The Path to Power (35 page)

When they went into action the next morning, they worked very fast indeed. Vernon Whiteside describes what happened. “We took one meeting at a time. There was only a small group of us—maybe a half-dozen or so. But there were so few other kids there. One of us would shout, ‘C’mon, let’s get going. Let’s elect Horace Richards temporary chairman.’ We always elected Horace, because Horace had a loud voice and more guts than a burglar. ‘All in favor of Horace Richards, say
Aye
.’ We’d all shout
Aye
. ‘The
Ayes
have it. C’mon, get up there, Horace.’ And he’d run the election, and when he called for the vote, we’d all yell loud for our candidate so that we sounded like more than we were. And no matter who sounded louder, he’d say our candidate had won. Then we’d go—Horace, me, Lyndon, the same half-dozen of us—to the next election, and pull the same thing. So each of us, you might say, voted in all four elections.”

In the junior class meeting, there was almost trouble because, with time running short and Johnson anxious to get to the senior class meeting where he was a candidate, Richards tried to rush the nominating procedure even faster than he had done previously. As soon as the White Star candidate had been nominated, he shouted “Nominations closed!”

There were still “a lot of guys with their hands up,” he recalls with a grin. “Henry Kyle was jumping up and down. He said, ‘You can’t do that [close the nominations]! I want to nominate someone!’” But Richards was equal to the challenge. “I said, ‘Don’t tell me what I can do. I’m president [temporary chairman] of this class, and I’m running this election. What I say goes.’ And I closed the nominations. The juniors and seniors were meeting in rooms right across from each other. As soon as I closed the nominations, I ran across the hall. The other guys—everyone who could possibly pass for a senior—were already in there voting. They were just closing up their election. I said, ‘I want to vote.’ They said, ‘You can’t vote, Horace. You’re not a senior.’ I said, ‘Don’t tell me I’m not a senior. I’m taking more senior subjects
than junior, and that makes me a senior.’ Well, who could tell if I was telling the truth unless they looked up the record, and they didn’t have time to do that. I voted for Lyndon, of course. The seniors were voting by paper ballots, and when they counted the votes, all our guys had won, and Lyndon had won—by one vote. I wasn’t really a senior, but I voted for him, and it was my vote that won for him, and it was illegal.

“You know,” Horace Richards says with a smile, “later on, when everyone got so excited about the election [the 1948 election for United States Senator from Texas] that Lyndon Johnson stole, I felt that I had been in on the beginning of history. Because I was in on the
first
election that Lyndon Johnson stole.”
*

W
ERE EVEN SUCH TACTICS
inadequate for Lyndon Johnson’s purposes? He used others.

The annual voting for the Gaillardians,
†
the college’s seven prettiest, most popular and most “representative” coeds, aroused the greatest interest of any campus election—far more than the class officer elections. And the voting, by secret written ballots deposited in a ballot box in the ground-floor hall of Old Main, was conducted under a strict supervision which would prevent repetition of the multiple-voting technique. Previously, most of the winners immortalized in full-page sepia pictures in the
Pedagog
had been members of the literary society-Black Star “in” crowd, but now Johnson wanted “White Star” girls to win as many of the seven places as possible. Standing in his way were three nominees too popular or pretty to be beaten, but he was confident that his vigorous campaigning would win four places—confident, that is, until Ruth Lewis was nominated.

Unlike the other candidates, Ruth Lewis was not a campus beauty. But although in practice the Gaillardian election was mainly a beauty contest, it was not supposed to be—“representative” was defined as “foremost in college life”—and Miss Lewis had other qualifications. There was always a twinkle in her eye, and in her fingers when she sat down at the old Underwood in the
Pedagog
office, where she was an assistant editor. “She was a terrific writer—brilliant,” says
Pedagog
editor Ella So Relle. She wrote for the Press Club, the Scribblers’ Club, and was involved in half a dozen campus activities. And she had ideas as novel on the San Marcos campus of that era as the hair she wore short and straight in the defiant and very un-Texan
flapper style: an enthusiastic tennis player herself, she believed that women should have their own athletic teams; she did not want to get married as soon as possible, preferring a career in journalism, where her writing could help people. But she argued for her ideas with a quiet earnestness and self-deprecatory humor that made her so popular that when she was nominated for one of the seven places, it was generally assumed she would win.

But then, as Ella So Relle puts it, “Lyndon found out this dirty little thing about Ruth.”

