And, of course, the bigger the headlines became, the bigger the crowds became, each fueling the other. On the final day of June, Johnson’s first stop was in the Central Texas town of Bangs. The population of the town was 756. Reporters, making a person-by-person count of the attendance, found “more than 700” people waiting when Chudars set the S-51 down in Bangs’ Main Street. And, the Austin American-Statesman reported, “that was the smallest crowd of the morning.”
“At small towns and large towns, Johnson crowds far exceeded expectations,” the American-Statesman said. In Coleman, where 2,500 of the town’s 7,500 people jammed onto Main Street to see the helicopter, sheriff’s deputies and Johnson’s advance men had to push people back into stores to clear enough space for it to land. Day after day, rural Texans were coming to see the Johnson City Windmill in numbers such as had come to see no previous candidate in Texas history—no candidate, that is, except one: Pappy O’Daniel had drawn such crowds—and Pass-the-Biscuits-Pappy had won every race he entered. Thanks to the helicopter, statewide campaigning in Texas, which had always been a candidate’s nightmare, had suddenly become a candidate’s dream. All at once those terrible Texas distances had virtually evaporated; now all at once you were freed of those rutted, bumpy rural roads and were cutting effortlessly cross-country, over hills and rivers and lakes. And now when you approached a town, a town in which a campaigner would once have been apprehensive that no one except a handful of campaign workers and a score of voters would be waiting to hear him, now, as the helicopter neared the town, Johnson would suddenly see—on the single main street, or around the patch of green which from the air signified the Courthouse Square or the high school football field—not scores of people but hundreds. And these people wouldn’t be standing around with the traditional studied, blank-faced small-town indifference that ordinarily made speaking to them difficult; circling the town, Johnson would see people running through the streets so as not to miss his arrival, and as he hovered and began to descend, he looked down on a sea of upturned faces—people waiting for him.
What politician—what human being—would not have been exhilarated by such a response? Lyndon Johnson, always elated by the slightest sign of respect or affection from the public, was exhilarated, particularly after a day of touring his own Tenth Congressional District, flying over the Hill Country in which he had spent the youth of anxiety and shame and humiliation that made respect and affection so necessary to him.
Heavy rain fell all that day in the Tenth District, but rain couldn’t keep the people away. A hundred people were waiting for the Johnson City Windmill on the lawn of the high school in Bastrop on the plains below the Hill Country, a sizable crowd for Bastrop, and there were about two hundred in the Courthouse Square in Giddings. Before the next stop, at Brenham, the helicopter was delayed for half an hour because a fuel truck did not arrive on time, but when he reached Brenham the crowd was still there. Then the helicopter headed west toward the Pedernales Valley. Along the roads—the roads on which he had worked as a laborer, harnessed like a mule—a long caravan of cars raced after him, for the regular entourage had been supplemented by some dozen campaign aides who had driven out from headquarters in Austin. The aides sped through the hills blowing their horns, every car bearing, tied to its radiator, a big picture of him, and overhead the helicopter circled each town it passed—Stonewall, where his father had lost the Johnson Ranch forever; Johnson City, where young Lyndon and his brother and sisters had lived out the rest of their youth in dread of losing their home there, too; Fredericksburg, where Lyndon had been beaten up at the dance; San Marcos, where Carol Davis had refused to marry him. The big helicopter circled each town again and again, Chudars banking the aircraft so that as the townsfolk came out on their front lawns and into the streets, they could not miss the name “Lyndon Johnson” written in such big letters on its sides. The rain was heavier now, and visibility was limited, but when he got close enough to Taylor to see the high-school football field, he saw some three hundred automobiles parked there. The helicopter came down on the far side of the field, away from the cars. The people waded through the mud to reach him. Another crowd—huge by Hill Country standards—was waiting in Georgetown, and at the end of his speech there, he held a little press conference. Did flying in the helicopter make him uneasy, one reporter asked. “No,” Johnson replied. “It gives me confidence.” Was he tired from the long day’s campaigning, another reporter asked. “Happy tired,” Johnson said. “I know I am sweeping up votes like a whirlwind. I just feel it in the crowds.” Heading back for Austin, where he was to spend the night, he passed over the little town of Round Rock. Ordering Chudars to circle lower and then lower still, and then to hover over Main Street, Johnson picked up the microphone and leaned out the window. The helicopter was low enough so that he could see the individual faces of people he knew staring up at him, mouths agape, and he called to them by name. He had invited Houston Post correspondent Jack Guinn to ride this leg of the trip with him, and, Guinn was to report, “We were close enough to witness smiles of astonishment on the faces of the citizens.” Landing at Municipal Airport in Austin, Johnson was greeted by a roaring crowd of supporters. Among them was his fellow Congressman John Lyle, of Corpus Christi. “That thing sure makes a lot of noise,” Lyle said. “That thing sure gets a lot of votes,” Lyndon Johnson replied.
