CHAPTER 10

COKE

BY1948, SENATORPAPPYO’DANIEL’S TIME HADpassed. His attacks on labor unions as bastions of communism andh is continuing isolationism had made him a pariah in the national Democratic party, and several shady business deals had compromised his reputation as a man of the people. Johnson’s real competition would lie elsewhere, from “Calculatin” Coke Stevenson, who was then governor. “Taking on Coke Stevenson was a very tricky thing to do,” Jake Pickle recalled. “He was very popular in Texas. One of those strong, silent cowboy types. A typical rancher.” Stevenson was an outspoken champion of states’ rights, local control, and a balanced budget. “He could be the taciturn, wise, careful, prudent … public servant. That was his approach, and that was his philosophy too.”¹

Wartime prosperity had enhanced his reputation as state revenues had risen without any new taxes. Stevenson entered office with a deficit and left with a surplus. He was antiunion, anti-Roosevelt, and anti-civil rights. He was also appealingly direct. In 1947 he was interviewed by Johns Gunther forInside U.S.A. Asked to enumerate his most significant decisions, Coke, puffing on his pipe, replied, “Never had any.” In announcing his candidacy for the Senate, Stevenson proclaimed that he would ensure “the complete destruction of the Communist movement in this country.”²To the bankers, insurance executives, and oil barons of Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston, he was entirely safe.

Shortly after Coke announced, George B. Peddy, a Houston attorney who had gained something of a statewide reputation fighting the Ku Klux Klan, joined the fray. One poll indicated that 53 percent of qualified voters favored Coke. But in the same survey, 45 percent said that they preferred experience in Congress, compared to 27 percent who preferred experience as governor as a qualification for the Senate. Moreover, 85 percent said that they wanted the successful candidate not to be over fifty. Stevenson was coming up on his sixtieth birthday and Johnson his fortieth.³

As LBJ pondered his decision, Stevenson, through an intermediary, contacted the Brown brothers and others who had funded Johnson’s 1941 campaign. The message was that Coke liked Johnson but that he stood almost no chance of winning. If the businessman in question contributed once again to a Johnson campaign, he would be pouring his money down the drain. Moreover, the congressman, who had brought in so many government contracts, would lose his seat. Why not back Coke, who would also serve their interests, and convince Lyndon to stay in Congress?⁴

On May 11, 1948, Johnson met with a group of his advisers in the backyard of the house on Dillman Street. The group included John Connally, Willard Wirtz, Claude Wild (who had had an offer to manage the Peddy campaign), Joe Kilgore, Buck Hood, Gordon Fulcher, Tom Miller, and Jake Pickle. There were a number of compelling reasons for the congressman to challenge Coke. The Dixiecrat revolt was looming, and Texas and the South desperately needed a progressive voice, a Roosevelt heir in the Senate and in the top echelons of the party.⁵Coke was the man who had fired Homer Rainey, the liberal president of the University of Texas who had challenged the regents over an anticommunist loyalty oath, and his racist views were so deeply held that he made no effort to conceal them.⁶A number of those present represented the large group of young veterans who were tired of the political establishment. “The thirties were not—in Texas they were not desperately poor times,” said Horace Busby, “but they were stagnant times. You couldn’t start a business without basically the consent of the banking community … The New Deal was bad in the eyes of such people because it was letting people who should not do things, do things. And I don’t mean poor people, but people who should not be Chevrolet dealers were becoming Chevrolet dealers … This was an insurrection.”⁷

As a young man on the make and a veteran of sorts, Johnson could pose as leader of this movement. But at the gathering, all the congressman could think of was the negatives. Polls still showed Stevenson’s lead to be three to one. Johnson was obsessed with the fact that he was about to turn forty; he saw his life flashing before his eyes. “He kept raising objections,” Connally recalled, “then declared he wasn’t going to run. We agreed. That was the only way to deal with him when he was in one of those moods. There was a chorus of voices: ‘Congressman, that’s really the right decision. We really think you ought to step aside and let us put forward a younger man who can carry on this great tradition.’ ” He asked who they had in mind. John Connally, one said. “Well, just a minute. Let me think about this a little bit.”⁸

The next morning the group met again. A spokesman asked Johnson to help them elect Connally and began discussing campaign plans. His mood darkening, Johnson called the gathering to order. He should have an announcement late in the day, he said, and walked out. That afternoon, from the penthouse at the Driskill, LBJ declared his candidacy. He had actually won in 1941, he told the packed press conference, but, like a good sport, had chosen not to challenge the result. He would have run again in 1942, but the war had intervened. At fifty-nine, Coke Stevenson was too old, he said. “I believe our senator should be young enough to have energy for the work … You’ve been fed up with hasbeens.”⁹

In February 1942, Johnson had hired Horace Busby as his staff intellectual. Busby, a journalism graduate from UT, had gained some degree of notoriety when, as editor of theDaily Texan , he had defended Rainey in his struggle with the Board of Regents and Governor Stevenson. A small, intense young man, Busby was the classic Texas intellectual: brilliant, imaginative, informed, simultaneously cynical and naïve, urbane but with a streak of populism.

For the rest of LBJ’s public life, Busby would move in and out of his inner circle, working furiously to help Johnson reconcile his drive for power with his lofty goals, and then retiring for a time, exhausted by his boss’s demands and idiosyncrasies. The evening after he announced, Johnson called the Washington office and asked to talk to Busby. “He came on the phone laughing,” the aide later recalled, “and said, ‘Well, Judge Busby’—e ‘Judge Busby’ was something that he called me—‘The monkey’s climbed the pole’ [from the saying, ‘If a monkey climbs a pole, he’s going to show his ass’]. And it was a fatalistic sort of laugh and comment, because he was being fatalistic about the fact that he had probably ended his career. He said, ‘Do you think we’re going to make it?’ and I said, ‘No, sir. I don’t think that’s in the cards.’ He said, ‘Well, do you want to try?’ And I said, ‘Oh, yes, sure, I want to try real hard.’ ”¹⁰At Johnson’s insistence, Busby got off the phone, packed his bags—he was staying, not surprisingly, in the Dodge Hotel—got in his car, and headed for Texas.

Busby arrived in Austin around noon, two days later. He went to campaign headquarters, but no one was around. Gradually Connally, Wild, and others began to drift back from lunch. Where was the congressman? Busby asked. They had no idea, they said, and retired to meet with other staffers. Puzzled, Busby began to wander around. Introducing himself to the switchboard operator, he learned that Johnson had left a message for him. He was to come to the house on Dillman Street as soon as he got in. Lyndon and Lady Bird occupied the main apartment, which included the entire second floor. The Connallys lived in a smaller apartment below. The upstairs included a spacious living room-dining room with a kitchen on one end and a bedroom on the other. A large picture window overlooked Westlake Hills.

Busby rang the doorbell, but no one answered. He entered anyway, and there in the half-light, reclining on a couch in his shirt sleeves was Lyndon. He was smoking, using the long ivory cigarette holder with which he could eject cigarette butts up to ten feet away. The ash tray was full. Johnson just nodded. Busby sat down. Minutes passed. Cigarette butts were periodically ejected. An hour passed. Finally, LBJ said in a very low voice, “Do you think we have a chance?” Busby began waffling, but Johnson cut him off. “ ‘I asked you, do you think I have a chance?’ I knew it was a yes or no question, so I said, ‘No.’ That’s good; I’d passed … I had not been unrealistic … he liked that. And he continued to lie there.” The two men sat in silence. The phones—there were several on thirty-foot cords—began to ring. One rang a dozen times, quit, and then began ringing again. “He whispered to me as though the phone could hear us,” Busby remembered. “He said, ‘that’s them’ … I mouthed back to him, ‘Who? Who is them?’ And he said whispering, ‘Headquarters.’ And he was careful not to speak while the phone was ringing, as though that was a microphone.”

