Means of Ascent

by Robert A. Caro

  Under the old politics, Stevenson’s charges, even without massive funds to publicize them, would have had a more substantial impact on the campaign. Under the old politics, radio, the prime consumer of campaign funds, was not nearly so great a factor, so stump speeches and newspaper articles had a greater relative importance, and good, if brief, newspaper play would have had more of an effect on a campaign. Limited though his airtime might be, the disparity between it and his opponent’s would not have been so disproportionate. But this was the new politics—media politics, money politics, Lyndon Johnson politics. During the last two weeks of the campaign, despite the dropping of stations from his “network” broadcasts, most areas of Texas heard Coke Stevenson at least three or four times. Occasionally, one of Stevenson’s supporters was on the air. Occasionally, there were in the big newspapers a few ads repeating his charges. During these last two weeks, Lyndon Johnson was on the air in every section of Texas at three regular times a day—every day; not only in Pappy’s old twelve-thirty slot, but at seven-forty in the morning and seven-thirty in the evening; by mid-August, a Texas farm family had difficulty sitting down to a meal and switching on the radio without hearing his voice. Transcribed four-minute recordings were on the air at other times. His supporters were on the air, frequently on statewide networks, so often that, as one observer recalls, “it seemed like you could hardly turn on the radio without hearing about Lyndon Johnson.” With the campaign roaring to a climax and newspapers focusing on it, news coverage of the candidates in newspapers was now fairly equal; but newspaper advertising was overwhelmingly Johnson’s—and in many weekly newspapers, this space was as influential with readers as the articles, because the newspapers did not differentiate much between the two, and many unsophisticated readers couldn’t tell the difference, anyway. As for direct mailings, Stevenson had few if any. Rural mailboxes were filled daily not only with the Johnson Journal but with mailing after mailing of letters and postcards. And always, of course, there was the conversational campaigning—the work of the “travelers.” Only a massive barrage of Stevenson ads and mailings and walking delegates could have countered this, and there was no money to pay for them.

  Stevenson’s charges did not bother John Connally for a moment. “So Coke makes a speech—so what?” Connally’s assessment of the situation was correct. Coke Stevenson had made charges about Lyndon Johnson—several charges. In effect, these charges went unheard. His charge that Johnson was, with his “huge expenditures,” trying to buy the campaign, was drowned out, as were all his charges—by Johnson’s huge expenditures.

  THERE MAY HAVE BEEN another reason, too, that Coke Stevenson’s attacks did not have greater impact on the campaign.

  During the first primary, George Peddy had commented on what he called a “strange coincidence.” In a radio address that he had hoped would provide a major boost to his candidacy, Peddy had advocated an increase in old-age pensions. On the very evening on which he made the address, however, Lyndon Johnson took much of the impact out of Peddy’s proposal by making a similar proposal—in almost the same words.

  Now others began to notice the same kind of coincidences. On August 18, for example, Stevenson said that he was “no new recruit in the fight against Communism.” Almost simultaneously, Johnson was on the radio. “I am no recent convert to the fight against Communism,” he said. On August 19, as Texas political historian Seth McKay puts it, “curiously … the two campaigners … on the same day accused one another of the same bad practices”—in almost the same words. In his speech in Austin that day, which claimed that Johnson’s supporters were “waging what is probably the most expensive political campaign in the history of Texas,” Stevenson added that money was being “spent like water” to defeat him. That same day, in Fort Worth, Johnson said in a radio speech that Stevenson’s supporters were “spending money like water” to defeat him.

  The coincidences went beyond phrasing. Meeting at the Driskill Hotel to plan strategy, Stevenson’s inner circle of advisers had gradually come to realize that their plans were known outside the room almost as soon as they made them—although their only communication with the outside world had been over the telephone. Stevenson’s schedule, for example, seemed to be known throughout Texas political circles even before it had been published—within minutes, in fact, after it had been decided on, although, Boyett says, during those minutes “the only time the schedule had been discussed” was on the phone. “We were absolutely certain that they were wiretapping our headquarters in the Driskill.”

  Asked about this, Connally has said, “We didn’t do any wiretapping.” He said that during the 1940s, “they didn’t tap and tape like they do now.” He also said, “Occasionally we would have a telephone operator—on her own”—listen in and tell us what was being said. “In those days, that was what happened: operators would listen in on the switchboard.” Connally added, “We may have had somebody in his headquarters reporting to us.” Was there in fact someone spying in Stevenson’s headquarters? “I don’t remember,” Connally replied. Other members of the campaign, however, believe that the phone lines of Stevenson’s headquarters were being constantly listened to, either by tapping or by operators listening in.

