The Path to Power (34 page)

An unusual remark for someone so sure of himself. With these students—more than with any other group he had encountered—Lyndon Johnson should have been confident of respect, and of the “friendship” he himself said he saw in their eyes. Yet at the slightest sign—even a false sign: a typical schoolboy imitation, someone not singing his song—that that respect and affection might be less than absolute, he reacted so strongly. Was it possible that nothing could convince him that he had respect?

That nothing could make him, deep inside himself, feel secure?

I
N THE EVENINGS
, there was little to do in Cotulla, and had there been any entertainment available, Lyndon Johnson would have had difficulty paying for it. Out of his monthly salary check, he was paying off his car, and the $75 bank loan, and the other, smaller, debts he had left behind in San Marcos. “He was broke from payday to payday, always borrowing a dollar here and a dollar there,” says his landlady, Mrs. Sarah Tinsley Marshall. But he was very gay—“as exuberant,” a Cotulla acquaintance says, “as a young boy. He was a happy-go-lucky sort of a fellow.”

Johnson made a friend of Mrs. Marshall. “Lyndon confided in me a lot,” she says. “Lyndon looked on me sort of as a second mother.” His attitude toward illness surprised her: “If he got just a little sick, it scared him half to death,” she says. But she was happy to take care of him; whenever he caught cold, she would boil water in a dishpan, and put mustard in it, and have him soak his feet. Her boarder’s attitude toward food would have been
familiar to Hugo Klein, the little boy at the Junction School whose pie Lyndon ate, or to Lyndon’s fellow diners at Mrs. Gates’ boardinghouse in San Marcos. “Lyndon just took everything for granted in my house,” Mrs. Marshall recalls. “One day I baked a coconut cake. He slipped into the kitchen and started eating it. He was down to one piece when I came in. He looked up and said, ‘Miz Sarah, if you give me this piece, I’ll buy you another cake.’” But Mrs. Marshall didn’t mind. “I didn’t care, and he knew I wouldn’t care. He just did about like a son would do in his own home.” With another boarder, Marthabelle Whitten, a plump waitress who worked in Cotulla’s café, he would joke and twist her arm, trying to force her to say “Calf-rope”—Cotulla slang for “I give up.” And then he would ask her to press a shirt or tie—“He was always in a hurry; he would run in and say, ‘Marty, won’t you please press this tie for me?’”—and Miss Whitten always would, and would be happy to do so. Sometimes, he would play bridge with the older man who was his roommate, and two sisters, and then “He was always the life of the party.”

Only occasionally, he would get very quiet, and stay quiet, sometimes for days. People would see him wandering up the rise in back of town, a tall, skinny, awkward figure staring into those endless, empty distances. Most times, he was “light-hearted like most twenty-year-olds,” Mrs. Marshall says. But “Sometimes, Lyndon could be as serious as an old man.”

Mrs. Marshall didn’t know what was behind the sudden quietnesses. Only his mother, to whom he wrote almost daily during his months down in South Texas, knew—his mother and Boody. Boody had graduated while Lyndon was in Cotulla, but was planning to return to San Marcos for more courses in the Summer of 1929, when Lyndon would be back in college. He had agreed to room with Lyndon then, and Lyndon wrote again and again reminding him of this arrangement, making sure his friend would be there when he got back. “He was very lonely down there in Cotulla,” Boody says. “
Very
lonely.” Perhaps the best indication of how Lyndon Johnson felt about the nine months—September, 1928, through May, 1929—that he spent in Cotulla comes from his wife, who saw it mostly through his eyes when, years later, he told her about the experience. “That was a little dried-up town,” Lady Bird Johnson says. “It was just a dying little town.” And then—in words that startled an interviewer who, during long hours of previous conversation with Mrs. Johnson, had become convinced that
nothing
, no provocation, no matter how strong, would draw from her diplomatic lips so much as a single word even faintly derogatory about anyone or anything—she says: “That was one of the crummiest little towns in Texas.”

H
IS ONLY GOOD TIMES
came when he drove over to see Carol Davis, who was teaching in Pearsall, another little South Texas town.

Carol was apparently not the only member of the couple who was experiencing
qualms about the relationship. Sarah Marshall, in whom Johnson was confiding, recalls that “He was beginning to feel they didn’t have … much in common.” She remembers her young boarder saying: “Miz Sarah, this girl loves opera. But I’d rather sit down on an old log with a farmer and talk.” But his qualms didn’t prevent him from courting her determinedly, almost frantically, telephoning her, writing her, taking her to see touring opera companies in San Antonio, and other musical events, or movies, or just driving the thirty-three miles to Pearsall to see her almost every evening she said she was free.

