Part 3

George Herbert Walker Bush
by Tom Wicker

(Page 3 of 4)

On its fifth anniversary, Offshore was listed on the American Stock Exchange and had attracted twenty-two hundred stockholders. The company occupied offices in the Houston Club building, had a fleet of four monster drilling rigs, employed 195 people, carried an impressive load of debt, and enjoyed plenty of business either under way or pending9 - including operations on Cay Sal Bank in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, once leased by Howard Hughes. Meanwhile, not least as a result of the huge social and political migrations in which George Bush had participated, Texas was metamorphosing from safely Democratic into something approaching a two-party state.

Governor Allan Shivers had led a "Democrats for Eisenhower" movement in 1952, and Texas was one of five southern states Ike carried that year. The growth of the Texas GOP - fueled by oil wealth, the influx of outsiders, and the state's basically conservative electorate - continued in the fifties. By 1961, when Lyndon Johnson abandoned his Senate seat to become vice president of the United States, Texas elected John Tower as his replacement - the state's first Republican senator since Reconstruction.

In that special election Tower had benefited from being the only Republican in the field with seventy-five Democrats, including Bing Crosby's father-in-law. Texas Democrats also were somewhat complacent, sure they could defeat Tower one-on-one in the regular election of 1962 if he managed to win in 1961. As things turned out, he survived both elections and went on to win three more terms, and to be nominated for secretary of defense by President George H. W. Bush in 1989.

A signal part of the Texas party's growth, however, was an archconservative sector in the image of, and deeply devoted to, Barry Goldwater, the guru of the swiftly emerging national conservative movement. When the Harris County (Houston) Republican chairman moved to Florida in 1962, the right-wing John Birch Society was strong enough to threaten a takeover of the county Republican committee. That's when leading Harris County Republicans asked the prosperous businessman and popular Houston resident George Bush to run for the chairmanship; and that's when Prescott Bush's restless son saw the opportunity for community service that he'd been seeking - never mind that Zapata Offshore required of him as much management effort as one man could reasonably handle.

Bush proved a roaring success, the hardest-working chairman Harris County Republicans ever had seen. He was enthusiastic and optimistic, raised money, organized precincts, brought in recruits, found volunteers, computerized the voter rolls, moved the committee to better quarters, and stayed right on top of the paperwork. In his new role he again made lots of new friends; women Republicans especially liked his good looks, his unfailing courtesy. Under Bush's committee leadership, the party even elected Houston's first Republican city councilman.

Everything Chairman Bush touched seemed to succeed - except that he could never win the Birchers' friendship, hard as he tried, not even when he named some of them to leadership positions in the county. He was too eastern, too Yale, too moderate, the epitome of everything Barry Goldwater was not - or so the Birchers were convinced. In 1963, nevertheless, Bush saw the kind of tempting opportunity that might offer him a political success similar to Offshore's in business; he determined to seek the Republican nomination to run in 1964 against Texas's senior senator - the old populist liberal Ralph Yarborough.

Bush believed that Yarborough was out of touch with a Texas grown more conservative since the senator's last election. Owing to Bush's own labors among Republicans, he also believed that the state was tired of the old man. Even Lyndon Johnson was believed to have little use for Yarborough. And with Goldwater given a good chance to be nominated for president and to carry Texas for the Republicans, he might well bring in an attractive Republican senate candidate on his coattails. All in all a race against Ralph Yarborough looked like a pretty good bet for a young man - Bush would be only forty in 1964 - who was obviously going places.

He threw himself without stint into a four-candidate Republican primary, helped by the zealous work of his wife and eldest son, George W. - eighteen years old in 1964 - and by all those Houston volunteers he had organized and led so enthusiastically. Bush was a poor speaker with a tinny voice - but he was a splendid handshaker, backslapper, and fresh face, a man never too busy or too tired, moreover, to dash off dozens of thank-you notes daily (probably thousands by the end of the campaign) to anyone who'd helped him in even the smallest way. He was piling up new friendships almost faster than they could be recorded in the card file Barbara Bush relentlessly kept up to date.

