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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview
A-0323, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern
Historical Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill”
Maury Maverick, Jr., was the son of Texas politician Maury Maverick, Sr. Born in 1921, Maverick grew up in Texas but spent considerable time in Washington, D.C., during his father's tenure in Congress. Maverick argues that his experiences with his father's political colleagues during his adolescence were particularly influential in the formation of his own political views. After serving as a Marine in World War II, Maverick earned his law degree. Then, following in his father's footsteps, Maverick was elected to the Texas House of Representatives in 1950. Serving for six years during the height of the McCarthy era, Maverick refused to follow the political status quo. Working in tandem with other Texas liberals and radicals, Maverick was a core member of the "Gashouse Gang" in the state legislature. Named for their effort to place a tax on natural gas, the Gashouse Gang worked to oppose anti-communist legislation during the 1950s. Aside from his tenure in the state legislature, Maverick briefly pursued politics at the national level, campaigning for Lyndon B. Johnson's vacated seat in the United States Senate following the latter's election as the vice-president. Although he continued to involve himself in politics, serving intermittently as a state committeeman for the Democratic Party, Maverick primarily focused on practicing law throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. Maverick describes in detail his legal advocacy for Vietnam draft resisters. Throughout the interview, Maverick offers his thoughts on various Texan politicians, including D. B. Hardeman, Sam Rayburn, Henry B. Gonzalez, and Bob Eckhardt. He also speaks at length about the impact of various constituencies in Texas on the evolution of liberal politics, focusing primarily on Chicano voters and the labor movement. Maverick's lively and engaging recollections of his various experiences offer researchers a revealing portrait of Texas liberalism during the mid-twentieth century.
Born into a long line of Texas politicians, Maury Maverick, Jr., served in the Texas House of Representatives for six years during the 1950s, and as a lawyer from the 1960s into the 1970s. Maverick speaks at length about his radical political leanings and the evolution of liberalism in Texas.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
This is October 27, 1975, I'm Chandler Davidson, Department of Sociology, Rice University. I'm interviewing Mr. Maury Maverick, Jr. in his law office in San Antonio, Texas. Maury, I'd like to start by simply asking you to tell me a little bit about your family and about when you were born and growing up and how you eventually got into politics.
I was born on January 3, 1921 and my father was in the Congress of the
United States for two terms and was described as one of the leaders of
Franklin Roosevelt's Young Turks, along with Jerry Voorhis,
who was the man that Nixon defeated. I was in Voorhis'
campaign in California when Nixon beat him. I knew people all over the
United States, including Dr. Frank Graham, who was then president of the
University of North Carolina and whom my father held in great affection
and respect. After I came back from the Marine Corps, I ran for the
Texas House of Representatives, was in it for six years during the
McCarthy period, got out, had been state Democratic committeeman a time
or two and I ran for the United States Senate when Lyndon Johnson became
Vice-President. I came in fifth in a field of seventy-one candidates.
Since then, I became a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union and
American Friends Service Committee and independently represented war
resisters of the Vietnam war for about five or six years. Now,
I've gone back to representing people in divorces and being
bored to death.
I guess that in a way, it doesn't make good sense to ask
Well, I never knew anything else in my life but politics, because my first recollection of politics is when my father, then a very young man, was Al Smith's campaign manager. The Ku Klux Klan still had some impact, not much in San Antonio, because this is a Catholic town, but it took a little spine to run Al Smith's campaign. That's the first campaign that I remember in my life.
That convention was in Houston, wasn't it?
Yes. That's right.
The one that Jesse Jones brought to Houston.
Yes.
Some people said that Jesse Jones hoped to get the nomination for having brought it there.
Yes, he did.
So, your father managed Al Smith's campaign in Texas?
In San Antonio.
In San Antonio. How old were you at that time?
It seems to me that I must have been about seven years old.
But you were aware of what was happening?
I was aware of that campaign and I was aware of politics in terms of
war…my first recollection of my father when I was a very
small child would be hearing him cry out from wounds suffered in the
Argonne Forest and I used to go sit with him, he would get into a hot
tub
Your father suffered from his war wounds most of his life, didn't he?
Oh, yes. He was a semi-cripple all his life and he would almost stagger. He would throw his body left to right and people would sometimes say that he was drinking, and sometimes he was, but a lot of times, he just couldn't walk even when he was cold sober.
So then, when he went to Congress, were you involved in his campaigns at that time?
