Johnson knew that in a general election against Stevenson there was no way he could win. Without that Senate seat, his chance to pursue his ultimate goal would disappear and his political career would be over. His lawyers tried to convince him that conservative voters would split their votes between Stevenson and the Republican candidate, leaving a wide berth for him to win. According to Luther Jones, when Lyndon met with his ten widely respected and learned lawyers to hear them deliver their advice, he “just hit the goddamned ceiling!”98 Having ten of the best lawyers money could buy tell him to accept the judge’s compromise was an outrage to him. Behind the closed doors of the conference room, Johnson raged at his lawyers and lashed out at the court and judge. That he had taken tremendous risks—to buy votes, bribe election officials, and agree to future favors demanded by George Parr for his last-minute “fix”—exacerbated his fury. And he had convinced himself that none of his illegal actions were even pertinent anymore: “This is a free country! I won it fair and square, and you want me to trade it away?”99 For him to crow about the fairness of his victory after the enormous fraud he had perpetrated (and was desperately trying to hide) vindicates what his aide George Reedy would say about Johnson’s veracity: “Whatever Johnson tells you at any given moment he thinks is the truth.”100
After attempting to stall the hearing of witnesses, John Cofer pleaded with Judge Davidson to dissolve the Stevenson restraining order on the basis that it was just a delaying tactic. The judge ignored that request and began hearing the witnesses, one of whom pointed out that the certificate that indicated the vote for Lyndon Johnson was 965 had obviously been changed: the number 9 had originally been a 7.101 Witnesses stated that the numbers had been altered to be in Johnson’s favor in several other counties as well.102 Ballot Box 13 was discovered to have been inadvertently lost and then found three days after the election. Johnson’s attorneys had already convinced the Democratic Party’s executive committee that investigating the votes was “contrary to law,” which became the position they adopted in court, where they bizarrely argued that regardless of whether or not Stevenson had been wronged, the law was powerless to right that wrong. The judge rejected this reasoning and asserted there was a legal remedy for every legal wrong, and that there must always be a tribunal wherein the remedy may be determined and subsequently enforced.103
The options were closing for Johnson, who feared having a campaign of write-in ballots. Opening the ballot boxes—an obvious danger which the Johnson forces tried to prevent—would have revealed evidence of a much more extensive fraud.104 The judge decided to appoint three masters in chancery, who were officers of the court with power to subpoena witnesses and evidence, to hold hearings in the three counties and to submit written reports by October 2. This development was not good news for Johnson, who knew that substantial investigations would uncover his criminal activity. What would the judge think of the overall results of all precincts in Duval County, where over 99 percent of registered voters (4,662 out of 4,679) allegedly voted, 99 percent of their votes (4,622 out of 4,662) supporting Johnson while only forty were recorded for Stevenson? What if the investigation revealed not just 202 fraudulent votes in Box 13, but thousands more; would it not be obvious that Johnson himself was behind it all?105
Enter Abe Fortas. When Johnson realized that the attorneys he had employed would fail him, he contacted Fortas—who had helped Johnson circumvent regulatory rules impeding the Marshall Ford Dam a decade before—who promptly flew to Austin. After the lawyers described the dilemma, Fortas said he could envision one possible scenario for Johnson, though it was a very large gamble: The only hope for Johnson was to take the case to a single circuit court judge and ask for a stay of the injunction on jurisdictional grounds, and do so with a weakly presented, unpersuasive plea presented to a judge predisposed to rule against Johnson—essentially the opposite of what any other lawyer would have prescribed. Fortas presented the perfunctory appeal to a Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals judge, who was almost guaranteed to reject it out of hand, on September 24; meanwhile, the rest of the legal team initiated delaying tactics to subvert the investigation by the three masters in chancery. The masters’ subpoenas had been issued but practically all of the election officials, upon whom U.S. marshals were supposed to serve the subpoenas, had left town and, in several cases, had gone to Mexico. The marshals also found that much of the evidence had disappeared, including the poll lists from the infamous Box 13. One copy had been taken by an election judge, Luis Salas, in his car and left there while he visited the Baile Espanola bar in Alice, Texas. While he was inside, the car was ransacked; Salas said, “They stole everything.” Salas was a former pistolero under George Parr who took the stand to announce that both copies of the poll and tally lists he had been responsible for were gone; the other he had simply “lost.” Additionally, Salas denied having told anyone how many votes were reported and the allegation that two hundred more had been added.106
