In his manuscript, Salas attempts to explain his motives for writing it. One, he says, was to “show people the corruption of politics.” This explanation becomes less convincing as Salas talks, because of the pleasure in his voice and on his face when he says, “Any vote for Stevenson [smile] I counted for Johnson.” But in the manuscript he also gives other motives which ring more true. In part, he stated, he wrote his “book” because he wanted his children to know the story of Box 13, and indeed of his whole life. “Now is the year 1979,” he wrote. “I am running short of time, feel sick and tired, but … before I go beyond this world, I had to tell the truth.… My wife Tana know why [he certified the two hundred votes] for Lyndon Johnson but my three children, they don’t know why, when they read my book, I hope they will understand, and find me free from blame, I am certain they are not going to be against me.” Before he died, he wrote, he wanted to put down the truth for them. And in part, he stated, he wrote his “book” because he wanted history to know the story of Box 13—and his role in it. The elderly, frail Mexican-American man sitting in the trailer in Houston felt very strongly that he was a part of history—a small but, in his view, a vital part (“I had to certify” the crucial two hundred votes; “we put L B Johnson as senator for Texas, and this position opened the road to reach the Presidency”)—and he had written it “exactly the way it happened” so that history would acknowledge his role. His story, he wrote, is the story of “How an Indian boy raised in the rugged mountains of Durango came to this country and was involved in one of the most notorious scandals of politics that opened the road for L B Johnson to reach the presidency of this country, this is history like it or not, nobody can erase these facts.”
Salas’ pride, moreover, was clearly hurt that when finally, in 1977, he told the Associated Press the story he had waited so long to tell, “many people did not believe.” “The people have a good reason not believe what I wrote in the book,” he admits in “Box 13.” “The reason is that I lied under oath.” But, he said, the story he told the Associated Press was “the true story.” As for the Johnson Library, quoting at one point from the transcript (which he refers to as the “questionnaire”) of the Masters’ hearing, he stops and says: “Reader it is a long questionnaire if you willing to read it all go to the Lyndon Johnson Library in Austin, of course you don’t find there that we stole the election for L B Johnson.” Perhaps, he wrote, if he put all the facts down in detail, in a book, people would believe.
During the years since he had written the manuscript, he had several times made additions to it. In some of them, he expresses confidence that eventually he will be believed. “May be I pass away before I see my book published,” he wrote, “but some day it will come out, because it is part of history of the United States and people have the right to know the exact truth.” At other times, as he grew older, he was more pessimistic. At one point, he wrote in hand, “I have been having trouble to publish, some publishers don’t believe what I wrote is the truth.” Later still, he wrote, “One thing worries me, and it is that I won’t be here to see my book published. My time is getting shorter and shorter every day that goes by.…”
In “Box 13,” Salas mentions two other reasons for coming forward at last to tell the story he had concealed for so many years. One is that George Parr died. “I gave George my word to stay at his side to the end,” he wrote. “That end came when George died, that released me from my promise.…” The other reason he gives is yet one more reminder of the force of the personality of the former Governor of Texas, and of its effect on people who hardly knew him.
Salas wrote about the moment in the hearing in Alice when the Federal Master announced that Justice Black had ruled and that the hearing was over. As the announcement was made, he wrote, “I looked at Coke Stevenson and that gave the shivers.… Still remember the look in his eyes, frustration, despair and desperation, when we all heard. At that moment I had pity and compassion for the man, we stole his well-deserved candidacy, and I thought for myself [that I] brought disaster to another man not involved in no way with my projects.… When I was going out, all my friends shouted viva Luis Salas, in other circumstances may be that could be welcomed, this time I did not feel anything but remorse, knew very deep on me that I had wronged another human being.” During the intervening years, Indio Salas wrote, he had been unable to forget the look in the eyes of that strong, silent man, and ever since, “The only remorse I feel is … for what we did to Coke Stevenson.”
