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  Lyndon’s classmates recognized the superiority of his intelligence. He was “very brilliant,” one schoolmate recalled. The boys his age were simply not in “his class mentally.” Even the older boys “saw that he talked—and thought—faster than they did.” He was too restless to sit still or concentrate in class, however, and recoiled from completing his homework. His mother tried to remedy his lack of preparation by reading his assignments out loud while he ate breakfast, but he felt “smothered” by her “force feedings.” Consequently, he was held back and forced to complete a summer session before graduating high school. Nor, despite his mother’s best urgings, did he ever become a reader. “Is it true?” he would ask her when she handed him a book, agreeing to open its cover only if it were about history or government. If Abraham Lincoln carried away from his standing at the top of his class “the self-confidence of a man who has never met his intellectual equal,” Lyndon Johnson remained forever plagued by a sense of academic inferiority. “My daddy always told me that if I brushed up against the grindstone of life, I’d come away with more polish than I could ever get at Harvard or Yale,” he said years later, a wistful tone in his voice. “I wanted to believe him, but somehow I never could.”

  * * *

  “The way you get ahead in the world, you get close to those that are the heads of things,” Lyndon told his college roommate when he finally arrived at Southwest Texas State Teachers College in San Marcos. “Like President Evans, for example.” Cecil Evans had served as the college president for fifteen years and was well respected by faculty and students alike. Aware of the demands on the president’s time, Johnson concluded “there was only one way to get to know Evans, and that was to work for him directly.” It was school policy to give students part-time jobs in the library, cafeteria, bookstore, administrative offices, or maintenance department. Lyndon’s first job was on the janitorial crew, picking up papers and trash. Most students did the minimum work necessary to keep their jobs, but Lyndon labored with extravagant enthusiasm, making a game of collecting the largest trash pile in the shortest time. His eagerness garnered a promotion to the janitorial crew that worked inside the administration building. Assigned to mop floors, Lyndon focused on the hallway outside the president’s office, allowing him to strike up conversations as President Evans passed by. Like Lyndon, Evans was enamored of politics from his earliest days; in fact, Evans still harbored the hope that someday he might run for office. With Lyndon, as with no other student or even most faculty members, he could enjoy conversations about doings in the legislature or share stories about various political figures. When Lyndon asked if he could work in his office running errands and delivering messages, Evans promptly agreed.

  What began as an inconsequential position soon became, in Lyndon’s hands, a generator of actual power as he expanded the limited function of messenger by encouraging recipients to transmit their own communications through him. Occupying a desk in the president’s foyer, he would announce the arrival of visitors as if he were the appointments secretary rather than the office messenger. In time, faculty members and administrative officials, whose names Lyndon always remembered, came to think of the skinny young Texan with black curly hair as a direct channel to the president. Increasingly impressed by Lyndon’s perceptive observations about state politics, Evans brought him to Austin when committee hearings were held on appropriations for state colleges and other educational matters. Soon, he began relying on his young messenger to work up reports on the hearings, which Lyndon did with flair, analyzing the inclinations of individual legislators as well as the mood and atmosphere of the legislature as a whole. Before long, Lyndon was handling the president’s political correspondence, drafting reports for various state agencies, and taking up residence in a room above the garage in the president’s house. In time, he almost seemed the son President Evans never had—a son who not only provided affection and companionship but whose organizational skills and attention to detail allowed him to assume burdensome tasks and responsibilities belonging to the older man.

  Without a doubt, many students perceived Lyndon’s flagrant consolidation of power as repellent. They considered his ingratiating attitude toward administrators and faculty “kowtowing,” “suck-assing,” “brown nosing.” Several of Lyndon’s classmates regarded him as “ruthless,” prepared “to cut your throat to get what [he] wanted.” They “didn’t just dislike Lyndon Johnson,” one said, “they despised him.”

  “Ambition is an uncomfortable companion,” Lyndon conceded in a college editorial. “He creates a discontent with present surroundings and achievements: he is never satisfied but always pressing forward.” This personification of ambition lacks comprehension of the impression he made on others. He failed to understand when to ease up and was often blind to the collateral cost of his own compulsive energies.

  * * *

  Lyndon’s need to achieve this self-aggrandizing and self-serving ambition was harnessed in the service of a larger purpose for the first time when, during a yearlong break from college, he became the principal of a six-teacher Mexican American elementary school in Cotulla, Texas, a dusty, impoverished town not too far from the border with Mexico. Most of the families lived in dirt hovels, engaged in a continual struggle to wring a living from the dry and treeless land.

  As principal, Lyndon occupied his first true position of authority and employed every leadership attribute he already possessed—indefatigable energy, ability to persuade, willingness to fight for what he wanted, intuition, enterprise, and initiative—to enlarge opportunities for his students and to improve their lives. The students adored him, his fellow teachers came to admire him, and he left an enduring impression upon the little community as a whole. At last, biographer Robert Caro observes, Lyndon was “the somebody he had always wanted to be.” He was neither trying to absorb power by accommodating an older mentor nor savagely competing with peers. He was simply trying to elevate the hopes and conditions of the marginalized and dispossessed of this South Texas town.

