The Path to Power

by O profissional

First of the series "The Years of Lyndon Johnson"

8. The Bottom of the Heap

WITH THE CHANGE in the Johnsons' fortunes, their relationship with their son Lyndon changed as well. The change was dramatic—so dramatic that it is possible to date it.

Descriptions of Sam Johnson's relationship with his son in Austin—from fellow legislators, legislative staffers and others who saw them together there—provide two contrasting descriptions of that relationship. And the contrast is, in fact, as sharp as if there had been two Sam Johnsons in the Legislature, and hence two different sons. Some of these men vividly describe a son who idolized his father, who not only imitated him—his lapel-grabbing, his nose-to-nose conversational technique—so closely that "it was humorous to watch," but who also tried, as one legislator put it, to "stand or sit as close to his father as he could get," who, in another's words, "stuck as close to Sam as his shadow," and who, when Sam sent him on an errand, ran eagerly to obey. Others describe—just as vividly—a boy who not only refused to run errands for his father ("Whenever Sam wanted him to do something, Lyndon was always interested in doing something else") but who refused to listen to his father or to obey him, who, in fact, defied him so blatantly that one legislator says that "There wasn't a very friendly feeling between them at all. To tell you the truth, he wouldn't pay much attention to anything his father wanted him to do."

The difference in descriptions is explained by a difference in dates. The men who remember a son who loved and respected his father were those who observed the Johnsons in 1918 or 1919 or 1920—when the father was successful. Those who remember a different son were those who observed the Johnsons in 1921 or 1922 or 1923—when the father was a failure.

HAD THE LEGISLATORS visited the Johnson home, that shabby ranch in Stonewall at which the family lived "just long enough to go broke," they would have seen the contrast etched in acid.

Lyndon Johnson had been so close to his parents—imitating his father, dressing like him, talking with him, politicking with him, listening to his mother's stories, learning his alphabet and his spelling at her knee, choosing as his favorite poem "I'd Rather Be Mama's Boy." Now his father was still a father who went off to the Legislature and fought for "The People" and wouldn't take any favors from the "the interests," but he was also a father who was the laughingstock of the county. His mother still read poetry and told her children that "principles" were the important thing, and that "a lie is an abomination to the Lord," but she was also a mother who didn't iron, so that he often had to go out in rumpled clothes, and who didn't cook, so that sometimes he went to bed hungry.

And he wouldn't obey them. When Sam left on legislative or real-estate business, he would assign Lyndon various chores around the farm. Instead of doing the chores, Lyndon would parcel them out among his sisters and brother. He was a hard taskmaster with them—so "bossy" and domineering that, Wilma Fawcett says, "I had always thought I wanted to have an older brother—until I met Lyndon." If the younger children didn't do the chores, they weren't done, for Lyndon wouldn't do them; the woodbox on the back porch, which he was supposed to keep filled, would remain empty unless his mother lugged the wood herself. If his father found out what had been going on in his absence, he would lose his temper, particularly when he learned that Lucia or Sam Houston, who were, after all, little more than babies, had been doing heavy physical work, and he would spank Lyndon (he didn't spank him more frequently only because Rebekah, hating the scenes between father and son, would often conceal Lyndon's derelictions), and order him to do the chores himself. But the next time Sam left, Lyndon would again order the other children to do them. Lyndon's attitude during Sam's absences was striking; in the evenings, he would read the newspaper as his father did, and would lounge on his parents' bed to do it. It is, of course, possible to place a Freudian interpretation on his behavior toward his father and some biographers do—but one complication must be taken into account: he was as hostile, defiant and cold to his mother as to his father. Her tears could make him sit sullenly through the violin lessons she had arranged for him, but nothing could make him practice; Rebekah finally told the teacher not to bother coming again. Meals were scenes of daily conflict, for to Rebekah table manners were as important as the tablecloth she insisted on using instead of oilcloth, as one of the last remnants of her cherished gentility. Lyndon's manners now grew so bad that it was apparent to other children that he was deliberately trying to annoy his mother. He ate with loud, slurping noises, violently cramming huge spoonfuls of food into his mouth. Nothing she could do could make him stop; if he was sent away from the table, his manners would be the same when he returned. More than once, watching him eat, his mother began to cry.

His defiance of his parents was sharpest in the area they considered most important for their children: education. School was a painful experience for Lyndon during the family's time back on the ranch. The nearby Junction School, which he had attended years before, had only eight grades. For the ninth, Lyndon had to attend the school in the tiny community of Albert, four miles away; most of the children there were German, and many of the classes were taught in that language. An outsider because he spoke little German (and that with an accent the other children found funny), Lyndon was mocked because, although he was twelve years old, he still rode a donkey instead of a horse to school—in part because he was physically very awkward and hence an unsure rider, in part, possibly, because his father was by this time in no mood to give him a horse of his own. After a while Sam relented and gave him a pony, but he would always remember the humiliation; "It helped a little when my mother told me that Jesus rode into Jerusalem on an ass," he would recall. (Rebekah knew how best to appeal to her son: Lyndon's desire to be "in the forefront"—to stand out, to be somebody—was as strong as ever; about this time, Lyndon got his first pair of long pants; he arranged for a photographer to come to the ranch to record the occasion—a trip his parents could ill afford. It was at the Albert School, moreover, at about this time—the time when his father was failing on the ranch—that he first made a remark that one of his schoolmates there, Anna Itz, remembers quite vividly. A group of children was sitting under the big hackberry tree near the school during recess, Mrs. Itz says, and "All of a sudden, Lyndon looked up at the blue sky and said, 'Someday, I'm going to be President of the United States.' We hadn't been talking about politics or the Presidency or anything like that. He just came out with it." The other children laughed at him, and said they wouldn't vote for him, Mrs. Itz recalls. "He said, 'I won't need your votes.'") Lyndon would not do his homework, and he became so boisterous in school that the teacher complained to his parents.

Nine was all the grades that the Albert School had; the next year (1921, when Lyndon was thirteen), he went to school in Johnson City, boarding during the week with his Uncle Tom and Aunt Kitty. One evening, Tom came out to the ranch and told Sam that he and Kitty "couldn't handle Lyndon"; they couldn't get him to do his homework. When his teachers hinted to his frantic mother that he might not be allowed to "pass on" to the next grade, she and Sam scraped together the tuition to send him, in the Summer of 1922, to the private San Marcos Normal School, thirty miles away, to make up his work. There he spent the allowance that his hard-pressed father had expected to last him through the whole eight-week session within a week, buying candy and ice cream for other students. Hitching a ride back to Johnson City, he joked about the matter with the Gliddons, and the next issue of their paper carried the following social item:

Linden Johnson, who is attending the San Marcos Normal School, passed through Johnson City to visit his mother and ask "Dad" for another "raise" for incidental expenses.

But it was no joke to his father. Enraged, he yanked Lyndon into his car, drove him straight back to San Marcos—and left him there without giving him a penny. "He cut Lyndon off and told him never to ask him for anything again," Sam Houston says. Beneath the polite phrases of a letter his mother sent at this time to a teacher at San Marcos Normal, Flora Eckert, is a note almost of pleading for help.

Lyndon is very young, and has been considerably indulged, so finds the present situation very trying, I am sure. To be away from home and to be compelled to really study are great hardships to him. … Anything you do for our boy will be deeply appreciated by Mr. Johnson and myself, and should he require much of your time and service we should be glad to remunerate you as you think right. We are very desirous of his completing the work he had begun as it is necessary, as I am sure you realize. …

The letter has a one-line postscript testament to mother love: "Miss E—When L. is homesick please pet him a little for me." Lyndon made up the necessary work—but barely. And when he went back to Johnson City High School in the fall of 1922—his father, having sold the ranch for whatever he could get, had moved back to town—the clash of wills continued. His marks were somewhat better (mostly B's)—not because he worked harder, but because he was so much quicker and more articulate than most of the other students in the little school (there were only ninety students in its eleven grades, and many attended only when farm chores permitted) and he had developed the ability to dazzle his teachers, some of whom did not have much education themselves. As Joe Crofts recalls:

Lyndon had a very brilliant mind. In fact, I don't think Lyndon ever knew what it was to ever bring a book home. … In history, … he could run in after recess or after the lunch hour and just glance through the lesson, and he would really know more about it than his teacher. And if by some chance he couldn't, and figured that he didn't know very much about the class … he'd come up with just any number of different things and even have the teacher so interested that before you'd know it, the period had gone by, and the rest of us would sit there like a bunch of birds on a telephone line wondering what was taking place.

At home, his mother was less easy to fool, and she developed a stratagem to help her son absorb knowledge. To a reporter, years later, she confided with a smile:

Many times, I would not catch up with the fact that Lyndon was not prepared on a lesson until breakfast time of a school day. Then I would get the book and place it on the table before his father and devote the whole breakfast period to a discussion of what my son should have learned the night before, not with Lyndon but with my husband.

Of course Lyndon was too well trained to interrupt this table talk, and forced to listen, he would learn. That way, and by following him to the gate nearly every morning and telling him tales of history and geography and algebra, I could see that he was prepared for the work of the day.

But while Mrs. Johnson would indeed, in later years, "confide" the story "with a smile," smiles are not what Lyndon's siblings and friends remember of the constant struggle to get him to do his schoolwork; they remember his father shouting angrily: "That boy of yours isn't worth a damn, Rebekah! He'll never amount to anything. He'll never amount to a Goddamned thing!" And if Mrs. Johnson paints a pretty picture of following him to the gate "telling him tales," the other children recall something else that occurred near the gate; his mother, of course, insisted that Lyndon wear shoes to school, but Lyndon would kick them off as soon as he got out of the gate, and leave them lying in the dust.

Rebekah's recourse was tears. Her own mother was a tougher customer. Discovering that Lyndon's brother, assigned to milk the cow, had bulked out the yield with water from the back-yard pump, Grandmother Baines said angrily, "Bend over, Sam Houston. I'm going to teach you a good Christian lesson right here and now." When she was in residence at the Johnson home, the girls even cleaned up their room. But Lyndon, already resentful of her presence because he had hoped to be in charge during his father's absences, would not accept any "Christian lessons." Between the strict Baptist widow, who would never appear out of her room without every hair in place and her cameo pin precisely centered on her bodice, and the boy whose shoes were defiantly untied, there was, in his brother's words, a constant "battle of wills." Infuriated to see eight-year-old Sam Houston staggering under a heavy load of wood that Lyndon had assigned him to carry, Grandmother Baines would order Lyndon to bend over for a spanking, but he would defiantly dance out of her reach, or run out of the house. "More than once," Sam Houston recalls, "she told my folks and anyone else who would listen, 'That boy is going to wind up in the penitentiary—just mark my words.'"

He refused to obey his father's most direct orders: to do chores or schoolwork—or to stop using his shaving mug. Lyndon didn't need to shave yet, but he liked to show off to his friends by pretending to shave with Sam's shaving mug and ivory-handled straight razor. His father forbade him to use them, but if his father wasn't home, he would do so anyway. "No one could boss him or persuade him to do anything he didn't want to do," Sam Houston says.

In his relationship with his father, moreover, there became apparent now an unusually violent strain of competition. "There was a kind of tension between them," Sam Houston says. "Even in small, unimportant matters, they seemed to be competing." When Rebekah was ailing, she would sleep in the girls' room, and her husband would be alone in their big double bed. On cold winter nights, he would call into the boys' room, where Lyndon and Sam Houston would be sleeping in a double bed, "Sam Houston, come in here and get me warm."

"I would crawl out of bed and scramble into his room like a little puppy, snuggling my always-warm body against his," Sam Houston says. "Pretty soon he'd fall asleep and start snoring, with me right next to him, holding mighty still and afraid to squirm even a little because it might awaken him." But then, he remembers, "I'd hear Lyndon calling me: 'Sam Houston, come on back, I'm getting cold.'

