Means of Ascent (64 page)

The three young attorneys were ill equipped for the mission. “I had
no badge or gun; I was a young lawyer,” Dibrell recalls. “It was an awful big assignment and I didn’t know where to start.” And they were, frankly, as Graham puts it, “
a little uptight going into this area we’d heard so much about.” They had, he says, been warned at Stevenson’s Austin headquarters
“that they were known to kill people down there.… They said, ‘Be sure not to wear a suit coat so they can see you don’t have a gun.’ ” When the three young attorneys arrived in Alice, at the end of that jouncing 150-mile trip through the empty South Texas brush country, the atmosphere in the little town did not relax them. Unshaven Mexican
pistoleros
, wearing Colts or carrying Winchester rifles, stood in
groups along Main Street, staring silently at the visitors.

The three young men had brought along a book on
election law, but hardly had they arrived when they learned what so many visitors had learned before them: that Jim Wells County, like so much of the Texas brush country, was a land outside the law, in which printed legalities did not apply. The law stated clearly, Graham was to recall, that every citizen has a right to look at the election tally sheet, and at the “poll list,” the list on
which was recorded the names of individuals as they signed in to vote. “It is
very clearly stated in the law, so we thought there’d be no problem.” These lists were in the possession of B. F. (Tom) Donald, secretary of Jim Wells County’s Democratic Executive Committee, and cashier at the Texas State Bank of Alice. That was George Parr’s bank, but the three attorneys went to Donald’s office at the bank, and asked to see the
lists. “No,” Donald replied. Recalls Graham:

Donald’s refusal to show the lists made the three lawyers suspect that they might contain the proof they were looking for: the proof that the Precinct 13 vote had been altered—that the crucial two hundred votes had been added to Lyndon Johnson’s total after the polls had closed, and after the time on Election Night when the smaller total had been reported to the
Texas Election Bureau. The lawyers went to see the
“reform” members of the county’s Democratic Executive Committee, who confirmed these suspicions. One reform member,
B. M. Brownlee, said that he had seen the precinct’s “tally list,” from which the Executive Committee had been taking the vote prior to making its official report. And, as Brownlee was later to testify, “about, possibly,
200 tallies from … the end,” the
ink in which the votes were being marked “had changed.” The tallies up to that point had been written almost entirely in black ink; after that point, they were all in blue ink.
Harry Lee Adams, who had “
snuck in” as new chairman of the Executive Committee while Parr “wasn’t looking,” had first been denied a look at the lists by Donald—although by law he, not Donald, was the official entitled
to their possession—but, on a later visit to the bank, he had, although still denied possession of the lists, been allowed a brief look at the poll list. And his brief look, Adams said, had been enough. While he was jotting down the names of the individuals who had allegedly voted, he said, he had noticed that approximately two hundred names from the end—at Number 842, to be precise—the ink in which they were written had changed. Prior to Number 842, the names
had all been written in black ink; beginning with 842, they had all been written in blue ink.

Brownlee and Adams’ stories convinced the three lawyers that the poll and tally lists contained the proof of the dishonesty of the voting in Precinct 13; with the lists, they felt, they could get the names of all the final two hundred
¹
voters and simply ask them if they had indeed voted
in the election, and whom they had voted for. And the voters’ testimony
could be presented in a court of law. But Donald had refused to show them the lists. And they were not anxious to make another trip to the bank; they were, they admit, “
intimidated” by the thought of walking again down that dusty street with men glaring at them and fingering rifles and revolvers as they passed.

So Coke Stevenson went to the Valley himself—and he took along with him a representative of another law enforcement body, one in which he, as a Texan, had even more faith than he had in the FBI, and one which was, in Texas, even more revered: the
Texas Rangers. And he didn’t take along just any Ranger, but one of the toughest Rangers of them all, a Ranger who was, in fact, a figure even more legendary in Texas than Stevenson himself.
For just before he left Austin, he met
Frank Hamer on the street.

Thirty years earlier, when Frank Hamer was a young Ranger and Coke Stevenson a young county attorney newly appointed to his first public office, the two men had “lain out” together night after night in the hills of Kimble County to catch cattle rustlers. During the intervening years, they had become hunting companions and close friends. And now, when Hamer heard that Stevenson was going to the Valley, and heard why he was going, he stared at him for a long
minute. And then he said, “
Well, I’ll just go down there with you.”

