The Path to Power

by O profissional

First of the series "The Years of Lyndon Johnson"

35. Part VI (Defeat) - Pass the Biscuits, Pa

SHORTLY AFTER DAYLIGHT on April 9, 1941, the telephone rang in the Johnsons' Washington apartment. Walter Jenkins was telephoning from the police desk at the front door of the Cannon Building, where, he told Lyndon Johnson, he had just heard a startling piece of news: during the night, Morris Sheppard, the senior United States Senator from Texas, had died of a stroke.

"Well, I won't be in this morning," Johnson said.

Under Secretary of the Interior Alvin Wirtz was also awakened early that morning. His secretary, Mary Rather, got to their offices at Interior unusually early because she had heard the news, but when she opened the door to Wirtz's private office, there he was, already sitting at his desk. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" he asked. Soon he and Johnson were mapping strategy for a Johnson campaign to fill the seat that Sheppard had held for twenty-seven years.

The principal obstacle to Johnson's candidacy was the one that had confronted him in his race for the House four years before: most voters had never heard of him. The voters of his Tenth Congressional District knew him, of course, and so did the voters of the Fourteenth, which he had earlier served as a congressional secretary. But in the state's other nineteen congressional districts, his name was all but unknown. Shortly after Sheppard's death, an East Texas radio station asked its listeners to send in postcards indicating the name of their favorite candidate. Not one of the hundreds of replies bore the name of Lyndon Johnson.

There were, moreover, potential candidates whose names were household words throughout Texas: the state's Governor, W. Lee O'Daniel; its youthful Attorney General, Gerald C. Mann; Congressman Martin Dies, chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. A Belden Poll—the Texas version of the Gallup Poll—taken shortly after Sheppard's death showed that 33 percent of the state's voters favored O'Daniel in a Senate race, 26 percent Mann, 9 percent Dies—and 5 percent Johnson.

Johnson's best hope of overcoming this handicap was the same strategy that had worked so well in 1937: linking his name with the name that was still magic in the state; just six months before, Franklin D. Roosevelt had crushed Willkie in Texas by a margin of more than four to one. Strong reasons existed for the President's active support of a liberal in the special election that would be held to fill Sheppard's seat. He obviously didn't want either Dies, the Garner protégé whose committee had begun investigating New Deal agencies, or the conservative, isolationist O'Daniel in the Senate; a memo circulating in the White House warned that the election of either is a possibility "too frightful for contemplation." But there was also a reason—a very strong reason—why the liberal should not be Lyndon Johnson but Gerald Mann.

Mann was an ardent New Dealer; although he had never met the President, "Gerry was a Roosevelt worshipper," an aide recalls. He had, in fact, worked for Johnson in 1937 because of Johnson's all-out support of the New Deal. And Mann had a much better chance to win than Johnson did.

A small-town boy who worked on farms and in a local hotel to earn money to attend Southern Methodist University in Dallas, the slender, speedy back was twice named to all-conference football teams and became famous throughout Texas as SMU's "Little Red Arrow." He possessed three enthusiasms somewhat rare among politicians: for God, for poetry and for the law as an abstract force that could promote the general good. Determined to study at the best law school in the country, he took his wife and baby son to Melrose, Massachusetts, where, while commuting to Harvard Law School, he worked two shifts a day in a garment factory—until parishioners of the Congregationalist Church in Gloucester, impressed by the Sunday School sermons of the intense, handsome young man, made him their pastor. Thanks to football, he had entered politics with a statewide reputation, and in public office he had burnished it. Returning to Texas from Harvard, he had become one of Governor James Allred's Assistant Attorney Generals and had produced some notably progressive legislation (including a revision of Sam Johnson's now-outdated "Blue Sky Law"), and then had been Ed Clark's predecessor as Secretary of State. In 1938, at the age of thirty-one, he had run for Attorney General. Finishing second to an experienced and popular politician in the first primary, Mann overtook him in the run-off and beat him by an astonishing 130,000 votes. Replacing the political hacks in the Attorney General's office with bright young lawyers, Mann raised its notoriously low standards, waged what Texas historian Seth McKay calls "continuous war" against loan sharks and usurious finance companies and, most significantly, instituted strict enforcement of the state's anti-trust laws, hitherto all but ignored by state administrations subservient to business interests. During his first two-year term, scores of anti-trust suits were filed, and a substantial portion were won. So popular was he that when, in 1940, he ran for re-election, no one ran against him. Thirty-four years old, already twice elected to statewide office, he was in 1941 by far the best-known and most-respected young public official in Texas. "A brilliant career was predicted for him in Texas politics," McKay writes. And when Sheppard died, several of the state's leading newspapers spontaneously joined in asking him to run for the Senate. O'Daniel had said he wasn't running; if the immensely popular Governor entered the race, Mann had the best chance to beat him. If O'Daniel stayed out, a Belden Poll showed, he would beat Dies, although the vote would be close. The only way Dies could win, in fact, was if another New Dealer—such as Lyndon Johnson—entered the race, and split the New Deal vote.

A little deceit was necessary to offset this reasoning. Roosevelt and the White House staff knew little about the internal politics of Texas, of course—as had been amply demonstrated the year before. In 1941, as in 1940, most of the information given to the President about Texas came from Johnson and Wirtz, and from Johnson's admirers on the White House staff (whose information of course came mostly from him). This information was not strictly accurate. The President was told that Mann possessed neither guaranteed loyalty to the New Deal nor the statewide reputation necessary to defeat Dies (or O'Daniel, should the Governor choose to run); a Johnson-inspired memo told Roosevelt that Mann was "unbranded and unknown."

Several influential Texans, including Senator Tom Connally, tried to explain the true situation to Roosevelt, but the President's fondness for Johnson predisposed him to be convinced by his arguments. Roosevelt, who had, following the 1938 "purge" attempt, re-adopted his pose of never intervening in an intrastate Democratic fight, orchestrated a scenario designed to show—without his actually saying so—that he was intervening in this one. He arranged for Johnson to see him on April 22, just before his regular Tuesday press conference, so that arriving reporters would see Johnson emerging from the Oval Office. While the reporters watched, Johnson announced his candidacy from the White House steps, saying he would campaign "under the banner of Roosevelt." And when the reporters, crowding into the Oval Office, asked the President if he had given Johnson permission to wave that banner, Roosevelt replied: "First, it is up to the people of Texas to elect the man they want as their Senator; second, everybody knows that I cannot enter a primary election; and third, to be truthful, all I can say is Lyndon Johnson is a very old, old friend of mine." Then, as Time magazine put it, the "correspondents laughed, and he laughed with them." F.D.R. PICKS JOHNSON TO DEFEAT DIES, said the headline in the Dallas Morning News.

In 1941 as in 1937, therefore, the Johnson campaign consisted of a single issue: "Roosevelt. Roosevelt. Roosevelt." That issue was emphasized in the candidate's speeches. What America needed, he said, was "Roosevelt and unity—unity under one management, and for a common purpose: saving America from the dangers ahead; united behind Roosevelt, we'll save America from the threat of slavery by the Axis." If he was elected, he said, he would be "100 percent for Roosevelt," "an all-out Roosevelt Senator," "just a private under my Commander-in-Chief." The issue was symbolized by his campaign emblem: the picture of Roosevelt and Johnson shaking hands on the Galveston dock at their first meeting four years before. In that picture, then-Governor Allred had been standing between the two men, but now he was airbrushed out. What remained was two tall, smiling men shaking hands across the empty space where Allred had once stood. This image was used in countless brochures and campaign newspapers. And, painted larger than life, it was plastered on thousands of billboards along highways the length and breadth of Texas—and not only the busy roads leading into Dallas and Houston and El Paso; the state's great empty spaces were not ignored; before a driver speeding across the vast, flat plains of West Texas or the Panhandle, those two huge figures shaking hands, painted dark against a red-white-and-blue background, would loom up against the sky, miles ahead. The issue was summed up in the campaign's slogan, which had originally been a private password used with a grin among the Chief's NYA boys who were out campaigning for him, but which was so catchy that it quickly became the campaign's public motto as well, appearing in new editions of the brochures and campaign newspapers—and on hundreds of thousands of hastily printed red-white-and-blue bumper stickers, simple and to the point: FRANKLIN D AND LYNDON B!

This time, the man whose name Johnson was invoking played an active role in the race. Ignorance of Texas politics may partially explain Roosevelt's original decision to support Johnson, but it does not explain the extent or the enthusiasm of his support. As if his press-conference hint had not been sufficiently broad, leaks went out from the White House to sympathetic columnists. "Roosevelt has a fatherly interest in young Johnson," Pearson and Allen wrote. Said Alsop and Kintner:

Although overburdened with the huge war effort and facing the gravest decision in this country's history, the President still takes a personal interest in the campaign of his protégé, Representative Lyndon B. Johnson. … Intimates disclose that the President and his small group of advisors are receiving regular reports on the campaign and that the President has lost none of his determination to give Johnson every aid. … As much as any candidate in recent years Johnson is running under the White House banner.

The President's support went beyond hints and leaks. Johnson wanted Vice President Wallace's aide Harold H. Young, the burly, brilliant Dallas attorney, seconded to his campaign for its duration. The Vice President refused to let Young go; the President intervened, and when Johnson flew down to Texas to open the campaign, Young was sitting beside him on the plane. Johnson had asked which Department of Agriculture officials could best help him, and Roosevelt apparently said he would find out. Informed that they were Milo Perkins, Maston White and Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Grover Hill, the President sent Rowe a memo: "Will you pass the word on to Lyndon Johnson and do the necessary." The necessary was a direct order to the three men, delivered by Rowe, to give Johnson any help he wanted.

Rowe had been designated liaison between the White House and Johnson's camp. One of his first tasks was to ensure that Johnson received credit for all federal spending in Texas. He says: "Word went out—from me—to all departments, all departments in Washington: no projects approved for Texas unless Lyndon Johnson is notified." In cases in which Rowe did not possess sufficient forcefulness, a more forceful man stepped in. Thomas Corcoran wouldn't be "White House Tommy" much longer, but in April, 1941, he could still use the magic words that had given him that nickname, and he used them on behalf of Lyndon Johnson. On the very day Johnson left for Texas, he requested approval of a certain Rural Electrification project, asking for its approval before he left. An REA official said such rapid action was simply impossible. The phone rang in the official's office: "This is Tommy Corcoran at the White House. Congressman Johnson wants this today, and the White House wants him to have it today." Not only had Rowe, Corcoran and other Roosevelt aides been told to help Johnson, but their fondness for Johnson, and their fear of an O'Daniel (or Dies) victory made them eager to help him; Harold Ickes took the trouble to telephone Dies' hometown himself to check on whether the Congressman had paid his real-estate taxes. "Everybody was helping him," Rowe says. "And I'm thinking of all the liberals, all the way." Their feelings are summed up in a memorandum from Pa Watson, who felt Lyndon was the "perfect Roosevelt man"; on a letter from a Texas politician critical of Johnson, Watson wrote: "Referred to Sec. Ickes for his perusal and then the ash-can."

The on-the-scene beneficiary of all this help was Walter Jenkins, who had been left behind in Washington when John Connally and Herbert Henderson left for Texas to work in the campaign. When Johnson needed something from the federal agencies, it was Jenkins who had to visit the officials involved. The shy twenty-three-year-old had no experience doing this. "I had been answering mail," he says—filling constituents' requests for farming pamphlets—when he wasn't directing tourists around the Cannon Building in his guard's uniform. Suddenly, he had to deal with Steve Early, Missy LeHand, Grace Tully, Jim Rowe and the legendary Corcoran. When Johnson told him his new assignment, he was at first "scared, nervous." But, he says, "I received a wonderful reception—it was just unbelievable to me."

Tommy the Cork couldn't have been nicer: "I talked to him lots of times. He was still very powerful, and when you asked him something, he could do it." Even the Old Curmudgeon was nice. Once, Johnson told Jenkins to see Secretary Ickes personally about some matter too sensitive to be broached over the telephone, "and I remember thinking I couldn't possibly get to see Ickes." But Ickes' office returned his call immediately, and said the Secretary could see him—immediately. ("I was very excited," Jenkins says.) And when he told Ickes what Johnson needed, Ickes said that Johnson would have it. No matter what he asked these officials to do, Jenkins says, they did it. In fact, in many cases he didn't have to ask. The White House would "often" call him about "something we hadn't even asked about. I think that Mr. Roosevelt had put the word out to do anything possible" to help Lyndon Johnson "within reason … and sometimes beyond reason. … He [Roosevelt] wanted Mr. Johnson to win so bad."

There were other similarities between Lyndon Johnson's first campaign for the Senate and his first campaign for the House. In 1941 as in 1937, only he, among all the candidates, possessed an efficient campaign organization. Although it was of course much larger than the 1937 organization, it was in many respects the same organization, from top (Under Secretary Alvin Wirtz directed campaign strategy from his desk in the Department of the Interior) to bottom (Carroll Keach was again Johnson's chauffeur). The Henderson brothers were on hand again, Herb (the "genius with a pencil") to write speeches, Chuck to write letters as the man in charge of communication with potential voters. The organization came primarily from the National Youth Administration, and many of the key names on the roster of the Johnson campaign workers of 1941—Kellam, Deason, Ernest Morgan, Fenner Roth—were the names of 1937. John Connally took orders from Wirtz and ran campaign headquarters in Austin.

It was an organization not only young, energetic and capable but devoted to its leader. When someone sneered at Carroll Keach for again being only Johnson's chauffeur, Keach replied simply: "Everyone can do something for him. This is what I can do for him." The "weeding out" begun by Johnson when he had been NYA director had continued under Kellam, and the NYA was composed now of men who had proven the hard way that they were willing to work, willing to take orders, and able to get things done. They were bound to Johnson as they had always been by the force of his personality (Fenner Roth had named his son after his Chief), as well as by self-interest; in 1941, their investment in his future was four years greater than in 1937, and this time the stakes were much bigger: J. J. ("Jake") Pickle, perhaps the most capable of the post-1937 recruits, had no hesitation about quitting his NYA job for a lower-paying campaign job, in part because "Well, it was expected that you would get your job back after the campaign," but mostly because "I felt at this time that Mr. Johnson had the prospects of being a state and national figure, and he'd take you along with him. It was a good gamble to do it. It was the best way to get ahead." It was an organization in place—and its individual members knew their place. The NYA was, after all, a well-organized, going concern; it was, in effect, shifted virtually en masse to the Johnson campaign. And, as in all Johnson operations, there was an iron-clad chain of command, a chain that carried over into the campaign. Superimposed above the NYA boys were Wirtz, Connally and James Blundell, a former Garner supporter who had seen where the future lay, had switched to the New Deal, and was now Connally's assistant. But the organization below—the organization that carried out the daily campaigning—was largely the NYA organization; the state was divided into districts, along the lines of the NYA districts, and an NYA director supervised each, and gave orders to local NYA men, who were familiar with smaller areas. And because the NYA was a statewide organization, Johnson's campaign organization was a statewide organization—the first statewide political organization Texas had ever seen. Johnson's insistence that his NYA workers meet and cultivate local officials would pay off now; the Mayors and County Commissioners whose support he needed would be contacted by men who were already their friends. Within a week after his campaign had begun, twelve two-man teams had fanned out from Austin across Texas to carry the message of "Roosevelt and Unity"—and these teams knew whom to see. Having worked in the 1937 campaign, moreover, they knew many little tricks of the political trade. Wingate Lucas knew he was in the hands of professionals from the moment the Johnson team of advance men arrived in his hometown to oversee his preparations for a Johnson speech; the audience was going to sit on a hillside, and Lucas' aides had been setting up the chairs "right next to each other. And his people said, you never put the chairs so close together at a political rally: you want to make it look like there are more people there." They removed every other chair; "we spread out those chairs across the whole hillside," and the press reported that Johnson had drawn a larger audience than in fact he had. "Now that sounds like a simple thing," Lucas says. "But at the time I didn't know that."

And in 1941 as in 1937, Johnson had money.

Running a statewide campaign had always been expensive in Texas. In part, this was because of the state's size—800 miles from top to bottom, close to 800 miles across, it is bigger than all New England (with several other states thrown in). In part, it was because the state was largely rural: only a third of its 6,450,000 residents lived in cities; a third lived in small towns, and a third still lived on farms. A substantial percentage of the farmers didn't possess radios; some didn't even get a weekly newspaper. In 1941 the only way to reach these people was by the campaigning methods that had been in use in Texas decades before. "You'd put a loudspeaker on some guy's car, load up the back with literature, mark up a road map for him, and send him out," driving from one "Saturday town" to another to put up placards, pass out literature and give speeches on the courthouse square, says D. B. Hardeman. Although the cost of individual items such as gasoline, hotels and food was low (a good small-town hotel charged no more than two or three dollars a night, a like amount would pay for a day's food, and, recalls one campaigner, "You couldn't drive far enough in a day to use up two dollars' worth of gasoline"), overall this type of campaigning was expensive. The campaigner needed money for car repairs and "to buy fellows a beer, to be a big shot, to be able to act like an 'important representative of headquarters.'" Keeping a man on the road cost about $100 per week, and because of the size of Texas, it was desirable to keep a lot of men on the road. Just keeping in touch with these men was expensive; long-distance telephone bills were no small item. Because of the size of Texas, the cost of every category of campaign expenditure was multiplied; a candidate who wanted to make a significant impact with highway billboards had to think not of hundreds of billboards, but of thousands. A candidate considering the purchase of advertising in weekly newspapers had to consider the fact that there were more than 400 weekly newspapers in Texas. No daily newspaper covered more than a small fraction of the state, so a candidate had to try to buy space in all sixty daily newspapers. And the new (and most effective) medium of campaign communication—radio—was the most expensive of all, and since no radio station reached more than a small fraction of the state, a candidate had to try to buy time on sixty stations.

Money had played a significant role in the 1941 campaign even before it began. The most logical candidate in Washington was Congressman Wright Patman. The forty-eight-year-old Patman wanted that Senate seat, had been dreaming of it for years—and, having earned a formidable reputation as a crusader for Populist causes, he was qualified for it. But dreams had to surrender to reality. "I wanted to run," he was to say, but "I couldn't afford to run. … Of course I knew that I could do more in the Senate, but I told Mr. Rayburn, 'Lyndon can be financed. It takes a lot of money for the Senate. … I don't have the money for it in 254 counties in Texas. I don't have the potential of a good organization with funds to support it. Lyndon has. …'" The most logical candidate in Texas was James Allred, now, retired from the Governorship at the age of forty-two, a federal Judge. Allred, too, wanted the job, but Allred was faced with the same reality—heightened, in his case, by the debt into which he had been plunged by two statewide races, a debt that had proven difficult to erase for an official unsympathetic to the reactionary oil and business interests that financed Texas politics. Publisher Houston Harte, a New Dealer and owner of the only Texas newspaper chain as large as Marsh's, sent D. B. Hardeman and another young, liberal, reporter, Alex Louis, to the ex-Governor's home to promise him the support of the seven Harte-Hanks dailies and to ask him to run. "We got Allred so excited he was walking up and down and making campaign speeches," Hardeman says.

"But the next morning, early, he rapped on our door. He asked us to go for a walk with him, and … he told us that his wife had just absolutely laid down the law to him. Jo Betsy had said: 'For the first time in your life, you're about to get out of debt. You cannot run again.'" Before the campaign even began, lack of money had eliminated two of the strongest potential candidates.

But Lyndon Johnson had money.

