Nurse Cox and Her Distinguished Patient

My maternal grandmother, Katherine Jones Cox, was born in Natchitoches, Louisiana in 1900. Her father worked as an overseer on a nearby sugar plantation, a fact that has always caused me some discomfort. Grandmother, as we called her, died in 1993. She had been urged to write about her life but ran out of energy and never put a word on paper. This is a shame because she had a story to tell. I can recount some of it, with emphasis on a very significant event from 1961.

Grandmother, orphaned during her teen years, somehow found her way to the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan. There, she earned a nursing degree and began a career in a starched white uniform and cap that lasted half a century. She returned south—to Dallas, specifically. At some point in the 1920s, she married William Adair Cox, my maternal grandfather. Whereas she was diligent and hardworking, he tended to idle about and drink. Two children came from this rather unhappy union—my mother and my uncle.

You undoubtedly remember JFK’s ill-fated visit to Texas in November 1963. In fact, he was there two other times during his presidency, both of which involved Sam Rayburn, legendary Speaker of the House of Representatives. Grandmother had a role in the first one, as will soon be made clear.

Born in 1882 in Tennessee, Rayburn moved with his family to Texas when he was five years old. While attending East Texas State Normal College, he swept floors for $3 a month. Rayburn won election to the Texas House of Representatives, and while there earned a law degree from UT. He was not in Austin long, winning election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1913 and remaining in that august body for 48 years. Rayburn served under Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and Kennedy, and had three stints as Speaker of the House—a total of 17 years. That’s longer than Henry Clay, the Kentuckian with whom he was sometimes compared.

Short and bald, Rayburn was nevertheless the tallest of Texans. He had intelligence, charisma and an uncanny ability to work with friends and foes alike. His longevity in office was aided, of course, by being a Democrat at a time when Republicans had virtually no chance of winning in the South. Robert Byrd of Virginia (57 years), Jamie Whitten of Mississippi (53 years), Carl Vinson of Georgia (50 years), Strom Thurmond of South Carolina (47 years), John Sparkman of Alabama (42 years), Russell Long of Louisiana (38 years) and Wilbur Mills of Arkansas (38 years) also benefited from this remnant of Jim Crow.

But, like his young Texas colleague Lyndon B. Johnson, Rayburn refused to sign the so-called Southern Manifesto which was intended to restrain the oncoming tide of black civil rights. He had known poverty, and he worked to pass legislation that might eradicate it. He used his considerable clout in making the New Deal a success. Furthermore, there was never a whiff of scandal about “Mr. Sam.” He did not take meaningless junkets, and when he did travel he was scrupulous about paying his own expenses. Anyone who dared offer him a bribe would get a stern rebuke before he turned on his heel and went the other way. Rayburn’s interests were not just domestic, as he favored bills and policies that helped win World War II and forged close friendships with men from Europe to Southeast Asia to Africa.

Rayburn’s connection to my sweet Grandmother is as follows. In September 1961, his health began to fail. He went to Dallas and entered Baylor Hospital—where, not that it matters, I had been born nine years earlier. Joe E. Risser, a longtime friend from Bonham, served as his doctor. And by some process that I would dearly love to know, Grandmother was chosen to be his primary nurse. The hospital, on short notice, had to set up a press room with telephones and typewriters, and facilities for Rayburn’s House administrative staff. He was inundated with visitors including Kennedy, Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Secretary of the Navy John Connally and former Vice President John Nance Garner. It pains me to realize how I should have sat down with her in later years and asked, “What was it like when Kennedy, et al. came striding into the room on October 9, 1961?” The newspaper accounts say they discussed politics and world events but tip-toed around the matter of his approaching death.

The president got on Air Force One and went back to Washington, although he probably suspected he would soon return for Rayburn’s funeral. Diagnosed with metastasizing pancreatic cancer, Rayburn was about to move to Risser Hospital (an early version of hospice care) in Bonham. First, however, he did something that was in keeping with his gracious character. Rayburn dictated a paragraph of text in which he thanked and praised Grandmother for nursing him and easing his pain while at Baylor Hospital. It was typed up, set in a black frame and given to her before he left for Bonham and his meeting with the grim reaper on November 16. Kennedy and a swarm of other heavy-hitting politicos were there for the funeral two days later.

In the years to come, Rayburn’s name would adorn a postage stamp, a nuclear submarine, elementary, junior high and high schools, highways and a lake, not to mention the Rayburn House Office Building in D.C. which was completed in 1965.

I think it is indicative that Grandmother never boasted about having taken care of Sam Rayburn during his stay at Baylor Hospital. She never pulled out that flattering text he had written for her before his departure and said, “Hey, look at this.” I doubt she ever had a more high-profile patient, but she did not seem especially awed about Rayburn. She kept it in admirable perspective. Like Rayburn, Grandmother possessed common sense, honesty and unflagging patriotism.