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
irritation to the New York banking community, and Tom Clark, who was Attorney
General under Truman and who later went on to the US Supreme Court, and whose son,
Ramsay Clark, has been distinguished by his denunciation of the war crimes of the Bush
regime in the Gulf war of 1991. A later generation of this same circle was represented by
former Speaker of the House Jim Wright, who was hounded from office during the first
year of George Bush's Presidential tenure, and by Congressman Henry Gonzalez.
Gonzalez stands out as one of the very few of the old Texas populist Democrats left in
elected office today. Gonzalez has put new luster on the time-honored maverick tradition
by offering a bill of impeachment for Ronald Reagan in the wake of the Iran-contra
revelations of 1986, more recently by submitting a bill for the impeachment of George
Bush for his illegal conduct of Operation Desert Shield, and by raising his voice as first
in the Congress for the cause of humanity against genocide with a call for the lifting of
the economic sanctions against Iraq to prevent the needless slaughter of hundreds of
thousands of children after the bombing campaign had ended. And even today there are