The Path to Power (39 page)

The man behind the methods was the same, too. In Washington, his fellows would be astonished by his frantic, almost desperate aggressiveness—that aggressiveness would have been familiar to his college classmates. The desire to dominate, the
need
to dominate, to bend others to his will—and the manifestation of that need, the overbearingness with subordinates that was as striking as the obsequiousness with superiors—had been evident at San Marcos. The tendency to exaggeration—to untruthfulness, in fact—the sensitivity to the slightest hint of criticism, the energy, the fierce, unquenchable drive that made him a man who worked harder than other men—his college classmates would have found those qualities familiar, too. Other qualities of Lyndon Johnson less immediately evident to others were present not only in Washington but at San Marcos: the viciousness and cruelty, the joy in breaking backs and keeping them broken, the urge not just to defeat but to destroy; the iron will that enabled him, once his mind was set on a goal, to achieve it no matter what the obstacles; above all, the ambition, the all-encompassing personal ambition that made issues impediments and scruples superfluous. And present also was the fear—the loneliness, the terrors, the insecurities—that underlay, and made savage, the aggressiveness, the energy and the ambition. He himself saw this. On the day he returned to reminisce at his old college, he said: “The enduring lines of my life lead back to this campus.” The Lyndon Johnson of Capitol Hill was the Lyndon Johnson of College Hill; to a remarkable extent, nothing had changed him.

Nothing could change him. Some men—perhaps most men—who attain great power are altered by that power. Not Lyndon Johnson. The fire in which he had been shaped—that terrible youth in the Hill Country as the son of Sam and Rebekah Johnson—had forged the metal of his being, a metal hard to begin with, into a metal much harder. In analyses of other famous figures, college, being only part of the formulating process that creates character, deserves only cursory study, but the years Lyndon Johnson spent at college are revealing of his character as a whole—all the more
revealing, in fact, because at college there are no complications of national or international politics or policy to obscure character. All the traits of personality which the nation would witness decades later—all the traits which affected the course of history—can be seen at San Marcos naked and glaring and raw. The Lyndon Johnson of college years was the Lyndon Johnson who would become President. He had arrived at college that Lyndon Johnson. He came out of the Hill Country
formed
, shaped—into a shape so hard it would never change.

E
VEN BEFORE HE GRADUATED
from college, Lyndon Johnson had demonstrated that he was a master of politics beyond the college level.

Pat Neff, the former Governor of Texas who in his new post as State Railroad Commissioner had given Sam Ealy Johnson his bus inspector’s job, was campaigning for re-election to the commission, and was scheduled to speak at a political barbecue and “speaking” in the live-oak grove outside the town of Henly in July, 1930. Lyndon, eager to hear the only orator in Texas who bore comparison to the mighty Joe Bailey, accompanied his parents. But when, with darkness falling after a long procession of candidates for local offices had followed one another to the speaking platform—the bed of a wagon under an old oak—the master of ceremonies, Judge Stubbs of Johnson City, called Neff’s name, no one responded. The judge asked for a substitute to speak on Neff’s behalf, but there was still no response. Once, Sam Johnson would have spoken, but Sam Johnson didn’t give speeches any more. “Lyndon,” he said, “get up there and say something for Pat Neff.”

Stubbs, reports one of the earlier speakers, Welly K. Hopkins, a young State Representative who was running for State Senator, was “in the act of declaring a default” when a voice called out, “‘Well, I’ll make a speech for Pat Neff.’ And here through the crowd came this tall, brown-haired, bright-eyed boy, kind of, with a bushy-tail attitude of vigor. And he repeated it. He would make a speech for him, so the master of ceremonies handed his hand down to him and pulled him up on the tailgate.” “Sam Johnson’s boy,” Stubbs said—
that
made the crowd sit up—and Lyndon made his first political speech.

