“What you accomplish in life,” Lyndon Johnson wrote in the college paper during his freshman year, “depends almost completely upon what you make yourself do … perfect concentration and a great desire will bring a person success in any field of work he chooses. The very first thing one should do is to train the mind to concentrate upon the essentials and discard the frivolous and unimportant. This will ensure real accomplishment and ultimate success.”1
One is tempted to dismiss these words as the recitation of an acquired credo, and yet Johnson’s college years reflect an incredibly precocious understanding of the requisites for achievement. In the first month he studied the structure of the college as he had, less consciously, come to understand the treacherous currents of his family home, and later would strive to master the relationship of men and position that constituted the Congress, the Senate, and the executive branch of government. Nearly all of the seven hundred students came from small towns and rural areas within a hundred miles of San Marcos—from the German settlements of Fredericksburg and New Braunfels, the prairie communities of Lockhart and Gonzales, the hill-country towns of Blanco and Johnson City. There were ten buildings on the campus, plus laboratories, shops, gymnasiums, and athletic fields. The faculty numbered fifty-six; some departments had only one or two members.2
Freshman Johnson wanted to know precisely how things worked, who made them work, what activities to join, what courses to take, which professors to seek out—all with a view to recognition, achievement, and a maximum of control over this new environment. There were, in his ability to comprehend the dynamics of San Marcos—its pulse points, sources of energy and command—a prescience and a discipline rare in anybody; extraordinary, almost shocking, in a boy of eighteen—so extraordinary, indeed, that one’s credulity would be strained by Johnson’s account were his portrait not corroborated by classmates who recall his ambition, his overwhelming, often overbearing personality, and especially his incessant motion: half-racing through the campus with long, loping strides; talking with both arms flailing; sitting at his desk while restless fingers drummed the surface. He did not, as they remember, work like most other people; the energy never seemed to wear down.3
From the beginning Johnson set out to win the friendship and respect of those people who would assist his rise within the community which composed San Marcos. Most obvious was the president of the college, Cecil Evans, whose favor would have a multiplier effect with the faculty and student body. But Johnson was not alone in the desire to have a special relationship with Evans. “I knew,” Johnson later said, “there was only one way to get to know Evans and that was to work for him directly.”4 Without that daily contact, given the demands on any college president and the natural distance between the administration and students, Johnson figured that at best he could become one of the thirty or forty students whom the college president could identify by name. And that, clearly, was not enough.
It was the policy of the college to give students—especially scholarship students—part-time employment, in the library, cafeteria, bookstore, and in the construction and janitorial crews—wherever it was possible to dispense with regular employees. Johnson’s first job was on the college clean-up crew picking up papers, rocks, and trash. Most of the students considered this unpleasant work, worthy of the minimum effort necessary to avoid being fired. But Johnson brought to it the same zeal he now brought to everything else. He imagined himself in a race to determine who could clean up the most trash in the least amount of time. The reality, of course, was that Johnson raced only against himself since he alone cared, yet his eagerness left its mark: when he applied for a better job, he received it at once, assistant to the janitor of the science building. At this post he again labored with extravagant enthusiasm, and again his efforts were rewarded: the next job he got was the one he had coveted all along—special assistant to the president’s personal secretary.5
In this post Johnson’s assigned job was simply to carry messages from the president to the department heads and, occasionally, to other faculty members. Johnson saw that the rather limited function of messenger had possibilities of expansion; for example, encouraging recipients of the messages to transmit their own communications through him. He occupied a desk in the president’s outer office, where he took it upon himself to announce the arrival of visitors. These added services evolved from a helpful convenience into an aspect of the normal process of presidential business. The messenger had become an appointments secretary, and, in time, faculty members came to think of Johnson as a funnel to the president. Using a technique that was later to serve him in achieving mastery over the Congress, Johnson turned a rather insubstantial service into a process through which power was exercised. By redefining the process, he had given power to himself.
Evans eventually broadened Johnson’s responsibilities to include handling his political correspondence and preparing his reports for the state agencies with jurisdiction over the college and its appropriations. After all, as the student was quick to explain, his father had been a member of the state legislature and Lyndon had often accompanied him to Austin, where he had gained some familiarity with the workings of the legislature and the personalities of its leaders. This claim might have seemed almost ludicrous had it not come from someone who already must have seemed an inordinately political creature. Soon Johnson was accompanying Evans on his trips to the State Capitol in Austin, and, before long, Evans came to rely upon his young apprentice for political counsel. For Johnson was clearly at home in the state legislature; whether sitting in a committee room during hearings or standing on the floor talking with representatives, he could, in later reports to Evans, capture the mood of individual legislators and the legislative body with entertaining accuracy. The older man on whose favor Johnson depended now relied on him or, at least, found him useful.
Another man wooed by Johnson was Professor Harry Greene of the government department, one of the most popular and highly respected members of the faculty and the coach of the debating team. Johnson thought him a teacher possessing special flair and integrity, a fearless expectation of popularity, and a contempt for petty obstacles. Here was a man sufficiently confident to say: “I know that this is right and that is wrong.” Greene believed that history and culture should be useful. He liked poetry that could be recited, songs that could be sung, paintings that told a story. With these opinions Johnson wholeheartedly agreed. His only problem was to find time with the master. During and after class Lyndon bombarded Greene with questions, comments, and criticisms. At the end of the day, he aggressively sought Greene out, engaging him in still more conversation. The more Johnson talked, the more Greene responded. Eventually, these talks at the end of the day became a ritual desired by both teacher and student. Again, at least in Johnson’s mind, the roles of apprentice and master seemed easily reversible.
Johnson had not been at San Marcos very long before discovering that a small group dominated nearly all activities of the student body: the student council, college newspaper, class offices, literary magazine, etc. Most members of this governing elite were athletes. Their organization, founded as an exclusive social fraternity a decade before, was called the Black Stars. Johnson was not an athlete, and when his name came up for consideration by the Black Stars, it was rejected. One can only speculate as to the effect of this rebuff, but rejection was always a powerful source of dread and energy in Johnson’s life, compelling him either to withdraw from danger—as he fell ill or contemplated quitting before nearly every election contest—or to find some way to nullify its consequences. Whatever the psychic implication of this particular exclusion, the practical consequence was to make Johnson the leader of a mini-revolution in campus politics that was to end the power of the Black Stars.
