Who Had Ever Heard of Odessa, Texas?.
As far as my mother was concerned, we could have been living in Russia.
-BARBARA BUSH.
We all just wanted to make a lot of money quick.
-GEORGE H. W. BUSH.
ALL BUSH REALLY KNEW about Texas came from his brief wartime stint at Corpus Christi, and, he admitted, from Randolph Scott movies. Everything was new to him. Stopping for lunch outside Abilene in his Studebaker in the summer of 1948, he went into a wooden-frame restaurant that advertised Lone Star, Jax, Pearl, and Dixie beers-all regional brands. He asked for a Lone Star or a Pearl-no time like the present to get into the local ways-and, looking over the menu, decided to go all in. "Chicken-fried steak," he said to the waitress. He did not know what, precisely, he had just ordered. "Would it turn out to be a steak fried like a chicken, or a chicken fried like a steak?" Bush wondered. Ten minutes later came a steak covered in what he thought was "thick chicken-type gravy." Between the midday beer and the steak and the gravy, Bush found the last two-hundred-odd-mile push west to Odessa a sleepy one. But he made it, passing derrick after derrick along the otherwise barren landscape, parking the Studebaker next to the small tin-roofed Ideco store, which sold parts for oil drilling.
"Ideco" was shorthand for Bush's new employer, formally known as the International Derrick and Equipment Company, a subsidiary of Dresser's. "You'll be an equipment clerk," Neil Mallon had told Bush. His monthly salary was $375. Within a week Bush rented half of a duplex on the unpaved East Seventh Street and sent for Barbara and the baby. The apartments were connected by a common bathroom. On Chapel and Edwards streets in New Haven the Bushes had shared baths before, but the similarities between Yale and Odessa ended there, as Barbara discovered when she and Georgie got off the plane from New York after a twelve-hour flight. They were stepping into what she called "a whole new and very hot world."
Back home in Rye, Pauline Pierce, Barbara's mother, was puzzled by the whole business. "Who had ever heard of Odessa, Texas?" Barbara wrote of Mrs. Pierce's reaction to the move. "She sent me cold cream, soap, and other items she assumed were available only in civilized parts of the country. She did not put Odessa in that category." The Bushes' fellow renters next door, a thirty-eight-year-old mother and her twenty-year-old daughter, were prostitutes whose callers often locked the Bushes out of the bathroom.
Reading trade journals, minding the Ideco store, and beginning to work as a salesman, Bush was learning the rudiments of the oil business. One day early in his stay in Odessa, he was assigned the task of painting some pumping units-while they were pumping. Bush and Hugh Evans, a Texan with what Bush recalled as "a gift for fading into the scenery at the slightest hint of physical labor," were sent out into the heat by their boss, Bill Nelson. "The units we were supposed to spruce up were monsters that had been baking in the sun for weeks," recalled Bush. "That meant trouble, because the only way to paint a pumping unit is to move, top to bottom, straddling the main beam as you go. Imagine riding a hot branding iron without a saddle and you've got the picture."
The savvy Evans painted a bit around the base of a pump then took a cigarette break in the shade of a nearby tree. "Hey, George, you know what the thermometer read when we left the store?" Evans asked. "A hundred [and] five degrees." Bush, riding the pump in the harsh sun, was feeling every one of those degrees. "One hell of a day to send folks out to paint a damn pumping unit, if you ask me," Evans said. "It just ain't fair." After watching Bush, who was "wrung out," finish the job, Evans asked the weary Bush, "George, would you mind if I ask a personal question?"
"That depends, Hugh. What is it you want to know?"
"Just tell me," he said, "whatever brought you to Texas?"
- In the autumn Barbara suffered a miscarriage. "As I told you before we both are sort of hoping that we will have another child before too long," Bush wrote his mother on Wednesday, October 20, 1948. "Bar thinks about it a lot, and foolishly worries too much. I don't like to have her upset." Her life in particular revolved around Georgie's; the toddler was a bundle of energy. She took him to the circus in nearby Midland and worried over his health. (He woke up one night and "coughed until his little body almost broke," Barbara wrote. "I climbed in bed with him and hugged him.") After a large shot of penicillin, the two-year-old was dozing on his parents' bed, listening to Mother Goose on a record player borrowed from a neighbor, when he looked up at his father and said, "No man hurt Georgie, No Man!" He was, Bush wrote home, "referring of course to the needle....He is so wonderful, Mum, so cute and bright. Oh he has his mischievous and naughty spells, but I just can't picture what we would do without him."
