stilts, a café beside which, at a rickety wooden table, old men in faded shirts played dominoes to fill endless hours, a few stores, not so many as a dozen, lined up along a raised wooden sidewalk on whose edge younger men sat desultorily in a row, and beneath which dogs curled up and slept. Straggling away from the courthouse and the street of stores, set down among vacant lots grown over sometimes with corn and sometimes with weeds, were small boxlike houses behind picket fences. Through its dusty streets occasional Model T’s chugged and horses ambled, slowly pulling wooden wagons. But through these streets roamed one boy who wasn’t typical at all. His clothes were different from the other boys’ clothes—sometimes more elegant than their weekday overalls or knickers or even than their Sunday suits, sometimes outlandishly elegant for such a town; by his senior year in high school, he had acquired not only the Palm Beach suit but the only straw boater in Johnson City; on some occasions, he wore blue jeans, but wore them tucked into brightly polished boots laced up to the knee, and the shirt he wore with them was a bright yellow silk crepe de Chine, the neck of which he kept open to display either a turtleneck dickey or an ascot; to school (in whose graduation picture he is the only boy wearing a necktie) he sometimes wore, on black hair that was painstakingly pompadoured and waved, and sometimes slicked dramatically flat with Sta-comb, a dapper English tweed cap. And sometimes his clothes were less elegant than other boys’—so dirty and full of holes that even in comparison with them he
looked shabby, shabbier than he had to, as if he were dressing for some deliberate effect.

When he approached other boys, he would run up to them and begin to talk, gesturing violently with his arms, grasping their lapels, putting his arm around their shoulders, shoving his face close to theirs. He would hug them—this, in the memory of his childhood companions, was a conspicuous aspect of his behavior. “He was always laying all over my brothers,” says Cynthia Crider. “The thing I remember about him was how he used to hang all over people. Just hang all over them.”

But it was with adults—particularly women, the housewives of Johnson City—that his behavior was most striking. He would flatter women, play up to them. Recalls Stella Gliddon: “‘Miz Stella,’ he would say to me, ‘I love your fried chicken better than
anything!
Better than anything in the
whole wide world!
’” And when she invited him to have some, he would say, “Why, Miz Stella, I thought you’d
never
ask!”—say it with such expressiveness that the sentence became a byword in the Gliddon household, so that whenever Mrs. Gliddon asked her own four children if they would like something to eat, they would reply: “Why, Miz Stella, I thought you’d
never
ask!”

He would hug women, and kiss them. Into the voice of Professor Emmette Redford, former president of the American Political Science Association, talking at the age of seventy-two, comes, astonishingly, a definite note of jealousy when he says: “He’d put his arm around my mother and kiss her repeatedly. We used to ask, ‘Mama, do you love Lyndon more than you do us?’”

The other children were almost in awe of the way Lyndon acted with adults. “He would put me to shame,” Redford says. “We and the Galloways were really close, but I would be too shy to go down and visit Grandma Galloway unless my mother took me. But he’d visit Grandma Galloway. He’d hug and kiss her. He’d hug and kiss all the mothers, and the grandmothers, too. And all the women in town just
loved
him.” And the children were in awe of the results he obtained. When Redford had caught him fighting in the dust of the Redford front yard with his brother, and had spanked him, and Lyndon had let out the “wail you could hear all over town,” Red-ford’s mother had appeared in the doorway—clad, he remembers, in a freshly starched white dress. She asked what had happened, and when told, said, “Well, Lyndon, I guess you’d better go home for the day.” And, recalls Redford: “He stepped up to her—all dirty—and hugged her, and said, ‘Oh, Miz Redford, we didn’t mean any harm. Why don’t you let us play?’ And of course she did.” She didn’t even seem to mind, Redford adds, that the dust had rubbed off Lyndon’s clothes onto her white dress. “My mother kept us on a pretty tight leash,” he says. “But Lyndon could get whatever he wanted from her.” Other children say he had the same effect on
their
parents. “Whenever we wanted to do something that we thought our folks wouldn’t like, we’d let Lyndon do the asking,” Bob Edwards says. “He could get them to let us do things that ordinarily they’d say no to.”