The phone rang again in the apartment; this time Johnson got up and jerked the cord out of the wall. He suddenly became animated. “He was talking about the people, serving the people, what the people wanted,” Busby recalled. “And he got off on Roosevelt, that Roosevelt was the man that had the vision, and Roosevelt was the man that had the feeling for people and that we didn’t have that kind of leadership.” The country must have someone who cared about the people, who knew about them, Johnson declared. He then began reciting large portions of FDR’s most famous speeches. All the while he was smoking and ejecting the butts, sometimes from amazing distances, into an ash tray on the coffee table.¹¹The next day, LBJ appeared at headquarters, and the campaign was off and running.

 

HOW TO DEFINE THEJOHNSON CANDIDACY?It was true that Texas seemed in a conservative mood, tired of reform, frustrated with the federal bureaucracy, anxious to be left alone to drink beer, pray, procreate, and make some money. Stevenson seemed their ideal representative, an antigovernment advocate of states’ rights and a neo-isolationist. Yet, LBJ was of the opinion then and later that Texans were more like other Americans than not. They had benefited enormously from government programs during the New Deal and World War II. They certainly desired no rollback of Social Security or government-insured, low-interest loans. They felt threatened by godless communism and nuclear annihilation, although it would be two years before the Soviets exploded their first nuclear device.

As he had in the past, LBJ would run as a national candidate, the would-be representative of a people who were not afraid of modernity, who favored equality of opportunity if not condition, who, in their own interest and that of the rest of the world, were ready to shoulder the burdens of collective security. “I believe that we can have peace, progress and prosperity through a central government while my opponent cannot see further than the county courthouse,” he would tell an audience in Denton. “I do not believe the courthouse can handle a 70-group air force. I do not believe you can halt hoof and mouth disease by applying to the Commissioners Court. I do not believe the Courthouse can build more REA [Rural Electrification Administration] projects … It is less costly to prepare and make our nation so strong that no other nation will dare jump on us than it is to have another war.”¹²

He would ensure that Texas would not be relegated to the political and economic backwater, like states such as Arkansas and New Mexico. Such a posture would appeal to the burgeoning white-collar middle class in Texas and to the tens of thousands of veterans who wanted to become part of the establishment.¹³

Johnson told the staff to prepare a fourteen-point program. “Worst thing ever happened to this country was those sixty-year-old senators, smelling of rat piss, doing Number One on Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen points,” he declared.¹⁴The second order of business at these initial planning sessions was to select a candidate to run for Johnson’s congressional seat. LBJ used the situation to put John Connally in his place. Creekmore Fath, a young Austin attorney, was considered but rejected as too independent for Johnson’s taste. He had Connally ask Ralph Yarborough, a former assistant state attorney general and district judge who had just returned from military service in Japan, but he was not interested. After a number of other possibilities were explored with no success, Connally said, “I guess there’s just little old me to serve up as the sacrificial lamb.” Johnson exploded. “Get it out of your head, John. You’d be dead meat when they start zeroing in on you as ‘Lyndon’s boy.’ ” The congressman finally settled on Jake Pickle, another member of his staff, who he thought would avoid the “Lyndon’s boy” tag. Connally did not even win the consolation prize of campaign manager. He would do the actual work, but Claude Wild would receive the title.¹⁵

The nerve center of the ’48 campaign was the Hancock House, a two-storey mansion, tending toward decay, situated at the corner of 8th and Lavaca across from the U.S. Courthouse. In its day it had been a symbol of wealth in Austin, with its colonnaded veranda and green-shuttered windows. It was still an imposing structure. For the next five months, through two primaries and various legal wranglings, the building would be throbbing with activity as secretaries staffed a switchboard, managers from each of Texas’s twenty-three congressional districts came and went, journalists hovered, waiting for the latest story, speechwriters wrote, and graphic designers turned out pamphlets.¹⁶“That old house sheltered us for a time as we raced and lumbered and laughed and shouted through it,” campaign worker Joe Phipps remembered, “making it our headquarters for a volunteer crusade we saw sweeping the state … The once-upon-a-time, long-ago-rich-man’s home became the center of our existence.”¹⁷

There was a second headquarters that functioned intermittently; the backyard of the Dillman Street house. The staff found a rural telephone box and nailed it to a tree. It would shelter a phone connected to a jack in the house by a long cord. “If [LBJ] needed the phone, he just reached up and opened the mail box,” Willard Deason recalled. It was here that Johnson frequently met with his brain and money trust: Alvin Wirtz, Charles Marsh, the Brown brothers, Tom Miller, and Roy Hofheinz of Houston.¹⁸

The campaign was set to open Saturday night, May 22, in Wooldridge Park. Johnson and his lieutenants planned every move, every pause, every phrase. Even Rebekah was brought in to Hancock House to give her input. During a break in LBJ’s almost constant stream of instructions, she said, “There’s a grammar error here, Son.” Johnson turned on her, “Goddamnit it, Mama, I pay people to correct the grammar. You just put in the Bible verses. That’s your job.”¹⁹

On the afternoon of the big event, Paul Bolton, a KTBC staffer and speech-writer, went with fellow campaign worker Warren Woodward to Dillman Street to deliver a final draft of the address. They met Dr. William Morgan, the Johnson family physician, coming down the stairs. “Who’s sick?” Woodward asked. The congressman, Morgan replied. He had a kidney stone that would not pass, and he had developed an infection. There were chills, fever, and excruciating pain. Morgan, who had given Johnson several injections, said that he did not see how a human being could function under those circumstances. Bolton and Woodward found LBJ in the bedroom, doubled over with pain, and Lady Bird helping him try to dress. He was determined to go on, he said. “At the appointed time, the Johnson car pulled up on the south side of the block near the public library,” Woodward recalled, “and Mr. Johnson got out and was all dressed up; he looked beautiful in his well-tailored clothes … He ran to the center stage after his introduction, made his speech without a single hitch, and got a huge ovation from the crowd.” He advocated preparedness, hailed the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan, railed against the abuse of big business and big labor and—true to form at this stage in his career—denounced the civil rights movement as “a farce and a sham—an effort to set up a police state in the guise of liberty.”²⁰After the speech, LBJ somehow managed to shake hands with the vast majority of a crowd estimated at more than two thousand.

The next morning, accompanied by Woodward and Bolton, Johnson took a Pioneer Airlines flight for Amarillo, stopping at San Angelo, Abilene, and Lubbock to phone local journalists and politicians. The candidate was sweating and in obvious discomfort, but insisted that he would pass his stone as he had passed previous ones. In Amarillo, he checked into the old Herring Hotel, and Woodward continued to ply him with aspirin. It was already hot in Texas, but Johnson seemed to be perspiring continuously and excessively. Woodward made a note to tell Zephyr Wright, the Johnsons’ maid, to send more shirts; at this rate, the candidate would go through six or seven a day.

