Oral History Transcript - Eleanor Crook - January 22, 2008
Interview with Eleanor Crook
Interviewer: Barbara Thibodeaux
Date of Interview: January 22, 2008
Location: San Marcos, Texas
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Interviewee: Eleanor Butt Crook – A member of the Board of Directors of the LBJ Museum of San Marcos, Mrs. Crook is the widow of the late Dr. William H. (Bill) Crook, who served as the national Director of VISTA and Ambassador to Australia during the Johnson administration. Dr. Crook was also president of San Marcos Baptist Academy.
THIBODEAUX: This recording is part of the LBJ Centennial Celebration Oral History Project sponsored by Texas State University. Today is Tuesday, January 22, 2008. My name is Barbara Thibodeaux. I am interviewing Eleanor Crook at San Marcos, Texas.
Mrs. Crook, even though you have agreed to the terms and conditions of the release pertaining to this interview in writing, will you also verbally acknowledge your acceptance with a yes or a no? You don’t mind just saying yes or no to the terms?
ELEANOR CROOK: No. Yes. (laughs)
THIBODEAUX: Thank you very much.
Okay. One thing I did find out about your husband is that he was a very idealistic person, and I believe—was it Liz Carpenter described him as a humanitarian, which certainly made him a valuable part of the War on Poverty team. Can you just give me some background information on your husband, which, you know, maybe inspired these characteristics in him?
CROOK: Um hmm. Bill was the son of a Baptist minister, and after his service in what was then the army air corps before the formation of the air force at the end of World War II, he went to—well, he went first to Baylor on the GI Bill, made him a lifelong advocate for the GI Bill and similar aids to students because of the generation it brought in that would never have gone to college. He was the first member of his family to have gone to college. After that went on to Southwestern Seminary in Fort Worth and became an ordained minister, pastored a couple of quite small churches in East Texas and then became the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Nacogdoches, which is quite a large church.
After several years there, during which he was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the role of the church in social problems, particularly the race issue, he at that time began to toy with the idea of running for office. We’d had absolutely no contact with the political world and knew absolutely nothing about it and realized afterward that it was an act of extreme naivety to have run against a five-term incumbent in the Congress, a man named John Dowdy. And we didn’t know that it had been probably fifty years in Texas since an incumbent had been beaten in a congressional race. It just simply wasn’t done. And we were novices. Amazingly, we came extremely close to beating Mr. Dowdy. I think it was about a two-thousand-vote margin in the end. But we did lose the race and of course then left the church.
It was at this point that Bill became acquainted with Bill Moyers. Bill Moyers contacted him because he had followed the race. He had walked in—that account is in one of Bill Moyers’ books where he tells about walking into the president’s office—to Johnson’s office and saying, “Look, some crazy Baptist minister—” because of course Bill had been a Baptist minister also, “—is running for East Texas against that man we love to hate, John Dowdy.” And the president had said, “Well, did you send him a contribution?” and he said, “Yes.” And my husband and Bill Moyers always argued about how big the contribution was, but it was very small, ten or twenty-five dollars or something.
Then after we lost the race, Bill Moyers contacted Bill and said, “Let’s get together. And I want to know who you are and why you did this,” you know. And they met at the Driskill Hotel for dinner one evening and left the coffee shop the next morning. (laughs) They talked all night, and there was born the friendship of both of their lives, just very, very—Bill Moyers did the tribute at Bill’s funeral ten years ago.
We remained very close, traveled with them some, and it was just a very formative friendship in every way, and it was through Moyers of course, that Bill came to know LBJ. The appointments and acts that followed, it was, you know, a circuitous route because after that Bill took the presidency at San Marcos Academy here in San Marcos, and we were there for six years.
But at the end of that time, he was appointed to open—by Johnson—to open the first OEO office in this region, this particular region, a five-state region for OEO, the Office of Economic Opportunity in Austin, and ran that office, established it, ran it for two years, and then was appointed national director of VISTA. And all of this fitted in with his increasing conviction that only government could do certain things, that it can’t change the human heart but it can change what is permissible in a just and civilized society. All of these particular posts that he held were posts which implemented that vision of government.
THIBODEAUX: When did Mr. Crook first come in contact Lyndon Johnson himself?
CROOK: Well before the presidency because it was during—I guess, that in ’70—let’s see, that would’ve been in ’60, he was either still senate majority leader or vice president. Well, I guess he was vice president, sure. Of course he was because Kennedy was elected in ’60. Right?
