35

Convention

ANOTHER KEY PART of his strategy for winning the Democratic presidential nomination was also in place: he was not only the chairman of the Texas delegation to the party’s national convention, but the state’s favorite-son candidate; its fifty-six votes at the convention would be his until he released them.

The ultimatum to Stevenson with which he had hoped to trap him—that Adlai prove his vote-getting ability by entering primaries—had backfired, however. Adlai had indeed entered the primaries—and had won almost all of them. As Democrats headed for Chicago on the weekend before the convention’s opening on Monday, August 13, various estimates gave him between 400 and 600 of the 6871/2 votes needed for nomination. Estes Kefauver had 202, and the third announced candidate, Governor Averell Harriman of New York, trailed far behind. Seven states besides Texas were supporting “favorite son” candidates—a switch of only one or two of the big delegations would give Stevenson victory, and two (Michigan and Ohio) were poised to switch; the New York Timesreported that “The professional prognosis was that the last ballot might come early”; Stevenson himself was so confident that he was writing his acceptance speech.

One aspect of Lyndon Johnson’s strategy had been sound. The wisdom of his decision to pose as merely a favorite-son candidate to avoid mobilizing Democratic liberals against him had been vividly demonstrated by liberal alarm at every journalistic suggestion that he might become a serious contender. Despite the last-minute passage of the Social Security bill, liberal antipathy to Johnson was as strong as ever—stronger, in fact: 1956 had, after all, been the year of the natural gas fight and the exemption of highway workers from the David-Bacon Act, and new revelations about Johnson’s relationship with Brown & Root. Under a headline that was an echo from the turn of the century—“THE IRRESPONSIBILITY OF THE SENATE”—the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran a long article by the liberal journalist William V. Shannon filled with phrases that recalled that gilded and corrupt age: under Johnson’s leadership, Shannon wrote, the Senate “has had a rising curve of power and a declining arc of moral prestige…. Several forces conspire to intensify the rigidity and unrepresentative character of the Senate. One is the increasingly important role of big money…. Political power must be purified.” Most of all, of course, 1956 had been the year of the civil rights bill, whose denouement had also been directed by Johnson. Civil rights, ADA National Chairman Joseph Rauh said, would be the “great issue” of the 1956 campaign. On the eve of the convention, the ADA issued a report on Johnson’s leadership. His constant cloakroom dealing, it said, had turned the Senate into “a legislative brokerage house.” Asked in a subsequent press conference if the liberal organization might consider supporting Johnson, Rauh replied by saying that it would consider supporting any of three candidates—the three other candidates. Even the admiring Stewart Alsop had to conclude that “Johnson is no ardent advocate of Negro equality, and as a Southerner he would probably alienate a big slice of the Negro vote, increasingly vital in the Northern industrial states. For such reasons, the Northern liberals could be expected to combine to veto a Johnson nomination…. Most political realists doubt that Johnson could ever get a convention majority.” Johnson’s strategy and persuasiveness had had an unintended drawback. So convincingly had he told southern leaders he was not a candidate that some of them had believed him, and had consequently turned to Stevenson as the least liberal of the three announced candidates—and now had become rather comfortable with Adlai, not only because they liked him personally but because, despite occasional lapses into support of the Brown decision, he had in general moved, as his biographer John Bartlow Martin puts it, “toward gradualism in desegregation.”

Rayburn, loyal as ever despite his desire not to split the party with a divisive convention fight, said firmly that he was supporting Johnson, but he tried to let the younger man of whom he was so fond know that, while he would certainly get the nomination in 1960, there was no realistic possibility of his getting it this year. At a luncheon in the Capitol for business leaders, attended by several senators and representatives, including Johnson, the old man sat dourly silent as the others speculated on the possibility of a convention deadlock that might enable a dark-horse candidate to win. But when one Pennsylvania industrialist opined that “if the convention deadlocks,” there might be a “stampede” to a dark horse like Stuart Symington, Rayburn finally spoke. “I’ll agree with you on a stampede,” he said. “But it won’t be to Symington.” The room fell silent. Finally the businessman asked, “Why not?” “Because there will be no deadlock,” Rayburn said. “Stevenson will be nominated on the first ballot, or by the second ballot at the most.” The favorite sons will start to jump on the Stevenson bandwagon, Rayburn said. “He won’t need many shifts … to put him over very quickly. Once that rush starts, no one can stop him.” Lyndon Johnson was sitting beside Rayburn. All during lunch, he had been voluble,telling one anecdote after another, but after Rayburn spoke, Johnson said not a word. Later, when the “dramatic incident,” as Robert Allen put it, was “reverberating through inner party circles,” reporters asked the Speaker if he was saying that he had swung to Stevenson. “I’ve never said I’m for anybody but Lyndon Johnson, dammit,” he replied, and he never wavered in that stand. But Johnson knew he had heard Rayburn’s assessment of the convention—that Stevenson had already won.

And for a while Lyndon Johnson appeared to recognize this reality, and to accept it. The rooms at the Chicago Hilton had been paid for, the special phone lines—and phone booth—installed, the banners ordered; the trappings of a candidacy went forward, and his staff began, in twos and threes, to head for Chicago. Behind the brave front, however, Johnson had all but stopped running. For him to line up the South solidly behind him despite its growing acceptance of Stevenson, he would need Russell, but Russell was reluctant to attend the convention. “Nineteen fifty-two had left a deep scar with him; in 1956—well, he didn’t want to participate,” John Connally recalls. And when Russell told Johnson that he would not attend—“I’m going somewhere [a fishing camp near Winder] where there are no telephones”—Johnson made no attempt to dissuade him. Seeing the spectre of the “humiliation” he always dreaded if he were to be portrayed as an active candidate and then didn’t win—“He didn’t want to run and suffer a defeat for personal ego reasons,” Connally says—it was important to him that his denials be believed. Over and over again, he told reporters he wasn’t a “serious” candidate but only a favorite son; that he had never sought, and would not seek, any delegates outside Texas. To convince skeptical journalists, he even reminded them of his heart attack—which he never would have done had he still thought there was an opportunity for victory—and did so, this man who could teach it either way, as convincingly as he had, for months, been saying that he felt no effects from the attack at all; at one press conference, reporters kept asking if there was any possibility that he would accept the nomination, and he ended the discussion by saying, “Eisenhower may have forgotten he had a heart attack. I have not. Mine still hurts.” Another reporter who began a long one-on-one interview with Johnson skeptical of his denials was convinced by the end of the conversation that “he is sincere and would not accept the nomination if it were offered to him…. He talked freely and without any of those guarded utterances which betray a man talking for effect rather than in truth.” With southern politicians he was just as convincing; it was particularly important to him that he not be portrayed as a “sectional”—southern—candidate, since such a candidacy would look as quixotic as Richard Russell’s had in 1952. More than one key southern politician urged him to run, and offered him his state’s votes. Harry Byrd had pleaded with him to declare his candidacy; all he had to do was say yes, the Virginian had said, and he would never have to think about Virginia again: its delegates would be solid for him until the end. Johnson thanked them but declined the offers. His actions were those of a man who understood that he had no chance to win.

AND THEN, suddenly, he thought he did.

It had been taken for granted that former President Truman would support Adlai Stevenson for the Democratic nomination in 1956. It was Truman, after all, who in 1952 had suggested to a “flabbergasted” first-term Governor largely unknown outside Illinois that he run for President and that he, Truman, “could get him nominated”—and who had, indeed, sent word to Democratic kingpins shortly after his arrival in Chicago in 1952 to release their delegates to Stevenson.

But things had changed in the intervening four years. For one thing, as Richard Rovere was to write, there was the wholly understandable human reaction. “It has happened time after time in American politics that former Presidents … have resented and fought against their rightful heirs.” But in addition, Stevenson, his friend George Ball would say, “was affronted by the indifferent morality and untidiness of the Truman Administration,” and after the 1952 campaign, showed, in Rovere’s words, “his eagerness to have it thoroughly understood that he had never been part of it.” He particularly did not want to be associated with Truman’s characterization of the Eisenhower Administration as “this bunch of racketeers,” and, as Rovere puts it, he simply “does not share Truman’s view of Truman as the greatest living expert on everything.” Stevenson gave vent to these views only in private, “never in public,” but of course “they got back to Mr. Truman, who took it hard.” Several months before the 1956 convention, the ex-President growled to a friend, “Why, if Stevenson is ever elected, he won’t let us inside the White House.”

When Truman’s train pulled into Chicago’s grimy old Dearborn Street Station at 8 a.m., Friday, August 10, the former President, as jaunty as ever, found a mob of delegates, reporters, and cameramen pushing and shoving to get a glimpse of him, and then grabbed the headlines when he pointedly did not endorse Stevenson but instead said he would announce his choice the next day. All day Friday, Truman held meetings with party leaders in his suite at the Blackstone Hotel, giving them broad hints (“I am not a bandwagon fellow”; “I’m going to stir up a little trouble tomorrow”), and by that evening, while journalists were still writing that the ex-President was keeping the candidates in a state of suspense, party insiders knew—and Lyndon Johnson still down on his ranch was told—that the next day the former President would endorse Harriman.

