Lyndon Johnson’s friends would never forget how his face turned white when he read that paragraph. “You could see the color just drain out of it,” says one. “He went white as a sheet.” Going into his bedroom with Wirtz, he conferred with him behind a closed door, but with this problem, even Wirtz couldn’t help him.
So Lyndon Johnson went to see a man who could—the man who was the smartest politician he had ever known. That night, Central Texas was hit by a sudden freeze; when Johnson awoke early Sunday morning, temperatures had dropped to twenty-nine degrees in Austin, and were much lower in the Hill Country; roads were sheeted with ice. But he climbed into his car and drove the fifty miles to Johnson City—alone for once, no one with him on this trip—and pulled up in front of the little white house with the “gingerbread” scrollwork and the wisteria, and went into the shabby front parlor, and asked his father’s advice.
Sam Johnson didn’t even have to think before giving it. Recalls Lyndon’s brother: “Lyndon started saying he was thinking of waiting to see what she [Mrs. Buchanan] does, and Daddy says, ‘Goddammit, Lyndon, you never learn anything about politics.’ Lyndon says, ‘What do you mean?’ And Daddy says, ‘She’s an old woman. She’s too old for a fight. If she knows she’s going to have a fight, she won’t run. Announce now—before she announces. If you do, she won’t run.’”
Mrs. Buchanan’s announcement was scheduled for Monday afternoon. After driving back to Austin on Sunday afternoon, Lyndon Johnson quickly called in reporters and told them that he was in the race to stay—whether or not Mrs. Buchanan entered it. When Johnson’s decision appeared in the newspapers, Mrs. Buchanan’s son telephoned reporters. “Mother has just reached the decision not to run,” he said.
AFTER LYNDON JOHNSON had left to drive back to Austin, Sam Johnson walked over to the home of Reverdy Gliddon, publisher of the Johnson City Record-Courier. Gliddon was eating Sunday dinner with his family when Sam came to the door and shouted in, “Gliddon, I want to talk to you.” (“That was Mr. Sam’s old booming voice,” Stella Gliddon says. “Oh, I hadn’t heard that voice in a long, long time.”) Entering, he said, “Gliddon, do you know what this silly boy of mine wants to do? He wants to run for Congress against ten seasoned politicians.” And he said, “Lyndon just thinks he can conquer the clouds—how can a boy run against ten men?” For some time, Sam went on, listing all the arguments against Lyndon running—until not only Stella (whose fried chicken Lyndon had loved “better than anything in the whole wide world”) but her husband was moved to come to Lyndon’s defense, and point out that his youthfulness was offset by his Washington experience. Steering the conversation (“I only realized later, when I thought about it, what he was doing,” Stella says), Sam made them work out for themselves the reasons why his son should be supported; let them convince themselves more firmly than he could have convinced them. Evidence of the success of his strategy was the headline over Gliddon’s editorial in the Record-Courier’s next issue: JOHNSON FOR CONGRESS.
We do not wish to praise Mr. Johnson merely because he is a native-born citizen of Blanco County. For the past eight or ten years, the home folks have seen but little of Mr. Johnson, during his absence from this city [because] he has been a very busy man as a congressional aide and NYA Administrator—what an admirable background for a young man. … He has made good in all of his undertakings. … He enters his political career with “clean hands.” No one ever heard of Lyndon Johnson doing anything that was not honorable and straightforward.
Sam also introduced his son before his first campaign speech, which was delivered from the front porch of the Johnson home. Despite unpleasant memories of the “native-born citizen’s” boyhood personality and family background, Blanco was predisposed to support him. In the rural counties of Texas—counties in which frontier privations and dangers were so fresh a memory and neighborliness therefore so prized a virtue—it was rare indeed for a county not to support its “home man” in a congressional race. Reinforcing this predisposition in Blanco County was the unusual depth of the county’s poverty and isolation. Because its residents not only were poor, but felt poor—felt poor and isolated and utterly cut off from the rest of the world—the success of a Blanco boy in that world was unusually important to them; it gave them a reason for self-respect. Johnson was at the time the only local boy who they felt had made good in the outside world, the only proof that someone from “our isolated corner,” “away up here on the Pedernales River,” could make good in that world. The “Little Congress” sounded very impressive to them; with his election to its speakership, Johnson City at last had someone to be proud of—something to take pride in. Ava Johnson Cox, Lyndon’s cousin, who had so resented the way Johnson City looked down on him, recalls that when his election was reported in the Record-Courier, “Well, that was just a boomerang! It [the news] just went like wildfire. It went down to the barbershop, and everybody was saying, ‘Well, that ol’ boy’s going places!’” With his NYA appointment, “They were really proud of him. Everybody was saying, ‘That’s my boy. I knew he’d do it. I knew he was coming through!’” Additional reinforcement was, in some cases, provided by gratitude. Ernest Morgan was not, after all, the only Hill Country youth who had been enabled to stay in college by an NYA job; more than a few Blanco families felt personally indebted to the man who had helped their children get an education. And, of course, in the ten years since Lyndon Johnson had spent much time in Johnson City, unpleasant memories had blurred. The crowd standing in front of the Johnson home that day was more than willing to support the young man who had grown up inside.
