Part 4

George Herbert Walker Bush
by Tom Wicker

(Page 4 of 4)

If luck seemed to have deserted George Bush when Johnson was sworn in as president within an hour of Kennedy's death, Bush's political fortunes were quickly reversed after 1964. As Harris County Republican chairman in 1963, he had filed suit for a redrawing of the county's congressional districts, basing the case on the Supreme Court's one-man, one-vote decision. National population shifts also had enlarged the Texas congressional entitlement. So a new Houston district was created for 1966 - white, wealthy, with few Hispanic or black voters but including a lot of newcomers to Texas. Reflecting his changed personal priorities - politics over business - Bush sold his share of Zapata Offshore for more than one million dollars and filed for the seat.

As the Republican candidate who had done well in the losing cause against LBJ and Ralph Yarborough, Bush had good "name recognition" and rather easily won the House seat in a contest with Houston's Democratic district attorney, Frank Briscoe - who made the mistake of calling his opponent a carpetbagger in a district full of carpetbaggers. But even with Bush's gifts for friendship, his indexed filing cases of friends, and the advantages of the new constituency, the new congressman was not solely responsible for his victory. In 1966 a new tide was running, led nationally by Richard Nixon. Republicans rebounded from the Goldwater debacle of two years earlier, taking sixty-six House seats - including the new Houston Seventh. There, both Nixon and House Republican leader Gerald Ford had campaigned personally for that promising newcomer - Prescott Bush's son George.

(The 1966 results, not incidentally, paved the way for Nixon's nomination and comeback presidential campaign in 1968, and thus indirectly - as will be seen - for George Bush's own national political career.) Rather inexplicably Bush recorded in Looking Forward that "a disappointing aspect" of the 1966 vote was "my being swamped in the black precincts, despite...an all-out effort to attract black voters."12 Can he have forgotten that he had opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in his right-wing campaign against Ralph Yarborough? Or did he believe that blacks should know that a Yale-educated candidate of good family could not be racially biased and was for them in his heart, no matter how political circumstances might have forced him to vote?

In other ways the Seventh District campaign yielded political connections to match the family position Bush already had. As one of forty-seven freshman Republicans in the House, he managed a coup - membership on the important Ways and Means Committee, an impossible feat for most rookies and unknowns without a father who'd served in the Senate. Otherwise his first term was undistinguished except for his typically hard work for his constituents and his assiduous courting of even the least among them (the name cards kept piling up in Barbara's files).

In 1968 he scored a politician's dream - reelection unopposed, in some ways a reward for his good record. Almost as important, Nixon - Bush's benefactor in 1964 and 1966 - moved into the White House in early 1969. Bush's name even turned up on a leaked shortlist of those Nixon supposedly was considering as his vice presidential choice (which doesn't necessarily mean that Bush was actually a serious contender, or a contender at all; but the mere report helped along his embryonic political career). Nixon later told him, "I really couldn't pick a one-term congressman."

Bush had, however, near the end of his first term, when he knew he would have no opponent for 1968, cast one controversial vote - in favor of one of the last gasps of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, an open-housing bill.* Though he'd expected criticism, the uproar of surprise and anger in his wealthy white district surprised him. The backlash couldn't hurt him in 1968, since he was running unopposed - but that vote would not be forgotten in Houston and Texas.

In 1970 it was one of the reasons Bush's luck turned bad again. That year, he was pondering whether to give up his safe House seat and take on Senator Yarborough a second time. A foolish move? Actually there seemed little risk. Bush was popular, a leader of the emerging Texas Republican Party; Yarborough really had outstayed his Texas welcome by 1970; and, anyway, Richard Nixon told Bush in urging him to run that he'd be considered for a high-level administration job in the unlikely event he should lose.

Even former President Johnson, his old antipathy to Ralph Yarborough apparently aroused again, gave Bush veiled encouragement. The congressman had had the good sense - and political perspicacity - to go to Andrews Air Force Base to see Johnson off to Texas when LBJ left the presidency in 1969. Now Bush called at the LBJ Ranch and asked Johnson, not if he'd support him, but if he thought Bush should give up the House seat for a Senate run.

LBJ replied that he'd served in the House and the Senate, that he wouldn't advise Bush what to do, but he would say 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." After this typically Johnsonian, only slightly Delphic remark, he asked: "Do I make my point?"

With everything looking so promising, Bush not unnaturally opted for chicken salad and filed for the Senate race. But he was to be handed, in LBJ's graphic description, a plate of chicken shit. Old Senator Yarborough lost his party's primary to a more conservative Democrat, a former congressman named Lloyd Bentsen - a protégé of Governor John Connally (who was still a Democrat in 1970) and a man Lyndon Johnson could and did openly support. Suddenly, his bridges burned, George Bush no longer had an elderly, worn-out opponent, a "liberal giveaway artist." Instead he faced a tough, vigorous, conservative Democrat in what was still mostly a conservative Democratic state. He was no longer likely to go to the Senate his father once had graced, and he had given up even the prospect of going back to the House.

Nevertheless, with his usual zeal and enthusiasm, Bush pitched headlong into the race against Bentsen - this time positioning himself to the left of his opponent (despite his earlier pledge to that minister not to take positions again just to get votes). He ran as the more liberal of the two candidates, even reaching out to blacks and Hispanics, building on the open-housing vote.

He may have had little choice, but the tactic was questionable anyway. Bush was no longer running in his familiar Houston district but statewide - in a state in which more whites were opposed to or suspicious of open housing and liberalism than minorities were for them. Those who'd voted for Ralph Yarborough in the primary remembered how Bush had savaged the old man in 1964, and most stayed with Bentsen. Nixon came to Texas in full cry and skewered the Democrats - dooming any Bush hope for a crossover vote. Bentsen tabbed him repeatedly as "a liberal Ivy League carpetbagger," and this time the charge struck a damaging note in Texas - and stuck to Bush for years. Representative Jim Wright, Democrat of Texas and Speaker of the House, once mocked Bush at a Gridiron Club dinner as "the only Texan...who eats lobster with his chili" and "had a downhome quiche cook-off.

Even so Bush went down fighting, bettering his 1964 vote percentage; but 46 percent was still not good enough. Bentsen went to the Senate, ultimately to a vice presidential candidacy and to become secretary of the treasury under President Bill Clinton. George Bush was not to win an election on his own for another eighteen years. Barbara Bush and the family wept; but George went right back to work, phoning and writing to those who had helped him.

There were a lot of people to be thanked, a lot of new friends, a good sign for the future if you were as optimistic as George Bush usually was. But on the sad night when the votes were counted in 1970, even he must have realized that little remained of what had been a surging political career - except Richard Nixon's pledge of a job in the national administration.

© 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.