THIBODEAUX: Um hmm.
CROOK: So, yes. It was while he was vice president with Kennedy that Bill Moyers introduced Bill to Lyndon Johnson, and after that we had contact with him—for one thing, the Job Corps Center here. He came to visit that Job Corps Center on a couple of occasions, and we entertained for him here at the house, had a big reception for him on a couple of occasions here at Crook Wood. And Bill began what was a friendship of sorts with him at that time, a personal relationship to him at that time.
THIBODEAUX: What was Mr. Crook’s initial impressions of Mr. Johnson?
CROOK: Ooh, I hate to characterize that. He was always, as I think almost everyone was, awed at the man’s powerful presence and drive for accomplishing whatever goals he set. And the implacability of that drive, the fact that if it was to be done, it would be done. (telephone interruption).
But I also remember Bill’s impression with Johnson’s sensitivity to social injustice from the very beginning, the very beginning when a lot of people wouldn’t have thought of that as a major characteristic before he actually was in the presidency. But as you remember, he had not been known as a civil rights leader, and this was not particularly on the race issue, it was just simply an impression that this was a man who was deeply committed to doing the right thing and his admiration for people who did the right thing. And that was sort of reflected in the relationship with this number of people, like Bill Moyers and Bill Crook. There were a number of young men who came out of the same sort of background, and Johnson was very drawn to those people and very anxious to incorporate them in government. And that alone will tell you a great deal about a person.
THIBODEAUX: So their relationship was both personal and professional?
CROOK: It was mainly professional. It was not—we were with him socially many times, but I would certainly not call it a close personal relationship. He was very—always extremely tender—is not too big a word—with me and very supportive of us, always inquiring about our children and my parents, whom he’d known for many years. Just kind, very kind, which was not everyone’s impression of Lyndon Johnson, but I never saw him anything but kind.
THIBODEAUX: Well, that takes care of my next two questions—was your impression, but that’s interesting that you found him so kind. Did either you or your husband’s impressions change over the years or did they remain basically the same?
CROOK: I would say they remained basically the same, except that like everyone who watched the unfolding of the Johnson trajectory from the vice presidency through the assassination and then into the White House, with the assumption of that awesome power, we all saw—the world saw—his increasingly open commitment to civil rights and education, the things he had believed in but had never before had in his power, of course, to implement. I suppose it was a growing awareness on his own part that he could do these things, and so you saw a different persona emerge with that increasing self-knowledge and determination to do those things.
THIBODEAUX: What was your husband’s first assignment? I believe you mentioned the regional office of the Office of Economic Opportunity.
CROOK: Um hmm.
THIBODEAUX: When was that?
CROOK: That was in 1966, I think, that he opened that—no, ’64 or ’5. I am not absolutely sure. It was in the Brown Building in Austin, and Bill assembled his own staff from people who had worked with OEO in Washington under Shriver. Our relationship was mostly with Sargent Shriver, who was, of course, the director of OEO. So he got some people from Washington, and then he took a couple of people that he had known here on the staff of San Marcos Academy that went with him to that office and did an excellent job although they had never been with the federal government. That must have been—we left the appointment as director of VISTA was in December of ’66. We moved to Washington in February of ’67, and he had—the Office of Economic Opportunity had been open for a good couple of years before that, so it must have been ’65—’64 or ’65 that he actually opened that office.
THIBODEAUX: So he was the second director of VISTA?
CROOK: I think that’s right. I think that he was only the second. He and Shriver got along famously and we had a couple of dinners for Shriver here that were memorable events when he came to town. Such a lovely endearing man.
THIBODEAUX: I saw a special last night on Sargent Shriver.
CROOK: Really!
THIBODEAUX: It was on PBS.
CROOK: Oh, I wish I had watched it. Maybe they’ll repeat it.
THIBODEAUX: Yes. It was very good. Again, you could see all of these men that were on a mission together—
CROOK: Yes. That’s exactly true.
THIBODEAUX: —that put together this War on Poverty.
