Means of Ascent

by Robert A. Caro

  George Parr’s control extended into Brooks and Jim Hogg counties, and into four other counties, through alliances with other, less well known, petty despots who ruled along the Rio Grande—Judge Manuel Bravo of Zapata County; Judge Manuel Raymond of Webb (a figure, one chronicler wrote, so secretive that “little is known of him except rumor,” who ruled Laredo “with an iron hand”); Sheriff Chub Pool of La Salle; and the “Guerra boys,” four brothers who, at Parr’s sufferance, ran Starr County. Until recently, Parr’s control had extended over Jim Wells County, which adjoined Duval, but the young Mexicans who had gone off to war came back more sophisticated, more independent, less willing to follow slavishly “George B’s” orders; in 1948, a reform movement was contesting twelve of Jim Wells’ thirteen precincts. The thirteenth precinct—“Box 13”—was the poorest Mexican district in Alice, the Jim Wells county seat, and in that precinct order was maintained by Parr’s enforcer in Jim Wells County, Luis Salas, a burly six-foot-one, 210-pound native of Durango who had fled Mexico after fatally wounding a man in a barroom brawl. Salas, known as “Indio” because of his swarthy appearance, was feared for his savage temper and immense physical strength. Once, during a vicious fistfight he had with the owner of a restaurant in Alice, the owner’s wife screamed at her husband, “Stop! Don’t you know who you are fighting? He is the man they call the ‘Indio.’ ” (The owner didn’t take her advice: Salas beat him senseless and, while he was lying on the floor, picked up a barstool and systematically wrecked the restaurant; when the police chief arrived, and the owner’s wife asked him, Aren’t you going to arrest him?, the chief replied, “No, lady, you better thank the Lord that Luis did not kill your husband.”)

  Parr appealed to Salas’ smoldering sense of racial injustice—Salas never forgot the shock with which, when he reached the United States, he saw his first “Mexicans Not Served Here” sign; “He [Parr] used to tell me, ‘Look, Indio, all these gringos that come to me for help, I make them pay for their ambitions, they have to crawl.…”If they were in a room with Anglos, Parr would speak to him in Spanish, calling them “cabrones” (cuckolds). Parr also appealed to Salas’ sense of machismo—Parr applauded the “guts” with which he followed his orders—and to Salas’ need for status: Parr gave him badges (as a city policeman in Alice, a deputy sheriff in Duval, Jim Wells and Nueces counties) to legitimize his brutality and allow him to use it enforcing his patron’s law; a car—a new black Ford; even a chauffeur to drive him around. And he gave him money—more money than Salas had ever seen: hardly had they met when Parr handed him ten hundred-dollar bills, saying with a lordly indifference which Salas admired: “Spend this money among our voters, and if you need more, just come to San Diego.” Says Salas: “Through my hands, every election year, passed thousands of dollars.… Every election year, we had to buy poll tax receipts—just for only that thing, took a great amount of money, also on Election Day, pay for the autos, pay for election judges, pay for clerks, etc., etc.…” Between elections, too, “I always had plenty of money to spend. People asking for money account they had sick people, or need to go to the hospital—we never said no, that was George’s orders, that was what made him famous and powerful. George told me: ‘Don’t be afraid to spend money; it does not come from my pockets, comes from candidates.’ … I spent money the way George told me: I go into a saloon, throw at them a ten-dollar bill. ‘The drinks are on.…’ Always had plenty of money to spend.” In return, Parr’s fearsome “Indian,” who carried a big revolver on his hip, destroyed the businesses of men who tried to remain independent in politics (“ ‘Indio, I want his place closed. Close his place, burn the shack or eliminate him.’ … [The owner] made a movement to reach something behind the bar, I gave him no chance, I threw two bullets in his direction, and he went out in a hurry [through] the back door.…”), taunted Parr’s opponents into fistfights (“Of course I was always the winner due to my physical strength.… My political enemies, I know they were scared of me”), and made sure that Jim Wells County (and especially Precinct 13, in Alice) voted the way Parr wanted. “In all these years, George told me to give our candidates 80 percent of the total votes, regardless if the people voted against us.” There was little trouble about doing this. “I had control of most of the Mexican-Americans in the county, they voted the way I tell them to vote.” And if occasionally less than 80 percent of the voters voted for Parr’s candidates, that did not matter; Parr’s candidate would receive 80 percent of the vote anyway, for Salas, as the presiding election judge in Box 13, was the official who “counted” the ballots.

