Means of Ascent (77 page)

During the years since he had written the manuscript, he had several times made additions to it. In some of them, he expresses confidence that eventually he will be believed. “
May be I pass away before I see my book published,” he wrote, “but some day it will come out, because it is part of history of the United States and people have the right to know the exact truth.” At other times, as he grew older, he was more
pessimistic. At one point, he wrote in hand, “I have been
having trouble to publish, some publishers don’t believe what I wrote is the truth.” Later still, he wrote, “One thing worries me, and it is that I won’t be here to see my
book published. My time is getting shorter and shorter every day that goes by.…”

In “Box 13,” Salas mentions two other reasons for coming forward at last to tell the story he had concealed for so many years. One is that George Parr died. “
I gave George my word to stay at his side to the end,” he wrote. “That end came when George died, that released me from my promise.…” The other reason he gives is yet one more reminder of the force of the personality of the former Governor of
Texas, and of its effect on people who hardly knew him.

Salas wrote about the moment in the hearing in Alice when the Federal Master announced that Justice Black had ruled and that the hearing was over. As the announcement was made, he wrote, “
I looked at Coke Stevenson and that gave the shivers.… Still remember the look in his eyes, frustration, despair and desperation, when we all heard. At that moment I had pity and compassion for the man, we stole his well-deserved candidacy, and I
thought for myself [that I] brought disaster to another man not involved in no way with my projects.… When I was going out, all my friends shouted viva Luis Salas, in other circumstances may be that could be welcomed, this time I did not feel anything but remorse, knew very deep on me that I had wronged another human being.” During the intervening years, Indio Salas wrote, he had been unable to forget the look in the eyes of that strong, silent man,
and ever since, “The only remorse I feel is … for what we did to Coke Stevenson.”

Indeed, Luis Salas relates in “Box 13,”
Sam Smithwick was not the only deputy sheriff from Alice who wrote Coke Stevenson a letter. He, Luis Salas, had written him also, Salas says. “I wrote him a letter
asking forgivings, but he never answered.”

“
I don’t blame him,” Luis Salas said.

W
HATEVER
S
ALAS’ MOTIVES
for writing “Box 13,” that manuscript—and his interview with me—adds details to the story of the 1948 election. The manuscript names the men who he says actually added the two hundred votes—Deputy Sheriffs Willie Mancha and
Ignacio (“Nachito”) Escobar—and explains why Salas refused George Parr’s request
that he add the votes himself. “I did not want them in my handwriting”; certifying the votes involved merely “giving another total,” so he agreed to do that. “That night in the dark corridors of the Adams Building a President of the United States was made.” Parr called off names from the poll list, Salas wrote, asking him if the person had voted, and if Salas said the person had not voted, Mancha would add that name to the poll list while
Escobar added a Johnson vote to the tally sheet. The manuscript explains the two
added votes for Stevenson: after they reached the requested 200 figure, “Nachito was a jolly man full of jokes, he said, let us give this poor man [Stevenson] a
pilón
[gift], and he added two votes making a total of 202.” As to whether he, Luis Salas, had on Election Night reported the Johnson total as 765, Salas wrote that of course he had: “
I told
Cliff Dubose … Dinky Price was there, and he heard me.… Price was right, so there you are if the investigation had continued, they could easily had me indicted.…”

I asked Salas if I could copy the manuscript, and when Salas agreed, we went to a nearby stationery store and copied it on a Xerox machine. “
Everyone is dead except me, Robert,” he said. “And I’m not going to live long. But Box 13 is history. No one can erase that.”

O
N THE POINT
in his 1977 statement to the Associated Press on which attention had focused—whether or not Lyndon Johnson himself had come to George Parr’s office to ask for two hundred more votes—Salas said that he had recognized Johnson because during Johnson’s campaign trip to Alice, Salas had been ill in bed and Johnson’s campaign workers had brought him to Salas’ house to meet this man who was so
important to his hopes in the Valley.

On this point, Salas could be lying. Or he could be mistaken—given his very imperfect English, that is a strong possibility; he may simply have misunderstood the introduction of the man who came to his home. Or, on that campaign trip to the Valley, a Johnson aide who physically resembled the candidate could have done in Salas’ home what
Joe Mashman did from the helicopter: pretend he was Johnson to someone who could not tell the
difference. Or Salas could be telling the truth; Johnson might have come to San Diego himself to ask for votes.