Johnson swiftly formed his own secret organization—the White Stars—whose purpose was to wrest political control from the Black Stars. The initial problem was to keep their identity secret until a long-range strategy had been developed and they had built up enough strength for a direct challenge. “We had a rule,” Johnson said, “that no more than two of us could be seen together on the campus. If a third member came along, we had special code signals as to which one was expected to leave.”6 So compelling was Johnson’s insistence upon secrecy that decades later one of the White Stars, describing the group for the Johnson Library’s Oral History Project, felt constrained to say: “LBJ and a few other campus leaders felt … that everybody needed competition. So there was a group composed of some eight or nine that organized another secret fraternity and in order that I don’t violate some vows I took some forty years ago, there are portions of it that I will not discuss.”7 The elaborate nature of the concealment suggests, more than practical safeguards of conspiracy, a powerful inner inclination toward secrecy in the acquisition and use of power, which was to manifest itself decades later on a far larger stage.
Each of the six original members of the White Stars was responsible for learning about the participants in different student groups: the YMCA group, the townies, the debating society, the music and art group. Several nights a week the secret cabal met to pool their information. From these discussions Johnson became aware of a widespread, if concealed, resentment against the Black Stars. Although 90 percent of the students were nonathletes, the athletes received all the privileges: they went to the head of the cafeteria line, they registered first during enrollment, they were excused from regular chapel, they were feted at special banquets.
Still, these injustices were trivial, Johnson believed, alongside the tremendously inequitable distribution of the student activities fund. On admission to San Marcos, each student paid a fee of $17, a considerable sum for most. The money, totaling nearly $12,000, was turned over to the student council, which had the power to decide how it should be spent. Over the years the student council, dominated by the Black Stars, had allocated most of the fund to athletic activities. Johnson discovered the extent of this preference by examining the budget in the president’s office. Eighty percent of the funds went into campus sports, the remainder being divided among the debating team, the drama society, the glee club, special speakers, and other campus activities.
Johnson later claimed that the moment he saw these figures he knew that redistribution of the funds would become the issue to muster the White Stars. Nevertheless, he moved cautiously, assigning each White Star the responsibility of finding out from the members of each campus group the answer to two questions. First: what are the things which you, as a member of the debating team (or the glee club or the drama society), want to do but cannot do because of insufficient funds? Second: do you realize that if your organization received even one-fifth as much as the athletic groups, you could do all these things and more? On this foundation of discontent, the White Stars mounted their campaign. Johnson’s technique was that of the entrepreneur who aimed not simply at satisfying present needs but at developing new and expansive ones.
Within one year, their membership expanded to twenty, the White Stars ran an insurgent slate of candidates for student offices against the traditional slate of Black Stars. Johnson’s strategy worked. Five of his slate were elected to the student council: three, including Lyndon Johnson, to the college newspaper, and two to the literary magazine. With this early victory, however, Johnson would not be content: “Ambition,” he wrote at the time, “is an uncomfortable companion many times. He creates a discontent with present surroundings and achievements; he is never satisfied but always pressing forward to better things in the future.”8
The key to Johnson’s strategy for increasing the power of the White Stars turned on his ability to render political things that previously had not been—that is, to make new matters negotiable. He prodded the new members of the College Star and the Pedagog to use their positions to publicize the activities and accomplishments of nonathletes. Recognizing the power of patronage, he asked the secretary to the president if he could share some of the administrative burden involved in distributing student jobs. Before long, students could recognize White Star supporters by one look at the roster of jobs. The inside jobs in the library, in the cafeteria, in the bookstore, and in the administrative offices were held by White Stars; all the outside jobs in construction, maintenance, and painting were allotted to the Black Stars.
By the time Johnson reached his senior year the White Stars had gained considerable power in the college. The one office that had eluded them was the presidency of the senior class. Knowing—or perhaps fearing—that he himself had made too many enemies, Johnson selected Bill Deason, his best friend, as the group’s candidate. It would be an uphill fight; the Black Stars had nominated Dick Speer, perhaps the most popular boy in the school. Into this campaign Johnson poured all his youthful passion. Day and night he caucused the White Stars, determining which blocs were leaning what way. The final count taken on the night before the election showed Deason behind by the substantial margin of twenty votes. “We were very discouraged,” said Bill Deason, recalling that evening, “and we gave up and quit; that is, all except LBJ. There was our group, there was the athletes’ group, and then there were folks who belonged to neither group … and there was a third group which we called the YMCA group … and they had been against us because Dick Speer was also a member of the YMCA and a fine outstanding student. So there wasn’t any reason why they shouldn’t support him. But LBJ in his inimitable way said to himself, ‘Well, if I can change that group, we might win it. The rest of you may go to bed, but I’m not.’”9
Throughout the night Johnson tramped from boardinghouse to boardinghouse, courting votes. Looking back, Johnson recalled a dreadful evening, cold and drizzly. He was exhausted, but he felt that he had to keep going until the last possible moment.
At San Marcos politics meant talking with individuals, often very sleepy individuals. That night, student after student, strongly wishing to silence Johnson when he began to talk, ended up transfixed. Johnson possessed an uncanny instinct for knowing which of his own qualities would produce the greatest impact on each person. Ebullience, fits of rage, logical argument, patriotic exhortation, flattery: this acute and indefatigable young man could alter his language and his tone to solicit the desired effect.
Here, as would be the case in the future, reliance on the forcefulness of his persuasive power was central to Johnson’s success. “His greatest forte,” Deason said, “is to look a man in the eye and do a convincing job of selling him his viewpoint; he could do it then and he can still do it today.”10The next day, when the votes were counted, Deason had won by eight votes; and thereby the White Stars gained complete control of campus politics. That year a basic redistribution of the student activities fund took place in the direction of intellectual and cultural pursuits.
