We’ve got that story about LBJ. How a drunk Amarillo delegate was the reason he ended up president.”
As a summer Brick & Elm intern, I was sitting in a planning meeting for this issue at Palace Coffee. Copublishers Jason and Michele were discussing editorial ideas. Then I heard my dad’s name.
“It’s from a paper written by Reed Welch and Wade Shaffer at WT,” Jason said.
I’m sure my face gave away my surprise. “That’s … my dad.”
I hadn’t heard of this paper, but I mentioned it shouldn’t be too hard to get in contact with the authors, given that I live with one of them. That’s how I ended up here, writing about Lyndon Johnson’s victory in the 1948 Texas Democratic Senate primary, and the strange but historically significant role Amarillo played in it.
Would LBJ have become president if not for what happened? Possibly not.
The 1948 Primary
Let me start at the beginning. My dad, Dr. Reed Welch, has taught at West Texas A&M University since before I was born. He’s the Teel Bivins Professor of American Politics and the head of the political science and criminal justice departments. His colleague, Dr. Wade Shaffer, is a professor of history who’s taught at WT longer than my dad has. Shaffer has been studying the political culture of the Texas Panhandle and, according to his WT bio, “the complicated relationship between Panhandle voters and Lyndon Baines Johnson.”
Together, they published an article in last year’s Panhandle-Plains Historical Review. It was titled “The Texas Panhandle, LBJ, and the 1948 Senate Primaries.”
I came home and informed my family I would need to interview our very own for a magazine. Admittedly, having grown up with my dad and his vast knowledge of niche American political history, I wasn’t anticipating the chaos and humor this particular story brought.
“For Johnson, this could make or break his career and with his future on the line, he worked his tail off,” my dad told me about that campaign. Back then, LBJ was still a young Congressman who was running against Coke R. Stevenson, an extremely popular former Texas governor. Johnson was hungry for power, but he was the underdog.
“You see it all the time. The person or team that is the underdog is willing to work harder, fight a lot harder and take some chances,” Dad said.
But Johnson’s ceaseless efforts to win that 1948 election weren’t enough to land him the victory—at least not without help. As they tell it, that help came from a drunk Amarillo delegate who cast the tiebreaking vote (29-28) which certified the result of a primary runoff election. Without this one man’s possibly intoxicated decision, LBJ’s political career might have ended. It was enough to change American history.
Johnson had never won a statewide election before, my dad explained. As the primary results came in, Stevenson had dominated Johnson, especially in the Panhandle. But it was a multi-candidate field and neither was able to gain the necessary majority for the nomination, so the election went into a runoff.
LBJ briefly considered dropping out of the race, which seemed unwinnable. But when he finally relented, he decided Amarillo—where he’d lost by 71,000 votes—would be 1 of 7 cities to focus his campaign on.
“Pappy’s Speech”
At a pivotal moment, conservative leaders offered Johnson financial support if he agreed to give a prewritten radio address known as “Pappy’s Speech” on radio stations across the state. The speech, originally delivered by former governor Pappy O’Daniel, was vehemently anti-communist. It embodied all of the harshest parts of Texas conservatism, my dad explained, and didn’t mesh well with Johnson’s values.
But with almost no money left and an embarrassing loss in sight, Johnson decided to give the speech, for the first time, in Amarillo. I asked Shaffer about this one.
“He’s in the Herring Hotel literally walking up and down the hallways deciding if he wants to do this or not,” Shaffer said. “Originally he said he was not going to do it. It went against everything he stood for.”
But at the Herring Hotel, LBJ apparently talked himself into it. The speech represented his only chance to stay competitive. “He was desperate enough to swallow his pride and read the speech to connect with an audience he hadn’t connected with before,” Shaffer said.
The image of Johnson pacing a hotel hallway in downtown Amarillo, agonizing over it, is something Shaffer finds compelling. “Johnson is easy for people to dislike and criticize, but at that moment he is very human,” Shaffer said. “I think this moral quandary he faced is one that a lot of people could understand, just maybe not at that level.”
He gave the speech on Amarillo radio station KGNC.
It worked. Almost immediately, Johnson’s poll numbers began to rise, and a few days later he received his first and only newspaper endorsement in the Panhandle, from the Shamrock Texan.
My dad, always a careful historian, said it’s impossible to be sure that the speech was the cause for LBJ’s rising popularity. In fact, he’s not sure if it even mattered, given how the election was eventually decided by one man from Amarillo.
One man who was probably drunk.
That’s the story I want to tell.
