Means of Ascent (48 page)

And as soon as he hung up the telephone, it seemed, it would ring—and it might be Alvin Wirtz or Ed Clark or Claude Wild or John Connally with some matter that had to be discussed and thought through, and the thinking had to be clear, no matter how tired he was, for calls from these men were important. And the candidate would be telephoning headquarters himself—making call after call, every time he thought of some item, no matter how minor, that might help
his campaign. Wild urged him to stop. “
Worry yourself about as few of the details of the campaign as you possibly can,” the veteran campaign strategist said in a hand-delivered memo. “You can’t run an organization with the perfection you might like to see it with volunteer and scattered help.” Wild had heard how exhausted Johnson was, and he said the important thing was to “keep yourself physically in shape to continue your
fine campaign.” The others knew better than to try to stop their Chief from worrying. Eleven o’clock would pass, and then midnight and then, often, one o’clock, and two—and Lyndon Johnson, gaunt and haggard under his tan, would still be lying in his underwear on the bed in a sweltering small-town hotel room, cigarette in one hand, telephone in the other, trying to do “everything.” Woody came to wake him at five, and often Lyndon Johnson was
already awake, with more items on a list, more things his restless mind had thought up during
the few hours in which he had been supposed to be sleeping. And when he left the hotel for that early morning broadcast, which was to be followed by the breakfast speech, and then by the grueling day in the helicopter, he left with those long strides and swinging arms. “He groused about no breaks,” Woodward would recall years later, “but if there came
a day when every minute wasn’t filled,” then he was furious.

Ed Clark, who had seen so many campaigners, said of Lyndon Johnson’s 1937 campaign for Congress, “
I never saw anyone campaign as hard as that. I never thought it was
possible
for anyone to work that hard.” If that campaign had been Johnson’s main chance,
this
campaign, the 1948 campaign, might be his last chance. Was 1937 the hardest Lyndon Johnson ever worked? Ed Clark would be asked. “Oh
no,” Clark said. “
In 1948, he worked harder.”

T
HERE WAS A SINGLE PAUSE
in this headlong rush: one brief time-out for a visit unconnected with politics. On June 2, his helicopter grounded in Waco by high winds, Lyndon Johnson was touring nine North Central Texas towns by car, and one of the towns was Marlin. His official schedule in Marlin called only for a speech, a handshaking tour and quick courtesy calls on two or three local officials. Without the helicopter he was running very late
by the time he reached Marlin, and as he fell further behind schedule there, his aides warned him that unless he hurried he might have to cancel the last two or three towns he was supposed to visit. But before he left—as his advance men were urging him into his car for the drive to the next town—he suddenly said: “No. There’s someone I have to see here.” Cutting off his aides’ protests, he said curtly: “This is something that has to be
done.” He had his local campaign manager drive him to the home of
Alice Glass’s mother, and, while his staff fretted outside, looking at their wristwatches, he had a long, leisurely visit whose significance they could not understand.

T
HOSE WHO KNEW HIM
realized the toll being exacted by his frantic pace. Walter Jenkins had seen his Chief drive himself to the verge of exhaustion before, but now, Jenkins saw, “he was more tired than he had ever been.” Others saw frenzy, a frenzy that came close to hysteria.

One reporter, interviewing him, watched Johnson sit in a chair for a few minutes, jump up, sit in another chair, jump up again, pace around the room, lie on the bed, jump up and sit in a chair again, and wrote: “he’s
just too nervous to remain still.” And as he moved restlessly from chair to chair, he puffed cigarettes, lighting one from the end of another; he rubbed big gobs of purple salve into his hands; he tilted back his head
and sprayed his throat with a vaporizer and his nose with an inhaler; he gulped pills from a variety of bottles on the dresser; he stuck lozenges in his mouth and in his nervousness chewed instead of sucked them, so that he had to keep putting new ones in his mouth.

