[2] He taught English literature as a professor and was later vice provost and Dean of the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University.

In the general election, Krueger defeated Republican Doug Harlan of San Antonio, who had also run unsuccessfully against the previous congressman from the district O.C.

Tower decided to retire but Krueger lost in the Democratic primary, caught in the middle between the more liberal State Senator Lloyd Doggett and the more conservative U.S. Representative Kent Hance.

From 1985 to 1989, he also wrote a regular column on a broad range of public affairs issues, which was carried in newspapers in San Antonio, Dallas, Houston, and Corpus Christi, Texas.

In his candidacy, Krueger received the most votes of any contested candidate on the primary ballot of either major party and defeated his general election opponent by a 16 percent margin.

[citation needed] He was appointed by Governor Ann Richards in 1993 to the U.S. Senate to fill the vacancy caused by the resignation of four-term incumbent and 1988 Democratic vice presidential nominee Lloyd Bentsen, who became Secretary of the Treasury in President Clinton's cabinet.

He lost the June 1993 special election runoff for the remainder of the term ending January 3, 1995 by a 2-to-1 margin to the popular Texas State Treasurer, Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison.

In 2010, Krueger's campaign was named by the same Houston Chronicle article as the single worst in Texas' modern political history.

He was traveling on a bare highway in Cibitoke, when gunmen with AK-47s attacked the motorcade, before being diverted by Diplomatic Security Service agents Chris Reilly and Larry Salmon.

He held those posts until 2000, when he became a visiting fellow at Merton College, Oxford, and began to write a memoir of his time in central Africa.