Lyndon: An Oral Biography

By Merle Miller

The bestselling author of Plain Speaking crafts a candid portrait of one of the most complex, fascinating, difficult, and colorful American presidents.
 
From his birth in 1908 to his death in 1973, the story of Lyndon B. Johnson is told without sparing his personal excesses and contentious public image—while also highlighting the strength of his greatest accomplishments in Washington. Interlaced with interviews from Lady Bird Johnson, John Kenneth Galbraith, J. William Fulbright, Larry O’Brien, Hubert H. Humphrey, and hundreds of others, Miller provides an extensive and objective image of the life of LBJ.
 
“No secret remains. This is Lyndon Johnson true, lunging through life, pouring ‘every ounce of his energy’ into whatever he did, ranting, raving, shouting, ‘screaming at the universe,’ flogging system, staff and self to achieve what others pronounced unachievable . . . Miller allows his posse of turncoats—336 in all, myself among them—to lead him to the Johnson few ever knew: at his best, magnificent; at his worst, outrageous.” —Horace Busby, The Washington Post
 
“The domestic triumphs and the Johnson style come across like the Fourth of July . . . page-by-page, this is the low-down up to the Presidency—and one long book that never flags.” —Kirkus Reviews

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9780795351297

Merle Miller

Merle Miller was born on May 17, 1919 in Montour, Iowa, and grew up in Marshalltown, Iowa. He attended the University of Iowa and the London School of Economics. He joined the US. Army Air Corps during World War II, where he worked as an editor of Yank. His best-known books are his biographies of three presidents: Plain Speaking: An Oral History of Harry Truman, Lyndon: An Oral Biography, and Ike the Soldier: As They Knew Him. His novels include That Winter, The Sure Thing, Reunion, A Secret Understanding, A Gay and Melancholy Sound, What Happened, Island 49, and A Day in Late September. He also wrote We Dropped the A-Bomb, The Judges and the Judged, Only You, Dick Daring!, about his experiences writing a television pilot for CBS starring Barbara Stanwyck and Jackie Cooper, and “On Being Different,” an expansion of his 1971 article for the The New York Times Magazine entitled “What It Means to Be a Homosexual.” He died in 1986.

Book preview

Lyndon

An Oral Biography

Merle Miller

Lyndon

Copyright © 1980 by Merle Miller

Cover art and Electronic Edition © 2018 by RosettaBooks LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Cover jacket design by Lon Kirschner

ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795351297

For my friends David and Carol

Contents

Introduction

Prologue

1     Young Lyndon

A Stormy Arrival , Rebekah Running, Running, Running Sam Ealy Three Churches and a Courthouse San Marcos How Do You Do, Mr. Johnson? Speaking for Pat Neff Mister Dick It Was Announced Today Lady Bird On the Way Remaking America Roosevelt's Boy The Defeat Pearl Harbor—Before and After Pacific Journey The Home Front KTBC The House on Dillman Street The Geriatric Problems of 1948 The Duke of Duval and Alice The Law Is the Law .

2     Mastering the Senate

Treading Lightly Getting Ahead Minority Leader Summer of '54 Joseph Raymond McCarthy Majority Leader The Long Shadows The Southern Manifesto Adlai Again A First Step One Big Happy Family Sputnik and Other Matters In Those Days at Least You Knew .

3     The Vice-President

Arthur and Modred The Word in Los Angeles Is . . . Wednesday Night And Thursday Morning From Boston to Austin A Joyless Victory Keeping Lyndon Happy The Man with No Shirt Americans in Berlin August in Ankara The 101st Senator Mildred Wicks Has Canceled Dumping Lyndon November 22, 1963 The Flight Back .

4     Not a Fluke of History, but a President

The Long Weekend Building Bridges Style and Substance The Warren Commission First Lady End of the First Hundred Days The War on Poverty The Courtship of Ev Dirksen Unveiling the Great Society The Inheritance Tonkin To Run or Not to Run A Lovely Campaign A Good Place to Walk So Little Time The Commitment The Frog Farm Hyperbole and the Dominican Republic Overcoming The Riots Using Up Capital Women .

5 The Creek Is Rising

More Guns and Less Butter The War The Other War The Downward Spiral Word from Ho The Friend of Israel Old Friends The Dissent Imperfect Alternatives What Shall I Do? Têt The Contenders March 31, 1968 Mr. President, Martin Luther King Has Been Shot The Peace Talks A Change in Cast So Little I Have Done, So Much I Have Yet to Do.

6 The Winter of LBJ

Flaws in a Diamond The Private Citizen The Farewell Address .

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Congressional Terminology

Voices in Lyndon

Notes

Bibliography

INTRODUCTION

Oral History is a relatively new way of dealing with the men and women and the events of the recent past. It's a particularly good way of dealing with someone like Lyndon Johnson, who almost never stopped talking himself, and about whom an extraordinary number of people had a great deal to say. I first heard of Oral History thirty years ago when a group of scholars at Columbia University, chief among them the historian Allan Nevins, decided that a collection of taped interviews with people who had memories of that past and of the people who shaped it would be a valuable addition to the historical record.

I did not read an Oral biography until 1969 when I first encountered T. Harry Williams' biography of a man much admired by Lyndon Johnson, Huey Long, the Louisiana governor and senator. Long's motto was, Every man a king, and President Franklin Roosevelt was afraid of him and of his possible strength in the 1936 presidential election in which Long said he would be a candidate. But he was shot and fatally wounded in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in September 1935. Dr. Williams, a professor of history at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, wrote that witnesses remembered Long's last words as being, God, don't let me die. I have so much to do. How like Lyndon Johnson.

In the Preface of Huey Long, Dr. Williams stated, I believe that some men, men of power, can influence the course of history. They appear in response to conditions, but they may alter conditions, may give a new direction to history. In the process they may do great good or evil or both, but whatever the case they leave a different kind of world behind them. Their accomplishment should be recognized. I believe that Huey Long was this kind of man.

Dr. Williams thought that Lyndon Johnson was this kind of man, and at the time of his death in 1978 he was working on an Oral History of Johnson. We talked to many of the same people.

