John Tower - Tower Quarrels With Conservatives

Tower Quarrels With Conservatives

Tower 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 by nearly 311,000 votes.

Once considered a solid conservative, Tower angered his party's right-wing when he supported the nomination of President Gerald R. Ford, Jr., as the Republican nominee in 1976 over former Governor Ronald W. Reagan of California. Reagan won every Texas delegate in the first ever Texas Republican presidential primary and four at-large delegates chosen at the state convention, but he narrowly lost the party nomination to Ford at the convention held that year in Kansas City, Missouri. Ernest Angelo, one of three co-chairmen of the 1976 Reagan campaign in Texas and a former mayor of Midland, recalls a trip to Midland by Tower in 1975. In their drive from the airport, Angelo informed Tower that he would be working in the forthcoming campaign to draft and nominate Reagan. Angelo recalls Tower as having told him that supporting Reagan would be a "dumb thing to do". At the time, all Republican U.S. senators except Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Paul Laxalt of Nevada were committed to Ford. Tower blamed Ford's defeat in Texas on "Dixiecrats... the Reagan organization, aided by former Wallace leaders, made a concerted and obviously successful effort to get the Wallace vote in the Republican primary. In addition some section of Ford's defense and foreign policy alienated some voters who may otherwise have cast their ballot for the president."

By virtue of their primary defeat, the Texas Ford supporters were shut out of the national convention in Kansas City. Angelo recalls Tower as having "begged" for a delegate slot because he was a U.S. senator and was supposed to be the Ford floor leader at the convention. Angelo said that Tower could have been a delegate if he were to support Reagan, an impossible condition for Tower because of his early commitment to President Ford. Tower hence was not a delegate to the 1976 convention because Angelo was mindful that a close convention showdown could have been decided by a handful of delegate votes. Angelo said that he always personally liked and admired Tower though they disagreed on some issues: "John was the best extemporaneous speaker and solid as a rock on most issues." Tower had campaigned for Angelo in the latter's unsuccessful race in 1968 for the Texas State Senate. As time passed though, Tower alienated the conservative wing of his party with his support for abortion and opposition to Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. Barbara Staff, the Reagan co-chairman for Dallas County and North Texas, recalls that Tower spent much of his time at the convention with the closely divided Mississippi delegation and did not address the phalanx of Reagan backers in his own state's delegation. Among the Reagan backers was Betty Andujar of Fort Worth, the first Republican woman to serve in the State Senate.

Tower developed a close relationship with John McCain, who was then a Navy liaison to the Senate. Tower was instrumental in helping McCain win his first election, by raising money and obtaining support from Arizona Republicans. However, the two were never Senate colleagues; Tower left the Senate two years before McCain entered the upper chamber.