George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

Yarborough served in the US Army ground forces during World War II, and was a
member of the only division which took part in the postwar occupation of Germany as
well as in MacArthur's administration of Japan. When he left the military in 1946 he had
attained the rank of lieutenant colonel. It clear from an overview of Yarborough's career
that his victories and defeats were essentially his own, that for him there was no Prescott
Bush to secure lines of credit or to procure important posts by telephone calls to bigwigs
in freemasonic networks.
Yarborough had challenged Allan Shivers in the governor's contest of 1952, and had
gone down to defeat. Successive bids for the state house in Austin by Yarborough were
turned back in 1954 and 1956. Then, when Senator (and former governor) Price Daniel
resigned his seat, Yarborough was finally victorious in a special election. He had then
been re-elected to the Senate for a full term in 1958.
Yarborough was distinguished first of all for his voting record on civil rights. Just months
after he had entered the Senate, he was one of only five southern senators (including LBJ)
to vote for the watershed Civil Rights Act of 1957. In 1960, Yarborough was one of four
southern senators- again including LBJ- who cast votes in favor of the Civil Rights Act of
1960. Yarborough would be the lone senator from the eleven states formerly composing
the Confederate States of America to vote for the 1964 civil rights bill, the most sweeping
since Reconstruction. This is the bill which, as we will see, provided Bush with the
ammunition for one of the principal themes of his 1964 election attacks. Later,
Yarborough would be one of only three southern senators supporting the Voting Rights
Act of 1965, and one of four supporting the 1968 open housing bill. [fn 5]
After Yarborough had left the Senate, his bitter enemies at the Dallas Morning News felt
obliged to concede that "his name is probably attached to more legislation than that of
any other senator in Texas history." Yarborough had become the chairman of the Senate
Committee on Labor and Public Welfare. Here his lodestar was infrastructure,
infrastructure in the form of education and infrastructure in the form of physical
improvements.
In education, Yarborough was either the author or a leading supporter of virtually every
important piece of legislation to become law between 1958 and 1971, including some
nine major bills. As a freshman senator, Yarborough was the co-author of the National
Defense Education Act of 1958, which was the basis for federal aid to education,
particularly to higher education.
Under the provisions of NDEA, a quarter of a million students were at any given time
enabled to pursue undergraduate training with low-cost loans and other benefits. For
graduate students, there were three-year fellowships that paid tuition and fees plus grants
for living expenses in the amount of $2200, $2400, and $2600 over the three years--an
ample sum in those days. Yarborough also sponsored bills for medical education, college
classroom construction, vocational education, aid to the mentally retarded, and library
facilities. Yarborough's Bilingual Education Bill provided special federal funding for
schools with large numbers of students from non-English speaking backgrounds. Some of