LYNDON JOHNSON got his name from his father's ambition. His mother wanted him named for a hero in a book; his father, who had wanted so desperately to be a lawyer, wanted him named for a lawyer. For three months after his birth on August 27, 1908, therefore, he was called only "the baby," until, as Rebekah recalled it, "one cold November morning" she refused to get up and cook breakfast until a name was agreed on.
Sam was close friends with three lawyers: Clarence Martin, Dayton Moses and W. C. Linden. "How would you like 'Clarence'?" he asked. "Not in the least," Rebekah replied. Then, she wrote, he asked,
"What do 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 smart man. … 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.
Relatives felt that naming the baby for the other side of the family would have been more appropriate. Its father, even as an infant, had had the "dark eyes, black curls and white skin"—and the large ears and heavy eyebrows—that were "a Bunton inheritance," and it was soon apparent that that inheritance had been passed on undiluted to the son. The observation Aunt Kate had made bending over Lyndon's cradle on the day he was born was repeated that same day by the baby's grandmother, Eliza Bunton Johnson; she "professed to find marked characteristics of the Buntons (her family) in the boy," Rebekah wrote. And before the day was over (for Sam, friendly and exuberant as always, waited only to see that his wife was all right before leaping onto Fritz and riding around the valley, reporting that he had a son and inviting everyone over to see him, so that people began crowding into the house before Rebekah had recovered enough strength to sit up in bed), the observation was being repeated by neighbors and by relatives who weren't Buntons. Ava, Lyndon's cousin, remembers her mother returning from the Johnson home and announcing, "He has the Bunton eye."
His parents were thrilled with the baby. When he was six months old, his father brought a photographer to the farm to take his picture, and while he went to pick up the prints a few days later, Rebekah waited eagerly. Years later, she was to recall how her husband "raised his hand holding the package as he saw me waiting on the porch and began to run. I ran to meet him and we met in the middle of the Benner pasture to exclaim rapturously over the photograph of our boy." Rebekah suggested ordering ten prints, for members of the family; Sam ordered fifty, and sent them to all his friends in the Legislature as well. While Lyndon was still very young, his mother began telling him stories—from the Bible, history and mythology—every day after lunch and at bedtime. "She taught him the alphabet from blocks before he was two; all the Mother Goose rhymes and poems from Longfellow and Tennyson at three; and when he was four he could spell many words beginning with 'Grandpa' down to 'Dan,' a favorite horse, and 'cat,' and could read." When his father carried him to a picnic at Stonewall in the Spring of 1909, neighbors hurried over to Sam—people always hurried over to Sam then—as he entered the picnic grounds, and Lyndon kept reaching out his arms to each newcomer, and trying to scramble out of Sam's arms to reach them, and everybody exclaimed over the bright-eyed baby. According to his mother, one man said, "Sam, you've got a politician there. I've never seen such a friendly baby. He's a chip off the old block. I can just see him running for office twenty-odd years from now." And neighbors remembered how Sam beamed as his boy was praised.
But Lyndon was an unusually restless baby. His mother made light of this aspect of his character in the careful phrases of the Family Album she wrote after her son became famous. "Lyndon from his earliest days possessed a highly inquisitive mind," she wrote.
He was never content long to play quietly in the yard. … He must set out to conquer that new unexplored world beyond the gate or up the lane. He … would be playing in the yard and if his mother turned away for a minute, Lyndon would toddle down the road to see "Grandpa."
But she didn't make light of it at the time. Because often, when she would get to "Grandpa's," Lyndon wouldn't be there.
Rebekah was frightened of the snakes and the other dangers that could befall a little child wandering alone. She would run first down to the Pedernales—she was most afraid that Lyndon would fall into the river—and then up to the top of a hill to look for him, and then she would ask her father-in-law to saddle a horse and find him—and she would wait anxiously until he was found. Then she would scold the little boy, and Sam, when he got home, would scold him, or, as he got older, spank him, and they would sternly forbid him to leave the yard again.