THE HELICOPTER was not the only cause of Johnson’s elation as June drew to a close and the campaign entered the final month before the primary. The other was a mistake—a grave one—made by his normally cautious opponent. The Texas chapter of the American Federation of Labor, meeting in Fort Worth, endorsed Coke Stevenson for Senator—and Stevenson did not repudiate the endorsement.
The AFL endorsement was to prove one of the great ironies in Texas political history. It was given not out of enthusiasm for the ex-Governor, who had tacitly supported the Brown & Root-backed anti-labor Manford bills, but out of deep hostility toward Lyndon Johnson. For years Johnson had assured Texas labor leaders that he was a New Dealer, “100 Per Cent” for labor’s great friend Roosevelt; then, believing that Johnson was what he said he was, the embattled, struggling unions of Texas had gone to him for help, and had found no help at all. Since FDR’s death, moreover, in his stance against Truman’s Fair Deal and his support of the Taft-Hartley Act, Johnson had openly opposed their aims. And his alliance with the hated Herman Brown had convinced them that while Stevenson had resisted them, Johnson had deceived and betrayed them. They saw their endorsement now as an opportunity for revenge.
But their action was to backfire. So weak were unions in Texas—utterly unable, even in the cities, to mobilize their members—that their support could not help, could only hurt, a candidate. Anti-union sentiment was fierce in rural Texas, which identified unions with labor racketeers, big-city corruption, big-city ethnic groups; a widespread theme in the state’s monolithic press, expressed in 295 editorials during a four-month period in 1948, was that strikes should be abolished because they were part of a Communist conspiracy to overthrow America. When Stevenson learned by telephone of the unexpected endorsement, he was so shocked that, recalls reporter Charles Boatner, who happened to be traveling with Stevenson and Bob Murphey that day, after the former Governor returned to the car, “he just seemingly for ten minutes didn’t say a word, and [then] he said, ‘Well, I’m going to accept it; it will do me less harm to accept it than to fight it.’ ”
Attempting in later years to understand their enigmatic “Old Man’s” failure to repudiate the endorsement, Murphey and advisers such as Ernest Boyett would speculate that his reasons were less political than personal. Every time he switched on the radio in the car, it seemed, he heard a Johnson speech or a Johnson advertisement calling him a “do-nothinger,” or “an old man.” “He never said a word,” Murphey recalls; “just sometimes he’d roll down the window and spit.” But those few men who had an opportunity to observe Stevenson during the campaign saw that his contempt for Johnson had bee
n confirmed, and that dislike for his opponent had turned into something deeper. “He felt there was no way he could lose much of the conservative vote,” Boyett says. “And he thought that maybe with it [the endorsement], he could pick up some of the liberals as well, and really rub it in. And by this time he really wanted to rub it in to Lyndon.” Whatever the reason, however, Stevenson’s failure to repudiate the endorsement gave his opponent’s campaign something it needed: an issue. “Peace, Preparedness and Progress” hadn’t caught on, and neither had anything else Johnson had tried. A helicopter could draw people to see a candidate, but he needed an argument to convince them they should vote for him. Now he had one; in the previously invulnerable armor of Coke Stevenson there had appeared a chink.
Lyndon Johnson’s college debating partner, Elmer Graham, could have warned Stevenson what would happen next. The strong point of Lyndon’s debating style, Graham says, was his devastating instinct for the jugular, his “knack of finding a weak point in the other team’s argument” and, once he had found it, making the most of it.
