The Path to Power (36 page)

Johnson also had reasons for keeping his strategy—and even the fact that he
had
a strategy—secret from the White Stars themselves. Richards and Whiteside, jealous of their leadership, might well balk at a Johnson plan simply because it wasn’t
their
plan. Or, if they agreed to it, they might—loudmouths that they were—talk about it, revealing it to the campus at large. Other White Stars might balk at a Johnson plan because of their dislike of him. He couldn’t let even his allies know what he was planning. Occasionally, very occasionally—only when it was unavoidable because Johnson needed his help—Bill Deason got a glimpse of the planning. Al Harzke recalls returning to the little room he shared with Deason and finding
his roommate and Johnson sprawled across the bed “calling politics, talking as if there wasn’t nothing but politics—I used to call Bill ‘Senator’ and Lyndon ‘Governor.’” But Johnson never gave even Deason, his first candidate and closest ally, more than a glimpse. It took Deason quite some time, in fact, to realize something about the White Stars’ meetings. They were still informal affairs—loud talk and laughter. And they were still chaired by the group’s founders, Richards and Whiteside, who did most of the talking; Lyndon Johnson, in fact, did very little talking at these meetings. But Deason began to notice by a meeting’s end the decisions they arrived at—Richards, Whiteside and the rest—would invariably be the decisions Johnson had told him, the night before, that he wanted them to arrive at. “In discussions that five or six of us would have in a room, he would not be the dominant one,” Deason says. “But I remember I began to think that he may have controlled the meeting more than we realized, that maybe … he was swaying the group. Gradually, we came to realize that. At least I did. I came to realize that he had a very clever mind.” Gradually, in fact, Deason came to understand something understood by no one else. Richards and Whiteside, the founders of the White Stars, thought they were still running the White Stars. But they weren’t.

T
HE MOST STRIKING ASPECT
of Lyndon Johnson’s secrecy, however, was not the success with which he imposed it on others but the success with which he imposed it on himself.

All his life he had “talked big”—had boasted, bragged, swaggered, strutted, tried to stand out, shoved himself into the forefront—so incessantly that he had revealed a
need
to talk big, a desperate thirst for attention and admiration. This thirst had not been quenched; his boasting and bragging on other subjects—any subject but campus politics—was as arrant as ever; it is difficult to escape the conclusion that he talked at length about campus politics to Sam Houston Johnson because he had to talk to
someone
, had to let
someone
know how smart he was, and his hero-worshipping little brother was the only listener who, because he was not part of the college and would go back to Johnson City on Sunday, could be trusted not to reveal his secrets on campus. But much as Lyndon Johnson may have wanted to talk on this subject, he said not a word to anyone but his little brother—and, in his silence, revealed that beneath the skinny, gangling, awkward, big-eared exterior, beneath the rambling monologues and the wild boasting, beneath the fawning and the smiling and the face turned so worshipfully up to the professors, lay a will of steel. Lyndon Johnson was planning to take a tiny group of outsiders and with them snatch student power; not only snatch existing power, but create for them—and him—new power, of dimensions no students had ever had on campus before.
If anyone on campus, even his allies, realized his purposes, he would not be able to accomplish them. If anyone saw what he was doing, he would not be able to do it.

And no one saw.

T
HE SUCCESS WITH WHICH
he cloaked his maneuvers in secrecy was demonstrated most dramatically during the selection, in May, 1930, of the following year’s
Star
and
Pedagog
editors.

Merit, not politics, had traditionally been the criterion for filling these posts, not only the highest-paying but the most influential available to undergraduates. In filling them, the Student Council had always accepted the recommendations of the incumbent editors, who nominated their most qualified assistants from the junior class. In May, 1930, the nominees for the
Star
and
Pedagog
editorships, respectively, were a brother and sister who lived in San Marcos, Henry and Medie Kyle, and they were so clearly the best-qualified candidates—as was another “townie,” Edward Puis, for
Pedagog
business manager—that there appeared to be no question that they would be selected. “We just assumed they would,” says
Pedagog
editor Ella So Relle. “They [the council] had never failed to do this before.” Kyle’s reforming zeal—he advocated not only less emphasis on athletics and a more equitable distribution of the Blanket Tax, but more independent reading to supplement the almost total reliance on textbook work, and adoption in “honors courses” of the “Oxford Method” of fewer examinations so that students could pursue lines of study without being tied to rigid curricula—had been thwarted during the elections a month before, but he was already planning to resurrect the campaign in the
Star
. While the council was meeting in Old Main, the three friends, who had grown up together in San Marcos, sat together on a bench outside, awaiting notification of their election.

