Means of Ascent (75 page)

One of the two drums was indeed a ballot box from Precinct 13, Jim Wells County. Despite his efforts to confuse the court, Salas had testified that on Election Day he had signed the back of each ballot, and when Smith reached into this drum he found that the ballots inside were signed
“Luis Salas.” Pulling seven out at random (they bore numbers from 229 to 1010), Smith asked Salas formally, “I ask you if that is your
signature,” and Salas acknowledged that it was. Then the Master looked through the ballot box. It contained hundreds of ballots. It did not contain a poll list, or a tally list.

The second of the two boxes was not from Precinct 13. It contained ballots from Precinct 4. There were still eighteen boxes piled up in front of Smith, and the Master was determined to find out for certain whether the crucial lists were in one of them. If the lists were not in one of those boxes—either because when the second Precinct 13 box was identified and opened, the lists were not inside, or because there turned out to be no other box from Precinct 13 in
the pile—that would mean that the third copy of the lists had disappeared like the first two, and in Smith’s opinion, this destruction of every copy of Box 13’s records would be “
the most potent piece of evidence” of the illegality of the returns that had elected Lyndon Johnson. When Salas, recalled to the stand, continued to maintain that none of the other eighteen boxes was the other box from his precinct, the Master recessed
the hearing until nine-thirty the following morning, Wednesday, and announced that he would open the rest of the boxes then.

T
HROUGHOUT THAT EVENING
, lawyers worked in Washington to draft the text of an order for Justice Black’s approval, and on Wednesday morning they presented it to him. Black retired to study it.

Meanwhile, in Alice on Wednesday morning, the climax of the Master’s hearing was at hand. Jamming the benches of the little courtroom and lining the walls in the rear and the sides were witnesses—the witnesses who had testified in Fort Worth that they had not voted in Precinct 13 despite the fact that their names were on the poll list, and dozens of others, including the two men Salas feared would be indicted if they were put on the stand. The witnesses
had been told that they would be called to testify that day—as soon as the Master had finished opening the ballot boxes. And Luis Salas was in court again, and during the night his resolution had hardened: he would not allow his election clerks to take the blame; if they were called to testify, he would take the stand again and, this time, tell the truth.

In front of Lyndon Johnson’s attorneys were the ballot boxes, behind them and all around them were the witnesses: they were surrounded by the evidence they had been fighting to keep out of the record. Desperately hoping for the arrival of Justice Black’s order, they made a new time-consuming motion that required a ruling from Smith. Parr’s deputy sheriff was again stationed in the County Judge’s office down the hall from the courtroom,
waiting for the phone call from Washington that would keep
the rest of the ballot boxes from being opened. But the call still had not come. “Let’s proceed,” Smith said. Because—perhaps unsurprisingly—the keys to the padlocks on nine of the eighteen boxes were missing, Smith sent for a locksmith, who began working on the nine locks as Smith began opening the other nine boxes. At one point that morning the Master let his feelings
show through. As he was about to open a box, one that Salas said was not from Precinct 13, Tarleton said, “
We object to the opening of that box because a witness has positively testified it was not Box 13.” “That witness testified
to a lot of other things, too,” Smith said dryly, opening the box. The stream of frenzied interruptions by Johnson’s attorneys continued. When Smith looked at ballots to see which
precinct number they bore, Looney objected to his “
examining … ballots from other boxes.” I’m just trying to see if they are Box 13, Smith replied. “
A violation of the sanctity of the ballot box,” Tarleton shouted. “You have impeached the verity of the ballot when you have opened the box.” Smith kept proceeding through the boxes. At the start of that Wednesday morning, eighteen
had stood between him and the proof he considered “most potent.” One by one, that morning, the eighteen were being opened. First came the nine unlocked boxes. None contained the ballots from Precinct 13. There were nine to go, and by this time the locksmith had opened them. The phone call from Washington had not come. The race was very close now.

