The Passage of Power (21 page)

The Convair was not equipped with a bed. Lady Bird urged him to close his eyes and nap in his seat, but there were other reporters to be told about the need for leadership, and, as one of them wrote, as the plane
“thundered
through the cloudy night,” Johnson’s voice never stopped. Lady Bird said, “Please.” “I’ll get my sleep on the ranch,” Johnson replied. But after the plane finally landed at his airstrip, at four o’clock in the morning, there wasn’t much sleep. He was up very early Saturday making telephone calls, and the next day, Sunday, he headed back to Washington.

And then, on the next Friday, on the eve of a long Memorial Day weekend, after another week of long days as Majority Leader—he was convening the Senate promptly at ten o’clock every morning now—and long strategy sessions every evening with his campaign team, he headed into the West, for a five-day speaking tour of six western states, beginning with
Iowa, where Governor Loveless, whose invitations he had been rejecting for two years, had agreed to come out to the Des Moines airport and meet with him aboard the Convair. Then he went on to Idaho Falls (where the mayor had declared “Lyndon Johnson Day,” saying, “This is the
biggest
day ever to happen to Idaho Falls”). For more than two years, he had been refusing every suggestion that he let western officeholders know he was a candidate. Now, when it was all but too late, he let them know. In the same Idaho Falls hotel suite in which, three months before, he had refused to give
Tom Boise the assurance he required, Johnson was approached now by another key Idaho Democratic leader, Lieutenant Governor
William E. Drevlow. “I can’t say whether I’m with you or not, because I don’t know whether you’re a candidate,” Drevlow said. “Are you a candidate?”

“You’re damn right I am,” Lyndon Johnson said.

He asked Drevlow to join him on the rest of the tour, and Drevlow agreed.

Then came Saturday,
“a
day that,” as one report described it, “started in Idaho Falls, swept through Spokane, side tripped to Coeur d’Alene,” and ended in Pierre,
South Dakota—at 3:30 a.m.

When the Convair landed at the little airport in Pierre, a cold, cutting wind was blowing, and it was dark, although there was the first faint pink smudge of dawn in the sky. And as the reporters filed down out of the plane, they saw, silhouetted black against that smudge, a big Texas Stetson. South Dakota’s governor,
Ralph Herseth, had come to the airport, and Johnson had “bounded out of
the plane” to meet him, and as the journalists walked past on the tarmac, he was pumping the governor’s hand, talking away, with the only expression on his face a broad, confident smile; if Lyndon Johnson was tired, he wasn’t letting anyone know it.

Not long before he left, Kennedy had given him an opening, and he charged through it. An American U-2 spy plane had been shot down over Russia, and Soviet premier
Nikita Khrushchev, demanding that President Eisenhower apologize, had broken up a scheduled summit conference. Criticizing Eisenhower for authorizing a flight when it would jeopardize the conference, Kennedy said that had he been President he would have sent “regrets” to Khrushchev.

Even as Kennedy was making his statement, the country was already rallying behind its President, as Americans had traditionally done in foreign affairs crises, and Johnson told his western audiences that that was what they should do now. “I want our President to be successful in his dealings with foreign nations,” he said. “If we get into trouble, it won’t be our President who is in a jam—it will be our nation that is in a jam.” Khrushchev was trying to divide the American people, he said, and “We ought not to be doing the job for him.” Kennedy’s statement gave him the opportunity to remind his audiences that supporting Eisenhower was what he had been having his Democratic senators do for eight years.

As for apologizing,
“It
was Mr. Khrushchev who … broke up the summit meeting by refusing to talk to the President other than in insulting language. It is not the American President who ought to apologize to Mr. Khrushchev. It is Mr. Khrushchev who ought to apologize to the American President.”

Audiences responded.
“At
every stop, with increasing fire and to increasing applause, he is holding up the hand of the President in the new cold war,” the columnist
Mary McGrory wrote.

Sharpening his rhetoric, he trained it on the candidate who had suggested “regrets.” By the time he reached Spokane, where he spoke to the Washington State Democratic Convention, he was shouting,
“I
am not prepared to apologize to Mr. Khrushchev. Are you? I am not prepared to send regrets to Mr. Khrushchev. Are you?” And to each question, the audience shouted back:
“No
. No.”

And it wasn’t only an issue that was working for Lyndon Johnson in the West—it was also his personality.

