Means of Ascent (83 page)

After a while, however, my circle of interviews about Johnson’s life began expanding so that I was talking to political figures from the 1930s and 1940s who had been outside Johnson’s orbit. At the time, I wasn’t interviewing these people about Stevenson or the 1948 campaign; the necessity of learning about that campaign in detail had still not sunk in on me. But although my interviews were primarily concerned with other subjects, sometimes the
interviewees would bring up Stevenson’s name—and slowly (very slowly, I must admit) I was beginning to realize that from these new sources the picture I was being given was quite different from the picture I had been given before.

If there was a single decisive moment in this process—a moment in which I finally understood that there might be much more to Coke Stevenson than I had previously believed—that moment occurred during an interview I conducted in 1977 in Bristol, Tennessee, with Wingate H. Lucas, congressman from Fort Worth in the 1940s.

I wasn’t interviewing Mr. Lucas about the 1948 campaign; at that point, I had no idea that he had
had
any connection with the 1948 campaign. I had located Lucas in Bristol (he had left Texas almost twenty years before) and had gone there to interview him because I was trying to talk to as many as possible of the surviving members of the Texas delegation in the House of Representatives who had served with Johnson when he was a member,
from 1937 to 1948. At one point during two long days of interviews, however, Lucas began attempting to explain the sources of Johnson’s unusual power within the Texas delegation. He said that part of that power was based on Johnson’s entree to Franklin Roosevelt’s White House, which enabled Johnson to obtain favors for influential Texans. In his own Fort Worth, for example, Lucas said, Johnson had through such favors cemented an alliance with several of
Lucas’ most influential constituents, notably publisher Amon Carter and oilman Sid Richardson. He himself, Lucas said, was therefore afraid of Johnson’s power, although he personally detested him. And then Lucas said, “Why, I even had to support him in 1948. And that was really hard for me. I was a Stevenson man. Coke Stevenson lived by the code of honesty.”

During those two days of talking to Mr. Lucas, I had found him to be an extremely pragmatic and cynical politician—as pragmatic and cynical, I think, as any I have ever encountered—and rather bitter about politics and politicians as well. His use of such a phrase about another politician was therefore striking to me. The moment was decisive, moreover, not merely because Lucas used such a phrase but because when he used it I realized that I had heard
similar phrases before. At that moment it dawned on me that I had been hearing testimony to Coke Stevenson’s honesty and personal integrity for months—ever since I had begun interviewing outside the Johnson-Loyalist circle. The Johnson people said Coke Stevenson was dishonest, a typical venal Texas pol. Others—almost all the others outside that circle, I suddenly realized—had been telling me that Coke Stevenson was a singularly incorruptible public
official. It was at this point that I began to do more intensive research into the campaign, and into Johnson’s opponent in it.

A
S FOR
other assertions repeated recently—for example, that Stevenson had often stolen votes in elections, just as so many other Texas politicians had—my education about these matters followed the pattern of my education about the oil lease “deals.” The vote-stealing allegations were repeated to me by Johnson aides, and by members of the Loyalist circle and their intellectual and journalistic heirs. I feel that
most of these people were not deliberately misleading me, that they had been repeating these stories for so long that they themselves believed them. Listening to them,
one hears a convincing case for Coke Stevenson’s transgressions in this area, and I was at first convinced. But I subsequently found that while most of the younger members of the Johnson circle claimed that Coke Stevenson had frequently stolen votes in those elections, most of the politicians
outside that circle who were old enough to be Stevenson’s contemporaries said he had never stolen votes, and considerable research showed, as I state in the “Head Start” chapter, that the allegations about Stevenson’s political integrity were, like the allegations about his personal integrity, merely gossip and rumors that supposedly “everyone knew”—but for which I was not able to find any factual support. Stevenson certainly received
the bloc vote from the Rio Grande Valley several times, but not by purchase. Rather, as I note on
this page
, he received it in most instances because his immense popularity made victory a foregone conclusion, and the border bosses preferred being on the winning side. In this aspect of his career as in others, Coke Stevenson was not the typical Texas politician but what I call him: “the exception.”
For those who are interested, a rather detailed analysis of the vote stealing in the 1941 Senatorial campaign may be found in my first volume, pages 734–740. And as for the similarly oft-repeated (and convincingly repeated) contention that no one really knew for sure whether votes were stolen for Johnson in 1948 or not, and that no one would ever really know, what I found in regard to that is also in the text of this book. Even if no other evidence were available—and,
of course, plenty is—the 1,040 pages of court testimony settle the question once and for all. Moreover, while Johnson and his apologists have always contended that his vote from the Valley was nothing more than normal Texas politics, and while Johnson’s younger aides—men such as Horace Busby and Warren Woodward, who had worked for Johnson for only a few months and who were not privy to any of the maneuvering in the week following the 1948
election—may believe that, not one of more than a score of older Texas politicians active in the 1930s and early 1940s whom I interviewed supports that contention, as is shown in the chapter entitled “Lists of Names.” (Not even Johnson’s older, higher-placed advisers believe that, as is shown on pages 320–322; moreover, Ed Clark, commenting on allegations that Stevenson’s aides stole votes in 1948, says flatly: “They didn’t know
how, and Governor Stevenson didn’t know how.”) While the limits of Texas politics were indeed notably loose, in 1948 Lyndon Johnson went beyond even those limits.

