Means of Ascent (57 page)

S
IMILAR TACTICS
were being employed in rural counties all over Texas. The impressions of a score of politicians who remember the
1948 campaign are summarized in the reminiscences of a man who had the gift of grasping the overall patterns in the Texas political scene,
Ralph Yarborough, United States Senator from 1957 to 1970.

For four months now, ever since May, Lyndon Johnson, and his money man, Herman Brown, and Alvin Wirtz had been trying to buy a state. They hadn’t succeeded—so now they simply raised their offer.

To levels “like Texas had never seen.”

C
OKE
S
TEVENSON
wasn’t organizing the rural counties. During the first two weeks in August, he campaigned as he had always campaigned, driving around the state, shaking hands, talking to handfuls of voters about “principles” and the need for “economy” and “common sense” in government. The pro-Stevenson officials in these counties—legislators and former
legislators, County Judges, men who were part of the traditional Texas political structure—were left to their own devices. There was almost no communication between them and Stevenson’s Austin headquarters. Some of these men were actively working for Stevenson in the weeks before the second primary—and some were not.

Some, in fact, weren’t even in the state. Well-to-do Texans try to escape the August heat by scheduling their vacations for that month. Many of Coke’s “lead men” had been planning to go hunting in Canada. When they offered to stay home if they were needed, Coke’s headquarters didn’t make them feel they were needed. Nothing illustrates the
lack of central coordination in the Stevenson campaign more clearly
than the situation in two remote counties, Kinney and Hansford. These two Stevenson strongholds had given the former Governor a combined plurality of four hundred votes in the first primary. Because Stevenson was so far ahead, officials of these two counties felt the ex-Governor would not need their votes in the second primary—so they weren’t holding one. And Stevenson headquarters was unaware of this fact. The
overconfidence in Stevenson’s
headquarters was understandable: they were seventy thousand votes ahead, and how could they possibly lose the Peddy vote? By all the ordinary rules of Texas politics, their candidate had won.

B
UT
J
OHNSON
wasn’t playing by these rules.

From the earliest beginnings of Lyndon Johnson’s political life—from his days at college when he had captured control of campus politics—his tactics had consistently revealed a pragmatism and a
cynicism that had no discernible limits. His morality was the
morality of the ballot box, a morality in which nothing matters but victory and any maneuver that leads to victory
is justified, a morality that was amorality.

Johnson had already enjoyed considerable success in linking Coke Stevenson, adamant foe of organized labor though he was, with “big-city labor racketeers.” Now he was to attempt to link the former Governor with another group: Communists. Coke Stevenson, Lyndon Johnson now charged, was a front man for a Communist conspiracy. Maybe Coke was an unwitting front man, Johnson said—and maybe he wasn’t.

Johnson began this effort in a series of
radio broadcasts (over statewide hookups) that read into Stevenson’s alleged failure to take a stand on Taft-Hartley a more sinister interpretation than any he had yet suggested. “
Lyndon Johnson voted for the anti-Communist Taft-Hartley Law,” Johnson said. “Lyndon Johnson will never vote to repeal this law. But my opponent has not yet made a public statement as to
just where he stands on this measure that bans Communist control of labor unions.” The next evening Johnson escalated the attack: “
Birds of a feather” such as
John L. Lewis,
James C. Petrillo “and Communist
Harry Bridges, whom I voted to deport to Australia years ago … have flocked together in a united effort to defeat Lyndon Johnson, who refused to wear
their Red feathers in his hat, and they are using Coke Stevenson as their silent man Friday.… My opponent has refused to promise that … he will not … return control of labor unions to racketeering Communist leaders who take orders only from Moscow.” By the following evening, he was implying that Stevenson’s “refusal to promise” might mean that he had made a secret promise—“
Does it mean that he would amend the law so that labor bosses could have secret Communist connections?”

Johnson seemed to think he could make Texans—at least rural Texans—swallow even so ridiculous a charge if it was repeated often enough. To reinforce his
speeches—which were making Stevenson’s Communist “link” more and more explicit—a new device was unveiled, aimed squarely at unsophisticated farmers. It was the inspiration of John Connally, who says that when he was a farm boy in Wilson County,
“
My first impression of politics in Texas was the
Ferguson Forum,”
a simulated weekly newspaper printed during the
campaigns of Governor Jim Ferguson. “People were all talking about it,” Connally recalls. “It went into every rural mailbox.… Most of these rural people … read it and they believed it.” Pappy O’Daniel had copied the
Forum
in his
O’Daniel News
. Now Connally ordered up the
Johnson Journal
—a four-page newspaper,
written in Johnson headquarters but designed to look like a genuine weekly so that to the unsophisticated it would carry a newspaper’s authority—and it was mailed early in August to 340,000 rural mailboxes. The
Journal’s
theme was captured
in its lead headline: “
COMMUNISTS FAVOR COKE
.” Also reinforcing Johnson’s speeches, of course, was the other campaign device that had proven so effective with unsophisticated voters. From the Hancock House, new marching orders were given to the missionaries: to fan out across Texas, calling on farm families, standing around in grocery stores, sitting in bars, dropping hints and innuendoes about Coke and “the
Reds”: “I’m not saying he is one, but listen.…”

A
SSIDUOUSLY
though he had, for years, privately cultivated Texas’ wealthy
reactionaries, Lyndon Johnson had always sought—for strategic reasons, it was true, but nonetheless he had sought—to preserve a measure of independence in his dealings with them. While he had run their errands and accepted their cash, he had kept a little distance between himself and them, partly because he
never wanted to be allied completely with any position, partly so that he could claim to the Washington liberals that he was liberal at heart. But now this was to change.

