The Path to Power (27 page)

For a few months, Lyndon’s hopes seemed on the way to realization. Martin’s practice was booming. He had impressed Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., and did legal work for him, and he also did a lot of divorce work, some for movie actresses from whom he received fees that sounded wonderfully large
to the two Hill Country youths. He had a knack for publicity—once, recalls Koeniger, he “saved up” his divorce cases for several weeks, and then gave them all to his two “assistants” in a bunch; “Lyndon and I took them down and filed them in the courthouse all at once, and we got a big headline in the
San Bernardino Sun
because it was the most divorce cases ever filed in one day.” And Lyndon was doing more and more of the paperwork in the office, and, Martin said, making good progress in his law reading.

But there was more than one facet to Martin’s character. He had blighted a brilliant career in Texas before coming to California. Elected to the Legislature at twenty-one, he had resigned to enlist (it was his seat that Sam took in the special election of 1917), and returned as a war hero with a lieutenancy and a silver star, awarded, the citation read, for his bravery in going “into the front line, which was under severe artillery and machine gun fire, in order to encourage … his regiment.” He was named police chief of San Antonio, and had been nominated for district attorney when he became involved in a series of escapades (on one occasion, drunk, he and some friends drove around the city shooting out streetlights). He resigned and left town while a grand jury was considering an indictment against him. When, during the summer of 1925, his wife, Olga, took their little son back to Texas for a visit, “she hadn’t more than left San Bernardino on the train” when Martin organized a “party” that was to go on (“more or less continuously,” Koeniger says) for more than two months.

The key participants were Martin and his actress girlfriend, Lottie. Martin had, in Koeniger’s words, a “great capacity” for Gordon’s gin, and a bootlegger client—whom he had been keeping out of jail for years—to supply it. “Any time you need anything, just call,” the bootlegger told the two youths, and, on Martin’s behalf, they called frequently during the ensuing two months, during all of which, Koeniger says, Martin remained “pretty much drunk.”

While present at the party—it took place, after all, at the house in which they were living—Lyndon and Koeniger were more spectators than participants. They each had a “girlfriend,” but only to have someone to go to the party with; Lyndon’s was Martin’s secretary, who would come over from the office with him; their relationship was platonic. What the two young men mainly did that summer—Lyndon with feverish earnestness—was try to hold Martin’s law practice together, for, with the onset of the “party,” Martin completely abandoned it.

At first, the task was fun. When a client telephoned, Koeniger says, he or Lyndon would in turn telephone Martin, “and he’d tell us what to tell the client, and to cover up for him not being there.” When Martin was too much under the weather to be of assistance, they would decide themselves what “legal advice” to give—“Lyndon and I were practically running the office.”

But it wasn’t fun for long. “We had to pay filing fees and other
expenses that lawyers have,” Koeniger explains. “And we had to pay the office rent. Several times Lyndon mentioned to Tom, ‘We’ve got to raise some money.’” The first few times, Martin gave him some, but then he grew evasive, and his two clerks realized he no longer had any to give. Lyndon and Koeniger had never been on salary—“we had just kind of been sharing with Tom on anything that came in.” They paid some filing fees themselves, and then some of the back rent—and found themselves, Koeniger says, “flat broke.” And the landlord began coming around to demand the rest of the rent. Then they learned that a mortgage payment was coming due on Martin’s house. Lyndon Johnson, who had for years watched his father, broke, worry about losing his home, realized with a start that he was in the same position. And Lyndon had an additional worry. He suddenly realized that in advising clients when Martin was unable to, he had in fact been practicing law without a license. If one of the clients found out, he could be arrested. He could go to jail! And several clients for whom legal papers hadn’t been filed as they had expected—because there was no money to pay the filing fees—were beginning to ask suspiciously what was going on. Whether or not jail was a real possibility, it loomed very real indeed for the two unsophisticated youths. Lyndon was terrified—they both were. Years later, with real feeling in his voice, Koeniger would say: “This was a
terrible
experience.”

