Means of Ascent by Robert A. Caro Page B

could strut sitting down”), and because he preferred discussing ideas and principles of government rather than crops and the weather, Sam refused now to change his manner although he “owed everyone in town,” persisted in
     wearing a jacket and tie instead of work clothes like every other man in Johnson City—and resentment turned to ridicule, ridicule climaxed by a roar of appreciative laughter at a barbecue when a potential political opponent said, “I tell you, ladies and gentlemen, Sam Johnson is a mighty smart man. But he’s got no sense.” Penniless, doomed to remain in debt until he died, unable to pay his bills in the stores he had to walk past every
     day, allowed to live in his house only because his brothers guaranteed the mortgage payments, he went to work on a road-grading crew that was building the highway for which he had fought in the Legislature, forced to wear work clothes at last. “He did a lot for that road, all right, Sam did,” one man snickers in recollection. Lyndon’s mother, also an idealist and romantic, who tried to teach her children that “principles” were the important thing, a
     delicate woman better educated than most Hill Country women (and less suited to the rough life), was unable to keep her five children neat, or even fed very well, and when she remarked, trying to explain the value of education, “Now is the time to put something in children’s heads,” the neighbors sneered, “Maybe she ought to try putting something in their stomachs.”
    The Johnsons became, in fact, the laughingstock of the town. Lyndon Johnson was to spend the restof his youth in a poverty so severe that often he and his brother and three sisters would have gone hungry were it not for food given as charity by relatives and friends, food seasoned with small-town sneers and cruelty. He had to stand in Courthouse Square and watch his high school sweetheart drive by with another man because her parents would not
     allow her to date “a Johnson.” “I saw how it made Lyndon feel,” his cousin Ava says. “And I cried for him. I had to cry for Lyndon a lot.” He was to work on the road gang himself, harnessed to a grader like a mule during a burning Hill Country summer and a freezing Hill Country winter. Lyndon’s relationship with his father was transformed into one of resentment, tension, blazing clashes of wills, and competition as violent as
     admiration had once been. And this competition had one dominant theme. After his father’s fall, it was terribly important to Lyndon Johnson that no one think that
he
had “no sense,” sense as the rough, brutal world of the Hill Country defined the term: “horse sense,” common sense, practicality, realism, pragmatism. Not only did he not wantto be regarded as an idealist, or as a fighter for causes, he wanted to be regarded
     as a man who scorned ideals and causes as impractical dreams, as a man practical, pragmatic, tough, cynical. He wanted the world to see him not as merely smart but as shrewd, wily, sly. This was not, perhaps, a reputation that most men would have wanted. But, as Lyndon Johnson’s demeanor proclaimed, it was the reputation he wanted, wanted and needed—because of the tears and terrors of his youth needed desperately.
    Cultivating and manipulating older men possessed of power that could advance his ambitions, the young Lyndon Johnson employed obsequiousness and flattery so striking that contemporaries mocked him as a “professional son”—but that was no more striking than the openness with which he explained to them in detail his techniques of cultivation and manipulation, and boasted and gloated over his success in bending older men to his will.
     In both high school and college, he courted the daughter of the richest man in town. Not a few youths do that; few take the trouble that Lyndon Johnson took, in both cases, to make sure that his fellow students realized that the principal basis for the courtship was not love or