What It Takes

by Richard Ben Cramer

  Boy. Jus’ whu’the hayl’r yew dooin’ out ’ere ennuhways?

  The short answer was: living high and free, on three hundred seventy-five dollars a month. And learning, sometimes the hard way. ... A couple days after they moved onto Seventh Street, Bar woke them all up in the middle of the night. Gas! She smelled it ...

  Get out!

  Get Georgie!

  GET OUT!

  DON’T LIGHT A MATCH!

  Thing was, there were always a couple hundred wells flaring off within the city limits, a refinery, a few hundred tanks. ... Odessa, as the wakened neighbors pointed out, always kinda smelled like that ... ma’am.

  It was land like Phyllis had never seen. No trees for miles, no hills or rocks like her home ground. But it was beautiful to her, at the end of that June. Phyllis was in love, and the harvest was on, the milo and beans were like rich green carpet, the ground checkered in emerald, gold, and deep brown, as Bob raced the Oldsmobile west on Highway 40, and told her about Russell. Bob said the earth there was so flat ... on a good day, you could see Kansas City. Well, it wasn’t quite like that. Kansas City was two hundred miles away.

  But she would have believed him, if he’d insisted. She was so willing to see it as his eyes did. If this was to be her adopted home, then she’d embrace it, too. But in Russell, it wasn’t quite that easy. For one thing, she came to make a home in a nest of ferocious homemakers. Actually, Phyllis knew how to cook—or thought she did: she’d even won a prize for a cake at the state fair in New Hampshire. But that wasn’t cooking in Russell, heck no. She couldn’t make the fried chicken like Bina (who could?), or the brownies, or the ice cream, or ... the problem was, Bina’s house was perfect, from the flowers bordering the lawn, to the shrubs and roses, the shiny scrubbed porch, and inside, the smell of flowers and wax, and the pie cooling on the dining room table, and not one dish out of place, unwashed, and the big embroidered white feedsack towels, the pink-and-green curtains on the French doors in the living room. It wasn’t that Bina was mean about it, no ... but you could see she noticed when something wasn’t just so, and Bob must have noticed, too. Of course, he didn’t say anything.

  But Phyllis felt she had to be perfect for him—it was expected. She’d stand next to Bina for hours in the kitchen, watching and measuring what went into the bowl—Bina never had recipes. When Bob went to buy clothes, the tailor at Banker’s was going to take in the shoulder of the suit, but Phyllis figured out how to pad it underneath, just so, and it looked perfect. ... Then there was the matter of his neckties—she tied them. But she couldn’t get the Windsor knot, with the dimple just so, and the front just a hair longer than the back, like Bob liked it. And this went on for years, and she asked their men friends, and the salesmen at Banker’s to show her ... but it still wasn’t right. And, of course, she could see he noticed, they all did. ... They were always watching Bob, jumping up to help him, getting something for him, or fixing something near him that wasn’t quite right. ...

  That was the heart of the problem, how they treated Bob, too tenderly, like a thousand-year-old vase. It just reinforced his feeling that something wasn’t right, wasn’t whole, about him. One day that summer, in lawn chairs out in Bina’s backyard, a glass of iced tea slipped from Bob’s numb left hand and spilled at his feet. “Oh, God,” Phyllis said, “can’t you hold on to anything?” Bina and Kenny looked at Phyllis like she’d just spat on the Bible. How could she talk to Bob that way?

  But, of course, that was the right way. That’s one of the things Bob loved about Phyllis: she never treated him like a cripple, an invalid ... God, how he hated that word. ... She’d tell him flat out not to wait to be waited on: “Do it yourself... you can do it!” She’d get after him to work on his body. “You’ve got that leg exercise to do ... why don’t you get that out of the way?” And she was so matter-of-fact, so sure of him and what he could do. “Pick up your feet, Bob. There’s no reason to shuffle like that!” In time, Bina and the rest realized it was good for Bob. In Phyllis’s eyes, he saw himself whole. And why not? She never saw him any other way.