But they couldn't stop him. "Every time his mama turned her back, seems like, Lyndon would run away," his cousin Ava says. And as he grew older, his trips grew longer.
Relatives who lived a half-mile—or more—away would suddenly notice that tiny figure toddling along with grim determination—a picture of Lyndon Johnson at eighteen months is striking not only for his huge ears but for the utter maturity of his expression; the face of the child in that picture is not the face of a child at all—across the open country or up one of the long dirt tracks that branch off to the various farms from the main "roads." They would take him back to Rebekah—and the very next day, or, if Rebekah wasn't careful, the same day, the tiny figure would appear again.
Soon, a further aspect of Lyndon's "running away" became apparent. Once, at threshing time, when twenty or thirty men were working with Sam in the Johnsons' cornfields, Lyndon, then about four years old, disappeared. After searching for him for a while alone because she didn't want to disturb the men (Rebekah had learned that time was precious on threshing days), his mother summoned help—by now, Lyndon was running away so frequently that his father had hung a big bell on the front porch so Rebekah could more easily call for help in finding him—and first his father came in from the fields and then, when he couldn't find Lyndon, the other men came in and fanned out over the hills in a full-scale search. It was a search that proved unnecessary, because Lyndon was near the front gate of the house all the time, hiding in a haystack. "Everyone was looking for him for a long time, and everyone was upset, and he must have been able to hear them," recalls Jessie Lambert, the maid who was living with the Johnsons at the time, "but even though he wasn't asleep, he didn't come out for the longest time. His mother was standing right by the haystack, crying, but he didn't come out." On another occasion, he disappeared for several hours; his father located him only because Lyndon's dog, "Bigham Young," was moving around in the cornfield in which the boy had been hiding and making the tassels wave. "Why did you run away?" Sam demanded. (Lyndon replied, according to his sister, who reported this story, that "he wasn't running away. He was going to the pasture to check on his horse.") If Sam didn't know the answer to the question he asked, his relatives and maids thought they did. "He [Lyndon] wanted attention," Jessie Lambert says. "He would run away, and run away, and the minute his mother would turn her back, he would run away again, and it was all to get attention."
At school, this aspect became more noticeable still.
Lyndon got to go to school by running away. Children weren't supposed to start until the age of five, and his mother didn't want Lyndon going to the local school anyway; the "Junction School," a mile down the road that ran along the river, was only a one-room box with a roof on it, and most of the thirty pupils, scattered through eight grades, were German, so that much of the teaching—by the only teacher, a strapping teen-ager almost six feet tall, Kate Deadrich—was done in that language. Rebekah and Sam were already intending to move into Johnson City the next year so that Lyndon could go to school there. But Lyndon, at four, began running away to the Junction School every day, showing up at recess to play with the children; and, short of tying him up, which they were unwilling to do, his parents were simply unable to stop him. "He'd run off to school and they would bring him back, and he'd run off again," his Aunt Jessie Hatcher recalled. His mother was particularly frightened because the route between the farm and the school was along the river. Giving in, she asked "Miss Kate" to let him start a year early, and, the teacher recalls, "I told her one more wouldn't make any difference." Thereafter, Lyndon as President would recall, "My mother used to lead me from our house to the schoolhouse. … With a baby in her arms, she would lead me down here, afraid I would get in the river and drown. She would lead me down and turn me over to the teacher at the side door." After a few months, Sam's brother Tom decided that his seven-year-old daughter, Ava, was old enough to ride a donkey to school, and since her route led past Sam's place, she would pick Lyndon up and take him along with her.
