Bringing Up Lyndon
As the twig is bent, so the tree is inclined.
His early life never was quite so hardscrabble as he later would advertise it. His father was less heroic than the son would publicly choose to remember, and his mother was something less than the gentle angel he often recalled from the podium. Evidence indicates that Lyndon B. Johnson, himself, was not always the can-do whiz of popular mythology—that, rather, he was an insecure, often troubled, rebellious youngster who sometimes avoided challenges or pressures by excessive sleeping, running away, or offering stubbornly indifferent performances.
Though a pragmatist who throughout his life dismissed fiction because “it isn’t true,” LBJ revealed a novelist’s imagination in reporting his own early life. It was as if his considerable and remarkable achievements were not good enough to satisfy some primal urge, some deep need to become the be-all-and-know-all. Mere excellence was not good enough in the mind of the former small-town Texan, and though he had risen higher and accomplished more than most men dare to dream, he felt a compulsion to establish his own cherry-tree legends. He continued to refurbish them, to revise them, almost to the last.
History’s secrets come from their hiding places slowly. The more personal the secrets, and the prouder or more complex the man or woman to whom they apply, the more reluctantly the secrets seek the sunshine. One wishing to understand the shaping forces of Lyndon Baines Johnson must be alert to the profits of reading between the lines. Much that his doting mother wrote was romantic bilge (her enthusiastic exercises as an amateur genealogist led to claims of kinship with sources improbably close to Scottish nobility in the twelfth century), and his early biographers too willingly accepted those fumigated and refurbished memories LBJ himself permitted to escape. Yet they, and others, have left clues and tracks inviting closer examination.
One clue to a man’s values is in noting what he claims to be that he is not. Lyndon Johnson, the consummate actor, the self-cast man for all seasons, so often exaggerated or improvised new roles or contradicted himself, that his claims are not easily sorted or ranked. His most persistent false claims, however, had to do with being a war hero, a poor boy born in a log cabin, a member of a perfectly harmonious family, and a descendant of Alamo heroes. One may logically assume, therefore, that he thirsted to be viewed as one braver than he privately considered himself, one who had overcome more adversities than he felt he actually had, one sometimes uncertain even of his cherished roots or of their worth.
Only in his last years, in retirement, did Johnson talk of the dark side of his youth—of early fears and resentments and of a family life often as stormy as that of the Archie Bunkers without the leavening humor. Much of what he revealed affirmed suspicions born of hints contained in his mother’s prose. Writing of herself and of LBJ’s father she said, “In disposition, upbringing, and background, these two were vastly dissimilar….[He] was sensitive and nervous, impatient of inefficiency and ineptitude and quick to voice his displeasure….We had definite and opposing ideas [on many things] which makes for interest and piquancy in life.” In her old age Rebekah Baines Johnson would “shudder” at the memory of her days as a young bride on a raw Texas farm, of learning to adjust to “a completely opposite personality” and “a strange new way of life.” Her pink-gauze view of the world vanished: “At last, I learned that life was real and earnest and not the charming fairy tale of which I had so long dreamed.”
She had been a young woman teaching Expression and Elocution in Fredericksburg and writing for area newspapers when she met Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr. She described Fredericksburg as “An Old World place” and “quite unexciting.” Along came young Sam Johnson—tall, strong, lively—to introduce her to the Austin political scene, to squire her to orations of Senators Joe Bailey and Charles Culberson, Governor Tom Campbell, even William Jennings Bryan. Sam Johnson himself was a young state legislator. One imagines he turned her head, that the romantic Rebekah Baines envisioned a more glamorous life than she would find on a Hill Country farm. Lyndon Johnson would remember his mother inexplicably bursting into tears when drawing water from the well or baking bread, and would recall attempts to comfort her by promising to grow up and take care of mommy. Mother kept private pin-money hidden in her pillow for unspecified “times of distress,” slept in one wing of the house with her daughters while her husband bedded in another near his two sons, and urged the young LBJ to seek wider horizons than had his father. It is not difficult to read disappointment, rejection, and uncertainty in these facts.
