- Election Day 1964 was, inescapably, Lyndon Johnson's hour. Nothing could withstand the raw political force that the incumbent president exerted over the United States on Tuesday, November 3, 1964. Johnson defeated Goldwater 61.1 to 38.5 percent, losing only Arizona and five Deep South states. In Texas the Republicans were destroyed, losing their two GOP House seats. The UPI election night lead was unambiguous: "President Johnson," the wire service reported, "smashed the Republican party in Texas to smithereens tonight."
Bush polled 44 percent to Yarborough's 56 percent in what The Dallas Morning News called the "fiercest" general election U.S. Senate contest in Texas history. "Actually we received more votes than any other Republican has ever gotten in Texas, polling over 1,100,000," Bush wrote Richard Nixon, "but with the Johnson landslide it was not in the cards to [have] enough vote splitting." It was small comfort. "I don't mean to be ungrateful," Bush said, "but I'm a competitor." He had come up short. "The figures indicate that we have lost," Bush told his supporters at about eleven thirty P.M. at the Hotel America in Houston. "I tried desperately to think of someone else I could blame for this and I came to the conclusion there is no one to blame but me." He was, a reporter noted, "baffled by the returns." He had outspent his opponent nearly three to one (roughly $300,000 to $100,000). He had genuinely believed victory was at hand.
Credit 12.2 Former senator Prescott Bush and George's brother Jonathan join the candidate to watch the returns on Tuesday, November 3, 1964, the night George H. W. Bush lost the U.S. Senate race to Democratic incumbent Ralph Yarborough.
All Bush could do was play the part of a gracious loser, congratulating Yarborough and looking toward a vague future. "I plan to continue my interest in politics," Bush said in defeat, "and hope to play a part in the future of our great state."
- Bush was candid in the aftermath. "We got beat," he wrote at the bottom of a typewritten thank-you note to a friend right after the election. Bush wrote Gerry Bemiss a private postmortem: "The Birchers are bad news and I don't like them a bit. They gave me a fit here in Houston and in other places in Texas and I think in retrospect I should have cracked down on them more. This mean humorless philosophy which says everybody should agree on absolutely everything is not good for the Republican Party or for our State. When the word moderation becomes a dirty word we have some soul searching to do."
"Did I go too far right?" Bush said, reflecting on the 1964 race nearly fifty years later. "Maybe. There is a political orthodoxy you take to win the support of the party. I was pushed a little to the right." And yet, and yet: "But I was not as moderate a guy as some in the East thought I should be. The mold, the prediction, was that I would be like my dad politically-the Washington guys wanted me, on some of the issues, to be like the senator from Connecticut." A pause. "I was a Texan. I was running for office in Texas."
Bush was exhausted. He and Barbara got away for a little break at Mary and Herbie Walker's house on Eleuthera. With the Walkers, Bush's parents, and their friends the Fred Chamberses, the Bushes swam and golfed and picnicked, unwinding from the campaign. "Pop was really dead when we arrived," Barbara wrote in March 1965. "When he left he was relaxed and never looked better."
PART IV.
The Wars of Washington.
1966 to 1977.
Although fundamentally conservative, he is liberal here and there, mid-19th century in some ways and mid-21st century in others.
-The Dallas Morning News, August 30, 1970.
The right to hope is basic.
-GEORGE H. W. BUSH, April 17, 1968.
Credit p4.1.
As CIA director, Bush leads a National Security Council meeting to discuss a crisis in Beirut in June 1976. From left, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General George Brown, White House Chief of Staff Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and President Ford..
THIRTEEN.
Without a Moment to Stop.
I'd like to be President. The chances are slight, but please don't limit me.
-GEORGE H. W. BUSH to a potential GOP congressional primary rival, January 1966.
For Bush, politics is a personal game in which, like commerce on the old frontier, the salesman and the product are a package; you sell your product by selling yourself; you sell individually, not institutionally.
-The Dallas Morning News, Sunday, August 30, 1970.
DESPITE THE DEFEAT, his was a good life in Houston at the midpoint of the 1960s. He was forty years old, the father of five loving children, the husband of an adoring wife. His eldest son, George W., had gone off to Andover, graduated, and was now at Yale; Jeb was twelve; Neil, Marvin, and Doro were in elementary school.
George H. W. Bush was a busy man, and like many in his generation he spent a lot of time on the road, leaving his wife in charge at home. When he was around, though, he was the dominant figure-and a source of apparently endless fun. George W.'s first memory of his dad is of the two playing catch in Midland; all of the kids recall the Sunday hamburger and hot dog lunches with neighbors after church, both in Midland and later in Houston. Marvin remembered the billboards from the '64 race on San Felipe Road: "I looked up and thought, 'There's my man, and he's bigger than life.'"