I
T WAS
F
RANK
H
AMER
who led the posse of lawmen who trailed Bonnie and Clyde for 102 days and set the ambush in which the famous bank robbers were finally killed, but that was only one of the episodes that had garlanded his career with glory. He first pinned on a Ranger’s star in 1906, when he was twenty-two years old, six-foot-three, two hundred pounds, with broad shoulders and a
lightning draw. His initial assignment was as one of the seventeen Rangers dispatched to curb the riots, punctuated by murders, which had been raging through the
Rio Grande Valley for months despite the efforts of hundreds of federal troops. (The success of the seventeen led to the remark, possibly apocryphal, that came to symbolize the Texas Rangers: the sheriff of a mob-ravaged city telegraphed Ranger headquarters for assistance, and received word it would
arrive on the next train. When the train pulled in, the sheriff was dismayed to see only one man disembark. “Only one Ranger?” he asked; “Only one mob,” the Ranger explained.)

Hamer then became a “town tamer”—in a town, Navasota, that was very tough to tame. When he pinned on the city marshal’s badge there, Navasota was a boomtown in which shootouts on the main street were so frequent that in two years at least a hundred men had died. After two years of what a writer called “Hamer’s
stern and unremitting justice,” shootouts were a thing of the past; nobody
wanted to incur Frank Hamer’s wrath. Asked if he knew the marshal, a man replied: “
Yes,
sir!
An’ when I sees him comin’, I jes’ steps aside.”

Not long thereafter, he was the state’s key witness in a trial being held in a West Texas town. In an attempt to prevent him from testifying, a gunman jumped out from a hiding place and shot him at point blank range as he was passing on the street. Wounded in his gun arm and hand but still on his feet, Hamer, as one writer put it, “
calmly observed that the man’s gun had jammed.” He snatched it out of his assailant’s
hand. A second gunman jumped out and fired. Barely missing Hamer’s head, the bullet tore a hole in his Stetson. Seeing him still on his feet, the two assailants turned and ran. One kept running; he was to escape until he was later arrested. The other made the mistake of pausing for a last shot. By this time, Hamer, despite his wound, had his gun out in his uninjured hand, and shot him dead.

By the 1930s, Frank Hamer had been wounded seventeen times; at least twice he had been left for dead. He had killed fifty-three men. Despite his refusal to give interviews and his dislike of publicity, the tall, powerful Texas Ranger, with his black suit, his invariable courtesy, and his laconic speech, had become a mythical figure in Texas. Historian
Walter Prescott Webb called him one of the “
most fearless men in Western
History.” A Hollywood writer said: “
It’s embarrassing to describe Frank Hamer in these days of Westerns. One can hear about him … and then one realizes that Hamer is the real character all casting directors are striving for.” His toughness had become mythical, too: looking down at Bonnie’s bullet-riddled body in 1934, he had affected regret at having been forced to shoot a woman. But, asked in private about
the climactic gun battle, he would say, “I sure did
hate to bust a cap on a lady”—and smile. And his reputation—and his grim bearing—were weapons in themselves. During the Thirties, when he was more than fifty years old, he was called in to end the violence in a particularly bloody dock strike in Houston; walking out onto a dock on which swirled an angry crowd of striking longshoremen, Hamer approached the largest man he could
find. “I’m Frank Hamer,” the big Ranger said. “This strike is over”—and it was. In 1948, he was sixty-four years old and long retired from regular duty, although as a “Special Ranger,” employed by the Texas Oil Company to protect its property, he was still allowed to carry a gun. He didn’t wear
it anymore, but when Coke Stevenson told him he was going to the Valley, he went home and strapped it on
before they set out.

A
RRIVING IN
A
LICE
, they met Dibrell and Gardner in a room in the Alice Hotel, and were told that the election records were still being kept in the bank. Stevenson said he wanted to go there, and the two lawyers said that of course they would go, too. While they were up in the room, the whisper was running through the town: “Coke Stevenson’s here! And Frank Hamer’s with him!” A reporter
walking into the Courthouse heard the name on all sides: “Hamer!” “Hamer!”

