Means of Ascent (6 page)

That campaign raises, in fact, one of the greatest issues invoked by the life of Lyndon Baines Johnson: the relationship between means and ends.

Many of the ends of Lyndon Johnson’s life—civil rights in particular, perhaps, but others, too—were noble: heroic advances in the cause of social justice. Although those ends are not a part of this volume, those ends are a part of that life: many liberal dreams might not be reality even today were it not for Lyndon Johnson.

Those noble ends, however, would not have been possible were it not for the means, far from noble, which brought Lyndon Johnson to power. Their attainment would not have been possible without that 1948 campaign.

And what are the implications of that fact? To what extent are ends inseparable from means?

Of all the questions raised by the life of Lyndon Baines Johnson, no question is more important than that.

O
N
J
UNE 28, 1941
, Lyndon Johnson seemed to have victory—yet another victory—in his grasp.

At the age of thirty-two, he had already won so many victories, and had won them so fast. A tall, lanky, big-eared young man from one of the most remote and impoverished regions of the United States, the Texas
Hill Country, a young man with no money and only a third-rate education, by twenty-one he was already known as the “wonder kid” of Texas politics. At twenty-three, a congressman’s assistant in Washington,
he was the “Boss of the Little Congress,” the organization of congressional assistants. At twenty-six, he was the youngest of the forty-eight state directors of the National Youth Administration, perhaps the youngest person ever entrusted with statewide authority for any New Deal program. At twenty-eight, plunging into a race no one believed he could win, he was elected to Congress. Now, at thirty-two, he was not only a Congressman but, having restored centralized
financing to his party’s congressional campaign and revitalized the moribund Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee with money from Texas oilmen and contractors to which he alone in Washington had access, he was a Congressman with power over other congressmen, national power. And when, in April, 1941, the sudden death of United States Senator
Morris Sheppard opened a Senate seat, a paternally beaming Franklin Roosevelt allowed him to announce his
candidacy in the ensuing special election from the White House steps, and Washington assumed Lyndon Johnson would be coming back a Senator—the youngest Senator, a Senator at thirty-two, well on the way to that vast ambition beyond the Senate of which he had spoken so frequently in his youth (and on not one recorded occasion since he had embarked on the road to it). All during the 1941 campaign, he assumed so himself. For the first time in his life, as week by week every poll
showed him gaining on his leading opponent, Governor W. Lee (“Pappy”)
O’Daniel, and then passing him and pulling further and further ahead, he was confident of success—euphoric, in fact. As late as midnight on June 28, Election Day, it appeared that the euphoria was justified.

But on that day, Lyndon Johnson made a mistake.

He hadn’t made many, at least not in politics. If a single credo had guided his career, it was a belief that, as he was constantly telling his assistants, “If you do
everything
, you’ll win.” He was constantly drumming that adage into his aides, and the evidence of his life indicates that he had drummed it into himself. For more than ten years, at every stage of his career, he had done “
everything,” had
worked unceasingly—as one assistant put it, “night and day, weekday and weekend.” For more than ten years, in addition, he had planned and schemed and maneuvered, trying to leave no stone unturned, cautious and wary at every step. But that day, after ten years of ceaseless work and ceaseless vigilance—and after ten years of victories—he had relaxed. In the very moment of apparent triumph, he had, for perhaps the only time in his life in a crisis,
let his guard down and given his opponents an opening.

Late in the afternoon of Election Day, the corrupt South Texas border bosses whose support he had purchased asked him when they should report the voting results from their counties, and he violated a fundamental rule of Texas politics: report your key precincts—the ones in which you control the result—only at the last minute so your opponent would not know the total he had to beat; otherwise, in a state in which not a few isolated rural precincts were
“for sale,” beating it would be all too easy. With a steadily widening lead feeding his overconfidence, Johnson had loftily told the South Texas bosses they could report their vote whenever they pleased. They reported immediately, and late that evening, even as headlines were proclaiming his victory and his supporters were parading him on their shoulders in triumph as he whooped and shouted in wild celebration,
O’Daniel’s strategists were making quiet arrangements. The next day, sitting at a telephone with his face turning ashen at the news, Lyndon Johnson found out that he had not won but lost. After ten years of victories, in this, his most important campaign, there was not victory but defeat.

