Means of Ascent (42 page)

“Now, Woody,” his Chief said,
“Why? WHY?????
Is this the way you want to do things all your life?”

“What’s wrong?” Woodward said.

“There’s no salt and pepper.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, the stone still had not passed. Johnson’s fever was up again. And reports of his hospitalization were in the Dallas newspapers, and Johnson had seen them, and, in Woodward’s careful phrase, “he was concerned about that.” Finding that there had been little if any change in the position of the stone during the night, Dr. Van Duzen was saying that an immediate operation—the operation that
would mean the end of the campaign, and perhaps of his career—was imperative.

During the morning, however, Woodward took a call in Johnson’s hospital room from
Jacqueline Cochran. The famous aviatrix had flown to Dallas in her twin-engined Lockheed Electra to hear Symington speak at a meeting of the Air Force Association, and she had learned from him of Johnson’s illness. In her brusque manner, she said that a friend,
Dr. Gershom J. Thompson, was the chief urologist at the
Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota; that Dr. Thompson was a world-renowned expert at removing kidney stones through cystoscopic manipulation rather than through operations; and that she was ready to fly Johnson to Rochester that afternoon.

An important consideration to Johnson was that there would be a
familiar face at the Mayo Clinic: his personal physician, Dr. James Cain, Alvin Wirtz’s son-in-law, was on the clinic’s staff. But even that consideration faded before the political: he was afraid that a trip to Minnesota for medical treatment would be taken as a slur on Texas doctors. “I don’t want anyone to think that I can’t get all the medical
attention I need right here in Texas,” he said, in Woodward’s recollection, and ordered Lady Bird to “call Jackie and tell her no.” But after a long conversation between Mrs. Johnson and Miss Cochran, “it was decided” that he would go; “Mrs. Johnson played a large part in that decision.” Taken to Love Field in an ambulance, Johnson was placed on a bed that had been made up in Miss Cochran’s Electra, and flown to
Minnesota. (Although being moved had intensified his pain again, Johnson remained in command of his staff—even if it consisted of only a single aide. During the flight, Miss Cochran came back to check on the patient and told Woodward, who had been chatting with her about the thirty-five missions he had flown over Europe during the war, to sit in her pilot’s seat while the co-pilot flew the plane. Johnson, who had been dozing, awoke and saw Woodward sitting in the
pilot’s seat. Rapping sharply on a table, he got Woodward’s attention, and when the young man hurried back, snapped, “Woody, don’t we have enough problems without you trying to fly this plane?” and told him to let Miss Cochran do all the flying.)

Hospitalization at Mayo’s didn’t solve the problem. Dr. Thompson was indeed expert at cystoscopic manipulation—inserting a cystoscope in the penis, running it up through the urethra and the bladder and then into the ureter, and then inserting a nylon loop in the cystoscope and using it to pull out the kidney stone—but only for a stone near the lower end of the ureter. It was general medical practice not to use a cystoscope on kidney stones
high up in the ureter because of the danger that the cystoscope would puncture the ureter. And the physicians felt, moreover, there was little chance that the procedure would work in this case. When Johnson explained the necessity in political terms of avoiding surgery, the doctors were sympathetic, but said that in medical terms surgery would shortly be unavoidable. A stone as large as Johnson’s appeared to be was probably almost completely obstructing the kidney, and
eventually such an obstruction can cause the kidney to stop functioning. In addition, the patient had been running an infection-indicating fever for more than a week, and an infection in the kidney can lead to an abscess and gangrene. The prognosis was rapidly becoming one in which there could be no more waiting; the situation was nearing a stage at which it might be life-threatening. A few more days was the outside limit of the time the doctors felt they could afford to delay. So,
for three days, Johnson waited, while doing everything he himself could think of to jar the stone loose: going out in a car, he had Woodward drive him over bumpy roads; in the clinic he
walked up and down the stairs; holding on to Woodward for support, he bounced up and down—even jumped up and down—as hard as he could bear to. These exercises produced no result except increased pain and weakness. Says Woodward: “There was no change in his
thinking. He was going to pass the stone. He wasn’t going to
let
them take it [out] any other way. He was going to pass it, he was going back on the campaign trail.”

