The projections for Monday’s second battle, the vote that evening in the party’s 62-member Executive Committee, were, however, far less optimistic. The Executive Committee vote would be the decisive vote at the convention. “By custom,” as Allen Duckworth wrote, the full 2,000-member convention “accepts without question the report of an executive committee on winners of primary nominations.” Johnson’s advisers felt that it was the Executive Committee vote that would decide the outcome of his long fight. And, polling the committee’s sixty-two members, his advisers found to their consternation that a majority favored rejecting any report from the canvassing subcommittee that did not throw out the tainted Jim Wells votes and name as the Democratic nominee not Lyndon Johnson but Coke Stevenson. Clark and Connally, bitter enemies who agree on little, agree on the situation in Fort Worth that weekend—in the same three words: “We were behind.”
No parade greeted Lyndon Johnson when he got off the plane in Fort Worth this time; he was met by worried faces and big, black headlines: “SHOWDOWN MONDAY.” At the Blackstone Hotel, he was ushered into a suite that had been hastily redecorated “in modernistic decor” for his visit, and he put on a confident front for reporters. He had a “comfortable majority” on the Executive Committee, he said, and he was sure he would receive the certification. But after the press filed out, he was handed a sheet of paper on which the names of the fifty-five members of the Executive Committee who were attending the convention had been divided into two columns according to the preferences they had expressed—one column for him, one for Stevenson. The list of names in Stevenson’s column was longer—several names longer. The committee’s ruling would probably be decisive, he was told. If it voted against him, his fight was over. His career was over. And it seemed that that was what the committee was likely to do. “Just one vote difference there [in the Executive Committee] and it was all over,” Ed Clark recalls. “One vote: if they had ordered [Stevenson’s name onto the ballot] there wasn’t going to be much we could do. It was over.” Recalling that night, Ed Clark stops talking and sits for long minutes behind his desk staring off into space, remembering. “The state convention,” he says at last. “That was when I thought we might lose.”
Johnson’s reaction to this news may never be known. Of those men who witnessed it only two were alive when research on this book began, and no matter how frank these two—Ed Clark and George Brown—have been in describing other episodes in Johnson’s life, neither wanted to talk about this one. Clark, who was intimately associated with Johnson for thirty years and at his right hand in a score of crises in Texas, will say only: “I never saw him so worried about anything.” Brown will say only: “He was wild.” After some hours, he grew calmer. By the time Connally saw him, he was, in Connally’s words, “frantic, but orderly—’Get me this one’; ‘Get me that one’ “—telephoning the Executive Committee members, and the men back in the members’ home counties who could influence them. He was “calling all over the state to get pressure on the delegates any way he could.” He interrupted his telephoning only to attend a barbecue for convention leaders, at which he arrived wearing a big smile and an air of confidence.
Johnson’s telephone calls were not the ones that mattered most, however. He needed all his big guns on the line now, and, thanks to the planes at his disposal, he could get them there; despite all the pressure Clark had exerted in East Texas, some Executive Committee members from the East Texas districts were still on Stevenson’s side. Clark was in his room when “Johnson called me and told me where to get a plane, and pick up Ben Ramsey [the Texas Secretary of State] in San Augustine so he could be in on the trouble we had up there.” Soon Ed Clark and Ramsey were prowling hotel corridors together—the two most powerful men in East Texas, trying to bring the East Texas members into line for Lyndon Johnson.
