LBJ

Architect of American Ambition

Randall Woods

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780684834580
• eBook ISBN: 9781416593317
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

For almost forty years, the verdict on Lyndon Johnson's presidency has been reduced to a handful of harsh words: tragedy, betrayal, lost opportunity. Initially, historians focused on the Vietnam War and how that conflict derailed liberalism, tarnished the nation's reputation, wasted lives, and eventually even led to Watergate. More recently, Johnson has been excoriated in more personal terms: as a player of political hardball, as the product of machine-style corruption, as an opportunist, as a cruel husband and boss. In LBJ, Randall B. Woods, a distinguished historian of twentieth-century America and a son of Texas, offers a wholesale reappraisal and sweeping, authoritative account of the LBJ who has been lost under this baleful gaze. Woods understands the political landscape of the American South and the differences between personal failings and political principles. Thanks to the release of thousands of hours of LBJ's White House tapes, along with the declassification of tens of thousands of documents and interviews with key aides, Woods's LBJ brings crucial new evidence to bear on many key aspects of the man and the politician. As private conversations reveal, Johnson intentionally exaggerated his stereotype in many interviews, for reasons of both tactics and contempt. It is time to set the record straight. Woods's Johnson is a flawed but deeply sympathetic character. He was born into a family with a liberal Texas tradition of public service and a strong belief in the public good. He worked tirelessly, but not just for the sake of ambition. His approach to reform at home, and to fighting fascism and communism abroad, was motivated by the same ideals and based on a liberal Christian tradition that is often forgotten today. Vietnam turned into a tragedy, but it was part and parcel of Johnson's commitment to civil rights and antipoverty reforms. LBJ offers a fascinating new history of the political upheavals of the 1960s and a new way to understand the last great burst of liberalism in America. Johnson was a magnetic character, and his life was filled with fascinating stories and scenes. Through insights gained from interviews with his longtime secretary, his Secret Service detail, and his closest aides and confidants, Woods brings Johnson before us in vivid and unforgettable color.

CHAPTER 1

ROOTS

TEXAS ANDLYNDONJOHNSON ARE INSEPARABLE.Both have been caricatured beyond recognition by historians. Texas stereotypes are legion, yet absurd for such a vast land, comprising 266,807 square miles, one-twelfth of the land area of the United States. One can travel eight hundred miles in a straight line without ever leaving the state. Texas is so diverse that it is the only member of the Union with a constitutional provision allowing it to divide into as many as five states (with, of course, the permission of the federal government). East Texas, with its coastal plain, piney woods, temperate climate, and high rainfall, is physically and culturally a westward extension of Louisiana. The north-central portion of the state, featuring rolling hills and numerous rivers, resembles Oklahoma and Kansas. The western portion of the state includes the Llano Estacado, or Staked Plain, a grassy, treeless, semiarid extension of the High Plains that rises to the Davis Mountains. South-central Texas is dominated by the Edwards Plateau, an area of low, angular hills, narrow valleys and thin, rocky soil, the eastern portion of which is known as the Hill Country.

The people of the Lone Star State are as diverse and unpredictable as its topography and climate. There are cowboys and Indians. There are also African Americans, Hispanics, Czechs, Jews, Chinese, Poles, Bohemians, Germans, Japanese, Italians, Moravians, and French Creoles, all of whom have interbred if not intermarried. Most famously, Texans are oilmen, cattle ranchers, farmers, and agribusinessmen. But they are also intellectuals, artists, social activists, scientists, and communitarians. The state boasts culturally active population centers that predate the founding of Jamestown. Texas is the birthplace of the Farmers’ Alliance and for a time, at the turn of the nineteenth century, host to a vigorous Socialist Party. Its people have embraced religion, but generally on Sunday and less frequently on Wednesday. God is to be worshipped but not necessarily strictly emulated. Texas is a land with a violent hand and an empathetic heart. Politically, the state is famed for its pragmatism and lack of ideology; this is true not because of too few values and ideas, however, but too many.

