The Passage of Power (34 page)

L
YNDON
J
OHNSON HAD
something else on his side in Texas. His investment in George Parr was paying off.

In the election, on November 8, the Kennedy-Johnson ticket carried Texas, 1,167,932 votes to 1,121,699; Kennedy won by 46,233 votes out of 2,311,670 cast, winning 50.5 percent of the votes to 48.5 for Nixon (1 percent were cast for candidates of two minor parties). Hardly had the votes been tallied when Texas Republicans charged that tens of thousands of them were fraudulent—and that tens of thousands of other votes, legitimate votes, had fraudulently been invalidated, and not counted. The GOP complaints dealt not primarily with the state’s big cities—Nixon carried Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston by almost 100,000 votes—where voting machines were used, but rather with the scores of counties in which voting was still by paper ballot, and in which voters had to sign numbered “poll lists” which made it possible for officials to know for whom they had cast their ballots, making a mockery of the concept of the secret ballot; well over half the ballots cast in Texas in 1960 were paper.

GOP complaints about most of the state centered on a technicality. Under a new state law—the 1960 election was the first time it was in effect—voters who used paper ballots were required not only to mark the candidate of their
choice, but also to cross off the candidates they opposed, not only the candidate of the other major party, but the candidates of the two minor parties as well. Although one of the law’s other provisions allowed judges to count votes (even if this requirement was not complied with) if the voter’s intent was clear, the GOP, noting that the longtime Democratic dominance in the state meant that the election machinery—from precinct judges to the State Board of Elections canvassers—was overwhelmingly Democratic, charged that in pro-Nixon precincts many ballots were invalidated, in pro-Kennedy precincts far fewer. Republicans said that a spot check of just ninety-four precincts showed that fifty-nine thousand ballots had been invalidated; in some precincts, heavily pro-Nixon, the disqualification rate was 50 percent, they said. About certain areas of Texas, however—the sprawling Mexican-American slum in San Antonio that was known as the “West Side” and the impoverished Mexican-American counties south of San Antonio in the Lower Rio Grande Valley that formed the border between Texas and Mexico—the Republican complaints were not about technicalities.

In these areas—then known in a Texas political euphemism as the “ethnic bloc”—Mexican-American Catholics made up a substantial portion of the population, and the Kennedy edge in these areas has been generally attributed to his Catholicism, as well as to the activism of the younger Mexican-American World War II veterans who had established
“Viva Kennedy” committees. Kennedy’s Catholicism, the
Texas Observer
noted, had contributed to his victory in the thirty-nine counties throughout Texas in which Catholics comprised a majority of the population: while Eisenhower had carried twenty-eight of them in 1956, Kennedy carried thirty-five in 1960. This analysis, however, omits the factor considered decisive by some Texas political figures, including the two key ones,
John Connally, who would in 1962 be elected the state’s governor, and
Edward A. Clark, the onetime Secretary of State and longtime “Secret Boss” of the state, a factor whose significance is demonstrated by the fact that while in the “Catholic” counties outside the San Antonio–Rio Grande areas, the shift from the Republican ticket in 1956 to the Democratic ticket in 1960 fell generally within limits that might be expected in elections held in a democracy, in San Antonio and the Rio Grande counties, the shift was outside those limits, and the majorities recorded for the Kennedy-Johnson ticket were startling in comparison with those recorded in the previous presidential election.

In that 1956 election, San Antonio (which used voting machines) supported the Republican ticket by a margin of 12,000 votes. In 1960, it supported the Democratic ticket by a margin of 19,000 votes.
“This
is a reversal of 31,000,” former San Antonio Congressman
Paul Kilday wrote Johnson. “We are quite proud of the results.” The reversal was due largely to results from the West Side, which was run, with an iron hand, by Kilday’s brother, Sheriff
Owen Kilday. The West Side went for Kennedy-Johnson by a margin of 17,017 to 2,982, just over 14,000 votes. In one precinct (or “box”) in that area, which had given Eisenhower a substantial majority in 1956, sentiment had evidently changed. Kennedy
won, 1,324 to 125. Other West Side boxes recorded margins for Kennedy of 880 to 55 and 799 to 48.
¹

