The Path to Power (54 page)

And his work paid off.

A network had sprung up, a network of men linked by an acquaintance with Lyndon Johnson, who were willing, because of Lyndon Johnson, to help one another. Johnson had few jobs at his disposal; if one of them was vacated by the friend for whom he had obtained it, he wanted it to be passed on to another friend. White Star Deason’s acquiescence to Johnson’s insistence that he not return to Alamo Heights High School meant that a job would be vacant there when school reopened in September, 1934. Deason did not notify the school of his change of heart until the very day that classes began in September. And it had been arranged that at the very moment Deason was telephoning a school official to tell him he needed a new teacher, a new teacher was actually standing in the official’s office, application in hand: White Star Horace Richards, who was quickly hired. “We always passed jobs on this way,” Deason says. Johnson, in fact, had “passed on” his own. Leaving Sam Houston High School to become Kleberg’s secretary, he had persuaded school officials, in somewhat of a quandary because of the suddenness of his departure, to hire Hollis Frazier—college debater and White Star—to replace him as debate coach. Frazier, at Johnson’s suggestion, later passed on the job to White Star Bert Home; Richards passed on his to White Star Buster Brown.

Among the significant aspects of this network was its location. More and more of the jobs Johnson was obtaining now were in Texas—all across Texas. Kleberg’s secretary had parlayed Kleberg’s friendship with Myers, of the Federal Land Bank, into a friendship for himself with the head of the Land Bank’s Houston office. That office was to hire 294 appraisers and attorneys in the first two years after its establishment in 1933. Among them would be Ben Crider, Bill Deason, Sam Houston Johnson and a dozen other men hired on Johnson’s recommendation. Also in Houston, of course, were Sam Houston High and Hollis Frazier. In San Antonio, there were Horace Richards and Buster Brown—and Dan Quill and his post-office jobs. In Austin, there were Jesse Kellam and, when the Federal
Housing Administration opened a branch office there, an appraiser or two. And in Corpus Christi, and in many of the little towns of the Fourteenth Congressional District, there were postmasters and rural mail-carriers, and WPA and CCC employees. Houston, San Antonio, Austin, Corpus Christi—the network was beginning to cover a significant part of Texas.

It was not a political organization. Its members were far too few to justify that title. It was, however, what Lyndon Johnson said it was: the nucleus of a political organization. Thanks to his skill in distributing the meager resources he possessed, the skill with which he had selected the recipients of his precious jobs, those jobs were held by men bound—by gratitude, by ambition, by love—to a single leader, even though that leader was still only a young congressional aide. They were men he could count on. The road he saw before him—the road to the dim, vast ambition about which he never spoke—was a very long road. Though its general direction—elective office—had become clear, he still couldn’t see its turnings, still didn’t know which of many paths he would follow. But now, as a result of his genius in distributing jobs, he could be sure that, whatever the paths he chose, he would not be without assistance when he trod them. As a far-seeing and determined explorer caches hidden supplies along a route he knows he will follow in years to come, so that they will be waiting for him when he needs them, Lyndon Johnson had cached along
his
route the resource indispensable to his plans: men. These men were hidden now, low-level aides in nooks and crannies of large bureaucracies. But they were ready to march at his command; when he needed them, he would be able to call them, and they would come.

Geography had always been a barrier to the ambitions of Texas politicians. The state’s vastness, coupled with its division into 254 counties, many more than any other state, each with its own independent political organization (and coupled also with the strict constitutional limits placed on governmental powers by a citizenry notably distrustful of government), had blocked efforts to achieve statewide political power. During the ninety years since Texas had become a state, only Jim Ferguson had been able to form an organization responsive in all corners of Texas to the command of a single individual. In ninety years, only one statewide political organization had been created—by this immensely powerful and resourceful Governor. Another was being created now—by a congressional aide, one of a thousand congressional aides, not yet twenty-seven years old.

H
E TRIED
to arrange his trips back and forth to Texas so that he drove with Kleberg or another Congressman rather than with his assistants—“He wanted to go with someone up, not someone down,” Latimer explains—but
sometimes he had no choice but to make the three-day journeys with the two youths with whom, representing Sam Houston High, he had already spent so much time in a car.