And then, suddenly, she was saying that less and less frequently. One evening, when Carol had been playing the piano in the parlor of the house in which she was boarding, a young man had appeared at the front door, which was open because of the heat. He loved music, he said, and would Carol mind if he listened?

The young man, a postal clerk named Harold Smith, was aggressive, as was Carol’s other boyfriend, but, unlike the other, he liked not only music but movies. “Lyndon was just interested in politics, which I certainly wasn’t,” Carol recalls. “Harold was more interested in the things I was interested in.”

And her father approved of Harold. One weekend, he accompanied her to San Marcos, and A. L. Davis said he liked him. (Carol’s sisters wondered if his approval was based less on his feelings about Smith than on his feelings about Lyndon; they wondered if he didn’t feel that marrying anyone else would be better than marrying Lyndon.)

For a while, back in Pearsall, Carol juggled evenings, seeing Lyndon one night and Smith the next. But more and more often, when Lyndon telephoned, she would say she was busy. Her job ended some weeks earlier than Lyndon’s, and when she returned to San Marcos, torn between the two young men, her father sent her to California with her sister Ethel to think things out. Waiting for her upon her return were two letters proposing marriage, one from Cotulla and one from Pearsall. “She sat down in the back room, where Daddy used to sit when he thought,” Ethel recalls. When she emerged, she had made her decision. While he was still down in Cotulla, Lyndon Johnson was notified that Carol Davis was engaged to Harold Smith.

L
YNDON JOHNSON
returned to San Marcos in June, 1929, and immediately resumed his place not only at the president’s side, but at the professors’ feet. There was, in fact, an almost frantic aura now about the sycophancy that students called “brown-nosing.”

And about the fawning in print as well, for he was again Summer editor of the
College Star
. Despite, for example, widespread student complaint about Registration Day delays that had forced them to wait for hours on queues that wound back and forth across the campus and most of the way down College Hill, the student newspaper lauded the “capable management” of the registrar’s office. “The able and efficient manner in which [it] handled the crowd of students Monday created much favorable comment,” Johnson wrote. “One can scarcely picture such a task being more expeditiously, tactfully and pleasantly discharged.” His popularity with undergraduates—as contrasted with “management”—rapidly resumed its pre-Cotulla level. He had hoped to remain as
Star
editor when the regular session started in September, and to be yell leader for the football season, but the Student Council elected Mylton (Babe) Kennedy to both jobs, demoting Johnson to editorial writer. Soon, moreover, Kennedy and Johnson became involved in a series of increasingly angry shouting matches that erupted in a fistfight—or in what would have been a fistfight had Johnson participated. Instead, when Kennedy swung at him, he fell back on a bed as he had during the poker-game incident two years before and began kicking his feet in the air. And as Kennedy came on, Johnson shouted: “I quit! I quit!” Vernon Whiteside, present during the encounter, was soon imitating Johnson’s panicky tone all over campus, and students were laughing at him again.

T
HE LAUGHING WAS
about to stop, however—to stop and never start again. For Lyndon Johnson was about to enter a new area of campus activity, an area for which he was to prove better equipped than for journalism or jousting. He was about to enter campus politics.

In the opinion of other students, he
began
campus politics.

Interest in elections for class officers and Student Council members had always been slight. “We had few class meetings or activities,” says Joe Berry, the tall, quiet star football end who was often elected class president. “There were no issues that people cared about.” The Black Stars, who were elected to most offices, cared least of all. Berry, a brilliant student who was to become a renowned microbiologist at Bryn Mawr College, looks back on his teammates with fondness for some of their qualities. “These guys had physical courage, and they were very, very loyal,” he says. “They would go to almost any lengths to back you up. They had basically an openness about them—you always knew where they stood. It was a kind of an open integrity of the West, where a man always stood up and was counted.” He also saw in many of them, however, an utter lack of “sharpness.” Even in a college where academic standards were almost non-existent by Eastern criteria, many of the football players were notably uninterested in course work. Their interests included drinking beer, girls, hunting and fishing—“physical things,” Berry says. They would not talk about—because they had absolutely no interest in—campus politics. “Someone might say, ‘Who we gonna run for president?’ And someone else would say, ‘Oh, hell, let’s run ol’ Joe.’ That’s how the nominations were decided.” Berry himself resigned during one of his terms, in fact, in favor of a friend—just so the friend could say he had been president. No one objected to that; no one cared. “I wanted to give him the honor,” Berry says, “and besides it didn’t mean very much. Elections were so unimportant.”