  Empathy fired Lyndon’s efforts at Cotulla. “My students were poor and they often came to class without breakfast, hungry,” Johnson later recalled. “And they knew, even in their youth, the pain of prejudice.” Because there was no school funding for extracurricular activities, he used half his first month’s salary to buy sports equipment, and then badgered the school board to include track and field events, baseball games, and volleyball matches in the school budget. In addition to his administrative responsibilities as principal, this one-man band taught fifth, sixth, and seventh grade classes, coached debating, and served as the softball coach, the drama coach, and the choir leader. At first, he had the children practice and compete against one another. Soon, however, he arranged field days with a dozen other regional schools.

  A chorus of voices decades later testifies to the enormous impact Lyndon left on the school. “He respected the kids more than any other teacher we ever had,” said Manuel Sanchez. “He put us to work,” another student remembered. “But he was the kind of teacher you wanted to work for. You felt an obligation to him and to yourself to do your work.” He was strict, they all agreed; he made them stay after school if they hadn’t done their homework. But he was “down-to-earth and friendly,” and years later they were grateful so much had been demanded of them.

  And no one worked more fiercely than Lyndon Johnson. The first to arrive in the morning and the last to leave at night, “he didn’t give himself what we call spare time,” a fellow teacher said. “He walked so fast, it was like seeing a blur,” one townsman recalled. His unflagging energy, his ferocious ambition, and his compulsive drive to organize were now linked to something larger than himself. The success he sought was coupled with an equally powerful desire to transform the lives of his students. “I was determined to spark something inside them, to fill their souls with ambition and interest and belief in the future. I was determined to give them what they needed to make it in this world, to help them finish their educa
tion. Then the rest would take care of itself.”

  The year Johnson spent teaching the Mexican American children in Cotulla was a pivotal experience, one to which Johnson returned again and again. “I can still see the faces of the children who sat in my class,” he said years later. This was the display of a different kind of leadership, one based on empathy and generosity he had never exercised before.

  * * *

  Among the seasoned political eyes trained upon young Lyndon Johnson on the occasion of his first political speech at the Henly picnic of 1930 was the gaze of Welly Hopkins, who was about to launch a campaign for the State Senate. On the spur of the moment that day, Hopkins had cannily invited Lyndon to take a leading position in his campaign, a chance encounter that would have a far-reaching impact on Lyndon’s future.

  “Even in that day,” Hopkins recalled of young Lyndon, “politics was in his blood, just by inheritance and by training, and by general aptitude.” Not only was he “steeped in political lore,” but he was “gifted with a very unusual ability to meet and greet the public,” and to organize. Within days, Lyndon had mobilized a half-dozen of his college friends into a tightly-knit machine.

  “We worked Blanco County in and out,” Hopkins recalled of his travels with Lyndon. “I was up every branch of the Pedernales,” following Lyndon’s judgment “almost completely,” because he knew the area so well and “had a favorable standing with the local people.” No matter how tired they were, Lyndon scoured the countryside for votes, even if the car had to travel to a single farm at the end of an unpaved road. “On one occasion,” Hopkins laughingly recalled, Lyndon had him stand in a dry creek bed to deliver a ten-minute speech to a group of three—a man, his wife, and a relative. Such attention to detail paid off. Hopkins secured a surprising victory. “I always felt he was the real balance of the difference as to whether I’d be elected,” a grateful Hopkins said. Word spread that there was a “wonder kid in San Marcos who knew more about politics than anyone in the area.”

  Lyndon was poised for entry into a political career, but the times said otherwise. The Depression offered no opportunity for a government job. Fortunately, his uncle George Johnson, longtime head of the history department at Sam Houston High, found him a position as a teacher of public speaking and debate. The moment Lyndon arrived at Sam Houston High he set a dramatic goal for the debate team: though they had never “won anything” in competition with neighboring schools, Lyndon told them that for the first time in the history of the school, the team would win not only the city and district competitions, but would go on to the state championship. Straightaway, he had set a psychological target to elevate the team’s ambitions before the debating season even got under way.

  At Houston High, as at Cotulla, Lyndon channeled his ravenous drive for success to benefit others, deploying his headlong leadership style to mobilize funding for the debate club. Luther Jones, one of the club members, recalled overhearing a “rather vigorous argument Johnson had with the principal,” who told him that money for the debating team had never been part of the school budget. “Yes, but you’ve never had a teacher like me!” Johnson countered. “By some people’s standards,” Jones observed, “you would say he was very conceited,” and surely his attitude was “extremely aggressive,” but he “could get people to do things they would under ordinary circumstances never think of doing.”

  Lyndon appeared to his students “a human dynamo,” “a steam engine in pants,” driven by a work ethic and an unlimited enthusiasm that proved contagious. His first day on the job, he had students stand before their mates and make animal noises, anything to slough off nervousness and self-consciousness. “He had a variety of ways to get you going,” debate club member Gene Latimer recalled. He’d either “make you feel ashamed” that you hadn’t seemed to invest sufficient time in the library studying the topic at hand, or “he’d brag on you and make you want to go do some more.” And always, “he liked to pit one against the other.” These techniques “came to him instinctively,” Latimer believed. “No one before or since has ever motivated me like he could. If he told any of us to go get up on a roof of a building and jump off, we’d all pile up there and do it.”

