32

“Proud to Be of Assistance”

IT WAS JUST EIGHT DAYS after Lyndon Johnson had been sworn in as a United States senator, in 1949, that the pattern—of true, deep compassion surrendering to true, deeper pragmatism—was repeated, in a fast-paced drama that revealed the pattern very clearly indeed.

The prologue to the drama had taken place more than three years earlier, in June, 1945, on Luzon Island in the Philippines, when a twenty-six-year-old Mexican-American private, Felix Longoria, a truck driver from a small South Texas town called Three Rivers, volunteered for a patrol and was killed in a fusillade of Japanese bullets, leaving a wife, Beatrice, and a young daughter. He was buried in a temporary military cemetery on Luzon for three years, and in December, 1948, his body was shipped home, and the Army notified his widow, who had moved to Corpus Christi. She said she wanted the body brought to Three Rivers for funeral and burial, and on Monday, January 10, 1949, she took a bus back there to arrange for her husband to be buried in his hometown. When, however, she arrived at Three Rivers’ only funeral parlor, the Rice Funeral Home, the owner, T. W. Kennedy Jr., told her that she could not use its chapel for the service because “the whites won’t like it.”

Once, Beatrice Longoria might have simply accepted that edict, for before Pearl Harbor, Mexican-Americans in South Texas had generally accepted discrimination meekly, but during the war, Mexican-American soldiers had served not in segregated units as had blacks but alongside white soldiers (and had compiled the country’s highest ethnic group representation in combat service and Medal of Honor awards), and had returned home in a different frame of mind, and in 1948, several hundred Mexican-American veterans in Corpus Christi had formed the American G.I. Forum to make sure they received the medical and educational benefits to which they were entitled under the G.I. Bill. As soon as Mrs. Longoria got back to Corpus Christi, she contacted the Forum’s president, physician and former Army major Dr. Hector Garcia. Dr. Garcia telephoned Kennedy, and told him that Mrs. Longoria wanted to use his funeral home. Kennedy repeated his refusal, at first simply giving the same explanation—“The white people just won’t like it”—but when Garcia had the temerity to persist, saying, “But in this case the boy is a veteran, doesn’t that make any difference?,” he lost his temper and furnished additional reasons. “That doesn’t make any difference,” he said. “You know how the Latin people get drunk and lay around all the time. The last time we let them use the chapel, they got all drunk and we just can’t control them…I’m sure you’ll understand.”

Dr. Garcia understood. Hanging up the phone, he sent seventeen telegrams to military officials, congressmen and senators, including one to the new junior senator from Texas, in which he asked for “immediate investigation and correction” of Kennedy’s “un-American action” which “is in direct contradiction of those same principles for which this American soldier made the supreme sacrifice in giving his life for his country and for the same people who now deny him the last funeral rites.”

The telegram was delivered to Suite 231 in the Senate Office Building at 8:49 the next morning, and was opened by either John Connally or Walter Jenkins (neither can now remember which one) and when Lyndon Johnson arrived at the office about an hour later, it was shown to him—and there was hardly a moment’s pause before his response. “By God,” he said, “we’ll bury him in Arlington!” He told someone to get him the official in charge of Arlington National Cemetery, burial place of America’s heroes, determined that indeed Private Longoria was eligible for burial there—any soldier, sailor, or marine who died in active service or held an honorable discharge could be buried there, with full military honors: three volleys from a firing squad, a bugler blowing taps, four uniformed flag-bearers holding the American flag over the casket as it was lowered into the grave, and then the presentation, by a soldier of the same rank or higher as the dead serviceman, of the flag to the next of kin, the soldier saluting and saying: “The Government presents to you this flag under which he served.”

The Lyndon Johnson who called in his staff now was a Lyndon Johnson in the grip of his emotions. “You all get on the phone,” he said, and his staff ran to obey, and within a few minutes after he had first read the telegram—“immediately, really,” Connally was to recall—“not only I but Walter was on the phone arranging things.” “His immediate reaction was he [Longoria] was eligible to be buried in Arlington,” Connally says. “This was an instinctive thing—his instinctive sense of fairness and his basic feelings…. It had to do with outrage. Here was a veteran who died for his country and he can’t be buried in his hometown.” And no one could have translated that outrage into action more effectively. The decision to have the burial in Arlington was so right, so perfectly suited to correct an injustice. A veteran’s hometown had refused to bury him with the ordinary honors that any dead soldier who died for his country deserved; so Lyndon Johnson had arranged that the veteran would be buried with full honors, in a place of deep symbolic significance. And his telegram back to Dr. Garcia, sent that afternoon after several calls to check to make sure that Garcia’s account was accurate, was so right. “I DEEPLY REGRET TO LEARN THAT THE PREJUDICE OF SOME INDIVIDUALS EXTENDS EVEN BEYOND THIS LIFE,” Lyndon Johnson’s telegram said. “I HAVE NO AUTHORITY OVER CIVILIAN FUNERAL HOMES, NOR DOES THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT,” he explained. However, he said, that did not mean that he, or Beatrice Longoria, was without recourse—glorious recourse. “I HAVE TODAY MADE ARRANGEMENTS TO HAVE FELIX LONGORIA REBURIED WITH FULL MILITARY HONORS IN ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY HERE AT WASHINGTON WHERE THE HONORED DEAD OF OUR NATION’S WARS REST.” Or, he told Garcia, should the widow desire to have her husband’s body buried nearer his home, “HE CAN BE REBURIED AT FORT SAM HOUSTON NATIONAL MILITARY CEMETERY AT SAN ANTONIO.” Just tell him what was desired, Lyndon Johnson telegraphed. It would be done. “IF HIS WIDOW DESIRES TO HAVE HIM REBURIED IN EITHER CEMETERY, SHE SHOULD SEND ME A TELEGRAM.” And Lyndon Johnson knew, because he knew the Mexican immigrants of South Texas, that the widow might be very poor. She should send her telegram collect, he said. And, he added, whichever cemetery she selects, she should not worry about the cost. “THERE WILL BE NO COST.”

And there were still other sentences in Lyndon Johnson’s telegram. “THIS INJUSTICE AND PREJUDICE IS DEPLORABLE,” he said. “I AM HAPPY TO HAVE A PART IN SEEING THAT THIS TEXAS HERO IS LAID TO REST WITH THE HONOR AND DIGNITY HIS SERVICE DESERVES.” After reading the telegram over one last time to make sure it accurately expressed his sentiments, he told Connally to send it out—at once.

