Then he won the Democratic nomination and went on to win the election as United States Senator in November, 1948. And on June 8, 1949, he called me one morning—8 o’clock in the morning—and said he wanted to submit my name for nomination as United States Marshal for the Southern District of Texas. I don’t think up to that minute I had thought more than sixty seconds in my entire life about a United States Marsha1—what a Marshal did—and I thanked him and told him that I was grateful for his consideration, but I really couldn’t undertake the job … Mr. Johnson said, “Hell, I’m not going to take an answer of no on that. I’ll call you back this same time in the morning … So, I’ll call you back in the morning. I don’t want to hear the word no.
Carter found someone else to manage his bottling plant as he took the appointment and went on the government payroll, all while working as a “volunteer” for Johnson, who put his key men on other payrolls to minimize his own; Carter said that Jake Pickle, who was running the overall campaign, told him, “Now, what I ought to do is get you on some company’s payroll where you’ll be doing this traveling for them and actually attending to this work.”78 Carter refused to allow the campaign to cover his expenses, telling Pickle, “I was doing this because I believed in Mr. Johnson; that I was an amateur and that I wanted to retain my amateur status. I didn’t want to be paid for any of it.”79 Carter said that Johnson seemed to him to be planning his presidential candidacy since he first met him in 1937, and specifically “talked to him about that in the 1948 campaign when he was running for the Senate.”80 Johnson had clearly identified useful aspects of Carter’s character by then—undoubtedly his 100 percent devotion and willingness to perform any task assigned to him were paramount—and had already decided that he would fit well into his organization. In 1954, Johnson made him the campaign manager for five districts and would rely on him for certain expected future tasks that would require delicate but forceful assertiveness.
Horace Busby and Malcolm Wallace joined the Johnson campaign about the same time as Carter; in fact, it was Carter who brought Wallace to Washington DC, introducing him to Johnson at Johnson’s home on 30th Place. Johnson had placed Wallace in the Agriculture Department, and by 1951, Wallace had passed an FBI background check and obtained work as an economist. But as with all the other men installed in government positions by his mentor, Wallace was serving primarily as a Johnson man. Mac Wallace and Horace Busby were not only classmates, but fellow radical leftist-socialists and campus activists; both were members of the exclusive Friar Society. They were involved in the same issues during the late 1940s, including the widely reported protests against the firing of the president of the University of Texas, Homer Rainey, a socialist who had been heavily attacked by conservative Texans. When President Rainey was dismissed by the board of regents because of his liberal persuasions, Busby used The Daily Texan to organize a campus rally for Rainey. At this rally, the student body president, Malcolm Wallace, led a march to the state capital and then a small group of students to the governor’s office, forcing the governor to temporarily leave town. During this period, Busby and Wallace shared the same liberal political beliefs, and both were members in some of the liberal campus clubs and organizations. They also had in common the appearance of both their names in numerous Texas newspapers being read in Washington by Congressman—soon-to-be Senator—Lyndon B. Johnson, who used such news items to recruit men to come to Washington. Busby, as the student editor of the Texan, received two letters from Johnson complimenting him on his editorials. When he received an offer from Johnson to come to Washington, he said that John Connally urged him to accept it: “The Congressman is regarded on the Hill, has been regarded almost from the beginning of his career, as having nearly always one of the two or three best staffs in Congress. You don’t lose any respect on the House side of Capitol Hill working for Lyndon Johnson, because people just assume that you’re good.”81
Johnson felt that his staff owed him 100 percent loyalty for having the honor of working for him. When any of them went into the military, he expected they would return to work for him, and if they didn’t, he took it as a personal insult. Walter Jenkins was the first to return to Johnson’s staff; according to Horace Busby, while Johnson was sulking about his employees, he said that he thought Jenkins was okay, but not as good as Connally had been:82
Walter was one of his boys and had gone off in the army and became a major … and was back and was working like a dog trying to win the Congressman’s approval and he just didn’t count. He knew he had a very able assistant, almost a genius assistant, but that still wasn’t good enough. Well, what he really wanted was another John Connally … He was going to get him another John Connally.
