41: A Portrait of My Father

by George W. Bush

  In 1956, my grandfather ran for reelection. He had established a strong record as a Senator, sponsoring important legislation like the Federal Highway Act and the bill creating the Peace Corps. He also earned a reputation for working tirelessly to serve his constituents. He spent Saturday mornings in the office answering every piece of mail that he had received that week. My father learned a valuable lesson: In politics, there is no substitute for staying in touch with the people you serve. Later, Dad followed his father’s practice of devoting Saturday morning to answering his mail.

  My grandfather’s opponent in 1956 was Thomas J. Dodd, a Democratic Congressman and lawyer. Dodd took a populist line of attack against my grandfather. “I notice Senator Bush seems to have a lot of time to play golf,” he said. “I can’t afford to play golf.”

  Then someone asked Dodd what his favorite hobby was. He said it was horseback riding. Without missing a beat, my grandfather said, “Well, I congratulate my opponent. I’ve never been able to afford a horse.”

  My grandfather went on to win reelection by more than ten percentage points. (Years later, I had the chance to work with the affable Chris Dodd, the son of my grandfather’s opponent and a Senator from Connecticut for thirty years.)

  In 1962, Prescott Bush was sixty-seven years old, suffering from arthritis, and exhausted from his demanding travel schedule. “You would be a fool to run again,” his doctor advised him, and he complied. I think he had second thoughts, especially after his health started to improve. He lived ten more years, and who knows what he might have accomplished in the political arena during that decade. His experience showed the importance of timing in politics. For Prescott Bush, the timing wasn’t right to continue. For his son, the time was right to begin.

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  IT MIGHT SEEM hard to believe now, but for almost an entire century—from Reconstruction until 1961—not a single Republican won a statewide election in Texas. Between 1896 and 1959, the state never sent more than one Republican at a time to the U.S. Congress or the state senate. No more than two Republicans served together in the state legislature. In the 1950 and 1954 gubernatorial races, the Democratic candidate, Allan Shivers, won nearly 90 percent of the vote against his Republican opponents.

  Despite the party’s minority status, I don’t think that Dad ever doubted that he was a Republican. His father’s politics had influenced him, and he agreed with the fundamental goals of the Republican Party: a vibrant free-enterprise system, a smaller and more accountable federal government, and greater decision-making at the state level. In Texas, Republicans and many Democrats weren’t all that far apart on those issues. Yet the Democrats were the party of power, and most Texans saw no reason to switch their allegiance.

  As a Republican in Midland, Texas, Dad used to joke that he could hold party meetings in his living room and still have chairs left over. He strongly believed that Texas would benefit from a two-party system in which voters had an alternative to the Democratic political machine. So he got involved with the local Republican organization. He served as the Republican precinct chair in Midland and as a delegate at county conventions. He was a local leader in the Eisenhower presidential campaigns in 1952 and 1956. Those elections marked minor triumphs for Texas Republicans. For only the second and third times in history, the Republican presidential candidate won Texas’s electoral college votes.

  My father’s first significant jump into politics came after we moved to Houston. He became involved with the Republican Party of Harris County, the largest county in the state. Dad worked hard to help elect Republican candidates, including John Tower, who won the 1961 special election to fill the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Vice President Lyndon Johnson. Tower was Texas’s first elected Republican U.S. Senator since Reconstruction, and his election gave the party a sense of optimism.

  In 1962, a handful of Houston friends asked Dad to run for Chairman of the Harris County Republican Party. He agreed and campaigned hard for the job, visiting every one of the more than two hundred precincts in the city, including some of the African-American areas that had probably never seen a Republican. Eventually, his only rival for the position withdrew, and the party elected my father unanimously. In retrospect, I am surprised that he agreed to take the job. Serving as a local party Chairman requires long hours of recruiting precinct Chairmen, building voter lists, and performing other thankless tasks at the grassroots level. As he had shown in the oil business, George Bush was not afraid to start at the bottom.

