Like them, she'd climb in to sleep with me, but somehow she'd fit.
She didn't boot and flip and wake me up with pug nose and mischievous eyes a challenging quarter-inch from my sleeping face.
No-she'd stand beside our bed till I felt her there. Silently and comfortable, she'd put those precious, fragrant locks against my chest and fall asleep.
Her peace made me feel strong, and so very important.
"My Daddy" had a caress, a certain ownership which touched a slightly different spot than the "Hi Dad" I love so much.
But she is still with us. We need her and yet we have her. We can't touch her, and yet we can feel her.
We hope she'll stay in our house for a long, long time.
Love Pop Credit 10.1 An image of Robin, the Bushes' second child, playing during a trip to Greenwich in June 1953. President Bush kept this photo in a drawer of his desk in the Oval Office, and later placed it on his desk in his retirement office in Houston.
Reading the letter aloud more than five decades later in his post-presidential office in Houston, Bush broke down in tears long before the end, crying so hard that he had difficulty catching his breath. After a time, the tears dried. He gestured toward the letter and said, "When I read that it's right there with me now. But normally I push it away, push it back." He continued, "But life goes on. You count your blessings and your sorrows and you realize how lucky you are and have been all my life, really."
His eyes fell on a small black-and-white photograph of Robin in a gold frame. She is playing next to a fountain at Grove Lane. He gazed at her a moment, then looked up, smiling awkwardly. He wiped his eyes again. It was time to move on.
ELEVEN.
I Was Bleeding Inside
I worried a lot in those days. I felt a responsibility-if things had gone badly it would've been a huge blow.
-GEORGE H. W. BUSH, on the late 1950s and early '60s in the oil business BUSH REACTED TO ROBIN'S LOSS in much the way he had reacted to the deaths of Ted White and Del Delaney at Chichi-Jima. He mourned but pressed ahead. In the Pacific in 1944 that had meant returning to VT-51 as soon as possible. In Midland in 1953 it meant hurling himself into his latest business venture: a new oil company with additional partners. The Liedtke brothers, Hugh and Bill, came from Oklahoma. Like the Bushes and the Overbeys, they were part of the new social fabric of Midland. Why not team up on the oil front? The result was a new company. Bush-Overbey and the Liedtkes each put up $500,000, creating $1 million in equity. But what to call it? Hugh Liedtke had a simple rule of thumb: Pick a name that started with either A or Z, so you would be first or last in the telephone listings. With that in mind, the team chose Zapata Petroleum Corporation, after the Marlon Brando movie Viva Zapata!, which was playing in Midland.
The association with the Liedtkes proved profitable. Under the Zapata name, Bush and his colleagues found success in Coke County, Texas, drilling 127 wells without a dry hole on the 8,100-acre West Jamieson field. The West Jamieson wells were steady producers, not gushers, and they gave Bush's business a sound foundation. Over the next decade or so, Bush struggled to build an international business. He did well enough, but never made the big find or the big deal that would have given him stratospheric wealth. He stayed after it, though, pursuing offshore opportunities from the Persian Gulf, including Kuwait, to Mexico, Japan, Ecuador, and Trinidad.
In 1955, applying for a $25,000 loan from the Texas National Bank in Houston for a new house in Midland, Bush, then 31, wrote that he "had no cash to speak of." He owed $11,000 to his father. Overall assets amounted to $40,000. His greatest hope lay in 100,000 shares of Zapata, which was about to go public at an expected price ranging from $8 to $10 a share. When Zapata shares hit the open market on Friday, December 30, 1955, they reached about $11 a share in early trading.
Bush was open to taking chances. Zapata contracted with R. G. LeTourneau, a celebrated designer of earth-moving machines, to deploy a tripod drilling platform. Turning LeTourneau's vision into reality required an enormous capital investment-roughly $3.5 million. LeTourneau ultimately designed three rigs for Bush: the Scorpion, the Vinegarroon, and a $6 million edition, the Maverick. The gamble paid off: Zapata prospered.
Bush embraced risk-reasonable risk, to be sure, but he preferred gambling big to seeking security in the familiar. He knew that the man who came through a contest through skill or luck (or a bit of both) was the kind of man other people tended to look up to, to admire, to respect. Of a piece with this ambition to attract the notice of the world through achievement was the anxiety that one might fail, losing not only the stakes at hand but the esteem of others. The pressure Bush applied to himself to succeed, all while striving to appear as though there was no pressure at all, made his stomach churn.