It came from Washington, because of ideology or self-interest. Traditional sources of New Deal funds, prodded by Tommy Corcoran, contributed, as did attorneys such as the one who made a contribution through Welly Hopkins because he "was building up a law practice and he may or may not have had clients who he thought might be benefited." It came from New York, from the garment district, because Corcoran assured Dubinsky and Lubin that Johnson was for labor and a liberal ("You'll be getting a liberal Senator from Texas!" Corcoran growled at them. "What do you want for a nickel?"), and because their idolized leader was so interested in the race ("Everybody knew he was Roosevelt's pet"), and it came from Wall Street, and from big corporations. Eliot Janeway had been made to understand that the New Deal considered the election of Lyndon Johnson a matter of the highest priority. ("[Justice William O.] Douglas would call me every third day and say, 'How are you doing for Lyndon?'" Janeway says.) Jane-way did well. In 1941, he jokes, he raised so much money for Johnson in New York that he "created a balance-of-payments crisis in New York over that campaign." The funds raised were carried to Texas by trusted couriers. Says Hopkins: "I… was able to raise a fairly good-sized sum for those days—a few thousand dollars." He says: "I had checks. And some cash." Carrying the money to Texas was a new experience, he says. "It was certainly novel to me—I had never had that much cash in my personal life." Asked in what form the contributions were made, Rowe replies, "It was all cash in those days." In fact, it was not, as Hopkins' statement shows, but a steady stream of couriers carrying cash or checks was soon heading for Lyndon Johnson's headquarters in Austin.

It came from Dallas—from anti–New Deal oilmen who didn't care what Lyndon Johnson's politics were so long as he protected their profits. In 1941, the specter of federal regulation by the hated Ickes was becoming more and more of a possibility, and they needed protection in Washington more than ever, and their trusted advisor, Alvin Wirtz, assured them they would get it from Johnson. Those of the wildcatters who had dealt personally with the young Congressman could assure their fellows that, unlike Rayburn, who was far too independent for their taste, Johnson would take orders. (On April 23, in fact, an exchange of telegrams had occurred which demonstrated the peremptory tone they used to him, and his eagerness to please them. Arch Underwood, the reactionary oil-and-cotton baron, had asked Johnson for some unknown favor in Washington, and Johnson had not replied. At two p.m., Underwood sent Johnson a three-word telegram: tell me something. Johnson's reply, sent a few hours after he received Underwood's wire, said: TRIED TO GET YOU AT DALLAS BUT WAS TOLD YOU HAD JUST LEFT. … [HAROLD] YOUNG LEAVING HERE WITH ME FRIDAY NIGHT. AM GOING TO TRY TO DO JOB IN WHICH YOU ARE INTERESTED BEFORE I LEAVE.) Bill Kittrell, who along with Bill McCraw was Johnson's contact with the oilmen, was able to wire him shortly after he announced that he was running: HAVE TALKED LECHNER, ARCH, ARMISTEAD, BROOKS, PURL AND CLARK. ALL OKAY. They were indeed. A few of the oilmen's contributions to the Johnson campaign are recorded: W. T. Knight, $2,000; Sid Richardson, $3,000; Clara Driscoll, $5,000. But most are not. The oilmen made them in cash through McCraw or Kittrell or Wirtz: on one occasion, Kittrell handed Johnson an envelope bulging with bills; on several occasions, Wirtz, who directed the campaign from a private office away from campaign headquarters, called Wilton Woods over to it. Woods says that Wirtz gave him cash to pay various "office expenses," and that the amount Wirtz gave him totaled $25,000.

It came from Charles Marsh. The alacrity with which Johnson had leaped at this chance for higher political office—after promising Alice Glass that he would leave politics, get a divorce and marry her—had led to a breach in his relationship with Marsh's mistress. (He would repair this breach shortly after the election, and their relationship would enter one of its most intense phases.) But Marsh, of course, was unaware of the relationship. On the day Sheppard died, the publisher had pledged Johnson his support in the race, which he was to point out was for a "25-year senatorship." At first, for reasons that can only be guessed at, Johnson pointedly did not respond, and did not ask for help from this man who liked to be asked. But now, needing him, he asked—so skillfully that Marsh dropped all personal business and rushed to Texas. Marsh liked to write speeches and plan campaign stratagems—it gave him the feeling of being on the inside of politics. He spent the ten weeks of the campaign driving his Buick convertible back and forth across Texas to be on hand whenever Lyndon Johnson arrived in a big city. As he drove (like many wealthy Texans, he refused to use a chauffeur), he dictated speeches and memos to his secretary, Alice's sister Mary Louise, who was sitting beside him, so that he could hand them to Lyndon when they met. With automobile air-conditioning still unknown, some of these long drives, often on narrow, badly paved roads, were memorable for their discomfort. "In one day," Mary Louise recalls, "Charles and I drove from Amarillo to San Angelo—all day long in the heat." But he was perfectly happy doing this for the young man of whom he was so fond. And Marsh was not only writing speeches, he was getting them on the air. FCC regulations required that radio time for political speeches be paid for in advance, and Marsh paid. Although this was a period in which he was, by his standards, somewhat short of ready cash, he donated thousands of dollars to Lyndon's campaign, and raised thousands more; his partner, E. S. Fentress, gave $5,000 himself. Richardson wasn't the only impoverished wildcatter Marsh had helped to hold on to his leases; Jack Frost of the Byrd-Frost Oil Company was another. Frost wasn't interested in politics, but now that he had made his money, he would donate to any politician Marsh asked him to, and Marsh asked him to donate to Lyndon Johnson. Whenever Marsh passed through Dallas, he would, Mary Louise says, "get some fellows in for a meeting." The money raised at such meetings would be pooled with his own, in his own bank account. Arriving in a city, Marsh would drive first to the local radio station, or send Mary Louise, and pay for radio time with his own checks, so that Marsh's checking account became almost an official arm of the Johnson campaign.

But, mostly, Johnson's money came from Brown & Root. Herman Brown had wanted so fiercely to build big things, and to make big money building them. Now, thanks to Lyndon Johnson, he had been able to do so—had, in fact, made money on a scale perhaps as big as his dreams. But the appetite grows by what it feeds on, and now his dreams were bigger. Representative Johnson had brought Brown & Root millions of dollars in profits. What might not Senator Johnson be able to do? On May 5, 1941, a luncheon was held in Houston at which were present thirty-four Brown & Root "subs," the sub-contractors who had gotten a piece of the work on the Marshall Ford Dam or the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station. They were asked for pledges for the Johnson campaign. And Herman Brown did not ask others to take risks he was unwilling to take himself. Brown & Root might be breaking the law if it gave money to the Johnson campaign, but Brown did not let the law deter him from backing his candidate to the hilt. He simply took precautions to conceal what he was doing. These precautions had to be more extensive than the ones he had taken the previous year, for the scale of his contributions was larger now. Corporation checks, entered on its books as "legal fees," were given to attorneys, who were instructed to get the money into the hands of the Johnson campaign. They deposited the Brown & Root checks, made out their personal checks for the same amounts (or, in some cases, for 10 percent less, deducting that amount for the service), or drew cash, and brought or mailed the checks or cash to Johnson campaign headquarters in Houston or Austin, or got it to the campaign through routes more circuitous; one lawyer, given $12,500 in "attorneys' fees," gave part of it to his partner as a "profit distribution." His partner promptly gave it right back to him—and he gave it to the Johnson campaign. "Bonuses" were paid to Brown & Root vice presidents—$30,000 apiece to two vice presidents, $33,800 to another, $40,000 to a fourth—who, Internal Revenue Service agents later came to believe, were instructed to give at least part of the money to the campaign as if it were their own. Within the first few weeks of Johnson's Senate run, Brown had put behind him well over $100,000.

During the pre-war era, the cost of a typical statewide campaign in Texas was about $50,000; an expensive campaign might run as much as $75,000 or $80,000; says one politician who managed many campaigns during that period: "That was what you figured you'd need to do it right. You seldom got nearly that much, but if you got that [much] money, you could do it right." But thanks to Herman Brown—and Tommy Corcoran and Eliot Janeway and Welly Hopkins and Sid Richardson and Charles Marsh—Lyndon Johnson had a great deal more than that. He could hire talent—the best that money could buy. Soon top political reporters—lured from their newspapers for the campaign—were, under Herb Henderson's direction, writing Johnson press releases and cultivating press contacts (along with, in some cases, their editors). He hired not just public relations men, but the best public relations men, including the legendary PR wizard, Phil Fox of Dallas, whose fee was a reported $300 per week. And Johnson could ensure that his press releases would be played as news stories in those weekly newspapers—and there were hundreds in Texas—whose editorial policy could be influenced by cash. Says one former Texas newsman familiar with the practice: "You'd go and say to the publisher of a small weekly newspaper, 'If your views are sound, we'll take a $25 ad every week.'" Few candidates for statewide office had utilized this practice on a broad scale, because few candidates possessed the requisite funds—$25 per week for a ten-week campaign, multiplied by hundreds of weeklies, ran into tens of thousands of dollars. Johnson could hire typists, after renting chairs and desks and of course typewriters for them to use; one way to make an unknown candidate known—fast—was through letters to individual voters; dozens of volunteers pounded out such letters, but Johnson wanted professionals as well; soon, in a large room on the mezzanine of Austin's Stephen F. Austin Hotel, eighty-two secretaries were working under the direction not only of Chuck Henderson but of experienced directors of corporate secretarial pools. (So big did the Austin mailing operations become that even eighty-two typists couldn't handle it; the students of an Austin secretarial school were commissioned to address 7,000 envelopes a week.) Veteran Texas politicians walked down from the Capitol along Congress Avenue—dominated by gigantic JOHNSON FOR SENATOR and JOHNSON FOR ROOSEVELT AND UNITY signs—-to take a look at the hotel mezzanine for themselves; no letter-writing operation on such a scale had ever been seen in Texas politics.

In all newspapers, even those whose editorial policy would not be influenced by money, Johnson could ensure the repetition of his name and of his link with the beloved President by purchasing ads. To run an advertisement in sixty daily newspapers and hundreds of weeklies cost tens of thousands of dollars in a single week; Johnson ran ads on this scale in many of the campaign's ten weeks. He printed his own newspaper; using the facilities of a cooperative local weekly, the journalists on his payroll composed a four-page full-size newspaper. In it, Roosevelt's name appeared in headlines almost as many times as Johnson's. There were catchy renditions of the motto—suitable for singing: "Now all over this state/they're saying/and it's going to be/Franklin D and Lyndon B!" (and, of course, there was only one front-page picture—the two men shaking hands in Galveston under the headline: "Old and Close Friends"). And copies of this newspaper were printed and mailed in the hundreds of thousands. Johnson bought radio time in huge hunks; one half-hour of air time in enough stations to blanket the entire state cost approximately $4,000. And then of course there were those thousands of "handshake" billboards—which in strategic locations cost $200 or $300 apiece. Johnson's barbecues were the most extravagant in Texas political history (by now he was employing Ed Clark's device of providing enough meat so that everyone attending could not only eat his fill but be encouraged to take home enough for several additional meals), his rallies the most elaborate (with, behind the stage, that huge canvas backdrop of him and Roosevelt shaking hands and the immense words: ROOSEVELT AND UNITY).

To speak at barbecues and rallies—and to tour their home areas on his behalf—Johnson needed local "lead men" and stump speakers. Although few of them knew him personally, some would campaign for him because they were persuaded that he represented the New Deal. Many, however, required other motivation. Buster Kellam, Jesse's brother, reported to Jake Pickle on the reception he had received from J. Edward Johnson, an attorney who was reputedly an effective stemwinder, and who had agreed to accompany Kellam on a speaking tour for Johnson in rural counties north of Dallas.

Mr. Johnson didn't approve of my coming with just $50. I did my best to explain that there would be more as it was needed. That he didn't like and made it clear that he wasn't spending any of his money, and that since he was neglecting his practice, he was entitled to more. He also said that he hesitated about leaving unless he had at least enough money to cover two weeks' expenses. … I have hopes that by the time you receive this we will be gone, but I do know that won't be until he has more money.

The requirements of most of the lead men were satisfied, and soon scores were out hawking the abilities of a candidate they had never met.

Four years before, campaigning in a district whose voters hardly knew his name, Johnson had overhauled far better-known and more experienced candidates partly through the use of money on a scale unprecedented in that district. Now he was using money on the same scale in twenty-one districts—all across Texas. Lyndon Johnson, in his first campaign for the Senate, was using money on a scale Texas had never seen.

FOR A WHILE this campaign seemed to be following the course of Johnson's 1937 race.

It was enlivened by a touch of humor. Because it was a special election rather than a party primary, any citizen could get his name on the ballot merely by paying a $100 fee, and twenty-seven candidates besides Johnson had taken advantage of this opportunity. One candidate was a radio peddler of various goat-gland concoctions designed to improve, among other things, virility. Another was a laxative manufacturer (Hal Collins of Crazy Water Crystals) who attracted big crowds at rallies by giving away a free mattress to the couple present who had the most children. A third, "Commodore" Muse Hatfield, felt that Roosevelt had not gone far enough; the Commodore favored the immediate creation of a five-ocean Navy, to be financed by a national lottery. The ballot also included "Cyclone" Davis, who lived under a Dallas viaduct and announced that he didn't have to campaign because "Providence will place me in the Senate"; a geologist who proposed a $50 monthly pension for everybody over sixty-five and a $5 pension for everyone else; a chiropractor; an ex-bootlegger; an admitted kidnapper; two bearded prophets, and two rocking-chair sages (including a wealthy self-styled "rump farmer" who said he was for "the masses"—by which he apparently meant his masses of impoverished tenant farmers). There were also two candidates whose qualifications rested on their kinship with famous Texans of the past. Joseph C. Bean was a cousin of a pair of legendary Texans: Judge Roy C. Bean, "The Law West of the Pecos," and Ellis P. Bean, a hero of Texas' war against Mexico who had gained fame by spending several years in a Mexican prison with a pet lizard named Bill. Edwin Waller III had only one famous ancestor, but that one, Edwin Waller I, had claimed the honor of having begun the Mexican War by committing that war's first "overt act" (which on closer inspection, turned out to be an argument between Waller and some Mexicans over the use of a small boat).

Besides Johnson, there were, during the first six weeks of the campaign, two serious candidates: Martin Dies and Gerald Mann.

The belief that Dies would make a strong candidate lasted only until he entered the race. A fiery stump speaker, the Congressman could evoke hysterical cheers when he addressed the Mothers of Dallas on the prevalence of Communism within the American Youth Congress. But he spoke rather infrequently, doing little touring and relying on a few speeches in the big cities. And even when these speeches were broadcast, the public was often not aware of them, because, although plenty of money was available to Dies for advertising, most of it went unused. He displayed an almost total lack of interest in setting up an organization beyond the boundaries of his own East Texas congressional district; in most of the state, there was no Dies organization at all. The Communist threat was practically the sole topic of his campaign, and it quickly became apparent that while a hard core of "super-patriots" would vote for him, he wasn't going to be able to add to that base. His strength—which soared to 27 percent the week he announced—declined, week by week, in every poll thereafter.

Mann's candidacy was a different story. The young Attorney General's personal qualities attracted loyalty. The wording on the plaque he had hung on the wall behind his desk—"I sacrificed no principle to gain this office and I shall sacrifice no principle to keep it"—did not strike a false note with those who knew him, and neither did his habit of carrying around a Bible and reciting poetry; the most cynical of politicians had to admit, as one puts it, "There was a guy who you wouldn't dare to ask him to do anything even slightly wrong"; D. B. Hardeman, the Austin journalist and an astute observer of Texas politics, says that Mann was "a very deep Christian, a very sincere man, a very clean man—politically, financially. A very gentle man. He had practically the loftiest ideals of any public servant I ever knew." He had, Hardeman says, "assembled an outstanding staff, because men were very loyal to him." When Senator Sheppard died, these young Assistant Attorney Generals asked him to run, and volunteered to resign and campaign for him—which meant that he would have at least the nucleus of a campaign organization.

He also, of course, had a statewide "name"—a very respected one, as had been demonstrated by the unsolicited newspaper editorials that echoed his aides' request that he run, and by his rating in the first Belden Poll: second only to Governor O'Daniel. And he had a fierce, driving energy that resembled Johnson's. Having launched the type of campaign that had given him his upset victory in 1938—a campaign that resembled Johnson's 1937 campaign in the refusal of the young candidate to spare himself—he was driving hundreds of miles each day, and giving dozens of speeches, in every corner of Texas. His intensity and earnestness made him a compelling speech-maker; slender, clean-cut, very handsome, he was an impressive figure in front of a county courthouse. O'Daniel was still saying he didn't plan to run, and a poll taken on May 12 to determine what would happen if he didn't showed that without the Governor in the race, Mann would receive 42 percent of the vote, Dies 40 percent, Johnson 15 percent and all the other candidates a total of 3 percent. Mann felt that Dies was not a substantial threat because of his unwillingness to work, or to organize. As for Johnson, Mann liked him, but felt "the people of the state didn't know Lyndon Johnson." He felt he was going to win.

In two respects, however, Mann's campaign was very different from Johnson's. A score of his former assistants were out enthusiastically working for him—an adequate campaign nucleus by traditional Texas standards. But it was not adequate in comparison with the Johnson campaign. And while Mann's workers were able, trained lawyers, they weren't able, trained campaign workers; they didn't know the local officials, as Johnson's men did. "Johnson had this network of young, aggressive operators from the NYA … that Mann couldn't match," says Hardeman (who himself joined Mann's campaign). "They knew more about how to organize a campaign, how to get a campaign manager in each county and city, how to get people to put up placards and pass out literature and ring doorbells … Johnson's operation was just a better political operation than Gerald Mann's."

The second—more significant—deficiency in the Mann campaign was in its funding. Although Mann had spent relatively little in his first race for Attorney General, he had spent more than he possessed, and in 1941, three years after the race, he was still paying off debts from it. He told his two campaign managers, his brother, Guy L. Mann, and his former law partner, Sam McCorkle of Dallas, that they were not to place him further in debt for this race. They didn't follow his instructions; strapped for cash, they arranged loans from the Republic National Bank of Dallas. But the amount of money available to Mann from this loan—and from contributions from his backers—was minuscule beside Johnson's. The difference was visible in Austin, where Johnson had eighty-two typists on the hotel mezzanine, and scores of other campaign workers, whereas the Mann-for-Senate headquarters consisted of Hardeman, and a few other volunteers. The same contrast existed in other cities, where Johnson headquarters were filled with paid, trained workers. "We didn't have any big headquarters staff anywhere," Mann says. In Dallas, for example, "my organization consisted primarily of Guy Mann and Sam McCorkle." This lack of staffing hurt in innumerable ways: Johnson's traveling "teams," for example, sent back from each town they visited lists of individuals who might be potential supporters, with a little personal data on each one; when these lists arrived at headquarters, letters with a personal touch carefully added by Chuck Henderson and other expert Johnson letter-writers were sent to these individuals (over the candidate's signature), and repeated "follow-up" letters were sent thereafter to win them to Johnson's side or keep them there. Thousands and thousands of such letters were drafted, typed and mailed. Mann could do nothing comparable.

Nor could Mann's men do much traveling—not when such campaigning cost a hundred dollars per man per week. Johnson had twelve two-man teams out full time; as for Mann, he says, "We didn't have any teams out—it would take all the money we had to keep me on the road, and to buy some advertising. We didn't have that kind of money at all."

It was sometimes hard for Mann's headquarters even to keep in touch with his campaigners: "telephoning over an area that was bigger than all New England—just the cost of it was an impossibility," Hardeman recalls.

When Johnson traveled, speechwriters and advance men traveled with him; Mann often traveled alone except for a single aide who had volunteered to be his driver.

