At ten o’clock, the whole school gathered in George Washington Hall, and Poppy was up front as senior class president. And when “The Star-Spangled Banner” started, the men were still slouching in front of their seats, as they always did in assembly. “Your country’s at war!” said Dr. Feuss. “I expect when ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ is played, I expect everyone here to be at attention!” But still there were a few wise guys who didn’t know their world had changed. They were dicking around in the back! Poking each other and laughing, like they always had! And up on stage, Poppy Bush was burning! They were mocking the flag! They were mocking Dr. Feuss! The bald doctor was standing there, helpless and frail, while they ignored him! While we’re at war! Poppy Bush took a small step forward, and stared them down. He glared at them so hard, so visibly, that soon he had their gaze on him. And from the stage, in front of the men, likely for the first time in his life, Poppy Bush curled his upper lip in an ugly sneer of contempt.
By the time Christmas break rolled around, and he went to a dance, back home in Greenwich, where he met an auburn-haired beauty, Barbara Pierce, sixteen years old (and so eager to know him!), he didn’t even mention staying in school. They sat out a waltz (Poppy never could waltz), and then sat out the next dance, and the next. But in all that talk, there was no confusion about what he was going to do. He was going to war. All the best fellows were. He would turn eighteen on Commencement Day, just a week after The Game (baseball with Exeter!) ... and that was the big day. Poppy was going to sign up to fly. The Navy had a program that would get him his wings in less than a year. Gold Navy Wings! The knighthood!
On that day, Stimson arrived once again, in his bulletproof car, to address the school: the war would be long, the Secretary said. In good time, they would be called upon to lead, to rescue the right, to remake the world. But they would serve their country better by going on to college and getting as much education as they could, before they donned the uniform.
Wait, Stimson said, and let the draft do its work.
After the speech, Pres Bush met Poppy in the hallway outside the auditorium. Pres didn’t have to bend down now to look straight into his son’s eyes. “Well, George,” he said in his big bass voice, “did the Secretary say anything to change your mind?”
“No, sir,” Poppy said. “I’m going in.”
Pres nodded, then shook his son’s hand.
This was where it ended? The promise, the service, great doings to come, ended here in a world of green water, blue mist, alone, small ... this is it? What was all that for, all the doing, trying, dear God, the blessed ... life, what was that for? ... But he kept searching the edge of his world, the hazy divide between air ... green water ... for the grand, bulking, blooming island of steel with the Stars and Stripes—all the guys! They had to come back! God, where were they ... where were they where were they where were they ...
Have to keep going, keep away, paddle, slap, pull, paddle, nothing out here, nothing but water, no water, no water, haze and water, blue and green, a speck over there, spots, bright bursting spots, and a speck, maybe it’s a ship! No, not a ship, too small, not growing, yes growing, too small, not a ship, not the guys, slap to where, my hand! What’s that thing it’s taller, yes it’s taller! It’s taller, dear God, it’s there yes what? Not a ship! Can’t be a ship, just a speck, black dot, is this how it ends, seeing spots? God, God it’s growing. A SUB! A SUB! A PERISCOPE DID THEY SEE ME GOD DID THEY SEE ME OVER HERE! OVER HERE HEY HERE HEY HERE I AM HERE ME HERE HEYYYY!
The conning tower rose from the water, and Bush, dazed, bobbing, saw the hatch open and there was a man. Jesus, what if it’s Japs? ... There was something on his face. He had something up to his face. Something black. A beard! He had a beard! NO JAPS WITH BEARDS! A bearded seaman was holding something up, as Bush slapped and tore at the water toward the sub. A U.S. submarine, in three thousand miles of ocean, here was a U.S. submarine, come to get him! Dear God, come for HIM!
They got him, sailors on the deck now, the shape of the sub on the water, they pulled his raft, grabbed for him, pulled him up on shaky legs onto the steel deck, sweet Jesus, steel! And the seaman he saw was standing there, watching with this thing up to his face, a camera, a movie camera. They were filming. Three thousand godforsaken miles of ocean. They came to get him. They pulled him out. And they filmed it.
He’d been on the raft two hours.
“Welcome aboard, sir ...”
