The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  And Johnson had money—and if, campaigning over unfamiliar terrain, he didn’t know how to make the most of it (and he probably did, this wonder boy of politics), Alvin Wirtz knew. Was Johnson unknown to the district’s voters? Money could make him known—fast. The printing of posters and calling cards for the typical candidate has to wait on the raising of cash to pay the printer; thanks to the instant cash provided by Wirtz and Cap’n Taylor, Johnson’s printings were ready the day the campaign began. The only source of political news for most voters was the twenty-five small weekly newspapers struggling to survive in sparsely populated areas whose residents were so impoverished that many of them paid their $1.50 for a yearly subscription with a chicken or a cord of wood. Few of their publishers were professional journalists—as prevailing practices and ethics revealed. Short not only on cash but on news to fill their pages, some of them were willing to print verbatim not only a candidate’s advertisements but “articles” prepared by the candidate’s staff—if the articles were accompanied by money. The individual amounts involved were small, as might be expected when dealing with newspapers in which a merchant could purchase an ad for fifty cents or a dollar, but the payments had to be made to perhaps twenty newspapers (some publishers refused to go along with this practice), and they had to be made each week. Johnson had the money to make them. The envelopes containing the announcement of his candidacy—an announcement written in the form of a news story—arrived at newspaper offices containing not only his picture but, although no advertising was being purchased, a check for ten dollars. A covering note from Ray Lee read: “I am enclosing a check for ten dollars which we want you to credit to our account. We shall want to use some advertising space later in the campaign. Here also is Mr. Johnson’s statement announcing for Congress. We hope that you will be able to use this statement this week.” Many papers used the statement—in the form in which Johnson wanted it used—and four days later, Lee sent a follow-up note: “We appreciate your kind and generous treatment. You will hear from us from time to time.”

  The times came fast—and with them promises that they would continue; Johnson himself wrote to one editor, “Here are [an] … ad for your paper this week, a check for ten dollars for credit against our account, and a news item about one of [my] speeches. I hope you will be able to handle all three. We are planning to have an ad in your paper each week during the campaign, and would like for you to keep us advised how we stand on your books.” Some of the checks grew substantially larger, and publishers were not discouraged from asking for more checks larger still; a typical Lee line was “If this is not sufficient to cover the amount due, please render us a bill immediately.” The payments paid off for the Johnson campaign. A campaign worker reported that “I called on the ‘Marble Falls Messenger’ and found that we owe them another $5. … He said that he would not add ‘paid advertisement’ at the end [of a news item written by Johnson’s staff] because it would carry more weight this way.” From beginning to end of the campaign, not only did the amount of Johnson’s paid advertising dwarf that of his opponents, so did the amount of “news coverage”—articles favorable to him written by his aides—that he received.

  Money could help with the district’s political leaders, too. First, it bought him Claud Wild. The leaders knew the canny old pol, knew him, liked him, had worked with him for years. Wild’s first reaction to the Governor’s suggestion that he manage Lyndon Johnson’s campaign was: “Who the hell is Lyndon Johnson?” After sounding out the leaders he was convinced not only that Johnson had absolutely no chance to win, but that his campaign would be little more than a joke—and that association with it would be an embarrassment. He at first rejected Allred’s suggestion that he help the young man, and when, at the Governor’s insistence, he finally sat down with Johnson and Wirtz, he was unmoved by their attempt to tempt him with the title of “campaign manager”; he would work for the campaign, he said, only for a fee, payable in advance: $5,000. Although Lady Bird did not know it, that was where half of her father’s contribution went.

  Wild’s enlistment in the campaign could not make the leaders support Johnson, but it would ensure their attendance at—and their permission to hold—the “barbecues” (political rallies highlighted by “speakings”) integral to Texas politics. And Lyndon Johnson’s barbecues were barbecues such as this impoverished district had never seen. Ed Clark describes them as “all the barbecue you could eat and take home, and all the beer you could drink”—at each barbecue, in other words, beef and beer for hundreds of persons. Emmett Shelton describes them in a more pithy term: a “giving away.” “Before then,” he says, “barbecues had never been very elaborate around here. And I tell you, we wanted to have one like his [Johnson’s] once, and we sat down and started figuring out how much it would cost—and there was no way we were ever going to afford it.”

  If the barbecues with their drinking and the speaking were the loud side of money in rural Texas politics, there were quiet sides as well: the rural “boxes,” or precincts, which could be bought by a payment to a local Sheriff or County Commissioner. There were a few of these boxes in the Tenth District, and Johnson had the money to buy them. The district contained a substantial Negro vote*—located in several small all-Negro settlements in Blanco County; in Lee County, where there were thousands of black sharecroppers; and in the Austin slums. In Austin and Lee County, at least, the Negro community voted the way its leaders wanted it to vote, and the leaders were for sale—cheap. Johnson had the money to buy them. The Czech vote—several thousand Czechs were grouped together in three or four rural communities—was also for sale; the price for this vote was much higher, but Johnson had enough money to pay it, too.

