Means of Ascent (52 page)

T
HE HANDS
with which he was doing this were terribly cracked now.

Dry and scaly as they had been before the campaign because of his eczema, the sun had baked them dryer. They looked almost like cracked leather marked with narrow lines of blood, for new cracks, deep, painful little knifelike slits, were constantly appearing in the skin. And many of the hands he was shaking were the hands of farmers, hard and strong, the hands of men who had worked with their hands all their lives. “Without meaning to, they hurt,” says
Horace Busby. And sometimes, in the crush after a speech, Johnson would momentarily forget to use the two-handed method or someone would grab his hand while he was still concentrating on someone else. Once, Busby was standing on the ground next to a flatbed truck, with steps on both ends, on which Johnson was shaking hands with members of the audience as they came up on the truck and filed past him. “All of a sudden I heard the damnedest yelp, like a dog had been hit.”
Busby looked up, and Lyndon Johnson “was down on one knee. He had been shaking hands with a big old guy in coveralls and a white shirt.” But, as the young speechwriter watched, Johnson recovered himself and smiled at the farmer, and turned with a smile to the next person in line, and the next, and the next. At every stop, no matter how much it might hurt him to shake hands, he shook every one. He shook even those that were not offered to him. In small towns there was
usually a little group of elderly men, the domino players from the Courthouse
Square, who would stand at the back of the crowd during the speech and after it would not approach the candidate, showing by the reserved look on their faces that
they
were not impressed by any politician (of course, elderly men like these were almost invariably Stevenson supporters). But when Johnson noticed such a group of men, he would, after he had shaken everyone
else’s hands, walk over to where they were standing to shake theirs, his cracked hand held out, and a broad, pleasant smile on his face.

H
IS VOICE WAS CRACKED
, too, and the throat sprays were not helping much more than the ointments were helping his hands. By the end of each day, it was a hoarse croak, but every time it seemed to be about to give out entirely, it would come back.

He was so tired. After spending July 15 accompanying Johnson on a tour of the Fourth Congressional District in Northeast Texas, District Chairman
Fred Meredith asked Claude Wild to show the candidate mercy. “He had a
mighty hard schedule that day,” Meredith wrote.

In his reply, Wild didn’t even respond to the suggestion about fewer appearances. What would have been the use? It wasn’t his campaign manager who was driving Lyndon Johnson. Once, in these final weeks before the July 24 primary, the candidate was so tired that during his noon stop at a hotel, he decided to take a half-hour nap; changing into pajamas, he went to sleep. His aides, who had been watching with concern the toll being exacted from him, did not
awaken him for two hours. When they did, his first look was at his wristwatch. His face tightened. He didn’t take a nap like that again. Thereafter, as before, napping was something he did in the helicopter.

He would shout at Mashman over the roar of the engine. “Joe, I’m just too tired. I’ve got to rest.” A moment later, he would be asleep. He slept sitting up, of course, since that tiny cockpit had no room in which to lie down: two twenty-four-inch-wide bucket seats occupied most of its sixty-inch width; between each seat and the door next to it (or the opening where the door would have been had there been a door) was a space of two and a half
inches. As Johnson sat cramped in his seat, one set of the dual controls was between his knees, so that as he slept, held upright by his seat belt, his head slumping forward on his chest, his long legs were
“sort of wrapped around the controls,” his right arm all but out the open door. “There was so much noise and the cockpit would be shaking and vibrating, and the doors were off so the wind was whistling through it.” The sun shining
through the unshaded Plexiglas made the inside of the “bubble” glaringly bright. But Johnson would be sleeping, sometimes with his Stetson pulled down over his eyes for shade, sometimes with the hat still on the floor where an aide had placed it. Mashman found it incredible that anyone could sleep in such conditions, but he realized his passenger was just too tired to stay awake.