Dr. Garcia had called an emergency rally of the G.I. Forum in a Corpus Christi elementary school for that evening, and when he walked out on the stage, before an audience of more than a thousand people, he was holding Johnson’s telegram, and he read it to the audience, and as he did, men and women began to stand up and cheer, some of them with their fists in the air, and the whole audience cheered when Garcia announced that Beatrice Longoria had selected Arlington as her husband’s resting place. She herself replied to Johnson by a telegram. It was addressed to “Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, House of the Senate, Washington, D.C.” “HUMBLY GRATEFUL FOR YOUR KINDNESS IN MY HOUR OF HUMILIATION AND SUFFERING,” the telegram said. “FOREVER GRATEFUL FOR YOUR KINDNESS,” it said. And when, the next day, Walter Jenkins drafted a reply—“IN VIEW OF YOUR DESIRE … HAVE COMPLETED NECESSARY ARRANGEMENTS …”—Johnson was dissatisfied with the formality of its tone, which extended even to its closing sentence, a typical sentence from his form letter to constituents, which said that he was pleased to help. He sat there staring at Jenkins’ draft for a long minute, and then crossed out that sentence and wrote in his own hand another sentence, which hinted at the depth to which his heart had been enlisted in the widow’s cause. Instead of saying merely that he was pleased to help, the telegram now said that he was proud to help, “I AM PROUD TO BE OF ASSISTANCE,” Lyndon Johnson wrote.

Johnson called in William S. White, and on January 13, the story was on the front page of the New York Times, under the headline, “GI, OF MEXICAN ORIGIN, DENIED RITES IN TEXAS, TO BE BURIED IN ARLINGTON,” and with a quote from Johnson as perfect as the lines in his telegram; “I am sorry about the funeral home at Three Rivers,” he had told White. “But there is, after all, a fine national funeral home, though of a rather different sort, out at Arlington.” He telephoned Walter Winchell in New York. “The State of Texas, which looms so large on the map, certainly looks small tonight,” Winchell told his national radio audience that evening. Newspapers across Latin America and the United States picked up the story—“U.S. TO BURY MEXICAN G.I., SPURNED BY TEXAS HOME,” the headlines said; “G.I. DENIED REBURIAL IN TEXAS TO GET FULL ARLINGTON HONORS”—even newspapers in Texas, not in South Texas perhaps but in the rest of the state. “A ringing blow for Latin-American relations, downright Democracy and plain ordinary humanity was struck by Texas’ junior Senator,” the Sherman Democrateditorialized. “Felix Longoria will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery, that haven where America pays its highest respect for its outstanding battle heroes.” “A WRONG IS RIGHTED” was the headline in the Denison Press. From New York City came a wire from a Veterans of Foreign Wars post saying that its members would consider it an honor and a privilege if the post’s chaplain could officiate at Private Longoria’s reburial. And if a note of pure grace were needed to this explosion of feeling, it was provided by a letter that Lyndon Johnson wrote to Beatrice Longoria on January 13, because he felt that, as he wrote her, “It was impossible for me to express to you in my telegram yesterday the deep sympathy I feel for you in this hour. I am honored to have some small share in making possible your husband’s reburial in Arlington National Cemetery, where many of our most honored heroes lie buried. I know your heart would be warmed if you could read and hear the many, many kind and thoughtful expressions of unselfish sympathy which have come to my office today…. We want to be helpful to you in every way possible…. My only desire is to be helpful, whenever and however you call upon me. Your wishes will guide me in all that I do, and I will be glad to do all that I possibly can.” Describing Johnson’s feelings during the first days of the Longoria incident, John Connally was to say years later that “His reaction was outrage, it was outrage over injustice, it was instinctive, it was real—it was from his heart.”

AND THEN, as John Connally was to recall, “We began to backtrack.”

Although Connally and Jenkins felt that Johnson’s initial reaction to Hector Garcia’s telegram—the reaction that governed his responses completely for the first three days of the Longoria drama—was not calculation but outrage, the two aides were not blind to political advantages that would accrue from his decision to help Beatrice Longoria, since the returning Mexican-American veterans were becoming politically active in South Texas and Johnson’s decision placed him firmly on their side. In that sense, Jenkins was to say, his decision “helped him immeasurably. I think they [the Mexican-Americans] felt like they had a friend maybe for the first time that would champion at least a small cause.” In fact, Mexican-American leaders like Dr. Garcia felt that they might have for the first time a champion for causes that were not small. A United States senator had taken their part against the Anglos, had stood up for them against discrimination; might not that senator right other wrongs, help them pass the laws they needed so badly? A champion gave them someone to rally behind, and they rallied behind him. Members of the American G.I. Forum “were inspired, energized,” Dr. Pycior recounts. “For the first time a Texas senator had treated them as full-fledged constituents, had responded to their call. Messages, money, and letters of support poured into the Forum headquarters…. From all over Texas Mexican-Americans were inundating their new senator with thanks and advice.” In the Senator’s office, recalls John Connally, “The phones were ringing off the wall.”

The first significant sign of trouble came—on the morning of Wednesday, January 14, the fourth day of the drama—in one of the telephone calls, from United Press reporter Warren Duffee. He asked Horace Busby, who took the call, if Senator Johnson would care to comment on a statement just released by undertaker Kennedy and S. F. Ramsey, president of the First State Bank of Three Rivers and of the town’s Chamber of Commerce, that denied that racial factors had been involved in the matter of Longoria’s burial. Kennedy’s statement said, “I did not at any time refuse to bury him or allow the use of the chapel,” but that “I did discourage it”—not “because he was Latin American” but solely because “of friction that I heard existed between members of the [Longoria] family.” He said, “I thought I was avoiding any trouble at the funeral home by asking Mrs. Longoria to use her house.” He said he had written Mrs. Longoria to say that “If there was a misunderstanding on my part, my apologies are extended. If you still want use of our funeral chapel and want us to conduct services, we will be only too glad to be of service.” Ramsey accused Johnson of having exploited the “misunderstanding” for political reasons. “It is our feeling that Johnson capitalized on this situation to further his own standing with the Latin-American population in Texas.” Three Rivers, Ramsey said, was a town notably free of racial discrimination. “You’ll find no town in South Texas that has enjoyed better relations between Latin-Americans and whites.” (That was probably true.) “Our town is ashamed of the publicity we have received,” he said. “We didn’t deserve it.”

