Means of Ascent (53 page)

This phenomenon, which would be corrected in later generations of helicopters by a simple change in the angle of the rotor blades, was extremely rare; Mashman himself had never experienced it, and the first time he encountered it he did not realize what was happening. All he knew was that as he was flying at a height of between twenty-five and thirty feet along Marshall’s main street on his way to a landing site in a park, with Johnson sitting beside him,
studying his briefing papers, without warning “the ship just dropped out from under me”; he had lost power completely. His reaction was to jerk the controls toward him, a maneuver whose only effect was to cause the helicopter to pitch forward and drop even faster. As he sat there “with a feeling of complete helplessness,” the helicopter fell like a stone, hitting the ground between two parked cars so hard that it bounced up into the air over one of the
cars. Suddenly
Mashman found that he had power again. He regained control and continued flying to the park.

After they landed, just before Johnson stepped out to begin his speech, he said, “Joe, that wasn’t where you wanted to land back there, was it?” His tone was one of mild curiosity. “No, no,” Mashman replied. “We had a little problem. I’ll tell you about it later.” While Johnson was speaking, Mashman was preparing an explanation of what had happened, but in fact no explanation was required. Climbing back into the
helicopter after the speech, Johnson immediately opened his next set of briefing papers and didn’t ask about the sudden drop to the ground. He never asked. The helicopter in which Lyndon Johnson had been riding had fallen like a stone for twenty-five feet, had hit the ground so hard that it bounced higher than a car roof, and then, regaining power, had swooped up into the air again.

And, Mashman realized, Johnson hadn’t really noticed.

A
T SIX-THIRTY
on the morning of July 24, Primary Day, George Parr came to the home of his feared Mexican-American enforcer, “Indio” Salas, and repeated his instructions: “
Concentrate on the Senate race. Be sure we elect Johnson.”

Salas, as election judge, presided over Precinct 13, the Mexican-American district of Alice, the county seat of Jim Wells County, where the polling place had as usual been set up in a large room in the Nayer Elementary School. In a vacant lot across the street from the school, Salas had arranged for the erection of the traditional Election Day tent—pyramid-shaped, about sixteen feet square at the base—and in front of it stood deputy sheriffs, wearing guns.
It had been set up so that the Mexican-American voters who were herded into it by other deputies could be given their poll-tax receipts, their sample ballots or “strings”—and their instructions—in privacy. (“
Inside we had a table,” Salas recalls, “with plenty sample ballots to teach some of our voters how to vote; lots of them needed training.”) There was a new development. Under Texas
election law, each party was permitted “
poll-watchers” to inspect the ballots, and the Jim Wells reformers, emboldened by recent successes, had actually dared to name two for Box 13,
H. L. (Ike) Poole and young
Jimmy Holmgreen, and when they arrived at the Nayer School just as the polls were opening at seven a.m., they handed Salas a paper: a judge’s order designed to ensure an honest vote. But
in George Parr’s precincts, the law was not what was written on paper. Salas pointed to two chairs that he thought were far enough away from the table on which the ballots were counted so that the reformers could not get a good look at them. “
I just ordered them to go sit in a corner and keep out of the way,” Salas
was to recall. “
I tell you once more, I was so powerful I could do anything that
pleased me.” Then he whispered to the election clerks: “
told them, Absolutely do not let them see the ballots.” Poole, Salas was to say, “more or less obeyed” his orders, but Holmgreen objected when he saw Mexican-American voters pull out sample ballots and refer to them while marking their own, an obvious violation of the election law. Before noon, Salas began counting the ballots. Sitting at a table, he unfolded each ballot and
called out the names on it; three clerks, sitting at the same table, marked down the votes on three separate tally sheets. Even from his chair in the corner, Holmgreen was to say, he could see the marks on the ballots, and he saw Salas calling out for Johnson votes that were actually for Stevenson. A brave young man, Holmgreen kept asking to inspect the ballots, as he was entitled by law to do. “He was
up many times approaching the desk where the clerks were
counting and reading the ballots,” Salas says. “I told him, Better sit down.” When Holmgreen persisted, Deputy Sheriff
Stokes Micenheimer, a huge man, as fat as any cinema caricature of a Deep South deputy, with his belly bulging over his gunbelt, arrested him, marched him off to the city jail, and locked him in a cell. An attorney for the reformers obtained a writ of mandamus freeing Holmgreen and ordering Salas to allow the poll-watchers to
see the ballots. “I
just ignored same and again told Poole and Holmgreen, You just stay put, don’t move from your chairs.” Shortly after the polls closed at seven p.m., Salas announced the “vote” in Precinct 13—that single “box” furnished Johnson with the bulk of his 1,881–1,357 lead in Jim Wells County. And no “reform” opposition to Parr existed in the six counties—Duval, Starr, La
Salle, Brooks, Jim Hogg and Zapata—controlled absolutely by the Duke of Duval. In Duval, Stevenson received 66 votes, Peddy 20, Johnson 3,707–98 percent of the total. In the six counties as a whole, Johnson received 90 percent of the total. His plurality over Stevenson in Parr’s domain totaled almost 7,000 votes. In Judge Raymond’s Webb County, he received 90 percent of the total, and a plurality over Stevenson of almost 6,000 votes. The districts of
Corpus Christi that Anglo politicians called “Mextown” and “Niggertown” produced 4,000 more; those in McAllen and Edinburg, on the border, weighed in with more. Although San Antonio’s West Side didn’t produce as well for Johnson as had been expected, he nonetheless came out of that city and the Valley with the 25,000 votes he had expected.

