ustxtxb_obs_1966_04_01_50_00014-00000_000.pdf

those who was allegedly deterring people from signing up. Documents prepared by workers in voter registration in Midland contended that only after receiving vigorous protests from them, and after the interest of federal officials had become manifest, did Linebarger consent, late in the registration period, to the mailing in of forms in batches from workers who had got them by canvassing house-to-house. It is the Observer’s information that in El Paso it was ruled that the authorized registration deputies should not check the race of each registrant only after a visit to the F.B.I. by a Negro leader. Eventually, but not at the outset, deputies working out of the Negro churches in El Paso were permitted to sign up voters. Woods protested the Waller County assessor-collector not letting Negro students at Prairie View A&M College sign up to vote unless they signed statements having to do with where they would reside permanently. On March 10 of the 15-day period ending March 17, Atty. Gen. Carr assigned 35 assistants to various counties. “We are offering this service to the local tax assessor collectors so that this office may be of the greatest possible assistance in attempting to register every qualified voter in our state,” Carr said. Carr at the same time wrote Charles Davis in San Antonio: “Technically speaking, applications . . . should be delivered in person or through the mail. This does not preclude you from accepting a number of applications in the same envelope. However, we do not believe that you would be in any difficulty should you accept applications delivered to your office in any manner other than through the mail, unless there was an indication that they had been fradulently obtained or were from fictitious persons. We would suggest that you interpret the law as liberally as possible. . . .” There was a discordant note, in an AP story from San Angelo after the period was closed, from Earnest DeLoach, chief deputy assessor-collector for Tom Green County. Carr should have kept out of it, he said, contending that FBI agents visited, but briefly and unobtrusively, but that state officials caused several interruptions in registering work. According to De Loach, a State Highway Department investigator, Jerry Palmer, saying he was acting at Carr’s request, asked DeLoach for a list by March 24 of all car registrations taken during the period of voter registration. DeLoach told him he was too busy. Carr told the San Angelo daily he knew nothing of it, but later a representative of Carr’s office, DeLoach said, called and admitted their interest in auto registration. “They wound up eating plenty of crow,” the AP quoted DeLoach. Political implications of this may be read into symptomatic reactions from Crawford Martin and Franklin Spears, the Connally-team and the liberal-labor backed candidates for attorney general. Martin said the FBI agents’ role is “only one step from a police state,” and “As far as I’m concerned, the only step left is to have folks in the neighborhood maintaining constant checks on the people around them.” Spears said the FBI checks were routine. “It is not meant to be an insult, even though some have been insulted,” he said. He thought the high registrations in Harris and Bexar would “help me win.” 0 The Making of a Senator, 1966 Washington, D.C. My emotions are very mixed when it comes to the end of Senator Dugger’s political career. Certainly I’m happy to see the grand old gentleman retire undefeated, his reign untouched by scandal’s hot breath, his convictions uncompromised by the croneyism and log-rolling of the United States Senate. Never need we fear again that temptations of the Washington cocktail circuit, secret deals in smoke-filled rooms, or long-dollar lobbyists reaching for the flaps of their billfold pockets will send Ronnie Dugger home to us less a senator than when he went away. Wherever men of Liberal bent shall gather so long as history continues to be writ, they will remember his spotless record with love. Yet, we lament the loss of Senator Dugger’s potential as a man of vast influence. Within the last few weeks he has been written of in Time, Newsweek, and the national press; some even printed likenesses of his physical person. He was quoted in slick-paper tomes that cost as much as forty cents the copy ; his wisdoms were read by men who move and shake our world. Anything seemed within his grasp: a center-fold position in Playboy, even. What man dares not dream . . . ? But the dream is vain, now, and shattered. The Senator Has Come Home Again. In choosing to put aside the heavy burdens of public office, Senator Dugger may have deprived himself of greater honors still. According to statistics, public opinion polls, studies by numerous taxexempt Foundations and inside information from Drew Pearson, exactly 100% of all Chief Executives who have served since November 22, 1963, are Texans. But even this unchecked trend, which placed Senator 14 The Texas Observer Larry L. King Dugger virtually on the threshold of the Presidency, could not deter his decision to reject the glamour and hoopla of public life. Forever after shall he devote himself to scholarly writings and barefoot philosophizing at his West 24th Street retreat hard-by the Forty Acres. I doubt whether Senator John Tower will honestly join me in telling Senator Dugger that I love him no less than I did in recent days gone by, and wish him respite from ,the woes of officialdom in his declining years. WE HAVE NOT got a lot left to choose from in the U.S. Senate race this year, Hon. Dugger having rescued his hat from the ring. Consider the Democratic primary. At this writing we are offered a choice between Attorney General Waggoner Carr, who will masquerade through the charade as a Democrat, or a man from Houston, Texas, by the name of John R. Willoughby. I know next-to-nothing about Mr. Willoughby, but expect to grant him my personal vote unless he is caught in locked shops or high treason. Mr. Willoughby should take no special pride in this: if a tree-swinging baboon were contesting Hon. Waggoner Carr for the U.S. Senate, you would find me out tacking up posters for the baboon and inventing him some virtues in street-corner orations. This is not because of any personal animosity toward Hon. Carr. I understand he is generally cheerful, looks good in his clothes, loves his family and has numerous friends who are extremely well-heeled. I begrudge him very little of this. I simply do not think he has shown one natural reflex toward the sensitivity, compassion, and concern for the public good that a United States Senator should have. Long live John G. What’s-His-Name! That, of course, is the problem. Mr. Willoughby is unknown, claims to be Liberal, and has not been touted to me as one whose affluences will stand a major campaign across the width and breadth of Texas. He thus is well-supplied in disadvantages. Hon. Carr, on the other hand, has enough money available to his purposes to lose steadily at all-night stud poker with H. L. Hunt and still buy plenty of television time. Hon. Carr, in the absence of some strong, personable man of Democratic instincts entering the fray, has got the Democratic primary sewed up the way the Muslims have got Cassius Clay in the bag. This will lead to a choice that to me borders on the obscene, even more than Eros did, and that is the “choice” between Hon. Carr and Hon. John Tower. My first inclination is to weep, my second is to retch, and my third is to run screaming into Mexico begging political asylum. My fourth inclination \(however shaky and regardless of the shame I feel in statTower. Perhaps this is because my bones know he has little real influence in Washington, and therefore cannot do us much harm. His day is gone, as is Goldwater’s and shaving mugs. He may prove a minor irritant now and again to men of tender sensibilities, but he will be capable of no really large or key embarranssments. Hon. Carr, on the other hand, is so much a willing, eager part of the Texas Establishment that he should wear a nose-ring. Everybody from Governor Connally to Marvin Watson to Big Money and The Dallas Morning News will be pulling on his strings to make him react a certain way. You can be damn sure they’ll be tugging him to the Right, and equally certain that