Henry B. Gonzalez

Henry B. Gonzalez (May 3, 1916 to November 28, 2000) represented San Antonio in the United States House of Representatives from 1961 to 1999 and was chairman of the Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs from 1989 to 1995. In 1977 he was briefly chairman of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. From 1990 to 1993 he investigated the loans of the Atlanta branch of Banca Nazionale del Lavoro to Iraq, and published much of what his committee obtained by reading it on the House floor.¹²

Early Career

Gonzalez was born in San Antonio to Mexican immigrants, took a law degree at St. Mary's University in 1943, and worked during the Second World War as a civilian cable and radio censor for military and naval intelligence. He was elected to the city council in 1953 and to the Texas Senate in 1956, where in 1957 he and Abraham Kazen filibustered a package of segregation bills. He ran for governor in 1958 and for the United States Senate in 1961, was a national chairman of the Viva Kennedy campaign of 1960, and won a special election to the House in November 1961. He sat on the banking committee for all of his 37 years in Congress.¹

In 1963 he shoved Representative Ed Foreman, who had called him a "pinko," and in 1986 he struck a man who called him a communist in a San Antonio restaurant. He pressed for years for an investigation of the 1979 murder of federal judge John H. Wood Jr. in San Antonio, which he held to be the work of organized crime. When indictments came in 1982, William Webster of the FBI credited him.¹

The Assassinations Committee

Gonzalez became chairman of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1977 and entered a public dispute with its chief counsel, Richard A. Sprague, over Sprague's independence of the committee. The other members sided with Sprague, and Gonzalez resigned on March 2, 1977, within a month of taking the chair.¹

The Banking Committee

He became chairman of the banking committee in January 1989, having warned of the condition of the savings and loan industry since 1979. His hearings on Charles Keating and Lincoln Savings and Loan produced the evidence against the five senators who had intervened with regulators on Keating's behalf.¹²

Banca Nazionale del Lavoro

The FBI raided the Atlanta branch of the Italian state bank in August 1989 and found that it had lent Iraq several billion dollars off its books, much of it guaranteed by the Commodity Credit Corporation of the Department of Agriculture. When Gonzalez proposed hearings, the Kennedy Library later recorded, "he was asked by high-ranking government officials to desist on the grounds of national security." Attorney General Richard Thornburgh wrote to him on September 26, 1990, that a hearing scheduled for October 9 and staff interviews of witnesses raised "the prospect that culpable parties will elude prosecution," and added: "As you should be aware, this is a sensitive case with national security concerns." On December 18 the State Department informed the Department of Justice that "with respect to the national security aspects of the investigation, we have determined that the State Department does not have any concerns it wishes to raise at this juncture." The committee issued subpoenas. Beginning in February 1992 he delivered about twenty hour-long special order speeches on the House floor, among them "Efforts to Thwart Investigation of the BNL Scandal," "Kissinger Associates, Scowcroft, Eagleburger, Stoga, Iraq, and BNL," "The Rostow Gang," "Scowcroft Improperly Intervened in CCC Program and Many More Lies to Congress," and "The BNL Case: Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil," and entered the documents in the Congressional Record.²³

On May 18, 1992, he said: "When the BNL offices were raided in Atlanta in August 1989, investigators uncovered massive fraud, placing the entire CCC Program for Iraq in jeopardy. So the White House and NSC, armed with National Security Directive 26, sprang into action in order to save the CCC Program for Iraq." He named Scowcroft, the president's counsel C. Boyden Gray, Gray's deputy John Schmitz, Richard Haass of the National Security Council staff, and Clayton Yeutter as parties to the discussions, and said that by April 1990 "it was apparent the BNL indictment was being delayed." On July 21 he quoted a July 1990 intelligence report, "Iraq's Growing Arsenal," which identified Iraq's State Establishment for Oil Refining and Gas Processing as "a dedicated front for procuring chemical weapons related components," against the text of National Security Directive 26, which placed "particular emphasis on expanding United States-Iraq oil industry related trade."³⁴

On September 25 he described a brass factory worth 40 million dollars sold to Iraq by SerVaas Inc. of Indianapolis under a contract negotiated with Safa al-Habobi and financed by the Atlanta branch. Its owner had told the committee in April 1991 that the brass was "solely for commercial uses." Gonzalez produced a memorandum of July 31, 1988, showing that the Iraqi purchaser meant it for cartridge cases and artillery fuses, and quoted the owner's remark to the Indianapolis Star in August 1992: "Probably the only thing they are doing is melting the brass down." President George H.W. Bush's report to Congress of September 1991 had stated that "United States suppliers did not contribute directly to Iraq's conventional or nonconventional weapons capability."⁵

The Ethics Resolution

His statement of July 7, 1992, drew on a CIA document titled "Iraq-Italy, Repercussions of the BNL-Atlanta Scandal." Director Robert Gates wrote to him that it "included information from a TOP SECRET compartmented and particularly sensitive document" of September 4, 1989, and that "because of the sources and methods underlying that information, I will ask for a damage assessment to determine the impact of the disclosure." Admiral William Studeman wrote that the statements of July 21 and 27 were drawn from similar material. Attorney General William Barr told the committee that the executive branch would stop supplying classified documents without guarantees. On August 4 the minority leader, Bob Michel, introduced a resolution calling for an ethics investigation, arguing that the proper course was a vote in secret session. "I believe that Mr. Gonzalez' conduct does not reflect creditably on the House," he said. He was not censured, and he continued the statements into 1993.⁶

The Kennedy Library gave him its Profile in Courage Award on September 11, 1994, for investigating, "regardless of the attempts to strip him of his committee chairmanship, the involvement of high-level officials in the Reagan and Bush Administrations in the sale of U.S. arms to Iraq." Of the war of 1991 he had said: "Not only did our own service men and women face military material that had been exported from the U.S., the U.S. military itself relied on these Iraqi front companies for some of the military goods they used." He lost the chairmanship to James Leach in 1995 and did not run in 1998. His son Charles succeeded him.¹²