LBJ's Texas White House "Our Heart's Home"

CHAPTER 1 Buntons, Baineses, Johnsons and the Hill Country

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U.S. 290, the road that leads west from Austin into the heart of the Texas Hill Country, seems to travel upward. Passing through the southwesterly sprawl of Austin and on through Dripping Springs, one of the many gateways to the Hill Country, the highway winds toward a line of hills on the horizon. The vegetation is sparse and intermittent, a combination of various kinds of brush that spread with awesome speed. During much of the road's ascent, grass is scarce, with xeric range forage, dirt, and rock the predominant ground cover. At the highest elevations, live oak trees, spread out against the ground instead of tall and straight as in the more humid climes to the north and east, provide shade. Animals graze, but to even the most casual of observers, each animal requires a great deal of land to fill its belly daily. To anyone who looks at the region from an economic perspective, this is, in the words of Texas author laureate John Graves, "hard scrabble country."¹

To someone of a romantic bent, the Hill Country presents an entirely different picture. At the crest of the line of hills—the great tabletop called the Edwards Plateau—the Hill Country seems to be a magic kingdom, a Xanadu, a place different from the rest of the world. The sky is close and low, as if the Hill Country were above the clouds and close to the heavens. The rich blue coloring overhead is clear and refreshing. The world stretches before a traveler's eyes, vision given greater acuity in the seemingly thin air of the hills. The close sky and the ragged hills create an endless space, one not bound by the rules and conventions of the rest of the world. The Hill Country can be a seductive place, a place that attracts observers with its raw beauty and pulls many into its distinct rhythms.

For those born in the region, such as Lyndon Baines Johnson, the thirty-sixth president of the United States, the Hill Country has an eternally strong pull. It is a place defined by its people and their values, shaped and molded by generations. Yet it is a difficult place, one of broken dreams and struggle as well as beauty. It teaches hard lessons that translate well in the rest of the world. What is real in the Hill Country is what someone can touch, decidedly not what they can dream, and that endemic pragmatism offers a strategy for success in the wider world. But the Hill Country never releases its grip on people such as Lyndon Johnson. His home region got under his skin and stayed there, reminding him of the essential truths of American life. The Hill Country became and remained the place where Johnson most wanted to prove himself; the place where validation of his efforts had the greatest personal meaning; and the place to which he returned to look inside himself, evaluate options, and make hard choices both personal and national in character.

Despite its stark beauty, the Hill Country is harsh and unforgiving; it crushes the weak and the foolish and challenges and often defeats even the strong. Its limitations are great, and its power to hold people in a kind of stasis is almost magical. It is "home" in a manner uncommon among American locales, a place to which to return, not merely one from which to depart. People can leave the Hill Country, can triumph over its drudgery and limits, but they always return, in failure or success, to the roots that the character of the place demands from them. The people of the Hill Country are deeply rooted in its thin soil.

Native peoples understood this region as a result of their millennium-long life within it. From a time in the distant past, the Tickanwatick, known to modern scholars as the Tonkawa, roamed the Balcones Escarpment and the Edwards Plateau, living a prehorse hunting and gathering life. Living on the edge of the vast bison range, which expanded until the seventeenth century A.D. and stretched from Tennessee and northern Alabama to the Rocky Mountains, the Tonkawa used skins for their tepees and winter robes. Their ceremonial practices were typical of the people who inhabited Texas before the coming of the Anglos: they tattooed their bodies, organized themselves into clans and moieties, and developed a civil and military leadership structure. Some early European observers perceived them as bellicose; as any hunting and gathering people would, they fought all intruders to protect the resources vital to their survival. Their systematic mobility and small population, which was a function of the limits of their region, made the Hill Country a place where they could live.²

By 1500 A.D., the Tonkawa faced Native American adversaries. From the north, Athapaskan peoples descended onto the southern plains, effectively limiting the range of their southern neighbors such as the Tonkawa. Called Apaches by the Spanish, the Athapaskan peoples divided into eastern and western groups. Those to the west became the "Apaches du Navaho," the Navajo. To the east, they became the Lipan, Jicarilla, Palomas, and Carlanas Apaches, the terrors of the plains to everyone they encountered for almost a century. In the 1700s, the Shoshone-speaking Comanches descended from the Rocky Mountains to destroy the eastern Apaches. Astride the horse, the great transformative instrument of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these newcomers captured the bison plains for themselves, driving away Apaches and Tonkawa alike. In the aftermath of the Comanche onslaught, some eastern Apaches looked to the ineffectual Spanish government of New Mexico for protection. The Tonkawa became scattered along the Balcones Escarpment. The plains had been called the Apachería; the new name of the region became the Comanchería, in honor and fear of the people who dominated it from astride their horses.³

The Spanish who settled Central Texas in communities such as San Antonio de Béxar felt the arrival of the Comanches as surely as the Tonkawa did. After grappling with Apaches fleeing the southward advance, the Spanish faced the Comanches and later their allies, the Kiowa. In 1790, well into the heyday of Comanche dominance of the southern plains, these two Native American groups formed an unlikely alliance at the behest of a trader. The weak hold of the Spanish on their northern territories; the attention elsewhere of Spanish and, after 1821, Mexican policy; and sparse settlement of areas north of San Antonio in effect turned the Hill Country into a Comanche province.⁴

It was to this land that the ancestors of Lyndon B. Johnson came. Typical of the first Anglos in Texas, they were descended from earlier settlers of the American South: Georgians, Tennesseans, Kentuckians, and others. In this migration, Southerners spread both west and north, across the Mississippi River and the Ohio River, creating farms and plantations using the methods ingrained by the experiences of the generations that preceded them. Their repertoire, born of a preindustrial culture that depended on wood for shelter, fuel, and other necessities, echoed the expansion of Anglo-Europeans throughout North America and reflected the goals of individualism tempered by community standards. The objective of individual economic accomplishment stood apart as a predominant value, particularly among the people from the southern uplands, who were a dominant current of Anglo migration into Texas.⁵

This objective offers a prism into the psyche of the people who came to the Hill County. Both sides of Lyndon Johnson's paternal family, the Buntons and the Johnsons, produced fiercely competitive individuals who sought success and felt little compunction about showing their attributes to others. The Bunton personality, described by Johnson biographer Robert Caro as a "pride so strong that some called it arrogance" coupled with a "fierce and flaring temper," produced bold, paternalistic, self-possessed, and sometimes heroic people who were physically statuesque. John Wheeler Bunton, a bona fide hero of the Texas Revolution and one of the signatories to the Texas Declaration of Independence, was a great-great-uncle of Lyndon B. Johnson. The president's great-grandfather, Robert Holmes Bunton, was equally tall, broad, and impressive. After fighting in the Civil War for the Confederacy, he and a brother began to participate in the cattle trade. In post-Civil War Texas, feral steers available for the taking were worth forty to fifty dollars a head at the railroad terminus in Abilene, Kansas. When a nephew returned penniless after losing the price of fifteen hundred head to cardsharps, Robert Holmes Bunton is purported not to have said a word. He did, however, change businesses, in no small part as a result. The two Bunton brothers stopped driving cattle themselves and began to rent out their pastures to passing herds. As the cattle trade became less profitable, this decision proved prescient. While those bringing herds to the railroad depots had to take the going market rate, pasture along the way remained a steady source of income, its value not subject to the whims of the market. His ranch perched just shy of the Hill Country itself in the town of Lockhart, Robert Holmes Bunton became a wealthy man.⁶

