George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

openings. In 1952 and 1956, Texas Democratic Governor Allan Shivers supported
Eisenhower, who carried Texas with a substantial majority both times. In 1960, Texas
had given its electoral votes to Kennedy, although the margin of Democratic victory was
so thin as to constitute an embarrassment to Kennedy's running mate, Texas Senator and
Democratic Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson. But Nixon had carried the city of
Houston and Harris County, which turned out to be the largest metropolitan area to go for
the Nixon-Lodge ticket that year. In 1960, Texas Republicans scored their greatest
success in a century by elected John Tower to the US Senate on a platform that was a
harbinger of the Goldwater movement. Tower was once asked if there was a single
domestic legislative program of John F. Kennedy that he could support, and his answer
was that he could not think of a single one. This is the same Tower who would join with
Edmund Muskie and Brent Scowcroft in early 1987 to concoct the absurd whitewash of
the Iran- contra affair that would exonerate Bush and attribute the central responsibility to
White House chief of Staff Don Regan, forcing his ouster. This was the same Tower
whose nomination by Bush to the post of Secretary of Defense would be derailed by
accusation of alcoholism and womanizing, followed by Tower's death in a mysterious
airplane crash in early 1991.
The Texas Democratic Party was divided in those days into two wings which fought each
other in the Democratic primaries, which were often tantmount to election. One of these
wings was called liberal and was identified above all with Bush's opponent, Senator
Ralph Yarborough. The "liberal" here is largely a misnomer; more accurate would be
populist, but populist ennobled by the revival of the classic nineteenth century American
system that occurred in Texas during Franklin D. Roosevelt's World War II mobilization,
when dirigist recovery policies pulled the Texas economy out of a stagnation that had its
roots in the failure of post-1865 econstruction. The strong suits of these populist
Democrats were education and infrastructure-- a good first approximation of the actual
business of government.
The other wing was called conservative, and was grouped around figures like Allan
Shivers and LBJ's protege John Connally, with whom Bush has had a history of
alternating stretches of conflict and moments of rapprochement. LBJ himself was close to
the Shivers-Connally group. The typical figure here is Connally, the governor who was
wounded in Dealey Plaza in Dallas the day that Kennedy was killed, and who later went
on the join the Nixon Administration as the Secretary of the Treasury who approved the
abolition of the post-1944 Bretton Woods gold reserve standard in Camp David on
August 15, 1971. Connally subsequently played out the logic of becoming not just a
Republican, but indeed a Republican presidential candidate, and of clashing with George
Bush once or twice in the snows of New Hampshire in 1979-80.
The Texas Democratic Party also contained an array of personalities of national
importance whose positive traits are part of what has been lost in the descent into today's
crisis: call them populists, call them the post-New Deal or the post-Fair Deal, but do not
mistake the fact that they were better for the country than their successors. These were
politicians like the legendary Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn, Congressman Wright
Patman of the House Banking Committee, who was a source of continuing populist