Bringing Up Lyndon
As the twig is bent, so the tree is inclined.
(Page 4 of 4)
More than any other modern president he harked back to the land of his past, felt tugged toward it, seemed literally to search for his boyhood tracks in its dust. Richard Nixon seldom looked toward Whittier, Dwight Eisenhower was no special fan of Abilene, Jack Kennedy could take Boston or leave it. But Lyndon Johnson knew the nostalgic pull of a given place, knew that special gravity of the heart and the head certain to bring one back. Hugh Sidey wrote in Life, “The President returns and returns, hands in his pockets, loitering like a boy, remembering the sights and the sounds. He cannot stay away long.” Once, lolling on what he called simply The Ranch, LBJ said to newsmen, “The cows are fat. The grass is green. The river’s full, and the fish are flapping.” Though he enjoyed thinking of himself as a gentleman rancher, he liked in his speeches to recall what a hard, demanding, arid land he and his ancestors had conquered. One of Johnson’s most moving and eloquent speeches paid tribute to a harsh land and its stubborn conquerors, and contained the phrase, “poor caliche soil”—written, ironically, by Dick Goodwin, who then had never been to Texas. LBJ loved it, however, and later would say of other speeches, “Let’s put some of that ‘poor caliche soil’ in it.” For all his swaying feelings about that land, he spoke for so many expatriates when he said that he wanted to spend his final years where “they know when you’re sick and care when you die.”
What mysteries haunted him, what answers did he seek, what affirmations of life did he need now that he moved toward the shadows, that he so stubbornly sifted the sands of his personal past? This, now, from a man who once snapped, “There’s no sense worrying over the past, it’s done and gone and you can’t do anything about it”; this from a man who never felt much affinity toward written history and seemed a long way from introspections. Yet, in retirement, he roamed the small towns and rural paths of the Hill Country as if to reclaim something of the promises and challenges of an earlier time.
One mid-morning a couple of years after Lyndon Johnson’s retirement, a school teacher friend of mine from Pampa—Aubra Nooncaster—en route with his family to visit the restored LBJ birthplace, teased his young son that he had telephoned ahead to be certain the former President would personally greet them. Nooncaster was astonished, on stepping onto the front porch, when Lyndon Johnson rushed out the front door, hand extended, crying, “Welcome to my birthplace!” Johnson marched about telling old tales of his youth, read passages of poetry described as precious to his mother, bestowed souvenir gifts, and generally left the Nooncaster family numb and bedazzled. What in the world was he doing there, what need was he serving, that random tourists might discover him puttering among the artifacts of his beginnings? In his final years, he had two main preoccupations: his death—which, with the aid of computers and his family medical history, he predicted within two months of accuracy—and his early life. Only a fool would fail to judge them as interrelated.
Well, did the Texas experience—his Texas heritage—place any special worms in his head, cause or aid any peculiar aberrations in his presidential conduct? Though the response may inspire outrage from Amarillo to Angleton, I come down on the side of those who think it did.
He took the Texas Ranger myth and the Alamo too much to heart; it made him say foolish things such as “When a Texas Ranger gets hit he just keeps on acomin’”—as if, literally, such men were bulletproof—or to beg his boys in Viet Nam to “nail the coonskin to the wall.” It caused him to claim heroic ancestors he did not have at the Alamo, and to concoct a story of being fired on by “a Japanese ace” during World War II when in truth he had been awarded a “political” decoration by General Douglas MacArthur after going along as an observer on a photo-and-recon flight. This tells us something of his mind-set in matters of war, and it was war, after all, that brought him down.
He early fell for the legend of the Wild West, for all the gory glorification of shoot-outs and show-downs and bad towns tamed by gunslingers wearing white hats; he could be downright embarrassing should he get strung out in recitation of such myths, especially when he attempted to correlate them to that hateful and vexing and impossible Asian war. He did not read books past an early point in life, and so the examples he drew from literature, the lessons he learned from it, stressed the romantic, the old-fashioned, the lovingly contrived myths and carefully preserved legends. His was the literature of boosterism, of Horatio Alger, of Travis defining honor by drawing a line in the dirt and waiting for the bold to step across it. It was, in a word, simplistic.
He never learned, I think, in an age of nuclear weapons and impersonalized killing machines, that there no longer was room for clear brave deaths, for lines to be drawn in the dirt with swords, for Custers making that last defiant stand. Or, at best, that such random personal acts of bravery now counted, somehow, for much less than they once had—because, in the end, two or three fiercely heroic grunts dying in a firefight could have little real impact on the outcome of a war controlled by computerized weapons, hostile public opinion at home and abroad, international intrigues, corruption and malfeasance among our South Vietnamese allies, and that combustible fuel driving a soldier to fight harder on his native ground than an outsider ever could.