Even including this bloc vote, however, Lyndon Johnson polled only 405,617 votes—34 percent of the total. Coke Stevenson had 477,077 votes, or 40 percent; Peddy had 237,195 votes, or 20 percent; and the eight minor candidates had 83,000 votes, 7 percent. Stevenson would have won without the necessity of a second primary had his fellow conservative George Peddy not polled an unexpectedly high total—largely, in the opinion of
political
observers, because of a mistake by the conservatives’ daily Bible, the
Dallas News
, which the day before the election, confident that its favorite, Stevenson, would win even with a split vote, had loftily assured conservatives that they could vote for either Stevenson or Peddy without hurting the conservative cause.

Despite the conservative split, Stevenson had defeated Johnson by 71,000 votes. And when the second—runoff—primary was held on August 28, Peddy would be gone from the race. Political writers and observers agreed with virtual unanimity that Peddy’s voters would now turn to the remaining conservative candidate: voters in the fourteen fiercely conservative
East Texas counties that Peddy had carried were hardly likely to switch to
the candidate identified as a liberal.

This assessment was echoed not only by newspapers—liberal and conservative alike—throughout the state but in Johnson’s own camp, stunned by the extent of his defeat. (The shock was intensified for the younger Johnson aides—those who worked out of the Hancock House—because a last-minute Belden Poll, released on Primary Day, had, in contrast to earlier Belden Polls, shown that among “most likely” voters whose preference had
been decided, Johnson had actually pulled ahead of Stevenson. The dramatic inaccuracy of this poll confirmed the feeling of the senior Johnson advisers—the Brown Building group—and of other Texas political observers that, in those relatively early days of polling in that state, identifying and predicting the preference of “most likely” voters was not reliable; the Brown Building group had not put much stock in the last-minute poll, which was, of course, at
variance not only with their own private polls but, indeed, with virtually all informed Texas political opinion.)
Stevenson’s campaign manager,
Morris Roberts, predicted that Stevenson would win “
ninety percent” of Peddy’s vote; “This is only natural.… The principles laid down by both Mr. Stevenson and Mr. Peddy are so closely identical it would be difficult to find a dividing
line”—and in the somber discussions at the Hancock House and in the Brown Building, the consensus was that Roberts’ estimate might not be too far off. The Johnson team had been confident that their chief would run close to OP Coke in the first primary, close enough so that Johnson would have a realistic chance of victory in the second. But the actual margin, Jake Pickle recalls, was “so imposing”—how could it possibly be overcome?
“Making up seventy thousand votes in five weeks, particularly when we were sure that Coke would get most of Peddy’s vote, too—it seemed impossible, absolutely impossible,” Joe Kilgore says. Talk to a dozen Johnson aides about their feelings after the first primary, and one adjective recurs in almost every conversation: “Hopeless.”