Hamer told the men in the hotel room to take off their suit jackets so that people could see they weren’t armed. He took his off, too—so that people could see he was. They clattered down the stairs of the rickety little hotel and out onto the dusty main street and, in a scene that would be incredible were it not attested to by witnesses for both sides, walked the two hundred yards to the bank. The lawyers trailed a few paces behind. Coke Stevenson and
Frank Hamer walked side by side, two tall, broad-shouldered, erect, silent men—two living legends of Texas, in fact—two men out of another, vanishing age, another, vanishing code, marching down a street in a dusty Texas town to find out for themselves, and prove to the world, how Lyndon Johnson had gotten the two hundred crucial votes.

Back in the hotel room, the two young lawyers had been a little disappointed at their first look at the legendary Frank Hamer. “
He appeared to be an old man,” Dibrell recalls. And then, coming out of the hotel, Hamer saw George Parr’s
pistoleros
.

There were more of them this time. “Everywhere you turned there were people with guns on,” Dibrell says. One group of perhaps five was directly in Hamer’s path. Another, somewhat larger, was standing in the very door of the bank.

As he approached them, Hamer didn’t even slow down. His biographers were to write that when he approached the first group, he said, “Git!,” and at the second, he ordered, “Fall back!” The two young attorneys don’t remember any words at all; they only remember how, walking behind the old Texas Ranger, they suddenly realized how big he was, and how he carried himself—and how his right hand was poised just above the butt of
his gun, his fingers curled for the draw. And they remember how, as Dibrell puts it, “when Frank Hamer walked down the street, those clusters of people parted.” The
pistoleros
in front of the bank, having stepped aside for Stevenson, evidently intended to follow the ex-Governor inside, but Hamer turned and stood in the doorway, his hand still poised
above his gun. None of the men facing him moved. After a few minutes, they walked away.

I
NSIDE
, Stevenson was confronting Tom Donald in his office. He said he wanted to see the tally sheet and the poll list and copy all the names on the poll list, and when Donald refused to allow him to do so, Stevenson, as he was to state in an affidavit, “advised him that
I was being deprived of my rights under federal law”—and advised him also, in the dry words of the affidavit, “of the
consequence thereof.” Recalls the one reporter who was present,
James M. Rowe of the
Corpus Christi Caller-Times:
“Coke was
like a glacier—he could look really mean.” Donald took the list and tally sheet from his desk, and showed them to Stevenson and his men, and for a few moments—a vital few moments—Dibrell and Gardner studied them intently. When they began copying names from the list, Donald
said, “No, you can’t do that!” and snatched it away, but the two lawyers had had time to memorize some of the names, and the numbers beside them, and they rushed out into the bank’s outer room and wrote them down. They had been alerted by Adams and Brownlee as to the crucial points, and had looked at those first—and they had had time to confirm what the two local men had told them: that the last 201 names on the list (two hundred of whom were listed
as voting for Johnson, one for Stevenson) had been written in the same ink, different from that previously used, and in the same handwriting, different from that which had previously appeared. They noticed, moreover, something that the two Alice men had not: that the 201 names were in alphabetical order—the first few names starting with 842 began with A, the next few with B, until about 915, when the end of the alphabet was reached; then the A’s began again—as if
whoever had been writing the names had miscalculated and gotten to the end of the alphabet too fast, and had thereupon simply gone back to the A’s and started over. The two lawyers also did something that Adams and Brownlee had not done: they had memorized—and now wrote down—the last name in black ink, the name of voter 841. If the moment of change came at 842, who was 841, and what could he tell them? James Gardner had also looked at the tally sheet—and
had made a discovery that dwarfed all the others: Johnson’s partisans were arguing that the count of Precinct 13 had not been changed, that no one had ever said Johnson’s vote total was 765, that it had always been 965. The certification on the tally sheet gave the lie to that argument, Gardner felt. “The certification showed that the vote for Lyndon Johnson was 965,” he was to testify, “but it was evident from looking at the 965 that the 9 had been
changed. It previously had been a 7.… The 7 had been worked over in
pen and ink from a 7 around to a 9.… An additional loop [had been] added to the 7 to make a 9 out of it.”