Means of Ascent

by Robert A. Caro

  Without those votes, Coke Stevenson was the party’s nominee. Johnson jumped to his feet. Grabbing his sleeve, Wirtz pulled him down, and he and another of Johnson’s attorneys, Charles I. Francis, made Johnson’s argument, Francis almost screaming at Subcommittee Chairman W. B. Simmons that with a court injunction in force, “For this or any other committee to refuse to accept the vote as now certified would be violating that injunction.” Simmons, however, ruled that the subcommittee could vote on General Johnson’s amendment. Wirtz and Mrs. Holman voted against it, as did one of the subcommittee’s neutral members, but the other neutral member voted with Stevenson’s two representatives. With the vote tied, three to three, Simmons cast the deciding vote. It was for General Johnson’s amendment, which thus carried, four votes to three, and became the subcommittee’s majority report. Wirtz announced that he would make his motion a minority report, but that was what it was: a minority report. Johnson had been confident that, if only his attorneys could stall long enough down in Alice, he would emerge from the subcommittee meeting bearing its imprimatur as the party’s nominee and with the two hundred indispensable votes from Jim Wells firmly certified as his. The stalling had worked, but not the rest of his strategy. He would be going into the crucial Executive Committee meeting with neither of those two advantages.

  The vote had been taken at five o’clock. The meeting of the Executive Committee would begin at seven.

  NOW EVERYTHING HINGED on the Executive Committee. Several alternatives were available to it. It could adopt its subcommittee’s majority report, and conduct its own investigation of the Jim Wells returns. It could adopt the subcommittee’s minority report, and name Lyndon Johnson the nominee. Or it could disregard both reports, and simply name a nominee: Johnson or Stevenson. Whatever the exact wording of the resolution on which it finally voted, the fifty-eight members of the committee present in Fort Worth would in reality simply be choosing between the two men who had fought so long for the nomination. And still, as seven o’clock neared, no one knew whom the committee was going to choose. Committee members were still switching back and forth. Others, afraid of being caught on the losing side, were saying they would abstain, or were telling each side what it wanted to hear. George Brown asked his brother how it was going to go that night. His brother said he didn’t know; all he knew, he said, was that it was going to be very close. Even as Ed Clark, weary from more than thirty-six consecutive hours of counting votes, was walking down to the ballroom for the meeting, he wasn’t sure what the actual count was going to be. As he walked, he pulled out the rumpled sheet of paper on which he had been doing his figuring, and counted up votes for the last time. “I had it figured as a tie,” he says.

  Spacious though it was, the Venetian Ballroom wasn’t nearly spacious enough to hold all the politicians who wanted to be present. Every seat, of course, was taken—and, it seemed, every foot of floor space, too. It was very hot; perspiration rolled down the faces of burly men with big cigars—by the time the meeting began, the ballroom seemed already filled with smoke—who were jammed so tightly together that they tried in vain to keep their expensive Stetsons from being crushed. Women members of the Executive Committee kept dabbing their faces with handkerchiefs that were already sodden.

  “The whole atmosphere was tension,” recalls the man who presided at the meeting, State Democratic Chairman Robert Calvert. Some of the spectators were there simply out of a desire to be present at one of the most dramatic moments in Texas political history, but others—those who were adherents of Lyndon Johnson and Coke Stevenson out of ideology or personal affection or who had personal stakes in the outcome of the vote—had deeper interests. Standing in the ballroom that evening were Jake Pickle and Raymond Buck and Fred Korth and John Connally, men who had, some of them many years before, tied their fortunes to Lyndon Johnson’s star. Those men would remember their feelings until they died. “I was leaning up against a pillar in the back listening and trying to make tabulations but my heart was pounding so much that I could hardly write,” Pickle recalls. “Because I knew what was involved.”

  Johnson had a lot of his men present; wavering committee members anxious to be with the winner might be swayed at the last moment by an impression as to who the winner was going to be. He was loudly cheered as he and Lady Bird walked to the seats that had been saved for him by two of his men in the front row and sat down, facing the committee. He smiled until he felt the ovation had gone on long enough. Then he lifted his hand, palm out, and the cheers stopped as abruptly as if he had turned off a faucet. “Is Coke here?” spectators asked each other. Then the former Governor was noticed, sitting inconspicuously in the middle of the audience.

