Bringing Up Lyndon
As the twig is bent, so the tree is inclined.
(Page 3 of 4)
Lyndon Johnson borrowed $75 from a local bank on his own signature, though he was still a minor, and hitchhiked to San Marcos. Vestiges of the teenage feud with his father repose in each of those acts. Certainly his father had the required money, and by Sam Houston Johnson’s testimony Sam Senior volunteered to give LBJ a ride. The son’s rejections of these offers show that the rebellion was not yet over, that not all wounds had healed.
“For a writer searching for a dramatic rags-to-riches angle,” Sam Houston Johnson wrote, “that picture of Lyndon trudging along a dusty country road with a cardboard suitcase is understandably tempting; but it gives a false impression about our family’s economic condition. Though he was never a wealthy man, our daddy was always able to provide for his family, sometimes more lavishly than others but never bordering on poverty. Our home was certainly no mansion by any definition, yet it was probably the nicest house in town while we were growing up.” Lyndon in later years liked to refer to himself as “the son of a tenant farmer”—inaccurate—and sometimes claimed to have been born in a log cabin that actually had been his grandfather’s. His mother described the small but quite presentable farm house birthplace as being in good condition. Newspapers of the Twenties described the Johnson farm as “one of the largest and best kept” in the area. Though LBJ claimed to have “slept on a cot in the school president’s garage” at college, he shared a decently furnished room with another student in an apartment above the president’s garage. Though he spoke of his shock in seeing Mexican-American children rummage garbage cans looking for food, he himself was never hungry; he saw soup kitchens, unemployment lines, and clots of desperate men during the Depression, just has he so often advertised—be he wasn’t in them. In a time of national want, he wanted not: he was teaching school in Houston for $1600 basic annual salary plus $1.50 per hour for special adult night tutoring, and he lived comfortably in the home of a relative. Over the years, a number of trusting and careless journalists perpetuated the poverty myth by accepting LBJ’s loose memories of having nothing to eat but “fried baloney and boiled potatoes.” This is not to say that LBJ was not impressed by those terrible times, but it is foolish myth-making to believe that he walked six miles barefoot to school and back in snowdrifts and that it was uphill both ways.
There is a grain of truth in President Johnson’s memories of practicing oratory while sweeping the halls at San Marcos College. But only a grain. He and his mother so badgered the college president for a better deal that LBJ shortly was able to abandon the push broom for a desk in the chief administrator’s outer office. “Lyndon’s tone and attitude gave the impression he was far more than a messenger,” a faculty member later would say; the college president himself once said, “Lyndon, I declare you hadn’t been in my office a month before I could hardly tell who was president of the school—you or me.” Now the LBJ star was burning bright: he successfully organized insurgents to overthrow the most powerful fraternity on campus during school elections, became a standout debater (his best weapons being withering sarcasm and the ability to convert his opponent’s mistakes), and wrote editorials for the college newspaper.
What did the young Lyndon Johnson believe in? Nothing very exotic if one is to judge by his bland editorials. He seems, indeed, to have owned little or no ideology and was as far from doctrinaire solutions as he was from being a brain surgeon. His boldest stroke was to bemoan the fact that society tended to mistreat its nonconformists. Everything else he wrote was conformity personified, an amalgamation of Horatio Alger and Dale Carnegie. “Do not sigh for Lindbergh’s wonderful luck,” he instructed after the Lone Eagle’s Atlantic crossing, “but determine to emulate Lindy’s glorious pluck.” He endorsed the value of “a strong personality,” “a well-trained will,” “ambition, that makes of a creature a real man,” “good deeds,” “the world’s need for men not for sale,” the glories of Sam Houston, and, of course, mothers.
