Means of Ascent

by Robert A. Caro

  Two friendly reporters, Charles K. Boatner of Amon Carter’s Fort Worth Star-Telegram and Robert V. Johnson of Hobby’s Houston Post, drove the fifty miles to Kerrville, and the Houston reporter confirmed that the letter “was on stationery of the Stevenson headquarters at Austin and bore a signature which looked similar to the several signatures of the former Governor I have seen.” But Johnson’s tactic caused some newspapers to delay publication of the letter a day, and to give it smaller play than they would have on a first-day story, and it also clouded the letter just enough so that in some large papers it never received the major coverage it deserved; Robert Johnson’s article, for example, said only that the letter “purported to give Stevenson’s view.”

  But the main reason that Stevenson’s letter had little impact was that Stevenson had little money. Now that the Old Man had made his statement, Murphey and Boyett and his other aides wanted it reprinted and broadcast. But printings and broadcasts cost money.

  Lyndon Johnson, who had money, countered the letter with a barrage of broadcasts. On both August 13 and 14, he delivered three separate fifteen-minute radio talks, each over a thirty-station network that brought his voice into every town in Texas. The line he took was that Stevenson was still “dodging” the issue. Stevenson’s letter, Johnson said, was “noncommittal. Texans think he has had plenty of time to give them a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer on whether he thinks Taft-Hartley is a good or bad law [and] whether he would vote to repeal it.…” Stevenson was still behaving like a frightened politician, Johnson said. “My opponent seems to be mighty interested in convincing the public he is not tied in with any labor bosses. Last June he accepted their endorsement with boasts. But under fire now from the other side he acts like he is ashamed of labor support … and is trying to rub off the brand.”

  To reinforce its candidate’s statements, the Johnson campaign put on the air public figures respected in their various locales—and put them on in an effective way, often purchasing simultaneous time on every radio station, no matter how small, in an area so that listeners could not avoid the Johnson pitch. New reprints of the press conference articles were made, and new mailings went out. On August 15, Johnson, in another radio address, said, “By this time, nearly everybody in Texas has been forced to the conclusion that my opponent has established a world’s record for refusing to declare his opinion on important issues.” And indeed the impression in Texas still remained that Stevenson had entered into some kind of deal with “labor bosses.” The ex-Governor’s letter had been buried as completely as his earlier statement in Abilene. The Dallas News was to comment on Johnson’s tactics: “With utterly unfounded allegation incapable of substantiation, he has striven to connect the AFL endorsement with a nonexistent deal to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act.” But the tactics had worked: Johnson had not merely “striven” to connect the endorsement with a “deal”—he had succeeded in doing so. Turning the truth on its head, he had made a state believe not merely a lie, but a lie which defied logic. Texas had known Coke Stevenson’s view about union bosses. But Lyndon Johnson was persuading a state that Stevenson’s view was the precise opposite of what it really was.

  The magnification of the power of money in the new media politics made such persuasion relatively easy. A substantial number of voters in Texas did not subscribe to a daily newspaper, and since many weekly newspapers never carried Stevenson’s letter, these voters never read it; all they knew about it was what Lyndon Johnson told them. Few voters in Texas read the text of the letter more than once; they read, and heard, Johnson’s interpretation of it over and over. Against an opponent who had so little money himself, this persuasion had, in fact, been easy. As John Connally is happy to explain: “You have to say something over and over to get voters to be aware of it. And he [Coke] didn’t [do that]. He didn’t advertise it, he didn’t make an issue of it on the radio. So the press might be aware of the [letter], they might write a story about it—but nobody knew about it.”

  IN A FINAL TOUCH of irony, in Washington the presidents of four railroad unions endorsed Lyndon Johnson for Senator. Stevenson said, “This development is no surprise to Texans who are familiar with the real issues in this race … and with the past records of both candidates.” But most Texans did not learn about the endorsement. There were few broadcasts and almost no mailings to drum home to voters that the supposedly anti-labor candidate had been endorsed by labor.1 Nor, of course, were voters or businessmen aware that Robert Oliver, organizing director for the Congress of Industrial Organizations in Texas, was quietly lining up “a number of local (CIO) unions” in Texas cities to support Johnson, or that Welly Hopkins, general counsel of the United Mine Workers (whose president, John L. Lewis, was being assailed by Johnson on his noontime radio broadcasts), was drumming up labor support for Johnson and carrying campaign material back and forth between Corcoran and Rowe in Washington and Wirtz in Texas, or that a major source of funding for Johnson’s “anti-union” campaign was David Dubinsky and other big-city union bosses, that in fact, unions in cities throughout the Northeast were shipping cash south to help the Johnson campaign. In almost every speech now, Johnson was reading the transcript of the press conference in which Stevenson had refused to answer the questions about Taft-Hartley. The fact that Stevenson now had answered was all but drowned out in the flood of Johnson broadcasts, ads and pamphlets.

