He did a lot of strutting. “You can tell a man by his boots and his hat and the horse he rides,” and Sam Johnson’s boots were hand-tooled in San Antonio, and his big pearl-gray Stetsons were the most expensive that could be purchased in Joseph’s Emporium down the street from the Driskill Hotel in Austin, and his Hudson—his chauffeured Hudson—was the biggest and most expensive car in the whole Hill Country. He dressed differently from the other men in Johnson City—that was very important to him. “You never saw my father go out of the house in shirt sleeves,” his daughter Rebekah recalls.
But people didn’t take the strutting amiss then, for, as Stella Gliddon puts it, “Sam Johnson had a good heart.” On the day she arrived in Johnson City, Stella recalls—on that terrible day when she felt she had come “to the end of the earth”—the nineteen-year-old girl was sitting on the porch of the hotel in the fading evening light, dreading the moment when the light would be gone and she would have to go up to her shabby little room, and thinking that she “could never live in a town like this” and would have to give up her new job and go back to Fredericksburg in the morning, when Sam Johnson came by, and seemed to see at once how she was feeling. “Sam knew my father real well, and he knew me, too,” she recalls. “He came right up on the porch and said, ‘Stay the night with Rebekah and me, and we’ll find you a place tomorrow.’ And I did—I slept in the room with the girls—and the next day, he found me a place. And I was real grateful for that. And that was the way Mr. Sam Johnson was. He was good for helping people. If you needed money and he had one dollar, he’d give you half of it—that’s the kind of man Mr. Sam was.”
People in the Pedernales Valley turned to “Mr. Sam”—that was what he was called, as a mark of respect; no one ever referred to him without the “Mister” then—when they were in trouble, and if they didn’t turn to him, he sought them out. Once, he heard that an impoverished German who had done odd jobs for him, a man named Haunish, was in jail in Fredericksburg. Convinced that Haunish had been convicted only because, unable to speak English, he didn’t know the law, Sam drove to Fredericksburg, hired a lawyer, went with him to see the judge, and got Haunish released. (A few days thereafter, there was a knock on the Johnsons’ front door; it was Haunish, who had determined to repay Sam by doing any odd jobs that needed doing. He painted the house, laid sidewalks, put up more trellises; he wouldn’t leave until he was convinced that he had done every bit of work for Sam that he could.)
And Sam was always friendly—laughing and joking; when he walked into the Fredericksburg bank, a teller recalls, he soon had all the tellers laughing; even the bank’s stern old president, whom Sam would have come to see because he was constantly paying off old loans or making new ones to buy more property, would sit there laughing with Mr. Sam. And he loved to talk—to discuss politics or world affairs. If, strolling along the wooden sidewalk of Main Street in Johnson City, he bumped into a friend and began talking, he would sit down with him on the edge of the sidewalk and continue the conversation there. Robert Lee Green’s daughter recalls that Green was “in hot water with the church-going people in town” because “he believed in the Darwinian theory, so they accused him of being an agnostic.” But, she says, “Sam Johnson was broad-minded. He would come by and they’d sit there by our fire spitting tobacco juice into the fire and talking about Darwin and other things all night. My father loved to talk with Sam Johnson. There were a lot of people who loved Sam Johnson then.” He was not only friendly but respected. When, in April, 1917, America entered the war, Blanco County farmers, who desperately needed their sons to help work the farms, were very much concerned that decisions of the draft board be just, and they picked Mr. Sam as one of its three members. And when, in November of that year, a special election was announced to fill a vacancy in the district’s legislative seat, the seat Sam had been forced to give up ten years before, and Sam, able now to afford the job, announced for it, no one even bothered to run against him.
AFTER HIS ELECTION, Sam was very happy. As he swung open the front gate, coming home in the evening, he would be met by what his daughter Lucia was to call “a flying mass of children.” (Lucia, the baby, always beat the others to him.) Swinging her up on his shoulders, Sam would put his arms around his other children and they would walk to the kitchen, where Rebekah would be cooking, and then demand of her and the children—in a ritual the children remembered fondly decades later: “I’ve brought a bag of sugar” (or a loaf of bread, or some candy) “and what will you give me for a bag of sugar?” “A million dollars,” the children—or Rebekah—might shout. “A million dollars isn’t enough!” Sam would reply, refusing to surrender the package until he had been paid in kisses.
Supper at the Johnsons’ long, narrow table, at which the children sat on benches down the sides, was like supper in no other home in Johnson City. “The first time I ate there, I was a little shocked at how loud it was,” recalls a friend of Lyndon’s. “The laughing—and the arguments that went on, arguing and fussing. Back and forth with everyone joining in. Mostly about politics—that was the thing that dominated his [the father’s] conversation. But about everything under the sun. Every time it calmed down, he would start it up again on some new topic. And then as the meal was ending and the kids were getting up, Lyndon’s father, he sort of winked at me, and said: ‘I argue with them to keep their wits sharp.’ And that was a revelation to me. That he was doing this all on purpose.”
