1 Allred produced his own affidavit from Soliz, saying that he could not read the first affidavit and that he had signed it because “I was very much afraid” of the “three very well dressed Americans” who had questioned him. But Groce recalled Gardner, one of the three men, to the stand. Gardner said he had typed Soliz’s statement himself, sitting in a car with him “in the pouring rain” while Wroe Owens, another attorney, and Conrado Martinez and a notary public stood outside, that the statement had been read to Soliz in both English and Spanish before he had sworn to it and had had it notarized, and that no duress of any type had been used. And, of course, Martinez, the notary and Owens were all prepared to testify. Allred did not pursue the matter.
16
The Making of a Legend
ALTHOUGH LYNDON JOHNSON was now a Senator, interest in the 1948 election did not die down, and in 1952, it was fueled by an incident which created a sensation in the media in Texas. It involved one of George Parr’s Mexican-American pistoleros, Duval County Deputy Sheriff Sam Smithwick, who in 1949 had shot to death a news commentator on an Alice radio station who had attacked the corruption of the Parr regime. Sentenced to life imprisonment, Smithwick, in 1952, wrote Coke Stevenson from the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville. He said that in 1949 he had “recovered” the missing “Box 13” from the Parr aides who had originally been ordered to dispose of it. He had hidden it, he wrote, and could produce the ballot box “if you are interested.” He asked Stevenson to visit him at Huntsville to discuss “this matter in detail.”
Receiving the letter at his ranch, Stevenson set out for the prison, but stopped in Junction to call and notify prison officials he was coming. They told him not to bother. Sam Smithwick, they said, was dead. He had committed suicide in his cell by tying a towel around his neck, attaching it to the window bars, and then slipping off his bed. Smithwick’s letter, reproduced on the front page of the Dallas News, made headlines—banner headlines—throughout Texas, particularly after, as the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported, “some guards and prisoners at the penitentiary had talked of the possibility that Smithwick” had been murdered. “Somewhere,” that article said, “the thief who stole election records from Precinct 13 in Jim Wells County after the 1948 senatorial election squirmed uncomfortably.”1 A dramatic cartoon in the News depicted a terrified Lyndon Johnson cowering under the sheets in his bed, while above him a huge ghost held a locked box labeled “Precinct 13.” No evidence whatsoever was ever adduced to link Lyndon Johnson with Smithwick’s death, and there is no reason to believe such a link existed. Nevertheless, so widespread throughout Texas was the speculation that the death might be connected with the 1948 election that, after attempting at first to ignore the issue, Johnson was forced to issue a statement saying that disclosure of Smithwick’s letter appeared to be “a continuation of a fight by a group of disgruntled, disappointed people.” Johnson’s statement did not, however, end the speculation, and it helped to keep the story of Box 13 alive in Texas. Year after year, references to it continued to appear in the state’s newspapers and magazines (a 1976 Texas Monthly article on “Historical Markers You Will Never See” referred to the “group of dead men, who had risen from the grave to cast their ballots in alphabetical order” for Lyndon Johnson). It had become an enduring part of the state’s political history. And when Johnson moved onto the national stage, the story followed him.
The national spotlight began to turn in Senator Johnson’s direction in 1951, when he was named Democratic “whip”—assistant floor leader—and as it turned, its glare fell on these vivid episodes down in the Valley. National news magazines reported, as did the New York Times Magazine: “Exactly 87 votes in Texas put Johnson in the position to do his present job.” The country was told how, in what Collier’s called “a fabulous political and legal melee,” these votes had been cast. It was told how, in the words of The Saturday Evening Post, “Johnson’s attorneys rushed into court and obtained an injunction to prevent eliminating any votes on the ground of … fraud,” how he had won at the convention only through a 29–28 vote, how Justice Black’s ruling made “it … too late to do anything else to keep Johnson’s name off the ballot.” The national spotlight, in fact, focused on that previously all-but-unknown kingdom from which those 87 votes had come, and on its ruler. A second Collier’s article that same year, an article on George Parr titled “SOMETHING IS ROTTEN IN THE STATE OF TEXAS,” said, “His power reaches into Washington,” and began with a description of the 1948 election:
The outcome astounded the state and stunned Stevenson’s supporters—because for six days after the election … the ex-Governor had been adjudged the winner. Then a single precinct had tardily “corrected” its count by adding 203 [sic] votes in its official return—all but one for Johnson!”
