Consequences: A Personal and Political Memoir

By John G. Tower

This is the memoir of former US senator John Tower, whose nomination for Secretary of Defence in 1989 was rejected by the Senate, the first such action in America's history against a cabinet nominee of a new president.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0316851132
• ISBN13: 9780316851138
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: Little Brown & Co
• Length: 356 Pages
• Weight: 1.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.2" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

A rather dangerous secret

Halfway through this book there is a strange photo of Richard Nixon and John Tower snapped at the White House. Nixon is gripping Tower by the throat with both hands. The two men are supposedly clowning for the camera, but you can see in Senator Tower's eyes that he does not like Nixon's bullying. At all.Senator Tower was killed in a tragic plane crash in 1991. This ghost written autobiography, published in that year, seems a little jumpy, or chunked out, but it is as close as we may ever get to the important historical enigma of Texas Senator John Goodwin Tower, and especially of his little known power struggle with Richard Nixon in 1972, the year of the Watergate burglary. In the elections of 1972, President Nixon tried to oust Senator Tower, who was then one of the most powerful Republicans in congress. The White House deliberately and repeatedly undercut Tower's re-election campaign in his native Texas. But despite Nixon's best efforts to ditch him, Tower routed his Democratic opponent and kept his seat in the Senate. Some Watergate mavens think that while Nixon was working to unseat Tower in 1972, Senator Tower was working with Bob Woodward to unseat President Nixon. Tower is one of 22 people on the typical list of Deep Throat candidates. Why?Senator Tower chaired the Senate Arms Services Committee. He knew a national security secret that was put at risk by the Watergate investigations. Most of the money used by the Nixon campaign to pay the Watergate burglars was contributed by Gulf Resources, a Houston defense contractor which no longer exists. The rather dangerous secret was that Gulf Resources was a producer of hydrogen bomb fuel.Senator Tower himself exposed this eyebrow raising fact nine years after Watergate in a letter about Gulf Resources printed in the New York Times in 1983. What was going on?The first step is easy to guess. Had the FBI investigation of Watergate continued, the money Gulf Resources contributed to the Nixon campaign could have been traced back to a nuclear arms transaction, since that was the business Gulf Resources was in. But Richard Nixon intervened at precisely this point to halt the FBI investigation of the money. The intervention cost his Presidency. On tape, Nixon carefully called the Gulf Resources contribution "the Texas money" but the FBI had already determined that the money, about $100,000 altogether, came from outside the United States, nominally from Mexico. Opening up the source of this money to a serious investigation would have opened up a political and nuclear Pandora's Box. Who were Gulf Resources' customers? Where was the product shipped? Who was making money? One prominent theory is that the CIA was exporting hydrogen bomb fuel to help China arm itself against Russia. There are five or six other theories. But the central fact is plain. Thirty years ago, the revelation of any sort of secret transaction involving the transfer of hydrogen bomb fuel, foreign or domestic, could have started