In a few days, it would be clear that Truman, and the press, had drastically overestimated his influence, but at the time it was almost universally assumed that his choice of Harriman would stop the Stevenson bandwagon, preventing Adlai from getting the necessary 6871/2 votes on the first, or any early, ballot, and thus throwing the convention open so that some other candidate could win. Among those making that assumption was Lyndon Johnson. Under the scenario he had devised a year earlier on the Pedernales, the convention would, after a series of deadlocks and bargains, be forced to turn to a compromise candidate—and as a candidate who came to the bargaining table with a solid bloc of almost three hundred southern and southwestern delegates, he would be a logical choice. It suddenly seemed possible again that he might yet be able to win the nomination—and he grabbed for it with an urgency that revealed how desperately he wanted it.

Telephoning eleven Texas congressmen that Friday evening, he told them he wanted them up in Chicago the next day so they could use their acquaintance with congressmen in other state delegations to keep their delegations from switching to Stevenson. “Get up to the ranch early,” he told Representative Joe M. Kilgore of McAllen. “We’re going up in Wesley West’s plane.” In the plane Johnson was “thoughtful, but upbeat.” “We have a chance to win this thing,” he told Kilgore. And soon after driving into the Chicago Loop from the airport and pushing through the crowd in the Hilton lobby and then through the crowd jamming the twenty-third-floor corridor, many wearing scarlet-and-gold “Love That Lyndon” buttons, Johnson emerged from his suite and went down to a press conference in the hotel’s Boulevard Room, striding out on the stage with a big smile, to try to convince three hundred reporters of the same thing. For months, he had been insisting that he was only a favorite-son candidate. Now a reporter asked him, “Are you just a favorite son, or are you a serious candidate?” “I’m serious about everything I do,” Lyndon Johnson said—and all over the room, pencils started scribbling.

Time and again, the correspondents, some of whom had heard him denying for months what he was now affirming, pressed the issue, and with each answer Johnson made his stand stronger; when he was asked if he would drop out of the race after one or two ballots, he said, “That is very unlikely,” and, as one reporter wrote, “that reply erased Johnson from the status of a mere favorite son candidate from Texas, planning only to get a token vote before throwing his state’s fifty-six votes to someone else.” Asked whether he considered Stevenson or Harriman the best-qualified candidate, he said: “The best qualified now is Lyndon B. Johnson.” He was the Democrat behind whom Democrats from all over the nation could unite, he said, and if he received the nomination, he would run “an effective campaign and a winning campaign” against President Eisenhower. There was no more talk about his heart still hurting. “I have been putting in 15- and 16-hour days every day, including Saturday, during the last weeks of Congress,” he said. But he had not sought any delegates outside his own state, one reporter pointed out. “In your experience in politics, do you recall any serious contender for a nomination who did not seek delegates from outside his own state?” Johnson answered firmly, “You don’t always have to seek something in order to get it.”

Soon after he left his press conference, with word “rolling out across Chicago” that Johnson was running in earnest, he received a call from Harry Truman’s suite in the Blackstone across the street. The former President told him what he already knew. He was going down to his own press conference in a minute, Truman said; “I’m opening this thing up so anybody can get it—including you.”

Truman told reporters that the “mounting crises” in foreign affairs required the nomination of a man with experience in foreign affairs—Averell Harriman. Johnson, in his suite, was watching the press conference on television. As soon as it ended, he emerged with John Connally, turned left and strode down the corridor, past the closed doors of Adlai Stevenson’s suite, to Sam Rayburn’s at the end of the hall. “It’s wide open now,” Connally shouted to a reporter. On Johnson’s face was a broad smile. Recalls Tommy Corcoran: “He thought he had a chance. He really believed it.”

HE BELIEVED IT in part because there were reasons to believe it. His hope that Stevenson would not win on the first ballot was bolstered by precedent: no contested Democratic presidential nomination in history had been decided on the first ballot. In addition, there existed, as at every Democratic convention, the possibility that civil rights—specifically, the wording of the platform plank dealing with the issue—would ignite an explosion, as it had after Hubert Humphrey’s speech in 1948, and upset all calculations. Indeed, Stevenson, after months of tiptoeing around the issue, had already—a few days before the convention—made a slip. When a television reporter unexpectedly caught him on a street, Stevenson said, in what his biographer Martin calls “an ill-considered moment,” that the platform “should express unequivocal approval of the Court’s decision, although it seems odd that you should have to express your approval of the Constitution and its institutions.” At once, “big blocks of southern delegates shifted to the doubtful column,” the New York Times reported. Only a quick public reversal—Stevenson assured an Alabama supporter, in a telegram released to the press, that he would not use force to uphold the Court’s decision—combined with similar private assurances by his aides, enabled Adlai to mend his southern fences. There was always the possibility of another misstep.

But Johnson also believed it for reasons that had no basis in reality—for reasons that were to astonish those who had come to regard him as a consummately practical politician.

He told aides and allies that he had a chance because influential figures in the Democratic Party were on his side, but when he named these figures, almost all of them were senators, or former senators.

His belief in these men—Bob Kerr in Oklahoma, Carl Hayden and Bob McFarland in Arizona, McClellan and Fulbright in Arkansas, Ed Johnson in Colorado, Mike Mansfield in Montana—was in a way understandable. To a man whose life in Washington was spent in the closed, insulated world of the Senate, a world in which these men had immense authority, it was perhaps only natural to assume that they had authority in their own states. But the belief revealed that Lyndon Johnson, knowledgeable though he was about power in Washington, had a woefully inadequate comprehension of power outside the capital. Anyone who held that belief, as Richard Rovere was to explain in The New Yorker, “forgot the wisdom of history, which is that members of the United States Senate almost invariably come to grief when they try to win Presidential nominations for themselves or to manipulate national conventions for any purpose whatsoever. For many reasons—patronage is one, and control of delegations is another—the big men at conventions are governors and municipal leaders.” And among these “big men”—the Democratic Party’s powerful traditional “bosses” since the onset of the age of Roosevelt: Mayor Daley and Jacob M. Arvey of Chicago, Mayor David L. Lawrence of Pittsburgh, Governors like George Leader of Pennsylvania and Robert B. Meyner of New Jersey, and leaders of the party’s major constituencies such as labor’s George Meany and Walter Reuther—Lyndon Johnson had very little support.

Moreover, as now became apparent, this most pragmatic of men—capable, in Washington, of looking into others and seeing the fundamental realities behind their behavior—was, in Chicago, incapable of seeing a crucial reality: the true depth of the antipathy toward him of northern liberals.

This, too, was understandable. Lyndon Johnson’s world, in Washington, was a world in which deals could always be made, bargains could always be arranged, in which men were reasonable in compromising their principles, except for a few crazies like Lehman and Douglas, who had so little power that they could safely be ignored. It was perhaps only natural that he believed that at least some northern liberals—enough, combined with southern and southwestern votes, to give him the nomination—could be brought under his standard if the right inducements were found, particularly since, in his view, he had already done so much for them by giving Meany and Reuther the Social Security and housing bills they wanted. But this belief demonstrated only that Lyndon Johnson simply had not grasped that there was another world, a world in which Douglas and Lehman were not crazies but heroes, in which principles mattered far more than they did in the Senate. In addition, Lyndon Johnson had not fully appreciated that it didn’t matter what he did for the liberals in Social Security and housing so long as he was not on their side on the “great issue.”

He should have appreciated this. When the ADA had issued that report accusing Johnson of “bringing the Democratic Party to its lowest point in twenty-five years,” it had been civil rights that the report emphasized. It was not two months since United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther had said that the party had “no right to preach morality to the world unless we are fighting equally hard against injustices at home”; even here in Chicago there had already been reminders: labor leaders were supporting the NAACP’s demand for a civil rights plank not only endorsing the Brown decision but advocating the use of force to uphold it if necessary. Johnson had exchanged friendly letters with George Meany after the passage of the Social Security bill, but when Meany appeared before the Platform Committee, it was not Social Security he emphasized, saying grimly, staring down the southerners facing him, “The Democratic Party must declare that it is not in favor of thwarting a decision by the Supreme Court.” In Washington, the conservative coalition that ran the Senate could ignore Walter Reuther with impunity, but more than a hundred delegates to the Democratic convention were members of Reuther’s UAW, and fifty of them were members of the Michigan delegation, which had been supporting favorite-son Governor G. Mermen (Soapy) Williams, but which Johnson was confidently asserting would swing over to him. And there were other labor leaders with substantial numbers of delegates: Emil Rieve of the Textile Workers, Joseph A. Bierne of the Communications Workers, Alex Rose of the Hat, Cap and Millinery Workers, Dave Dubinsky of the Garment Workers, James B. Carey of the Electrical Workers. Their views may not have mattered much on the floor of the Senate; they mattered a great deal in Chicago. “I was knocked for a loop,” Tommy Corcoran recalls. “He [Johnson] really thought these guys were going to come around [to support him]. Hell, as long as he wasn’t with them on civil rights, they were never going to support him!”