It wasn’t just the flattery and the hugging that did it, say the children who grew up with him. It was the quality that underlay his technique. The precise nature of that quality they are unable to define, but they try—hard—to make a researcher understand that it was something very rare. “You see,” Truman Fawcett tries to explain, “it didn’t embarrass him to just go up and talk to anybody, not like I would be embarrassed, not like anyone would be embarrassed. And the way he did it was like nothing I’ve ever seen. I’ve never seen anyone else who could put it over. But Lyndon could put it over. He’d go up to the old ladies and call them Grandma, and they’d just love him for it. He called my ma and pa ‘Cousin Melissa’ and ‘Cousin Oscar,’ and they had been all prepared not to like him, and they just loved him, too. Lyndon Johnson was a very unusual boy. He wasn’t unusual in smartness. He was smart, but he wasn’t smart like Emmette Redford, or like some others, either. He was unusual in this other thing.”

What was the reason that he acted this way? That he screamed and sobbed over spankings that didn’t hurt, and cried hunger when he wasn’t hungry, and made public complaint about the sloppiness of his sisters’ bedroom? What was the reason that he seemed almost to be trying to turn people against his own family? Was it, as Emmette Redford believes, because “he wanted people to feel sorry for him,” to pity him? And if so, why did he want pity? Was it because, for this boy who had, from his earliest years, needed attention, needed to be somebody, needed to stand out, needed public distinction—for this boy who was now a member of an undistinguished, poor, family, and was himself awkward in athletics and only average in schoolwork—pity was now the only distinction possible?

Was it something deeper? He was the same boy, after all, who had had to ride on the front of the donkey, who had had to be at the “head of the ring,” who had taken his ball and gone home if he couldn’t pitch—who had needed not only attention but respect, deference; who had needed to lead, to dominate. When his parents had been respected, he had been unusually close to them, especially to the father who was a leader. He had dressed like his father, talked like his father, campaigned with his father (and wished the campaigning “could go on forever”). Did he now feel that his father, by his failure, had betrayed him? Did he act the way he did because now that his parents were looked down on, he wanted to show that he was different from them? Better than them?

What was the reason for the intensity, the feverishness, of the way he acted, the way he worked so frantically to convince people he was right in every argument, worked so frantically to ingratiate himself with them, not with some of them but with all, down to the crustiest, most unapproachable
old matriarch? What was the reason that, as Clayton Stribling put it, “The more someone disliked him, the harder he’d try to be his friend”—try by fawning, by smiling, by wheedling, by hugging, by abasing himself, by doing whatever he had to do until he succeeded? What was the reason that he didn’t only
want
his way with people, adults as well as children, not only his friends but their mothers as well, but
had to have
his way? Was it because of the depth of his shame, because, as Wilma Fawcett speculates, “he was embarrassed because of his father,” and because of the depth of his insecurity, because he had been yanked—in an instant, it must have seemed, so rapid was his father’s fall—from security into an insecurity that included continual worry about whether the very house he lived in was going to be taken away from him; because his family had been yanked in an instant not just out of public respect but into something close to contempt; because where once he himself had been able to charge more in stores than other children, now he could charge nothing at all, and had to stand watching while his friends put purchases on their parents’ accounts? Lyndon Johnson understood the transformation in his father’s fortunes quite clearly: “We had great ups and downs in our family,” he would recall. “One year things would go just right. We’d all be riding high in Johnson City terms, so high in fact that on a scale of A-F, we’d be up there with the A’s. But then two years later we’d lose it all. … We had dropped to the bottom of the heap.” Was it, in short, the rapidity of the change in his life—the violence with which he was hurled from one extreme to the other—that made him act the way he did?