The “thing” was not really “dirty”—it was not even significant—except in light of the deep feeling of inferiority at San Marcos about the famous University of Texas just thirty miles away, where richer, smarter students went to college. “To understand [what happened], you have to understand how defensive we were about going to San Marcos,” Miss So Relle says. Johnson’s discovery consisted of nothing more than the fact that when two men had stopped to fix a flat tire on a car in which Ruth Lewis and two friends had been riding, and had asked the young women where they went to college, Miss Lewis, out of defensiveness, or embarrassment, had blurted out that they went to the University of Texas, and only later, with a shamefaced grin, had corrected herself. A more trivial incident can hardly be imagined—except that one of the men was an acquaintance of Lyndon Johnson, and happened to mention it to him.

Johnson told Miss Lewis that unless she withdrew from the Gaillardian election, the whole campus would know what she had done. Unless she withdrew, he said, he would write an editorial in the
Star
revealing the incident and stating that she should not be elected because any woman who was ashamed to say she went to San Marcos was not a “representative” San Marcos coed.

When Johnson left Ruth Lewis, he knew he had won. “He came back [after seeing her] and said we could stop worrying,” Horace Richards says. “He had blackmailed her right out of that election, and he knew it.” Johnson’s assessment was correct. As soon as he had left Miss Lewis, Ella So Relle says, “she came to my house in tears—which was very unusual for Ruth. She said, ‘I’m going to withdraw from the election.’ I was astounded. I wanted her to battle him, but she said he was going to put this in big headlines in the newspaper, and she just could not face that embarrassment.” She withdrew, and the four coeds Johnson wanted to be Gaillardians were all elected.

H
IS NEXT TARGET
was the Student Council. He himself, as a result of the “stolen” election, was a member, but more than half of the twelve other members, including almost all the seniors and juniors, were athletes and members of the “in” crowd. “I had to rely on the freshmen and sophomores to get the votes to run the Student Council,” he would recall in 1970. He
knew how to get them: use the “brains are just as important as brawn” issue that had “touched” in other elections. But he had to know whom to use the issue
on
: he had to learn the identities of “bright” underclassmen who would either be his candidates for the council or would vote for those candidates. And the inchoate, constantly shifting, nature of the San Marcos student body made identifying such students difficult.

But Johnson had figured out a way to identify them. As night watchman in Old Main, White Star Archie Wiles possessed keys to the registrar’s office. One midnight, Johnson was to recall in that 1970 conversation, “We took the keys and went in there and I … got those little yellow (grade) cards, and I got the names of everyone who had a B average—I took the people with superior intellectual ability.” Lining up nominees, nominators and voters, he saw to it that the freshmen and sophomore places on the council were filled with students to whom the “brains” argument would appeal.

In selecting women candidates, he took a further precaution. He instructed White Stars to date the freshman and sophomore coeds he was considering as nominees. Says Wilton Woods, a senior, who did a lot of such dating because his soft voice and tentative manner were attractive to younger girls, “Lyndon’s idea was to get a real nice-looking girl and see if you could control her. Date her and see how she comes out, see if she’ll go along if she was elected to the Student Council.” If Johnson received a report that a girl would “go along,” he would instruct the White Star who was dating her to ask her to run for the council. “I was dating a little ol’ girl, and my sole purpose in dating her was to get her to run,” Woods says. “That was Lyndon’s idea. [He] wanted [me] to tell her how to vote once she was elected.” The strategy worked. Women at San Marcos were not “modern girls,” Richards explains: they were not particularly interested in politics. (Although they outnumbered men three to one, no woman, so far as can be determined, had ever been a class president.) Johnson’s weeding-out process had ensured, moreover, that the women he selected as candidates were even less interested than most. Women at San Marcos were also not “modern” because, in Richards’ words, “Girls at that time—they’d do what you told them” in areas such as politics that were considered men’s domain. And Johnson’s process ensured, of course, that his candidates were not particularly independent. “And,” Whiteside adds, “don’t forget—these were girls in a school where there were six girls to every two boys. A lot of the girls were very lonely. A boy was a prized possession. They didn’t want to do anything to get you mad at them.” Says Woods: “Seldom did you have to make an issue of it. You’d say, ‘So-and-so wants to be editor of the
Star
. He’s a good ol’ boy. You’ll vote for him, won’t you?’ And almost always, they would.”