He believed it, as well, because of the euphoria to which he was prone when he thought he was winning, a euphoria fed by the trappings of a convention: the excitement in the air in the hotel corridors through which he pushed, the cheers of the Texas caucus, all those “Love That Lyndon” buttons in his suite. Truman’s announcement was the break he had hoped for; he thought the nomination was within his grasp, the nomination that would make him the odds-on favorite to get the party’s nod again in 1960, when Eisenhower would not be running. And, of course, Eisenhower was old, and had already had two major illnesses; what if there was another before Election Day? As that week’s Newsweek story on the convention put it, “Another new factor … is the issue of Mr. Eisenhower’s health. No man can be certain what that will be three months hence. This dominant political question is, alone and unaided, wiping out the prospect of a cut-and-dried election this year.” In hindsight, it is clear that, barring some new major illness, there was never any possibility that the President might be defeated; that was not the way it seemed in Chicago in August, 1956. Most of all, Lyndon Johnson believed it because of the intensity of his desire that it be true. Sometimes, talking to men like Tommy Corcoran and Jim Rowe, he was the old, realistic Lyndon Johnson of Washington. Once, during the convention, Rowe says, “he just made a flat statement”—which Rowe had heard him make many times before—“that he better recognize that for Texans, and also the South, their base for power was in the Senate, that was all they were going to have.” But, Rowe and Corcoran say, Johnson’s feelings veered wildly between realism and optimism—unrealistic optimism. “He was ambivalent,” Rowe says. “On one side, I think, deep down, he understood the realities. But he wanted to be President so much….” “On most things, you could talk sense to Lyndon,” Tommy Corcoran says. “But there was no talking to him about this.” On the morning after Truman’s dramatic announcement, the Sunday newspapers delivered to the delegates’ rooms were filled with speculation about imminent breaks in the Stevenson ranks from New Jersey, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. But by noon that Sunday, the party’s insiders already knew the truth. Counting delegates the evening before, they had found that if Adlai didn’t have the necessary 687/2, he was close to that number—and needed only another state or two to win, and by noon there was a growing awareness in the press that Truman’s coup had failed. But Lyndon Johnson wasn’t counting, he was hoping; this man who prided himself on never deluding himself, on always looking unblinkingly at the hard facts, was deluding himself now because he wanted, needed, the prize so badly that, plain though the truth was, he couldn’t see it. “He wanted to be President so much”—and after Truman’s announcement he had persuaded himself that he really might be.

MOST OF ALL, perhaps, Lyndon Johnson believed he had a chance because of Rayburn and Russell.

Although both men had publicly announced that they were supporting him, neither was working actively for his candidacy, since they knew it was hopeless. Russell had not even come to Chicago; Rayburn, the convention’s chairman, told delegates privately as well as publicly that he was supporting Johnson, but he had not demanded their support for Johnson, had not thrown his immense power behind him because he knew “no one can stop Stevenson.” On the day after Truman’s announcement, however, Johnson had been presented, as it happened, with an opportunity to work on his Rs. The crisis in the Mideast that had been precipitated two weeks earlier by Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal was worsening. British and French warships were steaming toward Egypt, and Britain was dispatching troops to the Mediterranean in preparation for an attack to regain control of the waterway. John Foster Dulles was about to leave for London to try to resolve the crisis without armed conflict, and Eisenhower had summoned congressional leaders to the White House for a briefing by Dulles before he left, sending an Air Force plane to Chicago to pick up Democratic leaders, and another one to Winder to pick up Russell. As soon as the plane lifted off from Chicago at 7:45 Sunday morning, Johnson’s delusions—and desperation—spilled out. Taking the seat beside Rayburn, he began talking the moment the plane took off, and didn’t stop until it landed at Washington’s National Airport. Truman had halted the Stevenson bandwagon, he said. The convention was deadlocked now, and in a deadlocked convention, who was in a better position to get the nomination than him? Nobody! he said. And he would get the nomination, he told Rayburn, if only you would take the lead, really get in there and fight for me. Some of the other congressional leaders who overheard the conversation had never before seen Lyndon Johnson “working” Mr. Sam, and they were astonished at his pleading and whining. Rayburn, grumpy anyway because he hated flying, didn’t say much in reply, aside from an occasional, noncommittal grunt; he sat silent, his broad bald head lowered between his shoulders, puffing on a cigarette. When Rayburn didn’t agree to do what Johnson wanted, Johnson escalated his pleas. “Johnson gave him a real sales job,” says House Democratic Whip Carl Albert of Oklahoma, who sat across the aisle from the two Texans. “He told Mr. Rayburn, ‘I have supported you all these years, and I need your help. I have a chance here….’” Rayburn sat silent, a block of granite in his seat. “It was an embarrassing ride for everyone on the plane,” listening to Johnson’s acting “like a spoiled child,” one of Rayburn’s biographers was to write. “But there was silent applause for Rayburn,” who during the two-hour flight said hardly a word.

Russell had been keeping himself inaccessible at his place “with no telephones,” but his attendance at the White House briefing (at which Johnson told Eisenhower that the proper response was “to tell [the British and French] they have our moral support and go on in; Eisenhower demurred) put him within Johnson’s reach, and Johnson had more success “working” him than he had with Rayburn. Determined not to go to Chicago, Russell tried to explain that he could not help Johnson get the nomination, that it was too late, that even the Georgia delegation, under Governor Marvin Griffin’s direction, was now so firmly committed to Stevenson that its vote could not be changed. As Evans and Novak were to recount: “Johnson persisted. All right, he said, Griffin is hopeless. But please,please, come out with me anyway. Come with me and sit with me in my headquarters and talk to me and eat with me and be with me. The tone was beseeching, pleading.” And Russell finally agreed, leaving for the airport with Johnson without even packing a suitcase. “Robert E. Lee could not have dragged Dick Russell to the Democratic National Convention in … 1956,” Evans and Novak wrote. “But Lyndon Johnson did.”

When the plane arrived back at Chicago’s Midway Airport at four o’clock Sunday afternoon, Rayburn and Johnson began walking toward their waiting limousines, accompanied by Booth Mooney. When newspaper and television reporters and cameramen ran toward them, the Speaker pushed through them, scowling, but Johnson stayed to talk.

“I don’t see why Lyndon lets those buzzards trap him like that,” Rayburn said to Mooney. Looking around to make sure that no reporter could hear him, he muttered, “I hate to see Lyndon get bit so hard by the presidential bug at this stage of the game. Stevenson’s got it sewed up.” When the reporters caught up to him, he “stayed hitched,” repeating that “I haven’t said I was for anybody but Lyndon, dammit.” Asked if Johnson’s candidacy was truly a “serious” one, he said, “It’s a serious one.” He even said that Johnson would get “a good many votes” besides the ones from Texas. But, as Mooney was to say, “he had no illusions.” And as soon as Russell started telephoning the leaders of southern delegations, he lost any he may have had. Rayburn and Russell were realists; both saw there was no hope. Rayburn told Johnson privately that he felt he was making a big mistake in actively pushing a hopeless candidacy. “I told Lyndon I thought he had lost his head,” he was to tell a friend later. “I told him that it was a mistake to become a sectional candidate. He should be thinking of 1960. Look what happened to Dick Russell.” Johnson was getting the same warning from the only member of his staff besides Connally who dared to give him warnings. When Johnson had awakened Sunday morning, he had found a memo slipped under his door. It was from Jim Rowe, who had written it during the night. In it, Rowe recalls, “I said you must be careful [that] you don’t get yourself where Dick Russell got himself in 1952…. Don’t get yourself in that position, don’t get out front, you can’t make it….” After he returned from Washington, Johnson came into Rowe’s room and said, “I agree with everything you said.” Perhaps he did agree—intellectually. But he didn’t take the advice. He couldn’t. He was beyond listening to warnings, as was demonstrated the next day, when the convention opened.

ON THAT DAY, Monday, August 13, “one man who thought Lyndon Johnson’s chances were excellent was Lyndon Johnson,” Richard Rovere wrote in his New Yorker analysis. “For somewhere between twelve and eighteen hours on Monday, he waged a perfectly serious and purposeful campaign for the nomination, and he … thought it more likely than not that he and Senator Russell, of Georgia, could gain control of the Democratic Party and make it a medium for the expression of their views.”

In the International Amphitheatre, party orators were droning away to a nearly empty auditorium; the real negotiations were going on in the big Loop hotels, not in the lobbies jammed with boisterous badge-wearing, placard-waving delegates, but upstairs in the traditional “smoke-filled rooms” of party leaders, and in the hotel conference rooms where state delegations were caucusing. At the Texas caucus early Monday morning, Johnson sat listening as one speaker after another predicted he would win the nomination; “Let us tell the nation and the world that we have here the next President of the United States,” John Lyle proclaimed in that ringing voice that would have been familiar to anyone who had attended the Leland Olds hearings. Emerging from the caucus, Johnson told reporters that he had no plans to release his delegates; “My name will stay as long as the American people are interested.”