Johnson issued a statement charging that the endorsement was the result of a “secret deal.” “Labor leaders made a secret agreement with Calculating Coke that they couldn’t get out of me,” he said. “A few labor leaders, who do not soil their own clothes with the sweat of honest toil, have met in a smoke-filled hotel room in Fort Worth and have attempted to deliver the vote of free Texas workingmen.… I think the laboring men should ask their leaders … why they wanted the unions to … endorse a candidate who did not have the courage to sign or veto the state’s vicious anti-labor law when he was Governor.” The “labor leaders” made it worse—by rising to Johnson’s bait. The AFL convention had not endorsed Coke Stevenson because of any “deal,” one AFL leader, Wallace Reilley of Dallas, said the next day; it had endorsed him because his opponent was Lyndon Johnson—and Johnson, by his years of support of anti-labor bills in Congress, “has disqualified himself in the eyes of the working people of Texas.” After Reilley offered a resolution terming Johnson’s statement “a deliberate lie,” the six hundred “boiling mad” delegates, the Dallas News reported, jumped to their feet, roaring in anger and shaking their fists as they approved it. But the headlines which reported their action—“INFURIATED AFL DELEGATES VOTE TO GET JOHNSON”—only helped the man they hated.
Then Johnson sharpened the charge. The “secret deal” to which Stevenson had agreed in return for AFL support, he said, was that if Stevenson was elected to the Senate, he would vote to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act—the act that was almost sacred in Texas as the symbol of the state’s flaming anti-union sentiment. In speech after speech, over the radio and in the small towns to which the helicopter was carrying him, he demanded that Stevenson “tell the truth” about this “secret deal” he had made “with labor dictators.” Stevenson, Johnson said, had sold his soul for the labor vote; “he’s a yearling with the labor boss brand on his hip.” Johnson’s charge was untrue. Coke Stevenson was not opposed to the Taft-Hartley Act; he was in favor of it. From the time it had first been proposed in Washington, he had explained to supporters, in his slow, painstaking way, that although he was in general opposed to legislation increasing government regulation of any institution, he was in favor of such regulation when an institution became a monopoly and thereby gained power so great that only government could check its abuses in the interests of the public. Organized labor, he had told intimates, had become a monopoly, and was abusing its power. And Johnson knew his charge was untrue; says Paul Bolton, who, under Alvin Wirtz’s guidance, was writing most of Johnson’s speeches on the labor issue: “We knew it wasn’t true, and I almost felt ashamed of what I was writing sometimes; Coke was so honest, you know.…”
Moreover, there had been no “secret deal”—or at least not one involving Coke Stevenson. The gulf between Johnson’s charges and the truth was deepened by the fact that Lyndon Johnson was receiving “secret” support from labor leaders. The support came in the same form it had taken during Johnson’s first campaign for the Senate seven years before, because he had maintained his ties to the labor movement in the Northeast. As in 1941, substantial amounts of labor cash were raised there and either sent to Texas by Tommy Corcoran and Jim Rowe, or brought in person by Welly Hopkins; on his return trips Hopkins carried recordings of Coke Stevenson speeches that had been carefully edited by Johnson’s aides to make Stevenson sound more conservative than he was, and that therefore helped Corcoran and Rowe raise still more money from labor and other liberals in Washington and New York to defeat this “Neanderthal.” (Johnson had, with more justification, used the same tactic in his race against O’Daniel in 1941.) Once Hopkins, chief counsel for John L. Lewis’ United Mine Workers union, arrived in Texas to hear Johnson excoriating John L. Lewis. “He was saying things that kind of hurt my ears, and that I hated to hear,” Hopkins was to recall. “I knew the political reasons for it, but it made me feel a little badly.” But he had been sent to Texas to help Johnson, and he did so, contacting UMW supporters, and bringing papers—which he will describe only as “various documents that Corcoran and Jim Rowe had helped me get—a copy of some sort of document, a government document or some correspondence—not for public use but that were informative to Lyndon.” But these labor connections were kept secret—Hopkins was to recall that he went to Texas “just informally and [as] quiet as I could [and] purposely stayed away from Lyndon’s headquarters.” So Johnson was free, in a violently anti-labor state, to make the most of labor’s endorsement of his opponent.
