| The plea-bargaining Frank Sharp, testified that he had been told the reason Barnes was not caught accepting payment was that "Barnes is too smart. He only takes cash."
I don't trust the word of jail-house rats, but enough Texas voters did to permanently damage Barnes' career.
Barnes makes a pretty convincing case in his 2006 auto-biography "Barn Building, Barn Burning" that Richard Nixon's dirty-tricks crew played a major role in blowing up the scandal and dragging him into it. From a recent NPR interview:
Question: What was the scandal that brought you down? And when you say Nixon was involved -- how so?
Answer: The scandal that ended my political career was an investigation at President Nixon's request of a gentleman named Frank Sharp, and an insurance company and bank he owned in Texas. The speaker of the House and the governor were involved with Mr. Sharp and they bought stock with loans from his bank, and he then bought the stock back at a profit. I never met Frank Sharp, and as you can hear at my Web site, Barn Burning, Barn Building, you can hear clips of Nixon's Oval Office tapes,where the president talks to his Attorney General, John Mitchell, about Sharpstown.
Attorney General Mitchell apologized to me after he got out of prison. The evidence has been clear that Nixon's primary goal in Texas politics was to end my political career -- which he succeeded in doing.
Question: In today's Reliable Source column, you imply that "Nixonian dirty tricks" brought your career down. How so? What would Nixon have had to do with things happening in Texas?
Answer: The U.S. attorney in Houston years later revealed to a friend of mine that he was put under tremendous pressure by the Justice Department to try to use his powers to involve me in the Sharpstown scandal -- or some other scandal. They wanted to bring my political career down, because at that time I was the strongest Democratic politician in Texas, and Nixon had lost Texas in the 1968 election.
Despite being heavily favored going into the Democratic primary for Governor in 1972, by the time election day rolled around Barnes only managed 18% and a career killing third place finish.
The tragic destruction of Ben Barnes' political career cost Texas the heir of Lyndon Johnson's brand of moderate/progressive Democratic leadership. As a protege of Johnson, Barnes focused on being progressive -- passing minimum wage laws, investing in education and Texas' technology industry, nurturing the career of Barbara Jordon -- while still maintaining a strong partnership with the business community.
It wasn't always pretty, but it worked.
Without Barnes' leadership, the Texas Democrats staggered through the 1970s and Texas Republicans capitalized. There was a strong Texas Democratic revival in the 1980s and early 1990s but no clear model of Texas Democratic leadership emerged. Governor Mark White, Lt. Governors Bill Hobby and Bob Bullock, and House Speaker Pete Laney attempted to replicate the Barnes/LBJ pro-business stance but did little on the progressive front. Governor Ann Richards and San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros were charismatic but not especially effective. Jim Hightower tried to revive the old liberal wing of the party. Attorneys General Dan Morales and Jim Mattox tried running to the right. None of them succeeded in defining the Democratic brand strongly enough in voters' minds to counter the impact of Reagan and Rove.
But the saddest part of the Ben Barnes story isn't the might have beens, it's what he did with all that wasted potential for the next three decades. It's a pretty epic tale spanning a failed real estate empire, the paving of the Texas Hill Country, the biggest lobbying contract in Texas history, questions about why Harriet Miers and then Governor George Bush kept that contract going into the late 1990s, raising millions for John Kerry, being at the center of Rather-gate, and questionable motivations behind his raising millions for a Republican turned independent running for Texas Governor in 2006. I'm going to try to tell that tale in three more blog posts, followed by a video interview with Governor Barnes.
Next: Barnes and Connally Get Rich and Go Bust and Barnes Wins the Lottery. |