"Back I'd go," Sam Houston says, "moving away from Daddy quiet as a burglar and snuggling up to my big brother." But, he says, "that might not be the end of it." Later on, "Daddy might get cold again and would call me back to his bed"—and then Lyndon would call again, his tone superficially sleepy and friendly, but with a note in it that Sam Houston knew as a note of command, and throughout the night, to avoid trouble between his father and his brother, the little boy would shuffle sleepily back and forth between their beds.

To outsmart his father, to get the better of him, Lyndon would go to considerable lengths. Once, in fact, he displayed an insight into his father's weakness, and an ability to do the planning and preparation necessary to take advantage of it and use it for his own ends, rather unusual for a fourteen-year-old boy.

During the 1923 legislative session, Sam telephoned Lyndon to come to Austin so that he could buy him a suit. Lyndon asked Milton Barnwell to drive him—but to make two trips instead of one, to take him to Austin not only on the day Sam had specified but on the day before as well. Lyndon knew that his father was planning to buy him an inexpensive seersucker suit. He wanted a more expensive model. And he had thought of a way of arranging things so that his father, concerned as he always was with appearances and anxious not to seem to appear poor, would be too embarrassed not to buy it for him.

At the store, Barnwell watched Lyndon's arrangements in awe. Selecting a cream-colored Palm Beach suit—a twenty-five-dollar suit, as Barnwell remembers it—he tried it on to make sure that it looked good on him and that there was one in his size. Then he told the salesman that when he and his father came in the next day, the salesman should pretend that he had never seen Lyndon before. And he told the salesman what to say. The next day, the boys drove back to Austin and went to the store with Sam. When Sam told the salesman he wanted to buy his son a suit, the salesman said he had one that might look nice on the young man and would the young man like to try it on? He brought out the Palm Beach suit—which of course turned out to be the right size. It was not in Sam's nature to ask to see a less expensive suit. "Sam like to have a fit," Barnwell recalls. "But he went ahead and bought Lyndon that suit."

AS THE REALITY of what had happened to him began to sink in on Sam Johnson, as he had to walk every day past stores that had cut him off, and stop and talk in the street every day with people who knew he had been cut off, his temper became more and more frayed. His mouth, day by day, pulled tighter and grimmer; his eyes, which had always been so piercing, now, often, glared defiantly back at the world. When he came home now, he would sometimes go straight into his bedroom without stopping for his old happy greeting to his children. The door of the bedroom might remain shut for hours, recalls one of his children's playmates, but "if the kids were making noise or she was having trouble with one of them, he might come storming out," and Sam Johnson in his rage, a big man with a loud, harsh voice and those glaring eyes, could be a fearsome sight to a child. "We were all afraid of Mr. Sam," another playmate, Bob Edwards, testifies. One of his daughter Rebekah's beaux refused to come in the house if Mr. Sam's car was out front. "He could say ugly things if he was angry," Louise Casparis says.

With his younger four children, Sam's anger never outlasted his wife's soft "Now, Sam, I'll take care of that." "You could see that a minute after he had said these things, he would be sorry he had said them," Louise Casparis says. His children knew it. If they were misbehaving, Louise says, Mrs. Johnson would say, "'I'll tell your father,' but that didn't scare them one bit." He was, in fact, very close to his children, particularly Sam Houston, who would get up before sunrise to have an hour alone with his father, to watch him while he shaved in the flickering light of a kerosene lamp hung over the kitchen sink, to eat the breakfast he cooked—"fried eggs, smoked ham, hominy grits or huge servings of pan-fried potatoes, all of them freely sprinkled with tabasco sauce"—and to listen to his wonderful stories, the stories Lyndon would no longer listen to. "Sitting there in the half-light of dawn, my feet not quite reaching the floor, I would listen hours on end to Daddy's stories about the Legislature in Austin, about colleagues named Sam Rayburn, Wright Patman and Jim Ferguson, that great Populist who later became Governor. Naturally, I couldn't really understand most of what he told me, but I could sense it was all very important and sometimes very funny. My daddy had a way of poking fun at even the most serious things. …"

With his older son, however, Sam's anger had a different quality. Once, Lyndon, learning that Sam Houston had, by months of diligent saving, managed to accumulate eleven dollars, suggested that his little brother—who, unlike their sisters, idolized him—"go partners" with him and buy a secondhand bicycle "together." Sam Houston was thrilled. "My favorite and only big brother—six years older than me—offering to be partners with me! Of course, I accepted." But the bike, which Lyndon chose, turned out to be the right size for Lyndon—but far too big for eight-year-old Sam Houston, whose feet couldn't even reach the pedals. Trying to ride it, he crashed. "When my daddy came home that night and heard about my accident and our partnership, he gave Lyndon a lecturing he never forgot. I had seldom seen him so angry. 'You give Sam Houston his money back,' he said in a low, threatening voice." While on that occasion, Lyndon obeyed, his defiance of his father's orders on most occasions continued, as did his refusal to do chores or schoolwork, and Sam's bitterness and frustration at his own life would often flare into rage at his eldest son. Returning home unexpectedly one day to find Lyndon, his face covered with lather, using his razor and mug against his wishes, Sam snatched the razor strop out of Lyndon's hand, marched him off to the back porch and spanked him with it. There were many spankings—at least one of which was undeserved. Irritated by Lyndon's posturing while holding court in Cecil Maddox's spare barber chair, several of the barbershop hangers-on decided to teach him a lesson. Knowing he would soon be coming, they smeared the seat of the chair with a fiery oil of mustard solution. It took only a moment to soak through the seat of Lyndon's pants, and he began first to squirm, and then, yelling, "I'm burning! I'm burning!" he jumped out of the chair and started pulling his pants down. Recalls Crofts: "He was on fire, and he began to cry and holler—we were just big ol' kids—and he got his pants down, but he didn't take them completely off, and he ran out on the sidewalk." His father, whose little real-estate office was also on Courthouse Square, "heard him hollering out there" and came running over, "and I never will forget, I always held that against Mr. Johnson, he took his belt off, and he grabbed Lyndon by the hand, and one of the pants legs came off, and ol' Lyndon was going around there, and Mr. Johnson was holding him by one hand, and every so often, why, he'd pop him one across the seat with the belt." Maddox kept trying to tell Sam what happened, but Sam was so angry he "wouldn't listen to him." When, finally, he did, he growled, "Well there isn't any kid of mine going to run up and down the street with his bare butt hanging out."

BUT SPANKING, or even a more emphatic form of corporal punishment, wasn't an unusual method of discipline in Johnson City; it was, in fact, standard, and generally accepted as such. Lyndon's friend Bob Edwards, for example, says: "My daddy had a razor strop, and he never sharpened a razor on it—he wore it out on me. My daddy had a pair of cowboy boots, and he just wore them out on the instep kicking my heinie. But he didn't do it out of meanness at all. My daddy was just trying to raise me the way his daddy raised him." And Sam Johnson's spankings were not unusually severe; quite the opposite, in fact. His car—his "T Model" Ford—had become the crux of his battle of wills with his son, who, against his repeated orders, would sneak it out of the Johnson barn at night after his parents were asleep, pushing it, often with his cousins Ava and Margaret and friends like Truman Fawcett, down the slope from the barn and out to the road so that the noise from starting it wouldn't wake them up. Not infrequently, Sam would find out the next day what had happened. Once, Lyndon's cousin Ava recalls, he and his brother Tom "came up to school, and they marched us right back over to Sam's house and out on that back porch and whipped our heinies with their razor strops." Truman, she says, had been "real scared" of Sam, but while the children were being marched along from school, "Lyndon had whispered to us: 'When he hits the first lick, scream like it's killing you, and he'll go easy.' We all hollered and screamed, and afterwards Truman whispered, 'He hardly hit me at all.' That was the way Uncle Sam was, you know. We knew we could get away with murder. Uncle Sam would never really hit anyone."

What was unusual was Lyndon's reaction to spankings. He would indeed scream—scream so loudly and hysterically and piercingly that the screams would echo from one end of the quiet little town to the other. Spankings usually occurred around dinnertime, when Sam would come home and be told about Lyndon's misdeeds by Grandmother Baines, or would see for himself that the chores hadn't been done again, and at dinner tables all over Johnson City, the conversation would suddenly be interrupted by those high-pitched yells, and people would say, "Sam's whipping Lyndon again."

Johnson City's children knew Lyndon wasn't really being hurt—some, like Truman Fawcett, because they had once been present at a "whipping," others because of physical evidence; when the boys went swimming in the buff in the Pedernales, quite often little rear ends would bear strap marks, but Lyndon's never did. "I've seen him right after we had all heard him hollering and yelling, and he wasn't hurt at all. He didn't have a bruise spot on him," says one playmate. Some adults—like the Fawcetts, who lived diagonally across the street from the Johnsons and could observe them closely—knew this, too. Their son Truman recalls that "We'd be sitting at the table and you could hear Lyndon hollering, and my parents would say, 'Oh, he's not hurting him.'" But not all adults understood—and many, ready to believe the worst of a man who "drank," would tell biographers years later that Sam had been physically brutal to Lyndon. Sitting at their dinner tables, they would say, when they heard Lyndon's cries, "Sam's been drinking again, and he's beating his boy." And families who lived outside town, and hence were out of earshot, would be notified by "Ol Miz" Spaulding, the telephone operator and a Baptist pillar, who would ring them up and report that "Sam's killing that boy again." Lyndon, in fact, sometimes seemed to be going out of his way to reinforce the impression of his father's brutality. Once, he ran out of the house to hide in a tree—and not only picked one right in Courthouse Square, where there were plenty of people around, but told them he was hiding from his father, acting terrified of Sam, begging them not to tell him where he was. "He always seemed to be trying to make people think that his father was mistreating him," Emmette Redford says.

Did he want people to know that his mother was mistreating him, too? He was constantly "borrowing" food from other families, even when there was no shortage of food in his own home. Recalls Barnwell: "We could hardly sit down to breakfast without Lyndon standing there with a cup wanting to borrow a cup of flour or a cup of sugar or some coffee. And he made such a production out of it!" He was continually going into the café saying he was hungry and there wasn't anything to eat at home—and at least once this statement surprised two boys who were sitting, unseen by Lyndon, in the rear of the café, because they had just come from the Johnson home, where they—and Lyndon—had just finished eating. "I think probably he was hungry sometimes," says one of them. "But nowhere near as often as he said he was."

Did he want people to know that his little sisters were mistreating him? He was constantly telling people how difficult it was for him to keep his house clean, particularly because his sisters wouldn't tidy up their bedroom, which was the largest room in the house—"He said they had to have a big room because they'd never keep their clothes up off the floor," Ava recalls. "He said he had to be after them all the time about how sloppy their room was"—a statement which fell somewhat strangely on the ears of people who visited the Johnsons, and who saw that Lyndon's room was by far the messiest of all.

His reaction to injury—or imagined injury—at the hands of people outside his family was just as striking. Once, when he was only ten years old, he and Clarence Redford had been fighting in the Redford front yard, rolling around in the dust, when Emmette Redford came along. Because his father was dead, Emmette says, "I regarded myself as the protector of my brothers, and I yanked them apart and picked up this little shovel that was lying there and turned Lyndon over my knee and whacked him." It was just an ordinary whack, Redford says, and he was utterly astonished by its consequence: "Lyndon let out a wail so loud I can still remember it. I can still see Lyndon. He was standing there—he had knee britches on and one leg was still up, but the other had fallen down around his ankle, and he was dirty, all covered with dust. And he stood there just screaming—you could hear him from one end of town to the other." As Lyndon grew older, the pattern of his behavior remained the same. After a male teacher spanked him and Luke Simpson for splashing water on girls in the schoolyard, Luke simply went back to playing. Lyndon raced home, crying, and burst into the house with a story of injustice and mistreatment that brought his father rushing to school for an angry confrontation with the teacher. Sometimes, he would get into fights—just ordinary scuffling and wrestling matches. In the memory of friends, he always lost—he was physically quite uncoordinated; "he threw a baseball like a girl," one classmate says—and as soon as he started losing, he would run home crying, a tall, skinny, awkward, teen-aged boy with dusty cheeks and tears sliding down them, running through the streets of that quiet little town sobbing loudly. "All anyone had to do was touch Lyndon, and he let out a wail you could hear all over town," Emmette Redford says. "He wanted attention. He wanted everyone to know someone had injured him. He wanted everyone to feel sorry for him."

