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John Paul Jones, a tall, firm-jawed World War II Navy officer, told what happened in northeastern Texas' Rusk County: "By majority vote I was elected one of the delegates to the state convention. A resolution endorsing Dwight D. Eisenhower and instructing the state convention delegates to vote in his favor was seconded by [County Chairman] Joe Compton and carried by 13 t01 ... There was no walkout—no rump convention . . . Later that week, Compton, a longtime friend of Henry Zweifel's, received instructions to file a false return on that convention, naming a Taft slate of delegates and claiming a resolution had been passed endorsing Taft. When Compton was placed under oath before the state executive committee, he admitted that he had participated in the convention that endorsed Eisenhower, and he admitted that no other county conventions had been held, yet the state executive committee voted 39 to 19 to seat his 'dream' delegation."
One-Man Convention. Houston Lawyer Malcolm McCorquodale reported on Brazos County in southeast Texas. Said he: "The county chairman was a Zweifel henchman. He looked over these delegates and he saw he was going to get outvoted, so he just refused to call the meeting to order . . . He ran the delegates off the premises, held a county convention all by himself, elected himself delegate to Mineral Wells; he was seated at Mineral Wells, and cast the entire five votes for the county himself . . ."
When their turn came, the Taft forces called no Texans before the national committee. Three lawyers presented the case and bore down hard on the Taft argument: the Texas precinct conventions had been packed with Democrats, whose real motive was to trick Republicans into nominating a candidate who couldn't win.
The Taftmen did not try to prove that individual Ike supporters were, in fact, Democrats. The national committee simply accepted their general assertions that this was the case. On that point, former Representative Ben Guill, the only Texas Republican elected to Congress in the past 20 years, had a sharp comment. Said Ikeman Guill: "The people who attended those conventions conformed with the election code of Texas; they sent the declarations saying T am a Republican.' They did it in good faith, and I don't know how in the name of heaven the state committee down at Mineral Wells could take that list of fine Texas people and go down that list and say: 'This man is a liar; this man is a Republican; the next 25 people are liars; that is a Republican; the next 100 are liars; or here is a Republican.' "
When all the testimony and argument were in, the national committee's Taft majority landed its final blow on the Ikemen's heads. The vote: 60-41 to split Texas 22 for Taft and 16 for Eisenhower, exactly as Candidate Taft had suggested in his letter.