Means of Ascent (78 page)

A
T FIRST
—as long as an investigation of the result of the 1948 election was still a possibility—Johnson’s reaction to what had happened was defensiveness. No sooner had he been safely seated in the Senate, however, than the defensiveness faded and was replaced by boasting.

As was customary with Johnson, the reaction was embodied in homey anecdotes and jokes—particularly in one joke, source unknown, which had begun circulating in Texas almost as soon as the election was over. Lyndon Johnson brought it to Washington and popularized it, telling it at Georgetown parties, in the Senate cloakroom, on the Senate floor; repeating
it even to reporters, who printed it. The story was related with evident enjoyment, and
with the flair of a master storyteller, complete with accent. The accent was that of a small Mexican-American boy, named, variously, Manuel or Jesus. As Lyndon Johnson told the story, Manuel was sitting on a curb in a little town near the Mexican border one day and crying, when a friend came up and asked him what the trouble was.

“My father was in town last Saturday, and he did not come to see me,” Manuel replied.

“But, Manuel, your father has been dead for ten years.”

Manuel just sobbed louder. “Sí, he has been dead for ten years. But he came to town last Saturday to vote for Lyndon Johnson, and he did not come to see me.”

The reaction was also embodied in an imitation, carried off with the flair of a great mimic. The imitation, performed at Georgetown dinner tables and in Senate Office Building hideaways, before audiences that included fellow Senators and reporters, was of George Parr. Cranking up an invisible old-fashioned two-piece telephone, Johnson would pretend to be Parr calling on Election Night, and shouting over the staticky connection between South Texas and Austin:
“Lyndon, this is George. George Parr! Can you hear me, Lyndon? Can you hear me?” Johnson would then act out his own role. “Yes, yes, go ahead, George.” Then Johnson would imitate Parr reporting the election results, always ridiculously lopsided in favor of Johnson. “Well, thank you, George,” Lyndon Johnson would say with a grin. “That’s mighty nice.”

The imitation was “one of Lyndon Johnson’s sidesplitting acts,” Hugh Sidey would write. “Johnson was funny imitating Parr. The thought of Parr was funny.”

And, of course, Johnson’s reaction was embodied in his nickname.

The identity of the coiner of that nickname cannot be definitively established, although it may have been Lyndon Johnson himself. But Johnson was among those who popularized it and made it a familiar part of the slang of insider Washington. “
From the start, he disarmed suspicious senators he did not know by sticking out a hand and saying, ‘Howdy, I’m
Landslide Lyndon,’ ”
Alfred Steinberg, a Capitol Hill reporter and Johnson biographer, was to write. During the first weeks after Johnson returned to Washington following the election, fellow Senators and friends would pick up the telephone to hear him drawl, “This is Landslide Lyndon calling.”

Within a very short time, he stopped using the nickname, came to dislike it, and more than once flew into a rage at someone who used it. But it was too late to erase it from Washington’s consciousness: the nickname was too vivid, and it had been circulated too widely, for it to be
forgotten. And, of course, he never completely stopped telling the 1948-related anecdotes and jokes, and doing the sidesplitting George Parr imitation. Most
contested intra-state elections are not items of intense interest in Washington: who, for example, would remember even a year or two later that another new Senator elected in 1948, Robert Kerr of Oklahoma, had also been charged with election irregularities? Loud though Kerr may have been on most subjects, he was discreet on that one. Texas’s 1948 campaign had never been followed particularly closely in Washington except by Johnson intimates; awareness of that campaign would
normally have faded fairly quickly. Instead, awareness grew—and became vivid. The campaign became a staple of Washington conversation. The joke, the anecdotes and the nickname had made it well known, had kept it in Washington’s mind. Johnson’s repetition of the anecdotes had, moreover, let Washington know that there was at least some truth in Stevenson’s charges: Johnson’s portrayal of Parr’s telephone calls, for example, would hardly have
led a listener to believe the charges were untrue. And the man who was repeating the joke and the anecdotes over and over, year after year, was the man accused of stealing the election. If there was anyone in Washington political circles who didn’t know that the 1948 campaign was a good story, it was not Lyndon Johnson’s fault. And everyone
did
seem to know. It was at least in part because of him that those first magazine articles in 1951 and 1952 which brought
him to the nation’s attention focused so strongly on that campaign. As years passed, the campaign became a minor American political legend, a legend with a decided tint of crookedness. And for some years the memory was kept vivid by the very man who had allegedly done the stealing. People hearing him reminisce about the campaign, or watching the grins and winks with which he joked and talked, could hardly escape getting the impression that the election
had
been
stolen, and that he was not ashamed of that fact. Far from it. The impression he conveyed was of a politician who had outsmarted an opponent, done something illegal, and hadn’t been caught. The impression he conveyed was of a man who not only was unashamed of what he had done, but who was proud of it—who boasted about it.

