The Path to Power (126 page)

If he had opened his campaign without a theme, moreover, he had two themes now. One of Texas’ most knowledgeable political observers, analyzing O’Daniel’s appeal, said that in part “He sensed the fears and the hopes of people before they actually had them.” One fear that wasn’t hard to sense—among the farm people who were O’Daniel’s strength—was the fear of old age, when they would no longer be able to do farm work. O’Daniel proposed a simple state pension plan: thirty dollars a month to everyone over sixty-five. When he was asked if he planned to raise the necessary funds for this plan—approximately $100 million per year, four times the entire state budget—through new taxes, he said certainly not, and said it to the tune of “My Bonny”:

Questions about financing details were drowned out by that tune, by another he wrote (to the tune of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart”)—“Thirty Bucks for Mama”—and by his Mother’s Day speech lamenting the Legislature’s failure to act:

His second theme was, if possible, even more effective. To his opponents’ charge that since he had no platform, he had no reason for running, he replied that there was indeed a reason; the reason, he said, was
them
. The principal reason he was running, he said, was to throw them—the “professional politicians”—out of Austin.

This theme touched a deep chord in government-hating Texas, where distrust of politicians had been heightened by the dichotomy between the state’s newfound and rapidly growing natural wealth and the poverty of its government. As one writer put it: “Texas was producing more oil, more gas … and more of a dozen things than any other state in the Union. It was producing more sulphur than all the rest of the world put together. … Under efficient and honest government, it certainly should have had a full treasury.” Instead, the state’s general fund was more than $19 million in the red. The treasury hadn’t been emptied on behalf of its citizens; this state, first in the nation in natural resources, was last, or near last, in almost every significant category—education, library services, pellagra control—of state aid to improve the lives of its citizens. The fault, O’Daniel said, lay in the “professional politicians.” He was no politician, he told his listeners, he was a “common citizen”—one of
them
. And if he was Governor, he told them, “we” would be Governor. His victory would be the victory of common citizens over professional politicians; his election he said, would be “the election of
us
. If I am elected Governor of Texas,
we
will be the Governor of Texas—
we
meaning the common citizens, of which I am one.”

Press and politicians had predicted that once the novelty of seeing him in person had worn off, O’Daniel’s audiences would get smaller. They got larger: crowds unprecedented in Texas politics—20,000, 30,000, 40,000—came to hear him in the cities. Crowds followed him from town to town. They barricaded the highway to force him to stop and speak to them. The man they saw was entirely unexceptional in appearance. He looked like a typical, fortyish Texas businessman, five-foot-ten and just a little portly, with a close-shaven face, and slicked-down hair. He would generally doff the jacket of his suit and speak in a white shirt and necktie. While his smile was broad, it was not often in evidence; his face was rather expressionless. But when he spoke, the voice was the voice of Pappy. A reporter watched its effect on about a thousand Texans gathered near Raymondsville. “It was amazing,” he wrote. “They were fascinated. It was a typical summer day in the hottest part of Texas and there they stood, dripping sweat and drinking in [his] words. … Next to me … stood a young mother with her baby in her arms and her eyes glued to the face of the speaker. The baby squalled; she opened
her dress and put the child to her breast without even looking at it. Every member of that outdoor congregation was equally attentive.” And at the end of each of O’Daniel’s rallies would occur another impressive scene. He asked his audience to finance his campaign. Saying, “We have not one dollar in our campaign fund,” he told his listeners he was giving them “the opportunity to join the people’s candidate against the professional politicians. You had better take that old rocking chair down and mortgage it and spend the money in the manner you think best to get your pension.” Then his sons and his pretty daughter Molly would pass among the crowd holding little flour kegs labeled “Flour; not Pork,” with a slot cut into them. And the audience crowded around his children, pushing and shoving to give dimes and quarters to Pappy. According to the press, the leading candidates in the race were two of the state’s best-known politicians, onetime State Attorney General William McCraw and Colonel Ernest O. Thompson, chairman of the Railroad Commission. McCraw received 152,000 votes. Thompson got 231,000. O’Daniel got 573,000. Polling 30,000 votes more than the eleven other candidates combined, he won the Governorship without a run-off.