Johnson employed a similar strategy with at least one woman who was already on the council, having Woods date her as long as Lyndon needed her vote. In this instance, the strategy worked particularly well, for the woman, a lively, dark-haired young lady with dark, glowing eyes, fell in love with
Woods. “And then, of course, as soon as Lyndon didn’t need her [vote] any more, ol’ Wilton drops her,” Richards laughs. “She really liked Wilton, too, and I bet she really used to wonder what had happened. I bet she could never figure out why ol’ Wilton dropped her.”

P
ROBABLY SHE NEVER COULD
, for, varied as were Lyndon Johnson’s political tactics, one aspect was common to them all. This aspect would have been striking no matter who was planning the tactics, but it was all the more striking when the tactician was a young man who had displayed throughout his life—and was, in his other, non-political, activities, displaying still—so notable a tendency for “talking big.” Lyndon Johnson was planning many tactics now—a whole political strategy, in fact. And he never talked about it at all.

Occasionally, his little brother got a glimpse of it. On some weekends, fifteen-year-old Sam Houston Johnson visited Lyndon, and he would, he would write, never forget “those wonderful conversations (monologues, really) that ran through the long Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings. … I heard several installments of his campaign against the Black Stars during my periodic weekend visits to San Marcos, always listening with wide-eyed admiration as my brother outlined his strategy for the coming week. Even now, I can still visualize him restlessly moving back and forth in his room … sometimes lounging on his bed and then moving on to a rickety wooden chair near the window, his eyes gleaming with anticipation and his deep voice tense with emotion.” But even Sam Houston got only a glimpse. At Sunday noon, he had to go home, and when he left, his brother would still be pacing and prowling around his little room, his eyes gleaming, his hands clasping and unclasping, his long fingers, nails bitten down to the quick and into the quick, twisting and twining under the tension of hidden thoughts.

The White Stars understood the necessity of keeping their existence secret. Students were especially susceptible to the “brains are just as important as brawn” argument because they knew that the “brawn”—the college athletes—belonged to a secret organization and, along with their girlfriends, to an exclusive clique into which most students were not invited. Johnson was playing on that susceptibility quite deliberately. “Most of the non-athletic students secretly resented and probably hated the Saturday heroes, no matter how much they apparently enjoyed the games,” his brother explains. “Quite obviously, since every practical politician knows that hate and fear offer more forceful tools for organizing than love and respect, Lyndon had a rather fertile field at San Marcos. … Lyndon had sized up the situation like an old pro. He had that gut knowledge about the little man’s resentment of the big man. …” The susceptibility of the voters—the “little men”—to whom Johnson was appealing would be less easily translatable
into support for Johnson’s candidates if the voters discovered that, in being asked to vote for a Deason or a Harzke, they were being asked to vote for members of another secret organization—also one into which they were not invited.

In forming the White Stars, Richards and Whiteside, not for political reasons but to enhance the feeling of “brotherhood, fraternity” that was so important to them, had formulated strict rules for secrecy. Johnson devised others, which they embraced. No three White Stars could ever be seen talking together on campus, for example; should three find themselves together, meaningful glances would indicate which one should leave. White Star meetings, previously held down at the creek or in members’ rooms in their boardinghouses, were now, at Johnson’s suggestion, moved to the two-story Hofheinz Hotel, where, Johnson pointed out, no passerby could peep through the windows. There was even an ingenious device to allow a White Star to deny with a straight face that he was one: immediately upon being asked if he is a member of the group, a White Star rule read, the member is—upon the very asking of the question—automatically expelled, so that he can answer “No”; he will be readmitted at the next meeting. These rules and others were incorporated into the White Star Bylaws, which new members had to swear to uphold in that impressive ceremony with the candle and the dictionary on the creek bank—and so seriously did these young men take this oath that, forty years later, asked about the White Stars, Deason declined to go into detail “in order not to violate certain oaths that I have taken,” and others declined to talk at all. So successful was Johnson in his insistence on secrecy that even after White Stars had won many campus elections, the campus did not know that there
were
White Stars. “The Black Stars didn’t know we were organized—
nobody
knew,” Deason says. “They didn’t know this was an
organization
working on them. They knew someone was playing havoc with the school, but they didn’t know who.” Whiteside recalls with glee “all these unsuspecting people we used. … We’d say, ‘You’re not going to vote with the Black Stars, are you? You’re not going to help the Black Stars?’ And all the time we had another organization that was so secret they didn’t know we had one.”