I suspect at bottom he was not all that shallow. My own observations were that Lyndon B. Johnson knew the value of pretending to know less than he did, of endorsing popular sentiments, of ingratiating himself with the widest possible circles. Those are the tools of the politician and he early was that. He could use the carrot, as with his candied rather than candid editorials, or the stick—as when he made full and imaginative uses of his powers as errand boy to the college president. Not until he was safely in the White House did he endorse controversial issues if another choice remained. As Senator, he instructed his staffers never to quarrel with those who advocated positions on public issues which he did not share: merely “thank them for their helpful views” and keep his own a secret. Always he was a man who would not make waves until he was pretty sure he owned the ocean. John F. Kennedy now was among the martyred dead? All right, boys, let’s tell ‘em how he’s looking down from Heaven and pass that Civil Rights Bill in his name. The national Red scare had somewhat abated, and the popular President Eisenhower was grousing at Senator Joe McCarthy’s reckless libels and slanders? Okay, gang, let’s censure the son-of-a-bitch! Lame duck Governor Allan Shivers was losing his grip on Texas? Mr. Rayburn, let’s you and me challenge his ass at the precinct level for control of the party machinery. The big boys know he’s going out and we’re staying in. He was a man who could peacefully co-exist with racial segregation, Red-baiting, or a powerful political rival in Texas—until the right time came. Then he’d cut you a new one. Until he tripped over Viet Nam, he’d always done a good job of reading the public mood and going with it. Little wonder that his editorials in the late Twenties failed to endorse pot, abortion, or even mixed bathing.
If Lyndon Johnson sometimes liked to make his root beginnings appear more humble than in fact they were, a part of him also needed to stress his family’s respectability and its ties to frontier Texas. He reveled in stories of Johnsons and Baineses who’d fought marauding Indians, of old uncles who drove cattle up the famous trails, of a hardy pioneer spirit in his genes. “Listen, goddammit,” he once said, “my ancestors were teachers and lawyers and college presidents and governors when the Kennedys in this country were still tending bar.” Brother Sam tells of the teenaged LBJ blessing out a girl friend who reported disparaging remarks about the Johnsons made by her father: “To hell with your daddy. I wouldn’t marry you or anyone in your whole damned family. But he’s right about us Johnsons sticking together—we always have and always will, and we sure don’t need to mix with you family to get along. And you can tell your daddy that someday I’ll be President of this country. You watch and see.”*
There was, indeed, a defensive regionalism in LBJ. From the first days of his presidency he was convinced that the “Harvard crowd” wouldn’t give a Texan a chance, that they would mock his accent and his taste for barbecue and consider him a dumbass simply because of his roots. In this he was not entirely without perception, though at times Johnson seemed to extend himself to make the prophecy come true. David Halberstam has written of LBJ’s compulsion to attend the call of nature while instructing his advisors, grunting and splashing as they shuffled uncertainly in the bathroom door, and of how C. Douglas Dillon—a breathing personification of the elite Eastern Establishment—“was virtually driven out of the Cabinet by this maneuver alone.” Often, in the presence of national newsmen or powerful Establishment people, he seemed to delight in scatological jokes and barnyard expressions. When someone suggested the retirement of J. Edgar Hoover, LBJ said, “I’d rather have him inside the tent pissin’ out than outside the tent pissin’ in.” He whooped a cowboy yell inside the Taj Mahal, more, I suspect, to appall or confound his critics than to hear the echo. He was a man who spent almost four decades inside the halls of power, the equal of kings or better, yet who stubbornly clung to his Texas origins in his associations, his speech, his stories, and his preferences.
On the evening when Dr. Martin Luther King was fatally shot, and an aide warned the President that Washington’s outraged blacks might march on Georgetown and burn it, he replied with a twinkle, “I’ve waited for this day for thirty years.” He never had been comfortable in Georgetown, with its bright brittle drawing room chatter and people he considered to be no more than elegant fops, dandy dilettantes, or worse. He had the old chauvinistic instincts indigenous to the macho country boy, and one of his worst insults—invariably directed at the Bundys, the Goldmans, and the Schlesingers, the polished intellectuals—was to sneer that such-and-so fellow “probably has to squat to pee.” In retirement, rather than admit the Viet Nam War had forced him from office—although his abdication speech had faced it forthrightly enough—he would say No, no, they wouldn’t give a Texan a chance, those Harvards and the Georgetown crowd. When Ted Kennedy made the wrong turn at Chappaquiddick bridge, LBJ gloomed that Kennedy probably would get away with it: “But if I had been with a girl and she had been stung by a bumblebee, then they would put me in Sing Sing.” He shared with Richard Nixon—though he didn’t as doggedly brood over it—a sense that although he had been to the top, he always would remain, somehow, an outsider. This insecurity surfaced when he lamented not having been better educated, not having known certain advantages. It may have had more than a little to do with his close friends being selected almost exclusively—with the exception of a few early New Dealers—from among Texas or Southern or Southwest politicians.
My Library