“He talked in the dark,” recalls Wilton Woods, who was sitting with the Johnsons. “The only light was the light from the barbecue fire, a big fire. He talked loud and a little bit squeaky like an adolescent. But I was impressed.” So was Hopkins: “He spoke maybe five to ten minutes in a typical fashion, a little bit of the oratorical effect, and a good one, some of the
arm-waving that I guess I’d indulged in some, too. But he showed pretty good cause why Pat Neff should be re-elected, and was favorably received.” Approaching Johnson after he had returned to his family, he asked him why he had made the speech. “His reply I’ve never forgotten,” Hopkins says. “It was, in substance, ‘Governor Neff once gave my daddy a job when he needed it, so I couldn’t let it go by default.’ We became friendly-familiar, you might put it, within a very short time.” Hopkins asked Johnson if he would help in his campaign, and “he very readily consented.”

Hopkins had expected a tough campaign, but he was to win by more than 2,000 votes, a large margin in the Hill Country. And the reason, he was to conclude, was the lucky chance that had led him to meet Lyndon Johnson. Johnson provided him with campaign literature; when Hopkins ran out of money to print his own, Johnson, because one of his White Stars was night watchman in Old Main, was able to use the college mimeograph machine and stationery supplies. He provided him with campaign workers; some White Stars—Woods, Deason, Richards, Fenner Roth—were persuaded, “just for the fun of it,” as one recalls, to drive with Johnson to the little towns in the six-county Senate district; they would pile out of his Model A roadster on Main Street, press literature on every passerby, and talk up the candidate’s virtues. He provided him with a claque—a loud one; arriving at a “speaking,” before Hopkins, the White Stars would quietly spread out through the crowd; Hopkins, a renowned stump orator, began his speeches by ostentatiously rolling up his shirt sleeves as if preparing for a hard job ahead; at that signal, Richards recalls, “We’d start cheering, and get the whole crowd cheering.” And provided Hopkins’ campaign with the same fierce, driving, driven energy he had given to Deason’s. In so sparsely populated a district, every vote counted, and, it seemed to Hopkins, every vote was courted. “Lyndon knows every man, woman and child in Blanco County, and has wide acquaintance in Comal, Kendall and Guadalupe Counties,” he was to write, and no acquaintance lived in a homestead too isolated, or at the end of a road too rough, to be paid a personal visit. “We worked Blanco in and out,” he recalls. “I guess I was up every branch of the Pedernales and every dry creek bed there was. … I rode all the byways … with Lyndon.” Once, at Lyndon’s insistence, he found himself not merely visiting but giving a speech to an audience of three persons. And, Hopkins saw, Lyndon Johnson was providing him with something else, too. Over and over again, he would recall in later years, he saw the tall, gangling college boy put his arm around a dour farmer, pump his hand, talk to him earnestly, smile winningly into his eyes. And over and over again, he saw the farmer smiling back at Lyndon before the conversation had ended. Writing to a friend about the campaign worker he had found at the Henly barbecue, Hopkins said that he was “gifted with a very unusual ability to meet and greet the public.” To meet, to greet—and more.
Not a month after he had seen a gangling college boy scrambling up onto a wagon tailboard, he was to recall, “I kind of turned my campaign over to him” in four counties. “I followed his lead completely.” For election eve—August 1—Hopkins had planned a big rally in New Braunfels. Johnson said he should hold another one as well in San Marcos. When Hopkins said he couldn’t get from one to the other in time, Johnson said he could, barely—he had timed the route. And when, at the end of a wild ride through the black Hill Country night in Johnson’s roadster, Hopkins arrived in San Marcos, he found a rally like none he had ever seen in the Hill Country. It was being held in the auditorium of Old Main—that in itself was unusual, for President Evans, leery of becoming embroiled in partisan politics, did not generally allow the use of college facilities for political rallies. And sitting on the platform was Evans himself—and that was unprecedented; somehow Johnson had persuaded Prexy Evans, the most respected man in the area, to lend silent support to Hopkins’ candidacy. The audience was, by Hill Country standards, huge, jamming the auditorium—flyers had flooded the campus and town for days to ensure that. And it was enthusiastic—when Hopkins strode out on the stage, a cheer went up, a cheer led by the familiar voices that he had been hearing, at picnics and barbecues, for weeks, and when he rolled up his sleeves for the last time, it grew even louder. And as the audience filed out after his speech, student volunteers, standing at the door polite and respectful under the eye of his new young friend, passed out more flyers, mimeographed by his new young friend, summarizing the speech’s main points; he had just had his campaign climaxed, Welly Hopkins realized, with a rally planned down to the last detail. “He did a magnificent job for me,” Hopkins says. “I always felt that he was the real balance of the difference as to whether I’d be elected.”

