John Tower
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John Goodwin Tower (September 29, 1925 – April 5, 1991) was the first Republican United States senator from Texas since the Reconstruction after the Civil War. He served in the Senate from 1961 until his retirement in January 1985, after which he was the chairman of the Reagan-appointed Tower Commission that investigated the Iran-Contra Affair.
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Early life
Tower was born September 29, 1925, to Joe and Beryl Tower in Houston, Texas. His father was a Methodist minister. Tower traveled where his father pastored, attending public schools in East Texas and graduating in Beaumont, Texas, in the spring of 1942. He was active in politics as a child; at the age of 13 he passed out handbills for the campaign of liberal Democrat and future senator Ralph Yarborough while Yarborough was running for attorney general. Yarborough and Tower would later be paired as Texas's Senate delegation, though of opposing political perspectives. He entered Southwestern University that same year in Georgetown, Texas, and met future president and political opponent Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1942 on a campus visit while Johnson was the local congressman.
Tower left school in the summer of 1943 to serve in the Pacific theater during World War II on an amphibious gunboat. He returned to Texas after the war in 1946, discharged as a seaman first class, and completed his undergraduate courses at Southwestern University, graduating in 1948 with a B.A. in political science. Tower worked as a radio announcer for a country music station in Taylor, Texas, east of Austin during and for some time after college.
In 1949 he moved to Dallas and attended graduate courses at Southern Methodist University, working part-time as an insurance agent. He left SMU in 1951 and entered academia as an assistant professor at Midwestern University (now Midwestern State University) in Wichita Falls, Texas. In 1952 and 1953 he pursued graduate coursework at the London School of Economics and conducted field research on the organization of the Conservative Party of the United Kingdom. His research was presented in his master's thesis, The Conservative Worker in Britain. He received his M.A. from Southern Methodist University in 1953. While a professor at Midwestern University, Tower met Lou Bullington, whom he married in 1952. Lou, a California native, was the organist at Tower's church. She was five years his senior.
Early political career
Although raised a Southern Democrat, Tower became a Republican in college around 1951. He rose quickly through the ranks of the Texas Republican party; he was the Republican candidate for representative to the Texas Legislature for the Eighty-First district in 1954, though he lost, and in 1956, he was a delegate to the Republican National Convention. In the 1956 presidential election, Tower was a campaign manager for the Eisenhower campaign in the 23rd Senatorial District. In 1960, he was prominent enough to be chosen in the state convention held in McAllen as the Republican candidate for the United States Senate against Lyndon Johnson. Tower seemed the natural choice for the nomination. The only viable, prominent candidates for the seat other than Tower were Thad Hutcheson, the Republican candidate for Texas's other Senate seat in a special election in 1957 and Bruce Alger of Dallas, the only Republican congressman from Texas at the time. Both were uninterested. Johnson, the incumbent senator and famous nationwide as the Senate Majority Leader, won the election against Tower. He was also seeking the vice presidency in the same election. Tower polled 927,653 votes (41.1 percent) to Johnson's 1,306,605 votes (58 percent). Tower was supported by prominent Democratic former Governor Coke Stevenson, the loser by 87 votes to LBJ in the 1948 Democratic Senate primary runoff.
Johnson became Vice President for John F. Kennedy, and Governor Price Daniel, Sr., appointed fellow Democrat William A. Blakley of Dallas to the seat, pending a special election to be held in May 1961. Blakley, a conservative Democrat, had also been appointed by Daniel in 1957 to succeed Daniel in the Senate when Daniel became governor. Considerable numbers of liberal Texas Democrats opposed the conservative Blakely and did not turn out to the polls. The conservative vote was divided. Texas conservatives, traditionally "Yellow Dog Democrats," had already voted for Republicans in the 1950s, when Democrat Governor Allan Shivers had aligned with Dwight Eisenhower over the national Democratic candidate Adlai E. Stevenson.
In his second Senate campaign in a matter of months, Tower charged that the national Democratic Party, represented by John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, was far to the left of typical Texas Democrats. The initial round of voting in the special election gave Tower 327,308 votes (30.9 percent) to Blakely's 191,818 (18.1 percent). The other contenders were Democrats Jim Wright, a congressman from Fort Worth and a future U.S. House Speaker, 171,328 (16.2 percent), state Attorney General Will Wilson (who later became a Republican and served in the Nixon Justice Department), 121,961 (11.5 percent), former state representative and liberal lawyer and columnist Maury Maverick, Jr., of San Antonio, 104,922 (9.9 percent), and then state senator and future Congressman Henry B. Gonzalez, also of San Antonio, 97,659 (9.2 percent). There were some 65 other candidates, enticed by a filing fee at the time of only $50 for special elections, who polled a total of 4.2 percent of the vote. Tower went on to win the special election runoff against Blakley and became the first Republican senator from Texas and from the former Confederacy since Reconstruction. The final total was 448,217 votes (50.6 percent) for Tower and 437,872 (49.4 percent) for Blakely, a margin of 10,343.
In the Senate
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Tower voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 but this didn't stop him from being reelected three times - in 1966, 1972, and 1978. He later expressed his regret for having opposed the 1964 law. In 1966, Tower defeated Democratic Attorney General Waggonner Carr (another later convert to the Republican Party, 842,501 (56.7 percent) to 643,855 (43.3 percent). Tower's victory was most impressive, but he lost the majority of Texas's rural districts. He won every county that cast more than 10,000 votes except for McLennan County (Waco). In numerous counties, the 1961 or the 1966 Tower election was the first in which that county had voted for a Republican candidate.
