RIP Jack Brooks

rimrocker · Dec 5, 2012

Always thought he was a good guy when I was growing up and got to meet him when I worked on the Hill. Brooks was worshiped in Beaumont for making Lamar a 4 year school and had a great rep around East Texas when I was a youngster. It took awhile, but the Repub wave finally took him out. In many ways, he was the embodiment of the pre-media/consultant politician.

Jack Brooks, an irascible, cigar-chomping former Texas congressman who over 42 years defied fellow Southerners to support civil rights, investigated abuses by Presidents Nixon and Reagan and repeatedly attacked government waste, down to the cost of wrenches, died on Tuesday night in Beaumont, Tex. He was 89.

Representative Jack Brooks, far right, looks on as Lyndon B. Johnson is sworn in as president in the cabin of Air Force One with Jacqueline Kennedy at his side.

The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department confirmed his death.

Mr. Brooks rose in Congress under the tutelage of two revered Texas Democrats, Speaker Sam Rayburn and Lyndon B. Johnson, both as a senator and as president, and became a swashbuckling Texas character in his own right. His politics were pro-labor, pro-gun, fiercely partisan and boldly unapologetic, particularly when it came to funneling federal funds to his East Texas district.

He played a supporting role in one of the most famous news photographs of the 20th century, that of President Johnson being sworn in as president on Air Force One in Dallas after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963. Mr. Brooks, who had been in the presidential motorcade, stands behind Jacqueline Kennedy.He had run Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign in his district, where Kennedy won by 40,000 votes. In October 1963, he was the only one of nine Southerners on the judiciary committee to vote for the Kennedy administration’s civil rights bill.

When President Johnson took up the bill after Kennedy’s murder, Mr. Brooks was one of 11 out of 92 Southerners to vote for it on the House floor in 1964.

President Richard M. Nixon, he loathed. Mr. Brooks said he would have voted to impeach him on Jan. 21, 1969, but it “would not have looked good” to do it the day he was inaugurated, Jan. 20. Five and a half years later, as a ranking member of the judiciary committee, he helped draft the articles of impeachment that prompted President Nixon to resign.

He was also a leader in the House investigation of President Ronald Reagan for trading arms for hostages and using the proceeds to finance the right-leaning Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

Mr. Brooks’s accomplishments included passing laws to revamp government procurement and to require federal agencies to have inspector generals. But he attracted more notice with his highly publicized investigations of the life of light bulbs, the number of coats of paint used on government buildings and airline pilots who let flight attendants fly jetliners.

His sharp edge showed in an unsuccessful effort to impeach President Reagan, not to mention in his refusing to allow Republicans at luncheons of the Texas congressional caucus. He ostentatiously puffed his cigars in nonsmoking areas.

He pulled no punches. After John Poindexter, Mr. Reagan’s national security adviser, and Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams testified to the judiciary committee about the Iran-Contra affair, Mr. Brooks called each “a lying son of a b****.”

An aide to President Johnson called the representative “one of the few men L.B.J. was ever afraid of,” while President Richard M. Nixon labeled him “the executioner.” Mr. Brooks’ nurtured a coalition of minorities, labor unions, pro-choice activists and loyal Democrats to win 20 straight Congressional elections. His defeat in the Republican Congressional landslide in 1994 reflected the long, steady rise of well-funded Republicans and anti-abortion organizers, as well as the defection of the Teamsters and some public employees unions.

The most proximate cause of his defeat was his antagonizing the gun lobby by voting for a crime bill that included banning 19 firearms as assault weapons. Mr. Brooks had fought vainly to remove the ban, but ultimately voted for the bill approved by the judiciary committee he chaired.

This left a gaping opening for his opponent, Republican Steve Stockman, a 37-year-old accountant making a third try for the seat.

“The problem that Brooks did was paint himself into a corner, quite frankly,” Mr. Stockman told The Washington Post after the election. “He sent letters saying, ‘I will do anything to stop the gun ban.’

“And he also said, ‘You need to keep me in office because I’m powerful.’ Well, you’re either powerful enough to stop the gun ban or you’re not. He set himself up as a giant and he couldn’t deliver.”

Jack Bascom Brooks was born in Crowley, La., on Dec. 18, 1922, and his family moved to Beaumont, Tex., when he was 5. His father, a rice salesman, died when Jack was 13, and the young man had to do jobs that included car hop, grocery clerk and newspaper reporter.

He received a scholarship to attend Lamar Junior College in Beaumont, where he completed two years of college. He moved on to the University of Texas and earned a journalism degree. He joined the Marines as a private in World War II, and fought in Guadalcanal, Guam, Okinawa and North China. He was discharged as a first lieutenant, and was a colonel in the Marine Corps reserve until 1972.

In 1946, when he was 23, Mr. Brooks was elected to represent Washington County in the Texas House of Representatives. An early victory was passing a law to make what is now Lamar University a four-year college. While a legislator, he earned a law degree from the University of Texas.

After four years as a state legislator, Mr. Brooks was elected to congress, defeating 11 Democrats in the primary. He entered the House in 1953 as the youngest member of that year’s freshman class. He left four decades later as the most senior representative ever to have lost a general election.He nestled under the protective wing of Speaker Rayburn, who invited him to stop by every day. “It was like being given a Ph.D. on how to run the place,” Mr. Brooks told the Houston Chronicle in 1995.Mr. Rayburn put Mr. Brooks on the judiciary committee in 1955, and he served there until 1995, the last six as chairman. From 1975 to 1988, he was chairman of the government operations committee, which oversees regulatory agencies.

