Means of Ascent (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #2)

by Robert A. Caro

How small a fraction of the cost to America of the episode that history has come to remember simply as “Vietnam” is represented even by these figures, moreover? How many American lives were wrecked in other ways, scarred inside with scars that would never heal? And what of the cost to which President Eisenhower referred when he wrote (in words he struck from his memoirs before publication), “The standing of the United States as the most powerful of the anti-colonial powers is an asset of incalculable value to the Free World.… Thus the moral position of the United States was more to be guarded than the Tonkin Delta, indeed than all of Indochina.” By the time Lyndon Johnson left the presidency that asset had been squandered; were the American empire to live as long as Rome, would that asset ever be made whole?

In an attempt to justify sending American troops into another small country, the Dominican Republic (in that same month, April, 1965), Lyndon Johnson told the press and the American people that the American Ambassador had said that otherwise “American blood will run in the streets.” (He hadn’t.) He said that the Ambassador had said that he “was talking to us from under a desk while bullets were going through his windows.” He hadn’t. Johnson said that fifteen hundred innocent people had been murdered, some by decapitation. They hadn’t. He said that the revolution had been taken over by “a band of Communist conspirators.” It hadn’t.

A new phrase—“Credibility Gap”—entered American political dialogue. It was printed in headlines, and on buttons, even on buttons pinned to flak jackets; men who had been sent to Vietnam on Lyndon Johnson’s orders went into action wearing a button—“Ambushed at Credibility Gap”—that called their Commander-in-Chief a liar.

That tarnishing revolutionized politics and government in the United States. The shredding of the delicate yet crucial fabric of credence and faith between the people of the United States and the man they had placed in the White House occurred during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. Until the day of Kennedy’s death—until, in other words, the day Johnson took office—the fabric was whole. By the time Johnson left office, the fabric was in shreds, destroyed by lies and duplicity that went beyond permissible political license, destroyed so thoroughly that Wicker could write that “The tragic irony of Lyndon Johnson is that the lowering of the presidency, not the Great Society of which he dreamed, is his most obvious legacy.”

As the story unfolds in succeeding volumes, the threads will, again, run side by side. As Senate Majority Leader during the 1950s, Lyndon Johnson displayed a genius for manipulation and domination for the sake of his ambition, and for power for its own sake—he wrested from the Senate barons power no Leader had ever enjoyed before—but he also displayed a capacity for achievement on behalf of the dispossessed, beginning to pass social-welfare legislation for which liberals had long been yearning. And, of course, during his presidency, in the 1960s, the threads run side by side, darker and brighter than ever.

That campaign was the new politics against the old. Johnson was the new politics: electronic politics, technological politics, media politics. He didn’t pioneer most of the tactics (except for one tactic, which had astonishing side effects: the use of a helicopter as a campaign device), but he brought some of these still-new devices to a higher level of sophistication, using them to maximum effectiveness. Scientific polling, techniques of organization and of media manipulation—of the use of advertising firms, public relations specialists, media experts from outside the political apparatus, of the use of electronic media (in 1948, radio) not only for speeches but for advertising to influence voters—the mature flowering of all these devices dates, in Texas and the Southwest, from Lyndon Johnson’s 1948 campaign.

Many of the ends of Lyndon Johnson’s life—civil rights in particular, perhaps, but others, too—were noble: heroic advances in the cause of social justice. Although those ends are not a part of this volume, those ends are a part of that life: many liberal dreams might not be reality even today were it not for Lyndon Johnson. Those noble ends, however, would not have been possible were it not for the means, far from noble, which brought Lyndon Johnson to power. Their attainment would not have been possible without that 1948 campaign. And what are the implications of that fact? To what extent are ends inseparable from means? Of all the questions raised by the life of Lyndon Baines Johnson, no question is more important than that. Part I “TOO SLOW”