Sam turned this predisposition into something more. There was little trace of the old Sam Johnson in the man who stood before them now. The last traces of the “Johnson strut” had vanished as heart attack followed heart attack; the eyes that had once been so “keen” were dim now, and sad, and had been sad for many years; he was stooped and gray-faced. So many years had passed since he had been “cut off” by Johnson City merchants that his debts had long since ceased to be news; no one any longer resented a man old and ill before his time; there was even a measure of grudging respect for Sam and Rebekah’s decision to move to San Marcos for four years so that their four younger children could finish college. As he stood before them, asking them to vote for his son, some of his listeners may even have remembered debts not owed but owing—for pensions the old man had once arranged for them, for loans he had given them, for the highway he had gotten built. And listening to him speak—this man who once had been so great a speaker—they may have remembered also the ideals for which Hon. S. E. Johnson had stood, for he talked about President Roosevelt and Sam Rayburn, and about how, with men like them in Washington, the farmer at last had allies to fight for the causes in which farmers had so long believed, and about how his boy would help them fight, for his boy believed in the same causes.
He hit the right note, in the Hill Country in which support of Roosevelt was running seven to one, in the Hill Country which had been the birthplace and the stronghold of the Alliancemen of Texas. The causes for which Roosevelt was fighting were causes for which the Hill Country had been fighting for decades; it had, after all, been out of the Hill Country that, almost exactly half a century before, the long line of wagons bearing the blue flags of the Alliance had clattered into Austin.
Sam Johnson had not made a speech for so many years, but he had never made a better speech than the one he made now for his son. Describing it, Lyndon Johnson was to say that while making it, “My father became a young man again.
“He looked out into all those faces that he knew so well and then he looked at me and I saw tears in his eyes as he told the crowd how terribly proud he was of me and how much hope he had for his country if only his son could be up there in the nation’s capital with Roosevelt and Rayburn and all those good Democrats. There was something in his voice and in his face that day that completely captured the emotions of the crowd. When he finally sat down, they began applauding and
they kept applauding for almost ten minutes. I looked over at my mother and saw that she, too, was clapping and smiling. It was a proud moment for the Johnson family.”
IF IT WAS Sam Johnson the great speechmaker who stirred his county into support for his son, it was Sam Johnson the master politician who mobilized that support. Lyndon Johnson’s first major campaign rally would be Friday, March 5, in San Marcos, in the auditorium of Old Main. Sam organized a Blanco County Caravan to go to the rally.
Early that Friday afternoon, Model A’s and Model T’s and an occasional Hudson or Packard began to pull into the square in front of the courthouse in Johnson City. So many came that the square was filled, and cars began to line the dusty streets of the little town. Most were crammed with people—whole farm families, or two families riding together—and as they waited, they got out and chatted with friends.
Sam had recruited young boys to put big posters bearing Lyndon’s picture on each car, in the windows or tied to the radiator grille in front. And as evening drew on, Sam and Rebekah got into his battered Model A and led the caravan out, down Route 66 for sixteen miles before turning onto a bumpy, unpaved road that ran fourteen miles through the hills to San Marcos. And that evening, as San Marcos students and townspeople began to troop toward Old Main, they heard a honking of horns from the hills above the town, and the face of Lyndon Johnson came down out of the Hill Country on a long, long line of rattling old cars—the longest caravan to come out of the Hill Country in fifty years.
