The Path to Power (26 page)

The hands turning those boards—and lifting those shovels, and tugging those rakes through rock—were young hands, for most of the workers were Johnson City teen-agers. Some of the hands were callused, the hands of boys accustomed to farm work. But the hands of fifteen-year-old Lyndon Johnson weren’t. Nor was Lyndon strong, or physically coordinated, or accustomed to working; one night, the foreman, Floyd Ferrell, came home and sarcastically told his wife: “That boy can’t even hold a shovel.” For Lyndon, the work was almost as brutal as it was for the girls working beside him; in that Summer of 1924, two dollars a day, the wage the state was paying, was precious in the Hill Country, and any pair of hands that could bring it home had to do so—“We had to work like
men
,” says Ava (her pretty sister, Margaret, was working, too, during their school vacations; despite their mother’s thriftiness, their father was on the verge of losing his farm to the bank that Summer). “That was work I’ll never forget.” Lyndon had always hated physical labor—Ava remembers him, at the age of no more than nine or ten, whispering to her as they and their friends picked cotton in someone’s stony fields, a score of skinny little backs stooped over in the burning sun: “Boy, there’s got to be a better way to make a living than this. I don’t see that there’s any future in this.” This road work—the only work available in a drought-stricken Hill Country—was even harder than picking cotton, and Lyndon hated every minute of it. Ava remembers him tugging at a wagon board beside her and grunting, “There’s got to be a better way.” But he did it—rather than do what his parents wanted.

More and more frequently now, he wouldn’t get up on time. Coming into his room, his father would say harshly: “C’mon, Lyndon, get up—every boy in town’s got an hour’s start on you. And you never
will
catch up.” He continued to sneak the car out at night, and his father grew angrier and angrier. Then, one night, while driving a group of older boys to a bootlegger’s still, he ran the car into a ditch and wrecked it, and, standing there on the lonely country road, said: “I just can’t face my father.”

“Money was scarce,” recalls one of the boys present, “but we put in our nickels and dimes and got Lyndon enough money” so that he could run
away from home; he slept in the wrecked car, in the morning hitchhiked to Austin, and from there took a bus 160 miles south to Robstown, in the cotton country near Corpus Christi on the Gulf, where his cousins, the Ropers, lived. When he arrived, his cousin Elizabeth recalls, he said that “working on that highway was just too much for him, and he wanted to find a job where he could use his brains instead of his hands.”

But the only job he could find in Robstown was in a cotton gin. The Roeder & Koether Gin Company was a long, low building filled with the clank of pulleys, the roar of machine belts, the whine of the high-speed saws that cut the cotton lint away from the seeds, and the heavy thuds of the huge hydraulic pump press that hammered the cotton into bales and pounded steel belts around them. Hot as it had been out on that highway in the Hill Country sun, it was hotter inside the gin, with the Gulf Coast sun beating down on its tin roof and fires roaring under the big steam boiler. The air in the gin was so thick with the dust and lint that drifted up in clouds from the cotton as it was pounded into bales by the pump press that men working in it sometimes found themselves gasping for breath. And Lyndon, working amid the roar and the whine and the pounding that must have been very loud to a boy from the Hill Country, where the gins were tiny, almost toylike devices compared to this, was put to work—eleven hours a day—keeping the boiler supplied with wood and water. And it was explained to him that if he ever let the water run out (or if the pop-off valve for some reason failed to work, and too much steam was kept pent up inside), the boiler would explode. Several had exploded in Robstown gins that summer; he was terrified.

“The work was hot and he wanted to come home,” a Johnson City friend, Fritz Koeniger, recalls, “but he didn’t want to come home and be punished. So he wrote to Ben Crider, and Ben told his brother Walter to bring it up with Mr. Sam. Walter asked him: ‘Have you heard anything from Lyndon, Mr. Johnson?’

“‘No. His mother is worried to death about him.’ (Pause.) ‘And so am I.’

“‘Well, Ben’s got a letter from him,’ Walter says. ‘And he says he’s working on a steam boiler down in Robstown. Those old steam boilers are mighty dangerous. The people down there won’t work on those boilers.’

“Sam got up and walked down the street in a deep study. Then he swung around and walked back, and said, ‘Walter, here’s ten dollars for gas. You drive down there just as fast as you can, and get Lyndon, and bring him home!’”

