The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  Aware of Marsh’s influential role in the campaign, Jenkins assumed that Johnson did indeed want the publisher to have the money, and he gave it to him. Actually, however, Johnson did not. Marsh wanted to use the money for advertising; Johnson wanted it for other purposes, but knew that if the imperious publisher got his hands on it, he would spend it his way. The realization that he had made a mistake dawned on Jenkins when Johnson asked him for the money, and, informed that it had been given to Marsh, exploded. Jenkins recalls that “I caught hell from Mr. Johnson,” who, Jenkins says, told him that, having been entrusted with a large sum of money, “You turn it over to the first person you see!”*

  Conservative lobbyists and New Deal strategists—both groups were sending cash to Texas to help Lyndon Johnson. This unanimity was displayed in New York, too. The liberal garment center leaders sent more money—and so did New York conservatives who were interested in power; men who hated Roosevelt and what he stood for, but who needed an “in” at the White House and who had been told by Ed Weisl that the way to get it was to back Lyndon Johnson. Principle or power—both found expression in cash for Lyndon Johnson.

  To obtain most of his new supply of money, however, no tactic was needed. For most of it came from Brown & Root. That firm had made so large an investment in the Johnson campaign already that a further investment was only logical, and it was not only logic that dictated. Herman Brown had thrown himself into the fight, and, as his lobbyist Frank Oltorf says, “Herman didn’t want to lose any fights.” Yet it was beginning to look as if he might lose this one. He summoned the “subs” again. Describing Herman’s demeanor in meetings with contractors, men familiar with these meetings say that he would say, “I’m putting you down for a thousand”—or two thousand, or five. And if someone balked, Herman would look at the man, and say, very quietly, “Now listen, we’ve made you a lot of money.” And he got the sums he wanted. He called in his insurance man, Gus S. Wortham, president of the American General Insurance Company of Houston, and Wortham subsequently gave cash to an American General employee who took it to radio stations, and paid for Johnson political broadcasts with it. He distributed money to men who knew how to use money in Texas: $4,000 to Roy Miller, for example.

  Herman Brown didn’t ask others to give if he wasn’t giving himself, although he appears to have had some qualms about what he was doing. Sometime during these months, a member of the Brown & Root hierarchy called in one of the firm’s tax attorneys, and asked him if political contributions were deductible expenses. The attorney told him what he already knew—that they were not. But Brown made the contributions anyway: giving more “legal fees” to attorneys who passed the money on to the campaign, more “bonuses” to executives who did the same thing.

  With the campaign roaring to its climax, caution was flung to the winds. Some $7,581 was paid to a subcontractor, W. L. Trotti, as “rental” for some equipment; Trotti placed the funds in a dormant bank account, and made withdrawals to “cash.” An IRS agent who later investigated believed the cash was given to the campaign—which would be a more transparent device than any previously used. Herman even drew money himself—$5,000 in one instance—and gave it to the campaign through Austin banker Walter Bremond, Jr. No tactic was necessary for Lyndon Johnson in dealing with Herman Brown. All he had to do was ask. No one knows how much Brown & Root gave to the 1941 Lyndon Johnson campaign for Senator, and no one will ever know, but the amount was in the neighborhood of $200,000. No one knows how much was spent in total in that campaign, and no one will ever know. But in an era in which the cost of a typical Texas political campaign ran in the tens of thousands of dollars, Lyndon Johnson spent hundreds of thousands of dollars—according to one estimate, half a million dollars. Johnson’s first campaign for the House of Representatives had been one of the most expensive congressional campaigns in the history of Texas. His first campaign for the Senate was the most expensive campaign in the history of Texas. Even in a state in which money had always been a significant factor in politics, his use of money to obtain political office was unprecedented.

  More significant than the amount of money was its availability. Asked how much money Johnson was given in 1941, Ed Clark says flatly: “All he needed. If he had $50,000 or $100,000 more, that wouldn’t have mattered. He had as much as he asked for.”

  SOME VOTES for Lyndon Johnson were being purchased more directly, for it was not only the size of Texas that made campaigning so expensive but the ethics that pervaded politics in entire sections of it.

