The Family (30 page)

The bigger man is George Bush, who took a bitter defeat gracefully. Bush, in his concession speech, said he had nobody to blame but himself. “He [Yarborough] beat me fair and square and I wish him success,” Bush said.

And Yarborough, the big winner? He issued a snide statement to the effect that Bush ought to pack his bags and leave the state. We’d like to point out to Ralph that Texas needs more men like George Bush, regardless of affiliation.

Yarborough won bigger than many thought he would. But he comes out of it a smaller man than his opponent. And he lost something that should be important, even to a politician—respect.

Samuel Bemiss, who like George opposed the Civil Rights Act, sent condolences to “My dear Pres” on November 4, 1964:

Poppy reflected honour and credit on his family and friends. . . . 

He has lost nothing and gained much.

Prescott responded to “Dear Sambo”: “It was just too much, the updraft of the LBJ vote and the down pull of the Goldwater Miller team. Our lad was hurt by both altho he polled more votes than any Rep. ever polled in Texas, including Ike.”

George’s father, at age sixty-nine, was struggling to adjust to his own precipitous political retirement. He also wrote to Bemiss: “I miss the Senate. I can’t get over it. There was a full life.”

Prescott never adjusted. Writing to his Yale classmates for their fiftieth reunion, he admitted how much he continued to miss the Senate:

I miss its excitement, its pressures and its privileges, particularly the privilege of service to my party and to the people of the State I have come to love. But . . . I believe I am [finally] getting more philosophical about my dilemma. Life has been too good to me to permit fretfulness in the closing years. After all, I have always believed in retirement at 65 or 68, so I really should never complain about a decision, which was my own, as I approached 68.

Shortly after leaving the Senate, Prescott was unceremoniously dropped from the Social Register.

George, meanwhile, was devastated by his own loss. “The only time I remember his being very, very down was when he was beaten for the [Senate],” said Mary Carter Walker. “When he came . . . to visit us, I never saw anyone as depressed as he was. But he got over it after a few days. Got out on the golf course and got over it.”

Actually, it took George much longer to recover from his staggering defeat than his Aunt Mary realized. When he finally limped back into his office, he started writing letters to his supporters. He promised Richard Nixon he would stay active in the party, admitting that it was “hard to concentrate [on business] after the intensity of the Senate campaign.” He thanked President Eisenhower for his endorsement and apologized for losing. “I think the greatest thing ever to happen to my father, in a very eventful life, was his service in the United States Senate. Perhaps it was overly ambitious of me to think that I might be there, too.”

Seven months after the 1964 Senate race, George was still smarting over his loss when he wrote to Lud Ashley: “I’ve recovered, well almost, from Nov.”

Young George had returned to Yale, where 70 percent of the campus had supported Lyndon Johnson. The
Yale Daily News
reported that of the twenty-two alumni running for public office, all but four had won; the four losers, Republicans all, included George Herbert Walker Bush, who “was expected to present a stiff challenge to Yarborough, but was trounced in Johnson’s two-to-one landslide.”

Young George did not mention his father’s defeat to any of his four roommates. One of them, Clay Johnson, kept looking for signs of despondency, but said he saw none.

Years later George W. would claim that after the election, he ran into the Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin on campus and introduced himself. Coffin, according to George, said, “Oh, yes. I know your father. Frankly, he was beaten by a better man.” George claimed that this incident engendered his lifelong distrust of easterners and began to shape his political thinking. “What angered me was the way such people at Yale felt so intellectually superior and so righteous. They thought they had all the answers. They thought they could create a government that could solve all our problems for us.”

The first time George mentioned the incident with Coffin to anyone was when he was being interviewed by
Texas Monthly
in 1994, thirty years after it had allegedly occurred. Running for governor of Texas, George may have felt he needed to country-boy his Ivy League credentials. His story was repeated by
The Washington Post
in 1999, which carried a denial from Coffin that was heavily offset by a quote from Barbara Bush: “You talk about a shattering blow. Not only to George, but shattering to us. And it was a very awful thing for a chaplain to say to a freshman at college, particularly if he might have wanted to have seen him in church. I’m not sure that George W. ever put his foot again [in the school chapel].”

Yet Barbara Bush, known for holding grudges, did not mention this “shattering blow” in her memoir. Nor did George himself deem the life-changing event worth mentioning in his autobiography. Both omissions tend to cast some doubt on the credibility of the story.

“I don’t recall any conversation with George W. Bush at Yale, and I certainly don’t remember my saying anything so cruel, even in jest,” said William Sloane Coffin many years later. By then George’s story had been printed in
The Hartford Courant
and
The New York Times
. “After so many people mentioned the story George was telling, I wrote to him and said I had a hard time imagining my saying with utmost seriousness that his father had been beaten by a better man. But if George was telling the story, I had to believe him, and so I asked him to forgive what neither of us understood.”

