The Path to Power (73 page)

H
E ALSO
provided Johnson with a strategy. It could be summed up in three words: Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Roosevelt’s Supreme Court-packing plan, announced just two weeks before, had promptly been denounced by a Texas Legislature subservient to the state’s reactionary monied interests, but when, on February 20, Harold Ickes, addressing the Legislature during a trip to Texas, had defended the President’s proposal, the audience in the packed galleries had leaped to its feet wildly cheering, in a broad hint that the state’s people did not agree with their representatives. Nowhere in the state was support for the President more firm than in the Tenth District, whose Hill Country counties had been the stronghold in decades past of the People’s Party (the birthplace of the Farmers’ Alliance, the Party’s precursor, was, of course, the Hill Country town of Lampasas, a bare two miles north of the district line). An
Austin American
poll of the district would shortly reveal a majority of seven to one in support of the President’s plan. Johnson should support Roosevelt’s proposal, Wirtz said—should, in fact, make support of the Supreme Court plan the main plank in his platform. He should support all Roosevelt’s programs. His campaign should be based on all-out, “one hundred percent,” support for the President, for all the programs the President had instituted in the past—and for any program the President might decide to initiate in the future.

Behind that strategy lay nothing but pragmatism. Wirtz was not in favor of the Supreme Court plan, he was opposed to it; he had been telling intimates that he was a “constitutional lawyer,” and therefore not in favor of any alteration in the Court’s composition. In private, his phrases were more pungent. His views—not only on Court-packing but on the New Deal as a whole—were the views of the reactionary Roosevelt-hating businessmen of whom he was both legal representative and confidant. Pragmatically, however, the Roosevelt strategy was Johnson’s best chance to win. It would offset his greatest weakness—the fact that he was unknown to the voters—by giving him an instant, popular, identification: “Roosevelt’s man.” It would give him an instant leg-up on several potential candidates who were anti-Roosevelt: State Senator Brownlee, for example, had voted for the Legislature’s condemnation of the Supreme Court plan. And it might obtain for him the support of two passionate New Dealers, Governor Allred and the publisher of the
American
(and of the
Austin Statesman
), Charles Marsh.

Most of the candidates would be pro-Roosevelt, Wirtz said; therefore, Johnson would have to be more pro-Roosevelt than they. If he could identify himself more firmly than any other candidate as the President’s champion,
he would obtain the support of district voters eager to show their support for the President in general, and for his Supreme Court plan in particular. L. E. Jones, then clerking for Wirtz’s firm, was taking dictation from Senator when Johnson rushed in on that fateful February 23. He remained throughout the conversation, and says he recalls it vividly. And Wirtz repeated his views at Johnson’s home that evening, with other persons present. They recall Wirtz saying that Johnson’s only chance to win was “to get an issue,” and that the issue should be the Court-packing plan. “The discussion,” Jones says, “was that the Court-packing plan might be a pretty lousy thing, but the hell with it, that’s the way to win. Wirtz said, ‘Now, Lyndon, of course it’s a bunch of bullshit, this plan, but if you’ll flow with it, Roosevelt’s friends will support you.’”

Jones, of course, was aware that Johnson himself was less than enthusiastic about the New Deal. He never heard Johnson express a private opinion on the Supreme Court proposal, but, he says, “It didn’t make a rat’s ass [of difference] to him one way or the other.” The strategy was accepted in the same spirit in which it was offered.

W
IRTZ’S SUPPORT
carried with it cash. As attorney for the Magnolia and the ’Umble, he could tap their lobbying funds; although Johnson would not, of course, announce his candidacy until after Buchanan’s funeral, that very day Wirtz phoned the headquarters of the two oil giants and obtained the first contributions for the Johnson campaign fund.

Wirtz was also delegated to obtain funds from another source. Asked whether she knew at once that her husband would run for Buchanan’s seat, Lady Bird Johnson replied, “We sure did
not
know we were going to run. Looking at it pragmatically, we did not have any right to expect we would win. Lyndon was from the smallest of the ten counties. He was quite young. And finances were a problem.”

Wirtz, in his subtle way, enlisted her enthusiasm. “He and I had a talk, and I asked if there was a chance for Lyndon to win. He was a lawyer, and he had all the reasons lined up why we couldn’t win. And at the same time he had the reasons why we might never get another chance. He said, ‘Yes, there’s a very
real
chance, and I’d be quite lacking in my duty if I didn’t tell you that it’s not a big chance, but there is a chance.’ So I called my Daddy. …”

The importance of the call was not so much in the money raised—Wirtz himself would eventually raise far more—but in the speed with which it was made available to the campaign. Fund-raising, even by Alvin Wirtz, took time, and time was a luxury this unknown candidate couldn’t afford. A large sum of seed money, at least $10,000, was needed immediately to get the campaign under way, and when Lady Bird called Cap’n
Taylor, and he asked, “How much do you need?” she replied, “We need ten thousand dollars.”

