Salas’s ailing wife languished in an adjacent room, and Caro has never forgotten the old man’s tenderness toward her. I’m doing a book on Lyndon Johnson.” “Oh,” Salas replied, “then you want to know about Box 13.” They sat on a couch in the trailer. Caro recalls: “It was just like he was expecting me.”Ĭaro was greeted by an eighty-four-year-old man, frail and withered, who bore no resemblance to the thug he had read about in old newspaper clippings. The elderly men in the streets of Alice told him that Salas was deceased, but eventually someone exclaimed: “No, Luis is alive.” After several weeks of scouring telephone books, Caro found Salas in the Houston suburbs, where he was living in a mobile home in the backyard of his daughter’s house. In 1986, Robert Caro, hard at work on volume two of his projected four-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, ventured to southern Texas in search of Luis Salas. The election judge for Precinct 13 was a burly, belligerent pistolero named Luis Salas, a top lieutenant to the “boss of bosses” in Jim Wells County and a political ally of Lyndon Johnson. Pundits would later refer to “the eighty-seven votes that changed history”-votes that came from Precinct 13 in Alice, Texas. Those votes put Johnson ahead of Stevenson, and eventually guaranteed his victory by eighty-seven votes. STEVENSON’S MARGIN FIRM, blared The Dallas Morning News five days after the polls closed.īut election officials received an amended return from Jim Wells County, a backward region in south Texas, which showed two hundred additional votes for Johnson.

In the chaotic days following the election, Stevenson appeared to be victorious.

Johnson, a ruthless young Texas congressman, squared off against former Governor Coke Stevenson in a brutally competitive runoff for the U.S. It was the most contested election in the history of Texas.

Means of ascent robert caro