During these weeks, Mashman feels, he came to understand the Congressman’s lack of interest. The helicopter, he says, echoing the same words that Chudars uses, was to Johnson “only a means to an end”—the end being victory. This end, Mashman came to see, was so all-consuming that the means mattered not at all; no consideration that might interfere with victory could be allowed to intrude.
Not even personal safety. Because of Lyndon Johnson, during these three weeks Mashman flew constantly on a razor-thin margin of safety.
“He would urge you on,” Mashman says. “He had a knack of getting everything there was to get out of you.” And, the pilot says, “in the field of aviation, that’s a very dangerous thing.” Mashman says that “if he pushed you to the point whereby he was definitely wrong in doing so, and you definitely couldn’t do it, if you just stopped and laid it on the line and said, ‘I don’t think this is a safe thing to do,’ that we just can’t do it, period—then he would back down and say, ‘All right. You’re the boss.’ ” Nonetheless, as day followed day, and Johnson pushed harder and harder, the “point” at which Mashman “stopped” edged closer and closer to the limits of safety.
The very act of “inching off” from inadequate landing sites with a too-heavy load, wavering in the air a few feet above the ground and then a few feet higher, and then struggling up into the sky, might have been disconcerting to the average passenger, but Johnson’s only concern during such moments was in weighing the waste of time involved in this experimenting against the waste of time involved if he told Mashman to set down and let him out so that he could be driven to a rendezvous with the helicopter outside town: his only concern was which method would get him to the next town—the next audience of voters—faster.
The margin of daylight was another source of concern to Mashman—and, under Johnson’s prodding, the pilot was constantly slicing that margin thinner and thinner. Since the helicopter was not equipped with night-flying instruments, Mashman had at first insisted that the campaign schedule allow him to be on the ground well before dark. Johnson was determined to cram the maximum number of campaign appearances into each day, and often he would run behind schedule; as the afternoon drew into evening, aides would warn him that daylight was running out, but the warnings were ignored, and Mashman found himself landing later and later, often in the dusk, just as darkness was becoming total. Years later, the pilot was to recall vividly the times he came in for a landing when he could barely see the ground.
Under Johnson’s prodding, moreover, Warren Woodward was selecting tighter and tighter landing sites. One was located in Rosenberg, a small city of forty-eight hundred residents about thirty miles west of Houston. There, Woodward had been unable to find near the center of town “even a lawn” large enough for the 47-D to set down on. The only sizable flat area was the roof of a B. F. Goodrich Service Station. So Woodward ordered Mashman to land on the service station. No one was really sure if the roof would bear the helicopter’s weight, and at the last minute Woodward had the roof shored up with beams hauled from a local lumberyard in wagons pulled by muleteams. The beams were in place—just—when the helicopter started to descend, but Mashman was more than a little worried about what would happen when its full weight settled on the roof. His passenger, however, was not; during Mashman’s slow, anxious descent, Johnson lifted his head from his perusal of his notes for a single glance at the satisfactorily sizable crowd gathering to watch the daredevil landing. When they were down, his only reaction to the risk that had been taken was pleasure; the smile he turned on Woodward was, for once, wholly uncritical; “that’s my can-do boy,” he said.
Storms—even the violent late-afternoon Texas thunderstorms—were to Johnson nothing but an annoyance, an obstacle between him and his goal. Ahead of the helicopter, suddenly, one of those mighty columns of swirling blackness would loom up thirty or forty thousand feet high. Mashman might venture to mention it to his passenger. “Well, just keep on going,” Lyndon Johnson would say. “We’ve got to get there.” Willing though the pilot was to fly through a storm’s turbulence, sometimes he would feel that the danger was simply too great because of the lack of visibility: he would be unable to see the ground, or even more than a few feet ahead, and of course the little craft was not equipped to fly on instruments. If he told Johnson he couldn’t proceed, Johnson’s initial response would be: “Well, are you sure, now?” If Mashman said he was, Johnson would defer to his judgment. Sometimes they would wait, hoping the storm would move away, hovering in midair close to its edge. At other times, the pilot would try to circle the storm and fly on to the next town, skipping one stop, with Johnson adjuring him to circle the storm as closely as possible so as not to lose a single unnecessary minute. But, more and more often, as the weight of Johnson’s personality bore on Mashman’s, the pilot found himself deciding to try to get through such storms—by flying under them, where he could see the ground. In order to see it, in the heavy rain, Mashman might have to descend as low as five feet off the ground, and would “just inch along,” slower and slower, sometimes as slow as fifteen miles per hour, peering ahead through the sheets of rain to look for any obstacles: a building or an electric telephone wire; “many times we actually flew under high-tension wires,” Mashman recalls. And all the time, of course, hanging above them was that mass of black clouds. The pilot himself was often “a little shaky” during such maneuvers, but his passenger wasn’t; “All he wanted to know was, Are we going to get there on time?”
