The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  In that 1956 election, San Antonio (which used voting machines) supported the Republican ticket by a margin of 12,000 votes. In 1960, it supported the Democratic ticket by a margin of 19,000 votes. “This is a reversal of 31,000,” former San Antonio Congressman Paul Kilday wrote Johnson. “We are quite proud of the results.” The reversal was due largely to results from the West Side, which was run, with an iron hand, by Kilday’s brother, Sheriff Owen Kilday. The West Side went for Kennedy-Johnson by a margin of 17,017 to 2,982, just over 14,000 votes. In one precinct (or “box”) in that area, which had given Eisenhower a substantial majority in 1956, sentiment had evidently changed. Kennedy won, 1,324 to 125. Other West Side boxes recorded margins for Kennedy of 880 to 55 and 799 to 48.1

  In the Valley border counties, the results were even more dramatic. For decades, as I wrote in Means of Ascent, the results reported from the “ethnic” towns

  had little to do with the preferences of the Mexican-Americans. The overwhelming majority of their votes had been cast at the orders of the Anglo-Saxon border dictators called patrones or jefes, orders often enforced by armed pistoleros who herded Mexican-Americans to the polls, told them how to vote, and then accompanied them into the voting cubbyholes to make sure the instructions were followed—if indeed the votes had been actually “cast” at all; in some of the Mexican-American areas, the local border dictators, in Texas political parlance, didn’t “vote ’em,” but rather just “counted ’em.” In those areas, most of the voters didn’t even go to the polls: the jefes’ men would, as one observer put it, simply “go around to the Mexicans’ homes. Get the numbers of their [poll tax] receipts. Tell them not to go to the polls. Just write in a hundred numbers, and cast the hundred votes yourself,” or, after the polls closed, would simply take the tally sheets and add to the recorded total whatever number was needed to give their favored candidate the margin he desired. “You get down on the border, and it didn’t matter how people [the Mexican-Americans] felt,” Ed Clark would explain. “The leaders did it all. They could vote ’em or count ’em, either one.”

  Between 1948 and 1960, little had changed. In the latter election as in the former, George Parr counted them for Lyndon Johnson. The first sign was the pace of the counting. By the evening of election day, several hours after polls had closed, veteran reporters had noticed what one called the “slow-motion count of votes” in Duval—they knew what that meant; that the Duke was holding back a final tally until he saw whether the race was close, so that if it was, he could give his allies the votes they needed. At midnight, only one of Duval’s ten precincts had reported a final tally. Then, finally, came the count itself. The Duke controlled not only Duval County but Starr County as well as a personal fiefdom. Duval voted for Kennedy-Johnson by a margin of 3,803 to 808, Starr by 4,051 to 284. In a petition for a recount filed with the state canvassing board three days after the election, Republicans charged that pistols were carried by “[election] judges and others in Duval County so that voters were intimidated and coerced.”

  Then there was Jim Wells County, or to be precise, the county’s Precinct Thirteen: “Box 13,” the precinct, already legendary in Texas political history, that in 1948 had provided the decisive margin for Lyndon Johnson by giving him two hundred new votes—the votes that were cast in alphabetical order and all in the same handwriting six days after the polls had closed. The Mexican-American reform movement had taken control of most of Jim Wells from Parr, but not the thirteenth precinct, the poorest Mexican district in the county seat of Alice. In 1960, that box gave Lyndon Johnson’s ticket a margin of 1,144 to 45, or twenty-five to one, so the ticket came out of the heart of the Duke’s Rio Grande domain with more than 88 percent of the vote—and a plurality of more than 7,800 votes.

  The results were almost as lopsided in the counties controlled by Parr’s allies, who followed his lead. In Webb County, it was 10,059 to 1,802, more than five to one; in Jim Hogg County, 1,255 to 244, more than five to one; in Brooks, 1,934 to 540, almost four to one. The nine counties controlled by Parr and his allies reported a total of 37,063 votes to the Texas Election Bureau. Almost 30,000 of them—29,377, or 79 percent—were for Kennedy-Johnson.2 The Democratic ticket therefore came out of those counties with a plurality of 21,691.

