Means of Ascent

by Robert A. Caro

  So powerful were Johnson’s speeches now that even reporters and aides sometimes found themselves stirred by passages they had heard hundreds of times before.

  Talking about the need for preparedness, from a flatbed truck in a little park in an East Texas county seat called Canton, he had gone through the routine about Colonel Stevens’ “smelly socks” and was telling his audience that “never again must we send our boys through flak-filled skies unprotected.” In the audience was Warren Woodward. He was ready to start the applause at the high points, but this wasn’t necessary, so caught up was the crowd in what Lyndon Johnson was saying. Woodward himself was so moved that when Johnson said, “I’ve got this young man working in my campaign who flew thirty-five missions over Europe and his plane was hit thirty-five times, and I don’t want him to ever have to go over there again unprepared; we have to give him the tools he needs,” Woodward applauded and cheered along with the farmers and ranchers around him. And when Johnson unexpectedly added a new line to the routine, Woody cheered that, too, without at first grasping its relationship to him. “I want that young man to come up here,” Johnson shouted, and Woodward shouted, “Yes, send him up!”—not understanding, he was to recall, that Johnson “was talking about me.” “C’mon up here beside me,” Johnson kept shouting, and Woodward kept shouting, “Yeah, go on up! Go on up!” until finally Johnson caught his eye, and “finally it dawned on me that I was that one that was supposed to go up,” and that he had been shouting and leading the applause for himself. But when Woodward clambered up in the truck, “mortified” over the fact that he had been calling for his own appearance, he realized no one had noticed that he had been among the shouters, for the whole crowd had been as moved as he had been by the words of the tall, haggard, grimy, perspiration-soaked man on the truck. At speech after speech now, the crowds were caught up. “You could see the rapport building between himself and the crowd,” Horace Busby says. Rural audiences, normally so reserved, would “start out at a distance, in a semicircle,” he says. But as Johnson spoke, “almost every time, the semicircle would edge closer and closer to him.”

  Lyndon Johnson knew how to make the most of such enthusiasm, how to play on it and intensify it. He wanted his audiences to become involved. He wanted their hands up in the air. And, having been a schoolteacher, he knew how to get their hands up. He began, in his speeches, to ask questions. The first ones he asked of the kids who had been so enraptured by the helicopter. “How many of you are going to tell your folks to be sure to vote?” he would ask, and then, “How many of you are going to tell your folks to vote for Lyndon Johnson?” Wrote a reporter: “The hands would fly up as if Superman himself had asked it.” Then he directed questions at the parents. “I’m traveling to places to see folks where no other candidate has bothered to go,” he would say. “Am I the first candidate who’s been here? Raise your hands if I’m the first candidate you’ve seen.” The hands would go up. And he could build on his questions, too. When he was speaking in a town that he knew Stevenson and Peddy had not visited, he would say, “I keep reading about how many counties [the other candidates] have visited, how many miles they have traveled. Has anyone here seen another candidate?” If no hands went up, he would say, “C’mon, raise your hands if you’ve seen another candidate? Surely someone here has seen one of them? No one? No one has even seen another candidate. Well, you’re seeing me. I’m here with you.” Or if, when Johnson asked if anyone had seen another candidate, someone did raise his hand, Johnson would ask, “Where did you see him?” And no matter what the reply, Johnson had a line ready. If, for example, the responder said he had seen Stevenson in a hotel, Johnson would say: “What did I tell you? I’m out here in the hot sun with you people, and my opponent—my big-bellied, pipe-smoking opponent—spends his time campaigning in air-conditioned hotels.”

  As good as he was while he was speaking, he was better after the speeches. For after the speech came the meeting and greeting.

  “He never just stayed on the [flatbed] truck or the platform, or, if the speech was indoors, on the podium,” Woodward recalls. “He would finish a speech, and then he would hurry to the back door so he could shake hands. He didn’t want anyone to leave before he had shaken their hand.”

  During the first weeks of the campaign—until, perhaps, that terrible Fourth of July weekend—he had rushed through the handshaking … in the description of Woodward and Busby, all but “throwing” people past. There was no throwing now.