His method of making the race was somewhat unconventional. All that Monday, Stevenson and Harriman (and Kefauver, who was trying to persuade his two hundred delegates to switch to Stevenson) rushed from caucus to caucus behind police motorcycle escorts with wailing sirens. The Texas caucus was the only one Johnson attended. He spent the rest of the day—the entire day—on the Hilton’s twenty-third floor, in his suite, behind closed doors. He had received four formal invitations from delegations to address them that day; he declined all four. Party leaders who wanted to talk to him were told he would be glad to meet with them—in his suite. “He wouldn’t go out to seek delegations or to meet with them,” Jim Rowe recalls. “It was a very odd performance”—odd unless one takes into account what Rowe calls Johnson’s “ambivalence”: the conflict between a desire to run and a dread of being seen to be running, lest he lose, since losing would then be “humiliation” (that word was on his lips constantly during the convention, particularly when he was asked why he wasn’t out appealing for votes; “I didn’t come here to be humiliated,” he told Marshall McNeil when McNeil asked him that question); the conflict between his emotions and his intellect, which told him how long the odds were against his winning. His emotions veered constantly between extremes: between the despair and depression when he thought he wasn’t winning and the overconfidence or euphoria that made him so overbearing when he thought he was winning (when, at a press conference, reporters pointed out that “serious” candidates usually address delegations, he replied, “Different people have different methods. Sometimes they come to you”). His performance is difficult to understand, furthermore, unless one also takes into account two other considerations. One was the self-knowledge that had made him say, when he first got to the Senate, that it was “the right size”—the awareness that he was most effective when he dealt with men in private, behind closed doors, and least effective when he had to speak to them in large groups. The other was not a personal but a political calculation. If he tried openly to rally support for himself, the first states that would announce their support would be southern states. Not wanting to be labeled a southern, regional candidate, he wanted at least one or two states from other regions to announce first.

And, indeed, on that Monday, the leaders did come to him. “While the other candidates rushed through the city in cavalcades heralded by sirens, to swoop down on wavering and uncommitted delegates, Lyndon Johnson sat in his white-walled suite overlooking Lake Michigan and received the mighty of his party,” Mary McGrory wrote. The Hilton’s twenty-third floor, on which Rayburn, Daley, and Stevenson also had suites, was the most crowded spot in Chicago, its long hallways crammed with the heavy, clumsy television cameras and cables of that era, with TV cameramen and newspaper and magazine photographers and reporters and delegates, and most of the delegates in the halls were wearing the “Love That Lyndon” buttons, and most of the visitors turned left after getting off the elevators, toward the wing that he had commandeered, not toward the suites of the other big names.

In the hallway that had in effect become his private corridor, the crush intensified, television cameramen and newspaper photographers shoving each other for vantage points, the TV cameras and cables so thick that when a waiter tried to push through them with a table containing Johnson’s lunch, the scene, one reporter wrote, was “not unlike the ship cabin scene” of the Marx Brothers farce A Night at the Opera. And down the corridor that day, pushing past the photographers and reporters to the door at the end numbered 2306-A, Stevenson, Harriman, and Kefauver made their way, as did the favorite-son candidates Symington and Magnuson, vice presidential possibilities Humphrey and Kennedy, as well as Ernest McFarland, “flown in,” as one reporter wrote, “to deliver his state,” Richard Russell, in town to deliver several states, and twenty-one other men. They would knock on the door and sometimes be admitted at once, and sometimes have to wait outside in the corridor, either because someone else was inside or because, alone in the suite or with only Rowe or John Connally present, Johnson was working the phones; so many telephones had been installed in 2306-A and the adjoining small sitting room that wires seemed to stretch everywhere, and Johnson spent hours that day pacing back and forth with a big hand wrapped around a receiver, talking, persuading, selling. Lyndon Johnson’s suite, Bill White wrote, “was the most crowded in Chicago”—the epicenter that day of convention maneuvering. Reporters clocked the visits, and attached significance to the length of time Lyndon Johnson deigned to spend with each man—Stevenson, it was noted, was allowed thirty minutes, Kefauver a mere five—before they emerged, to be backed against a corridor wall by the press while they gave carefully noncommittal comments about what had taken place inside. Johnson would emerge and pose for a minute for photographers with a favored few—Stevenson and Harriman, for example—joking and smiling, a bronzed, confident figure towering over shorter men, obviously enjoying himself. Occasionally he would drop a tidbit for the reporters. Harriman had invited Johnson to his suite in the Blackstone Hotel, but Johnson had had one of his secretaries say he would rather have Harriman do the visiting, and Harriman had done so—Johnson made sure the reporters knew that he had made Harriman come to him. All that day, he was the center of attention, and he was reveling in it.

Many of the reporters were from Washington, and they assumed that the closed-door conferences meant what they meant in the Senate: that, as Mary McGrory wrote, “what Lyndon wants Lyndon gets,” “that Senator Johnson, whose success in persuading senators to go along with him is nothing less than spectacular, suddenly saw in the delegates some 2,000 twin-brothers of his colleagues, that in this crowded arena he saw a reasonable facsimile of the Senate floor which he so indisputably dominates.” That assumption was incorrect, however. The famous political figures beating a path to his door were not offering support for his candidacy but asking for his support for their candidacies, and for the support of the southern delegates they thought he controlled. Not one of his visitors from the North was even considering supporting him. And there was another resemblance between suite and Senate, and it was not one that boded well for Johnson’s chances. Both locales were filled with senators—almost exclusively with senators. Among the visitors to 2306-A that Monday were no fewer than fifteen senators—and exactly two governors (Harriman and Luther Hodges of North Carolina) and one labor leader. The men with whom Lyndon Johnson was meeting did not have the power to give him what he wanted.

Furthermore, with the exception of Richard Russell, who came by twice that day, few of the visitors were from the South. Since he didn’t want journalists’ attention on the southerners, he dealt with them that day mostly over the telephone. Once, Lyndon Johnsoncould have had the southern states, could have had them easily. But he had declined their offers—and the South, determined to exercise enough power at the convention to block an unacceptable platform plank or candidate, couldn’t wait for him to make a firm commitment to run. The only way for the South to be powerful was for the South to be solid, which meant lining up behind a single candidate. So the South had gone looking for a candidate, and, in Stevenson, had found one. In addition, the senators had stepped out of the picture, leaving the selection of convention delegates to the governors, most of whom were only casually acquainted with Johnson and some of whom were more than a little offended by his rejection of their offers. Most of the eleven southern states had arrived at the convention with the intention either of supporting Stevenson from the opening ballot or of casting that first-ballot vote for a favorite son, so as to keep their leverage over Stevenson and the platform, with the expectation that they would switch to Stevenson later. Nonetheless, that Monday, with Johnson at last—suddenly—a declared candidate, and with pleas from Richard Russell, offers of support for him had been renewed by several of the Old Confederate states in telephone calls to Johnson’s suite.

Most of these offers, however, came with a request: that he promise to stay in the race until the end, or close to the end; that he not drop out on an early ballot. For many of the southern states, this pledge was the sine qua non for their support; they couldn’t take the chance of lining up behind a candidate who might drop out too early in the convention, leaving them without a rallying point in the fight over the civil rights platform plank. The Dallas Morning News, well attuned to the southern viewpoint, reported that as soon as Johnson said he was “serious,” “Southern states … asked him what they could do to help along a fellow southerner,” but they also asked, “Would he ride hard to the finish, as Sen. Dick Russell had done in 1952? … Southern states wanted that ironclad guarantee.” But Johnson still believed he could pick up the southern states whenever he wanted, and was still afraid of the “humiliation” a losing fight to the finish would entail, and, the Morning News reported, “That firm assurance never came.”

In some cases, Johnson’s declaration came too late. The illness of Harry Byrd’s wife had prevented him from coming to Chicago, but early Monday morning Johnson telephoned Byrd at his Winchester estate, and for more than two hours, Byrd was on the telephone to Chicago, trying to swing the Virginia delegation to Johnson. But, with Byrd having bowed out of the picture months before, the delegation had been selected by former Governor John Battle, and Battle and the delegation wouldn’t switch. Monday evening, there was a meeting of leaders from the eleven southern states. Texas was for Johnson, of course. Two states decided to stay with the candidate who would stay in until the end, who appeared likely to win—and who was so much more acceptable to them than Harriman: Adlai Stevenson. The other eight decided to support favorite sons “until an agreement was reached on a civil rights plank.” Some of these delegations were planning at that point to announce for Johnson, but their failure to announce immediately meant that no southern barricade had been thrown up in front of the Stevenson bandwagon.

Lyndon Johnson’s failure to acknowledge these realities ran counter to the previous pattern of his political life. A political convention is at bottom an exercise in counting, and if he had been counting delegates as he counted senators—coldly, unemotionally, looking unflinchingly at reality, no matter how unpleasant that reality might be—he would have seen that he had no chance for the nomination. But in Chicago, he was hearing what he wanted to hear, believing what he wanted to believe. At one point late Monday afternoon, Harry Byrd Jr., hastily dispatched to Chicago by his father, gave Johnson an overly optimistic report on the Virginia delegation. Instead of checking it, Johnson simply believed it. Inviting reporters into his suite that evening, Johnson was brimming over with self-confidence. He had had “a very fruitful day,” he said—the same type of day that he was accustomed to having in Washington: a day of talks with “many members of the Senate, leaders of the party, for whom I have respect and to whom I have obligations,” talks “about the problems which confront us,” “the same kind of talks which happen on the third floor of the Capitol when I’m there.” And, he said, he expected the results in Chicago to be just as satisfactory as they were in Washington. He had had many pledges of support, he said. Texas would not be the only state in his column; “There will be other states that will vote for me.” In particular, he said, one big northern state had been won over. “The biggest bloc of votes that I expect I’ll have was a complete surprise to me.”