  “One charge of vote-buying and voter-herding,” Earl Mazo reported in the New York Herald Tribune, “involves some Democratic leaders who are said to have purchased poll tax certificates in blocks of 300 to 3,000 at $1.75 for each certificate for use in precincts near the Mexican border,” precincts which, he noted, “produced sizable Democratic majorities.” There was, the GOP alleged, no secrecy in voting in these areas: in Precinct 8 of Benavides, in Duval County, a “local machine” supervisor kept a list of persons “voting against the machine.” The Valley patrones who had given Johnson huge majorities in his 1941 and 1948 Senate races (and who would have done so in his 1954 race had they been needed) were still for Johnson, Clark and Connally explain. The Valley was still “strictly L.B.J. country,” Duval County political operative O. P. Carrillo was to say. Catholicism was not the key, Connally says: “the basic core of the Johnson adherents in the Hispanic community”—he meant Parr and his allies—“were all still there [in 1960] and still loyal to him.” When Clark was asked about the role of Catholicism and the “Viva Kennedy” organizations in the vote in Parr’s Valley domain, he gave a slight smile, shook his head no and said that rather, “Our old friends stood by us.”

  Most important, George Parr had stood by Lyndon Johnson, and the reason, says Clark, was the Supreme Court decision. “He were grateful for the reversal,” Clark was to say in his East Texas patois.

  In the aftermath of Lyndon Johnson’s 1948 election victory, an investigation had been conducted by federal Masters in Chancery, appointed by a federal judge. The Chancery hearings were cut short by an order from United States Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black after arguments were made before him by Abe Fortas; enough witnesses had testified so that one of the Masters, the only one to comment, was to conclude, “I think Lyndon was put in the United States Senate with a stolen election.” No investigation was ever made of the 1960 results. The Republican petition, alleging “numerous and widespread frauds,” was brought before the three-man state canvassing board, whose members were Governor Price Daniel, Attorney General Will Wilson and the board’s chairman, Secretary of State Zollie Steakly—three of Johnson’s most active supporters in the campaign (Daniel and Wilson had been on the same ballot with him). Steakly said Texas law gave the Board no authority to investigate the returns, and hearings were simply delayed until after December 19, when the national Electoral College, using the totals furnished to them by the various states, the Texas total by the canvassing board, certified the overall vote. The truth of the Republican allegations was never examined in the depth necessary to ascertain their validity (as was also the case in Dick Daley’s Illinois, where the results were even closer and where widespread fraud was also alleged).

  The attention focused on fraud in the 1960 presidential campaign has during the intervening half century centered on Illinois, not Texas. The Republican allegations, not only about voting in the Valley but about the invalidating of ballots under the new state law, have never been examined in the depth necessary to ascertain their validity, much less to determine how many votes were affected if indeed the allegations were true. Nor have the many other factors—from demographic shifts in the state’s population to the scene in the Adolphus Hotel—ever been examined in the necessary depth. Today, the passage of time has made it difficult—impossible, really—to ascertain, in trying to assess the election results in Texas, the weight that should be assigned, in an equation that contains so many factors, to the vote from the “ethnic bloc.” Paul Kilday wrote of the 31,000-vote “reversal” in San Antonio, which of course included the 14,000-vote plurality the Kilday machine produced in that city’s West Side. It would be misleading to speak of a “reversal” in the Valley, since George Parr and his
allies could simply produce whatever result they wanted there. But Parr had demonstrated before that when he became angry at what he construed to be an inadequate lack of allegiance by some public official, he would retaliate in the next election by throwing the Valley’s bloc vote to the official’s opponent. How he might have reacted had Lyndon Johnson not assisted with his court case can be today, long after his death, a matter only for speculation, since, so far as the author can determine, no historian or journalist raised the matter with him before his death. But the point is moot in any event: Johnson produced the legal help, and Parr produced the votes—the 21,000 plurality. Thirty-one thousand and 21,000—in an election that was decided by 46,000 votes, the weight of those votes could hardly have been a minor factor. Whatever the explanation for the results from the “ethnic bloc” in Texas, John Kennedy had selected Lyndon Johnson in part to take back Texas for the Democratic presidential ticket, and Johnson had done it.

