The Path to Power (78 page)

Between the stores and the filling stations, along the lonely roads, other roads—unpaved, ungraveled, often ungraded—would cut off. These roads led into the hills, or across endless expanses of prairie on which no house or human figure could be seen. He turned off on those roads. The Pontiac might bounce along them for miles. Cutting off from them would be other even narrower roads—mere paths leading up into the hills, no more—which led to individual farms. He turned off on every path. Sometimes, so scattered were homesteads in this district in which forty acres were needed to support a single cow, he had to travel for miles along such a path. At intervals, a gate would bar it, to keep the cattle from straying. Johnson would get out and swing it open, careful to close it after Keach drove through. The path would grow rougher; the big car would lurch along the ruts. The slow progress would continue mile after mile, before finally, sometimes far off in the distance, a farmer would be seen at work in his fields. The car would jolt to a halt. Getting out, Johnson would climb the barbed-wire fence next to the path, and walk toward him. There might be several fields, and several fences, before he reached that tiny figure in the distance, who might have stopped working now and would be standing watching the tall, gangling stranger—wearing a necktie and a white shirt that glared in the sun—clambering awkwardly across the barbed wire. But the stranger’s face would be alight with happiness to meet him, and with sincerity. And he would stand and chat with the farmer, one foot up on the wheel of the cultivator or the handle of the plow, as if he had nothing else in the world to do.

Day after day, while his opponents rested for the next Saturday, or delivered a major speech or two, Lyndon Johnson campaigned like this. The district covered 8,000 square miles; there were few sections of it that Johnson didn’t visit. The fifty miles of State Highway 290 between Austin and Johnson City were barren miles, but at least at the end of them there was Johnson City, with its 300 or so votes. The district, however, extended twelve miles farther to the west beyond Johnson City. Seven miles beyond Johnson City was the “community” of Hye. When Lyndon Johnson had been a little boy, there had been a cotton gin at Hye, but the land in that area had worn out, and the gin was closed now. The “community” consisted of a one-pump filling station, and a combined general store/post office with a pressed-tin front. Lyndon Johnson never came to Johnson City without heading beyond it, still on paved Route 290, to Hye, where there might be a farmer or two shopping and picking up his mail. At Hye, moreover, an unpaved farm road branched south from Route 290. Along the thirty miles of this farm road were no more than a handful of scattered farmhouses. But Johnson never went to Hye without turning off onto that farm road. When, after visiting those farmhouses, he returned to 290, he did not head back to Austin but instead cut off 290 to the north on a rocky
cowpath. Flanking 290 on the north was the Pedernales River. Beyond the river the hills became steeper, higher. From 290, those hills looked utterly empty, but Johnson, who had been raised in this area—the Johnson Ranch on the Pedernales was nearby—knew there were farms in them. If the river was low enough, a car could cross the Pedernales on a “low-water crossing”—a narrow slab of concrete, no guard rails or any other amenities—laid flat across the riverbed near Stonewall (at the ford across which his grandfather had spurred Old Reb to summon a doctor to Johnson’s birth). Turning toward the river, the Pontiac bumped and lurched down to it on a rocky path. Johnson studied the water; if it was low enough, Keach drove across, and up into those hills. In this western end of the district, at the very farthest, most remote end of one of the most remote areas of the United States, votes were not measured in quantities so large as a handful; exactly two registered Democrats lived in the last precinct in Blanco County, for example. But Johnson never visited Johnson City without going beyond it to visit those two Democrats. In the eastern part of the district, portions of the plains were as barren of votes as the hills; beyond Paige, a Bastrop County community of perhaps fifty persons, for example, was Grassyville; on a typical trip to Grassyville, Halcomb noted, Johnson had found present “two people—store owner and customer.” (And the store owner, he noted, was “a deaf old German strong against change in court and will vote for Shelton.”) Johnson never went to Paige without going beyond it to Grassyville. Describing her cousin’s first campaign, Ava Johnson Cox says: “He went to the blackland belt, he went to the sandyland people—he went everywhere. He went to the people that no one had ever gone to. He went to the people on the forks of the creeks.”

