Means of Ascent (55 page)

This immense supply of campaign financing meant that
Liz Carpenter’s story on Coke Stevenson’s Washington press conference (including the erroneous implication that Stevenson had not made a “previous” statement) could be printed not just as an article in the newspapers that employed her but in many of the sixty daily and 488 weekly newspapers in Texas as an impressive advertisement with the headline: “
EXACT WASHINGTON INTERVIEW OF STEVENSON DODGING ISSUES
.” Her article rolled off presses not just on newsprint but on the glossy paper of brochures sent out in direct
mailings, and, in excerpted form, on penny postcards sent in repeated mailings so that the average Texas family would be able to see the name “Stevenson” connected with
“dodging” over and over again. Some days after the press conference,
Drew Pearson’s column appeared with the key word used twice in the lead: “Ex-Governor Coke Stevenson of Texas … on a recent trip to Washington evaded more issues and dodged more questions than any recent performer in a city noted for question dodging.” That column was reprinted, and tens of thousands—hundreds of thousands—of
copies were sent to voters in repeated mailings.

Most important, the story of the press conference was repeated over and over on the
radio. Johnson repeated it in his speeches, of course. These speeches were written by
Paul Bolton. Describing what he wrote, Bolton says: “Repeat the same thing over and over and over—jumping on Coke Stevenson’s having secret dealings with labor. You knew it was
a damned lie [but] you just repeated it and
repeated it and repeated it. Repetition—that was the thing.” Johnson had respected and influential politicians repeat the lie in radio speeches broadcast in the areas where they were known. For example, Longview newspaper publisher
Carl Estes, a power in East Texas, delivered a speech, written by Wirtz and his speechwriters, that was heard throughout his part of the state. Hailing Johnson’s “outspoken championship of the Taft-Hartley
law” during the fight for its passage in Washington two years before (a statement which would have surprised anyone who had been in Washington), Estes said:

Pleased with Estes’ delivery of the speech, Wirtz ordered it rebroadcast over a twenty-station statewide network, and reprinted in full-page advertisements in the state’s leading newspapers.

As for his own stand on Taft-Hartley, Johnson said,

If this was something less than a firm endorsement of the Act—if, indeed, it was no less equivocal than Stevenson’s position—no reporter pointed it out. (Indeed, a reporter wrote it.
Marshall McNeil was quite proud of his authorship of the Johnson speech.) Stevenson, still defiantly refusing to reply to an opponent’s charge, did not point it out either. Even if he had, his reply might have been lost. Lyndon Johnson had
one month to make Texas believe that Coke Stevenson was a secret supporter of big-city labor racketeers and had made a secret deal to repeal the sacred Taft-Hartley Act. And during this month, Texans were told this by letter, postcard,
telephone calls from banks of phone workers, pamphlets, direct
mailings,
radio advertisements and
speeches, by ads in weekly newspapers and by
“articles” in the weeklies that were in reality also written in Johnson headquarters. The charge was drummed into voters by the shouts of the scores of paid “stump speakers” Johnson had dispatched to crisscross the state. Special attention was given to the conservative businessmen who played so influential a role
in Texas politics—and who had for years been Stevenson supporters. “Transcripts” of the Washington
interview were mailed, with individually typed letters, to hundreds, if not thousands, of “responsible businessmen.” Such a campaign cost a vast amount of money—but Lyndon Johnson had it.

And it wasn’t only the shouts, but the whispers. One of the little-publicized
factors of rural Texas politics was the men known variously as “missionaries” or “travelers” or
“walking delegates” or “active campaigners.” These were men influential with a particular ethnic group—for example, “You’d hire some popular Czech to go talk to the
Czechs,” one veteran of Texas politics says—or simply an individual well known in some remote rural district. Such men were for hire in every campaign. “You’d send a guy out to see the lay of the land,”
D. B. Hardeman explains. “He would walk around the streets, try to find out who was for who, go to the Courthouse. And they would talk around,” spreading the rumors that their employer wanted spread. The
missionaries were an effective political weapon, particularly in
rural areas where voters were unsophisticated, uneducated and accustomed to relying on word of mouth for information. The missionaries knew what to say. “From previous campaigns they knew what people wanted to hear, and who to talk to.”