  MONEY COULD BUY more than publicity. Money could buy men. George Peddy’s votes were essential to any hope of victory, and Peddy’s stronghold was in Deep East Texas, the little towns in the piney woods along the Louisiana border, the stronghold not only of Peddy strength but of Stevenson strength—of a conservatism as rock-solid as the Confederate state that Deep East Texas so closely resembled.

  Johnson opened his second primary campaign there, in the very heart of Peddy country, in Center, county seat of Peddy’s native Shelby County. In some ways it was a traditional East Texas rally, with farmers and their wives sitting on backless benches in the Courthouse Square, near the inevitable statue of the Confederate soldier, others remaining in their cars behind the benches and honking their horns to join in the applause. But the evidence of what money—unlimited money—could accomplish in even a hostile area was visible. As the Houston Post commented the next day:

  His [Johnson’s] bid for votes in this section is obviously going to be a strong one.… Trees alongside the East Texas roads are decorated with his picture. His headquarters telephoned everyone in the Center phone book to get them out for the … speech.

  Advertisements announcing the rally had not appeared merely in Shelby County newspapers, or on Shelby County radio stations, but all over East Texas, and the crowd—four hundred to five hundred persons, larger than anyone had expected—had come from as far away as Bowie County 105 miles to the north, to hear Johnson praise the native son in a bellow delivered over a full-size microphone strapped to his chest with a harness so that he could move around as he spoke. “I have not and will not speak an unkind word about Colonel Peddy. He was a man I liked and admired.… Colonel Peddy and I agreed on almost all the issues of the race.”

  But it wasn’t Johnson’s shouts that most strongly influenced Deep East Texas; it was the whispers of the missionaries. They had always had an unusually strong impact in these isolated little towns, so cut off from news of the outside world. Because of the affection for Peddy in these towns, the active campaigners were instructed to make the Colonel’s friends believe that Stevenson was his enemy: “Well, you know, I was in Austin the other night, in the Driskill, and Coke came in, and you should have heard what he said about Colonel Peddy. He said …”

  Did the Johnson campaign buy more than missionaries? At this crucial moment, according to men in both camps, Brown & Root swung into action in East Texas with local subcontractors. The power of small-town banks, on which local farmers are continuously dependent not only for mortgages (and for refinancing of mortgages if they have had a bad year) but for annual crop loans and loans to purchase
seed, was mobilized. Federal agencies with whom Johnson had influence—the Rural Electrification Administration, in particular—used their influence in East Texas. And were more direct payments being made? Ed Clark, raised in San Augustine and still owner of a home there, was asked in later years how Johnson did so well in San Augustine, and throughout East Texas; Clark, forthcoming on other points, will not discuss his home county. For reply, he only raised a big hand and rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. Forty years later, Ernest Boyett still vividly remembers his shock when he began contacting East Texas political leaders whose support of Coke Stevenson he had considered certain. “Almost the first two I contacted—and they were key men—said to me that they couldn’t support Coke this time. I was so startled that words failed me. They had supported the Old Man for years. But they said that they had been offered a thousand dollars each to switch to Johnson. A thousand dollars was a great deal of money for them. I remember one of them saying that he was getting older, and he had to leave something for his wife. Well, what could I say to that? They said they still believed in Coke, but that they would be throwing their weight to Lyndon.” Into Stevenson’s headquarters poured similar reports. Boyett recalls his thoughts: “My God! They’re stealing East Texas!”

  SIMILAR TACTICS were being employed in rural counties all over Texas. The impressions of a score of politicians who remember the 1948 campaign are summarized in the reminiscences of a man who had the gift of grasping the overall patterns in the Texas political scene, Ralph Yarborough, United States Senator from 1957 to 1970.

