Means of Ascent

by Robert A. Caro

  But, this time, people were beginning to wonder whether they might not be true.

  Even the former Governor’s strongest supporters were beginning to wonder, as was shown in a column which expressed the views of the Dallas conservatives. “Mr. Leach’s letter to Mr. Stevenson was a trifle discourteous, it is true,” Lynn Landrum wrote in the Dallas News. “But it seems reasonable to expect that Mr. Stevenson in his own way will inform the public on this matter, which now seems to have become a critical issue in the race. The people of Texas … are substantially in favor of the Taft-Hartley Act.… They will want to know Mr. Stevenson’s views.”

  Within a startlingly short time after Johnson had begun campaigning by helicopter, his private polls had shown him cutting into Stevenson’s lead, and every day that gap had narrowed. On June 20, a new Belden Poll had been published. Stevenson was no longer leading him by 64 percent to 28, but only by 47 to 37, with Peddy having 12 percent (minor candidates had a total of 4 percent). The erosion in Stevenson’s popularity, Johnson’s more experienced advisers had realized, was not as great as it seemed at first glance, since Peddy had had only an insignificant 3 percent in the May poll, and his backers, conservatives, would return to Stevenson once Peddy was out of the race. But now Johnson’s polls showed that since the AFL endorsement, the gap had closed still further. After weeks in which it had seemed that nothing could erode Stevenson’s popularity, there was an erosion at last.

  WITH HIS HELICOPTER and his issue, Johnson’s mood veered from depression to elation. His euphoria was intense. Often, when his aides came at five a.m. to wake him, they found him already awake, and if he wasn’t, he woke the moment Woody gently touched his shoulder. And, Woodward recalls, “he started at full speed. The minute we woke him up, he hit the ground running,” giving orders and gulping coffee while he shaved. As he headed out the door of his room for his daily 6:45 a.m. broadcast, one staffer would call “He’s moving out!” to alert the others downstairs, for they would have to scramble to keep up. As he passed them, his strides were long and his arms were swinging; “he was,” in the words of the adoring Woody, “a general moving out in front of his troops.”

  After the broadcast—as stilted and stentorian as ever, the engineers in the studios of the little local stations frantically turning dials in an attempt to modulate his voice—he headed for the chopper. Charging from morning to night across the bare brown plains of West Texas, the Johnson City Windmill was landing in eight or nine towns each day now; Johnson was speaking in towns that few candidates for statewide office had ever visited; the helicopter was enabling him to do, on a statewide scale, what he had done in the Tenth Congressional District during his first campaign: to go to the people “at the forks of the creek.” Many of them—perhaps most of them—had never seen a candidate for the United States Senate before. But they saw Lyndon Johnson, saw him and heard him talk.

  He talked, for example, about his combat experiences—or what he said were his combat experiences. His service in the war was, of course, one of the major themes of his campaign. One of Woody’s assignments was to transfer the Silver Star bar to the lapel of whatever suit jacket Johnson was wearing that day. When possible, he wanted to be introduced by a veteran—preferably one whose service, and sacrifice, had been dramatized by the loss of a limb; in Spur, for example, Johnson would ordinarily have been introduced by his most powerful and prominent supporter, a physician named Brannen, but it was arranged that Brannen would introduce Jake Vernell, a veteran who had lost a leg in the war, and that Vernell would be the man who introduced the Congressman. So successful was the Johnson campaign in locating pro-Johnson amputees for this task that the percentage of men introducing Lyndon Johnson who still possessed all their limbs was surprisingly small. And the introductions stressed the war service: “Congressman Johnson was fighting in the Pacific until he was recalled to his congressional duties.” Particularly effective was a broadcast over a statewide radio hookup by veterans who told the story of their own war exploits and tied them in to Johnson’s—or what they thought to be Johnson’s. Typical of the newspaper coverage of the broadcast was the lead in the Austin American-Statesman: “Seven World War II heroes, young men new to politics, told why they are supporting Congressman Lyndon Johnson … [who] was awarded a Silver Star by General Mac Arthur for gallantry in combat action.…” But no one else could talk about Johnson’s exploits the way Johnson could talk about them.