Another pioneer in the field of Oral History was the esteemed, certainly by me, Studs Terkel of Chicago, whose Oral History, Division Street: America was published in 1967. In it seventy people talked not only about Chicago but about American life everywhere. In 1970 Terkel published the immensely popular Hard Times, An Oral History of the Great Depression, and more recently there was Working, People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do.

One reason I have felt a particular affinity for Studs is that, like me, he appears to have no mechanical aptitude, none, and when his tape recorder broke down, as tape recorders not infrequently do, he swore at it and, like me, on occasion kicked it. Also like me, Terkel has never been able to drive a car, ride a bicycle, roller-skate, swim or dance.

Reluctant tape recorders are not the only problem with Oral History. There is the interview itself and the preparation for it. With David W. Elliott's assistance some Oral Historians at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Austin say that the proper preparation for an interview takes a minimum of three days. One has to know as much as possible about the subject involved and about the interviewee's relation to it and, in this case, to Lyndon Johnson. And one has to ask the right questions, listen carefully to the answer and, equally important, hear the answer. Hearing is not always easy because the interviewer is at the same time phrasing in his mind the next question—and, of course, keeping the capricious tape recorder in order.

There is an Oral History story, no doubt apocryphal, about an Oral Historian interviewing Alice Roosevelt Longworth. Mrs. Longworth was saying, And, of course, on Tuesday afternoon we all had to leave the White House while my father entertained his mistress.

Oral Historian: Mrs. Longworth, we were discussing the Panama Canal. I wonder if you could clear up your father's views on the building of locks on the canal.

I tell you, you've got to hear.

This book was more than five years in the making. It involved thirty-nine trips to Washington, D.C., trips to New York, Chicago, and numerous cities and towns in Texas, Georgia, and California. There were 180 personal interviews; researchers conducted several more; two Texas historians, Ted Gittinger and Gary Gallagher, were particularly useful. I interviewed many people several times. Some 276 Oral Histories at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library were consulted as well as nine others in an Interior Department Oral History Project at Johnson City; eighty-nine at the John F. Kennedy Library, and several (see bibliography) at other presidential libraries. Material at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, N.Y., was especially helpful.

Lady Bird Johnson proved enormously helpful in opening a great many doors that previously had been closed; she opened many of them without mentioning it to me and never once asked to see any part of my work.

It was a long journey, exploring the history of Lyndon Johnson; it was like exploring a continent, maybe two continents and a couple of ocean beds as well.

He was—is—without doubt one of the most complex, fascinating, difficult, colorful personages in American history. There may have been other Presidents like Johnson in American history. Andrew Jackson comes readily to mind, but he was a simple man by comparison. I don't think we've ever seen the likes of Lyndon Johnson before, and I doubt we will ever again.

PROLOGUE

Harry McPherson: Lyndon Johnson was a true sophisticate. I know that's what most people think he wasn't, but they are wrong. He was an enormously sophisticated man about life, about what makes things happen, what causes people to do what they do.

Wilber J. Cohen: "Psychiatrists would say that your personality is always internally consistent, but I found Lyndon Johnson was a man of such tremendously different kinds of characteristics that it's difficult, perhaps impossible, to grasp all of his personalities.

"I went down to the Ranch with John Gardner—this was in 1966 or 1967—and after we finished our business we went out and rode around the Ranch. He started to tell us in the most vulgar kind of language about the breeding of cattle, referring to all sorts of sexual characteristics of the animals and of people. How you bred cattle, and so on. I knew nothing about cattle, so I just listened. But it was vulgar.

"About an hour later as the sun went down, we reached a hill and he stopped the car. We watched the sunset over the mountains, and he started talking what was really pure poetry—about the land, about the Hill Country, about the sun, about the seasons, about his hopes and aspirations for people. Pure poetry.

"Now, there within one hour was a man being three different things. First, he dealt with our business problems, the president of the United States dealing with matters of momentous national policy on an executive planning basis. Then he was a small-time cattle breeder in the way any two-bit farmer is who wants to get better cows or calves. And then, a half hour later, the same man was talking in the most emotional terms about the earth and the world and the incomprehensibilities of life. He was like a combination of Boccaccio and Machiavelli and John Keats.

"When I went away I said to myself, 'This man is larger than life.' He simply does not fit into any pattern. You can see a man being one of those things, two of those things even, but to see within an hour one man being three of them, you know you're in the presence of a great diversity, great flexibility, great competence, because of the range of his sensibilities. I think Johnson, as he experienced these different things, realized that he was an actor on a big stage. I have that feeling. The reason I feel that way is that while he was doing it, all of a sudden he would take that role as if in the way when you're eating something you really like, you smack your lips and say it's great. Or a wine you truly enjoy. I felt he understood that nature had given him this element of being able to do what he did and that he had maximized it in his role as president, which few people have the opportunity to do. But he did it brilliantly."

John B. Connally: "There is no adjective in the dictionary to describe him. He was cruel and kind, generous and greedy, sensitive and insensitive, crafty and naïve, ruthless and thoughtful, simple in many ways yet extremely complex, caring and totally not caring; he could overwhelm people with kindness and turn around and be cruel and petty towards those same people; he knew how to use people in politics in the way nobody else could that I know of. As a matter of fact it would take every adjective in the dictionary to describe him."

Adrian Spears: When my daughter was in college she worked in Senator Johnson's office one summer. And she was just amazed at the work these people did for him, the hours they kept, the dedication they had to him, the loyalty. And I know that a lot of senators were going around shaking their heads saying, 'How in the world does he do it? They work for him for half of what I have to pay and he gets the same amount of money allocated to him.' But he could just get more people to do the work for him for less pay.

Willie Day Taylor: When he said, 'Go,' it didn't matter when it was; you went.

J. Russell Wiggins: Johnson was an expert on the art of the possible. He sensed more quickly than anyone else what could be done and, without losing sight of the ultimate objective, was interested in making some progress. Whenever he did this, he got a deluge of abuse from ideologues who wanted to get everything, heaven before breakfast, and Johnson was too practical to be for heaven before breakfast.

