Master of the Senate (150 page)

During the 1948 campaign, Johnson occasionally reiterated this unambiguous opposition to the main tenets of the civil rights movement of the 1940s, but civil rights never became an issue. A survey of 147 Texas newspapers showed that civil rights “was hardly mentioned during the 1948 campaign.”

Johnson received heavy majorities in African-American areas in Texas cities, in part because Washington figures like Mary McLeod Bethune and Robert Weaver sent word to African-Americans in Texas that Johnson was “really something,” in part because African-American college and school officials
who had met him during his NYA tenure felt he “really cared about people,” in part because in meetings in small groups or one-on-one with black leaders of these areas, he convinced them that despite his public statements he was really on their side—but perhaps mostly because these leaders felt that, no matter what his true opinions, he was preferable to his two opponents. “For U.S. Senator, we have chosen Lyndon B. Johnson,” the
Houston Informer
declared. “Though he is no angel, he is about as good as we have seen in the race.” As one study put it, “Johnson was the best Texas minorities could get in 1948.” Ed Clark was to say, “They had no choice. Where else were they going to go?”

A
FTER HE BECAME
P
RESIDENT
, Johnson wanted his image to be that of a man who had “never had any bigotry,” who had been a longtime supporter of civil rights. The memory of the Wooldridge Park speech would blur that image, so he did his best to make sure it wouldn’t be remembered. Stapled to the text of the speech in the White House files was the following admonition:

“
DO NOT RELEASE THIS SPEECH—NOT EVEN TO STAFF, WITHOUT EXPRESS PERMISSION OF BILL MOYERS.
As background, both Walter Jenkins and George Reedy have instructed this is not
EVER TO BE RELEASED
.”

I
T WAS JUST EIGHT DAYS
after Lyndon Johnson had been sworn in as a United States senator, in 1949, that the pattern—of true, deep compassion surrendering to true, deeper pragmatism—was repeated, in a fast-paced drama that revealed the pattern very clearly indeed.

The prologue to the drama had taken place more than three years earlier, in June, 1945, on Luzon Island in the Philippines, when a twenty-six-year-old Mexican-American private, Felix Longoria, a truck driver from a small South Texas town called Three Rivers, volunteered for a patrol and was killed in a fusillade of Japanese bullets, leaving a wife, Beatrice, and a young daughter. He was buried in a temporary military cemetery on Luzon for three years, and in December, 1948, his body was shipped home, and the Army notified his widow, who had moved to Corpus Christi. She said she wanted the body brought to Three Rivers for funeral and burial, and on Monday, January 10, 1949, she took a bus back there to arrange for her husband to be buried in his hometown. When, however, she arrived at Three Rivers’ only funeral parlor, the Rice Funeral Home, the owner, T. W. Kennedy Jr., told her that she could not use its chapel for the service because “the whites won’t like it.”

Once, Beatrice Longoria might have simply accepted that edict, for before Pearl Harbor, Mexican-Americans in South Texas had generally accepted discrimination meekly, but during the war, Mexican-American soldiers had served not in segregated units as had blacks but alongside white soldiers (and had compiled the country’s highest ethnic group representation in combat service and Medal of Honor awards), and had returned home in a different frame of mind, and in 1948, several hundred Mexican-American veterans in Corpus Christi had formed the American G.I. Forum to make sure they received the medical and educational benefits to which they were entitled under the G.I. Bill. As soon as Mrs. Longoria got back to Corpus Christi, she contacted the
Forum’s president, physician and former Army major Dr. Hector Garcia. Dr. Garcia telephoned Kennedy, and told him that Mrs. Longoria wanted to use his funeral home. Kennedy repeated his refusal, at first simply giving the same explanation—“The white people just won’t like it”—but when Garcia had the temerity to persist, saying, “But in this case the boy is a veteran, doesn’t that make any difference?,” he lost his temper and furnished additional reasons. “That doesn’t make any difference,” he said. “You know how the Latin people get drunk and lay around all the time. The last time we let them use the chapel, they got all drunk and we just can’t control them…I’m sure you’ll understand.”

