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

by Robert A. Caro

Hours after midnight would pass. Henderson would produce the speeches he had written that day—not only speeches for Johnson but speeches for Johnson supporters to read over the radio. Johnson read every one, made changes; reread them, made more changes. Ray Lee would bring out the copy and mats for the new newspaper ads; Johnson would check every ad.

Then he would hurry off to bed, for the next morning he had to get a very early start. And the next morning, he would be up at the moment he had said he would be—for it wasn’t an alarm bell that was jerking him out of bed.

Ed Clark had seen a lot of campaigners. “I never saw anyone campaign as hard as that,” he would recall forty years later. “I never thought it was possible for anyone to work that hard.”

LBJ was such a hard worker, as seen by his aides. A temper he had, but he never stopped working.

AND CLARK DIDN’T KNOW how hard Lyndon Johnson was really working. No one knew—with the exception of Carroll Keach. Because only Keach, alone in the car with Johnson for hours each day, knew what Johnson was doing in the car.

Carrol Keach knows LBJ the most during the campaign

“He would try to rest between people,” he says. “He sat in the front seat next to me, and I would see him close his eyes, but never for more than a minute or two, and then he’d just jerk up. He couldn’t sleep.”

couldnt sleep

Instead, he worked—in a rather unusual fashion. Leaving a town, Johnson would begin talking, not to Keach but to himself, about the people he had met there, the personal and political likes and dislikes that they had revealed. “It was like he was going over his mental notes,” Keach says. “Who the people were, and little things about them, and who their relatives were, or how someone had reacted to some remark he had made. Someone didn’t like something he had said—why not? ‘I don’t understand why she didn’t react to such-and-such.’ ” In this sense, the talking was a review, and a preparation—a review of the people and town he had just visited, and a preparation for the next time he would visit them,

would mentally go through different people and prepare for his next encounter; cant sleep, evaluating and reflecting instead

“It was like he was having discussions with himself about what strategy had worked or hadn’t worked, and what strategy he should use the next time.” But the talking was also a critique of himself: self-criticism that was harsh, merciless. “He would talk about whether he had had a successful day, and if he had made a good impression or not. And lots of the time he felt he wasn’t doing too good. And he would tell himself it was his own fault. ‘Boy, that was dumb!’ or ‘Well, you just lost that box. You lost it, and you need it.’ ” And it was exhortation—self-exhortation that was also harsh and merciless. “ ‘Well, you’ll just have to do better, that’s all.’ ‘You’ll just have to do something else.’ ” And as Keach listened, he would try out “something else,” practice different approaches he could use the next time he saw the person, run through—aloud—the names of “people that he thought could talk to him.” The two men spent hours in the car together, and hour after hour Johnson would talk this way to himself, lashing himself for his mistakes at the last town, lashing himself into readiness for the next town. And always “like memorizing,” going over and over people’s names and their relatives and their prejudices as if to chisel them into his mind so that they would spring to his lips the next time he saw them.

very hard on himself if he didnt think he did well. Border line overthinking but diligent nonetheless

“Boy, sometimes he would get so tired,” he says. “He would just slump there. He would close his eyes, but he couldn’t sleep. So he’d start talking again. Maybe he had finished his memorizing about one town, going through all the people. So he’d just start all over again, right at the beginning. And he’d just get more and more tired. But when we’d get to the next town, he’d just bound out of the car, and start walking around like he was fresh as could be. He never let the voters see his fatigue.”

tired and sleep deprived, he never let the voters see

indicated. He felt he was doing well among the isolated rural voters—who were not included in the polls, in part because the polls were conducted by telephone and many of these voters did not possess telephones, in part because past experience led pollsters to discount the preference of rural families since many of them did not vote; time was far too valuable to an impoverished farmer for him to waste it driving long distances over unpaved roads to the voting box.

rural voters had no phone, which were how polls were taken. His rural voters werent taken account of

This race was Johnson’s chance, quite possibly his only chance. And he was losing the race.

If the leaders were against him, he told his son, stop trying to conceal that fact; emphasize it—in a dramatic fashion. If he was behind in the race, emphasize that—in a dramatic fashion. If he was younger than the other candidates, emphasize that.

Lyndon asked his father what he meant, and his father told him. If no leader would introduce Lyndon, Sam said, he should stop searching for mediocre adults as substitutes, but instead should be introduced by a young child, an outstanding young child. And the child should introduce him not as an adult would introduce him, but with a poem, a very special poem. You know the poem, he told Rebekah—the one about the thousands.

Corky Cox was, at the age of eight, already well known for the feats of riding and calf-roping with which he had swept the children’s events in recent rodeos; the best young cowboy in the Hill Country, people were calling him. “Corky can do it,” Sam said.

