Master of the Senate (166 page)

Rowe was later to hear Johnson recounting the conversation to Richard Russell. “He said, ‘Well, you know, Dick, I was really making some progress with Adlai. I took my knife and held it right against him. All of a sudden I felt some steel in my ribs and I looked around and Finnegan had a knife in
my
ribs.’ He laughed, and Russell said, ‘Finnegan is a pro,’ and that was it.”

By Tuesday evening, a reporter who ventured into 2306-A found the outer rooms empty except for Johnson’s secretaries. In the living room, Johnson was chatting with Hubert Humphrey, who had thought that Johnson would have only a brief moment or two to spare him. Instead, Johnson had time for a long talk. There was no one else waiting to see him. After a while, he left for a leisurely dinner. When he returned about midnight, he was greeted by an aide who said one wire service was reporting that he was about to withdraw as a candidate. Calling a press conference, he said the report was “a baseless, fantastical rumor. I’m still in. You will always find a lot of panicky folks trying to blitz things in the hours just before the balloting.” He talked with his usual bravado—asked if Stevenson had used “any pressure” to get the nomination, Johnson said that pressure wouldn’t work on him: “I’m used to pressure, and I know how to handle it”—but the reporters weren’t fooled. “The fire was out” on Lyndon Johnson’s candidacy, one wrote.

F
OR THE NEXT TWO DAYS
, however, Lyndon Johnson remained a candidate. Rowe’s repeated attempts to persuade him to withdraw and announce that Texas would vote for Stevenson, as so many other states were doing, met with no success.

This obduracy brought Johnson a measure of satisfaction—and a measure of what he was always saying he feared.

The satisfaction came on Wednesday, when, before a huge audience that packed the great stockyard arena to the rafters, the candidates’ names were placed in nomination, Johnson’s by John Connally. The speech nominating Adlai Stevenson, delivered by John F. Kennedy, and written by Kennedy and his aide Theodore Sorensen, was graceful, urbane and witty. The speech nominating Lyndon Johnson was quintessentially Texan: loud, filled with hyperbole, but delivered by a tall, handsome man with the presence of a movie star.

Connally emphasized the key point Johnson wanted—needed—to have made: “Let there be no mistake about it. He is not the candidate of a state or a section,” and his speech was filled with the usual stock phrases—“a dedicated American,” “a forceful and persuasive leader of men”—but John Connally had known Lyndon Johnson a long time, and his speech also contained some
phrases very particularly suited to the man he was describing. “This man has known poverty,” John Connally said. “He is a son of the Hill Country of Texas, where the sun is hot and the soil is meager and life itself is a never-easy challenge.” And Connally also said: “Call off the roll of great Democrats of this day. By the name of each, there may be entered many fine qualities and many splendid attainments. But alongside of this man there will surely be written the summation: ‘This man works hardest of all.’”

Even before the peroration—“Fellow Americans, fellow Democrats, I offer you for the Presidency of the United States, that son of the Texas hills, that tested and effective servant of the people: Lyndon B. Johnson”—the big Texas delegation had begun to roar, and now they leapt up in their tall red-white-and-blue “Love That Lyndon” hats, and grabbed their “Love That Lyndon” banners and moved into line behind a twenty-piece band playing “The Eyes of Texas Are upon You,” and started to march through the aisles. Delegates from other states—many other states—grabbed their state banners and followed, so many that, as Booth Mooney wrote, “television commentators noted with some surprise—
had they missed something?
—that participants were by no means confined to the whooping Texans and their southern neighbors”; was support for Johnson broader than they had thought? But most of the non-southern states were parading because of the short, stocky man, his visage stern and impassive, who was standing on the podium above them, looking as if he was bored by all the noise. Knowing how much demonstrations of affection meant to Lyndon, Sam Rayburn had called in the Texas congressmen attending the convention, and told them to pass the word among their House colleagues from other states that he would appreciate their states’ participation in the Johnson parade. He did not threaten, of course; Sam Rayburn never threatened. But, as Mooney wrote, the congressmen “reminded” their colleagues “that Sam Rayburn would go right on being Speaker. No doubt he would be watching with interest, and would remember, which states helped to add to the … demonstration for his friend.” Because of television constraints, a twenty-minute time limit had been placed on parades, and Rayburn had enforced it strictly for every other candidate. Now, “without a flicker of expression,” as one reporter wrote, he stood watching as the river of “Love That Lyndon” signs flowed past him and then wound around the convention hall two more times. An officious convention official went up to the old man and told him that the time limit had been exceeded. Rayburn turned and stared at him. The official went away and sat down. The old man stood unmoving, looking down on the signs bearing the slogan that expressed his feelings, too.

