Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  The tidbits of philosophy he dispensed to journalists were western philosophy. Working with nature was good for a man, particularly for a public official, he would explain. “Every man in public life should own a plot of land”—it gave him a practical knowledge of agricultural problems, and it rooted him in the realities ordinary Americans have to face. “All my life I have drawn substance from the river and from the hills of my native state,” he would say. When he was in Washington, he would say, “I am lonesome for them almost constantly.”

  ONE KEY PART of the image—that the ranch helped him to relax and reflect, that he was a different man down there from the frenzied, driven Lyndon Johnson whom they knew in Washington—was cultivated with great assiduity. A hammock was part of it; he liked to have magazine and newspaper photographers take his picture when he was lying in it, a beatific grin on his face. “I haven’t thought one time today about what would happen if Western Europe fell,” he told Margaret Mayer, now working for the Dallas Times Herald, when she visited the ranch. “People tell me I look better than they have seen me in a long time—no circles under my eyes.” As soon as he arrived, he was a happier man, he would tell reporters, because he was back among “the best people, climate and all-the-way-around best place on earth to live.” He was back among friends, he would say; “I have the best neighbors anyone could ask for. Most of them lived right here when I grew up as a kid.” So convincing was his performance, that Tom Wicker, who had moved from the Winston-Salem Journal to the New York Times, was only expressing the universal journalistic sentiment when he wrote, after a visit to the LBJ Ranch during Johnson’s presidency, that Johnson had an “essential ease” there—“the comfort of certainty, the assurance of belonging.” On the ranch, Wicker wrote, “the President is elemental in a different fashion” from what he was in Washington: “The West dominates him—this big, breezy, rough-cut man of the plains—the grass and the dust of the arid Texas hills…. Down on the ranch, on the old home place … LBJ is all wool and a yard wide. In tan twill and leather boots he is at home, at ease—serene as a restless Westerner can be.”

  The reality was very different, however; very different, and very sad.

  There was a gully on the ranch, a deep crevasse that had been cut into the earth, and then worn deeper and deeper, by decades of heavy Hill Country thunderstorms. Beginning almost at the top of the ridge that was the ranch’s northern boundary, it ran diagonally southeast across the meadows that sloped toward the Pedernales and then abruptly slashed its way straight south into the river—a ravine almost a half mile long, thirty yards wide in places, fairly shallow in some spots, but in other places, where the rains had cut not only through the soil but into the rock beneath, so deep that, Lindig recalls, “If you had elephants in there, you wouldn’t have been able to see anything but their backs.” Filling that ravine was a very expensive proposition. Soil—a lot of soil—had to be purchased, trucked in, then pounded down into the ravine with heavy equipment and reshaped so that grass could be planted in it so that its roots would hold the soil in place. In order for the grass to grow in that arid country, irrigation would be necessary: the laying of pipes up from the river all along the ravine’s half-mile length; the use of big electric pumps that could pull the water all the way up to the ridge. But Johnson said he wanted to grow feed for his cattle and sheep in the gully, and by the time Lindig arrived, he had already filled the ravine in twice. The first time, a thunderstorm had struck before the grass could take hold, and washed all the soil down into the river; the second time, the grass had taken hold and seemed stable, but only until the “hundred-year flood.” When, some weeks after the flood, Lindig arrived, the gully was as deep and as wide as ever, and Johnson told his new foreman to fill it up again.

  Filling the gully wasn’t necessary for any practical reason that Lindig could see, for Lyndon Johnson wasn’t growing crops on the ranch to support its operation, and feed could be purchased for a fraction of the cost of filling the gully. The cost of filling it was disproportionate to other expenditures Johnson was making on the ranch grounds. But Johnson insisted that it be filled, and it was, and it washed out again. “We finally got [the erosion] stopped, but only because we ran the irrigation pipe right over into the ditch and watered it, and fertilized it, over and over until the grass got established,” Lindig recalls. He couldn’t understand why Johnson was so insistent on filling it, but he saw that he was; “He had this fixation about gullies,” he says.

