Means of Ascent (82 page)

It is necessary, I think, to repeat here the note I made in Volume I about Lady Bird Johnson and my work. Lady Bird Johnson prepared carefully for our ten interviews, reading her daily calendars for the years involved, so that she could provide a month-by-month, detailed description of the Johnsons’ life. Some of these were lengthy interviews, particularly one in the living room of the Johnson Ranch that as I recall it lasted most of a day. These interviews were
immensely valuable in providing a picture of Lyndon Johnson’s personal and social life, and of his associates, for Mrs. Johnson is an extremely acute observer, and has the gift of making her observations, no matter how quietly understated, quite clear. The interviews were less valuable in regard to her husband’s political life. In later years, Mrs. Johnson would become familiar with her husband’s work,
indeed perhaps his most trusted
confidante. During this earlier period, Mrs. Johnson was not familiar with much of the political maneuvering in which her husband was engaged, as she herself points out. Once, when I asked if she had been present at various political strategy sessions, she replied, “Well, I didn’t always want to be a part of everything, because I was never … I elected to be out a lot. I wasn’t confident in that field. I didn’t want to be a party to
absolutely everything.”

Although from the first I made it clear to Mrs. Johnson that I would conduct my own independent research into anything I was told by anyone, for some time she very helpfully advised members of the semi-official “Johnson Circle” in Texas that she would have no objection if they talked with me. At a certain point, however—sometime after the interviews with Mrs. Johnson had been completed—that cooperation abruptly and totally ceased.

AFTER THIS BOOK
was published in March, 1990, a number of the articles about it that appeared in magazines and newspapers made statements about Coke Stevenson for which I believe there is no factual basis. Some of these articles, no doubt inadvertently, repeated allegations and rumors circulated in 1948 by Lyndon Johnson and his followers in their campaign to undermine Coke Stevenson’s reputation—allegations and rumors I also
believe to be without factual basis. I am adding this note to the paperback edition of the book (and to all subsequent hardcover editions) to expand and clarify the record in these areas, and to explain the process by which I learned about Coke Stevenson.

A particularly serious and dramatic allegation concerned Stevenson’s personal integrity. Nineteen-ninety saw the revival of the rumors circulated in 1948 that Stevenson had accepted large financial payoffs from oil companies, which camouflaged the payments by taking leases on Stevenson’s ranch although they never had any intention of drilling there. According to one allegation, these leases were patently “phony” because Stevenson’s
ranch and indeed Kimble County as a whole were notoriously barren of oil (“the poorest oil prospecting land in the world”); no oil company, it was stated, would ever seriously consider actually drilling for oil out there.

I heard these allegations while I was doing research on this book,
and attempted to determine if they were true. On June 21, 1977, I drove to the Coke Stevenson Ranch (which, after his death, in 1975, had been divided between his widow and his son) in Kimble County. I am certain that anyone who had been with me on that day would have no difficulty believing that an oil company would seriously consider drilling for oil on Stevenson’s ranch. For
as I drove down a dirt road on the ranch, I passed trucks and equipment of the Great Western Petroleum Company—which was drilling for oil on Stevenson’s ranch.

On that trip, and on others that I made to Kimble County over the next few years, I interviewed ranchers and studied records and maps in the Kimble County Courthouse in Junction. The records showed that oil companies had been leasing the Coke Stevenson Ranch for exploratory drilling for over six decades, including times when Stevenson had no political office or influence. (One lease, a ten-year lease by the Lewis Gas Products Company, was made in December, 1927, when
Coke Stevenson was not in public life; others were made—in 1950, by oil broker W. E. Sultenfuss, and in 1954, by the Ohio Oil Company—after Stevenson had left public life forever; another, made in 1972 by the Wayne Petroleum Company, was renewed annually after Stevenson was dead.) In fact, had anyone taken the trouble to telephone Stevenson’s widow, Marguerite King Stevenson, at the time this book was published, he would have learned that oil companies were
still
leasing the Stevenson ranch—fifteen years after his death; Mrs. Stevenson received her latest annual royalty check (for $4,483) in May, 1990.