But the point is not nearly so significant as Johnson’s partisans made it appear.

Although there is still a dispute over whether Johnson asked in person for the final, decisive 200 votes to be added to his total, there can no longer, thanks to the confirmation, in Salas’ manuscript and interviews, of the sworn testimony of others, be any reasonable doubt that 200 votes
were
added to that total—six days after the election. DuBose had testified that Salas had originally given the total as 765; Price had testified that it had been
765. The only doubt about that fact had been cast by Salas’ denial when he had testified. And now Salas was admitting that he had lied: “
I told Cliff [DuBose] 765.”

The two hundred votes that “changed history” are, in fact, once one retreats from the headlines, significant only because of their decisive timing. There is, thanks to Salas, no longer any doubt that in his Box 13
alone far more than two hundred votes were stolen for Lyndon Johnson.
Jimmy Holmgreen had previously said so: “I saw dozens of votes that were for Stevenson counted for Johnson.” Ike Poole
had previously said so. And now Salas was saying so: “
If they were not for Johnson, I make them for Johnson.”

Even Box 13 as a whole, notorious as it became in American political legend, is hardly unique. In that precinct, votes were counted for Johnson although they had actually been cast for Stevenson, and further votes were counted for Johnson although nobody had cast them at all. But “there were hundreds of Box 13s in the Valley.” Duval County gave Johnson 4,622 votes, and even the rudimentary investigation cut short by Justice Black’s order showed that
a high percentage of those votes had never actually been cast at all. The testimony in Zapata County had been presenting the same picture. In the three counties investigated by federal Masters in Chancery, therefore, the evidence was overwhelming that a high percentage of the 7,279 votes counted in Lyndon Johnson’s totals were not cast at all or were cast for Stevenson. Similar conditions had prevailed in Starr County, which had given Johnson 3,038 votes. And what of the rest
of George Parr’s domain: his key “boxes” in Corpus Christi that produced 3,000 Johnson votes, for example? What of Judge Raymond’s Laredo? No investigation was conducted there, but no Johnson adviser in a position to know suggests seriously that the 5,544 votes Johnson received in Webb County were “level.” As for San Antonio—San Antonio where Lyndon Johnson “rode the polls” on Primary Day himself to oversee the vast West
Side—Johnson’s deputies on the West Side themselves boast of the votes that were “switched” for him there, and the estimate most frequently given is 10,000. Not 87 votes “changed history” and not 200, but thousands—many thousands, in fact.

Did Johnson ask in person—or just over the telephone, or just through men like Wirtz and Looney and Clark—for these votes? Johnson’s followers deny Luis Salas’ contention that in the case of Box 13 Johnson asked in person. But that denial would be significant only if it proved not merely that those particular votes were not stolen at Johnson’s personal request but that he had no personal knowledge of what was going on in the Valley as
a whole, and in San Antonio. And nobody is seriously suggesting that.

I
N 1983
, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library obtained another item that might have been of interest in analyzing the 1948 senatorial election. It was an oral history interview given in that year by William R. Smith, the Federal Master in Chancery who had presided over the Precinct 13 hearing.

Smith’s oral history leaves little doubt as to what his report to Judge Davidson would have said, had not Justice Black’s ruling forced him to terminate his hearing. More important, it makes a point that articles on the election almost invariably overlook, possibly because it was so completely blurred by Johnson’s oratory. Salas’ confession in 1977 that he had lied on the witness stand had come as no surprise to him, Smith
told the oral history interviewer. “I thought at the time he was lying.” When the precinct election judge had testified that he had gone to the
Alice News
office on the night of the primary and not given the precinct’s election returns to the reporter, “I didn’t believe a word of that, because that’s what he went there for.… I figured what the hell was Salas doing there if he wasn’t there to give them
the election returns.”

But the lie that he, the Master, had found most significant was Salas’ statement that he had lost the poll list and other records of the election. “I didn’t believe a word of it,” Smith told the interviewer. “[He] kept telling how these poll lists had been stolen and misplaced” and “I didn’t believe that.” That lie, to Smith, was pivotal, because the failure to produce the records was, to his mind, the
crucial point in the case.