A few other students—less “country,” more interested in making money, better dressed—decided during the 1929 Summer session to form a rival White Stars group. Lyndon Johnson asked to join. But he was disliked by the group’s two leaders—fast-talking Vernon Whiteside, whose two earlier years at New York University endowed him with an aura of sophistication on the San Marcos campus, and Horace Richards, the campus promoter (who once stood outside a pep rally and, as the enthused students emerged, held out his hat, yelled, “Kick in for the decorations,” and kept the money he collected). “Anyone who talked back to him, he despised,” Richards says. “He wanted to dominate everybody.” Moreover, they wanted the White Stars to be a secret organization, and Johnson talked too much. When, at the group’s first meeting, someone mentioned that Johnson wanted to join, the subject was closed when someone else said scornfully: “ol’ Bull? He’ll tell everybody in school.” And when the White Stars organized—each one taking his oath in a mystical night ceremony on the bank of a creek, holding a candle and, in lieu of a Bible, a dictionary that was the biggest book available—Johnson
was not among them. Denied membership in the “in” crowd, he had been denied membership in the “outs” as well. He would never have become a White Star had not three early inductees been among “those country boys who really didn’t talk very much” and who found Johnson “very entertaining.” He asked them to bring up his name again, and when they did, at a meeting several weeks later, the two founders agreed to admit him—because they felt sorry for him, and because, in Whiteside’s words, “What difference did it make? I mean, the White Stars weren’t supposed to be any big deal. We formed it, I suppose, just because we weren’t invited to join the Black Stars. The real reason we did it, to tell you the truth, was because it was hard for anyone who wasn’t a Black Star to get a date with the pretty girls. We said, ‘Hell, if they can have the Black Stars, we can have the White Stars.’ We did it because of girls. Hell, we weren’t even thinking about elections or politics then.”

But Lyndon Johnson was thinking about politics. Hardly had he been inducted into the White Stars when he suggested they run a candidate for senior class president as the Black Stars did. And after he persuaded them to do so, he displayed considerable competence in political tactics.

In “nose-counting,” or vote-counting, for example. The other White Stars felt that no one had a chance against the Black Star candidate, Dick Spinn, the popular football and track star who had won an easy victory when the first class elections were held in October. (Class officers were elected—in October, January and April—for three-month terms.) But the other White Stars hadn’t counted votes. If most students voted, Johnson admitted, Spinn would win easily. But on a campus so uninterested in politics—a campus, moreover, on which there had never been a closely fought campaign—most students didn’t bother to vote. An opposition candidate could win with just a few votes.

He had, moreover, figured out where to get those few. The “in” crowd—the “T” Association of varsity lettermen and the two “literary societies,” the Shakespeare and the Idyllic, whose members included the pretty, popular coeds who dated the “T” men—would be solid for Spinn, of course, but there were two other groups on campus: the “townies,” students from San Marcos, and the “YMCA” crowd, members of the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Associations, who were considered the campus intellectuals. Nor were those the only votes available. There were also the students who belonged to no crowd at all. No one had ever thought of these campus nonentities in terms of class elections. But Johnson thought of them, and counted their votes, and counted the votes of the townies and the YMCA crowd—and realized that these “outs” had enough votes among them to defeat the “ins.”

And he knew how to get those votes. A popular candidate was needed, he said, and he had one picked out. And when, in the darkness down on the creek bank, a scornful voice said, “I bet it’s you, huh, Lyndon?” he said no
it wasn’t; he had made too many enemies. Bill Deason should be their candidate, he said. “Let’s take ol’ Bill—he’s got no scars on him.” Deason, he added, would also be a strong candidate because, smooth-spoken and as handsome as a model in a collar ad, he was very popular with campus coeds; in counting noses, the most obvious fact was that on the San Marcos campus more than two-thirds of them were women’s noses.