Other politicians felt the same way. Bill Kittrell recalls coming to Austin and hearing, over and over again, about “this wonder kid in San Marcos who knew more about politics than anyone else in the area.” Kittrell was in Austin to organize Edgar Witt’s campaign for Lieutenant Governor. Believing that Witt had no chance in the Hill Country counties, and feeling that there was nothing to lose in turning them over to a novice, he drove out to San Marcos and put the young man he met there in charge of “eight or ten” counties. Witt carried every one. Hopkins, active in Witt’s campaign, said, “Never have I seen better work.” He had become not only professionally but personally fond of Johnson. Shortly after Johnson’s graduation, he took him on a week-long spree in Laredo and Monterrey that cost a hundred dollars—“a pretty good-sized sum of money in those days.”

B
UT WHILE HOPKINS
could give Johnson a good time, he couldn’t give him a job. Johnson had decided by now that he wanted to make a career in
politics rather than teaching, but, with the Depression forcing the state government into staff cutbacks, there was no state job available. And he had already found out that there was no teaching job available either. His father’s brother George, who had remained an idealist but, having fled the Hill Country, had escaped the worst of idealism’s consequences, was chairman of the history department at Sam Houston High School in Houston. (A tall man with big ears and piercing eyes, he was very popular with students, despite their tendency to mock his “reverence for figures such as Andrew Jackson and William Jennings Bryan,” who, he believed, had fought for “the people.”) When, some months before graduation, Lyndon had asked him for a job at his school, he had agreed to get him one—although because the Depression was forcing the Houston School Board to restrict hiring, the job, which paid $1,600, was contingent upon the occurrence of a vacancy. Months passed without such an occurrence. Lyndon tried other school boards. By now there was almost a note of desperation in his efforts: a talk by President Evans to his seniors during the Spring of 1930 was entitled “All Dressed Up and No Place to Go,” and his sober listeners knew exactly what he meant; the diploma which had cost them so many bales of hand-picked cotton, so many hours on the Rock Squad was rapidly turning into worthless paper; Ella So Relle, perhaps exaggerating slightly, says that only three August graduates of San Marcos had jobs waiting for them. When Lyndon, who wasn’t one of the three, heard of an opening in Brenham, he deluged the Brenham board not only with letters but with telegrams of recommendation from every top administrator and faculty member at San Marcos. The warmth of these missives was all he could have asked for—impressive testimony to the opinion of his elders (Mrs. Netterville, who believed, because of his examination-paper note, that she had “strengthened” his “faith” during her Browning course, called him “a young man of … great spiritual force”; another professor noted that Johnson “has a habit of making friends of the best people wherever he goes”). But the Brenham board sent them back—with regrets. The position he finally obtained was in South Texas, not far from Cotulla—in Pearsall, the other town which broke the bleak flatness that stretched south from San Antonio. Pearsall was even smaller than Cotulla; its single hotel had so little business that, residents believed, it was the only self-service hotel in the United States; guests selected their own rooms, put a dollar in an envelope and dropped it into a box at the unmanned front desk. Carol Davis had taught in Pearsall, but Carol was married now (had been married in June in what the
San Marcos Record
called an “impressive ring ceremony in the spacious Davis home” with the bride very beautiful in a long white dress as she swept down the long stairway). There is no direct evidence of Lyndon Johnson’s feelings after, in September, 1930, he left San Marcos and drove back down to South Texas. None of the letters he wrote to his mother survive. But his brother and his
sister Rebekah remember that there seemed to be one every day; and every weekend, as soon as he had finished his last class, Lyndon Johnson drove home.

