Senate on a platform that was a harbinger of the Goldwater movement. Tower was once asked if
there was a single domestic legislative program of John F. Kennedy that he could support, and hisanswer was that he could not think of a single one. This is the same Tower who would join with
Edmund Muskie and Brent Scowcroft in early 1987 to concoct the absurd whitewash of the Iran-
contra affair that would exonerate Bush and attribute the central responsibility to White House chief
of Staff Don Regan, forcing his ouster. This was the same Tower 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 opponehere is largely a misnomer; more accurate would be populist, but populist ennobled by the revivalnt, Senator Ralph Yarborough. The "liberal"
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 fiactual business of government. rst approximation of the
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. Tfigure here is Connally, the governor who was wounded in Dealey Plaza in Dallas the day thathe typical
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 Bushonce 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 betterfor 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 Bushregime in the Gulf war of 1991. A later generation of this same circle was represented by form (^) er
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-honorein the wake of the Iran-contra revelations of 1986, md maverick tradition by offeore recently by submitting a bill for thering a bill of impeachment for Ronald Reagan
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 still others of thistradition left in positions of key influence: for example, Congressman Jack Brooks of the ninth (^)
district of Texas, the salty chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who dared to subpoena
Attorney General Richard Thornburgh to appear before his committee with a ducis tecum of the
documents of the Department of Justice theft of computer software in the Inslaw case.