One morning in London in 1960, he found that he had no choice but to admit all was not perfect. As Bush recalled it, Zapata Off-Shore was embroiled in a lawsuit over Zapata's performance as a contract driller on wells off Trinidad. As Bush saw it, the suit posed an existential threat to his company. "If we lost this, the whole thing could have gone to pieces," recalled Bush. "And I had people counting on me-stockholders, our employees, everybody."
Bush felt miserable. He and Baine Kerr, Zapata's lawyer, were in London to work on the litigation with their insurer, Lloyd's of London. Bush was sick to his stomach; his vomit was coffee-colored, his stool black. He rose early on the day of their departure back to the United States. Wrapped only in a towel, he was about to shave when his stomach seemed to explode. In excruciating pain, Bush fell toward the floor. Everything went dark.
He did not know how long he had been out when the room swam back into focus. He was on the floor, nude-his towel had fallen away-and he saw a set of buttons next to the bed. He pushed one and a maid came in; she quickly sent for the hotel doctor. "Don't worry, old chap-just a bit of indigestion," the doctor told Bush after a brief examination. The physician prescribed Coca-Cola.
Relieved but still in pain, Bush managed to dress and meet Kerr for an appointment at Lloyd's, where the insurers gave the delegation from Texas a small lunch, with sherry. Bush then flew from London to New York, New York to Dallas, and finally Dallas to Midland. By the time Bush landed at home he was in severe pain again. "I felt like hell," Bush recalled. He went to see his doctor. The verdict? "You've got a bleeding ulcer," the doctor told Bush.
"I was bleeding inside," Bush recalled. As was common at the time, Bush attributed the ulcer to stress-in this case, of the Trinidad litigation. We now know that such ulcers are primarily bacterial; the fact remains that Bush believed his own ulcer was caused by anxiety, which led him to ask the obvious question of his doctor. "What do you do about it?" Bush said.
"Don't worry about things that you can't do anything about," the doctor replied. Bush thought, "I'm paying this guy to give me that advice?" (The litigation was ultimately resolved without the dire consequences Bush had feared.) - Everything Bush heard from his parents in the 1950s suggested that the bigger, faster world of Washington held great appeal. "Politics entered into my thinking...especially after Dad went to the Senate in 1953," Bush recalled. Socially moderate (and sometimes liberal) Prescott Bush was fiscally conservative but shared Eisenhower's view that the New Deal had taken such root that the responsible approach in the postwar period was to manage, not reverse, the enlarged role of government in national life.
Describing Eisenhower, Prescott Bush could have been speaking of himself: "He was basically full of real human sympathy, and he was not antagonistic to the general New Deal philosophy, let's call it, which is for social betterment and increase in education, broadening the opportunities of education for our people and increasing their housing facilities, meeting the terrible needs within our cities." Prescott Bush was a strong advocate of the federal government's role in urban redevelopment and helped pass the National Interstate and Defense Highway Act. On civil rights he was a progressive Republican, noting the "essential rightness" of the Supreme Court's desegregation decisions "from the standpoint of simple justice and good conscience." He supported a strong civil rights plank in the 1956 GOP platform and pressed for integrated federal housing.
Nor was the senior Bush a blindly hawkish cold warrior. Perhaps most notably, Prescott Bush again spoke out against Joe McCarthy, hero to hardcore conservatives. Matters had only grown worse after the campaign event in Connecticut where Bush had criticized the Wisconsin senator. In disastrous hearings investigating alleged Communist influence in the U.S. Army, McCarthy smeared a young lawyer who worked for the army's special counsel. While millions watched on television, Joseph Welch, the army's counsel, turned on McCarthy. "Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness," Welch said. "You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"
The Senate formed a special committee to investigate McCarthy. In late 1954, the panel recommended that the Senate condemn him. In the debate Prescott Bush drew on his grave mien, his sense of duty, and his totemic reverence for the Senate as he rose against McCarthy. "Mr. President, all my life I have looked upon membership in the United States Senate as the greatest office to which one could aspire," Bush told the Senate on Wednesday, December 1, 1954. McCarthy, he went on, "has caused dangerous divisions among the American people because of his attitude, and the attitude he has encouraged among his followers, that there can be no honest differences of opinion with him. Either you must follow Senator McCarthy blindly, not daring to express any doubts or disagreements about any of his actions, or in his eyes you must be a Communist, a Communist sympathizer, or a fool who has been duped by the Communist line."