  Salas says that he was “the right hand of George B. Parr in Jim Wells County” for “ten years of violence, crime and killings due to the ambition of crooked politicians.” And he was very proud to be Parr’s right hand. He worshipped Parr—“he did not give a damn for nothing”—and was proud of his patrón’s power (“George’s office at San Diego always was crowded, especially in election year.… He stood there like a king”) and of his friendship: “I had the confidence of such a great man.… As long as I live, I will 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.”

  Money had purchased Parr—had purchased the entire Valley, in fact—for Lyndon Johnson before, in 1941. The purchase had not been cheap, for Pappy O’Daniel had paid high for the Valley in each of his previous campaigns: just the year before, when O’Daniel had been running for Governor, he had received 95 percent of the Valley’s vote. Negotiating the price for Johnson, however, was Alvin Wirtz, and Wirtz had a long-time business relationship with the Parrs. He had personally bargained with old Archie, with whom he had served in the State Senate, for the Parr-controlled votes in Corpus Christi during a 1928 attempt to unseat Congressman Harry Wurzbach. (After that election, Wurzbach charged widespread election fraud—and made the charges stick.) By 1941, with Brown & Root’s money behind him, as well as the money of two other clients, Lone Star Gas and the Humble Oil Company, Wirtz was so important a supplier of the commodity prized by Valley politicians that they had to make pilgrimages to his hometown northeast of San Antonio. Recalls one of them: “He [Wirtz] would never mix and mingle with us down here. We’d have to go up to Seguin to see him. He was very powerful.” At a crucial stage in the 1941 negotiations, moreover, Johnson himself had telephoned the Duke of Duval. In 1940, in the seven rural South Texas counties controlled by Parr, O’Daniel had received 95 percent of the vote; in 1941, O’Daniel received 5 percent of the vote, there was a scattering of votes for other candidates and Johnson received more than 90 percent of the vote.

  The abruptness—and extent—of this decline in O’Daniel’s popularity in the Valley startled even politicians who had become inured to its political mores. “It was nauseous to learn of the returns from such corrupt stinkholes as Duval and Starr Counties,” one said. “Money bought every Mexican vote.…” An observer in Cameron County said: “We have a situation in this State that is worse than Pendergast, Kelly-Nash and Boss Hague crookedness ever was. How can one expect honest men and clean government to survive such a system?”

  In the Valley, as in Texas politics as a whole, Stevenson had been the exception. The border bosses had always supported him by the traditional wide margins, but not for the traditional reasons—rather, during the first primary of his initial race for Lieutenant Governor because Austin’s conservative politicians and business interests who found his philosophy compatible persuaded the bosses to back him; in the second primary for no other reason than that the inexplicable O’Daniel (who had purchased the Valley that year) included him on the list of candidates he had never met but whom he was supporting (as one rebel Laredo politician said, “The machine localities are straight behind the candidates O’Daniel endorsed”); in Stevenson’s races thereafter for reasons not financial but strategic: because his immense popularity made victory a foregone conclusion, and the jefes wanted to be with the winner, and not antagonize a Governor whose disfavo
r might interfere with their rule. 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.)