But he [Johnson] kept on sulking. It was clear he was still sulking … he was walking around the room and his hands were always poked deep down in his pants pockets, and he was jiggling his keys and change … When he was thinking, that was the way he thought. He’d walk around the room looking up at the ceiling and jiggling the change in his pocket. Again, John (Connally), being the most sensitive of the group to these nuances of mood, said, Well, what else is eating on you? Is there something else you want? It took a little coaxing, but he finally came out with it. There was something else he wanted. And he said, “As long as I have been in Washington, I have observed one thing. That the men who go far there, and there’s never been an exception to it, they always have some little fellow in their office who sits back in a corner. He doesn’t have to have any personality, doesn’t have to know how to dress, usually they don’t have their tie tied right, a button off their shirt”—typical Johnson, running on at this—“nicotine stains on their fingers, no coat, all like that. But they sit back in the corner, they don’t meet any of the people that come in the office. They read and they think and they come up with new ideas, and they make the fellow smart. I’ve never had one of those, and I want one.”
Horace Busby’s recollection of Johnson’s interest in having his own “little fellow in the corner” makes for interesting conjecture over which of his many congressional aides fit that particular role: Certainly not Connally, probably not Jenkins, and obviously not Wallace; was Busby himself, in the early years, of that genus? Clearly, the original fellow in the corner Johnson brought to Washington, while he was still an aide to Congressman Kleberg, was Gene Latimer.
The import of the last few paragraphs cannot be overstated: Lyndon Johnson had created certain niches for each of his assistants, whether they were on his own payroll or in other government agencies, such as the Congressional Post Office, the Federal Communications Commission, or the Department of Agriculture. One such niche was to mold other men—John Connally, for example—into his own likeness. Another was performing in the role as Johnson’s unofficial chief of staff: Walter Jenkins and, after he was discarded, Bill Moyers, though neither had ever held such a title. After Moyers unceremoniously left, Marvin Watson replaced him. The niches he had in mind for Cliff Carter (chief bagman and assistant criminal facilitator) and Malcolm “Mac” Wallace (hit man extraordinaire) were special; there would be no need for successors because they were put in positions from which they could never leave.
When Johnson became a member of Congress, he recognized that the personality traits he had exploited in Prexy Evans were evident in the fearsome Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn. Most other congressmen or congressional staffers were afraid of him, but Lyndon was determined to become friendly with Sam Rayburn. Lyndon Johnson found that Rayburn reacted much the same to his sycophancy as Prexy Evans had, and began inviting the Speaker to Sunday breakfasts, after which Lady Bird would scoot them into the living room where she stacked all the major Sunday newspapers next to the overstuffed chairs, so they could spend hours reading and commiserating while she cleaned up and washed the dishes. Speaker Rayburn began staying longer and longer as he became closer to the earnest young congressman. Rayburn’s friendliness was understood by those who had seen the way Johnson treated him, which was i
dentical to how he treated Prexy Evans back in San Marcos. The other congressional secretaries found one of Johnson’s gestures particularly unbelievable: When Johnson met Sam Rayburn in the corridors of the Capitol, he would bend over and kiss him on his bald head.83
The traits that Lyndon Johnson exhibited during his youth and in college defined his congressional years: His domination of those below him, combined with obsequiousness toward superiors, together formed an overall art of manipulation that he refined, perfected, and practiced masterfully during his years in the Senate.84 Johnson always taught his young assistants to read the body language of the people they communicated with: “Watch their hands, watch their eyes,” he told them. “Read eyes. No matter what a man is saying to you, it’s not as important as what you can read in his eyes … The most important thing a man has to tell you is what he’s not telling you,” he said. “The most important thing he has to say is what he’s trying not to say.”85