In addition to his central role in campus politics, Johnson became the editor of the College Star, a prize-winning debater, and an honors student. The world of San Marcos had accommodated his gifts. If some found him tiresome, and even his friends admitted that he was difficult, they were nonetheless bedazzled by his vitality, guile, and endurance, his powers of divination and ability to appeal to the core interests of other people. And his gifts were more concentrated than those of others in a student body typically torn by conflicting aspirations and divided desires. Ambition so united every element of his personality that in the course of three years he had made himself the absolute center of the small world of San Marcos.
Even in college, Johnson did not regard, or at least did not portray, success as an end in itself. The drive for power was justified by the belief that in controlling others he was acting in their best interests, giving them things they could not provide for themselves. His mother had taught him, Johnson explained to me, that power had value only when used to benefit people. And his editorials in the college paper reflect an emerging self-portrait which corresponds faithfully to his mother’s ideal. “There is a selfishness,” he wrote in 1929, “which is more sordid than that which comes of the love of money alone. It is the selfishness which restrains one from the doing of goodly deeds.… Glorious as is genius, it is of little value unless it is wisely and practically applied for the comfort and welfare of mankind. Great and desirable as is talent, failure to use it in the interest of humanity only adds to the responsibility of him who has it. Powerful and useful as is wealth, it places added responsibility on him who is its possessor.”11
Nor were these sentiments confined to Johnson’s public editorials; they appeared as well in his frequent letters to Johnson City. “My dear mother,” Johnson wrote,
The end of another busy day brought me a letter from you. Your letters always give me more strength, renewed courage and that bulldog tenacity so essential to the success of any man. There is no force that exerts the power over me that your letters do. I have learned to look forward to them so long and now when one is delayed a spell of sadness and disappointment is cast over me.
I have been thinking of you all afternoon. As I passed through town on my way home to supper I could see the mothers doing their Xmas shopping. It made me wish for my mother so much. I thought of the hard times that you always have in seeing that every child is supplied with a gift from mother. I hope the years to come will place me in a position where I can relieve you of the hardships that it has fallen your lot to suffer—and I’m going to begin on a small scale right now. The enclosed is very small but you can make it go a long way. I don’t guess daddy has found me a job—so I may not get home for the holidays. I’ll be thinking of all of you every minute. I love you so much,
Your son …12
Whether it was the college student promising gifts to his mother or the President of the United States producing houses and jobs for the American people, Johnson always associated the delivery of “good works” with the attainment of power and position. After he left the White House, Johnson would contrast his outlook with the conduct of his successor and others. “Some men want power simply to strut around the world and to hear the tune of ‘Hail to the Chief.’ Others want it simply to build prestige, to collect antiques, and to buy pretty things. Well, I wanted power to give things to people—all sorts of things to all sorts of people, especially the poor and the blacks.”13
Lyndon Johnson was never the anonymous donor. Rather, his was a most visible benevolence which reminded recipients at every turn of how much he had done for them. Giving was a necessary part of a mission to reform, reshape, and thereby redeem. Paternalism was inextricably bound to such generosity. The cost to the recipient of the goods Johnson delivered seemed fair enough to him—gratitude, affection, a trust manifested by the willingness to let him decide what was best for them. In time, there was no mistaking his gifts: they had “LBJ”—and later “USA”—stamped all over them.
Already apparent during his college days was the pious preacher in his pulpit, an image he worked so hard to project. Nearly all his editorials begin and end with a moral injunction. The student who courted votes door to door in the middle of the night, tempering his appeal to the sensed desire of every individual, wrote:
The world today is looking for men who are not for sale;
Men who are masters of themselves and their tempers;
Men who place principle above all else;
Men who are honest and true;
Men who love work and the contentment it brings;
Men who are willing to lose sight of self, ease and pleasure in the effort to serve others.14
“Duty,” Johnson editorialized that same year, “drives its devotees with a relentless hand through trials that seem intolerable. No labor is too arduous for Duty to exact, no sacrifice too great for her to demand, no service beyond her command.”15 Duty’s gender is feminine. Rebekah had insisted that, in politics, the true gentleman always proceeded from the most splendid of motives in pursuit of the highest ideals; good works evidenced divine sponsorship; every action should reflect fealty to the social good and public benevolence demonstrating a Christian spirit. The protagonist in Rebekah’s romance of the godly politician, so alien to the brutal realities of political life that her husband relished, had been her own father. Her description of the public-spirited man left no room for the continual striving, deceptions, and bruising competitions, the elements of seduction and compulsion, which are the stuff of political life, and the means by which public power is secured and maintained even for the most beneficent of ends. It is not simply that she thought power should be exercised for public good. That, after all, is a conviction shared by many more participants in public life than fashionable cynicism allows. But it contained the prescription that motives and means should be equally pure. It invoked “the servant of the people,” a long and partly mythic tradition running through Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Carnegie—the tradition of the gentleman of rank who sets aside his own concerns and dons the robe of public service and benevolence as an expression of democratic equality and duty.16
The characterization of public life contained in Johnson’s college writings had a counterpart in the nature of fatherhood. “When troubles beset the family,” he wrote in his very first editorial, the mother can find comfort in “tears and confidences,” but the father “must square his shoulders, resolutely grit his teeth, suppress his emotions and with renewed courage meet the issue.” The father, Johnson explained, was “the producer, the provider and the protector.”17 These were, of course, the very capacities which Rebekah felt her own husband lacked. And her son had been burdened from his earliest years with the tales of Sam’s weakness and failure, along with the sense that he, Lyndon, must compensate for his father’s deficiencies and assume the role that Sam had abdicated—a responsibility with unbearable and inadmissible overtones. “At the center of my mother’s philosophy,” Johnson explained to me, “was the belief that the strong must care for the weak. From the early days when she knew that I was to be the strongest of the five—with the most ambition and self-discipline and the most successful—she made me feel responsible for the weaker ones in the family, who used to get into trouble by drinking and cavorting around. On weekends they would run off to the city and rack up enormous bills. Mother would ask me to fix things up. I resented it every time, but I always did what she asked. For she would tell me over and over that the strongmust care for the weak.”18
The day would come when this older brother/father, responding to the needs of blacks, would offer the civil rights bill; as panacea to the nation’s need, offer the Great Society; and, amid the final crisis of his career, use Rebekah’s lessons—almost her words—to justify America’s involvement in Vietnam: “There is,” he told the country, “a great responsibility on the strong. The oldest member of the family has got to look after the smaller ones and protect them when the wolf comes to the door. The boy of the household has got to look after his sisters. Now it’s not true that we’ve got to police all of the world … but the good Lord has smiled kindly upon us and we have an obligation as fellow human beings to help protect our neighbors against a bunch of desperadoes.”19
If Johnson’s college writings have the qualities of baccalaureate sermons, one must remember that he was voicing the accepted pieties of his day and place—the small-town Texas where success was a reward for virtuous effort, ambition was an admired good, and there was little room for cynicism. If running through Johnson’s life there is a duality of word and deed, as if the spoken word were vapor, it would be a mistake to assume that Johnson was simply a young Machiavellian who understood that it is well for a leader or an aspirant to power to seem religious, sincere, faithful, and humane. Conceptions of sacrifice, duty, and benevolence were as inseparable from and as deeply rooted in his character as his political skills and his pursuit of power.