In the Valley border counties, the results were even more dramatic. For decades, as I wrote in
Means of Ascent,
the results reported from the “ethnic” towns

Between 1948 and 1960, little had changed. In the latter election as in the former, George Parr counted them for Lyndon Johnson. The first sign was the pace of the counting. By the evening of election day, several hours after polls had closed, veteran reporters had noticed what one called the
“slow-motion
count of votes” in Duval—they knew what that meant; that the Duke was holding back a final tally until he saw whether the race was close, so that if it was, he could give his allies the votes they needed. At midnight, only one of Duval’s ten precincts had reported a final tally. Then, finally, came the count itself. The Duke controlled not only Duval County but Starr County as well as a personal fiefdom. Duval voted for Kennedy-Johnson by a margin of 3,803 to 808, Starr by 4,051 to 284. In a petition for a recount filed with the state canvassing board three days after the election, Republicans charged that
pistols
were carried by “[election] judges and others in Duval County so that voters were intimidated and coerced.”

Then there was Jim Wells County, or to be precise, the county’s Precinct Thirteen: “Box 13,” the precinct, already legendary in Texas political history, that in 1948 had provided the decisive margin for Lyndon Johnson by giving him two hundred new votes—the votes that were cast in alphabetical order and all in the same handwriting six days after the polls had closed. The Mexican-American reform movement had taken control of most of Jim Wells from Parr, but not the thirteenth precinct, the poorest Mexican district in the county seat of Alice. In 1960, that box gave Lyndon Johnson’s ticket a margin of 1,144 to 45, or twenty-five to one, so the ticket came out of the heart of the Duke’s Rio Grande domain with more than 88 percent of the vote—and a plurality of more than 7,800 votes.

The results were almost as lopsided in the counties controlled by Parr’s allies, who followed his lead. In Webb County, it was 10,059 to 1,802, more than five to one; in Jim Hogg County, 1,255 to 244, more than five to one; in Brooks, 1,934 to 540, almost four to one. The nine counties controlled by Parr and his allies reported a total of 37,063 votes to the Texas Election Bureau. Almost 30,000 of them—29,377, or 79 percent—were for Kennedy-Johnson.
²
The Democratic ticket therefore came out of those counties with a plurality of 21,691.

“One
charge of vote-buying and voter-herding,”
Earl Mazo reported in the
New York Herald Tribune,
“involves some Democratic leaders who are said to have purchased poll tax certificates in blocks of 300 to 3,000 at $1.75 for each certificate for use in precincts near the Mexican border,” precincts which, he noted, “produced sizable Democratic majorities.” There was, the GOP alleged, no secrecy in voting in these areas: in Precinct 8 of Benavides, in Duval County, a “local machine” supervisor kept a list of persons “voting against the machine.” The Valley
patrones
who had given Johnson huge majorities in his 1941 and 1948 Senate races (and who would have done so in his 1954 race had they been needed) were still for Johnson, Clark and Connally explain. The Valley was still
“strictly
L.B.J. country,” Duval County political operative O. P. Carrillo was to say. Catholicism was not the key, Connally says:
“the
basic core of the Johnson adherents in the Hispanic community”—he meant Parr and his allies—“were all still there [in 1960] and still loyal to him.” When Clark was asked about the role of Catholicism and the “Viva Kennedy” organizations in the vote in Parr’s Valley domain, he gave a slight smile, shook his head no and said that rather,
“Our
old friends stood by us.”

Most important, George Parr had stood by Lyndon Johnson, and the reason, says Clark, was the Supreme Court decision. “He were grateful for the reversal,” Clark was to say in his East Texas patois.