  Dad’s job was complicated by an active fringe element in the party, the John Birch Society. The Birchers were extremists who peddled a variety of conspiracy theories. They claimed that Eastern elites like the Rockefellers wanted America to surrender its sovereignty to some kind of world super-government. As a result, the Birchers wanted to pull the United States out of the United Nations. They also wanted to impeach Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren and to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment, which authorizes the federal income tax, without replacing it with any reasonable alternative. George Bush understood that the more the Republican Party became identified with the Birchers, the less likely that Republicans would ever emerge as a viable alternative to Democrats in Texas.

  Diplomacy was my father’s first instinct, and he tried hard to bring the Birchers into the fold. He instructed the party leadership to stop referring to Birchers as “nuts,” and he appointed Birch Society members to chair several important precincts. The move didn’t work. The Birchers railed against his leadership and refused to work with the so-called Republican establishment. So Dad purged the Birchers from their leadership posts and moved on without them.

  Running the county party turned out to be a valuable experience. He learned how to recruit and motivate volunteers. He gained experience managing a political organization. He formed friendships with other Republican county Chairmen and Republican leaders throughout the state. And he learned that there are some people on the extremes of the American political spectrum who would rather hurl invectives than work for the common good.

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  ON SEPTEMBER 11, 1963, George Bush held a press conference in Austin to announce his candidacy for the United States Senate. I had just started my senior year at Andover. I was no expert on politics, but I knew enough to recognize that this race was a long shot. My father was a thirty-nine-year-old businessman and county party leader who had never held public office. He had little name recognition outside Houston and Midland. And he was a Republican in a state that almost uniformly elected Democrats.

  My father never asked my opinion about his decision to run, and I didn’t expect him to. Of course, he talked to Mother. She later told me that her only reservation about Dad’s running for office was that he would win and they would run out of money. After all, there were no East Coast trust funds to support them. Mother did not want money to buy lavish things; as she put it, “I just wanted to make sure we could afford to send your brothers and sister to college.” My father convinced her that they were financially secure, and from then on she was all in. Working hard to help George Bush’s campaign succeed was another time that she went three-quarters of the way for the man she loved.

  George Bush was in the race for the right reasons. He felt the same duty to serve others that led Prescott Bush to serve as the Greenwich town moderator and to give up his Wall Street career to serve in the Senate. He also knew from watching Prescott Bush that it was possible to enter public service and remain a good father and a good man. That was a lesson that I learned from them both. Needless to say, Prescott Bush fully supported his son’s decision to run, even if he knew it was a long shot.

  The first stage of the contest was the Republican primary, a four-way race that pitted my father against Jack Cox, Robert Morris, and Milton Davis. Cox was the front-runner. Like Dad, he came from the oil business in Houston. He had served in the Texas state legislature for six years before joining the first wave of Democrats to switch parties. In 1962, Cox had won more than 45 percent of the
vote in his run for Governor against Democrat John Connally.

  My father dashed back and forth across the huge state. There was no coffee gathering or chamber of commerce banquet too small for him to attend. He laid out his case for “responsible conservatism” and his vision for a two-party state. After each campaign event, he sent handwritten notes to the people he had met. He must have written thousands of them that spring. Republicans responded to his warm personality, his energy, and his impressive biography. One person at a time, George Bush was building a political following.

  Dad’s hard work paid off in the primary. He won 44 percent of the vote, compared with 32 percent for Cox. Texas election law requires a nominee to get 50 percent of the vote, so he and Cox squared off again in a runoff. He had to skip my high school graduation because of the election, but I didn’t mind. I wanted him to win. And he did. He prevailed in the runoff with about 62 percent of the vote.

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  THE 1964 SENATE RACE in Texas may have included involvement from more future and former Presidents than any other Senate campaign in history. Dad was one of them, of course. I campaigned for him during the summer after I graduated from high school. So did Richard Nixon, whom my grandfather had gotten to know in the Senate. Dwight Eisenhower, still a close friend of Prescott Bush’s, supported Dad. The sitting President, Lyndon Johnson, campaigned for the Democratic incumbent, Ralph Yarborough, who also had the support of President Kennedy before he was assassinated.

