On the north bank of the Pedernales River in Stonewall, Blanco County, Texas, a mile of dirt road connects the ranch house where Lyndon Johnson died to the small farmhouse in which he was born. During his last years, Johnson often ambled the stretch of grassy river bottom, checking on his grazing Herefords, talking the entire way past the shack that once was his grandfather’s house, past the low stone wall bordering the family cemetery, to the meticulously restored museum, his birthplace.
There, his talk sometimes turned to his childhood, stories attached to this room or that furnishing. Once, standing at the entrance to his parents’ bedroom, where Lyndon slept when his father was away, Johnson described to me a long-remembered ritual: “First my mother washed my hands and face with water, then tucked me in between the cool, white sheets. She crossed then to that old marble dresser on the far side of the room and seated herself on the straw chair in front of the mirror. I watched her take out the long brown pins from her hair. Then she shook her head from side to side, brushing her hair. I used to count, fifty strokes with one arm, fifty with the other. Always the same. Then she emptied a pitcher of water into the washbowl and, with a small yellow cloth, she scrubbed her face, throat, and arms. Then she came back to the bed, said her prayers, and climbed in beside me. Propped against two pillows, she read to me from books she had read with her father long ago … Browning, Milton, Dickens. I liked it better when she talked about when she was a young girl.”1
The world Rebekah described, as Johnson remembered it, was very different from the shabby life she was then leading with her husband and children on the bank of the Pedernales. Her parents had money, position, respectability. They lived in a two-story house surrounded by trees, terraced flower gardens, and a white picket fence. Her people—unlike their poor and ignorant neighbors along the Pedernales—were a proper, civilized breed of educators and preachers of European culture. She projected herself to her son as a dreamy young girl who had spent her afternoons reading poetry under the shade of the big trees in those gardens, her evenings discussing literature with her father, Joseph Wilson Baines.
Baines, a lawyer, educator, and lay preacher in the Baptist church in Blanco, Texas, was seen by his devoted daughter as the paradigm of religious ideals, moral thought, and civic duty.2 In the late 1870s he had served Texas as Secretary of State and afterward as a member of the state legislature, where, as Rebekah told her son, “he thrilled the chambers with eloquent speeches on the rights and duties of mankind, the evil of liquor, the importance of cleanliness in thought and deed, and the iniquity of speculation.”3 With his encouragement, Rebekah had attended Baylor University—she was one of a small number of Texas women in college at that time—where she majored in literature and planned to write a novel about the old South before the Civil War.
“I’m certain she could have been a great novelist,” Johnson told me. “But then her daddy died and it all came apart. All his life he had spoken out against the speculators. He was as righteous as they come. Then in 1904, while my mother was in college, he lost all his money on one disastrous deal. It killed him. He became very depressed and his health got worse until he died.4
“My mother said it was the end for her, too. In early 1907 she moved with her mother to a smaller house in Fredericksburg, Texas. She taught elocution and corresponded for the local paper. She still wanted to do something big, to go places and write, but she said that after her father’s death she lost her confidence in everything. By the time my father came into the picture she’d given up. She’d met him the year before, after he’d won his first victory in the state legislature. Her father thought he was the most promising young politician in Blanco County and wanted her to interview him for the family newspaper. He was tall. Six-feet-four.”5
Sam Johnson was a small-time farmer and trader in real estate and cattle. A great storyteller, his language crude and often vulgar, he was apparently a new kind of man for Rebekah, the opposite of her father. Eight months after her father’s death, she married him and moved to the little farm on the Pedernales.
The anecdote Johnson told me of his mother’s life does not cohere. If she had possessed the talents of a great novelist, it is hardly likely that her writing would have been completely stopped by her father’s death. And her only published work, a history of the Johnson clan, is a highly mannered and sentimental rhapsody. “Now the light came in from the east,” she wrote of Lyndon’s birth, “bringing a deep stillness, a stillness so profound and so pervasive that it seemed as if the earth itself were listening. And then there came a sharp, compelling cry—the most awesome, happiest sound known to human ears—the cry of a newborn baby; the first child of Sam Ealy and Rebekah Johnson was ‘discovering America.’”6 And her splendid image of Joseph Baines, a man who insisted on morals in politics and inveighed against speculators and drinkers, must be reconciled with the man who lost all his money on one speculative deal and introduced his only daughter to the hard-drinking, practical Sam Johnson.
However concocted, Rebekah’s family portrait, the types and conceptions she delineated, nonetheless affected Lyndon Johnson for the rest of his life, forcing divisions between intellect, morality, and action, shaping ideals of the proper politician and the good life. By contrasting the idyll of her cultured youth with the grimness of her marriage, Rebekah left her son forever ashamed of his roots on the Pedernales.
There is a sense in which Rebekah’s story resembles that of many other educated women in the West, who found themselves trapped in a land and a life that they loathed, and yet whose only choice seemed self-denial. The “good woman” never complained in public; she considered it her duty to repress any awareness of the disparities between the civilization she had left behind and the one in which she had now placed herself.7
In her ancestral history, Rebekah writes only: “I was determined to overcome circumstances instead of letting them overwhelm me. At last I realized that life is real and earnest and not the charming fairytale of which I had so long dreamed.” A life devoid of all she reverenced—reading and long conversation—a tedious life of feeding chickens, scrubbing wash, sewing clothes, growing vegetables, became simply the problem of “adjustment to a completely opposite personality … to a strange and new way of life, a way far removed from that I had known in Blanco and Fredericksburg.”8
To her son, however, Rebekah voiced her profound discontent, describing in anguishing detail the ordeal of her life on the Pedernales with Sam Johnson. “My mother,” Johnson said, “soon discovered that my daddy was not a man to discuss higher things. To her mind his life was vulgar and ignorant. His idea of pleasure was to sit up half the night with his friends, drinking beer, telling stories, and playing dominoes. She felt very much alone. The first year of her marriage was the worst year of her life. Then I came along and suddenly everything was all right again. I could do all the things she never did.”9
“How children dance,” Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “to the unlived lives of their parents,” suggesting in poetic language much of the analysis that follows. In the course of this analysis psychiatric knowledge will be used as a means of understanding the formation of Johnson’s behavior. This body of knowledge, however, is and perhaps always will be incomplete. There are mysteries of the human mind that no analytic technique can penetrate—mysteries which, over time, even the greatest psychiatrists, poets, dramatists, and novelists have been unable to explain. There is, for example, no psychiatric principle that can explain Johnson’s immense talents, his extraordinary ability to harness his personal needs and direct his strength—tirelessly and with practical intelligence—toward the highest public achievements, or his capacity to sustain a private life whose intimate stability was rare, even among those not subject to the disintegrative pressures of a public career. Indeed, to know fully the disabling conditions of Johnson’s youth can only increase admiration for the inexplicable power of his will.