Latimer and Jones dreaded these trips. Their chief drove a car as he drove them. “He drove to the limit of the car’s ability,” Jones says. “If it would go eighty, he would go eighty.” Roaring up behind a slower-moving vehicle, he would honk the horn wildly to make it pull over so that he could pass. “He drove like a crazy man,” Jones says. If one of them was at the wheel, his concern for his own physical well-being, always so noticeable, was manifested by constant, nervous, criticism. As Latimer came up behind another car, Johnson would reach in front of him to push viciously down on the horn, while shouting, “Get on around, Gene! You’re going to kill us!”

Adding to the unpleasantness of these trips was another aspect of Johnson’s personality—one that would have surprised those who, knowing only the public Lyndon Johnson, the loud Lyndon of the Little Congress and the Dodge Hotel, thought they knew him. There were times when Johnson would stop criticizing their driving or even noticing it. Slouching down in the seat, he would sink into a kind of reverie. “He would get very, very quiet,” Latimer says. “His eyes might be pointed at the window, but you could tell he wasn’t sitting over there looking at the landscape. He was thinking, planning. Some people in Washington would say, ‘Oh, Lyndon—he’s always talking,’ but in that car sometimes he would be quiet for a long time—for hours and hours. He’d never close his eyes, and he’d never say a word. He’d just be thinking. And, boy, everyone found out pretty fast not to bother him while he was thinking.” He didn’t want anyone talking to him while he was “thinking,” and, because it disturbed him, he didn’t want anyone talking to anyone else, either. As the car roared down the narrow roads to Texas, across the gentle green hills of Virginia, through the winding passes of the Appalachians, down the valley of the Cumberland in Tennessee, and finally onto the flat plains of Texas across which his forebears had trudged behind wagons, Lyndon Johnson stared unseeing out the window, hour after hour; his two young assistants, bored, in the words of friendly, loquacious little Latimer, “through and through,” were afraid to break the silence with a single word.

Another aspect of Lyndon Johnson on these 1,600-mile drives would also have surprised those who knew him only in Washington—and who, having been given a short lift home in his car, felt that the speed with which he drove indicated carelessness or recklessness. Pulling into a gas station, he never failed to check the car—the motor and, most conspicuously, the tires. “He was always conscious of the tires,” Jones says. “He always bought the best tires available, and whenever we would stop, he always,
always
took the time to check them very, very carefully.” Walking around
the car, Johnson would kneel on the ground beside each tire, look at its treads, press it to measure the air pressure, test the tightness of each and every bolt holding it on.

Back on the road again, Johnson would be driving “like a crazy man.” Because of his behavior at the service station, however, Jones and Latimer felt that behind the “craziness”—the frenzied, frantic, almost desperate aggressiveness and haste—lay thorough, painstaking care. And because of the long, intense silences, they believed that behind the haste lay also the most careful, calculating “thinking, planning.” Those who knew only the public Lyndon Johnson saw the energy and the aggressiveness. Those who knew him best of all, the two youths who for years had not only worked in the same room with him but slept in the same room with him, saw the preparation—the long, intense, silent, secret preparation—behind the energy and aggressiveness. They did not know its details—Johnson let them know, as he let others know, nothing. But they knew it was taking place.

And if the two youths were correct, what, exactly,
was
Lyndon Johnson planning? As he sat, hour after hour, staring out at a road without seeing it, what was the road he
was
seeing? What was the road he was paving—paving with such care? What was the road down which he was traveling—traveling so fast? What led him, already working endless hours a day, seven days a week, on the affairs of his own district, to add to that crushing load hours on the affairs of other districts, affairs that he could so easily have respectfully referred to others? He never said. His energy and his talent, the talent that was beyond talent and was genius, were at the service of some hidden but vast ambition. And no one knew what it was.

