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'essentially his own, that for him there was no Prescott Bush to secure lines of credit or to procures career that his victories and defeats were (^)
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 w1956. Then, when Senator (and former governor) Price Daniel resigned his seat, Yarborough were turned back in 1954 aasnd
finally victorious in a special election. He had then been re-elected to the Senate for a full term in
1958.
Yarborough whad entered the Senate, he was one of only five southern senators (including LBJ) to vote for theas distinguished first of all for his voting record on civil rights. Just months after he
watershed Civil Rights Act of 1957. In 1960, Yarborough was one of four southern senators- again
including LBJ- who cast votes in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1960. Yarborough would be the
lone senator from the eleven states formerly composing the Confederate States of America to vote
for the 1964 civil rights bill, the most sweeping since Reconstruction. This is the bill which, as wewill see, provided Bush with the ammunition for one of the principal themes of his 1964 election
attacks. Later, Yarborough would be one of only three southern senators supporting the Voting
Rights Act of 1965, and one of four supporting the 1968 open housing bill. [fn 5]
After Yarborough haconcede that "his name is probably attached to more legislation than that of any other senator ind left the Senate, his bitter enemies at the Dallas Morning News felt obliged to
Texas history." Yarborough had become the chairman of the Senate Committee on Labor and
Public Welfare. Here his lodestar was infrastructure, infrastructure in the form of education and
infrastructure in the form of physical improvements.
In education, Yarborough was either the author or a leading supporter of virtually every important
piece of legislation to become law between 1958 and 1971, including some nine major bills. As a
freshman senator, Yarborough was the co-author of the National Defense Education Act of 1958,
which was the basis for federal aid to education, particularly to higher education.
Under the provisions of NDEA, a quarter of a million students were at any given time enabled to
pursue undergraduate training with low-cost loans and other benefits. For graduate students, there
were three-year fellowships that paid tuition and fees plus grants for living expenses in the amount
of $2200, $2400, and $2600 over the three years--an ample sum in those days. Yarborough also
sponsored bills for medical education, college classroom construction, vocational education, aid tothe mentally retarded, and library facilities. Yarborough's Bilingual Education Bill provided special (^)
federal funding for schools with large numbers of students from non-English speaking backgrounds.
Some of these points were outlined by Yarborough during a campaign speech of September 18,
1964, with the title "Higher Education as it relates to our national purpose."
As chairman of the veterans' subcommittee, Yarborough authored the Cold War GI Bill of Rights,
which sought to extend the benefits accorded veterans of World War II and Korea, and which was
to apply to servicemen on duty between January, 1955 and July 1, 1965. For these veterans
Yarborough proposed readjustment assistance, educational and vocational training, and loan
assistance to allow veterans to purchase homes and farms at a maximum interest rate of 5.25% per