Intensifying this “nervousness” was the cocoon of optimism in which he was wrapped. In town after town, the report from his local campaign manager was glowing: he was pulling up on Ol’ Coke; he was ahead of Ol’ Coke; they had never thought anyone could give Ol’ Coke a run for his money but by God, Lyndon, you’re doing it! This, of course, is standard in any campaign, for local leaders are prone to be overimpressed by the aura of
excitement which surrounds the candidate on his visit to their area, and are anxious moreover to let the candidate know how well they are doing on his behalf, but it was intensified in Johnson’s case by the well-known violence of his reaction to any news that was not good; no one wanted to be the one to give him such news, and as a result he did not receive much of it. And while ordinarily his keen political instincts would have helped him to give such optimism its appropriate
weight, he was even further charged up now by the peculiar nature of this campaign—both his and Coke’s. Crowd size had always augured political success in Texas; thanks to his helicopter, he was in many areas drawing unprecedented crowds, and their response was good. And it was not merely the testimony of his own managers and of his own eyes that contributed to Johnson’s euphoria, but what he read: the results of that last poll, which showed such substantial
gains; the articles about his opponent’s candidacy. Even Peddy was blanketing the state with
radio
speeches and developing a surprisingly strong campaign organization in Houston and some East Texas counties—and what was Coke Stevenson doing? Still interrupting his campaigning to attend to the shearing or the branding on his ranch, still driving from town to town, shaking hands, chatting with people, seldom giving a speech, and
when he did speak, saying the same old things; as for radio talks, when Stevenson took to the air on July 16, it was only the third speech he had given in three months. In it he said he would “do as I have done in the past”: uphold constitutional government and be a good steward of public funds. He said he favored aiding the Western nations of Europe, keeping America strong, opposing extensions of federal control. “The people of Texas know me,” he
concluded. “I don’t have the money to hire an army of paid workers all over the state or to write a letter to every holder of a poll tax. But I have something more valuable. I have friends and supporters in every county in Texas who know the principles I stand for and who like those principles.” Reporters said there was no news in the speech, that it was essentially the same talk he had been giving, several times each day, in the small towns to which he traveled.
They said there was no news in his campaign. Indeed, during
the previous few weeks, reporters had all but stopped covering Coke—for what, after all, was there to report? For days at a time, the ex-Governor all but vanished from view in the media. The scant coverage he received was not infrequently tinged with ridicule; a typical article described one of Coke’s campaign days as “
five towns and 95 handshakes.” Johnson
was seeing thousands of people each day, shaking hundreds of hands, was on the radio morning and night—and, often, noon. By all the standard indices of campaigning, he was doing well—and Coke was doing very badly.

Also playing a role in Johnson’s feelings, it may be, was the depth of his need to believe what he was hearing and reading, to feel that he would succeed in his last chance. One of the typical violent alterations in Lyndon Johnson’s moods had occurred. He was as euphoric in late June as he had been depressed early in the month. The prospect of victory always made his conduct as overbearing as the prospect of defeat made it humble to the point of
obsequiousness. And now he was confident of victory. By the end of June, he was so euphoric as to be all but hysterical, a candidate at the point of irrationality.

He found it impossible to control himself, it seemed, even before the public he was trying to court. The slightest thing that went wrong triggered explosions of a kind with which his aides had long been familiar but which could only antagonize voters. Once, he arrived at a meeting where he was not supposed to give a speech and learned that the organization expected a short talk. Wheeling on his hapless advance men, he screamed, as the club members looked on: “I
thought it was just gonna be
coffee, doughnuts and bullshit!” On another occasion, advance man
Cliff Carter had arranged to have the principal of Robstown High School and a delegation of teachers and students on the steps to greet him. Pleased, Johnson told Carter he wanted to shake the hands of every student in the school—in fact, every student in the whole city. That would take hours. “We don’t have time,
sir,” Carter said, and produced the list of all the stops he was already scheduled to make. Johnson didn’t even look at the paper; instead, he looked at Carter. As the principal observed the intensity of Johnson’s glare, the hand he had extended to welcome the candidate slowly dropped to his side. The smiles faded from the faces of the delegation. There was a long silence. Then Johnson said, in the low, threatening tone that his aides feared more than any other:
“Are we gonna join the Can’t Do It Club right here on the steps of Robstown High School?”

Hotel lobbies became stages for violent scenes. There might be a brief delay in registration or a bellboy might be slow in arriving to take the candidate’s bags. Johnson would shriek at the desk clerk or bellboy in public as he screamed at Woody or
Mary Rather in private, while other patrons stared in astonishment. Hotel suites became stages, too. “He
never got a meal that he didn’t find fault with,”
Horace Busby recalls. “I just couldn’t stand it: the way he’d beat up on the waiter or waitress. He would send back the food: Tell the cook I never saw so much fat on a piece of meat.’ He would ring the bell and tell the desk clerk: ‘This may be the worst hotel I’ve ever stayed in.’ ” The suites became stages even when the audience was the audience he most needed to impress favorably: local political leaders and their
wives. “I’m talking about explosions, tirades,” Horace Busby explains. “Especially explosions against the women who worked for him: ‘Everyone in this outfit is against me!’ That kind of thing.” Local politicians “would come into his hotel suite with their eyes all aglow over the opportunity to meet him—all enthusiastic—and you could just see the light turn off.” “His behavior was hurting him with
local politicians,” Busby says, and with their wives, whom they had often brought along to meet the great man, and who were even more shocked than their husbands at his abusiveness, particularly toward his female secretaries. If Johnson realized the effect his conduct was having, however, he seemed unable or unwilling to change it.

