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To Northern Virginia Democrats, 1952 will be remembered as the year victory slipped narrowly away.
In a battle between Arlingtonians in the newly created 10th Congressional District, conservative Republican Joel Broyhill defeated liberal Democrat Edmund Campbell by a scant 322 votes out of nearly 66,000 cast.
Broyhill would go on to hold the seat for 20 years, with Republicans controlling it for 60 of its first 66 years, until the Northern Virginia political tide turned decisively, and so far irrevocably, to the Democrats.
That extra-close 1952 race has left Democrats ever since wondering what might have happened had Campbell eked out the victory, rather than the other way around.
Another, lesser remembered 10th District battle probably gave Democrats at least as much heartburn.
In 1964, Democrats had their best chance in a decade to unseat Broyhill, but fell short on Election Day — in part because of intra-party infighting in Arlington and across the rest of Northern Virginia. It’s an instance of a race that Democrats definitely could have won and possibly should have won, but allowed to slip away.
The tale is seldom told, with many details lost to history. The archival record is uneven and the opponents (Broyhill and Democratic nominee Augustus “Gus” Johnson) each have been deceased since 2006.
Here is the story, much of it gleaned from records contained in the Charlie Clark Center for Local History and the Library of Virginia’s “Virginia Chronicle” newspaper archive.
1954: Where it all began
Having seen its 10 congressional districts reduced to nine after the 1930 federal census, Virginia got the 10th back in 1952 as the postwar government boom boosted population both in the D.C. suburbs and military-centric Hampton Roads area.
The redistricting that occurred after the 1950 census put the new 10th District squarely in the inner suburbs of Northern Virginia. Arlington County, the cities of Alexandria, Fairfax and Falls Church, and portions of Fairfax County all were included.
The first congressional election in the new district pitted two Arlington residents against each other. Republican Joel Broyhill, part of a family of developers, took on Democrat Edmund Campbell, an attorney who had served on the County Board.
The victory was razor-thin: Broyhill received 33,152 votes to 32,830 for Campbell. But it was enough to give Broyhill incumbency, which he used to his advantage in successive re-election bids in 1954, 1956, 1958, 1960 and 1962.
In the 1962 race, Broyhill had defeated Fairfax County Democratic Committee chair Augustus Johnson.
At the time, most watchers of politics would have expected that the next congressional race, in 1964, would play out in the shadow of a presidential contest that would see Democrat John F. Kennedy seeking re-election against a moderate Republican like Nelson Rockefeller or George Romney. But fate would intervene in Dallas, Texas.
The assassination of Kennedy all but solidified national support for the 1964 Democratic ticket. Republicans, meanwhile, opted in an acrimonious national convention in San Francisco to anoint conservative Sen. Barry Goldwater to take on Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson.
The 1964 presidential race would have profound implications for national political realignment in the decades to come. And in the 10th Congressional District, it gave Democrats an immediate opportunity: If they could tie Broyhill to Goldwater, they might have the chance to swipe the congressional seat out from under him.
That year, Broyhill would face a rematch. Democrats again opted for Gus Johnson as their nominee, crossed their fingers and began their planning.
And away we go!
It perhaps was not the most auspicious start to a congressional rematch. In the Feb. 24, 1964, edition of the Northern Virginia Sun, Gus Johnson’s re-election announcement only merited Page 2 coverage.
Perhaps that was because the 1962 results had not been super close, with Broyhill winning 49,500 and Johnson just 40,000.
In his 1964 campaign kickoff, the Democrat said he was counting on the “seeds of friendship, understanding and support planted in the 1962 campaign” to take him to victory.
The news coverage reminded voters that Johnson, then 49 years old, was a research director at Booz Allen Applied Research in Bethesda, and had just wrapped up six years as chair of the Fairfax County Democratic Committee.
It also noted that Johnson might not be the only Democratic contenter making a bid. It suggested that state Sen. Robert Fitzgerald and Del. John Scott also were mulling things over. In the end, both opted against running.
Did Johnson stand a chance?
Did Gus Johnson stand much of a chance in the 1964 race? In his “Political Grapevine” column in the May 30, 1964, Northern Virginia Sun, Phillip Sawicki laid out the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses.
