After his father’s political, financial, and physical collapse, Lyndon took off with a couple of other Johnson City boys to make a new life in California; after a few fruitless years there, Johnson decided in 1927 to return home and enroll in college at the Southwest Texas State Teachers College in San Marcos. That was the first year the college would graduate its first fully accredited class. The state considered it a third-class college, and professors were therefore paid less than the scale for high school teachers; it was hard for the school to attract good faculty because of the low pay, and most who taught at San Marcos were there because they couldn’t find a job anywhere else, just as the students were there because they couldn’t afford to attend anywhere else.29
How intensely Lyndon Johnson’s former classmates at San Marcos hated him was stunning; Robert Caro spent several years interviewing people who knew him during those years and concluded: “By the time the researcher completes his work on Lyndon Johnson’s college years, he knows that one alumnus had not been exaggerating when he said, ‘A lot of people at San Marcos didn’t just dislike Lyndon Johnson; they despised Lyndon Johnson’”30 (emphasis added).
When he arrived at San Marcos, he begged his cousin, the captain of the football team, to allow him to stay in a rent-free apartment above the college president’s garage, from which he got to know the president.31 Clearly, the single most important thing Lyndon learned in college was how to control powerful men who were flattered by his exceedingly deferential, sycophantic treatment of them. During his years there, he became more and more skillful at manipulating people, both those in superior positions as well as those below him, through bestowing favors in some cases and trickery, bribery, or outright deceit in others.
In his later years he used the same techniques on other powerful men, politicians who had themselves bullied and blustered their way to the top of their respective careers in the Congress and Senate of the United States. As he learned how and when and to whom to apply this natural and inherited talent, he began to manipulate the faculty and administrative staff of his college, whose president, Cecil Eugene Evans, he found to be particularly vulnerable. Chapter 8 of Caro’s first book, titled Bull Johnson, vividly describes this talent. Prexy Evans was an aloof man who generally avoided talking to students, except for Lyndon Johnson. He responded strongly to Johnson’s sycophancy and gave him a series of jobs, starting with gardening and groundskeeping that culminated in working as his personal assistant.32 Prexy Evans was the man upon whom Johnson practiced what would become his patented “Johnson treatment.” He was excessively deferential to Evans and would run errands for him or his wife without their even asking him to do so. By learning their likes and dislikes, their mannerisms and habits, he was able to become practically a personal servant to them while remaining on the college’s payroll. He would go into town early in the morning to retrieve a newspaper so that Evans could read it with his breakfast and accompany Mrs. Evans on shopping trips to carry her packages or groceries. Doing these favors led to quick promotions, including “inside jobs” such as janitorial work, ordinarily given only to athletes. Within five weeks of his arrival at the college, he was working inside the president’s office in a newly created position that had never existed before.33
Author Caro quoted a Johnson college classmate, Mylton Kennedy, describing Lyndon Johnson’s unctuousness: “‘Words won’t come to describe how Lyndon acted toward the faculty—how kowtowing he was, how suck-assing he was, how brownnosing he was.’”34 Caro found that many of the people who knew Lyndon Johnson from the San Marcos period intensely disliked him for the same reasons, a feeling as much to do with how he was such a brazen sycophant to those above him as it was about how condescending he was towards his fellow students. Johnson’s cringing obsequiousness toward Evans became one of his hallmark character traits that especially manifested around powerful men in superior positions. He knew instinctively that in the San Marcos arena of 1927, the most powerful man in town or on campus was President Evans, and he had to get as close to him as possible in order to target his next quarry. Johnson volunteered to do anything and everything Prexy Evans required, including running errands for him and his wife, flattering him at every opportunity, and generally treated him as though he was the most brilliant, erudite man in the world; his efforts to befriend this lonely, marginally intelligent, and otherwise nondescript man paid off. When he got to Washington, he would use the same techniques to ingratiate himself among the most powerful people in the nation: Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn; Senator Richard Russell; and President Franklin Roosevelt.35 Johnson had become a powerful force in San Marcos by the time he departed the campus, even though many of the people he left behind could not stand the man they had nicknamed Bull (for bullshit) Johnson because of his chronic habits of lying and deceit.36