  Senator Ralph Yarborough was a liberal populist who subscribed fully to the big-spending plans of the Great Society. He supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which many Texans opposed as an overreach by the federal government into an issue that they felt should be decided by the states. Yarborough attacked my father’s ties to the oil industry and tried to portray him as a wealthy Northeastern carpetbagger. One critic printed a flyer claiming that my mother was an heiress who spent all her time on Cape Cod. Shortly thereafter, my dad received a letter from Marvin Pierce. Mr. Pierce delivered the bad news that Mother was not an heiress. Nor had she ever been to Cape Cod.

  In his opening speech of the general election, Dad called Yarborough “a man who has fostered, finagled for, and flourished on a diet of spend, spend, spend the taxpayers’ money.” Dad’s platform called for a tax cut and a balanced budget, smaller government that encouraged free enterprise, and a “courageous” foreign policy “designed to extend freedom.”

  Given that Texas Democrats far outnumbered Republicans, Dad had no choice but to appeal to the conservative wing of the Democratic Party and try to outhustle his opponent. He chartered a bus nicknamed the “Bandwagon for Bush.” I traveled with him on a bus trip to West Texas, where we stopped in Democratic strongholds such as Abilene and Quanah. Those trips were like the ultimate father-son camping experience. We would pull into a town square, and a country band called the Black Mountain Boys would start playing in hopes of drawing some kind of a crowd. The Bush Belles, an enthusiastic and brightly clad group of housewives, would pass out campaign pamphlets. My job was to run back and forth to the bus to make sure that the Belles and other campaign volunteers had all the materials that they needed. Then Dad would mount the podium and give a speech. Some in the audience applauded and cheered. Others just looked startled at the sight of a real-life Republican.

  Campaigning with my dad was a thrilling experience. I was amazed by my father’s energy and his drive. I learned about the elements of a campaign, including the “stump speech.” At first I was surprised that Dad delivered the same speech at every campaign stop. For those traveling with him, hearing the same lines over and over again could be tiresome. (Perhaps that was the reason Mother started needlepointing purses for key volunteers during campaign trips.) For the crowd in each city, however, the speech was brand-new. And even if the entourage was bored, Dad was not. He was a sincere and emotional speaker who recognized that every minute is precious in a campaign. I grew to love the daily rhythms of the campaign—the crowds and the competition. It might have been that summer of 1964 when I caught the political bug myself.

  Dad’s campaign gained some momentum throughout the summer and fall, but it received a devastating blow on the day the President entered the race. While Ralph Yarborough may have been beatable in Texas in 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson was not. Even though Yarborough had taken positions to LBJ’s left—and even though LBJ liked and respected Prescott Bush—the President couldn’t afford to lose a Democratic seat in the Senate. Johnson praised Yarborough as a fellow Democrat and deftly tied Dad to Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, who had lost traction after LBJ’s “daisy ad” portraying him as eager to engage in a nuclear war.

  In the final weeks of the campaign, it was obvious that LBJ was surging in his home state. Dad convinced several major Texas newspapers to endorse both him and LBJ. Ticket splitting offered the only path to victory for George Bush, who remained upbeat to the end. On Election Day, my grandparents and I flew down to Houston from Connecticut, where I had started my freshman year at Yale. I remember driving to the Hotel America for the “victory” party right after the polls closed. We were listening to a radio broadcast that was interrupted by the news that Ralph Yarborough had won reelection.

  As an eighteen-year-old kid who loved his dad, I took the loss hard. I felt like getting out of the hotel ballroom as quickly as I could. My father showed me a different way to deal with defeat. He gave a gracious concession speech and spent the night shaking hands and thanking supporters and campaign staff.