Tuesday afternoon, the trio boarded the train for Dallas, where Johnson was to meet with Secretary of the Air Force Stuart Symington to discuss making Sheppard Air Force Base a permanent installation. The train did not leave for Dallas until ten at night. LBJ, suffering alternately from bonerattling chills and feverish sweats, spent the evening in bed. He and Woodward had the two bottom berths in an open Pullman. As the night wore on, Johnson moved in and out of delirium. When fever struck, he would make Woodward and the porter open his window. He would doze until the chills came, when he would cry out for blankets. “Finally, one time he asked me to get in the berth with him,” Woodward said, “and I actually got in the berth with him on two occasions that night to try to give some heat from my body over to his and try to keep him warm.”²¹After the train pulled into Dallas, Woodward got Johnson dressed, hailed a taxi, and conveyed his boss to the Baker Hotel. Johnson refused to let anyone call a doctor. He was still convinced he would pass the stone.

That afternoon, Symington and General Robert J. Smith, president of Pioneer, came by the suite. Woodward took them aside and explained the situation. Meanwhile, Johnson had showered and dressed. The three held their meeting on Sheppard, but by then LBJ had become desperately ill again. After much effort, Symington persuaded his friend to go to the hospital. The speech scheduled for Wichita Falls that night was canceled, but that was as far as Johnson would go. With the congressman throwing up in the hall, Woodward checked him into Medical Arts Hospital. Grudgingly, Johnson allowed his aide to call Connally in Austin and tell him. Under no circumstances was the press to be informed, however. Connally argued that it was impossible to keep the media in the dark; inquiries were already being made. Back and forth they went on the phone, with Woodward acting as intermediary. Finally, Johnson told his assistant to order Connally to keep quiet. Too late, Woodward reported, the press had already been informed that the congressman was in the hospital with a kidney stone.

LBJ grew quiet. “Well, if I can’t run my own campaign, I guess I might as well [withdraw]; now is the time to get out.” He had Woodward get his notebook and take down a withdrawal statement. Fortunately, Lady Bird was flying in from Austin. Woodward persuaded Johnson to do nothing further until he picked her up from Love Field. On his way out, he left instructions that Lyndon was to have no contact personally or by phone with anyone outside the hospital. When Lady Bird arrived, she managed to soothe and calm Lyndon until he drifted off to sleep.²²

The next morning, the doctors in Dallas told Johnson that they were going to have to remove the stone surgically. He was adamantly opposed. The abdominal procedure would require five to six weeks of convalescence and would effectively eliminate him from the Senate race. While this conference was going on, Woodward took a call from the famed aviatrix Jacqueline Cochran. She had been in Arizona setting some air speed records in a P-51 but had come to Dallas to hear Symington’s speech. She learned of her friend LBJ’s plight and had called with a possible solution. At the Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis there was a famed urologist, Dr. Gerst Thompson, who might be able to do something. She could collect Johnson and his party at the hospital and they could depart in her Lockheed Electra at 1A.M., arriving in Minneapolis around 6. LBJ agreed.

Johnson made the trip in a makeshift bunk in the fuselage of the plane. At the clinic, the doctors initially managed to control his infection with drugs. Johnson refused even to discuss surgery. Woodward and Lady Bird took him for auto rides on bumpy back roads and walked him up and down the stairs of the hospital in hopes of shaking the stone loose, but nothing worked. Finally, Dr. Thompson convinced him to let him and his colleagues use a new technique whereby they would insert a tube in his urethra and crush the stone. If it was lodged too far up for them to reach, however, they would have to operate. With LBJ’s political career hanging in the balance, the procedure worked and his fever cleared up rather quickly. Connally called, and the two talked as if there had never been a rift.²³

Johnson would not have to be confined to bed. But how could he be everywhere at once in the vastness of Texas? Connally proposed a new kind of whistle-stop technology: the helicopter. The machines were a novelty in 1948, sure to attract a great deal of media and public attention. The candidate could cover an incredible amount of territory in a short space of time. Marsh had argued that LBJ should not rely on “a synthetic set-up of fat cats, newspaper publishers, small business interests, and veterans, and labor. They talk big but don’t represent twenty percent.” The task would be to contact and convert the great silent majority. Coke led merely because he was familiar to these people.²⁴Working through Symington and General Smith, Connally made arrangements to rent a Sikorsky S51, a three-seat aircraft that could fly a hundred miles an hour, hover when necessary, and operate for up to 250 miles without the need to refuel. To avoid having the $25-a-day rental charged against the $10,000 ceiling imposed on campaign spending by law, Connally arranged for a group of one hundred Dallas-area veterans to pay for the helicopter as their contribution.²⁵

On June 15, LBJ launched a seventeen-day speaking tour of north-central Texas, from Lubbock in the west to Dallas in the north, Texarkana in the east to Austin in the south. The helicopter touched down fourteen to sixteen times a day after hovering over assorted farmers, picnickers, and railroad work gangs while the candidate appealed for their support. Reporters dubbed it the “Johnson City Windmill,” and it allowed him to reach an estimated 175,000 people. LBJ quickly abandoned the Sikorsky in favor of a smaller Bell helicopter. The machine was cheaper and the pilot, Joe Mashman, was a much more willing and involved campaigner than the Sikorsky pilot.²⁶

The logistics for the tour were incredible. An advance team would race ahead, driving as fast as their cars would allow, to reach a given community before the flying circus. They would pick a landing spot free of wires and poles—an athletic field was ideal—distribute campaign literature, hire a local operator to invite residents, organize a reception committee, and then work the crowd once the candidate landed. The Beau Jesters, a barbershop quartet from Dallas, frequently traveled as part of the advance team to help warm up the locals. Meanwhile, high-octane gasoline trucks would have to be driven to designated refueling stops ahead of the helicopter. Following the advance men was a car with three or four reporters. Occasionally, Johnson would allow one to fly with him, but he or she had to sit on the floor.

From the beginning there was a weight problem. The Bell was a small machine. Mashman weighed 185 and the congressman weighed 195 or so. Once, when the campaign literature Johnson insisted on dropping clogged the air intake, the aircraft nearly stalled and crashed.²⁷The long-suffering Warren Woodward remembered on one occasion that Johnson insisted on landing in downtown Rosenberg—not on the outskirts in a field, but downtown. What was a helicopter for if not to reach the people? Dutifully, Woodward convinced a service station owner to allow the Johnson City Windmill to land on his roof. But Mashman refused to descend unless and until the roof was reinforced. Frantically, Woodward and an elderly black man with horses and wagon hauled two-by-fours from the lumberyard and shored up the roof of the service station. “We had a good crowd,” Woodward recalled.²⁸

 

ON A TYPICAL DAY,Johnson would get up at five in the morning to make radio broadcasts to area farmers. He then would set off on the day’s flight. His approach to a town was generally the same. “He’d circle the crowd, and then he’d speak over the PA system [attached to the runners of the helicopter],” Jake Pickle said. “ ‘This is Lyndon Johnson, your next United States senator, and I’ll land in just a minute. I want to shake hands with all of you’ … the helicopter would make one last swoop, and he’d open the door … wave his [Stetson], and then throw his hat from the helicopter. And everybody whooped and hollered.”²⁹The advance team had to retrieve the Stetson. “Everybody thought he was giving his hat to the crowd, but we always had to retrieve it. Or pay a dollar to the kid who had caught it and thought it was his.”³⁰

Because of the heat, the doors were removed from the Bell, which allowed wind-blown sand and dust to fill the cockpit throughout the flight, especially on landings and takeoffs. Johnson made no concession to fashion. Even in the poorest towns he would appear attired in suit, monogrammed white shirt with French cuffs, and a Countess Mara tie. Every other stop or so, filthy, he would shower (with a special double showerhead that he carried with him) and at least change shirts. Dorothy Nichols, his longtime secretary, had to travel in a separate car to accommodate his travel wardrobe.³¹Once, Phipps quietly chided him about his three baths a day and a fresh change after each. “My people aren’t sending me to Washington,” he said, “to watch hayseeds sprout from my nostrils or onion shoots coming out of my ears. They want someone to represent them they can be proud of, not a country yokel in a dirty shirt with snuff juice dripping off his chin.”³²

Virtually every evening there would be a banquet or service club speech, after which the advance team and candidate would meet to recap and go over the next day’s routine. He would finally get to bed between 2 and 3A.M. and then was up again at 5. Nichols, Mary Rather, and Dorothy Plyler, the congressman’s three secretaries, alternated weeks on the road. Anything beyond seven days would have been beyond endurance.