  One of these sections was San Antonio, and the area south of it to the Rio Grande. “The way to play politics in San Antonio,” as John Gunther was to write, “is to buy, or try to buy, the Mexican vote, which is decisive.” The city’s West Side was a gigantic slum, containing perhaps 60,000 residents, who were paid, Gunther says, “probably the lowest wages in the United States”—for pecan shelters (San Antonio was the “Pecan Capital of the World) an average of $1.75 per week. It might have been supposed that the support of these disadvantaged people would go to advocates of the New Deal which was attempting to improve the lot of the disadvantaged, but in fact they voted at the direction of their leaders—who were motivated mainly by cash. Some of it they passed out to individual voters: two, three, or, perhaps, five dollars per voter. A single payment might not be enough—which inspired what Gunther calls a “cruel little joke, ‘An honest Mexican is one who stays bought.’” Explains San Antonio Postmaster Dan Quill: “First [some months before the election] you had to pay their poll taxes. And that was a very dangerous thing to do because they might take your money, and then on Election Day some guy might come along and give them five dollars, and they’d vote the other way—with your poll taxes.” Constant precautions were therefore necessary; in many of San Antonio’s “Mexican boxes” election supervisors would, in violation of law, stand alongside each voter in the voting booths to make certain that each vote was cast as paid for. Even the supervisors might take a candidate’s money and deliver the precinct’s votes to another candidate, who had paid more (or had paid later); the supervisors had to be watched by other men, more trusted men, usually from the candidate’s own staff. On Election Day, careful candidates had men “riding the polls” in San Antonio—driving from polling place to polling place to make sure the candidate was getting what he had paid for. Northern liberals might rhapsodize, as Sherwood Anderson did after one Maverick election victory, that he had, through implementation of New Deal policies, bought the West Side’s votes in a “new and legal way,” but in fact the use of cash had played a not inconsiderable role in his victories—and in 1941, he had learned again the crucial factor in San Antonio elections the hard way; “Maury Maverick won when he carried the West Side, and lost when he didn’t carry the West Side,” Gunther was to write; in 1941, this champion of the New Deal had been heavily outspent by the “City Machine” on the West Side, and had lost it and the election.

  In 1941, Lyndon Johnson needed the West Side, for he was very unpopular on the North Side, among the city’s large, and conservative, Catholic population; the San Antonio Rotary Club had refused even to let him address it during the campaign. He knew, of course, how to get the West Side; he had himself participated in the purchase of votes on the most basic level when, still a congressional secretary, he had sat in a hotel room handing dollar bills and five-dollar bills to Mexicans on behalf of Maury Maverick. Now he had to buy in large lots.

  He had a good man handling the West Side. Dan Quill had been handling such jobs for a long time. He had begun in 1931, when Kleberg ran for the first time, and Roy Miller gave him money and told him he was responsible for one of the Mexican “boxes.” “It was right in the heart of Mexican Town” in an area dangerous for an outsider even to walk through, the tough little Irishman was to recall forty years later. “That was a real terrible slum.” But he moved there “so I could be eligible to be an election supervisor there. I moved into a house there with a school janitor who was also going to b
e a supervisor. We were scared; we locked the doors. …” But on Election Day, he carried his box, and he had been carrying key Mexican boxes for the next ten years. He knew every trick of the trade—and he knew how much money was needed to get Lyndon Johnson San Antonio’s West Side vote. “We figured we needed ten thousand dollars,” he says—and that sum was provided.

  The reason Quill didn’t need more—$10,000 was a comparatively small investment in the West Side—was Lyndon Johnson’s new alliance with the “City Machine.” The alliance was kept secret, so secret that most of Johnson’s closest advisors didn’t know about it, but the alliance was solid. With the Kildays, Mayor Quin and Sheriff Anderson on Johnson’s side, Quill was excused from responsibility for those Mexican boxes which they controlled—and which would be delivered to Johnson by them; “If the leader [in a box] was a deputy sheriff [for example], we figured he’d control his precinct. We didn’t spend any money there.” San Antonio, third largest city in Texas, was a key to any statewide election. Johnson may have been unpopular there, but, thanks to his foresight when still a congressional secretary years before, now, running for statewide office, he could be sure of Quill’s 1,500 votes “who ought to follow in the steps of the Postmaster.” Now he was confident that San Antonio would give him about 10,000 more.

  South of San Antonio, south even of Cotulla, was “The Valley.”