George scribbled a short note in reply: “I believe my recollection is correct. But I also know time passes, and I bear no ill will.”

To those who know William Sloane Coffin, an avowed human rights activist, the story seems preposterous. To those who know George W. Bush the story seems improbable. Not one of his dorm mates interviewed many years later recalled his mentioning the incident at the time it supposedly occurred. Yet no one wanted to publicly challenge his credibility.

Coffin was a man of immense stature at Yale when he was chaplain. In the forefront of civil rights, he had been arrested in 1961 on the first Freedom Ride in Montgomery, Alabama. A champion of civil disobedience, he also became a national figure in the antiwar movement. Gratuitous cruelty was not part of his character.

“I can maybe—and I stress maybe—see George running into the Rev on campus and feeling that he [Coffin] wasn’t all that sympathetic to George senior’s loss,” said one Yale man in George’s class, “but that’s only because Reverend Coffin was known to be for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam, in total contrast to George’s father, who opposed civil rights and supported the war.”

In the ensuing years, William Sloane Coffin and George Herbert Walker Bush would become ideological foes, and perhaps the younger George, who always picked up the cudgels for his father, allowed his general animosity to form a specific recollection—one that would resonate in the state where he was seeking office.

By the time George W. Bush told his Reverend Coffin story in 1994, he had entered the political arena in which truth was frequently the first casualty. In 1964, such a story about an illustrious liberal chaplain would not have been accepted. Thirty years later, in a more conservative climate, the story might seem almost plausible.

As far as George Herbert Walker Bush had strayed from his father’s political principles, his firstborn son, George Walker Bush, had begun to stray even further.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

T
he lawsuit George lodged as chairman of the Harris County Republican Party rocketed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and in 1964 their ruling of “one man, one vote” fell back in his lap like a bowl of rich cream. The ruling required the city of Houston, previously one congressional district, to be divided into three. One of the new districts—the seventh—was predominantly rich, white, and Republican: that was the district George wanted to represent in Congress. A poll he commissioned showed that a Republican could easily win there, so he announced his candidacy for the 1966 congressional race. He said he was “a man who will owe his allegiance and his vote only to his constituents.” Not a difficult position to take, because most of his constituents were just like him.

This time George took no chances. He knew he needed to get elected to public office if he was ever to become President, so he resigned his position at Zapata to devote all his energy to political campaigning. He hired an advertising executive from J. Walter Thompson in New York City to orchestrate his media. He brought Richard Nixon to Houston to launch the campaign, he persuaded House Minority Leader Gerald Ford to raise money, and he sought another endorsement from President Eisenhower.

He wrote to Ike:

There is no incumbent and it is a district that I carried 57% to 42% in the Senate race in 1964. My opponent is a conservative Democrat . . . but I feel I can beat him.

I hate to impose on my Father’s friendship with you once again, but if it would be possible to endorse the enclosed picture as suggested below, I would appreciate it.

George explained that the picture was for “a Negro friend, Mr. Jesse Johnson, who is working for me . . . The Negro vote could be the difference in our race and since I’m running against an ex–district attorney, I feel that we will have an excellent chance to pick up a good percentage of the Negro vote.”

The number of black voters in his district was comparatively small, but it was a voting bloc George wanted. To soften his oft-stated opposition to civil rights, he followed the suggestion of his masseur, an African American named Bobby Moore, and sponsored an all-girls Negro softball team called “the George Bush All Stars.” He wrote in his campaign brochure as a partial explanation for the sponsorship: “Organized athletics is a wonderful answer to juvenile delinquency.”

His opponent, Frank Briscoe, accused him of pandering to black voters, but George deflected the charge. “I think the day is past when we can afford to have a white district,” he said. “I will not attempt to appeal to the white backlash. I am in step with the 60’s.”

Always hyperactive, George swung into overdrive, spinning around the district like a hamster on a wheel. He worked feverishly, out every day at sunrise, going door-to-door, shaking hands, telling people he cared, but as one writer covering that campaign noted, “about what was never made clear.” Still, George was doing exactly what his highly paid Madison Avenue adman, Harry Treleaven, had told him to do: establish a likable public image. In a campaign memo, Treleaven had written: “Bush . . . must be shown as a man who’s working his heart out to win.” As always, what was important to George—and what he assumed was important to everyone else—was image. Substance was of relatively little value, as was any sort of vision, moral code, or core beliefs. What mattered was winning—and being perceived as a winner.