  “I shared your boys’ experiences,” he would say in those small towns in which war heroes were revered and in which so many families had lost a son. “I said that if war was declared, I’d go to war beside them, and I did.” He would point to the pin in his lapel or wave the lapel back and forth at the audience (or, when carried away by enthusiasm, would yank off his jacket and hold it over his head, with the lapel stretched out). “That’s the Silver Star. General MacArthur gave it to me.” He had made sacrifices just as their boys had, he said. He had intended to run in the Senate election in 1942, he said, “But when that election came around I was in the jungles of New Guinea.”

  And, he said, I know what it is to see boys die, because I had a friend die. “He was the boy I roomed with,” Lyndon Johnson said. “He was a country boy, too. He was a pilot, and he flew a B-17, and he was a Colonel. His name was Francis Stevens, but we all called him Steve.” They had been on a mission together, Johnson said, and Stevens’ plane had been shot down, and he had perished in the crash. And to him, Lyndon Johnson, had fallen the task of collecting Steve’s personal effects and mailing them to his mother. “I sat in that little room we had shared together, and I got all the letters his mama had written him, and I tied them up to send back to her. And I packed up his clothes. I remember I rolled up his socks. They smelled bad, but they were his, so I sent them to his mama, too.”

  And though his wartime experiences were somewhat exaggerated, the telling was tremendously effective—particularly when he tied the experiences in with his pleas for “preparedness.” “Peace, Preparedness and Progress” might be the words he used during his stilted radio broadcasts, but here, face to face with the people whose votes he needed, he used different words. It cost us a lot of lives because we weren’t prepared when the Japs attacked, he said. “I’d rather save lives than money,” he said. “It’s either your boys’ lives or tax rebates for millionaires.”

  These words touched a deep chord in his listeners. One of the hands he shook after his talk at Graham was that of a farm wife. “My boy died on Iwo Jima,” she said. “I know what you mean.” At Sweetwater, an old man approached Johnson and tried to say something, but had to stop when he began to cry. And the press coverage of his war record was all that could be desired: talking about Lady Bird’s concern for his safety in a helicopter, the Port Arthur News reported that Johnson said “that his wife didn’t show particular concern when he was flying in B-29s, helping bomb one Japanese island after another into submission three years ago. His flights over jungle wastes and the limitless expanses of the ocean ‘were all right by her, for she realized the job had to be done,’ the Congressman says. ‘But when she heard that some of my old wartime buddies were volunteering to fly me all over Texas to meet the voters in a helicopter, she threw up her hands.…’ ”

  AND HE TALKED about his opponent.

  He had emerged from the hospital determined to try to destroy Coke Stevenson’s reputation, and he had been concentrating on doing so in his formal speeches, with attacks that had been growing steadily more personal. He kept calling his sixty-year-old opponent “an old man.” Stevenson had retired to his ranch, Johnson said, and the only reason he was running for the Senate was that he had discovered that Senators were paid $15,000 a year. Stevenson wasn’t planning to do any work for that money, just collect it as if it were a pension, Johnson said. “I am not for the fifteen thousand dollar pension you’ll be giving this old man if you elect him.” And then, somewhere near the end of June, Lyndon Johnson changed his mode of attack—in a stroke of p
ure political genius.

  Washington had learned of Lyndon Johnson’s gift for mimicry, of the accuracy with which he could capture a man’s traits and imitate and exaggerate them in a devastating form of mockery. Now he began to use that gift in the small towns of Texas on the man who had for so many years been a hero in those towns.

