Paranoid Politics

“What’s past is prologue.” –The Tempest, Act II, Scene I

At 12:55 on January 6, 1961, Sergeant at Arms William M. Miller held open the door leading to the floor of the United States Senate for Vice President Richard Nixon to count the votes for an election he had lost.

The 1960 campaign had featured two largely similar platforms with one major difference: race. The Democratic Party—which had been the party of the South since before the Civil War—in 1960 introduced the most sweeping Civil Rights plank in its history. “The time has come,” it read, “to assure equal access for all Americans to all areas of community life, including voting booths, schoolrooms, jobs, housing, and public facilities.”

In much of the South—like in Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Lyndon Johnson’s home state of Texas—this was nothing short of treason. Four days before Election Day, on November 4, Johnson was slated to address a Democratic rally at the Adolphus Hotel in still-segregated Dallas. But as he and Lady Bird arrived, a group of over 300—led by Congressman Bruce Alger—were there to greet them. Alger was Dallas’ representative in Washington and the lone Republican Congressman from Texas. Earlier in 1960, he had delivered a speech on the House floor to recognize Robert E. Lee’s birthday, “A great soldier…a loyal Southerner…a noble American…and a Christian gentleman.” In recognition of Alger’s speech, the city’s paper of record, The Dallas Morning News, led by publisher Ted Dealey, ran an editorial the next morning thanking Alger: “Lee fought for states’ rights. By resisting big government in Washington, so is Alger. Where were the Democrats—the so-called party of the South? Courting the support of the NAACP?”

Dallas was home to billionaires like H.L. Hunt, an oil tycoon who was once among the world’s richest men. In February of 1960 he self-published a book, Alpaca, a dystopian novel in which the richest Americans received the most votes—up to seven votes per man, while the bottom 40 percent of earners get no votes at all. His radio program, Life Line, on which he called democracy itself to be “a phony liberal form of watered down communism,” counted millions of listeners—including fellow Dallas resident, General Edwin Walker.

Walker had commanded units at Anzio in WWII and had taken to telling troops and anyone that would listen that at least 60 percent of the press were “convinced communists.” In 1957, at President Eisenhower’s command, Walker led the federal response to shepherd the Little Rock Nine and desegregate Little Rock Central High School, against his own conscience he later claimed. The rationale: his mind changed when he started listening to Hunt’s Life Line program and read John Birch Society literature which warned that much of American society had fallen to Communist influence.

That day in Dallas, just days before the 1960 election, the pro-Civil Rights Lyndon Johnson was met with signs reading “TRAITOR!” and “JUDAS!”, as Bruce Alger whipped up the crowd into a hysteria, his own sign reading, “LBJ SOLD OUT TO YANKEE SOCIALISTS,” as he shouted, “we’re gonna show Johnson he’s not wanted in Dallas!” As the Johnsons entered the lobby, the crowd moved on them. Alger whipped his sign around and around, at one point nearly missing Lady Bird’s head. But as police approached Johnson to rush him through the lobby, through the screaming crowd, he brushed them away. With flashbulbs popping and Texas polls razor thin, he seized the moment, using every ounce of his political instinct. Johnson aide Bill Moyers would later say, “He knew it got votes for him…If he could have thought this up, he would have thought it up. Tried to invent it.” Instead of rushing through the lobby, it took him and Lady Bird half an hour to go seventy-five feet. After the election, Richard Nixon would say, “we lost Texas because of that asshole Congressman.”

But Nixon knew that wasn’t why.

Nixon lost, albeit narrowly. In fact, Kennedy won the popular vote by the slightest margin since 1884—with a more comfortable victory in the Electoral College, 303 to 219, in large part due to narrow and controversial victories in Illinois and Texas, which together represented 51 electoral votes, enough to make the difference toward the necessary 270 electoral votes for either candidate.

In Illinois, a review found that mistakes did occur that favored Democrats, especially in Chicago’s precincts. Chicago, which was inside Cook County—was controlled by Mayor Richard M. Daley, one of the most powerful Democratic politicians in all of the United States, and a friend of the Kennedy family. Kennedy needed big margins in Cook County: he lost 92 of the state’s 101 counties. Research has found that net mistakes of ten or more votes for either candidate occurred in 16.9% of Chicago’s precincts—an astounding number in the most populous city in a state-wide race decided by less than 8,500 votes. However, in discovery recounts requested by the Republican National Committee—a recount controlled by the state’s Democratic Board of Elections—declared that 1,117 new votes were found for Nixon, still short by nearly 8,000 needed for victory in Illinois. However, none of the recounts, nor any research accounts for repeat voting, Board of Elections interference, or block voting, in which registered voters do not actually show up, but are “voted for.” This likely can never be proven beyond a reasonable doubt in Illinois—but in Texas, where Kennedy won by a more authoritative 46,000 vote margin, fraud almost certainly occurred in some manner—perhaps on a vast scale.

Just 12 years prior in 1948 in Texas, in his bid for the U.S. Senate, then-Congressman Lyndon Johnson worked with County Judge George Parr, the “Duke of Duval,” to buy nearly 25,000 votes in “the Valley,” made up of Duval, Jim Wells, and Starr counties, which were heavily Mexican American areas. As an attorney involved in the process told Robert Caro years later, the procedure often would be to “go around the Mexicans’ homes. Get the numbers of their poll tax receipts. Tell them not to go to the polls. Just write in a hundred numbers, and cast the hundred votes yourself.” These Mexican Americans were under the control of white men whom they called “patrones” or “jefes.” This process—reliant upon the payment of poll taxes and the heavy-handed control of political bosses—was repeated throughout Texas for decades. In 1948, when Johnson’s opponent, former Governor Coke Stevenson took a late, razor-thin lead in the primary—another 202 votes were “found” in Jim Wells county in “Box 13,” 200 of which were for Johnson, granting him victory by 87 votes. In total, “The Valley” produced 4,195 votes for LBJ, and only 38 for Stevenson. However, though less well documented, evidence suggests that in 1960, Johnson relied on George Parr’s skills again.

