- Bush called on Nixon in the Oval Office in January 1970 to make the Senate bid official. Photographers were invited in, and the president sent Bush off with a handshake and a brief benediction: "I wish you luck." A film crew shot footage of Nixon and Bush for campaign commercials.
An attractive young oilman with a distinguished war record and largely centrist views was most likely to win the Senate race in the Texas of 1970. John Connally and other Democrats, however, believed that forty-nine-year-old Lloyd Bentsen, a former Democratic congressman from the Rio Grande Valley, not Bush, should be that man.
Rivals in the Texas politics of the age, Bush and Connally each represented a distinct threat to the other. Bush was a relative newcomer, Connally a native; Bush was old money from the East, Connally new; Bush was the Republican future, Connally the Democratic past. (There was tension, too, over business: Connally had been a lawyer for Sid Richardson, the oil giant whose lobbyists had been so heavy-handed in pressuring Bush about Prescott Bush's oil vote in the 1950s.) When Bush looked at Connally, he saw the Texas of Lyndon Johnson and George Brown, a place where Democrats jealously held the keys to statewide power. When Connally looked at Bush, he saw an approaching GOP wave-one that might not come in this election cycle or the next one, but which was nevertheless coming. The conservative Bentsen was the Democrats' best bet to stop Bush's rise in Texas.
For Bush, Yarborough was one thing, Bentsen quite another. Yarborough was a traditional liberal who could be linked with a fading populist past. Bentsen was, like Bush, an appealing figure of the center in a still-largely Democratic state. A Bush-Bentsen race, The Dallas Morning News wrote, would mean that Texans "will be confronted with having to decide between two attractive, well educated, affluent and capable candidates. Bentsen and Bush even look a bit alike. There is not two cents' worth of difference in their basic political philosophies."
Credit 13.2 President Nixon, who was eager to see Congressman Bush make a run for the U.S. Senate in 1970, meets with the prospective candidate in the Oval Office in January 1970.
Bentsen defeated Yarborough in the May Democratic primary in part by attacking the incumbent for voting against a measure to allow prayer in public schools, for failing to oppose busing to achieve racial diversity, and for opposing two southern conservative Nixon nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court. The New York Times reported that Bentsen had won by "using President Nixon's 'Southern strategy' in a Democratic primary." The Southern Strategy was a political and cultural attempt to link Democrats to forces of disorder and of federal overreach on issues ranging from civil rights to Vietnam to social permissiveness. (Yarborough's defeat was seen as a troubling sign for another southern liberal, Albert Gore, Sr., who was facing Bill Brock in Tennessee.) In a primary ad for Bentsen, the Rives, Dyke agency in Houston ran images of rioting at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago while reporting that Yarborough had endorsed the liberal icon Eugene McCarthy for president. Bentsen then appeared on camera to ask Texans: "Does he support your view?" The answer came on primary day.
- In January 1970, Time observed that the November elections would "serve as the first broad referendum on the Nixon Administration's policies." And there were elements of a national strategy in the midterms. In the White House, Patrick J. Buchanan had sent Nixon an eleven-page memorandum about a new book by Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg, The Real Majority. Bright, aggressive, and unapologetically conservative, Pat Buchanan had grown up in Cold War, Roman Catholic Washington, had become an editorial writer for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, and had gone to work for Nixon in 1966. A provocative polemicist, Buchanan was always searching for ways to advance the conservative cause, and he saw merit in the Scammon-Wattenberg analysis of the American electorate in the new decade.
To Buchanan and to Nixon, the point was compelling: The key voter in the early 1970s was a forty-seven-year-old suburban housewife in Dayton, Ohio, married to a machinist. Nixon was particularly impressed with this passage from the Scammon-Wattenberg book: "To know that the lady in Dayton is afraid to walk the streets alone at night, to know that she has a mixed view about blacks and civil rights because before moving to the suburbs she lived in a neighborhood that became all black, to know that her brother-in-law is a policeman, to know that she does not have the money to move if her new neighborhood deteriorates, to know that she is deeply distressed that her son is going to a community junior college where LSD was found on the campus-to know all this is the beginning of contemporary political wisdom."
To win, Scammon and Wattenberg argued, the Democrats had to convince this housewife that they were in touch with her concerns. If the Democrats could do that, then they could make a case against the Republicans on the economy and successfully put together a majority. Nixon appreciated the logic. "If this analysis was right, and I agreed with Buchanan that it was, then the Republican counterstrategy was clear: we should...get the Democrats on the defensive" over issues such as crime, drugs, and patriotism, Nixon wrote in his memoirs. "We should aim our strategy primarily at disaffected Democrats, at blue-collar workers, and at working-class white ethnics. We should set out to capture the vote of the forty-seven-year-old Dayton housewife."