Bush was one of 22 Republicans (out of 44) to vote against McCarthy, who was condemned by a vote of 67 to 22 by the whole Senate. McCarthy died soon thereafter, a broken man. The anti-McCarthy senators were attacked by the far right. From Texas, George H. W. Bush weighed in on the proceedings. "I realize that anybody who takes a stand against McCarthy is apt to be subjected through the lunatic fringe to all sorts of abuse," wrote Bush. He wished, he said, that the tone of the politics was calmer.
- The Prescott Bushes enjoyed the folkways of Eisenhower's Washington, and Prescott Bush made the occasional trip down to the White House for drinks. Sherman Adams, Eisenhower's chief of staff, would call with an invitation for six P.M., and Bush would join the president and a handful of other senators to "talk quite informally" with Ike. When Bush and Eisenhower played golf, they would have a bite of lunch and then tee off at twelve thirty or one P.M. The Bushes loved the diplomatic social scene as well. "It's always helpful, I think, to get to know people from foreign countries, and to get their point of view about us," Bush recalled. He was a happy senator, savoring trips abroad. Bush was flown out and landed on two U.S. carriers-the FDR in the Mediterranean and the Enterprise in the China Sea.
During the 1956 reelection campaign the Bushes temporarily abandoned Greenwich for Hartford's Heublein Hotel. Dorothy Bush was characteristically competitive. In Washington she had taken classes in public speaking, graduating first in a field of about fifteen other students. She memorized her speeches and could speak flawlessly for twenty minutes or so without notes. The two were, Bush recalled, "on the go constantly, day and night, up until midnight or later" all fall. The hard work paid off, and Prescott was reelected for a full term in a race against Democratic nominee Thomas Dodd in November 1956.
- In the Eisenhower years, the interests of Bush father and son clashed. At issue was legislation deregulating the natural gas industry, a move favored by oilmen but opposed by many lawmakers from energy-consuming, as opposed to energy-producing, states. Prescott Bush and others feared that deregulation would raise the cost of energy for their constituents. George H. W. Bush and others argued from a free market perspective that deregulation would lead to more competition, more supply, and lower prices. That was, George H. W. Bush acknowledged, the "opinion...of a Texan in the oil business."
Senator Bush would not change his vote to favor the oil industry. The bill had successfully passed the House the year before and was now pending in the Senate. The oil industry, led by Sid Richardson, was furiously at work to get the legislation through the upper chamber to the president. The calls to George H. W. Bush's Midland home and office were numerous, and sharp in tone. Oilmen from all over Texas were ringing him up to urge him to lobby his father. The polite ones, Bush recalled, asked if the senator could be reasoned with. The more strident ones told Bush that he'd "damn well better" deliver his father's vote. Under pressure, Bush reacted coolly, but the calls got meaner. As Bush recalled, "The head of Phillips Petroleum, K. S. 'Boots' Adams, told Neil Mallon"-Prescott's old friend-that if the senator "doesn't vote for this bill, you can forget selling any more Dresser equipment to Phillips, and you can tell George Bush to forget his offshore drilling business."
And meaner still. At two o'clock one morning a drunken lobbyist for Sid Richardson, the greatest oil giant among great oil giants, telephoned the Bush household in Midland. Unless Prescott Bush "got right" on the legislation that Richardson wanted passed, "That's all she wrote for you, Bush, because we're gonna run your ass out of the offshore drilling business." Bush had trouble sleeping that night.
As the threats mounted, the son traveled to Washington to see his father and discuss Zapata's predicament. The senator was sympathetic but unwavering. "They'll never put you out of business," Prescott told his son. "They wouldn't dare, because this would be the worst possible mistake they could make. This will not affect you at all. I'm going to vote against the bill because on the whole I think that's in the best interests of my state, as well as the United States, to vote against this bill. But don't you worry about it, and if there's any after-effects from it, just tell me about them, and we'll take care of that."
President Eisenhower vetoed the bill, noting that the lobbying effort by the oil industry made "American politics a dreary and frustrating experience for anyone who has any regard for moral and ethical standards." In the aftermath, the oilmen who had put pressure on George H. W. backed down.
- In August 1959, Zapata Off-Shore became its own stand-alone company, breaking off from the Liedtkes' larger Zapata Petroleum. It was time, Bush decided, to move to the Gulf of Mexico, to Houston, where the offshore action was. ZOS, as the separate company was known, was substantial if not gigantic, with four rigs, 195 employees, and 2,200 stockholders.
