The Path to Power (3 page)

I
T IS NOT MERELY
his skill at a secrecy that makes understanding Lyndon Johnson so difficult. It is a lack of knowledge about the land in which he was born and raised: the Hill Country of Texas. For all the patterns of his life have their roots in that land.

Stella Gliddon, editor of the local newspaper in the remote Hill Country town called Johnson City and, for almost fifty years, the little town’s historian, said not long before she died, “So much has been written about Lyndon, but the thing is that none of it explains what it meant to grow up in a place like this.

“And without understanding that, no one will ever understand Lyndon Johnson.”

O
N THE DAY HE WAS BORN
, he would say, his white-haired grandfather leaped onto his big black stallion and thundered across the Texas Hill Country, reining in at every farm to shout: “A United States Senator was born this morning!” Nobody in the Hill Country remembers that ride or that shout, but they do remember the baby’s relatives saying something else about him, something which to them was more significant. An old aunt, Kate Bunton Keale, said it first, bending over the cradle, and as soon as she said it, everyone saw it was true, and repeated it: “He has the Bunton strain.” And to understand Lyndon Johnson it is necessary to understand the Bunton strain, and to understand what happened to it when it was mixed with the Johnson strain—and, most important, to understand what the Hill Country did to those who possessed it.

So strong were its outward marks that pictures of generations of Bunton men might, except for different hair styles and clothing, almost be pictures of the same man—a tall man, always over six feet, with heavily waved coal-black hair and dramatic features: large nose, very large ears, heavy black eyebrows and, underneath the eyebrows, the most striking of all the Bunton physical characteristics, the “Bunton eye.” The Bunton skin was milky white—“magnolia white,” the Hill Country called it—and out of that whiteness shone eyes so dark a brown that they seemed black, so bright that they glittered, so piercing that they often seemed to be glaring. “When my mother and father came back from seeing the baby and said he had the Bunton eye, I knew exactly what they meant,” says Lyndon’s cousin Ava. “Because Grandmother Bunton had the Bunton eye. If you talked to her, you never had to wonder if the answer was yes or no. Those eyes told you. Those eyes talked. They spit fire.”

If the Bunton eye was famed throughout the Hill Country, so was the Bunton personality. The Bunton temper was fierce and flaring, and the Bunton pride was so strong that some called it arrogance—although a writer describing one of the family notes that the arrogance was softened by a
“shadow of sadness running through his features,” and pictures of Buntons in middle and old age invariably show men whose mouths are pulled grimly tight and down.

The first Bunton in Texas was a hero, with a personality so striking that a man who met him only casually—encountering him among a group of riders on the great plains south of Bastrop in 1835—never forgot him, and years later would recall: “There were several men in the party, but Mr. Bunton’s personality attracted me. [He] had an air of a man of breeding and boldness. While our meeting was casual, he asked me a number of questions [and] I was greatly impressed by his manly bearing.” John Wheeler Bunton, a six-foot-four-inch Tennesseean, had come to Texas only that year, but apparently he impressed others as he impressed that rider: when the settlers of the Bastrop area met the next year to elect a delegate to the constitutional convention that would, in defiance of Mexico, create the Republic of Texas, he was elected—at the age of twenty-eight, the same age at which Lyndon Johnson would be elected to Congress. He was one of the signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence and a member of the committee that wrote the constitution of the new Republic. In the war between Texas and Mexico, he was at the first major battle—the three bloody days of house-to-house fighting that began when an old frontiersman, refusing to obey his officer’s order to retreat, shouted, “Who will go with old Ben Milam into San Antonio?” and led a wild charge into the city—and he was at the last: in the great charge at the San Jacinto when Sam Houston waved his 800 ragged men forward against the entire Mexican Army (the Texans marched side by side in a single line half a mile long; before them floated a white silk flag bearing a lone star; beside the flag rode Houston on his great white stallion, Saracen; for a while the Texans advanced in silence; then someone shouted, “Remember the Alamo!”). At San Jacinto, a fellow officer wrote, Bunton’s “towering form could be seen amidst the thickest of the fight. He penetrated so far into the ranks of the defenders of the breastworks that it is miraculous that he was not killed.” According to one account, he was the leader of the seven-man patrol that the next day captured Santa Anna, who was trying to escape in a private’s uniform, and brought “the Napoleon of the West” before Houston. Of his deeds as an Indian-fighter, a friend wrote years later: “To the present generation of Texans the name of this honored man is, perhaps, but little known; but in the day long gone by, it was a household word in all the scattered log cabins that dotted the woods and prairies of Texas.” Returning to Tennessee after the war to claim his sweetheart, he brought her to Texas—on a wild journey during which their ship was captured by a Mexican man-of-war and they were imprisoned for three months—and was elected to the new Republic’s first Congress, where he quickly demonstrated an ability to lead legislators: observers wrote of his “commanding presence” and “eloquent tongue”; among the bills in whose passage he played a prominent role was the one that established the Texas
Rangers. He was re-elected, seemed on the road to political prominence—and then, without a word of explanation, abruptly retired from public life forever.