The influence of money in the campaign was magnified in the media. When Gerald Mann received an endorsement from a respected daily newspaper, it appeared once—in that newspaper; perhaps, if he was lucky, the paper might repeat its endorsement once. But when Lyndon Johnson received an endorsement, it was reprinted, in ads or in "news stories" written in his headquarters, in scores of weeklies throughout the daily's circulation area—week after week. It was reprinted in brochures mailed—week after week—to voters across the entire state. It was reprinted on the hundreds of thousands of throwaways placed in voters' hands by campaign workers—NYA employees, Brown & Root employees, electric co-operative meter readers and repairmen, FHA mortgage appraisers—who reinforced to the voters, face to face, the message in the flyers they were being handed. The most glowing phrases of such an endorsement were shouted, or recited in honeyed tones, on radio broadcasts over and over, day after day. Mann's speeches might be persuasive to the voters who were actually standing in front of him when he gave them, and, perhaps, listeners to a local radio station, but that was all. Johnson could not speak well, but when he spoke, it was to large areas of the state, for his speeches were broadcast over statewide radio networks. Men—local lead men and stemwinders who had come to admire the young Attorney General—wanted to speak for Mann, but after the first few weeks of the campaign, the money to send them on the road ran out. All too often, Mann's headquarters was handicapped in responding even to a specific request to furnish a prominent speaker for the meeting of some local organization. When such a request came in to Johnson headquarters, the speaker was sent, all expenses paid, often accompanied by a claque to arouse enthusiasm in the audience. Newspaper advertising drummed up attendance. When a similar request came in to Mann's headquarters, expense money would have to be scraped up before a commitment could be made to send a speaker. Often, it couldn't be scraped up, and the opportunity was lost. Hardeman, hardly a prominent Texan, wound up making some speeches himself because he had no money to send anyone else.

Mann was mercifully unaware of the full extent of Johnson's advertising, for traveling long hours every day around the state, he would see only the local newspapers. "I was out campaigning, so I would see only one ad, not hundreds at a time," he recalls. His staff tried to shield him from the truth: "You want to keep the candidate believing he's going to win, so you don't tell him things like that," Hardeman says. But, a perceptive campaigner, Mann knew something was happening, something bad. "I could tell by the crowds," he recalls. "I don't know how to describe this—out on the stump, you can feel if things are going right," and now he began to feel that things were going wrong. "The crowds were just not as large any more, or they were just not as enthusiastic as they should be." And gradually the explanation dawned on him. "As I traveled around, I could just feel the effect of Johnson's money. The advertising, and the employing of people, and in every county in the state there were federal bureaus—they were really putting out so much money I could just feel what was happening." Mann was correct, but, without sufficient funds of his own, he couldn't do anything about it. He was campaigning now as Lyndon Johnson had campaigned in 1937—day and night, weekday and weekend, spending sixteen to eighteen hours a day in a car. He became so exhausted that he could "fall asleep on a moment's notice in a car. If I hadn't been able to do that, I couldn't have been able to keep going. You can look at a map and see how big Texas is, and how far apart these towns are, but you can't imagine it until you try to get from one place to another." He was, he says, "almost automated": he could sleep until his car pulled into a town, wake up and jump out of the car, make a speech, get back into the car—and go right back to sleep. And he was campaigning like this day after day. But even such an effort could not help him against the weight of Lyndon Johnson's money. Mann was running a traditional Texas campaign, and running it brilliantly. But it couldn't compete with the new type of campaign, Lyndon Johnson's type of campaign.

THERE WAS ONE GLARING DIFFERENCE between Lyndon Johnson's 1941 campaign and his 1937 campaign—the candidate himself.

The candidate of 1941 bore little resemblance to the skinny, gawky, nervous youth of four years before. When he took off his suit jacket, it became apparent that the only part of Lyndon Johnson that was still thin was his shoulders, conspicuously narrow in proportion to the middle of his body which had became quite wide. His belt sagged a little around the beginning of a paunch, and his rear end was now quite large. The jacket was seldom doffed, but not through concern over his bulk. His speeches, he instructed his speechwriters, were to be "senatorial"—statesmanlike and dignified—and he wanted his appearance to match, as the handkerchief painstakingly arranged in his breast pocket matched his necktie. His suits, most of them with a vest, were of good materials, mostly dark blue. There was often a carnation in his lapel, and his white shirt was starched and stiff; gold cufflinks gleamed on the sleeves. Bare-headed in 1937, now he often wore a hat, not a Stetson but a fedora, which he would wave to the crowds, and there was frequently a briefcase under his arm from which he would remove the text of his speech as ostentatiously as if it had been papers of state; to read the speech he would fussily put on a pair of eyeglasses. The gaunt face of 1937 was a broad, heavy face now: flesh had filled in the lines and filled out the cheeks; there was a full-fledged double chin, and the big jaw jutted now out of heavy jowls. The candidate of 1937 had looked so young; the candidate of 1941 was not young at all; he looked at least a decade older than his thirty-two years.

The difference was accentuated by his bearing. In 1937, he had been as ineffective reading a prepared speech as he was persuasive speaking extemporaneously. Now he almost never gave an extemporaneous talk, and he was, if possible, even worse now at reading prepared speeches—but in a very different way. In 1937, he had given the impression of being afraid to look at his audience lest he lose his place in the text. He still did not look at his audience nearly as much as his mother, the elocution teacher, would have liked, but fear was no part of the impression he made now. On a stage, he was a dominant, powerful figure, tall, long-armed; the spotlight glittered on his gold-rimmed eyeglasses, glistened off the waves of his black, carefully pomaded, shiny black hair and highlighted the pale whiteness of his skin, the blackness of the heavy eyebrows that the glasses did little to conceal, and the sheen of beard that was present on the jutting jaw no matter how closely he shaved. A powerful figure, but not a pleasant one. The modest tone in the text of most of his speeches (Charles Marsh, who wrote many of them, was constantly urging upon the candidate at least a public humility) was belied by the domineering tone in which they were delivered. Johnson shouted his speeches in a harsh voice almost without inflection except when he was especially determined to emphasize a point, when his voice would rise into a bellow; the tone was the tone of a lecturer uninterested in any opinion but his own: dogmatic, pontifical, the tone of a leader demanding rather than soliciting support. Reinforcing the tone were the gestures, as awkward as ever but now authoritarian to the point of arrogance. He spoke with his big head thrust aggressively forward at his listeners, and sometimes it would thrust forward even more and he would raise his hand and repeatedly jab a finger down at them. Sometimes he spoke with one hand on a hip, with his big head thrown back a little, shouting over their heads. His attitude went beyond mere inability to learn public speaking. His rare smiles were so mechanical that they seemed calculated to let the audience know they were mechanical, as if he wanted to let them know that he didn't need them, that he was the leader and they the followers. Early in the campaign, the ability of his advance men, the skill with which they were organized, and the waves of radio and newspaper ads which preceded each speech ensured large crowds at his rallies, and, spurred on by introductions from the best local orators (only the best were hired) and by the cheers of the Johnson campaign workers and federal and Brown & Root employees with which it was liberally seeded, the audience would welcome him with enthusiasm. As he spoke, though, the enthusiasm would steadily diminish; all too often, by the end of a speech the only cheers would be the cheers of his claque. His speeches were invariably long—too long, not infrequently an hour or more; the audience would begin to drift away relatively soon, and by the end of a speech it would often be embarrassingly smaller than it had been at the beginning. Word about Johnson's lack of speaking ability began to get around: despite the unprecedented publicity, crowds at Johnson's rallies began growing smaller than expected.

The difference was as noticeable after the speech as during it. During the 1937 campaign, a handshake from Lyndon Johnson had been an exercise in instant empathy; circulating among an audience with a face glowing with friendliness, he would keep a voter's hand in his for long minutes while he asked him for his help and told him that he too was a farmer, and wanted to help farmers; he had established rapport with the rapidity of a man who had a "very unusual ability to meet and greet the public." Now, in 1941, that ability was not often in evidence, for Johnson did not often choose to use it. In part, of course, this was because there were so many more voters to meet and greet now, but the difference went beyond that circumstance. When, after a speech, Johnson shook hands with voters lined up to meet him, he did so in a manner so mechanical that a friend from Washington commented on it—Justice Douglas happened to be in Big Spring to make a speech on the night Johnson spoke there. "As LBJ came to the close of his speech, he shouted, 'I want all you good folks of Big Spring to line up and shake the hand of the next Senator from Texas, Lyndon B. Johnson.'" And Douglas noticed that "Lyndon gave each of them two pumps with the arm and one slap on the back before greeting the next comer." The two-pump, one-slap technique was, in fact, one that Johnson had rehearsed; he boasted that, using it, he could, with his aides prodding the voters past him in a fast-moving single line, shake forty-two hands per minute. The method was efficient, but not effective. Far from establishing rapport with voters, he only managed to emphasize the feeling that he was not one of them, and that, while he might be asking for their help, he didn't really need it. And he would not allow a voter more than a hurried word or two, if that; Bill Deason says, "He never missed anybody on the street. … He shook hands with every one of them, but he never let them involve him in an argument. He moved fast. …"In fact, he seldom let them involve him in a conversation; the candidate moved through crowds in a cordon of officious aides who pushed people aside, none too gently, hurrying him along as he flashed mechanical smiles to left and right. And his aides were around him, and hurrying him along, because he had ordered them to. He wasn't always so coldly mechanical, of course. With "important people"—some local politician he recognized on the line of voters—his face would light up, and his greeting would be warm and unhurried, his handshake again as good as a hug. On some nights, his greeting of the public would also be warm, reminiscent of the campaigning of 1937, but such nights did not occur frequently during the first six weeks of the 1941 campaign. In 1941, his campaigning was as strikingly cold and mechanical as it had been strikingly warm and individual four years before; indeed at times his manner was almost contemptuous, making it clear that the individual to whom he was speaking simply didn't matter.

There was another difference between the two campaigns. Johnson was campaigning hard in 1941, was still putting in long days on the campaign trail, but there was a marked drop in his energy level. The desperation, the frantic, driving work was gone. He wasn't, in fact, even the hardest-working candidate. Gerald Mann in 1941 displayed the willingness Johnson had displayed in 1937: the willingness to do everything—to work day and night, without regard to hours—in order to win. The Attorney General was determined to go everywhere, to shake the hand of every voter who wanted to shake his. Mann had done it twice before, and in 1941, he was doing it again. Johnson's speeches were, thanks to money, reaching more voters, through being broadcast, but Mann was determined to overcome that difference with sheer physical effort. Johnson was making far fewer speeches, visiting far fewer towns. He concentrated largely on the big cities, where, of course, the votes were concentrated, and in the big cities he concentrated on the big men. Arriving, he would huddle, generally in a suite in the hotel in which he was staying, with the city's political and business bosses—in Texas, often the same men. Then he would make telephone calls or rest until the evening's rally. The pace was still grueling—the travel between cities made any campaign in Texas grueling—but it was much slower than the 1937 pace. It was the pace of a man confident of victory. Implicit in Johnson's delivery of speeches, and in his manner of greeting voters, was the feeling that with the mighty President behind him, he couldn't lose.

And, indeed, for the first six weeks of the campaign, the President's support, combined with Johnson's money and organization, suggested that Johnson's confidence was well founded. Although the May 12 Belden Poll showed Mann still far in front of Johnson, 28 percent to 9 percent, both his advisors and Johnson's—and the state's veteran political observers—felt that the poll was not accurately measuring the rapid shift toward Johnson, an opinion that would be confirmed by the May 26 poll, which found that Johnson had narrowed the gap from nineteen points to eight—19 percent for Johnson to 27 percent for Mann. Out on the campaign trail, Mann realized that the shift was continuing—and accelerating. He knew—and Austin knew—that Johnson was going to win.

THEN, HOWEVER, a twenty-ninth candidate, Governor O'Daniel, entered the race—and any resemblance to Johnson's first, victorious, campaign ended on the spot.

Until he had run for Governor three years before, W. (for Wilbert) Lee O'Daniel had never had the slightest connection with politics—not as a candidate, not as a campaign worker, not even as a voter; he had never cast a ballot. He was a flour salesman and a radio announcer. He had turned to radio—in 1927—to sell more flour. At the time, newly arrived in Texas, he was the thirty-seven-year-old sales manager for a Fort Worth company that manufactured Light Crust Flour. An unemployed country-and-western band asked him to sponsor it on a local radio station. The Light Crust Doughboys were not notably successful until one day the regular announcer was unable to appear, and O'Daniel substituted for him; finding that he liked the job, he decided to keep it.

He began whistling along with the band. He began composing tunes, and writing lyrics. Then he began writing little poems that he recited himself.

After a while not all the songs were about flour. They were tributes to Texas ("Beautiful, Beautiful Texas," "Sons of the Alamo") and to cowboys ("The Lay of the Lonely Longhorn"). There were hymns to an old horse and to "The Orphan Newsboy." Many were about motherhood: "The Boy Who Never Grew Too Old to Comb His Mother's Hair" was a particular favorite, as was another which began: "Mother, you fashioned me/ Bore me and rationed me. …" The songs were about current events: when the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped, the Light Crust Doughboys sang (to the tune of "My Bonny"), "Please Bring Back My Baby to Me"; when Will Rogers was killed, O'Daniel wrote: "Someone in heaven is thinking of you; someone who always was loyal and true; someone who used to be close to your side, laughed when you laughed and cried when you cried." More and more, the songs and poems were about religion—old-time, Fundamentalist, evangelical religion; "It was good for Lee O'Daniel, and it's good enough for me," the Doughboys sang.

He began giving short talks that were almost sermons. In 1938, most Texans still lived on farms, and even those farm boys who had recently arrived in the state's fast-growing cities were still farm boys, whose customs, tastes, vocabulary and view of life were those of country people. This view was simplistic, homespun, and very, very firm. A country boy himself—he had been raised in poverty on farms in Ohio and Kansas—W. Lee O'Daniel understood country people, and he knew how to appeal to their feelings and prejudices. He talked about how poor people should stick together and help each other, about how they should listen to their mothers; while the Doughboys played—pianissimo—"Marvelous Mother of Mine," he began one program: "Hello there, mother, you little sweetheart. How in the world are you anyway, you little bunch of sweetness? This is your big boy, W. Lee O'Daniel." And, while the band softly played "Shall We Gather at the River" in the background, he talked about religion: "You young folks who want jobs. You farmers who want crops. All of you folks who want things. How do you expect to get them when you are slapping your Savior in the face?" He urged his listeners to go to church, to love one another, to tell the truth, to avoid sin.

It was not the content of these rambling, informal little homilies that made them so popular, nor the soft violins playing familiar sentimental tunes in the background. It was the voice in which they were delivered. The voice was warm and friendly and relaxed—captivatingly natural. And yet it was also fatherly, soft but firm. It was a voice you could trust. For years, radio experts didn't understand this. As one reporter put it, they "didn't think very much of him. They figured it was the band that was putting the program over." But after a few years, the band broke up, and he replaced it with another, and then another, and the popularity of the show kept growing. In an era in which most radio messages were hard sell, the flour salesman from Fort Worth had, as one chronicler was later to put it, "either stumbled into, or deliberately figured out, that a microphone is an ear and not an auditorium—and you don't make public speeches to microphones, you don't shout into them any more than you would shout into your sweetheart's ear when you wanted to tell her you loved her. O'Daniel learned early that he had Texas by the ear and from that day on he cooed and caroled and gurgled into it." In 1935, he stopped selling flour for others and started selling it for himself. He organized his own company, Hillbilly Flour, and started his own show. It opened with a woman's request to him to "Please pass the biscuits, Pappy," and then, above the fiddles and guitars of the Hillbilly Boys, the voice of a "Pappy," friendly and fatherly, would be heard. On this show, there was less music and more O'Daniel—and the show's popularity leaped. By 1938, it had more listeners than any other daily show in the history of Texas radio. Most advertisers wanted their shows to be heard in the evening, when the men were home from work; O'Daniel wanted his show to go on when men weren't home; he wanted to talk to lonely housewives. And when his show went on, a half-hour past noon, he talked to them. He told them how to mend broken dishes and broken hearts. He told them how important families were. He told them how important they were—because they were mothers. "He talked to the housewives of Texas," one reporter wrote, "like a big brother and a pal, a guide, philosopher and friend." And "at twelve-thirty sharp each day a fifteen-minute silence reigned in the State of Texas, broken only by mountain music, and the dulcet voice of W. Lee O'Daniel." A newsboy who delivered his papers at midday in the little North Texas town of Decatur recalls that in summer his customers' windows were open, "and you never got out of the sound of the Hillbilly Boys—or of Pappy's voice."

Studio technicians who saw his show up close, and who saw him turn on, in an instant, laughter or tears, said, "He's just a born actor"; at the same moment in which he was bending into the microphone, intoning, in an emotion-choked voice, a tribute to an aged mother or an old horse, he might be imperiously motioning the band into precisely the right distance from the microphone for the background music it was playing. And, indeed, doubts about Pappy's sincerity were occasionally raised in print by commentators who noted that the first of his fervent paeans to Texas had been composed when he had hardly arrived in that state, having previously lived in Kansas, and that even now he was occasionally prone to minor errors about Texas history—such as confusing the Battle of San Jacinto with the Alamo. Those closest to him knew that his country-boy image was a pose; he was actually a business-college graduate and a businessman who dealt not just in Hillbilly Flour but in Fort Worth real estate; by 1937, while he was telling his listeners that he was a "common citizen," poor like them, his net worth had passed half a million dollars. Intimates also had some doubts about the depth of his religious feeling; although he was constantly urging his listeners to go to church, he seldom went himself. (Similar doubts were felt by one visitor to Pappy's radio studio. While the band was playing "That Old Rugged Cross," O'Daniel leaned over to the visitor and whispered, "That's what brings 'em in, boy. That's what really brings 'em in!") But O'Daniel's listeners, mesmerized by that friendly, sincere voice, had no doubts. They bought whatever he was selling. Hillbilly Flour was no different from any other flour; in fact, O'Daniel did not even manufacture it himself, simply buying flour ready-made from other mills and packing it in his bags. (He had designed the bags himself; in huge black letters, they bore the word guaranteed [against what, the bags didn't say]; they were also stamped, in vivid red, with the words, "Pass the biscuits, Pappy"; under that motto was a picture of a billy goat and a stanza he had composed: "Hillbilly music on the air/Hillbilly Flour everywhere;/ It tickles your feet, it tickles your tongue;/ Wherever you go, its praises are sung.") Soon, Hillbilly Flour was selling so fast that other millers realized that the surest way to sell their product was to let Pappy sell it as his own—which he was pleased to do, taking a hefty royalty on every bag. Pappy's listeners bought not only his flour but his suggestions; when he urged childless couples to adopt an orphan or two, every orphan asylum in Texas was shortly out of stock. And in 1938, on Palm Sunday, he asked his listeners if he should run for Governor. A blind man had asked him to do so, he said, and he wished they would write and tell him whether or not he should. He received, he said, 54,449 replies. All but three told him to run; these three said he shouldn't—because, they said, he was too good for the job.

O'Daniel's candidacy was not taken seriously by politicians or by the press, which noted his total lack of political experience (since he had not paid his poll tax, he was not even eligible to vote); reporters treated it as a joke, if they mentioned it at all; newspaper articles lumped this "radio entertainer" and flour salesman, who had announced that he would campaign (with the Hillbilly Boys) in a red circus wagon, with the numerous other fringe candidates who regularly people Texas politics. Then the campaign began. O'Daniel's first rally was held in Waco. When he drove up in the red wagon, the crowd waiting for him was possibly the largest crowd in the history of Texas politics—tens of thousands of people. Then the red wagon moved on to San Angelo, where one of Pappy's leading rivals, a veteran of thirty years in politics, was to draw 183 people to the Courthouse lawn. When Pappy arrived, 8,000 people were standing on that lawn.

His opponents, and the state's entire political establishment, concluded, as did the press and indeed most sophisticated and educated Texans, that the crowds had been drawn by the Hillbilly Boys, who were by now a popular country-and-western band starring banjo player Leon Huff, the "Texas Songbird"; for the campaign, a vocalist, "Texas Rose," had been added along with O'Daniel's sons, Pat, a fiddler, whom he called Patty Boy, and banjo-playing Mike (Mickey Wickey). People were coming to Pappy's rallies for entertainment, politicians said; they weren't coming for politics. The politicians were unable to take seriously a candidate who said his only platform was the Ten Commandments, who hadn't paid his poll tax, who was only barely a Texan, and who wasn't even a Southerner—who was, in fact, a carpetbagger from Kansas.

