Means of Ascent (46 page)

Stevenson made one attempt to answer the charge, although he did so as he had always answered questions in the past, not making a short reply but explaining the political philosophy that had led him to his decision. In an interview with the
Abilene Reporter-News
on July 3, he said: “
My policy is to let everyone alone unless he needs regulating. But when any segment of society becomes a monopoly, it needs to be
regulated. I think the Taft-Hartley Act is all right as far as it is needed to keep down a monopoly.” When Boyett and other advisers suggested that the last sentence might need clarification, Stevenson refused to issue any. One reason was that he felt he had been making statements with similar careful qualifications during his entire public career, and the people of Texas had always understood them, particularly in light of his consistent record. The people of Texas would
understand this one, he said; of course people knew where he stood on Taft-Hartley, and on organized labor, he said. Who could possibly believe he would vote to repeal that Act?
And he did not repeat his statement before the first primary. It appeared in the press—in just a few newspapers, really—only once.

But behind Stevenson’s refusal to repudiate the AFL endorsement lay also Lyndon Johnson’s genius at “reading” men. Johnson had read Coke Stevenson now, and he knew his weakness: his fierce pride, particularly a pride in his reputation for honesty and truthfulness. All his public life—from the time he had been a young county attorney and opponents had attacked his handling of the rustling case involving the son of the prominent Kimble
County family—he had refused to utter a single word of reply to personal attacks. So Johnson, to keep him from replying, made the attacks personal. Not only did Johnson himself, and his supporters, in
radio broadcast after broadcast, continue their attack on the “old man,” ridiculing his lack of courage, impugning his honesty; not only did they “demand” that Stevenson “tell the truth” about his “secret
deal” on the Taft-Hartley Bill; but the demands were deliberately couched in language that, Murphey says, “
anyone who knew Governor Stevenson knew he would never reply to.” For example, Johnson backer Ed
Leach, editor of the
Longview Morning Journal
, wrote to Stevenson “demanding” that he speak out: “I would like to ask you to … break a precedent by
stating your position on anything, but particularly on the Taft-Hartley Law.” Johnson had read his man: Stevenson responded just
as Johnson had known he would respond. Since the personal attacks concerned his “refusal” to say whether he was for Taft-Hartley, it became a matter of pride for him not to say whether he was for it. He said he would not “
be drawn into a name-calling exchange.” Voters knew his views
on organized labor, he said; he hadn’t changed, and they could be sure he never would. And because his support of Taft-Hartley had not been widely publicized, Stevenson’s stance allowed Johnson to claim that Stevenson had never disclosed his views; indeed, newspapers would state repeatedly that the former Governor had made no statement about Taft-Hartley.

Stevenson’s response was based not only on philosophy but on the buttressing of that philosophy by a lifetime’s experience. Time and time again during his long career, candidates had attacked him personally and he had been advised to reply, and time and time again he had refused, always giving the same reason: his record would speak for him—the voters knew where he stood; he hadn’t changed; the voters would therefore know the charges were
false. And, naïve and unrealistic though this reasoning had seemed, time and again it had been proven correct—attack after attack had shattered against his image, in part because his image was so close to the truth that there were no cracks in which the charges could lodge; the charges had indeed been false, and the voters had indeed not believed them.

But Stevenson didn’t understand that, as Boyett puts it, “Lyndon Johnson
wasn’t like other candidates.” He didn’t understand that Lyndon Johnson’s campaign wasn’t like other campaigns, that it was something new in Texas politics. Never before had attacks against Stevenson been repeated day after day, week after week, not only on the
radio, that powerful medium, now, for the first
time in Texas, being exploited to its fullest, but in weekly newspapers, daily newspapers, in campaign
mailings, so that voters heard and saw the charges against him, it seemed, every time they turned on the radio, read a newspaper, opened their mail. Never before had there been a campaign in which the same phrases were drummed into voters’ consciousness so constantly all through June and July. “Secret deal”? Perhaps Coke
Stevenson felt he wouldn’t dignify the charge by denying it. But
dignity was a luxury in a fight with Lyndon Johnson, a luxury too expensive to afford. Perhaps Stevenson had too much pride to deny the charge. Pride was a luxury that an opponent of Lyndon Johnson could not afford. Once Johnson found an issue, true or untrue, that “touched,” he hammered it—until people started to believe it. He had one that touched now; he had found the
jugular and he wasn’t letting go. The charges Johnson was making against Coke Stevenson were false—manufactured out of whole cloth, in fact. They were as false as any charges that had been made against Stevenson in the past.