Standing at the back of the room listening to the press conference, Corcoran and Rowe could not even imagine what big state Johnson might be referring to; they knew that nothing that had happened that day offered any hope that Johnson would receive the votes of any big state other than Texas. John Connally recalls that “for one day”—that Monday—“there was the feeling that there was hope.” But in truth there was no hope, and that day should have made Johnson understand that. The man who had always looked facts in the face wasn’t doing so this time. Years later, at their Washington law firm, Corcoran and Rowe would be talking to the author of this book about the 1956 convention. Rowe, thoughtful and analytical, was using terms like “ambivalence” to analyze Johnson’s behavior when the blunt Corcoran interrupted with a blunter explanation. “Listen,” he said. “He just wanted it [the nomination] so much. He wanted it so much he wasn’t thinking straight.” There was a pause, and then Rowe nodded agreement. Trying to run for President from behind the closed door of his Hilton suite, Johnson was insulated from reality by his hopes and dreams.

OUTSIDE THE SUITE, however, there was reality just the same.

Truman himself was finding out on Monday, to his chagrin, that his announcement had had little effect on Stevenson’s firmly committed delegates. Invitations to his Blackstone suite were accepted far more eagerly—delegates were thrilled to meet a former President—than was his advice. By evening, Murray Kempton wrote, “the old man was down to haggling for the votes of single delegates from Montana and one such came, and came out saying it was an honor to meet one of the great men of American history, but, no, he guessed he hadn’t quite made up his mind.” And, Kempton wrote, “all afternoon the word rolled in from the Kennedys, the ADAers and the Monroneys—all the names of the future in the Democratic Party—and every one said that he was still for Stevenson.” In fact, Truman’s statement had boomeranged against Johnson. Worried that Truman’s move might improve the chances of the hated Harriman, many southerners felt they could not wait any longer for a Johnson commitment to stay in the race and climbed back off the fence—into Stevenson’s camp. Byrd was still making telephone calls, but the growing sentiment in the Virginia delegation was expressed by Thomas Broyhill, who told a reporter that it was time for Virginia to stop “fooling around with dark horses. It’s Stevenson or Harriman, and we had better get Stevenson in there as quick as possible.” Almost every poll of delegates taken Monday evening, the evening of Johnson’s “very fruitful day,” showed that in fact Stevenson’s delegate count was either close to or over six hundred.

And, unlike Johnson, Stevenson and his canny campaign manager, James Aloysius Finnegan, a tough Irish politician from Philadelphia, were talking to the right people: all that Monday, while Johnson, in his room at the end of one wing of the Hilton, was conferring with senators, Stevenson and Finnegan, in their room at the end of the next wing (when Johnson looked out the window, he could have seen into Stevenson’s suite across a fifty-foot courtyard had the blinds in Stevenson’s suite not been kept closed), were conferring with the men who really ran the delegations.

Finnegan was using some very strong arguments. To southern leaders still supporting favorite sons, he was saying that Adlai had the nomination all but sewn up and needed only a few votes to win. If southern states supplied those votes, those states would have Stevenson’s gratitude, and sympathetic treatment from a Stevenson Administration. On the other hand, if they didn’t supply those votes, the North might do so—several northern states were about to throw their votes to Stevenson, he said. If they didn’t get aboard the train quickly, he told the southerners, they might find that it had left without them, and that there was no longer a seat for them on it.

To northern leaders, Finnegan was using the same argument in reverse; several southern states were about to throw the decisive votes to Adlai, he said; if northern states didn’t board the train quickly, they might find that it had left without them. And to northern liberals, Finnegan added another argument: If Stevenson didn’t get his majority, and the convention therefore was thrown into deadlock, who would benefit? he asked. Lyndon Johnson. Johnson would be in a position to demand concessions from Stevenson in exchange for the South’s support, he said. Do you really want to take a chance on that happening? A prolonged deadlock might even result in Lyndon Johnson eventually winning the nomination, Finnegan warned. Do you really want to take a chance that Lyndon Johnson will be the nominee?

These were chances that northern liberals indeed didn’t want to take. As W. H. Lawrence reported that night in the New York Times: “Some of the northern liberals [are] restive about the possibilities that the pressure on Mr. Stevenson might force him to make an accommodation with Senator Johnson.” Even liberals from Harriman’s own state were restive. The New York Post reported “uncertainty as to how long Harriman could hold New York’s delegation back from Stevenson if it looked like a coup by Johnson was in the making.”

One northern leader who didn’t want to take such chances was Walter Reuther. Lyndon Johnson had been confident that the big Michigan delegation would hold fast behind favorite-son Williams or would go for Harriman; he kept mentioning that Reuther was his friend, that he used to sleep on the spare bed in Johnson’s home when he came to Washington in the 1940s, that Reuther had helped swing labor support to him in his 1948 Senate race. He appears not to have grasped that for Walter Reuther, friendship was not as significant as Emmett Till, and that, in addition, since 1948 there had been Leland Olds and the natural gas bill and the destruction of Paul Douglas. And the Michigan delegation, as Murray Kempton wrote, “is the great fruit of the social revolution of the thirties; there are people in it who were arrested on sitdown strikes twenty years ago. The old CIO is stronger there than anywhere else at this convention.”

Monday evening, Michigan held a closed-door meeting, and Stevenson came to it, with a smile, a few jokes—and Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt.

Entering the room, she saw a photographer, Sammy Schulman of International News Service, who had been her husband’s favorite photographer. “Hello, Sammy,” she laughed. “Still going around?” Yes, he was, Sammy replied. And you, Mrs. Roosevelt, he asked, are you still going around? Yes, she was, Eleanor Roosevelt replied—and then she told Michigan why she was going around: that there are some things more important than winning—that principles are more important—and that therefore Michigan should be for Adlai Stevenson. The delegation stood up and cheered, and then Walter Reuther spoke, and said he was for Stevenson. And Soapy Williams had understood Finnegan’s warning. The convention was drifting dangerously, the Governor told a reporter; if the liberal forces didn’t unite, he said, there was a danger that “a minority power bloc” might name the nominee. By the time the meeting broke up well after midnight, it was clear that when Michigan caucused the next day, Adlai would receive the delegation’s vote.

Jim Rowe got the bad news at five o’clock Tuesday morning from one of his “spies” in the Michigan delegation, and he put on a bathrobe and hurried down the hall to relay it to Lyndon Johnson.

Rowe would never forget how Johnson looked when he opened the door. All of him looked asleep—he was in pajamas and his rumpled hair was standing on end—all of him except his eyes. Piercing and intent, they were very wide awake, and when Rowe gave him the news, they narrowed in that calculating look that Rowe had seen so often. But then Johnson responded, and his response was not the usual Johnson response to bad news. “I don’t believe it,” he said.

Rowe tried to convince him it was true. He knew it was important that Johnson understand what was happening, that Stevenson was about to win, and that if Johnson did not support him, give him Texas’ fifty-six votes and bring in other southern states as well, he would lose all his power in the convention. He recalls saying, “It is absolutely true. It is going to happen. Reuther has given his pledge.” Michigan was going to caucus at 11 a.m., he said, and once it did, it would be too late for Johnson to do anything. He said, “You have approximately six hours to deliver Texas and to control the convention.” But Lyndon refused to believe it.

BELIEVE IT OR NOT, however, it was true, and with the Michigan decision, the bandwagon was rolling. On Tuesday morning, the Arizona delegation also caucused, and, ignoring a last-minute plea by Bob McFarland, voted to cast its sixteen votes for Stevenson. Lyndon Johnson had been pinning a lot of his hopes not only on Michigan but on New Jersey, which had come to the convention with its thirty-six votes ostensibly behind its favorite son, Governor Robert B. Meyner, but Meyner had come to the same conclusion as Soapy Williams: that Harriman couldn’t win, and that the South could not be allowed to dominate the convention. On Tuesday morning, he flatly refused to allow his name to be placed in nomination, and New Jersey voted unanimously for Stevenson. Hearing the news, a Harriman aide silently drew his finger across his throat.

Finnegan’s gambit was working with southerners as well, as they saw the northern states clambering aboard the Stevenson bandwagon and realized that it was, indeed, leaving without them. Moreover, some of them were by this time quite annoyed at Lyndon Johnson. If they had declined to back Stevenson, it was on Johnson’s behalf that they had done so—had remained committed to their favorite sons—and yet he was still refusing to give them a firm commitment to stay in the race to the end. By Tuesday evening, it was apparent that Virginia would go for Stevenson. And since it was also becoming apparent Tuesday that “moderates” would control the Platform Committee, even Russell’s Georgia had less reason to hold out. Predicting a civil rights plank that “may not be all that we want but [that] we hope … will be one that we could live with,” Governor Griffin added—in a jibe at Johnson’s indecision—“Of all the candidates here that we know about, I would say that the Georgia delegation holds Mr. Stevenson in the highest esteem.”

Truman launched a second, more intemperate, attack on the man he had once persuaded to run for the presidency, calling him “too defeatist to win,” but while for the former President’s first press conference, the Blackstone’s Crystal Ballroom had hardly been big enough to hold all the reporters and cameramen, this time it was half empty—and his attack, as Lawrence wrote, served only “to confirm reports that his backing of Governor Harriman had not shaken” Stevenson’s support. Indeed, by Tuesday night, the former President’s actions had so “greatly minimized his own stature,” James Reston wrote, “that he was in danger of becoming” an ex-President “who no longer has the consolation of being powerful within his own party.”