Whatever the reasons for Bunton’s retirement from politics, they did not include lack of ambition: ambition—ambition on the grand scale—was, in fact, perhaps the most vivid of all the vivid Bunton characteristics. While some of the men who came to Texas—that vast and empty land—in the mid-nineteenth century were fleeing from the law or from debts, many of the thousands and tens of thousands who chalked GTT (“Gone to Texas”) on the doors of their homes in the Southern states were not fleeing from, but searching for something. “Big country … fed big dreams,” as one historian put it, and Texas, with its huge tracts of land free for the taking—in 1838, it enacted the first homestead legislation in America (and a man’s homestead, the legislation also provided, could never be seized for debt)—fed the biggest dreams of all. And judging from the actions of John Wheeler Bunton and his brothers, no dreams were bigger than theirs.

These were years when the frontier, the edge of settlement in central Texas, was terrible in its isolation, separated as it was by hundreds of miles from the state’s more populated areas near the Louisiana and Arkansas borders; families which moved to the edge of settlement in the 1830’s and ’40s and ’50s, says Texas historian T. R. Fehrenbach, “left 19th century civilization far behind.” And because central Texas was the hunting ground of the Apaches and the fierce Penetaka Comanches, masters of human torture, it was, in Fehrenbach’s words, “a genuine frontier of war.” Men who went—and took their families—to the edge of settlement had to be driven, or lured, by big dreams indeed. Each farmer who did so, Fehrenbach says, did so “yearning for his own small kingdom, willing to suffer hardships beyond counting while he carved it out with his own hands.” The Buntons went to the
very
edge. John Wheeler Bunton, the hero, came from a wealthy family in Tennessee but wanted something more and went west to Texas, then after the war with Mexico moved west within Texas, and then west again. His first homestead was on the plains below Brenham, when those plains were the edge of the frontier. About 1840, despite the hammerblows of the Apaches and Penetakas, the frontier edged west to the Colorado River; Bunton about 1840 moved beyond the Colorado, settling near Bastrop. During the 1850’s, settlers pushed about fifty miles farther west, to the 98th meridian, where the plains ended and the Texas Hill Country (a highland known to geologists as the “Edwards Plateau”) began, and along that meridian, Fehrenbach says, for two decades, “the frontier wavered, now forward, now back, locked in bitter battle”; during 1858 and 1859, two of the “bloodiest years in Texas history,” the dead of that frontier would be numbered in the hundreds; in the isolated log cabins that dotted the hills, settlers huddled in fear during the nights of the full moon, the “Comanche moon.” But during the 1850’s, near the 98th meridian, in the plains at the edge of the Hill Country, John Bunton
built not a cabin but a graceful two-story plantation house with three verandas, surrounded by cotton fields and pastures in which grazed not only sheep and cattle but the finest Tennessee thoroughbreds, and staffed with Negro slaves dressed in black trousers and white waistcoats—the great plantation of which he had dreamed. And although Indians still roamed the area (twice his wife, in his absence, scared off threatening bands with a rifle), when a log-cabin church was founded in nearby Mountain City in 1857, the Buntons would arrive at it on Sundays in an elegant sulky driven by an elderly retainer named Uncle Ranch. The Bunton plantation (named Rancho Ram-bouillet after a French breed of sheep John was trying to raise there) may have been the westernmost cotton plantation—and plantation house—on such a scale in all Texas.

West and west and west again, pursuing a big dream—John was not the only Bunton who took that course. So did the three brothers who followed him to Texas, one of whom, Robert Holmes Bunton—“a large impressive man, standing six feet and three inches in height and weighing about two hundred and sixty pounds … with fair skin, coal-black hair and piercing eyes”—was Lyndon Johnson’s great-grandfather.

Very little is known about Robert Bunton. He first moved from Tennessee to Kentucky, where he became a “substantial planter.” Nevertheless, in 1858, at the age of forty, he moved to Texas, near Bastrop; and then he, too, moved west, to Lockhart, in the plains just below the Hill Country. He fought in the Lost Cause (as did his sons and six grandsons, all of whom, a family historian noted, were over six feet tall), enlisting as a private and within a year being promoted twice, to sergeant and lieutenant. After the war, he raised cattle and sent them up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene—huge herds raised on a huge ranch, for with the profits of each drive he bought more land.

