Bringing Up Lyndon
As the twig is bent, so the tree is inclined.
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“I imagine I was closer to him than anyone in the family,” LBJ’s only brother would write of their father. “There was a kind of tension between them, a sort of competition…” There is not the slightest doubt. It was Sam Houston, not Lyndon, his father most frequently took on business trips. It was Sam Houston, six years younger than Lyndon, who rose before dawn to eat breakfast with his father while others slept. About sunup, Mrs. Johnson and the girls came in; Lyndon had to be shaken and dragged by the toe. When the teenage Lyndon quit home to adventure in California with three young friends—packing a hidden suitcase days in advance and leaving while his father was absent from home—Rebekah Baines Johnson accused her husband: “You’ve been too easy on Sam Houston and too strict with Lyndon. No wonder he took off for California.”
It is easy to see a family divided: parents each with a special favorite among their young, parents who by the evidence of all public accounts chose their two sons over their three daughters. When in a school recital seven-year-old Lyndon Johnson—as his personal selection—rendered a poem entitled “I’d Rather Be Mama’s Boy,” we may reasonably suspect that he was not unaware of the family rankings. From college, he wrote to his mother—not to his father. Letters between them often expressed such mutual admiration as to become maudlin, fawning, perhaps a bit sticky: mother and son seemed to have trouble giving each other enough assurances. “Your letters” —he wrote— “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 power over me that your letters do.” Again: “Mother, I am now learning the things you have been trying to teach me since I was a little boy.” In an editorial in the San Marcos College Star he wrote an open letter: “There is no love on earth compared to that of mother. Our best description of it is that of all types of earthly love, it most nearly approaches the divine.” (Reading such carefully crafted hymns of love and praise as they became public in later years, I was astonished to recall that in the Fifties—when LBJ was a busy majority leader in the U.S. Senate—his staffers laughed at sometimes being assigned to draft a “chatty letter” to mama for her son’s signature.)
In his final years LBJ became enchanted with a comely young Harvard professor, Doris Kearns—who helped with his memoirs of the presidency, The Vantage Point—and told her that her “intelligence, grace, and strong will” reminded him of his mother. It was to Doris Kearns, too, that he confided much more: that his mother had smothered him, that his parents had a stormy life together, that as a child he feared failure, that all his life he’d had bad dreams, that he’d always feared losing control—of being somehow paralyzed and powerless to act—in a time of maximum danger. Some of LBJ’s nightmares obviously took deep roots in home. In one he sat in a rocking chair, a huge heard of cattle bearing down on him, and yet was strangely unable to move. In another, he was in bed with his mother when suddenly his father would storm in the door, or—are you ready for this?—sometimes the father figure would be replaced by Bobby Kennedy.
Lyndon Johnson hated Bobby Kennedy. In the face of some evidence to the contrary, however, I am not convinced he equally hated his father. We all do, yes, in given instances or moments, and perhaps we go to the grave less than wholly cleansed of the formative resentments: Oedipus has visited more places than the mind of Sophocles. Despite their differences, Lyndon and his father had much in common. There was in their relationship that complex mixture of love and hate, pride and shame, hope and disappointment, gloom and joy so often experienced between men and their issue. Theirs was not a story as painfully unique as they doubtless considered it to be. Neither was introspective; they were not much inclined to cool self-analysis, nor did either find it natural to consider the special viewpoints of others. They were mutually self-centered, and even had they not been, their relationship probably would have been controlled more by blood than by brains, more by passions than by dispassionate reckonings. That seems to be the way, somehow, between fathers and sons.