Among Washington insiders, of course, Lyndon Johnson had long been known as a political manipulator, a “wheeler-dealer.” But this image had been unknown to the public at large—because Lyndon Johnson had been unknown to the public at large. So, by relating the 1948 campaign in detail, magazines first conveyed to a nationwide public the impression of Johnson as a manipulator, a schemer, a somewhat unprincipled and unscrupulous wheeler-dealer, of a
deceiver proud of his deceits. First impressions are strong, and hard to dispel.

The image would, of course, become very important to Johnson’s later career. But even more important was the fact that he had deliberately
created and cultivated the image—because it was the image he wanted to project. The poignant reason he had wanted this image—the reason it had been terribly important to Lyndon Johnson that he be known as calculating, shrewd, tough, hard, ruthless, “practical” in even the most
uncomplimentary connotations of that word—was all too easy to understand to anyone familiar with his heredity and with the carefully concealed circumstances of his terrible youth. He had been a “Johnson”: a member of a family despised because it did not possess, in the term that mattered most in the Hill Country, “common sense.” In particular, he had been the son of a man whose honesty and idealism had led him into ruin and disgrace and the
road-building gang—and had led his son into the road gang, too. Lyndon’s little brother, who understood Lyndon so well, said, “It was most important to Lyndon not to be like Daddy.” Lyndon Johnson had to prove that he possessed the “common sense” his father had lacked. He needed respect for his pragmatism—needed it passionately—even if obtaining it meant portraying himself as a wheeler-dealer, a politician in the worst sense of
the word. Had the public been aware of the humiliations of the early life of Lyndon Johnson, there might have been at least a measure of understanding of the pain-filled motivations behind the image. But there was no such understanding. There was only the image.

Alvin Wirtz had been worried that Coke Stevenson’s lawsuit would “black mark” Lyndon Johnson. In a sense, Lyndon Johnson had black-marked himself.

W
HEN, IN THE
mid-1950s, Johnson began maneuvering for the presidency, he attempted to dispel the impression he himself had done so much to create of the circumstances surrounding the 1948 election. By 1964, running against Barry Goldwater, he was stating that the 1948 election had been honest, and that his margin of victory had been the result of Lady Bird’s last-minute telephoning. But he was never to be able fully to restrain himself
from gloating about his cleverness in defeating Coke Stevenson. In 1967, a Texas journalist and longtime critic who was writing a biography of Johnson, Ronnie Dugger, interviewed the President in his bedroom in the White House.

The topic was not the 1948 campaign, but Johnson, “rambling about other subjects,” suddenly interrupted himself and told Dugger he wanted to show him something. Going into Lady Bird’s adjoining bedroom, he rummaged through a closet and after five or ten minutes returned “beaming,” holding a photograph. The photograph is of five smiling men gathered around the front hood of an automobile with a “Texas-1948” license plate.
Balanced on the hood of the car is a ballot box, marked “Precinct 13.” The men are Ed Lloyd, the attorney who ran Jim Wells County for
George Parr, and who was Johnson’s leader there; Parr’s cousin,
Givens Parr; County Sheriff Hubert Sain; Sain’s immense, pistol-carrying deputy,
Stokes Micenheimer; and another Johnson ally in Jim Wells, Barney Goldthorn. As Johnson returned with the
photograph, Dugger was to write, “he held it forward to me with a kind of pride.… The President watched my face as I searched the photograph for its meaning,” and “as I got it … he grinned at me with a vast inner enjoyment.”