His demeanor was unusual in other ways, too. Except for the extent of its isolation, Johnson City was such a typical little Texas town: a courthouse, a little bank, a cotton gin with walls and roof of dingy tin, a water tank on rickety stilts, a café beside which, at a rickety wooden table, old men in faded shirts played dominoes to fill endless hours, a few stores, not so many as a dozen, lined up along a raised wooden sidewalk on whose edge younger men sat desultorily in a row, and beneath which dogs curled up and slept. Straggling away from the courthouse and the street of stores, set down among vacant lots grown over sometimes with corn and sometimes with weeds, were small boxlike houses behind picket fences. Through its dusty streets occasional Model T's chugged and horses ambled, slowly pulling wooden wagons. But through these streets roamed one boy who wasn't typical at all. His clothes were different from the other boys' clothes—sometimes more elegant than their weekday overalls or knickers or even than their Sunday suits, sometimes outlandishly elegant for such a town; by his senior year in high school, he had acquired not only the Palm Beach suit but the only straw boater in Johnson City; on some occasions, he wore blue jeans, but wore them tucked into brightly polished boots laced up to the knee, and the shirt he wore with them was a bright yellow silk crepe de Chine, the neck of which he kept open to display either a turtleneck dickey or an ascot; to school (in whose graduation picture he is the only boy wearing a necktie) he sometimes wore, on black hair that was painstakingly pompadoured and waved, and sometimes slicked dramatically flat with Sta-comb, a dapper English tweed cap. And sometimes his clothes were less elegant than other boys'—so dirty and full of holes that even in comparison with them he looked shabby, shabbier than he had to, as if he were dressing for some deliberate effect.

When he approached other boys, he would run up to them and begin to talk, gesturing violently with his arms, grasping their lapels, putting his arm around their shoulders, shoving his face close to theirs. He would hug them—this, in the memory of his childhood companions, was a conspicuous aspect of his behavior. "He was always laying all over my brothers," says Cynthia Crider. "The thing I remember about him was how he used to hang all over people. Just hang all over them."

But it was with adults—particularly women, the housewives of Johnson City—that his behavior was most striking. He would flatter women, play up to them. Recalls Stella Gliddon: "'Miz Stella,' he would say to me, 'I love your fried chicken better than anything! Better than anything in the whole wide world!'" And when she invited him to have some, he would say, "Why, Miz Stella, I thought you'd never ask!"—say it with such expressiveness that the sentence became a byword in the Gliddon household, so that whenever Mrs. Gliddon asked her own four children if they would like something to eat, they would reply: "Why, Miz Stella, I thought you'd never ask!"

He would hug women, and kiss them. Into the voice of Professor Emmette Redford, former president of the American Political Science Association, talking at the age of seventy-two, comes, astonishingly, a definite note of jealousy when he says: "He'd put his arm around my mother and kiss her repeatedly. We used to ask, 'Mama, do you love Lyndon more than you do us?'"

The other children were almost in awe of the way Lyndon acted with adults. "He would put me to shame," Redford says. "We and the Galloways were really close, but I would be too shy to go down and visit Grandma Galloway unless my mother took me. But he'd visit Grandma Galloway. He'd hug and kiss her. He'd hug and kiss all the mothers, and the grandmothers, too. And all the women in town just loved him." And the children were in awe of the results he obtained. When Redford had caught him fighting in the dust of the Redford front yard with his brother, and had spanked him, and Lyndon had let out the "wail you could hear all over town," Red-ford's mother had appeared in the doorway—clad, he remembers, in a freshly starched white dress. She asked what had happened, and when told, said, "Well, Lyndon, I guess you'd better go home for the day." And, recalls Redford: "He stepped up to her—all dirty—and hugged her, and said, 'Oh, Miz Redford, we didn't mean any harm. Why don't you let us play?' And of course she did." She didn't even seem to mind, Redford adds, that the dust had rubbed off Lyndon's clothes onto her white dress. "My mother kept us on a pretty tight leash," he says. "But Lyndon could get whatever he wanted from her." Other children say he had the same effect on their parents. "Whenever we wanted to do something that we thought our folks wouldn't like, we'd let Lyndon do the asking," Bob Edwards says. "He could get them to let us do things that ordinarily they'd say no to."

It wasn't just the flattery and the hugging that did it, say the children who grew up with him. It was the quality that underlay his technique. The precise nature of that quality they are unable to define, but they try—hard—to make a researcher understand that it was something very rare. "You see," Truman Fawcett tries to explain, "it didn't embarrass him to just go up and talk to anybody, not like I would be embarrassed, not like anyone would be embarrassed. And the way he did it was like nothing I've ever seen. I've never seen anyone else who could put it over. But Lyndon could put it over. He'd go up to the old ladies and call them Grandma, and they'd just love him for it. He called my ma and pa 'Cousin Melissa' and 'Cousin Oscar,' and they had been all prepared not to like him, and they just loved him, too. Lyndon Johnson was a very unusual boy. He wasn't unusual in smartness. He was smart, but he wasn't smart like Emmette Redford, or like some others, either. He was unusual in this other thing."

What was the reason that he acted this way? That he screamed and sobbed over spankings that didn't hurt, and cried hunger when he wasn't hungry, and made public complaint about the sloppiness of his sisters' bedroom? What was the reason that he seemed almost to be trying to turn people against his own family? Was it, as Emmette Redford believes, because "he wanted people to feel sorry for him," to pity him? And if so, why did he want pity? Was it because, for this boy who had, from his earliest years, needed attention, needed to be somebody, needed to stand out, needed public distinction—for this boy who was now a member of an undistinguished, poor, family, and was himself awkward in athletics and only average in schoolwork—pity was now the only distinction possible?

Was it something deeper? He was the same boy, after all, who had had to ride on the front of the donkey, who had had to be at the "head of the ring," who had taken his ball and gone home if he couldn't pitch—who had needed not only attention but respect, deference; who had needed to lead, to dominate. When his parents had been respected, he had been unusually close to them, especially to the father who was a leader. He had dressed like his father, talked like his father, campaigned with his father (and wished the campaigning "could go on forever"). Did he now feel that his father, by his failure, had betrayed him? Did he act the way he did because now that his parents were looked down on, he wanted to show that he was different from them? Better than them?

What was the reason for the intensity, the feverishness, of the way he acted, the way he worked so frantically to convince people he was right in every argument, worked so frantically to ingratiate himself with them, not with some of them but with all, down to the crustiest, most unapproachable old matriarch? What was the reason that, as Clayton Stribling put it, "The more someone disliked him, the harder he'd try to be his friend"—try by fawning, by smiling, by wheedling, by hugging, by abasing himself, by doing whatever he had to do until he succeeded? What was the reason that he didn't only want his way with people, adults as well as children, not only his friends but their mothers as well, but had to have his way? Was it because of the depth of his shame, because, as Wilma Fawcett speculates, "he was embarrassed because of his father," and because of the depth of his insecurity, because he had been yanked—in an instant, it must have seemed, so rapid was his father's fall—from security into an insecurity that included continual worry about whether the very house he lived in was going to be taken away from him; because his family had been yanked in an instant not just out of public respect but into something close to contempt; because where once he himself had been able to charge more in stores than other children, now he could charge nothing at all, and had to stand watching while his friends put purchases on their parents' accounts? Lyndon Johnson understood the transformation in his father's fortunes quite clearly: "We had great ups and downs in our family," he would recall. "One year things would go just right. We'd all be riding high in Johnson City terms, so high in fact that on a scale of A-F, we'd be up there with the A's. But then two years later we'd lose it all. … We had dropped to the bottom of the heap." Was it, in short, the rapidity of the change in his life—the violence with which he was hurled from one extreme to the other—that made him act the way he did?

Or was it something deeper? Something not just in his circumstances but in his nature? Did he act this way because there was something in him—"born in him," "bred in him"—that demanded of him that he be in the A's, that demanded of him as it had demanded of his father, of his grandfather, of all that mighty Bunton line, that they be in the forefront? Lyndon Johnson's father had not, after all, been poor when little Lyndon let Harold Withers pop his ears for nickels no matter how much it hurt. Lyndon Johnson's father had not been despised when Lyndon had hidden in the haystack to get attention, written his name on the blackboard in capital letters, taken his ball and gone home—had displayed so strong a desire to be somebody, to lead. Whatever it was that made Lyndon Johnson act the way he acted—that made him try to dominate people, to get them to defer to his opinion, to get his way with them by any and every means—heredity as well as humiliation plays a role in the explanation. The transformation in his family's fortunes merely emphasized these needs in his temperament—by making it harder, almost impossibly hard, for him to satisfy them had given his efforts to satisfy them that feverish, almost frantic quality. His family's fall had added a powerful dose of insecurity and humiliation to the already powerful inherited strain that formed the base of the complex mixture that was Lyndon Johnson. In many ways, it was not what he did that made Lyndon Johnson so unusual, but the intensity with which he did it. What was it he wanted—attention? sympathy? respect? dominance? Whatever it was, he was desperate to have it.

YET HIS DESPERATION couldn't get for him whatever it was he wanted. He could make adults, particularly women, pity him, sympathize with him, let him have his way (in large part because he was desperate and they realized it; ask the women who were fondest of the gangling, awkward youth why they treated him so gently, and they all reply in almost the same words: "I felt sorry for him"). But he could not make them stop thinking of him as a Johnson—and in a small town like Johnson City, family was the significant identification. Moreover, his was a family that had, in Hill Country terms, been steeped in scandal; fifty years before, the original Johnson brothers had gone broke and left a trail of debts across the Hill Country. Now, in the hard and uncharitable opinion of the Hill Country, history was being repeated by another pair of Johnson brothers named Sam and Tom—not so much by Tom, perhaps, although he was unsuccessful in business and going broke, but certainly by Sam, who "owed everyone in town" and plenty of people in other towns besides. Truman Fawcett clearly remembers sitting on a porch with his uncle, Frank Fawcett, while Lyndon Johnson walked by; his uncle's eyes followed Lyndon down the street, and then he said, in a tone of flat finality: "He'll never amount to anything. Too much like Sam." Lyndon may not have wanted to be thought of as Sam Johnson's son, may have been desperate not to be thought of as Sam Johnson's son—but that was how he was thought of.

And if he had any doubts that this was so, they must have been erased shortly after his graduation from high school.

All during the spring of 1924, Lyndon and his classmate Kitty Clyde Ross were, their friends said, "in love." It was a spring of picnics beside the Pedernales and ice-cream-and-cake socials given by Johnson City women's clubs in honor of the six-member graduating class, and Lyndon and Kitty Clyde, a bright, pretty girl, sat together at all of them. In class, they passed notes, arranging to meet after school, and at snap parties they tried to kiss only each other. When Lyndon dropped her off at her house after an evening social, she would lean out her window and watch to make sure that he went straight home, and didn't talk to any other girl. Their classmates wondered if they would get married someday—although Lyndon wouldn't be sixteen until August (he was, the Record reported, "believed to be the youngest graduate of the school"), Kitty Clyde was a year older, and Johnson City girls married young.