All that Tuesday, Lyndon Johnson stayed in his suite, but in the corridor outside there were signs of the change in his status. During the morning, the cables and cameras were as thickly clustered as they had been on Monday, the callers were still lined up in the hall waiting for an audience, but, as one reporter wrote, “All through the day the Stevenson bandwagon kept on rolling. State after state, delegation after delegation, decided that instead of being on the fence, the place to be was on the side of the winner,” and by that afternoon, the television cameras had disappeared, and the number of visitors to Johnson’s suite was noticeably fewer. And two of the visitors were Stevenson and Finnegan, keeping an appointment that had been scheduled the previous day. Johnson tried to bargain with them, saying that in order for him to support Stevenson, he needed assurance that the civil rights plank would be acceptable to the South. Jim Rowe, the only Johnson aide present during the meeting, recalls Johnson saying, “I have got to have something that will not hurt my people too much.” Stevenson, ever courteous, said, “Well, I would like to think about it,” but Finnegan simply said: “No.”

“What did you say?” Johnson asked him. “I said no,” Finnegan replied. “We are not going to give you anything.”

When Johnson asked, “Why not?” Finnegan vouchsafed a further explanation, saying, “Look, all we are asking for [in the platform] is a shotgun. If we don’t give this crowd in the North that, they are going to use machine guns, [so] you’d better take it [the proposed plank]. But the answer to you is no.” If Lyndon Johnson needed proof that he no longer possessed meaningful power at the Democratic National Convention of 1956, that one-word reply gave it to him. Finnegan and Stevenson no longer had to bargain with him; he no longer had anything substantial to bargain with. Johnson said simply, “All right.” And then, Rowe says, “they left.”

Rowe was later to hear Johnson recounting the conversation to Richard Russell. “He said, ‘Well, you know, Dick, I was really making some progress with Adlai. I took my knife and held it right against him. All of a sudden I felt some steel in my ribs and I looked around and Finnegan had a knife in my ribs.’ He laughed, and Russell said, ‘Finnegan is a pro,’ and that was it.”

By Tuesday evening, a reporter who ventured into 2306-A found the outer rooms empty except for Johnson’s secretaries. In the living room, Johnson was chatting with Hubert Humphrey, who had thought that Johnson would have only a brief moment or two to spare him. Instead, Johnson had time for a long talk. There was no one else waiting to see him. After a while, he left for a leisurely dinner. When he returned about midnight, he was greeted by an aide who said one wire service was reporting that he was about to withdraw as a candidate. Calling a press conference, he said the report was “a baseless, fantastical rumor. I’m still in. You will always find a lot of panicky folks trying to blitz things in the hours just before the balloting.” He talked with his usual bravado—asked if Stevenson had used “any pressure” to get the nomination, Johnson said that pressure wouldn’t work on him: “I’m used to pressure, and I know how to handle it”—but the reporters weren’t fooled. “The fire was out” on Lyndon Johnson’s candidacy, one wrote.

FOR THE NEXT TWO DAYS, however, Lyndon Johnson remained a candidate. Rowe’s repeated attempts to persuade him to withdraw and announce that Texas would vote for Stevenson, as so many other states were doing, met with no success.

This obduracy brought Johnson a measure of satisfaction—and a measure of what he was always saying he feared.

The satisfaction came on Wednesday, when, before a huge audience that packed the great stockyard arena to the rafters, the candidates’ names were placed in nomination, Johnson’s by John Connally. The speech nominating Adlai Stevenson, delivered by John F. Kennedy, and written by Kennedy and his aide Theodore Sorensen, was graceful, urbane and witty. The speech nominating Lyndon Johnson was quintessentially Texan: loud, filled with hyperbole, but delivered by a tall, handsome man with the presence of a movie star.

Connally emphasized the key point Johnson wanted—needed—to have made: “Let there be no mistake about it. He is not the candidate of a state or a section,” and his speech was filled with the usual stock phrases—“a dedicated American,” “a forceful and persuasive leader of men”—but John Connally had known Lyndon Johnson a long time, and his speech also contained some phrases very particularly suited to the man he was describing. “This man has known poverty,” John Connally said. “He is a son of the Hill Country of Texas, where the sun is hot and the soil is meager and life itself is a never-easy challenge.” And Connally also said: “Call off the roll of great Democrats of this day. By the name of each, there may be entered many fine qualities and many splendid attainments. But alongside of this man there will surely be written the summation: ‘This man works hardest of all.’”

Even before the peroration—“Fellow Americans, fellow Democrats, I offer you for the Presidency of the United States, that son of the Texas hills, that tested and effective servant of the people: Lyndon B. Johnson”—the big Texas delegation had begun to roar, and now they leapt up in their tall red-white-and-blue “Love That Lyndon” hats, and grabbed their “Love That Lyndon” banners and moved into line behind a twenty-piece band playing “The Eyes of Texas Are upon You,” and started to march through the aisles. Delegates from other states—many other states—grabbed their state banners and followed, so many that, as Booth Mooney wrote, “television commentators noted with some surprise—had they missed something?—that participants were by no means confined to the whooping Texans and their southern neighbors”; was support for Johnson broader than they had thought? But most of the non-southern states were parading because of the short, stocky man, his visage stern and impassive, who was standing on the podium above them, looking as if he was bored by all the noise. Knowing how much demonstrations of affection meant to Lyndon, Sam Rayburn had called in the Texas congressmen attending the convention, and told them to pass the word among their House colleagues from other states that he would appreciate their states’ participation in the Johnson parade. He did not threaten, of course; Sam Rayburn never threatened. But, as Mooney wrote, the congressmen “reminded” their colleagues “that Sam Rayburn would go right on being Speaker. No doubt he would be watching with interest, and would remember, which states helped to add to the … demonstration for his friend.” Because of television constraints, a twenty-minute time limit had been placed on parades, and Rayburn had enforced it strictly for every other candidate. Now, “without a flicker of expression,” as one reporter wrote, he stood watching as the river of “Love That Lyndon” signs flowed past him and then wound around the convention hall two more times. An officious convention official went up to the old man and told him that the time limit had been exceeded. Rayburn turned and stared at him. The official went away and sat down. The old man stood unmoving, looking down on the signs bearing the slogan that expressed his feelings, too.

Johnson himself, observing the tradition that candidates do not attend the convention as long as their names are before it, was watching on television, upstairs in Wesley West’s Imperial Suite at the Hilton with Richard Russell, but seated in a box on the side of the big hall was not only Lady Bird but his family: his mother, his brother, and his three sisters, who had gone through that terrible childhood with him; who had lived, as he had lived, “at the bottom of the heap”; who had watched their father lose the ranch; who had lived in dread of losing their house in Johnson City, too. As the parade reached their box, Connally, its leader, halted for a moment and raised his banner in tribute to them. Who knows what was in their minds at that moment? Who knows what was in the mind of Lyndon Johnson watching in the Imperial Suite? But how far from that childhood he had come.

But the next day was Thursday, when the convention voted on the candidates.

While Johnson had been watching his parade in the Imperial Suite Wednesday night, Russell had given him a warning. “Lyndon,” he said, “don’t ever let yourself become a sectional candidate for the presidency. That was what happened to me.” If you are labeled as a sectional—southern—candidate, Russell said, “You can’t win.”

Although Johnson certainly understood, at least intellectually, the wisdom of that advice, that the southern label would be hard to shake off and that it would hurt his chances of winning the nomination not only in 1956 but in 1960, and although day by day he was being given the same advice with increasing urgency by Rowe and others and was always assuring them that he understood that advice and agreed with it, he hadn’t followed it on Wednesday. When, that evening, the dimensions of the Stevenson landslide were clear, a reporter asked him skeptically, “Senator, are you really going to keep your name in front of the convention to the end?” Johnson wheeled on him angrily and said, “I’ve told you forty times since I’ve been here what Johnson’s position is. I’ll tell you again.” His position, he said, was that his name was going to go before the convention, and stay there.

And he didn’t follow the advice on Thursday. During the balloting that evening, most of the favorite sons withdrew in favor of Stevenson. Only seven states did not do so, and five of them were southern states: Texas, Mississippi (the only state besides his own which voted for Johnson), and Georgia, Virginia, and South Carolina, who stayed with their favorite sons. So at the end of the first and only roll call, the figures on the big screen behind the rostrum were stark: Stevenson—9051/2; Harriman—210; Johnson—80. (Symington received 45 votes, most from his native Missouri.) So of the 4661/2 votes that Stevenson did not receive, 160 were southern votes. As one of the Texas delegates, Jerry Holleman, was to recall, “It became obvious before the first roll call was over that Adlai Stevenson was going to be the nominee, the Texas delegation wanted to switch over from Lyndon and change its vote, cast its final vote for Stevenson and be on the bandwagon. They were after John Connally, and John was on the phone talking to Lyndon, desperately trying to get Lyndon’s permission to let them ask for the floor to switch their vote.” But the permission was not given. After Rayburn announced that Adlai Stevenson “is declared the nominee of this convention,” Connally attempted to offer the traditional motion that the nomination be made unanimous, but Rayburn recognized Oklahoma instead.

