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  “Why Can’t You Do a Biography of Napoleon?”

  Ina and I would spend all day reading documents in the Johnson Library, I at one desk, Ina at another a few desks away. And then at a quarter to five the archivist would announce that the Reading Room was about to close and I’d take the elevator downstairs, walk out of the museum past the exhibits showing Lyndon Johnson as President, get into my car and drive out to the Hill Country, to find out what Lyndon Johnson had been like as a boy and young man.

  Johnson died at sixty-four. At the time I started these books, he would have been only sixty-seven. So most of the people who went to high school or college with him were still alive, and, in fact, still living in or around Johnson City. If Truman Fawcett, one of his best friends in high school, had lived back then on the other side of the courthouse square, well, Truman Fawcett was still living on the other side of the courthouse square. Kitty Clyde Ross, Lyndon Johnson’s first girlfriend (until her parents made her stop seeing him because he was “a Johnson”) was Kitty Clyde Leonard now, but she was still in Johnson City, available to be talked to (and asked what it had been like to take the ride on Air Force One that Lyndon had given her when he became President).

  I had thought I would only have to write a chapter or two on Johnson’s youth, and wouldn’t have to do much research for it. At the time I started there were already seven biographies of Johnson in print, all of them with a chapter or two on that period of his life. And they all related the same anecdotes, which portrayed young Lyndon as a sort of Horatio Alger hero of the Hill Country, smiling and popular, who had risen through ambition and hard work. Wonderful anecdotes, some of them. Poor boy making his way in the world. I thought that thanks to those books I already knew the basic story of his youth, without enough detail or sense of what the Hill Country was like, but that I could provide through some interviews and that was all I would need to do.

  I found the interviews unexpectedly difficult, however—very difficult, in fact. Some of the people who had known Lyndon in college lived on isolated ranches or farms. I would drive sixty or seventy miles on a highway and then (“Look for the cattle guard on the left”), turn off onto an unpaved track that might go for fifteen or twenty miles, and at the end of it would be a house, the only one for miles, and in it a couple (or a widow; there seemed to be a disproportionate number of widows in the Hill Country) who weren’t accustomed to having long conversations with strangers. And the barrier was not simply a shyness which I could break down. The ranchers and farmers of the Hill Country were very different from people in New York. There was a kind of reticence, of holding back, in their conversations with me, a laconic quality which didn’t provide much information. Moreover, they also felt—quite deeply, in a trait especially striking to someone from New York and particularly to someone from New York’s Upper West Side—that it was wrong to say anything derogatory about a man who had become President of the United States. While if you asked them a direct question, they would always tell you the truth, they wouldn’t volunteer anything; their answers would be terse, brief. I got the feeling that what they were telling me was only part of the story of the young Lyndon Johnson. I’d repeat one of those wonderful anecdotes that were in the other biographies, and the most someone might volunteer was, “Well, that’s not quite what happened.” They wouldn’t say what actually had happened, and were very chary about giving me any details. I began to sense a deep reluctance to tell me the whole story, or even the true story—to reveal to an outsider what Lyndon Johnson had really been like as a youth and young man. Equally disturbing, the more I talked to them, the more I realized that it wasn’t just the young Lyndon Johnson I wasn’t understanding, the same was true of the people to whom I was talking: I wasn’t understanding them, either—their culture, their mores. They were obviously very different from me, or from any people I had encountered before, and I didn’t know how to break through.

  Part of the problem, I came to realize, was that they had talked to too many people like me. During Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, journalists from all over the United States, from every major magazine and newspaper and a lot of minor ones, too, had come to the Hill Country, had spent three or four days there (or even a week), and had gone home to explain this remote place to the rest of America. Hill Country people had a name for them: “portable journalists.” They basically thought I was a portable journalist too.

  I said to Ina, “I’m not understanding these people and therefore I’m not understanding Lyndon Johnson. We’re going to have to move to the Hill Country and live there.” Ina said, “Why can’t you do a biography of Napoleon?” But Ina is always Ina: loyal and true. She said, as she always says: “Sure.” We rented a house on the edge of the Hill Country, where we were to live for most of the next three years.

  That changed everything. As soon as we had moved there, as soon as the people of the Hill Country realized we were there to stay, their attitude towards us softened; they started to talk to me in a different way. I began to hear the details they had not included in the anecdotes they had previously told me—and they told me other anecdotes and longer stories, anecdotes and stories that no one had even mentioned to me before—stories about a Lyndon Johnson very different from the young man who had previously been portrayed: stories about a very unusual young man, a very brilliant young man, a very ambitious, unscrupulous and quite ruthless person, disliked and even despised, and, by people who knew him especially well, even beginning to be feared.