But Johnson’s attitude went beyond caution. He ridiculed—intensely and harshly—politicians who fought for ideals and principles. Says Helen Gahagan Douglas, the stunningly beautiful and intelligent actress who became part of the little circle after she was elected to Congress in 1944, but who had been invited to its parties whenever, in the years before that, she came to Washington, “He made fun of those who refused to bend.…”

he portrayed himself as a war-scarred veteran of many battles on many fronts: by 1944, he was stating—in writing—“I lived with the men on fighting fronts. I flew with them on missions over enemy territory. I ate and slept with them; and was hospitalized with them in the Fiji Islands.…”

So deeply and widely mistrusted had Lyndon Johnson been at little Southwest Texas State Teachers College in the Hill Country that the nickname he bore during his years on campus was “Bull” (for “Bullshit”) Johnson. And his fellow students (who used his nickname to his face—“Hiya, Bull,” “Howya doin’, Bull?”) believed not only that he lied to them—lied to them constantly, lied about big matters and small, lied so incessantly that he was, in a widely used phrase, “the biggest liar on campus”—but also that some psychological element impelled him to lie, made him lie even when he knew the lie might be discovered, made him, in fact, repeat a lie even after it had been discovered, made him, in one classmate’s words, “a man who just could not tell the truth.” Now, in 1942, he was acquiring the same reputation in Washington.

Essential though such an image was to Lyndon Johnson politically, the image he needed in his inner life was very different. It was, as it had always been, very important to him that he be seen as shrewd, pragmatic, cynical—“different from Daddy.” A shrewd, pragmatic man would have volunteered to place himself in danger only because of political necessity, so Johnson, almost as if he could not help himself, kept making clear, often to the very same men to whom he was telling the story of the courageous mission, that he had gone to the Pacific only for political advantage—only because he had, in terms of his ambition, no choice—and that, once there, he had done the absolute minimum necessary to safeguard that ambition. Before leaving for the Pacific, he had told Jonathan Daniels he wanted to go only “for the sake of political future”; after a conversation with Johnson now, after his return, Daniels noted in his diary that the trip had been “politically essential.”

It is indeed somewhat difficult to conclude that the medal was awarded for any considerations other than political. Lieutenant Greer, whose brilliant flying saved the Heckling Hare, did not receive a medal, nor did Corporal Baren, who shot down the Zero—no one on the plane received a decoration for the mission over Lae except the observer; in fact, some members of its crew were to fly twenty-five missions without receiving any medal, much less one as prized as the Silver Star.

a letter to the Goldthwaite Eagle, for example, said that instead of re-electing Johnson to Congress in absentia, “I’d call a convention … and nominate Mrs. Lyndon Johnson for Congress to take her husband’s place while he is fighting for his country. She would make a good congressman.” The joking reached Johnson’s ears—and after he returned, he took pains to put it to rest, to make clear that his wife’s role as caretaker of his office while he was in the Pacific, and indeed her role in his overall political life, had never been significant. Once, in Austin, with a group of people present, he was asked if he discussed his political problems with Lady Bird. He replied that of course he did. “I talk everything over with her.” Then Lyndon Johnson paused. “Of course,” he said, “I talk my problems over with a lot of people. I have a nigger maid, and I talk my problems over with her, too.”

But although in 1942 and 1943 Lyndon Johnson’s political influence was not great, it was quite strategically situated in regard to the purchase of a radio station. In the “very close-knit group,” in which, as Virginia Durr put it, “there was a great intertwining of both personal and intergovernmental relationships,” three members were intimately connected with the governmental agency whose approval of the purchase would be necessary. Clifford Durr was an FCC commissioner, one of the seven-member board that ran the agency; W. Ervin “Red” James was Durr’s chief assistant at the Commission. As for Lyndon Johnson’s bluntest tool, barely a year into private practice, already becoming known as “the greatest wirepuller in history,” Tommy Corcoran had many wires to pull in the FCC—including some that ran all the way to the top: both the Commission’s chairman, James Fly, a former classmate of Corcoran’s at Harvard Law, and its former chief counsel, William J. Dempsey, a thirty-two-year-old Corcoran protégé, owed their appointments largely to his influence. (Dempsey’s predecessor, insufficiently responsive to a telephone call from “Tommy Corcoran at the White House,” had found himself dismissed on twenty-four hours’ notice.) And while Dempsey was now in private practice (sharing an office suite with Corcoran, with both men representing private clients before a notably accommodating FCC), many officials still at the top of the FCC were indebted to Corcoran for their jobs: the agency ...

