Means of Ascent (66 page)

As for rural counties, in Kenedy County, which Johnson charged was a “bloc vote,” he was correct, but the “bloc” was only 52 votes. (Kenedy County consisted almost entirely of a division of the King Ranch, whose owners, the Klebergs, distrusted Johnson.) In the two other rural counties he mentioned, the totals were also minuscule. Not
one
of the state’s 254 counties voted for Stevenson by ratios comparable to those Johnson
received in the Valley. Votes were certainly stolen for Stevenson—Stevenson’s totals were “corrected” in dozens of counties, just as Johnson’s were “corrected” in dozens of counties other than the Valley counties—but in numbers so small as to bear no comparison to the majorities Johnson received in the Valley. Furthermore, the “corrections” in the totals of the two candidates after Election Day, corrections which
followed the traditional Texas pattern, were so balanced as to virtually offset each other, and these corrections had no significance in the final result.

H
AVING SEEN THE EVIDENCE
, and filed his affidavit, Stevenson left Alice with
Frank Hamer on Friday evening, September 10. Before him was the weekend, during which the
reform majority of the Jim Wells County Democratic Committee was determined to meet and correct the county’s voting tally before the State Democratic Convention began. At the far side of the weekend, at ten a.m. Monday, the
convention would open in Fort Worth, to certify the result of the primary. All through that weekend, Coke Stevenson and Lyndon Johnson engaged in a grim, bitter struggle—and during it a pattern emerged that was to characterize the remainder of the fight between the two men. Stevenson was trying to get the ballot box and record of Precinct 13 open, to let Texans see the evidence that he and his men had seen—the loop added to change a
“7”
into a “9,” and the two hundred ballots that supposedly supported that change. Johnson was trying to keep the records closed.

The pattern was set in the weekend’s opening skirmish. The meeting of the Jim Wells Democratic Committee, at which reformers were planning formally to demand the records, and, whether or not they were produced, to throw out the tainted two hundred votes, might be convened at any moment. It had to be stopped—and it had to be stopped fast.

Behind the broad, amiable smile of Alvin Wirtz was the mind “as quick as chain lightning,” the mind that was always thinking “three steps ahead” of his opponents. On Saturday morning, while the Jim Wells reformers were planning their strategy for the county committee meeting, telegrams were delivered to each of their homes—telegrams, signed by a judge, forbidding them to hold one.

Jim Wells County was in the state’s Seventy-ninth Judicial District. The District Court was,
Dudley Lynch writes, “George Parr’s
home turf,” the judge, Lorenz Broeter of Alice, his “
loyal supporter.” But on this crucial Friday, Judge Broeter happened to be holding court in Starr County. It would take perhaps two hours to get there and locate him, and in two hours a
meeting might be convened, a new certification made. There were, however, judges conveniently to hand in Austin. An affidavit was hastily typed up, and Lyndon Johnson signed it. In it Johnson charged that Stevenson, Hamer and Dibrell, as well as Adams, Poole and the other fifteen members of the Jim Wells committee, had “entered into a conspiracy for the purpose of causing the votes in Precinct No. 13 in Jim Wells County to be thrown out on the grounds of fraud and
irregularity.” Johnson claimed that Stevenson had threatened and intimidated Adams and Poole into calling a meeting of the committee to “make a new tabulation” and that Adams would call that meeting “at any instant, unless restrained.” And Johnson therefore asked that a temporary restraining order be issued on the spot, without a hearing, to stop the committee “from making any new tabulation, or attempting to recanvass the votes in Precinct
No. 13, or hearing any contest, or eliminating any votes on grounds of illegality, fraud … and from making, sending or filing with the State Democratic Executive Committee any returns” other than those already sent in—the ones containing the disputed two hundred votes—until Broeter could rule.
Everett Looney hurried over to an Austin district judge, Roy Archer, of the 126th District, with the affidavit
and a proposed injunction signed by him and Wirtz (Looney’s name came first; Wirtz never put his name first on anything if he could help it), and the argument that unless the order was issued at once, Johnson would suffer irreparable harm from the committee’s “conspiracy.” Archer signed the order, and telegrams embodying it were instantly dispatched to every committee member.