He would take his children to Houston's new major league baseball games. These were the days of the Houston Colt .45s-pre-Astros and very much pre-Astrodome. Jeb remembered a hundred-degree doubleheader against the Dodgers at the rudimentary Colt Stadium. (Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale pitched for the visitors.) "They ran out of Coke, beer, water," Jeb recalled. "People were passing out all around us-literally." The Bush kids barely noticed the heat: Their dad was with them, and for that they would endure even a blistering, thirsty doubleheader. The children seemed never to have seen Bush angry or down; he deftly hid his anxieties about business and life. There was a single exception. "I have only one memory of his being sad or despondent," Jeb recalled. "I walked into the living room in Houston and there were adults in the room-they had lost a rig in the Gulf, and you could feel the tension, the sadness."
Jeb had read the room well. On Thursday, September 9, 1965, Zapata's rig Maverick was in 220 feet of water twenty miles off the coast of Louisiana when Hurricane Betsy struck. The damage to the rig was total: It disappeared. "This was the largest single loss that the domestic offshore drilling industry sustained in this or any other hurricane," Bush wrote his investors in the annual chairman's letter. He flew over the Gulf of Mexico in the aftermath, looking in vain for signs of the rig.
Zapata's future, however, no longer consumed him as it once had. "George Bush, Houston businessman," The New York Times reported in March 1965, "is rated by political friend and foe alike as the Republicans' best prospect in Texas because of his attractive personal qualities and the strong campaign he put up for the Senate last year." There was speculation that he might run for the State Senate. Another option was seeking an open, newly redistricted U.S. House seat in Houston, the result of a lawsuit Bush had helped file on behalf of the GOP.
Congress was an exciting possibility, but there were obstacles. Polling showed that Houston district attorney Frank Briscoe, the likely Democratic nominee, was ahead. And there were rumors that Ross Baker, a fellow Houston Republican, was planning on running against Bush in the GOP primary. Baker believed Bush was using the House race just to position himself for another run for the Senate. In a conversation with Baker in early January 1966, Bush said: "I don't want to move just up to the Senate, Ross. I'd like to be President. The chances are slight, but please don't limit me." Baker deferred to Bush, giving the former Harris County chairman and 1964 Senate nominee a clear path to the general election for Congress.
Bush decided it was also time to break away from his offshore oil business. "It would have been unfair to the company's stockholders and employees to do otherwise," Bush recalled. "The 1964 Senate race taught me that it takes a total commitment to be a candidate. Zapata, like any successful business, needed hands-on leadership from its front office." He sold his Zapata Off-Shore stock for an amount ranging between $737,000 (an estimate based on documents in the George Bush Presidential Library) to $1.1 million (a figure published in the press in the late 1960s). Whatever the precise number, the sale brought the Bushes somewhere between $5.5 million and $8 million in 2015 dollars.
- Bush announced his candidacy for the Seventh Congressional District on Saturday, January 15, 1966. The following Monday morning, Barbara was driving six-year-old Doro's carpool to school. "I saw your Daddy on television last night," one of the little girls said to Doro. "You did?" said a third child. "What was he doing?"
"Oh, you know," said Doro, "it was about that erection that he is going to have." (Barbara's response: "Needless to say we have worked on the word 'election'!") In July 1966, Bush was trailing Democrat Frank Briscoe by eight points, 49 to 41 percent. Bush's adman, Harry Treleaven from J. Walter Thompson, a leading national agency, had to close that gap. Treleaven went on to work for Richard Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign, and The Selling of the President, 1968, Joe McGinniss's account of Nixon's media strategy, detailed what Treleaven had done for Bush in Houston two years before. Bush's advertising strategy, McGinniss wrote, would consume 80 percent of the campaign budget. Ordinary voters, Treleaven noted, thought Bush "an extremely likable person"; the adman acknowledged, however, that "there was a haziness about exactly where [Bush] stood politically." So what to do? "There'll be few opportunities for logical persuasion, which is all right-because probably more people vote for irrational, emotional reasons than professional politicians suspect," Treleaven noted, according to McGinniss. As Treleaven saw it, candidates were-well, they were personalities. "Political candidates are celebrities, and today, with television taking them into everybody's home right along with Johnny Carson and Batman, they're more of a public attraction than ever."
For Bush, taking on a front-runner like Briscoe offered instant drama. "We can turn this into an advantage by creating a 'fighting underdog' image," Treleaven wrote. "Bush must convince voters that he really wants to be elected and is working hard to earn their vote. People sympathize with a man who tries hard: they are also flattered that anyone would really exert himself to get their vote." And so Bush played the role of a man on the move. "Over and over again, on every television screen in Houston," Joe McGinniss wrote, "George Bush was seen with his coat slung over his shoulder, his sleeves rolled up...."
