George Smathers

George Smathers
United States Senator from Florida
In office January 3, 1951 – January 3, 1969
Preceded by	Claude Pepper
Succeeded by	Edward J. Gurney
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 4th district
In office January 3, 1947 – January 3, 1951
Preceded by	Pat Cannon
Succeeded by	William C. Lantaff
Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Small Business
In office January 3, 1967 – January 3, 1969
Preceded by	John J. Sparkman
Succeeded by	Alan Bible
Personal details
Born	George Armistead Smathers November 14, 1913 Atlantic City, New Jersey
Died	January 20, 2007 (aged 93) Indian Creek, Florida
Political party	Democratic
Spouse(s)	(1) Rosemary Townley (div.) (2) Carolyn Hyder
Children	John Smathers Bruce Smathers
Alma mater	University of Florida
Profession	Lawyer
Military service
Service/branch	United States Marine Corps
Battles/wars	World War II

George Armistead Smathers (November 14, 1913 – January 20, 2007) was an American lawyer and politician who represented the state of Florida in the United States Senate for eighteen years, from 1951 until 1969, as a member of the Democratic Party.

Early life

Smathers was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the son of Lura Frances (Jones) and Benjamin Franklin Smathers.^[1] His uncle, William H. Smathers, was a U.S. senator representing New Jersey. His family moved to Miami, Florida in 1919, where he attended Miami High School. He then attended the University of Florida, where he earned his bachelor's degree and law degree. At Florida, he was president of his fraternity Sigma Alpha Epsilon (Florida Upsilon chapter), captain of the Gators basketball team, president of the student body, and a member of Florida Blue Key; he was inducted into the University of Florida Athletic Hall of Fame.^[2][3] After completing his LL.B. in 1938, Smathers returned to Miami, where he served as Assistant United States Attorney from 1940 to 1942. During World War II, he served as an officer in the United States Marine Corps.

Smathers was a childhood friend of Philip Graham, a fellow Floridian. Graham would later become the publisher of The Washington Post.

Political career

After the war, Smathers was elected to serve two terms in the United States House of Representatives, representing Florida's Fourth Congressional District from 1947 to 1951. He established a reputation for being a moderate except for his anti-communism.

Election to Senate

In 1950, Harry Truman called Smathers into a meeting at the White House and reportedly said, "I want you to do me a favor. I want you to beat that son-of-a-bitch Claude Pepper."^[4] Pepper had been part of an unsuccessful 1948 campaign to "dump Truman" as the Democratic presidential nominee, and Smathers had been his manager and pupil. Smathers challenged the incumbent senator in the Democratic primary and won by a margin of over 60,000 votes. The race was marked by echoes of the Red Scare. Smathers repeatedly attacked Pepper for having Communist sympathies, pointing out his pro-civil rights platform and campaign for universal health care as well as his travels to the Soviet Union in 1945 where, after meeting Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, supposedly declared he was "a man Americans could trust."^[4]

Part of American political lore is the Smathers "redneck speech," which Smathers reportedly delivered to a poorly-educated audience. The comments were recorded in a small magazine, picked up in Time and elsewhere, and etched into the public’s memories.^[5] Time Magazine, during the campaign, claimed that Smathers said this:

Are you aware that Claude Pepper is known all over Washington as a shameless extrovert? Not only that, but this man is reliably reported to practice nepotism with his sister-in-law, he has a brother who is a known homo sapiens,^[6] and he has a sister who was once a thespian in wicked New York. Worst of all, it is an established fact that Mr. Pepper, before his marriage, habitually practiced celibacy.^[7]

The leading reporter who actually covered Smathers said he always gave the same humdrum speech. No Florida newspapers covering the campaign ever reported such remarks contemporaneously. Smathers offered $10,000 to anyone who could prove he said it, and there were no takers before his death.^[4][8]

In the 1958 election, both Smathers and longtime Pittsburgh mayor and soon-to-be Pennsylvania governor David L. Lawrence were implicated in but eventually exonerated of an attempt to try to influence the Federal Communications Commission's choice of a grantee for a television license for channel 4 in Pittsburgh.^[9]

Smathers served as chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee for six years. In April 1957, Senator Smathers appeared on the CBS game show What's My Line? as a panelist.

Stand on civil rights

Smathers generally opposed legislative efforts for civil rights. Like many Southern Democrats, Smathers coddled segregationist voters.^[5] He denounced the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education rulings as a "clear abuse of judicial power." In 1956, Smathers signed the Southern Manifesto, together with eighteen of the other twenty-one U.S. Senators from the eleven states of the South, condemning the Supreme Court decision to desegregate the public school system. According to his obituary prepared by the Associated Press, Smathers once agreed to pay the bail of the jailed civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, but only if King agreed to leave Florida.

Smathers tried to water-down equal rights measures that President Dwight Eisenhower put through Congress, but he ultimately supported final passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Smathers voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He also opposed Johnson's elevation of Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court.

However, in 1965, Senator Smathers was one of only four senators from the Southern Democratic caucus to support President Johnson's Voting Rights Act which outlawed discriminatory voting practices that had been responsible for the widespread disenfranchisement of African-Americans in the United States.^[10] The act banned literacy tests, named federal vote registrars and imposed federal penalties on anyone who interfered with voting in local, state or federal elections.

Other work in the Senate

Smathers also helped pass bills to create Medicare, the Small Business Administration and Everglades National Park. He pushed for federal holidays to be moved to Mondays, essentially creating the modern three-day weekend, and he ardently supported the war in Vietnam.