San Marcos was also the setting for Lyndon Johnson’s first serious love, twenty-year-old Carol Davis. She was, he recalled, “very beautiful, tall and blond with dark blue eyes. Her skin was pale and very soft. She was very clever and everyone admired her. I fell in love with her the first moment we met. She seemed so much more alive than all the other girls I knew, interested in everything; she played the violin and wrote poetry but also liked politics and loved the out-of-doors. I still remember the summer evenings we spent together, lying next to the river in a waist-high mass of weeds, talking about our future. I had never been happier. After a while we began to talk about marriage.
“We decided that Carol’s parents had a right to know that we were as serious as we were. The Davises were one of the oldest and best families in Kerrville [a town about fifty miles from Johnson City]. Mr. Davis was a wealthy banker, an extreme conservative in politics, and a member of the Ku Klux Klan. I knew it would be a difficult relationship, but I believed that I could win them over. So one evening in June, Carol arranged for me to be invited to her home for a family dinner. The dinner began with a couple of glasses of wine, which made me more talkative than usual. I talked about my experiences in California and my activities in college. But the atmosphere, which was cold to begin with, just got colder and colder as I talked. I realized there was nothing I could do or say that night that would be considered right. Carol’s father hated everything about me.”20
Each sensed rebuff compelled him into further monologues as he searched with increasing urgency for some key to the father’s approval. The capacities which had already become his most reliable armor and weapon were now failing him in what must have seemed one of the most important quests of his life. It was always difficult for Lyndon Johnson to understand that there were some passions and ideas which could not be subdued or overwhelmed by any appeal of which he was capable.
“I won’t let you, I won’t have my daughter marrying into that no-account Johnson family,” Davis is reported to have told his daughter. “I’ve known that bunch all my life, one generation after another of shiftless dirt farmers and grubby politicians. Always sticking together and leeching onto one another so the minute one starts to make it, the others drag him down. None of them will ever amount to a damn.”21 In Lyndon’s presence that night, Davis was no less direct. As Johnson remembered it, before that evening was over Davis had assailed his father’s politics and then disparaged his grandfather, saying that everyone in Blanco County knew that Sam Ealy Johnson had been “nothing but an old cattle rustler.” “No criticism could have hurt more,” Johnson explained to me. As far as he was concerned, that was it. “‘To hell with the whole family,’ I said to myself. ‘I’ll never marry Carol or anyone in the whole damn family. Davis is right about the Johnsons sticking together; they always have and they always will and they don’t need to mix with the likes of the Davises to get along. We’ll make it on our own.’ I left the Davis home that night determined never to see Carol again. For a long time after I got back to my room, I sat in a chair without moving. I felt numb and angry.
“The next morning Carol came into my room. Her face was red from crying, she looked as if she hadn’t slept at all. She told me that until this moment she’d loved her father more than any other man and that to go against him on a matter as important as this would bring terrible pain to her for the rest of her life. But she’d decided that she had to do it. She loved me and she wanted to marry me. All the while she was talking I thought of the many nights we had dreamed of our future together. But all this had to be put in the past, forgotten. It could never work for us. I told her that, I was very firm, and after a long moment of silence, she went away. Long afterward, I still felt the pain of losing her; I missed her, and I missed the nights along the water terribly. I was lonely as I had never been before. But this did not change the way I felt.”
After that morning Johnson did not see Carol Davis again until seven years later when she attended his opening speech for his first congressional campaign in February, 1937. Mr. Davis, Johnson recounted, was leading the Blanco County opposition to his candidacy, and had personally authored and spread a claim that, if elected, the first act of this young radical would be to fight for public confiscation of all the power companies (which, in fact, Johnson claimed, is precisely what he wanted to do). Johnson remembered beginning his speech with a blunt denunciation of Davis and his friends as enemies of the people, and, as he spoke, being startled by the unexpected glimpse of Carol Davis leaning against the back wall of the auditorium.
“She was wearing a white dress. Her face was pale and sad. I sensed the agony she was experiencing in listening to me attack her father. As soon as I saw her, I stopped in midstream and softened my speech, suggesting that perhaps there were two sides to all these questions and that it was important to recognize that all these men were honorable men, no matter how much we disagreed with them. Six weeks later, I saw her one last time. It was the day after I won the election. I was in the hospital at the time, having come down with appendicitis three days before. When I awoke, I saw her standing in the doorway. She was wearing a flowered yellow dress. We were both married by then. I’d married first, then Carol. Carol’s match had pleased everyone in her family. She’d married a young banker who became a partner in her father’s savings bank. But here she was, looking more beautiful than I’d remembered. She said that she had just come to tell me how happy she was for me and that, even though her father had led the opposition, she had defied his wish and voted for Lyndon Johnson. I knew then that she was still in love with me. The vote proved it. But there was nothing left to be done about it.”
