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

by Robert A. Caro

“The trouble with him,” one state Senator said, “is that he insists on talking to a man’s intellect, not his prejudices.”

Stevenson polled 797,000. (That figure was 100,000 more than was polled in that same election by the still immensely popular O’Daniel, who, with an enlarged band, toured the state in a new campaign vehicle—a white bus topped with a papier-mâché dome of the Capitol.)

because Stevenson had long suffered for the hardships he had seen them undergo—now, as Governor, not only did he press a reluctant Legislature to pass a resolution calling for Mexican immigrants to be “entitled to full and equal accommodations”

Texas Good Neighbor Commission,

almost no Negroes in the Hill Country, and Stevenson accepted all the Southern stereotypes about that race.

Taking his place without removing his hat or his suit jacket (or his pipe from his mouth), he grabbed the big saw, nodded to signal that he was ready—and won.

Governor, he was once snowed in in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado for two weeks, and emerged leading two horses, each with a big buck slung over its shoulders;

Brown had glimpsed the wealth that could come to his company through the efforts of a Senator, rather than a mere Representative. In 1947, the pledge was renewed again; if Lyndon wanted to run, the money would be there—as much as was needed.

in 1941, he had bought votes on his own behalf, purchasing them wholesale instead of retail by arranging for the distribution of generous lump sums of cash to Mexican-American leaders

Opposition poll watchers and election judges at some West Side precincts might be persuaded—the

might be as high as fifty for a judge—to leave the polling place after the polls closed.

In other precincts, matters were managed less crudely: the voters were told whom to vote for, but were allowed to mark their own ballots. (Of course, the guards accompanied them into the voting cubbyholes to guarantee that the instructions were followed.)

Never before had there been a campaign in which the same phrases were drummed into voters’ consciousness so constantly all through June and July.

Once Johnson found an issue, true or untrue, that “touched,” he hammered it—until people started to believe it. He

Johnson leaned out of the helicopter and, in the words of one reporter, “whipped his Stetson on the plane’s flanks as though it were a bronco” that he was urging on to greater speed.

I took a book to read … a whodunit … and read the same sentence on page thirteen every night.

Johnson seemed to think he could make Texans—at least rural Texans—swallow even so ridiculous a charge if it was repeated often enough.

“The lead in the runoff always wins”;

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.

George Huntress, received a telephone call from “the Johnson camp … inquiring into the possibility of additional votes.” Huntress reminded “the person inquiring” that San Antonio now used voting machines, and that the results had been recorded.

“In the closest major race in the state’s long political history,” the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported, “Lyndon Johnson rode into the lead of the U.S. Senate race Sunday night on a sudden tide of votes from Duval County.” (No newspaper commented on a remarkable aspect of the Duval vote. Since another two votes would later be found there for Johnson, making Duval’s final vote 4,622 to 40, 4,662 persons thus voted in a county in which only 4,679 poll tax receipts had been issued—the 99.6 percent turnout was an astonishing display of civic responsibility.)

Johnson worked the telephone in his den, alternately sprawled, half reclining, on the day-bed and pacing back and forth across the little room, telephone in hand, lighting one cigarette from the end of another, the skin on his gaunt face drawing tighter and tighter, the circles under his eyes growing darker and darker—a

“A sound principle of justice,” he said, is “that there must never arise a wrong for which there is not a tribunal wherein there is a remedy. That is in fact the spirit of equity that has come down to us through the ages.”

In the opinion of many men in both camps, the headlines were an accurate summary of the situation. Recalls Ernest Boyett: “When Davidson handed down his ruling, we thought we had won.”