He had opened the ballot boxes in the hope of finding the Precinct 13 poll list, Smith said, “but I didn’t expect to find it. If I had found it, I probably would have fainted. I didn’t think it was going to be in there”—and, of course, it wasn’t.

And what would his report to Judge Davidson have said? Smith was asked. “What are your conclusions?”

“I was very much of the opinion that the Stevenson people were right.… I firmly believe and have for years that the election was stolen in Precinct 13. I’m now convinced that [the votes] were added, 202 of them, after the polls closed.… I think Lyndon was put in the United States Senate with a stolen election, and I think he and everybody else knew it.”

This statement by the Federal Master in Chancery is the most definitive word available on Precinct 13, since his report would have been the basis for Judge Davidson’s ruling on whether or not to keep Lyndon Johnson’s name off the ballot. But it is a statement that, so far as can be determined, has never appeared in print.

I
N THE LANDSCAPE
of Lyndon Johnson’s life, already littered with stolen elections, the 1948 election was simply one more detail. Its larger significance lay in the increased clarity it gave to certain aspects of his character.

Prior to his entrance into campus politics at San Marcos, “no one,” as another student recalled, “cared about campus politics.” Elections—for class offices or the Student Council—were casual affairs. But Johnson saw in those elections an opportunity to obtain a measure of control, small but pivotal, over the fate of some of his fellow students. At this “poor boys’ school,” a diploma was for many students the
only hope of escape from a life of poverty and brutal physical toil on their families’ impoverished ranches and farms, and in the Depression, campus jobs, with their tiny cash stipends, represented the only means by which these young men could stay in school and obtain their diplomas. Johnson saw a method by which the victors in campus politics could obtain authority to dispense those jobs. And to obtain this power that no one else had focused on, he did what no one else on
the sleepy campus had done: created, out of a small social club, a disciplined and secret political organization. And when, because of his personal unpopularity, the club could not, despite his organizing, win elections, he taught unsophisticated farm boys how to steal elections (and how to win them by other methods: “blackmailing” a popular rival woman candidate out of a race over a meaningless indiscretion, for example; “things we would never have dreamt of if
it hadn’t been for Lyndon”). College Hill’s pattern was repeated on Capitol Hill in 1933 and 1934. The
“
Little Congress” of congressional aides was a social organization. But Johnson saw in its presidency a means of entrée to men of power. Again there were repeated complaints, this time from fellow Little Congress members, that he had “stolen” elections (“Everyone said it: ‘In that last
election that damn Lyndon Johnson stole some
votes again’ ”). When, in 1933 and 1934, Johnson was accused of “stuffing” a ballot box, he was not yet represented by Abe Fortas, and his accusers succeeded in accomplishing what Fortas prevented Johnson’s 1948 accusers from accomplishing: opening the suspected ballot box. When the Little Congress box was opened, it was found that the accusations against Johnson were true.
Again, as at college, what he had done was unprecedented: no one had ever stuffed a Little Congress ballot box before. (And, perhaps no one would ever stuff one again, for after his departure the organization quickly reverted to its easygoing social role;
“My God, who would cheat to win the presidency of something like the Little Congress?”
) In his first campaign for the Senate, he stole thousands of votes, and when they proved insufficient (“He
[O’Daniel] stole more votes than we did, that’s all”), his reaction was to try to steal still more, and his failure in this attempt was due only to his irredeemable tactical error, not to any change in the pattern: in making the attempt he tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade George Parr to go further than even the Duke of Duval had ever gone before; (“Lyndon, I’ve been to the federal penitentiary, and I’m not going back for you.”) At
each previous stage of his career, then, Lyndon Johnson’s election tactics had made clear not only a hunger for power but a willingness to take (within the context of American politics, of course; the coups or assassinations that characterize other countries’ politics were not and never would be included in his calculations) whatever political steps were necessary to satisfy that hunger. Over and over again, he had stretched the rules of the game to their breaking
point, and then had broken them, pushing deeper into the ethical and legal no-man’s-land beyond them than others were willing to go. Now, in 1948, in his dealings with the Valley, he was operating beyond the loosest boundaries of prevailing custom and political morality. What had been demonstrated before was now underlined in the strongest terms: in the context of the politics that was his life, Lyndon Johnson would do whatever was necessary to win. Even in terms of a most
elastic political morality—the political morality of 1940s Texas—his methods were amoral.