Means of Ascent (5 page)

That growth, too, will continue, as the story continues. When,
in 1963, Lyndon Johnson became President, his “family’s” assets totaled perhaps $20 million. This son of an impoverished father from the impoverished Texas Hill Country, who for most of his life had no stated sources of income except his governmental salary, entered the Oval Office as possibly the richest man ever to occupy it. But in this volume, in which we
see Johnson almost twenty years before he became President, we can focus on the most significant aspect of his accumulation of wealth. The dimensions are small in relation to the wealth to come, and only a single entity—a radio station—is involved, while later that one station will become a radio and television (and banking and land and cattle) empire. So here we can pursue, in detail and without complication, a subject that has been endlessly discussed but little
understood, at least partly because of the dearth of detailed information: the role and significance of favoritism and influence in a democratic government. The birth and early years of the Johnson financial empire illuminate very clearly the subtle means by which favoritism and influence are exercised, and their effect on other individuals and on the body politic as a whole.

Throughout Johnson’s entire political career, and during the twenty years since it ended, the Johnson fortune has been shrouded in secrecy and surrounded by carefully cultivated myths: that although its foundation—radio and television interests—lay in an industry every aspect of which is regulated by a governmental agency, the Federal Communications Commission, no favoritism or influence was involved; that the fortune was not his at all, but his
wife’s, seeded by an inheritance she received, and entirely controlled by her; that the fortune had, in fact, grown not because of any participation on his part (in response to inquiries made of him over and over again, over many years, he stated, over and over again, that he played absolutely no role in the business), but solely because of her business expertise and hard work; that although the burgeoning of the Johnson fortune may have been helped by twenty years of
favorable FCC decisions, no one was hurt by those decisions. In this volume, the birth and early growth of the Johnson fortune are examined—and, under examination, the myths collapse.

T
HESE YEARS
include the Second World War. Lyndon Johnson’s six months in the United States Navy during the war have been treated with derision—as a story of opportunism or even cowardice—by detractors, and with praise—as a story of heroism—by supporters, but the actual story, as will be seen, is too complex for simplifications, and is strikingly revelatory of the violent
contradictions
in Johnson’s character.

A
ND, FINALLY
, these seven years are climaxed by the election which, in
1948, elevated Lyndon Johnson to the United States Senate, ended his seven years of despair, and thrust him back on the road to national power, an election in which almost a million votes were cast and which he won by eighty-seven.

His margin of victory in the 1948 election has been characterized as “the eighty-seven votes that changed history”—and they were. The Johnson Presidency was a watershed in American history, and without that election there would probably have been no Johnson Presidency. But there are additional reasons to examine that election in detail.

Among the many factors that contributed to the evolution of American history during his Administration, Lyndon Johnson’s personality and character bore an unusually heavy weight. To understand that history, we have to understand that personality, and nowhere are certain facets of his nature more clearly visible than in the grim struggle of 1948, Lyndon Johnson’s last chance for political survival.

During the forty years since it took place, moreover, the election in 1948 for junior United States Senator from Texas has become a small but enduring piece of American political history. When Johnson became President, and a wave of articles attempted to introduce him to the American people, that election was invariably prominent in every retelling of his career.
Life
magazine reminded Americans that an
“
87-VOTE ‘LANDSLIDE’ PUT HIM IN SENATE.”
“
THE STORY OF 87 VOTES THAT MADE HISTORY”
was a cover story blaring again from newsstands across the country. Years after his presidency, years after his death, that election remains ineradicably linked with his name. As Tom Wicker’s 1983 article assessing his “legacy” explained: “Even had
there been no war, it would not have been hard to distrust Lyndon Johnson. Hadn’t he been elected to the Senate by only eighty-seven votes …?” But the story of the 1948 election has been obscured by question marks; for forty years, Johnson aides and apologists
have steadfastly denied that the election was stolen, or have said that even if it was, the theft was only a standard example of ruthless Texas politics. But the fact is that although
Lyndon Johnson, largely through the legal genius of his ally
Abe Fortas, managed, by a hairbreadth, to halt a federal court’s investigation into the stealing of the 1948 election, nonetheless he stole it—and in the stealing violated even the notably loose boundaries of Texas politics. It wasn’t eighty-seven votes that Lyndon Johnson stole to win in 1948, but thousands of votes—many thousands, in fact. Thanks in part to a manuscript,
relating the details of the theft of the crucial votes, given to the author by the man responsible for the theft; in part to interviews with key figures in the election who had never previously spoken about it in detail; in part to the combining of hundreds of pages of transcripts of court hearings with scores of interviews, a previously bewildering picture comes blindingly clear.

