The Mudd Man­u­script Library recently acquired an extremely inter­est­ing col­lec­tion from a little-noted event in polit­i­cal history.

Werner’s 1944 memo explain­ing the dis­cov­ery of fraud­u­lent bonuses to Brown & Root exec­u­tives. The actual recip­i­ent of these funds was deter­mined to be the Lyn­don B. John­son 1941 U.S. Sen­ate campaign.

Between 1942 and 1944, Elmer Charles Werner led an Inter­nal Rev­enue Ser­vice inves­ti­ga­tion of Brown & Root’s* covert finan­cial sup­port of then U.S. Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Lyn­don B. Johnson’s failed 1941 U.S. Sen­ate cam­paign. Accord­ing to Werner’s records, this inves­ti­ga­tion was impeded and even­tu­ally ter­mi­nated by a com­pli­cated series of requests from John­son to Roosevelt’s White House to senior IRS officials.

This col­lec­tion includes Werner’s diaries from 1942–1945 (the period dur­ing which John­son was inves­ti­gated); Werner’s notes and news­pa­per clip­pings regard­ing the case; a chronol­ogy of the facts of the case pre­pared by Werner; and Werner’s man­u­script nar­ra­tive regard­ing his expe­ri­ences which he enti­tled “How High Can an Income Tax Fix Go?”

Many years before their trans­mit­tal to Mudd, these records were cen­tral sources for a chap­ter in Robert A. Caro’s book The Years of Lyn­don John­son: The Path to Power (1981). There, Caro explains how Johnson’s con­nec­tions to the Roo­sevelt White House pre­vented the IRS inves­ti­ga­tion from explor­ing the full scope of Brown & Root’s secret con­tri­bu­tions to the John­son campaign.

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