  In the counties that bordered the lower reaches of the Rio Grande, which separated the United States from Mexico, and in the counties which adjoined them to the north—the counties of the South Texas brush country—votes were delivered en masse to a degree true of perhaps no other region in the United States.*

  Only because of the drawing of a border were these counties part of the United States. More than half their inhabitants were Mexican not merely by descent but by culture; they spoke only Spanish, and clung to the customs of their homeland across the river; their tiny, dozing towns, strung like beads along it, “bore,” one traveler wrote in 1940, “an appearance as foreign as their names”—San Ygnacio, Santa Maria, La Paloma, Los Indios. Their houses were thatched adobe huts or jacales, one-or two-room structures of willow branches daubed with mud, around which swarmed goats and chickens and children. In the larger cities—Laredo, Harlingen—they lived in shacks in sprawling slums; entering these slums was like entering a foreign city. Largely illiterate, they had, as V. O. Key, Jr., noted, “only the most remote conception of Anglo-American governmental institutions.” One custom prevalent in the near-feudalistic regions of Mexico from which they came was that of dependence on a local leader, the patron or jefe; “from time immemorial, they had given obedience … to the head or overseer of the ranch,” one observer wrote. They continued this custom in America. In this region of great ranches, where so many of the Mexicans worked—the King Ranch, which extended over four of the counties in this region, alone employed more than 700 vaqueros—el patron was often the ranch owner. The cattle barons, Weeks wrote, “established themselves as lords protector of those Mexicans who became their tenants and ranch hands.” The resulting relationship was feudal, with the vaqueros giving “unquestioning loyalty to the ranch owners and regarding] their wishes as law, the only law he knows.” But some of these patrons were political bosses—ruthless, in some cases vicious, men who stalked the streets of the dusty little towns in their domains surrounded by armed, unshaven pistoleros; politics was violent in the Valley. A reporter from Philadelphia who journeyed there in 1939 found “as hardbitten a political crowd … as Texas ever saw … Each [county] has its own iron-fisted boss, who would make Philadelphia’s Jay Cooke or New York’s Jimmy Hines look like pikers.” The most famous among them, the Valley’s Boss of Bosses, was George Parr, son of Archie Parr, the legendary Duke of Duval, and now Duke in his own right. The Parrs had ruled Duval County since 1912, when Archie sided with the Mexicans after an “Election Day Massacre” in San Diego, the county seat, had left three of them dead. But others, less well known, had been in power even longer. Among the petty despots who ruled along the Rio Grande—Judge Bravo of Zapata County; Judge Raymond of Webb (a figure, one chronicler wrote, so secretive that “little is known of him except rumor,” who ruled Laredo “with an iron hand”), Sheriff Chub Pool of La Salle; the “Guerra boys,” four brothers who ran Starr County—were some whose families had held power in their dusty duchies for half a century.

  On Election Day, Mexican-Americans were herded to the polls by armed pistoleros, sometimes appointed “deputy sheriffs” for the day; each voter was handed a receipt showing he had paid his poll tax (usually these taxes had been purchased by the jefes months before and kept in their safes to, as Key puts it, “insure discipline and orderly procedure”). In some precincts, these voters were also handed ballots that had already been marked; according to one description,

  The Mexican voter … was marched to the polls, generally by a half-breed deputy sheriff with two six-shooters, a Winchester rifle, and a bandoleer of ammunition, to perform the sovereign act of voting. He entered the polls, one at a time, was handed a folded ballot which he dropped in the box, was given a drink of Tequila, and then was marched out, where he touched the hand of one of the local political bosses or some of his sainted representatives.

  In other precincts, matters were managed less crudely: the voters were told whom to vote for, but were allowed to mark their own ballots; of course, the guards accompanied them into the voting cubbyholes to ensure that the instructions were followed. Even if the voter was allowed to cast his ballot in secrecy, he had little chance of escaping unnoticed if he disobeyed instructions; each ballot was given a number that corresponded to the number on a tear-off sheet attached to the ballot, and a voter had to sign his name on the sheet before it was torn from the ballot and the ballot cast. This procedure had been enshrined in Texas law ostensibly to keep a person from voting more than once, but it also allowed the election judges to know—by matching the tear sheet to the ballot—how a citizen voted. Some jefes dispensed with all this bother; an attorney for one of them, who let his voters keep their poll tax receipts, recalls his procedure: “Go around to the Mexicans’ homes. Get the numbers of their [poll tax] receipts. Tell them not to go to the polls. Just write in 100 numbers, and cast the 100 votes yourself.”

