Master of the Senate (145 page)

To accept Lyndon Johnson’s contention that “I never had any bigotry in me,” it is necessary to ignore certain phrases in his early speeches which revealed his attitude toward people whose skins were not black or brown but yellow. During the late 1940s, his public rhetoric was filled with references to “the menace of Eurasia.” America must not surrender to “the barbaric hordes of godless men in Eurasia,” he said during a speech in 1947. “Without superior airpower America is a bound and throttled giant; impotent and easy prey to any yellow dwarf with a pocketknife,” he said during another speech the same year.
These were prepared addresses; his off-the-cuff speeches were not recorded, but persons who followed his campaigns say the speeches were filled with references to “yellow dwarves,” “hordes of barbaric yellow dwarves,” “sneaky yellow dwarves,” and “godless yellow dwarves.”

His remarks about African-Americans and Mexican-Americans before he was President were not isolated remarks. In conversations with friends, Johnson constantly employed the caricature shorthand for people of color—that they were dumb, that they were lazy, that they were prone to drunkenness and violence—to make points in casual conversation, as when, to show, as one man put it, “that he had no particular respect” for Lady Bird’s opinion, he said “I have a nigger maid, and I talk my problems over with her, too.” On other occasions, he made the same point by saying, “I talk my problems over with my nigger chauffeur, too.”

Despite what he claimed, then, Lyndon Johnson was not without prejudice. Like millions of other Americans, he held stereotypes, and sometimes the stereotypes were expressed in racial terms. When, moreoever, Johnson was speaking to a Negro, he often used racial pejoratives. If Negroes were sufficiently subservient to him, he was kind and rather gentle with them, and used these words in a somewhat friendly manner. One afternoon in the mid-1930s, during Johnson’s tenure as Texas director of the National Youth Administration, his old friend State Senator Welly K. Hopkins was talking with Johnson in his NYA office in Austin when a black employee came in. Hopkins was to tell an interviewer for an oral history that Lyndon asked the man what he wanted. “He said, ‘Boy, what do you want?’ Well, he said he wanted to borrow five dollars. ‘Well, what do you want it for, boy?’” Hopkins said that “I could tell the President was going to let him have it”—and after the employee said he needed it so that he could get married, Johnson gave him the money. But sometimes those terms were not used in a friendly way. Lyndon Johnson possessed not only a lash for a tongue, but a rare talent for aiming the lash, for finding a person’s most sensitive point, the rawest of his wounds, and striking it, over and over again, without mercy. With a black American, of course, the rawest point was likely to be the color of his skin, and the names by which he was addressed because of it: “nigger,” for example, or “boy.” And when Lyndon Johnson wanted to hurt a Negro, that was often where he aimed the lash. When the author asked Hopkins if Johnson always used the word “boy” in a joking or paternalistic way, Hopkins shook his head to say no, and related an incident that occurred in the NYA office, on another occasion when he was visiting Johnson. An employee, not of the NYA but of the office building—a middle-aged black man, “a porter or something, I think”—had done something that angered Johnson. “My God, I will never forget how he talked to that man,” Hopkins said. “He would just rip him up and down, and the man would just have to stand there and take it. Lyndon would just keep calling him ‘boy,’ ‘boy.’ ‘You understand that,
boy!
You got it now,
boy!
Do this,
boy.
Do that,
boy.’
”

Racial stereotypes sometimes governed Johnson’s actions as well as his
words. A stereotype that had currency in the Hill Country was that Negroes were terrified of all snakes. Sometimes Johnson or one of his Hill Country friends would catch a snake, sometimes a harmless snake, sometimes a rattlesnake. Johnson would put it in the trunk of his car, and drive to a gas station at which a Negro was working as the gas pump attendant. Pulling up to the pump to get gas, he would tell the attendant that he thought the spare tire in his trunk might need air, and would ask him to take a look at it. Often this practical joke was successful; relating this story, he said, about one Negro attendant, “Boy, you should have seen that big buck jump!” He went on playing this joke not only when he was in college, but when he was a congressional assistant—when he was a congressman, in fact. Once, when he played it while he was a congressman—in 1945 or 1946 at a service station at the corner of First Street and Congress Avenue in Austin—the joke had a different denouement. While Lyndon was “standing there laughing” at the attendant’s shock, the black man picked up a tire iron and, threatening to wrap it around Johnson’s neck, shouted, “I’ll make you a bow tie out of this!” The manager of the service station had to hustle Johnson out a back door to get him away.

