Johnson turned these difficulties to advantage. In the past, some of the people attracted to the landing site by the helicopter would drift away before his speech. Now Johnson devised a tactic to keep them from doing so. After the helicopter had landed, and he had told the audience to “come on around, and look at the whirlybird,” he would, before beginning his speech, say: “My good pilot Joe tells me it’ll be too dangerous if I take off with him because we wouldn’t have enough power to clear those 30,000-volt high-tension wires over there. He’s going to have to take off alone. And it’s going to be mighty tight. I just hope and pray he’ll be able to make it.” Then, having, as Mashman puts it, “told the people of the impending daredevil feat,” he would launch into his political speech. If people started leaving anyway, Johnson would ask them not to. “Now, folks, I want you to stay here and wait until Joe tries to get the Johnson City Windmill off the ground. He’s going to need all the help he can get—he’s going to need your prayers to get through this safely. We’re all hoping that the good Lord sees that Joe gets over those high-tension wires over there. I know we’ll all be here helping to pray for him.” And indeed, as the pilot lifted off at the end of the speech, Lyndon Johnson would, in an effective climax to his little rally, lead the crowd in prayers for his safety: “Let’s pray for Joe now. Good luck, Joe. We’re with you, Joe. Help him, O Lord. Help this brave man make it out of here safely.”
But Johnson was aware now of the limitations of helicopter drama. The polls had told him that. The helicopter could lure people out to meet him, it could even keep them around to listen to him. It couldn’t persuade them to vote for him, not over Coke Stevenson.
Only he could do that.
Hard as he had worked before, now, during the three remaining weeks between the Fourth of July weekend and the first primary, he worked harder.
The summer of 1948 was a summer, day after day, week after week, of a laconic one-word weather forecast: Hot. That summer, the summer of Lyndon Johnson’s last chance, was, in fact, one of the hottest summers of the century in Texas; it was a summer of terrible drought; and, in bone-dry East Texas, of widespread forest fires. Day after day, all across the vast state, the thermometer rose to near one hundred degrees by mid-morning and stayed there until sunset. Sunset brought only minor relief; the nights were little cooler. Few small-town hotels had air conditioning; after ten or eleven hours out in that blazing sun each day, Lyndon Johnson had to sleep at night in steaming hot rooms. During the day, moreover, the helicopter in which he was spending so many hours was no longer the big Sikorsky S-51, whose roof extended partly over the back seat, providing some shade there for Johnson; Chudars, who had to remain in the front seat to pilot the S-51, says that flying surrounded by unprotected glass on which the sun was beating down was as hot as “flying in a greenhouse.” In the tiny Bell, there was no shade, nothing around Johnson and his new pilot but the curved Plexiglas bubble that intensified the sun’s rays. Mashman, who had flown helicopters in Brazil for a year, had considered himself inured to heat, but that was only because he had never experienced “the Valley” during a drought. Even removing the helicopter’s doors didn’t help. “With the high humidity in the Valley, or Galveston or Houston, and the temperature in the nineties, the wind [from the open doors] didn’t help because our perspiration wouldn’t evaporate. We would be just dripping in there.” Most landing sites were naked of shade, of course, since they had been selected because there were no trees or buildings on them. After landing the helicopter, Mashman could hunt up a tree, or a house, and take advantage of its shade. Johnson couldn’t. Sometimes so brutal was the sun that Mashman, before leaving the helicopter, would slowly rotate the rotor blades until one of them was between the candidate and the sun, and Johnson would try to speak while remaining in that sliver of shade, but an eight-inch-wide rotor blade provided pathetically little protection. Campaigning in Texas during the summer of 1948 was, in the memory of those who were there, like campaigning in an oven.
Behind in the race—watching his last chance fade—Lyndon Johnson was campaigning longer and longer hours now, but no matter how long the hours were, they weren’t long enough for him. There was no more talk about “breaks” in the schedule. Johnson wanted more speeches, more “hoverings” over towns too small for speeches, more handshakings—a break meant minutes lost, possible votes lost; he knew now that he needed every one. Woodward had thought eight or nine speeches a day—plus the morning and evening radio talks—the limit of the endurance even of Lyndon Johnson; now, in the first two days after the Fourth of July revelation, touring in the merciless heat of Texas’ Gulf Coast, Lyndon Johnson delivered, in addition to his radio broadcasts, thirty-one stump speeches—and made fifty unscheduled stops to shake hands with cotton-pickers, farmers, or just a lone man driving a tractor. On the second day, he couldn’t seem to tear himself away from Robstown, where, as a teenager who had run away from home, he had worked eleven hours a day in a roasting-hot cotton gin in which the air was so thick with dust and lint from the cotton being pounded into bales that men working in it often found themselves gasping for breath; his job had been tending a big steam boiler, and he had been constantly terrified that it would explode as other boilers had exploded in Robstown gins that year. By the time he arrived in Corpus Christi on that second day, it was just before dark; Mashman, who had been watching shadows close in around his craft, breathed a sigh of relief when he had it on the ground before total darkness. Jumping out of the helicopter and into a waiting car, exhorting the driver to greater speed, Johnson raced into the downtown area of the city and shook hands with passing pedestrians for hours. The next day’s campaigning was summarized by a headline in the Houston Post: “JOHNSON IN 24 PUBLIC APPEARANCES IN DAY.” The length of time he had been out on the road that day was summarized in a phrase in the story: “Sunup to sundown.” On the following day, Thursday, July 8, thunderstorms hit the Gulf Coast as Johnson was flying along the coastline for a scheduled stop at Bay City. Ahead of the helicopter was swirling blackness; when Mashman said he couldn’t land in the storm, Johnson ordered the pilot to circle the storm as close to it as possible so as to lose the least time on the way to the next stop, at West Columbia.
