US senator, born in Houston, Texas, USA. He served in the navy during World War 2 and then studied at the London School of Economics. He was the first Republican ever elected to the US Senate from Texas (196185). He specialized in defence matters, was chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and chaired the Iran-Contra investigation (19867). In 1989 he was nominated for secretary of defence, but his nomination was rejected by the Senate after allegations of alcoholism and womanizing, charges he vigorously denied. He died in an aeroplane crash.
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.
Early life, education, and military
Tower was born September 29, 1925, to Joe and Beryl Tower in Houston. Tower traveled where his father pastored, attending public schools in East Texas and graduating in Beaumont, in the spring of 1942. Yarborough and Tower would later be paired as Texas's Senate delegation, though of opposing political perspectives.
Tower left school in the summer of 1943 to serve in the Pacific theater during World War II on an amphibious gunboat. Tower worked as a radio announcer for a country music station in Taylor, east of Austin during and for some time after college. While a professor at Midwestern University, Tower met Lou Bullington, whom he married in 1952.
Family life
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. John and Lila Tower were divorced in 1987, and she died thereafter. As the embittered 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.
Early political career
Although raised a Southern Democrat, Tower became a Republican in college around 1951. In the 1956 presidential election, Tower was a campaign manager for the Eisenhower campaign in the 23rd Senatorial District. 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.
Johnson, the incumbent senator and famous nationwide as the Senate Majority Leader, won the election against Tower. As Kennedy's running mate, Johnson was also seeking the Vice Presidency in the same election and Tower's campaign slogan was "double your pleasure, double your fun —vote against Johnson two times, not one." Tower was supported by prominent Democratic former Governor Coke Stevenson, the loser by 87 votes to LBJ in the 1948 Democratic Senate primary runoff. Tower polled 927,653 votes (41.1 percent) to Johnson's 1,306,605 votes (58 percent).
In his second Senate campaign in a matter of months, Tower charged that the national Democratic Party, represented by John F. 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).
Tower went on to win the special election runoff against Blakley. 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
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. 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. 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). In that 1972 race, Tower clashed with gubernatorial nominee Henry Grover of Houston;
In 1978, Tower had a very close call in a most hard-fought campaign. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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.
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.
In 1989, Tower was President George H. Others, including the conservative organizer Paul Weyrich, accused Tower (accurately, the evidence suggests) of having been involved in extramarital affairs and heavy drinking. 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.
Death
On April 5, 1991, Tower was killed along with 23 other people in the crash of Atlantic Southeast Airlines Flight 2311 on approach for landing at Brunswick, Georgia. Coincidentally, U.S. Senator John Heinz died in a plane crash in Pennsylvania one day prior to Tower's death.
John Tower and his daughter are buried together in the family plot at the Sparkman-Hillcrest Memorial Park Cemetery in Dallas, Texas.
Lou Bullington Tower died at the age of 81 in a Dallas hospital in August 2001, with her two surviving daughters at her side. 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.
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