ustxtxb_obs_1964_04_17_50_00005-00000_000.pdf

‘Scouting the Future’ Dallas Senator Yarborough, responding to a large crowd of perhaps 2,500 liberal Democrats in Dallas recently, gave a freeswinging campaign speech in which he characterized himself as a scout on the New Frontiera man who helped write many of the programs of the New Frontier into the 1960 national Democratic platform and then fought for them in the Senate. He said Dallas was “a citadel of reaction,” a quote that was widely debated subsequently. He added, however, that a magazine writer who said the city’s “good resolutions” after the assassination had not lasted long was mistaken, and that he would have found this out if he had talked to “the people of Dallas and the great heart and soul of the people of Dallas.” “We’re one of the 15 poorest states in the union. We have the resources to be one of the five richest states, and if Texas had been properly governed we would be one of the five richest,” he said. “Over and over,” he said, Dallas returns had “made the difference in gubernatorial election after gubernatorial election, and that’s why Texas is 35th in the states in education. “This oligarchy has not been good for Texas. It made its stock in trade vile slander . . . and . . . shouted ‘Treason,’ and that’s been the cry that’s been heard in this great city that I love and this great state that I love. “If Texas stood among the top ten states where it ought to stand, it would be to the United States what Athens was to Greece,” he said. Instead, it is 40th in old age pensions, 48th in unemployment compensation payments. “I remember a day under the late Jimmy Allred, the last Democratic governor of Texas, when Texas was in the top ten on unemployment compensation. When women’s suffrage was proposed, we were the ninth state to ratify it. But of the last two amendments extending the franchise, Texas has not ratified either one. What’s happened to the people of Texas in this short space of time? You have an oligarchy ruling Texas when you ought to rule,” he told the cheering Dallas Democrats. He said he had heard some people arguing Democrats should not take part in the primary. If the best Democrats did that, he said, they turned the party “over to the evil element in the party. If you don’t work in the primary,” he said, “you’d even have hucksters running for office.” HE HAD BEEN CHARGED, Yarborough said, with being a “me too Democrat.” “I deny it. I’ve been in front. I advocated many of the programs of the New Frontier before 1960. You didn’t hear much about me on the subject of the nominationI didn’t have much to do . with that. But I helped write those programs.” He appeared before the platform committee and testified on conservation bills and water and air pollution: “I was putting progressive measures in that platform.” Turning on Gordon McLendon, but not naming him, Yarborough alluded to a statement attributed to McLendon that he could have run as a Republican as easily as a Democrat. \(McLendon said it was the possibility of Goldwater getting the nomina”There are five Republicans running, and I’m the only Democrat running,” Yarborough said. Referring to education bills he co-sponsored in 1958 and 1964 and that passed, he said Texans had avoided the Senate education committee for fear of being “denounced as evil if any federal money went to education.” It’s been okay to give federal money for highways, he said; “It just depends on whether it was things or human beings. I believe in human beings, and if the Democratic Party ever forgets it’s human beings that count, it’ll perish. “I haven’t been following along behind the New Frontier,” he said. “I’ve been one Dallas Gordon McLendon, the Dallas radio man running for the U.S. Senate, is campaigning with actors and bands. The Observer followed him along as he welcomed Hollywood actor John Wayne opened his Dallas headquarters, and addressed a buffet crowd at a swank Dallas motel. McLendon told the airport crowd, “It is between you and all Texas and all of the racketeers and goons my opponent can bring in against me.” He asked his jam-packed campaign headquarters during the opening with John Wayne there: “My opponent is known in Washington and laughed at by his fellow senators as the senator from Texas, not the senator for Texas. “He is of, by, and for Northern liberal pressure groups who give him his money and his orders. He is their tool. He is one of the most spineless jellyfish I ever saw in my life. “When I am there [in the U.S. Senate], of the Scouts out on the Frontier, saying, ‘Come on, boys!’ “If we could visualize all of mankind as on a vast march coming from dim unknowns to a great future. . . . Sometimes in Dallas you just stare ’em to death and run ’em out of town for being a leader. . . . But the poets, the leaders, the statesmen of mankind, they are the scouts, the prophets, who write out the future. The police, the politicians, we’re not the prophets, we keep order.” Speaking very rapidly in the excited atmosphere of the smoky, spreading meeting place, Yarborough concluded: “I want to see Texas in the forefront of American progress and I fight for that ideal. “I wouldn’t be interested in going back to Congress to me-too for anybody, presidents or parties. I ask you to re-elect me to the United States Senate not as a follower but as a leader, out on the periphery, scouting the future.” In other remarks during the campaign, Sen. Yarborough has said the Big Thicket of southeast Texas ought to be made a national park; he has sponsored and helped pass more legislation for education, conservation, and national parks than any other senator from Texas ever has; and “I am the only candidate for the United States Senate who is supporting our Texan Democratic President, Lyndon B. Johnson, and his programs.” Opening his Dallas campaign headquarters, Yarborough said he has seen advance films and heard tapes that will be used against him before May 2. “They are malicious,” he said. 0 you will have a spokesman for Dallas. . . . Dallas is my home town. . . . Maybe it’s just about time that you fine people had a U.S. senator from Dallas. It might do you some good to have somebody in that city of Washington who is from Dallas, Texas! “You know I’m a conservative. . . . I will not bore you with that. I’m an intractable advocate of free enterprise. I am not against liberal Democrats, I never have been, but I am against radical Democrats.” Yarborough, he said, is “just as dangerous with your money as a puppy on a new rug. We’re gonna tie a corn cob on him and run him right into the river before this campaign is over.” McLendon’s campaign has been verbally colorful. He says Yarborough is “nervous as an alligator with the back itch” and “slicker than a buttered olive.” Furthermore, he’s a “left-wing lizard.” McLendon has accused Yarborough of deleting from a clipping he is mailing out the fact that its source is the Texas AFL April 17, 1964 5 `I Say Beware, Senator’