  Stevenson’s lead attorney, Clint Small, a former district judge, focused on what the Stevenson forces considered the main question: whether or not a single precinct—a boss-dominated precinct notorious for the “bloc” pattern of its voting—was to be the decisive factor in a statewide election. “The issue,” Small said, “is whether or not Precinct 13 in Jim Wells County is to elect a United States Senator.” And, the attorney said, the issue was whether or not that single precinct was to elect a Senator with votes that were patently illegal. Lyndon Johnson, he said, was “trying to get the [Senate] office with votes of people who never appeared at the polls.… Every name that appears after 841 has been placed there after the closing of the polls.”

  Small said he was prepared to prove this charge. Although access to the voting lists had been illegally denied, the names of some persons alleged to have voted had been taken down. Affidavits had been obtained from those persons. Johnson’s claque was heckling and booing Small now, in an attempt to drown him out, but Small read aloud the affidavits, in which each of the “voters” swore he had not voted. As he finished reading one, he asked the Executive Committee: “Are you going to put a man in the United States Senate on that vote? … They cold-bloodedly added the 202 votes that are deciding this Senate race. Don’t count votes put in four or five days after the ballots were counted.” Yelling above the shouts of Johnson’s claque, Small told the committee, “This [the Jim Wells] certificate reeks with corruption and fraud.… They will say you have to take it whether it is good or bad. You don’t have to take a certificate when you know it is false.”

  Opening the arguments for Johnson, John Cofer of Houston, one of the most renowned of the stem-winding, arm-waving school of courthouse lawyers, roared, “I believe in justice and right.” During his arguments—together with those of Charles Francis of Brown & Root and Ed Lloyd of the Duchy of Duval—it became apparent, however, that their substance was rather that justice and right had no relevance to the work of the Executive Committee. Determining the legality of ballots, Johnson’s lawyers said, in an argument which weighed heavily with many committee members, was the function of the state’s District Courts; it was, in fact, Francis said, “contrary to law” for the committee to determine legality: under state law, the committee’s sole function was to add up the voting totals sent in by the individual counties. “You are here [only] to count the votes,” Cofer shouted, pounding the air with both fists. “You may or may not be able to understand law, but by the Holy Writ, you can count!” Turning to Coke Stevenson as he sat puffing his pipe, Francis jabbed a finger at him and said, “Coke Stevenson, if you don’t think those votes were fair and accurate, you can take Frank Hamer with his pistols and have your day in court. We’ll meet you there. That is where the law says election contests should be held.” To rebel yells, shouts of “Pour it on!” and applause from supporters, Johnson smiled, then waved his hand for quiet.

  As for affidavits, he had affidavits, too, Cofer said. “Are you going to let Mr. Small wave an affidavit, and then let me wave one?” he asked. “Well, I can wave two for every one he can wave.” (He would not, however, do so at this time, Cofer said, because the place for affidavits was in court.)

  Furthermore, Small’s affidavits were worthless, Johnson’s attorneys said, because they had been ob
tained by intimidation and threats during what Lloyd termed an “invasion” of his beloved Jim Wells County by “goon squads” which had terrorized innocent people. The “goon squads,” Lloyd said, were Stevenson’s lawyers, and Frank Hamer; ignoring the fact that Hamer had not been present when any of the affidavits were obtained (he and Stevenson had been on their way back to Austin at the time), Cofer bellowed, “He [Stevenson] went down there [to Alice] with a man who had a gun on his hip and said to these people, ‘Swear to this.’ None of you would try a Negro on the basis of affidavits obtained by a policeman, with a gun on his hip.” The remainder of the arguments by the three attorneys on the affidavits also had racial overtones. “You are not going to deprive him [Johnson] of this election on affidavits obtained from Mexicans,” Cofer said. “You just take a number, pick you a Mexican and let him make an affidavit.”

