The Passage of Power (6 page)

It wasn’t that Lyndon Johnson didn’t want the nomination, these men saw. All during 1958, he swung back and forth between his desire for the presidency, and his refusal to reach for it. A few days after he was so adamant with one of them (or sometimes on the same day, in another conversation with the same man), he would begin talking—
“endlessly
,” Corcoran says—about delegate counts, analyzing how he was going to put together the necessary 761, and about the best arguments to use to win over some specific big-state leader, analyses that showed them that he wanted the nomination as desperately as ever, that he was thinking constantly about it, and that he understood the need to start taking steps to get it. Nonetheless, all through the year, he drew back from taking any steps. Having
“seen
in ’56 how much he wanted it,” Rowe says, he didn’t take seriously Johnson’s disavowal of interest, and early in 1958,
“I
wrote him a memo whose theme was the need to ‘position yourself for ’60’ ” without delay. “He said that’s a good memo,” and asked Rowe to expand it into a detailed campaign strategy, similar to the one he had written for Truman, for winning the Democratic presidential nomination. When, in August, Rowe told Johnson that the document was nearing completion, Johnson asked him to come to the ranch to discuss it. Just a day or two later, however, with the memo not yet finished, he told Rowe not to bother going on with it. Rowe told Johnson that they both knew he would eventually get in the race, and that if Johnson waited too long,
“It
won’t do you any good. You will be doing it too late.” Johnson’s response was to tell him again that
“he
wasn’t going to do anything.” And he didn’t. Kilgore, who had seen, close up, how hard Lyndon Johnson worked during campaigns, realized that this time “he wasn’t really trying.”

“One
so often thinks of Mr. Johnson as being a decisive man,” George Reedy was to say. “On most issues he is. On this one he was not.… That was a confused period, extremely confused, in which I believe he was a man badly torn.”

I
N ATTEMPTING TO EXPLAIN
why he was torn, why he wasn’t really trying—in attempting to explain why Lyndon Johnson, who had schemed and maneuvered so endlessly, worked so hard, to become President, now, when the prize was closer than ever before, when it was perhaps almost within his reach, was refusing to reach for it—the men, in both Texas and Washington, who had worked longest with Lyndon Johnson come to the same conclusion. Connally, who had once confided to a friend that
“He’s
never had another thought, another waking thought, except to lust after the office,” had been told by Johnson that he would
be managing the campaign for that office, but he had still been given no campaign to manage. Asked, years later, for an explanation, Connally said that as much as
“He
[Johnson] wanted the nomination, he did not want to be tarred” with—did not want the stigma of—“having lost it.” And, Connally says, “If he didn’t try, he couldn’t fail.” Says Jim Rowe:
“He
wanted one thing. He wanted it so much his tongue was hanging out; then he had another part inside him that said, ‘Why get my hopes up? I’m not going to try. If I don’t try, I won’t fail.’ ”

And indeed, as the men who had worked with him longest knew, failure—the dread of it, the fear of losing, that is a factor in the equation that makes up the personality of many men, perhaps most men—was a factor possessed of a particularly heavy weight in the very complex equation that was the personality of Lyndon Johnson. When
Bobby Baker had first been assigned the job of counting votes for Johnson in the Senate,
Walter Jenkins, who, like Connally, had been working for Johnson since 1939, warned him never to overestimate the number of votes that Johnson would have if he brought a controversial bill to the floor, because then the measure might be defeated, and defeat was something the Chief wanted to avoid at all costs.
“Never”
—that was the operative word, and Baker learned quickly that the warning had not been overstated. Other senators might want Johnson to make a fight even on an issue on which he might lose because it would enable them to make
“a
fighting record in behalf of their causes,” Baker says. But “Pyrrhic victories were not Lyndon Johnson’s cup of tea.… He saw no value in glorious defeats.”
“Johnson
feared losing,” Baker was to say. He had a deep
“fear
of being defeated. He always was petrified by that notion.” He was, Baker says,
“haunted
by fears of failure.”

“Petrified
. Haunted.”
Strong words—and other men who had known Lyndon Johnson a long time use words equally strong. Luther (“L. E.”) Jones, a member of the debate team he coached at Sam Houston High, recalls that when, in the final round of the Texas State Debate Championship tournament, the judges voted against his team, two to one, Johnson rushed to a bathroom and vomited.
“He
had a horror of defeat,” says Jones, who was later to work for Johnson, “an absolute horror of it.” And the people—his relatives and the residents of Johnson City—who had known Lyndon Johnson longest, who had known him in his boyhood, felt they understood at least something about the roots of that fear. They felt those roots lay in the little house—a shanty, really, a typical Texas Hill Country
“dog
run”: two box-like rooms, each about twelve feet square, on either side of a breezeway, two smaller “shed rooms” and a kitchen, all connected by a sagging roof—where Lyndon Johnson had lived from the age of eleven until just after his fourteenth birthday, for it was there that his father had failed.

