John R. Brinkley - Political Career

Political Career

Brinkley reacted to losing his medical and broadcast licenses by launching a bid to become the Governor of Kansas, a political position that would enable him to appoint his own members to the medical board and thus regain his right to practice medicine in the state. He kicked off his candidacy just three days after he lost his medical license, using his radio station to help his campaign. At his side was KFKB's biggest country-music star, Roy Faulkner, who took to the stage with guitar and hat in hand. Brinkley campaigned on a vague program of public works (a state lake in every county), education (free textbooks for public schoolchildren and increased educational opportunities for blacks), lower taxes, and old-age pensions. He appealed to the immigrant vote by putting German- and Swedish-speaking people on the air at KFKB. He enlisted a pilot with his own plane (which Brinkley dubbed The Romancer) to deliver Brinkley in grand style at his campaign rallies. In short, Brinkley was a master of the publicity stunt; when a prominent newspaper reporter ran an article critical of his qualifications to run a state, Brinkley sent him a goat.

His campaign was conducted as an independent write-in candidate, because he waited to declare his candidacy until September, after the ballots had already been printed. Three days before the election, the Kansas attorney general (who had prosecuted Brinkley before the medical board) announced that the rules surrounding write-in candidates had changed, and that the doctor's name could only be written in one specific way for the vote to count (as J. R. Brinkley). As a write-in candidate, he received more than 180,000 votes (29.5 percent of the vote) and lost to Harry Hines Woodring, later Franklin Delano Roosevelt's secretary of war. An article published at the time in The Des Moines Register estimated that between 30,000 and 50,000 ballots were disqualified in this manner. Woodring later admitted that had those votes counted, Brinkley would have won.

Brinkley ran again in 1932 as an Independent, receiving 244,607 votes (30.6 percent of the vote), losing to Republican Alf Landon, later Republican nominee for president.

His prospects for success in Kansas destroyed, Brinkley sold KFKB to an insurance company and decided to move closer to the Mexican border, where he could operate a high-power radio station with impunity. Though he could no longer practice medicine in Kansas, he kept his Milford clinic open and put two of his protégés in charge. Wooed by the prospect of being a big fish in a very small pond, Brinkley relocated to sleepy Del Rio, Texas, which lay just across a bridge from Mexico.