The Path to Power (131 page)

Roosevelt saved his best shots for strategic moments late in the campaign. One was a rumor, planted by Corcoran with friendly reporters in Washington, that the President would go to Texas and campaign for Lyndon Johnson. The Marsh newspapers, and the hundreds of captive weeklies, played up the rumor; so widely was it believed in Texas that the Legislature passed a resolution inviting the President to inspect the state’s defense plants during his trip. Another was a word: “preposterous.” Some time before,
Governor O’Daniel had suggested that Texas form its own army and navy to protect America’s southern border from invasion. Roosevelt had not replied at the time; on the night of June 27, Election Eve, he denounced the plan with that word, which appeared in headlines as Texas voters went to the polls the next day. Tommy Corcoran was often the instrument through which the President intervened in state elections to help candidates he favored; like Rowe, Corcoran tries to explain that Roosevelt’s intervention in Texas in 1941 was something special. “In that 1941 race, we gave him everything we could,” Corcoran says. “Everything.”

J
OHNSON’S MANEUVERS
in the Legislature had done the job on O’Daniel. Campaigning by his children, and by recorded speeches, had not been the same as the personal campaigning at which he was the master; at one of his rallies, a record of an O’Daniel speech stuck on one of his key phrases. Before it could be unstuck, it had said, “I want to go to Washington to work for the old folks, the old folks, the old folks, the old folks. …” The audience laughed. “The Governor’s radio speeches have been marked for their note of worry and frantic exhortation, in marked contrast to the previous calm and good humored self-confidence which he has always showed heretofore and which he showed in his announcement speech in May,” the
State Observer
reported. “His personal campaigning always raises his strength. People come to see him and go away convinced. … There is no doubt that O’Daniel’s failure to make a personal campaign over the state has hurt him.” But, trapped by the Legislature’s refusal to adjourn, he couldn’t get away from Austin until the closing days of the campaign. When he did, he found that it was too late to catch up with the argument conceived by Johnson and disseminated by hundreds of campaign workers. “The people who raised Mr. O’Daniel from a hillbilly flour salesman to the heights of the Governor’s chair are divided about the wisdom of sending him to Washington as Senator,” the
State Observer
reported. “The old age pensioners … still love him, but … feel that he can help them more in Texas than in Washington.” Frantic, Pappy made increasingly bizarre campaign promises: to purge Congress if it failed to pass a bill outlawing strikes; to do away with the federal debt; to force the Legislature to provide the necessary $100 million per year for his pension plan. After assailing Johnson as a “water carrier” for the President, a yes man who would simply carry out Roosevelt’s orders, he abruptly switched and said he had always supported the President himself, adding that he wanted to go to Washington so that he could rescue Roosevelt from the “professional politicians” surrounding him. But nothing helped. The
Observer
reported “undisputable evidence that the Governor is weaker than ever before, and that his campaign … has not caught the fire which characterized his previous campaigns.”

In June, Gerald Mann was still doing what he had been doing in April: touring the state alone except for a driver and, occasionally, a single other aide—each day traveling 300 or 400 miles, making eight or nine speeches, plus a dozen or so impromptu wagon-bed talks in little towns, doing most of his sleeping in the back seat of his car. Without sufficient funds, without any organization to speak of, “he never stopped fighting, not for one day during that whole time,” D. B. Hardeman says.

One spur that roweled him forward was indignation. To a man of such deep convictions, there was something almost immoral about the Johnson campaign, with its theatrics, its use of money, the unadorned appeal to selfishness in its argument that Johnson should be elected because he could get more federal contracts for Texas. Moreover, Roosevelt supporter though Mann was, he was disturbed at the brutal use of federal power in a state election. Having won two statewide elections, he was hardly a political naif, but never, he was to say, had he seen anything like this. “They spent so much money in that campaign,” he recalls. “And they did it overwhelmingly. And they had no qualms about it. I heard that Corcoran was down here in Texas. And Wirtz. And Harold Young from the Vice President’s office. And Grover Hill. There was an invasion of Texas by Washington bureaucrats, coming down here with money, or the ability to raise money. They were people who were in a position to
exact
money.”