  In 1948, however, the patrónes were not going to be behind Stevenson. During the war, their politics had clashed with his patriotism—and, as anyone who knew Stevenson could have predicted, that conflict could have only one result. Late in 1944, George Parr and Judge Raymond of Webb County had asked the Governor to appoint E. James (“Jimmy”) Kazen, a member of a politically powerful family and Raymond’s relative by marriage, to the recently vacated post of Laredo District Attorney. Stevenson, however, had also received a visit from the commanding general of the huge Army Air Force base in Laredo—who pleaded with him to appoint a District Attorney who was not tied in with the local political machine. “He said the prostitutes were running wild; half of his men were sick,” recalls Boyett, who was present during this visit. “Mr. Stevenson felt we were at war, and politics be damned.” He appointed another man. Raymond—and Parr—never forgave Stevenson for this slight, and Johnson took full advantage of the opening. During the war, he cemented a friendship with El Patrón. One of Parr’s intimates says that “for years” Johnson would make visits to San Diego, driving past the Duval County Courthouse and pulling up in front of the low building with the pretty red tile roof and the massive grillwork. Inside, he and Parr would talk alone, sometimes sending out for hamburgers to the nearby Windmill Café; Johnson always wanted them to “double the meat.” Says another Parr intimate: “Everybody knew about it, but nobody was present to see or hear.” Others say that such visits were actually rare, but that Johnson would make frequent telephone calls to Parr, sometimes chatting for an hour or more. Whatever the means of communication, the communication was there. The definitive word probably comes from Frank B. Lloyd, Parr’s hand-picked District Attorney in Alice, and, with his brother, Edward, a member of Lloyd & Lloyd, the Alice law firm through which most Parr business in Jim Wells County was handled. “George and Lyndon were very close,” Lloyd says. “He [Johnson] didn’t make public spectacles [of trips to Alice] like some of the politicians did. But there was the telephone.” About one thing all of Parr’s associates are agreed: he was fond of the Congressman. As one of Parr’s biographers puts it: “he liked Johnson’s style and guts.” Luther E. Jones, Johnson’s one-time assistant in Richard Kleberg’s office who was, for eight years during the 1940s, Parr’s most trusted attorney, says, “He liked him. They were good friends, dear friends. It was a real working together there.” Additional cement was troweled on after Tom Clark was appointed United States Attorney General by President Truman in 1945. A pardon for his 1932 income tax conviction was important to Parr, primarily because the other Valley jefes would regard it as proof of his power, and of his ability to protect them in Washington from investigations by federal agencies. Parr had applied for a pardon in July, 1943, and Johnson had attempted to help him obtain one. These attempts were unsuccessful as long as Francis Biddle was United States Attorney General. But on February 20, 1946, the pardon was granted—and Parr gave Johnson full credit for this. As for the still firmer cementing necessary for the 1948 campaign, that was again left to Wirtz. On the eve of the campaign, a deal was sealed. George Brown will say of it only that “We helped him [Johnson] down there [in the Valley] through Wirtz.” No details are known. But Parr told Salas, Salas was to recall: “Listen, Indio, concentrate on the senatorial race. Be sure we elect Johnson.”

  Coke Stevenson was going into the campaign with his great popularity. But before the campaign began, Johnson had a 25,000-vote head start.

  PURCHASING votes in the Valley was traditional in Texas politics. Johnson was thinking of other ways to use money in the campaign that were not traditional at all—ways that would, in fact, revolutionize Texas politics.

  Politics was already changing, becoming more scientific, more technical, more media-oriented. Polling, for example, was growing more common. But no politician in Texas had ever used polls as Johnson wanted to use them. A statewide poll in the 1940s cost about $6,000, so politicians commissioned them sparingly, perhaps once a month, three or four during a campaign at most. Johnson wanted polling done not monthly but weekly, and each week he wanted nearly identical polls done not by one firm but two or three. “He wanted to be able to compare them on every point,” Ed Clark recalls. Johnson was talking not about three or four polls but thirty or forty. And as Johnson explained to his advisers what type of polls he wanted, the more perceptive of them realized that their Chief was talking about something new to politics: he wanted polls that revealed not only voter preferences, but the depth of those preferences, how the preferences were changing—and how they might be changed: “He was interested in what today we would call the degree of strength support, in trends and in interest in [specific] issues,” John Connally says. Issues, to Johnson, had never been anything more than campaign fodder; caring about none himself, he had, in every campaign he had run, simply tested, and discarded, one issue after another until he found one which, in his word, “touched”—influenced—voters. (“We didn’t care if the argument was true or not,” recalls one of his college allies. “We just kept trying to find one that touched.”) Now he would no longer have to guess which issues were “touching”: a scientific measurement would be available to him. Such in-depth polls would cost more than ordinary polls. At first, Clark blanched at the cost. “I didn’t know where he was going to get the money for it,” he says, But then he realized that, in this campaign, cost was not a consideration. “Whatever was needed would be there.”