T
HE
dissimilarities between the Coke Stevenson vividly described by Loyalists and Johnson men and the Coke Stevenson I discovered in my research extended to other areas besides his personal and political integrity.
There was, for example, the larger question of his place in Texas history. The Johnson-Loyalist circles said he was “typical”—nothing unusual about his career. But, I found, this description
did not take into account Stevenson’s popularity—or the reason for that popularity. When, belatedly beginning now to research the Coke Stevenson story more thoroughly, I finally looked up the vote totals in Stevenson’s previous statewide elections, not only those for Governor but for Lieutenant Governor, I found that he had achieved the unprecedented triumphs detailed in the text of this book: for example, that in both his campaigns for Governor, he received a
higher percentage of the vote in the crucial Democratic primary than any candidate before him in the history of Texas, and once carried every one of the state’s 254 counties, the only gubernatorial candidate in the state’s history who had ever done so in a contested Democratic primary. Even in his earlier, pre-gubernatorial campaigns, his record was striking. In 1940, for example, he ran for Lieutenant Governor. Liberal journalists assailed his conservative views, and
journalists of all political persuasions ridiculed his old-fashioned style of campaigning. He had two opponents. One received 113,000 votes, the other 160,000. Stevenson polled 797,000, carrying all 254 counties. Whatever one’s opinion of Stevenson’s record as a public official, obviously a man who in running for office had done, and repeated, what no other candidate had ever done could hardly be described with fairness as merely “typical.” Even beyond the
election victories, his entire career—the fact that he held the governorship longer than any individual before him in the history of Texas, the fact that he was the only Speaker in the state’s history ever to succeed himself, the fact that he was the only man in the state’s history ever to hold all three of its highest offices—was not only not typical but was, in fact, unique.

His popularity was based on the facts of his life, which held a deep emotional appeal for Texans. By the time I was researching the 1948 election in depth, knowing now that there was far more to it than I had been aware of, I had begun reading weekly and daily newspapers and magazines from the 1930s and ’40s, many of which chronicled the life that seemed like a western epic, and contained the physical descriptions of Stevenson that made him seem the archetypal
Texan. I couldn’t find many individuals personally familiar with his life story (or, indeed, with him as a younger man), but I found a few, and their oral description confirmed the written. Looking through smaller, more obscure publications—
Sheep and Goat Raiser, Frontier Times
and
West Texas Today
, for example—I found several long articles written by contemporaries, and they, too, contained the same facts as the newspaper profiles. The
“Story of Coke Stevenson,” as I call it, was a very dramatic one. But the story—of the young boy who was a great rider, of the teenager starting up the freight line, of
the self-education by campfire light, of the founding of the almost mythical ranch, of the reluctance to enter politics, of the unprecedented political triumphs, of the refusal to trim political philosophy to prevailing political winds—was beyond dispute. The drama was
rooted in the facts I found.

