The Path to Power (32 page)

But the aspect of Lyndon Johnson’s character most remarkable to other students was his lack of embarrassment when caught out in an exaggeration or an outright falsehood. “You could catch him in a lie about something, and it was like he didn’t care,” Richards says. “The next day he’d be back lying about the same thing again.” Says Clayton Stribling: “He never seemed to resent [being found out]. He just didn’t care. He wouldn’t get mad. He’d be back the next day talking the same as ever.”

T
HE BIGGEST
MEN on campus were the athletes. They had formed a “secret” organization called the Black Stars, which met in the big meadow on Barney
Knispel’s farm for drinking parties at which these burly farm boys consumed beer by the kegful, frequently vomiting it out on the grass, and held “initiation ceremonies,” a highlight of which was convincing a blindfolded initiate that he was kissing a bull’s penis, which was actually the bent elbow of the group’s president, who was called the “Jupiter.” The Black Stars won most of the class offices. They hung around together at the Bobcat, the little shack at the bottom of College Hill run by the Coers brothers, former football stars themselves, and partied together—with the college’s prettiest girls. “Everyone wanted to be part of that crowd,” recalls Ella So Relle. “That was the ‘in’ crowd.”

Lyndon Johnson wanted very badly to be part of that crowd, and his roommate wanted him to be.

Alfred T. Johnson had been born and reared on a lonely ranch in the empty wastes of West Texas, and had thought he was doomed to that life—until one day, at tiny Lytle High School, someone put a football in his hands. One of the most famous players in Texas high school football history had been a great halfback named Boody Johnson, and on that day at Lytle, as the shy, rangy ranch boy began to run with the ball, someone yelled in awe, “Look at ol’ Boody Johnson go!” Word of his ability spread, and one day a coach from Southwest Texas State Teachers College showed up and offered him the San Marcos version of a scholarship—a job sweeping out campus buildings—and he took it; “My dad worked hard all his life, and I had worked hard all my life,” he would say. “If I could get me an education, I could let my brain work for me instead of my hands.” The Southwest Texas Bobcats were a tough team (“After bulldogging steers all our lives, you think it was tough tackling a
guy?
” Clayton Stribling asks), but during practice scrimmages they had as little success tackling Boody as high school teams had had; a talented athlete—he was a star baseball and basketball as well as football player—he was elected captain. In an age in which, even at faraway San Marcos, football players were lionized, he was the campus hero; under his picture in the
Pedagog
is the caption: “The stalwart Boody Johnson.”

But it is not the remembrance of his athletic ability that—fifty years later—makes San Marcos students smile when they remember the stalwart Boody Johnson. “He was the fatherly type,” a football player says. “If things were going bad in a game, he’d call a time-out, and gather the team around, and say, ‘Now, look, fellows, we’re here to play football,’ and settle everybody down.” He didn’t settle down only football players. “You always felt you could go to him with your problems,” says one woman. “He was a very kind person. Gruff and tough, but very kind. He was just like a father to everybody.” His unselfishness was legendary, and not just on the football field (where, because the other halfback, Lyons McCall, a good runner, was a poor blocker, Boody volunteered to do most of the blocking while McCall carried the ball—if the team was behind in the last minutes of a game,
however, the players would growl: “Give it to Boody”). “Boody was the kind of guy who, if you woke him up in the middle of the night and told him your car had broken down, would get out of bed and walk five miles to help you—nothing was too much trouble for him,” Vernon Whiteside says. And he was always so soft-spoken and slow-talking and friendly; no campus activity was complete unless Boody was part of it: he played the lead in romantic comedies and sang the solo in “Sweet Adeline” with the campus barbershop quartet. “Old Boody,” Ella So Relle would say, fifty years later, smiling and crying a little at the same time. “Gruff old Boody. A sweeter, calmer human being I never met.” And, she adds, “a more complete contrast with Lyndon could not be found. You would see them walking around campus together—Lyndon talking, talking, talking, swinging those arms, and Boody so calm and sweet. You just could not
imagine
how two boys so different could be friends.”

