The Path to Power (76 page)

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.

H
E 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 after 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.

First, Keach would drive him downtown to his campaign headquarters, a big room on the mezzanine of the Stephen F. Austin Hotel, where he would be handed his itinerary for the day, and a list of the influential men he would meet. Keach would head out of the city while Johnson sat reading beside him on the front seat.

The reading could not have been encouraging. Lyndon Johnson had spent four years learning a district—the hardest type of district to learn; a rural district in which there was little formal political organization with identifiable officials; in a rural district, a newcomer could ascertain the identity of a town’s true leaders—which storekeeper was respected, which farmer was listened to by other farmers—only through endless hours of subtle probing of reticent men. He had spent four years learning not only which men to talk to, but what to say to them: who was proud of a daughter, and who ashamed; who was really for Roosevelt, and who only said he was. And he had learned a district well. But that had been another district. The knowledge he had worked so hard to acquire was useless to him here, in rural precincts he had never even visited.

Sometimes, no one in Johnson’s campaign headquarters even knew how to reach the tiny communities to which he was traveling that day. The itinerary he was handed would contain directions that were sketchy, incorrect, or simply non-existent. During the early days of the campaign—until he himself had written out directions (typical notation made by this future President of the United States: “Grassyville—5 mi below Paige back over same road. To Schwertner, back to Jarrel, Jarrel to Theon, second left out of town, then to Walburg, Walburg to Weir, Weir to Jonah, Jonah to Georgetown”), he had to stop constantly and ask directions, and, even so, often spent a precious hour jolting over a cowpath into the hills only to find it was the wrong cowpath—a lost candidate in a lost cause wandering around a huge district he didn’t know. Often, his aides didn’t even know the correct name of the community’s “lead man”; the memorandum he was handed on the Walburg precinct informed him that its “about no votes all go one way,” at the direction of G. W. Cassens—or was it C. W.? Unfamiliar even with the names of the lead men, his aides were of course unfamiliar with the men themselves: he had to win them over unarmed with even a clue as to their politics or their prejudices. A typical daily memo told him that at his first stop, Lytton Springs, he should “See Mr. Frank Gomillion, who may or may not be for you”; three key farmers in the next area—Dale—were listed; not only was he given no hint of where, in the Dale area’s 200 square miles, their farms might be found, he was given no hint of their views: “Who these men stand for is unknown,” the memo said.

Traveling to these isolated communities was no more discouraging than the reception he received when he arrived.

Johnson had spent four years not only learning a district, but helping a district: working with boundless energy and ingenuity to solve its people’s problems. He had earned a district’s gratitude. But that had been another district—this new district had no idea of what he had done. What must Lyndon Johnson have thought, after four years of tirelessly obtaining pensions for hundreds of veterans, when, heading out to Red Rock one morning, he read a memorandum advising him that it was necessary for him to “get on record concerning veterans’ pensions”?

The district’s ignorance about his accomplishments magnified the misgivings aroused by his age. Claud Wild had dispatched a veteran Texas politician, “Hick” Halcomb, to reconnoiter some towns before Johnson visited them to ascertain their initial reaction to his candidacy, and Halcomb’s confidential memos to Wild contained, over and over again, an ominous phrase: “too young.” Addressing himself to the voters he met in these towns—the quiet, closed-faced farmers—Johnson could see that Halcomb’s pessimism was well founded. Sam Johnson had a favorite saying: “You can’t be in politics unless you can walk in a room and know in a minute who’s for you, and who’s against you.” Sam’s son possessed the gift to which his father had referred. He could see who was for him—and he saw that very few were for him.

The formal speeches he gave in these towns did not do much to improve the situation.

These speeches were generally delivered on Saturday: traditionally, rural campaigning in Texas was largely restricted to Saturdays, the day on which farmers and their wives came into town to shop, and could be addressed in groups. On Saturdays, two automobiles, Johnson’s brown Pontiac and Bill Deason’s wired-for-sound gray Chevy, would head out of Austin for a swing through several large towns. On the outskirts of each town, Johnson would get out of the Pontiac (“He thought it looked a little too elaborate for a man running for Congress,” Keach says) and walk into the town, while the Chevy would pull into the square, and Deason or some other aide would use the loudspeaker to urge voters to “Come see Lyndon Johnson, your next Congressman,” and to “Come hear Lyndon Johnson speak at the square”; to drum up enthusiasm, records would be played over the loudspeaker (“The ‘Washington Post March’—I can still hear it ringing now,” Keach recalls.) But the crowds who came to hear this unknown campaigner were very small—their size discouraging when compared to those who had come to hear Avery or Harris or Brownlee—and the speeches did not move them to much enthusiasm for his candidacy. Written by Alvin Wirtz and Herbert Henderson, their single theme—all-out support of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal—was the right one for that district
and that year when the Supreme Court fight was constantly on the front page of the Austin newspapers, but Johnson’s delivery of his theme lessened its effectiveness. When he read from a prepared text—and if he had one before him, he could not seem to stop reading it—his phrasing was as awkward and stilted as his gestures; he shouted the speech, without inflection. Although he was continually urged by his advisors to look at his audience, he did so infrequently, as if he were afraid to lose his place in the text.