During the three days, he acted, in fact, as if he was still campaigning. He persuaded the doctors to have three telephones installed in his room, and with the help of Lady Bird and Woodward he worked them constantly, waving nurses impatiently out if he was talking—and, indeed, refusing to stop talking even while a nurse was actually giving him treatment, telephoning not only Wirtz and Clark but supporters all over Texas, trying to convince them that he felt
fine, that his physical problems were minor, that they were all but resolved, that he would soon be back on the trail, that in the campaign itself things looked good, that he was pulling up on Ol’ Coke, that he was going to win; according to one report, in a single day he made sixty-four such calls.

But the reality was the stone—the stone that wouldn’t move. The reality was the pain that morphine only partly dulled, the pain that wouldn’t stop, the pain and the weakness. If the stone didn’t move, all the telephoning in the world wasn’t going to help him—and it wasn’t moving.

Finally, on Sunday, May 30, the doctors reluctantly agreed to attempt the cystoscopic manipulation as a last chance—the very last chance—to avoid surgery. Johnson was wheeled away and given a general anesthetic, and for forty-five minutes Mrs. Johnson and Woodward silently paced outside the operating room, lost in thought, she about her husband, Woodward, as he was later to relate, not only about Johnson but about politics, because “the realization
was dawning on me by this time that if they were unable to remove the stone this way … they would have to operate surgically. And in fact the campaign would be over.” The doctors emerged and said that the procedure had been successful—just barely successful. (They said that “Had it been lodged any further up, they wouldn’t have been able to do it.”) According to one report, no kidney stone as high in the ureter as
Johnson’s had previously been removed at the Mayo Clinic. With the stone gone, Johnson’s recovery should be rapid, they said, and Johnson could return to the campaign in a week.

H
E WOULD RETURN
to the campaign, of course, with almost two weeks lost. When he had begun the campaign, he had had nine weeks before the first primary, a terribly short time to make up ground on Coke Stevenson. Now he had only seven.

And he had made up little ground, if any. The news he was receiving in the hospital was not good. In the first place, there wasn’t very much of it. His staff at his campaign headquarters in the Hancock House in Austin was sending him all the newspaper clippings on the race, but on June 1st, campaign assistant Roy Wade was forced to report, “I have
no clippings. There were none in the Texas press today,” and
Wade’s June 2nd letter began: “
Again, very little news.”

Even worse, there had been little shift during the week Johnson had campaigned before he entered the hospital. The last Belden Poll released—on May 16—before the campaign kick-off in Wooldridge Park had stated that Stevenson was the choice of 64 percent of the state’s voters; Johnson had 28 percent.
Private polls taken now showed no significant change in those figures. The Wooldridge Park speech had made little impact, nor had
the series of talks he had given in the Panhandle; all the pain he had endured on the Panhandle trip had resulted in virtually no narrowing of the margin there, Johnson’s polls showed.
“Peace, Preparedness and Progress” wasn’t working.

But Stevenson’s campaign was. The former Governor was driving from one small town to another, accompanied only by Murphey and, occasionally, a public relations man,
Booth Mooney. Arriving at each town, often unannounced, he would introduce himself to people on the main street or in the Courthouse Square, chat with them, ask them if they had any questions he could answer and, if they did, stop and answer them. He told the people he met that he
would say a few words before he left, and in every brief talk (“I’ve never been very strong on making political orations. I’d much rather listen to you”), he repeated that if they sent him to Washington, he would do as he had done in the past: uphold constitutional government; make sure that America remained strong enough to be secure against Communism; oppose extending federal controls over individuals and businesses; encourage free enterprise and
“economy” in government. “You know what I did in Austin to keep your state taxes down”; in Washington, too, he would try to eliminate “waste” and “extravagance.” There was no news in such a campaign, of course; newspapers, as one Texas historian points out, “
could give no account of the various conversations into which the candidate entered daily with the hundreds of people whose hands he shook as he
introduced himself.… The Stevenson campaign dropped from sight.…” The meager newspaper coverage it attracted was couched in the mocking tone customary when “sophisticated” journalists discussed the Stevenson
campaign style. “
Candidate Stevenson was in Tyler Saturday, according to a message from his press agent,” one reporter wrote, alluding to the fact that the press was not
quite certain of his whereabouts. But Johnson, who knew small towns, was more aware than reporters of the effectiveness of Stevenson’s quiet
handshaking. And the former Governor had been out shaking hands all the time Johnson was lying there in Minnesota.