“Broyhill begins with several distinct advantages,” Sawicki wrote. “One of the optimistic beliefs in the [Gus] Johnson camp is that he will benefit from a bigger turnout [than 1962] and a Democratic sweep of the nation.”
Sawicki noted that, this year, the Democratic congressional candidate would try and tie himself to President Lyndon Johnson and the liberal-leaning reforms he was pushing through Congress. Local Democrats were calling it the “Johnson & Johnson” ticket.
Sawicki suggested that the congressional candidate named Johnson would need to win over independent voters, some of whom were “just plain scared” of Goldwater’s campaign promises.
He noted that Gus Johnson seemed not to have learned to better address crowds from his 1962 experience. While Broyhill was a polished orator, Johnson speaks too fast and in the same cadence, Sawicki wrote.
But, the analyst noted, “if Johnson’s criticisms of Broyhill are valid and powerful, his delivery will matter little.”
Democrats at loggerheads
Left out of the column by Sawicki was one of the issues that would play a major role in the 1964 congressional race: internal strife among Northern Virginia Democrats.
In Arlington, conservative and liberal factions had been wrestling for control of the Arlington County Democratic Committee since the late 1950s. A succession of liberal-leaning party chairs, including Mary Marshall in 1962-63, helped move the party away from the Byrd Machine that still dominated Virginia politics.
But divisions remained, and they would be on full display at Wakefield High School on May 28, 1964.
That date marked the Arlington County Democratic Committee’s annual convention, focused less on the congressional race — Johnson already had emerged as the nominee — and more on which faction would gain more seats to the state convention and, ultimately, the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City where President Johnson would be nominated.
Described in media reports as the largest political meeting of its kind in recent Arlington history, the goal of some party leaders was to elect a “balanced and vigorous” slate to the state convention.
Gus Johnson, decidedly on the liberal flank of Northern Virginia Democrats, was offered time to rally the troops.
He said the party needed to close ranks and fight local races together.
“There will be a Democrat in the House of Representatives in this district, and you’re looking at it,” Johnson said.
Controversy arose over the requirement that voting delegates at the local convention pay a $5 filing fee. Local party chair William Graham defended the requirement, saying it would help support the congressional candidate, and urged Democrats to “dig down deep” to financially support him.
There also was confusion about what role federal-government workers could play in local politics.
Earlier in May, the U.S. Civil Service Commission had attempted to provide some clarity. It ruled that federal employees covered by the Hatch Act indeed could attend political conventions and participate in the proceedings. But the same ruling said Hatch Act-covered workers were not allowed to be involved in the “management” of a convention, which left a degree of ambiguity.
At the county convention, liberal forces pressed the case for rallying behind Gus Johnson.
“If we are going to beat Broyhill, the 10th District Committee must be a liberal and working committee,” said Nancy Graham and Mary Marshall, co-chairs of the Committee for Good Democratic Government.
Those of a more conservative bent left the local convention angered at the outcome, which had resulted in more liberal than conservative delegates being sent to the state convention set for July. Six of those conservative local delegates resigned their posts in June, calling the local results a “rigged election.”
Broyhill and his supporters were likely watching closely from the sidelines, hoping to pick off more conservative Democrats come Election Day in November.
To debate or not to debate?
The 1960 presidential campaign had been the first in history to include a series of televised debates, with Kennedy and Republican Richard Nixon squaring off. But in 1964, with a big lead from the start, President Johnson declined any debates with his Republican challenger, Barry Goldwater.
Many incumbents throughout the political arena felt similarly to LBJ about debates that they believed largely only benefited challengers. Joel Broyhill was among them, as he typically avoided being seen with his challengers throughout the years, or even making a major effort to campaign.
Voters, Broyhill believed, should judge him on his legislative record. Too often, debates turned into “a clash of personalities, a horse show, a dog fight,” the incumbent said in the spring of 1964.
That did not stop Gus Johnson from seeking a series of candidate forums. He said voters needed to hear directly from both candidates, and a debate was the only way to pin Broyhill down on his record.
“His statements have been so much more confused and misleading this year that he should welcome the opportunity” a debate would provide, Johnson told the Sun in early September.
But Broyhill stood firm. Joint appearances never transpired, and that put some civic organizations in a political pickle.
The Fairfax County Federation of Citizens Association hosted Johnson at its September 1964 meeting, drawing complaints from some representatives. The chair of the organization said Broyhill also had been invited to appear, either on the same date or in October, but had declined.