The Johnson ancestors were flamboyant risk takers from the outset. Typical of the early westward migration out of the South, the Johnsons moved westward by generation. Beginning in Oglethorpe County, Georgia, Johnsons appeared in western Georgia and Alabama before arriving in Lockhart, Texas, around 1846. Exuberant and impulsive, they left the soft plains of Central Texas behind when they ascended to the Hill Country in 1856. Deemed by biographer Caro as "dreamers, romantics, and idealists," fierce-tempered, proud, and impractical, the Johnson clan settled the spectacular but limited Hill Country, with one ancestor boasting that they would become the richest family in Texas.⁷

The Hill Country was different than the humid plains of East Texas and much of the American South. Higher in elevation and much drier, with only a few perennial streams, the region deceived incoming Anglo-Americans. To even the trained eyes of people who made their living from the land, the Hill Country looked as if it could support a plethora of economic activity. In reality, the tall grasses of the region were an illusion resulting from ten thousand years of cyclic fire and nomadic use. Rainfall was sparse and too erratic to support unirrigated agriculture for long. The Hill Country was one of many places in the arid parts of the American West that looked appealing but delivered much less than first impressions promised. While the Johnsons briefly succeeded with cattle and fared well for a short time in agriculture, the Hill Country lacked the resilience of humid climes.⁸

There were sections that offered greater potential than the rest of the Hill Country. The valleys surrounding the few perennial rivers—the Pedernales, the Blanco, the Guadalupe, and the Medina—were lush and idyllic. It was in the valley of the Pedernales that the Johnson clan settled, ostensibly offering themselves shelter from the limits of this semiarid place that they did not yet understand. This valley made up a "peculiarly favored subsection" of the Hill Country, one in which prosperity was easier to find than in much of the surrounding region.⁹ But for people such as the Johnsons, who settled in this river plain dreaming of great wealth and its attendant status, which the land simply could not provide, the attributes of their valley were only a springboard to greater things.

The Hill Country was hard on such dreams. Although the river valley offered the basis for long-term preindustrial sustenance, the larger region did not. Its limited attributes meant that prosperity would be fleeting, and the instinctively arrogant Johnson clan had no interest in limitations. The Johnsons tasted success but could not hold on to it. On the peripheries of American society, lacking railroad lines to transport products to markets around the nation and the world, the Texas Hill Country and its people—both as a result of and in spite of their skills—would always remain outside of the prosperity of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American society.

Into a family that experienced all sides of this predicament Lyndon B. Johnson was born on August 27, 1908. His father, Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr., had been a barber and had taught in the one-room schools of the Hill Country before he was elected to the Texas legislature at the age of twenty-seven in 1904. A populist long after the demise of the People's Party, he articulated the slogans that so threatened the Texas oligarchy. Sam Johnson was a "man of the people" in the best Texas turn-of-the-century sense. He was loyal to the hard-working people of the state instead of to the railroads and other interests that ran it. While in Austin, he quickly earned a reputation as a talented legislator; the campaign he engineered that persuaded the state to purchase the Alamo in San Antonio was only the most symbolic of his triumphs. But in a legislature corrupted by money from lobbyists for oil companies, banks, and utilities, Sam Johnson stood apart. Instead of letting the lobbyists pay his way, as they did for so many state legislators, he drank and caroused on his own limited money—more limited after financial reverses in 1905—and acquired the respect of many for his fervent populist stand.¹⁰

By the time he married Rebekah Baines of Fredericksburg in 1907, Sam Johnson had learned important lessons about politics, economics, and life. Continued financial reverses in cotton futures forced him to decline his district's request that he run for a third term in 1908. Because he had resisted the entreaties of lobbyists and the corporations that supported them, he received no sinecure and few of the perquisites routinely dispensed to former legislators in turn-of-the-century Texas. Instead of a job that paid better than his meager legislative salary, Sam Johnson received nothing—no offers, no opportunities. By the time his first son was born, he had moved his family to the Johnson family homestead, a small three-room Hill Country dogtrot cabin a short distance from the Pedernales River, by the standards of the day a comfortable abode, and had begun to farm.¹¹

Sam and Rebekah Johnson's new farm was located in the center of the holdings of the Johnson-Bunton clan. Sam Johnson's parents, Sam Ealy, Sr., and Eliza Johnson, were the closest neighbors, living a little more than one-quarter of a mile away; his aunt and uncle, Frank and Clarence Martin, soon purchased a home farther down the road. Other Johnsons and Buntons abounded in the vicinity. Like many rural families of the time, this was a close-knit extended group that enjoyed all the large events and even the smallest of celebrations together. Their relationships were firm, reflecting the mores and norms of the Johnson clan.

For Sam Johnson's new wife, the Hill Country was a shock. Rebekah Baines Johnson had been raised in a different manner. She was the daughter of a prominent Hill Country attorney, Joseph Wilson Baines. Educated and pious, the elder Baines passed on characteristic, turn-of-the-century Texas Baptist virtues to his family. His daughter attended Baylor Female College, now Mary Hardin Baylor College, in Belton, Texas, and Baylor University in Waco, Texas, working in the bookstore there after her father's own financial misfortunes made the Baines family just another failed southern family. Rebekah Baines Johnson retained the refinement of her youth, and her adaptation to life as a Hill Country farm wife was difficult and torturous. Although she had ample help from her own relatives and the surrounding Johnson clan, whom she sometimes found loud and coarse, she occasionally found the strong sense of community that pervaded their lives—at least as long as the family lived along the Pedernales River—distasteful and oppressive.¹²

In this world, the young Lyndon Johnson was both a precociously intelligent and a famously spoiled child. Indulged by his parents as the oldest child and the center of attention of a large extended family, he was a personable child who sought to "woo and win the affection" of the people around him. From birth he was his mother's favorite; she doted on him and nourished his aspirations throughout his life, although some have suggested that her affection was conditional, alternately given and withheld. Lyndon Johnson cherished the attention and affection he received, once remarking that there was more than love, that there was "a special feeling, something we felt when we looked at one another." Some have called him a "Mama's boy" as a result of this closeness—a contention enhanced by his frequent solicitations of his mother's advice even after his election to the U.S. Senate—but there was also a rougher and independent side to Johnson, which emerged during his childhood. In a frequent ploy that the adults around him perceived as a strategy to gain attention, he "ran away" so often that the family hung a bell on the porch so that Rebekah could call the men from the fields to help look for him; relatives as much as one-half a mile away would see a little figure trudging by and return him home. As likely as not, he would return on another errand known only to himself later the same day or the next. With the Junction School less than two hundred yards away, the four-year-old Lyndon was also drawn to the children who passed by the house on their way to school and by the sound of children playing in the schoolyard. He tagged along, as did thousands of other children around the nation and the world who experienced this informal kind of child care, and his mother arranged with the teacher, "Miss Katie" Deadrich, to allow him to stay. The teacher remembered him as charming and friendly although petulantly demanding and sometimes egotistical.¹³

The Junction School retained the feeling of an extended kinship network. Some of the students were related to the young Johnson in one way or another, and these relationships smoothed Johnson's transition and allowed him to play a privileged role at the school similar to the one he played within his immediate family. Instead of finding himself and his self-defined role mocked by strangers, he experienced a supportive network that reinforced the roles he played at home. Dressed in a white sailor suit, a cowboy outfit, or a red Buster Brown suit, Lyndon looked different from his farm-clothed peers; even when he wrote his name, he made it larger than the rest, using capital letters big enough to cover two blackboards. Perceived as a child with special attributes almost from birth, he was able to extend that distinction into a slightly wider setting that would have seemed vast to a four-year-old. His position on Miss Katie's lap during reading confirmed what the young Lyndon Johnson believed about himself: he was entitled to special treatment that others did not receive.