Never in the history of Texas politics had these missionaries been deployed on the scale on which the Johnson campaign was deploying them. A lot of the cash that came in those brown paper bags went to the walking delegates. Asked, for example, how the $50,000 that Connally brought back from Houston was spent,
Charles Herring says: “
I saw him spend it. I saw him give it out. Our travelers would come by and pick up money.” The
Johnson campaign had between fifty and a hundred such delegates out on the road during the second primary and they each received between twenty-five and fifty dollars a day, plus expenses. Tens of thousands of dollars were thus spent to disseminate rumors about Coke Stevenson. Connally says the active campaigners were employed to “go around and spread propaganda. We’d contact a guy and give him walking money. To buy beers, that kind of thing.
He’d just circulate, dropping these little tidbits. He’d go from beer joint to beer joint, and go into the Courthouses. He was a local guy, and no one would suspect he was employed in the campaign.” And with their money, the rumormongers got their marching orders; says Connally: “We’d give them a party line. ‘Did you hear Coke’s not taking a stand [on Taft-Hartley]? Well, hell, he
can’t
take a stand, you know. He
made this deal. Well, no, he didn’t say it publicly. But he said it to a lot of people in Austin when he didn’t think anyone could hear, and one of them told me.…’ ” This whispering campaign was carried on not only by these travelers, of course; the rumors were spread by the thousands of federally paid employees of the state’s twenty-nine
Rural Electrification Administration cooperatives, and of the Department of
Agriculture’s
Soil Conservation Service, and by employees of the
Lower Colorado River Authority. And the whispers were very effective. “
It was working,” Boyett says. “These guys knew what to say. Lyndon had created the doubt: ‘He’ll vote to repeal that Act.’ ”

T
HE GREAT DANGER
for Lyndon Johnson was that his opponent would reply to the questions about his stand on Taft-Hartley—for Johnson knew what the reply would be.

The Johnson strategists knew the truth about the charges they were making. They knew that Coke was really in favor of the bill they were claiming he was against. And if Coke simply said he was in favor of the bill, the issue would vanish—and with it any hope for a Johnson victory. So Johnson, confident now that if someone demanded that Stevenson do something, Stevenson would refuse, demanded again and again that Stevenson reply—in terms that he knew would
make it even harder for Stevenson to reply. Calling the former Governor “pussy-footing” and “fence-straddling,” he said in a typical speech: “Let’s clear out the underbrush. The issue is plain. Has my opponent been gagged by the labor dictators? I challenge him to
lift either his left leg or his right leg off the rail and get off one side or the other. Now is his chance to come clean with the people of
Texas. It is his last chance.” And as a further device to keep Stevenson from stating that he was for Taft-Hartley, Johnson now also predicted that the former Governor
would
state that—for the basest of motives. “
It would be a peculiar circumstance if at this late date he should now decide … he is in favor of the Taft-Hartley Bill,” Johnson said. Stevenson would be doing so, Johnson said, only because he had realized that his
“true” feelings were costing him votes. The use of this tactic, too, was escalated from day to day. Under a headline that read
“
LIKE A BRANDED STEER—JOHNSON SAYS FOE TO BACK TAFT-HARTLEY,”
Hobby’s
Houston Post
reported that Stevenson will “actually endorse the Taft-Hartley Bill” before the second primary in an attempt to deceive voters. Charging that
Stevenson had tried “to be all things to all men,” Johnson said that his own attacks
on Stevenson’s refusal to take a stand would force him to take one. Comparing the former Governor to “a freshly branded West Texas steer who tries to rub his brand off,” the brand in this case being that of the state AFL, Johnson said, “If you folks will just stay with me, we will have him trying to get the AF of L brand off his left hip
before this campaign is over.”