Busby advised Johnson not to comment, saying “Any answer might cause the public to question just what your motives really were, and it would be less than dignified to enter a quarrel now,” and for the moment that was the stance that Johnson adopted, but that afternoon, at the monthly meeting of the steering committee of the “Texas Exes,” the Washington chapter of the University of Texas alumni association, in Dale Miller’s suite at the Mayflower Hotel, a heated argument broke out over the Longoria incident, and during it Miller said, “It’s too bad that one man down in Three Rivers could bring on an international incident. It’s even worse, though, that some of the men in Congress would try to capitalize on it for their own political position.” Connally put a typed report of the argument on Johnson’s desk, with the diplomatically worded notation, “Senator, this is interesting.” Johnson understood at once the seriousness of the report. Dale Miller, son of Roy, had succeeded not only to his father’s sprawling Mayflower suite but also to his mantle as Texas’ preeminent lobbyist, Washington representative of the Texas Gulf Sulphur Corporation, of an impressive array of oil and natural gas companies, and of business associations, including the Dallas Chamber of Commerce. Influential and popular, host for eighteen years of Sam Rayburn’s annual birthday party, Miller was the very heart of the conservative Texas establishment. He had, moreover, consistently been among Johnson’s staunchest supporters, persuading other conservatives to support him even when they were reluctant to do so, telling them that if they knew Lyndon as well as he did, they would be convinced of what he and his father had been convinced: that Johnson was “no wild-eyed liberal,” that he in fact “gave the impression of being much, much more liberal than he actually was,” and at least part of Miller’s conviction was based on the belief that Lyndon was as “practical” on racial matters as he and his father, racists to the core. Dale Miller’s reaction to Johnson’s involvement in the Longoria affair was an indication of what the response of the Texas conservative establishment was likely to be.

The political factors in Lyndon Johnson’s calculations began to change. As Posh Oltorf, who was shortly to become a major participant in the unfolding drama, puts it, Johnson now “realized” that “if he pursued” his original course in the Longoria affair, at the end “he would have gained a lot of new friends but would have lost a lot of old ones”—old friends whom he could ill afford to lose.

These old friends were the Anglo rulers of South Texas—of the impoverished, largely illiterate Mexican-American counties of the Rio Grande Valley that formed the border between Texas and Mexico, and of the counties that stretched north from the valley to San Antonio. While tens of thousands of Johnson’s votes in both his 1941 and 1948 Senate campaigns had come, in margins as high as 100 to 1—some reported well after Election Day—from those counties, the explanation for those huge pluralities had little to do with the preferences of the Mexican-Americans. The overwhelming majority of their votes had been cast at the orders of the Anglo-Saxon border dictators called patróns or jefes, orders often enforced by armed pistoleros who herded Mexican-Americans to the polls, told them how to vote, and then accompanied them into the voting cubbyholes to make sure the instructions were followed—if indeed the votes had been actually “cast” at all; in some of the Mexican-American areas, the local border dictators, in Texas political parlance, didn’t “vote ’em,” but rather just “counted ’em.” In those areas, most of the voters didn’t even go to the polls: the jefes’ men would, as one observer put it, simply “go around to the Mexicans’ homes. Get the numbers of their poll tax receipts. Tell them not to go to the polls. Just write in hundreds of numbers, and cast the hundred votes yourself,” or, after the polls closed, would simply take the tally sheets and add to the recorded total whatever number was needed to give their favored candidate the margin he desired. “You get down on the border, and it didn’t matter how people [the Mexican-Americans] felt,” Ed Clark would explain. “The leaders did it all. They could vote ’em or count ’em, either one.” It was not the Mexican-Americans of South Texas, then, but rather their Anglo patróns who had given Johnson the votes he needed to get to the Senate, and whose votes would again be needed in his re-election campaign. As for the “new friends” he might make—the returning Mexican-American veterans—their movement was still in its infancy, and confined to cities like Corpus Christi; there were no chapters of the G.I. Forum in 100–1 Duval or the other border counties. And since the returning veterans would not use the patróns patróns’ methods, they would never be able to deliver a bloc vote of such huge dimensions. It was the South Texas Anglo leaders whose support would still be crucial to Johnson. And subsequent developments made clear the extent to which his actions in the Longoria case had antagonized those leaders.

The next day—Thursday, January 15—the Three Rivers Chamber of Commerce intensified its attack, in two telegrams to Johnson, “WE DEPLORE YOUR ITCHY TRIGGER FINGER DECISION AND ACTION WITHOUT FIRST INVESTIGATING THE LONGORIA CASE,” the first said. The second deplored “YOUR ACTION WITHOUT FIRST INVESTIGATING TRUE FACTS FROM RELIABLE SOURCES.”

The “facts” to which the telegram referred were actually rumors, the rumors of “friction” within the Longoria family, and in their attempt to lend them credence, the Anglo leaders of Three Rivers revealed the depths to which they would sink. According to the rumors, sometime after Felix Longoria had been killed, Beatrice had dated another man, and Felix’s family had been infuriated by this. Now Ramsey, together with Three Rivers Mayor J. K. Montgomery and City Secretary Bryan Boyd, came to the home of Felix’s father, Guadalupe Longoria, a sixty-six-year-old man seriously ill with heart disease who did not speak English well, brought him down to Ramsey’s bank (which they may have considered a persuasive venue because there was still an outstanding balance on a small loan the bank had made to Guadalupe), and began firing questions at him in English, some of which he had a hard time understanding. Then they put in front of him a typed statement which they asked him to sign. The statement said that “Felix’s wife would not speak to me because I objected to the association she was having with another man,” that she “did not want us [the rest of the family] to know when the body would arrive,” and that he and the rest of the family did not want Felix buried in Arlington but rather in Three Rivers. “My family and I hope that our Three Rivers friends will help in getting his body brought here for burial.” At the bottom of the statement was a blank line for Guadalupe Longoria’s signature. A notary public was sitting outside Ramsey’s office, waiting to witness it.

The line remained blank, however; Guadalupe Longoria refused, although the interview went on a long time, to sign; an article was to say that “his grief was not less than his daughter-in-law’s, but neither was his honor, and he would have no part of this thing.” That evening, the same three men came to Guadalupe’s home, bringing with them the statement, which they again urged him to sign. He still wouldn’t sign it. Guadalupe would later dictate—and sign, along with Felix’s two brothers and three sisters—a slightly different statement: “I wish to state, contrary to reports published in some newspapers, my son’s widow, Beatrice Longoria, and I have never had any personal differences. She, members of her family, and all members of my family including myself have always been on the best of terms…. To this day, my son’s widow visits my home frequently and we still consider her, as we always will, as our own daughter.” Beatrice and he had agreed together to accept “Senator Johnson’s offer … to bury my son’s body in Arlington,” Longoria’s statement said. And even if he had disagreed with her, Guadalupe Longoria said, he would have bowed to her wishes; “the widow … after all, has the final say in all these matters, and properly so.”

“If any embarrassment has been caused by this case to anyone, I am sorry,” Guadalupe Longoria added. “But after all I did not create a feeling of prejudice which seems to exist in many places in Texas…. I think that we would only be fooling ourselves to try to leave the impression that people of Mexican descent are treated the same as anyone else [in] Texas.”