Although he could read better than most of the other children at the school, Lyndon refused to read at all—unless Miss Kate held him on her lap in front of the class. Most of the children were a little awed by their tall teacher, but Lyndon teased her and showered her with affection. "Lyndon used to come up to me and look so shy and cute and then he'd say, 'Miss Kate, I don't likè you one bit!' I would be so shocked. Then he would laugh and say, 'I just love you!'" His mother dressed him in red Buster Brown suits or white sailor suits or in a cowboy outfit, complete to a Stetson hat, and Lyndon not only didn't object to being dressed differently from the other boys, who wore farm clothes—he insisted on it. "He wanted to stand out," Ava explains. When Miss Kate excused one of her students to use the privy out back, the student had to write his name on one of the two blackboards that flanked the back door. The other students wrote their names small; whenever Lyndon left the room, he would reach up as high as he could and scrawl his name in capital letters so huge that they took up not one but both blackboards. His schoolmates can remember today—seventy years later—that huge LYNDON B. on the left blackboard and JOHNSON on the right.
Relatives as well as schoolmates recognized this desire to get attention—to stand out. Once, he bought a little china clown as a Christmas present for an aunt, but because he didn't want his gift to be just one of many under the Christmas tree, he gave it to her weeks in advance, informing her loudly: "It cost me a dime and it's worth every penny." Trying to explain his behavior, Ava says: "He wanted attention. He wanted to be somebody."
HE WANTED MORE.
His cousin Ava would ride by the Johnson farmhouse on her donkey, Molly, to take him to school. Not only did Molly belong to her, but Ava, at seven, was three years older than Lyndon. Nevertheless, after just a few days, Lyndon began demanding that he ride in front and hold the reins—and when Ava imitates Lyndon demanding, her voice grows harsh and insistent.
"'Ah wanta ride in front!'
"'No, ah'm older, Lyndon, and it's mah donkey.'
"'No, ah'm bigger! Ah wanta ride in front! Ah wanta ride in front!' And in the front he got."
A few weeks later, Lyndon was given his own donkey, and on that donkey there was never any question who would ride in front, not even when boys older than Lyndon were riding with him. "Well," recalls his Aunt Jessie Hatcher, "there'd be four or five boys in the neighborhood, and they all came. They'd all ride that donkey. All got on the donkey, but Lyndon was in the forefront, he was the head. And he had the quirt to make the donkey go."
Furthermore, Mrs. Hatcher says, even when the boys were participating in other activities, Lyndon was still in the forefront. "Whatever they were doing, Lyndon was the head. … He was always the lead horse. Made no difference what come nor what went, he was the head of the ring."
He had to be the head—and he had to make sure everyone knew it. The adjective most frequently used to describe him in the recollections of friends and relatives is "bossy"—and their descriptions of his relationships with other children make that adjective seem too pale. Ava, who even as a girl was motherly, and who loved her little cousin (Lyndon called her Sister), nonetheless recalls how Lyndon liked meringue pie, and how another little boy at the Junction School, Hugo Klein, said he had a piece in his lunchbox, and she recalls how, during recess before lunch, while Hugo was playing outside, Lyndon ate Hugo's pie, and calmly walked out to play "with pie all over his face." And when Hugo started crying, and Ava asked Lyndon, "What have you been doing?" Lyndon replied calmly, "Ah was just hungry, Sister. And ah got me some pie."
In Johnson City, where the Johnsons moved in September, 1913, when Lyndon was five, there were more children—and Lyndon's behavior grew more striking.
He didn't want to play with children his own age. Boys much older were in school with him, and even in his grade, because some boys had missed whole years of school helping on their families' farms, and some had been very late starting. Ben Crider, whose father had said, "I ain't gonna have no educated sonofabitch in my family," had finally defied him and started the first grade at the age of fourteen. Although Ben was six years older than Lyndon and mature for his age—a big, gruff, friendly ranch boy—Lyndon small, scrawny, awkward, soon became his friend. The Crider and Johnson families had long been friends, Ben explains, "ever since Indian time," and "Lyndon took a liking to me. One thing about Lyndon—he wouldn't run with anyone his own age. He wanted to run with older people, usually about five to ten years older." And on the whole, it wasn't a case of a little boy tagging along after older boys. It was almost a case of him leading them.