The Delegate in the Bathroom
By the time the runoff election day arrived, Johnson had pulled even with Stevenson statewide. The opportunism and campaign efforts had been worth it, but the contest was still incredibly close.
It was controversial, too. As they counted the votes, LBJ ended up with a razor-thin lead of 87 votes—out of nearly a million cast. Votes from some counties were contested, and the vote tallies kept shifting.
The winner of the runoff was officially decided at the State Democratic Convention in Fort Worth, where the 62-member executive committee had to certify the results. Given the disputes, they were divided over how to proceed, and only 57 members of the committee were present. The majority still favored Stevenson for the nomination.
But where were those five missing committee members?
After three hours of arguing, the committee started voting around 10 p.m. That first round of voting tied at 28 after one delegate marked a ballot “present, but not voting.”
As my dad explained this to me, this is where the story stopped being just another one of his history stories and instead an extraordinary turn of events.
LBJ suddenly had a chance, but he needed additional votes. Johnson’s staff began to hunt for the five men. It turns out that four of them weren’t even at the convention.
But one was: Charlie Gibson, of Amarillo.
They found him in a bathroom stall. The circumstances were sketchy. According to my dad and Shaffer’s article, LBJ aide John Connally—yes, that John Connally, the future Texas governor who was in the vehicle when JFK was shot—discovered Gibson and screamed at him to “get out there and vote.” (The language was a little more colorful than that, but this is a family magazine.)
What happened next depends on who you ask, or perhaps, who you want to believe. “Whether he was drunk, or whether he was simply afraid to go out on the floor, he knew the votes were happening and he was definitely hiding in the bathroom,” Shaffer told me.
Gibson finally stumbled into the meeting and asked what he was to be voting on. Then he cast his vote for Johnson. It cemented the winner of the primary and sent the room into chaos.
“Wait, he really had no idea what was being voted on?” I asked. Surely there’s no way that was true.
My dad chuckled. “You wouldn’t think so, would you?”
Shaffer added that one account indicates another delegate kicked over Gibson’s chair after he cast his vote.
The newspapers at the time reported a more sanitized story, stating merely that Gibson was initially absent but was paged and asked to come vote. Conspiracy theories began to spread. Was Gibson pressured to vote for Johnson? Why would a Panhandle delegate vote for someone the region opposed throughout most of the election?
“I think he was just too afraid to cast a vote in either direction,” Shaffer said, “and if he was in the bathroom and the tie vote didn’t happen, he could go back out and say he merely missed the vote.” Gibson faced immense criticism back home, and never gave a satisfying answer as to why he voted the way he did.
The LBJ Legend Begins
Lyndon Baines Johnson, of course, went on to win the general election in a landslide, taking 66 percent of the vote statewide.
Which means Gibson’s vote put him on a path that eventually led to the American presidency. “Johnson becomes senator, then vice president. And when Kennedy was assassinated, he became president,” Dad explained. If Johnson had lost the 1948 primary, his political career would have ended right there, probably for good.
“It’s interesting that the little old Panhandle that nobody cares about ends up casting the deciding vote,” Shaffer said.
The 1948 election is a famous one, but the Panhandle’s role in the end result had rarely been told. Shaffer and my dad met for several months to discuss how telling the story through this new lens could provide important context—not just to this integral piece of Texas history, but also to how it shaped the politics of a region.
“By using the Panhandle as the focus point, the story looks a little different than the one that has been told over and over again,” Shaffer said. “I think it gives us a much fuller image of what was taking place.”
The two political parties have definitely changed over the decades, but my dad and Shaffer both speculate about whether Amarillo and the rest of the Panhandle were actually ahead of the rest of the state when it came to adopting modern conservatism. That’s why Johnson never performed well in the area, regardless of his attempts, and that’s why Gibson’s vote was met with such surprise.
“We both feel like the Panhandle has been overlooked and ignored politically, socially, economically,” Shaffer said.
I can attest to this, having grown up in Amarillo before moving to the Metroplex area for college. Panhandle politics had always been a frequent discussion topic at our dinner table. I often felt like the city was forgotten about or left out of these types of conversations, and was visited infrequently by politicians or prominent names.
On campus, I’m reminded about the misconceptions and ignorance about our hometown again and again. I tell people where I’m from and they ask, “Where even is that?” or “Isn’t it just tumbleweeds out there?”
Maybe we do have too many tumbleweeds and definitely too much wind to blow them around. But this story shows that our region is capable of profound impact on an incredibly large scale. The history of the 1948 Texas Democratic primary and Charlie Gibson’s indelible role in it is just one clear example of the influence of the people of the Texas Panhandle.
We don’t just shape Texas history. We’ve shaped American history.