Much of the hearsay and gossip about Stevenson’s “phony oil leases” focused on alleged “deals” with the Magnolia Petroleum Company, supposedly made in return for his political influence. According to the rumors, these deals involved large sums of money—figures as high as $75,000 or $100,000 were mentioned to me. The Deed Records of Kimble County, in the County Courthouse, show that Magnolia took one lease on the
Stevenson Ranch, a ten-year lease registered on May 10, 1939. It wasn’t for $75,000. Stevenson received from it a total of $19,571, paid in a single payment at the signing of the lease. His income from the lease therefore averaged $1,957 per year. This lease was one of sixteen leases signed by various oil companies with sixteen ranches that lay in a line running north-south through the county; all sixteen leases were made in that year because a promising
geological fault had been discovered along that line (and because in that year a small well came in in Kimble County). By 1939, in fact, scores of Kimble ranchers—none except Stevenson with a political position—had signed leases with various oil companies, including Magnolia. The $1,957-per year rental that Stevenson received was consistent with that paid to ranchers without political influence; in fact, the Kimble Deed Records show that a few months before the
Stevenson
lease was signed, the Humble Oil and Refining Company leased the Lottie Bolt Ranch some ten miles away—at terms considerably higher than Magnolia gave Stevenson. Ramsey Randolph, Kimble County Clerk in 1939 and 1940, says: “The Humble lease certainly indicates that the Stevenson lease was legitimate.” (“Actually,” Randolph says, compared with the amounts given other ranchers Stevenson received a “pretty
low” rental for his lease.) Every aspect of the Magnolia lease is consistent with the company’s other leases in Kimble. There is not the slightest reason to believe it was given to buy Stevenson’s political influence; in fact, every piece of documentary evidence that I could find suggests it was not. (Exploratory wells have been drilled on the Stevenson ranch for decades; although, as is the case with Kimble County as a whole, little oil has been discovered on
it, enough—together with natural gas deposits—has been discovered to encourage oil companies to continue drilling and paying rent.)

I had been told that “everyone knew” about the “phony oil leases.” But over and over again during years of research, I have been taught that things that “everyone knew” often turn out, when investigated, to be without factual basis. Investigating the oil lease rumors, I found this to be the case. Not only could I find no evidence to substantiate these rumors, all the evidence I
could
find contradicted
the rumors, and suggested that they were false.

I did further research into Stevenson’s financial situation, studying as many of his personal financial records—including his bank statements and income tax returns—as I could obtain, and interviewing members of his family and the few elderly Kimble County neighbors who remembered him. From every one of these sources I received a picture of a man who, despite the years in which he held great power in Texas, never had much money. One fact remembered
by several persons was that when, during the late 1930s, Stevenson wanted to pay a local man to make wrought-iron railings for the balconies in his house, he had to have the work done piecemeal because he didn’t have enough money to pay for all of it at once. His income tax returns for the 1930s and 1940s, the years during which he was Speaker, Lieutenant Governor and Governor, show that in the 1930s his reported net income, including the income from the
Magnolia lease, averaged about $5,200 per year. During the 1940s it averaged about $8,000 per year—and most of this income consisted of his salary from the state; during this decade, in which, according to his opponents, Coke Stevenson’s acceptance of huge payoffs was “so well known,” the most income he ever reported in one year was $13,139. (The $19,571 Magnolia check, deposited in the Charles Schreiner Bank in Kerrville on May
12, 1939, was more than twice as large as any other deposit I could find during the 1930s and 1940s.) As I note on
this page
, Stevenson once said that he wanted to avoid any hint that he was using his influence with
state officials. Therefore, he said, when, after his retirement from public life, he practiced law, he took cases only “for fees … that I could write on
a blackboard in my office for all to see and not be ashamed of a single one of them.” This, too, was confirmed from local sources, and from his income tax returns. (Stevenson’s family has given me copies of the personal income tax returns of Stevenson and his first wife, Fay Wright Stevenson, for every year between 1927 and 1950.)

Finally, I read the probate records of Stevenson’s will, and the tax records of his estate. These show that when he died in 1975, Stevenson left an estate totalling $708,000. But the bulk of this amount—$639,000—consisted of the value the Internal Revenue Service placed on the land of his ranch. Most of this land was purchased before Stevenson entered state government, piece by piece as he earned fees as an attorney. Beginning in 1914,
he bought it for prices as low as six or eight dollars per acre—and the increase in its value over the sixty years he owned it accounts for most of the estate’s total value. Despite his lifelong frugality—so rigid it was a joke among his friends—and despite the fact that his legal expertise made his services as an attorney eagerly sought, Coke Stevenson, for a decade one of the most powerful men in Texas, died with only $59,000 in the bank.
¹
That amount, and the land, together with a few minor items, constituted his total estate. The record of Stevenson’s life so far as I could determine it is of a man who never had much money; of a man who, so far as his personal honesty was concerned, is as different as can be conceived from the image of a corrupt politician so vividly pictured in 1948 by the Johnson men—and, after publication
of this book, resurrected in some articles. (And, indeed, when, over the years I was doing the research on this book, I got to know these Johnson men better, some of them drew a different picture themselves. I will never forget Paul Bolton, one of Johnson’s speechwriters and author of some of the harshest attacks on Stevenson during the campaign, saying to me, in connection with another specific charge but in words describing Stevenson generally: “We
knew it wasn’t true, and I almost felt ashamed of what I was writing sometimes; Coke was so honest, you know.”)

