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A potent Democratic machine used to dominate Texas politics. However Harry Whittington was amongst those that helped change that, methodically aggrandizing the state’s Republican Celebration because it rose to energy within the final century.
Whittington, an old-school Austin legal professional and GOP heavyweight, died early Saturday morning after a brief sickness, based on two folks near his household. He was 95.
He turned the middle of nationwide consideration in 2006, when then-Vice President Dick Cheney by accident shot him whereas looking quail on a ranch close to Corpus Christi. He spent the final years of his life with greater than two dozen shotgun pellets nonetheless in his physique.
Whittington grew up in Henderson in East Texas to a household of Democrats. However he was interested in the Republican Celebration’s messages of small authorities and low taxes. He put himself by way of faculty on the College of Texas at Austin and its legislation faculty.
The Henderson Republican then later entered state GOP circles. He joined George H.W. Bush on the marketing campaign path in 1964, in the course of the future president’s failed bid to signify Texas within the U.S. Senate. He supported James Baker in an unsuccessful bid for Texas legal professional normal in 1978 and John Tower in his victorious 1961 bid to be the primary Republican to win a Senate seat since Reconstruction, based on a Washington Put up report. He was additionally a fervent ally of George W. Bush; he financially backed him in each presidential races — donating $1,000 to the primary presidential race and $2,000 to his reelection.
Republican governors additionally chosen Whittington for appointments to Texas boards and commissions. He served on the board of Texas Division of Corrections and the Texas Board of Prison Justice, amongst others. He pushed an initiative for higher therapy of incarcerated Texans with developmental disabilities.
And, after a sequence of shakeups on the Texas Funeral Service Fee, it was Whittington who the youthful Bush, then the governor, requested to chair the state entity. Whittington helped settle a lawsuit filed by a state regulator who claimed she had been fired over investigating an organization headed by a Bush supporter. Main his first assembly on the fee, he stated, “If any company wants divine steering, it’s this one.”
Settled in his old school methods, Whittington didn’t have a pc or invoice his authorized shoppers by the hour, based on the Austin American-Statesman.
Whittington, an actual property investor, was additionally in a authorized battle with town of Austin for greater than a decade after it tried to grab a block of property he owned. In 2013, a Texas district courtroom dominated the property belonged to town however ordered town pay Whittington $10.5 million in compensation.
However Whittington gained his most widespread notoriety in 2006 in the course of the ill-fated South Texas quail looking journey with Cheney. They have been on Armstrong Ranch, owned by one other household with deep ties to the Republican Celebration. Cheney fired on a chook and hit Whittington within the face, neck and physique.
“Quail looking is a fast-moving process,” Whittington instructed the Austin American-Statesman years later. “The birds fly and also you swing on them and shoot the perfect you may. I had been attempting to find 50 years earlier than this accident. I wasn’t precisely an inexperienced hunter, and I’d by no means seen an accident.”
“And I can see the way it can occur when the solar is setting and an individual is swinging the gun and never seeing who he’s swinging towards,” he instructed the Statesman. “It was simply an accident. … Cheney was swinging to his left and when he did he swung over into the place I used to be looking.”
Whittington was rushed to a hospital, and the Corpus Christi Caller-Occasions broke the information of the accident a couple of hours later. He spent every week within the ICU.
It turned a world story. Cheney famously didn’t publicly apologize for the accident in its rapid aftermath, although Whittington did say after he was launched from the hospital that he was “deeply sorry for all that Vice President Cheney and his household have needed to undergo this previous week.”
And although he later stated he wasn’t significantly near the vp, the 2 remained cordial. After Cheney had dinner with Whittington’s household in 2018, the Statesman reported on the time, Whittington stated, “all of them loved assembly him and located him to be very likable and so forth.”
Disclosure: College of Texas at Austin has been a monetary supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan information group that’s funded partly by donations from members, foundations and company sponsors. Monetary supporters play no position within the Tribune’s journalism. Discover a full listing of them right here.
:focal(0x0:3000x2000)/static.texastribune.org/media/files/2a71658d6aa33c5919735cf49475b714/Harry%20Whittington%20REUTERS%20TT.jpg "Harry Whittington, longtime Texas GOP supporter shot by Dick Cheney in a hunting accident, dies")
/static.texastribune.org/media/files/5e5395400eb1f412fb6d97a439483caf/SpaceX%20Brownsville%20MGO%2005.jpeg "Cards Against Humanity says in new lawsuit that SpaceX has destroyed some of its South Texas property")