What It Takes (48 page)

Soon enough, Overbey had Bush out in his Chevy, plowing through the gritty wind out to Pyote, Snyder, and Sterling City. ... Overbey had a few irons in the fire, and there was a piece of land right next to a dry hole that actually had a little show—just not enough to make a commercial well. But a half-mile south, now, maybe different story ... you never could tell. No one was perfectly smart about this ... it’s like old H.L. Brown—Windy Brown, outta Fort Worth—used to say about the Scurry County boom, he used to say: “There was a time, if my land man even drove across that county, I’da fired him.” See, you never could tell where the next boom was coming.

And Bush drank this all in, the lore, the lingo, all the names. He and Overbey scurried around, spending Herbie’s money, trying to get it back as quick as they could. Kept a sixteenth here, a thirty-second there. ... And now, Bush had maps under his arm as he breezed into The Spot for lunch. (“Just a bowla red, Helen. Gotta run. ...” Bush was the first of the Yalies to go local with his diet—bowl of chili and crackers for lunch, chicken-fried steak at night.) Bush got to be a good hand with the records, and he was great on the personal side: people who came by the office to bullshit a minute, on their way somewhere, would find him, in the mornings, typing out friendly notes to people he met the day before. Sometimes, if you didn’t have something he ought to hear, you couldn’t pull him away from that typewriter for two minutes! He was always on the go, assiduous about the work. He was head of a family of four, steward to his father’s money, and his uncle’s, and his uncle’s friends’ ... a man with rent to pay, a balance sheet to fret into the black ... a man with a deal to promote—
Hey, this thing is surefire!
... a man with stories to tell (“Head geologist for the whole damn
region
gets up in the middle of the meeting ... and pisses in the sink!”) ... a man twenty-seven years old ... an independent oilman.

Well, there never was a County Attorney like Bob Dole. People said it was probably because he had a question in his own mind—could he do it?—that he worked so hard. There never was a time when he wasn’t working, seemed like. He’d get to the courthouse, his second-floor office, maybe eight, eight-thirty. Usually, he’d have court in the morning, if the judge was in Russell that day. It wasn’t that crime was such a problem—crime like we know it, anyway—but there were disputes about land and water rights, sometimes a bit of cattle rustling. (One fellow asked his neighbor, nice as pie, to borrow his truck one night, then used it to go steal cattle—that’s the guts of a burglar: Sheriff Harry Morgenstern caught him at the auction house, with the check still in his pocket, and Bob sent him up the river.) There was always farm thievery and the usual run of drunk and disorderly. ... In the beginning. Bob would generally go home for lunch, then be back for the afternoon, when he’d go home again, then he’d be back in the office at night. Evenings, he’d try to do his private work: wills and license applications that the farmers brought in. Bob never charged them much—maybe five or ten dollars. He needed friends more than money: there was always another election in two years. Springtime, they’d bring him their tax returns, and Bob would fill them out (“How many those steers d’you sell last fall? ...”) for two bucks, or even free. There was one CPA in Russell, but he had his hands full with the bankers and the oilmen. And Bob didn’t mind. He had the time—or he made it. At Dawson Drug, when Chet and Bub would get the fountain clean, get the floor swept and the door locked, maybe eleven at night, they could always look down Main Street and see Bob’s light in the courthouse.

Phyllis didn’t mind, or said she didn’t. She kept busy—in two or three bridge groups. She got Bob to go with her to a Sunday night game, and he was good, but after a while, he didn’t have time. They rented a house on Sixth Street, and Phyllis had that to fix up: she did it early American, with stuff all stenciled and hand-painted like they did in New England. No one in Russell had ever seen its like. Phyllis taught some crafts to the local ladies—ceramics: no one in Russell had used that word before. Of course, there were friends, too, and family—Bob’s family. Sometimes Phyllis would fill in alone, at Bina’s house, for Sunday dinner, or potluck; Bob was working. Bina and Phyllis got along fine. Phyllis even learned, in time, how to make fried chicken. When all that wasn’t quite enough, Phyllis took a job, part-time, at a florist’s. Bob wasn’t happy about that. In those days, if your wife went to work, it said something about you, as a man. But he didn’t say anything. It’d be different ... if they had kids.

