Means of Ascent (56 page)

Immediately after the first primary, Stevenson’s campaign manager had sent out letters soliciting contributions for the second race. But from some longtime supporters—including certain big contributors “that,” Boyett says, “we had always counted on”—there was no reply. The checks that others sent in were often a zero short. “People who we thought would come in for a thousand or two thousand
dollars would come in for only a hundred or two hundred,” Boyett recalls. As a result, he says, “we had quite a bit less than we had expected.” Boyett understood why. “Lyndon created the doubt: ‘He’ll vote to repeal that Act.’ It cut the flow down to a dribble. Moreover,” Boyett explains, “it wasn’t just money we lost, but support.” For the men who were no longer supporting Stevenson were the owners and
managers of corporations. “In those days, if a popular executive with a company let it be known he was supporting a candidate, a lot of the employees would go along. And now some of the companies we had expected to support us, weren’t.” But the money aspect was crucial in itself. “We didn’t have adequate funds to conduct a campaign.”

I
T TOOK
Coke Stevenson two weeks to realize the damage that the Taft-Hartley “issue” had done to the reputation he cherished. “We didn’t have any polls,” Boyett recalls. “The Old Man didn’t understand what it was doing to him.” But calls from longtime supporters like Schreiner made him realize at last, and on August 11 Stevenson issued a statement on Taft-Hartley.

He made it in a letter to a friend,
Sam Braswell, Jr., publisher of the
Kerrville Times
. “Sam,” the letter said, “my stand on the Taft-Hartley law has never been a secret, although everything I have said regarding it has been deliberately misconstrued by my opponent in this race. I have said repeatedly in public statements and radio addresses that I think the effect of the Taft-Hartley law in curbing
the labor monopoly has been a
good thing for the country. I believe that you are sufficiently familiar with my public record to know that I have never kowtowed to any labor boss.”

The
Dallas News
commented that Stevenson’s letter proved that Johnson’s campaign “has been largely waged against a straw man,” for the letter “expresses the view that the Taft-Hartley Act has been of national benefit in curbing labor monopoly, the only real purpose at which it was aimed.” The charge has always been “a little absurd,” the
News
said, since “to anyone familiar with his
[Stevenson’s] long record in Texas administration obviously the accusation sought to portray him in a light utterly out of character.” Coke himself pointed out that his statement was “nothing new—it is a restatement of what I said in Abilene,” but his aides were pleased that he had finally made it; his letter would lay to rest once and for all Lyndon Johnson’s accusations, they felt. And the
News
expressed the same opinion.

Which demonstrated only that they didn’t know Lyndon Johnson.

He received the news in the midst of a day campaigning in San Antonio. He had to make three speeches in person that day and three over the radio, and to meet privately with the tough little postmaster, Dan Quill, and leaders of the “City Machine” and with the Mexican-American leaders who hadn’t delivered for him in the first primary, and in between these speeches and meetings he shook hands in a park and at the city zoo, at the gates to industrial
plants, with the workers crowding out at the end of their shifts, in downtown department stores, and in the teeming Mexican-American ghetto of the West Side. Towering above swarthy men in bright-colored shirts and old women in black rebozos, he abrazoed his way enthusiastically through the crowded, pushcart-jammed San Antonio slums. “Up one business block and down another, apparently unmindful of the more than 100-degree temperature,” the Congressman moved, hugging,
smiling, shouting, in a swirl of aides and voters. One by one, “reporters retired in defeat to the air-conditioned comfort of their hotel before the day was very old”; Johnson went on, hour after hour. But amid that turmoil and heat, the amazing political machine in Lyndon Johnson’s mind never stopped clicking away. By mid-morning, he had devised a strategy to combat Stevenson’s letter. First, he called in friendly reporters and planted doubts in their
minds about the letter’s authenticity. He understood there was some question about whether Coke had really written that letter, he told them; they’d better make sure he had before they got too excited about it. Didn’t it seem strange to them that after all these weeks of refusing to make a statement, Stevenson had finally made one in a letter to the publisher of some obscure small-town newspaper instead of in a speech or press release? Had anyone seen the
signature?