Both Bushes focused on two subjects above all others: the elder George's job and anything concerning the younger George. "Whenever I come home he greets me and talks a blue streak, sentences disjoined of course but enthusiasm and spirit boundless," Bush wrote Gerry Bemiss. "He is a real blond and pot-bellied. He tries to say everything and the results are often hilarious." The boy was spirited. Writing her parents to thank them for sending twenty-five dollars to pay for nursery school, Barbara reported that Georgie sometimes slipped out of the house unannounced, driving Barbara to distraction. "G.W.B. has a wee bit of the Devil in him," Barbara told her parents. "This A.M. while I was writing a letter early he stuck a can opener into my leg. Very painful and it was all I could do to keep from giving him a jab or two."
Bush shot doves with pals from Ideco, who taught him how to clean the birds, freeze them, and then, in due course, fry them up. There were football games or occasional dinners with the Reeders in Midland (old Yale friends) or a drive-in movie (the Bushes saw The Egg and I over Labor Day weekend 1948). Sundays were spent going to church, napping, and then taking Georgie to the playground. Though both Bushes were cheerfully adaptable, Bush worried about Barbara. "She is something, Mum, the way she never ever complains or even suggests that she would prefer to be elsewhere," he wrote in October 1948. "She is happy, I know, but anyone would like to be around her own friends, be able to take at least a passing interest in clothes, parties etc. She gets absolutely none of this. It is different for me, I have my job all day long with new things happening, but she is here in this small apt."
Barbara got a library card and loved suggestions for books to read. Her mother-in-law sent her a 1,500-page Civil War novel, House Divided, which she devoured. The young couple read Time and Life each week and took The Wall Street Journal and The Odessa American, which was daily except Saturdays. By Christmas, Bush had moved the family from East Seventh to East Seventeenth, where, Barbara recalled, they would have their own bath. On Christmas Eve, Bush was assigned bartending duties at the Ideco company party. The task did not require much expertise: Most of the crowd drank straight whiskey or, if they were taking it easy, whiskey with a bit of water. A martini man in New Haven-Bush tended to have one or two drinks and that was it-he got into the spirit of the place and of the season that afternoon. A great many amber-colored drinks later, Bush was poured onto the flatbed of the company pickup truck; his colleagues dropped him off in the yard in front of the new apartment. "That, at least, was the way Barbara told the story of our first Christmas Eve in Texas," Bush recalled. He admitted his memories of the day were, at best, fuzzy.
In January 1949, Bush's parents flew down to Odessa on the Dresser company plane. Mrs. Bush settled in for nearly a week while Prescott continued on a Dresser inspection trip. The tireless Dorothy offered her daughter-in-law an intimidating example, cleaning the house and even washing the windows. "I have got to get this in the mail," Barbara wrote as she closed a letter. "I want to get some work done before Mrs. B. does everything."
As always, Bush worried. "The job continues in an interesting fashion, although I am selling or supposed to be, and am frankly very sad at it," he wrote Gerry Bemiss. "I drive around to rigs and small company offices, and so far have sold nothing." Yet he knew he had made the right move. "This West Texas is a fabulous place, Gerry. Fortunes can be made in the land end of the oil business, and of course can be lost....If a man could go in and get just a few acres of land which later turned out to be good he would be fixed for life." Money, however, was not the only thing driving him. In January 1949, Bush-then twenty-four years old-wrote Bemiss, "I have in the back of my mind a desire to be in politics, or at least the desire to do something of service to this country."
In April 1949, the Bushes left Texas for a yearlong stint in California. This time all three of them got into the Studebaker to head toward the coast, living in motels, inns, and apartments in Whittier, Ventura, Bakersfield, and Compton, where Bush worked at Pacific Pumps, another Dresser-owned company. He joined the United Steelworkers, paying dues and attending union meetings. Barbara noticed how much the other men liked her husband. "When I pick him up at work they always nod or wave to him," she wrote her family. "He seems to have the common touch-he is loved by all-especially me."
Credit 9.1 From early days selling drilling equipment to years of scouting offshore sites around the world, Bush built a significant oil business before moving into politics full-time in the mid-1960s.
They were living at 624 South Santa Fe in Compton in the fall of 1949. Barbara, who was pregnant, spent her days there while Bush was at Pacific Pumps. On Friday, September 23, 1949, word of a terrible accident in Rye reached Bush at work. Marvin Pierce had been driving to the station with his wife, Pauline, who had brought along an English bone china cup of coffee. She took a sip and put the cup on the seat between them. Noticing that it was about to spill on Pauline, Pierce reached for the cup but lost control of the car, which swerved left and fell one hundred feet down an embankment before crashing into a tree and a stone wall. Barbara's mother died after her head struck the windshield; her father was hospitalized.
Bush broke the news to Barbara, who was so close to delivering the new baby that her father told her not to come east for her mother's funeral. "He did not want the baby endangered," Barbara recalled. "What a lonely, miserable time that was."
