First In His Class (52 page)

Johnson requested that the meeting be closed to press and staff, a decision which
greatly disappointed
Clinton and Branch, who held grand notions about being in the room and serving as mediators between the nominee and the former president. Branch was “pissed that we couldn't go to the ranch.” He thought he could mollify Johnson. Unlike many of their friends in the antiwar movement, Branch and Clinton professed no hatred for LBJ. Clinton considered him “
a great
man,” who tragically allowed “his own paranoid aggression to consume him.” Branch thought that even though he and Clinton “had no stature,” as fellow southerners they might have “had more rapport with LBJ” than McGovern did.

One week
before the meeting, Johnson made a political move that served his purposes while frustrating the McGovern campaign. He drove to Fredericksburg and dropped off a one-page endorsement of McGovern on the desk of Art Kowert, an old newspaper friend. He asked Kowert to publish it and then pass it along to the rest of the press. Longtime Johnson-watchers in the Texas McGovern camp concluded that LBJ did it to spite them. Many of Johnson's protégés, most notably John Connally, the former governor, and also former press secretary George Christian, had recently broken with their party and formed a national group known as “Democrats for Nixon.” The hope was that Johnson's endorsement of McGovern at the ranch would be a strong counteraction to the Connally betrayal; but the peremptory announcement minimized that possibility.

The day
after the announcement, Johnson received five pro-McGovern and fifteen anti-McGovern letters. The next day's pouch brought five pro-McGovern and eighteen anti-McGovern letters. Johnson's mail reflected public opinion. McGovern was trailing President Nixon in the polls by between 23 and 28 percent in mid-August.

The trip to Austin and the ranch marked the first time that McGovern and Shriver campaigned together. Waiting for them at Austin's municipal airport late on the night of August 21 was the largest crowd either of them had yet encountered along the campaign trail—more than ten thousand supporters waving banners that read “Jobs Not Bombs” and “Twenty Thousand More Americans Have Been Killed in Vietnam Since Nixon Took Office.”
The boisterous
crowd reflected McGovern's popularity in the college town, the most liberal place in Texas. In his speech at the airport, McGovern promised that his campaign would bring the fractious state party together, but there was little evidence of that possibility. Dolph Briscoe, the Democratic candidate for governor, was absent from the welcoming party. Briscoe had not endorsed McGovern and would not say who he planned to vote for in November. Also missing were Senator Lloyd Bentsen, who had declined to serve as McGovern's state chairman; Lieutenant Governor-elect William Hobby; and Austin's mayor, Roy Butler, another
conservative Democrat and LBJ partisan, who begged off, saying he had to interview a prospective city manager. The incumbent governor, Preston Smith, was at the airport, and in his speech he described himself as “a Democrat now and a Democrat in November,” but that was not enough for some liberals in the crowd who booed him for past grievances. As the caravan carrying the campaign entourage left the airport after mid-night and rolled toward the sprawling Villa Capri Motor Hotel near the University of Texas campus, it came to a sudden stop when the engine in the lead car carrying Secret Service agents conked out.

The next morning, McGovern and Shriver were flown out to the ranch in a small plane, and were met at the private landing strip by LBJ and Lady Bird, who were seated at the wheels of separate golf carts.
McGovern was
startled by the sight of the former president, dressed in a flannel shirt and khaki slacks. “He had hair down to his shoulders—longer than long hair, shoulder-length hair, he looked like General Custer,” McGovern recalled. McGovern could not help thinking about the psychological implications of that shoulder-length hair. All those long-haired college kids raising hell with LBJ about the Vietnam War, and here he was with hair down to his shoulders. McGovern and Johnson bounced back to the ranch house in one golf cart and Lady Bird drove Shriver in the other. When they had settled outside under the shade trees, Johnson, according to McGovern's recollection, said that some of his friends were “in this thing called Democrats for Nixon—but they haven't got me. They haven't got me and they aren't going to get me.” The quartet moved to a table for a noontime meal of small dinner steaks. “I remember vividly when Lady Bird served the steaks,” McGovern later recalled, “Lyndon cut his into small pieces. He'd take a bite, one small little cube, then he'd light a cigarette and he'd smoke for a while. And Lady Bird would look at him. She had a faint smile. If there is such a thing as a sad smile, she had a sad smile. She watched him. She saw him reliving his campaigns. She knew about the heart attacks. She saw him smoking cigarettes. I think he smoked eight or ten cigarettes while Sarge and I were there.” Everyone at the table knew the old man was dying.