The Fortas gamble, if successful, would quickly yield an unfavorable ruling that could be sent immediately to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, who could hear the case as a single justice; Fortas thought Justice Black would rule for them, because he knew that Black, a former member of Ku Klux Klan, would ultimately prefer to see Johnson, not Stevenson, in the Senate; Justice Black knew Johnson personally and the two were of like minds. Attorney General Tom Clark, whose son, Ramsey, would eventually be named as Johnson’s choice to replace Bobby Kennedy as attorney general, reportedly interceded with Black to assure that it was handled favorably.107 In short order, Justice Black issued “a sweeping order on behalf of Johnson, staying Judge Davidson’s temporary injunction and ending the Fort Worth hearing, where the iron curtain tactics of South Texas were on the verge of being proven in federal court.”108 Judge Davidson, in adjourning court, said that “‘the United States Supreme Court has altered my opinion, but it hasn’t changed my mind’ … He also remarked that Black’s order was unduly hasty ‘and probably unlawful,’ given that this was not a dispute in a general election, but in a State primary over a party nominee, where even the Senate was without power to act.”109
The pattern according to which witnesses and evidence alike vanished was manifesting in other counties; clearly, an attempt to stall if not prevent the investigations altogether had been orchestrated. Stevenson’s attorney, former governor Moody, made a key mistake by presenting the case as one of fraud on Lyndon Johnson’s part—despite clear and convincing evidence of such fraud—without addressing the more fundamental issue of court jurisdiction. Fortas had made jurisdiction the only issue to be addressed by the appellate court and beyond there, by Justice Hugo Black, arguing that “election contests were ‘irrevocably and incontestably vested’” in Texas state law and should not be supervised by a federal court. Another Johnson lawyer, Alvin J. Wirtz, warned that if the Stevenson injunction was not overturned, no Democratic names would appear on the November ballot, leaving only that of the Republican candidate—an untenable result.110
Finally, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black decided, as predicted by Abe Fortas, that the federal courts had no jurisdiction over the merits or conduct of state elections. Justice Black’s response to Moody’s contention that the federal courts were the only recourse was that the Senate itself was in the best position to judge the qualifications of its own members.111 Justice Black’s stance was later affirmed by the Supreme Court, which rejected Stevenson’s petition for a trial on the merits of the case. The gamble—fueled by the numerous brazen illegalities of the election, wagered on the thinnest slice of esoteric legal theory, and performed in opposition to the will of the voters—paid off, and Lyndon B. Johnson went to the Senate, his springboard onto the presidential election ticket twelve years later. As author and historian J. Evetts Haley put it, Justice Black’s ruling “over-rode a distinguished Circuit Federal Judge who had held that the full Court of Appeals should hear Johnson’s petition, and had set an immediate date to do so. It peremptorily denied just
ice to Governor Stevenson and nearly half a million Texans who had voted for him. It brazenly abridged the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the limitations on jurisdiction. But perhaps most terrible of all, it sanctioned corruption as public policy. There is nothing in American history like it.”112 The “celebrated 1948 election”113 described in Jack Valenti’s autobiography must have referred to the party after Justice Black’s decision, according to which the young Abe Fortas scored arguably his greatest feat ever: ensuring that his man, Lyndon B. Johnson, became a senator regardless of the will of the people, who had voted overwhelmingly for Johnson’s opponent, Coke Stevenson.
Thus ended the effort to decide the 1948 senatorial election case on its merits; had a comprehensive investigation been completed, along with a corresponding airing of the facts, Johnson would have wound up in the Big House instead of the White House. The Davidson-appointed masters were forced to stop their work before the fraud could be completely exposed. But facts that did emerge attest that Lyndon Johnson’s election to the Senate was tainted by thousands of fraudulent votes; no one will ever know exactly how many. From that point on, Lyndon Johnson would continue up the senatorial ladder, positioning himself to run twelve years later for the presidency in 1960; his failure at the Los Angeles Convention would be only minor, an anticipated detour until he assumed the next best position as the vice presidential nominee, which formed the only route he could take toward his ultimate goal. In an ideal and perfect world, Johnson never would have become a senator, much less the majority leader of the Senate, but that he did enabled him to exponentially increase his political power; eventually, he would appoint federal judges who were thereafter indebted to him and inclined to listen when he gave them future direction.
