The Path to Power

by Robert A. Caro

  Lean—gaunt now, in fact, after ten weeks of crisscrossing Texas—clean-cut, as handsome as an Arrow shirt ad in his starched collars and double-breasted suits, the thirty-four-year-old Attorney General spoke with one hand in a pocket and the other extended to the audience. His movements were the movements of the fine athlete he had been, and his eloquence was not the shouting of a typical stemwinder but the quieter persuasiveness that moved audiences on the stump as he had moved them in church, particularly when coupled with what the Dallas News called his greatest asset, “his evident sincerity.” He was so tired and tense now that the hand extended to the audience was often as curled as a talon, and he leaned forward to his listeners as he spoke. At most rallies, he had no politicians on stage with him to introduce him; he would walk onto an empty stage alone, say simply, “I’m Gerald Mann, your Attorney General,” and give the audience a grin that would win them over. Even veteran reporters were awed by his energy. “Tireless Gerald C. Mann, 12,000 miles behind him, pushed into vast West Texas Monday on the closing laps of probably the most intensive political campaign in Texas history,” wrote Felix R. McKnight.

  With this new issue, his campaign took on new life. “Mann, despite the absence of pyrotechnics, is attracting surprisingly large crowds,” the News reported. Says Hardeman: “His sincerity was such that he could win any crowd that heard him.”

  But not enough people heard him. Scraping up $1,300 for a limited statewide broadcast, his staff put him on the air on June 23, five days before the election, to give his new speech, but that was one of his last financial gasps, and during the campaign’s final week, Johnson was on the radio—with fifteen-or thirty-minute broadcasts on network hook-ups that blanketed the state—five times each day. Johnson’s supporters—Young, Wirtz, Looney, Hofheinz—had statewide broadcasts, too. Not enough people read about Mann. In the big-city dailies, he got good coverage. But in the weeklies, he didn’t. And, of course, he had few ads in weeklies, while, as he puts it, “They filled the newspapers full.” Mann knew he had a good issue, but he also knew he didn’t have the funds to make it sufficiently effective. His eloquent voice was being drowned out.

  As for Johnson, with Roosevelt behind him, with so much money behind him, with the newspapers filled with his name and the radio filled with his voice, with the guarantee of those bulk votes from San Antonio and the Valley (and, most important, with Pappy O’Daniel trapped in Austin, unable to campaign), how could he lose? The Belden Poll told him he couldn’t. Week after week, every poll showed a steady, and accelerating, increase in his share of the vote. A week before the election, the polls showed, for the first time, that he was in first place—by a single percentage point over O’Daniel, and by a greater margin over Mann and the rapidly falling Dies. He pulled further ahead with each survey that Belden took during that last week; in the final poll, Johnson had 31 percent of the vote, O’Daniel 26 percent, Mann 25 percent and Dies 16 percent. Joe Belden himself was so confident of the accuracy of his forecasts that he issued a statement saying: “The voters of Texas Saturday will more than likely send Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson to Washington as their junior Senator.” “Lyndon Johnson is pulling away,” said the Houston Post after its last poll of that crucial city. He had 43 percent and O’Daniel 22 percent. Mann and Dies were far behind and fading.

  Lyndon Johnson felt he couldn’t lose. Before O’Daniel had entered the race, he had been, for the first time in his life, confident of success. Now, with O’Daniel neutralized, his mood soared upward to euphoria as fast as it had plummeted into depression five weeks before. A staff responsive to its master’s every mood was euphoric, too. A reporter who visited Johnson’s headquarters found his supporters “jubilant. They said the race was over.” The young men were congratulating not only the candidate, but themselves, for their foresight in hitching their wagons to his star. That star had risen far faster than even the most optimistic of them had hoped. The Chief was going to be the youngest member of the Senate—a Senator at thirty-two. Old companions—L. E. Jones, Russell Brown—were planning to drive to Austin for the victory celebration. Even the candidate’s wife, ordinarily so cautious, was caught up in the elation—as, indeed, she had been caught up in it throughout this campaign in which her husband had seemed to have all the support, of every type, that he could want. “Oh, the adventures we had,” she was to recall. “It was in a way the best campaign ever. … Perhaps it was the wine of youth—we were never tired. And our troops loved us, and we loved them—it was a we campaign: ‘We’re going to win.’”