Kennedy won Texas by 46,000 votes—seemingly outside of the margin of a necessary recount. But by 1960, George Parr controlled nine counties in Southern Texas—among them Starr, Jim Hogg, Webb, and Duval counties. On election night, hours after polls closed and as other results had been tabulated, reporters noticed that Duval had yet to report its count. Finally, they came in: 3,803 votes for Kennedy-Johnson, 808 for Nixon-Lodge. Again, in Jim Hogg county: 1,255 to 244. In Webb: 10,059 to 1,802. And in Starr: 4,051 to 284. Together, these four counties made up the largest margins of victory in the entire state of Texas in the 1960 General Election. In the entire Valley, and the nine counties Parr controlled, Kennedy-Johnson won 29,377 of the 37,063 votes—a net gain of 21,691 votes. In 1956, San Antonio—not far from the Valley where George Parr ran supreme—Texans had voted for Eisenhower by a margin of 12,000 votes. In 1960, they voted for Kennedy by 19,000 votes, a swing of 31,000 votes in four years.

Furthermore, outside of the cities like Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston where voting machines were used (which all went for Nixon by nearly a combined 100,000 votes), paper ballots were used throughout the small and rural towns in Texas. Under a new law in 1960, paper ballot voters were required to not only mark their candidate of choice, but also cross off every other candidate listed—including minor party candidates. If a ballot was questioned, a judge would make a ruling—a judge that in deeply Democratic Texas, would likely have loyalties to Johnson, the state’s most powerful politician. Republicans said at the time that in pro-Nixon precincts, the disqualification rate of ballots was 50 percent, and that a spot check of 94 precincts showed 59,000 paper ballots had been thrown out due to the failure to properly mark the ballot.

However, in Texas, no recount was ever held. But in Dallas they didn’t forget.

Months into his presidency, on October 27th of 1961, Kennedy hosted a luncheon for nineteen publishers of Texas’ largest newspapers “to have an exchange of views. Just weeks prior to their meeting on October 14, the National Indignation Convention had convened in Dallas to “demonstrate that we are sick and tired of traitors in our government,” declaring, “we must contact every conservative in the United States—that is, every patriotic American.” John Birch Society councilman Tom Anderson called for impeaching Chief Justice Earl Warren, while J. Everetts Haley, a segregationist former Texas gubernatorial candidate who pushed for massive book bans, chided Anderson to say, “Ol’ Tom Anderson has turned moderate. All he wants to do is impeach Earl Warren—I’m for hanging him.”

Ted Dealey, the Dallas Morning News publisher, hadn’t attended the convention but he agreed with the sentiment—sentiment he was eager to share with the President. After usual small talk, over a menu of Gnocchi a la Parisienne, Dealey interrupted the president: “Isn’t one of the purposes of this meeting to get an expression of grassroots thinking in Texas?” With a little second-hand embarrassment, Kennedy agreed, and ceded the conversation to Dealey. Dealey then read from a statement he had written that very morning, on Statler Hotel stationary:

“We need a man on horseback to lead this nation—and many people in Texas and the Southwest think that you are riding Caroline’s tricycle…The American people are aroused, and rightly so…We should lead from strength, not from weakness…We want desperately to follow the administration as long as the administration displays courage, but we will not follow its policies like a bunch of driven sheep.”

Most of Dealey’s complaints centered on Soviet-paranoia and desegregation. Just a year later, ahead of President Kennedy’s visit to Dallas in November, his U.N. Ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, visited the city on October 24, in promotion of U.N. Week. Inside Dallas Memorial Auditorium, Stevenson’s speech was continually interrupted by Frank McGehee, the founder of the National Indignation Convention. Afterward, a mob followed him, carrying signs like “UN RED FRONT” and “THE HOUSE THAT HISS BUILT.” As police held back the crowd, one agitator snuck through and slammed her sign down on Stevenson’s head. The crowd had been ginned up by General Edwin Walker—who had been arrested the previous year leading the riot in opposition to Ole Miss’ desegregation, leading a Dallas Morning News editorial to refer to him as “the United States’ first political prisoner.”

Finally pushing into the car, Stevenson asked, “Are these human beings or animals?” Upon returning, he warned the President to cancel his trip to Dallas.

The President ignored Stevenson’s advice. Some 29 days later, on November 22, 1963, Air Force One touched down in Dallas. That morning, a full-page ad in The Dallas Morning News—with a black border like a death notice—read “Welcome Mr. Kennedy To Dallas.” Addressed from “we free-thinking and America-thinking citizens of Dallas still have, through a Constitution largely ignored by you,” it asked in several listed questions, why he had gone soft on Communism. Its contents were attributed to “The American Fact-Finding Committee,” later discovered to be a front for the John Birch Society. That same day, protest flyers pinned car windshields, with straight on and profile portraits of President Kennedy—the flyer read, “WANTED FOR TREASON.”

Landing at Dallas Love Field that morning, President Kennedy—the son of Joseph and Rose, the father of Caroline and John Junior—turned to his wife and said, “we’re in nut country now.”

Sources:

Edmund F. Kallina, “Was the 1960 Presidential Election Stolen? The Case of Illinois.” https://www.jstor.org/stable/27550168

Steven Davis and Bill Minutaglio, Dallas 1963. 2013.

Robert Caro, The Passage of Power. 2012.

Robert Caro, The Means of Ascent. 1990.