Means of Ascent (61 page)

S
OUTH
of San Antonio, in Alice in Jim Wells County, “Indio” Salas, after a stop at the Election Day tent that had been erected across from the Precinct 13 polling place in the Nayer School, arrived at the school ready for trouble from the reformers’ poll-watchers. But, he was to write, “
this time had no trouble. They just sit in the place designated by me”—two chairs on the far side
of the schoolroom, too far away to see the ballots. When the polls closed and Salas began to count the ballots, unfolding them and calling out a name to his three clerks,
Jimmy Holmgreen felt that the election judge was counting for Johnson ballots that had actually been cast for Stevenson—and he was right: “If they were not for our party, I make them for our party,” Salas was to reveal almost forty years later. But when Holmgreen jumped up
and approached the table, Salas snarled at him, “You stay away from that desk. You sit over there. Sit down and don’t interfere with my clerks.” Holmgreen, not eager for another encounter with the huge Deputy Micenheimer, sat down. Salas and his clerks resumed calling out the votes: “Johnson.” “Johnson.” “Johnson.”

No Election Day tents had been erected in neighboring Duval County. George Parr didn’t need to make any preparations. He was just
waiting for the telephone to ring to find out how many votes Lyndon Johnson needed.

T
HE EARLY RETURNS
came mostly from three of the state’s four big cities—Houston, Dallas and Fort Worth—because
voting machines were in use in these cities, and they gave Stevenson a lead of more than 20,000 votes. Returns from the fourth big city that used machines—San Antonio—were unexpectedly slow, but the young men in the Hancock House, and indeed almost all observers, anticipated
that when these returns came in they would substantially increase Stevenson’s lead. The young men were sure that their Chief had been defeated; Lady Bird told a friend: “Well, it looks like we’ve lost. I guess we’ll have to work real hard in the radio business now.” Stevenson drove to his ranch with a group of old friends to sit by the South Llano, listen to the falls, reminisce over old victories—and celebrate this new one.

But neither Lady Bird nor the young men knew what the men in the Brown Building knew. Nor did Coke Stevenson. He had defeated Johnson by 11,000 votes—a 2–1 margin—in San Antonio in the first primary, but when, late that evening, the returns from San Antonio finally came in, he had not beaten him by a 2–1 margin this time. He hadn’t beaten him at all. Johnson had beaten
him
. Kilday’s deputies and Dan Quill had done their
job: provide enough money, Quill had promised, and the West Side could be delivered. It was—and so was the adjoining black area. Some 10,000 Johnson votes had been produced in this vast slum—and despite Stevenson’s previous popularity in San Antonio, the city’s total vote this time was: Stevenson, 15,511, Johnson, 15,610. (“A remarkable turnaround,” one observer was to comment.)

And by that time, the Valley was being heard from.

It was heard from all that evening, for the most part late that evening. Stevenson’s lead was holding at 17,000 votes—and then Webb County reported 5,554 for Johnson, 1,179 for Stevenson—almost a 5–1 margin (and a plurality of more than 4,000 votes) for Johnson; Judge Raymond had delivered. New returns from Hidalgo County gave Johnson a plurality of almost 3,000 more; Cameron County’s new returns pulled him 1,700 votes closer. Then
Nueces County was heard from: a gain of 3,400 votes. And those were the counties with cities, and, in some precincts at least, voting machines. That evening returns were coming in also from the Valley’s isolated, rural counties controlled by George Parr. In Precinct 13 in Jim Wells County, Salas had counted well. In previous elections he had given the favored candidate eighty percent of the vote; this time he had given Johnson more than ninety percent: 765 to 60. Thanks
largely to that single precinct, Jim Wells County had given Johnson a total of 1,788 votes
to Stevenson’s 769. In the other rural counties, where there was no reform strength to speak of, Parr had been able to “count ’em” as he wanted. Brooks County reported 408 for Johnson, no for Stevenson. In Zapata it was 711 for Johnson, 158 for Stevenson; in Jim Hogg, 723 to 198. But even such overwhelming margins paled before the returns from the
two counties in which George Parr’s control was absolute. In Starr County, it was 2,908 for Johnson, 166 for Stevenson. And in Duval, Parr’s home county, it was 4,195 for Johnson, 38 for Stevenson—a margin of more than 100–1. When the
Texas Election Bureau closed for the night at 1:30 a.m., out of almost a million votes cast, Stevenson led by only 854.

