The Path to Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson #1)

by Robert A. Caro

“To Lyndon Johnson, whom I admire and love with the same affection as if he were in fact my own son.”)

Pragmatically, however, the Roosevelt strategy was Johnson’s best chance to win.

Most of the candidates would be pro-Roosevelt, Wirtz said; therefore, Johnson would have to be more pro-Roosevelt than they.

‘Now, Lyndon, of course it’s a bunch of bullshit, this plan, but if you’ll flow with it, Roosevelt’s friends will support you.’

“We sure did not know we were going to run. Looking at it pragmatically, we did not have any right to expect we would win. Lyndon was from the smallest of the ten counties. He was quite young. And finances were a problem.”

Unlike Avery’s organization, or Mayor Miller’s, or Brownlee’s or Harris’, they had no contacts, no friends. But they had the enthusiasm of the young—and faith in their leader. In part this faith was based on experience. “No matter what anyone said, we felt he had a chance, because we knew he would work harder than anyone else,”

In part it was blind confidence. Deason says he never had “a doubt in the world” that Johnson would win any contest he entered. “We just assumed if he went into it, he would win.”

Lyndon Johnson’s friends would never forget how his face turned white when he read that paragraph. “You could see the color just drain out of it,” says one. “He went white as a sheet.” Going into his bedroom with Wirtz, he conferred with him behind a closed door, but with this problem, even Wirtz couldn’t help him.

‘Goddammit, Lyndon, you never learn anything about politics.’ Lyndon says, ‘What do you mean?’ And Daddy says, ‘She’s an old woman. She’s too old for a fight. If she knows she’s going to have a fight, she won’t run. Announce now—before she announces. If you do, she won’t run.’

When Johnson’s decision appeared in the newspapers, Mrs. Buchanan’s son telephoned reporters. “Mother has just reached the decision not to run,” he said.

For some time, Sam went on, listing all the arguments against Lyndon running—until not only Stella (whose fried chicken Lyndon had loved “better than anything in the whole wide world”) but her husband was moved to come to Lyndon’s defense, and point out that his youthfulness was offset by his Washington experience. Steering the conversation (“I only realized later, when I thought about it, what he was doing,” Stella says), Sam made them work out for themselves the reasons why his son should be supported; let them convince themselves more firmly than he could have convinced them. Evidence of the success of his strategy was the headline over Gliddon’s editorial in the Record-Courier’s next issue: JOHNSON FOR CONGRESS.

Smart dad

Because its residents not only were poor, but felt poor—felt poor and isolated and utterly cut off from the rest of the world—the success of a Blanco boy in that world was unusually important to them; it gave them a reason for self-respect.

Johnson was at the time the only local boy who they felt had made good in the outside world, the only proof that someone from “our isolated corner,” “away up here on the Pedernales River,” could make good in that world.

True

Everybody was saying, ‘That’s my boy. I knew he’d do it. I knew he was coming through!’ ” Additional reinforcement was, in some cases, provided by gratitude. Ernest Morgan was not, after all, the only Hill Country youth who had been enabled to stay in college by an NYA job; more than a few Blanco families felt personally indebted to the man who had helped their children get an education. And, of course, in the ten years since Lyndon Johnson had spent much time in Johnson City, unpleasant memories had blurred. The crowd standing in front of the Johnson home that day was more than willing to support the young man who had grown up inside.

As he stood before them, asking them to vote for his son, some of his listeners may even have remembered debts not owed but owing—for pensions the old man had once arranged for them, for loans he had given them, for the highway he had gotten built. And listening to him speak—this man who once had been so great a speaker—they may have remembered also the ideals for which Hon. S. E. Johnson had stood, for he talked about President Roosevelt and Sam Rayburn, and about how, with men like them in Washington, the farmer at last had allies to fight for the causes in which farmers had so long believed, and about how his boy would help them fight, for his boy believed in the same causes.

Sam Johnson had not made a speech for so many years, but he had never made a better speech than the one he made now for his son.

“My father became a young man again.

When he finally sat down, they began applauding and they kept applauding for almost ten minutes. I looked over at my mother and saw that she, too, was clapping and smiling. It was a proud moment for the Johnson family.”

Entire family supports son

A vote for Johnson, the cards said, was a vote “For Roosevelt and Progress.”

stand wholeheartedly with the President on his program, and I invite the people who favor the Roosevelt program to support me. Yours Sincerely, Lyndon Johnson.”

From beginning to end of the campaign, not only did the amount of Johnson’s paid advertising dwarf that of his opponents, so did the amount of “news coverage”—articles favorable to him written by his aides—that he received.

Wild’s first reaction to the Governor’s suggestion that he manage Lyndon Johnson’s campaign was: “Who the hell is Lyndon Johnson?” After sounding out the leaders he was convinced not only that Johnson had absolutely no chance to win, but that his campaign would be little more than a joke—and that association with it would be an embarrassment.

“No one knew how much money was spent.” But he estimates the cost of Lyndon Johnson’s first campaign at between $75,000 and $100,000—a figure that would make the campaign one of the most expensive congressional races in Texas history up to that time.

There was no way to persuade these voters en masse to support a candidate of whom most of them had never heard. The only way to obtain the votes Lyndon Johnson needed was the hardest way: one by one.

Everyone in the district are spread out throughout the country side

AFTER THE FORMAL SPEECH, however, Johnson would circulate through the town, shaking hands with its people—and suddenly there was no awkwardness at all.

When he saw someone he knew, his lean white face “would,” in the words of a Hill Country resident, “just light up.”

Lyndon Johnson had not seen some of the people he was greeting for ten years, but his memory of good times they had shared seemed as vivid as if the times had been yesterday. And so was his memory of the names of their kinfolk.