  Storytelling, Johnson taught his students, was the key to successful debating. In contrast to the previous public speaking teacher who came from the “old school,” and trained his debaters to “be bombastic and loud,” Lyndon urged a conversational style that illustrated points with concrete stories. “Act like you’re talking to those folks,” he counseled his students. “Look one of them in the eye and then move on and look another one in the eye.” During competitions, he utilized all his supple array of gestures and facial expressions to cue and prompt—now frowning, narrowing his eyes, creasing his brow, shaking his head, gaping in wonder—creating a silent movie to steer and goad his charges to victory.

  From the start, Johnson sought to create an aura around the debate club that had previously been reserved for the football team. At the first competition, only seven people attended, but as the undefeated team’s victory tally mounted, excitement began to build. By the time the team clinched the city championship and began competing at the district level, every seat in the auditorium was taken. He had transformed debate into a community-wide campaign complete with pep rallies, cheerleaders, and team sweaters. Indeed, an amalgam of his father’s coarse politicking and his mother’s prim scrutiny of appearance and demeanor when she taught elocution at Johnson City High can be clearly traced in their son’s pedagogy. When the team clinched the district level championship, pictures of the two star debaters, Gene Latimer and Luther Jones, were splashed across city newspapers. Though the state championship was lost in the final competition by a single vote, by the time the school year ended, Latimer proudly noted, “we were more important than the football team.”

  * * *

  The services Lyndon rendered to Welly Hopkins’s campaign were remembered and repaid with Welly’s recommendation to Richard Kleberg (who had just won an election to fill a vacancy in the 14th Congressional District) that Lyndon Johnson was just the man he needed as his legislative secretary—in essence, his chief of staff. After meeting Lyndon, Kleberg promptly offered the job. A few days later the two men set off on a Pullman train for the two-day trip to Washington. “All that day I’d gone about feeling excited, nervous, and sad,” Johnson recalled. “I was about to leave home to meet the adventure of my future. I felt grown-up, but my mind kept ranging backward in time. I saw myself as a boy skipping down the road to my granddaddy’s house. I remembered the many nights I had stood in the doorway listening to my father’s political talk. I remembered the evenings with my mother when my daddy was away. Now all that was behind me.”

  If ever a destination seemed a destiny for Lyndon Johnson, it was Washington, D.C.—a city whose intricacies he would master and for a while dominate as completely as he had dominated his college in San Marcos, Cotulla, and Houston High. Upon seeing the Capitol dome for the first time, Johnson vowed that someday he would become a congressman in his own right. “I would not say I was without ambition ever,” he recalled. “It was very exciting to me to realize that the people, many of them that you were passing, were probably congressmen at least, maybe senators, members of the cabinet. And there was the smell of power. It’s got an odor you know. Power I mean.”

  Such was the nature of Johnson’s driven temperament that he had no sooner settled into the Dodge Hotel, where the majority of congressional secretaries lived, than he began his quest to determine the sources and relationships of power in the nation’s capital. There was no time to waste—the scale of inquiry was so much greater than ever before. His adaptation of rural friendliness to his competitive city lodgings made for bizarrely comic tactics: he took four separate showers in the shared bathroom his first night to engage as many people as possible; the next morning he brushed his teeth every ten minutes—all to winnow out the most useful informants in the lot. “This skinny boy was as green as any
body could be,” an older congressional secretary said, “but within a few months he knew how to operate in Washington better than some who had been here twenty years.”

  Managing a staff for the first time, Johnson filled his two positions with young men whose work ethic he had already formed and tested—his star debaters from Houston High, Latimer and Jones. Johnson was “a hard man to work for because he insisted on perfection,” Jones recalled. The Chief, as he was known to them, “wanted to answer every day’s mail every day.” And every letter “had to be just right,” which meant typing and retyping the same letter over and over again, until it was exactly “the way he wanted it.” One Saturday evening, Johnson came back to work after dinner to find Latimer and Jones gone. A note on the desk said they had gone to a movie and would be back at nine. Shuffling through the mail stack, he spied what he was searching for: an unanswered constituent letter! Seizing it, he raced to the local theater, found the two men, and brought them outside, only to learn that in compliance to his earlier directive, the letter in question had been put aside. Anxious to mollify matters, Johnson invited them to dinner at a local restaurant. No sooner had the first drink arrived than up he jumped. “We’ve been relaxing long enough,” he said, “there’s still three more good working hours until we fold.”

  When critics wrote about Johnson’s ruthless manner in dealing with the members of his staff, Latimer insisted that his boss was “extremely sentimental about the people close to him.” And yet, increasingly, the price for admission into his select extended family had grown from dedication and unquestioned loyalty to devouring all of the subordinate’s personal time and space. “If he caught you reading a letter from your mother,” Jones said, “or if you were taking a crap, he’d say, Son, can’t you please try a little harder to do that on your own time?”