His opponent looked so reactionary that George appeared moderate. Like George, Frank Briscoe opposed any kind of civil rights legislation, but Briscoe also firmly embraced the John Birch Society, which George had finally repudiated. After his first campaign, George said he was ashamed that he had not done so sooner. Segregated public accommodations were still common then in East Texas and not unheard of in Houston. Yet both men opposed government interference that might end such racist restrictions. George claimed that legislation was not necessary to ensure open housing for all. “There are wonderful alternatives in the field of housing that will help all persons attain home ownership,” he said vaguely.

He took out a full-page ad in
Forward Times
, the black weekly; a photograph showed him with white shirtsleeves rolled up, tie loosened, and his jacket slung over his shoulder—a direct steal from his telegenic Yale contemporary John Lindsay, the mayor of New York City. The message accompanying George’s photo:

Vote for the Man Who Really Cares About the Things That Are Worrying You These Days. Elect GEORGE BUSH to Congress and Watch the Action.

His slick television ads, his substantial financial backing, plus his name recognition from the 1964 Senate race gave him a resounding (58 percent to 42 percent) victory in November 1966. George Bush had won his first election. But in the end, his appeal to the black community did not work. He did not carry the black vote in his district, something he did not understand. “It was both puzzling and frustrating,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Running for Congress, I talked about the possibility of [breaking the Democratic Party’s grip on black voters] with a longtime friend . . . who chaired the United Negro College Fund when I headed the UNCF drive on the Yale campus in 1948.”

This recollection is typical of George H.W. Bush. Not only does it show the way he rewrites history to fit his convenient view, but it also allows him to find it “puzzling and frustrating” that a Republican who opposed open housing would not find support from black voters. The fact is that George had never “headed” a United Negro College Fund drive at Yale. There
was
no United Negro College Fund on the campus in 1948. Rather, he worked on the school’s annual budget drive, a charity project that allotted 18 percent of the drive’s twenty-five-thousand-dollar goal to the United Negro College Fund, a far remove from directly raising money for private black colleges. The national office of the United Negro College Fund said its archives show no record of George Herbert Walker Bush being affiliated with them at any time during his entire Yale career.

“Uh . . . maybe he got himself confused with his younger brother Johnny,” joked a friend. “Johnny is a member of the Executive Committee of the United Negro College Fund and a former board chairman. Or his father, Prescott, who worked to raise funds for private Negro colleges back in 1952 when he was state chairman of the United Negro College Fund in Connecticut.”

In later years of campaigning and public life, when George needed to embrace civil rights, he would cite his volunteer work at Yale. He further exaggerated his dubious claim on behalf of the United Negro College Fund so many times that it did not just become real to historians and biographers; it became real to George. When he was asked in 1988 how he could in good conscience portray himself as a candidate for black Americans when the Reagan administration had watered down civil rights for eight years, he sat silently and never objected. Maureen Dowd wrote in
The New York Times
that he looked genuinely hurt by the question. “But,” George said, “I helped found the Yale chapter of the United Negro College Fund.”

George’s 1966 victory meant yet another move for the Bushes because, unlike some congressional wives, Barbara did not want to stay in their home district while her husband went to Washington, D.C. She knew this congressional seat was the first step toward what George really wanted, and she fully intended to go along for the ride. Young George W. was still attending Yale at this time, so the move did not affect him, but fourteen-year-old Jeb wanted to remain in Houston with his friends and finish ninth grade. (Jeb was relatively used to being parentless. He had spent the first nine months of his life with neighbors while his mother lived in New York City attending to his dying sister. In the ensuing years his father was mostly a fleeting presence. If George wasn’t traveling on business, he was campaigning. “Even when we were growing up in Houston,” Jeb admitted later, “Dad wasn’t home at night to play catch. Mom was always the one to hand out the goodies and the discipline. In a sense, it was a matriarchal family . . . He was hardly around.”)

Barbara asked the Houston oil attorney Baine Kerr whether Jeb could live with the Kerrs during the year. Farming him out to friends was better than her staying in Texas, separated from her husband, whom she rarely saw. When the Kerrs agreed, Barbara and Jeb were both ecstatic.

The Bushes bought a house in Spring Valley, a restricted residential area within the district with real-estate covenants that forbade sales to blacks and Jews. Still, the move to Washington did not promote the family togetherness that Barbara had envisioned. “George went home [to Houston] every week that first term [1967–69],” she recalled. “But the children and I could go only during school vacations.”

Eleven-year-old Neil had been diagnosed with dyslexia in the second grade, and Barbara knew he needed special education. She decided to enroll him and his younger brother, Marvin, in St. Albans, the exclusive Episcopal boys’ school in Washington, D.C. Her daughter, Doro, or Dordie, as she was sometimes called, went to National Cathedral, the companion school for girls.