Barbara honored Mrs. Pierce by naming the new child after her. Pauline Robinson Bush was born on the evening of Tuesday, December 20, 1949. They called her Robin. Bush brought his wife and new daughter home to the Compton apartment on Christmas Day 1949. The little girl charmed them all-father, mother, and brother. "Beautiful hazel eyes, soft blond hair," said Robin's besotted father. Soon came good news on the work front: Ideco wanted him back in West Texas, this time in Midland.
- In the summer of 1948, in talking things over with Hugh Evans, Bush had said that his ambition wasn't complicated: He wanted to "learn the oil business and make money." Wise in the ways of the world-Evans had, after all, just smoked in the shade while an Ivy Leagueeducated decorated naval aviator from Greenwich had nearly melted in the punishing weather-he gave Bush a piece of advice. "You've come to the wrong town...," Evans said. "Midland's where the money is."
Midland in the postwar years was a boomtown that was attracting ambitious men and their families, many from the East. The newcomers' goals were clear. "We all just wanted to make a lot of money quick," Bush recalled. He knew it would take sweat and good fortune. "Quick, but not easy. We were young in the business, but still had enough experience to know that much." In the first week of May 1950, Bush received a letter from 59 Wall Street, the offices of Brown Brothers Harriman, offering him a job and thus presenting him with the kind of choice he had confronted before. Should his oil ambitions, while adventurous and protected by a watchful Neil Mallon, give way to a safer, more established career? He had not one but two children now. In practical terms, life in New York made vastly more sense for both Bushes than the life they had under construction in Texas. They would be close to their families, and investment banking would offer financial security and cultural familiarity.
Nearly two months of careful, even obsessive, consideration in the Bush household followed. Bush and Barbara were thinking of "nothing else," Bush told Tom McCance, the Brown Brothers Harriman partner who had made the overture. Bush went to New York to explore the idea more in person. Bush finally chose to stay with the course he had charted when he left New Haven. He would remain in Texas.
- His father was on leave from the firm to seek a U.S. Senate seat from Connecticut in the 1950 elections. It was not Prescott's first political twitch. In 1946, the Bushes' U.S. representative in Connecticut, Clare Boothe Luce, the wife of Time-Life founder Henry R. Luce, had decided to leave the House. As the news of an open Fourth Congressional District seat spread, Samuel F. Pryor, a top Pan-Am executive and a mover in Connecticut politics, called Prescott to ask whether Bush might like to run for Congress. "If you would," Pryor said, "I think we can assure you that you'll be the nominee."
"Gee, that's something I've always dreamed about," said Bush, "but let me talk to my partners about it."
The partnership did not embrace the notion. "Look, if this was the Senate we'd back you for it and we'd like to see you do it, but for the House, don't do it," they said. Though he passed on the race, Prescott stepped up his involvement in state politics, becoming the Republicans' Connecticut finance chairman in 1947. In the summer of 1949, Harold Mitchell, the state GOP chairman, asked whether Prescott would be interested in a 1950 challenge to incumbent Democratic senator William Benton, who was filling out an unexpired term. The winner of the 1950 campaign would serve for two years, then run again in '52 for a full six-year term. Returning to the partnership with a possible Senate bid, Bush was received more warmly. He announced his candidacy in March, won the nomination, and was running well against Senator Benton. His musical friends composed a song: Some churchmen think his program odd.
First Yale, now country, when for God?
They really shouldn't give up hope In ten years more he may be Pope....
His speeches like his drives will be Right down the center off the tee.
His only leftist tendency Is when he hooks around the tree.
On the Sunday before the election in November 1950, pamphlets appeared urging Roman Catholic voters to tune in to the Washington columnist Drew Pearson's radio broadcast at six P.M. that evening. Over the airwaves, the muckraking Pearson announced that "it has just been made known" that Prescott Bush was president of the American Birth Control League, a forerunner of Planned Parenthood. Bush denied being president of the organization, but he had, in fact, served as treasurer of a 1947 Planned Parenthood fund drive. Pearson was wrong about the details, giving Bush just enough political room to deflect the story. To win, Bush needed to deny the allegation, even if it were essentially true. And so he did.
The attack was a classic late political hit in a heavily Roman Catholic state-one of two states in the Union in which birth control remained illegal. Bush lost, narrowly, by about 1,500 votes out of 862,000 cast. Watching from Midland, George H. W. Bush was frustrated that he was not a help to his father. "We felt terribly about the outcome after the way Dad worked at it," Bush wrote a friend on New Year's Day 1951. "I do feel he made a lot of friends though and I think he will be hard to beat if he runs again in 1952." It was the code: Always look ahead.
TEN.
I Push It Away, Push It Back
We can't touch her, and yet we can feel her.
-GEORGE H. W. BUSH on his daughter Robin Time after time during the next six months, George would put me back together again.
