“As she changed for the trip,” Johnson was to recall, “I saw these big bruises,” and when he asked her about them, she had to tell him about the accident. But she drove back to Austin and was up early the next morning. She and Lyndon’s mother and his sisters divided the Austin telephone book among them, and all Election Day they phoned people asking them to go to the polls and vote. She had a good line ready for reporters who inquired about the accident: “All I could think of as we were turning over was I sure wished I’d voted absentee.” But she was prouder of the telephone calls, because all day she had managed to talk over the phone to absolute strangers without losing her nerve.
1 Asked about the difference in the candidates’ positions on Taft-Hartley, Jeff Hickman, executive secretary of the state CIO, told a reporter that there was no difference. “The position of both candidates on the Taft-Hartley law is substantially the same. Both of them think it is a good law.” But this statement was not even printed in many of the state’s newspapers—and was buried in those that did use it.
13
The Stealing
LYNDON JOHNSON had started the runoff campaign seventy thousand votes behind, and the Peddy votes had at first seemed likely to widen the margin. But almost day by day, it seemed, he was narrowing the gap.
And then, suddenly, during the last week or ten days of the campaign, it wasn’t narrowing any further.
His young aides weren’t aware of this. Amid the noisy bustle in the Hancock House, optimism mounted with each new report from Buzz or Woody of the record crowds Lyndon was drawing, and of their enthusiasm. The young men, like Connally and Herring, believed they were going to win. But in the quiet offices on the seventh floor of the Brown Building, where Al vin Wirtz, Edward Clark and Everett Looney, the senior partners in the law firms for which the young men worked, met with Herman and George Brown (and, whenever he was in Austin, with Lyndon Johnson), there was no longer jubilation. The reports coming into the Brown Building weren’t from Buzz or Woody, but from more seasoned politicians, men who had watched a hundred campaigns, and who knew that crowds were only a part, often a misleading part, of a political story. Furthermore, they were receiving other information not available to the young men: the results of private polls. In these polls, which were being taken almost daily, Johnson had been steadily gaining ground on Coke Stevenson. And then, abruptly, as had been the case in the first primary, he stopped gaining. In a public poll, the Belden Poll, released on August 21, one week before the August 28 primary, the two candidates had leveled off, with Stevenson leading Johnson 48 percent to 41 percent with 11 percent undecided. Among voters considered most likely to vote (and who had a definite preference), Stevenson led Johnson 54 percent to 46 percent. These figures, Belden noted, were “practically the same” as in a poll taken the previous week. A Belden Poll released on August 27 showed that “there has been no great change in the potential strength of Stevenson and Johnson since the first primary.”1 The men in the Brown Building knew what the polls meant: Johnson had chipped and chipped away at Stevenson’s strength, but there was a solid core, a bedrock of belief in Coke Stevenson, that had not been touched. Johnson had gained on Coke—but he hadn’t gained enough. He was going to come close. But he was going to lose.
FOR THESE MEN it was all on the line now; it was “all or nothing.” And they knew what they had to do.
“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.…”
Johnson aides made trips down to the Valley again. They flew in planes owned by Brown & Root, from an air terminal owned by Brown & Root; the name of the company was not on the plane; the terminal was simply called “Executive Air Services.” Often the man who went was Clark, the “Secret Boss of Texas,” the man who “knew how to use money without anyone ever seeing the money.” “People went down half a dozen times by plane—by private plane,” Clark says. “They landed mostly on private airstrips. I made several trips down there. I didn’t stay overnight any time I went down there”; there would be no names in a hotel register, no servants in a private home who could remember and later, perhaps, testify to the presence of these couriers. And they didn’t see many people. They didn’t have to. In Webb County, Clark says, he saw only one man. “Judge Raymond controlled the situation there just like I could take a piece of paper and write my name. He not only appointed the county judge, he appointed the county clerk, the election judges. He controlled the election process. I did not discuss details with him. You didn’t have to know what he was going to do or how he was going to do it. You just had to have a diplomatic talk with him, and tell him what was needed.” (Clark says he himself didn’t give money to Raymond, or to anyone else.)