Finally, on June 19, Mann’s feelings spilled over. They did so, he was to recall, almost on the spur of the moment, as he was making his 252nd speech of the campaign, before another crowd that was smaller than it should have been and less enthusiastic than it should have been because, he believed, of the effect of the money behind the Lyndon Johnson campaign. He had been “feeling” the money everywhere; suddenly, he began to talk about it. Standing in the bandshell in the courthouse square in Plainview, in the shadow of the town’s huge windmill, he “made his first mention of the campaign tactics of his opponents,” the
Dallas News
reported—of his opponents and of himself. With the wind tousling his hair—and turning the blades of the windmill overhead—he grinned and said, “I’m just doing this in the old-fashioned way—just a handshake and a talk. I have no mountain music nor entertainers, nor do I give away money. I have no telegrams of endorsement. All I know is how to go out and see the people of Texas—on courthouse squares, street corners and sidewalks. I’m just looking them in the eye.” Then, in detail, he lashed into what he was to call “the invasion of money from Washington.”

Instantly, he knew that he had touched a nerve, that he was saying something his audience had been waiting to hear. By the time he finished, the crowd was roaring in encouragement; a supporter said, “Gerry, you keep making that speech and you’ll be elected. Don’t make any other speech. Make it from now until Election Day.”

He did. Two nights later he gave it before a large crowd in Houston. He was appalled, he told his audience, at the Johnson rallies—“political rallies under the guise of patriotic meetings”—and at the lotteries. “These drawings at the congressman’s so-called defense rallies have been held at dozens of places all over Texas—always after the crowd has heard what the congressman has had to say. They have been conducted in the presence of little children all over Texas. What kind of conception of a democratic election do you think such practices are instilling in [their minds]?”

The use of “free money” was only one aspect of what enraged him, he said. There was also the federal pressure. In a way, he said, it threatened the state’s “independence” by violating Texans’ rights “to elect our own officials without interference from Washington”—Washington which was trying to “cram Lyndon Johnson down our throats.”

“You know and I know,” he told his audience, “what has happened in this race for the Senate.

“A federal hierarchy,” he said, “is undertaking to set up a federal-controlled political machine in Texas.” He was appalled at the very idea of a candidate asking voters to elect him as a patriotic obligation—of, in fact, the very use of “patriotism” as an issue. “There is no issue of patriotism in this campaign,” he declared. “You are simply choosing a Senator.” A candidate who, night after night, tries “to capitalize on the emotion of honest patriotism, cheapens the impulse. … It is like playing on the sacredness of mother love for the purposes of promotion.”

He was offended by someone campaigning on the ground that he could get more money—in the form of federal projects—for Texas. “The best job is going to be done for Texas in the United States Senate by sending there a man of individual courage, personal convictions and moral stamina to do what he believes is right. … Not political pull but personal integrity is the qualification for getting the job done. … I have stood by principles. I have
talked about principles. And you can always count on me to fight for principles.”

The audience rose up and roared. “That new issue really caught on,” Mann recalls today. He realized, he says, that “I should have started earlier an all-out campaign on the use of money because a lot of people who were voting for Johnson because they wanted O’Daniel beaten didn’t approve of what Johnson was doing or what was being done for him.”