-BARBARA BUSH TWO YEARS BEFORE, Odessa had offered little in terms of housing, and Midland was not much better. In April 1950, Bush told his Ideco bosses that the family had already moved twice "to cheaper rooms each time, but we are unable to find anything that resembles an apartment or boarding house." There was some good news, though: "Tomorrow we get a motel with kitchenette." After stays at Kingsway Courts and George's Courts, the Bushes bought a house on East Maple along "Easter Egg Row"-a development designed for the new families flowing into Midland looking to strike it rich in oil. The nickname was in honor of the houses' bright paint colors; the Bushes' was light blue. The price was $7,500 for 847 square feet.
In Midland there were sandstorms and dust and heat. There were also a lot of easterners: It had become fashionable for Ivy Leaguers who wanted to escape Wall Street to try the oil business, which meant a lot of young families, a lot of cookouts, a lot of pickup sports. Most of all there was a lot of talk of oil-of where to find it and how to get it out of the ground.
A man of enthusiasms and quick decisions-falling in love with Barbara, joining the navy, moving to Texas-Bush was coming to believe that his future lay not with Dresser but with an independent oil venture. He liked the idea of choosing the riskier path over the safer route. (Everything was relative, of course. Bush was always going to benefit from being Bush.) He could have spent year after year working for Uncle Neil at Dresser, but a new challenge was at hand, along with the possibility of vast riches. The combination was irresistible.
By late 1950, Bush had gotten to know and to like John Overbey, an Easter Egg Row neighbor, fellow backyard barbecuer, and independent oilman. Overbey thought there was almost a physical force to Bush's ambition. Bush, he recalled, had "caught the fever and decided there must be a better way to participate in the excitement than selling hardware for Ideco." Bush and Overbey talked it over. Maybe they should join forces, go in together, make some real money. As Bush recalled it, independents in the oil business did all kinds of things. They bought percentages of possible royalty rights from landowners. They invested in "farm-outs," arrangements by which the independents would buy parcels of land from a big oil company and drill at the independents' expense. Explaining the business, Bush imagined an independent oilman's case to a bigger company: "If I hit, you've found out there's oil in the area without having to put your money into an exploratory operation; if I don't hit, it's my hard luck: You've learned the area is dry, without having to spend any of your own drilling money." Independents could do just about anything they could get away with. Bush loved the idea.
Except that pursuing the dream of going "independent" meant he would have to make a break from Mallon, the man who had been training him and who was responsible, really, for giving Bush a way out of the East, out from the shadow of his father and his Walker grandfather. What would Uncle Neil say? A nervous Bush made the trip from Midland to Dallas to find out in the spring of 1951. Bush revered Mallon in the way he revered his own father. The thought of disappointing the Dresser chief chilled him to the core.
When Bush broke the news to Mallon, there was a long silence-to Bush, an eternally long silence. "Uncle Neil" removed his eyeglasses and cleaned them, still wordless. He rose, walked into the next office, returned with a yellow legal pad, and began writing. "I really hate to see you go, George," Mallon finally said, "but if I were your age, I'd be doing the same thing-and here's how I'd go about it."
For half an hour he walked Bush through the different issues facing the new venture, from organizational challenges to the search for capital. "I left Neil's office with a tremendous weight off my shoulders," recalled Bush. "Of course, the real weight had just been added." At the age of twenty-six, he was co-owner of the Bush-Overbey Oil Development Company, Inc.
- In a sense, the first campaign of George Bush's life was the pursuit of investors for Bush-Overbey and, later, for the company they formed with Hugh and William Liedtke, Zapata Petroleum Corporation. While Barbara took care of Georgie and Robin in the family's new 1,500-square-foot house at 1412 West Ohio-it was big enough for the children to have their own rooms-Bush sought backing for his new oil ventures. He and Overbey needed cash to buy royalty and mineral rights. The attraction for investors was clear: The U.S. tax code treated most investments in the oil business favorably, allowing significant tax deductions if they failed, which meant those with capital to spend were in a win-win situation. If oil was found, they were likely to profit; if there was just a dry hole, they could still write off much of the expense of the investment.
Bush hit New York and Washington in search of funds; he traveled to North Dakota, Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming in search of leases. His uncle Herbie Walker invested in Bush-Overbey and helped bring in others, making the whole enterprise possible.
Like Neil Mallon, George Herbert Walker, Jr.-"Uncle Herbie," though Bush tended to spell his name "Herby"-played a vital role in Bush's life. Born in 1905, Herbie was Loulie and Bert's third child, behind Nancy Walker and Dorothy, whom Herbie adored all his life. "He almost idolized Aunt Dotty Bush, and almost from the time George was born, my father pretty much idolized him, too," recalled G. H. Walker III. Six foot exactly-a bit shorter than Prescott Bush, who was six four-a Yale man (class of 1927), and a Bonesman, Herbie loved baseball and boating, as did George H. W. Bush, and uncle and nephew grew exceptionally close. Alternately charming and cool, Walker "could be very warm toward people he liked, and very opinionated about the people he didn't," his eldest son recalled. "He had strong views on people, positive and negative."
