The Path to Power (37 page)

A
ND HOW DID
Lyndon Johnson himself feel about the ruthless methods he had employed?

Many years later—forty years later: in 1970, after he had left the Presidency—Lyndon Johnson returned to San Marcos and spent an entire day touring the campus and reminiscing. Late in the afternoon, he sat chatting with four of his former professors, five old men in the shade, and the talk turned to his White Star activities, and to the Student Council, and he made the following statement:

The day had been long, particularly for a man with a serious heart condition, and Lyndon Johnson was tired when he made that statement. Perhaps it was the tiredness that let those words—particularly those two words, “dictator” and “Hitlerized”—slip out. But he was not so tired that he didn’t realize what he had said as soon as he had said it. Abruptly cutting off the conversation, he rose from his seat, gathered his aides, and strode away. Had not a young man been present with a tape recorder, posterity would not possess Lyndon Johnson’s own assessment of his first political activity.

But it was a revealing assessment, and not merely because he had seen himself as a “dictator,” a “Hitler,” and had not recoiled from the sight. The overall tone of the assessment is more revealing than those two words.
It was a pretty vicious operation for a while. They lost everything I could have them lose. … I broke their back good. And it stayed broke for a good long time
. Did he not see the ruthlessness? He saw it. Was he ashamed of it? He was proud of it.

“A
PRETTY VICIOUS OPERATION
”—and sometimes Lyndon Johnson displayed a viciousness that had little to do with the operation. Black Star Frank Arnold was slow academically, but, an immensely strong, quiet and gentle boy, he had other qualities; his courage playing football despite a series of painful injuries had led his teammates to elect him captain and call him Old Reliable; off the field, a friend says, “He was the kind of boy who always had something nice to say to everyone.” And sometimes he had a knack, despite his slowness, of seeing to the heart of a situation; during that Student Council vote on the
Star
and
Pedagog
editorships, for example, he had turned on Johnson and said that he didn’t believe in giving something to someone who hadn’t earned it. “He was the kind of boy that everyone liked—except Lyndon,” the friend says. Lyndon didn’t like him at all. Arnold, slow though he was, was dearly loved by one of the brightest girls on campus, pert, pretty Helen Hofheinz. Johnson devised a scheme to break them up.

His instrument was Whiteside, the fast-talking, handsome ladies’ man. “Lyndon had a Model A,” Whiteside recalls. “He’d say, ‘Call her up and take her out—take my car … just to aggravate him.’ He got a real kick out of that. Because he didn’t like Frank Arnold.” Says Helen: “I had been going with Frank Arnold for years. I was in love with him. And then, all of a sudden, Vernon Whiteside—he just gave me a frantic rush. For two weeks. Meeting me after class and sitting under the trees. I was so naive I never thought Lyndon was back of it. I just thought I had blossomed out. I never took it serious. I was too in love with Frank Arnold. But it was exciting.” Even when she accepted Arnold’s ring, Whiteside persisted. “Lyndon would say, ‘Whyn’t you call her, and get a date tonight, and make her take ol’ Frank’s ring off?’ I’d go up there, and Helen was wearing his engagement ring, and I’d go up there and talk her into taking it off. The next day, it would be back on, but you could see Frank walking around with that worried look on his face. He was so wrapped up in her.” Whiteside’s courtship ended, he says, “when I finally got ashamed of myself.”
*
Had it been up to Johnson, the false courtship would have continued until the true one had been shattered beyond repair. “That wasn’t politics,” Whiteside says. “That was just Lyndon.”

Sometimes, the viciousness had nothing at all to do with the operation.

One student, a Bohemian farm boy, was generally immune from practical jokes because he was so “slow” and gullible—some students believed he might be slightly retarded—as to be too defenseless a target. This student had a severe case of acne, and one evening, talking with Johnson, Whiteside and another student, he said girls wouldn’t go out with him because of it.

Recalls Whiteside:

J
OHNSON’S FLATTERY
of President Evans had continued—and so had its results. Prexy now displayed toward Lyndon a friendliness he had never displayed to any other student, or, for that matter, to any faculty member; a friendliness that was almost paternal. So at home was Johnson in Evans’ office now that the impression Tom Nichols had noted before Johnson left for Cotulla—“some of them probably thought he was running the place”—was strengthened. Professors, noting that he had Prexy’s ear, tried to get his. “As he was secretary of Dr. Evans, I always stopped and had a little chat with him …,” one says. Even Deans Nolle and Speck were wary of him, leery of crossing him. The strict Nolle, for example, had never relaxed the rule requiring a student to take six physical education courses. When, before he left for Cotulla, Johnson, embarrassed by his awkwardness and lack of physical coordination, asked Nolle for permission to write a paper on athletics instead of attending physical education class, Nolle had refused, and Johnson had received an F in the course. Now, when Johnson repeated the request, Nolle granted it. The meek Speck, as an ex-officio member of both the Student Council and the publications council, was frequently in Johnson’s company—and, says one student, “it was hard to tell who was the student and who was the dean.”

Then Evans, in an informal way, let his deans know that he wanted Johnson to have a say in assigning students to campus jobs.