In its relationship with the federal government, Texas exhibited, in its first years as a state, attitudes that would prevail for the next hundred years. Much like the stereotypical welfare cheat that Texans would rail against in the midtwentieth century, the Lone Star State looked to the federal government to provide largesse without expecting to exert any authority or control in return. Texans were states righters to the core. The Anglo-Celts who had migrated from Appalachia and Missouri had in some ways never left the eighteenth century behind. For them the Union was an association of sovereign states. The national authority existed to shoulder the burden of tasks the states could not or would not take on for themselves—defend the Texas frontier against the twenty thousand hostile Amerindians who continually threatened it, for example. When Washington failed to live up to its perceived responsibilities, Texans developed and nurtured a burning resentment against it and its denizens.

In many ways, mid-nineteenth-century Texans were an anomaly. For those yeomen not defeated by the frontier, literacy was an obsession, the most important badge of civilization. When two or three gathered together, they invariably pooled their resources to start a community school, one-roomed enterprises that taught the equivalent of the first eight grades. Approximately 95 percent of the white population could read and write. In 1859 Baylor University, a Baptist institution, granted twenty-two bachelor degrees. In that year, Texas boasted forty academies, thirty-seven colleges, including Blum’s College for Males and Females, twenty-seven institutes, seven universities, two seminaries, and one medical college—some of these institutions more loosely defined than others. In 1860, there were seventy-one newspapers being published in Texas with a total circulation of about one hundred thousand. Politics, local and national, was a Texan preoccupation. Even on the frontier, families followed with great interest the impending crisis that would eventually split the union. The cultural and educational mother lode in virtually every region was the King James Version of the English Bible. It was not only the guide to Christian worship but also the principal work of literature. Texans learned of good and evil, power and corruption, hope and salvation from the Bible, absorbing a bit of Greek philosophy and Jewish mysticism along the way. The God of the Old Testament threatened the wayward with eternal damnation while the God of the New Testament promised them salvation. Not surprisingly, churches were even more important than schools to the communal life of the yeoman farmer. Their social significance was as great as their religious. Members congregated to worship, converse, eat, and court. Because there was little else to compete for the farmers’ attention, the churches, increasingly evangelical in nature, played a huge role in shaping value systems. They augmented already strong tendencies toward fundamentalism, temperance, and social democracy.

The true planter aristocracy in Texas was numerically minuscule, no more than two thousand families. To qualify one had to possess enough chattel to employ an overseer. Freed from the restraints of labor, the planting class dabbled in politics, worshipped their Episcopalian God, raced horses, fought duels, gambled, drank, and tolerated lesser mortals. The planter was gracious, hospitable, charitable, and decent, rather than puritanically moral. The slave aristocracy was accorded deference in Texas, but it was grudging, and though politically influential, it was not the force it was in Mississippi or South Carolina. Slaves were relatively well treated, not because planters and their overseers were kind-hearted; rather, they were practical men who refused to damage a prized commodity except under the most extreme circumstances. Ironically, but not atypically, this class would lead the way in Texas in opposing secession.

But Texas did secede—states rights was better than federal submission—and suffered the fate of the other members of the Confederacy. What happened after the Civil War did much to revive Texas’s dominant political culture. Reconstruction and all things associated with it—blacks, federal troops, carpetbaggers, and scalawags—were reviled. The denouement of Reconstruction in Texas came in 1874, when Richard Coke and a band of ecstatic Democrats seized control of the political machinery. A new constitution virtually emasculated central authority in the state. The terms of state officers, including the governor, were set at two years. With virtually all state offices elective, the governor was no more than a peer among equals. At the polls, conservative Republicans deserted en masse to the Democrats. In this one-party atmosphere, virtually devoid of ideology, politics consisted of a continual grab for power. Participation in the rebellion became an enduring status symbol. The Texas Rangers were resurrected, and a Frontier Battalion organized. Between 1874 and 1880, the Rangers policed the Indian and Mexican frontiers, earning their reputation as fearless, ruthless, and sometimes lawless restorers and maintainers of order.

