The Loyalists’ view of the significance of their favorite issues also proved exaggerated. Johnson did indeed try out many of these issues, in his constant attempts to “touch” the voters, but most of them were rather quickly discarded.
Perhaps one example, involving a campaign aide, will illustrate. Horace Busby told me at great length that it was Johnson’s attacks on Stevenson “as an isolationist” that put Stevenson on the defensive. Stevenson’s “isolationism” was a pivotal issue in the campaign, Busby said. “That’s why we won,” Busby says.
It was Busby who first fashioned a press release for Johnson to use about Stevenson’s “isolationism”—the issue is, in a way, his issue—and I understand Busby’s pride of authorship in that issue. Moreover, I happen to admire Mr. Busby—who was endlessly helpful to me in describing the Lyndon Johnson he personally witnessed on the 1948 campaign trail—as one of today’s most perceptive political analysts. Nonetheless, after talking to as many of Johnson’s more senior advisers as I could, and after reading the campaign documents, I am compelled to disagree with his view of the importance of the “isolationist” or foreign policy issue. This issue was part of Johnson’s initial “ ‘Peace, Preparedness and Progress” campaign theme, and by the first week in June, as I write on this page, Johnson knew that “ ‘Peace, Preparedness and Progress’ wasn’t working.” That was a major reason that he began attacking Stevenson personally.
As a matter of fact, while some Johnson men and their Loyalist allies say flatly that Stevenson was a fervent isolationist, that matter becomes somewhat more complicated when one starts reading Stevenson’s speeches. In one, for example, Stevenson said: “As I have said before, the time is gone when the United States can isolate itself from the rest of the world. We must be strong enough to face the world without fear. We must be courageous enough to live up fully to our responsibilities to the rest of the world. Our own salvation cannot be separated from theirs.” During the campaign, he announced his support for the Marshall Plan, and for President Truman’s foreign policy in general. “I know of no changes that I could suggest in our policy. That policy is going to keep us out of war, and I support it.”
Unlike many of the other “issues” emphasized by the Johnson-Loyalist group, foreign policy was not discarded as an issue. Johnson continued to make speeches about it. It was certainly a factor in the campaign. But the evidence does not support the view that it was a decisive factor. The overall view of the campaign that had been accepted by history (and that is being repeated to this day by Johnson partisans)—that the campaign revolved around national issues—is a view similarly unsupported by the evidence. What the evidence does show is that the issue which worked for Johnson was the issue identified in this book: the assault on Stevenson’s reputation—Johnson’s campaign to persuade the voters of Texas that this Governor who was an adamant foe of organized labor had entered into a “secret deal” with “big city labor racketeers” (in other words, to persuade the voters that Stevenson’s views on labor and the Taft-Hartley Act were the precise opposite of what these views were in reality); and Johnson’s campaign to stand the truth on its head yet again by persuading the voters that this extremely conservative Governor might well be a front man for a Communist conspiracy.
In sum, there was really only one issue in the campaign that played a significant role in its outcome (unless, of course, one includes as an “issue” Johnson’s unsuccessful attempt to buy an election, and, when that attempt fell short, his successful attempt to steal it). That issue was Coke Stevenson’s reputation—the basis of that reputation, the strength of that reputation, the destruction of that reputation. Lyndon Johnson, as I note in the Introduction to this volume, did not pioneer the techniques by which that destruction was effected—what we would today call “attack politics” or “negative campaigning,” complete with the constant scientific polling, the use of advertising, public relations and media experts, and the use of electronic media. But his instinctive genius in the art of politics enabled him to raise these techniques to a new, revolutionary level of effectiveness in Texas. Lyndon Johnson’s 1948 campaign for junior United States Senator was, in that sense, the first mature flowering of the new politics in Texas. Since Stevenson was the very embodiment of the old politics, and because Stevenson’s campaign was the last campaign of its type ever waged by a major candidate for statewide office in Texas, the 1948 campaign marked the end of an era in politics—as the collision of old and new marked a significant transformation in American politics. By showing the collision between old and new, by exploring in detail the strength of Stevenson’s reputation, and the means by which, despite that strength, the reputation was wrecked, I have tried to illustrate the full destructiveness of these techniques on the fundamental concept of free choice by an informed electorate.
Mrs. Stevenson says that when she married Stevenson in 1954 (he was sixty-six at the time), “he had less money than I did” (she had the $45,000) and that he built up his cash reserves thereafter only under her prodding.
He didn’t build them up very far.
1 Mrs. Marguerite Stevenson says that when Stevenson died she had in her name $95,205, $45,000 of which represented money—largely from an insurance policy left by her first husband, who was killed in World War II—which she had at the time she married Stevenson, the balance being money given to her by Stevenson during the twenty-one years they were married, together with the interest it accumulated.
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