by James Fallows

Lloyd Bentsen: Can Another Texan Apply?

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Braniff Airlines’ flight number 11, a.k.a. the LBJ special, leaves Washington’s Dulles Airport each afternoon at 5:35 on a nonstop trip to Austin. The flight, which Braniff introduced with some reluctance during the heyday of the Pedernales, is now a steady earner, and it makes Austin the smallest far-off city with such direct connections to the capital.

On one Sunday afternoon last September, the day that Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, a lean, distinguished-looking man in his early fifties waited to check in on flight 11. From the cut of his brown glen plaid suit and the detached, slightly impatient look on his face, he might have been a banker from Connecticut on his way to discuss investment possibilities in the computer industry, or an executive of the Rockefeller Foundation preparing for a conference at the University of Texas. He received no more attention than any of the several hundred other passengers in the terminal, which was unusual only because he, unlike anyone else in the building, was at work trying to become the next President of the United States.

Since the end of 1973, when he decided to spend a year finding out “whether a moderate from Texas has a shot at the Democratic nomination,” Lloyd M. Bentsen, junior senator from the Lone Star state, has spent a great deal of his time as he spent it that afternoon—in transit between one public appearance and the next. By Election Day, 1974, Bentsen had appeared in thirty-three states, and had delivered some one hundred and thirty speeches. On the weekend he flew to Texas, for example, he spoke in Indiana on Saturday, spent half an hour on national TV on Sunday morning appearing with Senator William Brock on Face the Nation, landed in Austin on Sunday evening, and on Monday morning was a major speaker at the Southern Governors’ Conference; there he walked over to George Wallace’s wheelchair to shake hands as the TV cameras rolled. He can please a crowd, and did on this occasion. But in his speeches, and even more so in his private conversation, he foxily avoids the specific commitment or the revealing observation (on or off the record) that might prove embarrassing.

During the first week in October, Bentsen spoke in Lansing, Michigan, on Friday, in Wichita, Kansas, on Saturday, in San Antonio on Sunday morning, and in Dallas on Sunday night; he flew back to Washington on Monday, departed that night for Atlanta, taped another debate with Senator Brock on Tuesday morning, and on Tuesday afternoon addressed a meeting of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers in Miami.

Through this year of physical and financial depletion (at one point in late summer, Bentsen’s advance calendar showed a total of five free nights before the election; and much of a special $365,000 campaign fund has gone into the year’s effort), Bentsen was not technically “running.” What he was doing, he said, was deciding whether to run, conducting a sort of test marketing that would enable him to make his final decision at the beginning of the new year. If, as has seemed certain since the withdrawal of Teddy Kennedy, Bentsen becomes a starter in this year of the dark horse, his campaign will be one of the more fascinating. Its fascination is not that Bentsen is a probable—or at this moment even plausible—victor, but that his type of presidential politicking recalls something fifteen years past. Different inheritors have appropriated different portions of the “Kennedy legacy”—the looks and style passed on to the two brothers; the reputation for social concern taken over by assorted liberals; the tough-guy outlook on world affairs a tragic bequest to Lyndon Johnson. But at least one part, the part evoked by phrases like “tough-minded,” “hard-boiled,” “pragmatic,” is riding with Lloyd Bentsen this year.

The predominant fact about Bentsen’s national campaign is that he lacks a national identity; in mid-1974, the Harris Poll gave him a name-recognition figure of about 2 percent. But the problem is more profound than simply not being well known, for Lloyd Bentsen’s past is private. Before he was elected to the Senate four and a half years ago, Bentsen had spent the greater part of his adult years in the closed world of Houston high finance. Unlike Scoop Jackson, who has been in Congress for thirty-four years, or Walter Mondale, who won statewide office in 1960, or even Morris Udall, who entered the House in 1961, Bentsen’s record is a short one indeed. Save for his geographic identity as a Texan, no great advantage so soon after the Johnson years, Bentsen carries the handicap of anonymity—and the corresponding advantage of being able to create an identity ex nihil.

The way in which national anonymity can be an advantage is illustrated by Bentsen’s position in Texas, where his well-known background is actually his greatest handicap. Bentsen’s modest senatorial prominence has made him stronger at home now than he has ever been before, but there are still those who bear him an abiding mistrust. Generally they cite three reasons.

