DUANE
Duane's take
The marker's the word, and here's how I tell it — John Goodwin Tower, Dallas County, Texas. Now, if you were going to write a story about a man who kept finding himself at the center of history, you might not start it in a Methodist parsonage. But that's exactly where John Goodwin Tower began — the son of a minister, raised in a tradition that took duty seriously.
Before he ever set foot on the floor of the United States Senate, Tower had served his country in World War II and stood in front of a classroom teaching political science. The man knew the theory before he lived the thing. And then came 1960, going into 1961, and Texas politics handed him an opening that nobody — and I mean nobody — would have predicted.
Lyndon B. Johnson vacated his U.S. Senate seat, and a special election was called to fill it.
John Tower won that election. Now sit with that for a second. In the long stretch of Texas political history running all the way back through Reconstruction, not a single Republican had held a United States Senate seat from this state.
Tower broke that streak. First Republican senator from Texas since Reconstruction. That is not a footnote — that is a landmark.
He went on to serve in the Senate for twenty-four years. Twenty-four years of committee assignments, chairmanships, influence built the slow and careful way. When he finally retired from the Senate in 1985, you might think a man would ease back a little.
Not Tower. He became the chief United States negotiator at the strategic arms reduction talks in Geneva. The Cold War still had some cold left in it, and there he was, at the table.
Then came the Tower Commission. He chaired it. In 1987, that commission issued its report on the Iran-Contra Affair — one of the more tangled chapters in modern American governance, and Tower's name would be forever attached to the telling of it.
And still, he wasn't done. He was serving as an advisor to President George Bush when the end came — an airplane crash. The son of a Methodist minister, the World War II veteran, the professor, the trailblazer, the negotiator, the commissioner — gone like that.
Some men are present at one turning point and history calls it enough. John Goodwin Tower kept showing up at the next one, and the one after that. The marker remembers him.
Now you do too.
What the marker says
(1925-1991) The son of a Methodist minister, John Goodwin Tower was a veteran of World War II and a political science professor before entering politics. He joined the national political scene in 1960-1961 when he won the special election to fill Lyndon B. Johnson's U. S. Senate seat, becoming the first Republican senator from Texas since Reconstruction. Tower served in the Senate for 24 years, holding a number of influential committee assignments and chairmanships. He became the chief United States negotiator at the strategic arms reduction talks in Geneva after his retirement from the Senate in 1985. He later chaired the Tower Commission, which issued its report on the Iran-Contra Affair in 1987. Tower was serving as an advisor to President George Bush at the time of his death in an airplane crash. (1999)