Means of Ascent

by Robert A. Caro

  He could not control himself even when on stage before the voters he was wooing. As his confidence grew, he seemed to feel that he had them in his grasp as he had his subordinates—and he began to treat them the same way. Circling a town in the S-51, as Phipps urged over the loudspeaker, “Come to the speaking, come to the speaking,” he would grow irritated if the response was below expectations. Snatching the loudspeaker from Phipps, he would do the urging himself, and even through the loudspeaker’s distortion, what Busby calls the “umbrage” in the voice was clear as it bellowed: “Come on out to the speaking!” During his speeches, anything less than total attention from his audience evoked the same reaction. Most politicians display affection for the children of potential voters. Johnson, however, was not particularly fond of children in any circumstances, according to Busby, and although their presence was necessary to attract their parents to his helicopter landings, he didn’t intend to tolerate any nonsense from them. If there were childish antics in the crowd, the candidate would stop talking. And, Busby says, “I learned one thing: if he stopped—hide! You weren’t going to like what happened next.” Busby took his own advice—literally. Once, when Johnson stopped and stared down into the crowd at a little boy who was “talking or something,” Busby says, “I went behind a tree. He kept staring at the boy, and finally said: ‘Ahm not going to go on until the mother of this squirt comes up here and dusts his britches.’ ”

  Receiving reports of Johnson’s behavior, Alvin Wirtz attempted to calm him down, and his telephone calls worked for the first hour or two each day, but by mid-morning his quiet counsel had faded before the visions of victory dancing in Johnson’s head. He had added to his speeches now a chant in which he asked audiences to join, and if the participation of the public wasn’t always enthusiastic, there was usually enough of a claque on hand to make things sound as if it was. “Ain’t gonna be no runoff.” Johnson would say, “I’m gonna win without a runoff. Now let’s hear it!” And the crowd—led by the claque—would chant “Ain’t gonna be no runoff.”

  Whatever the young men in the Hancock House may have believed, the older, more experienced men in the Brown Building knew there was no realistic possibility of that prediction coming true. Johnson might do far better than had been expected, they felt, but as for polling more than half the vote?—the chant, they felt, was a campaign device; no one could seriously believe it might happen. But Ed Clark, talking one night in late June to the candidate, a candidate utterly in the grip of euphoria, came to a shocking realization: Lyndon Johnson believed it.

  AND THEN, on the Fourth of July weekend, came the Texas Cowboy Reunion.

  The Reunion had been begun in 1930 by Texans concerned by “the thinning ranks of true cowboys,” the embodiment not just of a way of life but of the spirit and principles that made Texas so special. Its sponsors had picked a perfect site, a little town, Stamford, that sat on the vast rolling plains of West Texas like the set of a Western movie, right down to the headquarters of a working ranch, the Swenson Ranch, which was located on the town square, with its façade bearing the ranch’s famous SMS brand with two backward S’s. Stamford was located in the very heart of what had been the land of the “mustangers,” the men who captured wild horses and drove them to Northern markets; children in this area grew up to the stories of the mustang stallions—Black Devil, Star Face, the Pacing Wild Stallion and, best remembered of all, Midnight, the great black herd leader who for years had outwitted men to keep his mares and foals free. By 1948, the mustangs had gone the way of the buffalo, but the great herds of cattle stretching to the horizon were still there, and so were the cowboys who herded them, sitting lonely guard against the horizon, and so was the cowboy’s way of life; as one writer put it, “throughout this part of Texas the atmosphere of the West prevails” so strongly that automobiles almost look out of place. The Reunion’s founders had designed it to preserve and revitalize the cowboys’ traditions and skills by holding bunkhouse dances, chuck-wagon meals and a rodeo in which participation was limited to “nonprofessionals” to ensure that only “true cowboys,” men who were still actually working the range, would compete; ranches sent their top hands to the three days of roping, cutting-out and riding contests that were held over each Fourth of July weekend. During the war, the young men of the ranches, the sons of the ranch owners and their cowboys, had gone off to fight, and the Reunion’s founders had feared the event would die away, but after the war, it actually became bigger than ever. Families would come from all over the Panhandle and West Texas, some in pickup trucks but an astonishingly large percentage in chuck wagons, which would stand in a huge encampment on an area set aside outside of town near the fifty acres of horse and cattle corrals around the rodeo grandstand. In 1948, the attendance was more than twenty-five thousand.