A
ND
, B
USBY SAYS
dryly, “his
nudity was inappropriate.”

Nudity? Rooms in many small-town hotels had only hand basins, with communal toilets at the end of the hall. These bathrooms were small and hot, and it was cooler if the door was left open, so often Johnson left it open. Not a few voters therefore saw the candidate for the United States Senate sitting on the toilet, and described that sight to relatives and friends. Once, in Corsicana, Busby says, several key local supporters arrived at his suite with their wives for a
private social hour following a speech. “He received them nicely, but then it was time for them to leave, and they didn’t. He kept looking over at me to get them out of there,” but the supporters were oblivious to Buzz’s hints. “They were lost in rapture.” So, Busby says, “right in front of them, he just starts undressing.” When he had taken off his tie and shirt and they still hadn’t left, “he started taking off
his pants. The ladies started looking at the ceiling,” and someone said maybe it was time to let Mr. Johnson get some rest.

H
E COULDN’T CONTROL HIMSELF
even with—or in front of—the press. He cultivated the reporters covering the campaign, at times with exaggerated flattery, at times with touches of unique political genius. One device he employed, and perhaps invented, was to introduce the members of the press to the audience at small towns. This impressed audiences and gave the townspeople a sense of identity with his campaign—in the
case of an
Allen Duckworth of the
Dallas News
or
Jack Guinn of the
Houston
Post
, whose names were familiar; “when you’re in a town of eight hundred or nine hundred people, why they like to … 
see the [face] of the byline they read,”
Charles Boatner of the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
explains—while at the same time making the reporters feel like celebrities. But the flattery alternated with harsh tongue-lashings over
the slightest hint of criticism in their stories. He even ridiculed them for no reason at all, displaying as he did so that keen insight into other men’s feelings that enabled him to wound them so deeply.
Dave Cheavens of the Associated Press was, recalls fellow reporter
Margaret Mayer, “a fat, chubby little fellow … a sweet man, a great fellow, but really fat and sensitive about it.” At one town
Cheavens was scheduled to board the helicopter after Johnson’s speech and ride to the next town with him. The helicopter was parked on the far side of a broad plowed field from the speakers’ platform. After the speech, Johnson was hurrying across the field, his long legs enabling him to stride over the furrows. Cheavens, scrambling awkwardly after him, was falling farther and farther behind; Johnson shouted over his shoulder, “C’mon, Cheavens. Won’t
those little fat legs of yours carry you any faster than that?” “It was the type of thing that Johnson seemed to think he was entitled to say,” Mayer says. “He could be quite mean to the reporters.… He thought he could get away with things like that.…” And, indeed, he could, because, in Mayer’s words, “Johnson had courted favor with publishers all over the state.” Reporters whose coverage of the campaign displeased
him were transferred off the campaign—or fired.
¹
Jack Guinn’s articles in the
Houston Post
were impartial, but impartiality was not what Johnson had in mind from the newspaper whose publisher, former Governor
William P. Hobby, had so admired Sam Ealy Johnson. Frank Oltorf was Johnson’s campaign manager for one of the
North Central Texas districts, but Johnson knew that Hobby was fond of Oltorf, a distant cousin. Telephoning Oltorf one evening, Johnson told him to ask “The Governor” if he could cover the Johnson campaign. Oltorf did so, and the Governor agreed, although Oltorf’s only previous newspaper experience had been as the paper’s student stringer at Rice University. (Asked how he would characterize his campaign stories for one of the state’s largest
newspapers, Oltorf says with a small smile: “They were adequate. And they certainly weren’t unfriendly.” “Did the editors rewrite you much?” Smile. “No.”) Some reporters got their first view of Lyndon Johnson’s relationship with subordinates during
this campaign, and it upset them so deeply that occasionally one would attempt to intervene. One evening, the candidate had some of the top state political
reporters in his suite, “talking to them, stroking them.” But he “wanted something from
Mary Rather and he spoke roughly and crudely to her … using obscenities that shocked even these hard-bitten reporters.” After a minute or two,
Felix McKnight of the
Dallas News
, burst out, “You can’t talk to her like that! Apologize to her!” But
“Johnson was totally oblivious to what he had done”—and, it appeared, “Mary was, too. She was used to it.” The moment passed away without an apology. But almost none of this feeling showed up in so much as a hint in the reporters’ articles.