Neck & Neck

Texans had to admit that the U.S. Senate race between pipe-smoking ex-Governor Coke Stevenson and fast-talking Congressman Lyndon Johnson was close--even for Texas. Ten days after the election it was still impossible to tell who had won.

The two contestants had been neck & neck during most of their runoff campaign. Big (6 ft. 3 in.), black-haired Lyndon Johnson was the more dramatic of the two. At 40, he was a seasoned and ambitious man. He had been a janitor, a schoolteacher, a secretary, a New Deal youth administrator (he liked to say that Franklin Roosevelt had "been like a daddy" to him), and had served 5 1/2 terms in Congress. He had been in close races before. He had run for the Senate against W. Lee ("Pappy") O'Daniel in 1941, had been beaten by only 1,311 votes (out of some 565,000 cast).

This year he had campaigned with the fervor of a thirsty desert wanderer heading for a water hole. He had leapfrogged across the state in a helicopter, had done his best to get siren-tooting motorcycle escorts when campaigning by automobile. Texans had admired his glib, excited, high-pressure approach.

But they had also admired conservative, 60-year-old "Calculatin' Coke." Coke looked and acted like "Mister Texas." As a youth, he had studied by the light of a campfire, and in the years since, he had been a wagon freighter, merchant, attorney, bank president, rancher. He had been in politics 34 years, was the only man who had been twice named Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives. This summer, one of Coke's supporters urged him to get a helicopter, too. Said Coke: "No thanks, I'll keep my campaign down to earth."

As the vote counting began, Stevenson got a narrow lead; but his backers' jubilation was soon quenched. Twenty-four hours after the polls closed, with 900,000 votes in, he had only an eight-vote margin. Then Johnson passed him, ran up a 717-vote lead.

Early last week Stevenson moved ahead again, and when the unofficial tallies were finished in midweek he held a 362-vote advantage. But in the days that followed, corrected totals were substituted for hurried, early vote counts. Stevenson's lead dwindled. At week's end Johnson was 162 votes ahead, and nobody from the Panhandle to the Rio Grande could guess who was finally going to win.

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