 

BY THE END OF THE SECOND WEEK,LBJ was anxious and dissatisfied. He had had several advance men accompany him to warm up the crowds before he spoke and occasionally to impersonate him in the air. None had proved satisfactory. He decided to summon young Joe Phipps, the morning announcer at KTBC. “Here’s how it will work,” the congressman said. “Give me a one-minute, not more than two-minute, evangelical introduction that convinces them we are on the move … We’re rolling. We’re flying … Across the state, everyone is turning to Lyndon Johnson as the one, true hope … Use ‘Texas’ a lot and ‘Texans’ a lot … Use ‘One’ a lot. And ‘First.’ Then, when the crowd gets whipped up, I’ll pull the mike away from you.” He would speak for no more than three minutes, then Phipps would do the windup. “The trick is this,” he told the young announcer: “Never give your audience a chance to find out what a truly bad speaker I am. At the same time, never let them think of you as being there. We are part of the same person.”³³Indeed, the relationship became a bit closer than Phipps had anticipated—or wished. It was decided that the new man would assume responsibility for laying out the candidate’s clothes, waking him, and seeing that he was properly dressed and shaved.

Sometime in his youth, Phipps observed of his boss, Johnson had gotten the idea that he was ugly. Therefore, he was absolutely meticulous about his personal hygiene and appearance. Phipps recalled that “a sense of something awesome—almost magisterial—attached itself to the responsibility [of dressing the candidate], as with a master of the royal bed chamber for some medieval procession through the countryside.”³⁴At the appointed time on his first day, he touched the sleeping LBJ on the shoulder and presented him with a glass of water, as he had been instructed. Lyndon sat up and sipped. He spat it out, sputtering. “Warm water! Warm water, you son of a bitch!” (Phipps had brought iced.) “What are you trying to do? Lose me the election? Didn’t your mama teach you anything. Cold water, you won’t be able to shit all day.” (This advice had come from Charles Marsh.)³⁵

As he prepared to shave, Johnson told Phipps to summon “the girls.” Dorothy Nichols and Dorothy Plyler appeared, notebooks in hand. As the candidate stood before the mirror to shave, towel loosely draped around his middle, they took turns standing in the doorway taking down his instructions in shorthand. After several moments, Phipps looked; Johnson was still barking orders and Nichols was still scribbling. The only change was that the towel had slipped off.³⁶“I was to discover that nudity—his own in particular—did not seem to concern Lyndon Johnson at all. It was a natural state.”³⁷

It seemed to Phipps that Johnson was constantly alternating between the refined and the crude. Obsessively clean, immaculately dressed by day, “but in the privacy of an overnight hotel room on the road, he almost seemed to take pleasure in shocking the more protected of our little cadre, presenting himself as a hunk of lumpen flesh born with low animal circulatory, nervous, respiratory and digestive systems; belching, breaking wind, stalking into an adjoining bathroom to urinate or defecate without even bothering to close the door.” But then he would launch into a description of some future utopia, identifying his central place in bringing it into being. “Inside, Lyndon Johnson harbored a romantic vision of the man he was meant to become: that same cruddy piece of clay born and named Lyndon Johnson, to be turned into a living work of art.”³⁸

From this point on, Phipps would be the master of ceremonies for the grand helicopter tour. Like many others, he was both repelled and attracted by Johnson. He recalled vividly the first staff meeting he attended. Johnson sat on a chair in the midst of a dozen or so secretaries and advance men. He began by issuing an endless stream of instructions: when to take off, where to land, whom to contact in Bastrop and Plano, what the next brochure should look like. Dorothy Nichols, Paul Bolton, Horace Busby, and the rest would all be sitting on the edges of their chairs, notepads on knees, taking copious notes. Suddenly, Johnson would shift gears, his eyes seemingly fixed on some distant utopia. “Firemen. Teachers. Farmers. Working men and women left out. Unrepresented. Disfranchised … Even if they belong to the National Grange, to the CIO, the Elks, the Woodmen of the World, the Mugwump Wing of the Republican party … No one really feels he has a voice. We will be that voice for all those beset by aloneness and helplessness by themselves.”³⁹

Phipps would later observe that his boss “had the capacity to split himself in two. Not the way a classic schizophrenic might … He could go back and forth across that hair-thin line which separated the practical ministry of running a political campaign and creating an almost mythological illusion of himself that he knew must be conveyed to voters if he were to be elected … The dramatic shifts from pragmatist to romantic, director to actor, and back again, occurred without warning over and over. Rhetorical flights mixed with down-to-earth instructions.”⁴⁰

 

BY THE END OF THE THIRD WEEK,LBJ was near exhaustion. At a reception in Lubbock, Plyler recalled, he “was literally propped against the wall … with somebody on each side of him.” He greeted the “folks” lined up to meet him by weakly extending his left hand. Only catnaps on the helicopter allowed him to go on.⁴¹By the time the campaign reached east Texas, the candidate was showing signs of depression. Following a desultory speech in Lufkin, he and Phipps headed for the Angelina Hotel, where accommodations had been booked by an old friend of the Johnsons’, Ernest Kurth.

Kurth had arranged for a corner suite where the breezes could sweep through unobstructed. Out of the bedroom appeared Lady Bird, radiant in a yellow cotton dress. Phipps describes the scene: “Her husband’s mouth did not so much pop as it sagged open, his whole face softening, melting, then suddenly he was stumbling toward her, both arms wide, and she was rushing to him, fleet as a dancing girl, being folded to his body. His shoulders slumped roundedly as he drew her close, trembling, voice half strangled. ‘Bird, Bird,’ he was saying. ‘I have needed you. More than I can say.’ ”⁴²

 

THE1948 SENATE RACEwas one of the most expensive in American history to that time. Texas campaign laws allowed candidates to spend $10,000 total, $8,000 in the primary and $2,000 if a runoff became necessary. The loop-hole that had proved so helpful in 1941 still existed, however. The $10,000 limit applied just to the candidate and the organization directly under his control. “Voluntary” campaign organizations that sprang up to support one candidate or another did not count. Stevenson claimed that all in all, the Johnson campaign raised and spent more than a million dollars. He was probably not exaggerating by much. One statewide radio speech cost $1,500; in July alone LBJ delivered twenty-three. According to one campaign worker, the Johnson campaign ran up $30,000 in phone bills.⁴³

But Stevenson was not far behind. With a few exceptions, Texas oil, banking, and insurance money backed the safe candidate. “Who is paying for the $1100 [full-page] newspaper ads and the $330 billboard posters for Stevenson on the highways?” Johnson asked in one speech. “In a twenty-five-mile stretch from Sugarland to Houston, there are seven such Stevenson billboards … I’m thankful I don’t have to have $1100 advertisements saying I can’t be bought.”⁴⁴

