Means of Ascent (51 page)

He would say whatever they wanted to hear. To rural audiences, he shouted, “The
day is over in Texas when people will work for sheep-herders’ wages while a few rich men skim all the cream,” but to wealthy listeners—businessmen and oilmen in the Petroleum Club of Dallas or the Ramada Club in Houston—his vocabulary was not Populist but plutocratic and the cream—increasing the cream—was what he emphasized.
He didn’t merely say the
oil depletion allowance should be continued; he said it should be increased, immediately, from twenty-seven and a half percent to thirty percent. Moreover, the government should set up a system of allocation of scarce materials to oil producers so that they would come first on the list.

In labor districts he was pro-labor, in anti-labor districts he was anti-labor, and in both districts he was very effective.

And when he talked about his opponent, he was just as effective. His listeners’ respect for Coke Stevenson was the main obstacle between him and his dream. It had to be destroyed. And no one could destroy a reputation better than Lyndon Johnson.

Mimicking his opponent had become a staple of his appearances, of course, and it invariably got a laugh. But making his listeners laugh at Coke Stevenson was no longer enough; he had to make them angry at him. And as the sight of a corncob pipe in a farmer’s mouth had given him inspiration, so, now, did faces in a window.

The window was in the second story of the County Courthouse in the North Texas town of Weatherford. On July 17, both candidates campaigned in the town. Stevenson had shaken hands and toured the Courthouse in the early morning and had then driven off to the next town. Some hours later, Johnson landed and was speaking in front of the Courthouse. The temperature that day was 106 degrees, and candidate and crowd were sweltering as he talked—when suddenly Johnson
glanced up at the window, and saw Courthouse clerks and county officials peering out, and noticed that the window was closed and that there was an air-conditioning unit protruding from it. “Look up there,” he shouted. “Look in the window. There’s Coke up there. Folks, I’m out here talking to you man to man in the hot sun, and that’s where Coke is, standing up there in that air-conditioned Courthouse looking down at us.” Coke, of
course, wasn’t one of the faces in the window; he wasn’t even in Weatherford any longer, but the people in the crowd didn’t know that; recalls an observer, “He [Johnson] pointed up there, and sure enough there were people behind the window looking down. You couldn’t see them clearly, and I’m sure everybody thought one of them was Coke, all nice and cool while they were sweating.”

Thereafter, the heat and the air conditioning—the blazing sun and the fact that he, Lyndon Johnson, was out there in it with them—were staples of his speeches. “My opponent does his campaigning in the Ramada Club and the Petroleum Club—where it’s air-conditioned,” Johnson would say. “He does his campaigning at buffet lunches, with millionaires who think they’re the bosses of this state. Well,
I’m out here in the hot sun campaigning with you. Because I know who the bosses of this state really are!
You! YOU!!!
You who I meet in the squares and the fields, you who I meet out here in the hot sun—you’re the real bosses of this state!”

The mimicking got laughs; this touched a deeper chord. “That’s right, Lyndon,” someone would shout. “You tell ’em, Lyndon!” And suddenly other voices would be shouting, too. “Tell ’em, Lyndon! Tell ’em, Lyndon.”

“Yes, you’re the bosses,” he would shout to men and women who had to work every day—in fields or farmhouse kitchens—in fierce heat. “You’re not sitting up in any air-conditioned rooms. And neither am I. I’m out here in the fields and the squares. And it’s the people in the fields and the squares who are going to elect the next Senator of this state. He’s going to be elected by
you.”
“You tell ’em, Lyndon!” a voice would shout. Another voice would shout, “A-men.” And all at once many voices would be shouting “A-men, Lyndon! A-men, Lyndon! You tell ’em, Lyndon!”

He told them more. In one speech, he said, “I’m not going to sling any mud in this campaign.” Then he said that Coke was sixty-one years old (actually, he was sixty), and was campaigning for a job that paid $15,000. “Old” was a word he drummed into his listeners. “He’s an old man,” he said. “A
big-bellied, pipe-smoking old man.” And it was the “old men of the
Senate” who had kept the United States from being prepared for the war. “We don’t need any more big-bellied old men in the Senate.” “
Isolationist” was another word he drummed into his listeners—until he started using a stronger word: “
appeaser.” Stevenson, he said, “is an
umbrella man.” “He talks Chamberlain talk.” “He wants
another
Munich.” “You can put this in your pipe and smoke it: Texas is not going to send either an appeaser or an old man to the Senate, because the immediate job is not of appeasement but preparedness.” Another word was “
stooge.” The proud Stevenson would pick up newspapers to see headlines like: “
STEVENSON STOOGE OF AUSTIN LOBBYISTS, JOHNSON
CHARGES.”
A
S
Governor, he said, Stevenson had been the tool of the big oil companies and the “trusts and the interests,” and now, he said, “these same men—who sit with Coke in air-conditioned hotel rooms—want to put their stooge in the United States Senate.” The attacks grew harsher and harsher. Coke’s refusal to make specific campaign promises, Johnson said, was designed to deceive the
voters. “For too long, the voters have
been deceived by candidates who spoke to you in glittering generalities, but who secretly engaged in double talk,” by “this man with the
slick tongue.”

