He would hug women, and kiss them. Into the voice of Professor Emmette Redford, former president of the American Political Science Association, talking at the age of seventy-two, comes, astonishingly, a definite note of jealousy when he says: “He’d put his arm around my mother and kiss her repeatedly. We used to ask, ‘Mama, do you love Lyndon more than you do us?’”
The other children were almost in awe of the way Lyndon acted with adults. “He would put me to shame,” Redford says. “We and the Galloways were really close, but I would be too shy to go down and visit Grandma Galloway unless my mother took me. But he’d visit Grandma Galloway. He’d hug and kiss her. He’d hug and kiss all the mothers, and the grandmothers, too. And all the women in town just loved him.” And the children were in awe of the results he obtained. When Redford had caught him fighting in the dust of the Redford front yard with his brother, and had spanked him, and Lyndon had let out the “wail you could hear all over town,” Redford’s mother had appeared in the doorway—clad, he remembers, in a freshly starched white dress. She asked what had happened, and when told, said, “Well, Lyndon, I guess you’d better go home for the day.” And, recalls Redford: “He stepped up to her—all dirty—and hugged her, and said, ‘Oh, Miz Redford, we didn’t mean any harm. Why don’t you let us play?’ And of course she did.” She didn’t even seem to mind, Redford adds, that the dust had rubbed off Lyndon’s clothes onto her white dress. “My mother kept us on a pretty tight leash,” he says. “But Lyndon could get whatever he wanted from her.” Other children say he had the same effect on their parents. “Whenever we wanted to do something that we thought our folks wouldn’t like, we’d let Lyndon do the asking,” Bob Edwards says. “He could get them to let us do things that ordinarily they’d say no to.”
It wasn’t just the flattery and the hugging that did it, say the children who grew up with him. It was the quality that underlay his technique. The precise nature of that quality they are unable to define, but they try—hard—to make a researcher understand that it was something very rare. “You see,” Truman Fawcett tries to explain, “it didn’t embarrass him to just go up and talk to anybody, not like I would be embarrassed, not like anyone would be embarrassed. And the way he did it was like nothing I’ve ever seen. I’ve never seen anyone else who could put it over. But Lyndon could put it over. He’d go up to the old ladies and call them Grandma, and they’d just love him for it. He called my ma and pa ‘Cousin Melissa’ and ‘Cousin Oscar,’ and they had been all prepared not to like him, and they just loved him, too. Lyndon Johnson was a very unusual boy. He wasn’t unusual in smartness. He was smart, but he wasn’t smart like Emmette Redford, or like some others, either. He was unusual in this other thing.”
What was the reason that he acted this way? That he screamed and sobbed over spankings that didn’t hurt, and cried hunger when he wasn’t hungry, and made public complaint about the sloppiness of his sisters’ bedroom? What was the reason that he seemed almost to be trying to turn people against his own family? Was it, as Emmette Redford believes, because “he wanted people to feel sorry for him,” to pity him? And if so, why did he want pity? Was it because, for this boy who had, from his earliest years, needed attention, needed to be somebody, needed to stand out, needed public distinction—for this boy who was now a member of an undistinguished, poor, family, and was himself awkward in athletics and only average in schoolwork—pity was now the only distinction possible?
Was it something deeper? He was the same boy, after all, who had had to ride on the front of the donkey, who had had to be at the “head of the ring,” who had taken his ball and gone home if he couldn’t pitch—who had needed not only attention but respect, deference; who had needed to lead, to dominate. When his parents had been respected, he had been unusually close to them, especially to the father who was a leader. He had dressed like his father, talked like his father, campaigned with his father (and wished the campaigning “could go on forever”). Did he now feel that his father, by his failure, had betrayed him? Did he act the way he did because now that his parents were looked down on, he wanted to show that he was different from them? Better than them?
What was the reason for the intensity, the feverishness, of the way he acted, the way he worked so frantically to convince people he was right in every argument, worked so frantically to ingratiate himself with them, not with some of them but with all, down to the crustiest, most unapproachable old matriarch? What was the reason that, as Clayton Stribling put it, “The more someone disliked him, the harder he’d try to be his friend”—try by fawning, by smiling, by wheedling, by hugging, by abasing himself, by doing whatever he had to do until he succeeded? What was the reason that he didn’t only want his way with people, adults as well as children, not only his friends but their mothers as well, but had to have his way? Was it because of the depth of his shame, because, as Wilma Fawcett speculates, “he was embarrassed because of his father,” and because of the depth of his insecurity, because he had been yanked—in an instant, it must have seemed, so rapid was his father’s fall—from security into an insecurity that included continual worry about whether the very house he lived in was going to be taken away from him; because his family had been yanked in an instant not just out of public respect but into something close to contempt; because where once he himself had been able to charge more in stores than other children, now he could charge nothing at all, and had to stand watching while his friends put purchases on their parents’ accounts? Lyndon Johnson understood the transformation in his father’s fortunes quite clearly: “We had great ups and downs in our family,” he would recall. “One year things would go just right. We’d all be riding high in Johnson City terms, so high in fact that on a scale of A-F, we’d be up there with the A’s. But then two years later we’d lose it all. … We had dropped to the bottom of the heap.” Was it, in short, the rapidity of the change in his life—the violence with which he was hurled from one extreme to the other—that made him act the way he did?
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.
YET 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. Moreove
r, 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.
(SOME 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.)
WHAT 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 o
f 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 teenagers. 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,
you strap on knee-pads and a long sack of cotton duck and you are in the field stooping and crawling and pulling that sack after you before daybreak, out until dark, beneath a searing sun. After just one day of it you cannot straighten your back at night to lie in bed, and your hands, even your work-hardened hands, are raw and bleeding from the sharp-pointed hulls.
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