Biography Increases Lbj's Stolen Votes To `Thousands'

AUSTIN, Texas - Legend has it that Lyndon B. Johnson stole the 1948 U.S. Senate race by 87 votes after 200 more votes from the infamous ballot Box 13 in Jim Wells County were mysteriously added to his total.

But in biographer Robert Caro's soon-to-be published book on LBJ, the author asserts that Johnson kept his political career alive by stealing ``thousands'' of votes across south Texas.

From Laredo to Corpus Christi and throughout the Rio Grande Valley, Caro reports, Johnson's supporters stuffed ballot boxes with thousands of bogus votes in his Democratic primary win over Coke R. Stevenson.

Backers also illegally transferred some votes cast for Stevenson into the Johnson column, Caro said.

``There were dozens of Box 13s in the Valley,'' Caro quotes a political operative for Johnson as saying after the Democratic primary.

The allegations of massive vote fraud are included in the Feb. 5 edition of the New Yorker, which has been running a four-part series based on Caro's account of Johnson's 1948 Democratic primary victory titled ``Annals of Politics.''

The series is taken from Caro's book ``The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent,'' expected to be published in March.

It is the second of what is expected to be four volumes of Caro's exhaustive study of the late president, covering the seven years from 1941 when Johnson lost a race for the U.S. Senate to the 1948 race that propelled him into the Senate.

Caro writes that Johnson was first defensive about allegations that he stole the election. But once he was safely seated in the Senate, he became boastful about the questionable votes, calling himself ``Landslide Lyndon.''

Although stressing that they had no firsthand knowledge about the 1948 race, George Christian, a former presidential press secretary, and Texas Democratic Party chairman Bob Slagle tried yesterday to deflect some of Caro's claims.

``If I were writing a definitive biography of Johnson, I'm sure I would use a different perspective,'' said Christian, now an Austin consultant. ``Caro sees a lot of the faults of Johnson and magnifies them. I've got a more positive perspective.''

The former press secretary said he had no knowledge of vote stealing by Johnson in the 1948

race. However, Texas Democratic chief Slagle said he believed there was vote fraud by both Johnson and Stevenson.

Slagle based his belief on stories told him by his late father, Robert Slagle, who was a north-Texas campaign manager for Johnson in the questionable race.

``My father told me the Johnson forces felt like the Stevenson forces were stealing thousands of votes in south Texas and so they were only protecting themselves.

``My father was persuaded there was vote stealing going on on both sides,'' Slagle said. ``Lyndon told my father that he was absolutely convinced that `Pappy' Lee O'Daniel stole that '41 race from him, and he wasn't going to have one stolen again.''

To bolster his assertion that Johnson stole thousands of votes, Caro interviewed scores of people involved in the campaigns and reviewed thousands of pages of court transcripts.

In Rio Grande Valley counties, Johnson reportedly received 43,409 votes to 19,367 cast for Stevenson, and Caro said he could not determine exactly how many votes were stolen by Johnson.

``But from the pattern revealed in the brief investigation allowed at the time, it is apparent that the overwhelming majority of those votes fall into the `stolen' category,'' the author writes.

Caro also suggests that at least 8,000 votes for Johnson were stolen in San Antonio and an undetermined amount in other parts of the state, such as Houston.

``Not 87 votes changed history, and not 200, but thousands, many thousands in fact,'' he concludes.

The ``Texas Almanac'' reports the final vote in the Democratic primary as 494,191 for Johnson and 494,104 for Stevenson, a former governor.

The author writes that after the election, Johnson gave the impression of a ``politician who had outsmarted an opponent, done something illegal and hadn't been caught.''

He also said Johnson was fond of telling a joke about an apparently fictional Hispanic boy in a small town who was sitting on the curb crying. His friend asked why he was shedding tears.

Caro writes that the lad said, ``My father was in town last Saturday and he did not come to see me.''

``But Manuel, your father has been dead for 10 years,'' his friend said.

``Si, he has been dead for 10 years,'' the boy replied. ``But he came to town last Saturday to vote for Lyndon Johnson and he did not come to see me.''