“You know,” Horace Richards says with a smile, “later on, when everyone got so excited about the election [the 1948 election for United States Senator from Texas] that Lyndon Johnson stole, I felt that I had been in on the beginning of history. Because I was in on the first election that Lyndon Johnson stole.”*
WERE EVEN SUCH TACTICS inadequate for Lyndon Johnson’s purposes? He used others.
The annual voting for the Gaillardians,† the college’s seven prettiest, most popular and most “representative” coeds, aroused the greatest interest of any campus election—far more than the class officer elections. And the voting, by secret written ballots deposited in a ballot box in the ground-floor hall of Old Main, was conducted under a strict supervision which would prevent repetition of the multiple-voting technique. Previously, most of the winners immortalized in full-page sepia pictures in the Pedagog had been members of the literary society-Black Star “in” crowd, but now Johnson wanted “White Star” girls to win as many of the seven places as possible. Standing in his way were three nominees too popular or pretty to be beaten, but he was confident that his vigorous campaigning would win four places—confident, that is, until Ruth Lewis was nominated.
Unlike the other candidates, Ruth Lewis was not a campus beauty. But although in practice the Gaillardian election was mainly a beauty contest, it was not supposed to be—“representative” was defined as “foremost in college life”—and Miss Lewis had other qualifications. There was always a twinkle in her eye, and in her fingers when she sat down at the old Underwood in the Pedagog office, where she was an assistant editor. “She was a terrific writer—brilliant,” says Pedagog editor Ella So Relle. She wrote for the Press Club, the Scribblers’ Club, and was involved in half a dozen campus activities. And she had ideas as novel on the San Marcos campus of that era as the hair she wore short and straight in the defiant and very un-Texan flapper style: an enthusiastic tennis player herself, she believed that women should have their own athletic teams; she did not want to get married as soon as possible, preferring a career in journalism, where her writing could help people. But she argued for her ideas with a quiet earnestness and self-deprecatory humor that made her so popular that when she was nominated for one of the seven places, it was generally assumed she would win.
But then, as Ella So Relle puts it, “Lyndon found out this dirty little thing about Ruth.”
The “thing” was not really “dirty”—it was not even significant—except in light of the deep feeling of inferiority at San Marcos about the famous University of Texas just thirty miles away, where richer, smarter students went to college. “To understand [what happened], you have to understand how defensive we were about going to San Marcos,” Miss So Relle says. Johnson’s discovery consisted of nothing more than the fact that when two men had stopped to fix a flat tire on a car in which Ruth Lewis and two friends had been riding, and had asked the young women where they went to college, Miss Lewis, out of defensiveness, or embarrassment, had blurted out that they went to the University of Texas, and only later, with a shamefaced grin, had corrected herself. A more trivial incident can hardly be imagined—except that one of the men was an acquaintance of Lyndon Johnson, and happened to mention it to him.
Johnson told Miss Lewis that unless she withdrew from the Gaillardian election, the whole campus would know what she had done. Unless she withdrew, he said, he would write an editorial in the Star revealing the incident and stating that she should not be elected because any woman who was ashamed to say she went to San Marcos was not a “representative” San Marcos coed.
When Johnson left Ruth Lewis, he knew he had won. “He came back [after seeing her] and said we could stop worrying,” Horace Richards says. “He had blackmailed her right out of that election, and he knew it.” Johnson’s assessment was correct. As soon as he had left Miss Lewis, Ella So Relle says, “she came to my house in tears—which was very unusual for Ruth. She said, ‘I’m going to withdraw from the election.’ I was astounded. I wanted her to battle him, but she said he was going to put this in big headlines in the newspaper, and she just could not face that embarrassment.” She withdrew, and the four coeds Johnson wanted to be Gaillardians were all elected.
HIS NEXT TARGET was the Student Council. He himself, as a result of the “stolen” election, was a member, but more than half of the twelve other members, including almost all the seniors and juniors, were athletes and members of the “in” crowd. “I had to rely on the freshmen and sophomores to get the votes to run the Student Council,” he would recall in 1970. He knew how to get them: use the “brains are just as important as brawn” issue that had “touched” in other elections. But he had to know whom to use the issue on: he had to learn the identities of “bright” underclassmen who would either be his candidates for the council or would vote for those candidates. And the inchoate, constantly shifting, nature of the San Marcos student body made identifying such students difficult.