With his campaign thus made viable, Johnson was able to bring to it the resource he had created with such care: the organization already in place and at work at the NYA. Kellam, who had been appointed acting director when Johnson resigned to run, let the top NYA staffers know they could campaign for Johnson; to a man they flocked to his banner.

Bill Deason, his first follower, who had begun following his banner in San Marcos years before, was in San Antonio when he heard the news of Buchanan’s death. “I didn’t have to ask anyone what was going to happen,” he says. “Within a few hours after his death, Lyndon called me. … He didn’t mention running. He didn’t mention the death. He just said, ‘You know what’s happened?’ I said yes, and he said, ‘You’d better come on over here.’ … So I got into my car and drove to Austin.”

The car was Deason’s most precious possession: a gleaming, spotless new Chevrolet which he kept polished to a high gloss. He was particularly proud of the fact that he didn’t owe any money on the car; he had saved for more than two years so that he could buy it free and clear. When he heard that Lyndon Johnson was running, he realized that a campaign car would be needed, one with a loudspeaker attached to its roof; he donated the car to the campaign, and allowed holes to be drilled into its roof for the bolts that secured the loudspeaker. And before he donated the car, he drove it down to his home town of Stockdale, where they knew him at the bank, and borrowed $500 on it—and when he gave Lyndon Johnson his car, he gave him the $500, too.

Some drove from farther away than San Antonio. Little Gene Latimer was at his desk in the Federal Housing Administration in Washington when he heard that “the Chief” might run. “I called him long distance to ask if he could use any help, and he told me he wished I was there.” Less than two days later, he was. He had hung up the telephone, arranged for a leave (his supervisor, he explains, “was an admirer of Mr. Johnson’s”), run out to his car, and left on the 1,600-mile trip to Austin—and, except to fill the car with gas, he had not stopped driving until he got there; when he arrived, “I was too exhausted to do anything except pass out.”

Like the Chief, his men were unfamiliar with the district. Unlike
Avery’s organization, or Mayor Miller’s, or Brownlee’s or Harris’, they had no contacts, no friends. But they had the enthusiasm of the young—and faith in their leader. In part this faith was based on experience. “No matter what anyone said, we felt he had a chance, because we knew he would work harder than anyone else,” Latimer says. In part it was blind confidence. Deason says he never had “a doubt in the world” that Johnson would win any contest he entered. “We just assumed if he went into it, he would win.”

A
STRATEGY
, money, an organization—these would give this unknown candidate a slim chance of victory against every opponent but one. Against that one opponent, nothing could give him a chance. Nothing could offset the sentimental appeal of a vote for Old Buck’s widow. If Mrs. Buchanan decided to run, Wirtz told Johnson frankly—and Johnson knew he was right—she would win.

And it began to look as if she was going to run. Buchanan’s funeral was held on Friday, February 26. On Saturday, the district’s most prominent politicians returned to the black-draped house in Brenham to pledge the sixty-two-year-old Mrs. Buchanan their unanimous support. Among them was Avery, who not only said he would not run if she would, but who also volunteered to serve as her campaign manager, as he had served as her husband’s. Avery’s sentiments were echoed by the other leading candidates, all of whom, the
Austin American
reported, “will stay out of the race” if she entered it. In this article, Johnson’s name was included in a list of potential candidates; his candidacy, too, the
American
reported, was “subject to Mrs. Buchanan’s remaining out.”

All day Saturday, Johnson waited anxiously in his Happy Hollow Lane house as speculation mounted that the widow would run, and then, late on Saturday night, one of Johnson’s friends, who had been waiting at the
American
’s printing plant, ran into the house with an early copy of the Sunday paper, which contained an article that seemed to confirm the speculation. Although the article’s lead said only that Avery had emerged from a meeting with Mrs. Buchanan’s son to promise that an announcement on her candidacy would be made on Monday, farther down in the story—near the very end—was a paragraph that indicated what the announcement was going to be: “Family associates of Mrs. Buchanan said that Mrs. Buchanan has kept closely familiar with all legislative matters affecting the district. … They said she is thoroughly conversant with the district’s interests in Congress, to carry through the unfinished portions of Cong. Buchanan’s program.”

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.

A
FTER 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.