Means of Ascent (43 page)

Johnson’s advisers were appalled. “Taking on Coke Stevenson was
a very tricky thing to do,” Jake Pickle recalls. “He was very popular.” When, in dismay, local Johnson managers throughout the state contacted
Claude C. Wild, a veteran Texas politician who had been given the largely honorary title of campaign manager, Wild assured them there would be no repetition. But Wild was wrong. By the end of
the week, Johnson was attacking “Mr. Fence-Straddler’s” courage. “
A man ought to have the courage to stand up and say what he believes in,” he said. Then he orchestrated attacks on Stevenson’s honesty, having allies charge that the former Governor had pardoned a record number of criminals. Johnson had hoped this charge would be effective with voters who remembered that alleged sales of pardons by a previous Governor,
Jim Ferguson, had become an accepted part of Texas political folklore. The Johnson camp said that the proof of the charge lay in the record number of pardons Stevenson had issued. Stevenson refused to reply to the charge, but state prison officials, queried by reporters, explained that the Johnson number had been arrived at by lumping together with true pardons two- or three-day passes given to convicts to attend the funerals of family members or to visit sick
relatives—and pardons faded away as a campaign issue. Then Johnson circulated charges of corruption in leases that Magnolia and other oil companies had purchased to test for oil on land Stevenson owned. Stevenson refused to reply to this charge, either; surrounded in Austin by reporters asking for an answer, he said he would not attempt to defend his honesty, “
as my private life is an open book and my record of public service is too well known to the
people of Texas to require repetition.… If my record does not warrant my election to the Senate then I ought to stay at home. The people know enough to make their own choice.” At the annual dinner of the Austin press corps, however,
Stuart Long, one of Johnson’s allies among the journalists, shouted a question at Stevenson about the Magnolia lease while he was speaking, and Stevenson lost his temper. Turning to Long, his face set in the
“stone stare,” his voice so low it could hardly be heard, he explained the circumstances of the lease. Since everything said at the dinner was off the record, his reply was not preserved, and the details are not remembered. But reporters who were there—even Johnson supporters—remember how ashamed Long looked when he sat down. “Well,” he whispered to Horace Busby, “I guess
I was sure wrong about that.” And that
issue, too, thereupon
dropped out of the campaign. But Johnson simply continued trying other “issues” that were nothing more than attacks on Stevenson’s integrity. Coke Stevenson’s strongest point was his reputation. Lyndon Johnson had decided his only hope was to destroy it.

T
OGETHER WITH THE NEW STRATEGY
came a new weapon.

It was a helicopter.

Despite their use in the war, helicopters were still almost unknown in civilian life; so far as Johnson could ascertain, no candidate had ever campaigned for political office in one. But some months earlier, Woodward, familiar with them from his Air Force service, had suggested that Johnson do so, because its use would ease one of the greatest difficulties in campaigning across a state eight hundred miles long and almost eight hundred miles wide, in which half the
voters still lived in small towns to which roads were often inadequate and which were so far apart that much of any campaign was wasted in traveling between them. Attending a demonstration in Washington staged for congressmen by the
Bell Helicopter Corporation, Johnson had perceived an additional advantage. Few Texans had ever seen one of these strange-looking aircraft; its arrival in a small town would be an event. Drawing crowds to campaign speeches was
extremely difficult in Texas not only because of the people’s distrust of politicians but because of the long distances they had to travel to reach a “speaking” and because the time these trips took was too precious to farmers and ranchers to be wasted. Politicians had tried everything from barbecues and watermelon feasts to a special train chartered by one candidate to haul voters to a speech from all across the state, but the only attraction that had ever
worked had been Pappy O’Daniel’s famous hillbilly band. Maybe, Johnson felt, a helicopter could be a drawing card for him the way the Hillbilly Boys had been for Pappy. Returning from the demonstration, he had told Warren Woodward: “Woody, that’s the best idea I’ve ever heard!”

As Johnson had weighed the idea, however, he had come to feel that its advantages were outweighed by its drawbacks. The logistical difficulties of keeping an aircraft in operation over so vast an area were formidable. Most of this early generation of helicopters could carry fuel enough for only about 150 miles of flight, which would necessitate several refuelings every day. Helicopters could use only ninety-octane gas; some airports stocked it, some
didn’t—and most Texas towns didn’t have an airport anyway. The helicopter would therefore have to be refueled from trucks, which would carry the gas in fifty-gallon drums. If the helicopter missed its connection with a truck, it would be forced down: the candidate could
find himself stranded in a town or a field, an object of ridicule in the press—ridicule that could be fatal to a candidacy.