  But Lyndon Johnson was to make a mistake.

  He made it at the very last moment—on Election Day, in fact. Arriving around noon at the Stephen F. Austin Hotel from Johnson City, where he had voted in the morning after making a last speech from the front porch of his boyhood home and kissing all the mothers and grandmothers, as he had kissed them as a teenager, he took a sleeping pill and napped for a while in the bedroom of his suite, while his mother stood guard in the living room to keep anyone from disturbing him. Awakening in the late afternoon, he learned that the news was good; the early returns had put him ahead of O’Daniel, and his lead was steadily widening. Mann and Dies were clearly out of the race. He was also told that George Parr and the other South Texas bosses had been telephoning to find out when they should report their counties’ votes—and he told them, either personally or through an aide, that they should report them immediately.

  The votes from the Valley came in. Duval County had given O’Daniel 95 percent of its vote just a year before; in that intervening year, O’Daniel’s popularity had evidently suffered a remarkably rapid decline; now Duval gave O’Daniel 5 percent of its vote—and gave Lyndon Johnson 95 percent. He received 1,506 votes to 65 for the Governor: George Parr had delivered. In Starr County, the vote was 615 for Johnson, 12 for O’Daniel: the Guerra boys had delivered. In Webb County, it was 978 for Johnson, 257 for O’Daniel: the mysterious Judge Raymond had delivered. In the other South Texas counties controlled by the Anglo jefes, the vote was equally lopsided: in Zapata, 273 for Johnson, 21 for O’Daniel; in Jim Hogg, 119 for Johnson, 12 for O’Daniel. In the five South Texas counties that voted as a bloc, in other words, Johnson received more than 90 percent of the vote: 3,491 to 376 for O’Daniel. Mann, Dies and the other twenty-five candidates received only a few scattered votes.

  In the South Texas counties in which only part of the vote—the vote in Mexican and Negro areas—was controlled, Johnson’s popularity in those areas was even more overwhelming. In “Mextown” and “Niggertown” in Corpus Christi, for example, the vote in one precinct was 411 for Johnson to 26 for the other three major candidates; in another precinct, it was 338 for Johnson to 53 for the other candidates; the Mexican-American and Negro precincts in Nueces County gave him more votes in that county than all the other candidates combined. The vote in the Valley was lighter than usual because of the paucity of paid-up poll taxes in a year in which no statewide election had been scheduled, but the ratios were still impressive. Taking the South Texas vote as a whole, it was 5,009 for Gerald Mann, 5,251 for Martin Dies, 5,364 for W. Lee O’Daniel and 15,423 for Lyndon Johnson.

  The abruptness—and thoroughness—of the decline in the Governor’s popularity in the Valley startled even politicians who might have been thought to be immune to voting conditions there. “It was nauseous to learn of the returns from such corrupt stinkholes as Duval and Starr Counties,” one said. “Money bought every Mexican vote. …” Even some independent spirits in the Valley commented; said one: “They simply voted the Mexicans in a body everyplace they could.” Said another: “… If there is any law to cover it, I think, in common decency, that the ballot boxes of Starr and Duval Counties should be opened and counted. The majority of those voters can neither read or write the English language so … they didn’t know who they voted for. As a matter of fact, they probably didn’t even go to the polls, and the ballots were all placed in the box by the boss.” An observer in Cameron County said: “
We have a situation in this State that is worse than the Pendergast, Kelly-Nash and Boss Hague crookedness ever was. How can one expect honest men and clean government to survive under such a system?”

  On Election Day, the early reporting of the South Texas returns did not seem like a mistake. They were simply added to votes from other counties, and the Johnson total continued to mount. By 9:30 that evening, Johnson was leading O’Daniel by more than 13,000 votes. Emerging from the room on the sixteenth floor in which John Connally, Tom Miller and Jim Blundell had been tallying returns, he went down to the mezzanine, clutching a fistful of telegrams from county judges reporting results, and was hoisted to his supporters’ shoulders and paraded around, waving the telegrams and shouting in triumph, in a wild celebration.