  He [Johnson] had to turn it around against the Establishment. The old establishment had more of the infrastructure in these [rural] counties than Johnson did. The sheriffs, the county judges, the tax assessors. But they [Johnson and the Brown Building group] turned it around between the two primaries.

  They were able to do it so fast because of money. You can create a new structure fast if you have unlimited money. And they did. They were spending money like mad. They were spending money like Texas had never seen. And they did it not only so big but so openly. Nothing had ever been seen in Texas on such a scale, and they were utterly brash. They spent a lot of money. And they were brash about how they spent it, and they were utterly ruthless. Brown & Root would do anything.

  They did it so big and so openly and so brash[ly] and so ruthlessly because they knew they didn’t have a chance by conventional political methods. Coke Stevenson had that race sewed up.

  And they did it because they knew they had more at stake. They had an awful lot at stake.

  For four months now, ever since May, Lyndon Johnson, and his money man, Herman Brown, and Alvin Wirtz had been trying to buy a state. They hadn’t succeeded—so now they simply raised their offer.

  To levels “like Texas had never seen.”

  COKE STEVENSON wasn’t organizing the rural counties. During the first two weeks in August, he campaigned as he had always campaigned, driving around the state, shaking hands, talking to handfuls of voters about “principles” and the need for “economy” and “common sense” in government. The pro-Stevenson officials in these counties—legislators and former legislators, County Judges, men who were part of the traditional Texas political structure—were left to their own devices. There was almost no communication between them and Stevenson’s Austin headquarters. Some of these men were actively working for Stevenson in the weeks before the second primary—and some were not.

  Some, in fact, weren’t even in the state. Well-to-do Texans try to escape the August heat by scheduling their vacations for that month. Many of Coke’s “lead men” had been planning to go hunting in Canada. When they offered to stay home if they were needed, Coke’s headquarters didn’t make them feel they were needed. Nothing illustrates the lack of central coordination in the Stevenson campaign more clearly than the situation in two remote counties, Kinney and Hansford. These two Stevenson strongholds had given the former Governor a combined plurality of four hundred votes in the first primary. Because Stevenson was so far ahead, officials of these two counties felt the ex-Governor would not need their votes in the second primary—so they weren’t holding one. And Stevenson headquarters was unaware of this fact. The overconfidence in Stevenson’s headquarters was understandable: they were seventy thousand votes ahead, and how could they possibly lose the Peddy vote? By all the ordinary rules of Texas politics, their candidate had won.

  BUT JOHNSON wasn’t playing by these rules.

  From the earliest beginnings of Lyndon Johnson’s political life—from his days at college when he had captured control of campus politics—his tactics had consistently revealed a pragmatism and a cynicism that had no discernible limits. His morality was the morality of the ballot box, a morality in which nothing matters but victory and any maneuver that leads to victory is justified, a morality that was amorality.

  Johnson had already enjoyed considerable success in linking Coke Stevenson, adamant foe of organized labor though he was, with “big-city labor racketeers.” Now he was to attempt to link the former Governor with another group: Communists. Coke Stevenson, Lyndon Johnson now charged, was a front man for a Communist conspiracy. Maybe Coke was an unwitting front man, Johnson said—and maybe he wasn’t.

  Johnson began this effort in a series of radio broadcasts (over statewide hookups) that read into Stevenson’s alleged failure to take a stand on Taft-Hartley a more sinister interpretation than any he had yet suggested. “Lyndon Johnson voted for the anti-Communist Taft-Hartley Law,” Johnson said. “Lyndon Johnson will never vote to repeal this law. But my opponent has not yet made a public statement as to just where he stands on this measure that bans Communist control of labor unions.” The next evening Johnson escalated the attack: “Birds of a feather” such as John L. Lewis, James C. Petrillo “and Communist Harry Bridges, whom I voted to deport to Australia years ago … have flocked together in a united effort to defeat Lyndon Johnson, who refused to wear their Red feathers in his hat, and they are using Coke Stevenson as their silent man Friday.… My opponent has refused to promise that … he will not … return control of labor unions to racketeering Communist leaders who take orders only from Moscow.” By the following evening, he was implying that Stevenson’s “refusal to promise” might mean that he had made a secret promise—“Does it mean that he would amend the law so that labor bosses could have secret Communist connections?”

