The Family (37 page)

“I got right to the point,” George recalled to friends. “I said, ‘Mr. President, I’ve still got a decision to make and I’d like your advice. My House seat is secure—no opposition last time—and I’ve got a position on Ways and Means.’”

Johnson said he had heard the rumors that George was thinking about running for Yarborough’s seat. Sensing that George might be seeking his support, the former President said he was a Democrat and would always support the Democratic candidate.

“I don’t mind taking risks,” George said, “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.”

Johnson looked George in the eye and spoke slowly and deliberately. “Son. I’ve served in the House.” Pause. “And I’ve been privileged to serve in the Senate, too.” Longer pause. “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.” Long pause. “Do I make my point?”

Johnson had insisted the meeting be kept confidential lest Texas Democrats think he was advising a potential Republican candidate about challenging the Democratic incumbent. Bush wanted the meeting publicized because he knew it would boost his status among the conservative Democrats he was wooing. He held a press conference on May 28, 1969, and—surprise, surprise—for some reason Sarah McClendon of the McClendon News Service just happened to ask if he had talked to President Johnson about the Senate race in Texas. George said that they had discussed it at the ranch: “But I have no feeling regarding his involvement in this matter. I would say that since this subject has come up—I would like the record clearly to show that there was a question asked about this. Because he is in one party and I’m in another, it would be clearly unlikely that he would ever be able to be for me.”

Peggy Simpson of the Associated Press followed up: “How come you met with President Johnson? Did you ask for the meeting? What did you learn?” George allowed how he had learned a great deal.

He jumped on the phone minutes later and called the LBJ ranch. Speaking to the presidential aide Tom Johnson, George said he was “very concerned” about his press conference. “I am worried that some of the reporters will try to read something into my visit that was not intended. I am particularly concerned that they will believe that the President might not want to support Senator Yarborough and would do something to aid me in a way to hit back at Senator Yarborough.”

The aide dutifully took notes on what George was saying. In his memo to the President, Johnson wrote:

The Congressman said that this matter was very much on his conscience and on his mind and that he wanted you to know that he had not tried to use you in any way. In fact, he said he thought that he had handled the visit very discreetly and had said nothing to anybody about it. He said, of course, that he had asked for the invitation and that . . . the question of the Senate race had not even been discussed.

The next day George wrote a disingenuous letter to the President, a seasoned pro in the deceptive art of leaking to the press. George enclosed a transcript of the question-and-answer session he had held with McClendon and Simpson, saying: “Their questions came out of the blue and in retrospect, it might have been better had I said ‘no comment.’ However, at the time I thought such an answer might only invite further and possibly incorrect speculation.”

On January 13, 1970, George decided on chicken salad: he announced his candidacy for the Senate. “We’ve polled it to death, we’ve talked it all out, and now I’ve determined that this is the thing for me to try to do,” he said. “I recognize that it’s going to be a long, tough 10 months, but I am convinced that I can win this race.”

“It was a long shot,” said his brother Jonathan, “but he wanted to get into position to run for President.”

George immediately sent application cards to all black and Hispanic residents who had not yet registered to vote. He urged them to fill in the cards. “Once registered, you can then vote in any party’s primary, as we do not register by party in Texas.” His letter, written on congressional letterhead, noted that it was not printed at the government’s expense.

George began his campaign by soldering himself to Richard Nixon. He supported Nixon’s continuation of the war in Vietnam; he endorsed Nixon’s nomination of Judge G. Harrold Carswell for the Supreme Court, despite the judge’s racist opinions; he even offered up his eldest son, then in flight school in Georgia, as an escort for Nixon’s daughter Tricia.