At a press conference afterwards back in Austin, McGovern said that the Vietnam War came up “in passing” only two or three times during the three-hour discussion and that Johnson advised him to reach out to the elements in the party that did not support his nomination. He said that he would take LBJ's advice. “We are going to reach out needing all the help we can get.”

It is doubtful that McGovern meant the sort of help that he received when he returned to his suite at the Villa Capri and met with a few dozen key Texas supporters and state campaign staff leaders, including Clinton.
This meeting was later charitably described by one veteran Texas political reporter as “
a donnybrook
of a family feud.” Although Clinton and Branch had not been in Texas long enough to deserve much blame, the message of the meeting was that McGovern's Texas campaign was disorganized, directionless, and divided. Sissy Farenthold was vacationing in Europe with her family, but she was at the meeting in spirit, since much of the discussion was about the wide split in the party between her supporters and those of Dolph Briscoe. Briscoe's reluctance to join the McGovern team, some argued, was directly related to the fact that Farenthold was bitter about her loss to the conservative Briscoe in the Democratic gubernatorial runoff and would not endorse him for governor.

Not that it required an ideological divide to rile this Texas crowd. Several blacks were also upset about being excluded from the meeting and went to the local paper that afternoon
to express
their “ill feeling.” Here was an example of the unintended consequences of political reform. George McGovern, who had chaired a commission that opened the Democratic party to groups that historically had been kept outside the system, was now constantly dealing with the frustrations of unrealized expectations. If everyone felt that they deserved a part of the action, they also were more easily aggrieved. The blacks who complained about McGovern's visit were university students who were unknown in Austin and had no connections to the campaign.

It is
clear from a series of letters McGovern wrote a week later that Clinton and the Texas staff had made several unfortunate mistakes in dealing with the varied constituencies of the campaign. In a letter to Gonzalo Barrientos, a leading Chicano politician in Austin, McGovern apologized for not speaking to Barrientos during the trip and added: “I realize that my campaign in Texas has had many shortcomings, especially among Chicanos. However I think things have improved on all fronts in the last few days.” A similar letter went to Leonel Castillo, the city comptroller in Houston. There was also an embarrassing omission involving Secretary of State Bob Bullock, who was among the handful of state officials willing to speak out for McGovern yet unable to get in to see him during the visit. “There is really no way to excuse or apologize for the mixup at the Villa Capri, but I do want you to know how sorry I am,” McGovern wrote in a note to Bullock. “Perhaps these foolish errors are bound to occur occasionally, but it's especially painful when they involve someone like you, who has served us so long and so well.”

O
NE
positive result of McGovern's trip to Austin was that he persuaded a colorful pair of Texas officials to serve as co-chairs of his Lone Star campaign
and help Clinton and Branch find their way through the chaos of state politics. John C. White, the agriculture commissioner, and Bob Armstrong, the land commissioner, signed on at a time when most other elected officials in Texas were staying as far away from McGovern as possible. White had been a strong Hubert Humphrey supporter during the primaries and Armstrong had stayed neutral. But they finally decided, “
Bullshit—we're
Democrats and we'll run as Democrats,” according to Armstrong. In the end the choice did not prove politically damaging to either of them, though Armstrong would later boast that his association with McGovern helped him make Richard Nixon's notorious enemies list “right there next to Bella Abzug,” and White got “
a damn
good I4RS audit out of it.”