  The number of votes at the jefes’ command was not necessarily limited by the number of eligible voters. Another advantage of the poll tax system to the Valley “machines” was that after the age of sixty, a voter did not have to pay the tax. Poll tax lists were checked only irregularly to eliminate the names of those who died after sixty, and, in the words of one expert on the subject, when an election was close in Texas, “in the Valley, the ‘machine’ votes the dead men.” Nor were all voters even American citizens; on Election Day the saloons of the Mexican town of Reynosa, across the Rio Grande from Hidalgo, were cleaned out, and truckloads of Mexicans were brought across to vote in Texas; Starr County was also “an excellent location for bringing voters from across the border,” a commentator notes. In Webb County, the small town of Dolores had about 100 American citizens—and in some elections recorded as many as 400 votes. As a result of such tactics, the vote from the Valley (a vote which generally went “all one way”: the jefes had learned to stick together to maximize their impact—and influence—on Texas politics) rarely displayed the diversity of opinion associated with a democracy; some 15,000 votes were generally believed to be controlled in the Valley, and it was not unusual for them to go to a favored candidate by margins as large as ten to one.

  The decisive consideration was cash. The power of these petty despots was matched by their greed. Not content with siphoning off hundreds of thousands of dollars from every aspect of municipal government (the Parrs “treated the county budget virtually as their own personal bank account,” says one Texas historian), the Parrs collected a nickel “tax” on every bottle of beer sold in Duval; visitors inquiring why beer, twenty cents everywhere else in Texas, cost twenty-five cents in Duval, were informed
that the extra nickel was for “George.” To some of these despots, votes were a commodity like any other—a commodity to be sold. According to the best history of politics in the Valley, “The State candidates who have the most money to spend usually carry these machine counties.” In 1940, O’Daniel had carried them—with their customary unanimity. George Parr’s Duval County, for example, had given the Governor 3,728 votes, to a total of 180 for the other seven candidates. But in 1941, efforts were being made to ensure that these counties would be carried by Lyndon Johnson instead. These efforts had begun almost as soon as the campaign had begun. Brown & Root played a hand in them; on April 23, the firm’s “Labor Director” informed Johnson that one bloc vote—the state’s captive labor unions—had been secured (“Statewide labor vote assured, but no noise”), and added: “Latin American support in lower counties is next objective. Looks easy.” For a while, with Mann refusing to buy votes, and Dies refusing to take an interest in buying them, this assessment proved correct. On May 9, Johnson headquarters was assured by a scout it had sent to the Valley that “this district … is for Lyndon Johnson.” The George Parr machine, the scout said, is “very active for Johnson.” The entrance into the campaign of the Valley’s 1940 favorite changed the situation—nor would this be the first time that the Valley’s commitment to a candidate had been changed by a later, higher, offer from another candidate. But Alvin Wirtz was an old ally of the Parrs. He had personally negotiated with old Archie, with whom he had served in the State Senate, for the Parr-controlled votes in Nueces County in a 1928 Democratic attempt to defeat Congressman Harry Wurzbach which failed when Wurzbach made charges of election fraud stick. When, with Johnson hospitalized and the campaign in crisis, Wirtz rushed to Texas, he stopped over in Dallas, where he held a meeting with the campaign’s treasurer, oilman Lechner. Then he disappeared for several days; only later would puzzled newsmen learn that during these days Wirtz had been in South Texas. No one can say with certainty what he was doing there, although, according to sources whose information on other, more verifiable, Wirtz activities invariably proves correct, he and O’Daniel supporters were engaged in a bidding war for the Valley’s votes. Lyndon Johnson himself contacted George Parr on the telephone at least once, in the presence of Polk and Emmett Shelton, two of Parr’s attorneys. By June 18, the situation had been resolved. Horace Guerra of Starr County, Parr’s principal ally, assured Johnson, “You can depend on my and my friends’ wholehearted support. I predict Starr County will give you a substantial majority.”