"He was a very brilliant young man," Ben Crider says. "The boys his age just wasn't his class mentally." And, some of the older boys felt, neither were they. They let Lyndon play poker with them, and—his father had taught him how to play—he more than held his own. The older boys saw that he talked—and thought—faster than they did. Ben and the others stood guiltily tongue-tied when the owner of the land on which they had earlier that day illegally shot and killed a baby deer—one whose antlers had not yet grown any "points"—suddenly appeared and asked them if they had shot any deer, but Lyndon said they sure had—a big "five-pointer"—and made up an elaborate story which cooled the owner's suspicions.
It was, in fact, more a case of his insisting on leading them. When the older boys were discussing what they wanted to do that day, Lyndon always had a suggestion, and, surprisingly often, he persuaded them to go along with it. "Lyndon Johnson was a natural born leader," Ben Crider would say. "… And if he couldn't lead, he didn't care much about playing, it seemed like." "Lyndon was a good boy, but he was overpowering if he didn't get his own way," says another of the older boys, Bob Edwards. "He had a baseball, and the rest of us didn't have one. We were all very poor. None of us had a ball but him. Well, Lyndon wanted to pitch. He wasn't worth a darn as a pitcher, but if we didn't let him pitch, he'd take his ball and go home. So, yeah, we'd let him pitch."
HE DIDN'T HANG AROUND only with boys. As he grew older—nine or ten—he started to give shoeshines in Cecil Maddox's barbershop across from the new courthouse, not only, his friends believe, to earn money, but because the barbershop was the place where men gathered. "Lyndon always had to be in on everything," Emmette Redford says. "Every time someone came to town—a drummer, a politician running for something, whatever—Lyndon was there quicker than anyone could be, and invariably he was in the front row, right in front of the fellow. And, of course, the barbershop was the center of gossip and talk." The men delighted in asking Lyndon questions, because, as Stella Gliddon put it, they liked the way that "He just shot the answers right back at them." And it wasn't only boys that he tried to lead. By the time he was ten or eleven, his father, embarrassed to have a son doing such work, had made him stop giving shines, but he still spent a lot of time in the barbershop. Only one newspaper was delivered to Johnson City each day—a single copy of a daily newspaper, two or three days old, that arrived early every afternoon with the mail from Marble Falls. Lyndon always tried to be the first person in town to read that paper, so that he would know the news first, Joe Crofts recalls. "Lyndon would make a bee line from school down there to the barbershop, and he'd get up there in the [barber] chair and read that paper from cover to cover." And sitting up there in that chair, he would not only tell the customers or hangers-on in the barbershop what the news was, but would pontificate on it as well, a twelve-year-old holding court on Courthouse Square. And if one of the men disagreed with him, Lyndon would not hesitate to argue, arguing with somewhat more deference than he showed Emmette Redford, but with no less perseverance, refusing to stop arguing, attempting to win the man to his view. He wanted men as well as boys to defer to his opinions.
Trying to describe the fierce, burning ambitions that drove his father, his mother used the word "competition." Trying to describe the young Lyndon Johnson, who was starting to shoot up now into a tall, very skinny, gangling boy with long, awkwardly dangling arms, white, pale skin, black hair and piercing eyes—and who looked so much like his father that many Johnson City residents, in describing him, still say simply, "He looked like Sam"—the same word is often repeated. "Everything was competition with Lyndon," his cousin Ava says. "He had to win."
He was happiest, his relatives say—the only time he was happy, they say—when he was, in the Hill Country phrase, "politicking" with his father.
Politics was an important part of the table talk in Sam Johnson's house—just as it had been in his father's house. For Sam still believed in what he had first believed. At least one copy of a weekly Populist newspaper, the Pathfinder, was sent to Blanco County, to Sam Johnson's house. "Uncle Sam got ideas from that," Ava recalls. "I remember one was government ownership of railroads. Another was the Socialist Party. Eugene Debs. He said that it was going to be one of the leading parties in the United States and we'd better learn what it was."