  For three hours the lawyers held forth in the sweltering, smoke-filled ballroom. Stevenson sat impassively. Johnson was hunched forward, one elbow resting on a knee, his face supported by his hand; his nervous fingers pinched and pulled the skin on his cheek, tore at the flesh around his fingernails. He was lighting one cigarette from the butt of another, and sometimes he bent over, sucking in the soothing smoke for a long minute. But only for a minute; then he would be hunched forward again, his eyes flickering around the room, watching everything, but mostly staring at the faces of the committeemen and women, trying to guess his fate. The voting began at 9:48 p.m.

  The vote was on a motion to adopt the minority report Wirtz had drafted in the subcommittee instead of adopting the subcommittee’s majority report, so an “aye” vote would be a vote that the Executive Committee certify Johnson as the nominee; a “no” vote would in effect be for Stevenson’s certification.

  At the beginning, the votes were mostly for Stevenson, including several from Executive Committee members Johnson had believed favored him. Men who were watching Lyndon Johnson would never forget how he sat there rigid and unmoving, appearing almost stunned, as the voting continued: “No.” “No.” “No.” After 31 votes had been cast, Stevenson had 21 to his 10.

  Then the tide changed, and vote after vote—including several that Johnson had believed would be for Stevenson—were for him. The vote was tied, and then tied again, this time at 28 to 28, and then the last vote was called, and it was for Johnson. He had won, 29 to 28. Pandemonium enveloped the ballroom; men pounded Lyndon Johnson on the back, women pushed through the crowd to hug and kiss him; cheers and rebel yells drowned out Chairman Calvert’s attempts to gavel enough order out of the chaos to announce the vote; in the din no one noticed for some minutes that a committee member, Mrs. Seth Dorbrandt, who had voted for Johnson, was waving her arms and asking for the floor. Finally, as the noise was dying down in anticipation of Calvert’s announcement, the chairman noticed Mrs. Dorbrandt and gave her the floor. She withdrew her previous “aye” vote for Johnson, saying she wanted to be recorded as “present, but not voting.” (She later told reporters that “I believed by changing my vote it would make a tie and force the decision into the courts where I believe it rightfully belongs.”) The vote was tied again. Spectators shouted to Calvert to call again the names of the five committee members who had been absent during the balloting. One after another, he called the names, and the first four, who had not come to Fort Worth, didn’t answer. The fifth and last name was that of Charlie C. Gibson of Amarillo. Knowing that Gibson was in Fort Worth, John Connally had been searching for him and moments earlier had finally found him. In later years, when the story of the Executive Committee vote would be encrusted with myth, some of those myths surrounded Gibson’s disappearance during the voting: it was said he had been missing when his name was called either because he had a headache or had dozed off in another room, or because he had gone to the bathroom. It was indeed in a bathroom that Connally found him, but, he says, Gibson was not there in order to use its facilities but because he had promised his vote to Johnson, and now didn’t want to be caught on the wrong side. What he was doing in the bathroom, Connally says, was hiding; “He knew it was going to be close and he didn’t want to vote.” “Goddamnit, Charlie, get out there and vote!” Connally shouted. Just as Calvert was calling his name, Gibson burst into the room. “Aye!” he shouted. Johnson again led 29 to 28. At that moment Lyndon Johnson thought fastest; in the instant of silence that followed Gibson’s “aye”—before pandemonium could break loose again—he called to Calvert: “Announce the results now, Bob, before someone else changes his mind.” Calvert did. Lyndon Johnson had won. The margin had been a single vote, but he had won.