The immensity of the Goldwater defeat had taught Republicans like Bush-Republicans who wanted to win among affluent suburbanites-that political conservatism required a genial face. Extremism on the right had been tested and found wanting; President Johnson's margin of victory two years before was proof enough of that. "Too long, Republicans have been oblivious to poverty, the Negro ghettoes, inadequate housing, medical care needs, and a million other pressing problems that face our people," Bush told the Texas Young Republican Federation in 1966. Republicans could not beat something (Johnson's Great Society) with nothing. Bush, for instance, pressed for a "human investment" program in which the government would reward businesses that offered workers training or retraining. "I want (the Republican Party's) conservatism to be sensitive and dynamic," The Wall Street Journal reported Bush as saying, "not scared and reactionary."
In Houston on Tuesday, November 8, 1966, George H. W. Bush won the general election 57 to 42 percent. It was an early evening: Briscoe conceded by ten P.M. It had been a bad night for Democrats generally. Johnson's party lost forty-seven seats in the House, three in the Senate-and in California, Ronald Reagan won the governorship in a race against Democrat Edmund G. "Pat" Brown. The pendulum that had seemed to swing so far and firmly to the left in the Johnson triumph in 1964 had now moved back toward the middle in the space of just twenty-four months.
- On the night the Bushes moved into their new Washington house at 4910 Hillbrook Lane NW-they had bought it from Milward Simpson, the senator from Wyoming who was retiring-Bush asked the moving men to spend the night, an invitation that sent Barbara out to a nearby Sears to buy bedding for the unexpected guests. Between January and April 1967, the Bushes would have twenty-nine houseguests in Washington.
Congressman Bush was arriving in the capital at a fluid political moment. President Johnson was at work on the Great Society legislation, much of which expanded government, while prosecuting a difficult war in Vietnam. As a Republican from Texas, Bush often opposed Johnson at home but largely backed him abroad.
That Bush came of political age in the Congress in such an odd time-a moment when Republicans were at once supportive of Johnson in Southeast Asia and wary of him domestically-may help explain Bush's own gentler understanding of partisanship in Washington. The political lesson of Bush's formative first years in public office was that the president of the United States-in this case Johnson-was neither wholly right nor wholly wrong. In House votes, Congressman Bush backed Johnson-supported bills 53.5 percent of the time. When Richard Nixon became president in 1969, the average for the two years Bush served under a Republican was, at 55 percent, virtually unchanged.
Bush's open-handed-and open-minded-manner once he was in office was grounded in more than politeness. It was a reflection of a truth about politics that he experienced in the Congress in the last years of the presidency of Lyndon Johnson.
- Asked for his first choice of committee assignment, Bush had written Gerald Ford, the House minority leader, seeking the moon-Appropriations-but with diffidence. "I know you are swamped with all kinds of grandiose requests-perhaps this ranks as the grandiosest of them all, but whatever you decide will be fine with me," Bush wrote, "and I promise to work like hell to be a good member of whatever committee I get." He would wind up on an even more powerful and prestigious committee-the tax-writing Ways and Means-as a result of an internal Democratic fight, the Republicans' sense that the Sun Belt was the future, and a call from his father.
As the new Congress was forming, Democrats had voted to replace a Texas Democrat on Ways and Means with a New Yorker. With a Texas Democrat off the committee, House Republicans voted Bush a seat as a signal to possible GOP candidates in previously Democratic states. The strategy, as described by The Dallas Morning News: "By choosing Bush, Republicans were able to show that they would take good care of Texans and other Southern Republicans elected to Congress, hoping to build up their party in those states." Bush was the first freshman to win a seat on Ways and Means since 1904.
Prescott Bush had played a crucial role in making that happen. "His father came to me...and wanted him on my committee," Ways and Means chairman Wilbur Mills recalled to The Washington Post's Walt Harrington in 1986. "I said, 'I'm a Democrat and I don't think I can do anything.' He said, could I call Jerry Ford? And so I did." To Harrington, Ford recalled that he had helped Bush to "give Texas Republicans 'a shot in the arm.'"
Word about Prescott's call spread. A reporter asked George H. W. Bush about one story that was making the rounds: "Your dad was here last week and people are saying that he put $50,000 in the GOP coffer to get your assignment. Is this true?" Bush denied it, and the suggestion left him "furious," according to Barbara. "There's a lot of luck involved in this," Bush wrote a constituent in late January 1967, "and I was at the right place at the right time." And with the right surname. As in the hunt for capital for his oil businesses, being George Herbert Walker Bush was of inarguable benefit. He was to be a conscientious congressman, but the circumstances of his birth and the connections of his family continued to shape his life for the better through means unavailable to others.
