Strong and silent—Coke Stevenson’s personality was the embodiment of what Texans liked to think of as “Texan.” And so, indeed, was the whole story of his life, for in Texas, in 1941, the frontier was little more than a half century away. Some Texans had grown up on what still was the frontier; or their parents had, or their grandparents had, and had told them about it. The story of Coke Stevenson was a story they could relate to: when a Texan was told about making twenty miles a day—day after day, week after week, month after month—with a heavy-loaded wagon over rocky trails and across swollen streams, he could appreciate what that meant; Texans understood about the sleeping out in the rain, and about repairing the broken wheel spokes and rims and axles, about nursing the horses, and about loneliness. And it was Texans’ deep love for the land—the soil that they had had to fight so hard to wrest from the Indians and the elements—that made their Governor’s love of his land so meaningful to them. His hatred of bureaucracy, his distrust of the federal government, his belief in independence, hard work, free enterprise—all this struck a particularly clear chord in Texas. It was the “big country” that “fed big dreams” and that had drawn so many people fleeing the restrictions of a more orderly society, trading safety for danger, as long as with the danger came independence and the chance to create their own empires by their own efforts. It was a state, moreover, in which an unusually virulent mistrust of the federal government was a part of not-so-distant history; the settlers of the Texas frontier—and their descendants—firmly believed that the federal government had, inadvertently (some said, deliberately), protected the murderous Comanche raiders with its policy of not pursuing them and of preventing settlers from retaliating. And distrust of all government had been fostered by the Carpetbaggers—against whom, of course, the man for whom their Governor was named (“the lion-hearted Richard Coke”) had fought. Reinforcing Texans’ pride in their heritage was the fact that Texas had entered the union as an independent republic (it had been the Republic of Texas from 1836 to 1845). And Coke Stevenson’s image was Texas. He was, in the words of one headline, “AS TEXAN AS A STEER BRAND.” “Almost everybody calls him the ‘typical Texan,’ ” the Observer noted. He made Texans remember why they were proud of being Texans. As a San Antonio reporter put it in April, 1942, after she visited “that beloved individualist,” “Well, folks, Texas has a real Texan for Governor. The kind of man who has brought Texas fame in song and story. The kind that will give Texas back its faith in patriotism, in the ideals of 1776 and 1836. Coke Stevenson is like a fresh Texas Centennial celebration. He makes us live all over again many things that marked Texas pride and progress of a hundred years.” The tone of this article was not unusual. Another began:
In fancy: students of and true believers in the democratic way of government dream of witnessing the ascent to high office of a man who is imbued with faith, steeped in the fundamentals of constitutional government, and inherently honest.
In fact: through a combination of patience, hard work and a quirk of fate, Texas has that sort of Governor.
“And,” as Bob Murphey puts it, “the most important thing about the image was not just that it was wonderful, but that it was true—and that people saw it was true.” In the summer of 1942, a year after he had stepped into the office Pappy O’Daniel had vacated, Coke Stevenson ran for Governor in his own right.
