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Authors: Robert A. Caro
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conversations … friendly conversations. Those were the only times that I ever saw Lyndon quiet and relaxed.” By the time Lyndon was thirteen or fourteen, and about six feet tall, there was a particularly conspicuous aspect of the resemblance between them. The tall man with the big ears and nose was very physical in conversation. His arm would go around the shoulders of the legislative colleague to whom he was talking, his other hand would grasp the man’s arm or lapel, his face would bend very close to him. Legislators saw Sam’s son adopting the same technique. “He was a gangling boy, very skinny,”Wright Patman would recall. He had the same huge ears, the same big nose, the same pale skin, and the same dark eyes, and “Lyndon clutched you like his daddy did when he talked to you.… He was so much like his father that it was humorous to watch.” Legislators saw what playmates saw: a quite unusual bond between father and son.
After Sam’s fall (and the change was so dramatic that, as the first volume of this work relates, it is possible to date it), his relationship with Lyndon was very different: cold—hostile, in fact—with Lyndon refusing his father’s requests and orders, defying him so blatantly that, legislators say, “He wouldn’t pay attention to anything his father wanted.”
It was at this time, too—the time during which his father was failing on the ranch—that Lyndon began making the prediction; it was at the school he attended when he was thirteen, the tiny school in the little village of Albert, four miles away, that he first began making it: a classmate,Anna Itz, remembers that during a recess, when a group of children were sitting under a hackberry tree near the school, “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.” (Mrs. Itz says that the other children laughed at him and said they wouldn’t vote for him, and Lyndon replied, “I won’t need your votes.”)
In the opinion of men and women who were children with Lyndon Johnson, his father’s fall affected him all his life. His brother, Sam Houston, says that “the most important thing for Lyndon was not to be like Daddy.” That feeling had several dimensions: for example, Sam Ealy was an idealist, a romantic, a dreamer, a man who had “no sense”; it was important—terribly important—to Lyndon that he be regarded as a man who scorned ideals and causes as impractical dreams, that he be regarded as pragmatic, cynical, tough, shrewd. But another dimension had to do with Lyndon’s feelings about failure and defeat. His father’s fall had shown him that failure could mean not merely failure but terror, the terror of living in a house that, month by month, you were afraid would be taken away from you by the bank; that failure could mean not merely terror but ruin, permanent ruin; that failure—defeat—might be something from which you would never recover. And failure in public—failing in a way that was visible: having to move off your ranch; having your credit cut off at stores you had to walk past every day; no longer holding your public office—could mean a different, but also terrible, kind of pain: embarrassment, disgrace, humiliation.
When, in 1948, the place he had wanted so long—a seat in the United States Senate—finally opened up, Johnson had not leapt at the opportunity as his allies had expected him to do, but instead had vacillated endlessly, until it was almost too late to enter the race, agonizing over the decision as to whether or not to run; his allies had finally threatened to runJohn Connally instead of him to nerve him up to announce his candidacy. And those men understood what was holding him back. Lyndon Johnson had long had the habit, in times of crisis, of telephoning Ed Clark, “the Secret Boss of Texas,”
After Sam’s fall (and the change was so dramatic that, as the first volume of this work relates, it is possible to date it), his relationship with Lyndon was very different: cold—hostile, in fact—with Lyndon refusing his father’s requests and orders, defying him so blatantly that, legislators say, “He wouldn’t pay attention to anything his father wanted.”
It was at this time, too—the time during which his father was failing on the ranch—that Lyndon began making the prediction; it was at the school he attended when he was thirteen, the tiny school in the little village of Albert, four miles away, that he first began making it: a classmate,Anna Itz, remembers that during a recess, when a group of children were sitting under a hackberry tree near the school, “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.” (Mrs. Itz says that the other children laughed at him and said they wouldn’t vote for him, and Lyndon replied, “I won’t need your votes.”)
In the opinion of men and women who were children with Lyndon Johnson, his father’s fall affected him all his life. His brother, Sam Houston, says that “the most important thing for Lyndon was not to be like Daddy.” That feeling had several dimensions: for example, Sam Ealy was an idealist, a romantic, a dreamer, a man who had “no sense”; it was important—terribly important—to Lyndon that he be regarded as a man who scorned ideals and causes as impractical dreams, that he be regarded as pragmatic, cynical, tough, shrewd. But another dimension had to do with Lyndon’s feelings about failure and defeat. His father’s fall had shown him that failure could mean not merely failure but terror, the terror of living in a house that, month by month, you were afraid would be taken away from you by the bank; that failure could mean not merely terror but ruin, permanent ruin; that failure—defeat—might be something from which you would never recover. And failure in public—failing in a way that was visible: having to move off your ranch; having your credit cut off at stores you had to walk past every day; no longer holding your public office—could mean a different, but also terrible, kind of pain: embarrassment, disgrace, humiliation.
When, in 1948, the place he had wanted so long—a seat in the United States Senate—finally opened up, Johnson had not leapt at the opportunity as his allies had expected him to do, but instead had vacillated endlessly, until it was almost too late to enter the race, agonizing over the decision as to whether or not to run; his allies had finally threatened to runJohn Connally instead of him to nerve him up to announce his candidacy. And those men understood what was holding him back. Lyndon Johnson had long had the habit, in times of crisis, of telephoning Ed Clark, “the Secret Boss of Texas,”
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