Means of Ascent

by Robert A. Caro

  But Stevenson’s campaign was. The former Governor was driving from one small town to another, accompanied only by Murphey and, occasionally, a public relations man, Booth Mooney. Arriving at each town, often unannounced, he would introduce himself to people on the main street or in the Courthouse Square, chat with them, ask them if they had any questions he could answer and, if they did, stop and answer them. He told the people he met that he would say a few words before he left, and in every brief talk (“I’ve never been very strong on making political orations. I’d much rather listen to you”), he repeated that if they sent him to Washington, he would do as he had done in the past: uphold constitutional government; make sure that America remained strong enough to be secure against Communism; oppose extending federal controls over individuals and businesses; encourage free enterprise and “economy” in government. “You know what I did in Austin to keep your state taxes down”; in Washington, too, he would try to eliminate “waste” and “extravagance.” There was no news in such a campaign, of course; newspapers, as one Texas historian points out, “could give no account of the various conversations into which the candidate entered daily with the hundreds of people whose hands he shook as he introduced himself.… The Stevenson campaign dropped from sight.…” The meager newspaper coverage it attracted was couched in the mocking tone customary when “sophisticated” journalists discussed the Stevenson campaign style. “Candidate Stevenson was in Tyler Saturday, according to a message from his press agent,” one reporter wrote, alluding to the fact that the press was not quite certain of his whereabouts. But Johnson, who knew small towns, was more aware than reporters of the effectiveness of Stevenson’s quiet handshaking. And the former Governor had been out shaking hands all the time Johnson was lying there in Minnesota.

  Then, on June I, Stevenson made a radio speech, his first of the campaign, and Johnson was able to pick it up in his room at the Mayo Clinic. Without mentioning Johnson by name, Stevenson discussed the Congressman’s references to “the barbaric hordes of godless men in Eurasia.”

  “There are men in this nation today who go about over the country as apostles of fear,” Stevenson said. “They tell us another war is just around the corner. They are prophets of doom, howlers of calamity. We must—they tell us—be afraid.” Such men, Stevenson said, were trying to manufacture an “emergency” based on fear. Such hysteria was not necessary. America must build up its defenses, he said; it must help Europe rebuild from the effects of the war because a rebuilt Europe would be a bastion against “economic and propaganda assaults” from Russia, and America must always be vigilant. But, he said, America should not get hysterical about a Red menace. “We can be vigilant without being frightened.” And, Stevenson said, “I don’t believe you are afraid. We are descendants of men and women who have fought and won both the battles of war and the battle of peace.”

  Part of Johnson’s reaction to that calm, sincere voice which he knew was so effective with voters was rage; his harassment of nurses increased in intensity and he brought up the withdrawal statement with Woody. “I know you didn’t send that,” Johnson snarled at him. “And I won’t forget.” Part was something else, particularly after Woody had been sent back to Houston to make preparations for a speech that Johnson was planning to give there following his release from the hospital. With his departure, there was no longer a need for Johnson to keep up a front of optimism. All Mrs. Johnson will say of this week was: “He was depressed, and it was bad.”

  But there was no way out now. The deadline for filing for election to his congressional seat had passed, and he had not filed. He had burned his bridges. It was going to be the Senate, or nothing. “I just could not bear,” he later recalled, “the thought of losing everything.” But he was losing everything.

  11

  The Flying Windmill

  OUT OF HIS DESPAIR, he emerged with a new strategy. It was unveiled in the first speech he made after returning to Texas, an address over a statewide radio network that was delivered from a studio at a Houston radio station instead of in Hermann Park, customary site of political rallies, “because he had been out of circulation” and his advisers felt there was now so little interest in his candidacy that attracting a crowd would be impossible and a rally in the park only an embarrassment; in fact, Woodward had to “work like a dog” even to get fifty or so people to the studio. (One of them, invited to fill out the crowd, was Woodward’s mother.)