What worked in Dayton tended to work in southern cities, too. Bush grasped the strategy and would duly attack, as The Dallas Morning News reported, "school busing, Ted Kennedy, and welfare chiselers." In Bush's case, however, the conservative rhetoric came in a package of centrist proposals and calls for Republicans to heed their better angels. With Bush one got both hardball and high-mindedness, with the former being played in order to give him the power to put the latter into action.
On drugs, he favored making possession of marijuana a misdemeanor rather than a felony. On guns, he opposed firearm registration but supported regulating interstate sales "so every nut with a plate in his head can't get a firearm by mail order." On student demonstrations, he said, "The way to turn the kids off is to tell them you have to do it just the way it's always been done....I want to be the guy who stands for change."
As in the House race in 1966, Bush tended to emphasize his personality as much, if not more than, his platform, and he rehired adman Harry Treleaven for the Senate campaign. In a profile published twelve weeks out from the 1970 general election, Sam Kinch, Jr., who covered state politics for The Dallas Morning News, wrote, "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." Bush's goal, he told the newspaper, was "to make good things happen and to make sure a disproportionate amount of bad things don't happen."
Referring to Harry Treleaven's ads for Bush, Bentsen complained that the GOP was "packaging [Bush] like a bar of soap. They are running an image campaign." In one Treleaven spot described by The Wall Street Journal, Bush tossed a football to one of the boys, sat down on the lawn, and looked into the camera. "During the seventies my children will become adults. I promise you this. I will work hard for peace, a just society, and a fair society." It was one of more than three dozen commercials designed to prove the point that Bush, in the words of the campaign tagline, "can do more."
Explaining the thinking behind the Bush vs. Bentsen ad blitz to the Journal, Treleaven said, "Our problem was that both men are very much alike. They're about the same age, both are businessmen, both moderately conservative with about the same views on major issues. So we decided to make effectiveness an issue: Who can do more for Texas? More for the country? More for people?"
Bush claimed his polling showed a turnaround from a 40 to 33 percent deficit in June to a 40 to 30 percent lead in October, with a huge undecided vote. Though he was banking on the Nixon administration's popularity in the state (Nixon had a 74 percent approval rating in a poll conducted by the Democrats), Bush could not have counted on a White House leak to The Washington Post's David Broder on the eve of a Nixon visit to the state in the last week of October. "In the view of some well-informed insiders," Broder wrote in a piece published on Tuesday, October 27, 1970, "Mr. Nixon is going to Texas in hopes of finding his running mate for 1972 and the Republican presidential candidate for 1976."
Yes, Broder admitted, such a scenario "seems far fetched, but it is the firm conviction of men intimately involved in White House political operations that 46-year-old Rep. George Bush (R) of Houston will be that man-if he can, with the President's help, win his close Senate race next week." Vice President Agnew was thought to be a political liability. If the attractive Bush were to triumph in Texas-which Hubert Humphrey had carried in 1968-then who knew?
Then, on Election Day, Bush lost to Bentsen 53.5 to 46.5 percent. Rural turnout, particularly in heavily Democratic East Texas, was higher than expected, largely because of a down-ballot constitutional amendment that would have legalized liquor by the drink, a measure that attracted traditional Democrats to the polls. "Like Custer, who said there were just too many Indians, I guess there were just too many Democrats," Bush said once the votes were in.
Election night was crushing. "God it hurts to lose to Bentsen after all our work and trying and caring," Bush wrote a friend. Doro, then eleven, cried all evening. "I'm the only girl in my class whose father doesn't have a job," she told Barbara.
Bush had lost before, both against Yarborough in 1964 and to Agnew in Miami Beach in 1968. Life was hardly over. "We're torn between staying in politics in some way, or moving back to Houston and getting fairly immersed in business," Bush told a supporter a few weeks after the election in November 1970.
In Texas and in Washington, there was a widespread question circulating among columnists and politicians: "What," The Dallas Morning News asked, "will George Bush do now?"
FOURTEEN.
A Turn on the World Stage
The fact that one door has been closed for him opens another door.
-RICHARD NIXON, on Bush's swearing-in as ambassador to the United Nations BUSH WELCOMED THE CALL. After the Bentsen defeat, Charles Bartlett, the Kennedy intimate and Washington correspondent for The Chattanooga Times, telephoned Bush. Bartlett was reassuring. "You'd be amazed what this campaign did for your image up here," Bush recalled his saying. "A lot of people are thinking of you in national terms." Bartlett "talked about the U.N. as the greatest thing," arguing to Bush that his being ambassador to the United Nations, based in New York, would be good for Nixon and good for Bush. The incumbent was a career diplomat, Charles Yost, and Bartlett was reflecting a Washington view that Nixon needed a stronger voice in Manhattan. It was an intriguing idea, but there were lots of those around, including the possibility of a post with Secretary of State William P. Rogers as undersecretary of some kind.
