announcment' of the ARA loan to Audio guaranteed the firm's soundness, several Texans
invested in it and lost all. One man dropped $40,000. A retired Air Force officer plowed
in $7000." It turned out in reality that those who had invested in the real estate for the
plant site had lost nothing, but had rather been made an offer for their land that
represented a profit of one third on the original investment, and thus stood to gain
substantially.
Bush campaign headquarters immediately got into the act with a statement that "it is a
shame" that Texans had to pick up the Reader's Digest and find their senator "holding the
hand of scandal." "The citizens of the area raised $60,000 in cash, invested it in the
company, and lost it because the project was a fraud and never started." Yarborough shot
back with a statement of his own, pointing out that Bush's claims were "basely false," and
adding that the "reckless, irresponsible false charges by my opponent further demonstrate
his untruthfulness and unfitness for the office of US Senator." Most telling was
Yarborough's charge on how the Reader's Digest got interested in Crockett, Texas, in the
first place: "The fact that my opponent's multi-millionaire father's Wall Street investment
banking connections enable the planting of false and libellous articles about me in
national magazine like the Reader's Digest will not enable the Connecticut candidate to
buy a Texas seat in the US Senate." That was on target, that hurt. Bush whined in
response that it was Yarborough's statement which was "false, libellous, and hogwash,"
and challenging the senator to prove it or retract it. [fn 17]
Beyond these attempts to smear Yarborough, it is once again characteristic that the
principal issue around which Bush built his campaign was racism, expressed this time as
opposition to the civil rights bill that was before the Congress during 1964. Bush did this
certainly in order to conform to his pro-Goldwater ideological profile, and in order to
garner votes (especially in the Republican primary) using racist and states' rights
backlash, but most of all in order to express the deepest tenets of the philosophical world-
outlook of himself and his oligarchical family.
Very early in the campaign Bush issued a statement saying: "I am opposed to the Civil
Rights bill now before the Senate." Not content with that, Bush proceeded immediately to
tap the wellsprings of nullification and interposition: "Texas has a comparably good
record in civil rights," he argued, "and I'm opposed to the Federal Government
intervening further into State affairs and individual rights." At this point Bush claimed
that his quarrel was not with the entire bill, but rather with two specific provisions, which
he claimed had not been a part of the original draft, but which he hinted had been added
to placate violent black extremists. According to his statement of March 17, "Bush
pointed out that the original Kennedy Civil Rights bill in 1962 did not contain provisions
either for a public accomodations section or a Fair Employment Practices Commission
(FEPC) section." "Then, after the hot, turbulent summer of 1962, when it became
apparent that in order to get the Civil Rights leaders' support and votes in the 1964
election something more must be done, these two bad sections were added to the bill,"
according to Bush. "I suggest that these two provisions of the bill-- which I most heatedly
oppose -- were politically motivated and are cynical in their approach to a most serious
problem." But soon abandoned this hair-splitting approach, and on March 25 he told the