'History needs to know that this happened.' A prominent Texas politician said he unwittingly took part in a mission to sabotage Jimmy Carter's 1980 re-election campaign.
President of the United States from 1963 to 1969
His mentor was John Connally Jr., a titan of U.S. politics and former Texas governor who had served three presidents and just lost his own bid for the White House. A former Democrat, Connally had sought the Republican nomination in 1980 only to be swamped by former Gov. Ronald Reagan of California. Now Connally resolved to help Reagan beat Carter and in the process, Barnes said, make his own case for becoming secretary of state or defense in a new administration.
Barnes is no shady foreign arms dealer with questionable credibility, like some of the characters who fueled previous iterations of the October surprise theory. He was once one of the most prominent figures in Texas, the youngest speaker of the Texas House of Representatives and later lieutenant governor. He was such an influential figure that he helped a young George W. Bush get into the Texas Air National Guard rather than be exposed to the draft and sent to Vietnam. Lyndon B.
Records at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum confirm part of Barnes’ story. An itinerary found this past week in Connally’s files indicated that he did, in fact, leave Houston on July 18, 1980, for a trip that would take him to Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel before returning to Houston on Aug. 11. Barnes was listed as accompanying him.
None of that establishes whether Ronald Reagan knew about the trip, nor could Barnes say that Casey directed Connally to take the journey. Likewise, he does not know if the message transmitted to multiple Middle Eastern leaders got to the Iranians, much less whether it influenced their decision-making. But Iran did hold the hostages until after the election, which Reagan won, and did not release them until minutes after noon on Jan. 20, 1981, when Carter left office.
The term “October surprise” was originally used by the Reagan camp to describe its fears that Carter would manipulate the hostage crisis to effect a release just before the election. Reached by telephone this past week, Sick said he never heard of any involvement by Connally but saw Barnes’ account as verifying the broad concerns he had raised. “This is really very interesting, and it really does add significantly to the base level of information on this,” Sick said. “Just the fact that he was doing it and debriefed Casey when he got back means a lot.” The story goes “further than anything that I’ve seen thus far,” he added. “So this is really new.
“If we had gotten the hostages home, we’d have won; I really believe that,” he said. “It’s pretty damn outrageous.” Along the way, Connally found a political protégé in Barnes, who became “more a godson than a friend,” as James Reston Jr. put it in “The Lone Star,” his biography of Connally. The son of a peanut farmer who paid for college selling vacuum cleaners door to door, Barnes was elected to the Texas Legislature at age 21 and stood at Connally’s side for his first speech as a candidate for governor in 1962.
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