Dr. Garcia understood. Hanging up the phone, he sent seventeen telegrams to military officials, congressmen and senators, including one to the new junior senator from Texas, in which he asked for “immediate investigation and correction” of Kennedy’s “un-American action” which “is in direct contradiction of those same principles for which this American soldier made the supreme sacrifice in giving his life for his country and for the same people who now deny him the last funeral rites.”

The telegram was delivered to Suite 231 in the Senate Office Building at 8:49 the next morning, and was opened by either John Connally or Walter Jenkins (neither can now remember which one) and when Lyndon Johnson arrived at the office about an hour later, it was shown to him—and there was hardly a moment’s pause before his response. “By God,” he said, “we’ll bury him in Arlington!” He told someone to get him the official in charge of Arlington National Cemetery, burial place of America’s heroes, determined that indeed Private Longoria was eligible for burial there—any soldier, sailor, or marine who died in active service or held an honorable discharge could be buried there, with full military honors: three volleys from a firing squad, a bugler blowing taps, four uniformed flag-bearers holding the American flag over the casket as it was lowered into the grave, and then the presentation, by a soldier of the same rank or higher as the dead serviceman, of the flag to the next of kin, the soldier saluting and saying: “The Government presents to you this flag under which he served.”

The Lyndon Johnson who called in his staff now was a Lyndon Johnson in the grip of his emotions. “You all get on the phone,” he said, and his staff ran to obey, and within a few minutes after he had first read the telegram—“immediately, really,” Connally was to recall—“not only I but Walter was on the phone arranging things.” “His
immediate
reaction was he [Longoria] was eligible to be buried in Arlington,” Connally says. “This was an instinctive thing—his instinctive sense of fairness and his basic feelings…. It had to do with outrage. Here was a veteran who died for his country and he can’t be buried in his hometown.” And no one could have translated that outrage into action more effectively. The decision to have the burial in Arlington was so
right
, so perfectly suited to correct an injustice. A veteran’s hometown had
refused to bury him with the ordinary honors that any dead soldier who died for his country deserved; so Lyndon Johnson had arranged that the veteran would be buried with full honors, in a place of deep symbolic significance. And his telegram back to Dr. Garcia, sent that afternoon after several calls to check to make sure that Garcia’s account was accurate, was so right. “
I DEEPLY REGRET TO LEARN THAT THE PREJUDICE OF SOME INDIVIDUALS EXTENDS EVEN BEYOND THIS LIFE
,” Lyndon Johnson’s telegram said. “
I HAVE NO AUTHORITY OVER CIVILIAN FUNERAL HOMES, NOR DOES THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
,” he explained. However, he said, that did not mean that he, or Beatrice Longoria, was without recourse—glorious recourse. “
I HAVE TODAY MADE ARRANGEMENTS TO HAVE FELIX LONGORIA REBURIED WITH FULL MILITARY HONORS IN ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY HERE AT WASHINGTON WHERE THE HONORED DEAD OF OUR NATION’S WARS REST.
” Or, he told Garcia, should the widow desire to have her husband’s body buried nearer his home, “
HE CAN BE REBURIED AT FORT SAM HOUSTON NATIONAL MILITARY CEMETERY AT SAN ANTONIO.
” Just tell him what was desired, Lyndon Johnson telegraphed. It would be done. “
IF HIS WIDOW DESIRES TO HAVE HIM REBURIED IN EITHER CEMETERY, SHE SHOULD SEND ME A TELEGRAM.
” And Lyndon Johnson knew, because he knew the Mexican immigrants of South Texas, that the widow might be very poor. She should send her telegram collect, he said. And, he added, whichever cemetery she selects, she should not worry about the cost. “
THERE WILL BE NO COST.
”

And there were still other sentences in Lyndon Johnson’s telegram. “
THIS INJUSTICE AND PREJUDICE IS DEPLORABLE
,” he said. “
I AM HAPPY TO HAVE A PART IN SEEING THAT THIS TEXAS HERO IS LAID TO REST WITH THE HONOR AND DIGNITY HIS SERVICE DESERVES.
” After reading the telegram over one last time to make sure it accurately expressed his sentiments, he told Connally to send it out—at once.