But it was Horace Richards and Wilton Woods who emerged from the building—and as they saw the waiting trio, they started giggling. Puis and the Kyles soon found out what they were giggling about. When a member of the council, a friend, appeared, he told them that there had been surprising developments at the meeting. A new rule had been suggested. He had objected to it, and so had others, but a vote had been quickly called for and, with the council’s freshman and sophomore members voting for it—along with a single senior, Lyndon Johnson—the rule had been quickly passed by the margin of a single vote. This rule, the friend said, made residents of San Marcos ineligible for
Star
and
Pedagog
jobs because, since they lived at home, they didn’t need the salaries as much as other students, and, with the Depression at hand, jobs should go to students in need. The new rule had made Puis and the Kyles ineligible, the friend said, and the jobs they had expected had gone instead to students who had not previously been considered in the running: the
Star
editorship to Osier Dunn, a junior
whose previous role on the paper had been so minor that his picture had not even been included among those in the
Pedagog
section devoted to the newspaper; the post of
Star
business manager to Harvey Yoe, a freshman, the first freshman in anyone’s memory to have received such an honor.

Mortified though they were at the injustice of the new rule (far from not needing money, Puis needed it badly; he had been counting on the
Pedagog
salary to pay his tuition; without it, he would have to drop out of college), they had no inkling at first that it had been devised solely to make them ineligible—and they had no inkling that Lyndon Johnson had done the devising. Kyle was especially shocked to learn the truth. He and Johnson were very different young men—the slender, bespectacled, studious Kyle was a voracious reader, a brilliant student who received in reality the A’s that Johnson only said he received, a brilliant debater who, undefeated during his junior year, won in reality the debating victories that Johnson only said he won—but they shared an interest in politics (although Kyle was more interested in the science than the practice). They argued constantly in history and social-science courses—Kyle, a professor says, could argue Johnson “to a standstill”; he had read the books that Johnson only said he had read—but Kyle had enjoyed those arguments, had thought the give-and-take of ideas was what college was all about, and he had believed that Johnson enjoyed them, too. During Johnson’s pre-Cotulla days at college, Kyle says, “I befriended him when no one else would have anything to do with him,” and Johnson had apparently reciprocated, inviting him to his home to meet his parents. During Johnson’s post-Cotulla days, he had needed the support of “townies” for Deason’s election, and, as Kyle was their leader, had cultivated him. “I thought we were friends,” Kyle says. Enraged though he had been by Richards’ railroading of the junior class vote, he had thought that Johnson was only one of the group following Richards around that day; he had not the slightest suspicion that Johnson was its leader. Now he had not the slightest suspicion of Johnson’s role in conceiving the “Depression” argument that had deprived him of the editorship. And he was as unaware of the existence of a secret organization called the White Stars as he was of how Lyndon Johnson really felt about being argued to a standstill. The previous year, Kyle recalls now, “two of his henchmen [Richards and Woods] asked me … would I be willing to be a member of a group that would try to get more money for these literary activities, forensic activities, because the football team was getting too much money. I never got the idea that [it] was a secret group, I never knew that Lyndon was even a member of it.” After he declined the invitation (“I said all these people you all are fighting are my friends”), he never again, although he previously had been class president, won another student office. Without understanding how, he felt that Richards and Woods were somehow behind those defeats. Now he felt that, in some way he didn’t understand, they were also behind his defeat for the editorship, and as soon as he
learned about it, he recalls, “I sought them out, and stopped them on the side of Old Main and cursed them with every name in the book. They just stood and looked at me and grinned.” But he never guessed—never had even a suspicion—who was behind Richards and Woods. Not until “the very last part of school,” some weeks after the decisive council meeting, was Kyle told that Johnson had been the moving force at the meeting, and that, moreover, “Lyndon had been working for years to keep me from getting any honors at all.” Puis also suspected nothing. “All the time this was going on,” he says, whenever he saw Lyndon Johnson on the campus, Johnson would smile in a friendly way and “stop and talk just like nothing was happening.”