  Around town, where the citizens looked at Bob like their own prize experiment (they were the ones who put him back on his feet!), there was a myth already spreading on Phyllis, that she was Bob’s therapist at the big Army hospital. Or, better yet, his nurse. She was the gal who nursed him back to life ... and fell in love. ... And no matter how many times Bob explained, or how many times Phyllis protested that Bob was well and strong again before she ever met him ... well, people believe what they want to believe. Even years later, when he’d risen so high, no one wanted to believe her when she said that he was always the strong one ... but she knew.

  That September, they packed up the Oldsmobile again and started south, to Arizona, where Bob would go back to college, as a junior. The doctors recommended a hot-weather climate, after all the blood thinners Bob had taken. Of course, Bob drove all the way, and Bob found their two-room house ... and although Phyllis did take notes (and wrote test papers from his dictation), it was Bob who did the work, who studied all night, each night, by memory, pacing their living room, barking German verbs in his prairie voice, over and over, until he had them in his head, until Phyllis finally had to ask: Bob, why? ...

  “Why do you have to get an A? Isn’t a C good enough?”

  And Bob snapped: “You tell me how to study a C’s worth, and I’ll do it. All I know’s how to work till I get it.”

  He taught her how to play cribbage, but he didn’t play, he had work to do. No one was going to have to cut Bob Dole any slack. There was a couple nearby who became good friends, and they’d go swimming, but Bob wouldn’t undress. He didn’t want anyone to see his problem. She could cut up his food for him at home, but not at a restaurant. He’d have them cut it in the kitchen and bring it out that way. He meant to be strong, and she relied on that, too.

  One night, that autumn, when they were at dinner, Bob suddenly lurched in his chair, slumped over his plate and gasped: “Omigod ... s’get to the VA ... on the double.”

  Phyllis was scared to death. She was twenty-three, had never stayed a night alone. She’d never even driven in Tucson by herself. And now Bob was in the hospital. ... It turned out he had another blood clot, but thinners took care of it. He was fine, in a week. Yet what she remembered was her shock, the way he looked at that moment, so frail! ... It had never occurred to her that Bob could get sick.

  The big excitement that fall was the Jugoslav who came to visit, to study American oil operations. The head office of Dresser sent him down, with carte blanche. But that didn’t mean the good ol’ bubbas wanted foreigners—a commie!—snoopin’ around. So the eager Jugo gentleman got kicked down the ladder and landed in the lap of ... George Bush.

  What fun! It went on for days and days. George and Bar took the guy all over West Texas. Took him for barbecue. Took him to a football game. The fellow had his notebook, with everything he wanted to learn, and anytime a fact penetrated the language haze, he’d write this, too, in his book. The big thing he wanted was ... skiddarig. That was a shortcut they’d figured out in West Texas. If a hole was dry or played out, and the drilling equipment was needed elsewhere, they wouldn’t have to take down the rig: they’d move it whole, skid it, sometimes hundreds of yards down the field, to the next location. Well, that was the cat’s pyjamas at the Ministry in Belgrade, in ’48. “Skiddarig?” the Jugoslav implored. So George Bush, whose highest attainment in the oil business, to that point, was a clerkship in an equipment warehouse, learned how to skid a rig ... and how to explain it without benefit of words.

  Words weren’t Bush’s strong suit, anyway. There was something extraverbal about his friendliness, his eagerness, the way his smile bent his whole body toward the guy, or the light, friendly bubba punch to the shoulder to show he was making a joke, the way Bush flung his legs out when he sank into a chair at home, told the Jugoslav that he could feel at home there, too. It was an animal thing ... the same bodily aw-shucks with which
Bush let Texans know they needn’t mind his back-East college-boy talk.

  How could they mind, when he was so happy to get to know them, to make their home his, to have them think well of him? Hell, here he was, after a few months, West Texas’s own ambassador to the foreigners. Thing was, he was so ... accepting. Here was a fellow who came from outside, but he didn’t act like it ... didn’t judge them like a stranger. Wasn’t that way. The way they saw it, the way they said it. Bush was just a hell of a good guy, tried to fit in, played the game.