Remembering his early years, Johnson spoke almost exclusively of his mother. When he mentioned his father, it was to enumerate his liabilities as a husband and explain what he did to Rebekah.
“One of the first things I remember about my daddy,” Johnson said, “was the time he cut my hair. When I was four or five, I had long curls. He hated them. ‘He’s a boy,’ he’d say to my mother, ‘and you’re making a sissy of him. You’ve got to cut those curls.’ My mother refused. Then, one Sunday morning when she went off to church, he took the big scissors and cut off all my hair. When my mother came home, she refused to speak to him for a week.”10
Contention between Sam and Rebekah was not restricted to the nurture of their son. There were constant disputes over how the household should be managed, whether it would be a home or a hostelry. “I remember one Thanksgiving,” he said. “Holidays always seem to mean a lot to women and they certainly did to my mother. She had gotten out the wedding china and roasted a huge turkey. Everything was set just right. She sat at the head of the table with her fancy lace dress and big wide sleeves. She was saying the prayers when a knock came on the door. My daddy answered and found a Mexican family with five children.
“They lived nearby. My father had done a lot to help them over the years. Now they were returning his favor. They had brought him a green cake, the biggest cake I’d ever seen. Well, the minute he saw them out there, cold and hungry, he invited them to dinner. He was always doing things like that. The dinner was loud. There was a lot of laughing and yelling. I liked it. But then I looked at my mother. Her face was bent toward her plate and she said nothing. I had a feeling that something was wrong, but I was having such a good time I didn’t pay attention. After the meal, she stood up and went to her room. I followed a little behind her and heard her crying in there. I guess she was really counting on it being a private occasion. I looked at her sad face and I felt guilty. I went in and tried to make her feel better.”11
Yet these discords were mild, Johnson remembered, in comparison to the fights provoked by his father’s drinking. In the Baines’ family code, sobriety was essential; it ensured the cardinal quality, self-control. Sobriety was a promise of industry and reliability. Nor was Rebekah alone in her dismay; at that time, women throughout the West regarded liquor as the most threatening rival for their husband’s acceptability, devotion, and income. Their anxiety sustained the Prohibition movement, which enlisted the support of thousands, among them Rebekah Baines Johnson. This war between good and evil was manifest in the two main symbols of the small Western towns—the church, with its steeple pointing upward to heaven, and the low saloon, with its swinging doors leading straight down to hell. There was no room in Rebekah’s Protestant ethic for uncontrolled and frivolous behavior. Economic and social ruin awaited the drunkard. Temperance was both the sign of morality and the key to economic success.12
According to her son, Rebekah saw this conviction painfully vindicated in her own husband’s intemperance. “There was nothing Mother hated more than seeing my daddy drink. When he had too much to drink, he’d lose control of himself. He used bad language. He squandered the little money we had on the cotton and real estate markets. Sometimes he’d be lucky and make a lot of money. But more often he lost out. One year we’d all be riding high in Pedernales terms, so high in fact that on a scale of A to F, we’d be right up there with the A’s. Then two years later, he’d lose it all. The cotton he had bought for forty-four cents a bale had dropped to six cents a bale, and with it the Johnsons had dropped to the bottom of the heap. These ups and downs were hard on my mother. She wanted things to be nice for us, but she could never count on a stable income. When she got upset, she blamed our money problems on my father’s drinking. And then she cried a lot. Especially when he stayed out all night. I remember one bad night. I woke up and heard her in the parlor crying her eyes out. I knew she needed me. With me there, she seemed less afraid. She stopped crying and told me over and over how important it was that I never lose control of myself and disappoint her that way. I promised that I would be there to protect her always. Finally she calmed down and we both fell asleep.”13
The image of Rebekah Baines Johnson that emerges in these stories is that of a drastically unhappy woman, cut off from all the things that had once given her pleasure in life, stranded in a cabin on a muddy stream with a man she considered vulgar and brutish, a frustrated woman with a host of throttled ambitions, trying, through her first-born son, to find a substitute for a dead father, an unsuccessful marriage, and a failed career. She seemed under a compulsion to renew on her son’s behalf all the plans and projects she had given up for herself. The son would fulfill the wishful dreams she had never carried out, he would become the important person she had failed to be.14
“She never wanted me to be alone,” Lyndon later recalled. “She kept me constantly amused. I remember playing games with her that only the two of us could play. And she always let me win even if to do so we had to change the rules. I knew how much she needed me, that she needed me to take care of her. I liked that. It made me feel big and important. It made me believe I could do anything in the whole world.”15
From his position of primacy in his mother’s home, Johnson seemed to develop what Freud has called “the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success.”16 The early privilege of his mother’s intense love was a source of great energy and power. He learned the alphabet before he was two, learned to read and spell before he was four, and at three could recite long passages of poetry from Longfellow and Tennyson. “I’ll never forget how much my mother loved me when I recited those poems. The minute I finished she’d take me in her arms and hug me so hard I sometimes thought I’d be strangled to death.”17
But as strong as Rebekah’s feelings undoubtedly were, one gets the impression Lyndon never experienced her love as a steady or reliable force, but as a conditional reward, alternately given and taken away. When he failed to satisfy her desires—as he did when he refused to complete the violin and dancing lessons she set up for him when he was seven and eight—he experienced not simply criticism but a complete withdrawal of affection. “For days after I quit those lessons she walked around the house pretending I was dead. And then to make it worse, I had to watch her being especially warm and nice to my father and sisters.”18 The same experience was repeated later when Johnson refused to go to college and Rebekah closed him out for weeks, refusing to speak or even to look at him.
One cannot prove the existence of a pattern on the basis of three or four remembered incidents. But there does seem to be a connecting link between the syndrome implicit in Johnson’s childhood memories—of love alternately given and taken away—and the pattern observed in nearly all his adult relationships. With friends, colleagues, and members of his staff, Johnson was capable of unusual closeness; he enveloped people, one by one, in the warmth of his affection and concern. If the hospital bill of a friend needed payment, he paid it. If an employee’s child needed a new coat, he bought it. If a secretary’s house needed renovation, he supervised. But in return he demanded a measure of gratitude and loyalty so high that disappointment was inevitable. And when the disappointment came, Johnson tended to withdraw his affection and concern—the “Johnson freeze-out” it was called—hurting others in much the same way his mother had hurt him years before.
