Nation: Rebekah’s Son

Toward daybreak in the hot, hushed land, the young woman lay in labor. “Now the light came in from the East, bringing a deep stillness so profound and so pervasive that it seemed as if the earth itself were listening.” In that mystical moment, her son was born. Looking into his eyes, the mother saw at once “not only the quick intelligence and fearless spirit that animated her husband’s flashing eyes, but also the deep purposefulness and true nobility that had shown in her father’s steady brown eyes.”

Seldom this side of Plutarch have a great man’s earliest moments been recorded in such pluperfect detail. But then, as Rebekah Baines Johnson went on to explain, her first son came from no common clay. Her matriarchal scrapbook saga of Lyndon’s life, from birth (weight: 10 Ibs.) in “the rambling old farmhouse of the young Sam Johnsons” on the Pedernales until 1931, when he went to Washington as secretary to Congressman Richard M. Kleberg, was presented to her son four years before her death in 1958. Last week, New York’s McGraw-Hill published Rebekah’s testament in book form.

Dayton Place? Entitled A Family Album, it opens with an ancestral chart that looks at first glance like the Stuart family tree, minus the bar sinister. Before running off the page, it traces Lyndon’s lineage back to his paternal great-great-great-great-grandmother, Sukey Johnson, whose date and place of birth are apparently unrecorded. Dozens of family photographs portray L.B.J.’s sturdy forebears, from Father Sam, looking astonishingly like L.B.J. on a bad day, to Maternal Great-Grandfather George Washington Baines Sr., a fire-breathing Baptist preacher who was president of Baylor University and the deadliest shot in the county. His favorite hymn, Rebekah attests, was Alas! And Did My Savior Bleed!

With such sanctified support, his mother never doubted that great things awaited Lyndon. But it was Grandpa Sam Ealy Johnson who came closest to pinpointing the boy’s future. “I expect him,” averred Sam, “to be United States Senator before he is 40.” As usual for a Johnson, the boast was only slightly inflated.

Clearly, the boy had to have a name in keeping with his prospects. The 36th President would be named Clarence if his father’s will had prevailed. Rebekah, fortunately, told Sam to “try again.” His next choice was Dayton (in which case, the L.B.J. Ranch might have been called Dayton Place). “Much better,” said strong-minded Rebekah, “but still not quite right for this boy.” Then Sam asked: “What do you think about Linden for him?” “That’s fine,” was his wife’s considered reply, “if I may spell it as I like. Linden isn’t so euphonious as Lyndon Johnson would be.” “Spell it,” said Sam, “as you please.”

Baines Genes. The boy was naturally a mother’s delight. “Always generous,” Rebekah writes, “he showered his mother with gifts, pebbles and flowers.” Like Gautama Buddha or the youthful George Washington, Lyndon Johnson “had a passion for truthfulness.” When a relative insisted that “all children tell stories,” Mrs. Johnson was “shocked and indignant.” “My boy,” she declared, “never tells a lie.”

Proudly noting that as a high school senior Lyndon was “president of his class of six,” Mrs. Johnson traces her son’s rise through Southwest Texas State Teachers College and eventually to Washington, where he soon “became widely known over the nation.” Of course, the former Rebekah Baines knew all along that he had it in him. After all, she points out, “the Baines characteristics are self-sufficiency, poise, reserve, inner resourcefulness, and independence.”