Stevenson did not reply—for two weeks, during which Johnson’s tactics had their effect. Speechwriter
Paul Bolton, who says Johnson’s
speeches were false, says also that the speeches were working. “
You watched [Johnson’s] ratings go up those … weeks in the polls.” Says Busby, a brilliant political analyst and strategist: “
At the point at which
Coke [in his Washington press conference] made the Taft-Hartley statement—at this point, he [Johnson] had no leverage to get back into the race, but the minute I saw [Liz Carpenter’s] article, I said: This is our
chance!’ ” “When Stevenson made his ‘notes’ reply, that was
all we needed,” John Connally says. “Johnson had an issue. Mr. Stevenson’s strength came from his
appearance of being a very solid, stable, thoughtful man. And a man who was above politics. Now … he looked indecisive. He looked vacillating. And he looked
political
. Which was destroying his image.”

Stevenson’s image was being destroyed even among the conservative businessmen who had known Coke Stevenson well—and who should therefore have been immune to the poison being circulated about his “secret dealings with labor.” Many of these men lived in Dallas, which, in Busby’s phrase, was “kind of the
de facto
headquarters of the right-to-work movement” in America. Their concern was both
ideological—“Dallas,” as Busby says, “had a singular number of businessmen who believed America had to be protected from labor unions”—and personal, for militant unionization
in Texas would have adversely affected their pocket-books. “The main concern” of the big Dallas businessmen, “the
employers
—was not to let unions take over the labor force in Texas. And they were just shocked to
their toenails by this interview” (or, to be more precise, by Liz Carpenter’s account of it). These businessmen read Stevenson’s interview, and Johnson’s advertisements and statements reminding them of the interview, “and concluded that Coke was making a secret deal with the unions.”

Stevenson’s little band of aides also knew almost immediately the effect that his refusal to answer
Leslie Carpenter’s questions would have among these
conservatives, and their suspicions were confirmed by a telephone call. One evening just after Stevenson’s return from Washington, the telephone rang in his hotel room while
Ernest Boyett was present. On the line was
Scott Schreiner of Kerrville, whom Boyett describes as “a lifelong friend” of Coke’s. Schreiner had a question: “Well, Coke, how
do
you stand on Taft-Hartley?” To an old friend, Coke had no objection to replying. “Well, everyone knows where I stand. I’m not going to vote to repeal it.” Boyett heard the reply, but he also recognized in the words “everyone knows where I stand” a disaster for the campaign,
for he understood the true significance of the telephone call. “Even an old friend was starting to have doubts,” he says. “Lyndon had planted doubts in the conservatives’ minds about the Old Man: ‘He’ll vote to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act!’ ” But his boss still didn’t understand, Boyett realized; he still felt that it was not necessary for him to reply. And, indeed, when Boyett and others attempted to persuade
Stevenson to say in public what he had said on the telephone—the one magic sentence (“I’m not going to vote to repeal it”) that could have neutralized Johnson’s tactics—the answer was the same as it had been for three months now: “ ‘I’m not getting into a cuss fight with Lyndon.’ ” (“I would ask him to make a public
statement every time I saw him,” Boyett
recalls with a sad smile. “He was just such a strong-willed person.…”)

Exacerbating the reactionaries’ doubts was a human consideration. Haters of Roosevelt and his
New Deal—indeed, in Busby’s words, of “everything Roosevelt stood for”—“they hated Johnson as a New Dealer. But when they saw Stevenson waver, they hated him worse than Johnson. To suspect that a former friend has betrayed you is worse than an enemy opposing you, and therefore they got very angry at
Coke.”

T
HE MISTRUST OF
S
TEVENSON
that Johnson had created among conservative businessmen increased
Stevenson’s difficulties, because these businessmen were, of course, the source of most of his campaign funds.