  As for him and Bar, they’d decided: they loved West Texas. The way people took you in! ... You couldn’t find nicer folks, no matter where you went. ... Late that fall, they decided they weren’t even going home for Christmas. Of course, they’d miss everybody back East: they sent out, must have been a hundred Christmas cards ... but it was just too long a trip with a two-year-old in tow. And they had their own life to live now, even for the holidays. So they made their own preparations in their half a house, and they did their shopping and found a tree, and everything was ready by Christmas Eve. ...

  Ideco had a party that afternoon—a West Texas custom, Bush figured—and customers and friends dropped in, and George helped out, mixing drinks. And he wanted to fit in and be friendly, of course, so as they hoisted each glass he poured, he’d hoist one, too ... and he did fine until a whole ’nother set of guests trooped in, a second shift to the office party ... but he poured more drinks and, just to be friendly ... It got to be dark, and well past dark, and Bar was still waiting with the dinner at home, and the tree was there, undecorated, and it got quite late, and George was being friendly, fitting right in, on his own now, and ... Anyway, they brought him home in the bed of the company pickup, rolled him gently out onto his lawn, and that Christmas Eve he was truly on his own, though he didn’t know much about it, shitfaced, on his back, under the stars, in Odessa, Texas.

  9

  God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen

  AT THE PARTY, GEORGE BUSH held a tall Perrier. He hadn’t been drunk for almost forty years: one martini, maybe two, for Christmas. Still, you’d have to say he had a rosy glow, mostly from his bright red blazer. He wore it to all his Christmas parties, then stuck it in the closet for another year. You wouldn’t catch him wearing anything like that any other time ... but the holidays were special, for friends, family ... didn’t matter what else was going on.

  George Bush was serious about spreading cheer. He had to make sure to take care of everyone. That’s why he had eleven parties that Christmas. Most were minestrone guest lists: any Bush family in the region, of course; a few friends from the White House, maybe a handful from Cabinet departments, notably Commerce, where Bush got a lot of jobs for friends; some friends or friends-to-be from the press (off the record); some fellows from Congress, friends from embassies, from the CIA, the Pentagon, politics ... and, Hey! Bring the wife! ... Bush worked over the lists himself, always threw in a few surprises. A couple of parties were just for staff, of course, and two for the Secret Service, their wives and kids. In fact, the Secret Service was the reason Bush stayed in D.C. for Christmas. He wanted to let the agents stay home with their families.

  Anyway, you couldn’t miss him at the party, leaning against the door jamb of the big entry hall of the Residence, watching as the Air Force Choir sang carols ... smiling and saying thanks all night, while the friends came up and shook his hand, wished him merry, then posed for their pictures with him. He posed perhaps a hundred times each party, over and over, in front of the mantel on the first floor, or before the big Christmas tree in the dining room, where the Filipino stewards manned the buffet of roast beef, ham, shrimp, salads, fruits, fruitcake, Christmas cookies, eggnog. ... Of course, there was a gift, too. This year, it was a porcelain model of the VP Residence. Must have given away hundreds of those. But the photo gave each friend something to remember, something to put on the wall. And Bush always had something to say, a funny moment to recall, a teasing needle, through his smile, as the cameraman clicked away. The VP thus bestowed his highest gift, his company, a personal moment with him, the currency that had paid his freight all the way from County Chairman. The photo was remembrance of that moment in the glow. Being with George, as his sister said one Christmas, was like feeling the sun on your back.

  “You know, if every voter could just meet him ...”

  “He’d be President already. I know.”

  The guests nodded murmurous agreement as they watched him, fondly, across the room, enjoying his friends, spreading the glow.

  “If he could just show himself ...”

  “Like he is ...”

  “I know.”

  Some went so far as to tell him, as if to make him understand, as if he could somehow unlock it in a speech, or on TV someday. “You just have to let people see you ...”

  “Just go out there and be yourself !”

  Bush always countered with his old one-liner, the punchline to a joke he’d heard years back: “Yeah, they told me, just be yourself ... so I did. Maybe that was the problem.”

  But now with Iranamok around his ankles, with Dole climbing past him in Iowa, with his polls at an all-time low, some friends wouldn’t be put off with a joke. One of the oldest friends, FitzGerald Bemiss—an usher at George’s wedding, known him forever, since boyhood summers in Maine—tried to sit Bush down for a serious talk: George had to define himself, to show the people who he was!