A
FTER THE FORMAL SPEECH
, however, Johnson would circulate through the town, shaking hands with its people—and suddenly there was no awkwardness at all.

When he saw someone he knew, his lean white face “would,” in the words of a Hill Country resident, “just
light
up.” He would stride over, ungainly in his eagerness, and call the man’s name. “Old Herman,” he would say. “How ya comin’?” He would put his arm around Herman’s shoulders. “How
are
ya?” he would say. “Ah’m
awful
glad to see ya.” Looking up at that face, alight with happiness, even the crustiest, most reserved farmer might be warmed by its glow. And the glow would deepen with fond recollection. “Well, the last time ah saw you was at the horse races up to Fredericksburg,” Johnson would say. “We had a
good
time, didn’t we? Remember that mare we bet on?” Lyndon Johnson had not seen some of the people he was greeting for ten years, but his memory of good times they had shared seemed as vivid as if the times had been yesterday. And so was his memory of the names of their kinfolk. Recalls his cousin Ava: “He would say, ‘It’s been a long time. How’s so-and-so?’ And he’d always know some member of his family to talk about. Listening to him, I realized he had a mind that didn’t forget anything. ‘Well, how’s your boy comin’? Ah remember
him!
’” His questions got the other man talking. In no more than an instant, it seemed, a rapport would be established.

The rapport would be cemented with physical demonstrations of affection. With women, the cement was a hug and a kiss on the cheek. The technique was as effective for him as a candidate as it had been for him as a teen-ager. “Lyndon’s kissing” became almost a joke during the campaign—but a fond joke. One elderly Hill Country rancher, annoyed by his wife’s insistence on attending a Johnson rally, growled, “Oh, you just want to be kissed.” (The rancher agreed to take her, but she was ill on the day of the rally, and he went alone. Upon his return, he told his wife, in some wonder: “He kissed
me!
”)

With men, the rapport was cemented with a handshake—and a handshake, as delivered by Lyndon Johnson, could be as effective as a hug.

All politicians shake hands, of course. But they didn’t shake hands as Lyndon Johnson did. “Listen,” Lyndon Johnson would say, standing, lean
and earnest and passionate, before a Hill Country rancher he remembered from his youth. “Listen, I’m running for Congress. I want your support. I want your vote. And if you know anybody who can help me, I want you to get them to help me. I need help. Will you help me? Will you give me your helping hand?”
Will you give me your helping hand?
—it was only as he asked that last question that Lyndon Johnson raised his own hand, extending it in entreaty.

With voters he didn’t know, his approach was equally distinctive. He wanted their hands, too, in his, and after a brief “I’m Lyndon Johnson and I’m running for Congress, and I hope that you will lend me your helping hand,” he would reach out and grasp them. Then, with his hand entwined with the voter’s, he would ask questions: “What’s your name? Where you from? What’s your occupation?” And then, as Ava says, “there was that memory again. That was the key—he always knew somebody. I know your mother, or your father—or some friend. ‘I’ve met so-and-so. He
told
me about you.’ He made a connection.” Seven years before, still a twenty-one-year-old undergraduate, Lyndon Johnson had campaigned for Welly Hopkins. That campaign had been Johnson’s first. But Hopkins, watching the tall, gangling college boy, had concluded that he had a “gift”—“a very unusual ability to meet and greet the public.” Now others saw that gift. They watched Lyndon Johnson’s hand reach out to a voter—and they saw the voter’s hand reach out in return. They saw that once a voter’s hand was grasped in his, the voter wanted to leave it there. They saw that after he had talked to a voter for a minute or two, his arm around him, smiling down into his eyes, the voter did not want the talk to end. “What people saw was friendliness and sincerity, a love of people,” Ray Lee says. The instant empathy Johnson created began, in fact, to cause problems for campaign aides trying to keep him on a tight Saturday schedule. An aide would attempt to urge Johnson along, but the voter, still holding tight to his hand, would walk along with him, trying to prolong the conversation. Sometimes, several voters would walk along. Waiting in the Pontiac, Keach would see Johnson coming—and there would be a small crowd behind him, a crowd reluctant to see him go. “Sometimes,” says Lee, “it was a problem to get him out of town.”