Johnson’s financial support came from the usual cast of characters: Brown and Root, Hughes Aircraft, industrialist Sid Richardson, publishing magnates Marsh, Houston Harte, and Amon Carter, and Jewish and Hollywood executives rounded up in Washington and New York by Abe Fortas, Paul Porter, and Ed Weisl, who brokered contributions from wealthy Jews and movie industry executives.⁴⁵

For all this seeming largesse, the Johnson campaign seemed continually strapped for money. “One day I was going down the road between Jasper, Texas, and Beaumont,” Warren Woodward said, “and I ran across another Johnson campaign car coming the other direction. I passed him and he passed me. We recognized one another and hit the brakes at the same time. We backed up and got out of our cars and walked over to each other and the first thing we said, almost in unison, was, ‘Have you got any money?’ ”⁴⁶At the Hancock Building, Charles Herring, a Johnson campaign financial manager and future state senator, was forced to climb out of his second-storey office window to escape a bill collector.⁴⁷

 

IN HIS SET SPEECHES,generally delivered at an evening venue, LBJ was careful to identify himself with those whose specific interests would be aided by the government programs he supported: doctors and federally funded hospitals, the elderly and a federally funded $50-a-month pension, veterans and the G.I. Bill, teachers and federal aid to education, businessmen and federally financed bases and defense contracts. To his rural audiences he played the populist, attacking Standard Oil and private utility companies for gorging themselves at the public’s expense.⁴⁸Though he had publicly denounced Truman’s civil rights programs, he courted blacks and Hispanics privately and indirectly, arguing that they would benefit from continued government programs and full employment and implying that equal opportunity would come if they were patient.

At times, LBJ could be quite confrontational with segregationists. One day, the Johnson City Windmill set down in the public square in Cleveland, a hamlet situated in the heart of east Texas, which, like northern Louisiana, was one of the darkest and bloodiest racial battlefields in the nation. Lyndon was scheduled to address the local citizenry from a flatbed truck parked next to the railroad station. As he stood on the back of the truck, the single track stretched before him, with woods on the right and the town on the left. The crowd that gathered to the left of the tracks was all white. On the right, further down the rails, were a few black men and women. He could see others, including children in the woods, looking at him. “I’m not going to start speaking until those Americans over there on the right [he gestured] side of the track come over here and stand on the same side of the track with the other Americans over here. This is America. We don’t do this.” Nobody moved. He did it again, this time obviously exasperated and a little angry. “All right, come on. This is America. You Americans over there [he pointed at the blacks] now come on get over on this track.” Some began to run for the woods. Three or four elderly blacks, however, sidled over closer to the track and up toward the speaker’s platform. He made his speech.⁴⁹

Back at the hotel, Horace Busby, who was advancing the trip, came into Johnson’s hotel room. Johnson was ecstatic, Busby recalled, boiling over with excitement. “How many votes do you think we are going to get out of this county?” he asked. Busby held up ten fingers. Johnson shook his head and held up four fingers. “And he was happy, he was so happy,” Busby recalled. “You know, it was Johnson; he had stuck it to them.”⁵⁰

 

ONJUNE22, the Texas Federation of Labor held its annual convention in Fort Worth. Traditionally, the state branch of the AFL had avoided endorsing any one candidate over another, preferring to stick instead to specific bread-and-butter issues. But this time, anger over Johnson’s votes on Taft-Hartley could not be contained. Various speakers denounced the congressman’s antilabor votes as the six hundred delegates cheered. In the end, the organization voted to support Stevenson. Though he sensed he was being offered a two-edged sword, Coke decided reluctantly to accept the endorsement.⁵¹The CIO chose to remain uncommitted and privately denounced the Texas chapter of the AFL for endorsing Stevenson. Lyndon’s advisers were elated. At their behest, Johnson issued a series of press releases accusing Stevenson of making a secret deal with labor bosses. What other explanation could there be? No one had been more antiunion than “Calculatin’ Coke.” There was a difference between labor bosses and the rank-and-file working men. “Both of us know,” LBJ declared, “that since the Taft-Hartley became a law, there has been less than 30% of the strike idleness than there was before. I submit that the workers themselves have had more take-home pay since Taft-Hartley than they ever had before.”⁵²

 

FORTUNATELY FORJOHNSON,if not for the country and the world, the Berlin Blockade Crisis erupted in late June. On the 24th, Soviet occupation authorities cut off land access to east Berlin, an isolated island in the Soviet occupation zone, from the American and British zones in the west. It seemed that if the Western democracies were not to abandon the people of noncommunist Berlin, they would have to push straight through the Russian forces. As a stop-gap measure, Truman ordered a massive airlift of food, medicine, and coal. Many predicted that the crisis would touch off World War III.

As midcentury approached, anticommunism and Russophobia in America were building to a perfect storm. It had long been rumored among Democrats that Coke Stevenson was an out-and-out isolationist. Johnson had tantalizing proof. He had discovered through Horace Busby that just before Stevenson delivered his announcement address in January, he had asked the press corps to excise a section from their advance copies. In the paragraph he wanted deleted, Coke had denounced Europe as a corrupt civilization that no longer warranted the sacrifice of American blood and treasure. Programs like the Marshall Plan were a waste of money. “We must follow the counsel of the good book,” he wound up, “and not cast our pearls before swine.”⁵³

The members of the press, including Busby himself, complied, but remembered. As the Berlin Crisis deepened, LBJ whaled away at his opponent’s stance on foreign policy. Those who opposed a large army and navy and aid to our allies abroad, he declared in one speech, are “of the same stripe of isolationist who got us into two world wars.”⁵⁴He believed in collective security; he equated Stalin with Hitler, and he was convinced that opposition to Soviet imperialism, if not domestic anticommunism, was completely compatible with liberalism.

 

MEANWHILE,Stevenson was touring the state, conferring with county judges and sheriffs and shaking as many hands as possible. All he had to do to win, he believed, was be himself. Coke sprang from rural poverty in west-central Texas, growing up in a log cabin in Kimble County. While working in a bank as a janitor and cashier, he read law and was admitted to the bar. Elected first as county judge and then state representative, Stevenson went on to the speakership of the Texas House in 1933, the lieutenant governorship in 1938, and then became governor.

Stevenson was not the benign Jeffersonian populist he appeared to be. He was a reactionary who built a budget surplus by slashing public services, including education and the Old Age Assistance Special Fund, which supported the aged, the blind, and dependent children. His reaction to a wartime lynching in Texarkana was to do nothing other than tell the press that “certain members of the Negro race from time to time furnish the setting for mob violence by the outrageous crimes which they commit.”⁵⁵If he believed in do-nothing government, he also believed in doing anything necessary to win an election.

On Saturday night, July 24, the Texas Election Bureau began releasing unofficial returns. All three of the frontrunners were disappointed. Up until the very end, Stevenson believed that he would win more than 50 percent of the vote and thus avoid a runoff. Instead, he polled 477,077 votes, 40 percent of the total. Peddy received a surprising 237,195, or 20 percent, but was eliminated. Johnson finished second with 405,617, or 34 percent. So there would be a runoff.

