And he couldn’t even use his mighty weapon. “We were too far behind,” Busby says. “Trying to draw crowds in little towns—that wasn’t going to get you anywhere. We had to go into the cities.” The cities, where a helicopter could not be used.
Every sacrifice had to be made, even one that may have been especially difficult: ending the abuse of helpless subordinates. Wirtz and Wild had been attempting for months to persuade Johnson to modify or at least conduct in private the explosions of violent, obscene rage at his staff (and, indeed, at non-staffers such as hotel waiters and desk clerks) which often took place in full view of local supporters. From town after town reports came in of tirades so shocking and unforgettable that they often negated all his efforts. But the suggestions from Austin that he abuse his assistants only in private had been ignored—as if the prerogative of venting his emotions at Mary Rather and Woody and Buzz whenever and wherever he felt like it was a necessity he could not deny himself.
Now, however, there was one month to go; he altered his behavior—with his customary thoroughness. The first witness to—and beneficiary of—the transformation was Horace Busby. Immediately after the first primary, the young press-release writer and idea man had been summoned from his desk on the first floor of the Hancock House “upstairs to where the big shots were meeting.” There he received rather unwelcome news. He had been absolutely correct when he reported that the unprecedented size of Johnson’s entourage was antagonizing voters, he was told. It had therefore been decided that on future campaign trips the candidate would be accompanied by only a single aide—“and guess who it’s going to be.”
Busby says he was designated for the assignment because “I had developed a reputation for handling his rages better than anyone else.” But, he says, he had done the “handling” partly by becoming “very good at never being in his line of sight” when an explosion was imminent. As Johnson’s sole companion, assigned to be constantly at the candidate’s side, he would no longer be able to use that tactic. “I was,” he recalls, “expecting the worst.”
Therefore, he says, he was “shocked” when Johnson was “different than he had been during the first primary.” Their next trip alone together was to El Paso, and on the plane “I was stunned. We were sitting side by side reading papers, and he was subdued. There was none of the volatility. We actually conversed.” But even greater was his surprise at Johnson’s behavior when they arrived at their hotel. Since their registration had been arranged in advance, Johnson could have gone straight up to his room, as had been his previous practice, but instead he went over to the desk clerk. “I’m Congressman Johnson,” he said with a pleasant voice and smile. “You have a very fine hotel here. I’ve stayed in it before, and I’m looking forward to this visit.” When the bellboy arrived in their suite with the luggage, Johnson told him, “I’d like to shake hands with you if your hands weren’t so busy.” When the bellboy put down the luggage, Johnson shook his hand. “Buzz,” he said, “give the young man a tip.” Then he changed his mind. “Son,” he said, “he’s a cheap tipper. I don’t want him tipping you.” And, Busby recalls, “he gave him five dollars.”
And nothing prepared Busby for what was to happen the next morning. Johnson’s first appearance would be an early-morning meeting, and he told Busby to get up at 4:15 a.m., so that he would have time to bring him coffee. The hotel operator failed to make the wake-up call, however. Busby was awakened at 4:45 a.m., not by the desk but by his boss. He was awakened gently. Johnson was sitting beside his bed. “He wasn’t mad,” Busby recalls. “ ‘Here, Buzz,’ Lyndon Johnson said. “ ‘I went down and got a coffee and doughnut for you.’ ” For the entire month of August, Johnson rarely lapsed from his new code of behavior. Dressing for a dinner speech, Busby says, “he put in his own cuff links—I didn’t have any of the valet services to perform that I was ill-disposed toward performing. Suddenly, Lyndon Johnson was taking care of himself.” And there were few, if any, explosions. “He was a changed man.”
ON MONDAY MORNING, July 26, both candidates left for Washington: Johnson for the special session of the “do-nothing” Eightieth Congress that President Truman had called to focus attention on its failures; Stevenson, in order to counter Johnson’s charges that he couldn’t be an effective Senator because he had no ties in the capital, for a brief visit to old friends like Tom Connally in the congressional delegation.