Sam's children and nieces and nephews didn't have to agree with his views, his niece Ava recalls, "but they had to think. Oh my, yes. At dinner, whenever I was over there, he would throw out questions. The government ownership of railroads—we didn't have any railroads, but we had to know. He said, 'What do you think of it?' And the League of Nations—Uncle Sam believed that the League of Nations was going to end war, and we had to know about it." And after dinner, Sam would pull out his blue-backed speller and there would be spell-downs, with Lyndon and the other children lined up in front of the fireplace until they missed a word, and "We'd have arithmetic contests to see who was the fastest in mathematics." And, of course, there were Sam's after-dinner "debates." Says Stella Gliddon: "I have been in that Johnson home when he lined those kids up in front of the fireplace—even Lucia, who was just barely big enough to stand up, she could hardly talk, she was just a baby." Trying to hide his smile, Sam would say gruffly: "'Now, we're gonna have us a debate here. Now we're gonna get down to business.'"
"He was very much a father," Ava says. "He wanted us to be the best. Not only his kids, but I and my sister and brother, too, because we were his brother's kids, and we were Johnsons. He wasn't satisfied with having a bunch of Johnson kids just growing up."
Sam's eldest son was very quick at firing back answers, even if he didn't know them. "Where does snow come from?" Sam asked once. "What's it made up out of?" "It's made out of frozen ice," Lyndon piped up. Sam laughed: "Well, that's sort of right. That's sort of right."
And in politics, quite often, he did know the answer.
Emmette Redford says that Lyndon's intense interest in politics was in part due to the lack of any laboratory equipment, or so much as a single science course, in the Johnson City school. "There was no way anyone could have cultivated an interest in science even if he had wanted to, but we had first-rate history and civics teachers," he says. And, Redford says, it was in part due to the town's lack of other activities. "There were no movie houses then, no nothing. There wasn't anything in the community except the three churches and the courthouse, and Lyndon was more interested in what happened in the courthouse." But there was something in Lyndon Johnson when it came to politics that went deeper than either of these explanations. At the age of six or seven, friends recall, he would drop out of a game he had been playing with them in Courthouse Square if he heard a group of men discussing politics nearby, and would walk over and stand on the fringes of the group, listening intently. After his father re-entered politics in 1917, when Lyndon was nine, politicians, state and local, began dropping by the Johnson home for chats and strategy discussions. Usually, these were held on the porch. Behind that porch was a bedroom, with a window opening onto the porch. Lyndon would hide in the bedroom, sitting on the floor, craning upward so that his ear was almost against the window, listening. In 1918, the Governor, William P. Hobby, came to Johnson City for a Fourth of July speechmaking, and had dinner at the Johnsons'. So many local politicians were invited that the children were relegated to the kitchen. But Lyndon hid under the dining room table all through the meal to listen to the talk.
It was probably in 1918 that Sam Johnson first took Lyndon, then ten years old, to a legislative session in Austin, and thereafter he took him frequently. Doris Kearns relates Johnson telling her (and this Johnson recollection is corroborated by other sources):
I loved going with my father to the legislature. I would sit in the gallery for hours watching all the activity on the floor and then would wander around the halls trying to figure out what was going on. The only thing I loved more was going with him on the trail during his campaigns for re-election. We drove in the Model T Ford from farm to farm, up and down the valley, stopping at every door. My father would do most of the talking. He would bring the neighbors up to date on local gossip, talk about the crops and about the bills he'd introduced in the legislature, and always he'd bring along an enormous crust of homemade bread and a large jar of homemade jam. When we got tired or hungry, we'd stop by the side of the road. He sliced the bread, smeared it with jam, and split the slices with me. I'd never seen him happier. Families all along the way opened up their homes to us. If it was hot outside, we were invited in for big servings of homemade ice cream. If it was cold, we were given hot tea. Christ, sometimes I wished it could go on forever.