CROOK: That’s very well put. They were. There was a sense of mission, of commitment, of vision. I mean, they suddenly could see in America. I know I heard Bill say so often, “Never before has a society on such a trajectory of success and power stopped to pick up those who have fallen behind,” that the whole society, but that’s what Johnson envisioned. Stopping to look behind and say, “Who was left out?” And trying to sweep them into the forward march, and that was what the War on Poverty was all about. And these were all people who saw that vision and responded to it, wanted to be a part of it. And they were—they came from such diverse backgrounds. I mean, there were people out of the Ivy League establishment people, and there were many people like Bill, who came from, you know, more Southern church groups, that kind of thing. A number of those.
THIBODEAUX: Do you remember maybe some of his larger challenges as director of VISTA?
CROOK: Yes. I think that one was just a sensitivity to looking at people as they really are and not just going in with the idea of what you wanted to do. Really listening, going in with VISTA volunteers and sitting in a room.
(laughs) I remember his telling a funny story about being with a couple of volunteers in a living room in, I think it was in Chicago. It was in an inner-city. And a big roach ran across the floor, and the volunteer just very automatically slipped off his shoe and hit the roach, and the owner of the house laughed very loudly. He said, “Son, they were here before you were.” Bill always thought of that as kind of a symbolic statement that you had to see the situation as it was and had been, that you just couldn’t go in with an idea of how to clean things up.
Of course, there was a lot of tremendous resistance from the establishment in all the communities, particularly in the South. One thing he did was hire a young woman who had been a very close friend of mine and a roommate at Baylor, who’d just gotten her master’s from Duke. And she was a Mississippi Delta girl, very pretty blonde with that wonderful drawl that nowhere but the Delta. And he would send her into these communities, and the things she ran into were sometimes actually frightening. She called back to the offices, got emergency numbers one night at midnight when somebody had called and said, “You better get out of this town. These people are not funny. They’re not joking.”
It was intense resistance to the VISTA programs because, of course, they were not about just doing good, like the church was famous for. They were about changing the social order of things and getting people the right to vote, which of course came later with the voting rights, but about organizing. They organized these people to demand things that were their rights but that they had never made any claim to because of fear. And that’s what, of course, VISTA did, and those people were not welcome in a lot of places.
And standing behind them—standing up for them was a major concern all the time, whether you really placed them ever in danger or whether you actually produced any change that could be permanent. Or whether you just stirred up trouble and the minute you left town, the people that had worked with you were left to bear the brunt of that, and it was always a question of what had happened or whether change had actually been effected.
THIBODEAUX: Speaking of opposition, did he receive much opposition in Congress for funding?
CROOK: Well, he always fought for funding, but of course, it was a sympathetic Congress to some degree, and Johnson never backed down what he wanted. He never left you dangling—left you hanging out to dry. If you started a program which Johnson approved and believed in, he was going to stay behind you when the going got rough. That was one thing that Bill felt all along. Amazingly, he ran into some big opposition from people who were friends of Johnson’s and supporters, and the president always backed him. He always talked about that, that he never—even when it came from governors or congressmen who were powerful in their own districts and who were just as mad as they could be at VISTA projects, that Johnson backed Bill or whoever was implementing the program.
THIBODEAUX: I know VISTA has survived maybe in a little different forms, but it survived, so apparently it is a successful program. How did your husband feel about its efficacy? Did he feel that it was a very effective worthwhile program?
CROOK: He did, but he felt that, like all the OEO programs, it was cut short. That once the Nixon administration was in place—in fact, it’s funny. I have a friend who was part of the Nixon administration, who was assistant chief of staff—well, that term wasn’t used then, but he was Haldeman’s chief assistant. And he says that one of the chief aims of the Nixon administration stated very openly and forcefully was to get rid of the OEO programs. So it was not a casual neglect policy, it was an act of dismantling and disarming. I mean, in other words, the actual power was taken away from the agencies, both the Peace Corps, VISTA, and those were the two most controversial—well, no Community Action as well and legal services to the poor and Job Corps. All of those programs were pretty defanged under the Nixon administration, which didn’t leave a whole lot of time that they had been in effect. So I think Bill always felt that there was a lot of efficacy there as potential that was never realized, that they made some changes but that they were really in the end pretty incremental as far as staying power because of the long following years when they were not nurtured or supported.
THIBODEAUX: So how long did your husband stay as director of the VISTA program?
CROOK: He was director of VISTA from ’66 through ’68, two years. And then we went to Australia.
THIBODEAUX: Did your husband have a more, I guess, social relationship with Johnson while you were in Washington or just remained the same, a professional relationship?