But the crowds weren't coming only for the band, they were coming for Pappy; "for years he's been talking to us on the radio," an elderly farmer explained. "He's been telling us things we like to hear because listening to 'em makes it seem easier to us to be poor folks." He was hours late for one rally, and a thunderstorm was raging at the site; for hours, 20,000 people stood in the rain waiting for him. When the circus wagon pulled in, the band played for a while under a big umbrella they had set up, but when Pappy stepped up to the microphone, he took it down. "If you folks can stand in the rain and listen to me, I sure can stand in the rain and talk to you," he said—and the roar of the crowd drowned out the thunder. And Pappy turned the politicians' attacks against them; if the Ten Commandments didn't satisfy them, he said, he would add another plank to his platform: the Golden Rule. "I didn't pay my poll tax because I was fed up with crooked politics in Austin and hadn't intended to vote for anyone this year," he said. A carpetbagger? Well, he said, he guessed that was true, but it was true for a lot of Texans; almost a million Texans had been born in other states, and the parents of many more had come to Texas from other states. Perhaps his crowning touch was his answer to the charge that he wasn't a Southerner. The reason he preferred to be known by his middle name, Lee, rather than by his first name, he said, was that his middle name had been bestowed on him in honor of the great Robert E. himself. One of his uncles had been a Union soldier mortally wounded in the war; during his final days he had been nursed so tenderly by a Southern family that he had sent a deathbed message to his sister that if she should ever marry and have a son, he should be named after Robert E. Lee. And after he had answered all the attacks, Pappy would say he didn't mind them; remember what the Scriptures say, he would tell his audience: "Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you and say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake." The Scriptures were a significant element of all O'Daniel's rallies, along with sacred music; his appearances resembled revival meetings more than political rallies. Texas was a wellspring of evangelism, and Pappy O'Daniel was tapping it. A Baptist minister compared him to Moses, because he could lead the nation back to the fundamentals of God and home.

If he had opened his campaign without a theme, moreover, he had two themes now. One of Texas' most knowledgeable political observers, analyzing O'Daniel's appeal, said that in part "He sensed the fears and the hopes of people before they actually had them." One fear that wasn't hard to sense—among the farm people who were O'Daniel's strength—was the fear of old age, when they would no longer be able to do farm work. O'Daniel proposed a simple state pension plan: thirty dollars a month to everyone over sixty-five. When he was asked if he planned to raise the necessary funds for this plan—approximately $100 million per year, four times the entire state budget—through new taxes, he said certainly not, and said it to the tune of "My Bonny":

We have builded our beautiful highways
With taxes from city and farm,
But you can't pyramid those taxes,
Without doing our Texas great harm.

Questions about financing details were drowned out by that tune, by another he wrote (to the tune of "Let Me Call You Sweetheart")—"Thirty Bucks for Mama"—and by his Mother's Day speech lamenting the Legislature's failure to act:

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and hello there, boys and girls. This is Lee O'Daniel speaking. This is Mother's Day from a sentimental standpoint only. Tired, forlorn, disappointed, and destitute Texas mothers several months ago thought they saw Mother's Day breaking in the East—but the golden glint preceding sunrise faded and faded again and again until today perhaps the practical Mother's Day is more obscure than ever before. But from the Texas plains and hills and valleys came a little breeze wafting on its crest more than 54,000 voices of one accord—we want W. Lee O'Daniel for governor of Texas. Why that avalanche of mail? Surely each and every one of you 54,000 folks could not have known that W. Lee O'Daniel is an only living son of one of those tired, forlorn, disappointed, and destitute mothers—a son who had played at that widowed mother's skirts, while during each day and way into the darkness of the nights she washed the dirt and grime from the clothes of the wealthy on an old worn-out washboard—for the paltry pittance of twenty-five cents per day—and that by that honest drudgery she provided corn bread and beans for her children which she had brought back with her from the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

His second theme was, if possible, even more effective. To his opponents' charge that since he had no platform, he had no reason for running, he replied that there was indeed a reason; the reason, he said, was them. The principal reason he was running, he said, was to throw them—the "professional politicians"—out of Austin.

This theme touched a deep chord in government-hating Texas, where distrust of politicians had been heightened by the dichotomy between the state's newfound and rapidly growing natural wealth and the poverty of its government. As one writer put it: "Texas was producing more oil, more gas … and more of a dozen things than any other state in the Union. It was producing more sulphur than all the rest of the world put together. … Under efficient and honest government, it certainly should have had a full treasury." Instead, the state's general fund was more than $19 million in the red. The treasury hadn't been emptied on behalf of its citizens; this state, first in the nation in natural resources, was last, or near last, in almost every significant category—education, library services, pellagra control—of state aid to improve the lives of its citizens. The fault, O'Daniel said, lay in the "professional politicians." He was no politician, he told his listeners, he was a "common citizen"—one of them. And if he was Governor, he told them, "we" would be Governor. His victory would be the victory of common citizens over professional politicians; his election he said, would be "the election of us. If I am elected Governor of Texas, we will be the Governor of Texas—we meaning the common citizens, of which I am one."

Press and politicians had predicted that once the novelty of seeing him in person had worn off, O'Daniel's audiences would get smaller. They got larger: crowds unprecedented in Texas politics—20,000, 30,000, 40,000—came to hear him in the cities. Crowds followed him from town to town. They barricaded the highway to force him to stop and speak to them. The man they saw was entirely unexceptional in appearance. He looked like a typical, fortyish Texas businessman, five-foot-ten and just a little portly, with a close-shaven face, and slicked-down hair. He would generally doff the jacket of his suit and speak in a white shirt and necktie. While his smile was broad, it was not often in evidence; his face was rather expressionless. But when he spoke, the voice was the voice of Pappy. A reporter watched its effect on about a thousand Texans gathered near Raymondsville. "It was amazing," he wrote. "They were fascinated. It was a typical summer day in the hottest part of Texas and there they stood, dripping sweat and drinking in [his] words. … Next to me … stood a young mother with her baby in her arms and her eyes glued to the face of the speaker. The baby squalled; she opened her dress and put the child to her breast without even looking at it. Every member of that outdoor congregation was equally attentive." And at the end of each of O'Daniel's rallies would occur another impressive scene. He asked his audience to finance his campaign. Saying, "We have not one dollar in our campaign fund," he told his listeners he was giving them "the opportunity to join the people's candidate against the professional politicians. You had better take that old rocking chair down and mortgage it and spend the money in the manner you think best to get your pension." Then his sons and his pretty daughter Molly would pass among the crowd holding little flour kegs labeled "Flour; not Pork," with a slot cut into them. And the audience crowded around his children, pushing and shoving to give dimes and quarters to Pappy. According to the press, the leading candidates in the race were two of the state's best-known politicians, onetime State Attorney General William McCraw and Colonel Ernest O. Thompson, chairman of the Railroad Commission. McCraw received 152,000 votes. Thompson got 231,000. O'Daniel got 573,000. Polling 30,000 votes more than the eleven other candidates combined, he won the Governorship without a run-off.

With O'Daniel's inauguration, the shape of his true philosophy became clearer, as did the identity of his true friends. During the campaign, he had repeatedly promised to fight to the finish any proposed sales tax, which would fall hardest on the small wage-earners (or "common citizens") whom he was allegedly championing; no sooner had he been inaugurated than he tried, unsuccessfully, not only to push through a sales tax (secretly drafted by his oilmen allies and the state's largest corporations) disguised under a different name, but to make it a permanent part of state government by incorporating it in a constitutional amendment (the amendment would also have permanently frozen—at ridiculously low levels—taxes on oil, natural gas and sulphur). As for his pension plan, he refused to discuss new taxes to pay for it—lest one of the new taxes turn out to be a tax on oil. And with this refusal, his pension plan was effectively dead. Almost totally ignorant of the mechanics of government, O'Daniel proved unwilling to make even a pretense of learning, passing off the most serious problems with a quip; asked once what taxes he was proposing to keep the deficit-ridden government's head above water, he replied that "no power on earth" could make him say. Ignoring Democratic party machinery, he tried to appoint to key government posts either men with absolutely no experience in the areas over which they were to be given authority or reactionaries, including members of the Jeffersonian Democrats, an extremist group that had bitterly opposed Roosevelt's re-election in 1936. He offered few significant programs in any area, preferring to submit legislation that he knew could not possibly pass, and then blame the Legislature for not passing it. He vetoed most significant programs passed by the Legislature. The Legislature in return rejected many of his nominees. His problems were exacerbated by his personality: that of a loner. Walking between the Governor's Mansion and the Capitol, he kept his head down to avoid having to greet passing legislators. (The legislators were not particularly anxious to greet him; one reporter, watching the Governor on his walks, called him "the loneliest man I ever saw.") The state's government was all but paralyzed.

But if legislators didn't like him, the voters did—and he knew it. When a reporter asked him, "What are you going to do about delivering the goods?" he held up his hand cupped like a microphone and said: "I've got my own machine. This little microphone." He knew why he had been elected. "Thanks to radio," he said. And he knew how to keep getting elected. He was still on the radio, broadcasting every Sunday morning from the Mansion while his hillbilly band played in the background: "Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and hello there, boys and girls, this is W. Lee O'Daniel, the Governor of Texas, speaking direct from this beautiful Governor's Mansion in Austin. …" He ran for re-election in 1940 because, he explained, he didn't want his pension plan to fall into the hands of demagogues. To the charge that he had betrayed the common citizens, he replied, "How can they say I'm against the working man when I buried my daddy in overalls?" When opponents talked about state financing, he talked about Communists and Nazi fifth-columnists—who he said had infiltrated industrial plants in Texas; he said he had lists of their names, but declined to make them public. Communists and racketeers had also infiltrated the state's labor unions, he said; he coined a phrase, "labor union leader racketeers." Touring the state in his new campaign vehicle—a white bus, with a papier-mâché dome of the Capitol mounted on top, that had been furnished him by one of his secret oilmen backers—he reiterated some version of that phrase over and over; recalls one observer, "He'd just drum, drum, drum with his little catch phrases: 'professional politicians,' 'pussy-footing politicians,' 'labor leader racketeers,' 'Communist labor leader racketeers'—you wouldn't think there would be that many ways to get 'labor leader racketeers' into a sentence. He just got up at his rallies, and said, in effect, 'I'm going to protect you from everything.'" And the people believed he would. In 1938, he had gotten 51 percent of the vote; in 1940, he got 53 percent, winning re-election as he had won election, by beating a field of well-known politicians without even a run-off. He had stormed out of Fort Worth waving a flour sack in one hand and the Decalogue in the other—and had become the greatest vote-getter in the history of Texas, a campaigner who had crushed every opponent he had run against. And during the week of May 15, 1941, the sixth week of the campaign, Lyndon Johnson learned he was running against him.

BEFORE JOHNSON HAD ENTERED the race, he had asked the Governor if he was going to run, and O'Daniel had assured him that he wasn't. The news that he actually was came on the heels of a Belden Poll that said if he ran, he would crush any opponent; according to this forecast, the Governor would get 33 percent of the vote to 9 percent for Johnson. Discounting those figures, Johnson's advisors assured him that the next poll would reflect the rapid increase in his popularity (as in fact, it did), but their Chief was beyond reassurance. He took to his bed. He himself was to recall that the shock "made me feel mighty bad. … I know that my throat got bad on me, and I had to spend a few days in the hospital." In fact, he was in the hospital for almost two weeks. Although the illness was described by John Connally as "pneumonia," another Johnson aide called it "nervous exhaustion," and Lady Bird, unknowingly echoing a phrase used by other women who had known Lyndon Johnson when his ambitions were threatened, says, "He was depressed, and it was bad." When doctors told Johnson he would have to be hospitalized, a violent scene erupted at his Happy Hollow Lane house. He insisted to Connally and Gordon Fulcher, an American-Statesman reporter working in his campaign, that his illness be kept secret—an insistence that the two aides considered irrational since he wouldn't be able to make scores of public appearances that had already been scheduled; in Connally's words, "He just threw a fit, went into a tirade, ordered us out of the house, said he never wanted to talk to us again." (His hospitalization—not in Austin, but, for reasons of secrecy, at the private Scott and White Clinic in Temple, fifty-seven miles away—was in fact kept quiet for almost a week; fiery stump speaker Everett Looney substituted for Johnson at speaking engagements, saying that the candidate was "busy with organizational work"—an excuse echoed by Marsh's cooperative American-Statesman. When, in the second week, the candidate's whereabouts became public knowledge, the American-Statesman explained that "the young congressman is getting a much-needed rest from congressional and campaign worries.") The situation became so serious that Wirtz abruptly resigned his Interior Department post and rushed back to Texas to run the campaign on the spot. There may even have been some doubt that Johnson would resume the campaign; there was quiet talk that if he didn't get out of the hospital soon, he might withdraw, using his illness as an excuse. "But," Lady Bird says, "he did get out."

He came out—on May 26—much thinner than he had gone in. Whatever had put him in the hospital had melted away most of the fat; although he still had a round little pot belly, he had lost so much weight that the shoulders of his suits slumped down, and his pants bagged away from his body. He came out changed in demeanor, too—as humble with voters now that he feared he was losing as he had been arrogant when he had felt sure he was winning.

And he came out fighting.

In election campaigns in college and for the Little Congress, he had demonstrated a pragmatism that had shaded into the morality of the ballot box, a morality in which any maneuver that leads to victory is justified. Now he displayed the same morality on a larger stage.

There was a ruthlessness to it. Federal loans and grants could give communities and community leaders projects they needed; previously, Johnson had been offering to help communities obtain such grants. Now he changed tactics, using not only the promise but the threat—naked and direct. Communities were told that if they didn't help him, he would see that they didn't get such grants. The threat was used on the leaders of small communities and of large cities alike. Because electricity could transform the lives of farmers, Johnson's influence with the Rural Electrification Administration was a powerful weapon in dealing with rural leaders. His liaison men were told to take off the kid gloves with these leaders. Two Johnson liaison men met, for example, with an influential farmer who was for Mann but whose community was desperate for electricity. Says one of the Johnson men: "We told him straight: 'If your box comes in for Johnson, you'll get the lines.'" If the box didn't come in for Johnson, they made clear, the electric lines that meant so much to the community's people would not be built. (The box came in for Johnson, and the community got electricity.) Fort Worth's leading booster, Amon Carter, publisher of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, wanted a number of federal projects. Stephen Early quoted him the price: support for Lyndon Johnson. (The Star-Telegram supported him in a front-page editorial, and Fort Worth got its projects.)

And there was a cynicism. He proclaimed himself the New Deal candidate, running under "the banner of Roosevelt." Few political organizations in the United States hated that banner more than San Antonio's "City Machine," the organization that had been Jack Garner's and that now was dominated by P. L. Anderson, the city's police and fire chief, who wore in his necktie a diamond as big as a peanut, and by the Kilday brothers (Paul, the Congressman, and Owen, the Sheriff), to whom the New Deal was "radicalism" and "Communism." The City Machine's bitter enemy in San Antonio was Mayor Maury Maverick. Maverick was, moreover, one of Johnson's oldest allies; he considered himself Johnson's friend. The day after Johnson emerged from the hospital, however, Maverick was defeated in his bid for re-election as Mayor by the City Machine candidate, C. K. Quin, and abruptly ousted from power in San Antonio. Before the week was out, Johnson had entered into a secret but firm alliance with the City Machine.

Anderson, Quin and the Kildays were not the only Roosevelt-haters with whom the Roosevelt candidate now allied himself. Roy Miller, who as Garner's campaign chief had led the "Stop Roosevelt" movement, is a convenient symbol; the great money-raiser was now quietly raising money for Lyndon Johnson. But at least Roy Miller was an old friend. Needing the power that they could put behind him in their cities and towns, Johnson made new friends. Telling them that in truth he believed as they did, that his campaign rhetoric had little relation to his real feelings, this "liberal" candidate enlisted, while continuing to wage a public campaign based entirely on support for Roosevelt, the private help of some of the most conservative men in Texas, reactionaries such as Dallas millionaire movie magnate Karl Hoblitzelle, who was shortly to organize an anti-labor crusade in Texas; when University of Texas economics instructors sought to speak in support of unions, Hoblitzelle played a leading role in having them fired.

THE CYNICISM was to be demonstrated also in his rallies.

Before O'Daniel had entered the race, Johnson and his advisors had loudly sneered—as did most educated Texans—at the Governor's style of campaigning, with his hillbilly band, his cheap theatrics and his refusal to discuss the issues; O'Daniel's rallies, they said—and Johnson was one of those who said it—were designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator among voters. Now Pass-the-Biscuits-Pappy was in the race, and Johnson no longer sneered at Pappy's rallies. He copied them.

There was one major difference. If the candidate was the centerpiece at an O'Daniel rally, he was not at Johnson's rallies. They were no longer even called "Johnson Rallies." As one newspaper put it, Johnson and his strategists "have at last tumbled to the fact that they can't get anywhere if they don't … do something to offset their lack of speaking abilities." The way to offset the candidate's lack of personal appeal, his strategists had decided, was to de-emphasize the candidate. The emphasis was shifted to his issue—Roosevelt—and to a tie-in theme, equally as popular as war grew closer: patriotism. His appearances were called "Patriotic Rallies." Most advertisements for them featured an "All-Out Patriotic Revue"; "a patriotic address by Congressman Lyndon Johnson" was generally in smaller type. And to minimize the candidate's "lack of speaking ability" he was surrounded with pageantry. If Johnson had earlier seemed to be equating Senatorial with "stuffy," that charge could certainly not be made about his rallies once O'Daniel had entered the race.

O'Daniel had made good use of a band. For Johnson's rallies, a six-man swing ensemble was chosen, by audition, from the best musicians in Houston, and named The Patriots. To offset the appeal of O'Daniel's Texas Rose, two-hundred-eighty-five-pound Sophie Parker, "The Kate Smith of the South," was hired, along with a thinner, notably shapely, country and western alto. Blackface comedians were hired, as were dancing girls, Pete Smith and His Accordion, a fifteen-year-old champion harmonica player and the best master of ceremonies in Texas, handsome, golden-voiced Harfield Weedin. These performers—together with a second musical organization, a twenty-four-man "big band" which was used at the largest rallies—were dressed in red, white and blue.

Johnson's rallies were held in civic auditoriums in the larger cities, and outdoors, in the courthouse square or on the bandstand in a park, in smaller towns. No matter what the location, the backdrop was the same: the painting of Franklin D and Lyndon B, larger than life, shaking hands. In a small county seat, the stage and that canvas backdrop would be set up in the square in front of the columns and portico of the old courthouse. As twilight fell, a pair of giant revolving searchlights would be switched on, their circling beams shooting up into the night as a beacon to the surrounding countryside, whose anticipation of the rally would have been honed by radio and newspaper ads. The old Model A's and Model T's would pull into the square, and line up against the far side, and farm families would get out, men in overalls, women in gingham dresses holding babies. By dark, the square would be full. Suddenly spotlights would be switched on, and looming over the people in their glare, framed by big American flags, would be the two huge figures, one, taller and thinner than the other, unfamiliar, but the other, with its heavy head and uptilted jaw, a part of their lives by now, the two figures dark and big against the red, white and blue stripes of the background. Beneath the figures were the words: ROOSEVELT AND UNITY—ELECT LYNDON JOHNSON UNITED STATES SENATOR. A blare of trumpets, and another spotlight would pick out the Patriots, patriotically resplendent in red carnations, white dinner jackets and blue trousers, and the band would swing into "Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here." And before the dazzled audience would unfold a show such as most of the audience had never seen. The Kate Smith of the South would emerge, all 285 pounds of her, clad in a snow-white evening gown that looked like a great white tent (decorated with red, white and blue ribbons), to sing "I Am an American."

With the patriotism of the evening thus established, it was time for the "jest folks" aspect, which was introduced by the more shapely vocalist, Mary Lou Behn, who would sing "I Want to Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart." Then it was time to bring in the South ("Dixie" by Ms. Parker) and of course Texas ("The Eyes of Texas" and "New San Antonio Rose" by Ms. Behn, "Rancho Grande" by Johnnie Lansy on his harmonica), and a touch of sex in the dancing girls. With these bases covered, the main part of the pageant began.