And this assessment was, in the privacy of the big back yard at Johnson’s Dillman Street house, echoed by the candidate himself. Because
local candidates would not be running, the pool of votes to draw from would be much smaller than in the first primary. “
People do not come out to vote for a United States Senator,” Johnson explained to Busby. “They come out to vote for the Sheriff or the County
Commissioner.” Most discouraging was that Johnson’s percentage of the vote had been so low: thirty-four percent. The June Belden Poll had predicted Johnson’s share of likely voters at thirty-seven percent. Despite the helicopter, despite the money, despite the frantic efforts of the past month, despite that month’s intensified deluge of radio broadcasts and newspaper ads, Johnson had made no appreciable gain in the last month of the campaign. One
explanation might be that, in conservative Texas, a percentage in the mid-thirties represented the upper limit of Johnson’s potential vote. Asked for a comment on the first primary, Stevenson said laconically: “I think Johnson has
pulled his weight.”

T
HERE WAS ANOTHER
possible explanation as well.

For more than a month before the first primary, unprecedented amounts of money had been devoted to persuading voters that Coke Stevenson had made a “secret deal” to help repeal the Taft-Hartley law.

Coke had hardly bothered to reply. The charge, he told intimates, wasn’t true, but he didn’t have to bother telling the voters that; they knew it without his telling them. The people of Texas, he said, wouldn’t believe that charge no matter how often it was made. They wouldn’t believe it because they knew him. They knew his record. They knew what he stood for. They knew what he would do in the future because they knew what he had done in the
past. He had never betrayed them before—and he would never betray them now. And they knew that.

Coke Stevenson’s belief flew, of course, in the face of all conventional political wisdom.

But, it now appeared, he had been right.

O
NE MONTH TO GO
. One month to make up seventy thousand votes. One month to make Peddy’s staunchly conservative followers turn against Coke Stevenson, symbol of
conservatism. One month for Lyndon Johnson to save his political career. His entire life, it seemed, had boiled down to August, 1948.

And he couldn’t even use his mighty weapon. “We were too far behind,” Busby says. “Trying to draw crowds in little towns—that wasn’t going to get you anywhere. We had to go into the cities.” The cities, where a helicopter could not be used.

Every sacrifice had to be made, even one that may have been especially difficult: ending the abuse of helpless subordinates. Wirtz and Wild had been attempting for months to persuade Johnson to modify or at least conduct in private the explosions of violent, obscene rage at his staff (and, indeed, at non-staffers such as hotel waiters and desk clerks) which often took place in full view of local supporters. From town after town reports came in of tirades so shocking and
unforgettable that they often negated all his efforts. But the suggestions from Austin that he abuse his assistants only in private had been ignored—as if the prerogative of venting his emotions at
Mary Rather and Woody and Buzz whenever and wherever he felt like it was a necessity he could not deny himself.

Now, however, there was one month to go; he altered his behavior—with his customary thoroughness. The first witness to—and beneficiary of—the transformation was Horace Busby. Immediately after the first primary, the young press-release writer and idea man had been summoned from his desk on the first floor of the Hancock House “upstairs to where the big shots were meeting.” There he received rather unwelcome news. He had been absolutely
correct when he reported that the unprecedented size of Johnson’s entourage was antagonizing voters, he was told. It had therefore been decided that on future campaign trips the candidate would
be accompanied by only a single aide—“and guess who it’s going to be.”

Busby says he was designated for the assignment because “I had developed a reputation for handling his rages better than anyone else.” But, he says, he had done the “handling” partly by becoming “very good at never being in his line of sight” when an explosion was imminent. As Johnson’s sole companion, assigned to be constantly at the candidate’s side, he would no longer be able to use that tactic. “I
was,” he recalls, “expecting the worst.”