The day following the election, Lyndon and Lady Bird met with their political intimates in the backyard of the Dillman Street house. Johnson was exhausted and despondent. To win, he would have to make up a seventy thousand-vote deficit in five weeks. It seemed impossible and, momentarily at least, not worth the time and money. Lady Bird was most adamant about going on. “I must say that was one time that I was very determined and tough, even belligerent,” she said. “I told Lyndon I’d rather put in our whole stack, borrow anything we could, work 18 hours a day … maybe we could even conceivably win.”⁵⁶

Immediately after the election, both Johnson and Stevenson left for Washington, the former to attend the famous “do-nothing” congressional session that Truman had called to embarrass the Republicans, and the latter to better identify himself with national and international issues. In Washington, LBJ paid highly touted visits to the Department of Defense, after which he was able to announce government plans to expand the workforce at the Fort Worth Consolidated-Vultee aircraft plant and the continued operation of wartime synthetic rubber plants in Texas as part of the ongoing preparedness program.

Meanwhile, Coke made mistake after mistake. Texas newspapers carried a picture of him standing in the Senate gallery pointing to a seat in the chamber as if it were already his. Johnson enjoyed the unspoken support of both the Capitol Hill press corps and the White House, who saw him clearly as the more progressive of the two candidates. When Stevenson appeared before reporters, they were ready for him. Where do you stand on Taft-Hartley? asked Jack Anderson, Drew Pearson’s assistant. Stevenson stammered, hemmed, and hawed. Anderson asked the question again. “What is your position on Taft-Hartley?” Coke finally responded, “You get me off up here away from my notes.” Five times the question was asked, but Stevenson never did answer.⁵⁷

Pearson pounced. In a column widely reprinted in the Texas press, he wrote, “Ex-Governor Coke Stevenson of Texas … on a recent trip to Washington evaded more issues and dodged more questions than any recent performer in a city noted for question dodging.”⁵⁸In subsequent speeches, Johnson would parody his opponent, lowering his head to make a double chin and saying, “You caught me away from my notes. I don’t know quite what to think about that.” His audiences whooped and hollered.⁵⁹

To eat into Coke’s advantage in east Texas, LBJ first courted and then won the support of former Governor Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, who agreed to write her supporters asking them to vote for LBJ. Mindful of Peddy’s attacks on him for being soft on communism, LBJ red-baited and labor-baited with a vengeance. The Johnson Journal, a campaign publication sent to rural voters, declared, “The big Northern labor unions, with their leadership which included admitted Communists … have aligned their forces against Lyndon Johnson and in favor of Coke Stevenson.” These were the same people who “favor the election of isolationist candidates … Wake up Texans! Don’t let the Reds slip up on you by any such cunning plot!”⁶⁰

“Never easy with prepared remarks, on the stump—unburdened by notes and pieces of paper—Lyndon Johnson became thunder and lightning,” Joe Phipps observed. “Even would-be scoffers remained to cheer as he lashed out at undefeated and detested faceless enemies: organized labor (something different from the lone, unallied, horny-handed sons of toil); the rich, metropolitan ‘kept’ (as opposed to the struggling, small city, family-owned) press; ‘big oil’ (which fenced out the ‘little independents’ … ); heartless mortgage bankers … ; out-of-state insurance companies (that wax rosy on the widow’s mite).”⁶¹

In these diatribes, Johnson was not merely acting, however; he genuinely identified with the downtrodden, the working man and woman’s fears, prejudices, limited horizons, hopes, and dreams. “Naked and alone,” he paraphrased the Bible, “we come into a hostile world; Naked and alone, we shall depart it.”⁶²An old friend of Johnson’s once remarked that if he had permitted himself a fantasy dream as a young politician when he drifted off to sleep, it probably would have been that he was the heir of Franklin D. Roosevelt—but he would awake in the morning to the realization that he was really the reincarnation of Huey Long.⁶³

As LBJ’s crowds swelled, Stevenson, to the anguish of his handlers, retired to his ranch to chop wood and dip stock. “Did you ever see a stump-tailed bull in fly time?” he asked reporters who wanted to know why he was not campaigning.⁶⁴By the second week of August, however, Calculatin’ Coke was once more scouring the state in his old Plymouth, chauffeured by his one-armed nephew. Not above red-baiting himself, Stevenson castigated his opponent for his votes against funding for the House Un-American Activities Committee. Johnson was nothing but a blowhard who had never introduced a meaningful piece of legislation in his eleven-plus years in Congress, he added.⁶⁵

 

WITH TWO DAYS TO GOin the campaign, Johnson was, as usual, a physical wreck. Observers noted the dark circles around his eyes, his rail-thin appearance, and his speech, now reduced to a painful croak. On the last evening of the runoff, Lady Bird was scheduled to meet Lyndon in San Antonio, where she would make her first and only radio address of the campaign. That morning, she and Marietta Brooks, chair of the women’s division of the Johnson operation, set off for a noontime reception in San Marcos. On the way, a truck ran them off the road. With Lady Bird at the wheel, the vehicle rolled over twice before landing upright. Bruised and battered, her dress and stockings torn, Lady Bird got out, flagged down a passerby, sent Marietta to the hospital, and hitched a ride into San Marcos. There she borrowed a dress from a friend and showed up in San Antonio in time to make her broadcast. She said nothing to Lyndon, who did not realize his wife had been in an accident until he saw her bruises later that night, while she was undressing.⁶⁶

On the day of the election, Lady Bird reported for duty at the Austin campaign headquarters. She, Rebekah, and Lyndon’s three sisters divided up the city phone book and began calling to solicit votes. Lyndon spent the day campaigning in San Antonio, where Stevenson had bested him by more than twelve thousand votes. Somehow, someway, Johnson had managed to get bitter political enemies Maury Maverick and Paul Kilday, the congressman who had defeated Maverick, to ride with him, one on one side and one on the other, in an open car through the barrio. He and James Knight, the pro-Johnson county clerk, made the rounds distributing cash to the ward and precinct bosses. “Don’t misunderstand me,” Knight said. “It’s not a payoff or anything, because they’ve been standing here all day, drumming up votes, putting up posters. Five dollars for expenses … It was costing ’em that much money.”⁶⁷

As reports began coming in from the Texas Election Bureau, the unofficial vote-counting agency run by a consortium of state newspapers, prospects looked grim for LBJ. At midnight, Stevenson led by 2,119 out of 939,468 votes counted. Lady Bird was ready to concede. But a staffer reminded her that the Bureau was unofficial and had to rely on county officials, most of them campaign workers for the candidates themselves, to send in the vote totals.

By 9P.M. Sunday, the next day, Lyndon held a 693-vote edge. “I was with Stevenson the night of the count … (Sunday),” recalled Charles Boatner, a Stevenson aide who would subsequently join LBJ’s entourage. “[He] was doing one of his river barbeques … There was quite a bit of barbeque and quite a few beans and a lot more bourbon down there on the river and every vote count that would come in Stevenson was ahead … And finally … Stevenson’s lead just dissipated, there was dead silence, and a few more drinks gulped … That night after they’d all left I drove back down the road from the ranch to the motel where we were staying and the next morning I got up pretty early and was putting my bag in my car when Coke came by just hell-bent for Austin. You could see the dust behind that car for five miles!”⁶⁸

By Monday evening, Stevenson had regained the lead, with four hundred ballots still unaccounted for. When the Bureau reported its final totals on September 2, Stevenson was 362 votes ahead.⁶⁹The Bureau reminded newspaper readers that its own tally was unofficial and that the State Executive Committee would meet in Fort Worth on September 13 for the official count, with the results to be presented to the state Democratic Convention the next day for confirmation.⁷⁰Connally and his staff had not forgotten 1941. “We had been bitten once,” he later recalled. “It would not happen again.”⁷¹They knew that the Stevenson camp would instruct county officials loyal to their candidate to with-hold or underreport some vote counts until it was apparent how many tallies would be needed to win. It was relatively easy to switch votes but hard to create new ones. “In 1948 we didn’t urge anyone to get their votes in early because we knew the kind of shenanigans that might happen,” Walter Jenkins said. “One of the first indications was when we got a call from a woman in Eastland County who was a supporter of Mr. Johnson and a telephone operator there. She called and said, ‘I shouldn’t listen in on conversations, but I just heard two men talking and they’re going to take two hundred votes away from you in Eastland County tonight in a revision of the votes.’ ”⁷²Johnson’s managers complained but were never able to recover the two hundred votes.