After supper, with the light flickering in the painted glass kerosene lamp which hung from the high ceiling on long chains—the lamp swung gently in a breeze, the glass pendants which hung from it tinkling softly—Sam Johnson might open a blue-backed speller and “give out” words in an informal, but fiercely contested, spelling bee. Or he might stage debates: Stella Gliddon was present one night when the topic was: “What’s better, sorghum or honey?” Or the whole family might go into the front parlor, a warm room with its two horsehide sofas and pink flowered wallpaper and the big portrait of Grandfather Baines in its gilt frame, and the two bookcases—small, but they contained far more books than any other home in Johnson City—on either side of the fireplace, and, while Mrs. Johnson sat doing needlework, listen to records (or “Edison discs,” as they were called); “Red Wing” by Frederick Allen Kerry, was a favorite, and so was a recording of William Jennings Bryan’s speeches—largely because hearing Bryan’s voice would move Sam to tell stories about him, and the children loved to hear Sam’s stories.
“They loved their father,” says Wilma Fawcett, who, as one of Lucia’s closest friends, spent many evenings at the Johnsons’. “When I see that family in my mind, I see him laughing, laughing with the kids. It was harum-scarum—not like my house, where everything was decorum. But it was fun. We had such hilarious good times together. I see them as a warm, happy family.”
On this point, the people who know—the people who were there, who were in the Johnson home with the Johnsons—agree. Ask a score of them, and a score agree: it was a warm, happy family.
Except, they also agree, for one of its members: the eldest son.
5
The Son
LYNDON JOHNSON got his name from his father’s ambition. His mother wanted him named for a hero in a book; his father, who had wanted so desperately to be a lawyer, wanted him named for a lawyer. For three months after his birth on August 27, 1908, therefore, he was called only “the baby,” until, as Rebekah recalled it, “one cold November morning” she refused to get up and cook breakfast until a name was agreed on.
Sam was close friends with three lawyers: Clarence Martin, Dayton Moses and W. C. Linden. “How would you like ‘Clarence’?” he asked. “Not in the least,” Rebekah replied. Then, she wrote, he asked,
“What do you think of Dayton?” “That is much better but still not quite the name for this boy,” I said. He thought of the third of his three lawyer friends and said, “Would you call him Linden?” There was a long pause and I said, “Yes, if I may spell it as I please, for L
-y-n-d-o-n Johnson would be far more euphonious than L-i-n-d-e-n Johnson.” “Spell it as you please,” said Sam. “I am naming him for a good smart man. … We will call the baby for him and for your father.” “All right,” I responded, “he is named Lyndon Baines Johnson.” I got up and made the biscuits.
Relatives felt that naming the baby for the other side of the family would have been more appropriate. Its father, even as an infant, had had the “dark eyes, black curls and white skin”—and the large ears and heavy eyebrows—that were “a Bunton inheritance,” and it was soon apparent that that inheritance had been passed on undiluted to the son. The observation Aunt Kate had made bending over Lyndon’s cradle on the day he was born was repeated that same day by the baby’s grandmother, Eliza Bunton Johnson; she “professed to find marked characteristics of the Buntons (her family) in the boy,” Rebekah wrote. And before the day was over (for Sam, friendly and exuberant as always, waited only to see that his wife was all right before leaping onto Fritz and riding around the valley, reporting that he had a son and inviting everyone over to see him, so that people began crowding into the house before Rebekah had recovered enough strength to sit up in bed), the observation was being repeated by neighbors and by relatives who weren’t Buntons. Ava, Lyndon’s cousin, remembers her mother returning from the Johnson home and announcing, “He has the Bunton eye.”
His parents were thrilled with the baby. When he was six months old, his father brought a photographer to the farm to take his picture, and while he went to pick up the prints a few days later, Rebekah waited eagerly. Years later, she was to recall how her husband “raised his hand holding the package as he saw me waiting on the porch and began to run. I ran to meet him and we met in the middle of the Benner pasture to exclaim rapturously over the photograph of our boy.” Rebekah suggested ordering ten prints, for members of the family; Sam ordered fifty, and sent them to all his friends in the Legislature as well. While Lyndon was still very young, his mother began telling him stories—from the Bible, history and mythology—every day after lunch and at bedtime. “She taught him the alphabet from blocks before he was two; all the Mother Goose rhymes and poems from Longfellow and Tennyson at three; and when he was four he could spell many words beginning with ‘Grandpa’ down to ‘Dan,’ a favorite horse, and ‘cat,’ and could read.” When his father carried him to a picnic at Stonewall in the Spring of 1909, neighbors hurried over to Sam—people always hurried over to Sam then—as he entered the picnic grounds, and Lyndon kept reaching out his arms to each newcomer, and trying to scramble out of Sam’s arms to reach them, and everybody exclaimed over the bright-eyed baby. According to his mother, one man said, “Sam, you’ve got a politician there. I’ve never seen such a friendly baby. He’s a chip off the old block. I can just see him running for office twenty-odd years from now.” And neighbors remembered how Sam beamed as his boy was praised.