Stiff, stilted and unconvincing though he had been when delivering prepared speeches during his congressional and Senate campaigns, shouting sentences without inflection, his gestures as awkward as his phrasing, when in the latter stages of some of those campaigns he had realized he was losing and in desperation threw away his text and spoke directly to his audience, he was suddenly something quite different. Lyndon Johnson without a speech in his hand, as I wrote about his first, seemingly hopeless campaign, “Lyndon Johnson alone and unprotected on a flatbed truck: no paper to hide behind, nothing to look at but the faces of strangers; Lyndon Johnson with nothing to rely on but himself,” was
suddenly, gangling and big-eared and awkward though he remained, a candidate with a remarkable gift for establishing rapport with an audience. In 1960, of course, his platforms were not flatbed trucks but elaborately bunting-draped stages, and the candidate was no longer skinny and gangling, but on this trip into the West there were nonetheless moments that recalled those desperate early days.

On the Saturday of that hectic trip, he was so far behind schedule that Governor Herseth had provided a helicopter; it wasn’t the tiny Sikorsky “Flying Windmill,” that then revolutionary machine, in which he had swooped across Texas in ’48, but it was a helicopter, and the plains he was flying over were plains as flat as those of Texas. And the audiences he spoke to during these days in the West had issues they shared with Texans, and those were the issues he spoke about.

Back in his plane, he was flying over the great West’s rivers—the Columbia, the Colorado, the Snake, the Pecos, the Platte—and over the tiny gray-white lines across them that were the great dams the government had built to tame their floods, to make their waters work for electricity and irrigation; he flew, on the second of those western days, over Hells Canyon itself. Dams were the symbol of what government could do for the West, and he told his audiences about the dams he had built in Texas, and what they had done for the people of the Hill Country. Flying over
Oregon, he had noticed strange lines on the earth far below, and someone had explained to him that they were ruts left by the wagon trains in which settlers had come into the Northwest. Those tracks had reminded him of the wagon trains that had come into the Texas Hill Country, he said, and had reminded him also that “those who remain behind in older sections don’t grasp the West, don’t understand it—and that is the West’s Number One roadblock and problem.” He spoke sometimes in terms out of another era—of the era of the Populists, of the People’s Party, which had been founded in the Hill Country not far from Johnson City. He told western ranchers that the “world of high finance” was cheating them; that its bias against the West was reflected in high interest rates on the financing for the development projects the West needed, and in discriminatory freight rates when they sent cattle and goods to market. That’s why the West needed “leadership which understands not how to keep the West in its place but how to give the West its place in the sun.”

“The
West,” Lyndon Johnson said,
“needs
a champion in Washington.”

In Theodore White’s book on the 1960 presidential campaign, he linked the name of Lyndon Baines Johnson with the name of a Democratic presidential candidate from another century. If Lyndon Johnson could become “the candidate of the West” as well as the South, White wrote, if he could add its delegate votes to those of the South,
“he
could stand as the candidate of the wide-open spaces, the candidate of the
William Jennings Bryan crescent, against the preponderant Northeastern bloc.” And if he could do that, White wrote, if he could in effect become another Bryan, he had a realistic chance of winning the Democratic
nomination. “Let Kennedy be stopped … on the first ballot or two, and this crescent would close on the Northern delegates and roll east to victory.” Whether or not the people Lyndon Johnson was talking to now ever thought of Bryan’s name—and no newspaper mentioned it, and this author has been able to find no book other than White’s that does, either—the people to whom Lyndon Johnson was speaking recognized the similarity between his background and theirs. The fact that he was wearing boots didn’t hurt, of course, and neither did the accent: the southernness had faded from his voice; it was a West Texas twang now. A Wyoming rancher, trying to explain to
Mary McGrory why he was for Johnson, said, “He has an honest-sounding voice.”

Whatever the reason, the lieutenant governor of one western state was aboard his plane, and the governor of another, South Dakota’s Herseth, told reporters,
“There’s
no question but that he’s picking up support.” Returning from the western trip, the columnist
Doris Fleeson wrote that on it Lyndon Johnson had been
“a
lion on the platform, a charmer in cozy conferences with delegates.” Journalists reported that, as one of them wrote, “party leaders as well as correspondents traveling on the plane with Johnson agreed that he had improved his position in the presidential sweepstakes in every state.”
The West?
Had he only started campaigning earlier, “he could have locked that place up without any difficulty at all,” Ted Kennedy said. Looking at that trip that Lyndon Johnson finally made at the end of May, 1960, it is easy to speculate about what he might have cost himself by his years of procrastination. If he had held the West, the convention might well have been deadlocked, been thrown into the back rooms from which, he was certain, he would emerge as the nominee.