Both sides arranged to have ballot watchers monitor the other camp’s activities.⁷³It was here that Johnson’s energy and superior organization paid off. “Mr. Stevenson’s more or less loose organization took a beating,” said Bob Murphy, Stevenson’s nephew and driver. “At this critical point of the campaign during this battle for ballots, after the election was over, Mr. Johnson’s refined organization and the lieutenants that he had who were experienced in this type of activity shot us out of the water, just to be perfectly frank.”⁷⁴

The Johnson camp was able to monitor calls coming into and out of the Stevenson headquarters. When Coke would ask one of his managers to up the total in his county, Connally would have one of his people on the spot intervene or, failing that, call in some unreported votes for Johnson. Alvin Wirtz persuaded Ma Ferguson to contact some of her county judges in east Texas. Governor Stevenson will be calling, asking you to shift a certain number of votes, she said. Tell him you will, but do not. Sam Houston Johnson estimated that because of this ploy, Coke counted some twenty-four hundred votes that he did not really have.⁷⁵

By September 3, the corrected returns turned into the Democratic State Executive Committee gave Lyndon a seventeen-vote lead. Twenty-four hours later, his margin had increased to 162. The previous Sunday evening, Stevenson had predicted that Johnson would try to win the election by calling in votes from the boss-dominated counties in south Texas.⁷⁶In fact, the biggest increase—not a switch of votes from one column to another, but the discovery of additional ballots—came from Jim Wells County. Officers there had discovered an additional 203 ballots, 202 of which went to LBJ.⁷⁷

Of the dozens of machine-controlled counties in south and east Texas, Jim Wells had been for Johnson from the beginning. Not for ideological or financial reasons, but because of a dispute with Coke over patronage. Calling the shots in Jim Wells and neighboring Duval County was forty-six-year-old George Parr, the so-called Duke of Duval. Parr’s bases of operation were tiny San Diego in Duval and the much larger town of Alice in Jim Wells. Parr ruled his fiefdom by controlling the votes of thousands of Mexican immigrant laborers. As in the cities of the East and Midwest, the Parr machine located jobs, paid for medical care for children, and delivered groceries on Christmas.⁷⁸It also paid the poll taxes of residents of Mexican descent, requiring them in return only to vote as they were told. “Most Latin Americans couldn’t care less who was president of the United States or who was U.S. senator or governor,” Jim Rowe observed. “The only one they were interested in was the sheriff because he was the law.”⁷⁹

Parr lived on a large estate complete with race track and swimming pool, while his fellow citizens wallowed in poverty and illiteracy. The Duke was a frequent partier with Dick Kleberg, until the latter failed to secure a pardon for him for income tax evasion. In previous elections, the Parr machine had delivered large majorities for Coke Stevenson: 3,643 to 141; 2,936 to 77, and 3,310 to 17. But when the governor refused to appoint Jimmy Kazen, a Parr protégé, as district attorney in Laredo, the Duke abandoned Coke.⁸⁰

“Parr would have supported whoever was on the other side,” said Callan Graham, an Alice attorney and Stevenson friend. “The fact that it was Lyndon in 1948 was incidental.”⁸¹

Stevenson knew all of this. At a 1947 meeting with Manuel Ramon, Parr’s ally in Laredo, he had been told, “We like you. We’re not against you personally, but we’ve got to do this.”⁸²Nevertheless, Stevenson and his lieutenants decided to confront Parr and Johnson and contest the election. Returns from Duval on election day had Johnson ahead 4,197 to 40. At the end of the next day, when LBJ’s overall 2,119-vote deficit turned into a 692-vote lead, Duval had added 425 more to his total. Six days after the election, officials in Alice, where Parr had a bank and a close working relationship with Ed Lloyd, the local boss, submitted corrected returns, giving Lyndon his additional 202 votes.

There is little doubt that fraud was involved. The Johnson man responsible for poll watching and vote totals in south Texas was Jim Rowe, who recalled, “I went to the meeting of the Jim Wells County Democratic Executive Committee where they canvassed the returns, and they announced this total for Box 13, and mouths fell open. I suddenly realized that here had been 200 votes added … One of the things that happened after the primary election was that the ballot boxes were taken to the jail … including Box 13, and they were kept by the Sheriff and not turned over to the County Clerk for several days. It’s my belief that in that period is when the votes were added.”⁸³Thirty years later, Luis Salas, the election judge for Jim Wells County, told reporters that votes had been added illegally to the totals in Box 13. According to his account, Johnson came down to Parr’s office in Alice and met with Parr, Lloyd, and himself. Johnson told them that Stevenson was ahead, and he needed an additional two hundred votes. Later that evening, in the sheriff’s office, clerks added 203 names to the voter list from Box 13, copying directly from the poll tax list, not even bothering to change the alphabetical order.⁸⁴

After Stevenson issued a public statement charging fraud, Lyndon went on a statewide radio hookup the night of September 6. He “did not buy anybody’s vote,” he declared and warned that a conspiracy was afoot to “thwart the will of the people.” His opponent had received lopsided votes in Jim Wells and Duval Counties when he ran for governor. Why did he not protest then?⁸⁵At the same time, his staff began collecting information on voting irregularities in counties that had gone for Stevenson, which was not hard to do. When Price Daniel, the state attorney general, refused to launch an investigation, Stevenson decided to take matters into his own hands.

On September 7, he dispatched aide Callan Graham and Kellis Dibrell, a former FBI agent and attorney practicing in San Antonio, to Alice to find out what had actually happened. They went to Parr’s Alice National Bank to see Tom Donald, the manager who was also the Democratic county chairman. The contents of Box 13 were locked in the bank’s vault, and he had no authority to release them, Donald said. At this point, Stevenson decided to intervene personally. He arrived in Alice with James Gardner, another ex-FBI agent, and Frank Hamer, the ex-Texas Ranger famous for his role in helping track down Bonnie and Clyde.

As Stevenson and his colleagues approached the bank once again, they encountered two knots of armed men. Hamer stared them down, however, and the party was allowed to enter the bank.⁸⁶They were joined by Harry Lee Adams, the incoming Democratic county chairman. Donald agreed to let only Adams into the vault and then for only five minutes. In that space of time he was able to copy twelve names off the list. Of those, several subsequently interviewed by Hamer and Dibrell claimed that they had paid their poll tax but never voted. Before Stevenson and his men left town, Hap Holmgren, the county clerk, fearful of being charged with fraud, allowed Dibrell and Graham to see the Precinct 13 ballots. The last 203 names were in alphabetical order and copied in a different handwriting from the rest.⁸⁷

After two judges refused to allow election officials to reconsider the vote totals, all eyes turned to the meeting of the State Democratic Executive Committee scheduled for September 13 in Fort Worth’s Blackstone Hotel, where the final vote tally would take place. The vote had been so close and contentious that committee chair Robert Calvert appointed a subcommittee of two Johnson delegates, two Stevenson delegates, and three chosen by him to do a preliminary count. The subcommittee meeting in the afternoon found that Johnson had won by eighty-seven votes, but they adopted by a four to three vote a resolution recommending the elimination of the Box 13 returns from Alice.