Puis, ironically in light of the argument Johnson had used to sway the council, had to spend “a horrible year” in Bishop, Texas, to earn enough money to return to college. He left for Bishop, he says, with “a bad taste” in his mouth. “He [Johnson] started [the politicking] at San Marcos,” Puis says. “He had to start it. If he hadn’t done the politicking and maneuvering, he couldn’t have been outstanding. He wasn’t an outstanding student, and he wasn’t outstanding in anything else. He was just the type of character who was snaky all the time. He got power by things you or I wouldn’t stoop to. But he got the power, and he cheated us out of jobs we had worked very hard for, and had earned.” Kyle and his sister had enough money to continue at San Marcos, but they dropped out, too—and would not return until Johnson had graduated and left. “We left college because of him,” Kyle says. “Because of disgust at what he did.” The disgust would not fade for years, Kyle’s friends say. Says Ella So Relle, who did not herself learn until years later the real reason the council rejected her recommendation for her successor: “Henry was very smart, and he was very idealistic, and he just could not tolerate what he saw as political purposes.” Says another student, who has asked not to be identified: “It was as if Henry, who had lived a very sheltered life, found out all at once just how dirty life could really be.”

C
LASS PRESIDENTS
, Student Council members, Gaillardians,
Star
and
Pedagog
editors—when Lyndon Johnson had returned from Cotulla in June, 1929, all had been members of a clique that had scorned Lyndon Johnson. By the time he graduated in August, 1930, all had been replaced by members of a clique led, in fact if not in name, by Lyndon Johnson. His enemies had been supplanted by his allies, and with remarkable speed. In little more than a year, he, a young man with a long-standing interest in politics but absolutely no political experience, had manipulated a campus political structure—
created
a campus political structure—so that he, still one of the most disliked students on campus, exerted over it more influence than any other student.

“Thinking back on those wonderful … monologues, … I can clearly see that political stratagems have always been my brother’s natural vocation and favorite pastime,” Sam Houston Johnson writes.
Natural vocation:
the insight of a brother who, throughout his life, would display considerable brotherly insight. Lyndon Johnson had come to his new field already an expert in it.

His brother understood part of the reason for this aptitude. “His penchant for nose-counting comes from Daddy,” he wrote. For nose-counting—and for much else. The tall, gangling, big-eared young man with the lapel-holding mannerism and the powerful talent for persuasion was, after all, the son of a man with the same mannerism and the same talent. The young man possessed of an instinctive gift for a campus version of backroom maneuvering was the son of a man who, coming to the State Capitol without experience, had displayed immediately a similar gift.

But there was a crucial difference between father and son—as a single contrast demonstrates. His father’s most gallant fight was the one he waged, alone in the Texas House of Representatives except for six forlorn allies, against Joseph Weldon Bailey, the Populist who had betrayed the Populists. Once, in a history class, Lyndon Johnson was asked if he had a particular hero. “Joe Bailey,” he replied.

Sam Ealy Johnson, an idealist “straight as a shingle” whose uncompromising adherence to the beliefs and principles with which he had entered politics made him a hero to some, was nonetheless a political failure who didn’t accomplish any of his most cherished aims. His son had, in the campus arena which was the only arena in which he had yet fought, accomplished his aims—because the impedimenta which hampered his father did not hamper him. He had won believing in nothing—without a reform he wanted to make, without a principle or issue about which he truly cared (“We didn’t care if the argument was true or not.”). He had demonstrated, moreover, not only a pragmatism foreign to his father but a cynicism foreign as well: he had persuaded students—had persuaded them earnestly, his arm around their shoulders, looking intently into their eyes—that they should not cast votes that would help a secret organization, without letting them know that he was a member of a secret organization. A cynicism—and a ruthlessness. He didn’t merely count votes; he stole them. In what a lieutenant termed “blackmail,” he had threatened a frightened girl with the exposure—the exposure and exaggeration, in “big headlines”—of a meaningless, momentary indiscretion. He had exploited the loneliness of women. The son of the man of whom “you always knew where
he
stood” let no one know where he stood. Men like Kyle and Puis, into whose ambitions he was scheming to plunge a knife, thought he was their friend until the knife was in up to the hilt. These tactics had, of course, been employed within the confines of campus politics, so small-scale and insignificant compared
to the politics of the outside world. Within those confines, nonetheless, had emerged a certain pattern to the tactics—the politicking—of Lyndon Johnson. Perhaps the most significant aspect of the pattern was its lack of any discernible limits. Pragmatism had shaded into the morality of the ballot box, a morality in which nothing matters but victory and any maneuver that leads to victory is justified—into a morality that is amorality.