John
Tower, the son of a Methodist minister, was born in Houston, Texas,
on 29th September, 1925. Educated at Beaumont High School, Tower enlisted
in the United States Navy in June 1943.
During the Second World War Tower served on
an amphibious gunboat in the Pacific.
After
the war Tower studied political science at the Southwestern University.
For a while he worked as an insurance agent in Dallas. He combined
this with attending classes at the Southern Methodist University.
In 1951 Tower accepted a position as assistant professor of political
science at Midwestern University. The following year he moved to the
London School of Economics (LSE). While in
London he carried out research into the
Conservative Party.
In
1953 Tower returned to the Midwestern University. He also became involved
in the Republican Party in Texas.
He was an unsuccessful in his attempts to be elected to Congress.
However, in 1956 he represented Texas in the Republican National Convention.
Tower
won the Republican Party nomination to take on Lyndon
B. Johnson in
1960. Johnson easily won the election but as he was also elected as
vice president, he had to resign his seat in the Senate. Tower beat
his Democratic Party candidate, William
Blakely, in May, 1961. He therefore became the first Republican senator
elected in Texas since 1870.
Tower
served on the Senate Armed Services Committee (1965-1985) and the
Joint Committee on Defense Production (1963-1977). Tower, eventually
replaced Richard Russell as chairman
of the Armed Services Committee. He developed a reputation for promoting
areas of commerce important to Texans.
In
January, 1985, Tower
retired from the Senate in order to become a highly-paid defense consultant.
Two weeks later President
Ronald Reagan appointed him as chief United
States negotiator at the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks in Geneva.
He resigned in April, 1986, to continue his career as chairman of
Tower, Eggers, and Greene Consulting, a company based in Dallas and
Washington. In November 1986, Reagan persuaded Tower to chair the
President's Special Review Board to study the actions of the National
Security Council and its staff during the Iran-Contra affair.
In
1989 President George Bush selected Tower
to become his Secretary of Defense. However, the Senate refused to
confirm his nomination because of his alleged excessive drinking and
womanizing. There
were also rumours about his links with the arms industry. As
Steven
Waldman reported in the Washington
Monthly: "There
was no solid proof Tower did anything illegal when he was a defense
consultant after leaving government, but his closeness to the industry
makes it doubtful he would have been sufficiently critical of contractors'
products and claims." This was the first rejection of a cabinet
nominee in more than 30 years.
In
1990 Bush appointed Tower as chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence
Advisory Board. Tower published his autobiography, Consequences:
A Personal and Political Memoir in 1991.
John
Tower was killed in a plane crash new New Brunswick, Georgia, on 5th
April, 1991. According to the New York Times the “failure of
a severely worn part in the plane’s propeller control unit caused
the aircraft to spin out of control.” This
was a day after his friend, John
Heinz,
had also died when his Piper Aerostar PA60 came down after colliding
with a helicopter in Montgomery
County.
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
The Deaths of John Tower and John Heinz
Namebase: Tower Report
(1)
Museum of the Gulf Coast, John
Tower (2003)
Considered
an ultraconservative, during his 23 years in the Senate, Tower became
an authority in matters concerning national defense and the military.
As defense spending rose to $211 billion a year, Tower brought prized
defense contracts to Texas. In 1981, he became chairman of the Armed
Services Committee. In 1984, Tower decided not to seek re-election.
He worked instead as a highly-paid defense consultant.
In 1985,
President Reagan named Tower to the post of strategic arms negotiator
with the Soviet Union. The following year, he appointed Tower to
chair a bipartisan committee to investigate the Iran-contra scandal.
George Bush nominated Tower for Secretary of Defense in 1989, but
critics claimed he had too many ties to defense contractors. His
was the first rejection of a cabinet nominee in more than 30 years.
(2)
Victor Thorn, George
Bush & John Kerry: Blood Brothers, World Independent
News Group (2004)
According
to researcher Rodney Stich in Defrauding America, when George
Bush Sr. and CIA Director William Casey engineered the October Surprise
to bribe Iranian officials into retaining US hostages until after
the 1980 elections, two of the passengers on Bush’s BAC 111
flight to Paris were Senator John Heinz, along with Senator John
Tower from Texas.