For a child of the Hill Country, of strong lineage but often limited financial resources, these were circumstances that enhanced personality traits and ties to place. As a child, Lyndon Johnson felt himself the most important of his generation, among an extended network of relatives, but not so important that he did not need to struggle for that preeminence. Biographers have attributed his basic insecurity to the birth of his siblings, who arrived regularly until the last, Lucia, was born in 1916. His attention-seeking ploys—the running away, refusing to read unless he was on Miss Katie's lap—reXected a child who sought security but found its permanent presence elusive. Although Johnson later reported unhappy memories of his childhood to biographer Doris Kearns, his experiences early in life demonstrated his essential needs and his ability to create a strategy to achieve them and bound him tightly to any community as long as he had a prominent role in it.¹⁴

After the family moved from the farm to Johnson City in 1913, a distance of approximately fifteen miles, the differences between the Johnsons and their neighbors became clear. The Johnson family stood out in the Hill Country; Sam Johnson was worldly and knowledgeable, and Rebekah Johnson was refined and educated. Sam Johnson, according to some who knew him was "a very friendly . . . very down-to-earth man, a man who attracted people and knew how to deal with people." Lyndon Johnson remembered his father as a "warm man, [who] loved people, while my mother was sort of aloof." Johnson City was a small town where everyone knew everyone else, and the successes and woes of each were part of the fabric of the community. It was an easy place to be noticed, but the price of having lofty goals was high in such a small town. The Johnsons were firmly ensconced in the economic and social leadership of the region throughout the 1910s, but their position did not shield them from critical and sometimes envious neighbors.¹⁵

As the son of a respected family, Lyndon Johnson continued to enjoy special status, but in Johnson City, he learned about life outside his immediate family. With nascent intelligence and a canny understanding of the world, the young Johnson successfully found a niche with boys older than himself. By the age of nine or ten, when his peers were playing marbles in the street, Johnson began to shine shoes in the local barber shop, the venue where local men met to talk. Some Saturday afternoons he sat reading a newspaper and discussing current events with the men who gathered at the barber shop. Like his father, he loved, in the Hill Country phrase, "politicking": the discussion of events that was common currency where men gathered, as well as a dinner-table staple in the Johnson home. At the age of nine, when his father reentered politics, again running for the state legislature, young Lyndon sat on the floor in a bedroom adjacent to his parents' bedroom and avidly listened to discussions of strategy. He also attended a session of the legislature with his father in 1918, canvassing the district on the way to and from Austin. For a boy possessed of a yearning for status and power, who intuitively understood the hierarchical relationships of the world of politics, the experience was idyllic and exciting.¹⁶

There was another side to the young Johnson, a side nurtured and promoted by his mother. Refined by Hill Country standards, Rebekah Baines Johnson was, in the words of her sister-in-law, "always dignified" and, some said, pretentious. Even Johnson City seemed primitive to her. Rebekah Johnson loved books and started Johnson City's first "literary society," where she taught local youngsters poetry and "elocution," the elusive art of public speaking. She taught the girls social skills as well, offering after-school lessons in her parlor. Rebekah Johnson seemed to have something to offer the community that no one else did: a sense of the proper, the graceful. Lyndon Johnson received the same lessons from his mother. He adored her and sought to please her, learning to spell at her knee and taking much of his sense of what was decent about the world from her.¹⁷ From his father, he learned to interact in the world of politics, to negotiate, to maneuver, and to support principles; from his mother he learned both to aspire in the world and to appreciate its nuances. In his manner, he took after his father; in the way he understood the world, he clearly followed his mother. This was a potent combination.

In the memories of those around him, the young Johnson loomed larger than life. "It might have been small politics" discussed in front of the barber shop, Albert Wierich, who knew Johnson as a boy and maintained a lifelong association with him, remembered. "But thinking about him now, he probably had in mind bigger politics than we ever give a thought at that time." Even those who disliked Johnson or who were ambivalent toward him regarded him as a special kind of product of the Hill Country. "Lyndon always had to be in on everything," Emmette Redford, a Johnson City native who later became the president of the American Political Science Association, recalled. "In any argument, Johnson had to win. He had to." This marked him as unique.¹⁸

The exhilaration of success in the town was short-lived, as Sam Johnson's financial reverses again limited the family's horizons. Fifty years after its settlement by Anglo-Americans and German immigrants, the Hill Country remained hardscrabble country, a trap for dreamers and pragmatists alike. People who saw its natural resources as a road to prosperity were sooner or later bound to come up against the hard realities of the region. Despite the overwhelming respect with which nearly everyone in the Hill Country regarded Sam Johnson, his business ventures continued to fail. He bought out his siblings' interests in the family farm on the Pedernales River in 1919 after the death of their mother, and he and his brother Tom tried to make a living raising cotton. They purchased the land in 1919, at the height of the post-World War I land boom. American agriculture had been invigorated by the war, and crop and land prices soared. The reality of the postwar era, however, saw the return to the market of crops from areas destroyed or cut off during the war, and American agriculture returned to the economic doldrums that had been characteristic of it since the end of the Civil War. The same year that Sam Johnson produced his first cotton crop, European cotton again became available, lowering the price the product fetched. In 1922, changes in the agricultural market overwhelmed this farming enterprise, and Sam Johnson and his brother busted. They sold the farm and found themselves saddled with as much as forty thousand dollars in debt, an enormous sum for the time and place.¹⁹

The demise of Sam Johnson's agricultural enterprise echoed a theme that was repeated through generations of the Bunton, Johnson, and Baines families and that was equally apparent in nearly any other Hill Country lineage. Sam Ealy Johnson, Sr., had endured the same experience, leaving a slew of debts, as had Rebekah Baines's proud family. After her father, Joseph Wilson Baines, died, her mother, formerly the wealthiest woman in the town of Blanco, was reduced to renting rooms to students at the Southwest Texas State Teachers College in San Marcos, at the foot of the Hill Country. As had their parents and grandparents, Sam and Rebekah Johnson toppled in their own esteem, if not always in the estimation of their neighbors.

There were ramifications for the Johnsons that extended beyond economic circumstances. Sam Johnson had been the well-loved incorruptible legislator who defended the interests of the people. He wanted to pave roads, build schools, and regulate utilities, all advantages for the ordinary people he championed. Long-time Texas congressman Wright Patman routinely referred to him as the "best man I ever knew."²⁰ But that status did not offer the means to earn a living. Despite a network of family, political friends, and others who cushioned the fall, the demise of his dreams in cotton was hard on Sam Johnson and damaged the family.

These were difficult times for the Johnsons. "It was hard for them to survive," Father Wunibald Schneider remembered Lyndon Johnson saying of his family. Sam Johnson had always been a harsh disciplinarian, and the changed circumstances reinforced his need for control; Lyndon Johnson remembered that his father would "take a razor strap and just whip the hell out of us." His drinking increased, and with it increased the characteristic irresponsibility of those who find solace in the muddled sentiments that emerge from a bottle of spirits. Life in the family became chaotic as Rebekah Baines Johnson repeated a pattern begun during earlier illnesses and often took to her bed in protest against her husband's excesses. On occasion, food became scarce, and the children's clothes were rarely pressed and sometimes not even laundered. One Christmas, there was nothing to eat in the house until Tom Johnson arrived with a turkey and a sack of potatoes. Lyndon Johnson saw his father's fall and resented its impact on the family. He felt an obligation to take care of his mother that he articulated from early in life, and the situation required more cooperation than any previously indulged youth could be expected to provide.²¹ When Lyndon Johnson's father was able to find work as the section foreman of a road crew on the Austin-Fredericksburg highway that he had worked so hard to fund in the legislature, this political patronage position, which eventually allowed him to employ his son, completed Sam Johnson's descent from respected leader of the community to someone of diminished status.