But Kitty Clyde's father was E. P. Ross, "the richest man in town." He was a merchant (the Record's front page often carried a large ad for Ross' General Merchandising store), one of the merchants who was writing "Please!" on the bills he sent to Sam Johnson every month. He was, moreover, a pillar of the Methodist church and strong for Prohibition—and his views of the Johnson clan were no secret; he was known to feel that it had been very lucky for his wife, the former Mabel Chapman, that, twenty years before, her family had forbidden her to marry Sam Johnson and that she had married E. P. Ross instead. When, shortly after graduation, the principal of Johnson City High School, Arthur K. Krause, asked Ross' permission to court Kitty Clyde, he gave it—encouraged the courtship, in fact, though Krause was almost thirty. "It was unusual in those days for a girl to go with someone so much older," Ava says. "But the Rosses were so afraid Kitty Clyde was going to marry Lyndon they were glad for her to go with anybody just to break her up with him."

Kitty Clyde's parents, in fact, ordered her not to spend time with Lyndon, and made sure she didn't have much time to spend—not that she would have disobeyed them, Ava says; "in those days, in towns like Johnson City, girls didn't disobey their parents." Krause was frequently invited for dinner at the Ross home. After dinner, Kitty Clyde and Krause would go for a drive—in the Ross car, a fancy new Ford sedan, with Mr. and Mrs. Ross along as chaperones. Often, in the evenings, Lyndon would be talking or playing with friends in Courthouse Square. He would see the Ross car pass by.

His cousins Ava and Margaret saw how he felt then. Trying to cheer him up, the vivacious Margaret made up a new verse to a popular tune, to mock the fact that Krause couldn't see Kitty Clyde without her mother along, and would sing it after the Ross car had passed: "I don't like the kind of man/Does his lovin' in a Ford sedan;/'Cause you gotta see Mama every night/Or you can't see Baby at all." Quiet, shy Ava never said anything to Lyndon. But sometimes, after she had gone home, she would, she says, "cry for him."

"It was so unfair," she says. "It [the Rosses' attitude] didn't have anything to do with Lyndon. He had never done anything wrong. It was because they thought Lyndon was going to be just like Sam. And what made it even sadder was that it was history repeating itself. Sam hadn't been allowed to marry Kitty Clyde's mother. And now Sam's son wasn't allowed to marry Kitty Clyde. I was a Johnson, and it was very unfair to the Johnsons, and it was very unfair to Lyndon. And I saw how it made Lyndon feel when that big car drove by with Kitty Clyde in it with another man. And I cried for him."

Once, Ava says, Lyndon told her and Margaret that he "was working up his nerve" to ask Kitty Clyde for a date anyway—he guessed, he said, that he would ask her to go with him to the annual Johnson City-Fredericks-burg baseball game and picnic. Kitty Clyde said she'd have to ask her parents. She came back and said she wouldn't be able to go. After that, Lyndon never asked her again.

(SOME TIME THEREAFTER, Kitty Clyde and Krause broke up. Her father thereupon sent her to the University of Texas, insisting she live in the Masonic Dormitory, whose tenants were not allowed to have dates. She returned to Johnson City after college, but never dated Lyndon again, and eventually married another local boy, who her father thought had good prospects, but who worked in the Ross store until it was sold. When Lyndon became President, he invited Kitty Clyde and her husband to Washington and took them for a flight on Air Force One.)

WHAT WAS IT LIKE to grow up in Johnson City? On the surface, life was idyllic, as idyllic as the scenery in which the town was set, those rolling hills and that sapphire sky. Listening to the friends of Lyndon Johnson's youth who stayed in Johnson City, Texas, who lived out their lives there, is like reading Penrod and Sam; their description is of picnicking and "Kodaking" (taking snapshots with "Brownie" cameras by the Pedernales), of long, lazy days sitting by the river with a cane fishing pole, of swimming in that clear, icy water, of playing croquet on Doc Barnwell's front lawn, of baseball outings when all the kids in town would pile onto a flatbed truck and drive to play a team from Blanco or Marble Falls, of chatting quietly with friends in Courthouse Square as a beautiful Hill Country sunset faded in the wide sky, and twilight fell, of gentle maturing in a quiet, serene, beautiful little town. The children who stayed speak of the friendliness of the Hill Country, "where," as a local saying went, "they know when you're sick and care when you die." More than one says flatly, "There's no place else on earth that I would rather live." More than one says, of growing up there, "it was Heaven."

But, listening to the friends of Lyndon Johnson's youth who didn't stay, to those who—like Lyndon Johnson—left Johnson City, the picture takes on darker shadows.

Poverty shadows the picture. Cash money was in such short supply that Joe Crider once rode a horse twenty miles across the hills at a slow walk, gingerly holding several dozen eggs, in order to sell them—for a nickel a dozen—in Marble Falls. Dolls were a luxury in Johnson City: Joe's daughter Cynthia had only one; it had a china head, on which, "every Christmas, my mother would put a new body," and many Johnson City girls made do with corncobs wrapped in scraps of cloth. Baseballs were a luxury: Lyndon's threat to take his ball and go home was effective because sometimes his was the only ball—after Sam Johnson went broke, sometimes there was none; when there was a ball, it was usually ragged; "when someone had one, boy, we played with it until it just fell apart," Bob Edwards says. Books, even schoolbooks, were a luxury: ragged, too, because they were handed down from one class to another; there were never enough to go around. "You just can't imagine how poor people in Johnson City were," says Cynthia Crider, whose brothers were Lyndon's closest friends. "You just can't imagine how little we had." Sometimes the Criders couldn't buy enough food for their cattle and goats; they would feed them on prickly-pear cactus from which they had burned off the nettles. Sometimes they couldn't buy enough food for their children; then the entire dinner would consist of "Crider Gravy," which was nothing but flour and milk flavored with bacon drippings, on top of bread. For Christmas decorations, the Criders made paper chains out of pages from Big Chief writing pads and colored them with Crayola crayons, and they glued the pages together with the sticky "white" of eggs—because they couldn't afford a bottle of glue.

As dark as the poverty was the consciousness of poverty. The children of Johnson City were not only poor, they felt poor. "I sure did," says Louise Casparis, whose father, the town blacksmith, made fifteen cents for shoeing a horse—a three-hour job. "Many times I'd go to the store with just a dollar to spend. That wasn't enough, not to buy food for a whole family. But a lot of times that's all I'd have. I still remember going into the store with just that one dollar."

They realized, moreover, not only that they were poor—but that they were getting poorer. The Depression came early to farmers, and nowhere did it come earlier than in the Hill Country. 1924 and 1925 were years as bad as anyone could remember; the drought in 1925 was so bad that on the Dollahite farm, John Dollahite recalls, "we made no crops at all." And in the Hill Country hard times had a special significance for teen-agers. When farmers' crops didn't bring them enough cash money to pay their taxes and mortgage, they had no choice but to take the step which many of them had vowed never to take: to send their children to work "off the farm," earning cash wages—pitifully small though they were—doing day labor for other farmers. Such labor was brutal in the burning Hill Country sun. Cotton, as William Humphrey has written, "is a man-killing crop." Plowing it, pointing and holding the plow blade in the rocky ground "while the horse or the mule strains at the traces" is hard; thinning it, chopping out every other plant with a hoe, is hard, and when picking times comes,

you strap on knee-pads and a long sack of cotton duck and you are in the field stooping and crawling and pulling that sack after you before daybreak, out until dark, beneath a searing sun. After just one day of it you cannot straighten your back at night to lie in bed, and your hands, even your work-hardened hands, are raw and bleeding from the sharp-pointed hulls.

Not only men and women were working in the Hill Country in 1924 and '25. Teen-age boys and girls were out in the fields, too. And even the girls had to work like men.

The picture is shadowed not only by poverty but by fear. Johnson City teen-agers understood why they had to work. "Looking back now on those days, it seems as if everyone, just about, was worried about meeting the payments on their mortgage," one says. "I know we sure were." Not having a home—being forced to take your possessions and move, to get into your rickety car, and drive off, God knows where, with almost no money in your pocket—that was the abyss. And in 1924 and '25, many Hill Country families were on the very edge of that abyss, and their children knew it. "We had a sense of insecurity," Emmette Redford says. "With very few exceptions—very few—a sense of insecurity hung over everyone around there."

Poverty, fear—and a sense of hopelessness. For there seemed no way out of the poverty. A dentist couldn't make money in Johnson City; the only dentist had long since left (the town's dental needs were met by a traveling dentist who came through every few months). A doctor couldn't make money; Doc Barnwell was always complaining that "Half the town is walking around and I haven't been paid for [delivering] them yet." A lawyer couldn't make money. As for men who sold insurance or real estate, "I used to wonder," Redford says. "How much real estate could you sell in that country?" Most of the people in the Hill Country made their living from the land, and those teen-agers who thought about the land understood that, as Redford says, "You go ten, fifteen miles east of Austin and you begin to see black soil and prosperous cotton farms, and big houses on the farms. But there was no black soil around us. And there were no big houses. I had a feeling even as a boy: in this town, there were no opportunities."

When, moreover, Johnson City teen-agers used the phrase "No opportunities," they were talking about more than career opportunities. The lack of money was not the lack they felt most.

The roar of the Twenties was only the faintest of echoes in those vast and empty hills—a mocking echo to Hill Country farmers who read of Coolidge Prosperity and the reduction in the work week to forty-eight hours and the bright new world of mass leisure, while they themselves were still working the seven-day-a-week, dawn-to-dark schedule their fathers and grandfathers had worked; a mocking echo to Hill Country housewives who read of the myriad new labor-saving devices (washing machines, electric irons, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators) that had "freed" the housewife. Even if they had been able to afford such devices, they would not have been able to switch them on since the Hill Country was still without electricity.

America—confident, cocky, Bull Market, hip-flask, Jazz-Age America—was changing in the Twenties, changing with furious and exciting speed; even much of Texas, still geographically isolated from the rest of the country, was changing, as oil made a boomtown out of Beaumont and war-born industries stayed on to turn Houston and Dallas and even Austin into fast-growing cities. But little of the excitement managed to penetrate those hills. It was the Age of Radio; even the poor had radio; forests of antennas had sprung up on tenement-house roofs; even the rural poor had radio, which was ending the isolation of many rural areas by, in the words of historian David A. Shannon, "bringing the world" not only to "the middle-class home" but to "the tar-paper shack with an immediacy never before known. … By the middle of the decade, few people were out of earshot of the loudspeaker." But the Hill Country did not have radio; with the exception of a few crystal sets whose operators sat hunched over the needle they kept maneuvering to bring into their earphones sounds from New York almost two thousand miles away, no one in the Hill Country heard the voice which, during the Democratic National Convention of 1924, became familiar to the rest of America as it bellowed over and over, "Alabama—twenty-four votes for Underwoo—ood!" It was the Age of Movies; by the time "the boys … came trooping home" from the war in 1919, Shannon says, "the movie had set up its flickering screen in every crossroads village." But the man who wrote that had never headed west out of Austin: movies in Johnson City, shown on the whitewashed wall of the second floor of Harold Withers' "Opera House," as Harold, Jr., provided background music by playing the same scratchy phonograph record over and over, were shown very infrequently; people couldn't afford to pay the fifteen-cent admission charge too often. To the extent that the 1920's were the age of radio and the movies, and of country clubs, golf, joy-riding and cheek-to-cheek dancing—of a new mass culture—the Hill Country was not a part of the 1920's.