Not a few of these articles, moreover, mentioned a nickname by which Johnson was sometimes known in Washington: “Landslide Lyndon.” His introduction to the nation came complete with the nickname, and with its provenance. As he made his entrance onto the great stage of history, still in a relatively minor role, he entered with that story attached to him.
All during the 1950s, as Lyndon Johnson rose to power in the Senate and came to dominate it, his nickname, and the reasons behind it, punctuated major articles about him. When, in 1959, he began running for President, the spotlight intensified and details emerged. Look magazine, in a long two-part biographical article that listed the hurdles “likely to arise before Johnson in a campaign for the Presidency,” included “an allegation of fraud in his first election to the Senate.” Its author, Bill Davidson, interviewed Stevenson attorneys who had investigated in the Valley, and read some of the court transcripts. The article concluded: “There is no evidence that Johnson had anything to do with the admittedly peculiar goings-on in Jim Wells County.… Johnson did, however, sign a petition for a court injunction that stopped … eliminating any of Johnson’s votes. Since that time his enemies have labelled him ‘The Senator from the Thirteenth Precinct.’ ” Even favorable articles, such as a generally laudatory cover story in Time magazine, mentioned the “suspicious 87 votes” and the “notorious Box 13.”
The presidency brought a spotlight more intense yet, and with that new intensity the 1948 election was elevated from being part of a cover story on Lyndon Johnson to a cover story itself. At the height of his popularity, in 1964, when he won his great election victory, on newsstands all over the country was “THE STORY OF 87 VOTES THAT MADE HISTORY,” the cover story of U.S. News & World Report: “The 87 votes … set him on the road to the White House.… If they had gone the other way, Lyndon Johnson probably would not now be occupying the White House.…” There again were the pictures of the pile of ballot boxes, of Parr, of Hugo Black, of Lyndon and Coke, of Lady Bird with a sad smile; there again was the map of Texas, with Jim Wells County outlined in red.
Distrust of Johnson grew during his presidency until, as Richard Rovere was to write in The New Yorker,
It seems … to be a fact beyond dispute that no other President has ever had to live in an atmosphere so heavy with distrust and disbelief as Lyndon Johnson.… What may well be a majority of the American people are persuaded that the President is a dishonest and dishonorable man.
And as more and more articles appeared attempting to analyze his character and his reputation, many of them turned to the 1948 election for clues. In a way, the most perceptive of these analysts said, the oft-repeated stories about that election formed in themselves a foundation for the misgivings. Tom Wicker, concluding in 1983 that “After Lyndon Johnson … trust in ‘the President’ was tarnished forever,” added: “Even had there been no war, it would not have been hard to distrust Lyndon Johnson. Hadn’t he been elected to the Senate by only eighty-seven votes, widely believed to have been stolen in Texas’s notorious Duval County?” As a President passes into history, the perception of his character can sometimes be summarized by a single anecdote. George Washington, with his reputation for honesty and in
tegrity, is often simplistically linked with the probably apocryphal incident of the cherry tree and “I cannot tell a lie.” Lyndon Johnson, passing into history, was also linked in the public consciousness with a single incident, not apocryphal—an incident summed up in a precinct number: “Box 13.”
EVEN AFTER Lyndon Johnson’s presidency—even after his death—bursts of news about “Box 13” would still from time to time make headlines across the United States. The most dramatic were occasioned by “Indio” Salas. For twenty-nine years after the election, Box 13’s election judge—the man, in the opinion of Coke Stevenson’s partisans, most directly responsible for the “87 votes that made history”—steadfastly refused to discuss those votes publicly or privately. But in a 1977 interview with reporter James W. Mangan of the Associated Press, Salas said that Stevenson’s supporters had been correct all along. During his testimony in the Alice Courtroom twenty-nine years before, Salas admitted, he had lied. Now, he said, he wanted to tell the truth. “Johnson did not win that election,” he said. “It was stolen for him.” And, he said, he, Luis Salas, had participated in the stealing.