O’Daniel was campaigning in the same election (Lyndon Johnson was in the Navy at the time, of course) for a full term as United States Senator—and Pass-the-Biscuits-Pappy was running the same way he had run before, with shows and bands and hillbilly music. He was more popular than ever—and he endorsed one of Stevenson’s five opponents, Hal Collins, a wealthy, spellbinding orator who, as one reporter wrote, “was out on the town squares with one of the hottest bands ever to make a political circuit.” Stevenson’s advisers pleaded with him all one long evening, to get a band himself, to do something to draw crowds. “Boys,” Stevenson said at last, “there’ll be no danged music.” There was no platform, either. He said the same thing he had said when he had refused to issue one during his campaign for Lieutenant Governor: voters knew what he was going to do, because of what he had done; he had a record, and he wanted to be judged on that record. He refused to make a campaign promise. He refused to answer his opponents’ attacks on him. “I have never made” any personal attacks “on anybody, and I am not doing it now,” he said. “I would not want any public office if I had to win by such tactics.” He campaigned the same way he had before, driving around the state, stopping in every town on his route to talk to small groups of voters. In that Democratic gubernatorial primary, the crucial election in a one-party state, Collins and the other four candidates received a total of 299,000 votes. Stevenson received 651,000. His 68.5 percent of the vote was the highest percentage that had ever been recorded in Texas in a contested Democratic primary. No candidate for Governor in the state’s history, not famous campaigners such as “Pa” Ferguson or Pat M. Neff or Dan Moody, not even Pappy O’Daniel himself, had won by so overwhelming a margin. In the general election that Fall, he again ran far ahead of O’Daniel. O’Daniel had stormed out of Fort Worth waving a flour sack in one hand and the Decalogue in the other and had become one of Texas’ greatest vote-getters. Coke Stevenson had ridden quietly out of the Hill Country and had campaigned without ever raising his voice—and had become an even greater vote-getter. In 1944, he ran again. This time the attacks were led by three-time State Attorney General Gerald C. Mann, who, in a trial balloon, spent the Spring of 1944 harshly attacking Stevenson. Stevenson refused to reply.
He didn’t have to reply. “Ever a statesman and never a politician,” a typical editorial said of him, and in fact even “statesman” did not adequately describe his image among Texans. To them, Coke Stevenson was not a politician but a hero. The nicknames pinned on him by journalists to mock his caution, and his deliberation in making decisions—Coffee-Coolin’ Coke, Calculatin’ Coke—did not stick, or became instead symbols of admiration for the qualities that the journalists were mocking. The nickname that did stick was more admiring. He had become known simply as “Mr. Texas.”
Mann’s attacks shattered against this silent granite image. That year, Stevenson’s eight opponents received a total of 15 percent of the vote. Stevenson received 85 percent, smashing the record he had set two years before. To this day, no gubernatorial candidate in the history of Texas has won nearly so high a percentage in a contested Democratic primary. He accomplished another feat perhaps even more impressive. He carried every one of the state’s 254 counties, the only gubernatorial candidate in the state’s history who had ever done so in such a primary. The leading historian of the Texas governorship was to write in 1974 that, thirty years after Coke Stevenson’s campaign of 1944, which consisted of “several radio speeches and occasional appearances at public gatherings” (and, of course, some driving around Texas), his campaign was still unique, and perhaps would always be so; “perhaps no other product of the primary system ever has won, or for that matter, ever will win again, the Democratic nomination with such a minimum of campaigning.” Stevenson’s entire career had been unique. Because he had served more than a year of O’Daniel’s gubernatorial term before winning two terms of his own, Coke Stevenson had been Governor longer than any other individual in the history of Texas. Before that, of course, he had been the only Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives ever to succeed himself. He was also the only man in the state’s history who had held all three of the top political posts in state government: Speaker, Lieutenant Governor, Governor. Set against such a record, it seems almost incidental that he had run for public office twelve times—once for County Judge, five times for state legislator, twice for Speaker, twice for Lieutenant Governor and twice for Governor—and had never been defeated. The man who had not wanted to go into politics, who had violated most of the rules of Texas political campaigning—who had been considered a terrible campaigner—was, in fact, not only the most popular
Governor in Texas history, but, in a state that had produced many remarkable political careers, his career had been perhaps the most remarkable of them all.
In 1946, he was asked—by newspaper editorials, by politicians, and by letters pouring in a flood into the gubernatorial mansion—to run for an unprecedented third term as Governor. Polls showed that his popularity was as immense as ever; even the liberal Austin American-Statesman was forced to report that he was so idolized in the capital that one state official “seems to believe that when he dies, he will go to Coke Stevenson.” (The American-Statesman also admitted that although it had frequently criticized Stevenson’s record, “He sincerely wanted to leave the State better off than it was when he came here, and he probably will.”) Stevenson refused even to consider a third term. He felt that the prohibition against it was an unwritten article of his beloved Constitution, and as such inviolate. When his term was over, he stuck his old Stetson on his head, and went home to his ranch.