The speeches he was giving were different, too. He was scared now, as scared as he had been in his first campaign, in 1937. Now his chance wasn’t his first but his last, and he was no longer the well-tailored “senatorial” candidate of the first few weeks of this campaign; he was the Lyndon Johnson of 1937 again, awkward, nervous, frightened—and one of the greatest stump speakers in Texas history.
He wasn’t trying to act like a Senator now. He wasn’t trying to act like a statesman. He was trying to win. The people in front of him held his fate in their hands. He told them he was one of them. “I’m a country boy, too,” he told them—a statement which wasn’t hard to believe as he stood there, tall and skinny, in his soaked-through shirt and bedraggled tie and wrinkled, baggy seersucker trousers, his face grimy and sweat-streaked. “I chopped cotton, I hoed my Daddy’s fields.” And because he was one of them, he told them, he understood how city people—like the people in Houston and Dallas who were backing Coke Stevenson—looked down on them. “They’re saying I was a goatherder,” he said. “That’s right, I was. They say I was just a country schoolteacher. That’s right, I was. But there’s sure nothing wrong with that. I’ve had calluses on my hands. I worked on the first roads that ever got built in my county—with these hands. And I’m not ashamed of it. I’m proud of it.” When he was young, he had gone through the trials their sons had gone through.
He had shared their sons’ dangers, too, he told them. In the South Pacific, “This boy I roomed with—he was a country boy, too.”
He had shared all their hopes and fears. As a boy, he said, he had lived on a farm that did not have electricity, and he had seen his sainted mother down on her knees every washday scrubbing clothes in a washtub, and “standing all day over that red-hot cookstove” ironing clo
thes with those heavy “sad irons” in a steaming-hot kitchen in midsummer “so that I and my brother and my sisters would be neat like the other kids.” And as a Congressman, he said, he had helped the people of his district to realize their hopes and dreams. Getting electricity for his district hadn’t been easy, he told them, and he told how the Rural Electrification Administration officials had told FDR that the population wasn’t dense enough and how FDR had replied, “Oh, they breed pretty fast down there,” and how the REA had then said, “Those people are too poor: they won’t pay their bills.” “The interests and the trusts—they were against us,” Lyndon Johnson said. “The power companies and the utility barons, they said, ‘You can’t take lights out to those people. You can’t sink poles in that granite.’ Well, we got the holes in,” he would say, “and we got the poles up, we put lights in twenty thousand farm homes. And do you know how many bills were delinquent? Not one. We can put REA lights in every rural home in Texas. We can build a blacktop road to every farm. We can pay our elder citizens a pension of fifty dollars a month. We can pay our teachers an extra four hundred dollars a year. We can guarantee the farmer minimum prices on farm products. We can build hospitals in every county.”
When he talked about foreign affairs now, the phrases he used were phrases to which these listeners could relate. He played on their fears as he played on their hopes. America was in great danger, he told them. It was in danger from “the red tide of Communism,” which was constantly planning a sneak attack. “Houston or Galveston could easily be the next Pearl Harbor.” “This is off the record,” he would confide, “but I can tell you that in 1951 another nation will have the atomic bomb. Twenty bombs in twenty places in twenty minutes could immobilize the United States.” And, he said, it was not just the atomic bomb that Americans must fear. The next war, he said, would be a war not only of bombs but of germ warfare—whose horrors he vividly portrayed. Therefore, he advised his audience, they should pray. “From the time you say the blessing before breakfast in the morning until the last child is tucked in at night, pray that we will find the solution to the problem of peace.” But prayer was not the only answer to the problem, he said. America must also be prepared. It must be strong. “Nobody would walk up and give Jack Dempsey a punch in the nose,” he said. “And nobody is going to give us a punch in the nose if we’re strong enough, too.” That was the reason, he said, that he was for a seventy-group Air Force. Seventy groups? “I wish it were a hundred and seventy groups.” We need “the best atomic bomb that money can buy,” he said. And we must have a policy of not yielding an inch to the Communists. America must “draw the quarantine line and we would rather have it on the Mediterranean than on the shore of the Gulf of Mexico.” The Communists, he said, are ready to move in on Berlin if America yields one inch. “One inch,” he would shout, shaking a long finger in warning. “One inch!”