  It was very different from Johnson’s earlier speeches. Previously, he and his advisers had agreed that attacking Stevenson personally would be a mistake. Because of the respect, indeed, almost reverence, in which the former Governor was held, such attacks had always boomeranged in the past. But now, in desperation, he attacked. Stevenson had said he opposed a Truman plan to provide federal aid to raise teachers’ salaries because of provisions which Stevenson feared would increase federal control of schools. On this stance, popular in Texas, Stevenson could not be criticized, but Johnson used Stevenson’s statement to bring in another issue, so that he could criticize the ex-Governor on that one. “While I was sick at Mayo’s,” Lyndon Johnson said, “a calculating, do-nothing, fence-straddling opponent of mine, who three months ago said he had no platform, got off the fence for the first time to oppose the teacher salary increase. I challenge my calculating opponent to tell Texans tomorrow if he favors withdrawing federal aid from five hundred thousand world-war veterans, men who did not sit at home when Old Glory had to be carried to every corner of the globe.”

  Two aspects of Johnson’s attack were significant. First, its implication—that Stevenson might be opposed to federal aid for veterans—was totally false. As Johnson was well aware, Stevenson was in favor of such aid, and indeed had already proposed that it be increased. Equally significant were the words in which the attack was couched: “calculating, do-nothing, fence-straddling”—and, as the speech went on, with Johnson elaborating on his falsification of Stevenson’s record, he referred to him directly: “Mr. Calculator,” “Mr. Do-Nothinger,” “Mr. Straddler.”

  Johnson’s advisers were appalled. “Taking on Coke Stevenson was a very tricky thing to do,” Jake Pickle recalls. “He was very popular.” When, in dismay, local Johnson managers throughout the state contacted Claude C. Wild, a veteran Texas politician who had been given the largely honorary title of campaign manager, Wild assured them there would be no repetition. But Wild was wrong. By the end of the week, Johnson was attacking “Mr. Fence-Straddler’s” courage. “A man ought to have the courage to stand up and say what he believes in,” he said. Then he orchestrated attacks on Stevenson’s honesty, having allies charge that the former Governor had pardoned a record number of criminals. Johnson had hoped this charge would be effective with voters who remembered that alleged sales of pardons by a previous Governor, Jim Ferguson, had become an accepted part of Texas political folklore. The Johnson camp said that the proof of the charge lay in the record number of pardons Stevenson had issued. Stevenson refused to reply to the charge, but state prison officials, queried by reporters, explained that the Johnson number had been arrived at by lumping together with true pardons two- or three-day passes given to convicts to attend the funerals of family members or to visit sick relatives—and pardons faded away as a campaign issue. Then Johnson circulated charges of corruption in leases that Magnolia and other oil companies had purchased to test for oil on land Stevenson owned. Stevenson refused to reply to this charge, either; surrounded in Austin by reporters asking for an answer, he said he would not attempt to defend his honesty, “as my private life is an open book and my record of public service is too well known to the people of Texas to require repetition.… If my record does not warrant my election to the Senate then I ought to stay at home. The people know enough to make their own choice.” At the annual dinner of the Austin press corps, however, Stuart Long, one of Johnson’s allies among the journalists, shouted a question at Stevenson about the Magnolia lease while he was speaking, and Stevenson lost his tem
per. Turning to Long, his face set in the “stone stare,” his voice so low it could hardly be heard, he explained the circumstances of the lease. Since everything said at the dinner was off the record, his reply was not preserved, and the details are not remembered. But reporters who were there—even Johnson supporters—remember how ashamed Long looked when he sat down. “Well,” he whispered to Horace Busby, “I guess I was sure wrong about that.” And that issue, too, thereupon dropped out of the campaign. But Johnson simply continued trying other “issues” that were nothing more than attacks on Stevenson’s integrity. Coke Stevenson’s strongest point was his reputation. Lyndon Johnson had decided his only hope was to destroy it.

  TOGETHER WITH THE NEW STRATEGY came a new weapon.

  It was a helicopter.

