The Path to Power (77 page)

And he didn’t campaign only on Saturdays.

On the other days of the week, the other candidates campaigned mainly in Austin, or in a “big” town such as Brenham or Lockhart (or, quite often, did not campaign at all). On those days, Johnson campaigned in the tiny towns that dotted the district. No speech had been scheduled for those towns, and none had been prepared by his speech writers. But, more and more often now, he had to give one. A voter who had shaken his hand would begin following him, and another would join him, and another—and soon a Tenth District version of a crowd (fifteen men and women, perhaps, or twenty or twenty-five; “twenty-five would be quite a
crowd,” Deason says) would gather, and someone would shout: “Let’s hear a speech,” and someone else would shout, “C’mon, Lyndon, let’s have a speaking,” and he would be pushed up onto the bed of a truck or a wagon.

And if Lyndon Johnson with a speech in his hands was stilted and stiff and unconvincing, Lyndon Johnson without a speech—Lyndon Johnson alone and unprotected on a flatbed truck; no paper prepared by others to hide behind; nothing to look at but the faces of strangers; Lyndon Johnson with nothing to rely on but himself—was, nervous though he was (his cousin Ava, who had known him since he was a child, saw that he was “terrified up there”), gangling and big-eared and awkward though he was, suddenly was also a candidate with gifts—“very unusual” gifts—that went far beyond “meeting and greeting.”

When, on such unplanned occasions, he talked about the President, it wasn’t in Herb Henderson’s phrases, or Alvin Wirtz’s phrases, but in his own.

“Don’t you remember what cotton was selling at when Mr. Roosevelt went into office?” he would ask.

“Don’t you remember when it was selling at a nickel?

“Don’t you remember when it was cheaper to shoot your cattle than to feed them?

“Don’t you remember when you couldn’t get a loan, and the banks were going to take your land away?

“I’m a farmer like you. I was raised up on a farm. I know what it’s like to be afraid that they’re going to take your land away. And that’s why I’m for Mr. Roosevelt.

“What President ever cared about the farmer before Mr. Roosevelt?” he would ask. “Did Hoover care about the farmer? Did Coolidge care about the farmer? The only President who
ever
cared about the farmer was Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was for the poor man. He wanted to give the poor man a chance. He wanted the farmers to have a break. And he gave ’em a break. He gave
us
a break! He’s the one who did it for us! He’s the one who’s
doin’
it for us! And he’s the one who’s
goin’ to
do it for us! AND I’M BACKIN’ HIM!”

The people before him were, many of them, people he had seen for the first time only a few minutes before. But as a result of his brief conversations with them, he could attach to their faces not only names but circumstances of their lives—and, in so doing, could make them feel that their destiny was linked to Roosevelt’s destiny, and to Lyndon Johnson’s.

“John Miller,” he would say, “didn’t you just now tell me you was goin’ under when the soil conservation came in, and they started payin’ you to let your land lie out? Well, whose program is it that’s paying the farmers to let their land lie out? Roosevelt’s program. Take the CCC. Now, it’s helping
you
, Herman. Didn’t you tell me your boy’s over to Kerrville doin’ terracing?
Well, whose program do you think CCC is? Roosevelt’s. All these programs that have got the farmer out of the hole are Roosevelt’s programs. He’s the man who’s doin’ it for you. And I’m behind him. It’ll take somebody in Congress to keep pushing for the things he wants. And you need to send a Congressman up there who
knows
this.”

Their destinies were linked because of the Supreme Court fight, he told the farmers standing before him. The Court had already struck down one program that had helped the farmer—the AAA; whose fault was it that the government cotton certificates they were holding could no longer be redeemed? Who knew what programs the Supreme Court would strike down next? “Can you afford to risk the loss of your personal progress under Mr. Roosevelt? I tell you, this fight of the President is one that affects you and me right in this district. It means our bread and butter, and our
children’s
bread and butter.”

That was why, he said, they should vote for Lyndon Johnson. “The eyes of the nation are on us right here,” he would say. “The whole country’s watching what you do on April 10. This is the first and only test at the polls in all of the United States of the President’s program.” The other candidates in the congressional race were all alike, he said. Sure, only two of them were openly opposing the Court plan. But the rest, he said, are noncommittal, vacillating, temporizing—“They’re hanging back like a steer on the way to the dipping vat.” Only “one man in this race has taken a positive stance,” he said. “I am that man. A vote for me will show the President’s enemies that the people are behind him. This is the test. Mr. Roosevelt is in trouble now. When we needed help, he helped us. Now
he
needs help. Are we going to give it to him? Are
you
going to give it to him? Are you going to help Mr. Roosevelt? That’s what this election is all about. Don’t let anybody kid you. That’s what this election is all about!”