Guadalupe Longoria’s refusal to sign their statement did not deter Three Rivers’ leaders, however. They gave it to the newspapers as if he had signed it; “Lupe Longoria, Sr. still wants” his son buried in Three Rivers, according to Mayor J. K. Montgomery, theCorpus Christi Caller-Times reported. “‘If it were in my power, I would still have my son buried in Three Rivers,’ Longoria told the Mayor”—the Mayor said. Undertaker Kennedy repeated the rumors for publication; in the January 20 issue of the Three Rivers News, he said: “There were reasons why I ‘discouraged’ the use of the funeral chapel. There is considerable evidence to the effect that there has been trouble between the wife of Felix Longoria and the rest of the family, including his parents…. I did not want trouble in the funeral chapel….” His desire to avoid “family trouble,” Kennedy repeated, was the sole reason he had “discouraged” Dr. Garcia, although, Kennedy said, “In the heat of the argument [I] undoubtedly made other statements which could possibly be misconstrued.” (Some of them possibly could. Garcia had taken the precaution of having his secretary, Gladys Blucher, listen on an extension phone, and take shorthand notes, when he telephoned Kennedy, and the notes, later attested to in an affidavit, showed that Kennedy had indeed said “Latin people get drunk and lay around all the time. The last time we let them use the chapel, they all got drunk and we just can’t control them.”)

The Three Rivers Chamber of Commerce continued to deplore “the stigma of unfavorable publicity” which it said Johnson had caused, and Live Oaks County State Representative J. F. Gray, a key figure in the loose alliance of South Texas Anglo leaders, accused him of “pulling a grandstand play to try and embarrass somebody.” (“Gray was bitter as hell—mean bitter,” John Connally was to recall.) Anglo anger spread beyond Live Oaks’ borders. “Dear Lyndon,” wrote William F. Chesnut, a longtime Johnson loyalist from the town of Kenedy, in adjoining Karnes County, “I don’t mean to be telling you what you should or should not do, but I would like to let you know what people are saying about you…. In the first place, there was a big misunderstanding of the whole thing. The funeral parlor at Three Rivers is rather small and the undertaker thought it would be better to hold the funeral service in the local Catholic Church. He had no sooner suggested this when right away, some hot-headed Latin-American jumped to his feet and hollered ‘PREDJUDICE’ [sic]. Now that is the whole truth of the matter … I have heard several comments on ‘Why doesn’t Johnson keep his nose out of this affair’…and still others which run mostly in the vein of ‘I voted for him once but I’ll be damned if I’ll do it again.’”

The American Legion’s Bexar County Central Council, which represented twenty Legion posts in and around San Antonio, passed a resolution, “to be sent to the Honorable Lyndon Johnson, Honorable Walter Winchell and Dr. Garcia,” condemning “careless and immature actions by people in high and honorable places,” which has caused “harmful humiliation and embarrassment … to the Kennedy family, Rice Funeral Home, the good people of the City of Three Rivers and the State of Texas by bringing nationwide publicity.” Its own investigation, the Council said, had “not found the least trace of Un-American activities or racial discrimination practiced in this matter.” The state’s most influential newspaper, the right-wing Dallas Morning News, weighed in with the disclosure that “Many who sent abuse [to Three Rivers] are offering apologies” as more facts about the case became apparent. “There is good comradeship [in Three Rivers]…. The two groups of citizens mingle freely and do business with one another with no apparent thought of difference in race origin.” The story, John Connally says, “became bigger than any of us had anticipated…became a furor.” After making rounds of telephone calls, both he and Ed Clark, in Austin, reported to Johnson that anger against him was intensifying among South Texas leaders. Posh Oltorf, taking soundings in the Legislature, recalls that “they [Johnson and Connally] were concerned with keeping this from becoming a big issue where all the Anglos would turn against Johnson and the Mexican-Americans.” But the calls coming in to 231 showed that that was exactly what was happening. “There were forces at work beyond our control,” Connally says. “By this time, we wanted to engage in damage control as far as South Texas was concerned.” Which is why, he says, “We began to backtrack.”

THE BACKTRACKING BEGAN on the point which had most infuriated Three Rivers and many Texans: the fact that the case had received national attention because of the decision to bury Longoria at Arlington instead of in his hometown, or at least in his home state. This decision had been regarded as a particular “stigma” by the town, which blamed Johnson for it, pointing out, accurately, that before he had made the suggestion no one else had thought of it. “Previous to your action,” the Three Rivers News said in an “Open Letter to Senator Johnson,” not “one word had been said in Three Rivers as to where this American soldier would be buried, other than the Longoria family lot in the Three Rivers Cemetery … in his own native town…. Therefore, Senator, you can very easily understand why the citizens of Three Rivers were so stunned when over the radio and in the papers came reports that you had made arrangements to have Felix buried in Arlington Cemetery.” R. E. Smith, chairman of the Texas Good Neighbor Commission, the state agency responsible for improving relations with Mexico, implored Dr. Garcia to intercede with Beatrice Longoria and persuade her to change her mind and allow her husband’s body to be “brought back to Texas for burial at Three Rivers, or at least in Texas.” If she did so, Smith assured her, “the Governor will do everything possible to show her that he approves of this action.” He urged her to “bear in mind that the reputation of Texas will be at stake in history’s recording of this very delicate matter…. Bring the Hero’s body back to Texas where it should be, and would have been had it not been for whatever action that caused all of this trouble…. Bear the thought in mind that Texas and all Texans and the children of Texans now living will feel the effect of the criticism, and we all know that none of them had anything to do with it.”

Once, during the first few days after he had received Dr. Garcia’s telegram, Lyndon Johnson had wanted his role in the decision to bury Felix Longoria at Arlington to be as prominent as possible. He had told Garcia he could read at the G.I. Forum meeting his telegram that “I HAVE TODAY MADE ARRANGEMENTS” for that burial; he had focused attention on Arlington by his remark that “There is, after all, a fine national funeral home, though of a rather different sort, out at Arlington.” He had telephoned Bill White and Walter Winchell. Once, he had been “honored to have some small share in making possible your husband’s reburial in Arlington.” In the form letters with which he replied to letters praising him for his role, he had been “Honored to have this share in securing Felix Longoria the last rites befitting a hero”; “proud” that “I was able to make arrangements.” He had done everything possible to emphasize his role in Longoria’s burial there.

Now that tone changed. On January 16, the day after Three Rivers accused him of bringing the “stigma of this publicity” on the town, he tried to disclaim responsibility for the publicity. Telephoning Dr. Garcia, he asked the physician to remind reporters that it was he, not Johnson, who had released the telegrams. (Garcia, who had considerable political savvy—he would become a very effective leader for Mexican-Americans in Texas—understood and agreed, cooperating with Johnson’s wishes by not mentioning that Johnson had given him permission to release them. The Corpus Christi Caller-Times reported that “According to Garcia, Johnson asked publication of the fact that he did not release the telegram to the press himself. The release was made by Garcia.”) While Johnson’s staff continued to send out the “honored” and “proud” replies to congratulatory letters, a series of new replies was drafted, to be used in response to angry letters from Texas, and successive drafts revealed a growing desire to distance himself as much as possible from the national publicity and the Arlington burial decision—not that much distancing was possible, given the centrality of his role in the whole affair. In a letter of January 26, addressed to Glen Rabe of Three Rivers but intended as a general form letter for Texas constituents, Johnson tried to claim that he had played only a “small part… in the Longoria case.”

