The Man Who Killed Kennedy Read online

  Stevenson lived an austere life on a ranch in South Llano, a homestead that the former governor lavished with attention and time, a forever-unfinished dream house in the vein of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.

  “The ranch was a fortress, or at least a refuge from the world. Since Coke had refused to build even a rough low-water bridge across the South Llano, the only way of reaching it was by fording the river, which was not infrequently too high to be forded. He refused to have a telephone on the ranch. The closest town was Telegraph, a mile across the river, and the “‘town’ consisted of one building: a store.”15

  At the ranch, land was cleared, cattle were branded, and sheep were sheared, all by Stevenson’s hand. Not a day went by on the ranch that Stevenson didn’t find something fit for improvement.16

  He was also a man of definite character. An attorney, Stevenson took a Jeffersonian view of the Constitution, favoring the individual over the institution. He abhorred public spending, taxation, and debt. He was meticulous in his thoughts, and only shared them with conviction, in a “low, slow drawl.”17

  “Coke would never say a word he didn’t believe, and that shone through,” a fellow attorney recalled. “When he spoke to a jury, the jury believed him.”18

  Stevenson was lovingly given the moniker “Mr. Texas” by the public and “coffee-coolin’, Coke” by the media, a term given to symbolize his politics.

  “Listen, I’m too old to burn my lips on a boiling cup of coffee,” Stevenson would say when asked for an immediate response regarding an issue. “We’ll just let that cup cool a while.”19

  The coffee pot and the pipe that he could be seen habitually smoking became indelible to the Stevenson image.

  If there was a flaw to Stevenson, it was racism, which as an old Southerner, he carried deep in his bones; he did not withhold his negative feelings toward blacks in Texas. When setting up a Good Neighbor Commission with Mexico, Stevenson was heard to remark, “Meskins is pretty good folks. If it was niggers, it’d be different.”20

  After the US Supreme Court’s 1944 decision to eradicate the “white primary,” an impediment to the voting rights of blacks, Stevenson derided the decision as a “monstrous threat to our peace and security.”21

  As governor, Stevenson was unflappable. One of his favorite tactics in his fight against government intervention was to “do nothing.” During his administration, small-town businesses displaying “No Mexicans” signs were protected by the governor, who said that “businesses are free to establish their own standards.”22

  Johnson would use Stevenson’s character against him. Stevenson’s heedful thought process and low-key style would be skewed as indecisiveness as Johnson parodied Stevenson’s nicknames to exemplify this trait, referring to Stevenson as “Mr. Straddler,” “Mr. Do-Nothinger,” or “Mr. Calculator.”

  A song devised by the Johnson campaign parodied Stevenson’s non-committal attitude:

  My friends, please make me Senator.

  I was your calculating governor.

  I’m sure you know my steadfast rule

  Of always let the coffee cool.

  All through my office term just past

  Were controversies thick and fast.

  And when the matters came to me,

  I solved ‘em all with ‘Leave ‘em be.’

  You got to let the coffee cool.

  Then you’ll be safe from ridicule.

  Don’t ever touch a subject when it’s hot.

  You got to let the coffee cool,

  Courage is for dangerous fools,

  Don’t never ever touch a boiling pot.

  When capital and labor fight

  I always find that both are right.

  Whenever wets and drys collide

  I just wait and choose the winning side.23

  Johnson also worked mimicry into his public appearances, imitating Stevenson, from his slow, deliberate style to his movement of rocking back and forth on his heels while thinking. Johnson even brought a pipe into the act. The aping of Stevenson’s image was clearly devised to show a clodhopping yokel, a backwoods, backward-thinking rube clearly unfit for politics.

  Johnson fanned the feathers of his personal war record claiming that, unlike Stevenson, he had served his country. “I didn’t sit and puff my pipe when our country was at war.”24

  Johnson pronounced that, during the former governor’s administration, Stevenson had handed out a record number of pardons to criminals. This claim was quickly batted down by prison officials, who countered that Johnson had combined the true number of pardons with days allotted to convicts to attend funerals or visit sick family members.25

  Stevenson would refuse to reply to these and similar charges because he deemed them dirty politics. This only emboldened Johnson’s tactics.

