Working

by Robert A. Caro

  And that led me to Luis Salas.

  I had heard about Salas during my trips to the Rio Grande Valley to learn about George Parr because Salas had been Parr’s enforcer, a thickset six-foot-one-inch native of Durango, Mexico, who had, years before, left Mexico in a hurry after killing a man in a barroom brawl. Known as the “Indio” because of his swarthy appearance, he carried a revolver with a barrel so long that when it was in his holster, it reached almost to his knee, and he was known for his fierce temper and for his brutality toward anyone who opposed the Duke; once, when the owner of a restaurant in Alice trying to remain independent in politics dared to start fighting with Salas, his wife screamed, “Stop! Don’t you know who you are fighting? He is the man they call the ‘Indio.’ ” After beating the man into unconsciousness, Salas picked up a barstool and wrecked the restaurant. And as presiding election judge at Box 13 during the 1948 election, he had been the key witness, and was actually on the stand, testifying, at the moment that the federal court investigation into the election was abruptly cut short, never to be resumed, by an order from a United States Supreme Court Justice in Washington. If he was alive, I was not going to write about the 1948 election until I had talked to him.

  * * *

  —

  I DROVE DOWN to the Valley again, and in Alice and other towns went into the cafés where elderly men who had been born in Mexico sat chatting in Spanish around tables, and eventually learned that Salas was alive, but had moved to Mexico some years—or decades—before. No one seemed to know to where, however. “Luis moves around a lot,” someone said.

  I get asked why it takes me so long to produce my books. Let me tell you that trying to track down someone who has left the United States years before and returned to someone where he “moves around a lot” is not a matter of hours. But eventually, in March, 1986, I found him. He was no longer in Mexico; he had come back to Texas—to Houston—where he was living in a mobile home in the spacious tree-shaded backyard of his daughter, Grace, and her family.

  When Salas answered my knock, I got quite a shock. Although intellectually, of course, I knew that almost forty years had passed since the 1948 election, I had in my mind the picture of the man as he had looked in 1948 photographs, and I guess was expecting to be looking up—at George Parr’s tall, broad, fearsome “Indio.” Instead, I found myself looking down—at a stooped, thin, gray-haired old man wearing eyeglasses. And when eighty-four-year-old Luis Salas showed me into the nicely furnished mobile home, his manner was gentle. In the next room, his wife, Tana, sat in a rocking chair, not speaking at all, wrapped in a blanket; several times, as we talked, he got up to wrap it around her more warmly.

  And that was not the only shock I received. It took no prompting to persuade Salas, whose eyes behind the glasses were keen and who was quite clear-witted, to talk about the 1948 election, and he confirmed many of the surmises that had been hinted at for decades about what had happened at Box 13. His job had been to pull the ballots—paper ballots—out of the ballot box and call out the name written on them to the other election judges, who were tabulating the vote, and he told me, not at all regretful but grinning, pleased with himself: “If they were not for Johnson, I make them for Johnson.” In case I had missed the point, he returned to it a few minutes later, saying, “Any vote for Stevenson I counted for Johnson.” A key point in the investigation in the federal court was whether or not Salas had, on election night, reported Johnson’s total in the box as 765 to a journalist named Cliff Dubose, and then, six days after the election, had added the 200 additional votes to Johnson’s total when he was reporting the results to the Texas Election Commission. Johnson’s opponents charged that the number that had been tabulated on election night, the number obtained by Salas having made them for Johnson, whether or not that was what the voter had intended, had been later raised from 765 to 965 by simply adding a loop to the 7 to change it into a 9. Salas had denied under oath that he had ever given the 765 number to Dubose. Now I asked him if he had, in fact, done that. Yes, he said, he had: on election night “I told Cliff 765.” But then, as I continued asking questions, he said, “I have written it all down.” He stood up and walked over to a trunk. Bending over stiffly, he opened it and pulled out a manuscript. It was a book he had written, ninety-four pages long. Its title was “Box 13.”