Lyndon Johnson’s political genius had always enabled him to see opportunities for political gain where no one else saw them. He saw one now in Stevenson’s trip to his turf, and he had a reporter Stevenson trusted casually ask the former Governor to hold a press conference while he was in Washington. Sure, Stevenson said. Stevenson, who had no faith in planes (“I never drove in anything with a motor that I didn’t have to get out at least once to fix it”), traveled to the capital by train. Johnson flew, so he got there two days before Stevenson—and by the time Stevenson arrived, the trap had been set.
Johnson was well aware by now how Stevenson’s pride could be turned against him: since he would always refuse to defend himself against a hostile question, particularly one asked in an insulting tone, simply ask him a hostile question, and, when he refused to reply, accuse him of “dodging” the issue. The question Johnson was most anxious for Stevenson to appear to “dodge,” of course, was on Taft-Hartley. So, says John Connally, “We encouraged Marshall McNeil [Washington correspondent of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram], who had this very abrasive way of asking questions, to ask Coke where he stood on Taft-Hartley.”
Johnson wanted the whole press conference “abrasive,” and he made sure that other friends in the Washington press corps knew what questions to ask, and how to ask them. He told these friends that Coke Stevenson had been just another one of Texas’ crooked Governors—that he had, in fact, sold pardons just like Jim Ferguson before him. He told them Stevenson was a “caveman,” a “Neanderthal”—ignorant, isolationist, reactionary; a country bumpkin like Pappy O’Daniel. He told them that Stevenson had struck a “secret deal” with labor bosses to help repeal Taft-Hartley, and that he had been frantically dodging reporters’ questions about that issue in Texas. He told them he hoped they wouldn’t let Stevenson get away with such tactics in Washington. Johnson “not only primed, I would say he had briefed them thoroughly … on this man Coke Stevenson whom they had never heard of and never seen,” Jake Pickle says. “It boiled down to the reporters actually asking and popping the questions and then riding him.” By the time Stevenson arrived in Washington, “the reporters were waiting for him. Mr. Johnson and his friends, reporters like Drew Pearson, had the stage set.” Hostile press conferences were rare in Washington in that era; this press conference, one reporter was to write, was “the most hostile in recent memory.”
Hardly had it begun when Leslie Carpenter, a Washington correspondent for several Texas newspapers, including the pro-Johnson Dallas Times-Herald (Carpenter’s wife, Liz, was a correspondent for other Texas papers), asked a question that attacked the former Governor’s integrity. Is the “large number of pardons granted in your Governorship an issue in this campaign?” Carpenter demanded. Bob Murphey, who had accompanied his uncle to Washington, saw Coke’s jaw set, and knew what was coming. “I wouldn’t know,” Stevenson replied coldly. Johnson’s charges about the pardons had been exposed as false in Texas, and the issue laid to rest there, but here in Washington it was raised again—in rapid-fire questions often couched in a sneering tone more suited to a prosecuting attorney interrogating an obviously guilty defendant. Reporters in Austin had become accustomed to Stevenson’s deliberate way of answering questions—the slow drawl in which he always spoke—and had learned to wait for his replies. These reporters didn’t wait, and while he was framing a reply to one question, they would be shouting others at him. Stevenson attempted once to explain that they were mistakenly lumping together “pardons” with three- or five-day “clemencies” during which prisoners were allowed to return home for a relative’s funeral or a
family emergency, but the reporters seemed not to understand.
The tone did not change when the questioning, led by Carpenter and young, aggressive Jack Anderson, a Drew Pearson legman, shifted to Taft-Hartley. Carpenter asked: “Do you think the Taft-Hartley law is a good or a bad law?”
Stevenson replied that the issue was too complicated to be answered by simply calling a law “good” or “bad,” but every time he attempted to explain his more complex view of the issue, Carpenter interrupted him by simply repeating the same question. He did so five times, until Stevenson said: “That’s a loaded question.” Stevenson added, evidently referring to the statement he had made in Abilene on July 3, that he had made a statement on Taft-Hartley, and the reporters could look it up.
That evening, the pack of journalists again crammed into Stevenson’s hotel room. Carpenter said that his paper could find no record in its files of his statement on Taft-Hartley, implying that Stevenson had lied. Then the reporter demanded: “Do you think the Taft-Hartley law is a good or a bad law?”
