The Path to Power (24 page)

Or was it something deeper? Something not just in his circumstances but in his nature? Did he act this way because there was something in him—“born in him,” “bred in him”—that
demanded
of him that he be in the A’s, that demanded of him as it had demanded of his father, of his grandfather, of all that mighty Bunton line, that they be in the forefront? Lyndon Johnson’s father had not, after all, been poor when little Lyndon let Harold Withers pop his ears for nickels no matter how much it hurt. Lyndon Johnson’s father had not been despised when Lyndon had hidden in the haystack to get attention, written his name on the blackboard in capital letters, taken his ball and gone home—had displayed so strong a desire to be somebody, to lead. Whatever it was that made Lyndon Johnson act the way he acted—that made him try to dominate people, to get them to defer to his opinion, to get his way with them by any and every means—heredity as well as humiliation plays a role in the explanation. The transformation in his family’s fortunes merely emphasized these needs in his temperament—by making it harder, almost impossibly hard, for him to satisfy them had given his efforts to satisfy them that feverish, almost frantic quality. His family’s fall had added a powerful dose of insecurity and humiliation to the already powerful inherited strain that formed the base of the
complex mixture that was Lyndon Johnson. In many ways, it was not what he did that made Lyndon Johnson so unusual, but the intensity with which he did it. What was it he wanted—attention? sympathy? respect? dominance? Whatever it was, he was desperate to have it.

Y
ET HIS DESPERATION
couldn’t get for him whatever it was he wanted. He could make adults, particularly women, pity him, sympathize with him, let him have his way (in large part because he was desperate and they realized it; ask the women who were fondest of the gangling, awkward youth why they treated him so gently, and they all reply in almost the same words: “I felt sorry for him”). But he could not make them stop thinking of him as a Johnson—and in a small town like Johnson City, family was the significant identification. Moreover, his was a family that had, in Hill Country terms, been steeped in scandal; fifty years before, the original Johnson brothers had gone broke and left a trail of debts across the Hill Country. Now, in the hard and uncharitable opinion of the Hill Country, history was being repeated by another pair of Johnson brothers named Sam and Tom—not so much by Tom, perhaps, although he was unsuccessful in business and going broke, but certainly by Sam, who “owed everyone in town” and plenty of people in other towns besides. Truman Fawcett clearly remembers sitting on a porch with his uncle, Frank Fawcett, while Lyndon Johnson walked by; his uncle’s eyes followed Lyndon down the street, and then he said, in a tone of flat finality: “He’ll never amount to anything. Too much like Sam.” Lyndon may not have wanted to be thought of as Sam Johnson’s son, may have been desperate not to be thought of as Sam Johnson’s son—but that was how he
was
thought of.

And if he had any doubts that this was so, they must have been erased shortly after his graduation from high school.

All during the spring of 1924, Lyndon and his classmate Kitty Clyde Ross were, their friends said, “in love.” It was a spring of picnics beside the Pedernales and ice-cream-and-cake socials given by Johnson City women’s clubs in honor of the six-member graduating class, and Lyndon and Kitty Clyde, a bright, pretty girl, sat together at all of them. In class, they passed notes, arranging to meet after school, and at snap parties they tried to kiss only each other. When Lyndon dropped her off at her house after an evening social, she would lean out her window and watch to make sure that he went straight home, and didn’t talk to any other girl. Their classmates wondered if they would get married someday—although Lyndon wouldn’t be sixteen until August (he was, the
Record
reported, “believed to be the youngest graduate of the school”), Kitty Clyde was a year older, and Johnson City girls married young.

But Kitty Clyde’s father was E. P. Ross, “the richest man in town.” He
was a merchant (the
Record’
s front page often carried a large ad for Ross’ General Merchandising store), one of the merchants who was writing “Please!” on the bills he sent to Sam Johnson every month. He was, moreover, a pillar of the Methodist church and strong for Prohibition—and his views of the Johnson clan were no secret; he was known to feel that it had been very lucky for his wife, the former Mabel Chapman, that, twenty years before, her family had forbidden her to marry Sam Johnson and that she had married E. P. Ross instead. When, shortly after graduation, the principal of Johnson City High School, Arthur K. Krause, asked Ross’ permission to court Kitty Clyde, he gave it—encouraged the courtship, in fact, though Krause was almost thirty. “It was unusual in those days for a girl to go with someone so much older,” Ava says. “But the Rosses were so afraid Kitty Clyde was going to marry Lyndon they were glad for her to go with anybody just to break her up with him.”