  While we continued talking, I leafed through it. I was caught by a paragraph near the beginning: “Reader, I don’t know if my story is to your liking, writing nonfiction is hard, I had no schooling, please excuse my spelling and grammar, but I had to write this book, to leave it to my family, when I go beyond, my time is running short, and I want to finish without adding or subtracting parts that are false, or invented by my imagination, no, everything has to be exactly the way it happened.” At another point, he had written, “I am running short of time, feel sick and tired, but…before I go beyond this world, I had to tell the truth.” He had written it, he said “exactly the way it happened” because he felt he had played a crucial role in history—“We put LB Johnson as senator for Texas, and this position opened the road to reach the Presidency”—and he wanted it to be acknowledged. And there were other lines that leapt out. After he shot the man in Durango, he fled, and for years, he wrote, “I was to become the wandering Jew,” until he met George Parr, who gave him the badge of a deputy sheriff and money and prestige, and “My life changed with the power invested in me.” But most of all what leapt out were the details of the election night; as I read I realized that he was confirming the truth of everything other officials had said on the stand—things that he had, in 1948, denied, and that, because of his denial, had remained shrouded in uncertainty for the almost four decades since; that his manuscript answered all the questions that had been unanswered: why, for example, during that vote-altering done six days after the election, in addition to the two hundred extra votes for Johnson, Stevenson had been given two extra votes: he himself had not wanted to write down the names of the two hundred additional voters, Salas explained in the manuscript; “I did not want them in my handwriting,” and instead had had one of his deputy election judges, Ignacio (Nachito) Escobar, do it, and “Nachito was a jolly man, full of jokes, he said, let us give this poor man [Stevenson] a pilón [gift].” As I leafed through the manuscript, I realized that Salas’ confession—for that was what it was: a confession—solved all the mysteries that for so long had surrounded the election. “The people have a good reason not to believe what I wrote,” he said in his manuscript. “The reason is that I lied under oath.” Thanks to that manuscript, it would not be necessary for me, Robert Caro, to write, “No one will ever be sure if Lyndon Johnson stole it.” He stole it.

  * * *

  —

  I HARDLY DARED ask the question I had to ask. What if he said No? What proof would I have that at last, after so many years, there was confirmation of what had been, for all those years, denied? I knew that the Johnson people, who for almost forty years had attacked every attempt to prove that Lyndon Johnson stole the election, who had told so many lies about it, were going to lie and deny about this one. But I asked it: With my heart in my throat, I asked Mr. Salas if I could make a copy of the manuscript. He said I could, reiterating that he wanted history to know the truth. “Everyone is dead except me, Robert. And I’m not going to live long. But Box 13 is history. No one can erase that.” He said there was a copying machine in a store not far away. We walked over and stood by the machine as, one by one, the pages slid out.

  “Hell, no, he’s not dead”: Vernon Whiteside

  The articles and biographies about Lyndon Johnson had portrayed him as a popular, even charismatic, campus figure during his college years. When I started hearing these stories about how Lyndon Johnson stole an election for the Student Council, how he in effect blackmailed a girl opposing his candidate for the Council to get her to drop out of the election, how he was so unpopular on campus that his nickname was “Bull” (for �
�Bullshit”) Johnson, I didn’t believe them.

  But I kept hearing them. I decided to interview more of his classmates.

  Locating them proved to be quite a job. It had been only recently that the college—Southwest Texas State Teachers College in San Marcos—had begun keeping track of its former students, and it had no addresses for many of them, who seemed to be scattered all across America. And of course many of the women students had gotten married, and their names had changed, or had married and then divorced, and married again, so their names had changed more than once. Ina and I had to track them down, from one town or city to another.

  Today, with a National Telephone Directory on your computer, it’s easy to find people. But that didn’t exist then. The New York Public Library had a little room with telephone directories not only for cities but for towns, too; sometimes the phone book for a place like, say, Johnson City, was a very slim volume. I remember sitting with Ina on the floor in this little room, with telephone books open on the floor all around us.

  Eventually we found, and I interviewed, enough of these students so that I knew the stories—unsavory as they were—might well be true. But again and again, a student who was telling them to me would say he or she didn’t know all the details. They would say that there was one student who did, who had worked closely with—had schemed with—Lyndon Johnson in college. His name was Vernon Whiteside. But everyone I talked to believed that Whiteside had died. Over and over I was told, “Well, old Whiteside, he would know about that. But old Whiteside is dead.” (Actually, what I was hearing was, “Ol’ Waatside, he daid.”)