Johnson provided inside information, vital to the FCC, on the direction of the next congressional attack, and advice on what the Commission could do to counter it. “He was sort of acting as a spotter, telling us where to put the next shell, and giving us Sam Rayburn’s reactions,” Durr was to recall. Nor was Johnson’s assistance to the Commission limited to information and advice. As the House massed more and more solidly against the FCC, its only hope seemed to be Rayburn’s intervention, and Johnson was working to procure that intervention, playing on the Speaker’s feeling that Cox’s investigative methods (and his $2,500 “legal fee”) were bringing his beloved House into disrepute; trying to overcome the Speaker’s reluctance to set aside tradition and interfere with the internal workings of a committee. And on at least two occasions, when the FCC’s cause looked particularly desperate, he succeeded in persuading Rayburn to come to its defense.

GRADUALLY, Lyndon Johnson put together the kind of staff he wanted—composed of men who had demonstrated an unusual willingness to allow him to dictate their lives: Sherman Birdwell, who, as one of his boyhood playmates in the Hill Country, had followed Lyndon around obediently, attempting to imitate his mannerisms, an imitation he had continued while working for Johnson in the National Youth Administration; Willard Deason, who at college had served as Johnson’s front man in his campaign to attain campus power, and who thereafter had demonstrated his unquestioning obedience by switching from a promising career in education to a career in law because Johnson told him to, and then, when Johnson decided another switch was in order, by leaving the law to work for Johnson at the NYA; Walter Jenkins, who had been in Johnson’s service only since 1939, but who had made up for his late start by his willingness to work for his Chief “like a slave” and by a psychological dependence on him at least equal to that of his elders.

And the kind of power he craved he could never obtain from the radio business. Indeed, he came to realize—and intimates like George Brown and Edward Clark watched the realization growing in him—that in a sense, as the proprietor of a radio station whose income was derived from the sale of advertising time, he was often placed in a position antithetical to the one he wanted to be in. In asking a businessman to purchase time on his station, he was not conferring a favor—a transaction which would result in power for him—but receiving one. His use of political influence to grant the businessman a favor in return was still only a trading of favors, not a conferring. If he was a very well paid salesman, nonetheless selling, not buying, was what he was doing—with all that that implied in personal relationships. Says George Brown: “Ordering people around—well, you don’t order around people you’re trying to sell something to.” Says Clark: “He wanted people to kiss his ass. He didn’t want to have to kiss people’s asses. And selling [radio] time—you have to kiss people’s asses sometimes. In business you have to. He liked power, and so he was unhappy in business.”

with the waning of the Roosevelt influence, conservatives had consolidated their political power in Texas. If Johnson was ever to run for the Senate, he needed their support, and needed to erase from their minds the impression that he was a New Dealer. In these post-war years, Harry Truman submitted to Congress an impressive new liberal agenda to end the wartime hiatus in social reform: increased Social Security benefits, a higher minimum wage, federal aid to education, prepaid medical care, health insurance, and—in what would, if passed, be the first major civil rights legislation of the century—laws against lynching and against segregation in interstate transportation and laws ensuring the right to vote and establishing a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC). Speaking out as he had never before done in Congress, Lyndon Johnson in 1947 opposed most of Truman’s “Fair Deal.”

One vote in particular helped consolidate the new image he was cultivating. Public resentment at the post-war wave of strikes and long-smoldering conservative anger at the power the New Deal had given to labor unions crystallized in the Labor-Management Relations Act of 1947—the “Taft-Hartley Act”—which curtailed union powers, outraging workers and labor leaders, who called it a “slave labor bill.” Johnson voted with the congressional majority to pass the Act, and, after the President, in a stinging message, had vetoed it, voted with the bloc that successfully overrode the veto the same day it was delivered.