Dreamers of big dreams, the Buntons were also, to an extent somewhat unusual among Texas frontier families, interested in ideas and abstractions. John Bunton was one of the founders of the short-lived Philosophical Society of Texas, which was formed in 1837 to explore “topics of interest which our new and rising republic unfolds to the philosopher, the scholar and the man of the world.” No such details exist about Robert, but his descendants recall hearing that he had a reputation for being “absolutely truthful” and “an excellent conversationalist, and greatly interested in government and politics.” If, in his old age, he found someone at Weinheimer’s Store to talk with when he went shopping, he would sit and talk all day and into the night, although, unlike most of those with whom he talked, he preferred to discuss not “practical” politics but theories of government; he was regarded by the other men, says a descendant of one of them, as “an idealist.”

Idealists, romantics, dreamers of big dreams though they may have been, there was nonetheless a hard, tough, practical side to the Buntons.
Neighbors remember them as canny traders, and remember, too, their favorite saying: “Charity begins at home.” And while their dreams were big, in the face of necessity they had the strength to scale them down, to adapt to reality.

The dreams of John Wheeler Bunton proved too big for the land to support: cotton could not be grown profitably enough in central Texas to support a huge, elegant plantation, and the showy French sheep didn’t produce enough wool or mutton. But he experimented with new breeds, and although he lost some of the “thousands of acres” Rancho Rambouillet had originally covered, he held on to enough so that he died “leaving a handsome estate” to his son, Desha. Desha drove cattle north and, making money, bought large tracts of land near Austin. When cattle-driving turned unprofitable he had to sell those tracts—but he managed to hold on to what he had started with. He held on to it and turned it into a farm, its hogs (if cattle weren’t profitable, the Buntons would raise an animal that was) producing sausage that he sold in Austin, acquiring as he did so a reputation as a hard, shrewd businessman. As late as 1930, Desha’s son and daughter were running the same ranch their hero grandfather had left—and the hero’s house still stood. (“The Buntons were very proud people,” a neighbor recalls. “They had elegant parties in that beautiful yard. They were really striking, the way they looked. Tall and straight. Their ears were big and their noses—and they had those piercing Bunton eyes.”) And although during the Depression they were forced to sell off first one piece and then another, they held on grimly to as much as possible—so that as late as 1981, more than a century after its founding, the ranch, reduced to perhaps 200 acres, was still in the family.

Robert Holmes Bunton, Lyndon Johnson’s great-grandfather, sent big herds up to Abilene with his sons. Cattle prices began to fall, and from one drive his sons returned all but penniless. Then, together with another brother, Robert mustered up a herd of 1,500 head and sent them up the trail with one of the brother’s sons. The young man returned home without a dime, having apparently fallen into the hands of cardsharps in Abilene; Robert, it is related, “said not one word of reproach.” But while other men persisted in making drives that grew steadily less profitable, the two Bunton brothers all but stopped raising cattle themselves, and instead rented out their pastures as grazing land for herds from South Texas that were passing through and needed to rest for a few days on the way north. Many of the men who owned those herds made no money from them—but the Buntons did. Robert Bunton made enough so that he was able to retire comfortably, and to give his six children a start in life when they married: money to his daughters—one of whom, Eliza Bunton, was Lyndon Johnson’s grandmother—and land to his sons. And the sons made successes of their land—one becoming one of the biggest ranchers in the big ranch country of West Texas.

The Buntons, then, while never as successful as they had dreamed of becoming, were more successful than the run of ranchers in central Texas: in a land in which economic survival was very difficult, they survived. Central Texans often judged their neighbors by whether or not they “left something for their children.” The Buntons left something for theirs, and the children made something out of what they were left. It was only when, in Lyndon Johnson’s father, the Bunton strain became mixed with the Johnson strain that the Bunton temper and pride, ambition and dreams, and interest in ideas and abstractions brought disaster, for the Johnsons were not only also dreamers, romantics, and idealists, not only had a fierce pride and flaring temper of their own, and physical characteristics which greatly resembled those of the Buntons, they also resembled the Buntons in their passion for ideas and abstractions—without resembling them at all in shrewdness and toughness. They had all the impractical side of the Buntons—and none of the practical side. Big as were the Buntons’ dreams, moreover, the Johnsons’ dreams were even bigger. Their dreams lured them beyond even that far point to which the Buntons had ventured. The Buntons stopped just before the edge of the Hill Country; the Johnsons pushed forward—into its heart.