DESPITE SPECULATION that Stevenson would run for the Senate in 1948, at first, Coke’s friends knew, he intended to stay home. “What people didn’t understand was that he loved that ranch, truly loved it,” says Ernest Boyett, who had been his executive assistant. “He had built it with his own hands, after all. And it symbolized everything he had wanted and dreamed of as a boy, and had fought for in life, and had gotten against very long odds. And it was beautiful.”
But when Coke got back to the ranch, the ranch was different. Fay wasn’t there.
“It had always been him and Fay,” says Boyett. “Him and Fay against the world. Now he was alone.” He had asked Coke, Jr., and his wife, Scottie, to come and live with him; his son, he had hoped, would practice law with him in Junction. But the young couple didn’t want that kind of life, and stayed in Austin. “When he left the governorship, he had intended fully to go out to the ranch and stay there,” his nephew Bob Murphey says. “But there was no one there.”
He tried to stay. Because he had no telephone, it was difficult for his former supporters and political allies to get in touch with him, and he tried to keep it that way, still refusing to have a telephone installed. His mail was brought out once a week from Junction, and each week, it seemed, the mail sack grew heavier, with letters typed on the embossed stationery of Houston and Dallas firms, and written in pen or pencil on ruled pages torn from school notebooks, with letters bearing postmarks from every corner of Texas. He didn’t open most of the letters—because he knew what they would be asking him to do.
Friends, visiting him, saw his loneliness. Murphey, now a young lawyer in Nacogdoches, loved him, and Stevenson’s friends asked—Coke himself would never ask—Murphey to live with him for a while. Murphey agreed, arriving on Labor Day, 1947, and saw that the legend of Coke Stevenson was true.
“We lived like men out of another time,” Murphey recalls. Their life was one of utter simplicity. It was a life of work, Rounding up cattle and goats, branding, shearing. Driving postholes, repairing fences, clearing cedar. Murphey considered himself a good worker, but he came to feel that his fifty-nine-year-old uncle could work him to death. “He never stopped, and he never got tired,” Murphey recalls. At the end of the day, the two men, covered with sweat, would strip off all their clothes and bathe in the freezing river, using buoyant Ivory Soap so that if a bar was dropped, it would float instead of sinking. Then they would have dinner: beans and salt pork or beans and bacon—or just plain beans. After dinner, Murphey would generally go to bed early—from exhaustion, and to stay as warm as possible. “The only heat in that house was from the fire” in the great fireplace, “and that house would get cold! I slept upstairs, and before I went to bed, I would stand close to the fire and toast myself back and front until I was sweating, and then run upstairs as fast as I could and jump into bed.”
The stories about Stevenson’s reading were true, too, Murphey saw. “He got up at four a.m.,” he says. “I don’t mean five, I mean four. I would get up to go to the bathroom, and I’d see him sitting there in front of the fire reading. That was when he did his reading, because when the sun came up, he wanted to be out on the ranch.” With sun-up, Stevenson would be out milking the cows—in weather that was sometimes so cold that before Murphey could water the horses, he would have to break the ice that had formed overnight in the trough. “Sometimes, you suddenly remembered that this was the former Governor of Texas milking cows, standing buck-naked washing himself in the river, eating the same beans every day—you could hardly believe it. But there was no pretense about Coke Stevenson, none at all. He was what he was—and that was it.” Once, driving into Junction, he and Murphey saw a car stopped on the road with a flat tire. While Stevenson was helping the driver change it, he tried to avoid telling him his name. When he was finished, the driver asked him point blank. “Coke Stevenson,” the big man muttered, and got back into Murphey’s car as quickly as he could.