The first is his family background, for like a hard-boiled candidate of another day, John F. Kennedy, Bentsen first entered politics backed by his father’s fortune, the accumulation of which has been a matter of public controversy. The elder Bentsen, Lloyd Sr., moved with his brother Elmer from South Dakota to the Texas Valley (the state’s southern tip) in the 1920s, where the two soon made a fortune in the “immigrant land business.” In theory this meant nothing more than selling land to people from far away, but in practice it often involved greeting a trainload of Minnesotans, escorting them through acres of sunny citrus land, and then selling them land identical in every respect save a lack of water rights. Virtually worthless land, that is to say. In 1950, dissatisfied customers began filing the first of several dozen lawsuits against the elder Bentsens, alleging conspiracy and fraud. The plaintiffs in the first test case, a couple from Iowa named Polmateer, claimed that they had paid $525 per acre for land worth, at most, one fifth that amount. The judge ruled in their favor, and ordered the elder Bentsens to refund the Polmateers in full. In another case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the elder Bentsens could properly be sued to determine whether they had violated a federal statute. Shortly thereafter, the Bentsens began settling most subsequent cases out of court. At no time has anyone accused Lloyd Jr. of involvement in his father’s and uncle’s affairs, but his first excursion into politics was financed by his father’s money.

After attending the University of Texas Law School (he has no undergraduate degree) and receiving decorations for flying fifty missions as a pilot in World War II, Bentsen returned to what had become the family’s political fiefdom, and in 1946 was elected county judge. Two years later, in 1948, he was elected to Congress, and, at age twenty-seven, was the youngest member that year.

The second of Bentsen’s burdens is his strong identification with the big-money, Texas-Tory branch of the Democratic party, dominated by John Connally before his Republican conversion, and associated (though never contentedly) with Lyndon Johnson. Although Bentsen has supported Johnson and Connally, and in turn been supported by them (Connally urged him to make his 1970 run for the Senate; in 1971, Johnson went so far as to say that Bentsen might be “the greatest senator Texas has ever had”), it would be a mistake to take either of them as a model for how Bentsen might perform in or around the White House. Connally and Johnson both made themselves into rich men, but both of them were born poor, Connally poorer than Johnson. Like Connally, wheeling and dealing, Johnson often radiated with a “joie de con.” But even during his darkest days in the White House, no one could accuse Johnson of being merely a manipulator. There was too much of the elemental man in him to justify so simplistic a label, and he retained his commitment to the New Deal to the end. All of these ingredients—passion, ideology, and the hustler’s glee—seem absent from Bentsen’s managerial makeup.

In his brief service in the House, Bentsen was a consistent if unsophisticated conservative, with a generally unremarkable record. He must live today with one of the few remarkable statements he made, his recommendation on July 12, 1950, that the United States give the North Koreans one week’s warning and then hit them with atomic bombs. Although he was unopposed in all his races for re-election, Bentsen decided to leave the House in 1954 “to establish financial independence” for himself and his family—his wife, Beryl Ann (nicknamed B.A.), and his children, Lloyd III, Lan, and Tina, whose ages now range from thirty to twenty-three.

He accomplished his goal quickly in the insurance business. By the time he ran against Yarborough, he was president of Lincoln Consolidated, a large holding company with extensive insurance interests, and his personal worth was $2.3 million.

Bentsen remained on the periphery of politics during these years but was clearly affiliated with the Connally camp. He supported Connally in his various races for the governorship, and at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, Beryl Ann Bentsen sat between Connally and Jake Jacobsen in the Texas delegation. Connally urged Bentsen to run for the governorship in 1968, and two years later played an important part in his successful race for the Senate. Indeed, Bentsen was the last Texas politician Connally successfully anointed before going on to Republicanism and disgrace.

The 1970 election is the third and most inflammatory item on Bentsen’s critics’ list, not because he beat George Bush, then a Republican congressman, in the general election, but because he eliminated the incumbent senator, Ralph Yarborough, in the Democratic primary. Yarborough had left fences unmended, and might well have fallen to Bush, but he was the Texas liberals’ hero, the only one of their number to hold major office, and as such, a perfect candidate for martyrdom. Bentsen played his role in this martyr’s drama to perfection, running an expensive, slick campaign which made heavy use of TV spots, and taking a gloves-off, Agnewesque position on all the divisive social issues. He pounded Yarborough on busing, school prayer, and—in what Bentsen’s own men called the “World War III” spot—antiwar protest. This last commercial, which has entered the mythology of Texas politics, depicted civil disorder and generalized mayhem, followed by Lloyd Bentsen’s calm voice reminding the voters that Yarborough had supported the moratorium, and asking whether this was the kind of representation Texans really wanted.

The ads were not so much dishonest as they were demagogic, and on Bentsen’s side it may be said that Yarborough engaged in a little demagoguery of his own about the Bentsen family history. After the primary, Bentsen engaged in enough reconciliation to enlist such liberals as Barbara Jordan, the black congresswoman from Houston who was then a state senator, to his side. He beat Bush by a 53 to 47 margin. Nonetheless, such was the residue of the primary campaign that the Nixon Administration, which had sent its big guns to Texas on Bush’s behalf, embraced Bentsen after his victory in the fall as part of its “ideological majority.”

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