The new circumstances affected different members of the family in disparate ways. Sam Houston Johnson said of his father that "though he was never a wealthy man, our daddy was always able to provide for his family, sometime more lavishly than others but never bordering on poverty." Younger than Lyndon Johnson by six years, Sam Houston Johnson was preadolescent at the most difficult time in his family's life and presumably less attuned to economic hardship. Yet his recollection indicates that while life in the Johnson house was hard during this time, at least for one of the children it was not unbearable.²²

During the 1920s, the Hill Country retained only the most marginal of people, those with little capital, less education, and fewer marketable skills than their peers elsewhere. The decline in land quality and agricultural prices had been consistent since the 1870s. Only World War I briefly altered the pattern. Long before Sam Johnson's difficulties, the Hill Country had become a place of terrible drudgery, "out of the Middle Ages," one woman from the region recalled. Even for the most skilled, educated, and affluent of its residents, failure, defeat, and frustration typified the Hill Country experience. The Johnson City of the 1920s remained a place out of time. Elsewhere in the nation, particularly in urban areas, electricity was a common feature of homes, more and more of which were heated by coal and natural gas each year. In Johnson City, a part-time electrical generator provided the little electricity available. Radios were battery powered, washing machines used gasoline when they existed at all, and kerosene mantle lamps and Coleman and Aladdin gasoline lamps provided what little light anyone had as dusk fell. To stay warm, people cut wood for their fireplaces. It was a hard place that aged people quickly and made them resentful, particularly when circumstances delivered a "comeuppance" to people who challenged local norms by their pretensions to the better.

The difficulties that accompanied the financial reverses that Sam Johnson and his family endured were typical of small-town life. Such communities offer safety in the norm. People exceed local standards at their own risk, for those who choose to toe the line have made a decision to reject risk and the opportunity that accompanies it in favor of the warmth of home and homeplace. Such security is highly prized, but it can be economically, socially, and culturally limiting, a reality not lost on community members. Anyone from such a place who tries to exceed the norm, to grow beyond the psychic boundaries of the community, will feel the pull of the place; as long as they succeed, they will retain local respect. When they fail—particularly if they live in diminished circumstances within the bounds of the community, as did the Johnsons—they become figures held up for pity and sometimes contempt in a manner particular to the web of a small town. For the proud Johnson clan and their eldest son, favored since birth and accustomed to special status, the demise of the family enterprise was a brutal fate.

For Lyndon Johnson, the transformation of the family into supplicants as his adolescence began was a cruel twist. The pillars of his world were shaken. His father, whom he previously had idolized, became marginal, still meriting the respect and love of his son but sometimes enduring the scorn of his neighbors. His adored mother, the most important influence on his life, fared little better. The women of Johnson City saw her as someone who would not recognize the fate of her family and who could not take care of her own children, an attitude that was hard for her proud son to bear. At school in the country, in Johnson City, and in a preparatory academy in San Marcos for which his parents had scrimped to afford the fee, Johnson showed all the traits of adolescent rebellion. He "liked to rebel," his brother recalled, defying his parents openly at home, evincing the tyrannical authority of any youth with power but bereft of the responsibility for its application, and breaking any rule or standard held out in front of him. Even his own grandmother believed he would end up in the penitentiary. Some of his choices were typical of those made by young people. He ran with a rowdy crowd and, on more than one occasion, snuck his father's automobile out for late-night escapades. Twice he wrecked the family car. Other manifestations were blatantly offensive. Lyndon Johnson refused to haul water from the well for the family's use, a difficult and physically demanding task that fell to his mother if he could not be persuaded that it was his responsibility. This defiance made his father apoplectic. No more egregious insult could be offered in a family that required the labor of all even to approach completing the tasks necessary to run the household.²³

The combination of the loss of his family's prestige and position with his personal traits, the symbiotically linked pride and insecurity, helped make Lyndon Johnson the man he became. One biographer notes that his need for attention and his mode of ingratiating himself were not in themselves unusual; what made Lyndon Johnson unique was the way in which he approached these emotional needs, with a fervor and an intensity that were unparalleled. Johnson himself noted his own insecurity when he told Doris Kearns that "my daddy always told me that if I brushed up against the grindstone of life, I'd come away with far more polish than I could ever get at Harvard or Yale. I wanted to believe him, but somehow I never could." Another biographer sees his mother's alternately offered and withheld affection as central to this phase of Johnson's development.²⁴ The economic collapse of the family brought out in the young man an overwhelming need to succeed at any cost that manifested itself in every subsequent aspect of his life. It drove him to defy his parents and to ignore their plans for him; to work rather than to go to college; to embark on an escapade to California, where he worked as a law clerk for his cousin Tom Martin; and to assert his independence and with it his sense of self in myriad ways. Ever after Lyndon Johnson needed to prove his own worth, most of all to himself.²⁵

This intense desire to succeed at all costs is typical of those who have the intelligence and fortitude to leave declining or moribund small towns for the outside world. The people who left places such as Johnson City in the 1920s were few and far between. When they left, they had at stake not only their economic future but their status, self-esteem, and entire relationship to the world from which they came. The fierceness people such as Lyndon Johnson evinced reflected the tangible consequences of failure. If they failed, they had to return in disgrace to the places they had sought to exceed. Lyndon Johnson was well aware of the price of this kind of failure: he had seen it in the lives of his own father and mother.

The young Johnson found many ways to overcome his lack of status and personal appeal, to lead, and to move toward the success he craved. He had been a successful high school debater. When he finally went off to college after resisting it for almost three years, he created a powerful if not always well-liked persona for himself. He finagled his way into the graces of the president of Southwest Texas State Teachers' College during his first five weeks on campus, receiving a job that had not existed before his arrival on a campus where status was determined by the kind of job a student held. At the time, he had not even been formally admitted to the college, but his silky-smooth means of ingratiating himself with older people worked once again. The faculty at the college and the parents of Johnson's friends found him winning.²⁶ Johnson's success, however, came at the expense of genuine personal popularity and the respect of his peers. His complicated status on campus reflected the resentment directed toward someone who saw bigger issues and dreamed larger dreams than most of the crowd. Entwined with that resentment was a reaction to Johnson's manipulative nature. Fear of Johnson and distrust of his ways were best expressed in the sobriquet attached to him: "Bull" Johnson, which derived from what was perceived to be the value of his words.²⁷

From this Hill Country crucible, Johnson moved on to new challenges, driven by the same feelings that had propelled him out of Johnson City. Biographer Robert Caro has suggested that the "Lyndon Johnson of college years was the Lyndon Johnson who would become President. He had arrived at college that Lyndon Johnson. He came out of the Hill Country formed, shaped—into a shape so hard it would never change." This, however, belies the complicated changes that occurred in Johnson's thinking, in his ways of working with and around people, in his perspective, and in myriad other aspects of his personality and thinking.²⁸ As are most human beings, Johnson was a product of his life experiences—of his family, their values, and the extended kinship network that had saved him time and again; of the limits of the Hill Country; of the problems his father experienced; and of all the other events and circumstances that shape an individual's life. To say that in the late 1920s he was all he could become is to apply a deterministic system to human beings that ignores the growth and change that everyone experiences and from which most learn. There were patterns that persisted in his life—intrinsic core features of his personality and value system that remained constant—but Johnson's rise to power, and his eventual decision to remove himself from it, reveal a suppleness that the raw youth from Johnson City simply did not possess.