The order that the Rangers compelled made possible the coming of the Cattle Kingdom, the Anglo-Celt’s economic and cultural response to the Great Plains. The cattle ranchers and drovers were in reality small businessmen who turned their enterprise into a legend. The Texas cowhand was neither northern nor southern, and cowherding was in many ways the first economic and cultural step reuniting North and South following the Civil War. The longhorn frontier, with its reverence for the horse and rifle, its buckskin, bunkhouses, dusters, and ten-gallon hats, bred certain characteristics. The cattle culture called for Darwinian efficiency. There was no room for waste, for mistakes, for wishful thinking. Those who prayed for rain rather than anticipating drought failed. Those who wished for peace and trusted Indians and Mexicans lost their cattle, if not their lives. Ideas and notions were valid in the West only if they worked. Natives, like wolves and bobcats, were beasts to be kept at bay or exterminated. Brave and generous to their fellows, residents of the cattle frontier were contemptuous of those who could not stand alone. Next to cattle thieving, the worst crime on the frontier was ineptitude. The cattle culture was the purview of the young because the old could not go west and survive. Women suffered disproportionately. Love and romance took a backseat to sexual gratification and utility in relations between the sexes. Frontier wives were immensely respected, if not understood; prostitutes and dancehall girls were valued, if not respected. In this male-dominated culture, reverence for fair play and for the principle of equality of opportunity took precedence over complicated legal codes imported from the East. Until the turn of the century, the penalty for killing another individual in a fair fight was less than that imposed for burglary, if any sentence was imposed at all.

The land into which Lyndon Johnson’s immediate ancestors came marked an intersection between the farming and cattle frontiers. The Hill Country of Texas lies along the eastern edge of the Edwards Plateau as it begins its ascent to the great Staked Plain. The first settlers found a land of big sky, abundant sunlight, violent storms, flash floods, and bone-chilling northers. The soil was generally thin, covering the limestone base rock that extended westward to constitute the foundation of the Edwards Plateau. The richest land was to be found in the river bottoms, in this case, the Pedernales and Blanco, western tributaries of the Colorado that paralleled each other. The landscape was gently rolling, covered by live oak, mesquite, and cedar, punctuated by picturesque limestone springs.

The first white men to take up permanent residence in the Hill Country were German immigrants. In late 1845 Henry Fisher and Burchard Miller sold their original land grant of some 3 million acres obtained from the Spanish to a group of German noblemen who hoped to extend the fatherland to Texas. The first German settlers arrived at Galveston, and after some indecision settled in New Braunfels. Following completion of the Fisher-Miller deal, John Meusbach led a wagon train of 120 families and established the community of Fredericksburg thirty miles northwest of New Braunfels on Barron’s Creek. Eclipsing the weather as a threat to the newcomers were the Comanche. Having mastered the horses first imported by the Spanish, these Native Americans, guided by the light of the moon, rode two hundred miles or more across New Mexico and West Texas to kill, kidnap, steal, and burn and then backtrack across the plains at breakneck speed. Eventually, Meusbach concluded his famous treaty with the Comanche, and the Germans lived in relative peace with that people, if not the Lipan Apache, thereafter. In 1848 German settlers organized Gillespie County with Fredericksburg as its county seat. The booming village then boasted more than a dozen commercial structures, including the Nimitz Hotel. Shortly after the Germans came to the Hill Country, other frontier farmers began building dog-run cabins along the picturesque Blanco River, whose valley was rich with fish and game.¹The Pittsburgh Land Company, owned by Captain James Callahan and John D. Pitts, established a small community, and in 1858 Blanco County was organized. It was at this point that the Johnsons arrived on the scene.²

Lyndon’s great-great-grandfather, John Johnson, was an Anglo-Celt immigrant whose parents settled in colonial Georgia. A veteran of the Revolutionary War, John was a successful farmer and the owner of two slaves.³His fourth son, Jesse, Lyndon’s great-grandfather, was one of those frontier farmers who stayed ahead of the expanding plantation system and behind the Indian-fighting frontier. The year Texas became a state, Jesse gathered up his slaves, eight of his ten children, his wife, and four grandchildren, and in covered wagons made the nine hundred?mile trek from Alabama to Lockhart, some twenty-five miles south of Austin.⁴It turned out to be an economic mistake. Despite the fertility of the black, waxy soil, Jesse Johnson did not prosper. At his death in 1857, his estate was in arrears.

