Means of Ascent (50 page)

A
FTER THAT NIGHT
in Abilene, the euphoria was gone. It was replaced by desperation.

By coincidence, the next day, he got a new helicopter. The S-51, having reached the limit of mileage it could fly without a major checkup and overhaul, left on its return trip to Connecticut, and it was replaced by a 47-D model furnished, at
Stuart Symington’s request, by the
Bell Helicopter Corporation. Dramatic as Johnson’s campaigning had been before, now the drama was heightened. The 47-D was much smaller than
the S-51, little more than a Plexiglas bubble, five feet wide, five feet long and five feet high, barely big enough to seat a pilot and a passenger at the front of a twenty-three-foot-long fuselage; it looked like a toy in comparison with the Sikorsky craft. Because it required so much less space in which to land, it could get in closer to the centers of population, where the landings were most effective, and its pilot,
Joe Mashman, a
thirty-two-year-old test pilot, could use its greater maneuverability to perform new crowd-pleasing stunts before and after landings. Its engine generated a meager 178 horsepower at best, and less in hot weather, so that with a load of any size, Mashman was to recall, “that little engine had to strain just to keep the aircraft airborne.” Hardly had he landed in Austin when KTBC radio engineers arrived with an amplifier and a microphone which they told him the helicopter
was going to have to carry—and which weighed a hundred pounds. Next, cars drove up with bundles of campaign literature for the candidate to distribute at unscheduled stops. And then the candidate himself arrived (he displayed no interest in the little craft, but “just got on and said, ‘Let’s go!’ ”). No one had told Mashman how big Lyndon Johnson was, and he was “dismayed” to find out; one look at him, the pilot was to
recall, and “I knew I had a problem.” Exacerbating the problem would be the necessity—caused by the candidate’s insistence on landing as close to the center of town as possible—of taking off from constricted areas, which required rising steeply, often almost vertically, and thus using more power than if the helicopter could, as was normal, rise in a shallower climb. Although Mashman would keep the weight down by never filling the gas tank to
capacity, for the remainder of the campaign, as the “Little Brother of the Johnson City Windmill” toured small towns all across Texas, almost every takeoff was an adventure. Mashman would lift off a few feet above ground, and then inch a little higher, hovering while studying his instruments to determine if he had sufficient “reserve,” or unused power capacity, “to safely climb on out.” Often, the instruments would show that he was using all
the power the engine could generate just to hover, and he would have to return to the ground. The pamphlets would be unloaded and put in a car which would meet the helicopter outside town, at a location at which there would be more room, and less power, needed for takeoff. But sometimes that didn’t help sufficiently. “Mr. Johnson, we’ve got to take the doors off,” Mashman would say. If the fifteen pounds thus saved still wasn’t enough, the only
remaining jettisonable item would have to go. Mashman would set the helicopter down again, and the candidate would disembark, and a car would drive him to the site outside town. After a day or two, Mashman learned to evaluate the situation in advance. As he circled a town, with Johnson using the bullhorn to round up the populace, Mashman, if
he “saw it was going to be tight,” would tell his passenger he would be able to land with him, but not take
off.

Johnson turned these difficulties to advantage. In the past, some of the people attracted to the landing site by the helicopter would drift away before his speech. Now Johnson devised a tactic to keep them from doing so. After the helicopter had landed, and he had told the audience to “come on around, and look at the whirlybird,” he would, before beginning his speech, say: “
My good pilot Joe tells me it’ll be too dangerous
if I take off with him because we wouldn’t have enough power to clear those 30,000-volt high-tension wires over there. He’s going to have to take off alone. And it’s going to be mighty tight. I just hope and
pray he’ll be able to make it.” Then, having, as Mashman puts it, “told the people of the impending daredevil feat,” he would launch into his political speech. If people started leaving anyway, Johnson would ask
them not to. “Now, folks, I want you to stay here and wait until Joe tries to get the Johnson City Windmill off the ground. He’s going to need all the help he can get—he’s going to need your prayers to get through this safely. We’re all hoping that the good Lord sees that Joe gets over those high-tension wires over there. I know we’ll all be here helping to pray for him.” And indeed, as the pilot lifted off at the end of the speech,
Lyndon Johnson would, in an effective climax to his little rally, lead the crowd in prayers for his safety: “Let’s pray for Joe now. Good luck, Joe. We’re with you, Joe. Help him, O Lord. Help this brave man make it out of here safely.”

