Means of Ascent (76 page)

The presidency brought a spotlight more intense yet, and with that new intensity the 1948 election was elevated from being part of a cover story on Lyndon Johnson to a cover story itself. At the height of his popularity, in 1964, when he won his great election victory, on newsstands all over the country was “
THE STORY OF 87 VOTES THAT MADE HISTORY
,” the cover story of
U.S. News
& World Report:
“The 87 votes … set him on the road to the White House.… If they had gone the other way, Lyndon Johnson probably would not now be occupying the White House.…” There again were the pictures of the pile of ballot boxes, of Parr, of Hugo Black, of Lyndon and Coke, of Lady Bird with a sad smile; there again was the map of Texas, with Jim Wells County outlined in red.

Distrust of Johnson grew during his presidency until, as
Richard Rovere was to write in
The New Yorker
,

And as more and more articles appeared attempting to analyze his character and his reputation, many of them turned to the
1948 election for clues. In a way, the most perceptive of these analysts said, the oft-repeated stories about that election formed in themselves a foundation for the misgivings. Tom Wicker, concluding in 1983 that “
After Lyndon Johnson … trust in ‘the President’ was
tarnished forever,” added: “Even had there been no war, it would not have been hard to distrust Lyndon Johnson. Hadn’t he been elected to the Senate by only eighty-seven votes, widely believed to have been stolen in Texas’s notorious Duval County?” As a President passes into history, the perception of his character can sometimes be summarized by a single anecdote.
George Washington, with his reputation for honesty and integrity,
is often simplistically linked with the probably apocryphal incident of the cherry tree and “I cannot tell a lie.” Lyndon Johnson, passing into history, was also linked in the public consciousness with a single incident, not apocryphal—an incident summed up in a precinct number: “Box 13.”

E
VEN AFTER
Lyndon Johnson’s presidency—even after his death—bursts of news about “Box 13” would still from time to time make headlines across the United States. The most dramatic were occasioned by “Indio” Salas. For twenty-nine years after the election, Box 13’s election judge—the man, in the opinion of Coke Stevenson’s partisans, most directly responsible for the
“87 votes that made history”—steadfastly refused to discuss those votes publicly or privately. But in a 1977 interview with reporter
James W. Mangan of the Associated Press, Salas said that Stevenson’s supporters had been correct all along. During his testimony in the Alice Courtroom twenty-nine years before, Salas admitted, he had lied. Now, he said, he wanted to tell the truth. “Johnson did not win that election,” he
said. “It was stolen for him.” And, he said, he, Luis Salas, had participated in the stealing.

Three days after the election, he said, he was summoned to George Parr’s office in San Diego, where he found the Duke, Ed Lloyd, Alice City Commissioner Bruce Ainsworth—and Lyndon Johnson. Johnson, according to Salas, told Parr: “If I can get two hundred more votes, I’ve got it won.” Speaking to Salas in Spanish, Parr asked him to add the two hundred votes. Salas refused, he says, but agreed to certify the votes as accurate if someone
else added them. “I told him I would certify them because I didn’t want anybody to think I’m not backing up my party; I said I would be with the party to the end,” he says. That night, at about nine o’clock, in an office on the second floor of the Adams Building in Alice, two other men whom he refused to identify because “they were just following orders” added the votes as he sat watching. “I was right
there
when they added the names,” he told the Associated Press reporter. “They all came from the … 
poll tax sheet … I certified.… I kept my word to be loyal to my party.” He did so, he said, despite misgivings about the identical handwriting. (Asked by the reporter why the handwriting had not been varied, he replied, “How? Only two guys? How they going to change it? The lawyers spotted it
right away, they sure did.”) Noticing, moreover, that the two men were adding the names from the poll tax sheet in alphabetical order, he warned Parr that it was “a mistake” not to “mix up” the names. But Parr was too arrogant to accept advice. “I told George Parr, and he wouldn’t listen to me. I said, ‘Look at the “
A
”. You add 10 or 12 names on that letter. Why don’t you change it to the
other—C or
D
or
X
—mix ’em up.’ [But] George said, That’s all right.’ George was stubborn. He would not listen to anybody. But it was stupid.”