  Despite their use in the war, helicopters were still almost unknown in civilian life; so far as Johnson could ascertain, no candidate had ever campaigned for political office in one. But some months earlier, Woodward, familiar with them from his Air Force service, had suggested that Johnson do so, because its use would ease one of the greatest difficulties in campaigning across a state eight hundred miles long and almost eight hundred miles wide, in which half the voters still lived in small towns to which roads were often inadequate and which were so far apart that much of any campaign was wasted in traveling between them. Attending a demonstration in Washington staged for congressmen by the Bell Helicopter Corporation, Johnson had perceived an additional advantage. Few Texans had ever seen one of these strange-looking aircraft; its arrival in a small town would be an event. Drawing crowds to campaign speeches was extremely difficult in Texas not only because of the people’s distrust of politicians but because of the long distances they had to travel to reach a “speaking” and because the time these trips took was too precious to farmers and ranchers to be wasted. Politicians had tried everything from barbecues and watermelon feasts to a special train chartered by one candidate to haul voters to a speech from all across the state, but the only attraction that had ever worked had been Pappy O’Daniel’s famous hillbilly band. Maybe, Johnson felt, a helicopter could be a drawing card for him the way the Hillbilly Boys had been for Pappy. Returning from the demonstration, he had told Warren Woodward: “Woody, that’s the best idea I’ve ever heard!”

  As Johnson had weighed the idea, however, he had come to feel that its advantages were outweighed by its drawbacks. The logistical difficulties of keeping an aircraft in operation over so vast an area were formidable. Most of this early generation of helicopters could carry fuel enough for only about 150 miles of flight, which would necessitate several refuelings every day. Helicopters could use only ninety-octane gas; some airports stocked it, some didn’t—and most Texas towns didn’t have an airport anyway. The helicopter would therefore have to be refueled from trucks, which would carry the gas in fifty-gallon drums. If the helicopter missed its connection with a truck, it would be forced down: the candidate could find himself stranded in a town or a field, an object of ridicule in the press—ridicule that could be fatal to a candidacy.

  Fuel was only part of the problem. It was unusual for helicopters to be in the air more than an hour or two a day, and campaigning obviously demanded far more daily flying time. Not only fuel trucks but a mechanic would have to follow the craft back and forth across Texas in case it broke down. And what if it broke down and couldn’t be repaired? What if, in some remote part of Texas, a needed replacement part wasn’t available? That, too, could strand a candidate. Each night the helicopter would require servicing, and then would have to be guarded against curious people wanting to handle its valves or rotors. And the crowds attracted to hear the candidate speak would be attracted not to a courthouse or a schoolhouse but to an open area; explains Woodward: “If you are going to land in a field, there’s no electrical sockets out there and you had to find some way to get your sound system wired in.…” So many things could go wrong in the daily hurly-burly of even a traditional campaign; why add to the normal difficulties the problems of traveling in a still largely unfamiliar form of transportation?

  Safety factors had been the decisive consideration. Since the idea was to attract people, landings would have to be in or near populated areas; people unfamiliar with a helicopter might stray into its path or, once it had landed, might wander into the whirl of its rotor blades and be injured or killed, “CANDIDATE’S HELICOPTER KILLS FARMER”—that would be the end of the candidate’s hopes. It was fine to say that the landing area would be roped off and guarded, but among the crowd would be children—how could you be sure that a child might not dart out between the guards and be injured? As more and more such problems presented themselves to his imagination, Lyndon Johnson had decided that using a helicopter was simply too risky a gamble. But things had changed. Now he was losing—losing everything. He took the gamble. On June 10, a big four-passenger blue-and-white Sikorsky S-51, sixty feet long and with three twenty-four-foot-long blades on its main rotor, piloted by James E. Chudars, an Air Force veteran who was one of the few pilots with substantial helicopter flying time, and carrying an ace mechanic, Harry Nachlin, left the Sikorsky Aircraft plant in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and headed southwest. Cruising at about ninety miles an hour, it arrived at Love Field in Dallas three days later. The next day, a public address system was installed in the baggage compartment behind the seats, a large speaker was lashed to one of the landing gear struts, “Lyndon Johnson for U.S. Senator” was painted on both sides, and the day after that, Chudars’ passenger arrived for a test flight. Chudars noticed that Johnson seemed to have remarkably little interest in the machine to which he was going to be entrusting his life. When they were up in the air, what Johnson was watching was not the control panel but the faces of people on the ground. He was watching to see if their faces lifted to look at the helicopter.