And the children of the Hill Country knew it. Not only were they not current on events, they knew they weren't current—and they were ashamed. During Lyndon Johnson's high-school years, the school's students held a debate on the League of Nations. They sent away to the University of Texas extension service for articles, and studied them, and the students felt they understood the subject. But, they recall, it was the only international—or national—subject they understood. "You know, you couldn't get any information out here, even if you wanted it," Louise Casparis says. "In bad weather, even the newspaper wouldn't come in—maybe for a week at a time. We were completely cut off out here. We knew about the League, but that was all we knew about. That was the pathetic thing." Truman Fawcett remembers that, during the years when Sam Johnson was still a politician, Lyndon would bring posters of the Democratic candidates for Governor and other state-wide offices around to shops and ask shopowners for permission to put them in the window. "And we had never even heard of most of them," Fawcett says. "Their names were names we had never even heard!" Says Louise Casparis: "You just would hardly understand the situation back there that we grew up in, because, you know, we had no radio, no newspapers to amount to anything—no nothing! We were just what you would call back in the woods, compared to the rest of the world."

They felt poor, they felt "back in the woods"—and they felt bored. "It was a rather drab little city," Lyndon Johnson's sister Rebekah says. Says Emmette Redford:

About all there was out there was three fundamentalist churches, a school with six rooms in it, and the courthouse. Occasionally, there would be a case for the Justice of the Peace Court, which handled traffic violations and minor offenses. And three or four times a year, the District Court, which handled the big cases then, would come into town, and would meet for a week, and the town would fill up with visiting lawyers, and the district attorney and the district judge would come in. And occasionally drummers would come in, or outside preachers for revival meetings at the churches, and in political campaigns, candidates for office would come through—not too often, though. Aside from that, the contact with the outside world was very limited. There was no movie, no form of paid entertainment whatsoever. My God, there wasn't even a café half the time. If you were a kid, you went to school five days a week. On Saturdays, everybody comes into town. The kids play with each other. On Sundays, you go to church. Now, that was about the round of life.

There seemed no way out of that round. Once there had been excitement in Blanco County, but that excitement had ended when the last Comanche had faded away to the north. In the half-century since then, the round of life had changed hardly at all. If a teen-ager wanted to see what lay ahead of him, all he had to do was look across Courthouse Square—at the old men, once youths who had stood chatting in the square as they themselves were doing now, who appeared promptly at noon every day (they had, after all, nothing else to do) and sat playing dominoes for matchsticks until it became too dark to play anymore.

And what of the unusual teen-ager, the one more interested in the outside world, more intellectually active, more ambitious or, perhaps, simply more restless than the other teen-agers in Johnson City? Few Johnson City teen-agers—no more than a handful, really—graduated even from the eleventh grade, which was the last grade in its high school. Fewer still went off to college. And of those who went to college, almost none came back to their hometown. "So what was left in Johnson City," says one who did come back, "were people who didn't have much education, and weren't much interested in current events or in the larger world. It wasn't just that we didn't have anything to read—we didn't have anyone to talk to."

And what, specifically, of the one teen-ager most interested in the outside world, the teen-ager who put up the political posters? How did he feel about living out his life in the Johnson City round? Was that last high-school spring, so idyllic on the surface, an idyll for him?

The contemporary most like Lyndon Johnson, in the opinion of Johnson City residents, was a youth three years older, Emmette Redford. "We had two boys who grew up here who became presidents," they say—and indeed Professor Redford, whose presidency was of the American Political Science Association, is the only other person who came out of Johnson City in the 1920's to achieve any substantial measure of nationwide prestige even in a limited field. What were Redford's feelings about Johnson City?

"Well," he says slowly, "I had no resentment. I liked the people out there. They were friendly, good people." He pauses, for quite a long time. Then he says, in a very different tone: "My feelings were escape, you see. It was a dull kind of life. It was boring. My God, it was boring! And there was always this feeling of insecurity, that you'd never have any of the comforts of life. And I couldn't see any way of ever obtaining any security in Johnson City. I couldn't see any way of accomplishing anything at all there. There were no opportunities in Johnson City. So my feelings were I had to get out of that town. I had to escape. I had to get out!"

Emmette Redford was a member of a family respected in Johnson City. What was it like to live in Johnson City and be a member of a ridiculed family—a family like the Johnsons?

During this period of his life, Lyndon Johnson was to say, he dreamed—over and over—the same terrible dream. In it, he was sitting alone in a small cage, "bare except for a stone bench and a pile of dark, heavy books." An old woman walked by, holding a mirror, and, catching a glimpse of himself in it, he saw that he had suddenly turned from a teen-age boy into a gnarled old man. When he pleaded with the old woman to let him out, she would instead walk away. And when he awoke, dripping with sweat, he would be muttering in the night: "I must get away. I must get away."

Many of Lyndon Johnson's "dreams" were related to interviewers for a carefully calculated effect, but this dream, real or invented, seems to reveal true feelings, for these feelings are corroborated by outside, independent sources—the recollections of people who knew him—as well as by his actions. Emmette Redford wanted to get out of Johnson City. Lyndon Johnson was desperate to get out.

HE REFUSED TO GET OUT by the road his parents had mapped for him, though. And by refusing to take that road, he gave them one of the most painful wounds it was within his power to inflict on them. They had always assumed—this couple to whom their children's education was so terribly important—that he would go to college. But now he said he wouldn't.

His mother kept trying to reason with him, telling him, in the words of Ben Crider, the older boy whom she enlisted in the struggle, that without an education "you couldn't get anywhere in life," that "she knew he had the qualifications, and she wanted him to be important, … to make good." She never, in the memory of Lyndon's friends and siblings, raised her voice or lost her temper, just kept trying to persuade him to go, telling him that he had a good brain and should work with it, instead of his hands, to get ahead, telling him that if he didn't go to college he would never learn to appreciate the beauties of literature or art, would never really learn the history in which he was so interested—kept trying to persuade him and encourage him, telling him she knew he would do well there. "Her big struggle was to get Lyndon" to go to college, Crider says—and she never gave up. Describing the struggle, Louise Casparis says: "'Hope springs eternal' was written about her." Sam at first tried to reason with him, telling him that without an education all he could look forward to was a life of physical labor. Then he flatly ordered him to go. When Lyndon flatly refused, he tried insulting him, shouting, "You don't have enough brains to take a college education!"

Neither his mother's pleading nor his father's shouting moved him, however. His need to stand out, to "be somebody," to dominate, hadn't abated; now, more than ever, his friends recall, "Lyndon was always talking big"; once, when he said he would be a Congressman one day, and Fritz Koeniger laughed, Lyndon said, "'I'll see you in Washington'—and he wasn't kidding at all." But, according to a girl who went to the only college in the Hill Country—Southwest Texas State Teachers College at San Marcos—to whom he confided some of his feelings during the summer following his graduation from high school, he was afraid he couldn't be somebody at college. Academic standards were much lower at Southwest Texas than at the University of Texas, but Lyndon was afraid they were too high for him: Johnson City High wasn't an accredited school; before a Johnson City graduate could be admitted, in fact, he had to take examinations to prove he was up to college level in his courses. Says the girl, Lyndon's cousin Elizabeth Roper Clemens: "He didn't have a full education, and he knew it." And, Mrs. Clemens says, although tuition at Southwest Texas was low—much lower than the university, for example—he would have to work while at school, "and going to school as just another poor boy—well, that wasn't something Lyndon wanted to do."

But perhaps there was something else behind Lyndon's attitude. College, the world of books, of Truth and Beauty, of the poetry his mother loved, of the ideals and abstractions so dear to his mother and father both, was the very essence of his parents' way of life—of everything important to these two people. He had seen what their way had got them. He had seen what it had got him. And he refused to go to college.

IF HE WOULDN'T go to college, his father said, he'd have to go to work.

The state was gravel-topping six miles of the highway between Johnson City and Austin with gravel from the banks of Miller Creek. First, so rocky were those banks, the gravel had to be loosened with pickaxes. Then it had to be shoveled into mule-drawn wagons. The boards that formed the beds of the wagons had been loosened, and after the mules had hauled the wagons into position on the highway, the boards would be turned so that the gravel fell through onto the road, where it was smoothed out with rakes. Only the pickaxing was easy. For what the axes loosened was not soil but that hard Hill Country rock, so that the shovelfuls that had to be lifted up into the wagons were heavy. And the wagon boards had to be turned by hand, turned with piles of rock on top of them.

The hands turning those boards—and lifting those shovels, and tugging those rakes through rock—were young hands, for most of the workers were Johnson City teen-agers. Some of the hands were callused, the hands of boys accustomed to farm work. But the hands of fifteen-year-old Lyndon Johnson weren't. Nor was Lyndon strong, or physically coordinated, or accustomed to working; one night, the foreman, Floyd Ferrell, came home and sarcastically told his wife: "That boy can't even hold a shovel." For Lyndon, the work was almost as brutal as it was for the girls working beside him; in that Summer of 1924, two dollars a day, the wage the state was paying, was precious in the Hill Country, and any pair of hands that could bring it home had to do so—"We had to work like men," says Ava (her pretty sister, Margaret, was working, too, during their school vacations; despite their mother's thriftiness, their father was on the verge of losing his farm to the bank that Summer). "That was work I'll never forget." Lyndon had always hated physical labor—Ava remembers him, at the age of no more than nine or ten, whispering to her as they and their friends picked cotton in someone's stony fields, a score of skinny little backs stooped over in the burning sun: "Boy, there's got to be a better way to make a living than this. I don't see that there's any future in this." This road work—the only work available in a drought-stricken Hill Country—was even harder than picking cotton, and Lyndon hated every minute of it. Ava remembers him tugging at a wagon board beside her and grunting, "There's got to be a better way." But he did it—rather than do what his parents wanted.

More and more frequently now, he wouldn't get up on time. Coming into his room, his father would say harshly: "C'mon, Lyndon, get up—every boy in town's got an hour's start on you. And you never will catch up." He continued to sneak the car out at night, and his father grew angrier and angrier. Then, one night, while driving a group of older boys to a bootlegger's still, he ran the car into a ditch and wrecked it, and, standing there on the lonely country road, said: "I just can't face my father."

"Money was scarce," recalls one of the boys present, "but we put in our nickels and dimes and got Lyndon enough money" so that he could run away from home; he slept in the wrecked car, in the morning hitchhiked to Austin, and from there took a bus 160 miles south to Robstown, in the cotton country near Corpus Christi on the Gulf, where his cousins, the Ropers, lived. When he arrived, his cousin Elizabeth recalls, he said that "working on that highway was just too much for him, and he wanted to find a job where he could use his brains instead of his hands."

But the only job he could find in Robstown was in a cotton gin. The Roeder & Koether Gin Company was a long, low building filled with the clank of pulleys, the roar of machine belts, the whine of the high-speed saws that cut the cotton lint away from the seeds, and the heavy thuds of the huge hydraulic pump press that hammered the cotton into bales and pounded steel belts around them. Hot as it had been out on that highway in the Hill Country sun, it was hotter inside the gin, with the Gulf Coast sun beating down on its tin roof and fires roaring under the big steam boiler. The air in the gin was so thick with the dust and lint that drifted up in clouds from the cotton as it was pounded into bales by the pump press that men working in it sometimes found themselves gasping for breath. And Lyndon, working amid the roar and the whine and the pounding that must have been very loud to a boy from the Hill Country, where the gins were tiny, almost toylike devices compared to this, was put to work—eleven hours a day—keeping the boiler supplied with wood and water. And it was explained to him that if he ever let the water run out (or if the pop-off valve for some reason failed to work, and too much steam was kept pent up inside), the boiler would explode. Several had exploded in Robstown gins that summer; he was terrified.

"The work was hot and he wanted to come home," a Johnson City friend, Fritz Koeniger, recalls, "but he didn't want to come home and be punished. So he wrote to Ben Crider, and Ben told his brother Walter to bring it up with Mr. Sam. Walter asked him: 'Have you heard anything from Lyndon, Mr. Johnson?'