  No one knows, or will ever know, how much money was spent in Lyndon Johnson’s first campaign. Mrs. Johnson says, with understandable pride, that her money was virtually all that was needed to launch her husband’s career; the deposit slip for the $10,000 she obtained from her father was one of her most cherished possessions; “I kept that deposit slip in my purse until it wore out,” she says. “Literally until it just crumpled away.” And, she says, while Alvin Wirtz raised some money, “probably” the $10,000 “covered the entire cost of the first campaign.” But while Mrs. Johnson no doubt believes this statement, it is not correct. The Sheltons—not only Polk but his brother and campaign manager, Emmett—went broke trying to keep up with Johnson’s spending. Emmett vividly recalls raising, at the beginning of the campaign, $1,000 from one friend, and $1,500 from another, “and thinking it was so much,” and then realizing that it was nothing. “We would not have started had we known how much the campaign was going to cost,” Shelton says. “Because we didn’t have it. By the end of the campaign, we had borrowed everything we could borrow. It took us years to get out of the [financial] hole we dug for ourselves.” Their expenditures totaled $40,000; Avery and Brownlee, observers agree, each spent considerably more than that figure.

  Johnson’s expenditures dwarfed those of any of his opponents. Ed Clark, the homespun political genius who in later years would become perhaps Texas’ greatest campaign fund-raiser, was exercising his talents on Johnson’s behalf. The Governor’s trusted advisor telephoned state employees: “If I said to someone, ‘The Governor would like you to support his friend Lyndon Johnson,’ they knew I was authorized to make the call.” Their contributions were small—twenty dollars or ten or even less—Clark says, but there were a considerable number of them. More money came to Johnson from Austin businessmen—suppliers of Camp Mabry, a United States Army base, for example—who, in Clark’s words, “thought it would help them to be friends with a Congressman.” These contributions were not so small—“these would be one hundred dollars to five hundred dollars,” Clark says—and there were a considerable number of these, too. And his money came from men who were used to contributing far larger sums to politics: from not only Alvin Wirtz but Roy Miller, for example, and from lobbyists who contributed where Wirtz and Miller told them to contribu
te. Although pro forma reports on campaign spending were filed (Johnson’s shows contributions of $2,242.74), they are not reliable, Clark says. Only three men—Lyndon Johnson, Alvin Wirtz and Ed Clark—had even a vague idea of the total amount spent. Johnson and Wirtz are dead. Clark says that he does not know the actual figure. “There wasn’t too much reporting then,” he says. “No one knew how much money was spent.” But he estimates the cost of Lyndon Johnson’s first campaign at between $75,000 and $100,000—a figure that would make the campaign one of the most expensive congressional races in Texas history up to that time.

  AND, MOST OF ALL, Johnson had the qualities of personality and temperament that he had been displaying most of his life.

  All his adult life, because of the agonies of his youth, the insecurity and shame of growing up in the Hill Country as the son of Sam and Rebekah Johnson, he had grasped frantically at every chance, no matter how slender, to escape that past. In Washington, and before that in Houston and Cotulla, he had worked so feverishly, driven himself so furiously, forced his young will to be inflexible—had whipped himself into the frantic, furious effort that journalists and biographers would call “energy” when it was really desperation and fear. He had tried to do everything—everything—possible to succeed, to earn respect, to “be somebody.” “There was a feeling—if you did everything, you would win.”

  The feeling had been reinforced—in Washington and Houston and Cotulla—by experience. In each of those jobs, he had done “everything”—had lashed himself into the effort in which “hours made no difference, days made no difference, nights made no difference,” into the effort in which he worked weekday and weekend, day and night. And he had “won,” had made the most of each of those slender chances.

  Now had come the main chance, the real chance, quite possibly the only chance.

  And the effort that Lyndon Johnson had made before was nothing beside the effort he made now.

  HE COULD NOT, he felt, win in the city; Austin, home of 88,000 of the district’s 264,000 residents, was controlled by Mayor Miller, and Miller was for Avery. So he had to win in the countryside.

  But that countryside covered almost 8,000 square miles. The Tenth Congressional District of Texas was one of the most sparsely populated areas of the United States; its 176,000 residents who lived outside Austin were scattered across ten huge Texas counties, across an area larger than Delaware, larger than Connecticut—larger than Delaware and Connecticut combined. Austin, of course, was situated at the very edge of the Edwards Plateau, near the fateful 98th meridian; to the west of Austin, the district—3,000 square miles of district—was the vast and empty Hill Country, through which it was still possible, in 1937, to drive for miles without seeing a human habitation; the 62-mile drive west from Austin through Johnson City to the district’s border, for example, was still one of the loneliest trips it was possible to take in the United States. The 111-mile trip from Austin to the district’s eastern border lay across prairies whose black soil was more fertile than the Hill Country’s limestone, but whose population was almost as sparse.