It seemed like they never were going to have a child. Phyllis got herself tested, and the doctors didn’t see anything they could do. Bob was always ready, in those days, to fear the worst about his own body, and one time, he went all the way to Chicago for tests. (Dr. Kelikian set that up.) But none of the doctors could say what the problem was—if there was a problem. After a while, they figured it just wasn’t in the cards ... maybe they’d adopt, but for that you had to do a home visit, it was part of the routine with the agency in Topeka—and that cost money, and ... well, it dropped through the cracks, for a while.

Anyway, it wasn’t like Bob had time to sit and worry. It seemed like he was always pushing harder, just to see how much he could do. Sometimes, he and Phyllis would go to someone’s house for dinner, or bridge, and, come eleven, Bob would stand up and say he had to get back to the office. After midnight—till the bars on the highway closed—Sheriff Morgenstern would drive around, nab a drunk driver or two. And generally, when he got them back to the courthouse, he’d find Bob still at his desk. They’d book the drunks and arraign ’em, right there, 2:00
A.M. ...
Bob figured it was his job to get those cases out of the way. That’s how he met Huck Boyd. Huck was a small-town newspaper editor and a Republican bigwig—National Committeeman for the state of Kansas. Anyway, one night Huck was driving through, on his way home to Phillipsburg, in northwest Kansas. Must have been midnight, and Huck looked up, saw a light in the courthouse. He thought there must be a break-in ... got out of his car and went to investigate, and he found young Bob Dole, working at his desk. County Attorney ... at midnight! Huck told the story to friends around the state. Meanwhile, he marked that boy Dole as a comer.

That he was. Summertime, when the farmers were lined up with the harvest on Main Street, Bob’d work his way down the row of trucks, just like he used to for Dawson Drug, except this time, he was only saying hello, shaking hands. Sometimes, he wouldn’t even make it home for meals—he’d stay downtown for lunch with Harry, the Sheriff, then catch dinner at a Legion affair, or the Rotary. Sometimes, Phyllis used to say, it was like they didn’t have time to talk ...

“What do you wanna talk about?” Bob would say.

She didn’t ask about his work. She got that piece of advice from another lawyer’s wife, Doc Smith’s wife: “Sometimes, it’s better not to know.” So Phyllis steered clear of his work life. It was just ... that didn’t seem to leave any life for her. When she did catch him, long enough to have a conversation, it was generally whether they were going this weekend to someone’s house for dinner, or when Bob was going to get home that night. To which Bob would issue his standard reply, which was: “Depends.”

Depends on what?

“On a lotta things.”

Thing was, everyone talked about how well Bob was doing: Bina, the Dawsons, the old crowd in general. And Phyllis, for her part, certainly wasn’t going to complain: she told her mother, who came to visit, that she loved Kansas—the people in Kansas. Her mother, Estelle, couldn’t stand the place—it gave her the creeps, driving through the flat emptiness, past nothing but a thousand telephone poles, and then, on one pole, you’d see a sign: CITY LIMITS. How could you live like that? One time, Estelle and Phyllis’s dad drove through Russell, all the way to Denver, and when Estelle came back she announced to the Doles: “Now I understand that cowboy music ... it’s nothing but a howl of human loneliness.”

Phyllis was lonely sometimes, too, but she did what she had to—she found plenty to do. One springtime, she devoted weeks to learning how to make sugar Easter eggs. They were tiny, ornate, something she’d never seen before. Finally, one night, when Bob was home for dinner, she showed him: “Look, aren’t these wonderful?”

“Yeah,” he said, “was it worth walkin’ on sugar for two weeks?”

It would be different, she thought, if they had a family. So they filed the papers to adopt in Topeka, but it took a long time, more than a year ... and by that time, Phyllis found out she was pregnant. Bob and Phyllis had a little girl, whom they named Robin. And Bob was very pleased. He even came home in the evenings, for a while.

E
VERYBODY SHOWED UP FOR
touch football, except Hugh. It was the big event of the week. The fellows would gather Sunday afternoons, after church, at the high school practice field, mostly just to hack around, while the wives on the sidelines peered into one another’s prams and talked about houses, schools, and kids. It was a family affair, start to finish. No one brought beer. And no one took the game seriously—save, perhaps, for Bush, who was always the quarterback, and called the plays, did the passing, and most of the running, too.

Sometimes, there was a real game—when they challenged the fellows from Lubbock, for instance. But even that was tongue-in-cheek. The Midland guys named the game the First Annual Martini Bowl. They named their team the Midland Misfits. They even printed a program, with ads from Bush-Overbey, and Liedtke & Liedtke, Attorneys at Law.