And then Lyndon Johnson found out that he wasn’t going to be a lawyer after all. In assuring him that he would be able to obtain a Nevada license, Martin had overlooked the fact that Nevada had an age requirement; a lawyer had to be at least twenty-one. In this summer of 1925, Lyndon was only seventeen; he would have to wait four years! Koeniger isn’t sure whether or not Lyndon had known this earlier, but he is sure—for he remembers his friend’s shock and dismay when he found it out—that he hadn’t known about another requirement. Martin had assured him that once he obtained a Nevada license, it would be easy for him to obtain a California license. California law, however, required that such reciprocal licenses go to attorneys who had been practicing in another state for at least three years. It wouldn’t be four years before Lyndon could practice in California—it would be
seven!
And at the same time that Lyndon learned this dismaying fact, Koeniger says, he learned another one: Nevada was in the process of tightening up its previously slack requirements for obtaining a license to practice law; it was going to be much more difficult to obtain one without a college degree, so difficult that it might be all but impossible to obtain one with only a Johnson City High School education.

In September, 1925, Martin received word that his wife was on her way back from Texas, driving back with his father, Clarence Martin. “When we got the word that Olga was coming home—of course Lottie understood that; no trouble there—Tom said, ‘Now, you take the car and take Lottie
back to Hollywood, and Lyndon and I will clean up. We’ve got to remove any trace of any woman being here.’ Olga never did find out, and when she came back, Tom said, ‘Now, boys, we’re going to straighten up and practice law.’” But the young men had been too scared. “We hadn’t wanted to desert Tom, but we had resolved that when Olga came back, we’d leave,” Koeniger says. “After this terrible experience, we had resolved that we didn’t want to go on any more.” As soon as Olga arrived, they left. Koeniger took the first job he was offered—in a box-making factory in Clovis—and couldn’t leave San Bernardino fast enough, so thoroughly frightened had he been. And when, a week later, Clarence Martin started driving back to Texas, Lyndon went with him. In October or November, 1925—less than a year, not two years as he later said—after he had run away from Johnson City, Lyndon Johnson came back home. Just as his stay in California was not at all as he described it, neither was his trip back. He said he hitchhiked home; in fact, he was driven to his front door in Clarence Martin’s big Buick.

But coming back, while it may have been in luxury, was still coming back. Lyndon Johnson had gone to California in the hope of finding a way to achieve the security and respect he wanted without following the course laid out by the parents with whom he was in such violent conflict. For a few months, sitting behind Tom Martin’s big desk in that paneled law office, acting like a lawyer—believing, because of Martin’s promise to him, that he would be a lawyer, would be one, moreover, without having to go to college as his parents wanted—he had been sure that he had found the way. He had been given hope. Now he had had to come back. The hopes had been smashed. Before he went to California, Stella Gliddon says, he had been over at her house almost every day. Now she heard he was back, but for some weeks she never saw him. And then, when he finally came around again, she says, “I saw a changed person. Before he went to California, he was just a happy-go-lucky boy. When he came back, well, I saw a serious boy then. I saw a man. I saw what disappointment had done.”

H
E BEGAN RUNNING AROUND
with what Johnson City called the “wild bunch,” a group of young men older than he—he was eighteen—who prowled the countryside at night, seizing whatever pathetic opportunities for mischief the Hill Country afforded. Waiting until their fathers were asleep, they took the family cars and held drag races outside of town, or rendezvoused in the hills with bootleggers to buy a jug of moonshine. When they went to the weekend dances, they would pick up a jug first, and at the dance they would get drunk and start fights. They put Eugene Stevenson’s buggy up on the roof of his barn, and broke into henhouses and stole a few hens for whiskey money.