Stevenson lost his temper. “I’m not going to let the Times-Herald shape up my campaign,” he said. Then, the Dallas News was to report, Stevenson “was also hammered at by Jack Anderson.” Anderson’s questions were couched in a tone that Stevenson was to liken to “cross-examination,” and, Murphey was to say, “No one was going to cross-examine him.” He was determined not to reply to questions asked in that tone. When Pearson’s legman demanded, “What did you say about the Taft-Hartley law?” Stevenson angrily said only: “I couldn’t repeat it from memory.” “Could you give us the gist of it?” Anderson asked. “I might be able to,” Stevenson said, “but I don’t see any value in it.” Stevenson’s determination not to reply led him only into deeper and deeper trouble. When Anderson kept demanding a reply—“All I want is a yes or no”—Stevenson refused to give one, and when Anderson demanded to know why, he said: “Because you all catch me here away from my notes and put me under cross-examination.” Well, Anderson said, “It seems like a simple thing to remember how you stand.” “The people of Texas know,” Stevenson replied.
The questioning, by Anderson, Carpenter and McNeil, was finally stopped by other, more neutral, reporters, who found their colleagues’ tactics repugnant. When Anderson said, “It appears to me you’re trying to carry water on both sides, Governor,” another reporter, Bascom N. Timmons, objected, even though he also represented a pro-Johnson paper. “That’s an unethical question,” Timmons said. Sarah McClendon, who represented the Beaumont Enterprise and the El Paso Times as well as other Texas papers, and who was already known as a fiery questioner herself, was to say of that press conference: “It was lousy. It was one of the lousiest things I ever saw.”
Johnson would have been pleased by the tone of the questions at the press conference; he must have been pleased, too, by the tone of the stories that stemmed from it. The lead on Leslie Carpenter’s article in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, for example, was that Stevenson “Tuesday dodged a direct question, asked five times, as to whether he considered the Taft-Hartley Labor law to be a ‘good law’ or ‘a bad law.’ ” Liz Carpenter’s article, in the Austin American-Statesman, said that “a dozen newsmen … tried for 20 minutes to get an answer from him on the question.”
The cooperation of some of the reporters with the Johnson campaign did not end with the filing of their stories. While Stevenson was on a train back to Texas, Leslie Carpenter was dictating a message to Johnson suggesting follow-up questions (“Why don’t you get some favorable reporter to ask Stevenson something like this.… If Stevenson says ‘No,’ have the reporter [say] … Then the reporter could say … I think we can start the whole thing over with questions like this. Good luck and God bless you”). Marshall McNeil was drafting a statement about Stevenson for Johnson to deliver.
THE PRESS CONFERENCE became a pivotal point of the campaign because of money—and what money could buy.
More money had been poured into Johnson’s campaign than had ever been donated to a politician in Texas, but that money was gone now, spent. More money could be raised, however, for by this time, even if Herman Brown had wanted to cut his losses, he couldn’t. He was in too deep.
None of the group whose fortunes were tied to Brown & Root—and, therefore, to Lyndon Johnson—could back out now. All of them were in too deep.
