Following the news Elmer Greinert “Bud” Shuster died Wednesday at age 91, the former Republican U.S. Representative from Pennsylvania was remembered in the press primarily for his tenure as all-powerful chairman of the House Transportation Committee from 1995-2001.
In that capacity, Shuster successfully defied both his own party’s House leadership and Democratic President Bill Clinton to keep more revenue from taxes on gasoline and air travel in the Highway and Aviation Trust Funds and to plow them back into highways and infrastructure.
What was barely reported about the Pennsylvanian was that, by all contemporaneous accounts, he was not supposed to make it to Congress in the first place — not by a long shot.
In 1972, the Keystone State’s newly-redistricted 12th District suddenly became the new and open 9th District when Republican Rep. J. Irving Whalley retired. The smart money had veteran State Sen. D. Elmer Hawbaker as GOP heir apparent. But the smart money did not reckon with Bud Shuster. Having completed a rapid rise to a vice presidency at the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), he then launched his own electronics business, sold it, and, after years in suburban Washington DC, started Shuster Farms in West Central Pennsylvania.
Financially comfortable enough to campaign full-time, Shuster blitzed the district in a bus and spoke to Rotary, Kiwanis, and Lion’s Club or any group that would host the little-known farmer-businessman. After each speaking date, Shuster — who had worked in the fledgling computer industry and seen its potential — and his secretary Ann Eppard would dash off scores of personalized thank-you notes on computers. Wife Patricia won over supporters with her charm, and their five young children delighted voters wearing buttons reading “Vote for Dad.”
From days of wooing investors for such risky deals as the rescue of the early computer Datel Company in the 1960’s, Shuster was a natural fund-raiser and soon outraised the front-runner Hawbaker.
Hawbaker suddenly saw his anticipated easy ride to Congress was not so easy. In the days before the primary, his campaign sent out a tabloid showing the “real” Shuster home in northern Virginia and strongly suggesting he was an outsider who moved into the district to run. But Shuster’s personal drive, attractive family, and image as a non-political problem-solver carried the day, and he beat Hawbaker in a major upset.
With the same winning-is-the-only thing attitude that got him to Congress, Shuster was elected president of the thirty-something Republican freshman class. President Richard Nixon instantly liked him, and Shuster soon found himself on the presidential yacht Sequoia discussing strategies of how to fight Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. Denouncing Cox as a “pompous, pious, self-righteous supposedly special prosecutor,” Shuster introduced a bill in 1973 calling for an investigation of criminal violations by Cox and his office. Nixon eventually fired Cox in the storied “Saturday Night Massacre” of October 1973 and resigned the following August. Shuster, who never apologized for his support of the embattled president, was re-elected with 56 percent in 1974.
Elected chairman of the Republican Policy Committee in 1978, the Pennsylvania lawmaker set his sites on the Number Two position — that of Whip — in the House GOP hierarchy. This would be the first time Shuster’s indefatigable energy and meticulous sense of planning and execution let him down. By a slim vote of 96-to-90, he lost to Mississippi’s Trent Lott. Most sources agree that the larger-than-usual number of Southerners among the 54 GOP freshman elected in Ronald Reagan’s landslide win in 1980 put Lott in over Shuster.
His dreams of one day becoming House speaker gone, Shuster focused on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. He championed the then-little-known practice of earmarks — that is, individualized legislation for a particular House district providing funding for pedestrian crossings, access roads, interchanges, buses, road widening, and all forms of infrastructure.
In 1998, four years after becoming Transportation Committee chairman, Shuster wrote and guided to passage the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century, which reserved revenue from gasoline taxes for road and transit projects, and earned him the nickname “King of Asphalt.” He also wrote a 2000 bill guaranteeing that money from a tax on airline tickets would be dedicated to aviation.
With a number of House Republicans opposing earmarks, Shuster asked GOP pollster Frank Luntz to create a “white paper” on how lawmakers could argue federal spending on infrastructure as a conservative cause — one that created private-sector jobs and more revenue. But most Republicans were not buying it and eventually they voted to end earmarks as a practice.
Shuster hit one of the few bumps in the road of his congressional career with a letter of reprimand for improper contact his former top aide Eppard had with his office after leaving to start her own lobbying business. In 2001, soon after being sworn in for another term, Shuster suddenly announced he was resigning from office and thus paved the way for his son Bill to be selected by local Republicans to run in the resulting special election.
The son of an engineer from Glassport, Pennsylvania, Bud Shuster worked his way through the University of Pittsburgh and was elected class president. He once recalled to Newsmax how, while in college, he met Matt Cvetic, an FBI informant posing as a Communist Party organizer in Pittsburgh who helped bring down the local Communist network (and whose exploits were the subject of the film I Was A Communist For the FBI). In the mold of Cvetic, Shuster was recruited by the CIA to infiltrate civil rights groups who had come under Communist influence and provoked police to attack Black marchers for civil rights. Shuster later served in the U.S. Army, earned a master's degree in Business Administration from Duquesne and a Ph. D in business from American University(Washington DC). By then, he was moving onward and upward as an RCA executive.
His business acumen and political success aside, Shuster also loved books and writing. While in Congress, he took a creative writing course at nights and, in 1983, wrote his first book "Believing in America" — an anthology of short stories on American history dating back to World War I and including several stories on his own life. He wrote five other books, including a novel entitled "Chances" about young men in the early days of the computer industry and their professional and lives and romances. Whatever one thought of Bud Shuster — and there was little middle ground among those who knew him — there was little disagreement he was a man of many parts and none of them uninteresting,
John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.
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