  Johnson issued a more substantial lie that Stevenson was consorting with heads of labor and receiving payoffs. “Labor leaders made a secret agreement with Calculating Coke that they couldn’t get out of me,” Johnson said. “A few labor leaders, who do not soil their own clothes with the sweat of honest toil, have met in a smoke-filled hotel room and have attempted to deliver the vote of free Texas workingmen.”26

  The labor ploy was Johnson’s way of tying Stevenson to the Taft-Hartley Act, a controversial bill that proposed federal monitoring of labor unions to ensure fair practice. Johnson’s allegation that Stevenson was consorting with labor leaders was meant to show that Johnson was strongly opposed to Taft-Hartley. And whereas Johnson would hammer away at this throughout the campaign, it was patently untrue; Johnson himself was accepting money from labor leaders including John L. Lewis’s and the United Mine Workers.27

  Even though it came easy for Johnson to devise elaborate lies about himself and his opponent, he was reluctant to meet Stevenson face-to-face, using any and all opportunities to worm out of the possibility of an encounter.

  The two candidates were both scheduled to attend the Texas Cowboy Reunion on Fourth of July weekend in Stamford. Stevenson, a living embodiment of frontier idealism, was asked to lead the horse riders in the parade.28 Johnson, hearing of Stevenson’s grand reception at the event, concocted an escape. Johnson visited Aspermont, Texas earlier in the day but then falsely claimed to reporters present that his helicopter lacked the fuel to fly to Stamford for his joint appearance with Stevenson. When a refueling tanker inauspiciously rolled up, Johnson told his pilot, Jim Chudars, “Tell the driver to go away. He should come back and meet you here in two hours.”29

  Walking away from the tanker back to reporters, Johnson offered an explanation. “Wrong octane,” Johnson said, shaking his head. “I swear I don’t know what’s wrong with my travel team. I don’t know why we keep having trouble getting 91 octane gas when we need it.”30

  It was a blatant lie, symbolic of Johnson’s character.

  “As the truck rolled out of the pasture, all could see clearly printed beneath the Esso Fuel logo: “Flammable. 91 Octane,” wrote Joe Phipps, an LBJ campaign worker in his book, Summer Stock: Behind the Scenes with LBJ in ‘48. “But no one, including the reporters, challenged Johnson. They never would. It was almost as if each was ashamed for him in his blatant dishonesty, embarrassed for him in his plain dumbness, even if he was not embarrassed for himself.”31

  Aiding this particular lie was an innovative means of transportation, which Johnson utilized for his campaign: a helicopter—a technological and visual marvel at the time. It is important that, while Stevenson campaigned at a leisurely pace, Johnson barnstormed the state relentlessly by a relatively new mode of transportation. Just Johnson’s arrival would guarantee a crowd in rural counties, where no one had seen a “whirlybird.” The helicopter thus became an integral part of the Johnson campaign image.

  “Long Lyndon Johnson, one of Texas’s most ebullient congressmen, has introduced the first new gimmick in Texas politics since the hillbilly band and the free barbecue,” wrote Time magazine. “Out in the bottoms and the back country, the Johnson City Windm
ill wowed the citizenry.”32

  When asked by the press about the danger of the travel and the concerns of Lady Bird, Johnson wound his response around his war record, stating that his wife “didn’t show particular concern when I was flying in B-29s, helping bomb one Japanese island after another into submission three years ago.”33 The helicopter would also assist the campaign in the number of citizens it helped Johnson reach in a short amount of time. Coke Stevenson traveled town to town in a worn-down Plymouth; Johnson could canvass large areas of Texas quickly, sometimes campaigning over a loudspeaker from the air.