Well, I knew about it. When I was a kid in Washington, you know, my heroes were people like Jerry Voorhis and Hugo Black. Hugo Black was a great favorite of the children of Congressmen because Senator Black would always stop and pat us on the head and treat us with great dignity. He was a fine fellow and I remember when he got appointed to the Court and all the liberals were raising hell in New York City, my father went all over New York City talking to ACLU groups saying, "Give this guy a chance. I don't care if he belonged to the Klan or not, he is going to be all right. Give him a chance." I remember hearing about that and was quite excited about it when I was a child.
Where did you go to college?
I went to the University of Texas and then after I got out of the Marine
Corps, I went to school for awhile at Loyola Law School on the West
Coast and finished here at St. Mary's Law School in
You were in the Marines how long?
Four and a half years.
From when to when?
Well, from about 1942 to 1946.
When your dad called you up and said, "Why aren't you
in the Marines?" did you go out and get in there?
Well, also it was after Pearl Harbor and I was flunking all my courses
and Dean Parlin, the Dean of Men at the University called me in and he
said, "We've figured out a way for you to get a
degree." I said, "How?" and he said,
"Volunteer for the Marines." I said, "What
are the Marines?" "Just go on and volunteer, and
you'll find out, Maury."
My father was in the Marines, too. So, you got out and your father was living in California at that time?
Yeah, he had moved to California to practice law out there and that didn't turn out too well. I think that he got lonely and he wanted to come home. He said, "I live out here in Los Angeles and if I get drunk and fall down, my friends won't take me home. If I go back to San Antonio and get drunk, even my enemies will take me home. I'm going back home." So, we came back home.
But you say that you were involved in Jerry Voorhis' campaign out there.
Yes, I was in Voorhis' campaign. I organized the Loyola Law
Students for Jerry Voorhis and I remember Voorhis at the time. I still
correspond with him. He's in a sort of a semi-rest home. His
mind is very alert, but his body is frail. Anyway, Nixon began to make
That was in what, '46 or '48?
'46, I think.
I guess that shortly after that campaign, you came back to Texas?
I came back to Texas and finished here at St. Mary's Law School and then ran for the House of Representatives.
That was when?
It seems to me that it was 1950 to 1956, during the McCarthy period.
You said that you spent six years in the House?
I spent six years in the Texas House of Representatives, got out and ran
for the Senate when Lyndon Johnson became Vice-President.
When you ran for the legislature here, you were representing what, Bexar County?
I was running at large, Bexar County.
How many representatives were there from Bexar County at that time?
I think there were four.
Were you the only liberal?
I was the only liberal at the time. That was the worst period I ever went through. That was the days of the Red scare and while during the Vietnam war, it was plenty tough - - if you want to talk about that later on, we will—while it was plenty tough, it was nothing like the days of Joe McCarthy. Because in addition to all the terror of McCarthy on a national level, we had the bush league, new rich, ignoramus Texas style-attitudes to contend with in addition to everything else. They had bills before the legislature such as to remove all books from libraries that were critical of American history, Texas history, religion or were in any way agnostic, atheistic or made fun of God or whatever, which of course, would remove all good books from the library. It got so bad, for example, that the high school teachers' lobby of Texas, the Texas State Teachers' Association endorsed the bill and not one college professor in the whole state of Texas, I remember, spoke in opposition to that or any other Red legislation. There were only four of us who voted against outlawing the Communist party.
In the entire House of Representatives?
Yes. I was one of them. I voted for it my first term. I
also…there is a great story that Willie Morris tells in his
book, North Towards Home when Clarence Ayers, the
great libertarian professor was censured, it came up
fast…what they would do, the speaker would lay out these
bills without haying any committee consideration and they would say
terrible things about someone and you wouldn't know whether
they were true or not and you wouldn't know how to vote.
I'm trying to rationalize my cowardice now. Well, anyway, I
ran and hid in the men's room and they were looking for me
and I pulled my feet up so they wouldn't see me underneath
the bottom of the toilet and my father called me. He died not much long
after that. He called me and said, "Why in the hell
didn't you vote against that resolution censuring Clarence
Ayers?" I said, "Well, Papa, I was hiding in the
men's room." He said, "Well, you are just a
goddamn shithouse liberal." And he hung up on me.
That was when, in '54?
Something like that, '54.
Your father died in '54?
Yeah, around there. It was the McCarthy period and it was really the worst thing. I killed for example, or rather I had the lead in killing the Un-American Activities Committee in the last closing minutes of the session, which by the way…like some southern left-wingers, I'm for an unlimited filibuster because it is the reverse down South. We use the filibuster. It is our weapon down here.
The liberals?
The liberals, yes. We use it. And while you don't
Who was the Speaker at that time?