Richard Neustadt: Mr. Johnson had a fine eye for the human vulnerabilities of people he was working with and looked for that soft spot and then turned the knife in it as a means of attaching people more securely. There may have been also a streak of cruelty in him like the Roosevelt streak, of just liking to pull the wings off flies.

Hubert H. Humphrey: "It is true that Johnson could be very rough. He didn't spend a lot of time trying to figure out whether he was going to hurt your feelings, but after he got you all bruised up, he put his arms around you and gave you a bear hug and told you that you were the greatest man that ever lived. And he'd get you almost to believe it for half an hour or so.

"Just keep in mind that he had all the weaknesses and strengths of a big man. He loved women; he loved to take a drink; he loved a good earthy story; he understood politics and power. He was a patriarch of absolutely unbelievable dimensions. He wanted to do good. He was a soft-hearted guy with all the big veneer.

"He really was interested in poor people, truly interested. And he never was able to project that as sincerely as I knew it to be. He never did forget those days when he taught school to those Mexican-American kids. He never forgot about it. He romanticized it a lot, that I know. And people thought he just used that, but that wasn't true.

"He was an All-American president. He was really the history of this country, with all of the turmoil, the bombast, the sentiments, the passions. It was all there. All in one man.

"Now of course you have to understand that above all he was a man steeped in politics. Politics was not an avocation with him. It was it. It was the vocation. It was his life, it was his religion, it was his family, it was his social and economic life; it was his totality. And he gave himself to it, absorbed it. He was a phenomenon. And if you liked politics, it was like being at the feet of a giant. Because it just poured out of him. Every time you saw him it wasn't like seeing a man; it was like seeing an institution, a whole system that just encompassed you. Johnson thought he could pick up the globe and walk off with it."

George W. Ball: "He was a strong, strong man with a great intellectual capacity. The thing about Johnson that always impressed me most was that in the quiet times he would lean back and really talk about his vision for the United States.

This was a man who had been a poor boy and who felt he hadn't had the education he should have had. He was going to have a United States that would let everybody have a chance at an education, and not know the poverty he had known.

Harrison Salisbury: "I suppose everyone has his own theory as to why Lyndon was so persuasive so much of the time. My theory comes from my experiences in Russia. If you've ever been to the theater in Russia, you find that every actor is bigger than life. He shouts louder than you expect him to; his gestures are more broad; everything is that much bigger.

"At first I couldn't understand it because Russians are good actors. And then suddenly I realized that everything in Russia is like that. The ordinary Russian shouts more than we do. He uses stronger language. He makes a drama out of a little street scene—an argument with a policeman or something like that. So if you're going to have a drama on stage it has to go up another several decibels.

Now I think Lyndon was a little like that, a little like the Russians, making a drama out of small street scenes. He was an actor, and everything was a little larger than life to him because he was larger than life, and not just physically. A lot of what he was may have to do with his being a Texan. In general they seem to come on a little stronger than anyone else. But Lyndon was stronger than most Texans, and I imagine that is one of the reasons he was so effective.

Bill Moyers: "Johnson had an uncanny ability to see himself as if he were an actor and a spectator at the same time. And he had this double layer—bifocal vision in a sense. He could be acting and yet, while he was performing, he was existentially involved in the moment—he always was outside the process looking at himself. This was a flaw at times, and I think helped to bring him down.

Since Johnson studied too much his effect on the audience of which he was artificially a member, he was on stage, he was in the act; he was in the drama and he worried too much about how he was appearing.

George E. Reedy: Every time I think of Johnson, the first thought that springs into my head is Pirandello. Pirandello is a playwright who would leave you with the most baffled wonderment as to whether the whole thing was a figment of somebody's imagination; whether this man really was a king, or whether he was just a demented lunatic that was surrounded by some others. Johnson would leave you like that.

Elizabeth Goldschmidt: "With the physique he had plus his acting ability he could be a terrible bully. He would shake his hand under your nose, stride up and down, raise his arms. He knew exactly what he was doing.

And he also had a tremendous capacity for concentration. Everyone was amazed at how much Johnson knew, say, about the details of the federal budget. He could just reel off statistics and facts that he had absorbed and all those controversial laws that he dealt with. He knew backward and forward not only what was in them but what the issues were, who was on what side. He had an encyclopedic memory, like an elephant.

Sam Houston Johnson: "A lot of people never knew Lyndon had a sense of humor, but he did. He was always telling stories, and the stories always had a point.

"Our father was a good imitator and storyteller, just like Lyndon. Maybe that's where he got it from. Lyndon could screw up his mouth and sound just like Eisenhower and even Dean Acheson. You wouldn't think that was possible, Acheson being a fancy-panter from way back, but they were friends, and Lyndon could imitate him till you couldn't tell them apart. He could even imitate Acheson saying the word fuck, and I tell you that wasn't easy.

He could mimic old Eisenhower; he liked Eisenhower, but a lot of the time he didn't think Ike'd done his homework when he was president. He could even imitate Roosevelt, making his voice sound just like Franklin's. But of course he never made fun of Roosevelt. Not to my knowledge.

Marianne Means: "He was always on, always manipulating, never happy without some kind of human exchange or confrontation. It was more than a performance, because you felt that he was reliving an experience. I mean, that he was involved in it. He wasn't just repeating something.

But he was primarily an actor, and a good one, with all the requisite body gestures and facial expressions, and he gave a real performance, especially with his stories about the Hill Country people and about his childhood. He was reliving it, and sometimes his imagination heightened and exaggerated his stories—that was how he got this reputation of lying.

Hugh Sidey: My whole experience as a journalist was that Johnson was outrageous in some of the devices he used. He would lie, beg, cheat, steal a little, threaten, intimidate, but he never lost sight of that ultimate goal, and he never violated the law, to the best of my knowledge, to achieve it. He would never have clapped reporters in jail or do the things Nixon did in his White House. He'd go up to the edge, but he respected the system. In his personal maneuvering—goddamn, he was a wild man.

