“Texas Senator” John Tower Hand Signed 3X5 Card Todd Mueller COA

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“Texas Senator” John Tower Hand Signed 3X5 Card.
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Mueller Autographs and comes with their certificate of authenticity.
ES-8973E
John Goodwin Tower
(September 29,
1925 – April 5, 1991) 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 (now
Midwestern State
University
) in
Wichita Falls
. 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
, Tower defeated Johnson’s appointed
successor,
Bill Blakley
. He won
re-election in
1966
,
1972
,
and
1978
.
Upon joining the Senate in 1961, Tower became the first Republican Senator to
represent a state in the
South
since 1913. He
was the only Southern Republican in the Senate until
Strom Thurmond
switched parties in 1964. A political
conservative earlier in his career, Tower staunchly opposed the
Civil Rights Act of 1964
and
the
Voting Rights Act of 1965
.
Starting in 1976 with his support of
Gerald Ford
rather than
Ronald Reagan
in the 1976 Republican primaries, Tower
began to alienate many fellow conservatives. He became less conservative over
time, later voicing support for legal abortion and opposing President
Reagan’s
Strategic Defense
Initiative
in 1982. Tower retired from the Senate in 1985.
After leaving Congress, he served as chief negotiator of the
Strategic Arms Reduction Talks
with the
Soviet Union
and led the Tower Commission. The
commission’s report was highly critical of the Reagan administration’s
relations with
Iran
and the
Contras
. In 1989, incoming President
George H. W. Bush
chose Tower as his nominee for
Secretary of Defense, but his nomination was rejected by the Senate. After the
defeat, Tower chaired the
President’s
Intelligence Advisory Board
. Tower died in the 1991
Atlantic
Southeast Airlines Flight 2311
crash.