Means of Ascent (65 page)

Armed with the names they had jotted down and those that Adams had obtained earlier, Dibrell and Gardner, together with Graham, set out to ascertain if these “
voters” could furnish additional information about the balloting in Precinct 13. It turned out that they could furnish quite a bit.

Persuading them to give evidence was difficult, because of the atmosphere of fear—fear of Parr, of Luis Salas and his deputies, of Parr’s lawyer Ed Lloyd, and, for the unsophisticated, all-but-uneducated members of Alice’s Mexican-American community, of Anglos in general. One of Stevenson’s attorneys was to remember vividly years later how one Mexican man told him, “
People live longer down here if they keep their
mouths shut.” Nevertheless, evidence was given. The 841st voter on the poll list—the voter who, Stevenson’s allies were convinced, was the last person who had in fact voted—was
Eugenio Soliz, a twenty-eight-year-old worker on a county highway crew. And Soliz told them that he felt he probably had indeed been the last voter; he had arrived at the Nay er School voting place at about 6:40 p.m. on Election Day, twenty minutes before the
polls closed. When he left some minutes later, after voting, “there was no else there voting besides me … and there was no one else coming up to vote.” Would Soliz give an affidavit affirming his statement? Gardner asked him. Soliz said he would—and he did so, sitting in Gardner’s automobile, while Gardner, resting a portable typewriter on his lap, took his statement down and a notary listened and attested to it. Although Soliz said he
understood it in English, his statement was read to him in Spanish by
Conrado Martinez, a local businessman, and Soliz signed it.

Then Stevenson’s lawyers turned to the 201 names listed after Soliz on the poll list of voters—200 of whom, the tally sheet said, had voted for Lyndon Johnson. Brownlee had taken nine of these names down during his brief look at the poll list, and the young lawyers had jotted down additional names. They asked each of these people if they had voted for Lyndon Johnson. No, they replied, they had not; they had not, they said, voted for anyone. Without
exception, the voters questioned said they had not been to the polls at all on Election Day. For one of these persons, twenty-one-year-old
Hector Cerda, a college student, voting in Jim Wells County would have been difficult. He hadn’t
been
in Jim Wells County that day, he explained; he had spent the day in the town of Pharr, 109 miles away, and had not returned until late that night, long after the polls had closed. For three other persons whose
names were listed as voting, voting would have been even more difficult. They had been dead for some years.

Now, Coke Stevenson believed, he had proof that the decisive two hundred votes had been stolen—that they had not been cast by voters at all, that that number had simply been added to Lyndon Johnson’s total several days after the election—and he believed that this proof would enable him to have these votes thrown out and give him victory.

They could be thrown out at either of two levels—local or state—and he moved on both levels at once. While what one newspaper described as “
a small army of attorneys” went from house to house in Alice collecting affidavits, Stevenson swore to his own, summarizing the evidence of “fraud … errors and
irregularities” in Precinct 13 already collected, filed it with the
county clerk, and petitioned the Jim Wells County Democratic Executive Committee to meet and recertify a new, correct, tabulation of the county’s votes to the State Democratic Executive Committee. Ten of the seventeen members of the newly elected county committee met. They heard their new chairman, Harry Adams, their secretary, Ike Poole, and
B. M. Brownlee add to Stevenson’s affidavit what they themselves knew about the counting of the vote at the
Nayer School and about their own investigation; as a result, Poole was to say, “
I am confident there are more than two hundred people shown as voting who did not vote.” (Poole was also to tell reporters, “I helped gather the evidence and obtain affidavits from more than 200 such people.”) The committee then passed a resolution which its members felt would eliminate the 200 votes once and for all; it was certainly unequivocal enough:
“The
Democratic Committee of Jim Wells County … has evidence of fraud and irregularities in” the county’s Precinct 13, it said, and “it is the opinion of the [committee] that the certified report to the state committee was not a true and correct picture of the results of the election as held in [that] Precinct.” Since the committee “had been denied” all records of the voting in Precinct 13, it
could not determine the true vote, the resolution said, and it therefore could not draw up a new certification to replace the one already sent to the state committee; the state committee should therefore itself “determine the correct vote” and substitute it for the incorrect one. Later that day, the reformers on the committee, meeting among themselves, decided that the denial of the records need not handcuff them as totally as that resolution implied and that they could
draw up a new certification themselves without waiting for the state committee; the certification could either return the Precinct 13 vote to the one originally reported Election Night, thereby removing 200 votes from Johnson’s total or, since the fraud and irregularities in that precinct were, they felt, so widespread, they could throw out the precinct entirely, thereby removing 965 votes from Johnson’s total (and 61 from Stevenson’s). It is
“
expected,”
the
Austin American-Statesman
reported, that “an entirely new resolution of certification [will]
be drawn up by the new [county] committee and presented to the Democratic State Executive Committee as a substitute for that filed by the outgoing committee.” And, the committee members said, since they were legally entitled to those voting lists, why not move legally to force
Donald to turn them over? There were lawyers in Alice who were not under Parr’s domination; they would hire one to force the bank cashier to do so.