Tom Johnson: "All of the people who came in contact with Lyndon Johnson—his family, his friends, his political associates, the members of the White House staff—each of them has his or her slice of Lyndon Johnson. Now some of the slices are larger than others. Bill Moyers's slice is a very large slice. Mrs. Johnson's slice is surely the largest.

But nobody has ever put all of the slices together. The things that have been written about him, all of them are very limited, taking in a very small slice. What has to be done is to put all the slices of the pie together. If it can be done.

1

Young Lyndon

A STORMY ARRIVAL

Aunt Jessie Hatcher: The night that Lyndon came, why, we had the biggest storm we ever had, and couldn't get a doctor. And that was the beginning.

Lyndon was born in the west room of the farmhouse by the Pedernales (pronounced Purd'n Alice) in the Texas Hill Country at, or so his mother Rebekah recorded later,¹ the auspicious hour of daybreak. Rebekah liked such omens of divine approval. The baby, Rebekah also recorded, was a large, perfectly formed child weighing, in an age of considerable guesswork in that regard, eleven pounds.

Rebekah's mother was there to help, as was Aunt Kate on the father's side. The father himself, Sam Ealy, Jr., was—no one bothered to record where. Perhaps in the east room. In any case it was the grandfather, Sam Ealy, Sr., Big Sam as he was called, who went for the midwife. As Aunt Jessie later described it:

"The doctor was twenty miles away, and he couldn't get across the river anyhow. The Pedernales was on the biggest rise it ever had been.² My father had to go up a half mile above the crossing in order to get through at the crossing, across the river. He went and got this Mrs. Lindig, one of the nicest women in the whole county. She was really a good woman. As a midwife, she brought lots of children. And it just tickled my father nearly to death to think that he could do that, especially when we couldn't get a doctor.

"Doctor just laughed about it when they told him; said, 'Why, she's just as well off. Mrs. Lindig's just as fine a doctor as I am.'

I was fixing to say, I don't think Rebekah would have ever wanted anybody to say that Lyndon came with a midwife instead of a real doctor. I don't think she would've ever wanted that said. But still it was one of those accident things that happen.

Aunt Jessie was right; Rebekah hoped that aspect of Lyndon's birth would be lost to history. Rebekah always was, as Lyndon was to become, concerned with keeping up appearances. Life was hard in the harsh Texas Hill Country in those days, and often appearances were just about all you had.

Ralph Yarborough: "Johnson comes from hardscrabble country where you have a drought every three years, and unless you get a good crop, you nearly starve. These people are in the same position as Scarlett O'Hara was in Gone With the Wind when she picked up that last turnip. They are always picking up that last turnip.

"The first Anglo-Americans that went out there tried to farm. They weren't basically ranchers. But as a result of the Spaniards and others, there were a million head of wild cattle. So you went out and rounded up some wild cattle.

Johnson's grandfather was one of the great trail drivers of Texas.

Lyndon: "My grandfather and his brother came here to the Hill Country in the early 1850s; they were orphan boys. They started driving cattle up the trail to Abilene, Kansas—the old Chisholm Trail. And the two Johnson brothers had a cattle concentration point at what is now Johnson City.

They would assemble them there and drive them up the trail. And that's where they put down their stakes, and that's where they've all stayed since. And those that are living live in this general area; those that are dead are buried in the little family graveyard near the ranch house.

The Hill Country, in spite of its harshness, had its own beauty, and its spell was considerable. According to John Graves: A friend of mine from Houston said, 'This is where everybody would like to come from. There isn't a soul in Texas that wouldn't have been born here in these hills if he could have managed it.' ³

Lyndon loved the Hill Country, and loved Hill Country lore, savored it, trotted it forth whenever occasion demanded and often when it didn't.

My daddy . . . he would begin, or my grandaddy . . . and a typical Hill Country story would follow. Rebekah Baines Johnson may have thought she married beneath herself—both she and her daddy, Joseph Wilson Baines, were college graduates—but there is no indication that Lyndon ever thought she had. He grew up on the Johnson ranch, later in Johnson City, petted and prodded by his parents as well as the Johnson grandparents; the Baineses, those that were left, were shadowy and somewhat colorless by comparison.

When Lyndon's grandaddy, Sam Ealy, Sr., and his brother Tom settled in the Pedernales Valley they joined forces with three Johnson nephews—Jesse, James, and John. All five were bachelors. They built a log cabin with a loopholed rock barn for defense against Indian raids; this was the embryo of Johnson City. The family partnership was, they stipulated, strictly male; if a member married, he checked out, appropriated his share, and went it alone. But they were, while they were all there together, the largest trail-driving operation in the Hill Country. They drove cattle eastward to Kansas and as far north as Wyoming and Montana.

The first intrusion came with the Civil War.

Joe Payne: My grandfather and Sam Johnson were in the Confederate army together. My grandfather got shot, I think in the right shoulder, and Grandpa Johnson got his horse shot from under him.

The second intrusion was the arrival in the Hill Country of Eliza Bunton from Kentucky.

Lyndon: Grandpa came in '53; then grandmother came. I can remember my grandparents talking about the ranch, how they had wanted to settle here.

So the rangy Texas cattle driver and his black-eyed young wife, Eliza, set up housekeeping in a log cabin on a corner of the ranch. There was nobody else there then—except the Indians.

Lyndon: "The last Indian fight up here was in 1873, and from the time my people came in 1853—that twenty-year period was pretty heavy going. There are a good many stories about grandmother hiding the children in the basement and the Indians coming in and ransacking the house. Shooting the horses in the pen.

Plenty of times she hid down there. She'd get in the flour barrel and cover herself up whenever she heard the war whoops.

Finally Eliza decided that the Hill Country, or at least Sam Ealy's corner of it, was not a healthy place for babies, and she persuaded Sam to move to the more settled prairie country around Buda, Texas. There, after four successive daughters, Eliza at last, on October 11, 1877, bore a son—named, predictably, for his father.

By the time the last child had arrived, Big Sam now the father of nine, began to yearn for the old ranch and the carefree, trail-driving life it represented. The Indian threat was past, so, Big Sam asked his wife, why not return to the Hill Country? Eliza conceded; not only that, she sold her most prized possession—the silver-mounted carriage with its matched span of horses that Sam's brother Tom had given her⁴ for a sum large enough to meet the down payment on a farm on the Pedernales.⁵ The farm, midway between Johnson City and Fredericksburg and not far from the original Johnson ranch, was where Sam Ealy, Jr. grew up.