And, it is easy to speculate, had he only started sooner, he
could
have held the West.

B
UT NOW IT WAS
too late. The Kennedys had been sowing in the West for two years. And now, almost as soon as Johnson returned from his Memorial Day trip, the Kennedys began to reap.

Although none of the reporters understood the significance, there had been indications that during the trip itself it was too late. Seven states, not six, had been on the original itinerary; one of the seven—
Montana—had been quietly dropped even while the Convair was heading west. Confident that he could count on that state—one of its senators,
Mike Mansfield, was his Assistant Leader, after all—Johnson had told Rowe to schedule a full day of appearances there. Montana was Rowe’s home state, however, and when he began telephoning his old political allies, the reports he received were so disturbing that he contacted Johnson, who was already on his way, and told him to postpone his visit.

(The reports were correct, as Rowe was to find when, two weeks later, he arrived on the scene himself, to prepare for the Democratic State Convention in Helena on June 27. Reporting to Jenkins over the phone on June 23, he told him
that Kennedy was ahead in Montana,
“and
Symington next. Symington has seven people in here plus two airplanes and they are really covering the territory.” The Kennedys were playing hardball with the delegates, he said. “We had to do everything very quietly because every single time somebody comes out in the open [for Johnson], the Kennedy crowd move in [on him].” Just before the convention, Mansfield finally arrived in Helena—only to inform Rowe that, in Rowe’s words, “he’s for Johnson, but he won’t tell anyone who to vote for.” Though Johnson had been planning to address the convention on the morning it opened, Rowe telephoned him and said:
“Don’t
come. We are going to get badly licked.”)

Another indication had come in
Idaho—at the Idaho Falls airport, where the delegation welcoming Johnson had been led by thirty-five-year-old
Frank Church, who was, in the Senate, a favorite of the Majority Leader: Johnson had given him a key role in the ’57 civil rights battle, and then a seat on Foreign Relations, simply bypassing half a dozen senators with greater seniority to do so.

Having assessed Church’s ambition, he had once scribbled a note to him at a committee meeting to assure him he would help him realize it: he had, the note said, asked
Drew Pearson
“to
help me give you a buildup over the years” so that one day “you can … be our President.” A faster buildup had been promised by the Kennedys, however: in return for his support they had offered Church, a stirring orator, the role of keynoter in Los Angeles, a role that Church believed would catapult him to national prominence. Church had agreed. Johnson had heard rumors that this was the case, and, reading the young senator’s eyes over the toothy smile he gave him at the airport, he saw it was true. Walking toward the terminal, he told
Horace Busby:
“The
little sonofabitch has already sold out. They bought him.”

“The halter and bridle” had been slipped on western delegates by Robert Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy was not a man to allow someone who had accepted the halter to take it off. One of Idaho’s delegates, a state legislator, had been moved by a Johnson speech, but had earlier given his pledge to Bobby Kennedy. When a reporter asked him if he would change, he replied that he
“simply
couldn’t.” Bobby, he said, was not a man who ever forgave a broken promise.

In the weeks after his return to Washington, Johnson frantically worked the telephone for hours every day, and, since the time was earlier in the West, for hours every evening. His father had been a farmer, he told the head of a
Minnesota farmers’ grange. The Hill Country was a land of farmers.
“You
and I have got a lot in common, and I don’t think you and your people have any with Boston.” And he was flying—to New York, to Oklahoma, back to Iowa: in May and June, 1960, Johnson logged 31,250 miles back and forth across the United States, making thirty-six speeches and holding twenty-seven press conferences. But, state by state in rapid-fire order now, his mistake in relying on senators was exposed. With
Anderson and
Chavez behind him, he had taken
New Mexico for granted. Every delegate count on those laminated cards in his breast pocket had
had all seventeen states from
“Texas’s
backyard” in the Johnson column. But when, a week after his western trip, New Mexico’s Democrats held their state convention, at which the delegates were actually selected, [Kennedy] received seven of the seventeen. The “successful [Kennedy] raid … deep in [Johnson’s] southwestern backyard” shook the Johnson camp, the
New York Times
reported.
³