  The repetition of speech themes and phrases by Johnson—whether based on overheard telephone calls or not, whether repeated the same or the next day—took the edge off Stevenson’s belated efforts to attack, or at least to defend himself against his younger opponent. On August 19, for example, Stevenson made the point that Johnson’s attempts to give himself a new, ultra-conservative, image squared poorly with his previous alliances with ultra-liberals in Washington; Stevenson pointed out that Henry Wallace had actively supported Johnson in his previous Senate race in 1941, and had even loaned one of his chief aides, Harold Young, to the Johnson campaign as a fund-raiser to obtain large sums of money from labor leaders in the North. “Are they [still] together to the extent that the money they are spending is coming from the same source?” Stevenson asked. This charge, which was accurate, might have been a telling point, but the next day Johnson stated that it was actually Stevenson and Wallace who were secret allies. In radio broadcasts that day he demanded, “What promises of support did he [Stevenson] extract from Henry Wallace when Wallace cooled coffee with him in the Governor’s Mansion back in 1944?” (Wallace had visited the Governor that year during a tour of the Southwest.) And Johnson added, “I see … that the black bag of the labor bosses has finally arrived from the North to swell the slush fund being spent to defeat Lyndon Johnson.” As the Corpus Christi Caller-Times commented: “The question by Johnson pushed the political merry-go-round full circle and left each candidate implying the other was—or had been—associated with the head of the Progressive Party.” Who could blame voters, even those who were conscientiously attempting to follow the campaign, for being confused—and, in a sea of identical charges by both candidates, for being convinced by the candidate who could, thanks to the power of money, make the charge so much more frequently than his opponent?

  DURING the crucial month of August, Lyndon Johnson even made use of his most reluctant weapon.

  Months earlier, at the very beginning of the campaign, Johnson had personally ordered cards and placards with pictures of Lady Bird and his two daughters, and had commented with satisfaction upon seeing the finished product: “Coke can’t do that.” In competing for the “women’s vote,” he had told aides frankly, he possessed a significant advantage: he had a wife, and Stevenson didn’t.

  Attempts to maximize this asset had proven unsatisfactory during the first primary, because the confidence which Lady Bird Johnson had gained as a result of managing a congressional office and a business had not carried over into the area of her greatest timidity.

  In the hectic swirl of Johnson campaign headquarters, the one constant was Mrs. Johnson’s calm, warm smile. When, on her husband’s rare days in Austin, staff members arrived at Dillman Street for an evening meeting, they had learned to expect
a gracious welcome, and, no matter how late the hour, a hot meal. Sometimes she quoted Kipling: “If you can keep your head while …” And, says Dorothy Nichols, during the frantic dark days of 1948 “I really believe she lived by [that poem]. She doesn’t lose her head.” Suitcases packed with her husband’s medical supplies and carefully starched shirts were ready every time Woody screeched up to her door. But despite her husband’s increasingly insistent demands that she make speeches, or at least personal appearances, on his behalf, during the first primary she had not done so. Her terrible shyness had always made public appearances of even the most undemanding variety such an ordeal that her friends had suffered for her on the rare occasions when she had been induced to stand beside her husband on a receiving line at some Tenth District event and, a bright smile set rigidly on her face, shake hands and try to chat with strangers filing by. As for making a speech, the very suggestion that she face an audience brought panic to the face of this woman who had once prayed for smallpox so that she wouldn’t have to speak at her high-school graduation ceremony.

  Although Mrs. Johnson was willing to do almost anything for her husband, making speeches was one thing she would not do—felt she could not do. There was, moreover, another impediment to her campaigning. Because of Texas’ vast distances, personal campaigning—even appearing at receptions—involved airplane travel. Lady Bird disliked all flying; in very small planes such as those used for campaign hops, dislike turned into a fear almost as deep as her fear of speaking in public; in such planes she was often not only in terror but violently airsick as well. Finally, near the end of the first primary campaign, Alvin Wirtz, who always had more influence with her than any other of her husband’s associates, suggested a way in which she might meet at least a few voters. Why not drive from gas station to gas station, purchasing only five gallons of gas at each stop, and meet the hangers-on around rural gas stations? This Mrs. Johnson finally agreed to do—as long as she didn’t have to do it alone—and Mary Rather was deputed to accompany her. But this attempt lasted only a day or two. Then, one morning, as they were pulling into their third gas station, Lady Bird said to Miss Rather: “You ask them this time, Mary, I don’t believe I can do it again.”

  After the first primary, however, there was only one month to go, and his wife’s fears were no longer a luxury that Lyndon Johnson was prepared to indulge. “We need to get after the women’s vote,” Johnson told Busby. He told Lady Bird’s friend Marietta Brooks of Austin, who was active in a number of statewide women’s clubs, to telephone leading clubwomen throughout the state and organize “coffees” at which Lady Bird would meet the local clubwomen and give interviews to local reporters. And when aides ventured to mention that this would mean that Lady Bird would have to fly, Johnson said: “She’ll fly.”