The yearbook at San Marcos, the Pedagog, contained a section called “The Cat’s Claw” that mocked certain students’ foibles. In the 1928 edition, Lyndon Johnson was singled out for particularly harsh treatment: a picture of a jackass replaced Lyndon’s photo with a caption that said he was a member of the “Sophistry Club … Master of the gentle art of spoofing the general public.”37 A humor column in the campus newspaper, the College Star, established the following definition: “Bull: Greek philosophy in which Lyndon Johnson has a MB degree.” One of his classmates explained, “Master of Bullshit—that’s what MB means … He was known as the biggest liar on the campus. In private, when there were no girls around, we called him ‘Bullshit Johnson.’”38 The 1930 edition of the Pedagog, released during his senior year, was equally vicious on Johnson and loathsome of his mentor President Evans. Evans wrote that “a number of pages … aroused bitter resentment among our students,” even though only one student, Lyndon Johnson, resented them. Johnson talked with Evans, and shortly thereafter, Evans ordered his secretary, Tom Nichols, two deans, and several professors to locate every copy they could find and cut out the offending section. By the time they were done, it had been removed from virtually all copies of the yearbook.39
The above activity occurred forty-odd years before researchers began looking for glimpses of the Johnson persona at San Marcos; it was as though Lyndon Johnson knew he would eventually receive such scrutiny and needed to act then to shape his reputation and future legacy. He could not allow the assessment of his fellow students to persist and be discovered later by people investigating his past. The destruction of the San Marcos yearbooks was an early marker for measuring the length of his focal point into the future, and represented the starting point of the planning he undertook to become president.
Lyndon Johnson Goes to Washington
After graduating from San Marcos, Johnson spent a year in Houston teaching and coaching at Sam Houston High School, where he liked to talk politics with other teachers and the students on his debate teams. While he was beginning his second year there, a newly elected congressman, Richard Kleberg, gave him a job as an administrative aide. Johnson lived meagerly in a run-down hotel and worked long hours for his congressman, who exercised virtually no power since he had the least seniority of any member.40 Kleberg was the grandson of the founder of the King Ranch, an enormous two-thousand-square-mile empire that included whole towns within it. As a fabulously rich Texas cowboy, his interest in Washington politics was peripheral at best; he was a playboy and spent more time at the Congressional and Burning Tree golf courses or the polo grounds than inside the Capitol building. He usually spent his morning sleeping off the previous night’s poker and bourbon parties and often did not show up to his office in room 258 of the Cannon Building. His detached view of his responsibilities afforded his new aide ample opportunity to fill the vacuum created by his absence.41 Lyndon Johnson was thrust into his job as a congressional aide with no training on even the fundamentals of the position; he could not type and he did not know how to dictate a letter, or how to respond to the hundreds of incoming letters seeking assistance from some federal agency or bureau. He had to l
earn the role on his own, using his wile and whatever tools he could muster from the congressman’s office.
Congressman Kleberg delegated to Lyndon Johnson practically all of his own responsibilities; since Kleberg would not even read the mail, Johnson did that too and took whatever action he felt was necessary. Upon learning from other secretaries the way around the federal bureaucracies, he slowly made contacts in key agencies, expanding his telephone list every day until he could at least keep up with the mail, even though his limited dictation skills made him take a long time to accomplish it, having to resort to handwriting the letters he wanted the secretary to type. As his confidence level increased, so did his chutzpah; he began impersonating Congressman Kleberg on the telephone whenever he needed another congressman to do something he felt was particularly important.