  Then one day I telephoned a classmate of Lyndon’s named Horace Richards. He lived in a small town near Corpus Christi, and I was calling to ask if I could drive down to see him. When he agreed, I told him some of the Johnson maneuvers I wanted to ask him about. He said he knew about them—in fact, had participated in some of them—but that he would tell me about them only if Vernon Whiteside also agreed to do so. I said: “But ol’ Waatside, he daid.”

  “Hell, no,” Richards replied. “He’s not dead. He was here visiting me just last week.”

  Whiteside, Richards told me, had sold his ranch a year or two before, bought a fancy mobile home and had been driving around with his wife to see the United States, including Alaska, ever since; in that pre–cell phone time, he had been out of touch; that, I supposed, was why his classmates had thought him “daid.” But, Richards said, ol’ Vernon was planning to settle down now. When he had left Corpus Christi, he had been planning to drive to Florida and buy a condominium. Richards didn’t know which city in Florida he was heading for. All he knew, he said, was that the city was north of Miami, and had “Beach” in its name.

  That certainly narrowed it down some.

  Oh, well. Ina and I got a map of Florida, and for each city or town north of Miami that had “Beach” in its name, we got the names of all its mobile home courts. We divided up the names, and started calling each court to see if a Whiteside was staying there. It was a court in Highland Beach, Florida, that said yes, there was, and indeed Mr. Whiteside had pulled in that very day, only a few hours before.

  I didn’t ask the court’s operator to bring him to the phone. It’s too easy to say no over the phone, and I wasn’t going to give him the chance to say he didn’t want to talk to me; the only flight to anywhere in Florida from Austin that evening was to an inconvenient city—I think it was Tampa—but I jumped in my car, drove to the airport, caught the flight, rented a car, and the next morning was knocking on his door. I told him my name and what I was doing, and said I’d like to talk to him, and he said, sure, come in—and over the course of many hours, with his wife sitting there listening, told me the details of the character-revealing episodes at which his classmates had hinted. And he told me of other episodes, of which only he knew. And when I made new calls to these men and women, they confirmed Whiteside’s accounts, which added up to a portrait of the young Lyndon Johnson very different from the one previous accounts had depicted.

  “It’s all there in black and white”: Ella So Relle

  A few days after I interviewed Mr. Whiteside, I spoke by telephone to another of Johnson’s classmates, a woman who had retained her maiden name, Ella So Relle.

  Ms. So Relle had become a schoolteacher, and her tone when she answered my questions (confirming those of the Whiteside incidents with which she was familiar) was the tart, acerbic tone she might have employed with a slightly backward pupil.

  Finally, exasperated, she said, “I don’t know why you’re asking all these questions. It’s all there in black and white.”

  “All where in black and white?” I asked.

  In the Pedagog, she replied. I had read the Pedagog, the Southwest Texas yearbook, had found a copy for the year 1930, the year Lyndon Johnson had graduated, a large-size book thick with the ads of San Marcos merchants, had perused it, I had thought, thoroughly, and had found only a few references to Johnson, all innocuous, and certainly none which related to the Whiteside incidents. I asked Ms. So Relle if she had a copy of the yearbook—I had already observed, in the homes of many of the other Southwest Texas graduates I had visited, that the yearbook was often in a prominent place on their bookshelves, so important had their years there been to them—and of course she said she did. By this time I felt she was on the verge of hanging up on me, but I asked her if she would please—I know this is taking so much of your time, Miz So Relle, but it would mean so much to me—would she mind very much getting it and telling me the pages that contained the references? With a very audible sigh of resignation she went and got the yearbook. It wasn’t hard for her to find those pages—they were all in a section of the yearbook called “The Cat’s Claw”—and she read off the page numbers.

  There were five of them: 210, 226, 227, 235, and 236. I turned the pages of my copy of the Pedagog to get to them—and they weren’t there! The pages before and after them were there, but not 210, 226, 227, 235, or 236. Looking closely, I could see now that they had been cut out, but so carefully, and so close to the spine, perhaps with a razor, that unless you were looking as closely as I was, you wouldn’t notice. I asked Ms. So Relle to read me what they said, but of course there was no hope of that, and the call was over.