B
UT HE LED
. And most of the votes were in. The next three days—Sunday, Monday and Tuesday—would be days of wild confusion; they always were in close Texas elections. Nearly a million votes had been cast, most of them on paper ballots. The judges counting them on Election Day in the precincts were often doing so with representatives of both sides looking over their shoulders and urging them to greater speed, interrupting them
with arguments and with pleas for the latest totals. Then the totals were sent in by telephone, or by telephoning Western Union, whose operators also made mistakes, and were recorded at the Texas Election Bureau in a hectic Election Night scene. One common error was transposition of the two candidates’ votes, because some lists had Stevenson’s name first, others Johnson’s. Transpositions, however, were merely one out of many possibilities for error. “
In counting, copying and tabulating, the votes pass through the hands of eight different groups, between the voter and the final declared result,” the
State Observer
noted. “With a million votes running the gauntlet of ‘the Human Element’ eight different times, there will always be mistakes regardless of the
honesty and good intentions of the humans involved.” Few persons familiar with Texas
politics, though, were confident of the universality of “honesty and good intentions”; there was common knowledge in the upper levels of Texas politics of the precincts that were for sale, the “boxes” in which the County Judge wouldn’t “bring in the box” (report the preeinet totals to the Election Bureau) until the man who had paid him told him what he wanted that total to be. In close elections, precinct results were altered all
through the state. Coke Stevenson’s supporters included men who were veterans at these practices, and although they had been careless before Election Day, having neglected the preparations needed to assure that the “re-counting” would be in their favor, they were working frantically now—and they were on the alert against Johnson’s attempt to do the same thing. An axiom of Texas politics held that “The lead in the runoff always wins”;
in other words, the candidate ahead by the end of Election Day,
at which time most of the vote had been counted, almost invariably won because he could “hold out”—delay reporting—enough boxes to keep a reserve to counter changes made by the other side; since both sides were changing votes, the side with the lead could keep the lead by changing enough votes to offset the other side’s changes. Perhaps the only instance in modern
Texas political history in which this rule had been broken was Lyndon Johnson’s 1941 race, when he had, through overconfidence, allowed all his boxes to be reported early, thereby revealing how many votes his opponent needed to add—and foreclosing his chance to add any more of his own. Now, in the areas of Johnson’s greatest strength, those whose votes had made the election close, observers felt he was again foreclosed. San Antonio voted by machine and those
mechanically recorded tallies had been officially certified, and few changes were possible. And, as the dean of Texas political reporters,
Allen Duckworth, was to write about Duval County but in words applicable to the Valley as a whole, “
Duval always votes overwhelmingly, one way or the other,” but “the county usually reports, practically complete, on Election Night.” On Sunday, with Stevenson in the lead, his
supporters were telephoning to election judges who had not yet reported their boxes to keep them out until they saw what Johnson would do—and they were confident that they could offset any move Johnson could make.

The “bloc vote” that Lyndon Johnson received with the help of the men in the Brown Building was substantial even for Texas. In the counties where George Parr “just counted ’em”—Duval, Starr, La Salle, Jim Hogg, Zapata and Brooks—the total reported on Election Day was 10,323 for Johnson, 1,329 for Stevenson, a plurality for Johnson of almost 9,000 votes. (To that plurality could be added the 700 votes from Box 13 in Jim
Wells County.) Parr-controlled “Mextown” and “Niggertown” in Corpus Christi added another 3,000 votes to Johnson’s advantage. And these were not the only “ethnic votes” that Johnson received from the area bordering the Rio Grande. He came out of the Valley—an area that included not only Webb County, where Judge Raymond “just wrote down what he wanted,” and the six counties in Parr’s domain but also Cameron,
Hidalgo, Dimmit, Maverick and Nueces—with a margin of more than 27,000. The “remarkable turnaround” in San Antonio was achieved through the 10,000 votes he received in “ethnic” areas. Although key officials in both camps say that 10,000 was the number of votes controlled—on Johnson’s behalf—in that city, the number of votes that were, in a term euphemistically used by these officials, “changed over” between the two
primaries is only about 8,000. Even if the lower—8,000—figure is used, however, that figure, added to the Valley’s 27,000 plurality, means that Johnson’s plurality from the “bloc” totaled 35,000 votes.