Kitty Clyde’s parents, in fact, ordered her not to spend time with Lyndon, and made sure she didn’t have much time to spend—not that she would have disobeyed them, Ava says; “in those days, in towns like Johnson City, girls didn’t disobey their parents.” Krause was frequently invited for dinner at the Ross home. After dinner, Kitty Clyde and Krause would go for a drive—in the Ross car, a fancy new Ford sedan, with Mr. and Mrs. Ross along as chaperones. Often, in the evenings, Lyndon would be talking or playing with friends in Courthouse Square. He would see the Ross car pass by.

His cousins Ava and Margaret saw how he felt then. Trying to cheer him up, the vivacious Margaret made up a new verse to a popular tune, to mock the fact that Krause couldn’t see Kitty Clyde without her mother along, and would sing it after the Ross car had passed: “I don’t like the kind of man/Does his lovin’ in a Ford sedan;/’Cause you gotta see Mama every night/Or you can’t see Baby at all.” Quiet, shy Ava never said anything to Lyndon. But sometimes, after she had gone home, she would, she says, “cry for him.”

“It was so unfair,” she says. “It [the Rosses’ attitude] didn’t have anything to do with Lyndon. He had never done anything wrong. It was because they thought Lyndon was going to be just like Sam. And what made it even sadder was that it was history repeating itself. Sam hadn’t been allowed to marry Kitty Clyde’s mother. And now Sam’s son wasn’t allowed to marry Kitty Clyde. I was a Johnson, and it was very unfair to the Johnsons, and it was very unfair to Lyndon. And I saw how it made Lyndon feel when that big car drove by with Kitty Clyde in it with another man. And I cried for him.”

Once, Ava says, Lyndon told her and Margaret that he “was working up his nerve” to ask Kitty Clyde for a date anyway—he guessed, he said, that he would ask her to go with him to the annual Johnson City-Fredericks-burg
baseball game and picnic. Kitty Clyde said she’d have to ask her parents. She came back and said she wouldn’t be able to go. After that, Lyndon never asked her again.

(S
OME TIME THEREAFTER
, Kitty Clyde and Krause broke up. Her father thereupon sent her to the University of Texas, insisting she live in the Masonic Dormitory, whose tenants were not allowed to have dates. She returned to Johnson City after college, but never dated Lyndon again, and eventually married another local boy, who her father thought had good prospects, but who worked in the Ross store until it was sold. When Lyndon became President, he invited Kitty Clyde and her husband to Washington and took them for a flight on Air Force One.)

W
HAT WAS IT LIKE
to grow up in Johnson City? On the surface, life was idyllic, as idyllic as the scenery in which the town was set, those rolling hills and that sapphire sky. Listening to the friends of Lyndon Johnson’s youth who stayed in Johnson City, Texas, who lived out their lives there, is like reading
Penrod and Sam;
their description is of picnicking and “Kodaking” (taking snapshots with “Brownie” cameras by the Pedernales), of long, lazy days sitting by the river with a cane fishing pole, of swimming in that clear, icy water, of playing croquet on Doc Barnwell’s front lawn, of baseball outings when all the kids in town would pile onto a flatbed truck and drive to play a team from Blanco or Marble Falls, of chatting quietly with friends in Courthouse Square as a beautiful Hill Country sunset faded in the wide sky, and twilight fell, of gentle maturing in a quiet, serene, beautiful little town. The children who stayed speak of the friendliness of the Hill Country, “where,” as a local saying went, “they know when you’re sick and care when you die.” More than one says flatly, “There’s no place else on earth that I would rather live.” More than one says, of growing up there, “it was Heaven.”

But, listening to the friends of Lyndon Johnson’s youth who didn’t stay, to those who—like Lyndon Johnson—left Johnson City, the picture takes on darker shadows.