  The people’s very familiarity with the former Governor, and with his well-known mannerisms and phrases, made him a good target. Johnson’s mimicry took the form of an interview in which he played two parts: a reporter and Stevenson. First, playing the reporter, he asked a question—“What are your views on federal aid to education?” perhaps. Then, taking a step away, he turned, as if facing the reporter, and played Stevenson. Out and up came Lyndon Johnson’s jaw in an imitation of Coke’s. His hands went to his hips, in the former Governor’s habitual stance when answering questions. And he rocked back and forth on his heels as Stevenson did while thinking, and paused for a while before answering. “Ah believe in constitutional government,” he finally said. “Are you for or against the seventy-group Air Force?” the “reporter” would ask. Jaw; hands; rocking—in flawless imitation. The long pause which had given “Coffee-Coolin’ Coke” his nickname. Finally: “Ah believe in constitutional government.”

  “It was perfect,” a reporter said. “It was Coke to the life.” The only element missing was Coke’s pipe. And then, suddenly, Johnson had an inspiration. While performing his imitation one day, he noticed a farmer right in front of him smoking a large corncob pipe. Reaching out, Johnson grabbed it, stuck it in his own mouth, and added it to the act. Now, after his “reporter” asked Stevenson, “How do you stand on the 70-group Air Force,” his “Governor” hurriedly stuck the pipe in his mouth as if panicked by the question and drew deeply on it, puckered up his eyes in mock concentration until he finally removed it, studied it for another long moment, and then said: “Ah believe in constitutional government.” At every stop thereafter, Johnson would borrow a pipe from some man in the crowd. “With one eye on the labor bosses in Fort Worth and the other eye on the millionaires in Houston, he sits and smokes,” Johnson would say. He would place the pipe in his mouth, stick out his jaw, put his hands on his hips, and rock back on his heels until he had the crowd giggling. Then he would mutter through the pipe stem: “Ahm for states’ rights.” “And what do you think about federal aid for veterans?” Long pause. “Well, I don’t want to move the county courthouse to Washington.”

  Then, having made the crowd receptive, he could launch into a stronger attack. These savage personal onslaughts were directed against perhaps the most respected public official in the history of Texas. They were a great gamble, part of the great gamble that Johnson was taking in the whole campaign. From Jacksonville, Horace Busby reported: “The Congressman has gone berserk. He is using a satire on Stevenson.” But, Busby added, the satire “seems to be going over with the crowds fine.”

  PEOPLE WHO HAD KNOWN HIM for years said they had never seen Lyndon Johnson so “high.” He had always deeply needed crowds and the feeling from them of acceptance and warmth and respect—now, thanks to the helicopter and to his own gifts, he was getting that feeling. “When he got in a crowd of people, that was when he was at his happiest,” Woodward recalls, and “these were very special crowds for him.” “He really thrived on the helicopter, and on the crowds that would come out,” Margaret Mayer recalls. “He was energized, he was really charged up.”

  He was, in fact, carried away, at times all but out of control. A key to his handshaking method of “taking their hand first” was to reach for the people coming toward him to shake his hand, and in effect pull them past him. Shaking hands on the flatbed truck after the speech, he would sometimes be so excited that he would not only forget the pain in his cracked hands but would pull on voters’ arms so enthusiastically that the voters needed all their alertness and physical strength to avoid being yanked off balance as Johnson pulled them past. “He was just throwing little old ladies past him,” Busby recalls. “Woody and I stationed ourselves below the platform in case any of them needed to be caught.” “When he was shaking hands, that was when he got most charged up,” Margaret Mayer recalls; “It was just like he was plugged into electricity.” During the handshaking, of course, KTBC announcer Joe Phipps was delivering over the helicopter microphone a nonstop spiel about the Congressman’s accomplishments, and sometimes the Congressman became absolutely carried away by enthusiasm as Phipps’ voice boomed out: “Come meet Congressman Johnson. He got roads for the Tenth District. He got lights for the Tenth District. If you elect him, he’ll get lights for you! He’ll get roads for you!” Sometimes, as Phipps’ voice was filling the air, his subject, shaking hands on the truck, would shout to the announcer across the heads of the crowd: “Tell ’em about me, Joe! Tell ’em about me!”

