Means of Ascent (15 page)

But Johnson’s attitude changed—and as with so many Johnson changes, the change was dramatic and total.

The letter refusing the medal was filed away, unsigned. All talk of refusal abruptly ended. Instead, not only did Johnson accept the Silver Star, he arranged to accept it in public. Several times. After purchasing the decoration (in an Army-Navy store in Washington), he took it to Texas, where in a number of public appearances it was affixed to his lapel as if for the first time; in Fort Worth, for example, the commander of the
local American Legion
post pinned it on him while a crowd of Legionnaires cheered and Johnson stood before them, head bowed, face somber, hardly able to blink back the tears.

And once he had it, he flaunted it; a medal for Lyndon Johnson was not a medal that was hidden away in a drawer. By the end of 1942, he had added a new item to his daily attire: a small silver bar with a star in its center. It was the “battle ribbon” emblematic of the Silver Star, and he wore it in his lapel for the rest of his life. And because the silver bar was unfortunately rather inconspicuous and audiences might therefore not notice it (and, even if
they did, might not recognize it), Johnson introduced a gesture into his speeches: while referring to his combat service and the medal he had been awarded—and for some years his speeches were liberally studded with these references—he would place his left hand on his lapel and pull it forward and back, waving it, almost, to focus his audience’s attention on the silver bar.

Had he once felt that he did not deserve the medal? Lyndon Johnson rapidly came to feel not only that he deserved it but that he deserved more: that the Silver Star was not a sufficiently high honor for such heroism as his.

One of his protégés in Texas politics was a young attorney from McAllen,
Joe M. Kilgore. “Fighting Joe Kilgore,” he was called—with reason. Enlisting when the war began, Kilgore became an Air Force pilot, flew a twenty-five-mission tour over some of the most hazardous targets in Europe in Flying Fortresses, re-enlisted, and flew ten more. In a state that produced many heroes, Kilgore was one of the bravest. Once,
seeing Nazi fighters swarming around another Fortress that had already been hit and crippled, the young pilot turned back into the face of the enemy, and flew cover for the other Fortress as it struggled home. He was awarded the Silver Star. After the war, Johnson brought Kilgore, now a promising young legislator, into his political camp. Constantly reminding Kilgore that he, too, had won the Silver Star, Johnson took great pains to make sure the younger man understood that in his
(Johnson’s) case that medal was not really sufficient acknowledgment for what he had done. “I had the Silver Star, and I kind of felt you got it for something special,” Kilgore recalls. “I never heard [Johnson’s mission] was anything more than a routine raid in which he got shot at. And to hear the man complaining that he had gotten only the Silver Star for an experience that thousands of people had had was almost irrational,” but “He
bitched and bitched because he only got the Silver Star.” And, Kilgore came to realize, “he believed what he was saying. He believed it totally.” During twenty years of political alliance with Lyndon Johnson, Kilgore came to understand, he says, that Johnson could believe whatever he wanted to believe—could believe it with all his heart. “He could,” Kilgore says, in words that are
echoed by the closest of Johnson’s
associates, men like
George Brown and John Connally and Edward Clark, “
convince himself of anything, even something that wasn’t true.”

It was that capacity of Lyndon Johnson’s that, when one assesses his influence on history, proves to be the single most significant implication of his war service.

A
ND WHAT OF THE WIFE
he had left behind?

Claudia Alta (“Lady Bird”) Taylor was not a person to whom other people paid much attention.

