Means of Ascent (37 page)

In 1946, he was asked—by newspaper editorials, by politicians, and by letters pouring in a flood into the gubernatorial mansion—to run for an unprecedented third term as Governor. Polls showed that his popularity was as immense as ever; even the liberal
Austin American-Statesman
was forced to report that he was so idolized in the capital that one state official “
seems to believe that when he dies, he
will go to Coke Stevenson.” (The
American-Statesman
also admitted that although it had frequently criticized Stevenson’s record, “
He sincerely wanted to leave the State better off than it was when he came here, and he probably will.”) Stevenson refused even to consider a third term. He felt that the prohibition against it was an unwritten article of his beloved Constitution, and as such inviolate. When his term was over, he stuck his old Stetson
on his head, and went home to his ranch.

D
ESPITE SPECULATION
that Stevenson would run for the Senate in 1948, at first, Coke’s friends knew, he intended to stay home. “What people didn’t understand was that he loved that ranch, truly loved it,” says
Ernest Boyett, who had been his executive assistant. “He had built it with his own hands, after all. And it symbolized everything he had wanted and dreamed of as a boy, and had
fought for in life, and had gotten against very long odds. And it was beautiful.”

But when Coke got back to the ranch, the ranch was different. Fay wasn’t there.

“It had always been him and Fay,” says Boyett. “Him and Fay against the world.
Now he was alone.” He had asked Coke, Jr., and his wife, Scottie, to come and live with him; his son, he had hoped, would practice law with him in Junction. But the young couple didn’t want that kind of life, and stayed in Austin. “When he left the governorship, he had intended fully to go out to the ranch and stay there,”
his nephew Bob Murphey says. “But there was no one there.”

He tried to stay. Because he had no telephone, it was difficult for his former supporters and political allies to get in touch with him, and he tried to keep it that way, still refusing to have a telephone installed. His mail was brought out once a week from Junction, and each week, it seemed, the mail sack grew heavier, with letters typed on the embossed stationery of Houston and Dallas firms, and written in pen or pencil on ruled pages torn from school notebooks, with
letters bearing postmarks from every corner of Texas. He didn’t open most of the letters—because he knew what they would be asking him to do.

Friends, visiting him, saw his loneliness. Murphey, now a young lawyer in Nacogdoches, loved him, and Stevenson’s friends asked—Coke himself would never ask—Murphey to live with him for a while. Murphey agreed, arriving on Labor Day, 1947, and saw that the legend of Coke Stevenson was true.

“We lived like men out of another time,” Murphey recalls. Their life was one of utter
simplicity. It was a life of work, Rounding up cattle and goats, branding, shearing. Driving postholes, repairing fences, clearing cedar. Murphey considered himself a good worker, but he came to feel that his fifty-nine-year-old uncle could work him to death. “He never stopped, and he never got tired,” Murphey recalls. At the end of the
day, the two men, covered with sweat, would strip off all their clothes and bathe in the freezing river, using buoyant Ivory Soap so that if a bar was dropped, it would float instead of sinking. Then they would have dinner: beans and salt pork or beans and bacon—or just plain beans. After dinner,
Murphey would generally go to bed early—from exhaustion, and to stay as warm as possible. “The only heat in that house was from the fire” in
the great fireplace, “and that house would get
cold!
I slept upstairs, and before I went to bed, I would stand close to the fire and toast myself back and front until I was sweating, and then run upstairs as fast as I could and jump into bed.”

The stories about Stevenson’s reading were true, too, Murphey saw. “He got up at four a.m.,” he says. “I don’t mean five, I mean four. I would get up to go to the bathroom, and I’d see him sitting there in front of the fire reading. That was when he did
his reading, because when the sun came up, he wanted to be out on the ranch.” With sun-up, Stevenson would be out milking the cows—in weather
that was sometimes so cold that before Murphey could water the horses, he would have to break the ice that had formed overnight in the trough. “Sometimes, you suddenly remembered that this was the former Governor of Texas milking cows, standing buck-naked washing himself in the river, eating the same beans every day—you could hardly believe it. But there was no pretense about Coke Stevenson, none at all. He was what he was—and that was it.” Once, driving
into Junction, he and Murphey saw a car stopped on the road with a flat tire. While Stevenson was helping the driver change it, he tried to avoid telling him his name. When he was finished, the driver asked him point blank. “Coke Stevenson,” the big man muttered, and got back into Murphey’s car as quickly as he could.

