The Passage of Power (33 page)

Often he told his audience that he had come because he had been reading about southern defections to the Republicans.
“We
just decided we’d come down and see who deserted us and where they’ve gone.” Or he would talk about his daddy, his father who had been dying in a hospital, but when he, Lyndon, had come to see him, had said, “Son, get me my britches. I’m going home.” He had reminded his daddy that he would get better medical care in the hospital, Lyndon would say, but his daddy had said, “I want to go back among our people, where they know when a man’s sick, and they care when he dies.” That is the difference between Democrats and Republicans, Johnson would say. “Democrats
do
care when a man is sick, and they care when he dies, and Democrats care year in and year out.” Republicans care, too, he said—“just before every election time.”

And his talks were very southern in their delivery: old-fashioned stump speeches, “real stemwinders”: shouted out, with the points he wanted to make delivered in a bellow, so that his voice was continually hoarse, and as he shouted, his arms flailed, and he would raise an arm—or two—high above his head, and jab a finger toward the sky. Among his gestures was one in which, a reporter wrote, “the Johnson hands went up beside his ears and wavered there like a television commercial on headache misery.”

And some of the points he made were unforgettable, for if Lyndon Johnson reading from a prepared speech was stilted and unconvincing, Lyndon Johnson without a speech—Lyndon Johnson alone with an audience he had to persuade—was still the Lyndon Johnson who had, in his early Texas campaigns, shown that in a state with a history of great stump speakers, he was one of the greatest of them all.

Was the religious issue—Kennedy’s Catholicism—a menace to the Democrats? Jack Kennedy had met the issue in his way, with the carefully reasoned speech to the ministers in Houston. Lyndon Johnson met it in
his
way.

The “hate campaign” being waged against Jack Kennedy because of religion was a shame, he said, particularly the attacks by Baptist preachers from the pulpit. Jack Kennedy had had an older brother, Joe Jr., he told the huddles of people at the whistle-stop towns of the South. Jack Kennedy had loved Joe Jr., he said. But Joe Jr. was dead now. He had been killed in the war. He had been killed when he volunteered to pilot a plane on a suicide mission. And when Jack’s brother took off that morning, on that mission from which he knew he would never return,
“nobody
asked him what church he went to.” And after he died—after he “went down in a burning plane over the English Channel so that we could have free speech and a free press and live as free men, not a soul got up in a pulpit and asked what church he went to.” And as Lyndon Johnson told the story of Jack’s brother, his voice wavered and almost broke, and, in town after town, a deep hush fell over the crowd gathered around the train platform.

As he was talking, Lyndon Johnson had of course gotten “worked up,” and
often, as the train pulled out, with “The Yellow Rose” blaring again, he would think of additional points he wanted to make, and, with the train already in motion and pulling away from the crowd, would turn back to the microphone, waving and shouting to make them, so that as the train disappeared down the tracks, the sound of his voice remained behind with its final message, as when he shouted while the train was chugging away from the station in a little town in Virginia named Culpepper:
“Good-bye
, Culpepper. Vote Democratic. What has Dick Nixon ever done for Culpepper?” Since often the public-address system was still turned on as the train left, his audiences could also hear his asides to his staff.
“Good-bye
, Greer,” he shouted to a little South Carolina town rapidly vanishing down the tracks. “Good-bye, Greer. God bless you, Greer. Bobby, turn off that ‘Yeller Rose.’ God bless you, Greer. Vote Democratic. Bobby, turn off that fuckin’ ‘Yeller Rose.’ ”

So wound up would he become that, sometimes, at the end of the day, he couldn’t stop talking. One day his last stop was in Atlanta, Georgia, and the Special didn’t pull into the yards behind Atlanta’s Terminal Station, where a small crowd was waiting on the crossties, until after eleven o’clock. He was still speaking at midnight—when he was drowned out by a loud hiss as the train’s engineer shut down its air brake for the night. His speech was very effective, reported
Eugene Patterson of the
Atlanta Constitution.
“What
he was doing was speaking the language.… He was likeable. He was folksy … earthy.… It was clear what his job is—to speak to the people in their own tongue while Kennedy addresses his broad A to the ages. Kennedy looks good on the white horse. Johnson dominates the caboose.” And while the engineer had cut off Lyndon Johnson’s speaking for the day, there were other means of campaigning. Grabbing a packet of Kennedy-Johnson campaign cards from an aide, Johnson climbed down from the rear platform, and, leaning “comfortably” against the steps, started handing them to the people filing by, like a blackjack dealer dealing cards. “His fawn Stetson sat on the back of his head,” a reporter wrote. “A quizzical smile, hinting of spoofery, played around his mouth and eyes under the bright light. A card here, a card there, when he would lick his thumb and deal.… Imagine a blend of Harry Truman and Marshal Dillon dealing a hand of poker in the railroad yard near midnight and you’ve got a picture of Lyndon Johnson’s visit to Atlanta.”