"'No. His mother is worried to death about him.' (Pause.) 'And so am I.'

"'Well, Ben's got a letter from him,' Walter says. 'And he says he's working on a steam boiler down in Robstown. Those old steam boilers are mighty dangerous. The people down there won't work on those boilers.'

"Sam got up and walked down the street in a deep study. Then he swung around and walked back, and said, 'Walter, here's ten dollars for gas. You drive down there just as fast as you can, and get Lyndon, and bring him home!'"

Then Sam went home and telephoned Robstown, telling Lyndon to come home with Walter. But Lyndon wouldn't let his father know he wanted to. Pretending that he was having a good time where he was, he said he would come home only if Sam promised never to punish him for the car wreck—or even to mention it. And when his father finally agreed, Lyndon insisted that his mother come to the phone and say she had heard the promise, so that in the future he would have a witness. And thereafter, whenever Sam, angry at Lyndon, would start to bring up the car wreck, Lyndon would say, "Mama, you remember, he said he wouldn't do it"—and Rebekah would say, "Now, that's out, Sam. You promised." And Lyndon's father would always drop the subject.

Lyndon could always outsmart his father.

But if Lyndon's car accident was a topic banned from the Johnson household, Lyndon's college career was not, and conflict flared again and again as September approached. Johnson City was abuzz over the fact that five children from a single graduating class, the most in the city's history, were going to college—and the parents of the sixth felt very bad. In September, Lyndon drove to Kyle to visit the last of the original Buntons, his Great-uncle Desha, who, tended by a former slave, old Uncle Ranch, who was almost as feeble as he, was dying—on the same ranch he had founded almost sixty years before and had managed to hold on to ever since, and would be able to pass on, unencumbered by mortgage, to his sons. But if Lyndon was offered any financial assistance for his higher education, it was not sufficient to change his mind. On the day that four of his former classmates went to San Marcos to enter college—Kitty Clyde, of course, went to Austin—Lyndon went, too, in response to a direct order. But he returned to Johnson City without registering, and stood sullenly under the lash of his father's tongue. And, a week or two later, he ran away again.

THIS TIME, he ran not south but west—to California.

Four older boys, discouraged by the lack of work in Johnson City, were planning a job-hunting trip to the coast in Walter Crider's old "T-Model," which they had purchased for twenty-five dollars. When Lyndon asked his parents for permission to accompany them, Rebekah became hysterical, and Sam flatly forbade him to go. Lyndon boasted that he was going anyway. Told about the boast, Sam said, "Weeelll, I'm just gonna wait until they're all loaded up, and then I'm gonna yank him out of that car." One Wednesday in November, however, Sam heard of a farm for sale near Blanco at a cheap price, and drove down to investigate. The boys had been planning to leave that Friday, but, Lyndon's brother says, "The minute he [Sam] took off, Lyndon ran into his room, pulled his already-packed suitcase from under the bed, and quickly called his fellow travelers together. In less than ten minutes, they … zoomed out of town at close to thirty miles an hour." Returning some hours later, Sam

exploded in several different directions. I had never heard such rich, inventive language. … Cranking the phone as if it were an ice-cream machine, he called the sheriff of nearly every county between Johnson City and El Paso on the far western border of Texas, asking them to arrest his runaway son,

but for some reason no one did.

After Lyndon Johnson became President, he would frequently enthrall reporters—and biographers—with his dramatic description of this California trip, which he said he took because "it meant one less mouth for my poor daddy to feed." In a typical description, he said the five travelers had been so naive and frightened ("None of us had been off the farm for a trip longer than the road to town") that

We'd camp out along the railroad tracks at night, and always our first chore would be to dig a hole in which to bury our money. The heaviest member of our party always slept over our cache. We didn't propose to be robbed. Finally we came to a place where a hole in the ground was no longer necessary. The money we had just trickled away. When we were broke and job hunting, we separated.

He remained in California for two years, he said, and during this time,

Nothing to eat was the principal item on my food chart. That was the first time I went on a diet. Up and down the coast I tramped, washing dishes, waiting on tables, doing farm work when it was available, and always growing thinner.

When finally he returned to Johnson City—hitchhiking the entire fifteen hundred miles—he said,

The trip back home was the longest I've ever made. And the prettiest sight I ever saw in my life was my grandmother's patchwork quilt at the foot of my bed when I got home.

Lyndon Johnson's description of the trip, however, no matter how enthralling to biographers—a passage in a typical biography reads: "Johnson was barely able to survive on the grapes he picked, the dishes he washed and the cars he fixed. … [He] lived the vagabond life"—is no more accurate than the reason he gave for taking it.

Once California had been the frontier, the land of opportunity to the west, and in the Hill Country it was still thought of as the land of opportunity. "Everyone in Johnson City wanted to go to California," Louise Casparis says. "They thought you could make money out there"—and the five boys believed they were on the trail of fortune; they named their car "the Covered Wagon." Arriving in El Paso (population 74,000), they were thrilled by it because it was the first time any of them had been in a "big city." Traveling up through New Mexico and then across Arizona on plank roads, crossing the Colorado River on a ferry, they felt very much like explorers. "We had a lot of fun," Rountree says. And when they arrived in Tehachapi, California, where a number of Johnson City boys, including Lyndon's close friends Ben Crider and Fritz Koeniger, were working in a cement plant, while only two of the travelers could obtain jobs in the plant and two others did indeed pick grapes and do other farm work in the San Joaquin Valley, if Lyndon Johnson picked any grapes, he picked very few. His cousin Tom Martin, son of the well-known attorney Clarence Martin, had become a prominent attorney himself in San Bernardino, and what Johnson actually did as soon as he arrived in California was to telephone Martin and ask if he could work as a clerk in his law office. Martin, after calling the Johnsons and obtaining their consent, agreed. He drove to Tehachapi to pick Lyndon up and took him straight to the best men's shop in San Bernardino, where he bought him two expensive suits, and then brought him to his home, a four-bedroom ranch house. And what Johnson actually did, from beginning to end of his fabled stay in California, was not tramp up and down the coast, "with nothing to eat," "washing dishes, waiting on tables, doing farm work," but work in his cousin's paneled office and live in his cousin's comfortable home.

YET IF THERE WAS no poverty or hunger on the trip, there were terrors nonetheless.

Martin had given Johnson hope: he promised to make him a lawyer. In California as in Texas, he explained, admission to the bar required passing a written examination, which he felt—and Lyndon said he agreed—Lyndon wouldn't be able to pass, even after studying law in Martin's office; not without more education than had been provided at Johnson City High. In neighboring Nevada, however, no written examination was required, and the oral examinations were very informal, especially when the candidate came recommended by a prominent attorney. Martin was friends with several prominent attorneys in Nevada, he said, and if Lyndon studied law in his office—no more than a few months would be needed—he would arrange with one of his friends to have Lyndon admitted to the Nevada bar. Practicing in Nevada wouldn't be a good idea, Martin said; that state was still sparsely settled and rather impoverished. But once he was a lawyer in Nevada, Johnson could be admitted to the California bar under a provision which made such admission all but automatic for any lawyer from another state. And as soon as he was admitted, Martin would take him into his own profitable practice.

To Lyndon, this seemed a chance—his first real chance—to be someone without bowing to his parents' wishes and going to college. Fritz Koeniger was rooming with Lyndon, who had persuaded Tom to let Koeniger work as a clerk in his office, and, Koeniger says, "Lyndon wanted to be a lawyer, wanted it very badly." He threw himself into his work with an energy he had never displayed before. If at home he had had to be shouted out of bed, now he jumped up and dressed in an almost frantic haste—so anxious to get to work, in fact, that he developed a habit Koeniger had never heard of: instead of untying his necktie at night, which would have required him to spend half a minute or so retying it in the morning, Lyndon would loosen the knot enough to pull it over his head and hang it, still tied, on a doorknob, so that he could just pull it over his head and tighten the knot in the morning. And when he got to the office, he not only raced to do whatever work Martin assigned him, but in every spare minute bent over Martin's big lawbooks with a fierce concentration. "He had always been ambitious, even back in Johnson City," Koeniger says, but there was a new level of intensity about that ambition now. "He wanted to get ahead in the world, wanted to be something, and he wanted it so bad that he was aggressive," Koeniger says. "He was very aggressive." Martin, as renowned an orator as his father, was active in Democratic politics in San Bernardino, and had been invited to speak at a Labor Day picnic. But the night before, he, Lyndon and Koeniger had driven over to Los Angeles to a party for two Johnson City newlyweds who had come to California, and they had slept over. As soon as they started driving to San Bernardino the next morning, they saw that the holiday traffic was so heavy that they might not get to the picnic on time. The road had only two lanes, one in each direction, and both lanes were crowded, so that Lyndon, who was driving, had to get cars in his lane to pull off to the side of the road if he wanted to pass them. And the horn on Martin's car didn't work. "And then," Koeniger says, "and this is what I've thought of many times to show how aggressive Lyndon was—he'd pull right up behind some car and bang the side of his door, just smash it—hard—with his open palm so it sounded like a crash, almost, over and over until they'd pull over. Chauffeur-driven cars, some of them. Rich people out for a holiday. But that long arm would just reach out the window and just smash and smash. And the other car would swerve over and we'd go by and they'd glare at us. I wouldn't have done that, but Lyndon was just determined to get there on time." He did—they arrived just as the master of ceremonies was asking, "Is the Honorable Thomas J. Martin in the audience? He is scheduled to speak at this time." Martin shouted up, "Here I am!" Koeniger was never to forget that long arm beating—smashing on the car door.

For a few months, Lyndon's hopes seemed on the way to realization. Martin's practice was booming. He had impressed Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., and did legal work for him, and he also did a lot of divorce work, some for movie actresses from whom he received fees that sounded wonderfully large to the two Hill Country youths. He had a knack for publicity—once, recalls Koeniger, he "saved up" his divorce cases for several weeks, and then gave them all to his two "assistants" in a bunch; "Lyndon and I took them down and filed them in the courthouse all at once, and we got a big headline in the San Bernardino Sun because it was the most divorce cases ever filed in one day." And Lyndon was doing more and more of the paperwork in the office, and, Martin said, making good progress in his law reading.

But there was more than one facet to Martin's character. He had blighted a brilliant career in Texas before coming to California. Elected to the Legislature at twenty-one, he had resigned to enlist (it was his seat that Sam took in the special election of 1917), and returned as a war hero with a lieutenancy and a silver star, awarded, the citation read, for his bravery in going "into the front line, which was under severe artillery and machine gun fire, in order to encourage … his regiment." He was named police chief of San Antonio, and had been nominated for district attorney when he became involved in a series of escapades (on one occasion, drunk, he and some friends drove around the city shooting out streetlights). He resigned and left town while a grand jury was considering an indictment against him. When, during the summer of 1925, his wife, Olga, took their little son back to Texas for a visit, "she hadn't more than left San Bernardino on the train" when Martin organized a "party" that was to go on ("more or less continuously," Koeniger says) for more than two months.

The key participants were Martin and his actress girlfriend, Lottie. Martin had, in Koeniger's words, a "great capacity" for Gordon's gin, and a bootlegger client—whom he had been keeping out of jail for years—to supply it. "Any time you need anything, just call," the bootlegger told the two youths, and, on Martin's behalf, they called frequently during the ensuing two months, during all of which, Koeniger says, Martin remained "pretty much drunk."

While present at the party—it took place, after all, at the house in which they were living—Lyndon and Koeniger were more spectators than participants. They each had a "girlfriend," but only to have someone to go to the party with; Lyndon's was Martin's secretary, who would come over from the office with him; their relationship was platonic. What the two young men mainly did that summer—Lyndon with feverish earnestness—was try to hold Martin's law practice together, for, with the onset of the "party," Martin completely abandoned it.