Nixon, meanwhile, was currently enamored with John Connally. The tall, glamorous, conservative Texas Democrat had taken on mythic stature in Nixon's eyes. The president had asked the former governor to serve on a commission to reorganize the federal government in 196970. Just before the election, Texas Republican chairman Peter O'Donnell wrote Peter Flanigan, a powerful Nixon adviser on economic and regulatory matters, to complain that the Nixon-Connally relationship was hurting Bush in the race against Bentsen: How important could it be, really, to elect a Republican from Texas if President Nixon were already close to a Democrat from Texas? As detailed in James Reston, Jr.'s biography of Connally, The Lone Star, Texas Republicans could not see the logic of a Republican president's embrace of the conservative Texas Democratic establishment. "Connally is an implacable enemy of the Republican Party in Texas, and, therefore, attractive as he may be to the President, we should avoid using him again," Flanigan told Nixon's chief of staff H. R. "Bob" Haldeman.
Nixon ignored the advice. On Monday, November 30, 1970, the president named Connally to the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Texas Republicans were flummoxed and angry. For Bush, Connally's rise could not have been more galling. The human reaction to Nixon's courtship of Connally was understandable: Bush felt shunned, overlooked, even betrayed.
By early December 1970 there was much bigger news than the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board: Connally was to become Nixon's secretary of the Treasury, replacing the banker David Kennedy. Shrewd about such things, Nixon and Connally understood that one price for peace in the kingdom was making sure Bush was "taken care of" before Connally's Treasury appointment was announced. "Connally set," wrote Haldeman. "Have to do something for Bush right away."
Bush had not forgotten Charlie Bartlett's November suggestion about becoming ambassador to the United Nations. The more he thought of it the more he liked it. While it was true that Bush had no foreign policy experience (unless traveling the world for Zapata counted), he knew New York and was attracted to the prospect of learning diplomacy on a big stage without having a great deal of actual operational responsibility.
Peter Flanigan, the Nixon adviser, had been trying to act as a broker between Bush and the White House. An Anheuser-Busch heir, Greenwich Country Day alumnus, and Wall Street investment banker, Flanigan spoke to Bush about running NASA or the Small Business Administration. Neither post felt big enough. Barbara thought that it might be time to give up the arena. "I was about ready to suggest that we pack up and go home to our friends, children, and home in Houston and live happily ever after," she wrote. Then, however, Bush's old Zapata partner Bill Liedtke told Bush that Flanigan was not the best way in. Flanigan, Liedtke suggested, was jealous of Bush.
Taking the hint, Bush tried other routes, speaking with, among others, Bob Finch, the secretary of health, education, and welfare (who was himself moving into a White House job), and Republican senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky. Finally Flanigan brought the White House's offer to Bush: Would he be interested in serving as an assistant to the president, working with Haldeman? Bush said yes, prompting Flanigan to make an indiscreet remark. "Well, you know, George, you'd have to work hard if you took this job." ("How George kept his temper, I'll never know," wrote Barbara.) It was one of the first of many subsequent indignities Bush would have to suffer as part of an appointive career-a career that was by definition dependent on presidents and their allies.
- On Wednesday, December 9, 1970, Bush reported to Haldeman's West Wing office. The decision, Haldeman said, had been made. Bush was to become an assistant to the president. Haldeman was summoned to the Oval Office, returning five minutes later to take Bush in to see the president, who offered him the White House post during a forty-minute conversation. The president, Bush recalled, said that he "felt I could do a good job for him in the White House presenting the positive side of the issues."
That seemed to be that. Before leaving the Oval Office, though, Bush made his case for the United Nations, arguing that Nixon needed an enthusiastic spokesman in Manhattan's diplomatic, financial, and media circles. Bush told the president that he could "spell out" Nixon's "programs with some style and we could preempt that mass news media area-that he was operating almost in a vacuum....I felt I could really put forward an image there that would be very helpful to the administration."
Nixon had not considered the matter in quite this light before. "Wait a minute, Bob, this makes some sense," the president said to Haldeman. Nixon paused, his mind turning over the possibilities and their ramifications. "Let's announce tomorrow that Bush will be Assistant to the President with general duties, and that he will start right after the Congress reconvenes," Nixon said. "Tell Rogers to put a 'hold' on the U.N. job. In this way, if Yost anytime wants out, we can still have the option open on the U.N., but go ahead with the staff position."
Nixon told Haldeman to get Bush a White House office, and the new assistant to the president went back to the chief of staff's office with Haldeman. Then Nixon apparently thought things over again. Bush's argument-one that spoke to Nixon's sense of insecurity about the East-had been that nobody in the nation's largest city seemed to be on the president's side.
