ustxtxb_obs_1966_04_01_50_00013-00000_000.pdf

ference in Austin, followed by his public attack on the FBI in the free voter controversy, the reports of the governor rifting with the President were charged up when \(in the context of a snafu whether the inwould not attend a presidential briefing in Washington. A Connally spokesman denies a rift. The governor and his lady were to attend a coffee for Mrs. Johnson on the U.T. campus March 30. The President’s daughter Lynda and actor George Hamil , ton were given a dinner at Connally’s mansion. V Cliff Carter, the Smithville man who is now finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee, met privately with big-money Democrats in Dallas and elsewhere in Texas, drumming up funds for the committee this yeai. April 28 there is to be a ball in Houston, attended by Johnson, for the $1,000 club members -those who put up that much, each year, for the Democratsbut a member can’t bring his mate unless he puts up a second $1,000 for her. David Broder reports in the New York Times that Citizens for Good Government, Dallas, which is 150 officers of the big aero-space-electronic firm, Ling-Temco-Vought, Inc., a major defense contractor, have given $25,000 of the total $106,553 received by the Democratic National Committee the first two months of 1966. The same group gave the GOP $5,000, onefifth what it gave the Democrats. The Dallas Times Herald noted that Texans have contributed this year a total of $65,000 toward the $232,000 collected by the D.N.C. and the $1,000 Club this year. Johnson named William P. Hobby, Jr., president and executive editor of the Houston Post, and Burt L. Risley, executive director of the Texas Cmsn. for the Blind, to a 15-member national citizens advisory committee on vocational rehabilitation. A Houstonian, William Sherrill, now on the F.D.I.C., is a rumored replacement for Comptroller of the Currency James Saxon. Broder reported that neither Kilgarlin nor Dies, liberal congressional cand1 7 dates in hard fights in Texas, is receiving help of encouragement from Johnson. Last month the party leadership in the House made Kilgarlin’s opponent, conservative incumbent Bob Casey, a member of the vital appropriations committee. V The condemnation proceedings to pre vent land near the LBJ Ranch from being used commercially have stalled out in the outcry of landowners, amplified by publicity in Newsweek and the dailies. The five county commissioners met with A. W. Moursund, Johnson’s business adviser and a member of the state parks board, in Moursund’s office. Evidently it’s becoming a waiting game. V Cong. Joe Pool of Texas says the House Un-American Activities Cmte. is “going to go backto investigating communists again.” . . . Cong. Jim Wright, Fort Worth, is pushing his bill against fees at U.S. parks . . . Cong. Henry Gonzalez, San Antonio, says the renegotiation board should be enlarged to stop war profiteering. V Eleven Texas legislators have joined the national committee for the Dirksen amendment for State Senates not based on “one-man, one-vote.” They are Sen. Ratliff and Reps. Barnes, Duggan, Arledge, Clayton, Cahoon, Haines, Blaine, Harding, Grant Jones, and Fletcher. George Bush of Houston has joined up, too. V The salary of Dr. Jack Kenny Wil liams, the new Texas commissioner of higher education, will be $22,500 state money plus $17,500 from private foundations or members of the coordinating board that hired him. vit Jay Naman of Waco was only a nom inal candidate for president of the Na tional Farmers’ Union . . . Alex Dickie, who preceeded Naman as TFU president and then went to Sen. Yarborough’s staff, has been named deputy director of congres The Free Vote Austin Steadily increasing his estimates from 250,000 during the’ registering, Atty. Gen. Waggoner Carr finally estimates that 603,368 Texans registered during the 15-day period to vote free. The commonplace conjecture is that more of these voters are going to vote liberal than conservative. Senator Ralph Yarborough hailed the outcome as a victory of the people. In San Antonio no one disputed the fact that the Democratic Coalition scored a smashing success, registering perhaps 60,000 of the county’s 88,000 new voters by canvassing the areas that vote Democratic most heavily. Harris County has 100,000 new voters, Dallas about 97,000, Tarrant about 51,000. Thus the two big counties for liberal candidates, Harris and Bexar, clearly outdid the two more conservative northerly cities. Stanley Woods, liberal candidate for governor, has gone to court, along with two members of the State Democratic Executive Committee, seeking a federal order that voters can register up to within 30 days of an election, but the signs from the court as we passed our deadline this week indicated its indisposition to grant the suit. The predictions of Roy Evans, speaking for organized labor, exceeded the actual results. Evans said the goal was a million new registrants. But statehouse officials had not dreamed the total would go past a couple hundred thousand. Perhaps the Justice Department, the F.B.I. agents who were doing spot checks, and the federal court had not, either, and were satisfied. In any case, the U.S. Supreme Court decision, 6 to 3, clearly holding that Virginia’s state-imposed poll tax as a prerequisite to voting is unconstitutional removed any practical doubt whether the high court will uphold the lower federal court’s ruling as to Texas that the poll tax is unconstitutional here. In the storm of words about the situation, Sen. Yarborough charged that “secret sional liaison for A.I.D. in Washington .. . The Houston Chronicle says the Texas State Industrial Union Council, which draws strength from the old CIO unions, is threatened with the pull-out of the communications workers . . . The Rev. Martin Luther King spoke in Dallas last month, but you’d not have known it in advance from the Dallas papers. King was heavily guarded by the Dallas police. V Lloyd Hand, former University of Texas student president and the Presi dent’s chief of protocol, is running for lieu tenant governor of California. . . . About 75 turned out for a peace rally at the Uni versity of Houston. . . . Cty. Cmsr. Albert Pena signed a letter urging a boycott of Shamrock Oil and Gas products, causing a publicized beef because he added his title. 0 meetings were held by certain public officials in Texas in an effort to limit the number of voters who were registering.” Emmett Cater, chief of county affairs in the office of Bexar County District Attorney James Barlow, told the Observer that he attended a meeting of the county tax-assessor-collectors from Harris, Dallas, Tarrant, and Bexar counties in Dallas shortly after the legislature had passed the free vote law. “They did discuss the fact that some of the liberal elements had already planned house-to-house canvassing. Their opinion was that the legislature did not intend a house-to-house canvass, so the language of the statute was what they went by,” he said. On the other hand, he said, when they received Secretary of State Crawford Martin’s letter of instructions that voters 60 or older in cities of 10,000 who had not already got their exemption certificates could not sign up for the free vote, a protest was phoned to Austin, and the Secretary of State’s office \(not Martin himself; the Dallas meeting, a ruling from the Attorney General’s office that the ruling tax collectors of the major cities agreed that the law permitted them to consent to newspapers printing the voter forms for use by registrants. “The thing got completely out of the realm of the special statute,” Cater said. “They went way beyond what the legislature passed.” Evidently a decision was taken that the law was being widely disregarded and that it was best not to press for enforcement of its terms. Charles Davis, Bexar’s assessor-collector, first ruled that forms could not be mailed in by batches, but reversed this ruling. Midland’s assessor-collector, Elmo Linebarger, was specified by Woods as one of April 1, 1966, 13 603,368