“I worked for GB that first term,” said Virginia Stanley “Ginny” Douglas. “Everyone in the congressional office called him GB. We were a great big family . . . He and Bar pulled people into their lives . . . GB was constantly building relationships. Constantly . . . Johnny and Bucky Bush were in the office a lot. They called GB ‘Poppy,’ his growing-up name . . . My fiancé, later my husband, and I took Neil and Marvin to a lot of baseball games with the Washington Senators, and we took Doro ice-skating. We saw a lot of the younger kids.

“GB had a hilarious sense of humor. I remember a wig salesman came into the office selling falls and hairpieces. GB put on a fall with long flowing curls. He tore down the hallway to show Congressman James R. Grover, a Republican from New York who spoke with Long Island lockjaw. GB came back in the office and said, ‘Well, Grover didn’t like it. The man has no sense of humor.’”

As soon as George was elected in 1966, his father began working his connections to get him a prime committee assignment. As always, Prescott started at the top. He called Wilbur Mills, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, the most powerful committee in the House of Representatives. No freshman congressman had been assigned to this committee since 1904, because Ways and Means was the preserve of seasoned men with expertise in tax law, especially those whose reelections were guaranteed. “Why waste satin on stand-ins?” reasoned the pragmatic chairman.

Prescott knew that a seat on Ways and Means was a leg up in congressional life, much like Andover and Yale in real life. So he prevailed on his friendship with Mills to make an exception for George. The chairman, a Democrat, said that the House Minority Leader Gerald Ford made all the committee assignments for Republicans, but Prescott, knowing how to flatter a powerful man, said that Jerry Ford would agree to whatever Wilbur Mills wanted.

George got his seat, but he never admitted his father’s intercession. Rather, in a letter to one friend, he ascribed the assignment to serendipity: “I hope you approved of my committee assignment. Let’s face it. There’s a lot of luck involved in this, and I was at the right place at the right time. But no matter how you skin it, it’s a real good break for a freshman Congressman to be on the Ways and Means Committee.” (The Bushes rarely acknowledge that privilege and position often account for their success; it is the reason, years later, George W. could run for President as an “outsider,” never publicly admitting that being the son of a former President might have helped elevate his political standing.)

Barbara Bush pushed the self-made man myth as much as anyone in the family. She did not blink when she answered the television interviewer David Frost’s question about Prescott helping his political son. “He never did,” she said with a straight face. “Nor did his father ever make a phone call for George, which I read fairly often. Never.”

Amassing wealth—or as the Bushes put it, “securing our future”—became their first priority, and each man declared his financial success an independent achievement. Even Prescott denied the realities of his family background and the stature of his father as one of the leading industrialists of his day. “[This] was consistent with perpetuating the myth of the self-made man,” wrote the historian Herbert Parmet, authorized biographer of George Herbert Walker Bush.

George, too, insisted that he had earned his fortune on his own, and never acknowledged that he had relied on his father and his uncle George Herbert Walker II for the thousands of dollars he needed in 1951 to start Bush-Overbey, the high-risk Texas oil venture that eventually led to his success with Zapata.

Before leaving Texas, George sold all his shares in Zapata and publicly declared his net worth with the clerk of the House of Representatives: $1,287,701 ($7,380,434 in 2004). At the time such full financial disclosure was unusual and quite admirable. George was the only member of the Texas delegation to make a voluntary statement of his assets, including a list of all his stocks. (Tax records and financial disclosure forms over the years indicate that he did not raise his net worth until 1992, when he finally retired from public service, joined the Carlyle Group, and began charging $80,000 for speeches and public appearances. By the age of eighty, in 2004, George Herbert Walker Bush was worth an estimated $20 million.)

He arrived in Washington as a freshman congressman in the minority party, which meant he was among the lowest forms of political plant life, but having declared himself a staunch supporter of the war in Vietnam, he felt he was part of the moral majority. “I will back the President no matter what weapons we use in Southeast Asia,” he said after Lyndon Johnson escalated the war. “I am for our position in Vietnam and opposed to those who want to pull out and hand Southeast Asia to the Communist aggressors.”

As his close friend James A. Baker III said: “George respects authority. Has deep respect for authority.” That respect—which his relationship with his father, and later with Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, showed him almost powerless to overcome—plus his conventional mind-set put him at odds with William Sloane Coffin, the charismatic Yale chaplain who believed that American involvement in Vietnam was so legally wrong and morally repugnant that he counseled young men to resist the draft. Flabbergasted, George could not accept Coffin’s actions, which he characterized as “provoking lawlessness.” George was correct in such a description, for until Coffin tested the legal concept of civil disobedience, there was no protection in this country for expressing dissent—there was only arrest.