  I was in what I guess you could call a fever of impatience to see those pages, but the fever didn’t last long. There was a used book store in San Marcos, and I had already noticed that they stocked old Southwest Texas yearbooks, and when I drove down there from Austin the next day there were several copies of the 1930 edition. In the first few I looked at, the five pages had been excised, but then I found one that had them, and Ms. So Relle had not been exaggerating: there was confirmation, in black and white, in print and in drawings, of the incidents of which Whiteside and others had spoken. Two of the five pages depicted the college elections that had been stolen under Lyndon Johnson’s direction; one cartoon showed him hiding behind one of his candidates for the Student Council, another showed him and a group of his allies in the college’s White Stars club standing in front of a photograph of a pile of wood on which a photograph of a black woman had been superimposed in what could only be an allusion to “a nigger in a woodpile”—shorthand for something crooked. And there was a question on those pages that was evidence of the mistrust with which he was regarded by his fellow students: “What makes half of your face black and the other half white, Mr. Johnson?” And there were three other pages dealing with him. On one was a reference to what his fellow students evidently believed was his determination to marry money (a fake advertisement to persuade students to join a Lonely Hearts Club entices him with the line “Lyndon, some of our girls are rich”); on another was an allusion to his loudness and untruthfulness; on the third a sarcastic reference to his penchant for flattering or “sucking up to” the faculty (“Believe It Or Not—Bull Johnson has never taken a course in suction”). I was holding in my hands—in that une
xpurgated copy of his college yearbook—proof of the opinion of his peers about the young Lyndon Johnson.

  “I wanted to be a citizen”: Margaret and David Frost

  No choice at all. Just part of me, like it or not. Since the centerpiece of my third volume, a book about Lyndon Johnson as Senate Majority Leader, was going to be his monumental achievement in ramming through that body, in 1957, a bill to make it easier for black Americans to vote, the first civil rights bill to be passed in eighty-two years, I wanted to briefly show in the opening pages of the book—to make the reader understand and feel right at the beginning—how hard it had been for a black person to register to vote, let alone to actually cast a ballot, in the South before 1957: what were the obstacles facing African-Americans wanting to exercise this basic right of citizenship, the obstacles that Lyndon Johnson was going to fight to remove. To do so, I turned to testimony given by black men and women who had been denied that right before the passage of the bill. There was plenty of it, including that given to the United States Commission on Civil Rights in 1957 during a series of hearings in Montgomery, Alabama.

  There was no shortage of dramatic testimony in the transcript of those hearings, but I finally decided to focus on that of thirty-eight-year-old Margaret Frost of the town of Eufala, in Alabama’s Barbour County. I think the element of Mrs. Frost’s story that got to me and made me want to tell it was that she had tried to register—had had a hearing before the three members of the Barbour County Board of Registrars, in January of 1957—and had been humiliated by them, and yet had tried again. The questions Mrs. Frost had been asked at that January hearing had been difficult, but she felt she had answered them all correctly. The board’s chairman, William “Beel” Stokes, had rejected her application to register, however, telling her she had missed one—and had refused to tell her which one it was, saying only, “You all go home and study a little more.” And despite the humiliation, Mrs. Frost had tried again, rehearsing, over and over, answers to all the questions the board might ask—and eight months later had gone down to the courthouse again (the hearings were held after hours in the County Clerk’s office) and had been subjected again to humiliation: this time, there were three applicants, and while she and one of the others answered every question correctly, the third didn’t, and Stokes therefore rejected all three applications, with the same words, “You all go home and study a little more.” That got me, and so did the reason she gave the Civil Rights Commission when she was asked why she had again put herself at the board’s mercy. “I was scared I would do something wrong,” she said. “I was nervous. Shaky. Scared that the white people would do something to me [but] I wanted to be a citizen. I figure all citizens, you know, should be able to vote.” I wanted to show the efforts black people had made to be part of the American political system, and how the system had prevented them from doing that, and with this story, I felt I could.