I
N THE 1932 DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY
in which Richard Kleberg was challenged for re-election, Kleberg won ten of the eleven counties in his district. The one he lost was Lyndon Johnson’s home county of Blanco—although in 1931, before Johnson went to work for him, Kleberg had carried Blanco by a two-to-one margin. Some residents of the county felt that he lost Blanco in 1932
because
it was Johnson’s home; they say that the votes against Kleberg were an expression of dislike for Kleberg’s secretary. The dislike was to intensify—even the adoring Latimer, accompanying Johnson on a trip to his home town two years later, noticed it. “He worked hard—he just broke his back—to get those people up there to like him,” Latimer says. “But they just didn’t.” Johnson did not return to Johnson City in his own car, or in the car Kleberg normally put at his disposal. He arrived in the little town in the fanciest car in the Kleberg fleet—a big, bright-yellow Buick with white balloon tires and Running W seat covers. He wore his flashiest clothes—and a manner to match. “Lyndon came back swaggering around, showing what a big shot he was,” says Clayton Stribling. “Same old Lyndon.”

The same phrase was used at his alma mater. Dazzled though they were by the big Buick, undergraduates who remembered him (and, since so many San Marcos students had to interrupt their college careers to earn money, a considerable number of old acquaintances were still around), and who had disliked his swaggering and boastfulness, discerned beneath the dazzle a familiar figure. Loading them into the Buick, he drove them around, pulled out a bottle of whiskey, and, his head tilted back to address those in the back seat, talked incessantly and pompously, largely about the famous men with whom he was now on intimate terms. Barney Knispel, one of those in the back, recalls him saying (and as Knispel imitates Johnson, he adopts a tone of overbearing pomposity): “You know, that’s the kind of people you have to associate with.” Says Horace Richards: “I can still see him in that car—talking, holding sway. Same old Lyndon.”

One college acquaintance who accompanied him to the King Ranch saw another familiar trait in Johnson, one especially familiar to her. The ultimate power at the Ranch resided in its matriarch, eighty-two-year-old Alice Gertrudis King Kleberg, daughter of its founder (and mother of Congressman Kleberg). Having inherited not only her father’s controlling interest in the Ranch but some of his personality as well, she was held in considerable awe; employees who didn’t call her “Mrs. Kleberg” never ventured beyond “Mrs. Alice.” But her son’s secretary called her “Grandma Kleberg.” He had taken every opportunity to write her from Washington—when he sent her copies of her son’s speeches, he always attached a little note—and soon the fierce old woman was writing back. At the Ranch, she sat in a big rocker on the long porch; he sat at her feet, his face upturned, listening avidly to her stories about Captain King. He asked her advice on personal matters, told her how much she reminded him of his mother, how much he loved her famous prickly-pear jelly. She had inherited from her father an obsession that gates be kept closed to prevent cattle from wandering out of their assigned pastures. One day, after a heavy rainstorm, Johnson drove around the Ranch with her. Hooves had churned the ground around each of the many gates through which they passed into deep, sticky mud. Johnson was wearing an expensive blue suit and expensive, highly polished shoes. But at each gate, although there were two booted ranch hands in the car and, at many of the gates, cowboys standing around, he made a point of leaping out of the car so that he could be the one to make sure the gate was closed after it passed through. The San Marcos acquaintance who had accompanied them on this drive was not surprised by the scene—as she was not surprised by his overall adoration of “Grandma Kleberg.” The acquaintance was Ethel Davis, who, years before, had herself been asked by Lyndon for advice, and had been told of her own resemblance to his mother—and who had concluded, in a phrase now being echoed in Washington, “He was a professional son.”

Another development in Lyndon Johnson’s life would have been found familiar at San Marcos—for the belief that he was determined to marry money had been widespread on the campus. Lyndon Johnson had courted two young women. Each—Carol Davis of San Marcos and Kitty Clyde Ross of Johnson City—had been the daughter of the richest man in town. In 1934, he began courting a third young woman. She was Claudia Alta Taylor of Karnack, Texas, her nickname was “Lady Bird”—and whether or not (and no one can know) her father’s position was the explanation, or any part of the explanation, for Lyndon Johnson’s interest in her, her father was the richest man in town.