  THE FULL CONVENTION the next day, tumultuous though it was on the surface, and crucial though it was for Truman’s chances of holding Texas, was an anticlimax in terms of Realpolitik. The deal struck earlier between Wirtz and the Loyalists was consummated. Johnson’s forces voted to seat not the Houston delegation that had won in May but a Loyalist delegation from Houston—whereupon States Rights delegations from Dallas, Tarrant and several smaller counties stalked out (in their bitterness, taking with them microphones, speakers, podium and even the organ, which had been rented by the host delegation; “AS TARRANT GOES, SO GOES THE FURNITURE,” one headline read). Pro-Truman (and pro-Johnson) delegates swarmed into the Will Roberts Auditorium to take their places, thus giving the Loyalists overwhelming control of the convention. Johnson’s aides “helped us on the seating,” Eckhardt recalls. “In return we took care of the Johnson crowd on the ballot boxes. We didn’t open the boxes.” The Loyalists voted to place on various party committees—including the new Executive Committee and the canvassing committee of the convention as a whole—men and women who would oppose any investigation of the Jim Wells vote. That canvassing committee, on which Stevenson supporters had pinned their last hopes, was now, in the words of one observer, “a merry Johnson party.” “It’s stacked 99 percent against us; what good would a fight do now?” a depressed Clint Small asked. And, indeed, when the Executive Committee’s minority report, the report charging Johnson with “palpable fraud and irregularities,” was presented to the convention’s canvassing committee, it was ignored; one committee member moved to table it, another quipped, “Let’s put it under the table,” and there was general laughter. When, that evening, at the convention’s closing session, Governor Beauford Jester tried to speak, he was interrupted by shouts of “We want Johnson.” A party official read the Executive Committee’s majority report, the one carried by the 29–28 vote, amid swelling applause. Then permanent Chairman Tom Tyson called for an “aye” and “no” vote on the report, and there was a thunder of ayes. Then a roaring chant; “Johnson! Johnson!” The candidate and Lady Bird had been waiting in the wings, and they were escorted to the speaker’s platform to a tremendous roar. He had had a hard fight, but he had won, he said. “This is the moment for which we have been waiting for one hundred weary days.… I am filled with so much gratitude towards my friends that there is no room for bitterness. The election is behind us. This is a great night for us.… To all of you, we say, we love our friends; we forgive our enemies.” The next morning, the Johnsons rose early, left the Blackstone, were driven to the airport and boarded a plane for the Gulf Coast, “to look on sand and water where there are no telephones.” His aides, some of whom had been celebrating all night, were still celebrating. The morning’s pro-Johnson newspapers exulted with them. The convention had been “a field day for Lyndon Johnson,” the Houston Post said. “Hairbreadth Harry himself never experienced a more exciting run of adventures than those which brought to a hairbreadth, photo-finish climax the closest major political race in all Texas history.”

  “And,” said the Post, “the most exciting thing about it all, from Mr. Johnson’s viewpoint, was its happy ending.”

  ENDING? The fight that had gone on so long had not ended at all.

  1 In the different tallies of the election—in court testimony and at the Convention and in newspaper accounts—the number of additional votes for Johnson is
sometimes given as 200 and sometimes 201. Stevenson is usually given two extra votes, but sometimes only one. This appears to be the result simply of careless or hurried arithmetic in the various tabulations. All accounts agree that the color of the ink changed approximately 200 names from the end, but all accounts also agree that the change occurred at Number 842, instead of about 825. Although it is impossible to determine the reason for this discrepancy, apparently about 17 names listed on the poll list did not show up as votes, either because the voters mismarked their ballots, which were then invalidated, or because the election judges misnumbered some of the first 825 ballots.

  2 The more substantive side of Tarleton’s argument was studded with legalisms and technicalities. The laws forbidding state courts to intervene in primaries referred only to a first primary; second primaries were not mentioned, he said. County committees might be empowered to “convene” to certify precinct votes, but the laws did not mention “re-convening.” To change the certification, he said, the Jim Wells committee would have to hold another meeting, and the law’s omission made such “re-convening” illegal.

  15

  Qualities of Leadership

  IN BELIEVING that the struggle with Coke Stevenson was now over, Lyndon Johnson and his aides (and Stevenson’s aides as well) were not reckoning with the deepening sense of injustice the former Governor had come to feel—or with the implications of this feeling for a man with so fervent a belief in the law. Stevenson believed that an election had been stolen from him; that in itself was infuriating. But then, after he had set out to retrieve what had been stolen—after he had gone to Alice and obtained the evidence which, he believed, proved the theft—he had been told that, evidence notwithstanding, the law provided no recourse against that theft.