The Path to Power (14 page)

On this point, the people who know—the people who were
there
, who were in the Johnson home with the Johnsons—agree. Ask a score of them, and a score agree: it
was
a warm, happy family.

Except, they also agree, for one of its members: the eldest son.

L
YNDON
J
OHNSON
got his name from his father’s ambition. His mother wanted him named for a hero in a book; his father, who had wanted so desperately to be a lawyer, wanted him named for a lawyer. For three months after his birth on August 27, 1908, therefore, he was called only “the baby,” until, as Rebekah recalled it, “one cold November morning” she refused to get up and cook breakfast until a name was agreed on.

Sam was close friends with three lawyers: Clarence Martin, Dayton Moses and W. C. Linden. “How would you like ‘Clarence’?” he asked. “Not in the least,” Rebekah replied. Then, she wrote, he asked,

Relatives felt that naming the baby for the other side of the family would have been more appropriate. Its father, even as an infant, had had the “dark eyes, black curls and white skin”—and the large ears and heavy eyebrows—that were “a Bunton inheritance,” and it was soon apparent that that inheritance had been passed on undiluted to the son. The observation Aunt Kate had made bending over Lyndon’s cradle on the day he was born was repeated that same day by the baby’s grandmother, Eliza Bunton Johnson; she “professed to find marked characteristics of the Buntons (her family) in the boy,” Rebekah wrote. And before the day was over (for Sam, friendly and exuberant as always, waited only to see that his wife was all
right before leaping onto Fritz and riding around the valley, reporting that he had a son and inviting everyone over to see him, so that people began crowding into the house before Rebekah had recovered enough strength to sit up in bed), the observation was being repeated by neighbors and by relatives who weren’t Buntons. Ava, Lyndon’s cousin, remembers her mother returning from the Johnson home and announcing, “He has the Bunton eye.”

His parents were thrilled with the baby. When he was six months old, his father brought a photographer to the farm to take his picture, and while he went to pick up the prints a few days later, Rebekah waited eagerly. Years later, she was to recall how her husband “raised his hand holding the package as he saw me waiting on the porch and began to run. I ran to meet him and we met in the middle of the Benner pasture to exclaim rapturously over the photograph of our boy.” Rebekah suggested ordering ten prints, for members of the family; Sam ordered fifty, and sent them to all his friends in the Legislature as well. While Lyndon was still very young, his mother began telling him stories—from the Bible, history and mythology—every day after lunch and at bedtime. “She taught him the alphabet from blocks before he was two; all the Mother Goose rhymes and poems from Longfellow and Tennyson at three; and when he was four he could spell many words beginning with ‘Grandpa’ down to ‘Dan,’ a favorite horse, and ‘cat,’ and could read.” When his father carried him to a picnic at Stonewall in the Spring of 1909, neighbors hurried over to Sam—people always hurried over to Sam then—as he entered the picnic grounds, and Lyndon kept reaching out his arms to each newcomer, and trying to scramble out of Sam’s arms to reach them, and everybody exclaimed over the bright-eyed baby. According to his mother, one man said, “Sam, you’ve got a politician there. I’ve never seen such a friendly baby. He’s a chip off the old block. I can just see him running for office twenty-odd years from now.” And neighbors remembered how Sam beamed as his boy was praised.

But Lyndon was an unusually restless baby. His mother made light of this aspect of his character in the careful phrases of the
Family Album
she wrote after her son became famous. “Lyndon from his earliest days possessed a highly inquisitive mind,” she wrote.

But she didn’t make light of it at the time. Because often, when she would get to “Grandpa’s,” Lyndon wouldn’t be there.

Rebekah was frightened of the snakes and the other dangers that could befall a little child wandering alone. She would run first down to the
Pedernales—she was most afraid that Lyndon would fall into the river—and then up to the top of a hill to look for him, and then she would ask her father-in-law to saddle a horse and find him—and she would wait anxiously until he was found. Then she would scold the little boy, and Sam, when he got home, would scold him, or, as he got older, spank him, and they would sternly forbid him to leave the yard again.