So powerful were Johnson’s speeches now that even reporters and aides sometimes found themselves stirred by passages they had heard hundreds of times before.

Talking about the need for preparedness, from a flatbed truck in a little park in an East Texas county seat called Canton, he had gone through the routine about Colonel Stevens’ “smelly socks” and was telling his audience that “never again must we send our boys through flak-filled skies unprotected.” In the audience was Warren Woodward. He was ready to start the applause at the high points, but this wasn’t necessary, so
caught up was the crowd in what Lyndon Johnson was saying. Woodward himself was so moved that when Johnson said, “I’ve got this young man working in my campaign who flew thirty-five missions over Europe and his plane was hit thirty-five times, and I don’t want him to ever have to go over there again unprepared; we have to give him the tools he needs,” Woodward applauded and cheered along with the farmers and ranchers around him. And when Johnson
unexpectedly added a new line to the routine, Woody cheered that, too, without at first grasping its relationship to him. “I want that young man to come up here,” Johnson shouted, and Woodward shouted, “Yes, send him up!”—not understanding, he was to recall, that Johnson “was talking about
me.”
“C’mon up here beside me,” Johnson kept shouting, and Woodward kept shouting, “Yeah, go on up! Go on
up!” until finally Johnson caught his eye, and “finally it dawned on me that I was that one that was supposed to go up,” and that he had been shouting and leading the applause for himself. But when Woodward clambered up in the truck, “mortified” over the fact that he had been calling for his own appearance, he realized no one had noticed that he had been among the shouters, for the whole crowd had been as moved as he had been by the words of the
tall, haggard, grimy, perspiration-soaked man on the truck. At speech after speech now, the crowds were caught up. “You could see the rapport building between himself and the crowd,” Horace Busby says. Rural audiences, normally so reserved, would “start out at a distance, in a semicircle,” he says. But as Johnson spoke, “almost every time, the semicircle would edge closer and closer to him.”

Lyndon Johnson knew how to make the most of such enthusiasm, how to play on it and intensify it. He wanted his audiences to become involved. He wanted their hands up in the air. And, having been a schoolteacher, he knew how to get their hands up. He began, in his speeches, to ask questions. The first ones he asked of the kids who had been so enraptured by the helicopter. “How many of you are going to tell your
folks to be sure to vote?”
he would ask, and then, “How many of you are going to tell your folks to vote for Lyndon Johnson?” Wrote a reporter: “The hands would fly up as if Superman himself had asked it.” Then he directed questions at the parents. “I’m traveling to places to see folks where no other candidate has bothered to go,” he would say. “Am I the first candidate who’s been here? Raise your hands if I’m
the first
candidate you’ve seen.” The hands would go up. And he could build on his questions, too. When he was speaking in a town that he knew Stevenson and Peddy had not visited, he would say, “I keep reading about how many counties [the other candidates] have visited, how many miles they have traveled. Has anyone here seen another candidate?” If no hands went up, he would say, “C’mon, raise your hands if you’ve seen another candidate? Surely
someone here has seen one of them? No one? No one has even seen another candidate. Well, you’re seeing me. I’m here with
you.”
Or if, when Johnson asked if anyone had seen another candidate, someone
did
raise his hand, Johnson would ask, “Where did you see him?” And no matter what the reply, Johnson had a line ready. If, for example, the responder said he had seen Stevenson in a hotel, Johnson would say: “What did I tell
you? I’m out here in the hot sun with you people, and my opponent—my big-bellied, pipe-smoking opponent—spends his time campaigning in air-conditioned hotels.”

As good as he was while he was speaking, he was better after the speeches. For after the speech came the meeting and greeting.

“He never just stayed on the [flatbed] truck or the platform, or, if the speech was indoors, on the podium,” Woodward recalls. “He would finish a speech, and then he would
hurry
to the back door so he could shake hands. He didn’t want anyone to leave before he had shaken their hand.”