From his utterances and actions as applied to the Viet Nam War, I believe we may fairly conclude that LBJ was a victim of the six-gun syndrome and all it implies, a syndrome that—while surely American to the bone—may also be described as particularly, if not peculiarly, Texan. Against these early lessons, what chance did the Harvards and Clark Cliffords and street peaceniks have? For these lessons precluded retreat or defeat or even the damning tinge thereof; they blinded him to realities; they cost precious national coin and drove him from office.
It is possible that had LBJ grown up in Houston or Dallas or even a middling-sized Texas city—rather than in a remote rural village—he might not have been fashioned into the puzzling combination of arrogant wheeler-dealer and self-doubting Thomas that he became. Though he had one of the quickest, most absorbing minds it has been mine to witness—and could grow quickly impatient with those less gifted—he was capable of fretting about his “cow college education,” of wondering in moody moments whether he had the capacity to be President. In other moments he could, with equal fervor and equal sincerity, complain that he seldom was appreciated to the full extent of his talents. He gained strength from the memory of having always led his village contemporaries in competition and from having come so far from Johnson City, and yet he privately wondered whether his potential or development had been curtailed simply because his root beginnings had not offered much in the way of day-to-day challenges. I imagine that sometimes he tossed in a sleepless bed, or stared into a cooling fire, trying to balance out whether he had been all that special a duck or whether the pond simply had been too small. If he did, the evidence would seem to indicate that he failed to reach a consistent conclusion. This mystery probably accounted in part for his sneering at the Harvards on the one hand and envying their better starts on the other.
He was influenced, too, in the treatment of his own staff members, by the traditional Texas attitude toward the hired help. Virtually a non-union state for much of Lyndon Johnson’s life, Texas has always pretty much considered the employee to have only such rights as a benevolent employer sees fit to grant: it has been one huge company town. Brother Sam Houston Johnson wrote: “An employee owes complete loyalty to his employer. That was almost a phobia with him. Any shade of criticism or lack of enthusiasm from any staff member could be suspect. A staffer’s duty was to carry out instructions, not to challenge them.” Few of LBJ’s employees ever were able to nay-say him: John Connally more than others; Bill Moyers up to a point; Horace Busby now and again. “An eight-hour man ain’t worth a damn to me,” he often stated. He explained why as a U. S. Senator he had a dozen married couples on his payroll: “I don’t want some wife at home complainin’ that the cornbread’s gettin’ cold while her husband’s doin’ somethin’ for me.” He once asked Bill Brammer whether he had written The Gay Place “while you were workin’ for me,” and when Brammer stammered that he had written the book “at nights and on weekends,” Johnson dismissed him with the comment, “You ought to have been answering my mail.” This insistence on a blind, tireless application of energies toward his own goals or purposes would eventually drive off many of the better, more sensitive staffers—and would cause LBJ to die feeling bitter toward those he felt had deserted him to feather their own nests, advance their own careers. More important, it made it extremely difficult for most of his staff to offer candid advice on matters of the public business.
History’s jury is still out on our only true Texas President—it does not seem to matter much that Dwight Eisenhower happened to have been born in Denison and left while still in dresses—and, one supposes, the disputes will long rage over what Texas did to him or for him. One of the few eloquent passages in The Vantage Point is revealing, however, in expressing some sense of wonder that a boy from Johnson City could have scaled the heights. Of his first night back at The Ranch, after leaving the White House for good, LBJ wrote:
“I went outside and stood in the yard again, looking up at the moon in the broad, clear Texas sky. My thoughts went back to that October night in 1957 when we had walked along the banks of the Pedernales River and looked for the Soviet Sputnik orbiting in the sky overhead. I thought of all that had happened in the years between. I remembered once again a story I had heard about one of the astronauts from the crew of Apollo 8, which a month ago had circled the moon only a few miles above its surface. Soon after his return to earth the astronaut had stepped into his backyard at home and looked up at the moon. He had wondered if it really could be true that he had been there. I had recounted this story a few days ago to a group of friends. Perhaps, I told them, the time would come when I would look back on the majesty and the power and the splendor of the Presidency and find it hard to believe that I had actually been there.”
Footnote:
* This is one of a half-dozen claims the young LBJ allegedly put on the presidency, according to the later recollections of otheres. Perhaps, however, such testimony owes much to hindsight. Another legend, for example, had LBJ’s grandfather galloping by horseback through the Texas hils to say, “A future United States Senator was born today—my grandson.” Actually, the grandfather years later wrote a friends, “My grandson is as smart as they come and I expect he’ll be a Senator by the time he’s forty.” This seems to be the seed of the more romantic story.
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