Diligence, Discipline, Ambition : Bentsen: A Conservative Not So Far From Dukakis

WASHINGTON —  They were the rich boys of Sigma Nu--sons of Texas aristocrats who gathered at the university in Austin for fun and studying before they would take over the banks, the businesses and the government of their state. In 1942, Lloyd Millard Bentsen Jr. was their president.

Following a custom of that time and place, the fraternity brothers decorated their walls with the phone numbers of their girls--until the wallpaper in some rooms looked like a telephone directory. Bentsen’s room was different, remembers one Texas alumnus who inherited his top bunk on the third floor:

“There was a whole series of numbers on the wall, six-digit numbers, and I asked Earl Brown, the houseman, what they were. ‘Are those phone numbers?’ I asked him. ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘those are Mr. Bentsen’s bank accounts.’ ”

In a state long dominated by men of outsized passions, by up-from-the-dust giants such as Lyndon Baines Johnson and John Connally, the millionaire’s son from the Valley of the Lower Rio Grande has always been something different.

And, to a surprising degree, Bentsen and Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis--the liberal to whose political star he has now hitched his wagon--are kinfolk under the skin.

Lloyd Bentsen’s is a life of diligent efficiency. Diligence plus ambition.

Although he grew up with wealth and the emotional comfort of a stable family life, Bentsen has been propelled by a drive for ever-greater success that is the overwhelming constant of his life. If his policy positions make him look like George Bush, in these central facets of personality Bentsen is far closer to the Greek immigrant’s son from Brookline, Mass., than to the investment banker’s son from Greenwich, Conn.

The ceaseless determination to strive and win. The calculating, dispassionate, methodical style--the readiness, when needs must, to be hardball-tough.

At age 25 Bentsen was the youngest county judge in Texas. At 27 he was the youngest member of Congress. After three terms in the House, he paused to turn a $6-million grubstake from his family into a large and profitable insurance conglomerate.

Then, in the 1970 Texas Democratic primary--still remembered as one of the nastiest in the state’s history--he launched what became a career in the Senate by learning to do what he had to do in order to win.

Controlled, Not Colorful

“Controlled . . . disciplined . . . analytical”--this is how friends, colleagues and staffers describe the man tapped to be the Democratic Party’s vice presidential nominee. Few remember him ever raising his voice in anger or banging a fist on the table.

“He is not a colorful politician,” said Robert Lighthizer, an attorney and former staff director of the Senate Finance Committee, which Bentsen now chairs. “He is a businessman who just happens to be a senator.”

“You won’t find any skeletons in his closet,” fellow Democrat and former Texas Gov. Mark White said of Bentsen. “He keeps his clothes there.”

Since last Tuesday, when Dukakis startled the political odds makers by choosing Bentsen to be his running mate, much has been made of the two men’s differences on a range of issues. It is true that Bentsen, while siding with the Reagan Administration less often than some Democrats--including Georgia’s Sen. Sam Nunn--has supported the President on a great many controversial measures that Dukakis opposes.

Bentsen, for example, backed the MX missile and the B-1 bomber; Dukakis has opposed both. Bentsen opposes gun control; Dukakis supports it. Bentsen favors prayer in public schools and the death penalty; Dukakis does not.

Foreign Policy Views

In what is probably their most fundamental difference, Bentsen steadfastly supports sending aid to the U.S.-backed rebels in Nicaragua, while Dukakis just as consistently has denounced aid to the Contras. Their disagreement on this issue goes deep and reaches something basic in the way the two men look at foreign affairs.

To Dukakis, hiring a mercenary army to make war against a foreign government the President opposes is “illegal” and a “failed policy,” a classic case of the United States trying to achieve alone and by force a goal that should be shared with allies and accomplished through diplomacy. To Bentsen, who grew up half an hour’s drive from the Mexican border, such a policy seems necessary to protect the peace of the United States from the chaos that lies to the south.

Yet, important as these differences may be, they mask deeper similarities between candidate and running mate--similarities far greater, for instance, than those between Dukakis and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, some of whose positions on specific issues Dukakis shares.

The prospective Democratic running mates share a basic style and approach to government, and already, friends say, they have hit it off well personally, plunging into the minutiae of things such as fiscal policy.

Organization Is Key

Both are politicians who have relied on rigorous field organizing more than on personal magnetism.

Both are described over and over by friends and staff members as “problem solvers,” pragmatic men who like to read and who take pleasure in mastering the details of complex issues.

Both are indifferent to ideology, to universal explanations or prescriptions for remaking society from the ground up. They are “jelly makers,” not “tree shakers,” in Jackson’s terms.