Well, Nixon seems to have decided, Bush was goddamned right about that. "Bush's arguments were well taken," wrote biographer Herbert S. Parmet, "and the president's contemplation made them seem all that much more attractive." Why not send the affable Ivy Leaguer up to Manhattan to defend the president in the salons of the East Side? Think of it: The polished son of a senator from Greenwich working to promote the cause of a grocer's son from Whittier. Why not, indeed? And as Haldeman had once said, Bush "takes our line beautifully." On reflection, Nixon thought Bush should indeed go to the United Nations. "You've sold the President, and he wants to move with it now," Haldeman told Bush, whose career as a White House aide had lasted far less than a day.
There was another factor in Nixon's thinking: the 1972 campaign. The president suggested that the Bushes forgo living full-time in the customary forty-second-floor ambassadorial apartment at the Waldorf Towers. Instead, Nixon said the family should set up residence in Greenwich or another suburb, and have Bush commute from Connecticut to the United Nations-all to set the stage for a 1972 Bush challenge in Connecticut to U.S. senator Abraham Ribicoff, Prescott's old political foe. Bush resisted the idea of a Senate campaign from Connecticut-he believed himself a Texan-but there was no need to argue about all of that now. The future would take care of itself. What mattered was that Bush had prevailed. He had the job he wanted.
His old friend Lud Ashley, now a Democratic congressman from Ohio, was mystified by the appointment. "George, what the fuck do you know about foreign affairs?" Ashley asked him.
"You ask me that in ten days," Bush replied, and went to work.
- Bush sensed that transitions in public life would be made easier by courting those with whom you were to work and saying thanks to those with whom you had worked. The Bush touch was evident when he called on the staff of the U.S. Mission to the UN before confirmation. The mission's administrator "seemed amazed when I asked him to have lunch...but he is a down to earth kind of guy and I was determined to get his confidence early on."
Like the oil business, like Congress, the UN job was one in which relationships mattered. Reaching out to others and keeping them close created a personal atmosphere that sometimes translated into tangible professional or political benefit. Bush's world was defined by an intermingling of the personal and the professional. The neighbor down the way on Easter Egg Row who came for hamburgers, for example, might one day be an investor or a partner; the fellow congressman, Democrat or Republican, who had a locker nearby in the House gym might one day agree to see your point of view on an important issue; the more senior politician or even president with whom you exchanged kind words might one day call on you to do a big job.
His passion for friendship was not fundamentally political, even if his ingrained habit of making and keeping friends helped him politically. In politics and diplomacy Bush had found the perfect world in which he could instantly transform new acquaintances into those he considered friends. And the threshold for friendship in George H. W. Bush's universe was pretty much just meeting George H. W. Bush.
As part of the campaign to make himself a part of things at the UN, Bush invited Henry Kissinger out to the house in Washington for dinner. At nine P.M. on Thursday, January 14, 1971, the national security adviser arrived for a late meal. A Kissinger Secret Service agent was invited in to play tiddlywinks with the Bush children. (The agent lost.) Over a supper of black bean soup, lamb chops, and ice cream with strawberries and a burnt sugar topping, "Henry told us that there were two plots to kidnap him," wrote Barbara. "He is very close to the president and not just on foreign affairs...seems to know all."
Born in Germany in 1923-he was only a year older than Bush-Kissinger fled the Nazis with his family in 1938. He served in the U.S. Army in World War II, earning a Bronze Star, and went on to Harvard, where, after completing three degrees-he received his PhD in 1954; his dissertation was on the Congress of Vienna-he joined the university faculty. He loved intrigue, beautiful women, the New York Yankees, and positive press stories. A brilliant global strategist and longtime adviser to Nelson Rockefeller, he made the transition to the Nixon team after the 1968 election when the president-elect asked him to serve as national security adviser. By 1973, the canny Kissinger would also become secretary of state and hold both jobs simultaneously.
An astute observer of power and master of diplomatic flattery, Kissinger had taken the trouble to accept the Bushes' invitation to dinner in part because he understood that Bush-still a young man, not yet fifty-had the potential to become a crucial national figure, whether in the Senate, in the cabinet, or in the White House.
- At ten o'clock on the morning of Friday, February 26, 1971, the Bushes entered the State Dining Room on the first floor of the White House for the new ambassador's swearing-in. The vice president, much of the cabinet, and many members of Congress were joined by Jim Baker from Houston and Peter O'Donnell from Dallas and Dorothy and Prescott Bush. The marine band played; Rogers Morton, the secretary of commerce, was heard to grumble, "I didn't get all this attention when I was sworn in-no music-smaller crowd..."