A congressional aide with whom Robert Caro talked revealed Lyndon Johnson’s ambition to win the political game, to accrue more power, stature, money, and influence. The aide admitted there was nothing whatsoever altruistic about Johnson’s motives; he did not care about any of the causes he espoused, certainly not civil rights for minorities, whom he disparaged and ridiculed. The aide felt that the political arena required believing in contemporary issues, regardless of which view one might hold; a man had to believe in something. But, Lyndon Johnson “believed in nothing, nothing but his own ambition. Everything he did—everything—was for his ambition”86 (emphasis in original). Moreover, the attitude of many people on the Hill toward Johnson was one of antagonism in reaction to the condescension and sycophancy he alternately displayed, depending on whether the person he needed something from was below or above his level. Charles Marsh’s daughter, who watched Lyndon unashamedly fawn over her father while he was, “behind his back, sleeping with her mother … was reminded ‘every time I saw Lyndon’ of ‘a Uriah Heep from Texas.’” A number of Senate staffers independently used the very same analogy, the very same character, to describe Johnson.87
Throughout his years in the House of Representatives, Johnson yearned to take the next step to the Senate, so that he would then be within reach of the presidency. During the four decades of his life to that point, he retained his obsession to become president. Now, in early 1948, at age thirty-nine, he would tell his friend Welly Hopkins, “By God, I’ll be President someday!”88 He knew the 1948 Senate election represented an opportunity that no obstacle could prevent him from realizing: not money, the vagaries of the election process, the rules and controls over handling ballots, or least of all, the absence of a sufficient number of votes. Votes could be bought, counts of ballots adjusted, the process managed to ensure victory. Lyndon Johnson was ready for the Senate.
Stolen Elections
Johnson’s storied history of stolen elections dated to his college years and continued while he served as an aide to Congressman Kleberg, when he won a race for the “Little Congress.” He stole thousands of votes when he first ran for the Senate in 1941, but unfortunately for him, he had not stolen enough, and thus lost the election. That experience apparently taught him a lesson, because seven years later he stole untold thousands of votes to secure a seat in the United States Senate.
Three days after the balloting, the 1948 election was about to be called for Johnson’s opponent, Coke Stevenson, who was leading by 113 votes out of roughly 1 million cast after a long and hard-fought campaign. Suddenly, another ballot box was discovered in the south Texas town of Alice, the home of the Duke of Duval County, George Parr. He was in complete control of everything that happened there as well as in several surrounding counties, including Jim Wells County, where Alice was located. Aided by a couple of Mexican pistoleros working as bodyguards, Parr ruled Alice with an iron fist and acted as the county political boss. Johnson pushed him to help Johnson win the election regardless of the risk of returning to the penitentiary. In the process of winning, Johnson stole tens of thousands of votes; the final 202 were merely the last ones needed to put him over the top, going farther than anyone else had ever ventured. Robert Caro wrote that “even in terms of a most elastic political morality—the political morality of 1940s Texas—his methods were immoral.”89
George Parr had previously favored Coke Stevenson, a former Texas governor, but reportedly switched to Johnson because he had a brother in trouble and needed a politician with more influence and the willingness to use it for illegal purposes. The Stevenson forces attempted to investigate the newly found “Precinct 13” ballots by checking the polling lists inside the boxes with the original ballots, but managed only a fast look at them, memorizing a few of the names, before they were locked away. Recriminations flew, but the Democratic state executive committee upheld LBJ’s nomination—and soon thereafter, the last-minute ballots mysteriously disappeared. Johnson’s attorneys, Ed Clark and Don Thomas, presented a petition to Judge Roy Archer in Austin, two hundred miles from Jim Wells County, to issue a restraining order to Governor Stevenson so that Johnson would “keep his rightful seat in the United States Senate.”