  There was reason for the celebration. He had come not only so far, but so fast: from the Hill Country to, it seemed, a seat in the Senate of the United States at the age of thirty-two. Just ten years before, he had headed for Washington with a borrowed suitcase, no warm clothes, and no money to buy any—impoverished, moreover, in education as well as in pocketbook—to live in a basement and be one of a thousand secretaries to Congressmen. He had become a Congressman himself, and now had become the youngest member of the Senate—so young that, even if he was worried by his family’s short life span, it must have seemed that there was plenty of time to attain the next, last, rung on the ladder. Even though the size of his margin was reduced later that evening, it remained substantial. Mayor Miller was preparing a statement that he would run for the vacated House seat of “Senator Lyndon Johnson.” With 96 percent of the vote in, Johnson with 5152 LEAD, APPEARS ELECTED, the Houston Post headlined the next morning. Said the Dallas News: ONLY MIRACLE CAN KEEP FDR’S ANOINTED OUT. Lady Bird, who was “going around with my little camera, clicking,” says, “He was announced the winner. The Dallas Morning News was even running pictures: ‘Lyndon aged six. …’ We were talking about staff.”

  But, in Texas, not all the votes were counted on Election Day.

  The urban vote was counted on Election Day, of course—by 1941, voting machines were in use in most Texas cities—and most of the rural vote, too, although most rural voting in Texas was still by paper ballot. The results from some rural precincts, however, often didn’t trickle in until several days after a statewide election—and the explanation, in some cases, did not lie merely in the isolation of these precincts and the fact that, in some of them, the county judge might not have a telephone with which to communicate with the Texas Election Bureau.

  There existed in the upper levels of Texas politics common knowledge about the precincts that were for sale, the “boxes” in which the county judge wouldn’t “bring in the box” (report the precinct totals to the Election Bureau) until the man who had paid him told him what he wanted the total to be, the precincts in which the county judge took the rather flimsy locked tin ballot box (to which the judge had the key) to his home to count the ballots at leisure and in privacy (and, if necessary, to insert some new ones), with confidence that no one would ever be able to discover—and certainly not to prove—what he had done. Unless an election was contested, the ballots were never checked at all; in case of a contest, as one politician puts it, “so many things could happen to keep them [the ballots in some rural precincts] from being checked”: if a box arrived at the Election Bureau with its bottom torn off and no ballots inside, the judge would simply swear that when he had sent it off to the Bureau, the box had been intact—it must have been ripped open by some accident en route, he would say.

  Since in a close election, precinct results could thus be altered, it was a fundamental rule of Texas politics not to report your important precincts—the ones in which you controlled the result—early. By reporting your total, you let your opponent know the figure he had to beat, and in Texas, it was all too easy then to beat it. Even if a judge had already reported the result in his precinct, so long as he hadn’t officially certified it, he could change it, saying he had made a mistake in his arithmetic. Johnson had violated this rule, perhaps out of overconfidence, perhaps because his intelligence network had assured him that O’Daniel, his principal opponent, had made no preparations to change any boxes, and would have difficulty doing so now because, except in South Texas, he had alienated the “professional politicians”—the county judges and commissioners whose cooperation he would have needed. But the vote was to be changed nonetheless.

  The reason it was changed had nothing to do with Lyndon Johnson.

  According to O’Daniel’s campaign manager, William Lawson—and Lawson’s account of the following events is confirmed by members of Johnson’s campaign staff and by disinterested politicians and political observers—during the last week or two before the election, the Governor’s increasingly frantic campaign promises had alarmed some of the conservative business lobbyists, the longtime powers behind Texas politics, who had hitherto been his secret supporters. They feared that his new promises to increase pensions might lead to higher taxes on the oil, sulphur and natural gas industries. “He had always gone along with them,” an observer says, “but he was just so unpredictable; they couldn’t be sure they would always be able to control him.” Says another: “O’Daniel wasn’t a very dependable man. You couldn’t tell what he’d do! They were all scared of him. He was an unknown quantity.”