During the first weeks of the campaign—until, perhaps, that terrible Fourth of July weekend—he had rushed through the handshaking … in the description of Woodward and Busby, all but “throwing” people past. There was no throwing now.

The things he had been saying in the speech had made these rural Texans feel he was one of them. “They felt he was approachable,” Woodward says. “They didn’t hesitate to come over to him.” And in a surprisingly large number of towns—not only in his own Tenth Congressional District and in the Fourteenth, for which he had worked for almost four years as a congressional secretary, but in other districts as well, through his NYA
activities or his
1941 senatorial campaign—he knew personally one or more of the people crowding around him, and through the “favorable” list his staff had compiled for each town he was able to put names to faces. And when he saw someone he knew, Lyndon Johnson’s face would, in the words of one observer, “just
light
up” with pleasure. He
would reach out for him, and call
the man’s name. “Old Bob,” he would say. “How you comin’?” He would put his arm around Bob’s shoulders. “How
are
you?” he would ask. “Ahm awful glad to see you. Well, the last time ah saw you was when you came up to Washington to see Dick Kleberg. Ah hope you haven’t been up again without comin’ by to say howdy to me? You haven’t. Well, ah hope you’ll come up again, and we can
chat for a while.” “At almost every stop,” Woodward says, “there was someone he had done something for.” The “favorable” cards—and that remarkable memory—enabled him now to make the most of what he had done. “Someone would introduce himself, and say, ‘Lyndon, do you remember my boy, John? You helped him get his disability.’ ‘Ah sure do. Ahm glad ah could help him. What’s he doin’
now? How’s he comin?’ ” And when the man had told him, he would say: “That’s
good!”
Or “Is there anything ah can do for him?” And “How’s your missus?” Or they would ask him for new favors. “Lyndon, my boy—you know he was in the service, and he was hit in the leg. I need him to help out on the farm, but, Lyndon, he can’t plow, and they say he can’t get any
disability, and I don’t think they’re doing right by him.” And Johnson would turn to Woodward, who would be standing there with his notebook: “Woody, get that boy’s name, and we’ll look right into it.”

The rapport was cemented—or, if there had been no previous connection, created—with physical affection, with hands and eyes, or, in the case of women, quite often with kisses. He would call older women “Mother” or “Grandma” even if he had never met them before, and hug and kiss them, and say a fond, respectful word to them. Often, when he would reach out to hug a woman, she would giggle and back away, and when he had kissed one,
and the other women saw what was coming, they would retreat out of his path. But “he would come after them,” recalls a man who watched this. “He’d go across the room after them,” and when he caught them, Lyndon Johnson would take one of their hands in his and put his other around their shoulder and bend down and kiss their cheek, and these elderly farm women would receive the kiss scrunched down a little in embarrassment with their faces turned
away, but with their faces aglow: “you could see they just loved this attention.”

With men, the rapport was cemented with a handshake—and a handshake, as delivered by Lyndon Johnson, could be as effective as a hug. “Now, July 24 is Primary Day,” he would say, “and I hope you will lend me your helping hand.” And he would reach out and grasp the farmer’s hand, looking down into his eyes. “What’s your name?” he would ask. “Where’re you from? What’s your
occupation?” And he would always have a relevant sentence or two ready to add. If the farmer said he had two sons, Lyndon would ask what they were doing, and if the farmer said they were studying agriculture at a college, Johnson would say, “Well,
they’re learning a lot of good things there, but people like you who know the land know stuff they can’t learn from teaching, don’t you?” Sometimes, in the midst of a crowd of
strangers, he would stop and concentrate on a single person, as if he were back in a little Hill Country town again, running for Congress for the first time, and talking to a man he knew. He wouldn’t take the man’s hand at first. “Listen,” he would say, standing before the man and looking into his eyes, his own face glistening with perspiration, his cheeks hollow with fatigue, and the shirt clinging to his body, “Listen, you know why I’m
running for the Senate. I want your support. I want your vote. I hear tell that all the people down in your neck of the woods will listen to what you tell them. Will you tell them to vote for me? I need help. Will you help me? Will you give me your helping hand?”
Will you give me your helping hand?
—as he asked that final question, Lyndon Johnson would raise his own hand and hold it out in a mute appeal. When Johnson was only twenty-one, participating in his
first political campaign, State Senator Welly Hopkins had concluded that the tall, gangling college boy had a “gift”—“a very unusual ability to meet and greet the public.” Time after time now, Lyndon Johnson’s hand would reach out to a voter—and the voter’s hand would reach out in return.