ustxtxb_obs_1977_09_23_50_00011-00000_000.pdf

pI offenses that must have been involved. The close relationship between FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and Johnson throughout their careers may well date from Hoover’s 1948 footwork on Johnson’s behalf. The items in the Johnson Library file on 1948 are not verbatim FBI reports. Instead, they are anonymous summaries prepared from original FBI documents. One cannot therefore be confident that important material has not been omitted or glossed. The key communications were those passed between “JEH” and “AMC”Hoover and Alexander Morton Campbell, assistant U.S. attorney general. Both are now dead. “States’ rights” Campbell worked for U.S. Atty. Gen. Tom Clark, a Texan. Clark’s public attitude toward the election dispute was similar to Johnson’s. In Texas with the Truman party late in September, Clark was quoted as saying, “They talk about states’ rights. We think they should practice what they preach.” Thus, Clark echoed Johnson, wondering why Stevenson had not filed his vote fraud suit in a state rather than a federal court. Complaints about irregularities in the handling of ballots in Jim Wells County’s Box 13 began after the first Senate primary and stepped up in number after the run-off. Added to the later round of charges were allegations of illegal ballot burning in Duval County, where tallies showed Johnson outpolling Stevenson by a 100-1 ratio. The 1948 FBI records begin with a Hoover memo dated Aug. 3 \(about ten “Memorandum re Luis Salis [sic ], Precinct 13, Alice, Texas, Texas Primary Election, July 24, 1948.” \(Salas’ name was misspelled throughout the FBI The Aug. 3 memo said the FBI had received two complaints that Salas had bulldozed election supervisors in the first primary. H. L. Poole and J. E. Holmgreen had been appointed Box 13 supervisors by Morris Knight, a candidate for Congress against John E. Lyle. Hoover reported that Poole alleged “a miscount of the ballots by Luis Salas .. . in Precinct 13.” Poole said he saw eight or nine ballots miscounted for Parr’s candidate, Lyle. Keeping quiet In a letter to Tom Clark, Holmgreen made several more charges. He reported to the attorney general that Alice city commissioner E. G. Lloyd, boss of Jim Wells County and a Parr ally, had ruled a supervisor ineligible and that Salas ordered the man out of the polling place. Holmgreen also said that when he himself complained that ballots were being marked illegally, Salas had him arrested by a deputy city marshal. Holmgreen was later readmitted to the room “on the condition that he keep quiet.” On Sept. 9, prosecutor Campbell called for “a preliminary investigation” of charges growing out of the Box 13 affair. On Sept. 10, Hoover wrote Campbell that nothing would be done until Campbell requested action \(the messages presumably passed in the FBI had not yet entered the case. The FBI files contain a letter, evidently written in late September, from Lloyd to Parr’s man, Lyle. Referring to Alice residents who were asking for an FBI inquiry, Lloyd said that these “are the same folks who are fighting President Truman, Lyndon Johnson and our friends.” Whoever prepared the memo in the Johnson Library file adds, “Presumably Mr. Lyle forwarded this letter to the [Justice ] Department.” \(One might