There was, however, nothing carefree about farming in the Hill Country, as both Big Sam and young Sam Ealy soon discovered.

Rebekah: "Sam's services on the farm were needed, and it required sacrifice on the part of his parents much of the time to send him to school at nearby Johnson City. Once his father gave him some cattle, saying, 'This is all I can do on your schooling this year.' . . . [He] slaughtered and cut up a steer and sold steaks and soupbones to tide him over until next 'butchering day.'

Later on, he bought a barber's chair and tools from the town barber who had become ill and . . . soon Sam was a full-fledged barber on Saturdays. . . .⁶

Sam was, at that time, trying his hand at whatever came along, with varied success. According to Sam Houston Johnson, Lyndon's brother, their father was a teacher for a little while down near Sandy at the White Oak school. He always wanted to be a lawyer, but he never did become one. He'd have been a good one, too.

But to go from teaching to law required at least a modicum of money and drive. and Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr., had not quite enough of either. When he tired of teaching, he returned to the ranch. He served for a while as justice of the peace, but it was politics that really interested him. The little cabin he occupied on the farm was, many nights, the scene of animated political discussion, lasting often well into the morning.

At one such session he learned that the seat in the legislature for the Eighty-ninth(soon to be renumbered Eighty-seventh) District, then occupied by one Joseph Wilson Baines of Blanco, would next year, under the tricounty rotation system, fall to Gillespie County. Why shouldn't Sam run for it?

Sam did, and at age twenty-seven Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr. was elected to the Texas state legislature. Not long afterward he received a request for an interview from a reporter on the Blanco County Gazette. His interviewer, to his surprise, turned out to be a young woman; not only that, she was the daughter of that same Joseph Wilson Baines, his predecessor.

Her name, he soon learned, was Rebekah.

Rebekah's lineage, a term she often used, was quite different from Sam's. Her grandfather, George Washington Baines, had been a Baptist minister, much revered. During the Civil War and afterward he presided over Baylor College, one of the earliest seats of higher learning in the state. Her father, Joseph Wilson Baines, was a student at Baylor when Sam Ealy Johnson, Sr., was traveling the Chisholm Trail. The Civil War, while it temporarily interrupted his studies, apparently did not afford him cause for such excitement as it had Big Sam. After the war he took a teaching position in the town of Rowlett, Texas. Joseph Wilson was a handsome young man, slender, with the droopy mustache popular at the time. Among his pupils was pretty Ruth Huffman, blond and blue-eyed, and not yet fifteen when they married.

Faced with providing for a wife and, one always assumed, a close succession of offspring, Joseph Wilson decided to study law. He also edited a local paper; neither was a great success, but he was accepted by the bar, and he did become secretary of state for Governor John Ireland.

After their first child, Rebekah, was born, the family moved to Blanco, also a Hill Country town. Joseph Wilson added cattle raising and farming to his law and editing endeavors, but none was very lucrative or pursued with much enthusiasm. Reading was his passion—by nature he was a scholar, and Texas in the 1880s was hardly the time or place for that. His law practice dwindled over the years. Several years of drought made further farming impossible. The farm was sold in 1903, not an uncommon occurrence in the Hill Country.

Joseph Wilson, much chastened and much poorer, moved his family to Fredericksburg and was elected to the legislature. Just why he chose that course is uncertain, perhaps he did not know what else to do. Only in his mid-fifties, he was a broken man, and neither psychologically nor economically did he ever recover. He served out his two-year term and, just before he died, turned over his seat in the Eighty-ninth District to that promising young man from neighboring Gillespie County—Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr.

When Rebekah interviewed the new young legislator, she asked him, among other matters, his views on the controversial U.S. Senator, Joseph Weldon Bailey. They were negative, and that interested the young reporter even more. Opposition to Senator Bailey was not yet a popular course to take. Sam Ealy, in his turn, was equally interested; reporting for newspapers was not the usual occupation of young women in 1906. Miss Baines, he learned, had just graduated from Baylor; she was obviously a person of intelligence and determination. Besides, she was beautiful.

In her Album Rebekah describes frequent visits from a dashing and dynamic young legislator,⁷ which in short order became a whirlwind courtship. There is no mention of church suppers, country dances, river strolls, the conventional pursuits of a young Hill Country couple in love at the time. Instead she describes a Confederate Reunion where we enjoyed the oratory⁸ and writes of hearing William Jennings Bryan, whom we both admired extravagantly, address the Legislature.⁹ Sam was delighted to find a girl who really liked politics.

There was no mention of love either, but then that wasn't much talked of in those days. When Joseph Wilson Baines died, Rebekah, who had adored him, sought comfort. He had been, as she later expressed it, the dominant force in my life.¹⁰ She had to adjust herself to life without her most interesting companion.¹¹ and she did this by marrying Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr.

We were married August 20, 1907, and moved out to the farm on the Pedernales River in Gillespie County.¹² There, on August 27, 1908, Lyndon was born.

There was, almost immediately, the quandary of what to name their son. Apparently the happy parents had not thought to decide it beforehand, and three months were to pass before it was resolved. Rebekah described how, baby in one arm, she would

copy long lists of names and submit them for his father's approval. None ever quite suited the exacting father . . . His being un-named sorely irked his mother, so one cold November morning she decided upon a plan to remedy that situation. . . .

Sam called to me from his place in front of the roaring fire in the fireplace in our room: Everything is nice and warm now, Rebekah, get up and cook breakfast. I had taken the baby from his bassinet by my bed and lay there thinking that my beautiful boy must have a name all his own that very day and hour; so I nonchalantly replied, No, Sam, I am not cooking breakfast until this baby is named. . . .

Sam studied a moment, then looked up from tying his shoe to say, How would you like Clarence? Not in the least, came my prompt reply. Then he asked, What would you think of Dayton? That is much better but still not quite the name for this boy, I said.