At first, the task was fun. When a client telephoned, Koeniger says, he or Lyndon would in turn telephone Martin, "and he'd tell us what to tell the client, and to cover up for him not being there." When Martin was too much under the weather to be of assistance, they would decide themselves what "legal advice" to give—"Lyndon and I were practically running the office."

But it wasn't fun for long. "We had to pay filing fees and other expenses that lawyers have," Koeniger explains. "And we had to pay the office rent. Several times Lyndon mentioned to Tom, 'We've got to raise some money.'" The first few times, Martin gave him some, but then he grew evasive, and his two clerks realized he no longer had any to give. Lyndon and Koeniger had never been on salary—"we had just kind of been sharing with Tom on anything that came in." They paid some filing fees themselves, and then some of the back rent—and found themselves, Koeniger says, "flat broke." And the landlord began coming around to demand the rest of the rent. Then they learned that a mortgage payment was coming due on Martin's house. Lyndon Johnson, who had for years watched his father, broke, worry about losing his home, realized with a start that he was in the same position. And Lyndon had an additional worry. He suddenly realized that in advising clients when Martin was unable to, he had in fact been practicing law without a license. If one of the clients found out, he could be arrested. He could go to jail! And several clients for whom legal papers hadn't been filed as they had expected—because there was no money to pay the filing fees—were beginning to ask suspiciously what was going on. Whether or not jail was a real possibility, it loomed very real indeed for the two unsophisticated youths. Lyndon was terrified—they both were. Years later, with real feeling in his voice, Koeniger would say: "This was a terrible experience."

And then Lyndon Johnson found out that he wasn't going to be a lawyer after all. In assuring him that he would be able to obtain a Nevada license, Martin had overlooked the fact that Nevada had an age requirement; a lawyer had to be at least twenty-one. In this summer of 1925, Lyndon was only seventeen; he would have to wait four years! Koeniger isn't sure whether or not Lyndon had known this earlier, but he is sure—for he remembers his friend's shock and dismay when he found it out—that he hadn't known about another requirement. Martin had assured him that once he obtained a Nevada license, it would be easy for him to obtain a California license. California law, however, required that such reciprocal licenses go to attorneys who had been practicing in another state for at least three years. It wouldn't be four years before Lyndon could practice in California—it would be seven! And at the same time that Lyndon learned this dismaying fact, Koeniger says, he learned another one: Nevada was in the process of tightening up its previously slack requirements for obtaining a license to practice law; it was going to be much more difficult to obtain one without a college degree, so difficult that it might be all but impossible to obtain one with only a Johnson City High School education.

In September, 1925, Martin received word that his wife was on her way back from Texas, driving back with his father, Clarence Martin. "When we got the word that Olga was coming home—of course Lottie understood that; no trouble there—Tom said, 'Now, you take the car and take Lottie back to Hollywood, and Lyndon and I will clean up. We've got to remove any trace of any woman being here.' Olga never did find out, and when she came back, Tom said, 'Now, boys, we're going to straighten up and practice law.'" But the young men had been too scared. "We hadn't wanted to desert Tom, but we had resolved that when Olga came back, we'd leave," Koeniger says. "After this terrible experience, we had resolved that we didn't want to go on any more." As soon as Olga arrived, they left. Koeniger took the first job he was offered—in a box-making factory in Clovis—and couldn't leave San Bernardino fast enough, so thoroughly frightened had he been. And when, a week later, Clarence Martin started driving back to Texas, Lyndon went with him. In October or November, 1925—less than a year, not two years as he later said—after he had run away from Johnson City, Lyndon Johnson came back home. Just as his stay in California was not at all as he described it, neither was his trip back. He said he hitchhiked home; in fact, he was driven to his front door in Clarence Martin's big Buick.

But coming back, while it may have been in luxury, was still coming back. Lyndon Johnson had gone to California in the hope of finding a way to achieve the security and respect he wanted without following the course laid out by the parents with whom he was in such violent conflict. For a few months, sitting behind Tom Martin's big desk in that paneled law office, acting like a lawyer—believing, because of Martin's promise to him, that he would be a lawyer, would be one, moreover, without having to go to college as his parents wanted—he had been sure that he had found the way. He had been given hope. Now he had had to come back. The hopes had been smashed. Before he went to California, Stella Gliddon says, he had been over at her house almost every day. Now she heard he was back, but for some weeks she never saw him. And then, when he finally came around again, she says, "I saw a changed person. Before he went to California, he was just a happy-go-lucky boy. When he came back, well, I saw a serious boy then. I saw a man. I saw what disappointment had done."

HE BEGAN RUNNING AROUND with what Johnson City called the "wild bunch," a group of young men older than he—he was eighteen—who prowled the countryside at night, seizing whatever pathetic opportunities for mischief the Hill Country afforded. Waiting until their fathers were asleep, they took the family cars and held drag races outside of town, or rendezvoused in the hills with bootleggers to buy a jug of moonshine. When they went to the weekend dances, they would pick up a jug first, and at the dance they would get drunk and start fights. They put Eugene Stevenson's buggy up on the roof of his barn, and broke into henhouses and stole a few hens for whiskey money.

While most of their escapades were harmless, some began to skirt closer to the law. When Lyndon and his friends heard that a German farmer, Christian Diggs, had made his annual batch of grape wine, they pried loose boards from his barn and stole a fifty-five-gallon barrel, worth a not inconsiderable amount of money in Hill Country terms—and Diggs was persuaded only with difficulty not to go to the sheriff. They hung a few sticks of dynamite in trees in Johnson City, and ignited them to scare the townspeople—that was just a prank, but it stopped being funny when it was learned that they had obtained the dynamite by breaking into the State Highway Department storage shed. That was a state offense, and the sheriff passed word around Johnson City that whoever had done it had better not do it again. "I always hated cops when I was a kid," Johnson was to say, and on this occasion he defied them; a few nights later, they stole more dynamite and shattered the large mulberry tree in front of the school. The Highway Department put a watchman at the shed; after he fell asleep one night, Lyndon and his friends broke in, stole more dynamite, and hung it from the telephone line that ran across Courthouse Square. Then, Bob Edwards says, "we lit the thing and got in the car and ran like hell"—and the ensuing explosion knocked all the windows out of the Johnson City Bank. The sheriff let it be known that the next time something like this happened, he would make arrests. Lyndon's Grandmother Baines repeated her prediction that "That boy is going to end up in the penitentiary," and Johnson City, which had always known that he was going to come to no good, felt that he was well on the way to fulfilling her prophecy. And, perhaps, so did Lyndon Johnson himself. Recalling his boyhood, he once said: "I was only a hairsbreadth away from going to jail."

His parents were terrified of what was going to become of him. His mother would hear no criticism—"No matter what they came and told her Lyndon had done, it was always the other boys' fault for persuading him to go along," a friend says—but she could not blink the fact of who the other boys were. The Redfords and Fawcetts were in college, and Lyndon was hanging around with the Criders and other young men who weren't ever going to go to college, who were going to spend their lives working on the highway or on the ranches—who were going to spend their lives at manual labor. His father understood why Lyndon was acting this way. "If you want to get noticed," he would say, "there are better ways." Sam Johnson made other attempts to get through to his son. In May, 1926, Lyndon again wrecked his father's car on a nocturnal drive, this time smashing it beyond repair, and again ran away, this time to the New Braunfels home of an uncle. His father telephoned him there, and, Lyndon was to recall:

My daddy said: "Lyndon, I traded in that old car of ours this morning for a brand-new one and it's in the store right now needing someone to pick it up. I can't get away from here and I was wondering if you could come back, pick it up, and drive it home for me. And there's one other thing I want you to do for me. I want you to drive it around the Courthouse Square five times, ten times, fifty times, nice and slow. You see there's some talk around town this morning that my son's a coward, that he couldn't face up to what he'd done, and that he ran away from home. Now I don't want anyone thinking I produced a yellow son. So I want you to show up here in that car and show everyone how much courage you've got. Do you hear me?"

"Yes sir," I replied. I hung up the phone, shook hands with my uncle, and left right away.

For a while after this episode, tensions eased between Lyndon and his father, but soon he began to sneak out at night and take the new car without permission. Then, in September, his father grew sick, and had to lie in bed for months—since he was unable to work, bringing no money at all into the house. When he got up—got up to put on his khaki work shirt and go back to the road gang—his emotions were noticeably rawer than before, and tensions rose. On weekends, Lyndon liked to sleep most of the day; his father, awakening him, would shake his bed violently. And when, one morning after Lyndon had sneaked out the car, Sam ran out of gas on the way to work, he came raging back to confront his son; when Lyndon, lying, denied that he had used the car, Sam slapped him in the face—"just with his palm, not his fist, but hard; Mr. Sam was a big man," says Edwards, who was present. Lyndon started to run away, Edwards says, but "Mr. Sam yelled, 'C'mere, Lyndon! Goddamn, you all come here!' And Lyndon had to come back. And his daddy slapped him again. Lyndon was crying, 'Oooh, Daddy, that's enough, Daddy. I won't do it any more.' But the next night, he stole the car again." When, now, Sam stood talking with Rebekah about Lyndon, knowing he would overhear, there was a harsh tone in the voice in which he spoke harsh words. "Nope, Rebekah, it's no use," he would say. "That boy's just not college material."

The strategy hurt Lyndon, but it didn't have the effect Sam had hoped. "If you want to get noticed," he had said, "there are better ways." But his parents' way was going to college—and over and over again during this year, he said defiantly that he wasn't going to go.

But Lyndon Johnson was going to go to college. Had he been as much a Johnson as his father, he might—like his father—never have gone. He might—like his father—have spent his life fighting the realities of the Hill Country and being crushed by them. But he wasn't primarily a Johnson. Beneath the foppish silk shirts was a Bunton. People might call Sam Johnson impractical. No one ever called a Bunton impractical. If there was only one way to accomplish their purpose, the Buntons found that way and took it. Once Lyndon Johnson fully understood the reality of his circumstances, he wouldn't go on fighting them. He may not have wanted to go to college, he may have been determined not to go to college—but if going to college was the only way to accomplish his ends, to escape, to get out of the Hill Country not as a laborer but as something better, go he would. And after he returned from California, the Johnson who was also a Bunton was taught—the hard way—that there was indeed only one way to accomplish his ends.

After he returned from California, he worked for the State Highway Department.

The work started at dawn. Six a.m. sharp was the time the State Highway Department cars left Courthouse Square for the job site, with the road gang on board. And this time the job wasn't merely gravel-topping, or smoothing off, a road. This time the job was building a road.

Because little mechanical equipment was available, the road was being built almost entirely by hand. It wasn't being paved, of course; in 1926, Hill Country roads were still made of that rocky Hill Country "caliche" soil that was as white as the limestone of which it was composed, and as hard. For a while, to earn his two dollars a day, Johnson "drove" a "fresno," a two-handled metal scoop pulled by four mules. He would stand behind the scoop, between its handles. Because he needed a hand for each handle, the reins leading to the mules were tied together and wrapped around his back, so that man and mules were, really, in harness together.

Lifting the handles of the scoop, Johnson would jam its front edge into the caliche. Urging the mules forward, he pushed as they pulled—pushing hard to force the scoop through the rocky soil. When the scoop contained a full load, he pressed down on the handles, straining with the effort, until the scoop rose free of the ground. Then, still pressing down on the handles with all his might, the reins still cutting into his back, he directed the mules to the dumping place, where he would pull up the handles to dump the heavy load. "This was a job which required … a strong back," says one description of the work. "This, for a boy of … seventeen, was back-breaking labor."