Hollers called his campaign “a crusade against corruption in public office,” and its focus was Johnson’s finances and ethics. Johnson, Hollers charged, had “enriched himself in office,” and had enriched his friends as well, during a time in which other men in the Tenth Congressional District had been off at war. He noted that Johnson’s three senior advisers, Wirtz, Clark and Looney, represented the oil companies and the big private utilities Johnson claimed he was opposing; the name of Brown & Root was raised, and, for the first time, publicly linked with Johnson’s; the Congressman, Hollers said, was “an errand boy for war-rich contractors.” “If the United States Attorney was on the job, Lyndon Johnson would be in the federal penitentiary instead of in the Congress,” Hollers said. “Will Lyndon Johnson explain how the charter for KTBC, owned by Mrs. Johnson, was obtained? Will Lyndon Johnson explain … his mushrooming personal fortune?” Johnson’s vigorous contention that he played no role in the affairs of his wife’s station was not convincing in a small city in which the link between KTBC’s advertising and the Congressman was an open secret among the city’s businessmen. As an Austin journalist was to write: “Never again, after this campaign, was Johnson free from the belief … that he used his public power to get money for himself.”

Newsmen deplored the closely reasoned tone of his speeches, and the lack of emotion in his voice—because Stevenson has no “radio sex appeal,” the State Observer said, “his political future is uncertain in these days when the ether waves rule the political scene”—and politicians agreed. “The trouble with him,” one state Senator said, “is that he insists on talking to a man’s intellect, not his prejudices.”

The Rainey dismissal caused lasting damage to the concept of academic freedom at the state university, and Stevenson’s refusal to intervene in this controversy revealed that he did not adequately grasp that concept. As he had refused to offer platforms when he was running for office, now he would not propose overall legislative programs, fearing he might unduly influence an independent branch of government. In Jefferson’s time, such opposition to government per se—such fierce frontier individualism—might have made Stevenson a real democrat; in the more complicated mid-twentieth century, his reluctance to make use of the powers of his office allowed the continuation of the vacuum in Texas government in which special interest groups—the Texas oilmen, natural gas and sulphur companies, Brown & Root and their subordinate contractors—who had no such reluctance to interfere in government had long exerted undue influence in the legislature.

Under Texas law, beer retailing licenses had to be approved by the County Judge. In Duval County, only one license was approved, for a company owned by the County Judge: George Parr. But this income from beer was not enough for Parr. In the rest of Texas, beer cost twenty cents; in Duval, it cost a quarter; visitors to the Valley who asked why were informed that the extra nickel was for “George.” Parr owned oil wells. But their income was not enough. To obtain more oil rights, he erased clauses from land leases filed in the County Courthouse he controlled. He took kickbacks on road construction contracts—according to some sources, a kickback on every road construction contract awarded in Duval County. In 1932, for example, a contractor’s representative had placed $25,000 in cash “in a little black bag” and had delivered it to him. But kickbacks on contracts were not enough. He formed a construction company, and awarded all the contracts to himself. For failing to report the $25,000 in income he pled guilty to tax evasion, and in 1934 received a suspended two-year sentence. But he went right back to altering oil and gas leases, and in 1936 was forced to serve nine months of that term.

Money was never a factor in the Valley’s support of Stevenson—he treated the jefes with the same indifference and independence that he displayed toward other powerful political figures. (And, of course, as Ernest Boyett, his executive assistant, notes, “Why shouldn’t the Old Man have been” independent of the Valley bosses? To a candidate who carried Texas by hundreds of thousands of votes, the Valley was not a significant factor in the electoral equation.)