Stevenson’s other recourse was his party. Its nominees would be determined—at the party’s convention in Fort Worth that was to begin the following Monday, September 13—after reports from a “
canvassing subcommittee,” and from the full 62-member State Executive Committee. Customarily, the committee certifications were
pro forma;
as a result of court decisions, it was generally accepted that neither
committee would seriously consider disallowing an individual county’s certification. But there was nothing
pro forma
about this election, and the Executive Committee members were sufficiently sophisticated about politics to understand what had happened down there in Precinct 13 and in the Valley as a whole, and the implications for future close statewide elections. What had happened, others felt, was simply too raw, too blatant. Moreover, many of the
committee’s members were old friends of Coke’s. In Fort Worth, Stevenson issued a statement saying he was prepared to appear before the Executive Committee “
with proof that the returns in Jim Wells are not correct.” They knew Coke: if he said he had proof, he had proof. When the committee members arrived in Fort Worth that weekend, reporters quickly realized that the Jim Wells certification was not considered a typical example of Texas
election chicanery but an exceptional case—and was going to be seriously considered, “
SENATE RACE MORE DOUBTFUL
,” the headlines suddenly said; “
SPOTLIGHT TURNS ON SOUTH TEXAS”
—on, to be more specific, a tiny town in South Texas. As the
Corpus Christi Caller-Times
explained, in a lead paragraph beginning with a rather unfamiliar dateline:
“
ALICE
—
Voting Precinct 13 at Alice—not Duval or Harris or Dallas counties—and its 1,027 disputed votes Friday became the issue that may decide whether Lyndon B. Johnson or Coke R. Stevenson will be the next senator from Texas.” Reporters raced to the Valley. On Primary Day,
James M. Rowe of the
Caller-Times
had been unable to interest any major newspaper or wire service
in the reports from Jim Wells County. Now, he recalls, “
all of a sudden people seemed to realize that a little town in Texas had elected a United States Senator.” Under the headline “
The Duke Delivers,”
Time
magazine said: “Last week many Democrats from north and west Texas who never considered the dapper ‘Duke of Duval’ anything more than a local political princeling found he had become
a powerful king-maker. In the stretch of one of the
closest political races in U.S. history, he was the man most responsible for Congressman Lyndon Johnson’s nomination over Coke Stevenson for the U.S. Senate.” Texas newspapers were agog over “the biggest political story in the state’s history.” And Texas reporters began to zero in on the specific charge Stevenson was making. A reporter from the
Houston
Chronicle
interviewed Ike Poole, and the headline over the interview said flatly: “
200
VOTES GIVEN JOHNSON AFTER PRIMARY
.” For months the political headlines had drummed the words “Taft-Hartley” into public consciousness; now, suddenly and repeatedly, there was in the headlines a new word—
“FRAUD.”

Politics—the new politics—helped Johnson counter Stevenson’s efforts. The influence of national politics and power on a state, already so evident during the campaign itself, was to intensify during the party’s convention. The 1948 Texas convention had national political implications. In four Southern states, Democrats had broken away from the national ticket and formed the States Rights Party, which would, in November, carry these states for
its presidential candidate, J. Strom Thurmond. For Harry Truman, far behind
Thomas Dewey in the polls, it was considered imperative to keep Texas from deserting his party; the
delegates chosen in May who didn’t support him had to be ousted at this convention. The fight to do so would hinge on the ability of the “Loyalist” (in general, liberal) Truman Democrats to unseat the legally elected (by, in some cases, overwhelming
margins) delegations from the “big” counties—Harris, Dallas and Tarrant—on the convention floor, a fight which was going to be very close.