In 1972, Tower defeated a former Dallas federal judge with an unusual name, Harold "Barefoot" Sanders, 1,822,877 (54.7 percent of two-party vote) to 1,511,948 (45.3 percent of two-party vote). There were more than 79,000 votes cast for others. Several of the "Democrats for Nixon" organizers in Texas, such as former Congressman Joe Kilgore, made it clear that they were Sanders supporters for the Senate. Sanders ran far ahead of Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern in the state.
In 1978, Tower had a very close call in a most hard-fought campaign. He edged out Democratic Congressman Robert Krueger of New Braunfels in Comal County, 1,151,376 (50.3 percent of two-party vote) to 1,139,149 (49.7 percent of two-party vote). Tower's plurality over Krueger was 12,227 votes, but because there were another 22,015 votes cast for others, Tower prevailed with less than 50 percent of the total vote. This was the campaign in which an irate Tower refused to shake Krueger's hand at a candidate forum on grounds that his opponent had spread mistruths about Tower's personal life. (Robert Krueger later served in the Senate on an interim appointment from Governor Ann Richards from January to June 1993.)
In the Senate, Tower was assigned to two major committees: the Labor and Public Welfare Committee and the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. Tower left the Labor and Public Welfare Committee in 1964, though in 1965 he was named to the important Armed Services Committee, in which he served until his retirement. He was chairman of the Armed Services Committee from 1981 to 1984. Tower also served on the Joint Committee on Defense Production from 1963 until 1977 and on the Senate Republican Policy Committee in 1962 and from 1969 until 1984. Tower served as chairman of the latter from 1973 until his retirement from the Senate.
As a member and later chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Tower was a strong proponent of modernizing the armed forces. In the Banking and Currency Committee, he was a champion of small businesses and worked to improve the national infrastructure and financial institutions. Tower supported Texas economic interests, working to improve the business environment of the energy, agricultural, and fishing and maritime sectors.
Though Tower and President Johnson were political rivals, Tower offered support to Johnson on Vietnam. Johnson often invited Tower to fly back to Texas with him on Air Force One. Johnson, in one of his occasional moods of melancholy, once told Tower that he had given him more support on the war than the whole Democratic party had done.
Tower broke with many conservatives by his support of abortion rights. He quarreled with State Senator Henry Grover of Houston, the 1972 Republican gubernatorial nominee, to such an extent that the intraparty divisions may have contributed to Grover's 100,000-vote defeat by Democrat Dolph Briscoe even as Tower was winning a third Senate term over the Democrat Sanders by nearly 311,000 ballots.
Tower also angered conservatives by his support of the nomination of Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr., as president in 1976 over former California Governor Ronald W. Reagan. Reagan won every Texas delegate in the first ever Texas Republican presidential primary but narrowly lost the party nomination to Ford at the convention held that year in Kansas City.
Retirement
Tower retired from the Senate on January 3, 1985 after 24 years in office. Tower continued to be involved in national politics, advising the campaigns of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Two weeks after his resignation from the Senate, Tower was named chief United States negotiator at the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks in Geneva, demonstrating an effective handling of the technical issues of arms reduction. Tower resigned from this office in 1987, and for a time was a distinguished professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, from which he had received his M.A. He became a consultant with Tower, Eggers, and Greene Consulting from 1987 to 1991.
In November 1986, President Reagan asked Tower to chair the President's Special Review Board to study the action of the National Security Council and its staff during the Iran-Contra Affair. The Board, which became known as the Tower Commission, issued its report on February 26, 1987. The report was highly critical of the Reagan Administration and of the National Security Council's dealings with both Iran and the Nicaraguan Contras.
In 1989, Tower was President George H. W. Bush's choice to become Secretary of Defense, but the Senate did not confirm his nomination after much contentious debate and testimony. Critics claimed he had too many ties to defense contractors. There were also extensive reports during the time that his nomination was being considered that Tower habitually abused alcohol and was "known" as a womanizer. One of Tower's leading critics was Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn, a Georgia Democrat. Instead, Tower was named chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
Tower was killed at the age of 65 in the crash of Atlantic Southeast Airlines Flight 2311 in Brunswick, Georgia, in 1991. His middle daughter, Marian, also died in the crash.
Some conspiracy theorists hold that Tower's plane crash and John Heinz' the day before in Pennsylvania were connected to their Iran-Contra investigation.
John Tower and his daughter are buried together in the family plot at the Sparkman-Hillcrest Memorial Park Cemetery in Dallas, Texas. His personal and political life are chronicled in his autobiography, Consequences: A Personal and Political Memoir, published the year of his death.
John and Lou Tower had three children during their years in Wichita Falls: Penny, born in 1954, Marian, born in 1955, and Jeanne, born in 1956. They were divorced in 1976, and Senator Tower married Lila Burt Cummings in 1977. John and Lila Tower were divorced in 1987, and she died thereafter. As Lila lay near death from cancer, she refused to accept flowers sent to her by John Tower, according to Tower's former assistant Ken Towery.
Lou Bullington Tower died at the age of 81 in a Dallas hospital in August 2001, with her two surviving daughters at her side. She is also buried in Hillcrest Memorial Park. The personable Lou Tower was widely credited with having helped John Tower win his early Senate races. Her obituary said that she was preceded in death by her parents and several other individuals, including "Senator John Tower," with no mention of Tower as her ex-husband.