The son of an Alabama sharecropper, Thomas Jefferson Taylor had GTT—to Harrison County in East Texas, an area reminiscent, in the rutted red clay of its low hills, in its fetid swamps and stagnant, muddy bayous lined with the gnarled roots of giant, moss-draped cypresses, and in the
servitude in which it kept its Negro sharecroppers (who made up half its population), of the Old South from which he had come. And Thomas Jefferson Taylor might have been type-cast as an Old South small-town furnishing merchant. He had opened a truly general store (“T. J. Taylor—Dealer in Everything”), and then another, and then a cotton gin, and then another. A tall (six-foot-two), fat, ham-handed man, loud and coarse, “he never talked about anything but making money,” and he was tireless in its pursuit. He rose at four a.m. to open his stores, and, after a long day behind the counter, returned home at sundown to spend a long evening toting up accounts and checking the dates on IOU’s. During harvest time, he never left his gins until the last wagonload of cotton had been baled, but even if the baler didn’t stop until one or two a.m., when he went home, he went home to his ledgers. Tireless and ruthless: he loaned money to tenants and sharecroppers at 10 percent interest, and his tactics with those who fell behind on their payments led Gene Lassater, who grew up near his home, to say, “The Negroes were kept in peonage by Mr. Taylor. He would furnish them with supplies and let them have land to work, then take their land if they didn’t pay. When I first saw how he operated, I thought the days of slavery weren’t over yet.” (His own son, Lady Bird’s brother, says: “He looked on Negroes pretty much as hewers of wood and drawers of water.” White men called him “Cap’n Taylor”; Negroes called him “Mister Boss.”) He bought more land, and more—until by the time he married Minnie Lee Patillo of Alabama, he owned 18,000 acres, was “Mister Boss” of the whole northern portion of Harrison County, and lived in the county’s most imposing residence, the “Brick House,” a two-story white antebellum structure, with columns in front, that sat on a red clay hill about a mile outside Karnack, a town with about one hundred residents that had been named (by someone who couldn’t spell) after the temples of Egypt.

When Lady Bird (her nickname was given her at the age of two by a Negro nurse because “She’s purty as a lady bird”) was born, on December 22, 1912, Cap’n Taylor was still poring over ledgers at night, and Lady Bird’s two brothers, both much older, were away at school; aside from Negro playmates, her mother was her only companion. Her mother loved culture—she had come to Karnack with trunkloads of beautifully bound books and every year went to Chicago for the opera season—and loved to read to her daughter, who loved to listen (“I remember so many things,” Lady Bird would say. “All of the Greek and Roman myths and many of the German myths. Siegfried was the first person I was in love with.”) But when Lady Bird was five, her mother died—and the leitmotif of the rest of Lady Bird’s childhood, the sixteen years until, at twenty-one, she met Lyndon Johnson, was loneliness.

Her father didn’t know what to do with the motherless little girl. For a while, he took her with him, letting her play around the store in the daytime; at night she slept on a cot in the attic above the store. Stacked near
the cot were long wooden boxes that Taylor sold: coffins. Then, when she was six, he sent her, a tag around her neck for identification, on a train ride alone (Cap’n Taylor appears to have been fond of his daughter, but he wouldn’t neglect his business) to Alabama, and her mother’s spinster sister, Effie.