When he wasn't operating the fresno, Johnson worked with Ben Crider, who had come back from California, as a pick-and-shovel team. "He'd use the shovel and scoop the dirt up, and I'd pick it up out of the ground, or vice versa," Crider recalls. And, Crider says, such work was "too heavy" for Johnson. He would come home at flight—work started at daybreak, it ended at dusk—exhausted. His skin—that soft white Bunton skin—refused to callus; blister formed on top of blister on his hands, which were often bleeding. He still tried to impress the other workers—at lunch hour, one says, he "talked big … he had big ideas … he wanted to do something big with his life"—but if he had ever had any difficulty seeing the reality of his life, it must have been clear to him now. He was down in that hated Hill Country rock, down in that rock for two dollars a day, down working beside youths who knew that Kitty Clyde had jilted him because her father had predicted he was going to end up doing work like the work he was in fact doing. And the home he went to at night was again a home to which people brought charity; Sam fell sick again, and stayed sick for months, and without income, there was, again, no money in the house for food, and other families would bring cooked dishes to the Johnsons.

He had started work in Winter. "It was so cold," Ben Crider recalls. "That was the worst part of it—getting so cold you had to build a fire to thaw out your hands before you could handle a pick and shovel. And we have done that many a day—build us a fire and thaw and work all day." Spring was more pleasant, but Spring was followed by Summer, the Hill Country summer where laborers toiled beneath that almost unbearable Hill Country sun with their noses and mouths filled with the grit that was the dried soil the wind whipped into their faces. And Summer became Autumn and then Winter again; the first cut of the wind of this new Winter may have slashed into Lyndon Johnson's consciousness the realization that this wasn't his first year on the road gang any more, that he had been working on it for an entire year, and now a second year was starting, and he was still on the road gang. He had boasted to his cousins in Robstown that he was going to work with his brains and not his hands. That had been in 1924. Now it was 1927, and he was still working with his hands. The boy who had wanted so desperately to escape from the cage that was Johnson City had not done so.

So many others had, moreover. The streets of the little town were empty now of many of the faces he had grown up with. Not only Kitty Clyde but all his classmates were away at college. All three Redford boys were at college, as were his cousins Ava and Margaret. Even Louise Casparis, who had been his mother's maid, was going to college now. But, almost three years after he had graduated from high school, Lyndon wasn't going to college. All during his boyhood, he had boasted to his friends that he wouldn't work with his hands. Well, his friends weren't working with their hands any more. But he was.

Still he wouldn't go. Instead, determined not to continue his education as his parents wanted but desperate to stand out, to be somebody—born with a flaming ambition but born in an area that offered ambition no fuel; driven into desperation by the conflict between lineage and landscape—he flailed frantically, trying to stand out every way but their way.

He was seizing now on anything that might offer prestige. He took to talking frequently about the Baineses' "Southern blood"—which, he emphasized to Ava and Margaret, they possessed, too; once, Ava recalls, Lyndon warned her sternly not to dance with a certain young man because "he's common." At dances, Lyndon dressed differently from other men—and acted differently. Entering a small, bare Hill Country dance hall with his friends, wearing a brightly colored silk shirt, his hair elaborately pompadoured and waved and glistening with Sta-comb, he would walk in front of them, swaggering and strutting—or, rather, so awkward was he, trying to swagger and strut; when his friends attempt to imitate the way he looked, they stick their stomachs far out, pull their shoulders far back, and let their arms flap awkwardly far away from their bodies, so that they look quite silly—and that is how they say Lyndon looked. Even Ava, so fond of him, says, "A lot of times he looked smart-alec, silly-like." His "big talk" grew bigger; he was frequently predicting now that he would be "the President of the United States" one day.

But, always, there was reality. Dress as he might at night, every morning at six o'clock he had to be in Courthouse Square, wearing work clothes. The job he hated was the only job available. And then even that was not available. Ferguson man Sam Johnson had worked for "Ma" Ferguson in the 1926 Gubernatorial campaign, but she had been defeated by Dan Moody. And no sooner was Moody inaugurated, on January 18, 1927, than he began replacing all the Ferguson men in the Highway Department with his own followers. Sam Johnson and his son were notified that they wouldn't have their jobs much longer. The "sense of insecurity" which Emmette Redford says "hung over everyone" certainly hung over the Johnsons then; there were the taxes on the house, and the mortgage, to be paid—over all of the Johnsons now hung the knowledge, every time they looked at their house, that it might not be theirs much longer.

Then, one Saturday night in February, 1927, Lyndon Johnson went to a dance.

It was held in Peter's Hall in Fredericksburg, a big, bare barn of a building undecorated except for benches ranged against the walls—music was provided by a German "Ooom-pah-pah" band—and most of the men were wearing plain shirts and trousers, with here and there a suit. But Lyndon was wearing a shirt of white silk crepe de Chine (he had been saving for weeks to buy it; he boasted to his friends that it cost "more than ten dollars") with broad lavender stripes and big French cuffs in which he had inserted a pair of huge, gleaming cufflinks he had "borrowed" from his father. At the dance was a pretty, buxom Fredericksburg girl with big blue eyes and blond hair whose father was a well-to-do merchant. She was "going with" a young German farmer whose first name was Eddie, but as soon as the group from Johnson City arrived—Lyndon, his cousins Ava and Margaret, Harold Withers, Cora Mae Arrington, and Tom and Otto Crider—Lyndon told his friends, "I'm just going to take that little Dutch girl away from that old boy tonight, just as sure as the world." And, Ava says, "He just sauntered across the hall—he looked so silly, I can't keep from laughing; you don't know how funny it was; really, you can't imagine; I can just see him swaggering up to this little old country girl; he'd been to California, he had a lot of new airs—and he just sauntered across the hall, just smiling like the world was his with a downhill pull," and pulled her out on the floor.

Eddie, who was standing talking with some friends, didn't pay any attention at first, but Lyndon bent over and put his cheek against hers, and the Johnson City group could see the farmer get angry. And after Lyndon had brought her back to her seat after one set, the music started again, and he pulled her back onto the floor and repeated his actions. "They had up on the wall, NO CHEEK-TO-CHEEK, and Lyndon of course was a lot taller than she was, and he bent down and put his cheek next to hers, and he had made this ol' boy so mad he like to have died." And he was acting, Ava says, "like 'I've got it made—she'll be mine in no time.' Smart-alec." When the third set began, he started to dance with Eddie's girl again, but Eddie walked over and tapped him on the shoulder and asked him to step outside.

"Nice" Hill Country girls wouldn't "go outside" dance halls then, so for a while Ava and Margaret and Cora Mae Arrington could only speculate about what might be happening, but finally Margaret said, "Well, I'm going to see," and all three ran out. And when they did, they saw that, as Ava puts it, "Lyndon was getting really beat up!

"Lyndon was so awkward and this boy was so big and fast," Ava says. "He'd knock Lyndon down, and Lyndon would get up, and shout, 'I'll get you!' and run at him, and he never got to hit him once that I can recall. He didn't even get close to him. He'd yell, 'I'll get you!' and run at that Dutch boy, and the Dutch boy would hit him—whoom! And down Lyndon would go again." Blood was pouring out of Lyndon's nose and mouth, running down his face and onto the crepe-de-Chine shirt. The Criders, afraid he was going to be badly hurt, started to interfere, but Fredericksburg's old, tough sheriff, Alfred Klaerner, had been present at the dance, and Sheriff Klaerner had had, for some time now, more than enough of Lyndon Johnson. "We'll just stand back and let them have it out," he said, stepping in front of the Criders, and when Otto kept coming, the sheriff knocked him backward and said: "If you try that again, I'll stick the whole bunch of you in jail." The Johnson City group stood silent, and the beating went on.

"Lyndon never got in a lick," Ava says. "It was pitiful. Every time he got up, that old boy knocked him down—he had fists like a pile-driver. Lyndon's whole face was bloody, and he looked pretty bad." And finally, lying on the ground, he said: "That's enough."

When Lyndon had recovered a little, Ava says, he realized that one of his father's cufflinks was missing, and he got "very upset," After a while, someone found it and gave it back to him, but there was nothing anyone could do about the shirt; it was thoroughly bloodstained. But it wasn't Lyndon's injuries that most impressed Ava, it was his demeanor. "Lyndon was always so talkative, so lively," she says. He had lost fights before—"Lyndon always lost"—but as soon as they were over, he would always be chattering away in no time. But all the way home to Johnson City, he didn't say a word. The group stopped at Flatt's Creek to clean him up, and he still didn't say anything. "He was very subdued," Ava says. "He acted like a guy who had had all the wind taken out of his sails." When they took up a collection and gave him enough money to pay his fine—while he had still been lying on the ground, Sheriff Klaerner had bent over and handed him a summons for disorderly conduct—Lyndon thanked them, but in a voice so low that Ava had never heard it before. Possibly his depression was due to the beating he had taken—"He'd had fights before, but he'd never gotten walloped like this," she says—but his cousins didn't think so. After they had dropped him off at his house, he walked inside without a word, and Ava and Margaret agreed that they had seen Lyndon in a similar mood only once before: when he had come back from California. And, Ava says, she and Margaret agreed that the reason for the depression was the same both times: "Something had made him realize that he wasn't cock of the walk."

WAS AVA RIGHT? Did the dance teach Lyndon Johnson the same lesson that his California experience had taught him? Was he silent and depressed by the realization that his hopes were doomed? Realizing how hard it was to be somebody in the Hill Country, he had tried twice, in running away to Robstown and California, to escape from it, but to escape without following the course his parents wanted him to take. But both attempts had failed. On his return from the second, had he tried to be something in the Hill Country—and had he had pounded into him, every morning that he put on the work shirt, that he couldn't be? Hadn't there been an increasing desperation in his actions during the past year; hadn't the boasting become wilder, the shirts brighter and more expensive, the nighttime pranks more and more frenetic? And had, then, his beating by the hard fists of the Hill Country farm boy, his humiliation before his friends, been a final pounding into him of the reality about the Hill Country, where the physical was all that mattered. Had the beating been a final confirmation of the realization that he was never going to be somebody as long as he stayed in Johnson City—that even at a dance in a bare hall he couldn't be somebody—that there was no choice for him but to get out, even if the only way out was his parents' way? Is it possible to read into his "That's enough" a surrender not just in a dance-hall fight but in the larger fight he had been waging for years: the fight to be somebody without following the course his parents wanted him to take? No one can say. No one knows what Lyndon Johnson thought that night, on the way home and lying in bed, and no one will ever know. But the next morning, he told his parents he would go to college.

WHEN, HOWEVER, he left for college the following week, he did not leave in a spirit of reconciliation with his parents. He would not, in fact, even permit his father to drive him to San Marcos, preferring to hitchhike the thirty miles, carrying a cardboard suitcase, rather than accept a favor from him. And he didn't attend college in that spirit, either; the values he took from college were not at all what his parents had envisioned, as was perhaps symbolized following graduation by his lifelong reluctance—a reluctance so strong that it was seldom broken—to read books. They wanted him to go to college to learn about literature and art, Beauty and Truth. He wanted to be somebody, to stand out, to lead, to dominate. He may not yet have known how to accomplish that, but he certainly knew how not to accomplish it: his parents—the lesson of their lives—had taught him. In Austin, he had seen the legislators who accepted the beefsteak, the bourbon and the blondes, who lived at the Driskill while his father lived at the boardinghouse. His father had refused to be like them, and he had seen what happened to his father. His mother had believed that poetry and beauty were the most important things in life, and she had refused to ever stop believing that, and he had seen what happened to his mother. The most striking characteristic of both his parents was that they were idealists who stuck to their ideals. They had been trying ever since he was a little boy to teach him that what mattered was principle, and sticking to principle.

Lyndon Johnson's college career—and his career after college, from beginning to end—would demonstrate what he thought of their teachings.