It wasn’t, Mashman came to realize, that his passenger was weighing various considerations against the political necessities of the moment, such as getting to a rally on time, or cramming in one more stop before dark. Rather, it was that in his passenger’s mind, there were no other considerations.
Mashman came to understand this fully after an incident in Marshall, Lady Bird Johnson’s high-school hometown, on July 14.
The incident was the result of a form of stalling (its technical name was “settling with power”) that occasionally occurred during those early days of helicopter flying. This stalling was caused by a combination of extremely hot weather, which reduced the engine’s power, and a sudden shift in the wind when a helicopter was flying at a low altitude—so that the blades find no purchase in the air, and, as Mashman puts it, “the ship just begins to drop like a brick.”
This phenomenon, which would be corrected in later generations of helicopters by a simple change in the angle of the rotor blades, was extremely rare; Mashman himself had never experienced it, and the first time he encountered it he did not realize what was happening. All he knew was that as he was flying at a height of between twenty-five and thirty feet along Marshall’s main street on his way to a landing site in a park, with Johnson sitting beside him, studying his briefing papers, without warning “the ship just dropped out from under me”; he had lost power completely. His reaction was to jerk the controls toward him, a maneuver whose only effect was to cause the helicopter to pitch forward and drop even faster. As he sat there “with a feeling of complete helplessness,” the helicopter fell like a stone, hitting the ground between two parked cars so hard that it bounced up into the air over one of the cars. Suddenly Mashman found that he had power again. He regained control and continued flying to the park.
After they landed, just before Johnson stepped out to begin his speech, he said, “Joe, that wasn’t where you wanted to land back there, was it?” His tone was one of mild curiosity. “No, no,” Mashman replied. “We had a little problem. I’ll tell you about it later.” While Johnson was speaking, Mashman was preparing an explanation of what had happened, but in fact no explanation was required. Climbing back into the helicopter after the speech, Johnson immediately opened his next set of briefing papers and didn’t ask about the sudden drop to the ground. He never asked. The helicopter in which Lyndon Johnson had been riding had fallen like a stone for twenty-five feet, had hit the ground so hard that it bounced higher than a car roof, and then, regaining power, had
swooped up into the air again.
And, Mashman realized, Johnson hadn’t really noticed.
AT SIX-THIRTY on the morning of July 24, Primary Day, George Parr came to the home of his feared Mexican-American enforcer, “Indio” Salas, and repeated his instructions: “Concentrate on the Senate race. Be sure we elect Johnson.”