And he had not just Clark and Ramsey but the man behind Clark and Ramsey. He had wheeled up his biggest gun of all. Telephoning Herman Brown in Houston, he asked him to come in person. No one who knew Herman, and who was aware of his contempt for politicians and his distaste for politicians in groups, thought he would come. “Herman Brown [had] never worked a convention in his life,” his lobbyist Oltorf says. But he worked this one. Herman knew them all, it seemed. He knew the district judges and the county commissioners from the counties in which he had done road contracting work long before there was a Mansfield Dam, and if he didn’t know the judge or the commissioner to whom a stubborn Executive Committee member might listen, he knew a subcontractor, a subcontractor who did work for Brown & Root or who wanted to do work for Brown & Root in the future, who knew the judge or commissioner. He knew the legislators with whom he had dealt on the Manford bills, and on a hundred other items, the men to whom he had sent envelopes filled with cash. And that night in Fort Worth, Herman Brown called in all his chits. It was necessary that he call them in, he told the recipients of his calls, because if Lyndon Johnson didn’t win in the Executive Committee tomorrow, there might not be any more contracts—or subcontracts. The full, immense, weight of the economic power of Brown & Root was thrown behind Lyndon Johnson that night. Three of the seven absent committee members were contacted by Herman Brown, and leaders in their counties were telephoned by Herman Brown, and then Herman Brown’s plane went and collected the members—and there were three new votes for Lyndon Johnson.
But Coke Stevenson’s side was working the committee members, too—and working hard—and his side had legislative leaders and state officials and county officials who had had alliances with Coke through the long years, and all that night the fight went on. “Johnson knew damn well that Stevenson had some real pros on his side,” Oltorf says. “They might not have been working during the campaign, but they were working that night.” Lyndon Johnson didn’t sleep at all that night—and neither did his men. Midnight turned into one o’clock, and one o’clock into two, and Lyndon Johnson’s men worked the corridors and the bars in the big hotels. At two o’clock and three, Ed Clark’s big hand was on the shoulders of committee members. “That was the longest night,” Clark says. “I was up all night, and Ben Ramsey was with me, and he was up all night.” But no one knew which candidate was ahead. In this fight the committee members were particularly anxious not to be joining the losing side. Recalls Clark: “People were asking me for a commitment that if they gave me their vote, they’d be on the winning side.” But Clark had his code of honor. “I said, ‘I cannot give that commitment.’ ” Some committee members were telling each side what it wanted to hear, so it was difficult to be certain even of some votes that had been promised. And as pressures and counter-pressures were brought to bear by both sides, votes kept shifting. “I knew we had turned around votes they still thought they had, and so I felt sure they had done the same to votes we still thought we had,” Clark says. He was carrying around a list of the fifty-eight potential voters, he recalls, and he had to keep switching names from one column to the other. “I just didn’t know how it was going to go,” he says. The only certainty in the Johnson camp, and in the hotel room in which Lyndon Johnson sat all night amidst the bright modernistic decor in a shirt soaked with sweat, his face gray with fatigue and stubble, his eyes sunk in his head, hunched over a telephone and a list, was that, with those three new votes Herman Brown had flown in, it was going to be terribly close. Lyndon Johnson’s fate was on the piece of paper lying on the desk in front of him—in that list in which votes were counted not in tens of thousands but one by one. And the list kept changing.
THEN it was Monday. “SHOWDOWN MONDAY.”
As convention delegates and Executive Committee members were crowding into the Blackstone’s high-ceilinged, dimly lit Venetian Ballroom at ten a.m., the lobby outside was filled with more delegates, and with tension. An elevator door opened and Lyndon Johnson stepped out, behind a phalanx of aides. His hair was slicked down so flat that it might have been pasted to his skull, the circles beneath his eyes were as dark as bruises, his skin, covered with nicks from the
closeness of his shave, was sallow. As his entourage was pushing through the crowd, one of its members, Jerome Sneed of Austin, who was also a member of the Executive Committee, suddenly collapsed, gasping for breath and writhing in pain on the lobby floor from what appeared to be a heart attack (it was later diagnosed as ptomaine poisoning). Sneed was quickly surrounded by shouting, excited delegates—and by one man who was always calm, the man whose mind worked so fast. While other men knelt by Sneed’s side and loosened his necktie and shouted for a doctor as he gasped in pain, Alvin Wirtz knelt by his side, scribbled something on a piece of paper and, handing it to Sneed along with a pen, told him to sign it: it was his proxy; Wirtz had saved a Johnson vote.