To introduce their son and daughter-in-law to Washington, Dorothy and Prescott Bush took over the F Street Club on Wednesday, January 18, 1967, for a dinner in honor of their congressman son and daughter-in-law. In black-tie and evening gowns, the guests had drinks and dinner and toasted young Bush. Among those included in the evening were the John Sherman Coopers of Kentucky, the Hugh D. Auchinclosses, the Rowland Evanses, Gordon Gray, Katharine Graham, the Allen Dulleses, the Potter Stewarts, Susan Mary and Joe Alsop, Stewart Alsop, Admiral and Mrs. Jerauld Wright (he was a former ambassador to Taiwan), Admiral and Mrs. Arthur W. Radford (he was a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), and the Charles Bartletts.
- Bush's legislative priorities grew out of the centrist conservatism of his '66 race. While he opposed a proposal of President Johnson's for a 6 percent tax surcharge to help pay for the administration's $135 billion budget, the new congressman hoped to pursue the "human investment" agenda he had discussed during his campaign as well as "a tax credit for pollution control."
The costs of the Vietnam War and of Johnson's Great Society programs were driving the federal deficit to what Bush and other fiscally conservative Republicans believed to be dangerous levels. In the middle of 1967, the administration revised its shortfall projections from $11.1 billion to $24 billion for 1968, news that led Bush to change his mind about the president's proposed 6 percent tax surcharge. "Unpopular though it may be, it is becoming increasingly clear to me that because of exorbitant projected deficits, we must have a tax increase," Bush said on the House floor in June 1967. There also had to be cuts in spending, Bush added; if the administration agreed to that, then he would support more taxes.
The young Republican congressman appreciated the difficulties facing the aging Democratic president. In the fall of 1967, during a pre-wedding party at the Sulgrave Club for the president's daughter Lynda and her fiance, Chuck Robb, LBJ and Bush exchanged warm words. "Mr. President," Bush said, "I just want you to know that I may not agree with you but you can count on me to never attack you personally."
"George, Mrs. Johnson and I raise cattle and we have learned to look at the stock," Johnson replied. "We say, 'Who's the daddy?' We know you're all right."
Back home, Texas politics was unsettled. In the fall of 1967, John Connally announced that he would not seek reelection as governor in 1968. The Bushes' telephone began to ring: Would Bush come home and run for governor? He was reluctant. "Does Pop want to be gov.?" Barbara wrote in her diary. "In my opinion 'No.' Pop really would like to be president-I guess. But meanwhile he should run for the Senate if the time arises....My presidential statement probably is true of all politicians....What I am really trying to say is-Pop is interested in world affairs & national affairs."
- Thanksgiving 1967 at Hillbrook Lane was amiably noisy. All of the Bush children were there, from George W., in his last year at Yale, to Doro, who was eight. "What fun and what a mob," wrote Barbara. They played Scrabble, bridge, and a word-guessing game George W. introduced to the family called Fictionary. By year's end Bush had decided against seeking the Texas governorship in favor of running for reelection to Congress. Among the reasons was a hunger to play his part on the largest possible stage. His best chance of doing so lay in national, not state, politics.
Late in the year, Bush visited Vietnam. He dined with Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker and came away believing that the antiwar elements in the United States were having a disproportionate influence over the North Vietnamese. "We believe in freedom of speech," Barbara wrote after talking the trip over with her husband, "but it does seem tough to have our enemy think that a small group speaks for our country, and therefore prolong this hideous war. Whether or not this is actually true, I don't know, but the military men that G. talked to seemed to feel that this was keeping the enemy away from any peace talks."
Credit 13.1 Congressman Bush of the Seventh District of Texas with Vietnamese children during a visit to the war-torn country in the weeks after Christmas 1967.
On Tuesday, January 17, 1968, President Johnson delivered his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress. "Tonight our nation is accomplishing more for its people than has ever been accomplished before," Johnson said. "Americans are prosperous as men have never been in recorded history. Yet there is in the land a certain restlessness-a questioning." The unease, the president said, came "because when a great ship cuts through the sea, the waters are always stirred and troubled...We ask now, not how can we achieve abundance?-but how shall we use our abundance? Not, is there abundance enough for all?-but, how can all share in our abundance?"
A week later, CBS broadcast a Republican reply. Former president Eisenhower introduced the program with a prerecorded message; Gerald Ford, Bush, and others then took turns rebutting Johnson's speech. Bush was assigned the question of federal spending-which Republicans believed was too high even in what LBJ had called as "prosperous" an age as men had ever known-and made a brief, impassioned plea for fiscal responsibility. Johnson, Bush said, had offered "no sense of sacrifice on the part of the Government, no assignment of priorities, no hint of the need to put first things first."