Barbara was unhappy about the move to Houston, but it made sense. Bush's mission in business had shifted over the years from oil in general to offshore in particular. The Bushes used Mildred and Baine Kerr's house in Houston as a base for searching for a new home, settling on buying a 1.2-acre lot near the Kerrs' and building from scratch on Briar Lane. Barbara soldiered on.
Bush set up offices downtown on the seventeenth floor of the Houston Club Building. On Tuesday, August 18, 1959, Barbara gave birth to Dorothy Walker Bush, to be called "Doro." She was, Bush said, "enchanting...a wild dark version of Robin." He was found with his head leaning against the hospital's nursery window, crying in happiness.
TWELVE.
Goldwater's Policies, Kennedy's Style
The Senate is a terribly sought-after post....So the Senate is the ultimate goal of most every politician.
-PRESCOTT BUSH He radiated charm and gave us a certain respectability.
-PETER O'DONNELL, chairman of the Texas Republican Party EVERYBODY WANTED HIM. In Texas circles in the first years of the 1960s, George Bush was a prime political prospect. The Harris County Republican chairman in Houston, James A. Bertron, encountered Prescott Bush at a fundraiser in Washington.
"Jimmy, when are you going to get George involved?" Prescott asked.
"Senator, I'm trying," Bertron said. "We're all trying."
Bertron was right-more right, perhaps, than he knew. One of the most powerful Democrats in Texas, George Brown of the construction giant Brown & Root, had already reached out to Bush. Brown made the case that the attractive young Republican at work in the Houston Club Building would find a congenial home in the Democratic Party. It was a serious overture. Brown and his brother Herman were instrumental figures in the rise and reign of Lyndon Johnson. Bush knew that a suggestion from that quarter was not to be taken lightly. "They mentioned several possibilities, including a chance at a U.S. Senate seat, if I crossed over and became a Democrat," Bush recalled. "The transition, they said, would be painless: In Texas there are really two Democratic parties-conservative Democrats on one side, liberal Democrats on the other. I'd just take my place on the conservative end of the Democratic spectrum."
Though Bush admitted that George Brown's argument "made pragmatic sense," he "just couldn't see it," and he declined to switch parties. "Privately my own political philosophy had long been settled," Bush recalled. "I supported much of Harry Truman's foreign policy in the late 1940s. But I didn't like what he and the Democratic Party stood for in the way of big, centralized government-the attitude that 'Washington knows best' and the policies and programs it produced." He was a Republican, and he would not fake being a Democrat, even a conservative one.
In Connecticut, in the middle of May 1962, Prescott Bush, suffering from arthritis, realized that he had lost ten pounds. He saw his doctor, who told him he'd "be a fool" to run again. After talking things over with Dorothy, the senator announced his retirement. He regretted it almost immediately. "Once you've had the exposure to politics that I had...I mean, intense exposure for about 12 years...it gets in your blood, and then when you get out, nothing else satisfies that in your blood," Prescott recalled in 1966. "There's no substitute diet for it."
- Historically, the path to power George Bush chose in Texas-the Republican route-was a difficult one. The Democratic Party's hold over Texas and over most of the other states of the old Confederacy was rooted in Reconstruction. Beginning in the late 1860s, the real contests for political office took place in the Democratic primaries. As late as the 1940s, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman could count on Texas and much of the rest of the South as an electoral bulwark against Republicans nationally.
Bush's timing, however, was fortuitous. As conservative reaction to the New DealFair Deal expansion of government set in after the end of World War II-during the years Bush first moved to the state-the Democratic monopoly in Texas began to break down. Eisenhower carried the state twice, and it was respectable for a young oilman such as Bush to play a grassroots role in the Eisenhower-Nixon campaigns in Midland and similar places. Race was also a factor. The U.S. Supreme Court's school desegregation decisions in 1954 and in 1955, as well as the push for a federal civil rights bill in 1957, unnerved some white voters who believed John Kennedy a liberal on such issues. In 1960, the Kennedy-Johnson ticket only narrowly defeated Nixon and Henry Cabot Lodge, carrying Texas by two percentage points. Bush was proud to recall that his new home county, Harris, was "the largest metropolitan area in the country to go Republican in 1960."
Then came John Tower, the small, nattily dressed professor of government at Midwestern University in Wichita Falls, Texas, who ran as a Republican in the May 1961 special election to fill Lyndon Johnson's Senate seat. The Tower campaign was the Republicans' moment, one made possible by a civil war between conservative Democrats and liberal Democrats. Their split opened the way for Tower, who became the first Republican elected to statewide office in Texas since Reconstruction. The unthinkable-a victorious Republican in Texas-had become thinkable.