Three days after the election, he said, he was summoned to George Parr’s office in San Diego, where he found the Duke, Ed Lloyd, Alice City Commissioner Bruce Ainsworth—and Lyndon Johnson. Johnson, according to Salas, told Parr: “If I can get two hundred more votes, I’ve got it won.” Speaking to Salas in Spanish, Parr asked him to add the two hundred votes. Salas refused, he says, but agreed to certify the votes as accurate if someone else added them. “I told him I would certify them because I didn’t want anybody to think I’m not backing up my party; I said I would be with the party to the end,” he says. That night, at about nine o’clock, in an office on the second floor of the Adams Building in Alice, two other men whom he refused to identify because “they were just following orders” added the votes as he sat watching. “I was right there when they added the names,” he told the Associated Press reporter. “They all came from the … poll tax sheet … I certified.… I kept my word to be loyal to my party.” He did so, he said, despite misgivings about the identical handwriting. (Asked by the reporter why the handwriting had not been varied, he replied, “How? Only two guys? How they going to change it? The lawyers spotted it right away, they sure did.”) Noticing, moreover, that the two men were adding the names from the poll tax sheet in alphabetical order, he warned Parr that it was “a mistake” not to “mix up” the names. But Parr was too arrogant to accept advice. “I told George Parr, and he wouldn’t listen to me. I said, ‘Look at the “A”. You add 10 or 12 names on that letter. Why don’t you change it to the other—C or D or X—mix ’em up.’ [But] George said, That’s all right.’ George was stubborn. He would not listen to anybody. But it was stupid.”
Salas confirmed all the suspicions of Coke Stevenson and his supporters. The two hundred votes were only some of the votes he had stolen for Lyndon Johnson, he said. On the witness stand, he had sworn that “The election was level, nothing wrong with the election.” Now he told the Associated Press reporter that the election had not, in fact, been “level” even before the two hundred votes were added. On Election Day itself, he said, he had, in the Nayer School, “called out” as votes for Johnson votes that had, in fact, been cast for Stevenson.
The Associated Press story was picked up by the nation’s leading news magazines and by newspapers all across the United States. Once again, after almost three decades, the dateline “ALICE, TEX.” was on the front page of the New York Times; once again, in a thousand headlines, the familiar words were linked anew with Lyndon Johnson’s name: “LBJ ELECTION ‘STOLEN,’ EX-OFFICIAL SAYS.” There were again the same references to “the notorious Precinct 13,” to “the notorious eighty-seven votes,” the same reminders that, as Newsweek put it under the headline “HISTORY: LBJ ACCUSED,” “suspicions have persisted that Lyndon Baines Johnson stole his way into the U.S. Senate.”
By 1977, of course, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library was in full stride as the guardian of Lyndon Johnson’s reputation. It swung into action. Director Harry Middleton assured a Johnson biographer, Merle Miller, that Salas’ assertions were untrue. “I know Johnson didn’t do what Salas said because that would have been dumb,” Middleton said. That was enough to convince Miller. In his biography, Lyndon, Miller was to write that Middleton’s remark was “perhaps the best comment on the Salas story.” Using the public relations expertise of two one-time Johnson aides, Liz Carpenter and George Christian, the Library announced that it would open five thousand pages of documents relating to the 1948 campaign. That was a lot of documents to be absorbed quickly, particularly by reporters unfamiliar with a rather complicated historical situation, so they could be excused for focusing on a “memo” from Johnson (actually a draft of a 1948 press release) denying the charges (“I am without knowledge concerning the ballots in either Duval, Jim Wells or Zapata Counties.…”), as if this press release had greater significance than any of a hundred others issued by both sides during the investigation.
