Means of Ascent (63 page)

L
YNDON
J
OHNSON HAD WON
the election. Now he had to keep it won—and that was to be very difficult. For Coke Stevenson believed Johnson had stolen the election. And Stevenson decided to prove he had stolen it.

When the 200 new Johnson votes from Luis Salas’ Precinct 13 in Jim Wells County were reported on Friday afternoon, Stevenson exploded. “
A concentrated effort is being made to count me out of this Senate race,” he said in a press release. “On Thursday at noon”—when the Election Bureau was reporting that he, Stevenson, was 381 votes ahead, and after the Bureau’s manager had said that there was little
doubt that he had won—Johnson had “issued a ‘victory’ statement and urged his friends to ‘do their duty.’ Almost immediately, last-minute ‘gains’ for my opponent began to roll in from those counties of South Texas which are said to be dominated by a single man. I would like to know how my opponent knew so much in advance of the ‘revisions’ being made today.”

Johnson’s response came fast—too fast. No “revisions” had been made, he said in a written statement. The explanation for the changes from the South Texas counties was simply that incorrect figures had originally been reported to the Election Bureau and that the correct figures had not been reported for some time. He had known the correct figures all along, he said. “
The corrected votes in several of the counties
which the Election Bureau has just used were reported to our headquarters Saturday night [August 28, the night of the election].” He had, he said, known ever since Election Night that he had won.

This statement did not help his case; as the
Dallas News
commented, the Duval County election chairman had announced on Sunday morning, August 29, that the ballots in Duval’s last box, the box that was to turn out to contain 425 votes for Johnson and two for Stevenson, had not yet even been counted. How, then, could Johnson have known on Saturday night what the count would be? Two days later, Johnson made a statewide
radio broadcast;
in the final moments before he went on the air, he sat hunched over the microphone, editing and re-editing the text. During the eight minutes he spoke (the last two minutes were reserved for his wife), he changed his earlier statement: Now he said he had known the correct figures not since Saturday night but since Tuesday night (August 31). Then, shifting from defense to offense, he said, “The hue and cry about Duval County has taken so many, many years to develop.”
Many of Texas’s most renowned Senators and Governors had received Duval’s overwhelming vote over the years; Coke Stevenson had—each of the previous four times Stevenson had run for office. And neither Stevenson nor anyone else had ever complained before. “My opponent has accepted that vote,” he said. “The newspapers have complacently reported the vote from the county, year after year.” If Stevenson had evidence that votes had been
bought in Duval, “it was his duty to present it to the grand jury. Lyndon Johnson did not buy anybody’s vote.” Furthermore, he said, “similar charges could be made about many counties which Stevenson had carried throughout the state.”

This argument—that the Valley’s vote for Lyndon Johnson was nothing more than the normal run of Texas politics—was always to be Johnson’s contention, and it was to be stated and re-stated over the years by Johnson supporters, most notably
Mary Rather, Walter Jenkins and
Charles Herring. Evaluating this contention is made difficult by the conditions of Texas election records for earlier
decades—in the case of lopsided elections, the votes in some counties are not even on record, either because the counties didn’t report them or because the state, with the conclusion already sealed, didn’t record them. Sufficient records are available, however, for analysis of the previous fourteen senatorial and gubernatorial elections—every such election since 1932—and for those elections, Johnson’s contention is not correct.

In part, the differences between the 1948 election and earlier elections were only differences of timing and degree. Late amendments of returns were indeed, as Johnson said, common in Texas elections—but not this late. Johnson’s 1941 race for the Senate, in which both candidates tried “to outsteal each other,” had been marked by “corrected” returns, but the bulk of these returns for the Saturday election had been reported to the
Election Bureau on Monday, mostly by county officials who excused even this much delay by claiming that no counting of returns had been done on the Sunday Sabbath; by late Monday, the election was in fact over, and the decisive votes were announced as soon as the Election Bureau opened Tuesday morning. Even that degree of lateness had been considered shocking—and now, seven years later, the decisive votes had come in not on Monday or Tuesday but on Friday, six days after the
election.

