The first thing the latest visitor noted about the Johnson family home in Texas when he got out of the Vice Presidential limousine was that he had just stepped into turmoil. The circus was pulling down the big top, caging the animals and packing its caravans ahead of moving on.
The Vice President was loading up the wagons and heading back to Philadelphia. There were Secret Service officers everywhere, there were suitcases and travelling trunks stacked on the porch, and most of the windows of the ranch were heavily draped as the staff began to place the small complex into mothballs.
The car, a gleaming Cadillac had collected Thurgood Marshall from the tarmac of Robert Mueller Municipal Airport in the north eastern suburbs of Austin minutes after his Continental Airways flight had touched down from San Francisco. Fifty-five year old Marshall was a thick set, sometimes severe-looking man who had been the executive director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund since 1940. He had been the man who decided which cases the NAACP fought before the Supreme Court and had become the best known, and certainly the most famous black litigator in the history of the United States. It was Marshall who had won the decision handed down by the Supreme Court in May 1954 — by a unanimous verdict — that desegregated public schools when he fought the Brown versus Board of Education of Topeka case for the NAACP.
It was another dry, stifling southern Texas summer day. The air tasted of dust and the wind rustling the leaves of the nearby trees planted to give the main house shelter from the blazing sun was hot, which made the charming cool elegance of the Vice President’s wife amidst the chaos of ‘moving day’ all the more impressive.
“Lyndon had to take a call from Philadelphia,” she smiled as she stepped down from the steps in front of the house.
Marshall had heard that the Vice President and his old friend John Connally had been ‘in conference’ the previous day, confirming him in the opinion that now was the time to remind LBJ, cordially but firmly, of the Administration’s obligation to his people. His people were every bit as American as Johnson’s white Southern Democrat power base.
Thurgood Marshall inquired as to the Vice President’s health.
“Lyndon is fully recovered,” he as assured.
The first time Marshall had visited the ranch LBJ had told him the homestead had had to be raised off the ground because of snakes in the summer and floods in the winter. One never really knew if and when Johnson was pulling one’s leg; because in everything but his down home, innate pragmatism the Vice President could be, and frequently was an enigma even to those who knew him best.
Claudia Alta ‘Lady Bird’ Johnson had met her husband when he was working as an aide to Congressman Richard Kleberg, the representative of the 14th District of Texas. Backed by a modest inheritance she had entertained hopes of a career in journalism but right from the start she had been drawn to Lyndon Johnson like a moth ‘to a flame’. Her future husband had proposed to her on their first ‘proper’ date but she had held out for another ten weeks before accepting his proposal. They had married in November 1934 in San Antonio. People said Lyndon would never have made anything of himself without her — and her money — but they were wrong about that, just as they were wrong about so many of the things they said about her husband.
It was true that she had bankrolled his campaign for Congress. That had been her decision; from the outset LBJ had been scrupulous in insisting that whatever she did with ‘her inheritance’ was her affair. Moving to Washington DC in 1938 had been a wrench, even more so after Lyndon had joined the Navy in 1942 leaving her to run his Congressional Office in his absence. However, that was the thing, they were inseparable partners in life’s great endeavor and she had always known that she had married a great man. Albeit a great man who sometimes had an uncanny knack of willfully upsetting people. But even in this she and Lyndon were ideally matched; he was a force of nature, she was one of life’s born arbitrators and mediators. One night in Houston she had driven after a young reporter who had been on the wrong end of LBJ’s famous ‘treatment’, inviting him back to the Johnson home.
‘That’s just the way Lyndon is,’ she had explained.
After LBJ had had blazing rows and apparently irreconcilable partings from friends and foes alike Lady Bird would pick up the phone and invite the ‘new enemy’ to dine at their Washington home, or to stay over at the Ranch or take steps to unreservedly, unambiguously apologize for her husband’s angry words via the political wives grapevine.
It helped that she was not just a political wife.
As long ago as 1943 she had purchased KTBC, a radio station in Austin. As President of the LBJ Holding Company she had built up the business over the years, made lucrative deals with the CBS radio network and expanded into Television in the early 1950s. Eventually, KTBC Radio had become the CBS affiliated KTBC-TV/7 organization in possession of — by no small measure courtesy of Lyndon’s influence as Senate Majority Leader over the Federal Communications Commission — a license granting it a monopoly over all VHF TV frequencies in the area. Utilizing this franchise had made the Johnsons millionaires in the years before the October War. People sniped at them but that was only jealously. In this World nobody gave you anything; everything had to be earned and over the years the Johnsons honestly believed they had paid their dues.
“Come straight inside and let me pour you a long cold drink, Thurgood,” the nation’s second lady smiled after planting a passing, pecking kiss on her visitor’s right cheek and seizing his left hand proprietarily. “The phone rang as your car was coming up to the house. Now isn’t that just typical!” She complained philosophically, for she was the most dutiful of political wives.
“It’s good to see you, counselor!” Lyndon Johnson boomed, visibly shrugging off a cloak of exasperation as he stomped into the airy reception room next to his study as Marshall and Lady Bird exchanged pleasantries about each other’s respective spouses. Marshall’s first wife had died in 1955, having since remarried he had two young sons aged seven and five. “How was California?”
Although the Vice President tended to be the tallest man in any room he did not tower over Marshall, himself a big man in every respect. The two men sized each other up; as they always did even though they had known from the beginning that they were men who had been born to ‘do business’. While there was nothing remotely ‘color blind’ in Johnson’s politics or his career, he came from the Southern Democrat caucus of his Party and had never been ashamed, or felt any compunction to apologize for it. The truth was that he and the man who had been the NAACP’s guiding legal hand and brain for the best part of a quarter of a century had recognized something of themselves in the other from the outset.
Johnson was the son of a Texas dirt farmer who had had to fight tooth and nail for everything he had got in life, achieved everything that he had achieved by the sweat of his own brow.
Baltimore born Thurgood Marshall was the son of a railroad porter and the great-grandson of a slave born in what was now the Congo. Marshall was dignified, his words considered, weighty and his character formed and tempered by a career battling on behalf of the weak and the oppressed against the rich and the powerful.
Johnson was silently brooding or manic, forever seeking a path through the morass of party politicking, vested interest and the plain stupidity of the Washington — now Philadelphia — ruling elite.
They were men with agendas who wanted more than anything to get things done; and that, when all was said was the unbreakable steely cord that bound them together.