The result of the successful application of the Southern Strategy in 1968 and in the
following years has been a a period of more than two decades of one-party Republican
control over the Executive Branch, of which George Bush personally has been the
leading beneficiary, first through his multiple appointments, then through the vice-
presidency, and now through the possession of the White House itself. This has had the
decisive structural consequence of making possible the kind of continuous, entrenched
bureaucratic power that we see in the Bush regime and its leading functionaries. As we
will see, such administrators of the corporate state as James Baker and Brent Scowcroft,
for whom the exercise of executive power has long since become a way of life, appear to
themsleves and to others as immune to the popular reckoning. The democratic republic
requires the moment of catharsis, of throwing the bums out, if the arrogance of the
powerful is ever to be chastened. If there is no prospect for the White House changing
hands, this amounts to a one- party state. The southern Republican Party, including two-
party Texas, has provided the Republican lock on the White House which has proven a
mighty stimulus to those tendencies towards authoritarian and even totalitarian rule
which have culminated in the Administrative Fascism of the current Bush regime.
Bush's opponent in that Goldwater year of 1964 was Senator Ralph Webster Yarborough.
Yarborough had been born in Chandler, Texas in 1903 as the seventh of eleven children.
He attended public schools in Chandler and Tyler, worked on a farm, and went on to
attend Sam Houston State Teachers College and, for one year, the US Military Academy
at West Point. He was a member of the 36th division of the Texas National Guard, in
which he advanced from private to sergeant. After World War I he worked a passage to
Europe on board a freighter, and found a job in Germany working in the offices of the
American Chamber of Commerce in Berlin. He also pursued studies in Stendahl,
Germany. He returned to the United States to earn a law degree at the University of
Texas in 1927, and worked as a lawyer in El Paso. At one point he found a job as a
harvest hand in the Oklahoma dust bowl of the late 1920's, and also served a stint as a
roughneck in the oil fields. Yarborough entered public service as an Assistant Attorney
General of Texas from 1931 to 1934. After that, he was a founding director of the Lower
Colorado River Authority, a major water project in central Texas, and was then elected as
a district judge in Austin.
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.