Archer’s order shocked attorneys knowledgeable in the state’s
election law; one historian was to state that the order “
amazed and angered others not directly related to the proceedings or to the Senate race.… Lawyers across the state searched in vain for a legal precedent for an Austin judge restraining an official Democratic Party meeting hundreds of miles away in another county.” Stevenson
understood the reason for Wirtz’s maneuver; it was, he said angrily, an “obvious attempt to prevent
the truth from coming out of Jim Wells County until after the State Executive Committee has canvassed the returns on Monday.” But a judicial order was a judicial order: when Adams, who of course did not feel he had been intimidated or threatened by anyone (at least not by anyone on Coke Stevenson’s side), took Archer’s telegram to
an anti-Parr attorney in Alice, he was told bluntly what it meant: “
Even if it [the election] was stolen, you’re not to do anything.” Wirtz’s maneuver worked. “Of course we’ll obey the law,” Poole told a reporter; there would be no meeting until Judge Broeter ruled. And Broeter, George Parr’s loyal supporter, notified of Archer’s order, said he would hold the hearing—but not until Monday morning. Monday, of course,
was the day of the state committee canvassing. And once the state committee had opened the Jim Wells returns—the returns which the present Jim Wells committee felt were false—and certified them, the feelings of the Jim Wells committee wouldn’t matter.

W
HILE HIS LAWYERS
were fighting the rearguard delaying action in Alice over the weekend, Lyndon Johnson himself was engaged on the main front, in Fort Worth, five hundred miles to the north. He had rushed there on Sunday afternoon after dispatches from his lieutenants told him that, on this front, he was losing.

Two battles—two votes—would be waged on this front on Monday. The first vote would be taken by a seven-member subcommittee of the State Executive Committee, the party’s ruling body, to canvass and certify (in theory, to examine and make official) the returns from the 252 counties that had held elections and then to make a report (in effect, a recommendation as to who the party’s nominee should be) to the full, 62-member Executive Committee.
The second vote would be taken by the Executive Committee on whether or not to accept the “canvassing subcommittee’s” report: on whether, in other words, to recommend that the full convention name as the party’s official nominee the candidate named by the subcommittee, or some other candidate.

In this election, the canvassing subcommittee’s certifications of the votes from the individual counties would be more than usually crucial. Once it had made official the vote from Jim Wells County to the Executive Committee, the attempts of the reformers down in Alice to submit a revised return would be largely moot: the certified return (the original return) would now be in the hands of the Executive Committee, with the weight of the subcommittee’s
certification behind it. If, however, the subcommittee refused to certify the Jim Wells vote, the nature of the entire Johnson-Stevenson fight could change dramatically—and unpredictably; the range of possibilities seemed endless. But one clear possibility loomed
as disastrous to Johnson’s supporters: that the reformers in Alice would, before the subcommittee finished its work, submit a revised return—one with the two hundred disputed Johnson
votes subtracted from the county total—and that the subcommittee would certify
that
return instead of the original, thereby giving Stevenson a higher total statewide vote than Johnson.

It was to forestall this possibility that Alvin Wirtz had obtained that temporary injunction forbidding the Jim Wells County Committee to revise the county’s return. Without a revised return before it, the canvassing subcommittee could not of course certify it to the full Executive Committee; there would be nothing for it to certify except the original. On Monday, Johnson would be safe from a revised return as long as Judge Archer’s injunction remained in
force. That holding action in that District Court down in Alice was therefore the key to the subcommittee battle in Fort Worth. His attorneys felt Judge Broeter might well keep the injunction in force until some later date. But even if Broeter dissolved the injunction, Johnson would still be safe, so long as the dissolution did not come too early in the day. As far as the subcommittee battle was concerned, delay was the key; all that was required for victory was a delay of a few
hours. Since the court hearing and the subcommittee’s county-by-county certifications would be going forward simultaneously on Monday morning, there would be tense hours until Johnson could be sure that his attorneys back in Alice had delayed long enough. His attorneys assured him they would be able to do so.

The projections for Monday’s second battle, the vote that evening in the party’s 62-member Executive Committee, were, however, far less optimistic. The Executive Committee vote would be the decisive vote at the convention. “
By custom,” as
Allen Duckworth wrote, the full 2,000-member convention “accepts without question the report of an executive committee on winners of primary
nominations.” Johnson’s advisers felt that it was the Executive Committee vote that would decide the outcome of his long fight. And, polling the committee’s sixty-two members, his advisers found to their consternation that a majority favored rejecting any report from the canvassing subcommittee that did not throw out the tainted Jim Wells votes and name as the Democratic nominee not Lyndon Johnson but Coke Stevenson. Clark and Connally, bitter enemies who agree
on little, agree on the situation in Fort Worth that weekend—in the same three words: “
We were behind.”