Johnson left the Hill Country as one of its people, something he grappled with until economic and political success allowed him to return home as an affluent leader. Even in San Marcos, on the edge of the Hill Country but tied to the wealthier, more humid lands east of the Balcones fault, Johnson recognized that he was marked by his upbringing. To a certain degree, he felt betrayed by his family's loss of status; to an equal degree, that loss served as motivation. "The things that you think are defeating him," Johnson once told press secretary George Reedy of Arkansas senator and Rhodes scholar William Fulbright, "are the very things that are putting him up there."²⁹ Lyndon Johnson might very well have been speaking of himself. His youth had forged in him unbreakable ties to place, but before the young Johnson could exorcice the demons of his past, he first had to triumph, return to his place of origin, and then reconcile himself with his family's past.

Johnson's experiences as a teacher began while he was still a student. His impecunious condition and extravagant spending habits at school drove him to seek a temporary teaching permit granted to teachers' college students with sophomore standing. He accepted a position teaching on the "wrong side of the tracks," in the Welhausen School in the town of Cotulla, ninety miles south of San Antonio and sixty miles from the Mexican border. As was typical in Texas from the end of Reconstruction until the 1960s, Cotulla had a segregated school system. White and Hispanic children were separated, as white and African American children were elsewhere in the nation. The "Mexican schools," as schools such as Welhausen were called, differed little from the sadly equipped "separate but equal" schools for African Americans that took more than twenty years of Supreme Court decisions and changes in federal law to dismantle. The schools were designed not to educate but to warehouse children while their parents worked. Any aspirations to better lives that children in such schools showed were routinely quashed, and in a hurry. Such schools taught Spanish-speaking children their purported "place" in mid-twentieth-
century Texas and little more.

Lyndon Johnson set out to change this in the little town of Cotulla. Approaching the education of these forgotten children with the fervor and zeal that had become characteristic of him when he thought a task was important, he accomplished the impossible: he made a difference. Unlike the five local women who made up the rest of the school staff, Johnson treated the post seriously. Appointed principal of the school, he arrived early and stayed late, provided a role model of great fervor and intensity, and injected a combination of spirit and order. He arranged for activities with other schools, set up baseball games and track meets, and cajoled parents who needed the income from every minute of their workday to take time off to drive their children to these events. Seeking to upgrade the use of English among his students, he instituted schoolwide assemblies in which students were forced to participate. Debate, declamation, and spelling bees became characteristic of Johnson's school. The children, even the ones he had to discipline, loved him for his passionate interest in their lives, as did their parents and most of the teachers who found themselves working for the precocious college student. By all accounts, no one could have done a better job than Johnson did that year in Cotulla.³⁰

Johnson's motivation at Cotulla has been described as merely the desire to receive a letter of recommendation from the superintendent to assist him in seeking his next job.³¹ This transparent explanation belies the reality of Johnson's accomplishments in the hopeless little town. Securing even an outstanding recommendation required far less effort than he put into the school and could have been as easily achieved with the ingratiating techniques Johnson so successfully practiced on President Cecil Evans at the teachers' college in San Marcos. The young Johnson clearly felt real compassion for these people, who were even poorer than those he knew in the Hill Country; when he arrived at the school, he was told that no lunch hour existed because the children did not have lunches to eat. To secure a good letter, he did not need to tutor the janitor in English, to purchase a book for him to use from his own limited funds. Nor did he need to regard the classroom and extracurricular activities with the gravity he assigned them. Cotulla touched Johnson. There in that lonely little crucible, he was a teacher of the kind immortalized in lore and memory; a link in the unending chain of inspirational teachers; and a forerunner of remarkable individuals such as Jaimé Escalante, the near legendary 1980s high school teacher who taught advanced mathematics and science to inner-city teenagers and was immortalized in the movie Stand and Deliver. Johnson shared something with the people of Cotulla. He too knew what it was like to start from behind, and he sought to convince them that they could overcome such humble beginnings with sheer hard work. This idealistic sentiment stemmed from his own insecurities and his personal feelings for the people of this little place, not from any utilitarian sense that he could rise in the world as a result of his actions there.

Cotulla also allowed Johnson to continue his role as rebel in a subtle and discreet manner. In 1920s Texas, the effort he expended on Spanish-speaking children was an affront to the hierarchical mores of his time and place. Such an effort would be seen as a waste by the community at large. Johnson's work in Cotulla, however, reflected the populist spirit imbued in all the Johnsons by Lyndon's father, the idea that people were at their core equals and that little people were entitled to the same benefits as big corporations. While this view had the sympathy of large swaths of the Texas public, in the corporate-dominated legislature and in other agencies with authority it remained anathema. By acting out this populist doctrine in what his wife later called "one of the crummiest little towns in Texas," Lyndon Johnson paid a sort of homage to the traditions of his father and his family.³²

In Cotulla, Johnson was a model teacher and administrator, but he was also a young man alone. Important in the town because of his role and status, he still had immense gaps in his personal life. His first post-Johnson City High School relationship, with Carol Davis, the daughter of an important San Marcos merchant who taught that year in Pearsall, Texas, thirty-three miles away from Cotulla, had begun to cool. Left alone, Johnson was gnawed at by his insecurities, as would be the case for even the most self-assured and self-confident twenty-year-old. He derived his sense of worth from the place and the feelings of its people toward him, engaging in the same kind of emotional manipulation that some biographers attribute to his mother. Nevertheless, he gave his all to a community that had never before experienced anything like his dedication. Cotulla and its Hispanic children were special to him because he was special to them.

Johnson's return to San Marcos after a year in Cotulla marked a change in his life. Emboldened by his ability to motivate in the classroom, he returned to campus full of ideas about politics and power. Through an organization called the White Stars—invented to counteract the power of the athlete-dominated Black Stars, which refused to have Johnson as a member—he inverted the social hierarchy of campus politics; brokered the school elections; and became a "Big Man On Campus," albeit not always a popular one. This was his first direct experience with electoral politics, but to his peers he seemed to have been born with the knowledge he brought to the process. His ability to compromise in politics first became evident in San Marcos, where his knowledge and acute sense of political processes allowed him a measure of control atypical in campus politics.³³

He soon transferred this knowledge to the realm of real politics, in effect becoming a political operative at about the same time he became a high school teacher. In July, 1930, while Johnson was still enrolled at San Marcos, he and his father attended a political barbecue and "stump speaking" outside the Central Texas town of Henly. Before the widespread ownership of radios, such political events were the primary way to reach small-town voters. Among the scheduled speakers was the Texas governor, Pat Neff. But the governor did not appear when introduced. As legend has it, just before the master of ceremonies, Texas state representative and state senate candidate Welly K. Hopkins, was about to declare a default, Sam Johnson nudged his son and sent him forward to speak on behalf of Neff.³⁴

This first public political speech had all the virtues of such spontaneous events and presumably many of its flaws. One account suggests that Johnson spoke loudly and "a little bit squeaky like an adolescent." One biographer presumes that he spoke in generalities. But from all accounts, he was a powerful speaker, possessed of oratorical style and a little bit of flair, and the audience received his words in a positive fashion. Hopkins came over to meet the young man. The two talked, and soon after Hopkins enlisted Johnson in his own campaign, giving him responsibility for Hays County, with its county seat of San Marcos, and Blanco County, Johnson's home county. In what he expected to be a tough race, Hopkins won the Democratic primary—tantamount to a general election in Texas during the first half of the twentieth century—by more than two thousand votes.³⁵