Then, on June I, Stevenson made a radio speech, his first of the campaign, and Johnson was able to pick it up in his room at the Mayo Clinic. Without mentioning Johnson by name, Stevenson discussed the Congressman’s references to “the barbaric hordes of godless men in Eurasia.”

“There are men in this nation today who go about over the country as apostles of fear,” Stevenson said. “They tell us another war is just around the corner. They are prophets of doom, howlers of calamity. We must—they tell us—be afraid.” Such men, Stevenson said, were trying to manufacture an “emergency” based on fear. Such hysteria was not necessary. America must build up its defenses, he said; it must help Europe
rebuild from the effects of the war because a rebuilt Europe would be a bastion against “economic and propaganda assaults” from Russia, and America must always be vigilant. But, he said, America should not get hysterical about a Red menace. “We can be vigilant without being frightened.” And, Stevenson said, “I don’t believe you are afraid. We are descendants of men and women who have fought and won both the battles of war and the battle of
peace.”

Part of Johnson’s reaction to that calm, sincere voice which he knew was so effective with voters was rage; his harassment of nurses increased in intensity and he brought up the withdrawal statement with Woody. “
I know you didn’t send that,” Johnson snarled at him. “And I won’t forget.” Part was something else, particularly after Woody had been sent back to Houston to make preparations for a speech that
Johnson was planning to give there following his release from the hospital. With his departure, there was no longer a need for Johnson to keep up a front of optimism. All Mrs. Johnson will say of this week was: “He was depressed, and it was bad.”

But there was no way out now. The deadline for filing for election to his congressional seat had passed, and he had not filed. He had burned his bridges. It was going to be the Senate, or nothing. “
I just could not bear,” he later recalled, “the thought of losing everything.” But he
was
losing everything.

O
UT OF HIS DESPAIR
, he emerged with a new strategy. It was unveiled in the first speech he made after returning to Texas, an address over a statewide radio network that was delivered from a studio at a Houston radio station instead of in Hermann Park, customary site of political rallies, “
because he had been out of circulation” and his advisers felt there was now so little interest in his candidacy that
attracting a crowd would be impossible and a rally in the park only an embarrassment; in fact, Woodward had to “work like a dog” even to get fifty or so people to the studio. (One of them, invited to fill out the crowd, was Woodward’s mother.)

It was very different from Johnson’s earlier
speeches. Previously, he and his advisers had agreed that attacking Stevenson personally would be a mistake. Because of the respect, indeed, almost reverence, in which the former Governor was held, such attacks had always boomeranged in the past. But now, in desperation, he attacked. Stevenson had said he opposed a Truman plan to provide federal aid to raise teachers’ salaries because of
provisions which Stevenson feared would increase federal control of schools. On this stance, popular in Texas, Stevenson could not be criticized, but Johnson used Stevenson’s statement to bring in another issue, so that he could criticize the ex-Governor on
that
one. “
While I was sick at Mayo’s,” Lyndon Johnson said, “a calculating, do-nothing, fence-straddling opponent of mine, who three months ago said he had no
platform, got off the fence for the first time to oppose the teacher salary increase. I challenge my calculating opponent to tell Texans tomorrow if he favors withdrawing federal aid from five hundred thousand world-war veterans, men who did not sit at home when Old Glory had to be carried to every corner of the globe.”

Two aspects of Johnson’s attack were significant. First, its implication—that Stevenson might be opposed to federal aid for veterans—was totally false. As Johnson was well aware, Stevenson was in favor of such
aid, and indeed had already proposed that it be increased. Equally significant were the words in which the attack was couched: “calculating, do-nothing, fence-straddling”—and, as the speech went on,
with Johnson elaborating on his falsification of Stevenson’s record, he referred to him directly: “Mr. Calculator,” “Mr. Do-Nothinger,” “Mr. Straddler.”