More important, in reading not later accounts influenced by—or, more often, based wholly upon—an image of Stevenson presented by his opponents but rather those newspapers and magazines contemporaneous with Stevenson’s tenure in public life, I found that the Stevenson story had already been transmuted into legend: the legend that I summarize in the book by quoting excerpts from some of these articles. In discussing Stevenson, there was a tone in many
newspapers and magazines—not in the liberal
Texas Spectator
or the
Austin American-Statesman
, of course, but in many others—of a near-reverence quite unusual in descriptions of a public official. The man Lyndon Johnson had to defeat in the campaign of 1948 was not merely a public official but a folk hero, not just a typical Governor but one of the most beloved public figures in the history of Texas. I considered it essential to show
why
Stevenson was a folk hero. The image of Coke Stevenson that had come down to history (to the very limited extent that
any
image of Stevenson had come down to history) was the image the Johnson people painted during the campaign, and that, today, more than forty years later, the Johnson-Loyalist group still paints for biographers and historians. They were able to paint this image during the campaign for many reasons, one of which was that their target disdained to fight back.
They have been able in recent years to paint this image virtually without refutation, for there is almost no one left to dispute them. But the image the Johnson people painted and paint is a strikingly incomplete image. They describe Coke Stevenson as a figure scorned and despised. That is certainly what he was to them. To the overwhelming majority of Texans, he was something quite different. No one could hear old men talk—as I have heard many old men talk—about Coke
Stevenson, the Cowboy Governor,
“our
Cowboy Governor,” riding at the head of a rodeo parade; no one could hear them talk, decades later, about “Mr. Texas” riding by as a memorable moment in their lives, and not
know
he was something quite different.

T
HIS
is not to say that I approve of Coke Stevenson’s record as Governor. Indeed, aspects of that record—his refusal to intervene in the Beaumont race riots or to investigate the Texarkana lynching (his segregationist views in general, in fact), and his stance in the Rainey affair—are indefensible. These episodes—and the uncompromising conservative philosophy that ran through his Administration as a
whole—made him a symbol
of all that Austin’s liberal academics, intellectuals and journalists opposed, and if I had been in Texas in the 1940s, I would have been on their side.

In the era about which I am writing, however, Texas was not a liberal state, but an extremely conservative state. The views of the Austin liberals were not the views of the majority of the Texas electorate, and it is important to realize that the 1948 election was not, as several articles published in 1990 would have it, a campaign between a liberal and a conservative.

Race is an example. Texas was a segregationist state in 1948. In that year, President Truman submitted a civil rights program—including a proposal for a federal law against lynching—to Congress, and a poll conducted in March showed that only 14 percent of white Texans favored that program. Certainly, Stevenson expressed himself on more than one occasion in decidedly racist terms, but those who claim that his segregationist attitude was an issue in the
campaign choose not to remember that
both
candidates—not just Stevenson—opposed Truman’s program. Lyndon Johnson used the opening speech of his 1948 campaign to make an all-out attack on that program. “The Civil Rights program is a farce and a sham—an effort to set up a police state,” he said.

And, of course, as is noted in the Introduction to this book, for eleven years in Congress Johnson had voted against every civil rights bill, including an anti-lynching bill (as he would, following the 1948 campaign, vote against every civil rights bill for the next nine years). This is not to say that Johnson was a segregationist, just as I do not say that Stevenson was
not
a segregationist. Stevenson was one. Nor, of course, is it to condone
Stevenson’s views. What I
am
saying is that since Texas was a segregationist state and the public positions of both candidates were the same, civil rights was not an important issue in the campaign. Nor, sadly, did Stevenson’s deplorable record and views ever affect his overwhelming popularity. To have given significant emphasis to race in this book would have been to wrench the campaign out of its historical context, to have looked at a 1948 event through a
lens ground in 1990. The Rainey affair, too, despite all the anguish it caused (and still causes) those who love
freedom of thought and discussion, was not an important campaign issue in 1948. Stevenson’s Administration as a whole was not an important issue in the campaign; Johnson did not make it an issue, for he was well aware of the popularity of that Administration—and of the political philosophy on which it was based—with the great
majority of Texans. As even Stevenson’s critics conceded, “He was as liberal as the people.” And since I am writing about Coke Stevenson primarily because of his relationship to Lyndon Johnson and the 1948 campaign, aspects of Stevenson’s life which had little to do with the campaign are dealt with in only summary fashion. (As are aspects of
Johnson’s
life that had little to do with the campaign, such as his stated
position on civil rights issues: The evolution of Johnson’s views on civil rights and segregation from his early days in government to the Civil Rights Acts he championed as Senate Majority Leader and President will be examined in detail in Volume III, the point at which civil rights becomes a major theme of his career.) Moreover, I try to make the reader see events as they unfolded, to make the reader feel as if he were present at the scene when the events described were
taking place. If the reader had been in Texas during that hot summer of 1948, watching Lyndon Johnson and Coke Stevenson campaign, he would have heard very little about race or Rainey, and for that reason he will read little about those matters here.