OBIT

Longtime Texas Rep. Jack Brooks Dies

Was in the Dallas motorcade with JFK.

Jack Brooks, who represented southern Texas in the U.S. House of Representatives for 42 years, died on Tuesday after a sudden illness. He was 89. Brooks was one of the last of the once-powerful Texas Democrats and one of “Sam’s Boys,” the name given to the state’s protégés of Sam Rayburn. “I’m just an old man like Rayburn,” Brooks said. “Just a Democrat, no prefix or suffix.” Brooks was in the Dallas motorcade in November 1963 when President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed—and Brooks stood behind Jacqueline Kennedy as his fellow Texan Lyndon Johnson took the oath of office the same day aboard Air Force One in Dallas’s Love Field.