It was called "The Spirit of '41," and it was narrated by Weedin, who, he recalls, gave "my best imitation of Westbrook Van Voorhis narrating a 'March of Time' newscast." At first, Weedin's wonderfully evocative voice was sad, as he gave a grim recital of America's plight during the Depression. Then it turned dramatic: "On March 4, 1933, we, the American people, inaugurated our thirty-second President, Franklin D. Roosevelt!" (Music: HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN—UP TO FULL—THEN SEGUE TO STARS AND STRIPES FOREVER—ESTABLISH AND FADE TO BACKGROUND) "People Were eating chicken and ice cream again. We Americans had again found faith, courage and peace of mind under the leadership of a great Democrat and his loyal supporters. … We can thank God today that there were enough far-sighted men in Congress, loyal men, to see that these social reforms became the law of the land. … But [sad music, sad voice] things started to slip again. What did the people do? They re-elected Roosevelt!" (STARS AND STRIPES—SWELL TO FULL) Weedin's voice was happy: "There was more prosperity, more jobs! America was saved! Then [SEGUE TO OMINOUS DRUM ROLL] shadows began to gather over Europe. … War clouds gathered—clouds, however, that never hid the monster that raised itself up to gaze with covetous and fiendish eyes upon the democracies of nearby France and England. That same monster now searches out the democracy of the Western Hemisphere! The country needed someone it could trust. What did it do? It re-elected Roosevelt again!"

By this time, Weedin recalls, the audience was cheering and weeping with emotion. "Never have I seen anything other than a religious meeting get an audience so worked up." They were ready for the climax. Roosevelt cannot save Democracy all by himself. He needs "loyal supporters in Washington." In particular, he needs a loyal supporter from Texas—Texas, which gives America oil, sulphur, metals, wheat and vegetables, the soil for camps and landing fields, and is therefore vital to America's defense. "And, Mr. Roosevelt, on June 28, Texas will make one more contribution to national unity when we show undeniably that we want our President to have a man whose loyalty and cooperation has never been—and will never be—questioned. To you, the President, and to the Nation, we give your choice for Senator from Texas—Lyndon Baines Johnson!" Another large flag was unfurled on stage, to ripple dramatically in the currents from a small wind machine, the Patriots broke into "God Bless America," the Kate Smith of the South emerged on stage to sing it; as she entered the second chorus, Weedin and the rest of the cast lined up beside her and sang along, hands over their hearts; as they sang, they began marching in place, Weedin's knees enthusiastically pumping up almost to his chest, Sophie Parker's knees rising as high as they could go—and then Weedin introduced "that dynamic young, native Texan, six-foot-three, that high-riding Texan from the hills of Blanco County …," and as the claque and the rest of the audience roared, out onto the stage bounded the candidate, his arms outstretched high over his head in a useless attempt to stop the cheering, to stand—his chin uptilted as much like Roosevelt's as possible—waving his right arm in an awkward imitation of a Roosevelt wave.

NO LONGER was Lyndon Johnson trying to look Senatorial. Now he was trying to win. Except at a few big city rallies, the vest and the carnation were gone; the dark suits of Washington had been replaced by Texas white; the jackets of the suits hung open, or were taken off, exposing sweat-stained, rumpled shirts; his neckties were the ties of the Hill Country again, not of Capitol Hill; they were the ties of his first campaign, the unfashionably short mail-order neckwear of the countryman; their knots, loosened in the heat of campaigning, dangled from an open, sweat-wilted collar.

Unfortunately, however, Johnson's own speeches were usually more anti- than climax. Their theme was the right one before crowds who loved FDR: "I stand for all-out aid to President Roosevelt and his program on every front." Their prose was in keeping with the evening's ambience. Pledging to stand behind the President's efforts to prepare the nation for war, he said:

We must stop the beast of Berlin before he reaches America. Now if you want your Senator to go up there to Washington to snoop and sneak and snipe at your Commander-in-Chief, don't vote for Lyndon Johnson. Because he'll always support your Commander-in-Chief…

The most important job today in our nation is all-out American preparation. We must beat Hitler. We must keep aggressors from American shores. If not, we shall writhe under the dictator's heel as more than a dozen formerly free European nations now are writhing.

All other considerations must bow to the need for preparedness, Johnson said. Strikes by defense workers must be banned, he said; all too often, they were inspired by foreign agitators. "Every fifth-columnist, Communism, Nazism, all proponents of every 'ism' except Americanism must be wiped out." His words were punctuated by shouts from his claque—in the right places. "Do you want another 'no' man like Wheeler or Lindbergh?" (No! No!) "Or do you want a man who can say 'yes' to the President, and to whom President Roosevelt can say 'yes'?" (Yes! Yes!) "I am proud to be a 'yes man' now, and my critics can make the most of it! I am a 'yes' man because I have placed my flag with the flag of Roosevelt and unity!" (Applause. Cheers.) After half an hour or so of speaking, when the candidate would ostentatiously throw aside his prepared speech (which he had finished) and say, "Now let's get down to my country-boy style of talking," the claque would applaud and cheer some more. But the candidate's appearance diminished the effect of his words. Without the concealment of a suit jacket, his little pot belly and his big rear end made him a somewhat comical figure. He had always been very awkward when he ran, and now that awkwardness was on display when he ran out onto the stage as Weedin whipped up the applause. When he had to run up steps to reach the stage, his rear end jutted out so far that small boys in the audience audibly snickered. He practiced endlessly trying to wave his right arm as Roosevelt did, but the gesture emerged so rigid as to be more Hitlerian than Rooseveltian. When speaking, he still jabbed his finger at the audience, and bellowed at them, and when he wasn't bellowing, he delivered his text in a harsh, very loud monotone so that his demeanor was not only awkward but aggressive. During his congressional campaign, he had been able to effect a marvelous empathy with an audience, as long as it was only a few handfuls to whom he could relate individually, but utterly unable to do so when the crowd was larger, and in this Senate campaign all crowds were larger. His problems were especially marked during his "country-boy style of talking." Lyndon Johnson's real country-boy style was emotional and forceful; the "country-boy" talking he did before these larger crowds was stilted and rehearsed; even the stories about his father's homilies emerged flat and insincere. Night after night, the enthusiasm of the crowd—whipped up to fever pitch for the candidate's appearance—crested as he ran out on stage and drained away, moment by moment, thereafter. In fact, not long after Johnson began speaking, the audience began leaving; farm families started drifting back to their cars; small boys started playing tag among the automobiles that remained in the square.

Another attraction was therefore added to the rallies—one that astonished even Texas political observers who thought they had seen everything.

The attraction was money. It was given away to the audience. In keeping with the "patriotism" theme, it was handed out in the guise of Defense Bonds and Stamps; every person who attended was given a ticket, and a drawing was held on stage to determine the winners. Although Johnson's ads were careful to explain that the lottery would be held in the interest of the national defense, they emphasized the pecuniary more than the patriotic. A typical full-page advertisement (this one in the Williamson Sun) said that, at the "Big Patriotic Rally in San Gabriel Park Tuesday Night," not only would there be "a patriotic review" and "band music" but (in bold black letters) $25.00 IN DEFENSE TO BE GIVEN AWAY. "12 defense stamps, in the amount of $25.00 will be given away free to those in attendance by local citizens who are interested in national defense. Numbered tickets will be distributed at the rally. Be sure to get yours. Get a ticket for each member of the family. The prizes: One Saving Stamp, $10.00 Value; One Saving Stamp, $5.00 Value; 10 Saving Stamps, $1.00 Value." If, in rural areas, as little as $25 was considered sufficient to attract the citizenry, in cities the amounts were higher: $100 in Port Arthur, for example, $175 in Austin.

The new attraction worked. Night after night, the American-Statesman commented, Johnson was now "addressing thousands where three weeks ago he was talking to hundreds." To keep the audience at the rally until its end—despite the dullness of the candidate's speech—the bonds and stamps were not distributed until after the speech. The squirrel cage device from which the winning tickets would be drawn was placed in a prominent position on the stage, and it stood there all the time Johnson was talking. Its presence had the hoped-for effect: the crowds stayed to the end. As the State Observer noted in a description of a typical Johnson rally, despite the heat and the swarms of bugs attracted by the spotlights, 15,000 persons "stood crowded together" until Johnson had finished speaking. "They all kept their eyes on the speakers' stand. They jealously guarded hundreds of lottery tickets. They were all waiting for the free money."

The reaction of Texas journalists to "free money" was summed up in the Granger News' two-word comment: "Glory be!" National journalists who came to Texas to watch the campaign were more caustic. "At political rallies, Johnson drew the crowds by handing out defense bonds and stamps, thereby demonstrating his patriotic fervor and simultaneously proving that he was a handy man to have around between paydays," wrote Jack Guinn in the American Mercury.

National journalists were somewhat startled by the campaign as a whole. "The current election campaign in Texas to fill the late Morris Sheppard's seat in the United States Senate contains so many elements of the ridiculous that at times it is difficult to take it seriously," wrote Roland Young in The Nation. Time magazine called the campaign the "biggest carnival in American politics."

But beneath that carnival atmosphere, a grim battle was taking place.

Two Johnson tactics much more subtle than his rallies were proving much more effective.

One was based on the devotion to O'Daniel and the faith in Pass-the-Biscuits-Pappy among the poor people of Texas. Lying in the hospital, Lyndon Johnson had devised a stratagem that made O'Daniel's popularity work against him. Johnson's thousands of workers—not only his teams of paid, expert campaign workers but the REA employees bringing electricity to the farms, the meter readers of the electric co-ops, the soil-conservation experts and county agents and other federal employees who spent their days traveling from farm to farm—were told to use a new argument: Pappy O'Daniel is a great Governor and a great man. We need him in Texas. Let's keep him in Texas.

This argument was particularly persuasive when it was linked to pensions. Dozens of weekly newspapers—the only source of news to so many rural families in Texas—made the link by reprinting a Fort Worth Press article sent to them by Johnson headquarters, under a headline suggested by the headquarters: WILL THE OLD FOLKS KILL THEIR GOLDEN GOOSE?

Aesop, the old fable teller, may have called the turn on the Texas Senate race.

Remember the folks who killed the goose that laid the golden eggs—and then there weren't any more eggs?

… If O'Daniel is elected Senator he can't be Governor any more. He will have to resign. … If the people elect O'Daniel Senator they may be killing their pension hopes. O'Daniel can't be a pension-giving Governor and a U.S. Senator at the same time.

Pappy is fighting for our pensions, a county agent would remind a farm family who had invited him to share their dinner. The Legislature is keeping us from getting those pensions. If Pappy leaves for Washington, there won't be anyone left in Austin to fight for pensions. We need him in Austin. But the argument was effective even when it wasn't linked to pensions. For to many of O'Daniel's faithful, the strongest reason for not electing him to the Senate was their love for him. They didn't want him to leave them, to go to faraway Washington; they couldn't bear to lose him. The argument was working. Recalls one Johnson campaign worker: "I said, 'O'Daniel's made us a good Governor—let's keep him there.' I said, 'Don't send Pappy way up there to Washington with all those professional politicians.' And that argument really touched. They loved Pappy. They didn't want him to go away."

O'Daniel's campaign manager, his Secretary of State, William J. Lawson, saw that the argument was indeed "touching." The evidence was piled on a long table in Lawson's office in the Capitol. On his Sunday-morning broadcasts, O'Daniel was, both before and after he announced for the Senate, using the tactic that had worked so well for him in his previous campaigns: asking his listeners to write and tell him if they thought he should run for Senator. As always, the response was immense. It would begin coming in Tuesday morning, and would keep coming on Wednesday. Each delivery brought so many letters and postcards to the Post Office branch in the Capitol that Lawson would have to recruit a crew of porters to haul the big mail sacks back to his office. Secretaries would go through the mail, dividing into separate piles on the table the replies urging him to go to the Senate and those urging him not to.

At first, the piles were very unequal. Lawson, who counted them, says, "At first, it was maybe ninety to ten that he should run for the Senate. 'We'll support you. Anything you want, we'll help you.'" This response duplicated that of 1938 and 1940, and O'Daniel was sure it would continue, and that the result of those campaigns would be duplicated in 1941. "He got a little smug," Lawson says. "He didn't think he was going to have to [actively campaign]." But it didn't continue. The pile urging O'Daniel to run began, day by day, to grow smaller, the pile urging him not to began to grow higher. One day, to Lawson's shock, the latter pile was bigger than the former. And, day by day, this trend continued.

"I didn't see any reason why it should change, in just two or three weeks, like this," Lawson says. Although he had previously taken little interest in the campaign—believing none was necessary—"I went down to the hotel lobbies and the restaurants" frequented by politicians, "and over and over again, I heard the same explanation: 'Well, Bill, here's what's doing it. It seems that Lyndon Johnson's people in all the counties had started this rumor: "O'Daniel is a great Governor. Why send him to Washington? Keep him here. He'll be more valuable here."' Johnson's previous arguments had been too complicated for the people out there to grasp. But just a little simple lie—'He's doing more for you than any Governor ever did; it'd be silly for us to vote to send him to Washington'—they could grasp that. And that spread like wildfire."

Johnson saw that it was touching. After just a week back on the campaign trail, he had sufficient confidence in the argument to use it publicly. Over statewide radio hook-ups, he pointed out that although the federal government would match a state's contribution to Social Security up to $20 per recipient per month, Texas, because of the state's empty treasury, had been putting up only $4.75. Instead of a possible $40 per month, he told his listeners, "Your pension checks will average $9.50" until the state's contribution rises. "The best thing you can do is to keep your Governor on the job until you get that forty dollars a month, and while he is holding that end up for you here, Lyndon Johnson, as your Senator in Washington, can work with President Roosevelt toward" increased federal pensions. Waving a twenty-dollar bill before the audience at his rallies, he said, "Your Governor can't raise that money in Washington." So effective was the argument that Johnson's strategists considered printing up a new bumper sticker, KEEP PAPPY IN TEXAS, but that tactic was considered too blatant.

Soon there was harder evidence that this argument was touching. In McLennan County, for example, a mass meeting of local pension clubs and "friends of Governor W. Lee O'Daniel" was called "to discuss a resolution urging the Governor's withdrawal from the campaign," in order, a spokesman for the clubs said, "to ensure that 'a friend of the pensioner' would remain in the Governor's chair."

THE GOVERNOR HIMSELF was hardly aware of this threat to his plans. With crucial appropriations stalled by a hostile Legislature, the state government was in disarray, and he had pledged not to leave Austin until the bills were passed and the Legislature had adjourned. At the end of May—two weeks after he had announced he was running—he still had not made a single campaign appearance; his campaigning consisted solely of his Sunday-morning broadcasts. Not out among the people, he was not aware of their feelings. Nor did he see any reason to be; "he had expected to win just by announcing," Lawson said. When Lawson told him he was behind both Johnson and Mann, his reaction was disbelief; it wasn't until he had checked around the state himself that he found that Lawson was correct. "He didn't like to lose," Lawson said. He told his Secretary of State to get the campaign in gear.

But Johnson's second subtle tactic—one quieter (and even more effective) than the first—kept those gears from turning. The legislative session had already dragged on far longer than normal; and O'Daniel, sure it would not last much longer, announced that he would open a statewide speaking tour on June 2 in Waco. But working for Johnson behind the scenes in Austin were two men with a lot of legislators in their pockets: Alvin Wirtz, 1940 head of the Roosevelt campaign in Texas, and Roy Miller, 1940 head of the Stop Roosevelt campaign in Texas. The crucial appropriations bills remained unpassed, and every attempt to have the Legislature adjourn—or recess—was defeated. The Governor brought Molly, Mickey-Wickey, his hillbilly band and his big sound truck with the Capitol dome on top to Waco on the 2nd, but immediately after that one speech, he had to return in it to Austin. Canceling his speaking dates for the following week, he said he hoped he would be able to start his statewide tour by June 9. During the week of the 2nd, however, no fewer than eight separate plans for adjournment or recess were presented—and if one was approved by one house, it was disapproved by the other. The Governor had to cancel the next week's engagements, too—and then the next; the 1941 Legislature was staying in session longer than any other Legislature in the state's history. On June 16, desperate, he announced that he was sending his children out in his place, each with half the hillbilly band; Molly, speaking in Waco the next day, said that "Dad got a raw deal from the Legislature, which for some unknown reason, won't adjourn." But the kids and the band were no substitute for Pappy himself, and "many voters were resentful after he had made engagements and cancelled them." As late as June 18, just ten days before the election, he still hadn't gotten out on the road. Pappy O'Daniel was perhaps the greatest campaigner in the history of Texas—but Lyndon Johnson wasn't letting him campaign.

AND ALWAYS there was the money.

The "free money" given away at the "Patriotic Rallies" was a very minor item in their cost. There were the salaries of Harfield Weedin, and of the two singers, the harmonica player, the accordion player, and the band (or bands). There was the cost of transporting the cast—and the flags and the huge, rolled-up canvas of the Galveston handshake—around the state, which meant the rental of a bus and the salary of a driver. Weedin had been wary when he was approached to put the show together. "I had worked in Texas politics before, so the cash was always in advance," he says. But he had learned quickly that he could stop worrying: the Lyndon Johnson campaign was unlike other political campaigns. There was money available to pay for the talent and the transportation—and for much more besides. Johnson wanted big crowds, so he wanted newspaper advertising before each rally, and soon a Houston advertising agency was "up to their ears with artwork and getting the necessary plates and mats prepared." And when, on May 26, Weedin and his troupe arrived in Wichita Falls for the first rally, he got a better indication of the financial resources at Johnson's disposal. "Full pages had been purchased in each of the Wichita Falls papers," and in every weekly newspaper for a hundred miles around. (Weedin also noticed that in the ads for the "All-Out Patriotic Revue" presented by "Friends of Roosevelt," "not one word was mentioned that there would also be an address by Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson, candidate for Senator from Texas.") And, Weedin adds, "Naturally, Congressman Johnson's words were too important to be wasted upon only the few thousand people assembled at the rally, so his speeches were always broadcast—and on a tremendous number of stations which joined together to form a network for each occasion." For six weeks, the Lyndon B. Johnson Show was on the road ("Big Spring, Eastland, Abilene, Denison, Waco, Dallas, Amarillo, Austin, San Angelo, Corpus Christi, Harlingen, Marshall, San Antonio, and so on, night after night—Man! Texas is a big state! One hop alone, from Harlingen to Marshall, was over eight hundred miles," Weedin recalls), and for six weeks the money never ran out. In fact, more and more was spent. A press agent, an ace reporter from the Houston Post, was hired, and advance men were attached to the entourage. And when Johnson's campaign managers realized that Weedin was a celebrity local politicians wanted to meet, he was removed from the bus and flown (along with the press agent) from stop to stop in an oilman's ten-seat Lockheed with built-in bar so that he would arrive in advance of the troupe and could entertain the local VIP's in a hotel suite stocked with whiskey. Weedin was very impressed; campaign funds of unprecedented magnitude "sprang from nowhere," he says.

Every aspect of the campaign was being carried on in a similarly unprecedented scale: the banks of typists and telephoners on the hotel mezzanine in Austin, and in campaign headquarters in El Paso and Lubbock and San Angelo and Houston and Corpus Christi, the posters and placards with which, as one observer put it, Lyndon Johnson seemed to be trying to "plaster the state," the billboards, of which new crops blossomed weekly, the newspaper advertising. The impact of the Johnson money was particularly strong on the airwaves, of course. Radio was rapidly becoming the most potent political weapon, but it was a weapon that could be wielded only by those who could afford it. Although Johnson's radio campaign had already been on a scale new to Texas, he wanted that scale expanded—greatly expanded. Mayor Tom Miller was as strong a speaker as he himself was weak. After hearing Miller make one particularly effective speech, he told the Mayor he wanted it on the air every day "from now until election. Please contact John Connally and arrange to make that speech this week over statewide hook-up." Roy Hofheinz, the young Harris County Judge who was one of his campaign managers, was a great speaker; Johnson wanted Hofheinz on the air more often. He wanted other supporters on the air more often. And he wanted advance advertising for those speeches—plenty of advertising.