Shortly after noon, Smith recessed the hearing for lunch. When he reconvened, at one-thirty, that phone in the County Judge’s office had still not rung. Pointing at the nine remaining ballot boxes, the Master said: “
Let’s pass [them] up, please.” He had opened two—neither from Box 13—and was lifting the top from a third when, at one-fifty, the phone rang. Allred was on the phone. Justice Black had just signed
an order directing that all proceedings in the case be stayed “until further order of the Supreme Court.” Shoving his way through the spectators jamming the courtroom door, the deputy sheriff ran up to
Dudley Tarleton and whispered to him. The white-haired attorney, oratorical tricks forgotten for once, leaped up and without a word to Smith ran behind the sheriff to the County Judge’s office, where Allred told him that Davidson had received
Black’s order, and had sent a telegram to Smith (and to Federal Master Burnett, in San Diego) ordering them to halt their hearings. When Tarleton returned to the courtroom and informed Smith of this, the Master telephoned Davidson, who confirmed Tarleton’s report. Resuming his seat on the bench, Smith said, “
Judge Davidson has just instructed me to close this hearing and proceed no further.” He did so. The race was over. The third copy
of the poll list had not been found (and never would be), but because seven of the ballot boxes had not been opened, no one would ever be able to prove definitively that all three copies had vanished. The
hearings ended in anticlimax. Smith told the courtroom that he would be unable even to file a report. “
I hardly see how I could make any findings … on a record wholly incomplete,” he said. “The
testimony was not all in, and one of the parties had not been heard and the other party had been heard only in part.… As a matter of fact the plaintiff had just begun to develop the case when we adjourned.” To this, Groce added a statement poignant to Stevenson’s adherents. “
I am so full of what went on in Fort Worth which Your Honor does not know about.”

Well, Smith repeated, the whole record is not in.

“It will be,” Groce said.

G
ROCE WAS WRONG
. On October 5, the Supreme Court refused to hear Coke Stevenson’s petition that it consider Black’s stay of the injunction. On January 31, 1949, the Court rejected Stevenson’s petition for a trial on the merits of the case. The hearing Judge Davidson had ordered would never be resumed. The remaining ballot boxes were never to be opened. The testimony of the witnesses who filed out of the Alice
Courthouse—and out of the Courthouses in Duval and Zapata counties—without being heard was never to be heard. The federal courts’ investigation of Lyndon Johnson’s 1948 senatorial victory was over. Definitive proof that the decisive two hundred Box 13 “votes” had not been cast was never to be obtained. Proof that thousands of other votes from the Rio Grande Valley—votes indispensable to Johnson’s election—were not votes
at all but merely numbers written on a tally sheet by border-county
jefes
would never be obtained.
Evidence that some of these votes were “cast” by dead men would never be presented in a court of law. Abe Fortas’ strategy had worked with only a few minutes to spare. But it had worked.

All other investigations were, in effect, over, too. Stevenson asked the Justice Department and the FBI to investigate the election. Attorney General Tom Clark agreed to do so, but the investigation showed, as one analysis put it, “
a notable lack of investigative and prosecutorial vigor.” An historian has written: “The FBI investigation … disappeared
without a trace.” Attempts by
Stevenson partisans to interest the FBI and Justice Department more deeply in the case resulted only in “
a fancy dance without a serious investigation”—as was also the case with a
pro forma
Senate investigation of the Texas senatorial election. After Lyndon Johnson easily defeated Republican Jack Porter in the November election, he was seated in the Senate.

A
LTHOUGH
L
YNDON
J
OHNSON
was now a Senator, interest in the 1948 election did not die down, and in 1952, it was fueled by an incident which created a sensation in the media in Texas. It involved one of George Parr’s Mexican-American
pistoleros
, Duval County Deputy Sheriff
Sam Smithwick, who in 1949 had shot to death a news commentator on an Alice radio
station who had attacked the corruption of the Parr regime. Sentenced to life imprisonment, Smithwick, in 1952, wrote Coke Stevenson from the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville. He said that in 1949 he had “recovered” the missing “Box 13” from the Parr aides who had originally been ordered to dispose of it. He had hidden it, he wrote, and could produce the ballot box “if you are interested.” He asked Stevenson to visit him at Huntsville
to discuss “this matter in detail.”