Even more intriguing is
the fact that John Heinz chaired a three-man presidential review board
that probed the Iran-Contra affair and had in his possession all the
damning documents from that sordid affair, while John Tower led the
infamous Tower Commission that investigated a variety of different
CIA criminal activities and dirty dealings. Coincidentally, both John
Heinz and John Tower died in plane wrecks on successive days in 1991
– Tower in Georgia, and Heinz in Montgomery County, Pa. Once
again I must ask: what are the odds of such an occurrence, especially
when both men had close ties to George Bush Sr., who was a former
CIA director in the mid-1970s? Did both of these men uncover information
that they refused to keep silent about any longer?
(3)
Steven Waldman, Washington
Monthly (March, 1991)
Time after time, someone
made a charge, the FBI investigated it, and then the fact that the
FBI was looking into it gave the charge credence-even if it was found
to be untrue. Consider this report in the Los Angeles Times: "Tower,
according to unsubstantiated stories, is a womanizer and has a drinking
problem. The tales were inspired by Tower's recent divorce. One particularly
wild-and wholly unfounded-story has Tower barred from Australia because
of a drunken spree there." And L.A. Times editor Shelby Coffey's
mother wears army boots, a wholly unreliable source once told me.
Having said all that, I
must add: Boy, am I glad John Tower isn't defense secretary. Not because
of "womanizing." And not primarily because of his drinking,
which was troubling, but ultimately not conclusive enough to reject
any nominee who was otherwise outstanding. The problem was that Tower
was not otherwise outstanding - because of his relationship with the
defense industry and his stewardship of the Senate Armed Services
Committee during the Reagan defense build-up. There was no solid proof
Tower did anything illegal when he was a defense consultant after
leaving government, but his closeness to the industry makes it doubtful
he would have been sufficiently critical of contractors' products
and claims.
Looking back through the
press coverage of the confirmation battle, it is staggering how little
attention was given to Tower's role as chairman of the Armed Services
Committee from 1981 to 1985, as the Pentagon and Congress squandered
a trillion dollars. Here, the public was ill served by the media's
predilection toward certain types of critical reporting and its avoidance
of others. It vigorously pursues "character" issues-sometimes
legitimate, sometimes not-because they're fun to write and read about.
The press is also good at tracking down corruption because it involves
the breaking of predefined rules. Since the rules were written by
other people, the media doesn't have to judge their appropriateness,
just whether they were violated. But when it comes to policy dereliction-remember
the S&L crisis?-the press finds itself unequipped (who am I to
say if a billion dollars should have been spent on that weapons system?),
uninterested (covering policy means studying minutiae), or unwilling
(no one ever won a Pulitzer for analyzing how a piece of legislation
got screwed up).
Tower says he was a military
reformer all along. I'm no defense expert, but one statement from
his book casts serious doubt on his bona fides: "Waste, fraud,
and abuse [in the Pentagon] wouldn't have amounted to even a billion
dollars. . . . The money was spent well." Does he honestly believe
that the Pentagon has wasted only .05 percent of its budget? The B-1
bomber alone is a waste of $20 billion. Unwise and consent
Tower feels that an irrational,
runaway process chewed him up, ignoring his defense expertise and
past service to his country. What's more, "the rules of ethical
conduct are constantly shifting with little or no warning" -
and he ticks off the names of senators who drank a lot more than he
did, believe you me.
(4)
Sherman H. Skolnick, The
Overthrow Of The American Republic (2004)
Two U.S. Senators knew
too much themselves about the murder of President Kennedy; about treason
committed by Ronald Reagan and the Elder Bush in the Iran-Contra Affair;
about how the American CIA and various foreign intelligence agencies
used BCCI to launder funds for political assassinations, committed
within the US and overseas.
One such Senator was John Tower (R., Texas). He headed up what became
known as the Tower Commission which whitewashed the criminality of
Reagan and Daddy Bush as to Iran-Contra. The other one was Senator
John Heinz (R., Penn.) Heinz knew too much about fellow US Senator
Arlen Specter (R., Penn.) Specter had previously been on the staff
of the infamous Warren Commission. Specter formulated the big lie
that a single pristine bullet, marked Warren Commission Exhibit 399,
somehow wounded John Connally in the limousine with JFK, and blew
out Kennedy's brains. Cynics contend the bullet still circles the
planet and no doubt, under Specter's big lie, also killed Dr. King,
Bobby Kennedy, and a host of other assassination victims.
In the spring of 1991, just as we were verifying the bribery list,
Senators Tower and Heinz were both assassinated, a few days apart.
Both, in separate sabotaged plane crashes. By October, 1991, our exclusive
story about the bribery list ran in a populist newspaper, "Spotlight"
(later defunct after publishing continuously for 25 years). They had
from us the bribery list and ran the complete story, but at the last
minute, deleted the list from my story.
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