“I did not release the story here, the entire publicity originated in Texas,” he wrote—a statement that was, at best, disingenuous, given his initiation of the contacts with White and Winchell which had generated the national publicity. “I had no control over it,” he added. And, he said, “I had no desire to have any connection with the affair except to see that an American soldier was given a decent burial under honorable conditions”—which, he said, had not necessarily meant Arlington. “I sent a telegram advising the body could be buried” in either Arlington or Fort Sam Houston. “I made no recommendation of where the body should be buried.” By January 28, in a telegram to Three Rivers Mayor Montgomery, Johnson was suggesting that, in fact, Arlington had been only one ofmany possibilities he had raised, “MY ONLY CONNECTION WITH LONGORIA MATTER HAS BEEN TO INFORM CONSTITUENTS THAT THEY HAD PRIVILEGE OF REBURIAL OF SOLDIER’S BODY IN ANY [emphasis added] MILITARY CEMETERY, INCLUDING FORT SAM HOUSTON AND ARLINGTON,” Johnson’s telegram said. “I Have Not And Do Not Intend To Inform Any PARTIES IN CONNECTION WITH THIS MATTER, AND MY PARTICIPATION WAS LIMITED TO DOING MY DUTY AS I SAW IT TO THIS CONSTITUENT.”

LYNDON JOHNSON’S DESIRE TO AVOID, as far as possible, any further publicity in connection with the Longoria affair was demonstrated by his actions when the Longorias arrived in Washington.

It might have been expected that when the family—Felix Longoria’s widow, his eight-year-old daughter, and his mother, two brothers and a sister (his father, whose heart condition had worsened, in the opinion of his family because of the pressure from the Three Rivers leaders, was too ill to make the trip)—arrived for the funeral on February 15, the day before it was held, the senator who had, with so much fanfare, planned that funeral, would have invited the Longorias to visit his office, would have arranged for them to have their picture taken with him. No such invitation was extended, or arrangement made. Instead, John Connally, Horace Busby, and Warren Woodward met the Longorias at the airport, drove them around Washington on a sightseeing trip (which did not include the Senate Office Building), and dropped them at their hotel, where they stayed until the funeral.

At the funeral, Johnson’s actions were striking—coming from a politician known among journalists for the pithy and dramatic statements he generally had ready for quotation in their articles, and for the way he invariably thrust himself into the center of photographs. Asked years later about the funeral, John Connally would say, “I don’t recall if he [Johnson] went to the funeral. My guess is he didn’t go.” Connally’s recollection was inaccurate. Johnson was present when Felix Longoria’s body was laid to rest, along with the bodies of eighteen other servicemen killed in action, at Arlington on Wednesday, February 16. But it is easy to understand Connally’s mistake.

A number of dignitaries attended the service, because of the attention that had, thanks to Johnson, been focused on it. President Truman sent his military aide, Major General Harry H. Vaughan, who arrived early and had a statement ready when reporters approached him. He was there, he said, “because of the stupidity of that undertaker.” The First Secretary of the Mexican Embassy arrived carrying a large wreath, and there were representatives of the State Department.

Lyndon Johnson did not have a statement for reporters—did not, in fact, so far as can be learned, speak to any. There would be no quote from him in any of the newspaper articles that appeared on the funeral the following day. He did not arrive early, and after the ceremony he quickly shook hands with the family and left.

RETURNING TO HIS OFFICE FROM ARLINGTON, Johnson immediately wrote Dr. Garcia to urge him not to keep the matter alive. After commenting on the “impressive ceremony” and complimenting the Longoria family—who, he said, “seem to be exceptionally fine people”—and saying, “If there is any way in which I may be of further service to them, it will be a pleasure to do whatever I can,” he added the following: “As I told you, I have not sought and do not seek any personal attention for my small role in this. I hope there will no further reason for this to linger in the newspapers or instigate unnecessary contention.”

This hope was to prove fruitless. By a 104–20 vote, the conservative Texas House of Representatives, at the urging of the furious Gray and some of his fellow South Texas legislators, passed a resolution establishing a five-member committee to investigate “the truth or untruth” of the allegations of racial discrimination by Kennedy’s funeral home.

Further “damage control” was therefore undertaken. Gray and his allies expected House Speaker Durwood Manford, a staunch conservative, to name only conservatives to the committee, which would then, they expected, exonerate Kennedy, finding that his refusal had been based only on the Longorias’ “family troubles,” and thereby clear Three Rivers’ good name. And this fiction might well have been perpetrated—had not Manford been firmly under the thumb of Herman Brown and Ed Clark. When Manford announced the names of the committee members, only four were conservatives. The fifth, to the conservatives’ shock, was the canny young liberal Frank C. Oltorf (still a legislator and not yet Brown & Root’s Washington lobbyist). “Without Clark, there wouldn’t have been a single liberal member on it,” Posh Oltorf was to say.

Oltorf understood his assignment: to keep Johnson’s name as inconspicuous as possible throughout the committee hearings. Each evening during the hearings, which were held that March in Three Rivers, he would telephone Johnson’s office in Washington to report on the day’s developments to either Johnson or Connally, and when it was Johnson who picked up the phone, “He [Johnson] would ask, ‘Did they bring up anything about me?’” Oltorf understood Johnson’s concern, and knew there was reason for it. “They [the South Texas Anglo leaders] would have liked to punish Johnson. They would have [liked to show] that he had meddled when he had no business to meddle. They [Johnson and Connally] were afraid of a complete whitewash [of the funeral home]—that the committee would find that there had been no discrimination, and it [the funeral] could all have been arranged quietly if Johnson hadn’t interfered.” But, the young legislator realized, the two men in Washington were more afraid of something else: that Johnson would be prominently “labelled an ally of the Mexican-Americans and all the [South Texas] leaders would then turn against him.” Johnson could have been vindicated on the “meddling” point by the truth—proof that Kennedy’s motives had been racial. But, Oltorf realized, proving that explosive point—with the resultant big headlines—would not accomplish Johnson’s larger purpose. The Senator was less concerned that his role be vindicated than that it be minimized. “The thing they [Johnson and Connally] wanted was his name kept out,” he says, in a recollection confirmed by Clark.