Johnson made use of this fact. The
liberals, more sophisticated than the run of Texas politicians, were aware of Johnson’s true, less-than-liberal, record in Washington; although he was more liberal than Stevenson, their support of him had never been enthusiastic. More idealistic on the whole than other Texas politicians, many of them were as outraged as the conservatives over the manner in which Johnson had attained his 87-vote majority. But
now feelings about the senatorial campaign were submerged in feelings about the presidential race. And Johnson told his men to take advantage of those feelings. They made an offer to the “Loyalist” leaders: the delegates with whom he would have influence at the convention—most notably the delegations from Austin, San Antonio and the Valley—would vote to unseat the States Rights delegations and vote to seat Loyalist delegations in their place. They would
also vote for the Loyalist candidates for the new State Executive Committee which would be elected at the end of the convention and for Loyalist candidates to all other convention posts. In return, Johnson asked for only one thing. It was couched in legal terms: his men, headed by Wirtz (Connally was doing much of the legwork), were ostensibly asking for certification of the senatorial
vote as it had been sent in by the individual counties, with no changes, and
they claimed that this was the course prescribed by law. But what they were really asking for was plain to the Loyalist leaders. Says one of them,
Robert Eckhardt, later a Houston Congressman and in 1948 a key figure in the Loyalist group: “
Johnson was interested in preventing Box 13 from being opened.… His major purpose was not to permit the opening of Box 13.” The request made them all the more aware of what the crucial
Box was likely to contain, and ordinarily they might have balked, but now, as Eckhardt puts it, “It seemed much more important to a lot of us … that there not be a bunch of [presidential] electors that could throw away Texas votes” instead of giving them to Truman. So, in his words, “Connally and I
connived on that,” and the deal was struck.

P
UBLICITY HELPED, TOO
. Johnson countered Stevenson’s charges of vote-stealing by saying—over statewide radio networks—that actually it had been Stevenson who had stolen votes, not he.

Stevenson’s supporters “were
strangely silent about the bloc vote which gave my opponent a 30,000-vote lead coming out of three big cities,” Johnson said. Moreover, Johnson said, in Dallas “they have counted me out of 2,000 votes.” And “nobody has asked for an investigation of … the River Oaks Box of Houston where Stevenson got eight out of every ten votes cast.” In Brown County, he
said, there was vote-switching. He had been cheated in rural counties as well. “You didn’t hear of the Kenedy County bloc vote, where only eight votes were in the Johnson column,” he said, and listed three other suspicious counties or boxes.

These charges would not have been very convincing to anyone who examined them closely. In Dallas, for example, there had been five changes in the returns, and not all of them favored Stevenson. Besides, they were the result not of late returns but of clerical errors; made by a clerk who typed a “9” instead of a “7” in a Johnson column, the most significant of them gave
Johnson
, not Stevenson, 2,000 more votes than he deserved.
(Dallas’ official certificate, as one writer pointed out, “
corrected that error, and the final returns were certified, without protest from Johnson leaders, on September 4.”) Johnson’s reference to Stevenson’s 30,000 total plurality in Houston, Dallas and Fort Worth as a “bloc” vote is totally misleading: in none of the three cities, which together cast a total of 173,627 votes—100,479 for Stevenson and 73,148
for Johnson—was there any pattern of “bloc” voting other than the normal heavy majorities for Stevenson in upper-income, conservative precincts and for Johnson in low-income, black and Mexican precincts (and in precincts with heavy concentrations of workers in defense-related industries). Houston’s River Oaks Box “where Stevenson got eight out of every ten votes” was the
city’s wealthiest enclave; it always voted
heavily for a conservative candidate. Nobody but Johnson ever suggested that there was any illegality in the voting there; in saying that “Nobody has asked for an investigation” of it, Johnson was correct—and nobody ever would. In Brown County, there certainly was a heated contest going on—however, it was not over the Senate election, but over the election of a County Judge. Ballots would indeed be ruled invalid there, but not because of anything to do
with the Senate race.