Uncle Herbie's affection for his sister and her son George created strain in his own family. "'Dotty doesn't do things that way,' he would say to my mother, and that could be upsetting," recalled G. H. Walker III. "His devotion to George-never missed a baseball game of George's at Yale, and they would go out on the boat together, by themselves, in Maine-was obviously not easy for the rest of us, but we learned it was a fact of life, and we rolled with it." Herbie ran G. H. Walker & Company, would co-own the New York Mets, and was instrumental in funding George H. W. Bush's oil ventures in Texas.
The search for cash was never ending. Eugene Meyer, the financier who had bought The Washington Post at auction in 1933, was one possible source of capital. (Meyer was the father of Katharine Graham and the father-in-law of Philip Graham.) A client of Brown Brothers Harriman, Meyer agreed to see young Bush and his friend and colleague Fred Chambers. Over breakfast at Meyer's house in Washington, Bush and Chambers made their pitch for capital to finance a project in West Texas. Meyer listened politely, and as the meal of bacon and eggs came to an end, volunteered to give Bush and Chambers a ride to Union Station in his limousine. The old man offered them a fur lap robe to keep warm on the drive-a generous gesture, but Bush was more focused on the fact that Meyer had not signaled an interest in the proposed deal one way or the other. "What I remember about the ride is the sinking feeling I had as we neared the station," Bush recalled. "Our host just didn't seem interested in the details of our proposition."
As the car came to a stop, Bush was ready for a polite goodbye when Meyer said, "Okay, put me down for $50,000." Bush and Chambers were thrilled and were about to head into the station when Meyer called to them from the window of the car. "You say this is a good tax proposition?" Bush and Chambers eagerly assented. "Okay, then put my son-in-law down for..." So it went for the next decade or so, through the 1950s: Bush worked hard to raise money in the East in order to press ahead in Texas. For Bush, raising capital required charm, smarts, and drive. Though few people could have been as well positioned to have access to big moneymen than Bush, he still had to make the sale, and then produce.
- In the political world, Dwight Eisenhower, the former supreme Allied commander, had won the 1952 Republican presidential nomination, and his general election campaign offered signs of the emergence of a viable Republican opposition to the dominant Democratic Party across the old Confederacy. Volunteering for Ike in Midland, Bush had a personal stake in the voting in 1952: His father was again campaigning for the Senate. In this second bid, Prescott ran against Democratic congressman Abraham Ribicoff of Hartford. One evening the Bushes were driving back from a campaign event with Bush adviser Elmer Ryan. They passed one of the many billboards in the state that read YOU'RE BETTER OFF WITH RIBICOFF.
"I wish we could develop something to offset that slogan, 'You're Better off with Ribicoff,'" said Ryan. Dorothy Bush, who was riding in the front seat, spoke up: "You're in a jam with Abraham." Ryan loved it, Prescott loved it, and the next day the candidate began using the line. The Bushes soon faced questions of anti-Semitism about the slogan. Asked about the formulation, Prescott explained its origin, and the tempest passed. "It was one of those things that was here today and gone tomorrow," he recalled, "because it was obviously not designed to be anti-Semitic." Then Prescott added, coldly: "If I'd wanted to be anti-Semitic I'd have attacked it in a mighty different way than that."
During the '52 campaign, Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy, the Republican red-baiter who had won national celebrity by raising fears about Communist infiltration in America, was the featured speaker at a rally at the Klein Memorial Auditorium in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Beginning with a speech at Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1950, McCarthy had capitalized on Cold War tensions by claiming, at first, that he had a list of 205 "members of the Communist Party who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department." The numbers would change-downward-and McCarthy frequently hurled reckless charges. He had, however, tapped into widespread anxieties about the Soviets, and droves showed up to hear him in Bridgeport. Arriving at the venue on Fairfield Avenue, Prescott was stunned by the size and ardor of the crowd. It was standing room only. Seated onstage with McCarthy, Bush listened as the state's national committeeman, party chairman, and finally Senator William Purtell all bid McCarthy welcome. When Bush's turn came, he remembered that his knees were "shaking considerably."
"I said that I was very glad to welcome a Republican senator to our state, and that we had many reasons to admire Joe McCarthy," Bush recalled. "In some ways he was a very unusual man. At least...he had done one very unusual thing-he had created a new word in the English language, which is 'McCarthyism.'" The audience loved the point; "everybody," Bush recalled, "screamed with delight."
