The Three Rivers Chamber of Commerce continued to deplore “the stigma of unfavorable publicity” which it said Johnson had caused, and Live Oaks County State Representative J. F. Gray, a key figure in the loose alliance of South Texas Anglo leaders, accused him of “pulling a grandstand play to try and embarrass somebody.” (“Gray was bitter as hell—mean bitter,” John Connally was to recall.) Anglo anger spread beyond Live Oaks’ borders. “Dear Lyndon,” wrote William F. Chesnut, a longtime Johnson loyalist from the town of Kenedy, in adjoining Karnes County, “I don’t mean to be telling you what you should or should not do, but I would like to let you know what people are saying about you…. In the first place, there was a big misunderstanding of the whole thing. The funeral parlor at Three Rivers is rather small and the undertaker thought it would be better to hold the funeral service in the local Catholic Church. He had no sooner suggested this when right away, some hot-headed Latin-American jumped to his feet and hollered ‘PREDJUDICE’ [sic]. Now that is the whole truth of the matter … I have heard several comments on ‘Why doesn’t Johnson keep his nose out of this affair’…and still others which run mostly in the vein of ‘I voted for him once but I’ll be damned if I’ll do it again.’”
The American Legion’s Bexar County Central Council, which represented twenty Legion posts in and around San Antonio, passed a resolution, “to be sent to the Honorable Lyndon Johnson, Honorable Walter Winchell and Dr. Garcia,” condemning “careless and immature actions by people in high and honorable places,” which has caused “harmful humiliation and embarrassment … to the Kennedy family, Rice Funeral Home, the good people of the City of Three Rivers and the State of Texas by bringing nationwide publicity.” Its own investigation, the Council said, had “not found the least trace of Un-American activities or racial discrimination practiced in this matter.” The state’s most influential newspaper, the right-wing Dallas Morning News, weighed in with the disclosure that “Many who sent abuse [to Three Rivers] are offering apologies” as more facts about the case became apparent. “There is good comradeship [in Three Rivers]…. The two groups of citizens mingle freely and do business with one another with no apparent thought of difference in race origin.” The story, John Connally says, “became bigger than any of us had anticipated…became a furor.” After making rounds of telephone calls, both he and Ed Clark, in Austin, reported to Johnson that anger against him was intensifying among South Texas leaders. Posh Oltorf, taking soundings in the Legislature, recalls that “they [Johnson and Connally] were concerned with keeping this from becoming a big issue where all the Anglos would turn against Johnson and the Mexican-Americans.” But the calls coming in to 231 showed that that was exactly what was happening. “There were forces at work beyond our control,” Connally says. “By this time, we wanted to engage in damage control as far as South Texas was concerned.” Which is why, he says, “We began to backtrack.”
THE BACKTRACKING BEGAN on the point which had most infuriated Three Rivers and many Texans: the fact that the case had received national attention because of the decision to bury Longoria at Arlington instead of in his hometown, or at least in his home state. This decision had been regarded as a particular “stigma” by the town, which blamed Johnson for it, pointing out, accurately, that before he had made the suggestion no one else had thought of it. “Previous to your action,” the Three Rivers News said in an “Open Letter to Senator Johnson,” not “one word had been said in Three Rivers as to where this American soldier would be buried, other than the Longoria family lot in the Three Rivers Cemetery … in his own native town…. Therefore, Senator, you can very easily understand why the citizens of Three Rivers were so stunned when over the radio and in the papers came reports that you had made arrangements to have Felix buried in Arlington Cemetery.” R. E. Smith, chairman of the Texas Good Neighbor Commission, the state agency responsible for improving relations with Mexico, implored Dr. Garcia to intercede with Beatrice Longoria and persuade her to change her mind and allow her husband’s body to be “brought back to Texas for burial at Three Rivers, or at least in Texas.” If she did so, Smith assured her, “the Governor will do everything possible to show her that he approves of this action.” He urged her to “bear in mind that the reputation of Texas will be at stake in history’s recording of this very delicate matter…. Bring the Hero’s body back to Texas where it should be, and would have been had it not been for whatever action that caused all of this trouble…. Bear the thought in mind that Texas and all Texans and the children of Texans now living will feel the effect of the criticism, and we all know that none of them had anything to do with it.”