They knew it. More than a few of the younger members of Johnson’s team felt that their Chief should seriously consider bowing out of the race without running in the second primary, so hopeless did they consider his position, but when one of them, Wilton Woods, ventured to raise that possibility to Alvin Wirtz, Wirtz replied, not with his customary smile, but with a snarl: “He’s got to run it out now. There are too many people out on a limb now.” Johnson’s personal attacks on Coke Stevenson, so beloved a figure in Austin, had infuriated not only the former Governor but his longtime friends and allies in the State Legislature and bureaucracy, who, as Austin lobbyists like Wirtz and Ed Clark knew, would be less restrained in their use of governmental powers than Coke would be; there was, Clark recalls, real “hatred” for Lyndon Johnson in the corridors of the State Capitol. Clark, who had been aware when he had cast his lot with Lyndon Johnson five months before that “If I lost, I was going to be through; I was going to be out,” now had additional fears. Now, he recalls, he was afraid that “We might be in trouble. They were going to punish us if they could.” Asked whether some Brown & Root officials were afraid of being indicted, Clark replied, “That might happen. If you’re in power, people will say what you want them to say.” George Brown was to recall decades later that he and his brother feared that the bitterness engendered in Austin by the campaign might even endanger the continuation of the state road-building contracts that Brown & Root had been receiving for decades. After a normal campaign, Brown was to say, a “reconciliation” could be expected, but this campaign had been too bitter—and their opponent was too tough—for them to expect that. “In that second primary,” he said, “it was all on the line.” George and Herman had escaped—narrowly escaped—indictment on federal income tax charges for their financing of Lyndon Johnson’s first senatorial campaign, largely (perhaps only) because they had a friend in power in Washington. In this second campaign, they had multiplied their illegalities—and if Lyndon Johnson lost, who would be their friend in power? Who was to be their friend with federal regulatory agencies, such as the Interstate Commerce Commission, whose jurisdiction included their Joe D. Hughes Trucking Company, or the Federal Power Commission, whose jurisdiction included their Big and Little Inch pipelines? “They [Brown & Root] were regulated in a thousand ways,” says Clark, Brown & Root’s attorney and lobbyist. “And [if Stevenson became Senator] Stevenson would have run them out of Washington. He would say, if anyone wanted to give them a contract, They’re personally objectionable to me.’ The Browns had to win this. They had to win this. Stevenson was a man of vengeance, and he would have run them out of Washington. Johnson—if he lost, he was going back to being nobody. They were going back to being nobody. That [second primary]—that was when the chips were down. That was the acid test. That was it! All or nothing.”
Therefore, Ed Clark explains, “whatever he [Johnson] needed was available to him.” Some of this financing was handled through the younger men, who would collect it—in cash—from Herman Brown or Wesley West in Houston or Sid Richardson on St. Joseph Island or Clint Murchison and Amon Carter in Fort Worth, or from big oil independents such as Harris Melasky in Taylor. Asked how much money was involved, John Connally smiles and says: “A hell of a lot. I’d go get it. Walter [Jenkins] would get it. Woody would go get it. We had a lot of people who would go get it, and deliver it.… I went to see Harris Melasky three or four times.… / handled inordinate amounts of cash.” Connally says he can make no estimate of the amount of cash spent during the single month of August, 1948, but some idea of the scale emerges from an anecdote told by Charles Herring, the young Looney & Clark associate (and former
Johnson congressional aide) who had been seconded to Connally for the campaign. No matter how fast the cash came in to Connally, Herring says, it went out at the same rate, and the telephone company, whose bill had not been paid, was threatening to cut off phone service. One evening, Connally told Herring: “I can get currency in Houston, but I’ve got to get it tonight.” A private plane would take him to Houston, and he asked Herring to meet him at the Austin Municipal Airport on his return. When Connally arrived “at two, three o’clock in the morning,” he was carrying a “brown paper sack like you buy groceries in.” Inside, Herring says, was $50,000 in hundred-dollar bills. After counting it, the two young attorneys decided to stop for a snack at the Longhorn Café, an all-night diner. As they were driving home, Herring recalls, Connally “suddenly snapped his fingers and said: ‘Where’s that sack?’ We had left it in the restaurant. Any bum off the street could have picked it up.” But when they ran into the café, the brown bag was still there. When asked whether the $50,000 represented a substantial part of the cash spent in the primary, Herring looked astonished. “That didn’t touch what you’re talking about,” he said. On another occasion during August, Herring says, Connally returned from a trip to Houston with $40,000 in cash, “took it home and hid it, and forgot where it was. For two or three days we couldn’t find it.” Connally thought the money must have been in a suit that had been sent to the cleaners, but no trace of it could be found. Herring said, “Maybe we’d better tell Johnson,” but Connally, cool as ever in a crisis, never panicked, and told his assistant to tell nobody—“and,” says Herring, “we didn’t tell anybody about it. Except every cleaner in town.” Finally the cash was found inside a shirt in Connally’s shirt drawer. (Asked about these two incidents, Connally says only, with a grin: “I told you I handled inordinate amounts of cash.”) Wilton Woods says that in 1941 he once carried $25,000 in cash from Herman Brown to Alvin Wirtz. During the 1948 campaign, he said, he made “several” trips carrying that amount—or more.
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