The Path to Power (79 page)

The great distances that had to be covered in Texas political campaigns, and the amount of time that politicians were therefore forced to spend traveling by car, had created a Texas political custom: while their chauffeurs drove them from town to town, most politicians spent considerable time sleeping. Keach would watch Johnson try to sleep. “He would try to rest between people,” he says. “He sat in the front seat next to me, and I would see him close his eyes, but never for more than a minute or two, and then he’d just jerk up. He couldn’t sleep.”

Instead, he worked—in a rather unusual fashion. Leaving a town, Johnson would begin talking, not to Keach but to himself, about the people he had met there, the personal and political likes and dislikes that they had revealed. “It was like he was going over his mental notes,” Keach says. “Who the people were, and little things about them, and who their relatives were, or how someone had reacted to some remark he had made. Someone didn’t like something he had said—why not? ‘I don’t understand why she didn’t react to such-and-such.’” In this sense, the talking was a review, and a preparation—a review of the people and town he had just visited, and a preparation for the next time he would visit them, so he would know what to say to them. “It was like he was having discussions with himself about what strategy had worked or hadn’t worked, and what strategy he should use the next time.” But the talking was also a critique of himself: self-criticism that was harsh, merciless. “He would talk about whether he had had a successful day, and if he had made a good impression or not. And lots of the time he felt he wasn’t doing too good. And he would tell himself it was his own fault. ‘Boy, that was dumb!’ or ‘Well, you just lost that box. You lost it, and you need it.’” And it was exhortation—self-exhortation that was also harsh and merciless. “‘Well, you’ll just have to do better, that’s all.’ ‘You’ll just have to do something else.’” And as Keach listened, he would try out “something else,” practice different approaches he could use the next time he saw the person, run through—aloud—the names of “people that he thought could talk to him.” The two men spent hours in the car together, and hour after hour Johnson would talk this way to himself, lashing himself for his mistakes at the last town, lashing himself into readiness for the next town. And always “like memorizing,” going over and over people’s names and their relatives and their prejudices as if to chisel them into his mind so that they would spring to his lips the next time he saw them.

Only Keach saw the full extent of his fatigue. “Boy, sometimes he would get
so
tired,” he says. “He would just slump there. He would close his eyes, but he couldn’t sleep. So he’d start talking again. Maybe he had finished his memorizing about one town, going through all the people. So he’d just start all over again, right at the beginning. And he’d just get more
and more tired. But when we’d get to the next town, he’d just bound out of the car, and start walking around like he was fresh as could be. He never let the voters see his fatigue.”

D
ESPITE HIS EFFORT
, he seemed unable to overcome the handicaps with which he had begun.

Only his sparsely populated home county was solid for him, and he had been unable to unhitch the leaders of the more populous counties from their “home men.” He had spent so much time with Judge Low down in Brenham, but Low now publicly announced that he was sticking with Senator Brownlee; Keach had sat outside Mayor Miller’s home so many times while Johnson pleaded his cause inside, but Miller now reiterated, even more emphatically, his support of C. N. Avery. The “carpetbagger” and “youth” issues were still weighing heavily with the voters. On March 25, the
San Antonio Express
, which three weeks earlier had found Avery far ahead of the field, took another poll—which showed Avery even further ahead. This poll, which forecast the final vote totals of the candidates, predicted that Johnson, with an estimated 6,000 votes, would finish in third place, 200 votes behind Merton Harris—and more than 4,000 votes behind Avery, who would, the poll estimated, finish with 10,500 votes. “With two more weeks to come around the bend and down the home stretch … [of this] horse race,” the
Express
said, “the favorite is leading by four lengths.” And, the
Express
said, “the indications are that” Avery’s margin was continuing to widen. Another poll, in the
San Antonio Light
(which Johnson promptly dubbed the San Antonio Blight), placed Johnson behind not only Avery and Harris but also Brownlee and Polk Shelton. Johnson believed that he was doing better than the polls indicated. He felt he was doing well among the isolated rural voters—who were not included in the polls, in part because the polls were conducted by telephone and many of these voters did not possess telephones, in part because past experience led pollsters to discount the preference of rural families since many of them did not vote; time was far too valuable to an impoverished farmer for him to waste it driving long distances over unpaved roads to the voting box. But Johnson’s belief was not shared by the district’s veteran politicians; their own soundings confirmed the poll’s conclusion. Those of them who had, at the urging of Wirtz or Ed Clark, agreed to remain neutral for a while to see if Johnson had a chance, now began, one by one, to announce for his opponents; several who had agreed to introduce Johnson at rallies in their home towns suddenly found excuses for not doing so; even Governor Allred began dissociating himself from his candidacy. This race was Johnson’s chance, quite possibly his only chance. And he was losing the race.

A
S HE ENTERED
the home stretch, however, he made two improvements in his strategy.

One was his own inspiration. He always enjoyed such great success with elderly people; now he invested a valuable campaign morning in a visit to the Austin home of seventy-three-year-old Albert Sidney Burleson, who had himself been elected to Congress from the Tenth District, in 1898, as a young man of thirty-four, to begin a distinguished career climaxed by a term as Postmaster General of the United States under Woodrow Wilson. The investment paid off handsomely. Burleson, long retired and ailing, was an almost legendary figure in the district, from one of its legendary families (Burleson County was named for his grandfather, a hero of San Jacinto). And Johnson emerged from his home bearing his handwritten statement that “I hope the people of this district will elect a young man who can develop. … To elect an old man is for the people to throw the office away.” The statement made page one in the Austin newspapers, and, of course, in the weeklies. And Johnson made the most of the statement; at climactic moments during his speeches, one White Star, planted in the audience, would shout, “General Burleson is right!” and another would shout back, “Let’s send a young man to Congress!” and a third would shout, “Let’s do what General Burleson says!”