Corxy Cox, 8yo horse rider, to introduce LBJ, not old people. Use his low polls to his advantage and emphasize the youth

how.” And that night, at a rally in Henly, in Hays County, Lyndon Johnson told the audience, “They say I’m a young candidate. Well, I’ve got a young campaign manager, too,” and he called Corky to the podium, and Corky, smacking down his hand, recited a stanza of Edgar A. Guest’s “It Couldn’t Be Done”:

The audience applauded the eager young boy, and before the applause had died down, Lyndon Johnson took off his coat, and, with his version of “a bit of a grin” (combined with a nod to Corky to make sure the audience got the point), started in to attack the “thousands”—the San Antonio “Blight,” for example—who said that just because he was behind, he couldn’t win.

If he felt he was losing, he let none of his listeners know how he felt. “Everywhere I go, the people declare I’m the high man,” he said.

But on this day, at these large rallies, there was, suddenly, a very different response. Corky’s poem ignited the emotions of the audience, and the White Stars’ reminders of Burleson’s statement fueled those emotions, and Johnson’s hoarse shouts whipped them into blazing flame.

Johnson spoke, in a reporter’s phrase, “to a group of farm people.” And when he shouted “Roosevelt! Roosevelt! Roosevelt!,” the farm people shouted back: “Roosevelt and Johnson! Roosevelt and Johnson! Roosevelt and Johnson!”

winning the farmers

Shelton, speaking first, said Johnson was not only too young for the post he sought but too “new in the district,” and “comes from the smallest county, Blanco.” He accused him of trying to buy the race with large campaign contributions from the “Interests.”

His reply to the charge that he was too young subtly reminded the audience where Shelton stood on the Court issue: “I’d rather be called a young whippersnapper than an old reactionary,” he said. “And as for buying the race, I do want you to know that my campaign is financed by my own meager savings, and that I am not getting a dime from special interests.” Then he briskly stepped down. “Although given only five minutes,” the Austin Statesman reported, he “won the crowd so well he received four spontaneous bursts of applause and drew two heavy laughs.”

Although most of it was spent on traditional campaign devices, during the last two weeks of the campaign, more and more of it was spent on radio time. Early in the campaign, Johnson had purchased fifteen minutes every evening for a week on Austin’s only station, KNOW, and had raced back to the capital every evening to speak over the air.

He purchased time—a lot more time, hour-long blocks of time—not only on KNOW but on the more powerful San Antonio stations that reached into the district. During the campaign’s final ten days, in fact, Johnson was on the radio more than the other seven candidates combined.

“I come tonight as one who … could be classed among the pioneers of this section”), was very persuasive as he replied (in words Johnson himself wrote) to charges that Johnson was trying to “buy” the campaign with huge outlays of cash: “We home-folks know how ridiculous that charge is.… We know that Lyndon Johnson’s campaign has been financed by his own small savings, by contributions of his family and friends, received a few dollars at a time.” Purchasing still more time, Johnson put the old Judge on the air again and again. His opponents’ charges about Johnson’s unprecedented expenditures were buried under Johnson denials, broadcast thanks to Johnson’s unprecedented expenditures.

Johnson stepped up his campaigning, running harder and harder, covering large sections of the district in a single day—speaking, each day, in as many as a dozen little communities, visiting, between speeches, scores of farms and ranches.

The same thought was worrying others who knew Johnson well. “He was very tired,” Gene Latimer says. “He had been tired for a long time. He had stayed tired ever since the beginning of the campaign. I had seen him tired before, but this was beyond that. I was getting a little concerned.”

he's worn out

“He ate very irregularly and very unbalanced meals, which made me very angry because I’m a great believer in nutrition. He would just stop at some country store and buy a can of sardines and some crackers, or some cheese.…” But when she gave him a “proper meal,” he would gag on it. He didn’t get much down, and what he did eat, he sometimes couldn’t keep down.

puking and cant eat

drove him home, and then to Seton Hospital; doctors there said, Lee and Mrs. Johnson recall, that “his appendix was on the point of rupturing.” They operated almost immediately.

evening. The official totals for the major candidates showed Houghton Brownlee with 3,019 votes; C. N. Avery with 3,951; Stone with 4,048; Polk Shelton with 4,420; Merton Harris with 5,111—and Lyndon Johnson with 8,280, 3,000 votes more than his nearest opponent. “When I come back to Washington,” Johnson had vowed, “I’m coming back as a Congressman.” Now, less than two years later, he was coming.

HE WON BY A LONG SHOT

he was Congressman from a district in which only one out of every thirty-two persons had voted for him.

Johnson had been elected with the fewest votes—by far the fewest votes—of any of the nation’s 435 Congressmen.