Johnson’s New Aides
Johnson eventually brought two of the students he had taught in Houston, Gene Latimer and L. E. Jones, to Washington to work as secretaries under him; importing young men from Texas allowed him to exert more control over them than the alternative of simply recruiting Washington-area assistants. To avoid putting them on the district’s clerical payroll allotted by Congress—keeping most of that for himself—he secured positions for them in the House Post Office, which paid $130 per month.42 They were required to work in the post office from 5:00 a.m. to noon; after a thirty-minute lunch, they worked for Lyndon the rest of the day, usually until eight or nine o’clock but often until 11:30 p.m. or later. Latimer, then only eighteen years old, was working eighteen-hour days, barely getting by on his post office salary and the pittance Johnson allowed him from the district’s payroll, $91.66 per month. He kept the office open on weekends and would only let Latimer and Jones have free time after 3:00 p.m. on Sundays.43
Johnson’s demeaning treatment characterized his relationships with his aides, who in most cases nevertheless remained loyal to him. As soon as Latimer came into the congressman’s office, promptly at twelve-thirty every day after a fast sandwich and drink, Johnson would rip into the mail sacks, barking out instructions to this former debater who so admired his boss. They developed a regimen by which Johnson would tell Latimer in a few words how to reply to each letter: If Johnson said to “butter them up,” Latimer knew that meant to lay it on thick; if Lyndon wanted to tell someone how much he liked them, he would say, “You’re the greatest guy in the world.” Latimer says, “I did get to be a master of laying it on, all right.”44 Johnson trained Latimer to respond to letters with just a few words of instruction—“Say yes. Say no. Tell him we’re looking into it. Butter him up”—and Latimer would prepare a letter on his typewriter as though Johnson had written it.45 Lyndon dictated letters requiring a more detailed response to Jones in another room. Johnson didn’t want to distract Latimer, whose “typewriter was supposed never to stop.”46
As the volume of mail increased with the economic collapse of the Depression, other congressional offices sent mimeographed or pro forma responses, or simply didn’t reply at all, and fell still further behind. But Congressman Kleberg’s office answered every possible letter, because Lyndon Johnson was convinced that doing so would avoid the fate awaiting those congressmen who had lost touch with their districts. Johnson became consumed with the notion that every letter was critical to keeping Kleberg, and thus himself, connected to every constituent in the district. Consequently, he insisted on personal responses to be sent the same day a given letter was received, and on perfection in the typed correspondence; errors would be marked up and the document sent back for retyping. If a response entailed contacting some other department or agency, then that letter had to be sent the same day as well. When his assistants thought they were finished after hours of nonstop typing, Johnson would bring another pile of top-priority letters, the responses to which had to be completed before they left for the night.47
In every other congressional office, a constituent’s request for assistance would require that statements and justifications be produced before the matter could be referred to the appropriate agency. Requests from the Fourteenth District of Texas were forwarded to the agency that could comply and pursued vigorously, especially requests from veterans for a disability pension, even if the case had been previously heard and denied because of the absence of a connection to a war injury. Johnson would telephone his contacts at the Veterans Administration, and if he was denied, he would procure the veteran a lawyer and file a formal written appeal. Johnson would often accompany the lawyer to the following hearings, but due to his obsession with secrecy, he would request the stenographer to be instructed not to take down his remarks. Latimer would often see the typed minutes of the hearing and see the same sentence, “Mr. Johnson spoke off the record,” and know what was coming next—that the decision would be reversed in favor of Johnson’s “client.” Referring to these outcomes, Latimer said, “It was almost unheard of to get someone ‘service-connected’ [status] after it had been denied, but the Chief did it. Many times.”48
Johnson called Latimer “son,” and Latimer called him “chief.” Latimer admitted he had never called Johnson by his first name and seemed astonished at the very thought he could have been so impertinent.49 Latimer feared but also idolized Johnson, and acted as though he were completely under Johnson’s control. Johnson could convince Latimer to perform any of his requests, that they were simply essential, the right thing to do. If Latimer ever fell out of line, Johnson would make him feel so bad that Latimer claimed he wanted to shoot himself and that it was unforgivable to let Johnson down.50 He would experience a series of nervous breakdowns and “recurrent, severe bouts of alcoholism.” He understood their cause: “‘The work broke me,’ he says.”51 Despite the extreme pressure exerted by his boss, he invariably returned to Johnson’s offices, because he felt he could not do anything else. Gene Latimer became the model for the kind of aide Johnson would value: one who would unconditionally accept whatever orders were given to him without regard to issues of ethics or legality. That is what Latimer meant when he said that Johnson could talk you into anything and make you feel it was right.
