Means of Ascent (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #2)

by Robert A. Caro

If you did “everything, you’ll win.” To Lyndon Johnson, “everything” meant literally that: absolutely anything that was necessary. If some particular effort might help, that effort would be made, no matter how difficult making it might be.

Lyndon Johnson had worked at politics for years to achieve power; now he was working at politics to make money.

In 1946 alone, the revenues from the property she had bought three years before for $17,500 totalled $272,500.

Horace Busby says: “He was thirty-nine years old. He believed, and he believed it really quite sincerely … that when a man reached forty, it was all over.

“He treats his books like friends,” one man would recall. “None of his books has a turned-down edge” to mark the place; “none has notes on the margin—if notes are needed, he makes them on a piece of paper and inserts them at the place.…”

Stevenson had pushed his auditing, bookkeeping, highway and prison legislation in quiet talks with his fellow legislators. He received little public attention. But his fellow legislators had learned about him:

AT THE INAUGURATION, Fay had heard Coke speak words she had often heard before. “To me the plan of government of our forefathers is a divine inspiration.… It is a government of laws and not of men.” And, he said, now that he, as Governor, was the man who held power, the lesson he must remember was to be restrained in its use, for “Even if it means submerging his individual opinion as to what the law ought to be, the chief executive still must respect the majesty of the law. He must restrain his own opinions if those opinions should run contrary to the law.” At the end he quoted Shakespeare: “This above all—to thine own self be true.”

When liberals later criticized him for having had “no program,” Stevenson would reply, “Well, that’s not exactly right. I had a program. It was economy.” Within that definition, he was very successful. The $34,000,000 state deficit he inherited at his inauguration had become a surplus of $35,000,000 by the time he left office. His program may not have been broad enough to remedy decades of backwardness in social welfare programs. It was, however, a program of which the people of Texas approved.

People could hardly avoid seeing Johnson’s picture, too, for Johnson was dispatching men to place posters in shop windows and on trees, urging his workers on with the same phrase he had used in previous campaigns: “I want it so you can’t wipe your ass on a piece of paper in that town that hasn’t got my picture on it.”

Recalls one of these campaign workers: “He said he wanted posters up on every light pole—and he meant every light pole; I was driving with him once, and there was one pole—just one pole—without a picture of him, and, my God, I have never heard one human being talk to another human being like he talked to that poor guy who had missed that pole.”

Lyndon Johnson sometimes seemed to be following the rule that if it was moving, he shook its hand. The pilot, asked once how often Johnson made him land for a handshake, replied: “Wherever we saw more than two people and a big dog.”

“That mad dash from Navasota to Conroe in which I dodged stumps at 70 MPH just to keep up with that contraption will ever be green in my memory.”)

In his initial instructions to his schedulers, Johnson had been very firm about the necessity for ending his evenings early. “You don’t make any converts after ten o’clock,”

Sometimes a name on the list would represent a potential gain of only a single vote. The call was made.

He never asked. The helicopter in which Lyndon Johnson had been riding had fallen like a stone for twenty-five feet, had hit the ground so hard that it bounced higher than a car roof, and then, regaining power, had swooped up into the air again. And, Mashman realized, Johnson hadn’t really noticed.

Lyndon Johnson’s political genius had always enabled him to see opportunities for political gain where no one else saw them.

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.

Johnson had not merely “striven” to connect the endorsement with a “deal”—he had succeeded in doing so. Turning the truth on its head, he had made a state believe not merely a lie, but a lie which defied logic. Texas had known Coke Stevenson’s view about union bosses. But Lyndon Johnson was persuading a state that Stevenson’s view was the precise opposite of what it really was.

The magnification of the power of money in the new media politics made such persuasion relatively easy.

Johnson seemed to think he could make Texans—at least rural Texans—swallow even so ridiculous a charge if it was repeated often enough.

Sometimes politics asks too much” of a man,

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.”

(No newspaper commented on a remarkable aspect of the Duval vote. Since another two votes would later be found there for Johnson, making Duval’s final vote 4,622 to 40, 4,662 persons thus voted in a county in which only 4,679 poll tax receipts had been issued—the 99.6 percent turnout was an astonishing display of civic responsibility.)

suddenly, with virtually all the counting in the election over, Coke Stevenson was no longer ahead. Lyndon Johnson was ahead. With so few counties still to be reported—and only minor remaining changes to be made—those 200 votes from Precinct 13 were decisive. In the Bureau’s final tabulations, Johnson had 494,191 votes, Stevenson 494,104. Out of 988,295 votes, he had won by 87—less than one hundredth of one percent.

By the 1930s, Frank Hamer had been wounded seventeen times; at least twice he had been left for dead. He had killed fifty-three men. Despite his refusal to give interviews and his dislike of publicity, the tall, powerful Texas Ranger, with his black suit, his invariable courtesy, and his laconic speech, had become a mythical figure in Texas. Historian

Johnson countered Stevenson’s charges of vote-stealing by saying—over statewide radio networks—that actually it had been Stevenson who had stolen votes, not he.

Johnson’s reaction to this news may never be known. Of those men who witnessed it only two were alive when research on this book began, and no matter how frank these two—Ed Clark and George Brown—have been in describing other episodes in Johnson’s life, neither wanted to talk about this one.

The vote was tied, and then tied again, this time at 28 to 28, and then the last vote was called, and it was for Johnson. He had won, 29 to 28. Pandemonium enveloped the ballroom;

I was asking questions about the 1948 election when Salas suddenly said, “I have written it all down.” Walking over to a trunk, he bent down stiffly and pulled out a manuscript—eighty-five pages of it typed, obviously by someone unsure of the rules of punctuation, with nine additional handwritten pages attached—and handed it to me.

What had been demonstrated before was now underlined in the strongest terms: in the context of the politics that was his life, Lyndon Johnson would do whatever was necessary to win. Even in terms of a most elastic political morality—the political morality of 1940s Texas—his methods were amoral.

“More is thy due than more than all can pay.”

From the first time I thought of becoming a biographer, I never conceived of my biographies as merely telling the lives of famous men but rather as a means of illuminating their times and the great forces that shaped their times—particularly political power, since in a democracy political power has so great a role in shaping the lives of the citizens of that democracy. What I set out to try to do was to examine the way power works in America in the middle of the twentieth century. I have been fascinated by political power ever since I was a reporter and realized how little I knew about it—and you can learn quite a bit about that subject if you just sit there and read enough documents in the Lyndon Johnson Library.

I had been told that “everyone knew” about the “phony oil leases.” But over and over again during years of research, I have been taught that things that “everyone knew” often turn out, when investigated, to be without factual basis.

Lyndon Johnson, as I note in the Introduction to this volume, did not pioneer the techniques by which that destruction was effected—what we would today call “attack politics” or “negative campaigning,” complete with the constant scientific polling, the use of advertising, public relations and media experts, and the use of electronic media. But his instinctive genius in the art of politics enabled him to raise these techniques to a new, revolutionary level of effectiveness in Texas.