Sam Ealy Johnson Jr. had brought to that dog run not only his family—his gently reared wife, Rebekah; his elder son, Lyndon; Lyndon’s brother,
Sam Houston Johnson; and their three sisters—but also his dreams: big dreams. The land on which it sat had once bordered the legendary “
Johnson Ranch,” whose corrals, in the days of the
Texas Cattle Kingdom, had stretched for miles along
the banks of the Pedernales River; during the 1860s and ’70s, its owners, Lyndon’s grandfather Sam Ealy Johnson Sr. and Sam’s brother Tom, had driven huge herds north to Abilene through Indian Country, returning with saddlebags stuffed with golden eagles; Sam’s wife, Eliza Bunton, a heroine of the Hill Country, had ridden out alone in front of the herd to scout, a rifle across the pommel of her saddle. The Johnson brothers had gone broke and lost the ranch, but Sam and Eliza had later saved enough money to buy an adjacent 433-acre parcel on the Pedernales, and Sam Ealy Jr. had grown up there. In 1919, after his parents’ deaths, his eight siblings wanted to sell the place, but Sam, a romantic and a dreamer, wouldn’t hear of it; the Pedernales Valley had been “Johnson Country,” he said, and it was going to be Johnson Country again. A touch of grandiosity in his nature, and the lure of high cotton prices, which had been soaring for years and seemed likely to continue to do so (he was planning to raise cotton until he made enough money to re-establish a Johnson cattle herd), led him to end a tiresome bidding war by paying far too much for the land—much more than he could afford.

At the time he bought the ranch, Sam Ealy Jr. had been quite a figure in the Hill Country: tall, with a jutting nose and jaw, long ears and piercing eyes, outgoing, friendly, and eloquent. Despite a streak of idealism that made him a fervent Populist and put him at odds with the “interests” who dominated the Legislature, during his six terms in the Texas House he was surprisingly successful in getting bills passed. He and his growing family lived in Johnson City. The town, whose population during Lyndon’s high school years was 323, was one of the tiny towns, miles apart from each other, that dotted the vast emptiness of the Hill Country, a little huddle of houses so cut off from the rest of the world by a sea of land that one of its residents called it an “island town”; with no paved roads, it took hours to reach Fredericksburg or Austin, even when roads were passable. But the Johnsons’ house was comfortable. “The Hon. S. E. Johnson,” as the local newspaper called him, the only man in Johnson City who always wore a necktie, was for a while so successful in “real-estatin’ ” that he bought his wife the first automobile anyone in the town had ever owned, and provided her with a chauffeur to drive it. “You can tell a man by his boots and his hat and the horse he rides,” he said, and his hand-tooled boots and pearl-gray Stetson were the most expensive money could buy. And his demeanor reminded people of an old Hill Country saying: “Johnsons always strut; they even strut sitting down.” Johnson City was a religious town—fundamentalist, revivalist, hard-shell religious—but everyone knew that Sam believed in the Darwinian theory, that he attended church (on the irregular Sundays on which he attended church) only to please Rebekah, and that he would take a drink now and then, although, as Johnson City knew, “sneaking a beer by Jesus is like trying to sneak daylight by a rooster.” His financial success brought him respect, and he was so smiling and friendly, always so willing to spend days helping an old rancher get a pension, that he was a popular figure in the little town.

All that changed when, in January, 1920, Sam moved his family to the ranch. The next years were years of drought, and as Sam’s cotton was dying under the blazing Hill Country sun, so was the cotton market, as prices fell from forty cents a pound to eight cents. In September, 1922, when Lyndon was fourteen, Sam had to sell the ranch for whatever he could get—which wasn’t nearly enough to cover his debts.

The Johnsons moved back to their house in Johnson City, but they were able to keep it only because Sam’s brothers periodically made payments on the back interest on the mortgage. Often, there would have been little to eat in that house if it hadn’t been for the covered dishes neighbors brought. There was no money in the house; the ranch had broken Sam’s health, and it was always frail after that.

