Means of Ascent (60 page)

One thing, however, she still resisted doing. When a reporter asked her that August if she planned to speak on her husband’s behalf, she said: “
I couldn’t possibly make a speech!” Her husband was particularly insistent that she make one at the opening rally of the second primary, the rally in Center in Deep East Texas. Since she was from that area, and since her father was a political force there, even a few words from her
would be a big help. But she said she simply couldn’t. In a maneuver conceived by her husband to call attention to her despite her silence, she continually got up from her seat on the platform while her husband was speaking and adjusted the light on the podium, so that she was as visible as she could be without actually saying anything.

Now, finally, at the very end of the campaign, Lady Bird bowed to her husband’s demands and agreed to take the step she dreaded most of all. She agreed to speak at the closing Johnson rally on August 27, the day before the election—in front of a crowd of some fourteen thousand people who would be jamming the San Antonio Municipal Auditorium, and in front of microphones that would carry her speech over a statewide radio hookup.

At least San Antonio was close enough to Austin so that she could drive there, but this proved a doubtful blessing. She and Mrs. Brooks were going to stop en route for a “coffee” in Seguin, but before they got there, their car skidded on wet pavement, veered off the road, overturned, and rolled over twice before coming to a stop in a ditch.

Lady Bird was bruised and shaken up but otherwise uninjured—and she didn’t want anything to disturb Lyndon before his big rally. Depositing Mrs. Brooks, who was badly bruised, in a hospital, she drove alone to
the Seguin reception, borrowed a dress from the hostess to replace her torn clothes, and shook hands with two hundred women with her usual smiling graciousness. Then she drove to San Antonio and made her speech.

During the next few days, mail poured into the Hancock House from political leaders (Abilene District Chairman
Jay Taylor wrote, “
Lady Bird was wonderful on the radio last night. Should have been on all the time!”) and from voters (Mrs. W. S. Harris of Hays County wrote Johnson, “I heard your wife’s
sweet voice over the radio, and I thought what a comfort she was to you”); a Houston attorney and
his wife, who had heard Mrs. Johnson’s speech, were to write that they were waiting in line at the polling place on the “
hot, muggy Election Day, being jostled by ‘unwashed’ members of our democracy,” when his wife turned to him “with perspiration streaming down her face, and with makeup, hat and clothing somewhat bedraggled, and said, ‘I want you to know that I am enduring this
only
on account of that
lovely Mrs. Johnson.’ ”

After the speech, Lady Bird and Lyndon arrived at their San Antonio hotel room about midnight, and Johnson, as he would later recall, “
told her we’d better get to bed.” But Lady Bird said she was driving back to Austin that night for some last-minute campaigning on Election Day.

“As she changed for the trip,” Johnson was to recall, “I saw these big bruises,” and when he asked her about them, she had to tell him about the accident. But she drove back to Austin and was up early the next morning. She and Lyndon’s mother and his sisters divided the Austin
telephone book among them, and all Election Day they phoned people asking them to go to the polls and vote. She had a good line ready for
reporters who inquired about the accident: “All I could think of as we were turning over was I sure wished I’d voted absentee.” But she was prouder of the telephone calls, because all day she had managed to talk over the phone to absolute strangers without losing her nerve.

L
YNDON
J
OHNSON
had started the
runoff campaign seventy thousand votes behind, and the Peddy votes had at first seemed likely to widen the margin. But almost day by day, it seemed, he was narrowing the gap.

And then, suddenly, during the last week or ten days of the campaign, it wasn’t narrowing any further.