Previously, he and his advisers had agreed that attacking Stevenson personally would be a mistake. Because of the respect, indeed, almost reverence, in which the former Governor was held, such attacks had always boomeranged in the past. But now, in desperation, he attacked. Stevenson had said he opposed a Truman plan to provide federal aid to raise teachers’ salaries because of provisions which Stevenson feared would increase federal control of schools. On this stance, popular in Texas, Stevenson could not be criticized, but Johnson used Stevenson’s statement to bring in another issue, so that he could criticize the ex-Governor on that one. “While I was sick at Mayo’s,” Lyndon Johnson said, “a calculating, do-nothing, fence-straddling opponent of mine, who three months ago said he had no platform, got off the fence for the first time to oppose the teacher salary increase. I challenge my calculating opponent to tell Texans tomorrow if he favors withdrawing federal aid from five hundred thousand world-war veterans, men who did not sit at home when Old Glory had to be carried to every corner of the globe.” Two aspects of Johnson’s attack were significant. First, its implication—that Stevenson might be opposed to federal aid for veterans—was totally false. As Johnson was well aware, Stevenson was in favor of such aid, and indeed had already proposed that it be increased. Equally significant were the words in which the attack was couched: “calculating, do-nothing, fence-straddl...

Coke Stevenson’s strongest point was his reputation. Lyndon Johnson had decided his only hope was to destroy it.

So weak were unions in Texas—utterly unable, even in the cities, to mobilize their members—that their support could not help, could only hurt, a candidate. Anti-union sentiment was fierce in rural Texas, which identified unions with labor racketeers, big-city corruption, big-city ethnic groups; a widespread theme in the state’s monolithic press, expressed in 295 editorials during a four-month period in 1948, was that strikes should be abolished because they were part of a Communist conspiracy to overthrow America. When Stevenson learned by telephone of the unexpected endorsement, he was so shocked that, recalls reporter Charles Boatner, who happened to be traveling with Stevenson and Bob Murphey that day, after the former Governor returned to the car, “he just seemingly for ten minutes didn’t say a word, and [then] he said, ‘Well, I’m going to accept it; it will do me less harm to accept it than to fight it.’

Never before had there been a campaign in which the same phrases were drummed into voters’ consciousness so constantly all through June and July. “Secret deal”? Perhaps Coke Stevenson felt he wouldn’t dignify the charge by denying it. But dignity was a luxury in a fight with Lyndon Johnson, a luxury too expensive to afford.

In labor districts he was pro-labor, in anti-labor districts he was anti-labor, and in both districts he was very effective. And when he talked about his opponent, he was just as effective. His listeners’ respect for Coke Stevenson was the main obstacle between him and his dream. It had to be destroyed. And no one could destroy a reputation better than Lyndon Johnson.

“People who we thought would come in for a thousand or two thousand dollars would come in for only a hundred or two hundred,” Boyett recalls. As a result, he says, “we had quite a bit less than we had expected.” Boyett understood why. “Lyndon created the doubt: ‘He’ll vote to repeal that Act.’ It cut the flow down to a dribble. Moreover,” Boyett explains, “it wasn’t just money we lost, but support.” For the men who were no longer supporting Stevenson were the owners and managers of corporations. “In those days, if a popular executive with a company let it be known he was supporting a candidate, a lot of the employees would go along. And now some of the companies we had expected to support us, weren’t.” But the money aspect was crucial in itself. “We didn’t have adequate funds to conduct a campaign.”

IN A FINAL TOUCH of irony, in Washington the presidents of four railroad unions endorsed Lyndon Johnson for Senator. Stevenson said, “This development is no surprise to Texans who are familiar with the real issues in this race … and with the past records of both candidates.” But most Texans did not learn about the endorsement. There were few broadcasts and almost no mailings to drum home to voters that the supposedly anti-labor candidate had been endorsed by labor.1 Nor, of course, were voters or businessmen aware that Robert Oliver, organizing director for the Congress of Industrial Organizations in Texas, was quietly lining up “a number of local (CIO) unions” in Texas cities to support Johnson, or that Welly Hopkins, general counsel of the United Mine Workers (whose president, John L. Lewis, was being assailed by Johnson on his noontime radio broadcasts), was drumming up labor support for Johnson and carrying campaign material back and forth between Corcoran and Rowe in Washington and Wirtz in Texas, or that a major source of funding for Johnson’s “anti-union” campaign was David Dubinsky and other big-city union bosses, that in fact, unions in cities throughout the Northeast were shipping cash south to help the Johnson campaign. In almost every speech now, Johnson was reading the transcript of the press conference in which Stevenson had refused to answer the questions about Taft-Hartley. The fact that Stevenson now had answered was all but drowned out in the flood of Joh...

consistently revealed a pragmatism and a cynicism that had no discernible limits. His morality was the morality of the ballot box, a morality in which nothing matters but victory and any maneuver that leads to victory is justified, a morality that was amorality.