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MEN CLOSE TO JOHNSON would puzzle for years over his actions at the 1956 convention, offering different explanations. Rowe would say that “I never could understand why he didn’t [withdraw]. It [his reason] was obviously wrapped up in Texas and his base of power, and the Eisenhower feeling down there. And it may have been just a dislike for Adlai.” Others note that during the fight for the Texas delegation earlier that year, the conservative Shivers had charged that if Johnson was a candidate, he would be merely a stalking-horse for Stevenson, secretly pledged to turn over his delegates to him, and speculated that Johnson was afraid to release his delegates lest that action prove Shivers correct. But during the intervening months Johnson had been a leading figure—second only to Truman, the leading figure—in the “Stop Stevenson” campaign. Releasing his delegates after Stevenson had already been declared the nominee would not make even Texas conservatives believe he had been plotting for Stevenson all along. And in fact Connally, the representative of the anti-Stevenson, pro-Eisenhower conservative powers in Texas, was among those pleading for Johnson to withdraw. Connally himself was to say years later that Johnson’s actions at the convention “made no sense to anyone, myself included.”

Men who, like Connally, knew Johnson very well, in the end fall back on considerations that are not political but personal, considerations that revolve around the single-mindedness with which Lyndon Johnson held to his great dream. Connally kept returning to the fact that in politics “you can always have a dream,” that even when all seems lost, in the hurly-burly of a convention “you always have hope.” He was also to note that 1956 was still in the era (although in fact near the end of that era) “when politicians believed in spontaneous forces, that delegates could be stampeded, in the eleventh-hour draft, in a deadlocked convention turning to a compromise candidate.” His statement is a reminder that in 1956 a reporter whose articles often reflected Connally’s views wrote that until the very end, Johnson was waiting for some “explosion” that would reverse the Stevenson tide, “the explosion that might send him into presidential contention.” George Brown, who sixteen years before had watched Lyndon Johnson turn down a small fortune because it might just possibly, at some long-distant future date, interfere with his pursuit of the presidency, and at whose Falfurrias hunting lodge Johnson rested up after the convention, says that “he hadn’t thought he would be so close [to the nomination] in ’56, and then when all of a sudden [after Truman’s endorsement of Harriman], he felt he was close, he got carried away with the thought that he might get it, and he simply couldn’t bear to just admit he didn’t have a chance.” A key word in Brown’s analysis is repeated by Tommy Corcoran. Asked why Johnson hadn’t withdrawn, Corcoran said flatly: “Because he couldn’t bear to.” That vast prize that Lyndon Johnson sought, the prize that had always seemed so far off, had suddenly seemed so close, almost within his reach. It was too hard for him to consign it again to the future, to admit that, under the best of circumstances, four years would have to pass before he could try for it again; he “couldn’t bear” to do that.

And this emphasis on the personal is given weight by what happened after the convention chose its presidential nominee—and turned to choosing the vice presidential nominee.

AT LYNDON JOHNSON’S TUESDAY MIDNIGHT PRESS CONFERENCE, one reporter had asked him if he would accept the nomination for vice president. “I have not the slightest interest in such an assignment,” he said. When, however, another reporter pressed him to make his reply definitive, to say that he would not accept the vice presidential nomination if it was offered to him, Johnson did not do so. He said something very different. “I am not saying that under NO circumstances would I refuse to serve,” he said.

Little attention was paid to the reply at the time; only one or two reporters even bothered to include it in their articles on the press conference. But attention should have been paid. Felix McKnight of the Dallas Morning News, who was close to Connally and got much of his information from him, was shortly to write that Johnson is “reported ready to accept the vice presidency if he is asked.”

In fact, he wasn’t waiting to be asked. Early Thursday evening a number of Johnson partisans, Tommy Corcoran prominent among them, “told Johnson that he ought to be Vice President,” and Johnson told Rowe: “Go in and talk to Adlai. Tell him I want it.” Rowe says that “I went in to where everyone was churning around at Adlai, and I said to Finnegan, ‘I have got to talk with you and Adlai right away.’ So they came out of the room and I said, ‘I have got a candidate for the vice presidency and he says he wants it.’” Stevenson reacted graciously, if noncommittedly, with “a very flowery, attractive speech … right off the top of his head, saying ‘I am a great admirer of Lyndon Johnson. I don’t know what I am going to do. I want you to go back and tell Johnson he is one of the great men,’ and so forth.” Finnegan was simply flabbergasted. He “just sort of sat there and said something like you can knock me [over with a feather]. I said, ‘That’s my message, gentlemen,’ and left.”

It was only after Rayburn had offered a little fatherly advice to Johnson on the subject that he dropped the idea. When Corcoran told Rayburn what Johnson was doing, the Speaker reacted with his unique version of disapproval. “I saw that red [flush] coming up over his neck and head, and I just said to myself, ‘Uh-oh,’” Corcoran recalls. The whole subject of the vice presidency had already proved irritating to Rayburn; reporters were constantly asking him if he himself would accept the job, a question Rayburn regarded as insulting; “I have never been a candidate for vice president of anything,” he growled to one. The advice he gave to Johnson was blunt, and profane—and within a very short time, Rowe was entrusted with a new message for Stevenson. “Johnson said, ‘Go back and tell Stevenson that NO Texan wants to be vice president…. The only thing I want is to be in the meeting where the vice president is selected.’ I don’t want to be humiliated by not being called into the meeting.” Returning to Stevenson and Finnegan, an embarrassed Rowe said, “I don’t understand what I am doing, gentlemen, but I now have a new message.”

SEVERAL HOURS BEFORE Rowe delivered his two messages, Stevenson and Finnegan had already privately decided on a startling move: instead of announcing his choice of vice presidential candidate as presidential nominees traditionally do, Stevenson would throw the convention open to make its own choice. An hour or two after Rowe had delivered the messages, at about the time Rayburn was announcing that Stevenson had won the nomination, Stevenson sent word to the Speaker on the podium—and to Johnson in the Imperial Suite at the Hilton—to please join him in a private room at the Stockyards Inn restaurant across a parking lot from the International Amphitheatre, and there gave them, and other party leaders, advance notice of his decision.

Rayburn denounced it, in John Bartlow Martin’s words, “profanely and contemptuously,” and Johnson was only slightly less violent. After all his work to keep the party united, Rayburn saw, Stevenson was about to divide it and throw the convention into turmoil. And the two Texans feared that in an open convention, the despised Kefauver would win: there were less than twenty-four hours before the balloting for vice president began, and the Tennessean, with his forces already organized, would have a long head start. Moreover, Johnson and Rayburn said, the decision would contribute to the impression, already far too prevalent, that Stevenson was indecisive. His face again red with rage, Rayburn stood there refusing to agree to what Stevenson was suggesting until Johnson took him by his arm and said, “Mr. Sam, it’s his decision, he has to live with it, not us,” and pulled him away. “All right,” Rayburn said, “if your mind’s made up, give me your arm and I’ll take you out there and introduce you to the convention.” Watching them leave the room, Democratic Deputy Chairman Hy Raskin warned a friend: “Stay out of the old man’s way—he’s madder’n hell.” Stevenson’s announcement ignited a mad scramble. “Within minutes,” Time said, “no delegate could buy his own drink and no elderly lady could cross a Chicago street without help from an eager vice-presidential candidate.”

Making clear that he himself was no longer interested in the vice presidential nomination (“Under no circumstances that I visualize will my name ever go before the convention,” he said now), Lyndon Johnson also made it clear that he intended to determine who did get it, but he had as little success—and adroitness—in the maneuvering for this nomination as he had had for the presidential nomination.

The South’s Number One priority was to stop Kefauver, and Johnson kept huddling with the leaders of the southern delegations to determine which of the other candidates—Kennedy, Humphrey, Gore, Wagner—would be most likely to do that, so that the South could unite behind him. The South was looking for leadership from him, but he seemed unable to decide. “I talked to Lyndon, too,” John Kennedy was later to recall, “but he gave me a noncommittal answer. Maybe Hubert thought Lyndon was for him and maybe Symington thought the same thing and maybe Gore thought that too and maybe Lyndon wanted them all to think that. We never knew how that one [Johnson] would turn out.” In fact, Johnson’s indecisiveness was making it difficult for him to keep even his own delegation in line, and he repeatedly had to be rescued by Rayburn.

His first choice to stop Kefauver was Humphrey, but Johnson was afraid of antagonizing his conservative Texas financial backers with that liberal choice and doubtful that the other southern states would rally behind a senator so strong for civil rights. When the Texans held their first caucus of the day at 10:30 a.m. Friday, he suggested Texas vote for Tennessee Governor Frank Clement on the first ballot as a holding action, with the idea of switching later to Humphrey. This idea appealed to almost no one—the delegation’s conservatives preferred practically anyone to Humphrey, the liberals preferred Kefauver—and Johnson was losing control of a hectic meeting when Rayburn, who had been sitting silently, stood up and said bluntly that “Kefauver can’t win in Texas,” and that Kennedy was unacceptable because of anti-Catholic prejudice in America. “You fellows are too young to remember the Al Smith thing,” Rayburn was to say later. “I’ve been through it.” (Rayburn had another reason, which he didn’t divulge, for opposing Kennedy; he had watched the young man’s performance in the House and considered him, as his biographers note, “a wealthy dilettante.”) The caucus agreed to vote for Clement on the first ballot.