Hopkins attributed much of his success in the primary campaign to Johnson's efforts. The young man used his White Stars associates from San Marcos to pass out leaflets in every small town in the district, to stir up crowds when Hopkins spoke, and generally to advance Hopkins's election. Johnson served as the de facto campaign manager for the two counties, lining up venues such as the election-eve rally held in Old Main on the Southwest Texas State Teachers' College campus. Only Johnson, with his close ties to the notoriously apolitical President Evans, could have arranged this location. Evans, the most respected man in the area, even sat on the podium in a tacit endorsement of the candidate. Johnson "did a magnificent job for me," Hopkins remembered.³⁶

This entrée to politics suggested a rapid rise for the young Johnson. He had successfully orchestrated a campaign for a district-wide office on the force of his savvy. The word traveled quickly in Texas political circles, and Johnson became known as the boy wonder of Hill Country politics. In the general election, he helped secure the Hill Country for Edgar Witt, a candidate for lieutenant governor, after campaign manager William Kitrell thought there was no chance of victory in the area. But the realities of the Depression meant that job opportunities were scarce, and Johnson needed to earn a living. He taught briefly in Pearsall before taking a job at his Uncle George Johnson's school, Sam Houston High School, in Houston, Texas. There, with the energy he displayed in politics and teaching, he took the school's debate team to the city championship and almost pulled off an upset win in the state finals. But his real calling remained politics.³⁷

In 1931, the opportunity to exercise that calling finally appeared, and in an instant, Lyndon Johnson was on his way to Washington, D.C., to fulfill his personal quest. He went as the assistant to Richard Kleberg, himself an unlikely choice for the U.S. House of Representatives but a descendant of a line of Texas moguls. Heir to one-quarter of the immense King ranch, Kleberg was a dilettante and raconteur, a man possessed of that special conceit that belongs only to those born and bred with substantial wealth. His best political quality was his electability in an area of the state known as "Kleberg Country." Disinterested in politics, Kleberg hired Johnson as his private secretary—the position now called administrative aide—and effectively turned the office over to the young man.³⁸

From the office of an absent and disinterested congressman, Lyndon B. Johnson began to build what would become an enormous power base in American politics. Developing his practice of cultivating people in positions of power, of providing service to Texans who requested it, and of making sure that everyone knew who the affable young man contributing to their success was, Johnson fashioned the beginnings of a political empire. His willingness to help people extended beyond the limits of Kleberg's district; he offered the congressman's assistance not only to the people of his district, in places such as San Antonio, a city then labeled the "mother-in-law of the Army" because so many soldiers met their wives there, but also to people throughout the state. Johnson's oft-remarked-upon unusual political ability came into play in Washington, D.C., as it had in San Marcos and on Hopkins's and Witt's campaigns. Johnson revived a moribund organization called the "Little Congress," made up of congressional employees, and turned it into the basis of his power among congressional assistants.³⁹

Johnson inserted himself close to the heart of the New Deal, the enormous package of reforms enacted by the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the new climate, with the emphasis on government spending to prime the pump of the American economy, Congress was responsible for much patronage. Johnson's unimportant and uninterested congressman, with his attendant lack of seniority, received fifty patronage jobs to dispense. The average congressman might receive four or five; a powerful committee head could have as many as forty. With Kleberg absent, dispensing the patronage that Johnson himself created in his time in Washington, D.C., became his personal obligation and opportunity. Nor was the young man unknown at the Capitol. No less a personage than United States Postmaster General James A. Farley, the powerful personnel director of the New Deal, knew Johnson and even expressed fondness for him. In 1932, Johnson even challenged the patronage goals of Vice President John Nance "Cactus Jack" Garner and orchestrated a strategy that defeated him. Within a few years of his arrival in Washington, D.C., Lyndon Johnson had defined a role for himself in national politics.⁴⁰

He also had the good fortune to be present as the New Deal gathered momentum. It was the kind of policy that spoke to Johnson's populist roots; to the beliefs of his father, Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr.; and to the experiences of his family in the Texas Hill Country. The Depression had brutal consequences across the nation, particularly in the fourteenth Congressional District, which Kleberg and Johnson represented. Its two main industries, the military bases of San Antonio and agriculture, were hard hit by the economic catastrophe. Lyndon Johnson's drive to power was intrinsically linked to the needs of the constituency in South Texas.

Characteristically, Johnson's approach was pragmatic. Johnson persuaded Kleberg to loan him and two assistants, Gene Latimer and L. E. Jones, his former debate stars from Houston, to Maury Maverick for Maverick's 1934 campaign for the new Twentieth Congressional District seat, which had been carved out of Kleberg's district. No one more antithetical to Kleberg's views could have been found; Maverick was a utopian and—both in Texas and after his arrival in Congress—a radical. He was another in the long line of people who appealed to Johnson's ties to his roots, to his sense of what ought to occur in American society. Johnson's persuasiveness made this odd pair of positions possible, and he helped Maverick engineer a plurality in a second primary in August.⁴¹

At the same time, the list of people who knew Johnson and for whom the young congressional assistant could do something continued to grow. Dan Quill, a labor leader whom Johnson had drawn to his camp, became postmaster of San Antonio. Nueces County attorney, former Texas state senator, and noted Austin powerbroker Alvin J. Wirtz, a resident of neither the Fourteenth Congressional District where Kleberg served nor Maverick's Twentieth District, secured important appointments in Washington, D.C., with Johnson's help. Although Johnson was only a "mere" congressional assistant, he became an important contact in the capital for anyone in Texas who needed entrée into the world of national politics.⁴²

About the same time, Johnson's personal life took a new direction. Although he had had a steady girlfriend in high school, he had never been popular with women. At San Marcos, where women outnumbered men three to one, Johnson was the target of mocking contempt for his inability to get a date even after he became one of the few students with his own automobile. After the end of his relationship with Carol Davis, he apparently lacked steady female companionship for an extended period. Passing through Austin in September, 1934, however, he discreetly invited a young woman to breakfast the following day as he prepared to take an acquaintance of hers on a blind date. Although she planned to skip the breakfast, Claudia Alta "Lady Bird" Taylor was waved into the restaurant where Lyndon Johnson awaited. According to legend, he proposed marriage on the first date, and a whirlwind courtship began. They married on November 17, 1934, before Lady Bird turned twenty-two.⁴³

Lady Bird Johnson proved to be a tremendous asset for her ambitious but socially unsophisticated husband. She was a charming person, shy to a fault but imbued with the grace of southern gentility and the hospitality of Texas. She made their apartment comfortable and homey for the many friends, acquaintances, and contacts that Lyndon Johnson brought home, usually without calling ahead to warn her. Among the guests was a valuable contact who shared Lady Bird's characteristic shyness—Sam Rayburn, a powerful congressman well on his way to holding the position of Speaker of the House of Representatives. A bachelor who feared loneliness more than anything else, Rayburn was consumed with his solitude until Lyndon Johnson and his new wife began having him over, first for dinner and later for Sunday breakfast. Taciturn and grim Sam Rayburn was charmed by the Johnsons—by the sincere sweetness and shyness of Lady Bird and by the filial behavior of her husband. Over time, Lady Bird became Rayburn's favorite of the two, a reality Johnson understood and used to tug at the emotions of this solemn man. The relationship became one of Johnson's most valued, and except for a period of estrangement in 1940 and 1941, it lasted the remainder of Rayburn's life.⁴⁴

The relationship with Rayburn also helped propel Johnson out of his role as a congressional staff member and toward his next objective. Johnson had been planning his subsequent position from the day he accepted his job with Kleberg. He persuaded the congressman to put him forward as a candidate for the presidency of the Kleberg-dominated Texas College of Art and Industries—Texas A&I—in Kingsville, Texas. He was also offered a position as number two lobbyist for General Electric at the princely salary of ten thousand dollars per year. Johnson, however, was not offered the Texas A&I position, and he declined the lobbying job because he thought it would make it impossible for him to win state-wide electoral office in Texas. His sights were set on political goals.⁴⁵