A
ND THERE ARE
yet other reasons for examining the 1948 campaign so closely.

This biography of Lyndon Johnson is intended to be a study not merely of his life but of American history during the years of that life. One of its focuses is the workings of the political power that shapes history, and in a democracy political power comes ultimately not from a gun’s barrel or a monarch’s manifesto but from a voting booth. Understanding political power in a democracy requires understanding elections. Explore a single individual deeply
enough, Emerson noted, and truths about all individuals emerge. This is as true about campaigns as it is about men. Study a particular election in sufficient depth—study not merely the candidates’ platforms and philosophies and promises but its payoffs, study it in all its brutality—focus deeply enough on all of these elements, and there will emerge universal truths about campaigns in a democracy, and about the nature of the power that shapes our lives.

Johnson’s 1948 campaign is the perfect campaign to study, first of all because of Lyndon Johnson’s genius in the art of politics. Election campaigns are the means to political power in a democracy, and in this campaign the means are used by a master—and can therefore be seen at their clearest and most effective. And it is perfect because of the man who was Lyndon Johnson’s opponent in it.

Coke Robert Stevenson has been all but lost to history; yet for decades he was (and, indeed, among Texans old enough to remember him, he still is) a legend. He held the governorship of Texas longer than any man before him and was one of the most beloved public figures in the state’s history: in one contested Democratic primary, the crucial election in a one-party state, he carried every one of the state’s 254 counties, the
only
candidate for either of the state’s two highest offices—Governor or United States Senator—who had ever done so in the history of Texas. But the legend of Coke Stevenson was based less on his political triumphs than on his political principles, which included a deep distaste for “politics” in its meaner sense. He campaigned almost entirely in the style of the Old West, in which a candidate simply drove from one county seat to another, delivering a
speech in each to a small audience on the courthouse lawn. Decades after Stevenson’s 1944 campaign, in which, against eight opponents, he won the Democratic primary with 84 percent of the vote (still the highest percentage compiled by a gubernatorial candidate in any contested Democratic primary in the history of Texas), a leading historian of the Texas Governorship wrote that that campaign was still unique: “Perhaps no other product of the
primary
system ever has won, or for that matter, ever will win again, the Democratic nomination with such a minimum of campaigning.” The legend was based, moreover, on Stevenson’s political philosophy—a fierce, self-taught Jeffersonian Democracy made fiercer by the influence of the harsh Texas frontier; for whether or not that philosophy was suited to a rapidly changing twentieth-century world (and, as his gubernatorial record demonstrated, it had all that
philosophy’s weaknesses as well as strengths), it possessed a deep emotional appeal to
Texans in its uncompromising belief in individual enterprise and self-reliance, in freedom of the individual, in a view of government as a necessary evil at best, and in a near-reverence for the word “conservative.” Most of all, Coke Stevenson was a legend because of his remarkable life. Known as the “Cowboy Governor,” not only was he a true
cowboy, his whole life, it seemed, was a Western epic, right down to the 1948 campaign, when, in an almost incredible confrontation on the main street of a dusty little South Texas town, Stevenson and his old ally, the renowned Texas Ranger Captain
Frank Hamer, faced a band of Mexican
pistoleros
who had been ordered to prevent Stevenson from inspecting the
disputed ballots that had taken victory from him and given it to his despised
foe, Lyndon Johnson. Coke Stevenson was the living personification of frontier
individualism, the very embodiment of the myth of the cowboy, a myth that still, today, reverberates through American culture with astonishing power.