Nixon was in a good humor. He had breakfasted that morning with Wilbur Mills, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in the House, and Bush's name had come up. "Chairman Mills pointed out that William McKinley at one time had been defeated for office in Ohio running for the Congress," Nixon told the audience in the State Dining Room. "Two years later, however, William McKinley went on to be elected as Governor of Ohio, and then went on to be elected as President of the United States. Now, I don't know whether Chairman Mills was suggesting that defeat, therefore, was good for George Bush and that his future may be somewhat like William McKinley's."
Heady talk. "The fact that one door has been closed for him opens another door," Nixon said, "a door of service for him and also for the United States of America, a representative of whom we can all be proud, representing the United States and working in the cause of peace in the United Nations in the years ahead."
Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart, an Eisenhower appointee whose wife, Andy, was one of Barbara's best friends, administered the oath. Dorothy Bush's face seemed to quiver; Prescott Bush, usually so reserved, wept as their son raised his right hand. Like his parents, Bush was emotional. Repeating after Stewart, he stumbled over a word and had to begin again.
Before the month was out, the George Bushes were in New York, settling into the ambassador's residence at the Waldorf Towers. Mrs. Douglas MacArthur was a neighbor. Being a Republican from Texas in New York-even a Republican from Texas born in Connecticut-was disconcerting for Bush. As disingenuous and dissonant as it may seem, Bush of Greenwich, Andover, and New Haven had complaints about the elitism of New York, by which Bush meant the city's tendency toward centerleft groupthink. "I find it very difficult to be polite when people ask me how I like New York," Bush told a diary he had begun to keep in 1971. "It is an unrepresentative city....They are so darn sure they are right on everything." The conventional wisdom in Manhattan, Bush believed, often failed to take opposing views into account except to dismiss such opinions as uninformed, prejudiced, and just plain wrong. Yet Bush hurled himself into the United Nations, hosting the ambassadors from Madagascar and from Nigeria and their sons at a hockey match and a basketball game. The signature Bush diplomatic style was already taking shape.
Credit 14.1 Addressing the United Nations Security Council. Bush served as America's ambassador to the international organization in New York from 1971 to early 1973.
- He soon encountered a great new fact of his diplomatic life: Yakov Malik, the Soviet ambassador whom Bush likened to a stone wall. Born in 1906, the white-haired Malik was Moscow's longtime man in New York. Implacably hostile one moment but largely rational the next, Malik gave Bush a tutorial in the art of dealing with the Soviets. As Bush was to see, the key to managing them-indeed, the key to all diplomacy-was knowing when they were serious about their threats and when they were posturing. Nations were like individuals, requiring cultivation and the paying of respect. Bush believed in an old Emersonian quotation that FDR had liked: The best way to have a friend is to be one.
Yakov Malik was the first Soviet that Bush knew well. He was, Bush recalled, "a true cold warrior who could make my life difficult"-and often did. Over a liquid lunch in the Soviet's apartment in New York-vodka before and during the meal, in addition to wine, and a proffered cognac afterward-Malik and Bush kept up the push and pull. "He repeated all the cold war rhetoric-that we were imperialists," Bush recalled. At a UN Security Council session in Ethiopia in the winter of 1972, the ambassadors spent a weekend in Somalia. Beforehand the CIA had briefed Bush on the presence of Soviet warships off the Somali coast. Bush asked Malik about it, but Malik waved it off, saying, "Oh, no-no ships." On arrival, though, the Soviet ships were in plain view, and Mogadishu was filled with Russian sailors. Teasing, Bush said, "No warships?" Sputtering, Malik replied: "They are here to rescue me from sharks."
- As Bush recalled it, his "most difficult issue" at the UN was the fate of Taiwan, or, as it was sometimes known, the Republic of China. For decades the United States had insisted on recognizing Taiwan-rather than the Communist mainland-as the real China, and Taiwan held China's seat on the UN Security Council. In the context of the Cold War, abandoning Taiwan was tantamount to capitulating to the mainland Communist behemoth, and the United States was committed to defending Taiwan's UN membership. Anti-American countries within the United Nations, meanwhile, were more than happy to try to embarrass the United States by attempting to expel Taiwan in favor of the mainland in the early 1970s.
The debate over Taiwan's fate came on Bush's watch as ambassador, and he loyally defended America's longtime ally against a hostile Third World majority month after month in 1971. Bush was pushing an alternative plan called "dual representation," a compromise that would bring the People's Republic into the United Nations and onto the Security Council while maintaining UN recognition of Taiwan as a member of the global organization.
The task could hardly have been more difficult. As Bush politely recalled it, Nixon, after a "secret" visit to China by Kissinger, "surprised everyone" with the Thursday, July 15, 1971, news of a presidential visit to the mainland-and "everyone" included Bush. The development was startling-here was the greatest of cold warriors, Nixon, preparing to call on the greatest of Communist rulers, Mao. Nearly a quarter century of geopolitical reality was suddenly open to radical revision.