The full Executive Committee met that night in the jam-packed ballroom of the Blackstone. “The tension in that room was so sharp that anything could have exploded it,” Jake Pickle recalled. “I was leaning up against a pillar in the back listening and trying to make tabulation on my sheet—and keeping tabs on my own heart!”⁸⁸Lady Bird and Lyndon arrived, followed shortly by Stevenson. After greeting friends and supporters, they took seats in the front row, sitting about ten feet apart, Coke puffing on his pipe. Lawyers for both sides presented their respective cases. “I am here to prevent the stuffing of the ballot box,” proclaimed one Stevenson representative.

LBJ’s spokesmen insisted that they could give two examples of fraud for every one Stevenson presented, and accused Coke of dispatching a “goon squad” to Alice to intimidate the poor Mexican voters there.⁸⁹And in fact, Wirtz had in hand evidence that the Stevenson people had switched or added votes in Dallas, Jack, Brown, Eastland, and several other counties.⁹⁰Horace Busby later observed that “if you had recounted the election after throwing out ballots that were found to be fraudulent … Johnson would have won by four or five thousand votes.”⁹¹

As the Executive Committee began its vote, Stevenson got off to an early lead, and it looked as if all was lost. But then Johnson began to gain. When the final tally was in, LBJ led twenty-nine to twenty-eight. That morning Jerome Sneed, a Johnson committee member from Austin, had collapsed in the lobby of a hotel with a heart attack. With his permission, Johnson had named Alvin Wirtz to replace him. It looked for a moment as if the Sneed proxy would be the difference. But then a female delegate from Conroe County rose to declare that she was reversing herself. The vote count stood at twenty-nine to twenty-nine. Pandemonium erupted. Under the rules, Robert Calvert had the power to cast a tie-breaking vote. He was convinced, he later recalled, that the votes in Box 13 had been fraudulent, but he was aware that a state supreme court decision in 1932 had prohibited the Committee from doing anything but accepting the reported return. He decided that if necessary, he would vote for Johnson.

There were, however, still six Committee members unaccounted for. The clerk called the name of each; none of the first five answered. The sixth name, that of Charlie Gibson of Amarillo, was announced. Sam Houston would later claim that he fetched Gibson from the men’s room, where he was being sick with a hangover. Gibson stood on a chair in the back of the room, demanding to be recognized. When he was, he cast his vote for LBJ. The tie was broken. The room broke into cheers and boos, and someone knocked Charlie Gibson’s chair over.⁹²

 

THE NEXT MOVEin the 1948 election was up to the general convention, whose two thousand delegates had gathered in Will Rogers Auditorium. Traditionally, the state convention accepted the recommendation of the Executive Committee without question, but 1948 was an unusual year. An unofficial head count taken by the Johnson people showed their candidate with a mere twelve-vote margin of victory. Illness, bribery, infidelity, and a host of other happen-stances could easily change the outcome.

Fortunately, LBJ was saved by larger issues that pervaded the meeting. Wirtz and other loyalists were determined that the Texas delegation to the national convention support the party’s regular nominee, Harry Truman, and not the Dixiecrat ticket of Strom Thurmond and Fielding Wright. They controlled the credentials committee and, after several fistfights on the floor of the convention, succeeded in barring a number of regulars who were real or suspected Dixiecrats. These delegates, of course, happened also to be supporters of Coke Stevenson. One of those ejected hailed from Fort Worth, and as such was part of the convention’s host delegation. As he and his colleagues left the hall, they took with them chairs, desks, sound system, and typewriters. Standing in the bare hall, the Democratic loyalists overwhelmingly voted to accept the Executive Committee’s decision and certify LBJ as the party’s candidate for the U.S. Senate.⁹³

 

THERE REMAINED ONLY COURT CHALLENGES,which initially went Stevenson’s way, until Abe Fortas and other New Dealers convinced Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black to rule on the case. His stay of a state court decision in favor of Stevenson resulted in an order requiring that Johnson’s name be listed as the candidate. In essence, he ruled that the federal courts, through which Stevenson had sought redress, had no jurisdiction. Human history is replete with irony. In 1948, a group of New Dealers, which certainly included Hugo Black, Virginia Durr’s brother-in-law, used states’ rights doctrine and counter-reconstruction litigation to confirm the election of one of their own, a liberal nationalist, to the U.S. Senate.

Several weeks after the election, when the tensions and stress had had a chance to ebb, LBJ told Vernon Whiteside a Box 13 joke that he would repeat periodically throughout his public career. “Well, this little boy was sitting on the curb Sunday morning at Alice,” he said, “close to Box 13, crying, a little Mexican boy. And this fellow walked up and said, ‘Son, are you hurt?’ He said, ‘No, I no hurt.’ He said, ‘Are you sick?’ He said, ‘No, I no sick.’ He said, ‘Are you hungry?’ He said, ‘No, I no hungry.’ He said, ‘What’s the matter? What are you crying for?’ He said, ‘Well, yesterday, my papa, he been dead four years yesterday, he come back and voted for Lyndon Johnson, didn’t come by to say hello to me.’ ”⁹⁴

 

MUCH WOULD BE MADEof the election by LBJ’s critics, from the reactionary J. Evetts Hailey to the liberal Texas journalist Ronnie Dugger, in an effort to portray him as a corrupt, feckless politician. “Landslide Lyndon,” his own self-deprecating term, would be used derisively by segregationists opposed to his civil rights policies and antiwar protestors opposed to the war in Vietnam. Yet from the evidence, it appears that if all fraudulent ballots and counts had been thrown out, Johnson would have beaten Stevenson by 506 votes.⁹⁵

Indeed, there is evidence of Stevenson fraud in Dallas County, where the Democratic party chair was the candidate’s cousin, and in Navarro County, where all ballots were burned before they could be inspected by election judges.⁹⁶Throughout the legal proceedings, Johnson’s lawyers could not present specific facts refuting Stevenson’s charges or submit charges of their own because they were contesting the authority of the federal court to hear the case in the first place.⁹⁷

Indeed, there are other, more important questions to ask about the 1948 senatorial race. How, incredibly, had LBJ made up seventy thousand votes in a matter of a few weeks? The reason Calculatin’ Coke lost was because he ran a truly abysmal campaign the second time around. An estimated 113,523 voters who opted for Stevenson in the first primary did not vote in the second, compared to only 4,054 Johnson supporters.⁹⁸A number of conservatives were turned off by Stevenson’s equivocation on Taft-Hartley and his acceptance of the Texas AFL endorsement. Veterans and their families were alarmed by his incipient isolationism. Most inportant, Johnson just flat outworked his opponent.

The campaign had showed Johnson at his best and his worst. He had been dogged, relentless, and at times inspiring. He had done a bit of demagoguing, but appealed mainly on the issues. With staff and supporters he had frequently been insensitive, gross, and even abusive. He thought nothing of chewing out campaign workers and volunteers in public. “You have to realize that a politician—a good one—is a strange duck,” he told Joe Phipps at the height of the campaign. “Anyone who periodically has to get down on hands and knees to beg voters to prove they love him by giving him their vote is really sick. Depending on how obsessed he is, he could be very, very sick … Try to think of me as a seriously ill, a dear relative or friend who needs all the care, compassion, comfort and love he can get in order to get well, knowing that in time he will get well. The illness … won’t come back till the next election rolls around.”⁹⁹