ustxtxb_obs_1967_01_20_50_00008-00000_000.pdf

A Democrat for Eisenhower Is Called by the Great Society V The President’s appointment of Ever Under-Secretary of the new cabinet-level department on transportation is significant in that Hutcheson, a close friend of former Gov. Price Daniel’s, was a key Eisenhower supporter in 1952, the year Daniel bolted Adlai Stevenson for Eisenhower, too. Hutcheson was a legislator from East Texas. As a special attorney for the Texas Railroad Assn., he represented the railroads before the Interstate Commerce Cmsn., the Texas Railroad Cmsn., and the courts. In 1949 Daniel made him a state assistant attorney general. In 1955 Eisenhower appointed Hutcheson to the Interstate Commerce Cmsn.; in Austin it was assumed this was then Senator Daniel’s influence with Eisenhower. In more recent years, Hutcheson has been associated with motor transportation interests in Washington. V National columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, authors of the book Lyndon B. Johnson: The Exercise of Power \(a book which has not opened any ported that after the decline of Bill Moyers’ influence set in about six months ago, Jake Jacobsen became Johnson’s closest confidante. Jacobsen was Daniel’s secretary of the State Democratic Executive Committee. Evans and Novak say also that Horace Busby, one-time Austin liberal who became the producer of businessmen’s newsletters, has “returned to presidential favor” and that with Moyers ione, W. Marvin Watson, Jr., the conservative former executive of Lone Star Steel Co. of Daingerfield and Dallas, becomes “the chief attitude-maker at the White House now.” g o of Another . Evans-Novak column tripped off an eyebrow-singing and raising letter from the President’s congressman, Jake Pickle of Austin. Evans and Novak wrote that Johnson might have trouble carrying Texas today; that Waggoner Carr’s defeat for the Senate hurt Johnson’s prestige here; and that “Texas liberal leaders told us flatly they would vote for Michigan’s Gov. George Romney if he were nominated for President and might even endorse him publicly.” Pickle; in a letter to the columnists that was made public, said that “Senator Bobby Kennedy, aided and abetted by a handful of columnists and news organs, had set out to damage the President’s 8 The Texas Observer image in all 50 states, not just Texas,” that The New York Times and pollster Lou Harris are on this anti-Johnson progmosity toward the Kennedys “for this hatchet job because it is all part of the political game.” A Washington writer for Texas papers, Ed Johnson, reported, as to a report that “Bobby might or should” apologize to the President, that Pickle wrote Evans and Novak, “In my country, you do not kick a man all over the pasture, pick him up then say ‘excuse me.’ Pickle predicted that Kennedy’s tactics will not be forgotten ‘in Texas, nor the South, nor indeed, in many places of which young Bobby has not dreamed.’ The boomerang that Kennedy has pitched across the nation to damage Johnson will fly back to knock Kennedy’s image in the head, Pickle said.” And Pickle added that he’d bet Evans and Novak 100-to-1 that Johnson will carry Texas in 1968. V Sen. Ralph Yarborough has had another say on the Vietnam war, according to the Dallas Times Herald. “It’s costing us $3 billion a month to fight that war,” the paper quoted him, in the course of his opposing cuts in the war on poverty, which he said is basically a program of education. The Times Herald continued: “He stated his firm opposition to any escalation of the war, saying, ‘It’s already big as it ought to be right now. “‘I do not and will not approve of spreading it to North Vietnam, Cambodia or anyplace else. It should be kept to South Vietnam.’ “Yarborough said in his travels about Texas, it is the war that is on most people’s minds. ‘They want to know how to get this war over with,t” he said. Yarborough vehemently objected when, on the basis of statements he had made, this feature said about a year ago that he was moving into the dissenters’ camp about the war. V Sen. John Tower of Texas said on CBS-TV after the President’s State of the Union speech that the U.S. should assert itself more in the war. He was not specific but evidently had stepped-up bombing in mind. \(The Chicago Sun-Times reports that Secretary of Defense McNamara is opposed to stepped-up bombing and may resign if Johnson overrules him on this or on the inauguration of an anti-missile defense system, to which McNamara is also The LBJ Park The LBJ State Park Fund, now about $200,000, was provided, according to state park officials, by about 100 donors. One of these, it now emerges, gave a fourth of the fund. This was the Brown Foundation, established by the George and Herman Brown families. George Brown of Houston, long a potent political backer of Johnson’s and a businessman whose firms have received many millions in federal contracts, revealed that the foundation gave $50,000 to the fund in 1966. Brown expressed disapproval of the unwillingness of any of the donors to be identified. They should “take their money out of it” if they don’t want to be known, he said. As Brown also noted, gifts of the Brown Foundation become a matter of record. Backing and filling, the park commissioners, who made themselves trustees of the private fund, replaced themselves in this role with John Ben Shepperd, former state attorney general and now a tourist booster and preserver of historical spots in various -minor official roles. Shepperd, as the new, sole administrator of the $200,000 fund, agreed with Brown that the secrecy about the donors must end. Gov . John Connally has made it clear he wants the names of the donors released, and Shepperd presumed that he would do that after all the land has been acquired. In that latter connection, the park commissioners have decided not to press for the last 399 acres they had wanted. The owners had taken them to court; evidently the commissioners didn’t want to go through a trial. Development of a 25-acre section of the park has begun. A menagerie will be part of the park. Unkindly unearthing old bones, the Houston Tribune, a right-wing weekly, said that from 1953 to 1957, Shepperd “served on the three-member Veterans Land Board during the notorious veterans land scandals.” The Trib’s headline said, “‘Watchdog’ Who Missed Land Scandal Guards LBJ’s Fund.” Shepperd did sit on this board, with Gov. Allan Shivers and Land Cmsr. Bascom Giles. Evidence never tied Shivers or Shepperd into the scandals in any culpable way, although, with Giles going to prison for bribes and fraud, they paid a heavy political price for not having noticed what Giles had been up to. V Interest in the President’s land hold ings continues unabated. The New York Times and Austin Associated Press’ Lee Jones turned out lengthy stories on the President’s and his family’s holdings of about 15,000 acres of land in Blanco,