“He seemed to like what he was doing,” Patterson wrote—and the crowd “liked him.”

And as that very perceptive reporter,
Mary McGrory of the
Washington Evening Star,
put it, effective as Johnson was as a southern stump speaker,
“the
Senator was doing his best work not on the observation platform” of the train’s last car but in the car in front of that one, which she called the train’s “equivalent of the Senate cloakroom” (a southern reporter called it
“a
portable smoke-filled room”).

That car—a parlor car with roomy, comfortable seats—was filled with southern politicians: a constantly changing cast of politicians. The local dignitaries who stepped out onto the rear platform with Johnson and got off in their
town had boarded the train at the previous town, climbing into the parlor car to be offered drinks by Johnson’s pretty secretaries and have impressively large “Official Party” badges pinned to their lapels. As soon as Johnson had finished his speech in that town, he and Lady Bird had come back into the parlor car to have their picture taken with the officials, and he would chat with them, charm them, and warn them what would happen to the South if Nixon won—or if Kennedy won without its support. Then there would be an announcement: “Five minutes till the next stop.” The secretaries would line up the officials behind Johnson, and they would walk into the rear car and then to the rear door of the train, and, as “The Yellow Rose” blared and the train pulled into their town’s station, would come out on the rear platform behind him, in front of their constituents, waving to them as if—“as befitted their importance”—they had been aboard the train for a long time, and would climb down into the midst of the hometown crowd. For a moment the parlor car would be empty, except for the secretaries. And then, as Johnson began his speech, a new group of dignitaries, from the next town down the line, would come aboard, climbing into the parlor car, to be handed their drinks and badges.

The efficiency of this technique maximized its impact: during the five days that the LBJ Special chugged through the Southland, the incredible number of 1,247 dignitaries—governors, senators, congressmen, state legislators, mayors, councilmen, sheriffs, bankers, businessmen and other pillars of local communities—were entertained in that parlor car. And maximizing its impact also was the unique ability of its host; after interviewing a group of local officials who had just descended from the train, McGrory summarized their comments: “In explaining the political realities, he remains peerless.”

Coverage of the LBJ Special in northern papers was relatively cursory, and tinged with condescension (among themselves, reporters had dubbed the train the “Cornpone Special”), but in the South the headlines grew steadily larger—
JOHNSON HAILED BY S.C. CROWDS; “LADY BIRD” MAKES BIG HIT AT PRESS SESSION; SOUTHERN DEMO POLITICOS FLOCKING TO JOHNSON’S SPECIAL; CANDIDATE FOR VICE PRESIDENT OF U.S. TO BE IN GREENVILLE 5:25 TODAY; JOHNSON MAKES FIERY TALK HERE; JOHNSON BRINGS CAMPAIGN TO MERIDIAN; JOHNSON SPEAKS HERE TODAY; LBJ’S SPECIAL CARAVAN SHARP, EFFICIENT SHOW; LBJ ON WAY, PARADE SLATED
—and so did the crowds: two thousand in Clemson, three thousand in Meridian, five thousand in Gaffney, until, in an end-of-the-trip climax, Johnson led and then reviewed a Mardi Gras preview parade in New Orleans before one hundred thousand spectators. And the tour accomplished its purpose. Republican strategists saw its effect: the astute White House counsel
Bryce Harlow told Nixon that he was
“being
religioned right out of this campaign. Lyndon is talking religion at every stop.… You’re just flat losing the campaign on religion.… It’s a calculated stance. Kennedy can’t talk it. Lyndon can and Lyndon’s talking it.” Southern Democratic politicians aboard the LBJ Special were saying that, as
Mary McGrory reported,
“two
weeks earlier, the Republicans would have won
the election [in the South] if it had been held then, but that now the South had rejoined the flock.” Skeptical though she had been when the tour started, at its conclusion McGrory wrote that Lyndon Johnson
“has
justified his existence on the Democratic ticket.” Said another observer:
“master
of the political coup has done it again.”