Fuel was only part of the problem. It was unusual for helicopters to be in the air more than an hour or two a day, and campaigning obviously demanded far more daily flying time. Not only fuel trucks but a mechanic would have to follow the craft back and forth across Texas in case it broke down. And what if it broke down and couldn’t be repaired? What if, in some remote part of Texas, a needed replacement part wasn’t available? That, too, could strand a
candidate. Each night the helicopter would require servicing, and then would have to be guarded against curious people wanting to handle its valves or rotors. And the crowds attracted to hear the candidate speak would be attracted not to a courthouse or a schoolhouse but to an open area; explains Woodward: “If you are going to land in a field, there’s no electrical sockets out there and you had to find some way to get your sound system wired in.…” So many
things could go wrong in the daily hurly-burly of even a traditional campaign; why add to the normal difficulties the problems of traveling in a still largely unfamiliar form of transportation?

Safety factors had been the decisive consideration. Since the idea was to attract people, landings would have to be in or near populated areas; people unfamiliar with a helicopter might stray into its path or, once it had landed, might wander into the whirl of its rotor blades and be injured or killed,
“CANDIDATE’S HELICOPTER KILLS FARMER”
—that would be the end of the candidate’s hopes. It was fine to say
that the landing area would be roped off and guarded, but among the crowd would be children—how could you be sure that a child might not dart out between the guards and be injured? As more and more such problems presented themselves to his imagination, Lyndon Johnson had decided that using a helicopter was simply too risky a gamble. But things had changed. Now he was losing—losing everything. He took the gamble. On June 10, a big four-passenger blue-and-white Sikorsky
S-51, sixty feet long and with three twenty-four-foot-long blades on its main rotor, piloted by
James E. Chudars, an Air Force veteran who was one of the few pilots with substantial helicopter flying time, and carrying an ace mechanic,
Harry Nachlin, left the Sikorsky Aircraft plant in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and headed southwest. Cruising at about ninety miles an hour, it arrived at Love Field in Dallas three days later. The next day, a
public address system was installed in the baggage compartment behind the seats, a large speaker was lashed to one of the landing gear struts, “Lyndon Johnson for U.S. Senator” was painted on both sides, and the day after that, Chudars’ passenger arrived for a test flight. Chudars noticed that Johnson seemed to have remarkably little interest in the machine to which he was going to be entrusting his life. When they were up in the air, what Johnson was watching
was not
the control panel but the faces of people on the ground. He was watching to see if their faces lifted to look at the helicopter.

And they did.

T
HE WEEK
before the helicopter arrived had been a bad week, one of the worst, his aides say, in Lyndon Johnson’s political life. His attacks on Stevenson had dismayed many of his advisers, and, even worse, had failed to arouse interest among voters. Stevenson was shrugging off the attacks, and so was the press. The press was, in fact, less and less interested in the senatorial race. On June 13,
Margaret Mayer, of
the
Austin American-Statesman
, reported that with only six weeks to go, voters were still reacting to the candidates’ efforts with “
a withering lack of enthusiasm.” Johnson’s announcement during that week that he would be “the first candidate to use a helicopter in political history” (to defuse the issue of its cost, he said that it, and its pilot, had been chartered and donated to his campaign
by a group of “107 Dallas war veterans”) had been greeted with misgivings from most of his staff, and with lack of interest in the press—except for occasional bursts of ridicule: a typical headline on a typically brief article about the announcement said: “J
OHNSON TO GIVE ’EM PIE FROM THE SKY
.” Under the headline “
LOOKEE, MAW—THAR’S THAT
CONGRESSMAN
,” a
Houston Post
article said: “Asked what would happen if the sudden arrival of the helicopter stampeded some neighbor’s cows through his kitchen, a spokesman for Johnson’s headquarters said after a moment’s thought, ‘
no comment.’ ” Peddy said only, “
I hope he doesn’t get hurt and have to go
back in the hospital.” This reaction, however, demonstrated only that in politics as in other fields, a revolutionary innovation may not be immediately recognized as the stroke of genius it is.

On June 15, the Tuesday following his brief test flight, Johnson took off at dawn, flying east out of Dallas. At his first stop, in Terrell, the landing site that had been selected by the advance man was a baseball diamond so far outside town that the crowd was small. Johnson, recalls Busby, “just
flogged
the man with his tongue.” But at the next town to the east, Canton, the site was a vacant lot adjacent to the Courthouse Square, and the crowd
was better—and at the next, Lindale, over in East Texas now, Johnson told Chudars to try circling over the little town several times before landing. As the pilot did so, and the roar of the helicopter’s Pratt & Whitney 985 engine filled Lindale’s streets, people poured out of their houses and stores, staring up at the sky. Then, when Chudars was over the Lindale High School football field, Johnson told him not to descend immediately, but to hover above the
field, holding the helicopter as stationary as possible, so that people would realize where he was going to land. And as the helicopter finally settled gently down, Lyndon Johnson
could see latecomers running through the streets to see it at close range.