Not that Hugh was going to show up. Bill Liedtke would play football with the guys, or tennis, even golf, but brother Hugh, the fellows used to say, only thought about deals: probably worked up deals in his sleep. Hugh and Bill Liedtke, as the ad said, operated as a law firm, but the only legal business they ever did was to bail a few of the Yalies out one night after they got liquored up in someone’s apartment and went after the miller-moths with croquet mallets—busted up the walls pretty good. Anyway, three or four of the boys ended up at Sheriff Darnell’s jail—and Big Ed’s jail was not a place to spend a night, if you could help it. So Bill Liedtke came down to spring them. Of course, Hugh wasn’t going to come ... probably busy thinking up deals.

It wasn’t that Hugh was unfriendly. Just seemed like when he was friendly, he always had something in mind. No, to be fair, it was the other way around: he always had something in mind; if he was friendly, that was just bonus. Anyway, you learned pretty quick that behind the deep drawl and jowly grin was a mind that was two or three sharp steps ahead of you, maybe a step or two ahead of what he was telling you. The Liedtke boys had grown up in the business—their father was a lawyer for Gulf, in Tulsa, and well connected there—and the way Hugh thought about the game was different from the rest of the Yalies. With the money from Tulsa, Hugh put Liedtke & Liedtke right into operation of wells. Hugh was buying and selling oil when most of the boys were hustling leases that
might
get drilled, and
might
have oil. Hugh Liedtke was building equity. He didn’t talk about the Big One, the quick strike and a gusher of cash. He had a long-term, corporate view of the business. Hugh didn’t mind buying into someone else’s production. He’d try to work out a deal where he’d pay for the purchase, down the line, with proceeds from the oil he bought. Hell, if it came to that, Hugh wouldn’t mind calling a broker in New York, to buy the stock of the company that owned a share of the partnership that owned the oil. He always saw five ways to skin the same cat. One of Hugh’s stops in the Ivy League was the Harvard Business School, and what he brought to the West Texas oil fields was not romance, but a genius for finance.

The Liedtke brothers had an office across the street from Bush-Overbey, and, of course, George Bush made friends. Still, it came as a surprise in Midland when Bush let out word that he and Hugh—or, to be precise, the Liedtkes and Bush-Overbey—were going into business together. “I’ve been talking to Hugh,” is the way Bush said it, “and we’re going to go the corporate route.” It seemed to the other fellows in Midland that with less than two years in the business, George Bush was a bit dewy for Hugh to pick as a partner. As usual, Liedtke had a different view. What he saw was a man who worked hard, who would work with him—maybe he wouldn’t bring to the firm long experience, or deep knowledge of the business, but that would come. Hugh had the long haul in mind, and what Bush would bring, right away, was access to East Coast money. That was in the nature of Hugh’s proposition: the Liedtkes would raise a half-million dollars, and Bush-Overbey would do the same. What they’d have was a real oil company—a million-dollar outfit—some staff, maybe a geologist ... in the argot of the game, which Bush so enjoyed, “a little more muscle, a little more stroke.”

That they did, when they joined up in March 1953, with Hugh Liedtke as the new company president. George Bush would be vice president. ...

“What should we call it? ...”

President Hugh said it had to stand out in the phone book: “It oughta start with A ... or a Z.”

There was a movie playing that week in downtown Midland:
Viva Zapata!
, with Marlon Brando ... so that’s what they fixed on—Zapata, the name of a Mexican rebel
comandante
.

Hugh was right: it did stand out. And at twenty-eight, George Bush was not just in the game, he was on the map. In The Spot, or at the Ranch House, where the guys would kick back over dinner with a couple of drinks, people talked about Bush now in a different tone of voice. Zapata was a player—a clean million in equity. But Bush? ... For the first time in his life, people talked about George Bush as a man whose résumé may have outpaced his attainments.

“Smartest thing he’s done was to hook up with Hugh ...” someone would say.

“Yep. Ol’ Hugh, though: he’s the one who makes the snowball ... and he throws it.”

“Yeah ... bring s’more snow, George.”

Even a year later, when the other independents learned, to their shock, to their admiration, and later still, to their envy, that Liedtke and Bush had bet it all on one roll of the dice—$850,000 on one lease—no one made much point of crediting Bush’s steady faith, his assiduous work, his hyperactive friendliness ... or even the good fortune that had followed him through three decades.