Much of Johnson’s account of his relationship with Carol Davis cannot be verified. Nevertheless, there is no reason to challenge the description of his youthful desires and intentions, the hostility of Mr. Davis, and the sudden rupture of his relationship with Carol. These elements of the story are given credibility from other sources and by the assumption—based on the evidence of his entire life—that it would be grotesquely out of character for Lyndon Johnson to contrive a fictional humiliation and defeat. As for the rest of the melodrama—the more interesting part—we cannot know how much is actual event and how much fantasy or flawed memory. We can suspect that his description of the young man compelled to sacrifice his great love in defense of his family’s honor, only to find even greater happiness while Carol still suffered the consequences of her father’s brutal scorn, represents the refraction of an intense but remote episode through the wishful ego. But such inevitable distortions are less significant than the way in which Johnson remembered. He did not, for example, see anything disproportionate in his reaction to Mr. Davis’ condescension and hostility; nor, seemingly, any cruelty in his abandonment of the young woman who loved him and was willing to defy her own family to go ahead with marriage. Moreover, Johnson’s account contains the unvoiced assumption that personal honor and family duty left a man of principles no other choice. His story indicates no awareness that he was requiring sacrifice as well as making it, inflicting pain as well as bearing it; that the moral issues might be ambiguous. Ordinarily, Johnson was alert to every nuance in his stories and anticipated all possible reactions in order to guide them. Yet in the narration of this episode, those intuitive faculties have been suspended. Personal rejection was so unbearable to Johnson, so mortally threatening, that withdrawal was necessary. An emotional imperative surfaced as the inevitable behavior of a rational and principled man.
A self-preserving action disguised as honor and principle upheld—this pattern is illustrated with remarkable consistency throughout Johnson’s life. Episodes of rejection, actual or apprehended, seem to cripple Johnson’s faculties and even, at times, interrupt his normal state of physical health and vitality. In the above recollection of Carol Davis, for example, their last meeting occurred in the hospital room to which the stricken candidate had been rushed just two days before the congressional election. His appendicitis had been authentic. Yet he was also seriously ill shortly before an astonishing proportion of his elections.
By the time Carol visited, the doctors had performed successful surgery and the people had made their favorable decision. And how did Johnson know that she still loved him? Why, she had voted for him: “The vote proved it.” And undoubtedly she—along with many others—would vote for him again.
Lyndon Johnson’s college days spanned the latter part of the 1920s, that curious decade in which the world—or what we now call the Western world—was adjusting to a new reality that it had not yet perceived. In retrospect it can now be understood that World War I was a great watershed, the beginning of a period of dissolution in which established landmarks of thought, values, and the social order would be displaced.22 Young Americans emerged from the war, Fitzgerald wrote, “to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faith in man shaken.” He wrote, of course, for himself and for a relatively small group of artists and intellectuals. To them the pointless carnage of the war, the sensed shattering of an older order, demonstrated the corrosive futility of national loyalties, efforts at social change, the expansive ideals and material striving which coalesced in what was called the “American dream.” “All was nada y pues nada,” mused a character in a story by the young Hemingway, in the supreme expression of the nihilism toward which the mostly expatriate artists and the resident intellectuals who made up the “lost generation” were attracted. But they were expatriates for a reason. For most Americans the vaguely sensed passage from familiar certainties opened onto new horizons of opportunity along traditional American lines—material prosperity, personal success, innovation; the natural reaction of a nation for whom change was both expected and desired. The hero of the day was not the Great Gatsby—that would come only decades later—but Charles Lindbergh. The authentic voice of Blanco County in 1925 was the editorial page of the Record Courier:
When you hear an old timer sigh for the days of his forefathers, smile to yourself and think of this … there has never been a time when life bettered itself so rapidly and consistently … socialism and its more radical brother, communism, in its wildest imaginations has never contemplated the distribution of wealth in the manner and by the means by which it is now being distributed … by dividing and selling vast corporations in small pieces to the man on the street, the wage earner and the housemaid.23
These sentiments were far truer to the shared orthodoxy of the time than the creative outpouring which drew strength from its opposition to the dominant faith and from the fear that most Americans were right to anticipate a future of limitless and totally absorbing material accumulation. If Sinclair Lewis saw the life of George Babbitt as a nightmare, the voters nonetheless sent Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge to the White House. It was to take the depression, with its demonstration of unexpected and dangerous flaws in the material order, to bring the “lost generation” home.
But in Johnson City or San Marcos the dominant concern in the 1920s was not how to achieve “the good life,” and certainly not a “great society,” but how to make a living. Most of the three hundred residents of Johnson City made a meager living raising goats, cattle, and sheep on small plots of land. The “city” had no paved roads, no electricity, no gas, no trains, a few telephones and a few automobiles. There was one local bar, an eating place, a courthouse that showed movies, a church, a barbershop, and a drugstore. The hours of work were long; the moments of leisure were scarce; and there were few decisions about consumption to be made. Advertisements for clothes and household goods stressed not fashion, but durability and price. Shoes were sold for “more days of wear in every pair.” The families of Johnson City were compelled to save their money for basic material possessions; they had little or nothing left to squander on the luxuries, the trappings of affluence, which could be seen in popular magazines and in films. Johnson’s neighbors had no big-city taste for lipstick, rouge, or breath freshener; scarcely more than a dozen ads for such cosmetics appeared in local papers during the entire decade. The Record Courier and the Blanco News were full to the brim, however, with news of worm eradicators, reports of miracle cure-alls, and notices detailing the days of the year when the circuit dentist or doctor would be in town for his biannual visit.24
Among these Americans, the prosperity of others—even the most outrageous luxuries of the very wealthy—did not inspire envy or thoughts of revolution. They were a spur to their own progress. They saw not the dusty, shabby homes in which they were presently living, but the shiny new homes they would build when their labor was rewarded with economic success. Through an almost magical compound of persevering ambition and rewarded hope, big wealth was protectively linked to the average man. Optimism led to quietism, even celebration, as citizens tried to fit every event into a pattern of inevitable progress. Though the economic hardships which Johnson experienced and saw during those early years made him aware that a wealthy few controlled much of the land and the labor of the people, he did not seem to resent, but desired, the possession of economic power. In the 1920s Johnson’s picture of society was of a hard-working, continually striving community. No one disagreed with what was to be sought. The only question was how to get more of the good.
