Means of Ascent (47 page)

“It was perfect,” a reporter said. “It was Coke to the life.” The only element missing was Coke’s pipe. And then, suddenly, Johnson had an inspiration. While performing his imitation one day, he noticed a farmer right in front of him smoking a large corncob pipe. Reaching out, Johnson grabbed it, stuck it in his own mouth, and added it to the act. Now, after his “reporter” asked Stevenson, “How do you stand on the
70-group Air Force,” his “Governor” hurriedly stuck the pipe in his mouth as if panicked by the question and drew deeply on it, puckered up his eyes in mock concentration until he finally removed it, studied it for another long moment, and then said: “Ah believe in constitutional government.” At every stop thereafter, Johnson would borrow a pipe from some man in the crowd. “With one eye on the labor bosses in Fort Worth and the other eye on
the millionaires in Houston, he sits and smokes,” Johnson would say. He would place the pipe in his mouth, stick out his jaw, put his hands on his hips, and rock back on his heels until he had the crowd giggling. Then he would mutter through the pipe stem: “Ahm for states’ rights.” “And what do you think about federal aid for veterans?” Long pause. “Well, I don’t want to move the county courthouse to Washington.”

Then, having made the crowd receptive, he could launch into a stronger attack. These savage personal onslaughts were directed against perhaps the most respected public official in the history of Texas. They were a great gamble, part of the great gamble that Johnson was taking in the whole campaign. From Jacksonville, Horace Busby reported: “The
Congressman has
gone berserk. He is using a satire on Stevenson.” But,
Busby added, the satire “seems to be going over with the crowds fine.”

P
EOPLE WHO HAD KNOWN HIM
for years said they had never seen Lyndon Johnson so “high.” He had always deeply needed crowds and the feeling from them of acceptance and warmth and respect—now, thanks to the helicopter and to his own gifts, he was getting that feeling. “When he got in a crowd of people, that was when he was at his happiest,” Woodward recalls, and “these were very special crowds for
him.” “He really
thrived
on the helicopter, and on the crowds that would come out,”
Margaret Mayer recalls. “He was energized, he was really charged up.”

He was, in fact, carried away, at times all but out of control. A key to his handshaking method of “taking their hand first” was to reach for the people coming toward him to shake his hand, and in effect pull them past him. Shaking hands on the flatbed truck after the speech, he would sometimes be so excited that he would not only forget the pain in his cracked hands but would pull on voters’ arms so enthusiastically that the voters needed all their
alertness and physical strength to avoid being yanked off balance as Johnson pulled them past. “He was just
throwing
little old ladies past him,” Busby recalls. “Woody and I stationed ourselves below the platform in case any of them needed to be caught.” “When he was shaking hands, that was when he got most charged up,” Margaret Mayer recalls; “It was just like he was plugged into electricity.” During the handshaking,
of course, KTBC announcer
Joe Phipps was delivering over the helicopter microphone a nonstop spiel about the Congressman’s accomplishments, and sometimes the Congressman became absolutely carried away by enthusiasm as Phipps’ voice boomed out: “
Come meet Congressman Johnson. He got roads for the Tenth District. He got lights for the Tenth District. If you elect him, he’ll get lights for
you!
He’ll get
roads for
you!”
Sometimes, as Phipps’ voice was filling the air, his subject, shaking hands on the truck, would shout to the announcer across the heads of the crowd: “Tell ’em about me, Joe! Tell ’em about me!”