Information about his survivors was not immediately available.

As Mr. Johnson was close to Mr. Rayburn, so Mr. Brooks was to the president. He and his wife dined at the White House as many as two or three times a week. Mr. Johnson let him use the White House bowling alley when he was not there.

Some observers wondered why such a long-serving representative did not rise to top leadership or enact more laws. But nobody questioned his ability to look after his district. In the crime bill that helped spell his defeat, Mr. Brooks tried to include $10 million for construction of a criminal justice center at Lamar University.

“It it’s pork,” he told The Times, “it’ll be tasty.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/06/u...-former-texas-congressman-dies-at-89.html?hpw
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rimrocker · Dec 5, 2012

Here's another obit...

Jack Brooks, who spent 42 years in Congress representing his Southeast Texas district and was in the Dallas motorcade in 1963 when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, has died. He was 89.

Brooks died Tuesday night at Baptist Hospital of Beaumont after a sudden illness, according to a statement from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department. Brooks, who would have turned 90 on Dec. 18, was surrounded by family when he died, Deputy Rod Carroll said.

Brooks was among the last links to an era when Democrats dominated Texas politics and was the last of “Mr. Sam’s Boys,” protégés of fellow Texan and legendary 21-year Democratic House Speaker Sam Rayburn in the state’s congressional delegation.

“I’m just like old man Rayburn,” Brooks, from Beaumont, once said. “Just a Democrat, no prefix or suffix.”

He also was a contemporary and supporter of Lyndon Johnson, who was U.S. Senate majority leader in the 1950s and later president.

Brooks was in the Dallas motorcade Nov. 22, 1963, when President Kennedy was assassinated. He’s in the famous photo taken later that day aboard Air Force One at Dallas’ Love Field, standing immediately behind the grief-stricken Jacqueline Kennedy as Johnson, his right hand raised, takes the oath of office from U.S. District Judge Sarah Hughes.

Brooks, first elected to the House in his far Southeast Texas district in 1952, was returned to office 20 more times and was on the verge of becoming the dean of the U.S. House when he was ousted in the Republican revolution of 1994.

Rayburn, whose 48 years rivaled Brooks’ House tenure, put Brooks on the House Government Operations Committee, a panel Brooks eventually would chair. Brooks gained notoriety as a curmudgeon-like scourge of bureaucrats he grilled for wasting taxpayers’ money, peering at witnesses over his glasses as he chewed on a cigar.

“I never thought being a congressman was supposed to be an easy job, and it doesn’t bother me a bit to be in a good fight,” Brooks once said.

A Brooks-authored law required full and open competition to be the standard for awarding federal contracts. The 1965 Brooks Act set policy for the government’s computer acquisition program, requiring competitive bidding and central management. His Inspector General Act established independent Offices of Inspector General in major agencies to prevent fraud and waste.

Other Brooks bills reduced federal paperwork, provided a uniform system of federal procurement, eliminated overlapping audit requirements and established the Department of Education.

“He literally has saved American taxpayers billions of dollars through his actions in improving government efficiency and eliminating waste,” former Texas Gov. Dolph Briscoe, a longtime friend who died in 2010, said two years earlier when Brooks donated his congressional papers, photos, correspondence and other items to the Center for American History at the University of Texas.

Brooks also served on the House Judiciary Committee, where he strongly supported President Richard Nixon’s impeachment and drafted the articles of impeachment the judiciary panel adopted. Nixon, who resigned Aug. 8, 1974, referred to Brooks as “the executioner.” Brooks would rise to committee chairman.

Jack Bascom Brooks was born Dec. 18, 1922, in Crowley, La., and moved to Texas at age 5. While in public schools, he worked as a carhop, grocery clerk, magazine salesman and a reporter for the Beaumont Enterprise. He attended Lamar University in Beaumont, then a two-year school, and earned a degree in journalism from the University of Texas. He served with the Marines in the Pacific in World War II and retired as a colonel from the Marine Corps Reserves in 1972. He received a law degree from the University of Texas and was a two-term Texas state legislator when he was elected to the U.S. House at age 29.

He supported civil rights bills, refused to sign the segregationist “Southern manifesto” in 1956, helped write the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 that banned racial segregation.

His congressional longevity — figures showed there were 13,858 roll call votes during his tenure — was an issue for him and other long-serving Democrats who were swept from office in 1994. Brooks also had alienated gun owners for supporting a ban on assault weapons and abortion opponents for his support of abortion rights.

Brooks married Charlotte Collins in 1960 and the couple had three children, Jeb Brooks, Kate Brooks Carroll and Kim Brooks, and two grandchildren, Matthew Carroll and Brooke Carroll.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local...75003e-3ea8-11e2-8a5c-473797be602c_story.html
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Deckard · Dec 11, 2012

I meant to post in the thread and got distracted. Brooks was another Texas pol of a kind that just doesn't seem to exist any longer, but that were not uncommon in Texas back in the day of Democratic domination. I gaze around at the players in the Lege and those being sent to Congress in both houses today, and damn near want to weep.

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