Bush was not yet done. A master of publicly using innuendo and sometimes even pure invention to smear government officials, military personnel, and academics as Communists, McCarthy was widely seen as a bully, and Bush called him on it. "But, I must say in all candor," Bush went on, "that some of us, while we admire his objectives in his fight against Communism, we have very considerable reservations concerning the methods which he sometimes employs." For a Republican seeking office in that time and that place, Prescott Bush's words were brave.
The crowd turned on Bush. But he had said what he had come to say.
- On Election Day-Tuesday, November 4, 1952-Eisenhower defeated Adlai Stevenson by twelve points, 55 to 43 percent, and Bush bested Ribicoff by thirty thousand votes. In Washington, Dorothy and Prescott leased quarters at the Wardman Park, a large redbrick hotel on Woodley Road, and on Capitol Hill, Senator Bush was delighted to find a Washington that was rather like Brown Brothers. Senator Harry Byrd, Democrat of Virginia, was a neighbor-he lived at the Shoreham-and the two men would sometimes take walks together. In the weeks between the election and Eisenhower's inauguration, Bush discovered the joys of the Republican senators' private dining room on Capitol Hill. From the very first he felt he belonged. The game Bush had learned from his father paid political dividends, too. Eisenhower loved golf, and Prescott Bush was the best-and perhaps the most discreet-golfer in the Senate. The president often invited Bush to play with him, confident that Bush would keep the details of the round and of any business they might discuss confidential.
Substantively, Bush eschewed ideology. A delegation of postal workers once called on him to win his support for a pay-increase bill. "Now, Senator, we want to put you on the spot," they said, according to Bush. "We want you to tell us what you're going to do about this."
"Now, listen, gentlemen, I don't go on the spot for anybody," Bush replied. "I'm glad to be here with you, and I want you to tell me all you want me to know about this bill. But I don't make it a practice to tell any group or anybody how I intend to vote on a bill, until the time comes for me to vote. Then you'll know, and you can then make up your mind whether that's been a favorable decision to you or not."
News soon arrived from Texas: John Ellis Bush had been born in Midland on Wednesday, February 11, 1953. Called "Jeb," the baby came home from the hospital to join his brother and his sister on West Ohio Avenue. Barbara turned the family's sunroom, which was just off the living room, into his nursery. "Life," Barbara recalled, "seemed almost too good to be true."
- A few weeks after Jeb's birth, Robin, now three, was feeling out of sorts. "I don't know what to do this morning," she said one day. "I may go out and lie on the grass and watch the cars go by, or I might just stay in bed." Worried, Barbara took the little girl to the family's pediatrician, Dr. Dorothy Wyvell. The doctor drew blood for tests and said she would get back to the Bushes as soon as she knew something.
Bush was at the Ector County Courthouse in Odessa, checking land records, when Barbara called him and said the doctor wanted to see both of them-right away. It was late afternoon when the Bushes and Wyvell sat down together in the doctor's small office. Bush noticed that the doctor was having trouble getting out what she had to say. "I have some bad news for you," Wyvell said, fighting off her own tears. "Your daughter has leukemia."
Bush was startled and uncertain. Neither he nor Barbara knew what leukemia was. "What do we do about it?" he asked.
"You have two choices," Wyvell said. "You can treat her. The research is very preliminary, but you could do that. Or you could just let nature take its course, and I know this is hard to believe, but then she probably would be dead in a few weeks."
The Bushes looked at each other, trying to absorb what Wyvell was telling them. The diagnosis, so unexpected and so foreign, devastated their perfectly normal world, one that had seemed secure only moments before. Groping for something, anything, Bush called his uncle Dr. John Walker, the president of Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital on the Upper East Side of New York City. "You don't have a choice," Dr. Walker said to Bush. "There's no choice. You've got to bring her up here and let us treat her." Bush arranged to fly to New York the next morning.
The Bushes drove home, separately, in the gathering Texas dusk. Bush said he needed to stop off at the office for a moment; in fact, he went to the house of their friends Liz and Tom Fowler to ask Liz to come over to be with Barbara. Before long, the Bushes' house was filled with neighbors. The next morning, the Bushes left Georgie and Jeb with friends and took Robin to New York to check her into Memorial Sloan Kettering. Not quite twenty-four hours had passed since they had sat, dumbstruck, in Wyvell's Midland office. They were not going to give up-or more precisely, they were not going to give Robin up. The Bushes moved into Bush grandfather G. H. Walker's Sutton Place apartment and prepared for a long siege against their child's cancer.
Given the state of oncology in 1953, only so much could be done. There were bone marrow tests, and oxygen tents, and cortisone injections. At times, Bush recalled, "God, the poor little girl was panicked, crying"; at others she was her smiling, charming self. "Robin does unfortunately have Leukemia, and although there is little hope for her we have taken her to Memorial Hospital for treatments," Bush wrote a correspondent in August 1953. "She has responded satisfactorily, and our big hope is that some new cure will be discovered for this horrible disease."