So predictable was his tendency to spoil the relationships he most cared about that it suggests in him the presence of a powerful fear attached to the experience of intimacy: a fear reminiscent perhaps of that he must have felt years before as a consequence of the unique role he’d been asked to play in his mother’s life. For though the young boy took obvious pleasure from certain aspects of his special role—“I loved it when my mother needed me and when she told me all her secrets”19—he is certain to have feared, at least subconsciously, that his father might one day cease tolerating his presumption and take revenge. Johnson does remember the “absolute terror” he experienced one night when he was wakened from sleep in his mother’s bed by the sudden opening of the bedroom door, only to find a younger sister standing there, in her nightgown, crying out for her mother. And from the fears of the boy would develop in the man a continuing sense that, in the end, his power to command love and affection was illegitimate, momentarily wielded but easily overthrown.20
While admitting the pain and confusion he felt as a child, Johnson refused to recognize his mother as a possible source. But it is a commonplace of psychiatric observation that too much devotion and tenderness can lead to great trouble when the child has to step from the tiny kingdom of his mother’s home.21 When Johnson first went to school, he stood next to his teacher all day long, refusing to let go of her skirt. As the teacher, Katie Dietrich, told the story many years later, she could hardly understand him the first two weeks. He had a peculiar way of rolling his r’s and his own way of talking. If she asked him to read the lesson, he would simply stand there, unmoving and mute. Finally, she called “Miss Rebekah,” who suggested that perhaps things would progress if Lyndon were allowed to sit on the teacher’s lap whenever she asked him to read. She tried and the tactic succeeded.22 Still, Johnson wanted to be home, and in three months got his wish. He contracted whooping cough, the first of a series of illnesses that strangely abetted his desires, and had to be kept at home for the remainder of the school year.
So close was the boy to his mother, as Johnson recalled, that one imagines him as an only child when in fact he had four siblings: Rebekah, born when he was two, Josepha when he was four, Sam when he was six, and Lucia when he was eight. Of his relations with his siblings Johnson said very little. There is one vivid scene, however, which he described as a memory but which may, instead, have been a dream or even an aggressive fantasy against both his mother and the unborn child she was then carrying: “I was throwing a baseball to my oldest sister, Rebekah. We were playing in the yard in front of our house. Mother was watching. My younger sister, Josepha, was sitting in her crib behind us, crying. I threw the ball straight and fast, but just as it left my hands Mother moved toward Josepha and stepped right in the path of the ball. She was very pregnant with Sam then. The ball hit her hard, right in the middle of her stomach, and she lost her balance and fell down. I was terrified at the thought of what I’d done. I was certain that her belly would pop just like a balloon. Later, I found out that she had been even more frightened than me. She was, she told me much later, certain that the baby had been damaged. But at the time she said nothing of her fear; she immediately gathered me up into her arms and held me until I finally stopped crying.”23
It is difficult to imagine that a boy of five could throw a ball with sufficient force to knock an adult woman to the ground. It is also difficult, though not impossible, to accept the certainty of Rebekah’s belief that in her fall she had damaged her unborn child. The interesting detail is Johnson’s memory that his mother stepped right into the path of the moving ball, permitting the argument that she and not he was responsible.
“But that wasn’t all,” Johnson continued. “Later that day, I left home to walk to my grandfather’s house, which was a half-mile up the road. Mother, always afraid that I would fall into the river, had told me never to leave the dirt path. But the day was hot and the road was dry and dusty and I wanted to cool my hands and feet. I left the road and ran down to the river bank. I was skipping along until I fell on the roots of a dead tree, and hit my head. I tried to get up. My head hurt. I fell back and lay still. I thought I would be left there forever. It was my punishment. Then, suddenly, my parents were there. Together they picked me up and carried me home. They put me to bed, blew out the light, and sat down at the end of the bed waiting for me to fall asleep. All the time they kept talking in a low voice. They sounded good together. Mother’s voice was not as cold as it usually was when she talked with Father. His voice was warm, too. I remember thinking that being hurt and frightened was worth it so long as it ended this way. I thought that I would have been willing to go through the experience a hundred times to be sure of finding at the end a thing so nice and friendly as my parents were then.”24
The boy’s willingness to exchange physical pain for mental peace provides an interior window on the constant tensions that must have shaped his childhood days. Further evidence of these tensions is suggested in Johnson’s memory of his grandfather’s house just down the road as “the perfect escape from all my problems at home.”25 Years later Johnson told how much he loved to visit with his grandfather late in the day, when the two of them could talk undisturbed for two hours or more. “I sat beside the rocker on the floor of the porch, thinking all the while how lucky I was to have as a granddaddy this big man with the white beard who had lived the most exciting life imaginable.”26
The elder Sam Ealy Johnson had spent his working life as a cowboy, driving herds of cattle from Fredericksburg, Texas, across twelve hundred miles of dangerous country to Abilene, Kansas. Three years before the beginning of the Civil War, he and his brother Tom, both men in their twenties, had come to the East Texas valley where the slim Pedernales River cut through harsh caliche soil. Their cattle-raising enterprise was interrupted when both brothers entered the Confederate Army. Returning after Appomattox, the brothers worked long days, constructed a rock barn for protection against Indian attacks, seeded pasture, bought cattle on credit during the spring and sold them in the fall. During the late sixties rising cattle prices brought increased prosperity, and in the boom year of 1870 Sam drove over seven thousand head of cattle to Kansas, returning with over $100,000.27
The old man had endless stories to tell of these days on the trail, and a renowned narrative gift, only to be matched and exceeded by his grandson, who, sixty years later, could recreate these conversations as if they had occurred the day before, adding, one always suspected, a few embellishments of his own. “Eleven cowboys,” as Johnson remembered it, “made an average crew for a trail herd of fifteen hundred cows. Gathered and branded in Texas, the cattle were driven up the Chisholm Trail until they reached Abilene, Kansas, where they were slaughtered and sent East by railroad. When the rivers that crossed the trails were cold, the cattle would often balk partway across, circling and jumping on top of one another instead of moving in a straight line. Then the lead cowboy would have to ride out in front of the herd and get the cattle moving.”28
The young boy would never forget his grandfather’s image of men and cattle circling aimlessly in the cold, treacherous currents, their continued progress dependent on the daring and skill of the lead cowboy. In later years he was to describe the arena of national affairs as a huge swampland in which the participants often wandered, mired and confused, in circles of endless debate until the appearance of strong leadership. It is an irony he would not have appreciated that later commentators would accuse him of bringing the nation into just such a swampland—Vietnam—through the exercise of these very qualities of leadership and will.