Oltorf’s assignment was carried out successfully. In some ways, the hearings were blatantly stacked; the committee’s four-member majority allowed Mayor Montgomery to testify that no discrimination against Latin-Americans existed in any form in Three Rivers, and did not allow testimony that would have disproved the Mayor’s contention. (Although proof would have been quite convenient to hand. While the hearings were going on in the courthouse square of Three Rivers, a Mexican-American veteran attempted to get a haircut in a barbershop a few doors away; “We don’t serve Mexicans here,” the barber told him.) Thanks largely to Oltorf, however, testimony about the Longorias’ alleged “family troubles” was, mercifully, kept to a minimum—as was the inclusion of Johnson’s name. To every demand by a committee member that the “full story” of the Longoria incident be told, Oltorf would blandly reply that the committee had been authorized to look into only the initial “refusal or discouragement” of the use of Kennedy’s funeral home. And “every time his [Johnson’s] name was brought up, I would change the subject,” Oltorf recalls. “I’d say, ‘Well, that’s not the issue.’” His job proved easier than he had expected, thanks to the power of the “Secret Boss of Texas.” “There were times when you could see one of the other [committee] members was ready to start a fight [with me],” Oltorf says. “But then all of a sudden, they’d think better of it. He [Johnson] had Ed Clark behind him, and so I had Clark behind me, and believe me, in the Legislature no one ever wanted to cross Ed Clark—ever.”

Assisting Oltorf in his assignment was attorney Gus Garcia, a law school friend of Connally’s, whom Connally had enlisted to advise the Longorias during the hearings. Gus Garcia was an eloquent and flamboyant courtroom attorney, but eloquence was not what was required here, and Garcia understood that. At the close of the hearings, he would write Johnson, “Your name was bandied about a bit, but we managed to leave the correct interpretation in the record—namely, that you did nothing except follow Mrs. Longoria’s instructions.” He had had no choice, the attorney wrote Johnson, but “to introduce a letter from you to her, in which you stated that you would follow her instructions. You also expressed your sympathy in that letter, but there is nothing in it which would harm you politically.” As for the telegrams that Johnson had sent in those first moments of the Longoria affair, the telegrams that said “I DEEPLY REGRET TO LEARN THAT THE PREJUDICE OF SOME INDIVIDUALS EXTENDS EVEN BEYOND THIS LIFE,” the telegrams that said “I AM HAPPY TO HAVE A PART IN SEEING THAT THIS TEXAS HERO IS LAID TO REST WITH THE HONOR AND DIGNITY HIS SERVICE DESERVES,” the telegrams that said “I AM PROUD TO BE OF ASSISTANCE”—Gus Garcia was able to assure Johnson now that he and Oltorf had been able to keep those wonderful telegrams from being introduced in the hearings (because, he explained in his letter, “Frank and I decided” that they “might be distorted by your political enemies”). When Dorothy Nichols, one of his secretaries, brought Gus Garcia’s letter to Johnson’s attention, he had her give it to Connally to draft a reply, with a note: “John—Senator says you’ll have to answer this; be careful about it.” And John was. The letter Gus Garcia received over Lyndon Johnson’s signature was carefully noncommittal except for one sentence: “I trust that the incident will shortly be a closed chapter.”

The committee’s majority drafted a report that was the expected whitewash; “There was no discrimination on the part of the undertaker at Three Rivers,” the draft concluded. A liberal state senator, Rogers Kelley, was to call the document “a slap in the face of more than one million Latin-American citizens of the State of Texas.” The report was signed, however, by only four of the five committee members. Declaring that “I could not concur in their majority report without violating both my sense of justice and my intellectual honesty,” Oltorf refused to sign it, and issued his own minority report which was so persuasive that one of the four later withdrew his signature, and, as one analysis put it, “the two dissensions so undercut the credibility of the majority report that the committee found itself on the defensive,” and the report was quietly tabled without any action by the full legislature.

THE LONGORIA AFFAIR was a turning point—“a catalyst,” the Texas Monthly was to say in 1986, “for the modern civil rights movement of the Mexican-Americans in Texas.” Before that affair, Hector Garcia was to recall, the G.I. Forum “had nothing to do with civil rights. It was strictly a veterans affairs organization.” By demonstrating so vividly how “prejudice and hatreds” poisoned “all aspects of our lives in the state of Texas,” the affair broadened the Forum’s focus to include all aspects of civil rights, and moved the organization into the political arena in which those rights could be secured. New chapters sprang into being; membership burgeoned. Almost two decades would have to pass before this new Mexican-American movement became as significant a force in Texas political calculations as the docile old Mexican-American bloc vote, but the birth of that new force dates from the Longoria affair. The furor over the burial of the Army private from Three Rivers galvanized the movement, and filled it with energy and purpose.

And it did so because of Lyndon Johnson—because of his compassion and his genius for making that compassion politically meaningful. Without him, the Longoria incident might simply have faded away—have become only one more quickly forgotten episode in the long history of racial discrimination in Texas. In an instant, hearing of the injustice to Felix Longoria, Lyndon Johnson’s heart had been enlisted in the Longoria cause, and in that same instant he had found the perfect gesture, a grand gesture, to right the wrong that had been done, to right it gloriously—“By God, we’ll bury him at Arlington!”—and the perfect words, the words of those stirring telegrams, that brought an audience to its feet and made it feel that it had a champion at last. It was his gesture and words that had taken a local incident, probably only one of a score of similar incidents that had gone unremarked outside the boundaries of the towns involved, and had made it, as one writer was to put it, “into one of those signal events that stir consciences” across an entire state.

The Longoria affair was not a turning point for Lyndon Johnson, however. For a moment, it had seemed that it would be—a magnificent turning point. Prior to the morning on which Dr. Garcia’s telegram arrived at the Senate Office Building, Johnson’s record on civil rights had been, during his almost twelve years on Capitol Hill, almost entirely one of opposition. In the first hours after the telegram, he had galvanized the cause, seized its flag and charged to its fore. But as opposition mounted, the flag had been quickly dropped. On that night in the Corpus Christi elementary school, it had seemed that the Mexican-Americans of South Texas had found a champion, an Anglo leader who would lend his name to their cause. But Lyndon Johnson’s concern had been to keep his name from being linked to their cause. Summing up the Longoria affair for the author of this book in 1986, John Connally would explain Johnson’s “backtracking” by saying it was consistent with his entire life: “He never wanted to be a dead hero.”

The damage control was effective. It didn’t work with Representative Gray of Three Rivers, whose bitterness over the incident never abated. “He hated Johnson forever because of it,” John Connally was to say. But most of the Anglo border county leaders remained Johnson’s allies.