But Murphey saw that his uncle was very lonely, and he had after all been the center of a very different world for many years. And Murphey had opened the mail, “and,” as he recalls it, “the letters all said the same thing: ‘Come back. We need you. Run for senator.’ ” Nor was Stevenson happy either with national political developments—the return to what he called constitutional values that he had hoped would follow Roosevelt’s death was not nearly fast or thorough enough for him—or with the role, or lack thereof, of that buffoon O’Daniel, who was representing his beloved state in the Senate. Stevenson had agreed to a request from an old friend, R. M. Eagle, to address the Texas Lumber Manufacturers Association in Lufkin in October, 1947. At the end of the speech, Eagle, thanking him for coming, said, “We hope the Governor’s public life is not closed.” The audience began to applaud. Then one lumberman stood up, and then another, shaking their fists in the air. And then the whole audience was on its feet, roaring. Stevenson left without responding, said hardly a word on the long drive back to Junction, and the next morning was out at sun-up milking the cows as usual. But no one who knew him—including Murphey—was surprised when his uncle scheduled a radio broadcast for New Year’s Day, 1948. Listening to it, Lyndon Johnson learned that among his opponents for the Texas senatorial seat would be “Mr. Texas” himself.
9
Head Start
TEN DAYS AFTER Stevenson entered the race, Johnson got a break. A 56-year-old Houston attorney, George E. B. Peddy, announced that he was entering also. In 1922, Peddy, then a youthful state legislator, had polled 130,000 votes as a candidate for United States Senator. During the intervening twenty-six years, he had not run for any public office, but he had been an officer in both world wars and was widely known, and respected, in veterans organizations. He was, moreover, regarded as a symbol of uncompromising conservatism, and his numerous family was well known in ultra-conservative Deep East Texas. He had no chance to win, but he certainly would draw a significant number of votes in East Texas—and the votes he would draw would be Coke Stevenson’s.
Nonetheless, polls could not have heartened Johnson. A Belden Poll taken in February, by which time it was obvious that O’Daniel would not be running, showed that Stevenson was the choice of a higher percentage of voters than Johnson, Peddy and all minor candidates combined.
Nor could he have been heartened by the attitude of the press—which was that of course Coke would win. Who could possibly beat him? The only question was whether the former Governor would win a majority in the primary on July 24, or whether Peddy, and other minor right-wing candidates, would siphon off enough of the conservative vote to deny him a majority and force him into a second primary, which would be held, if necessary, on August 28. As one writer put it: “That strong, silent man on his isolated ranch in the Hill Country fastness holds no public office at this time, but he is considered … the most potent political force in the state.”
LYNDON JOHNSON’S career had been marked at every stage by a repetition of vivid patterns in both his political behavior and his personality. Now, in this crucial, perhaps
final, moment of that career—in this longshot last chance—these patterns re-emerged, sharper than ever.
One pattern was the use of money as a lever to move the political world.
Stevenson’s campaigns had always been adequately financed, not that his type of campaigning required much financing. Although his incorruptibility annoyed big business lobbyists, big business contributed to his campaigns nonetheless, because of their Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest philosophy into which his laissez-faire philosophy so easily shaded, and because his “economy” style of government was agreeable to men who felt that it was their taxes that paid for government services. Stevenson’s campaigns, however, had been financed on the traditional Texas scale—a rough rule-of-thumb, occasionally violated, among Texas politicians was that a respectable statewide campaign could be waged for between $75,000 and $100,000. Johnson was thinking of money on a completely different scale. He always had. His first campaign for Congress, in 1937, had been one of the most expensive congressional campaigns—possibly the most expensive congressional campaign—in the history of Texas. During his first Senate campaign, in 1941, men handed him (or handed to his aides, for his use) checks or envelopes stuffed with cash—checks and cash in amounts unprecedented even in the free-spending world of Texas politics—and with these contributions of hundreds of thousands of dollars, he had waged the most expensive senatorial campaign in Texas political history. Now, in his last chance, he planned to use money on a scale unprecedented even for him.
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