A family friend once said of Rebekah Baines Johnson, “She was kind of an early-century hippie. She thought she had married beneath her. She was pregnant all the time and laid around in bed writing poetry.” The psychologist Harold Lasswell described her as “an ambitious, domineering woman who thought she had married beneath herself.” Not long before his death, LBJ said her early force feedings and attentions had sometimes “smothered” him. There was, indeed, much of the ambitious stage mother in Mrs. Johnson. Always she pushed her first-born front and center, getting him into the public schools before he was eligible, quizzing him on his homework at the breakfast table, following him to the gate on school mornings to drill him in mathematical equations or dates of history. She was quick to challenge teachers who failed to give him the best marks, and even when Lyndon Johnson was of college age his mother frequently telephoned the president of San Marcos Teachers College to gain him a better campus job or other advantages. To a neighbor woman who mentioned in passing that all children “tell stories” —i.e., lies—she hissed, “My boy never fibs.” One senses she aspired for her son all the adventures and laurels she resented being absent from her own life, for originally she had been a lady of literary and social pretensions and many vain dreams. Young Lyndon Johnson would think his mother “sort of aloof” with others. When a common workman once called with his family at the home to make a holiday gift of a chocolate cake, the Johnson family matriarch was cool, distant, and eyed the offering with rude distaste.
The father, Sam Johnson, could be warm and hearty when he willed it. Often, however, he was a difficult man of dark moods, quick angers, and stinging sarcasms. There were frustrations to trigger his demons and fuel them: family fortunes rising or falling as he lost money in cotton speculation or made it in farming or real estate, or—again—years after having reached his political heights as a six-term member of the Legislature, accepting a Depression-era appointment as a $150-per-month state inspector of buses for the Texas Railroad Commission. Though his early ambition was to be a lawyer, he never made it. (In the Fifties, when I was a green Capitol Hill aide, LBJ advised: “You oughta get a law degree, young man like you. Come in handy no matter what profession you follow. Not getting one was my daddy’s greatest regret.”)
Congressman Wright Patman, who served with Sam Johnson in the Texas Legislature, remembers him as “the cowboy type, a little on the rough side.” Others have described him as often profane and overbearing, a man who feuded with a neighbor said to be well-connected in the Ku Klux Klan so that young Lyndon feared his father might be “tarred and feathered or worse”; he carried a gun even when on the floor of the Texas House and owned a celebrated temper. When he took out after a school teacher who he felt had abused Lyndon, the fellow left town so quickly he had to send for his clothes and personal belongings.
He was a drinking man. Sam Houston Johnson, in My Brother Lyndon, recounts LBJ’s objections. “Come on home!” young Lyndon would shout from outside the doors of local saloons when his father stopped for drinks with his political pals. He persisted, even when his father tried to treat it as a joke or bribe him to go home himself. The father stubbornly remained long enough to assert his independence and then left “somewhat mortified and rather annoyed.”
Though LBJ himself occasionally got drunk, and frequently enjoyed social belts of Scotch (despite his Texas pose of drinking only “bourbon and branch water”), he retained a life-long fear of the destructive powers of demon rum. He constantly lectured brother Sam Houston Johnson for his loose bottle habits. Once, in his Senate days, when LBJ came in potted from the golf course, he woke his brother and said, “Yes, by God, I want you to take a damned good look at me, Sam Houston. Open your eyes and look at me. ‘Cause I’m drunk, and I want you to see how you look to me, Sam Houston, when you come home drunk.” LBJ warned his suspected staff tipplers that drinking was a sign of weakness, not manliness, that it could make good men lose control. Those who failed to heed the warning were fired or shunted aside to jobs with lesser responsibilities and rewards—and this included his brother. LBJ was not, incidentally, a man who held his liquor exceedingly well. As a young man he tended toward fistfights when drinking and once wrecked the family car; as an adult, on those infrequent occasions when he was overly influenced, he would brag of his political power or grow careless in his yearnings for a little free-lance romance.
In his way, Sam Johnson was no less ambitious for his first-born son than was Lyndon’s mother. Each morning, almost ritualistically, he shook his son’s foot and said, “Get up, Lyndon. Every boy in town’s got a two-hour head start on you.” He grew impatient when LBJ dodged his share of the farm chores, and berated him or applied the razor strap for cheating little brother Sam Houston in bicycle trades or at dominoes. Though he sometimes accused young Lyndon of lackadaisical attitudes or—God help us—small ambitions, he became upset on learning that LBJ had advertised his budding shoeshining business in the Johnson City newspaper. Sam Johnson felt that it implied a certain financial failure on his part, that everyone would figure his son wasn’t properly supplied at home.
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