The overall reviews of the program were underwhelming, but in the "TV Today" column of the Chicago Tribune, critic Clay Gowran found much to like in the congressman from Texas. "Bush, a wholesome young man, won enthusiastic applause by reiterating the Republican-and to a large extent, Democratic-vow that Congress will not consider a tax increase unless there is a cut in federal spending," Gowran wrote, adding that Bush and Colorado senator Peter Dominick "proved definite assets to the G.O.P. when it comes to television."
On Sunday evening, March 31, 1968, facing declining support at home in the wake of the Tet Offensive, a massive North Vietnamese attack on U.S. and South Vietnamese forces, Lyndon Johnson withdrew from the 1968 presidential race. Four days later, Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered in Memphis, igniting violence in numerous American cities. Amid the furies of 1968, Bush decided to take a stand.
- On Wednesday, April 10, 1968-six days after King's assassination-Bush voted for the Fair Housing Act of 1968, essentially reversing his opposition to the 1964 civil rights bill. The law banned discrimination in the housing market, enabling home buyers of any color or ethnicity to purchase real estate wherever they could afford it. (Prescott Bush had also been a supporter of open housing.) Bush knew what was coming. His mail from his voters was vicious and voluminous. At one point during the debate over the legislation Bush estimated that he had received five hundred letters attacking the law-and just two in favor of it. On the day after his vote, Bush tried to calm conservatives by introducing a bill that would have banned rioters from the federal payroll, but the gesture did little to quell the outrage. His life was threatened in a call to his office, and he denounced the "hatred and venom" he and his staff faced. "That anyone would resort to this kind of talk," Bush later said, "makes me ashamed I'm an American." Bush remembered one angry constituent in particular. "There was a really rich guy here" in Houston, Bush recalled in retirement. "His family were huge stockholders in Texaco or some huge oil company. And he was just ugly about it. 'We didn't put you up there to do this kind of thing-to sell out to the niggers.' He couldn't have been uglier and meaner, and that just made me more determined to do what was right."
It was a grim time. "I voted for the bill and the roof is falling in-boy does the hatred surface," Bush wrote a friend. At one point he came home from the office with "tummy troubles," as Barbara put it-a reminder of the old days of his collapse in London. "He got into bed and had some soup and worked on mail."
The showdown came in Houston, at Memorial High School, on Wednesday, April 17, 1968. Bush told the audience that he was being attacked as a "'nigger-lover'-this in 1968 with our country ripped apart at the seams. The base and mean emotionalism...makes me bow my head in sadness." He took things head-on. His plea was less for radical change than for fair play. "What this bill does...is to remove an obstacle-what it does do is try to offer a promise or a hope-a realization of The American Dream." He continued: In Vietnam I chatted with many Negro soldiers. They were fighting, and some were dying, for the ideals of this Country; some talked about coming back to get married and to start their lives over.
Somehow it seems fundamental that this guy should have a hope. A hope that if he saves some money, and if he wants to break out of a ghetto, and if he is a good character and if he meets every requirement of purchaser-the door will not be slammed solely because he is a Negro, or because he speaks with a Mexican accent.
In these troubled times, fair play is basic. The right to hope is basic.
He was exhausted. Aboard an evening flight to Washington, he saw an older woman approaching him and braced himself for yet another tense exchange. "I'm a conservative Democrat from the district," she said, "but I'm proud, and will always vote for you now." Bush felt relief wash over him. "I started to cry-with the poor lady embarrassed to death-I couldn't say a word to her," Bush wrote. Perhaps, just perhaps, everything was going to work out. He sat back and flew on.
- Bush's fair housing vote is all the more remarkable given the way many in the Republican Party nationally, and especially in the South, were coming to view the politics of race. LBJ's work on the civil and voting rights bills had created an opportunity for Republicans to appeal to historically Democratic disaffected white voters. Culture-ranging from long hair and drugs to antiwar campus demonstrations-was another factor working to the GOP's advantage. Many Americans felt that the nation, which was growing more racially and ethnically diverse as well as more culturally permissive, was slipping its moorings.
Bush shared some of those worries, but, while no liberal, he was attuned to the shifting cultural, political, and demographic realities, and hoped that his party would engage with a changing America rather than reflexively resist it. In the wake of his civil rights vote he paid a call on demonstrators at Resurrection City, the Poor People's Campaign encampment in Washington. (The campaign was part of MLK's movement for economic justice.) The prosperous Republican congressman from Houston was something of anomalous sight at Resurrection City, but Bush was curious, and so he made the trip. "I think it is important for members of Congress to know what is happening and to try to understand it," Bush told The Dallas Morning News.