  * * *

  —

  ONE THING THAT LIVING in the Hill Country did for me was to get to know Lyndon’s little brother, Sam Houston Johnson.

  I had, of course, interviewed Sam Houston several times already, while we were still living in Austin. He had a reputation not only for a severe drinking problem but for bravado, braggadocio, for exaggeration that bordered on untruthfulness, and I had found the reputation fully justified. It didn’t ameliorate my feelings for him that he played the archetypal Texan: big hat, big boots, a bottle of Tabasco sauce that he always carried in his pocket because food was never spicy enough for him; and, I felt, big—tall—stories. He told me the same stories about Lyndon that others had, but with fanciful details added, all to glorify his brother, but it seemed to me that every actual fact in his anecdotes that could be checked would, when I checked it, turn out to be either exaggerated or entirely false. Feeling I had wasted enough time checking, I had decided to simply not use anything he told me.

  I didn’t see Sam Houston for perhaps a year.

  During this interval, I heard that he had had a horrible operation for cancer, that he had to use a cane all the time now, and that he had stopped drinking. Then, one day, while I was walking around the streets of Johnson City—I was there a lot, just chatting with people, trying to absorb the atmosphere; walking the sidewalks, a few paved, some wooden, some just dust; saying, “Howdy” to everyone I met; trying to remember that the noun was not “you” but “y’all”—there he was, limping toward me, shrunken, frail. We went to have a cup of coffee in Casparis’ Café (you venture too far beyond coffee in that café at your peril; Lady Bird Johnson told me once, in a rare moment of acerbity, that when forced to eat there she always ordered eggs: “There isn’t too much they can do to eggs”). I found the man sitting next to me at the counter now a changed man—quiet, calm, all the braggadocio gone. I decided to try interviewing him again.

  There was one thing in particular about which I not only wanted but needed his help, and I had thought of a way I might get it. By this time, having interviewed not only Lyndon Johnson’s sister Rebekah, but three cleaning women who had, at one time or another, worked in the Johnson home, I felt that a key to Lyndon Johnson’s youth—to his character throughout his life, in fact, the character that had had such a profound impact on American history—was his complicated relationship with his father, Sam Ealy Johnson, whom he so strikingly resembled, not only in appearance but in
manner. It was a relationship that veered from idolization to hatred, but I didn’t have a clear picture of that relationship in my mind, and not enough detail to make my readers see it. Here was someone who had seen it every day, including every evening when Lyndon and his father sat down with the family for dinner. And I had thought of a device that I hoped might elicit from Sam Houston the true picture of that relationship—the details of it—that I needed; that might put him back, in his mind, into his childhood, that might make his memory of the relationship become as clear to him as possible.

  I persuaded the National Park Service to allow Sam Houston and me to go into the Johnson Boyhood Home in Johnson City, which had been faithfully re-created to look as it had when Lyndon was growing up in it, after it had officially closed for the day. And one evening, when it was empty, with the tourists and guides all gone, I took Sam Houston Johnson into the house in which he had been a boy.

  I led him into the dining room. There was a long plank table, just like the one around which the Johnsons had gathered for meals. At its head and foot were high-backed chairs, for the father and mother. When the Johnsons had dined there, Rebekah and her two sisters had sat side by side in chairs on one side of the table, and Lyndon and Sam Houston had sat on the other.

  I asked Sam Houston to sit in the same place he had sat in as a boy. Despite his lameness, he threw a leg over one of the chairs, put his cane down next to it, and, pulling over his other leg, sat down, next to his father’s old chair, as if he were a boy sitting there again.

  I didn’t sit down at the table. I sat down instead behind Sam Houston, in a chair against the wall, and it was sitting there that I opened my notebook. I didn’t want anyone at that table who was not one of the Johnsons of Johnson City.

  It was about the same time of day that would have been dinnertime in Johnson City long ago. Rays of the low evening sun came into the dining room and cast shadows, the same shadows the sun would have cast as Sam Houston had sat there as a boy.

  “Now, Sam Houston,” I said. “I’d like you to tell me again about those terrible arguments that your father and Lyndon used to have at dinnertime—just take me through them again, like you did before, only with more detail.”

  At first, it was slow going, halting, just fragments of generalized memory, and I had to keep interjecting myself to keep it going at all: “Daddy would say something about…” And then what? “Well, Lyndon would say…” But once Sam Houston started remembering, the memories, strikingly different from others he had previously given, began coming clearer and faster until finally no interjections were necessary, and there were no pauses: Sam Houston was re-creating family dinners at the Johnsons’, saying, almost shouting, back and forth, what his father had shouted at his brother, and what his brother had shouted back: “You’re just not college material, are you, goddammit? You’re just a failure, Lyndon, and you’re always going to be a failure…” and Lyndon would shout back, “What are you? You’re a bus inspector, that’s what you are!…” “ ‘Sam!, Sam!,’ Mother would say…‘Lyndon!, Lyndon!’ ”

  Sitting there against the wall, I felt I was getting closer to the heart of Lyndon Johnson’s boyhood. And when, finally, after quite a long time, Sam Houston had stopped talking, and was sitting quietly, very quiet and still, so still that I felt he was in the grip of memory, memory as true as it could be after all these years, I said to him: “Now, Sam Houston, I want you to tell me again all those wonderful stories about Lyndon when you both were boys, the stories you told me before—just tell me them again with more details.”