But Murphey saw that his uncle was very lonely, and he had after all been the center of a very different world for many years. And Murphey had opened the mail, “and,” as he recalls it, “the letters all said the same thing: ‘Come back. We need you. Run for senator.’ ” Nor was Stevenson happy either with national political developments—the return to what he called constitutional values that he had hoped would follow
Roosevelt’s death was not nearly fast or thorough enough for him—or with the role, or lack thereof, of that buffoon O’Daniel, who was representing his beloved state in the Senate. Stevenson had agreed to a request from an old friend,
R. M. Eagle, to address the
Texas Lumber Manufacturers Association in Lufkin in October, 1947. At the end of the speech, Eagle, thanking him for coming, said, “
We
hope the Governor’s public life is not closed.” The audience began to applaud. Then one lumberman stood up, and then another, shaking their fists in the air. And then the whole audience was on its feet, roaring. Stevenson left without responding, said hardly a word on the long drive back to Junction, and the next morning was out at sun-up milking the cows as usual. But no one who knew him—including Murphey—was surprised when his uncle scheduled a radio
broadcast for New Year’s Day, 1948. Listening to it, Lyndon Johnson learned that among his opponents for the Texas senatorial seat would be “Mr. Texas” himself.

T
EN DAYS AFTER
Stevenson entered the race, Johnson got a break. A 56-year-old Houston attorney,
George E. B. Peddy, announced that he was entering also. In 1922, Peddy, then a youthful state legislator, had polled 130,000 votes as a candidate for United States Senator. During the intervening twenty-six years, he had not run for any public office, but he had been an officer in both world wars and was widely known, and
respected, in veterans organizations. He was, moreover, regarded as a symbol of uncompromising conservatism, and his numerous family was well known in ultra-conservative Deep
East Texas. He had no chance to win, but he certainly would draw a significant number of votes in East Texas—and the votes he would draw would be Coke Stevenson’s.

Nonetheless, polls could not have heartened Johnson. A Belden Poll taken in February, by which time it was obvious that O’Daniel would not be running, showed that Stevenson was the choice of a higher percentage of voters than Johnson, Peddy and all minor
candidates combined.

Nor could he have been heartened by the attitude of the press—which was that of course Coke would win. Who could possibly beat him? The only question was whether the former Governor would win a majority in the primary on July 24, or whether Peddy, and other minor right-wing candidates, would siphon off enough of the conservative vote to deny him a majority and force him into a second primary, which would be held, if necessary, on August 28. As one writer put it:
“
That strong, silent man on his isolated ranch in the Hill Country fastness holds no public office at this time, but he is considered … the most potent political force in the state.”

L
YNDON
J
OHNSON’S
career had been marked at every stage by a repetition of vivid patterns in both his political behavior and his personality.
Now, in this crucial, perhaps final, moment of that career—in this longshot last chance—these patterns re-emerged, sharper than ever.

One pattern was the use of
money as a lever to move the political world.

Stevenson’s campaigns had always been adequately financed, not that his type of campaigning required much financing. Although his incorruptibility annoyed big business lobbyists, big business contributed to his campaigns nonetheless, because of their Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest philosophy into which his laissez-faire philosophy so easily shaded, and because his “economy” style of government was agreeable to men who felt that it was their taxes
that paid for government services. Stevenson’s campaigns, however, had been financed on the traditional Texas scale—a rough rule-of-thumb, occasionally violated, among Texas politicians was that a respectable statewide campaign could be waged for between $75,000 and $100,000. Johnson was thinking of money on a completely different scale. He always had. His first campaign for Congress, in 1937, had been one of the most expensive congressional
campaigns—possibly
the
most expensive congressional campaign—in the history of Texas. During his first Senate campaign, in 1941, men handed him (or handed to his aides, for his use) checks or envelopes stuffed with
cash—checks and cash in amounts unprecedented even in the free-spending world of Texas politics—and with these contributions of hundreds of thousands of dollars, he had waged the most expensive senatorial campaign in
Texas political history. Now, in his last chance, he planned to use money on a scale unprecedented even for him.

He had it to use. After Johnson’s 1941 Senate campaign, George Brown had delivered to Johnson Herman Brown’s pledge to finance a second Senate campaign as lavishly as he had financed a first. Since that time, the federal contracts Johnson had helped
Brown & Root obtain had gotten bigger; profits had mounted from millions of dollars to tens of millions—and at the same time fierce Herman Brown had glimpsed the wealth that
could come to his company through the efforts of a Senator, rather than a mere Representative. In 1947, the pledge was renewed again; if Lyndon wanted to run, the money would be there—as much as was needed.

