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World War II. William Perry Clements Jr. (April 13, 1917 – May 29, 2011) was an American businessman and Republican Party politician who served two nonconsecutive terms as the governor of Texas between 1979 and 1991. His terms bookended the sole term served by Mark Wells White, a Democrat who defeated Clements in the 1982 election only to ...
Nov 11, 2015 · Published: November 11, 2015. Updated: October 20, 2016. William Perry “Bill” Clements, Jr., businessman, philanthropist, and forty-second and forty-fourth governor of Texas, was born on April 13, 1917, in Dallas, to William Perry Clements, Sr., and Evelyn (Cammack) Clements. He graduated from Highland Park High School in 1934.
President Nixon seated informally with William P. Clements, Jr., Camp David, Maryland. November 22, 1972. As Deputy Secretary of Defense, Clements was the chief management officer of the department, overseeing an $92.8 billion budget with 3.01 million employees in 1976 alone, and the procurement of 116 major weapons systems that cost over $150 ...
- Early Career
- Governor
- The 1986 Return
- Clements as Governor
- Post-Political Life
- Further Reading
- Other Websites
Clements was born in Dallas and worked as an oil driller for many years. He studied at Southern Methodist University (SMU) but did not finish a degree. He founded SEDCO in 1947, which became the world's largest offshore drilling company. He entered politics as the United States Deputy Secretary of Defense under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald F...
On January 16, 1979, Clements replaced Democrat Dolph Briscoe as governor of Texas. He defeated State Representative Ray Hutchison in the Republican primary by a vote of 115,345 to 38,268. Clements won the November 1978 general election defeating Democrat John Hill. Hill had been the Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court and had been the Texas A...
After being defeated, Clements was chairman of the board of governors of SMU in Dallas. He ran again in 1986 and won a primary against U.S. Representative Thomas Loeffler of New Braunfels and former Democratic turned Republican Congressman Kent Hance of Lubbock. At the election Clements defeated Governor White getting 52.7% of the votes.
His first term was marked by SEDCO's involvement in the then largest oil blowout in history, the Ixtoc I oil spill, which caused extensive environmental damage. Charlie Brooks, Jr., became the first prisoner to be executed by lethal injection (December 1982). Clements faced heavily Democratic state legislatures. In 1980, Clements changed the death ...
After leaving the governorship, Clements worked hard to help Republican candidates seeking office in Texas. He lived in Dallas with his second wife, Rita Crocker. She was later appointed to the University of Texas Regents by Governor George W. Bush. Clements was known for his acerbic, energetic personality, which Democrats hated but Republicans lov...
Bridges, Kenneth William. "The Twilight of the Texas Democrats: The 1978 Governor's Race," Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Texas, 2003, 281 pages; AAT 3117260 in Proquest
Papers of Governor William P. Clements at Texas A&M University Archived 2009-08-02 at Archive.todayBill Clements at Find a Grave'Bill Clements Dies at 94; Set Texas on G.O.P. Path', James C. McKinley, Jr., The New York Times, 30 May 2011William P. Clements was born April 17, 1917, in Dallas. After his family lost their farm in the Depression, Clements worked as an oil-field roughneck before attending college. The oil fields interested him more than school and he began a career in drilling. In 1947, he and two partners borrowed the money to buy two oil drilling rigs, a venture ...
May 31, 2011 · By James C. McKinley Jr. May 30, 2011. HOUSTON — Bill Clements, a brash oilman who founded an international drilling company before going into politics and breaking the Democrats’ stranglehold ...
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Other articles where Bill Clements is discussed: Karl Rove: …the successful gubernatorial campaign of Bill Clements, the first Republican to be elected to the state’s highest office since Reconstruction (1865–77). Rove formed his own consulting business in 1981, with a list of clients that included Phil Gramm, elected to the U.S. Senate in 1984, and Tom Phillips, who in…