The grip of the Depression, which had started early in the Hill Country, had tightened. A few years before, three bales of cotton would have brought enough money at the gin to send a child to college for a year. Now prices had fallen so low that six to eight bales were needed—six to eight bales of that
man-killing labor in the fields so that a man’s son wouldn’t have to labor in the fields. Talk to a score of Hill Country men, and a score remember their mothers taking the cotton money, and adding it to the pennies they had saved out of the egg money, and hiding it away—and trying desperately not to take it out until tuition time came. Professors tried to help. Some loaned students money. Others, with no money to loan, borrowed money from the bank against their next paycheck to give a young man or woman another term at school. Nonetheless, many students had to pack their cardboard suitcases and turn away from Old Main’s spires. Of 1,187 students enrolled at San Marcos during the spring term of 1929, only 906 came back in the Fall (a “good” figure, the
Star
said, “because times in this district are hard; it is known that many sacrifices were made”). Jobs—those twenty-cent-an-hour jobs on the Rock Squad, those set-the-alarm-for-three-a.m. boiler-room jobs—were precious now. “Twenty cents an hour, and you either went to school or you didn’t,” Horace Richards says. And, Richards says, “If Lyndon would say (to the deans), ‘This boy is a good boy—give him a job,’ he’d get that job.” Evans had handed Johnson what was, at a “poor boys’ school,” real power.

And what Johnson did with that power was revealing.

He gave his friends jobs—the best jobs. Within a few months after his return from Cotulla, the twenty-five-dollar-a-month part-time “inside” jobs, which formerly had been held almost entirely by Black Stars, were held almost entirely by White Stars. But he didn’t give himself a job to supplement his salary as Evans’ assistant. The regular paycheck he had received at Cotulla had enabled him to pay his debts, but not to save any money for the year ahead, and, with his spending as free as ever, he still needed money badly. But there were only a few twenty-five-dollar jobs, and he didn’t take one; every job he controlled, he gave away. Money had always been important to him, but there was something more important.

In the opinion of some of his allies, the manner with which he gave showed what was important. “He was always willing and ready to do whatever he could. In fact, it seemed to please him for you to ask him to do something for you,” one says. But you had to ask. He insisted on it. One White Star was too proud to do so; no job was given to him. When this student told Richards that he was going to drop out of school, Richards, thinking that Johnson must be unaware of the situation, told him about it. Johnson, he found, was fully aware—but adamant. He told Richards, “If he’s got too much pride to ask me for a job, I ain’t going to give him one. Let him ask me. If he asks me, I’ll give him anything I’ve got, but he’s got to ask me.” The White Star asked—and was given. “Lyndon wanted to show off his power, see?” Richards says. The opinion is echoed by other White Stars. What was important to Johnson, they feel, was the acknowledgment—the deferential, face-to-face, acknowledgment—that he had the power.

A
ND WHAT HE
wanted from power, power gave him.

His personality hadn’t changed. He still strutted, both on wheels (he honked his horn repeatedly as he drove up College Hill to make sure everyone saw him in his car) and on foot (“I can see him now walking up that hill, slinging his arms and talking to everybody with that smile. He was always head-huddling people. He always had something that they had to confer about”). He was still as deferential as ever to professors and as domineering as ever to students—the same mixture of bootlicker and bully. And the reaction of many students to that personality hadn’t changed. The “in” crowd still wouldn’t accept him—would hardly talk to him, in fact. “Lyndon was always the string-puller behind the scenes,” says Joe Berry. “He found those he could use, and used them, and those he couldn’t, he worked behind the scenes to put down. And he was just anathema to me.” The more idealistic students still noticed that if, when Johnson approached a group of students, he realized they were discussing a serious issue in campus politics, he would hastily walk away. “He’d avoid us because he didn’t want to have to take a position,” one says. “He never took strong positions, positions where you knew where Lyndon stood. He was only interested in himself and what could help himself.” This reaction was still not confined to “ins” and idealists. His campus-wide nickname remained “Bull.” He still—on a campus on which women outnumbered men three to one—had difficulty getting dates, so much difficulty that one student says that “After Carol Davis, he never had a real girlfriend.”

His involvement in campus politics had, for some students, only intensified the reaction—by piling distrust atop dislike. Says Helen Hofheinz: “He could be very gracious and very pleasant. But I just didn’t trust him. He was likable. He was smart. But he would do anything to get his way. He was a very brilliant man. But he’d cut your throat to get what he wanted.” Ella So Relle recalls the election that Horace Richards says Johnson “stole.” The students were so naive about politics that no one was quite sure what had happened, she says, “but everybody felt it wasn’t straight, and everybody felt that if it wasn’t straight, it was Lyndon Johnson who wasn’t straight.” Thanks to his involvement in campus politics, however, the reaction was no longer universal. Though some students despised his methods, others, more pragmatic, were aware of the power that those methods had gotten him. This recognition complicated their feelings. Richards, who was one of them—a wry, sardonic, self-seeing man—admits that while he didn’t like Johnson any more than he ever had, he made considerably more effort to make Johnson like
him
. “It’s just like everything else—if you feel this guy can help me if he likes me, you’re going to be awful nice to him.” Quite a few students were coming to understand that Johnson could help them. “He had power. He was secretary to the president. … If there was anything
to give away, he would know. It paid to know him.” And, understanding, they acted toward Bull Johnson not with disdain but with deference. “It was quite noticeable that quite a few boys who had always said they couldn’t stand him started to act now as if they liked him.”