  Johnson seemed to think he could make Texans—at least rural Texans—swallow even so ridiculous a charge if it was repeated often enough. To reinforce his speeches—which were making Stevenson’s Communist “link” more and more explicit—a new device was unveiled, aimed squarely at unsophisticated farmers. It was the inspiration of John Connally, who says that when he was a farm boy in Wilson County, “My first impression of politics in Texas was the Ferguson Forum,” a simulated weekly newspaper printed during the campaigns of Governor Jim Ferguson. “People were all talking about it,” Connally recalls. “It went into every rural mailbox.… Most of these rural people … read it and they believed it.” Pappy O’Daniel had copied the Forum in his O’Daniel News. Now Connally ordered up the Johnson Journal—a four-page newspaper, written in Johnson headquarters but designed to look like a genuine weekly so that to the unsophisticated it would carry a newspaper’s authority—and it was mailed early in August to 340,000 rural mailboxes. The Journal’s theme was captured in its lead headline: “COMMUNISTS FAVOR COKE.” Also reinforcing Johnson’s speeches, of course, was the other campaign device that had proven so effective with unsophisticated voters. From the Hancock House, new marching orders were given to the missionaries: to fan out across Texas, calling on farm families, standing around in grocery stores, sitting in bars, dropping hints and innuendoes about Coke and “the Reds”: “I’m not saying he is one, but listen.…”

  ASSIDUOUSLY though he had, for years, privately cultivated Texas’ wealthy reactionaries, Lyndon Johnson had always sought—for strategic reasons, it was true, but nonetheless
he had sought—to preserve a measure of independence in his dealings with them. While he had run their errands and accepted their cash, he had kept a little distance between himself and them, partly because he never wanted to be allied completely with any position, partly so that he could claim to the Washington liberals that he was liberal at heart. But now this was to change.

  The reactionaries’ alliance with Coke Stevenson had always been tenuous; the former Governor, although in agreement on ideology, had always been too independent for their taste, too proud, not nearly subservient enough; not subservient at all, in fact. Richardson and Murchison and other members of their circle had assured them that Lyndon Johnson could “get things done” for them in Washington and that Johnson was not in reality the liberal he appeared to be, but before the first primary they had continued to give their support—their money, their influence over the votes of their employees—to Stevenson. Now, however, feeling betrayed by Coke (“He’ll vote to repeal that Act!”), they were more disposed to give it to Johnson. But, prudent, practical men that they were, and determined to exact the complete subservience of the candidate who received that support, they put a price on it.

  The price was that Lyndon Johnson should give a certain speech.

  It was a speech not unfamiliar to Texas voters. They had, in fact, heard versions of it hundreds of times—delivered by W. Lee O’Daniel. For years, first as an announcer for Light Crust Flour and then for his own Hillbilly Flour, O’Daniel had exerted an immense influence over rural Texas through the radio talks he gave every day at a half-hour past noon over the dominant Texas State Quality Network, talks that were almost sermons about motherhood and religion and “Beautiful, Beautiful Texas,” delivered, against a background of soft violins playing sentimental country-and-Western tunes, in the matchlessly warm, soft but firm voice of a wise and wonderful “Pappy.” “At 12:30 sharp every day,” one reporter wrote, “silence reigned in the State of Texas, broken only by mountain music and the dulcet voice of W. Lee O’Daniel.” Even after Pappy’s entrance into politics, he still spoke in the same time slot, but the speech was different. It had in its many versions the same basic themes, which played on the fears and prejudices of the unsophisticated and poorly educated listeners sitting over lunch on their farms and ranches. Its main theme was the danger from Communists, who, Pappy said, had infiltrated Texas industrial plants and—along with racketeers, “goons” and “mobsters” from the big cities of the Northeast—the state’s labor unions. A genius in demagoguery, he would reiterate certain phrases—“Communist labor leader racketeers,” “union thugs,” and, after a labor incident in Chicago in which a hand grenade was thrown, “pineapple-throwing Red goons”—over and over; attempting to describe the speech—“Pappy’s Speech,” as it came to be known in Texas political circles—one observer recalls: “He would just drum, drum, drum with his little catch phrases—‘labor leader racketeers,’ ‘Communist labor leader racketeers,’ ‘pineapple-throwing labor leader racketeers’: you just wouldn’t think there would be that many ways to get ‘labor leader racketeers’ into a sentence.”