No writer can be certain that he knows all the facts about private financial affairs dating back fifty years and more. But I tried to ascertain
as many of those facts as possible, and after doing so I was convinced—and am convinced—that Coke Robert Stevenson was a public official of extraordinary personal integrity.

S
TEVENSON
has also recently been portrayed anew as merely a “typical,” totally unexceptional Texas right-winger, just another in the long line of the state’s extremely conservative public officials—unintelligent, narrow-minded, bigoted, a segregationist and an isolationist.

This, as it happened, was the impression of Stevenson I myself received when I began research on my book in 1975, and for some years thereafter I had no reason to doubt it. By 1975 Stevenson was a forgotten figure, a man all but lost to history. Two biographies—one by an aide, Booth Mooney, the other by two of Stevenson’s Kimble County neighbors—were both so slight, not only in length but in research, as to provide little insight into the man or his
career. The literature on Texas history during the era in which Stevenson served in the state government is, as one writer puts it, “notoriously spotty”; moreover, most of it is written from a point of view antithetical to his. In the few books on the era, he was generally given scanty treatment, and even that concentrated on his gubernatorial record, not on his pre-gubernatorial record in government, or on the story of his life as a whole. Apart from these sources,
Coke Stevenson had been described—briefly and harshly—primarily in biographies of Lyndon Johnson. Interviews would normally be helpful in learning about a man, but Stevenson was eighty-seven years old when he died. He was almost the last survivor of his generation in Texas politics; only a very few of his friends and political allies—indeed, only a few handfuls of Texas politicians who knew him more than passingly well—were still alive. When, almost thirty
years after the 1948 campaign, I began hearing about it in interviews, the description of Coke Stevenson available to history was very largely a description furnished by a younger generation in Texas politics—the Johnson generation, the bright young Johnson campaign aides who helped him defeat Stevenson in 1948 and thereby rose to power in Texas—as well as by Johnson supporters and allies, and by one-time Texas “Loyalists” and their spiritual descendants
in the Texas academic, intellectual and journalistic community, a group to whom Stevenson had been a symbol of much of what they hated. It was they who, in interviews with me, in oral history interviews given to representatives of the Lyndon Johnson Library and in opinions repeated in Johnson biographies and other books, described Stevenson as typical, and it was during my interviews with them that I was told that like so many other Texas public officials, Stevenson was just another
officeholder on the take (witness those “phony oil leases”: the persons who repeated the oil-lease allegations
to me all admitted that none of the allegations had ever been proven; they said they were “rumors” or “scuttlebutt” or “hearsay.” But, they all said, “everyone knew about them”; they were, I was told over and over again, “common knowledge”). As for the allegations of
Johnsonian vote-stealing in the 1948 election, these were also dismissed as nothing more than typical Texas politics. If there had been any stealing in the 1948 election—and, I was told repeatedly, no one really knew for sure whether there had been or not—the stealing had been done by both sides. Coke Stevenson, like most Texas politicians, had always stolen votes in his elections, I was told; “everyone knew that.” There was, in fact, nothing unusual or
significant about the 1948 campaign as a whole, I was told; Johnson had simply made use of the “issues” in the race—these were identified to me as Stevenson’s isolationism, his racism, his identification with the ultra-right Texas Regulars—to persuade a majority of the voters to vote for him. That was the accepted image of Coke Stevenson and of his last campaign, and for a long time I had no reason to think the image incomplete or inaccurate. I was
planning to make the 1948 campaign only a single long chapter (as I did with Johnson’s 1941 campaign in Volume I), and I wasn’t doing extensive research on it, or on Johnson’s opponent in it. I was learning about Stevenson only incidentally, during the course of interviews about other aspects of Johnson’s life. Moreover, since these interviews were almost entirely with people who ridiculed and despised Stevenson, they only reinforced the picture of the man
that I had obtained from the history texts. (I never interviewed Stevenson. He died, in June, 1975, just about the time I was making my first trips to Texas; at the time I had no idea that he would be a figure of any particular significance in my work, and I had never tried to contact him.)