  “Hello down there,” Johnson’s voice would bellow over a small town. “This is your friend, Lyndon Johnson of Johnson City. Your candidate for the United States Senate. Just saying good morning.”34

  The hovering transportation not only symbolized a new method of campaigning, but also exemplified Johnson’s brand of backdoor politicking. Johnson first utilized the Sikorsky S-51 for fast travel and later he teamed with Bell Helicopter and flew in the Bell 47-B.35 The Bell Corporation was a better fit, supplying Johnson with campaign money in exchange for political favors. “We’re interested in helping him [Johnson] out because helicopters are new, and if we get an important person such as a congressman showing enough confidence to fly in our aircraft, it would help us and the overall industry,” founder and owner of Bell Helicopter, Larry Bell, said at the time.36 Years later, Bell Helicopter would benefit mightily from their association with LBJ, becoming one of the “Johnson” companies to procure big-money Vietnam War contracts. Lady Bird Johnson would make a killing on Bell Helicopter stock.

  Johnson’s campaign success and political scope was also helped greatly by his control of Texas media in a sixty-three-county area, which included Austin, the state capital. The control gave Johnson a tremendous influence on the message that was delivered to the voting public. In 1943, on purchasing a radio station in his wife’s name, KTBC in Austin, Johnson was to exercise his power as a congressman to obtain the necessary license, frequency, and hours of operation, which were all essential to the station’s success. “Lady Bird” acquired the station cheaply. Its value was greatly enhanced in 1945, when the FCC, under tremendous pressure from Johnson, granted KTBC an allowance to quintuple its power, an increase in range that extended the Johnson media umbrella to cover sixty-three counties.37

  Johnson also traded his political influence for radio advertising. Together with his friend and attorney Ed Clark of Looney and Clark, KTBC obtained high-money advertising contracts with General Electric and Gulf Oil. Speaking of his relationship with Gulf Oil, Clark stated, “I had friends there. I spoke to them about it, and they understood. This wasn’t a Sunday-school proposition. This was business.”38 It was a clean arrangement. Corporations with interests in Washington or Texas didn’t have to hire a lobbyist or pay a cash bribe. Instead, they paid thousands for advertising on KTBC.

  In the early 1950s, the FCC granted Johnson’s radio station a television license, and KTBC become the only broadcast television station in Austin, furthering Johnson’s political reach and personal enrichment.39

  Ed Clark would supply Johnson with big business advertising for his radio station and big business money for his campaign—more money than had ever been donated to a politician in Texas.40 Brown and Root, a Texas construction firm that would later combine with the infamous Haliburton Company, also threw their lot in with Johnson. The company, founded by George and Herman Brown, won the contract to build the Mansfield Dam near Austin in 1937 thanks to the help of Congressman Johnson. With Johnson as a senator, Brown and Root would benefit greatly.

  In the closing days of the 1948 campaign, Ed Clark would recall “Johnson—if he lost, he was going back to being nobody. They were going back to being nobody. That was when the chips were down. That was the acid test. That was it! All or Nothing.”41

  Having lost his bid in 1941 to jump from the House to the Senate, Johnson knew the 1948 election was it for him. He was frantic, unscrupulous, indefatigable, and prepared to engage in electoral fraud to “win.”

  Johnson’s moneyed campaign of untruths, deception, and technological advance, in the end, still could not topple the popular Stevenson. Even with the collusion of George Parr, who turned over 4,662 votes for Johnson in Duval County compared with forty for Stevenson and 93 percent of the vote in Parr’s complete territory, Johnson was behind by 854 votes statewide when the polls were closed. The slim margin quickly elicited desperate measures from Johnson and company. Calls made on Johnson’s behalf to several Houston precincts sparked several “revisions,” which cut Stevenson’s lead in more than half.

  George Parr, who had already turned over nearly 100 percent of his territory for Johnson, had also been called. Parr would have to pull another favor for LBJ. The Sunday morning following Election Day, Parr’s election officials announced that returns were not in for one of Duval’s precincts. When these 427 “uncounted” votes were tallied, Johnson was given a small, short-lived lead in the post-election scramble for votes.42

  On Monday and Tuesday following Election Day, vote corrections tipped the election back into the hands of Stevenson by 349 votes. Yet again, Parr was called to help. On Friday, more “revisions” came out of Parr’s territory, reducing Stevenson’s lead to 157. Later that Friday, an amended return out of a box in precinct thirteen proved to be the deathblow to Stevenson: two-hundred more votes allegedly cast for Johnson had appeared.