Johnson himself, observing the tradition that candidates do not attend the convention as long as their names are before it, was watching on television, upstairs in Wesley West’s Imperial Suite at the Hilton with Richard Russell, but seated in a box on the side of the big hall was not only Lady Bird but his family: his mother, his brother, and his three sisters, who had gone through that terrible
childhood with him; who had lived, as he had lived, “at the bottom of the heap”; who had watched their father lose the ranch; who had lived in dread of losing their house in Johnson City, too. As the parade reached their box, Connally, its leader, halted for a moment and raised his banner in tribute to them. Who knows what was in their minds at that moment? Who knows what was in the mind of Lyndon Johnson watching in the Imperial Suite? But how far from that childhood he had come.

But the next day was Thursday, when the convention voted on the candidates.

While Johnson had been watching his parade in the Imperial Suite Wednesday night, Russell had given him a warning. “Lyndon,” he said, “don’t ever let yourself become a sectional candidate for the presidency. That was what happened to me.” If you are labeled as a sectional—southern—candidate, Russell said, “You can’t win.”

Although Johnson certainly understood, at least intellectually, the wisdom of that advice, that the southern label would be hard to shake off and that it would hurt his chances of winning the nomination not only in 1956 but in 1960, and although day by day he was being given the same advice with increasing urgency by Rowe and others and was always assuring them that he understood that advice and agreed with it, he hadn’t followed it on Wednesday. When, that evening, the dimensions of the Stevenson landslide were clear, a reporter asked him skeptically, “Senator, are you really going to keep your name in front of the convention to the end?” Johnson wheeled on him angrily and said, “I’ve told you forty times since I’ve been here what Johnson’s position is. I’ll tell you again.” His position, he said, was that his name was going to go before the convention, and stay there.

And he didn’t follow the advice on Thursday. During the balloting that evening, most of the favorite sons withdrew in favor of Stevenson. Only seven states did not do so, and five of them were southern states: Texas, Mississippi (the only state besides his own which voted for Johnson), and Georgia, Virginia, and South Carolina, who stayed with their favorite sons. So at the end of the first and only roll call, the figures on the big screen behind the rostrum were stark: Stevenson—9051/2; Harriman—210; Johnson—80. (Symington received 45 votes, most from his native Missouri.) So of the 4661/2 votes that Stevenson did not receive, 160 were southern votes. As one of the Texas delegates, Jerry Holleman, was to recall, “It became obvious before the first roll call was over that Adlai Stevenson was going to be the nominee, the Texas delegation wanted to switch over from Lyndon and change its vote, cast its final vote for Stevenson and be on the bandwagon. They were after John Connally, and John was on the phone talking to Lyndon, desperately trying to get Lyndon’s permission to let them ask for the floor to switch their vote.” But the permission was not given. After Rayburn announced that Adlai Stevenson “is declared the nominee of this convention,” Connally attempted to offer the traditional motion that the nomination be made unanimous, but Rayburn recognized Oklahoma instead.

•    •    •

M
EN CLOSE TO
J
OHNSON
would puzzle for years over his actions at the 1956 convention, offering different explanations. Rowe would say that “I never could understand why he didn’t [withdraw]. It [his reason] was obviously wrapped up in Texas and his base of power, and the Eisenhower feeling down there. And it may have been just a dislike for Adlai.” Others note that during the fight for the Texas delegation earlier that year, the conservative Shivers had charged that if Johnson was a candidate, he would be merely a stalking-horse for Stevenson, secretly pledged to turn over his delegates to him, and speculated that Johnson was afraid to release his delegates lest that action prove Shivers correct. But during the intervening months Johnson had been a leading figure—second only to Truman,
the
leading figure—in the “Stop Stevenson” campaign. Releasing his delegates after Stevenson had already been declared the nominee would not make even Texas conservatives believe he had been plotting for Stevenson all along. And in fact Connally, the representative of the anti-Stevenson, pro-Eisenhower conservative powers in Texas, was among those pleading for Johnson to withdraw. Connally himself was to say years later that Johnson’s actions at the convention “made no sense to anyone, myself included.”