The other improvement was his father’s inspiration.

Lyndon Johnson was very dejected as he sat, on the day the
Express
poll appeared, in his parents’ home in Johnson City after hours of campaigning, talking to his parents, his brother, his Uncle Tom, his cousin Ava Johnson Cox, and Ava’s eight-year-old son, William, known as “Corky.” The leaders were almost all against him, he said; he had several large rallies scheduled, and he had not been able to persuade a single prominent individual to introduce him.

So, Ava recalls—in a recollection echoed by Lyndon’s brother—“his Daddy said, ‘If you can’t use that route, why don’t you go the other route?’”

“What other route?” Lyndon asked—and his Daddy mapped it out for him.

There was a tactic, Sam Johnson said, that could make the leaders’ opposition work for him, instead of against him. The same tactic, Sam said, could make the adverse newspaper polls work for him, instead of against him. It could even make the youth issue work for him. If the leaders were against him, he told his son, stop trying to conceal that fact; emphasize it—in a dramatic fashion. If he was behind in the race, emphasize that—in a dramatic fashion. If he was younger than the other candidates, emphasize that.

Lyndon asked his father what he meant, and his father told him.

If no leader would introduce Lyndon, Sam said, he should stop searching for mediocre adults as substitutes, but instead should be introduced by a young child, an outstanding young child. And the child should introduce
him not as an adult would introduce him, but with a poem, a very special poem. You know the poem, he told Rebekah—the one about the thousands.

Rebekah knew the poem. And when Lyndon asked who the child should be, Sam smiled, and pointed to Ava’s son. In an area in which horsemanship was one of the most esteemed talents, Corky Cox was, at the age of eight, already well known for the feats of riding and calf-roping with which he had swept the children’s events in recent rodeos; the best young cowboy in the Hill Country, people were calling him. “Corky can do it,” Sam said.

All the next day, Sam trained him. “He wanted Corky to really shout out ‘thousands,’” Ava recalls. “He wanted him to smack down his hand every time he said that word. I can still see Uncle Sam smacking down his hand on the kitchen table to show Corky how.” And that night, at a rally in Henly, in Hays County, Lyndon Johnson told the audience, “They say I’m a young candidate. Well, I’ve got a young campaign manager, too,” and he called Corky to the podium, and Corky, smacking down his hand, recited a stanza of Edgar A. Guest’s “It Couldn’t Be Done”:

The audience applauded the eager young boy, and before the applause had died down, Lyndon Johnson took off his coat, and, with his version of “a bit of a grin” (combined with a nod to Corky to make sure the audience got the point), started in to attack the “thousands”—the
San Antonio “Blight,”
for example—who said that just because he was behind, he couldn’t win.

T
HE
H
ENLY RALLY
took place on March 26, Good Friday. It was one of many Johnson rallies that day. Avery, whose campaign had been notably casual even before he had learned the previous day of the
Express
poll, decided that a “four-length” lead justified his celebrating the holy day with a day of rest. Johnson headed out to Hays County. Hard as he had run before, now, with the race seemingly lost, he ran harder.

The weather, mild and springlike the previous week, had changed overnight; when he awoke Friday morning, the temperature had dropped to thirty-two, and as he dressed, a hard, driving rain began to fall. He and his aides arrived in San Marcos, at the edge of the Hill Country, to be greeted
by the news that an outdoor rally scheduled there had been canceled. Pulling on a slicker, he walked through the rain for hours, going from store to store, entering each store smiling through the water running down his face. By the time he left San Marcos, he was wet through despite the slicker.

“From San Marcos,” a reporter wrote, “the fast-moving party” of “mud-speckled campaigners … went into the hill country, stopping first at Wimberley, then at Driftwood, before swinging west at Dripping Springs and on to Henly”—speeding (“C’mon, Carroll, let’s
go!
”) through the rain that rolled across the hills in blinding sheets. The temperature continued to drop. The rain turned to freezing sleet. Late-Spring northers like this had destroyed so many hopes in the Hill Country; this storm was, in fact, destroying hopes that day, killing corn and fruit that had been lured out of the ground by the previous week’s warmth. Johnson’s aides feared for a while that the storm would deal still another blow to Johnson’s hopes. Large rallies had been scheduled in those Hill Country towns; the storm, they feared, would cut attendance. Arriving in each town, however, they found the courthouse or general store packed with farmers and their wives; these towns were in Will Burnet country, and Judge Will had finally emerged from his dog-run to “put his might behind” Johnson; during this “hard-driving day in Hays County, in which the candidate swept on through driving rains … and braved chilling cold winds,” another reporter wrote, “the people came out to meet Johnson and to hear him talk.”

And he talked. At each stop, he would hoist Corky onto the judge’s bench or onto the store counter, and the boy would tell him that “There are thousands to prophesy failure.” Pulling off his dripping jacket, the candidate would wipe his hand across his dripping face and grin around the room. His voice was very hoarse—because he shouted his speeches, his throat had been hurting almost since the campaign began—but he shouted now. If he felt he was losing, he let none of his listeners know how he felt. “Everywhere I go, the people declare I’m the high man,” he said. “Second place is entirely a local matter. It’s Johnson and Avery; Johnson and Brownlee; Johnson and Shelton; Johnson and somebody. We’ve got this race won, and now it’s a matter of how big the plurality. … We have two weeks to go and we’re building up the total every day.” He talked of Burleson. “Why don’t you write to the General and ask him how he feels?” he shouted. “He’ll tell you that you ought to send a young man to Congress.” And he talked of Roosevelt, and of the Supreme Court, which, he told these farmers, had stepped in and told the President, “Stop! You can’t help the farmers!”