Johnson’s support came from the hills, from the five counties in the district that lay on the Edwards Plateau.

the results followed, in general, an identical pattern: the deeper in the hills a precinct, the more isolated and remote—and poor—its people, the stronger the showing that Lyndon Johnson made in it.

He was the candidate of the Hill Country, of one of the most remote, most isolated, most neglected—and most impoverished—areas of a wealthy nation.

His 3,000-vote plurality—a plurality whose dimensions had been utterly unsuspected—came principally from the farmers and the ranchers he had visited one by one, from the people in whom he had invested time no other candidate for Congress had ever given them, from the people who had, on Election Day, repaid that investment in kind, giving up their own time—the time so valuable to them—to make the trip, sometimes quite a long trip, to the polling place to cast their votes for Lyndon Johnson.

Hill country are his people

His very willingness to travel to these people may have been an important reason that they supported him. Not only were they neglected, they felt neglected—they had always felt neglected; the people of the Hill Country had had to plead even to the People’s Party.

Gave attention to the neglected

“If we do live away up here on the Pedernales River, amid rocks, cliffs and waterfalls, cedars and wild oaks, we are not varments, but have hearts just like men.” “Brethern, in sending out lecturers, please remember our isolated corner, and send us in time of need.” “We had an ‘encampment’ and honestly expected the presence of a ‘Big Gun’ with it, but, no we were sadly left, as usual.”

When, finally, a candidate for Congress made the effort to come to them, muddying his shoes to walk across fields to talk to them, they were grateful for his coming.

Grateful

But his effort was no more important than the philosophy he expressed. Saying he was a poor man like them, he also said he was fighting for the President who was helping the poor—for the only President who had ever helped the poor, for the President who, with bank regulation and railroad regulation and government loans and public works projects, had held out government’s helping hand to the poor instead of the rich.

A man of the poor, who was also poor, fighting for a president fighting for the poor. New Deal

“He won that election in the byways,”

‘I know what you people are up against. Because I’m one of you people.’

And it wasn’t the people of the cities who elected him, but it was the people from the forks of the creeks.”

That was indeed the reason he won—and the reason no politician had thought he could win. The polls had not shown his strength at the forks of the creeks, for no poll bothered with the people at t...

But Lyndon Johnson had visited these people. And they had se...

The byways and the highways

he had been perhaps the youngest state director of any New Deal agency, now he was, at twenty-eight, although not “the youngest Congressman” he now claimed to be, one of the youngest.

He was later to say that during the campaign’s forty days, he had lost forty pounds. When the campaign began, 181 pounds had been stretched thin over his six-foot-three-inch frame. His weight when he entered Seton Hospital is not known, but when he left the hospital two weeks later—after two weeks of bed rest, and a hospital diet designed to fatten him up—his weight was back up only to 151 pounds.

The first letters to be answered, moreover, were those not from friends but from enemies: the concession messages from his opponents. And while their congratulations had been strictly pro forma, his replies were not. You didn’t lose, he told Avery, just as I didn’t win. “It was a victory for President Roosevelt.” He repeated that to Sam Stone—“My dear Judge: Thank you very much for your kind telegram. The people voted to support President Roosevelt and his program, and the victory is his”—and, since the Judge would be a more dangerous future opponent than Avery, went on at more length: “You warned me you would show us how to carry Williamson County, and I congratulate you upon the support the homefolks gave your candidacy. Please tell your and my friends there that I admire the way they stood by you.”

Directs praise to FDR not himself

“Thank you for your kind telegram and your pledge of support.… I hope you will always feel that my efforts are at your disposal. Whatever service I may be able to render will be cheerfully and gladly done.”

Any prudent politician would take steps to try to make friends out of enemies, but even very prudent politicians were amazed by both the rapidity and the extent of the steps Johnson took.

As they were driving up Congress Avenue, Shelton realized that he had left some papers in his office. Johnson drove him back. Shelton said he would be a few minutes, and said it was no trouble for him to walk to the courthouse. No, no, Johnson said, I’ll wait. Glad to. Take your time. And the Congressman waited there for Shelton as if he were his chauffeur, and as they talked during the brief drive, “He [Johnson] was gracious, very gracious.” Though he had disliked Johnson, “now,” Shelton says, “he was just nice. He was humble.” More than humble, in fact. “He made you feel he was dirt under your feet.”

More than humble, like dirt

(Shelton didn’t know the full extent of the trouble Johnson was taking to become his friend; Johnson had not, in fact, just parked his car when Shelton came out; he had parked it an hour before, and had been sitting in it for an hour waiting for Shelton to come, to take advantage of the “chance” meeting.)