But Johnson had figured out a way to identify them. As night watchman in Old Main, White Star Archie Wiles possessed keys to the registrar’s office. One midnight, Johnson was to recall in that 1970 conversation, “We took the keys and went in there and I … got those little yellow (grade) cards, and I got the names of everyone who had a B average—I took the people with superior intellectual ability.” Lining up nominees, nominators and voters, he saw to it that the freshmen and sophomore places on the council were filled with students to whom the “brains” argument would appeal.
In selecting women candidates, he took a further precaution. He instructed White Stars to date the freshman and sophomore coeds he was considering as nominees. Says Wilton Woods, a senior, who did a lot of such dating because his soft voice and tentative manner were attractive to younger girls, “Lyndon’s idea was to get a real nice-looking girl and see if you could control her. Date her and see how she comes out, see if she’ll go along if she was elected to the Student Council.” If Johnson received a report that a girl would “go along,” he would instruct the White Star who was dating her to ask her to run for the council. “I was dating a little ol’ girl, and my sole purpose in dating her was to get her to run,” Woods says. “That was Lyndon’s idea. [He] wanted [me] to tell her how to vote once she was elected.” The strategy worked. Women at San Marcos were not “modern girls,” Richards explains: they were not particularly interested in politics. (Although they outnumbered men three to one, no woman, so far as can be determined, had ever been a class president.) Johnson’s weeding-out process had ensured, moreover, that the women he selected as candidates were even less interested than most. Women at San Marcos were also not “modern” because, in Richards’ words, “Girls at that time—they’d do what you told them” in areas such as politics that were considered men’s domain. And Johnson’s process ensured, of course, that his candidates were not particularly independent. “And,” Whiteside adds, “don’t forget—these were girls in a school where there were six girls to every two boys. A lot of the girls were very lonely. A boy was a prized possession. They didn’t want to do anything to get you mad at them.” Says Woods: “Seldom did you have to make an issue of it. You’d say, ‘So-and-so wants to be editor of the Star. He’s a good ol’ boy. You’ll vote for him, won’t you?’ And almost always, they would.”
Johnson employed a similar strategy with at least one woman who was already on the council, having Woods date her as long as Lyndon needed her vote. In this instance, the strategy worked particularly well, for the woman, a lively, dark-haired young lady with dark, glowing eyes, fell in love with Woods. “And then, of course, as soon as Lyndon didn’t need her [vote] any more, ol’ Wilton drops her,” Richards laughs. “She really liked Wilton, too, and I bet she really used to wonder what had happened. I bet she could never figure out why ol’ Wilton dropped her.”
PROBABLY SHE NEVER COULD, for, varied as were Lyndon Johnson’s political tactics, one aspect was common to them all. This aspect would have been striking no matter who was pla
nning the tactics, but it was all the more striking when the tactician was a young man who had displayed throughout his life—and was, in his other, non-political, activities, displaying still—so notable a tendency for “talking big.” Lyndon Johnson was planning many tactics now—a whole political strategy, in fact. And he never talked about it at all.
Occasionally, his little brother got a glimpse of it. On some weekends, fifteen-year-old Sam Houston Johnson visited Lyndon, and he would, he would write, never forget “those wonderful conversations (monologues, really) that ran through the long Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings. … I heard several installments of his campaign against the Black Stars during my periodic weekend visits to San Marcos, always listening with wide-eyed admiration as my brother outlined his strategy for the coming week. Even now, I can still visualize him restlessly moving back and forth in his room … sometimes lounging on his bed and then moving on to a rickety wooden chair near the window, his eyes gleaming with anticipation and his deep voice tense with emotion.” But even Sam Houston got only a glimpse. At Sunday noon, he had to go home, and when he left, his brother would still be pacing and prowling around his little room, his eyes gleaming, his hands clasping and unclasping, his long fingers, nails bitten down to the quick and into the quick, twisting and twining under the tension of hidden thoughts.