Thus, Jesse’s sons, Andrew Jackson (Jack) Johnson, Jesse Thomas (Tom) Johnson, and Samuel Ealy Johnson (Sam), Lyndon’s grandfather, had to start virtually from scratch.⁵In 1859, attracted by the endless acres of shimmering prairie grass, Jack settled on the north bank of the Pedernales River, some twelve miles north of Blanco. He built a double-room, dog-run cabin and began raising sheep, horses, and cattle. Shortly thereafter, Tom and Sam followed. They constructed a rock cabin and pens and began gathering cattle in anticipation of a profitable drive north to Sedalia or Abilene. The Civil War intervened, however. Sam, the youngest, enlisted in the Confederate Army, Company B, DeBray’s regiment, in the fall of 1861. Tom would later join the Texas State Troops headquartered at Blanco, but he spent most of the war with his brother Jack raising stock for sale to the Confederacy.⁶

When Union occupying forces landed at Galveston, Sam Johnson returned to the Hill Country, but he found it difficult to leave the Civil War behind. Ger-man Unionists living between New Braunfels and Fredericksburg had been hunted and harassed throughout the war. Some fifty were hanged by Confederate state militia in Gillespie County alone.⁷During Reconstruction, the limestone hills witnessed numerous armed clashes between loyalists and warriors of the Lost Cause. “Bushwacking” became a common occurrence.⁸

The Johnson brothers had better things to do. Between 1867 and 1870, Tom and Sam made four six hundred?mile trips along the Chisholm Trail to Kansas. By 1871, they headed the largest cattle operation in Blanco County, their corrals occupying several dozen acres. In 1870 alone, Tom and Sam drove seven thousand head north, grossing nearly $100,000.⁹“I got my best experience,” reported one drover, “joining the ‘roundup’ for Sam and Thomas Johnson … with headquarter pens and branding stall at the mouth of Williamson’s Creek in Blanco County and headquarters at Johnson’s ranch on the Pedernales … The roundup of range hands and range boss usually gathered, road branded and delivered a herd of from 2,500 to 3,000 head of cattle, which a trail boss and his outfit received at headquarters ranch, but sometimes we delivered them at the Seven Live Oaks on the prairie west of Austin.”¹⁰The drives were long and arduous, featuring blistering heat, violent thunderstorms, dangerous river crossings, frigid northers, and occasional raids by hostile Indians.¹¹

The Johnson brothers were one of the best-known outfits in Kansas. “I am in Johnson’s camp now, out at the cattle pens,” Horace Hall wrote his father in November 1871. “The boys have sold all of their cattle and tomorrow they will commence ‘outfitting’ and then go to Texas.” The following spring Hall reported, “We have been gathering cattle for the past month and now they have two herds about ready to start … This is a beautiful country through here: mountains, clear rocky streams, live oaks, mesquite with rich valley and bottom lands for farming … abundance of game & Indians once a year.”¹²

In December 1867 Sam Johnson married Eliza Bunton. Sam and Eliza set up housekeeping in the cabin that the Johnson brothers had occupied as bachelors. Eliza was one of those Texas women who fought the frontier and won. With the black hair, black eyes, and ivory skin of her father, she cut a striking figure. Intensely proud of her family’s accomplishments, Eliza held up her ancestors, Joseph Bunton, a Revolutionary war hero, and Joseph Desha, who had served in Congress and as governor of Kentucky, as examples to her children.¹³In the early years, she accompanied Sam and Tom on their drives up the Chisholm Trail. After children came, she lived the more conventional and, in some ways, harder life of the frontier wife, toiling over a wood fire, hauling water, sewing, nurturing, and persevering.¹⁴One of the characteristics that Sam and Eliza shared, according to those who knew them, was their patrician bearing. “He was an aristocrat … Just natural,” recalled Ida Felsted, who knew the Johnsons as a child.¹⁵Patricians or not, the couple could not escape the dangers of the frontier. Well into the 1870s, Sam, Eliza, and their neighbors had to deal with the marauding Lipan Apache and renegade Comanche.