The forks of the creeks
. Lyndon Johnson was campaigning not just on the creeks—those tiny tributaries that trickled out of the hills and along the plains to create the little rivers of Central Texas—but on the “forks,” mere rivulets of water that flowed into and created the creeks. The people who lived along the forks of the creeks lived in the district’s emptiest, most isolated sections. And Lyndon Johnson did not rush through these sections. He spent time there. Years before, Welly Hopkins, riding “all the byways with Lyndon,” had spoken of campaigning “up every branch of the Pedernales and every dry creek bed”—and of not merely visiting, but giving a speech to, an audience of only three people in an isolated valley. Now, with Lyndon Johnson campaigning for himself, that scene was repeated over and over. Lyndon Johnson talked of the Supreme Court and of the future of the farmer—talked of Roosevelt! Roosevelt! Roosevelt!—before audiences much smaller than the dozen who might gather on a courthouse lawn. The district’s roads—paved roads, graveled roads, dirt roads, cowpaths—were measured in thousands of miles; by the end of the campaign, by the end of Lyndon Johnson’s forty days, few of those roads would not bear the big Pontiac’s tread marks. Hick Halcomb began to realize that he was hearing,
in one town after another, some version of the same phrase. He would be standing in a town’s courthouse or general store when a farmer from some isolated area entered. “That boy Lyndon Johnson was to see me,” the farmer would say. “That’s the first candidate for Congress that I’ve ever seen.”

Days made no difference to him, nights made no difference to him
. One scene which Carroll Keach was to recall vividly forty years after that campaign, so often had it been repeated during that campaign, occurred at the end of a day of campaigning. The sun might be disappearing behind the hills; the first stars might be out. Or perhaps darkness would already have fallen—the black darkness of the Hill Country unbroken for miles by a single light. He might have pointed the car back toward Austin; if it was dark, the city would be a glow on the horizon as he sped through the black hills, so tired that he could hardly keep awake, and could think only of falling into his bed. And then Johnson, sitting beside him, rechecking in the fading sunlight or in the light from the dashboard the list of names he had been handed that morning, would realize that somehow they had missed one, that one farm back there in the hills behind them had not been visited. “If that happened,” Keach recalls, “we would go back, no matter how hungry and tired we were, no matter how far it was. Sometimes, I could hardly believe we were going back, but we always did.” He would turn the car; they would be heading away from the glow in the sky, back into the hills, back along the highway looking for the mailbox, then along the path the mailbox marked, jouncing through the ruts in the dark. While Keach had been resting at each stop all through the long day, Johnson had been shaking hands and making speeches. Keach knew how tired his Chief was. But his Chief was portraying a candidate with youth and energy. “He would be very fatigued,
very,”
Keach says. “But he never let a voter see the fatigue.” When they reached the farm at the end of the path, all the farmer would see, in the last rays of daylight or in the glow of a kerosene lamp, as Lyndon Johnson strode toward him, was a face—young, eager, enthusiastic—all alight to see him.

J
OHNSON’S DAYS
out in the countryside might begin before the sun came up. They might end after the sun went down: twelve, fourteen hours later. His aides, waiting for him at campaign headquarters or at his home, were shocked at his appearance when he arrived back in Austin. Always thin, he was thinner now, terribly thin, so thin that his shirt collars gaped away from his neck, and his suits drooped off his shoulders. The customary pale whiteness of his face had turned gray; his burning eyes burned now out of sockets sunk deep in his head and rimmed, top and bottom, with skin so dark it looked smudged. In his cheeks, just a few weeks before smooth and youthful, hollows and harsh lines had been carved; his big ears appeared
even bigger—huge—alongside this gaunt, haggard face. His fingers, stained yellow with nicotine—he seemed now always to be holding a cigarette—twisted in each other, and he tore at the skin around his fingernails, which was red and raw. But the days weren’t over when he got back to the city—not nearly over.

His first concern in the evenings was money. Substantial as were the funds he was raising, they were not as substantial as the funds he was spending; his outlays for posters, calling cards, mailings, “campaign workers,” newspaper ads and articles, and radio time was of a prodigality perhaps unprecedented in a Texas congressional campaign. Recalls Latimer: “When he would come in all tuckered out at the end of a day, he would call a meeting, and his first question would be: ‘How’s our money?’”