But friends they were—so close that the campus, seeing them so often together, called them “Johnson and Johnson.” Slow-talking Boody admired Lyndon’s glibness. “He had a wonderful way about him,” he recalls. “Once Lyndon and myself were sitting there on the campus, after Lyndon had gotten himself a pipe, and Dean Speck came by, and he said: ‘Lyndon, you know we don’t allow any smoking on campus.’ ‘I’m not smoking, Dean Speck.’ ‘Well, Lyndon, you’ve got your pipe in your mouth.’ ‘Yes, Dean Speck, and I’ve got my shoes on my feet, but I’m not walking.’ I nearly died laughing, and Dean Speck did, too, and he said something like, ‘Good boy,’ and went on walking. Well, I could never have thought of saying something like that.” Shy Boody admired Lyndon’s effusiveness. “He was so warm and affectionate,” he says. “The first time I brought him home, he grabbed my mother and hugged and kissed her, and my sisters—my father said, ‘That boy you brought down here—I thought he was going to kiss
me!
” And fatherly Boody was touched by something he saw in the skinny boy three years younger than himself. Before dates, he would lend Lyndon money—money he had earned in his campus jobs—and would tie his bow tie. And then, when Lyndon was ready to leave, he would dance around Boody, jabbing out at him with his fists—“he’d make like he was going to fight, punch you and all,” Boody says, still smiling at the memory. Just as the fatherly older boy who had been Lyndon Johnson’s best friend in Johnson City, Ben Crider, had helped him, so Boody tried to help him. He asked the Black Stars to make Lyndon a member.

Because of the respect in which Boody was held (when one Black Star was asked, “Who was the Jupiter?” he replied, in a tone of surprise that anyone would have to ask: “Why, Boody, of course”), they would normally have admitted anyone he sponsored, even a student who wasn’t an athlete. But not when the student was Lyndon Johnson.

Lyndon acted differently toward the athletes than he did toward less-renowned
students, but they saw through his attitude. “If he thought you could help him, he would fawn all over you,” star end Joe Berry says. “If you couldn’t, he wouldn’t waste much time with you.” In later years, Lyndon would maintain that a single blackball—cast by a student whose girlfriend Lyndon had stolen—had kept him out of the organization, but the truth was otherwise. Black Stars who were present remember seeing the slips of paper on which the votes on Lyndon Johnson’s nomination had been cast and seeing, on one slip after another, the same word:
No
.

At the Black Stars’ next meeting, Boody brought Lyndon’s name up again—this time with arguments uncharacteristic of Boody. The Black Stars guarded the secrecy of their organization with the exaggerated seriousness of college boys. Boody said that he had inadvertently left the organization’s constitution, bylaws and membership list out on his dresser, and that his roommate had seen them, and that he should be admitted so that he would be bound by the Black Stars’ oath of secrecy. “We figured Lyndon had thought of that business,” one Black Star says. “That wasn’t Boody’s style at all. Boody would never have said a thing like that on his own.” Whoever the author of the strategy, it did not succeed. The second vote on Lyndon Johnson was the same as the first:
No. No. No
.

E
LLA
S
O
R
ELLE
could see how hurt he was. “He wanted so badly to belong to the ‘in’ crowd,” she says. “He would have loved to be part of that crowd, to be accepted by them. But they wouldn’t let him in. He was just not accepted. You had the feeling of climbing and climbing—and then he didn’t make it. You see, he was just one of the mass. And he so badly wanted to be more. To tell the truth, I felt very sorry for him.”