Indeed, Luis Salas relates in “Box 13,” Sam Smithwick was not the only deputy sheriff from Alice who wrote Coke Stevenson a letter. He, Luis Salas, had written him also, Salas says. “I wrote him a letter asking forgivings, but he never answered.”
“I don’t blame him,” Luis Salas said.
WHATEVER SALAS’ MOTIVES for writing “Box 13,” that manuscript—and his interview with me—adds details to the story of the 1948 election. The manuscript names the men who he says actually added the two hundred votes—Deputy Sheriffs Willie Mancha and Ignacio (“Nachito”) Escobar—and explains why Salas refused George Parr’s request that he add the votes himself. “I did not want them in my handwriting”; certifying the votes involved merely “giving another total,” so he agreed to do that. “That night in the dark corridors of the Adams Building a President of the United States was made.” Parr called off names from the poll list, Salas wrote, asking him if the person had voted, and if Salas said the person had not voted, Mancha would add that name to the poll list while Escobar added a Johnson vote to the tally sheet. The manuscript explains the two added votes for Stevenson: after they reached the requested 200 figure, “Nachito was a jolly man full of jokes, he said, let us give this poor man [Stevenson] a pilón [gift], and he added two votes making a total of 202.” As to whether he, Luis Salas, had on Election Night reported the Johnson total as 765, Salas wrote that of course he had: “I told Cliff Dubose … Dinky Price was there, and he heard me.… Price was right, so there you are if the investigation had continued, they could easily had me indicted.…”
I asked Salas if I could copy the manuscript, and when Salas agreed, we went to a nearby stationery store and copied it on a Xerox machine. “Everyone is dead except me, Robert,” he said. “And I’m not going to live long. But Box 13 is history. No one can erase that.”
ON THE POINT in his 1977 statement to the Associated Press on which attention had focused—whether or not Lyndon Johnson himself had come to George Parr’s office to ask for two hundred more votes—Salas said that he had recognized Johnson because during Johnson’s campaign trip to Alice, Salas had been ill in bed and Johnson’s campaign workers had brought him to Salas’ house to meet this man who was so important to his hopes in the Valley.
On this point, Salas could be lying. Or he could be mistaken—given his very imperfect English, that is a strong possibility; he may simply have misunderstood the introduction of the man who came to his home. Or, on that campaign trip to the Valley, a Johnson aide who physically resembled the candidate could have done in Salas’ home what Joe Mashman did from the helicopter: pretend he was Johnson to someone who could not tell the difference. Or Salas could be telling the truth; Johnson might have come to San Diego himself to ask for votes.
But the point is not nearly so significant as Johnson’s partisans made it appear.
Although there is still a dispute over whether Johnson asked in person for the final, decisive 200 votes to be added to his total, there can no longer, thanks to the confirmation, in Salas’ manuscript and interviews, of the sworn testimony of others, be any reasonable doubt that 200 votes were added to that total—six days after the election. DuBose had testified that Salas had originally given the total as 765; Price had testified that it had been 765. The only doubt about that fact had been cast by Salas’ denial when he had testified. And now Salas was admitting that he had lied: “I told Cliff [DuBose] 765.”
The two hundred votes that “changed history” are, in fact, once one retreat
s from the headlines, significant only because of their decisive timing. There is, thanks to Salas, no longer any doubt that in his Box 13 alone far more than two hundred votes were stolen for Lyndon Johnson. Jimmy Holmgreen had previously said so: “I saw dozens of votes that were for Stevenson counted for Johnson.” Ike Poole had previously said so. And now Salas was saying so: “If they were not for Johnson, I make them for Johnson.”