Johnson’s supporters focused on Salas’ statement that Johnson had been present personally at the meeting in Parr’s office. Walter Jenkins, Mary Rather and Charles Herring held a joint press conference to assure the reporters who had descended on Austin that his presence in San Diego would have been impossible. They insisted that Johnson had remained at his Dillman Street home in Austin for the four days after the election, keeping tabulations on the vote-counting. “I was there all the time,” Miss Rather said. “Congressman Johnson hardly left the house, except once to go downtown.” Jenkins said, “It would have been absolutely impossible for Mr. Johnson to have been outside Austin for the length of time it would have taken for him to go to Alice [sic].” Their statements were hardly conclusive—all three acknowledged that their recollections of the hectic days twenty-nine years earlier were based solely on their memories, unsupported by any diaries or other documentation, and it would have taken no more than a few hours for Johnson to make the short drive to the Austin airport and fly the two hundred miles to San Diego in a Brown & Root plane and then return—but no confirmation of Salas’ statement on this point existed. Many of the follow-up newspaper articles treated his statement with skepticism. The story faded inconclusively away.
The focus on that single point, however, enabled Johnson’s defenders to obscure the fact that it was the only unconfirmed point in Salas’ statement. Reporters’ skepticism about his other statements would, perhaps, have been reduced had they been more familiar with the overall record of the case, particularly the transcripts of the testimony given by other witnesses during the Federal District Court hearing in Fort Worth and the federal Master-in-Chancery hearings in Alice and San Diego. The reporters believed that in his 1977 statement Salas was making new revelations. Actually, Precinct 13’s election judge was only confirming testimony that had been given by others during those hearings. The principal doubt surrounding that testimony had been the doubt he had cast by denying what these witnesses had said. Now Salas was admitting that his denials had been false.
ANOTHER DECADE LATER, in March, 1986, I located Luis Salas in Houston. He was living with his wife, Tana, in a comfortably furnished mobile home in the large, pleasant back yard of the house of his daughter, Grace, and her family. The man who opened the door of the trailer bore, at eighty-four, little resemblance to Parr’s fearsome “Indio.” He was no longer tall and broad but stooped and slender, with gray hair, eyeglasses and a gentle manner. Throughout the interview, he kept glancing anxiously toward his wife, who was sitting in the next room, obviously in poor health. But his eyes were keen, and he was mentally alert.
I was asking questions about the 1948 election when Salas suddenly said, “I have written it all down.” Walking over to a trunk, he bent down stiffly and pulled out a manuscript—eighty-five pages of it typed, obviously by someone unsure of the rules of punctuation, with nine additional handwritten pages attached—and handed it to me. A paragraph near the beginning
says: “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.” The title of the manuscript is “Box 13.”
The manuscript is actually an autobiography, written in 1979. It tells in detail the story of Salas’ youth in the little Mexican town of Bermejillo, while Pancho Villa’s Mexican Revolution was raging; how he learned Morse code at fourteen and became a railroad telegraph operator; how “my Indian blood” made him a fighter and his size and temper made him feared until “my character was hardboil, cinic and arrogant, and never looked for trouble but if trouble came to me, I was right there.” When he was twenty-three, he wrote, he shot a man who later died of gangrene from the wounds. The man’s relatives swore revenge, and he fled Durango. “I was to become the wandering Jew,” he wrote. For years, working as a telegraph operator, he lived in lonely little shacks along the lines of the Mexican National Railways until, in 1936, he crossed the border into the United States and settled in Alice; “I missed the mountains, here was endless flatland.” In 1940, he related, he met George Parr, whom he revered and who gave him money, and a car and badges—and made him his enforcer. “My life changed with the power invested on me.… Wearing a gun gave me sense of security, but very few times, I used the gun, most of the disagreements I had were resolved with my fists, I weighed 210 pounds.… As long as I live, I never forget this man, and when I gave him my word to stay by his side regardless, I meant it, so up to date I still worship his memory.”
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