But subduing a stampede was the most dangerous adventure of all. As he remembered his grandfather’s version of it, “There was no foretelling what might start a stampede. It might be a clap of thunder, a lightning flash, a strange smell, or the rattle of a single snake in the middle of the night.” Or, Lyndon always insisted his grandfather said—but it was more likely his own retrospective parable—“It might be started by one or two troublemaker cows that went around hooking the sleeping cattle.”29 One steer stood up, then another, and more and more until the whole herd was on its feet. To soothe the cattle down, lullabies were sung. That failing, all you could do was to outrun the wild herd, trying to swing its leaders around into its tail end, so as to turn the mass into a circle that would wind down like a spent top. You had to ride at a dead run in the dark of the night, knowing there were prairie dog holes all around and knowing that if the horse stepped into one of these holes, you could be crushed to death by the oncoming stampede.30
His grandfather talked, Johnson said, until the sun set. Even then, the boy did not want him to stop. But the talk always came to an end when Sam Ealy Johnson stood up. “You better go along now, son, your mama is waiting.” Then, seeing the boy’s disappointment, he invited Lyndon into the study, where there was a roll-top desk opened by a large gold key. Grandfather Johnson took the key from his pocket and unlocked the bottom drawer, filled with sticks of candy in all the colors of the rainbow. Every day the boy chose a different color, his grandfather locked the drawer, returned the key to his right pocket, and suddenly, from his other pocket, pulled another present—a big red apple. “I remember how I thought that deep pockets were wonderful things to have.”31Lyndon remembered hurrying down the road, mounting the steps of his house in haste, anxious to avoid his mother’s displeasure.
Johnson’s image of the intrepid cowboy stayed with him the rest of his life, although he never experienced the working day of the cowboy, nor the long and lonely nights on the plain, for by the time he was born in 1908 the world of the cattle drives had collapsed. In the 1880s and ’90s as the railroads penetrated the West, the long drives to market became increasingly unnecessary. Frightened cattle farmers, realizing the precariousness of their situation, began to fence in land which, until then, had been open. The stringing of barbed wire and the building of fences brought the cattle drives to an end. Indeed, the decline of the Western farmer had been going on for decades. Between 1860 and 1890 commodity prices declined persistently while the price of manufactured goods, protected by tariff barriers and monopolies, continued to rise. The economic life of the many in the West became increasingly dependent on the decisions of the few in the East—the monopolists who kept prices up, the middlemen who handled commodities on the exchanges, the railroads that levied heavy rates, the money powers that determined rates of currency, the political elite that supported a tax structure which bore disproportionately on land.
During this period of economic distress Johnson’s grandfather had joined the newly formed Populist Party, often traveling hundreds of miles to attend the large political camp meetings that so resembled evangelistic revivals, reading and circulating a prodigious number of crudely printed pamphlets from the Populist press, spreading the word of new hope for the common man. And in 1892 the Populist Party had supported its own candidate for President on a platform calling for government regulation of railroads, telegraph, and telephone, a graduated income tax, reform of the currency system, and a series of political reforms, including the secret ballot, the initiative and referendum, and direct election of Senators.32
But the Populist Party was also dead by the time Lyndon Johnson was born—killed through a combination of Republican McKinley’s overwhelming victory over Populist-Democrat Bryan in 1896 and the Spanish-American War in 1898—and the reformist impulse had fallen into the hands of the Progressives, who shared a narrower vision of social change. This narrowed vision and the closing of the frontier meant a closing in of horizons for Sam Johnson, as for many of his generation. Accustomed to continual movement, the old man spent the last decades of his life in his small farmhouse on the Pedernales. And the more the past receded, the more idealized it became.
In the picture the old man created for the young boy, the dangers of the frontier were romanticized, its tedium forgotten. Fantasy mixed with memory, gradually lifting ordinary events to the level of heroic legend. Extravagant claims were made for the courage and daring of the cowboy: the tall, strong he-man, ready for action in any situation.33 And with the idealized man came an idealized female: the strong, courageous pioneer woman, called upon to protect her home and family from the ravages of nature and the attacks of Indians. The stories Johnson heard about his grandmother, Eliza Johnson, fit this image. Over and over, his grandfather described the day when his wife, alone in the house with an infant child, hid beneath a trap door, her handkerchief stuffed in the baby’s mouth, while Indians ransacked the house above.
“I always felt a little uneasy hearing those stories about my grandmother,” Johnson later said. “For I knew that as we sat there and talked on the porch, she was inside the house, lying flat on her back, paralyzed with a stroke which she’d had when I was three or four. But so long as we stayed outside on the porch I felt happy and safe.”34
The porch in front of the house was happy and safe; so, too, was Johnson’s relationship with his grandfather—the adult who seemed to provide the boy with the pleasure of love without the constraints he experienced in his own house.
When Johnson was five, his family left the cabin on the river and moved to a frame house in Johnson City. His father had found some real estate business in Austin and wanted to be nearby. The new house was larger and more pleasant than the old one, and the move gave Rebekah an escape from her isolation. Though Johnson City was hardly more than a village, it had a high school, in which she soon taught debating, a newspaper, for which she wrote a weekly column, and an opera house, in which local plays, directed by Rebekah, were performed. Rebekah organized a Browning Society. She gave private lessons in elocution and she taught a class in “Old Bible.” She joined a temperance society.
Johnson was not as happy as his mother about moving into town. The excitement of the new house was spoiled for the boy by the feeling that he had left behind his closest friend—his grandfather. Now he saw his grandfather only when the whole family went back to visit the farm, and he hated these visits since he had to sit in the parlor and listen to the adults talk. Even worse, he then had to see his paralyzed grandmother. Always before, she had remained in the bedroom, but now, when his whole family came to visit, they brought her to a chair and he would have to confront her sitting next to him: “Her skin was brown and wrinkled. Her body was twisted. I was afraid that I was meant to kiss her. I tried to imagine her as the strong pioneer woman she had once been. I remembered the amazing stories I had heard about her staggering courage in the face of Indian attacks. But age and illness had taken all life out of her face. She never said a word. She sat perfectly still. And I was terrified to sit beside her.”35
It was in this period, Johnson later said, that he began having, night after night, a terrifying dream, in which he would see himself sitting absolutely still, in a big, straight chair. In the dream, the chair stood in the middle of the great, open plains. A stampede of cattle was coming toward him. He tried to move, but he could not. He cried out again and again for his mother, but no one came.