Even Box 13 as a whole, notorious as it became in American political legend, is hardly unique. In that precinct, votes were counted for Johnson although they had actually been cast for Stevenson, and further votes were counted for Johnson although nobody had cast them at all. But “there were hundreds of Box 13s in the Valley.” Duval County gave Johnson 4,622 votes, and even the rudimentary investigation cut short by Justice Black’s order showed that a high percentage of those votes had never actually been cast at all. The testimony in Zapata County had been presenting the same picture. In the three counties investigated by federal Masters in Chancery, therefore, the evidence was overwhelming that a high percentage of the 7,279 votes counted in Lyndon Johnson’s totals were not cast at all or were cast for Stevenson. Similar conditions had prevailed in Starr County, which had given Johnson 3,038 votes. And what of the rest of George Parr’s domain: his key “boxes” in Corpus Christi that produced 3,000 Johnson votes, for example? What of Judge Raymond’s Laredo? No investigation was conducted there, but no Johnson adviser in a position to know suggests seriously that the 5,544 votes Johnson received in Webb County were “level.” As for San Antonio—San Antonio where Lyndon Johnson “rode the polls” on Primary Day himself to oversee the vast West Side—Johnson’s deputies on the West Side themselves boast of the votes that were “switched” for him there, and the estimate most frequently given is 10,000. Not 87 votes “changed history” and not 200, but thousands—many thousands, in fact.
Did Johnson ask in person—or just over the telephone, or just through men like Wirtz and Looney and Clark—for these votes? Johnson’s followers deny Luis Salas’ contention that in the case of Box 13 Johnson asked in person. But that denial would be significant only if it proved not merely that those particular votes were not stolen at Johnson’s personal request but that he had no personal knowledge of what was going on in the Valley as a whole, and in San Antonio. And nobody is seriously suggesting that.
IN 1983, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library obtained another item that might have been of interest in analyzing the 1948 senatorial election. It was an oral history interview given in that year by William R. Smith, the Federal Master in Chancery who had presided over the Precinct 13 hearing.
Smith’s oral history leaves little doubt as to what his report to Judge Davidson would have said, had not Justice Black’s ruling forced him to terminate his hearing. More important, it makes a point that articles on the election almost invariably overlook, possibly because it was so completely blurred by Johnson’s oratory. Salas’ confession in 1977 that he had lied on the witness stand had come as no surprise to him, Smith told the oral history interviewer. “I thought at the time he was lying.” When the precinct election judge had testified that he had gone to the Alice News office on the night of the primary and not given the precinct’s election returns to the reporter, “I didn’t believe a word of that, because that’s what he went there for.… I figured what the hell was Salas doing there if he wasn’t there to give them the election returns.”
But the lie that he, the Master, had found most significant was Salas’ statement that he had lost the poll list and other records of the election. “I didn’t believe a word of it,” Smith told the interviewer. “[He] kept telling how these poll lists had been stolen and misplaced” and “I didn’t believe that.” That lie, to Smith, was pivotal, because the failure to produce the records was, to his mind, the crucial point in the case.
There’s one thing that kept going through my mind during that whole hearing, which I thought was probably the most potent fact in the case.… At the hearing before Judge Davidson, the hearing before that old Judge [Archer] in Austin, and the hearing before the State Democratic Committee, if Stevenson were wrong about the illegally added votes, all the Johnson forces had to do was to bring the election poll list and the election return [tally sheet] of Precinct 13 and show it to them, that there hadn’t been anything added, but they never did it. They never did do it. And if they had wanted to defeat Stevenson in the hearing before me, all they’d have to do is bring the official poll records of Precinct 13 of that day’s voting and put them before me as proof. Of course, they may have done it later, but I didn’t think they were going to. They hadn’t ever produced it anywhere else. And to me, that was the most potent fact in the whole case, the fact that they had not brought these things in. That would have been a perfect way to refute the allegation of Stevenson. But they never did do it.
He had opened the ballot boxes in the hope of finding the Precinct 13 poll list, Smith said, “but I didn’t expect to find it. If I had found it, I probably would have fainted. I didn’t think it was going to be in there”—and, of course, it wasn’t.
And what would his report to Judge Davidson have said? Smith was asked. “What are your conclusions?”
