Overton Brooks - Political Career

Political Career

Brooks succeeded John Nicholas Sandlin, Sr., a fellow Democrat from Minden, the seat of Webster Parish. Rather than seek reelection to the House, Sandlin ran unsuccessfully in the 1936 Democratic primary against Allen J. Ellender for an open seat in the U.S. Senate.

In 1940, newly elected Governor Sam Houston Jones urged that Brooks be defeated in the Democratic congressional primary, but Brooks won his third term that year. In 1950, Brooks overwhelmed the conservative intraparty challenge waged by James H. Greene (1918–1988), a 32-year-old graduate of Fair Park High School, a veteran of the U.S. Navy, and at the time a reporter for the since defunct Shreveport Journal. In 1952, Brooks defeated another young conservative intraparty rival, attorney Lawrence L. May, Jr. (1921–1995), of Vivian in Caddo Parish, who in an advertisement criticized the mounting casualties of the Korean War and the excesses of federal bureaucracy. May declared himself "an anti-Truman, anti-New Deal, anti-communist Demorat."

Brooks served on the U.S. House Committee on Armed Services from 1947 to 1958, and he then became the first chairman of the newly formed House Space Committee (later Science and Astronautics), reportedly because his seniority entitled him to a more important post on Armed Services than he was considered capable of handling. He was reappointed in 1961. It was Brooks who proposed a civilian, rather than military, space program. On May 4, 1961, his committee sent a memo to then Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson on this subject. U.S. President John F. Kennedy's speech which prompted the development of the Apollo program was delivered a few weeks later.

From his berth on the House Armed Services Committee, Brooks became a champion of veterans' causes. The Overton Brooks Veterans Administration Medical Center at 510 East Stoner Street in Shreveport just south of Interstate 20 and viewed from along the Clyde Fant Parkway is named in his honor.

Brooks was the president of the National River and Harbor Congress and was an early advocate of making the Red River navigable from Shreveport to Alexandria, a cause continued by his popular Democratic successor, Joe Waggonner of Plain Dealing in northern Bossier Parish.

Two conservative legislative assistants to Representative Brooks, Ned Touchstone and Billy McCormack, went on to careers of their own in journalism and the Christian ministry.