Yet American policy remained American policy: Bush was still pressing ahead with dual representation, which would simultaneously promote the mainland in status but protect Taiwan's dignity. For Bush, the problem was that the Nixon-Kissinger overture to the mainland strongly suggested that, as he put it in July 1971, "The ball game is over, Peking is in and Taiwan is out." After the announcement of Nixon's trip, countries that might have been persuaded to vote to keep Taiwan had even less reason to antagonize the mainland. If the United States and Communist China were about to open a new chapter in diplomacy, why keep up the illusion that Taiwan really mattered? Once the symbolic stand-in for all of China, Taiwan was now seen as dispensable-and if the United States lost a big vote at the United Nations, well, all the better.
Bush understood this reality, but America had given its word that it would be there for Taiwan, and he was going to keep that word as best he could. There were other factors, too. Because Taiwan was important to the Republican right wing, Nixon needed to appear sympathetic to Taipei's cause even as he pursued the breakthrough with Beijing. Nixon had instructed Bush to win the vote, and allowing the competitive Bush to fight the battle at the UN gave the White House some cover with the right at a fluid moment.
Then Kissinger traveled to the mainland in the midst of the struggle in New York, further complicating Bush's efforts to secure the votes. Bush kept after it, cajoling and charming his way through the UN General Assembly. But it was the wrong case at the wrong moment. "It was an ugliness in the chamber," Bush recalled. "I was hissed when I got up."
Taiwan was ultimately expelled by a vote of 59 to 55, with 15 countries abstaining. "Life goes on, and there is no question that the U.N. will be a more realistic and vital place with Peking in here, but I had my heart and soul wrapped up in the policy of keeping Taiwan from being ejected," Bush wrote a friend in Dallas after the vote.
In November, China's vice minister of foreign affairs, Chiao Kuan-hua, delivered a speech to the United Nations that Bush thought "was clearly hostile to the United States, referring to us as bullies etc." American officials were under strict orders not to reply except in warm generalities, but Bush, still stung by the Taiwan defeat and thinking of domestic U.S. opinion, argued for a stronger response. "If we appear to be pushed around by Peking at every turn," Bush said, "the whole thing can backfire on the President."
Kissinger was unmoved by Bush's views. To Kissinger the relationship with Peking was too sensitive and too momentous to be subject to the emotions of a given moment. To have Bush making a contrary case, even internally, was infuriating. The two men met in Washington. "He started off madder than hell," Bush recalled.
"I want to treat you as I do four other ambassadors, dealing directly with you," Kissinger said, "but if you are uncooperative I will treat you like any other ambassador." The threat did not sit well with Bush, who pushed back. "I reacted very strongly...and told him that I damn sure had a feel for this country and I felt we had to react" to provocative Chinese rhetoric.
For two or three minutes-an eternity in such circumstances-both men spoke candidly and passionately. It was, Bush thought, "a very heated" exchange. Bush insisted he was arguing out of conviction, not self-interest. "I told him very clearly when he got upset that I was not trying to screw things up, I was trying to serve the President [by defending the U.S. against the Chinese attacks] and that it was the only interest I had," Bush recalled saying. "He ought to get that through his head. I was not trying to get any power." After hearing Bush out, Kissinger "really cooled down."
- Sunday, January 9, 1972, was a fairly typical weekend day for Ambassador Bush. In the morning, after waking up in the Waldorf, the Bushes called the Japanese ambassador to see if his thirteen-year-old daughter, a friend of Doro's, would like to join them for ice-skating out in Greenwich. By ten thirty they were on the road to Connecticut. In Greenwich they found Bucky Bush already testing the ice, which was soft but safe enough for a skate. It was a familiar routine: Bush liked taking different foreign diplomats out to his parents' house, always believing hospitality could never hurt.
And even after the Taiwan debacle, Bush quickly adapted to the geopolitical realities and invited the Communist Chinese UN delegates to Sunday brunch at his childhood home. It was a new world, and Bush was always one to face facts.
- The autumn of 1972 brought grief. In September, Bush's mother called to tell her son that Prescott was sick. There was, she reported, "a pain by his heart." Bush was worried. "He seems instantly old," Bush wrote after visiting his father. Diagnosed with lung cancer, Prescott also underwent a prostate operation that resulted in complications-infection, fever, an irregular heartbeat, poor blood pressure. It was a matter of weeks or perhaps months, but no longer. One evening, Bush was summoned from a dinner with the Soviets at the Peruvian embassy. Prescott was failing. Bush called his mother, woke her up, and told her he would meet her at the hospital-and that he loved her.