George Parr was left mainly to Al vin Wirtz. Neither of the two men is alive to discuss their dealings, but Luis Salas saw the result. Heavily though Johnson money had been spent before the first primary in the six counties Parr controlled, it was nothing to the way Johnson money was spent now. The Mexican-American political workers soon caught on. “Our people sure were spoiled.… They wanted money and more money,” Salas says. But his patrón told him not to balk at any request. As Salas recalls it, Parr told him: “Luis, do not hesitate. Spend all the money necessary, but we have to have Johnson elected.”
THE LARGEST single source of “ethnic” votes was, of course, San Antonio. Before the first primary, Johnson money had been poured lavishly into the Mexican-American slums of San Antonio’s West Side, but leaders of the West Side machine had been lackadaisical, and Stevenson, a great favorite among Mexican-Americans because of his championing of their causes during his governorship (and, of course, the overwhelming favorite in the city’s non-Mexican areas), had beaten Johnson in the citywide totals by more than eleven thousand votes. Johnson’s key man in San Antonio had always been Dan Quill. After the first primary, the Postmaster had written Johnson that his organization could do better the second time around, although “We will need some money.”
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.”
Did Johnson spend as much as $50,000 in San Antonio? “I wouldn’t be surprised,” John Connally said recently. But then he added that while that figure might be correct for the Kilday organization, “Then, of course, there was Valmo Bellinger”—the black boss in San Antonio; he had an organization, too. “Valmo had to have some help.”
Huge sums of Johnson money were poured into the city. Whatever the price of the Kilday organization—and the Bellinger organization, and the Quill organization—Johnson paid it. Quill received a sum of money far greater than he had expected, and he came to realize not only that “the Kildays [were] not fighting us,” but that Kilday and his many deputies were working in Johnson’s behalf, and working hard.
Johnson made sure he got his money’s worth. The final week of his campaign was a week of spectacle in the state’s big cities. Flying into Dallas, Houston, Fort Worth and San Ant
onio in a private plane, he was met in each city by cheering, sign-waving campaign workers and a band playing “The Eyes of Texas,” and then was driven—sitting atop the back seat of an open convertible and waving a Stetson—at the head of a caravan of banner-draped automobiles led by police motorcycles with sirens wailing, to greet crowds in the downtown shopping area and to speak at elaborate rallies that featured ten “star” Hollywood entertainers (and of course to make the customary three broadcasts a day over the statewide network). In San Antonio, the day before the election, the candidate, almost hysterical, shouted at a rally at the city’s Municipal Auditorium that he was forty years old that very day—“You know, life begins at forty, and I hope to be the next junior Senator when I am forty years and one day old”—and massed bands played “Happy Birthday.” It was the climax of a week of public pageantry spectacular even in the vivid history of Texas politics. In a motorcade led by police cars filled with dozens of Sheriff Kilday’s deputies, and by jeeps, bearing immense photographs of himself, driven by uniformed war veterans, Johnson rode through San Antonio sitting atop the back seat of a convertible, with a Kilday (Congressman Paul) flanking him on one side, and Kilday’s deadliest enemy, former Mayor Maury Maverick, flanking him on the other, symbolizing the fact that he had the support of both sides in the city’s political wars. On his first two days in San Antonio, however, Johnson’s most significant activities were not public but private: quiet meetings with leaders in that same Plaza Hotel in which, fourteen years before, he had sat in a room buying votes with five-dollar bills. In this election, Lyndon Johnson was going to run the West Side personally.