The steel stairs poked up crazily at his legs as they half hauled him, half lowered him into a world of dark red light and overused air, clanking steel and the smell of men. The hatch closed. They were getting out, getting the hell out of there.
“Welcome aboard, sir ...”
They stretched him out flat, swabbed his head. He’d be all right, he heard them say. The guys on the Finback always liked this, this pilot rescue duty, when they fished them out and watched them wake up to a new world below the sea. ... What would the guy say?
“Welcome aboard the Finback, sir ...”
But as the guys on the Finback remembered it, Bush was distraught, kept asking for his crew, half-delirious. ... Then, no words, just tears.
He was on the sub for a month, while it hunted the Pacific for Japanese ships, and when the Finback dropped him off at Midway, he likely could have fiddled a ticket home. The Navy didn’t want shaky pilots, men with second thoughts. But Bush hitched a ride west across the ocean, and then another to his ship, back to the guys. Of course, they greeted him like a lost brother:
“George Herbert Walker Bush!”
No one asked much about the day he was shot down. They knew how it was: he’d lost two friends.
There were a half-dozen more missions in the Philippines, but VT-51’s number was up. By December, they were steaming home. Bush got to Greenwich on Christmas Eve. Poppy made it back! After that horrible telegram, saying he was shot down! He was here! Christmas Eve! Everyone was crying, laughing, hugging. He looked great! He was home! It was like a movie!
And then, after New Year’s, in his snappy dress blues, he married his dark-haired sweetheart, Barbara Pierce. What was the point of dawdling? It could all end in a puff of smoke—just like that. There was a honeymoon, just a few days, on Sea Island, off the Georgia coast, and then a new posting to Virginia Beach. Of course, he’d have to go back to the war. They were only halfway to Tokyo. He’d get another squadron, and Bar would go back to college, to Smith. ... But then, Truman dropped the bomb, and they got the news: the Nips had folded! No invasion! No more war! It was over! The Blessed Confluence!
Poppy was out of the Navy in a month, off to Yale the same September. What was the point of dawdling? Three years of his life were gone. There was a child on the way. There sure wasn’t time to moon about the war, to talk about the day the plane went down, Delaney and White (never did know what happened to them), or the way they came to get him, Lieutenant George Herbert Walker Bush, out of thousands of miles of ocean. He had the Air Medal and two Gold Stars, and then the Distinguished Flying Cross: he was a hero, but he wasn’t going to bring that up. He’d done his part. That was all he’d say.
He didn’t even pick up any cheap points with Bar, saying he’d thought of her when he thought he was a goner, in the ocean. And she, being Bar, didn’t ask if he did.
No one in his family could remember talking about it. Must have been dreadful, they agreed. And, being Walkers, and Bushes, they didn’t bring it up.
It was only years later, when he got into politics and had to learn to retail bits of his life, that he ever tried to put words around the war.
His first attempts, in the sixties, were mostly about the cahm-rah-deree and the spirit of the American Fighting Man. The Vietnam War was an issue then, and Bush was for it. (Most people in Texas were.) He said he learned “a lot about life” from his years in the Navy—but he never said what the lessons were.
Later, when peace was in vogue, Bush said the war had “sobered” him with a grave understanding of the cost of c
onflict—he’d seen his buddies die. The voters could count on him not to send their sons to war, because he knew what it was.
Still later, when he turned Presidential prospect, and every bit of his life had to be melted down to the coin of the realm—character—Bush had to essay more thoughts about the war, what it meant to him, how it shaped his soul. But he made an awful hash of it, trying to be jaunty. He told the story of being shot down. Then he added: “Lemme tell ya, that’ll make you start to think about the separation of church and state ...”
Finally, in a much-edited transcript of an interview with a minister whom he hired as liaison to the born-again crowd, Bush worked out a statement on faith and the war: something sound, to cover the bases. It wasn’t foxhole Christianity, and he couldn’t say he saw Jesus on the water—no, it was quieter than that. ... But there, on the Finback, he spent his time standing watch on deck in the wee hours, silent, reflective, under the bright stars ...
“It was wonderful and energizing, a time to talk to God.