  Then the helicopter would take off, and Lyndon Johnson would be up in the air again, charging across the face of Texas, circling closer and closer to farmhouses to the accompaniment of pandemonium in the chicken coop and panic in the stable, landing beside railroad repair crews and little groups of farm workers so he could hug them and give them leaflets. (Occasionally, the pilot would simply circle the workers as Johnson bellowed down and showered them with great handfuls of campaign literature, but only occasionally. “He would rarely pass [a group] without going down,” Busby recalls. “I would say, ‘Hell, they’re not going to vote.’ He drew himself up in one of his more noble poses, and said: ‘Son, they’re people!’ “) Seeing a train roaring along beneath him, he insisted on Chudars dipping low above the flat prairie and then racing the train for miles, the S-51 gradually passing the long line of freight cars as the engineer tooted his whistle in excitement. Circling a town where he was to land, he would lean far out of the helicopter window, waving his gray Stetson at the people below while he shouted, “Come to the speaking! Come to the speaking!” Above larger cities he went wild. Coming into Port Arthur (where the Port Arthur News was to proclaim the next day, under the headline “IT LANDS ON ROOFS AND IN PASTURES!,” that “Candidate Lyndon B. Johnson’s ‘flying windmill’ is probably the greatest political innovation since the invention of the ballot”), he circled the downtown shopping area again and again at a height of three hundred feet, leaning out of the helicopter window and yelling down through a megaphone (the helicopter’s public address system was broken that day): “Hello, Port Arthur! Hello, Port Arthur! You look wonderful down there! Hello, Port Arthur!” while showering the city with his leaflets. Between cities, he urged Chudars to fly faster. And in his enthusiasm, Lyndon Johnson leaned out of the helicopter and, in the words of one reporter, “whipped his Stetson on the plane’s flanks as though it were a bronco” that he was urging on to greater speed.

  Following him was quite an experience, too.

  Advance man Sam Plyler would leave each stop as soon as the helicopter touched down, because he had to be at the next stop before it arrived to make sure the landing area had been cleared, and he needed all the head start he could get. “Sam drove wide open, as fast as the car would go,” Chudars recalls. Even so, if the town was some distance away, Plyler couldn’t be sure he would make it in time, and as he sped along, he would keep darting backward glances into the sky to see if the black dot had come into view behind him. The other cars would wait until the helicopter lifted off, and then they would race out after it. There was quite a line of them. One car carried mechanic Nachlin and the radio engineer—and a two-way radio linked with Chudars, so that Nachlin could be summoned without delay in case engine trouble forced the helicopter down. Another carried a secretary and a speechwriter, generally Paul Bolton, and his typewriter. Another carried Busby—and his typewriter. Then there was a car for Woody, and his suitcases filled with the candidate’s shirts, ties, pills, lozenges and hand creams. Sometimes there was a car for the band. Their absences for the campaign had cost the band’s four members their radio station job, but Johnson had told them not to worry: “Some day you’ll sing o
n the steps of the White House.” And then there were the reporters’ cars, more and more of them as the Flying Windmill became bigger and bigger news. Quite a caravan careened across Texas that summer—advance men, secretaries, speechwriters, aides, reporters, band members, sound truck operators—all of them, in Frank Oltorf’s phrase, “driving like hell” along highways or narrow country roads, going just as fast as they could, while scanning the skies and hoping to make the next town before the Windmill landed.

  State troopers stopped them. Once, waved over by a trooper, Plyler pleaded that he had to get to the schoolyard in the town up ahead because the helicopter was going to land there and he had to make sure no children got hurt. The trooper said, “Okay, I’ll follow you. If that helicopter doesn’t come in there, you’re going to jail.” And Plyler roared off again, the trooper flooring his gas pedal to keep up.