Coke R. Stevenson - Public Service

Public Service

In 1928 he was elected to the Texas House as a Democrat, and served there from 1929 until 1939. In 1933, he was elected Speaker of the House; he was re-elected in 1935, becoming the first person in Texas history to serve two consecutive terms as Speaker. After five terms in the House, he was elected Lieutenant Governor in 1938, serving under Governor W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel.

Stevenson succeeded to the governorship on August 4, 1941, when O'Daniel resigned to take a seat in the U.S. Senate, which he won in a special election. A dramatic contrast to the flamboyant and unpredictable O'Daniel, Stevenson's approach was so conservative and taciturn that his critics accused him of doing nothing. Stevenson was elected to a full term in 1942, winning the Democratic primary with 69% and being unopposed in the general election. He was elected to a second term in 1944, effectively unopposed. When he left the governorship in January 1947 he was the longest-serving governor in the history of Texas and had presided over a broad and deep economic recovery during the years of World War II.

In 1948, Stevenson filed for the U.S. Senate. He led the Democratic primary with 39.7% to 33.7% against U.S. Representative Lyndon B. Johnson of Austin. In the hotly-contested runoff, Johnson won by only 87 votes out of 988,295 cast - one of the closest results in a senatorial election in U.S. history. (As there was only a weak Republican Party in Texas at the time, winning the Democratic primary was all that mattered.) Stevenson challenged the result on grounds of voter fraud, a charge widely acknowledged as accurate today on the basis of evidence presented by Johnson biographer Robert Caro, such as the testimony of Luis Salas, the Texas election judge who certified the disputed ballots. However, the Democratic State Central Committee sustained Johnson's victory by a 29-28 vote. The tie-breaking vote was cast by publisher Frank W. Mayborn of Temple, who rushed back to Texas from a business trip in Nashville, Tennessee, at the urging of Johnson's campaign manager, John B. Connally. Stevenson was granted an injunction by the federal district court, barring Johnson from the general election ballot. However, Supreme Court Associate Justice Hugo Black, sitting as a circuit justice, ruled that the federal district court lacked jurisdiction, and that the question was for the Central Committee to decide. He ordered the injunction stayed, and his ruling was upheld by the Supreme Court.

After the loss to Johnson, Stevenson retired to Junction. Disenchanted with the Democratic Party, he supported Republicans for the rest of his life, including John G. Tower for the Senate and Richard M. Nixon and Barry Goldwater for the presidency.

In 1964, he even met at his ranch with the Republican gubernatorial nominee Jack Crichton of Dallas but did not specifically endorse Crichton over John B. Connally, who had worked for Johnson against Stevenson in the disputed 1948 vote.