  And in political terms—the terms that mattered to Lyndon Johnson—it was not the sparseness of the district’s population that was most intimidating but the pattern in which it was distributed. With the exception of Austin, the district contained not a single large community; only six towns—Brenham, San Marcos, Lockhart, Luling, Taylor and Georgetown—had even 3,000 inhabitants. Many of the district’s country people lived in towns too small to be marked on any map. Most of the district’s country people didn’t live in any town—or near any town. The voters Lyndon Johnson would have to convince to vote for him—voters most of whom had never even heard the name of Lyndon Johnson—were scattered on their isolated farms and ranches so thinly across those immense spaces that a candidate could drive miles between one voter and the next. Difficult miles. Two major highways ran through the district: east-west U.S. Highway 290, and north-south U.S. Highway 81. Most of the district’s other roads were unpaved; in 1937, the fifty-eight miles of “State Highway 66” between Johnson City and the northern boundary of Burnet County, for example, were largely unpaved. And most of the district’s voters did not live on 290 or 81—or even on 66. Their homes, the farms and ranches on which lay the votes which alone could enable him to take advantage of his great chance, lay on a thousand separate, long, winding, rutted roads that were little more than paths or cow trails.

  These roads were, moreover, the only way to reach these voters. Newspapers could reach them with only limited impact. Almost none of them received a newspaper more than once a week; the circulation of the daily newspapers read in the district, the Austin American and Statesman (combined circulation 30,000), the San Antonio Light, the Dallas News, was limited almost entirely to Austin. Many of them received no newspaper at all, either because their homes were too isolated to make delivery even of a weekly feasible, or because they simply could not afford a subscription. Radio could reach them hardly at all; by now an established political tool in other areas of the United States, it was a tool with limited use indeed in rural precincts few of whose residents owned one; the first survey of the use of electrical appliances in rural areas of the Tenth District, conducted in 1939, would disclose the presence of a radio in exactly one out of every 119 homes. Out of reach of the media, these voters were—most of them, at least—out of reach also of personal influence. Here and there a local influential—a “lead man,” in Central Texas parlance—wielded influence beyond his immediate family, either because of the local power he might exercise, if he was the town banker or the town lawyer or the County Judge, or simply because people so isolated from news media relied for their political opinions, to an extent unthinkable in a city, on men whose opinions they respected: a successful farmer, for example. Here and there was a crooked “box,” or election precinct, whose votes could be purchased wholesale by a payment to an election judge or local Sheriff. But in this district, lead men and crooked boxes were few. There was no way to persuade these voters en masse to support a candidate of whom most of them had never heard. The only way to obtain the votes Lyndon Johnson needed was the hardest way: one by one.

  HE STARTED EARLY. The announcement of his candidacy had appeared on Monday, and he was on the road before daylight on Tuesday, March 2, with forty days to go before Election Day, as his chauffeur, Carroll Keach, headed out along 290 on the 111-mile trip to Washington-on-the-Brazos, a score of ramshackle frame buildings huddled on a bluff above the muddy yellow river that marked the district’s eastern border. The Texas Declaration of Independence had been signed in the little town on March 2, 1836 (Johnson’s hero ancestor, John Wheeler Bunton, had been one of the signers); every March 2, farmers and ranchers flocked there to celebrate—and Johnson wanted to be there to greet them. And when he left the town, he didn’t head straight back to Austin. About fifteen miles to the southwest was a junction with a dirt road, muddy, rutted, almost impassable because of deep puddles left by recent rains. But nine miles down that road was the town of Independence. Johnson had heard that morning that some of its 319 residents, deterred by the road conditions, had not attended the celebration. So he ordered Keach to turn off on the dirt road and drive to Independence—so that he could greet them, too.

  His opponents, accustomed to the leisurely pace normal in Texas elections, had not expected the campaign to start until Allred set a date for the election; on the day—March 5—that the Governor set the date as April 10, Johnson had already completed a tour of the entire district, and was holding his rally in Old Main. Not having begun preparations until after the Governor’s announcement, the other candidates were some time completing them. When Avery opened his campaign on March 9, Johnson had already been in the field for a week. Merton Harris promised a “very active” campaign in the opening statement he issued on March 11, but he actually did not begin until March 18, only a little more than three weeks before the election. Senator Brownlee said that he would not campaign until aft
er the Senate adjourned, so that he could attend to his duties—and adjournment did not come until March 27.

  Johnson didn’t need an alarm clock; during their thirty-eight years of married life, Lady Bird says, “I don’t ever remember Lyndon when something important was afoot ever oversleeping”—what woke Lyndon Johnson was more insistent than any bell. And since he had given Carroll Keach a room over his garage, the big brown Pontiac would be already idling at the curb when, at daybreak or before, Johnson walked out to it.