What It Takes

by Richard Ben Cramer

  “I’m goin’ down there.”

  Laura’s voice was urgent: “George!”

  But Junior was gone.

  They were screwing around with the wrong guy. Junior was the Roman candle of the family, bright, hot, a sparkler—and likeliest to burn the fingers. He had all the old man’s high spirits, but none of his taste for accommodation. In fact, he was more like Bar, the way he called a spade a spade. But it wasn’t so easy for him to do it in the background, the way she’d done it all these years. No, he didn’t mind being up front. But he’d learned some control as he’d neared the age of forty. In fact, these days, control, discipline—some of that old Bush medicine—was what he was always teaching himself. He’d just have a talk with Fuller, let him know ... calmly, but clearly. Before the Veep even got to the seat. He wasn’t going to make a stink about it. He’d be doing the guy a favor. The campaign was just beginning—they weren’t even through the ’86 cycle yet, and Fuller was going to buy himself trouble like this. In fact, it would do Fuller good to get a taste of him: Junior was thinking of moving to Washington, too, take a job in the campaign. What the hell! Oil business was no business these days. And Junior could watch out for the Vice like others couldn’t: he knew him. ... Atwater saw it. Atwater didn’t know the family either, but he saw he could make Junior an ally. Had to be an ally. That’s what he’d explain to Fuller. In fact, it was just this kind of thing ... what the family meant to the old man. He’d explain. ... What was the guy’s first name?

  Uh, Craig? C’mere for a minute? ... He’d take him off to the side. Calm ... control ... guy oughta get a taste of him. ... Uh, listen, asshole. What’s the story here?

  But he couldn’t do it. He got to the Box Seat and thought how his father would hear of a showdown. It was the damnedest thing: forty years old and still shy of his father. But he knew, if he picked a fight, the Vice would be disappointed. So, instead, he said hello to Atwater.

  “Hey, whuss happ’nin?” Atwater growled. Lee always talked like a rock ’n’ roller exhausted from his recent world tour.

  “HOW THE HELL WOULD I KNOW?” Junior said, much too loud. He knew Fuller was right behind him. “SEATS AIN’T WORTH A SHIT. I GUESS THE BOX GOT A LITTLE CROWDED ...

  “PEOPLE WHO THINK THEY GOTTA BE HERE ...”

  Everybody heard him. Fuller got every word. His face didn’t change, but his calm brown eyes grew a millimeter wider. He could have tried to explain: he knew McMullen, who insisted he sit in the owner’s box. He wasn’t trying to take anybody’s seat. It wasn’t his idea. He didn’t mean ...

  But then Junior was already talking to someone else. And anyway, Fuller wasn’t going to deal with anyone who didn’t talk to him face-to-face. He had enough on his plate without that. What he couldn’t understand was why George was so mad. After the game began, while they all walked up to the skybox, he asked Junior’s friend from Midland, Bobby Holt: What got into George?

  But Bobby just gave him a big oilman grin, and mumbled some chili-mouth West Texas at him: “Y’pissed’im ohff. ... Y’dohn’ screw with th’family. ...”

  Well, apparently. But you don’t screw with the Chief of Staff, either. Fuller said: “Well, he better not act that way around me.”

  Later, Fuller thought it through some more. Maybe he’d made a mistake. He still didn’t understand what got into Junior. But he could just imagine the account the Veep might get. The Veep might be disappointed. So he mentioned the whole thing to Mrs. Bush.

  And that was definitely a mistake.

  George Bush didn’t know about any of that yet. What he knew was they had him in a hole under the stands, behind home plate, strapped into this damn Kevlar vest, or whatever the stuff was—bulletproof ... and it bulged in his shirt, thickened him with unaccustomed bulk, constraint, and if he arched his spine, it dug in, right there ... couldn’t move a certain way, like that ... and the field looked huge from here. It looked like a mile to the scoreboard, the way the bright green carpet stretched away at eye level. The Catfish Hole, they called this place—why, he had no idea. But that was the program: he had to wait in the Catfish Hole while they did the anthem and introductions. The P.A. announcer was laying it on for every player—stats, records, hometowns and nicknames—while they ran through the lineups ... well, walked through the lineups. They had him down in the hole for ... seemed like hours, waiting to go to the mound.