George H. W. Bush watched the Tower campaign closely. "Something was stirring at the political grass roots in Texas," Bush recalled, "especially in Houston and Harris County." As a result, the chairmanship of the Harris County Republican Party in the early 1960s mattered more than such posts usually did. James Bertron, the county chairman, was moving out of state. The contest to succeed Bertron became a proxy for a larger struggle in Harris County between traditional Republicans such as Bush and extremists, many of whom belonged to the far-right-wing John Birch Society, a faction convinced that an international conspiracy was at work to hand America over to the Communists.
On a sunny springtime Saturday morning in 1962, Bush recalled, GOP leaders from the county came by to confer about the opening created by Bertron's move. The hard right had nearly won the chairmanship the last time around, and Bush's callers wanted to keep the party out of the hands of the extremists. Over lunch came the question: Would Bush allow his name to be put up for Harris County party chairman? "I didn't really need time to think it over," Bush recalled. "This was the challenge I'd been waiting for-an opening into politics at the ground level, where it all starts."
The campaign for county chairman featured three elements that were to recur in Bush's political career. There was an eagerness to jump into the race at hand; a limitless energy; and, once the race was done, an instinctive attempt to reconcile with his foes and to harmonize discordant forces.
After spending nearly a year visiting precinct after precinct-Barbara took up needlepointing at the meetings to pass the time-Bush was elected chairman in February 1963. There was no ideological purge of the party under Chairman Bush. He was wary of the Birchers but believed no good would come of antagonizing such a passionate faction. Naturally conciliatory, Bush tried to keep the focus on the common foe-the Democrats. "I found out that jugular politics-going for the opposition's throat-wasn't my style," Bush recalled. "It was a lesson carried over from my experience in business. When competition gets cutthroat, everybody loses. Sometimes confrontation is the only way to resolve problems-but only as a last resort, after all other avenues have been explored."
The driving issue in Texas was the alleged liberalism of the New Frontier. "You're either for or against the Kennedys," wrote John Knaggs, a former United Press International reporter in Austin, "and anybody out in the middle of the road will get run over." The test was nearing. "Nineteen sixty-four," Bush wrote in a Harris County GOP newsletter, "is the critical year."
- In Dallas, Peter O'Donnell, a leading Republican and important supporter of Barry Goldwater for the 1964 presidential nomination, had been hearing good things about young Bush down in Houston. Robert Stewart III, a banker friend of O'Donnell's, was a Bush fan from the oil business. Stewart thought the two men should meet. After securing his own election as chairman of the Texas Republican Party in December 1962, O'Donnell made the trip to see Bush.
The first U.S. Senate race since Tower's victory was coming up, and O'Donnell asked Bush whether he would be game for a campaign against the liberal incumbent Ralph Yarborough. Bush was enthusiastic. "I thought I could win," he recalled. Republicans in Texas were thrilled. O'Donnell believed Bush's energy, good looks, handsome family, and Ivy League education gave the Texas GOP "a certain respectability" at a time when the extremists were making a great deal of noise.
Credit 12.1 In Bush's first run for major elective office, the U.S. Senate in Texas in 1964, he was a Goldwater Republican. "Did I go too far right?" Bush wondered decades later. "Maybe."
- Peter O'Donnell saw the Bush bid as complementary to the fight to nominate and elect Goldwater president. Broadly put, there were two prevailing factions contending against each other in the Republican Party in 1964. Arizona senator Goldwater represented the right, New York governor Nelson A. Rockefeller the left. The right was strongly anti-Washington at home and anti-Communist abroad, pressing to dismantle the New DealFair Deal federal establishment and to roll back the Communist threat with military force wherever necessary. As Goldwater would put it, capturing the conservative credo, "...extremism in defense of liberty-is-no-vice." (He added: "...moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!") Rockefeller stood at the other end of the Republican spectrum. Scion of one of the great American fortunes, "Rocky" believed that government had a vital role to play in the life of the nation. Where Goldwaterites saw the world in black and white, Rockefeller noted shades of gray. The split in the GOP was profound. Goldwater was the Sun Belt and the Rotary Club; Rockefeller was Manhattan and the Council on Foreign Relations. Goldwater flew his own plane and lived in an adobe house in the desert of Arizona, the embodiment of a western hero. Rockefeller collected modern art and lived in a vast Fifth Avenue apartment, the epitome of the Eastern Establishment.
