The world has shelves on Lyndon Johnson. The Journal has 2 pages, and he is on both of them.
1919
In January 1919 State Representative José Tomás Canales of Brownsville brought 19 charges against the Texas Rangers and was told by a Ranger sergeant that he was going to get hurt. Other members of the House walked him to the hearings. One of them was Samuel Ealy Johnson Jr., a Hill Country farmer and legislator from Blanco County. His son Lyndon was 10. That is the first time the family touches Hora de Sangre, and it is the only time it touches it well.
1948
Lyndon Johnson was born near Stonewall on August 27, 1908, taught school, went to Congress in 1937, and in 1941 lost a Senate race to W. Lee O'Daniel by 1,311 votes when the other side's counties reported late. He learned the lesson.
As a congressman he lobbied for a presidential pardon for George Parr, the Duke of Duval, convicted of tax evasion in the 1930s. Truman signed it on February 20, 1946. In the Senate runoff of August 28, 1948, against Coke Stevenson, Johnson trailed for 5 days, and then Precinct 13 in Alice, in Jim Wells County, amended its return by 202 votes, 200 of them his. Duval went 4,195 to 38. He won by 87 votes out of 988,295, was certified by a party committee 29 to 28, survived a federal injunction when Justice Hugo Black lifted it, and went to Washington as Landslide Lyndon, a name he first wore as a joke and later stopped finding funny.
In 1977 the election judge for Precinct 13, Luis Salas, told the Associated Press that the votes were added on Parr's orders, and that Johnson himself, in Parr's office, had said 200 more would do it. Whether Johnson was in that room rests on Salas's word. That the votes were not real rests on the tally sheet, which Stevenson and Frank Hamer read in a bank in Alice in September 1948. The rest is in Duval County.
After
Senate majority leader at 46, vice president at 52, president on November 22, 1963. The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare and Vietnam. He did not run in 1968, went home to the ranch on the Pedernales, and died there on January 22, 1973, at 64. Ronnie Dugger, who wrote an early biography, once asked him about a photograph of Jim Wells County officials grinning over the Precinct 13 ballot box. Johnson, he said, just grinned back.
Sources: Handbook of Texas, entries for Lyndon Baines Johnson, Duval County and the Canales Investigation; Robert Caro, "Means of Ascent" (Knopf, 1990); Ronnie Dugger, "The Politician" (Norton, 1982); Associated Press, July 1977, and the LBJ Presidential Library's 2023 release of the Mangan tapes.