Salas confirmed all the suspicions of Coke Stevenson and his supporters. The two hundred votes were only some of the votes he had stolen for Lyndon Johnson, he said. On the witness stand, he had sworn that “The election was level, nothing wrong with the election.” Now he told the Associated Press reporter that the election had not, in fact, been “level” even before the two hundred votes were added. On Election Day itself, he said, he had, in
the Nayer School, “called out” as votes for Johnson votes that had, in fact, been cast for Stevenson.

The Associated Press story was picked up by the nation’s leading news magazines and by newspapers all across the United States. Once again, after almost three decades, the dateline “
ALICE, TEX
.” was on the front page of the
New York Times;
once again, in a thousand headlines, the familiar words were linked anew with Lyndon Johnson’s name:
“LBJ ELECTION
‘STOLEN,’ EX-OFFICIAL SAYS.”
There were again the same references to “the notorious Precinct 13,” to “the notorious eighty-seven votes,” the same reminders that, as
Newsweek
put it under the headline
“HISTORY: LBJ ACCUSED,”
“
suspicions have persisted that Lyndon Baines Johnson stole his way into the U.S. Senate.”

By 1977, of course, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library was in full stride as the guardian of Lyndon Johnson’s reputation. It swung into action. Director
Harry Middleton assured a Johnson biographer,
Merle Miller, that Salas’ assertions were untrue. “
I know Johnson didn’t do what Salas said because that would have been
dumb,”
Middleton said. That was enough to convince
Miller. In his biography,
Lyndon
, Miller was to write that Middleton’s remark was “perhaps the best comment on the Salas story.” Using the public relations expertise of two one-time Johnson aides, Liz Carpenter and George Christian, the Library announced that it would open five thousand pages of documents relating to the 1948 campaign. That was a lot of documents to be absorbed quickly, particularly by reporters unfamiliar with a rather complicated
historical situation, so
they could be excused for focusing on a “memo” from Johnson (actually a draft of a 1948 press release) denying the charges (“
I am without knowledge concerning the ballots in either Duval, Jim Wells or Zapata Counties.…”), as if this press release had greater significance than any of a hundred others issued by both sides during the investigation.

Johnson’s supporters focused on Salas’ statement that Johnson had been present personally at the meeting in Parr’s office. Walter Jenkins,
Mary Rather and
Charles Herring held a joint press conference to assure the reporters who had descended on Austin that his presence in San Diego would have been impossible. They insisted that Johnson had remained at his Dillman Street home in Austin for the four days
after the election, keeping tabulations on the vote-counting. “I was there all the time,” Miss Rather said. “Congressman Johnson hardly left the house, except once to go downtown.” Jenkins said, “It would have been absolutely impossible for Mr. Johnson to have been outside Austin for the length of time it would have taken for him to go to Alice [sic].” Their statements were hardly conclusive—all three acknowledged that their
recollections of the hectic days twenty-nine years earlier were based solely on their memories, unsupported by any diaries or other documentation, and it would have taken no more than a few hours for Johnson to make the short drive to the Austin airport and fly the two hundred miles to San Diego in a Brown & Root plane and then return—but no confirmation of Salas’ statement on this point existed. Many of the follow-up newspaper articles treated his statement with
skepticism. The story faded inconclusively away.

The focus on that single point, however, enabled Johnson’s defenders to obscure the fact that it was the only unconfirmed point in Salas’ statement. Reporters’ skepticism about his other statements would, perhaps, have been reduced had they been more familiar with the overall record of the case, particularly the transcripts of the testimony given by other witnesses during the Federal District Court hearing in Fort Worth and the federal
Master-in-Chancery hearings in Alice and San Diego. The reporters believed that in his 1977 statement Salas was making new revelations. Actually, Precinct 13’s election judge was only confirming testimony that had been given by others during those hearings. The principal doubt surrounding that testimony had been the doubt he had cast by denying what these witnesses had said. Now Salas was admitting that his denials had been false.

A
NOTHER DECADE LATER
, in March, 1986, I located Luis Salas in Houston. He was living with his wife, Tana, in a comfortably furnished mobile home in the large, pleasant back yard of the house of his daughter, Grace, and her family. The man who opened the door of the trailer bore, at
eighty-four, little resemblance to Parr’s fearsome “Indio.” He was no longer tall and broad but stooped and slender, with
gray hair, eyeglasses and a gentle manner. Throughout the interview, he kept glancing anxiously toward his wife, who was sitting in the next room, obviously in poor health. But his eyes were keen, and he was mentally alert.

