Jones was born in 1940 and raised in the Houston suburbs of the post-World War II boom in Texas. When Jones came of age, Texas was still a one-party Democratic state, but his town was a harbinger of the region’s future—a Republican stronghold. A high school debater, Jones wrote fan mail to Richard Nixon, who had just lost the race for governor of California and moved to New York to practice law. The former vice president flabbergasted young Jones by writing back with an offer: come to New York to work as a researcher as Nixon plotted his political comeback. Jones spent about a year with Nixon before toiling for the next three as an aide to various Republican congressmen on Capitol Hill.
Jones returned to Oklahoma with a singular goal—to win a seat in Congress. He chose to settle in Enid, the eighth largest city in the state, where he had no previous ties, because he thought the area offered him the best chance to run for office. And Jones did run for office—over and over. In the 1970s and ‘80s, Republicans were coming to dominate Oklahoma politics, but Jones never caught the wave. He ran four times, starting in 1974 as the Republican nominee for state attorney general; he lost with 32 percent of the vote. His political career ended sixteen years later, when he was routed, with just 17 percent of the vote, in a U.S. Senate race against David Boren, the incumbent Democrat. The common touch eluded Jones. A regal Anglophile, with a gray comb-over atop a six-foot-plus frame, Jones bought his suits on London’s Savile Row and favored such pretentious expressions as “sanctum sanctorum” for his office. He lived with his wife and four children in a house in Enid modeled on George Washington’s Mount Vernon. The house had a name—Elmstead—rather than an address.
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