In later conversation, Johnson suggested a relationship between the chair in the dream and the chair where his paralyzed grandmother used to sit. As a child, he had, as he remembered it, a persistent fear of becoming paralyzed and sitting forever, like his grandmother.36 But recurrent dreams are generally a statement of profound psychic dilemmas, suggesting unresolved problems far beyond the reach of daily events. Seen in this light, the boy’s paralysis presents one solution, albeit painful, to the fear of acting out the forbidden Oedipal wish to eliminate the father and take the mother. Termed in psychiatric literature a “castration” or “punishment” dream, the paralysis would restrain what in young Johnson’s case seems to have been a particularly powerful combination of desire, fear, and guilt.37
The Pedernales was not Thebes, however, and the importance of the dream lay more in its particular meaning than in its archetypal form. The cattle drive was the domain of the male in the world of fantasy and fact created for Johnson by his grandfather; controlling a stampede of cattle by one’s own intense motion was the supreme test of a man’s courage and skill. Pitted against this practical, active life was Rebekah’s world of books and beauty and morality, a feminized world of dreamy thinkers whose idealism led inevitably to ruin and collapse. Both worlds rigidly defined—the one the object of aspiration, the other the object of scorn. Boys were supposed to be active, to run, shout, and get dirty; they were never to cry and never to play with dolls. Girls were supposed to read and sit still, dress pretty and stay clean, cry a lot and play with dolls. Yet Lyndon’s mother always kept him clean and she read to him at the end of the day. She brushed his hair in long, yellow curls, dressed him like little Lord Fauntleroy, bought him a violin, and enrolled him in dancing class. He knew that his friends were laughing at him for taking time with these feminine things. He loved his mother and loved being close to her, but he feared he was becoming a sissy.
The equation of femininity, intellectuality, and paralysis—and the corresponding compulsions to move, keep control, stay in charge—becomes even clearer in later versions of the same dream which Johnson claimed he dreamt repeatedly for several months after his heart attack in 1955 and then again after North Vietnam’s Tet offensive in 1968. In these dreams, which we will discuss later in more detail, Johnson had become Woodrow Wilson, the President he once characterized as “too intellectual” and “too idealist” for the people’s good. In the dream, he was lying in a bed in the Red Room. His head was still his, but from the neck down his body was dead, victim of that paralysis which had held both Wilson and his grandmother in their final years. In the next room, he could hear all his assistants squabbling over who would get what parts of his power. He could neither talk nor walk and not a single aide tried to protect him.
Not long after the move into town, Johnson’s grandfather died. He was seventy-seven years old. Johnson did not remember seeing the body. The experience that did stand out in his memory was a cool, dark moment in a corner of the family cemetery. He described that moment to me nearly sixty years later as we stood on the shaded plot, a hundred yards from the birthhouse, which still serves as the family cemetery, and where he, too, is now buried. Canopied by oaks beside the Pedernales, it is a lovely, restful place. Johnson, however, was agitated as he walked among the low stone markers and read them aloud one by one: Sam Ealy Johnson (1913); Sam Johnson (1937); Rebekah Johnson (1958). He pointed to a giant climbing oak and said he remembered standing by that tree at the ceremony for his grandfather, watching the coffin as it was lowered into the ground. A light rain had then started to fall. He remembered thinking at the time how happy the rain would make his grandfather. He recalled that during the ceremony he caught sight of his father’s tearful eyes and the big red splotches on his cheeks. This was the first time he had seen his father cry. He had often seen his mother in tears, but she was a girl. It frightened him. When the small crowd began dispersing, Johnson ran up to his father and they walked together down the dirt road. He knew from the tone of his father’s voice that a terrible thing had happened. As they walked away, he looked back at the tree against which he had been standing and felt, he said, that something within him had banged shut.38
Johnson remembered turning to his father after his grandfather died. The two had grown closer with the move into town, but now, with Grandpa Johnson dead, a feverish eagerness to resemble his father took possession of him. He listened to his father talk and, rejecting his mother’s elocution lessons, adopted his father’s crude, colorful, and alive way of talking. Yet unlike Sam’s crudity, Lyndon’s would always be controlled; with the son, the use of swearwords and obscenity usually had a point.
Imitating his father’s friendliness, Lyndon struck up conversations with everyone he met. He became a favorite of all the older people in town, asking them how things were going, how they were feeling and what they thought about the latest political happenings. This capacity to charm his elders produced advantages with his peers: as one of his childhood friends later said, “Lyndon could talk my parents into anything, letting us do anything or go anywhere.”39
In school, Johnson became something of a troublemaker. He wanted to be outside with his father. His chronic restlessness earned him extra tasks as punishment, such as bringing in the firewood and cleaning the blackboards. He often failed to complete his lessons. But Rebekah refused to give up. Every morning at breakfast, holding his lesson book in her hand, she would read aloud to Sam the lesson of Lyndon’s that was due that day. Forced to listen, Johnson would learn. If it took longer to read the lesson than to eat breakfast, Rebekah would walk him to school, reciting from the primer all the way. Still, Johnson never came to like reading for its own sake. He could sit still only if the stories were real histories and real biographies, that is, if they spoke mostly of the actions of other men. “Is it true?” he repeatedly asked. “Did it actually happen, Mama?”40
In the evenings, Sam liked to sit in the brown rocker on the porch, swapping tales and jokes with three or four of his political friends. Something in the laughing voices of these men excited Johnson’s imagination. The boy stood in the half-darkness by the doorway, straining to hear these stories filled with colorful details about the comings and goings of the political figures of the day and the great historical figures of the past. He heard a lot of discussion about James Ferguson, the champion of the tenant farmer, elected Governor of Texas in 1914 on a liberal platform calling for a law fixing farm-rental prices. Re-elected in 1916, Ferguson ran into difficulties with the state legislators that led to his impeachment in 1917. Lyndon’s father admired Ferguson greatly, and his uncle, Clarence Martin, serving as chief counsel for Ferguson’s defense, argued that the charges against him were based solely on conservative opposition to his liberal stance. He also heard talk of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. His father supported Wilson’s New Freedom, but the defeated Bull Mooser, Teddy Roosevelt, remained the local hero. “Whenever I pictured Teddy Roosevelt,” Johnson later said, “I saw him running or riding, always moving, his fists clenched, his eyes glaring, speaking out against the interests on behalf of the people.”41 There was also much talk of local county figures and endless calculations on how different families would vote in the next election.