So fast was the Johnson campaign spending money that, despite the lavishness with which the campaign had been funded, the money began to run out. At one point in late May the twelve teams almost had to be brought in off the road; so low were funds that the owner of the rented sound trucks sent dunning letters to Johnson headquarters. Therefore more money had to be raised. Some was raised in Washington—with the help of a tactic suggested by Wirtz: a recording was made of an O'Daniel speech criticizing Roosevelt, and it was sent to Washington to be played for Corcoran and Rowe, where it had the desired effect of intensifying their enthusiasm for O'Daniel's defeat. Envelopes stuffed with cash cascaded into Texas. So much money was sent, in fact, that Johnson sometimes lost the personal control of its use that was so important to him. Corcoran "went up to the garment district and raised money for Johnson, and we … sent it to Texas" via one of the men active in his campaign, Rowe says. "Johnson called and said: 'Where's that money? I need it!'" Told the identity of the courier, Johnson grew upset, apparently because the man had authority to distribute funds on his own. Rowe recalls Johnson saying: "Goddamn it—it'll never get to me. I'll have to meet him at the plane and get it from him." The fate of one envelope in particular caused the candidate to erupt in wrath. On June 20, Walter Jenkins, who had remained in Washington to run Johnson's office there, left for Texas on Braniff's midnight flight. He was carrying between $10,000 and $15,000. The money, collected by a Washington lobbyist from Texas, was in small bills; "I went down to Texas carrying this money in bills stuffed into every pocket," Jenkins recalls.

When the plane arrived in Austin the next morning, Jenkins immediately went to campaign headquarters, "and the first guy I saw was Charles Marsh." Marsh said: "You got that money? Well, Lyndon has told me to take it."

Aware of Marsh's influential role in the campaign, Jenkins assumed that Johnson did indeed want the publisher to have the money, and he gave it to him. Actually, however, Johnson did not. Marsh wanted to use the money for advertising; Johnson wanted it for other purposes, but knew that if the imperious publisher got his hands on it, he would spend it his way. The realization that he had made a mistake dawned on Jenkins when Johnson asked him for the money, and, informed that it had been given to Marsh, exploded. Jenkins recalls that "I caught hell from Mr. Johnson," who, Jenkins says, told him that, having been entrusted with a large sum of money, "You turn it over to the first person you see!"*

Conservative lobbyists and New Deal strategists—both groups were sending cash to Texas to help Lyndon Johnson. This unanimity was displayed in New York, too. The liberal garment center leaders sent more money—and so did New York conservatives who were interested in power; men who hated Roosevelt and what he stood for, but who needed an "in" at the White House and who had been told by Ed Weisl that the way to get it was to back Lyndon Johnson. Principle or power—both found expression in cash for Lyndon Johnson.

To obtain most of his new supply of money, however, no tactic was needed. For most of it came from Brown & Root. That firm had made so large an investment in the Johnson campaign already that a further investment was only logical, and it was not only logic that dictated. Herman Brown had thrown himself into the fight, and, as his lobbyist Frank Oltorf says, "Herman didn't want to lose any fights." Yet it was beginning to look as if he might lose this one. He summoned the "subs" again. Describing Herman's demeanor in meetings with contractors, men familiar with these meetings say that he would say, "I'm putting you down for a thousand"—or two thousand, or five. And if someone balked, Herman would look at the man, and say, very quietly, "Now listen, we've made you a lot of money." And he got the sums he wanted. He called in his insurance man, Gus S. Wortham, president of the American General Insurance Company of Houston, and Wortham subsequently gave cash to an American General employee who took it to radio stations, and paid for Johnson political broadcasts with it. He distributed money to men who knew how to use money in Texas: $4,000 to Roy Miller, for example.

Herman Brown didn't ask others to give if he wasn't giving himself, although he appears to have had some qualms about what he was doing. Sometime during these months, a member of the Brown & Root hierarchy called in one of the firm's tax attorneys, and asked him if political contributions were deductible expenses. The attorney told him what he already knew—that they were not. But Brown made the contributions anyway: giving more "legal fees" to attorneys who passed the money on to the campaign, more "bonuses" to executives who did the same thing.

With the campaign roaring to its climax, caution was flung to the winds. Some $7,581 was paid to a sub-contractor, W. L. Trotti, as "rental" for some equipment; Trotti placed the funds in a dormant bank account, and made withdrawals to "cash." An IRS agent who later investigated believed the cash was given to the campaign—which would be a more transparent device than any previously used. Herman even drew money himself—$5,000 in one instance—and gave it to the campaign through Austin banker Walter Bremond, Jr. No tactic was necessary for Lyndon Johnson in dealing with Herman Brown. All he had to do was ask. No one knows how much Brown & Root gave to the 1941 Lyndon Johnson campaign for Senator, and no one will ever know, but the amount was in the neighborhood of $200,000. No one knows how much was spent in total in that campaign, and no one will ever know. But in an era in which the cost of a typical Texas political campaign ran in the tens of thousands of dollars, Lyndon Johnson spent hundreds of thousands of dollars—according to one estimate, half a million dollars. Johnson's first campaign for the House of Representatives had been one of the most expensive congressional campaigns in the history of Texas. His first campaign for the Senate was the most expensive campaign in the history of Texas. Even in a state in which money had always been a significant factor in politics, his use of money to obtain political office was unprecedented.

More significant than the amount of money was its availability. Asked how much money Johnson was given in 1941, Ed Clark says flatly: "All he needed. If he had $50,000 or $100,000 more, that wouldn't have mattered. He had as much as he asked for."

SOME VOTES for Lyndon Johnson were being purchased more directly, for it was not only the size of Texas that made campaigning so expensive but the ethics that pervaded politics in entire sections of it.

One of these sections was San Antonio, and the area south of it to the Rio Grande. "The way to play politics in San Antonio," as John Gunther was to write, "is to buy, or try to buy, the Mexican vote, which is decisive." The city's West Side was a gigantic slum, containing perhaps 60,000 residents, who were paid, Gunther says, "probably the lowest wages in the United States"—for pecan shelters (San Antonio was the "Pecan Capital of the World) an average of $1.75 per week. It might have been supposed that the support of these disadvantaged people would go to advocates of the New Deal which was attempting to improve the lot of the disadvantaged, but in fact they voted at the direction of their leaders—who were motivated mainly by cash. Some of it they passed out to individual voters: two, three, or, perhaps, five dollars per voter. A single payment might not be enough—which inspired what Gunther calls a "cruel little joke, 'An honest Mexican is one who stays bought.'" Explains San Antonio Postmaster Dan Quill: "First [some months before the election] you had to pay their poll taxes. And that was a very dangerous thing to do because they might take your money, and then on Election Day some guy might come along and give them five dollars, and they'd vote the other way—with your poll taxes." Constant precautions were therefore necessary; in many of San Antonio's "Mexican boxes" election supervisors would, in violation of law, stand alongside each voter in the voting booths to make certain that each vote was cast as paid for. Even the supervisors might take a candidate's money and deliver the precinct's votes to another candidate, who had paid more (or had paid later); the supervisors had to be watched by other men, more trusted men, usually from the candidate's own staff. On Election Day, careful candidates had men "riding the polls" in San Antonio—driving from polling place to polling place to make sure the candidate was getting what he had paid for. Northern liberals might rhapsodize, as Sherwood Anderson did after one Maverick election victory, that he had, through implementation of New Deal policies, bought the West Side's votes in a "new and legal way," but in fact the use of cash had played a not inconsiderable role in his victories—and in 1941, he had learned again the crucial factor in San Antonio elections the hard way; "Maury Maverick won when he carried the West Side, and lost when he didn't carry the West Side," Gunther was to write; in 1941, this champion of the New Deal had been heavily outspent by the "City Machine" on the West Side, and had lost it and the election.

In 1941, Lyndon Johnson needed the West Side, for he was very unpopular on the North Side, among the city's large, and conservative, Catholic population; the San Antonio Rotary Club had refused even to let him address it during the campaign. He knew, of course, how to get the West Side; he had himself participated in the purchase of votes on the most basic level when, still a congressional secretary, he had sat in a hotel room handing dollar bills and five-dollar bills to Mexicans on behalf of Maury Maverick. Now he had to buy in large lots.

He had a good man handling the West Side. Dan Quill had been handling such jobs for a long time. He had begun in 1931, when Kleberg ran for the first time, and Roy Miller gave him money and told him he was responsible for one of the Mexican "boxes." "It was right in the heart of Mexican Town" in an area dangerous for an outsider even to walk through, the tough little Irishman was to recall forty years later. "That was a real terrible slum." But he moved there "so I could be eligible to be an election supervisor there. I moved into a house there with a school janitor who was also going to be a supervisor. We were scared; we locked the doors. …" But on Election Day, he carried his box, and he had been carrying key Mexican boxes for the next ten years. He knew every trick of the trade—and he knew how much money was needed to get Lyndon Johnson San Antonio's West Side vote. "We figured we needed ten thousand dollars," he says—and that sum was provided.

The reason Quill didn't need more—$10,000 was a comparatively small investment in the West Side—was Lyndon Johnson's new alliance with the "City Machine." The alliance was kept secret, so secret that most of Johnson's closest advisors didn't know about it, but the alliance was solid. With the Kildays, Mayor Quin and Sheriff Anderson on Johnson's side, Quill was excused from responsibility for those Mexican boxes which they controlled—and which would be delivered to Johnson by them; "If the leader [in a box] was a deputy sheriff [for example], we figured he'd control his precinct. We didn't spend any money there." San Antonio, third largest city in Texas, was a key to any statewide election. Johnson may have been unpopular there, but, thanks to his foresight when still a congressional secretary years before, now, running for statewide office, he could be sure of Quill's 1,500 votes "who ought to follow in the steps of the Postmaster." Now he was confident that San Antonio would give him about 10,000 more.

South of San Antonio, south even of Cotulla, was "The Valley."

In the counties that bordered the lower reaches of the Rio Grande, which separated the United States from Mexico, and in the counties which adjoined them to the north—the counties of the South Texas brush country—votes were delivered en masse to a degree true of perhaps no other region in the United States.*

Only because of the drawing of a border were these counties part of the United States. More than half their inhabitants were Mexican not merely by descent but by culture; they spoke only Spanish, and clung to the customs of their homeland across the river; their tiny, dozing towns, strung like beads along it, "bore," one traveler wrote in 1940, "an appearance as foreign as their names"—San Ygnacio, Santa Maria, La Paloma, Los Indios. Their houses were thatched adobe huts or jacales, one- or two-room structures of willow branches daubed with mud, around which swarmed goats and chickens and children. In the larger cities—Laredo, Harlingen—they lived in shacks in sprawling slums; entering these slums was like entering a foreign city. Largely illiterate, they had, as V. O. Key, Jr., noted, "only the most remote conception of Anglo-American governmental institutions." One custom prevalent in the near-feudalistic regions of Mexico from which they came was that of dependence on a local leader, the patron or jefe; "from time immemorial, they had given obedience … to the head or overseer of the ranch," one observer wrote. They continued this custom in America. In this region of great ranches, where so many of the Mexicans worked—the King Ranch, which extended over four of the counties in this region, alone employed more than 700 vaqueros—el patron was often the ranch owner. The cattle barons, Weeks wrote, "established themselves as lords protector of those Mexicans who became their tenants and ranch hands." The resulting relationship was feudal, with the vaqueros giving "unquestioning loyalty to the ranch owners and regarding] their wishes as law, the only law he knows." But some of these patrons were political bosses—ruthless, in some cases vicious, men who stalked the streets of the dusty little towns in their domains surrounded by armed, unshaven pistoleros; politics was violent in the Valley. A reporter from Philadelphia who journeyed there in 1939 found "as hardbitten a political crowd … as Texas ever saw … Each [county] has its own iron-fisted boss, who would make Philadelphia's Jay Cooke or New York's Jimmy Hines look like pikers." The most famous among them, the Valley's Boss of Bosses, was George Parr, son of Archie Parr, the legendary Duke of Duval, and now Duke in his own right. The Parrs had ruled Duval County since 1912, when Archie sided with the Mexicans after an "Election Day Massacre" in San Diego, the county seat, had left three of them dead. But others, less well known, had been in power even longer. Among the petty despots who ruled along the Rio Grande—Judge Bravo of Zapata County; Judge Raymond of Webb (a figure, one chronicler wrote, so secretive that "little is known of him except rumor," who ruled Laredo "with an iron hand"), Sheriff Chub Pool of La Salle; the "Guerra boys," four brothers who ran Starr County—were some whose families had held power in their dusty duchies for half a century.

On Election Day, Mexican-Americans were herded to the polls by armed pistoleros, sometimes appointed "deputy sheriffs" for the day; each voter was handed a receipt showing he had paid his poll tax (usually these taxes had been purchased by the jefes months before and kept in their safes to, as Key puts it, "insure discipline and orderly procedure"). In some precincts, these voters were also handed ballots that had already been marked; according to one description,

The Mexican voter … was marched to the polls, generally by a half-breed deputy sheriff with two six-shooters, a Winchester rifle, and a bandoleer of ammunition, to perform the sovereign act of voting. He entered the polls, one at a time, was handed a folded ballot which he dropped in the box, was given a drink of Tequila, and then was marched out, where he touched the hand of one of the local political bosses or some of his sainted representatives.

In other precincts, matters were managed less crudely: the voters were told whom to vote for, but were allowed to mark their own ballots; of course, the guards accompanied them into the voting cubbyholes to ensure that the instructions were followed. Even if the voter was allowed to cast his ballot in secrecy, he had little chance of escaping unnoticed if he disobeyed instructions; each ballot was given a number that corresponded to the number on a tear-off sheet attached to the ballot, and a voter had to sign his name on the sheet before it was torn from the ballot and the ballot cast. This procedure had been enshrined in Texas law ostensibly to keep a person from voting more than once, but it also allowed the election judges to know—by matching the tear sheet to the ballot—how a citizen voted. Some jefes dispensed with all this bother; an attorney for one of them, who let his voters keep their poll tax receipts, recalls his procedure: "Go around to the Mexicans' homes. Get the numbers of their [poll tax] receipts. Tell them not to go to the polls. Just write in 100 numbers, and cast the 100 votes yourself."

The number of votes at the jefes' command was not necessarily limited by the number of eligible voters. Another advantage of the poll tax system to the Valley "machines" was that after the age of sixty, a voter did not have to pay the tax. Poll tax lists were checked only irregularly to eliminate the names of those who died after sixty, and, in the words of one expert on the subject, when an election was close in Texas, "in the Valley, the 'machine' votes the dead men." Nor were all voters even American citizens; on Election Day the saloons of the Mexican town of Reynosa, across the Rio Grande from Hidalgo, were cleaned out, and truckloads of Mexicans were brought across to vote in Texas; Starr County was also "an excellent location for bringing voters from across the border," a commentator notes. In Webb County, the small town of Dolores had about 100 American citizens—and in some elections recorded as many as 400 votes. As a result of such tactics, the vote from the Valley (a vote which generally went "all one way": the jefes had learned to stick together to maximize their impact—and influence—on Texas politics) rarely displayed the diversity of opinion associated with a democracy; some 15,000 votes were generally believed to be controlled in the Valley, and it was not unusual for them to go to a favored candidate by margins as large as ten to one.

The decisive consideration was cash. The power of these petty despots was matched by their greed. Not content with siphoning off hundreds of thousands of dollars from every aspect of municipal government (the Parrs "treated the county budget virtually as their own personal bank account," says one Texas historian), the Parrs collected a nickel "tax" on every bottle of beer sold in Duval; visitors inquiring why beer, twenty cents everywhere else in Texas, cost twenty-five cents in Duval, were informed that the extra nickel was for "George." To some of these despots, votes were a commodity like any other—a commodity to be sold. According to the best history of politics in the Valley, "The State candidates who have the most money to spend usually carry these machine counties." In 1940, O'Daniel had carried them—with their customary unanimity. George Parr's Duval County, for example, had given the Governor 3,728 votes, to a total of 180 for the other seven candidates. But in 1941, efforts were being made to ensure that these counties would be carried by Lyndon Johnson instead. These efforts had begun almost as soon as the campaign had begun. Brown & Root played a hand in them; on April 23, the firm's "Labor Director" informed Johnson that one bloc vote—the state's captive labor unions—had been secured ("Statewide labor vote assured, but no noise"), and added: "Latin American support in lower counties is next objective. Looks easy." For a while, with Mann refusing to buy votes, and Dies refusing to take an interest in buying them, this assessment proved correct. On May 9, Johnson headquarters was assured by a scout it had sent to the Valley that "this district … is for Lyndon Johnson." The George Parr machine, the scout said, is "very active for Johnson." The entrance into the campaign of the Valley's 1940 favorite changed the situation—nor would this be the first time that the Valley's commitment to a candidate had been changed by a later, higher, offer from another candidate. But Alvin Wirtz was an old ally of the Parrs. He had personally negotiated with old Archie, with whom he had served in the State Senate, for the Parr-controlled votes in Nueces County in a 1928 Democratic attempt to defeat Congressman Harry Wurzbach which failed when Wurzbach made charges of election fraud stick. When, with Johnson hospitalized and the campaign in crisis, Wirtz rushed to Texas, he stopped over in Dallas, where he held a meeting with the campaign's treasurer, oilman Lechner. Then he disappeared for several days; only later would puzzled newsmen learn that during these days Wirtz had been in South Texas. No one can say with certainty what he was doing there, although, according to sources whose information on other, more verifiable, Wirtz activities invariably proves correct, he and O'Daniel supporters were engaged in a bidding war for the Valley's votes. Lyndon Johnson himself contacted George Parr on the telephone at least once, in the presence of Polk and Emmett Shelton, two of Parr's attorneys. By June 18, the situation had been resolved. Horace Guerra of Starr County, Parr's principal ally, assured Johnson, "You can depend on my and my friends' wholehearted support. I predict Starr County will give you a substantial majority."

IF O'DANIEL COULD USE the popular revival-meeting tune "Give Me That Old-Time Religion," Johnson could, too—and his lyrics incorporated the name that in Texas was second in potency only to Christ's: "Franklin D and Lyndon B / They're good enough for me." With Pappy having entered the race, moreover, Johnson felt he needed increased support from "Franklin D"—and he got it. Asked at another Oval Office press conference if he had any additional comment on the Texas race, the President "smilingly" replied that "he thought he had done a good job the first time and was quite certain the people of Texas understood him." (Their understanding was facilitated by a description of the press conference written at Johnson headquarters and run verbatim by scores of obliging weeklies under a headline also written at headquarters: FDR ENDORSES JOHNSON.) Roosevelt also decided that Steve Early should reply to a letter from a Texas voter who had inquired if Johnson was indeed the President's choice. Although he was still unwilling to have his support stated flatly, Roosevelt directed Early (and James Rowe, who was helping to draft the reply) in precisely what words to use so that his support would be clear nonetheless. And to ensure that it became public, he told Rowe that if the voter did not release Early's letter, Johnson could release it himself. The letter said:

… At a press conference several weeks ago, the President made his position perfectly clear. He told the newspapermen that he is not taking any part in the Texas primary as that is solely a question for Texas to decide. In answering a question the President stated something which everybody knows to be true, which is that Congressman Lyndon Johnson is an old and close friend of his.

Because of O'Daniel's entry into the race, another presidential letter was requested—this one to help Johnson counter the strength with the elderly that O'Daniel possessed because of his pension plan. Rowe balked at this request. He was continually being pushed by Johnson and Wirtz for greater presidential involvement in the campaign, and he had, over and over again, given them what they asked for. Now he was fearful that he had gotten the President too involved. And he felt that in the suggested wording of this letter, Johnson had gone too far: it attributed to the junior Congressman a totally non-existent role in the fight for Social Security. "I thought he was asking too much. I said, 'Goddammit, Lyndon, I can't do too much. We've done so much for you already—I can't go back" and ask for this. He refused to do so, and even sent the President a cautionary note: "The polls show Lyndon leading at this time (but I suspect they are Lyndon's polls)." But Johnson only used other avenues to reach the President. "Four days later, the letter comes out anyway," Rowe says. "He just went right around me."

