The Path to Power (81 page)

“T
HERE HAD BEEN
such mad rushing for so long,” Lady Bird Johnson recalls. “And then everything came to a sudden dead stop. There was this dreadful day of hiatus, and then the election.”

Shortly after the polls closed on Saturday evening, Sam Stone’s Williamson County vote—3,180—was announced, putting him some 2,400 votes ahead of Johnson. But outside Williamson, Stone did very poorly, and, as the votes came in from other counties, Johnson soon passed him. He soon passed all the other candidates, and pulled steadily ahead throughout the evening. The official totals for the major candidates showed Houghton Brownlee with 3,019 votes; C. N. Avery with 3,951; Stone with 4,048; Polk Shelton with 4,420; Merton Harris with 5,111—and Lyndon Johnson with 8,280, 3,000 votes more than his nearest opponent.

“When I come back to Washington,” Johnson had vowed, “I’m coming back as a Congressman.” Now, less than two years later, he was coming.

A
NALYZING IN DETAIL
the results of the special election for Congressman in the Tenth Congressional District of Texas in 1937—breaking it down by ethnic groups or age brackets or educational levels—is an unrewarding exercise, for the results are both too small and too fragmented to have much significance.

Although the district’s population was estimated at 264,000, only 29,948 persons, one out of every nine residents of the district, went to the polls. And of those voters, only 8,280 cast their votes for Lyndon Johnson. Johnson won the election, in other words, with less than 28 percent of the vote—with only one out of every four votes cast. He won, moreover, with the votes of little more than 3 percent of the district’s population; he was Congressman from a district in which only one out of every thirty-two persons had voted for him.
*
Johnson had been elected with the fewest votes—by far the fewest votes—of any of the nation’s 435 Congressmen.

In a broader context, however, the election was significant for two reasons. One, of course, was that it set Lyndon Johnson on the path of elective office that would lead him to the Presidency, and that would lead America to the Great Society and to Vietnam. The other was the identity of the people who set him on that path.

They were not the people of the plains. Half the district consisted of prairies, and Johnson lost that half; in the district’s five plains counties, in fact, Johnson finished not first but fourth, trailing Harris by a total of more than 800 votes. Johnson’s support came from the hills, from the five counties in the district that lay on the Edwards Plateau. Not only did he win four of those five counties, losing only in Stone’s Williamson County, but he won them by overwhelming margins. If his home county, Blanco, gave him 688 votes to 82 for his nearest opponent, Hays County’s support was also impressive: 940 votes for Johnson, 270 for his nearest opponent.

And within those five counties, the distribution of his votes was striking. Although—to the surprise of all forecasters (and Mayor Miller)—he won Austin on the edge of the plateau, it was the precincts west of Austin, the boxes in the hills, that gave him a substantial margin in Travis County. The votes he received in Williamson County came, in large proportion, not from Georgetown and Taylor, the two “big” towns just below the plateau, but from the hills to the west. And in Blanco, Burnet and Hays counties, the other Hill Country counties, the results followed, in general, an identical pattern: the deeper in the hills a precinct, the more isolated and remote—and poor—its people, the stronger the showing that Lyndon Johnson made in it. He was the candidate of the Hill Country, of one of the most remote, most isolated, most neglected—and most impoverished—areas of a wealthy nation. His 3,000-vote plurality—a plurality whose dimensions had been utterly unsuspected—came principally from the farmers and the ranchers he had visited one by one, from the people in whom he had invested time no other candidate for Congress had ever given them, from the people who had, on Election Day, repaid that investment in kind, giving up their own time—the time so valuable to them—to make the trip, sometimes quite a long trip, to the polling place to cast their votes for Lyndon Johnson.

His very willingness to travel to these people may have been an important reason that they supported him. Not only were they neglected, they felt neglected—they had always felt neglected; the people of the Hill Country had had to plead even to the People’s Party.
“If we do live away up here on the Pedernales River, amid rocks, cliffs and waterfalls, cedars and wild oaks, we are not varments, but have hearts just like men.” “Brethern, in sending out lecturers, please remember our isolated corner, and send us in time of need” “We had an ‘encampment’ and honestly expected the presence of a ‘Big Gun’ with it, but, no we were sadly left, as usual.”
When, finally, a candidate for Congress made the effort to come to them, muddying his shoes to walk across fields to talk to them, they were grateful for his coming.