With Rayburn's insistent help, Johnson landed a job as Texas state director of the new National Youth Administration (NYA), an inspiration of Eleanor Roosevelt's designed to put young people to work in public service projects. The twenty-six-year-old Johnson was a surprise choice. He was the youngest director selected among the forty-eight state programs, and he was the only one without prior administrative experience. Marshaling college friends, recipients of his patronage, and former students from Houston into a staff, he began to devise a program that would put twelve thousand young people to work across the vastness of Texas. After weeks of suggestions that failed to meet one or another of the important criteria—that the jobs be applicable statewide across the eight hundred miles of Texas and that they function in a manner that would allow 75 percent of the cost of the projects to be spent on workers' salaries—someone on the staff conceived of the idea of roadside parks. These picnic areas would have a number of functions: they would allow people a place to stop and eat at a table off the often shoulderless, narrow, two-lane roads over much of Texas; they also would improve highway safety, providing a place for drivers to pull off to sleep or relax. After the state highway department agreed to furnish land, materials, and vehicles to transport the young workers, the program met NYA salary allotment requirements. The program was a stroke of genius that created much opportunity, considerable loyalty, and a great deal of patronage that Johnson could wield.⁴⁶

The NYA was also the start of what would later become Johnson's Texas political machine. From his NYA post, Johnson was able to use the patronage he had begun to dispense as Kleberg's secretary. From there it was a small step to begin to galvanize support for a run at a congressional seat. Passing up opportunities to acquire statewide power, Johnson prepared to seek a national position. When that opportunity came with the February 23, 1937, death of Congressman James P. "Buck" Buchanan of the Tenth Congressional District, which included both Austin and the Hill Country, Johnson was more than ready.⁴⁷

He went into the campaign for the special election determined to win and with the financial backing of powerful interests in Texas. Through Alvin Wirtz, Johnson received access to Herman and George Brown. Heads of a multimillion-dollar construction company, Brown and Root, the two brothers aspired to even greater construction projects. The three businessmen needed Johnson's support for the construction of a chain of Hill Country dams—the Browns for the way in which such a project would move them up in the world of construction, Wirtz for the positive impact the dams would have on his power base in the utility industry. In the enthusiastic Johnson, they found their candidate. Despite Johnson's relative unfamiliarity to most of the large district and Herman Brown's fierce suspicion of a candidate who openly espoused New Deal doctrines, the combination of energy; of financial resources, both Lady Bird's and Wirtz's; and of sheer determination in campaigning worked. Although he lost thirty pounds of body weight in his vigorous campaigning, almost destroyed his voice, and landed in the hospital with an inflamed appendix, Johnson won the election. In a winner-take-all situation, he received the largest number of votes of any of the eight candidates but less than 30 percent of the total cast. He had galvanized rural backcountry voters of the district, and by all accounts they were responsible for his triumph.⁴⁸

The congressional seat was clearly a stepping-stone for Johnson. He had bigger plans, as well as a strategy to accomplish them. Johnson's vociferous support of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his Supreme Court-packing plan at a time when the plan was unpopular won him a photo session and a two-hundred-mile ride with the president during a Roosevelt trip to Texas. In the photograph taken at the time, Johnson and Roosevelt reach across Texas governor James "Jimmy" Allred to shake hands. Johnson later had the photograph altered to remove Allred and displayed and made famous the self-serving version of the photograph. As had many older men before him, Roosevelt quickly became fond of the new congressman. With this powerful ally, Johnson had access to the world of New Deal insiders, and he became an associate and personal friend of many of them. Johnson developed relationships in the nation's capital in the same manner that he had in San Marcos.⁴⁹

Johnson invested in this effort for at least two apparent reasons. The first was to advance himself—to have the power and status he craved and to win the respect that he feared had eluded him throughout his life. The second reason was to be a part of implementing the programs of the New Deal and, not incidentally, to bring to fruition projects that helped his constituents and his powerful sponsors. Chief among these projects during his first term in the House was the Marshall Ford Dam, later renamed the Mansfield Dam, on the lower Colorado River. The first-term congressman's influence was wide and strong enough to arrange the authorization of this major project, which helped his constituents and his political patrons alike.⁵⁰

The dam and an additional appropriation to enlarge it became the basis of Johnson's power. No less a Washington, D.C., power broker than Thomas G. "Tommy the Cork" Corcoran later remarked that Johnson's "whole world was built on that dam."⁵¹ It established him with all sides of his Central Texas constituency, assured widespread support for his election to a full two-year House term in 1938, and created the context that could permit a run at the U.S. Senate when a seat became available.

The two most important people behind Johnson were Herman Brown and Charles E. Marsh, a southwestern regional newspaper mogul, major businessman, and bankroller of legendary Texas oil wildcatter Sid Richardson. Together Brown and Marsh, both self-made men, had more than enough power to get Johnson where all three wanted him to go: to positions of more power and responsibility. Marsh exposed Johnson to the trappings of real wealth at his Virginia estate, Longlea, enticing the young congressman with the benefits of a luxurious life. At Longlea, Johnson and Marsh's paramour, Alice Glass, may have engaged in a long-running affair. The world of glitz and glitter attracted Johnson, but wealth was clearly not his sole objective. It was at Longlea, biographer Robert Caro suggests, that Johnson's aspiration to the presidency of the United States first became clear. Amid the beautiful hills of Virginia, the congressman declined a characteristic Marsh offer to allow him to purchase enough of a West Texas oil business to make Johnson a millionaire. "It would kill me politically," George Brown recalled Johnson saying. Oil interests would not have hurt Johnson in Texas. They could only have been a problem in a race for a national office.⁵²

By 1941, Johnson was ready to make a run for the Senate, and the death of Morris Sheppard, the senior U.S. senator from Texas, opened the way. Just as he had sought the seat of a deceased congressman in 1936, Johnson again sought to move up the political ladder without challenging an incumbent. In this case, he faced three candidates with statewide recognition—Governor W. Lee "Pass the Biscuits, Pappy" O'Daniel, formerly a radio entertainer; state Attorney General Gerald C. Mann; and Congressman Martin Dies, chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities—as well as a host of other oddities who paid the filing fee. Although "Pappy" O'Daniel initially demurred, Dies and Mann seemed to be genuine opponents who could beat Johnson. But Dies ran an ineffectual and lazy campaign with no statewide organization of any substance and failed to remain a serious candidate after his strong initial showing. A former football hero at Southern Methodist University, the incorruptible Mann was a perfect candidate for Texas. He had served as a pastor during law school, was handsome and clean-cut, and radiated sincerity. Mann, however, had two weaknesses: he lacked the organization and financial support that Johnson had built, and he failed to understand that spending the campaign traveling from town to town by himself or with one assistant would not get him elected. Despite early polls that placed Dies and Mann far in front of Johnson, the money and organization behind Johnson quickly changed the conditions of the race.⁵³

Then, during the week of May 15, 1941, Pappy O'Daniel announced that he would run for the Senate seat. An ironic creation of the media in a state that was still overwhelmingly rural, O'Daniel had parlayed a career in the flour business into a role as the lead radio personality in Texas. Mastering the art of deception that mass media communications allowed before the 1960s and Watergate made the press and the public cynical about the pronouncements of any public figure, O'Daniel, a shrewd businessman, was by 1937 a millionaire. When he decided to run for governor that year, pundits treated his entry into state politics as a joke. O'Daniel had not paid his poll tax and so was ineligible to vote in his first race for the governorship. But with his understanding of rural people and the media, O'Daniel touched a chord with the Texas public. His first political rally in Waco was the largest ever seen in Texas. O'Daniel won the gubernatorial election without a runoff and was reelected by an even larger plurality in 1940.⁵⁴