Then Sam went home and telephoned Robstown, telling Lyndon to come home with Walter. But Lyndon wouldn’t let his father know he wanted to. Pretending that he was having a good time where he was, he said he would come home only if Sam promised never to punish him for the car wreck—or even to mention it. And when his father finally agreed, Lyndon
insisted that his mother come to the phone and say she had heard the promise, so that in the future he would have a witness. And thereafter, whenever Sam, angry at Lyndon, would start to bring up the car wreck, Lyndon would say, “Mama, you remember, he said he wouldn’t do it”—and Rebekah would say, “Now, that’s out, Sam. You promised.” And Lyndon’s father would always drop the subject.

Lyndon could always outsmart his father.

But if Lyndon’s car accident was a topic banned from the Johnson household, Lyndon’s college career was not, and conflict flared again and again as September approached. Johnson City was abuzz over the fact that five children from a single graduating class, the most in the city’s history, were going to college—and the parents of the sixth felt very bad. In September, Lyndon drove to Kyle to visit the last of the original Buntons, his Great-uncle Desha, who, tended by a former slave, old Uncle Ranch, who was almost as feeble as he, was dying—on the same ranch he had founded almost sixty years before and had managed to hold on to ever since, and would be able to pass on, unencumbered by mortgage, to his sons. But if Lyndon was offered any financial assistance for his higher education, it was not sufficient to change his mind. On the day that four of his former classmates went to San Marcos to enter college—Kitty Clyde, of course, went to Austin—Lyndon went, too, in response to a direct order. But he returned to Johnson City without registering, and stood sullenly under the lash of his father’s tongue. And, a week or two later, he ran away again.

T
HIS TIME
, he ran not south but west—to California.

Four older boys, discouraged by the lack of work in Johnson City, were planning a job-hunting trip to the coast in Walter Crider’s old “T-Model,” which they had purchased for twenty-five dollars. When Lyndon asked his parents for permission to accompany them, Rebekah became hysterical, and Sam flatly forbade him to go. Lyndon boasted that he was going anyway. Told about the boast, Sam said, “Weeelll, I’m just gonna wait until they’re all loaded up, and then I’m gonna yank him out of that car.” One Wednesday in November, however, Sam heard of a farm for sale near Blanco at a cheap price, and drove down to investigate. The boys had been planning to leave that Friday, but, Lyndon’s brother says, “The minute he [Sam] took off, Lyndon ran into his room, pulled his already-packed suitcase from under the bed, and quickly called his fellow travelers together. In less than ten minutes, they … zoomed out of town at close to thirty miles an hour.” Returning some hours later, Sam

but for some reason no one did.

After Lyndon Johnson became President, he would frequently enthrall reporters—and biographers—with his dramatic description of this California trip, which he said he took because “it meant one less mouth for my poor daddy to feed.” In a typical description, he said the five travelers had been so naive and frightened (“None of us had been off the farm for a trip longer than the road to town”) that

He remained in California for two years, he said, and during this time,

When finally he returned to Johnson City—hitchhiking the entire fifteen hundred miles—he said,

Lyndon Johnson’s description of the trip, however, no matter how enthralling to biographers—a passage in a typical biography reads: “Johnson was barely able to survive on the grapes he picked, the dishes he washed and the cars he fixed. … [He] lived the vagabond life”—is no more accurate than the reason he gave for taking it.

Once California had been the frontier, the land of opportunity to the west, and in the Hill Country it was still thought of as the land of opportunity. “Everyone in Johnson City wanted to go to California,” Louise Casparis says. “They thought you could make money out there”—and the five boys believed they were on the trail of fortune; they named their car “the Covered
Wagon.” Arriving in El Paso (population 74,000), they were thrilled by it because it was the first time any of them had been in a “big city.” Traveling up through New Mexico and then across Arizona on plank roads, crossing the Colorado River on a ferry, they felt very much like explorers. “We had a lot of fun,” Rountree says. And when they arrived in Tehachapi, California, where a number of Johnson City boys, including Lyndon’s close friends Ben Crider and Fritz Koeniger, were working in a cement plant, while only two of the travelers could obtain jobs in the plant and two others did indeed pick grapes and do other farm work in the San Joaquin Valley, if Lyndon Johnson picked any grapes, he picked very few. His cousin Tom Martin, son of the well-known attorney Clarence Martin, had become a prominent attorney himself in San Bernardino, and what Johnson actually did as soon as he arrived in California was to telephone Martin and ask if he could work as a clerk in his law office. Martin, after calling the Johnsons and obtaining their consent, agreed. He drove to Tehachapi to pick Lyndon up and took him straight to the best men’s shop in San Bernardino, where he bought him two expensive suits, and then brought him to his home, a four-bedroom ranch house. And what Johnson actually did, from beginning to end of his fabled stay in California, was not tramp up and down the coast, “with nothing to eat,” “washing dishes, waiting on tables, doing farm work,” but work in his cousin’s paneled office and live in his cousin’s comfortable home.

