Read Online The Passage of Power by Robert A. Caro - Free Book Online

smart man. But he’s got no sense.” The remark was first delivered at a political barbecue. Everyone roared. The interests in Austin made sure Sam didn’t get a state sinecure: the only job he could find at first was a two-dollar-a-day post as a state game warden. He was to die—in 1937—as a penniless bus inspector; the only thing he had to leave his children was a gold watch and a legacy of the townsfolk’s sneers. He couldn’t pay what he owed to the local merchants, and he and his wife and children had to walk every day past stores whose owners were writing “Please!” on the bills they sent every month; they had cut him off from further credit, so that he had to shop—and to run up bills which he also couldn’t pay—in other towns. A remark made by the Johnson City druggist soon gained wide circulation: “Sam Johnson,” the druggist said, “is too smart to work, and not smart enough to make a living without working.” His wife’s education (she was the only woman in the area with a college degree) and “pretensions” (her inability, for example, to work in the fields like other Hill Country wives) now made her almost a joke, too. And the children of Sam and Rebekah shared in their shame. One of Lyndon’s classmates at Johnson City High School,Truman Fawcett, was sitting on his uncle’s porch one day when Lyndon walked by. “He’ll never amount to anything,” the uncle said, loud enough for Lyndon to hear. “Too much like Sam.” The Johnsons were, for the rest of Lyndon’s boyhood, the laughingstocks of Johnson City.
    The scar that his father’s failure left on Lyndon Johnson was shown by the way he talked about it. “We had great ups and downs in our family,” he wouldrecall. “One year … we’d all be riding high in Johnson City terms.… But then two years later we’d lose it all.… We had dropped to the bottom of the heap.” Once in later years a reporter asked him about life on the ranch. “We lived there just long enough to go broke,” he replied. And the depth of the scar was, perhaps, shown even more clearly by the rarity of such remarks. Lyndon Johnson very seldom talked about his youth—or, to be more precise, very seldom talked about it frankly: he tried to conceal its circumstances by weaving, for journalists and biographers, a mythical boyhood, a tapestry of anecdotes, told with the vividness and plentiful detail of a great storyteller, that, as his brother sums up, “never happened.”
    N O TRANSFORMATION CAUSED by Sam Ealy’s failure was more complete than the one it effected in his relationship with his elder son.
    Before the Johnsons moved to the ranch, the relationship had been strikingly close: when Lyndon was a little boy, his favorite outfit was one that made him look like his father, right down to a scaled-down version of Sam’s big Stetson hat. Lyndon imitated his father, tagged along with him everywhere—“right by the side of his daddy wherever he went,” an aunt says.
    When Lyndon was ten, Sam began taking him to Austin. “I loved going with my father to the Legislature,” Lyndon would say. “The only thing I loved more was going with him” during his campaigns for re-election. “We drove in the Model T Ford from farm to farm, up and down the valley, stopping at every door. My father would do most of the talking … local gossip, talk about the crops and about the bills he’d introduced … and always he’d bring along an enormous crust of homemade bread and a large jar of homemade jam.… We’d stop by the side of the road. He sliced the bread, smeared it with jam, and split the slices with me. I’d never seen him happier. Families all along the way opened up their homes to us.… Christ, sometimes I wished it could go on forever.” Other children in Johnson City remember how, while they were playing outside, Lyndon and his father would be sitting together in the swing on the Johnsons’ screened back porch, holding “long