Even as a relative newcomer to Texas - naturally Yarborough and Republican primary opponents called him a carpetbagger - Bush led the primary with a plurality, then defeated his main rival in a runoff in which he took more than 60 percent of the vote. That, of course, was only among registered Republicans, of whom there were not yet too many in Texas. Bush not only had still to take on Yarborough himself; he had to confront the uncomfortable fact that Goldwater probably couldn't win Texas after all - because Lyndon Johnson had become president, succeeding the murdered John F. Kennedy, and there was no doubt that LBJ, the master of Texas politics, would be at the top of the Democratic ticket in 1964.

Back in Connecticut, Prescott Bush - retired from the Senate since 1962 - was one of those Eisenhower Republicans itching to knock Goldwater out of the Republican running and rescue their party from its fire-breathing right wing. Prescott Bush and other Eisenhower Republicans first favored Nelson Rockefeller of New York, then William Scranton of Pennsylvania - anyone, in fact, but AUH2O (as Goldwater's bumper stickers proclaimed him). Down in Texas, however, George Bush - the Republican Senate nominee but also a relative newcomer from the East, a Yalie, and maybe even an internationalist - realized that if his own father came out publicly against Goldwater, all those Texas right-wingers never reconciled to the son would be newly angered and aroused.

So Prescott Bush received an anguished phone call from George Bush - and thereafter Prescott remained loyally silent, doing nothing throughout 1964 to stop his party from nominating Barry Goldwater for president (to be fair, Dwight Eisenhower himself did little more). In Texas, Bush had recognized that he would sink or swim with Goldwater at the top of the national Republican ticket - and he was neither willing to sink nor at a loss about how to swim. He moved almost as far to the right as was Goldwater himself, then staged another fighting, handshaking, note-writing campaign, visiting more than half of Texas's 254 counties (in most of which no Republican organization existed). The supposed eastern moderate one-worlder opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, just passed by Congress under LBJ's unique pressures; he denounced the United Nations, deplored what he called the "soft" Democratic policy on the war in Vietnam, and argued against a nuclear test-ban treaty. Three years after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, he even proposed arming Cuban exiles for another go at Fidel Castro.

With a patrician sense of propriety, however, that might seem odd to those of a different background, Bush refused all suggestions that he talk about his wartime heroism. That would be bad form, contrary to the code of sportsmanship that Bush had learned from his grandfather, his mother, and his father, and at Andover: One did not boast about one's accomplishments.

Though Bush was still not much of a stump speaker and had no identifying "message" except the claim, endlessly repeated, that Yarborough was a proven giveaway artist, a liberal out of step with Texas, his campaign - featuring country music, barbecue, a determinedly folksy candidate, and stump speeches from Goldwater and Richard Nixon - clearly was not hopeless, not at first, anyway. Then President Lyndon Johnson, who had little love for Ralph Yarborough but even less for John Tower, and who was determined that his home state would not have two Republican senators, swept into Texas, rolled out the political power he had been stockpiling for thirty years, and gathered even Yarborough into his fulsome embrace. In the end, on his way to a national landslide, LBJ took 63 percent of the Texas presidential vote and easily carried Ralph Yarborough back to the Senate. George Bush could take comfort only from the fact that his creditable 44 percent, though swamped by Johnson's huge majority, represented the most votes any Republican had ever won in Texas.

In his book Looking Forward Bush does not even mention his right-wing, Goldwaterish performance in 1964, remarking only that his "was the kind of campaign not generally identified with Republican candidates, a leaf taken from the old Texas populist book."10 In the days following his defeat, however, Bush told his minister in Houston, "I took some far-right positions to get elected. I hope I never do it again. I regret it."11 The sincerity of this resolve was to be tested again and again in the years to come - years that found George Bush, the successful oilman, devoting himself almost fully to politics and government.

The greatest irony of 1964 may have been that even his taking those "far-right positions" didn't win the John Birchers over to George Bush, any more than his Reaganesque attitudes during his presidency, 1989-93, were to convince conservatives of that later era that he was one of them. In 1964, the Birchers thought they knew a "moderate" when they saw one, no matter what he might be saying to win votes. So they sat on their hands during Bush's campaign and took a walk on election day. Better even Ralph Yarborough than an easterner - probably a closet internationalist to boot.

© 2004 Viking, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Tom Wicker covered American politics at The New York Times from 1960 to the early 1990s, when he succeeded Arthur Krock as writer of the "In the Nation" column. He is the author of several books of nonfiction, including One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream, and JFK and LBJ, as well as several novels.