Two friendly reporters, Charles K. Boatner of
Amon Carter’s
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
and
Robert V. Johnson of Hobby’s
Houston Post
,
drove the fifty miles to Kerrville, and the Houston reporter confirmed that the letter “was on stationery of the Stevenson headquarters at Austin and bore a signature which looked similar to the
several signatures of the former Governor I have seen.” But Johnson’s tactic caused some newspapers to delay publication of the letter a day, and to give it smaller play than they would have on a first-day story, and it also clouded the letter just enough so that in some large papers it never received the major coverage it deserved; Robert Johnson’s article, for example, said only that the letter “purported to give
Stevenson’s view.”

But the main reason that Stevenson’s letter had little impact was that Stevenson had little money. Now that the Old Man had made his statement, Murphey and Boyett and his other aides wanted it reprinted and broadcast. But printings and broadcasts cost money.

Lyndon Johnson, who
had
money, countered the letter with a barrage of broadcasts. On both August 13 and 14, he delivered three separate fifteen-minute
radio talks, each over a thirty-station network that brought his voice into every town in Texas. The line he took was that Stevenson was still “dodging” the issue. Stevenson’s letter, Johnson said, was “
noncommittal. Texans
think he has had plenty of time to give them a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer on whether he thinks Taft-Hartley is a good or bad law [and] whether he would vote to repeal it.…” Stevenson was still behaving like a frightened politician, Johnson said. “My opponent seems to be mighty interested in convincing the public he is not tied in with any labor bosses. Last June he accepted their endorsement with boasts. But under fire now from the other
side he acts like he is ashamed of labor support … and is trying to rub off the brand.”

To reinforce its candidate’s statements, the Johnson campaign put on the air public figures respected in their various locales—and put them on in an effective way, often purchasing simultaneous time on every radio station, no matter how small, in an area so that listeners could not avoid the Johnson pitch. New reprints of the press conference articles were made, and new
mailings went out. On August 15, Johnson, in
another radio address, said, “By this time, nearly everybody in Texas has been forced to the conclusion that my opponent has established a world’s record for refusing to declare his opinion on important issues.” And indeed the impression in Texas still remained that Stevenson had entered into some kind of deal with “labor bosses.” The ex-Governor’s letter had been buried as completely as his earlier statement in Abilene. The
Dallas
News
was to comment on Johnson’s tactics: “
With utterly unfounded allegation incapable of substantiation, he has striven to connect the
AFL endorsement with a nonexistent deal to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act.” But the tactics had worked: Johnson had not merely “striven” to connect the endorsement with a “deal”—he had succeeded in doing so. Turning the truth
on
its head, he had made a state believe not merely a lie, but a lie which defied logic. Texas had known Coke Stevenson’s view about union bosses. But Lyndon Johnson was persuading a state that Stevenson’s view was the precise opposite of what it really was.

The magnification of the power of money in the new media politics made such persuasion relatively easy. A substantial number of voters
in Texas did not subscribe to a daily newspaper, and since many weekly newspapers never carried Stevenson’s letter, these voters never read it; all they knew about it was what Lyndon Johnson told them. Few voters in Texas read the text of the letter more than once; they read, and heard, Johnson’s
interpretation of it over and over. Against an opponent who had so little money himself, this persuasion had, in fact, been easy. As John Connally is happy to explain: “
You have to say something over and over to get voters to be aware of it. And he [Coke] didn’t [do that]. He didn’t advertise it, he didn’t make an issue of it on the radio. So the press might be aware of the [letter], they might write a story about it—but nobody knew about
it.”