Sometimes Johnson, in the moment before he went to sleep, would tell Mashman, “We’re going to fly over this town and, if you want to, slow down there and you can just say whatever you want, but I’m just too tired.” He had found that Mashman could speak over the microphone, and the quality of the sound system ensured that no one on the ground would be able to tell who was really talking to them. So when the helicopter reached the town, Johnson
would go on sleeping while Mashman, circling and hovering, would say through the microphone: “
Hello, down there, this is your friend Lyndon Johnson, asking you to vote for me in this forthcoming election. This is Congressman Lyndon Johnson speaking, hopefully your next Senator.… We’re sorry we can’t land, but we’re thinking about you.” The blare of the public-address-system amplifier, lashed to the helicopter only a foot or
two behind Johnson, had no more effect on him than the roar of the engine, or the vibration. As Mashman proclaimed, “This is Lyndon Johnson speaking,” Lyndon Johnson slept on. Having completed his spiel, Mashman would climb and soar away. Glancing over at the exhausted man beside him, Mashman noticed how the sun pouring down on him made even sharper the grooves clawed into his cheeks by fatigue and deepened the dark, almost purple, shadows under his eyes. It glinted off
the slits of blood on his hands. But as Lyndon Johnson slept in that cockpit filled with sun, he never blinked.

Johnson would never sleep for more than half an hour, Mashman recalls. Then, in an instant, he would be wide awake, and his first question, shouted over the engine noise, would be: “Are we on schedule, Joe?” or “How we doin’ on time?” or “When are we going to get there?” And if the answer wasn’t satisfactory—“Well, c’mon. We’ve got to get there, you know.
Come on!!”

D
URING THESE THREE WEEKS
from the Fourth of July weekend to Primary Day, Mashman had a unique view of what the pilot calls Lyndon Johnson’s “single-mindedness, his concentration, his determination”—words that are inadequate to describe either the intensity with which his
passenger was focusing on his goal, an intensity that left no room for other considerations, or the ferocity with which he was
fighting to reach it.

Mashman’s view was unique because he alone flew with Lyndon Johnson during these weeks. He had been surprised—as had his predecessor, Chudars—by Johnson’s total lack of interest in the helicopter; by the way, in an era in which helicopters were so new and “unproven that even many seasoned pilots shunned them,” the Congressman had “just got on and said, ‘Let’s go’ ” the first time he had
seen the aircraft, burying himself in his briefing papers and staying buried in them. Flying in the Bell was a substantially different experience from flying in the far larger Sikorsky: it vibrated much more, and was noisier; moreover, instead of sitting in a cockpit that resembled the cabin of a small airplane, a passenger was sitting, surrounded only by glass, as if he were simply perched five hundred or a thousand feet up in the air. But Johnson seemed not to notice.

During these weeks, Mashman feels, he came to understand the Congressman’s lack of interest. The helicopter, he says, echoing the same words that Chudars uses, was to Johnson “only a means to an end”—the end being victory. This end, Mashman came to see, was so all-consuming that the means mattered not at all; no consideration that might interfere with victory could be allowed to intrude.

Not even personal safety. Because of Lyndon Johnson, during these three weeks Mashman flew constantly on a razor-thin margin of safety.

“He would urge you on,” Mashman says. “He had a knack of getting everything there was to get out of you.” And, the pilot says, “in the field of aviation, that’s a very dangerous thing.” Mashman says that “if he pushed you to the point whereby he was definitely wrong in doing so, and you definitely couldn’t do it, if you just stopped and laid it on the line and said, ‘I don’t think this is a
safe thing to do,’ that we just can’t do it, period—then he would back down and say, ‘All right. You’re the boss.’ ” Nonetheless, as day followed day, and Johnson pushed harder and harder, the “point” at which Mashman “stopped” edged closer and closer to the limits of safety.

The very act of “inching off” from inadequate landing sites with a too-heavy load, wavering in the air a few feet above the ground and then a few feet higher, and then struggling up into the sky, might have been disconcerting to the average passenger, but Johnson’s only concern during such moments was in weighing the waste of time involved in this experimenting against the waste of time involved if he told Mashman to set down and let him out so that
he could be driven to a rendezvous with the helicopter outside town: his only concern was which method would get him to the next town—the next audience of voters—faster.