No parade greeted Lyndon Johnson when he got off the plane in Fort Worth this time; he was met by worried faces and big, black headlines:
“SHOWDOWN MONDAY
.” At the Blackstone Hotel, he was ushered into a suite that had been hastily redecorated “in modernistic decor” for his visit, and he put on a confident front for reporters. He had a “
comfortable
majority” on the Executive Committee, he said, and he was sure he would receive the certification. But after the press filed out, he was handed a sheet of paper on which the names of the fifty-five members of the Executive Committee who were attending the convention had been divided into two columns according to the preferences they had expressed—one column for him, one for Stevenson. The list of names in Stevenson’s column was longer—several names
longer. The committee’s ruling would probably be decisive, he was told. If it voted against him, his fight was over. His career was over. And it seemed that that was what the committee was likely to do. “
Just one vote difference there [in the Executive Committee] and it was all over,” Ed Clark recalls. “One vote: if they had ordered [Stevenson’s name onto the ballot] there wasn’t going to be much we could do. It was
over.” Recalling that night, Ed Clark stops talking and sits for long minutes behind his desk staring off into space, remembering. “The state convention,” he says at last. “That was when I thought we might lose.”

Johnson’s reaction to this news may never be known. Of those men who witnessed it only two were alive when research on this book began, and no matter how frank these two—Ed Clark and
George Brown—have been in describing other episodes in Johnson’s life, neither wanted to talk about this one. Clark, who was intimately associated with Johnson for thirty years and at his right hand in a score of crises in Texas, will say
only: “I never saw him so worried about anything.” Brown will say only: “
He was wild.” After some hours, he grew calmer. By the time Connally saw him, he was, in Connally’s words, “
frantic, but orderly—’Get me this one’; ‘Get me that one’ “—telephoning the Executive Committee members, and the men back in the members’ home counties who could influence them. He
was “calling all over the state to get pressure on the delegates any way he could.” He interrupted his telephoning only to attend a barbecue for convention leaders, at which he arrived wearing a big smile and an air of confidence.

Johnson’s telephone calls were not the ones that mattered most, however. He needed all his big guns on the line now, and, thanks to the planes at his disposal, he could get them there; despite all the pressure Clark had exerted in East Texas, some Executive Committee members from the East Texas districts were still on Stevenson’s side. Clark was in his room when “Johnson called me and told me where to get a plane, and pick up
Ben Ramsey [the Texas Secretary of State] in San Augustine so he could be in on the trouble we had up there.” Soon Ed Clark and Ramsey were prowling hotel corridors together—the two most powerful men in East Texas, trying to bring the East Texas members into line for Lyndon Johnson.

And he had not just Clark and Ramsey but the man behind Clark
and Ramsey. He had wheeled up his biggest gun of all. Telephoning
Herman Brown in Houston, he asked him to come in person. No one who knew Herman, and who was aware of his contempt for politicians and his distaste for politicians in groups, thought he would come. “
Herman Brown [had] never worked a convention in his life,” his lobbyist Oltorf says. But he
worked this one. Herman knew them all, it seemed. He knew the district judges and the county commissioners from the counties in which he had done road contracting work long before there was a Mansfield Dam, and if he didn’t know the judge or the commissioner to whom a stubborn Executive Committee member might listen, he knew a subcontractor, a subcontractor who did work for Brown & Root or who wanted to do work for Brown & Root in the future, who knew the judge
or commissioner. He knew the legislators with whom he had dealt on the Manford bills, and on a hundred other items, the men to whom he had sent envelopes filled with cash. And that night in Fort Worth, Herman Brown called in all his chits. It was necessary that he call them in, he told the recipients of his calls, because if Lyndon Johnson didn’t win in the Executive Committee tomorrow, there might not be any more contracts—or subcontracts. The full, immense, weight of
the economic power of Brown & Root was thrown behind Lyndon Johnson that night. Three of the seven absent committee members were contacted by Herman Brown, and leaders in their counties were telephoned by Herman Brown, and then Herman Brown’s plane went and collected the members—and there were three new votes for Lyndon Johnson.