‘Well, how’s your boy comin’? Ah remember him!’ ” His questions got the other man talking. In no more than an instant, it seemed, a rapport would be established.

The rapport would be cemented with physical demonstrations of affection. With women, the cement was a hug and a kiss on the cheek. The technique was as effective for him as a candidate as it had been for him as a teen-ager. “Lyndon’s kissing” became almost a joke during the campaign—but a fond joke. One elderly Hill Country rancher, annoyed by his wife’s insistence on attending a Johnson rally, growled, “Oh, you just want to be kissed.” (The rancher agreed to take her, but she was ill on the day of the rally, and he went alone. Upon his return, he told his wife, in some wonder: “He kissed me!”)

LJ is personal and physicaly affectionate

With men, the rapport was cemented with a handshake—and a handshake, as delivered by Lyndon Johnson, could be as effective as a hug.

Handshalke for the men

And if you know anybody who can help me, I

want you to get them to help me. I need help. Will you help me? Will you give me your helping hand?” Will you give me your helping hand?—it was only as he asked that last question that Lyndon Johnson raised his own hand, extending it in entreaty.

He wanted their hands, too, in his, and after a brief “I’m Lyndon Johnson and I’m running for Congress, and I hope that you will lend me your helping hand,” he would reach out and grasp them. Then, with his hand entwined with the voter’s, he would ask questions: “What’s your name? Where you from? What’s your occupation?”

And then, as Ava says, “there was that memory again. That was the key—he always knew somebody. I know your mother, or your father—or some friend.

Always knew somebody. Tries to build familiarity

But Hopkins, watching the tall, gangling college boy, had concluded that he had a “gift”—“a very unusual ability to meet and greet the public.” Now others saw that gift. They watched Lyndon Johnson’s hand reach out to a voter—and they saw the voter’s hand reach out in return. They saw that once a voter’s hand was grasped in his, the voter wanted to leave it there.

“What people saw was friendliness and sincerity, a love of people,”

The instant empathy Johnson created began, in fact, to cause problems for campaign aides trying to keep him on a tight Saturday schedule. An aide would attempt to urge Johnson along, but the voter, still holding tight to his hand, would walk along with him, trying to prolong the conversation. Sometimes, several voters would walk along. Waiting in the Pontiac, Keach would see Johnson coming—and there would be a small crowd behind him, a crowd reluctant to see him go. “Sometimes,” says Lee, “it was a problem to get him out of town.”

could make them feel that their destiny was linked to Roosevelt’s destiny, and to Lyndon Johnson’s.

It’ll take somebody in Congress to keep pushing for the things he wants. And you need to send a Congressman up there who knows this.”

whose fault was it that the government cotton certificates they were holding could no longer be redeemed? Who knew what programs the Supreme Court would strike down next? “Can you afford to risk the loss of your personal progress under Mr. Roosevelt? I tell you, this fight of the President is one that affects you and me right in this district. It means our bread and butter, and our children’s bread and butter.”

Only “one man in this race has taken a positive stance,” he said. “I am that man. A vote for me will show the President’s enemies that the people are behind him. This is the test. Mr. Roosevelt is in trouble now. When we needed help, he helped us. Now he needs help. Are we going to give it to him? Are you going to give it to him? Are you going to help Mr. Roosevelt? That’s what this election is all about. Don’t let anybody kid you. That’s what this election is all about!”

The election is about FDR

No Fundamentalist preacher, thundering of fire and brimstone in one of the famed Hill Country revival meetings, had called the people of the Hill Country to the banner of Jesus Christ more fervently than Lyndon Johnson called them to the banner of Franklin Roosevelt. And, as in revival meetings, passions rose.

“That was when Lyndon really touched people,” says his cousin Ava. “Because what people here wanted more than anything else was for their children to have a better life than they had had.”

Seeing a young man in the crowd, Johnson would speak directly to him—but in words that touched chords in the parents in the crowd. Calling the young man by name, he would tell him that he knew what it took to get an education if you were a poor boy.

“There’s an education for every boy and girl that wants one,” he would say. “It’s up to you. You can get it if you want it. You have to work for it. You can do what I did. You can pick up paper. You can pick up rocks. You can wash dishes. You can fill up cars. You can do a lot of things if you want that education. But if you want it, you can get it.”

LBJ did anything he could to stay in college

Sitting around his living room, his aides watched Lyndon Johnson as he sat in a big easy chair waiting for the calls to be put through. They saw a man ashen with fatigue, slumped in his chair, his nervous fingers tearing at the flesh around his fingernails. Lighting a fresh cigarette, he bent over, head low as he took his first puff, inhaled deeply—“really sucking it in,” L. E. Jones says—and sat like that, head bowed, cigarette still in his mouth, for a long minute, as if to allow the soothing smoke to penetrate as deeply as possible into his body. But the Houston businessmen didn’t see that man. They only heard his voice. As he talked on the phone, the watchers before him saw a body hunched and tense, a face drawn and gaunt and haggard—but the voice issuing from that face was a voice confident, almost gay (“ ‘We’re almost over the hump’—that sort of thing,” Latimer says). And the checks it elicited were substantial.

If Johnson felt a White Star had made a mistake in talking to some “lead man,” he would rage at him. “Well you lost him all right!” he would shout in a high, shrill voice. “And you lost everybody he knows! You cost me fifty votes today!”

In later years, the men who sat with him in his living room during his first campaign would speak of Johnson on the record in terms of his “energy.” Off the record, they speak of the fear that sometimes filled their Chief’s voice.

He was terribly afraid he was going to lose.”

But after the outbursts came the work. Tired though Johnson might have been, no part of it was scanted. Had someone failed to persuade a local leader? Should he try another approach? What should it be? Should someone else try? Who would be best? What should he say? What could be done in the leader’s box that hadn’t been done already?