The White Stars understood the necessity of keeping their existence secret. Students were especially susceptible to the “brains are just as important as brawn” argument because they knew that the “brawn”—the college athletes—belonged to a secret organization and, along with their girlfriends, to an exclusive clique into which most students were not invited. Johnson was playing on that susceptibility quite deliberately. “Most of the non-athletic students secretly resented and probably hated the Saturday heroes, no matter how much they apparently enjoyed the games,” his brother explains. “Quite obviously, since every practical politician knows that hate and fear offer more forceful tools for organizing than love and respect, Lyndon had a rather fertile field at San Marcos. … Lyndon had sized up the situation like an old pro. He had that gut knowledge about the little man’s resentment of the big man. …” The susceptibility of the voters—the “little men”—to whom Johnson was appealing would be less easily translatable into support for Johnson’s candidates if the voters discovered that, in being asked to vote for a Deason or a Harzke, they were being asked to vote for members of another secret organization—also one into which they were not invited.
In forming the White Stars, Richards and Whiteside, not for political reasons but to enhance the feeling of “brotherhood, fraternity” that was so important to them, had formulated strict rules for secrecy. Johnson devised others, which they embraced. No three White Stars could ever be seen talking together on campus, for example; should three find themselves together, meaningful glances would indicate which one should leave. White Star meetings, previously held down at the creek or in members’ rooms in their boardinghouses, were now, at Johnson’s suggestion, moved to the two-story Hofheinz Hotel, where, Johnson pointed out, no passerby could peep through the windows. There was even an ingenious device to allow a White Star to deny with a straight face that he was one: immediately upon being asked if he is a member of the group, a White Star rule read, the member is—upon the very asking of the question—automatically expelled, so that he can answer “No”; he will be readmitted at the next meeting. These rules and others were incorporated into the White Star Bylaws, which new members had to swear to uphold in that impressive ceremony with the candle and the dictionary on the creek bank—and so seriously did these young men take this oath that, forty years later, asked about the White Stars, Deason declined to go into detail “in order not to violate certain oaths that I have taken,” and others declined to talk at all. So successful was Johnson in his insistence on secrecy that even after White Stars had won many campus elections, the campus did not know that there were White Stars. “The Black Stars didn’t know we were organized—nobody knew,” Deason says. “They didn’t know this was an organization working on them. They knew someone was playing havoc with the school, but they didn’t know who.” Whiteside recalls with glee “all these unsuspecting people we used. … We’d say, ‘You’re not going to vote with the Black Stars, are you? You’re not going to help the Black Stars?’ And all the time we had another organization that was so secret they didn’t know we had one.”
Johnson also had reasons for keeping his strategy—and even the fact that he had a strategy—secret from the White Stars themselves. Richards and Whiteside, jealous of their leadership, might well balk at a Johnson plan simply because it wasn’t their plan. Or, if they agreed to it, they might—loudmouths that they were—talk about it, revealing it to the campus at large. Other White Stars might balk at a Johnson plan because of their dislike of him. He couldn’t let even his allies know what he was planning. Occasionally, very occasionally—only when it was unavoidable because Johnson needed his help—Bill Deason got a glimpse of the planning. Al Harzke recalls returning to the little room he shared with Deason and finding his roommate and Johnson sprawled across the bed “calling politics, talking as if there wasn’t nothing but politics—I used to call Bill ‘Senator’ and Lyndon ‘Governor.’” But Johnson never gave even Deason, his first candidate and closest ally, more than a glimpse. It took Deason quite some time, in fact, to realize something about the White Stars’ meetings. They were still informal affairs—loud talk and laughter. And they were still chaired by the group’s founders, Richards and Whiteside, who did most of the talking; Lyndon Johnson, in fact, did very little talking at these meetings. But Deason began to notice by a meeting’s end the decisions they arrived at—Richards, Whiteside and the rest—would invariably be the decisions Johnson had told him, the night before, that he wanted them to arrive at. “In discussions that five or six of us would have in a room, he would not be the dominant one,” Deason says. “But I remember I began to think that he may have controlled the meeting more than we realized, that maybe … he was swaying the group. Gradually, we came to realize that. At least I did. I came to realize that he had a very clever mind.” Gradually, in fact, Deason came to understand something understood by no one else. Richards and Whiteside, the founders of the White Stars, thought they were still running the White Stars. But they weren’t.