THAT RALLY WAS, however, the lone bright spot in Johnson’s candidacy for some time to come.
Seven other candidates had entered the election, which Governor Allred had set for April 10.* (He ruled that it would not be a party primary in which a two-man run-off would be held if no candidate received a majority, but rather a “special election”—a “sudden death” election, in Texas parlance—in which the high man would be Congressman with or without a majority.) One candidate was a perennial also-ran not taken seriously, one was a Townsendite candidate who would receive only Townsendite votes. But the others included a handsome young Austin attorney, Polk Shelton, an idealistic conservative (he, like Wirtz, identified himself as a “constitutional lawyer”) who had decided to run because he wanted to go to Washington and fight the Supreme Court-packing plan, but who was also a former star athlete at San Marcos, well known and popular throughout the district. And they included four seasoned politicians—not only longtime Williamson County Judge Sam Stone, who could expect the solid support of his county’s 45,000 residents, but three politicians who each had a broader base: the district’s State Senator, Houghton Brownlee; Merton Harris, the aggressive Assistant Attorney General who had been working the district for years in preparation for the chance that had now presented itself; and, of course, C. N. Avery. Already the heavy favorite because of his district-wide political connections, Avery was also aided by sentimental considerations—on which he played; he was entering the race, he said in his opening statement, only because Old Buck would have wanted him to: “The late Mr. Buchanan … told me that [when he died], he wanted me to run for the office he held. He told me I was the only man in the district qualified to carry on his work. … Now I feel bound to carry on his work. I feel it is an obligation to my friend.” During the campaign’s first week, moreover, Mayor Miller, who had decided not to run, announced that he would throw his support, and that of the Austin machine, to Avery. “When Miller came out for Avery,” recalls the tough, pragmatic Quill, “why, we thought the race was over. Austin had the votes, you know. It was the largest city in the district. And Miller—he sure was a power, and a very difficult man to oppose. It hardly seemed worthwhile to go on.” Political observers were all but unanimous in conceding the election to Avery. And those few observers who thought he might be challenged thought the challenge would come from Stone, or Brownlee or Harris. The candidacy of Lyndon Johnson, “home man” of the district’s smallest county, all but unknown in the others, was not taken seriously.
Johnson’s limited residence in the district was, moreover, proving to be a major handicap in an area in which the word “carpetbagger” had a particularly distasteful ring. His hometown paper’s line—“For the past eight or ten years, the home folks have seen but little of Mr. Johnson”—was quoted out of context by opponents who also noted that, as Avery put it, “He has never voted in the district.” And his age was turning out to be even more of a handicap than had been expected. He had attempted to minimize this handicap by confusing reporters and voters about it. The press release announcing his candidacy said, “He will soon be thirty years old.” Subsequently, the line adopted was that he was “almost thirty.” In the many articles in which a specific age was mentioned, it was twenty-nine; not once during the entire campaign, so far as can be determined, would his actual age—twenty-eight—appear in print. But, whatever they believed his age to be, his opponents emphasized it. “This Johnson is a young, young man,” Stone’s campaign manager told a Georgetown audience. “Don’t let him take off the baby robe and put on the toga.” Any illusions that Johnson may have possessed about the effectiveness of this line of attack were dispelled the first time he shared a platform with Avery, at a meeting of the Austin Trades Council. “Now I believe,” Avery said, “that every boy by the time he reaches the age of seven develops a burning desire to be a policeman, a fireman. … But before we entrust them with such tasks we demand that they gain a considerable amount of experience. We just can’t picture a youngster with a pop-gun chasing bandits.” As Johnson sat listening on stage, this sally drew laughter from the audience.
But Johnson had men—and he knew how to use men. Divided into teams, they were assigned to towns, and told whom to see in each town and what to say. “We’d go into a little town,” Ernest Morgan recalls. “We’d have lists of people to see, and we’d nail up posters. He wanted posters with his picture on them up everywhere. And the first thing we’d do was to go to the local newspaper. He would tell us: ‘That’s the first thing you do—get my picture in the paper. I want it so you can’t wipe your ass on a piece of paper that hasn’t got my picture on it.’” Although Governor Allred did not announce the special election until March 5, Johnson had announced on March 1 that he was running in the election. And the very next morning, cars crowded with Johnson’s young men, the young men who had once been the White Stars of San Marcos, were fanning out across the district, racing across the district; speeding away from Giddings after a long day of electioneering, A. J. Harzke, who in college had been Lyndon Johnson’s second candidate for class president, saw roaring toward him on the lonely road to Ledbetter a car that he recognized: it belonged to Bill Deason, Johnson’s first candidate for class president. The two men waved as they passed; neither stopped; there was too much to do.