He would say whatever they wanted to hear. To rural audiences, he shouted, “The day is over in Texas when people will work for sheep-herders’ wages while a few rich men skim all the cream,” but to wealthy listeners—businessmen and oilmen in the Petroleum Club of Dallas or the Ramada Club in Houston—his vocabulary was not Populist but plutocratic and the cream—increasing the cream—was what he emphasized. He didn’t merely say the oil depletion allowance should be continued; he said it should be increased, immediately, from twenty-seven and a half percent to thirty percent. Moreover, the government should set up a system of allocation of scarce materials to oil producers so that they would come first on the list.
In labor districts he was pro-labor, in anti-labor districts he was anti-labor, and in both districts he was very effective.
And when he talked about his opponent, he was just as effective. His listeners’ respect for Coke Stevenson was the main obstacle between him and his dream. It had to be destroyed. And no one could destroy a reputation better than Lyndon Johnson.
Mimicking his opponent had become a staple of his appearances, of course, and it invariably got a laugh. But making his listeners laugh at Coke Stevenson was no longer enough; he had to make them angry at him. And as the sight of a corncob pipe in a farmer’s mouth had given him inspiration, so, now, did faces in a window.
The window was in the second story of the County Courthouse in the North Texas town of Weatherford. On July 17, both candidates campaigned in the town. Stevenson had shaken hands and toured the Courthouse in the early morning and had then driven off to the next town. Some hours later, Johnson landed and was speaking in front of the Courthouse. The temperature that day was 106 degrees, and candidate and crowd were sweltering as he talked—when suddenly Johnson glanced up at the window, and saw Courthouse clerks and county officials peering out, and noticed that the window was closed and that there was an air-conditioning unit protruding from it. “Look up there,” he shouted. “Look in the window. There’s Coke up there. Folks, I’m out here talking to you man to man in the hot sun, and that’s where Coke is, standing up there in that air-conditioned Courthouse looking down at us.” Coke, of course, wasn’t one of the faces in the window; he wasn’t even in Weatherford any longer, but the people in the crowd didn’t know that; recalls an observer, “He [Johnson] pointed up there, and sure enough there were people behind the window looking down. You couldn’t see them clearly, and I’m sure everybody thought one of them was Coke, all nice and cool while they were sweating.”
Thereafter, the heat and the air conditioning—the blazing sun and the fact that he, Lyndon Johnson, was out there in it with them—were staples of his speeches. “My opponent does his campaigning in the Ramada Club and the Petroleum Club—where it’s air-conditioned,” Johnson would say. “He does his campaigning at buffet lunches, with millionaires who think they’re the bosses of this state. Well, I’m out here in the hot sun campaigning with you. Because I know who the bosses of this state really are! You! YOU!!! You who I meet in the squares and the fields, you who I meet out here in the hot sun—you’re the real bosses of this state!”
The mimicking got laughs; this touched a deeper chord. “That’s right, Lyndon,” someone would shout. “You tell ’em, Lyndon!” And suddenly other voices would be shouting, too. “Tell ’em, Lyndon! Tell ’em, Lyndon.”
“Yes, you’re the bosses,” he would shout to men and women who had to work every day—in fields or farmhouse kitchens—in fierce heat. “You’re not sitting up in any air-conditioned rooms. And neither am I. I’m out here in the fields and the squares. And it’s the people in the fields and the squares who are going to elect the next Senator of this state. He’s going to be elected by you.” “You tell ’em, Lyndon!” a voice would shout. Another voice would shout, “A-men.” And all at once many voices would be shouting “A-men, Lyndon! A-men, Lyndon! You tell ’em, Lyndon!”
He told them more. In one speech, he said, “I’m not going to sling any mud in this campaign.” Then he said that Coke was sixty-one years old (actually, he was sixty), and was campaigning for a job that paid $15,000. “Old” was a word he drummed into his listeners. “He’s an old man,” he said. “A big-bellied, pipe-smoking old man.” And it was the “old men of the Senate” who had kept the United States from being prepared for the war. “We don’t need any more big-bellied old men in the Senate.” “Isolationist” was another word he drummed into his listeners—until he started using a stronger word: “appeaser.” Stevenson, he said, “is an umbrella man.” “He talks Chamberlain talk.” “He wants another Munich.” “You can put this in your pipe and smoke it: Texas is not going to send either an appeaser or an old man to the Senate, because the immediate job is not of appeasement but preparedness.” Another word was “stooge.” The proud Stevenson would pick up newspapers to see headlines like: “STEVENSON STOOGE OF AUSTIN LOBBYISTS, JOHNSON CHARGES.” AS Governor, he said, Stevenson had been the tool of the big oil companies and the “trusts and the interests,” and now, he said, “these same men—who sit with Coke in air-conditioned hotel rooms—want to put their stooge in the United Stat
es Senate.” The attacks grew harsher and harsher. Coke’s refusal to make specific campaign promises, Johnson said, was designed to deceive the voters. “For too long, the voters have been deceived by candidates who spoke to you in glittering generalities, but who secretly engaged in double talk,” by “this man with the slick tongue.”
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