Moreover, on the basic notion of how government ought to work and what it ought to do, Dukakis and Bentsen share with each other and Jackson, but not with Bush, the idea that an active government is good, that it can accomplish things that business, left to the free market, would not. It is no accident that this idea encapsulates the issues--jobs, economic development, medical care, education--on which the Democrats hope to win the 1988 election.

They are the issues Bentsen has made his speciality since he took the oath of office as a U.S. senator in 1971.

Model Senator’s Office

Shortly after his election, Bentsen, in a move typical of him but rare in the Senate, hired Peat, Marwick & Mitchell, one of the Big Eight accounting and consulting firms, to study the offices of other senators and find out how to set up his own. It remains today one of the best-organized operations on Capitol Hill--”more like an executive office than a legislative one,” a longtime lobbyist noted.

In another characteristic move, the freshman senator rebuffed a Nixon Administration suggestion that he help form a conservative “ideological majority” on the Hill. At his first press conference in Washington, Bentsen said: “I’m coming here as part of the loyal opposition, not as part of the Nixon forces.”

In his first few years, he upset the Nixon Administration and the Texas aerospace industry by helping defeat plans for a government-financed supersonic transport plane. He used corporate board room expertise to devastate the arguments of Navy witnesses seeking higher appropriations for the Trident nuclear submarine. And he changed his mind about Vietnam and voted for Democratic efforts to end the war.

On other issues, his stands were shaded, carefully balanced. On the gun control issue, for example, he said during his 1970 campaign for the Senate that he opposed federal firearms laws, and he has voted since to weaken them. But, he quickly added, he might support curbs on “Saturday night specials.”

“Loophole Lloyd,” his 1976 GOP opponent, Alan Steelman, dubbed him, and the nickname fits much of the record. Consider his ratings from interest groups in 1986, a typical year of his 17 in the Senate: 50% from the American Conservative Union, 50% from the AFL-CIO, 45% from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action, 46% from the conservative National Taxpayers Union.

“He’s a definite measurer of the intensity factor,” noted a longtime liberal lobbyist who is also one of the Capitol’s best vote-counters. “It’s not just the 50% thing,” he explained: Bentsen--knowing he cannot side with everyone on every issue--has been careful, whenever possible, to support each constituency on the issues they care about most deeply.

Beginning in 1973, when he achieved another ambition and joined the Senate Finance Committee, Bentsen has become an expert on some of the most arcane, yet important, issues: tax policy--he was one of the chief sponsors of landmark reform legislation--foreign trade and pensions.

These are non-ideological issues, on which the real stakes are enormous but disagreements involve details, not sweeping statements of policy.

Bid for Presidency

In 1976, Bentsen tried to parlay his meticulously managed Senate record into the Democratic presidential nomination. In a slogan reminiscent of Dukakis’ rhetoric, he campaigned as the candidate of “competence.” He flopped early--the only time in public life thus far that Lloyd Bentsen’s striving ambition has failed.

The striving began 67 years ago--Feb. 11, 1921.

People outside Texas often wonder at Bentsen’s lack of a “Texas” accent, but the Lower Valley of the Rio Grande is a place apart. Most of Texas was settled in the first half of the 19th Century by farmers from Tennessee and Alabama, but the Valley remained sparsely inhabited--and almost wholly Mexican--until early in this century.

When it began to grow, in the years around World War I, the Valley drew settlers from the upper Midwest, people like Peter and Tina Bentsen, Danish immigrants who came from South Dakota to farm 10 acres of former mesquite scrub near the village of McAllen.

Their son, when he grew up and married, did something very unusual. With $500 wheedled from a local bank, he started buying land at the unheard-of price of $7 an acre. When news of his purchases spread through town, people stopped him on the street to inquire about his mental health. “Is there gold underneath it?” asked one. “It’s $3 land and will never be worth a damned dollar more.”

Saw Valley’s Future

What Lloyd Bentsen Sr. understood and most of his neighbors did not was that improvements in railroad cars were making it possible to ship citrus crops safely to distant markets, and that, in turn, would make profitable the extensive irrigation systems which--along with cheap Mexican labor--could turn the Rio Grande’s dry alluvial plains into a subtropical garden.

Lloyd Bentsen Sr. became a prophet, then a millionaire.

He did it not in the risky business of farming, but in real estate. The elder Bentsen became a master of the “immigration land business,” attracting refugees from the agricultural hardships of the upper Midwest, bringing them down a score at a time, putting them up in a lodge he and his brother Elmer owned, and telling them that the secret to prosperity was “to buy all the Valley land you can as quick as you can”--from the Bentsen brothers.

He estimates now that over the years, he and Elmer bought and sold a quarter-million acres--an area about half the size of Orange County in California. By the time Lloyd Jr. was growing up, his father was one of the wealthiest and most prominent men in the Valley.