Lean—gaunt now, in fact, after ten weeks of criss-crossing Texas—clean-cut, as handsome as an Arrow shirt ad in his starched collars and double-breasted suits, the thirty-four-year-old Attorney General spoke with one hand in a pocket and the other extended to the audience. His movements were the movements of the fine athlete he had been, and his eloquence was not the shouting of a typical stemwinder but the quieter persuasiveness that moved audiences on the stump as he had moved them in church, particularly when coupled with what the
Dallas News
called his greatest asset, “his evident sincerity.” He was so tired and tense now that the hand extended to the audience was often as curled as a talon, and he leaned forward to his listeners as he spoke. At most rallies, he had no politicians on stage with him to introduce him; he would walk onto an empty stage alone, say simply, “I’m Gerald Mann, your Attorney General,” and give the audience a grin that would win them over. Even veteran reporters were awed by his energy. “Tireless Gerald C. Mann, 12,000 miles behind him, pushed into vast West Texas Monday on the closing laps of probably the most intensive political campaign in Texas history,” wrote Felix R. McKnight.

With this new issue, his campaign took on new life. “Mann, despite the absence of pyrotechnics, is attracting surprisingly large crowds,” the
News
reported. Says Hardeman: “His sincerity was such that he could win any crowd that heard him.”

But not enough people heard him. Scraping up $1,300 for a limited statewide broadcast, his staff put him on the air on June 23, five days before the election, to give his new speech, but that was one of his last financial gasps, and during the campaign’s final week, Johnson was on the radio—with fifteen- or thirty-minute broadcasts on network hook-ups that blanketed the state—five times each day. Johnson’s supporters—Young, Wirtz, Looney, Hofheinz—had statewide broadcasts, too. Not enough people read about Mann. In the big-city dailies, he got good coverage. But in the weeklies, he didn’t. And, of course, he had few ads in weeklies, while, as he puts it, “They filled the newspapers full.” Mann knew he had a good issue, but he also knew he didn’t have the funds to make it sufficiently effective. His eloquent voice was being drowned out.

As for Johnson, with Roosevelt behind him, with so much money behind him, with the newspapers filled with his name and the radio filled with his voice, with the guarantee of those bulk votes from San Antonio and
the Valley (and, most important, with Pappy O’Daniel trapped in Austin, unable to campaign), how could he lose? The Belden Poll told him he couldn’t. Week after week, every poll showed a steady, and accelerating, increase in his share of the vote. A week before the election, the polls showed, for the first time, that he was in first place—by a single percentage point over O’Daniel, and by a greater margin over Mann and the rapidly falling Dies. He pulled further ahead with each survey that Belden took during that last week; in the final poll, Johnson had 31 percent of the vote, O’Daniel 26 percent, Mann 25 percent and Dies 16 percent. Joe Belden himself was so confident of the accuracy of his forecasts that he issued a statement saying: “The voters of Texas Saturday will more than likely send Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson to Washington as their junior Senator.” “Lyndon Johnson is pulling away,” said the
Houston Post
after its last poll of that crucial city. He had 43 percent and O’Daniel 22 percent. Mann and Dies were far behind and fading.

Lyndon Johnson felt he couldn’t lose. Before O’Daniel had entered the race, he had been, for the first time in his life, confident of success. Now, with O’Daniel neutralized, his mood soared upward to euphoria as fast as it had plummeted into depression five weeks before. A staff responsive to its master’s every mood was euphoric, too. A reporter who visited Johnson’s headquarters found his supporters “jubilant. They said the race was over.” The young men were congratulating not only the candidate, but themselves, for their foresight in hitching their wagons to his star. That star had risen far faster than even the most optimistic of them had hoped. The Chief was going to be the youngest member of the Senate—a Senator at thirty-two. Old companions—L. E. Jones, Russell Brown—were planning to drive to Austin for the victory celebration. Even the candidate’s wife, ordinarily so cautious, was caught up in the elation—as, indeed, she had been caught up in it throughout this campaign in which her husband had seemed to have all the support, of every type, that he could want. “Oh, the adventures we had,” she was to recall. “It was in a way the best campaign ever. … Perhaps it was the wine of youth—we were never tired. And our troops loved us, and we loved them—it was a we campaign: ‘We’re going to win.’”

But Lyndon Johnson was to make a mistake.