And the “good” often meant “more.” In young Johnson’s environment respect for quantity was unquestioned. The farmer rejoiced in a big crop and the rancher in a large herd. Anything that promised to increase the quantity of anything being produced was self-evidently desirable. A thing became a hundred times as important if it was a hundred times as big. People counted and calculated, they figured and reckoned, measuring quality by numbers.
Inconceivable was the notion that one might find sadness or sterility at the top of the ladder of success. Like most young men, Lyndon Johnson saw the success of the self-made man as a dramatic vindication of the American way of life. Horatio Alger was the classic invitation to identification and emulation. “Do and dare,” “be brave and bold,” “strive and succeed”—these were the recurrent themes in Johnson’s college editorials. In weekly editorial sermons on “getting ahead,” on “sincerity,” on “thrift,” and on “playing the game,” Johnson preached that with industry, temperance, promptness, and generosity, the persistent man would inevitably triumph, that where there was a will, there was a way. Cultivate Poor Richard’s virtues and failure is impossible; fail to cultivate them and success will elude you forever. It was never clear in Johnson’s writings whether all these virtues were necessary or any one was sufficient, for promptness was rewarded as handsomely as charity, idleness punished as severely as theft. But to Johnson’s mind, it was the total result and not the particular means that counted; “It is,” the young editor wrote in 1929, “ambition that makes of a creature a real man.”25
The Johnson of the 1920s considered ambition and self-mastery the mainsprings of American activity, the driving wheel of cultural, social, and economic progress. What better proof could there be than the extraordinary feat of Charles Lindbergh in crossing the Atlantic? For Johnson, Lindbergh’s flight in 1927 represented the triumph of the individual on his own. It served to reaffirm what he had known all along. “Lucky Lindbergh is the hero of the hour,” the young editor wrote,
yet the adjective which most characteristically describes Lindbergh is not lucky, but plucky.… A sketch of his life reveals the grit and determination that have been outstanding traits of his.… He is a simple, straightforward, plucky lad whose first lesson learned was self-mastery. He did not give up when hardship and trials beset him.… His pluck carried him through to success and fame.… It is a wonderful thing to make the first transocean flight and achieve spiritual independence. Still more wonderful is the fact that this feat lies within the grasp of all of us. Students, the choice lies with you. Do not sigh for Lindbergh’s wonderful luck, but determine to emulate Lindy’s glorious pluck.26
The curious thing in Johnson’s interpretation is his concentration on only one-half of Lindbergh’s message—the triumph of the individual. By singling out the fact that Lindbergh rode alone, by talking of him as though he were the reborn pioneer of the frontier, Johnson projected his sense that the source of America’s strength lay somewhere in the past. But side by side with this nostalgia there was also the more ominous fact that Lindbergh’s exploit was a window to the future: a victory for the machine, a triumph for the plane as well as for the man.27
Lindbergh’s flight quickly came to embody and represent qualities that Americans prized but were afraid of losing. For many, something had gone out of American life after the war, some simplicity, some innocence, some confidence in the autonomous powers of the individual. It was the loss of an American myth. But it was not Johnson’s loss. “We must not forget,” he wrote in 1927,
the things for which it [the war] was fought. It was a war fought to make the world safe for democracy.… Let us strive to carry on as best we can in the struggle for world democracy.… By honoring our heroes, by upholding democracy, by reverencing our laws and by promoting peace, we in a measure show ourselves striving to become worthy of the supreme sacrifices the war exacted.… Ours is the duty, the privilege, the God-given task to bear onward the lighted torch. Let us fail not, for to break faith with those who sleep in Flanders field would indeed be the deed of a craven and ignoble soul—carry on.28
Lyndon Johnson never questioned that his was the best of all countries. This assumption of superiority imposed a moral obligation to share the American way with the world. And it was accompanied by a sense of justified outrage at the slightest criticism of America. Lack of faith in America or in its heroes was considered treason. Johnson’s was a society where the problem always lay with the critic, not the country. “Down with the debunking biographer,” he wrote in 1929. “It now seems to be quite a thing to pull down the mighty from their seats and roll them in the mire. This practice deserves pronounced condemnation. Hero worship is a tremendous force in uplifting and strengthening. Humanity, let us have our heroes. Let us continue to believe that some have been truly great.”29
In his defense of the hero, Johnson spoke for all the values that were under attack by artists and many intellectuals. “Not the cynics,” Johnson wrote in 1927,
but the men of faith are responsible for the progress of humanity.… For example, in the great struggle of the Revolution … two matchless leaders were Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin. Paine was only a revolutionist and a destroyer. He had no faith to sustain him. He passed from the scene of action reviling the great Washington, preferring libertinism to liberty, and predicting the final downfall of the new nation.… Franklin was upheld by a great faith. He had something to replace the discarded government. He was a great constructor, a builder, a man of vision and faith.… Faith builds, but cynicism destroys.30
Faith builds, cynicism destroys; do and dare, strive and succeed: by the time Johnson graduated from college in August, 1930, these tenets were central to everything he did. His achievements in college had confirmed his faith in individual will. A crude and excessive young man in the eyes of many, yet he contained the motley strains that had long been shaping a native American psychology. Child of the passing frontier, he revealed it in its strengths and in its weaknesses. His Americanism was the reflection of an America that is no longer ours. Energy, goodwill, resourcefulness, enterprise, optimism, inventiveness, and exaggerated faith in self—these were the qualities Johnson brought in abundance to his brief career in teaching and his lifelong career in politics.
In his March, 1965, speech proposing the voting rights bill, President Johnson explained that his convictions on this issue were rooted in his experience as a teacher of Mexican-American children in Cotulla, Texas. “My students were poor,” he told the joint session of Congress, “and they often came to class without breakfast, hungry. They knew even in their youth the pain of injustice. They never seemed to know why people disliked them, but they knew it was so, because I saw it in their eyes. I often walked home late in the afternoon, after the classes were finished, wishing there was more I could do.”31
It is unlikely, however, that any of the three thousand residents who made up the population of Cotulla in 1928 felt that Lyndon Johnson should be doing more. It is more probable that they were overwhelmed and slightly baffled by the frenetic torrent of activities, attention, and projects that accompanied the arrival of the young new principal of the Welhausen Ward Elementary School. The job had been secured for Johnson by his patron, President Evans of San Marcos, so that the promising college sophomore could earn enough money to complete his education. Indeed, during his nine months at Cotulla, Johnson earned twelve credits in special extension courses, enabling him to complete his degree requirements little more than a year after his return to San Marcos.