  And Bush unloaded on him, blew up! Set poor Gerry back on his heels. Bush wasn’t going to cut and run from Reagan! He wasn’t going to duck out on his friend now!

  Of course, that wasn’t what Bemiss meant. But Bush couldn’t see the difference between showing himself and showing up a friend. And that was just out of the question. George Bush would never lose a friend.

  That was the reason for the Christmas cards, at least at the start: a way for George and Bar to keep beaming the glow to the folks they’d left back East, when they moved to Texas. But the way those two were about friends, the list just kept growing. Every year George Bush was alive on the planet, there were more friends to take care of. And the way Bar kept her file cards, no one ever dropped off the list. Bar moved her box of file cards from Midland to Houston, to Washington, back to Houston, to New York, back to Washington, to China, back to Washington, then back to Houston, and to Washington again. Of course, every year it grew, from family and schoolmates, to oil-business friends and new Texas neighbors, and Texas pols, to Washington friends and neighbors, fellow Congressmen, then UN Ambassadors from all over the world, and then local pols from all over the country, and more new neighbors, and Chinese officials, and CIA colleagues and foreign intelligence pooh-bahs, and more pols, now from all fifty states and a few from the U.S. territories, and campaign contributors, and volunteers, and staff, and ex-staff, and that wounded soldier he met at the VA, and that lady who told him such a sad story at the shopping center in Waco, and the cop who used to stop traffic every afternoon, as George Bush nosed his car out of the Houston Club garage. Some of the older entries were written over a dozen times for that friend’s successive new houses, amended for that family’s every new child, and when a child moved away from home, that child got a new file card. By the mid-seventies, say, while the Bushes sojourned in China, Bar had four or five thousand file cards, all updated by year-round effort, stored in a gleaming wooden four-drawer case that held pride of place, like the Roman gods of the household, in the upstairs family room of the residence of the U.S. compound in Peking. Bar used to point it out to guests, as one might mention a family heirloom. One visitor who saw it protested:

  “Some of those must be just political friends.”

  And Bar’s eyes turned icy as she snapped: “What’s the difference? A friend is a friend.”

  It wasn’t till 1979, in the first George Bush for President campaign, that staff intruded in any way upon Bar’s Christmas card suzerainty. The friend list was growing geometrically as George flew around the country, and Bar was busy campaigning
, too. So a group of volunteer ladies in Houston took over. Of course, Bar came by, every chance she got, to see that the cards were done right, addressed by hand with blue felt-tip pens, to give them a soft, kitchen-table look; and the cards for the closest friends pulled out of the bulk mailing and brought to the house for a scrawled P.S. and signature from George Bush.

  Two years later, when the campaign was over and, in Bar’s phrase, “we became Vice President,” there was a VP Christmas card budget from the Republican National Committee, and a Houston Branch Office of the Vice President to do the heavy lifting. To be sure, the friend list was bigger now, embracing all U.S. Ambassadors overseas, and foreign dignitaries, and all members of Congress, and Governors, Republican Committeemen, campaign contributors, County Chairmen, and like stars in the new George Bush cosmology. By 1983, the ladies in Houston had the list cross-indexed on an IBM database. And a gentle, white-haired woman named Dot Burghard (a bit hard of hearing of late, but still possessed of beautiful penmanship) sat at a desk in the workroom of the Houston OVP, attending to the friend-list updates and then addressing envelopes, every day, beginning each year in May. By December, of course, it wasn’t just Dot, but a whole roomful of volunteers, bent to the three S’s (stuff, seal, and stamp) at the long table in the workroom, amid a murmur of old Bush-stories, and occasional shouted queries to Dot, and Betty Baker’s Texas trail-boss voice, on the phone, trying to rustle up more volunteers: “Hah, Suzie! Did Santa Claus visit yet? ... Oh, well, tellya how ta assure it. Come on down here and give us a hand. ... Well, we’re doin’ all right, but we could always use s’more ... Gloria! What’re we up to—the H’s? ... Fact, I’m a little worried ’bout gettin’ ’em out!”