Sam's neighbor August Benner was running against him (largely, some people thought, because he resented Sam cutting through his pasture as a shortcut to the road) and Sam felt that although Benner was regarded as ill-tempered and slow-witted, he would be a formidable opponent because he was German, and the German voters of Gillespie County were by far the largest bloc vote in the district. Learning that about seventy related German families in a valley of one of the Pedernales' tributary creeks were all planning to vote for Benner, Sam asked a friend to go to the valley, look up the head of the German clan and "Tell him that the sitting judge ain't in good health and that lots of us are thinking that he [the head of the clan] will be succeeding the judge before too long." Returning from his errand, the friend reported that he had found the potential judge sitting on a bucket milking his cow: "His wife was in the loft throwing hay down for the cattle. I told him what you said, Sam, and he came up off that bucket like it was hot. And she nearly fell out of the loft."
Whether or not Lyndon actually heard these conversations between Sam and his friend—Lyndon says he did; the quotes are from him—he must have heard many concerning the type of political promises and arrangements that Sam made. He also remembered his father giving him many little pieces of political advice; one was, "If you can't come into a room and tell right away who is for you and who is against you, you have no business in politics." "And if Lyndon learned politics from his father, he learned it from someone who really knew what he was talking about," a friend says. "He learned it from a man who was, in his rough way, a master of politics." In politics, moreover, Sam was a winner. He never lost an election, running for the Legislature six times and winning every time. In the election against Benner, Sam won handily. Benner claimed that fraud had been involved, but his charges were not taken seriously; he did not even show up at the legislative hearing scheduled in Austin to discuss them. And to celebrate, Sam took his son the sixty miles to San Antonio, the largest city Lyndon had ever been in, where they ate tamales at the stands on the streets near the Alamo, which now housed paintings of Travis and Bowie and Crockett and the other heroes of the great battle, and also photographs of the legislators who had saved the Mission from destruction—and one of the pictures Lyndon saw there was of his father.
Sitting in the swing on the big, screened back porch of the Johnson home, Sam and Lyndon Johnson would have long conversations now. Sometimes, children who were playing in the back yard would call to Lyndon to come and join them, but when he was talking with his father, he never would. "I remember them sitting on that swing, talking away," Truman Fawcett says. "We would be playing out back, and they'd be out there talking. They looked like they were having friendly conversations. Those were the only times that I ever saw Lyndon quiet and relaxed."
As a child, he had imitated his father. Of all the outfits in which his mother dressed him, he was fondest of the one that made him look like his father; his favorite item of apparel was a scaled-down version of his father's big Stetson hat. Says Mrs. Hatcher:
He was right by the side of his daddy wherever he went. When he was little, two years old, he used to go with his daddy down to get a shave. They had to shave him, too. They put him up in that stand, and they put stuff all over his face and took the back of the razor, you know, and shaved it off. Washed his face, set him down, off he went with his daddy.
His father would sometimes bring back from Austin a printed compendium of bills, either the Congressional Record or the official Journal of the Texas House of Representatives. Once he gave Lyndon a copy; for weeks, the boy carried it everywhere with him, holding it in as conspicuous a fashion as possible.
As Lyndon grew to be eleven or twelve, the imitation became quite noticeable. Sam Johnson, always friendly, always stopping to talk with everyone he met, was very physical in conversation. The man he was talking to would feel Sam's arm around his shoulder, or Sam's hand on his arm or his lapel, and as they talked, Sam's face would bend closer and closer to his own in an onslaught of friendliness. In the words of Wright Patman, who shared a two-man desk in the Texas House Chamber with the Gentleman from Blanco County, "He would get right up to you, nose to nose, and take a firm hold." Now, back in the Legislature, Sam brought his son to Austin, bringing him into the Chamber so frequently that some legislators thought he was one of the page boys. By this time, Lyndon, six feet tall, looked very much like his father. "He was a gangling boy, very skinny," Patman recalls—and he had the same huge ears, the same big nose, the same pale skin, and the same dark eyes. When the mannerisms were added to the picture, the resemblance became remarkable. "They looked alike, they walked the same, had the same nervous mannerisms, and Lyndon clutched you like his daddy did when he talked to you," Patman says. "He was so much like his father that it was humorous to watch."
But there was a difference between father and son.