  The things he had been saying in the speech had made these rural Texans feel he was one of them. “They felt he was approachable,” Woodward says. “They didn’t hesitate to come over to him.” And in a surprisingly large number of towns—not only in his own Tenth Congressional District and in the Fourteenth, for which he had worked for almost four years as a congressional secretary, but in other districts as well, through his NYA activities or his 1941 senatorial campaign—he knew personally one or more of the people crowding around him, and through the “favorable” list his staff had compiled for each town he was able to put names to faces. And when he saw someone he knew, Lyndon Johnson’s face would, in the words of one observer, “just light up” with pleasure. He would reach out for him, and call the man’s name. “Old Bob,” he would say. “How you comin’?” He would put his arm around Bob’s shoulders. “How are you?” he would ask. “Ahm awful glad to see you. Well, the last time ah saw you was when you came up to Washington to see Dick Kleberg. Ah hope you haven’t been up again without comin’ by to say howdy to me? You haven’t. Well, ah hope you’ll come up again, and we can chat for a while.” “At almost every stop,” Woodward says, “there was someone he had done something for.” The “favorable” cards—and that remarkable memory—enabled him now to make the most of what he had done. “Someone would introduce himself, and say, ‘Lyndon, do you remember my boy, John? You helped him get his disability.’ ‘Ah sure do. Ahm glad ah could help him. What’s he doin’ now? How’s he comin?’ ” And when the man had told him, he would say: “That’s good!” Or “Is there anything ah can do for him?” And “How’s your missus?” Or they would ask him for new favors. “Lyndon, my boy—you know he was in the service, and he was hit in the leg. I need him to help out on the farm, but, Lyndon, he can’t plow, and they say he can’t get any disability, and I don’t think they’re doing right by him.” And Johnson would turn to Woodward, who would be standing there with his notebook: “Woody, get that boy’s name, and we’ll look right into it.”

  The rapport was cemented—or, if there had been no previous connection, created—with physical affection, with hands and eyes, or, in the case of women, quite often with kisses. He would call older women “Mother” or “Grandma” even if he had never met them before, and hug and kiss them, and say a fond, respectful word to them. Often, when he would reach out to hug a woman, she would giggle and back away, and when he had kissed one, and the other women saw what was coming, they would retreat out of his path. But “he would come after them,” recalls a man who watched this. “He’d go across the room after them,” and when he caught them, Lyndon Johnson would take one of their hands in his and put his other around their shoulder and bend down and kiss their cheek, and these elderly farm women would receive the kiss scrunched down a little in embarrassment with their faces turned away, but with their faces aglow: “you could see they just loved this attention.”

  With men, the rapport was cemented with a handshake—and a handshake, as delivered by Lyndon Johnson, could be as effective as a hug. “Now, July 24 is Primary Day,” he would say, “and I hope you will lend me your helping hand.” And he would reach out and grasp the farmer’s hand, looking down into his eyes. “What’s your name?” he would ask. “Where’re you from? What’s your occupation?” And he would always have a relevant sentence or two ready to add. If the farmer said he had two sons, Lyndon would ask what they were doing, and if the farmer said they were studying agriculture at a college, Johnson would say, “Well, they’re lea
rning a lot of good things there, but people like you who know the land know stuff they can’t learn from teaching, don’t you?” Sometimes, in the midst of a crowd of strangers, he would stop and concentrate on a single person, as if he were back in a little Hill Country town again, running for Congress for the first time, and talking to a man he knew. He wouldn’t take the man’s hand at first. “Listen,” he would say, standing before the man and looking into his eyes, his own face glistening with perspiration, his cheeks hollow with fatigue, and the shirt clinging to his body, “Listen, you know why I’m running for the Senate. I want your support. I want your vote. I hear tell that all the people down in your neck of the woods will listen to what you tell them. Will you tell them to vote for me? I need help. Will you help me? Will you give me your helping hand?” Will you give me your helping hand?—as he asked that final question, Lyndon Johnson would raise his own hand and hold it out in a mute appeal. When Johnson was only twenty-one, participating in his first political campaign, State Senator Welly Hopkins had concluded that the tall, gangling college boy had a “gift”—“a very unusual ability to meet and greet the public.” Time after time now, Lyndon Johnson’s hand would reach out to a voter—and the voter’s hand would reach out in return.

  THE HANDS with which he was doing this were terribly cracked now.

  Dry and scaly as they had been before the campaign because of his eczema, the sun had baked them dryer. They looked almost like cracked leather marked with narrow lines of blood, for new cracks, deep, painful little knifelike slits, were constantly appearing in the skin. And many of the hands he was shaking were the hands of farmers, hard and strong, the hands of men who had worked with their hands all their lives. “Without meaning to, they hurt,” says Horace Busby. And sometimes, in the crush after a speech, Johnson would momentarily forget to use the two-handed method or someone would grab his hand while he was still concentrating on someone else. Once, Busby was standing on the ground next to a flatbed truck, with steps on both ends, on which Johnson was shaking hands with members of the audience as they came up on the truck and filed past him. “All of a sudden I heard the damnedest yelp, like a dog had been hit.” Busby looked up, and Lyndon Johnson “was down on one knee. He had been shaking hands with a big old guy in coveralls and a white shirt.” But, as the young speechwriter watched, Johnson recovered himself and smiled at the farmer, and turned with a smile to the next person in line, and the next, and the next. At every stop, no matter how much it might hurt him to shake hands, he shook every one. He shook even those that were not offered to him. In small towns there was usually a little group of elderly men, the domino players from the Courthouse Square, who would stand at the back of the crowd during the speech and after it would not approach the candidate, showing by the reserved look on their faces that they were not impressed by any politician (of course, elderly men like these were almost invariably Stevenson supporters). But when Johnson noticed such a group of men, he would, after he had shaken everyone else’s hands, walk over to where they were standing to shake theirs, his cracked hand held out, and a broad, pleasant smile on his face.