The margin of daylight was another source of concern to Mashman—and, under Johnson’s prodding, the pilot was constantly slicing that margin thinner and thinner. Since the helicopter was not equipped with night-flying instruments, Mashman had at first insisted that the campaign schedule allow him to be on the ground well before dark. Johnson was determined to cram the maximum number of campaign appearances into each day, and often he
would run behind schedule; as the afternoon drew into evening, aides would warn him that daylight was running out, but the warnings were ignored, and Mashman found himself landing later and later, often in the dusk, just as darkness was becoming total. Years later, the pilot was to recall vividly the times he came in for a landing when he could barely see the ground.

Under Johnson’s prodding, moreover, Warren Woodward was selecting tighter and tighter landing sites. One was located in Rosenberg, a small city of forty-eight hundred residents about thirty miles west of Houston. There, Woodward had been unable to find near the center of town “even a lawn” large enough for the 47-D to set down on. The only sizable flat area was the roof of a B. F. Goodrich Service Station. So Woodward ordered Mashman to land on the
service station. No one was really sure if the roof would bear the helicopter’s weight, and at the last minute Woodward had the roof shored up with beams hauled from a local lumberyard in wagons pulled by muleteams. The beams were in place—just—when the helicopter started to descend, but Mashman was more than a little worried about what would happen when its full weight settled on the roof. His passenger, however, was not; during Mashman’s slow, anxious
descent, Johnson lifted his head from his perusal of his notes for a single glance at the satisfactorily sizable crowd gathering to watch the daredevil landing. When they were down, his only reaction to the risk that had been taken was pleasure; the smile he turned on Woodward was, for once, wholly uncritical; “that’s my can-do boy,” he said.

Storms—even the violent late-afternoon Texas thunderstorms—were to Johnson nothing but an annoyance, an obstacle between him and his goal. Ahead of the helicopter, suddenly, one of those mighty columns of swirling blackness would loom up thirty or forty thousand feet high. Mashman might venture to mention it to his passenger. “Well, just keep on going,” Lyndon Johnson would say. “We’ve got to get there.” Willing though
the pilot was to fly through a storm’s turbulence, sometimes he would feel that the danger was simply too great because of the lack of visibility: he would be unable to see the ground, or even more than a few feet ahead, and of course the little craft was not equipped to fly on instruments. If he told Johnson he couldn’t proceed, Johnson’s initial response would be: “Well, are you sure, now?” If Mashman said he was, Johnson would defer to his
judgment. Sometimes they would wait, hoping
the storm would move away, hovering in midair close to its edge. At other times, the pilot would try to circle the storm and fly on to the next town, skipping one stop, with Johnson adjuring him to circle the storm as closely as possible so as not to lose a single unnecessary minute. But, more and more often, as the weight of Johnson’s personality bore on Mashman’s, the pilot found himself deciding to try
to get through such storms—by flying under them, where he could see the ground. In order to see it, in the heavy rain, Mashman might have to descend as low as five feet off the ground, and would “just inch along,” slower and slower, sometimes as slow as fifteen miles per hour, peering ahead through the sheets of rain to look for any obstacles: a building or an electric telephone wire; “many times we actually flew under high-tension wires,” Mashman
recalls. And all the time, of course, hanging above them was that mass of black clouds. The pilot himself was often “a little shaky” during such maneuvers, but his passenger wasn’t; “All he wanted to know was, Are we going to get there on time?”

It wasn’t, Mashman came to realize, that his passenger was weighing various considerations against the political necessities of the moment, such as getting to a rally on time, or cramming in one more stop before dark. Rather, it was that in his passenger’s mind, there
were
no other considerations.

Mashman came to understand this fully after an incident in Marshall, Lady Bird Johnson’s high-school hometown, on July 14.

The incident was the result of a form of stalling (its technical name was “settling with power”) that occasionally occurred during those early days of helicopter flying. This stalling was caused by a combination of extremely hot weather, which reduced the engine’s power, and a sudden shift in the wind when a helicopter was flying at a low altitude—so that
the blades find no purchase in the air, and, as Mashman puts it,
“the ship just begins to drop like a brick.”