Lyndon already knew, through Gene, who Lady Bird was; he quietly asked her to meet him for breakfast the next morning in the coffee shop of the Driskill Hotel. She says she didn’t plan to, but she was in Austin to consult with an architect about remodeling the Brick House, the architect’s office was next to the Driskill, and as she passed the coffee shop, she saw Lyndon sitting at a table at its window. As he realized she wasn’t planning to join him, he frantically waved at her until she did. Then he took her for a drive. On it, he first showered her with questions (“I never heard so many questions; he really wanted to find out all about me”), and then—this man whose “mind could follow another mind around and get there before it did”—with answers, answers, as she puts it, to “questions that hadn’t been asked.… He told me all sorts of things I thought were extraordinarily direct for a first conversation”—about “his ambitions,” how he was determined to become somebody, and was already well on his way as secretary to a Congressman, a Congressman who was, moreover, a Kleberg, about “his salary … how much insurance he had … his family. It was just as if he was ready to give me a picture of his life and what he might be capable of doing.” And then, on this, their first date, he asked her to marry him. “I thought it was some kind of joke,” she recalls.

Caro, Robert A.. The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson I (pp. 474-475). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5869067&forum_id=2Elisa#49901041)

He was more than a reader of men, he was a master of men. And these men, the first on whom he had an opportunity to fully exercise his mastery, not only served him, but loved and idolized him. “I knew that he would be moving into something with a bigger challenge,” Deason says. “I had a sense of destiny for him.” When young Chuck Henderson had still been engaged to Mary, then a secretary back in Ashtabula, Ohio, he wrote to her, she says, “I’m working for the greatest guy in the world. Someday he’s going to be President of the United States. And he’s only twenty-seven years old!” Mary found this hard to believe, but when she arrived in Austin to get married—Lyndon Johnson was best man—and to become a secretary in the NYA offices, she saw at once why Chuck believed it. “I find it hard to understand when I talk about it now,” she says. “But he had what they call now a charisma. He was dynamic, and he had this piercing look, and he knew exactly where he was going, and what he was going to do next, and he had you sold down the river on whatever he was telling you. And you had no doubts that he was going to do what he said—no doubts at all. You never thought of him being only twenty-seven years old. You thought of him like a big figure in history. You felt the power. If he’d pat you on the back, you’d feel so honored. People worked so hard for him because you absolutely adored him. You loved him.”

Caro, Robert A.. The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson I (p. 567). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5869067&forum_id=2Elisa#49901426)

"Lyndon just had to lie about everything.” He had made a great point of describing himself as a tough man in a fistfight—something believable, despite his awkwardness, because of his size. During a poker game, however, he began arguing with another student, and wouldn’t stop shouting at him. The other boy jumped up and lunged at him. Johnson, without a single gesture of resistance, immediately fell back on a bed and, as his foe approached, began kicking his feet in the air with a frantic, windmilling motion. The other poker players all remember him lying there and kicking—“like a girl,” Horace Richards says—and they remember him shouting: “If you hit me, I’ll kick you! If you hit me, I’ll kick you!” The other men were astonished. Says Whiteside, one of those present: “He was a coward. You know, every kid in the State of Texas had fights then, but he wouldn’t fight. He was an absolute physical coward. And the thing about it was that he had made such a big thing about what a great fighter he was.”

Caro, Robert A.. The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson I (p. 261). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5869067&forum_id=2Elisa#49905989)

THE REACTION OF the targets of this barrage of compliments is documentation of the adage that where flattery is concerned, no excess is possible. Miss Brogdon, so inflexible about her curfew rules, relaxed them for Lyndon Johnson. The professor at whose feet Johnson sat most often was H. M. Greene, a history professor and debate coach; Johnson may have received a D in the debate course taught by another professor, but he made Greene’s debating team, much to the surprise of students who, like one member of the team, considered him “very forceful, but really not a good speaker at all.”

The key to Johnson’s college career—the key, in fact, to whether he would be able to earn enough money so he could have a college career—was Prexy Evans. The public flattery was nothing to the private flattery (witnessed only by Tom Nichols) that went on in the president’s office, and flattery—a striking humbleness, deference, obsequiousness—was not the only weapon employed; Nichols, a non-competitive man, liked Johnson (Nichols was “red of face, a real country boy whom Lyndon could easily get around,” another professor says), but he couldn’t resist remarking on the pains the student took not only to carry out Evans’ assignments diligently, but to dramatize his diligence.