Young Lloyd was graduated from school early. He studied law at the University of Texas, fell in love with Beryl Ann (B.A.) Longino, and joined the Army. By 1943, when childhood friend Joe Kilgore--who later represented the Valley in Congress--ran into him on a U.S. base in Brazil, Bentsen was already talking about entering politics after the war.

Decorated Bomber Pilot

Meantime, he married B.A. and became a pilot in the Army Air Corps. Bentsen flew some 50 bomber missions over Italy, was shot down twice and, at age 24, received the Distinguished Flying Cross.

When the war was over and he had returned to Mission and B.A. and 2-year-old Lloyd III, Bentsen promptly was elected Hidalgo County judge, a post more in the nature of a county commissioner than a judicial officer. At 25, he was the state’s youngest.

Two years later, he hired a professional consultant--an innovation in South Texas politics--and produced brochures asking voters to help him “Beat the Machine” and make him the youngest congressman. In Washington, he joined other recently returned veterans such as John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford and Eugene J. McCarthy. It was one of the biggest infusions of new blood in the history of Congress.

Shortly after his arrival in Congress, Bentsen bucked convention in the House to support legislation that would have abolished the poll tax--a device widely used to disenfranchise poor blacks throughout the South and Latinos in Texas. He was one of only two Texas congressmen to do so.

In another moment of controversy, he suggested that the United States threaten to use atomic bombs to end the Korean War. (Many historians believe Dwight D. Eisenhower secretly made just such a threat, after he was elected President in 1952, to force North Korea and China to enter armistice talks.) By the late 1960s, Bentsen’s public statement had become controversial, and he disavowed it as youthful foolishness.

Typical Texas Issues

Most of the rest of Bentsen’s tenure in Congress was conventional. He sided with Texas farmers against proposals to restrict migrant labor and supported the state in its fights with the federal government over royalties for offshore oil production.

Bentsen had become a favorite of Speaker Sam Rayburn, a fellow Texan, but success in the House, Rayburn counseled, would take a generation of waiting, and Bentsen’s ambition would not let him rest. After three terms, he quit.

Settling in Houston, Bentsen set out, with some $6 million from his family as initial capital, to establish an insurance company, which he quickly merged with another, Nebraska-based, insurer.

Exploiting Nebraska’s permissive rules on how insurance companies may invest their cash, he used his firm’s capital to buy substantial interests in several Texas banks. Then he diversified the operation into a conglomerate worth upwards of $30 million.

In 1962, he built one of Houston’s first skyscrapers--a Sheraton that was the first new hotel downtown since before World War II. Although the city remained largely segregated, the Sheraton opened as an integrated establishment, and was the first major hotel in the state to do so.

As Bentsen rose in the business elite, becoming a member of the boards of giant corporations such as Lockheed and Continental Oil and making friends who still are at the core of his inner circle, he never totally left politics. He was an active member of the Texas Democratic Party’s “Tory” wing, led by Lyndon B. Johnson and John B. Connally against the liberals, who led by the outspoken Sen. Ralph W. Yarborough.

Return to Politics

In 1970, with his fortune established--he is a multimillionaire--Bentsen itched to return to public office. People, he said, are like plants: They need to be “repotted” every now and then, and he was ready for repotting. As he later told his aide and adviser Loyd Hackler, he did not want to be remembered only for making money: “I want to do something where I can leave tracks.”

He set his sights on the Senate. To get there, Bentsen would first have to beat the incumbent, Yarborough, in the Democratic primary, then face an ambitious young Republican named George Bush.

The Democratic primary became a no-holds-barred donnybrook between the two feuding wings of the party. Copious amounts of mud were slung on both sides. Bentsen, with much deeper pockets for television advertising, could sling it farther and faster.

Yarborough’s speeches railed against Johnson and Connally and Bentsen’s father, bringing up old court cases that alleged the senior Bentsen had swindled some of the people to whom he sold land. Bentsen’s ads linked Yarborough to every unpopular liberal cause in the country.

The most famous advertisement showed scenes of rioting at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. “That was the violence in Chicago spawned by supporters of Eugene McCarthy during the Democratic convention,” the narrator said. “Sen. Ralph Yarborough endorsed McCarthy for President. Did he represent your views when he backed McCarthy?”

Attack From the Right

The strategy worked. Bentsen came from behind to beat Yarborough by 200,000 votes. Bush, who had expected to run against the liberal Yarborough, vowed that if Bentsen tried to run against him from the right, he would “step off the edge of the earth” to protect his flank.

Bentsen proved him wrong. He attacked Bush from the right on social issues and from the left over economic policy. This time, Bentsen won by 150,000 votes.

With the exception of his short-lived presidential bid in 1976, the contest against Bush was the last serious race Bentsen had to run.

Until now.

Staff writers J. Michael Kennedy in McAllen, Tex., and Robert L. Jackson in Houston contributed to this story.