Y
ET IF THERE WAS
no poverty or hunger on the trip, there were terrors nonetheless.

Martin had given Johnson hope: he promised to make him a lawyer. In California as in Texas, he explained, admission to the bar required passing a written examination, which he felt—and Lyndon said he agreed—Lyndon wouldn’t be able to pass, even after studying law in Martin’s office; not without more education than had been provided at Johnson City High. In neighboring Nevada, however, no written examination was required, and the oral examinations were very informal, especially when the candidate came recommended by a prominent attorney. Martin was friends with several prominent attorneys in Nevada, he said, and if Lyndon studied law in his office—no more than a few months would be needed—he would arrange with one of his friends to have Lyndon admitted to the Nevada bar. Practicing in Nevada wouldn’t be a good idea, Martin said; that state was still sparsely settled and rather impoverished. But once he was a lawyer in Nevada, Johnson could be admitted to the California bar under a provision which made such admission all but automatic for any lawyer from another state. And as soon as he was admitted, Martin would take him into his own profitable practice.

To Lyndon, this seemed a chance—his first real chance—to be someone without bowing to his parents’ wishes and going to college. Fritz Koeniger was rooming with Lyndon, who had persuaded Tom to let Koeniger work as a clerk in his office, and, Koeniger says, “Lyndon wanted to be a lawyer, wanted it very badly.” He threw himself into his work with an energy he had never displayed before. If at home he had had to be shouted out of bed, now he jumped up and dressed in an almost frantic haste—so anxious to get to work, in fact, that he developed a habit Koeniger had never heard of: instead of untying his necktie at night, which would have required him to spend half a minute or so retying it in the morning, Lyndon would loosen the knot enough to pull it over his head and hang it, still tied, on a doorknob, so that he could just pull it over his head and tighten the knot in the morning. And when he got to the office, he not only raced to do whatever work Martin assigned him, but in every spare minute bent over Martin’s big lawbooks with a fierce concentration. “He had always been ambitious, even back in Johnson City,” Koeniger says, but there was a new level of intensity about that ambition now. “He wanted to get ahead in the world, wanted to be something, and he wanted it so bad that he was aggressive,” Koeniger says. “He was very aggressive.” Martin, as renowned an orator as his father, was active in Democratic politics in San Bernardino, and had been invited to speak at a Labor Day picnic. But the night before, he, Lyndon and Koeniger had driven over to Los Angeles to a party for two Johnson City newlyweds who had come to California, and they had slept over. As soon as they started driving to San Bernardino the next morning, they saw that the holiday traffic was so heavy that they might not get to the picnic on time. The road had only two lanes, one in each direction, and both lanes were crowded, so that Lyndon, who was driving, had to get cars in his lane to pull off to the side of the road if he wanted to pass them. And the horn on Martin’s car didn’t work. “And then,” Koeniger says, “and this is what I’ve thought of many times to show how aggressive Lyndon was—he’d pull right up behind some car and bang the side of his door, just smash it—hard—with his open palm so it sounded like a crash, almost, over and over until they’d pull over. Chauffeur-driven cars, some of them. Rich people out for a holiday. But that long arm would just reach out the window and just smash and smash. And the other car would swerve over and we’d go by and they’d glare at us. I wouldn’t have done that, but Lyndon was just
determined
to get there on time.” He did—they arrived just as the master of ceremonies was asking, “Is the Honorable Thomas J. Martin in the audience? He is scheduled to speak at this time.” Martin shouted up, “Here I am!” Koeniger was never to forget that long arm beating—smashing on the car door.