Mylton Kennedy, who echoes Whiteside’s vivid description of Johnson sitting at his instructors’ knees and drinking in avidly all they had to say, pauses and finally says: “Words won’t come to describe how Lyndon acted toward the faculty—how kowtowing he was, how suck-assing he was, how brown-nosing he was.” And if students disliked Lyndon Johnson because of his attitude toward the faculty, they disliked him even more because of his attitude toward them. If he was obsequious to those above him, he was overbearing to those who were not.

And he wouldn’t let anyone else talk. The young man so eager to sit and listen to the faculty seemed determined that everyone else was going to sit and listen to him. Fellow students who ate at Mrs. Gates’ boardinghouse remember two things about Lyndon Johnson most vividly: how he grabbed for food and gulped it down and grabbed for more, trying always to get more than his share—“He had those long arms, and he would reach out with that fork and get the last biscuit on the plate, even: if it was on the other end of the table, and if there was one pork chop that was bigger than the others, no one was going to get it but Lyndon Johnson,” says one of those students—and how he also grabbed more than his share of the conversation.

Caro, Robert A.. The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson I (p. 257). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5869067&forum_id=2Elisa#49905999)

Each edition of the San Marcos yearbook, the Pedagog, contained a section, “The Cat’s Claw,” which mocked students’ foibles. In the 1928 Pedagog, twelve students were selected for such treatment. The treatment of eleven is rather gentle, but the twelfth was Lyndon Johnson. Instead of a picture of Johnson, the editors used a picture of a jackass. The caption beside it read: “As he looks to us on the campus every day.” Johnson, the caption went on, is “From far away, and we sincerely trust he is going back.” And, the caption said, he is a member of the “Sophistry Club. Master of the gentle art of spoofing the general public.”

The Pedagog was not the only publication in which the word “master” was applied to Lyndon Johnson. In the College Star’s humor column appears the following definition: “Bull: Greek philosophy in which Lyndon Johnson has an M.B. degree.” “ ‘Master of Bullshit’—that’s what M.B. means,” says one of Lyndon Johnson’s classmates, Henry Kyle. “He was known as the biggest liar on the campus. In private, when there were no girls around, we called him ‘Bullshit’ Johnson.” He was given the public nickname “Bull.” “When you saw him, that’s what you called him,” says Horace Richards. “ ‘Hiya, Bull.’ ‘Howya doin’, Bull?’ Bull Johnson was his name, as far as we were concerned.” “That was what we called him to his face,” Edward Puls, another classmate, says. “That was what he was generally called. Because of this constant braggadocio. Because he was so full of bullshit, manure, that people just didn’t believe him. Because he was a man who just could not tell the truth.”

Caro, Robert A.. The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson I (p. 267). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5869067&forum_id=2Elisa#49906011)

Demanding though he was, moreover, he was demanding in a way that made his students like him. “He put us to work,” says Manuel Sanchez. “But he was the kind of teacher you wanted to work for. You felt an obligation to him and to yourself to do your work.” The children he spanked “still liked him.” He displayed toward these children feelings he had never displayed before. “He just moved right in and took over.… We were all crazy about him.” And he drove himself as hard as he drove the students and other teachers. “He didn’t give himself what we call spare time,” Elizabeth Johnson recalls. For a young man, she says, he was a remarkable disciplinarian—the discipline she is talking about, she makes clear, is self-discipline. He became friendly with a calm, quiet Mexican who had been a farm laborer but had become janitor at the school, Thomas Coronado. He told Coronado that he, too, should learn English, and with his own money bought Coronado a book to learn it from. He always arrived at school before anyone else did, and left later, and therefore had time to tutor Coronado. “After I had learned the letters, I would spell a word in English. Johnson would then pronounce it and I would repeat.”

Caro, Robert A.. The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson I (p. 281). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

He's like a completely different guy from one chapter to the next, except for being driven at whatever he did.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5869067&forum_id=2Elisa#49906190)

Caro, Robert A.. The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson I (pp. 283-284). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5869067&forum_id=2Elisa#49906195)

Soon, moreover, Kennedy and Johnson became involved in a series of increasingly angry shouting matches that erupted in a fistfight—or in what would have been a fistfight had Johnson participated. Instead, when Kennedy swung at him, he fell back on a bed as he had during the poker-game incident two years before and began kicking his feet in the air. And as Kennedy came on, Johnson shouted: “I quit! I quit!” Vernon Whiteside, present during the encounter, was soon again imitating Johnson’s panicky tone all over campus, and students were laughing at him again.