Early in August, 1948, Attorney General Tom Clark’s brother Robert, a Dallas lawyer who represented the men who controlled that time slot, approached Lyndon Johnson with a simple proposal. They would support him—and give him the time slot—if he used it to deliver “Pappy’s Speech” as if it were his own. Of course, Clark explained, they didn’t want him to give the speech just once; they wanted him to give it over and over, day after day, every day until Election Day, just the way Pappy would have done it. Lyndon would not even have to write it, they said. Pappy’s old speechwriters would write it. All Johnson would have to do was read it, over and over, as evidence of his good faith, as public proof that he truly subscribed to Pappy’s philosophy, which was, of course, their philosophy.

“I don’t know about that,” Johnson said. “Sometimes politics asks too much.” For what Busby describes as “an extended period of time,” the candidate “was going through just an intense personal debate with himself.” He paced back and forth, stopping every so often and staring at the ceiling, absent-mindedly jingling the change in his pocket—as if unable to decide whether or not to give the speech. He gave Busby some of the background. He named the men who were involved. He never said exactly what they had done. They had bought the time. They had put up the money. He said some of the largest employers in Texas had done this. Had defected from Coke and said if he would do these speeches that they would not only pay for it but that they would go to work with their people and get a turnout. All the arrangements had been made, he said; in fact, one of Carr Collins’ men was downstairs to handle the broadcast. But, repeating that “Sometimes politics asks too much” of a man, he also said, several times, “I’m going to call Bob Clark and tell him to forget it.” That call was not made. Instead, there followed what Busby calls “the rationalizing.”

With the campaign roaring to a climax and newspapers focusing on it, news coverage of the candidates in newspapers was now fairly equal; but newspaper advertising was overwhelmingly Johnson’s—and in many weekly newspapers, this space was as influential with readers as the articles, because the newspapers did not differentiate much between the two, and many unsophisticated readers couldn’t tell the difference, anyway. As for direct mailings, Stevenson had few if any. Rural mailboxes were filled daily not only with the Johnson Journal but with mailing after mailing of letters and postcards.

“We were absolutely certain that they were wiretapping our headquarters in the Driskill.”

“Occasionally we would have a telephone operator—on her own”—listen in and tell us what was being said. “In those days, that was what happened: operators would listen in on the switchboard.”

Was there in fact someone spying in Stevenson’s headquarters? “I don’t remember,” Connally replied.

“Campaigning was no good any more,” Ed Clark says. “We had to pick up some votes.” Votes in the numbers needed couldn’t be picked up by conventional methods, he says. “We needed blocs. Ethnic groups—that was the place to go.… That meant going into the Mexican country: the Rio Grande River, the border.…”

But no one was more skilled in the purchasing of votes in San Antonio than Lyndon Johnson himself, and he wanted another organization out working for him in San Antonio on the second Election Day as well, an organization that had never worked for him in the past: that of the city’s feared Sheriff, Owen Kilday. “Dan Quill was a smart little operator,” John Connally says, “but the man with the muscle in San Antonio was Owen Kilday.” The Kilday organization bore a very high price tag. “That was a sophisticated organization,” Connally recalls. Election Day work was handled by Kilday’s numerous deputy sheriffs. They would be responsible for hiring cars and drivers to round up Mexican-Americans and get them to the polls—and to make sure they voted correctly—and, Connally says, “They had a standard rate for a car and a driver, and they were paid handsomely”: $250 for some deputies, $500 for others. “It takes a hell of a lot of money for an organization like that.”