His young aides weren’t aware of this. Amid the noisy bustle in the Hancock House, optimism mounted with each new report from Buzz or Woody of the record crowds Lyndon was drawing, and of their enthusiasm. The young men, like Connally and Herring, believed they were going to win. But in the quiet offices on the seventh floor of the Brown Building, where Al vin Wirtz, Edward Clark and
Everett Looney, the senior partners in the law firms for
which the young men worked, met with Herman and George Brown (and, whenever he was in Austin, with Lyndon Johnson), there was no longer jubilation. The reports coming into the Brown Building weren’t from Buzz or Woody, but from more seasoned politicians, men who had watched a hundred campaigns, and who knew that crowds were only a part, often a misleading part, of a political story. Furthermore, they were receiving other information not available to the young men: the results
of
private polls. In these polls, which were being taken almost daily, Johnson had been steadily gaining ground on Coke Stevenson. And then, abruptly, as had been the case in the first primary, he stopped gaining. In a public poll, the Belden Poll, released on August 21, one week before the August 28 primary, the two candidates had leveled off, with Stevenson leading Johnson 48 percent to 41 percent with 11 percent undecided. Among voters considered most likely
to vote (and who had a definite preference), Stevenson led Johnson 54 percent to 46 percent. These figures, Belden noted, were “practically the same” as in a poll taken the previous week. A Belden Poll released on August 27 showed that “there has been no great change in the potential strength of
Stevenson and Johnson since the first primary.”
¹
The men in the
Brown Building knew what the polls meant: Johnson had chipped and chipped away at Stevenson’s strength, but there was a solid core, a bedrock of belief in Coke Stevenson, that had not been touched. Johnson had gained on Coke—but he hadn’t gained enough. He was going to come close. But he was going to lose.

F
OR THESE MEN
it was all on the line now; it was “all or nothing.” And they knew what they had to do.

“Campaigning was no good any more,” Ed Clark says. “We had to pick up some votes.” Votes in the numbers needed couldn’t be picked up by conventional methods, he says. “
We needed blocs. Ethnic groups—that was the place to go.… That meant going into the Mexican country: the Rio Grande River, the border.…”

Johnson aides made trips down to the Valley again. They flew in planes owned by
Brown & Root, from an air terminal owned by Brown & Root; the name of the company was not on the plane; the terminal was simply called “Executive Air Services.” Often the man who went was Clark, the “Secret Boss of Texas,” the man who “
knew how to use money without anyone ever seeing the money.” “People went
down half a dozen times by plane—by private plane,” Clark says. “They landed mostly on private airstrips. I made several trips down there. I didn’t stay overnight any time I went down there”; there would be no names in a hotel register, no servants in a private home who could remember and later, perhaps, testify to the presence of these couriers. And they didn’t see many people. They didn’t have to. In Webb County, Clark says, he saw
only one man. “Judge Raymond controlled the situation there just like I could take a piece of paper and write my name. He not only appointed the county judge, he appointed the county clerk, the election judges. He controlled the election process. I did not discuss details with him. You didn’t have to know what he was going to do or how he was going to do it. You just had to have a diplomatic talk with him, and tell him what was needed.”
(Clark
says he himself didn’t give money to Raymond, or to anyone else.)

George Parr was left mainly to Al vin Wirtz. Neither of the two men is alive to discuss their dealings, but Luis Salas saw the result. Heavily though Johnson money had been spent before the first primary in the six counties Parr controlled, it was nothing to the way Johnson money was spent now. The Mexican-American political workers soon caught on. “
Our people sure were spoiled.… They wanted money and more money,” Salas says. But
his
patrón
told him not to balk at any request. As Salas recalls it, Parr told him: “Luis, do not hesitate. Spend all the money necessary, but we have to have Johnson elected.”

T
HE LARGEST
single source of “ethnic” votes was, of course, San Antonio. Before the first primary, Johnson money had been poured lavishly into the Mexican-American slums of San Antonio’s West Side, but leaders of the West Side machine had been lackadaisical, and Stevenson, a great favorite among Mexican-Americans because of his championing of their causes during his governorship (and, of course, the overwhelming favorite
in the city’s non-Mexican areas), had beaten Johnson in the citywide totals by more than eleven thousand votes. Johnson’s key man in San Antonio had always been Dan Quill. After the first primary, the Postmaster had written Johnson that his
organization could do better the second time around, although “We will
need some money.”

But no one was more skilled in the purchasing of votes in San Antonio than Lyndon Johnson himself, and he wanted another organization out working for him in San Antonio on the second Election Day as well, an organization that had never worked for him in the past: that of the city’s feared Sheriff,
Owen Kilday. “Dan Quill was a smart little operator,” John Connally says, “but
the man with the muscle in
San Antonio was Owen Kilday.”

The Kilday organization bore a very high price tag. “That was a sophisticated organization,” Connally recalls. Election Day work was handled by Kilday’s numerous deputy sheriffs. They would be responsible for hiring cars and drivers to round up Mexican-Americans and get them to the polls—and to make sure they voted correctly—and, Connally says, “They had a standard rate for a car and a driver, and they were paid
handsomely”: $250 for some deputies, $500 for others. “It takes a hell of a lot of money for an organization like that.”