  HE HAD TAKEN back the South, too.

  “Republicans were stunned by their poor showing in Dixie,” Evans and Novak were to write. Before Johnson was nominated, Republican strategists had been confident—in a confidence bolstered by poll results—that Nixon would hold all five of the former Confederate states that Eisenhower had carried in 1956—Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee and Virginia—and would pick up the two Carolinas as well, for a total of seven. In the event, it was Kennedy who carried seven; Nixon won only three southern states: Florida, Tennessee and Virginia. (Mississippi voted for a slate of independent electors.) Texas and Louisiana were brought back into the Democratic column, and both Carolinas stayed there—by very narrow margins. There were southwestern and border states in which Johnson’s presence on the ticket may have been crucial—New Mexico’s Clinton Anderson was to say flatly that without Johnson that state would have gone Republican; and in Missouri, as U.S. News & World Report reported, Johnson “is given much of the credit” for the narrow Democratic victory, but it is not necessary to go beyond the South in showing his impact on the result. Together, the Carolinas had 22 electoral votes, Louisiana 10, and of course there were Texas’ 24—a total of 56 votes. The electoral vote by which Kennedy defeated Nixon was 303 to 219. Had those four states gone Republican, Kennedy would have had 247 electoral votes—and Nixon would have had 275.

  On a national scale, of course, other factors were more significant in the 1960 campaign: Kennedy’s triumph over Nixon in the televised debates; his courageous speech before the ministers in Houston; the telephone call he made to Martin Luther King’s wife when the minister was arrested in Atlanta; the style, the elegance, the wit, the charisma of the handsome, debonair candidate that brought larger and larger, and more and more frenzied, crowds out to greet him in the cities of the Northeast. Despite all these factors, however, Kennedy might not have been elected President without Johnson. “John F. Kennedy could not have been elected President without the South,” Evans and Novak were to conclude. “Could he have carried enough southern states to win” without Johnson on the ticket? “Probably not.” “The key to the election had been in the South,” said U.S. News & World Report. “And this was the land of Lyndon Johnson. It had backed him for the presidency and he had been put on the Kennedy ticket to hold it for the Democrats. Mr. Johnson did the job. He campaigned and cajoled and persuaded and wound up by getting almost all of the top-level Democrats in the South out fighting for the ticket.” In Kennedy’s suite at the Biltmore Hotel the morning after his nomination, the southern governors had told him, one after the other, that the only way to hold their states was to put Johnson on the ticket. Kennedy had put him on—and the states had been held. Eighty-one of the South’s 128 electoral votes had gone to Kennedy-Johnson; Nixon had received only 33 (14 went to Mississippi’s independent slate).