Strictly in terms of upbringing, Bush should have been a Rockefeller Republican. His father, Prescott, seemed, on the whole, to be one. But while the son's ancestral sympathies and inclinations were more moderate to liberal, by the time of the 1964 campaign, George H. W. Bush had been away from the East for sixteen years. As an oilman he had grown more conservative-not radically so, but notably so.
Largely conservative in philosophy, favoring fiscal probity at home and a firm but well-considered foreign policy abroad, Bush was closer to an Eisenhower than to a Goldwater or a Rockefeller. To reach an office where they could put such precepts into action, though, both Bush and Eisenhower were willing to make accommodations. In the 1952 presidential campaign, for instance, to appease conservatives, Eisenhower had failed to defend General George C. Marshall against McCarthyite charges that the former secretary of state was a Communist or, at best, a dupe of the Soviet conspiracy. In that critical moment, even Ike had chosen to court the right wing rather than challenge it. That's what savvy Republican politicians did-and Bush was determined to be among the savviest of Republican politicians of the age. Prescott Bush had offered a similar lesson in political calculation when he misled Connecticut voters about his involvement with Planned Parenthood and the American Birth Control League to appeal to the state's Roman Catholics in 1950.
Now his son wanted to be in politics, and he wanted to win. Republicans in the Texas of 196364 were Goldwater men, not Rockefeller men. So George Bush was a Goldwater man.
Like Goldwater, Bush opposed key elements of the landmark Civil Rights Act and advocated states' rights. Like Goldwater, Bush would oppose Medicare and President Johnson's war on poverty. Like Goldwater, Bush opposed the admission of Communist China to the United Nations. And like Goldwater, Bush opposed a nuclear-test-ban treaty.
- On Wednesday, September 11, 1963, Bush paid a call on Austin's journalists in the Capitol Press Room to announce his Senate candidacy. Ralph Yarborough, Bush said, "is diametrically opposed to everything I believe in. He is a federal interventionist. I believe in the finest concept of States' rights-in keeping the government closest to the people."
A populist Democrat and familiar political figure, Yarborough had been born on a farm in Chandler, Texas, graduated from the University of Texas law school, served as a Texas state judge, fought in World War II, and lost three races for governor before winning the Senate seat in a 1957 special election. He was the hero of the Democratic left in the state and a bane of the Democratic right.
Bush hired GOP operative James Leonard to manage the campaign. Bush, Leonard recalled, may have been "the worst candidate I'd ever had." Bush's vernacular with audiences in Texas remained rooted in Massachusetts and Connecticut. "He'd go over to these yokels and call Yarborough a 'profligate spender'-and nobody knew what the hell 'profligate' meant," Leonard recalled. "It sounded like some kind of sexual thing. So I said, 'George, don't use that word again.' I thought he was going to fire me."
Bush knew he needed counsel, but knowing he needed it did not mean he enjoyed hearing it. "I pushed him more than he wanted me to-'Do this, do that,'" Leonard recalled. "He didn't always like it, but he did it all." One day Bush appeared for a day of campaigning in a striped tie. "Take that thing off," Leonard told him, and Bush, Leonard recalled, looked as though "he wanted to hit me."
The 1964 campaign marked the beginning of a life that was to consume the Bushes for the next half century. It was a blur of handshakes and receptions, of Barbara's cooking spaghetti for scores out of The Joy of Cooking, only to realize she didn't have enough to go around-news that sent her to the grocery store for mounds of sliced roast beef and cans of Franco-American to add in. There were "Tastin' Teas" in Texas, events where you paid a dollar to have a bite of everyone's favorite dish. Barbara preferred sitting in audiences rather than onstage: If she were out with the crowd, then she could do her needlepoint through the speeches.
For Bush, the key problem was what Barbara called "the Ivy LeagueYankee label." "George H. W. Bush" became just "George Bush" in press releases and mailings. Some allies thought Bush should put on a cowboy hat when campaigning in rural Texas, a suggestion that Barbara called "lousy superficial advice. The main thing-the big thing-I believe is to get around the state and get known. Not as a fake or a phony-but just get known as himself." The nascent Bush network went to work in the early autumn of 1963. Margaret Hampton, an indispensable aide to Prescott Bush, moved from Washington to Texas for the year. The candidate, who had bought a Mercedes, got rid of it in favor of a dark-green Chrysler. "No foreign car driver is our Senator!" Barbara wrote.