With O’Daniel’s inauguration, the shape of his true philosophy became clearer, as did the identity of his true friends. During the campaign, he had repeatedly promised to fight to the finish any proposed sales tax, which would fall hardest on the small wage-earners (or “common citizens”) whom he was allegedly championing; no sooner had he been inaugurated than he tried, unsuccessfully, not only to push through a sales tax (secretly drafted by his oilmen allies and the state’s largest corporations) disguised under a different name, but to make it a permanent part of state government by incorporating it in a constitutional amendment (the amendment would also have permanently frozen—at ridiculously low levels—taxes on oil, natural gas and sulphur). As for his pension plan, he refused to discuss new taxes to pay for it—lest one of the new taxes turn out to be a tax on oil. And with this refusal, his pension plan was effectively dead. Almost totally ignorant of the mechanics of government, O’Daniel proved unwilling to make even a pretense of learning, passing off the most serious problems with a quip; asked once what taxes he was proposing to keep the deficit-ridden government’s head above water, he replied that “no power on earth” could make him say. Ignoring Democratic party machinery, he tried to appoint to key government posts either men with absolutely no experience in the areas over which they were to be given authority or reactionaries, including members of the Jeffersonian Democrats, an extremist group that had bitterly opposed Roosevelt’s re-election in 1936. He offered few significant programs in any area, preferring to submit legislation that he knew could not possibly pass, and then blame the Legislature for not passing it. He vetoed most significant programs passed by the Legislature. The Legislature in return rejected many of his nominees. His problems were exacerbated by his personality: that of a
loner. Walking between the Governor’s Mansion and the Capitol, he kept his head down to avoid having to greet passing legislators. (The legislators were not particularly anxious to greet
him
; one reporter, watching the Governor on his walks, called him “the loneliest man I ever saw.”) The state’s government was all but paralyzed.

But if legislators didn’t like him, the voters did—and he knew it. When a reporter asked him, “What are you going to do about delivering the goods?” he held up his hand cupped like a microphone and said: “I’ve got my own machine. This little microphone.” He knew why he had been elected. “Thanks to radio,” he said. And he knew how to keep getting elected. He was still on the radio, broadcasting every Sunday morning from the Mansion while his hillbilly band played in the background: “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and hello there, boys and girls, this is W. Lee O’Daniel, the Governor of Texas, speaking direct from this beautiful Governor’s Mansion in Austin. …” He ran for re-election in 1940 because, he explained, he didn’t want his pension plan to fall into the hands of demagogues. To the charge that he had betrayed the common citizens, he replied, “How can they say I’m against the working man when I buried my daddy in overalls?” When opponents talked about state financing, he talked about Communists and Nazi fifth-columnists—who he said had infiltrated industrial plants in Texas; he said he had lists of their names, but declined to make them public. Communists and racketeers had also infiltrated the state’s labor unions, he said; he coined a phrase, “labor union leader racketeers.” Touring the state in his new campaign vehicle—a white bus, with a papier-mâché dome of the Capitol mounted on top, that had been furnished him by one of his secret oilmen backers—he reiterated some version of that phrase over and over; recalls one observer, “He’d just drum, drum, drum with his little catch phrases: ‘professional politicians,’ ‘pussy-footing politicians,’ ‘labor leader racketeers,’ ‘Communist labor leader racketeers’—you wouldn’t think there would be that many ways to get ‘labor leader racketeers’ into a sentence. He just got up at his rallies, and said, in effect, ‘I’m going to protect you from everything.’” And the people believed he would. In 1938, he had gotten 51 percent of the vote; in 1940, he got 53 percent, winning re-election as he had won election, by beating a field of well-known politicians without even a run-off. He had stormed out of Fort Worth waving a flour sack in one hand and the Decalogue in the other—and had become the greatest vote-getter in the history of Texas, a campaigner who had crushed every opponent he had run against. And during the week of May 15, 1941, the sixth week of the campaign, Lyndon Johnson learned he was running against him.