But his effort was no more important than the philosophy he expressed. Saying he was a poor man like them, he also said he was fighting for the President who was helping the poor—for the only President who had ever helped the poor, for the President who, with bank regulation and railroad regulation and government loans and public works projects, had held out government’s helping hand to the poor instead of the rich. The people of the Hill Country had been asking for such programs for a long time. In half a century, only two long caravans had come out of the Hill Country. One had borne pictures of Lyndon Johnson. The other had borne blue flags.

“He won that election in the byways,” Bill Deason says. Ava Cox says: “That’s what made Lyndon Johnson be elected the first time. … He told them: ‘I
know
what you people are up against. Because I’m one of you people.’ And it wasn’t the people of the cities who elected him, but it was the people from the forks of the creeks.”

That was indeed the reason he won—and the reason no politician had thought he could win. The polls had not shown his strength at the forks of the creeks, for no poll bothered with the people at the forks of the creeks, as no candidate visited them. But Lyndon Johnson had visited these people. And they had sent him to Congress.

N
OTHING ABOUT HIS VICTORY
, however, was as significant as his reaction to it.

“I’m coming back as a Congressman,” he had vowed, and he had kept that vow. And he had done so fast—as he had lived his entire life fast: he had been perhaps the youngest state director of any New Deal agency, now he was, at twenty-eight, although not “the youngest Congressman” he now claimed to be, one of the youngest. He was the same age as his hero ancestor John Wheeler Bunton had been when Bunton had first been elected to public office, only a year older than his father had been when he had first been elected. Was he content? Was he happy now—even for a day?

He was desperately weak—not just because of the appendicitis but because of the effort that had preceded it. He was later to say that during the campaign’s forty days, he had lost forty pounds. When the campaign began, 181 pounds had been stretched thin over his six-foot-three-inch frame. His weight when he entered Seton Hospital is not known, but when he left the hospital two weeks later—after two weeks of bed rest, and a hospital diet designed to fatten him up—his weight was back up only to 151 pounds.

On the day after the election, congratulations had arrived in stacks. (Phrases in the letters from people who had known him as a boy or as a college student or as a congressional secretary provided a panorama of his life. Marsalete Summy, who had heard him talk of his ambitions in a Johnson City schoolyard, wrote: “You have always had a vision ever since I have known you and I am most happy to see that it is being fulfilled for you.” Vernon Whiteside wrote reminding him of “the day at San Marcos” when “I separated you and Babe Kennedy.” Arthur Perry, the older secretary who had taken him under his wing when he got to Washington, wrote: “My dear Congressman!!! Do I get a kick out of that!—Well, sir, when I used to see you wearing those summer suits in the winter time, and skimping on lunches until pay day, the prospect of your becoming Congressman in the immediate future, I must confess, appeared a little indefinite.” Remembering that, when he had found himself in trouble, he had turned for help to
the younger man, Perry also wrote: “On the other hand, when I recall your presentation before the Civil Service Commission … I might have known I was in the presence at that moment of a budding ‘People’s Choice.’” And, aware that Johnson was not quite as wholeheartedly a New Dealer as the campaign had made him appear, he also wrote: “We will be expecting you to make a ‘balance the budget’ speech in the House.”) Early on the morning after Election Day, Johnson sent for his aides, and told them that all the messages had to be answered at once—that very day. Sitting up in bed, smoking one cigarette after another, he began to dictate replies. Many people had expressed a desire to see him so that they could express their congratulations in person, he was told; he wanted to see
them
, he replied; a schedule of visits should be set up at once; he had a lot of people to see before he left for Washington—and he wanted to leave for Washington fast.

The first letters to be answered, moreover, were those not from friends but from enemies: the concession messages from his opponents. And while their congratulations had been strictly
pro forma
, his replies were not.

You didn’t lose, he told Avery, just as I didn’t win. “It was a victory for President Roosevelt.” He repeated that to Sam Stone—“My dear Judge: Thank you very much for your kind telegram. The people voted to support President Roosevelt and his program, and the victory is his”—and, since the Judge would be a more dangerous future opponent than Avery, went on at more length: “You warned me you would show us how to carry Williamson County, and I congratulate you upon the support the homefolks gave your candidacy. Please tell your and my friends there that I admire the way they stood by you.” And to the opponent he considered most dangerous of all—Polk Shelton, who had campaigned with energy, and whose strong beliefs Johnson feared would impel him to run again—his reply went even further: “Thank you for your kind telegram and your pledge of support. … I hope you will always feel that my efforts are at your disposal. Whatever service I may be able to render will be cheerfully and gladly done.”