Latimer was the more malleable of the two clerks working for Johnson in the 1930s. L. E. Jones was much more independent, but Johnson had appealed to his ambition and promised to help him achieve his dreams if he worked hard for him. But Johnson did this in a demeaning way, actually ridiculing the college education that Jones had worked so hard to achieve. Johnson took pleasure in critiquing Jones’s letters, slashing across them with his pen, making rejections; Johnson thought they were “too literary”: “Is that what they taught you at college, LE? Dumbest goddamned thing I ever read.”52 Jones was a neat, clean, and prim fellow who was disgusted by any kind of crudeness. Nevertheless, Johnson made him take dictation from him while he sat on the toilet; though Jones resisted, Johnson insisted, and he stood in the doorway with his head and nose averted and took dictation. This procedure started with Jones and later became the ultimate form of condescension with which Johnson could treat his subordinates, a powerful way to remove their dignity and assert his authority.53 Richard Goodwin, a Kennedy aide who continued serving under Johnson when he became president, confirms that Johnson required subordinates and even peers to conduct business while he defecated in the bathroom throughout his career, in the Senate, the vice presidency, and even into the Oval Office.54 But such repulsive behavior didn’t end there; he was often observed by others as he scratched his rear end or crotch, picked his nose in meetings, or pulled his pants down to show his hernia operation when women were present nearby.55
Johnson’s Condescension to Reporters, Others
Johnson’s treatment of his first assistants on Capitol Hill became typical of how he would treat others throughout his career as a congressman, senator, vice president, and as the president. He would employ other methods to demean colleagues, reporters, and politicians, one of which was to call their attention to his manhood; he was apparently endowed with a larger-than-average penis that he
referred to as “jumbo” to his friends as a young man.56 One day, he offered to compare the length of his penis with that of any of the male journalists at the Johnson ranch. “I’ll match mine against any of yours,” he said.57 On another occasion, in a moment of exasperation with persistent reporters who wanted him to explain why the United States was at war with Vietnam, he opened his pants, withdrew his penis, and shouted, “This is why!”58 Evidently, he thought exposing himself would be sufficient to appease his audience, who were so stunned that they walked away and forgot the original question. Johnson also enjoyed taunting reporters, businessmen, and politicians into joining him for a session of skinny-dipping in the White House pool to demonstrate who was superior, if he felt they may have bested him in terms of intelligence, college alma mater, wealth, looks, political savvy, connections, or any other aspect.59
People in Washington were generally shocked by Johnson’s aggressiveness and single-minded intensity. His ironfisted resolve enabled him to achieve his goals regardless of obstacles. Contributing to the manic aggressiveness and fierce ambition were the paranoia, loneliness, and insecurities Johnson tried to hide.60 Few people perceived his depressive periods, or how sullen and morose he would become, but one of his staff members once observed that “‘Lyndon had a side to him. He could get very low. When he got real quiet it was bad,’ sometimes ‘very bad.’”61 George Reedy, Johnson’s former press secretary, admitted that Johnson’s drinking, self-pity, and paranoia reached such depths that his staff often had to hide these tendencies from outsiders, acting as buffers to avoid exposing to the world just how peculiar he was. Reedy noted that during his agonizing depressed days spent holed up in bed, he still drank and spent a lot of time simply looking up at his bedroom ceiling and lashing out at anyone entering the room. Bill Moyers, worried about Johnson’s mood, described a similar scene: “‘He would just go within himself, just disappear—morose, self-pitying, angry.’ While lying in bed with the covers pulled over his head, the President said that he felt he was in a Louisiana swamp, getting sucked under.”62
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