B
ECAUSE OF
the personality and
philosophy of Lyndon Johnson’s opponent, the 1948 campaign provides a unique view of the transformation of American politics in the middle of the twentieth century.

That campaign was the new politics against the old. Johnson was the new politics: electronic politics, technological politics, media politics. He didn’t pioneer most of the tactics (except for one tactic, which had astonishing
side effects: the use of a helicopter as a campaign device), but he brought some of these still-new devices to a higher level of sophistication, using them to maximum effectiveness.
Scientific
polling, techniques of organization and of media
manipulation—of the use of
advertising firms, public relations specialists, media experts from outside the political apparatus, of the use of electronic media (in 1948,
radio) not only for speeches but for advertising to influence voters—the mature flowering of all these devices dates, in Texas and the
Southwest, from Lyndon Johnson’s 1948 campaign.

Stevenson was the old politics: the lone campaigner driving around a vast state speaking to handfuls of voters, no electronic devices to mediate between himself and them. Partly because Texas was changing from a rural to an urban state, mostly because the Johnson campaign demonstrated the effectiveness of the new techniques so convincingly that thereafter all politicians who could afford them adopted them, Coke Stevenson’s campaign in 1948 was the last campaign
of its type ever waged by a major candidate for a statewide office in Texas. It marked the end of an era in politics.

Furthermore, regardless of its date, the Stevenson campaign was not merely the last of the traditional, pre-media campaigns in Texas, but also as pure an example of that type as can be found. Coke Stevenson was not just the old politics; he was the perfect exemplar of that old politics. He was indeed what the historian called him: “unique.” The absolutism of Coke Stevenson’s campaigning—the rigidity of his refusal to employ modern political
techniques—made the 1948 campaign as complete a contrast between the new and the old as can be imagined. The juxtaposition of opposites throws into bold relief the essential qualities of each. Today, television sound bites and commercials make and break candidates, and substance fades all but completely before the power of image. But the techniques of mass media manipulation are employed by both sides in campaigns, a fact which, despite extensive analysis, blurs understanding
of the impact and significance of this manipulation. In the 1948 campaign in Texas these techniques were not employed by both sides. One candidate used them—to an extent unprecedented in the state. The other candidate refused to use them at all. And as a result, we can observe the impact of these techniques with a clarity that illustrates the full force of their destructive effect on the concept of free choice by an informed electorate. By studying this campaign we can, on the
other hand, hark back to an era in which public opinion was molded, to an extent hardly imaginable today, not by a candidate’s media advisers, but by the candidate.

T
HE 1948 CAMPAIGN
was not only the new politics against the old, it was political morality made vivid, as political techniques were made vivid, by the sharpness in the contrast between the two principals.

The pattern of pragmatism, cynicism and ruthlessness that pervaded Lyndon Johnson’s entire early political career was marked by a lack of any discernible limits. Pragmatism shaded into the morality of the ballot box, a morality in which any maneuver is justified by the end of victory—into a morality that is amorality. In the 1948 campaign, this pattern came clearer than ever before, in part because of the lengths to which Lyndon Johnson went in order to
win—and in part because of the contrast between his extreme pragmatism and Coke Stevenson’s extreme
idealism, which makes Johnson’s methods stand out in the clearest possible relief. The Johnson-Stevenson campaign was merely an election in a single state for a single Senate seat—one of hundreds of senatorial elections that have been held in the United States. But if, upon close study, elections seem to blur together and to have only
meager larger significance, this election is an exception to that tendency, because of the sharpness in contrast between the philosophy, principles, strategy and tactics of the two candidates. The clash of such mighty—and violently contrasting—opposites illuminates not only Lyndon Johnson’s path to power but some of the most fundamental ethical, moral and philosophical issues of American politics and government in the twentieth century.