N
OT MANY SUCH TRIPS
were necessary. In October, a position opened in the speech department in Houston. Johnson had assured his uncle that “In the event that I can secure the place in Houston I can resign this place at any time.” That had not been the precise understanding of the Pearsall superintendent, George Barron, who says that he was in fact “a bit stunned” to lose a teacher in the middle of a term, particularly a teacher of such promise; Johnson, he says, “took on the task as though the future of America depended on what he taught those children.” But, he says, “Lyndon took a seat on the corner of my desk and, abandoning all formality, he said, ‘George, I look upon you as an older brother. I feel somehow that you have a kindred feeling toward me. If I didn’t feel that way toward you, I wouldn’t make this request.’” And, he says, Lyndon had a replacement ready; his sister Rebekah. Barron agreed to release Johnson from his contract, and near the end of October, Johnson arrived in Houston, where he moved into a two-story white frame house, owned by other relatives, on a tree-shaded street; he shared a room with his uncle.

Houston must have looked huge to Lyndon Johnson as he drove toward it across the flat Gulf plains in his battered little car; from miles away, the setbacks of its skyscrapers, thirty stories high and more, cut right angles out of the blue Gulf sky; the long lines of factory smokestacks before them belched out plumes of smoke like banners announcing a new age for Texas, and the last miles before he reached the city were covered with forests of oil derricks. With its population closing in on 300,000, Houston dwarfed the cities of his youth; the high school in which he was to teach, with its 1,800 students, was twice as large as his college (and its faculty had more advanced degrees than the San Marcos faculty). But if he felt intimidated or unsure, he gave no sign of it; while informing Lyndon that he would not only be teaching public speaking but coaching the debating team, his new principal mentioned that the team had never won the city championship, and Lyndon announced that it would win this year—and would win the state championship as well!

Public speaking at Sam Houston High School had been taught by a mild-mannered gentleman whose classes were rigidly decorous. On the first day with Lyndon Johnson, every student had to stand up in front of the class and “make noises” for ten seconds. Any noises, Johnson said: “Ow, ow, ow,” or “Roaw, roaw, roaw”—just any noises at all. The next day, it was thirty seconds, and the noises had to be animal noises: roar like a lion, quack like a duck. “You were sort of encouraged to be silly,” recalls one of his students. “He was trying to get people to feel comfortable on the podium,
to make the whole thing such a game that no one would feel embarrassed. He’d do it with smiling and laughter to make you feel at ease. ‘Everybody’s going to do it, so don’t worry about it—just have fun.’ And we did. Even the shy kids did. There was a feeling that we’re all comrades, we’re all going to be doing these silly things, so we were all together in it. And everyone would laugh.” Then came speeches—first, thirty seconds, “very short, and on so limited a topic that you wouldn’t be scared.” Then a minute, and then five minutes. Speeches no longer extemporaneous but prepared, and prepared thoroughly. “I have a memory of an
enormous
number of assignments,” says one student. “And he was terribly strict about you doing them.” Says another: “We had to do more reading for Mr. Johnson’s course than all the rest of my courses combined. You really had to
know
your stuff.” Then came the heckling. “No kidding—heckling,” one student says. If the heckling wasn’t fierce enough, the teacher would join in. Students could try to pick holes in a speaker’s arguments, or simply insult him, or shout nonsense to try to drown him out. “The idea of that was so you could keep your head clear and think logically of the arguments, no matter how much pressure you were under,” a student says. Always the teacher was picking out flaws not only in arguments but in appearance. “Mr. Johnson wanted you to stand straight, but not stiff, to move your eyes around, no silly gestures but make some gestures to show you’re alive. And he’d shout at you, ‘C’mon, Gene, stand up! Stop slouching! Who’re you talking to, Gene—the ceiling? Look at the audience! C’mon, Gene, look at them!’ Boy, he wanted you
perfect
.”