Her reaction to Lyndon Johnson was more charitable than that of most students, however. A more common feeling was that expressed by a group of his classmates who frequently visited the little “summer lodge” on the Blanco River in nearby Wimberley that was owned by Ethel Davis, the assistant registrar. Fond of Lyndon, who had told her that she reminded him of his mother, she invited him along. “The youngsters would go fishing and swimming,” she says. “But I don’t remember Lyndon fishing or swimming. He just talked all the time. He told funny stories.” The “youngsters,” however, were less amused. “Everybody else was always anxious for the meal to be served, but he was never ready to eat. They often said, ‘Of course, Lyndon’s not ready to eat. He has to finish telling his story.’ And he embroidered the stories. I found them interesting, but the boys didn’t care to have Lyndon there.” They asked Miss Davis not to invite him back. Even Ella So Relle has to admit: “He was not a popular boy.”

The feelings about Lyndon Johnson spilled over into print.

Each edition of the San Marcos yearbook, the
Pedagog
, contained a
section, “The Cat’s Claw,” which mocked students’ foibles. In the 1928
Pedagog
, twelve students were selected for such treatment. The treatment of eleven is rather gentle, but the twelfth was Lyndon Johnson.

Instead of a picture of Johnson, the editors used a picture of a jackass. The caption beside it read: “As he looks to us on the campus every day.” Johnson, the caption went on, is “From far away, and we sincerely trust he is going back.” And, the caption said, he is a member of the “Sophistry Club. Master of the gentle art of spoofing the general public.”

The
Pedagog
was not the only publication in which the word “master” was applied to Lyndon Johnson. In the
College Star’
s humor column appears the following definition: “Bull: Greek philosophy in which Lyndon Johnson has an M.B. degree.”

“‘Master of Bullshit’—that’s what M.B. means,” says one of Lyndon Johnson’s classmates, Henry Kyle. “He was known as the biggest liar on the campus. In private, when there were no girls around, we called him ‘Bullshit’ Johnson.”

He was given the public nickname “Bull.”

“When you saw him, that’s what you called him,” says Horace Richards. “‘Hiya, Bull.’ ‘Howya doin’, Bull?’ Bull Johnson was his name, as far as we were concerned.”

“That was what we called him to his face,” Edward Puis, another classmate, says. “That was what he was generally called. Because of this constant braggadocio. Because he was so full of bullshit, manure, that people just didn’t believe him. Because he was a man who just could not tell the truth.”

I
N
J
OHNSON
C
ITY
, Lyndon Johnson had courted Kitty Clyde Ross, the daughter of the richest man in town. In San Marcos, the richest man was A. L. Davis. Lyndon Johnson began courting Davis’ daughter.

Carol Davis, two years older than Lyndon, had graduated the year before he arrived in San Marcos, but although she was not unattractive—a tall, sandy-haired, slender young lady—she was painfully shy, and had never had a serious suitor. Johnson, meeting her early in 1928, became her first, and when she responded to his interest—the only young lady in San Marcos who had done so—he made sure the news got out. The couple was conspicuous anyway, because Carol’s father had bought her a big white convertible, and Lyndon, who would drive it when they were together, would honk its horn loud and long when signaling for curb service at Hillman’s Confectionery in town or when passing students trudging up College Hill. In the words of one student, Lyndon “made a production” of the romance—a production whose primary theme was not the usual college-boy boasting about his sexual progress with Carol (although there was plenty of such boasting), but Carol’s car, and Carol’s willingness to pick up checks (“He’d brag about this,” a student says. “He’d say, ‘We’ve been to the movies in Austin, and Carol paid.’”), and about the fact that Carol’s family had enough money so that she could do so. So incessantly did he harp on this last point that there was a general feeling that the basis of the romance was, in the words of another student, the fact that “She was a rich man’s daughter, and Lyndon was always looking for a way to help himself.” Says yet another student: “He was hinting: he wanted to find a girl who had a lot of money.” So unconcealed was his desire to marry for money, in fact, that it was to become the subject of a joke in the
Pedagog
.

If this was his intention, however, it was to be thwarted in San Marcos as it had been thwarted in Johnson City—and for the same reason.

