Preston Smith (Texas)

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Preston Smith
40th Governor of Texas
In office January 21, 1969 – January 16, 1973
Lieutenant	Ben Barnes
Preceded by	John Connally
Succeeded by	Dolph Briscoe
Born	March 8, 1912(1912-03-08) Williamson County, Texas
Died	October 18, 2003 (aged 91) Lubbock, Texas
Political party	Democratic
Profession	Politician

Preston Earnest Smith (March 8, 1912 – October 18, 2003) was a Democratic governor of Texas from 1969-1973, and the lieutenant governor from 1963-1969.

Smith was born into a tenant farming family of thirteen children in Williamson County near Austin. The family later moved to Lamesa, the seat of Dawson County on the Texas South Plains, where Smith graduated from Lamesa High School in 1928. He thereafter graduated from Texas Tech University in Lubbock and built a movie theater business by the middle 1940s.

Smith was first elected to the Texas House of Representatives in 1944 and then to the Texas State Senate in 1956. In 1962 he was elected lieutenant governor, and then in 1968 he was elected governor, a position he held from 1969 to 1973. He succeeded the popular Democratic Governor John B. Connally, Jr., who later switched parties. To win the governorship, Smith first defeated Don Yarborough in the 1968 Democratic runoff election. Two other candidates Dolph Briscoe, a large landholder from Uvalde in the Texas Hill Country, and former Attorney General Waggoner Carr, were eliminated in the primary.

Smith then twice defeated Republican nominee Paul W. Eggers of Dallas, a friend of Senator John G. Tower. In the high-turnout election of 1968, Smith received 1,662,019 ballots (57 percent) to Eggers' 1,254,333 (43 percent). In the low-turnout election of 1970, Smith was an unopposed Democratic candidate, receiving 1,197,726 votes (53.6 percent) to Eggers' 1,037,723 (46.4 percent). Smith's terms were still two years each. The state went to four-year terms in 1974.

Preston Smith (second from left) with House Speaker Gus Mutscher, former president Lyndon B. Johnson and Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes in Brenham, August 17, 1970.

Smith was embroiled in the Sharpstown scandal stock fraud scheme of 1971 and 1972, which eventually led to his downfall. Smith lost his third term bid for the governorship of Texas to Dolph Briscoe of Uvalde in the Democratic primary in 1972. He ran a distant fourth in the primary, behind Briscoe, women's activist Frances "Sissy" Farenthold of Corpus Christi, and Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes.

In 1974, Smith joined banker Stanton Leon Koop (1937-2008), a native of Pampa, in forming the West Texas Savings Association in Lubbock. In 1986, Koop moved to Dallas, where he was affiliated with Great Western Mortgage Company, until his retirement in 1994.

In 1978, at the age of sixty-six, Smith again entered the Democratic gubernatorial primary against his intraparty rival, Governor Briscoe. Both Smith and Briscoe lost out in the primary to former Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice John Luke Hill, who in turn was narrowly defeated in the general election by Republican William Perry "Bill" Clements, Jr.

Toward the end of his life, Smith worked as a political liaison officer for Texas Tech. After he died in Lubbock, the city airport was renamed in 2004 as Lubbock Preston Smith International Airport in his memory.

Smith termed himself a "conservative Democrat". Though he was generally supportive of U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, he refused to support his party's nominees for president in 1980 and for governor in 1982. Instead of voting to reelect President Jimmy Carter and Governor Mark White, Smith cast his ballot for Ronald W. Reagan and Bill Clements, respectively.

Smith died in Lubbock and is interred in the Texas State Cemetery in Austin.

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Kinch, Jr., Sam; Procter, Ben (1972). Texas Under a Cloud: Story of the Texas Stock Fraud Scandal. Jenkins. 

[edit] External links

• Programs for people, by Preston Smith, published 1973, hosted by the Portal to Texas History.

• http://www.lubbockonline.com/stories/020508/obi_243811655.shtml

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