Ronnie Dugger, the journalist and author, reported that when he was interviewing Johnson in the White House, Johnson presented a photograph of a car with a 1948 Texas license plate and a small can with a “Precinct 13” label surrounded by five men, including George Parr’s cousin, Givens Parr, and Ed Lloyd, the Jim Wells boss. Dugger asked Johnson about the men and occasion, but Johnson said nothing more, offering only a knowing grin.114 Clearly, that picture reminded Lyndon Johnson of one of his greater triumphs: his blatant theft of the 1948 election through the most conniving, fraudulent scheme ever devised, which not only produced more phony ballots but arguably the most brazen and outrageous judicial miscarriage of justice involving election fraud in history. Knowing that his “victory” was entirely because of a legal technicality over a fuzzy jurisdictional issue and his lawyers’ manipulation of the judicial system, rather than a verdict based upon fairness and equity, his grin represented an in-your-face retort to those Texas voters who had the wisdom not to vote for him.
Twenty-nine years later, in 1977—well after he was safely out of Johnson’s reach—Luis Salas, the former election judge and pistolero for George Parr, decided to confess his role in the 1948 election fraud. The columnist Hugh Sidey lamented that Johnson was merely one of many politicians “who have come out of the seamy regions of American life and used the devious rituals learned to gain power, but have also held a certain reverence for the system and its goals. Ultimately they may have produced more good than their critics.” Sidey also wrote about Salas’s belated confession:115
There were indignant headlines last week over the story from Luis Salas, a former election judge and Parr crony, on how L.B.J. made it into the Senate on stolen votes. Salas, now 76 and bent on a spiritual cleansing, claimed to recall a meeting back in 1948 near the town of Alice, Texas, as the votes were being counted. Lyndon was there pleading for 200 more votes, according to Salas, and George Parr ordered them faked and stuffed into ballot box No. 13. Johnson triumphed in that primary election over former Governor Coke Stevenson. The Salas narrative suggested strongly that the protests were smothered because the fix was put in all the way up through Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black and President Harry Truman … “Of course, they stole that election,” said one former aide. “That’s the way they did it down there” … As for Lyndon’s showing up in Alice to ask for 200 votes, all those old Johnson hands, from John Connally on down, just scoffed. The idea that a man of Johnson’s skills would place himself at the scene of the crime was ridiculous. “He was more devious than that,” insisted one friend with relish.
Hugh Sidey’s diffidence, nearly thirty years after the stolen election, towards Johnson illustrates the way many of his colleagues rationalized his known contradictions with their own desire to maintain cordial relations with him in order to keep their access to the White House. Mr. Sidey acknowledged Johnson’s conniving, duplicitous and criminal ways, but seemingly gave him a carte blanche pardon, since after all, he had done some “good things” too, when he wrote:
All these twists and turns, the mixing of deceit and truth, the use of corrupt means for noble ends, seem to have inhibited serious assessment of Johnson so far. Around Washington last week there was a thought or two that maybe Johnson, already so suspect, would have less distance to fall than some who had left office on loftier notes.
It was this rationalization of the “noble ends” that had allowed Johnson to become president despite the scandals that nearly drove him out of the vice presidency, and—were it not for the power of his position after November 22, 1963—subsequently avoid impeachment as the president. But it wasn’t only journalists who gave Johnson their collective “nod” for him to proceed; it was the entire nation, still in shock at JFK’s murder, that kept giving him the “benefit of the doubt.” To do otherwise meant that terrible national secrets would have to be exposed and by then the people of the United States were caught up in a new scandal and its aftermath; there was no time to continue dwelling on the previous crisis.
The Kennedy-Johnson ticket won the election of 1960 in eleven states through massive voter fraud, without which the Republican candidate, Richard M. Nixon, would have won the presidency eight years earlier than he eventually did.116 The voter fraud in the 1960 general election will be explored further in later chapters.
Black Bag Finance and Political Payback
The more honest biographies of Johnson prominently feature his solicitation and extortion of campaign funds and the corresponding political favors and paybacks. In some cases, these stories are obliquely mentioned, then quietly dismissed and ignored as simply the mundane reality of the U.S. political scene. That the actions contained therein were transparently illegal has apparently not tarnished the solid reputation that remains among many of the educators, historians, and contemporary politicians whose judgments determine membership in the pantheon of past presidents.