  Of course he was going to the mound. What’s the point of throwing out the first ball if you don’t get out there and throw it? He wasn’t gonna stay in a seat and lollipop the ball over the rail, five feet to the catcher, like Eleanor Roosevelt. Jeez, what fun was that? It was his own call in the end, the only call he had to make on this trip: he knew they’d make him wear the vest. But it wasn’t even an issue, really. It was a personal thing, with George Bush.

  See, he’d done it before—done fine. That’s what the new fellows didn’t understand. He did his first First Ball in ’81, the All-Star Game in Cleveland. They’d asked him for opening day, Cincinnati, when the President was still in the hospital, just a week after he was shot ... but it wouldn’t have been right, trying to step into the President’s shoes. So he did the All-Star thing, four months later, and had a great time. He was on his game that night. Hell, he’d been around a ball field longer than most of these guys had been alive. He popped into both dugouts, fooling around, wrestling with his friend Nolan Ryan. (That woke up the Service, sure enough.) Then, from behind Bush, Tom Seaver growled: “What’s an Eli doing in here?” and he threw an arm around Bush in a Vice Presidential body lock. Bush loved that locker-room stuff. Ryan and Seaver were friends since their days with the Mets, when Bush’s uncle owned a piece of the team. So the young UN Ambassador used to call up and get the best seats in the house, stop by the locker room before the game. He was always dragging along some bewildered Ambassador from Senegal or Tanzania, making friends with baseball.

  Anyway, that All-Star night, they picked out a kid from the bleachers for his catcher. When they told him the plan, Bush’s face fell. (“You mean I’m gonna have to take something off?”) But walking onto the field with the kid was a stroke of genius. A crowd might boo a politician muscling in on the All-Star Game, but who’s going to boo a thirteen-year-old kid? So they got a little round of applause, and meanwhile, Bush kept after the child: “Suppose I go with the slider? Can you handle it?” The kid was solemn, nodding, in his Police Athletic League T-shirt, with a big glove borrowed from Kansas City’s Frank White, scared to death. But Bush kept talking him through it. “Well, what are our signals? How about a ‘one’ for a fastball and ‘two’ for a curve? If you get nervous about the curveball, just give me a ‘one.’ ” Finally, the kid cracked a smile. Bush had a new friend. (Sent him a picture and a note, too.) In the end, Bush threw him two first pitches: the first was a lob, just a straight lollipop; but then he did try to break off a slider, wild as hell—almost hit a photographer in the foot—and the kid made a nice lunging grab. Saved Bush’s bacon. The crowd gave a cheer, Bush gave the kid a big “Well done!” and the VP climbed back into the Plexiglas cage they’d put around his Box Seat.

  After that, he’d materialize at ballparks all the time. The Service preferred it unannounced: don’t give the nutballs a chance to plan. He’d just pop up in the dugout in the middle of a game; him and all the earplugs, who’d stand, glaring out at the field and the grandstands, while the VP watched the game from the bench. “Oh, great fun,” he’d report afterward. And he made lots of new friends.

  One time, back in ’84, the VP actually got into a game, an Old-Timer’s Day he ran into in Denver. A few of the aged stars had come to his event that morning, asked to meet him, and he said, “Of course! We love this kind of stuff!” Jeez, Warren Spahn, and Billy Martin, a bunch of them came. Then they told him he could come and suit up that evening, at Mile High Stadium. “Oh, come on!” he said, and then quickly, “No, I can’t do that. We’ve got Secret Service ... constraints.” But the Service just had to work it ou
t for him. So they snuck him in, in an unmarked car, just a normal sedan, with ten normal young men in suits trotting alongside, and he showed up in the dugout with a Denver Bears uniform on, and the P.A. announcer suddenly boomed: “Now batting for the American League, the Vice President of the United States!” The great thing was, they didn’t even boo. People cheered him! And Spahn was on the mound, and he grooved him a fastball, but the Veep popped it up. Of course, they don’t play by the rules in these things, so they sent him up again, next inning. This time, it was Milt Pappas pitching, and he served up a fat cantaloupe down the middle, and George Bush swung and rapped it cleanly over second base—solid single! How about that? He made a turn at first and got a cheer from the crowd. He was in heaven! Back in the dugout, he said he’d stay and watch another inning. They told him: Watch? Hell! He had to go out and play! So they gave him a new first baseman’s mitt, lefty for him, of course, and sent him out. Just like old times—Poppy Bush at first!