But they couldn’t stop him. “Every time his mama turned her back, seems like, Lyndon would run away,” his cousin Ava says. And as he grew older, his trips grew longer.

Relatives who lived a half-mile—or more—away would suddenly notice that tiny figure toddling along with grim determination—a picture of Lyndon Johnson at eighteen months is striking not only for his huge ears but for the utter maturity of his expression; the face of the child in that picture is not the face of a child at all—across the open country or up one of the long dirt tracks that branch off to the various farms from the main “roads.” They would take him back to Rebekah—and the very next day, or, if Rebekah wasn’t careful, the same day, the tiny figure would appear again.

Soon, a further aspect of Lyndon’s “running away” became apparent. Once, at threshing time, when twenty or thirty men were working with Sam in the Johnsons’ cornfields, Lyndon, then about four years old, disappeared. After searching for him for a while alone because she didn’t want to disturb the men (Rebekah had learned that time was precious on threshing days), his mother summoned help—by now, Lyndon was running away so frequently that his father had hung a big bell on the front porch so Rebekah could more easily call for help in finding him—and first his father came in from the fields and then, when he couldn’t find Lyndon, the other men came in and fanned out over the hills in a full-scale search. It was a search that proved unnecessary, because Lyndon was near the front gate of the house all the time, hiding in a haystack. “Everyone was looking for him for a long time, and everyone was upset, and he must have been able to hear them,” recalls Jessie Lambert, the maid who was living with the Johnsons at the time, “but even though he wasn’t asleep, he didn’t come out for the longest time. His mother was standing right by the haystack, crying, but he didn’t come out.” On another occasion, he disappeared for several hours; his father located him only because Lyndon’s dog, “Bigham Young,” was moving around in the cornfield in which the boy had been hiding and making the tassels wave. “Why did you run away?” Sam demanded. (Lyndon replied, according to his sister, who reported this story, that “he wasn’t running away. He was going to the pasture to check on his horse.”) If Sam didn’t know the answer to the question he asked, his relatives and maids thought they did. “He [Lyndon] wanted attention,” Jessie Lambert says. “He would run away, and run away, and the minute his mother would turn her back, he would run away again, and it was all to get attention.”

At school, this aspect became more noticeable still.

Lyndon got to go to school by running away. Children weren’t supposed to start until the age of five, and his mother didn’t want Lyndon going to the local school anyway; the “Junction School,” a mile down the road that ran along the river, was only a one-room box with a roof on it, and most of the thirty pupils, scattered through eight grades, were German, so that much of the teaching—by the only teacher, a strapping teen-ager almost six feet tall, Kate Deadrich—was done in that language. Rebekah and Sam were already intending to move into Johnson City the next year so that Lyndon could go to school there. But Lyndon, at four, began running away to the Junction School every day, showing up at recess to play with the children; and, short of tying him up, which they were unwilling to do, his parents were simply unable to stop him. “He’d run off to school and they would bring him back, and he’d run off again,” his Aunt Jessie Hatcher recalled. His mother was particularly frightened because the route between the farm and the school was along the river. Giving in, she asked “Miss Kate” to let him start a year early, and, the teacher recalls, “I told her one more wouldn’t make any difference.” Thereafter, Lyndon as President would recall, “My mother used to lead me from our house to the schoolhouse. … With a baby in her arms, she would lead me down here, afraid I would get in the river and drown. She would lead me down and turn me over to the teacher at the side door.” After a few months, Sam’s brother Tom decided that his seven-year-old daughter, Ava, was old enough to ride a donkey to school, and since her route led past Sam’s place, she would pick Lyndon up and take him along with her.