Then the helicopter would take off, and Lyndon Johnson would be up in the air again, charging across the face of Texas, circling closer and closer to farmhouses to the accompaniment of pandemonium in the chicken coop and panic in the stable, landing beside railroad repair crews and little groups of farm workers so he could hug them and give them leaflets. (Occasionally, the pilot would simply circle the workers as Johnson bellowed down and showered them with great
handfuls of campaign literature, but only occasionally. “He would rarely pass [a group] without going down,” Busby recalls. “I would say, ‘Hell, they’re not going to
vote.’ He drew himself up in one of his more noble poses, and said: ‘
Son, they’re
people!’
“) Seeing a train roaring along beneath him, he insisted on Chudars dipping low above the flat prairie and then
racing the train for miles, the S-51 gradually passing the long line of freight cars as the engineer tooted his whistle in excitement. Circling a town where he was to land, he would lean far out of the helicopter window, waving his gray Stetson at the people below while he shouted, “Come to the speaking! Come to the speaking!” Above larger cities he went wild. Coming into Port Arthur (where the
Port Arthur News
was to proclaim the next day,
under the headline “
IT LANDS ON ROOFS AND IN PASTURES
!,” that “Candidate Lyndon B. Johnson’s ‘flying windmill’ is probably the greatest political innovation since the invention of the ballot”), he circled the downtown shopping area again and again at a height of three hundred feet, leaning out of the helicopter window and yelling down through a megaphone (the helicopter’s public address system was
broken that day): “Hello, Port Arthur! Hello, Port Arthur! You look wonderful down there!
Hello, Port Arthur!” while showering the city with his leaflets. Between cities, he urged Chudars to fly faster. And in his enthusiasm, Lyndon Johnson leaned out of the helicopter and, in the words of one reporter, “
whipped his Stetson on the plane’s flanks as though it were a bronco” that he was urging on to greater
speed.

Following him was quite an experience, too.

Advance man
Sam Plyler would leave each stop as soon as the helicopter touched down, because he had to be at the next stop before it arrived to make sure the landing area had been cleared, and he needed all the head start he could get. “Sam drove wide open, as fast as the car would go,” Chudars recalls. Even so, if the town was some distance away, Plyler couldn’t be sure he would make it in time, and as he sped along, he would
keep darting backward glances into the sky to see if the black dot had come into view behind him. The other cars would wait until the helicopter lifted off, and then they would race out after it. There was quite a line of them. One car carried mechanic Nachlin and the radio engineer—and a two-way radio linked with Chudars, so that Nachlin could be summoned without delay in case engine trouble forced the helicopter down. Another carried a secretary and a speechwriter,
generally
Paul Bolton, and his typewriter. Another carried Busby—and
his
typewriter. Then there was a car for Woody, and his suitcases filled with the candidate’s shirts, ties, pills, lozenges and hand creams. Sometimes there was a car for the band. Their absences for the campaign had cost the band’s four members their radio station job, but Johnson had told them not to worry: “Some day you’ll sing on the steps of
the White House.” And then there were the reporters’ cars, more and more of them as the Flying Windmill became bigger and bigger news. Quite a caravan careened across Texas
that summer—advance men, secretaries, speechwriters, aides, reporters, band members, sound truck operators—all of them, in Frank Oltorf’s phrase, “driving like hell” along highways or narrow country roads, going just as fast as they could, while
scanning the skies and hoping to make the next town before the Windmill landed.

State troopers stopped them. Once, waved over by a trooper, Plyler pleaded that he had to get to the schoolyard in the town up ahead because the helicopter was going to land there and he had to make sure no children got hurt. The trooper said, “Okay, I’ll follow you. If that helicopter doesn’t come in there, you’re going to jail.” And Plyler roared off again, the trooper flooring his gas pedal to keep up.

Tires blew out. Oltorf remembers a blowout while he was doing eighty on a narrow bumpy road, and how he was almost unable to get the car under control. Engines blew out. When a car was disabled, the driver simply abandoned it, like a dead horse by the side of the road, and flagged down another; the important thing was not to miss the Windmill’s next landing. (Until the end of their lives, these men and women would tell stories about the summer they followed
Lyndon Johnson and his Flying Windmill around Texas; as
Oliver Knight of the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
would write about one trip, “
That mad dash from Navasota to Conroe in which I dodged stumps at 70 MPH just to keep up with that contraption will ever be green in my memory.”) At the landing site, there would be the brief respite while Johnson gave his speech, and shook hands. And then he would clamber
back into the helicopter, and the advance men would push back the crowd to clear enough room for the takeoff, and the mechanics, secretaries, speechwriters, advance men, aides and reporters would run back to their cars and screech off again in their long, frenzied dash back and forth across the state of Texas.