Relationship with JFK

Smathers befriended John F. Kennedy and was an usher in his wedding, speaking on behalf of Kennedy at the wedding dinner rehearsal and reception.^[11] During the 1960 presidential campaign, Smathers was a favorite son candidate for the Democratic nomination. He later managed Kennedy's campaign in the Southeast.

Journalist Roger Mudd recalls being the network representative in the press pool boat that tried to follow the presidential yacht with Smathers aboard in the early 1960s. "Smathers was probably John Kennedy's best friend in the U.S. Senate. Together or singly, they were wolves on the prowl, always able to find or attract gorgeous prey.... It was a joke, our pretending to be covering the president, bobbing around in the ocean, squinting through binoculars to find out who was coming and going but always having our view blocked by a Secret Service boat just as another long-legged Palm Beach beauty climbed aboard."^[12]

It was leaked to the press that an emerging scandal involving the corrupt activities of Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson's aide Bobby Baker prompted Kennedy to give a private offer to Smathers of the second spot on the 1964 presidential ticket and a plan to drop Johnson as his running mate.

Retirement from politics

In 1968, Smathers declined to run for re-election to a fourth Senate term and retired from politics. He remained active in politics after his retirement from the Senate as a lobbyist.

Later life

Smathers Library, formerly known as Library East, at the University of Florida

Soon after leaving the Senate, Smathers divorced his first wife, heiress Rosemary Townley Smathers. In addition to lobbying, Smathers became a successful businessman, involved in a wide variety of interests, including automobile dealerships and orange groves. He sold his house on Key Biscayne to Richard Nixon, when Nixon was looking for a residence in Florida.

The former Senator became a rich man as both a lobbyist and businessman. Smathers made substantial gifts to the University of Florida. In 1991, Smathers gave a $24 million gift to the University of Florida library system, now known as the George A. Smathers Libraries.

Smathers resided in exclusive Indian Creek Island off of Miami Beach and was father to two sons, John (born 1941) and Bruce Smathers (born 1943) (Florida Secretary of State 1975–78) from his marriage to Townley.

Smathers often attended "Church by the Sea", the United Church of Christ in Bal Harbour, Florida. His funeral was held here^[13] after his death at age 93. Smathers' remains are located in Arlington National Cemetery.

Relations

Smathers was personally acquainted with every President of the United States to serve in the office in between, and including, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Bill Clinton. He was particularly close to both of the 1960 major party presidential nominees, John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. All three became congressmen in 1947. All three had been young senators together in the early 1950s. Smathers was said to have been the only person present at the 1953 Newport wedding of John Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier who was a member of neither the Kennedy nor Bouvier families.

It was through Smathers that Richard Nixon met his best friend and longtime companion, "Bebe" Rebozo. Smathers arranged for Rebozo, his Key Biscayne neighbor, to take Nixon deep sea fishing. It was Smathers' former Key Biscayne home, which he eventually sold to Nixon, which became famous as the Florida White House during Nixon's presidential administration.

Smathers' connections in politics continue to the present day. The current senior U.S. Senator from Florida, Bill Nelson, was a summer intern in Smathers' office, 1961–1962.^[14]

In popular culture

• Smathers Beach, a popular Key West destination, is named after the senator.
• The handsome politician was known as "Gorgeous George" (after the famous professional wrestler who appeared under that moniker) by his detractors.
• Smathers appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show and as a panelist on What's My Line?,^[15] and was frequently a guest on Larry King Live and other news programs.

See also

• Florida Gators
• List of Levin College of Law graduates
• List of Sigma Alpha Epsilon members
• List of University of Florida alumni

References

1. http://politicalgraveyard.com/families/11033.html
2. F Club, Hall of Fame, Distinguished Letterwinners. Retrieved December 19, 2014.
3. "Seven to be inducted into UF Hall of Fame," The Gainesville Sun, p. 8C (April 4, 1991). Retrieved July 24, 2011.
4. Fund, John, Political Journal "George Smathers, RIP", January 24, 2007.
5. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/us/21smathers.html
6. Swint, Kerwin C., Mudslingers: The Twenty-five Dirtiest Political Campaigns of All Time, Praeger Publishers, Westport, CT, 2006
7. "FLORIDA: Anything Goes". Time. 55 (16). April 17, 1950. Retrieved 12 September 2013.
8. State: A born winner, if not a native Floridian
9. "Smathers Exonerated in Pittsburgh TV Case". St. Petersburg Times. September 26, 1958. Retrieved 12 September 2013.
10. Andrew Glass (2011-03-15). "LBJ calls on Congress to enact voting rights bill March 15, 1965". Retrieved 12 September 2013.
11. Associated Press, "George A. Smathers, 93; Former Florida Senator," The Washington Post (January 21, 2007). Retrieved December 18, 2015.
12. Mudd, Roger (2008). The Place to Be: Washington, CBS, and the glory days of television news. New York, New York: PublicAffairs, p. 95. ISBN 978-1-58648-576-4
13. "United Church of Christ". Archived from the original on June 7, 2011.
14. Palm Beach Post, October 22, 2006.
15. "What's My Line? 28 Apr 1957". YouTube. CBS Television. Retrieved 15 Apr 2015.

Bibliography

• Crispell, Brian Lewis, Testing the Limits: George Armistead Smathers and Cold War America, University of Georgia Press, Athens, Georgia (1999). ISBN 0-8203-2103-6.

External links

• 1962 Democratic Fundraiser Footage; Kennedy commentary on Smathers
• Interviews with Smathers
• St. Petersburg Times newspaper article
• Washington Post, report of death
• UF Special Collections bio.
• George A. Smathers Digital Collection from the University of Florida Digital Collections
• A film clip "Longines Chronoscope with George A. Smathers" is available at the Internet Archive