Dear Lyndon:

I have your letter favoring further help for our senior citizens over 60 years of age. As you remember, you and I discussed the problem before the Chicago convention of the Democratic Party last year. Our ideas were incorporated in the party platform, which called for the "early realization of a minimum pension for all who have reached the age of retirement and are not gainfully employed." I agree with you that the implementation of this pledge is the best solution of the problem. I hope you will come in and talk to me about it when you return.

Very sincerely yours,
Franklin D. Roosevelt

(Johnson made the most of this letter, reading it over a statewide radio network and saying, "As your Senator I can and will continue to take your problems to our President. I have worked with him for years and I shall continue to work with him for you." And Marsh's American-Statesman—and many country weeklies—carried the story under the headline: F.D. TO HELP JOHNSON ON PENSION PLAN.)

The wording of this letter made clear to Rowe that he hadn't understood how far the President was willing to go on behalf of the young Congressman. And Rowe was to be reminded of this again and again. Already well on his way to becoming one of Washington's smoothest political operators, he understood very well the seldom stated White House rules that governed Roosevelt's participation in the campaign of even a highly favored candidate, but he became aware that Roosevelt would make an exception to the rules for Lyndon Johnson.

During the last month of the campaign, Roosevelt's "special feeling" for Johnson was documented over and over again.

Much of it was couched in the form of telegrams.

To many Texans, who had never received one, there was a mystique about telegrams, and they were handy props at campaign rallies because they could be pulled from a pocket and read to an audience. A steady stream of telegrams was sent to Texas at the direction of the White House, to be pulled from Johnson's pocket and waved dramatically before crowds at rallies, and read by him (to make sure that the audience would remember the message, he read the telegram twice or even three times), and be printed in Marsh's six papers or in the weeklies that ran the canned stories emanating from his headquarters, and be reproduced in the hundreds of thousands of campaign flyers and pamphlets and brochures that, day after day, poured into homes throughout Texas. Some were endorsements: from Vice President Wallace, from Interior Secretary Ickes and Navy Secretary Frank Knox and other Cabinet members—even from Eleanor Roosevelt, who scarcely knew (and didn't particularly like) Johnson. And there were numerous telegrams from the President himself. One was designed to counter criticism of Johnson's long absence from his duties in Washington during a national emergency. (Roosevelt had declared one on May 27, with the Wehrmacht massing on the Russian front and the Battle of the Atlantic at fever pitch—the German battleship Bismarck had just been sunk off the French coast.) Johnson sent a plea for help to Missy LeHand, telling her: I AM BEING CALLED A SLACKER TO AN OLD TRUSTED FRIEND. To ensure getting the reply he wanted, he had Wirtz draft one:

… WE SHOULD NOT LOSE SIGHT OF OUR ULTIMATE OBJECTIVE WHICH IS THE DEFENSE OF OUR DEMOCRATIC WAY OF LIFE. … UNDER OUR DEMOCRATIC PROCESSES THE PEOPLE OF TEXAS … ARE ENTITLED TO BE INFORMED OF ISSUES BY THE CANDIDATES THROUGH PERSONAL APPEARANCE. THEREFORE, MY ANSWER TO YOUR WIRE IS, STAY IN TEXAS UNLESS CONDITIONS CHANGE SO THAT I THINK IT NECESSARY TO SEND FOR YOU, BUT RETURN IMMEDIATELY AFTER ELECTION AS I WILL BE NEEDING YOU THEN. GOOD LUCK.

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

Thinking the telegram went too far, Rowe deleted the words after "election," but the rest of the telegram went out over the President's signature with few other changes; the headline in the Houston Chronicle read: STAY ON FIRING LINE, JOHNSON TOLD IN WIRE—and the attacks ceased. There was a telegram orchestrated by Corcoran on parity in farm prices. At Tommy's suggestion, Roosevelt, who was about to sign a new farm parity bill, told Wirtz over the phone that if Johnson sent him a telegram before plans for the signing were announced, he would, in Corcoran's phrase, "be willing to respond to" the telegram with one of his own. Since this would foster the (incorrect) impression that Johnson had played a significant role in the bill's passage, Johnson jumped at the opportunity. The wily Wirtz attempted unsuccessfully to sneak past Rowe into the President's "reply" a "Good luck," which could be interpreted to mean that the President was openly supporting Johnson, but otherwise the President's reply, I WILL APPROVE THE PARITY LOAN BILL THAT YOU HAVE SO ARDENTLY SUPPORTED, was all that a candidate could have desired, (FARMERS GIVEN PARITY—JOHNSON GETS THE JOB DONE, headlined the Bertram Enterprise. Unsophisticated rural voters were told that "President Roosevelt, urged to do so by Cong. Lyndon Johnson of Texas, signed into law the farm parity bill. … [Johnson] stopped his campaigning and wired his friend, Roosevelt, and shortly thereafter …") A private exchange of telegrams provided insight into the relationship between the President and the young Congressman. When Roosevelt proclaimed the May 27 national emergency, Johnson wired him from Tyler, Texas: YOUR VOICE GAVE ME HAPPINESS TONIGHT, WE WHO HAVE WORKED WITH YOU KNOW THAT YOU HAVE NEVER FAILED WHEN THE HIGH LINE CALLED FOR COURAGE. WHEN HITLER'S MAN THREATENED, WE KNEW THE ANSWER BEFORE YOU SPOKE. I HOPE TO BE WITH YOU BATTLING FOR YOUR FRIENDS AGAINST YOUR ENEMIES ON THE SENATE FLOOR. Roosevelt's Staff drafted a form reply, but the President, when signing it, added to it by hand three words that made it personal: "Your old friend, Franklin D. Roosevelt."

Roosevelt saved his best shots for strategic moments late in the campaign. One was a rumor, planted by Corcoran with friendly reporters in Washington, that the President would go to Texas and campaign for Lyndon Johnson. The Marsh newspapers, and the hundreds of captive weeklies, played up the rumor; so widely was it believed in Texas that the Legislature passed a resolution inviting the President to inspect the state's defense plants during his trip. Another was a word: "preposterous." Some time before, Governor O'Daniel had suggested that Texas form its own army and navy to protect America's southern border from invasion. Roosevelt had not replied at the time; on the night of June 27, Election Eve, he denounced the plan with that word, which appeared in headlines as Texas voters went to the polls the next day. Tommy Corcoran was often the instrument through which the President intervened in state elections to help candidates he favored; like Rowe, Corcoran tries to explain that Roosevelt's intervention in Texas in 1941 was something special. "In that 1941 race, we gave him everything we could," Corcoran says. "Everything."

JOHNSON'S MANEUVERS in the Legislature had done the job on O'Daniel. Campaigning by his children, and by recorded speeches, had not been the same as the personal campaigning at which he was the master; at one of his rallies, a record of an O'Daniel speech stuck on one of his key phrases. Before it could be unstuck, it had said, "I want to go to Washington to work for the old folks, the old folks, the old folks, the old folks. …" The audience laughed. "The Governor's radio speeches have been marked for their note of worry and frantic exhortation, in marked contrast to the previous calm and good humored self-confidence which he has always showed heretofore and which he showed in his announcement speech in May," the State Observer reported. "His personal campaigning always raises his strength. People come to see him and go away convinced. … There is no doubt that O'Daniel's failure to make a personal campaign over the state has hurt him." But, trapped by the Legislature's refusal to adjourn, he couldn't get away from Austin until the closing days of the campaign. When he did, he found that it was too late to catch up with the argument conceived by Johnson and disseminated by hundreds of campaign workers. "The people who raised Mr. O'Daniel from a hillbilly flour salesman to the heights of the Governor's chair are divided about the wisdom of sending him to Washington as Senator," the State Observer reported. "The old age pensioners … still love him, but … feel that he can help them more in Texas than in Washington." Frantic, Pappy made increasingly bizarre campaign promises: to purge Congress if it failed to pass a bill outlawing strikes; to do away with the federal debt; to force the Legislature to provide the necessary $100 million per year for his pension plan. After assailing Johnson as a "water carrier" for the President, a yes man who would simply carry out Roosevelt's orders, he abruptly switched and said he had always supported the President himself, adding that he wanted to go to Washington so that he could rescue Roosevelt from the "professional politicians" surrounding him. But nothing helped. The Observer reported "undisputable evidence that the Governor is weaker than ever before, and that his campaign … has not caught the fire which characterized his previous campaigns."

In June, Gerald Mann was still doing what he had been doing in April: touring the state alone except for a driver and, occasionally, a single other aide—each day traveling 300 or 400 miles, making eight or nine speeches, plus a dozen or so impromptu wagon-bed talks in little towns, doing most of his sleeping in the back seat of his car. Without sufficient funds, without any organization to speak of, "he never stopped fighting, not for one day during that whole time," D. B. Hardeman says.

One spur that roweled him forward was indignation. To a man of such deep convictions, there was something almost immoral about the Johnson campaign, with its theatrics, its use of money, the unadorned appeal to selfishness in its argument that Johnson should be elected because he could get more federal contracts for Texas. Moreover, Roosevelt supporter though Mann was, he was disturbed at the brutal use of federal power in a state election. Having won two statewide elections, he was hardly a political naif, but never, he was to say, had he seen anything like this. "They spent so much money in that campaign," he recalls. "And they did it overwhelmingly. And they had no qualms about it. I heard that Corcoran was down here in Texas. And Wirtz. And Harold Young from the Vice President's office. And Grover Hill. There was an invasion of Texas by Washington bureaucrats, coming down here with money, or the ability to raise money. They were people who were in a position to exact money."

Finally, on June 19, Mann's feelings spilled over. They did so, he was to recall, almost on the spur of the moment, as he was making his 252nd speech of the campaign, before another crowd that was smaller than it should have been and less enthusiastic than it should have been because, he believed, of the effect of the money behind the Lyndon Johnson campaign. He had been "feeling" the money everywhere; suddenly, he began to talk about it. Standing in the bandshell in the courthouse square in Plainview, in the shadow of the town's huge windmill, he "made his first mention of the campaign tactics of his opponents," the Dallas News reported—of his opponents and of himself. With the wind tousling his hair—and turning the blades of the windmill overhead—he grinned and said, "I'm just doing this in the old-fashioned way—just a handshake and a talk. I have no mountain music nor entertainers, nor do I give away money. I have no telegrams of endorsement. All I know is how to go out and see the people of Texas—on courthouse squares, street corners and sidewalks. I'm just looking them in the eye." Then, in detail, he lashed into what he was to call "the invasion of money from Washington."

Instantly, he knew that he had touched a nerve, that he was saying something his audience had been waiting to hear. By the time he finished, the crowd was roaring in encouragement; a supporter said, "Gerry, you keep making that speech and you'll be elected. Don't make any other speech. Make it from now until Election Day."

He did. Two nights later he gave it before a large crowd in Houston. He was appalled, he told his audience, at the Johnson rallies—"political rallies under the guise of patriotic meetings"—and at the lotteries. "These drawings at the congressman's so-called defense rallies have been held at dozens of places all over Texas—always after the crowd has heard what the congressman has had to say. They have been conducted in the presence of little children all over Texas. What kind of conception of a democratic election do you think such practices are instilling in [their minds]?"

The use of "free money" was only one aspect of what enraged him, he said. There was also the federal pressure. In a way, he said, it threatened the state's "independence" by violating Texans' rights "to elect our own officials without interference from Washington"—Washington which was trying to "cram Lyndon Johnson down our throats."

"You know and I know," he told his audience, "what has happened in this race for the Senate.

We have seen the tremendous power of the federal hierarchy behind the candidacy of Lyndon Johnson. We have felt the pressure brought to bear upon the countless number of federal employees and Texas citizens employed on federal projects. We have seen the power and the influence of official position wielded in an attempt to influence and dominate a free Texas election. We have seen obvious attempts to take advantage of our love and affection for Franklin D. Roosevelt. We have seen enormous expenditures of money on Texas in this election.

You and I know that every form of political pressure, supported by enormous expenditures of money, has been applied to dictate to you whom you should elect to the United States Senate.

"A federal hierarchy," he said, "is undertaking to set up a federal-controlled political machine in Texas." He was appalled at the very idea of a candidate asking voters to elect him as a patriotic obligation—of, in fact, the very use of "patriotism" as an issue. "There is no issue of patriotism in this campaign," he declared. "You are simply choosing a Senator." A candidate who, night after night, tries "to capitalize on the emotion of honest patriotism, cheapens the impulse. … It is like playing on the sacredness of mother love for the purposes of promotion."

He was offended by someone campaigning on the ground that he could get more money—in the form of federal projects—for Texas. "The best job is going to be done for Texas in the United States Senate by sending there a man of individual courage, personal convictions and moral stamina to do what he believes is right. … Not political pull but personal integrity is the qualification for getting the job done. … I have stood by principles. I have talked about principles. And you can always count on me to fight for principles."

The audience rose up and roared. "That new issue really caught on," Mann recalls today. He realized, he says, that "I should have started earlier an all-out campaign on the use of money because a lot of people who were voting for Johnson because they wanted O'Daniel beaten didn't approve of what Johnson was doing or what was being done for him."

Lean—gaunt now, in fact, after ten weeks of criss-crossing Texas—clean-cut, as handsome as an Arrow shirt ad in his starched collars and double-breasted suits, the thirty-four-year-old Attorney General spoke with one hand in a pocket and the other extended to the audience. His movements were the movements of the fine athlete he had been, and his eloquence was not the shouting of a typical stemwinder but the quieter persuasiveness that moved audiences on the stump as he had moved them in church, particularly when coupled with what the Dallas News called his greatest asset, "his evident sincerity." He was so tired and tense now that the hand extended to the audience was often as curled as a talon, and he leaned forward to his listeners as he spoke. At most rallies, he had no politicians on stage with him to introduce him; he would walk onto an empty stage alone, say simply, "I'm Gerald Mann, your Attorney General," and give the audience a grin that would win them over. Even veteran reporters were awed by his energy. "Tireless Gerald C. Mann, 12,000 miles behind him, pushed into vast West Texas Monday on the closing laps of probably the most intensive political campaign in Texas history," wrote Felix R. McKnight.

With this new issue, his campaign took on new life. "Mann, despite the absence of pyrotechnics, is attracting surprisingly large crowds," the News reported. Says Hardeman: "His sincerity was such that he could win any crowd that heard him."

But not enough people heard him. Scraping up $1,300 for a limited statewide broadcast, his staff put him on the air on June 23, five days before the election, to give his new speech, but that was one of his last financial gasps, and during the campaign's final week, Johnson was on the radio—with fifteen- or thirty-minute broadcasts on network hook-ups that blanketed the state—five times each day. Johnson's supporters—Young, Wirtz, Looney, Hofheinz—had statewide broadcasts, too. Not enough people read about Mann. In the big-city dailies, he got good coverage. But in the weeklies, he didn't. And, of course, he had few ads in weeklies, while, as he puts it, "They filled the newspapers full." Mann knew he had a good issue, but he also knew he didn't have the funds to make it sufficiently effective. His eloquent voice was being drowned out.

As for Johnson, with Roosevelt behind him, with so much money behind him, with the newspapers filled with his name and the radio filled with his voice, with the guarantee of those bulk votes from San Antonio and the Valley (and, most important, with Pappy O'Daniel trapped in Austin, unable to campaign), how could he lose? The Belden Poll told him he couldn't. Week after week, every poll showed a steady, and accelerating, increase in his share of the vote. A week before the election, the polls showed, for the first time, that he was in first place—by a single percentage point over O'Daniel, and by a greater margin over Mann and the rapidly falling Dies. He pulled further ahead with each survey that Belden took during that last week; in the final poll, Johnson had 31 percent of the vote, O'Daniel 26 percent, Mann 25 percent and Dies 16 percent. Joe Belden himself was so confident of the accuracy of his forecasts that he issued a statement saying: "The voters of Texas Saturday will more than likely send Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson to Washington as their junior Senator." "Lyndon Johnson is pulling away," said the Houston Post after its last poll of that crucial city. He had 43 percent and O'Daniel 22 percent. Mann and Dies were far behind and fading.

Lyndon Johnson felt he couldn't lose. Before O'Daniel had entered the race, he had been, for the first time in his life, confident of success. Now, with O'Daniel neutralized, his mood soared upward to euphoria as fast as it had plummeted into depression five weeks before. A staff responsive to its master's every mood was euphoric, too. A reporter who visited Johnson's headquarters found his supporters "jubilant. They said the race was over." The young men were congratulating not only the candidate, but themselves, for their foresight in hitching their wagons to his star. That star had risen far faster than even the most optimistic of them had hoped. The Chief was going to be the youngest member of the Senate—a Senator at thirty-two. Old companions—L. E. Jones, Russell Brown—were planning to drive to Austin for the victory celebration. Even the candidate's wife, ordinarily so cautious, was caught up in the elation—as, indeed, she had been caught up in it throughout this campaign in which her husband had seemed to have all the support, of every type, that he could want. "Oh, the adventures we had," she was to recall. "It was in a way the best campaign ever. … Perhaps it was the wine of youth—we were never tired. And our troops loved us, and we loved them—it was a we campaign: 'We're going to win.'"

But Lyndon Johnson was to make a mistake.

He made it at the very last moment—on Election Day, in fact. Arriving around noon at the Stephen F. Austin Hotel from Johnson City, where he had voted in the morning after making a last speech from the front porch of his boyhood home and kissing all the mothers and grandmothers, as he had kissed them as a teenager, he took a sleeping pill and napped for a while in the bedroom of his suite, while his mother stood guard in the living room to keep anyone from disturbing him. Awakening in the late afternoon, he learned that the news was good; the early returns had put him ahead of O'Daniel, and his lead was steadily widening. Mann and Dies were clearly out of the race. He was also told that George Parr and the other South Texas bosses had been telephoning to find out when they should report their counties' votes—and he told them, either personally or through an aide, that they should report them immediately.

The votes from the Valley came in. Duval County had given O'Daniel 95 percent of its vote just a year before; in that intervening year, O'Daniel's popularity had evidently suffered a remarkably rapid decline; now Duval gave O'Daniel 5 percent of its vote—and gave Lyndon Johnson 95 percent. He received 1,506 votes to 65 for the Governor: George Parr had delivered. In Starr County, the vote was 615 for Johnson, 12 for O'Daniel: the Guerra boys had delivered. In Webb County, it was 978 for Johnson, 257 for O'Daniel: the mysterious Judge Raymond had delivered. In the other South Texas counties controlled by the Anglo jefes, the vote was equally lopsided: in Zapata, 273 for Johnson, 21 for O'Daniel; in Jim Hogg, 119 for Johnson, 12 for O'Daniel. In the five South Texas counties that voted as a bloc, in other words, Johnson received more than 90 percent of the vote: 3,491 to 376 for O'Daniel. Mann, Dies and the other twenty-five candidates received only a few scattered votes.

In the South Texas counties in which only part of the vote—the vote in Mexican and Negro areas—was controlled, Johnson's popularity in those areas was even more overwhelming. In "Mextown" and "Niggertown" in Corpus Christi, for example, the vote in one precinct was 411 for Johnson to 26 for the other three major candidates; in another precinct, it was 338 for Johnson to 53 for the other candidates; the Mexican-American and Negro precincts in Nueces County gave him more votes in that county than all the other candidates combined. The vote in the Valley was lighter than usual because of the paucity of paid-up poll taxes in a year in which no statewide election had been scheduled, but the ratios were still impressive. Taking the South Texas vote as a whole, it was 5,009 for Gerald Mann, 5,251 for Martin Dies, 5,364 for W. Lee O'Daniel and 15,423 for Lyndon Johnson.