Rumors about Bush and his eastern ties were common. He was attacked, Barbara wrote, as a "Rockefeller plant," who was being "largely financed by [the] Eastern Group who are leading the block Goldwater move. Big stockholders, the Bush family (eastern and Texans) in Brown Brothers Harriman & Co." Bush's rivals pointed out that Barbara's father, the head of the McCall Corporation, was the publisher of Redbook-which, in the Texas of 1964, was said to be a "tool of the Commies"-not mentioning that Redbook was a mainstream women's magazine rather than a Marxist-Leninist tract. Barbara countered that her father's company also published the John Birch Society's handbook, but unfortunately her father had given up that contract a dozen years before "because it was losing money."
The feud between conservative and liberal Democrats-a dispute that threatened to put Texas in play in the presidential race the next year-was bringing President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson to the state for a unity trip. From Bush's perspective, the Senate campaign was a hard but winnable battle. He was going to run against the liberal Yarborough by running against the unpopular and liberal Kennedy. And there was hope: A statewide Houston Chronicle poll had Goldwater defeating Kennedy by fifty thousand votes in Texas, and Johnson's popularity was down.
The Chronicle survey appeared in the morning edition of the newspaper on Friday, November 22, 1963.
- The Bushes were one hundred miles east of Dallas, on a campaign swing in Tyler. At midday the news came over the radio: President Kennedy had been shot. Bush was at a meeting while Barbara was having her hair done. "Oh Texas-my Texas-my God-let's hope it's not true," Barbara wrote to her family as she sat in the beauty parlor. "I am sick at heart as we all are."
Kennedy was dead, Texas governor John Connally wounded. Bush called Barbara and picked her up, and they flew home to Houston. "The rumors are flying about that horrid assassin," Barbara wrote her family back East. "We are hoping that it is not some far right nut, but a 'commie nut.' You understand we know they are both nuts, but just hope that it is not a Texan and not an American at all." Bush canceled his political commitments until January 1, 1964, and the Bushes took Jeb and Doro to a memorial service for President Kennedy in Houston on Monday.
Bush held a pragmatic view of the assassination's local political implications. "Poppy seems to feel that in two or three months the climate in Texas will be right back where it was," Barbara wrote her family on Saturday, November 30, 1963.
He was right: Texas did not long mourn John Kennedy. In a piece in The Nation magazine, an influential South Texan was reported to have remarked, "I don't hold with murder. But I can't say I'm not glad to see us rid of that bushy-haired bastard from Boston." In the May 1964 presidential primary, more Republican voters in Dallas County wrote in the name of George C. Wallace of Alabama-a Democrat, but a hero to segregationists-than had done so for George Romney of Michigan, a moderate Republican. A reading of The Texas Observer, a liberal Austin journal, tells the tale of the moment: Southern Methodist University withdrew an invitation to Martin Luther King, Jr., to speak, and the president of Texas Tech in Lubbock canceled a planned appearance by the national secretary of the Young Socialist Alliance, saying, "I regard it not necessary for him to be on our campus." Abilene and San Antonio debated whether the fluoridation of water was a Communist plot to poison the American water supply. The Texas Manufacturers Association produced a mailing charging that the civil rights bill was a "grab for power" that "puts into the hands of the President the awful power to make himself a virtual dictator."
The real choice in Texas politics, Bush told voters and reporters, was no longer between liberal Democrats and conservative Democrats but between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans. Bush's case: Yarborough had voted "down the line with the New Frontier."
- In the primary balloting on Saturday, May 2, 1964, Bush led the field with roughly 44 percent. He faced Jack Cox, a former GOP gubernatorial nominee, in a runoff to be held on Saturday, June 6-the first Republican runoff in Texas history.
The money was with Bush. In the weeks after the May primary, he raised four times as much as Cox (roughly $15,000 to Cox's $3,500). Noting that Bush had already spent about $176,000 in the first primary to win 60,000 votes, Cox extrapolated that it might cost $3 million to defeat Yarborough, "an amount unheard of in Texas politics." The money issue helped crystallize the eastern question. "Just as surely as Rockefeller's millions can't buy [the] presidential nomination," Cox said, "George Bush with his millions can't buy a Senate seat." Bush struck back, saying he would not apologize for running a "properly financed" campaign. "Our goal is to beat Yarborough," Bush told a morning coffee gathering in Houston. "He is going to have many thousands of dollars from" organized labor, which meant the Republicans had to meet strength with strength.