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. One of his middlemen, the city’s Street Commissioner, Jimmy Knight, was to recall that Johnson gave him a thousand dollars in one-dollar bills for the expenses (“don’t misunderstand me, it’s not a payoff or anything”) of poll-watchers “because he, Lyndon Johnson, wanted to go around the polls,” and “if the candidate gives the money, it has to be more. The price goes down immediately if somebody else but the candidate gives it to ’em, and the satisfaction is just as great.” So as Johnson jumped out of his car at each polling place and walked among his workers, urging them on, the Street Commissioner followed him, handing out expense money: “You happen to inadvertently put your hands in your pocket and give ’em a couple of dollars and move on, you understand. You take this and put ten, fifteen, twenty dollars and put this in the crowd.…”If there was a touch of legitimacy to such “expense money,” with other amounts of money handed out by the Johnson entourage in San Antonio that day the touch was less perceptible, and the amounts were much larger. And with the candidate’s eye on them, Owen Kilday’s deputies earned their money. All day they patrolled the West Side, looking not for crime but for votes. All that broiling-hot Election Day, Lyndon Johnson, with John Connally at his side, rode the polls in San Antonio—and only then did he drive to Johnson City to cast his own vote, Ballot Number 353, in the Blanco County Courthouse, two blocks from the house in which he had spent his youth after his father had lost the Johnson Ranch.
SOUTH of San Antonio, in Alice in Jim Wells County, “Indio” Salas, after a stop at the Election Day tent that had been erected across from the Precinct 13 polling place in the Nayer School, arrived at the school ready for trouble from the reformers’ poll-watchers. But, he was to write, “this time had no trouble. They just sit in the place designated by me”—two chairs on the far side of the schoolroom, too far away to see the ballots. When the polls closed and Salas began to count the ballots, unfolding them and calling out a name to his three clerks, Jimmy Holmgreen felt that the election judge was counting for Johnson ballots that had actually been cast for Stevenson—and he was right: “If they were not for our party, I make them for our party,” Salas was to reveal almost forty years later. But when Holmgreen jumped up and approached the table, Salas snarled at him, “You stay away from that desk. You sit over there. Sit down and don’t interfere with my clerks.” Holmgreen, not eager for another encounter with the huge Deputy Micenheimer, sat down. Salas and his clerks resumed calling out the votes: “Johnson.” “Johnson.” “Johnson.”
No Election Day tents had been erected in neighboring Duval County. George Parr didn’t need to make any preparations. He was just waiting for the telephone to ring to find out how many votes Lyndon Johnson needed.
THE EARLY RETURNS came mostly from three of the state’s four big cities—Houston, Dallas and Fort Worth—because voting machines were in use in these cities, and they gave Stevenson a lead of more than 20,000 votes. Returns from the fourth big city that used machines—San Antonio—were unexpectedly slow, but the young men in the Hancock House, and indeed almost all observers, anticipated that when these returns came in they would substantially increase Stevenson’s lead. The young men were sure that their Chief had been defeated; Lady Bird told a friend: “Well, it looks like we’ve lost. I guess we’ll have to work real hard in the radio business now.” Stevenson drove to his ranch with a group of old friends to sit by the South Llano, listen to the falls, reminisce over old victories—and celebrate this new one.
But neither Lady Bird nor the young men knew what the men in the Brown Building knew. Nor did Coke Stevenson. He had defeated Johnson by 11,000 votes—a 2–1 margin—in San Antonio in the first primary, but when, late that evening, the returns from San Antonio finally came in, he had not beaten him by a 2–1 margin this time. He hadn’t beaten him at all. Johnson had beaten him. Kilday’s deputies and Dan Quill had done their job: provide enough money, Quill had promised, and the West Side could be delivered. It was—and so was the adjoining black area. Some 10,000 Johnson votes had been produced in this vast slum—and despite Stevenson’s previous popularity in San Antonio, the city’s total vote this time was: Stevenson, 15,511, Johnson, 15,610. (“A remarkable turnaround,” one observer was to comment.)
And by that time, the Valley was being heard from.