Reuben Senterfitt and a fellow by the name of Joe Kilgore who later went
to Congress. So, they let me stand up on the front microphone and on the
back microphone was a fellow named Edgar Berlin. They called it the
"snortin' pole," the one in the back. We
stayed on the microphones for over an hour. It was very dramatic. it was
mainly aimed at professors at the University of Texas and they kept
turning the hands of the clock back to get me off the microphone. I had
a couple of people on both sides of me physically holding on to the
podium to keep from being knocked down. Finally, with great fanfare, the
Speaker said, "I declare this session adjourned sine die. It was a hell of a thing, because if that thing had
passed, it would have gone out and kicked college teachers around all
over the state of Texas. I again went back to the men's room
and vomited and almost started crying. It was the worst goddamn thing
that I ever went through in my life.
Looking back on this period in the legislature, do you see the civil libertarian issues as the key issues of that period? Those are certainly the ones that you seem to be identified with.
Yes. It really is tied into economics, because when they talk about the
tidelands or they talk about not having adequate appropriations for old
people or not having first-rate hospitals, if they really wanted to get
the thirty-five of those like myself going down another road, they would
pull up a Red issue and we would talk about Red
Do you see the race issue as playing pretty much the same function as the Red issue did, kind of refocusing people's attention on noneconomic issues?
Probably. Well, this busing business. It is the same that wiped Frank Graham out at the University of North Carolina, because the Supreme Court decision came down between the time of the primary and the runoff and it wiped him out. We are going to have to have another walking through the fire, I guess, over the busing issue and such as that.
Who were the names that you associate as leaders of the radical right back in that period, the people who were really coming down hard on the Communist issue and making it rough for liberals?
There were the America First and some outfit out of Houston called The
Minute Women. They were middle-class and upper middle-class women who
would come up and jeer at us and taunt us and stomp their feet. They
were the kind of people who spat on Adlai Stevenson in Dallas and tried
to hit him in the head with a picket sign
Who were some of them?
Jack Cox, who later ran for governor. There are some others,
I'll try to think of their names later. Marshall Bell was the
one from San Antonio who was a man who introduced all the so-called
anti-Red legislation. There were bills such as "anyone who
invokes the Fifth Amendment and works for the State of Texas will be
automatically fired." There was a bill for awhile to give
anyone the death penalty who belonged to the Communist party. I remember
that I had a hand in reducing that to life imprisonment. That was a
great liberal move at the time.
How about the newspapers at this point? Were there any of them on the side of the libertarians?
No, but it is a very strange thing. The first newspaper, Morning
News.
You say, "liberal" paper, you don't mean….
No, the first daily paper. I don't mean
"liberal" paper. The first was the most reactionary of
all newspapers. That was the one to take all books from the libraries.
My father had told me that there was a man who had been in the first
officers' training camp of World War I with him who was the
closet liberal on the Dallas Morning News. I forget
his name, but he said, "He's a civilized, good guy
and if he can do anything for you, he will." I sent him the
bill to read and said, "I hope that you will help us."
About two weeks later, the Dallas Morning News
editorialized against it and that gave the other dailies a lot of
courage. And then the San Antonio News did, but the
strange thing about it is that the so-called "worst"
newspaper in Texas was the first to really stand up. Of course, the Texas Observer and Willie Morris and before him and
Ronnie Dugger were always good, but that wasn't a daily
newspaper.
How about the Corpus Christi Caller-Times?
Well, the Caller-Times has come along since then, in
terms of its liberalism, because of Ed Hare, who is down there now and
who is a good friend of mine and a first-rate good man. He backed Nixon,
much to the chagrin of his children, who are raising hell with him this
last time. But day in and day out, it is probably the best newspaper in
Texas.
But at that time, they really didn't support you?
Well, they were on day in and day out, with Governor Shivers and with the
power structure, but the Hares were always civilized
At the time that you were fighting these battles, what percentage of the Texas House would you consider to be liberal?
They called us The Gashouse Gang in those days because we tried to put a natural gas tax across and we did, which was declared unconstitutional. There were about thirty-five of us.
Thirty-five out of 150.
Out of 150.
How many in the Senate?
Four, maybe. Four or five out of thirty.
Hardeman is from where? What was he representing when he was in the House?
Well, he's from Goliad, but he was representing Denison, Texas.
And how long was he in the House, what period was this?
I think that he was in the House two terms when I was there. He got
beaten on a totally irrelevant issue. He got
Was Bob Eckhardt in the House at the time?