  Coke Stevenson arrived on a morning during which, as Bob Murphey drove him across the plains, he had listened to Lyndon Johnson assailing him; in his radio broadcast that morning, Johnson had said: “Old men killed Woodrow Wilson’s plan for the League of Nations, old men in the Senate. I could say pipe-puffing old men, but that might look like a reference to one of my opponents.” He himself had fought in the last war, Johnson said, unlike his opponent; “I didn’t sit and puff my pipe when our country was at war.” Arriving at Stamford, Stevenson was told that a big crowd of reporters was on hand—not to see him but to see Johnson’s helicopter, which was scheduled to land at the rodeo site later that day. A Johnson sound truck was driving through the town taunting him: “Coke, if you’ve never seen a helicopter, here’s your chance.” The reporters crowded around him, asking him to hold a press conference. “I’m not here for politics,” he replied. “I’m here to be with my friends.” Since he would be riding in the parade, he had brought along his black boots, and he bent down and tugged them on.

  TWO RIDERS carrying huge flags, one the Stars and Stripes, the other the Lone Star, were first in the parade, and behind them came six pretty girls in cowboy regalia on six white horses, leading the famous Cowboy Band of Abilene’s Hardin-Simmons University also in cowboy regalia, playing Sousa marches. And then came the riders—hundreds of them, who had been milling around in giant corrals waiting for the parade to start—in a long column of threes. There were so many of them that even over the music you could hear the thudding of hooves.

  Coke Stevenson led them out.

  He had felt it was not right for a candidate for office to be leading the parade, and his old friend Bill Swenson of the SMS, president of the Reunion, had said he would ride beside him, but as the parade began, Swenson reined in his horse so that he was a few steps behind, and Stevenson was alone.

  He was riding “Pal,” a big, magnificently muscled Palomino, but Stevenson, with his great shoulders and the erectness with which he held himself in the saddle, seemed almost too big for him. He was still wearing a brown business suit and his gray Stetson hat without the wide brim, but the crowd watching him come saw a man riding like the cowboys behind him, sitting easily, deep and back in the saddle with a lot of leather showing in front, where it was most comfortable for the horse. Made nervous by the music and the excitement, Pal shied and pranced at first, but Stevenson calmed him down.

  There were no cheers, but as he rode, people called out to him. “Hello, Coke.” “Hey, Coke.” “Howdy, Coke.” He called back. “Hello, Jack.” “Hello, Bill.” A reporter realized that what he was seeing was “an exchange of greetings from old friends.” At first the calls were scattered, but as he rode along, there were more and more of them until they were almost a continuous chorus; along the whole line of march, what you heard between the noise of the band fading ahead and the noise of the hooves mounting behind was, as one reporter wrote, “one constant [greeting] from the sidewalk crowds,” a quiet but immense outpouring of affection.

  And there was a gesture, too. It was a cowboy gesture, a peculiarly Texas gesture, in fact, for cowboys do not tip their hats except to ladies. As men said “Hello, Coke,” they would
touch one or two fingers to the brim of their Stetsons and then point the fingers toward the big man riding by. Even men who didn’t call out made that gesture; every man in the crowd was making it, it seemed. To Murphey, standing on the porch of the hotel watching his uncle ride toward him, it looked as if hands were rising and touching hat brims in a long wave as Coke Stevenson passed by, “almost in a kind of salute.”

