John Goodwin Tower

Tower's hardest defeat came after the Senate. In 1989 President George Bush chose him for secretary of defense, but the Senate did not confirm the nomination. The Handbook of Texas attributes the rejection to his conservative political views and to alleged excessive drinking and womanizing; the charges and counter-charges of the hearings are chronicled in his 1991 memoir. Before politics he enlisted in the Navy in 1943 and served on an amphibious gunboat in the western Pacific. In 1952 and 1953 he studied at the London School of Economics, researching the Conservative party's workers.

What the plaque says

John Goodwin Tower (1925-1991) The son of a Methodist minister, John Goodwin Tower was a veteran of World War II and a political science professor before entering politics. He joined the national political scene in 1960-1961 when he won the special election to fill Lyndon B. Johnson's U. S. Senate seat, becoming the first Republican senator from Texas since Reconstruction. Tower served in the Senate for 24 years, holding a number of influential committee assignments and chairmanships. He became the chief United States negotiator at the strategic arms reduction talks in Geneva after his retirement from the Senate in 1985. He later chaired the Tower Commission, which issued its report on the Iran-Contra Affair in 1987. Tower was serving as an advisor to President George Bush at the time of his death in an airplane crash. (1999)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dallas Museum of Art — 5.8 mi
  A city art museum that began as the Dallas Art Association in 1903, grew up in Fair Park, and has stood in the Arts District since 1984 under a forty-foot barrel vault.
• Fair Park — 6.2 mi
  The State Fair of Texas grounds since 1886, where the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition left one of the country's greatest concentrations of Art Deco exposition buildings.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 6.3 mi
  Founded in 1974 at Bishop College, a free Fair Park museum holding the Sepia photograph archive, African art and A. Maceo Smith's papers, and the story of the Hall of Negro Life.
• The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — 6.4 mi
  A plow-company warehouse of 1903, identified by the Warren Commission as the building Oswald fired from, now a museum on its sixth and seventh floors above Dealey Plaza.

More markers nearby

• Caruth Pioneer Cemetery — 0.3 mi
• Zion Lutheran Church — 1.7 mi
• Highland Park Methodist Church — 2.3 mi
• Ursuline Academy — 2.7 mi