THE MOST STRIKING ASPECT of Lyndon Johnson’s secrecy, however, was not the success with which he imposed it on others but the success with which he imposed it on himself.
All his life he had “talked big”—had boasted, bragged, swaggered, strutted, tried to stand out, shoved himself into the forefront—so incessantly that he had revealed a need to talk big, a desperate thirst for attention and admiration. This thirst had not been quenched; his boasting and bragging on other subjects—any subject but campus politics—was as arrant as ever; it is difficult to escape the conclusion that he talked at length about campus politics to Sam Houston Johnson because he had to talk to someone, had to let someone know how smart he was, and his hero-worshipping little brother was the only listener who, because he was not part of the college and would go back to Johnson City on Sunday, could be trusted not to reveal his secrets on campus. But much as Lyndon Johnson may have wanted to talk on this subject, he said not a word to anyone but his little brother—and, in his silence, revealed that beneath the skinny, gangling, awkward, big-eared exterior, beneath the rambling monologues and the wild boasting, beneath the fawning and the smiling and the face turned so worshipfully up to the professors, lay a will of steel. Lyndon Johnson was planning to take a tiny group of outsiders and with them snatch student power; not only snatch existing power, but create for them—and him—new power, of dimensions no students had ever had on campus before. If anyone on campus, even his allies, realized his purposes, he would not be able to accomplish them. If anyone saw what he was doing, he would not be able to do it.
And no one saw.
THE SUCCESS WITH WHICH he cloaked his
maneuvers in secrecy was demonstrated most dramatically during the selection, in May, 1930, of the following year’s Star and Pedagog editors.
Merit, not politics, had traditionally been the criterion for filling these posts, not only the highest-paying but the most influential available to undergraduates. In filling them, the Student Council had always accepted the recommendations of the incumbent editors, who nominated their most qualified assistants from the junior class. In May, 1930, the nominees for the Star and Pedagog editorships, respectively, were a brother and sister who lived in San Marcos, Henry and Medie Kyle, and they were so clearly the best-qualified candidates—as was another “townie,” Edward Puis, for Pedagog business manager—that there appeared to be no question that they would be selected. “We just assumed they would,” says Pedagog editor Ella So Relle. “They [the council] had never failed to do this before.” Kyle’s reforming zeal—he advocated not only less emphasis on athletics and a more equitable distribution of the Blanket Tax, but more independent reading to supplement the almost total reliance on textbook work, and adoption in “honors courses” of the “Oxford Method” of fewer examinations so that students could pursue lines of study without being tied to rigid curricula—had been thwarted during the elections a month before, but he was already planning to resurrect the campaign in the Star. While the council was meeting in Old Main, the three friends, who had grown up together in San Marcos, sat together on a bench outside, awaiting notification of their election.
But it was Horace Richards and Wilton Woods who emerged from the building—and as they saw the waiting trio, they started giggling. Puis and the Kyles soon found out what they were giggling about. When a member of the council, a friend, appeared, he told them that there had been surprising developments at the meeting. A new rule had been suggested. He had objected to it, and so had others, but a vote had been quickly called for and, with the council’s freshman and sophomore members voting for it—along with a single senior, Lyndon Johnson—the rule had been quickly passed by the margin of a single vote. This rule, the friend said, made residents of San Marcos ineligible for Star and Pedagog jobs because, since they lived at home, they didn’t need the salaries as much as other students, and, with the Depression at hand, jobs should go to students in need. The new rule had made Puis and the Kyles ineligible, the friend said, and the jobs they had expected had gone instead to students who had not previously been considered in the running: the Star editorship to Osier Dunn, a junior whose previous role on the paper had been so minor that his picture had not even been included among those in the Pedagog section devoted to the newspaper; the post of Star business manager to Harvey Yoe, a freshman, the first freshman in anyone’s memory to have received such an honor.
The Path to Power Page 29