THE CAMPAIGN: Whistling Through Dixie

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The crowds were variable, but the daily average of 15,000 pleased Johnson. Only once, in Republican Greenville, S.C., was there any open hostility. At a rally in a local park, a disappointingly small crowd of 1,000 booed and displayed impolite placards ("Walter Reuther Speaks Today," "L.B.J., the Counterfeit Confederate"). Lyndon was stung into his sharpest attack on Nixon, and threatened the sign-carrying teenagers: "We're going to tear the masks off the faces of those who hide behind little girls." But mostly Johnson comfortably identified himself with the crowds he met, displaying a native son's sensitivity to local moods. With his aide, Senate Majority Secretary Bobby Baker, he helicoptered to a big barbecue in the mountain hamlet of Rocky Bottom, S.C. After one look at the holiday-minded audience, L.B.J. cast the script aside, drawled: "You just don't know how I'd enjoy sittin' down here and whittlin' with you awhile." His listeners ate it up.

Happy as a Hush Puppy. There were some notable non sequiturs ("What has Dick Nixon ever done for Culpeper?" he asked a dazed Virginia crowd and he observed that the G.O.P. had used the South as a golf course for the past eight years.) There were also a few glimpses of L.B.J. the political pitchman. In Greer, S.C., as the L.B.J. Special clacked away from the depot, Johnson shouted: "Goodbye, Greer. Goodbye." Then in an aside: "Bobby, turn off that Yellow Rose." And finally, as he disappeared down the tracks: "God bless you, Greer. Vote Democratic." By the time he wound up his trip at a big rally in New Orleans, Johnson was as well pleased as a man who has just dined on hush puppies and peach cobbler: his Southern accent and his political instincts were still working, and, at last, L.B.J. was beginning to mean something, if no one knew how much, in the 1960 campaign.