  HIS VOICE WAS CRACKED, too, and the throat sprays were not helping much more than the ointments were helping his hands. By the end of each day, it was a hoarse croak, but every time it seemed to be about to give out entirely, it would come back.

  He was so tired. After spending July 15 accompanying Johnson on a tour of the Fourth Congressional District in Northeast Texas, District Chairman Fred Meredith asked Claude Wild to show the candidate mercy. “He had a mighty hard schedule that day,” Meredith wrote.

  Upon arrival in Greenville that evening, we noticed the telling effects of this hard drive upon him. I don’t know but what it would be well for John [Connally] and you to try to have him make fewer appearances for the balance of the campaign … because you are driving him to death.

  In his reply, Wild didn’t even respond to the suggestion about fewer appearances. What would have been the use? It wasn’t his campaign manager who was driving Lyndon Johnson. Once, in these final weeks before the July 24 primary, the candidate was so tired that during his noon stop at a hotel, he decided to take a half-hour nap; changing into pajamas, he went to sleep. His aides, who had been watching with concern the toll being exacted from him, did not awaken him for two hours. When they did, his first look was at his wristwatch. His face tightened. He didn’t take a nap like that again. Thereafter, as before, napping was something he did in the helicopter.

  He would shout at Mashman over the roar of the engine. “Joe, I’m just too tired. I’ve got to rest.” A moment later, he would be asleep. He slept sitting up, of course, since that tiny cockpit had no room in which to lie down: two twenty-four-inch-wide bucket seats occupied most of its sixty-inch width; between each seat and the door next to it (or the opening where the door would have been had there been a door) was a space of two and a half inches. As Johnson sat cramped in his seat, one set of the dual controls was between his knees, so that as he slept, held upright by his seat belt, his head slumping forward on his chest, his long legs were “sort of wrapped around the controls,” his right arm all but out the open door. “There was so much noise and the cockpit would be shaking and vibrating, and the doors were off so the wind was whistling through it.” The sun shining through the unshaded Plexiglas made the inside of the “bubble” glaringly bright. But Johnson would be sleeping, sometimes with his Stetson pulled down over his eyes for shade, sometimes with the hat still on the floor where an aide had placed it. Mashman found it incredible that anyone could sleep in such conditions, but he realized his passenger was just too tired to stay awake.

  Sometimes Johnson, in the moment before he went to sleep, would tell Mashman, “We’re going to fly over this town and, if you want to, slow down there and you can just say whatever you want, but I’m just too tired.” He had found that Mashman could speak over the microphone, and the quality of the sound system ensured that no one on the ground would be able to tell who was really talking to them. So when the helicopter reached the town, Johnson would go on sleeping while Mashman, circling and hovering, would say through the microphone: “Hello, down there, this is your friend Lyndon Johnson, asking you to vote for me in this forthcoming election. This is Congressman Lyndon Johnson speaking, hopefully your next Senator.… We’re sorry we can’t land, but we’re thinking about you.” The blare of the public-address-system amplifier, lashed to the helicopter only a foot or two behind Johnson, had no more effect on him than the roar of the engine, or the vibration. As Mashman proclaimed, “This is Lyndon Johnson speaking,” Lyndon Johnson slept on. Having completed his spiel, Mashman would climb and soar away. Glancing over at the exhausted man beside him, Mashman noticed how the sun pouring down on him made even sharper the grooves clawed into his cheeks by fatigue and deepened the dark, almost purple, shadows under his eyes. It glinted off the slits of blood on his hands. But as Lyndon Johnson slept in that cockpit filled with sun, he never blinked.

  Johnson would never sleep for more than half an hour, Mashman recalls. Then, in an instant, he would be wide awake, and his first question, shouted over the engine noise, would be: “Are we on schedule, Joe?” or “How we doin’ on time?” or “When are we going to get there?” And if the answer wasn’t satisfactory—“Well, c’mon. We’ve got to get there, you know. Come on!!”

  DURING THESE THREE WEEKS from the Fourth of July weekend to Primary Day, Mashman had a unique view of what the pilot calls Lyndon Johnson’s “single-mindedness, his concentration, his determination”—words that are inadequate to describe either the intensity with which his passenger was focusing on his goal, an intensity that left no room for other considerations, or the ferocity with which he was fighting to reach it.

  Mashman’s view was unique because he alone flew with Lyndon Johnson during these weeks. He had been surprised—as had his predecessor, Chudars—by Johnson’s total lack of interest in the helicopter; by the way, in an era in which helicopters were s
o new and “unproven that even many seasoned pilots shunned them,” the Congressman had “just got on and said, ‘Let’s go’ ” the first time he had seen the aircraft, burying himself in his briefing papers and staying buried in them. Flying in the Bell was a substantially different experience from flying in the far larger Sikorsky: it vibrated much more, and was noisier; moreover, instead of sitting in a cockpit that resembled the cabin of a small airplane, a passenger was sitting, surrounded only by glass, as if he were simply perched five hundred or a thousand feet up in the air. But Johnson seemed not to notice.