One-sidedness (noticeably heavy votes for one candidate or another) was also common in late, “corrected” returns in Texas—but not this onesided. The 1941 Senate race is typical. The corrections which gave Pappy O’Daniel the victory came from East Texas, and while the corrections shifted the trend in those counties, the shifts had at least a tinge of plausibility to them. The Election Night returns from a typical county,
Shelby, for example, had been 46 percent for Congressman
Martin Dies, 34 percent for O’Daniel, 11 percent for Johnson and 9 percent for Gerald Mann. After the 256 new votes reported from Shelby on Monday, the county’s total percentages were: Dies, 44 percent; O’Daniel, 38 percent; Johnson, 10 percent; Mann, 8 percent. This shift of percentages had enabled O’Daniel to pick up 162 votes on Johnson, but in an inconspicuous manner. The
shifts in other counties followed the same pattern. There were no countywide totals for O’Daniel anywhere comparable to 4,622 to 40.

And while these differences were only of timing and degree, there was a crucial third element that, when combined with the first two, made Lyndon Johnson’s 1948 senatorial campaign something new in Texas politics. This was the fact that the unusually, perhaps unprecedentedly, onesided votes which were decisive in Johnson’s victory were cast at the direction of a single man, a man who, moreover, did not have to “vote ’em” but simply to
“count ’em”—which meant that he could provide a candidate with additional votes simply by filling in new numbers on the printed “tally sheets” provided for a county’s returns. This factor combined with the timing with which these votes were reported—at the last minute, after virtually all other votes had been recorded—to narrow the 1948 election, in its final, decisive stage, down to a single border boss waiting for a
telephone call, and, when he received it, determining the outcome of an election by simply writing down whatever new numbers were required.

Johnson’s contention that his vote from the Valley was nothing more than normal Texas politics ignores this crucial point. The reason that there had been no “hue and cry” over the Duval County or South Texas vote for “many, many years” was that for many years that vote had not played a decisive—or even a significant—role in any senatorial or gubernatorial election. Coke Stevenson now declared that Johnson’s
statement was not true. “This is
the first instance in recorded history that those bloc voting counties have determined the result of a statewide election,” he said. And beyond that, “This is the first time that the manipulators of the voting in these counties were not content with all-out bloc voting, but re-opened the boxes in secret long after the election had closed and stuffed them with a directed number of ballots.” More than a
score of Texas politicians who were active in the 1930s and 1940s, interviewed in recent years, unanimously disagreed with Johnson’s contention—as do the only two surviving
intimates of Coke Stevenson from the campaign,
Ernest Boyett and Bob Murphey. More tellingly, the only three surviving members of the Johnson campaign’s high command—John B. Connally, who would later be
Governor of Texas;
Edward A. Clark, who was for decades an immensely powerful figure in state politics; and George R. Brown, bankroller of scores of Texas elections—do not agree with it, either. Valley votes had never before been decisive in a statewide election, John Connally says. “
Never. Never before 1948.” Says Ed Clark: “
I never did know of a situation like that. I just never did know of anything that was similar to what was happening down there in
that area [in 1948].” And they explained why: the unprecedented size of the Parr-delivered vote in 1948, and the timing of the delivery. Over the years, Clark says, “a lot of different people” had been given top-heavy majorities down there, but these majorities “had never been” given after the votes had been reported. “See, down there one of the questions that was often asked, when five or six good friends got together, you understand, was
‘Does that fellow vote ’em or does he just count ’em?’ ” And if he just “counted ’em,” Clark explains, and could go on counting them after the election had been over for some days, he could decide the result of any close statewide election—just by counting more, as needed.

Edgar Shelton, after talking to his father, who was George Parr’s lawyer, and to the George Parr intimates with whom his father put him in touch, had seen in 1946 “
the possible dangers of those [Valley] machines.” What, Shelton asked, “if we had two men running for an important office such as Senator or Governor, one of them being … dishonest? Assume that the dishonest man had secured a pledge of
support from the bosses of the Valley, as he probably would. If the race were close and the honest man was ahead by only a few thousand votes with all of the returns in except from the Valley’ … the election could easily be ‘stolen’ by having the Valley counties send in just enough votes to put the dishonest man in office. Thus the will of the people of the State would be denied by less than a dozen men, all political feudal lords of the
Valley.”