Now Johnson had to go back to Washington, had to go back not as the youngest Senator, not as perhaps the brightest star in the new galaxy that in 1941 was rising over the political horizon, but as merely the Congressman he had been before. He had had the aura of the winner. Now he was going back a loser. So going back was hard.

And going back was made harder by the unusually powerful hereditary strain, famous in the Texas
Hill Country, that ran through Lyndon Johnson’s family, the Buntons. Generation after generation, the “
Bunton strain” had produced dark-haired men well over six feet tall, all of whom
had strikingly similar, and dramatic, features: a long nose that jutted far out of the face, a sharp jaw that
jutted almost as far, huge ears with very long lobes. Their eyes, vividly set off by milky, “magnolia white” skin, were so dark a brown that they seemed black, so bright that they glittered, so piercing that they often appeared to be glaring. And the “Bunton eye” was no better known for its fierceness than were the Bunton pride and ambition: the phrases that Hill Country ranchers used about young Lyndon—that something “born in him,”
bred in him, “demanded” that he always be “in the forefront,” “at the head of the ring”—were the same phrases that had been used about his forebears. Buntons possessed also a “commanding presence” and an “eloquent tongue” that led them to try, at an early age, to realize their ambition through politics. Lyndon Johnson, born on August 27, 1908, had been elected to Congress at the age of twenty-eight, the same
age at which his grandfather had won
his
first elective office; Johnson’s father had won his at twenty-seven. And going back was hard in part because of the poignant circumstances of Lyndon Johnson’s youth. When he was thirteen, his father’s sudden financial failure had hurled his family, in what seemed like an instant, from a respected position in the isolated little town of Johnson City to what Lyndon was to call “the bottom of the heap.”
The boy was condemned to live out the remainder
of his youth in a continual insecurity that made him dread, month after month, that his family would lose the modest home that was all they possessed. Where once he had been able to charge more in stores than other children, now he could charge nothing at all, and had to stand watching while his friends bought candy because their parents had credit. The boy who, in the words of his favorite cousin, Ava Johnson, who
grew up with him and loved him, “had to be the leader in everything he did, just
had
to, just could not
stand
not to be, had to win,” was now the son of a man who “owed everybody in town,” a member of a family held in contempt. He heard his father’s acquaintances whisper as he passed on the street, “He’ll never amount to anything. Too much like Sam.” And going back was hard
because the insecurity and humiliation aggravated the already powerful inherited strain that formed the base of his complex personality: he had to “be somebody,” he had to be successful and appear successful; he had to win and be perceived as a winner. It was the interaction of his early humiliation with his heredity that gave his efforts their feverish, almost frantic, intensity, a quality that journalists would describe as “
energy”
when it was really desperation and fear, the fear of a man fleeing something terrible.

Making the return even harder—much harder—was the fact that he not only had lost, but had allowed victory to be stolen from him.

His brother, Sam Houston Johnson, said, “It was most important to Lyndon not to be like Daddy,” and Sam Houston was correct. Their father,
Sam Ealy Johnson, was idealistic, romantic, rigidly honest; in wide-open Austin, lobbyists who dispensed the “Three B’s” (“beefsteak, bourbon and blondes”) liberally to other legislators learned that they couldn’t buy Sam Johnson so much as a drink. His
colleagues called him “straight as a shingle,” and despite this rigidity, he—an idealistic Populist with a remarkable aptitude for legislative maneuvering—compiled an impressive record in championing causes against the “Interests” and for what he called, almost with reverence, “The People.” And the respect in which he was held by fellow legislators—decades later, one of them,
Wright Patman, by that
time a powerful United States Congressman familiar with the nation’s most renowned public figures, was to call Sam Ealy Johnson “the best man I ever knew”—was mirrored in the adoring eyes of his son. As a small boy, Lyndon Johnson had tried so hard to imitate his father that people watching him laughed; he had tried to dress like him, right down to a scaled-down version of Sam Johnson’s big Stetson hat. He tried to accompany him
everywhere—“right by the side of his daddy wherever he went.” As a teenager, Lyndon Johnson resembled his tall father not only in appearance—“the same huge ears, the same big nose, the same pale skin and the same dark eyes,” recalls Patman, who was to serve with the father in the Legislature and with the son in Congress—but also in mannerisms, most notably in one very distinctive mannerism: when Sam Johnson wanted to persuade a
listener of a point, he would drape one long arm around the shoulders of the man he was talking to, with his other hand grasp one of the man’s lapels, and lean into him, talking with his face very close to the listener’s. “Even as a teenager,” Patman was to recall, “Lyndon clutched you like his daddy did when he talked to you.” And when his father took Lyndon campaigning—Sam won six terms in the
Texas Legislature—driving from farm to farm in a Model T Ford, stopping by the side of the road to share with his son an enormous crust of homemade bread covered with jam while they talked quietly together—that was a time of which Lyndon Johnson was to say, “Christ, sometimes
I wished it could go on forever.”