  Radio had, of course, been an integral part of politics in Texas ever since Pappy O’Daniel had started selling himself instead of flour, but no politician, including O’Daniel, had ever used radio with the sophistication with which Johnson was planning to use it. In the past, radio politics had meant speeches, mostly by the candidate, occasionally by supporters. Johnson, knowledgeable about radio because of his KTBC activities, of course, wanted not only speeches but “produced,” slicker, shows, with scripts and music, professionally written, directed and narrated. And he wanted to use radio on a scale it had never been used in a political campaign. He wanted to be on the air himself every day, several times a day—over a statewide network of stations. He wanted key supporters—Judge Roy Hofheinz of Houston, for example—on the air frequently, also over statewide networks. Since a single statewide broadcast cost between $5,000 and $8,000, Connally realized that Johnson was talking about an expenditure unprecedented in Texas campaigning, which traditionally had placed considerable emphasis on a candidate driving from county seat to county seat, speaking at each County Courthouse, giving occasional radio addresses. Connally realized that Johnson was talking about revolutionizing Texas politics. Thanks to polling, Johnson would be able to discover exactly what issues “touched” Texas voters. And when he found one that touched, he could hammer it into the voters’ consciousness, in speeches on the radio, in ads on the radio, in ads in newspapers, in mailings—with a repetition whose scale alone would be a significant factor in the transformation of Texas politics that he was planning. And Connally also realized how money could specifically help against a candidate like Coke Stevenson. With the media politics Johnson was planning, the influence of money is magnified. “In politics you have to say something over and over to get voters to be aware of it,” Connally explains. “One-day play—that’s all you get out of any speech.” But Stevenson, he felt, would go on making speeches, and not making much use of the media. And even if Coke wanted to, Connally felt, he couldn’t. Media meant money, and, Connally says, Coke Stevenson “didn’t know how to raise money.” And Stevenson wouldn’t want to;
he had been campaigning the old way for so long, and so successfully, that he wouldn’t realize the power of the new politics—until it was too late. “He didn’t know how to advertise, he didn’t know how to use the press.…” “Ol’ Coke,” Lyndon Johnson’s bright young men felt, was not going to change. The 1948 campaign would, therefore, be a dramatic contrast—on the one hand, a lone campaigner traveling from town to town by auto, speaking on Courthouse lawns to small audiences; on the other hand, a candidate whose words would be brought several times each day into homes throughout Texas. Ol’ Coke would campaign in the old way. Lyndon would campaign in the new. And, his men believed, no matter how popular Coke was, no matter how snugly his views dovetailed with the views of the electorate, because of the new way, Lyndon Johnson had a chance. Talking about it almost forty years later, John Connally grew excited: “This [the 1948 senatorial campaign] was the beginning of modern politics,” he says. “You saw—you have this in your book [The Path to Power]—the small level of money” that had been employed before. “And this was the first big election in Texas since 1941. It was the dawn of a whole new era in politics.” Other young men recall their excitement at the time. Joe Kilgore says Connally and Johnson came to the Valley in 1947, when he was still a young state legislator from McAllen. For several days, Kilgore recalls, the three men drove around the Valley, and “the entire conversation was political. The entire conversation was how he would run the campaign.…” The possibility that Stevenson might run was explored. At the beginning of these long days in the car, Kilgore had not believed that any candidate could possibly defeat the beloved Cowboy Governor. But after those days, Kilgore had changed his mind. “He [Johnson] had a better understanding of campaign organization than Coke Stevenson did—of the use of radio, of the use of the press, of the organizing of local political people. He was fascinating. Knowledgeable. I felt, ‘He can win!’ ”