CROOK: It remained the same really. We went to the White House on various occasions pretty often for state dinners or luncheons. I remember I was there for that famous luncheon when—who is the famous black singer—her name escapes me right now—stood up and confronted Mrs. Johnson about the Vietnam War at the—she’s still living. She was interviewed recently. Anyway, it was an act of extreme rudeness and yet, you know, I mean, it would just depend on whether you admired it or just were appalled. Of course, all of us were appalled—all of us that were part of the administration—at her doing that. And Mrs. Johnson, of course, typically was very gracious in handling it. Awkward—
But we saw a lot of wonderful moments that are historic there. Of course, as the riots, we could see from our house the smoke when they did the march after—I guess, it was after King’s death or maybe after Bobby Kennedy’s death. Anyway, we saw all of that unrest, of course, spilling out in Washington. We were there through all of that. And you saw the president increasingly isolated and alone.
There were times—I remember he came to dinner at our house one night. Mrs. Johnson was out of town, and he came alone, just with Secret Service people that accompanied him, of course. It was a small dinner and I remember our impression. He brought, Yuki, the dog. He always took him. And I remember after he left, our saying, you know, “That dog is—that’s the support and the companionship now.” He was at that time so under siege. That was not long before he announced that he would not run again. But you could just see the loneliness and the isolation as he struggled with the right thing to do. Bill was always so impressed with that, the agony that he was in about the war and what to do, how to get out.
THIBODEAUX: Did that affect the whole administration? Was there just kind of a—they were on a such high, I think, with the War on Poverty—
CROOK: That’s right.
THIBODEAUX: —and then with the Vietnam War, did it just kind of bring things down?
CROOK: That’s right. Exactly. Exactly. It was as we saw it destroying his presidency, and yet the inability to extricate ourselves. And we felt it when we had the overseas assignment then in Australia because even though Australia was one of the few countries that really supported action and felt what he’d done to us in the eyes of the world. I mean, we had students there demonstrating at the embassy even, even in Australia, which was very friendly, actually paid their own way for their troops in Vietnam, the only country that did so. We didn’t pay their troops to be there. They were just there because the Australian government supported the effort in Vietnam, and so few people did in the world.
THIBODEAUX: That’s become a pattern apparently.
CROOK: Yes.
THIBODEAUX: How long was the assignment in Australia? Was that until the end of the Johnson administration?
CROOK: Yes. Yes. We returned after Nixon was elected in ’69. Nixon (laughs) went into office and said, “I want all political appointee—the State Department people all ambassadors out within two months,” and he emptied all those embassies and of course did not have replacements lined up or they hadn’t been through Senate approval. All that is a long process, so a lot of embassies were left without an ambassador, as was Australia. Australia was nearly two years without an ambassador, just the chargé d’ affaires. Fortunately, the chargé there was an old hand in the State Department and just a marvelous man, and he did a good job. But it was a very, very political, highhanded—in other words, he didn’t ask on any individual basis, how is this person doing there? What is there—how have they been received in the country? I mean, Bill had been extremely popular there, and it was a very unpopular move to remove him so precipitously after the election and to leave the embassy vacant. The Australians did not like that. It was sort of an affront to leave them without diplomatic presence for such a long time just because you didn’t want somebody from the other party in the embassy, and that was Nixon’s pattern. And that’s the pattern in all changes. It was just a bit more sweeping and fast with Nixon.
THIBODEAUX: Do you remember any other appointments that your husband had while he was in Washington, other committees where he served?
CROOK: No.
THIBODEAUX: In all areas of his service in the Johnson administration, what do you think Mr. Crook felt was his most important contribution?
CROOK: I think he felt it was the establishment of the Office of Economic Opportunity in this region of the South and the West, which were of course bastions of anti-civil rights feeling and that the establishment of that governmental presence saying, We have to do this another way, was a really significant thing.
THIBODEAUX: What prompted your husband to write Warriors of the Poor? (Warriors of the Poor: The story of VISTA, Volunteers in Service to America, 1969) Why do you think he wrote the book?