But, this time, people were beginning to wonder whether they might not be true.

Even the former Governor’s strongest supporters were beginning to wonder, as was shown in a column which expressed the views of the Dallas conservatives. “
Mr. Leach’s letter to Mr. Stevenson was a trifle discourteous, it is true,”
Lynn Landrum wrote in the
Dallas News
. “But it seems reasonable to expect that Mr. Stevenson in his own way will inform the public on this matter, which now
seems to have become a critical issue in the race. The people of Texas … are substantially in favor of the Taft-Hartley Act.… They will want to know Mr. Stevenson’s views.”

Within a startlingly short time after Johnson had begun campaigning by helicopter, his private polls had shown him cutting into Stevenson’s lead, and every day that gap had narrowed. On June 20, a new Belden Poll had been published. Stevenson was no longer leading him by 64 percent to 28, but only by 47 to 37, with Peddy having 12 percent (minor
candidates had a total of 4 percent). The erosion in Stevenson’s popularity,
Johnson’s more experienced advisers had realized, was not as great as it seemed at first glance, since Peddy had had only an insignificant 3 percent in the May poll, and his backers, conservatives, would return to Stevenson once Peddy was out of the race. But now Johnson’s polls showed that since the AFL endorsement, the gap had closed still further. After weeks in which it had seemed that nothing could erode Stevenson’s popularity, there was an erosion at
last.

W
ITH HIS HELICOPTER
and his issue, Johnson’s mood veered from depression to elation. His euphoria was intense. Often, when his aides came at five a.m. to wake him, they found him already awake, and if he wasn’t, he woke the moment Woody gently touched his shoulder. And, Woodward recalls, “he started at full speed. The minute we woke him up, he hit the ground running,” giving orders and gulping coffee while he
shaved. As he headed out the door of his room for his daily 6:45 a.m. broadcast, one staffer would call “
He’s moving out!” to alert the others downstairs, for they would have to scramble to keep up. As he passed them, his strides were long and his arms were swinging; “he was,” in the words of the adoring Woody, “a general moving out in front of his troops.”

After the broadcast—as stilted and stentorian as ever, the engineers in the studios of the little local stations frantically turning dials in an attempt to modulate his voice—he headed for the chopper. Charging from morning to night across the bare brown plains of West Texas, the Johnson City Windmill was landing in eight or nine towns each day now; Johnson was speaking in towns that few candidates for statewide office had ever visited; the helicopter was
enabling him to do, on a statewide scale, what
he had done in the Tenth Congressional District during his first campaign: to go to the people “at the forks of the creek.” Many of them—perhaps most of them—had never seen a candidate for the United States Senate before. But they saw Lyndon Johnson, saw him and heard him talk.

He talked, for example, about his combat experiences—or what he said were his combat experiences. His service in the war was, of course, one of the major themes of his campaign. One of Woody’s assignments was to transfer the Silver Star bar to the lapel of whatever suit jacket Johnson was wearing that day. When possible, he wanted to be introduced by a veteran—preferably one whose service, and sacrifice, had been dramatized by the loss of a limb; in
Spur, for example, Johnson would ordinarily have been introduced by his most powerful and prominent supporter, a physician named Brannen, but it was arranged that Brannen would introduce
Jake Vernell, a veteran who had lost a leg in the war, and that Vernell would be the man who introduced the Congressman. So successful was the Johnson campaign in locating pro-Johnson amputees for this task that the percentage of men introducing Lyndon Johnson who still possessed
all their limbs was surprisingly small. And the introductions stressed the war service: “
Congressman Johnson was fighting in the Pacific until he was recalled to his congressional duties.” Particularly effective was a broadcast over a statewide radio hookup by veterans who told the story of their own war exploits and tied them in to Johnson’s—or what they thought to be Johnson’s. Typical of the newspaper coverage of the broadcast
was the lead in the
Austin American-Statesman:
“
Seven World War II heroes, young men new to politics, told why they are supporting Congressman Lyndon Johnson … [who] was awarded a Silver Star by General Mac Arthur for gallantry in combat action.…” But no one else could talk about Johnson’s exploits the way Johnson could talk about them.