Once, during the first few days after he had received Dr. Garcia’s telegram, Lyndon Johnson had wanted his role in the decision to bury Felix Longoria at Arlington to be as prominent as possible. He had told Garcia he could read at the G.I. Forum meeting his telegram that “I HAVE TODAY MADE ARRANGEMENTS” for that burial; he had focused attention on Arlington by his remark that “There is, after all, a fine national funeral home, though of a rather different sort, out at Arlington.” He had telephoned Bill White and Walter Winchell. Once, he had been “honored to have some small share in making possible your husband’s reburial in Arlington.” In the form letters with which he replied to letters praising him for his role, he had been “Honored to have this share in securing Felix Longoria the last rites befitting a hero”; “proud” that “I was able to make arrangements.” He had done everything possible to emphasize his role in Longoria’s burial there.
Now that tone changed. On January 16, the day after Three Rivers accused him of bringing the “stigma of this publicity” on the town, he tried to disclaim responsibility for the publicity. Telephoning Dr. Garcia, he asked the physician to remind reporters that it was he, not Johnson, who had released the telegrams. (Garcia, who had considerable political savvy—he would become a very effective leader for Mexican-Americans in Texas—understood and agreed, cooperating with Johnson’s wishes by not mentioning that Johnson had given him permission to release them. The Corpus Christi Caller-Times reported that “According to Garcia, Johnson asked publication of the fact that he did not release the telegram to the press himself. The release was made by Garcia.”) While Johnson’s staff continued to send out the “honored” and “proud” replies to congratulatory letters, a series of new replies was drafted, to be used in response to angry letters from Texas, and successive drafts revealed a growing desire to distance himself as much as possible from the national publicity and the Arlington burial decision—not that much distancing was possible, given the centrality of his role in the whole affair. In a letter of January 26, addressed to Glen Rabe of Three Rivers but intended as a general form letter for Texas constituents, Johnson tried to claim that he had played only a “small part… in the Longoria case.”
“I did not release the story here, the entire publicity originated in Texas,” he wrote—a statement that was, at best, disingenuous, given his initiation of the contacts with White and Winchell which had generated the national publicity. “I had no control over it,” he added. And, he said, “I had no desire to have any connection with the affair except to see that an American soldier was given a decent burial under honorable conditions”—which, he said, had not necessarily meant Arlington. “I sent a telegram advising the body could be buried” in either Arlington or Fort Sam Houston. “I made no recommendation of where the body should be buried.” By January 28, in a telegram to Three Rivers Mayor Montgomery, Johnson was suggesting that, in fact, Arlington had been only one of many possibilities he had raised, “MY ONLY CONNECTION WITH LONGORIA MATTER HAS BEEN TO INFORM CONSTITUENTS THAT THEY HAD PRIVILEGE OF REBURIAL OF SOLDIER’S BODY IN ANY [emphasis added] MILITARY CEMETERY, INCLUDING FORT SAM HOUSTON AND ARLINGTON,” Johnson’s telegram said. “I Have Not And Do Not Intend To Inform Any PARTIES IN CONNECTION WITH THIS MATTER, AND MY PARTICIPATION WAS LIMITED TO DOING MY DUTY AS I SAW IT TO THIS CONSTITUENT.”
LYNDON JOHNSON’S DESIRE TO AV
OID, as far as possible, any further publicity in connection with the Longoria affair was demonstrated by his actions when the Longorias arrived in Washington.