Men who, like Connally, knew Johnson very well, in the end fall back on considerations that are not political but personal, considerations that revolve around the single-mindedness with which Lyndon Johnson held to his great dream. Connally kept returning to the fact that in politics “you can always have a dream,” that even when all seems lost, in the hurly-burly of a convention “you always have hope.” He was also to note that 1956 was still in the era (although in fact near the end of that era) “when politicians believed in spontaneous forces, that delegates could be stampeded, in the eleventh-hour draft, in a deadlocked convention turning to a compromise candidate.” His statement is a reminder that in 1956 a reporter whose articles often reflected Connally’s views wrote that until the very end, Johnson was waiting for some “explosion” that would reverse the Stevenson tide, “the explosion that might send him into presidential contention.” George Brown, who sixteen years before had watched Lyndon Johnson turn down a small fortune because it might just possibly, at some long-distant future date, interfere with his pursuit of the presidency, and at whose Falfurrias hunting lodge Johnson rested up after the convention, says that “he hadn’t thought he would be so close [to the nomination] in ’56, and then when all of a sudden [after Truman’s endorsement of Harriman], he felt he was close, he got carried away with the thought that he might get it, and he simply couldn’t bear to just admit he didn’t have a chance.” A key word in Brown’s analysis is repeated by Tommy Corcoran. Asked why Johnson hadn’t withdrawn, Corcoran said flatly: “Because he couldn’t bear to.” That vast prize that Lyndon Johnson sought, the prize that had always seemed so far off, had suddenly seemed so close, almost within his reach. It was too hard for him to consign
it again to the future, to admit that, under the best of circumstances, four years would have to pass before he could try for it again; he “couldn’t bear” to do that.

And this emphasis on the personal is given weight by what happened after the convention chose its presidential nominee—and turned to choosing the vice presidential nominee.

A
T
L
YNDON
J
OHNSON’S
T
UESDAY MIDNIGHT PRESS CONFERENCE
, one reporter had asked him if he would accept the nomination for vice president. “I have not the slightest interest in such an assignment,” he said. When, however, another reporter pressed him to make his reply definitive, to say that he would not accept the vice presidential nomination if it was offered to him, Johnson did not do so. He said something very different. “I am not saying that under
NO
circumstances would I refuse to serve,” he said.

Little attention was paid to the reply at the time; only one or two reporters even bothered to include it in their articles on the press conference. But attention should have been paid. Felix McKnight of the
Dallas Morning News
, who was close to Connally and got much of his information from him, was shortly to write that Johnson is “reported ready to accept the vice presidency if he is asked.”

In fact, he wasn’t waiting to be asked. Early Thursday evening a number of Johnson partisans, Tommy Corcoran prominent among them, “told Johnson that he ought to be Vice President,” and Johnson told Rowe: “Go in and talk to Adlai. Tell him I want it.” Rowe says that “I went in to where everyone was churning around at Adlai, and I said to Finnegan, ‘I have got to talk with you and Adlai right away.’ So they came out of the room and I said, ‘I have got a candidate for the vice presidency and he says he wants it.’” Stevenson reacted graciously, if noncommittedly, with “a very flowery, attractive speech … right off the top of his head, saying ‘I am a great admirer of Lyndon Johnson. I don’t know what I am going to do. I want you to go back and tell Johnson he is one of the great men,’ and so forth.” Finnegan was simply flabbergasted. He “just sort of sat there and said something like you can knock me [over with a feather]. I said, ‘That’s my message, gentlemen,’ and left.”

It was only after Rayburn had offered a little fatherly advice to Johnson on the subject that he dropped the idea. When Corcoran told Rayburn what Johnson was doing, the Speaker reacted with his unique version of disapproval. “I saw that red [flush] coming up over his neck and head, and I just said to myself, ‘Uh-oh,’” Corcoran recalls. The whole subject of the vice presidency had already proved irritating to Rayburn; reporters were constantly asking him if he himself would accept the job, a question Rayburn regarded as insulting; “I have never been a candidate for vice president of anything,” he growled to one. The advice he gave to Johnson was blunt, and profane—and within a very short time, Rowe was entrusted with a new message for Stevenson. “Johnson said,
‘Go back and tell Stevenson that
NO
Texan wants to be vice president…. The only thing I want is to be in the meeting where the vice president is selected.’ I don’t want to be humiliated by not being called into the meeting.” Returning to Stevenson and Finnegan, an embarrassed Rowe said, “I don’t understand what I am doing, gentlemen, but I now have a new message.”