John Tower - Rise To The Senate

Rise To The Senate

Although reared as a Southern Democrat, Tower became a Republican in college about 1951. He rose quickly through the ranks of the Texas Republican Party; he was an unsuccessful candidate for representative to the Texas Legislature for the 81st district in 1954. He was a delegate to the 1956 Republican National Convention. In the 1956 presidential election, he was the campaign manager for Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 23rd Senatorial District. In 1960, he was chosen by the state convention held in McAllen in Hidalgo County, as the Republican candidate for the United States Senate against Lyndon Johnson. Two other Republicans mentioned for the senatorial nomination, Thad Hutcheson, who had sought Texas' other Senate seat in a special election in 1957, and Bruce Alger, the only Republican congressman from Texas at the time, were both uninterested.

Johnson, the incumbent senator and famous nationwide as the Senate Majority Leader, won the election against Tower. As John F. 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 of Junction, the loser by 87 votes to Johnson in the 1948 Democratic Senate primary runoff. Tower polled 927,653 votes (41.1 percent) to Johnson's 1,306,605 votes (58 percent), better than Republicans usually fared in Texas at that time.

Johnson became Vice President, and Governor Price Daniel, Sr., appointed fellow Democrat William A. Blakley of Dallas to Johnson's Senate 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 was elected governor. Considerable numbers of liberal Texas Democrats opposed the conservative Blakely and did not vote. The conservative vote was divided. Texas conservatives, traditionally "yellow dog Democrats", had already voted for Republicans in the 1950s, when Democratic Governor Allan Shivers had aligned with Eisenhower, rather than the national Democratic candidate Adlai E. Stevenson, in a movement that was jokingly called "Shivercrats".

In his second Senate campaign in a matter of months, Tower charged that the national Democratic Party, represented by Kennedy and 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 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 sixty-five 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 runoff against Blakley. His election was historic: (1) first Republican U.S. senator from Texas since Reconstruction, (2) third Republican from the former Confederacy since Reconstruction, (3) first Republican from a former Confederate state since Newell Sanders of Tennessee left office in 1913 (a gap of forty-eight years), and (4) first Republican from the former Confederacy ever to win popular election. 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 ballots.