CROOK: I think that he saw so many of his friends going through the same agony that he did, and he was a very introspective, thoughtful, philosophical person. And it was not just an individual thing, it was a phenomena across the religious world that some people of faith came to see that the expression of faith in the churches as it was then was really at variance with any true understanding of the Christian faith—or the Jewish faith—and that those people as they begin to step out, as he did, and say, “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t preach to a congregation when I know that there are actually members of that congregation who have sent their rent collectors out to actually beat up African Americans who couldn’t pay their rent.” That kind of thing, just real bad stuff that you knew was completely covered up, ignored, countenanced by the religious community, and that was true all across the South. And that as these people became more and more uncomfortable with the dichotomy of what they said they believed about the dignity of the human being and the way that those human beings were treated by church congregations with no word from the pulpit, they felt the need to speak out on it.
THIBODEAUX: That was an interesting book. It certainly gave a lot of information not only about just the volunteers and what they accomplished but the organization, so I certainly enjoyed reading it.
So how did Mr. Crook adjust to civilian life after serving the Johnson administration for so long? Was that difficult or—
CROOK: Very difficult. I think it is for everybody that comes out of government. I mean, in Australia he was reading the communiqués from the State Department every morning, that he knew what was going on everywhere in the world. (laughs) And one thing that impresses you when you move from that world back to the world of ordinary newspapers delivered every morning, you realize how—not only how lacking and scanty the information you get is, but how wrong. How often it’s just simply at variance with what is really going on because it’s all spin and you are limited on what the government can actually—anyway, that was difficult.
And of course, there was just the ordinary human that everybody laughs about that has done that, that you go from a position of power where you can execute that which you think should be executed to a position of just being an ordinary citizen. And that’s an adjustment for any personality, anybody that does that.
THIBODEAUX: Did he maintain a relationship with Mr. Johnson after Mr. Johnson left the presidency?
CROOK: We did. We were at the ranch numerous times, and one of the great regrets of my life is that we had called for a date for them to come to dinner and had settled on a date, which was just after his death. And it’s always been sad to me that we didn’t have that last time with him in our home because that was always such a—just a thrill. I mean, to have this man that had done so much, that we admired so much at our dining room table with close friends. We would’ve probably at that time had Liz Carpenter and maybe—I don’t know—maybe Harry Middleton—I don’t know who we would’ve had at that time, maybe Larry Temple, people that had been part of the administration that they liked to see their close friends we would’ve had around that dinner table. I don’t think we’d gotten far enough to do the inviting. All I remember is that we had the date set and cleared with Mrs. Johnson’s office, and that he died before that date. And that I just felt such a pang that we hadn’t had that last time with them.
THIBODEAUX: It would be an interesting dinner party today to have that same group around the table. I’d certainly like to hear their opinions today. (laughs)
CROOK: Yeah.
THIBODEAUX: I have one last—well, maybe just a couple more questions. The collection of books, I was wondering if as a part of that collection, did LBJ have a contribution? Do you remember?
CROOK: Oh, I feel sure there’s a Johnson book in there. I don’t remember what it was or when we got it or anything about—that’s funny but I don’t remember that. But that would’ve been the easiest—
THIBODEAUX: To get.
CROOK: —so there would certainly have been no reason it wouldn’t have been there because there were one or two. You know, there was one president that we said the problem was he didn’t read. (laughs) Just a joke, but very few books from his library. And there was another president whose library had burned, and actually everything had been destroyed, fairly toward the end of his life. So there really were—it was a very difficult find, and I think we may have ended up on that one with a substitute paper of some kind and not an actual volume. But I’m sure Johnson would’ve been represented because he would’ve just asked Mrs. Johnson for something out of the library and it would’ve been simple.
THIBODEAUX: I remember seeing a list and now I can’t remember where I saw the list. So I’ll check on that.
Let’s see. And your husband continued in his humanitarian efforts later on in life, didn’t he?
CROOK: Oh yes. Oh yes. Of course, he was still the same person, and there were many, many projects, many efforts after that he was always associated with and with politics. He was still very, very involved and interested in democratic politics to the end of his life.
THIBODEAUX: Well, those are the questions that I have, but I may have skipped over something. Is there any information or stories that you can recall that you’d like to share?
CROOK: No. I think your questions have given me an opportunity to put in some little personal things that I did remember about the president that are nice to share because they are not things that, you know, people would necessarily see.
THIBODEAUX: And that is most appreciated, your comments.
Well, thank you, Mrs. Crook. It was a wonderful interview. I really appreciate it.
CROOK: And I’ve enjoyed it. You’re quite easy—
THIBODEAUX: Oh, thank you.
CROOK: —and the questions were most well-phrased.
(End of interview)