The abruptness—and thoroughness—of the decline in the Governor's popularity in the Valley startled even politicians who might have been thought to be immune to voting conditions there. "It was nauseous to learn of the returns from such corrupt stinkholes as Duval and Starr Counties," one said. "Money bought every Mexican vote. …" Even some independent spirits in the Valley commented; said one: "They simply voted the Mexicans in a body everyplace they could." Said another: "… If there is any law to cover it, I think, in common decency, that the ballot boxes of Starr and Duval Counties should be opened and counted. The majority of those voters can neither read or write the English language so … they didn't know who they voted for. As a matter of fact, they probably didn't even go to the polls, and the ballots were all placed in the box by the boss." An observer in Cameron County said: "We have a situation in this State that is worse than the Pendergast, Kelly-Nash and Boss Hague crookedness ever was. How can one expect honest men and clean government to survive under such a system?"

On Election Day, the early reporting of the South Texas returns did not seem like a mistake. They were simply added to votes from other counties, and the Johnson total continued to mount. By 9:30 that evening, Johnson was leading O'Daniel by more than 13,000 votes. Emerging from the room on the sixteenth floor in which John Connally, Tom Miller and Jim Blundell had been tallying returns, he went down to the mezzanine, clutching a fistful of telegrams from county judges reporting results, and was hoisted to his supporters' shoulders and paraded around, waving the telegrams and shouting in triumph, in a wild celebration.

There was reason for the celebration. He had come not only so far, but so fast: from the Hill Country to, it seemed, a seat in the Senate of the United States at the age of thirty-two. Just ten years before, he had headed for Washington with a borrowed suitcase, no warm clothes, and no money to buy any—impoverished, moreover, in education as well as in pocketbook—to live in a basement and be one of a thousand secretaries to Congressmen. He had become a Congressman himself, and now had become the youngest member of the Senate—so young that, even if he was worried by his family's short life span, it must have seemed that there was plenty of time to attain the next, last, rung on the ladder. Even though the size of his margin was reduced later that evening, it remained substantial. Mayor Miller was preparing a statement that he would run for the vacated House seat of "Senator Lyndon Johnson." With 96 percent of the vote in, Johnson with 5152 LEAD, APPEARS ELECTED, the Houston Post headlined the next morning. Said the Dallas News: ONLY MIRACLE CAN KEEP FDR'S ANOINTED OUT. Lady Bird, who was "going around with my little camera, clicking," says, "He was announced the winner. The Dallas Morning News was even running pictures: 'Lyndon aged six. …' We were talking about staff."

But, in Texas, not all the votes were counted on Election Day.

The urban vote was counted on Election Day, of course—by 1941, voting machines were in use in most Texas cities—and most of the rural vote, too, although most rural voting in Texas was still by paper ballot. The results from some rural precincts, however, often didn't trickle in until several days after a statewide election—and the explanation, in some cases, did not lie merely in the isolation of these precincts and the fact that, in some of them, the county judge might not have a telephone with which to communicate with the Texas Election Bureau.

There existed in the upper levels of Texas politics common knowledge about the precincts that were for sale, the "boxes" in which the county judge wouldn't "bring in the box" (report the precinct totals to the Election Bureau) until the man who had paid him told him what he wanted the total to be, the precincts in which the county judge took the rather flimsy locked tin ballot box (to which the judge had the key) to his home to count the ballots at leisure and in privacy (and, if necessary, to insert some new ones), with confidence that no one would ever be able to discover—and certainly not to prove—what he had done. Unless an election was contested, the ballots were never checked at all; in case of a contest, as one politician puts it, "so many things could happen to keep them [the ballots in some rural precincts] from being checked": if a box arrived at the Election Bureau with its bottom torn off and no ballots inside, the judge would simply swear that when he had sent it off to the Bureau, the box had been intact—it must have been ripped open by some accident en route, he would say.

Since in a close election, precinct results could thus be altered, it was a fundamental rule of Texas politics not to report your important precincts—the ones in which you controlled the result—early. By reporting your total, you let your opponent know the figure he had to beat, and in Texas, it was all too easy then to beat it. Even if a judge had already reported the result in his precinct, so long as he hadn't officially certified it, he could change it, saying he had made a mistake in his arithmetic. Johnson had violated this rule, perhaps out of overconfidence, perhaps because his intelligence network had assured him that O'Daniel, his principal opponent, had made no preparations to change any boxes, and would have difficulty doing so now because, except in South Texas, he had alienated the "professional politicians"—the county judges and commissioners whose cooperation he would have needed. But the vote was to be changed nonetheless.

The reason it was changed had nothing to do with Lyndon Johnson.

According to O'Daniel's campaign manager, William Lawson—and Lawson's account of the following events is confirmed by members of Johnson's campaign staff and by disinterested politicians and political observers—during the last week or two before the election, the Governor's increasingly frantic campaign promises had alarmed some of the conservative business lobbyists, the longtime powers behind Texas politics, who had hitherto been his secret supporters. They feared that his new promises to increase pensions might lead to higher taxes on the oil, sulphur and natural gas industries. "He had always gone along with them," an observer says, "but he was just so unpredictable; they couldn't be sure they would always be able to control him." Says another: "O'Daniel wasn't a very dependable man. You couldn't tell what he'd do! They were all scared of him. He was an unknown quantity."

Business lobbyists' worries had been reinforced by their concern over another, more particular pledge made by O'Daniel during the campaign, one aimed at another major Texas industry: the making of liquor and beer. Murky and shifting as were many of Pappy's beliefs, one was crystal clear and inflexible: his conviction that liquor was a tool of the Devil. Even his intimates were not excused an occasional drink. "He was a rabid Prohibitionist," says Secretary of State Lawson. "I was very careful never to come to the office with liquor on my breath." On June 6, needing a new surefire issue to rekindle the enthusiasm of his rural Fundamentalist supporters, O'Daniel, assailing "booze dives" which he said were "demoralizing fine young soldiers," sent to the Legislature a bill prohibiting the sale of beer or liquor within ten miles of any military base. Since the military installations springing up throughout Texas were presenting beer and liquor manufacturers with an immense new market of tens of thousands of young soldiers, this bill posed a real threat. The beer and liquor industries had long been powerful in Texas politics. The Texas Brewers Institute (more informally known on Congress Avenue as "Beer, Inc."), which represented the giant Pearl Beer Company and more than 200 smaller beer-makers, and the hard-liquor lobby had long been a force in Austin; they had had to be to keep the business flourishing in a state with such strong Prohibitionist sentiment. They had assumed they could easily defeat O'Daniel's proposal, but just ten days before the campaign ended something occurred which made them worry. When, before the start of the campaign, the chairmanship of the state's three-member Liquor Control Board, whose power over liquor licenses throughout Texas was all but absolute, fell vacant, the Governor had appointed a crusading Prohibitionist preacher to fill the post. The lobbyists had mobilized the Legislature to refuse to confirm the preacher's appointment, and to turn down as well other O'Daniel nominees for the post, all of whom seemed more interested in closing down the liquor business in Texas than in supervising it—they included the head of the Texas anti-saloon league and the past president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. Ten days before the election, however, O'Daniel had succeeded in pushing through his fifth nominee, another Prohibitionist. A second vacancy on the board would occur shortly, and if O'Daniel succeeded in filling that, too, with another Prohibitionist, the Board "could just about have ended the liquor and beer business down here." Equally important, O'Daniel's victory reminded Beer, Inc., that a powerful Governor might succeed in winning passage of the bill creating a "dry zone" around military camps. "There were millions and millions of dollars involved now," Lawson says. "They had to get him out of the Governorship."

The lobbyists had thought the problem would be solved by O'Daniel's election to the Senate, which would remove him to Washington and see him replaced in the Governor's chair by Lieutenant Governor Coke Stevenson, a lifelong Wet and an ally of Beer, Inc., and its hard-liquor partner. Now O'Daniel appeared to have lost the election, but by only about 5,000 votes; it was at once apparent to these powerful lobbyists that removing the threat would not be difficult at all—particularly since Lyndon Johnson, by having his votes reported early, had let them know precisely how many additional O'Daniel votes would be needed to beat him.

After midnight on Election Day, while Johnson was being paraded around the Stephen F. Austin mezzanine in noisy triumph, across the street, in the Driskill Hotel, a quiet meeting was being held; according to some reports, its de facto chairman was Emmett R. Morse, a former Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives and an attorney for the liquor interests, other key figures were lobbyists for Beer, Inc., and fifteen State Senators. And on Sunday, these men headed out of Austin—to visit county judges who had taken ballot boxes to the privacy of their homes.

This maneuver was made easier by another mistake that Johnson had made. The mistake was as untypical of Lyndon as overconfidence, and it was due to overconfidence that he made it. It ran directly opposite to the whole grain of his adult life, and ignored one of its most consistent themes: "If you do everything, you will win." During the ten years since his graduation from college, he had lived by that rule, no matter what the personal cost. For ten years, no matter what the price in fatigue or pride or dignity, he had touched every base, taken every precaution. The 1941 campaign, of course, had been—except for the brief period in which he had been panicked by O'Daniel's entry into the race—atypical of his adult life, the single instance in which he had been cheerful, optimistic; after a lifetime of apprehension and anxiety, in this lone instance he had been overconfident. And his overconfidence had caused him to neglect certain basic precautions.

This had already hurt him. San Antonio's West Side had given him more votes than all the other twenty-eight candidates combined—but it hadn't given him nearly what he had expected. The turn-out had been extremely light. Some boxes in the Mexican slums had produced the kind of margin he had been promised: 101 to 6, for example; 115 to 4; 169 to 3. But in most precincts, only about 100 of the 300 or more possible ballots had been cast. His overall edge over O'Daniel in the Mexican slum had been 3,058 to 1,110, but he had been promised many more than 3,000 votes.

The reason for the shortfall was that maximum effort for a candidate would only result if the candidate had men—men he could trust absolutely, men who would give him an all-out effort—"riding the polls" on Election Day, driving from precinct to precinct, exhorting workers who had just brought a carload of voters to the polls to head out immediately to collect another carload, and to keep doing this from the time the polls opened till the time they closed. The Johnson headquarters had done almost none of this—relying on Quill's men, and on the "City Machine." Quill had put forth a maximum effort, but the Machine—the deputy sheriffs and other officials who handled the West Side boxes—had not. They got Johnson's money—but Johnson didn't get the votes. In fact, they took his money and laughed at him. A leader of the West Side, Frank H. Bushick, Jr., was later to tell him that during the campaign, "I went by your headquarters several times [and] found an atmosphere of smug self-sufficiency." Bushick had enrolled nine of his precinct men—"men who have carried their boxes on the West Side for the past fifteen years"—in the Johnson cause, but on Election Day, they were given "the munificent sum of $5 to cover entire expenses for large precincts and voluntary workers. The result being that most of them got disgusted and went home. I know that a number of your friends subscribed ample funds to meet the necessary expenses on Election Day, but frankly, Mr. Johnson, I am afraid it was not spent. Since the election, several of them [local election officials] have laughingly admitted that they made some money."

On Election Day, this shortfall had seemed unimportant—at the time the San Antonio votes had come in, Johnson had been well ahead; it had, in fact, seemed like a triumph that he had carried Bexar County in the face of his unpopularity in the white neighborhoods. But it was to be important now.

So, more serious, was another elementary precaution he had neglected, uncharacteristically, to take. The only way to prevent vote-stealing in crooked counties was by having men on the scene in those counties, to make sure that only voters placed ballots in the boxes, that no illegal instructions were given to voters, that no local politicians looked over voters' shoulders as they cast their vote—and that, when the precinct was closed, the judges sent in the results before taking the boxes home. It was necessary to keep men on the scene in shifts, twenty-four hours a day, for a day or two thereafter until not only the first but the official returns had been filed. Partly because he thought he was so far ahead—and, more to the point, because he knew that, outside of South Texas (which had been switched to the Johnson camp), O'Daniel had no organization and no acquaintance among election judges and could not steal votes (and because he knew that Mann would not steal votes)—Johnson didn't, except in a very few instances, take that precaution. And in some cases where he did have men present, once the election judges reported their totals Saturday night, his men were told they could come in to Austin and join the victory celebration.

On Sunday evening, after some 8,500 additional votes had been counted, Johnson still led O'Daniel by more than 4,500 votes—167,471 to 162,910. Mann had 132,915 votes, Dies 76,714. More than 96 percent of the votes had been counted, only about 18,000 remained "out" and almost all of these were in Martin Dies' East Texas congressional district, where Dies had been garnering the lion's share of the vote. "Barring a miracle," announced Robert L. Johnson, manager of the Texas Election Bureau, Lyndon Johnson was elected Senator.

But arrangements for Monday were being completed. In a suite in the Driskill Hotel where four of the key figures in these arrangements had spent the night on the telephone, one of them made a last call as dawn was breaking on Monday. Apologizing for waking its recipient, he said: "Just thought you'd like to know that we've got it in the bag. The Governor is going to the Senate. …"

O'Daniel himself had had nothing to do with the arrangements, but on Monday morning, even he was told about them, and he in turn informed his aides; when one said that Johnson was still thousands of votes ahead, the Governor replied, "Well, that don't make any difference." The "drawn anxious looks of those close to O'Daniel" abruptly disappeared, the Austin American-Statesman noted. By noon on Monday, the paper reported, "the news was abroad—Pappy was in. … It was noised about in the Senate Chamber." The capital was snickering over what was about to happen to Lyndon Johnson.

Johnson and his aides were among the last to get the news. At noon on Monday, John Connally was still sending off victory telegrams; he wired a friend in Washington that, while the results were not yet official, ELECTION BUREAU CONCEDES ELECTION UNLESS MIRACLE HAPPENS. … LOOKS LIKE WE'RE IN.

Johnson himself was spending the day on Alvin Wirtz's shadowy, comfortable back porch. The two men, relaxed and happy, were sipping drinks in tall silver glasses while Lady Bird Johnson, the only other person present, took home movies.

The news may have reached them on that porch; the home movie shows Wirtz on the telephone, and as he listens, his face, relaxed a moment before, changes. But, however the news came, when it started coming, it came fast.

At nine a.m. Monday, clerks in the Election Bureau began opening the envelopes—telegrams and special delivery letters—containing "late" returns that had not been counted Saturday or Sunday. Many of these envelopes were from East Texas counties—and almost every East Texas envelope contained figures that were a dramatic reversal of the previous trend. In earlier returns from that section, its Congressman, Martin Dies, had led handily, with the other three major candidates running far behind. In these new returns, Dies' percentage dropped off sharply. Mann didn't pick up any of Dies' votes, and neither did Lyndon Johnson. They went almost entirely to Pappy O'Daniel.

Shelby County, for example, was considered a Dies stronghold, and the report Shelby County had sent in Saturday night had confirmed that. Out of 2,275 votes reported, Dies had received 1,040, or 46 percent, almost as many as the other candidates combined. O'Daniel received 779 votes, or 34 percent, Johnson 241 votes, or 11 percent, Mann 215 votes, or 9 percent. But now Shelby reported 256 additional votes. These were mostly from the same precincts that had reported earlier. But Dies did not do as well as he had done earlier. He received only 82 of these "new" votes—not 46 percent but 32 percent. Johnson and Mann didn't do as well either: Mann received 6 votes, or 2 percent; Johnson did particularly badly; he received 3 of the new votes: 1 percent. O'Daniel, who had received 34 percent on the first returns, received 64 percent on these later returns: 165 out of these last 256 votes—165 votes to 3 votes for Lyndon Johnson. When Shelby County's new figures were included in the Election Bureau tally, therefore, Johnson's lead was reduced by 162 votes. As Marsh's American-Statesman was to comment bitterly, despite the fact that "These last votes were from the same county, the same folks" who had voted earlier, in this "late" vote "O'Daniel bettered his rate against Johnson, 16 times over."

This shift was repeated in Newton County, which now reported 556 additional votes. Dies again received a smaller percentage of these votes, and again the difference went entirely to O'Daniel. In the late vote from Newton County, therefore, the Governor outpolled Johnson, 168 to 32. Johnson's lead was reduced by another 136 votes. This abrupt reversal was repeated in the late returns from other East Texas counties. Still other counties from this section had telephoned in "complete," if unofficial, returns on Saturday, so that they were now precluded from making substantial changes. But now "official"—written—returns were coming in from these counties by letter or telegram, and many of these written figures were different from the telephoned figures—and the difference was seldom in Johnson's favor. There were 32 less votes for Johnson in Angelina County than had previously been reported; 69 more votes for O'Daniel in Hardin County; 85 more for O'Daniel in Colorado County. County by county, Johnson's lead was being sliced away. Jimmy Allred, presiding over a federal court in New Mexico, telephoned Carroll Keach. "I'm listening to the radio," he said. "They're stealing this election in East Texas!"

Johnson's reaction was to try to steal it back. Telephoning George Paar, he asked the Duke of Duval to give him more votes. But Parr refused; he later told friends that he had replied, "Lyndon, I've been to the federal penitentiary, and I'm not going back for you." Johnson got some "corrected" totals from various strongholds: 226 from Austin, for example. But he couldn't get enough. His strength was in South Texas, and due to his mistake, South Texas had already sent in its official figures; there was little more South Texas could do. East Texas was going for O'Daniel, and because it hadn't sent in its figures, it could give Pappy whatever he needed. Indeed, as Johnson's effort to improve his total became apparent, his canny opponents held back certain key counties—Trinity County deep in East Texas was one—to see what would be needed at the end; whatever Johnson managed to add, they would be able to add more.

Having rushed back to his headquarters from Wirtz's porch, Lyndon Johnson sat all day Monday next to a telephone, and almost every ring brought bad news. It was about noon on Monday that the trend to O'Daniel began; at the time, Johnson's lead was still more than 4,000 votes. Hour by hour—telephone call by telephone call—he had to watch it being sliced away: by seven p.m., Pappy was less than a thousand votes behind. But there were only perhaps 5,000 more votes to go, and they had to be divided among four candidates—could he hang on? Late in the evening, a bunch of East Texas counties—Anderson, Cass, Panola, Refugio, Van Zandt—reported their "official" returns almost simultaneously. When they had finished, Johnson's lead was only 77 votes. And there were still more East Texas counties to be heard from. O'Daniel knew what Tuesday was going to bring; when a reporter read him the evening's final figures, the Governor smiled and said, "Well, that's looking fine." And Johnson knew, too. Walter Jenkins tried to console him by telling him he was still ahead. "It's gone," Lyndon Johnson replied. Dan Quill was philosophical. "He [O'Daniel] stole more votes than we did, that's all," he says. But Johnson's frustration and rage erupted over hapless aides. One of them, Dick Waters, was taking his wife out to dinner that night, when, as they were leaving the Stephen F. Austin Hotel, they happened to cross Lyndon's path. Although Waters, a low-level campaign assistant, had had no responsibility, or authority, for seeing that votes were not changed, Johnson began blaming him for what had happened, "screaming and hollering, and throwing his arms like Lyndon can do," viciously reviling him in front of his wife. Inside the candidate's suite on the fifteenth floor, Mary Rather sat, hair disheveled, face wan, trying to muster up a smile for Lady Bird's camera; John Connally wept. Their premonitions were borne out on Tuesday. Hardly had the Election Bureau office opened when more "corrections" began coming in. By the end of the day, O'Daniel was more than a thousand votes ahead; the official final count would give him 175,590 votes to 174,279 for Johnson, a margin of 1,311.

Lyndon Johnson's loss had been due to a political fluke. He had been beaten not by his opponent's friends but by his opponent's foes; O'Daniel had won the Senate seat not because these men wanted him to be Senator, but because they didn't want him to be Governor—because they wanted to get him out of Texas. But it was Johnson's mistake that had enabled these men to take his victory away. He had planned and schemed and maneuvered for ten years—had worked for ten years, worked day and night, weekday and weekend—had done "everything." And, for ten years, he had won.

He had relaxed for one day. And he had lost.

---

*The ultimate disposition of this shipment of cash is unclear. Jenkins says that Marsh used it for newspaper advertising, "and that wasn't what it was supposed to be used for." Marsh's personal secretary, Mary Louise Glass, says that the publisher, after taking the money from Jenkins, gave it to her to hold, "and I put it in a white mesh purse. It just bulged with money. I carried it around two or three days." She says that when Marsh took it back, he used it to purchase not newspaper but radio advertising.

*All these counties were lumped together as "The Valley" in Texas political parlance of that era.