Aunt Effie, who soon moved to Karnack, raised Lady Bird. She was a slight, sickly woman. “She opened my spirit to beauty,” Lady Bird says, “but she neglected to give me any insight into the practical matters a girl should know about, such as how to dress or choose one’s friends or learning to dance.” Nonetheless, her aunt was her closest companion—her aunt and those beautiful books; the little girl loved to read, memorized poems that she could recite decades later, finished
Ben-Hur
at the age of eight. “Perhaps I had a lonely childhood,” she was to say, in her carefully chosen words, “but it didn’t seem lonely to me. …” But she perhaps affords a more revealing glimpse of her life in the Brick House when, talking about another town in Texas, she says, “I came from … a small town myself, except that I was never part of the town—lived outside.” At school—a one-room structure atop a red clay hill—there were seldom as many as a dozen students, and few of them stayed long: since they were children of tenant farmers who owed money to Cap’n Taylor, they were constantly moving away. At thirteen, she moved with Effie into an apartment in Marshall, the county seat, where she went to high school, graduating at fifteen, but her high school years do not appear to have been happy ones. Although her eyes were expressive and her complexion a smooth olive, she was not a pretty girl, and her clothes seemed almost deliberately chosen to make her less attractive—although her father would buy her any clothes she wanted, her baggy dresses looked as if they had been handed down from some older, and larger, woman. At dances, she was a wallflower. She appears to have been somewhat of an object of ridicule to the other girls, to whom she had, in any event, little to talk about, preoccupied as they were with dresses and dancing, and boys. In remembering her, they remember a shyness so deep that it seems to have been active fear of meeting or talking to people. One schoolmate, Naomi Bell, says: “Bird wasn’t accepted into our clique. … We couldn’t get Claudia to cooperate on anything. She didn’t date at all. To get her to go to the graduation banquet, my fiancé took Bird as his date, and I went with another boy. She didn’t like to be called Lady Bird, so we’d call her Bird to get her little temper going. My mother would call he ‘Cat.’ She’d say, ‘All right, pull your claws in, Cat.’ … When she’d get in a crowd, she’d clam up.” Her own recollections of high school are perhaps saddest of all. “I don’t recommend that to anyone, getting through high school that young. I was still in socks when all the other girls were wearing stockings. And shy—I used to hope that no one would speak to me. There was one boy who used to try to talk to me. He was real nice, and, what’s
more, he was real glamorous, being on the football team. But I never knew what to say, and finally it got so that if I saw him coming, I’d leave the room.” She loved nature, the winding bayous of Lake Caddo, the moss hanging around her as she walked along the lake or rowed a boat on it, flowers (“drifts of magnolia all through the woods in the Spring—and the daffodils in the yard. When the first one bloomed, I’d have a little ceremony, all by myself, and name it the queen”). But she boated and walked mostly alone. Even her good grades brought her dread; she would never forget her fear at realizing that she might finish first or second in her class, and thereby be valedictorian or salutatorian and have to make a speech at graduation. She prayed that she would finish no higher than third; she prayed, in fact, that if she came in higher, she would get smallpox: she would rather risk the scars than stand up before an audience. She still remembers the exact final grades of the top three students: Emma Boehringer, 95; Maurine Cranson, 94½; Claudia Taylor, 94. When she graduated, the school newspaper joked that her ambition was to be an old maid.

At the University of Texas, to which she transferred after two years at a junior college in Dallas, she was still shy—almost as silent and retiring as she had been in high school—but she began to date occasionally, and two of her beaux received glimpses of qualities beneath the quietness. For a while, says Thomas C. Soloman, “I thought I was the leader.” But, he says, he came to realize that this impression was incorrect. “We had been doing what she wanted to do. Even when we went on a picnic, it was she who thought up the idea. This convinced me that it would take a strong man to be the boss. I also knew she would not marry a man who did not have the potentiality of becoming somebody.” J. H. Benefield came to realize that the shy, reserved young woman “was one of the most determined persons I met in my life, one of the most ambitious and able. She confided in me her wish to excel.” Determination and ambition were also beginning to be manifested in other areas of Lady Bird’s life. When she received her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1933, her father and aunt expected her to return to Karnack, but she didn’t want to—and she took pains to make sure she wouldn’t have to. She had studied to be a teacher, a respectable occupation for a Southern girl in danger of becoming an old maid, and had graduated (with honors) with a second-grade teacher’s certificate. But she returned to the university for an extra year, and received a second degree—in journalism, “because I thought that people in the press went more places and met more interesting people, and had more exciting things happen to them.” And because a journalist couldn’t be shy, she fought her shyness, forcing herself to become a reporter for the
Daily Texan
and to ask questions at press conferences, volunteering to be public relations manager of the university’s intramural sports association. And she took other measures to ensure that she wouldn’t have to go back to Karnack, or be a teacher.
She studied shorthand and typing, so that she could go into business; she took those courses, she would say, years later, so that she would have “the tools that can get you inside the door. Then, with a little skill and a great deal of industry, you can go on and take over the business—or else marry the boss!”