They never had. During her girlhood, in the East Texas town of Karnack, the reason was her manner. The lonely little girl whose mother died when she was five and whose older brothers were off at school for much of the year, lived alone with her father, a tall, burly, ham-handed owner of a general store and cotton gin, loud and coarse, who “never talked about anything but making money.” While apparently fond of his daughter, he didn’t know what to do
with her and packed her off alone at the age of six, a tag around her neck for identification, to her mother’s spinster sister in Alabama. Lady Bird (she was given her nickname by a nurse because “she’s purty as a lady bird”) was raised by her aunt, who moved to Karnack. Frail, sickly Aunt Effie “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.” Lady Bird loved to read, particularly in a beautifully bound set of books that had belonged to her mother. She memorized poems that she could recite decades later, finished
Ben-Hur
at the age of eight. As for other companionship, the handful of students at Karnack’s one-room school were almost all children of the itinerant black sharecroppers who worked her father’s 18,000 acres
of red clay cotton land; they seldom stayed for long, since her father was notoriously ruthless in his treatment of tenants behind in their rent. “I came from … a small town, except that I was never part of the town—lived outside,” she says. During her high school years in nearby Marshall (she graduated at fifteen), the lonely little girl became a lonely young woman. Despite her expressive eyes and smooth complexion, she was considered plain,
and her baggy, drab clothes seemed almost deliberately chosen to make
her less attractive. To the other girls, preoccupied with dresses and dancing, and boys, she seems to have been almost an object of ridicule. Says one: “Bird wasn’t accepted into our clique.… 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.… When she’d get in a crowd, she’d clam up.” In talking about her, they recall a
shyness so profound that it seems to have been an active fear of meeting or talking to people. Lady Bird’s own recollections are perhaps the most poignant. “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.” She loved nature, boating on the winding bayous of Lake Caddo or walking along its shores (“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 the boating and walking were also usually “by
myself.” So deep was her shyness that, as a high school senior, she prayed that if she finished first or second in her class, she would get smallpox so that she wouldn’t have to be valedictorian or salutatorian and have to make a speech at graduation. (She finished third.) The school newspaper joked that her ambition was to be an old maid.

Although she remained silent and retiring at the
University of Texas, indications of determination and ambition began to appear. Instead of returning to Karnack when she graduated in 1933, as her father and aunt had anticipated, she insisted on spending an extra year at the university, so that she could obtain 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.” Attempting to overcome her shyness, she became a reporter for the
Daily Texan
, and forced herself to ask questions at press conferences. Nevertheless, the fight seemed to be a losing one. Except at press conferences, one friend recalls, “she was always pleasant, smiling, and so quiet she never seemed to speak at all.” Her best friend,
Eugenia
Boehringer, despaired of making her more outgoing, or even of persuading her to change her style of dressing; despite the “unlimited” charge account her father had opened for her at Nieman-Marcus, she still wore flat-heeled, sensible shoes, and plain dresses that were much too large and of very drab colors. If her high school classmates remember a plain girl, her college classmates remember a plain young woman—in their words, drab, dumpy, a little plumpish,
almost dowdy; painfully shy, and quite lonely. And despite her journalism degree, when college ended, she did return to Karnack. It was on a visit to Austin some months later, in September, 1934, that by chance, in the
office in which Eugenia Boehringer was working as a secretary, she met Lyndon Johnson. Eugenia and Johnson were friends; through her, he already knew who Lady Bird was; he immediately asked her for a date and on that first date he asked her to marry
him, which she did in November.

After her marriage, there was an additional reason that people did not pay much attention to Lady Bird Johnson: the way her husband treated her.

Upon their return to Washington from their honeymoon, he told her that he wanted her to serve him his morning coffee in bed; to bring him his newspaper in bed, so that he could read it as he sipped his coffee; to lay out his clothes, fill his fountain pen and put it in the proper pocket; to fill his cigarette lighter and put it in the proper pocket; to put his handkerchief and money in the proper pocket. And to shine his shoes. And she performed these chores. (When he
first told her he wanted his coffee in bed every morning, she was to recall, “I thought, What!?!?!? Me?!?! But I soon realized that it’s less trouble serving someone that way than by setting the table and all.…”) And he made sure that everyone knew that she was performing these chores, loudly reminding her about her duties in front of other people. He was constantly inviting fellow congressmen, his own staffers, and friends like Jim Rowe, to their modest
one-bedroom apartment on Kalorama Road at the last minute and telephoning Bird to inform her that another two guests—or ten—would be arriving shortly for dinner. And in these telephone calls, he did not ask her if she could handle the additional people, he simply told her—curtly—that they were coming. Often the invitees would be in the room with him when he telephoned. They heard his tone of voice.