  She did—perhaps as much out of concern about what the humiliation of overwhelming defeat would do to her husband as for any other reason. In recalling her reasons years later, she would say: “We were overwhelmingly, vastly, horribly behind.…” Overcoming Stevenson’s huge margin “looked hopeless, but at least I wanted to narrow that margin, just as much as I could, and make just as much of a showing as I could for myself and for him and all those folks who had already shoveled so much love and sweat and time and money into it.”

  Her first trip was to Corpus Christi on August 2. Mary Rather recalls that “We were all fanning out in various directions over the state that Monday morning, and if any had had time, they would have felt sorry for Lady Bird as she took off through gray rainy skies in a very small plane with one pilot and one traveling companion.…”

  Lady Bird was so nervous that she had written out and memorized every phrase she was to say in the Corpus Christi interview—and it showed; asked if she thought helicopter campaigning was a good idea, she said she did because “I think a candidate ought to let the voters see one and to hear one’s ideas.” She said a Peddy supporter had telephoned her to say ninety percent of the Peddy vote would go to “Lyndon,” and this was “a very happy generalization that we are going to strive to make a fact.” But it was an interview—it was publicity, a pleasant article and photograph in the Corpus Christi Caller. And although she took plane trips back and forth across Texas all during August, a month in which the intense heat spawned almost daily thunderstorms, and the terror and the airsickness never got better, the fear of interviews eased at least a little; after a while, Lady Bird was to say, she realized that “these people are just like me, so I had no reason to be scared.” She never became less modest in her statements, but she became more effective. In Fort Worth, on August 24, she was still saying to a reporter, “My campaigning role is comparatively simple. I just pack and unpack and take care of Lyndon,” but she was less reluctant to talk about herself, telling a reporter that she had studied to be a journalist herself but had gotten married instead, “so I became part of the news instead of reporting it.” And, the reporter wrote, “Mrs. Lyndon Johnson, an attractive brunette whose roles as wife and mother have kept her in the background of her husband’s public career, charmed two hundred Tarrant County women at a coffee Wednesday morning.” Soon, in fact, her husband’s top advisers, receiving reports back in Austin on her appearances, realized that she was becoming quite an effective force in the campaign. For one thing, Edward Clark says, unlike her husband, “She had never done anything unpopular. She had never done anything anyone could criticize.” But, Clark says, it was more than that: “She was a great asset. She made votes everywhere she went.”

  One thing, however, she still resisted doing. When a reporter asked her that August if she planned to speak on her husband’s behalf, she said: “I couldn’t possibly make a speech!” Her husband was particularly insistent that she make one at the opening rally of the second primary, the rally in Center in Deep East Texas. Since she was from that area, and since her father was a political force there, even a few words from her would be a big help. But she said she simply couldn’t. In a maneuver conceived by her husband to call attention to her despite her silence, she continually got up from her seat on the platform while her husband was speaking and adjusted the light on the podium, so that she was as visible as she could be without actually saying anything.

  Now, finally, at the very end of the campaign, Lady Bird bowed to her husband’s demands and agreed to take the step she dreaded most of all. She agreed to speak at the closing Johnson rally on August 27, the day before the election—in front of a crowd of some fourteen thousand people who would be jamming the San Antonio Municipal Auditorium, and in front of microphones that would carry her speech over a statewide radio hookup.

  At least San Antonio was close enough to Austin so that she could drive there, but this proved a doubtful blessing. She and Mrs. Brooks were going to stop en route for a “coffee” in Seguin, but before they got there, their car skidded on wet pavement, veered off the road, overturned, and rolled over twice before coming to a stop in a ditch.

  Lady Bird was bruised and shaken up but otherwise uninjured—and she didn’t want anything to disturb Lyndon before his big rally. Depositing Mrs. Brooks, who was badly bruised, in a hospital, she drove alone to the Seguin reception, borrowed a dress from the hostess to replace her torn clothes, and shook hands with two hundred women with her usual smiling graciousness. Then she drove to San Antonio and made her speech.

  During the next few days, mail poured into the Hancock House from political leaders (Abilene District Chairman Jay Taylor wrote, “Lady Bird was wonderful on the radio last night. Should have been on all the time!”) and from voters (Mrs. W. S. Harris of Hays County wrote Johnson, “I heard your wife’s sweet voice over the radio, and I thought what a comfort she was to you”); a Houston attorney and his wife, who had heard Mrs. Johnson’s speech, were to write that they were waiting in line at the polling place on the “hot, muggy Election Day, being jostled by ‘unwashed’ members of our democracy,” when his wife turned to him “with perspiration streaming down her face, and with makeup, hat and cl
othing somewhat bedraggled, and said, ‘I want you to know that I am enduring this only on account of that lovely Mrs. Johnson.’ ”

  After the speech, Lady Bird and Lyndon arrived at their San Antonio hotel room about midnight, and Johnson, as he would later recall, “told her we’d better get to bed.” But Lady Bird said she was driving back to Austin that night for some last-minute campaigning on Election Day.