As a Texas Republican he was concerned about the future impact of his state's Hispanic population. Bush praised PASO, the Political Association of Spanish-Speaking Organizations, for its goal of registering one million new voters in Texas, and he urged its leaders to give the Republican Party a chance. "Competition brings out the best in anyone, whether it is in athletics or in government," Bush told PASO's convention in Austin in August 1967. He also formulated a four-point program entitled "For the Mexican-American Texan-A Future of Fair Play and Progress" that included bilingual education programs, expanded Head Start, increased emphasis in Texas schools on Latin American culture and contributions, and the abolition of discriminatory local and state statutes. "We must demonstrate that all Republicans are not opposed to progress," he said. In Texas, he told The Dallas Morning News, Mexican Americans are "essentially law-abiding and family-oriented and yet seem to have been forgotten. These Texans are becoming increasingly more interested in evolving their own futures." Republicans needed to pay more attention to this community, Bush said, if they had any hope of winning them away from Democrats.
Population control was a long-standing public-policy concern. "We need to make population and family planning household words," Bush said. "The sensationalism needs to be taken out of the subject." He urged the creation of a joint House-Senate panel on family planning and related issues. "Population control and family planning is too important to whisper and giggle about now," Bush said. He credited his interest in the issue to his involvement with Planned Parenthood in Houston. Bush raised the stakes in the fall of 1969, proposing that the Department of the Interior become a new federal Department of Resources, Environment, and Population. His interest in legislation about "family-planning services" led Wilbur Mills to refer to Bush as "Rubbers."
On race relations, Bush took on the segregationist governor George Wallace of Alabama. In the early 1960s, Wallace, a southern Democrat with a taste for White Owl cigars, had become a symbol of defiance against federally mandated integration, pledging "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever!" As he had in 1964, Wallace was taking his reactionary message national, this time with a third-party presidential bid that Bush argued was part and parcel of the white backlash against civil rights. Wallace was an effective politician, Bush said, but "the Republican Party has too much more to offer in 1968 and through the '70s than a reversion that is hiding behind a label of states' rights....It's too late to accept the definition of states' rights as the status quo in the matter of race, and don't you for a minute think that this isn't really the basis for this Wallace campaign. It is."
It was not hard to see, then, how the political columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, writing about Bush in the summer of 1968, could observe that the congressman had something of a "left-of-center image in Houston."
- Overnight on June 45, 1968, the Bushes were awakened at four A.M. by a phone call: Robert Kennedy had been shot in Los Angeles. "A nightmare," wrote Barbara. "Brought back memories of 1963."
In the swirl of 1968, word circulated that Bush was in the mix to go on the ticket as vice president with Richard Nixon if Nixon prevailed in his fight for the nomination at the Republican National Convention. The idea had reportedly originated with the evangelist Billy Graham. (Graham had gotten to know Dorothy and Prescott at Hobe Sound, a Florida retreat.) "This possibility is based partly on Bush's television style, regarded by Dr. Graham as among the best of current practicing politicians," wrote Evans and Novak in the first week of June.
An unnamed "Texas industrialist" had made a similar pitch to Nixon, as had Republican congressman Fletcher Thompson, a colleague of Bush's from Georgia, who suggested that the geographical calculus made sense: "Nixon, a Californian now living in New York, would be coupled with a Massachusetts-born Texan whose father...has valid credentials in the Eastern Establishment." As Evans and Novak saw it, Bush just might help Nixon with Nixon's "weak spots: minority groups, the young, the industrial northeast." Bush was also listed as one of eight "moderate" possibilities for the ticket in a front-page New York Times story on Sunday, June 30, 1968. Tom Dewey promoted a Nixon-Bush ticket, as did former president Eisenhower.
Nixon was the favorite for the presidential nomination, but Ronald Reagan, a year and a half into his first term as governor of California, was a viable challenger. Reagan stopped in Texas en route to the convention, which was being held in Miami Beach. In Amarillo, he spoke at a $100-a-plate dinner. Reagan impressed Barbara, who attended the event, with his native political ability. "He has all the poise in the world, great timing etc.," wrote Barbara. "Didn't say much, but said it well. 'We must show the world where we stand in Vietnam' and gets a standing ovation. They loved him."
Congressman Bush had endorsed Nixon, a move that put him at odds with many Texas Republicans, who were more conservative and harbored hopes for a Reagan nomination. "I am expecting to be in quite a little trouble as the Reagan people are a lot like the Goldwater people in Texas," Barbara wrote before the Amarillo dinner. "They are furious with Poppy for being for Nixon."
