Word: bentsens
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Bentsen's father Lloyd Sr. was well on his way to his first million by the time Lloyd Jr. was born in a small cottage on a dirt road in Mission, Texas. "Big Lloyd" arrived in Texas from South Dakota with $1.50 in his pocket and became one of the largest landowners in the Rio Grande Valley. He started his empire with a grocery and a land-clearing operation. He hired Mexican laborers to clear the land, and instead of paying them half the contract price, as was the custom, he paid them the full amount -- but in scrip good...
...Bentsen returned to Texas in 1945, and at 25 was elected Hidalgo County judge. When he won his House seat two years later, he was its youngest member. He did not make much of a mark in his three terms, and may be best remembered for a speech in 1950 urging that America drop an atom bomb on North Korea unless its troops retreated north of the 38th parallel. Bentsen became one of the youngest members ever to leave the House voluntarily. At 33, complaining ! that the $12,500-a-year salary was not enough to raise three children...
...fortune made, Bentsen returned to politics in 1970, taking on a fellow Democrat and populist icon, Senator Ralph Yarborough. With the help of the L.B.J.-Connally wing of the party, Bentsen won the primary in a brawl that was messy even by Texas standards. Bentsen linked Yarborough with antiwar demonstrations and ran commercials of the uproar outside the 1968 Democratic Convention to make his point. He labeled Senator Edmund Muskie, who came to campaign for Yarborough, an ultra-liberal. Yarborough kicked up dust as well, calling the Bentsens a family of land frauds and exploiters, a reference to lawsuits that...
This time Bentsen cut a wider swath in Washington. In the days before economist chic, he quickly established himself as the Senator with the numbers. His office was hung with spreadsheets and flow charts. In a world of financial illiterates, he became known as a man of probing analysis and computer-chip memory who actually knew how to wend intricate tax breaks for the oil and real estate industries through Congress...
...Although Bentsen is proud of representing business interests, he likes to think of himself as a middle-of-the-road Senator willing to turn left when conviction or politics dictates. He has long been an advocate of civil rights: he opened his Houston hotel to blacks in 1963, before the law required integration and while other major hotels remained segregated. He was one of the few Southern House members to vote for repeal of the poll tax in 1949. Personal circumstances -- illness in his family -- have softened his view on the Government's role in social programs...