Patman, who was friends with both—he served with Sam in the Texas House and with Lyndon, for ten years, in the nation's—saw the difference in political terms. "Sam's political ambitions were limited," he says. "He didn't have any aspirations to run for Congress. He wanted only local prestige and power, and the Texas House was fine for him as his limit, because it was close to home and made him feel important." But Patman saw Sam and Lyndon only in Austin and Washington. Those who saw father and son in their home town saw the difference in human terms.
By these people, the difference is often described in terms of that conversational technique that father and son shared. Both grabbed arms and lapels, shoved faces close, but as Truman Fawcett says, in Sam Johnson's case, "there was a friendliness underneath it. Sam wouldn't try to come over you." That is not what these people say was "underneath it" in Lyndon's case. About the father, Stella Gliddon says, "His eyes were keen, but it seemed like he always had a smile—he had a happy face." About the father, Emmette Redford says, "He was always friendly—laughing and joking." About the son, Emmette Redford says: "If there was an argument, he had to win. He had to. He was an argumentative kid—if he'd differ with you, he'd hover right up against you, breathing right in your face, arguing your point with all the earnestness. … I got disgusted with him. Sometimes, I'd try to just walk away, but … he just wouldn't stop until you gave in."
Other Johnson City residents—relatives, friends and neighbors of the Johnsons—make the same distinction as Redford: Sam, they say, liked to argue; Sam's son liked to win arguments—had to win arguments. Sam wanted to discuss; Lyndon wanted to dominate.
Patman is only partially right about their ambition. Sam's may not have been as big as Lyndon's, but that may have been a function only of education: a function only of the fact that Sam hardly went to school, and Lyndon did, and that even when Lyndon was a boy, the world, through the radio particularly, was impinging more on the consciousness of the Hill Country than it had when his father was a boy; a function only of the fact that Lyndon's horizons were broader. And Sam's ambition was, in terms of the Hill Country, big enough—huge, in fact. The difference between Sam and Lyndon lay not so much in what they wanted, but in the intensity with which they wanted it.
An example that many who knew him give to illustrate what they are talking about is Lyndon and the ear-popping.
Money—cash money—was very important to Lyndon even at the age of ten and eleven, even, in fact, when he was several years younger than that.
Cash was short for almost everyone in Johnson City, and especially so for children, and any boy or girl who had a few nickels was looked up to by the other children. But Lyndon was no shorter on nickels than his playmates; as a matter of fact, he had more than most of them, for Sam was always generous with his children. "He had a lot more [money] than most of us did," Milton Barnwell says.
But he wanted still more.
Boys in Johnson City would "pop ears" then. Popping ears meant grabbing an earlobe and yanking it—hard. Generally this was done as a trick, one boy coming up behind another and taking him by surprise, for it hurt—"it hurt," says Barnwell, "a lot."
But Lyndon had very big ears [Barnwell says]. Harold Withers had more money than the other kids because his dad had a store. He used to say to Lyndon, "I'll give you five cents to pop your ears five times." Lyndon would always say yes. Harold would start. Tears would run down his [Lyndon's] face—"Ooooh, Harold, not so hard, Harold!"
"Okay, then, give me my five cents back."
And every time, Lyndon would say, "Go ahead," and he'd be all scrooged down crying, and every time Harold popped him, he'd go Ow. But he always let Harold do it. And after Harold did it five times, if he asked Lyndon if he would let him do it five more times for another five cents, Lyndon would say yes.
Says another one of the boys who would stand watching, Payne Rountree: "You would give him a nickel, and he'd stand there, and tears would come into his eyes, and he'd still stand there.
"Because he wanted that nickel."
TRYING TO EXPLAIN, Stella Gliddon says: "Let me tell you what I think was in Lyndon Johnson. First, his father was politically minded—you have to say that first. But with Lyndon, there was an incentive that was born in him to advance and keep advancing. Oh, Sam had that. More than anyone else around here. Sam had that incentive, he had it fierce. But he didn't have it anywhere near like Lyndon did."
Born in him. To the people of the Hill Country, those are the crucial words. "Don't you understand?" asks Lyndon's cousin Ava. "He was a Bunton!"