But when Rayburn, high above the jammed, swirling floor on the podium, gaveled the convention to order that afternoon, Johnson got a rude shock: Clement wasn’t going to be on the ballot. The Tennessee Governor came over and informed him that he had withdrawn, and that Tennessee was going to nominate Senator Gore. One of the Texas delegates, Kathleen Voight, standing near Johnson, said sarcastically: “We’re gonna vote for a man who’s not even running.” Johnson then repeated to Clement that Texas intended to vote for him; Clement said politely that he “was very grateful,” but didn’t want the votes. Johnson hurried up to the podium, where Rayburn told him what to do: vote for Gore. When Johnson told the Speaker that he doubted he could persuade the delegation to do that, Rayburn said, “Use my name”—and it was only when Johnson did so that some order was restored. As Johnson cast Texas’s fifty-six votes for Gore, “the delegates sat stone-faced,” one account noted.

At the end of the first ballot, Kefauver had 4831/2 votes, Kennedy 304, the other candidates trailed far behind; it was clear that the race was between two men—neither of whom was Humphrey or Gore, the two men Johnson had suggested.

“As Rayburn surveyed the field,” his biographer notes, “Kennedy began to look better—anybody but Kefauver.” Johnson felt the same way. He told the delegation that he knew all the senatorial candidates, and that Kennedy was the best man. The delegates were not persuaded, and the Gore backers in the delegation kept fighting for their man. Then, as Time reported, “the delegation was faced down by grim old Sam Rayburn.” “We’ve got a choice of two men—Kennedy and Kefauver,” he said bluntly. “Gentlemen, you can vote as you please—but Sam Rayburn is voting for Kennedy.” Texas decided to vote for Kennedy.

On the second ballot, Kennedy surged ahead of Kefauver, with Gore far behind. When the roll call reached Texas, Johnson grabbed the floor microphone and shouted: “Texas proudly casts its fifty-six votes for the fighting sailor who wears the scars of battle….” With his announcement, it looked for a moment as if Kennedy would win, and Johnson shouted exultantly, “All right, it’s over!” But that was just another of his mistakes; at the very moment that he was shouting, the standards of half a dozen states were waving wildly in the air, in signals to Rayburn that they wanted to change their vote—and one of the standards was Tennessee’s. Grabbing a microphone himself, Gore announced that he was withdrawing—in favor of Kefauver.

Gore’s switch turned the tide. State after state switched to Kefauver. One state that did not switch, however, was Texas. Johnson sat at the foot of the Texas standard, holding the microphone in his lap, chewing his lip and looking more and more uncomfortable. As it became obvious that Kefauver would win, many Texans wanted the state to join him. Pushing his way angrily down the crowded aisle toward Johnson, one delegate shouted, “If we can’t drive the bandwagon, at least let’s ride on it!” Responding lamely, “We don’t want to be changing from one to the other,” Johnson was still sitting there, glumly holding the silent microphone, refusing to help nominate Kefauver, when suddenly Kennedy was striding out on the platform above him to move that Kefauver be nominated by acclamation. Over Johnson’s face came a grimace, in the words of one man who saw it, “of real, deep pain.”

HE HAD REASONS to grimace. His party’s nominees were two men he disliked and despised. (While he and his mother were being driven back to the Hilton from the International Amphitheatre after Stevenson’s acceptance speech that evening, she asked him what he thought of Stevenson’s chances to win the election. “He’s a nice fellow, Mother, but he won’t make it ’cause he’s got too much lace on his drawers,” Lyndon Johnson said.) He had done his best during the convention to “stop” both Stevenson and Kefauver—without success.

And there were other, larger, reasons. Before the convention, Lyndon Johnson had been almost universally portrayed as an enormously powerful and influential figure in the Democratic Party. By the end of the convention, it had become obvious that that portrait was overdrawn. His image as a brilliant political strategist had also been smudged. “Lyndon Johnson’s reputation as an uncommonly astute Senate leader remains unimpaired, but the fact has been established—as it was not before—that in the jungle of a national convention he cannot employ the gifts he uses in the Senate,” Richard Rovere wrote in The New Yorker. He had, in fact, looked almost foolish. Before the convention opened, summarized the Washington Post and Times-Herald, it had been expected that Stevenson “would have to make bargains if he hoped to win the nomination. He would have to ‘deal with’ the kingmaker, Sen. Lyndon Johnson of Texas, who was expected to corral a huge bloc of Southern delegates and tie them up until he got what he wanted. Adlai would have to be a supplicant and give Johnson his way with respect to a civil-rights plank and a vice presidential nomination…. Of course, it didn’t turn out that way…. Sen. Johnson, so his friends say, was carried away for a while with a vision of himself in the White House. At any rate, he waited too long to play his cards as a king maker…. The idea that [Adlai] would have to make concessions to Sen. Johnson … seemed a fantastic one in the storm of ballots and acclaim tonight.” “This great maneuverer from Texas has been outmaneuvered,” the Wall Street Journal said.

Even friendly Texas journalists agreed. “The Johnson bloopers on both candidates cannot be ignored for they were surprising at the hands of such a skilled political technician,” Leslie Carpenter wrote. Johnson’s tactics at the convention were a “mystery,” Sarah McClendon wrote. “Here is a man who wanted to be sought but would not seek. He wanted to be President, but he did not tell some states and would not go to ask for votes, even when invited and urged by those states.” Marshall McNeil used the same word. “What’s Sen. Lyndon Johnson actually been up to this week? Some regard this as the major mystery of the Democratic convention,” he said. “State after state, delegate after delegate,” had decided, “instead of being on the fence, to be on the side of the probable winner … but not Lyndon Johnson.” McNeil said that delegates were asking “a question”: “What had happened to a man who had always seemed one of the smartest operators around—never a man to get left out on the end of the issue.” “One of his [Johnson’s] aides” had assured McNeil early in the week, “He’s too smart to stay stuck all the way through. He’s too quick on his feet”—but in fact, McNeil noted, Johnson had “stayed stuck all the way through…. He is a skillful cloak-room and Senate floor operator, [but] a national convention is not the Senate; the same techniques don’t apply.” And those were the assessments of friendly journalists. Drew Pearson gloated that “Lyndon ended up looking like a cellophane bag with a hole in it.” Dreading humiliation though he did, Lyndon Johnson had brought a form of humiliation—ridicule—on himself.

There were also less subjective, more rational reasons for Lyndon Johnson to grimace, considerations that were much more serious than a failure to stop other candidates. Johnson’s foremost priority before the convention had been to avoid being labeled as the “southern candidate.” So overriding was this objective that his tactics had revolved around it: to achieve it, he had refused to seek southern delegates, had, in fact, declined the southern states’ offers of delegates. And yet that label had been pinned on him—quite firmly. Arthur Krock had flatly called him “a sectional candidate,” and James Reston had ridiculed his attempts to pretend that he wasn’t one. Describing Chicago as “a place … full of fantasy,” in which “normally serious, intelligent, experienced men, sweating under the Presidential fever … can convince themselves of anything,” Reston said that one of these “illusions” was that “Lyndon can persuade himself that he is really a national and not a regional figure.” In a sentence that must have been particularly hurtful to Johnson, Reston said he “is playing in this convention the role played by Richard Russell of Georgia in the last.” And the label fit, as the actual balloting had proved. The only state besides his own which had voted for him was the most segregationist state in the entire country.

Not only had he been tagged at Chicago with the label he didn’t want, Lyndon Johnson had also been given dramatic, devastating proof of how damaging that label was to his chances for national office, not only in 1956 but in any future year. He had learned for himself, the hard way, what before he had known only by observing the fate of others: you could not win a presidential nomination as the “southern candidate.” Even had he kept the South solid in Chicago—as he could so easily have done, simply by early and openly avowing his candidacy—the South would still not have been able to play a decisive role in the convention. It had, after all, been while the South was still holding aloof from Stevenson that Stevenson had wrapped up the nomination with northern votes. Influential, even decisive, as the South was in the Senate, with its chairmanships and its filibuster, in a national convention, it had only 262 of 1,373 votes, and that wasn’t enough. It was those huge non-southern blocs of delegates that a candidate needed—Michigan’s 44, Ohio’s 58, Illinois’s 64, California’s 68, Pennsylvania’s 74, New York’s 98. If you wanted the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party, you had to get votes from the North.

And, Lyndon Johnson had learned the hard way in Chicago, there had never been any realistic possibility that he would get those votes. He had entered the convention believing—and had, after Truman’s intervention, believed even more firmly on the Monday and Tuesday of that frantic week in Chicago—that he had a chance of getting at least some significant liberal support, and he had learned, learned beyond possibility of misunderstanding, that there was no chance of that, and never had been. He had thought he could split the North, but the North wouldn’t split—in large part because its antipathy toward him was so strong it didn’t want to give him an opening. One of the arguments most effective in persuading northern delegates to unite behind Adlai Stevenson, in fact, had been the argument that if they didn’t, Lyndon Johnson might exert significant influence at the convention, might even become the nominee. New York might not even have held firm behind its own Governor “if it looked like a coup by Johnson was in the making.” Johnson may have been aware before the convention of the depth of northern antipathy to him, of the implacability of liberal resolve to deny power to him, or to any other southern candidate. He could hardly have been unaware of this reality, having watched from a ringside seat as it crushed Richard Russell in 1952. But just as Russell had not understood the reality—understood it emotionally as well as intellectually—until it struck him personally, so Johnson had not understood it fully. When Jim Rowe had awakened him at 5 a.m. to tell him that Michigan was going for Stevenson, his reaction had been: “I don’t believe it.”

But he had to believe it now.