They arrived at about eleven P.M. to find Prescott "full of tubes," Bush recalled. "He was conscious though very sleepy with drugs." To fill the air Bush told his father about the dinner with the Soviets. "Who picked up the tab?" Prescott asked from beneath the tubes.
Prescott Sheldon Bush died two weeks later, on Sunday, October 8, 1972. He was seventy-seven years old. The clan gathered for the funeral at Christ Church in Greenwich; mourners included Averell Harriman, New York City mayor John Lindsay, U.S. senator Lowell Weicker of Connecticut, and Yale president Kingman Brewster, Jr. "Our boys all came home and were pall bearers (the Senator dreaded the thought of his friends huffing and puffing under the burden of the coffin)," Barbara wrote. "Mom Bush was wonderful. My heart aches for her. She is so lonely. 51 years of loving Dad. She dreams that he is coming in from golf and then awakens to find that it was just a dream."
Prescott was buried next to Robin, in the plot he had chosen twenty years before.
FIFTEEN.
This Job Is No Fun at All
One real challenge lies in enchanting the disenchanted young who view partisan politics with a worrisome cynicism.
-GEORGE H. W. BUSH, 1972 RICHARD NIXON HAD BIG PLANS. It was Monday, November 20, 1972, and Nixon, fresh from his epic reelection victory over George McGovern, was remaking his administration-and hoping to remake the Republican Party along with it. Nixon believed the GOP was poised to become a truly majority party by permanently converting disaffected Democrats, many of whom had voted for him in the 1972 landslide. An attractive, reasonable face at the head of the GOP would be key, and Nixon had summoned George H. W. Bush to the presidential cabin at Camp David to ask him to leave the United Nations to become chairman of the Republican National Committee. "This is an important time for the Republican Party, George," Nixon said. "We have a chance to build a new coalition in the next four years, and you're the one who can do it." Kansas senator Bob Dole had been chairing the RNC, but Nixon wanted a full-time leader for the party. Nixon talked big, suggesting that Bush would be "the President's top political adviser."
Bush was surprised, and not altogether pleasantly. He had left New York hoping to become the number two man at the State Department. He liked foreign affairs, liked the big stage and the broader world; he was in the middle of what he called a "love affair...with high-level policy dealings on international matters." His ambition was to become secretary of state, and then, one day, perhaps, reach the presidency.
Nixon wanted him at the national committee in part because the president believed Bush would be both respectable and manageable. To the president, Bush remained the eager-to-please supplicant of 1970. "A total Nixon man-first," Nixon had said to Treasury Secretary George Shultz in a conversation about Bush's job prospects. "Doubt if you can do better than Bush." Nixon was apparently unaware of the Bush who had held his own against Kissinger. If Nixon had known about Bush's stubborn streak-a streak that, to be sure, manifested itself very, very discreetly-he might have rethought the RNC offer.
In the Age of Nixon, the RNC chairman was expected to strike back at the president's enemies without mercy. Bush knew this, and it worried him. "I can and will of course take orders, but I'd like to retain options on the style in which to carry them out," Bush told Nixon. "I can be plenty tough when needed, but each person has his own style, his own methods, and if I get too far out of character-I'll be unconvincing and incredible and this will not serve you well."
The conversation at Camp David ended. According to Nixon adviser John Ehrlichman's notes of the session, Bush told the president: "Not all that enthralled [with] RNC, but I'll do it." Barbara, on learning of the offer, was skeptical. "She is convinced that all our friends in Congress, in public life, in God knows where-will say, 'George screwed it up at the U.N. and the President has loyally found a suitable spot,'" Bush wrote Nixon the day after their Camp David meeting. "Candidly, there will be some of this." Yet he told Nixon he would accept the job, closing his letter to the president warmly. "My wife's initial reaction is understandable, for she is but a mirror of how the real world regrettably views politics," Bush wrote. "Most people feel it is not the noble calling it should be-not the noble calling like affairs of state." He added a final, poignant note: "But with your help maybe I can be a part of changing some of that. And in the final analysis that's one hell of a challenge."
- Richard Nixon himself would make Bush's idealistic vision of a cleaner, nobler politics an impossible one to bring into being. Bush accepted the RNC post at an odd political moment. Nixon had been resoundingly reelected in November 1972, but a new term was entering the American vernacular at the same time: Watergate.
The scandal that destroyed the Nixon presidency had begun with a botched break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate apartment complex on the Potomac River in June 1972. The burglars were linked to the White House political operation. In the wake of the Watergate fiasco, attempts to cover up a culture of dirty tricks, illegal campaign funding, and what became known as the "White House horrors" reached all the way to Nixon. The story of his (abbreviated) second term became one of disturbing revelations and, for the country, unsettling investigations into White House conduct. Republican senator Howard Baker's question "What did the President know, and when did he know it?" came to dominate Washington in 1973 and most of 1974 as Nixon fought for his political life, falsely maintaining his innocence until the weight of contrary evidence led him to the brink of impeachment and finally to resignation in August 1974.