  Sure enough, third batter that inning: Tony Oliva ... hits a smash down the first-base line. But Poppy is there. He lunges to his left ... knocks it down. Stays with it. ... Pappas is coming across from the mound. ... Poppy bare-hands and hits him with the throw at the bag ... runner is OUT!

  And the crowd was roaring.

  Bush knew his cue. He left the game. And whenever he told the story later (not often—only to friends), he was sure to add: “Should have had it clean.”

  Poppy Bush always had a big-league glove, if he did, every once in a while, say so himself. There was even a time—not very long—when he thought of trying to make a living with it. In the spring of ’42, when Captain Bush led the Andover ball team on a spring-training trip to Florida, Clark Griffith, owner of the Washington franchise, said he’d like to have the young man play that summer for the Senators. But that was after Pearl Harbor—Griffith was desperate for talent—and all the boys on the Andover nine knew where they were going: it was their last season of ball for a while. By the time Poppy played for Yale, he had a wife and a baby son, and the war had taught him, as it had most of his classmates, that life was a serious and finite business. There wasn’t much margin spending years of it as a banjo-hitting first baseman, trying to make the major leagues.

  But his teammates wouldn’t have bet against him. He had that kind of presence on a ball field: serious, capable, a student of the game and a hundred-percent competitor. He had to be, coming from his family, where competition, games of all sort, were practiced with a gravity and fervor that some families reserved to religion.

  Pres Bush, his dad, had been a Yale first baseman, at six-foot-four, a towering slugger who’d hit the ball a mile—would have had twice as many homers if he could have run faster. Not only was Pres elected captain of the ball team, he’d occasionally succumb to entreaty from the golf team. (Pres, we’ve got to have you, we’ve got Penn today!) So he’d play against another school’s best golfer in the morning, then suit up in Yale flannels for a one-thirty ball game. It was from big Pres that Poppy, and all the Bush kids, took their attitude toward the game itself: the seriousness of playing well, the appreciation of form. Prescott Bush demanded much of himself, and he did not play a game to hack around. He was still a scratch golfer into his fifties, and never would accept the demands of a Wall Street partnership, or later, his duties as a U.S. Senator, as excuse for shoddy play. There was one way to insure that you’d never be invited to play golf with Pres again, and that was to talk while he was putting.

  Still, Pres mostly played against the golf course and his own human tendency to error. The competitive fire, the will to win, Poppy got from his mother’s family, the Walkers. It was always sink or swim with the Walkers. The old man, the grandfather, G.H. Walker, was as hard a handful of business iron as the Midwest ever produced. It was he who transplanted the family from St. Louis to a mansion in New York, so he could play in capitalism’s big leagues with the Vanderbilts and Harrimans. That was the same league he played as a sportsman. For a while, he kept a stable of racing horses in partnership with Averell Harriman. When his friend (and rival) in St. Louis, Dwight Davis, created the Davis Cup championship for tennis amateurs in Britain and the U.S., Gampy Walker created the Walker Cup for the amateurs of golf. In his later years, he headed the New York State Racing Commission and served as president of the United States Golf Association.

  But those were the public connections to sport. It was in private that he practiced and passed on the religion of games, chiefly in Kennebunkport, Maine, where, at the turn of the century, he bought seventeen acres of rocky coastline as the Walker clan’s summer preserve. For the Walkers, the long days in Maine were a whirlwind of contests. There were boat races from the harbor to Walker’s Point. (And not in the genteel, silent canoes or sailboats that other families kept; Pops Walker favored powerboats, big ones.) There were pickup ball games, in the family, at the Point itself, or bigger games on the town field for the summer league that Gampy Walker created, staffed with town boys and college players brought to Maine for the summer, so his own sons could have summer baseball experience. There were daily and twice-daily golf matches, and tennis matches, pitting parents and children, cousins and uncles, Walkers and friends, against one another in an ever-shifting, always ranked, round-robin to determine the best. In some ways, golf was the fiercest: it was his game. By the time his sons came of age and honed their skills enough to beat him, they’d also learned a dozen little ruses (“Oh, sorry, Father ... Bill’s counting on me for a foursome”) to dodge the dread despair and rage, somewhere on the back nine, when the old man found himself four down, with only three to play. Even when younger, tennis-playing Walkers would hit the River Club, Court One (pretty much the only court they’d play on), everyone knew it: no other members were so energetic, noisy, clannish, and competitive. No other matches had the same air of seriousness, of importance, do-or-die. And when there was a championship, or like cataclysm, there would be G.H. Walker himself, attending in his very clean white-and-brown saddle shoes, tweed jacket and necktie, stiff white collar, white flannel trousers, and straw boater.