“One of the things I realized out there all alone was how much family meant to me. Having faced death and been given another chance to live, I could see just how important those values and principles were that my parents had instilled in me, and of course how much I loved Barbara, the girl I knew I would marry. ...”
That was not quite how he was recalled by the men of the Finback. Oh, they liked him: a real funny guy. And they gave him another nickname, Ellie. That was short for Elephant. What they recollected was Bush in the wardroom, tossing his head and emitting on command the roaring trumpeted squeal of the enraged pachyderm; it was the most uncanny imitation of an elephant.
Nor were “sobered” or “reflective” words that leapt to Bar’s mind when she remembered George at that time. The image she recalled was from their honeymoon, when she and George strolled the promenades, amid the elderly retirees who wintered at that Sea Island resort. All at once, George would scream “AIR RAID! AIR RAID!” and dive into the shrubs, while Bar stood alone and blushing on the path, prey to the pitying glances of the geezers who clucked about “that poor shell-shocked young man.”
But there was, once, a time when he talked about the war, at night, at home, to one friend, between campaigns, when he didn’t have to cover any bases at all.
“You know,” he said, “it was the first time in my life I was ever scared.
“And then, when they came and pulled me out ...” (Him, Dottie Bush’s son, out of a million miles of empty ocean!)
“Well ...” Bush trailed off, pleasantly, just shaking his head.
5
1945
BOB DOLE DIDN’T WANT to go to war. He was doing what he wanted, at KU, in the Kappa Sig house, doing what he never had time to do before: fooling around.
He was just ornery enough to be a good pledge. There was a pledge brother with a motorcycle, a big old Harley, weighed about a ton. Bob and some of the others hauled that bike up to a third-floor bedroom, then wouldn’t help the fellow bring it down. That sealed Bob’s fame. He even sailed through the hazing. Hell Week, the “actives” made freshmen wear burlap underwear to class. Bob laughed that off. The older guys got staves from a barrel factory, to whack the pledges into line. Bob said, “I’ve heard so much about those boards, I better find out how bad it’s gonna be.” So he made one of the actives haul off and whack him—hard as he could. Pretty near drove him through the wall. Bob said, “Well, that wasn’t so bad.” That was the last time anybody hit him.
He was going out for football, basketball, and track, so he kept up his training. He asked a friend coming from Russell to bring his concrete weights in her car. And he kept up his running, every day, before the others were awake. He was waiting tables in the house to pay his dues, and he had a milk route, dawn Saturdays, that earned him pocket money. A Big Man on Campus, like Bob Dole intended to be, had to have money to spend. ... Grace McCandless was the most beautiful girl on campus, and Bob Dole, freshman, invited her home for Christmas. (Bina was so excited, she baked twice as many cookies.) Before he left in December, Bob was elected vice president of Kappa Sigma. In his first term! But with all the new things he was trying that year, something had to slip: his grade point slid below the gentleman’s C, and he couldn’t make initiation. He was still a pledge in December, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and Bob Dole’s bright new world started to change.
He hung on at KU as long as he could. Heck, people said the war might be over before they got to him. He ran track that spring, finished the school year and started another. He played another season of football, then basketball, and more than a year after Pearl Harbor, Bob was still at school. But it got to be obvious that every man was going. Pretty soon his draft board would turn up his number—they were already coming for Kenny, back in Russell—so Bob looked to his chances, and signed up for the Army Enlisted Reserve Corps. That way, at least he’d get to finish the term.
What did he know about the war in Europe? KU, in Lawrence, was the farthest east he’d ever been. When the Army called him in ’43, and sent him off to basic training, they gave him his first plane ride. Heck, his first bus ride! Turned out, Bob and Kenny ended up in basic at the same time, the summer of ’43, at Camp Barkley, near Abilene, Texas. So Bina bought herself a train ticket, and showed up at the base, blew past the sentry: What was he going to do, shoot her? Bina marched down the dusty main street of camp, looking for her boys. The MPs tried to talk her into leaving, but she’d have none of it. “I’ve got two boys here and I’ve come to visit.” They had to call the camp commandant to deal with her. “Ma’am, you cannot go walking around here. If you’ll just wait, we’ll get your boys for you.”