Bob Eckhardt was a labor C.I.O. lobbyist when I was there. He used to sit
up in the gallery. He's as smart as hell, he's the
smartest guy you ever saw. He could write an intricate amendment to an
intricate bill and he would send it down to us on the floor. He was our
research assistant. The great tragedy of the liberals is that they are
all so poor. They needed teachers and research people doing work for
them. We were so… our time was so taken up with the logistics
of just fighting on the floor all the time, we never had any good
research and the teachers were getting scared then to talk to us. They
were plenty scared. The law school wouldn't talk to us. No
one would hardly talk to us in those days. We had no research
assistants. The natural gas tax we passed was Huey Long's gas
tax. We thought it was a good one and we were so proud of that victory
and then later on, the
The U.S. Supreme Court?
Yes, the U.S. Supreme Court. And afterwards, we found out that the reason it hadn't been taken up in Louisiana was that Huey called the oil and gas people and he really ran the state and he said, "You sons-of-bitches take this case up to the Supreme Court and have this law declared unconstitutional and I'll give you a constitutional law that you'll wish to God you'd never had." I don't know whether that's true or not, but anyway we took Huey's bill and it didn't work. We didn't have any power in the governor's office.
Who were some of the other members of the Gashouse Gang?
Well, the four that voted against outlawing the Communist party were myself, Doug Crouch, who is now in Ft. Worth, A.D. Downer…"Buffalo" Downer. He's a labor leader in Houston now, and Edgar Berlin, who's a lawyer with the federal government nowdays. The first guy to make a stand when I was there was a little guy named John Barnhart out of Houston. He is a lawyer in Houston and he….
He was in the House?
He was in the House and when the thing came up to outlaw the Communist
party… he voted against the Professor Ayers resolution that I
went and hid in the toilet on, but then when the Communist thing came
up, he cast a "present, but not voting" button. He was
the only one in the House. He was from Beeville. He was all but run out
of Beeville. He was a Catholic and he had trouble with his church and he
got in trouble in a little country town and he later moved 1 Barnhart denies he was hounded out of Beeville.
Yes, I know him.
The only thing that I've got against him is that he was a
cheer leader when he was at the University of Texas. If I can get over
that, then he's a great guy.
Who were some of the other liberals in that period who were in the legislature?
A semi-liberal of the period, that people don't seem to understand or believe anymore, was Dolph Briscoe, the present governor of Texas. He didn't have a super left-wing voting record, but he had a very civilized voting record and was a very decent man. It is almost impossible to explain that to younger people your age, maybe. I don't know you personally, but it is hard to get the younger generation to understand that. He was a good legislator and well liked. He did some fine things. He never, during the McCarthy era, would go out of his way to sponsor bad stuff or hurt anybody or be cruel. I never saw him be cruel to anybody in my life. Now, when you get down to the final vote, he would go for it, but the little ancillary votes, to send it back to committee, to table it, he would go with the side of constitutional liberty. He was a pretty good guy.
How about his vote on economic issues?
Pretty good. He was better than the average. I would put him in the upper 50%. He was a multi-millionaire, but he voted for some things that would have hurt his own pocketbook. He was the father, largely, of farm-to-market roads. Of course, he had the biggest ranches in Texas and it helped him some, but for country people, that's a great thing. Sam Rayburn used to…Sam Rayburn told me that when the national highway lobby came through Congress and said, "We're going to build these super highways across America," Mr. Rayburn said, "You're not going to build these highways across America unless you have farm-to-market roads for country people. I lived up in north Texas and couldn't get into town on Saturday. The roads were muddy, the Model-T Fords wouldn't run and before that, the wagons couldn't get through the mud and you are not going to build these highways unless you give these country people farm-to-market roads." So, old man Rayburn may be the father of farm-to-market roads and even among the liberal movement, that was a good issue in those days.
Well, let's talk a minute about Sam Rayburn. There has been a biography of him published in the last few months, a very flattering and favorable biography. I noticed that some of the criticisms of it have been that it was too flattering and that it makes Rayburn out to be more of a man of the people than he really was. What about Rayburn? How would you fit him into the liberal-conservative spectrum?
Well, there is another book coming out on Rayburn by D.B. Hardeman and Don Bacon. Hardeman, as I said, was his research assistant for years.
And Hardeman was a well-known liberal?
Yes. And Hardeman would be an interesting… it will be
interesting to see what D.B. says about him. I think of him (Rayburn)
more as a
What about his relation to the oil and gas industry?
Well, I think that he kind of took care of them. I remember in the Adlai Stevenson race in Dallas the first time around, the two co-campaign managers, and I had a hand in doing this, were D.B. Hardeman and Blind Jim Sewell, the district judge from Corsicana and a swell guy. Old man Rayburn was the titular head and I remember Rayburn sitting around with a drink of bourbon in his hand saying, "Those sons of bitches, we took care of them on the depletion allowance and now they are running out on us." And they did run out on the Democratic party. The Democratic party did take care of them on it—and that worries me—and there are a lot of things about the Democratic party that worry me, the loyalty investigations of Harry Truman and the fact that we seem to have the capacity to get into wars a little bit too easy.