“Mother found little of interest in those nightly sessions; to her, such politics were low and dull, and so were Daddy’s friends. What attracted her wasn’t personality, not detail—she saw that as gossip—but great issues and great ideas. She had the Southerner’s passion for rhetoric. To her the greatest politicians were the greatest orators—Daniel Webster, John Calhoun, William Jennings Bryan.”42 Rebekah tried to interest Lyndon in debate; she even coached his debating team at school, but, for a long while, Lyndon simply mumbled too much.43
“Mother was interested in national politics, not local. I think she was hoping that someday my father would run for national office—in particular for the same congressional seat her father had tried and failed to get decades before. I’m not sure when it was he ran for that seat, but Mother said the problem was that he was too eloquent for the people’s tastes. He was more concerned about saying the right things than about winning and he lost to a lesser man who sold himself to the people door to door. But my father had no desire for national office; he had no desire to leave his home.”44
Sam had courted Rebekah during his first stint in the state legislature (1904–1908). In those years, marked on the national level by Teddy Roosevelt’s Square Deal, Sam earned the reputation of a loyal progressive, supporting bills to tax insurance, telephone, and sleeping car companies; to regulate rates charged by public utility companies (water, gas, electric power); to enact a franchise tax on corporations; to establish the eight-hour workday; and to regulate lobbying. When his two terms were up, however, he stayed out of politics for nearly a decade and devoted his attention to his real estate business.45
Though Sam failed to secure a stable income for his family during those years, he kept up his ties with the legislature and remained an important figure in the local power elite. After the war in 1918, when Lyndon was ten, Sam began another stint in the legislature, which lasted until 1924. The war had bred an ugly intolerance in the country, and Texas was no exception. In the spring of 1918, under the sway of strong anti-German sentiment, a loyalty bill was passed in the legislature which specified that any person using disloyal language at any time or place in the presence of another would be subject to imprisonment. “My father stood right up against that situation,” Johnson later said. “He got up on the floor of the House of Representatives and made a wonderful speech pleading for tolerance and common sense. He was a great civil libertarian. He threw himself into the battle against the provision that would have granted the power of arrest to every Texas citizen, and that provision was defeated even though the bill succeeded. He will always be a hero to the German-Americans in our area for that. At the same time, he fought the Ku Klux Klan and defended civil liberties on all levels.
“I loved going with my father to the legislature. I would sit in the gallery for hours watching all the activity on the floor and then would wander around the halls trying to figure out what was going on. The only thing I loved more was going with him on the trail during his campaigns for re-election. We drove in the Model T Ford from farm to farm, up and down the valley, stopping at every door. My father would do most of the talking. He would bring the neighbors up to date on local gossip, talk about the crops and about the bills he’d introduced in the legislature, and always he’d bring along an enormous crust of homemade bread and a large jar of homemade jam. When we got tired or hungry, we’d stop by the side of the road. He sliced the bread, smeared it with jam, and split the slices with me. I’d never seen him happier. Families all along the way opened up their homes to us. If it was hot outside, we were invited in for big servings of homemade ice cream. If it was cold, we were given hot tea. Christ, sometimes I wished it could go on forever.”46
This growing identification with his father produced both strain and pleasure. By comparison with most citizens of Johnson City, Sam Johnson had a certain dash and style—even if his dash and style were sometimes employed to glide over his failures as head of the family. Sam Johnson never did rise in the political world. He remained for life what he was the day Rebekah married him—a small-time farmer and trader who enjoyed local politics. If only the boy could have felt as proud of him openly as he loved him privately. As it was, Lyndon remained forever uneasy about having become, in so much of his mind and his spirit, Sam Johnson’s son.
Some of the tension came out in the form of competition between father and son. Lyndon’s younger brother, Sam Houston, describes one such episode. When he was three and Lyndon was nine, the two brothers slept together in a small room right next to their father’s bedroom. At about midnight, as he was snuggled warmly against his brother, he would hear his father call: “Sam Houston, come in here and get me warm.” The boy crawled out of Lyndon’s bed and went to his father, holding himself perfectly still until his father fell asleep. Then he would hear Lyndon’s call: “Sam Houston, come on back, I’m getting cold.” Back he went, moving away from his father, quiet as a burglar, so that again he could snuggle up to his big brother.47
Aside from the slavish position of Sam in this peculiar game of power and convoluted sexuality, this episode reveals again Lyndon’s uncommon presumption—the belief that he was somehow entitled to the same rights and privileges as his father. The younger brother’s compliance with his older brother’s wishes, even in the face of his father’s contrary command, suggests the powerful position Lyndon held in his family structure. And when his father was away, this position was strengthened: Lyndon was left in charge of the household, responsible for taking care of his mother and delegating the daily chores to his sisters and brother.
The more serious tension between father and son reveals itself in a story Johnson later told about his first experience killing an animal. “In the fall and the spring, I spent every moment when I wasn’t in school out in the open. With the other boys, I went hunting squirrels and rabbits. I carried a gun and every now and then I pointed it at the animals but I never wanted to kill any of them. I wanted only to know that I could kill if I had to. Then one day my daddy asked me how did it happen that I was the only boy in the neighborhood who had never shot an animal. Was I a coward? The next day I went back into the hills and killed a rabbit. It jumped out at me from behind a bush and I shot it in between the eyes. Then I went to the bathroom and threw up.”48
The lessons in manhood continued. When he was fifteen, Johnson smashed up his father’s car. He had borrowed the car to meet a new girl at a church gathering. On meeting Johnson, the girl realized that she was three years older and very quickly took off with someone else. Feeling sorry for himself, Johnson gathered a few of his friends and they went off together for a couple of drinks. Then they all piled into the car to go home. On the way, the car hit a bridge and turned upside down. The boys were not hurt, but the car was totally wrecked. Johnson was, as he remembered it, too frightened to know what to do. “I knew only that I could not face my father. I had four dollars in my pocket, so I hopped the bus to New Braunfels, where my uncle lived. I thought I could hide out there for a few days. The second day, Daddy tracked me down on the phone. I walked to the phone, feeling like I was going to the guillotine. I tried to keep my legs and my voice from shaking. My uncle looked at me in silence and I felt the blood rising to my face.
“My daddy said: ‘Lyndon, I traded in that old car of ours this morning for a brand-new one and it’s in the store right now needing someone to pick it up. I can’t get away from here and I was wondering if you could come back, pick it up, and drive it home for me. And there’s one other thing I want you to do for me. I want you to drive it around the courthouse square, five times, ten times, fifty times, nice and slow. You see there’s some talk around town this morning that my son’s a coward, that he couldn’t face up to what he’d done, and that he ran away from home. Now I don’t want anyone thinking I produced a yellow son. So I want you to show up here in that car and show everyone how much courage you’ve really got. Do you hear me?’
“‘Yes sir,’ I replied. I hung up the phone, shook hands with my uncle, and left right away.”49
In telling the story, Johnson saw this as a lesson in manly courage. By returning home he was asserting the masculine virtue of “sticking it out.” But as Johnson himself discloses, Sam had already informed him that the damage had been undone, or had led to benefit in the form of a brand-new car. Slipping away from responsibility had proved a sheer gain. He had avoided a confrontation with a perhaps irate father, delaying his return until the potential punisher became an actual accomplice. We shall encounter this aversion to confrontation many times again in Johnson’s later life; so fearful was he of any remote appearance of weakness or loss of face, and so rigid was his definition of courage, that often he would shun situations where he was unable to assert his mastery.