Carol’s father had become one of the Hill Country’s few successful businessmen, building a small grocery in Dripping Springs into the Southern
Grocery Company of San Marcos, a wholesale house so big that it purchased baking powder by the freightcar load. A large, friendly man who had designed his home so that he could greet passersby from his porch as he sat there every evening, he possessed not only unshakable physical courage (in a Ku Klux Klan parade held in San Marcos at the height of the Klan’s power, virtually every prominent local family participated—except the Davises; he had defiantly announced that “No member of my family will be with them”) but convictions to match. “A. L. Davis,” says a friend, “was a man who made up his own mind,” and once he had made it up, “I don’t know that anything could ever change it.” And among the firmest of his convictions, along with his fierce Baptist faith, was his loathing of men who drank; of politicians—particularly liberal politicians—whom he considered leeches living off the taxes paid by hard-working businessmen (he had served as mayor of San Marcos, but only because the townspeople, during the years in which the town’s streets were being paved, had begged him to take the job to ensure that the paving was done right; he had done so by marching, daily, behind the paving machines; as soon as the job was completed, he resigned); and of the impoverished farmers and ranchers of the Hill Country whose poverty, he was convinced, was due to loose morals and laziness. (San Marcos, situated on the very edge of the Hill Country—on the first line of hills above the plain—was served by two railroads, and was more prosperous than other Hill Country towns, with 5,000 inhabitants and several streets of large, gracious homes.) Sam Johnson, of course, qualified on all three counts—and on a fourth: he was a Johnson, a member of that shiftless, no-account clan for which Davis had long had contempt.

Davis’ most precious possessions, moreover, were his four daughters. He lavished dresses and automobiles on them; he had a grand piano shipped in from St. Louis so that they could learn to play. He was fiercely possessive about them, and very much afraid they would marry beneath them. Having dreamed one night that his eldest daughter, Ethel (the college’s assistant registrar), had married the owner of a local ice-cream parlor, he woke up in a rage at the man—which, Ethel recalls, lasted for months, although she and the man were barely acquainted. Davis had, in fact, moved from Dripping Springs because he was afraid his girls would marry “those goatherders up there.” Wanting them to be educated women, he sent them to boarding schools, but none was a particularly good student except Carol, his youngest and his favorite; when she graduated from college with high marks, he was very proud. Like the father of Kitty Clyde Ross back in Johnson City, he had no intention of allowing his jewel to fall into unworthy hands. “Papa did not want Carol to marry Sam Johnson’s son, and that was that,” Ethel says. When he realized that Carol was serious about Lyndon, he told her: “I don’t want you getting mixed up with those people. That’s the reason I moved away from the Hill Country. I wanted better for my children.”

Lyndon tried to overcome this prejudice, but Davis, whose eyes could glitter coldly behind his gold-rimmed spectacles when he was angry, was not charmed by the approach Lyndon was using so successfully on his professors. “Lyndon was pretty determined to get on his good side,” recalls Ethel, and tried to chat with him on his porch, but Davis, after one or two conversations, would leave the porch when his daughter’s suitor arrived. “My father always sat on the porch and talked to people,” Carol says. “But he wouldn’t talk to Lyndon.”

For a while, nonetheless, the romance flowered. In May of 1928, Carol visited Johnson City on two consecutive weekends, staying with a college friend. While she says that she and Lyndon did not have much in common—she liked to play the piano and sing, but Lyndon didn’t like to listen; “I loved the picture shows, but Lyndon didn’t care much about them”; “Lyndon was just interested in politics, which … I didn’t believe women should get mixed up in”—she also says that “we were very interested in one another.” On a picnic with a group of Johnson City friends, Lyndon and Carol went off alone, “hugging and kissing.”

But Carol was a very devoted daughter. “I knew I couldn’t go against my father’s wishes,” she says. She had told Lyndon how strongly “my father felt about him,” and “it was always hanging over us. All the time we were going together, it was hanging over us. The whole time.” During that summer, chaperoned by an uncle, she went to the Democratic National Convention in Houston, to which Lyndon had wangled tickets as a representative of the college newspaper. He was tremendously enthusiastic about the convention, but “I just remember how hot it was and how long those sessions lasted into the night. More boresome than anything.” Whether or not her father’s opposition was the real reason for these feelings, she began to wonder, she says, whether two people with so little in common ought to marry. In September, she would be leaving San Marcos to become a schoolteacher in the little South Texas town of Pearsall, and she was almost looking forward to the chance to get away and think.