There is no indication that Johnson approached his new duties with the tentative caution that would seem appropriate to one entering a different and rather alien environment. The cultural gap between Cotulla and Johnson City was far greater than the two hundred miles of Texas that separated them. About 75 percent of Cotulla’s three thousand inhabitants were Mexican-Americans, most of whom spoke only Spanish. Bounded by the sun-baked fields, Cotulla was a small cluster of streets and buildings. Few of Cotulla’s residents had journeyed as far as the neighboring town. Although to those who could read English the Cotulla Record brought weekly reports of major national and Texas events, most of the families of Johnson’s pupils lived in dirt hovels, engaged in a continual struggle to wring a bare subsistence from the dry and treeless land. They were too preoccupied with survival to think much about success.32
For Johnson, the qualities and circumstances of the local life were handicaps that obstructed his determination to improve the prospects of his pupils and open the way to fulfillment of those desires for success which he believed were universally shared. He assumed that his Mexican-American pupils possessed these desires, albeit stifled and denied expression by the impoverishing conditions of their lots. “I was determined,” Johnson said later, to improve the lives of “those poor little kids. I saw hunger in their eyes and pain in their bodies. Those little brown bodies had so little and needed so much. I was determined to spark something inside them, to fill their souls with ambition and interest and belief in the future. I was determined to give them what they needed to make it in this world, to help them finish their education. Then the rest would take care of itself.”33
And in the nine months he was there, before leaving on his own quest to “make it in this world,” Johnson applied himself to the task. The ability to compete could only be acquired through activities that were wholly lacking on his arrival. Within three months, therefore, he had introduced a spectacular array of contests—spelldowns, public speaking tournaments, volleyball games, baseball games, track events, field events. Since Cotulla had no money for equipment of any kind, Johnson invested half of his first month’s salary to buy softball bats and gloves, volleyballs, and basketballs. In addition to his administrative duties and his teaching, Johnson became the debating coach, the soft-ball coach, the volleyball coach, the song leader, and, in his spare time, he later claimed, the assistant janitor. At first, Johnson had the children practice and compete with each other; after a while, he invited their parents to watch, and finally, he arranged field days with a dozen other neighboring schools in the region. Since Cotulla had no buses to take the children to and from these trips, Johnson worked to persuade those few parents who owned cars to participate in the activities at the school. That the parents showed so little interest proved a continual disappointment, but so long as he remained principal the contests continued. The year he left, they ended.
Johnson refused to accept the fact that many of his students had never learned English. Convinced that without English their future opportunities would be severely limited, he made a rule that no Spanish could be spoken on school property, including the playground. Pupils caught speaking Spanish were brought to his office and punished. It was true, of course, that knowledge of English would be necessary to break out of the confinements of Cotulla poverty. But his approach contained no awareness that his pupils’ own cultural traditions and language might constitute an independent source of strength and fulfillment. Indeed, in teaching American politics, Johnson appeared at times to forget his students completely. Children whose parents were denied the right to vote were told that if they worked hard and studied well, they could one day become the President of the United States.
There is no reason to doubt that Johnson’s enterprising days in Cotulla were motivated by sincere compassion and intense feelings, nor that the impact of his activities was largely constructive. Yet there is more than a hint of something compulsive, an unremitting drive to organize and prescribe conduct in accordance with the configurations of his own beneficent will. But Johnson never seemed aware, in Cotulla and afterward, that the benefactor might destroy his recipient’s capacity to grow and find expression on his own.
Among Johnson’s fondest memories was his childhood friendship with a Mexican-American boy named Huisso, who was his closest playmate when the Johnsons still lived on the farm. The two boys learned to ride together, Johnson recalled, in the big field that separated his home and Huisso’s family’s cabin. “The problem was that Huisso could barely keep up with me, and I always wanted to race. His horse was thinner and weaker than mine; it hadn’t received the kind of food or care that mine had. One day I got an idea. Every morning I would go to the bins behind our house, take some oats and give them to Huisso, and Huisso would feed his horse double the amount he usually got until he got as fat and strong as mine. This went on for some while, and Huisso’s horse got fatter and fatter. His stomach stood out more and more. Finally, I decided the time had come for the big race. Together we marked the starting point and the finishing point. Off we went, but almost immediately Huisso fell way behind, and I won easily. We tried a second race, but I won again, this time by even more distance. So we tried one more time, and Huisso pushed his horse as hard as he had ever pushed anything. This time the horse seemed to be moving much faster, but in the middle of the race it simply slipped out from under him. It had collapsed. It was dead. It was too much, I guess, too much running, too much food, too much care. It just didn’t seem fair after all we had done. We cried and cried and cried until I thought we would never stop.”34
After his year at Cotulla, Johnson returned to San Marcos to complete his degree. Back on campus, he resumed his leadership role. Yet even as he consolidated his dominant position in the affairs of San Marcos, he was searching out a more expansive arena for his capacities and ambitions. “I thought originally I’d be a teacher,” he told me, “but the head of Teachers College counseled me against it. Dr. Evans told me there wouldn’t be enough competition in the classroom to satisfy me. He thought I was a competitive animal. My ambition, he said, was laudable—to be either a teacher or a preacher or a politician. Teachers can see the fruits of their work in the performance of their students, preachers in the morality of their parishioners, and public servants in the people’s progress. But he thought that being a public servant would be best because I’d have to meet the challenges of the time at the very moment they were happening.”35
Undoubtedly Johnson liked teaching. For fifteen happy months after his graduation from college he taught high school in Houston. Teaching was on the list of future career possibilities. He considered its advantages and satisfactions, contemplated alternatives, and consulted with older men. But, in retrospect, it seems clear that there was never really any choice; his course had been fixed from the time when the spellbound young child had listened to his father discussing the latest political news of Blanco County. His childhood experience and the inner need to both emulate and surpass his father combined with his natural capacities to draw him toward that political vocation to which he was so perfectly suited. “I wouldn’t want to be building great towers or big dams as an engineer, or big banks as a banker, or big insurance companies as a businessman,” he explained. “All those things are essential, but the thing that gives me the greatest satisfaction is dealing with human beings and watching the development of those human beings.”36 To “deal” with others, to help them, to direct their actions and desires, to achieve mastery in the society of men, would provide not only the greatest satisfaction but the most effective protection against inward dangers and the most ample scope for Johnson’s restless energies and unique skills. If teaching was a profession, politics was his calling.