  And it wasn’t only old men making that sign of respect. The young men in the crowd—the sons and grandsons of the old ranchmen who had settled this range—were making it, too. Their fathers and grandfathers had told them the story of Coke Stevenson, about the young boy starting up the freight line and studying at night in the lonely hills, about the young rider herding cattle up on the Divide, about the founding of the fatnous ranch, about the love story of Coke and Fay, the young wife who had believed her husband should be Governor, about the rancher who as Speaker and Lieutenant Governor and Governor had never become a politician, had never betrayed his standards, which were, of course, their standards, too, about their beloved “Cowboy Governor”—their own Governor. And as he came closer, the big man sitting so erect and calm on the prancing horse, the young men, too, touched the brims of their hats in salute. Behind the crowd—wherever there was space—were pickup trucks parked in a long row. Their owners, mostly young couples, would be standing in the backs of the trucks with their children so that they could see over the heads of the crowd. But often the children couldn’t see. So, as Coke Stevenson approached, fathers and mothers would pick up their children and put them on their shoulders or hold them up in the air, so that they, too, could see “Mr. Texas” passing by.

  After the parade, the 5,000-seat grandstand was filled to overflowing for the rodeo. Stevenson was sitting in the judges’ box. Five other state officials and candidates for office were with him, and before the rodeo began the master of ceremonies introduced them one by one. The first five introductions were greeted by a polite but unenthusiastic sprinkling of applause. Then the announcer began, “Our beloved former Governor.” And suddenly, before the announcer could finish, everyone was cheering. They were giving the rebel yell. They were throwing their hats in the air. Four or five riders who had been waiting on horseback against one wall to help in the events, caught up in the excitement, spurred their horses into a gallop across the arena, came to a rearing halt before the judges’ box and waved their hats toward Stevenson. Everyone was shouting “Coke! Coke! Coke!”

  BOB MURPHEY REMEMBERS how moved his uncle was by what had happened. Driving away from Stamford that night, Stevenson said: “Bob, the kind of people you saw today, remember them. The ranching business is changing; that kind of people—you won’t see them again.”

  And Bob Murphey remembers what he thought when his uncle said that. “I didn’t say anything,” he recalls, “but I thought: Uncle Coke, we won’t ever see your kind again, either.”

  THE REPORTERS who were waiting for Lyndon Johnson’s helicopter at the Cowboy Reunion were disappointed. At his final stop before Stamford, the town of Aspermont, twenty-seven miles away, he had received a telephone call describing the reception Coke Stevenson was being given at the Reunion. He decided not to attend. Using the excuse that his helicopter was low on fuel because a truckload of gasoline had missed connections, he flew instead to Abilene.

  BAD NEWS WAS WAITING for him there, too: the result of the latest private poll he had commissioned, and advance news of the latest Belden Poll, which was even then in progress and would be completed the next day. In the previous Belden Poll, Johnson had pulled closer to Stevenson: Stevenson had led Johnson by only 47 percent to 37 percent among voters whose preference had been decided; 23 percent of all voters had not decided. In Belden’s new poll, the percentage of undecideds had dropped from 23 to 18, but Johnson’s gains had all but come to a halt. Among voters with a preference, Stevenson still led him, 47 percent to 38 percent. (Peddy had 10 percent, the eight minor candidates a total of 4 percent.) The results, which Belden summarized as “almost the same as [the] results” of the poll a month before, were disquieting. During the month just past, the month of the great excitement over his helicopter, Johnson had picked up exactly one percentage point—and Coke had lost not even one. The percentages in Johnson’s private poll cannot be found, but men connected with his campaign recall that its findings were even more unfavorable than Belden’s.

  For a candidate as sophisticated as Johnson in interpreting polling figures, the news was discouraging: since all the excitement about his campaign during the past month, the massive money poured into it, had not cut further into Coke Stevenson’s strength, cutting further might well be impossible. During that month, Johnson’s name had been brought before the voters in Texas not only by newspaper and radio coverage but in an unprecedentedly heavy wave of newspaper and radio advertising, direct mail, billboards, handbills. And Johnson, in his campaigning in so many small towns, had been brought before the voters in person. The result: no significant increase in his support. Had he reached the limit of his support—a limit above which he could not go? He had drawn hope in the early-June poll from the high percentage of undecided voters. Now a substantial number of those voters were no longer undecided, but, contrary to his firm expectation, they had not decided for him, at least not by any substantial majority; almost as many were going into Coke’s camp as into his.