No Fundamentalist preacher, thundering of fire and brimstone in one of the famed Hill Country revival meetings, had called the people of the Hill Country to the banner of Jesus Christ more fervently than Lyndon Johnson called them to the banner of Franklin Roosevelt. And, as in revival meetings, passions rose.

Often they began to spill over when Johnson began talking about the NYA. “That was when Lyndon
really
touched people,” says his cousin Ava. “Because what people here wanted more than anything else was for their children to have a better life than they had had.”

Seeing a young man in the crowd, Johnson would speak directly to him—but in words that touched chords in the parents in the crowd. Calling the young man by name, he would tell him that he knew what it took to get an education if you were a poor boy. He knew, he said, because
he
had been a poor boy—and he had gotten an education.

“There’s an education for every boy and girl that wants one,” he would say. “It’s up to you. You can get it if you want it. You have to work for
it. You can do what I did. You can pick up paper. You can pick up rocks. You can wash dishes. You can fill up cars. You can do a lot of things if you want that education. But if you want it, you can get it.”

A Roosevelt program—the NYA—would help you get it, he said. And if he, Lyndon Johnson, was elected Congressman,
he
would help you get it. He had already helped others. Turning to a father in the audience, he would demand: “Well, how’s
your
boy comin’? I remember
him
. Didn’t I get him a job down in San Marcos? How’s he comin’?”

Suddenly his voice would not be the only voice. “Oh, yes, you sure did,” the father would shout back. “You got him that job. And he’s doin’ just
fine!
We’re sure proud of him.” Another voice would shout. “That’s right, Lyndon. You tell ’em, Lyndon!” Another voice would shout, “
A
-men.” And all at once many voices would be shouting. “
A
-men, Lyndon.
A
-men, Lyndon! You tell ’em, Lyndon!”

And sometimes the response took a form even more impressive than shouting. “Sometimes,” Carroll Keach says, “when the Chief would start talking, the people in the crowd would be kidding with him, and laughing. But then he’d really get started, and the crowd would get quieter and quieter, and finally there would be just a group of farmers standing there and listening very hard, without saying one word.” Observers less impressionable than Keach started noticing the same phenomenon. On March 16, Johnson was pushed up onto a flatbed truck in Lockhart for an impromptu talk. Hick Halcomb, the old pol who was following Johnson around for Claud Wild, was present; his memo to Wild that night did not have its customary cynical flavor. “Speech was to some 45 men, who listened unusually attentively,” it said. Two days later, Halcomb reported from Georgetown: Johnson “made a speech at urgence of group on street corner. Spoke to 64 people. … Not a man moved out of his tracks during speech.” Another report was filed from Bastrop. “Reaction to Johnson’s appearance started folks talking,” Halcomb wrote. “I followed him and listened to such remarks as these: ‘He’s a fine-looking chap. He’s a go-getter.’” Halcomb’s memos began to have a different tone. It was hard to believe, he told Wild, but he was beginning to think that maybe Lyndon Johnson had a chance.

I
F MEN
, even men who had long known Lyndon Johnson, now became aware of new dimensions of his “gift”—his ability not only to meet but move the public—they became aware also of new dimensions of the effort he would make in using that gift. The men who knew Lyndon Johnson best—who knew best how utterly unsparing of himself he was willing to be, how “hours made no difference, days made no difference, nights made no difference”—had felt at the start of the campaign that, as Gene Latimer put it, “No matter what anyone said, we felt he had a chance, because we knew
he would work harder than anyone else.” But even these men had not known how hard he would work.

Very few of the local influentials, the “lead men,” were for him. The leaders in the four counties in which Harris had been District Attorney knew Harris; the leaders in the counties Brownlee represented in the Legislature knew Brownlee; the leaders in Williamson County knew Sam Stone; leaders throughout the entire district, because they had needed favors from Buchanan, knew Buchanan’s man Avery—when Johnson visited them, they were courteous to him, but they also let him know quite clearly that their allegiances, forged over many years, were not transferable to a stranger, particularly not to some young—too young—stranger who thought he should be a Congressman.