  Lyndon’s cousin Ava understood, however, and so did Lyndon’s brother, who knew him so well, and who understood that the “most important” thing for Lyndon was “not to be like Daddy.” It had been a gully—one not far from this one and very similar in length and width—that had symbolized his father’s struggle to make the Johnson Ranch pay, and his failure. For Sam Johnson, it had been necessary to fill his gully—desperately necessary; a lot of cotton could be planted in it, and Sam needed all the cotton he could grow. Time and time again, in labor that must have been backbreaking for a man in his forties, Sam had taken a wagon down to the Pedernales, shoveled up into it the richest river-bottom soil he could find, and then shoveled the soil into the gully and planted cotton seeds in it—and every time, before the seeds could take root, a gully-washer had washed the seeds and soil away again. “He planted it and planted it,” Ava was to say. “And he never got a crop out of it. Not one.” For Lyndon Johnson, his ranch on the Pedernales was a place of memories. No matter where he walked, there was a reminder: the sagging “dog-run” that looked so much like the shack in which he had been born and spent much of his boyhood; the family graveyard, with the tombstones of his father and grandfather, both of whom had failed on the Pedernales; the weather-beaten little schoolhouse nearby, where as the youngest child in school he had sat on the teacher’s lap (and scrawled on the blackboard, in letters as large as he could make them: “LYNDON B. JOHNSON”). The very sky was a reminder, for his first years on his ranch—1952, ’53, and ’54—were years of a terrible drought in central Texas; he could look up at the sky—the beautiful “sapphire” Hill Country sky, that heartbreakingly empty Hill Country sky—and search for clouds that gave hope of rain, just as he had watched his father and mother look up at the sky and hope for rain.

  Sometimes, he would drive into Johnson City. That little town was so unchanged; almost every house was still occupied by the same family that had been living in it when he had been growing up there, so almost every house held memories for him. Kitty Clyde Ross (now Kitty Clyde Leonard) was still living in Johnson City—Kitty Clyde, with whom, as a high school senior, Lyndon had been “in love,” but whose father was one of the merchants who had written “Please!” on the bills he sent to Sam Johnson every month and who, to break up her romance with Lyndon, had allowed another suitor to drive her around Courthouse Square in the Rosses’ new Ford sedan. (“I saw how it made Lyndon feel when that big car drove by…. I cried for him,” Ava recalls.) Truman Fawcett still lived in Johnson City, Truman Fawcett, who had been sitting on his uncle’s porch when Lyndon walked by, and who had heard his uncle say, “He’ll never amount to anything. Too much like Sam.”

  He had proven Johnson City wrong, had amounted to quite a lot. But memories still shadowed his time on the ranch. And there were other shadows of the past, for often he would be visited at the ranch by his mother, and his brother and sisters, who had gone through that childhood with him.

  The marks of those years remained indelible on the Johnsons. In the Family Album she wrote after her eldest son had become a national figure, Rebekah Baines Johnson portrayed her harsh life in soft colors, but a more accurate gauge of her feelings was what she did on the day—October 24, 1937—of her husband’s funeral. The night before Sam Ealy Johnson was buried in the Johnson family cemetery, she had packed her clothes and whatever else she wanted to keep, and immediately after the funeral she was driven to Austin—without returning to the house. “She went away that very night,” her eldest daughter, Rebekah,
was to say. After a night in Austin, she took a train to Washington, where three of her children—Lyndon, Sam Houston and Rebekah—were living, and after a month or two there came back to Texas, first to Houston for some months, then to Corpus Christi, and finally back to Austin, where she rented an apartment. She was to live in Austin for the rest of her life. If she ever lived again in the house in which she had raised her children, it was not for very long. By January of 1938, the house had been rented. In March of that year, Lyndon Johnson wrote the tenant that his mother was reluctant to sign a long lease since “there is a very slight possibility that she will want to return to Johnson City after a year’s time,” but that he had suggested that she sign because “I seriously doubt that she will want to move back.” In fact, say both her daughter Rebekah and Sam Houston, she never did. “Mother never went back into the house after Daddy’s funeral,” her daughter said. Asked if that statement was to be taken literally, both she and Sam Houston said it was. “Mother never could stand Johnson City,” her daughter said. Sam Ealy had died without making a will—he had very little to leave, beside his gold watch and chain*; the house was mortgaged to close to its value—and in 1940, his five children relinquished to their mother any claim they might have had to the property. In 1942, Lyndon bought it from her for a token payment of ten dollars, assuming the mortgage and tax payments; this was apparently done so that she could have the rent from the house without having to make the payments.