In telling the story, Johnson also emphasized his father’s generosity in deciding not to punish his son for wrecking the car. And, indeed, there was a certain generosity in Sam Johnson’s handling of the accident. For all that, one need only picture Lyndon driving around the courthouse square fifty times to suggest the shame he must have felt in being forced to make his private accident the public property of Johnson City.
In this tale, as in the tale of the rabbit, the evidence suggests that, despite Johnson’s conclusions, the boy was deeply humiliated by his father’s tests of manliness. And, as before, Lyndon refused to admit anger toward his father, endeavoring rather to admire his father’s manner of raising a son. “Oftentimes my father would talk to me through my mother. She’d be standing over the stove where she spent her life and he’d come in saying, ‘Rebekah, you know that son of ours has the most foolish judgment of anyone I know … why, he …’ and before you knew it, I was mending my ways.”50 But Lyndon’s resentments would not remain unburied; self-esteem wounded by humiliation became vindictive.
The more powerful he became, the more Johnson forced people around him to submit to his tests of manhood.51 Visitors to the LBJ Ranch were handed rifles and expected to shoot an antelope or a deer in the presence of the Majority Leader; politicians and bureaucrats were called upon to swim naked with the President in the White House pool; members of the Cabinet and the White House staff were compelled to accompany their boss into the bathroom and continue their conversation. From the boy’s fear of being tested came the man’s determination that he would be the one giving instead of taking the tests.
Just the same, Johnson seemed to endure his father’s testing far better than his mother’s gloomy silence. As Johnson remembered it, Rebekah said nothing to him about the smashup. Indeed, she had refrained for months from commenting about his mediocreperformance in school or his frequent evenings on the town with his friends. She had her own way of showing her displeasure—not to yell or even to scold, but to greet her son at all times with an impassive stare. She made no secret of the fact that his drinking, fast driving, and generally aggressive behavior displeased her; nor did she conceal the repugnance she felt at the reputation he had established in school as a sluggish student who treated everything as a joke. Johnson knew by his mother’s withdrawal that he had not lived up to the splendid vision she had held of him as a boy.
When Johnson graduated from high school in May, 1924, Rebekah allowed her quarrel with her son to surface at last. When she spoke, daily taking him to task for his slovenly manner, she had, as Johnson later described it, “a terrible knifelike voice.”52 She inquired scrupulously into his plans for the future and, eliciting no assurance that he was even willing to entertain the notion of college, she closed him out completely. During supper she would direct her remarks to her husband and her younger children, never so much as confirming Lyndon’s existence. Directly after supper, she went to bed.
“We’d been such close companions, and, boom, she’d abandoned me. I wanted to please her, but something told me I’d go to pieces if I went to college. I’d just finished ten years of sitting inside a school; the prospect of another four years was awful. It would make me a sissy again and I would lose my daddy’s respect.”53
In this stormy period, Johnson suffered a recurrent dream that he was sitting alone in a small cage. The cage was completely bare, he said, except for a stone bench and a pile of dark, heavy books. As he bent down to pick up the books, an old lady with a mirror in her hand walked in front of the cage. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror and to his horror he found that the boy of fifteen had suddenly become a twisted old man with long, tangled hair and speckled, brown skin. He pleaded with the old woman to let him out, but she turned her head and walked away. At this point in the dream, as he remembered it, he woke up, his hands and his forehead damp and dripping with sweat. He sat up in the bed and then, not fully knowing what he meant by it but believing in it faithfully, he said half aloud: “I must get away. I must get away.”54
The dream is almost too good, too easy to fit into the pattern of his other dreams. It is without jagged edges, the false doors, blank spaces, and swerves that usually complicate our memories of dreams. I wondered as Johnson described it to me whether he was telling it in part for my sake. Perhaps the obvious interest I had shown in his earlier dream provoked him to construct an additional one. Perhaps he said to himself: “You intellectuals, you like dreams? I’ll give you all you like.” There is no way of knowing.
But whether it was truly a remembered dream or simply a yarn spun for the sake of the conversation, the image of the jail and the old woman suggests again a hostility toward his mother. He has done the duty his mother has asked of him. He has voluntarily caged himself in another educational prison. But the price of recovering his mother’s love is nothing less than his own manhood. Yet here, as always, the bad feelings toward her had to be deflected, as if an acknowledgment of her failings would be treasonous. She was ever the “great lady,” the “perfect woman,” “brilliant,” “sexy,” “beautiful,” and “endlessly enchanting.” Over time, however, while unfailing in his expressions of love for his mother, Johnson adopted those patterns of behavior she most despised: he wheeled and dealed behind closed doors; spoke crudely; interrupted family occasions with unexpected guests; turned to alcohol for relaxation and solace; and expressed a lasting distrust and fear of ideas, intellectuals, debates, books, and eloquence.55
Actually, he believed, it was the intellectuals who hated him: “The men of ideas think little of me, they despise me.”56 And that, too, reflected his unconscious perceptions of his mother’s feelings. That there was some truth to this—given the prejudices of the literary and publishing world toward the boisterous style of the Texan—made it all the more useful for overlooking his own feelings of hatred toward the type of people whom his mother so admired. It was not he who wanted to injure them; it was they who wanted to injure him and were responsible for his failure. In retirement, Johnson sincerely believed that he would have been the greatest President in his country’s history had it not been for the intellectuals and the columnists—the men of ideas and the men of words.
From time to time, Johnson’s antagonism toward these men of culture assumed the crude shape of simple exhibitionism. His penchants for talking to visitors while on the toilet, for using crude and scatological language, and for exhibiting his sexual organs were especially pronounced when he dealt with “gentlemen of culture.” In renouncing his civility he stripped them of theirs; he reduced them to his own ignominy, in which he celebrated a triumph over his mother’s voice within him.
