Close Thing

Two days after election day last week, after one of the hottest political campaigns in the history of Texas, nobody knew who had won the late Morris Sheppard's seat in the U.S. Senate. Lanky, 32-year-old Representative Lyndon Johnson, endorsed by President Roosevelt, started out with a seemingly secure 13,500-vote lead in a field of 25 candidates. But as the count piled up, folksy Governor Wilbert Lee ("Please Pass the Biscuits, Pappy") O'Daniel slowly ate into Lyndon Johnson's vanishing plurality.

As the last returns trickled in this week, from backwoods counties where Lee O'Daniel is strongest, Roosevelt's Johnson was still leading. But his margin was so fabulously small--77 out of a total of 566,551 votes counted--that it could be considered virtually a dead heat. Although Texas law considers a plurality of one vote sufficient in a special election, the Election Bureau took it for granted that a recount would be demanded, that it might be weeks before Texas knew the winner.

Win or lose, Lyndon Johnson, like his competitors, had given Texas quite a show.

His great contribution to campaign entertainment was a political version of cinema's Bank Night. At a Johnson rally, listeners sat with lottery tickets clutched in their moist palms. The lucky numbers won defense bonds.

For the first time since the disastrous Roosevelt "purge" of 1938, the President had taken a bold and active hand in a State election. Lyndon Johnson, who first announced his candidacy from the steps of the White House, was backed three times during the campaign by letters and telegrams from Franklin Roosevelt, his "very old and close friend." On election eve Governor O'Daniel tried to include himself in the President's blessing, suggested to Franklin Roosevelt that Texas should have its own Army and Navy. It was a "breath-taking" idea, the President told Pappy. Then he wired Lyndon Johnson, said the idea was "preposterous." Meanwhile, the one forgotten man of Texas' election was the man who held the seat for which Johnson and O'Daniel were fighting. In Baltimore, two days before his successor was to be chosen, death came to 87-year-old interim Senator Andrew Jackson Houston, son of Texas' Liberator Sam Houston (see p. 40).

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