Nixon reciprocated by giving George $106,000 in illegal campaign contributions. This money came from a secret campaign slush fund called “Operation Townhouse.” Ledger sheets in the National Archives show at least half of these contributions—$55,000—were in cash and not reported as required by law. Operation Townhouse was a secret channel of contributions from wealthy Republicans to Nixon’s favorite candidates in fifteen states. George received $10,000 from W. Clement Stone, a Chicago millionaire, in four checks. Only $2,500 was reported on Bush’s campaign financial report; Henry Ford II sent George $9,500 through Operation Townhouse, but Bush’s campaign financial report listed only $2,500 as having been contributed by Ford. Yet George signed a sworn statement that he had reported “all gifts and loans of money or other things of value received by me.”

A memo from the presidential aide Tom Johnson in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library indicates that Senator John Tower was also taking good care of George:

Mr. President:

You may be interested in the following:

1. Senator Tower is in charge of the Republican Campaign.

2. Senator Tower has allocated almost twice as much money to Congressman Bush as any other of the candidates.

3. Congressman Bush has received $72,879.00. The next highest is Ralph Smith of Illinois. ($37,204.00)

With money raining down on him, George had no financial worries, but after May 1970 his real problem became his opponent. Ralph Yarborough had been defeated in the Democratic primary by a rich, conservative former congressman named Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. A George Bush clone, Bentsen had the added advantage of being secretly backed by John Connally, the popular governor of Texas, as well as by former President Johnson.

George panicked. He wrote to Harry Dent, the White House political operative, to request fifteen minutes of Nixon’s time: “Harry. There is no way to over-emphasize now the importance of ‘Bush getting things done,’ etc. . . . I wanted Bentsen to win. He has.”

Naively, and incorrectly, Bush added that Bentsen’s win was “a plus” because:

1) there will be a real liberal backlash and 2) the vote will be small—nothing on the ballot in any race for the liberals to turn out for.

He cited John Kenneth Galbraith’s letter to
The Texas Observer
in which the Kennedy Democrat had urged Texas liberals to vote for Bush and to defeat Bentsen. Galbraith’s logic was that as prospective senators, both men were equally bad. But “a Bentsen victory will tighten the hold of conservatives on the Texas Democratic Party, force the rest of us to contend with them nationally, and leave the state with the worst of all choices—a choice between two conservative parties.”

Nixon, too, knew there was not a dime’s worth of difference between Bush and Bentsen. As White House Chief of Staff H. R. “Bob” Haldeman wrote in his campaign report before the elections, “Make note have already won one—Texas.” Haldeman explained that view in a note to then–White House speechwriter William Safire, who was composing last-minute campaign commercials for Nixon. Haldeman proposed that the message should say, “Vote for a man who will work for and with the President, not a man who will work against the President.” But he cautioned that this message “should not be used in places like Texas where the opponent (Bentsen) would be working for the President, too.”

George had more than a Senate race at stake in 1970. If he won and swept Texas with more than a million votes from Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, he was in the best position to replace Spiro Agnew and become Nixon’s running mate in 1972. Agnew had been unable to carry his own state of Maryland in 1968 and was already vulnerable. “This I knew from Prescott Bush,” recalled the syndicated columnist Charles Bartlett. “He and Nixon were very close and Nixon had told Pres that he’d love to run with his son . . . George had a real fire in those days . . . All he had to do to get on the national ticket was win big in Texas.”

On election night, W., who had devoted himself full-time to his father’s campaign after F-14 flight school at Ellington Air Force Base, prepared to celebrate what his parents had assured him would be a victorious evening. Prescott and Dorothy Bush had come from their winter home in Hobe Sound, Florida, to witness the expected entry of the second Bush generation into the U.S. Senate. Champagne flutes were standing on silver trays in the Bush suite at Houston’s Shamrock Hotel as close friends and campaign aides gathered to watch the returns.

Young Doro sat next to her father on the couch as George turned on the TV to CBS. Twelve minutes into the broadcast the election was over. Walter Cronkite said his computers called the race for Bentsen by 200,000 votes.