B
EFORE JOHNSON HAD ENTERED
the race, he had asked the Governor if he was going to run, and O’Daniel had assured him that he wasn’t. The news
that he actually was came on the heels of a Belden Poll that said if he ran, he would crush any opponent; according to this forecast, the Governor would get 33 percent of the vote to 9 percent for Johnson. Discounting those figures, Johnson’s advisors assured him that the next poll would reflect the rapid increase in his popularity (as in fact, it did), but their Chief was beyond reassurance. He took to his bed. He himself was to recall that the shock “made me feel mighty bad. … I know that my throat got bad on me, and I had to spend a few days in the hospital.” In fact, he was in the hospital for almost two weeks. Although the illness was described by John Connally as “pneumonia,” another Johnson aide called it “nervous exhaustion,” and Lady Bird, unknowingly echoing a phrase used by other women who had known Lyndon Johnson when his ambitions were threatened, says, “He was depressed, and it was bad.” When doctors told Johnson he would have to be hospitalized, a violent scene erupted at his Happy Hollow Lane house. He insisted to Connally and Gordon Fulcher, an
American-Statesman
reporter working in his campaign, that his illness be kept secret—an insistence that the two aides considered irrational since he wouldn’t be able to make scores of public appearances that had already been scheduled; in Connally’s words, “He just threw a fit, went into a tirade, ordered us out of the house, said he never wanted to talk to us again.” (His hospitalization—not in Austin, but, for reasons of secrecy, at the private Scott and White Clinic in Temple, fifty-seven miles away—was in fact kept quiet for almost a week; fiery stump speaker Everett Looney substituted for Johnson at speaking engagements, saying that the candidate was “busy with organizational work”—an excuse echoed by Marsh’s cooperative
American-Statesman
. When, in the second week, the candidate’s whereabouts became public knowledge, the
American-Statesman
explained that “the young congressman is getting a much-needed rest from congressional and campaign worries.”) The situation became so serious that Wirtz abruptly resigned his Interior Department post and rushed back to Texas to run the campaign on the spot. There may even have been some doubt that Johnson would resume the campaign; there was quiet talk that if he didn’t get out of the hospital soon, he might withdraw, using his illness as an excuse. “But,” Lady Bird says, “he
did
get out.”

He came out—on May 26—much thinner than he had gone in. Whatever had put him in the hospital had melted away most of the fat; although he still had a round little pot belly, he had lost so much weight that the shoulders of his suits slumped down, and his pants bagged away from his body. He came out changed in demeanor, too—as humble with voters now that he feared he was losing as he had been arrogant when he had felt sure he was winning.

And he came out fighting.

In election campaigns in college and for the Little Congress, he had
demonstrated a pragmatism that had shaded into the morality of the ballot box, a morality in which any maneuver that leads to victory is justified. Now he displayed the same morality on a larger stage.

There was a ruthlessness to it. Federal loans and grants could give communities and community leaders projects they needed; previously, Johnson had been offering to help communities obtain such grants. Now he changed tactics, using not only the promise but the threat—naked and direct. Communities were told that if they didn’t help him, he would see that they didn’t get such grants. The threat was used on the leaders of small communities and of large cities alike. Because electricity could transform the lives of farmers, Johnson’s influence with the Rural Electrification Administration was a powerful weapon in dealing with rural leaders. His liaison men were told to take off the kid gloves with these leaders. Two Johnson liaison men met, for example, with an influential farmer who was for Mann but whose community was desperate for electricity. Says one of the Johnson men: “We told him straight: ‘If your box comes in for Johnson, you’ll get the lines.’” If the box didn’t come in for Johnson, they made clear, the electric lines that meant so much to the community’s people would not be built. (The box came in for Johnson, and the community got electricity.) Fort Worth’s leading booster, Amon Carter, publisher of the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
, wanted a number of federal projects. Stephen Early quoted him the price: support for Lyndon Johnson. (The
Star-Telegram
supported him in a front-page editorial, and Fort Worth got its projects.)