A popular issue was needed, too. Neither he nor any of the other White Stars had one that they cared about, so, says Whiteside (who, along with Richards, regarded the whole “politicking” idea with cynical amusement), “We’d say anything—we didn’t care if the argument was true or not. We kept trying arguments to find one that touched.” And, finally, Johnson discovered one that did. Extracurricular activities were funded from the so-called “Blanket Tax,” a single all-inclusive fee that each student paid as part of his tuition. The Student Council, which allocated it, had always given the lion’s share to the athletic teams. The townies and the YMCA crowd, whose votes Johnson needed, weren’t athletes, so he had the White Stars campaign, using the slogan “Brains Are Just as Important as Brawn,” for additional allocations of the Blanket Tax to non-athletic activities such as debate and drama.

To his own campaigning Johnson brought the aggressiveness and energy he had displayed in California and Cotulla. None of the other White Stars—not even Deason, who believed he had no chance—did much campaigning. “They made fun of his [Johnson’s] enthusiasm,” one says. “Their attitude was: if he wanted to organize and pull something off, let him.” But Johnson spent evening after evening visiting boardinghouses, talking to students, asking for their votes. When talking to a potential voter, he would place one arm around the voter’s shoulders; with his other hand, he would grasp the voter’s lapel—or, if there was no lapel available, a shirt collar. “He would do a lot of buttonholing—talking right into their face to make the point,” White Star Al Harzke says. This conversational technique had irritated some of his Johnson City schoolmates, but now that he had an issue to talk about, the technique was surprisingly effective. Deason, watching him, saw that “his greatest forte [was] to look a man in the eye and do a convincing job of selling him his viewpoint. In one-on-one salesmanship, Lyndon was the best.” Nonetheless, on election eve Deason agreed with the other White Stars that the effort had failed.

And the next morning, when the votes were counted, Deason had won.

Stung by the defeat—the first ever, so far as anyone could recall, for a Black Star—the athletes determined that Deason wouldn’t win again. “The day I won, the war was on,” he recalls. “They started cutting me up”—pointing out, during the three months before the April elections, Deason’s weaknesses as a student leader. But Johnson used a tactic to counter this campaigning against one man: he saw to it that that man’s name didn’t appear on the ballot. “This was Lyndon’s strategy,” Deason recalls. “They were going to beat me pretty good, so we let them think I was going to run again, and then, at the very last minute, it was announced that Al Harzke would be running instead.”

He used other kinds of tactics, too.

In that April election, Johnson himself was running for an office: senior class representative to the Student Council. Because of his unpopularity—and the popularity of his opponent, Joe Berry, who was generally considered the best-liked man in school—“we didn’t think he had much of a chance,” Horace Richards says, “but he wanted to be representative, and he wanted it bad.” And when, on the night before the election, the White Stars met on the creek bank, they found, in Richards’ words, that “he had planned things” so that he would get it.

Johnson’s strategy was based on the confusion that existed at San Marcos—whose students, to earn money, were continually dropping out for a term, or a full year, or several years, and then returning to school—over exactly which class (senior, junior, sophomore or freshman) a student was in at a given moment. His strategy was based on the relaxed atmosphere in which class elections were held: due to the past lack of interest in the elections, the election meetings, held in different classrooms in Old Main, were extremely informal, with hasty nominations, quick voting, rapid adjournment and no set rules of procedure. And, most importantly, perhaps, it was based also on the fact that, because elections had been conducted honestly in the past, no one was prepared for something different.

There was more interest in the April elections than anyone could remember. Johnson had persuaded the White Stars—more receptive to the idea now because of Deason’s victory—to run not only Harzke but a whole slate of candidates for class offices and Student Council seats. The aroused Black Stars were also running candidates, and because of the new interest in
campus politics aroused by the White Stars’ campaigning, there were individual candidacies, most notably that of the brilliant, popular Henry Kyle, the only student who could argue Johnson to a standstill in government classes, who had campaigned on a far-reaching platform of reforms in student government. Since the other candidates were, in general, more popular than the White Star candidates, the White Star candidates would normally have lost, but under Johnson’s strategy, this would not necessarily follow—because, while everyone else would be voting only once (in his own class election), each White Star would be multiplying his vote by voting in
every
class election. There were, moreover, refinements to the strategy, refinements designed to further minimize the handicap of limited numbers; that night on the creek bank, the White Stars carefully rehearsed the tactics Johnson proposed, because, with the four class meetings all scheduled to begin at ten a.m. and only one hour set aside for them, their little band would have to work fast.