Johnson had been scheduled to vote in Johnson City on Election Day and then go to his Austin headquarters, but instead he spent the day—his third that week—in San Antonio. He was “riding the polls” on the West Side—on that West Side where “they’d just stuff the ballots in there,” on that West Side where, after polls closed, some poll watchers were paid to leave, and doors were locked, and levers were pulled on voting machines.

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.

Stevenson and his advisers understood at once the significance not only of the fact that Parr was announcing that new votes would be coming in from the Valley, but of the fact that now, more than twelve hours after the polls had closed, these votes had not yet been counted, so that no one could tell how many each candidate had received. In later years, Johnson aides would argue that such a late finding of votes in the Valley was customary in Texas politics, but it wasn’t.

Two things now motivated Coke Stevenson. One was personal: his injured vanity and pride, and the simple code by which he lived, the Code of the West. When someone stole something from you, you got it back—or at least brought the thief to justice. The other went beyond the personal. It was his belief, the belief so deep it was “almost like religion to him,” in democracy and the law. If this could happen, if an election could so blatantly be stolen, neither democracy nor law could prevail.

Then Stevenson’s lawyers turned to the 201 names listed after Soliz on the poll list of voters—200 of whom, the tally sheet said, had voted for Lyndon Johnson. Brownlee had taken nine of these names down during his brief look at the poll list, and the young lawyers had jotted down additional names. They asked each of these people if they had voted for Lyndon Johnson. No, they replied, they had not; they had not, they said, voted for anyone. Without exception, the voters questioned said they had not been to the polls at all on Election Day. For one of these persons, twenty-one-year-old Hector Cerda, a college student, voting in Jim Wells County would have been difficult. He hadn’t been in Jim Wells County that day, he explained; he had spent the day in the town of Pharr, 109 miles away, and had not returned until late that night, long after the polls had closed. For three other persons whose names were listed as voting, voting would have been even more difficult. They had been dead for some years.

For Harry Truman, far behind Thomas Dewey in the polls, it was considered imperative to keep Texas from deserting his party; the delegates chosen in May who didn’t support him had to be ousted at this convention. The fight to do so would hinge on the ability of the “Loyalist” (in general, liberal) Truman Democrats to unseat the legally elected (by, in some cases, overwhelming margins) delegations from the “big” counties—Harris, Dallas and Tarrant—on the convention floor, a fight which was going to be very close.

feelings about the senatorial campaign were submerged in feelings about the presidential race. And Johnson told his men to take advantage of those feelings. They made an offer to the “Loyalist” leaders: the delegates with whom he would have influence at the convention—most notably the delegations from Austin, San Antonio and the Valley—would vote to unseat the States Rights delegations and vote to seat Loyalist delegations in their place. They would also vote for the Loyalist candidates for the new State Executive Committee which would be elected at the end of the convention and for Loyalist candidates to all other convention posts. In return, Johnson asked for only one thing. It was couched in legal terms: his men, headed by Wirtz (Connally was doing much of the legwork), were ostensibly asking for certification of the senatorial vote as it had been sent in by the individual counties, with no changes, and they claimed that this was the course prescribed by law.

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.

Opening the arguments for Johnson, John Cofer of Houston, one of the most renowned of the stem-winding, arm-waving school of courthouse lawyers, roared, “I believe in justice and right.” During his arguments—together with those of Charles Francis of Brown & Root and Ed Lloyd of the Duchy of Duval—it became apparent, however, that their substance was rather that justice and right had no relevance to the work of the Executive Committee. Determining the legality of ballots, Johnson’s lawyers said, in an argument which weighed heavily with many committee members, was the function of the state’s District Courts; it was, in fact, Francis said, “contrary to law” for the committee to determine legality: under state law, the committee’s sole function was to add up the voting totals sent in by the individual counties.

Before Fortas arrived, Johnson’s roomful of attorneys had been trying to decide what was the strongest case they could present to a Circuit Court judge. Fortas was suggesting they present to that judge not the strongest case, but the weakest. Under his plan, the object was not to try to win in Circuit Court, but to lose—fast.