When Bush signed on for the RNC, though, the scope of the scandal was as yet unknown. Nixon had, after all, just won a smashing reelection, but Bush's life in 1973 and the first nine months of 1974 was to be shaped by Nixon's attempts to hold on to power amid revelations of wrongdoing. Nixon's wide-ranging hopes about an expanded Republican Party faded in the face of Watergate. Soon Bush was in the most awkward of positions: he was the man in charge of Republican political fortunes at the moment when those fortunes were in maximum peril. Bush, like many Republicans, defended the president against the investigations nearly to the very end while struggling to protect, as best he could, the party's future-and his own.
- Bush took command of the national committee on Tuesday, January 23, 1973. Given an office in the Old Executive Office Building, sharing a foyer with the president, who kept a hideaway there, Bush could not complain about his proximity to power. His job was to recruit and support Republican candidates for offices at every level, raise money, and defend the party and the president in the national and local media. The year was hectic. From January 20 through December 23, 1973, Bush traveled 97,000 miles through 33 states, delivering 101 speeches, holding 78 news conferences, and making 11 appearances on national television. Back at the committee's offices in Washington, Bush trimmed the internal budget, eliminated the chairman's limousine, cut down on personnel, and ended workday happy hours.
He was loyal to the president but not blindly so, declining to make the RNC available to the Nixon circle to use as it wished. The White House wanted Bush to be the "point man in a counterattack against investigators leading the Watergate charge," Bush recalled, but Bush refused, declining, for instance, to sign a letter drafted by Nixon political aides viciously assaulting the president's critics.
As Watergate unfolded, letters and calls poured into the committee. Many thought Nixon was a crook; many others believed he was being railroaded. Jeb Bush, then a twenty-year-old student at the University of Texas, worked at the RNC in the summer of 1973 calling small donors to urge them to re-up their pledges. "Either people were saying, 'I'm no longer a Republican, so screw you,'" Jeb recalled, "or they would say, 'Tell Nixon to stand up for himself.' No one was happy."
As the man tasked with keeping the president's party afloat while the president struggled to survive, George H. W. Bush pleaded with both sides for fair play. To Nixon's opponents he counseled patience and forbearance; to the White House, he politely, and often indirectly, advised telling the truth, if only to end the misery sooner rather than later.
Bush wanted to believe in Nixon. The idea that a president of the United States would lie to the country for selfish political ends was anathema to Bush, who kept hearing his father's voice. "Knowing Dad, as you did," Bush wrote to a family friend, "I'm sure you can understand when I say that I really am glad he is not around to have to worry about Watergate."
In the summer of 1973 came word of the Nixon White House tapes-news that stunned Bush, who recalled hearing about it while standing in the southwest lobby of the White House with Republican wise man Bryce Harlow. "I am shocked," Bush remarked to Harlow. For a time in this bleak season Bush thought about escaping Washington to run for governor in Texas, then decided duty required him to stay at his post to protect the larger GOP. Writing a friend in the fall of 1973, Bush said that "this isn't the time to quit" the Republican chairmanship. "It's not a time to jump sideways, it's not a time for me to wring my hands on the sidelines."
Tom Wicker, then the political correspondent of The New York Times, recalled encountering Bush at a national governors' conference in 1973. As Wicker told it, Bush "took me aside-backstage in a cavernous auditorium-to assure me that Nixon was not guilty, that ultimately the charges of the Times and other critics would be shown to be unfair and unwarranted." An astute reporter, Wicker listened to the chairman's words with care. "Bush was trying hard, I remember thinking, but was not really convincing-either about Nixon's innocence or about his own belief that the president would survive the scandal," Wicker wrote in a later biography of Bush. "He did concede that the political situation for Nixon and his party was bad and getting worse."
In the fall, Vice President Agnew resigned amid a bribery scandal unrelated to Watergate. He was replaced by Congressman Gerald Ford of Michigan, a solid Midwestern Republican. Bush had been mentioned for the number two spot, as had an old House colleague: Donald Rumsfeld. Bright, ambitious, and self-confident, Rumsfeld, born in Chicago in 1932, had grown up entranced by The Lone Ranger on the radio and proud of his real-estate-salesman father's World War II service in the navy. As a wrestler and football player at Princeton, Rumsfeld signed on for a naval ROTC program to help pay for school. After graduating in 1954, he became a naval aviator, and won a congressional seat in 1962. He was only thirty. In the Nixon years, Rumsfeld ran the Office of Economic Opportunity, served as counselor to the president and director of the Cost of Living Council, and was serving as an ambassador to NATO. He was, like Bush, a rising star.