There were a few good days. The Bushes were allowed to take Robin to the Walkers' on Sutton Place once in a while. "Gampy Walker was a scary old man," Barbara said of G.H., "but he was putty in Robin's hands." The great-grandfather taught his great-granddaughter a version of gin rummy. Robin at first heard the name as "Gin Mummy," then decided to call it "Gin Poppy" in honor of her father. On a brief visit to Kennebunkport the family was reunited-Barbara, George, Georgie, and tiny Jeb. Robin adored the boys, calling them "superman" brothers and taping their pictures to her headboard at the hospital.
Barbara was able to take her home to Midland for a time. "Leukemia was not a well-known disease," Barbara recalled. Fearing it might be contagious, there were those in town who kept their children away from Robin. "In those days," Barbara said, "cancer in general was only whispered about, and some people just couldn't cope with a dying child." Yet Robin could seem so bright and active that an acquaintance who saw her and her father together asked Bush whatever had happened to that sick daughter of his.
The Bushes decided not to tell Georgie, then six, about the full extent of his sister's illness. "We hated that, but we felt it would have been too big a burden for such a little fellow," recalled Barbara. She had to watch over them carefully when they were together for fear that natural sibling "roughhousing" could lead to hemorrhage. As autumn came hope dwindled. The doctors were trying everything they reasonably could, including cortisone treatments, which "changed her whole personality," Bush recalled. "She'd strike out at people-'Don't do this to me-you can't do this to me.' But except for that, she was just smiling." When Bush was there, he could not stand it when the doctors and nurses did their most intrusive work.
Bush juggled business and the boys while Barbara remained steadfast at Robin's side. Bush's Yale friend Thomas W. L. "Lud" Ashley was there at the hospital in New York every day. A nurse once asked Barbara what her husband, who kept such strange hours, did for a living. "I meet him every morning around 2 A.M. when he comes in to check on Robin before going to bed," the nurse said. It was Ashley, standing in for his old friend.
Barbara had only one real rule for visitors: No tears in front of Robin. She didn't want the little girl scared by seeing grown-ups crying. "Poor George had the most dreadful time," recalled Barbara. He would say he had to go to the bathroom and step outside. "We used to laugh and wonder if Robin thought he had the weakest bladder in the world," recalled Barbara. "Not true. He just had the most tender heart." Senator Bush came up from Washington one day and took Barbara with him out to Greenwich. He asked her to go on a walk; he told her, she recalled, that he wanted her to see where he was going to be buried. She soon found herself in the town's graveyard, standing before a simple three foot by four foot stone that read BUSH. There was a lilac bush on one side, a dogwood on the other. On that sunny day on a Connecticut hillside, surrounded by gravestones, it slowly but inescapably came to her that her father-in-law was showing her not only his grave, but Robin's. "That darling man bought that lot so Robin would have a place to rest," Barbara recalled.
She was alone with Robin at the hospital when the little girl began to fade. Bush told his brother Jonathan that an infection was "raging through her body." From the hospital Barbara and the doctors called Bush in Texas. "They wanted to operate again, and I said, 'No, we've done enough to her,'" Bush recalled. "They said there was no real hope for her. I said, 'Can you learn something if you operate?' Not much more, they said. We thought it was time to let her go. They agreed with our decision."
Robin went into a coma while her father was en route from Texas. Mother and father were both there at her bedside when the end came. "One minute she was there, and the next she was gone," recalled Barbara. "I truly felt her soul go out of that beautiful little body." Barbara combed Robin's hair, and both parents held her a last time.
Robin, not quite four years old, died on the evening of Sunday, October 11, 1953. There was a small memorial service in Greenwich, but without Robin's body. The Bushes had given her to research in the hope that her loss might help others survive. A short while later, after the remains were released from the hospital, Dorothy Bush and Lud Ashley buried Robin in the grave her grandfather had prepared for her.
In the upstairs bedroom where she and George were staying in the Bush house on Grove Lane, Barbara had heard guests assembling to go over to the memorial service at Christ Church. Suddenly everything seemed too much, and Barbara told her husband that she couldn't face them all. "For one who allowed no tears before her death, I fell apart," recalled Barbara, "and time after time during the next six months, George would put me together again." She made it through the day, and the two flew home to Midland.