Wednesday morning’s newspapers carried stories about the senatorial candidate who, as one paper put it, was “
flitting around in a strange sort of flying machine” that could go straight up and down and stand still in mid-air and that looked like a “
flying windmill” (because of its tail rotor with its three four-and-one-half-foot-long blades), and there had been time now to place spot announcements
on local
radio stations. The word was also being spread by
telephone, as East Texans who had seen the helicopter on the first day called relatives and friends in towns Johnson was to visit Wednesday to tell them not to miss it. All that day, Lyndon Johnson flew back and forth near the Louisiana border, over the thick pine forests that covered the rolling hills of the East Texas counties of Upshur, Cass, Lamar and Marion,
before heading off to Texarkana, at the northeasternmost corner of the state. When he passed over a town too small to merit a landing, the helicopter would hover over its main street while he shouted down through the loudspeaker, relying on notes from his
advance men, “This is Lyndon Johnson, your candidate for United States Senator. How’s the gang at Morgan’s Drugstore?” or “Give my regards to Will Overton.” And as he
neared a town where a landing was scheduled, he could see below him not only people running through the streets toward the landing site, but, in the countryside outside the town, plumes of dust moving along the dirt roads. Farmers had loaded their wives and children into their cars and were racing to see the helicopter land.

By Thursday, the Associated Press had given the helicopter a name, “The Johnson City Windmill,” and the Windmill was flying west, leaving the pine forests behind as the land below changed into blackland prairie; for hours, Chudars and Johnson flew along the broad Red River Valley on the state’s northern border,
hovering over some towns while Johnson shouted down from the air, and at intervals cutting south to land for speeches in
Omaha, Mount Pleasant, Mount Vernon, Bogota, New Boston, Clarksville and Detroit. The last stop of the day was Paris, in Texas terms not a town but a small city, with its twenty-four thousand residents. The streets of Paris, laid out following a fire that had all but leveled the city in 1916, were unusually wide. Wide as they were, however, as the Johnson City Windmill settled to its landing, they were jammed, not only the sidewalks but the streets themselves, with people waiting to
see it. That evening, Johnson gave a radio speech from a Paris station. Afterward, back in his hotel room, he made his nightly telephone call to his headquarters at the Hancock House. Claude Wild had something to tell him. All that day, telephone calls had been pouring in from mayors and other public officials not only in East and Northeast Texas but all across the state, requesting that the itinerary for the “Flying Windmill” include
their town.
Communities that generally had little interest in a visit from a politician were asking—in some cases, almost pleading—for a visit from Lyndon Johnson.

W
ITH THE EXCEPTION
of Coke Stevenson, candidates for the United States Senate did not generally travel with only one or two assistants—and certainly this candidate didn’t. He needed at least one secretary, more than one speech writer—he was, after all, giving both morning and evening
radio addresses daily—as well as a man (Woody) to carry his suitcases, his boxes of monogrammed shirts and
Countess Mara ties, his traveling case crammed with throat sprays and lozenges, skin ointment and pills. Now he needed, in addition, a helicopter mechanic, and someone familiar with the aircraft’s landing requirements to be on hand at each stop to arrange vital crowd-control precautions. The microphone he used for speeches on the ground had proved unsuitable for mid-air speeches because it picked up too much noise from the helicopter motor, so a second, more sensitive,
microphone was installed and hooked up to the loudspeaker lashed to the landing gear; a radio engineer—from KTBC—was needed to keep both microphones in working order. And he wanted, he now decided, a radio announcer—he selected KTBC’s
Joe Phipps—to announce his arrival from the air as the helicopter was coming in to land. He wanted
everything—
everything included, of course, sound trucks to tour towns to prepare
their inhabitants for his coming (“You could do every street in these little towns twice in an hour,” an aide recalls). And, to the astonishment of even his most hardened aides, he wanted a band, a hillbilly band. Was a helicopter a drawing card? Well, so was a band. A band playing at the landing site for an hour or so before the landing would help attract a crowd. He wanted a band. And whereas Phipps and perhaps one other person could fit into the helicopter, the band,
the mechanic, the speechwriters and the rest of the entourage would have to travel by cars, cars which could not keep up with the helicopter. A score of unanticipated problems further complicated logistics, and although the red-and-blue tank trucks of the ’Umble (counsel: Alvin Wirtz) were supposed to be positioned along the helicopter’s route, they were continually missing connections. Inability to prevent children from swarming around the helicopter and turning its
valves necessitated a safety check after each stop.