The answer to that question would invariably be disappointing, because Wild, unconvinced by Halcomb’s reports of Johnson’s effectiveness in the field, still regarded the campaign as hopeless and was only going through the motions as campaign manager. On some days, in fact, the campaign cupboard would be bare. “It would cost three, four hundred dollars just to mail out a day’s letters, and we didn’t always have that,” Latimer recalls. Once, in a late-evening meeting in Johnson’s living room, disappointment and frustration almost boiled over. “He came in one night and asked the campaign manager [Wild] how our money was, and the campaign manager said he didn’t have enough to do something he [Johnson] wanted to do the next day, and he absolutely couldn’t raise any more, and Johnson said, ‘I hired you because you were supposed to be the best money-raiser, and now you tell me you can’t raise any money!’ He said something like: ‘Okay, all I’ve done today is make eighteen speeches. Give me the phone.’” He placed long distance calls to two department store owners in Houston whom he had met while arranging jobs for young people in his capacity as NYA director—two ardent New Dealers who might support him because he was for Roosevelt.

It was important that the Houston businessmen not see the disappointment and frustration. Contributors liked winners. Sitting around his living room, his aides watched Lyndon Johnson as he sat in a big easy chair waiting for the calls to be put through. They saw a man ashen with fatigue, slumped in his chair, his nervous fingers tearing at the flesh around his fingernails. Lighting a fresh cigarette, he bent over, head low as he took his first puff, inhaled deeply—“really sucking it in,” L. E. Jones says—and sat like that, head bowed, cigarette still in his mouth, for a long minute, as if to allow the soothing smoke to penetrate as deeply as possible into his body. But the Houston businessmen didn’t see that man. They only heard his voice. As he talked on the phone, the watchers before him saw a body hunched and tense, a face drawn and gaunt and haggard—but the voice issuing from that face was a voice confident, almost gay (“‘We’re almost over the hump’
—that sort of thing,” Latimer says). And the checks it elicited were substantial.

Later in the evening after Wild had left, and he was alone with his White Stars, listening to their reports on the day’s campaigning, he would no longer have to bottle up his emotions, and they would boil over. If Johnson felt a White Star had made a mistake in talking to some “lead man,” he would rage at him. “Well you lost him all right!” he would shout in a high, shrill voice. “And you lost everybody he knows! You cost me fifty votes today!” In later years, the men who sat with him in his living room during his first campaign would speak of Johnson on the record in terms of his “energy.” Off the record, they speak of the fear that sometimes filled their Chiefs voice. “He would say things like, ‘Well, you can just cross off Bastrop after today. Take a pencil and just cross it off!’ Or, ‘Well you really put a knife into me in Brenham, didn’t you? Just put it in and twisted it!’ There was a lot on the line, and he was afraid he was going to lose. He was terribly afraid he was going to lose.”

But after the outbursts came the work. Tired though Johnson might have been, no part of it was scanted. Had someone failed to persuade a local leader? Should he try another approach? What should it be? Should someone else try? Who would be best? What should
he
say? What could be done in the leader’s box that hadn’t been done already?

Midnight would pass. Who was going where tomorrow? What was each of them planning to do, and say? What themes were working in each area? What new themes should be used? The White Stars would think a point had been settled; Johnson would begin going back over it, painstakingly reexamining every angle.

Hours after midnight would pass. Henderson would produce the speeches he had written that day—not only speeches for Johnson but speeches for Johnson supporters to read over the radio. Johnson read every one, made changes; reread them, made more changes. Ray Lee would bring out the copy and mats for the new newspaper ads; Johnson would check every ad.

Then he would hurry off to bed, for the next morning he had to get a very early start. And the next morning, he would be up at the moment he had said he would be—for it wasn’t an alarm bell that was jerking him out of bed.

Ed Clark had seen a lot of campaigners. “I never saw anyone campaign as hard as that,” he would recall forty years later. “I never thought it was
possible
for anyone to work that hard.”

A
ND CLARK DIDN’T KNOW
how hard Lyndon Johnson was
really
working. No one knew—with the exception of Carroll Keach. Because only Keach,
alone in the car with Johnson for hours each day, knew what Johnson was doing in the car.