Nor did Johnson’s backtracking in the Longoria battle hurt him with the rank and file of South Texas’ Mexican-Americans. The dexterity with which he had handled his retreat from the field—simply removing his name, and his presence, from the fight without any dramatic public statement—meant that most of the Mexican-Americans who had cheered his earlier, dramatic championing of the Longorias’ cause were unaware that he had stopped doing so. Realization that the Senator could have used the legislative hearings as a platform for their cause, or that a statement could have been issued from Washington, required a political awareness and experience still in short supply in 1949 within this newly militant group. Johnson’s silence was as nothing beside the gesture he had made in having their compatriot buried in Arlington. The Longoria episode was to have a permanent and prominent place in the Mexican-American consciousness; Felix Longoria would become in a way a martyr, and the Senator who had arranged for the hero to be buried in a hero’s grave became a hero himself. Teachers in South Texas’ Mexican schools recounted the episode to their students. Accompanying Johnson on a 1953 swing through South Texas to shore up support for his 1954 re-election campaign, George Reedy would never forget the chant with which Mexican-Americans greeted his boss: “Olé Johnson, Olé Johnson! Tres Rios, Tres Rios, Tres Rios!”

As for the Mexican-American leader, Lyndon Johnson quickly began to bind Hector Garcia to him. Shortly after the legislature’s investigation had been completed, he agreed to address Garcia’s G.I. Forum, and the doctor was grateful: “He addressed our group, and of course it was a great occasion because at that time it was rare to have any politician or certainly a U.S. Senator addressing [a] Mexican group.” When there was an opening on the U.S. Border Patrol or for some other minor federal job, Johnson began asking Garcia to recommend someone. And he did small favors for Garcia, the little favors that a federal officeholder could do for his constituents—but that no officeholder had been doing for South Texas’ Mexican-Americans. The veterans who made up the backbone of the Mexican-American movement were entitled to veterans’ benefits; Johnson saw that they got them. And once a mother of a Corpus Christi boy in the Marine Corps came to the doctor’s office, saying that her son was in a guardhouse at Camp Pendleton in California, and that no one at the base would give her any information about him. “All I want is to talk to my son and find out what is happening to him,” she said. “Perhaps he is dead. I am going to pieces, doctor.” Garcia could see, he recalls, “that she was going to pieces.” He called the base and got a major, who refused to give him any information, even after Garcia said, “You are doing a very cruel thing to this woman. A mother needs talking to her son.”

“I got on the telephone, and I called Senator Johnson,” Garcia recalls, “and five minutes after he hung up this major was calling apologetically.” Garcia was a very adroit politician—his G.I. Forum was to become the largest Mexican-American organization in the country, with chapters in twenty-eight states—and he knew how much the fact that he could produce such assistance helped him retain a position of leadership with his people. “These are the favors I do for people, through people like Johnson,” he would say. “I’m the helpful go-between.” Explaining Garcia’s adherence to Johnson, Dr. Pycior says: “He [Johnson] answers their letters. He treats them with dignity. It’s pathetic that such small things can [mean] so much. But you’ve been beaten down for so long—to have a senator treat you like a human being, that means a lot.”

Cementing the alliance between the two men further was the promise it might represent for the future of Hector Garcia’s people. The physician was totally bound up with their cause, and Johnson convinced him that he, too, wanted to advance that cause, but that he would be able to do so only if he continued to hold power, and therefore he couldn’t take steps that would hurt him politically. As Pycior wrote, “Garcia thought that Johnson could not afford to risk his political advancement by supporting controversial issues.” For that reason, Garcia was to say, he understood why Johnson had had to back away from the Longoria affair. “Johnson … certainly may have been subjected to some of the pressures of state politics…. Yet his heart was all right.”

Binding other Mexican-American leaders to Johnson was the same combination of patronage and promises. When Reynaldo Garza of Brownsville, whose ambition was to be the first Latin-American federal judge, was wavering over whether to support Johnson or Governor Shivers in intra-party maneuvering, Johnson put it to him flat: “Reynaldo, Allan Shivers is going to be out as Governor and I’ll still be up in Washington, and I know I can do more for you than he can.” (“After I got appointed federal judge some years later, I ran into Allan Shivers,” Garza recalls. “He told me, ‘Well, he was right, wasn’t he? He could do something for you.’”) In a particularly dramatic example of what Johnson could do for a leader, he arranged an attractive job with Brown & Root for Manuel Bravo, when Zapata County’s feared jefe became tired of politics. And he convinced these leaders—convinced them absolutely—that he wanted to help Mexican-Americans, and was only waiting for the right time to do so. He kept reminding them—movingly—of his days in Cotulla. “Johnson had a real empathetic relationship with the Mexicans in Texas,” George Reedy was to say.

A LOT OF BINDING was necessary. Although in later years—after the great civil rights achievements of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency—Garcia would say that Johnson had consistently stood with the Mexican-Americans over the years, the records of the time show this to have been very far from the case. For if, when controversy erupted in the Longoria affair, their champion had vanished from the field, when he reappeared, it was not to be on their side.

Each harvest season, hundreds of thousands of Mexican farm workers crossed the Rio Grande into Texas to work on the huge South Texas farms owned by the powerful Anglo “growers.” Some were imported legally under the “bracero” program, through which wages and hours were established by contracts (their terms unbelievably unjust to the migrants; wage scales were often set at about twenty cents per hour) approved by the federal government. Others simply swam or waded across illegally, and hence were called “wetbacks.” Legal immigrants or illegal, however, these Mexicans were pitiful figures, working under the scorching South Texas sun for endless hours each day at “stoop labor,” bent over the notorious “short hoe,” crammed at night into hovels without electricity or running water. They had come because they had no choice: there was no work for them in Mexico; “exiled from [their] homeland by the threat of starvation, unselfishly hoping to mitigate the woes of [their] … relatives by sending them a few dollars each week or month.” Once on those immense ranches—feudal domains, most of them—the migrant worker was, as one study put it, “entirely at the mercy of his … employers. Once within the walls or fences of … a ranch or farm, he has no recourse to appeal, no bargaining power, no protection of any kind…. If he expresses dissatisfaction with the treatment he receives, his employer can merely expel him, whereupon he will be caught by the officers and taken back to face worse privation in Mexico.” Some of the worst of the growers, in fact, expelled these migrants anyway; they would wait until the harvest was completed, and then call the sheriffs or Border Patrol, report their workers as illegal aliens; they would be arrested and deported, without even the few dollars they had earned.