Poverty shadows the picture. Cash money was in such short supply that Joe Crider once rode a horse twenty miles across the hills at a slow walk, gingerly holding several dozen eggs, in order to sell them—for a nickel a dozen—in Marble Falls. Dolls were a luxury in Johnson City: Joe’s daughter Cynthia had only one; it had a china head, on which, “every Christmas, my mother would put a new body,” and many Johnson City girls made do with corncobs wrapped in scraps of cloth. Baseballs were a luxury: Lyndon’s threat to take his ball and go home was effective because sometimes his was the only ball—after Sam Johnson went broke, sometimes there was none;
when there was a ball, it was usually ragged; “when someone had one, boy, we played with it until it just fell apart,” Bob Edwards says. Books, even schoolbooks, were a luxury: ragged, too, because they were handed down from one class to another; there were never enough to go around. “You just can’t imagine how poor people in Johnson City were,” says Cynthia Crider, whose brothers were Lyndon’s closest friends. “You just can’t imagine how
little
we had.” Sometimes the Criders couldn’t buy enough food for their cattle and goats; they would feed them on prickly-pear cactus from which they had burned off the nettles. Sometimes they couldn’t buy enough food for their children; then the entire dinner would consist of “Crider Gravy,” which was nothing but flour and milk flavored with bacon drippings, on top of bread. For Christmas decorations, the Criders made paper chains out of pages from Big Chief writing pads and colored them with Crayola crayons, and they glued the pages together with the sticky “white” of eggs—because they couldn’t afford a bottle of glue.

As dark as the poverty was the consciousness of poverty. The children of Johnson City were not only poor, they
felt
poor. “I sure did,” says Louise Casparis, whose father, the town blacksmith, made fifteen cents for shoeing a horse—a three-hour job. “Many times I’d go to the store with just a dollar to spend. That wasn’t enough, not to buy food for a whole family. But a lot of times that’s all I’d have. I still remember going into the store with just that one dollar.”

They realized, moreover, not only that they were poor—but that they were getting poorer. The Depression came early to farmers, and nowhere did it come earlier than in the Hill Country. 1924 and 1925 were years as bad as anyone could remember; the drought in 1925 was so bad that on the Dollahite farm, John Dollahite recalls, “we made no crops at all.” And in the Hill Country hard times had a special significance for teen-agers. When farmers’ crops didn’t bring them enough cash money to pay their taxes and mortgage, they had no choice but to take the step which many of them had vowed never to take: to send their children to work “off the farm,” earning cash wages—pitifully small though they were—doing day labor for other farmers. Such labor was brutal in the burning Hill Country sun. Cotton, as William Humphrey has written, “is a man-killing crop.” Plowing it, pointing and holding the plow blade in the rocky ground “while the horse or the mule strains at the traces” is hard; thinning it, chopping out every other plant with a hoe, is hard, and when picking times comes,

Not only men and women were working in the Hill Country in 1924 and ’25. Teen-age boys and girls were out in the fields, too. And even the girls had to work like men.

The picture is shadowed not only by poverty but by fear. Johnson City teen-agers understood why they had to work. “Looking back now on those days, it seems as if everyone, just about, was worried about meeting the payments on their mortgage,” one says. “I know
we
sure were.” Not having a home—being forced to take your possessions and move, to get into your rickety car, and drive off, God knows where, with almost no money in your pocket—that was the abyss. And in 1924 and ’25, many Hill Country families were on the very edge of that abyss, and their children knew it. “We had a sense of insecurity,” Emmette Redford says. “With very few exceptions—
very
few—a sense of insecurity hung over everyone around there.”

Poverty, fear—and a sense of hopelessness. For there seemed no way out of the poverty. A dentist couldn’t make money in Johnson City; the only dentist had long since left (the town’s dental needs were met by a traveling dentist who came through every few months). A doctor couldn’t make money; Doc Barnwell was always complaining that “Half the town is walking around and I haven’t been paid for [delivering] them yet.” A lawyer couldn’t make money. As for men who sold insurance or real estate, “I used to wonder,” Redford says. “How much real estate could you sell in that country?” Most of the people in the Hill Country made their living from the land, and those teen-agers who thought about the land understood that, as Redford says, “You go ten, fifteen miles east of Austin and you begin to see black soil and prosperous cotton farms, and big houses on the farms. But there was no black soil around us. And there were no big houses. I had a feeling even as a boy: in this town, there were no opportunities.”