One such incident came to light years afterward as a result of a SEC lawsuit involving a Gulf Oil lobbyist Claude Wild Jr., who testified about a Gulf Oil commitment to furnish Johnson $50,000 for his personal use; Wild delivered the money, in cash in plain envelopes, to Walter Jenkins, Ed Clark, Cliff Carter, John Connally, or Jesse Kellam.117 When asked how much money Gulf had contributed, Ed Clark, Lyndon’s attorney, responded, “I knew of about two hundred thousand. And Gulf was only one oil company—and there were non-oil businesses in Texas, too.”118
In 1956, the columnist Drew Pearson managed to acquire copies of an investigation into Johnson’s financial misconduct, including IRS records that showed that George and Herman Brown’s company, Brown & Root, paid their employees bonuses with the understanding that they were to immediately deposit them and then send the same amount to one of Johnson’s campaign funds.119 Pearson cited numerous examples of this scheme; for example, an employee named Randolph Mills at the Victoria Gravel Company, a subsidiary of Brown & Root, received a check for $2,500 that he deposited before immediately paying out the same amount to J. Frank Jungman, Lyndon’s Houston campaign manager.120 In another case, Edgar Monteith, a Houston attorney, received several checks in 1941 that he and his partner, A. W. Baring, treated as revenue for their firm and then sent to the Johnson campaign as reimbursement for campaign expenses. D
rew Pearson further wrote that “when asked specifically about the matter, Lyndon told the IRS that he ‘had never heard of Monteith,’ much less of his financial support, though Monteith was the brother of a former Houston mayor.”121
Still another example of Johnson’s illegitimate power can be traced to Brown & Root having been given a contract to build subchasers and destroyers, which was eventually worth $357 million, despite having no experience whatsoever in shipbuilding. After landing the largest navy contract in history, paving the way to expand his construction business into shipbuilding, George Brown observed, “We didn’t know the stern from the aft—I mean bow—of the boat.”122 Before Johnson went to Washington to act as Brown & Root’s personal emissary and “rainmaker,” their company was practically bankrupt and Herman lived with his wife in a tent;123 shortly after Lyndon went to Washington, thanks to Herman and the Austin attorney, Alvin Wirtz, the contracts began to flow so quickly that the company became highly profitable and one of the largest independent government contractors; in 1962 it was acquired by Halliburton.
At some point during his Senate years, Johnson decided to separate his illegal business transactions into two groups: those he had to manage personally and those he could delegate to his sidekick, Bobby Baker, for which he would collect a “skim” that would be too small in nature to occupy his mind and time. Major decisions, such as Brown & Root favors, high-level appointments, awards of defense contracts and legislative initiatives, would be under his control.
Johnson’s Connection with the Mob and other Miscreants
Among Johnson’s clients were hoodlums and tainted labor leaders who belonged to a group known as the Mafia, the very existence of which was denied by the famed director of the FBI. One of Johnson’s longest-term Mob contacts, Jack Halfen, had run a gambling syndicate in Houston while conducting payoffs to the Mob of $100,000 per week before being imprisoned for income tax fraud in 1954. During his trial, Halfen refused to reveal who else he’d been paying off, but he later acknowledged that he’d had business dealings with Lyndon Johnson, stating that over a ten-year period in the 1950s he had given Johnson $500,000 in cash and campaign contributions, and that Johnson, in return, “repeatedly killed anti-rackets legislation, watered down bills that could not be defeated and curbed Congressional investigations of the Mob.”124 Johnson was even given credit for the fact that Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver, despite holding hearings on organized crime in many cities during the 1950s, never made it to Texas. Johnson continued taking money from mobsters even after he had become president: “During a 1964 cocktail party at Teamster headquarters that [former administrative assistant to Maryland Senator, Daniel Brewster, Jack] Sullivan attended, Brewster and Teamster boss, Jimmy Hoffa, walked off to talk privately on the terrace overlooking Capitol Hill. Afterward, Brewster told Sullivan that Hoffa had asked him to take $100,000 in cash to presidential aide Cliff Carter. The payoff was meant to enlist Johnson’s support in blocking Hoffa’s prosecution for jury tampering and pension fund fraud, for which Hoffa was ultimately convicted. A few days after the party, Sullivan testified that Teamster lobbyist Sid Zagri came into Senator Brewster’s office and gave Brewster a suitcase full of money. Sullivan then accompanied Brewster to Cliff Carter’s office and waited in the car as Brewster went into the office with the suitcase and left without it.”125
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