Former WWII hero, Texas senator, Dukakis Vice-Presidential candidate and Clinton Administration Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen died Tuesday in Houston. He was 85 at the time of death and had been largely out of the public eye for the past seven years or so after suffering a stroke. The Houston Chronicle story on his life is here.
Bentsen was a genuinely charming man and successful businessman who often seemed somewhat out of place in the dog-eat-dog world of politics in Texas and Washington. His political mentor was former legendary House speaker, Sam Rayburn, but Bentsen was not particularly close to the other Texas political icon of the 1950’s and 60’s, former President Lyndon B. Johnson. Most of Bentsen’s political career occurred after Johnson had left office.
Bentsen was a member of the traditional part of the Texas Democratic Party that dominated Texas politics for over a century after Reconstruction, and he re-entered politics in the early 1970’s to run against the standard-bearer of the more liberal faction of the party, Ralph Yarborough. Thus, Bentsen often sided with Republicans in political decisions, although he resisted the temptation to switch to the Republican Party as his Texas Democratic Party contemporary, former Texas Governor John Connally, did in the early 1970’s.
Bentsen’s popularity in Texas is perhaps best reflected by the fact that he won the 1988 Senate race by a large margin despite the fact that the Dukakis-Bentsen Presidential ticket lost the state to the Bush-Quayle ticket. Although Bentsen was able to help stem the demise of the Texas Democratic Party for a couple of decades, he and others in his faction of the party ultimately lost the war as the Republican Party began dominating Texas politics about the time that Bentsen retired from politics in 1994. After his retirement, Bentsen prepared an oral autobiography of his political and business career, which will remain confidential for five years after the date of his death.
A memorial service for Bentsen is tentatively scheduled for next Tuesday at First Presbyterian Church in Houston after a private graveside service at Forest Park Lawndale Cemetery.
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De mortuis nil nisi bonum and all that, but I am very happy to see you misspelled his name every time but once. Bentsen’s principal job in a dull and lackluster House career was to carry water for his father’s insurance interests. His 1970 campaign against Sen. Ralph Yarborough, the only Senator with sufficient cojones to have endorsed Sen. Eugene McCarthy for President in 1968, was the first time Nixonism had been tried in the Democratic Party. As a Senator, his somnolence rivalled that of Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. The single moment of glory he had, squelching the vacuous Sen. Dan Quayle during the Vice Presidential debate of 1988, was based on the Congressional fiction that all members of the same party are good friends of one another. Otherwise, his voting record was the opposite of then Rep. John Kennedy’s, whose friendship Bentsen claimed only after it could do him no harm. All in all, Bentsen was a fine servant of the corporate interests who put him into public life and kept him there, but the obscurity of a misspelled name in his obituary is a perfect image for his usefullness.
Thanks for the catch on the incorrect spelling of Bentsen’s name.
As for your comments about Bentsen, I find it difficult to square your observations about Bentsen’s character with what he did during WWII.
The fact that a man has an admirable war record does little to predict whether he has any political courage. Probably the inverse is true as well.
James, I agree with the observation in your reply. However, your comments about Bentsen in your initial comment go far beyond stating that he lacked political courage. That’s what I have a hard time squaring with the man’s career.
Tom-
My sense was that ‘lack of political courage’ tied together all the observations in my original comment about Bentsen’s career. I say nothing of his character or personality as I know nothing of them. But his public acts I can, and do, judge. In the House at a time when Texas Reps. Wright Patman and Henry B. Gonzales were fighting the banks and S&Ls to make home ownership more affordable, Bentsen was tending the narrow interests of the insurance industry. To say that Bentsen’s 1970 campaign employed Nixonism is a statement about technique, not character. (Those TV commercials showing Chicago Mayor Daley’s police riot as if it were antiwar suppporters’ fault, instigated by Yarborough, were particularly Nixonian.) Not that Bentsen had to be against the war. But he could have been for it in a way that followed honorable principles of discourse. And to undercut Bentsen’s line to Quayle, “John Kennedy was a friend of mine,” is again just setting the record straight. For all I know Bentsen never took bribes, never introduced a bill written by a lobbyist, nor did any of the other sleazoid acts the Tom DeLay Republican Congress has made regular, if not mandatory. But I submit to you that Lloyd Bentsen never cast a difficult vote in his life, neither in the House nor the Senate, with the possible exception of following Speaker Rayburn on the 1957 Civil Rights Act. But again, Bentsen did not lead, he followed, and most of what he followed was pretty undistinguished. Again, this is not about character, this is about policy. And I believe that is the only grounds on which politicians ought to be judged by voters.
Well, your initial comment stands, so I will let others judge as to whether you criticized his character. Suggesting that a man claimed a friendship only after it could do him no political harm is a severe indictment of character in my book.
By the way, the economic policies that Bentsen adhered to during his political career have much in common with those of John F. Kennedy. As a result, your suggestion that Bentsen had little in common with Kennedy politically is simply not accurate and makes the comment you made about Bentsen’s use of his relationship with Kennedy in the Quayle debate look all the more like an ad hominem attack.
Finally, although I concede that Bentsen’s legislative record was not distinguished, Hutchison has taken somnolent legislative behavior to a level that Bentsen could never rival. ;^)
This is where I need one of those several-thousand-dollar-per-year subscriptions to Congressional Quarterly to get them to run Kennedy’s House voting record against Bentsen’s. Confining it to economic matters, as you have suggested doing, would make things better for Bentsen by leaving out all the procedural votes leading up to final passage on civil rights. Still, it would highlight their polarity on the oil depletion allowance, not one of Bentsen’s finer moments. As for ad hominem, I still submit I have gone after what Bentsen did, not who he was. Perhaps my loathing for the deeds is so strong as to violate the old rule of “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” But it’s difficult, as you must know, to separate them. As ee cummings said, “who can tell the dancer from the dance?” And on the point of battlefield vs. political courage, US Grant and DD Eisenhower were almost inert as policy innovators. Again, if you ran Bentsen’s Senate record against Hutchisons you would not find much to choose between them in terms of inactivity, though on opposite sides of the aisle. Finally, to say a man lacks political courage is not to say he is not otherwise a decent human being, pets his dog, etc. But politically Bentsen was in a position where he had enough chips to be able to lead, and, in my view, steadfastly refused to do so. For all his personal failings as a bully and an alcoholic, Lyndon Johnson stuck his neck out for what he believed in. The Bentsen neck, never injured, was never exposed.