He thought of the third of his three lawyer friends and said, Would you call him Linden? There was a long pause, and I said, Yes, if I may spell it as I please, for L-y-n-d-o-n Johnson would be far more euphonious than L-i-n-d-e-n Johnson. Spell it as you please, said Sam. I am naming him for a good and smart man, a true friend, and how you spell it doesn't matter. We will call the baby for him and for your father. All right, I responded. He is named Lyndon Baines Johnson.

I got up and made the biscuits.¹³

Now that he was named, and to everyone's satisfaction, baby Lyndon proved more captivating than ever.

Rebekah: Lyndon's earliest . . . one of his earliest public appearances was the spring of 1909 when his parents took him to a general picnic near Stonewall. As Sam entered the grounds carrying the baby, he was constantly greeting friends and neighbors. Lyndon gave each his happy smile and usually extended his arms in an attempt to go from his father's arms to the friend's. Eddie Hahn, a general leading citizen of the community, exclaimed, 'Sam, you've got a politician there. I've never afore seen such a friendly baby. He's a chip off the old block. I can see him running for office twenty years from now.' ¹⁴

Lyndon: "My first memory. I remember standing in front of the pump near the house I was born in. And my mother was crying. My daddy was buying cotton at the gin, and he hadn't come home; he stayed there until the last cotton was ginned, usually about midnight. And here she was with two tiny children and alone.¹⁵

She went out to pump some water. It was dark; we didn't have lights then, and I could hold the lamp while she pumped the water. I remember she was crying, and she said she was frightened. I told her I'd take care of her.

Well, that's how Lyndon remembered it later. In any case, he was clearly a precocious child.

Rebekah: "Lyndon learned readily and knew his alphabet and the Mother Goose rhymes, many juvenile poems from Tennyson and Longfellow, and brief speeches when he was only two. He read quite early and at three could spell words ranging from cat to grandpa. His little cousins, Ava and Margaret, attended the little country schoolhouse, Junction, in sight of his home, so at recess Lyndon would run over to see them."¹⁶

Kathryn Deadrich Loney: "I was hired for teaching at the little school up there. Lyndon and his family lived nearby, and he would run away from home and attend the school, day in and day out. He didn't care about playing with the children; he just kind of hung on to my skirt and hung around when I was teaching. So I told his mother that if we could get the board's permission, I would take him—he wanted to come to school so badly. And they said 'Okay.'

I taught all eight grades in the same room, one little room. I had about thirty-five children. That's the only way we had in those days.

Rebekah: Lyndon from his earliest days possessed a highly inquisitive mind. He was never content long to play quietly in the yard. He must take his toys apart to see what made them go, or he must set out to conquer that new unexplored world beyond the gate or up the lane.¹⁷

Lyndon: "I remember that when I was a boy, that I walked through the sand, hot sand, up to see my grandfather. A child of five or six—I would cross the dusty field and walk along the banks of the river.

"My granddaddy would ask me questions. He would say, 'How many ponies do you have? How many chickens do you have? How many cows are down there at your place? Tell me about the state of the crops—when are you going to start picking your cotton?'

"I would stand there and wiggle my toes in the sand with my finger in my mouth. And if I knew the answers and answered all his questions correctly, grandpa would take me in and open a black mahogany desk he had and reach in and get an apple. And I would walk satisfied and quite proudly back across the fields along the bank of the river. If I failed, the walk seemed endless—if I hadn't known the answers.

And those hills and those fields and that river were the only real world that I really had in those years. So I did not know much about how much more beautiful it was than that of many other boys, for I could imagine nothing else from sky to sky. Yet the sight and the feel of that country somehow or other burned itself into my mind.¹⁸

REBEKAH

Rebekah: The first year of my marriage . . . I was confronted not only by the problem of adjustment to a completely opposite personality, but also to a strange and new way of life, a way far removed from that I had known in Blanco and Fredericksburg. . . . However, I was determined to overcome circumstances instead of letting them overwhelm me. At last I realized that life is real and earnest and not the charming fairy tale of which I had so long dreamed.¹

There was little of the fairy tale romance in life on the farm by the Pedernales. Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr., in his dusty boots and battered Stetson, bore little resemblance to Prince Charming; moreover, it must have been very early apparent to Rebekah that he would never replace her father in intellectual companionship as she had hoped. Sam Ealy's mind was, as Lyndon's would be, essentially pragmatic, not philosophical.

The farmhouse, too, was no castle, not even a rose-covered cottage; it was quite unlike her girlhood home, which Rebekah remembered as a two-story rock house with a fruitful orchard of perfectly spaced trees, terraced flower beds, broad walks, purple plumed wisteria climbing to the room, fragrant honeysuckle at the dining room windows whose broad sills were seats for us children.

There were other differences. Her own parents were childless the first twelve years of their marriage; Rebekah became pregnant almost immediately and seemed always to be so in the decade that followed. Lyndon Baines, born 1908, was followed by Rebekah Luruth in 1910, Josefa Hermine in 1912, Sam Houston in 1914, and Lucia Huffman in 1916. After which the bearing ended, and the bearing up began.

Aunt Jessie: Rebekah wasn't used to the rough ranch life like I was. She never had done much of anything except schoolwork. And it was hard on her. I used to go down and help her all the time. I'd go in and help her wash the dishes, help her sweep the floor, help her bathe the babies. I'd just do anything that was to be done. Now that was all there was to it.

Rebekah alludes to the vagaries of the great iron stove and the chickens as her greatest trials, but Lyndon, who had a very early memory of his mother crying at the pump, focused on water.

Lady Bird: A lot of the way he felt about water came from seeing his mother have to draw the water from the well and not having a washing machine and having to scrub the floor on her hands and knees.