Receiving the letter at his ranch, Stevenson set out for the prison, but stopped in Junction to call and notify prison officials he was coming. They told him not to bother. Sam Smithwick, they said, was dead. He had committed suicide in his cell by tying a towel around his neck, attaching it to the window bars, and then slipping off his bed. Smithwick’s letter, reproduced on the front page of the
Dallas News
, made
headlines—banner headlines—throughout Texas, particularly after, as the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
reported, “
some guards and prisoners at the penitentiary had talked of the possibility that Smithwick” had been murdered. “
Somewhere,” that article said, “the thief who stole election records from Precinct 13 in Jim Wells County after the 1948 senatorial election squirmed
uncomfortably.”
¹
A dramatic cartoon in the
News
depicted a terrified Lyndon Johnson cowering under the sheets in his bed, while above him a huge
ghost held a locked box labeled “Precinct 13.” No evidence whatsoever was ever adduced to link Lyndon Johnson with Smithwick’s death, and there is no reason to believe such a link existed.
Nevertheless, so widespread throughout Texas was the speculation that the death might be connected with the 1948 election that, after attempting at first to ignore the issue, Johnson was forced to issue a statement saying that disclosure of Smithwick’s letter appeared to be “
a continuation of a fight by a group of disgruntled, disappointed people.” Johnson’s statement did not, however, end the speculation, and it helped to keep the story of Box 13 alive in
Texas. Year after year, references to it continued to appear in the state’s newspapers and magazines (a 1976
Texas Monthly
article on “
Historical Markers You Will Never See” referred to the “group of dead men, who had risen from the grave to cast their ballots in alphabetical order” for Lyndon Johnson). It had become an enduring part of the state’s political history. And when Johnson moved onto
the national stage, the story followed him.

The national spotlight began to turn in Senator Johnson’s direction in 1951, when he was named Democratic “whip”—assistant floor leader—and as it turned, its glare fell on these vivid episodes down in the Valley. National news magazines reported, as did the
New York Times Magazine:
“
Exactly 87 votes in Texas put Johnson in the position to do his present job.” The country was told how, in what
Collier’s
called “
a fabulous political and legal melee,” these votes had been cast. It was told how, in the words of
The Saturday Evening Post
, “
Johnson’s attorneys rushed into court and obtained an injunction to prevent eliminating any votes on the ground of … fraud,” how he had won at the convention only through a 29–28 vote, how Justice Black’s ruling made
“it … too late to do anything else to keep Johnson’s name off the ballot.” The national spotlight, in fact, focused on that previously all-but-unknown kingdom from which those 87 votes had come, and on its ruler. A second
Collier’s
article that same year, an article on George Parr titled “
SOMETHING IS ROTTEN IN THE STATE OF TEXAS
,” said, “
His
power reaches into Washington,” and began with a description of the 1948 election:

Not a few of these articles, moreover, mentioned a nickname by which Johnson was sometimes known in Washington: “Landslide Lyndon.” His introduction to the nation came complete with the nickname, and with its provenance. As he made his entrance onto the great stage of history, still in a relatively minor role, he entered with that story attached to him.

All during the 1950s, as Lyndon Johnson rose to power in the Senate and came to dominate it, his nickname, and the reasons behind it, punctuated major articles about him. When, in 1959, he began running for President, the spotlight intensified and details emerged.
Look
magazine, in a long two-part biographical article that listed the hurdles “
likely to arise before Johnson in a campaign for the Presidency,”
included “an allegation of fraud in his first election to the Senate.” Its author,
Bill Davidson, interviewed Stevenson attorneys who had investigated in the Valley, and read some of the court transcripts. The article concluded: “There is no evidence that Johnson had anything to do with the admittedly peculiar goings-on in Jim Wells County.… Johnson did, however, sign a petition for a court injunction that
stopped … eliminating any of Johnson’s votes. Since that time his enemies have labelled him ‘The Senator from the Thirteenth Precinct.’ ” Even favorable articles, such as a generally laudatory cover story in
Time
magazine, mentioned the “
suspicious 87 votes” and the “notorious Box 13.”