You feel that Rayburn in his heart of hearts was more a man of the people than not and that he accommodated himself to oil and gas simply as a practical necessity?
Yes. I think that he was an old-fashioned Populist. My father's campaign slogan was "Liberty and Groceries." It's a great slogan. An economist at UCLA used that on a thesis one time. I think he called it that, "Liberty and Groceries" and old man Rayburn understood what liberty and groceries were.
How about Lyndon Johnson? How would you classify him? Can you classify him?
Lyndon worked in my father's office at night time when he was working for Dick Kleberg and my father was responsible more than anyone for getting Lyndon as head of the NYA in Texas. As Lyndon got more popular and my father got less popular, Lyndon would more and more say, "Sam Rayburn is just like my daddy and got me that job," but that isn't so. Aubrey Williams, who was head of the NYA, wrote my father and said, "Maury, you did it." And there's a very interesting call, I got a call from Lyndon Johnson's brother, who all the rest of the family has fallen out with… I forget his name right now….
Sam?
Sam Johnson. He called me about six months ago and said that he
hadn't had a drink, "I'm not drunk now
and haven't had a drink in two years and before I die, I want
you to know that your father had more to do with getting Lyndon that NYA
job than anybody in Texas. Some of the family is denying it now but I
want to tell you that before I die." He did tell me that and it
was true. I don't know, Lyndon was a superb guy. You
can't forget the Vietnam war, but if you could for a minute
and think about what he did on Medicare and all the other
things… if it hadn't been for the Vietnam war, I
think that he would have ranked among the top two or three or four or
five presidents. I do
A lot of them on the other side.
A lot of them on the other side, keeping their own kids out of the war. I haven't gotten over that yet.
Well, you were very much involved in defending draft resisters at that period, weren't you?
I spent five years representing draft resisters and being
Treated rudely by whom?
I mean treated rudely by people like the marshałs, who would
sort of hover near you like someone was going to blow up the court or
the judges would be sharp to you, "Sit down,
Counselor," and talk to you in a rough kind of way as if you
really had some dangerous person with you. I must say, though, that the
federal judiciary, particularly the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, gave
us the great relief that we needed. I
He's still on there, isn't he?
He's still on there and he's a great old man.
Why were so few of your fellow lawyers willing to take these cases? How do you explain that?
Well, it's related to patriotism, you know. It's a
lack of patriotism to not back your country in time of war and it was
the second most terrifying thing that I went through in my life. The
McCarthy era was worse, but I was older and smarter and my skin was
thicker and didn't give a damn as much. But, there was this
question of whether you loved your country or not and people were
checking on me. I knew that I was under surveillance. I would go out to
the military bases and sometimes the military police would follow me.
Since then, I've talked to people who said that they would
say, "Maury Maverick is now driving into the base,"
and they would have a condition read as if someone from Mars was landing
at Galveston. Sometimes when I would talk to kids in a parking
lot…they wouldn't let them come to my office,I had
to talk to them in a parking lot, well the MPs would circle me and one
time, I got my associate, Herschel Bernard, who is Jewish, to come and
help me and a big MP came up, looked like he was about six feet, seven
inches tall and damn near weighed 300 pounds. He had his fists doubled
up and looked like he was going to beat us up and I said,
"Sergeant, if you are goint to beat
Well, this isn't the first time that you've been "surveilled", as they say. The FBI or somebody has been on your tail for many years, haven't they?
I guess so.
You mentioned the other day to me over the phone, for example, that when you went out to El Paso to speak…what was the story there with Malcolm McGregor?
Well, I ran for the Senate and the only ones that would let me talk to
them was the Unitarian Church and he said, "There'll
be more FBI agents outside taking down license plate numbers than there
will be people inside listening to you." That was true and not
only that, I got in there and these goddamn Unitarians
weren't satisfied that I was for letting Red China into the
United Nations twenty years ago, they kept on bringing up worse and
worse left-wing issues and if I had any chance of getting elected to the
Senate before I talked to those five Unitarians, I didn't
have any after it was over with.
Did the knowledge that the FBI was on your tail exert any dampening effect on your ardor?
No, it didn't bother me. The thing that worried me, the thing
that was discouraging to me and that was only about eighteen, fifteen or
twenty years ago, I remember going into East Texas, campaigning in deep
East Texas and I had a local campaign manager, I remember and I was
working through the courthouse and I shook hands with a black person and
my liberal manager took me off to the side and said, "You will
not shake
This was in '61?