Johnson entered the ballroom in the midst of his aides, smiling, waving and reaching out to shake hands. Stevenson had arrived early, and was sitting quietly, puffing his pipe. As Johnson was passing Stevenson’s seat, an enterprising newspaper photographer tried to persuade them to pose together. The two men were not far apart; “just for a moment, they looked like two dogs wanting to get at each other and held back by a leash,” says a man who was between them. The moment passed; Stevenson’s mask and Johnson’s smile were back on, they turned away from each other, and Johnson and his entourage moved to another part of the big room. Pulling out a pack of cigarettes, Johnson lit one, drawing on it deeply; oblivious for once to photographers, he put on his eyeglasses.
After the seven members of the “canvassing subcommittee”—three neutral; two representing Stevenson; two (Wirtz and Alma Lee Holman of Taylor) representing Johnson—had been appointed, the ballroom was cleared, and at about 10:45 a.m. the subcommittee began its meeting there.
At almost the same moment, the District Court hearing began in Alice, so that for the next few hours, the two interlocking actions were proceeding simultaneously.
During those hours, therefore, the pattern—of Stevenson trying to open the Box 13 records and of Johnson trying to keep the records closed—became clear. And so did the tactics—haste in Fort Worth, delay in Alice—by which Johnson’s men were trying to accomplish his aims.
In Fort Worth, Wirtz was attempting to hurry the subcommittee through its work. Stacks of big manila envelopes were piled on the stage of the Venetian Ballroom: the returns for 252 counties. Wirtz wanted to dispense with opening them. No sooner had the subcommittee meeting begun, with Democratic State Secretary Vann M. Kennedy reporting that on purely arithmetical grounds Johnson had indeed won by the eighty-seven votes previously reported, than Wirtz moved that the subcommittee, without any further deliberations, certify those figures as official and report to the full Executive Committee that Johnson was the nominee. And when this motion failed—the subcommittee’s three neutral members agreeing with Stevenson’s representatives that it was their function to canvass the election county by county—Wirtz kept urging the canvassing along. One of those manila envelopes contained the Jim Wells return, the return based on the tally sheet on which the “7” had allegedly been changed into a “9,” the return which had given Johnson the 87-vote majority. At the moment, it was the only Jim Wells return. If the Jim Wells committee met and authorized one of its members to telephone the subcommittee and say that the return was being corrected, anything could happen. Once the subcommittee reached Jim Wells in its canvassing, and made the old return official, the danger of a new certification would be over. But the subcommittee was going through the envelopes alphabetically, and there were 122 counties between Johnson and safety. So Wirtz hurried the subcommittee along—and when the Jim Wells return was finally reached, and Stevenson’s representatives showed some disposition to discuss it, Wirtz said, in a statement with which the neutral members agreed, that they could not do so: so long as the court restraining order was in effect, he said, the subcommittee was prohibited not only from changing the Box 13 vote but from investigating it—even, in fact, from discussing it.
In Alice, meanwhile, Johnson’s representative, attorney Dudley Tarleton, was working to keep that restraining order in effect—at least until the subcommittee had finished its work. So, as speed was the order of the day in Fort Worth, delay was the order in Alice.
Stevenson attorney Wilbur Matthews considered the case so clear-cut that he thought the hearing in Alice wouldn’t take long. No court should stop the Jim Wells committee from opening the records, investigating the returns, and, should the findings justify such an action, revising the returns—and, he said, nothing could be clearer: to support his view, Matthews read passages from the authoritative Texas Jurisprudence, which said flatly that because intra-party primary elections were not open to all voters but only to members of a political party, disputes in it were to be considered intra-party matters “of which courts are not to take cognizance.” What could be clearer than that? he asked. Judge Archer’s restraining order, he said, “has no parallel in the judicial history of the United States” and no justification under Texas law; it should be dissolved at once.