After O'Daniel's announcement, a fierce campaign ensued for the U.S. Senate seat. O'Daniel was a master of carnival campaigning, offering a stage show complete with hillbilly bands, theatrics, and sermon-like homilies that appealed to rural people. Johnson, who had previously scorned such tactics, now embraced them and organized his own theatrical revues, in effect seeking to "out-O'Daniel" the governor. Johnson had begun the campaign trying to look senatorial; he finished it as a showman and master political tactician in his effort to defeat the best campaigner in Texas political history.⁵⁵

The chicanery that had prevailed throughout the campaign eventually determined the winner. Johnson and his supporters had worked to nullify efforts to adjourn the Texas state legislature, preventing O'Daniel from leaving Austin to campaign. The legislature remained in session for a month after O'Daniel announced for the seat. Ten days before the election, O'Daniel had still not been out on the campaign trail. Johnson's operatives also worked to convince O'Daniel's supporters that the governor could do them more good in Austin than in Washington, D.C. Both sides bought ballot boxes, a common practice in midcentury Texas—Johnson in San Antonio and South Texas, O'Daniel in the East Texas counties that had been Martin Dies's stronghold as long as he was a viable candidate. O'Daniel supporters, with the assistance of powerful opponents who wanted the governor out of Austin, arranged for the purchase of the votes in these counties; additional votes were reported; and in the end Johnson lost by 1,311 votes.⁵⁶

The defeat must have been devastating to a man who saw his dreams so close, but Lyndon Johnson remained indefatigable. If the theft of the election made him more cynical, it also made him more determined. He retained his seat in the House, kept his close ties to the Roosevelt administration, and continued to maneuver for position when the next chance arrived. Johnson repaired the falling out he had had with Sam Rayburn, joined the military to fulfill a pledge he had made during the 1941 campaign, passed on the chance to run against Pappy O'Daniel for a full term in the Senate in 1942, moved away from the New Deal toward a brand of politics that the political powerbrokers of Texas could support, and waited impatiently for his next chance.⁵⁷

It came in 1948, when Pappy O'Daniel decided to leave the Senate. O'Daniel's successor as governor, the popular Coke Stevenson, was positioned for a run for the seat; so was Johnson. A fierce, intense campaign followed, in which Johnson was the underdog to Stevenson after the primary, losing by seventy-two thousand votes. But a runoff between the two was necessary, as Stevenson failed to garner a majority of the vote. During the campaign, Johnson invented techniques that would become typical of the postwar era. He used any available technology to get his message out; he was the consummate modern politician, traveling by helicopter to as many as ten county seats each day and addressing dozens more towns from the air with a loudspeaker. Johnson also remanufactured his political stance, moving much closer to the center of the Democratic Party than to the New Deal wing that had supported him through the 1930s. He also engaged in characteristically tough campaigning, using his allies and keeping his opponent off guard. Johnson's antiunion and anticommunist fervor put Stevenson on the defensive and made the runoff that followed Stevenson's primary victory an extremely close race.⁵⁸

The conclusion of the 1948 election remains shrouded in mystery and myth. Officially, Lyndon Johnson was elected U.S. senator by a margin of eighty-seven votes, earning him the derogatory sobriquet of "Landslide Lyndon." Those votes, delivered by South Texas political bosses, were probably fraudulent. It was clear that Johnson had learned from his experiences in 1941 that he could not depend upon an accurate accounting of votes. All of those who have written about Johnson agree that the decisive votes were stolen and that Johnson supporters held the seat through sheer political muscle at a specially convened meeting of the state Democratic Party. They disagree on the significance of the theft. Biographer Robert Caro portrays the election as a battle between good and evil, with Johnson as the corrupted opportunist and Stevenson as the true Texan, unsullied by modernity. This view, however, belies some of the more vicious aspects of Stevenson's personality: his racism, his isolationism, and his reactionary politics. Robert Dallek carefully outlines the vote augmentation of both camps. Even the sympathetic Paul Conkin agrees with the substance of the vote-stealing charges. Johnson's detractors of all political stripes have pointed to the story as evidence of the flaws they have detected in his character.

J. Evetts Haley, a historian and reactionary who in 1964 published a skewed study, A Texan Looks at Lyndon: A Study in Illegitimate Power, foreshadows Caro's approach to the 1948 election; the liberal Ronnie Dugger, editor of the Texas Observer and a confidante of Johnson during the White House years, portrays Stevenson in a far more realistic manner but comes to similar conclusions about the election. "Possession is the first nine-tenths of the law," writes Dugger, "and politics is the tenth." It was political power and its exercise that brought Lyndon B. Johnson to the U.S. Senate.⁵⁹

Reaching the Senate, Johnson, in his own mind, had finally arrived. The Senate was not the House of Representatives; Johnson was one of ninety-six rather than one of the multitudes in the House. No longer did he have to worry about ending up as an elevator operator, a fear he had expressed during his terms in Congress. In the years between 1941 and 1948, the Johnsons had become wealthy, the purchase and improvement of an Austin radio station, KTBC, contributing greatly to their economic success. Lyndon Johnson had reached the stature he had long sought.⁶⁰

Johnson threw himself into his Senate career with the same energy that had characterized his first terms as a congressman. Within two years he became Senate whip, within four minority leader, and a mere six years after he was sworn in, Lyndon Johnson became majority leader of the U.S. Senate. This meteoric rise was made more significant by virtue of the seniority system in the Senate. Johnson's rise confounded many Senate watchers, for he successfully circumvented the hierarchy of the institution. By the early 1950s, Johnson was a recognized force in the Senate; he was an up-and-coming Democratic star.

At the same time as he rose to power, Johnson perfected his role as consummate insider. Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia was the master of the Senate, and Johnson succeeded in rapidly developing a close relationship with him. Johnson also became very friendly with two other new members, Senator Robert Kerr of Oklahoma and Senator Clinton P. Anderson of New Mexico. Through Russell, he became tied to a group of approximately ten southern and western senators who provided much of the leadership and controlled most of the committees in the Senate. After he had entered this tight-knit group, the road to Senate leadership was cleared of obstacles.

Now wealthy, Johnson also sought the trappings of the office. Russell, Kerr, and Anderson were all wealthy men. Russell had a southern-style country estate. Kerr had a ranch, as did Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon and many other senators. By this time, the Johnsons had tired of Austin. The radio station did not require their day-to-day input, and when Alvin Wirtz died in 1951, there were fewer reasons for the Johnsons to live in town. Still possessed by memories of his youth and the stark beauty of the Hill Country and still driven by a need to prove himself to the flinty-hard people of his home region, Lyndon Johnson, with his wife, began to search for the right place, a "home" worthy of the man he had made himself.

This search had many implications for Johnson's life. It reflected the importance of the Hill Country to him, the significance of showing his success to the people of the place where generations of his family had failed. Johnson had exceeded the norms of Johnson City and the Hill Country; he had forged a life for himself and his family as he linked the Hill Country to the rest of the state by providing it with electricity and other necessities of twentieth-century life. By returning there to reside, Johnson meant both to locate himself in the place most important to him and to remind those who had denigrated his father, mother, and grandfather that Johnsons were and always had been people of substance. For Lyndon Baines Johnson, the pull of the Hill Country was complicated indeed, its draw uniting many variables in his life.