- It was a hellish time. "We awakened night after night in great physical pain-it hurt that much," Barbara recalled. When they arrived home, they drove to pick George W. up at Sam Houston Elementary School; they wanted to be the ones to tell him the terrible news. Seven-year-old Georgie and a classmate were carrying a record player from one part of the school to another when the Bushes' pea-green Oldsmobile appeared. "I could have sworn that I saw Robin's blond curls in the window," George W. Bush recalled. "My mom, dad, and sister are home," he said to his teacher. "Can I go see them?" Reaching the Oldsmobile, he looked in vain in the backseat. No Robin. Barbara enveloped him in a tight hug. She was capable of just a whisper. "She died," Barbara told him.
The ride home was the first time the boy had ever seen his parents cry. It was the beginning of a difficult period in which even the best intentioned of friends and acquaintances sometimes exacerbated the couple's grief rather than assuaging it. At first there was just silence on the topic. No one really knew what to say about Robin, so they settled on a strategy of acting as though nothing had happened. "I hated that nobody mentioned her; it was as if she had never been," Barbara recalled. Those who did speak of it often made a mess of things. One day Barbara caught a caller practicing making sad faces in the living room mirror, preparing for her audience with the grieving mother. Barbara, unnoticed, backed out of the room and then entered again. The visitor stammered out an appalling remark: "At least it wasn't your firstborn and a boy at that." Bush was more understanding than Barbara, who privately lashed out about such awkward episodes. "George pointed out that it wasn't easy for them and that I should be patient," she recalled. "He was right. I just needed somebody to blame."
The man who could not stand his daughter's cries in the hospital proved to be a superb and caring husband, able to talk about the things that he could not watch. In the darkness, in their bedroom at the end of the hallway on West Ohio, Bush would hold Barbara as she sobbed herself to sleep. When she fell into grief-stricken silences, she found that he was engaged and emotionally accessible. Bush, Barbara recalled, "made me talk to him, and he shared with me. What a difference that makes....He did it subtly, but with love."
The younger George Bush put Robin back into common conversation. At a football game Georgie told his father that he wished he were Robin. Why was that? Bush asked. "I bet she can see the game better from up there than we can here," the boy said. One day Barbara overheard Georgie declining to play with another child because his mother needed him too much. "That started my cure," said Barbara. "I realized I was too much of a burden for a little seven-year-old boy to carry."
- The quest for the meaning of Robin's death never ended. "It taught me that life is unpredictable and fragile," Bush recalled. "It taught me the importance of close family and friends, because of Lud and several other friends that rallied around. It taught me that no matter how innocent or perfect a child, she can still be taken away from you by horrible illness. That gets into 'the Lord works in strange ways,' if you believe in that. I've never gotten a real answer to that one. But I learned a lot from it. Keep going, charging ahead." There wasn't, after all, much else to do.
Dorothy Bush commissioned an oil portrait of Robin for her son and daughter-in-law. Bush wondered, sometimes, whether it was fair to have the picture hanging in the house. He worried that it might make the other children or guests uncomfortable. In the end, though, "selfishness takes over," for when he gazed at it in the flickering candlelight of the dining room, Bush would feel "a renewed physical sensation of closeness to a loved one."
In the late 1950s, after the births of Neil Mallon Bush (1955) and Marvin Pierce Bush (1956), Bush, in the midst of the busiest of lives, was in New York on business. One evening he went "out on the town," and only when he was heading in for the night did he think that "You could well have gone to Greenwich tonight," to see Robin at her grave. The thought, he wrote his mother, "struck me out of the blue, but I felt no real sense of negligence....I like...to think of Robin as though she were a part, a living part, of our vital and energetic and wonderful family of men and Bar." How long, he wondered, would this sense of Robin as a perpetual child last? "We hope we will feel this genuine closeness [to Robin] when we are 83 and 82," he wrote his mother. "Wouldn't it be exciting at that age to have a beautiful 3 and a half year old daughter....She doesn't grow up. Now she's Neil's age. Soon she'll be Marvin's-and beyond that she'll be all alone, but with us, a vital living pleasurable part of our day-to-day life." He continued: There is about our house a need. The running, pulsating restlessness of the four boys as they struggle to learn and grow; the world embraces them....All this wonder needs a counterpart. We need some starched crisp frocks to go with all our torn-kneed blue jeans and helmets. We need some soft blond hair to off-set those crew cuts. We need a doll house to stand firm against our forts and rackets and thousand baseball cards. We need a cut-out star to play alone while the others battle to see who's 'family champ.' We even need someone...who could sing the descant to "Alouette," while outside they scramble to catch the elusive ball aimed ever roofward, but usually thudding against the screens.
We need a legitimate Christmas angel-one who doesn't have cuffs beneath the dress.
We need someone who's afraid of frogs.
We need someone to cry when I get mad-not argue.
We need a little one who can kiss without leaving egg or jam or gum.
We need a girl.
We had one once-she'd fight and cry and play and make her way just like the rest. But there was about her a certain softness.
She was patient-her hugs were just a little less wiggly.