Dorothy Nichols was to be asked what she remembered about the 1948 campaign. “
Three hours of sleep,” she would reply. Three hours of sleep—or less.

And she remembered wet hair. Like the rest of the staff, Mrs. Nichols would recall, she had to be awake every morning at five, and after the early morning broadcast would spend the entire day racing frantically from town to town trying to keep up with the helicopter, at each town being given a long list of telephone calls to make or memos or speeches to type at the noon or evening stops.

The original plan had been for Mrs. Nichols to stay with the candidate as secretary for the whole campaign, but that plan survived only until the campaign’s first weekend, when she arrived back in Austin with the candidate, and reported in at the Hancock House. “They took one look at me at headquarters … and … realized that I couldn’t take it all the time,” she recalls. It was decided that for the
rest of the campaign, she,
Mary Rather and
Dorothy Plyler would alternate on the road, one week on and two weeks back at headquarters, where the pace was less inhuman. Even with this schedule, however, by the end of the campaign the three women would be exhausted. “And,” as Mrs. Nichols was to point out, “we were only doing it one out of every three weeks. He was doing it all the time.”

Even when he was supposed to be resting, they came to realize, he wasn’t. At the noon rest stop, Lyndon Johnson would indeed get into bed. But when someone came to waken him after an hour or so, he would almost invariably be awake—awake and ready with a long list of things to be done, things he had thought of during the hour. He had been “on the phone the whole time,” Mrs. Nichols would say, or “he had somebody—local people or
somebody on the staff—in there planning.”

The afternoons would be long—hour after hour of flying across country, hovering over towns and speaking from the air, landing at farmhouses or in cotton fields, and, eight or nine or ten times a day, delivering a speech in a town, then shaking the hands of every member of the crowd. And evening brought no respite; often, Johnson would arrive at the town in which he was to spend the night just in time to race to his hotel, strip off his wringing-wet clothes, take
a quick shower, dress and head out for the evening’s event—a rally or a Rotary Club or Chamber of Commerce banquet—at which, after a reception, he would give a formal speech. And after the dinner (and the handshaking) would come an informal reception for prominent local supporters and financial contributors—identified as “FC’s” (for “Fat Cats”) in briefing memos for the day—either in Johnson’s hotel suite or
at the home of one of the fattest of the cats, receptions
that were quite important because they gave Johnson an opportunity to meet new supporters, or to cement relations with those he knew only slightly—and to allay the fears of so many of them that he might secretly be a liberal after all.

In his initial instructions to his schedulers, Johnson had been very firm about the necessity for ending his evenings early. “You don’t make any converts after ten o’clock,” he had said. Before ten, therefore, Woody and other aides would begin trying to move visitors out of the room. But after the visitors had left, there would be a long list on yellow legal notepads of people who had been trying to reach him that day, and the calls were
returned—every one. “He did not spare himself,” Woodward recalls. In Washington, the importance of callers was weighed, and many calls were not returned. Now, however, every name represented someone he needed. And before he went to bed, every name on the list would have a line through it and a brief notation for a follow-up letter to be sent in his name by headquarters. Sometimes a name on the list would represent a potential gain of only a single vote. The call
was made. Shaking Johnson’s hand after a speech in Kandalia, an elderly man mentioned a favorite nephew,
James H. Knapp, who was an attorney in Arlington, a town near Dallas. In Arlington, Johnson telephoned Knapp to give him his uncle’s regards, and ask for his support. (Knapp was not home when Johnson telephoned, but Johnson wrote him a letter, and in it said: “I am taking the liberty of dropping a note to your uncle.”)