Lloyd Bentsen, the former Texas senator and Treasury secretary who uttered one of the most memorable put-downs in American politics when he told Dan Quayle, "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy," has died. He was 85.
Bentsen died Tuesday morning at his home in Houston, said Joe O'Neill, his former chief of staff. He had been in ill health since suffering a stroke in 1998.
"Lloyd Bentsen was a man of great honor and distinction," President George W. Bush said in a statement from the White House. In Congress, Bentsen "was known for his integrity and for seeking bipartisan solutions to issues facing our nation," said Bush, whose father lost a Senate race to Bentsen in 1970.
Bentsen was praised on the Senate floor Tuesday by Democratic Leader Harry Reid, who called him "a guiding light." Texas Governor Rick Perry ordered flags at state buildings to be flown at half-staff for five days in memory of Bentsen, "a war hero and true Texas leader who earned the respect of the nation."
While Bentsen had presidential ambitions, it was as the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 1988 that he dismissed Republican rival Quayle's comparison of his own Senate experience with that of former Democratic President John F. Kennedy. "Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy," Bentsen responded. "I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy."
Bentsen and fellow Democrat Michael Dukakis lost the election to George H.W. Bush and Quayle.
As a senator from Texas, Bentsen was chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and helped pass bills establishing individual retirement accounts and protecting workers' pensions. As President Bill Clinton's first Treasury secretary from 1993 to 1994, Bentsen helped push through the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and a controversial deficit-reduction package.
Bentsen "wasn't the good ol' boy, slap-you-on-the-back- type of guy; he was very controlled, he was reserved," said Don Carleton, director of the Center for American History at the University of Texas in Austin, who conducted oral history interviews with Bentsen.
Bentsen started his political career in Texas as a conservative Democrat and over the years his views moderated, said Lewis Gould, history professor emeritus at the University of Texas and author of "The Most Exclusive Club," a book about the Senate.
Bentsen "was sort of the last great Democratic figure in the state," Gould said. "His real triumph was in 1982 when he ran for re-election" for his third Senate term, Gould said. With Bentsen on the ticket were Mark White for governor, William Hobby Jr. for lieutenant governor and Ann Richards for state treasurer.
"They really just pulverized the opposition," Gould said. "It turns out in retrospect to have been the last real surge of Democratic support" in Texas, Gould said.
Lloyd Millard Bentsen Jr. was born Feb. 11, 1921, in Mission, Texas, on the Mexican border.
He did his undergraduate work and earned his law degree from the University of Texas at age 21 in 1942, then volunteered for the Army, as the U.S. was then in World War II.
He was first sent to Brazil, but longed to get back to the U.S. to court his girlfriend, Beryl Ann Longino, whom he heard was being pursued by other men, said Gould, who also interviewed Bentsen for the Center for American History oral history project.
Bentsen was told the only way to do that was to volunteer as a combat pilot, so he did, winning some time in the states before flying B-24 bombers for the Army Air Force on missions in Italy, Germany, France, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, including raids on the Ploesti oil fields in Romania.
Among Bentsen's classmates in flight training was actor Clark Gable, Gould said. Bentsen was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters and achieved the rank of colonel in the Army Reserve.
He married Beryl Ann, known as B.A., in 1943. The couple had three children.
Returning home after the war, Bentsen practiced law and entered politics, winning election as a county judge in 1946. In 1948, he won a race for Congress and entered the House in 1949 as its youngest member. He served for three terms and left to enter the insurance business.
Bentsen returned to politics in 1970, running for the U.S. Senate in the Democratic primary against incumbent Ralph Yarborough. Few, including former President Lyndon Johnson, thought Bentsen could win.
"Well, Mr. President, I can't if I don't try," Bentsen told Johnson according to an oral history interview with Bentsen in the LBJ Library in Austin.
Bentsen edged out Yarborough in the primary and then defeated future President George H.W. Bush in the general election.
"Bentsen ran close enough to the right-field wall, there was no way Bush could get outside of him," author Richard Ben Cramer wrote. Bentsen would serve 22 years in the Senate, rising to become chairman of the Finance Committee in 1987.
In that post he worked for fiscal discipline, tax overhaul and expanding U.S. trade in foreign markets.
He also gained unwanted attention for his plan to have a series of breakfasts with the chairman in which lobbyists would pay $10,000 to participate. "The press dubbed the process "Eggs McBentsen,' and the astute chairman quickly canceled the whole venture," Gould wrote.
In 1976, Bentsen announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination, a futile quest as former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter got the party's support. Bentsen considered running for president again in 1992 against George H.W. Bush, but rejected it, Gould said.
In 1988, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee for president, chose Bentsen to be his vice presidential running mate to appeal to "Reagan Democrats." The so-called Boston-Austin team of a liberal northeasterner with a more conservative Texan was deemed "the Odd Couple" on the cover of Time magazine.
With Texan Bush on the Republican ticket, Dukakis and Bentsen failed to carry Texas, though Bentsen won re-election to the Senate.
In 1992, Democratic President-elect Bill Clinton picked Bentsen to be his Treasury Secretary. If Bentsen and Dukakis were the Odd Couple, Bentsen and the Clinton administration were the dean and the frat boys.
"He told me that the president wanted some gray hair in the administration," Carleton said.
"The Clinton White House had sort of a college all-nighter atmosphere," Gould said. Soft-spoken, precise and personally restrained, Bentsen "expected a more orderly and systematic approach to how governance worked," Gould said.
Like many other Treasury secretaries, Bentsen made mistakes at first, not realizing the strictures of the job.
In February 1993, he told reporters, "I'd like to see a stronger yen." His comment flew around the world, and the dollar fell to the lowest levels in a generation against the yen, weakening confidence in the economy and the new administration.
"He said that was when he realized it was one thing to have a public opinion as a senator and share it with the press, and it was something else again to have an opinion as secretary of the Treasury and share it with the press," Carleton said.
As Treasury secretary in 1993, Bentsen pushed hard for congressional passage of Nafta. Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich credits Bentsen with causing Clinton to make it a priority, even over former First Lady Hillary Clinton's health- care overhaul plans.
"I remember Lloyd banging his finger on the table, 'We must get this done right away.' And so the president decided that that was going to get the priority," Reich said in an interview for PBS's Frontline.
"I have courted some of these congressmen longer than I courted my wife," Bentsen quipped, according to Newsweek magazine.
Bentsen played tennis with then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, and, as Reich saw it, Bentsen became Greenspan's conduit to Clinton. Greenspan's message was that the Fed would cut interest rates if the White House cut the deficit, and then the economy would prosper, Reich said. The message suited Bentsen's own deficit-cutting instincts, and Clinton, encouraged later by Bentsen's successor, Robert Rubin, heeded it, presiding over the longest period of economic growth in U.S. history and turning federal deficits into surpluses.
In 1999, Clinton awarded Bentsen the Presidential Medal of Freedom, calling him a friend to business and workers alike who "helped bring greater opportunity and unprecedented prosperity to our country."
E-mail: barthur@bloomberg