It was heard from all that evening, for the most part late that evening. Stevenson’s lead was holding at 17,000 votes—and then Webb County reported 5,554 for Johnson, 1,179 for Stevenson—almost a 5–1 margin (and a plurality of more than 4,000 votes) for Johnson; Judge Raymond had delivered. New returns from Hidalgo County gave Johnson a plurality of almost 3,000 more; Cameron County’s new returns pulled him 1,700 votes closer. Then Nueces County was heard from: a gain of 3,400 votes. And those were the counties with cities, and, in some precincts at least, voting machines. That evening returns were coming in also from the Valley’s isolated, rural counties controlled by George Parr. In Precinct 13 in Jim Wells County, Salas had counted well. In previous elections he had given the favored candidate eighty percent of the vote; this time he had given Johnson more than ninety percent: 765 to 60. Thanks largely to that single precinct, Jim Wells County had given Johnson a total of 1,788 votes to Stevenson’s 769. In the other rural counties, where there was no reform strength to speak of, Parr had been able to “count ’em” as he wanted. Brooks County reported 408 for Johnson, no for Stevenson. In Zapata it was 711 for Johnson, 158 for Stevenson; in Jim Hogg, 723 to 198. But even such overwhelming margins paled before the returns from the two counties in which George Parr’s control was absolute. In Starr County, it was 2,908 for Johnson, 166 for Stevenson. And in Duval, Parr’s home county, it was 4,195 for Johnson, 38 for Stevenson—a margin of more than 100–1. When the Texas Election Bureau closed for the night at 1:30 a.m., out of almost a million votes cast, Stevenson led by only 854.
BUT HE LED. And most of the votes were in. The next three days—Sunday, Monday and Tuesday—would be days of wild confusion; they
always were in close Texas elections. Nearly a million votes had been cast, most of them on paper ballots. The judges counting them on Election Day in the precincts were often doing so with representatives of both sides looking over their shoulders and urging them to greater speed, interrupting them with arguments and with pleas for the latest totals. Then the totals were sent in by telephone, or by telephoning Western Union, whose operators also made mistakes, and were recorded at the Texas Election Bureau in a hectic Election Night scene. One common error was transposition of the two candidates’ votes, because some lists had Stevenson’s name first, others Johnson’s. Transpositions, however, were merely one out of many possibilities for error. “In counting, copying and tabulating, the votes pass through the hands of eight different groups, between the voter and the final declared result,” the State Observer noted. “With a million votes running the gauntlet of ‘the Human Element’ eight different times, there will always be mistakes regardless of the honesty and good intentions of the humans involved.” Few persons familiar with Texas politics, though, were confident of the universality of “honesty and good intentions”; there was common knowledge in the upper levels of Texas politics of the precincts that were for sale, the “boxes” in which the County Judge wouldn’t “bring in the box” (report the preeinet totals to the Election Bureau) until the man who had paid him told him what he wanted that total to be. In close elections, precinct results were altered all through the state. Coke Stevenson’s supporters included men who were veterans at these practices, and although they had been careless before Election Day, having neglected the preparations needed to assure that the “re-counting” would be in their favor, they were working frantically now—and they were on the alert against Johnson’s attempt to do the same thing. An axiom of Texas politics held that “The lead in the runoff always wins”; in other words, the candidate ahead by the end of Election Day, at which time most of the vote had been counted, almost invariably won because he could “hold out”—delay reporting—enough boxes to keep a reserve to counter changes made by the other side; since both sides were changing votes, the side with the lead could keep the lead by changing enough votes to offset the other side’s changes. Perhaps the only instance in modern Texas political history in which this rule had been broken was Lyndon Johnson’s 1941 race, when he had, through overconfidence, allowed all his boxes to be reported early, thereby revealing how many votes his opponent needed to add—and foreclosing his chance to add any more of his own. Now, in the areas of Johnson’s greatest strength, those whose votes had made the election close, observers felt he was again foreclosed. San Antonio voted by machine and those mechanically recorded tallies had been officially certified, and few changes were possible. And, as the dean of Texas political reporters, Allen Duckworth, was to write about Duval County but in words applicable to the Valley as a whole, “Duval always votes overwhelmingly, one way or the other,” but “the county usually reports, practically complete, on Election Night.” On Sunday, with Stevenson in the lead, his supporters were telephoning to election judges who had not yet reported their boxes to keep them out until they saw what Johnson would do—and they were confident that they could offset any move Johnson could make.
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