Virginia Foster Durr: Bird had this luncheon for Mrs. Maury Maverick, and Bird's mother-in-law was out from Texas, Lyndon's mother. She was an extremely beautiful woman; she had a very aristocratic, if you want to call it that, a very beautiful bone structure. I sat by her at the luncheon table, and she had rather large, swollen and very red hands. As she began to eat lunch, she said to me in sort of a whisper, 'You know, I'm always so embarrassed and ashamed about my hands. Where we lived at down in the country when I was young, I had to do so much hard work, and my hands never recovered. Even as a little boy Lyndon used to say to me, Oh, mamma, when I get big I'm going to see that you don't have to do any of this hard work so you can have pretty white hands. ' She remembered that even as a little boy, you know, he was worried about it. I really think this is one of the reasons that Lyndon had this passion against poverty and this passion for electricity. He did remember his mother doing all this hard, heavy work, and it did hurt him, and he did want to see her life made easier and he wanted to see the life of women like her made easier.

Kathryn Deadrich Loney: "Nearly every day after school I went by to see Miss Rebekah. She was older than I, so sweet and so patient. She was always ready to help you if you wanted advice. To me she was just precious.

I don't think she was strict with Lyndon. She would appeal to him to do things. I don't think she ever scolded him. I never heard her scold her children. She would just talk to them in a little gentle voice, and they seemed to understand that that was right.

There is no doubt, though, that the pivot of Rebekah's life was her eldest child.

History is full of examples of firstborn children pushed into prominence by ambitious parents; Rebekah seemed to consider it the normal course of things. Of her childhood she wrote, I was fortunate in being the firstborn of my parents, a happy circumstance of superior advantage. ²

Rose McKee: His mother said that as a child she was timid, but her own father taught her confidence by saying: 'My little girl can do anything she wants to do.' When her own children came along, she said, 'The only thing I knew about bringing them up was what my father had told me.' ³

Rebekah (much later, on hearing rumors that her son might become president): I'm not surprised. 'Course it's a mother talking, but from the first time I looked into his eyes, none of his accomplishments have surprised me.⁴

John Skuce: I can't see anything of what I know of the family, stories that I've been told, that makes me think that Mama Johnson cared about any other child but him. She was just overwhelmed with Lyndon.

Horace Busby: Members of the Johnson family, including brothers and sisters, quietly dispute his portrayal of the family home life; before her death in 1957 his mother, Rebekah, became greatly distressed about the inaccuracy of Lyndon's memory. Former contemporaries who knew him in his Johnson City youth insist he was disabled not by parental deprivation but by parental indulgence which left him 'spoiled rotten.' Success, he thought, denied him the sympathy that comes with failure and the affection accorded the ineffectual. To compensate, he constructed for himself a past which he believed would transform him into a weak, even pitiable figure. Surely the young, the intellectuals, the writers—all those put off by his power and success—would be moved to compassion if only they understood he was disadvantaged by his birthplace, deprived by his schooling, and demeaned by his lack of hereditary graces and manner.⁵

Sam Houston Johnson: They say, some people say, Lyndon was a mama's boy, but I don't think that's so, not that I'm sure I know what a mama's boy is. More often than not our mother was doing Lyndon's bidding, rather than the other way around.

The geographic sphere of Rebekah's experience was limited to central Texas, and there is little doubt that within her world of Blanco, Waco, Fredericksburg, and Johnson City, the most rural, seemingly the least civilized was Johnson City, where Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr., moved his little family when Lyndon was six.

Stella Glidden: When I first came to Johnson City—well, I came from Fredericksburg, a town where you could almost eat off the streets. In Johnson City there was very little except just living from day to day and being grateful.

Emmette Redford: All of us lived in circumstances that don't compare at all with the way we live today. Not many people had indoor plumbing; virtually nobody had electric lights. Whatever we now regard as the normal standard of living just didn't exist in Johnson City at that time. So that if you had a home and food and clothes, you were a middle-class family.

Glidden: "When I came to Johnson City at that time, I thought I had come to the end of the world. Mr. Sam came down that afternoon, and I was sitting on the porch of the hotel all by myself, and he asked me how I was liking it. I said, 'Well, for one thing, I'm not going to sleep up here!' He said, 'Well, where are you going to sleep?' I said, 'I'm going to go down to the print shop and sleep on that pile of paper and cover up with my coat.' (It was March.) So he went off, and he came back directly, and he said, 'Rebekah wants you to come up to the house.' So that's how I spent my first night in that house. I slept in the east room with little Rebekah, Josefa, and Lucia, who was then just a very little child. I never did know how the two west rooms looked, because in those days we didn't go all over people's houses. And that was Mr. Sam's and Miz Rebekah's room, and a room for the boys. It was one of the best houses in Johnson City.

I wondered just why people would like a town like Johnson City, but it wasn't long before I, too, liked it, because I found the people so warm and so friendly. It seemed after a period of about three months that I had lived in this little town all my life.

But even the best house in Johnson City would have commanded only a portion of Rebekah's attention. And Sam Johnson understood, possibly even admired, that in her.

Liz Carpenter: "Sam Johnson always indulged his wife's independence. One day he appeared with two presents for her—a Victrola and a newspaper, the Record-Courier, a weekly newspaper in Johnson City. The owner of both had to go west for his health and he persuaded Sam Johnson to buy them.

"The newspaper gave Mrs. Johnson an opportunity to do what she had always loved—write. Despite the fact that she had five little children under eight years of age, she wrote out—on yellow tablet paper—every line of copy that went into the weekly paper for a year.

"And during this time she also was correspondent for the Dallas News, the Austin American, and the San Antonio Express, signing her stories RBJ."⁶

Rebekah was always one for keeping up appearances. Johnson City may not have been her choice, but it was her lot in life. It was certainly better than the farm, and she would make the best of it.

Aunt Jessie: She dressed them little children—oh, they looked just like little angels, her little children did. Of course, this kid like Sam and like I was, we came up hamper-scamper, you know. Anything that mama put on us was all right. But Rebekah's children were always dressed.

Simon Burg: We'd go visit on a Sunday afternoon, and Mrs. Johnson would call the children up on the porch and each of them would recite a declamation or an extemporaneous speech. She was the type of person who wanted to teach the children how to meet a problem and how to speak on it.

But Rebekah did not limit her concern for proper speech to her own children. She was generous with her time and her talents in public speaking; it was her great love, that and dramatics.