It might have been expected that when the family—Felix Longoria’s widow, his eight-year-old daughter, and his mother, two brothers and a sister (his father, whose heart condition had worsened, in the opinion of his family because of the pressure from the Three Rivers leaders, was too ill to make the trip)—arrived for the funeral on February 15, the day before it was held, the senator who had, with so much fanfare, planned that funeral, would have invited the Longorias to visit his office, would have arranged for them to have their picture taken with him. No such invitation was extended, or arrangement made. Instead, John Connally, Horace Busby, and Warren Woodward met the Longorias at the airport, drove them around Washington on a sightseeing trip (which did not include the Senate Office Building), and dropped them at their hotel, where they stayed until the funeral.
At the funeral, Johnson’s actions were striking—coming from a politician known among journalists for the pithy and dramatic statements he generally had ready for quotation in their articles, and for the way he invariably thrust himself into the center of photographs. Asked years later about the funeral, John Connally would say, “I don’t recall if he [Johnson] went to the funeral. My guess is he didn’t go.” Connally’s recollection was inaccurate. Johnson was present when Felix Longoria’s body was laid to rest, along with the bodies of eighteen other servicemen killed in action, at Arlington on Wednesday, February 16. But it is easy to understand Connally’s mistake.
A number of dignitaries attended the service, because of the attention that had, thanks to Johnson, been focused on it. President Truman sent his military aide, Major General Harry H. Vaughan, who arrived early and had a statement ready when reporters approached him. He was there, he said, “because of the stupidity of that undertaker.” The First Secretary of the Mexican Embassy arrived carrying a large wreath, and there were representatives of the State Department.
Lyndon Johnson did not have a statement for reporters—did not, in fact, so far as can be learned, speak to any. There would be no quote from him in any of the newspaper articles that appeared on the funeral the following day. He did not arrive early, and after the ceremony he quickly shook hands with the family and left.
RETURNING TO HIS OFFICE FROM ARLINGTON, Johnson immediately wrote Dr. Garcia to urge him not to keep the matter alive. After commenting on the “impressive ceremony” and complimenting the Longoria family—who, he said, “seem to be exceptionally fine people”—and saying, “If there is any way in which I may be of further service to them, it will be a pleasure to do whatever I can,” he added the following: “As I told you, I have not sought and do not seek any personal attention for my small role in this. I hope there will no further reason for this to linger in the newspapers or instigate unnecessary contention.”
This hope was to prove fruitless. By a 104–20 vote, the conservative Texas House of Representatives, at the urging of the furious Gray and some of his fellow South Texas legislators, passed a resolution establishing a five-member committee to investigate “the truth or untruth” of the allegations of racial discrimination by Kennedy’s funeral home.
Further “damage control” was therefore undertaken. Gray and his allies expected House Speaker Durwood Manford, a staunch conservative, to name only conservatives to the committee, which would then, they expected, exonerate Kennedy, finding that his refusal had been based only on the Longorias’ “family troubles,” and thereby clear Three Rivers’ good name. And this fiction might well have been perpetrated—had not Manford been firmly under the thumb of Herman Brown and Ed Clark. When Manford announced the names of the committee members, only four were conservatives. The fifth, to the conservatives’ shock, was the canny young liberal Frank C. Oltorf (still a legislator and not yet Brown & Root’s Washington lobbyist). “Without Clark, there wouldn’t have been a single liberal member on it,” Posh Oltorf was to say.