A
T ABOUT THIS SAME PERIOD
, the Summer of 1928, Johnson’s money troubles were growing worse, and no longer from a simple lack of cash.

Ben Crider’s $81 was not the only gift Johnson received during his first year and a half in San Marcos. Several relatives (including his aunt Lucy Johnson Price, who on one occasion called him aside and handed him all her laboriously saved egg money: $30) gave him cash presents. And he also received loans: the Blanco State Bank advanced him $75; the deans who administered the Student Loan Fund were, perhaps because of his closeness to President Evans, unprecedentedly liberal with him—by the time he graduated, he would owe the fund $220. His monthly salaries ($15 as Evans’ assistant,
$30 as
Star
summer editor) were among the highest paid to students, and, of course, Evans allowed him to earn additional money by painting and re-painting his garage at craftsman’s wages. If students—many students—were attending Southwest Texas State Teachers College for $400 per year (including rent, which Johnson, of course, did not have to pay), Johnson should have been able to afford to stay in college.

But he spent more than most students: on forty-cent haircuts, on clothes they considered extravagant, and, before he began going with Carol Davis, on dates; although they were none too frequent, each one was “a production”; whether “show-offing” at Hillman’s Confectionery or in Austin, he spent money on girls as if such expenditures could give him popularity. Whatever he made—or borrowed—he spent. Once, for example, he conceived the idea of selling “Real Silk Hose” on campus, and, returning from Austin with sample cases well after midnight, walked from boardinghouse to boardinghouse, barging into men’s rooms, snapping on the lights and, while they were still growling sleepily, “What’re you doin’, Lyndon?” trying to sell them a pair or two. The next morning, Dr. Evans, legendarily close-fisted with his money, agreed to buy so many pairs from Johnson—thirteen dozen was the figure the president sheepishly told Dean Nolle—that he was still wearing them years later. Lyndon earned more than $40 from that twenty-four hours’ work—and promptly spent it all in another twenty-four, in a spree, on which he took another student as his guest, in San Antonio. As a result of these spending habits, he was continually broke, and continually borrowing small sums of money from Boody and from anyone else who would lend it to him, even the publisher of the
San Marcos Record
, Walter Buckner (“‘Mr. Walter, do you happen to have fifty cents on you? Well, I need it. Could I borrow it?’ And I’d always give it to him”). And while Boody never asked for his money back, the others did—and Lyndon could not always pay his debts. “He was always borrowing,” says Horace Richards. “And he was always short. He didn’t have a pot nor no window.”

Then, after some months of driving Carol’s car, he bought his own, a used Model A roadster, for $400. The purchase guaranteed him conspicuousness at a college at which no more than a handful of students had cars, and Lyndon would drive up and down College Hill, offering rides to coeds. But he could not make the monthly payments; soon he was several months behind. The automobile agency was threatening to repossess the car, and Lyndon hid it in someone’s garage. In September, moreover, the $75 loan from the Blanco Bank would come due. His father had defaulted on a loan from that bank; the thought of being classified with Sam in the bank’s books was intolerable to him.

Each Summer, superintendents of school districts all over Texas enrolled in San Marcos Summer school to earn more credits, and Johnson, joining the Schoolmasters Club, became acquainted with W. T. Donaho, school superintendent in Cotulla, a little town in South Texas. Donaho
offered him a $125-per-month teaching job in the Mexican school there, starting in September, and he accepted, with the understanding that he would return to San Marcos after a year. Boody urged him not to interrupt his education, but, he says, understood why Lyndon rejected his advice: “The bucket was just dry, and had been dry too long.”