C
OKE
S
TEVENSON
may have been immensely popular in Texas. But in the state’s third-largest city, San Antonio, and in the area south of San Antonio, the broad, gently undulating “brush country” covered with cactus and mesquite and dotted with small towns that slopes gently two hundred miles southward to the Rio Grande River and Mexico, popularity was not the coin of the political realm.

San Antonio’s “West Side” was a sprawling Mexican-American slum, containing perhaps 60,000 residents, and, as journalist
John Gunther was to write, “
The way to play politics in San Antonio is to buy, or try to buy, the Mexican vote, which is decisive.” Lyndon Johnson had, of course, been buying votes on the West Side for years: in 1934, buying them on behalf of
then-Congressman
Maury Maverick, he had sat in a room in the city’s Plaza Hotel behind a table covered with five-dollar bills, peeling them off and handing them to Mexican-American men at the rate of five dollars a vote for each vote in their family; in 1941, he had bought votes on his own behalf, purchasing them wholesale instead of retail by arranging for the distribution of generous lump sums of cash to Mexican-American leaders who would make the
direct purchases themselves, and whose organizations would make sure that voters got to the polls and voted for the approved candidate. Through a number of devices, moreover, the purchase of many West Side “votes” was accomplished without voters being involved at all. Opposition poll watchers and election judges at some West Side precincts might be persuaded—the going rate for such persuasion was only about ten or twenty dollars for a clerk, but it might be as
high as fifty for a judge—to leave the polling place after the polls closed. Then the doors would be locked, the ballot boxes or voting machines would be opened, the names of persons who had paid their
poll tax but had not actually voted would be added to the list of persons who
had
voted, and a corresponding number of votes would simply be added to the total of the purchasing candidate. There were more than 10,000 votes available on the West Side
that were, political leaders in Texas estimated, in effect, for sale.

South of San Antonio, in “the Valley,” geographically the area bordering the Rio Grande but in political parlance also including the counties which adjoined them to the north, there were cities—Laredo, Harlingen, Corpus Christi—with similar Mexican-American and black slums, and similar voting practices. Entering these slums was like entering a foreign city. As for the rest of the Valley, with its tiny communities scattered thinly across the
brush country, only the arbitrary drawing of a border made these counties part of the United States. Their inhabitants were predominantly Mexican, their language and culture predominantly Spanish; they clung to the customs of their homeland across the Rio Grande. Their dozing towns, strung along the river, “bore,” as one traveler wrote, “an appearance as foreign as their names”—San Ygnacio, Santa Maria, La Paloma, Los Indios. Their houses were
thatched adobe huts, or
jacales
, one- or two-room structures of willow branches daubed with mud, around which swarmed dogs and goats and chickens. Inland, the names of the towns were more Anglo—Alice, Alfred, Orange Grove, Freer—and the Mexican sections often consisted of little wooden buildings
with corrugated tin roofs, or of buildings up on cinder blocks or stilts because of huge termites which, in some towns, seemed to swarm everywhere;
but whatever the materials used in their construction, the homes in these sections were still hovels—rickety shacks crowded together—and in their yards were the same goats and chickens. These Mexican-American inhabitants were largely illiterate; the Valley as a whole had one of the lowest literacy rates, if not
the
lowest, in the entire United States. And they had, as historian
V. O. Key, Jr., noted, “only the most remote conception
of Anglo-American governmental institutions.” In the near-feudalistic regions of
Mexico from which they came, serf-like dependence on a local leader, the
patrón
or
jefe
, had been the custom, as one observer noted, “
from time immemorial,” and they continued this custom in the United States. Since many of the Mexicans worked on the great South Texas ranches—the huge King Ranch alone employed
more than seven hundred
vaqueros
—the
patrón
was often the ranch owner. The cattle barons, historian
Douglas O. Weeks wrote, “established themselves as
lords protector of those Mexicans who became their tenants and ranch hands,” with the
vaquero
giving “unquestioning loyalty” to the ranch owner and regarding his wishes “
as law, the
only law he knows.” But some of these
patrónes
were political bosses—ruthless, in some cases vicious, men who walked the streets of the dusty little towns in their domains surrounded by armed unshaven
pistoleros;
politics was violent in the Valley. A reporter from Philadelphia who journeyed there in 1939 found “
as hard-bitten a political crowd … as Texas ever saw.… Each [county] has its own
iron-fisted boss, who would make Philadelphia’s Jay Cooke or New York’s
Jimmy Hines look like pikers.”