Working

by Robert A. Caro

of that relationship in my mind, and not enough detail to make my readers see it.

And I had thought of a device that I hoped might elicit from Sam Houston the true picture of that relationship—the details of it—that I needed; that might put him back, in his mind, into his childhood, that might make his memory of the relationship become as clear to him as possible.

I persuaded the National Park Service to allow Sam Houston and me to go into the Johnson Boyhood Home in Johnson City, which had been faithfully re-created to look as it had when Lyndon was growing up in it, after it had officially closed for the day.

And one evening, when it was empty, with the tourists and guides all gone, I took Sam Houston Johnson into the h...

“You’re just not college material, are you, goddammit? You’re

just a failure, Lyndon, and you’re always going to be a failure…” and Lyndon would shout back, “What are you? You’re a bus inspector, that’s what you are!…” “ ‘Sam!, Sam!,’ Mother would say…‘Lyndon!, Lyndon!’ ”

“Now, Sam Houston, I want you to tell me again all those wonderful stories about Lyndon when you both were boys, the stories you told me before—just tell me them again with more details.”

There was a long pause. I can still see the scene—see the little, stunted, crippled man sitting at the long plank table, see the shadows in the room, see myself, not wanting to move lest I break the spell, sitting there with my notebook against the wall saying, “Tell me those wonderful stories again.” “I can’t,” Sam Houston said. “Why not?” I asked. “Because they never happened.”

“No one really understood what happened when Lyndon went to California”—and related, incident after

incident, anecdotes from Lyndon Johnson’s youth, some of which I had heard before, in shorter, incomplete, and softened versions but which I heard in new, more complete versions now; others that had never been mentioned to me, or, I felt, to anyone else.

The voice went on. By the time, a long time later, that it stopped, I had a different picture of Lyndon Johnson’s youth—that terrible youth, that character-hardening youth—than I, or history, had had before. And now, when I went back to the men and women who had been involved in the incidents, and, armed with the details Sam Houston had given ...

A crucial moment in Lyndon Johnson’s career was the 1948 election for a United States senator from Texas, which Johnson apparently had lost to former governor Coke Stevenson until, six days after the balloting, Precinct 13—“Box 13”—in Jim Wells County, one of the border counties ruled by Duval County’s George Parr, the notorious “Duke of Duval,” suddenly reported 202 new votes, 200 of them for Johnson, votes which gave him the victory by eighty-seven votes out of almost a million that

had been cast. Every Johnson biography had included some pages on the election, and on the ensuing controversy over whether he had stolen it, but all had treated it somewhat offhandedly and had made some version of the statement: no one will ever know if it was really stolen. Most of these books treated the election as sort of a Texas-size joke, with stealing by both sides.

I was supposed to be examining the political system in America, and there had been a lot of stolen elections in American political history; it wouldn’t be exaggerating much, in fact, to say that the stealing of elections was an integral part of that history; I wanted to examine, to dissect, a stolen election in detail.

In my defense: while I am aware that there is no Truth, no objective truth, no single truth, no truth simple or unsimple, either; no verity, eternal or otherwise; no Truth about anything, there are Facts, objective facts, discernible and verifiable. And the more facts you accumulate, the closer you come to whatever truth there is.

It took no prompting to persuade Salas, whose eyes behind the glasses were keen and who was quite clear-witted, to talk about the 1948 election, and he confirmed many of the surmises that had been hinted at for decades about what had happened at Box 13. His job had been to pull the ballots—paper ballots—out of the ballot box and call out the name written on them to the other election judges,

who were tabulating the vote, and he told me, not at all regretful but grinning, pleased with himself: “If they were not for Johnson, I make them for Johnson.” In case I had missed the point, he returned to it a few minutes later, saying, “Any vote for Stevenson I counted for Johnson.” A key point in the investigation in the federal court was whether or not Salas had, on election night, reported Johnson’s total in the box as 765 to a journalist named Cliff Dubose, and then, six days after the election, had added the 200 additional votes to Johnson’s total when he was reporting the results to the Texas Election Commission. Johnson’s opponents charged that the number that had been tabulated on election night, the number obtained by Salas having made them for Johnson, whether or not that was what the voter had intended, had been later raised from 765 to 965 by simply adding a loop to the 7 to change it into a 9. Salas had denied under oath that he had ever given the 765 number to Dubose. Now I asked him if he had, in fact, done that. Yes, he said, he had: on election night “I told Cliff 765.” But then, as I continued asking questions, he said, “I have written it all down.” He stood up and walked over to a trunk. Bending over stiffly, he opened it and pulled out a manuscript.

was a book he had written, ninety-four pages long. Its t...

But most of all what leapt out were the details of the election night; as I read I realized that he was confirming the truth of everything other officials had said on the stand—things that he had, in 1948, denied, and that, because of his denial, had remained shrouded in uncertainty for the almost four decades since; that his manuscript answered all the questions that had been unanswered: why, for example, during that vote-altering done six days after the election, in addition to the two hundred extra votes for Johnson, Stevenson had been given two extra votes: he himself had not wanted to write down the names of the two hundred additional voters, Salas explained in the manuscript; “I did not want them in my handwriting,” and instead had had one of his deputy election judges, Ignacio (Nachito) Escobar, do it, and “Nachito was a jolly man, full of jokes, he said, let us give this poor man [Stevenson] a pilón [gift].” As I leafed through the manuscript, I realized that Salas’ confession—for that was what it was: a confession—solved all the mysteries that for so long had surrounded the election. “The people have a good reason not to believe what I wrote,” he said in his manuscript. “The reason is that I lied under oath.”

With my heart in my throat, I asked Mr. Salas if I could make a copy of the manuscript. He said I could, reiterating that he wanted history to know the truth. “Everyone is dead except me, Robert. And I’m not going to live long. But Box 13 is history. No one can erase that.” He said there was a copying machine in a store not far away. We walked over and stood by the machine as, one by one, the pages slid out.

But again and again, a student who was telling them to me would say he or she didn’t know all the details. They would say that there was one student who did, who had worked closely with—had schemed with—Lyndon Johnson in college. His name was Vernon Whiteside.

Since the centerpiece of my third volume, a book about Lyndon Johnson as Senate Majority Leader, was going to be his monumental achievement in ramming through that body, in 1957, a bill to make it easier for black Americans to vote, the first civil rights bill to be passed in eighty-two years, I wanted to briefly show in the opening pages of the book—to make the reader understand and feel right at the beginning—how hard it had been for a black person to register to vote, let alone to actually cast a ballot, in the South before 1957: what were the obstacles facing African-Americans wanting to exercise this basic right of citizenship, the obstacles that Lyndon Johnson was going to fight to remove.

There was no shortage of dramatic testimony in the transcript of those hearings, but I finally decided to focus on that of thirty-eight-year-old Margaret Frost of the town of Eufala, in Alabama’s Barbour County. I think the element of Mrs. Frost’s story that got to me and made me want to tell it was that she had tried to register—had had a hearing before the three members of the Barbour County Board of Registrars, in January of 1957—and had been humiliated by them, and yet had tried again. The questions Mrs. Frost had been asked at that January hearing had been difficult, but she felt she had answered them all correctly. The board’s chairman, William “Beel” Stokes, had rejected her application to register, however, telling her she had missed one—and had refused to tell her which one it was, saying only, “You all go home and study a little more.” And despite the humiliation, Mrs. Frost had tried again, rehearsing, over and over, answers to