Salas, as election judge, presided over Precinct 13, the Mexican-American district of Alice, the county seat of Jim Wells County, where the polling place had as usual been set up in a large room in the Nayer Elementary School. In a vacant lot across the street from the school, Salas had arranged for the erection of the traditional Election Day tent—pyramid-shaped, about sixteen feet square at the base—and in front of it stood deputy sheriffs, wearing guns. It had been set up so that the Mexican-American voters who were herded into it by other deputies could be given their poll-tax receipts, their sample ballots or “strings”—and their instructions—in privacy. (“Inside we had a table,” Salas recalls, “with plenty sample ballots to teach some of our voters how to vote; lots of them needed training.”) There was a new development. Under Texas election law, each party was permitted “poll-watchers” to inspect the ballots, and the Jim Wells reformers, emboldened by recent successes, had actually dared to name two for Box 13, H. L. (Ike) Poole and young Jimmy Holmgreen, and when they arrived at the Nayer School just as the polls were opening at seven a.m., they handed Salas a paper: a judge’s order designed to ensure an honest vote. But in George Parr’s precincts, the law was not what was written on paper. Salas pointed to two chairs that he thought were far enough away from the table on which the ballots were counted so that the reformers could not get a good look at them. “I just ordered them to go sit in a corner and keep out of the way,” Salas was to recall. “I tell you once more, I was so powerful I could do anything that pleased me.” Then he whispered to the election clerks: “told them, Absolutely do not let them see the ballots.” Poole, Salas was to say, “more or less obeyed” his orders, but Holmgreen objected when he saw Mexican-American voters pull out sample ballots and refer to them while marking their own, an obvious violation of the election law. Before noon, Salas began counting the ballots. Sitting at a table, he unfolded each ballot and called out the names on it; three clerks, sitting at the same table, marked down the votes on three separate tally sheets. Even from his chair in the corner, Holmgreen was to say, he could see the marks on the ballots, and he saw Salas calling out for Johnson votes that were actually for Stevenson. A brave young man, Holmgreen kept asking to inspect the ballots, as he was entitled by law to do. “He was up many times approaching the desk where the clerks were counting and reading the ballots,” Salas says. “I told him, Better sit down.” When Holmgreen persisted, Deputy Sheriff Stokes Micenheimer, a huge man, as fat as any cinema caricature of a Deep South deputy, with his belly bulging over his gunbelt, arrested him, marched him off to the city jail, and locked him in a cell. An attorney for the reformers obtained a writ of mandamus freeing Holmgreen and ordering Salas to allow the poll-watchers to see the ballots. “I just ignored same and again told Poole and Holmgreen, You just stay put, don’t move from your chairs.” Shortly after the polls closed at seven p.m., Salas announced the “vote” in Precinct 13—that single “box” furnished Johnson with the bulk of his 1,881–1,357 lead in Jim Wells County. And no “reform” opposition to Parr existed in the six counties—Duval, Starr, La Salle, Brooks, Jim Hogg and Zapata—controlled absolutely by the Duke of Duval. In Duval, Stevenson received 66 votes, Peddy 20, Johnson 3,707–98 percent of the total. In the six counties as a whole, Johnson received 90 percent of the total. His plurality over Stevenson in Parr’s domain totaled almost 7,000 votes. In Judge Raymond’s Webb County, he received 90 percent of the total, and a plurality over Stevenson of almost 6,000 votes. The districts of Corpus Christi that Anglo politicians called “Mextown” and “Niggertown” produced 4,000 more; those in McAllen and Edinburg, on the border, weighed in with more. Although San Antonio’s West Side didn’t produce as well for Johnson as had been expected, he nonetheless came out of that city and the Valley with the 25,000 votes he had expected.
Even including this bloc vote, however, Lyndon Johnson polled only 405,617 votes—34 percent of the total. Coke Stevenson had 477,077 votes, or 40 percent; Peddy had 237,195 votes, or 20 percent; and the eight minor candidates had 83,000 votes, 7 percent. Stevenson would have won without the necessity of a second primary had his fellow conservative George Peddy not polled an unexpectedly high total—largely, in the opinion of political observers, because of a mistake by the conservatives’ daily Bible, the Dallas News, which the day before the election, confident that its favorite, Stevenson, would win even with a split vote, had loftily assured conservatives that they could vote for either Stevenson or Peddy without hurting the conservative cause.
Despite the conservative split, Stevenson had defeated Johnson by 71,000 votes. And when the second—runoff—primary was held on August 28, Peddy would be gone from the race. Political writers and observers agreed with virtual unanimity that Peddy’s voters would now turn to the remaining conservative candidate: voters in the fourteen fiercely conservative East Texas counties that Peddy had carried were hardly likely to switch to the candidate identified as a liberal.
