Means of Ascent (84 page)

Rather, Stevenson’s relation to Johnson and the campaign was as the folk hero Johnson had to run against, and that is how I portrayed him. The voters’ respect for Stevenson was the main obstacle between Johnson and his goal; it was in effect the main “issue” of the campaign. So the reputation (and the life story that was its basis) is presented in detail to show its strength—and to show, as well, the difficulty Johnson faced in
wrecking it.

“ISSUES,”
in the conventional sense of the word, had little to do with the campaign, I found.

This was not at all what I believed during the early stages of my research for this volume. The Loyalists are an issue-oriented group, and they describe the 1948 campaign as one oriented to issues. In their opinion, Stevenson’s views on race were a significant factor in the campaign, as was the question of United States involvement in the postwar world. In the Loyalists’ opinion, also, Johnson needed them badly, courted them fervently, and entered into a
close alliance with them—an alliance that they contend was crucial to his victory; they feel that only through understanding the fight between Loyalists and Regulars in the 1944 presidential campaign can one understand the Texas senatorial election of 1948. The Johnson adherents in Austin—a group to some degree synonymous
with the old Loyalists—feel, in short, that the 1948 campaign was a campaign in which their participation was vital, a
campaign that hinged on the issues which were important to them. In oral histories, books and interviews they convey this view quite persuasively—and for some time I shared that view.

Eventually, however, it became impossible for me to continue to share it—or even to remain convinced of any substantial part of it. For one thing, by this time I was reading the approximately 56,000 pages of documents in the Johnson Library relating to the campaign. I was no longer interviewing only pro-Johnson politicians and political observers. And I was now reading—and analyzing—the coverage of the campaign in the daily and weekly newspapers.
The more research I did, the more obvious it became that the Loyalists’ view of their significance in the campaign was drastically exaggerated. To the extent that the Johnson campaign had a consistent philosophical thrust at all, it was a drive to obtain not the liberal vote but, as this book shows in detail, the
conservative
vote. Although various Loyalists portray Johnson and his top aides as courting them throughout the campaign (and although, of course,
some
courting did in fact take place), talk to the aides—men truly in a position to know, like Edward Clark and George Brown—and read the campaign documents, and it becomes apparent that this portrayal owes more to ego than to reality; the alliance between Johnson’s men and the Loyalists became significant to the election’s outcome only at the Fort Worth Convention
after
the election.

The Loyalists’ view of the significance of their favorite issues also proved exaggerated. Johnson did indeed try out many of these issues, in his constant attempts to “touch” the voters, but most of them were rather quickly discarded.

Perhaps one example, involving a campaign aide, will illustrate. Horace Busby told me at great length that it was Johnson’s attacks on Stevenson “as an isolationist” that put Stevenson on the defensive. Stevenson’s “isolationism” was a pivotal issue in the campaign, Busby said. “That’s why we won,” Busby says.

It was Busby who first fashioned a press release for Johnson to use about Stevenson’s “isolationism”—the issue is, in a way,
his
issue—and I understand Busby’s pride of authorship in that issue. Moreover, I happen to admire Mr. Busby—who was endlessly helpful to me in describing the Lyndon Johnson he personally witnessed on the 1948 campaign trail—as one of today’s most perceptive political
analysts. Nonetheless, after talking to as many of Johnson’s more senior advisers as I could, and after reading the campaign documents, I am compelled to disagree with his view of the importance of the “isolationist” or foreign policy issue. This issue was part of Johnson’s initial “ ‘Peace, Preparedness and Progress”
campaign theme, and by the first week in June, as I write on
this page
, Johnson knew that “ ‘Peace, Preparedness and Progress’ wasn’t working.” That was a major reason that he began attacking Stevenson personally.

As a matter of fact, while some Johnson men and their Loyalist allies say flatly that Stevenson was a fervent isolationist, that matter becomes somewhat more complicated when one starts reading Stevenson’s speeches. In one, for example, Stevenson said: “As I have said before, the time is gone when the United States can isolate itself from the rest of the world. We must be strong enough to face the world without fear. We must be courageous enough to live up
fully to our responsibilities to the rest of the world. Our own salvation cannot be separated from theirs.” During the campaign, he announced his support for the Marshall Plan, and for President Truman’s foreign policy in general. “I know of no changes that I could suggest in our policy. That policy is going to keep us out of war, and I support it.”

Unlike many of the other “issues” emphasized by the Johnson-Loyalist group, foreign policy was not discarded as an issue. Johnson continued to make speeches about it. It was certainly a factor in the campaign. But the evidence does not support the view that it was a decisive factor. The overall view of the campaign that had been accepted by history (and that is being repeated to this day by Johnson partisans)—that the campaign revolved around
national issues—is a view similarly unsupported by the evidence. What the evidence does show is that the issue which worked for Johnson was the issue identified in this book: the assault on Stevenson’s reputation—Johnson’s campaign to persuade the voters of Texas that this Governor who was an adamant foe of organized labor had entered into a “secret deal” with “big city labor racketeers” (in other words, to persuade the voters
that Stevenson’s views on labor and the Taft-Hartley Act were the precise opposite of what these views were in reality); and Johnson’s campaign to stand the truth on its head yet again by persuading the voters that this extremely conservative Governor might well be a front man for a Communist conspiracy.

In sum, there was really only one issue in the campaign that played a significant role in its outcome (unless, of course, one includes as an “issue” Johnson’s unsuccessful attempt to buy an election, and, when that attempt fell short, his successful attempt to steal it). That issue was Coke Stevenson’s reputation—the basis of that reputation, the strength of that reputation, the destruction of that reputation. Lyndon Johnson, as I note
in the Introduction to this volume, did not pioneer the techniques by which that destruction was effected—what we would today call “attack politics” or “negative campaigning,” complete with the constant scientific polling, the use of advertising, public relations and media experts, and the use of electronic media. But his instinctive genius in the art of politics
enabled him to raise these techniques to a new, revolutionary level
of effectiveness in Texas. Lyndon Johnson’s 1948 campaign for junior United States Senator was, in that sense, the first mature flowering of the new politics in Texas. Since Stevenson was the very embodiment of the old politics, and because Stevenson’s campaign was the last campaign of its type ever waged by a major candidate for statewide office in Texas, the 1948 campaign marked the end of an era in politics—as the collision of old and new marked a significant
transformation in American politics. By showing the collision between old and new, by exploring in detail the strength of Stevenson’s reputation, and the means by which, despite that strength, the reputation was wrecked, I have tried to illustrate the full destructiveness of these techniques on the fundamental concept of free choice by an informed electorate.

Mrs. Stevenson says that when she married Stevenson in 1954 (he was sixty-six at the time), “he had less money than I did” (she had the $45,000) and that he built up his cash reserves thereafter only under her prodding.

He didn’t build them up very far.