Dugger asked the President for details about the picture, including “when it had been taken,” but Johnson said not a word and “carried the picture back to its place in his wife’s room.” Some years later, however, Dugger mentioned the photograph to Luis Salas. “Yes, I know the one you mean,” Salas said, and found his own copy of it. He showed it to Dugger, and said it had been taken on the day of the second primary in
1948—before the polls had closed.

For a President to preserve as a personal memento a photograph showing the notorious Box 13 in the possession of his political allies—a photograph which by implication proves that someone was indeed in a position to stuff it—is startling in itself. For him to display the photograph to a hostile journalist is evidence of a psychological need so deep that its demands could not be resisted. It is continuing evidence of the fact that not even his possession of
the presidency had eased the insecurities of his youth.
²

T
HE
1948 Texas senatorial campaign marked the end of the old ways in Texas politics and the beginning of the new.

The Johnson campaign taught Texas politicians the power of the media. “
After that,” as
Horace Busby puts it, “they saw that the way to reach the state was through
radio.” And, of course, the state was becoming more urban, less rural. “The exodus from the small towns had started.” So, in subsequent statewide campaigns, candidates no longer campaigned as Coke Stevenson had
campaigned in 1948. They no longer drove from one small town to the next. “You no longer made the circuit. The campaigning in the Courthouse Square died out. Coke’s campaign was the last campaign of that kind ever waged in Texas.”

Busby was speaking as he sat in a restaurant in Washington, D.C., looking back on the campaign of almost forty years before. He had been talking about it for several hours, and now he stopped. Then, after a long pause, he said he had one more point to make. “You should understand,” he said. “Coke was good quality. He was a good quality legislator, Lieutenant Governor, Governor.” There was another pause. “You should understand,”
Busby said. “He wasn’t as bad as we cut him up to be.”

B
UT THE STORY
of Coke Stevenson was not over when the fight for the Senate seat ended.

It was to continue for twenty-seven more years, more than a quarter of a century, for he lived until 1975, when he was eighty-seven; that number therefore had a double significance in his life.

After Justice Black handed down his ruling, Stevenson went back to his ranch—and his old life. A longtime friend, hunting companion and fellow widower,
Emil Loeffler, a former mayor of Junction, moved in with him. Until she died in 1952, Stevenson’s mother, who was in her eighties,
would visit him for several weeks at a time; every morning, he would rise at four to read, cook the cornbread his mother liked, eat
breakfast with her, and then, after washing the dishes, drive her around the ranch. Later, while she napped, he would do his chores, but only those that could be done near the house; during his mother’s visits Coke was never out of earshot of the house.

He had lost none of his desire to improve the ranch, which he now expanded to more than fifteen thousand acres; he sunk the poles for new fences and corrals, sledgehammering 120 posts into the hard Kimble County rock himself because the work was so hard that he could hire nobody to do it. He practiced law from an office in Junction (he still refused to install a telephone on the ranch; prospective clients who couldn’t find him in town had to drive out to the
ranch), becoming a familiar figure again in the old Kimble County Courthouse. (To avoid any hint that he was using his influence with state officials he took cases mainly for Kimble County families he had known over the years “for
fees … that I could write on a blackboard in my office for all to see and not be ashamed of a single one of them.”) Many of the state’s conservative business leaders had, once the excitement of
the campaign had faded, reached the same conclusion as Busby, and realized they had been unjust to Stevenson, and they asked him to run—ample financing assured—for Tom Connally’s Senate seat in 1952; he would, after all, be only sixty-four years old, they pointed out. He declined. “
I would not want to be the junior Senator to Lyndon Johnson,” he said. “It just wouldn’t work. My belief in principles is too
strong.” He might run again, he said, but against Johnson—in 1954, when Johnson came up for re-election. To his friends, however, it was obvious that Stevenson had no enthusiasm for re-entering politics. “He hadn’t lost interest in politics; he still read the news magazines and all, but he had lost interest in his participation in politics,” his nephew, Bob Murphey, says. The stacks of mail—heavier than ever, containing now not only pleas for
him to run but information on alleged 1948 vote frauds in scores of counties—piled up on the kitchen table, unanswered. His friends felt he was considering the race mainly because life on the ranch was, again, too lonely.