In this antagonism toward the men of ideas, however, Johnson’s attitudes were shared by many others, an aspect of an indigenous anti-intellectualism. For years in America, intellect had been pitted against active work and practicality since theory was held to be the opposite of practice; frequently it had even been pitted against democracy since affairs of the mind were associated with aristocracies.57
The sad and poignant thing for Johnson, however, was not his anti-intellectualism in itself but his need to be accepted by the very people he scorned. For the boy’s hidden feelings toward his mother were succeeded by the man’s feelings toward Culture: subdued awe and blatant bitterness, a sense that he, unlike the Eastern intellectuals, had none of those ridiculous and precious tokens, an Ivy League degree and a facility for words. “They” came into the world fully clothed; he remained essentially naked no matter how much power he acquired. “My daddy always told me,” Johnson once remarked, “that if I brushed up against the grindstone of life, I’d come away with far more polish than I could ever get at Harvard or Yale. I wanted to believe him, but somehow I never could.”58
In drifting back and forth between these feelings of awe and bitterness, Lyndon Johnson’s behavior is reminiscent of an important strain in the American struggle for national identity. The country was born in repudiation of Europe, yet many Americans were forever turning to Europe for approval and justification of the way of life they had created—especially in matters of culture, art, and intellect. For generations, Europe contrived to haunt and heckle the American imagination; Europe’s greater genius would be denied one day, enhanced the next. This ambivalence often took the form, as did Lyndon Johnson’s own ambivalence, of a conflict over the comparative value of will, on the one hand, and intellect on the other.
Yet our concern here is not simply with the conflicts from which Lyndon Johnson suffered, but with how he surmounted or utilized these conflicts, adapting them to the realities of his life. And here the interesting biographical fact is that Johnson knew enough at the age of fifteen to know that he simply had to get away.
That summer—the summer of 1924—the opportunity arrived. A group of Johnson’s friends had decided to leave home and go to California. For each of the boys the trip no doubt meant something different—adventure, the hope of work. There was a report, one of the boys later recollected, that money out there grew on trees and that a person had but to reach up and get it. Lyndon, youngest of the group, listened in as they made their plans; he watched as they fixed up the old Model T that would carry them West. He wanted desperately to go along, but he knew that his parents would never allow him to leave. “Going was one hell of a problem,” he said. “I decided I’d just say to my mother and father that I was going West with the boys. I knew it would be an emotional scene, but one night I decided to look them straight in the eye and reveal my plans. But when I reached the front door of my house, I began to shiver uncontrollably. At last, I went in. They sat opposite one another at the kitchen table. My sisters and brother were there. I tried to speak, but I couldn’t say a goddamn word. I lost my nerve.”59
One week later, before the sun came up on a Monday morning, the boys took off in their Model T. At the last minute, Johnson decided, without asking or telling anyone, to go with them. He jumped into the car. “Here I am,” he said. “Let’s hurry along and be on our way.”
During the entire trip Johnson walked around carrying his suitcase as though it were incredibly heavy and had within it enough clothes to last a family of twenty for fifteen years. His companions could not imagine why Johnson took so much along and yet wore the same clothes day after day. Then one afternoon the baling wire that Johnson had used to tie up the suitcase came loose and it opened on the street. Out rolled the sum of Johnson’s worldly possessions—a straw hat!
Johnson saw the trip, when he talked about it later, in cartoon imagery. He recounted brushes with gruff poker players, scenes of burying money in underground holes, and fancies of reliving his grandfather’s life on the frontier.60
But the old frontier had promised economic and spiritual independence, and in California, in 1924, that independence was not easy to secure. Indeed, Johnson was barely able to survive on the grapes he picked, the dishes he washed, and the cars he fixed. Just the same, he remembered living happily for a time in different places. Free of both his mother and his father, he found he had an immense curiosity about the different kinds of people with whom he worked—the field hands in the Imperial Valley, the cooks in the all-night cafes, the garage mechanics in the big cities. He found himself constantly entertaining his fellow workers with stories and jokes. People seemed to like him; they admired his quickness.
Johnson lived the vagabond life for nearly a year; then, when his money dried up completely, he took a job in Los Angeles as a clerk to a criminal lawyer. The job was no accident. The lawyer was a cousin of Rebekah’s. There Lyndon stayed for another year, until one August day in 1926 when, suddenly, faced with an offer of a ride to Texas, he decided that after two years’ absence he was ready to return.
Johnson would long remember this trip back home; he later theatrically designated it the moment when he found his vocation of politics. On the trip, as Johnson recounted it, he thought a great deal about his parents. “I still believed my mother the most beautiful, sexy, intelligent woman I’d ever met and I was determined to recapture her wonderful love, but not at the price of my daddy’s respect. Finally, I saw it all before me. I would become a political figure. Daddy would like that. He would consider it a manly thing to be. But that would be just the beginning. I was going to reach beyond my father. I would finish college; I would build great power and gain high office. Mother would like that. I would succeed where her own father had failed; I would go to the Capitol and talk about big ideas. She would never be disappointed in me again.”61
Johnson reached his boyhood home on a Sunday afternoon. When he walked inside the door, he carried with him an air of pride and self-respect. At supper that night, there was, as he remembered it, much conversation. Later, left in his room, he knew that somehow things were different. He was ready to embark on his future career.
Perhaps the trip was, as Johnson believed, a turning point, marking the transition from childhood to adulthood. The separation from home obviously helped to distance Lyndon in a positive way from his mother’s ceaseless pressure. And the resolve he felt the night he returned certainly showed up in the rapid successes he achieved once he entered college. But turning points are rarely as dramatic as we remember them to be. Despite his resolution, Lyndon stayed away from the study of books for another six months, taking, instead, a job with a road gang. Finally, one hot afternoon in February, 1927, he went to his mother and said: “All right, I’m sick of working just with my hands and I’m ready to try and make it with my brain.”62
The next day Rebekah phoned San Marcos College, where her mother had found work as a house mother after her father died. Primarily a teachers college, San Marcos was the college in Southwest Texas; it was inexpensive, familiar, and close to home. One week later, Lyndon was admitted as a provisional student, pending the completion of a series of entrance exams. “I’ll never forget,” Johnson later said, “how my mother helped me out on those exams. She came to San Marcos and stayed up with me the entire night before the math exam, drilling me over and over until it finally got into my head.”63 From the breakfast table in Johnson City to a student room at San Marcos College, she was always his coach. But this time necessity limited Rebekah’s aid; San Marcos was thirty miles from Johnson City and Rebekah still had four younger children at home. So after the exam, she went home, leaving Lyndon on his own in an environment that provided numerous outlets for his abilities and talents, allowing him for the first time to employ all those resources he had developed as a child as a protection against the unremitting tensions at home: negotiation, charm, manipulation, avoidance, and control.
Released from the constant dilemma of his parents’ conflicting demands, Johnson’s prodigious energies turned from an inner world of turmoil, undependable love, and need to the external environment. From the world of work and the conquest of ever-widening circles of men, Johnson hoped to obtain the steady love he had lacked as a child. The problem was that each successful performance led only to the need for more. There was no place to rest so long as love and the self-esteem based on love depended upon another’s approbation. So Johnson plunged into ceaseless activity, always searching for the one thing external success could never provide: the reassurance of being loved for who he was rather than for what he was doing.64