Bush defeated Cox in the runoff, and in Washington four days later, on Wednesday, June 10, 1964, Yarborough voted for cloture in order to break the filibuster against the civil rights bill. (Tower voted for the filibuster.) With Yarborough's support, the landmark law was about to become a reality. In Texas, Bush said he was "shocked" by Yarborough's vote. Conservative opposition to the bill focused on provisions ordering the integration of privately owned businesses, including restaurants, which the right wing argued was unconstitutional and invested the federal government with too much control. Yarborough, Bush said, had voted for "a course of action which will be most detrimental to the concept of States' rights which is near and dear to so many Texans."
He was uncomfortable with racial politics even as he opposed the civil rights bill and struggled to reconcile the impulses of a good heart with the demands of the politics of 1964. The tensions he felt were evident in a letter he wrote a Jewish supporter in Houston in late July. "My heart is heavy-I have traveled the state for 2 weeks. The civil rights issue can bring Yarborough to sure defeat. I know this now for certain," Bush wrote. Republicans "must develop [their] position reasonably, prudently, sensitively-we must be sure we don't inflame the passions of unthinking men to garner a vote; yet it is essential that the position I believe in be explained." He was honestly conflicted. "What shall I do? How will I do it?" he asked. "I want to win, but not at the expense of justice, not at the expense of the dignity of any man...nor teaching my children a prejudice which I do not feel."
Still, Yarborough's civil rights vote gave the ambitious young Republican an opening. Campaigning against the bill, Bush argued for "states' rights" and hoped that might be just enough to bring Yarborough down. "There is at least one hard-money bet in Washington now between politically wise people that Bush will win," Mike Quinn of The Dallas Morning News wrote in midsummer.
- On Friday, June 12, 1964, Bush celebrated his fortieth birthday. He had never felt-or looked-better. The ulcer that had felled him in London was apparently gone, and observers were dazzled by his charisma. "His campaign...gets a lot of energy and sparkle from the young Republican matrons who are enthusiastic about him personally and have plenty of money for baby sitters and nothing much...to do with their time," wrote The Texas Observer. And there were his manners, always warm, always proper, always deferential. "Sir, I'm George Bush, running for the U.S. Senate," he would say as he shook hands on the campaign trail.
"Sir": a small thing, perhaps, but notable-a tangible sign that the lessons of Greenwich endured. In the wake of Yarborough's civil rights vote, Jim Leonard announced that Bush would begin a merciless campaign on August 1. That was another lesson from Connecticut: If you run for office, run hard.
"The more widely Bush can make himself known, it appears, the better his chances will be," the Dallas Morning News observed in September 1964. "A lot of people are talking Bush," an unnamed Democrat in Corpus Christi told the paper. A bank officer from Plainview liked Bush on the grounds that he "wants the same things as Goldwater, but he's not reckless." The liberals at The Texas Observer feared that Bush might just unseat Yarborough. "Surely the one extremism or culpable opportunism which George Bush's suaveness and pleasantness cannot dispel is his enthusiastic championing of the candidacy of the senator from Arizona, which he knew very well was a pre-condition of his nomination by Texas Republicans," the Observer wrote in June 1964. As the general election neared, the Observer argued that a Senator George Bush would be "another anti-test ban treaty, anti-medicare, anti-war on poverty, anti-federal government Goldwater Republican."
The stridency of tone was a sign that Bush was doing well. "R.Y. is getting mean," Bush reported to a supporter in August. Calling Bush "the Connecticut candidate," Yarborough returned to the carpetbagger charge more and more as the fall wore on, and it annoyed Bush more and more. Dating his baptism into Texas life to his initial posting to Corpus Christi during the war, Bush told crowds that he had first come to Texas twenty-one years before and that "my philosophy of government is Texas." He hit on the right wry tone: "I was born outside of the state," he said. "I did that so I could be close to my mother."
Ten days before the election, a poll of likely voters put Bush within striking distance of Yarborough. The Democrat led 49 to 44 percent, with 6 percent undecided. On Tuesday, October 27, Bush broadcast an hour-long statewide program entitled "The Empty Chair." Using a picture of Yarborough and tape recordings of his voice, Bush had staged this quasi-debate on Sunday, October 25, after Yarborough declined to face off on television. The telecast ran on more than a dozen different Texas stations on the same evening that many network affiliates showed a half-hour Goldwater broadcast that featured a speech, "A Time for Choosing," by a recent Democratic convert to Republicanism-Ronald Reagan. Yarborough did not relent. "Let's show the world," Yarborough said, "that old Senator Bush can't send Little Georgie down here to buy a Senate seat."