The Texans did not delude themselves about McGovern's chances in Texas. During the Austin visit, White told the senator, “
I cannot
see a win here. I think your ceiling is forty percent.” Even so, the national staff promised them that Texas would be regarded as a key battleground state, targeted for at least one million dollars in campaign funds and frequent visits from McGovern and Shriver. Why would they spend so much time and money on a state that appeared to be a lost cause? Because to ignore Texas would amount to surrender. It was one of eight states that McGovern strategists believed they had to carry to win the election. They had already written off the Deep South. They had to try to win somewhere. To survive in that period, according to Gary Hart, the campaign manager, “
you had
to be an optimist.” The optimists searched for signs of hope in the statistics of past campaigns. No Republican presidential candidate had carried Texas since Eisenhower in 1956. Humphrey had defeated Nixon in Texas in 1968, though by a mere 38,000 votes. The pessimists saw chilling similarities between 1972 and twenty years earlier, when Eisenhower trounced Adlai Stevenson in Texas with the help of a potent Democrats for Eisenhower organization led by a conservative governor, Allan Shivers, who assumed the role then that John Connally was playing now.

White and Armstrong lacked potent political organizations that they could lend to the McGovern effort, but they got along well with Clinton and Branch, and entertained and nourished the young coordinators. They were a generation older, but were more the good-natured uncles or big brothers than father figures. After a rough day on Sixth Street, Clinton and Branch were invited up to White's suite in the state office building, where the convivial agriculture commissioner dipped into his stock of confiscated whiskey. “
He had
this bootleg cellar and he'd bring out some of the best stuff and we'd drink it and talk,” Branch recalled. Like most homegrown Texas pols, White and Armstrong loved to gossip about the characters they had dealt with over the years. Clinton was interested in stories about
Lyndon Johnson, and White, a storyteller who had known Johnson since 1950, had a supply of stories as deep and potent as his whiskey cabinet. Johnson, he told the young Arkansan, was an “exciting, dangerous man-it was dangerous to be his friend and worse to be his enemy.” As he got to know Clinton, White came to think that in some respects he resembled LBJ, especially in the passion he felt for the process. In that respect White saw Clinton as a classic southern politician who viewed
politics as
“an art form, an entertainment, a story, a whole life.”

Clinton took quickly to Armstrong.
They were
both southern moderate liberals who loved to shoot the bull, stay up late, flirt with women, and enjoy life. “They were right out front with the horseplay,” recalled White. “They had a real buddy relationship.” Armstrong would arrive at work at the General Land Office at about ten each morning, drink coffee and conduct business for a few hours, then slip out in the afternoon and head down to the Sixth Street headquarters with two six-packs of beer and his guitar. “I'
m taking
some sick leave,” he would say on the way out the door. “I'm sick of all those Republicans.” He had one foot in establishment politics and the other foot in the youth culture. “I was there at the dawn of the Age of Aquarius, at noon and at midnight,” he said later. “It was exciting, a great time for newfound freedoms—that was what it was all about.”

Most members of the campaign staff were under thirty. They worked long hours to try to elect McGovern while still enjoying life. Late at night, they would head over to Scholz's beer garden, the hangout for Texas liberals and unofficial McGovern headquarters, where Armstrong would be picking and strumming and holding forth. Sometimes the younger staffers would go bowling at an alley across the river on South Lamar Boulevard. The bowling crew included Clinton, Branch, and Texans Carry Mauro, Roy Spence, Judy Trabulsi, Nancy Williams, and Betsey Wright, all of whom would later become important political allies of Clinton's. Mauro, a University of Texas law student and former Aggie Yell Leader at Texas A&M, ran the Youth for McGovern operation.
He shared
Clinton's political obsession and thought he was on the fast track—working at headquarters and attending law school at the same time—until he realized that Clinton was running the state campaign while enrolled at Yale Law thousands of miles away. Mauro's girlfriend, Trabulsi, and her business partner, Spence, were fresh out of college and had just started an advertising firm that did some work for the campaign.

Perhaps the most resolutely ideological person in the crowd was Betsey Wright, an energetic political operative from the small West Texas town of Alpine, who had worked for the state Democratic committee.
Wright lived
two blocks from headquarters with Poppet, her Pomeranian. Although she was not yet thirty, she was considered a mentor and role model
for some of the younger women in the office. Lisa Rogers called Wright “
our moral
pulse.” Wright had a more difficult time with some of the men, especially Don O'Brien, an old-fashioned Kennedy-clan operative who had been sent to Texas to help Clinton and Branch deal with traditional Democrats who were leery of the long-haired McGovern crowd.