But Lyndon was an unusually restless baby. His mother made light of this aspect of his character in the careful phrases of the Family Album she wrote after her son became famous. “Lyndon from his earliest days possessed a highly inquisitive mind,” she wrote.
He was never content long to play quietly in the yard. … He must set out to conquer that new unexplored world beyond the gate or up the lane. He … would be playing in the yard and if his mother turned away for a minute, Lyndon would toddle down the road to see “Grandpa.”
But she didn’t make light of it at the time. Because often, when she would get to “Grandpa’s,” Lyndon wouldn’t be there.
Rebekah was frightened of the snakes and the other dangers that could befall a little child wandering alone. She would run first down to the Pedernales—she was most afraid that Lyndon would fall into the river—and then up to the top of a hill to look for him, and then she would ask her father-in-law to saddle a horse and find him—and she would wait anxiously until he was found. Then she would scold the little boy, and Sam, when he got home, would scold him, or, as he got older, spank him, and they would sternly forbid him to leave the yard again.
But they couldn’t stop him. “Every time his mama turned her back, seems like, Lyndon would run away,” his cousin Ava says. And as he grew older, his trips grew longer.
Relatives who lived a half-mile—or more—away would suddenly notice that tiny figure toddling along with grim determination—a picture of Lyndon Johnson at eighteen months is striking not only for his huge ears but for the utter maturity of his expression; the face of the child in that picture is not the face of a child at all—across the open country or up one of the long dirt tracks that branch off to the various farms from the main “roads.” They would take him back to Rebekah—and the very next day, or, if Rebekah wasn’t careful, the same day, the tiny figure would appear again.
Soon, a further aspect of Lyndon’s “running away” became apparent. Once, at threshing time, when twenty or thirty men were working with Sam in the Johnsons’ cornfields, Lyndon, then about four years old, disappeared. After searching for him for a while alone because she didn’t want to disturb the men (Rebekah had learned that time was precious on threshing days), his mother summoned help—by now, Lyndon was running away so frequently that his father had hung a big bell on the front porch so Rebekah could more easily call for help in finding him—and first his father came in from the fields and then, when he couldn’t find Lyndon, the other men came in and fanned out over the hills in a full-scale search. It was a search that proved unnecessary, because Lyndon was near the front gate of the house all the time, hiding in a haystack. “Everyone was looking for him for a long time, and everyone was upset, and he must have been able to hear them,” recalls Jessie Lambert, the maid who was living with the Johnsons at the time, “but even though he wasn’t asleep, he didn’t come out for the longest time. His mother was standing right by the haystack, crying, but he didn’t come out.” On another occasion, he disappeared for several hours; his father located him only because Lyndon’s dog, “Bigham Young,” was moving around in the cornfield in which the boy had been hiding and making the tassels wave. “Why did you run away?” Sam demanded. (Lyndon replied, according to his sister, who reported this story, that “he wasn’t running away. He was going to the pasture to check on his horse.”) If Sam didn’t know the answer to the question he asked, his relatives and maids thought they did. “He [Lyndon] wanted attention,” Jessie Lambert says. “He would run away, and run away, and the minute his mother would turn her back, he would run away again, and it was all to get attention.”
At school, this aspect became more noticeable still.
Lyndon got to go to school by running away. Children weren’t supposed to start until the age of five, and his mother didn’t want Lyndon going to the local school anyway; the “Junction School,” a mile down the road that ran along the river, was only a one-room box with a roof on it, and most of the thirty pupils, scattered through eight grades, were German, so that much of the teaching—by the only teacher, a strapping teenager almost six feet tall, Kate Deadrich—was done in that language. Rebekah and Sam were already intending to move into Johnson City the next year so that Lyndon could go to school there. But Lyndon, at four, began running away to the Junction School every day, showing up at recess to play with the children; and, short of tying him up, which they were unwilling to do, his parents were simply unable to stop him. “He’d run off to school and they would bring him back, and he’d run off again,” his Aunt Jessie Hatcher recalled. His mother was particularly frightened because the route between the farm and the school was along the river. Giving in, she asked “Miss Kate” to let him start a year early, and, the teacher recalls, “I told her one more wouldn’t make any difference.” Thereafter, Lyndon as President would recall, “My mother used to lead me from our house to the schoolhouse. … With a baby in her arms, she would lead me down here, afraid I would get in the river and drown. She would lead me down and turn me over to the teacher at the side door.” After a few months, Sam’s brother Tom decided that his se
ven-year-old daughter, Ava, was old enough to ride a donkey to school, and since her route led past Sam’s place, she would pick Lyndon up and take him along with her.
The Path to Power Page 12