Congressman Patman recalls of the young Lyndon, “He was so much like his father they were humorous to watch. They looked alike, they walked the same, had the same nervous mannerisms, and Lyndon clutched you like his daddy did when he talked to you.” Young Lyndon was a willing and apt political pupil at his father’s knee, sitting with him in the Legislature and rapidly becoming intrigued. Here he formed friendships that would last a lifetime—with Sam Rayburn and Wright Patman, with Homer Thornberry (then a House page boy)—and indelible impressions of the political process. He surely learned, too, the darker side of politics as he moved among his street-wise page boy contemporaries and heard their reports of life in the raw. Austin then, even more than now, had its friendly lobbyists eager to pick up the hotel bills of willing legislators, or to furnish the traditional beefsteak, bourbon, and blondes. Young Lyndon must have known of “drinking drys,” those legislators who back home railed against John Barleycorn and voted against it at each opportunity, but who made whoopee in the capital (or even in the Capitol) so long as a single lobbyist remained to pick up the tab. He must have learned of legislative secretaries who performed their best work at night, of loose campaign money, of those mutual back-scratchings indigenous to the smokier political rooms. Though Sam Johnson was always described by his son as an “agrarian liberal,” he enjoyed associating with lobbyists and the rich. These lessons were vital to Lyndon B. Johnson’s shapings; his own political conduct would forever be influenced by them. LBJ never resented the economic power of others, or the village pharaoh who lived in the big white house on the hill; he merely wanted to be that man, to emulate him. As Sam Johnson in his legislative days found his patron in Roy Miller of Corpus Christi and Texas Gulf Sulfer, so later would Lyndon discover his in George R. Brown of Houston Brown and Root.
The future President’s early life, spent on the family farm near Stonewall or in Johnson City, contained elements of the classic Tom Sawyer boyhood. Lyndon evinced a bit of the natural con displayed by Tom when he got that famous fence whitewashed: LBJ’s siblings say that when there were chores to do, he organized and supervised, rather than break his own back. He talked his brother into buying a bicycle more nearly Lyndon’s size than Sam Houston’s. He was ultra-competitive. By the time he was ten, Sam Houston writes, “Lyndon never let anybody beat him at anything if he could help it.” Though he made good grades in school in everything but Deportment, he read nothing not required and rejected violin lessons as sissy stuff; all his life, he would say that “culture was the business of womenfolk.” He so sassed and bedeviled one of his grandmothers that he virtually turned her against little boys. She predicted he would go to the penitentiary.
There was an old swimming hole—actually called the “Baptizin’ hole”—where Lyndon’s gang often repaired. A boyhood chum recalls that LBJ quickly became bored and urged his companions out of the water: “Then we’d throw mud on him so he’d have to get back in the swimmin’ hole to wash it off.” Regarded as a good country first baseman, he quickly wearied of the mild pick-up games and might walk away with the score tied. Whatever he did, he seemed to want to be doing something else.
As a teenager he was something of the small-town “jelly bean,” a sharpie who wore the only bow tie among his contemporaries and slicked back his hair. He enjoyed riding around in old flivvers, playing dominoes, and eating oceans of chili—which he slyly called “Mexican T-bone.” He squired a variety of young women to picture shows, which he never much fancied, and to country dances or political pie suppers, which he did. When he reported home from a country dance proudly wearing a black eye, his father tongue-lashed him for being a tough and a wastrel. His mother gently wrote of those relatively troubled years when LBJ, a high school graduate at age fifteen, seemed unnaturally rebellious to her: “Now followed a period of indecision and indifference. His parents were eager for him to attend college, but his mild interest in books at this time was discouraging.” She should not have been surprised when he ran off to California—she had long urged him to escape to higher things, and Johnson City bored him.
Lyndon Johnson would later romanticize the California experience. “Up and down the coast I tramped,” he would say, recalling jobs hopping tables, picking fruit, washing dishes, and running an elevator, “growing skinnier and hungrier.” There was a little of that, yes. Actually, however, Rebekah Baines Johnson had a relative—a prominent California attorney—who not only gave the young man an office job but also kept an eye on him and sent secret reports home. Though LBJ would recount a long and dismal hitchhiking experience back to Texas, others say he was brought home by a Johnson family friend who visited the West Coast.
He still was not ready for college. He took a job hauling gravel on a road construction gang for $1 or $2 per day, depending on how he told it. A coworker, Zeke Felps, recalls that it was customary for truck drivers to back up to the gravel pit and help others shovel the load. LBJ, instead, catnapped in the cab. Indeed, it appears to have been a time of great lethargy: he came in from work, bathed, ate supper, and soon was abed. Lectures and hints from his parents failed to move him; possibly he slept to avoid these. One day he came in from the road gang and said to his mother, “I’m tired of working just with my hands and I’m ready to try working with my brain. Mother, if you and daddy will get me in college, I’ll go as soon as I can.” Biographers seemed to have missed something here: was it that simple? Did the light dawn that quickly? Some main force or event surely has gone unreported, for on that day Lyndon B. Johnson suddenly went from slow speeds to the frenetic pace that would last until he died. Unless Doris Kearns thought to ask, we may never know.
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