Means of Ascent by Robert A. Caro Page A

interaction of his early humiliation with his heredity that gave his efforts their feverish, almost frantic, intensity, a quality that journalists would describe as “energy”
     when it was really desperation and fear, the fear of a man fleeing something terrible.
    Making the return even harder—much harder—was the fact that he not only had lost, but had allowed victory to be stolen from him.
    His brother, Sam Houston Johnson, said, “It was most important to Lyndon not to be like Daddy,” and Sam Houston was correct. Their father,Sam Ealy Johnson, was idealistic, romantic, rigidly honest; in wide-open Austin, lobbyists who dispensed the “Three B’s” (“beefsteak, bourbon and blondes”) liberally to other legislators learned that they couldn’t buy Sam Johnson so much as a drink. His
     colleagues called him “straight as a shingle,” and despite this rigidity, he—an idealistic Populist with a remarkable aptitude for legislative maneuvering—compiled an impressive record in championing causes against the “Interests” and for what he called, almost with reverence, “The People.” And the respect in which he was held by fellow legislators—decades later, one of them,Wright Patman, by that
     time a powerful United States Congressman familiar with the nation’s most renowned public figures, was to call Sam Ealy Johnson “the best man I ever knew”—was mirrored in the adoring eyes of his son. As a small boy, Lyndon Johnson had tried so hard to imitate his father that people watching him laughed; he had tried to dress like him, right down to a scaled-down version of Sam Johnson’s big Stetson hat. He tried to accompany him
     everywhere—“right by the side of his daddy wherever he went.” As a teenager, Lyndon Johnson resembled his tall father not only in appearance—“the same huge ears, the same big nose, the same pale skin and the same dark eyes,” recalls Patman, who was to serve with the father in the Legislature and with the son in Congress—but also in mannerisms, most notably in one very distinctive mannerism: when Sam Johnson wanted to persuade a
     listener of a point, he would drape one long arm around the shoulders of the man he was talking to, with his other hand grasp one of the man’s lapels, and lean into him, talking with his face very close to the listener’s. “Even as a teenager,” Patman was to recall, “Lyndon clutched you like his daddy did when he talked to you.” And when his father took Lyndon campaigning—Sam won six terms in theTexas Legislature—driving from farm to farm in a Model T Ford, stopping by the side of the road to share with his son an enormous crust of homemade bread covered with jam while they talked quietly together—that was a time of which Lyndon Johnson was to say, “Christ, sometimesI wished it could go on forever.”
    But it didn’t go on forever. In the Hill Country, ideals and dreams brought disaster when they collided with the inexorable realities of that harsh land. Although, until Lyndon was thirteen, his father was financially successful, business was never what interested Sam Johnson. Texas legislators earned only five dollars a day, and then only on days when the Legislature was in session, but Sam was always available to drive endless miles over rutted roads locating
     elderly ranchers who didn’t know they were entitled to a pension and helping them with their applications, or to lead long campaigns for better roads that would help farmers get their goods to market. His personal fortunes began to decline. And when, on a romantic impulse to make the whole Pedernales Valley “Johnson Country”again, Sam, ignoring the realities of the worn-out soil and the marketplace, paid far too much to buy back the old
     “Johnson Ranch,” he plunged himself, seemingly overnight, into a morass of debt from which there was no hope of escape. Always a little resented by Johnson City because of his “air of confidence” (“the Johnsons