But Johnson was aware now of the limitations of helicopter drama. The polls had told him that. The helicopter could lure people out to meet him, it could even keep them around to listen to him. It couldn’t persuade them to vote for him, not over Coke Stevenson.

Only he could do that.

Hard as he had worked before, now, during the three remaining weeks between the Fourth of July weekend and the first primary, he worked harder.

The summer of 1948 was a summer, day after day, week after week, of a laconic one-word weather forecast:
Hot
. That summer, the summer of Lyndon Johnson’s last chance, was, in fact, one of the hottest summers of the century in Texas; it was a summer of terrible drought; and, in bone-dry East Texas, of widespread forest fires. Day after day, all across the vast state, the thermometer rose to near one hundred degrees by mid-morning and stayed there until
sunset. Sunset brought only minor relief; the nights were little cooler. Few small-town hotels had air conditioning; after ten or eleven hours out in that blazing sun each day, Lyndon Johnson had to sleep at night in steaming hot rooms. During the day, moreover, the helicopter in which he was spending so many hours was no
longer the big Sikorsky S-51, whose roof extended partly over the back seat, providing some shade there for Johnson; Chudars, who had to remain
in the front seat to pilot the S-51, says that flying surrounded by unprotected glass on which the sun was beating down was as hot as “
flying in a greenhouse.” In the tiny Bell, there was no shade, nothing around Johnson and his new pilot but the curved Plexiglas bubble that intensified the sun’s rays. Mashman, who had flown helicopters in Brazil for a year, had considered himself inured to heat, but that was only because he had never
experienced “the Valley” during a drought. Even removing the helicopter’s doors didn’t help. “With the high humidity in the Valley, or Galveston or Houston, and the temperature in the nineties, the wind [from the open doors] didn’t help because our perspiration wouldn’t evaporate. We would be
just dripping in there.” Most landing sites were naked of shade, of course, since they had been selected because there
were no trees or buildings on them. After landing the helicopter, Mashman could hunt up a tree, or a house, and take advantage of its shade. Johnson couldn’t. Sometimes so brutal was the sun that Mashman, before leaving the helicopter, would slowly rotate the rotor blades until one of them was between the candidate and the sun, and Johnson would try to speak while remaining in that sliver of shade, but an eight-inch-wide rotor blade provided pathetically little protection.
Campaigning in Texas during the summer of 1948 was, in the memory of those who were there, like campaigning in an oven.

Behind in the race—watching his last chance fade—Lyndon Johnson was campaigning longer and longer hours now, but no matter how long the hours were, they weren’t long enough for him. There was no more talk about “breaks” in the schedule. Johnson wanted more speeches, more “hoverings” over towns too small for speeches, more handshakings—a break meant minutes lost, possible votes lost; he knew now that he needed every
one. Woodward had thought eight or nine speeches a day—plus the morning and evening radio talks—the limit of the endurance even of Lyndon Johnson; now, in the first two days after the Fourth of July revelation, touring in the merciless heat of Texas’ Gulf Coast, Lyndon Johnson delivered, in addition to his radio broadcasts, thirty-one
stump speeches—and made fifty unscheduled stops to shake hands with
cotton-pickers, farmers, or just a lone man driving a tractor. On the second day, he couldn’t seem to tear himself away from Robstown, where, as a teenager who had run away from home, he had worked eleven hours a day in a roasting-hot cotton gin in which the air was so thick with dust and lint from the cotton being pounded into bales that men working in it often found themselves gasping for breath; his job had been tending a big steam boiler, and he had been constantly
terrified that it would explode as other
boilers had exploded in Robstown gins that year. By the time he arrived in Corpus Christi on that second day, it was just before dark; Mashman, who had been watching shadows close in around his craft, breathed a sigh of relief when he had it on the ground before total darkness. Jumping out of the helicopter and into a waiting car, exhorting the driver to greater speed, Johnson raced into the downtown area of the city and
shook hands with passing pedestrians for hours. The next day’s campaigning was summarized by a headline in the
Houston Post:
“JOHNSON IN 24 PUBLIC APPEARANCES IN DAY
.” The length of time he had been out on the road that day was summarized in a phrase in the story: “Sunup to sundown.” On the following day, Thursday, July 8, thunderstorms hit the Gulf Coast as Johnson was flying along the coastline for a scheduled stop at Bay City. Ahead of the helicopter was swirling blackness; when Mashman said he couldn’t land in the storm, Johnson ordered the
pilot to circle the storm as close to it as possible so as to lose the least time on the way to the next stop, at West Columbia.