En route to Miami Beach for the convention in the first week of August, Barbara was on the same flight as Nancy and Ronald Reagan. They were both, she thought, "most attractive. She is tiny and really a very lovely, natural beauty. He is 5211 or 6 feet...and very attractive also." In Florida, the Bushes stayed at the Barcelona Hotel on Collins Avenue at Forty-Second Street where they were greeted by a banner reading BUSH FOR VICE PRESIDENT. On the eve of the convention the Southern Association of Republican State Chairmen emerged from the closed-door session with three recommendations for a Nixon running mate: Reagan, John Tower, or George Bush (in that order). Any of the three, Texas GOP leader Peter O'Donnell suggested to reporters, would help Nixon fight off the Wallace challenge from the right. Asked about the speculation, Bush was honest. "I've never understood people being coy about these things," he told reporters. "A lot of people would like to be vice-president but they won't say so." Bush did say so: He would be delighted. The Wall Street Journal reported that Bush's office in Houston had shipped two thousand BUSH buttons over to Miami-just in case.
On the morning after Nixon's presidential nomination, "Our phones rang off the hook with reports coming in from friends who had attended one of the all-night meetings that Nixon held or from reporters from all the news media," wrote Barbara. Tom O'Neal of CBS, a friend of George's youngest brother, Bucky, was assigned to the Bush camp and kept in touch with the CBS news desk as Nixon made his decision. To escape the tension, the Bushes went swimming at the hotel but watched the window of their suite in case word arrived.
Nixon settled on Spiro T. "Ted" Agnew of Maryland, a law-and-order governor. Bush had come up short, Nixon later told him, because he had been in the House for such a brief time. "Though we finished out of the money it was a great big plus for me," Bush wrote Tom Dewey, "and I am indebted to you for your interest."
Nixon did ask Bush to be a key surrogate in the autumn, and Bush was happy to agree. He traveled out to San Diego for a session with Nixon and other surrogates-a group that included Congressman Donald Rumsfeld of Illinois.
At Kennebunkport in September 1968, not long after the convention, a visitor remarked "in her reincarnation she'd like to be First Lady." Barbara replied, "That's funny. That's the last thing I want to be...and I suspect that I will be."
- Richard Nixon narrowly defeated Vice President Hubert Humphrey in November 1968, creating high hopes among Republicans in Washington who would now have a president of their own party for the first time since 1961. During the inaugural festivities in January 1969, Bush, who had been reelected to the House unopposed, would go out to meet the private planes bringing in Texans and invite everyone over. Barbara had planned an open house for fifty; more than three hundred showed up. At one point Barbara noticed the mayor of Houston standing in the rain outside the Bushes' house, trying in vain to get in.
Bush transformed his House office into a center of hospitality, offering coffee, sandwiches, and Bloody Marys. On the afternoon of Nixon's inauguration, the Bushes went to a party at the Washington Club. They rode with Mr. and Mrs. Ross Perot of Dallas. At the suggestion of one of his assistants, Rose Zamaria, Bush also took time on Inauguration Day to drive to Andrews Air Force Base to bid farewell to President Johnson. It was cold-the temperature was about twenty degrees-and the ceremony was brief, with an army band playing "Auld Lang Syne" and the national anthem before 105 mm howitzers fired a twenty-one-gun salute.
Bush shook Johnson's hand. The congressman long remembered what he called the "poignancy of the moment"-the leave-taking of a once-powerful president, once master of his domain, now deflated, driven from office by a war he could not win and by a nation that once loved him but now could hardly wait to see him go. After Bush "wished him a safe journey," the former president "nodded, took a few steps toward the ramp, then turned, looked back at me, and said, 'Thanks for coming.'"
Johnson also appreciated a report of a remark of Bush's from Joe B. Frantz, director of the LBJ Library's Oral History Project. As Frantz told the story to Johnson, he had asked Bush "why a prominent Republican such as he was seeing you off instead of being in the midst of Republican activities in the city. His reply was a nice tribute to you: 'He has been a fine President and invariably courteous and fair to me and my people, and I thought that I belonged here to show in a small way how much I have appreciated him. I wish I could do even more.'" From Bush's perspective, there might also be utility in Johnson's continuing warmth. Should Bush challenge the liberal senator Ralph Yarborough once more in 1970, it was just possible that Johnson might be quietly helpful-or at least, as Bush and Nixon biographer Herbert S. Parmet observed, do no harm.
"Please know that I value your friendship, as I do your father's, and that I am glad you are one of us down here in Texas," Johnson wrote Bush on the last day of January. "When you are home sometime, come to see us."