“This,” Shelton wrote in 1946, “has probably not yet happened.” Every longtime Texas politician interviewed agrees that, before 1948, it probably never had. Not even the most arrogant border dictator had ever dared to do that, they say. Indeed, when, two days after Election Day in 1941, Lyndon Johnson had asked George Parr to do precisely that, Parr had refused because his county’s overwhelming majority for Johnson had already been
recorded; he was later to tell friends that he had replied, “
Lyndon, I’ve been to the federal penitentiary, and I’m not going back for you.” Clark says, “I just never saw—now, there have been other close contests but,” he says, never one in which there had been “a feeling that
a result might be changed by an investigation of those controlled counties.” (In addition, Clark ridicules
the theory that Stevenson aides were also stealing votes on a widespread scale throughout the state. Asked about it, the “Secret Boss of Texas” laughs. “They didn’t know how, and Governor Stevenson didn’t know how,” he says. And, Clark adds, in a view echoed by politicians familiar with Texas politics of the time, stealing votes on a widespread scale would have been impossible for Stevenson after Election Day even had he wanted to try it:
“Preparations had to be made in advance for that sort of thing; contacts have to be made; it takes organization.” The Stevenson camp, Clark points out, were so unprepared for the second primary “that they didn’t even know that two of their counties weren’t even holding a primary.”) But George Parr had done now for Lyndon Johnson what Shelton had feared could one day happen. The unwritten laws, the ethics, the morals of Texas politics were so
loose and elastic that it was difficult to break them. But Lyndon Johnson had broken them.

Stevenson was used to Valley politics. He had received the Valley’s support in the past, not that its support had ever had any significance to his political career. But he knew the limits within which these politics operated—and he felt that it was by going beyond those limits that Lyndon Johnson had beaten him. The ex-Governor felt particularly strongly about the timing of those decisive changes in the Valley’s vote. Johnson had claimed that the
votes in Duval, Jim Wells, Zapata, Starr and other Parr-dominated counties had all been counted on Election Night, and that the counts had not been changed thereafter. Stevenson believed they had. He was certain that Johnson had, by those changes, stolen the election from him. Two things now motivated Coke Stevenson. One was personal: his injured vanity and pride, and the simple code by which he lived, the Code of the West. When someone stole something from you, you got it
back—or at least brought the thief to justice. The other went beyond the personal. It was his belief, the belief so deep it was “almost like religion to him,” in democracy and the law. If this could happen, if an election could so blatantly be stolen, neither democracy nor law could prevail.

He decided to do something about it.

First, he sent men to the Valley. The head of the team investigating Duval County, San Antonio attorney
Pete Tijerina, says that when they began interviewing residents who were certified as having voted, “many said they hadn’t. They told us their county commissioner had picked up their poll tax receipts and voted for them.” But when the investigators tried to get these statements notarized, they found that no notary public in
Duval County would do so. “We were stopped by sheriff’s deputies, one of whom had a submachine gun. They said they [had] heard we had guns. We told them we had no guns, but they
made us spread-eagle while
they searched us. They then told us we had thirty minutes to get out of Duval County. We got out in that time.”

To investigate in Jim Wells County, Stevenson asked the help of three young attorneys. One,
Callan Graham, had been an impoverished youth in Junction during the Depression. Stevenson had encouraged him to take up the law, had loaned him his books and his office to study in, and, after Graham had been admitted to the bar “in the old-fashioned way” (without attending the University), had helped him through the early years of practice by
quietly referring cases to him. Graham idolized Stevenson; he was proudest of his election in 1948 to the Legislature because his seat was the one Coke had once held. The other two lawyers,
Kellis Dibrell and
James Gardner, partners in San Antonio, had been agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in whose awesome reputation Stevenson believed; Stevenson telephoned them and, in Dibrell’s words, asked them to go and “see
what we could find out.”