  Most ominous of all, of course, was the fact that with 18 percent of the voters still undecided, Coke with 47 percent was very close to 50.1 percent, the majority which would make the first primary also the last. Lyndon Johnson’s prediction—“Ain’t gonna be no runoff”—might prove accurate, but not in the way he had intended. With only three weeks to go before the first primary, there was a strong possibility that despite Peddy’s presence in the race, the first primary would be the last. Lyndon Johnson might well have to overtake Coke Stevenson in only three weeks. And study the poll results though he might that night in his hotel room in Abilene, they contained no indication that he could do it. They told him that he was on the verge of losing his last chance.

  AFTER THAT NIGHT in Abilene, the euphoria was gone. It was replaced by desperation.

  By coincidence, the next day, he got a new helicopter. The S-51, having reached the limit of mileage it could fly without a major checkup and overhaul, left on its return trip to Connecticut, and it was replaced by a 47-D model furnished, at Stuart Symington’s request, by the Bell Helicopter Corporation. Dramatic as Johnson’s campaigning had been before, now the drama was heightened. The 47-D was much smaller than the S-51, little more than a Plexiglas bubble, five feet wide, five feet long and five feet high, barely big enough to seat a pilot and a passenger at the front of a twenty-three-foot-long fuselage; it looked like a toy in comparison with the Sikorsky craft. Because it required so much less space in which to land, it could get in closer to the centers of population, where the landings were most effective, and its pilot, Joe Mashman, a thirty-two-year-old test pilot, could use its greater maneuverability to perform new crowd-pleasing stunts before and after landings. Its engine generated a meager 178 horsepower at best, and less in hot weather, so that with a load of any size, Mashman was to recall, “that little engine had to strain just to keep the aircraft airborne.” Hardly had he landed in Austin when KTBC radio engineers arrived with an amplifier and a microphone which they told him the helicopter was going to have to carry—and which weighed a hundred pounds. Next, cars drove up with bundles of campaign literature for the candidate to distribute at unscheduled stops. And then the candidate himself arrived (he displayed no interest in the little craft, but “just got on and said, ‘Let’s go!’ ”). No one had told Mashman how big Lyndon Johnson was, and he was “dismayed” to find out; one look at him, the pilot was to recall, and “I knew I had a problem.” Exacerbating the problem would be the necessity—caused by the candidate’s insistence on landing as close to the center of town as possible—of taking off from constricted areas, which required rising stee
ply, often almost vertically, and thus using more power than if the helicopter could, as was normal, rise in a shallower climb. Although Mashman would keep the weight down by never filling the gas tank to capacity, for the remainder of the campaign, as the “Little Brother of the Johnson City Windmill” toured small towns all across Texas, almost every takeoff was an adventure. Mashman would lift off a few feet above ground, and then inch a little higher, hovering while studying his instruments to determine if he had sufficient “reserve,” or unused power capacity, “to safely climb on out.” Often, the instruments would show that he was using all the power the engine could generate just to hover, and he would have to return to the ground. The pamphlets would be unloaded and put in a car which would meet the helicopter outside town, at a location at which there would be more room, and less power, needed for takeoff. But sometimes that didn’t help sufficiently. “Mr. Johnson, we’ve got to take the doors off,” Mashman would say. If the fifteen pounds thus saved still wasn’t enough, the only remaining jettisonable item would have to go. Mashman would set the helicopter down again, and the candidate would disembark, and a car would drive him to the site outside town. After a day or two, Mashman learned to evaluate the situation in advance. As he circled a town, with Johnson using the bullhorn to round up the populace, Mashman, if he “saw it was going to be tight,” would tell his passenger he would be able to land with him, but not take off.