Letters were not the only means by which he dealt with the men who had been his enemies just twenty-four hours before. The powerful Mayor Miller, so hostile during the campaign, was leaving for Washington the next day on a long-planned visit. Because Johnson did not yet have a secretary in Washington to show the Mayor around, he telegraphed his brother, now Congressman Kleberg’s secretary (Sam Houston had returned to Washington a week before) to do it—and to go all out in doing it, to “give him all the privileges and courtesies of the office.” Johnson would have to run again in eighteen months, and, this time, he would be running not in a special election but in a regular primary in which victory would require not the 28 percent of the vote which he had received, but 51 percent. Any prudent politician would take steps to try to make friends out of enemies, but even very prudent politicians were amazed by both the rapidity and the extent
of the steps Johnson took. The eminently pragmatic Dan Quill had spearheaded the ward-by-ward fight against Miller in Austin; he knew the bitterness of the fight, and the depth of Miller’s dislike of Johnson; he knew that Johnson had visited Miller’s house many times to beg for a truce, and he knew how rude Miller had been in denying him one. Quill, by coincidence, left for a Washington visit on election night, and when he arrived, dropped in to see Sam Houston Johnson, and saw the telegram. Pragmatic though he was, Quill could hardly believe that Johnson had sent it. When he had left Austin, Miller had been Johnson’s most bitter enemy, “and here he had sent a telegram to take care of him. … I never saw anything like it. … When I got in a fight with a fellow in an election, I didn’t forgive him so quickly. … I don’t know how he did it. I wouldn’t have had the nerve to have been nice to those kind of people, but he was. That was just three days after the election, and he wanted to be nice to Tom Miller. …” Quill recalls saying to Sam Houston: “I’ll tell you, Washington is a big city, but it’s not big enough for Tom Miller and me at the same time.” To avoid bumping into the Mayor, “I came back home.”

(Quill did not know the extent to which Johnson had gone to “take care of” Miller. Because he was afraid his brother would not carry out the task with sufficient diligence, he had asked not only Kleberg’s office but Maury Maverick’s to put itself completely at the Mayor’s disposal.)

No effort had been spared to defeat these men; no effort would be spared to win their friendship. One day, before Johnson left for Washington, Emmett Shelton would step out of his office building to walk up Congress Avenue to the Travis County Courthouse, and would see Johnson getting out of his Pontiac, having apparently just parked it. Johnson said hello to Shelton, asked him where he was going, and then insisted that Emmett join him; he would be glad to give him a lift, he said. As they were driving up Congress Avenue, Shelton realized that he had left some papers in his office. Johnson drove him back. Shelton said he would be a few minutes, and said it was no trouble for him to walk to the courthouse. No, no, Johnson said, I’ll wait. Glad to. Take your time. And the Congressman waited there for Shelton as if he were his chauffeur, and as they talked during the brief drive, “He [Johnson] was gracious, very gracious.” Though he had disliked Johnson, “now,” Shelton says, “he was just nice. He was humble.” More than humble, in fact. “He made you feel he was dirt under your feet.” (Shelton didn’t know the full extent of the trouble Johnson was taking to become his friend; Johnson had not, in fact, just parked his car when Shelton came out; he had parked it an hour before, and had been sitting in it for an hour waiting for Shelton to come, to take advantage of the “chance” meeting.) Shelton was not the only opponent thus disarmed; Tom Miller gave Johnson a postelection contribution of $100 to meet any campaign deficit he might have.

What might prevent a Dan Quill or another man from behaving to his
enemies the way Lyndon Johnson behaved would be pride or embarrassment—or any one of a hundred conventional emotions, such as a natural desire to gloat, even for a day or two, over a fallen, and vicious, foe. But Lyndon Johnson had determined many years before the emotion that would govern his life—the emotion that, with “inflexible will,” would be the only emotion that he would
allow
to govern his life. “It is ambition,” he had written, “that makes of a creature a real man.” Pride, embarrassment, gloating: such emotions could only hinder his progress along the road he saw so clearly before him—the “vision” he had indeed held for so long. They were luxuries in which he would not indulge himself.