Yes. And my press secretary was Ronnie Dugger, who was the editor of the
Texas Observer and a great guy. We went into one
town with him one day and the manager in that town, whose name shall
remain anonymous, saw Ronnie Dugger walk up with me and he said,
"Why have you got Ronnie Dugger with you? Everybody in East
Texas knows that Ronnie Dugger would sleep with a nigger
woman." And instead of Dugger being a good press agent and
going out to the car, he said, "Yes, I'd sleep with
a nigger woman, you son of a bitch, what's it to
you?" So, I lost a manager right there and had to get out of
town. I told Dugger, "Will you please wait until the campaign
is over before voicing your sexual preferances and I will appreciate
it."
A lot of liberals back in 1961 were kind of appalled to see both you and Henry B. Gonzalez, both well-known liberals, running against each other on the ticket there in that special Senatorial election. What is and what was your relation with Henry Gonzalez and what effect did that have?
We have sort of an Alphonse and Gaston relationship. We're
polite to each other. He and I should have talked to one another. That
taught me something about vanity. He wouldn't talk to me and
I wouldn't talk to him. What I should have done and what he
should have done, is pick up the telephone and say, "Look
Henry, you get out of the race or I'll get out of the race
—we'll flip." In retrospect, I know I
should have done that, but it was two liberals who were too proud and
too vain and too foolish to talk to one
But both of you were very similar in your political beliefs?
Yes, but I think…yes, I think so. You see, Henry wiped me out in San Antonio among the Mexicans where I had been strong and my father was strong. That polished me off from going to Congress.
That particular race did?
Yes. That ended my chances of going to the U.S. House of Representatives.
Well, if you had gone, you would probably have gone from the seat that Henry now has.
I would have gone from the seat that Henry has gone from, but it would have been interesting to see what I would have done with this Pentagon-oriented society. I often wonder whether I would have been a hawk on Vietnam if I had been in Congress because Henry was a very studied hawk on Vietnam. He would come down in Air Force One and he was a hawk against Castro and he was a Hawk on the Dominican Republic and I don't know what the hell I would have been. Because, it is one thing not to be in Congress and talk about it and another thing to be there.
You are suggesting that his hawkishness here might have had something to do with what you call "San Antonio's Pentagon economy?"
Yes. You know, this whole town makes its living off the Pentagon. I made
my living off the Pentagon by fighting it. I made maybe
You know Bob Hall, I guess, in Houston.
Not well. I used to know him. He is a good fellow. He's a labor lawyer there, isn't he?
Yes, he was performing pretty much the same function there that you were performing here, insofar as being one of the few people who were identified as being willing to handle the draft cases.
Yes. Johnny Barnhart handled some, too.
Yes.
Bob Hall is a good fellow and I think that he is with that lawyer… the one who has the Greek name?
Chris Dixie.
Dixie, yeah. He is a good guy. A very fine lawyer in Austin is David Richards, who has just filed a law suit for the members of the University of Texas faculty who were denied merit increases although their chairman of their departments, recommended them for it. There is a big fight going on against the new president of the University of Texas and Richards is the lawyer for them.
How about Dave Shapiro, do you know him?
I know Dave Shapiro pretty well. He is a bright guy and a very cynical guy and he would always manage to write extremely withering invectives against me in behalf of Henry Gonzalez. So, you know, I don't go around singing his praises all the time, but he was a good guy and a good liberal. He was just for Henry and against me.
That's rather ironic. I was talking to him awhile ago and he
Well, I would rank Henry among the top three to five Congressmen from Texas, Bob Eckhardt of Houston is the best and I think worthy of being the President of the United States of America. A great and fine man.
How about Barbara Jordan?
Oh, I don't know. If she had had a white skin, she might have been a southern lady. I don't know, I'm not as comfortable around her and I don't know why. I think that she is probably one of the better representatives from Texas, but I'm not as enthusiastic about her as a lot of people are.
Would you say that Eckhardt is pretty much in the Maverick mold? Do you see a sort of continuity here between your father's career and that of Eckhardt?
Bob is a lot smoother fellow than my father. My father was an abrasive guy who was the youngest of eleven children and he had ten brothers and sisters that picked on him…youngest of ten or eleven, I forget. There were plenty of them. Anyway, he would get into a fistfight with his older brothers and sisters and Allistair Cook called him the "bad boy of the New Deal who always had his fists up." Bob is a more slow-talking and gracious and polite person than my father was. My father would call somebody a son of a bitch and have a fistfight and then go on to something else. He didn't carry grudges, though. Henry Gonzalez, for example, if you fall out with Henry and he knocks you down, the battle isn't over with. He will grind you and grind you with his heel, figuratively speaking, with your face into the ground until you are a bloody pulp. When my father had a fight and knocked you out or got knocked out and when he was mayor of San Antonio….