Did Johnson spend as much as $50,000 in San Antonio? “I wouldn’t be surprised,” John Connally said recently. But then he added that while that figure might be correct for the Kilday organization, “Then,
of course, there was
Valmo Bellinger”—the black boss in San Antonio; he had an organization, too. “Valmo had to have some help.”

Huge sums of Johnson money were poured into the city. Whatever the price of the Kilday organization—and the Bellinger organization, and the Quill organization—Johnson paid it. Quill received a sum of money far greater than he had expected, and he came to realize not only that “the Kildays [were] not fighting us,” but that Kilday and his many deputies were working in Johnson’s behalf, and working hard.

Johnson made sure he got his money’s worth. The final week of his campaign was a week of spectacle in the state’s big cities. Flying into Dallas, Houston, Fort Worth and San Antonio in a private plane, he was met in each city by cheering, sign-waving campaign workers and a band playing “The Eyes of Texas,” and then was driven—sitting atop the back seat of an open convertible and waving a Stetson—at the head of a caravan of
banner-draped automobiles led by police motorcycles with sirens wailing, to greet crowds in the downtown shopping area and to speak at elaborate rallies that featured ten “star” Hollywood entertainers (and of course to make the customary three broadcasts a day over the statewide network). In San Antonio, the day before the election, the candidate, almost hysterical, shouted at a rally at the city’s Municipal Auditorium that he was forty years old that very
day—“You know, life begins at forty, and I hope to be the next junior Senator when I am forty years and one day old”—and massed bands played “Happy Birthday.” It was the climax of a week of public pageantry spectacular even in the vivid history of Texas politics. In a motorcade led by police cars filled with dozens of Sheriff Kilday’s deputies, and by jeeps, bearing immense photographs of himself, driven by uniformed war veterans,
Johnson rode through San Antonio sitting atop the back seat of a convertible, with a Kilday (Congressman Paul) flanking him on one side, and Kilday’s deadliest enemy, former Mayor
Maury Maverick, flanking him on the other, symbolizing the fact that he had the support of both sides in the city’s political wars. On his first two days in San Antonio, however, Johnson’s most significant activities were not public but private: quiet meetings with
leaders in that same Plaza Hotel in which, fourteen years before, he had sat in a room buying votes with five-dollar bills. In this election, Lyndon Johnson was going to run the West Side personally.

Johnson had been scheduled to vote in Johnson City on Election Day and then go to his Austin headquarters, but instead he spent the day—his third that week—in San Antonio. He was “riding the polls” on the West Side—on that West Side where “they’d just stuff the ballots in there,” on that West Side where, after polls closed, some poll watchers were paid to leave, and doors were locked, and levers were pulled on
voting machines. One of his middlemen, the city’s Street Commissioner,
Jimmy Knight, was to recall that Johnson gave him a thousand dollars in
one-dollar bills for the expenses (“don’t misunderstand me, it’s not a payoff or anything”) of
poll-watchers “because he, Lyndon Johnson, wanted to go around the polls,” and “if the candidate gives the money, it has to be more.
The price goes down immediately if somebody else but the candidate gives it to ’em, and the satisfaction is just as great.” So as Johnson jumped out of his car at each polling place and walked among his workers, urging them on, the Street Commissioner followed him, handing out expense money: “You happen to inadvertently put your hands in your pocket and give ’em a couple of dollars and move on, you understand. You take this and put ten, fifteen, twenty
dollars and put this in the crowd.…”If there was a touch of legitimacy to such “expense money,” with other amounts of money handed out by the Johnson entourage in San Antonio that day the touch was less perceptible, and the amounts were much larger. And with the candidate’s eye on them,
Owen Kilday’s deputies earned their money. All day they patrolled the West Side, looking not for crime but for votes. All that
broiling-hot Election Day, Lyndon Johnson, with John Connally at his side, rode the polls in San Antonio—and only then did he drive to Johnson City to cast his own vote, Ballot Number 353, in the Blanco County Courthouse, two blocks from the house in which he had spent his youth after his father had lost the Johnson Ranch.