H
OLDING HIS OWN STATE
—or, to be more precise, bringing it back into the Democratic column after Eisenhower’s lopsided victories there—was perhaps the toughest job of all. The anger of the state’s conservatives over his decision to join Kennedy’s ticket and thereby in effect run on the liberal Democratic platform had only intensified since the convention; signs with the word
“Judas
” on them had been waved at his every appearance in Texas. As always with Lyndon Johnson, the spectre of “humiliation” loomed before him. Writing
John Connally on October 18 that he was
“deeply
disturbed about Texas,” he added: “We just must not win the nation and lose Texas. Imagine when we win how the next Administration will look upon us.”
“The
ever haunting fear of losing Texas never left him for a second,” Jim Rowe was to recall; “he was wound up tight like a top.” When he and Lady Bird arrived in Dallas on November 4, four days before the election, to attend a Democratic rally in the Adolphus Hotel, it appeared the fear might well prove justified; his private polls were showing the Democratic ticket to be slightly, but clearly, behind.

On that day, however, he got a break. An hour before the Democratic rally, there had been a Republican event at the Adolphus, attended mainly by wealthy right-wingers—many of the women were
Dallas Junior Leaguers, wearing red-white-and-blue Nixon costumes. Hearing that the Johnsons would be arriving shortly, they crowded into the hotel’s lobby, their hatred simmering, joining a group of placard-carrying men who had been organized by the state’s only Republican congressman,
Bruce Alger of Dallas, and as Lyndon and Lady Bird entered the lobby, they swarmed around them, shouting and cursing. Alger was raising and lowering his big sign,
LBJ SOLD OUT TO YANKEE SOCIALISTS
, like a piston, and it came dangerously close to Lady Bird’s head. One woman snatched the gloves out of Lady Bird’s hand, and threw them on the floor, and there was spitting in her direction. At one point, she fell several steps behind her husband, and there was a frightened expression on her face. Several Dallas policemen were escorting the Johnsons, but Lyndon told them to stand aside, and when General
Carl L. Phinney, commander of the Texas National Guard, tried to step between Johnson and the demonstrators, Johnson said,
“I
want you to get away from me.” It took the Johnsons thirty minutes to negotiate the seventy-five feet between the front door of the Adolphus and the elevators that took them up to the ballroom, where two thousand Democrats were waiting to greet them.

Not everyone who witnessed the scene was sure it had had to take that long.
“LBJ
and Lady Bird could have gone through that lobby and got on the elevator
in five minutes, but LBJ took thirty minutes to go through that crowd, and it was all being recorded and played for television and radio and the newspapers, and he knew it and played it for all it was worth,” says
D. B. Hardeman, Rayburn’s aide and a Johnson admirer.
Bill Moyers says:
“He
knew it got votes for him. He could never have calculated that scene or fixed that situation or arranged for it. He didn’t know how he was going to carry Texas, and he greatly feared losing Texas because he thought it would discredit him totally in the nation and with Kennedy. If he could have thought this up, he would have thought it up. Tried to invent it. But the moment it happened, he knew.” Some Johnson admirers feel that was the reason he sent the policemen away. But whatever the reason, television that evening showed Lady Bird’s frightened face and Lyndon saying, at the Democratic rally, that he had told the police to leave because
“I
wanted to find out if the time had come when I couldn’t walk with my lady through the corridors of the hotels of Dallas.” The incident turned the tide in Texas. Editorials in newspapers across the state echoed the
Abilene Reporter-News
comment that
“a
mob in Dallas yesterday wrote a new chapter that stands to the shame of our state and people, of whatever political shade.” The next day, the Johnsons flew to Houston.
Ashton Gonella recalls that
“we
had been told ahead of time that it [Houston] was really going to be ugly to us because they were very conservative; up to then, Texas had really not been that much for Kennedy-Johnson.” When the Johnson plane arrived at the Houston airport, however, “it couldn’t have been more overwhelming. Everybody had signs: ‘
WE APOLOGIZE. WE LOVE YOU
.’ ” And during the remaining time before the election, the Johnsons were greeted everywhere in Texas with standing ovations.