Tarleton’s presentation was somewhat longer. He read, in what Matthews considered “a deliberate manner,” Judge Archer’s order and Johnson’s petition asking for the order. He read “at length” from the primary election statutes. Then he started in on various court decisions. It was evident, Matthews was to write, “that he was stalling for time.” He was still reading when Judge Broeter called a two-hour recess for lunch. And he was still reading when court resumed after the recess.2 Tarleton’s recitation may have been unnecessary. Early in the court proceedings that morning, an extra-legal occurrence had convinced Stevenson’s attorneys, had any further convincing been needed, of the slimness of their chances of having the order vacated. The occurrence was the arrival in court of George Parr. Striding past the benches where other spectators sat, he pushed through the low swinging door into the section of the courtroom customarily reserved for attorneys and sat down at the table with Johnson’s attorneys, relaxed and at ease, as if he owned the courtroom (which, of course, many of the persons watching him felt he did). His nonchalance slipped only once; during a recess, the Duke of Duval was expansive and smiling as he explained to newsmen that the reports about his political influence were untrue: “You don’t control votes,” he said. Then a question, an innocuous one, annoyed him, and for just a moment the reporters saw the true face of George Parr. He “stopped short,” one wrote; “His eyes seemed to pierce his glasses and his smile and hearty laughter” were replaced by what the reporter described as “a resolute expression.” After the recess, he returned to the attorneys’ table, where he bent his gaze on Judge Broeter. But despite Parr’s presence, there was always a possibility of a miscarriage of the ducal brand of justice—always a possibility that the judge might rule for Stevenson and vacate the restraining order. Members of the County Democratic Committee, including Adams and Poole, were in the courtroom, hoping to be allowed to look at last into Box 13. So Tarleton took no chances. He delayed as long as was necessary. And his tactics served their purpose. At 2:30 p.m., a newspaperman brought a wire service bulletin into court. Reports conflict on its contents, but it appears to have stated that the canvassing subcommittee had reached Jim Wells County in its tabulations. It’s “too late,” Matthews told Judge Broeter. Dissolving the restraining order would no longer serve any purpose. “The case is moot and should be dismissed,” he said in disgust.
Broeter did not dismiss the case. “I am not saying that there was fraud or that there was not fraud,” the judge said. “If it so happens that our laws do not set out adequate means and speedy procedures to correct illegal acts I regret it,” but “I do not make the laws.…” At three p.m., a rumor swept the courtroom that the subcommittee was refusing to certify the Jim Wells returns, and was waiting to hear what the court ruling was. Broeter thereupon gave the ruling. It was in favor of Johnson. The judge said he did not see how granting Johnson’s request for an injunction would “interfere in any way with an election contest.” Therefore, he said, he was continuing the injunction until such a contest was fi
led, or until the present case was heard on its merits. Until that time, no change could be made in the Box 13 tabulations. The case “failed in the face of the power of George Parr,” Matthews was to write. Delay had been Johnson’s purpose, and that purpose had been served. When the subcommittee had reached Jim Wells, there had been no new certification for them to look at.
UP IN FORT WORTH, however, Lyndon Johnson was now to receive a most unpleasant shock. His attorneys had assured him that in the absence of a new certification from Jim Wells County, the canvassing subcommittee would have no choice but to accept the old one and send his name to the Executive Committee as the party’s senatorial nominee. But suddenly, without warning, the subcommittee was refusing to do so. When, with the county-by-county tabulation completed, Alvin Wirtz moved that the subcommittee certify Johnson’s 87-vote majority, one of Stevenson’s two representatives on the seven-member subcommittee, retired Major General Albert Sidney Johnson, objected. Declaring that the 87-vote majority included at least 202 clearly illegal votes from Jim Wells County, he moved to amend Wirtz’s motion. His amendment would certify the returns from 251 counties—but not the Jim Wells returns. The “question of the correct and legal vote” of Jim Wells should be submitted to the full Executive Committee, he said—and until that correct and legal vote was ascertained, that county’s votes should not be included in any tabulation.
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