“I shared your boys’ experiences,” he would say in those small towns in which war heroes were revered and in which so many families had lost a son. “I said that if war was declared, I’d go to war beside them, and I did.” He would point to the pin in his lapel or wave the lapel back and forth at the audience (or, when carried away by enthusiasm, would yank off his jacket and hold it over his head, with the lapel stretched out).
“That’s the Silver Star. General MacArthur gave it to me.” He had made sacrifices just as their boys had, he said. He had intended to run in the Senate election in 1942, he said, “
But when that election came around I was in the jungles of New Guinea.”

And, he said, I know what it is to see boys die, because I had a friend die. “He was the boy I roomed with,” Lyndon Johnson said. “He was a country boy, too. He was a pilot, and he flew a B-17, and he was a Colonel. His name was Francis Stevens, but we all called him Steve.” They had been on a mission together, Johnson said, and Stevens’ plane
had been shot down, and he had perished in the crash. And to him, Lyndon
Johnson, had fallen the task of collecting Steve’s personal effects and mailing them to his mother. “I sat in that little room we had shared together, and I got all the letters his mama had written him, and I tied them up to send back to her. And I packed up his clothes. I remember I rolled up his socks. They smelled bad, but they were his, so I sent them to his mama, too.”

And though his wartime experiences were somewhat exaggerated, the telling was tremendously effective—particularly when he tied the experiences in with his pleas for “preparedness.”
“Peace, Preparedness and Progress” might be the words he used during his stilted radio broadcasts, but here, face to face with the people whose votes he needed, he used different words. It cost us a lot of lives because we weren’t
prepared when the Japs attacked, he said. “I’d rather save lives than money,” he said. “It’s either your boys’ lives or tax rebates for millionaires.”

These words touched a deep chord in his listeners. One of the hands he shook after his talk at Graham was that of a farm wife. “
My boy died on Iwo Jima,” she said. “I know what you mean.” At Sweetwater, an old man approached Johnson and tried to say something, but had to stop when he began to cry. And the press coverage of his war record was all that could be desired: talking about Lady Bird’s concern for his safety
in a helicopter, the
Port Arthur News
reported that Johnson said “that his wife didn’t show particular concern when he was
flying in B-29s, helping bomb one Japanese island after another into submission three years ago. His flights over jungle wastes and the limitless expanses of the ocean ‘were all right by her, for she realized the job had to be done,’ the Congressman says. ‘But when she heard that
some of my old wartime buddies were volunteering to fly me all over Texas to meet the voters in a helicopter, she threw up her hands.…’ ”

A
ND HE TALKED
about his opponent.

He had emerged from the hospital determined to try to destroy Coke Stevenson’s reputation, and he had been concentrating on doing so in his formal speeches, with attacks that had been growing steadily more personal. He kept calling his sixty-year-old opponent “an old man.” Stevenson had retired to his ranch, Johnson said, and the only reason he was running for the Senate was that he had discovered that Senators were paid $15,000 a year.
Stevenson wasn’t planning to do any work for that money, just collect it as if it were a pension, Johnson said. “I am not for the fifteen thousand dollar pension you’ll be giving this old man if you elect him.” And then, somewhere near the end of June, Lyndon Johnson changed his mode of attack—in a stroke of pure political genius.

Washington had learned of Lyndon Johnson’s gift for mimicry, of the accuracy with which he could capture a man’s traits and imitate and exaggerate them in a devastating form of mockery. Now he began to use that gift in the small towns of Texas on the man who had for so many years been a hero in those towns.

The people’s very familiarity with the former Governor, and with his well-known mannerisms and phrases, made him a good target. Johnson’s mimicry took the form of an interview in which he played two parts: a reporter and Stevenson. First, playing the reporter, he asked a question—“What are your views on federal aid to education?” perhaps. Then, taking a step away, he turned, as if facing the reporter, and played Stevenson. Out and up
came Lyndon Johnson’s jaw in an imitation of Coke’s. His hands went to his hips, in the former Governor’s habitual stance when answering questions. And he rocked back and forth on his heels as Stevenson did while thinking, and paused for a while before answering. “Ah believe in constitutional government,” he finally said. “Are you for or against the seventy-group Air Force?” the “reporter” would ask. Jaw; hands;
rocking—in flawless imitation. The long pause which had given “Coffee-Coolin’ Coke” his nickname. Finally: “Ah believe in constitutional government.”