  The complexity of the relationship between Lyndon Johnson and his mother would be demonstrated for the rest of his life; during the twenty years until she died of cancer in 1958, he would help support her, adding monthly payments to the income she received from Social Security and renting the Johnson City house, but except for very rare occasions, he wouldn’t write her; if, during his youth, there had been a steady stream of letters between them—his desperate for encouragement and reassurance, hers providing them with an unstinting hand—during the years since he had first gone to Washington in 1931, the correspondence continued, but with one difference: while his mother was still writing him (“I have been highly incensed all day over Drew Pearson’s hateful thrust…. Courage and forthrightness are synonomous with your name”; “You are a fighter, darling, you have right on your side; you are doing a wonderful selfless task for your government and for humanity, so keep up a brave heart, my wonderful son, right will triumph again! My dearest love, Mother”), he wasn’t writing her; almost all the letters—hundreds of letters—signed by him were written by members of his staff, for a while by Herbert Henderson, for a while by Walter Jenkins, for some years by Gene Latimer. “He used to say, ‘Write two long pages. Put in a lot of bull. Just fill it up with everything that happened this week,’” Latimer recalls. Unlike his other correspondence, these letters were not letters he read, corrected, and sent back to a staffer for rewriting; “He never sent any back that I remember,” Latimer says, and during his Senate years, after Latimer and Jenkins had learned to duplicate his signature, they were often letters he didn’t even sign. The staff was conscientious about this chore (“Next Sunday is Mother’s Day. Shall I wire her a greeting? ‘… Darling: Mother’s Day just one of three sixty-five I give thanks for you annually. Lyndon’”), but it was one in which he seemed to have very little interest. That he saw as much of her as he did was largely due to Lady Bird. Rebekah had been very hurt that her son’s wedding had been so hastily arranged that she was not invited to it, but Lady Bird understood her (“She was a college graduate and accustomed to more luxuries than she had living out there on a farm, where the going was rough”), and the two women had similar interests; when Lyndon’s mother came to Washington (the invitations were often issued by Lady Bird), the two women would visit antique shops and go “kinship hunting” in Virginia and Maryland. “We would case the county seat for a good place to have lunch, and spot the antique shops, before heading into the big old courthouse” to examine birth and marriage certificates, Lady Bird would say. The two women became friends. “I liked her so much,” Lady Bird was to say. “If I had an extra hour in Austin before I had to catch a plane or train to Washington, I would think of all the friends I could call, but I usually decided I would rather go and see Mrs. Johnson. We would sit together and talk about books, about household decorating, about family. We were very good friends, and that is probably better than loving one’s in-laws.” Lyndon’s mother often stayed overnight at the big white ranch house. Visitors from Washington, meeting the gracious, white-haired woman and seeing the affection with which she treated her grandchildren, and the rapport between her and her daughter-in-law, had a hard time understanding why, when she was around, her normally loquacious son sometimes fell into such long silences.

  HIS THREE SISTERS and his brother were sometimes at the ranch, too.

  All four had a nervousness, a fragility of temperament, that was striking to people who met them as adults. Three of them—Sam Houston Johnson and his two oldest sisters, Rebekah and Josefa—developed serious ulcers while they were in their early thirties.

  Two of them—Rebekah and Lucia—were to live relatively stable lives. Rebekah was a tense, high-strung woman; by 1950, her mother, writing about her to Lyndon, would describe her health as “highly precarious.” She married Oscar Price Bobbitt, who went to work for the Johnson radio station as a salesman and eventually rose to be senior vice president of the Johnson television station. Lucia married Birge Alexander, who became area manager of the Federal Aviation Agency in Memphis.