This exploitation of their countrymen made the bracero issue an overriding concern to the Mexican-Americans of South Texas on humanitarian grounds; they called the bracero program “rent a slave.” And it was overriding on economic grounds as well: in the opinion of most Mexican-American leaders, it was the willingness of these Mexicans to work the same jobs they were working, and accept such low wages, that kept their own wages low. The unrestricted flow of migrant workers was held to be the principal reason why the rise of Mexican-Americans to the middle class had been so much slower than that of the Irish or other immigrant groups. If there was a single issue most important to Mexican-Americans in the 1950s, it was this issue. And on this issue, throughout the 1950s, Lyndon Johnson supported not them but their opponents. They wanted the government to require working conditions and wages in bracero contracts equal to those prevailing in the United States and to cut off the flow of illegal immigrants, both by increasing appropriations to the United States Immigration Service and by increasing criminal penalties for growers who knowingly hired illegal aliens. “Something must be done and I believe that charging a heavy fine to those persons who insist on hiring wetbacks … will do it,” one Mexican-American leader wrote Johnson. But the Anglo patróns wanted a surplus labor supply, and it was these patróns who controlled the votes Lyndon Johnson had needed, and might need again. One of his first actions after becoming Democratic whip in 1951, therefore, was to muster Democratic support, crucial for its passage, for a bill renewing the bracero program with its harsh contracts. When it passed, on May 28, he wrote to a committee of thirty-three large growers: “Delighted to inform you that the Senate and House conferees have agreed … [o]n the Mexican labor bill …” J. C. Looney, one of the attorneys who represented the committee—and who had helped “coordinate” Johnson’s 1941 and 1948 Senate campaigns in the valley—wrote Johnson to assure him that “the people in the valley who are handling the situation and who are certainly influential… know what you are doing.” They would express their gratitude, he told Johnson, but “without… publicity that could backfire.”

In 1951, and again in 1952, Johnson opposed bills that would have increased criminal penalties for hiring illegal aliens. With the wetback problem growing worse in 1953, Mexican-American leaders pleaded with Johnson to support a bill earmarking four million dollars for an intensified campaign by the Immigration Service against illegal importation of wetbacks. If the bill was defeated, they predicted, South Texas would be “flooded” with migrant workers, whose willingness to work endless hours for low wages would cause “suffering to native workers.” Johnson led the opposition to the bill, which was defeated. This was too much even for the G.I. Forum, which passed a resolution noting that “whereas, Senator Johnson owes in large measure his position in the U.S. Senate to the vote of thousands of citizens of Mexican descent in South Texas … [h]is vote is in utter disregard of the friendship in which he has been held by [those] citizens.” Claiming that his vote had been due only to the lateness, and excessiveness, of the Immigration Service’s budget request, Johnson replied that “I am sorry that the friendship that I have shown throughout the years … should be … cast aside” because of a single vote. “There is no group for which I have done more and to whom I feel more friendly than the LatinAmericans,” he added. “I have tried to show my friendship in a number of practical ways and I shall not be deterred from continuing to do so by resolutions which seem to me at least to be unfair.”

The resolution did not have much impact on his actions. In 1953, the Eisenhower Administration attempted to stop the illegal importation of wetbacks, but Johnson opposed the program. On several other issues of major concern to the Mexican-Americans Johnson was also on the growers’ side. During his first seven years in the Senate—1949 through 1955—he was willing to help the Mexican-Americans on any issue on which their interests did not conflict with the interests of the Anglos. When the two groups were in conflict, he almost invariably came down on the side of the whites. He kept the support of Hector Garcia and other leaders in part because he had convinced them that “his heart was right,” in part because of the patronage and prestige he gave them—and in part because of another factor, which both John Connally and Ed Clark were to sum up in the same question: “Where else were they going to go?” The Republican Party had no power in Texas. Within the state’s all-powerful Democratic Party the alternative was the party’s Shivers wing, so right-wing and unapologetically racist that any enemy of that wing must be their friend. After Tom Connally, no friend to Mexican-Americans, left the state’s other Senate seat, he was succeeded by Price Daniel, also no friend to Mexican-Americans. As Stanford Dyer wrote, “Johnson was aware that his civil rights record was the subject of much concern among Texas minorities. Yet he also knew that he had everything to lose and nothing to gain politically by supporting civil rights legislation. Texas minorities would continue to support him until some Texas politician promised them more, and this was not likely to happen in the near future.” The Mexican-Americans of South Texas never stopped supporting Lyndon Johnson. They couldn’t—as he was well aware: There was nowhere else for them to put their support. Although Forum leaders were “disappointed” with Johnson on some issues, Forum official Ed Idar Jr. was to tell Pycior that “we were not ready to make an enemy of the man.” In 1954, they had no difficulty recognizing his opponent Dudley Dougherty’s ineptitude, and had no wish to be allied in any way with that hapless political naïf. In that election Johnson received the overwhelming majority of Mexican-American votes in South Texas, whether those votes were merely “counted” by patróns or freely cast. After his victory, Johnson wrote Dr. Garcia, whom he called his “special friend”: “Believe me, I am well aware of all you did to help make our great victory possible. I will never forget it. Please let me know when I can be of service—and I mean that from the bottom of my heart.” After the lesson he had learned in the Longoria affair, however, Lyndon Johnson had not again—in 1949 or the next six years—taken the field on behalf of Mexican-Americans in any battle in which there was danger of antagonizing the South Texas Anglos. Having learned the cost of siding with the oppressed, he took his stance, over and over, on the other side.

He was on that side in Washington, too. It was less than a month after the legislative hearings on the Longoria affair, in fact, that Lyndon Johnson took the field not with the friends of social justice but with its foes by delivering, as part of the southern battle against President Truman’s civil rights legislation, his “We of the South” maiden speech—the speech that Richard Russell called “one of the ablest I have ever heard” and that moved the Houston NAACP to telegraph Johnson, “The Negroes who sent you to Congress are ashamed to know that you have stood against them on the floor today.” It was during that same 1949 battle that Johnson stood as a southern “sentry” against northern maneuvers for civil rights, and all during that year, the year of the Longoria affair, he repeatedly convinced Russell that he would be a loyal soldier in Russell’s cause, even voting for the Eastland Bill that would, had it passed, have made segregation mandatory in public accommodations in the District of Columbia.

He had stayed on that side in the years since 1949, voting against FEPC and anti-poll tax legislation as well as against legislation to outlaw discrimination in unions, voting for legislation that would have allowed draftees to serve in segregated Army units—voting on the side of the South not only in 1949 but in 1950 and 1951 and ’52 and ’53 and ’54 and ’55. And in 1955, having won the majority leadership with southern support, he used the Leader’s power to crush the hopes of Senate liberals for a change in Rule 22 and to turn back liberal attempts to ban segregation in armed forces reserve units. His empathy and tenderness for people oppressed simply because their skins were dark, strong though it was in his makeup, was not as strong as his need for power. The compassion, genuine though it was, had always—always, without exception—proven to be expendable. That had been true throughout his life before he got to the Senate—and it was true after he got to the Senate. The Longoria affair had been proof of the compassion—and of its expendability. The next seven years had been further proof. By the end of 1955, Lyndon Johnson had held positions of public authority—State NYA Director, Congressman, Senator—for twenty years, and for twenty years the record had been consistent. Whenever compassion and ambition had been in conflict, the former had vanished from the landscape of Lyndon Johnson’s career. For it to become a permanent element of that landscape, it would have to be compatible with the ambition: compassion and ambition would both have to be pointing in the same direction. When the year 1955 came to an end, that had not yet occurred, and once again ambition had won.

Now, in 1956, it won again.