B
UT THERE WAS A DIFFERENCE
between Lyndon Johnson and all the other Americans who held racial stereotypes—and between Lyndon Johnson and all the presidents, save only Abraham Lincoln, who came before him and who came after him. Lincoln freed black men and women from slavery, but almost a century after Lincoln, black men and women—and Mexican-American men and women, and indeed most Americans of color—still did not enjoy many of the rights which America supposedly guaranteed its citizens; they did not—millions of them, at least—enjoy even the most basic right, the right to vote, and thereby choose the officials who governed them. It was Lyndon Johnson who gave them those rights. It was the civil rights laws passed during his presidency—passed because of the inspiring words with which he presented them “
We
shall overcome,” he said once as a Congress came cheering to its feet, and in front of television sets all over America, men and women of good will began to cry), and because of the savage determination with which he drove them to passage—that gave them the vote, and that made great strides toward ending discrimination in public accommodations, in education, in employment, even in private housing. Lincoln, of course, was President during the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, with its eighteen American presidents, Lyndon Baines Johnson was the greatest champion that black Americans and Mexican-Americans and indeed all Americans of color had in the White House, the greatest champion they had in all the halls of government. With the single exception of Lincoln, he was the greatest champion with a white skin that they had in the history of the Republic. He was to become the lawmaker for the poor and the downtrodden and the oppressed. He was to be the bearer of at least a measure of social justice to those to whom social justice
had so long been denied, the restorer of at least a measure of dignity to those who so desperately needed to be given some dignity, the redeemer of the promises made to them by America. He was to be the President who, above all Presidents save Lincoln, codified compassion, the President who wrote mercy and justice into the statute books by which America was governed.

L
YNDON
J
OHNSON WAS ABLE
to win these victories, to become this champion, in part because of where he came from.

Texas was in the South—one of the eleven Confederate states—but in a crucial respect, the Texas Hill Country wasn’t southern. Because rainfall sufficient to grow cotton petered out just before its eastern edge, little cotton was grown there, and there were very few Negroes there—none at all in Johnson City. “There were no ‘darkies’ or plantations in the arid Hill Country where I grew up,” Johnson was to recall. “I never sat on my parents’ or grandparents’ knees listening to nostalgic tales of the antebellum South.” This was not to say that the Hill Country wasn’t part of the South. “In Stonewall and Johnson City I never was a part of the Old Confederacy,” he was to say. “But I was part of Texas…. And Texas is a part of the South…. That Southern heritage meant a great deal to me.” Southern racial attitudes existed in the Hill Country—the word “nigger” was in common use—but with few Negroes to focus on, or to pose a threat, the attitudes were more casual than in the rest of the South; the atmosphere in which Lyndon Johnson was raised was not steeped in racism, and neither was he. He never exhibited, in word or deed, the visceral revulsion that southern racists like Bilbo and Eastland displayed at the very thought of Negroes and whites mingling together in social situations, or at work, or at the thought of them having sexual intercourse together or of racial intermarriage; never exhibited the conviction of a Richard Russell that “mongrelization” would lead to the end of civilization. Lyndon Johnson’s use of words like “nigger” and “boy” to hurt or intimidate was primarily an example of the way the lash that was his tongue sought out the most vulnerable spot in everyone, not just blacks: in using those words, Lyndon Johnson was guilty less of racism than of cruelty. At least once, in fact, dealing with an African-American employee, he used these epithets, and the pain they caused, in a different way, to teach the employee the lesson Johnson felt everyone had to learn, a lesson Johnson felt would lead to an improvement in the employee’s life: that it was necessary to accept reality, to face harsh facts and push beyond them, to be pragmatic, which in the employee’s case meant to accept that he would always be the target of these epithets, would always be the target of prejudice, and that he had to accept that fact—because only by accepting it could he move beyond prejudice and achieve his ambitions.