  The lives of the other two Johnson children were quite different. While Josefa, who was born in 1912, was still an undergraduate at San Marcos, bright, tall and strikingly beautiful, stories about what the Hill Country calls her “looseness” or “wildness” in sexual matters began to spread, and continued to spread after college. So did tales of her drunkenness; Arthur Stehling, the powerful Fredericksburg attorney who kept Gillespie County in line for Lyndon Johnson, was called on more than once to intercede after she had been brought to a sheriff’s office or police station in some small Hill Country town because of complaints about a drunken party in a hotel or motel. She was married to an Army lieutenant colonel in 1940, and Lyndon got her a job with the Texas NYA, but the job didn’t work out—that year Lyndon wrote to his mother that if Josefa refused to learn to type, other arrangements would have to be made—and neither did the marriage; by 1945, she was divorced, and more than once Horace Busby, who in 1948 was delegated to “deal with” the “Josefa situation,” had to deal with the fact that she was in a hospital alcoholic ward. Fascinated by politics, she worked in Lyndon’s 1948 senatorial campaign, and on the Texas Democratic Executive Committee in the 1952 presidential race, and the kind of stories that had followed her at San Marcos reemerged. Says a woman reporter who watched her at conventions and executive committee meetings in those years, “If there was a man to be picked up, Josefa picked him up.” The Josefa Johnson who came to the LBJ Ranch in 1951 and 1952 was a woman with trembling hands and few traces of her former beauty, and what Horace Busby was to call “a frighteningly low opinion of herself; when someone important came into the room, sometimes she would jump up and run out as if she felt they didn’t want to be bothered talking to her.”

  During their boyhood, there had been a great closeness between Lyndon Johnson and Sam Houston Johnson, five years younger than he, who would say that he would never forget “those wonderful conversations (monologues, really) that ran through the long Saturday afternoons and Sundays” when he would visit his big brother at San Marcos, and would sit “listening with wide-eyed admiration as my brother” talked of his political stratagems—“even now, I can still visualize him restlessly moving back and forth … his eyes gleaming with anticipation and his deep voice tense with emotion.” This idolatry lasted into adulthood. “He worships you and will do anything for you,” their mother wrote Lyndon in 1937. “You are his hero.” But there was also a great competitiveness, and this, too, lasted into adulthood. Six-foot-one, v
ery handsome and very charming, with a crooked, engaging grin, Sam Houston seemed to some friends to have a brilliant mind (Bill Deason says, “He was smarter ’n Lyndon in some respects”), particularly about politics, a field in which Sam Houston had the same ability Lyndon had—Sam Houston said they both got it from their father—to see several moves ahead on the political chessboard. “More than any man I have ever known he loved politics for its own sake,” Booth Mooney was to write. “His greatest pleasure was to set up intricate, devious schemes for bringing about the discomfiture of any Texas or Washington politician who dared to oppose his brother.” Graduating from San Marcos at fifteen, he received a law degree from Cumberland College in Lebanon, Tennessee, at nineteen, and it seemed for a while as if he would follow in his brother’s footsteps: when in 1935 Lyndon left his job as Richard Kleberg’s chief assistant to become Texas NYA director, he persuaded the Congressman to hire Sam Houston to succeed him.

  But what Sam Houston made of that position was very different from what Lyndon had made of it. He loved to party, loved to drink, and to grandiosely pick up the check when he was out with friends. And he was always buying expensive clothes, for which he couldn’t pay. So that he would have more money, the indulgent Kleberg had him put on the payroll of his family’s King Ranch as a public relations consultant, but Sam used the money to rent an expensive apartment and hire a valet, and his debts only increased. In addition to his own money problems, Sam Houston was creating some for Kleberg. Says Russell Brown, who was a friend of both men, “He didn’t pay much attention to office business. Bills would come in, and instead of methodically compiling them and getting them paid like Lyndon used to do, he would throw them away…. He stopped paying anybody.” A school board in Kleberg’s congressional district actually filed suit to force the Congressman to pay unpaid school taxes. To cover his own debts, Sam started to write checks that bounced, one, to a custom tailor in Washington, for quite a substantial amount.