  There was a long pause. I can still see the scene—see the little, stunted, crippled man sitting at the long plank table, see the shadows in the room, see myself, not wanting to move lest I break the spell, sitting there with my notebook against the wall saying, “Tell me those wonderful stories again.”

  “I can’t,” Sam Houston said.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Because they never happened.”

  I don’t think there was a pause after that. In my memory, without a pause from Sam Houston or a question from me, he simply started talking—my notes tell me he began by saying, “No one really understood what happened when Lyndon went to California”—and related, incident after incident, anecdotes from Lyndon Johnson’s youth, some of which I had heard before, in shorter, incomplete, and softened versions but which I heard in new, more complete versions now; others that had never been mentioned to me, or, I felt, to anyone else. The shadows lengthened, the room grew darker. The voice went on. By the time, a long time later, that it stopped, I had a different picture of Lyndon Johnson’s youth—that terrible youth, that character-hardening youth—than I, or history, had had before. And now, when I went back to the men and women who had been involved in the incidents, and, armed with the details Sam Houston had given me, asked again about these incidents, I got a different response than I had gotten before. Yes, that’s what happened, they would say. And, often they would say, there’s something else I remember. More details would come. The story at last would be coherent—and closer to the truth.

  Interviewing

  “I lied under oath”: Luis Salas

  I’ve done so many interviews for my books—522 I see I counted for The Power Broker, when I was still counting; for the Johnson books I didn’t count: thousands, I guess.

  Some of them stick out in your memory, like one with a man named Luis Salas.

  A crucial moment in Lyndon Johnson’s career was the 1948 election for a United States senator from Texas, which Johnson apparently had lost to former governor Coke Stevenson until, six days after the balloting, Precinct 13—“Box 13”—in Jim Wells County, one of the border counties ruled by Duval County’s George Parr, the notorious “Duke of Duval,” suddenly reported 202 new votes, 200 of them for Johnson, votes which gave him the victory by eighty-seven votes out of almost a million that had been cast. Every Johnson biography had included some pages on the election, and on the ensuing controversy over whether he had stolen it, but all had treated it somewhat offhandedly and had made some version of the statement: no one will ever know if it was really stolen. Most of these books treated the election as sort of a Texas-size joke, with stealing by both sides.

  I remember thinking when I reached 1948 in my research that that election wasn’t a topic that I was going to treat offhandedly. Part of the reason was straightforward and professional: what I was trying to do with my books. I was supposed to be examining the political system in America, and there had been a lot of stolen elections in American political history; it wouldn’t be exaggerating much, in fact, to say that the stealing of elections was an integral part of that history; I wanted to examine, to dissect, a stolen election in detail. But part of the reason was neither straightforward nor professional, nor, to be honest (or as honest as possible), was it something that had much to do with reason. It had to do with that something in me, that something in my nature, which, as I said earlier, wasn’t a quality I could be proud of or could take credit for. It wasn’t something that, as I missed yet another deadline by months or years, I could take the blame for, either. It was just part of me, like it or not; the part of me that had hated writing an article for Newsday while I still had questions—or even a question—left to ask; the part of me that, now that I was writing books, kept leading me, after I had gotten every question answered, to suddenly think, despite myself, of new questions that, in the instant of thinking them, I felt must be answered for my book to be complete; the part of me that kept leading me to think of new avenues of research that, even as I thought of them, I felt it was crucial to head down. It wasn’t something about which, I had learned the hard way, I had a choice; in reality I had no choice at all. In my defense: while I am aware that there is no Truth, no objective truth, no single truth, no truth simple or unsimple, either; no verity, eternal or otherwise; no Truth about anything, there are Facts, objective facts, discernible
and verifiable. And the more facts you accumulate, the closer you come to whatever truth there is. And finding facts—through reading documents or through interviewing and re-interviewing—can’t be rushed; it takes time. Truth takes time. But that’s a logical way of justifying that quality in me. And I know it wasn’t only logic that made me think: I’m never going to write about a crucial election, a pivotal moment in my subject’s life, and say that no one’s ever going to know if it was really stolen or not until I’ve done everything I can think of to find out if it was stolen or not.