Are you speaking figuratively here?
Figuratively, yes. He would hire the widows of all his enemies and give them jobs, things like that. Henry is a tough guy and I imagine that Barbara Jordan is the same way, but Bob is I think equally courageous and equally intellectual, but he is a smoother guy. I don't mean that in a saracastic way, he's just a gentle, soft-spoken guy.
You just suggested a minute ago that Bob would make a fine President of the United States. He doesn't seem to have that ambition, though, does he?
Well, a lot of people who would make a good President of the United
States know that they can't be President. I think that I
would make a good appellate justice, a federal appellate justice, but
I'm not ever going to get to be one. Bob is realistic. He
said that he would rather "hang from the tit of his
Congressional district in Harris County than cling to the cold bosom of
Texas." That probably is a realistic thing and it's
probably the truth. He couldn't go anywhere in Texas, I
don't think. They would do a job on him and they may do a job
on him in Houston before it's all over. His great threat is
that some member of the minority is going to run against him and polish
him off like they polished me off in Bexar County. The white
Anglo-liberal in the South is going to more and more become a gadfly and
he is going to have to understand that about himself. That's
important. That's all right. I'm a gadfly and I
understand that role, but now that the Supreme Court has said that you
run in smaller legislative districts instead of countywide, the blacks
are going to elect blacks for another hundred years and the browns are
going to elect browns. Where in the hell is a white liberal
So far as electoral politics goes?
Yes. It may be all right, because it is right for blacks and browns to have their own liberals and it's o.k., but I think that the white liberal has to understand that about himself and not worry about it, sort of be like Wayne Morse was when he got in and not worry every five minutes about being reelected and understand that you are not and go on and play your role.
Do you think that for the middle-aged white liberal that is a role that he can accept gracefully, to give his electoral base to the minorities?
Well, he will act like he is graceful about it. I am not so damn gracious about it now in the deep recesses of my heart because I think that I would be a better legislator than some of the blacks and browns. I'm getting a little reverse Jim Crow and I don't like it and hell, I don't have to like it just because I'm white and Protestant, I don't have to like it. I would at least like to get beaten for the right reasons if I am going to get beaten. I think that is a phase that we are going to go through.
Well, I know that you have to go out of town today, so….
If you want to talk to me some more, go ahead.
If you've got a little more time, I'll….
Go ahead.
I'll sure do it. You say when, because I could go on and on.
I was not at that convention. My father was up there and like all the sons of fairly famous fathers, when he was doing his stuff, I would go off somewhere else. I have a complex about that and I wanted to be my own man and make my own light shine under the basket. My father was such a powerful personality that I felt dwarfed by him and so, when he was operating, I would get out of the way. There's another story that Willie Morris tells and this really happened. After my father had had about his fifth heart attack, I went in to see him and he was dead an hour later or two hours later and he said, "I want to give you a compliment, Maury, Jr." I said, "What is it, Papa?" He said, "Well, you didn't turn out to be as big…."
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
Those were the last words that my dad spoke to me. So, when he was alive, he was such a powerful guy that I would get in the background. I've noticed that the children of famous people, it is awful hard for them not to be alcoholics or washouts because they are constantly compared to their father or mother. If my father had stayed alive another ten or fifteen years, I don't know what the hell I would have done myself, so it is tough.
To get back to that convention, maybe you will remember what was involved there. It was a case of Shivers leading one set of delegates and your father… I believe that the state convention was in San Antonio and your father led a rump convention to La Villita and so they both went up there trying to get seated and according to at least one account that I've read, Rayburn initially wanted to see your dad's delegation seated and Lyndon Johnson had a long talk with Shivers and Shivers convinced him that he ought to have his delegates seated.
I think that my father told me that they had promised him, indicated to
him that he would be seated. Then, you will remember that on the floor,
Shivers took the microphone and said he would support the nominee, as I
recall. Right on national t.v. and then came back home two weeks later
and double-crossed the people that he made this national commitment to.
Now, a very interesting thing happened, I don't know what
that had to do with it, but I remember one night that the telephone rang
and Adlai Stevenson called my father and he said, "Maury, what
should I
Did the tidelands issue come up in the way of any votes in the Texas legislature?
You've made me think about something. I was looking through
some old letters the other day, where I wrote Justice William O.
Douglas. The first week that I was in the Texas House of
Representatives, there was a bill to impeach William O. Douglas because
he had written the tidelands decision. As I remember it, only seven of
us voted against it. Well, we were so green that we didn't
know how to ask for a record vote and we had an electric voting system,
they have green lights and red lights up on the panel for about fifteen
or twenty seconds and there were seven votes against impeachment of
Douglas and I was one of them. I remember seeing the names up there, I
didn't know who in the hell they were, but it was a rough
vote, really a rough vote. I think that I
That was kind of the first vote that brought you….