In any small town, a world to itself, such a transformation would have been dramatic; in Johnson City, an unusually isolated town—in which, as late as 1922, there was not a movie house or, except for a few outmoded crystal sets, a single radio—its residents’ interest in each other, and particularly in the fall of its most famous resident into ruin, was unusually intense. Sam Johnson became, in a remarkably short time, a figure of ridicule, as if Johnson City had been eager to turn against a man whose views—on Darwin, on Prohibition—violated deeply held beliefs. He didn’t run for re-election, and he probably wouldn’t have won anyway. A potential opponent coined a saying: “Sam Johnson is a mighty smart man. But he’s got no sense.” The remark was first delivered at a political barbecue. Everyone roared. The interests in Austin made sure Sam didn’t get a state sinecure: the only job he could find at first was a two-dollar-a-day post as a state game warden. He was to die—in 1937—as a penniless bus inspector; the only thing he had to leave his children was a gold watch and a legacy of the townsfolk’s sneers. He couldn’t pay what he owed to the local merchants, and he and his wife and children had to walk every day past stores whose owners were writing “Please!” on the bills they sent every month; they had cut him off from further credit, so that he had to shop—and to run up bills which he also couldn’t pay—in other towns. A remark made by the Johnson City druggist soon gained wide circulation: “Sam Johnson,” the druggist said, “is too smart to work, and not smart enough to make a living without working.” His wife’s education (she was the only woman in the area with a college degree) and “pretensions” (her inability, for example, to work in the fields like other Hill Country wives) now made her almost a joke, too. And the children of Sam and Rebekah shared in their shame. One of Lyndon’s classmates at Johnson City High School,
Truman Fawcett, was sitting on his uncle’s porch one day when Lyndon walked by. “He’ll never amount to anything,” the uncle said, loud enough for Lyndon to hear. “Too much like Sam.” The Johnsons were, for the rest of Lyndon’s boyhood, the laughingstocks of Johnson City.

The scar that his father’s failure left on Lyndon Johnson was shown by the way he talked about it. “We had great ups and downs in our family,” he would
recall. “One year … we’d all be riding high in Johnson City terms.… But then two years later we’d lose it all.… We had dropped to the bottom of the heap.” Once in later years a reporter asked him about life on the ranch. “We lived there just long enough to go broke,” he replied. And the depth of the scar was, perhaps, shown even more clearly by the rarity of such remarks. Lyndon Johnson very seldom talked about his youth—or, to be more precise, very seldom talked about it frankly: he tried to conceal its circumstances by weaving, for journalists and biographers, a mythical boyhood, a tapestry of anecdotes, told with the vividness and plentiful detail of a great storyteller, that, as his brother sums up, “never happened.”

N
O TRANSFORMATION CAUSED
by Sam Ealy’s failure was more complete than the one it effected in his relationship with his elder son.

Before the Johnsons moved to the ranch, the relationship had been strikingly close: when Lyndon was a little boy, his favorite outfit was one that made him look like his father, right down to a scaled-down version of Sam’s big Stetson hat. Lyndon imitated his father, tagged along with him everywhere—“right by the side of his daddy wherever he went,” an aunt says.

When Lyndon was ten, Sam began taking him to Austin. “I loved going with my father to the Legislature,” Lyndon would say. “The only thing I loved more was going with him” during his campaigns for re-election. “We drove in the Model T Ford from farm to farm, up and down the valley, stopping at every door. My father would do most of the talking … local gossip, talk about the crops and about the bills he’d introduced … and always he’d bring along an enormous crust of homemade bread and a large jar of homemade jam.… We’d stop by the side of the road. He sliced the bread, smeared it with jam, and split the slices with me. I’d never seen him happier. Families all along the way opened up their homes to us.… Christ, sometimes I wished it could go on forever.” Other children in Johnson City remember how, while they were playing outside, Lyndon and his father would be sitting together in the swing on the Johnsons’ screened back porch, holding “long conversations … friendly conversations. Those were the only times that I ever saw Lyndon quiet and relaxed.” By the time Lyndon was thirteen or fourteen, and about six feet tall, there was a particularly conspicuous aspect of the resemblance between them. The tall man with the big ears and nose was very physical in conversation. His arm would go around the shoulders of the legislative colleague to whom he was talking, his other hand would grasp the man’s arm or lapel, his face would bend very close to him. Legislators saw Sam’s son adopting the same technique. “He was a gangling boy, very skinny,”
Wright Patman would recall. He had the same huge ears, the same big nose, the same pale skin, and the same dark eyes, and “Lyndon clutched you like his daddy did when he talked to you.… He was so much like his father that it was humorous to watch.” Legislators saw what playmates saw: a quite unusual bond between father and son.