In the aftermath of Lyndon Johnson’s 1948 election victory, an investigation
had been conducted by federal Masters in Chancery, appointed by a federal judge. The Chancery hearings were cut short by an order from United States Supreme Court Justice
Hugo Black after arguments were made before him by
Abe Fortas; enough witnesses had testified so that one of the Masters, the only one to comment, was to conclude,
“I
think Lyndon was put in the United States Senate with a stolen election.” No investigation was ever made of the 1960 results. The Republican petition, alleging
“numerous
and widespread frauds,” was brought before the three-man state canvassing board, whose members were Governor
Price Daniel, Attorney General
Will Wilson and the board’s chairman, Secretary of State
Zollie Steakly—three of Johnson’s most active supporters in the campaign (Daniel and Wilson had been on the same ballot with him). Steakly said Texas law gave the Board no authority to investigate the returns, and hearings were simply delayed until after December 19, when the national Electoral College, using the totals furnished to them by the various states, the Texas total by the canvassing board, certified the overall vote. The truth of the Republican allegations was never examined in the depth necessary to ascertain their validity (as was also the case in Dick Daley’s
Illinois, where the results were even closer and where widespread fraud was also alleged).

The attention focused on fraud in the 1960 presidential campaign has during the intervening half century centered on Illinois, not Texas. The Republican allegations, not only about voting in the Valley but about the invalidating of ballots under the new state law, have never been examined in the depth necessary to ascertain their validity, much less to determine how many votes were affected if indeed the allegations were true. Nor have the many other factors—from demographic shifts in the state’s population to the scene in the Adolphus Hotel—ever been examined in the necessary depth. Today, the passage of time has made it difficult—impossible, really—to ascertain, in trying to assess the election results in Texas, the weight that should be assigned, in an equation that contains so many factors, to the vote from the “ethnic bloc.”
Paul Kilday wrote of the 31,000-vote “reversal” in San Antonio, which of course included the 14,000-vote plurality the Kilday machine produced in that city’s West Side. It would be misleading to speak of a “reversal” in the Valley, since George Parr and his allies could simply produce whatever result they wanted there. But Parr had demonstrated before that when he became angry at what he construed to be an inadequate lack of allegiance by some public official, he would retaliate in the next election by throwing the Valley’s bloc vote to the official’s opponent. How he might have reacted had Lyndon Johnson not assisted with his court case can be today, long after his death, a matter only for speculation, since, so far as the author can determine, no historian or journalist raised the matter with him before his death. But the point is moot in any event: Johnson produced the legal help, and Parr produced the votes—the 21,000 plurality. Thirty-one thousand and 21,000—in an election that was decided by 46,000 votes, the weight of those votes could hardly have been a minor factor. Whatever the explanation for the
results from the “ethnic bloc” in Texas, John Kennedy had selected Lyndon Johnson in part to take back Texas for the Democratic presidential ticket, and Johnson had done it.

H
E HAD TAKEN
back the South, too.

“Republicans
were stunned by their poor showing in Dixie,” Evans and Novak were to write. Before Johnson was nominated, Republican strategists had been confident—in a confidence bolstered by poll results—that Nixon would hold all five of the former Confederate states that Eisenhower had carried in 1956—Texas,
Louisiana,
Florida,
Tennessee and
Virginia—and would pick up the two Carolinas as well, for a total of seven. In the event, it was Kennedy who carried seven; Nixon won only three southern states: Florida, Tennessee and Virginia. (
Mississippi voted for a slate of independent electors.) Texas and Louisiana were brought back into the Democratic column, and both Carolinas stayed there—by very narrow margins. There were southwestern and border states in which Johnson’s presence on the ticket may have been crucial—
New Mexico’s
Clinton Anderson was to say flatly that without Johnson that state would have gone Republican; and in
Missouri, as
U.S. News & World Report
reported, Johnson
“is
given much of the credit” for the narrow Democratic victory, but it is not necessary to go beyond the South in showing his impact on the result. Together, the Carolinas had 22 electoral votes, Louisiana 10, and of course there were Texas’ 24—a total of 56 votes. The electoral vote by which Kennedy defeated Nixon was 303 to 219. Had those four states gone Republican, Kennedy would have had 247 electoral votes—and Nixon would have had 275.