Johnson used that meeting to criticize Broyhill for traveling to California in support of U.S. Senate candidate George Murphy (who would win his race) rather than interacting with 10th District voters. He also criticized Broyhill for voting against almost all of the Johnson administration’s legislation during the year.
On the issues
Throughout the campaign, the two candidates sparred, usually via the press, on various issues.
Johnson criticized Broyhill for his stances on civil rights, foreign aid, public housing, home rule for D.C., urban renewal, the United Nations, school-construction funds and support for libraries.
The Democrat called for preservation of the Potomac River and its banks, conservation of open space and a “balance” between mass-transit and roads.
Broyhill, for his part, in October 1964 proposed an $83 million federal project for a monorail system that would connect the Pentagon to Bailey’s Crossroads, Seven Corners and Springfield.
The proposal, which came three years before establishment of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, was hailed by Broyhill supporters as another effort to support the local region.
Johnson, however, would deride the incumbent as a “hopper dropper,” a lawmaker who would propose feel-good projects without any plans to follow through.
Endorsement Time
The Northern Virginia Sun’s editorial page often followed its own course during the ownership of Herman Obermayer from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, not favoring one political party or the other.
In determining which candidate it would endorse in the 1964 congressional race, the page noted there were pluses and minuses to each candidate.
“The Democratic contender is a man of intelligence and stature. So is the Republican incumbent,” the editorial noted before examining each candidate in turn.
As for the 45-year-old Broyhill? “We have disagreed with his position on more than one issue in the past,” noted the endorsement, issued Oct. 20. In particular, the paper expressed hopes Broyhill would “re-examine his positions” on civil rights, suggesting they were too conservative for the district.
On the plus side, “on many local issues, [Broyhill] has been a leading and influential voice that has brought constructive benefits to Northern Virginia,” the endorsement noted.
The editorial acknowledged “respect and admiration” for Johnson, but said that “his record of accomplishment in the legislative process is non-existent” while Broyhill had been “involved in the tedious detail and perpetual effort” of Congress for a dozen years.
In the end, the paper advised its readers to stick with Broyhill.
To skip forward a bit, it’s worth noting that the Sun itself would stick with Broyhill all the way through the 1974 election. That year, the paper endorsed the Republican incumbent over Democratic challenger (and eventual victor) Joseph Fisher.
While the 1974 race, as in 1964, was between “two qualified men,” the paper again believed that Broyhill’s legislative experience carried the day, despite voicing concern about the incumbent’s unwillingness to debate Fisher or actively campaign.
“The scales are tipped in Joel Broyhill’s favor,” the 1974 endorsement said. “His record reflects the views of the 10th District.”
Unlike in 1964, however, the electorate of 1974 disagreed. Fisher, a member of the Arlington County Board, was elected and would serve until 1980, when he was defeated by Republican Frank Wolf.
Wolf would go on to serve for 34 years and, during his time in office, legislative boundaries would evolve and Arlington, Alexandria, Falls Church and eastern Fairfax County would move into the 8th District.
But back to the 1964 campaign.
Election Day: The time has arrived
In the Arlington County Democratic Committee’s archives held by the Charlie Clark Center for Local History at Arlington Central Library, there is a 3-foot-by-2-foot sample ballot that, based on some of the notations, was hanging in Arlington’s Glebe precinct on Election Day 1964.
That year, Virginia voters had three choices for president — LBJ, Goldwater and Socialist Labor Party candidate Eric Hass — and six challengers running very uphill battles of unseat Sen. Harry Byrd Sr., who had served in the Senate since 1933 following a four-year term as governor.
In the race for 10th District U.S. House of Representatives, there were no third-party candidates or independents. Joel Broyhill and Gus Johnson were the only ones to qualify.
Election Day arrived with some concerns, primarily on the Democratic side, of chicanery in the congressional race.
In a memo marked “confidential” and sent out to party leaders apparently just after the results were announced, Arlington County Democratic Committee chair William Graham voiced concerns about a host of purported irregularities, including misleading information sent to voters and “unusual” delays to vote in several precincts.
Graham acknowledged that the concerns were at that point merely conjecture, with no factual basis to back them up that could lead to a successful legal challenge. Trying to make the best of the situation, the party chair said Democratic leaders in the 10th District should be pleased to have come so close to victory.