  The city of Alice, Texas was in Jim Wells County, where Parr’s influence reached. Parr had a strongman in Alice, deputy sheriff Luis Salas. Journalist and author John Knaggs hypothesized the use of Alice to rig the vote as a necessary strategy.

  “Parr had used [voted] most of the eligible names in Duval County before he knew Johnson would need more,” Knaggs said to John E. Clark in Clark’s excellent book on Parr, The Fall of the Duke of Duval. “That would explain why he took the chance of using a box in Jim Wells, where he didn’t have quite as much control as he had at home, instead of just padding the Duval count a little more. It would also explain why he added all 200 votes in one box instead of spreading them out over several boxes, which would have been a lot less obvious. By using only Box 13, he limited the number of people who could ever testify what really happened.”43

  Box 13 was stuffed haphazardly, a slipshod job. When voter 841, Eugenio Solis, approached the poll site in the thirteenth precinct, it was close to 7 p.m., closing time. In later testimony, Solis said there was no one else coming to vote when he cast his ballot. The names of two-hundred more phantom voters, 842 through 1041, would later “show up,” their names written in one handwriting, a different color ink and strangely listed in alphabetical order. Interviewed later, some of these voters would attest that they did not vote in the election. Others were deceased.

  Author Bar McClellan alleged that it was Don Thomas, a lawyer from Ed Clark’s firm, who stuffed the box when Salas declined due to fear of retribution. Thomas started writing down names at random from the poll list, then, with time running low, proceeded to write them in alphabetical order. With the poll list exhausted, only then would Thomas begin to add names of the departed.44 When all the remaining votes were tallied, Johnson would win the election by eighty-seven votes. Upon hearing of the Jim Wells County skullduggery, Stevenson quickly sent investigators to interview residents in Duval County who were listed as having voted, quickly finding in many cases that their county commissioner had voted for them. When word made its way to Parr’s agents of enforcement, the investigation was quickly halted.45

  “We were stopped by sheriff’s deputies, one of whom had a submachine gun,” Pete Tijerina, a San Antonio attorney and head of the investigation team said. “They said they [had] heard we had guns. We told them we had no guns, but they made us spread-eagle while they searched us. They then told us we had thirty minutes to get out of Duval County. We got out in that time.”46

  Stevenson then sent three attorneys to Jim Wells County to confront Tom D
onald, secretary of Jim Wells County’s Democratic Executive Committee and the cashier at the Texas State Bank of Alice, who held the poll list for the town. The attorneys brought with them a book on election law, which reiterated that any citizen could view the election tally sheet. When Donald was confronted there and asked to produce the lists, the attorneys were greeted with a readied “No”.47

  Stevenson subsequently took matters into his own hands and went to Alice with Frank Hamer, an old friend and the Texas Ranger who had set the fatal Bonnie and Clyde ambush. It was now Stevenson’s turn to confront Tom Donald at the bank, after which Donald turned over the poll list to Stevenson and his lawyers for a few important moments. In those moments, they memorized some of the added names on the list as well as the noticeable visible discrepancies.

  Unfortunately, no amount of evidence could help Stevenson. The case was to go to a federal court less than a month later, but to no avail. The top suspects in the fraud, Luis Salas and Tom Donald, could not appear in court because they were away in Mexico “on business.”48 The altered poll lists had been emptied from their boxes, burned, and blamed on a Mexican janitor. The fix was in, and there was too much invested in Johnson for truth to prevail. Lyndon Johnson was now a senator. For years afterward, he was known in some circles, mockingly, as “Landslide Lyndon” and “Lyin’ Lyndon.”

  Johnson proudly retold a joke that began circulating after the election on countless occasions. It told of a small Mexican boy named Manuel whose father had voted in Alice.

  “My father was in town last Saturday, and he did not come to see me,” Manuel said

  “But, Manuel, your father has been dead for ten years.”

  “Si, he has been dead for ten years. But he came to town last Saturday to vote for Lyndon Johnson, and he did not come to see me.”49

  Dan Moody, who served as governor of Texas from 1927 to 1931, said “if the district attorney here had done his duty, Lyndon Johnson would now be in the penitentiary instead of the United States Senate.”50