I was asking questions about the 1948 election when Salas suddenly said, “I have written it all down.” Walking over to a trunk, he bent down stiffly and pulled out a manuscript—eighty-five pages of it typed, obviously by someone unsure of the rules of punctuation, with nine additional handwritten pages attached—and handed it to me. A paragraph near the beginning says: “
Reader, I don’t know if
my story is to your liking, writing nonfiction is hard, I had no schooling, please excuse my spelling and grammar, but I had to write this book, to leave it to my family, when I go beyond, my time is running short, and I want to finish without adding or subtracting parts that are false, or invented by my imagination, no, everything has to be
exactly the way it happened.” The title of the manuscript is “Box 13.”

The manuscript is actually an autobiography, written in 1979. It tells in detail the story of Salas’ youth in the little Mexican town of Bermejillo, while Pancho Villa’s Mexican Revolution was raging; how he learned Morse code at fourteen and became a railroad telegraph operator; how “my Indian blood” made him a fighter and his size and temper made him feared until “my character was hardboil, cinic and arrogant, and never looked for
trouble but if trouble came to me, I was right there.” When he was twenty-three, he wrote, he shot a man who later died of gangrene from the wounds. The man’s relatives swore revenge, and he fled Durango. “I was to become the wandering Jew,” he wrote. For years, working as a telegraph operator, he lived in lonely little shacks along the lines of the Mexican National Railways until, in 1936, he crossed the border into the United States and settled in Alice;
“I missed the mountains, here was endless flatland.” In 1940, he related, he met George Parr, whom he revered and who gave him money, and a car and badges—and made him his enforcer. “
My life changed with the power invested on me.…
Wearing a gun gave me sense of security, but very few times, I used the gun, most of the disagreements I had were resolved with my fists, I weighed 210 pounds.… As long as I live,
I never forget this man, and when I gave him my word to stay by his side regardless, I meant it, so up to date I still worship his memory.”

In his manuscript, Salas attempts to explain his motives for writing it. One, he says, was to “show people the corruption of politics.” This explanation becomes less convincing as Salas talks, because of the pleasure in his voice and on his face when he says, “
Any vote for Stevenson [smile] I counted for Johnson.” But in the manuscript he also gives other
motives which ring more true. In part, he stated, he wrote his
“book” because he wanted his children to know the story of Box 13, and indeed of his whole life. “
Now is the year 1979,” he wrote. “I am running short of time, feel sick and tired, but … before I go beyond this world, I had to tell the truth.… My wife Tana know why [he certified the two hundred votes] for Lyndon Johnson but my three children, they don’t know why, when they read my book, I hope
they will understand, and find me free from blame, I am certain they are not going to be against me.” Before he died, he wrote, he wanted to put down the truth for them. And in part, he stated, he wrote his “book” because he wanted history to know the story of Box 13—and his role in it. The elderly, frail Mexican-American man sitting in the trailer in Houston felt very strongly that he was a part of history—a small but, in his view, a vital part
(“I had to certify” the crucial two hundred votes; “we put L B Johnson as senator for Texas, and this position opened the road to reach the Presidency”)—and he had written it “exactly the way it happened” so that history would acknowledge his role. His story, he wrote, is the story of “
How an Indian boy raised in the rugged mountains of Durango came to this country and was involved in one of the most notorious
scandals of politics that opened the road for L B Johnson to reach the presidency of this country, this is history like it or not, nobody can erase these facts.”

Salas’ pride, moreover, was clearly hurt that when finally, in 1977, he told the Associated Press the story he had waited so long to tell, “
many people did not believe.” “The people have
a good reason not believe what I wrote in the book,” he admits in “Box 13.” “The reason is that
I lied under oath.” But, he said, the story he told the Associated Press was “the
true story.” As for the Johnson Library, quoting at one point from the transcript (which he refers to as the “questionnaire”) of the Masters’ hearing, he stops and says: “Reader it is a long questionnaire if you willing to read it all
go to the Lyndon Johnson Library in Austin, of course you don’t find there that we stole the election for L B Johnson.” Perhaps, he wrote, if he put all the facts down in detail, in a
book, people would believe.