The reactionaries’ alliance with Coke Stevenson had always been tenuous; the former Governor, although in agreement on ideology, had always been too independent for their taste, too proud, not nearly subservient enough; not subservient at all, in fact. Richardson and Murchison and other members of their circle had assured them that Lyndon Johnson could “get things done” for them in Washington and that Johnson was not in reality the liberal he appeared to be, but before the first primary they had continued to give their support—their money, their influence over the votes of their employees—to Stevenson. Now, however, feeling betrayed by Coke (“He’ll vote to repeal that Act!”), they were more disposed to give it to Johnson. But, prudent, practical men that they were, and determined to exact the complete subservience of the candidate who received that support, they
put a price on it.

The price was that Lyndon Johnson should give a certain speech.

It was a speech not unfamiliar to Texas voters. They had, in fact, heard versions of it hundreds of times—delivered by W. Lee O’Daniel. For years, first as an announcer for Light Crust Flour and then for his own Hillbilly Flour, O’Daniel had exerted an immense influence over rural Texas through the radio talks he gave every day at a half-hour past noon over the dominant
Texas State Quality Network, talks that were almost sermons
about motherhood and religion and “Beautiful, Beautiful Texas,” delivered, against a background of soft violins playing sentimental country-and-Western tunes, in the matchlessly warm, soft but firm voice
of a wise and wonderful “Pappy.” “At 12:30 sharp every day,” one reporter wrote, “silence reigned in the State of Texas, broken only by mountain music and the dulcet voice of W. Lee O’Daniel.” Even
after Pappy’s entrance into politics, he still spoke in the same time slot, but the speech was different. It had in its many versions the same basic themes, which played on the fears and prejudices of the unsophisticated and poorly educated listeners sitting over lunch on their farms and ranches. Its main theme was the danger from Communists, who, Pappy said, had infiltrated Texas industrial plants and—along with racketeers, “goons” and
“mobsters” from the big cities of the Northeast—the state’s labor unions. A genius in demagoguery, he would reiterate certain phrases—“Communist labor leader racketeers,” “union thugs,” and, after a labor incident in Chicago in which a hand grenade was thrown, “pineapple-throwing Red goons”—over and over; attempting to describe the speech—“
Pappy’s
Speech,” as it came to be known in Texas political circles—one observer recalls: “He would just drum, drum, drum with his little catch phrases—‘labor leader racketeers,’ ‘Communist labor leader racketeers,’ ‘pineapple-throwing labor leader racketeers’: you just wouldn’t think there would be that many ways to get ‘labor leader racketeers’ into a sentence.”

Pappy’s speech embodied the ignorant and vicious side of Texas conservatism; it was the essence of everything that Lyndon Johnson had convinced his liberal friends in Washington he was fighting against in Texas; indeed, during his 1941 campaign against O’Daniel, he had had Pappy’s speech recorded and sent to Washington to convince Corcoran and Rowe (and Franklin Roosevelt, for whom they played the record) that Johnson’s opponent was a
“Neanderthal” and that therefore their support of Johnson’s candidacy should be increased. (This device had worked; says Rowe: “That speech was the most unbelievable thing I ever heard.”) When liberal or moderate Texans gave their reasons for despising Pass-the-Biscuits-Pappy O’Daniel—and they despised him quite deeply—they often did so by quoting “Pappy’s Speech.”

Because the twelve-thirty slot on the Texas Quality Network had become identified with O’Daniel, and because farm and ranch families had grown accustomed not only to listening to it, but to believing what was said on it, that time slot was, recalls
Horace Busby, “
the great prize in Texas politics.” It was controlled by a group of Dallas reactionaries, and was not available to any liberal politician—or,
indeed, to any politician who refused to tug his forelock to them: when an unapproved candidate tried to buy the time, the network simply said it was not for sale.

Early in August, 1948, Attorney General Tom Clark’s brother Robert, a Dallas lawyer who represented the men who controlled that time slot, approached Lyndon Johnson with a simple proposal. They would support him—and give him the time slot—if he used it to deliver “Pappy’s
Speech” as if it were his own. Of course, Clark explained, they didn’t want him to give the speech just once; they wanted him to
give it over and over, day after day, every day until Election Day, just the way Pappy would have done it. Lyndon would not even have to write it, they said. Pappy’s old speechwriters would write it. All Johnson would have to do was read it, over and over, as evidence of his good faith, as public proof that he truly subscribed to Pappy’s philosophy, which was, of course, their philosophy.

Horace Busby was in Amarillo with Johnson, staying in the same hotel, when the candidate received the first script. Having known nothing of Clark’s proposal, the young aide had been surprised when he had noticed in the schedule that Johnson was to give a speech in that prized time slot.

No campaigning had been arranged for that morning, as Busby recalls: “He had a morning alone.” Busby was in his own room, and Johnson summoned him. When he arrived, the candidate was looking through the script. “It was as though he had no life in him,” Busby recalls. “He would sit down at a table, and … he would turn the pages. He would get up and pace and sit down again. Finally,” Busby says, “he
motioned me over [and said], ‘Look at this stuff.’ ” Busby read the speech. He cannot recall the exact words but, Busby says, “it equated unionism with mobs. All about ‘goons’ and ‘goon squads’ and ‘pineapples’ [grenades] being thrown into the homes of honest union reformers, and extortion. The language was very rough.”

“I don’t know about that,” Johnson said. “Sometimes politics asks too much.” For what Busby describes as “an extended period of time,” the candidate “was going through just an intense personal debate with himself.” He paced back and forth, stopping every so often and staring at the ceiling, absent-mindedly jingling the change in his pocket—as if unable to decide whether or not to give the speech. He
gave Busby some of the background.