I think that in my mind, that was the first vote that ushered in the so-called Gashouse Gang and then we expanded from about seven to thirty-five.
What was the effect of that vote? Was it merely a resolution?
A resolution. I wrote Douglas about it and he wrote me back as mad as hell about it and he wanted me to explain it and so I wrote back and forth to him for about six weeks, explaining it to him. He didn't like it at all.
Not the last time they attempted to impeach him.
No.
You also were involved in presidential politics in 1960, weren't you? Didn't you work pretty hard in the Kennedy-Johnson campaign?
I worked pretty hard in the Kennedy-Johnson thing, I was state committeeman for awhile and then I was….
How long were you state committeeman?
Off and on for either four or six years, I forget. I was state
committeeman when Jack Kennedy came down here and was killed. Ralph
Yarborough claimed that also was an effort to do him in and I think
he's right. Everybody denies it, but I think that
it's right. I think that he is right because although I was
state committeeman, the John Connally people were running the party and
I was not given a pass to go into the airport to meet the presidential
nominee of my party although I Washington Wife?" A great-aunt
of mine, Ellen Maury Slaton, who wrote Washington
Wife, it was one of the ten best sellers. It was a gossipy, mean,
smart, funny book and he called his wife over and threw back his head,
laughed and said, "God, that was a swell book." The
next day, he was murdered. That was an anti-Ralph Yarborough manouever
partially, I think. I don't think that Kennedy realized it
was, but the Johnson-Connally people were doing Yarborough in.
Well, how, specifically, do you speculate they were trying to do him in?
Well, I was the only Yarborough man and whoever heard of not letting a state Democratic committeeman in to meet the President and head of your party?
In other words, they were just trying to isolate the state liberals from the President?
Yes, the liberals in general and the Yarborough people in particular. I think that Ralph is telling the truth about that. He is paranoid as hell, but he is entitled to be. I don't think that there is any question that there was extreme tension during that whole thing. Ralph was calling me three or four times a night, calling Woodrow Seals, who is a federal district judge now, all day long. Woodrow is the one that earlier lined up that meeting with Kennedy and all the preachers in Houston and that was….
In the campaign?
Yes, that was further back. Anyway, he was calling
What was it, they weren't letting him ride in the same car…
In the same car with the President and they were pushing Connally and putting him Yarborough off to the side.
Was Johnson seen as partisan in this, to Connally?
I think so, yes. Yes. I can't prove it, but I believe that it was. I know San Antonio politics and I know that the Connally people were running the airport rally for Jack Kennedy. They were all over the place and the Yarborough people were kept off the premises.
Who were some of the Connally people in San Antonio that were involved in that?
Oh, John Peace, who was later on the Board of Regents and is dead now and there was George Brown's daughter out of Houston, I forget her married name….
Mrs. Negley?
Yes, Nancy Negley. A smart, good-looking gal. And then there was….
Is she a force in San Antonio politics, she and her husband?
They are separated right now, but…she was when she was with John Connally, but I think that she has become more of an artsy-craftsy type now.
Junior League?
Junior League, artsy-craftsy and has done some pretty good stuff on sustaining the arts here. She's all right.
How old is she, in her forties?
Yes, she's in her forties. A good-looking gal. She was offered a Hollywood contract at one time. Nobody knows that, it is hardly known.
How about the Yarborough campaigns? Have you been involved in the Yarborough effort over the years in his bids for….
I was in all of his campaigns except when Jim Hart, the Chancellor of the University ran and I was for Jim Hart in that campaign.
Which campaign was that, what year?
He ran for the Senate and I forget. It was the time when Ralph got elected to the Senate for the first time. I had gone to Ralph and said, "Are you going to run for the Senate?" He said, "No, I'm going to run for governor." I said, "Well, I'm going to be for Jim Hart." He said, "That's fine." The next week, he announced for the Senate. So, I just said, "Hell, I can't quit Chancellor Hart." Jim got no votes at all, but I was in nearly all of Yarborough's campaigns. He would stay at my house at night and we would give him a bed, he was so poor. He was campaigning then like Fred Harris is campaigning now. We would give him a free bed and the next morning, I would give him five dollars to get gas money to get his car from San Antonio to Austin. That's how desperately poor he was.
Wasn't that true in just about every campaign he ran in?
Yeah, you know…once he got elected, he began to get money, labor money and other stuff. But it was generally true in all of his campaigns and he still owes a lot of money.