restrict imports at a level that will not be harmful to our domestic oil industry." "I know
what it is to earn a paycheck in the oil business," he boasted. Bush also told Texas
farmers that he wanted to limit the imports of foreign beef so as to protect their domestic
markets.
Yarborough's counterattack on this issue is of great relevance to understanding why Bush
was so fanatically committed to wage war in the Gulf to restore the degenerate,
slaveholding Emir of Kuwait. Yarborough pointed out that Bush's company, Zapata
Offshore, was drilling for oil in Kuwait, the Persian Gulf, Borneo, and Trinidad. "Every
producing oil well drilled in foreign countries by American companies means more cheap
foreign oil in American ports, fewer acres of Texas land under oil and gas lease, less
income to Texas farmers and ranchers..," Yarborough stated. "this issue is clear-cut in
this campaign - a Democratic senator who is fighting for the life of the free enterprise
system as exemplified by the independent oil and gas producers in Texas, and a
Republican candidate who is the contractual driller for the international oil cartel." In
those days the oil cartel did not deal mildly with those who attacked it in public. One
thinks again of the Italian oilman Enrico Mattei. For Bush, these cartel interests would
always be sacrosanct. On April 1, Bush talked of the geopolitics of oil: "I was in London
at the time of the Suez crisis and I quickly saw how the rest of the free world can become
completely dependent on American oil. When the Canal was shut down, free nations all
over the world immediately started crying for Texas oil."
Later in the campaign, Yarborough visited the town of Gladewater in East Texas. There,
standing in view of the oil derricks, Yarborough talked about Bush's ownership of
Pennzoil stock, and about Pennzoil's quota of 1,690 barrels per day of imported oil,
charging that Bush was undermining the Texas producers by importing cheap foreign oil.
Then, according to a newspaper account, "the senator spiced his charge with a reference
to the 'Sheik of Kuwait and his four wives and 100 concubines' who, he said, are living in
luxury off the oil from Bush- drilled wells in the Persian Gulf and sold at cut-rate prices
in the United States. He said that imported oil sells for $1.25 a barrel while Texas oil,
selling at $3, pays school, city, county, and federal taxes and keeps payrolls going.
Yarborough began his day of campaigning at a breakfast with supporters in Longview.
Later, in Gladewater, he said he had seen a "Bush for Senator" bumper sticker on a car in
Longview. 'Isn't that a come-down for an East Texan to be a strap-hanger for a
carpetbagger from Connecticut who is drilling oil for the Sheik of Kuwait to help keep
that harem going?'" [fn 21]
Yarborough challenged Bush repeatedly to release more details about his overseas
drilling and producing interests. He spoke of Bush's "S.A. corporations drilling in the
Persian Gulf in Asia." He charged that Bush had "gone to Latin America to incorporate
two of his companies to drill in the Far East, instead of incorporating them in the United
States." That in turn, thought Yarborough, "raises questions of tax avoidance." "Tell
them, George," he jeered, "what your 'S.A.' companies, financed with American dollars,
American capital, American resources, are doing about American income taxes." Bush