Doro, then in the fifth grade, started crying. “I’ll be the only girl in my class whose father doesn’t have a job,” she whimpered. George W. and Marvin broke down. Barbara, too, shook with sobs, and Neil and Jeb collapsed in tears. George hugged them all and said everything would be all right. But the family knew that he had just lost what he wanted most in life—a chance to become President.

“He was shattered by the loss,” said his aide Jack Steel. “He said it was just the end of everything.”

“It was sort of like being on a train going 180 miles an hour and hitting a brick wall,” said Pete Roussel, Bush’s congressional press secretary. “We were so deflated.”

George confessed his agony the next day. “I had but one goal, a single purpose,” he wrote to a friend. “This loss has sent me to the depths.”

A few days later he rallied enough to write to the major-league baseball player Carl Warwick: “My main balloon has burst—we didn’t win the pennant. But today it’s clear that the world will keep turning. Tuesday night with those great kids in tears I wasn’t a bit sure.”

Barbara was inconsolable. “When I called her up after the loss, she couldn’t stop crying,” recalled George’s sister, Nancy Ellis. A year later Barbara was still upset. She told Jerry Tallmer of the
New York Post
how much harder it was to lose the race for the Senate a second time. “George took it hard too but better than me. Men are so much braver. I still don’t like it. I hate to think about it. I get so angry.”

Young George got very drunk on election night. He admitted later he had never seen his father sink as low as he did with that defeat. Big George confided his despair to his old friend James A. Baker III and said that he was going to get out of politics. He told his financial chairman, Robert Mosbacher, “I feel like Custer.”

In truth, George’s public life looked as though it was over. Unable to get himself elected to statewide office, despite two campaigns and several million dollars, he had failed the first test of a politician. Nixon planned to dust off his obligation to George by appointing him head of the Small Business Administration or else giving him a White House staff position with no specific duties. In his view, George H.W. Bush no longer had a political future.

“I feel like I saved his public career,” said George’s friend Charles Bartlett, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, “and I’m quite proud of it . . . The day after the election when George was wiped out by Bentsen, I called Doug Bailey, a brilliant political consultant. The two of us sat down for lunch at the Federal City Club, and tried to think of a way to keep this bright young man on the political horizon . . . In those days George was one of the most attractive, energetic young men in either party. He had real fire then . . . and idealism. He lost it in later years, I think, but then I thought he was worth saving and so did Doug. We figured if he took a government job, he’d be buried in the bureaucracy and never heard from again. We knew that Nixon wasn’t about to give him much more after the debacle in Texas. What we didn’t know was that Nixon was secretly courting John Connally, the Democratic governor of Texas, to join his cabinet as Secretary of the Treasury; Connally was the guy who backed Bentsen to beat Bush, so that tells you how much Nixon thought of Bush at that point . . . Doug and I came up with the UN as the best way to keep George politically alive . . .

“I reached him at his campaign headquarters and he was still pretty shattered . . . I told him our plan, which didn’t go down too well at first. Barbara later told me it didn’t go down at all. ‘We hated the UN in Texas,’ she said. ‘Always hated the UN.’ She reminded me that George had campaigned against the United Nations. I looked it up later and saw that George had said the UN ‘has largely been a failure in preserving freedom.’ At the time I told George to come to Washington right away and we’d have dinner with Bob Finch, a Nixon aide, who could push the plan to the President. I explained to George that there was no better way for him to stay in public life than to become the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.”

Over dinner Bartlett briefed Bush on how to play his longest and strongest suit—his high-society connections. With keen political insight, the journalist pointed out that Nixon had not been adequately represented by the previous UN Ambassador, Charles Yost, a Democrat who publicly opposed the administration’s position on Vietnam. Plus, Nixon had always felt like a gargoyle on the cathedral of New York society. He would want to have someone as socially acceptable as George Herbert Walker Bush doing his bidding at the United Nations, entertaining recalcitrant diplomats, and selling Nixon’s political gospel to the great and the good of Manhattan’s media.