“I was very much of the opinion that the Stevenson people were right.… I firmly believe and have for years that the election was stolen in Precinct 13. I’m now convinced that [the votes] were added, 202 of them, after the polls closed.… I think Lyndon was put in the United States Senate with a stolen election, and I think he and everybody else knew it.”
This statement by the Federal Master in Chancery is the most definitive word available on Precinct 13, since his report would have been the basis for Judge Davidson’s ruling on whether or not to keep Lyndon Johnson’s name off the ballot. But it is a statement that, so far as can be determined, has never appeared in print.
IN THE LANDSCAPE of Lyndon Johnson’s life, already littered with stolen elections, the 1948 election was simply one more detail. Its larger significance lay in the increased clarity it gave to certain aspects of his character.
Prior to his entrance into campus politics at San Marcos, “no one,” as another student recalled, “cared about campus politics.” Elections—for class offices or the Student Council—were casual affairs. But Johnson saw in those elections an opportunity to obtain a measure of control, small but pivotal, over the fate of some of his fellow students. At this “poor boys’ school,” a diploma was for many students the only hope of escape from a life of poverty and brutal physical toil on their families’ impoverished ranches and farms, and in the Depression, campus jobs, with their tiny cash stipends, represented the only means by which these young men could stay in school and obtain their diplomas. Johnson saw a method by which the victors in campus politics could obtain authority to dispense those jobs. And to obtain this power that no one else had focused on, he did what no one else on the sleepy campus had done: created, out of a small social club, a disciplined and secret political organization. And when, because of his personal unpopularity, the club could not, despite his organizing, win elections, he taught unsophisticated farm boys how to steal elections (and how to win them by other methods: “blackmailing” a popular rival woman candidate out of a race over a meaningless indiscretion, for example; “things we would never have dreamt of if it hadn’t been for Lyndon”). College Hill’s pattern was repeated on Capitol Hill in 1933 and 1934. The “Little Congress” of congressional aides was a social organization. But Johnson saw in its presidency a means of entrée to men of power. Again there were repeated complaints, this time from fellow Little Congress members, that he had “stolen” elections (“Everyone said it: ‘In that last election that damn Lyndon Johnson stole some votes again’ ”). When, in 1933 and 1934, Johnson was accused of “stuffing” a ballot box, he was not yet represented by Abe Fortas, and his accusers succeeded in accomplishing what Fortas prevented Johnson’s 1948 accusers from accomplishing: opening the suspected ballot box. When the Little C
ongress box was opened, it was found that the accusations against Johnson were true. Again, as at college, what he had done was unprecedented: no one had ever stuffed a Little Congress ballot box before. (And, perhaps no one would ever stuff one again, for after his departure the organization quickly reverted to its easygoing social role; “My God, who would cheat to win the presidency of something like the Little Congress?”) In his first campaign for the Senate, he stole thousands of votes, and when they proved insufficient (“He [O’Daniel] stole more votes than we did, that’s all”), his reaction was to try to steal still more, and his failure in this attempt was due only to his irredeemable tactical error, not to any change in the pattern: in making the attempt he tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade George Parr to go further than even the Duke of Duval had ever gone before; (“Lyndon, I’ve been to the federal penitentiary, and I’m not going back for you.”) At each previous stage of his career, then, Lyndon Johnson’s election tactics had made clear not only a hunger for power but a willingness to take (within the context of American politics, of course; the coups or assassinations that characterize other countries’ politics were not and never would be included in his calculations) whatever political steps were necessary to satisfy that hunger. Over and over again, he had stretched the rules of the game to their breaking point, and then had broken them, pushing deeper into the ethical and legal no-man’s-land beyond them than others were willing to go. Now, in 1948, in his dealings with the Valley, he was operating beyond the loosest boundaries of prevailing custom and political morality. What had been demonstrated before was now underlined in the strongest terms: in the context of the politics that was his life, Lyndon Johnson would do whatever was necessary to win. Even in terms of a most elastic political morality—the political morality of 1940s Texas—his methods were amoral.
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