The trip back and forth to his district, a trip that had to be made at least once, and usually more than once, each year, was a difficult one, since the 1,600 miles of roads between Washington and Austin were not the broad interstate highways of later decades; although Lady Bird was to recall that the distance could be covered in “three hard days,” generally the trip took five days. A few years after his marriage, Lyndon Johnson stopped making that trip.
One way in which
Herman Brown repaid Johnson for the federal contracts he procured for
Brown & Root was to place the company plane at the Johnsons’ disposal. But only one Johnson used the plane. Lyndon Johnson flew back and forth. His wife drove—drove, after she had packed. Lady Bird disliked flying, but the principal reason she made the long drive instead of using the Brown & Root plane was that the Johnsons did
not feel they could afford two sets of household furnishings or a second car. Every time Lady Bird drove from Washington to Texas and back, she took with her a earful of boxes. “For years,” she would later recall, “my idea of being rich was having enough linens and pots and pans to have a set in each place, and not have to lug them back
and forth.” And of course everyone in the Texas delegation was aware of this disparity in the
Johnsons’ travel arrangements. Says one Congressman: “He treated her like the hired help.”

Lyndon Johnson possessed not only a lash for a tongue, but a talent—a rare gift, in fact—for aiming the lash, for finding a person’s most sensitive point, and striking it, over and over again, without mercy. And he did not spare the lash even when the target was his wife—not that great talent was required to discern the rawest of Lady Bird’s wounds: her terrible
shyness, her dread of having attention called to
herself.

Everyone was aware of the way he talked to her because he talked to her that way in public, shouting orders at her across a crowded room at a
Texas State Society dinner (“Lady Bird, go get me another piece of pie.” “I will, in just a minute, Lyndon.”
“Get me another piece of pie!”
). “He’d embarrass her in public,” recalls
Wingate Lucas, a Congressman from
Fort Worth. “Just yell at her across the room, tell her to do something. All the people from Texas felt very sorry for Lady Bird.” If while entertaining friends at home, or while staying overnight at a friend’s house, he saw some imperfection in her attire such as a run in her stocking, he would order her to change stockings, “just
ordered
her to—right in front of us,” as her friend
Mary Elliott recalls.

Also public were Lyndon’s constant attempts to get Lady Bird to improve her appearance, about which she had always been so sensitive—to make her lose weight, to wear brighter (and tighter, more figure-emphasizing) dresses, to replace the comfortable, low-heeled shoes she preferred with spike-heeled pumps, to get her hair done more often, to wear more lipstick and more makeup. And after 1940, when John Connally married Ida Nell Brill, Johnson was able to
flick the lash even harder. The dazzling Nellie Connally was everything Lady Bird was not—perfectly dressed, outgoing, poised, charming, beautiful; as a freshman at the
University of Texas, she had been named a Bluebonnet Belle, one of the ten most beautiful girls on the campus; as a junior, she was named
the
most beautiful: Sweetheart of the University. After Nellie became a member of the Johnson entourage, Lyndon made sure that Lady Bird never
forgot the contrast now so conveniently near at hand, “
That’s a pretty dress, Nellie. Why can’t you ever wear a dress like that, Bird? You look so muley, Bird. Why can’t you look more like Nellie?” Nellie, who had become close friends with Lady Bird, was distressed at such remarks. “He would say things like that right in front of whoever was present. ‘Get out of those funny-looking shoes, Bird. Why can’t you
wear shoes like Nellie!’
Right in front of us all!
Now, can you think of anything more cruel?” Aware of Lady Bird’s shyness, her almost visible terror at having attention called to herself, acquaintances said to each other: “I don’t know how she stands it.” And, of course, because of the complete lack of respect
with which she was treated by her husband, they didn’t have much respect for her. Seeing that in
her relationship with Lyndon, her opinion didn’t count, they gave it little consideration themselves. She talked hardly at all, and when she did try to talk, Nellie says, “nobody paid any attention to her.”