  As the decades have rolled by since that election, the picture of the Kennedy campaign etched at the time by the journalists traveling with it and by the campaign’s first—and most famous—chronicler, Theodore H. White, became a staple of American political legend. Lyndon Johnson was only peripherally a part of that legend. In the 173 pages in The Making of the President 1960 that White devoted to the post-convention campaign, the Adolphus incident is mentioned only in a phrase, as was Johnson’s role in the South as a whole; his name appears in those pages exactly seven times, always as a brief mention. In a vivid portrait of efficiency and sophistication, of Ivy League charm and a group of brilliant young men transforming American politics, what room remained for a tall, thick, bellowing figure with his arms flailing above his head, shouting, “What has Dick Nixon ever done for Culpepper?,” for the endless blaring repetition of “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” for the “Cornpone Special”? In the years since White’s book established the terms of reference by which the 1960 campaign is considered, there has been scant reference to the scene at the Adolphus. Even in discussions of possible fraud in the election, and of how it might have changed the overall result, it had been Illinois on which most of the focus has remained, not those border counties down on the Rio Grande. But Johnson should have been a part of the chronicles, as one of Kennedy’s intimates, Ted Sorensen—the only one, really, to give Johnson more than passing mention—acknowledges. Noting that Kennedy’s margin of victory in Texas had been 46,000, and that a switch in votes by 23,000 voters would therefore have turned the tide, Sorensen wrote that “The maltreatment to which he [Johnson] and his wife were subjected by a shoving and booing crowd of disorderly Republican fanatics in Dallas undoubtedly helped switch more than the 23,000 …. And had it not been for the return of Texas and Louisiana to the Democratic column … and for the Carolinas staying Democratic against a predicted Republican victory, Nixon would have won the election.” Kennedy had “gambled” on Lyndon Johnson, Sorensen wrote. “That gamble paid off.” Jack Kennedy himself was to say to Ken O’Donnell in 1962: “You have to admit I was right. We couldn’t have won without him.”

  On election night, from Austin, Johnson made a call to Jack Kennedy. “I am carrying Texas,” he said. “I hear you are losing Ohio, and we are doing fine in Pennsylvania.” Kennedy turned away from the phone with a smile. “We?” It was he who was going to be President. Lyndon Johnson was going to be Vice President.

  *

  1 The vote for Bexar County as a whole was 75,298 for the Democratic ticket, 63,931 for the Republican.

  2 For the nine counties—Starr, Duval, Webb, Jim Hogg, Jim Wells, Brooks, Maverick, La Salle and Zapata—the major-party totals were 37,063 votes, of which Kennedy-Johnson received 29,377, or 79.3 percent, and Nixon-Lodge received 7,686, or 20.7 percent. In contrast to the 21,691 plurality, in 1956 these counties had given a plurality of only 7,432 votes to the Democratic ticket.

  Part II

  “RUFUS

  CORNPONE”

  6

  “Power Is Where Power Goes”

  “POWER IS WHERE POWER GOES”: the most significant factor in any equation that adds up to political power, Lyndon Johnson had assured his allies, is the individual, not the office; for a man with a gift for acquiring power, whatever office he held would become powerful—because of what he would make out of it.

  Johnson felt he had that gift—“I do understand power, whatever else may be said about me,” he had once told an aide. “I know where to look for it, and how to use it”—and nothing in his career, at least nothing in his career before he began running for the presidency, made that assessment seem immodest. At every stage in his life, from college onward, he had demonstrated not only that he possessed the gift, but that he possessed it in a particularly rare and creative form: the ability to look at an organization that had little or no political power, to perceive in it political potentialities that no one else had ever seen, to acquire a position in the organization, and then to transform the organization into a political force, so that the office he held, and he, as its holder, became powerful. At every stage, the gift had been maximized by the ruthlessness with which he grabbed for the power he perceived
and with which he wielded the power once he had it, but nothing could diminish the brilliance of the perception.

  At college—a sleepy teachers college deep in the Texas Hill Country—the organization was a small social club, the “White Stars.” Becoming its leader, he turned it into a political organization, disciplined and secret, brought it into campus politics—“he created campus politics, really”; previously, “no one even cared” about campus elections—and through means that included a stolen election and the use against a young woman student of what his lieutenants called “blackmail,” made himself, an extremely unpopular young man on College Hill, the student with the most influence there. Then he persuaded the college president to give him a say over which students would get campus jobs. At this “poor boys’ school” the choice was often stark: get a teaching diploma or live out a life of drudgery on your family’s lonely farm or ranch. The wages from a campus job were often a student’s only hope of paying his tuition. “Twenty cents an hour and you either went to school or you didn’t,” one says. “And Lyndon would say [who would] get that job.”