Dr. Garcia had called an emergency rally of the G.I. Forum in a Corpus Christi elementary school for that evening, and when he walked out on the stage, before an audience of more than a thousand people, he was holding Johnson’s telegram, and he read it to the audience, and as he did, men and women began to stand up and cheer, some of them with their fists in the air, and the whole audience cheered when Garcia announced that Beatrice Longoria had selected Arlington as her husband’s resting place. She herself replied to Johnson by a telegram. It was addressed to “Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, House of the Senate, Washington, D.C.” “
HUMBLY GRATEFUL FOR YOUR KINDNESS IN MY HOUR OF HUMILIATION AND SUFFERING
,” the telegram said. “
FOREVER GRATEFUL FOR YOUR KINDNESS
,” it said. And when, the next day, Walter Jenkins drafted a reply—“
IN VIEW OF YOUR DESIRE
…
HAVE COMPLETED NECESSARY ARRANGEMENTS
…”—Johnson was dissatisfied with the formality of its tone, which extended even to its closing sentence, a typical sentence from his form letter to constituents, which said that he was pleased to help. He sat there staring at Jenkins’ draft for a long minute, and then crossed out that sentence
and wrote in his own hand another sentence, which hinted at the depth to which his heart had been enlisted in the widow’s cause. Instead of saying merely that he was pleased to help, the telegram now said that he was proud to help, “
I AM PROUD TO BE OF ASSISTANCE
,” Lyndon Johnson wrote.

Johnson called in William S. White, and on January 13, the story was on the front page of the
New York Times
, under the headline, “
GI, OF MEXICAN ORIGIN, DENIED RITES IN TEXAS, TO BE BURIED IN ARLINGTON
,” and with a quote from Johnson as perfect as the lines in his telegram; “I am sorry about the funeral home at Three Rivers,” he had told White. “But there is, after all, a fine national funeral home, though of a rather different sort, out at Arlington.” He telephoned Walter Winchell in New York. “The State of Texas, which looms so large on the map, certainly looks small tonight,” Winchell told his national radio audience that evening. Newspapers across Latin America and the United States picked up the story—“
U.S. TO BURY MEXICAN G.I., SPURNED BY TEXAS HOME
,” the headlines said; “
G.I. DENIED REBURIAL IN TEXAS TO GET FULL ARLINGTON HONORS
”—even newspapers in Texas, not in South Texas perhaps but in the rest of the state. “A ringing blow for Latin-American relations, downright Democracy and plain ordinary humanity was struck by Texas’ junior Senator,” the
Sherman Democrat
editorialized. “Felix Longoria will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery, that haven where America pays its highest respect for its outstanding battle heroes.” “
A WRONG IS RIGHTED
” was the headline in the
Denison Press.
From New York City came a wire from a Veterans of Foreign Wars post saying that its members would consider it an honor and a privilege if the post’s chaplain could officiate at Private Longoria’s reburial. And if a note of pure grace were needed to this explosion of feeling, it was provided by a letter that Lyndon Johnson wrote to Beatrice Longoria on January 13, because he felt that, as he wrote her, “It was impossible for me to express to you in my telegram yesterday the deep sympathy I feel for you in this hour. I am honored to have some small share in making possible your husband’s reburial in Arlington National Cemetery, where many of our most honored heroes lie buried. I know your heart would be warmed if you could read and hear the many, many kind and thoughtful expressions of unselfish sympathy which have come to my office today…. We want to be helpful to you in every way possible…. My only desire is to be helpful, whenever and however you call upon me. Your wishes will guide me in all that I do, and I will be glad to do all that I possibly can.” Describing Johnson’s feelings during the first days of the Longoria incident, John Connally was to say years later that “His reaction was outrage, it was outrage over injustice, it was instinctive, it was real—it was from his heart.”

A
ND THEN
, as John Connally was to recall, “We began to backtrack.”