Lyndon: There is hardly a boy or girl that ever went to Johnson City school district that she didn't prepare for the declamation contest up at the little theater. She was the dramatics teacher, public-speaking teacher. She could teach anything.

Ben Crider: She coached her high school people in literary events; she taught them how to debate, how to stand, taught girls how to sit down properly, and helped in every way without any pay. We didn't have any money to pay with. She did this of her own free will without any cost. She was a brilliant woman—graduated from Baylor—and we had very few college graduates in our country at that time.

But whatever her other activities, and they were many, nothing in Rebekah's life superseded the welfare of her eldest child. She coached him first, everybody else second.

When Lyndon was thirteen Rebekah sent him to summer school at an academy in San Marcos. No letters between them from this early a period have survived, but beginning with his college years we have much of their correspondence,⁷ mostly undated, and a bit fulsome on both sides, but apparently they were comfortable with that.

Dearest Mother,

Have all of my books arranged before me in preparation for a long evening of study. You can't realize the difference in the atmosphere after one of your sweet letters. I know of nothing so stimulating and inspiring to me as one of your encouraging, beautifully-written letters . . . Mother, I love you so. Don't neglect me . . .

My dear Mother,

The end of another busy day brought me a letter from you. Your letters always give me more strength, renewed courage, and that bull dog tenacity so essential to the success of any man . . .⁸

During at least some periods of his life, Rebekah wrote Lyndon every day. The sheer volume of what survives is staggering. Newsy, chatty letters for the most part, but always with the extra line or two (or ten) of superlatives:

—1934

Dearest Lyndon,

Was greatly disappointed in not hearing from you . . . I never see you alone any more. I never could talk freely or naturally before outsiders. Often I think with pleasure of the long confidential talks we used to have when you would come in from San Marcos and sit on the bed and tell me all your hopes, disappointments and dreams. You were always so close to my heart and my life, darling . . . With dearest love to my dear, dear, splendid son,

Mama

He was her dearest love, her splendid sweet son, but Rebekah could hardly be called possessive; she expected Lyndon to take his place in the larger world, and she never objected to his leaving home as long as his plans coincided with her own expectations. Neither did she, as far as anyone ever heard, protest his rapid-fire courtship and near elopement with Lady Bird, and if she worried a little at its precipitousness and because Bird was an Episcopalian, it was a pretty normal worry.

Lady Bird: "She regarded me, when she first saw me, with great concern and I won't say hostility, but with just a sort of wondering what on earth kind of person I was and what I would mean in the life of her son and his relation to his family. But she was also a person to whom marriage was a mighty important institution, a very good member of the Baptist church. So once we were married, she was going to make the loving best of it.

And she did.

—1939

My precious Boy,

. . . You know how I feel in regard to Bird. She is one of the nicest people in the world to live with and that is saying a great deal . . . I think my daughter-in-law is second to none. I am indeed thankful for your sake, as well as for my own, that you made such a wise and fortunate choice . . .

Lady Bird: "She was the sort of person that I truly enjoyed being with. If I had an extra hour in Austin before I had to catch a plane or train to Washington, I would think of all the friends I could call, but I usually decided I would rather go and see Mrs. Johnson. We would sit together and talk about books, about household decorating, about family.

We were very good friends, and that is probably much better than loving one's in-laws."

Durr: I think Lyndon was accustomed to two adoring women all his life, his mother and his wife.

Rebekah never really cared for the farm, or for Johnson City,⁹ and when her husband died (shortly before Lyndon's first election to Congress), Lyndon found a house for her just outside Austin, and she made periodic visits to Washington. With her scene thus set, she could act her preferred roles, the intellectual, the proud mother of the increasingly famous son, the Texas grandlady.

Charles Boatner: "Whenever I would go to Austin on a story or some detail regarding the paper, why I always would call Mrs. Johnson and take her to the Driskill to dinner. Because I was—I had the feeling—I didn't know Mr. Johnson would ever become president, but I thought he was going to be a great man in the United States government, and I wanted to learn as much as I could about him, and I thought she was the best source, as she was.

"She was such a gracious lady, too, that—well, you'd walk into the Driskill with her on your arm, and they had an old white-haired maître d' in the dining room. And when he saw her, his head just swept the floor. That old white head went all the way to the floor. And, selfishly, you always got a better meal when she was there.

She had good political instincts. I think he inherited his from both of them. I've watched her at political rallies when he was running, and she didn't go out of her way to shake hands with people. It seemed like people wanted to come up and shake her hand. She never failed to give them a nice smile, and they went away feeling like they had received an accolade. She just had that presence.

The 1956 convention was what Lady Bird once described as Rebekah's last hurrah. It was there in Chicago that for the first time she admitted she had, and had had for some time, nodules on her arms, and that they were more numerous than before. The doctor's prognosis—on lymphosarcoma—was not favorable, but then as Lady Bird said, getting her to a doctor had in itself been a major project.

She did not live to see her son's ultimate triumph, although perhaps, depending on how you view it, since she saw him majority leader, she did just that and was spared the rest. She died September 12, 1958, age seventy-eight, and was buried next to Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr., in the family graveyard.

Lyndon: She was a great moral influence over me. A Christian lady that was brought up with a Bible in her hand and a preacher in the front room.

Willie Day Taylor: "They were so fond of each other; they understood each other much better than parents and children frequently understand each other. He always felt that he could talk with her about everything, and she always had complete confidence in him. He could

Reviews for Lyndon

[gmillar_8 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I thought that this "Oral Biography" style of presentation was going to be a bit difficult to read and digest. After about the 5th page I changed my mind.I started to like it. Even though the biographer chooses which quotes he wants to use, he doesn't choose the words or the emotions. Therefore, I believe this book carries an accurate account of who Lyndon Johnson was. I found myself liking the raw reality of the man but, not until the very end did I really believe that he was an all-out democrat who actually cared a great deal about social justice for all Americans. Yes, he taught and enjoyed little Latino kids in south Texas and yes, he rammed through two Civil Rights bills at propitious moments in his presidency but my impression was that the bills were more about aggrandizement than deep-rooted belief. His speech and rebuttal at his library in December 1972 made me a believer.