Deaths: Bob Krueger, whose brief tenure as an appointed senator in 1993 made him the last Texas Democrat to serve in the upper chamber, died Sunday at the age of 86. Krueger previously was elected to represent the 21st District, which at the time was a geographic vast seat covering much of West Texas, in 1974 and 1976, but he gave it up to challenge Republican Sen. John Tower in 1978.
Lone Star State Democrats were still the dominant faction in this conservative state at the time, but Krueger had a difficult task ahead of him unseating Tower, whose win in the 1961 special election to succeed Vice President Lyndon Johnson made him the first Republican to win a direct election to the Senate in any of the 11 former Confederate states since the passage of the 17th Amendment half a century earlier. The Washington Post wrote weeks before Election Day, “With Tower and Krueger agreeing on most economic and oil-and-gas issues, the glitter foreseen for this campaign has turned to ho-hum boredom, a far greater hazard for Krueger than Tower.”
Krueger’s team tried to go after the incumbent by mailing out a newspaper column that, while it didn’t name Tower directly, implied the senator was a womanizer; Tower’s camp, in turn, asked why the 43-year-old Democrat was unmarried. The result turned out to be tight, but Tower held off Krueger 50-49; that same evening, Bill Clements was pulling off a similarly narrow win to become Texas’ first GOP governor of the 20th century.
Krueger ran again in the 1984 race to succeed the retiring Tower only for future Rep. Lloyd Doggett to narrowly deny him a place in the runoff. Krueger, however, eventually returned to office in 1990 by winning a spot on the powerful Railroad Commission. He held that job in 1993 when Gov. Ann Richardson appointed him to succeed Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, who resigned to become Bill Clinton’s first treasury secretary, after a long process where she would mention a name and see what the reaction was; one Democratic state representative explained Krueger was ultimately chosen because he “has statewide name ID, and no one has strong objections to him.”
The new senator, though, soon had to defend his seat months later in a special election that occurred as Clinton’s weak numbers were accelerating Texas Democrats’ decline in the state. Krueger and his allies argued the state needed to maintain a Democratic senator, while Republican state Treasurer Kay Bailey Hutchison used every chance she had to tie him to the administration: It was Hutchison’s strategy that resonated, and she scored a 67-33 victory. Krueger, who never sought elected office again, went on to serve as Clinton’s ambassador both to Burundi, where he survived a 1995 attack on his convoy that killed one person, and Botswana.