In June of 1928 the Democratic National Convention was in Houston preparing to nominate Al Smith. Ignoring the college rules against automobile trips outside the San Marcos area, Lyndon Johnson persuaded a friend to drive him there. With a bundle of editorials from the College Star for credentials, he talked convention officials into admitting him as a member of the press. After the excited leader of the White Stars watched Franklin Roosevelt deliver the nominating speech, he returned to the San Marcos campus and was promptly summoned by Dean Alfred Nolle to explain his absence. Years later Nolle remembered that Johnson gave such an animated and colorful account of his experiences at the convention that the original purpose of the meeting—to take some disciplinary action—was completely forgotten.37 And soon afterward Lyndon Johnson, then a college senior, was to give his own speech on behalf of another man’s candidacy, initiating the events that were to bring him to Washington.
Near San Marcos was the village of Henley, where in mid-July of each election year candidates for state and local office traditionally journeyed to attend an all-day political picnic. Amid wild oak trees and milling picnickers, the candidates were called one by one to the platform for speechmaking. According to Johnson, this was considered one of the most important political events in south-central Texas. He had come to the picnic with his father every year from the time he was ten. He loved being there, he said, listening to the funny old master of ceremonies as he shouted out the names of the candidates, and watching the different ways speakers responded to the call. Some, he recollected, walked sedately to the platform, a country wagon with its tailgate let down, and delivered a straight and serious speech. Others skipped and hopped all over the platform, yelling incomprehensibly for ten minutes. He recalled that the older he got, the more he wanted to be up front instead of down below. In 1930 he got his wish.
The master of ceremonies called out the name of Pat Neff. Neff, a former governor, had been appointed State Railroad Commissioner and was now up for election in his own right. Three months before, Neff had given Sam Johnson a job as railway inspector. Neff’s name was called once, twice, and three times, but no one responded. His turn to speak was about to go by default when a young man was seen running through the crowd, his arms waving, calling out, “By God, I’ll make the speech for Neff.” Introduced simply as Sam Johnson’s boy, the young man proceeded to explain why Neff was a good man and why he should be elected. He talked earnestly and with great spirit, walking up and down. As he went on, the already excited young man’s voice rose to a shout and his arms flew out. When he finished, the crowd responded with great applause.38
This impromptu performance impressed Willy Hopkins, a rising young politician running for the state senate from a district that included San Marcos. Hopkins sought Johnson out after the speech, talked with him for ten minutes, and then invited him to manage his campaign for the legislature. Johnson accepted at once and, while finishing up in college, he managed Hopkins to victory.
The following year, Hopkins returned the favor by suggesting young Lyndon’s name to Richard Kleberg, heir to the legendary King Ranch, who had been elected to Congress in a special election that had been called to fill a vacancy in the 14th Congressional District. On Hopkins’ advice, Kleberg called Johnson at Sam Houston High, where he had just started his second year of teaching, and asked if he would come to Corpus Christi to discuss the possibility of an appointment on his Washington staff. A member of the history faculty who was in the office when Johnson received the call reported later that he was so excited that he didn’t seem to know what to say. That night the young teacher left for Corpus Christi, and the following afternoon Kleberg announced to the press that Lyndon Johnson had been appointed his legislative secretary. Two weeks later, after receiving a leave of absence from Sam Houston High, Johnson left for Washington.
Johnson recalled that the eastbound train left Houston at four in the afternoon. “All that day I’d gone about feeling excited, nervous, and sad. I was about to leave home to meet the adventure of my future. I felt grown-up, but my mind kept ranging backward in time. I saw myself as a boy skipping down the road to my granddaddy’s house. I remembered the many nights I had stood in the doorway listening to my father’s political talks. I remembered the evenings with my mother when my daddy was away. Now all that was behind me. On the platform more than two dozen people, relatives and friends, waited about to say goodbye. I tried to say something important to my mother, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. When the train came, I felt relieved. I kissed my parents and climbed aboard.”39
Johnson remembered that even before the station was out of sight, he had turned to look along the chain of cars leading to a black engine spouting large circles of brownish smoke and never saw Rebekah and Sam leave for the Pedernales farm. Whenever Rebekah had sent a letter to San Marcos she had written across the back of the envelope, “Mizpah,” which means, “The Lord watch between me and thee, when we are absent one from another.” But Johnson had never really left before; indeed, his mother’s letters often contained revisions of the college themes and editorials that he had sent for her correction and approval. But he was really going now. Nevertheless, the bond between them, between all three, did not require divine watchfulness. Rebekah and Sam, in ways they could not have conceived, were also being carried with gathering momentum toward an unimaginable future.
For two days the train moved through the states of the Old Confederacy toward the city where Lyndon Johnson would, with one short hiatus, spend the next thirty-seven years; a city whose intricacies and half-secret movements he would master, and, for a while, dominate as completely as he had dominated the small campus at San Marcos.
One can only try to imagine the confused multitude of plans and intentions that tumbled through the mind of this restless, ambitious young man as he alternately sat and roamed through the cars until, as the train began to slow, he looked impatiently through the grimy window of the exit door, rushed down steps still vibrating from their arrested motion, and strode across the vaulted caverns of Union Station, from whose entrance one can see the familiar dome of the American Capitol. Lyndon Johnson had left home, but he had come to where he belonged.