But soon, they were far out of her reach. Kenny was shipped to the Pacific. Bob signed up for Army Engineering School, in the strange new world of Brooklyn, New York. After that, he was transferred to Camp Polk, Louisiana, then to Camp Breckenridge, in Kentucky, for antitank gunnery. By the spring of 1944, he’d made corporal and applied for officer training. The news from Europe was better and better: the U.S. was marching up the boot of Italy, Mussolini was out of power. As Bob Dole reported to Fort Benning, Georgia, for his three-month Officer Candidate School, the Allies were fighting their way off the beaches in Normandy. By the time he got his lieutenancy, Paris was free, the Germans were pulling back. ... Who could tell if he’d get there in time to fire a shot?
There was time. The invasions of Europe had taken a fearful toll among the junior officers who led platoons. By December 1944, just as George Bush was steaming home across the Pacific, Bob Dole was headed east, across the Atlantic. It was just before Christmas when he pitched up outside Rome, where the Army maintained a replacement camp, from which to deal out officers to plug the gaps in its ranks.
The first thing everyone noticed about Bob Dole was his strength. He was six-foot-two, a hundred ninety-four pounds. Then, too, he always wore a tank jacket that gave his upper body more bulk. The guy was big as a house. In fact, his body almost kept him out of the fighting. In Rome, he ran into Dean Nesmith, the trainer for Phog Allen’s KU teams. Nesmith was a taskmaster, an ex-football hero with a prognathous jaw, and no tolerance for whiners or weaklings. Now he was in the Army’s Special Services unit: sports and games for the guys behind the lines. He knew Dole, liked him: Bob was a kid who’d never quit. So he tried to get Dole into his outfit, as one of the trainers, a coach for the troops.
But too late: the Army had milled out orders for Dole to fill a slot with the Eighty-fifth Mountain Regiment, Third Battalion. The mountain troops were fighting their way up the spine of Italy, in a drive to the broad Po Valley, and beyond, to the Alps, to cut off the Germans before they could fall back to reinforce the Reich. At least, that was the plan: like most things in Italy, nothing went according to plan. The whole Italian invasion was a sop to Stalin, who demanded a second front in 1943. The U.S. went along, but insisted that no men or matériel be diverted from the next year’s grand D-Day plunge. Meanwhile, Hitler a
nnexed Italy and ordered his generals there to fight to the last drop of blood. The result was the war’s most vicious sideshow: a meat grinder of a year and a half, where America lost tens of thousands of men, chewing north at less than a mile a day, in a campaign that history would little remark. Among the original 200 men of the company to which Dole was assigned, there were 183 casualties in four months after they debarked in Naples. When Dole got his orders, in February ’45, the battalion had just fought its first major engagement: a night assault on Mt. Belvedere; in less than twenty-four hours, a company commander and half the lieutenants were gone.
Of course, Dole didn’t know all that. In Uncle Sam’s infantry, you were lucky to know what was going on a hundred yards to your right or left. But he knew, somehow, it was bad business up there: he told Dean Nesmith he didn’t want to go. He sensed there was a bullet waiting for him in those hills. Nesmith told him to pack his kit. There was nothing more to be said.
That was the other thing they noticed about Dole, when he got to the mountains and took over Second Platoon: the way he held himself so quiet, like he’d stepped into someone else’s war, and didn’t want to intrude. He wasn’t like some of those ninety-day wonders, graduates of the Benning School for Boys, who thought they owned the world because they got a strip of brass on their collars. Dole knew what it meant to be a lieutenant of infantry: he was fodder, the guy out front, the guy with the binoculars and map case, whom the Jerries tried to shoot first because it would disrupt the chain of command. German snipers went for the officers and radio men: if they got them, the unit was cut off, disorganized, without eyes and ears. ... Of course, every man in the unit knew that: Dole could see the way they looked him over—coolly, like they didn’t want to invest too much, he might not be around for long. “I’m Lieutenant Dole,” he’d say, introducing himself. “I’m going to be leading the platoon. ...” If they didn’t say anything, he’d add: “Dole. Like the pineapple juice.”
What It Takes Page 16