In the summer of 1869, Tom and Eliza Phelps of Blanco County were cut off by a band of Comanche while fishing in a creek near their house. Both were stabbed, bludgeoned, stripped, and scalped. Both died of their wounds. Sam joined the party of armed men organized to hunt down the Indians and avenge the Phelpses’ murder. Some of the war party doubled back, however, and Eliza Johnson and her infant daughter, Mary, were nearly caught at their well. Alerted by the war whoops, Eliza, with baby in arms, ran to the house. For hours the two hid in a space under the cabin, she stifling Mary’s cries with a dirty rag, while the Comanche ransacked the house. Eventually, the Indians rounded up their booty, including horses, and rode off. Eliza dared not move until, hours later, she heard her husband’s voice as he searched through the remains of their possessions.¹⁶In 1872, a force of Rangers met and defeated a band of Comanche at Deer Creek. Several of the wounded Texans were carried to the Johnson ranch for medical attention. It would be the last pitched battle between Indians and whites that the Hill Country witnessed.

The cattle business was boom or bust. From 1867 through 1871, Tom and Sam Johnson flourished. Flush with the profits from their drives, they bought thousands of acres in Blanco and Gillespie Counties, plus property in Austin. In late 1871, together with sixteen cowboys, the brothers drove several thousand head north to Kansas, only to find that the bottom had dropped out of the cattle market. Hoping that prices would rise, the Johnsons wintered their herd on the plains. Many of the animals froze to death, prices refused to rise, and upon their return to Texas, Sam and Tom had to sell much of their property to pay their debts.¹⁷The following year brought no relief. They drove smaller herds to market but found prices still depressed. A Comanche raid cost the brothers their remuda of horses and broke them. County tax rolls showed Tom worth a mere $180 in 1873; Sam was not listed at all. In 1872 Sam, Eliza, and their children decided to abandon the frontier and, with her father’s help, bought a farm near Buda, a community southeast of Austin. Tom Johnson died in 1877.¹⁸

Sam Johnson could never reconcile himself to the flat land and tame existence that he found in east-central Texas. He and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Colophon
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Prologue
• 1 Roots
• 2 Growing Up
• 3 College
• 4 The Secretary
• 5 Lady Bird and the NYA
• 6 Congress
• 7 Pappy
• 8 War
• 9 Truman and the Coming of the Cold War
• 10 Coke
• 11 A Populist Gentlemen’s Club
• 12 Leader
• 13 Passing the Lord’s Prayer
• 14 Back from the Edge
• 15 Containing the Red-Hots: From Dulles to the Dixie Association
• 16 Lost in Space
• 17 1960
• 18 Camelot Meets Mr. Cornpone
• 19 Hanging On
• 20 Interregnum: Death and Resurrection
• 21 “Kennedy Was Too Conservative for Me”
• 22 Free at Last
• 23 Containment at Home and Abroad
• 24 “The Countryside of the World”
• 25 Bobby
• 26 Barry
• 27 A New Bill of Rights
• 28 The Crux of the Matter
• 29 Daunted Courage
• 30 Castro’s and Kennedy’s Shadows
• 31 A City on the Hill
• 32 Balancing Act
• 33 Divisions
• 34 Civil War
• 35 Battling Dr. Strangelove
• 36 The Holy Land
• 37 Backlash
• 38 Of Hawks and Doves, Vultures and Chickens
• 39 Tet
• 40 A Midsummer Nightmare
• 41 Touching the Void
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• Photographic Insert