  When the final vote tally came in, George Bush had something to be proud of. While LBJ had beaten Goldwater by 700,000 votes in Texas, Dad lost to Yarborough by only about 300,000 votes. More than 1.1 million Texans voted for my father—the highest statewide total that any Republican had ever received, including Dwight Eisenhower in his two presidential campaigns.

  The LBJ landslide was unstoppable across Texas. After the 1964 election, there were no Republicans in the state senate and only one Republican in the 150-member state house, Frank Cahoon of Midland. In hindsight, it’s hard to see what more Dad could have done. The lesson of 1964 was there are some races that you just can’t win. Two years later, however, he found one that he could.

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  BETWEEN 1950 AND 1960, Texas’s population expanded from 7.7 million to 9.6 million. Houston grew from under 600,000 to almost a million. In 1965, Houston’s one congressional district split into three. My parents lived in the newly created Seventh District. As a former Chairman of the county party and a strong candidate in 1964, Dad would have a good shot at that new seat. The loss in the Senate race stung, but (like Prescott Bush’s losses in 1952) it didn’t dampen my father’s enthusiasm for politics or his desire to serve. He announced his candidacy for Congress in January 1966 and ran unopposed for the Republican nomination.

  The Democrat in the general election was Frank Briscoe, the District Attorney for Harris County. Unlike Ralph Yarborough, Briscoe was a conservative. Since he and Dad agreed on most policy issues, the race turned on personality. Dad ran billboard ads that showed him carrying his suit jacket casually over his shoulder, a youthful and energetic image. His campaign’s official slogan was “Elect George Bush to Congress and Watch the Action.” He gave more than one hundred speeches in the fall campaign. Former Vice President Nixon and House Minority Leader Gerald Ford both came to Houston to campaign for him.

  Briscoe took a personal approach too—he personally attacked George Bush. Like Ralph Yarborough, he called him a carpetbagger. But Dad turned the provincialism into an advantage. He repeated the mantra he had adopted in 1964, “Texan by choice, not by chance.” That attitude appealed broadly, since a majority of the voters in the district were new Texans. Dad’s memorable phrase, along with his billboards, provided my introduction to messaging in politics. Then, as now, a catchy and accurate slogan can help a candidate grab the attention of busy voters, especially those who are open-minded enough to consider crossing party lin
es. I like to think that I picked up a few supporters by describing myself as a “compassionate conservative” in the 2000 campaign.

  As a college student on the East Coast, I didn’t have the chance to give Dad much help on the 1966 campaign. I did fly down from Connecticut for the election-night party in Houston. This time the victory party lived up to its name. Dad won 57 percent of the vote. George Bush was headed to Congress as the representative of Texas’s Seventh District—a district that has remained Republican ever since.

  MAN OF THE HOUSE

  UNLIKE SOME MEMBERS of Congress, Dad decided to move his family with him to Washington when he was elected. He was a family man first, and he wanted to be around as much as possible while my younger brothers Neil and Marvin and my sister Dorothy grew up. (Jeb and I did not live with our parents in Washington; I was finishing college, and he was in high school at Andover.) My parents sold their house in Houston, bought a town house there for Dad’s trips back to his district, and moved into a home in Washington’s Spring Valley neighborhood. They purchased the house sight unseen from Senator Milward Simpson of Wyoming, whose son Alan later followed his father into the Senate and became a lifelong friend of my parents’.

  I didn’t see my parents all that often in the late 1960s. I was in college and then figuring out what I wanted to do with my life—a transitional period that I once described by saying, “When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible.” One thing I’m sure of is that I tested my father’s patience during those years. After a hard-fought tennis match in Washington, Dad’s friend Jimmy Allison and I became quite inebriated. I later drove my tennis partner, my brother Marvin, back to my parents’ house. Everything went fine until I struck our neighbor’s garbage can, which had been placed on the curb. I then zoomed into the driveway. Mother had watched the scene unfold. She was furious.