But he didn’t stop visiting them. In Brenham, for example, he was, as Keach puts it, “working on an old Judge”—Sam D. W. Low. “His house sat on a knoll,” and the Judge sat on the porch. After calling on Low, Johnson would come back to the car, and say, “Boy, I don’t know. That was a tough cookie. Well, I tried, anyway.” He kept trying. Low told Johnson he was for Avery, and was going to stay for Avery, “but,” Keach says, “he [Johnson] kept going back. Many times I sat down on the road in the car watching him take the long walk up that trail to the house where the Judge was sitting on the porch.”

“He kept going back” even to the one leader who did not, in dealing with Johnson, observe the tradition of courtesy: Austin’s beefy Mayor Miller, an arrogant, hot-tempered man who had taken an instant and deep dislike to Johnson. Johnson humbled himself before him; returning to Austin after a day’s campaigning, he would sometimes tell Keach to drive by the Mayor’s big house on Niles Road; if Miller’s car was parked there, indicating that the Mayor was home, he would ring the doorbell and ask if he could come inside for a talk. Miller never wavered in his views, but Johnson never stopped dropping by.

One “lead man” who was for him (because his daughter was married to Johnson aide Ray Lee) was County Judge Will Burnet of Hays County. But Hays looked bad for Johnson nonetheless: the county was the site of San Marcos—and of Johnson’s alma mater, Southwest Texas State Teachers College. As the
Austin American
put it, “Johnson was prime mover in organization of a college secret society known as the ‘White Stars’ which for some years controlled campus politics. … The college days’ animosities have carried over into later political life.” Johnson needed “Judge Will” not just to support him, but to actively campaign for him. The road to the Burnet Ranch (where the stone ranch house was occupied by the Judge’s father; the Judge lived in a log cabin “dog-run”) was paved—a County Judge’s road was always paved—but it was so isolated, deep in the Hill Country fastnesses, that from the nearest town, San Marcos, it was twenty-four
miles to the ranch. Yet, every time Johnson finished campaigning in San Marcos, no matter how late the hour, he would tell Keach not to head back for Austin but to head instead into the blackness of a Hill Country night to see Judge Will.

He kept going back to towns, too, visiting repeatedly not just the district’s six “big” towns in which the other candidates campaigned but tiny villages which most of the other candidates never visited at all. Many of these towns did not even have a town square; they consisted of a line of little stores along the road. On a typical day, he would stop in five or six towns, going into each business establishment on the square or along the road, shaking hands, talking for a few minutes wherever he found a group, speaking while leaning on counters (“Made favorable impression on farmers in Beyers Store by eating lunch on counter—cheese, crackers, soda pop,” Halcomb reported), and on bars (“The fact that Lyndon talked to old man Pfluger in beer joint and treated nine to beers didn’t hurt any”), speaking through swirling lint (in cotton gins whose owners had been persuaded to stop the pounding of the baler long enough so the workers could hear him speak), and in front of blazing forges (“LJ talked informally to a group of about eight in a blacksmith shop. Of this group, John Cowart, farmer, was thoroughly sold. Henry Conlee, Raymond Welsch, Albert Gardner, all veterans, were given sales talk, but they are still uncommittal. LJ recited his record in getting claims through”).

If Johnson was to win this election, however, it would not be in towns that he won it. The votes that he needed could not be harvested in groups even as large as nine or eight. So, during the forty days—the forty long days—of his first campaign, towns were only stopping places. His real campaign was waged outside the towns: in the vast empty spaces of the hills and the plains.

Scattered outside the towns along the lonely roads, sometimes paved, usually graveled, were occasional general stores. He stopped at every store, purchasing some small item in each so as to predispose the proprietor toward him—if not cheese and crackers then a can of sardines, which he would open and eat on the counter. If he was lucky, there would be a farmer or two there, and he could talk to several people at once. If no one was inside but the storekeeper, he would talk to the storekeeper, in as casual and unhurried a manner as if he had nothing else in the world to do. Scattered along the roads were filling stations, and he stopped at every one of these, too. At most of these stations, there was only one pump outside, and one voter—the proprietor—inside. But he chatted unhurriedly with that voter. (To ensure that he would be able to buy some gas at each station, he was careful never to fill his tank completely; Polk Shelton’s brother Emmett recalls the lesson in country campaigning that Johnson gave him: “I drove down to Smithville one day; I had been planning to put posters in gas station windows, but every time I would get to one, Lyndon had been there before us. And at
each one, he would go in and buy a gallon or two. We didn’t need any gas; I had filled up before we left. So they were a little cold to us.”)