The employee, a native of Wichita Falls, Texas, Robert Parker, was, indeed, ambitious. He would, during the 1960s, become
maitre d’
of the Senate
Dining Room. During the 1940s and 1950s he was one of Johnson’s “patronage” employees, holding down a Johnson-arranged job as a District of Columbia postman and being paid by the Post Office Department while earning his patronage by serving without pay as bartender and waiter at Johnson’s parties, and, after Johnson acquired the use of the Democratic Leader’s limousine, filling in as his chauffeur when Johnson’s regular driver, Norman Edwards, had a day off.

“Yet for years,” Parker would write in his autobiography,
Capitol Hill in Black and White
, Johnson “called me ‘boy,’ ‘nigger,’ or ‘chief,’ never by my name….” Parker felt there were political reasons that could explain Johnson’s use of these terms in public. “He especially liked to call me nigger in front of southerners and racists like Richard Russell,” he was to write. “It was … LBJ’s way of being one of the boys,” and once, when “we were alone,” Johnson “softened a bit” and said, “I can’t be too easy with you. I don’t want to be called a nigger-lover.” But Johnson also used those terms in private. “Whenever I was late, no matter what the reason, Johnson called me a lazy, good-for-nothing nigger,” Parker wrote. And there was an incident that occurred one morning in Johnson’s limousine while Parker was driving him from his Thirtieth Place house to the Capitol. Johnson, who had been reading a newspaper in the back seat, “suddenly…lowered the newspaper and leaned forward,” and said, “‘Chief, does it bother you when people don’t call you by name?’”

Parker was to recall that “I answered cautiously but honestly, ‘Well, sir, I do wonder. My name is Robert Parker.’” And that was evidently not an answer acceptable to Johnson. “Johnson slammed the paper onto the seat as if he was slapping my face. He leaned close to my ear. ‘Let me tell you one thing, nigger,’ he shouted. ‘As long as you are black, and you’re gonna be black till the day you die, no one’s gonna call you by your goddamn name. So no matter what you are called, nigger, you just let it roll off your back like water, and you’ll make it. Just pretend you’re a goddamn piece of furniture.’”

Parker found that incident in Johnson’s limousine difficult to explain—or forgive. Years later, as he stood beside Lyndon Johnson’s grave thinking of all Johnson had done for his people, Parker would say he was “swirling with mixed emotions.” Lyndon Johnson, he would write, had rammed through Congress “the most important civil rights laws this country has ever seen or dreamed possible.” Because of those laws, Parker would write, he felt, at last, like a free man. “I owed that freedom to him…. I loved the Lyndon Johnson who made them possible.” But remembering the scene in the limousine—and many other scenes—Parker was to write that on the whole working for Johnson was “a painful experience. Although I was grateful to him for getting me a job … I was afraid of him because of the pain and humiliation he could inflict at a moment’s notice. I thought I had learned to fight my bitterness and anger inside…. But Johnson made it hard to keep the waves of bitterness inside…. But I had to swallow or quit. If I quit, how would I support my family? I chose
survival and learned to swallow with a smile.” And, Parker would write, “I hated
that
Lyndon Johnson.” The words Johnson shouted from the back seat in the limousine that day—“As long as you are black, and you’re gonna be black till the day you die, no one’s gonna call you by your goddamn name”—those words, Parker was to write, “stuck in my belly like a fishhook for thirty years until I almost believed them.” Yet that lesson Parker learned—that he had “to swallow” in order to get ahead—was taught to him in part by the man who shouted in his ear, “Let it roll off your back like water, and you’ll make it. Just pretend you’re a goddamn piece of furniture.”

Lyndon Johnson was able to win these victories in part because of empathy—a deep sense of identification with the poor, including the dark-skinned poor; he understood their thoughts and emotions
said felt
their thoughts and emotions as if they were his own. And this was not surprising, for in a way they
were
his own. His empathy was deeply rooted in his personal experience, in blisters and sunburn and windburn and humiliation.

This empathy was also a product of the place from which he came. Because there were so few Negroes or Mexicans in the Hill Country and no money in that impoverished land to import Negroes or Mexicans to work the crops, when one of the few farmers who grew cotton needed it chopped or picked, “there wasn’t any Mexicans or niggers to do it,” as Lyndon’s friend Otto Crider was to recall, “so everybody, including the kids, went out to do it,” and one of the kids doing this work they called “nigger work” was young Lyndon Johnson.