And Johnson had a strategy—and he knew how to use a strategy. The White Stars were told to concentrate on a single, simple point. “When we asked what we should tell people,” one recalls, “they told us that the campaign would have many slogans, but that there was only one slogan that mattered: ‘Roosevelt. Roosevelt. Roosevelt. One hundred percent for Roosevelt.’” That slogan was the entire content of the posters that, on the day following Johnson’s announcement, blossomed, unpunctuated but to the point, on trees and fenceposts throughout the district: A VOTE FOR JOHNSON IS A VOTE FOR ROOSEVELTS PROGRAM. It was the sole theme of the calling cards, printed the same day, that were distributed by the tens of thousands. A vote for Johnson, the cards said, was a vote “For Roosevelt and Progress.” It was the message emphasized in the letters that began pouring out of his campaign headquarters. “Dear Mr. Carson: Mr. O. E. Crain has suggested that I send you some literature about my campaign for Congress. I stand wholeheartedly with the President on his program, and I invite the people who favor the Roosevelt program to support me. Yours Sincerely, Lyndon Johnson.”
In his initial announcement, Johnson not only stated the theme, but gave it a particular emphasis, one especially ap
pealing in a district grateful to the President for the help he had given it. Because of the timing of the election, he said, a vote for Johnson would not only express generalized support of Roosevelt, it would give the President help—help he badly needed—in the fight in which he was currently engaged. “The paramount issue of this campaign … is whether the President shall be sustained in his program for readjustment of the judicial system,” he said. “The voters of the Tenth Congressional District, due to the untimely death of Congressman Buchanan, are the first to have a chance to speak on this vital issue and to have an opportunity to speak … with such unanimous voice that there will be no doubt throughout the country as to how our people stand on this question.” The way to speak, he said, was to vote for him. “I have always been a supporter of President Roosevelt and I am wholeheartedly in favor of his present plan.”
This emphasis placed two of his opponents at an immediate disadvantage. Polk Shelton was not a man to compromise his principles. “Roosevelt was Jesus Christ in this area,” says his brother, Emmett, “but Polk was Polk—nobody could make him say something he didn’t believe in.” To a reporter’s question about his feelings on the Supreme Court fight, the young attorney replied (in a statement taken as a sneer at Wirtz’s about-face), “I am opposed to the court reorganization. I was against it before this election, and I’m no hypocrite.” Senator Brownlee tried to compromise, but couldn’t—since his vote for the legislative resolution condemning the Court plan was a matter of record.
Furthermore, as Wirtz and Johnson had hoped, the strategy tied in with the editorial stand of Marsh’s two daily newspapers, the Austin American and the Austin Statesman. As for Governor James V. Allred, he was personally fond of Johnson, and had been impressed by his work as NYA director, and by his knowledge of Washington. “He felt Johnson could do the most [of any of the candidates] to get Texas what it was entitled to in Washington,” says Ed Clark, the Governor’s Secretary of State and the man most familiar with Allred’s thinking. Nonetheless, the Governor had originally decided to remain neutral in the congressional race—in part because he believed that Johnson had no chance to win, and he didn’t want to antagonize the next Congressman. But Allred was a true liberal—the only truly liberal Governor elected in Texas in the twentieth century, swept into office by the Roosevelt landslide—and he too idolized the President. And Johnson, Clark says, “was just such a real rootin’-tootin’ Roosevelt supporter—Jimmy just couldn’t stay out.” Publicly, he made no statement—reiterated neutrality, in fact—but privately he allowed Clark to go to work for the man on whom the Secretary of State had decided “to buy a ticket,” and he put at Johnson’s disposal his own campaign manager, veteran Texas political string-puller Claud Wild. Allred could not resist one semipublic gesture: as Johnson was leaving his office after a visit, the Governor impulsively snatched his big white Stetson off a hatrack and gave it to the young man—who wore it, and let it be known whose it was, at every rally.
The Path to Power Page 61