But then the Securities and Exchange Commission filed suit against Houston banker and real estate developer Frank Sharp, alleging that Sharp had manipulated the price of his bank’s stock. Won’t You Say You Love a Dark ‘Barney’ Movie?

But the résumé does not even begin to hint at what he is really like. In retrospect, success came to him too soon in life, before he was able to understand how fickle it could be. “He called a friend of mine to see if I could help him in Austin. By his second term, which began in 1963, he was clearly on the rise, aligned with Connally, who had just been elected governor, and the new Speaker, an East Texan named Byron Tunnell.

Barnes won a second term as speaker in 1967, before his election as lieutenant governor in 1968. Enter your email below to send a password reset email. Here comes Thomas Carper of Delaware across the floor to shake hands. Barnes defeated a heavily favored opponent to win election in 1961 to the Texas House, where he represented the Comanche County town of De Leon. He has a knack for quick thinking and never lets the goalposts out of his sight. Our first stop was the office of Carl Levin of Michigan, the chair of the Armed Services committee. As Barnes tells it, the bill authorizing a study for the train was languishing in the Legislature with three weeks left in the session when he was hired. It was time to close the deal. "And I love the chance to make good things happen for them.". “I went from over fifty percent to the forties, to the thirties.” In the end, he didn’t even get twenty. What Is NASA Going to Announce About the Moon? He had attended a Democratic senatorial fundraiser on Nantucket in 1990 and struck up a friendship with Tom Daschle. Potential rivals never had a chance. While still a UT student, Barnes worked at the state Health Department.

You have to pay him now.’” He landed the two biggest lobbying jobs that the Capitol has ever seen: the bullet train and the lottery. That was the good news. In frantic maneuvering at the end of the 1991 legislative session, Barnes had three hours to get three votes in the Senate, which he did. https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/ben-barnes-2/. You go into a conversation with him remembering how controversial he has been, vowing to be on guard, but it doesn’t matter. “The president of this company arrived in Houston in 1984 with nothing more than a U-Haul truck,” Barnes told one of Levin’s staffers. Ben Barnes Ben's keen political insight, hard work, ability to cut through the clutter, along with his charisma, made him a protégé of President Lyndon B. Johnson and an ally of Governor John Connally. The tall redhead is instantly recognizable, and even in this inner sanctum of power, he seems to know someone at every table. But his meteoric career worked against him; who knew what such an ambitious young man might have done? Barnes began accumulating pledges of support from colleagues to succeed Tunnell if the Speaker decided not to seek a third term in 1967. University of Texas at Austin, 2006-2017. “I don’t represent clients day to day on legislation. There goes Barnes to press the flesh with John Edwards of North Carolina. He foresaw an urban and modern Austin and was part of the wave of developers who literally built the city we see today.

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