page_title: John Tower
section_title: Subsequent elections
hierarchical_section_title: John Tower / Subsequent elections
context_page_description: John Goodwin Tower was an American politician, serving as a Republican United States Senator from Texas from 1961 to 1985. He was the first Republican Senator elected from Texas since Reconstruction. Tower also led the Tower Commission, which investigated the Iran-Contra Affair, and was an unsuccessful nominee for U.S. Secretary of Defense in 1989.
  Born in Houston, Texas, he served in the Pacific Theater of World War II. After the war, he worked as a radio announcer and taught at Midwestern University. He switched from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party in the early 1950s and worked on the 1956 presidential campaign of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Tower lost Texas's 1960 Senate election to Democratic Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, but performed relatively well compared to his Republican predecessors. With the Democratic victory in the 1960 presidential election, Johnson vacated his Senate seat to become Vice President of the United States. In the 1961 special election to fill the vacancy caused by Johnson's resignation, Tower narrowly defeated Democrat William A. Blakley. He won re-election in 1966, 1972, and 1978.
context_section_description: Tower was reelected three times – in 1966, 1972, and 1978, all of which were good years for Republican candidates. In 1966, Tower defeated Democratic Attorney General Waggoner Carr of Lubbock, 842,501 (56.7%) to 643,855 (43.3%). Despite the victory, Tower lost the majority of the state's rural districts. He won every county that cast more than 10,000 votes except for McLennan County (Waco) in central Texas. In numerous counties, the 1961 or the 1966 Tower election was the first in which that county had supported a Republican candidate. In 1968 and 1972, Tower recruited his friend and later business associate Paul Eggers of Wichita Falls as the Republican gubernatorial nominee. Despite energetic but underfunded campaigns, Eggers lost both races to the Democrat Preston Smith of Lubbock.
  In 1972, Tower defeated Harold Barefoot Sanders, Jr. (1925–2008), a Dallas lawyer who had formerly served in the Texas House of Representatives, as a U.S. attorney under Kennedy, as a deputy attorney general and counselor to Johnson, and thereafter as a U.S. District Judge in Dallas, under appointment of Jimmy Carter, from 1979 until his death. Tower prevailed, 1,822,877 (54.7% of two-party vote) to Sanders's 1,511,948 (45.3% of two-party vote). There were more than 79,000 votes cast for others. Several of the "Democrats for Nixon" organizers in Texas made it clear that they were Sanders supporters for the Senate. Sanders ran far ahead of Democratic presidential nominee George S. McGovern in the state. Tower tried to tie Sanders to former United States Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who donated $2,000 to the Sanders campaign."
  In 1978, Tower ran in a close campaign. He edged out Democratic Congressman Robert Krueger of New Braunfels in Comal County in the Hill Country, 1,151,376 (50.3% of two-party vote) to 1,139,149 (49.7% of two-party vote). Tower's plurality over Krueger was 12,227 votes, but because there were another 22,015 votes cast for other nominal contenders, Tower prevailed with less than 50% of the total vote. This was the campaign in which Tower refused to shake Krueger's hand at a candidate forum on grounds that his opponent had spread untruths about Tower's personal life. (Krueger later served in the Senate on an interim appointment from Governor Ann Richards from January to June 1993.)
caption: John Tower in 1983
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