Judge Roy Archer of Austin was securely under Edward Clark’s control, whereas Judge Lorenz Broetter of Alice was not.90 Johnson and Clark’s first action was to sign an affidavit that Judge Broetter could not be reached, even though the claim about Judge Broetter’s unavailability proved to be a lie. Johnson’s lawyers presented the aforementioned petition to Judge Roy Archer in Austin; time was of the essence, as it was reported that “had the action in Judge Archer’s chambers been delayed more than an hour, it is highly likely that the Jim Wells Democratic Committee would have met, thrown out Box 13, and restored the electoral decision in Stevenson’s favor.”91 Johnson’s legal chicanery later prompted an article in the then widely read national magazine Collier’s which noted that the political maneuvering
raised a serious question, not alone of honesty and fair play, but also the more serious fact of swearing to a falsehood (that the “resident judge of Jim Wells County … cannot be reached in sufficient time,” and that therefore “a restraining order without notice to the defendants … should be granted’) when Johnson knew it was a lie. Just why Judge Archer was beguiled into signing this order in chambers, without notice, thus perverting the vast powers of a District Court to handcuff a victim while ruthless political hijackers mauled and stripped him clean, is a question still unanswered. Maybe it was the legendary Johnson charm and personality. Maybe the decision stemmed from the law of heteronomy rather than the law of Texas. Judge Archer alone has the answer.”92
In two counties in the area, fires had “accidentally” destroyed poll records: in Duval County, a Parr enterprise employee “had grown nervous over the vast disparity between the election returns and the poll taxes issued—about two to one—and had taken the lists home for safekeeping. There, his wife, in her commendable zeal of housecleaning, had apparently consigned them to the fire. Thus the attempt to get at the actual voting in Duval ended in futility, in complete frustration.” In Alice, the poll list turned up missing, after “Commissioner Smith impounded the County’s ballot boxes and found them empty. ‘Why?’ Obviously, it was suggested, the industrious Mexican janitor, ignorant in the premises, must have emptied the boxes and burned the ballots.”93
Though the Stevenson men only glimpsed the inside of the ballot box, they noticed a number of clues that the ballots were fraudulent: the poll lists for “Box 13” were completed in alphabetical order, and in blue green ink (even though the rest of the lists were completed in black ink); all the signatures were in the same handwriting; and several of the names designated people who were deceased, many of whom had been for several years,* and still other people listed, upon interrogation, claimed they hadn’t voted at all.94 The last man to vote before the 202 were added to the list stated that the election officials were locking the doors immediately after he entered the building. Altogether, evidence that the Johnso
n campaign perpetrated voting fraud was overwhelming, going well beyond the Box 13 issue; there were actually thousands of miscounted or nonexistent votes: “Not eighty-seven votes ‘changed history,’ and not two hundred, but thousands, many thousands,” in fact, according to the research done by Robert A. Caro.95
For three more weeks the legal wrangling continued, with the Johnson lawyers manipulating the process to keep the boxes closed, while the Stevenson men argued that they should be opened and inspected to determine whether fraudulent votes had been insinuated into the total. Johnson’s injunction effectively kept Coke Stevenson from seeing the poll and tally lists, though such access was his constitutional legal right. Johnson’s ten lawyers, including John Cofer, Ed Clark, Don Thomas, Alvin Wirtz, and former governor James V. Allred, fought Stevenson’s lawyers. His team, including another former governor, Dan Moody, then secured their own injunction to keep Johnson’s name from being printed on the ballot for the general election, at least until October 3, when the ballots had to go to the printer.96 The federal judge from the United States District Court, T. Whitfield Davidson, proved to be an honest and untainted judge, a major frustration for Lyndon Johnson and Ed Clark. Before the formal start of the trial, Judge Davidson appealed to Stevenson and Johnson to avoid the taint that would follow them into the general election if the trial proceeded, suggesting that they agree to put both names on the ballot along with the Republican candidate, and the voters would decide whom they wanted to represent them. Stevenson immediately assented to this plan; meanwhile, a surly Johnson pushed his way out of the courtroom, uttering simply, “No comment.”97
LBJ Page 6