But it didn’t go on forever. In the Hill Country, ideals and dreams brought disaster when they collided with the inexorable realities of that harsh land. Although, until Lyndon was thirteen, his father was financially successful, business was never what interested Sam Johnson. Texas legislators earned only five dollars a day, and then only on days when the Legislature was in session, but Sam was always available to drive endless miles over rutted roads locating
elderly ranchers who didn’t know they were entitled to a pension and helping them with their applications, or to lead long campaigns for better roads that would help farmers get their goods to market. His personal fortunes began to decline. And when, on a romantic impulse to make the whole Pedernales Valley “Johnson Country”
again, Sam, ignoring the realities of the worn-out soil and the marketplace, paid far too much to buy back the old
“Johnson Ranch,” he plunged himself, seemingly overnight, into a morass of debt from which there was no hope of escape. Always a little resented by Johnson City because of his “air of confidence” (“the Johnsons could strut sitting down”), and because he preferred discussing ideas and principles of government rather than crops and the weather, Sam refused now to change his manner although he “owed everyone in town,” persisted in
wearing a jacket and tie instead of work clothes like every other man in Johnson City—and resentment turned to ridicule, ridicule climaxed by a roar of appreciative laughter at a barbecue when a potential political opponent said, “I tell you, ladies and gentlemen, Sam Johnson is a mighty smart man. But he’s got no sense.” Penniless, doomed to remain in debt until he died, unable to pay his bills in the stores he had to walk past every
day, allowed to live in his house only because his brothers guaranteed the mortgage payments, he went to work on a road-grading crew that was building the highway for which he had fought in the Legislature, forced to wear work clothes at last. “He did a lot for that road, all right, Sam did,” one man snickers in recollection. Lyndon’s mother, also an idealist and romantic, who tried to teach her children that “principles” were the important thing, a
delicate woman better educated than most Hill Country women (and less suited to the rough life), was unable to keep her five children neat, or even fed very well, and when she remarked, trying to explain the value of education, “Now is the time to put something in children’s heads,” the neighbors sneered, “Maybe she ought to try putting something in their stomachs.”

The Johnsons became, in fact, the laughingstock of the town. Lyndon Johnson was to spend the rest
of his youth in a poverty so severe that often he and his brother and three sisters would have gone hungry were it not for food given as charity by relatives and friends, food seasoned with small-town sneers and cruelty. He had to stand in Courthouse Square and watch his high school sweetheart drive by with another man because her parents would not
allow her to date “a Johnson.” “I saw how it made Lyndon feel,” his cousin Ava says. “And I cried for him. I had to cry for Lyndon a lot.” He was to work on the road gang himself, harnessed to a grader like a mule during a burning Hill Country summer and a freezing Hill Country winter. Lyndon’s relationship with his father was transformed into one of resentment, tension, blazing clashes of wills, and competition as violent as
admiration had once been. And this competition had one dominant theme. After his father’s fall, it was terribly important to Lyndon Johnson that no one think that
he
had “no sense,” sense as the rough, brutal world of the Hill Country defined the term: “horse sense,” common sense, practicality, realism, pragmatism. Not only did he not want
to be regarded as an idealist, or as a fighter for causes, he wanted to be regarded
as a man who scorned ideals and causes as impractical dreams, as a man practical, pragmatic, tough, cynical. He wanted the world to see him not as merely smart but as shrewd, wily, sly. This was not, perhaps, a reputation that most men would have wanted. But, as Lyndon Johnson’s demeanor proclaimed, it was the reputation he wanted, wanted and needed—because of the tears and terrors of his youth needed desperately.