  Business lobbyists’ worries had been reinforced by their concern over another, more particular pledge made by O’Daniel during the campaign, one aimed at another major Texas industry: the making of liquor and beer. Murky and shifting as were many of Pappy’s beliefs, one was crystal clear and inflexible: his conviction that liquor was a tool of the Devil. Even his intimates were not excused an occasional drink. “He was a rabid Prohibitionist,” says Secretary of State Lawson. “I was very careful never to come to the office with liquor on my breath.” On June 6, needing a new surefire issue to rekindle the enthusiasm of his rural Fundamentalist supporters, O’Daniel, assailing “booze dives” which he said were “demoralizing fine young soldiers,” sent to the Legislature a bill prohibiting the sale of beer or liquor within ten miles of any military base. Since the military installations springing up throughout Texas were presenting beer and liquor manufacturers with an immense new market of tens of thousands of young soldiers, this bill posed a real threat. The beer and liquor industries had long been powerful in Texas politics. The Texas Brewers Institute (more informally known on Congress Avenue as “Beer, Inc.”), which represented the giant Pearl Beer Company and more than 200 smaller beer-makers, and the hard-liquor lobby had long been a force in Austin; they had had to be to keep the business flourishing in a state with such strong Prohibitionist sentiment. They had assumed they could easily defeat O’Daniel’s proposal, but just ten days before the campaign ended something occurred which made them worry. When, before the start of the campaign, the chairmanship of the state’s three-member Liquor Control Board, whose power over liquor licenses throughout Texas was all but absolute, fell vacant, the Governor had appointed a crusading Prohibitionist preacher to fill the post. The lobbyists had mobilized the Legislature to refuse to confirm the preacher’s appointment, and to turn down as well other O’Daniel nominees for the post, all of whom seemed more interested in closing down the liquor business in Texas than in supervising it—they included the head of the Texas anti-saloon league and the past president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Ten days before the election, however, O’Daniel had succeeded in pushing through his fifth nominee, another Prohibitionist. A second vacancy on the board would occur shortly, and if O’Daniel succeeded in filling that, too, with another Prohibitionist, the Board “could just about have ended the liquor and beer business down here.” Equally important, O’Daniel’s victory reminded Beer, Inc., that a powerful Governor might succeed in winning passage of the bill creating a “dry zone” around military camps. “There were millions and millions of dollars involved now,” Lawson says. “They had to get him out of the Governorship.�
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  The lobbyists had thought the problem would be solved by O’Daniel’s election to the Senate, which would remove him to Washington and see him replaced in the Governor’s chair by Lieutenant Governor Coke Stevenson, a lifelong Wet and an ally of Beer, Inc., and its hard-liquor partner. Now O’Daniel appeared to have lost the election, but by only about 5,000 votes; it was at once apparent to these powerful lobbyists that removing the threat would not be difficult at all—particularly since Lyndon Johnson, by having his votes reported early, had let them know precisely how many additional O’Daniel votes would be needed to beat him.

  After midnight on Election Day, while Johnson was being paraded around the Stephen F. Austin mezzanine in noisy triumph, across the street, in the Driskill Hotel, a quiet meeting was being held; according to some reports, its de facto chairman was Emmett R. Morse, a former Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives and an attorney for the liquor interests, other key figures were lobbyists for Beer, Inc., and fifteen State Senators. And on Sunday, these men headed out of Austin—to visit county judges who had taken ballot boxes to the privacy of their homes.

  This maneuver was made easier by another mistake that Johnson had made. The mistake was as untypical of Lyndon as overconfidence, and it was due to overconfidence that he made it. It ran directly opposite to the whole grain of his adult life, and ignored one of its most consistent themes: “If you do everything, you will win.” During the ten years since his graduation from college, he had lived by that rule, no matter what the personal cost. For ten years, no matter what the price in fatigue or pride or dignity, he had touched every base, taken every precaution. The 1941 campaign, of course, had been—except for the brief period in which he had been panicked by O’Daniel’s entry into the race—atypical of his adult life, the single instance in which he had been cheerful, optimistic; after a lifetime of apprehension and anxiety, in this lone instance he had been overconfident. And his overconfidence had caused him to neglect certain basic precautions.