Caro, Robert A.. The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson I (p. 289). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5869067&forum_id=2Elisa#49906215)

The Hill Country was a country in which there was unbelievably little cash. In 1937 as in 1932, the Johnson City High School nearly missed basketball season—because the school could not afford a basketball; after several weeks of fund-raising, the News reported that “collections are coming in too slow on the basketball.”

Caro, Robert A.. The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson I (pp. 773-774). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5869067&forum_id=2Elisa#49912094)

Caro, Robert A.. The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson I (p. 847). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5869067&forum_id=2Elisa#49913577)

Now Duval election officials said there had been 427 previously unreported votes in that “uncounted” precinct. Stevenson, they said, had received two of them; Johnson had received 425. Four hundred and twenty-five new votes (Duval’s count was now Johnson 4,620, Stevenson 40) and for the first time Stevenson was no longer ahead in the statewide totals. “In the closest major race in the state’s long political history,” the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported, “Lyndon Johnson rode into the lead of the U.S. Senate race Sunday night on a sudden tide of votes from Duval County.” (No newspaper commented on a remarkable aspect of the Duval vote. Since another two votes would later be found there for Johnson, making Duval’s final vote 4,622 to 40, 4,662 persons thus voted in a county in which only 4,679 poll tax receipts had been issued—the 99.6 percent turnout was an astonishing display of civic responsibility.)

Caro, Robert A.. Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson II (pp. 314-315). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5869067&forum_id=2Elisa#49932878)

But their feelings were incorrect. The Valley wasn’t done yet. On Friday, September 3, the sixth day after the election, the Valley was heard from again. Hardly had the Election Bureau opened at nine when corrections were reported from the Rio Grande: 43 new votes for Johnson from Dimmit County, 38 new votes for Johnson from Cameron County. In particular, George Parr wasn’t done. With Duval County poll taxes exhausted, no more votes could be produced in that county, of course, but there were other counties in his domain. One was Zapata, and Friday morning, Zapata produced 45 votes more for Johnson. Corrections came in from counties in other areas of the state that Friday morning, but all were small—none as big as those from the three Valley counties. At noon the Valley’s 126 new votes had played the major role in reducing Coke Stevenson’s lead to 157 votes, 494,096 to 493,939.

Another county in Parr’s domain was Jim Wells, where the reformers’ strength had forced Parr to exercise discretion on Election Day. The only precinct in that county that had been run as the Duke liked precincts run was Luis Salas’ Precinct 13. The vote reported by Salas on Election Night, 765 to 60 in Johnson’s favor, had provided the bulk of Johnson’s 1,788–769 margin in Jim Wells. Now, on Friday morning, the Democratic Executive Committee of Jim Wells County was meeting to make its final certification of the returns and report them to the state committee. In the County Courthouse, one of the committee members, B. M. Brownlee, was unfolding the tally sheets and reading off the totals. The totals for the first twelve precincts were the same as those that had been reported on Election Night. Then Brownlee unfolded the tally sheet for Salas’ Precinct 13. This total was not the same.

The figure for Johnson, which had been reported as 765 on Election Night, was now 965—because, according to testimony that would later be given, someone had, since Election Night, added a loop to the “7” to change it into a “9”. Johnson had 200 more votes. At about 12:30 p.m. on Friday, with Stevenson’s lead holding at 157 votes, Jim Wells County telephoned its amended return, including those 200 additional Johnson votes, to the Election Bureau—and suddenly, with virtually all the counting in the election over, Coke Stevenson was no longer ahead. Lyndon Johnson was ahead. With so few counties still to be reported—and only minor remaining changes to be made—those 200 votes from Precinct 13 were decisive. In the Bureau’s final tabulations, Johnson had 494,191 votes, Stevenson 494,104. Out of 988,295 votes, he had won by 87—less than one hundredth of one percent.

Caro, Robert A.. Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson II (pp. 316-317). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5869067&forum_id=2Elisa#49932890)