This assessment was echoed not only by newspapers—liberal and conservative alike—throughout the state but in Johnson’s own camp, stunned by the extent of his defeat. (The shock was intensified for the younger Johnson aides—those who worked out of the Hancock House—because a last-minute Belden Poll, released on Primary Day, had, in contrast to earlier Belden Polls, shown that among “most likely” voters whose preference had been decided, Johnson had actually pulled ahead of Stevenson. The dramatic inaccuracy of this poll confirmed the feeling of the senior Johnson advisers—the Brown Building group—and of other Texas political observers that, in those relatively early days of polling in that state, identifying and predicting the preference of “most likely” voters was not reliable; the Brown Building group had not put much stock in the last-minute poll, which was, of course, at variance not only with their own private polls but, indeed, with virtually all informed Texas political opinion.) Stevenson’s campaign manager, Morris Roberts, predicted that Stevenson would win “ninety percent” of Peddy’s vote; “This is only natural.… The principles laid down by both Mr. Stevenson and Mr. Peddy are so closely identical it would be difficult to find a dividing line”—and in the somber discussions at the Hancock House and in the Brown Building, the consensus was that Roberts’ estimate might not be too far off. The Johnson team had been confident that their chief would run close to OP Coke in the first primary, close enough so that Johnson would have a realistic chance of victory in the second. But the actual margin, Jake Pickle recalls, was “so imposing”—how could it possibly be overcome? “Making up seventy thousand votes in five weeks, particularly when we were sure that Coke would get most of Peddy’s vote, too—it seemed impossible, absolutely impossible,” Joe Kilgore says. Talk to a dozen Johnson aides about their feelings after the first primary, and one adjective recurs in almost every conversation: “Hopeless.”
And this assessment was, in the privacy of the big back yard at Johnson’s Dillman Street house, echoed by the candidate himself. Because local candidates would not be running, the pool of votes to draw from would be much smaller than in the first primary. “People do not come out to vote for a United States Senator,” Johnson explained to Busby. “They come out to vote for the Sheriff or the County Commissioner.” Most discouraging was that Johnson’s percentage of the vote had been so low: thirty-four percent. The June Belden Poll had predicted Johnson’s share of likely voters at thirty-seven percent. Despite the helicopter, despite the money, despite the frantic efforts of the past month, despite that month’s intensified deluge of radio broadcasts and newspaper ads, Johnson had made no appreciable gain in the last month of the campaign. One explanation might be that, in conservative Texas, a percentage in the mid-t
hirties represented the upper limit of Johnson’s potential vote. Asked for a comment on the first primary, Stevenson said laconically: “I think Johnson has pulled his weight.”
THERE WAS ANOTHER possible explanation as well.
For more than a month before the first primary, unprecedented amounts of money had been devoted to persuading voters that Coke Stevenson had made a “secret deal” to help repeal the Taft-Hartley law.
Coke had hardly bothered to reply. The charge, he told intimates, wasn’t true, but he didn’t have to bother telling the voters that; they knew it without his telling them. The people of Texas, he said, wouldn’t believe that charge no matter how often it was made. They wouldn’t believe it because they knew him. They knew his record. They knew what he stood for. They knew what he would do in the future because they knew what he had done in the past. He had never betrayed them before—and he would never betray them now. And they knew that.
Coke Stevenson’s belief flew, of course, in the face of all conventional political wisdom.
But, it now appeared, he had been right.
1 During one of his trips to North Texas, Johnson had spotted an article in the little Palo Pinto Star which did not meet his standards for reportorial accuracy. He ordered a former NYA assistant, Tony Ziegler, to “get in touch” with a local supporter, Judge Pat Corrigan of Mineral Wells, “and see if it could be stopped.” Corrigan shortly informed Ziegler “that Mr. Brown, who is with the Palo Pinto Star, is no longer with them.”
12
All or Nothing
ONE MONTH TO GO. One month to make up seventy thousand votes. One month to make Peddy’s staunchly conservative followers turn against Coke Stevenson, symbol of conservatism. One month for Lyndon Johnson to save his political career. His entire life, it seemed, had boiled down to August, 1948.
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