- As a congressman, Bush once wrote of dwelling "in a world congested, in a life cluttered, in a day without a moment to stop." In point of fact, though, Bush was uninterested in an uncongested world or an uncluttered life. His restlessness with service in the House grew more pronounced in the first months of 1969. "He just must get to the Senate where he can have the national forum that he wants," Barbara wrote in February 1969.
His best bet for moving up, he realized, lay in a rematch against Yarborough in 1970. Yet he had the safest of House seats, a place on Ways and Means, and a long, serene future ahead of him. Was the Senate worth the risk?
He decided to ask Lyndon Johnson. On Wednesday, April 9, 1969, Bush, who was just beginning his second term as a congressman, flew to see the former president at LBJ's ranch at Stonewall, Texas, about 220 miles from Houston. "Mr. President, I've still got a decision to make and I'd like your advice," Bush said. "My House seat is secure-no opposition last time-and I've got a position on Ways and Means. I don't mind taking risks, but in a few more terms, I'll have seniority on a powerful committee. I'm just not sure it's a gamble I should take, whether it's really worth it."
"Son," Johnson said, "I've served in the House. And I've been privileged to serve in the Senate, too. And they're both good places to serve. So I wouldn't begin to advise you what to do, except to say this-that the difference between being a member of the Senate and a member of the House is the difference between chicken salad and chicken shit." The former president paused. "Do I make my point?"
He did.
Bush called on President Nixon six weeks later to talk over the Senate race. For forty-five minutes on Thursday, May 22, 1969, the two men discussed whether Bush should give up the Houston House seat. "The President said that he'd like GB to run and would help him," wrote Barbara. By late 1969 the Senate was a go. "We are moving into a new decade," Bush wrote friends. "The tired, old answers of the past are not good enough for the '70s. Texas needs a positive and constructive voice that will be respected by President Nixon whether in support of his programs or in criticism."
- When the Bushes had arrived in Houston a decade before, they had become friendly with another attractive young couple with an Ivy League pedigree: Mary Stuart and James A. Baker III. The son of a leading Houston lawyer, Baker had been sent to the Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, before Princeton (where Baker played rugby), service in the marine corps, and law school at the University of Texas. Baker's father had been an admirer, from afar, of Bush's father, donating money to Prescott Bush's Senate campaign. The elder Baker also supported George Bush's 1964 bid, writing Bush: "You ran a great race against almost overwhelming odds. The cards were stacked against you from the beginning and the breaks never came your way....It was a pleasure and a privilege to support any man with the high ideals and courage that you have."
George and "Jimmy" were fast friends. There were cookout lunches at the Bushes' and men's doubles at the Houston Country Club. Bush was quick at the net; Baker handled the baseline. They complemented each other's strengths and, with the exception of equally underwhelming serves, compensated for each other's weaknesses. Together they won two club championships. The two men were six years apart in age-Bush had been born in 1924, Baker in 1930. Bush was an eastern aristocrat in search of Texas credentials, Baker a Texas aristocrat who liked having eastern credentials. They had big families-the Bushes and their five children, the Bakers had four sons. And they were innately competitive young men, eager to live lives of consequence.
Bush was the bolder risk taker, Baker cooler and more judicious-a distinction perhaps attributable to the differing cultures of the oil business and of lawyering. Bush had made his fortune in West Texas and in his offshore ventures; Baker was a steady counselor, a reassuring figure in the boardrooms and men's grills of Houston. After lunch on Thanksgiving Day, the Baker men (father and sons Jamie, Mike, John, and Doug) would square off against the Bush men (father and sons George W., Jeb, Marvin, and Neil) in touch football games at the end of Green Tree Road. They called it the Turkey Bowl-and, as Jim Baker recalled, "the touching sometimes looked a lot like tackling."
In 1969, when Bush was planning the 1970 race, Baker considered making his own run for the Seventh District congressional seat, writing "Bushie" about his consultations. But Baker could not do it: His wife, Mary Stuart Baker, had been diagnosed with breast cancer, and he confided painful details about her condition to Bush. The Bushes were the last friends to be with her when she died in early 1970. "You need to do something to take your mind off your grief," Bush told Baker, and brought him into the campaign.
Bush described his relationship with Baker as a "big brotherlittle brother" dynamic, with Bush the elder figure. (Baker affectionately called Bush "Jefe," Spanish for "boss.") They formed a bond of love leavened with natural elements of tension. Bush would shake his head at Baker's brilliance with the press, and could become irritated at how so many stories managed to present Baker as the genius without whom George H. W. Bush would be nothing. Baker would grow frustrated with Bush's shortcomings as a candidate and was believed to wonder, sometimes, why Bush's name was on the ballot rather than his own. Yet theirs was a kind of marriage, and through the years the two men would return to each other again and again. They were stronger together than they were apart.