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THE 1934 MAVERICK CAMPAIGN also marked Lyndon Johnson’s first involvement with one of the more pragmatic aspects of politics. Awakening early one morning a day or two before the election, in the big room in San Antonio’s Plaza Hotel that he shared with Johnson, L. E. Jones experienced an awakening of another sort. Johnson was sitting at a table in the center of the room — and on the table were stacks of five-dollar bills. “That big table was just covered with money — more money than I had ever seen,” Jones says. Jones never learned who had given the cash to Johnson — so secretive was his boss that he had not even known Johnson had it — but he saw what Johnson did with it. Mexican-American men would come into the room, one at a time. Each would tell Johnson a number — some, unable to speak English, would indicate the number by holding up fingers — and Johnson would count out that number of five-dollar bills, and hand them to him. “It was five dollars a vote,” Jones realized. “Lyndon was checking each name against lists someone had furnished him with. These Latin people would come in, and show how many eligible voters they had in the family, and Lyndon would pay them five dollars a vote.
THE PASSION eventually faded from Johnson’s relationship with Alice Glass. She married Charles Marsh, but quickly divorced him, and married several times thereafter. “She never got over Lyndon,” Alice Hopkins says. But the relationship itself survived; even when he was a Senator, Lyndon Johnson would still occasionally dismiss his chauffeur for the day and drive his huge limousine the ninety miles to Longlea; the friendship was ended only by the Vietnam War, which Alice considered one of history’s horrors. By 1967, she referred to Johnson, in a letter she wrote Oltorf, in bitter terms. And later she told friends that she had burned love letters that Johnson had written her — because she didn’t want her granddaughter to know she had ever been associated with the man responsible for Vietnam.
But this belief demonstrated only that Lyndon Johnson simply had not grasped that there was another world, a world in which Douglas and Lehman were not crazies but heroes, in which principles mattered far more than they did in the Senate. In addition, Lyndon Johnson had not fully appreciated that it didn’t matter what he did for the liberals in Social Security and housing so long as he was not on their side on the “great issue.” He should have appreciated this.
It is not clear who will bring to the Whitehouse those useful commodities of vivid language, a sense of history and most important - a sense of humour, but Johnson himself will provide many other attributes. He is effective precisely because he is so determined, industrious, personal and even humourless, particularly in dealing with Congress. (…) Kennedy had a detached and even donnish willingness to grant a merit in the other fellow’s argument. Johnson is not so inclined to retreat and grants nothing in an argument, not even equal time. Ask not what you have done for Lyndon Johnson, but what you have done for him lately. This may not be the most attractive quality of the new administration but it works. The lovers of style are not too happy with the new administration, but the lovers of substance are not complaining.
Johnson, who had been reading a newspaper in the back seat, “suddenly … lowered the newspaper and leaned forward,” and said, “ ‘Chief, does it bother you when people don’t call you by name?’ ” Parker was to recall that “I answered cautiously but honestly, ‘Well, sir, I do wonder. My name is Robert Parker.’ ” And that was evidently not an answer acceptable to Johnson. “Johnson slammed the paper onto the seat as if he was slapping my face. He leaned close to my ear. ‘Let me tell you one thing, nigger,’ he shouted. ‘As long as you are black, and you’re gonna be black till the day you die, no one’s gonna call you by your goddamn name. So no matter what you are called, nigger, you just let it roll off your back like water, and you’ll make it. Just pretend you’re a goddamn piece of furniture.’
He was, in fact, so deeply and widely mistrusted at college that the nickname he bore during all his years there was “Bull” (for “Bullshit”) Johnson. Most significant, perhaps, the dislike and distrust of him extended beyond politics. As President, Lyndon Johnson would be accused of lying to the American people. When he was a college student, his fellow students (who used his nickname to his face: “Hiya, Bull,” “Howya doin’, Bull?”) believed not only that he lied to them — lied to them constantly, lied about big matters and small, lied so incessantly that he was, in a widely used phrase, “the biggest liar on campus” — but also that some psychological element impelled him to lie, made him, in one classmate’s words, “a man who just could not tell the truth.” Credibility gap as well as Great Society are foreshadowed in
No southerner had been elected President for more than a century, and it was a bitter article of faith among southern politicians that no southerner would be elected President in any foreseeable future; when members of the House of Representatives gave their Speaker, Sam Rayburn, ruler of the House for more than two decades, a limousine as a present, attached to the back of the front seat was a plaque that read 'To Our Beloved Sam Rayburn - Who Would Have Been President If He Had Come From Any Place but the South.
Johnson’s voting record — a record twenty years long, dating back to his arrival in the House of Representatives in 1937 and continuing up to that very day — was consistent with the accent and the word. During those twenty years, he had never supported civil rights legislation — any civil rights legislation. In Senate and House alike, his record was an unbroken one of votes against every civil rights bill that had ever come to a vote: against voting rights bills; against bills that would have struck at job discrimination and at segregation in other areas of American life; even against bills that would have protected blacks from lynching.