The 36th President of the United States, Lyndon Johnson, was first elected to the Senate back in 1948, starting a political career that led him to vice president, and then, after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, to the presidency.

But interview tapes with Associated Press reporter James Mangan, released last week on the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum’s Discover LBJ website, show that in 1948, Johnson’s people rigged the election so he could win the Democratic nomination and be elected to Parliament. . Senate.

After Mangan’s death in 2015 at age 87, his family found the tapes in his San Antonio home and donated them to the University of Texas library on the Austin campus last summer.

Former South Texas election judge Luis Salas told Mengan about the story: “Johnson didn’t win this election—it was stolen for him. And I know exactly how it happened.”

The story aroused suspicion as election commissioners in rural Jim Wells County announced the discovery of uncounted ballots in a ballot box known as Box 13 in the days following the 1948 Democratic Senate primary.

Mangan’s son Peter said that listening to the records was like opening a “little window into history”.

Mark Lawrence, director of the library, said the recordings are “deeply connected to one of the great mysteries and controversies that have surrounded LBJ for decades.” Lawrence said that much is now known about Box 13, thanks to Magan’s 1977 account and later research by LBJ biographer Robert Caro, who “substantially corroborated” and built Magan’s story.

Mangan said in a 2008 AP article that in an attempt to get Salas to talk, he told him, “If you die, history will never know what happened.”

“The kinds of violations that we can see in the Texas Senate race in 1948 were, I think it fair to say, fairly widespread throughout American history and in all areas of the country to one degree or another, but certainly in South and along the Mexican border as recently as the 1940s,” Lawrence said.

Salas told Mangan that powerful South Texas political boss George Parr, who exercised control through grace and coercion, ordered about 200 votes to be added to box 13. Salas said he then watched as the fake ballots were added alphabetically, with names coming from people. who did not vote.

The new votes gave Johnson an 87-vote victory in the primary over then-Gov. Coke Stevenson. Johnson, later nicknamed “The Lindon Landslide”, handily defeated his Republican opponent in the general election.

Elected to the US House of Representatives in 1937, Johnson ran for the US Senate in 1941 and lost to then Governor Wilbert Lee O’Daniel.

Lawrence said that the 1948 Senate victory brought Johnson national prominence. Johnson became vice president of then-president John F. Kennedy and was sworn in as president on November 22, 1963, after Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Johnson was elected president in 1964. He decided not to run again in 1968 and died of a heart attack in 1973 at the age of 64.

Source: Associated Press.