Oltorf understood his assignment: to keep Johnson’s name as inconspicuous as possible throughout the committee hearings. Each evening during the hearings, which were held that March in Three Rivers, he would telephone Johnson’s office in Washington to report on the day’s developments to either Johnson or Connally, and when it was Johnson who picked up the phone, “He [Johnson] would ask, ‘Did they bring up anything about me?’” Oltorf understood Johnson’s concern, and knew there was reason for it. “They [the South Texas Anglo leaders] would have liked to punish Johnson. They would have [liked to show] that he had meddled when he had no business to meddle. They [Johnson and Connally] were afraid of a complete whitewash [of the funeral home]—that the committee would find that there had been no discrimination, and it [the funeral] could all have been arranged quietly if Johnson hadn’t interfered.” But, the young legislator realized, the two men in Washington were more afraid of something else: that Johnson would be prominently “labelled an ally of the Mexican-Americans and all the [South Texas] leaders would then turn against him.” Johnson could have been vindicated on the “meddling” point by the truth—proof that Kennedy’s motives had been racial. But, Oltorf realized, proving that explosive point—with the resultant big headlines—would not accomplish Johnson’s larger purpose. The Senator was less concerned that his role be vindicated than that it be minimized. “The thing they [Johnson and Connally] wanted was his name kept out,” he says, in a recollection confirmed by Clark.
Oltorf’s assignment was carried out successfully. In some ways, the hearings were blatantly stacked; the committee’s four-member majority allowed Mayor Montgomery to testify that no discrimination against Latin-Americans existed in any form in Three Rivers, and did not allow testimony that would have disproved the Mayor’s contention. (Although proof would have been quite convenient to hand. While the hearings were going on in the courthouse square of Three Rivers, a Mexican-American veteran attempted to get a haircut in a barbershop a few doors away; “We don’t serve Mexicans here,” the barber told him.) Thanks largely to Oltorf, however, testimony about the Longorias’ alleged “family troubles” was, mercifully, kept to a minimum—as was the inclusion of Johnson’s name. To every demand by a committee member that the “full story” of the Longoria incident be told, Oltorf would blandly reply that the committee had been authorized to look into only the initial “refusal or discouragement” of the use of Kennedy’s funeral home. And “every time his [Johnson’s] name was brought up, I would change the subject,” Oltorf recalls. “I’d say, ‘Well, that’s not the issue.’” His job proved easier than he had expected, thanks to the power of the “Secret Boss of Texas.” “There were times when you could see one of the other [committee] members was ready to start a fight [with me],” Oltorf says. “But then all of a sudden, they’d think better of it. He [Johnson] had Ed Clark behind him, and so I had Clark behind me, and believe me, in the Legislature no one ever wanted to cross Ed Clark—ever.”
Assisting Oltorf in his assignment was attorney Gus Garcia, a law school friend of Connally’s, whom Connally had enlisted to advise the Longorias during the hearings. Gus Garcia was an eloquent and flamboyant courtroom attorney, but eloquence was not what was required here, and Garcia understood that. At the close of the hearings, he would write Johnson, “Your name was bandied about a bit, but we managed to leave the correct interpretation in the record—namely, that you did nothing except follow Mrs. Longoria’s instructions.” He had had no choice, the attorney wrote Johnson, but “to introduce a letter from you to her, in which you stated that you would follow her instructions. You also expressed your sympathy in that letter, but there is nothing in it which would harm you politically.” As for the telegrams that Johnson had sent in those first moments of the Longoria affair, the telegrams that said “I DEEPLY REGRET TO LEARN THAT THE PREJUDICE OF SOME INDIVIDUALS EXTENDS EVEN BEYOND THIS LIFE,” the telegrams that said “I AM HAPPY TO HAVE A PART IN SEEING THAT THIS TEXAS HERO IS LAID TO REST WITH THE
HONOR AND DIGNITY HIS SERVICE DESERVES,” the telegrams that said “I AM PROUD TO BE OF ASSISTANCE”—Gus Garcia was able to assure Johnson now that he and Oltorf had been able to keep those wonderful telegrams from being introduced in the hearings (because, he explained in his letter, “Frank and I decided” that they “might be distorted by your political enemies”). When Dorothy Nichols, one of his secretaries, brought Gus Garcia’s letter to Johnson’s attention, he had her give it to Connally to draft a reply, with a note: “John—Senator says you’ll have to answer this; be careful about it.” And John was. The letter Gus Garcia received over Lyndon Johnson’s signature was carefully noncommittal except for one sentence: “I trust that the incident will shortly be a closed chapter.”
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 119