  One summer, when son Louis and daughter Dorothy were a mixed-doubles team playing for the River Club’s junior cup, G.H. Walker appeared at Court One, but Lou was nowhere to be seen. He claimed later he didn’t know the match was on. It turned out he was at the bathing beach, fooling around and drinking with friends. So the old man had Lou summoned. And he showed up loaded, snookered, in front of the whole club! He tossed a ball for a serve and whiffed. He was staggering on the court. The old man departed, leaving word: he would see Louis, after the match ... in his room. When Lou got back to the Point, much sobered (by match end, he hadn’t played so badly), the old man didn’t wait for explanation. He announced to Lou: “You’re not going to college. You’re too stupid to go to college. You’re going to work.” That same evening, Lou was packed, and on his way to a year in the coal mines in Bradford, Pennsylvania.

  In time, all the Walker kids got the religion. They certainly had the talent. Herbie—George Herbert, Jr.—got it all, right down to the attitude. He was as hard in business and sport as his father, he loved a winner, and he became the second patriarch of the Point. But Johnny Walker was certainly the best ball player: one year at Yale, he hit a glorious .600! And no one played a better golf game than Jimmy: it was he who was in line to fill the shoes once worn by the old man as president of the USGA. Even Lou might have had some sporting glory if he hadn’t screwed around so much. When he was a senior, a pitcher at Yale, he got a spring-training tryout with the New York Giants. But when the great Mel Ott came to the plate, Lou’s first pitch plunked the slugger in the neck. Ott said: “Get that college jerk outta here!” And that was the end of Lou’s tryout.

  But pound for pound, perhaps the best was Dottie, the younger of two daughters, the pearl in this pan of gravel. Not only was she bright and beautiful (they were all so attractive), but she seemed to have in her small form the distillate of the Walker ethic: she played to win.
When Betty Trotter, a girlfriend at Kennebunkport, challenged Dottie to a swim from the River Club pier, all the Walker boys knew that Dottie wouldn’t stop until Betty did. But when Betty quit, after twelve hundred yards in choppy open sea, Dottie just kept swimming, more than a mile, straight to Walker’s Point. No one had to make allowances for Dottie in competition. When she married Prescott Bush, and had her own kids to raise, she served as the one-woman ranking committee: it was she who made the matches, pitting Bushes against Bushes, Bushes against Walkers, and Bushes against friends, in the constant contest to be the best.

  And it wasn’t just summers, not just in Maine: in their year-round home in Greenwich, Connecticut, the Bush kids played games constantly. If there wasn’t a ball game at the Greenwich Country Day School, or a tennis match at the Field Club, they’d gather their friends for football at the Bush house, where there was room, and a ready welcome from Dottie. The house on Grove Lane was a magnet for kids: if it rained, all the friends might still show up, to play indoor football in the long upstairs hall, or Ping-Pong on the table in the front hall (Dottie finally tired of taking it down—that table was the first thing visitors saw), or some game that Poppy made up, on the spot. Poppy never liked to be alone. And he was so good about sharing, making sure everyone was included. For a while, Dottie and the housekeeper, Antonina, called him Have-half, because once, when he got a new wagon, he turned to a friend and offered: “Have half? ...” Of course, he had the most little friends. When Pres would come home on the train from New York and find a house taken over by children at play, he’d sigh and inquire of his wife: “Dottie, do they all have to be here?” But even when Pres was home, and didn’t want a bunch of wild Indians in the halls, Dottie would sneak the boys’ friends up the back stairs so they could play. After supper, when Pres was closeted with important telephone calls, Dottie, daughter Nan, and all the boys, were likely in the living room, locked in a vicious tiddlywinks match: so serious, involving, so do-or-die, that it wasn’t uncommon for a child to leave the room in tears, after being “shot out.”