“Your efforts paid off handsomely in the big gains we scored, and we have every reason to be proud of the job we did,” he wrote.
Election Day: The results are in
More than 158,000 10th District voters cast ballots in the 1964 congressional race. When they all were counted, Broyhill won 80,370 (50.7%) while Johnson garnered 78,242 (49.3%).
By locality:
- In Arlington, Broyhill took 25,579 votes to 23,730 for Johnson
- In Alexandria, Johnson won by a 12,619-to-11,744 margin
- In Falls Church, Johnson won narrowly, 1,744 to 1,705
- In the City of Fairfax, Broyhill received 2,414 to 2,183 for Johnson
- In the portion of Fairfax County that included the 10th District, Broyhill won 38,928 votes to Johnson’s 37,966
Speaking several days after the votes were in, Johnson told the press he had failed to successfuly tie Broyhill to Goldwater, who went down to defeat locally and nationally.
Johnson also told the Northern Virginia Sun he wouldn’t contest the results, even though he had some concerns about voting machines that broke down in Alexandria. And he said it was too early to tell whether he would mount a third challenge to Broyhill in 1966. (In the end, he did not.)
In early December 1964, Johnson attended the monthly meeting of the Fairfax County Democratic Committee. According to coverage by the Fairfax-Falls Church Echo, the nominee called it a “marvelous campaign” but said name recognition probably carried Broyhill to victory.
Many voters who turned out primarily for the presidential race “didn’t know one [down-ballot] candidate from the other,” Johnson said.
In his own election post-mortem, Broyhill staked out a different thesis.
He told the Northern Virginia Sun that about 25,000 Lyndon Johnson voters in the 10th District, most of whom also had voted for Democratic Sen. Harry Byrd, had split their tickets and gone Republican at the House of Representatives’ level.
Expressing himself as “surprised and disappointed” by the depth and breadth of LBJ’s win, Broyhill told the press he “never expected to buck a landslide like this one.”
He did, although some Democrats nursed lingering doubts.
Concern was raised over the results at a number of traditionally African-American precincts in Arlington, specifically the Black stronghold of the Glebe precinct.
In the presidential race, Lyndon Johnson received 1,253 votes to just 105 for Goldwater at Glebe. In the County Board contest that same day, Arlingtonians for a Better County candidate Thomas Richards received 490 votes to 59 for Republican Dr. Kenneth Haggerty.
But in the congressional race, Gus Johnson tallied 972 votes while Broyhill got 270 — still a substantial victory, but seemingly at odds with the results in the other races.
Democrats raised concerns about the result in Glebe, but in the end couldn’t provide any proof of irregularity. It simply could have been a case of name recognition of an entrenched incumbent, or perhaps efforts by Broyhill to provide strong constituent service to local residents.
The Arlington results
Arlington voters provided Broyhill with 87% of his margin of total victory across the 10th District, with turnout across 36 county precincts topping 55,000. Though up from 46,400 in 1960, it was less than expected.
The victory of incumbent Richards over Haggerty in the County Board race meant that the body remained with four members from Arlingtonians for a Better County (a stand-in for Democrats) plus one Republican.
Lyndon Johnson became the first Democratic presidential nominee to win Arlington since 1952 and the first to take Virginia since 1948. He would be the last to win the commonwealth until Barack Obama’s Virginia 2008 victory snapped 10 consecutive Virginia presidential victories.
Graham, the Arlington Democratic chair, saw positives in the Arlington vote. He said this party improved its past fortunes by 4% or 5%, while acknowledging Democrats would have done better had turnout been higher.
In one of several editorials after the dust had settled, the Northern Virginia Sun was brutal to Goldwater, saying he “did just as badly here as he did in the overwhelming majority of precincts throughout the nation.”
Of the 184 Northern Virginia precincts in 1964, Goldwater managed to win just five, all in Fairfax County.
Republicans nationally had “put their faith in a ‘hidden vote’ which only Aladdin and his magic lamp will ever be able to conjure up,” the Sun’s post-election editorial said, expressing dismay that the party of Abraham Lincoln was now openly appealing to the racist tendencies of some Southern voters.
The same editorial noted that the Republican committees of Arlington and Fairfax were now solidly in the hands of the GOP’s conservative faction, which could prove problematic in the future if they continued to be “blinded … by overzealousness.”