If his total was impressive, his percentages were more so. In Duval
County, Lyndon Johnson received 99 percent of the vote; in the six counties of George Parr’s domain combined, he received 93 percent. He was given 82 percent of the vote in Judge Raymond’s Webb County. In the key Mexican-American and black sections of Corpus Christi, his percentage was 80 percent. In each of these areas, in other words, at least four out of every five
voters voted for him. So he received a 35,000-vote plurality from areas in which the voting pattern was dramatically out of keeping with the normal patterns in a democracy. How much of that 35,000-vote edge can be said to have been “bought,” either by payments to
jefes
and other political bosses who wrote down voting totals with little or no reference to the actual votes that had been cast, or by payments to bosses who rounded up men and women and made sure
they voted as they were told to, or by payments to election judges who counted for Johnson votes that had actually been cast for Stevenson, or by payments to individual voters who voted in accordance with the payment they received, or by payments to deputy sheriffs who transported to the polls and directed the voting of men and women who did not even know whom they were voting for—how many of those votes were “bought” and how many would have been cast for Lyndon
Johnson even had no money changed hands cannot, after forty years, be determined. But from the descriptions given by men familiar with the voting in the Valley and on the West Side that Election Day in 1948, it is apparent that the overwhelming majority of those votes—not merely thousands of votes but tens of thousands—fall into that category.

The dramatic disparity between the returns from the West Side and the Valley and the returns from the rest of Texas indicates the disproportionate significance that this area played in the election.

Coke Stevenson carried three counties in the state by a margin of at least 80 percent, two of them so tiny as to be of almost no significance in the election. In one, Kenedy County, the vote was 52–8, and in the other, Roberts County, it was 181–12. The third county was Gillespie, where the Johnson Ranch is located; Gillespie gave Stevenson 80 percent of its vote, 1,014–250. These three counties produced for Stevenson a plurality not of 35,000 votes
but of 977; they were a minor factor in the election. Johnson’s bloc voting was a major factor—the decisive factor. Without that plurality from the West Side and the Valley, he would have trailed Stevenson by a substantial margin.

Despite Johnson’s harvest of these votes, however, he was still behind. His months of ceaseless campaigning, and his injection into the Texas political scene of unprecedented amounts of money, had narrowed the huge advantage which Coke Stevenson had enjoyed at the beginning of the long campaign, and had brought him within striking distance of “Mr. Texas.” His purchased votes had brought him almost even. But he
was still behind by
854 votes, and the men in the Brown Building feared that Stevenson was likely to increase his lead during the blizzard of corrections—honest mistakes and normal Texas “re-counting”—that were to come. And if their own candidate didn’t make up that narrow margin, his loss would be as final as if he had lost by 100,000. Lyndon Johnson’s political career was all but over—for want of fewer than a thousand votes.

T
HE
E
LECTION
B
UREAU
closed at 1:30 a.m. Lady Bird begged Lyndon to get some sleep; he went into the bedroom and changed into pajamas, but a few minutes later he burst out, his hair as wild as his eyes. He spent the night in the little paneled den of the Dillman Street house, still in his pajamas, pacing back and forth or sprawled across the day-bed, and a telephone was always in his hand.
In the Brown Building, Alvin Wirtz and
Everett Looney were telephoning, too. Ed Clark was calling from his home. Lyndon Johnson had tried to buy a state, and, although he had paid the highest price in Texas history, he had failed.

So now he was trying to steal it.

The telephone calls were to local Johnson managers in thousands of precincts all across Texas. Some of the calls were to ask the managers to be vigilant against any Stevenson attempt to steal votes in their counties. But other calls had a different purpose: the local managers were being asked to “re-check,” and, in the re-checking, to “find” a few more votes for Johnson. So far as can be learned—or at least proven—forty years
later, Johnson personally made no telephone request that votes be added to his totals. Clark explains that the men in the Brown Building did not want the candidate to make such requests himself; when questioned as to whether that was because Johnson “might be
asked
if he had called,” Clark nodded. Rather, the purpose of Johnson’s calls was to reassure the local leaders that they would be with the winner when all the votes had been counted, and to give
them a sense of personal contact with the candidate. “We weren’t asking him to say anything illegal, but it was important that he give them recognition, that he tell them everything was going to be okay,” Clark says. “Because we still needed them—to validate their votes, to stand behind them.” Of course, it was not necessary for Johnson to make requests himself; others were making them on his behalf.