Although he could read better than most of the other children at the school, Lyndon refused to read at all—unless Miss Kate held him on her lap in front of the class. Most of the children were a little awed by their tall teacher, but Lyndon teased her and showered her with affection. “Lyndon used to come up to me and look so shy and cute and then he’d say, ‘Miss Kate, I don’t
likè
you one bit!’ I would be so shocked. Then he would laugh and say, ‘I just
love
you!’” His mother dressed him in red Buster Brown suits or white sailor suits or in a cowboy outfit, complete to a Stetson hat, and Lyndon not only didn’t object to being dressed differently from the other boys, who wore farm clothes—he insisted on it. “He wanted to stand out,” Ava explains. When Miss Kate excused one of her students to use the privy out back, the student had to write his name on one of the two blackboards that flanked the back door. The other students wrote their names small; whenever Lyndon left the room, he would reach up as high as he could and scrawl his name in capital letters so huge that they took up not one but both blackboards. His schoolmates can remember today—seventy years later—that huge LYNDON B. on the left blackboard and JOHNSON on the right.

Relatives as well as schoolmates recognized this desire to get attention—to stand out. Once, he bought a little china clown as a Christmas present
for an aunt, but because he didn’t want his gift to be just one of many under the Christmas tree, he gave it to her weeks in advance, informing her loudly: “It cost me a dime and it’s worth every penny.” Trying to explain his behavior, Ava says: “He wanted attention. He wanted to
be
somebody.”

H
E WANTED MORE
.

His cousin Ava would ride by the Johnson farmhouse on her donkey, Molly, to take him to school. Not only did Molly belong to her, but Ava, at seven, was three years older than Lyndon. Nevertheless, after just a few days, Lyndon began demanding that he ride in front and hold the reins—and when Ava imitates Lyndon demanding, her voice grows harsh and insistent.

“‘Ah wanta ride in front!’

“‘No, ah’m older, Lyndon, and it’s mah donkey.’

“‘No, ah’m bigger! Ah wanta ride in front! Ah wanta ride in front!’ And in the front he got.”

A few weeks later, Lyndon was given his own donkey, and on that donkey there was never any question who would ride in front, not even when boys older than Lyndon were riding with him. “Well,” recalls his Aunt Jessie Hatcher, “there’d be four or five boys in the neighborhood, and they all came. They’d all ride that donkey. All got on the donkey, but Lyndon was in the forefront, he was the head. And he had the quirt to make the donkey go.”

Furthermore, Mrs. Hatcher says, even when the boys were participating in other activities, Lyndon was still in the forefront. “Whatever they were doing, Lyndon was the head. … He was always the lead horse. Made no difference what come nor what went, he was the head of the ring.”

He had to be the head—and he had to make sure everyone knew it. The adjective most frequently used to describe him in the recollections of friends and relatives is “bossy”—and their descriptions of his relationships with other children make that adjective seem too pale. Ava, who even as a girl was motherly, and who loved her little cousin (Lyndon called her Sister), nonetheless recalls how Lyndon liked meringue pie, and how another little boy at the Junction School, Hugo Klein, said he had a piece in his lunchbox, and she recalls how, during recess before lunch, while Hugo was playing outside, Lyndon ate Hugo’s pie, and calmly walked out to play “with pie all over his face.” And when Hugo started crying, and Ava asked Lyndon, “What have you been doing?” Lyndon replied calmly, “Ah was just hungry, Sister. And ah got me some pie.”

In Johnson City, where the Johnsons moved in September, 1913, when Lyndon was five, there were more children—and Lyndon’s behavior grew more striking.

He didn’t want to play with children his own age. Boys much older
were in school with him, and even in his grade, because some boys had missed whole years of school helping on their families’ farms, and some had been very late starting. Ben Crider, whose father had said, “I ain’t gonna have no educated sonofabitch in my family,” had finally defied him and started the first grade at the age of fourteen. Although Ben was six years older than Lyndon and mature for his age—a big, gruff, friendly ranch boy—Lyndon small, scrawny, awkward, soon became his friend. The Crider and Johnson families had long been friends, Ben explains, “ever since Indian time,” and “Lyndon took a liking to me. One thing about Lyndon—he wouldn’t run with anyone his own age. He wanted to run with older people, usually about five to ten years older.” And on the whole, it wasn’t a case of a little boy tagging along after older boys. It was almost a case of him leading them.