Stevenson made one attempt to answer the charge, although he did so as he had always answered questions in the past, not making a short reply but explaining the political philosophy that had led him to his decision. In an interview with the Abilene Reporter-News on July 3, he said: “My policy is to let everyone alone unless he needs regulating. But when any segment of society becomes a monopoly, it needs to be regulated. I think the Taft-Hartley Act is all right as far as it is needed to keep down a monopoly.” When Boyett and other advisers suggested that the last sentence might need clarification, Stevenson refused to issue any. One reason was that he felt he had been making statements with similar careful qualifications during his entire public career, and the people of Texas had always understood them, particularly in light of his consistent record. The people of Texas would understand this one, he said; of course people knew where he stood on Taft-Hartley, and on organized labor, he said. Who could possibly believe he would vote to repeal that Act? And he did not repeat his statement before the first primary. It appeared in the press—in just a few newspapers, really—only once.
But behind Stevenson’s refusal to repudiate the AFL endorsement lay also Lyndon Johnson’s genius at “reading” men. Johnson had read Coke Stevenson now, and he knew his weakness: his fierce pride, particularly a pride in his reputation for honesty and truthfulness. All his public life—from the time he had been a young county attorney and opponents had attacked his handling of the rustling case involving the son of the prominent Kimble County family—he had refused to utter a single word of reply to personal attacks. So Johnson, to keep him from replying, made the attacks personal. Not only did Johnson himself, and his supporters, in radio broadcast after broadcast, continue their attack on the “old man,” ridiculing his lack of courage, impugning his honesty; not only did they “demand” that Stevenson “tell the truth” about his “secret deal” on the Taft-Hartley Bill; but the demands were deliberately couched in language that, Murphey says, “anyone who knew Governor Stevenson knew he would never reply to.” For example, Johnson backer Ed Leach, editor of the Longview Morning Journal, wrote to Stevenson “demanding” that he speak out: “I would like to ask you to … break a precedent by stating your position on anything, but particularly on the Taft-Hartley Law.” Johnson had read his man: Stevenson responded just as Johnson had known he would respond. Since the personal attacks concerned his “refusal” to say whether he was for Taft-Hartley, it became a matter
of pride for him not to say whether he was for it. He said he would not “be drawn into a name-calling exchange.” Voters knew his views on organized labor, he said; he hadn’t changed, and they could be sure he never would. And because his support of Taft-Hartley had not been widely publicized, Stevenson’s stance allowed Johnson to claim that Stevenson had never disclosed his views; indeed, newspapers would state repeatedly that the former Governor had made no statement about Taft-Hartley.
Stevenson’s response was based not only on philosophy but on the buttressing of that philosophy by a lifetime’s experience. Time and time again during his long career, candidates had attacked him personally and he had been advised to reply, and time and time again he had refused, always giving the same reason: his record would speak for him—the voters knew where he stood; he hadn’t changed; the voters would therefore know the charges were false. And, naïve and unrealistic though this reasoning had seemed, time and again it had been proven correct—attack after attack had shattered against his image, in part because his image was so close to the truth that there were no cracks in which the charges could lodge; the charges had indeed been false, and the voters had indeed not believed them.
But Stevenson didn’t understand that, as Boyett puts it, “Lyndon Johnson wasn’t like other candidates.” He didn’t understand that Lyndon Johnson’s campaign wasn’t like other campaigns, that it was something new in Texas politics. Never before had attacks against Stevenson been repeated day after day, week after week, not only on the radio, that powerful medium, now, for the first time in Texas, being exploited to its fullest, but in weekly newspapers, daily newspapers, in campaign mailings, so that voters heard and saw the charges against him, it seemed, every time they turned on the radio, read a newspaper, opened their mail. Never before had there been a campaign in which the same phrases were drummed into voters’ consciousness so constantly all through June and July. “Secret deal”? Perhaps Coke Stevenson felt he wouldn’t dignify the charge by denying it. But dignity was a luxury in a fight with Lyndon Johnson, a luxury too expensive to afford. Perhaps Stevenson had too much pride to deny the charge. Pride was a luxury that an opponent of Lyndon Johnson could not afford. Once Johnson found an issue, true or untrue, that “touched,” he hammered it—until people started to believe it. He had one that touched now; he had found the jugular and he wasn’t letting go. The charges Johnson was making against Coke Stevenson were false—manufactured out of whole cloth, in fact. They were as false as any charges that had been made against Stevenson in the past.
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