The
speeches he was giving were different, too. He was scared now, as scared as he had been in his first campaign, in 1937. Now his chance wasn’t his first but his last, and he was no longer the well-tailored “senatorial” candidate of the first few weeks of this campaign; he was the Lyndon Johnson of 1937 again, awkward, nervous, frightened—and one of the greatest stump speakers in Texas history.

He wasn’t trying to act like a Senator now. He wasn’t trying to act like a statesman. He was trying to win. The people in front of him held his fate in their hands. He told them he was one of them. “I’m a country boy, too,” he told them—a statement which wasn’t hard to believe as he stood there, tall and skinny, in his soaked-through shirt and bedraggled tie and wrinkled, baggy seersucker trousers, his face grimy and
sweat-streaked. “I chopped cotton, I hoed my Daddy’s fields.” And because he was one of them, he told them, he understood how city people—like the people in Houston and Dallas who were backing Coke Stevenson—looked down on them. “They’re saying I was
a goatherder,” he said. “That’s right, I was. They say I was just a country schoolteacher. That’s right, I was. But there’s sure
nothing wrong with that. I’ve had calluses on my hands. I worked on the first roads that ever got built in my county—with these hands. And I’m not ashamed of it. I’m proud of it.” When he was young, he had gone through the trials their sons had gone through.

He had shared their sons’ dangers, too, he told them. In the South Pacific, “This boy I roomed with—he was a country boy, too.”

He had shared
all
their hopes and fears. As a boy, he said, he had lived on a farm that did not have electricity, and he had seen his sainted mother down on her knees every washday scrubbing clothes in a washtub,
and “standing all day over that red-hot cookstove” ironing clothes with those heavy “sad irons” in a steaming-hot kitchen in midsummer “so that I and my brother and my sisters would be neat like
the other kids.” And as a Congressman, he said, he had helped the people of his district to realize their hopes and dreams. Getting electricity for his district hadn’t been easy, he told them, and he told how the Rural Electrification Administration officials had told FDR that the population wasn’t dense enough and how FDR had replied, “Oh, they breed pretty fast down there,” and how the REA had then said, “Those people are too poor: they
won’t pay their bills.” “The interests and the trusts—they were against us,” Lyndon Johnson said. “The power companies and the utility barons, they said, ‘You can’t take lights out to those people. You can’t sink poles in that granite.’ Well, we got the holes in,” he would say, “and we got the poles up, we put lights in twenty thousand farm homes. And do you know how many bills were delinquent? Not
one. We can put REA lights in every rural home in Texas. We can build a blacktop road to every farm. We can pay our elder citizens a pension of fifty dollars a month. We can pay our teachers an extra four hundred dollars a year. We can guarantee the farmer minimum prices on farm products. We can build hospitals in every county.”

When he talked about foreign affairs now, the phrases he used were phrases to which these listeners could relate. He played on their fears as he played on their hopes. America was in great danger, he told them. It was in danger from “the red tide of Communism,” which was constantly planning a sneak attack. “Houston or Galveston could easily be the next Pearl Harbor.” “This is off the record,” he would confide, “but I can
tell you that in 1951 another nation will have the atomic bomb.
Twenty bombs in twenty places in twenty minutes could immobilize the United States.” And, he said, it was not just the atomic bomb that Americans must fear. The next war, he said, would be a war not only of bombs but of germ warfare—whose horrors he vividly portrayed. Therefore, he advised his audience, they should pray. “From the time you say the blessing before breakfast in the
morning until the last child is tucked in at night, pray that we will find the solution to the problem of peace.” But prayer was not the only answer to the problem, he said. America must also be prepared. It must be strong. “Nobody would walk up and give Jack Dempsey a punch in the nose,” he said. “And nobody is going to give us a punch in the nose if we’re strong enough, too.” That was the reason, he said, that he was for a seventy-group Air
Force. Seventy groups? “I wish it were a hundred and seventy groups.” We need “
the best atomic bomb that money can buy,” he said. And we must have a policy of not yielding an inch to the Communists. America must “draw the quarantine line and we would rather have it on the Mediterranean than on the shore of the Gulf of Mexico.” The Communists, he said, are ready to move in on Berlin if
America yields one
inch. “One inch,” he would shout, shaking a long finger in warning. “One inch!”