But it suggested that Republicans publicly held together locally while local Democrats split into factionalism, which may have helped Broyhill survive.
“Good Republicans who didn’t want Goldwater, but didn’t want to leave the party either, ‘kept their mouths shut,’ as one put it,” the editorial noted.
Remembering Johnson
How often Gus Johnson and Joel Broyhill crossed paths after their 1964 race is lost to history. Both lived until 2006, with Broyhill dying Sept. 24 at age 86 and Johnson dying Dec. 14 at 92.
Johnson had moved to Syria, Va., in 1980, according to his Washington Post obituary, serving on the Madison County Democratic Committee. He relocated to Arlington in 2005, the year his wife died, and he died in Richmond.
The 19-paragraph obituary, with a photo of Johnson meeting with President Johnson in the 1960s, noted that Gus Johnson had spent “40 years in the political trenches” where he “played a role in Northern Virginia’s turn away from the conservative political organization” led by Harry Byrd Sr.
The obituary noted the Kentucky-born Johnson’s support for Democratic presidents starting with Franklin Roosevelt. It remarked that, after his dual defeats of 1962 and 1964, Johnson retreated from the public spotlight but continued to play a role in Democratic politics behind the scenes.
Many of Johnson’s political papers are archived at Virginia Commonwealth University, but they largely span the post-1964 era. Where those earlier papers may be, if they still exist, is unknown.
Remembering Broyhill
In its obituary of Broyhill several months earlier, the Sun Gazette had noted the pugnacious side of the Republican lawmaker.
Noting his World War II service, the obituary recounted comments Broyhill made in 1970. He was not a fan of the Vietnam War, the legislator said. But had no patience with youthful war protesters.
“I know a damn sight more about war than any of those damn punks who came to Washington last week,” he said of protesters that year. “Instead of Earth Day, we need a national Shave Day and Bath Day.”
In retirement, Broyhill had stayed in touch with the politics of the region. He supported then-Del. Vincent Callahan’s bid for Congress in 1976, and was campaign manager for John Warner’s successful run for the U.S. Senate in 1978.
In a 2003 Sun Gazette profile, Callahan called Broyhill the best hands-on congressman he had ever seen.
“He set the stage for constituent service,” Callahan said. “You wrote a letter to him and got a response the next day. He did an awful lot for this region.”
Even The Post — no fan of Broyhill for most of his career — acknowledged in his obituary that the legislator had been an “institution.” But that was about the extent of its praise.
More laudatory was Sen. John Warner, for whom Broyhill had served as campaign manager in Warner’s successful first campaign in 1978.
In remarks included in the Congressional Record, Warner praised Broyhill for his “joie de vivre” and “dedication to constituent service.”
He noted that, for years after leaving office at the end of 1974, Broyhill maintained a constituent-services office at his own expense, with staff to help his former constituents.
Owing to his military service in World War II, Broyhill is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
Much of Broyhill’s political paper trail is contained in the archives at George Mason University. The repository contains 66 boxes spanning 34.25 linear feet, donated in 1985-88 by Broyhill and one of his political aides, Virginia Lampe.
Looming just over the horizon
Much of the front page of the Nov. 3, 1964 edition of the Northern Virginia Sun was devoted to the elections taking place that day at the local, state and national levels.
But below the fold was this headline: “Alexandria Officer Dies in Viet Cong Barrage.”
It reported that 40-year-old U.S. Army Maj. Thomas Whitlock of Alexandria had been killed during a mortar barrage targeting Bien Hoa airfield near Saigon, South Vietnam.
Whitlock, who had joined the Army as an enlisted man during World War II and was commissioned a second lieutenant in 1949, was an operations officer who had been in Southeast Asia since May, helping to train South Vietnamese forces in the 10-year civil war against the communist north.
Maj. Whitlock would be one of 216 American military personnel killed in South Vietnam in 1964, and one of more than 58,000 Americans to lose their lives in the conflict prior to the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975.
Leaving behind a wife, three sons and a daughter, Whitlock was one of 1,305 Virginians to die in a conflict that, on Election Day 1964, was barely on the minds of most Americans — but soon would be.
Thanks to the Charlie Clark Center for Local History and Library of Virginia for access to archival material.