While most of their escapades were harmless, some began to skirt
closer to the law. When Lyndon and his friends heard that a German farmer, Christian Diggs, had made his annual batch of grape wine, they pried loose boards from his barn and stole a fifty-five-gallon barrel, worth a not inconsiderable amount of money in Hill Country terms—and Diggs was persuaded only with difficulty not to go to the sheriff. They hung a few sticks of dynamite in trees in Johnson City, and ignited them to scare the townspeople—that was just a prank, but it stopped being funny when it was learned that they had obtained the dynamite by breaking into the State Highway Department storage shed. That was a state offense, and the sheriff passed word around Johnson City that whoever had done it had better not do it again. “I always hated cops when I was a kid,” Johnson was to say, and on this occasion he defied them; a few nights later, they stole more dynamite and shattered the large mulberry tree in front of the school. The Highway Department put a watchman at the shed; after he fell asleep one night, Lyndon and his friends broke in, stole more dynamite, and hung it from the telephone line that ran across Courthouse Square. Then, Bob Edwards says, “we lit the thing and got in the car and ran like hell”—and the ensuing explosion knocked all the windows out of the Johnson City Bank. The sheriff let it be known that the next time something like this happened, he would make arrests. Lyndon’s Grandmother Baines repeated her prediction that “That boy is going to end up in the penitentiary,” and Johnson City, which had always known that he was going to come to no good, felt that he was well on the way to fulfilling her prophecy. And, perhaps, so did Lyndon Johnson himself. Recalling his boyhood, he once said: “I was only a hairsbreadth away from going to jail.”

His parents were terrified of what was going to become of him. His mother would hear no criticism—“No matter what they came and told her Lyndon had done, it was always the other boys’ fault for persuading him to go along,” a friend says—but she could not blink the fact of who the other boys were. The Redfords and Fawcetts were in college, and Lyndon was hanging around with the Criders and other young men who weren’t ever going to go to college, who were going to spend their lives working on the highway or on the ranches—who were going to spend their lives at manual labor. His father understood why Lyndon was acting this way. “If you want to get noticed,” he would say, “there are better ways.” Sam Johnson made other attempts to get through to his son. In May, 1926, Lyndon again wrecked his father’s car on a nocturnal drive, this time smashing it beyond repair, and again ran away, this time to the New Braunfels home of an uncle. His father telephoned him there, and, Lyndon was to recall:

For a while after this episode, tensions eased between Lyndon and his father, but soon he began to sneak out at night and take the new car without permission. Then, in September, his father grew sick, and had to lie in bed for months—since he was unable to work, bringing no money at all into the house. When he got up—got up to put on his khaki work shirt and go back to the road gang—his emotions were noticeably rawer than before, and tensions rose. On weekends, Lyndon liked to sleep most of the day; his father, awakening him, would shake his bed violently. And when, one morning after Lyndon had sneaked out the car, Sam ran out of gas on the way to work, he came raging back to confront his son; when Lyndon, lying, denied that he had used the car, Sam slapped him in the face—“just with his palm, not his fist, but hard; Mr. Sam was a big man,” says Edwards, who was present. Lyndon started to run away, Edwards says, but “Mr. Sam yelled, ‘C’mere, Lyndon! Goddamn, you all come here!’ And Lyndon had to come back. And his daddy slapped him again. Lyndon was crying, ‘Oooh, Daddy, that’s enough, Daddy. I won’t do it any more.’ But the next night, he stole the car again.” When, now, Sam stood talking with Rebekah about Lyndon, knowing he would overhear, there was a harsh tone in the voice in which he spoke harsh words. “Nope, Rebekah, it’s no use,” he would say. “That boy’s just not college material.”

The strategy hurt Lyndon, but it didn’t have the effect Sam had hoped. “If you want to get noticed,” he had said, “there are better ways.” But his parents’ way was going to college—and over and over again during this year, he said defiantly that he wasn’t going to go.

But Lyndon Johnson was going to go to college. Had he been as much a Johnson as his father, he might—like his father—never have gone. He might—like his father—have spent his life fighting the realities of the Hill Country and being crushed by them. But he wasn’t primarily a Johnson. Beneath the foppish silk shirts was a Bunton. People might call Sam Johnson impractical. No one ever called a Bunton impractical. If there was only one way to accomplish their purpose, the Buntons found that way and took it. Once Lyndon Johnson fully understood the reality of his circumstances, he wouldn’t go on fighting them. He may not have wanted to go to
college, he may have been determined not to go to college—but if going to college was the only way to accomplish his ends, to escape, to get out of the Hill Country not as a laborer but as something better, go he would. And after he returned from California, the Johnson who was also a Bunton was taught—the hard way—that there was indeed only one way to accomplish his ends.