  And they did.

  THE WEEK before the helicopter arrived had been a bad week, one of the worst, his aides say, in Lyndon Johnson’s political life. His attacks on Stevenson had dismayed many of his advisers, and, even worse, had failed to arouse interest among voters. Stevenson was shrugging off the attacks, and so was the press. The press was, in fact, less and less interested in the senatorial race. On June 13, Margaret Mayer, of the Austin American-Statesman, reported that with only six weeks to go, voters were still reacting to the candidates’ efforts with “a withering lack of enthusiasm.” Johnson’s announcement during that week that he would be “the first candidate to use a helicopter in political history” (to defuse the issue of its cost, he said that it, and its pilot, had been chartered and donated to his campaign by a group of “107 Dallas war veterans”) had been greeted with misgivings from most of his staff, and with lack of interest in the press—except for occasional bursts of ridicule: a typical headline on a typically brief article about the announcement said: “JOHNSON TO GIVE ’EM PIE FROM THE SKY.” Under the headline “LOOKEE, MAW—THAR’S THAT CONGRESSMAN,” a Houston Post article said: “Asked what would happen if the sudden arrival of the helicopter stampeded some neighbor’s cows through his kitchen, a spokesman for Johnson’s headquarters said after a moment’s thought, ‘no comment.’ ” Peddy said only, “I hope he doesn’t get hurt and have to go back in the hospital.” This reaction, however, demonstrated only that in politics as in other fields, a revolutionary innovation may not be immediately recognized as the stroke of genius it is.

  On June 15, the Tuesday following his brief test flight, Johnson took off at dawn, flying east out of Dallas. At his first stop, in Terrell, the landing site that had been selected by the advance man was a baseball diamond so far outside town that the crowd was small. Johnson, recalls Busby, “just flogged the man with his tongue.” But at the next town to the east, Canton, the site was a vacant lot adjacent to the Courthouse Square, and the crowd was better—and at the next, Lindale, over in East Texas now, Johnson told Chudars to try circling over the little town several times before landing. As the pilot did so, and the roar of the helicopter’s Pr
att & Whitney 985 engine filled Lindale’s streets, people poured out of their houses and stores, staring up at the sky. Then, when Chudars was over the Lindale High School football field, Johnson told him not to descend immediately, but to hover above the field, holding the helicopter as stationary as possible, so that people would realize where he was going to land. And as the helicopter finally settled gently down, Lyndon Johnson could see latecomers running through the streets to see it at close range.

  Wednesday morning’s newspapers carried stories about the senatorial candidate who, as one paper put it, was “flitting around in a strange sort of flying machine” that could go straight up and down and stand still in mid-air and that looked like a “flying windmill” (because of its tail rotor with its three four-and-one-half-foot-long blades), and there had been time now to place spot announcements on local radio stations. The word was also being spread by telephone, as East Texans who had seen the helicopter on the first day called relatives and friends in towns Johnson was to visit Wednesday to tell them not to miss it. All that day, Lyndon Johnson flew back and forth near the Louisiana border, over the thick pine forests that covered the rolling hills of the East Texas counties of Upshur, Cass, Lamar and Marion, before heading off to Texarkana, at the northeasternmost corner of the state. When he passed over a town too small to merit a landing, the helicopter would hover over its main street while he shouted down through the loudspeaker, relying on notes from his advance men, “This is Lyndon Johnson, your candidate for United States Senator. How’s the gang at Morgan’s Drugstore?” or “Give my regards to Will Overton.” And as he neared a town where a landing was scheduled, he could see below him not only people running through the streets toward the landing site, but, in the countryside outside the town, plumes of dust moving along the dirt roads. Farmers had loaded their wives and children into their cars and were racing to see the helicopter land.