I
N A FINAL TOUCH
of irony, in Washington the presidents of four railroad unions endorsed Lyndon Johnson for Senator. Stevenson said, “This development is
no surprise to Texans who are familiar with the real issues in this race … and with the past records of both candidates.” But most Texans did not learn about the endorsement. There were few broadcasts and almost no mailings to drum home
to voters that the supposedly anti-
labor candidate had been endorsed by labor.
¹
Nor, of course, were voters or businessmen aware that
Robert Oliver, organizing director for the Congress of Industrial Organizations in Texas, was quietly lining up “a number of local (CIO) unions” in Texas cities to support Johnson, or that Welly Hopkins, general counsel
of the
United Mine Workers (whose president,
John L. Lewis, was being assailed by Johnson on his noontime radio broadcasts), was drumming up labor support for Johnson and carrying campaign material back and forth between Corcoran and Rowe in Washington and Wirtz in Texas, or that a major source of funding for Johnson’s “anti-union” campaign was
David Dubinsky and other big-city union bosses, that in
fact, unions in cities throughout the Northeast were shipping
cash south to help the Johnson campaign. In almost every speech now, Johnson was reading the transcript of the press conference in which
Stevenson had refused to answer the questions about Taft-Hartley. The fact that Stevenson now had answered was all but drowned out in the flood of Johnson broadcasts, ads and pamphlets.

M
ONEY COULD BUY
more than publicity. Money could buy men. George Peddy’s votes were essential to any hope of victory, and Peddy’s stronghold was in Deep
East Texas, the little towns in the piney woods along the Louisiana border, the stronghold not only of Peddy strength but of Stevenson strength—of a conservatism as rock-solid as the Confederate state that Deep East Texas so closely resembled.

Johnson opened his second primary campaign there, in the very heart of Peddy country, in Center, county seat of Peddy’s native Shelby County. In some ways it was a traditional East Texas rally, with farmers and their wives sitting on backless benches in the Courthouse Square, near the inevitable statue of the Confederate soldier, others remaining in their cars behind the benches and honking their horns to join in the applause. But the evidence of what
money—unlimited money—could accomplish in even a hostile area was visible. As the
Houston Post
commented the next day:

Advertisements announcing the rally had not appeared merely in Shelby County newspapers, or on Shelby County
radio stations, but all over East Texas, and the crowd—four hundred to five hundred persons, larger than anyone had expected—had come from as far away as Bowie County 105 miles to the north, to hear Johnson praise the native son in a bellow delivered over a full-size microphone strapped to his chest with a
harness so that he could move around as he spoke. “
I have not and will not speak an unkind word about Colonel Peddy. He was a man I liked and admired.… Colonel Peddy and I agreed on almost all the issues of the race.”

But it wasn’t Johnson’s shouts that most strongly influenced Deep East Texas; it was the whispers of the missionaries. They had always had an unusually strong impact in these isolated little towns, so cut off from news of the outside world. Because of the affection for Peddy in these towns, the active campaigners were instructed to make the Colonel’s friends believe that Stevenson was his enemy: “Well, you know, I was in Austin the other
night, in the Driskill, and Coke came in, and you should have heard what he said about Colonel Peddy. He said …”

Did the Johnson campaign buy more than missionaries? At this crucial moment, according to men in both camps,
Brown & Root swung into action in East Texas with local subcontractors. The power of small-town banks, on which local farmers are continuously dependent not only for mortgages (and for refinancing of mortgages if they have had a bad year) but for annual crop loans and loans to purchase seed, was mobilized. Federal
agencies with whom Johnson had
influence—the
Rural Electrification Administration, in particular—used their influence in East Texas. And were more direct payments being made? Ed Clark, raised in San Augustine and still owner of a home there, was asked in later years how Johnson did so well in San Augustine, and throughout East Texas; Clark, forthcoming on other points, will not discuss his home county. For reply, he only raised a
big hand and rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. Forty years later,
Ernest Boyett still vividly remembers his shock when he began contacting East Texas political leaders whose support of Coke Stevenson he had considered certain. “Almost the first two I contacted—and they were key men—said to me that they couldn’t support Coke this time. I was so startled that words failed me. They had supported the Old Man for years. But they said
that they had been offered a thousand dollars each to switch to Johnson. A thousand dollars was a great deal of
money for them. I remember one of them saying that he was getting older, and he had to leave something for his wife. Well, what could I say to that? They said they still believed in Coke, but that they would be throwing their weight to Lyndon.” Into Stevenson’s headquarters poured similar reports. Boyett recalls his thoughts: “My
God! They’re stealing East Texas!”