(3 of 8)
The Guide & the Goad. To Lyndon Johnson, common sense has a special meaning. Says he: "One of the wisest things my daddy ever told me was that 'so-and-so is a damned smart man, but the fool's got no sense.' " By sense, Johnson means the art of knowing what is possible and how to accomplish it. He does not waste time on lost causes. He realizes that hot issues are rarely settled by victory for the extremists on either side. Always willing to give a little in return for a lot, Johnson is the Senate's acknowledged master at charting the paths of accommodation and compromise. He is contemptuous of the crusaders and windmill tilters among his colleagues. "All they do is fight, fight, fight," he says, "and get 15 Senate votes." As for himself: "I would rather win a convert than an argument."
But if Johnson's sense is his guide, his sensitivity is his goad. It spurs him to vanity: his LBJ brand appears everywhere, on his shirts, his handkerchiefs, his personal jewelry, in his wife's initials, his daughters' initials (Lynda Bird Johnson, 13, and Lucy Baines Johnson, 10), even in the initials of his beagle pet (Little Beagle Johnson). Lyndon Johnson would rather be caught dead than in a suit costing less than $200. Indeed, when he suffered his far-from-mild 1955 heart attack, the question arose about whether to cancel orders he had put in with his San Antonio tailor for a blue suit and a brown one. Muttered Lyndon, who knew that doctors gave him only a fifty-fifty chance to live: "Let him go ahead with the blue one; we can use that no matter what happens."
"My Daddy Told Me." Small imperfections can upset Johnson terribly. His Sanka is always hot—but never quite hot enough. His staff, the hardest-working and most efficient on Capitol Hill, may reply to letters from 600 Texas constituents in a single day, leaving only 45 unanswered. Cries Johnson: "There's 45 people who didn't get the service they deserve today." When host at his LBJ Ranch near Johnson City, Texas, he often serves hamburgers cut to the shape of Texas. But an unavoidable symmetrical flaw seems to bother him. "Eat the Panhandle first," he urges his guests.
"My daddy told me," says Lyndon Johnson, "that if I didn't want to get shot at, I should stay off the firing lines. This is politics." But Johnson hates to get shot at. He spends hours each day devouring everything written about himself in Texas weeklies, in all the major U.S. newspapers and magazines, in the Manchester Guardian and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ("These men writing for foreign papers seem to understand me better than the men writing at home").
Pressing the Flesh. Yet Lyndon Johnson, who worries constantly about being misunderstood, understands others. He is a student of people from the moment of introduction, when he goes through a process he calls "pressing the flesh and looking them in the eye." Says he: "When you extend a handshake to a fellow, you can sort of feel his pulse and evaluate him by the way his hand feels. If it's warm and if it has a firm clasp, then you know that he is affectionate and that he is direct. And if he looks you in the eye, you usually know that he is dependable."